Delivered at First Unitarian Church of Portland

June 13, 1999

Opening Words:

"I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve." - - Albert Schweitzer

We often think about traditional religions, especially those in the Judeo-Christian tradition, as being about rules and requirements. Rules and requirements for belief and action. "Thou shall’s" and "Thou shall not’s."

According to the Book of Genesis, the very first thing that God did was to create the heavens and the earth. The second thing that God did was take a day off. The third thing God did was to lay down the rules.

"And the Lord God commanded the man," Genesis tells us, "‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die.’"

According to the story we find in Genesis, humankind didn’t do to well with that rule, and so other rules and requirements soon came later. In the Book of Exodus, Moses received the 10 commandments on Mt. Sinai. More rules. According to one version of this story, Moses negotiates with God about both the number and the contents of the commandments. In the middle of the negotiations, Moses descends from Mt. Sinai to consult with his people. "I’ve got good news and bad news," Moses says. "The good news is I’ve got Him down from 50 to 10. The bad news is adultery is still one of them."

One of the debates in early Christianity was whether gentiles who converted to Christianity still had to follow Jewish laws, including dietary restrictions and circumcision. Later in church history, the emphasis was a little less on what one had to do but what one had to believe.

And to this day, whenever we think and talk about traditional religions, we talk about rules and requirements. Have to’s and must’s. What do you have to do? What do you have to believe? What do you have to eat? What do you have to wear?

But then we come to the liberal religious tradition. One of the cornerstones of the liberal religious tradition has always been freedom, freedom from those externally imposed rules and requirements of belief and action. When we tell our story, one of the earliest dates we refer to is 1568, the year the first and only Unitarian king the world has ever seen, King John Sigismund of Transylvania, issues the earliest known edict of religious toleration. In the history of Unitarianism in this country, Earl Morse Wilbur, a Unitarian historian and one-time minister of this church, said that the three defining themes of Unitarian history are freedom, reason, and tolerance.

Throughout our history, there have been various attempts to try to add rules and requirements to what it has meant to be a religious liberal, but this has usually led to splits and factions that been reconciled by once again emphasizing a position of freedom for both individuals and congregations, and so this is what you get when you walk into most Unitarian Universalist churches these days, not rules and requirements, but freedom, even options.

I have been told that when the singing duo Sonny and Cher were trying to get married, they went from church to church, minister to minister, trying to find somebody who would marry them, but each minister required them to do something they didn’t want to do or say something they didn’t want to say. Finally, they went to a Unitarian minister. Sonny asked, "What’s required for us to get married in the Unitarian church?" The minister replied, "Do you have $100?"

Our emphasis on freedom has added a lot to our theological diversity. Before I came to Portland, I heard it said that in Unitarian Universalist churches on the East Coast, Christ is optional. In the Midwest, God is optional, and on the West Coast, clothes are optional. When I arrived here last summer, I was glad to see that wasn’t true.

For the most part, I cherish the religious freedom that our tradition offers and doubt whether I would be able to be a minister or even a member of any other tradition, and yet I have I do have concerns about it.

I have sometimes wondered if there is anything that we have to do as Unitarian Universalists? Is there anything that we have to believe? Is there anything that’s required of us as a liberal religious people, or does being a liberal religious person really mean that you can believe and do anything you want?

The reason that I ask this question is not out of a desire to impose my own beliefs on others or to find some kind of test of faith for what it means to be a religious liberal. The reason I ask the question is for another.

The builders of this church words of Micah 6:8 so inspiring that they are chiseled in stone outside the doors of this church: "What does the Lord require of thee but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God?" This is a popular verse among Unitarian Universalists, and I remember once asking a colleague how well we as U.U.’s had done in living according to this verse. He replied, "Well, two out of three ain’t bad. It’s that walking humbly part that’s so hard for many of us."

I agreed with him that walking humbly was very difficult for many of us, but I wondered about our ability to do justice. I wondered if a religious movement with so much emphasis on individual freedom of belief and action could elicit the support for justice making that the world seems to so desperately needs and that traditional religions, if taken seriously, seem to demand.

Let me explain. There are many people within this church and within Unitarian Universalism who struggle to make this world a more just place, and I sometimes include myself in that number. I struggle with the question sometimes of how good I have to be. Usually, I consider myself to be, on the whole, a good person. I have chosen a profession that allows me to help people and serve others, which I enjoy doing. To the best of my knowledge, I don’t do things that intentionally hurt or cause harm to others. I do other good things. I sign petitions. I write letters to people in the state legislature. I vote. I give what I can afford to good causes. I tip 20%. I sometimes volunteer. I take the bus or walk when I can avoid driving. I recycle. I turn off the lights, most of the time without being yelled at. I like to think of myself as being at least "minimally good."

In looking at most of these activities, I do them because I want to do them and only some because I feel morally or ethically obliged to do so. I also sometimes question myself whether I, like the young rich man from our reading this morning, should do more.

Yet when I look within our religious tradition, though I find many inspiring stories, I find no absolute imperative that tells me that I must do more or less to commit myself to the work of justice in this world, only an imperative that I must follow my own heart and my own conscience.

Some have said that though we may have varied theological beliefs, we required to act in accordance with the Principles and Purposes of the Unitarian Universalist Association, beginning with the affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Yet, in fact, these Principles and Purposes are a covenant between the congregations that make up the Unitarian Universalist Association and not requirements for belonging to most Unitarian Universalist churches.

My doubt about our ability as religious liberals to work for justice stems from wondering, without word from on-high or from some text that we hold absolutely sacred, whether the religious freedom our tradition offers us to follow our own hearts is enough.

Let me, however, put that question, that doubt, that anxiety, aside for a moment and say that I have always both admired, slightly feared, and been fascinated by people who have led particularly morally exemplary lives, people who have seemed to thoroughly devote themselves to the common good even when that has meant risking their own well-being, and sometimes their own lives. People like Socrates or Jesus or Martin Luther King or Gandhi or Mother Teresa or Adrei Sakharov. I have often asked myself, what has motivated these people? Are they acting out of some extremely strongly held religious beliefs or some equally strong held moral vision of justice or acting out of something else?

My search for an answer to this question led me to a book called, The Heart of Altruism, by Kristen Renwick Monroe, in which Monroe explores the motivations of people who resisted the Nazis, especially those who risked their lives to rescue Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II.

In her interviews with those who risked their lives and sometimes endured terrible hardships for the sake of others - - often total strangers that they did not know at all, she found some who were extremely devout in their religious beliefs, but also many who were not. However, none of the people whom Monroe interviewed saw their actions resulting from any specific religious belief or requirement, and for some of them their actions were even in contradiction to their religious beliefs.

"Many of them had some religious affiliation, but they judged it irrelevant to their rescue efforts," Monroe said. One of the rescuers, named Bert, said, "I know what I did during the war, I did not do for religious reasons. No, it was not religious. I just never thought about it."

Also interesting is that though many of the rescuers were very intelligent, well-educated, and articulate people, none of them explained their actions as resulting from the logical application of a well-worked out system of morality. Bert said, "I don’t have any kind of ethical credo, a personal ethical credo that I use to guide my life. No, I don’t think I live by special rules."

What was it that guided these people in their actions? In analyzing her interviews with the rescuers with whom she spoke, she did find something that distinguished them from others she had interviewed. What distinguished them was not their beliefs about the world, or their understanding of the requirements of religion, or their ability to construct a well-reasoned moral argument. What distinguished them was simply the way they understood and experienced relationships with other people and the rest of the world.

"What I did find instead [of deep religious values] among [them] was a world view - - closely akin to spirituality - - in which all life constitutes an indissoluble whole. This seemed less a religious belief and more a more of conceptualizing the world. [They] see the world as one in which connections exist and extend, through nature, beyond the death of any one particular individual.

One of the rescuers, a man named Tony, articulated this well. "Personally, I’m not particularly Christian," Tony said, "insofar as men believing in the resurrection of the Lord and stuff like that. But I do believe that one of the most important teachings in Christianity is to learn to love your neighbor as yourself. I was to learn to understand that you’re part of a whole, and that just like cells in your own body altogether make up your body, that in our society and in our community, that we all are like cells of a community that is very important. Not America, I mean the human race. And you should always be aware that the every other person is basically you. You should always treat people as though it is you, and that goes for evil Nazis as well as for Jewish friends who are in trouble."

Even for those who were religious in a more tradition sense, this was true. A rescuer named John was the son of a minister and John had been on the Gestapo’s Most Wanted List because he organized and operated an escape route to take Jews to Switzerland and Spain. He was a devout Seventh Day Adventist whose life was permeated by religion. Yet even John said, "I don’t think you have to be religious. You had to have love in your heart."

Though only a few of these people claimed to be religious - - mostly because they interpreted traditional religion as I described it at the beginning of this sermon as rules and requirements for belief and action - - I consider them to be all deeply religious, and they remind us of another sense of what it means to be religious, traditionally or liberally.

They remind us that in the truest sense being religious is about being in relationship, about relationship with one another and with what is deepest inside of us, whether we call that God or something else, and I really don’t think it matters.

They also seem to show us that it is out of this understanding and experience of relationship that all of their moral actions flow, rather than from some externally imposed rules or requirements.

And in this we can come to a deeper understanding of what it means to be a religious liberal or a religious person at all. We can understand that the religious freedom we cherish is not simply a freedom from external rules and requirements with which we disagree. It is a freedom to act on those internal requirements that flow out of our relationships with one another and the holy.

We can also understand that the reason that we as religious liberals do not have strong rules and requirements about belief and action is not because we can’t come up with any that we might agree on. I think we could if we tried. We can understand that the reasons we do not have too many rules and requirements is because we recognize at a very deep level that no matter what rules and requirements we came up with, that they would be insufficient, insufficient to motivate us to do what is desperately needed in this world.

Of course, this is a very old idea.

In the Christian tradition, when a lawyer ask Jesus, "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest? Jesus answers him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." On these two commandments hang all the law." It is here that Jesus recognizes that relationship - - with the holy and with one another - - is more important than any rule.

And interestingly, this is an idea that is expressed somewhere in almost every other religious tradition as well. In the Shinto tradition, the native tradition of Japan, Shintoists believe that being open to the kami, which can be experienced through nature and through others, is so powerful that Shinto needs neither a system of ethics or a creed. "If man were in need of detailed rules," claimed the Shinto scholar Motoori Norinaga, "he would be little better than an animal that needs to be trained and retrained in order to behave properly." Shinto does not need a creed because no one can adequately express the ideas which this kind of experience inspires to another person. "These ideas cannot be taught directly," the Shinto priest Yukitaka Yamamoto says. "They can only be captured by someone whose experience of them is sufficiently moving for him or her to realize their fullest meaning," he says.

So we gather this morning as a religious community, not to learn what rules we must live our lives by, for whatever purposes they may serve. We gather in hopes of coming into fuller, deeper relationship with the holy and with one another, knowing that, if at all, this is how we will be guided to live and to love.

Will you pray with me?

Spirit of Life,

Deep within each of us and amidst us all,

Ease us of our worries about what we must and must not do,

Teach us to let go of what we believe the world requires of us.

Let us learn to be together with one another and our deepest selves, knowing that this will guide us well all of our days.

Amen.

Let us go from this place guided by one another and what is deepest within us to live out of lives most fully. Go in love. Go in peace. Amen.

Copyright 1999 by James Kubal-Komoto. All rights reserved.