O, sing a new song to the Eternal…
Sing a new song.
Perhaps it is the unusual early run of warm, summer-like weather, or the dramatically changed new guidelines from the CDC…
But for whatever reason, it feels more and more like we are beginning to emerge from Covid-life…
That there will be some ending to our isolation…
And that ending feels so much closer than it did just weeks ago.
We will not emerge unscathed…much has been lost including so many lives…so many livelihoods…
We will carry grief with us as we emerge…
But there is also a lightness of spirit I feel…
And I don’t think I am alone.
I’ve talked with more than a few folks who are…tentatively and carefully, I grant you…beginning to gather again with family and friends…to take off masks if everyone has been vaccinated…
I hugged my grandkids last week…without a mask-on…
There are so many things that I can’t wait to do again. Sit in a restaurant…inside…
Shake hands…will we return to that habit…no more elbow bumps?
Greet you all at church…with hugs for the huggers and no six feet between us?
The impulse to resume the life we knew…as if our lives were a video that had just been paused these last 15 months…
It feels like life is gathering energy to begin whatever this new creation will become.
Whoever you are
Whoever I may become…as I quoted June Jordan in our Call to Worship.
But what shape will the life we emerge into take?
It is not just that the world into which we will emerge has changed…
We know…at some level we know, that we will not emerge into the same world that we left…
The world has changed but how have we been changed by the experience of this pandemic?
What impact have these months had on our spirits?
O, sing a new song. A new creation.
What do we know about real change? We are such creatures of habit. And religious traditions…including our own liberal religious tradition…churches are places that preserve tradition…that’s what we do…
What do we know about emerging into a new world?
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus uses wineskins and new wine as metaphors for the dynamics of change.
“No one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. New wine must be put into fresh wineskins.”
With this parable, he was teaching that the Jewish tradition, the old testament, the original covenant…could not hold the new vision and the new promise he was bringing.
The old notions simply could not hold the new truth.
As the early Jesus movement struggled to find its voice and its place separate from the Jewish tradition out of which it had emerged, the image of the old wineskins bursting communicated the need for a new way to hold a new, more embracing message of hope.
Like the Tahitian creation story…Ta’aroa had to break each shell as he grew.
Each breaking through meant the destruction of that shell…that destruction was necessary for the creation to continue.
Is the message, for us, that the new creation toward which we are moving cannot be held within our old understandings…
Is the message that our old and tentative understandings must be shattered…again and again…as our knowing deepens…
Is our lot a constant giving up and a constant grief…mingled with a constant delight? Is that what lies ahead? Is that what we are being asked to sign on for as we emerge?
As liberal religious folks we pride ourselves on our openness to change, to new information, new ways of thinking. We particularly pride ourselves on welcoming the growing wisdom of science.
No fundamentalisms will hold us back…hold us down.
We like to think that we are not limited by old visions and old understandings of truth.
We proudly proclaim that revelation is not sealed…that truth is being revealed constantly and that we are open to it and ready for it.
Perhaps that is so…
Revelation is not sealed.
It was the summer of 2003. I was standing amidst the ruins of the Deva Castle in Transylvania. The then Bishop of the Transylvanian Unitarian Church…and yes, that’s a thing… was by my side.
We had come to place memorial bouquets at the entrance to the dungeon where Francis David, one of our Unitarian saints…had been imprisoned and died…long ago.
A youth group from the Concord, MA UU church was there, on a pilgrimage, when we arrived. And the Bishop and I, preachers both of us, regaled them with stories of Francis David, of the first and only Unitarian King, of the Edict of Tolerance that king issued and the religious path that proclaims that revelation is not sealed.
It was almost 450 years ago that young John Sigismund was crowned King in the hill country of Transylvania… now part of Romania in Eastern Europe.
The Reformation had been tearing Europe apart religiously for several decades and King John inherited a land that included Roman Catholics, Calvinists, and Lutherans.
The court preacher, Francis David, influenced by ideas from Italy and Poland, had even begun questioning the doctrine of the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus…the beginnings of a Unitarian theology.
There were also a few Jews in the Kingdom and the ancestors of the indigenous people who would become the Roman…the gypsy people as well.
King John realized that there was going to be no compromise among the various Christian theologies. He knew of the wars being fought about those differences in doctrine in other parts of Europe…among folks all of whom claimed to be Christian.
He knew he had to find some way forward, religiously, in his Kingdom.
In those days, doctrinal differences were often settled by formal debate.
So the King issued an order that each person was free to argue for their chosen understanding.
And he convened a formal debate…in 1568, inviting those representing the “Unity of God” position, the emerging Unitarians, to debate the various Trinitarians.
The debate lasted ten days, beginning at 5 AM every day.
We have an image of Francis David making his argument, painted much later.
I can almost hear him preaching that the Trinity is never mentioned, not once in the New Testament, that “revelation is not sealed,” and that there is more truth waiting to be discovered and lived out, more truth waiting to be discovered and lived.
David was a powerful preacher and many converted to Unitarianism as a result of the debate.
A second debate the following year led the King to declare himself a Unitarian…the first and only Unitarian King… and to issue an Edict declaring that there should be religious toleration in the kingdom. The Edict of Torda.
Toleration was extended only to the various Christian, and emerging Unitarian theologies…not to Judaism, or Islam which was knocking on Europe’s doors as Muslim armies pushed into Eastern Europe. We don’t know how important Islam was to the development of David’s Unitarianism. It is worth noting that Islam is the definitive “Unity of God” position.
So, tolerance within the broad definition of Christian theology. Not affirmation of difference. Just tolerance.
Still, that was better than the bloody religious and dynastic wars that dominated most of Europe for a couple of centuries.
But even that tolerance was short lived. King John died, without an heir, shortly after issuing the Edict of Toleration. He was succeeded by a Catholic who accepted the Edict but ruled that no other religious innovation would be allowed.
The country could accept only so much tolerance and only so much new truth. Innovation…new ideas…new practices…well, they simply had to stop. Enough already.
Francis David, by that time Bishop of the new Unitarian Church, however, did not stop and continued to question Christian doctrines. In fact, there is some reason to believe that he was moving toward a conservative Judaism. If you reject the divinity of Jesus, then what you are left within the Judeo-Christian tradition…is Judaism… We don’t know for certain.
What we do know is that David’s continued religious innovation got him arrested and imprisoned in the dungeon at the Deva Castle where I preached to that youth group from the US. The prohibition on religious innovation did not help the Transylvanian Unitarians who remain stuck in a kind of stasis that lasted for several hundred years.
We don’t know if David ever spoke the words “revelation is not sealed” but Unitarians have long claimed that theological point of view and traced it back to those early days of the Radical Reformation in Transylvania.
Generations of UU ministers were taught that freedom, reason and tolerance were the abiding qualities in our liberal religious faith.
And, here at First Unitarian, we have a connection to that history.
The story of Transylvanian Unitarianism, along with so many other stories of those early Reformation-era European explorations of Unitarian theologies…they were all collected by Earl Morse Wilbur…Rev. Earl Morse Wilbur…who served as Associate Minister here, at First Unitarian, during the latter years of Thomas Lamb Eliot’s founding ministry.
Wilbur was searching for a center for this faith in its history.
Unitarian Universalism is a much different faith today than Francis David proclaimed and that King Sigismund tried to protect with that Edict of Toleration.
Our faith is not shaped by a racial, or ethnic or national identity. We hear “revelation is not sealed” not as an invitation to revisit the past, as David did in his excavation of the Christian and Jewish traditions, searching for religious truth…
We hear “revelation is not sealed” as an invitation into a future in which more and more of us can find a home, in a world that we have helped become more home-like for us all.
“Revelation is not sealed” rings in our ears as the hope that this liberal faith may find a way to transform itself into a liberating faith for us all.
But the questions of how to deal with change remain very real, especially as we begin to transition out of these Covid days.
Will we have to break out of shells that we may not even know are holding us in? Covid shells….comfortable enough during the pandemic…that will need to be broken as we emerge…
Or will we try to hold change at bay…try to restore what we remember of pre-Covid life…pretending that change can be avoided or at least delayed?
Will we yearn so for a return to what we knew, that we will try to stop innovation and change?
Revelation is not sealed. I think we know that that is true.
And if we cannot ground ourselves in what we knew…and loved…in the past…
Even the church that we have missed so much…the in-person church where before too long we will be able to gather once again…even that church will have changed…
And the downtown will have changed…
Portland will have changed…but somethings have not changed.
We know that the inequities of our world are still waiting for us to address…
The need to reimagine policing, to address the racism that is built so deeply into our world…that still remains.
The violence on our streets has not ended.
The need to find a way to resolve the long-standing harms that are erupting yet again in Israel and Palestine…
There are many things that remain to be reconciled and healed and changed…
And if we just return to what we knew…or try to…we will re-enforce those inequalities as well…trust me on that…
What can ground us? What, in this liberal faith, in this liberal tradition can sustain us…can see us through?
What can keep us open enough to allow hope to live?
The vision of Beloved Community still calls us on. A vision of a rich multi-cultural world, drawing strength from its diversity, and finding power in its pluralism.
A Beloved Community, as I sometimes describe it, in which all souls are welcomed as blessings and the human family lives whole and reconciled.
A Beloved Community in which truth is told and in which forgiveness is possible.
A Beloved Community in which hope is justified by the way we are together…not as perfect persons…but as companions committed to finding a future worth inhabiting together.
As we prepare to emerge, we need to ground ourselves not in a return to a past…which was deeply flawed…but in a vision for a future in which we all have a place.
We ask the young people of the church, in their middle school years, to develop a Credo…which we often think of as a statement of belief…a statement of what they have come to believe…at least thus far…
But Credo…is mis-translated as belief…in the sense of a creed of belief…
The root meaning of credo is not about a creed of belief…it is about what one trusts…it is about the heart…credo asks not what you believe but what you “set your heart upon.”
The hope in this liberal faith is not to be found in a creed of belief. It is to be found in what we trust…in what we set our hearts upon.
In the hope that emerges when a community gathers and sustains relationships…accountable relationships…
A community that is committed to a vision of what may never have been before…but that we trust can be…
A vision of Beloved Community into which we can grow
A Beloved Community, the movement toward which, is enough to sustain hope.
A Beloved Community where all souls are welcomed as blessings and the human family lives whole and reconciled.
Prayer
Will you pray with me now?
Spirit of Life. Spirit of both tradition and of innovation. Source of both memory and of hope.
As our hearts lift with the thought of leaving the pandemic behind,
As we ready ourselves to emerge from these Covid days into whatever the future will bring,
Help us resist the desire just to recreate the way things were
We have not forgotten how much change is needed
These Covid days have just made those needed changes more clear
And more urgent.
Help us hold onto and hold out for a more hopeful vision
A vision of Beloved Community in which we can imagine everyone of us thriving.
We will need to stay awake and aware
That hopeful future will not magically appear.
Help us put our trust in one another
Move within us and among us
Help us put our trust and our effort
Into a vision that is worth our commitment,
Into the building of a Community worthy
Of being called Beloved.
May that be so and amen.
Topics: Emergence