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Unitarian Christianity
A Sermon Given
by The Rev. Roger Fritts
on June 13, 1999
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
I have heard a number of jokes about Unitarian
Universalists and Christianity. For example:
- When was the last time someone mentioned Jesus Christ in a
Unitarian Universalist church? When the Custodian hit his
thumb with a hammer.
- Instead of studying the New Testament, a Unitarian Universalist
studies Robert's Rules of Order.
- The favorite Unitarian Universalist Christmas Carol is "What
Child Is This?"
- And, according to Unitarian Universalists, on Easter, if Jesus
comes out of the cave and sees his shadow, we will have six
more weeks of winter.
These jokes stem from the fact that the number of Unitarians
who consider themselves Christian has steadily declined during this
century.
- In a study completed in 1934, the researchers classified 68% of
those surveyed as traditional Christians.(1)
- In 1967, 43% of Unitarian Universalists described themselves
as Christians.(2)
- In a 1987 study 19% of Unitarian Universalists in the United
States and Canada identified themselves as Christian.
(3)
- And, in a study completed in 1998, 10% of American Unitarian
Universalists called themselves Christian.(4)
Given that 90% of Unitarian Universalists in the United States
and Canada no longer define themselves as Christians, I would say
that most Unitarian Universalist churches are not Christian. Some
exceptions exist. The National Universalist Church on Sixteenth
Street in Washington retains a Christian identity. And certain the
members of some Unitarian Churches in New England, such as
King's Chapel in Boston continue to see themselves a Christian.
Nevertheless, these congregations are in the minority. In most of
our churches, ministers only occasionally use a reading from the
Bible. Clergy seldom mention "Jesus" from the pulpit. We hardly
ever speak the word "Christ," in our worship services. Not only are
most of us not Christians, many of us are uncomfortable with
Christianity. My mother and father are examples.
My mother grew up in the Mennonite Church in the 1920s and
1930s. Withdrawal from the world along with a rigorous internal
group discipline is central in Mennonite Christian Theology. So my
grandparents never allowed my mother to go to the movies or to
wear make-up when she was growing up. Alcoholic beverages were
considered a sin. In their isolation Mennonites Christians taught my
mother to be frugal, to work hard and to be pious. In the 1940s she
left home, stopped attending the Mennonite Church and rejected the
ridged Christianity her family had taught her as a child. For a time
she was not a member of any church.
My father grew up in the Southern Baptist church in the 1920s
and 1930s. When he was about fifteen years old, the Baptist
Church he attended fired its music director because the director
was a homosexual. My father liked the music director. After the
church fired him, my Dad dropped out of the Southern Baptist
church. For about twenty years he was not a member of any
church.
Eventually, my father and mother married, had children and
joined the Unitarian Universalist Church. Because of their
experiences growing up, they were both critical of traditional
Christianity. My mother saw her older sister become so paranoid
that she broke off relations with all members to her family. My
mother associated her sister's mental illness with a strict Christian
upbringing. My maternal grandparents sent my uncle to a seminary
to become a Christian minister. The family story is that after
completing classes a church called him to be their minister. When
my uncle stood up in the pulpit to give his first sermon, he looked
at the congregation and fainted. He resigned from the ministry and
entered therapy. It was several years before he could function in
the world after his Christian upbringing.
I am talking about my own family of origin here, but I suspect
that many of you have similar stories that you could tell. Many of
you came to Unitarian Universalism after a bad experience in a
traditional Christian church. These experiences can make us
uncomfortable and distrustful of people who describe themselves
as Christians. As a result, for some of us, seeing the good in
Judaism or Buddhism is easier than seeing the good in Christianity.
I have within me a complex and subtle web of distrust when it
comes to Christianity. This is the result of the scepticism about
Christianity I learned from both my parents, and from the Unitarian
Universalist church in which my parents raised me. As an adult, I
have had that distrust reinforced from encounters with
organizations like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition.
I am afraid that some Christians will, if they can gain enough
power, take away our freedom. Because of Christians, I fear that
freedom of choice about abortion will be lost and that society will
continue to condemn my gay and lesbian friends. I am afraid that
Christians will force seriously ill people to have their life sustained
on a respirator long after we should have allowed them to die with
dignity. I am afraid that my children will be forced to say Christian
prayers in school and they will be forced to mouth words they do
not believe or understand. So I distrust Christians.
I was twenty-five years old when I first heard about a
successful Unitarian Universalist minister who said he was a
committed Christian. Something must be wrong with this man, I
thought. How was it possible to be a rational, logical Unitarian
Universalist and also be a Christian? So much of the New
Testament is obviously inconsistent with our experience of life.
Why would any clear headed person identify with a religious
movement that is based on old irrational stories? How old-fashioned, I thought.
Knowing that something must be wrong with this man, at first
I did not go to hear him preach. However, other students at the
seminary I was attending keep telling me what a great preacher this
man was. Finally, a friend dragged me to the Unitarian Universalist
Christian's church.
The sermon that day was entitled "Hello. I'm Your Sexton."
The minister spoke as through he was a member of the church's
custodial staff. For twenty-five minutes he told about the joy and
sorrows of setting up, maintaining, and cleaning a very busy
Unitarian Universalist Church. The sermon was entertaining and
funny. Without saying it, the underlying message was loud and
clear: "Hey, you liberals. Treat the people who move the chairs
and mop the floors and clean the toilets with respect!" Having
worked my way through college as a dishwasher in a restaurant,
the sermon spoke to me.
At the coffee hour I bought a reprint of an old sermon called
"Confessions of a Unitarian Christian."(5)
The minister had said:
I remember meeting with the Pulpit Committee of a large
Unitarian Universalist congregation in the East. It was a
very congenial meeting until one of the members asked me
about my theology. When I replied that I was a Christian,
the faces turned suddenly to stone and the room went dead.
Finally, after the longest meditation I had ever endured, the
Chairman said: "Well, maybe we won't have to tell
anyone."
The Christian Unitarian Universalist went on:
I remember another incident when I spoke on the theme of
the Christian symbolism in literature. I was asked to attend
a sermon discussion after the service in the basement of the
church. When I arrived, a man was screaming loudly,
pounding on a table, and throwing ashtrays to the floor. As
I approached, he shouted: "We have a free pulpit in this
church, and we don't want any of that Christian garbage!"
As I read these stories, I though that perhaps it was time for me
to set aside my own distrust of Christianity, and see if there was
something here from which I might learn. What are the beliefs of
a twentieth century American Unitarian Christian? This man, the
first Unitarian Universalist Christian minister I came to know,
wrote:
I define a Christian as a person who demonstrates their love
of God and the world through the example of their life. In
my weakness, I need the example of Jesus' life.
In another sermon he went on to say:
I do not pretend that I am a worthy example of the
Christian faith. The abandonment of selfishness, the will to
sacrifice, and the goodness of heart are daily struggles of
the soul. I am never "complete," but always in the process
of "becoming." I do not even declare myself a Christian to
most people, because I know I do not deserve the title.
This minister has since retired. Nevertheless, I will always be
indebted to him for the way in which his sermons reestablished my
own trust in Christianity. Thanks to a fine teacher, I began to see
Christianity, less as an old fashioned, irrational religion, and more
as a story about a person who tried to teach people to love each
other. This Unitarian Universalist Christian taught me that in spite
of all the baggage loaded onto Jesus' life, in the original story there
is still much that can inspire and guide me.
Three years ago when I first visited Transylvania, I had another
encounter with Unitarian Christianity. Four hundred years ago, in
this beautiful land we call Transylvania, the reformation
encouraged a minister named Francis David to reexamination the
Christian religion and the Christian Church. He decided to accept
only those religious claims that had a sure foundation in biblical
text and that were reasonable.
During the 1560s David began to set forth objections to the
doctrine of the Trinity. He came to the conclusion that the Trinity
was an abstract, theological speculation that was not
understandable. David wrote,
If these things are necessary for salvation, it is certain that
no poor peasant Christian is saved, because he could never
understand them in all his life.(6)
David argued that the Trinity and the dual nature of Jesus were
unscriptural and unreasonable. This Christian Unitarianism spread
throughout Transylvania.
For more than 400 years Ethnic Hungarians have kept Francis
David's Unitarianism alive. The estimated membership of the
Transylvanian Unitarian Church is now 100,000, making it the
largest Unitarian church anywhere in the world outside North
America. Since the fall of Communism in 1989, there have been
many new contacts between the Christian Unitarians in
Transylvania and American Unitarian Universalists. In a new book
by Transylvania ministers called Confessions About Ourselves, one
minister, Sándor Kovács, wrote about his visit to America:
Dracula's popularity has not yet decreased, and one may be
sure that of the first three questions they would ask, one
would be on this theme . . . I had to get used to the fact
that I was in America, but the Americans had to get used
to the fact that the minister read from -- guess what -- the
Bible in the pulpit . . .
We were the guests of [the San Francisco Unitarian Church]
for ten months. We attended the worship service at the
Unitarian Universalist church in this beautiful city every
Sunday. Worship service? Well, in the American
perspective it was a worship service, but according to our
Transylvanian ideas it was more a friendly meeting, a kind
of a club event, where there was not much talked about
God but everybody had a pleasant time. On Sundays, the
sermon itself was an essay worked out with great precision.
It was not particularly Christian, but neither was it a lecture
from any other world religion. It was rather interesting. I
must admit that for a long time, I had a strange feeling
about the Sunday services. Music was the only thing that
made these meetings real worship for us. The choir, its
conductor and the organist of the church, being blessed with
the highest professional knowledge, enchanted the assembly,
so that the Sunday meetings became real worship services
not only for the American Unitarian Universalists, but for
the Transylvanian experience as well.(7)
The Christian Unitarian visitor from Transylvania found
spiritual power in the music of our worship services. In my visits
to our partner church in Transylvania, I found spiritual power in
their Unitarian Christian beliefs. In their catechism they have
preserved the simple, original Jesus without the baggage that so
many have added to the story. I suspect that as people come to our
church in search of spirituality, some may find that spirituality in
the power of this Unitarian Christianity. I close today with the
selections from the Transylvania Unitarian Catechism:
We do not call Jesus God, because we know that he was in
realty a man . . . His real humanity is verified by his whole
life. He was born, grew up in body and spirit, was happy,
sorrowful, hungry, thirsty, suffered and died . . . After
Jesus' death, his loyal disciples and followers took his body
down from the cross and buried it in the tomb . . . His
disciples and followers loyalty kept the memory of their
master and teacher, and proclaimed his teachings . . . Our
most important duty is to love God, to love our neighbors
and to build the kingdom of God on Earth. In fulfillment of
our duty we shall listen to voice of our conscience, we shall
always choose good, truth and beauty, and we shall be loyal
to these. If we lived in that way, our reward will be a
restful heart, and peace among us.(8)
1. Eliot, Frederick May, Chairman, Unitarians
Face a New Age, the Report of the Commission
of Appraisal to the American Unitarian
Association, 1936, page 155.
2. Committee on Goals Report, Commission of
Appraisal to the Unitarian Universalist
Association, 1967.
3. The Quality of Religious Life in Unitarian
Universalist Congregations, A survey by the
Commission on Appraisal to the Unitarian
Universalist Association, 1989, page 31.
4. Fulfilling the Promise, Unitarian Universalism
Needs and Aspirations Survey, 1998, page 7.
5. Rankin, David, "Confessions of a Unitarian
Christian,"in So Great a Cloud of Witnesses,
Strawberry Hill Press, San Francisco California,
1978, page 65.
6. 6. Erdö, John, Transylvania Unitarian Church,
The Center for Free Religion, Chico, CA, 1990,
page 47.
7. Kedei, Mózes, editor, Confessions About
Ourselves, The Transylvanian Ministerial
Fellowship, Transylvania, Romania, 1999, pages
247, 249.
8. Kedei, Mózes, editor, Confessions About
Ourselves, The Transylvanian Ministerial
Fellowship, Transylvania, Romania, 1999, pages
271-301.
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