Our Sources
a sermon preached by the Rev. Diane Miller
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle
on October 5, 2008
Honestly, how did I get myself into this? This! A sermon on By-laws!
I ask myself: What was I thinking? But you are here, which is absolutely wonderful, despite this deadly-sounding sermon topic. Ministers starting a new ministry get a few free passes for early blunders. Perhaps I am using one up this morning.
Apart from a handful of television preachers, few ministers have a genius for promoting Sunday sermons. We tend to be in short supply of marketing talent.
Take the sermon title, often published in the church newsletter well before the sermon is prepared. When we are clueless about what we will preach, we make the title fairly general. Once, over lunch with some colleagues, we compared sermon titles we could use when we didn’t have the foggiest idea what we were going to say. The winner of our lunchtime contest was the generic all-purpose title, “Unitarian Universalism Today.” Virtually anything can fit under that large umbrella.
There is the classic story, retold recently by the Rev. Forrest Church, about a colleague, James Madison Barr of Memphis, Tennessee. Barr was a free spirit and a minister of the old school, who had a habit of disappearing periodically, especially on Mondays and Tuesdays, when the office staff was composing and printing the weekly church newsletter. At the top of each newsletter, they included the sermon title for the following Sunday and a brief précis of its theme. Whenever Dr. Barr was missing in action and necessity forced the Memphis church administrator to be creative, she listed his forthcoming sermon as follows:
“The Great Mystery” James Madison Barr, Preaching
And then the description:
What Dr. Barr will be preaching about this Sunday is a mystery,
but we’re certain it will be great.
I hope to make this sermon on our sources a little less wonkish than it sounds, and more spiritually relevant. But there are a few facts that need to be said, that get us to the point. Bear with a brief exposition needed to set up the issues.
The words we read together this morning, printed in the front of our hymnbook, are generally called our UU Principles & Purposes. They are Article II of the bylaws of our Association of congregations.
In 1961, The Universalist Church of America and the American Unitarian Association combined to create a new body. This congregation, which had gone from being Puritan Calvinist to Unitarian long before, joined with over a thousand other congregations to create the Unitarian Universalist Association, our denomination. New by-laws were hammered out, including a statement describing the new body and what it stood for. Twenty years later, by the 1980’s, there was increasing discontent voiced about the descriptive section of the UUA bylaws. Women began pointing out that they were out of date and the language and theology were not inclusive. A Committee was appointed by the UUA Moderator to draft a revision of that section of the UUA by-laws, and I was asked to serve on it. A group of 8 lay and clergy UUs from across the country worked over the next two years to create a new statement of principles and purposes. We then presented a draft of this statement to the congregations for adoption. With some modifications it was adopted by delegates to our General Assemblies and became the new Article II of our bylaws, the Principles and Purposes.
A generation later, the Commission on Appraisal was asked to review the statement and suggest changes. They asked for suggestions from congregations. They collected the feedback and came up with the new version which is included in the insert in your order of service. They are asking for feedback about this draft by October 16th.
Thus, today I invite you to take a look at the new draft, to compare it to the one we read together, and offer your feedback to the Commission. We have some laptops set up so that you may do this on line during coffee hour. Or take this home. Websites are listed at the bottom of the handout.
In most religious traditions, revelation is revealed in a miraculous fashion – a message from the mountaintop, God’s voice through scripture, a moment of realization, herald angels, signs and miracles. In our tradition, we have a process that comes through a highly democratic process, a grass roots theology, shaped by human beings. Though when I look back on it now, it seems like a miracle that we got so much done in a short time. I was starting a new settled ministry, and our work covered the time in my life when I was expecting my first child, and then caring for an infant while serving a growing church. Luckily, I was close to Boston and didn’t have to travel for the meetings.
By now, after living with the Principles and Purposes for a couple decades, some people are deeply attached to them and don’t want them changed in the slightest. These are the words of faith many people grew up with, have memorized, have handed out to people who want to know what we are about. And there is a Cottage Industry of posters, books, and curricula based on our current statement.
At the same time, a substantial critique has taken shape. The Reverend Davidson Loehr has a scathing sermon in which he refers to our Principles as the Seven Dwarfs. He maintains that they are banal. No one disagrees with them, they are in the category of common sense, of platitudes, or saying nothing about what distinguishes us from other faith perspectives. Others have labeled the statement self-centered and narcissistic.
I come to this with the bias of having been on the P&P Committee that produced the second iteration, in the 1980s. The first was done at merger in 1961. Admittedly, I tend toward some protective feelings about the results of our efforts back in the day, and find the critiques excessively dismissive. And so it is good for me to recall that our project emerged from the need to significantly transform the original text, and we who had been critics of the 1961 language were certainly dismissive when we sought to replace it. (sexist, patriarchal, anthropocentric, hubris, were among the charges leveled at the merger text when we began to tear it apart) So all is fair in the name of progress and the free exchange of ideas. I am prepared to see the version in which I invested myself topple in the light of new wisdom and new times.
Here is another piece of information from the P&P Committee experience. Our first draft, presented at the 1982 GA after we started meeting the prior autumn, was a dreadful clunker. We worked fast, and put together a booklet with background and other covenant statements from our tradition as well as our first attempt at a new statement. We read an enormous amount of input from congregations & individuals, with ministers having the most engagement with the input. Our first try attempted to cover all the bases, to composite the many “agendas” and viewpoints people wanted reflected. It read like a “laundry list” of issues and groups within our movement.
When our Committee returned to the project the next fall we tried to improve on our first effort and wrangled with it to the point of exhaustion. It was when we scrapped the first draft entirely and started over that something began to happen. We put aside the pressure to create an inclusive statement/description that pleased all the factions, and instead asked ourselves what Unitarian Universalism was, and what a statement of Principles needed to say. We returned to the work, after a good night’s sleep, and came up with the basics of what was then adopted. The Committee’s language was amended by the General Assemblies that followed, but the structure held up.
My hope is that the Commission on Appraisal may have a similar revelatory moment when a fresh new path forward can emerge. I could not vote for this version. I hope the good people who worked on this will not take my critique personally, but this draft is too long, too tied to the issues of the moment, full of jargon, and inappropriately detailed for our By-laws.
It is also embarrassing in places. In the section on our sources, it mentions Jewish and Christian roots for “more than two thousand years…” But of course if we are embracing Judaism then we are talking about four thousand years and more…
The new statement reminds me of the new book, titled Things White People Like. You don’t have to actually be white to be in the book’s demographic target being skewered, but you do want to be very correct in matters of cultural correctness. Take, for example, the phrase about cultural misappropriation. While this is an important issue, why not list all the things we should and should not be doing in our congregations – being green, being welcoming, being inclusive, being responsible stewards, being compassionate, being fair compensation employers….the list goes on.
Here in this Sanctuary we have an item of cultural appropriation, an eagle feather blessing given to us by Rick St. Germaine when he led a worship service here in 2003. Rick was on leave from the University of Wisconsin and teaching at Harvard, so he and Becky moved their two sons to Carlisle and joined this church. Their primary religious identity is the spiritual tradition of their Ojibway nation. Most native American religious practices were destroyed, but some have been retained and reconstructed. Rick is the leader of two Ojibway spiritual groups that protect sacred traditions. Rick shared with us one of the sacred songs, very rarely heard, and he also gave us the Eagle Feather on our East window. He explained that it is illegal to have an Eagle feather unless it was given by a Native American, but that it was given as a blessing to us, hung in the window facing East. We have been enriched by our encounter with another tradition, and we appropriately have this reminder with us.
A statement of our principles and sources in the UUA By-laws is meant to be descriptive, for the clarification of the public, and for *those who wish to join the UUA, i.e. for congregations who may wish to affiliate.*
The By-Laws are not the place for long, leading theological statements, which is what the draft seems to be. The By-Laws are not the place for congregational covenants, but are indeed the place for a covenant among the member congregations. The focus should be on how we work together/walk together as an association and how it is that we hope to be with each other. I encourage you to give thought to this new draft statement. Respond, fill out survey, and use this as an opportunity to think about what our larger tradition means to you, and how you want us to be described to the world at large.
AMEN