Reading
Adapted from a 2/99 Quest article by Rev. Suzanne Meyer, Tulsa, OK

Our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors didn't always have it as easy as we do. Michael Servetus and Katherine Vogel were burned at the stake for their heretical beliefs. Francis David and John Biddle died after many years of imprisonment. Joseph Priestley and George DeBenneville were driven out of England and France respectively because of their religion. Norbert Capek died in a Nazi concentration camp. The religious persecution of Unitarians and Universalists continued well into the 20th century in Romania and the Phillipines.

Given that rich and difficult history of ours, ask yourself this question: If Unitarian Universalism were illegal in America today, would there be enough evidence against you for a conviction?

For instance, do your neighbors and co-workers know of your faith? Are you active in the world, living out our commitments to justice and equality? Would the Thought Police find incriminating UU books and pamphlets in your home? Would they know where to find you on Sunday morning? Could they seize your bank account and find a paper trail of contributions to your church and denomination and service committee? Have you been caught teaching a child - your own or another one in your faith community - what it means to be a religious liberal?

The point I'm trying to make is this: Calling oneself a Unitarian Universalist is easy. Living the life of a religious liberal is often hard work. In some settings it is downright dangerous; in all settings it requires a true commitment to a challenging spiritual path.

You Can Lead a Horse to Water
by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, September 19, 2004

This is a special Sunday in our congregational year because it's the day on which we name and bless and commission our religious education teachers. It's the first day of the new round of classes for our children, where we expect them to learn something about what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist. Some of us, myself included, have had our children enrolled in classes within this faith for their entire lives. Especially with that kind of tenure, we have some reason to hope that by the time they graduate they will feel as solidly grounded in our faith, history and tradition as any of their peers are in the more mainstream religions around us.

But we have an interesting and perhaps unique challenge before us when it comes to transmitting our faith to the next generation. If our religion were one of the mainstream or conventional ones, we would have a clear and unambiguous doctrine to impart. We would teach our children chapter and verse in our particular scriptures as something holy, something to be revered and to guide one's life by. We would teach them the specific spiritual discipline of our faith: how to sit quietly in meditation, how to bow in the direction of Mecca, how to recite the Kol Nidre or the Lord's Prayer. And we would tell them the core truths of our faith: that God's name is Allah and Mohammed is his prophet, or that Jesus is part of a holy trinity and died for our sins.

But ours is not a mainstream or conventional faith. Ours is a faith that was born from dissent. It's a faith that evolved through long struggle against the mainstream during the course of centuries in which our ancestors risked life and limb to speak their doubts out loud. Because they took that risk, spoke their doubt, and shaped a new belief for themselves, the seeds were planted that flourished through the years and eventually blossomed into the Unitarian Universalism we know today.

There are two reasons why this legacy as a dissenting faith makes it peculiarly difficult for us to teach our faith to our children. First, because we know what it cost our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors to claim their beliefs, we hold fiercely to the right of each person - child or adult - to choose for ourselves what our statement of belief will be.

And second, because so many of those within our fold arrived here as adults, coming as refugees from a mainstream faith that no longer fits us, we carry baggage. We are determined to raise our children in a place where their hearts and minds can flourish without being forced into creedal statements they can't understand or believe. We are committed to raising them without the baggage of rejected creeds that so many of us have dragged around as adults. But those two things - our legacy as a dissenters' faith and our own status as religious refugees - can create some challenges for our kids.

You all know the popular aphorism on which I built the title of my sermon this morning: "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink." The truth it points to is a common one: no matter how hard you try to get someone else to do the right thing, it's impossible. The best you can do is lead them to water. You can't make them drink. You can't make your kids eat only healthy stuff, no matter how lovely a feast of carrots and whole grains you keep in stock. You can't force your spouse to organize her home office no matter how many organizing systems you buy for her. You can't make someone change even a very self-destructive pattern - you can only point out a better one. And if we push the edge of the old wisdom just a little in order to apply it to religious beliefs, you could say that we can teach all the religious truth we want to, but we don't have the ability - or the right - to make someone else accept it.

We feel okay about that piece of it. It seems right to us that no one could make us 'drink' the catechism we grew to reject, so we want to be very sure we don't try to force our kids to take in some creed or belief that they haven't chosen for themselves. But here is where I think we too often fail in the task that confronts us in raising our children in this faith: because we cannot make a horse drink, we too often fail even to lead it to the water. Because we do not want to force our children into a constraining little faith box of some kind, we too often fail to give them the rich and nuanced parameters of our religion.

A week ago I had a small role in the training we offer our teachers before the semester begins, and I shared with them an excerpt from an article in the UU World that I think is important enough for all of us to ponder together. This article was originally a speech given to denominational staff by Kris Fikkan, a young woman who was raised UU from the age of seven, when her family moved to Salt Lake City, Utah. They felt they needed a faith community as a sort of bulwark against the dominant Mormonism of that town, and the local Unitarian church is what they found. This is what she has to say:

"Here's a little bit of what I understood my church was about, as a little kid. These are not the words that adults spoke to me, but my childhood translation of them. I think they reveal something key, and very tricky, about our faith:'Unitarian Universalists can believe anything they want, or nothing. Nothing is more common. This is because we're smart, and we got away from places where we were told what to do and what to believe. We are very lucky. Everyone would be happier if they could get here, but not everyone is as brave or as free as we are. …'"

"But what does it mean to believe anything you want," Fikkan goes on to say, "when no one's ever suggested to you that you believe something specific? [Our Purposes and Principles], to my childish ear, made a lot of sense, [but] sounded exactly like the admonishments and ideals I heard in other places. They did not define a faith to me - especially not in the environment that I was in. They were no answer for the questions I got on the playground. 'Does your church have a God, or do you worship Satan?'…When I put these same questions to the adults in my family and my church, they had answers about all the world's other religions - and nothing to say about our church.

"I'm still trying to work out a faith for myself that is something more than just a way of fending off the faith of others. The liveliest questions of my faith, as a nearly life-long Unitarian Universalist, have precisely to do with the things many other UUs left at the door when they arrived: 'God' and other religious language, worship and tradition, faith…In my religious journey, I'm glad to be free, but I am still hungry. I've read the menu, and I know it to be virtually limitless - but I want to sit down at the table and eat."

I found this testimony to be very sobering. There is a glimmering of hope in it, because as a young adult Kris Fikkan is still a committed Unitarian Universalist, so the First Unitarian Church of Salt Lake City, Utah, certainly did some things right. But what I hear in her dissatisfaction with her UU upbringing is something to which we should be very attentive: Kris was told that she had the right to choose for herself whether or not to drink, but she was not led to the water.

The truth is, the waters of our faith run very deep, and all those proverbial thirsting souls out there need to be led to them - whether they are adults or children. Our deep waters don't flow around creedal statements or scriptures that we hold to be immutable or spiritual practices that must be followed in a certain way. But they're here nevertheless, available to nourish spirit as well as mind, as they did for our religious ancestors.

We have our own answers to the great religious questions, and we need to give those answers to our children, without fear that we will thereby cripple their ability to think for themselves. It's by offering our answers that we bow to these enormous questions. Through our answers, we show that the questions are worth pondering, that our own attention is focused on them, and that the religious quest is worth pursuing.

So what do we say, when our children ask one of the typical religious questions, especially one that might threaten to unpack the baggage that we, their parents, still carry? Let's say they ask, "Is there a God?" The kind of answer that Kris Fikkan got and the kind that comes most easily out of our mouths, is: "Well, that depends. Some people think there is and some people don't. We think it's okay for you to believe either way."

True though that statement might be, it is only a partial truth. In its half-heartedness it leaves our children with nothing to grab onto and wrestle with. It gives them the distinct impression that the adults in their lives believe nothing.

We have to do the work that our ancestors freed us up to do, wrestle with our own beliefs until we can say clearly, and with conviction, what they are. So when the question comes, we say: "Yes, I believe there's a God, and this is what I believe about God, and this is why I believe." Or, "No, I don't believe there's a God, at least not the way I think you mean it. But let me tell you what I do believe."

In my best of all possible scenarios, both of those answers - true to what the adults in question believe - would go on to say something like this: "You know, one of the reasons that we're Unitarian Universalists is because a long time ago, our ancestors were asking themselves the same thing: whether or not there was a God, and what kind of God they could really believe in. Back in those days pretty much everyone thought there was a God, one who was very severe and angry. It was kind of a scary way to think about God, because they also believed that whenever people did anything wrong God was likely to send them to hell.

"But the Universalists - our ancestors -- decided that kind of God didn't make any sense to them, and they started teaching that God is love. They thought that the better we knew a God of love, the better we could love each other, and finally learn to live in peace. I still think that's a pretty smart thing to believe. What do you think?"

Our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors came up with answers to the same fundamental religious questions that we ask today, and that our children ask of us. Their answers still have something true and important to teach us, even if we put a modern spin on them. Because beliefs don't exist in a vacuum, and they don't simply rattle around in our individual heads. They shape the story we tell ourselves about the nature of our world and our universe, about our place in it, about the meaning of our lives and what we ought to do with those lives. They compel us toward the moral choices we make and the actions we take.

All around us we can witness the evidence of other people's stories, the ways in which their actions arise from their beliefs. For instance, the story about a vengeful, punishing Jesus results in a kind of 'Christian' who goes to the funeral of a murdered young man carrying a sign that say, "God Hates Faggots." The story about a narrow, sectarian God gives rise to the Israeli settler who confiscates Palestinian land based on a 3,000-year-old verse from the book of Exodus; or to the reactive violence and misogyny of the Afghan Taliban. The story about a remote, heaven-dwelling God brings on a kind of spiritualism that denies the beauty of this world and ignores its suffering.

What we believe makes a difference. When our Universalist ancestors rejected the God of vengeance and punishment in favor of a God of love, there were implications. It meant that we too, as children of God, are called to love; that the divine embrace includes all people, not just those who think the way we do; that in forgiving and loving us despite all our spectacular flaws, God hands us the difficult, liberating assignment to forgive one another as well.

When our Unitarian ancestors rejected the doctrine of the trinity and declared that Jesus was a human being rather than a god, there were implications. It meant that despite all evidence to the contrary, we ourselves, made of exactly the same stuff as Jesus, could learn to live lives of great holiness, great courage and great integrity. It meant that intimacy with God as sons and daughters was the birthright of every human being, and that we'd better learn to live as though we are in fact sisters and brothers in holiness.

When our Universalist ancestors put the emphasis on the breadth of God's embrace, there were implications. It meant that there were many ways to know holiness, many scriptures worthy of study, many forms of prayer, no matter how foreign they might seem at first. It meant that we should study our differences, study other faiths and beliefs with open minds, so that some glimmer of truth that had eluded us might manage to squeak in through our biases. It meant we had to treasure diversity instead of fearing it.

When our Unitarian ancestors, led by Emerson and Thoreau, taught about transcendent holiness in all things, there were implications. It meant that every person already has the tools necessary to perceive the world as it truly is, that we don't need a particular creed or church or minister or prayer to draw closer to God. It meant that we should trust our own senses, that we should try out religious claims against our own experience and perception. It meant that we should never surrender our will or intuition or common sense to a truth claim that does not ring true for us.

It is deep water we offer, in this peculiar community of faith. It is deep water to drink from, to which we should lead our children, lead one another, over and over again. The religion of Unitarian Universalism isn't particularly difficult, although it doesn't lend itself to short, simple answers to the complex questions of life and death.

It is a slow, steady flowing that can help us lead lives of great compassion and integrity, and face death with great peace. It seems to me that that's the whole point of a spiritual life and a spiritual community. So --may we drink deeply from the water that is ours. AMEN