Many Mansions

October 9, 2005

Rev. Dr. Frank Carpenter, D.Min.
St. John's Unitarian Universalist Church, Cincinnati, OH

Sermon

My first year as a full time minister was as an intern at the Buffalo, NY, Unitarian Church. Paul Carnes, who later became President of the UUA, was then the minister. The year was that year of miracles, that Anno Mirabilis, 1968.

Those of you active in Unitarian Universalist churches that year remember it well. It was the year of anti-war protest. Peter, Paul and Mary came to the Buffalo church for concert for the Peace and Freedom Party. One of my responsibilities was advisor to the youth group, then known as LRY, Liberal Religious Youth. We had greater concerns on our minds than the drugs, acid, grass, that were prevalent. The church gave sanctuary to several draft resistors. Blood was spilled when the police came in to arrest them. Being in community was not easy, the transforming power of love works in mysterious ways.

Anyone interested in the history of Unitarian Universalism in the second half of the 20^th century could well read Tom Wolfe’s ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST. An electric kool-aid acid test was putting LSD into the kool-aid punch at a conference. The first electric kool aid acid test was held at the Canoga Park, CA, Unitarian church.

During what for many seemed to be those halcyon times, a miraculous year, that Anno Mirabilis, the UUA, our denominational headquarters, received a call for help from a mid-western UU congregation. It seemed that one of there members was regularly spiking the children’s punch with LSD during coffee hour. Being in community is not easy; that transforming power of love does work mysteriously!

Had the church leaders spoken with the person? Yes, to no avail.

They had stood guard at the punch bowel and that had not helped. They had followed him around the church, and still the punch was spiked. What could they do?

The UUA wondered if they had asked the person to leave the church? Unheard of! After all, the person’s motivation was to create spiritual experience for the children. We strive to be inclusive. We have trouble not including everybody; we don’t like to talk about excluding people. I have heard it asked, How can you prove that UU’s are too obsessed with including everybody? And the response: if they had to form a firing squad, they’d arrange themselves in a circle.

Our Unitarian Universalist interest in spirituality is thought to begin in the late sixties. Spirituality also began to capture the attention of our nation. One person told a sociologist, “One day I woke up and wondered: maybe today I should be a Christian, or would I rather be a Buddhist, or am I just a Star Trek freak?” [RESTLESS SOULS, 1] Spirituality, it was said was different from religion. Religion was for people afraid of going to hell; and spirituality for those who had already been there. Spirituality was mysticism without particulars: Christianity without the cross, Buddhism without the Bo Tree. No particulars, nothing concrete; only universal abstractions. In the words of the poet Conrad Aiken:

Mysticism, but let us have no words,

Angels, but let us have no fantasies,

Churches, but let us have no creeds,

No dead gods hung on crosses in a shop,

Nor beads or prayers nor faith nor sin nor penance:

And yet, let us believe, let us believe.

We as liberals in religion have at least talked about opening our doors wide and welcoming all. And many have come; you have come, been welcomed at the door. Your various faith journeys have enriched the community, for that is why we are here. St. John’s celebrates freedom of belief.

And if truth were allowed out, inclusiveness, acceptance is probably the oldest religious agenda: love one another, honoring the path we are each on, our struggles, our hopes; our sorrows, our dreams; encouraging us through beauty, meditation and community. Christianity began as the spiritual alternative to the oppressive imperialism of the Roman Empire. When Jesus talked about heaven to his disciples, he spoke about the many mansions that his father had created in heaven. Harvard theologian, Harvey Cox comments, “Those who look with appreciation on other faiths frequently cite [the Gospel of] John 14:2 and suggest that the "many mansions" may refer to the heavenly palaces in which Hindus and Buddhists will dwell -- alongside Christians -- in the hereafter.” [LINK]

Today as our Jewish friends are preparing for Yom Kippur and our Muslim friends are in the midst of the holy month of Ramadan, shall we not also assume that Jews and Muslims, along with Buddhists, and Hindus have their mansions? Whether there is a UU mansion in this construction of heaven I do not know, perhaps we get to go from palace to palace, continuing our spiritual journeys. Being in community, even in heaven, is not easy. The transformative steps of promising and forgiving are challenging.

This openness to all people was the early message of Christianity; even Saint Paul says that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither male nor female. And if there is neither male nor female in Christ, I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how there could be gay and straight. It may not have been possible to come out to Jesus, or to Paul, but if the God of Love proclaimed by those prophets is for real, you can come out to their God.

Being in an open, inclusive community isn’t easy. Just like being in a family, or working in an office, it takes work, thought, reflection. Being an individual in a community, one that considers itself liberal and inclusive can be challenging. Encountering that challenge you will be changed, you will grow.

Consider again the mid-western congregation which called the denomination asking what to do about the person who was spiking the children’s punch with LSD. A person in the church was placing the children of the church at risk; it was not a safe and caring community for those we all want to protect. The final advice of the UUA after going though a number of options was to say that they should ask the person to leave and if he didn’t, contact the police. As a group they asked him, and he didn’t’ return. The congregation made the decision and acted on it. Was it ever easy being in community?

Nobody likes to deal with the hard questions about what is acceptable in a community. Our faith in the worth of everybody and equity and compassion in all relationships make it hard for us to deal with it. The concept of ‘sinner’ or ‘evildoer’ doesn’t fit into our perspective. We all too often look for easy comprise. As has been said, Unitarian Universalists don’t have Ten Commandments, they have Ten Suggestions.

I think the difficulty for us as liberals, wanting to be inclusive, of being in community, can be explored by thinking about the meaning of the word ‘accept.’ We want to be accepted, “Just as I am” as the old time hymn has it.

Just as I am, though tossed about
With many a conflict, many a doubt,
Fightings and fears within, without,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

Just as I am, poor, wretched, blind;
Sight, riches, healing of the mind,
Yea, all I need in Thee to find,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

We want to be accepted as we say in our first principle, as having supreme worth and dignity, just as I am, without having to prove myself to you or anybody else. But what does acceptance mean?

Does acceptance mean acceptable? Is it acceptable to spike children’s punch with LSD? We can point out what was unacceptable was not the person, but the behavior. If the punch spiker had just wanted to talk about it, people might have wondered, but it might not have warranted a request to depart.

The founder of our liberal religion, William Ellery Channing, ran into this problem in his debates about slavery. Being a good liberal he believed that slave owners had inherent worth and dignity.

Owning slaves, he was the first to say, was a sin. But the radical abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, repeated, time after time, called on Channing not to just condemn the sin of slavery, but also condemn the slave owners as human beings. But being a liberal, believing in the inherent worth and dignity of each human being, Channing refused. What is acceptable in our sight are all people. But not all behavior.

Yet ideas have consequences. What would Channing do if someone came to his church and preached a sermon in favor of owning slaves? Would we welcome someone advocating racism, homophobia? How do we feel about Islam? I was at a ministers conference recently where there was discussion about how welcome Muslims might be in UU congregations, regardless of their views of the fringe Muslim right. Ideas have consequences.

At the level of our theological diversity we tend to let things slide. That is why the report “engaging our theological diversity,” the title of the Commission of Appraisal report, is a call to a new level of spirituality in our congregations. Engaging our theological diversity has never really been undertaken. What will happen? We fear, perhaps quite rightly, that if we engage each other, at the spiritual level, not just the behavior level, we will be changed!

One time early on in my ministry, in a small church in a New Hampshire town with more apple trees than human beings, I taught the junior high school class. There were about three in the class. As the curriculum, I decided to use the UUA’s Boy Scout merit badge program for UU’s. Part of that program called for the students to go home and interview their parents about what they thought about spiritual things. What did their parents think about Jesus? What did their think about the Bible?

Boy! Did I get blasted. The parents of one of the children got back to me real fast. Who was I to ask their child to talk with them about God? Jesus? Sometime later I learned that the child’s’ mother had an inoperable brain aneurysm and might die at any time. After I left the congregation, I did hear that the child got home from school one day to find her mother dead on the kitchen floor. I have wondered if living which such fear of death inhibited them from talking about God, and perhaps the after-life. Living in community is not easy and if they talked about such things, they might have been changed.

And it happens. Recently I watched an interview of James Yee. Yes was the Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo who was charged with treason, locked up in solitary confinement for 76 days and then all charges dropped. The interviewer asked him how he became a Muslim.

Yee responded he had grown up Lutheran and attended West Point. At one point, he was in an interfaith conversation with other officers. One of them was a Muslim. Having been brought up a Christian, Yee was critical of Islam. The Muslim talked with him, and asked what he knew about Islam. Not much Yee admitted. Then Yee was asked how he could condemn something he did not know much about. Yee admitted it wasn’t fair, so he began to study Islam. Among other things he found more reasonable about Islam was the concept of one God instead of a Trinity. Yee became a Muslim.

Being in community, a liberal, inclusive community is not easy. We will be challenged. That challenge offers to us the promise of the transforming power of love and hope.

Being in a community, a liberal, inclusive community, challenges us. The challenge is whether we will be transformed by the love that underlies the community, transformed into more caring human beings.

In our opening hymn, the fifth verse went

Young, growing God, eager still to know,

Willing to be changed by what you’ve started,

Quick to be delighted, singing as you go:

Becoming a Unitarian Universalist may be the end of a journey. More than that, I believe it is the beginning of a journey, a journey into transforming community with others. Are we willing to be transformed by what we started by showing up here?

Our Affirmation, which means so much to many of us, continues the promise of the transforming power of love that is at the core of inclusive spiritual community:

Love is the spirit of this church,

The quest of truth is its sacrament,

Service is its prayer.

And this is our [great] covenant:

To dwell together in peace,

To seek knowledge in freedom

And to help one another.

Being in community is not easy. It is our hope. The transforming power of love is the promise of our lives.