2017.11.5 "A House for Hope"

2017.11.5        “Blessing the World with a House for Hope”                      Rev. Laura Bogle

Reading

From “A House for Hope: the Promise of Progressive Religion for the 21^st Century”

by Rebecca Parker and John Beuhrens, published 2010

“We write in a time of hope – hope that the tragedies of torture and war might be eased, that threats to the earth’s environment might be turned around, that economic systems might be converted to better support all earth’s peoples and cultures. We also write with the awareness that hope began before we were born. It began with generations of people who lived before us and devoted their lives to what they hoped for their children and grandchildren. We have benefited from their labors, and we take up the tasks of our own time indebted to them for what has been accomplished and mindful of new challenges, as well as perennial ones that remain.

Hope will go on after us, through those who will continue the struggles for justice, equity, and compassion, and will form and reform communities that embody love for life.

Rebecca [Parker] developed the metaphor [of] theology as a habitation. …[The] image conveys that “theology” – whatever else it may connote – is about the structures of meaning that shelter and shape our way of living. The image counters the common notion among liberals that every person must build his or her own theology from scratch – as if religion were only a private matter of personal belief, without history or community. In fact, liberal and progressive people of faith inherit a communal theological house, built by those who lived, labored, and loved before us.”

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Rebecca Parker and John Beuhrens published these words in 2010, during a time when the state of our country and the direction we felt we were going did feel more hopeful for some.

Perhaps we feel less hopeful this morning, this Sunday before election day 2017.

Nonetheless, they wrote this book knowing that the tides of history ebb and flow.

And knowing that what we believe as religious people, and how we articulate what we believe, shapes how we live our lives, and shapes our common life together.

They wrote this book with the hope that we religious liberals would no longer separate our dearly held faith commitments from our commitments in the public square.  That we might start bringing the language of faith to our engagement with the important social and political issues of our land. 

Can you imagine more and more of us saying, “A Muslim Ban is against my religion.” 

“Discrimination against transgender people is against my religion.”

“Paying people poverty wages is against my religion.”

And they wrote the book with the hope that we might remember that we don’t have to start from the ground up—that we already have important frameworks in place.

Today, one year after the Presidential election, I thought it a good time to review.  We need all the resources our faith tradition has to offer us for these times.

When you enter a place of worship you are not just entering into a physical building, a physical house of worship.

You are entering into a metaphorical house too.  A whole framework of meaning is present, whether you are aware of it or not, whether it is explicitly spelled out or not.

This is true for us as Unitarian Universalists, too.  It is as true for us as it is for the Baptists or the Muslims or the Presbyterians.

We Unitarian Universalists inherit a rich legacy of liberal theology which we often take for granted, or sometimes ignore, or sometimes aren’t even aware of.

Today I want to take us on a tour of our Unitarian Universalist house and share a bit about what it contains. All of this reflection is based especially on the work of Rebecca Parker, who served as President of our UU seminary Starr King School for the Ministry. Each part of the house corresponds to a classic category of systematic theology.  This will be a very quick and necessarily basic tour. 

Foundation: (theology)
What do we say about God or the ultimate source of Life?

Who/what do we most deeply trust?  Who/what upholds us?

When I was a kid I questioned why I needed to bow my head in church--

One thing we understand is that our conceptions of who or what God is reflects more about humanity than about some external knowable Truth.  What we believe and say about God has real-world implications.  If we believe in an angry, judging, violent, distant, male God, chances are we will live that out in our earthly lives.

Much of our theological heritage comes from people and communities who rejected and built a different way.  Joke/nutshell:  Unitarians believed humans too good to be damned by God and Universalists believed God too good to damn people.

In Unitarian Universalism we have inherited a rich theological tradition that includes these ideas:

--humanity and the divine/the ultimate source of Life are co-creators; God is relational, is relationship.

--If there is a God, it is all goodness, Love, creativity -- Universalism

--there is little separation between the divine and the human – we are part of a continuum—God is both within us and beyond us.

--our ideas of God, and perhaps even Godself, changes; continuing revelation;  God and the Universe is always in process and so are we.  Our ancestor’s ideas about God changed with, for instance, the way biblical criticism was done in the 17 and 1800s.  They changed again with scientific advancement, with dialogue with other religious traditions, and with the increase of theological voices from the margins—women and people of color.

“In liberal theology, at the core of the struggle with God is a restless awareness that human conclusions about God are always provisional, and any way of speaking about God may become an idol….The nineteenth century Unitarian Theodore Parker put it well: the goodness of God is manifest in that God has given humanity the power to judge God.” (94, 95)

“The fundamental question then is an existential question, not merely an intellectual exercise.  Do you believe in God? Is a relatively meaningless question, compared to the inquiry of the heart: is there reason to trust that there is any help available?”

Now I will bow my head to the unknowable mystery, to remember that I can’t know it all or do it all by myself.


Walls: (ecclesiology)  ekklesia=assembly, gathering, congregation
nature and purpose of religion from religare=to bind together

The root of the word religion is religare – to bind together.  What binds us together?  What holds us in?  What is the purpose of church and how do we gather?

The walls of our UU house are the covenants we make with one another.  To be religious for us means to be in covenanted community, not to subscribe to a creedal statement of believe.

We choose to be in covenant with one another—to make promises to one another. 

We affirm that the purpose of our Fellowship is to help one another, to live not as isolated individuals but in an interdependence with one another.

When we break those promises, which we all always do at some point, we choose a path to try to stay in relationship and renew those promises.

We are a freely chosen and democratic community – where we pay attention to whether everyone has a voice.  Where the biggest decisions about our community are not made somewhere else, but made right here, by you.

We are place of the priesthood and prophethood of all believers, where I as professional clergy work in shared partnership with you to live out our mission and our ministries.


Roof: (soteriology) soteria=salvation, preservation
What saves us?  What protects us?  What “delivers us from evil?”

Next March our monthly worship theme is Evil – and we’ll be able to get deeper into these questions.  Today I’ll just say:

Unitarian Universalism has been one expression of an alternative theology of salvation that “emphasizes that human beings need to be saved from the consequences of human sin – not from God’s punishing wrath; and that salvation comes through the powers of life and goodness, present within and around us.” (63)

Both Sin and Salvation are in human hands.

In our Christian Unitarian and Universalist heritage, Jesus saves through the example of his life which we are able to follow, not through his death.

Our Universalist forebears said that all would be saved by a loving God.  Period.

Salvation is not an individual, personal experience, but a collective one. 

We will all be saved together. It is our ability to live in Love and Connection which will save us.

The Welcoming Rooms: (theological anthropology, pneumatology)

What does it mean to be human and how to we relate to one another? How do we understand the fact that every human civilization across time and geography has created and expressed some kind of religious framework?

Theological anthropology

At the core of our UU theology is an affirmation of the goodness of the diversity of human life – all of it.  We carry the legacy that each one of us is made in the image of God.  That our human powers of “reason, feeling, imagination, language, memory, creativity, conscience” are fundamentally good, not depraved or sinful.  And that our very bodies, and our capacity for pleasure in and through our bodies, including sexual intimacy, is a good gift.

Now, all of these good gifts can be and are deformed into something unethical, sinful. (see: soteriology) But that is not our starting point.

Our conclusion from the starting point of the goodness of humanity is that no matter your race, your sexual orientation, your gender identity or expression, where you were born or how old you are – you are sacred and worthy, and deserve access to the gifts of life, to flourish and live in safety and well-being.

Rebecca Parker says these rooms are where Love lives.  Love that is “the gift of gracious, transforming, unexpected invitation into greater life through increased connection and engagement with others, especially those that the dominating society deems Other.” (125)

We experience this Love in relationship.  And we can experience it when we encounter a Spirit which feels greater than our human existence, which beckons us to more beauty and more mystery, which calls forth a response of awe and praise.

Pneumatology  Pneuma = breath or wind 

In classical theology it is the doctrine of the Spirit.
Many people today will say “I am Spiritual but not Religious.”  There is a hunger for a deeply felt connection, an experienced sense of Spirit within our human existence.

How do we create a room within this House for spirit to live?  Is our congregation a place where Spirit comes and settles down among us, or sometimes knocks us out of our expectations?  As we are silent, as we sing, as we create – are we acknowledging the mysterious spirit of life that is present in all and that connects us?

Unitarian Universalists can be Spiritual and Religious.  The Spirit shows up in the religious community that worships and sings and creates and engages spiritual practice together.

Door/Threshold: (missiology)  mission=missive, message
How do we relate to others who are not in our theological house?
When and how do we leave our own house to connect with others?  How we are neighbors to those people?
How do we invite others into our house?

Our UU theological framework tells us a few things about this:

--There is truth to be found in all religions, and we accept many ways of seeing, understanding, and believing.  We don’t have a corner on the market.

--It is possible to work respectfully with those of other religious belief towards the flourishing of all life.

--Our respect for a diversity of belief can sometimes make us timid in proclaiming what our good news is.  I never want to be coercive or seen as proselytizing, do you?  At the same time, I know stories of people whose lives have been literally saved because they found our community of faith—a place for head and heart; service and spirit.  A place where people at the margins may be brought into the center.  A place where how we live out our values says so much more about who we are than any statement of belief.

If there’s one challenge I want to leave you with today:  think about when and how you share your UU faith with others. 

Garden/Paradise/Earth: (eschatology)  eschaton=last, final
the end times – or the ultimate point of our existence – where do we hope to be going?

The main thing to know about progressive eschatologies is that they point not heavenward, but bring us back down to earth.  There are some variations on this theme.

One variation was expressed through Universalist Christianity and also through the Social Gospel Movement in the 1800’s. It focuses on the human ability and responsibility to build the Kingdom of God or Beloved Community right here on earth.  We are the ones who create heaven or hell.  Our purpose is not to do good so that we can reach a faraway Paradise after we die, but to use the life we have to work for a communal expression of that Paradise here and now.

In this perspective we are always, always working towards something better in the future, a progressive path.

Another variation encourages us to understand that where we stand right now, right here is already holy.  Jesus said “Today you will be with me in paradise.”  To focus only on some future better time or better place means that we will constantly critique and might neglect what is already here right now.  The better is already here, right here on this incredible planet earth, and we can awaken to it, choose to participate in it, and do all we can to protect and love it.

In this view, in every single moment we have the ability to experience heaven, what we ultimately, fervently hope for.

For me, this (the framework house) and this (our congregation) is the House where Hope lives.  What about for you?  Where does Hope live?

May we be ones who continue looking to both our past and our current life together, taking care of and renewing this House.  May it be so.  Amen.