October 3, 2004
South Nassau Unitarian Universalist Congregation

“The Elevator Speech”

Rev. Nancy Palmer Jones
Joe McCauley, organist

Responsive Reading # 569 – Stand by This Faith, by Rev. Olympia Brown

On this day when we are focusing on just what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist, it seems particularly appropriate to read the words of one of our great Universalist forebears, Olympia Brown. Let me set the context: Olympia Brown was ordained a Universalist minister in 1863, the first woman to achieve full ministerial standing recognized by a denomination. She plunged into the fight to win women the right to vote, and when the suffrage amendment was finally passed in 1919, she was one of the few original suffragists still alive. She voted in her first presidential election at the age of 85. About Universalism, with its commitment to justice making and its devotion to an all-loving all-inclusive God, Olympia Brown was as fierce, fiery, and passionate as she was about everything else. The words we are going to read come from a sermon she preached in 1920, at age 85. I wonder how they will sit with each one of us today …

Stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it.

There is nothing in all the world so important as to be loyal to this faith which has placed before us the loftiest ideals,

Which has comforted us in sorrow, strengthened us for noble duty, and made the world beautiful.

Do not demand immediate results but rejoice that we are worthy to be entrusted with this great message,

That you are strong enough to work for a great true principle without counting the cost.

Go on finding ever new applications of these truths and new enjoyments in their contemplation, always trusting in the one God which ever lives and loves.

Reading     “Who Do You Think You Are?” by Rev. Victoria Safford

We continue our readings this morning with this piece from a modern-day Unitarian Universalist minister, Victoria Safford. She writes:

So last Sunday, when we were all singing “Amazing Grace,” and we got to that bizarre moment in the first verse where our Unitarian Universalist hymnbook slaps down an asterisk and a choice, what did you do? Which did you choose to sing: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me” or “… that saved a soul like me”?

      It probably depends on how you were feeling that day, how particularly wretched or soulful. I know of no other hymnal in print that virtually stops the singing in mid-measure to poll the congregation, to call for a theological debate within the mind and heart of every singer. And right there, quickly—because the pianist isn’t going to wait for you, the congregation isn’t going to wait for you, Sunday rolling on its way to Monday isn’t going to wait for you—you have to stake your claim, make your mark, testify—all the while wondering if the person singing next to you will take offense if you confess at the top of your voice your own wretchedness and even our common condition as a fallen, faulty species. Or will your neighbor be annoyed, or maybe shocked, if you stand there warbling on about what a pleasant soul you are, what a nice, well-rounded, fully individuated, sin-free, guilt-free humanist soul? [So] there you stand, frozen in time, and the music plays on while you hastily cobble a theology.

      We sing our song in different keys and cadences. We are on our own to make a faith out of nothing, which is to say, out of everything we have. That is daunting, lonely work, demanding and relentless work, the work of a lifetime, and I suspect it is the very scope of it that keeps our tiny movement small. Not everyone wants to stop singing in the middle of the song and consider once again and all alone the nature of the human soul and God, infinity without and infinity within.

      It’s a lot to ask of people on a Sunday morning.

NPJ: And so of course I am going to ask it of us! Would you please rise as you are willing and able and join in singing hymn #205, “Amazing Grace”?

Sermon          The Elevator Speech

Rev. Nancy Palmer Jones

So how did you do? Are you feeling like a “wretch” or a “soul” today? And does your choice have anything to do with how you feel about us human beings in general—are we creatures who are broken, unfinished, perpetually sliding into error, or are we sparks of the divine, born good and getting better, in no need of “salvation”? Speaking of which, maybe you wrestled with more than just that asterisk; maybe you stuttered over the word saved, for instance. I always want to know, Saved from what? Saved for what or to what? And what about “grace”? What does that mean—grace, this unexpected “gift” beyond our control? And “God”—there’s that word again. So tell me, did you struggle with the whole theology of this song?

      Or maybe you just enjoyed singing this old familiar tune. When I was a hospital chaplain, my fellow student chaplains and I would go from unit to unit singing. The most often requested song was “Amazing Grace”; actually, we sang it so often that even the Catholics among us wanted to quit. Years later, I’ve recovered my love for it, and this love, along with that earlier experience, reminds me how this particular melody combined with these words can bring comfort to folks from many different faiths and life circumstances.

      Yet as Victoria Safford has pointed out, our task as Unitarian Universalists is much less comfortable. For it is up to each of us to choose or define, and then refine, our faith. Sometimes the open-endedness of this task leaves folks thinking that we Unitarian Universalists “can believe anything.” I don’t think so. Anythingarianism is the term the old satirist Jonathan Swift came up with, pointing out that when anything and everything is tolerated, “tolerance becomes a disguise for indifference,”[1] and surely we Unitarian Universalists are called to care! “Stand by this faith,” Olympia Brown shouts it out. “Work for it and sacrifice for it.” This faith can make the world beautiful …

      But if we have this freedom to choose, what does lie at the heart of Unitarian Universalism? What holds us together; what do we all have in common? This is the question that the current Commission on Appraisal has been studying for the past few years. Now, the Commission on Appraisal is a group of Unitarian Universalist laypeople and ministers, elected at our annual General Assembly, who look into some aspect of our life together as UUs with the mission of provoking “deep reflection” and “energizing and revitalizing Unitarian Universalism.” Right now, they are in the midst of producing a report in response to the question “Where is the Unity in Our Theological Diversity?” Their process is to meet with as many UUs as possible, of all ages; I attended one of their sessions at GA this past June.

      What they are working on reminds me of how our UUA president, Bill Sinkford has encouraged us to work on our “elevator speech”—“what you’d say when you’re going from the sixth floor to the lobby [in the elevator] and somebody asks you, ‘What [is] a Unitarian Universalist, [anyway]?’” So for about the last year and a half, the UU World magazine has been publishing the elevator speeches that UUs from around the country have sent in. Perhaps you’ve seen some of them.

      But before I offer any samples, I want to offer you a chance to answer the question: What lies at the heart of Unitarian Universalism? Or to put it another way, what core commitments do we all share? What are the essential elements of being a UU? Or here’s another version of the question: What, if you took it away, would make Unitarian Universalism no longer Unitarian Universalism?

      Take just a minute to think about it—I know, it’s a lot to ask of a person on a Sunday morning—but give it a shot. You can jot down notes on the back of the handout, which shows our UU principles in a particularly cool format, or you can close your eyes and just let your intuitions rise to the surface. If you are a newcomer or a visitor, make a guess from what you’ve seen here so far. I can promise you that you will not be any more stumped than most of us here in this room. So: What lies at the heart of Unitarian Universalism? What do we have in common? What essential element, if you took it away, would make us not UU?

[pause]

      Now, for the next two minutes, I’d like you to turn to your neighbor, making sure no one gets left out, and share, ever so briefly, what you came up with. Make sure that you both have time to talk, and do come back to me when I ring the singing bowl.

[pause]

      Of course we cannot “finish” this process in this short amount of time—perhaps not in a lifetime of searching. And maybe that is one of the things that we hold in common: in older language, it’s been said that we UUs believe “revelation is not sealed”—in other words, our understanding of ourselves and our world, of the holy and the human, continues to grow and evolve. Ours is an unfolding faith, influenced by what we learn, from our own experience, from each other, and more … One seventeen-year-old has said: “Growing up UU is like searching for your head, finding it, picking it up, screwing it on, having it fall off again and again, with hopes of a tighter fit next time!” Tom Owen-Towle tells the story—maybe it’s a legend—of Ralph Waldo Emerson taking an interim ministry job toward the end of his life, and instead of writing new sermons, he simply used the sermons he had delivered a long time ago when he was young and serving another church. He’d be reading along and then suddenly he would stop, look up at the congregation and smile and say, “I no longer believe that,” and then he’d go right back to reading his sermon.[2] The point of this story being that he may have become much more efficient at “producing” a sermon, but his faith continued to grow and change.

So, what about for you? Was it hard or easy to come up with some core element, or elements, of Unitarian Universalism? And did what you were thinking change when you began to talk with someone else?

      Well, let me throw some other possibilities into the mix.

One person at that GA workshop last summer said, “What’s distinctively Unitarian Universalist is the collectivity—the seven principles together. Taking away any one of them would make us not UU.” On your handout you can see the way Barbara Wells and Jaco Ten Hove have laid out our principles in the form of an arch, with the first and seventh principles acting as the pillars. They are “what we affirm about life”—maybe they are pretty commonly held beliefs among us??—while the other five principles express how we want to be together. By the way, just so you don’t miss it, I’ve laid out something similar with the candles on the chalice table. Wanting more light, I worked with Susan Okun from the Beautification Community until we came up with something that was both light-giving and symbolic, with our two larger pillar candles and five smaller candles; they make an arch that is more like a circle, another favorite symbol. Just so, the person at GA was saying that if we took one of the principles away, the circle—the wholeness of our faith—might be broken, or at least it would be smaller, more constricted, less spacious.

Here’s another idea: Perhaps what’s distinctively UU is the desire to use all our sources to discern what is justice and what is love and how to embody them both. Sometimes we focus so much on the seven principles that we “affirm” that we forget that our sources are a part of our statement of principles too. These sources lead off with our own direct experience of mystery and wonder; then the words and deeds of prophetic, challenging men and women, past and present; the wisdom of all the world’s religions, and Jewish, Christian, and humanist teachings. Rooting deep within these rich resources in order to find the truth that speaks to us, that enlivens us and guides our lives—that’s what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist. According to one UU.

Bill Sinkford himself offered his own elevator speech back in 2003, and it went like this: “The Unitarian side [of our movement] tells us that there is only one God, one spirit of life, one power of love. The Universalist side tells us that God is a loving God, condemning none of us, valuing the spark of divinity that is in every human being.” Really, this is an updated version of that famous summary, a kind of pre-elevator elevator speech, from Thomas Starr King, who was both a Universalist and a Unitarian minister a hundred years before our merger; he said that Universalists think “God is too good to damn them,” while Unitarians think “they are too good to be damned.”

But Bill Sinkford’s elevator speech, with its God-centered language, set off a storm of controversy, as you can imagine. For months, the Unitarian Universalist chat room was howling with the retorts of humanists, pagans, agnostics, atheists, and more—all bona fide UUs who weren’t buying our president’s elevator speech for a minute.

So perhaps that is what binds us to each other: the freedom to disagree and still find our home here. At that GA workshop, as the opinions flew, one person said, “What makes us Unitarian Universalist is this—this room, this discussion.” And perhaps we are unique in our “attempt to institutionalize dissent.”

But frankly this is not enough for me. First, it does not lead me to depth, and as Tom Owen-Towle puts it, I believe that our faith, our movement demands that we “climb down from [our] elevated perches, vacate the comfortable surrounds of life’s surface, and enter life’s depths where authentic suffering, joy, and meaning await us.”[3] Why else are we here, instead of reading the New York Times and going out to brunch?

Second, this emphasis on dissent does not speak to the call to put our faith into action. Yes, as Unitarian Universalists we are free to disagree about theology—we are encouraged to wrestle with our own faith, to learn and borrow from each other, and to dissent—but we are not free, I believe, to remain inactive in the face of injustice, at home, at school, or in the wider world. Last week in Youth Worship I heard a stirring sermon from Matt Levenson about speaking up and speaking out for justice and about how this lies at the heart of our UU faith. As we went around the room, listening to each person’s description of a time when she or he spoke up, the stories were both large and small, but the injustices were always real, and immediate, and grounded: a grade that was unfair which this youth protested, a group of students who were making fun of someone with differing abilities, and our UU youth stood up to them, claiming for everyone their full humanity … Putting our faith into action isn’t about something larger than life; it is about just such small moments as these. For Unitarian Universalism doesn’t look up to the heights or the heavens for our religion; we look down “into the heart of things,” down to this place and this time, to the here and now.

In short, our much-vaunted freedom—freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom to choose our faith—is a necessary condition for truth, but it is not the truth itself. Martin Buber wrote, freedom is “the run before the jump, the tuning of the violin, the possibility of communion.”[4] It is not the jump itself, or the music, or the meeting of two souls. It is not the gutsy gritty work of living our faith.

So: here is my current favorite summary of what it means to be Unitarian Universalist. I have borrowed it, once again, from Rev. Tom Owen-Towle, who says, “We are freethinking mystics with hands.” Freethinking because “freethinkers ardently believe in the worth, [but] not the infallibility, of human reason… [and] we use our reason to the fullest to explore … life’s inescapable mysteries.” Mystics because we know we will never be able to capture those mysteries—“and we like it that way.” The UU mystic Jacob Trapp says that mysticism is “the art of meeting reality, the art of richer and deeper awareness, … an experience of Oneness, flooding in to overwhelm our illusion of aloneness…. There are moments when life seems vivid and resplendent, … when there is a … glory in just being alive.” And we are freethinking mystics with hands because “ultimately, we are measured not by our reasonable thoughts or hallowed encounters but rather by the breadth of our justice-building and peace-making.”[5] Ultimately, we are measured not by our reason or by our mystical unions, but by the simple question: how well did we love each other and our world?

      Victoria Safford says that this UU demand that we make our own faith is “lonely work,” that we are called to “consider all alone” the nature of ourselves and of the holy. But I disagree. An essential element of our Unitarian Universalism calls us to be in community with each other. Look at our principles; they are all about how we are to relate. Perhaps we can sum all these ideas in one final elevator speech, which comes from our own Susan Nykolak. Sleepless at 3:00 one morning, she wrote this:

“Unitarian Universalism is a faith guided by principles relating to attitude and behavior. It is concerned with how people treat each other and the earth and its creatures. It encourages personal growth and the search for meaning in life. It does not dictate how one should feel, think, or believe. It supports a questioning and open mind, thinking for oneself, loving hearts, and helping hands.”

Tell me, you Unitarian Universalists you, who do you think that you are?