THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
A QUESTION OF STYLE AND GRACE
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached April 20, 2003,
at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of HonoluluI have been on sabbatical since Match 1st. I spent the second week down in the Philippines visiting our partner church. I have pictures; I have letters from the kids and a letter from the congregation. I'll say some more about that in a minute.
The rest of the time, to prove that I haven't been wasting my time entirely, I have here the proof copy of the collection of my poetry. I'm about a third of the way through catching the computer's glitches.
The trip to the Philippines caught me by surprise. I have spent time in communities of the very, very poor before in my life, but Caican, Negros Orientale, the Philippines, was not what I expected. These people were dirt poor, but they refused to act poor. It wasn't until I was on my return trip that I realized what the difference was. The difference was that I was in an intact culture, whereas the experiences I'd had before were in slum communities of the displaced. It made all of the difference in the world.
I am a science-fiction fan, and my very favorite form of science-fiction is stories of first contact with an alien culture. One of my claims to fame is to have performed the wedding ceremony for Michele Nicholls who played Ahura in the original Star Trek shows. One of the problems that I always had with Star Trek was that there was this magic wand, the universal translator, that removed from all of the stories of first contact -- and most of those stories were first contact stories one way or another -- removed from them the very part of first contact experience that I was most interested in. How do we build the bridge between totally different cultures ? We experience reality from within our own cultural point of view. The encounter with another culture tends to reveal pieces of our own that we took for granted; that were to a great extent invisible to us. Our tendency is to first try to force-fit the alien culture into our own. Failing that, we find the other wrong, incomplete, or inadequate. But, if the relationship can be mutually sustained, it can transform our assumptions and perceptions about how people are supposed to be.
It is a problem that Unitarian Universalist congregations in the U.S. are having, not just with our new partner church relationships with Unitarian Universalist congregations in the Philippines. That program is only a couple of years old. We were a part of the very first three congregations to have partner church relationships with our Philippine UUs. For a long time now U.S. UU congregations have had similar relationships with our Unitarian brothers and sisters in Transylvania in Romania. That was where we first began to be called Unitarians almost 450 years ago. And those churches are still Unitarian to this day. I'll be visiting some of them this summer. Because of the time span, and our isolation from them, they too are alien cultures.
It is very difficult not to drag along with us all of our assumptions about how people are and about how people are supposed to be and about what they must "of course" be like if they are Unitarians or Unitarian Universalists.
To add to the difficulty, one of the characteristics of our Unitarian Universalist programs in concert with and partnership with our congregations in Romania and in the Philippines has been the fact that many of the UU leaders here in the U.S., because of their interest and commitment, themselves happen to be Unitarian Universalist Christians. They have tended to come largely from the Universalist side of our merged Unitarian Universalist denomination.
The very first evening that I was down there, one of those leaders "went off" - that's all I can call it - on a rant about how people from the U.S. were going to the Philippines and trying to de-Christianize our Universalist Philippine brothers and sisters.
One of the fascinating things about the Philippine experience was that the fellow who started what now are our Unitarian Universalist congregations down there started out as an Assembly of God lay minister. The Reverend Turibio Quimada made the mistake of actually reading his New Testament. He came to the conclusion, as our Universalist forebears did, that the God that is seen in and through the teachings and life of Jesus of Nazareth is not a God that would send people to hell forever for holding the wrong opinions.
He was, of course, thrown out of the Assembly of God group, but the churches that he had started stuck with him.
What has happened in the Philippines is a discovery in situ of a heritage that already existed and they didn't know about it. In fact, the way they found out that they were Universalists was that Reverend Turibio Quimada sent to the U.S. for some Sunday School materials. They came back in a box with newspaper stuffing to keep the materials from rattling around. One of the newspapers had an advertisement for the Racine, Wisconsin Universalist church. He wrote them a letter - it sounded like that's what he was! They couldn't read a word of Cebuano, so they threw it away. Fortunately, he sent for another box of materials. This one came back with some more newspapers, and an ad for the Gloucester, Massachusetts Universalist Church. When they received one of those letters in Cebuano, somebody had sense enough to say, "Hmmm, the Philippines. That's interesting" and got the letter translated. They sent it down to the Universalist headquarters and there began a whole relationship where the Philippine Universalists discovered that they weren't alone, that there were other Universalists in the world. They were ecstatic. They joined the Universalist Church of America.
But, during the messy process of the merger of the Unitarians and the Universalists in 1960, U.S. UUs proceeded to forget that those people existed. In the early '80's, they showed up at a General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Well, we were mortified. We were delighted to see them and all; but, it felt an awful lot like colonialism.
And it has been a problem. In fact, that issue is the major reason that Unitarians and Universalists around the world started the International Council of Unitarian Universalists. The ICUU includes not only the U.S. , Canadian, British, New Zealand and Australian Unitarians, but also the Unitarians in the Kasi Hills in India. There are a couple of Unitarian Universalist congregations, believe it or not, in Nigeria; indigenous ones, not expat congregations. There are two Unitarian Universalist congregations in Japan, the result of graduate students coming to this country to study and saying, "That's not what I want to do. I want to be a Unitarian Universalist minister;" then going to our theological school, going home and starting churches. There is also my favorite, the Non-Conforming Presbyterians, and the Free Religious Movement in Germany.
I stayed that Thursday afternoon with our Partner Church, The UU Congregation of Caican. I brought them lots of gifts and greetings from you and more pictures and then spent a whole day with them. I took the bus up from Dumaguete to Caican, a two-hour bus ride.
The streets are unbelievable. The road from the little village at the foot of Kalihi Valley that I live up would be a freeway. There are almost no private automobiles on the roads. I saw huge buses, huge trucks and, interspersed amongst them like mosquitos, these little bitty motorcycles with a huge frame on the side of them, they're called pedicabs, zipping in and out. Terry Robinson says he counted 15 people in and on one. They would play "chicken" with the buses ! Guess who won ?
An incredible trip. I spent the day and then stayed the night with the minister of our congregation there. Actually, I ended up sleeping in his and his wife's bed (I think). It was a raised platform in their small house. This was not the community that I expected. This is a community that is ready to do some interesting things. We now begin to realize what can come out of the partner church relationship. What we will be providing from our end will not be primarily money, but access to expertise and "clout." Money, the easiest thing for us, only leads them into dependence on us.
We will do some things that will involve money, though. One of the things that I want to do is send them the money, almost right away, for some actual chairs. The church building uses pieces of stump with salvaged pieces of funny-shaped boards between them for seating. They would kind of like to have some actual seats. And they're very expensive there. The plastic chairs, which is what they want, cost a whole $4.00 each. We can get them some chairs.
What we're in the process of putting together is economic development programs for each of the villages. These economic development programs have to use the technology that is available right there, because again there is no money to bring the stuff in. If we bring stuff in at our expense we have weaned the community on to dependence and it's not dependence that we're trying to build but independence and to empower these congregations. The young men that I spent an afternoon talking with are absolutely ecstatic about it. All I had to do was suggest, "Gee, I saw once upon a time -" and their imaginations were off and running. They're ready to make things happen.
But are they Unitarian Universalists? A part of the offense that my colleague saw in them was that here were Universalist congregations affirming his U.S. Unitarian Universalist Christian point of view, except that these people had been shown the purposes and principals. Worse than that, they liked them! He was concerned that if we take our American Unitarian Universalist vocabulary into the Philippine experience that we will end up de-Philippinizing and, to his great horror, de-Christianizing them. The irony was that, in conversations afterward I wasn't terribly surprised, but he seemed to be, that the Philippine folk weren't worried about this at all. They found the Unitarian Universalist Purposes and Principals quite fascinating and useful - they've got them posted up all over the place - and it has not replaced their Universalism at all. The vocabulary, the style, the way in which they worship together as communities, the way they talk about and push and argue (and, like good Unitarians, they love to push and argue.) -- Their style of being Unitarian Universalists is indeed liberal Christian Universalist style.
Are we Christian? Are Unitarian Universalists as a bunch Christian? It's one of those questions that people ask me frequently and I used to give them theological answers. I figured out, however, that most of the time, when somebody's asking me that question, what they're really asking is, "Can I trust you to be O.K. or are you going to turn out weird?" It's really what they're asking. "Are you okay? Are you nice people? Are you reliable?"
My colleague's rant about U.S. UUs de-Christianizing the Philippine churches got me to thinking about the relationship between the UU Purposes and Principles and Liberal Christian theology. Our UU Purposes and Principles in an interesting way are the basic values and commitments of liberal Christian orientation translated into a less emotionally-loaded vocabulary.
We had a church service the evening that I spent the whole day. I mentioned this in talking with them and the minister's reaction was, "Yeah" - like I had just stated the perfectly obvious.
Our Principles start out with the commitment to "to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person." And among the religions of the species, some of the earliest affirmations of the importance and significance of the individual is in that first century Christian experience. In Jesus' teaching, he says, "Are you not more valuable than the birds?" He tells the story of the sheep: 99 left behind but the shepherd goes in search of the 1 lost sheep. Asked what the law is, he said, "Love them as yourself." " As you have done it unto one of the least of these," he says in the parable of the separation of the sheep from the goats, "You have done it unto me." The speaker here in Jesus' story is the judge at the last judgment.
"No child of God left behind." This was the original "no child left behind," not the current one.
"Justice, equity and compassion in human relations," our Principles say.
Jesus speaks out of the prophetic tradition in which he stood which reminds us, "Let justice roll down like waters." "Do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with your God." And one of the major themes of that prophetic tradition is the insistence that it is human relations--how we treat one another--that comes way before issues of whether you hold the right religious opinions or not, whether you behave in the correct religious ways or not, whether your style of spirituality happens to be the then-accepted correct proper one. How you treat one another, with justice, equity and compassion. That's what counts.
The third of our Principles says "acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations." This is a core acknowledgment that none of us are "there" yet. Even if by some miracle the religious ideas that I teach you, tell you, preach at you; only cut any ice as those ideas indeed persuade you and take root in your life.
"A free and responsible search for truth and meaning." One of the lines in the New Testament is "to work out your salvation with fear and trembling." I take this as an acknowledgment that nothing in that heritage is a neat, wrapped package. It is not the case that all you have to do is swallow it like a pill and somehow you're in and get to go to the good place instead of the bad place where all of the people who can't swallow it go.
The one piece in there that is difficult to find a New Testament parallel to is "the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our communities." Human understanding of how we organize ourselves together had not, in that particular part of the world, evolved to the place where that idea had even begun to break its seed coat yet. But the core of it is there, that people should not be coerced, that all of us are included in the community. Jesus tells the interesting story of the wheat and the tares, and in the parable he recommends that you don't go through your field pulling out all of the weeds after you have sown the field and they have begun to sprout. If you do you're going to end up tearing out a good deal of the wheat, as well. Leave it alone and then, after the harvest, when you winnow the results only the wheat will end up winnowed out. Don't worry about drawing those lines between who is and who is not acceptable.
"The goal of world community, with peace, liberty and justice for all," sounds like a modern de-mythologized version of the Kingdom of God, to me. If you want to impress your Christian neighbors, I'll give you a phrase with which to really impress them, because the goal of world community, of peace, of liberty and justice for all is immanentizing the eschaton. Can you say that? Immanentizing the eschaton. It is to bring what has so often been the abstract goods that you're supposed to acknowledge, but nobody really expects you to live, down into the real world where people actually encounter one another, so that, indeed, we come to live together in community with grace and style and compassion.
And our final one, the seventh Principal, "Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part". I have to say that every time I mention that one to some of my Christian brethren they say, "But the Bible says to go forth and multiply," and my response is, "Yes, but it didn't say to do it geometrically!"
We live in a UNI-verse and if there is any meaning or truth in that old matter, spirit, divided realm concept they are still interdependent. All of the pieces of the life we share together, even in ways we may never notice, in fact have us acting out an interconnectedness that has no limits. What we do, how we do, how we behave in the world, as individuals, as communities; we are all connected in ways that are sometimes scary,
That's what happened to me in the Philippines. After a couple of days I got seduced and no longer was I looking at the things I was experiencing in that - "Oh, that's different!"-way. I was so thoroughly accepted and integrated into the life of that community, both the headquarters in Dumaguete and out in Caican, that for a brief time what had at first seemed to me so alien was my community. They were friends who accepted me in warmth and interest and excitement, and who I also found interesting, exciting, challenging, stimulating.
When I go back in February of 2004, and I will, I expect two things to be the case. The first is, they're going to have hot showers. I told those teenage boys about all you had to do was throw the coiled black hose up on top of a roof. They pointed out that the only roof that would hold the black hose coils was the roof of the church, I said, "That's fine. Don't worry about having a shower on the back side of the church because nobody will accuse you of being Methodists. It's okay." (Methodists sprinkle for baptism.)
The other thing that they will have is that in several of those villages out in almost inaccessible places will be small economic development cooperatives. Perhaps a string of pocket fertilizer plants made out of locally indigenous materials. I happen to have a friend in Florida who knows how to do that, a chemist who's done it in several third world countries. These villages are all essentially agricultural villages. The land was once all plantation land. One of the good things that happened in the Philippines after the Second World War and before Mr. Marcos got control of the place, was that they managed to do a good deal of land reform. People actually have land, but it's worn out land and they need the fertilizer. It is possible to make fertilizer pocket plant fashion without high tech, without industrial processes, without huge trucks to drive it to the fields. It will happen. Hopefully it will have begun by next February.
The children of God, all of those of us who are a part of the source of life, shall one day transcend all of the boundaries, real and imagined, that have divided us. This is our saving truth, our commitment to it is what is Unitarian Universalist. If we can listen loud enough, behind the theological mistakes and emotionally loaded vocabulary, most of my colleagues who call themselves Christian in this town are committed to the same vision. So is our Unitarian Universalist Partner Church in Caican, Negros Oriental, the Philippines.