The story of Esther is the story of a hero. And like so many of the heroes in the Hebrew Bible, she is a reluctant hero. She doesn’t seem particularly interested in being queen to the Persian king Achashverosh. The contestants in the royal beauty pagea...

Unitarian Universalism does not have one sacred text. It also does not have one origin story or one moment that it all began. Unitarian and Universalist thought has been rediscovered time and time again. We are not a people of a single path to truth. We Unitarian Universalists are in fact a people of interconnectedness. Our history is also one of many threads and connections across space and time.

 

Many threads, many stories, many places, one religion.

 

We have the Lutherans to thank for one moment that A beginning occurred, just over five hundred years ago, in 1517 Martin Luther nailed ninety-five points of contention with the Catholic Church to a chapel door in Wittenberg, Germany. This began the Reformation. We Unitarian Universalists are among the many heirs to the moment that began an intellectual and religious debate which is still unfolding.

 

Radical communities have sprung up over and over again. As new thoughts were spread from town to town and city to city, new forms of religious community came to be. New ideals became the center of religious life such as - God is One, Love is Unconditional, and that all are welcome. These communities did not gather without risk though. Many were persecuted and those who dared to speak of love or change or the inherent worth of every person could lose their lives to that cause.

 

One such place was in Poland, just 37 years after the Edict of Torda in 1605. At this point another community began to gather around the Unitarian ideas of an Italian theologian, Fausto Sozzini. Sozzini joined with the Polish Brethren which published The Racovian Catechism as well as many other radical religious tracts. Racovia became the center of what came to be known as Socianian thought.

 

Socianian could be another word for Unitarian but for the chance of history. Socianians hold that Jesus was human, his life was an important exemplar, and they rejected the idea of original sin. They believe that revelation is not sealed and have many connections to our Transylvanian siblings as well.

 

So we have German and Italian and Polish and Transylvanian threads. There are also British and other European stories where Unitarian thought that has bubbled up over time and continues to the present day. Each of these are part of our heritage even when we do not know it. American Unitarianism, Universalism, and Unitarian Universalism came to be among many other threads. And we continue to be in relationship with places we may not even realize right now.

 

Our relationships matter. Our ideas matter. And most importantly, our ability to create community together matters. Each of these threads were small groups of people saying incredible things in the face of powerful institutions. These communities are in fact a movement, these communities are not solely of the past but very much of the present too.

 

Many threads, many stories, many places, one religion.

 

There is another part of the world I would like to tell you about and another time that Unitarian thought emerged. In the Khasi Hills of northeastern India, a man by the name of Hajom Kissor Singh became a self-created unitarian. Like many of us Sing had a path from the religion of his birth to the Reform Welsh faith of missionaries, to becoming a questioning Methodist. Singh sought a true religion, one that removed the many pieces he disagreed with from his birth religion and those he encountered from Europe. He sought a non-sectarian, non-creedal path to God.

 

At the age of 25, in the year 1890, Singh heard from a liberal Hindu friend that there might be a tradition that held many of his beliefs. He began exchanging letters with Charles Henry Appleton Dall who was an American Unitarian minister in Calcutta at that time. After this connection and relationship began, Singh had a name for the religion he sought to create in the Khasi Hills, Ka Niam Unitarian, the Unitarian Religion.

 

Today, there are more than 9,

The story of Miriam, after whom my daughter is named, begins during a terrifying episode in the biblical drama. The Israelites, Miriam’s people, are enslaved in Egypt. The Pharaoh, insecure and cruel, as wealthy men with illegitimate power often are...

Do Not Be Afraid – Christmas Eve Homily 2017

Ana Levy-Lyons

Dec. 24, 2017

First Unitarian, Brooklyn

 

Why do we tell the same story every Christmas Eve? I mean, we know the plot. The virgin Mary gets a visit from an angel telling her she’s going to have a special baby, she gets pregnant, they have to go to Bethlehem to register, the baby is born in a manger because (say it with me) there’s no room at the inn, the shepherds come to check him out, and the wise men give him gifts of … gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Right? We know it. We know how it ends. Enough already!

But I think we don’t get sick of it because, although we tell the same story every year, we don’t hear the same story every year. Because we change and our world changes. Time keeps flowing inexorably forward and once a year we stop and look back and hear the very same story …and it’s different. There’s something deeply comforting about this.

That’s the power of tradition. It’s really a wondrous thing because, through our new hearing, new meaning keeps bubbling up like accrued interest on the principle that’s just been sitting there for almost two millennia.

This year has been no ordinary year in those two millennia. I don’t need to enumerate for you all the upheaval, the anger, the violence, and the fear. No matter where any of us may fall on the political spectrum, I think we can all agree that this has been a painful year. And so we hear the Christmas story today with all that pain in the backdrop.

Remember that the story itself, set in Roman occupied Palestine, also takes place against a backdrop of pain. It was a time of great economic inequality. The Romans had levied taxes on the poor to pay for the opulence of the rich. They had helped the wealthy get even wealthier in exchange for loyalty. The spirit of Judaism was slowly eroding.  Meanwhile, the peasants, the farmers, the majority of the people were angry and scared. If anyone tried to fight back, they’d get crucified.

In the context of all this, there’s one particular phrase in the Scripture that leaps off the page: “Do not be afraid.” Like a slow strobe light cutting through the night of this narrative, it repeats over and over again. Do not be afraid. An angel tells Mary, “Do not be afraid;” an angel tells Joseph, “Do not be afraid;” an angel tells the shepherds, “Do not be afraid.” Even though there is much to be afraid of, this phrase recurs and eventually Jesus himself repeats it and teaches his followers, “Do not be afraid.” It’s the motto of the Christmas story.

The angel does not tell Joseph, Mary, or the shepherds to do anything wildly heroic. He just tells them to keep going – do your thing. Joseph, go ahead and marry Mary and raise this child together. Mary, go ahead and be a mother to this child and share the prophecy with him. Shepherds, go witness this miracle, spread the word about it, and come back and tend your sheep some more. Do your thing. The angel tells them to do what they already know how to do; to give what they already have to give; to refuse to be paralyzed by fear of the strange and disturbing events of their world.

This is a message that we need desperately right now. Because fear, you could say, is the root of our problems. It’s fear that drives people to override our natural compassion and keep out refugees in need. It’s fear that drives people to deny climate change, risking their own children and grandchildren’s futures. It’s fear that drives people to want to deport immigrants and end DACA. It’s fear that drives people to discriminate against people of color, women, and LGBTQ communities. It’s fear that drives kind and loving people to buy semi-automatic weapons and put them under their Christmas trees. Fear, fear, fear.

All combined, the wave of fear swells and becomes a dangerous tsunami for all of us. And now there is fear on all sides, some warranted, some not, along with anger and depression and despair and distrust and sometimes outright hatred.

When it comes to Mary’s attention that she’s supposed to get pregnant by the Holy Spirit and that her future son is going to retake the throne on behalf of the Hebrew people, she has a number of options. One option, given that she’s a Jewish peasant living in a tiny, dirt-poor town in an occupied territory and she has never had sex, is to say to the angel Gabriel what Ebenezer Scrooge said to the ghost of Jacob Marley: “You may be a bit of undigested beef, a blob of mustard, a crumb of cheese. There's more gravy than of grave about you.”

 

Another option is just to be terrified – so terrified that maybe she would try to end this pregnancy that’s unplanned (at least by her) and will seem very suspicious to her fiancé. Yet another option would be to say, “Whatever.” Accept it passively but shrug off the prophecy about who her son will be.

 

This is the third in a sermon series I’m doing this year on women of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. Here we see a key moment in the Christian tradition when the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Mary has a vision or a visitation. She could have not believed it, she could have believed it but not accepted it, she could have believed it and accepted it but not let in the significance of Gabriel’s message. But none of these reactions is hers. Instead, she owns it.

 

At the end of the exchange with Gabriel, she says, “Here am I, the servant of God. Let it be with me according to your word.” She agrees right away. And this way of saying it, “Here am I,” echoes the language of the major Biblical protagonists like Abraham. When God calls them by name, they answer, “hineni” – here am I – meaning, yes, I’m showing up. I’m all in. I’m ready for whatever you’re calling me to do.

 

How often do we, when life calls us to do something important, when something unexpected shows up at our door, an opportunity comes up to serve in a big way that will mean a big change in our lives, how often do we immediately say yes, here am I, I’m ready, I’m in? Mary’s reaction provides a model for a kind of faith in the flow of life that leads to decisiveness.

 

Not only is she all in, Mary seems exhilarated. She’s full of radical fervor. She goes to her friend Elizabeth’s house and tells her the news, not like “OMG I’m having a baby and guess who the father is,” but in a long, prophetic, political interpretation of what’s going on. I won’t read the whole thing here, but here’s a piece of what she says, from the book of Luke:

 

“The Mighty One has done great things for me and holy is his name…He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and has sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

 

This is prophetic language.

 

Now Mary is not labelled as a prophet in the Scripture, but all the clues are there in the text to indicate that that’s exactly how she’s understood. When the angel Gabriel first approaches her, he says, “Greetings, favored one! God is with you.” Then it says, “she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.” The reason she’s perplexed is that the sort of greeting that this is is the sort of greeting God gives to prophets and to male protagonists like Abraham. It’s always some version of, “you’ve found favor with God; God is with you.” And now God is relaying this message to Mary, a woman.

 

So as a Jew who is obviously familiar with this tradition, Mary has a template in her head for what it means when an angel greets you like this. She recognizes this kind of mystical encounter and she paints herself into that narrative. This itself is a powerful move that requires belief in herself because women are not usually the “favored ones” of these stories.

Helen spoke so clearly and insightfully about the complexities of religious language. It’s a problem for everyone (or at least everyone who thinks about such things, which is probably not everyone). It’s been a problem ever since the story of Moses at the burning bush when he asked the voice coming out of the bush who or what it was and the voice replied with the completely unsatisfying non-answer, “I will be what I will be.” And ever since then we have struggled with what to call this thing that is not a thing at all. And when people have tried to nail it down and say “God” and give names to all the associated concepts – “worship,” “church,” “sin,” “blessing,” “prayer” – there have always been people who resisted; people who have said, “you can’t do that! Putting words on something confines it. Words make finite what really should be infinite.”

 

It became part of Jewish tradition to not even try to speak the most sacred name of God. And Buddhists don’t use any names at all to describe ultimate reality – anything that would narrow it would turn it into an illusion. Words are powerful – our concepts of reality shape the words we choose; but the words also shape our concepts. So that’s one problem with religious language.

 

The second problem has to do with how it’s been used over the centuries. As religion developed with the aid of these words we attached to it, the words began to enshrine some truly oppressive understandings of the universe. “God” became the word for a male powerful figure that judges and punishes and smites the unfaithful. “Worship” became the word for supplication to this patriarchal figure. “Sin” became the word used as a weapon against innocent people who were loving who they loved and being who they were and harming no one. “Blessing” became the word for preferential treatment for those with wealth and power and privilege already. “Religion” became the pretext for all these kinds of violence. And “church” became the room where it happened.

 

And so people, for good reason, fled from these words. Unitarian and Universalist churches across the country became “congregations” or “societies,” or in our case a “congregational society.” (Congregants had originally called this the “church of the Savior,” which is still what it says on a plaque outside the sanctuary.) The word “God” got dropped from liturgies across the land and replaced with words like “love” and “hope” and “spirit of life.” The word “sin” got wiped from the lexicon entirely and some people bristled at calling Unitarian Universalism a “religion.” Religious language fell away.

 

This worked fine for a time, roughly the second half of the 20th century. People enjoyed the freedom from those words that carried such painful baggage. But then the pendulum started to swing back. Even in the time I’ve been in ministry, which is about eleven years, I’ve noticed a change. People have been craving that religious language. Former UUA president Bill Sinkford in a controversial sermon in 2003 called for a “language of reverence.” Spiritual seekers were finding that while language, for all its limitations, can also serve as a vehicle for connection. This is what Helen was talking about in her homily – how religious language played a role in bringing her closer to the holy.

 

I believe that we, as religious liberals, should reclaim and redeploy religious language. This means that we don’t surrender these words -- these sparkly, powerful, meaning-packed, heritage-rich words – we don’t surrender them to those who misuse them. To say that religious conservatives get to own “God” and “worship” and “sin” is to say that they win the linguistic Monopoly game and walk away with Park Place and Boardwalk and Pennsylvania Avenue! And we’re left with just a couple boring “utility” words.

 

Conservative religion is not the “real” religion. We’re just as real and we have just as much claim on those sparkly words as they do.

Listen to the audio of Sunday's sermon, The Vulnerable Heart, by Ministerial Intern Kevin Jagoe below.

http://www.fuub.org/home/home/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/The-Vulnerable-Heart.m4a/powerpress]

To read the text of this sermon, please click here.