Before I begin, I want to let you know that this is the first of a two-part message, and that I’ll be delivering the second half next Sunday. So, please plan to be here next week and, if you can’t, you can either read or listen to next week’s message on our newly revamped web site. Because, while today’s message focuses on what we can and should expect from our Unitarian Universalist faith, we need to turn the tables and examine what this faith expects of us, too. That’ll be coming next week.

Let me also preface my message this morning by revealing my own personal biases, which like all biases are shaped by my experience. You need to know that I was raised in the Catholic church. My parents weren’t particularly devout, but they took us to mass every Sunday morning and sent me to CCD classes. I received First Communion in second grade and continued my religious education through my confirmation when I was twelve. But the tenets of the Catholic church never really “took” for me – although they did for both my sisters who continue to embrace the Catholic church to this day – and at the age of about 15 I told my parents that I wasn’t going to church any more. From that time until I walked through the doors of the First Universalist Church in Yarmouth, Maine in 1986, I was what they called “un-churched.” I tell you all this because it’s important to know that I discovered our faith in the mid-1980’s and that I was what we once called a “come-outer:” one of the many UU’s, perhaps the majority of us at that time and perhaps like yourself, who came to Unitarian Universalism out of another faith tradition.  I can distinctly remember coming home from the first Unitarian Universalist service that I ever attended and gleefully reporting to Irene, who had stayed home to care for our infant daughter, that I couldn’t believe there was a church where they didn’t even mention Jesus. And, as I would soon learn, it was a church where you didn’t need to believe in God or, really, from what I could tell, anything in particular to belong. I share a similar history with many UU’s, and perhaps many of you here today.

Back in the mid-1980’s, Unitarian Universalism was still in the grips of the Humanist movement, and I was taught that our faith was a stool whose three legs were “freedom, reason and tolerance.” Earl Morse Wilbur, who penned a definitive, three-volume history of our faith back in the early 1970’s described Unitarian Universalism as “a movement fundamentally characterized by its steadfast and increasing devotion to these three leading principles: first, complete mental freedom in religion rather than bondage to creeds or confessions; second, the unrestricted use of reason in religion, rather than reliance upon external authority or past tradition; third, generous tolerance of differing religious views and usages rather than insistence upon uniformity in doctrine, worship or polity.” At the time that I joined our church, these three principles – freedom, reason, and tolerance – were the highest values and ideals. They were the altar at which we worshipped, although no one would have openly used those words at that time.

Freedom, reason and tolerance are certainly still very much with us these days. We can safely hold an expectation that these values will be upheld within our congregations, including this one. As Unitarian Universalists, we place a premium on our freedom from dogma, on our freedom to pursue our own spiritual path. We also continue to place value on reason. We rely on an expectation that, as it’s sometimes said, “we don’t have to check our brains at the door.” Our faith isn’t a blind faith that requires us to believe in the supernatural, or things that can’t be proven. Although the value we place on freedom says that we make room for those who do believe in God, angels and life after death. “Tolerance” strikes me as an antiquated word, a tepid response to the alleged diversity among us. Maybe “inclusion” would