Halfway to 100
The Rev. Dr. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
October 3, 2010


Message: Halfway to 100

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. If you want to hear what was actually said, you can listen to sermon visit our website at www.uurockford.org. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2010.

New life comes to us as a gift,
it has a story to tell, and we shall listen.
Each new life goes forth from us,
laying the child’s sovereign claim on whole realms of being
we had called our own.

New life comes to us,
and we offer our thanksgiving.
For without such newness, such rebirth,
our forms, our institutions, our ways of being in the world,
they shall grow rigid and cold,
fall away into oblivion.

But new life renews,
it re-imagines, it charts a new way.

8:45: At the eleven o’clock service,
we’ll dedicate a group of children today –
the youngest, two twin girls, a little over a year old.

11:00: Lauren and McKenna, among those we dedicated this morning,
are a little over a year old.

They are not the only young ones among us:
my own son Leo just turned four months,
little Hannah Furman is just a few weeks,
and there are more.
And, we are sure, among this community, more to come.

These young children come into this community of faith
at one of those hinges in time.
They enter this faith,
this living tradition,
fifty years since the Unitarians and the Universalists
consolidated their organizations,
half a century of living together.
It is not just, though, that the odometer is turning over:
it is that at this time,
halfway to 100,
we are on the verge of something new,
something that the world has not seen before:
a multi-religious, deeply scientific, passionately ecological,
justice-centered faith –
we’re not there yet,
but it feels like maybe we’ll be there in fifty years.

When these children are all grown with children of their own,
what will this faith look like?
Who might we be then?
What will have come to pass, fifty years from now?

As it has always been,
our future will build on our past.
“Bring, O time, your harvest,
golden sheaves of hallowed lives and minds by truth made free,
come you faithful spirits,
builders of this temple . . .”

We follow the saints,
those who proclaimed we would be one,
who have made us one;

There’s a long list – people and communities –
who brought this faith to this point,
“who, long over life’s swift river
preach the eternal gospel:
faith, hope, and love for all humanity”

folks who put that faith into action;
who believed that faith was action:
who fought for peace and equality and dignity and the earth,
and still do.

We stand on the shoulders of giants,
and . . . and
the essential quality of our free faith is freedom,
that we are not bound to the past –
we are inspired by it,
we are strengthened by it,
but we are not bound to it for ever and ever.

Fifty years ago,
the folks who gathered in Boston
to ratify the agreement to bring
the American Unitarian Association
and the Universalist Church in American
together, into a new body,
they imagined a future.

Alan Deale, this church’s minister at the time, went to those meetings,
along with the congregation’s organist –
Kay Hotchkiss – who had been invited to play a
piece during what turned out to be one of the breaks in debate -
and her husband, Del –
they drove out for the meetings.
There was plenty of debate,
and then an overwhelming vote in favor,
and then a worship service –
a photo of that service is on the front of your program.
You see there the men in their robes on stage,
the choir behind them,
and the new symbol of the new faith,
the flaming chalice,
in the background.

At that service, a sermon was preached,
it imagined a new faith,
what the preacher called a “fourth great world religion.”
By the other three, he meant Christianity, Judaism, and Islam,
completely overlooking the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Taoists,
the Jains, and the followers of Shinto,
let alone all of the local, animistic, pagan, and earth-centered traditions.

We haven’t become the world’s fourth great religion,
but we have become a unique place in the religious world,
a place where all the great religious traditions,
and the rich spiritual and secular sources of inspiration,
are brought together into conversation,
are honored and valued, despite their differences
and because of their common core:
faith, hope and love for all humanity.

When leaders of the association gather next summer
to celebrate this anniversary,
it won’t just be middle-aged white guys on stage,
although there will be a few of them.
There will also be women, and people of every race,

and gay and lesbian folks –
and all that is something that a lot of folks in that picture,
fifty years ago, might have had some trouble imagining –
though, when change came,
those same guys mostly embraced it willingly.

In the fifty years since that day,
we have also deepened our sense of ourselves as an ecological faith.
Back then, we embraced science and nature as good things,
now we know we are part of the web of life,
and that the earth, our home, is in dangerous peril,
and our task as religious people is to restore the balance
as best we are able.
That’s something those guys in the picture
prepared the ground for, but not something they probably predicted.

And we have become a more global faith.
Back in 1961, the Unitarians had long lost touch with our brothers and sisters
behind the iron curtain.
But when the wall came down in 1989,
we reconnected with them,
and today we are building connections with
Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists
all over the world – in some of the most unlikely places,
in places where the message:
faith, hope and love for all humanity –
is so desperately needed.

All this is a way of saying that it’s hard to predict
what our faith will look like in fifty years.
I could get out a crystal ball [do so]
but I’m not really getting any clear images.

It does seem to me that some of these trends
will continue, maybe in surprising ways.
I decided to pass on the great Carnac costume,
but here are my four predictions about what
Unitarian Universalism will look like in fifty years:

1. A multi-religious faith.

Our seminary in California, Starr King School –
recently started using this language –
multi-religious –
to describe their work and their aspiration for our faith.
This seems to me to be where we are headed.
We’ve turned away from the hope of 1961
that we’ll be, on our own, a great world religion.

Instead, we are embracing a very particular niche,
but a vital one:
a place where people can genuinely encounter and draw upon
the religious and secular wisdom of the world.
Look, plenty of folks are doing something we can call “exclusive pluralism” –
this is the idea that we each have our own way,
and I might be a Buddhist, but I don’t insist that you stop being a Christian –
I’ll do my thing at the sanga, and you do your thing at the church,
and that’s fine.
Our world would be a more peaceful place if more folks
embraced exclusive pluralism.
And it was Unitarians who set the stage for such an idea –
King John Sigismund in Transylvania,
who issued Europe’s first declaration of religious tolerance,
in 1568;
Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned a wall of separation,
so that people could be free to worship as they see fit.

But now we are doing something different.
Instead of “exclusive pluralism”, we are now interested in “inclusive pluralism.”
This is the idea that folks with different spiritual practices and ideas
can be together in worshipping community,
and that, in fact, a person can incorporate the teachings of a variety of traditions
in their own path –
so I am inspired by Christianity, Taoism,
and Religious Naturalism and Humanism;
you might practice Buddhist meditation and celebrate pagan holidays,
while the person next to you prays to God and does yoga.
This idea, of a multi-religious faith,
is revolutionary.
The Bahi’a are on this track, but this is different.

We live in an interconnected and synergistic world,
and some folks today –
and I hazard to guess, more folks fifty years from now,
will want to be in a place where they can bring all the parts of their religious journey,
where like a collage-artist, they can put the pieces together,
and be inspired and challenged by the work of those around them.

We might, when these children are grown,
be a multi-religious faith,
and I think that would be pretty great.

2. A multi-ethnic, multi-racial, diverse faith.

We’ve come a long way in fifty years, but we are still traveling on this journey.
A faith that limits itself to a single culture,
that is dominated by one way of being,
that is faith that will soon fade from the earth.
My children’s children will grow in a demographically very different country
than the one that my grandparents did;
and our faith must – must – learn, and quickly,
to embrace variety, including the diversity already among us.
This might be uncomfortable.
I can assure that that for those guys on stage in that picture,
it was often uncomfortable,
as women entered the ministry in larger numbers,
as gay and lesbian and bisexual and transgender folks
were and are welcomed into our faith and leadership roles.

They were sometimes at sea, bewildered by difference.
But, mostly, they went with it.
Their vision of faith, hope and love for all humanity demanded it,
so they did their best.
We, too, will be uncomfortable, but our vision demands it,
and we’ll have to do our best.
But I assure you, if Unitarian Universalist is still alive in 50 years,
it won’t look or sound like we do today.
And for that, I am excited and hopeful.
I think, as I’ve said to you before,
that a more diverse faith will be a richer and more beautiful faith,
and faith that does, indeed,
turn our hope that we will be one
into a fact: we are one.

3. A global faith

The list of countries where Unitarian Universalism
exists as a locally-led movement is growing.
It includes not only all the ones on your quiz,
but also England, Canada, and Australia, South Africa,
another half-dozen in central Africa,
and a variety through Eastern Europe,
and smaller groups – sometimes American ex-pats,
but mostly local folks who are seeking a more inclusive faith,
a faith that doesn’t require them to choose between the traditions they love,
a faith that doesn’t ask folks to lie about who they are –
in Brazil, and Japan, and Indonesia, and Finland, and China,
and all over.

We live in an interconnected world,
a world where anyone with a computer
can read the essays of Emerson,
chat with current Unitarians,
and start their own church in some place
that many of us could never find on a map.

It’s a new world.
And these folks can teach us what it means
to be a member of this liberal faith
in a global age.
What is Unitarianism when Mark Kiyamba
reads about us on-line,
and starts a Unitarian church in Uganda,
where folks are free to be Christian and Muslim and Animistic
and worship together,
where a 150 member church
sponsors a school for 450 orphans with AIDS?
What is Unitarianism when a minister in India’s Khasi Hills
brings the message of unity and kinship to a Hindu context?
And so on, and so on.

Fifty years from now, I suspect that we will be globally connected
with our brothers and sisters and cousins in faith
around the world
in ways we cannot today even imagine.
It will help us imagine a wider and deeper faith than
we can know when we live only in our own context.
I can’t wait.

4. An ecological faith

Fifty years ago, we had the legacy of transcendentalism,
its sense that God was found in nature and wilderness,
and we had the inkling of a sense that we should care for the earth.
In the time since then,
we have added a commitment to the interdependence of all,
and an appreciation of earth-centered spiritual traditions,
to our official documents:
more than this,
we have sought to make ourselves an ecological faith;
we have embraced the science behind religious naturalism,
the truth, now clear and compelling,
that we are one with all that lives and all that is,
and that the choices we make matter for the health of this,
our blue boat sailing the universe.

Fifty years from now – well, we can only imagine.
I suspect that we will believe then
that no Unitarian Universalist church is worthy of the name
unless it is carbon neutral, or very close to it.


Recycling, composting, and efficiency will be just part of how we live;
we’ll also be thinking about
how ecology and justice intersect,
how choices we make here affect how folks live
down the street and across the world –
and who knows what the edge will be then –
fifty years ago, almost nobody knew about climate change;
fifty years from now,
maybe we’ll be the ones educating and advocating
for something we don’t even know about today.

But it is clear: the faith that will be worthy of our past,
and worthy of the affection of the children now entering the world,
will be a faith that is consciously embedded in and responsible to
the ecological web of life.

And that will be a good thing –
it will be beautiful, and a source of wisdom and spiritual strength.

Those, anyway, are my four predictions:
that we will be multi-religious, multi-ethnic, global and ecological.
Chances are quite good that the biggest and most important change
is one I haven’t even thought of.
And that’s OK.

The changes I do believe will come to us,
these changes are good things.
They won’t always be easy.
They might require us to give up things that used to work for us,
but don’t anymore.
They will require us to stretch our minds and our hearts.
But they’ll be good for us –
they will honor our past by calling us into our future.

So we, today, at this hinge in time,
we have a choice.
We can be like those men in their robes on stage,
fifty years ago –
sure, they didn’t know what was coming,
they were surprised and not always ready.
But in the end, they made it possible,
and most of them helped give birth to a stronger faith then they knew.
They risked for the future.

For all their faults,
for all their blinders, the naiveté of their modernism,
and the paradoxical shortness of their horizon,
these men dreamed great dreams,
and they helped make them happen.

They could have chosen otherwise.
They could have chosen to hunker down,
to stay apart,
to stay safe,
to let change happen to them, rather than making it happen for them.

That same choice,
halfway to 100,
lies before us,
who have inherited this glorious tradition.

I hope, I pray,
that we shall sail forward,
lean over the edge in wonder,
seize the wind,
and steer our rudder into the unknown,
traveling together, in all our beautiful diversity,
in all our humanity, in our hopes and fears,
we kindred pilgrim souls,
may we sail forward,
as one,
building a new way,
giving thanks,
giving thanks,
that new life comes to us.




A Quick Quiz: Religious Literacy for Unitarian Universalists

1. What countries have active, indigenously-led Unitarian or Unitarian Universalist movements?
a. Romania
b. The Philippines
c. India
d. Uganda
e. New Zealand
f. All of the Above

2. What is the origin of the flaming chalice as a symbol for Unitarian Universalism?
a. Theodore Parker accidentally set fire to the communion cup in 1842, and it caught on.
b. Followers of Jan Hus adopted the symbol after he was burned at the stake in 1415 for opposing the Catholic hierarchy and preaching in the native language instead of Latin; Unitarians in Eastern Europe in the 16th century claimed Hus’s legacy and used the chalice in worship.
c. In 1994, a marketing consultant recommended it to the UUA.
d. The Unitarian Service Committee commissioned a design during World War II, for their official papers. The artist, after hearing a description of the roots of Unitarianism, created the flaming chalice as a symbol of the light of reason and helpfulness in dark times.

3. Which organization was NOT founded or co-founded by a Unitarian or Universalist?
a. The ACLU
b. The Red Cross
c. The NAACP
d. Habitat for Humanity

4. What phrase was used by former UUA President Bill Sinkford, and others, to describe the theological claims of Unitarianism and Universalism?
a. Believe whatever you want and act however you please.
b. One God, and no one left behind.
c. The Unitarians believe they are too good to be damned, and the Universalists believe that God is too good to damn them.
d. We’re right and everyone else is wrong.

5. Who, a Unitarian minister and author, was the leading figure of the Transcendentalist movement?
a. Oliver Wendell Homes
b. Julia Ward Howe
c. John Quincy Adams
d. Ralph Waldo Emerson


Answers: 1.f 2. d 3. d 4. b 5. d