Shortly after Jesus died, and the new Christian faith was just beginning,
the early Christian communities started fighting within each other.
I know you find it shocking that a religious community could ever possibly have a disagreement.
People who take things seriously never ever disagree with each other!
Oh wait.
They fought.
And the church in Corinth fought quite a bit —
they fought, in particular, about which of their gifts were more important:
prophecy? speaking in tongues? preaching? leadership?
What was best?
So Paul wrote them a letter:
stop fighting, he said,
all the gifts are important,
but if you have not love then you are a noisy gong -
you know that part.
In the next chapter, he writes that they should not be so excited about being moved by the spirit,
by feeling mystically connected with god,
that’s good,
but if they can’t explain their feeling,
if their feeling doesn’t produce understand, edification,
then what good is it?
He writes “pray with the spirit, and the understanding also.
Sing with the spirit, and the understanding also.”
[Rockford: Those are the words John Rutter put to music the choir sang this morning.]
And since Paul wrote that letter, Christians have never ever fought about
how to balance the spirt and the understanding.
No source of disagreement at all!
Oh, wait.
Is there anything we’ve fought over more?
Perhaps the question of “who is in charge?” but other than that,
the primary disagreement has been about this - where is the correct balance
how do we integrate,
the spirit of mysticism and wonder
with rationality, science, philosophy, and so forth?
It was this effort that led to the two greatest works in Christian philosophy,
Augustine’s Confessions and Aquanis’ Summa Theologica,
as well as the whole project of the Enlightenment: from Descartes to Kant
and all the rest.
And it has been in the last 150 or so years that this question
has been most stark,
for the insights of science and archeology and neuroscience,
as well as historical criticism, anthropology, and the encounter with world religions,
have all shaken the foundations of any literalist understanding of Christian scriptures.
This year, we’re celebrating our 175th anniversary as a church,
and it has been this question which has animated our existence too —
we have decided as a faith to take science seriously,
to be guided by reason,
to elevate the understanding,
but we have also held - in varring degrees -
the proposition that the spirit is not dead, that mystery and art and beauty and
a love beyond belief
is real and worthy.
So I read with fascination the sermon,
preached by my predecessor, Dr. Thomas Kerr, in 1888,
at the laying of the cornerstone of the church, Unity Hall,
built at Mulberry and Main, just south of Memorial Hall -
land now a parking lot, there across from the main branch of the public library.
Dr. Kerr was a baptist, but his encounter with liberalism -
with the science of evolution,
and a historian understanding of the person of Jesus,
made him change his views,
and he, with the Unitarians in Rockford, formed the Church of the Christian Union in 1870.
Though a new organization, we date our founding to the 1841 beginning of the Unitarian Church,
and Dr. Kerr and his congregation was recognized as the Unitarian congregation of this city.
Dr. Kerr’s attempts to reconcile spirit and understanding were not unique to this pulpit,
but common in churches - ours and others - across the land.
What, in light of the inventions of science, the encounter with Hinduism and Buddhism,
the theory of evolution, the industrialization of the economy,
and after the civil war - when so much idealism had been stripped away -
might we say about the world we live in,
and the place of the holy in that world?
Dr. Kerr wrote in a style that today’s listeners would find hard to hear,
so I’m not going to quote the whole thing to you,
but I want to lift out parts of what he said then, 128 years ago,
say something about what they mean for us today,
for us who attempt still, in a never-ending dance,
to live a rational and spiritual faith.
Dr. Kerr is aware that he his living in a new age.
[page 16].
Dr. Kerr’s contention, and ours to this day,
is that these new insights in science and reason and literature
do not diminish our faith, but make it what he called broader and sweeter:
less narrow, less about doctrine and more about character.
He says this:
[page 17]
I love this sense that the engagement - serious and fruitful engagement:
with science, and history, and literature
makes one’s experience of faith, one’s understanding of the human condition,
to be “larger and broader.”
Dr. Kerr is careful to say that it is not his business to attack (he writes arraign)
other denominations or traditions.
He does not want to say what Unitarianism is only be talking about what it isn’t,
which is one of the dangers we get into sometimes.
But it is helpful to note our distinctive traditions.
Here, in worship today, you heard music that quoted scripture and you sang songs written
much more recently.
I read a modern poem.
Sometimes I might read from a scientific article.
We have a story - usually a new one, with pictures,
we take as our sources for religious reflection
not one record of humanities encounter with the holy,
but many of them,
we look to what is called religious writing and what is called secular writing,
thinking less about the difference between them
and more about what they might say about how we live in this world
with joy and purpose and beauty.
We sometimes call this “exploding the cannon” - the cannon,
the accepted great works, the material included on the syllabus -
we say, yeah, but what else should we read? live? hear? do?
And that is what Dr. Kerr is talking about,
and what Jenkin Lloyd Jones is doing, when he finds inspiration
in the telephone wires,
when he says “you do not lay aside those graces that ever use poetry and art and music and sculpture and architecture and all the other graces to embellish and ennoble the ideas in humanity.”
It is not, as some thing,
that the encounter with science and reason and history
will diminish our faith —
unless our faith is based on things that are not worthy of our devotion -
but that this encounter will help us understand ourselves and humanity itself better,
and that, that, is the purpose of religion - and art, and science, and history.
Dr. Kerr’s particular interest was in archeology and pre-history.
He gave lectures, re-printed in the Rockford Register and Morning Star,
about the discoveries in Egypt and elsewhere and what it meant for religion.
And in the cornerstone sermon, he says something revolutary for his time,
and, somewhat, still for ours today. He says this:
[page 19-20]
Right?
Did you catch that?
The origin, Kerr says in 1888, of religion is not in the mystical
but in the human heart - in our attempts to understand the world, ourselves, and our experiences of divinity.
Which means the bible isn’t a document of God but a document of humanity trying to understand what they call God — and themselves.
And the same goes for all the religions of the world.
And the same goes for art and literature.
We are alive. We have transcendent thoughts! We experience wonder!
Awe and amazement!
And we ask, what does that mean?
And understanding the meaning - why the moon rises,
where butterflies come from,
and stars and people and grains of sand -
this does not diminish our wonder, only our ignorance,
for the experience of awe, of tender love for one another,
of majesty and joy -
is always there for us.
But this understanding, this development means a sense of loss, too —
that the clarity of doctrines and creeds slips away.
Kerr writes of this as a benefit, a great good,
but now, more than a century later,
after the backlash of against liberalism by fundamentalism,
we know that such things are not so easily given up.
Yet I think Kerr’s vision of the broader and sweeter faith is still beautiful.
He writes:
[page 22-23]
But, for Dr. Kerr, and for us still today,
the point of this broader and sweeter faith is not simply that we have incorporate more information
into our perspective,
it is not that we have a larger bibliography.
It is, he says, that we have a practical faith - a simple faith, really,
despite our interest in a broad array of subjects,
in ever expansive knowledge,
the purpose of this faith are what he calls
the “practical elements of the christian life.”
He writes that the purpose of all this is to live well, thoughtfully, yes,
with knowledge, yes, because humanity is worth knowing,
and the universe is worth knowing,
but that this greater understanding leads us to more peace and to love.
Religion, like science and art is a resource for living well,
and that the prophets of religion show us how to live with this spirit of love.
We have chosen the path of knowledge, reason, rationalism,
without abandoning the spirit - but the two being in a dance,
a sense of wonder about the world and an admiration for the human soul -
but what matters is not our creeds or our approach,
but whether or not we are lifting each other up,
whether we are building a world of peace for all people.
Kerr ends his sermon in this vein.
He writes:
[page 24-25].
A generation before Kerr, Theodore Parker,
the Unitarian preacher, writer, and activist,
made a distinction between the transient and the permeant in Christianity -
so much has changed in 2000 years, he observed -
the rituals, the forms, the language, the music, the creeds and their meaning -
that is all transient, and new discovery’s in science and history
should change those things —
but there is one thing that hasn’t changed —
the spirit of love at the heart of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth -
that spirit is the one constant,
even when the emperors and powers who claim to be Christian forget,
that spirit remains.
And Parker said, therefore, that our faith should embrace the world world -
go everywhere -
that we should make our shrine the good heart
its creed all truth - from any subject -
and its ritual, works of love.
So we sang today.
So we still sing.
The ideas of the 19th century -
that a wider understanding of the world lead toward a deeper understanding of the holy and of humanity -
are still, to this day, our ideas.
Now we look less to archeology and more to neuroscience,
as much to quantum mechanics as evolution.
Our ideas about human diversity are less colonial and our understanding of religious diversity is more respectful.
But we still believe that with knowledge, deeper reverence be,
we still believe that arguing over which gifts are best is unwise,
and being filled with the spirit of love is wise,
we still believe that our spiritual experiences should be understood with reason,
and we believe that understanding must leave room for - nay, provoke - mystery and wonder-
and we still believe that we should be a practical religion,
a religion whose test of worth is not how right we are but how just,
not how smart we are but how sweet,
not how large our bibliography but how large our heart,
not with what righteousness we judge others, but with what rightness we live our lives.
So has it been, and so shall it be,
and when, 128 years from now,
we know more about humanity and the universe than we could even imagine today,
it shall still be our faith, our rational spiritual faith,
that discovery is good, and learning is good, and the life of love,
and justice, and mercy, and truth is best of all.