Hi, I’m Roberta Finkelstein. I’ve been a Unitarian Universalist for 53 years, and the minister of this congregation for 8 months. I want to thank Bob for posing these very intriguing and challenging questions to us, and for his eloquent introduction to this sermon. He did leave one essential line out of his text, quite by accident. When he said he believed that most of organized religions was a plot by the clergy to terrorize the laity, I’m sure he meant to add, “Present company excepted.” Not that I haven’t been tempted . . .

I am a Unitarian Universalist because my parents found the UU church to be the only place where they could comfortably raise their children. My mother, like Bob’s father, was a devout Christian until the day she died. She read the bible, attended weekly services, and had her own daily spiritual practice of sacred reading and prayer. My father was a humanist Jew; an active member of the Ethical Humanist Society. Neither of them wanted their children to be raised the way they had been raised; they remembered Sunday School and Hebrew School as a combination of meaningless rote and the terrorizing that Bob referred to.

But they persisted in searching for a religious home for me and my brother because they knew a truth about human nature: people are, like it or not, incurably religious. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A man will worship something – have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts – but it will out. That which dominates our imagination and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character.

Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.” And more recently, John Cobb and Herman Daly, whose book is about economics more than theology, said, “Those who do not consider God at all nevertheless orient themselves around something.”
So my parents, knowing instinctively about the essential and unavoidable religiousness of human beings, brought us to a church where they hoped we would be given the opportunity to develop that religiousness in an atmosphere of safety and encouragement, rather than fear.

In that eclectic religious childhood, where we celebrated Jewish and Christian holidays with two extended families, took the curriculum of the UU Sunday School seriously, and debated the Christian and humanistic perspectives, I developed my first theology of the church. I believed, and still do, that the purpose of the church is to be the place where people, in their incurable religiousness, can probe the ethical and spiritual implications of our basic choices and direct them towards the common good. Daly and Cobb’s book about economics is subtitled Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. A good subtitle for all of religion, don’t you think?

Now all you have to do is look in even the most superficial way at the history of religion to realize that this is an ideal rarely, if ever achieved. Religious institutions are created and sustained by human beings. Huston Smith, in his seminal work The Religions of the World, says, “Their theological and metaphysical truths are, I am prepared to argue, inspired. Institutions – religious institutions included – are another story. Constituted as they are of uneven people (partly good, partly bad), institutions are built of vices as well as virtues, which has led one wag to suggest that the biggest mistake religion made was to get mixed up with people.” Getting mixed up with people That’s how we got from “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” to “You’re going straight to hell because you don’t believe what I believe.”

One way to look at the history of religion is to see each new religious movement as an attempt to reform the extant religion, to call it back to it’s normative theological and metaphysical truths, to correct the excesses and corruptions. Jesus did not set out to start a new religion; he wanted Judaism to return to original covenant of the Torah. Buddha, likewise was seeking enlightenment through the classical Hindu paths when he realized that for many people, it could be so much simpler and more accessible. The Prophet Mohammed was moved by the suffering of the people around him who were clearly not being well served by the prevailing superstitious religious culture. And the Reformation was really just ‘Round 2’ in the attempt to call people back into covenant.

The Unitarian controversy, back in the 1800’s, was also a reformation. Our ancestors believed that the doctrine of the trinity corrupted monotheism. They also believed that the doctrine of human nature that Augustinian Christianity had passed on to later generations was wrong. The idea of regenerate people born in sin was simply unacceptable to our Unitarian ancestors, who read their bibles pretty carefully and not only found no reference to the trinity, but found ample evidence that the emphasis on sin and damnation did not track with the teachings of Jesus. The earliest Unitarians considered themselves Christians; in fact they may have thought of themselves as the only true and pure Christians. And so it goes and has gone throughout human history.

Here we are in a new millennium, in what Michael Ventura calls a new middle ages. The world is torn apart by fanaticism, fundamentalism, religious violence, intractable dogmatism. Scholarly observers from a number of different disciplines have characterized our time as a clash of world views: the Enlightenment/modernity approach vs. the traditional/orthodox approach. Sounds pretty grim. But I brought tidins of great joy back from my class at Meadville Lombard in January The ware for the soul of humanity in the 21st century is actually over. The Enlightenment won. All of the chaos and fanaticism of fundamentalist religious movements across the globe is actually their dying gasps. They will not go gently, but, I am told, they are gone.

When we say the Enlightenment won, what do we mean? We mean that the reputation of human nature has been restored; wrested from those who preached original sin and depravity and returned to those who preach the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We mean that liberal democracy, that hugely flawed system of government that honors the individual above the common good, is the yardstick against which good government is measured. For better or for worse, we won. And I say we because Unitarian Universalism is the quintessential Enlightenment religion. We institutionalized individualism!

Maybe that is the answer to Charles Ladner’s question about why his son Bob gave up on Christianity. Bob was born at a time when Enlightenment values were deeply entrenched in our culture that he couldn’t help but absorb them. And Bob has been paying attention all along. Like others who pay attention, and who believe with all their hearts and souls that human life is worthy of their ultimate commitment, a new approach to religion was needed. Fortunately for all of you, Bob found an alternative. Unitarian Universalism, which allowed Bob to remain a committed member of a religious institution without compromising his humanistic philosophy.

The other side of that question is, why didn’t Bob’s dad give up on Christianity? Or my mom, a flaming liberal who marched for civil rights and against the ABM, who never crossed a union picket line in her life? I think it was because she was hard-wired to be religious and didn’t recognize UUism as an alternative to her Christianity. It didn’t feel religious enough to her in the UU worship service. Our style of worship has evolved in the decades since my mother’s death. Hopefully we have found more of a balance between mind and spirit in our liturgy.

So, given the history of religion – the corruptions, the failures, the violence and fanaticism and dogmatism, the inherent conservatism and resistance to new knowledge and revelation – do we need religion at all in the 21st century? Can’t we just leave it behind, an interesting artifact of an unenlightened time? If we humans are, in fact, incurably religious, then I see no option other than to continue to struggle to create religious institutions that give form and substance to our deepest yearnings. Maybe my answer to the question of whether we need religions is, ‘Yes, but not THAT religion.’ It will not surprise you to hear me argue that we certainly need the Unitarian Universalist religion. And not just because I’m a member of the clergy!

We need religion, even in the 21st century, because like our ancestors in millennia past we still mourn and would be comforted. Religious institutions are still the places we go for pastoral care and comfort. We need religion because, like the ancient Israelites, our communities stray from their covenants and depend on bold prophets to call them back. Religious institutions are still the places from which prophets emerge demanding justice, mercy, and peace. Several years ago commentator and activist Michael Lerner said, “The only left left is in the churches”

Most urgently, we need religion because although we have eschewed the easy, superstitious answers, we still ask the hard questions. Questions about ultimate value, about the meaning of life, about where we were before we were born and what will happen to us after we die. Faced with questions about ultimate worth, what are we to do but turn to each other for help in answering them? The process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said the religion is what a man does with his solitude. I think he was wrong. Religion is what people do, together, with their sorrow and their joy and their puzzlement and their fear and their questions.

Bob quoted the work of Jarred Diamond earlier. People who live in the global village do seek some sense of identification. We need places that ground us, places where we can share a common story. But our stories are neither illogical nor incredible. Our beliefs are based on the fact that water flows down hill, that water is wet, and that stones are hard. That’s why we don’t throw them at people who disagree with us. We believe that evolution is the best possible explanation for how we got to where we are today, that scientific progress is to be embraced, that light is both a particle and a wave, that beneath every layer of chaos there is order, then more chaos.

Unitarian Universalism names personal experience as the primary source of authority in our belief system. That is what makes us the quintessential Enlightenment religion, the religion of the modern world. I just wish more people, like my mother and Bob’s dad, recognized it as such.

Who needs religion in the 21st century? I do. You do. We all do. This member of the professional clergy sincerely hopes that Unitarian Universalism, the imperfect institutional expression of the belief that people are worth having faith in, is around for a long, long time. World without end. Amen.

Benediction by Lauralyn Bellamy

If, here, you have found freedom, take it with you into the world.
If you have found comfort, go and share it with others.
If you have dreamed dreams, help one another, that they may come true!
If you have know love, give some back to a bruised and hurting world.

Go in peace.