Last Sunday before the service, Mark Peterson told me he didn’t have my sermon titles to post on the board outside, so for December twelfth he put up “Guadalupe” because he saw it on a calendar. I had been thinking of sermon topics, something related to the season, so when Mark mentioned Guadalupe, what came to mind was the week I spent in January 2001 in Cuernavava, Mexico with a side trip to Mexico City to see the Basílica of Guadalupe. Continuing in a theme of important dates in the Mexican calendar, today I bring you The Feast of our Lady of Guadalupe, December twelfth, a day when thousands of Mexican pilgrims make their way to the Basilica, many traveling by bicycle and some arriving on their knees to pay homage to the Virgin.
The day I visited the basilica fell about a month after the feast day, but still hundreds of pilgrims filed by me on their knees. Thousands gathered to view the displayed piece of fabric bearing the image of Mary found by a peasant named Juan Diego this day in 1531.
The Benedictine nuns who took me and six other North American visitors to the shrine told us the miraculous origin of the cloth.
A peasant named Juan Diego was traveling from his home village to Mexico City when he came upon a young woman surrounded in light who instructed him in the local language of Nahuatl to build a church in her honor. Juan Diego recognized the woman as the Virgin Mother. He hurried to tell the Bishop who instructed him to return to site and ask the woman for a sign proving her identity. So off Juan went and when he found her, he asked for a sign and she told him to go up the rocky hill and gather flowers. And though it was winter he found roses everywhere. Guadalupe herself arranged the flowers in his cloak and bade him not to move them until he reached the Bishop. Juan Diego returned to the Bishop and when he opened his cloak, the flowers fell to the floor and in their place a glowing figure of her appeared on the cloth where the petals had been.
It is that image on Juan Diego’s cloak that hangs in the basilica.
The nuns explain Guadalupe’s name really means “the one who protects us from the ones who eat us,” undoubtedly a reference to the Spanish conquistadors Indians like Juan Diego faced. “She is mestizo,” says Sister Fatima. “She welcomes the children of Spanish fathers and indigenous mothers,” inviting the blended into her maternal embrace.
On my winter visit, roses bloomed in the gardens of the nuns just as they bloomed before Juan Diego.
In the Christian liturgical calendar, this is the third Sunday of Advent, Any of you who grew up in or near the tradition may remember the colors that correspond with each of the four Sundays. Because Advent begins like Lent as a time of penitence and fasting, altars first feature purple, a color associated with both penitence and royalty, but by the third week they shift to bright blue to signify the night sky that will herald the rising star or the waters of life associated with creation, or they feature rose to reflect the joy inherent in the coming birth.
This year the third Sunday of Advent falls on December twelfth, the day Mexicans honor Guadalupe who chose as a sign of her authenticity roses abloom out of season on a rocky hillside.
There is a way the Spirit alights today no less wondrously or mysteriously than it appeared before Juan Diego. No less wondrously or mysteriously than it appeared to Mary herself when the angel Gabriel announced to her she would carry a son.
It is easy for folks like us who prefer a more rational approach to life than religious miracles portend, to dismiss the relevance of such stories, but the nine days I spent in Mexico a decade ago with the nuns taught me otherwise and summon me to heed the message of this time of year. So on this Mexican high holy day, it feels fitting to recount my experience, not with an apparition of Guadalupe, but an incarnation of her that appeared in the form of Benedictine sisters in their modest blue skirts and white blouses, cinnamon skin and dark eyes closer to the color of a Middle Eastern Mary than the paler versions we know.
Benedictines, whether monks or nuns, follow the Rule of Benedict, a set of directions for monastic life written in the 6th century by Benedict of Nursia whose wisdom shaped Western monasticism. Ten months a year, the good sisters at Las Misioneras Guadalupanas de Cristo Rey welcome visitors from the United States for a program called "Faith/Hospitality Experience in Latin America." For nine days, people like me are given the chance to experience Benedictine hospitality. For Benedictines, each guest is a representative of Christ.
Upon our arrival at the retreat center, several nuns rush out to greet us. Each one offers a big hug and says in English, "Welcome Home." In our rooms, much more spacious than the ones the nuns live in, we each find a vase of flowers next to a hand-lettered card with our name and another "welcome." In each bathroom is a bottle of purified water. In our three daily chapel services, the nuns provide readings in English and play tapes of U.S. monks singing. In the dining room there are Oreos, and mashed potatoes. Hot dogs and grilled cheese. Evidence abounds of their effort to make us feel at home.
Year-round the nuns work with the poor of Cuernavaca. Part of their mission is to educate us about that reality. Eighty percent of Mexico’s people live in poverty. Illiteracy and malnutrition contribute to vast underemployment. We listen to guest speakers and watch a twenty-year-old video about the hidden Holocaust of Guatemala—a civil war where 135,000 people died. We meet survivors of that war who have settled in Mexico. Every day, we visit children and adults who labor to subsist. On a dirt walkway just over the hill from the retreat center, we chat with four women, shovels in hand, creating a road from a heap of gravel. Another day, we visit four families in The Station, a cramped, non-arable swath of government land where 30,000 squatters live in dwellings constructed from scraps. In the homes we enter, little light shines in. There are no windows amidst the corrugated metal and stone. Dust. Rats. Bare light bulbs. Outhouses. Strips of cloth functioning as doors. Conditions that mirror the encampments of poor blacks who lived a mile from my childhood home in Tennessee, reminiscent of lives lived in cardboard box villages and in subway tunnels. Each foray led by the nuns a billboard for the prophet Jeremiah who wrote: Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper rooms by injustice; that makes his neighbors work for nothing, and does not give them their wages.
The good sisters aim to churn our consciousness by exposing us to harsh realities. They want us to consider the ways we spend our disposable income and think twice before supporting NAFTA; but it is the nuns themselves, voices soft and laughter keen, who stir my soul beyond measure. It is their oft-repeated melodies sung on or off key, in praise of a god that restores their hope daily and calls them to serve by accompanying them as they do.
In Cuernavaca as I read aloud the poetry of Mary Oliver each day as part of my morning meditation, sitting outside among lavish winter roses, apricot and ivory, I realize why the people I meet there need the Lady of Guadalupe, a mestizo incarnation of Mary who fuses indigenous religion with Christianity in a way that makes sense to conquered people. As I walk to 7a.m. chapel, marveling at the roses and hibiscus, the palette of sky as the sun transforms it, I experience the divine in Mary Oliver’s images and the scent of flora, in the colors and texture and infinite wisdom of the universe. And as soon as I sit down in the chapel, careful to select a seat that permits me to gaze out the picture window at the rising sun and the reflection of the candle in the foliage on the hill so that I peer into a burning bush, the nuns sing praises to El Senor, to a human incarnation of God who suffers with the poor. As the sound of the nuns singing psalms in Spanish fills my ear, I feel the presence of the God they invoke.
Up until that moment, I have experienced a sense of the divine through poetry. My realm of the sacred: magnificent trees, Not surprising for a person who lives in a wooded landscape where the trees have room to grow like spires. But there in the small room filled with the good sisters of Guadalupe, my horizon of the sacred expands.
The sisters faithfully bow to the consecrated host in a glass box that hangs from the chapel ceiling, wafers made holy they tell me by blessings of the priest. And at that moment, I see as clearly as Juan Diego did, the presence of holiness. Not in the host consecrated by the priest, but in the welcome consecrated by nuns who embody the risen spirit in their radical hospitality, their tireless pursuit of justice, their unsung labor—they emanate a god that before, I would have only seen present in the petals of rose light that bloom on the chapel wall at evening prayer.
It is the nuns who instruct me why it is that as lovely as their flowers are, what ultimately stirs Juan Diego, and centuries of his descendents is the image of a mestizo Mary welcoming them as graciously as the Virgin accepts the fullness of her womb, a pregnancy she does not choose. The message Mary imparts is that within each of us the divine gestates and comes to light when we, as courageously as she does, welcome the unbidden. When we heed the great Sufi poet Rumi, who writes: “Be grateful for whoever comes/ because each has been sent /as a guide from beyond.”
The morning of our departure, I am the only guest who shows up for 7 a.m. prayer. I peer in the doorway of the chapel where five nuns pray. No guitars or singing, just the quiet murmurs of Spanish. An amber hand beckons me in. The mother superior offers me an English Bible and indicates a passage to read. After I finish, she reads the same passage in Spanish. A moment later, the nuns rise and move toward center. We all join hands. They begin the Lord’s Prayer in English. I wave my hand to indicate no, no, please say it in Spanish. But daily they embroider the Rule of Benedict on their hearts. Of course they will pray in English for the sake of their lone North American guest.
The words catch in my throat, blocked by welling tears. I struggle to make them audible, to give voice to my gratitude for their kindness, for the gift of their prayer.
I keep replaying the words of sister Ramona telling me that after we depart, they will clean our rooms, launder the linens, re-make the beds. "This is our work," she says.
I think of Glenda telling me our job is to stay in our joy. And I think of Guadalupe telling a peasant to gather flowers where you least expect them. I recall gazing up at that cloth, centuries old, beholding the image of a woman radiating light, arms extended in welcome. I recall the sight of men and women walking on their knees across an acre of concrete in humility and praise, traveling like the legendary wise men to pay homage to “the one who protects them from the ones who will eat [them].”
We rarely believe it is the unknown that will protect us. We don’t associate the unbidden or unexpected with what saves us. Usually, we meet the unknown with apprehension or run the other way. But on the feast day of Guadalupe, the third Sunday of Advent, may the color of roses, the color of joy, remind us of flowers that bloom when and where we least expect. May we, like Juan Diego, see holiness on the hillside, and like Mary, feel it stirring within.
Amen.
Closing words: Helen Keller wrote, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” Adventure begins with Advent. Pregnant with risk and possibility, it invites us to participate in birth of what we cannot imagine but nevertheless can come to know.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Seligman Sermons in the Wider World
Recently, we received a response to Leaf's sermon, "The Cost of Indifference" from UUSC:
Dear Rev. Seligman,
I was moved by your recent blog on the cost of indifference – thank you. “What happens when we lose touch with the folks we wish to help? When their reality seems so distant from our own?” you wrote. It really is so important to remember that the people we are helping have character, personality, history, relationships – full lives.
I noticed your blog because recently I met a woman in Washington DC who attended First Parish Fitchburg years ago and still received news from your congregation. Your news had prompted her to renew her support of UUSC!
UUSC recently ran a “JustJourney” to Uganda and one of the participants – Rev. Sally Beth Shore of the UU Congregation of the Swannanoa Valley – wrote a blog post about her experiences in meeting people over there, addressing one of your points in your blog.
Sincerely,
Charles
-----------------------------------------------------
We're so happy to hear that Leaf's words are making a difference out in the world! Thanks for writing us, Charles.
The Blog Team
Dear Rev. Seligman,
I was moved by your recent blog on the cost of indifference – thank you. “What happens when we lose touch with the folks we wish to help? When their reality seems so distant from our own?” you wrote. It really is so important to remember that the people we are helping have character, personality, history, relationships – full lives.
I noticed your blog because recently I met a woman in Washington DC who attended First Parish Fitchburg years ago and still received news from your congregation. Your news had prompted her to renew her support of UUSC!
UUSC recently ran a “JustJourney” to Uganda and one of the participants – Rev. Sally Beth Shore of the UU Congregation of the Swannanoa Valley – wrote a blog post about her experiences in meeting people over there, addressing one of your points in your blog.
Sincerely,
Charles
-----------------------------------------------------
We're so happy to hear that Leaf's words are making a difference out in the world! Thanks for writing us, Charles.
The Blog Team
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
UU Hammers
Hanukah, sometimes known as the Festival of Lights, began Wednesday at sundown. Later in the service when the children join us, we will light the menorah together. Although light is a central metaphor for winter holidays, Hanukah’s first metaphor is a hammer. Hence this morning’s rousing rendition of the Pete Seeger classic, “If I Had a Hammer.”
As our last hymn will tell us, the main characters of the Hanukah story are a band of brothers known as the Maccabees. This isn’t their surname; it is an honorific designation. Maccabee means hammer and according to Michael Lerner, of Tikkun magazine that’s just what the brothers and their father did.
When Alexander the Great introduced Jews to Hellenistic culture some city-dwelling Jews assimilated, but many rural Jews who were farmers, held fast to their ways; they resented foreign rule and the Jewish elite who courted favor with their Greek conquerors. Burdened by taxation and repulsed by the Hellenists’ love of power, a small band of rebels under the leadership of a country priest and his five sons, who came to be known as “the Maccabees,” decided to fight back against imperialism. There were unwilling to accept the desecration of the Temple. For them it was an unbearable assault that they were forbidden to study the Torah or observe the Sabbath. They refused to worship the Greek Gods set on the altar. They believed the human spirit was more powerful than technology and in 165 B.C.E. they retook Jerusalem, purified and rededicated the Temple, (Hanukah means “dedication”) and rekindled the eternal light. Thus, the miracle of Hanukah has less to do with mysteriously long-burning oil, and more to do with the tenacity, bravery, and faith evident in a small group of people who refused to give up the communal practice of their faith or give in to oppression.
And since some of you have asked about the origins of Unitarian Universalism and what exactly is a Unitarian as distinctive from a Trinitarian, this morning I will take you on a brief tour of the hammers of Unitarian Universalism. I realize taken out of context that could sound like Builder Bob on a rampage, but think of it in the Pete Singer and Lonnie Hayes way of hammering out justice, freedom and love.
First stop on the tour, Egypt in third century of the Common Era. A Christian theologian and scholar named Origen, whose name is reputed to mean “unbreakable” took issue with the way the early church leaders sculpted theology. Though he believed in a trinity, he saw it hierarchically with God the Father as more powerful than Jesus, his Son. He subscribed to a doctrine of universal reconciliation, which refuted the idea that only certain souls would be reconciled with God in the afterlife. This is the doctrine that lends its name to Universalism.
As one scholar, Edward Moore, put it:
Origen was an innovator in an era when innovation, for Christians, was a luxury ill-afforded. He drew upon pagan philosophy in an effort to elucidate the Christian faith in a manner acceptable to intellectuals, and he succeeded in converting many gifted pagan students of philosophy to his faith. He was also a great humanist, who believed that all creatures will eventually achieve salvation, including the devil himself.
So in 1770, when the father of American Universalism, a Brit named John Murray arrived on the New Jersey coast spreading his message of Universalism, he drew on the theology of Origen and many others through the centuries who refused to accept the position so fiercely articulated by John Calvin that only certain souls, predetermined before birth, would reunite with God after death.
Though it may seem passé to us in 2010, the covenant we recite every week contains this very theology: “To help one another in fellowship, to the end that all souls shall grow in harmony with each other and with the Holy.”
Origen is not only known for his understanding of universal salvation; he also laid the theological groundwork for our Unitarian forebears. Though Origen acknowledged the Trinity, he did not recognize Jesus or the Holy Spirit as equivalent to God. He applied a hierarchy wherein God the Father had the most power, with Jesus the Son took a secondary position and the Holy Spirit, third.
For almost as long as Christianity has existed in a systematically organized form, theologians have debated the nature of the Trinity, he concept of a triune or three-part deity. Early in the 4th century of the Common Era, Arius provoked controversy when he declared not unlike Origen, that Jesus, though the Son of God was not made of the same substance as the Father. In 325, at the Council of Nicea, Arius’s proposition was defeated. Hence, the Nicene Creed recited in most Christian churches, affirms “the belief in one God, one Lord Jesus Christ, the essence of the Father and being of the same substance.” And that is a Trinitarian.
When Michael Servetus, a sixteenth century Spaniard, penned his tome, On the Errors of the Trinity, he was burned at the stake.
Peter Hughes, editor of the Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography, writes,[Servetus] inspired unitarians and other groups on the radical left-wing of the Reformation to develop and institutionalize their own heretical views.… [he] rejected the doctrine of original sin and the entire theory of salvation based upon it,… [and] held that God was present in and constitutive of all creation. This feature of Servetus' theology was especially obnoxious to Calvin.
Let me repeat that: “God was present in and constitutive of all creation” That is what we would call a panentheist: one for whom God is present in and comprised of all being. That Michael Servetus would so pithily describe the theology of so many contemporary Unitarian Universalists, including mine, is remarkable. That he died for doing it, hammers a new meaning of religious conviction.
Prior to Unitarianism, theologians destructed and reconstructed Trinitarianism, the doctrine of a triune God. The Transylvanian Unitarianism that crystallized in 1568 was suffused with the universalism that had been percolating through the centuries. On March 8, 1568 the only Unitarian king in history, John Sigismund, convened ministers of both Hungary and Transylvania to listen to eleven debaters, five Unitarians and six Calvinists. They began with solemn prayers then proceeded to debate in Latin. The bishop of the Reformed Church in Hungary appealed to the authority of the Bible, the creeds, the Fathers, and the orthodox theologians. Ferenc Dávid, the preacher of the King’s court appealed to the Bible alone. Note the absence of any reference to creeds or the Church Fathers from Dávid. By the ninth day the Calvinists asked to be excused from listening further. The king suggested that might signal defeat so the Calvinists stayed, and mercifully, the king ended the debate on day ten, “recommending that the ministers give themselves to prayer, seek harmony, and refrain from mutual abuse as [it is] unbecoming in them” (Earl Morse Wilbur).
The debate, generally regarded as a complete victory for the Unitarians, made a hero of Ferenc Dávid, met by crowds “who insisted he mount a large boulder at a street corner (still preserved as a sacred relic) and speak to them of his victorious new doctrine.” (Perhaps that is why there is a boulder right outside our church.) And while the hometown exploded with excitement, others were not so pleased. According to Earl Wilbur’s historical account, “the Calvinists began to rally their forces in Transylvania; while in Hungary, all through the year 1568, they kept holding synods in different districts, confirming the orthodox doctrine and condemning [Unitarians]. Disregarding the king’s decree of tolerance, they persecuted and drove out ministers holding Unitarian views, if they would not deny their faith, and forbade them to speak in their own defense, lest they thus make more converts to their views.”
The debates continued with great fervor, for in the sixteenth century, these weren’t good-natured jousts of intellect designed to affirm the superiority of reason. The king and his court attended along with generals. When the bishop of the Reformed Church spoke viciously to Dávid, the king himself interjected, “We wish that in our dominions there be freedom of conscience; for we know that faith is the gift of God, and that one’s conscience can not be forced.” A mere six days later, “the king saw that nothing further could be gained, and having charged the orthodox with evading the real issue he closed the debate.”
By 1571, Unitarianism, or “the religion of Ferenc Dávid” as it was known then, reached the height of its prominence, recognized as one of the four “received” religions protected by law, with almost five hundred congregations. Dávid published no less than eight of his own texts on Unitarianism in both Latin and Hungarian so that scholars and commonfolk alike could have access to his thoughts. King Sigismund required all rulers in Transylvania to respect and preserve the religious rights and freedoms of the four received religions: Unitarian, Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed, but once the king died prematurely, Unitarians were no longer assured protection or respect.
The ensuing decades brought great challenges to the early Unitarians whose theological innovations continued to cause controversy and place spokesmen such as Dávid at risk. Though he was not alone in putting forth the idea that there was no biblical support for the belief that Jesus equaled God, or that Christ should be worshiped, Dávid suffered the blows of orthodox Christians who considered him blasphemous.
And not unlike the Maccabees, he refused to be silenced. Despite warnings he spoke his truth to power and paid the price. Ill and sentenced to prison, Dávid died there November 15, 1579.
In his last sermon, he preached. "Whatever the world may say, it must some time become clear that God is but one." That is the theological root of Unitarianism. What we think of as our core values: religious freedom, the responsibility to bring reason and conscience to bear, and to interpret sacred texts ourselves come from Servetus, David, the Polish theologian Faustus Socinus and King Sigismund.
Their legacy flourishes today in Transylvania, now known as Romania, and parts of Hungary where about seventy thousand Unitarians dwell. They are members of the only religion indigenous to that region. Ninety-five percent of their congregations are rural. While certainly the most liberal religion there, it is quite different than our version of Unitarian Universalism. A bishop still presides though he can only be elected to two six-year terms and cannot be over seventy-five. A catechism remains in use that declares belief in one God comprehended as spirit and love; belief in the spiritual leadership of Jesus through the example he set; and a belief in the mission of the Unitarian church. Communion, known as The Lord’s Supper, is offered four times a year, not as a sacrament but as part of the liturgy. Ministers preach from the Bible and junior-high aged children are confirmed.
What binds us to this expression of Unitarianism is not ritual, liturgy or even congregational polity. A cursory glance reveals few similarities and our respective ways of speaking about our beliefs would hold few if any words in common. What binds us is a shared heritage and living history that instructs us in courage and the meaning of conviction.
And that’s what the candles we light at Hanukah represent. Not the miracle of long-lasting oil, but the miracle of human beings, who against all odds, hammer out justice, refusing to forsake irrefutable values, rescuing religious freedom from the flames of intolerance and restoring what is holy to the altar of everyday life. Amen.
Closing words:
Each of here has the opportunity to seek our inner Maccabee, to find and refine a faith worth defending, a spiritual community worth preserving. Let us hammer out justice and freedom as carry our light into the world.
As our last hymn will tell us, the main characters of the Hanukah story are a band of brothers known as the Maccabees. This isn’t their surname; it is an honorific designation. Maccabee means hammer and according to Michael Lerner, of Tikkun magazine that’s just what the brothers and their father did.
When Alexander the Great introduced Jews to Hellenistic culture some city-dwelling Jews assimilated, but many rural Jews who were farmers, held fast to their ways; they resented foreign rule and the Jewish elite who courted favor with their Greek conquerors. Burdened by taxation and repulsed by the Hellenists’ love of power, a small band of rebels under the leadership of a country priest and his five sons, who came to be known as “the Maccabees,” decided to fight back against imperialism. There were unwilling to accept the desecration of the Temple. For them it was an unbearable assault that they were forbidden to study the Torah or observe the Sabbath. They refused to worship the Greek Gods set on the altar. They believed the human spirit was more powerful than technology and in 165 B.C.E. they retook Jerusalem, purified and rededicated the Temple, (Hanukah means “dedication”) and rekindled the eternal light. Thus, the miracle of Hanukah has less to do with mysteriously long-burning oil, and more to do with the tenacity, bravery, and faith evident in a small group of people who refused to give up the communal practice of their faith or give in to oppression.
And since some of you have asked about the origins of Unitarian Universalism and what exactly is a Unitarian as distinctive from a Trinitarian, this morning I will take you on a brief tour of the hammers of Unitarian Universalism. I realize taken out of context that could sound like Builder Bob on a rampage, but think of it in the Pete Singer and Lonnie Hayes way of hammering out justice, freedom and love.
First stop on the tour, Egypt in third century of the Common Era. A Christian theologian and scholar named Origen, whose name is reputed to mean “unbreakable” took issue with the way the early church leaders sculpted theology. Though he believed in a trinity, he saw it hierarchically with God the Father as more powerful than Jesus, his Son. He subscribed to a doctrine of universal reconciliation, which refuted the idea that only certain souls would be reconciled with God in the afterlife. This is the doctrine that lends its name to Universalism.
As one scholar, Edward Moore, put it:
Origen was an innovator in an era when innovation, for Christians, was a luxury ill-afforded. He drew upon pagan philosophy in an effort to elucidate the Christian faith in a manner acceptable to intellectuals, and he succeeded in converting many gifted pagan students of philosophy to his faith. He was also a great humanist, who believed that all creatures will eventually achieve salvation, including the devil himself.
So in 1770, when the father of American Universalism, a Brit named John Murray arrived on the New Jersey coast spreading his message of Universalism, he drew on the theology of Origen and many others through the centuries who refused to accept the position so fiercely articulated by John Calvin that only certain souls, predetermined before birth, would reunite with God after death.
Though it may seem passé to us in 2010, the covenant we recite every week contains this very theology: “To help one another in fellowship, to the end that all souls shall grow in harmony with each other and with the Holy.”
Origen is not only known for his understanding of universal salvation; he also laid the theological groundwork for our Unitarian forebears. Though Origen acknowledged the Trinity, he did not recognize Jesus or the Holy Spirit as equivalent to God. He applied a hierarchy wherein God the Father had the most power, with Jesus the Son took a secondary position and the Holy Spirit, third.
For almost as long as Christianity has existed in a systematically organized form, theologians have debated the nature of the Trinity, he concept of a triune or three-part deity. Early in the 4th century of the Common Era, Arius provoked controversy when he declared not unlike Origen, that Jesus, though the Son of God was not made of the same substance as the Father. In 325, at the Council of Nicea, Arius’s proposition was defeated. Hence, the Nicene Creed recited in most Christian churches, affirms “the belief in one God, one Lord Jesus Christ, the essence of the Father and being of the same substance.” And that is a Trinitarian.
When Michael Servetus, a sixteenth century Spaniard, penned his tome, On the Errors of the Trinity, he was burned at the stake.
Peter Hughes, editor of the Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography, writes,[Servetus] inspired unitarians and other groups on the radical left-wing of the Reformation to develop and institutionalize their own heretical views.… [he] rejected the doctrine of original sin and the entire theory of salvation based upon it,… [and] held that God was present in and constitutive of all creation. This feature of Servetus' theology was especially obnoxious to Calvin.
Let me repeat that: “God was present in and constitutive of all creation” That is what we would call a panentheist: one for whom God is present in and comprised of all being. That Michael Servetus would so pithily describe the theology of so many contemporary Unitarian Universalists, including mine, is remarkable. That he died for doing it, hammers a new meaning of religious conviction.
Prior to Unitarianism, theologians destructed and reconstructed Trinitarianism, the doctrine of a triune God. The Transylvanian Unitarianism that crystallized in 1568 was suffused with the universalism that had been percolating through the centuries. On March 8, 1568 the only Unitarian king in history, John Sigismund, convened ministers of both Hungary and Transylvania to listen to eleven debaters, five Unitarians and six Calvinists. They began with solemn prayers then proceeded to debate in Latin. The bishop of the Reformed Church in Hungary appealed to the authority of the Bible, the creeds, the Fathers, and the orthodox theologians. Ferenc Dávid, the preacher of the King’s court appealed to the Bible alone. Note the absence of any reference to creeds or the Church Fathers from Dávid. By the ninth day the Calvinists asked to be excused from listening further. The king suggested that might signal defeat so the Calvinists stayed, and mercifully, the king ended the debate on day ten, “recommending that the ministers give themselves to prayer, seek harmony, and refrain from mutual abuse as [it is] unbecoming in them” (Earl Morse Wilbur).
The debate, generally regarded as a complete victory for the Unitarians, made a hero of Ferenc Dávid, met by crowds “who insisted he mount a large boulder at a street corner (still preserved as a sacred relic) and speak to them of his victorious new doctrine.” (Perhaps that is why there is a boulder right outside our church.) And while the hometown exploded with excitement, others were not so pleased. According to Earl Wilbur’s historical account, “the Calvinists began to rally their forces in Transylvania; while in Hungary, all through the year 1568, they kept holding synods in different districts, confirming the orthodox doctrine and condemning [Unitarians]. Disregarding the king’s decree of tolerance, they persecuted and drove out ministers holding Unitarian views, if they would not deny their faith, and forbade them to speak in their own defense, lest they thus make more converts to their views.”
The debates continued with great fervor, for in the sixteenth century, these weren’t good-natured jousts of intellect designed to affirm the superiority of reason. The king and his court attended along with generals. When the bishop of the Reformed Church spoke viciously to Dávid, the king himself interjected, “We wish that in our dominions there be freedom of conscience; for we know that faith is the gift of God, and that one’s conscience can not be forced.” A mere six days later, “the king saw that nothing further could be gained, and having charged the orthodox with evading the real issue he closed the debate.”
By 1571, Unitarianism, or “the religion of Ferenc Dávid” as it was known then, reached the height of its prominence, recognized as one of the four “received” religions protected by law, with almost five hundred congregations. Dávid published no less than eight of his own texts on Unitarianism in both Latin and Hungarian so that scholars and commonfolk alike could have access to his thoughts. King Sigismund required all rulers in Transylvania to respect and preserve the religious rights and freedoms of the four received religions: Unitarian, Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed, but once the king died prematurely, Unitarians were no longer assured protection or respect.
The ensuing decades brought great challenges to the early Unitarians whose theological innovations continued to cause controversy and place spokesmen such as Dávid at risk. Though he was not alone in putting forth the idea that there was no biblical support for the belief that Jesus equaled God, or that Christ should be worshiped, Dávid suffered the blows of orthodox Christians who considered him blasphemous.
And not unlike the Maccabees, he refused to be silenced. Despite warnings he spoke his truth to power and paid the price. Ill and sentenced to prison, Dávid died there November 15, 1579.
In his last sermon, he preached. "Whatever the world may say, it must some time become clear that God is but one." That is the theological root of Unitarianism. What we think of as our core values: religious freedom, the responsibility to bring reason and conscience to bear, and to interpret sacred texts ourselves come from Servetus, David, the Polish theologian Faustus Socinus and King Sigismund.
Their legacy flourishes today in Transylvania, now known as Romania, and parts of Hungary where about seventy thousand Unitarians dwell. They are members of the only religion indigenous to that region. Ninety-five percent of their congregations are rural. While certainly the most liberal religion there, it is quite different than our version of Unitarian Universalism. A bishop still presides though he can only be elected to two six-year terms and cannot be over seventy-five. A catechism remains in use that declares belief in one God comprehended as spirit and love; belief in the spiritual leadership of Jesus through the example he set; and a belief in the mission of the Unitarian church. Communion, known as The Lord’s Supper, is offered four times a year, not as a sacrament but as part of the liturgy. Ministers preach from the Bible and junior-high aged children are confirmed.
What binds us to this expression of Unitarianism is not ritual, liturgy or even congregational polity. A cursory glance reveals few similarities and our respective ways of speaking about our beliefs would hold few if any words in common. What binds us is a shared heritage and living history that instructs us in courage and the meaning of conviction.
And that’s what the candles we light at Hanukah represent. Not the miracle of long-lasting oil, but the miracle of human beings, who against all odds, hammer out justice, refusing to forsake irrefutable values, rescuing religious freedom from the flames of intolerance and restoring what is holy to the altar of everyday life. Amen.
Closing words:
Each of here has the opportunity to seek our inner Maccabee, to find and refine a faith worth defending, a spiritual community worth preserving. Let us hammer out justice and freedom as carry our light into the world.
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