Melbourne Unitarian Peace Memorial Church

Address given at the 156th Anniversary of the Melbourne Unitarian Church on 30th November 2008 by Rev. Dr. David Sammons, Visiting Professor UU Heritage and Ministry, Starr King School for the Ministry, California USA

For the past three and a half years, after forty-two years in the parish ministry, I’ve been teaching at Starr King School for the Ministry, the Unitarian Universalist seminary in Berkeley, California. The subjects I teach are history, polity (meaning how Unitarian Universalists are organized in my country), and the arts of ministry (how to lead worship and do rituals, like memorial services and weddings, along with the many pastoral and organizational tasks of the ministry).

The subject that that interests me most among all these things is history. I love looking back to see where things have come from. I suppose it’s why, while I was a parish minister, I liked to poke around in the files of the churches I served to try to find the ghosts that were buried there – and I found a few, like the story of a predecessor of mine who had officially “moved on,” but had actually been dismissed for plagiarism. When I asked the church administrator about him, she said: “Yes. It finally got so bad he came in one day and put a newsletter from another church down on my desk and told me to print the minister’s column in it as though it were his own.” It turned out he was also an alcoholic who he become romantically involved with a number of women in the church. So, he was gone by the end of the week.

Then there was the story about the beloved treasurer who had pocketed over $20,000 of the church’s money and the organist who was found in the minister’s bed. If someone else had been looking they would have found a newspaper article about something that once happened to me. A man jumped up during a service one Sunday with a pistol in his hand threatening to kill me because of the bad things I was saying about Baptists. His family were Baptists, damn it. So, how dare I say such a thing! Luckily, a couple of my larger congregants grabbed him and escorted him out of the sanctuary before he could do anything. A few months ago, people in a Unitarian Universalist church in Tennessee weren’t so lucky. During a musical that was being presented by some children of the congregation a man entered the church, pulled out a gun, and killed or wounded several people. He did it because he was upset with “radicals,” like these Unitarians. There are times, it seems, when it’s dangerous to be a follower of our rather unconventional faith.

Because I didn’t know anything about the history of this church, I decided to find out what I could before leaving for Australia. I couldn’t poke around in your files from that distance, but I could go on line where I discovered that a used book store in the States had a history of this congregation for sale: The Halfway House to Infidelity, written by Dorothy Scott. So I bought it I discovered some interesting things: This congregation has been around for a long time. It’s older than all but one of our churches in California – and it’s gone through a lot of change, as have the churches in my country. As the politics, economy and religious moods of this city and your country have undergone change, so have the kinds of religious expression and make-up of this congregation.

It’s a story familiar to a North American. I once served a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Ohio not only used the Lord’s Prayer in its worship until a few years before I arrived, once a year its members celebrated communion. The church was even named after a saint, being called St. John’s Unitarian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was originally a church of immigrants, like this one; though the immigrants in St. John’s case were Germans, rather than British or Irish.

This made St. John’s different from most other churches in my country, all but a handful of which were founded by people who felt set apart from their European roots. Unitarian Universalists pride themselves on being part of an American church, shaped by American democratic values. No matter what their theology, Unitarian Universalists in the United States, just like here, are open and non-dogmatic – as the slogan of the California UU church I served put it, we are people of “Open Hearts, Open Minds, and Open Doors,” welcoming anyone who wants to come in. Such an attitude has allowed many Unitarian Universalists in the United States to evolve way beyond their faiths original liberal Christian roots without feeling alienated from those who have chosen to hold on to them. Holding in with our differences have strengthened us, rather than tearing us part. It’s why I call one of the courses I teach: “The Divisions That Didn’t Divide Us.”

It’s also why those unable to find a religious home anywhere else can find one among us – and I include myself among them. I didn’t encounter Unitarian Universalism until after I had graduated from college, got married and was ready to begin a family. I accepted a friend’s invitation to come to his UU church one Sunday because he said it was different from the Anglican Church whose creeds and stories I could no longer believe, including the notion that someone to die for my salvation. I wasn’t even sure I believed in God, but my friend said that didn’t matter to the members of his church. Its minister, in fact, was an agnostic and he, himself, was an atheist. Being a moral person was what mattered, he said. He said: “What matters is how we live our lives, not the creeds we repeat in a church.” Unitarian Universalists, he said, believed they could be religious without saviors, creeds or petitions to a deity they thought would take care of things they couldn’t take care of themselves.

The people I met in the church to which my friend invited me were an amazing group of people. They were barbers, artists, labor unionists, teachers and social workers – people who liked to think and talk about what was going on in the world, as well as in their own personal lives. Because of this their church was totally unlike any church I’d even been in and the experience of being a part of it gave the idea that maybe I’d like to work in a church like this – to become a minister, someone who was actually paid to help such people with their thinking, and to be with them as they dealt with the unavoidable problems people have to face once they get past thinking about sport and the weather: things like how to find some meaning in life; how to deal with pain and cope with death and loss; and how to celebrate happier things, like having a child or getting married. Becoming a minister is something I’ve never regretted, though it’s hard work and involves dealing with a lot of things that are troubling. I’ve loved my work and think I’ve been good at it. This is why, when I had brought my parish ministry to an end, I accepted an invitation to take a job in a seminary where I could teach students how to take my place – as well about how Unitarian Universalism in North America came to be what it is.

It’s a history different from the history Unitarianism here in Australia. The United States has always been a more “religious” country than this one is. In part it’s because of many of the original Europeans who came North America did so, at least in part, for religious reasons. In the part of Eastern North America called New England, where both Unitarianism and Universalism were born, the original European setters came because they believed that in this “New Jerusalem” they would be able to “purify" the church they had left in the old England. In this New England they could form congregations of their own, beholden to no one but themselves and their God. It’s what we congregational polity – a democratic form of governance, like the governance of this church.

These Puritans were thinkers and this eventually got some of them in trouble. It got them in trouble because in their thinking they began to question the given interpretations of the Bible and the doctrines of the historic church. And they began to think about things outside of the Bible, like why things were the way they were in the world and began to question doctrines they couldn’t prove, like miracles and virgin births, and God taking on a human form. They also began to question the belief that they were somehow tainted with sin because some ancestor of ours had eaten an apple and to question the idea that God had predetermined who among us, having been tainted with that sin, was going to have it wiped away so we could enter heaven. The evil in this world, these thinkers came to believe, was of human making, not the making of some fallen angel.

The Unitarians in North American, just as was true of our Unitarian forbears who had remained in England came to believe in what William Ellery Channing, in a sermon in 1819 in which he accepted the heretical label “Unitarian,” called “salvation by character.” In his sermon Channing, who I think ought to join those Unitarian saints you have up on your walls, said it’s up to each of us to develop our own sense of morality, along with all the other virtues important to being a whole and caring human being, such as an ability to think and reason, to appreciate the beauty around us, to feel compassion for other people, and to do what we can to enhance life.

Channing believed it was doing this, not adhering to some ancient doctrine, that made a person religious.
Channing’s opponents said such ideas would propel Unitarians straight out of Christianity, and perhaps they did, though there is much in the ethics of Jesus, as opposed to the theologies that have grown up around him, that say a lot about how to live a good life. After all, if we’re to believe the story, when the rabbis asked the young Jesus, when began to question them about all the elaborate ritual laws which no longer seemed to matter in the world in which he lived what the law should be? He said: “Love the Lord thy God (that is, Life), with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind (that is, relate to Life as fully as we can), and love thy neighbor as thyself (that is, care about both ourselves and others).” It’s as life-serving principle one could imagine.

Channing’s idea of salvation by character, influenced by this notion of Jesus, remains at core of Unitarian Universalism as it’s practiced in my country, and, I suspect, as it’s practiced in yours. It’s stayed at the core of our faith in North America through all the changes we’ve undergone in the language of our theology and style of worship. You can see it in that Unitarian Universalist church I joined in Chicago. Like this church, there were pictures on the walls. To the left of the pulpit were mosaics of Jesus, Moses, Confucius and Socrates; to the right were mosaics of the other historic figures in the history of religion, like Mohammed and the Buddha, along with Unitarian and Universalist figures, like Emerson, Martineau and Florence Nightingale. On another wall were portraits of those the members of the congregation thought of as their saints, from the great social worker, Jane Addams, to Governor Altgelt of Illinois, who lost his job because he came to the defense of striking workers, to Martin Luther King, Jr., in whose memory I am proud Americans have finally elected a President of African decent. Now that the Universalists have thrown in their lot with the Unitarians in the United States Universalist figures are joining the others, like Dr. Benjamin Rush, signer of the American Declaration of Independence, pioneer abolitionist and defender of woman’s rights and the founder of psychotherapy in the Americas

These days those who have such figures on the walls of their churches in North America, in both the United States and Canada, are doing pretty well. Our movement is growing, even if not as fast our immigrant-fueled population. When I graduated from seminary I had only two fellow graduates, one an Australian from Adelaide, named Jeff Selth, the other the first women in the wave of women who began to enter our seminaries in the late 60s and 70s. Today over 50% of the UU churches in North America are served by women, including many of our largest ones – and they are very good.

Part of our success is not just our openness, it’s the things we affirm, like the statement of Principles and Purposes you, yourself, have on the back wall of this church – the statement that asks those who are members of a church like this to affirm:

The inherent worth and dignity of every person.

Justice, equity and compassion in human relations.

Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.

A free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.
The goal of world community and peace, liberty and justice for all.

Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

And to draw their faith not just from what’s said in some single ancient book but from all it is we can discover from history, from other peoples struggles and ideas and from our own experience.

I should think that every bit as much here in Australia as in the country from which I come this is the kind of faith which will help us to move toward a future made better by our being alive, instead of being made worse by human avarice and the miss-thinking of the past. It’s because we are such people that I value the company of Unitarians and Universalists here and in the other countries in which our faith exists.

In both this great country and in mine we share a religious tradition that, even though our national movements may have different roots and their own particular history, affirms our belief that we human beings are responsible for what we make of the gift of life with which we’ve been blessed and that religion, for us, isn’t about how we can escape from the mess we’re making out of this planet. It’s about how we can put things right – how we can make good use of the gift of life with which we’ve been blessed right here on earth.

May we do so in a way that will allow those who write the history of our time on this planet to say good things about us.