“Brave New Religion”

How many of you have written your six-word biography yet? I wrote mine and you’ll see this
illustrated if you go up to my office later, “Life is complex. Love trumps excellence.” That’s
me.
Pour Johnson spent his life making wrong decisions. It didn’t matter whether he was
going to the bank, he always go into the wrong line. It didn’t matter what he did, it was wrong in
every aspect of his life: the lane of traffic, the day he picked for the picnic always got rained out.
And so it went day after day, year after year. Because he had such terrible luck in making
decisions, he obviously didn’t like to fly. But he had to fly, and he only had one option. There
was only one plane that was going to the meeting he had to attend. So he thought, “Well, in this
case, I can’t make a bad decision.” He was a good catholic, so he broke into fervent prayer as
the plane took off. To his favorite saint, St. Francis, he said, “You know I’ve never made the
right choice. Why this should be I don’t know, but I have bore this cross and I have not
complained. On this occasion this is the only plane I could take. I had to take it, and therefore
let this be a safe journey.” But it was not. Turbulence began to develop, and suddenly to
everyone’s horror the plane started down. He prayed, “St. Francis save me,” and a hand came
down, swooped him up and held him a mile above the earth. St. Francis said, “My son, I can
save you if you have in truth called upon me.”
“Yes I’ve called upon you,” he cried, “I called upon you St. Francis!” “Ah,” said the
heavenly voice, “St. Francis Xavier or St. Francis of Assisi? Which?”
Now why did I tell that goofy joke? Well, one, I like it. Two, we now live in a time of
choice. For centuries upon centuries human beings have been born into religious communities
just as they have been born into tribes and nations and families. That is what they’ve accepted.
It’s been very rare in human history that there have been hinge moments where people felt an
inner freedom to shift and to change. But we are living in one of those moments. Maybe you’ve
noticed a Pew Foundation poll that’s been released in great fanfare and coverage in the media. It
was astonishing. These were results that not even the people taking the poll had anticipated. It
tells us that we Americans are living in a time of unprecedented religious change. Some would
say, if you’re fundamentalist, you would interpret it as chaos. But it’s real. Twenty eight
percent of all Americans have now left their church, or religion, or temple, or faith, or synagogue
of origin, twenty eight percent. Amazing statistic. Equally amazing, sixteen percent of
Americans say that they are not adults of any religious group, making ‘unaffiliated’ now the
fourth largest “religious” group in America: larger than all Protestant sects. The three largest
religious groups break down at Protestant Evangelicals at twenty six percent, Roman Catholics at
about twenty four percent, and Liberal Protestants at eighteen percent. I’m curious, and don’t
know the answer, as to where they put Unitarian Universalists.
We do know one thing, we are moving into a new era. Right now, America is barely
Protestant, it’s about fifty one percent. But we know for a fact that because of immigration and
population trends, that we will soon be a Protestant minority country. Interestingly, the Roman
Catholic Church lost more people than anyone, but they also gained because of immigrants. So
they ended up being pretty much even. Not so good news for American Protestantism.
Nearly a third of all the people in America feel no sense that they need to feel in stay in
the religion of their childhood, and that such a large percent, sixteen percent, say that they can go
through life without religion being an important element of their daily life. What we know from
this amazing poll is that we are moving in a brave new world of faith and spirituality. The
change is almost unprecedented.
One of my favorite stories about modern day religion is a young man named Bill Hybels,
an Evangelical who graduated from seminary and decided, “You know, I think that I’ll go to the
suburbs of Chicago and ask people who are unchurched why they’re unchurched.” So he went
door to door to door. It didn’t matter what religion they were. If he found out they were no
longer attending or participating in any aspect of religious life, he asked them why. The answers
he received were very interesting. The things that people didn’t like and the reasons that people
claimed they no longer went to church or synagogue were: 1) the hymns, 2) the offering, 3)
having to dress up (I see you’re very relaxed today and I compliment you on that), 4) sermons (I
don’t know how that got in there). So Bill Hybels said, “You know it isn’t important about the
form. What’s important is that we somehow create something that actually answers modern
peoples’ needs and try to answer what they say they want.” So he created Willow Creek, which
is the largest church in America. They have five services every Sunday, a huge parking lot,
theater style seating, they don’t accept and offering and say at the beginning of the service that
they won’t accept money, have Broadway style music with a rock band, and say come
comfortable. Instead of classic sermons they have plays! They have a whole team that puts this
creative package together every week. They call it a ‘searchers service.’ They say, “You all are
searchers.” Now interestingly a lot of people don’t want to stay searchers forever. So they either
drop away or they start going Wednesday night to a place where they have to sing the old hymns
and tithe.
Another amazing statistic that came out two years ago: the two factors in American
congregations that are growing, as opposed to American congregations that are shrinking, are
churches that have organs tend not to grow and churches that have rock bands are growing. The
other factor: ministers without seminary education have growing congregations. If you got
trained, sorry. So we’re living in a time of absolutely unprecedented change where expectations
are absolutely being turned on their head and turned upside down. So the UUA, our mother ship,
decided that maybe we should try and do some experimenting. A friend of mine tried and
decided he was going to use the music of REM, the rock group, to sort of be the glue that held
his new mega church together. It didn’t work, possibly because their most famous song is titled,
“Losing My Religion.” We wanted to have Paul play it, but he claimed in a staff meeting a few
weeks ago that he didn’t know who James Taylor was…
This sermon isn’t about losing your religion. It’s about a very strange process that is
going on that I think affects Unitarian Universalists. I suspect it affects many people who are in
the pews or listening on the radio this morning. That is, that you’re not losing your religion at
all, but there is some trading going on. There is some shifting going on. There’s a rediscovery
of what it actually means to be religious. I can’t tell you how many times I’m working with a
couple to do a wedding or a child dedication service or sometimes sadly a funeral, and people
say to me over and over again, “I’m not religious. I don’t like organized religion.” Now the
classic joke for Unitarian Universalists is, “That’s okay. We’re a disorganized religion.” But
that’s not good enough. The reality is, the real reply, because we are living in such
unprecedented times, the real reply we have to make is not a joke, but to simply say, “This is a
time where organized religion does indeed suffer. But it is also a time, a blessed time, for the
spirit.” People have an incredible hunger. Not to receive liturgies, and creeds, and perceived
gods, but something real and vital. It’s what Emerson tried to do a long time ago in the
Transcendental movement. He said, “You know, if it isn’t fresh, if it isn’t real, if it isn’t new,
then it’s actually not faith.” In early America they had something called the Great Awakening
and then, seven years later before the revolution, the Second Great Awakening. I would posit
that what we’re being told in these statistics is that we’re in the middle of a Third Great
Awakening. The question for us this morning, and I submit each and every time we gather, is a
simple question, “Are we going to be awake for this great awakening? Are we going to be
flexible, and free, and full of the spirit?” Can we respond when twenty eight percent of all
Americans say that they no longer feel any need to be in their childhood faith that they grew up
with? This is also an opportunity, an invitation, a challenge; it is a blessing.
So many of you today are here because you are attempting a soul experiment. You are
flexing your spirit muscles if you will. You are exercising your own discernment. What speaks
to you? What helps you? What nurtures you? What lifts you up? What challenges you? What
comforts you? Rosemary, in the prayer, talked about to love and to serve. They are really the
same: to love and to serve. The purpose of First Church since 1630, nothing has changed and
our essential purpose and mission and self-understanding were to help people live good and
strong lives. We’re to encourage people, to lift up their morale, to serve the cause of justice, to
take love and to live it in our own lives. To our families, yes: to our neighbors, yes: to our
communities, yes: and to this beautiful and suffering world. That’s what religion is, to find the
energy, to grow, and to change, and to shift, and to move and to find happiness: to find happiness
in love and service.
Nothing in this essential mission and self-understanding has shifted one iota. But in a
time of change, we must be free to be flexible, to be open, to try new things, to experiment. The
old ways are good, but there may be new ways to add to the things that are comforting. I often
think, now that I’m twenty-eight years into this, “What will the life of congregations be like
when my children are my age?” I think it will be considerably different and I need not fear that.
None of us, as Unitarian Universalists, need in any sense to afraid of this shift. It is in fact the
greatest opportunity that Unitarian Universalism has even been given.
The question is, “How do we respond? Can we open our doors? Can we understand the
mission of hospitality? Can we understand that it’s important to sing the old hymns and to be
free with music but there is so much more that we can and should do, and that people want us to
do?” The true sense of a church, as I’ve tried to express, is not always our own comfort as a
beloved community. We do need to take care of each other. I spent a wonderful afternoon
yesterday with a woman in her nineties. I love that, that’s what a church is about, to make that
kind of visit. But it’s also about the next person who walks in the door. Can we speak to them?
Can we open our arms to them? Is our theology open and free enough so that young people, who
are rightly suspicious of organized religion, can find something true and vital here? Are we
going to be open enough to create new venues of spirit? Can we do more with our evenings here
so that we become a place where people in Boston immediately think of First Church as a place
to come when they have questions and when they wish to understand themselves and their time
better? Can we reach out to them? Can we form circles of caring and compassion? It is so
important to be able to speak to people’s happiness and their core sense of what they were meant
to do in this life. Life is so short. It is a breath. It is a fleeting moment, and therefore every
opportunity we gather is absolutely crucial. Lives get changed here. More importantly, there is
so much more we can do, and want to do, and that these times compel us to want to do. In this
time of shift and change, in a world that sometimes seems poised between a title wave of
secularism, where people say that there is no meaning, and rampant fundamentalism where
people say I have the only meaning, there is a this narrow wedge where we stand to say, “You
are free to determine your own religious path. But you are free also to choice who you will walk
with. Who do you want to work with to do this love and this service?”
It is a time of great change and shift. The Church of Christ lost twenty percent of its
members in the past twenty years: the Episcopal Church, twenty eight percent: Methodist,
eighteen percent: Disciples of Christ, down forty three percent. Mainline church after mainline
church after mainline church is going down. The question before us as people of the free faith is,
“Are we free enough to escape that trap?” I believe that we are. I know that we are. I think that
we are living in such a creative time. To some people it might be disquieting and dismaying, but
to those of the free faith it is in fact the opening that we have desired. We have so much good
that we can do. There is so much happiness and mercy that we can offer if we are flexible and
open and willing to greet this brave new world of faith. Unitarian Universalism may be a small
religion, but may be large players in this emerging religious reality. To embrace the wisdom and
insight of the past and to do so in open and free and creative ways we can help to answer
people’s spiritual needs, their perplexities, and most of all speak to their sense of hope. In an age
of decreasing denominationalism and increasing individualism we may be creative in modeling
what a beloved community looks and feels like. In an era of “losing my religion,” we can
become in the midst of shift, a place where we can find out spirituality, find our soul, find our
true life to be awake for this great awakening. The purpose of our faith is for this liberty, for this
change, to inspire love, more than love, friendship, connection: all the ways in which modern
consumer society seduces us to retreat from one another, we say no. We say it’s important to be
bound to one another. That is how we find freedom. When we care for each other and when we
care for people we don’t yet even know. That is how to love and serve. That is a brave new
world, and I for one welcome it. Amen.