Perhaps you’ve spotted this bumper sticker riding around on a car belonging to someone who would be coming here on Sunday morning if they lived nearby. “The Uncommon Denomination” strikes me as a fine little capsule description of us. Of course, it says way too little; it only piques the curiosity, and to get where we are we’ve got to begin way, way back. Here’s how wildly imaginative novelist, Tom Robbins, describes the journey:

Early religions were like muddy ponds with lots of foliage. Concealed there, the fish of the soul could splash and feed. Eventually, however, religions became aquariums. Then, hatcheries. From farm fingerling to frozen fish stick is a short swim. …

If one yearns to see the face of the Divine, one must break out of the aquarium, escape the fish farm, to go swim up wild cataracts, dive in deep fjords. One must explore the labyrinth of the reef, the shadows of lily pads. … A longing for the Divine is intrinsic in homo sapiens. (For all we know, it is innate in squirrels, dandelions, and diamond rings, as well.) We approach the Divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains. To expedite those two things may be the mission of our existence.
-Tom Robbins, from his novel, “Skinny Legs and All”

Enlarging our souls — I identify that with our Universalist heritage, and lighting up our brains —that’s our Unitarian quest. To expedite those two things may be the mission of our existence. Perhaps poet Carl Sandburg’s experience will resonate with yours (as it does with mine). He grew up Lutheran in the late 19th century in Galesburg, Illinois, the hometown of both Knox College, founded by Presbyterians, and Lombard College, which was Universalist. He was 8 or 9 years old, as he tells it, when he asked his mother about the Universalists

She shook her head gravely, and gave her ideas about Universalists in two short sentences. “They say there is no hell” and “They believe in dancing in church.” On the first point I found she was correct. On the second point, I came to see she had been listening to gossip. [I learned that] most of the preachers in town spoke from their pulpits against dancing, either square or round, while the Uni-versalists said little or nothing about dancing, either in church or out, claiming only that since there is no hell you couldn’t dance your way there. I didn’t know what to make of it. My mother had a large, loving heart and wide compassion, and her two brief and absolute points about Universalists had me looking at them with suspicion. I had a vague notion that maybe there ought to be a hell and there might be something wrong about people who claimed positively there is no hell.

Carl Sandburg soon became Universalist himself, and years later blessed his church with a substantial legacy in his will.

When people seek out a religion they typically expect to find answers, but people who discover Unitarian Universalism have often questioned their way here.

Rabbi Harold Kushner was a featured speaker at the 2003 UUA General Assembly. He charged his audience to “be as good as your theology.” And he said: “I feel very much at home here with you. The greatest strength and the greatest limitation of Unitarian Universalism is that you are the thinking person’s faith.” A provocative observation! The thinking person's faith. It dredges from memory several lines from poet Phyllis McGinley:

Ah, snug lie those that slumber beneath Conviction’s roof.
Their floors are sturdy lumber, their windows weatherproof.
But I sleep cold forever and cold sleep all my kind,
Born nakedly to shiver in the draft of an open mind.

Harold Kushner’s first book, written from personal experience and deeply moving, captured a wide audience with its title alone: “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.”—Though very many people misremember that title as why bad things happen to good people. We long for an answer to this question—as if we could prevent all bad things if only we knew why they happen, or as if someone or something were to blame. Yet what helps the most, what can save us, is how we respond when bad things happen.

People arrive at churches, seeking answers. But answers carry us only part way home. Answers can be handed down, but a faith really can’t. Faith is forged in the crucible of life experience.

When I look back on my own faith journey, I see it as a pilgrimage from received answers into ventured questions —driven at first by dismay with the answers, but wending onward into trusting the questions. — Learning that the key to finding the right answer in science, or any other realm of mystery, is posing the right question. — Because the question directs where one goes hunting for the answer, and the answer one is truly seeking may be somewhere else. If the questions grow as intriguing to you as the answers, you’re in the right church. Here we keep faith with the questions. And that's it exactly! — we keep our faith with our questions. Answers may come, but it cannot be claimed that we need them. Questions light the way of our lives.

Bernard Loomer was a Baptist professor of religion, dean of two leading theological schools, one before and one after the thought he had retired, and he wound up joining the First Unitarian Church of Berkeley a few years before he died. He wrote as one of us: “I know much less than I used to. I have many more questions, and fewer answers. Sometimes I am not even sure that I am interested in the answers anymore. I get so interested in the questions that I do not have the patience to listen to someone who has gotten it all worked out in ways that I do not believe belong to life.”

We seek ways we believe belong to life. Other people sometimes deride us with the dismissive remark that “Unitarians can believe anything they want to.” But that misunderstands us; it isn’t true. Rather: we must believe what compels our minds and hearts, and resonates with our life experience. We must hold true to conscience.

You and I leave faiths that cease to fit us because we care deeply about truth, and we want very much to get it right. — And at some time we come to realize that this is not going to be possible. We’re inextricably bound by limits of knowledge and time, and by the limits of our very physiology. What we do have, in T.S. Eliot’s poignant words, “…are only hints and guesses. Hints followed by guesses. …The hint half-guessed, the gift half-understood, is incarnation.” — Our own incarnation: the gift of our lives.

Many arrive here on the rebound from other religious paths, and may spend years in spiritual recovery from the anger, the guilt, the grief and the loss. But as we heal we grow free to soak in this open-minded, open-hearted way of faith. — Free to consider any faith-full idea, as we clarify and claim our own, and exalt what we hold worthy, and exult in sharing the journey.

We resist defining our beliefs because they may change tomorrow — and if they do, that will be because we’ve learned something new.

Our heritage here is Christian, but unitarians and universalists broke away from orthodoxy centuries ago. So today, one can be Jewish or Hindu or Buddhist or Sufi or humanist or pagan or atheist and also be Unitarian Universalist.

Others grow confused and we grow tongue-tied because our way of faith is not a set of answers but a way of being. Without a creed to believe in, “how are you a religion?” “what holds you together?” they ask.

But creeds are not the only kind of community clue. Covenants are far more ancient. We unite not on creedal questions (what do we believe?) but covenantal questions (what will we promise each other, and in what hope?). The vital difference is one of growing room. A creed is static; it encapsulates truth, resists change, defines people out. A covenant is enacted, lived in relationship, flexing with circumstances, engaging change, inviting people in. Covenants are commitments not of the mind, but the heart.— How we will be with each other, how we will sustain community rather than how we will think alike, which thinking people won’t.

An anecdote tickles the difference. A very liberal Episcopalian priest was once challenged as to why he did not leave that fold and join the Unitarian Universalists, where it appeared that he better belonged. “My problem with that faith,” he said, “is that it sets no limits whatsoever. Theoretically at least, I could be a cannibal and still be a Unitarian.” To this one of our clergy replied, “Well, perhaps you could believe in cannibalism as a philosophy, but you would cease to be Unitarian Universalist the minute you took your first bite.”

Here’s one familiar way our covenant of relationship has been expressed: Love is the doctrine of this church; the quest for truth is its sacrament; and service is its prayer. To dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom, to serve each other in fellowship-to the end that all souls may grow into harmony with the divine-thus do we covenant with one another.

Whatever truth or meaning we each discover, however uniquely our own, is shared in community, revealed in how we live our lives. For life is inescapably relational; every cell and atom, every thought, every feeling, exists in relationship to what preceded it, what it affects, and what follows after.

At the center of our way of faith is the discovery, the creation, the celebration of relationship. — Within ourselves, and with one another in community. — And also with the earth and the stars, with time and history and hope, and with the creative energy at the center of all.

We join together in a covenant to uphold these eloquent principles:

• the inherent worth and dignity of every person…
• justice, equity and compassion in human relations…
• acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth…
• a free and responsible search for truth and meaning…
• the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process…
• the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all…
• respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are part.

That’s enough to say amen to!

But you know, I think what’s most uncommon about us is something else, undergirding this. It is faith in what we don't know which is greater than our faith in what we do know.

It’s our willingness to abide with insecurity, to trust the unknown. And this invites us to question what may have no answer. We can’t ever be sure. Religion for us is not a haven to safely nest in. It’s an adventure. And no-one can ever render an adventure secure.

Scientific discoveries in the 20th century kept encountering richer fields of wonder in their quest for certainties. Quantum physics and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle glimpse infinite possibility rather than ‘ultimate truth’ at the heart of a dynamic universe.

Asked where we stand, the truest response I’ve ever heard is that we do not stand at all; we move. The essence of our way of faith is this daring venture: to quest and to question; to endure uncertainty; and to live without absolutes — keeping the answers open, the soul open, and all the windows of our minds.