This is the fourth part of a four part series. In the first three, we looked at the idea of sin and how it is still relevant for us today, the ideas of guilt and shame, and why guilt may be good for us, and how shame is destructive to our very notions of self, and what I consider the pivotal foundation of Unitarian Universalism, salvation by character and what makes good character. In this sermon we come to one of the most difficult ideas for contemporary Unitarian Universalists to truly grasp: being a creedless faith.

There’s an old riddle that asks: “What do you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a Unitarian Universalist?” The answer: “Someone who goes around knocking on doors with nothing to say.”

As they say, “It’s funny because its true.” How much do we have to say about our faith? How much that is truly relevant do we have to say about our faith? I ask this, this morning, because in the world of easy answers in religion, we don’t offer any. We have answers, but none of them are easy, and once you have an answer, or at least something that works for you, you are expected to live it. It’s not easy.

When most of the world’s religions tell us that they have the answers, they mean it, and they can tell you what they are. We can’t because we don’t. In our honesty, we have an integrity. But while that is not easy for many of us, it is doubly hard for our youth and young adults. Imagine going off to college for the first time, leaving your sheltered and sheltering faith community (and if you think we’re not sheltered, think again) and encountering someone who knows just what it is that they believe. No doubts, no nagging questions, we’re talking knowledge here. And they ask us, “Well, just what is it that you do believe?” What do we do? What do our young adults and youth do?

If we have no concept of our faith, we will probably start stammering out some of the principles. We believe in democracy. Well, so does the local republican club. We believe that people should be treated fairly. Well, so does nearly everyone else in the entire world. What does that even mean? How do you define fairly? Whose idea of justice? Nearly everything we may claim in our principles is close to being meaningless as a statement of faith. The principles are doubly meaningless in that no one must believe any of them in order to be a Unitarian Universalist. There are no requirements of belief. There is the requirement that we live by the standards we set for ourselves.

Or, have we equipped ourselves with the deeper truth of our faith; that our faith is a creedless faith. What does that mean? A creed is a statement that “We Believe…” It is a fence to include some and exclude others. To be part of most faith communities, we need to believe in the creed of that particular faith. Now, on one hand, that can be nice. We know what we believe. We can say it in a certain number of words and some phrases that roll off the tongue. We know why we belong in a particular faith community.

This is one of the reasons that the principles have become a sort of de facto creed among Unitarian Universalists. It tells us that we belong to this community, if we believe in the precepts put forth in the principles. It makes our faith easy to talk about when someone asks us about it. That’s not necessarily bad. The motivations are in the right place. I mean how do you explain something that is not based upon assenting to certain beliefs when we live in a culture where the dominant religions are all about assenting to certain beliefs? Why don’t we just name the principles as our creed and be done with it?

For one simple reason: it would deny the very foundation of who we are as a faith.

While creeds include, they also exclude. As one of my favorite writers, Robert Anton Wilson, has written “Convictions cause convicts.” Which is to say that our beliefs can actually be bars that imprison our minds, our very spirits. This is especially true when we codify them, write them down, set them in stone. A creed is a conviction set in stone.

Our spiritual ancestors, the earliest Unitarians in our country, found that creeds were binds upon the mind and upon the very spirit of our humanity. Rather they sought through our inward and inherent moral agency a spiritual freedom. Only a spiritually free people can have the freedom to choose to do good. Only a spiritually free people are free enough to find wholeness in the expression of our character. It is through our character that we are saved. It is through the expression of our freedom that we may find the fullness of our faith.
In 1830, William Ellery Channing, preached the sermon Spiritual Freedom in which he speaks of the free mind and links it with the foundations of good character. It is notable that he clearly speaks of freedom in terms of responsibility. It is a mature freedom. We have an abridged version of this selection in our hymnal, this is an expanded version:

“I call that mind free, which masters the senses, which protects itself against animal appetites, which contemns pleasure and pain in comparison to its own energy, which penetrates beneath the body and recognizes its own reality and greatness, which passes life, not in asking what it shall eat or drink, but in hungering, thirsting, and seeking after righteousness.

“I call that mind free, which escapes the bondage of matter, which, instead of stopping at the material universe and making it a prison wall, passes beyond it to its Author, and finds in the radiant signatures which everywhere bears of the Infinite Spirit, helps to its own spiritual enlightenment.

“I call that mind free, which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven, which, whilst consulting others, inquires still more of the oracle within itself, and uses instructions from abroad, not to supersede but to quicken and exalt its own energies.

“I call that mind free, which sets no bounds to its love, which is not imprisoned in itself or in a sect, which recognizes in all human beings the image of God and the rights of his children, which delights in virtue and sympathizes with suffering wherever they are seen, which conquers pride, anger, and sloth, and offers itself up a willing victim to the cause of mankind.

“I call that mind free, which is not passively framed by outward circumstance, which is not swept away by the torrent of events, which is not the creature of accidental impulse, but which bends events to its own improvement, and acts from an inward spring, from immutable principles which it has deliberately espoused.

“I call that mind free, which, through confidence in God and in the power of virtue, has cast off all fear but that of wrong- doing, which no menace or peril can enthrall, which is calm in the midst of tumults, and possesses itself though all else be lost.
“I call that mind free, which resists the bondage of habit, which does not mechanically repeat itself and copy the past, which does not live on old virtue, which does not enslave itself to precise rules, but forgets what is behind, listens for new and higher monitions of conscience, and rejoices to pour in fresh and higher exertions.

“I call that mind free, which is jealous of its own freedom, which guards itself from being merged with others, which guards its empire over itself as nobler than the empire of the world.

“Such is the spiritual freedom which Christ came to give. It insists in moral force, in self-control, in the enlargement of thought and affection, and in the unrestrained action of our best powers. This is the great good of Christianity, nor can we conceive a greater within the gift of God. I know that to many, this will seem too refined a good to be proposed as the great end of society and government. But our skepticism cannot change the nature of things. I know how little this freedom is understood and enjoyed, how enslaved men are to sense, and passion, and the world; and I know, too, that through this slavery they are wretched, and that while it lasts no social institution can give them happiness.

Our spiritual ancestors felt that the only way to have this sort of free mind is without the limiting and binding element of a creed. We are a creedless faith, not because we relish the idea of being characterized by knocking on doors with nothing to say, but because we have found the whole of human experience is too vast, too multi-dimensional, to ever be contained in mere words for all time and eternity. It is this freedom which allows our character to shine through with all the saving graces that ethical living may bring.

So when our young adults find themselves in college, surrounded by people who are not Unitarian Universalists, and they are asked, “What exactly is it that you believe?” Will they mutter a few of the principles, or will they take the more spiritually mature Unitarian Universalist path æ the path less traveled? Will they say, “Unitarian Universalists believe that we are born good. And because we are good we can be trusted with our own salvation. We believe that ethical living here and now is its own reward. And we believe that no one but ourselves can tell us what is right for us because we are spiritually free.”?

Maybe they’ll say something completely different, in their own words, because that is what being creedless is all about: the spiritual freedom to be who we are. Amen.

Delivered to the:
South Nassau Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Freeport, NY
October 6, 2002