The Good News We Proclaim

What is it then which draws us into community? The need to find a place of peace? The need to appease a nagging spouse? A desire for more connection, to be part of something bigger? Our own questions in the face of this weird and wonderful thing we call life? Questions in the face of that spectre of death upon our horizon? A curiosity which cannot be named? Or a hope, and a prayer, that in this space healing might occur, a mending of hearts might take place? I’m sure there are as many reasons, whether we can name them or not, which brought us through those doors for the first time, as there are people here this morning. Whomever you are, friends, visitors, supporters, long-time attenders, members, old and very new, it’s good to have you all with us this morning to celebrate membership. It is very special to celebrate these important milestones in people’s lives. In a way, the significance and importance of membership within a community like ours is captured more in the atmosphere this morning, more in the readings, the prayers, the liturgy we joined together in, and in the songs we sung, more in these things, than in my attempt now to express it in a few words. But it has something to do with the good news we have to share here.

Good News. First, that you are full of goodness: a good people, all in the process of life, ever-changing, and ever-renewing. Our hearts long for goodness, goodness in others, goodness in community, goodness in our world. Without it our hearts ache. In our longing after the good, we cultivate it, we birth it forth, around us, and in our world; like Jesus, who lived according to that deep goodness, which is within each one of us, within everyone whom we meet – a deep goodness. The Second bit of good news is that love will make us whole. The love of the spirit, the love of the sacred present, the love of God, the love of the indefinable, which can be felt, and yet we struggle to name it. That love which forces us to cry out for justice, and feel compassion for the dispossessed. That love which knows us better than we know ourselves. That love so great that it envelops the very worst within us, the very worst of humanity. Love which embraces us, no matter our hateful thoughts, no matter our judgments, no matter the company we keep, no matter… Love can and will make us whole. And that is our good news, that we are full of goodness, and that love will make us whole. And in community we remind ourselves of that fact.

For, though we are full of goodness, we are full of a lot of other things too. And when pressure is high, when the world is pressing in, and it takes all our will to keep the storm clouds within our heads at bay, that’s when community, when congregational life, can recharge us, and remind us that it will all be okay. And, it will all be okay. Here we can and do make the choice, to live according to the good within us. And when we make that choice, and are accompanied along the way by others making that choice, what is the possibility? Witnessing the power of that good in others? That is a sacred to be celebrated, a sacred amongst us. That is Kingdom present. Let us be here, let us be present to one another. Determined enough not to turn away, but to lean in more deeply. Letting some of those hardened places within us soften, and yield new possibilities. New Life. Let us learn what it is to bring this good news into a world aching for it, moving beyond these walls, to enact this good out there; to move beyond all walls, all lines in the sand, and demonstrate the boundless nature of God’s love, the light which is shining for all, the cup over flowing…

That is our good news, that we are full of goodness, and that love will make us whole.

Amen.

Our Unitarian Theology?

Cross Street Chapel - Machester

Where to begin? Like the Manchester Conference itself, this address can just act as the beginning of the conversation. To get the ball rolling, the explorers may go out and map territory, but it still takes the pioneers to go and do the colonising. So what do we mean by Theology?

We all do theology: the way we choose to live our lives, what we value, the meaning we give to our lives. ‘What is the meaning of life?’ - this is a bit of a joke question, and rightfully so. Nobody can know what the meaning of life is. But nonetheless we all answer that question quietly within our own hearts. To be loving, to be kind, to further one cause or another. We all do theology. When decisions are made about how this Meeting House should present itself to the outside world, we are doing theology. We’re saying something about who we are, and what we represent.

When you attempt to explain to someone, ‘what is a Unitarian?’, you’re doing theology. And when you’re thinking about, or talking about your faith, your conception of God, if you value faith communities, if you believe that love will overcome hate, if you believe this world is getting better or getting worse, if you have hope. We all do theology. But how examined is that theology? Does it just come from a gut level sense? Do we hold opinions just because? Opinions we have inherited from our elders, or inherited from the way it has always been done? By thinking about theology, we attempt to unpack why we think what we think. We get down to the roots of what we think. We hold opinions or perspectives of ours next to one another, and see if they contradict, and if they do, we examine if that is a problem, or not.

There is an idea within our denomination that because we are a ‘creedless religion’ we don’t do theology (‘Creedless’ meaning there is no set beliefs to which you have to sign up.) But to be ‘creedless’ is deeply theological. By being ‘creedless’ we are making a radical and bold theological claim, that the search for truth and meaning cannot be delegated to any person living, or indeed the writings of any old man from history. We have the sacred task of looking at the place we inhabit in the world, and building a worldview, a spiritual perspective, which is in line with our own conscience, our own rational understanding, our own sense of what has come before. "To trust yourself when all men doubt you, but to make allowance for their doubting too." To consider deeply the perspectives of others within our community, and therefore as a community to grow in our togetherness.

My favourite talk from the Manchester Theological Conference was Jo James’s, his cryptic title being ‘Spectral Hermeneutics’ which he borrowed from the theologian John Caputo. Jo James, if you don’t know, has been the Unitarian minister up at Leeds for the last couple of years. Unlike the other speakers who mainly spoke on the problems we are facing - lack of theological discourse, lack of core identity, etc. - Jo James’s talk was a bit more on the positive side, on the constructive side.

Hermeneutics is about the interpretation and understanding of something, usually in reference to the Bible. We did a bit of hermeneutics last week when we looked at Genesis 3, and explored how it has been understood and how we might want to understand it now. ‘Spectral’ is the adjective for spectre; not the James Bond movie, but rather a ghost or spirit. So ‘Spectral Hermeneutics’ is a fancy way of saying ‘interpreting the spirit’, or ‘a theology of spirit’. That’s what Jo James’s talk was on, a Theology of the Spirit, and how that relates to our Unitarian theology, or identity. Throughout the world, in many different languages, the word for spirit is synonymous with the word for breath. The same breath which sustains all living beings, which binds us and unites us all together.

Jo James went on to list five key ways in which the spirit can be said to be working in liberal religion, acting in its development. They are:

1) Emphasis on reason in faith.
2) Open and thoughtful approach to religious texts.
3) Preference for unity and dialogue.
4) Individual responsibility for faith.
5) An insistence upon tolerance, and freedom of conscience.

Five ways in which the spirit can be seen quietly working in the background of our communities. Ralph Waldo Emerson says we should ‘Refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men.’ Because all our models, all our structures and institutions, are of human making, not divinely created. And we only hold to a particular structure by virtue of where and when we were born.

Those early disciples in Acts were waiting for the return of Jesus, but when he didn’t come, they settled for creating the Church. The Church is a creation of humanity: at best humanity responding to the spirit of God, responding to their experience of the spirit of love, and at worst motivated by egotistical desire, or needs for certainty. As they, the disciples, were inspired by the spirit, so we can be inspired by the spirit. We need not settle for imitating what has come before. We are creedless, we refuse the good models, we are receptive to the inadequacies of “The Church”, and are open to the spirit moving amongst us. The spirit which brings forth such fruits as love and freedom. To recognise the spirit in our own life is to be seized by reality in the depth of our being, as John Caputo says. To know our own humanity, and to be compelled towards love and hope. True love, and true hope, which is the love of the difficult to love, and a hope in the face of hopelessness: this is the Spirit among us.

The power of this spirit is egalitarian, and anarchic in nature, it threatens those who hold onto the reins of traditional Church power. Jo James referenced the Christian mystics who were always feared for this reason. Throughout Church history such mystical groups were systematically suppressed by the Church. Perhaps they laid the popular ground work for religious tolerance and freedom of conscience, characteristic of the early reform traditions.

Jo James went on to talk about the Dutch Low Countries, where in the 17th century there was an interesting exchange of ideas which took place amongst students. They offered there a community open to refugees, the most notable person being Spinoza, who was himself a Jew, whose family fled Spanish persecution. But also at this time, refugee Quakers, Baptists and ‘others’ fled to the Dutch Low Countries from British persecution. Spinoza’s approach to religion moved it away from something based upon superstition, towards something more rationalistically based. In this arena of free flowing thought, the ideas espoused by Spinoza and others fed into the spiritual tradition which we now identify as ‘Unitarian’. Spinoza, on writing about the Spirit, or the breath of God, says that this Spirit is synonymous with the power, mind, intention and effect of God as perceived by human faculties, and in doing so he prepares the ground upon which understanding God and nature as concepts bound together could be taken up, as our tradition of course went on to do.

I think, as one unplugs the name of God from some supernatural supreme being, one understands spirit or God as the name for a certain galvanised form of life in the now, which is expressed as the Kingdom of God, a form of life in this world. That is the core of this tradition. Our tradition is elusive and difficult to pin down. You can’t point to a few sentences, and say ‘that’s what it is’. ‘Unitarian Theology’ is a spirit led broad affair, but it is not a blank space, it is not an anything goes. It has a character, a bolshie tone about it. It is not a soft liberalism of niceness and kind platitudes; it doesn’t think everyone’s opinion is equally valid.

That kind of ‘your mind is so open your brain falls out’ approach to religion is not Unitarian, it is what creeps in when we forget what our traditions stands for: spirit, breath which binds all of creation, sacred anarchy, deeply thoughtful, radical expressions of love and hope, a present-centred spirituality, pioneering, and ready to go deeper.

Look at the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Amen.

David & Goliath

In my on-going thinking about Unitarian identity I read Understanding Unitarians by Phillip Hewett, who was briefly the minister here in the 1950s. He developed a model that attempts to get away from the Humanist/Christian dichotomy; a Venn Diagram, with not two but three overlapping circles. I have put the model in your order of service.

Diagram by Phillip Hewett

As you can see the three circles are labelled: Christian, Humanist, and Universalist. Hewett believed this model could be applied to the Unitarian movement as a whole, and to individual congregations. People inhabit one of the seven spaces in the centre of the diagram, and from there they argue, promote, and dialogue with one another, all the while upholding their togetherness.

Hewett believed that the possibility that a congregation might uncouple itself from this central pivot was a risk that needed to be guarded against. A risk, because he believed to do so would inhibit our freedom of conscience, creating a climate intolerant towards those who were not on board with whatever belief system was the prevailing one. Hewett’s model (perhaps inadvertently) creates an ideal of nothingness. An ideal which evades all commitment, and therefore falls into the very trap it was trying to avoid, by creating a climate intolerant towards those who would affirm anything.

But perhaps that is what it is to be postmodern. To hold lightly to the multiple languages we inhabit: a little of this, and a little of that. Holding lightly to the Christian label one moment, then more to the humanist or Buddhist label the next. Certainly it was this impulse to eschew the meta-narrative which surely drove Unitarians such as Hewett to seek this ‘neutral’ middle ground in the late 20th Century. A trend which has characterised shifting British Unitarian thought in response to the demands of postmodernity.

But what is postmodernity really? It has popularly been defined by the French philosopher Lyotard as incredulity towards meta-narrative. Postmodernism when defined in this way cannot help but slide into relativism – as Hewett’s model unintentionally demonstrates. The cost is one where we cannot speak anything that might sound like a metanarrative. But there is another way to approach the demands of postmodernity.

The feminist Donna Haraway coined the term ‘situated knowledge’ – situated knowledge recognises that no one gets to own the ‘truth’ category for their particular perspective – and yet acknowledges that all knowledge is narrated (or mediated) from a speaking position (from a particular perspective). That means that we as thinkers must never attempt to deny the moment or space that we inhabit – such as our language, culture, gender, historical location, and religious location.

In other words it is a mistake to think that we need eschew metanarrative-like language. To use it does not threaten our postmodern credentials, as long as we obviously never claim that ours is the only perspective.

Perhaps it is the influence of this metanarrative denying postmodern impulse within our own tradition which has left us seemingly so voiceless in the public arena, unable to tell the world we are here, dare our words be taken as ‘proselytizing’. Dare our words cause upset. Well I think we should be upsetting more people, by actually saying something of substance, and even challenging the Goliaths in the religious public arena. Daring to be Bold.

As a dissenting, historically illegal, radical movement, being more bolshie should be second nature to us. On the surface we are certainly the little guy on the block, but not unlike David I think many of the things which we may very well perceive as weaknesses might actually be our greatest strengths.

Take for example the language that we use. Not only do we fill an entire hour with mostly words, we use rather academic words too. If we are to be more relevant, more accessible, then surely this is a great weakness of ours; but I think that is far from the case. By limiting our vocabulary we would diminish one of our most unique features. The strength of a religious movement does not hinge upon how accessible it is. Almost the opposite is the case. The religious movement which demands much of us, in terms of belief and behaviour, does well because there is a cost – becoming a Baptist, or a Mormon, or a Jehovah Witness, incurs great cost. There is much to learn, much enculturation required, and as such it becomes rooted far deeper into one’s identity.

Unitarianism is never going to have universal appeal. We are a rather odd lot. You kid yourself if you think it would be possible to frame what we are in such a way that people come flooding in. Being a Unitarian should incur great cost, the cost of a long and rich spiritual journey before even arriving, becoming religiously literate, having a self-awareness beyond others and so on… As we root Unitarianism deeply into our identity, as we are loud and proud, these are the foundations of a strong religious movement.

Severed head of Goliath by Gustave Doré (1866).

Like David we may well appear weak. That is how the story of David and Goliath has been classically understood, David is the underdog, a metaphor for improbable victories. The weak overcoming the strong. David is the child, the shepherd. Goliath is the man, the giant, the experienced warrior, kitted-out with all the latest military gear, shining armour, and the lot.

But as Malcolm Gladwell explains, to understand the story in this way is to entirely misunderstand it. David fought with a sling – a sling which he would have spun at 6 or 7 revolutions per second, a sling that would have released a stone going at about 80 miles an hour. This is powerful! Equivalent to a 45mm handgun, a weapon that could kill moving targets at distances up to 200 yards. When David stood in front of Goliath and launched that stone, there was no chance of a miss, no chance of failure. Goliath was utterly doomed.

Given this fact, given the inevitability of David’s victory, one may well wonder why Goliath failed to react to his own inevitable demise. Goliath was a giant, he was 6’ 9, and expecting the kind of hand to hand fighting customary of single combat: a way of settling disputes without incurring the bloodshed of a major battle.

It is postulated that Goliath failed to react because he had a condition – the same condition president Abraham Lincoln had – Acromegaly. Acromegaly is caused by a benign tumour positioned in such a way in your head that it causes an over production of human growth hormone. It also often pressed upon visual nerves, making one partially sighted. Hence Goliath being led onto the battle field, hence Goliath’s slow movement, hence Goliath not responding to David heading his way.

So why do we refer to David as an underdog? What we wrongly assume to be weakness is in fact anything but, and what appears as strong, the very source of his apparent strength, is the very source of his undoing.

Returning to the landscape of religion, the Goliaths are not as strong as they might appear. And we are certainly not as weak as first impressions might suggest.  

Amen.

The Image of Eve in Islam

Immigration. Cultural assimilation. To be British. To pledge our allegiance to the Union Jack. A woman in a hijab wins the British Bake off.

Tabloid news persistently characterises Islam as intrinsically violent, akin to terrorism, a threat to British values, anti-democratic, and misogynistic. It is this issue of misogyny, sexism, the characterisation of women in Islam, which is the theme of today’s service, a theme I will address by looking at a passage in the Quran which has historically been used to assert male dominance. A theme which I am obviously wholly capable of addressing as a white, male, middle class, educated, Christian!

Nadiya Hussain winner of the British Bake Off

This obviously does present me with a challenge, as I cannot simply step out of my skin and assess Muslim female issues as a neutral arbitrator. My reading of the Quran is ever coloured by my liberal Christian suppositions, as indeed should be the case. Suppositions such as my approach to the sacred texts.

As a liberal Christian I have learned to be rather uncompromising with the Biblical text, treating it not as the words of God, but as humanity’s questing after the sacred; and thus riddled with inconsistencies, sexism, and barbarism. This affords a great deal of latitude in its use and application, latitude which cannot simply be applied to the Quran. The Bible is inspired and mediated through many authors, and therefore it is appropriate to take the idiosyncrasies of those authors into consideration in one’s interpretation.

In Islam on the other hand, the Quran is revealed. Revealed verbally by Allah to Muhammad (peace be upon him) through the angel Gabriel. This affords Muslims less room to manoeuvre, though they can still take into consideration the context in which the Quran was revealed, how it says what it says, and frame specific parts in the context of the whole.

So here is a reading from the Quran Chapter 4 verse 34 which literally translates as…

‘Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has made one of them superior the other. Because one of them spends what he has to support the other. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient to Allah and to their husbands. As to those women from which you see ill-conduct, admonish them first, then refuse to share their beds, and lastly beat them, but if they return to obedience, do not continue to hold their ill-conduct against them. Surely, Allah is Ever Most High, Most Great.’

This passage has classically been held as the most important in the Quran regarding the relationship between men and woman. There are some problems in the literal translation of this verse. Certainly this verse has been taken by men as the unconditional preference of men over women. Though note that the superiority or preference towards men is conditional upon men’s economic support of women – a cultural norm of sixth century Saudi Arabia. Many men will assert that this state of affairs is the natural order of things – which is to say that men were created by God to be inherently superior to women, in strength and reason – though there is no Qur’anic support for this view.

The Quran

Rather, this passage can be understood as asserting the fact that some men excel over some woman in some matters, as some woman excel over some men in some matters. This verse pertains to the economic superiority of one over the other in a particular time and place. As such, one cannot assert the intrinsic value of male over female from this verse.

Rather, finding Qur’anic support pertaining to the equality of men and woman is far easier to come by – take for example the Adam and Eve episode found in the Quran and the Hadith. Eve is not created as an afterthought, as is the case in our biblical tradition, nor is Eve blamed for eating the forbidden fruit, rather it says, ‘they ate of it’, and were both to blame for the transgression. Both Adam and Eve were co-created from one soul.

Okay so returning to verse 4:34 the second part asserts that ‘the righteous women are devoutly obedient to Allah and to their husbands. As to those women from which you see ill-conduct, admonish them first, then refuse to share their beds, and lastly beat them…’ The passage intends to provide a means for resolving disharmony between husband and wife, though it has certainly been used, and continues to be used, to justify violence and abuse.

First of all this idea of obedience to Allah and to their husbands. This is wrongly understood as two separate rules: obedience to God, and obedience to husband. Rather it is better understood as co-operative subservience before Allah. This is where the literal translation falls down; the word for obedience between one created being and another is not the word used here. So it can be understood in this way: First, find a verbal solution. If verbal discussion fails then move on to a more drastic solution. Separation. And in extreme cases, the ‘scourge’ is permitted.

If the steps are followed in sequential order, then surely the argument goes that it should be possible to avoid the final step. The first step, finding a verbal solution, is the preferred in Quran whenever two parties are trying to resolve a matter. Peace is better. As the Quran states, it is peace and making amends that are the goals, not violence and forced obedience.

Beds apart allows for mutual reflection, a cooling off period before re-addressing the problem. But what can be said about the final step, which we can translate as scourge, or beat lightly, or to strike?

I have read of an argument which states that the ‘gentle nature’ of this violence was intended to limit the excessive violence already being done against woman. And the intention was always to recover harmony, not to commit violence for the sake of violence. In other words the norm of female subjugation and male violence is in fact not being affirmed here, but reigned in within the context of this marriage type, in which the male has cultural and economic superiority.

Malala Yousfazai awarded the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize

A marriage type which can no longer be applied to the marriage types of today in the west in which couples seek mutual emotional, intellectual, economic, and spiritual enhancement. In other words the Quran focuses on the marital norms of the time when it was revealed, or broadly sets out to establish a mechanism for resolving conflict through mutual consultation.

The revelation was received into a patriarchal context, a culture built on a structure of domination and subordination. The male experience was looked upon as the norm. As such, females were looked upon in terms of their utility to men, most obviously for reproduction. Separating these cultural norms from the Qur’anic ideal is therefore exceedingly difficult.  One is forced not to look upon single instances, such as the verse we have considered in which the social context is accommodated, but rather to find the greater Qur’anic principles at work, and resisting literal application of certain Qur’anic statements. In other words a western Muslim can believe in the whole book as is required of them (chapter 3 vs 119), by recognizing the book’s ultimate intent.

And perhaps here we can locate a wider principle in the way we approach the most central text to our own tradition, in our unfolding of its ultimate intent. And in so doing I make a full circle. I acknowledged my liberal Christian starting point. We explored together a rather problematic verse from the Quran, attempting to tackle it in the most sensitive way possible, respecting the tradition which it emerges from, drawing out from that some conclusions which can be fed back into our liberal Christian, Unitarian context and perhaps inform our own practices. In this case the unfolding search for ultimate intent, or macro level principles which sit above those things in our own sacred text which we might get hung up on, such as biblical genocide, sexism, miracles, and so on…

I wanted to explicitly point this process out because I have been thinking about our own Unitarian identity. And to be honest the way this movement frames it as a dichotomy between the humanists and the Christians makes little sense to me. I wonder how I would want to answer that question: are you a humanist Unitarian or a Christian Unitarian? I really don’t know… I want to say that I’m strongly humanist and strongly Christian. I don’t like the dichotomy – I want to spend a lot of time thinking about religions, and ideas, and philosophies, but it surely has to be done by means of a shared language – a different language every week would be as useful as a broken clock, only right twice a day.

Perhaps it is a somewhat optimistic vision of Unitarianism: rooted in Christianity, but ever stretching out our branches in every direction.

In conclusion then, the Abrahamic sacred texts were written or revealed within a patriarchal context. God’s masculine identity was asserted, thus alienating women from the divine, creating metaphorical walls which limit the horizons of the excluded, and belittles their God-given humanity. These Abrahamic texts point to an ultimate intent, best expressed in the words of Theodore Parker, ‘“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one… And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

This bending towards justice is found in the naming of historical abuse. It is found in asserting the sexist reality of the words we have heard for generations. It is found in recasting that which is damaging. It is found in the words of Jesus as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount. It is found in uncovering silenced voices, and affirming the feminine within our tradition.

Amen.