One of the joys of my 18 years as a member of the US Army Chaplain Corps has been the relationships I have had with Army Chaplains from very different faith traditions than my own. I think I have learned more about my own personal faith and theology, and indeed about my chosen denomination of Unitarian Universalism through those relationships than I ever did in seminary, or in my years in parish ministry, or in my now 12 years as a Congregational Consultant for the Unitarian Universalist Association. Being in relationship with ministers and chaplains who hold very different understandings of Christianity, of Jesus, and of Christian theology than myself has been pivotal in my growing in my own identity and depth as a Unitarian, Universalist, and Unitarian Universalist Christian.
There was one conversation, over 15 years ago now, when I was a fairly new Unitarian Universalist minister and Army Reserve Chaplain. I was sitting with one of my fellow chaplains, a conservative evangelical Christian pastor, and listening to him describe a situation in his congregational ministry, and asking for my thoughts. I do not even really remember the situation anymore, but it was something where he was determining how much he felt called to offer grace and compassion in a particular situation.
As I listened, there was a phrase from Jesus, a red-letter gospel moment, that came to mind that I felt directly addressed the situation my Chaplain colleague was discerning through. I have spent the last week trying to remember what verse it was, and for the life of me I cannot. I think it might have been Matthew 7 verse 1 “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.” But I cannot remember for certain.
And the reason I cannot remember was that it was my colleague and friend’s response that seared itself into my mind and heart. After I shared Jesus’s admonition, he looked up at me, and with a depth of earnestness he said, “Yeah David… but I’m not Jesus.”
At first I was confused… what does it matter whether or not my friend was Jesus? I never said that he was. The teaching was clear, the intent rooted in the message of the Gospel. And my friend was an Evangelical pastor and chaplain, committed, I thought, to following the teachings of Jesus.
And then it hit me. He did not feel that he was accountable to the teachings and practices of Jesus, because Jesus was divine and perfect, and he, my chaplain friend, was a flawed, sinful, mortal human. Jesus was God, not a mere human like himself… and so my friend did not have to follow in Jesus’ example, because who could, right?
His humanity and Christ’s divinity gave him a pass from being accountable to follow the teachings of the Nazarene teacher, rabbi, and mystic known modernly as Jesus. Whereas I, a Unitarian Christian who encounters Jesus as an inherently and fully human man, the founding teacher of my theological tradition, I feel bound to follow the teachings of this Jewish mystic from over 2000 years ago as best I can in a way my friend did not.
There are a lot of ways that I could share with you the ideas and theology of Unitarian Christianity this morning, but I wanted to begin with the story of this one of my personal epiphanies. I could have begun with an exploration of Unitarian Theology or practice, or a look at the theological problems and compromises that led to the development of the Trinity in the third and fourth centuries AD, or quote from one of our foundational sermons from 1819, titled Unitarian Christianity by Rev. William Ellery Channing, or told the story of Thomas Jefferson seeking a Unitarian Christian Gospel by clipping out the teachings of the four gospels and removing all the miracles.
But what was on my heart was this moment when the implications of a fully human Jesus became clear to me, in the reaction of my evangelical friend to the idea of actually trying to follow the teachings of Jesus… when he said, “But I’m not Jesus”.
Rev. Clinton Lee Scott, an American Universalist minister from the middle of the 20th century has a reading that I love, that is in our current Unitarian Universalist Association hymnal:
Always it is easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed the direction of their vision.
It is easier to blindly venerate the saints than to learn from the human qualities of their sainthood.
It is easier to glorify the heroes of the race than to give weight to their examples.
To worship the wise is much easier than to profit by their wisdom.
Great leaders are honored, not by adulation, but by sharing their insights and values.
Grandchildren of those who stoned the prophet sometimes gather up the stones to build the prophet’s monument.
Always it is easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed the direction of their vision.
I want to tell another quick story, about another Army Chaplain friend of mine. The two of us were in a class at the Army Chaplain school for two weeks, and I had a car and he did not. He was a black Southern Baptist Pastor from Oklahoma, and he asked if he could ride the 15 minutes to and from class with me each day. He told me he wanted to learn more about Unitarian Universalism and about my own theology, and that the car rides could be a good way to do that. So, for two weeks, we spent about 30 minutes a day sharing our theologies, or thoughts on our respective faith traditions, and our callings to both congregational ministry and to the military chaplaincy.
Near the end of our time together, he shared with me a thought that he wanted my opinion on. He said “So, essentially, you all are trying to be a church that Jesus might attend, rather than a church about Jesus”.
I told him I do not think I had ever heard anyone put it that way, but in many ways yes. Unitarian Christianity’s focus on the human Jesus and our responsibility to follow the values of love, justice, and generosity that we find in the teachings of Jesus, and the Universalist Christian theologies that recognize that we are all interdependent with one another, and that religious community must arise from equity and pluralism to be truly transformative… those theologies are the foundation upon which the modern covenantal faith of Unitarian Universalism rests.
There is another story that I feel called to share with you, one that may be apocryphal, but I heard it from one of the two people involved. In 1999 Pope John Paul II held an Interreligious Assembly at the Vatican, inviting the leaders of many different denominations and faith traditions to the Vatican for a series of interfaith talks. At the beginning of the conference, each leader of a faith tradition was presented to the Pope. The President of the Unitarian Universalist Association at the time was the Rev. John Buehrens, and it was he who told me that when he was presented to Pope John Paul II as the President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, John Paul smiled really big, took his hand and said “You all are the ones who took all the heresies and made them into one religion!”
A little taken aback, Rev. Buehrens replied, “Yes, Your Holiness. Yes, we did”.
To which Pope John Paul replied, with a reported glint in his eyes “Good! Someone has needed to do that for centuries!”
Since the Council of Nicaea, in 325 AD, the idea that Jesus was fully and solely human, and not of the same substance and kind as God the Father has been considered a Christian heresy, just as the idea that no one is forever damned to eternal hell, or Universalism, has been considered a Christian heresy since the early third century. Yet both of these theologies go back to the earliest days of Christianity, and both were influenced by Gnostic writings such as the Gospel of Thomas and the idea that we, each of us, are of the same make, kind, and substance as Jesus, and so we can participate in divinity just as Jesus did.
There are reasons why these theologies were declared heretical in the early Christian Church. During my bachelor’s degree studies in Christian Church history, I learned that the reason that the Emperor Constantine called the Council of Nicaea was a political one… Constantine needed a new base of political support with the nobility turning against him, and he wanted that support to be from the powerful and growing Christian middle class. But to do that, the Christians had to stop fighting over theology and settle on a set of beliefs they could all agree to, known today as the Nicaean Creed. The theologies that developed into modern Unitarian Christianity were unable to be reconciled with that creed, and were declared heretical.
And yet, even as a child growing up in the Southern Baptist Church, I found that it was the humanity of Jesus that most moved me. I found for myself that it was the teachings and values, it was Jesus’ commitment to the poor and the outcast, to the marginalized and the immigrant, to the powerless and the widowed that most inspired me. I found in his teachings values that did not depend on the miracles to be true, to be good, to be a calling for how we humans should treat one another and to hold our relationship to God.
Let me just add that I do still believe in the miracles, at least some of them. I have seen miracles today, when the Holy Spirit that is the center of my understanding of God moves amongst us. I just don’t need the miracles to see the transformative importance of the values of love, compassion, justice, grace, and mercy that Jesus tried to inspire within humanity.
And, I saw that many of those whom I went to church with, who called themselves Christian, seemed to have forgotten all that Jesus taught and did in this world. They seemed to have forgotten Jesus the human healer and teacher in favor of an image of Christ that seemed to give them permission, through the forgiveness of sin, not to follow the teachings of and hold to the values of the Jesus I met in the Gospel.
For myself, Unitarian Christianity became a way for me to reclaim the human Jesus. To reclaim the founding teacher of a tradition that I believe I, as a Unitarian Universalist minister, am the inheritor of and called to bring into the world. To advocate for the disadvantaged, powerless, and the marginalized. To center love, and the justice that is what love looks like in public. To practice generosity, to accept the interdependence of us all, to work towards equity and be open to a pluralist understanding of our world and faith. And, to work to bring forth the transformation in humanity and human society that some call the Beloved Community, and that Jesus called the Kingdom of God. Not in some metaphysical heaven, but here, in this place, on this earth, for us all.
And because Jesus was fully human, just like me, I am held to the weight of his example, not excused from it by a theological conception of his divinity.
That is the central implication, at least for me, of what it means to be a Unitarian Christian.
So may it be, and amen.