There is a two-fold liberty, natural… and civil or federal. The first is common to man with beasts and other creatures. By this, man, as he stands in relation to man simply, hath liberty to do what he wants... This liberty is incompatible and inconsistent with authority and cannot endure the least restraint of the most just authority. The exercise and maintaining of this liberty makes men grow more evil and in time to be worse than brute beasts. This is that great enemy of truth and peace, that wild beast, which all of the ordinances of God are bent against, to restrain and subdue it. The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal; it may also be termed moral, in reference to the covenant between God and man, in the moral law, and the politic covenants and constitutions between men themselves. This liberty is the proper end and object of authority and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just and honest. This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard (not only of your goods, but) of your lives if need be.

Society chiefly [exists to call] forth intellectual and moral energy and freedom.  Its action on the individual is beneficial, in proportion as it awakens in him a power to act on himself, and to control or withstand the social influences to which he is at first subjected. . . . The mind is enriched, not by what it passively receives from others, but by its own action on what it receives.   . . . it does not consist in what we inherit, or what comes to us from abroad.  It is of inward growth.  . . . Inward power is the end; a power which is to triumph over, and control, the influence of society.

. . . Let the judgment of others be our trust, so that we cease to judge for ourselves, and the intellect is degraded into a worthless machine. . .. It becomes heroic, when it reverences itself and asserts its freedom in a cowardly and servile age; when it withstands society through a calm, but invincible love of truth . . .

Let [an individual] not, then, enslave his conscience to others, but act with the freedom, strength and dignity of one, whose highest law is in his own breast.

We are in great peril… of forgetting, or never learning, our true responsibility; of living in unconsciousness of that divine power with which we are invested over ourselves, and in which all the dignity of our nature is connected; of overlooking the sacredness of our minds, and laying them open to impressions from any and all who surround us.  . . . There is no moral worth in being swept away by a crowd, even towards the best objects.

. . . In truth, we cannot express too strongly the importance we attach to an enlarged intercourse with other minds, considered as the means of freeing and quickening our own.  

[Thus, regarding our relationships with others,] associations are good which communicate, power, moral and intellectual action, and the capacity of useful efforts to the persons who form them, or to the persons on whom they act.  Associations which in any degree impair or repress the free and full action of men's powers, are so far hurtful…

In this series on looking at the differences and similarities between us and other faith traditions and communities, we made a significant break last week that we will conclude the series with today. The first two sermons we compared the perspectives of an individual Free Thinker and Jew, to a Unitarian Universalist. Last week we changed the focus to looking at what a group represents. We will continue today looking at the nature of spiritual community as it were, by comparing the “sociological” theology of the Reform tradition and Unitarian Universalism. Conceivably we could continue this series for another three weeks, adding the Catholics, Methodists, and Hindus to our list, and more, but that is for another time. Today we will look at the aim of the social order of relationships we call a church.

There is a warning I would give the hearer regarding perspective. While growing up, on those rare occasions when the Smith family attended church, I went to the Presbyterian Church, in the Reform tradition. And I spent a year in their church school, so growing up I had nominal experiences in the Reform tradition.

I grew up with a younger sister and older brother, and to me now it is an incredible, wondrous thing that my older brother and I both came from the same immediate family. We shared a room growing up, he on the lower bunk, I in the “upper room,” but sharing parents and where we lived seems to comprise the entire list of our similarities! He is tall, played basketball and baseball, while I am barrel-chested and played football. His teammates called him Smitty and mine called me Brent. He strummed the guitar, while I blew the French horn. He teaches. I preach. He is a member at an independent evangelical church, while I am a minister at a liberal, Unitarian Universalist one. Without him standing beside me in full view, you wouldn’t guess we are related.

But we’re from the same family, incredible as it seems to me. The familial connection is implicit, the bloodline in evidence when you look closely.

It is the same with Unitarian Universalism and the churches that comprise the Reform tradition; the Presbyterian, Reform, and Christian Reform churches. We are kin, as surprising as it might be. If you looked at my brother and me in terms of the churches that shape our lives, or the sports we played, or the instruments we took up, you would not see any evidence that we are related. Similarly, if you look at theology you will not see that connection between us and the Reform tradition either. How you compare things relates to the connections you see or don’t see, and if you compare us theologically you would see we are as opposed as any two traditions could be. That is because we once “grew up in the same home,” and when each of us left it, each claimed it was fulfilling the family destiny!

But if you look at the sociological and organizational history of these two traditions, how people initially organized themselves into spiritual community centuries ago, and for what purpose, and how that relates to the development of the different theologies, the kinship will be obvious and the deep differences will make sense.

If you remember last week we used this same first reading from John Winthrop to illustrate the difference between Fountain Street Church and a Unitarian Universalist Church. Fountain Street Church is an historic Baptist church, and ironically enough, its claim of independence from the Baptists and all faith tradition legacies is the most Baptist of all things to declare and do. In the Baptist tradition freedom is understood as independence, what Winthrop called “natural liberty”; that is, the freedom that all human beings, all creatures in fact, are created with. It is the freedom to do what you want. It is an independence from, a freedom from the influence of and relationship with others. If you remember last week, we share the Baptist core value of freedom as a holy thing, but it is not to us “natural liberty,” the “freedom from,” independent of all connection and relationship, the freedom “to be you and be,” a return to a “natural” state of being. Freedom is holy to us, too, but is understood in a completely different way.

The reason for reviewing this distinction between our understanding of freedom and the Baptist understanding, a distinction that makes all the difference in the world, is the link we share with the Reform tradition: what is holy is found through relationship. In both the Reform traditions and ours, what is holy emerges through relationship, through community. It’s just to us, freedom is that holy and spiritual thing.

Both the Reform tradition and the Unitarian Universalist faith tradition come from a long historical line of thinking that understands with clarity and fullness the limitations of human knowledge, understanding, and power. We share what philosopher and theologians call, a realistic view of human nature. We would both reject “natural liberty” because we both know the distortions and delusions within which humanity often operates. “Natural liberty,” freedom as the independence from all influence and relationship, free to be you and me, disbelieves in the individual’s capacity for error, idolatry, and illusion. It’s the kind of freedom suicide bombers exercise when they drive cars into airport terminals, not ever considering their connection and relationship to the human beings inside. Or, to say it another way, recalling the sermon a few weeks back in what we share with Judaism, we know how deep is the human longing to be God. To us it is evident in the individual who holds to a view of “natural liberty,” whether he realizes it or not. If freedom is predominantly independence from the influence of others, what happens when the individuals is wrong? Who is there to influence him away from this idolatry?

And in addition, the human longing to be God is so deep and persistent that human beings will create spiritual community organized in such a way as to give it those godly powers. Human beings are tempted to give to the community the power to discern what must be believed and done in order to be “right” and “acceptable” to God. We give over to the community the authority God has given each of us individuals.

The origin of both the Unitarian Universalists and the Reform traditions are in what came to be called “Puritanism.” This was the desire and drive of some Christians after the 1500’s to “purify” the Christian Church of its idolatrous illusion that it was God. For centuries the Christian Church had been developing the means to reconcile the individual to God, and it had forgotten that being the means to reconcile and being the source of that reconciliation, are two different things. The Christian Church – the Catholic Church in Europe and its counterpart, the Anglican Church in England – had developed an organizational form that upheld it was both the means of and the source for goodness, holiness, and the fully spiritual and complete person. Our shared forbears wanted to purify the Church community of this idolatrous distortion about the nature and purpose of human groups, even and especially the church.

I had the honor of teaching a session in the Doctrine of the Church for Dr. John Bolt’s class at Calvin Theological Seminary, of course in the Reform tradition. I started the session with this history that we share. Through their spiritual ancestor Calvin, on the mainland of Europe, and through ours, Robert Browne and John Robinson in England, Christians in the 1500’s broke this monopoly that the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church, later the Episcopal Church, had on people. The symbol of breaking this monopoly, and seeking to purify religion of the idolatry of the Church concerning its own authority and power, was in England where the Puritans, when they came to political power, smashed the statues in the sanctuaries. The Anglican Church, as the Catholic Church, yesterday and today, determined what pieces of art were to go into the sanctuary and what they meant. These are works of art that take on a religious symbolism that, through the theological monopoly of the church, have to be understood by the individual in certain ways. The Church proscribes rituals for their use and enforces its understandings as doctrinally correct and absolute. The Stations of the Cross mean what the Church says they mean, regardless of how the artist fashioned them to mean. Eventually, said our shared forbears, the individual worshipper comes to worship the statues and rituals themselves, and the Church that monopolizes the power to interpret them, as if they were God. The Churches’ bishops speak for God, while its clergyman reward and condemn individuals for all eternity. Its congregations, and the social order of relationships that make up spiritual community, serve the men who make up the Church’s organization. Its spiritual communities worship men, not God.

This is implicit today in that we are a liturgical people, not a ritualistic one. In our Sunday liturgy, when someone lights the Chalice candle, and drops the taper, she picks it up. No big deal, the service hasn’t been compromised, nothing has to be “done over” because it has become impure. We are not ritualistic but liturgical, for our “order” of service does not serve the determinations of the Church.

This idolatry our shared forbears protested; hence, the Reform and Unitarian Universalist faith traditions are “Protestant.” This, our shared forbears sought to purify in a particular way, by decentralizing the Church’s power. We both understand how finite human knowledge and power can be forgotten by human beings in groups which, like individuals, come to act like and be God. So, many of our church buildings as many of their church buildings – Presbyterian, Reform, Christian Reform, Unitarian Universalist – are colonial design buildings with no stain glass windows obscuring the light from heaven and no interior symbols to distract the individual, thus purifying the sanctuary of the Church’s monopoly on interpretation. I would even suggest it is so implicit that, unbeknownst to us, it was made explicit in us in the delight we had last fall in worshipping at the Forest Hills Fine Arts Center for several Sundays in a room with clear windows to the outside. Through the relationship, the covenant that forms the community, the individual can encounter God more directly, encounter one’s conscience and intellect more immediately, without being under the thumb of the Church’s rituals and hierarchy and doctrinal monopoly.

We both are also the origin of modern Western democracy in trying to order human social relationships such that power is not centralized in the hands of a political monarchy or a religious few. We share Winthrop’s “civic or federated liberty.” Freedom becomes possible through relationships ordered in certain ways.

It’s just that we differ on the aim for which that order is to be created and maintained, and what that aim tells us about human nature. In the Reform tradition, Calvinist as it is, the order and aim of community reflects the view that human nature is depraved. In the Reform tradition human idolatry is evident in the individual’s holding to a chaste, pure, and virtuous view of human nature. Therefore, the order and aim of community is to assist the individual in realizing his and her essentially depraved nature and, through relationships, to be reconciled with God in the face of that depravity.

In the Unitarian Universalist tradition, the order and aim of community reflects the view that human nature is free with the capacity to choose right or wrong. In the Unitarian Universalist tradition idolatry is evident when the individual turns away from this nature, and holds to either being purely good or, as is the case with Calvinism, essentially depraved. Therefore, the order and aim of community is to assist the individual in realizing his and her full nature and, through relationships, to fully realize the freedom and individuality and integrity that form part of that nature.

In the Reform tradition, Calvinist as it is, existence is like the Columbo detective television series of the 1970’s. Like all television shows it had a predictable formula, but it was intentionally predictable. At the beginning of each episode the viewer saw the crook execute the murder that Detective Columbo would eventually solve. The viewer, like God, knows ahead of time who was responsible. Columbo was not a “whodunnit” any more than existence is, because everyone knows “whodunit.” In the case of existence it was Adam and all of us since. The crook, like humanity, was responsible for the shameful sin. Columbo, like the church, sought through his relationship with the crook, to reveal the true nature of the crook to himself and others. In the Reform tradition, Calvinist as it is, it is the aim of the social order of relationships to reveal the sinful nature of humanity to itself so that there might be a reconciliation with humanity’s Maker.

To us, human nature is not characterized by depravity but nobility. In the Unitarian Universalist tradition, the Free Church tradition that we are, existence is like the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Existence is essentially a mystery to us, though throughout time and history we learn more about it, can exercise our increased knowledge upon it, for weal and woe. Throughout time this life has become increasingly more complex, as does the central character of humanity in the movie, because of this freedom woven inside the fabric of existence. But in the face of increasing complexity it is to the extent that we know who we are as human beings, with moral energy and power, and not like slaves or machines or computer Hal in the movie, that the hope of creation is enlivened. Like the infant yesterday and the infant tomorrow, human nature was created freely with the capacity to choose right or wrong. The fate of creation as we know it is related to how we exercise that freedom in relationship to others in the days and years ahead. Faith is the persistence in exercising that freedom to build bonds of affection, just and lasting, to assist in creation’s unfolding and to live more and more inside of the Kingdom of God.

My brother and I are decidedly different. He has born with these long fingers that could reach the strings on the guitar and palm the basketball while playing hoops. I have pudgy fingers good for the French horn and grabbing the jerseys of opposing halfbacks in football. You couldn’t look at our hands, how they were formed and for what purposes, and see the shared bloodlines. We were formed for and are aimed for different things.

And so I would conclude this sermon series with the central question our spiritual tradition bequeaths to us: What is the purpose of gathering together? It’s not to be more independent of one another, or to conform to one larger, transcendent view. Remember, our faith tradition knows how we human beings, when we gather in groups, can make those groups and their characteristics into gods. What was true in what our forbears saw, is still true today. What, in our faith tradition, is the aim of a spiritual congregation formed by an agreement, a promise, a covenant to which individuals freely consent? The goal of the fellowship that is central to the individual’s spiritual health, is the goal that is also central to the well-being of spiritual community. The goal is freedom. It yields individuality through a deeper relationship with others and with God.

Ultimately, we do not gather in order for our community, formed by our free consent, to be tranquil. Ultimately, we do not gather in order for our community, formed by our free consent, to be stable. Ultimately, we do not gather in order for our community, formed by our free consent, to itself declare and determine if we are acceptable by others and by God. Ultimately, we do not gather because we think the community has any claim over particular doctrinal truths about humanity or God. We gather to order to create the kinds of relationships that will assist creation and the human family to be free. Free in creativity, free in individuality and difference, but most of all, free to see in tomorrow a hope and a faith that humanity can freely create bonds of affection that will fulfill the gift of life, which we have been given.

Our relationships paradoxically deepen while our individuality becomes more distinct. As we are in relationship with others we come unto ourselves. The bonds of love keep open the gates of freedom.

[Thus, regarding our relationships with others,] associations which in any degree impair or repress the free and full action of men's powers, are so far hurtful… Associations are good which communicate, power, moral and intellectual action, and the capacity of useful efforts to the persons who form them, or to the persons on whom they act. AMEN.