And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

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.

The past two weeks, today, and next Sunday are focused on the differences and similarities between All Souls and Unitarian Universalism, and various faith traditions and communities in West Michigan. The first two Sundays we took an approach to two perspectives that was more “individual,” comparing the Free Thinker and then the Jew, to the Unitarian Universalist. Free Thinkers are to us as distant relatives who look strikingly like us. We are related historically, lending an appearance of similarity. But we have different immediate families and, therefore, different experiences and different foci. Yet, because we are related, all Unitarian Univeralists are Free Thinkers, although because we are different immediate families, not all Free Thinkers are Unitarian Universalist. Jews are our grandparents, for we are their “historical grandchildren” having come from Christianity which is itself their child and our parent. But, the grandkids and the grandparents are much more similar than the generation in-between, Christianity. For Christianity the central concern forming the spiritual life involves belief, as in, “What is correct belief?” Correct belief establishes what it means to be a Christian, and identity and the spiritual life flow from the determination of correct belief. To the Jew and Unitarian Universalist, the central question of identity circumscribes the spiritual life, and living out the question itself is the form of the spiritual life: “What does it mean to be a Jew?” “What does it mean to be a Unitarian Universalist?” For the individual Jew and Unitarian Universalist, belief and practice do not precede this central question, but flow from it. This links us together, grandparent and grandchild, much more so than either of us is linked to the generation in-between, even as the various ways we differ in belief and practice distinguish us.

Today we move into two Sundays where we will look more at the nature of spiritual community, rather than the particularity of individual perspective as we have the previous weeks.

Two weeks ago Mary Anne Hoelscher died. I know this has meaning here only for my wife and me because you never knew her. If I were to recount her personality and life history, the characteristics and qualities that made her who she was, any one of you might be tempted to respond, “I’ve known people like that.” We all do this at times, assume a familiarity we do not actually possess.

The Hoelschers lived on the same side of town as did the Smiths, and in fact on the same street. Their house was the same track home as the Smiths. Their car was a Ford like the Smiths. The Hoelscher family was composed of a father and mother, an oldest son, a middle son, and a youngest daughter, like the Smiths. Once this Smith had a Hoelscher over to climb the maple tree in our front yard during the half hour after school and before my mother got home from work, when my older brother babysat us. Bill Hoelscher and I didn’t think twice about it. His mother marched over the street divide and switched his rear all the way back, saying, “Hoelschers don’t do that.” Sometimes it’s hardest to make distinctions when at first glance things appear so much alike. It wasn’t allowed for a Hoelscher to be in someone else’s yard without constant parental supervision. “I don’t want to be a Hoelscher,” Bill would say with each emphatic whack, and I understood why he would say that. The larger meaning escaped me then, yet I recalled it two weeks ago. The sting of presuming a sameness and equivalency affected Bill differently than it did me, but I remembered wincing nonetheless!

Families are communities, and communities are different and distinct. It is a distortion of the human spiritual need for connection that blinds us to difference and substitutes a fabricated familiarity and similarity, almost always with painful results. It is the presence of distinction, differentiation, particularity, originality, that is, the recognition of otherness, of individuality whereby true relationship and connection can come about. It’s a lesson from our Unitarian Universalist covenantal faith perspective. It was not a matter of what Bill Hoelscher thought or believed as an individual, or how he described or wished himself to be. He was a Hoelscher, and our assumption that didn’t make a difference was painfully dispelled by his mother. To the world the Hoelschers and Smiths might be a distinction without much of a difference, but we learned it made all the difference in the world.

From the outset I must give the hearer a warning about perspective, and give a different warning for next week’s sermon. I was part of Fountain Street Church as I came to Grand Rapids to be the minister there, and parted ways with that community only two years after arriving here. This Smith “lived with the Hoelschers” metaphorically speaking, but the parting was as a painful divorce. And I have come to understand that what Fountain Street church is about, and what our spiritual communities are about, are different. To the uninformed world the Hoelschers and the Smiths might be a distinction without a difference, but having lived in both places it, the distinction between Fountain Street Church and Unitarian Universalist churches makes all the difference in the world.

To discern the difference requires one to be able to discern the difference not between individuals but between groups, communities, churches, the entities formed by voluntary human association. We live in a time in history when this kind of analysis and understanding is in short supply. Size is a distinction between Fountain Street Church and Unitarian Universalist churches, as we have many churches smaller and several larger, including the one I served in Tulsa before coming here. The individual at Fountain Street Church on Sunday morning sings out of one of our hymnals, so one could easy consider that a similarity. But, upon closer examination it is a distinction. We use our hymnal because it connects us, through music and lyrics, to the core meanings and persistent demands of our larger, historic faith tradition. Fountain Street Church chooses to use our hymnal, and being autonomous, might well later use someone else’s hymnal, as earlier they have. For them, whatever is chosen begs the question of justification: “Why this one and not another?” On hymnals, there is no distinction but all the difference in the world.

The key to understanding the difference between Fountain Street Church and a Unitarian Universalist Church, is the same key to understanding the difference between any spiritual communities. One has to start with history.

The distinctions between groups require one to see how the groups were formed in their earliest times, because they are implicitly at work today. What were the first Holescher’s like and the first Smith’s like, that would have trickled down through the centuries to yield families living on different sides of the same street, with two very different understandings? Fountain Street Church was formed as a Baptist Church and the Baptists extend historically back to Roger Williams. In fact, in a strange way, when it declared itself independent of the Baptists in the 1970’s, Fountain Street Church was doing the most Baptist of all things. In the Baptist tradition, like Unitarian Universalism, freedom is a holy thing. It’s why the verse from the Gospel of John is a shared understanding between our churches. But, to the Baptists, unlike us, freedom is about being liberated from relationships that entangle the liberty of conscience. Freedom is being self-supporting and self-sustaining, relying ultimately on individual conscience, what was for Roger Williams the direct and unimpeded relationship the individual has with God. It is not so with us.

Baptists in this country are traced back to Roger Williams who advocated the liberty of conscience when in the early 1630’s he severed church relationships and declared himself independent of the fellowship of Massachusetts churches, and headed for Rhode Island. So strong was his faith in freedom as the “liberty of the soul,” that he left behind relationships to stand courageously alone. To him, and his spiritual lineage through the ages, the spiritual demands of freedom ultimately require the individual to be free from relationships, to stand alone in Truth. He embodied what John Winthrop represented as “natural liberty,” so to turn away from relationships and back towards freedom as the Truth of how humanity was created by God, was to Roger Williams what he was doing.

I saw this lineage when I arrived at Fountain Street Church, although it is no longer attached to the Bible as Baptist churches are. But, even if Bill Hoelscher swore to raise his children separate from his parents’ ways, he was still a Hoelscher. At Fountain Street Church on Sunday morning the individual sits between stain glass windows depicting the icons and symbols of Christianity on one hand, and the secular world on the other. The building teaches the individual how to be independent of the conforming tendencies in both religion and the world by depicting the Bible stories and great men of Western, European civilization who, from this perspective, stood “alone” against tyranny. The church’s preacher may be ordained a Unitarian Universalist, as has been the case with the last three, Fred Wooden, David Rankin, and me; or, may be a preacher ordained as a Baptist, like Duncan Littlefair, Alfred Wishart, and others in their history. The church at any time in the future could hire an Episcopal, or a Methodist, or a Scientologist. The church chooses its minister unaided by tradition or other congregations, as a symbol of its autonomy and separateness from other churches and faith traditions; it’s natural liberty..

There is no expectation the minister be a member of the church, as even the minister can remain independent and unattached. I was encouraged to avoid the entanglements of the everyday operations of the church – the organizational, financial, and staffing issues – and was counseled by church members and the former minister to create a distance that would strengthen the independent mind. Even having an office at the church might jeopardize that liberty of conscience. The minister need maintain an aloofness to the weekly meetings that constitute church life because the church exists most fully when individual self-sufficiency is most fully expressed, once a week during worship. When I arrived I was advised that at the beginning of worship the minister walked onto the chancel from a side door, exited the same door at the end of worship, and stayed on the chancel at some distance from the congregation. The preacher preached in a darkened sanctuary under a single light projected onto the pulpit, disconnected from the faces of the hearers, disassociated from all influences outside individual conscience.

In other words, to Fountain Street Church freedom is a holy thing. It is freedom from, freedom as independence. It is natural liberty, what the individual is created with since time immemorial, and it is a state that social life often distorts. Life is like Gary Cooper in High Noon, the sheriff who stands alone for truth and the right, the individual seeking to stand where he does, believe what he does, courageous, autonomous, an independent and self-sustaining individual. It is the freedom of being self-contained, the liberty of individual conscience unconnected to faith tradition or society, both smothering and distorting influences. Roger Williams would understand freedom in a similar way, even across the centuries, as “natural liberty,” so it should not be surprising to see his likeness in one of the stained glass windows.

We, too, prize freedom as a spiritual thing. You have heard me say often that our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition holds the idea that when God works or moves in the world, it is in the form of freedom. But, to us and our faith tradition, it is civic or federated liberty.

A truth we declare every Sunday is that there abides a unity and freedom of the Spirit, expressed through a love for all souls, a succinct statement of the theological center of our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition. But, notice the two parts; the first part, “a unity and freedom of the spirit,” and the second, “expressed through a love for all souls.” In our faith tradition freedom is gained through certain kinds of relationships and certain kinds of ties of love human beings create. In our faith tradition, the bonds of love keep open the gates of freedom. In our faith tradition, the man by himself, standing apart, is not “naturally free.” He is alone. He is not moral, or immoral for that matter, because things like what is right and good are always related to our connection to others. Spiritual freedom is gained through relationships that empower and uphold individuality, not apart from them. Spiritual freedom is the product of a voluntary covenant between persons, a freely offered promise of faithfulness to walk with others through life’s journey. Freedom is a civic product, a “becoming” that is a possibility anytime a relationship is established. To us, life is like a march towards freedom that we individually consent to join, and not Gary Cooper at High Noon standing alone for truth and the right. In our faith tradition freedom is the yield of a walk with others through the valley of the shadow of death, a stroll through life’s great transitions, a march to the old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts to fight political tyranny, or striding across the Edmund Pettis Bridge and towards Selma and, eventually, to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington that all souls of the human family might be free. It is a distinction that makes all the difference in the world.

Our Unitarian forbears are the very churches in Massachusetts whose number included Roger Williams before his membership was severed. He said he left for the “liberty of conscience,” while they maintained he left the covenant, which our unfolding Unitarian Universalist faith since would represent makes liberty and freedom a spiritual possibility. These Puritans and Pilgrims had both left Europe to arrive here in order to be free to worship as they pleased. But, they left as a community, arrived as a community, and conceived of freedom as a product of community and certain kinds of human connections.

Freedom that is derived from a covenantal community has individuality as its aim, and uses the affection from others to alleviate the debilitations of individual self-interest and the self’s own egotism. Natural liberty has no protections against that. When we are severed from relationships we can tyrannize ourselves, easily succumb to the narrow needs of the self as if they were ultimate, and the inflation and promotion of the self as if the opinions of self were king. Fellowship with others enlivens us to be our individual selves in ways isolation cannot and does not. Honest difference liberates narrow thought. Affection extended and burdens shared, free us from lifeless creeds and being overcome by life’s trials. And this covenant is not just amongst members of any one of our churches. I am preaching this sermon about our understanding of freedom on this Sunday because as we are gathering, so also are our brothers and sisters gathering at the international meeting of Unitarian Universalists, this year in Portland, Oregon, and attended by Jackie and Elgin Vines of All Souls. The relationships that yield freedom span the globe and all souls, binding the destiny of All Souls to the people of Cluj in Romania and the Khasi Hills in India.

This lineage of freedom derived from relationships resides in every one of our churches, explicit in some and implicit in others. On Sunday morning, in buildings built by our churches, many times influenced by Unitarian Frank Lloyd Wright or of a colonial design harkening back to our forbears, the individual often gazes through clear windows out onto nature and the world wherein his or her promises and responsibilities are to count Monday through Saturday. Amidst the faces of fellow congregants aglow in the promise of faithfulness to the spiritual pilgrimage of one another, the individual seeks freedom through the matrix of relationships that form human existence. Churches choose their own ministers in order to establish a relationship with a minister who himself or herself is in relationship with other Unitarian Universalist ministers. This is how freedom is created and extended. It is civic. It is federated. It is relational, and is a spiritual possibility and not a state from the dark recesses of the past and to which the individual need return.

There is an expectation that the minister become a member of the congregation, because in our tradition ministers are called out of the congregation they serve. The center of our spiritual life is the community’s covenant, the promises people make to one another, which creates the prospect of spiritual freedom, and the promises the congregation and minister make to one another that deepen freedom’s ministrations. The minister need be involved in all aspects of the church, lending advice to the congregation on its organizational, financial, and staffing issues that strengthen the free spirit. The minister is expected to be at the church during the week, and on call when parishioners determine they are in need. At the beginning of worship the minister greets the congregation as it comes in – as soon as we have agreed upon how to prepare the sanctuary for worship, I will greet the congregation outside – and the minister retires from worship walking through the congregation he is in relationship with. I see your faces and you see mine because we are connected to one another through a deeper Spirit that liberates us from our narrow thoughts and our self-serving, self-interested ways. And we liberate one another in order to serve the cause of human need.

In other words, to us, freedom is a holy thing. But it is freedom towards, freedom created by those kinds of relationships that fulfill human existence because they simultaneously and paradoxically uphold our individuality and our unity as the human family at the same time. Life is like a freedom march with others because freedom is not a solitary thing. It is a liberation that witnesses to the bonds of love that keep open the gates of freedom.

Fountain Street Church lives on the same side of town as All Souls, as all churches here do, that being West Michigan, and on the same block, that of liberal religion, that the spiritual life is about freedom. But to us one is born with the capacity to be free and becomes so through the love and support of others, not apart from them in some natural and solitary state. It’s why community and fellowship, eating and drinking and partying together are essential to the spiritual health of All Souls. Freedom depends upon fellowship. And where and when there are persons who aren’t spiritually free, it is because we have not conceived of the covenant as large and wide enough to extend to them the bonds of love that keep open the gates of their freedom. A distinction with a difference that makes all the difference in the world.

In fact, it didn’t occur to me til now that there were other fundamental differences between the Hoelschers and the Smiths that I hadn’t seen before. The Hoelschers were Catholic, and the Smiths, when they did go to church on those rare occasions, went to the Presbyterian Church, part of the Reform tradition. And that will take us to next Sunday’s service even as the church gathers in all its various ways in the intervening days.

AMEN.