Seekers and the Sought:
The Free and Responsible Search for Truth and Meaning

Opening Words

 "A Lifelong Sharing"  

Love cannot remain by itself - it has no meaning.
Love has to be put into action and that action is service.
Whatever form we are,
Able or disabled,
Rich or poor,
It is not how much we do,
But how much love we put in the doing;
A lifelong sharing of love with others.  

By Mother Teresa Reading #562,
in the hymnal Singing the Living Tradition.  

The Road Not Taken      

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,  
And sorry I could not travel both  
And be one traveler, long I stood  
And looked down one as far as I could  
To where it bent in the undergrowth;         

Then took the other, as just as fair,  
And having perhaps the better claim,  
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;  
Though as for that the passing there  
Had worn them really about the same,         

And both that morning equally lay  
In leaves no step had trodden black.  
Oh, I kept the first for another day!  
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,  
I doubted if I should ever come back.         

I shall be telling this with a sigh  
Somewhere ages and ages hence:  
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—  
I took the one less traveled by,  
And that has made all the difference.         

By Robert Frost

Sermon

I first heard Robert Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken, in junior high school.  It resonated with me because it captured that angst we all feel, whatever age we may be, about making significant choices, and the wistfulness of wondering what might or might not have happened if a different decision had been made.  Frost's poem also recognizes that the freedom to make choices is precisely what makes each of our lives unique - 'I took the [road] less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.'   

Reading this poem as a teenager, I especially liked this idea.  After all, when you're 13 or 14 the world revolves around you, and you are acutely aware of the various ways in which you are different from everyone else.  In fact, I was so gosh darn unique, that I just knew no one could ever really, truly understand me.  Immersed in this version of teenage angst, The Road Not Taken became a badge of courage - even if no one else on the planet understood me, I knew that Robert Frost did!  He understood what it means to be a unique individual.  

Frost's poem stayed with me through to the end of high school, and when the time came for the seniors to submit quotes for the yearbook, I chose excerpts from The Road Not Taken.  You can imagine my astonishment when the yearbook came out and several other classmates had chosen the same poem - none of them nearly as interesting as me!  I discovered that my poem about uniqueness was apparently not unique to me...  

This ability to have different roads ahead of us, to have options and choices, is something we, as a culture, pride ourselves on.  Generally speaking, we have some choice about where we will work, where we will live, who will represent us politically, whether or not we will belong to a religion, and if so, which one.  Not everyone in the world can claim the luxury of options.  For the vast majority of human beings, including many in our country, the realities of poverty, and the lack of resources to get out of poverty, severely limit what one can or can't do.  Yet many of us have been blessed with the luxury to choose what the major pieces of our life will look like.  If we are that fortunate, it's a freedom we shouldn't take for granted.  

In our country, one of the areas where we exercise a great deal of choice is with religion.  We have perhaps the widest range of religious options, out of any nation, but becoming a member of a particular religion almost always involves choosing one specific road, a road that excludes others.  Most religions have certain basic beliefs that are not optional, you are expected to subscribe to those core beliefs.  If I'm told that Jesus is the one and only source of salvation, I'm also being told that options other than Jesus are inferior.  In a similar fashion, all the major religions have bits of dogmatic belief; each restricts your intellectual and spiritual freedom in certain ways.   

The subject of our worship service today is the fourth principle of Unitarian Universalism, our belief in the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.  Our religion explicitly articulates that we have freedom: we have choices, as we work towards discovering truth and meaning.  This is an intriguing concept.  It would seem, on the surface, to fly in the face of what all the major world religions say -- that there is only one correct answer, and that each one believes they have it.  The twist here is that we're talking about a definition of religious freedom that goes well beyond the ability to choose whether we are Christian, Buddhist, or something else - those are external freedoms, the freedom to move between religions.  Our fourth principle speaks of our desire for freedom within our chosen faith.  It is a uniquely Unitarian Universalist way of being religious.   

The major religions do give you freedom in determining how you will practice the faith; for example, you might have the freedom to choose whether you will experience the religion through worship services, or silent contemplation and prayer, or reading scholarly commentary on the scriptures.  But you do not have freedom when it comes to certain core theological beliefs.  Those are never optional.  

As I've mentioned in other sermons, our UU principles sound so matter-of-fact, so agreeable, that it's easy to take them for granted.  We forget that other religions don't believe what we believe.  We forget that other brave souls came before us and helped create this religion.  I'd like to dig into this a bit: how did we come to believe that freedom is necessary in the search for religious understanding?  

For our Unitarian ancestors, this desire for freedom was rooted in the fact that they had been persecuted.  Back in the early 1800s, before there were any individuals in our country who were called 'Unitarian,' there was one main religion in New England -- the Congregationalist church, a religion that could trace its routes back to the Puritan settlers.  A division had been forming within this community.  Some of the ministers had been reading the liberal writings of European biblical scholars.  These scholars argued that Christianity had gotten too wrapped up in beliefs that weren't even found in the scripture, most specifically, belief in the trinity.  They argued that the bible needed to be understood in its historical context, and interpreted through the lenses of reason and rationality.   

A group of liberal ministers began to coalesce around these ideas, and the more traditional and conservative ministers branded them as 'Unitarian.'  In New England, back then, this was a slur.  To be labeled a Unitarian was to be considered unorthodox, heretical, and unworthy even of recognition.  In an attempt to isolate these liberal ministers, their more conservative colleagues refused to participate in pulpit exchanges with them.  Swapping pulpits with a colleague on any given Sunday was an integral part of church life back then, more so than now.  Preaching from a colleague's pulpit was an expression of communion between the ministers, an expression of faith and confidence in one another, an expression of religious fidelity.  To make clear that a colleague was not welcome in your pulpit was to question the competency and fidelity of that minister.   This deliberate shunning, this isolation and marginalization, led the liberal ministers to do what many other oppressed people in history have done: they embraced the slur, 'Unitarian,' and redefined it in positive terms.  A minister by the name of William Ellery Channing gave a now famous sermon in 1819 in which he was the first minister to publicly explain what Unitarianism is, what it stood for, what it believed in.  In the process of doing this, the liberal ministers formally left the Congregationalist church.  A few years later, in 1825, these now Unitarian ministers founded the American Unitarian Association.  

Having been persecuted for the desire to freely explore their faith, it's no surprise that these ministers considered the 'free search for truth and meaning' an essential part of the religious journey.  It is a legacy they created, and one that we have inherited.  

Why does the ability to search freely matter?  Why does this legacy matter?   

Our way of being religious in the world -- and it is a particular style, a particular way of being religious --  is deeply connected to how we understand that which we are seeking:  truth.  We Unitarian Universalists don't view truth as something that is immovable and fixed; as something that has already been given to us, for all time, eternal, in scripture.  If you think of the Christian metaphor of revelation being sealed, we are the exact opposite.  We are the faith that believes that truth is constantly being revealed, that it is constantly unfolding all around us.  If truth possesses this quality, we can only seek it if we have the freedom to go where ever it might lead us.  What we understand today as truth will shift as we learn more about ourselves and the universe we live in.  Keeping up with those changes requires the freedom to reinterpret and modify our beliefs.  (There's a name for this, even.  It's called 'process theology,' the theology that's constantly in process, constantly evolving.)  

But, our religious freedom does not mean that we can do anything we want in the name of spiritual exploration.  Our freedom is tied to a sense of responsibility.  Freedom brings with it the fact that we are moral agents - we can make choices that are troublesome as well as sound.  In the context of community, having a sense of responsibility is how we ensure that we don't hurt one another.  That's where we draw the limit.  Search freely, explore the depths of spirituality freely, but our individual searches for truth should not lead ourselves or others to harm.  

OK, I think most of us would agree that behaving responsibly is a good thing, but how do we know whether we're doing that?  Speaking for myself, I know that I can come up with all kinds of rationalizations and justifications for my whims, some of which can be petty.  In the intensity of any given situation, I can convince myself that the wrong thing is the right thing to do.  We've all been there.   

Which is why, looking at that Robert Frost poem 20 years later, I notice with curiosity that the traveler, choosing between the two roads, is alone.  He/she has no companions.  I suppose that ultimately, we are alone in all the choices we make - we are the ones that must live with our decisions, good or bad.  But, there are time tested ways of trying to ensure that what we do is right, that what we do is good and responsible.  One of those ways is through companionship, through friends.  

And here I don't mean any friend.  There are superficial friendships and toxic friendships.  I'm not referring to those.  I'm talking about those friendships that reach to the depths of our spirituality - our values, hopes, and dreams.  In those companions, we have friends who can be more objective than us, ones who will stand by us, and ones whose advice we'd hopefully listen to if we were on the wrong track.  We encounter such individuals in the guise of mother, father, brother, sister, teacher, minister, doctor, mentor, and best friend, to name but a few.  Such friendships are not easy to come by, they are rare and valuable.  But without them, we run the risk of having our own imperfect perceptions as the only insight into our behavior and decision-making.  We cannot know whether we are behaving responsibly if we lack spiritual connection with others.       

In my experience, you are in one of the best possible places to find such companionship.  It is one of the core strengths of our faith: the love, support, and inspiration we give one another.  Our Unitarian Universalist music, our hymns, speak of this.  Did you notice the words of the hymn we sang at the beginning of worship?  As we close, let me share those words again...  

"We laugh, we cry, we live, we die;
We dance, we sing our song.
We need to feel there's something here to which we can belong.
We need to feel the freedom just to have some time alone.
But most of all we need close friends we can call our very own.  

And we believe in life,
And in the strength of love;
And we have found a need to be together.  
We have our hearts to give,
We have our thoughts to receive;
And we believe that sharing is an answer.'"

Hymn 354, Singing the Living Tradition  

All around us, in this sanctuary, exists the possibility of spiritual friendships that will nurture our souls.  We need but reach out with openness.  Such friendships help keep us grounded, and that solidity, in turn, sets us free to explore life's mysteries.   

Appreciating all that our faith gives us, may we each be blessed with the grounding of friendship, the healthy boundaries of responsibility, and the ever-evolving wisdom that comes with freedom. 

Amen.