A few weeks ago one of our speakers said that after something had occurred in his life he had found salvation. Later one of the members said to me that he had been taken aback by that word, but after reflecting on it he understood what the speaker meant and thought that perhaps that really was the right word to use. That's what we need to do, I believe, accept such a word and allow it to help us reach a new level of understanding. Salvation is not a word that Unitarian Universalists generally view with much affection. Quite a few years ago now a man named Rokeach came up with two lists of values, one instrumental values and the other terminal values. Unitarian Universalists tended to rank them quite differently than did those in other religions, in the list of instrumental values, for example, ranking such things as obedience, politeness and cleanliness quite a bit lower than did others. We tended to like things like curiosity and responsibility better. However, it was in the list of terminal values that something really strange happened. To make it easy to work with the rankings, Rokeach had put the words on removable tapes. Unitarian Universalists had done strange things with the word salvation. Some, of course, being obedient and polite, merely put it at the bottom of their lists. Others placed it upside down, or at a space below the margin of their page, or refused to rank it at all. Unlike most of the others, it was defined. In parentheses beside it, it said "Saved; eternal life". If I had been one of the Unitarian Universalist subjects, I would have done the same thing they did, and yet I have said more than once with complete sincerity that salvation is the only thing I ever preach about.
We Unitarian Universalists do get hung up on words. One of the oldest jokes about us, a one-liner, which doesn't, I'm happy to say, apply to this congregation, is the reason Unitarian Universalists can't sing is that they're too busy reading ahead to make sure they agree with the words. I have a colleague who says, "I'm asking you to sing it, not sign it!" I was preaching in Kirkwood, Missouri, some years ago, and afterwards a member of the congregation came up to me and said, "I really liked your sermon, but why did you pick all those hymns with God in them?" I said, "Because I liked them," but what I should have said more precisely was, "Because I thought they were saying the same thing my sermon was."
I was asked to speak to a humanist group in Fort Myers one morning that was feeling extremely marginalized. One of them talking to me later said that he and others were convinced that there was a real intention to purge us from the Unitarian Universalist Association. They asked me what I thought was happening, and I answered that although 60% of Unitarian Universalists still characterize themselves as humanists, and I would argue fiercely that in the broadest definition we are 99 and 44/100% humanist (that is we believe that humans are responsible for their own choices of good and evil and we have no expectation of supernatural intervention) we have given ourselves a bad name by our extreme literalism and our continual calling to account those people who use metaphorical religious language. It was hard for them to accept or believe that so small and so justified a thing could disturb people so much, but I am sure that it is true. There is a rigidness and aridity of discourse that turns all poetry to prose.
Part of it, of course, is that many people are carrying a lot of baggage from their past, or from the media fixation on the most fundamentalist religions. It's interesting that it is easy to find religious education teachers without a single qualm about teaching the various world religions, and I doubt they would have too much trouble with Judaism, but teaching about Christianity and about the Bible seemed the most uncomfortable idea they could imagine. Yet our faith is the immediate descendent of radical Protestantism and almost everything about us reflects that reality -- so shouldn't our kids learn something about it? Especially as 86% of the American public categorize themselves as Christian. It seems to me a good thing to enable them to understand what their friends are talking about, and ignorance of the Bible makes it impossible to understand much of our literature, and indeed our whole western culture. Because of all this baggage, however, and because of a tendency toward dictionary literalism as severe as that of a Biblical literalist there are certain words that make the hair rise on the backs of our necks, chills run down our back, adrenaline to begin to flow, and their use results in a compulsion to scold speakers for the images they use. Really, as Humpty Dumpty said in Alice through the Looking Glass, it's a question of who is going to be the master.
A few years ago the Unitarian Universalist president, Bill Sinkford, caused a major flap by suggesting that it might be a good thing for us to use more traditional religious language in interfaith settings. For the next two years he found himself explaining what he meant every time two or three gathered together in his presence. You would think that he had called for us to adhere to a creed! Actually, I didn't entirely disagree with him. I don't do it myself. When I go pray for the City Council once a year I apostrophize the spirit of justice and wisdom, or whatever qualities seem most necessary from that day's agenda, and they hear God, and it's all cool. What I'm concerned about is not that we use the words but that we are able to hear them, and in my experience sometimes gain some extremely valuable insights. If we think about what those words can really mean to us, they can become, not words of discomfort or horror, but words of poetry and meaning that are as sacred to us as to any of those who use them easily.
I don't mean that we should just arbitrarily assign any meaning we wish to words, nor that we should stifle our critical sensibilities. Take one of the most pervasive (and most difficult) words, God. Once years ago, shortly before I discovered the Unitarian Universalist Church, someone told me that I could be an Episcopalian. I said that I could not because I was unable to say the creed. When he argued that it was simply a matter of interpretation, I said, "Well, let's see. If I remember correctly, it begins, 'I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth....' I don't believe in God as Father, as all-powerful, or as creator. How am I going to interpret that?" He allowed as how it might be a tad difficult. If people don't obtrude their own definitions or begin giving credit or blame where it is not due, there is a meaning for the word that is, in fact, sacred to me, and that is not inconsistent with many other concepts of God. It is those values that I find transcendent and eternal to which I give (or try to give) my service and which therefore make my life meaningful. The short list is truth, beauty justice, compassion wisdom, love.... When someone uses the word God, and the concept I hear is the one that defines it for me, I can often also hear something that is deeply true and lovely.
It is argued that we must use the generally accepted meanings of these words, but I don't think that one particular meaning of any of them is as generally accepted as we think. With the word God, at least, there are almost as many ideas as there are people who think about it. The only people who really agree on the definition of God are the fundamentalist Christians and the atheists, and the main difference is the atheists don't believe it and the Christians do. For nearly everyone else there is a range of meaning. I still like what my colleague Forest Church says when people tell him they don't believe in God when he has said that he does. He answers, "Tell me what God you don't believe in, because I probably don't either."
I was going to go down the list of words that I am sometimes called to account for using and give my definitions for them -- definitions that I think are entirely defensible given the history and etymology of the words -- but we don't probably wish to sit here that long. Too, my definitions might not necessarily be the ones that you find that enable you to at least hear if not use those words without discomfort. I think, though, that it really would be a good thing to try to find them since it opens up a path to metaphor and a sense of the sacred that gives a value to life that we otherwise cannot know. Although words can be the most powerful things in the world, in themselves they have no power. They are essentially neutral. It is the meanings and the context that have the power, and instead of rejecting them because of others' misuse -- and I think it is misuse when they are used to mean things that are false or damaging, even if the definition is precise -- we should, as Humpty Dumpty says be their masters. You know the words I mean -- some of them seem so benign to me that I am taken aback when someone challenges them -- words like church, sermon (yes, that is what I call it -- note the order of service), sin, faith, grace -- words of power and poetry. We harm ourselves when we are so often on the alert to be offended by their use.
And then there's salvation, the word that Unitarian Universalists refused even to rank, much less value, in Rokeach's survey, that I would have refused to rank myself with the definition that he used, and yet that I say and mean is the essential topic of my preaching. What are we saved from? And for what? And how, for that matter, does it happen? It seems like a rather ridiculous concept for those of us who simply do not believe that we are born in sin from which we need to be rescued or who think the idea of an eternal existence in heaven after we die makes no sense at all. I do not believe at all that we are born in sin, and yet I have said and believe in -- traditional terms -- that there is no salvation without a conviction of sin. I've also said that there's no salvation without a sense of humor, and I am quite certain that both those statements are true. There are undoubtedly other requirements for salvation, but those are two of the important ones. Salvation is that condition in which one's life becomes meaningful through one's service to the holy -- to the highest ultimate values -- to God. Until we are aware of our own failings, our greed or fear or self-righteousness, we will never be able to serve with our whole hearts or even realize that that is what we need for the good of our souls. We need a sense of humor to understand that when an evangelist tells us that it is in the next life that salvation is achieved it is a message that we can take to heart, since we can certainly never achieve it in this one. We can only have it in intention, in moments, in the hopeful faithfulness of our lives.
We need to learn to use these words that we have feared and hated and rejected, not so much, as we are told, to communicate with others. We can find words, definitions, circumlocutions to avoid them that will be properly interpreted by our hearers. We need them to be hearers of truth that otherwise we may be deaf to. We need them to hear the words of Joshua: "Choose you this day whom you will serve, but as for me and my house we will serve God." Or those of Micah: "What is required of you but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?" Or of Jesus: "You shall love God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself. And this is the law and the prophets." We need to be able to hear and follow the truth in whatever words it may be couched, and living in the truth, whencesoever it may come, is the path to salvation.