Pirates, Moors, Neighbors, and other Barbarians March 9, 2003 Rev. Susan Ritchie A Service for the North Unitarian Universalist Congregation

from http://www.nuuc.org/sermon20030309.html …………..

[John] Locke believed in both the importance of reason in religion, and also the limits of reason in religion. No one can embrace a religion, he taught, without having it make sense to both heart and mind. This is why compulsion in religion is always wrong-you cannot force a person to accept as reasonable that which strikes them as unreasonable, and you cannot force someone to accept something in their heart. We each believe that we are following truth–everyone, Locke wrote, is orthodox to himself. And yet obviously, because we do each seem to differ in the truths we have found, it must be impossible to finally know absolute religious truth. In the absence of a guarantee of absolute truth, tolerance must be granted to all opinions born of genuine conviction.

This is without a doubt the founding statement of Western religious freedom. And my recent discovery about Locke has to do with the surprising origins of Locke’s thinking on religious toleration.

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Our Unitarian Universalist tradition has tried to operate on a different basis. We have deliberately sought to include a diversity of theologies and persons within our congregations because we believe that inclusion is a more appropriate model for identity than exclusion. We believe that individuals are more likely than not to have a healthy self-identity, for example, not if they are isolated from others who believe differently, but if they exist in regular relation with them, a relation where it is possible to maintain senses of both mutual respect and inclusion and difference. I appreciate, for example, the music that Nathan selected for today’s interlude in this vein. Is Debussy really less himself for having incorporated Spanish themes into his own distinctive voice? Or might this sort of respectful inclusion define him even more fully as an individual artist?

Fortunately, contemporary sociology and experience are starting to bear out this notion that both self-identity and community-identity are best formed through inclusive rather than exclusive operations. Joan Wallach Scott is one social scientist for example, who has changed our notion of community from a model of homogeneity to one of hetereogenity. Enduring community, she has suggested, is not founded on assumptions of commonality but rather of difference. Indeed, she argues, differences are what we have in common, and therefore, while difference might sometimes serve as a destabilizing element in community, difference is also the only basis on which community can be founded.

And it is interesting to see how especially post-September 11, faith communities who have derived their identity from the exclusionary principle are having to rethink that approach in a world so obviously pluralistic that it is simply impossible to even imagine a completely homogenous community.

Joseph Hough, president of Union Theological Seminary in New York, has given similar calls for the church to come to grips with the reality of religious pluralism in our world. Speaking as a Christian theologian struggling with his own tradition in the grim but illuminating aftermath of the terrorist attacks, he suggested that Christians need a “new theology of religions”: a theology where it is freely acknowledged that people have very different ideas about who God is and what God asks of them and how to be a religious community. He called for a pluralistic worldview, which allows the possibility that different faiths in different cultures each help people to seek what they need-that each path that people follow has its own integrity, its own sense of truth. These are allowances that traditional Christianity – and most traditional religions, actually – have not been always been willing to make. Hough observes that Christianity has often operated by an “exclusionary principle,” an assumption that only Christians have received the revelation of God. And though believers may teach and practice tolerance, such tolerance has little meaning if other faiths are seen to have lesser value.

However, I don’t personally believe that Christianity is naturally exclusionary. At least the earliest church was not exclusionary, the earliest church which knew oppression and knew what it was like to have to keep one’s faith a secret. I agree with the Episcolaplian priest, the Rev. Barabara Brown Taylor, who has suggested that Christianity only became exclusionary when it became equated with empire, and it became possible to think about the possible triumph of Christian culture. She has suggested that all Christianity needs to return to its early days, and get in touch with the sensitivity to difference that comes from knowing what it is like to belong to an oppressed minority.

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And so it is that the Bible says, “Thou, when thou art converted, strengthen the brethren.” When we know the power of our difference, when we are truly confident in our own religion of inclusion, it is then that we are ready to become true ambassadors for our faith, ready to demonstrate through our own genuine interest in other beliefs the bonds of a community where difference is what we share most.

READING

1689 Letter Concerning Toleration – [John Locke]

I esteem toleration to be the chief characteristic mark of the true Church. For whatsoever some people boast of the antiquity of places and names, or of the pomp of their outward worship; others, of the reformation of their discipline; all, of the orthodoxy of their faith- for everyone is orthodox to himself- these things, and all others of this nature, are much rather marks of men striving for power and empire over one another than of the Church of Christ. Let anyone have never so true a claim to all these things, yet if he be destitute of charity, meekness, and good-will in general towards all mankind, even to those that are not Christians, he is certainly yet short of being a true Christian himself. “The kings of the Gentiles exercise leadership over them,” said our Saviour to his disciples, “but ye shall not be so.”* The business of true religion is quite another thing. It is not instituted in order to the erecting of an external pomp, nor to the obtaining of ecclesiastical dominion, nor to the exercising of compulsive force, but to the regulating of men’s lives, according to the rules of virtue and piety. Whosoever will list himself under the banner of Christ, must, in the first place and above all things, make war upon his own lusts and vices. It is in vain for any man to unsurp the name of Christian, without holiness of life, purity of manners, benignity and meekness of spirit. “Let everyone that nameth the name of Christ, depart from iniquity.”*(2) “Thou, when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren,” said our Lord to Peter.*(3) It would, indeed, be very hard for one that appears careless about his own salvation to persuade me that he were extremely concerned for mine. For it is impossible that those should sincerely and heartily apply themselves to make other people Christians, who have not really embraced the Christian religion in their own hearts. If the Gospel and the apostles may be credited, no man can be a Christian without charity and without that faith which works, not by force, but by love. Now, I appeal to the consciences of those that persecute, torment, destroy, and kill other men upon pretence of religion, whether they do it out of friendship and kindness towards them or no?