A FREE AND RESPONSIBLE SEARCH FOR TRUTH AND MEANING: PROCLAIMING OUR 4TH PRINCIPLE

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

February 4, 2007

READING

From the pamphlet “Whether heretics should be persecuted” by the Swiss theologian Sebastian Castellio, published in 1554

There are, I know, persons who insist that we should believe even against reason. It is, however, the worst of all errors, and it is laid on me to fight it. Let no one think he is doing wrong in using his mental faculties. It is our proper way of arriving at truth. . . .

My counsel is that thou cease to compel men’s consciences, that thou cease to kill and persecute, that thou grant to men who believe . . . according to to their innermost faith and not according to someone else’s faith. And you that are private people, do not be so ready to follow those who lead you astray and push you to take up arms and kill your brothers. . . .

I am a poor little man, more than simple, humble and peaceable, with no desire for glory, only affirming what in my heart I believe. Why cannot I live and say my honest word and have your love?

SERMON

To introduce our topic today I invite you back in time to view a pivotal, but rather grim scene. It is October 1553 on a hillside in the town of Champel, about a mile outside the gates of Geneva, Switzerland. We have joined a crowd looking on as a man in his middle years is seated on a log surrounded by bundles of oak limbs and chained to a metal stake driven into the ground next to the log.

A book is strapped to the man’s thigh as a clergyman announces that this man, one Michael Servetus, has forfeited his life by the crime of heresy, having denied the truth of the holy trinity and disdained the sacrament of infant baptism. With that a flame is lit and the pyre surrounding the chained man is lit. After some minutes as the smoke and flames rise, Servetus is heard to choke out his last words: “O Jesus, son of the eternal God, have pity on me,” and before long he is dead.

Every religious tradition has its distinguishing principle: that affirmation that sets it apart from all others, that most clearly sets out its reason for being and place in the world. This year I have been spending time with each of the seven principles around which we Unitarian Universalists organize our religious life today. Each of them touches on a different dimension of religious life, and I expect that as we have made our way through them you, like me, have felt a certain affinity for some principles and less for others. I happen to be a fan especially of the first and seventh principles.

Today, though, I want to suggest that of all these principles the fourth is the one that could most appropriately be called our distinguishing principle, the one that most clearly separates us from other religious traditions, without which we would no longer be who we claim to be. And a test I would like to suggest in support of that claim is that of the seven principles, it is the one that is most likely to get us into trouble.

To review: our fourth principle calls us as a congregation to covenant, that is to promise each other in the life of our church, to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. OK, you say, but what kind of trouble am I referring to? Well, let’s talk a bit about Michael Servetus.

Servetus grew up in Spain in the years during the turbulent years when the Christian church was consolidating its power and driving out Muslims and Jews. Sent off to school with the Franciscans, he fell in with an enthusiastic group of students who immersed themselves in the Christian scriptures, learning Greek, Latin and Hebrew and debating the church’s teachings, often in greater depth and intensity than their instructors found quite fitting.

Eventually he found employment with the church, but he was troubled by its bent at the time on tormenting nonbelievers and scandalized by its corruption. After some study, he decided that church’s ills were the result of faulty doctrine, specifically the trinity, which he declared to be “a monster,” a ruse contrary to Jesus’ teaching and invented by the church to control the people.

He left the church, found shelter among Protestant reformers and at the tender age of 21 wrote a book called “On the Errors of the Trinity.” The book was brash, insulting both the church and many of its reformers. But it wasn’t the insults that upset the reformers as much as the way Servetus challenged their doctrine.

None of the reformers was especially enthusiastic about the trinity, but they felt it would be going too far to question it. So, they banned Servetus’ book, but Servetus would not be stopped. He peppered them with letters and even a second book. Finally they referred him to the Spanish Inquisition, which condemned him and ordered his arrest.

So, Servetus changed his name and went underground. He found shelter with friends in France who eventually helped him into medical school. Oddly, it was there that he made a discovery that put him on the path that led to his execution.

Servetus occupied a good part of his time studying anatomy. A particular puzzle for physicians at the time was how blood in the heart passed from the right ventricle to the left. The theory had been that tiny holes in the heart made it possible, but Servetus insisted that couldn’t be right. Instead, after some study he suggested that after entering the right ventricle, the blood made its way to the lungs, where it took in oxygen, and then returned to the heart.

It was an amazing insight, coming decades before William Harvey, the great Britain physician described the human circulatory system. As it happens, though, Servetus didn’t seem to recognize how important his find was for medicine. That was because for him it served a far greater purpose: it solved a major problem in his theology. Servetus had believed that people received faith by a literal union with God, but he could tell how that occurred. Now, he believed he knew. Pulmonary circulation, during which our very blood is exposed to the air, was the moment, he believed, when the holy spirit entered our bodies.

Thus inspired he wrote a new book, “The Restoration of Christianity,” where he laid out his theory in detail. (This was the book strapped to his thigh at his execution.) For some reason he placed his hope in the reformer John Calvin to help make his case. Receiving Servetus book, Calvin was happy to offer corrections, but after receiving several lecturing letters from Servetus he became fed up and alerted the Inquisition to his presence. Servetus was captured, but escaped.

In fact, he might have lived much longer had he not chosen to pass through Calvin’s Geneva on the way to Italy. There he was spotted, jailed, tried for blasphemy by Calvin himself, and condemned. Servetus, in fact, continued the debate with Calvin up to his very last words on the funeral pyre: by pleading for pity from “Jesus, son of the eternal God” he held to his belief in Jesus as subordinate, not co-equal with God.

We remember Servetus today as a forebear of our tradition. His challenge of the trinity inspired later Unitarian reformers in Hungary, Poland, and the Netherlands. Yet, it is not his theological stance that I want to call attention to today so much as the larger point raised in the writing of Sebastian Castellio that we heard earlier.

Castellio was no advocate for Servetus’ theology: what he argued for simply was for Calvin to make room for the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. “My counsel,” he wrote, “is that thou cease to compel men’s consciences.” The Protestant Reformation, after all, was founded on just such a principle. Martin Luther himself at his trial for advocating positions contrary to the Catholic hierarchy confessed, “God help me, I can do no other.”

But sadly most of the reformers, including Luther himself, eventually proved unwilling to extend the privilege they arrogated to themselves to others. There were limits, they insisted, to how far the free and responsible search for truth and meaning might go. There were propositions they would not bear anyone questioning, to the point that they would happily slander anyone who did and even use every means in their power to end that person’s life.

Over the centuries Castellio’s haunting response to Calvin, a man who had been his long-time friend and admirer, stands as a stark admonition to all who lose their way and become wrapped up with a sense of their own infallibility: “To burn a man is not to defend a doctrine,” he said. “It is to burn a man.”

Let no one think that he or she is doing wrong in using their mental faculties. This is indeed the hallmark of our movement. Religion for us is not a matter of stretching and squeezing your own thinking and feeling to fit into someone else’s view, no matter how subtle or compelling. It is using your own native wit and the tugs of your heart to confront the mystery of your existence, your place in the world and how to get through your days with integrity and hope.

There are many wise and wonderful people worthy of our study and reflection who have addressed this subject over the million years or so that we as a species have been in existence. They have much to teach, much insight and wisdom as well as some real goofs and foolishness, but none of them speaks for you.

This last week in our adult education class organized around the Rev. John Buehrens’ book, Understanding the Bible, we spent a little time with that famous passage from Genesis commonly described in Christian churches as “The Fall.” It is, of course, the story of Adam and Eve and the garden, of how the first man and woman disobeyed God by eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and were banished from Eden.

Those of you who grew up in traditional Christian churches know that they regard this event as humankind’s original sin, a transgression so grave it took the death of Jesus on the cross to atone for it. For Jews the offense was hardly so grave: merely an example of humankind’s fickle and headstrong ways.

This story carries no particular weight with most Unitarian Universalists, but like any myth it can be evocative of the struggles we all endure in finding our way in the world. I am drawn to an interpretation that sees in this story a metaphor for the process of maturation that is an essential to our spiritual growth.

In our early years most of us are sheltered, our needs provided for, our questions responded to with firm answers. The time comes eventually, though, when we must split, we must separate from that which has sheltered us. If we are lucky, this moment is celebrated as a signal that we are coming into our own. We are given space to stretch and grow, and we are supported in the work of growing our own identities. If we are unlucky, we may be chided, even punished for daring to question, and the break we eventually are forced to make may be a traumatic one.

Like every other part of our lives, the growth of our spiritual identities requires freedom to test and question, to dive in and explore, to follow what we feel is our heart’s call, even when sometimes we find out later that it wasn’t that at all. It can be a rocky path, as I’m sure some of you here have experienced, filled with the kinds of thorns and thistles that the text in Genesis warns us that we may face as we leave the garden, especially if we go about it on our own.

That brings us to the wisdom of community. As Margot Adler, the radio personality and long-time Unitarian Universalist, puts it: “To be truthful about it, not everything comes from personal experience and revelation. There are times when gut and heart and intuition are not enough, and it’s important to have a reality check, people who will bring us down to earth.”

Yet, the community we seek is not one that sets up fresh roadblocks in our path – that says, you can only enter here if you affirm this or that belief, teacher, or text – but a community that welcomes us as we are: incomplete, unsure, questioning, possessed of some insight, some wisdom, but still deeply befuddled in so many ways.

Such a community embraces the notion of religion as a journey, not a destination, a path that each of us walks. It provides safe space to pursue and explore that which calls to us, yet it also requests of us the discipline of care and respect. In our community that discipline is framed as the covenant that guides how we agree to be with each other. We are free to frame our beliefs as we choose, but not free to be disrespectful or peremptory with each other. In community we learn a discipline grounded in love.

Our religious search, then, is free, but also responsible: responsible to what is true within us, what our authentic self affirms, but also responsible to others with whom we share this covenant of care.

Yes, our fourth principle can get us into trouble, especially among those whose vision of religious understanding is exclusive, even oppressive. As we see it, though, this principle proclaims that at the center of our life as a church is a vital and alive openness, a welcoming space where we each bring the epiphanies and puzzlements of our lives and engage in spirited exploration, where we are invigorated and renewed, awakened, inspired and amazed. May this church ever be so for you.

So be it.