Something must be done.

CC

Ok, this is very simple…
Who are you in real life, and why aren’t we friends?????

EOM.

Thanks for this.

And welcome home!

As for myself, I’m quite comfortable with the Bible, and I think given the history of our denomination as well as the theological orientation of lots of folks both inside and outside our walls, those of us who find value in it shouldn’t feel inhibited from preaching it confidently. I don’t think we’re so much “coopting someone else’s tradition” when we do so as reclaiming our own. As a denom with our roots firmly in Protestantism, the Bible is our original religious source, and it remains a perfectly valid one for us today even though we have also adopted others.

PB, glad to hear that your own church bucks the trend you’re decrying in your post. I’ve belonged to other congregations that do too. Yet I know the opposite isn’t just a stereotype–I’ve been to a number of UU congregations who really do seem defensive, confused, and maybe even spiritually-dead (an awful charge, one I hesitate to even mention as speculation).

Fausto: even though I was taught Bible in Sunday School and given a Bible at my 5th grade UU graduation, I would hesitate to speak from it in the pulpit as a guest lay preacher. I just don’t feel a sense of ownership toward it, it feels like I’m coopting someone else’s tradition (specifically, Christianity). I wouldn’t be much more comfortable doing that than coopting, say, Native American spiritual ways. Part of being UU to me means respecting other people’s ways and texts enough not to cherry-pick from them with a sense of entitlement. Since I’m not Christian and was never made to feel I was, Christianity seems like a foreign faith and the Bible seems like a part of my general religio-cultural heritage but not something I should speak from as an insider. I guess I’m ceeding the Bible to conservative Christians to a certain extent, but to me I feel like I’m also ceeding it to liberal Christians (UUs included) in an attempt not to rifle through their sacred text for my own, non-Christian, purposes.

Jeff Wilson (guess I need to sign my name since it comes up Tricycle).

I have a sneaking suspicion that if you brought your own quasi-hellfire and damnation about “how we’re all one people under God” and preached an impassioned, emotional, and theistic UUism that you’d quickly encounter some objections but over time build a strong church of dedicated, inspired parishioners.

Very true, but I’ll go even further — both further than what Tricycle asserts, and further than PB’s own pulpit.

Unless and until we start preaching that message from a lot of UU pulpits rather than only the odd one here or there, we will continue to be a slowly dying, increasingly irrelevant religious community.

And, likewise for the remaining, non-theistic pulpits, unless and until they find a similarly morally grounded and relevant voice that speaks not only to the general condition of society but also to the personal spiritual need of the parishioner.

PB says:

This isn’t to say that UU preachers have to rely on the Bible.

Agreed, but I would also offer the balancing observation that just as they needn’t rely on it, they needn’t deliberately avoid it either, as so many seem to do today. It can be a powerful tool in the right hands, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that in the era when we did rely primarily on the Bible, we were generally a lot more influential in society and effective in spreading what we now call our “principles” than we are today. Most of our principles today are merely a restatement of the same principles that yesterday our predecessors teased out of the Bible. There’s no need to set aside one of the truest, strongest arrows in our quiver.

She also says:

we should all feel stung and confronted and corrected in worship services, not for our politics but for our humanity, and for our many sins of commission and ommission.

Exactly, and this is exactly what is missing from many UU political sermons and positions statements. All too often they aren’t about redoubling our own commitment and correcting our own shortcomings, but about condemning and correcting the moral failures of somebody else in the broader society. In effect we’re ministering to other people who don’t want to hear from us, when we should be ministering to ourselves.

In the old Red Hymnal, there are more than a dozen orders of service, including a very humbling general confession, specifically acknowledging our sins of comission and ommission. This is the kind of language we never use in our sevices any more, but perhaps we should, at least in any service where the preacher sees fit to lament the shortcomings of others. As a very wise man once asked, “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is a log in your own eye?”

The big thing I hate about politics in church is that it so opens the church up for stupid stuff. Clyde Grubbs says on his blog that his minister friends are careful and thoughtful when preaching political things. I believe him. But the people who are NOT careful and thoughtful, or who are so in love with their causes that they don’t care, do a lot of damage.

This wouldn’t be my personal baliwick if I hadn’t seen some presentations from the pulpit that were way across the line. If grounding things in theology were a way to keep the truly nutjob “Let’s put on a play about the Patriot Act and call it a sermon” stuff, I could certainly be OK with the rest.

CC

Ps. GREAT post.