PROVE ALL THINGS: CHANNING’S CALL

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

May 14, 2006

READING

From “Unitarian Christianity” by W.E. Channing

We grant that the use of reason in religion is accompanied by danger. But we ask any honest ham to look back on the history of the church, and say, whether the renunciation of it be not still more dangerous. Besides, it is plain fact that men reason erroneously on all subjects as on religion. . . . But who ever supposed that we must cease to exercise reason on nature and society because men have erred for ages in explaining them? We grant that the passions continually disturb the rational faculty in its inquiries into religion. The ambitious contrive to find doctrines that favor their love of dominion. The timid and dejected discover a gloomy system, and the mystical and fanatical a visionary theology. . . .

The true inference from the almost endless errors that have darkened theology is not that we are to neglect and disparage our power, but to exert them more patiently, circumspectly, uprightly. The worst errors, after all, having spring up in that church that proscribes reason and demands from its members implicit faith. The most pernicious doctrines have been the growth of the darkest times, when the general credulity encouraged bad men and enthusiasts to broach their dreams and inventions, and to stifle the faint remonstrances of reason, but the menaces of everlasting perdition.

Say what we may, God us given us a rational nature, and will call us to account for it. We may let it sleep, but we do so at our peril.

SERMON

The risk inherent in a religious movement like ours that remains ever open to evolving truth is that we can become so preoccupied with concerns of the present day that we lose sight of our identity. The metaphor for this that one person offered recently was to point to the role of beach grass in preserving sand dunes. The grass’s deep roots help hold the dunes in place and preserve their integrity. If you dig up the grass, the wind and waves will blow the dunes away.

For us as a liberal religion that steers clears of creeds and catechisms, it is our history that gives us our rootedness. The struggles of our predecessors, those whose labors contributed to the emergence of this free, open and affirming religious tradition, remind us where we came from and teach us how we might confront the quandaries of our own faith journeys and respond when the forces of narrowness, intolerance and oppression appear in our own day.

This year our Flower Communion, an important ritual emerging from our history, nearly coincides with the anniversary of a major milestone in the liberal church, what is famously known as the Baltimore sermon of William Ellery Channing. So, today I’d like to spend some time exploring our roots as Channing established them and reflect on how we might trace them to the stems, leaves and buds that are opening around us today.

An interesting aspect of Channing’s sermon in May 1819 is what a heavily managed event it was. The ostensible occasion was the ordination of a Boston seminarian, Jared Sparks, whom Channing knew well, as the first minister of the newly opened First Independent Church of Baltimore, a church that remains in our association today.

But there was far more at stake in his sermon than welcoming one man into ministry. Channing in recent years had taken on the role among congregational ministers in Boston as the chief advocate for a gathering theological consensus among the more liberal clergy.

This came at a time when the predominant theology was Calvinism, the doctrine that all humans are by nature depraved, born with an innate bent toward sin, and that only by the grace of God, given to a select few chosen at the beginning of time, could we achieve salvation. In our UU101 class I refer to this a “Cinderella” theology, borrowing an image offered by the Unitarian Universalist historian Alice Blair Wesley. The idea is that, like Cinderella, we are all born in an ashy state and we require the arrival of the prince – Jesus in this theology – to be redeemed.

The Boston liberals insisted that we are all born with the capacity for good as well as evil, and we need not wait for some transforming experience to know what is right; rather, we can seek out the impulse to goodness that is within each of us. It isn’t always easy to find the good, they argued. We make mistakes and have to learn and discipline ourselves, but we are all capable of leading worthy lives.

The more orthodox clergy, though, were alarmed by this thinking and set out to find a way to discredit it. And one conservative minister, Jedidiah Morse, thought he found it in letters to the liberals from the clergyman Theophilus Lindsey, a leader of the British Unitarian movement. Though sympathetic to Lindsey’s criticism of the trinity, the Boston liberals disagreed with his position that Jesus had been fully human. They held out for the idea that Jesus was at least somewhat God-like, and they were not interested in theological labels that would divide the churches. Morse, though, felt he had found the tool to fight the liberals and published Lindsey’s letters as proof that they were in league the discredited “Unitarians” of Britain.

Replying in religious journals, Channing and others denied the charge, but soon concluded that they had no choice but to engage in the battle that had been thrust upon them. Channing agreed to deliver the message and the Baltimore ordination was chosen as the location. Leading liberal clergy of Boston joined the sizeable entourage to Baltimore and plans were made in advance to rush Channing’s sermon into print.

In some ways, Channing was a curious choice for this august task. Sickly and frail, he stood at not quite five feet tall and his soft voice hardly carried, so it is said that few present in Baltimore could actually hear the hour-and-a-half-long address he gave. But as minister of Boston’s Federal Street Church, Channing was also renowned for the moral power of his preaching, a clear, reasoned writer who when pressed could show powerful passion.

The text he chose for his sermon was one of the simplest and most direct in the Bible, and it served as a crucible to test the claims of the conservatives and make the liberal case: From Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians: Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.

Channing began with his title – Unitarian Christianity – accepting the label with which the conservatives sought to tar him. The liberals, he said, were happy to advocate for the unity of God in the face the confusing, convoluted doctrine of the trinity. In fact, he said, anyone who made a reasoned and honest study of the Bible would agree with it.

And here is where Channing centered his sermon. The teachings of religion, if they are to have worth to us, he said, must bear up under the scrutiny of the human mind. We can demand that they make sense. Conservatives had dismissed such demands as prideful hubris. How could we flawed humans pretend by our petty powers to gain insight to the divine plan? Unquestioning faith, not skeptical questioning was what was demanded of us.

Remember Channing’s response from our reading earlier: using our reason in religion is no guarantee we will not make mistakes. Yet, any honest look at the history of the church makes plain that renouncing it is more dangerous. The true inference from our errors is not that we should neglect our powers of discernment, but that we should apply them more carefully and patiently. The worst errors, he said, emerge in those religious communities that are suspicious of the reasoning mind and that demand implicit faith.

And Channing made clear that his admiration of human reasoning was grounded in something even deeper: belief in the fundamental moral nature of humankind. The Calvinist view was that, absent the grace of God, humans were essentially incapable of moral action. On their own they were degraded, debauched beings until lit by the light of religious conversion.

Channing’s view was that that light of moral action need not be sought elsewhere. It is present in each of us. There is, he felt, a greatness to every human being, which we become acquainted with through the exercise of our reasoning and our conscience. The role of religion, he felt, was not to advise anxious followers how to appease an angry God, but to teach how to cultivate that seed of greatness within each of us. An active life is required of us, one where we use every faculty at our disposal to better the world and bring ourselves better in tune with the greatness of our hearts.

Channing’s sermon met and exceeded every expectation the Boston liberals had. It sold thousands of copies, ranking as the best-selling pamphlet in America for a decade of more, and enthusiasm over it results in the starting of Unitarian churches in cities across the country. In New England, the next several decades marked the highpoint of the American Unitarian church’s influence.

Channing himself became hugely influential, and a decade later, his thinking was an important influence among Unitarian ministers who described themselves as Transcendentalists. Channing, though, distanced himself from that group. He was troubled by how they strayed from Biblically centered Christianity, where Channing focused his ministry.

That, of course, is a reminder of how in looking at historical figures we must be respectful of their context. Channing’s image of himself was as a dutiful Christian minister, interested not so much in kicking off a new denomination as in introducing a humane spirit to the religious life.

Yet, many of the themes he introduced in his Baltimore sermon and subsequent preaching echo across the years. We find them in our Unitarian Universalist principles affirming the worth and dignity of all and a free and responsible search for meaning. And we reenact them today with our Flower Communion that invites us to imagine a flower as representing the wonder and beauty that we each bring to this place.

Our work as a church proceeds from the assumption that each of us is worthy, that each of us is encouraged to use all our gifts, our faculties to weigh whatever comes from this pulpit or anywhere else in this community or outside it and decide for ourselves how relevant it is to our own notions of religious truth. We are guided by a vision of a “reasonable faith,” a settled sense of our place in the world and what matters that touches on every part of our lives, that resonates with our own moral compass and that makes sense.

The challenges we face are framed in different terms than they were in Channing’s day. Debate over original sin and predestination is no longer a pressing concern. But we still find the thread of a way of thinking that despairs over the state of the world and what we as humans are able to do about it.

Underlying that pessimism is a fear that our capacities are too meager to cope with the woes that face us, that the only source of our hope is from somewhere far beyond us. It is a way of thinking that distrusts our own hearts and minds and is susceptible to the influence of those who claim to speak for a higher power.

Amid all this, I find myself turning to Channing’s confidence in what he called the greatness of human spirit. “Every person in every condition is great,” he wrote in his sermon on “Self Culture.” “It is only our own diseased sight which makes them little.”

Could it be that in our despair we are merely infected with diseased sight? How would it be if we adopted Channing’s words as a way of response: every person in every condition is great? And if so, how would we elicit that greatness?

On this Mother’s Day, it strikes me as the kind of question a mother would ask, someone who looks at us and sees not all the faults and foibles that stare at each of us from the mirror, but a person of inherent worth and dignity, a person of greatness.

Channing’s call to us is to find that greatness in ourselves and each other, to use our gifts to weigh and test all that confronts us in life and to hold fast to what is good. With it we will find us the wisdom to survive that Wendell Berry counsels us to work for, making our seasons welcome here, locating in our memory, the memory of traditions that we renew and relive, a hope that will grow into legend, learning to know the abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds, that will be health and wisdom and indwelling light.

So be it.