It’s that time of year when Nature rolls back the huge white snowy cotton comforter from the bed of the world here in the Northeast, to reveal what lies underneath: crocuses beginning to push up through the earth. Wet carpets of grass in varying shades of ochre waiting to dry in the sun and turn bright green. Leaves left behind after the fall cleanup, or fallen to the ground during winter, having still clung to tree branches after failing to catch the last train out of town before the first frost.
The melting of the snow and the coming of the spring equinox, which arrives faithfully this Thursday as it does every year, remind us that life goes on. The earth continues to turn at about 1,000 miles per hour, the pace of a turtle when seem from space … while here on the ground our world seems to be spinning out of control at a breakneck pace.
Well, thank heaven for gravity, for without Newton’s law, where would we be? Flung hither and yon into the cosmos, I imagine, involuntarily bolding going where no one has gone before.
You could wonder the same about life down here on the ground. Without the rule of law, without the rules of common decency, of brotherly and sisterly and otherly love, all of which we see eroding before our eyes, where will we be? Where will we be flung to? And who is there to stop it? Who will stand with us? Who will stand by us?
Thankfully, we do have something working for us and with us. Many things, in fact. In Unitarian Universalism, we have our six sources, our seven values, and our eight principles. Today I’d like to focus on our values—and, by association, any other values you may have—and how they can serve as our allies as we wend our way through a trying time.
Let me pause for moment to explain what I mean by our values. Many of you are familiar with our UU principles, in which we covenant to affirm and promote what you might call the Keys to a Good and Meaningful Life—our ideals—starting with our first principle, the inherent worth and dignity of every person, which we affirm and promote through, for example, our advocacy for LGBTQI rights or our ministries here at First Parish helping the homeless. We also affirm and promote the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all. That’s our sixth principle, and examples of that include our speaking out on the war in Ukraine, or our historical involvement in the civil rights movement and many other social justice causes.
Our seven principles were first adopted back in 1985, forty years ago. The eighth principle, which promotes and affirms building a multicultural community and fighting racism and other forms of oppression, was added more recently.
I also mentioned six sources. For many years, Unitarian Universalism has declared that our living faith tradition draws from many sources, including a sense of mystery and wonder and the words and writings of our religious ancestors. We draw strength and inspiration from the world religions, including Christianity and Judaism, Humanist teachings, and the spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions. Our living tradition, our faith, draws from these deep, deep wells—and more.
If some of this is unfamiliar to you and you’re thinking, where can I look these things up? -- I have good news for you: Whenever you sit in church, those principles and sources are always nearby. Just grab the gray hymnal at the end of your pew and turn to one of the first pages. You’ll find our principles and sources there. I highly recommend that every Sunday you find yourself sitting and waiting for worship to begin, it’s a worthy practice to grab a hymnal and look them up, and refresh your memory.
That brings me at last to our Unitarian Universalist values. Officially our values are almost brand new, adopted by our denomination just last June at General Assembly, which is what we call our annual meeting. There at General Assembly delegates voted to declare that Unitarian Universalists express our shared covenant through six values. Those values are pluralism, transformation, interdependence, justice, generosity, and equity—yes, equity, the E in DEI--and that these six values are all interrelated and interdependent and held together by love in the center.
It is these values that will be our allies as we barrel ahead into a time of uncertainty. They are what will stand by us. So let’s get to know them a little better. In no particular order …
Interdependence means we honor the interdependent web of all existence and acknowledge our place in it.
Pluralism is the feeling that we are all sacred beings, diverse in culture, experience, and theology.
Justice means we strive to be diverse multicultural Beloved Communities where all feel welcome and can thrive.
Transformation means we adapt to the changing world.
The value of equity means we declare that every person is inherently worthy and has the right to flourish with dignity, love, and compassion.
Generosity means we cultivate a spirit of gratitude and hope.
And last, love is the supreme value around which all of these other values gather.
If some of this language sounds redundant with our principles, that is because, officially, at least, according to the voting at General Assembly, these six values were intended to replace our principles and sources. I, however, believe we could use all the help we can get, and so it is my position that these values are yet another way for us Unitarian Universalists to express our truths. I say we keep the sources and the principles. Because our newly minted values serve another purpose altogether.
You see, I come from the world of branding. In my previous career, I advised corporations on what their truths were. I wrote mission statements then like I write sermons now, something like, “We, XYZ Company, exist to save lives through our unique and innovative medical technology and commitment to evidence-based medicine.” That’s overly simplified, but that’s the idea.
But I also helped these companies articulate their values. Their values, what they wanted their employees to personally embrace, were why they would succeed in pursuing their mission—not because they had the latest whiz-bang product. You can have the world’s greatest gizmo, like, say, an electric vehicle, but if your people value, say, efficiency over equity, there’s a fatal flaw in your organization, and while you might see a temporary bump in your stock price, you’re not likely to succeed in the long run, because people don’t get out of bed in the morning thinking, I want to be efficient today. You want your people to believe in something greater than profit and greater than themselves. It’s not unlike why we might follow a certain religion.
So in my prior career, I would sometimes be the one in the room to explain to a CEO what his or her company’s values were and why they mattered, and they would then use those values as part of their hiring criteria and to rally the troops.
So our values, they’re more than just words. Think of them as your spiritual software.
The first thing to know about this software package, which was first installed when you were young but has had many upgrades since, is that values are abstract, as opposed to the behaviors and actions guided by our values, which are concrete. For instance, an action might be feeling thankful for the crocuses that remind you that life goes on—that’s concrete. The value behind that action might be generosity, one of our UU values, which we define as cultivating a spirit of gratitude and hope. If crocuses don’t symbolize hope, I don’t know what does. Feeling thankful for them is the mark of a generous heart.
So values are abstract, which means they’re kind of squishy; you can’t quite hold them in your hand and they are kind of invisible. But they are surely there. And like any good software, they’re always running in the background and we don’t really think of them moment to moment. But also like software, if something is going wrong in our lives, we may stop to check our system settings and check in with our values to look for any compatibility issues.
Right now, with the state of the world such as it is, some of us might be feeling fear. Checking in with our values, asking ourselves what is important to us, might help us deal with that fear. In this case, our UU value of transformation, which places a high premium on adapting to a changing world, might help—but only if we dare act upon it. Now, it’s quite a lift to face one’s fears and ask oneself, instead of who’s going to help me, how can I change, what must I do to adapt to meet the moment? And yet, if we do that, and act upon it, we may find ourselves transformed by the experience. You’ve already done this, believe it or not. Think of the pandemic and the lessons learned, how you don’t think twice about logging into a Zoom meeting. Are any of us the same as we were before March of 2020?
The other thing to know about values is that unlike our principles, which respond to the world around us, and our sources, which mainly come from outside of us, our values live deep inside of us in a very unique way. They aren’t written down in a book at the end of a pew. They’re written in our hearts. We carry them with us wherever we go.
As is true of any software package, every so often we need reboot our spiritual software to debug it and make sure it’s running right. If you’ve ever gone on retreats or attended self-improvement workshops, those count as system checks and even, if you are lucky enough to have an epiphany during one of these outings, a reboot. Because you are, in a very real sense, checking in with yourself. You come back cleansed, refreshed. You have reinstalled your spiritual software.
Sitting in church on Sunday is also a way to do that. And I do mean sitting. I mean, I would love to think that here and on every other Sunday I’m up here that you are hanging onto my every word. But I assure you, if you enter this sacred space on Sunday—or any other day, it doesn’t have to be a Sunday—settle yourself in, just you and your values, you really have all that you need. In a way, even if you are sitting all by yourself in a pew, it’s actually quite crowded, for you have brought your values with you. Our values help us fill up our lives and make us a larger presence in the world. It’s as if we were surrounded by allies. As the poet Mark Nepo said in today’s reading, awareness of these connections, the preservation of presence, is the province of faith.
My favorite writer of all time is Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and one of my favorite statements of all time about church comes from a sermon Vonnegut once gave in New York City at St. Clement’s Episcopal Church. At the end of his sermon, Vonnegut said,
“This has no doubt been a silly sermon. I am sure you do not mind. People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.”1
I think one could do worse than to think of church as a place to daydream—about matters of the spirit, about the mysteries of life, about how we can be a better person and yes, how might we better respond to the tumult of the world.
The threat we are facing now is that the events taking place—or maybe it is just one big event, a turning of the wheel of time—what is going on now can make it hard to remember that we didn’t survive this long by accident. Something within us has worked, individually and collectively. Something has kicked in when we needed it most.
At First Parish, we have a mission: To inspire spiritual growth, to connect with one another, and to serve the wider community in love. As mentioned earlier, we are about to envision what living our mission might look like in the years to come, knowing that our physical house is old and in need of repair. Fortunately, our spiritual house is intact. And that is because of the values we share. Squishy they may be, but our values are also kind of relentless, a bit of the eternal in each of us in the here and now.
It is when we feel most alone that we must remember that we are never truly alone. And even if we doubt our faith or that any set of ethos is up to the task, our faith never abandons us. It is there in the form of what we value, what we hold dear, what is meaningful to us and what makes our lives worth living.
At the end of the day—at the end of every day—we have our faith. And our faith is faithful to us. It is there in our pluralism, seeing the sacred in everyone; our humble sense of interdependence; our insistence on equity and the worth and dignity of all; our burning desire for justice; our generous hearts, grateful and hopeful; and a willingness to be transformed, not defeated, by the changes in our world. Our values are with us, always. All powered by love, the stuff of which daydreams are made.
May it be so, and blessed be.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Palm Sunday. (New York: Dell, 1981), p. 330.