On August 3, 2019—it was a Saturday—the Reverend Doctor Jonipher Kwong, then minister for the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, stood before an audience at a Hawaiian community center and performed a pretty remarkable feat: He summarized the entire history of Unitarian Universalism in about an hour.
Reverend Kwong had his work cut out for him. First, he had to survey the history of not one but two religions, double the work. And second, the roots of both Unitarianism and Universalism go back a long time. Today, the first Sunday of the new year, feels like a good time to reconnect with those roots, for it can help us appreciate that we have been here a long time, we UUs, and no matter what this new year may bring, we’re not going anywhere, and we will still have much to celebrate as this new year unfolds.
Today we just held our annual Burning Bowl ritual, a tradition that has its roots in ancient rites, and so today feels like an important day for us. But there is another day coming that is in fact the most important day in our church year, one that symbolizes everything we are about. But I will get to that. First, we’ll take a quick dance through our long history to help you understand why that day matters so much.
Now, I happen to be standing before an audience that can appreciate the long history of our denomination more than most. First Parish of Taunton is one of the oldest religious bodies in America, first gathered back in 1637. But 1637 was modern times when it comes to Unitarianism as well as Universalism. It was 100 years earlier that King John Sigismund of Transylvania, the first Unitarian king anywhere, became the first monarch to put religious freedom into law. His was the earliest edict of complete religious toleration, proclaimed on January 28, 1568.
The edict read in part:
His Majesty … reaffirms that in every place the preachers shall preach and explain the Gospel each according to his understanding of it, and if the congregation like it, well, if not … they shall be permitted to keep a preacher whose teaching they approve.[1]
It was revolutionary and it planted the seeds for the congregational churches begun in the old Plymouth Bay Colony here. In that proclamation were principles we hold dear: religious freedom, freedom of the pulpit, and congregational self-rule.
So you could say that January 28th should be commemorated every year as a Unitarian Universalist holiday, the most important day for religious liberalism. The ecclesiastical shot heard round the world.
But on that Saturday just a few years ago in Honolulu, Reverend Jonipher Kwong went further back. Way back. Because the roots of both Unitarianism and Universalism go back to the early days of Christianity.
On the Unitarian side, we have the Council of Nicaea, when hundreds of bishops gathered in what is now part of Turkey in the year 325. The bishops were there to debate and vote on the existence of a Holy Trinity. They started debating in May and went to the end of July, when, by a majority vote, human beings informed God that he was in fact three, not one—father, son and Holy Ghost.
But at that same council, a priest named Arius argued that God was singular, that Jesus was not God. I’ll let Reverend Jonipher tell it. He said:
There was this group of people called the Arians, and the Arians believed that Jesus was not God himself, so he was a son of God, but not any more so than you and I are children of God.[2]
Aruis the priest said there was no Holy Trinity. Although he lost the vote, many people agreed with Arius, and his thinking, which became known as Arianism, planted the seeds for Unitarianism. (I know, a lot of -arianisms.)
So we might look to a day at the end of July as our most important day because there at the Council of Nicaea was the founding of Unitarian thought, even though today the word “Unitarian” no longer retains the literal sense of one God so much as it does the belief that all creation, all reality is connected, and that we are one.
Now, Universalism … Universalism is even older. The early Christian theologian Origen, who was born in the year 185, believed in God’s goodness, and this convinced him that God was guiding creation toward an ultimate reunion with its benevolent creator God—no eternal damnation, in other words. It was the earliest declaration of the Universalist theology of universal salvation.
Origen, who hailed from Alexandria, Egypt, was eventually imprisoned, tortured and martyred for his beliefs. But he was, for centuries, the preeminent Christian theologian, influencing every church that came along. So Origen’s birthday might point us toward a very important day in our history, the birth of Universalist theology.
But let’s fast forward to other important events in our history. We could point to October 27, 1553, when Spanish theologian Miguel Servetus was burned at the stake in Geneva by John Calvin, the Protestant reformer. Servetus wrote many essays stating that there was no Holy Trinity. Most of Servetus’s writings were burned right along with him, but his ideas took hold and inspired Unitarians for centuries to come.
So October 27th could be our day, not only honoring Miguel Servetus’s martyrdom, but delivering quite the comeuppance to John Calvin, the founder of Calvinism and the doctrine of predestination, as well as the image of the Puritans as stern, dour and focused on humankind’s depravity, with hell always just around the corner.
But let’s move on. For our most important day we could look to the year 1770, when Universalist minister John Murray sailed from England to New Jersey and then settled up in Gloucester. Or 1794, when British scientist Joseph Priestly brought Unitarianism to America, landing in Philadelphia. I’m a bit partial to acknowledging 1811, when Maria Cook, considered the first woman to preach in Universalist pulpits, began her work, or 1863, when Universalist minister Olympia Brown became the first woman to be ordained by a denomination in. Either of their birthdays, or better yet, Cook’s first sermon or Brown’s ordination date, seem worthy of celebration, the very essence of a living tradition not satisfied with doing things the way they’d always been done.
Of course, there are also moments that changed our world, and, one could say, the world in general. The Dedham Decision of 1820, a court case which established the autonomy of churches, especially in their choice of minister, led to America’s first churches splitting off into Unitarian churches and what are called congregational churches such as United Church of Christ. When the congregations split, the liberal Unitarians usually got to keep the property—the buildings and the parish silver. It’s why many UU churches are called First Parish and why many United Church of Christ churches are called First Congregational Church. It’s also why some UU historians like to joke that the Unitarians kept the silver but the Congregationalists kept the Bible.
The Dedham Decision also changed the world in general in that it led to the doctrine known as separation of church and state. So the day in February 1820 that this decision was handed down in a Dedham, Massachusetts courtroom was a very important day in our history.
There are also the days prophetic words came forth from our pulpits to plant our religious stakes in the ground and, in some cases, change the course of religious history. William Ellery Channing’s sermon, “Unitarian Christianity,” delivered in Boston in 1819, was the first public declaration of Unitarianism in America. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Divinity School Address, which he preached at Harvard to a graduating class of 13 ministers in 1838, outlined the need and forthrightness of a transcendentalist spirituality versus the cold intellectual sermonizing of the typical Unitarian minister. As one of my UU history professors noted, in that address Emerson said to those young men, you preach as if you’ve never been in love.
A few years after Emerson’s address, Theodore Parker, West Roxbury’s minister and a leading abolitionist, preached a famous sermon in 1841 called, “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity.” According to UU historian Mark Harris, Parker’s sermon “stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy,” when Parker argued something we take for granted today, that great spiritual truths emerge not from Scripture but from our own hearts and our own experiences. So the day Parker delivered that sermon, May 19, might be our most important day.
Let’s crank up the time machine and fast forward to 1933 and the issuing of the Humanist Manifesto, the first declaration of ideas that had spread among Unitarians that reality is self-existing and not created by God or a god. Many humanists identify as atheist or agnostic, but not all humanists are atheist or agnostic. The Manifesto and a revised version issued in 1973 helped humanists feel welcome in our congregations and likely fueled explosive growth of our congregations in the 1970s, when our denomination’s membership numbers peaked. So those days in 1933 and 1973 feel pretty important.
Then there is May 15, 1961, when the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of American voted to consolidate into what today is known as the Unitarian Universalist Association, our denomination. Given that it is our birthday, one might regard May 15 as the most important day in our history.
That day nearly 64 years ago was followed by others, of course. The Marches on Selma, which took place in March of 1965, just four years after our founding, saw the murders of the Rev. James Reeb, a UU minister from Roxbury, and a civil rights volunteer, Viola Liuzzo of Detroit. Reeb and Liuzzo were the first Unitarian Universalist martyrs. So Reeb’s birthday in January and Liuzzo’s birthday in April might be honored as UU holidays the way Martin Luther King’s birthday is honored in January.
I could go on with dates and names, but you get the point. There are a lot of candidates for our most important day. Yet there is another kind of day one might hold as the most important in Unitarian Universalism, the most sacred. The most meaningful and inspiring.
That is the day you discovered Unitarian Universalism, or, if you were raised UU, the day it really landed firmly in your soul that this was your church, your religious kin, your spiritual home—your tribe. That you were UU through and through.
I hope you have had a day like this. I can remember the first Sunday I walked into First Parish of Watertown with my five-year-old son and was smitten. Now he’s 34, raised UU and as good as they get, and I’m a minister. You never know what will happen when UU finds you.
But there is one last way I can think of to find our most important day—maybe you can think of others, but I’m really just an armchair historian and my powers are limited—just one more way to flip open the calendar, grab a Sharpie and circle one date and say there—there—that is the one day we can all agree on; that is the most important day, the one that crystalizes what Unitarian Universalism is all about.
For Catholics and many other Christians, it’s Easter. For Jews, it is the 10 Days of Awe, beginning with Rosh Hashana and concluding with Yom Kippur. For Muslims, it is Id Al Fitr, the last day of the holy month of Ramadan. For Hindus in India it is Diwali, the Festival of Lights.
So what is it for us?
Remember that we call Unitarian Universalism a living tradition. Our faith is alive; it breathes; it grows; it changes. A liberal religion both responds to the times and tries to make the times better, drawing upon a rich history and rich traditions but always with a readiness to think of something new.
Which is why I would like to suggest that the most important day in Unitarian Universalism … is Monday, January 6, 2025. Tomorrow. In a living tradition, and especially a living tradition such as ours, the most important day is always the next day.
Yesterday is done; we can’t change it. We can change how we feel about it, but we can’t change it. Today we can do something about, but it’s going to be over pretty soon. Tomorrow, though … tomorrow could be better than today depending on what we say and do and how we live our faith.
On this Sunday we are facing nearly a year’s worth of tomorrows. What will be do with them? Rather than feel tremendous pressure—my gosh, that’s a lot of tomorrows!—what if instead we were to feel … hopeful? Because if we somehow didn’t quite change the world today, guess what? We get another chance tomorrow. And then another. And another. And so on. It can be very freeing.
Today we let go of something about the year just ended. In a sense, we made our spiritual suitcase a little lighter for the journey ahead. And we made some room in that suitcase—more room for our faith. All that history, all that resilience, all that achievement is something we can carry forward. Because, as Unitarian Universalists, it all belongs to us. And the thing to remember about all those important days and events you heard about today is this: None of them changed anything in the immediate aftermath. But they changed an awful lot of tomorrows for the better. Goodness takes time—or perhaps it is that goodness takes its time, with no less than eternity waiting.
A few Sundays ago I shared these words from the liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. I offer them again because I find them so very reassuring and I hope you do, too:
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.
Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.[3]
Our faith urges us to look forward, not backward. With hope, not regret. Regret, after all, is merely doubt in the rearview mirror. Unpack those doubts and carry hope. Make room for love.
When the most important day is always tomorrow, there is always a reason to get out of bed in the morning. There is always something to look forward to. There is always a reason to say, “Thank God I’m here.”
With tomorrow the most important day, and with that as the cornerstone of our faith, we could say our faith always gives us reason to hope. More important, and perhaps most important, our faith always gives us reason to live.
Amen, and blessed be.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Torda.
[2] UU History by Rev. Dr. Jonipher Kūpono Kwong. August 3, 2019. Neighborhood Place of Puna, Puna, Hawai'i.
[3] Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Irony of American History.