This sermon was presented by Rev. Judith Campbell at Stevens Chapel on March 2, 2003.

A Free and Responsible Search for Truth and Meaning

This is the fourth in a series of talks on our Unitarian Universalist & principles. #4 is: "We affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning". I think this is the one that those people who don’t understand us or who would try to dismiss us as not being "religious or spiritual…or even legitimate" would use. My skin crawls when I hear someone say to me, "Oh Yeah…Unitarian Universalists… "You guys can believe anything you want…right?"…Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Technically yes…but responsibly and meaningfully…not necessarily. In other words, each one of us really is free to choose our own religious and or ethical and or spiritual framework. But that being said, choosing and living within an ethical framework or religious belief system or spiritual practice is not like choosing amongst 28 flavors of ice cream or ordering a "Big Mac". "I’ll have a serving of religious liberalism please. Not too well done, Easy on the theology and hold the Jesus!" Or, "Hold everything that isn’t proven, and just give me a break!" "A scoop of Buddhism please, easy on the meditation."

All kidding aside. These principles look so easy. I just said "Look easy". Living them day to day is a different matter.

Within this 4th principle, we are examining the words "free and responsible" and "Truth and meaning". I will begin with meaning.

My "Last" doctoral student, who is finishing her dissertation as we speak, has done a wonderful piece of work studying the role of the importance of meaning making in the lives of marginalized teenage girls. Marginalized is defined here as teenaged girls who are not making a healthy transition from puberty to young adulthood: young women who are using drugs, who are runaways, who are in legal custody and who are engaged in any number of unhealthy to downright suicidal activities.

She and a colleague have created a two week summer program called "Side by Side", where inner city teens are paired with suburban teens to create a summer camping experience for inner city children who would otherwise not have an outdoor summer camping experience. For the first week, the teen leaders work together to get to know one another, and to prepare themselves and the camp for the children. The second week, the city kids come to the camp, and they all work together to become a community, working in a garden, keeping journals and creating a performance of some kind and together experiencing something that goes beyond the mechanics of living and their needs for food, sleep and exercise. It became clear to these kids that what was just as important as the food and the fun, was the spiritual dimension that grew out of their sharing and caring for one another.

By the end of the two weeks, most of the teen leaders felt that they had been profoundly changed by the experience of providing something of value to a bunch of kids who might never otherwise climb a real tree, eat a fresh tomato right out of a garden, or feed a real cow. For more than a few of them, it felt like it was the first time their lives had real meaning and purpose, that what they did and said made a difference in the life of another human being.

What my friend Eva found in her work with troubled teens is so many of them felt as though their lives had no real meaning. That they look at their parents engaged in the pursuit of making more and more money and using dope and/or drinking themselves silly while telling their kids to walk the "straight and narrow". They see their environment being dangerously polluted. They see random violence, drive-by shootings and now terrorism in their own front yards.

Seeing all of this, the kids would ask, "what’s it all about anyway, and what am I doing here, and why bother working hard if I stand a good chance of getting blown up anyway, in the end we are all going to die, so why not just do what I want to do now, there may not be a tomorrow!

That’s scary….And it’s not only kids think that way.

What Eva found in her work was they when kids found a way to have their lives make meaning and have purpose, they began to want live more responsibly, and to find ways to make a difference and taking responsibility for making it happen.

Somehow…we have moved onto the word responsibility.

A free and Responsible search for truth and Meaning. There is a UU Religious Education Curriculum for children entitled, "Freedom and responsibility." We here in America really do have the freedom to choose. But with that freedom comes the responsibility of having made a choice, which is why some people refuse to take that responsibility by refusing to commit. Have you ever noticed that? My own mother was the best I have ever seen at avoiding committing herself.

"Mum? What would you like for supper"
"I don’t know, what do you want"
"I asked you first"
"Anything you like I would like
"No, really, Mum, I want to cook something for you, what would be a real treat for you?"
"Anything you like to cook will be a real treat for me"

She could circle like this for hours. She was legend at not ever saying what she really wanted. She hated making up her mind, because if she chose one thing, she might have forever lost the opportunity to have something better if it came along That became too much of a responsibility, so she would duck and dodge for as long as I would play the game.

A responsible search for truth and meaning - for religious and/or spiritual truths and meaning - is a lifelong journey if you want it to be. It is much like the journey of scientific inquiry. In the field of science, each time we prove something or discover something it raises any number of questions and/or points which demand further exploration.

Now not everyone wants to be on a lifelong religious or spiritual quest. But if you care enough to call yourself a Unitarian Universalist, you must have thought about it at one time or another to have gone so far as to have signed the book and made it official. Some folks find what works for them early on and simply stay with what works. That’s OK. It’s almost a kind of a personality thing. Some are people are seekers, and some are finders and keepers.

I have an old painting buddy friend from back in my days as a professional artist. She was and is a fine expressionist painter. Her work is her signature. She has such a clear strong style that you can spot one of her paintings from a mile off. She has not significantly changed her style of painting in over 50 years. She has found what works for her and sells, and she has kept on doing it. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. She found what she was looking for early on, and she stayed with it.

Other artists have a more evolutionary style (you can guess whose summer camp I fall into). These artists continually evolve, trying out new things perfecting new techniques, exploring new media and continually exploring their own artistic and creative truths and meaning to their work. We are not flighty or irresponsible, we are simply on our particular journey because we like the looking for the questions as much as we like looking for the answers, maybe even more so!

One of the aspects of Unitarian Universalism that I find so compelling is that, within the denomination, and within our little church right here, there are so many avenues available to us to explore our individual journeys towards truth and meaning. We can explore the loving kindness Buddhist Philosophy with Jo Rice on Saturday mornings. We can look into ancient earth-based traditions with the Earth Spirituality group. Our Sunday mornings offer a rich variety of ideas with our practice of having such an open pulpit, and inviting those with something to say to come here and say it responsibly! And the institutional policy of the free pulpit of Unitarian Universalism guarantees my right to say what I want in this pulpit, as long as I do it responsibly!

I don’t know how many of you know that about the free pulpit. I really can say what I want. It’s in my contract and in the contract of all Unitarian Universalist ministers. And I don’t treat that privilege and responsibility lightly at all. Because of our congregational polity, if a congregation doesn’t like what the minister is saying, they can tell, ask and even advise him or her. But they can’t put a gag-order on the minister, unless they terminate the contract.

I freely chose ordination and joyfully accepted the huge responsibility that comes with it. A minister deals with people at the very core of their beings and at some of the most fragile times in their lives. It is a huge responsibility and it has given my life its meaning in a way that no painting I have painted or book I have written has ever done or will ever do. But I am not the only minister in this church, and I’m not talking about Janet. If we accept that the church itself has a ministry, then we are all ministers unto one another, in the ways that are needed, which are not necessarily the ways we might want to minister. I might want to make soup for someone because I like to do that and I think it’s needed, .whereas the person I’m thinking about might not want soup, but just want someone to be there and listen for a while. The responsibility in our collective ministry is to listen AND to hear, and then to respond. There’s the truth and meaning and responsibility again, all in one sentence.

Meaning does not come into our lives unbidden. But things can happen in our lives that change the meaning of our lives forever. We conceive, carry and give birth to a child. We fall in love, and commit to a partner. the loss of a loved one from our lives. We get a dog or a cat or even a plant that we must be responsible for. For meaning to happen in our lives, we have to make it happen; and that’s what we are trying to do both as human beings and Unitarian Universalist human beings.

If I am in a position to want to have a life of meaning, if I want to make a difference for my having walked on this planet, it is my responsibility to see that it happens. And then there’s truth

I could be on very thin ice here. For religious liberals, the light of truth is always at the end of the tunnel. It’s just that the tunnel goes on for ever. We are always aware of it, and we are/should always be responsibly moving towards it. But just when we think we are almost there a new truth is revealed: the earth is round; I am not at the center of the universe, however much I would like to think so. And God is not an old man with a beard who lives in the "Sixteenth chapel" in Italy. The divine is different for each one of us. It is one of the most fundamental elements of liberal religion: that we just don’t know, but we are always open to new ideas.

In religions which decree that God and the Truth about God are fixed, the task of the believer is to find out as much as possible about that which is already established and will not change. It is a different kind of challenge. But we have chosen the road less traveled. And there aren’t any maps, just beloved community each responsibly searching for truth and meaning, sharing the journey, and respecting our differences.

How we undertake the free and responsible search for truth and meaning will be different for each one of us. Some of us can, for example, decide to form a covenant group and explore ideas together; that’s kind of an inside approach. On the other hand, our Social Action Committee is making meaning by trying to find ways to make a difference in the larger community. They are exploring ways to envision the ultimate truth of equity and social justice. Green groups are envisioning a sustainable planet that won’t get all used up and left to die. All of us, in supporting our Religious Education efforts, are helping our children learn the very fundamentals of making meaning and the search for truth in their own lives by seeing others - that’s the rest of us - in their community do it.

The liberal religious journey towards the light of truth will go on for another hundred thousand years - if we don’t blow ourselves up. For us and a few other notables like Plato, Socrates and Confucius, the search for the ultimate truth is an ongoing process. The responsible searcher keeps uncovering the onion layers of the truth in the light of new evidence, and in faith that there will always be new evidence, and in hope that we humans will continue the free and responsible search, and continue the free and responsible search, and continue the free and responsible search,……and that’s the Truth!

Amen. Blessed be.