The Joy of Association
Reverend Doctor Gaye
Williams Ortiz
Aiken Unitarian
Universalist Church
June 9, 2013
"Authorities
arrested 151 people in the rotunda between the legislative
chambers during the latest “Moral Monday” protest – the largest mass
arrest since the N.C. NAACP began organizing
the weekly civil disobedience events in late April.
The
number is nearly the equivalent to the arrests at the four prior
protests combined and brings the total above 300 this session.
The
crowd of spectators also exploded, with hundreds rallying on
the mall outside the legislative building, listening to speakers condemn
Republican legislative leaders. “That’s extreme,” shouted the Rev.
William Barber, the N.C. NAACP president, into
a loud speaker as he listed legislation Republicans have approved
this year. “That’s immoral, and we must stand up and wake up right here,
right now.”
Police
estimated the crowd at 1,000 – about five times more than the last
protest – but organizers counted 1,600."
One of our Unitarian Universalist ministers, the Rev Robin Tanner,
was arrested at a protest last month on the one-month anniversary of her
wedding…and her life partner, the Reverend Ann Marie Alderman, was arrested
this week. Today in solidarity I’m wearing the stole they sent me for my
ordination, which they bought for me on their honeymoon in Guatemala. Maybe
this news has passed you by…but it is an important illustration of the ‘joy of
association.’
The Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams is known
for his writings on voluntary associations. And he says that the freedom of the
individual American citizen defines the voluntary principle – our freedom of
speech and freedom of belief come under what he calls ‘voluntaryism.’ But chief
among the freedoms, he argues, is the freedom to associate. And in the early
1970s, while writing “The Voluntary Principle in the Forming of American
Religion,” he was concerned with the paradox he saw since the end of World War
II, namely instances of the US government of infringing on the rights of
Americans to exercise their First Amendment right to demonstrate nonviolently, which he believed were at odds with the image of America as the ‘land of the free.’
However, Adams
says that these freedoms of speech and belief fall short of the defining
distinction of voluntaryism, which is the institutional aspect: that we have
the freedom to form voluntary associations, and that this “distinguishes the
democratic society from any other” (James Luther Adams, Voluntary Associations,
1986, p.172).
Why is this particular freedom not free from attack in our society?
Adams says it is because “freedom of association…represents a dynamic force for
social change or for resistance to it” (173). It is a way in which individuals
can join together and exercise power through organizations, and can participate
“in the process of making social decisions” (173).
The creation of the voluntary church, in our historical context,
came about when the primitive Christian church rejected the civic religion of
Caesar and the institutional gods, who had to be worshipped by citizens who had
to belong to that imperial religion. It called for individuals to make
voluntary choices to join the Christian movement, and it used new forms of communication
and organization – a covenant and a community serving the ethos of
voluntaryism.
Then Christendom was created on the backs of these primitive
Christians! And so the call for separation of church and state, Adams writes,
was also a call for a self-sustaining freedom of choice. The collection plate –
which we really don’t like to talk about except at the annual stewardship drive
– actually became the most important symbol of a free faith! According to
Adams, “the collection plate symbolizes – indeed it in part also actualizes and
institutionalizes – the view that the church as a corporate body is a
self-determinative group and that in giving financial support to the church
members affirm responsibility to participate in the shaping of the policies of
the church” (177).
Do you feel the weight of that responsibility right now? Let me give
you a few examples from Unitarian Universalist history that we mark just in the
week to come, that show us how beholden we are to liberal religious heroes of
voluntaryism.
Tomorrow, the 10th of June, is the day in 1565 when
Socinianism was formed. Socinianism is also called the Minor Reformed Church of
Poland, and it is named after Faustus Socinus who spread anti-trinitarian
ideas. The movement spread from Poland to have a great influence on English and
Transylvanian Unitarianism. Socinians wanted to go back to the ways of
primitive Christianity, and in particular were pacifists.
In 1569 Hermann van Flekyk was burned in Bruges (now in Belgium) for
denying the Trinity and deity of Jesus Christ in a public debate with a
Franciscan monk.
In 1645 Paul Best was denounced before the British House of Commons
for his blasphemies, which were to deny the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and
the Holy Ghost. He was ordered to be hanged but thanks to Oliver Cromwell, who
intervened, he lived to write more about Unitarianism.
Still on the 10th of June, in 1841, an American, Minot
Judson Savage, was born; he was a Congregational minister who converted and as
a Unitarian minister was a popular preacher whose sermons were circulated by
the thousands. He played a major role in 1894 in ending a controversy between
the Unitarian National Conference and the Western Conference.
Okay, I’ll spare you the rest of this week in UU history …oh well,
maybe one more name: Lewis McGee, who was installed on June 13 1948 as an
African-American minister of a new interracial Unitarian church in Chicago,
called the Free Religious Fellowship (Unitarian).
McGee did not find it easy to find a position in either Unitarian or
Universalist congregations, and at one point he was told “If you want to be a
Unitarian you’d better build your own church.” (Frank Schulman, This Day in Unitarian Universalism, p.
111)
Without these people, we would not have the free faith that we have
now. As the Rev. Paul Rasor writes, “liberal theology is not for the faint of
heart. It points us in a general direction without telling us the specific
destination. It refuses to make our commitments for us, but holds us
accountable to the commitments we make” (Patricia Prevert, ed., Welcome: a Unitarian Universalist Primer,
2009, p. 61)
Right after this service today all of the members of this church
will be held to accountability – as voluntary members – in decision-making. The
polity, or form, of every Unitarian Universalist congregation is based upon its
autonomous democratic exercise of commitment that we call an annual
congregational meeting. The meeting needs a quorum, a certain number of
members, in order to have a vote and make members’ decisions valid and binding
– as Adams described it, this congregation is a self-determinative group.
That is why we should be so happy to welcome new members today: they
join other members in determining the future of this church – and, in effect,
the future of Phoebe Mae’s church, until she is old enough to become a member
and join in herself in preserving this free liberal faith of ours. If you have
previously seen the annual meeting as a bit if a drag, if you have entertained
the thought that you might slip out before the business is finished, think
again. Look at that child, think of our children in the Annex: I can’t believe
that anyone here can honestly say that the future of our children’s faith is
not important!
Of course, the decisions you make today in this meeting are not earth-shattering;
we will not create world peace or solve world hunger in the next hour or two.
But what we will do is honor those Unitarians and Universalists – and Unitarian
Universalists – who protest injustice today as well as those who have gone
before us, ready and willing to radically volunteer to the point of scorn, of
public humiliation, of punishment, even of death, in order to give us – today,
in this sanctuary – a free faith. A faith that is, in the words of Lewis McGee,
“a religion that stresses the dignity and worth of the person as a supreme
value and goodwill as the creative force in human relations” (Frevert, p. 58).
Called together as one, May we be the ones who make it so, Blessed
Be, Amen.
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