By highly unofficial survey, of the seven principles that we affirm and promote as a member congregation of the Unitarian Universalist Association, number four, “A free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” is the favorite. Today we delve into what this freedom and responsibility mean, at a particularly acute moment for our country.
Worship leader: Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern
Special music: Ihang Lin, piano
Photo by Brandon Mowinkel on Unsplash
Follow along in the order of service: bit.ly/uucpa_oos_20210124
Video of the entire January 24, 2021 service with copyrighted and private information redacted.
Do you know the song that’s in our hymnal that goes: (sings) “I wish I knew how it would feel to be free. I wish I could break all these chains holding me,” and then this great, enigmatic line,
“I wish I could say all the things I could say.” It raises so many questions. What are these things that I could say? And why can’t I say them?
What is keeping us from saying the things that we could say if we were free? Sometimes it’s an actual danger. Sometimes we are at no physical risk, yet there’s something else making us feel as if we can’t speak what is in our hearts . . . Or maybe we don’t even know yet what we want to say, and we won’t be able to say it until we do know it.
And to turn the question around: what would help us to say what we could say? What would make us safer, braver, wiser . . . more free?
One thing we do to help ourselves along is come here: to explore, to discover what we think, to discover what we believe is true and to what we want to commit ourselves.
Compelled by longing, we come here we seek out practices and people that will help us to be free and to say what is in our hearts.
When I gave a version of this sermon several years ago, I was thinking mostly of internal congregational practices. But last week, as I searched for a sermon that would bear repeating, this one caught my eye because its theme also resonates with our country’s struggles. All year, during the pandemic; and for many years, as our political and economic systems have shifted; and really, for the entire history of this country, we have posed the question: how does it feel to be free? What does freedom mean?
You may know that Unitarian Universalist congregations promise each other that they will affirm and promote seven principles. In an extremely informal survey of Unitarian Universalists, the favorite of these principles is the fourth. The middle one. I’m tempted to say, therefore, the hub around which all the others revolve, although honestly, one could make that argument for any of the seven . . . In any case, we like it. It is “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”
If we were in our Main Hall, I’d urge you to take a wallet card of the principles from our pamphlet rack. Instead, I’ve put them at the end of the order of service so you can print them out if you want to keep them handy. I know somebody who keeps a little stack of them by the front door so that when somebody comes and tries to give her their religious literature, such as the Watchtower, she agrees to take theirs if they’ll take hers. I guess we’re not seeing a lot of door-to-door proselytizing at the moment.
In this fourth principle, there are at least four words of such richness...
