Another creed

 It is often passed off as the case that the Unitarians have no creed.

As we have often remarked here, that is not the case.  Every Unitarian has a creed (in fact, we would argue that every person has a creed - a philosophy or set of values that they live by, whether they recognise them in that way, or not).

We have recently published here, in serial form, a take on the Apostles' Creed by one of our members.

This has set another one of our members thinking, about their own personal creed. And they are now happy to publish it here.  It's a photograph of the front page of their daily office (service) book and journal, ready and waiting to be seen and reiterated every morning, as a measuring stick for the previous day and a goal for the day to come.

Life with the neighbours — giving, but with no sense of condescension

As Chesterton wrote : ‘We have to love our neighbour because he is there – a much more alarming reason for a much more serious operation.  He is the sample of humanity which is actually given us. Precisely because he may be anybody he is everybody. He is a symbol because he is an accident.’  G. K. Chesterton, 'Heresy' (House of Stratus, Thirsk, 2001)

~~~~~~~~~

For only the second time, people who usually meet under the Unitarian umbrella in Ringwood (Hants, UK) met on Zoom on 11 April 2021.

We lit the candle in our chalice at the start of the gathering.

In the gathering there were prayer and blessing words from Rev David Usher, Rev Andy Pakula, Darren Canning.  We heard a suggestion from Marcus J. Borg on a relevant way to read the Bible, 'Reading the Bible Again for the First Time — taking the Bible seriously but not literally.'  The website  www.bibleodyssey.org had also been a help in preparation for the gathering.  There was music from www.smallchurchmusic.com and the Unitarian Musical Society.  There were two readings, and we were also given the space for private, personal prayer or meditation practice in the customary seven minute period of silence.

The first reading was from the Bible, taken from the book of Luke, chapter 10 verses 25-37, a story commonly referred to as 'The Good Samaritan', but which we now prefer to know as 'The priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan.'  The take home points were these:

• Jesus presented the ethnic and religious outcast not only as the story’s hero but also as the moral exemplar and, because of the compassion he showed the person in need, the inheritor of eternal life — the one to imitate, should one be seeking to inherit eternal life.  The corollary implied by Jesus was that, on their showing that day, neither the ritually pure priest nor the Levite would inherit eternal life.
• Jesus switched the question from, “Whom should I love?” which placed the recipient of the enquirer's love as an object to 'be done to', to “What must I do to show love — what am I prepared to risk to show love — what does it cost me to show love?”  In so doing, Jesus prompted the listeners to build in themselves the capacity for loving, independent of the identity of the recipient.  And to stop treating others as objects.
• To label the Samaritan in the story “good” (a word never used in the text) is to participate in a racist assumption that being “good” is an unusual and noteworthy achievement for Samaritans.

The second reading was from 'Utopian Dreams: In Search of the Good Life' by Tobias Jones. 

Tobias and his wife Francesca took a sabbatical of a year from their usual lives and went away to find ‘the good life’ — something they could enjoy as an objective experience.  Yet while they were away their priorities changed; and they came back home to find instead a ‘good way to live’ — a way of actively being good neighbours.  So we heard again about the switch round of emphasis that Jesus had made.

When they got back home, Tobias and Francesca drew a circle of 1 km centred on where they lived, and searched out all the communities that were alive in that circle — which ones they could commit to being involved with.  We were invited to think about how their experience in localism relates to us and our lives today.  

We have all just experienced a great and shocking upheaval, and many people are re-thinking how they live and what their priorities now are.  We are discovering that there is such a thing as living much closer to home, literally.  That it is actually possible to do that, even if as yet we don’t necessarily find it the most enjoyable thing to do.  There have been some very big political issues in the past five years that have dominated the UK public sphere; but now that we may be nearing the end of the COVID pandemic we simply have to return to something much bigger, which is staring us in the face: the climate emergency.

There is much that only governments, commerce and industry can do to restructure, so as to put the brakes on carbon emissions; nonetheless, we all have a part to play.  We may not see the victims lying by the side of our road, beaten up and bleeding; but the climate emergency has victims.  So if we learn from Jesus the way to live a good life, we have to ask ourselves the cost and risk to ourselves — what we are going to have to change and give up in our own lives — of showing love to those victims.  (And, harking back to the discrimination against Samaritans by Jews of Jesus' time, we note that climate change, although something which will affect us all, is a deeply racialised phenomenon.  See the link to the Christian Aid website, below.)

Giving up our love of casual travel and the romance of the exotic may be part of the cost we have to pay, to secure the lives of those vulnerable to the effects of climate change. We may really all have to live right where we are, within a much smaller radius.  But like Tobias and Fran, we may actually find everything we need, right there.

~~~~~~~~

The Unitarian church in UK was (and remains) a founder member of the charity Christian Aid, and still has a stakeholder voice in the charity.  Find out here what Christian Aid has to say about the climate emergency: Our prophetic journey towards climate justice

A personal view of Maundy Thursday

Bear in mind that this post, like all the posts on this blog, has been supplied by one of the Ringwood Unitarians – and not necessarily always the same one.  It should not be assumed that any other Ringwood Unitarian, or any Unitarian from anywhere, thinks or feels the same as this. Or that the rest of our Ringwood group are even interested in this train of thought.  That’s the beauty of any Unitarian community – we worship and we connect, but we don’t expect each other to think about the same things or to think or feel in the same way.

It’s Maundy Thursday today.  That’s the name the Christians gave to this day when a significant event for them took place, during the Jewish festival of the Passover.  Christians commemorate that on this day Jesus of Galilee gave the mandate (the Maundy) to his followers and students to carry on his work and to love each other as he had loved them.

The teacher Jesus and his friends had gone to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, for the celebratory worship of the just and merciful God.  At the Passover, Jews commemorate that God allowed their ancestors, the Israelite slaves in Egypt, to escape the horrors inflicted that night on their unresponsive and cruel slave masters, the Egyptians.  The horrors the Egyptians experienced was the overnight death of every first-born.  With the Israelites following the instruction to mark their covenant with God on the doorways of their dwellings, God did God's part of the covenant by passing over the houses of the Israelites, without inflicting death.

It is the festival that recognises that God, or Life, will act kindly towards people who act in accordance with the edicts that God, or Life, demands.  This recognition is portable from Judaism right through all the faiths, right across the spectrum of faiths, even to an oriental belief system that shies a long way away from the Jewish idea of a “personal God”, by which I mean Taoism.  Passover, or pesach, is a festival for all those who have had a good experience of their faith.

So Jesus and his friends and family sat down to eat their evening meal, to quietly await the arrival of the next day, the commemoration of the day when Israelites woke up to find that God’s word had been carried out – and the Egyptians were shocked and frightened to find their first-borns had died – and the Israelites now had to get out of Egypt very quickly.

And during that evening meal, Jesus seemed to be very sure that his time was coming to an end.  Perhaps he too was shocked and frightened; or perhaps he thought that within a day or two it would be his followers who would be shocked and frightened.  You see, he had been in Jerusalem since the previous Sunday and he was aware that all sorts of people had all sorts of expectations of him that he would not necessarily fulfil.

Some people had been truly offended to the core by some of the teachings he had given, and wanted him to renounce some of the things he had said about his relationship to God.  Others wanted him to lead a zealous and possibly armed rebellion against the Roman occupying forces.  A few others seemed to think he was bigging up his part as a wise man with a following, at the cost of wasting money that could better have been spent on supporting the poor.  Jesus got the vibes.  He knew the show-down was coming.

So he spent some time that evening over the meal reflecting back to his followers what it was that he stood for, and asking them to remember his words always – by tying them inextricably with the bread and wine of the meal on this Passover festival, which he knew they would celebrate year after year, so they would have no excuse to forget them.

And in my reading of it, the message of Jesus was this.  We are in a covenant with God – which was an old Jewish message.  We are in a relationship, said Jesus, a relationship we cannot own or control – it’s a connection we can enter.  We are loved into being, we are all sustained by love throughout our lives, and we are received in love at our ending.  Jesus lived as if it were both task and gift to strive to echo that love, right up until his life's end. 

The kingdom of God, said Jesus, – this relationship – the way to lasting life lived true to our best selves – lies within, and it is accessible to all.  But to find that kingdom, to enter into that ultimate relationship with the just and loving God, you have to be prepared to let go of yourself and act in all humility.  As though you and your wants and desires were all just by-the-bye, scarcely relevant at all.  Jesus demonstrated that he thought everyone, including the most acclaimed ones amongst us, need to see ourselves as fit for the most unpleasant and menial jobs; like taking off the sandals and washing the dusty, smelly feet of our companions after a day on the Galilean plains; like taking without comment an unwarranted slap across the face; like carrying the load of someone who chose to press us into service against our plans and expectations – and not just the mile they demand of us, but an extra mile too.

My message, said Jesus, is that we have to try to mirror God – who is in all people, including the most disadvantaged and disregarded, the ones cast out by the establishment, and the ones who self-injure by getting knotted up in their pain and difficulty.  The kingdom really is there to be experienced, but you have to work very hard to put yourself last, to put yourself gracefully out of everyone else’s way, and to be prepared – despite your fear – to relinquish your own comfort and control over what is happening to you.  Look, said Jesus, what I mean is we have to give up our own safety and comfort even if, and while, doing that may lead us to the most painful and bitter end.  Right when it hurts most, right when we don’t think we can go on, we have to stand quietly in trust, and surrender ourselves in all humility to Life, to God – both in God's/Life's direct presence as we feel it, and as we feel it coming to us through other people.  You have to love the very people who cause you grief and pain because God/Life is in them too: because that’s the only way to be fully human.

I can’t imagine the power of the inspiration Jesus had experienced.  But I can see what a strong man he was.  What serenity and peace and fulfilment he found in his love for God and others.  How disregarding he was of himself.  And, though at the end even Jesus felt abandoned, I can see that that didn’t prevent him from offering himself to God.  What a model.

So this Maundy Thursday I celebrate the life and message of the teacher Jesus with some flatbread and a glass of wine as my evening meal.