Category Archives: teachings

12/9/10

We Forgive You, Saint Nick

Nicholas of Myra punching Bishop Arius at the Council of Nicaea

Nicholas of Myra punching Bishop Arius at the Council of Nicaea

The birth of Jesus Christ may be the “reason for the season,” but for millions of children the man of the moment is Santa Claus.

While it is widely known that the Santa Claus of Christmas is derived from St. Nicholas, few know much about the original Saint Nick beyond the fact that he did not live at the North Pole, own flying reindeer, or employ a workshop full of elves.

Nicholas was a political ally of Athanasius of Alexandria during the Church intrigues of the 4th Century that led to Trinitarianism.  And, like Athanasius, he is rumored to have come into power at an absurdly young age through dubious means.

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05/27/10

Battle Hymn of the Unitarian

This year’s Ultimate Thursday of the 12 Days of Thorns falls on the birthday of Julia Ward Howe, a Unitarian best known for writing the lyrics to The Battle Hymn of the Republic, a march calling the righteous abolitionist to war. 

And, the spirit of militant abolitionism — which finally crushed the slave economy after decades of impotent pacifist abolitionism satisfied its own sentimentality while the slaves suffered in bondage — is perfectly congruous with the lesson of this dozenal.  There can be no moral success, no advance of justice, without trial and tribulation.

Those seeking the easy way out of injustice will usually instead find no way out.

Unfortunately, after the War of Liberation, Ms. Howe reverted to the pacifism that had for so long shackled abolitionism, and kept generations of African Americans shackled along with it.  Even so, the words of her Hymn still ring true for those who seek justice, truth, and freedom with open eyes. Continue reading →

05/23/10

Pentecost & Shavuot – The Twin Virtues

On the second Sunday following Ascension Thursday falls the Pentecost, originally a Hebrew harvest festival known as Shavuot (חג השבועות, “Festival of Weeks”) or the Day of First Fruits.  It is also called White Sunday in some Northern European countries.

As often happens, this year the Pentecost dozenal falls inside Rose Season.  But even though Unitarian Reform is more focused on the 12 Days of Thorns this year, Pentecost is still an important holiday, the afterword of the Lent-Ascension cycle.

Meaning of the Season.  In Judaism, this day commemorates the descent of the Law on Mt. Sinai, but in Christianity it commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit on followers of Jesus.  Taken together, these two express the complementary virtues that are the underlying theme of Abrahamic spirituality — Faith and Hope, Law and Wisdom, Son and Spirit, Lion and Lamb, Serpent and Dove, the Two Trees of Knowledge and Life — the same complementary virtues displayed on Ascension Thursday.

In both cases, a great flowering resulted.  Just as the Jewish people were bound by the physical ties of tribe and family, Christians are bound by the mental ties of concept and idiom. So, in Jewish tradition, Mt. Sinai became covered in blooms and greenery after the Law was revealed, a material flowering. In Christian tradition, the descent of the Spirit resulted in the crowds in Jerusalem being able to understand the Gospel in their own languages, a mental flowering.

For Reform Unitarianism, these parallel revelations on Shavuot/Pentecost represent a great reconciliation of complementary goods: punitive Law which outlines strict rules of conduct to protect us from the perils of the material world, and benevolent Wisdom which over-rules the obstacles of language to protect us from the perils of ideology and cultural/linguistic isolation.

[An earlier version was published on previous Pentecost Sundays]

05/20/10

Lucifer’s Day

Bishop Arius Assaulted at the Council of Nicaea

Today is the first of the 12 Days of Thorns, during which we contemplate the tragic errors of the past.  This dozenal opens the Spring Interval, also called the Rose Season.

The first Day of Thorns is Lucifer’s Day, marking the anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea in which the Josiac error of conflating the Son and God was repeated.

This is also the traditional feast day of Lucifer Calaritanus — whom some Trinitarians honor as “Saint Lucifer” — one of the principle proponents of the conflationist error against Christian monotheism. 

An excellent case study in partisan hypocrisy, Lucifer is famous for publishing two works advising Emperor Constantius not to meet with Arians nor forgive them, yet also a work advising the Emperor not to condemn the conflationist bishop Athanasius of Alexandria in absentia.

On this day, we should not only lament the unravelling of the original Church, but also contemplate the beams in our own eyes, that we do not follow where Nicaea and Lucifer transgressed.

05/13/10

Ascension Thursday

AscensionThe Twelve Days of Commission conclude today in the Ascension of Jesus. This feast day is one of the Four Great Thursdays of AUR, the other three being Garden Thursday, Declaration Thursday, and Harvest Thursday.

Ascension commemorates the return of Jesus to Heaven between two angels. This imagery places a final seal on the importance of reconciled, complementary virtues to Christian morality by closing Jesus’ time on Earth with symbolism that echoes a consistent theme throughout religion, both Christian and otherwise.

For example, in the book of Numbers, we read that the Word of God came to the Jews from between the two angels on the “Reconciler,” a device which sat atop the Ark of the Covenant.

Medieval Jewish theologian Moses Maimonides explained that these two angels on the Ark represented the punitive and beneficent aspects of God, reconciled in God’s Unity.

This moral message of reconciled virtues can also be seen symbolically in the prophecy of Isaiah that the Anointed returns when the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and the kid, and the lion and the calf lie down together.

In the Christian idiom are repeated lessons in reconciled, complementary virtues: Law and Wisdom reconciled in true religion, Faith and Hope reconciled in Divine Love, the shrewdness of serpents and the innocence of doves reconciled in the attitude of a true Christian.

Justice and mercy, strength and kindness, the arrow and the olive branch: these are the yin and yang of the Abrahamic idiom.  Only together and reconciled are these virtues; apart and partisan, they become the vices of Beast and Babylon, rage and lust, violence and libertinism, authoritarianism and anarchy.

The Reconciling Word of God, manifest in Jesus of Nazareth, returned to Heaven between two angels representing the benevolent and punitive aspects of God, angels who appeared beside him echoing the cherubim of the Ark. It is this image, and its rich spiritual meaning, that we commemorate on Ascension Thursday.

[A version of this homily was published on a previous Ascension Thursday.]

04/15/10

A Day of Hope and Blessings

hopeJoyful Thursday, the second Thursday after Easter, is the Ultimate of the 12 Days of Blessings, the first of the three dozenals of the Ascension Season.

The 12 Days of Blessings are a celebration of the open-minded virtue of Hope (ἐλπίς in Biblical Greek), and Joyful Thursday is a day to feast in optimistic happiness.

Hope is the virtue of open-minded thinking, the antidote of despair, and with Faith a vital half of the highest Christian virtue of Love.

03/29/10

Celibacy, Catholic Sex Crimes, and Trinitarianism

Reform Unitarianism feels a particularly close kinship with the Roman Catholic Church, despite that it is the institution that adopted the apostasy of Trinitarianism.  Roman Catholicism retains the sense of the ancient pedigree of Christianity, which more recent off-shoots (which nevertheless imagine themselves reformatory) fail to project.

This is why it pains us to witness the perennial sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, now even shaking the Throne of St. Peter.  Only a few are calling for Pope Benedict XVI to resign, but many more are questioning the Church’s policies on clerical celibacy.

For Reform Unitarians — who accept both the marriage of priests and ordination of women — it is clear that the Vatican’s sex-related troubles stem from the same 4th Century political intrigues that pinned the Church to Imperial power and the conflationist theology that eventually became Trinitarianism.

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03/25/10

Palm Sunday and Religious Idiom

palm_sundayPalm Sunday commemorates the day Jesus entered Jerusalem on the back of a colt (or donkey) with throngs of Messianic enthusiasts paving the way with palm fronds. Celebrations of this holiday therefore often include palms.

In some regions, however, this tropical plant has historically been difficult to acquire, particularly when shipping methods were still primitive and slow. For this reason, local trees were often substituted for palms, and the name of the holiday revised to match.

This raises an intriguing question: Were Christians who celebrated “Yew Sunday” — because their culture knew yews and did not know palms — practicing a heresy because they violated the explicit accounts in scripture?

We don’t think so.  In fact, to invest the palm tree (or any other created thing) with significance over and above the spiritual meaning it conveys would verge on idolatry.

This is why AUR takes an idiomatic, rather than dogmatic, approach to religious creed.  This approach allows us, even as creedal Christians, to look beyond the particulars of the life of Jesus of Nazareth to see the Word of God as expressed in other regions, other cultures, and even other religious traditions.

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03/18/10

Attrition in Unitarian Universalism Reflects History

Earlier this year, a guest posting at the Unitarian Universalist Growth Blog discussed the perennial problem of high membership turnover in the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), eliciting comments that highlight the tension between UU and its Christian origins, Christian origins that American Unitarian Reform (AUR) has chosen to embrace rather than hold at a safe arms’ length.

As a matter of etiquette among general friends and allies, Reformed Unitarians tend not to contrast ourselves with UU as often we do Trinitarians.  But, to understand the issues facing “Unitarianism” in America, it is appropriate occasionally to revisit the philosophical history of American Unitarianism, and explain the differences between our two divergent paths.

Or, more accurately, between the path of AUR and other Christian Unitarians, and the lack of an explicit path in the UUA.

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03/11/10

A Homily on Homosexuality

In America’s capital, gay marriage is now legal, highlighting the role of religion in the struggle for homosexual rights.

AUR’s official stance is that the push for gay marriage is well-intentioned but misguided: although we do believe in equal rights and dignity for gays and straights before the law, we also believe that the government should not discriminate based on relationship status and should not be involved in anything that is — in the overwhelming majority of cases — a religious institution.

The truly progressive position is that the institution of marriage belongs to churches and cultural organizations, and therefore has no place in legislatures and courtrooms.  Still, the legalization of gay marriage reaches toward social justice, even if it falls short of achieving it.

The larger issue of homosexuality in society remains in play, and forces opposed to gay rights will certainly fight to have gay marriage in DC (and elsewhere) repealed, renamed, or outright banned.  The governor of Virginia has recently declared anti-gay discrimination in state government acceptable, and the ability of homosexuals to serve openly in the American military continues to be obstructed by the infamous “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

Although there are many arguments against homosexuality, the anti-gay movement draws key inspiration from religion, specifically Christian scripture.  It is this inspiration that is the subject of this Thursday’s homily.

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