Conventional wisdom is, disagreements divide. If one person is in favor of free trade, Vivaldi, and the Red Sox, but disapproves of leaf blowers and the genetic engineering of food, while another favors the Yankees, protectionism, Garth Brooks, leaf blowers, and the genetic engineering of food, one might assume that these two should not decide to be roommates.

 That outlook finds ghastly daily confirmation on the streets of Dublin, Jerusalem, Kashmir, and elsewhere, and in more modest forms we see evidence all around us: relationships at work, in homes and in schools, founder over issues that provoke opposite responses.

 It even happens here in church, I’m sorry to say. But so far our membership – even our ministry – has been composed entirely of human beings, a species prone to bickering, like house finches. Still, in Unitarian Universalist congregations like our own, we have fewer causes than others for altercations because we have fewer things we think we have to agree about. Indeed, we rather like it that we don’t agree on many things about which other religions believe they have to speak with one voice.

This has long been our style, by the way. Back in the eighteenth century, before churches like this one were called Unitarian, back when the church was just the church, since there was only one in town, and the word for the liberal outlook that dominated in the congregations of eastern Massachusetts, including here, was still “arminianism” – one thing that characterized the liberals was the wide range of religious questions they thought should be left open for individual difference.

 It drove the other side, the conservative or orthodox church folk who predominated further west, wild that the liberals wouldn’t accede to their demand for creeds that could define a Christian consensus among the congregational churches of the Commonwealth. Now the conservatives suspected that part of the resistance to creeds on the part of liberals was that the liberals had strayed from traditional church doctrines of the sort that the creeds would likely express.

 And the conservatives were probably right: if the creeds had affirmed the Calvinism of seventeenth-century Puritan thought, with its wrathful god, predestination, eternal damnation to hell for most people, and the doctrine of humanity’s native depravity, the liberals couldn’t have gone along. But the liberals were more than hiding behind the anti-creedalism, one likes to believe; they also believed in the freedom of religious belief that anti-creedalism respected.

  A belief in the importance of allowing people to follow their own consciences in matters of faith has an even longer history in the liberal church tradition. It was affirmed by the religious toleration proclaimed in Transylvania in the sixteenth century by the Unitarian king John Sigusmund. While limited and short-lived, that toleration was broader than anywhere else at the time, and was explicitly grounded on the belief that true faith could not be coerced but must be an individual’s own best effort to determine the truth.

 This was at the same time and place that the great founder of independent Unitarianism, Bishop Francis David, memorably declared succinctly, “You do not have to think alike to love alike,” words that are still in our hymnbook.

We Unitarian Universalists have long gone past the notion of mere tolerance, where people accept that others think differently but can still somehow stand to be together, especially if they’re careful not to bring up certain subjects. I know that some extended families manage to get through the December holidays by shooting for no more than that kind of tolerance.

But it has been our hope, our expectation, and often our experience that when they’re carried on respectfully, attentively, our disagreements actually strengthen us. Rather than splinter us, they make us more whole and more healthy as a congregation, and more able to be ourselves personally as who we are, in all our complexity of attitudes and beliefs and practices.

 This is not true across the American scene. The speculation may be overheated, but it suggests that both the Methodist and Episcopal denominations are in some danger in splitting apart over disputes about homosexuality, as is the largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptists, in a fight over biblical inerrancy. The Lutherans already had a shake-up and reconfiguration.

I would not insist that ours is the one right way of doing things. It may be that the conservatives are right, truth is truth, a church should know what it thinks that truth is, in no small detail, and stick to that creed. I suspect we all know people who think our Unitarian Universalism is lacking on that account and may not even qualify as a religion, because it doesn’t do what their religion does. It doesn’t have firm, final answers to many of the questions that other denominations think they have all figured out.

And in case you haven’t noticed the numbers, more people belong to those denominations than to ours. But with our more lenient view of differences among us, at least we are largely spared the problem I just mentioned, when disagreements spring up and denominations split apart. We still have arguments that sometimes get out of hand, but not over doctrine, just the turmoil that touches every human enterprise.

But when it comes to doctrine, we live and let live and I think we’re all glad for that. When I was in the first church I served, in northern Maine, there were nineteen churches for eight thousand people, with lots more in the surrounding little towns. Many of these could trace their founding to a need of some people to withdraw from one of the other congregations because the minister had a controversial view, often about the end of time as described in the Book of Revelations.

We UUs differ among ourselves, too, and in many ways just as deep and long-standing and distinctive. We may not care much about the Book of Revelations, but we care about reason, for example, and in contrary ways. In fact, in several contrary ways. We always have.

People who have been looking into the Transcendentalists of the 1840s know that Unitarianism of that time was caught up in the disagreement between leaders who valued reason, thought, and learning as the way to religious truth, and a younger generation that favored feelings and intuition. Decades go by, and you can still hear disputes among us between people who think we’ve got to apply our critical faculties when judging religious matters, and those who prefer to trust in their emotions, their heart.

Or the argument takes place between those who want a religion that is about what’s true, as nearly as that can be determined by the mind as it reflects on experience and the teachings of science, and those who want the freedom to experiment with religious practices and points of view that are inventive, that explore the inexplicable, that let the imagination redefine reality.

These are among a set of disagreements that define us as surely as disputes over the Rapture do fundamentalists. In either case, the arguments show what people in these movements care about. But we not only have our own set of issues we wrestle with, we have our own way of dealing with our differences: we acknowledge, accept, and even value them.

Why? Because otherwise, we would not be as complete, neither collectively nor as individuals. We don’t want our opponents to go away – we want to learn from them, be tempered by the interchange with them, have our own positions clarified. We become more sure of some viewpoints, and able to retreat from others, hearing the strengths and weaknesses in the words we say. When it all works best, we are able to do that in safety, knowing that our less brilliant remarks they will not be held against us in the future conversation, in a community where we are all groping and learning, making mistakes and growing thereby.

So there are differences that characterize us, just as there are for others. But in our case, when all works well, they are differences that unite us. There used to be a course for adults, years ago, that used that very phrase for its title, just as I have for this sermon: “Differences That Unite Us,” particular ones that are ours, that define us, that we go on working on because they matter to us as debates over the rapture don’t.

Like the role of reason I already mentioned. We have some churches where this discussions has gotten unpleasant, but luckily they are few. Mostly we go on living with both sides together, with a healthy interaction between different kinds of thoughtfulness. As Ken Patton put it, ours have been houses of truth-seeking “where scientists can encourage devotion to their quest, [and] where mystics can abide in a community of searchers.”

 We could resolve the apparent conflict. We choose not to. We choose to be of at least two minds, working together, and therefore more nearly whole.

 I’ll give you another example that touches on me more personally than most: the role of the minister in the leadership of our congregations. We could resolve that quandary, too. We could agree that as I’m the senior called pastor of this congregation, I am in charge. Some traditions give the pastor almost that much authority, at least over matters of concern to the local congregation. A Presbyterian minister is automatically the chairperson of the governing board. A Roman Catholic priest answers to the hierarchy, but is not much obliged to take orders from his laity.

 And among the Hutterites, a communal sect that’s not uncommon in upper plains states, the leader has absolute authority over everything that pertains to the community. I learned that from an article one of you gave me about the unusual way a Hutterite community picks its new leader when the old leader retires. They hold a lottery among the men.

 Well, we could do our ministerial selection that way, but we don’t. Instead, you all get to vote to call someone. And neither do you choose to invest that person with absolute authority. Which I appreciate. But I also appreciate that you called me to be minister here, you did not hire me as an employee with a job to do that you defined.

 We choose to live in the murky middle, where there will always be some disagreements between those who think one minister is too pushy and others love her confident leadership style, while another minister is variously held up as a model of sensitively effective leadership or a frustrating wimp. It is an argument that changes from parish to parish, and again with every new minister called. We could resolve it in favor of the minister’s control or the congregation’s, but we choose to unite in our disagreement over the right balance in between.

 Here’s another disagreement which we could resolve but don’t: how much power should headquarters have? Headquarters is in Boston, right next door to the State House. It develops Sunday school curricula, pamphlets, and every thirty years or so a new hymnbook. It helps ministers and churches in search find each other. It tries to implement action in response to statements of social witness passed by our annual General Assembly. You will probably hear more when the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association for the past seven and a half years, John Buehrens, joins me in this pulpit to deliver the sermon on May 6.

 But along with a headquarters, a website, and regional offices, we have something called congregational polity, which means that each local church is a corporation unto itself, empowered to manage all its own affairs. Headquarters can’t make us to do anything we don’t want to. That is the nature of an association. The UUA is an association of independent congregations. So there have always been disagreements over how much power Boston should have to speak and act on behalf of the movement as a whole.

 We could resolve this by giving up on congregational polity and adopting a more hierarchical model like the Methodists have, or we could dissolve the association and all go our own congregational ways. Instead, we choose to unite as a people who live with that ongoing and sometimes contentious balancing act.

 Many of you can probably think of some other examples, like our relationship with our Christian history, or with Jesus, or with God – I suppose we could resolve any of these relationships in some one way or the other, but we choose to let the discussions continue, while each of us finds his or her best answer, and all the better an answer, we like to believe, being arrived at by ourselves in the interaction with other views altogether.

 I will quickly name three more examples. First, a particularly hot topic these days is the way we use symbols, rituals, and wisdom from other faith traditions than our own. There are some people who would argue that every culture is distinct, its attributes are incomprehensible to us outsiders, and the use of its sacred practices and literature by non-members amounts to desecration or stealing.

 This is a tough outlook to accommodate, since the religious traditions it would have us stick to, Unitarianism and Universalism, were notable for their universalism, their willingness to look everywhere for religious truth, their belief that the divine is at work in every culture, and that thoughtful people can hear truths in translation. If you are in a sanctuary and there on the walls are symbols of all the world’s great religions, you can be pretty sure you’re in one of our churches.

 Of course, there have always been some who were not enthusiastic about supplementing the Bible with the Bhagavad-Gita, but they were not nearly as numerous as they were in other religions, and they didn’t have an anti-imperialist argument to make. So we’re just beginning to find new ways of uniting around this disagreement. I can’t see us dropping our interest in world religions or not using some of their literature and practices, but I imagine we will continue to be united in disagreeing how far one can go without being larcenous or dishonest.

 Yet another example: on the one hand we offer so much freedom in matters of faith, some like to say that we can believe whatever we want, and that’s why they like it here. On the other hand, others say, we have common faith, just look at our purposes and principles. We are a religion, and that religion has a content. These folks are here because they believe in that religion.

 That is maybe the most timelessly persistent, powerful, and difficult disagreement that unites us: we want to be free to find our individual points of view on matters of religion, but we also want to affirm a corporate religious identity – one that believes in freedom and justice, kindness and mercy – and unite to defend its values in the world.

 We could resolve that tension either way, but we won’t. We will go on living in the creative tension between two affirmations that we believe in at once, even though they can never be fully reconciled. But either one would be even less satisfactory on its own.

 And finally this: is it enough to have the right questions, these interesting ones like I’ve been talking about, ones of depth and importance that go on engaging us in discussion and growth, or don’t we really want some answers? Well, that’s an interesting question of itself, and one we will go on disagreeing about, all the while we know the answer is, both – we both value the questions and the sense of an on-going journey, and we know that all along the way we are called upon to have real answers, best as we can fashion them when the time arrives.

 And the times do arrive: a death, a divorce, a terrible illness, the loss of a job or the loss of some valued ability, an ethical dilemma, a parental crisis, any of those times when it’s not enough that we have conversational points to make on this side and on that, but we have to reach a decision, make a stand, find an answer, even knowing the journey and the questions will go on.

 Often times, we do that here, in this community, finding with each other answers amid the questions, even as other times we open up new questions amid the answers. Some are more eager for answers, and may resist so much uncertainty. Others will grow impatient to explore the next question. Which view is more important? We’ll go on disagreeing about that. The disagreeing is part of what makes us healthy and whole, when we do it in love. It’s part of what binds us together as one.
 

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