The Key and the Lock

September 15, 1963
Rochester

Sermon Series: The Free Church in the Changing World

I-The Church and its Leadership
2. The Key and the Lock

If you have made this Church your choice or interest because you believe that here your religious personality and conviction can expand in an atmosphere of creative change, unencumbered with the weight of outmoded doctrines or outlandish superstitions, then the key to your personality may well be an independent mind. You may hold strong convictions that your own individuality develops most fully in an atmosphere of freedom. You would respond to Emerson's challenge, "nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

When you consider what is valuable in the human religious heritage, you will more than likely attach unique importance to the deep convictions of the great prophets and teachers of religion who discovered themselves and the vision of their most high goals in solitary experience. Moses was alone when he discovered wonder and guidance were in the flaming image of the burning bush. From that moment on he was master of himself and servant to a great and difficult task. Elijah, alone at the entrance of a barren cave heard the still, small voice. Through that experience there was born in him the strength of spirit to meet and master the priests of Baal. Would Jesus have ever called fishermen away from their nets unless first he had mastered the solitary experience of the wilderness temptations? Could there have been the noble Buddhist faith had not the Gautama apprehended reality and made final choice, sitting alone under the Bo tree?

The mark of individual religious experience is cut deeply on the mind-set of religious liberals today. We tend to flare up defensively when encountering the person or group, even among ourselves, who believes less, or more, than we believe at that particular moment; or who phrases essentially the same basic structure of religious faith with differing words. If our religious convictions are keyed to individuality, then indeed we are proud of our freedom.

Centuries ago however, John Donne said the words which should always give us pause, “No man is an island....”

Inevitably when in association with persons whose motives are much the same, one is confronted with the formidable fact that between free individuals there will be an encounter of contrary conviction. A key is made for a lock. A key is filed to fit the tumblers of the lock. The orderly society is the master lock which will fit the keys of individuality when it permits the fullest maturity of individuality without shutting out mutual respect and affection.

This is a sermon dealing with the Church and its leadership. I would speak of the key – the individual in the light of the unending alterations of the lock of the society. Sometimes it seems that the locks are changed overnight. I would speak of the lock, the good society, which sometimes becomes rusted over because individuals will not use a key that has any chance of fitting; or because individuals will not even try their key in the lock to see if the tumblers will spring. I shall speak of the past as well as the present. Furthermore, while all this can be measured in terms of growth and change in religious institutions, I have no doubt that the principles involved apply to all human situations. To be human is to be free; to be human is to be involved and committed to some order of things. These statements are contradictory, yet each is true. When a person asserts vehemently that the Church does not speak for him, even though it is his church; or when a person, just as insistently asserts that the Church should stand forthwith for what HE believes, they are in the doorway fumbling with the knob. Is the lock defective? Or are they using the wrong keys?

The nature of the Church and its leadership should be considered in the light of the past as well as the present and future. There are several relevant illustrations of which I would remind you: the ancient nature of man and society, the atmosphere of the old testament times and the striking example of freedom and order in the 1st century Christian church at Corinth. One should look backward frequently enough so that one may neither be surprised overmuch at human behavior nor unduly complacent that we are the first generation to come to grips with the persisting problems of freedom in the social order.

First of all consider the basic stuff of human nature. Nothing that creates selfhood, individuality is born with us. Individuality is a product of the social order. Without the orderings of human society, we would not be persons; therefore without the structure of human society, all hymns to the free soul are like the chaff which the winds drive away.

Man has the biological potential for the mental ability and physical characteristics of human nature. But that potential from which the human self grows is realized only in society. The well-known example of the wolf-children of India was a pathetic and direct case. Some years ago, a missionary in India discovered two children living with wolves. One child was about eight, the other a year and a half. The baby died soon after being returned to civilization, but the older lived for nine years. When taken into an orphanage at eight, she could not stand or walk in any way like an eight-year-old child, but ran on all fours like a wolf. She looked normal but lacked any of the characteristics of the human self and it was too late for her to become a person. She had lived for eight years, but had not become a person. The famous educator, William H. Kilpatrick observes truly, “Thus does the life of man as man, in its distinction from the merely animal life, depend on the fact of selfhood achieved by the cooperation of others.” What makes human life distinct from animal: "Use of language, conscious intent, conscious conveying of meanings, making responsible decisions, conscience, making distinctions between right and wrong. . . ." (PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION,p. 42 and passim). None of the qualities unique to humanity and necessary for humanity can be acquired in isolation.

Thus there is a basic premise to the relationship of the key and the lock: Nothing that is human – human character, human decisions, human freedom, has any substance without the prior establishment of a social human order through which these individual characteristics can emerge.

Religion is not an exception. Henri Bergson summed it up succinctly when he observed, "...whether religion be interpreted in one way or another, whether it be social in essence or by accident, one thing is certain, that it has always played a social role." (TWO SOURCES OF MORALITY AMD RELIGION, p. 13).

Consider the life in old testament days as preserved for us by the scripture of the Hebrews. In the earliest days man survived because of the nature of the kinship and tribal groups. He did not survive alone.

With the overwhelming impact of the idea of the covenant between God and Israel, the nature of the community and its responsibility far outweighed any assertion of autonomous man. Again and again there was an emphasis that humanity is one particular and special strand in the whole nature of creation. The responsibility of the covenant community to Yahveh was a separation from non-human nature. Humanity had a history and a destiny. A continuous assumption ran through the scriptures of our particular heritage that no man alone lives a full life; fulfillment is achieved only by man in society. This was not to cloud the nature of man's individual responsibility. Man was responsible. Jesus, out of this cultural-religious heritage, insisted that individual man was capable of understanding the will of God; that individual man had freedom to choose and the ability to make the choice. But nowhere is there any suggestion that "alone and light-hearted I take the open road."

One of the most telling examples of the key and the lock occurred in the early Christian fellowship at Corinth. Paul's letters to the Christians at Corinth, as well as all other New Testament literature, provide proof that the early Christian churches were by no means united in themselves or co-ordinated fully with other Christian communities in matters of faith, worship, practice or behavior. The romanticism that distance in time lends makes it easy to think of all 1st century Christians as gentle, pious persons for whom there was no controversy, only commitment. Such was not the case. They did not need unanimity in order to be dynamic in growth or effective in society. The Corinthians vividly demonstrate what one scholar has called, "the varieties of New Testament religions." Persons concerned with the church and its leadership, or any social form and its leadership would do well to read Paul's letters from that point of reference. His correspondence illuminates both the complexity of the problem and the basis of its resolution.

In the year 50 a.d., or thereabouts, Paul came to Corinth to visit the Christian Church which had organized in that cosmopolitan Roman city of commerce and culture. After 18 months in Corinth, Paul continued his missionary travels and went to Ephesus. From there, not more than two or three years later, Paul engaged in correspondence with friends at Corinth because he had heard of quarrels, disorder, misbehavior and lack of discipline in the Corinthian Church. What survives of this correspondence, contained in the New Testament literature as 1st and 2nd Corinthians, has been called by one scholar, Dr. Kirsopp Lake, as the "history of a quarrel." Although this is correspondence of an ancient age, written in language most easily understood in those times, not ours, we may look searchingly at it for it describes the troubles a particular church had with individual freedom in a functioning society.

The central source of trouble resided in the nature of belief. Because believers had the religious experience of the "new law in Christ," they felt freed of the old laws. This was interpreted by some to be a charter of freedom from all restraints of church government, social order, moral habits and consideration of others. In effect, their theology was, "love God and do what you like." Some, the "spirituals," had experienced religious ecstasy, spoke in tongues, that is, ecstatic gibberish, were convinced that God communicated to them directly and individually. Therefore, the church as community had no powers of control over behavior or church discipline.

Paul rebuked these “spirituals” and uncontrolled converts. He catalogued their wrongdoing with considerable detail, injecting advisory remarks that have become some of the classic aphorisms of Christianity. E.G., (1st C. 10/23), "all things are lawful, but not all things are helpful." (4.2) "Moreover it shall be required of stewards that they be found trustworthy."

The 13th chapter, justly celebrated as among the finest examples of literature, was not a spontaneous, poetic hymn to love, or a sudden flight of religious inspiration. Paul's preface is, "I will show you a more excellent way." When Paul referred to those who spoke with the tongues of men and angels but who have not love, he was addressing directly those who believed they could love God and do what they like. They had the key of individuality, but not the lock of order.

There are other facets to this many-sided dilemma in human affairs. By the 16th century, a.d., the church order had become so dominating that the Reformation was needed to restore the key of individual judgment.. Martin Luther maintained that salvation was dependent on individual faith, not the sacraments of a church.
Some of the left-wing churches of the Reformation, in which our roots are also, went to extremes that Luther rejected. Indeed most religious revolts have been against overemphasis on the institution. There is something about institutional structure that does not like the free individual. In Colonial New England, religious requirements were based largely on the faith and order of the Puritan Church with its rigid Calvinistic doctrine and order. So much did Colonial establishment dread individual inspiration and fear the power of the lone person's inner religious certainty, that such Christians as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson and others were persecuted savagely. Jos. Gatchell of Marblehead, Mass, in 1684, was put in stocks and his tongue pierced with red hot irons for the heresy of cherishing individual conviction that all souls would be saved.

The reaction came in New England, as it always must everywhere for excesses. Ralph W. Emerson, Thoreau and others were courageous and articulate prophets of the belief that man's destiny was most fully achieved and God's will done in the development of the individual's courage, integrity and solitary judgment. Emerson's essay on “Self-Reliance” is the classic example of the able mind denouncing the foibles and weaknesses inevitable to any social order:
"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." (p. 166)
"Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." (p. 168)
^'Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." (p. 168)
"...you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it."

(Those of you who love Emerson will recognize that this is but a bare sampling of his innumerable trenchant sentences.)

All the foregoing brings us to today's "Free Church in the Changing World," the nature of the Church and its leadership. The issues are ancient, but always must be freshly resolved. Otherwise a person will be unable to find his place.

In the course of events, the churches of the Unitarian Universalist Association have come to place authority for group action and decision on a way of functioning, rather than a way of believing. That is, participation is voluntary. The person decides whether he shall be a member; not the church, ruling either on his belief or other qualification. The basic condition is to follow the self-governing processes—as Angus MacLean said in connection with religious education, "the method is the message." Ecclesiastically, we believe in majority rule, with minority right always protected so that persuasion and interchange of opinion will not cease.

This by no means can create religious Utopia. People feel deeply about beliefs. When there are glaring differences, the democratic process may solve the constitutional nature of the problem, but in itself will not heal the wounds left by intellectual and emotional strife.

Henry Nelson Wieman, one of the eminent philosophers of liberal faith, in his book, THE SOURCE OF HUMAN GOOD, (p. 39), wrote of the creative power that seemed to arise in the group relationship of Jesus and his disciples: "(Jesus) split the atom of human egoism, not by psychological tricks, not by intelligent understanding, but simply by being the kind of person he was, combined with the social, psychological and historical situation of the time and the heritage of Hebrew prophecy. Thus there arose in this group of disciples a miraculous mutual awareness and responsiveness toward the needs and interests of one another."

In the winning and losing of issues in constitutional processes of government—political or religious, not only the letter of democratic method, but also the spirit of mutual awareness and response is needed. That this search for community feeling may seem optimistic, even fatuous, in the harsh quality of national and international struggles is an index, perhaps, that either our goals aren't grand enough or that we do not seek enough joy in human enterprise.

Earlier I said that Paul's more excellent way also suggested the way to bridge the gap between the free individual and the good social order. I'm sure it is obvious to you, too. Faith in the democratic process, yes; hope in the solutions arrived at in the free market of ideas, yes; but underlying all this, love, or good-will as the greatest factor in the human scene. If the losers in a political struggle accepted the situation as one wherein their cause must have had weaknesses which needed new strength; if the winners in a political struggle embraced their victory as opportunity to demonstrate to the opposition that there is creativity and hope in the case they have lately opposed, we would be living the more excellent way.

In the Free Church our faith is in the process which creates a church order committed to promoting experiences of value to human beings in this world. We affirm that the sabbath was made for man. There is no loss of our individual fulfillment or private freedom when the feeling of community is abundant enough among us to surround divided decisions with awareness and response. The creation of such feeling of community among free persons is the most difficult and desirable goal for persons who place their religious trust in a way of living together, rather than on a way of words or a way of tradition.

There is no likelihood that in predictable time we could carve out a verbal creed, even if we would. Certainly there are sound reasons for not establishing a creed, even if we could. The church and its leadership must depend on the more excellent way of love.

Maxwell Anderson, the late American dramatist in his play, "Joan of Lorraine," in Act II, Rehearsal Preface, has Masters the Stage Director say, after there has been an observation that the play is pessimistic, "More and more, men are going to realize that it’s our destiny to be in the dark and yet go forward – to doubt our religions and yet live by them. To know that our faith can't be proved and yet stick to it. Unless it's a bad one.”
Elling: "But how do you know a bad faith from a good one?"
Masters: "I can't tell you. Nobody can tell you. But you have to know, because you're held responsible if you follow a bad one."
• • • •
Tessie: "But who holds us responsible?"
Masters: “We do. The human race. We hold each other responsible."

This is our task in the Free Church in the Changing World, to hold each other responsible in the more excellent way.