“A More Abundant Life”
By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto
Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church
Des Moines, Washington
September 10, 2006
There is a story I heard not too long ago about a group of Unitarian Universalist ministers who were meeting with a group of evangelical Christian ministers.
I don’t know too many details about this meeting. I don’t know exactly who was there or when the meeting happened or where the meeting happened or even why the meeting was happening.
All I heard is that at some point during the meeting, one of the evangelical Christian ministers asked the Unitarian Universalist ministers a question.
He asked, “What’s your gospel?”
One of the Unitarian Universalist ministers gave an explanation of what Unitarian Universalism is. Like I said, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what the explanation was, but I imagine it was something like the explanation that I usually give, that Unitarian Universalism is a liberal religious tradition that looks to many sources for inspiration while affirming individual experience and conscience as the ultimate authority for belief.
“Yeah, I get that,” the evangelical Christian minister said, “but what’s your gospel?”
Now the word gospel isn’t a word that Unitarian Universalists use a lot, not even Unitarian Universalist ministers, and it’s a word that has a lot of different uses. For example, if you just say the word “gospel,” most people probably think of a kind of Christian music. On the other hand, if you say the word “gospels,” most people probably think of the first four books of Christian scripture, Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John. But going way back, before Christian scripture was even written, “gospel” is just the English translation of an old Greek word meaning, “good news,” and that’s how this evangelical Christian minister was using the word. He was asking the Unitarian Universalist ministers, “What’s your good news?
If somebody had asked him the same question, I’m guessing he would have been able to answer easily, probably quoting something along the lines of John 3:16 in Christian Scripture. Most of you probably even know that verse. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.”
For him, that was good news, news that he not only believed himself but wanted to share with others. When people walked through the door of the church where he was the minister, this was the good news he was selling, so to speak, and he was asking the Unitarian Universalist ministers what their gospel was, what good news they were selling to the people who walked through the doors of their churches.
According to the story as I heard it, none of the Unitarian Universalists ministers gathered at that meeting were able to give a very good answer to his question.
That bothers me.
I don’t tell this story to be critical of my colleagues who were at that meeting. I’m not sure I could have answered his question right then and there on the spot, and that bothers me even more.
So since I heard this story, I’ve been reflecting on this question of, “What’s our gospel as Unitarian Universalists? What’s our good news?” This, for me at least, is a different question than “What is Unitarian Universalism?” or “What do Unitarian Universalists believe?”
One answer might be that we don’t have a gospel, that we don’t have good news to share. One might say that Unitarian Universalism, unlike most other faith traditions, isn’t a creedal faith, and that Unitarian Universalist churches are places where individuals cherish the freedom to discover their own religious truths.
But too me, that answer sounds wishy-washy and mealy-mouthed and overly typical of the answers that we Unitarian Universalists give when explaining of faith to others.
At General Assembly in St. Louis this past summer, I heard a lecture from William McKinney, a professor from the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. McKinney described himself as a liberal Christian and said that while sympathetic to the Unitarian Universalist tradition, he could never be a Unitarian Universalist because he felt that we never came down anywhere.
It’s always good to hear from a friendly critic, but this stung a little bit.
It’s true that Unitarian Universalism is different from other faith traditions. It’s true that, unlike other faith traditions, we don’t have definitive answers to some of life’s biggest questions, and people sometimes make fun of Unitarian Universalists for this.
We’ve heard all the jokes. What do you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a Unitarian Universalist?. Somebody who knocks on your door for no apparent reason. Did you hear about what the Ku Klux Klan did to the Unitarian Universalist? They burnt a question mark on his lawn.
But I do believe we have a shared gospel - - implicit if not explicit in the tradition we share and all that we do, and right here and right now, to use McKinney’s phrase, I’m going to “come down” and tell you what I think it is.
Since I started reflecting on this question of what our gospel is, I have kept coming back to a phrase that late Peter Raible often used to finish his sermons. For those of you who don’t know, Peter served as minister of the University Unitarian Church in Seattle for 36 years. Peter always used to end his sermons using the phrase, “so that we may have life and have life more abundantly.” For those of you who know the New Testament, this is a phrase that Peter adapted from the Gospel of John, but within it, lies a big clue to what our shared gospel is as Unitarian Universalists, and it’s this:
A more abundant life is possible for each one of us and for humanity as a whole, and that more abundant life is possible for each one of us and for humanity as whole not in some other lifetime, but within this one.
What do I mean by a more abundant life?
I bet you already know what I’m talking about.
I believe that for each of our lives, its as if a voice calling to us saying, “something more is possible,” and it creates in us a yearning, a desire, you might even say a hunger.
And it’s not a hunger to have more, though many people, I think, mistake it for that, filling their lives with too much stuff.
And it’s not a hunger to do more, though many people, I think, mistake it for that, too, filling up their lives with too many activities.
It’s a hunger to experience life more fully, richly, and deeply - - or, to use Peter’s phrase, more abundantly.
Henry David Thoreau - - not a Unitarian himself but a friend to many Unitarians - - - spoke of this hunger. “I do not want to live what is not life, living is so dear,” he said. “Nor do I wish to practice resignation, unless it is quite necessary. I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, I want to cut a broad swatch, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms. If it proves to be mean, then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it is sublime, to know it by experience, and to able to give a true account of it.”
Of course, our world sometimes seemed designed to distract us from this hunger. We have cell-phones and instant messaging and e-mail and 24-hour-news channels on 500-channel cable systems and mail order movies, which never leave us with a few uninterrupted hours or days to pay attention to that vague sense of dissatisfaction that something is not quite right in our lives or in our world, that there is the possibility of something more beyond the shallow, surface quality of so much of modern life.
But if we take time to listen, that hunger, that desire, that yearning is there.
And the gospel of our liberal religious tradition is that a more abundant life is possible for each of us.
Not by falling for the false promises of the overly materialistic society in which we live or by taking any irrational leap of faith.
Rather, we know that we live more abundantly when we live with our hearts open, open to the wonder of life itself and open to others. We know we live more abundantly when we live fully in the present moment. We know we live more abundantly when we are compassionate. We know we live more abundantly when we have the courage to take risks. We know we live more abundantly when we live with gratitude. We know we live more abundantly when we are generous. We know live more abundantly when we live with acceptance of life’s limitations and practice forgiveness towards ourselves and one another. We know we live more abundantly when we live with hope. We know live more abundantly when we commit our lives to some cause beyond ourselves, when we choose goals that are worthy of our lives.
We also know we live more abundantly when we live our lives in community, in a community like this one, whose coming together we celebrate today.
Furthermore, we know that all humanity will live more abundantly if we live in a society that treats all people as worthy of love and respect, that celebrates the diversity of the human family rather than fearing it, that is free, equitable, just, democratic, peaceful, and respectful of the natural world in which we live.
This is our gospel. This is our good news, good news that we come to remember, to explore, to proclaim, and to celebrate here at this church every Sunday morning - - the possibility of a more abundant life for ourselves and for all humanity, not in some future life, but in this life. This is the good news I’m selling.
As the Unitarian minister Ulysses Pierce once said, “The aim of religion is not to get us into Heaven, but to get Heaven into us.” And that’s what we’re doing here every Sunday, trying to get a little more Heaven into us and into this world in which we live.