Back to the Future

". . . for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty vpon a Hill, the eies of all people are vppon us. . . ." -from "A Modell of Christian Charity" by John Winthrop, 1630

This morning I have been asked by our recently formed Visioning Committee to speak with you about the ways in which our history connects with both our present and our future. You may recall that earlier this year I spoke to you on the subject of "Becoming a Great Church." Today I am borrowing the title of a popular movie about time travel to speak with you about the ways that our past not only influences, but in many ways, perhaps in the most important ways, actually determines our future. Paradoxically, it may be that we must seek our future first by understanding and owning our past.

It is most appropriate that the committee has asked me to do this on one of our New Member Recognition Sundays, for what better reminder than the welcoming of new members that change is an inevitable, and, we trust, a good and necessary, part of church life? People come and people go, mortality is real, but the institution remains. We are inheritors of a local tradition that now spans 281 years. An awful lot has happened in that time.

Consider that this congregation has weathered the American Revolution, the Civil War, and two World Wars, in addition to too many lesser conflicts. When it was gathered in 1725 as the "Third Parish in Newbury," Newburyport didn’t yet exist as a separate town. We were still a colony of Great Britain, and we still had a King. When the present building was built, Thomas Jefferson was President, and the Lewis and Clark Expedition had not yet embarked on its historic trek to the Pacific Ocean. Think of it!

Religiously, there were as yet few if any Roman Catholics in this country, and the Standing Order of Congregational Churches still held sway, though that was about to change radically with the First Great Awakening and the emerging split within Congregationalism between Evangelicals and Liberals.

This church would weather a Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century. And it would survive the so-called Unitarian Controversy, emerging on the liberal, or Unitarian, side. It would lose perhaps its most famous minister, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in 1849 in the gathering storm over the abolition of slavery. It would weather Transcendentalism and it would survive a move toward religious humanism and away from traditional Christianity.

But our connection to the past goes even deeper than this. Unitarianism and Universalism as theological ideas both have roots in the Protestant Reformation of the 1500’s and even beyond, in the radical movements of the early Christian Church, and prior to that in the Judaism which spawned the Christian movement itself.

So, needless to say, this church has "been around" in more ways than one. It has, in the words of our opening hymn, "withstood the storm." Lots of storms, both literal and symbolic. And it is very much the product of all of those storms. Who and what we are today is a direct result of who and what we have been, just as what we shall become is also dependent on both our past and our present. Thus my title, "back to the future."

Our church had its more immediate origins in the great Puritan migration of the 1630s. Our mother church, the First Parish in Newbury, was gathered in 1636 as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony which stretched from southern Maine all the way down to Plymouth. It took less than a century for that original church to subdivide twice, first into the western part of Newbury, and second into what would eventually become Newburyport.

At the time of its gathering, our church was "Congregational," and in terms of its polity or method of governance, it still is. In that form of church governance were the seeds not only of the liberalizing movement of Unitarianism, but also the seeds of American democracy itself. For the Puritans who brought it here were wary about any external control over their congregations. They sought to be a community of autonomous churches, each independent as to its own business, each a complete church unto itself as to the sacraments. They feared hierarchies, and they believed that power should be dispersed among the people.

Though the Puritans were practitioners of the theology of John Calvin, they gathered less around particular creeds than around "covenants," which were mostly agreements to "walk together" in mutual love and admonition. They believed in a "learned ministry"--the reason for the founding of Harvard College, by the way--and therein, perhaps, lay the seeds of their own destruction.

For it would not be long before ministers and lay people began to question the accepted doctrines of their faith. Already in the 18th century, there were liberals and conservatives in the church. I cannot emphasize enough, in these anti-intellectual days, how important education was to those early religious ancestors of ours.

The Puritans who arrived here in the 1630s believed that they were the New Jerusalem, planted here in the wilderness of New England. They believed that they were reliving the biblical story. They believed that they were types of the biblical archetype. And they had a powerful vision, taken directly from the Bible, of what they should become.

That vision is stated nowhere more powerfully or beautifully than in John Winthrop’s great and justly famous sermon, "A Modell of Christian Charity," from which I read to you this morning. Winthrop, you will remember, invoked the biblical "Citty vpon a Hill" as his vision of what the Puritan churches ought be. This was no small vision: listen again to what he said:

Now the onely way to avoyde this shipwracke and to provide for our posterity is followe the Counsell of Micah, to doe Justly, to loue mercy, to walke humbly with our God, for this end, we must be knitt together in this worke as one man, wee must entertaine each other in brotherly Affeccion, wee must be willing to abridge our selues of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities, wee must vphold a familiar Commerce together in all meekenes, gentlenes, patience and liberality, wee must delight in eache other, make others Condicions our owne reioyce together, mourne together, labour, and suffer together, allwayes haueing before our eyes our Commission and Community in the worke, our Community as members of the same body, soe shall we keepe the vnitie of the spirit in the bond of peace, the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among vs, as his owne people and will commaund a blessing vpon vs in all our wayes, soe that we shall see much more of his wisdome power goodnes and truthe than formerly we haue been acquainted with. . . .

Now there is a vision, and we could do far worse than to make that vision our own! (Perhaps we don’t dream big enough.)

Over the next few centuries, there would be other visions of what the church should be, but Winthrop’s is still perhaps the greatest, unfulfilled though it continues to be.

Among us Unitarians there would be other visions: the vision of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists, of a personal kind of religious experience wherein we dare to love God, as Emerson put it, "without mediator or veil." The Transcendentalist view was not a particularly institutional one, though there were a few Transcendentalist institutionalists, but it was a clarion call for a renewal of spirituality in the face of a religious practice which in Emerson’s famous phrase had become "corpse cold." His vision called for each of us to "acquaint ourselves at first hand with deity."

Among the Universalists, there was founder John Murray’s great call to give people "not Hell, but hope and courage" along the way. Now, there is a vision. How might we make it a reality?

In the 20th century the vast corruptions within traditional Christianity would lead many religious liberals to embrace a new form religious humanism. God was at best an unanswered question, but human beings, the humanists said, were capable of taking responsibility for their own destiny.

These were great visions of what the church and its people ought to be about. Insofar as we still believe that trying to create community is important, we stand upon those visions. Insofar as we believe in our responsibility to make a better world, to still be in some sense "a Citty vpon a Hill" for all to see, we stand upon those visions. Insofar as we believe in the freedom to determine our own personal faith, we stand upon those visions. Insofar as we believe in Micah’s great admonition to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God, we stand upon those visions. We stand on the backs of heroes and heretics, people who died for this faith of ours, and unless we know something about them and it, how can we ever hope to move forward into the future with any kind of viable and coherent vision?

Religious freedom, the use of reason, and tolerance still stand as the hallmarks or religious liberalism. This church could not exist in its present form without all that has gone before, both the bad as well as the good. It’s non-creedalism is an inheritance from both the radical Protestantism of the 16th century and the Puritans’ own reticence about centralized authority. We still agree to walk together in much the same way as our Puritan Congregational ancestors did. Theologies may change and alter, but the underlying principles of our faith remain. We still believe that it is up to the individual to forge a personal faith. We still believe that religion is incomplete if it does not seek at some level to change the world in which we live. We still believe that love is a divine principle.

Given this reality of a living past, what, then, should our future look like? That is not up to me to determine: it is up to you. But I personally cannot imagine a future for our congregation and its religious life that does not hearken back to those earlier visions of what a church and what faith should be about. I believe that whatever vision we arrive at must be firmly rooted in the past. Our mistakes as well as our triumphs must be part of whatever vision we hope to carry into the future. There is much that we can be proud of, but there are also other things that we must look at and confess, "Here our vision failed us; here we failed to do the right thing."

What have we learned from the past? If our church is truly to become the "great church" of our dreams, we must have a firm grasp of where we have come from, where we are, and where we want to go: of why we are the way we are. It will not be easy: great visions never are. But I truly believe that this is the work that we are called to do. To be a city upon a hill for all to see. To represent in our very beings all that we want our church to become. Not to serve false gods or idols, but to serve the highest and the best that we know. To be generous and kind, to spread hope and courage. To choose the way of "life" which John Winthrop, echoing Moses, laid before our religious forebears so long ago on the good ship Arabella.

If we do this, then I truly believe that we can prosper for at least another 281 years. This morning we are asking you to begin this work by considering our individual and collective past. It’s important that we hear from all of you. We can make a difference for the better in this troubled and troubling world. That is my hope, and my dream, and my vision. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock