Held by Promise, Not Creed

Sermon delivered on 16 August 2026 by the Reverend Abhi Janamanchi

Look around for a second. No cross on the wall. No bible in the chair. No moment this morning where we all rise and recite a creed, though we did just chant Om Shanti together, and half of you are probably still not sure what it means or why I coax you into chanting it together. Some of you have been coming here for decades and never memorized a catechism, never had to swear to a single belief to belong. 

Every so often somebody new sits with that for a Sunday or two, then asks the inevitable question: 

"So what do y’all believe?" 

I used to think I owed them a short answer. An elevator speech. A nifty slogan. What I've learned instead is that the honest answer isn't a belief at all. It's a story, a long line of people who refused to recite something they didn't believe, and a long line who couldn't stop believing love was bigger than anybody had told them it was allowed to be. Put those two lines together and you get us, this sanctuary, this morning. 

No creed. No dogma. But a promise, a covenant, carried hand to hand across nearly five hundred years. I want to spend the next twenty or so minutes sharing whose hands carried it. 

Unitarianism

Let's go back to the year 325 CE, a council of bishops meeting in a town called Nicaea to settle what the Church would say about the nature of God. They land on the doctrine of the Trinity. Anybody who thought Jesus was something less than fully divine got pushed out. That should have been the end of the argument. It wasn't. The question of whether God is one kept resurfacing every few generations, in people who had never heard of each other. 

One of them was an eighty year old widow in Poland named Catherine Weigel who was asked by her interrogators whether she believed in the Son of God. She said God had no wife and no son, that only mortals needed sons, and that all of us who walk in God's ways are God's children. She was burned at the stake in Krakow in 1539.

That same conviction had already found voice a few years earlier, in a young Spanish law student named Michael Servetus, who in 1531 published a book, The Errors of the Trinity, arguing there was no scriptural basis for the Trinity. He spent the next two decades as a wanted man, living under an assumed name and working as a physician, corresponding secretly with the reformer John Calvin, who eventually turned him over to the Inquisition. Servetus was burned at the stake outside Geneva on October 27, 1553, fourteen years after Weigel, on a pyre built from his own books. He was forty two. 

That conviction found a home among a group called the Polish Brethren, who broke from the Calvinist church in 1565 around one simple idea: faith has to be free and reasonable, or it isn't faith at all. In 1658, Poland's parliament gave them a choice, convert or leave, and roughly three hundred congregations scattered across Europe within a few years. But the books kept moving, and those ideas about reason and conscience turned up in other places. 

You already heard about Transylvania, Francis Dávid, the young king John Sigismund, and the edict of Torda. 

Those ideas also crossed into England, where Theophilus Lindsey preached the country's first openly Unitarian service in 1774, on Essex Street in London. Joseph Priestley was in the room that first Sunday and became one of Lindsey's closest allies, eventually ministering his own congregation in Birmingham. In 1791 a mob burned his house and his meeting house to the ground for his views, and in 1794 he fled to Pennsylvania, founding two congregations and befriending Thomas Jefferson, carrying those convictions to America a generation before there was an American Unitarian Association. 

That association came together in 1825, six years after William Ellery Channing preached in Baltimore that human beings are born with dignity, not depravity, and that reason and conscience have to guide our faith. We marked its two hundredth anniversary just last year. 

Around that same time, half a world away, a Hindu reformer in Calcutta named Rammohun Roy had arrived, on his own, at the conviction that God is one. When he came across Unitarian writing from Britain and America, he recognized his own theology already spoken back to him. He was a founding member of the Calcutta Unitarian Committee, corresponded for years with Unitarians in Bristol and Boston, and in 1828 started a movement of his own, the Brahmo Samaj,

carrying that same conviction forward in the language and culture of his own country. 

Almost two decades passed before the next jolt. Ralph Waldo Emerson stood up at Harvard Divinity School in 1838 and told a room of future ministers to stop borrowing their religion secondhand, to find the sacred themselves in nature and within, reading the Bhagavad Gita and the Buddhist sutras as he said it. In the audience that day was a young minister named Theodore Parker, who went home and wrote in his journal how beautiful and true and sublime it was. 

Three years later, Parker preached his own bombshell, "The Transient and Permanent in Christianity," and it nearly cost him his ministry. Fellow ministers shut their pulpits to him and demanded he resign. He refused, and gave that same fire a spine of justice, hiding escaped slaves in his home in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act, signed by a Unitarian president, Millard Fillmore. For weeks he wrote his sermons with a loaded pistol in his desk and a sword within reach, in case the slave catchers came. In an 1850 sermon, Parker described democracy as government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people. Abraham Lincoln trimmed it for Gettysburg. And Dr. King borrowed his line about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. 

In 1865, a Unitarian gathering voted to define the denomination as strictly Christian. Ministers who thought that too narrow walked out and founded the Free Religious Association, insisting truth wasn't the property of any one tradition. That conviction found its expression in Jenkin Lloyd Jones, who in 1893 helped organize the World's Parliament of Religions, the first time Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Brahmo, and Muslim leaders shared a stage before an American audience, the Brahmo Samaj represented by delegates carrying forward the same conviction Rammohun Roy had planted seventy years before. It would be another century before this Hindu Unitarian Universalist was called to a pulpit in Florida as its own minister but that's where the door opened. 

That same Midwestern circuit Jones had built produced something else entirely. Around 1917, two Unitarian ministers who had never met, John Dietrich in Spokane and Curtis Reese in Des Moines, had each independently started preaching a religion with no God in it, just human beings, their reason, and their responsibility to each other. When they finally crossed paths at a conference, they realized they'd arrived at the same place from different roads. Dietrich called it humanism. Reese adopted the name. By 1933, when a group of philosophers

and ministers published the first Humanist Manifesto, more than half the signers were Unitarian clergy, Dietrich and Reese among them. Even the ones who stopped believing in God couldn't stop believing they were bound to each other. 

In the twentieth century, John Haynes Holmes helped found both the NAACP and the ACLU, a militant pacifist who believed a faith that talked about justice without organizing for it was hollow. In 1921, from his pulpit at the Community Church of New York, he preached a sermon called "Who Is the Greatest Man in the World?" and answered with a name most of his congregation had never heard, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, then spent the rest of his life introducing Americans to Gandhi's nonviolence. 

The same conviction showed up wherever it was most dangerous to hold it. Norbert Čapek built a Unitarian community in Prague and gave us the Flower Communion, then died at Dachau in 1942 for preaching against the Nazi occupation. A Massachusetts minister and his wife, Waitstill and Martha Sharp, went into occupied Europe those years to help refugees and Jewish families escape. And UU theologian James Luther Adams came home from watching Germany fall into fascism warning that an unexamined faith isn't worth having, that freedom has to be defended, actively, every generation. 

Universalism

That's one half of the story. The other half runs just as deep, back to a theologian in Alexandria named Origen, who taught in the third century that God would eventually restore every soul, even the devil, back into love. Two centuries after his death, the church condemned that teaching as heresy. The hope didn't die with the ruling. It went underground, resurfacing here and there for thirteen hundred years, waiting on the right two people to run into each other. 

The story tradition tells goes like this. An Englishman named John Murray comes ashore on a sandbar off New Jersey, grieving a dead wife and child, buried in debt, sworn never to preach again. A farmer named Thomas Potter had built a chapel out there and had been waiting years for someone to preach in it. He looks at the wreck of a man coming ashore and says, "You're the one I've been waiting for." Murray argues. Potter doesn't budge. Murray ends up preaching there in 1770, and a movement gets born out of that argument on a sandbar. 

Standing beside him for the rest of his ministry is Judith Sargent Murray, his wife, and calling her a supporter undersells her completely. A poet and playwright, one of the earliest published voices for women's equality in this country, she's the one who shaped and organized the churches that grew from his preaching. In 1793 the Universalist Church of America was formally organized. 

Its greatest theologian was Hosea Ballou, and there's one story I have to share because it's the whole theology in a single exchange. A man tells him, terrified, "Brother Ballou, my son drinks, runs with the wrong crowd, I'm afraid he'll burn in hell." Ballou says, "Then let's wait outside the tavern. When he comes out, we'll tie him up and throw him in a fire." The man is horrified. "I could never do that to my own child." Ballou says, "Friend, neither would God." 

In 1805, fourteen years before Channing's Baltimore sermon (read full text), Ballou published a book, A Treatise on Atonement, arguing that God never needed blood or sacrifice to forgive anybody, that the love had never been withdrawn, that we're the ones who forget it. Hell, for Ballou, was the suffering we build for ourselves right now, whenever we live apart from love. 

Unitarian Universalism

One man ended up living both halves of this story at once. Thomas Starr King was born the son of a Universalist minister, and became a Unitarian minister himself, decades before the two traditions ever formally spoke to each other, let alone merged. Barely five feet tall and never in good health, he moved to San Francisco and, on the eve of the Civil War, crisscrossed California by stagecoach preaching for the Union, credited by Lincoln himself with keeping the state from breaking away. He liked to joke that his hundred and twenty pounds proved nothing, "though I weigh only 120 pounds, when I'm mad, I weigh a ton." He's also the one who gave us the line that still gets a laugh, that “Universalists believe God is too good to damn them, while Unitarians believe they're too good to be damned.” He died at thirty nine, having carried the intellectual fire of one tradition and the radical love of the other in the same body, a full century before anyone made him choose. 

Both threads kept growing through the 1800s. Universalists, along with the Quakers, were among the first American denominations to formally condemn slavery. In 1863 they ordained Olympia Brown, one of the first women ordained in this country. When a seminary professor told her, "If only you were a man, I could do something for you," she told him, "I didn't come here for you to do something for me. I came here to learn." And in 1889, they ordained the

Reverend Joseph Jordan, the first Black Universalist minister, who opened a school for Black children in Norfolk, Virginia, that ran for nearly twenty years. 

By the early 1900s, theologian Clarence Skinner was writing that Universalism hadn't gotten rid of hell, it had humanized it. Poverty, war, racism, these are the hells we build with our own hands, and salvation means going out and dismantling them. He called the whole project loving the hell out of the world. I love that phrase. 

When these two traditions finally came together, it wasn't the institutions that led the way. It was the kids. Universalist youth organized a national network in 1889, Unitarian youth in 1896, and they started worshipping together decades before any of the adults thought it was a good idea. By 1953 those two youth movements had already merged into one, Liberal Religious Youth (LRY), years ahead of their parent denominations. The grownups followed in 1961, when the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America consolidated into the Unitarian Universalist Association. 

When they merged, they wrote down a statement of who this new thing was for, and it read like 1961, "man" instead of "people," "brotherhood" instead of "community." They rewrote it in 1985. We rewrote it again in 2024. Even our own words for this promise keep changing. The promise itself doesn't. 

More than a hundred UU ministers answered Dr. King's call and marched in Selma in 1965. A Unitarian Universalist minister named James Reeb was beaten to death on a street there. Weeks later, a UU layperson from Detroit named Viola Liuzzo was murdered by the Klan on a highway outside Selma. A minister and a layperson, both killed for showing up. The following year, Dr. King told a UUA General Assembly that the arc of the moral universe only bends toward justice if people are willing to bend it. 

Three years after that, when Black Unitarian Universalists asked this young association to share power and fund real Black leadership, the promise got made and then pulled back. Many left in the years that followed. That wound is still being tended. A promise that only tells its flattering half isn't one you can trust. We broke faith once. We are still working to earn it back. 

And still, this small, strange denomination kept doing things that mattered. Beacon Press published the Pentagon Papers in 1971, landing the UUA on Nixon's enemies list. We taught teenagers the truth about their own bodies before most institutions dared to, first with About Your Sexuality in the 1970s and later with Our Whole Lives. Our clergy went from almost entirely male to majority women in a generation. We adopted the flaming chalice, affirmed same sex unions in 1984, launched the Welcoming Congregation program in 1989, and in 2004, the day marriage equality became legal in Massachusetts, President William Sinkford officiated the wedding of Julie and Hillary Goodridge, two of the plaintiffs whose lawsuit made it possible. Sinkford, elected in 2001, was the first African American to lead a historically white denomination in this country. It's now led by the Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt, elected in 2023, the first woman of color and first openly queer person to hold the office. The story hasn't stopped. It's being written by people alive right now. 

That's the promise. Not a doctrine. A record, imperfect and unfinished, of people who kept showing up for each other and for anyone the world had decided to give up on. 

So if you're new here this morning, still working out what you're supposed to believe to belong, here it is. There's no test. No creed. No dogma. This isn't a belief centered faith. It's a value centered one, held together by covenant rather than creed, a promise about how we treat each other and how we honor the Holy as it lives in someone else, whether or not we agree about God ourselves. That's how a Hindu ends up chanting Om Shanti during the meditation and the whole room chants it back with him. Nobody has to believe what I believe. You just have to be willing to keep the promise, to journey together even when we don't agree. 

Weigel at eighty years old. Servetus at the stake. A broken man on a sandbar and a farmer who wouldn't let him leave. A preacher in Transylvania. People demanding, in 1968, that a young denomination live up to what it claimed to believe, and a faith slowly, imperfectly, trying to. 

That thread runs all the way to this sanctuary, seventy five years old this year, rising on the same promise, rooted in the same tradition, asking the same question it's always asked. It runs to whoever is sitting next to you this morning, deciding whether this is a place they can stay. 

We're not asking you to recite anything. We're asking you to show up. Keep asking the questions. Let the promise pass through your hands the way it passed through theirs. Then pass it on.

We believe in that. The staying. The showing up. The passing on. The love that keeps showing up, generation after generation, the radical, revolutionary love that will not let us go, let us down, or let us off the hook. 

May it be so.