HomeReligious Education Sunday – June 11, 2006
NOTE: Due to time considerations a shorter version of this sermon was delivered from the pulpit. The full text, however, is printed here.
Good morning!
Education is a process of teaching and learning.
Religious education is teaching and learning about developing knowledge, theology, practice, spirituality and the actions that arise from these.
One of the great debates in education is whether education is about instilling a set of facts and viewpoints, or is about learning how to find information and how to think about what one has found, in which case testing for knowledge of particular facts is not necessary.
In our liberal religious tradition, while we recognize that it is important to teach a specific body of knowledge, especially to the younger ages, our major focus in on teaching children how to apply their own thought to issues of religion.
That is, we provide not a set of dogmas or creeds, but an approach to thinking through and feeling through both religion and life issues and the connection between these. What do events in our personal lives and in the world around us say about human nature or about the existence of divine power? What does the existence or non-existence of divine power say about the events that happen in our lives and in the world around us? Does it explain these? Does it help us to cope with or learn from or more deeply appreciate these?
The Protestant Reformation of the fifteen hundreds occurred in a particular social context. In the medieval period, very few people in Europe were literate. In a village, it might be that only the local priest could read and write, and it might be that even he could not. And remember that the Bible being used was in Latin, while the local populace spoke a local language or dialect. Further, books were copied by hand, so they were rare and extremely valuable. The local church would have a Bible, but no one else would. So the practice arose of reading from the Bible, then delivering a homily or sermon explaining what it was the Bible said and what how to apply that to contemporary life. There were many cases in which it was the local Bishop who wrote these homilies.
With the development of economic growth more people had the money and the leisure time to learn to read and write and the printing press made Bibles more available and economical.
One characteristic of the Protestant Reformers was that they tended to have greater trust in the people than the old practice allowed for. They believed that each person should read the Bible for themselves and that each could be trusted to understand the meaning of the Bible and to use it wisely. Trust was a major issue.
Growing out of the Reformation, Biblical interpretation became individualized. And because God spoke through scriptures directly to the hearts of individuals, and by extension spoke to congregations through the voice of the community, that is, through dialogue, debate and ultimately through voting, the liberal wing of the movement developed the practice of having congregations run themselves, rather that being controlled by a Bishop or other ecclesiastical authority. This meant, besides members voting on budgets and Boards of Trustees, that congregations called and ordained their own ministers, determined their own statements of purpose, and ran their own education programs. I said this occurred in the liberal wing, though it was among the Puritans of the Calvinist movement, hardly what we today would call liberals. And yet it was directly from them, from the Puritan churches of New England, that the Congregationalist and then the Unitarian movements arose. Some of the old Puritan churches are today Unitarian Universalist.
In our UU movement we do not assume that the minister or the denomination has the truth and that it is their job to teach the laity. We assume instead that it is the minister’s job to raise questions and to point to a few possible answers. It is then the job of the people in the congregation to think through the questions for their own responses, responses that, while they may not fully answer the questions, do help one to live in the world today. We help adults to do this through the Continuing Religious Education Committee programs.
And in our modern Unitarian Universalist movement we have a high degree of faith and trust in not only our adults but also in our children and young people. We trust them with information; trust them to use that information wisely--in part because we help them to think through the issues that facts raise and that young people face in their day to day lives.
And so in the program entitled Our Whole Lives, we give them full age appropriate information about their bodies, about sexuality, about the choices they have. We do not withhold truth and facts from them out of fear that they will use them in ways we may not feel comfortable with.
That is true not only for sexuality, but for theology and spirituality. We recognize that our children and youth will live in a world vastly different from ours and that their answers to life’s questions will be different than the one’s we have. And we see that not as a threat but as progress.
So today we celebrate our Religious Education program, we celebrate the RE Committee, the RE teachers and our Director of Religious Education. We celebrate too the ongoing nature of the program, that fact that it has existed for 150 years and—we hope—will exist for another 150 years; which is to say that we celebrate our religious movement, we celebrate this congregation, and we celebrate ourselves for the good work we have done in passing on our faith to later generations.
Our religious education program is not identical to the one that existed 150, 100 or even 50 years ago; and the one that exists here 50 years from now will be different still. But if we have done our work well, then the same spirit of openness and individual search for truth will still live on.
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