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Atlantis Mint Atlantisz, a rég elsüllyedt ország,(Translated by Judit Gellérd) Sermon
One reason for the title of the sermon has to do with the eighty-year history of our Partner Church movement. During the presidency of Louis Cornish, a first sister church program was created in the 1920s. Then many American Unitarian churches donated bells to their sister churches to replace the ancient bells of Transylvania, turned into cannon during World War I. I have a surprise for you: In this very moment, the bells of your partner church in Harangláb--which in Hungarian means “bell tower”--are tolling. The bells are gathering the congregation for a synchron worship service. I e-mailed a message about our today partner church Sunday to Rev. Szentgyörgyi, and within hours, the reply came back with his enthusiastic greetings to you. He wrote that they would not only tall their bells, but they would have an evening partner church worship service, synchronized with ours. If we listen carefully, we might hear the congregation singing gloriously the same hymns as we do here today: Find the Stillness. I can hear Rev. Szentgyörgyi’s inspired words: "May God bless our sacred friendship between Harangláb and Bridgewater." And we respond: "May God bless your congregation, your family, and our journeying together as pilgrims of a common faith.” Why is the simple faith of the Transylvanian Unitarians so compelling for the sophisticated, educated American Unitarian Universalists?--one often asks. Why does the encounter seem to fill a spiritual void on a large scale? A Transylvanian visiting minister intuitively answered it: "You Americans hold your faith far from your core." For us, in Transylvania religious and cultural identity are our core value. It has to do with centuries of persecution of Unitarians in Transylvania, and its minority status. I assess with great pride that Unitarianism, the most radical wing of the Radical Reformation in the sixteenth century, is a Hungarian-born religion, indigenous to Transylvania. Other non-Trinitarian, that is, Unitarian movements--in Poland, Spain, Italy--were eradicated by Inquisition. It was Transylvania where the principle of toleration and freedom of conscience was first proclaimed in the Edict of Torda in 1568 and, consequently the first Unitarian church if the world established by Francis David. What is so remarkable, is that Transylvanian Unitarians granted religious freedom, and practiced religious tolerance in a time when they were the majority in power, religion of the king, John Sigismund. He could have coerced the people of his kingdom to convert and practice his religion. Instead, he practiced generosity and recognition of the values of the other. The golden era for Unitarians was short lived, and during the next four centuries Unitarians, a minority now, have been persecuted by those other religions. Yet, Unitarians have always nurtured a quality-conscious self-esteem and a wondrous capacity for renewal from within. Some Theological Principles Transylvanian Unitarians are Christian humanists. Our main precept is: God is one; Egy az Isten; God is within. The Christological consequence is Jesus’ humanity. We follow Jesus as our example, rather than worship as god. The good news for us is that we humans have the same divine potentials as Jesus had, with the consequent responsibility to activate this potential, to strive toward self-realization, perfection--that is the bottom line. As my father put it: because we can follow our highest ideals, we therefore must. This “ought-to-be”-ness is an imperative because of our potentials. A quote from an 18th century sermon underlines this idea: “God has given us the spirit of free will. It is not enough to avoid evil; good must be done. And it is not enough to stay good--one must grow in human values.” Ours is an active faith, an active existence against odds, against persecutions of all kinds. We have always been aware that our faith would keep us. It did. I am not talking about a Unitarian denominational membership. I am talking about faith. We are born into our religion, yet it never came cheap to practice it. Each generation had to fight for this basic right throughout the four centuries. Some died for our faith. My father was one of them. A brilliant scholar and Unitarian minister, was sentenced to seven years of political prison at age 35, in Romania's Gulag. Physically broken by torture and deprivation, he continued writing even after prison--and the Secret Police continued persecuting him. Facing a new arrest, he chose active martyrdom, he ended his own life on his sixtieth birthday. But his broken dream of church renewal is being carried by 200 Unitarian Universalist Partner churches all over the country. You are helping my people dream their future into being. It was my decade-long mission and privilege to be an instrument and work with dedicated UU-s like Dick and Ellie--and now you--in creating a nationwide grassroots movement--the largest UU movement in the century--called the Partner Church Council, a framework for covenantal relationship between two times 200 churches. The scale of revitalization of the Transylvanian Church is unprecedented in its four-century history. In the process, American UU-s experienced spiritual transformation by participating in the program. The underlying principle of the Partner Church program in post-traditional American churches is that giving the congregation a meaningful vision, a vision of transformation, will encourage people to dream boldly, become generous as instrument of grace. American Unitarian Universalists long for and seek spiritual depth in their religion, historical depth in their tradition. One place to find it is Transylvania. The power of the Partner Church movement lies in this discovery of historic roots and of a faith that heals the “pessimism of the intellect with the optimism of the will.” American Unitarian churches needed a focus to bring a heterogeneous congregation together and to give up a rigid culture of scarcity, always asking “Can we afford it?” rather than asking “What are we called to be and to do?” and, then, “How can we make that dream come true?” The Partner Church relationship, through its inspiring and humbling experiences, provided precisely the needed focus to release American churches from a captivity of stagnation, changing the way congregations think and behave as religious community. A church which has a vision and a focus of meaningful actions, which stems from a deeper understanding of faith, is worth attending. Salvation is to be found there. In his last sermon, the day before he died, my father preached these words: “God does not expect from you to save the world, your mandate is limited to one single human being, which could be just yourself. God never expects more from us than we are capable of doing. Each word of comfort, each act of compassion is a small bonfire during dark nights. But these tiny flickering flames, the simple gestures of loving hearts will add up and will eventually save the world. Salvation is not something we have to wait for, but as good Unitarians, we should do something about it. Because we can. Because we can, therefore we must.” Transylvania has become the Holy Land for Unitarian pilgrims. There are two kinds of UU-s: those who had visited Transylvania and those who will visit it. And I hope you, too, will go there some day. Rev. Peter Raible’s testimony after our first pilgrimage was this: I was not prepared for how holy the trip [to Transylvania] would prove to be. What is so transforming, I found in no detached examination of our Transylvania movement, but in direct experience. To hear parishioners sing their long banned national anthem as tears stream down their faces is before long to feel wetness on one’s own cheeks. To sit in a worship service, not a word of which one can understand, and feel the depth of the spirit flowing. To encounter the talented young people who are studying for our ministry there is to feel the "soul’s invincible surmise" that our small, fragile, precious faith in Transylvania has a future as well as a past. My pilgrimage, as I suspect for most of Unitarians, did not strive to create a religious experience, but I found it again and again. The experience, simply put, was transformative. Whatever North Americans may have done on behalf for their peers in Transylvania is more than repaid by the religious experience that have come to us by visiting there. We return, I think, more deeply grounded in our own faith, more consecrated to seeing our Unitarian Universalist cause continue in this continent, and more assured that our religion has much to give in the hard times of life. We need each other indeed, Rev. Gary Smith emphasized, “more than emotionally, more than psychologically, more than socially. We need each other spiritually, which has to do with the divine flame within each of us; with our spiritual mentors in Transylvania who had to fight for our faith, not in the time of the Council of Nicaea, not in the Middle Ages, not at the time of the Reformation, but in our own time, in our own generation. Even if they lost everything to wars and dictatorships, but they kept their faith. They had the courage to stand up for something, to live a life far simpler than ours materially but richer in the spirit, a shared faith. We have spiritual cousins to die for." The eighty thousand Transylvanian sisters and brothers in faith
are dreaming the renewal into being with every day. American bells
in Transylvanian bell towers are tolling in testimony that God has intended
a brighter future for us. And you are instruments of this divine
intention. The commitment to witness and care for this faithful and
suffering people are your testimony of how freedom and tolerance, grafted
to the root, now find their blossoming in all of us: in how we pray, in
what we do, in who we are. Amen
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