I don't have a text to share with you as a reading this morning. I have a symbol. What I want to do is bring the flaming chalice up close to the pulpit with me this morning for our sermon.

Moncure Conway, the abolitionist minister of All Souls back in the 1850s used to tell a story about two of his colleagues in the abolition movement, William Lloyd Garrison, the famous leader of the movement, and the Reverend Samuel May, a Unitarian minister and abolitionist preacher in upstate New York. Now, while Garrison and May had much in common -- they were both abolitionists and both Unitarians -- they had different temperaments, you could say. Garrison was a radical, not patient with those who sought gradual solutions to the evil of slavery. He wanted it gone, now. The Reverend May was no less an abolitionist, but he was, above all -- how shall I put it? -- a gentleman, a gentleman with a keen sense of decorum and propriety. If slavery could be abolished without rocking the boat too much, well that would suit Mr. May just fine.

So the story goes that one day the two crusaders shared a platform at a large abolition rally. Garrison spoke first and gave a passionate speech that inflamed the audience. They rose to their feet, clapping and cheering and chanting and when Garrison sat down beside Samuel May, May turned to him and said, with a note of disapproval in his voice, "Mr. Garrison, you are on fire." [Laughter] Garrison wheeled around to look May directly in the eye and responded, "Mr. May, I have need to be on fire. I have icebergs to melt." I have need to be on fire. I have icebergs to melt.

I don't know about you, friends, but I'm feeling a little bit like William Lloyd Garrison these days, feeling like there are a lot of icebergs out there that I'd like to melt, a lot of things going on in my country that make it feel like it's not my country any more. And, you know, I've tried Mr. Mays' way of doing things. I've tried to be decorous and reasonable. Like a good Unitarian, like a good progressive, I've believed that if only we could sit down and reason together, if only calmer, cooler heads could prevail, then all would be well. Then the icebergs of racism and war and homophobia and environmental degradation, then these icebergs would melt away.

But friends, it hasn't happened. I have come to believe, with Garrison, that while there is an important place for reason in public debate, reason can only go so far to change the hearts of a people and a nation. Reason, it turns out, can't melt an iceberg. Only fire can. And fire comes when we speak and act from our deepest, from our ultimate convictions. Fire comes when we speak and act out of devotion to the things that we love the most. Fire comes, in other words, when we speak from our faith, from what we believe in our heart of hearts to be true and just and holy and beautiful.

I believe that if we are to melt the hearts, the icebergs of our nation, we must be willing to play with fire. We must be willing, with courage and conviction, to take our faith out beyond the walls of this church, to take it into the streets and into our communities and into our nation, to win over peoples' hearts and minds. We need to play with fire.

Now Unitarians sometimes have a hard time doing this. We tend to be a timid and a shy -- not in most things, but when it comes to our faith, we can sometimes be a timid and a shy people. And sometimes we're a little bit uncertain about where we stand on things. And so I believe that to play with fire here and now, we need to know where our tradition stands; we maybe need to take a little bit of courage from our religious ancestors, to show us the way, to show us how we can bring fire to bear in our nation at this time. I think it's appropriate now, with 47 new members of the church here, for me to say one more time, as succinctly as I can, what is the core of the Unitarian faith. People always ask me to "just summarize it for us, Rob; distill it into something that I can share with my uncle and my co-worker." And there is a core to our faith, for all of our diversity. And that core has remained unchanged since virtually the time of the American Revolution. And it is this: That there is, implanted in each and every human being, a spark of the divine. That's what the chalice represents for us, that spark of divinity.

Because of that spark, human beings possess inherent worth and dignity. And the purpose of our lives is to take that little spark and to fan it so that flame grows, so that our lives burn with more holiness, so that our lives become a shining reflection of truth and beauty and justice. That is the purpose of the spiritual life for Unitarian Universalists. Contained in that spark are all the powers and gifts that we've been given as human beings. The purpose of our lives is to use those gifts, to enfold them and develop them so that they might serve the holy.

A Unitarian is someone who sees that the goal of life is the flourishing of the human personality. For in that flourishing, we see the flourishing of God. We weren't the first to think this up. As early as the Third Century, the church father, Eranaeus, put it nicely when he said "The glory of God is a human being fully alive."

Imbued with this core faith, our ancestors have, throughout the centuries, sought to make the world a better place, sought to shape their nation in accord with this vision of what human beings are and what is our purpose. I want to share just a couple of examples of those with you today so that we might gain some strength. Let's go back to Mr. Garrison and Mr. May for a moment, and the issue of slavery. It's important to remember that for folks like Garrison and May, slavery was not, first and foremost, a political or social issue. You know, they didn't come to oppose slavery because they got an e-mail from Amnesty International [Laughter] with pictures of conditions on plantations asking for twenty-five dollars. For them, it was a religious conviction from the start. It was a matter of faith.

They said this: "When I see a human being enslaved, I see God in chains." To them, a human being was the most precious and valuable thing they could conceive of, and slavery was destroying human beings, preventing a whole class of people from flourishing as their faith told them was the purpose of life. I wonder how many of us today could stand up and name a cause that we believe in deeply, a cause that we support, and say as succinctly and clearly the faith that lies behind our support of that cause. As simple and clear as saying "When I see a human being enslaved, I see God in chains."

Let's take another issue, for example. Public education. Free and universal education in America began when Horace Mann, a person who sat in the pews of William Ellery Channing's church for many years and heard Channing go on and on and on about the spark of the divine that was in people, and how we must cultivate it. And Mann said to himself, "Well, how should we be cultivating it? What role does society have in cultivating that spark that is within people?" And that's when he got this idea that education shouldn't just be for the elite sons of Boston merchants, but should be for all the people. And so he went to the statehouse and he made an argument for free and universal education. But he didn't say, "Well, I think it would give us a more competitive workforce, and I think we'd improve our college graduation rate . . ." You know, how many candidates have bored us to death with a list of reasons for us to support their cause? He said "We must educate all the people of our nation because it is their God-given right" to flourish as human beings. Again, he went back to the core of our faith. How many of us could make that statement today?

Let me just take one other issue from the Nineteenth Century, the issue of women's rights. Given this explanation of our theology, it won't surprise you to know that the Universalist denomination was the first denomination to ordain women in this country, in 1863. Olympia Brown was her name, and Olympia Brown made the case. She said "If religious authority, as you say, comes from this spark of divine within every person, they why can't a woman stand in this pulpit and speak about God?" What about this ancient lineage of male apostolic succession has excluded women from the pulpit? And then that expanded because Olympia's sisters, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony -- Unitarians as well -- took that theology and said women should also have the right to vote. Again, it wasn't first and foremost a political issue. It wasn't about coalition-building; it wasn't getting out the vote for more people for a particular party. It was a religious issue for them.

Now, let's see. I've managed to claim the abolition of slavery, universal education and the women's right to vote for Unitarian Universalists. What else can I grab for us today? [Laughter] My point isn't that Unitarians get all the credit for these things, rather that during that period of time, Unitarians were successful in shaping the minds of the general public in such a way that our theology provided a vision, a progressive vision for America, that carried out beyond our walls, and that shaped a vision for this country. That vision inspired later on the progressive movement; it inspired the New Deal; it inspired the Civil Rights movement, a vision of a society that was egalitarian, that was democratic and that allowed the individual person, the human soul, to flourish and to be free.

Friends, it took generations for us to build a public culture in this nation that reflected that vision. And now, in one generation, it has nearly crumbled. It has come unraveled with the rise of the religious right. And so, here we are, at the dawn of the 21st Century, and we still have icebergs to melt. When more young black men are in prison than are enrolled in college, we have icebergs to melt. When our nation's leaders still insist that the science is inconclusive on global warming, and, as payback to businesses for campaign contributions, try to ease environmental restrictions and then call it "Clean Skies," we have icebergs to melt. When a hurricane strikes a major American city and the botched and delayed federal response lays bare the systemic racism that still permeates our country, we have icebergs to melt in this country. When there are those who still can't muster the generosity to allow two people, no matter what their gender, to get married, who still begrudge them that "mazel tov," then we have icebergs to melt.

Friends, this week marks the third anniversary of the United States' invasion of Iraq. This war, waged against a country that posed no great threat to our security, has taken more than 2,300 United States lives, injured more than 17,000 U.S. soldiers, and killed roughly 35,000 Iraqi civilians. Mr. May, I have need to be on fire; I have icebergs to melt.

The most common question that I get from members of the congregation, the most common pastoral question that comes to me, is "Rob, how will we take back our country, the country that we love?" I think that we need to do as Mr. Garrison did. I think we need to play with fire. I think that one of the most important things that we can do in this church . . . Let me say, we're doing lots of social justice work in our neighborhood. We're hosting a national conference of the religious left here in May, bringing together a thousand religious progressives from across the country. So we're organizing locally, we're organizing nationally. But today I want to take the most frequent question that comes to me and to put it back on your shoulders. Because I think that the most important thing that we can do in a church is to equip each and every person in this sanctuary to go out into the world and to be able to speak passionately and articulately about how your faith grounds your political and social commitments in the world. I think that is how we are going to change the hearts and minds of people in this country. I think that is how we are going to melt the icebergs. [Applause]

You know, I've been teaching a class and Louise has been teaching a class where we've been practicing how to do just that. I want to share with you something that we learned in that class, a formulation that I want you to practice, in Pierce Hall, in the dining room today at lunch, let's practice this. And when you go home and have dinner tonight with your family, go ahead and practice it. The formulation goes like this: I support X -- fill in a cause that you believe in deeply -- because I believe Y -- fill in an ultimate belief of yours. "I support X because I believe Y." I support a reduction in CO2 emissions because I believe that human beings and the earth are part of one inter-dependent creation, and that if our mother dies we will perish too. I believe that love is the highest purpose and greatest end of human living and I can't tolerate a society that will sanction two people for trying to express that love.

I support X because I believe Y. That is the formula that I want you to go out and practice today, that I want you to be able to share. Because I think that this political battle is, certainly, going to be waged on a national level; it's going to be waged on a local level. But ultimately, it's going to be waged at the level of the individual, the single heart, the single mind. And that's where you can make a difference.

And so I want to leave you, my friends, with a commissioning. It's a commissioning from the great Universalist preacher, John Murray who, at a time of great uncertainty in our nation, right after the American Revolution, said this to his congregation: "Go out into the highways and byways of America, your new country, and give the people, blanketed with a decaying and crumbling faith, something of your new vision. You may possess only a small light, but uncover it and let it shine. Use it to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. Give them not hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and the everlasting love of God."

Friends, let us make that our task in our own day.

Amen.