You know that I am an unabashed evangelist for our church and our faith. Unitarian-Universalism has given so much to me that I just feel compelled to share it with others, with [ask Henry] whoever wants to know. So I'm not ashamed to be an evangelist. But I am aware that evangelism has been given a bad name in our culture. Too many televangelists spend more time reciting their toll-free phone numbers for donations than they do reciting scripture. Too many use cheap threats of hell to build up a hoard of cash that they spend on nice homes and cars. Eventually people see them for who they are, hucksters, the religious equivalent of a bad used-car salesman, using cheap tricks and lies to lure the unsuspecting believer.

I don't want to be that kind of evangelist. I don't want to have to resort to cheap sales tricks to get you to church. I want you to know exactly what you're getting yourself into with this church and this faith. And so this morning I want to come clean and reveal to you a deception that is built into the very center of the theology and culture of Unitarian-Universalism. A deception that I and many others, unintentionally and without malintent, have nonetheless perpetuated while representing our faith. So call this the "buyer beware" sermon. Caveat emptor. Think of it as a 60-Minutes expose where we uncover this deception at the heart of Unitarian-Universalism so that we can get a true sense of what we are getting ourselves into when we commit to this faith.

I call this deception "the Unitarian bait-and-switch." Now we all know what a bait and switch is, right? It's when you walk into the car dealership or the department store because of some promise they've made in an advertisement and then when you get there you discover that the promise was false and they try to sell you something more expensive, more costly. "I'm sorry, sir, that model is sold out already. For a thousand dollars more I can offer you our premium model." Something like that. How does this translate, though, to our church?

The person who best articulated the Unitarian bait and switch is a former minister of this church, Moncure Conway. Conway was both a victim of this deception and, poignantly, a perpetrator of it. I'd like to illustrate the Unitarian bait and switch by just telling you a little bit of Conway's story.

Moncure Conway was born into a prominent slave-holding family in Virginia before the Civil War. The Conways were devout Methodists and pillars of their community. In school, Moncure received training to take over his father's plantation. In church he attended revivals where threats of hell brought people on their knees to the alter. Week after week, he heard the preacher use the Bible to justify slavery and slowly but surely young Moncure was being groomed for the Virginia aristocracy.

But somewhere along the line, Conway began to question some things. Slavery offended his conscience. His free-thinking nature began to chafe under the dogma of the church. He felt manipulated when people used hellfire to bring him to God. He resented the way his family had his life all planned out for him. And then, one day, while reading a magazine, he encountered an article by Ralph Waldo Emerson, someone who didn't get down to Virginia very much in those days, an article that suggested God could just as easily be found in the world as in scripture, an article that said that when we listen to our conscience we are sometimes hearing the call of God there. Conway had never heard these things before and he began to travel around and talk to people about Emerson's ideas. Before you knew it, he had enrolled at Harvard to study to become a Unitarian minister. This was apostasy for his family in more ways than one.

Now the neat thing about being a Unitarian seminarian back in the 1840s was that when you went to seminary you didn't just get to read Emerson; you actually got a chance to meet him. That's what Conway did. He didn't waste any time. In the first week of his studies he walked out to Concord and met Emerson who greeted him warmly. They spent the afternoon discussing religion on the banks of Walden Pond. What a nice way to have a seminary education, I have to say.

Strolling on a lovely spring day, Emerson pointed out to Conway the flora and fauna of the region. Meanwhile, Conway was lamenting a paper he had to write for school, a philosophical justification of the existence of God. Emerson stopped Conway in his tracks. He said "Stop talking about that." And he said to him "an actually existent fly was more important than a possibly existent angel." Emerson had a knack for the provocative aphorism like that.

And so it was, over the course of that afternoon in the woods of Walden Pond that Moncure Conway was baptized into a faith that found God in all creation, a faith that valued this world more than the next, a sense of the sacredness and preciousness of the now. He wrote in his autobiography, "My instruction in the supremacy of the present hour began, not so much in Emerson's words as in himself. Standing beside the ruin of the shanty Thoreau had built with his own hands and lived in for a year at a cost of $28, Emerson appeared an incarnation of the wondrous day he was giving me. That night I sat in my room in Divinity Hall and wrote: May 3 -- the most memorable day of my life -- spent with Ralph Waldo Emerson."

Can you see what's happening here? Can you see Conway taking the bait? Can you see him being seduced by the free faith of Unitarianism? Imagine how it must have felt for a young person who'd grown up having to memorize creeds and doctrines to be told to trust his conscience. Imagine how it must have felt for someone who'd spent hot summer nights in Virginia packed into a church where the preacher talked about hell, to be transported to the shores of Walden Pond in springtime and told that all he needed to know about God could be found right there. Imagine how refreshing it must have been after listening to the moral hypocrisy of preachers justifying slavery to have someone tell him to trust the truth in his own conscience. Imagine that.

Or maybe you don't have to imagine. Maybe Conway's story sounds a little bit like, circumstances are different, but a little bit like your own journey to Unitarian-Universalism. Aren't these some of the same reasons that we've come to this faith? The affirmation of human conscience and reason, the commitment to justice, the world embracing spirituality, the acceptance of ourselves for who we are, the replacement of a threatening, judging god with a god of love? We took the bait too, didn't we? We took the bait too.

And when I say bait, I don't mean that these descriptions of Unitarian-Universalism aren't true. They are true. But they're not the whole story. That's why I call it the bait. It's just the beginning of the story. It's the good news that gets us in the door to the church, but it's not the whole story. Moncure Conway learned that the hard way.

Fifty years later, looking back on his exciting seminary days from his mid-seventies, Conway wrote, "How small a part of my new religion did I learn from those entertaining studies at Divinity Hall." What's he referring to here? What was it that he later learned about his new faith that caused him to write that line? Here comes the switch.

It was only when he became pastor of All Souls Church, during the turbulent years leading up to the Civil War, that the other shoe dropped for Conway. The 1850s were a time of taking sides, when people were forced to take a stand on one side or the other of the great sin of that time, slavery. What happened during that time was that many preachers and churches abdicated their role in side-taking. They retreated to a personal spirituality. They focused on personal sins like drinking and Sabbath keeping, rather than public sins like slavery. They said the job of religion was to save our souls for the next life, not to save souls here in this life.

But not Conway; he was not satisfied with that religion. Not too long into his ministry at All Souls, Conway discovered that the this-worldly religion he embraced on the shores of Walden Pond not only fostered a kind of ecstatic embrace of the world; it fostered a profound sense of responsibility for the world. If Walden is burning, it must be saved. He said religion must speak to the conditions of this world, must account for the public sins of this world, must save souls in this world. His faith demanded that he speak to the problems of the times, to make moral judgments and to act.

When Conway first grasped the overwhelming responsibility of this, it felt like too much for him to carry. He knew that the dictates of his conscience would tear apart his country; he knew that it would separate him from his family that he loved. He suddenly realized that the exuberant faith of Walden Pond felt like the weight of the world on his shoulders and he actually named it. He called this feeling "the world burden." World burden. "With my new faith," he remarked, "fictitious hells faded and actual hells appeared. And on my knees I swore that it shall remain my supreme end to save hearts suffering not in eternity but in time, in flesh and in blood."

Conway's sense of this responsibility, this weight, was magnified by the fact that not only was he speaking and acting for himself but every Sunday he had to get up into this pulpit and say something that lots of folks were going to hear as well, and felt responsibility for his people, his flock. For Conway, this sense of responsibility was forever wrapped up in the life and death of a member of his congregation, this congregation, named Gerald Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald was a young man of 18 who attended All Souls back then. Conway notes that he came from a Catholic family, but happened to fall in love with a young lady who was coming to All Souls and so he converted. Not too long after, she fell for another man. (Talk about a bait and switch!) But Fitzgerald ended up falling in love with this faith. Week after week the boy sat in rapt attention to Conway's preaching, to his application of religion to the injustices of the world and especially to his anti-slavery sermons. Fitzgerald, too, decided that he wanted to be a preacher of this kind of religion; he would go to Harvard and study to be a Unitarian minister as well, but just before he left the war started.

Fitzgerald, who could have gotten out of the war with his connections, signed up for what he believed to be a holy cause. And Conway writes "None of us ever saw Gerald again. Two soldiers reported that they found him dying of a wound on the field and bore him to the shade of a tree by the Rappahannock. The exact place of his burial is unknown. "So vague were the rumors about his end," says Conway, "that I long cherished a hope that Gerald might be in some kindly cabin restoring life, and might yet surprise us with his return."

Conway was devastated by Fitzgerald's death and he felt responsible for it. Worse, in later years he began to question his support of the war because the cause of racial justice was progressing so slowly in the wake of it. In his autobiography, he penned this epitaph to his friend Fitzgerald: "Rest in your peaceful unknown grave, my friend. For you, no tears, no heartbreaks, no harrowing reflection that your chivalry was in vain and the war mere manslaughter. These are for me who found you a happy youth, clinging to me with boyish affection, and from my pulpit helped to lay on you the burden of the world."

That's the Unitarian bait and switch. How do we make sense of this bait and switch, and what does it mean for each of us in our own journey of faith? The way I see it, it's something like this: At the heart of the Unitarian bait and switch lie two different understandings of what freedom means. The allure of the Unitarian bait, if you will, is its sense of wondrous freedom of faith, freedom of conscience, acceptance of our own selves. But freedom in this sense means freedom in the sense of freedom from oppression, freedom from restrictive dogma and creed, freedom from hierarchy in church and society. Initially people embraced the Unitarian faith to be free from something. And there's nothing wrong with this; there is much we have to be free from in this world.

Yet a faith that promises freedom from, only freedom from, is ultimately a faith based on a negation. It's a faith that rejects something. Just as important as freedom from is the question of what we are free for. What we are free for. Once freed from oppression and injustice, to what ends will we devote our free selves? To what good will we commit ourselves? The Unitarian bait and switch takes place when people make the shift from the liberating freedom from to the costly freedom for. We don't seek to be free just so we can do whatever we want. We don't seek to be free just so we can buy a big car and have lots of money. What does freedom mean if that's all it means?

Our freedom is a gift because it allows us to answer the question "To what higher cause, to what ultimate purpose, will I freely give my life?" And once we answer that question, that's when responsibility kicks in, that's when we declare what it is we will give ourselves to, and fight for, and sacrifice for. We will each encounter the Unitarian bait and switch when we can answer the question of what our freedom is for, what our free faith has allowed us to devote our lives to. And though we might at first feel deceived by that bait and switch, feeling that our faith has lured us in, ultimately we will be thankful for the richness of life that it has given us.

People say to me, "Rob, doesn't being a Unitarian mean that I can believe whatever I want?" And it makes me want to cry when they say that. It makes me want to cry. Because that's the bait talking. Right? If that's what you believe about this faith, then you haven't gotten to the switch yet. You haven't made the transition from freedom from to freedom for. You haven't answered the question yet of what it is your conscience demands that you give your life to. Because once you make the switch, then instead of saying 'I'm a Unitarian; I can believe whatever I want,' you will say 'I am a Unitarian; I believe what I must. I believe what my conscience demands.'

On Memorial Day we are asked to remember those who gave their lives, ostensibly to defend freedom. As we do so, we would do well to examine how we ourselves are stewards of our own freedom. And to remember that the pursuit of that freedom can oftentimes be costly.

Amen.