Jamie Awesome

Jamie was asked by our social justice committee to speak about peace at today's church service. He spent a lot of last evening preparing and I'm telling you, he was freaking awesome! He's a totally amazing public speaker.

Here's what he said (UUI is our specific church--Unitarian Universalist Church of Indianapolis and UU is the main denomination--Unitarian Universalists):


Good morning. I'm Jamie Hinson-Rieger.

In 2006 the General Assembly asked UU congregations to begin a conversation about peace. That is, to talk about what it could mean to move beyond our historic acceptance of just war principles, to a place of actively affirming and promoting a world community of peace through nonviolence. I'm not a peace activist, and I'm not a peace scholar. But as a member of the Social Justice Committee here at UUI, and in particular, as someone who is new to UUI and new to UU, I'd like to talk to you this morning about why I'm excited about this conversation.

But first, I have a confession to make. There was a time, and it wasn't so long ago, when I thought that being UU would be, well, kind of easy.

When my wife Susanne and I began attending UUI, we were both looking for an outstanding environment in which to pass on our values to our children. And UUI is that. And we knew from our visits that we'd find art and music and fellowship here. And we have found that. But I'll admit, I wasn't expecting so much to be personally, spiritually challenged by Unitarian Universalism.

You see, I grew up Catholic, and we would get together in church every week and say the Nicene Creed, which is a whole series of "we believes." We believe in the trinity, we believe in the resurrection, we believe, we believe, we believe. I'm not catholic anymore, but that way of thinking stayed with me. That's what religion was. Creed. Dogma. Religion was what you believed. Only UU doesn't work that way. There is no creed or dogma. There are the seven principles, but I already agreed with the seven principles, and have all my life. Aside from that, no one was going to stop me in the halls here and say, "Hey, if you want to be in the club, you better believe this." To be in religion without a creed seemed, well, kinda easy.

The idea that religion could be a covenant, and what that might mean, was something that snuck up on me.

So we'd come here every Sunday, and we'd sing, send the kids off to RE, enjoy the sermon, and every week I'd say the covenant. And in the beginning, to my ears, it sounded like a UU version of the old Catholic Nicene Creed, like a statement of belief, like I was just saying that generally speaking I was down with this whole UU thing.

But then the language of it started to get through to me. "This is our covenant." This is our covenant. This is our promise. Well, wait a minute. I was standing up here every week and making a promise? A promise is a serious thing. By contrast, belief is easy. I can believe in "the inherent worth and dignity of every person" while flipping channels between football games. I don't even have to get off the couch. But here we don't say, "we believe." We say "We covenant to promote and affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person." We promise. We pledge ourselves. And not just to believe, but to promote and affirm. To act. To get off the couch.

A year ago, if a friend had asked me what UU was about, I probably would have talked more about what UU is not. Not a dogma, not a creed. Not THAT kind of religion at all. I don't presume to speak for anyone's understanding of UU but my own, but today I would say that in simplest terms, we're making a promise. To love our fellow human beings, to love the earth, to live in peace. And maybe we're going to spend the rest of our lives puzzling out together what exactly that means, and what's the best way to go about doing all of that, but first of all, we have promised to do it.

I hope everyone here had the opportunity to attend the youth service last week, and as an aside let me say, I'm just blown away by the children here at UUI. And they did such a fabulous job. But what was the emphasis of their service? Taking action. "Here are things you can do. What are you doing now? What are you going to do?" What I heard them saying to me was: You've made this promise. How are you going to live it out?

To which I say, this is a very demanding religion you have here.

And that brings me back to this conversation we're supposed to have. The one about peace. As I said earlier, I'm not a peace activist, and I'm not a scholar of nonviolence. This will all be very new to me. I'm starting at the very beginning with this. But what's so challenging about this, what stretches me spiritually, is knowing that at the end of this conversation, what I'll end up with is not a new belief, not a bunch of words to tack on to my list of dogmas, but a deeper understanding of a promise that I've made. And then I'll have to live that promise, wherever it takes me. And that's very exciting.

Thank you.