Without vision, the people perish. I had a dream that there was a mighty God at the very centre of the universe. I don't know if this God was real or just imagined. Talking to him was the archangel Raphael who had been to see our world.
The world is in a mess again. There is fighting between nations and there is fighting between religions. There are millions in refugee camps, more displaced within their own countries. The earth itself is damaged and they continue to damage it.
And only a few call out against it and their voices are weak and they don't really make much of a difference.
The world is divided against itself.
The vision of the leaders is for power over one another. Their assemblies are separated from the people. And the traders are speculators with the fruits of the earth and they seek only greater wealth for themselves.
And if some do have a vision it is a vision for austerity. There is suffering everywhere.
I don't have a good feeling about this world and wonder if it might not be better just to destroy the people and let it start again.
But the God said, I can't destroy this world so long as there is goodness in people.
They need to sort themselves out.
And there’s the rub of my dream. Who is responsible for this world.
What have we, people of faith, got to do with it ? Some will say this mess is because people don't believe in God, some will say it is all god's will. Others will say it has nothing to do with God. It is all to to do with us.
But we are people of faith. The teaching of the first gospel was that we should love one another.
I grew up in a traditional Christian family. I suppose we were a God fearing family rather than a god loving family. We believed that God pulled the strings on this earth and there was a string attached to everyone of us .
We believed that God saw into our hearts and would punish us for our wrongdoings. We believed that God was working his purpose out in the world and there was a reason behind everything.
Probably more than anything else we feared going to hell.
How times have changed. At least in those days,society seemed orderly. We had no fear of the future. It was easy to find a job and keep it, or change it and there was always the promise of a pension at the end of your working life.
Our leaders had strong personalities. I admired their oratory. There was a mystique about Parliament, and police and all the institutions. There was a mystique about church.
Where did it all begin to change ? Maybe it was in the sixties, maybe it was simply in me.
Today, I feel I am living in a world where everything has collapsed The house of cards has fallen down and we are all standing around looking at it and wondering if it can ever be rebuilt.
And I am a person of faith. We are all people of faith. What are we to do as we look at the house that has fallen down ?
Do we have a role to play in this fallen world?
The Unitarians in the United States, the Unitarian Universalists, recently held their annual general assembly, a gathering of the movers and shakers. I looked at some of their events via Youtube.
They were reflecting the oneness of humanity and the music was inspiring, a heady mixture of spirituals and hymns to emphasise that music cuts across all cultures.
The preacher of the anniversary sermon gave a powerful address which began with him recollecting a meeting with Martin Luther King. King had said never to give up the fight.
Fifty years on and the fight still needs to continue - especially in the wake of the Brexit result, where racial tensions and violence have increased.
The second thing that Martin Luther KIng had said was that the fight had to be maintained by the churches. They were the source of goodness in the world.
Churches working together can have a voice that is heard. When I first arrived in Bolton as a new minister I was quite inexperienced.
Luckily I found a good friend in the Vicar of Bolton and in Rev Jim Hollyman who was at the URC church. We were all town centre ministers. We used to meet together on a weekly basis. We were a mutual support group, I found it very helpful at times.
It was Jim who took an initiative and said if we ministers can get along let us bring all our congregations into this. We did. It was a process where we defined who we were and how each of the six churches involved were different, what we had in common, what boundaries there were between us. It was love one another in action.
We all wanted to keep our identities. We did not want to become some homogenous group, so we recognised the boundaries between the different faiths and we agreed to accept them and not use up energy trying to break them down.
With that we became Christians together in Bolton Town Centre. We spoke with one voice to Bolton Council and other agencies. It was not to be moral guardians but to promote the voice of goodness and fairness - the basic teachings of the Gospels.
We shared pulpits and we set up the town centre chaplaincies. As a Unitarian I was hardly in the middle of the Christian spectrum but I did believe in the one doctrine of Christianity that comes from the very source - that is to love one another for we are all children of God.
We still preach that. One of the problems we have at the moment is that we only seem to preach it to each other.
Unitarians like to boast how they helped to change the world in the nineteenth century. We like to say it was only us but that is not true. All the church denominations were social crusaders. They achieved so much.
But that was then. I can only speak for the Unitarians but when the battle for social justice seemed won and the state took over so much that the churches had voluntarily run, schools, libraries, clinics etc, we were left only with our faith.
And people seem to be managing very well without faith in what had become a consumer driven world. The old teachings of Christianity were being demolished. John Robinson with his ‘Honest to God’ and then then David Jenkins, the Bishop of Durham questioning the tenets of the creed.
One of my Unitarian friends describes the Anglican church worship as being led by priests in mediaeval costumes practicing a mystery religion that follows a long gone agricultural calendar.
Churches are mostly regarded as irrelevant in the modern consumer driven world. We Unitarians with our Freedom, reason and tolerance seem more irrelevant than all the others. People vote for freedom of worship by not worshipping at all. We apply the test of reason to our reading of scriptures. The modern person doesn’t read them at all. And does tolerance mean we must tolerate the intolerable. The medical profession speaks of tolerance as a way to measure pain and discomfort.
What we need to offer is inspiration. Inspiration to find goodness in yourself and create goodness in the world
Our wonderful consumer driven world is not interested in faith yet it lives in a vacuum. Consumerism does not give long term satisfaction. It is transient. It does not give faith.
So the vacuum is being filled with dissatisfaction with life, unhappiness, a sense of hopelessness, a perpetual yearning for more of the consumer fix.
But also it is being filled with a yearning for the spiritual. Meditation, eastern religions and Yoga, a revival of paganism as earth centred spirituality.
There is a need to find love of self as a whole person.
One of the speakers at the Unitarian Universalist annual meeting was a well known broadcaster called Krista Trippett.
She talked about a new reformation for religion, a new reformation for the churches.
We as individuals, she said, thanks to the growth of technology are much more aware of ourselves as individuals. We are not just one of the herd that doesn’t really count.
We are also aware that we are part of a global community of humankind. Our spiritual side is aware of the suffering going on in the world and feels a sympathy for it and a link to it.
But our trust in governments doing anything about it has gone. We see what we see now.
So what do we do as people of faith? What do we do as communities of faith. Reformation, she says, The reformation begins with building bridges.
Building bridges between individuals - actually getting to know one another. Knowing what it is that is so hurting in someone that it comes out as anger. It is about holding conversations with one another - and actually listening to the answers.
She said we rarely listen to one another. We greet one question with another question because we want to dominate the conversation. Listening is an art form.
And build bridges across communities. As we are doing today. But keep expanding the bridges, create true friendships, build new bridges, create a web of friendships - between groups and cultures, listen and understand one another.
And where can all this building and listening begin? In the churches. That is where the Reformation must start - because it won’t start anywhere else.
Love one another, let love be the doctrine of our faith. Love that is Caritas, caring, that is charity, giving, love that is agape, sharing.
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A vision to inspire ourselves,
inspire our communities, and release that goodness in humanity which leads to an understanding of God.
A reformation of faith, else we perish.
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