It was a Sunday morning in May, in the year 1845. Unitarians in Montreal were celebrating the dedication of the very first Unitarian church ever built in Canada.  Ezra Gannett was the guest preacher for the occasion, and a rousing and provocative sermon it was.

There is not a being on Earth wholly depraved—without any good in him. In the worst of men there are secret qualities that need only the right sort of collision with circumstances to bring them out to our admiration, as from the hard and black flint sparks of light may be struck by proper means. Man is a sinner—call him so … but say not that man is only vile. Commit not that sacrilege, for it is God's work which you abuse. The sinner is a man, and in that title if he have not the pledge of his redemption, he has what for a free and accountable being is better, the proof of its possibility.

The congregation’s own minister, John Cordner from Ireland, believed that this Unitarian principle of salvation by choice was actually what was taught by the Christian Apostles. He declared those teachings:

Clear, simple, sublime, ennobling; everything that could better the human heart, everything that could remove the mists and clouds of superstition … that could elevate and dignify the character, and cause the graces and virtues of which humanity is capable to blossom and bring forth fruit. How different, how opposite, has been the language of human creeds! (from  Montreal’s Unitarians, 1832-2000, Edgar Andrew Collard, pp. 78-79).

In the earliest Unitarian teachings in this country  we hear the promise—the promise that free and accountable brings have the possibility of redeeming their own lives, and of transforming their society.  Indeed, the purpose of religious life, to these ancestors of ours, was to support one another on the path to unfolding possibility, to fulfillment of promise. 

What is the promise we hope to fulfill?  The hope—the promise—our faith offers us is on many levels. This morning I will raise four for reflection:  the promise of each unique individual, the promise of covenanted community, the promise of a courageous tradition, and the promise of our faith within the Canadian context where we find ourselves, here and now.

No, we don’t offer promises of guaranteed salvation. We are more about getting heaven into people than people into heaven. We celebrate the unique promise of each individual—the possibility of deepening integrity, of blossoming courage, of worth and dignity claimed, of creativity freed. That potential is in all of us. We know it is indeed sacrilege to call any human “vile,” though it is appropriate to name the evil consequences of some human behavior.

The promise we would fulfill, on the personal level, is the potential we are born with to keep growing and changing and choosing—choosing—all of our days. The power to choose is the power of heretics—for the very word means those who choose. Yes, we make mistakes. We miss the mark—the literal meaning of the Greek word translated as “sin.”  But we have the power to try again. Marksmanship improves with persistent practice. 

We have the power to choose how we frame our understanding of the mystery in which we live and move and have our being. Did you hear about the child in our “Stories about God” course who decided to draw a picture of God? The teacher was explaining that no one knew what God looked like. This confident, creative youngster responded, “They will when I finish my drawing!”

The promise we are challenged to fulfill in covenanted community is to provide support, acceptance, and challenge to the free-thinking choosers in our midst. A UU congregation carries power towards transformation as wisdom unfolds in our midst through creative dialogue between people who are different, and have chosen different frames of understanding to make sense of their experience. Our ancestor Francis David, founder of the Transylvania Unitarian tradition, admonished us over four centuries ago “not to think alike, but to love alike.”

We are bearers of a tradition. We carry the stories of lives lived with courage, integrity and creativity, often at risk of life, freedom, fortune or livelihood. The promise of that tradition, carried by those who came before us—carried by those who dwell among us like Debbie and Carl and others we have celebrated over the years—that promise cries out to us for fulfillment. It is not a passive gift, this tradition of ours. We reap the seeds sown by those who came before us.  Must we not sow the fields in our turn, that those who come after us may reap a rich harvest? 

The promise of our lives cannot be fulfilled unless we give ourselves—all that we are, and all that we have it in us to be—our hearts, our minds, our hands—our hopes and dreams, our gifts and even our tragic flaws - unless we give ourselves to something larger than ourselves. Some of us may name that something larger God—a god in which we participate, of which we are somehow a part. Some of us speak of the interconnected web. Others find a cause, such as working for peace or feeding the hungry, to give their lives a larger frame of meaning.

There is no greater gift we can give our children, or indeed ourselves—no greater gift than to give ourselves away. Truly those who are willing to give their lives away shall find life more abundant. Not at the cost of betraying or abandoning their own well-being. But there is a costthe cost of giving up our certainties, our rational plans for a stable and predictable future, our desire to hold on and to be in charge.

A paradox, here. We don’t claim to be a chosen people. We do, however, claim to be a choosing people. Yet sometimes the most powerful choice we can make—the path to fulfilling our amazing promise of life abundant—is the choice to be open to change—to the flow of serendipity—to the unexpected possibility—to the power of letting go—to the rhythm of endings and new beginnings.

Today is our “Sharing our Faith” Sunday in Canada. The new beginning we have chosen is a declaration of autonomy on the part of the Canadian Unitarian Association. As of July first, services to congregations in Canada will be delivered through the CUC, rather than the Unitarian Universalist Association which is 95% American. We’ll be on our own, folks! It will be more important than ever to support efforts to grow our Canadian congregations.

The fourth area of promise I would encourage us to nurture is the unique brand of Unitarianism and Universalism which have grown up in Canada. Perhaps, as we explore and clarify our identity as Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists in Canada, we will find we have something unique to offer our kin in the U.S. and around the world. As a multicultural nation, we have many opportunities to practice creative dialogue. Our faith brings both perspective and experience to that conversation. We have something to offer the society in which we live which it needs to hear.

Our Canadian faith strand may well bring wisdom about cooperation to balance the larger tradition's focus upon individuality. It can bring a clearer sense of responsibility to balance the celebration of freedom which lives at the heart of our faith.

When we speak here in Western Canada of fulfilling our promise, we need some historical context. This congregation was founded in 1956. But it was first imagined in 1907—almost 50 years earlier. Frank Wright Pratt was named Field Secretary for Western Canada, an outcome of a meeting of the International Council of Religious Liberals, now the International Association for Religious Freedom. Supported jointly by the British Unitarians and the American Unitarian Association, he revitalized the congregation in Winnipeg, then moved on to establish congregations in Calgary, Edmonton, Victoria, and Vancouver.

Pratt  wanted to buy a portable church, and to move it in turn to places such as Saskatoon, Moose Jaw, Regina and Lethbridge, but that plan didn’t work out. He did conduct services in all these and more. He wrote the AUA, “We are going to have Unitarian  churches in these places. If a lot of land can be bought in Saskatoon, for instance, for $3000 today, is it proper to wait until a year from today when $5000 will have to be paid for the same lot?”  Pratt, in 1914, wanted someone to take over his work in Victoria so he could take up work at Saskatoon. But the British pulled out their financial support, and a World War cast a pall over the climate of optimistic growth on the prairies. The real estate boom busted.  No other English-speaking congregations were founded in Western Canada until the 1950s.

It was Pratt, too, who conceived and helped found the first national association of Unitarians in Canada. At the founding meeting in Winnipeg, however, only two other people showed up. It struggled along for a few years after Pratt's position evaporated, then disbanded. It was not until 1960 that the CUC came into being.

There have been other times of promise in our history here in Canada—times when that promise was not fulfilled. Imagine what could have happened if Pratt had had five more years before war broke out!  Nor is this the only such story in our history. 

Now that promise is in our hands. While other religions have become somewhat more liberal than they were a hundred years ago, we still have something unique to offer. Our vision and our promise speak to the redemption needed in our time.  This day, we renew our commitment to work for the realization of that promise we bear as choice-makers—ever-deepening integrity, courage, compassion and creativity in our personal lives—support and challenge given and received in a covenanted community of dialogue—celebration of a precious heritage which has woven its way through many times and cultures—the particular strand of that heritage which has grown up here in Canada, and in particular on the Canadian prairies, and is ours for nurturing. All of this is a part of the promise. 

May our lives, woven through the web of our days, be a part of the fulfillment of that promise. May every life we touch be richer because that promise has touched us with possibility. And may our world be richer, kinder, more just because we have chosen to gather ourselves into a covenanted community of freedom and responsibility, authenticity and cooperation, history and hope.