Our biblical reading today, the story of the Tower of Babel serves several purposes as a piece of ancient, sacred text. We’ll explore it more in a bit, but one is simply as an origin myth to explain cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity. In Genesis we have a creation story and a clear outline of human lineage, but ancient people could see that not everyone on earth was the same, so there must be some explanation for that outside of the existing Biblical family trees.

But I assume the ancient author was mostly thinking about the diversity of neighboring lands and distant geographies and not a single 125-member house of worship. We probably need a different origin story to explain how, given our puritan history, we ended up with so much religious diversity here in these pews in Salem, MA. According to the spiritual survey that I looked at as part of the ministerial search process, 74% of you identify as Unitarian Universalist. 24% are agnostic and about 9% of you are atheist. 14% are Buddhist, close to 50% identify with some form of Christianity, 27% are humanist, 7% are Jewish, 13% are Pagan, 6% are Wiccan and 17% of you are still searching. If you’re counting, that does come to more than 100%. Now folks were allowed to select more than one, but these numbers still don’t really add up in a way that would make clear sense to a religious researcher or demographer. I wonder if the tower of babel story can also account for the scattering of beliefs that so often lie within our individual selves.

And yet about 80% of you said showing up here to worship together on Sunday mornings was meaningful to you. That is beautiful. It’s incredible really. Amidst all that diversity of belief and practice there is something that happens here on Sunday morning that binds you together in common purpose and meaning. But meaningful doesn’t always mean easy. It doesn’t always mean without friction. I can see from up here when you’re singing or not. When you’re in the moment or checking your phone. When you’re uncomfortable during a reading. The cacophony of voices during the covenant, not always speaking the same words, might sound beautiful or discordant depending on who you ask. It’s not a judgement, you don’t need to change your behavior. It’s simply an observation that the diversity of beliefs in this sanctuary means we aren’t all always comfortable. I’ve been meeting with many of you one on one, getting to know you, and I know there are folks who don’t feel that their traditions are adequately represented from the pulpit or respected by their neighbors. And they aren’t all folks from the same tradition. I know some of you have asked or are asking, is there space here for my beliefs?

Pluralism is not easy business. Unitarian Universalists are unique in respecting pluralism not just as a civic virtue we are called to support outside of these walls but as a value we practice and live into here in these pews on Sunday morning. It is one of the six stated values of our faith. And it is not merely some polly-anna-ish, politically correct expression of tolerance. We didn’t get here because we’re all good, well-meaning liberals and well-meaning liberals like pluralism, so let’s go ahead and add it to our UU values. No, this commitment is deeply rooted in our history and theology. It comes from our Unitarian ancestors who saw the spark of the divine in each person and valued freedom of conscience and individual reason. It comes from our Universalist ancestors who see us all as bound for a common destiny, none of us more worthy of eternal life than anyone else. Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing famously said, “I think God that my own lot is bound up with that of the human race.” We are cosmically in this together, so we might as well learn to be in this together now.

It comes from our Transcendentalist ancestors like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who found meaning exploring other religious traditions and concluded that revelation wasn’t closed, that wisdom from a walk in the woods or the Bhagavad Gita contained as much possibility of hope and truth as Christian scripture. In 1849, in a sentiment radical for it’s time, Thoreau wrote “It would be worthy of the age to print together the collected Scriptures or Sacred Writings of the several nations... such a juxtaposition and comparison might help to liberalise the faith of men. This would be the Bible, or Book of Books, which let the missionaries carry to the uttermost parts of the earth.”

This commitment to pluralism is our religious inheritance, and as is the case with most inheritances it is both a blessing and a burden. It can be a source of great hope, serving as a model of belonging and beloved community. But it can also be a source of deep conflict. We struggle to honor and learn from other traditions without appropriating them. The words we use in prayer sometimes exclude or isolate. We sometimes say things that disrespect people’s deeply held beliefs. When we’re being honest with ourselves, we find some practices or traditions harmful, silly, meaningless, uncomfortable and we don’t know how to reconcile that.

So, we come up with ways to try and smooth over our theological and religious differences and make pluralism easier to manage. In my experience there are two ways that we often do this, and they almost always fail us. First, we resort to an overly simplified universalism, ignoring the means for the ends. We say things like, “At the end of the day, we all basically believe the same thing. It’s all different paths to the same truth. As long as we all hold love at the center, the rest of it doesn’t really matter.” And it’s not that these are wrong, but I think we get in to trouble when we use them as a way to avoid engaging with our differences.

But clearly it does matter. There’s a reason why you all checked those different boxes in the survey. If it really didn’t matter at all, you would all have just checked Unitarian Universalist and nothing else. If it didn’t matter, there wouldn’t be folks eager to help plan both Christmas Eve and Winter Solstice services. This is sort of the religious equivalent of saying “I don’t see color” when talking about race. Our differences really do matter. When we take an “it’s all the same anyway” approach, we begin to lose our curiosity and our commitments. We miss out on the opportunity to learn what’s unique and meaningful about others’ traditions and practices. And it makes our own traditions and practices feel less meaningful. Fasting for Lent or Ramadan, keeping the Sabbath, having shabbat dinner, meditating each morning are all things done with specific intention and purposes that can’t and shouldn’t be generalized. We also lose out on opportunities for moral discernment and inquiry. We value pluralism but there are some practices or beliefs that don’t align with our values and that we wouldn’t allow in our UU churches. A communion service that excludes LGBTQ+ folks for example. And, as anyone of any marginalized identity will tell you, in our world, any universal or neutral framework, almost always means the dominant framework. It’s a slippery slope from, “All religions are about love anyway,” to, “since it’s all the same, it shouldn’t matter that we say, “under God” in the pledge or pray a Christian prayer in school.” We say, God can mean Allah too, or it can mean the sacredness of nature, you can interpret it however you want. I’m guilty of this from the pulpit too! I just did it last week! We often ask people in the minority to do the translating to fit their beliefs into the dominant model. So embracing pluralism shouldn’t be about erasing differences.

The second strategy we use to make us more comfortable with pluralism lies at the completely opposite end of the spectrum. This is what I like to refer to as the “Collect Them All!” mentality, where we treat religious traditions as action figures or trading cards. Distinct entities in original, sealed packaging that we can take down off a shelf when we want to look at it and put back up when we’re finished. We try to make sure we have a speaker of every major religion; we celebrate every major religious holiday. We tell people they are welcome here and invite them into our pews and then put protective cases around them so we can preserve our collection, rather than opening ourselves up and letting us be changed by one another. This is one complaint that some academics and sociologists have about “pluralism” as a norm in our society. They feel it often reinscribes borders and boundaries around us. That it leaves little room for porous or even anti-colonialist expressions of religion, like Santeria in Cuba that blends Yoruba religions from Africa with Caribbean spiritism and Catholicism or the pagan influences on Celtic Christianity. A collector approach to pluralism closes off these opportunities for transformation, imagination and co-creation that are opened through human encounters. And even in the most well-meaning displays of this kind of pluralism, we inevitably forget someone. Or two holidays or traditions conflict with each other. We end up like bumper cars, running into each other, but never breaching the barriers between us.

Both of these strategies fail us because they don’t understand religious traditions in the way that Diana Eck, a scholar of religious pluralism and director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard, writes about them in our reading, as rivers, dynamic and changing, springing from ancient sources, pouring into and out of one another as they meander through an ever-changing landscape. These common approaches to religious pluralism either completely ignore or rigidly reinforce our differences and while they may seem easy in the moment, they leave most of us dissatisfied, hurt, unseen or spiritually unnourished.

So, then what is the answer? How do we show up together as representatives of 16 different religious traditions, as 100 and some odd people who believe like 827 different things, in one meeting house? How do we have conversations about our prayer and worship life and traditions without causing irreparable fracture? I hate to tell you, but I think the only answer is to just get used to discomfort. To lean into those places of tension and difference without feeling like you have to resolve it. And that’s not easy but I hope it is freeing. I hope it does reduce some tension and anxiety. The pluralism of this place isn’t something that has to be fixed or managed or resolved. It’s simply something to live into. There is beauty in the encountering, in the wrestling, in the articulating what exactly is so meaningful to us about our own traditions and beliefs, while staying porous enough to let the traditions and beliefs of others change us. Let yourselves play in that space. See it as a site of imagination and exploration. Have a conversation about God and prayer, the scripture verses behind me or the commercializing of sacred pagan traditions I see on the street in front of me and don’t assume that if that conversation doesn’t end in agreement or a vote on a new church policy or something that it’s a failure. In this place, that holds pluralism as a sacred value, those conversations themselves become the tabernacle of the holy.

That’s what I take from the Tower of Babel story in Genesis. Once we think we’ve gotten close to some consensus about religious truth, it turns out what we’re worshiping is actually just our own egos and God will knock us back down real quick. The story tells us that diversity and difference and disagreement is part of the divine plan. Because they cause uncertainty and uncertainty makes room for the holy spirit, for mystery and for revelation. We are closest to the sacred, not when we are building our uniform towers but when we are moving in those uncertain spaces where we encounter difference.

And this is certainly one of those spaces. It’s part of what attracted me to this congregation. I loved how little sense I could make out of those survey numbers. My prayer for us is that this community can keep resisting easy narratives. Be proud that you have earth-based and pagan vespers services and Bible verses on the wall. Because sites of theological tension and uncertainty are sites of theological imagination. And that’s something our society desperately needs — new, creative answers to our most difficult moral questions.

Here, in this place of 16 different faith traditions and counting, revelation is not closed. The final word isn’t written. And I can’t think of anything more hopeful than that.

May it always be so.

Amen.