Last fall, a tax official in the great state of Texas denied a tax exemption for a Unitarian Universalist congregation.

Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn denied the Red River Unitarian Universalist Church in Denison tax-exempt status because the church, according to Strayhorn, "does not have one system of belief." Officials from the Southwestern Unitarian Universalist Conference, which covers parts of six states, were stunned. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, publishing 75 miles southwest of Denison, ran a story in mid-May about the church’s plight, sparking letters to the editor and a phone call from a reporter at National Public Radio.

Finally, on May 24, Jesse Ancira, a lawyer in the comptroller’s office, faxed a memo to church president Dan Althoff. After reviewing the file, Ancira said, "It is my opinion that the Red River Unitarian Universalist Church is an organization created for religious purposes and should be granted the requested tax exemption."

Scottie Johnson, a past president of the Denison church, which was founded in 1997, was left scratching her head over the case. "We obviously are a church," she said. "We are not just a recent player on the religious scene in any way, shape or form." Yet Johnson admitted that while she believes in a Supreme Being, some of her fellow congregants do not. And the comptroller’s office has denied tax-exempt status to groups whose members do not profess belief in "God or gods or a higher power". According to an article in the Austin American-Statesman last month, the Ethical Society of Austin is in a court battle with Strayhorn’s office. Her predecessor reversed an original award of tax-exempt status to the society based on Ethical Culture’s lack of belief in a Supreme Being.

So where does that leave us? We’re not in the Lone Star State, and I don’t anticipate that any New Jersey officials are going to deny tax-exempt status to any Unitarian Universalist congregations. Unitarians have been recognized as a very active denomination in New Jersey since the 1890s and even earlier. And, as many of you know, the first Universalist sermon in North America was delivered here in New Jersey back in 1770. Still, we ought to react to what Bob Hill of the Southwestern UU Conference called "a shot fired across our bow."

We here at Central Unitarian Church have bonded together into a religious community where we have not been asked to recite a creed as a prerequisite to membership. Our church has a mission statement, and it’s right there on the back wall. We have a Unison Affirmation. The Unitarian Universalist Association, which is holding its annual General Assembly this weekend, publishes a wallet-size card entitled "What do Unitarian Universalists believe?" But while we may have some commonality of purpose that binds us, we don’t all necessarily have the same system of beliefs. While that was something I had been aware of for quite a while, it came home this past spring when I participated in a religious education class here at CUC called "Building Your Own Theology." Last week’s speaker, Philip Mariconda, alluded to this course as having been helpful for him as well.

Our minister, the Rev. Dr. Justin Osterman, likes to call our congregation "a community of faith." But if each of us has our own theology, what makes us a community of faith? What, indeed, is faith?

We take so much on faith in our lives, because we can’t directly observe everything. There is a word for people who don’t believe except what they see. These people don’t believe that the world even existed before they were conscious of it. I was born on Wednesday, July 26, 1961, at 2:32 p.m. prevailing time in Passaic, N.J. Or at least, that’s what my birth certificate says. And I have no reason to doubt it – or to doubt that there are thousands of years of recorded history that predate me, and billions of years of pre-history. But as somebody once said, "Vas you dere, Sharlie?" I take it on faith, and for me, and for most of us, that’s an easy faith to accept. Perhaps too easy.

We do have a tendency to believe history as it’s been taught to us. But history, it is said, is written by the victor. Can we really believe everything we read in the history books? Or have we been taught an incorrect view? Is our world view tainted by the lessons we are taught in school? Millions of American schoolchildren have been taught that our War of Independence was nothing if not a noble battle to avoid continued subjugation by a tyrannical state. But what do British pupils learn about it? Their textbooks are written so as to promote pride in being British, and the Crown’s acquiescence to the Treaty of Paris in 1783 has to be seen as a humiliating defeat. What is their spin?

In addition, battles are constantly waged over the presentation of certain controversial subjects, like evolution, in the schools. The winner of that battle gets to frame the issue for hundreds of thousands of children – children who don’t yet know how to analyze data that are presented to them and draw their own conclusions. Yet scientists accept things on faith, too, particularly when it comes to theories of evolution or of the formation of the universe. We simply weren’t there.

This past Tuesday, William Gold died. He was one of the proponents of the "steady state" theory of cosmology, which postulated that the universe has essentially looked the same over time, rather than exploding twelve to fifteen billion years ago in a "big bang". Gold and others thought they could explain the current condition of the universe using an alternate hypothesis. Never mind that most astronomers and cosmologists today have pushed Gold’s theory aside in favor of the "big bang": Gold was able to formulate theories that fit the steady state hypothesis, and so for him it became his faith.

William James, the great late 19^th century American philosopher, delivered a speech in 1896 to the Philosophical Clubs of Brown and Yale universities which he called "The Will to Believe". He spoke in terms of hypotheses and options. A hypothesis, according to James, was either living or dead depending on whether it held any glimmer of truth for the one contemplating it. And a living option was a choice to believe in either of two live hypotheses – for instance, whether to be an agnostic or a Christian. To Ivy League philosophers a hundred years ago, either choice might be seen as valid, as ours was a Christian country (even the Unitarians still considered themselves Christians then) yet science and reason offered the possibility that there was no Supreme Being. On the other hand, and I quote James here, "We disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use." The scientist rejects alleged paranormal behaviors as the work of charlatans, while many of us in this room – like our Unitarian forebears – reject the concept of the Trinity. These ideas are of no use to us, for they fail to illuminate the Truth as we see it.

However, James took the next logical step and said that when we are faced with a living option, a choice between two hypotheses that are equally plausible, we not only may, but must, decide between them. In other words, it is imperative that we believe something – for to fail to decide the question for ourselves is to run an even greater risk of losing the Truth.

I’m going to tell you a little story about something that happened to me recently. Some of you may already be somewhat familiar with it. Back in early April, I planned a trip to Yuma, Arizona, to see a baseball game. The Edmonton Trappers were scheduled to open the season at home, but it’s generally too cold for baseball in Edmonton in early April. As it turns out, Yuma is a popular spot for snowbirds – Canadians who escape the winter chill by staying at resorts in warmer climes. So the club made a deal with the city of Yuma to play their first two series of the season at Desert Sun Stadium, a ballpark that once hosted spring training for the San Diego Padres.

I left my house in Rutherford a bit before 10:00 on Good Friday morning, April 9. I walked down to the train station, got a train to Secaucus Junction, and changed for another train to Newark Airport. There, I caught a flight to Phoenix, rented a car, took a look at a few Phoenix-area spring training sites, and then drove the 180 miles to Yuma for the game. Edmonton beat Sacramento, 6-5 in 10 innings. I stayed overnight in Yuma before driving back to Phoenix, looking at a few more area parks, and then catching my return flights. I changed planes in Cleveland, as it was cheaper than getting a non-stop flight. But, as often happens, the flight back into Newark was delayed a bit because of airport congestion, and we had to circle Newark once before we could land.

The slightly delayed flight meant that I didn’t get onto the Northeast Corridor train I really wanted. But I still boarded one at about 8:15. The trouble was that it then had to wait for an Amtrak train to scoot ahead of it at the Hackensack River bridge. The train got to Secaucus at 8:30 – and the Rutherford-bound train was leaving at 8:31. I sprinted through the transfer, but as I arrived at the Rutherford platform, the train was just pulling out. I had missed it by perhaps ten seconds. After traveling for 12½ hours, I now had to wait another whole hour to cover the last four miles of my 2700-mile return journey. I got so frustrated that I started yelling "Damn! DAMN!", and I gave a garbage can a good, swift kick.

As it happened, that steel, chrome-plated can was bolted to the floor, and it gave no quarter. The irresistible force of my foot proved not quite so irresistible when it encountered that immovable object, and the result was a broken first metatarsal – the bone just above my big toe. At least I realized the error of my ways. When I got to the hospital emergency room, they asked me how old I was, and I told them, "Old enough to know better." I left the hospital with my leg in a splint, a brand-new pair of aluminum crutches, and orders to visit a podiatrist on Monday morning. The podiatrist ordered a CAT scan and then told me, "Well, surgery is indicated, but I wouldn’t call it mandatory because you’re not guaranteed to avoid arthritis even if you have it, and the foot stands a good shot at healing normally without it." I declined the surgery, and I went into a hard cast for a month. My orders were now to put no weight on the foot for as long as I had the hard cast. After a month, the podiatrist put my foot in a soft cast and told me, "You can start driving if you can find a sneaker you can put this cast into." So I had my ride for the morning drive me down to Payless Shoe Source, where I found a pair of size-13 sneakers and I started driving. A week and a half later, the soft cast came off, and I’ve been walking around ever since.

So what does this painful journey have to do with faith? A lot more than you might think. There are so many things that we take on faith every single day. We have faith that the sun will rise in the morning, even if it may not shine. When I left the house to go to Yuma, I had faith that the trains and the plane would arrive on time and that their operators would get me to my destination safely. While I have confidence in my ability to avoid a collision while operating a motor vehicle, I had faith in the rental car company’s maintenance of their vehicles – and in the ability of other drivers to avoid colliding with me. My fit of anger at Secaucus Junction was partly my Irish temper – and partly the result of my loss of faith in NJ Transit to properly mesh their train schedules so I could get home from Newark reasonably quickly.

More significantly, I put my faith in the medical professionals who treated me for my injury. I’m not a doctor, unlike some people in this room. Had my podiatrist told me that surgery was needed in order for my foot to heal properly, I would have followed his advice and gone under the knife. Instead, he told me that I stood just as good a chance at an acceptable recovery if I didn’t have him operate. I then followed his recommendations to the letter, not putting any pressure on the foot for 4½ weeks. Once he X-rayed the foot and told me it was OK to start putting pressure on it, I went ahead and did so. Now, I’m not exactly as good as new, but I’m a lot better than I was in the week after the injury. It’s my faith in science that healed me.

But what of the rest of us? Earlier, I alluded to the common belief about Unitarian Universalists that if you put ten of us in a room, you’ll get eleven belief statements. Is there a common belief of Unitarian Universalists that can be called our common faith? After all, there is no belief statement we’re required to adhere to, and one of the Seven Principles of the UUA calls for a free and fair search for the truth. Why, it’s practically a requirement of UUism that each person develop his or her own statements of belief.

But is that not itself a statement of faith? We believe in upholding the idea that each of us is a unique individual, worthy of respect and dignity, and worthy of the freedom to seek our own answers to the cosmic questions. Essentially, we have faith that religion is not "one size fits all." And we gather together each seventh day to celebrate the fact – or, rather, the faith – that each of us is, and of right ought to be, free to seek our own interpretations of the Truth, while celebrating and nurturing the life-giving capacity of the planet on which we live.

Which brings me to another point. Quoting William James again, "A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs." So in yet another sense, we are a community of faith because we have faith in each other. It is not necessary for our interpretations of Truth to be identical. Instead, we bind together to help each other in numerous ways over the course of the year – whether in putting together a Sunday service – Sue, Joan, Maureen, Phil, Betty, Justin – working on a committee, or embarking on a social action project.

Pam Kohlmann, one of our religious education teachers who is also a member of the choir, likes to say of our choral performances, "Miracles happen on Sunday mornings." That’s because we all work, together at rehearsals with our music director as well as individually, at presenting a performance that will enhance the service as we intended. I inadvertently betrayed that trust when I suffered my foot injury: the Sunday morning I spent in the emergency room was Easter, and due to my medical condition I was no longer able to lend my voice to the choir. I apologized profusely the first chance I had, because I recognized that my fellow choristers had put their faith in me and I had let them down thanks to my failure to maintain my self-control the night before.

In another essay, "Is Life Worth Living?", James discusses the issue of faith in the case of the suicidal person. What makes someone carry on ... or not? "Pessimism," he writes, "is essentially a religious disease." He grants that the notion of an ever-loving and beneficent God is betrayed by the world we live in, a world where love and hate, beauty and depravity, seem to exist in equal amounts. What faith can one generate from a good hard look at the facts of the matter?

To extricate himself, and ourselves, from this sticky wicket, James first discusses – the dog. Say I have my dog leashed in the yard, and a boy comes up and starts teasing him. The dog reacts in the way a dog knows how to react: he bites the boy. Soon, the boy’s father rings the doorbell and demands damages from me for allowing my dog to harm his son. We stand out there in the yard, and we negotiate, and eventually we settle on a sum that will pay for the boy’s visit to the doctor. Meanwhile, my dog is sitting there, watching the proceedings, and even though the dog is partially responsible for the events he has "witnessed", he doesn’t know what’s going on. The dog lives in the human world, but he is not part of it – and so he has no comprehension of human interaction. In fact, the dog is – to the best of our knowledge – incapable of all but the simplest emotions, yet somewhere deep within his being he must put some sort of trust in the human world. After all, he lives from day to day with the help of his master.

So what of our belief in a world beyond us? James goes on to speak of the mountain climber who reaches a point where he must leap across a chasm in order to continue. The one who has faith (in his own ability) will steel his legs and get across; the one who does not will get weak-kneed, give a half-hearted jump, and roll in the abyss. "Refuse to believe," he says, "and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself. You make one or the other of two possible universes true by your trust or mistrust, – both universes having been only maybes, in this particular, before you contributed your act." By the same token, we bring God into existence by the very act of belief. James writes, "God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity. For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this." He concludes: "Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."

Many of you, I’m sure, have heard of Pascal’s wager. The philosopher writes that when faced with a choice to believe or not believe in God (by which he referred to the God of monotheism), it makes sense to believe. For if one believes and God does indeed exist, the believer is granted eternal life; while, on the other hand, if one believes and it turns out there is no God, there is no loss.

Now you will never find me up here at the pulpit telling you to accept Pascal’s wager. To do so would run against the principles of Unitarian Universalism. But I submit to you that one of the most important things I have ever done is to walk through the doors of this church back in February 2000 and accept the great challenge of our tradition – the challenge to discover my faith. My life is enriched by having critically examined my living options and decided upon the hypotheses that rang true for me.

So, if you have not already done so, take the time to determine what your faith is. If you have already visited your options and decided upon your faith, do it again, for new evidence or new insights may alter your perception of the Truth. And then once you know what your faith is, live it. By doing so, your life will be enriched beyond belief. If you don’t believe me ... well, just take it on faith.