This Sunday, our #BeingUU summer reaches its widest circle. The Sixth Principle: the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.
You have known the last six words since childhood. You said them with your hand over your heart, facing a flag, before you could spell half of them. Our faith takes that familiar sentence, adds one word, peace, and removes the border. Our Universalist grandmothers put the whole theology in four words: all means all. Not all Americans. Not all believers. All.
It is fair to ask whether a faith our size has ever lived a sentence that large. So let me tell you where our chalice comes from.
In 1939, a Unitarian minister named Waitstill Sharp and his wife Martha, a social worker, were asked to leave their comfortable parsonage outside Boston and go to Prague, into the path of the Nazi advance, to help refugees, dissidents, and Jews escape Europe. Seventeen ministers had been asked before them and declined. The Sharps said yes. They learned to launder money for bribes, memorize names rather than carry lists, and walk strangers across borders as if they were old friends. They went back a second time even after the Gestapo had flagged them. Decades later, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, named them Righteous Among the Nations, an honor held by only a handful of Americans in history.
The rescue work they started grew into the Unitarian Service Committee. And in 1941, the committee needed a symbol for its travel papers, something that could make a refugee’s documents look official at a checkpoint, something a frightened family could recognize in a crowded port and know help was near. An Austrian artist named Hans Deutsch, himself a refugee who had fled after drawing cartoons of Hitler, sketched a flame burning in a chalice. That is the drawing we light every Sunday morning.
Our most sacred symbol began as a passport. Every week of this series, when the flame goes up and we say our words, we are lighting a promise that once moved actual human beings across actual borders to actual safety. The Sixth Principle is not an aspiration we bolted onto our faith in a committee meeting. It is the family business, stamped on our papers.
And the thread never broke. That service committee became today’s Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, which still works in dozens of countries, not by parachuting in with answers, but by partnering with grassroots leaders who know their own ground, after earthquakes, at borders, in the long slow work of human rights. Since 1962, our faith has kept an office at the United Nations, a small denomination keeping a stubborn seat near the world’s biggest table. In 1970, UUA president Dana McLean Greeley helped found the World Conference of Religions for Peace, bringing together faiths that had blessed opposing armies in one room in Kyoto. When the Iron Curtain fell, American congregations knit themselves to Unitarian villages in Transylvania, pew to pew across an ocean. And in our own century, UU congregations have opened their buildings as sanctuary for immigrant neighbors facing deportation, and answered the call to stand with Indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock. Different decades, same signature. Somebody’s border, and our people deciding it did not outrank their conscience.
I tell you all this for one reason. World community can sound like the least practical principle, the one for diplomats and dreamers. Our own history says otherwise. It was practiced by a minister and a social worker with suitcases. It was drawn by a refugee with a pencil. It is practiced now by congregations with spare rooms and stubborn love. The widest circle has always been built by people our size.
And this week, before Sunday, one small assignment. When you pass a stranger, try the old Universalist math on them. All means all. It includes them. It always did.
Peace,
Rev. Dr. Harold Marrero