If this title sounds faintly familiar, it may be because a few weeks ago my Reflection was titled, "Who Do You Think You Are?". That talk focused on individual identity; this morning, on "Bring-a-Friend Sunday," the focus is on our collective identity: who do we in the First Unitarian Congregation of Waterloo think we are? If you have indeed brought a friend with you to this service, or if you're a friend who's been brought, this is intended as an opportunity to discover or rediscover or rethink who we are as a congregation and as part of the Unitarian Universalist movement and tradition.

There are many possible ways of talking about who we are, ranging from an introduction to each of the people present today - hardly possible now that we have this number of people attending, though I hope you'll have many personal introductions and interactions after the service - from that to an overview of the Unitarian Universalist movement historically and organizationally. In deciding how to tackle the topic, I've been conscious of the need to speak to those who've been coming here for a while, or even most of a lifetime, as well as the questions of those who're here for the very first time. The saving grace, for me, is that this is not the only chance any of you will have to find out who we are. You can ask me or anyone else who seems familiar with this place, after the service in the social time or by phone or email later. You can even take the slow way of coming back on other Sundays and discovering us gradually, which is a more reliable way than any quick overview. We hope you will, but if you're here for just one occasion we want to make it as good and representative an experience as possible.

Who are we? Well, as you can see, we're a relatively small congregation compared with some, but we're growing slowly and surely. We began as an informal fellowship of a couple of dozen people in 1956, and now have about 105 members. Looking at the wider picture, we began as an organized denomination in Canada in the 1830s, in Montreal and spreading west. The recognized beginnings of our history as a movement go back to the 1500s in Europe - and that gives me an excellent opportunity to mention again one of our earliest historical figures. We don't have a "Founder" of Unitarianism or Universalism, by the way, but we do have some people we're proud of, and one of them was Michael Servetus. Tomorrow, October 27th, is the 450th anniversary of the death of Michael Servetus, burned at the stake in 1553 by order of John Calvin, for having questioned the doctrines of the Trinity and original sin and opposed the practice of infant baptism and other orthodox teachings of his time.

Servetus was a pioneering Spanish physician (the first to publish a description of the blood's circulation through the lungs) who has often been considered an early Unitarian; he certainly influenced those who later founded Unitarian churches in Poland and Transylvania. But it was the widespread hostile reaction to the killing of Servetus which significantly influenced the birth in Europe of religious tolerance, a principle which is much more important to modern Unitarian Universalists than anything to do with the Trinity. We have often been said, in fact, to have our own version of the Trinity - freedom, reason and tolerance, each of which is so essential to who we are that they form a kind of three-in-one unity!

Who are we in this time and place? We're the only Unitarian congregation in Waterloo Region - although notice that hopeful "First" in our name! We're one of only about 45 Unitarian congregations in Canada - I say "about" because you never know when new ones are emerging or others amalgamating. With our membership of just over a hundred we're fairly typical - there are some congregations with several hundred, and many more who are smaller than us. In total, we have somewhat more than 5,200 Unitarians in Canada - a small and beautiful movement! Among us are those who particularly treasure the Universalist strand of our history, that story which asserted the essential friendliness of the universe and denied the possibility of eternal damnation for anyone. I ministered for a few years with the Unitarian Universalist Church of Olinda, down near Windsor, and I love the words which they used for their Chalice Lighting each week, so expressive of Universalist belief:

This church was founded on the faith that love is a more positive force for good than fear.

It is a haven of religious freedom, offering fellowship, knowledge and inspiration to all who would seek truth, live responsibly and courageously, and be of service to humanity.

The light we kindle is a symbol of the warmth of love and its power to overcome fear.

The light we kindle is a symbol of religious freedom, and of our belief that the truth shall make us free.

The light we kindle is a symbol of our aspirations and highest religious ideals, our striving for inclusiveness.

As the wick joins the flame and the candle, may our separate selves be joined in one community of warmth and light.

In our history and our varying convictions, we are Unitarians and Universalists. In 1961, when the Unitarian and Universalist denominations joined on this continent in the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Canadian Unitarian Council was also formed, including 3 congregations of Universalist heritage, and in 2002 (just last year) the CUC became an autonomous body, independent of the UUA, with headquarters in Toronto, rather than Boston. In this congregation gathered here today there are only a few lifelong Unitarians or Universalists, but many more who have come to our movement from other religious traditions, or none at all, often after some chance contact with us through a friend. What most often attracts first-timers to come back is our conviction, whatever our specific beliefs, that every human being can be trusted to carry out their own quest for the truth about human and divine realities. Many denominations today encourage their members to think for themselves rather than simply to accept what they are taught, but it wasn't always so, and it's still emphasized here to a greater extent than in most other religious communities. Conscience is the ultimate authority for Unitarians. Gathered here today, we are part of a body of congregations which covenant to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

We are Unitarians and Universalists, we're city people and country people and in-between, we're old and young, rich and poor, male and female, straight and gay, bisexual and transgender. We range widely in theology from those who consider themselves liberal Christians, or Christian humanists, through those who draw inspiration from Buddhism and Judaism and paganism, and maintain connection with those traditions, to those who are agnostics or convinced atheists -- and many of you heard from just some of the atheists last Sunday. We tend to be more homogeneous than most religions in the level of our education. For better or worse, we tend to be "heady" people, with the strengths and weakness that implies.

Probably our biggest challenge is to make this a home for people across the spectrum. It's an inescapable challenge, because if there's one thing that paradoxically characterizes Unitarians it's our insistence on religious freedom. Here no-one is asked to subscribe to a creed, whether it's the Apostles Creed of Christianity or the Manifesto of Humanism. He we affirm principles for living our lives but no beliefs which must be held in common. That means we're engaged in a continuing and vital struggle to keep in mind the purposes for which we gather: to support and encourage one another in the free and responsible search for truth and meaning, to be a congregation of religious freedom and human concern, to welcome everyone.

When people visit for the first time they're usually curious about a number of things. We're often asked about our attitude to the Bible, for instance, and we answer that we respect it for the insight it offers into the human condition and its record of the lives of great teachers and prophets. We add that we respect other sacred writings in a similar way. The honour that we pay to any scripture is in proportion to the influence for good that we perceive it to have had on our own lives and in human history. Our holy texts are those which light the torch of truth in the human heart. So we are people who listen to ancient and modern words from the poetry and prose of many cultures, trying always to enlarge our experience rather than narrow it down to a particular book or set of books.

Even those of us who call themselves Unitarian Christians would probably say that Jesus is not the only revelation or incarnation of divinity. As the Society of Friends, the Quakers, would say, each of us has the divine light within , and sometimes this light is so bright as to identify a person as an inspired teacher or one whose life and work is an inspiration to all who know of it - as a saint, some people would say. We might include the Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther King Jr., Emily Dickinson, Mother Teresa - well, you can see that the list any one of us might make ends up being thoroughly personal and might even include some unobtrusive members of this congregation! The test of greatness, for Unitarians and Universalists, is the power to break the bonds of captivity - to depression, addiction, victimization, evil, slavery of any kind. Our heroes are those who liberate us, however quietly. We are people who honour all the great liberators, throughout history and in our own time.

Many religions have a specific place or places in the world that are sacred to them, such of the Holy Land of the faiths which originated in the Middle East. We don't have such a holy place - not even in Toronto, where the Canadian Unitarian Council is now located on St.Clair Avenue West, close to the First Unitarian Congregation of Toronto, which you might think makes it doubly special! No, most of us believe that every part of this earth can be made sacred by the way we live on it and that that, indeed, is our task as people dedicated to living responsibly. Although there's a greater concentration of organized Unitarians in North America than elsewhere in the world, we count as our religious kin people in every part of every country whose lives embody our principles of free and responsible living, and we know full well that we have no denominational or geographical monopoly on that. We are people who want to treat this whole world as our home, and to make it homelike for everyone.

We treat this world as our home in another important sense, too. I mentioned earlier that we're the spiritual heirs of the Universalists, with their rejection of the concept of hell. You probably wouldn't find many of us who believe in a place or condition of everlasting punishment. Perhaps more significant is that while we have very varied ideas about what happens after death, ranging from a conviction that death is the end (in every sense) to a diversity of beliefs in reincarnation or continuation of personal identity, you'll find very few UUs for whom heaven or the afterlife is an important aspect of their faith. For us, this life is more important than any next life that there might be. It's living well that counts much more than living with an eye to an afterlife. We are people who try to make this moment as good as it can be, believing (in the words of an eastern mystic) that today well-lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.

As well as being people with a complex religious history, coming from a diversity of areas and backgrounds and with widely varying beliefs, we are also a congregation with links to many others. We belong to an organizational network, within which we have complete autonomy and independence. Starting at the most local level, we belong to the Central Region of the Canadian Unitarian Council. Each of the four Regions in the CUC has an annual gathering, and the one for the Central Region took place in Toronto yesterday, with our President, Lee Dickey, and our Director of Religious Education, Dianne Heise-Bennett, in attendance. We also have links to the Unitarian Universalist Association in the U.S., the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists, who provided the Chalice Lighting words this morning, and the International Association for Religious Freedom. With all these links, we need never feel isolated; we are strands in a worldwide web of free religion.

You may have noticed my reference to the fact that this congregation, though linked with so many others, is independent and autonomous. This independence, known as our congregational polity, is a precious aspect of who we are. We're not governed by any central authority. The Canadian Unitarian Council exists to serve its member congregations, not to control them. Same with all the other organizational links I mentioned. And this, as you've probably realized, is consistent with our stress on freedom of belief and action - as individuals and as congregations, we're people for whom conscience, alone, is the ultimate authority. Yes, we learn from our history, our traditions, from other people and other faiths, but in the end it's only each person, and each congregation, who can decide how to live and who they are.

That rugged independence extends to the conduct of affairs within congregations, too. Each one is free to decide on its own arrangements for worship and all the other activities which make up the life of a community. Most, like us, elect a Board of Trustees to whom they delegate the routine decision-making, but for anything which goes beyond the routine the congregation as a whole gets involved. And each member of the congregation has an equal voice and vote on any matter which comes before it - the President who chairs the Board here has exactly the same one vote at a congregational meeting as the newest person on the membership list. And if a congregation calls a minister to lead their spiritual life, that person doesn't have any vote unless they choose to become also an ordinary member of the congregation, as I have done, so that I have the same one vote as all the other members. We are people with the utmost regard for democratic principles and for equality at all levels of our life together.

Not all Unitarian congregations, by any means, choose to be led by a Minister. Many are too small to afford a Minister's salary, others which are large enough prefer to be lay-led. But even when a Minister is called by a congregation, as I was called by this one, to take a leadership role in the worship life and spiritual growth of the people, it doesn't dilute in any way the responsibility which every member of the congregation has for their own religious life. The Minister's role is to assist people in that life, to nurture their growth and, in an image I particularly like to use, to help clear peoples's vision in the way that eye-drops clear one's physical sight - not supplying a ready-made picture to anyone but, at best, enabling sharper focus and clearer sight. We are people who take responsibility for our own religion, using all the help we can get in discovering how we can think and live and relate more fully, but never handing our religious quest over to anyone else.

And it's in that vein that I want to finish, with a comparison of two stories, one from Buddhist and one from Christian tradition. For this comparison I'm indebted to another Unitarian Minister, Dr. Susan Ritchie. She reminds us first of the story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman by the well, and how he asks her for a drink of water and also offers to give her a drink - of the water of life. The story shows Jesus to be loving and generous in interacting freely with a woman on her own who was not only one of the low-status Samaritans but who also had a suspect sexual history. Moreover, Jesus was offering the woman a far greater gift -- "living water" - which she could receive through his teachings.

The other story about a prophet at a well comes from the Buddhist tradition, where one of the Buddha's favourite monks, a young man of the highest social caste, encounters a woman, an untouchable woman of the very lowest social order, at a well. And in this story it is the woman who offers him the water and he who accepts. In doing so, in interacting with the untouchable, the monk lost his own caste, his own social rank, and so, later, he dutifully went to the Buddha to explain his transgression. The Buddha suggested that they welcome the woman into their community as an ordained nun!

What struck Dr.Ritchie about these stories, and I believe it's relevant to us and who we think we are, was that in our culture, as typified by the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman, we tend to think that leaders and teachers have something to impart to others, and that there's a kind of generosity in doing so. But it's possible to have a different concept of learning and a different sense of the relationship between leaders and congregations. We do well to acknowledge that leaders and teachers, too, are led and taught by the very ones who hear them. When we acknowledge the ability of all the members to teach and to lead, we are acknowledging our congregation as a place where we each agree to be open to the teachings of all the others, even, and especially, if those teachings cause us to re-examine what we find most precious.

Who do we think we are? We are people engaged in a mutual ministry, in which (even with our much-treasured individual and congregational autonomy) we know that we are interdependent, relying on one another for our life and growth as a faithful community. We depend on one another. So it is. And so may it always be.