Monday, April 17, 2006
Monday, April 10, 2006
Monday, April 03, 2006
"The Renewal of Values" by Mark W. Harris, April 16, 2006
April 16, 2006 - Easter Sunday at the First Parish of Watertown
“The Renewal of Values” - Mark Harris
Audio (mp3)
Opening Words - from "Miracles" by Walt Whitman,
Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with anyone I love or sleep in the bed at night with anyone I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every square foot of the interior swarms with the same.
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim - the rocks - the motion of the waves - the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?
Sermon
There is a new book by Sebastian Junger called A Death in Belmont. Junger won fame and riches a new years ago with his best selling book, The Perfect Storm, about the 1991 Noreaster and the sinking of the sword fishing boat, the Andrea Gail. Junger’s new book pertains to a murder in Belmont in the early 1960’s, when Bessie Goldberg was slain, and a black man who was working at her house that day was eventually convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the killing. The twist in the case is that Albert DeSalvo, who later confessed to being the infamous Boston Strangler, who was terrorizing Boston at this time, was working on a construction job at Junger’s parent’s house on the same day of the murder, just down the street from the Goldberg’s. In the book Junger makes an interesting claim about nonfiction. He says, “Maybe the truth isn’t even the most interesting thing about some stories, I thought; maybe the most interesting thing about some stories is all the things that could be true. And maybe it’s in the pursuit of those things that you understand the world in its deepest most profound sense.” The historian in me wants to take some exception to that claim because I have been taught that we should do our utmost to discover as much of the truth as we can about life events. Yet when it comes to Easter events, and the life of Jesus, Junger’s statement seems completely accurate.
Easter celebrates a miracle that probably most every Unitarian Universalist would declare is physically impossible. No person who is dead ever comes back to life. This very belief has always made this an awkward holiday for us. In response we usually talk about the renewal of the earth in spring or the resurrection of the human spirit after a particularly painful personal trauma. There is a natural or metaphorical bringing back to life of that which is declared dead, but nothing supernatural. Because it is Easter though, we often wrestle with the story. Who was this man, and why did his disciples believe he had come back to life? But it is not just us. Much of the world seems to want to do the same, especially at this time. Just look at your best seller lists.
First, there is The DaVinci Code, which every other person in the world seems to have read, and now the other half will get their chance with all the various paperback versions. The Times Book Review made note of this, and wondered if the scratch and sniff version would be appearing soon. The movie is due next month. There has been the lawsuit in England, where the authors of the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail argued that Dan Brown stole their material. While Brown prevailed in the lawsuit, it was great publicity for his accusers, who, of course, now have their own new book out. Now Brown has a big fence around his house to keep out the publicity seekers. What’s great about all this from a religious seekers perspective is that it reflects the very point that Junger is trying to make. Does speculation on those things that could have happened leads us in the direction of deeper spiritual truths? I believe it does. With The Da Vinci Code, perhaps the most intriguing speculation for both traditional and liberal believers alike is that Jesus was intimately involved or even married to Mary Magdalene, and that they produced a royal line of progeny who continue to populate the world.
More Biblical speculation has also come up with the newly released Gospel of Judas, yet another Gnostic Gospel, all of which show that there were a variety of beliefs about Jesus and who he was, and what his message was, especially during the first three centuries of Christian tradition. While one Catholic priest declared in the title of his Globe editorial that there are “No revelations in Gospel of Judas,” it seemed to me that he was simply defending church doctrine. Those who are wedded to one truth are usually reluctant to join Junger in the speculation of what could have happened. While believers might want to dismiss the Gnostics as fools who failed to see Jesus’ mission in its true, read Catholic, interpretation, why not consider alternatives? The alternative idea is that Jesus asked Judas to betray him. While none of the Gospels are exactly clear as to the cause of Judas’ betrayal (or even if it actually happened), it is not absurd to suppose that something like arranging a political arrest might foment the coming of a cosmic or at least an earthly revolution. What turns traditional belief on its head is the idea that the villain in the story might actually be the hero. We like clean lines of good and bad. What all of these alternate Gospels inform us with is that no body possess the ultimate truth, and we should not be too quick to dismiss what could be true. The truth is, we simply do not know.
This may seem second nature to Unitarian Universalists. We are affirmed when others are open to a variety of spiritual truths. We like to speculate on who Jesus was as sexual or political being. We are quick to ask was he or could he have been this or that. Yet today rather than talk about the fascinating possibilities, or tell you that doubt is the only handmaiden of truth, I am going to actually declare that there is one unconvertible truth about him that is present in the resurrection stories. I am also going to say that if we had the courage to live and to deliver this message to the world, it would foment miraculous changes in societies and cultures everywhere. While the evangelicals have declared how they speak for America’s values, I think it is time for liberals to renew their foothold in the moral landscape of America by voicing a central value that we represent, but also one that is plainly evident in the Gospel stories about the resurrection.
There are really two parts to this Easter declaration. What do we mean by miracle, and what is this story about Jesus. Let’s start with the miracle. As you heard in the children’s story, there are a couple of ways to look at the idea of miracle. There are those who believe that God causes supernatural events, like the bodily resurrection of Jesus, to occur. We try to be as generous as we can with those who hold these kinds of beliefs without dismissing them outright. We can certainly affirm that there are many unexplained mysteries in the world. A more likely definition of miracle for us pertains to those kinds of events that through sheer will power, determination, luck and timing occur when we would have thought that the likelihood was very remote. The 1980 Olympic gold medal winning hockey team cones to mind, with the TV announcer intoning, Do you believe in miracles?
We often call something a miracle when an invention or its use, the timing of an action, or the sheer courage or skill of a person or group, result in an earth shattering event which changes history. Was the invention of the printing press a miracle because it allowed the mass production of the Bible, so that people all over Europe could read the texts for themselves, and follow Luther’s idea that the word of God was meant to be read and understood by everyone in the priesthood of all believers, not just a small select group who would inform the masses what the texts said and what they meant. Would we also say the words of Tom Paine’s “Common Sense” helped to miraculously stop all the great armies of Europe with its revolutionary invective? Was Lincoln right when he said that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s words on the evils of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin miraculously brought about a war that finally led to the end of this horrible institution?
In her book Conversations with Children, Edith Hunter quotes a little boy who says “A miracle is something that seemed like it couldn’t happen, but it did, and you can hardly believe it.” She then goes on to distinguish between strange miracles, like Jesus coming back to life, and common miracles which is more what Whitman describes in our opening words. He seems to be saying that everything that happens in nature is a miracle. This is similar to Emerson who wrote that the Christian church speaks of miracles, but “all of life is a miracle.” While much of the natural progression of life is miraculous, we lose sense of the significance of the word, if we see everything as miracle. So we might think of extraordinarily ordinary things as miracles. For many of us seeing our children be born, or viewing the Northern Lights, ending some form of addiction that has severely impaired relationships and living, , or being part of a mass movement that changed history, so that human life inclines ever more toward peace and justice; these are some of the miracles of life.
In her book Small Wonder, Barbara Kingsolver writes about the seeds that flower in the desert in southern Arizona in her essay, “Called Out.” I know I have been astounded when a flower that is labeled an annual suddenly flowers again after its advertised single appearance has long since gone by. We have often taken left over lilies from Easter, for instance, let them dry up, been told that they would not flower again, and yet after a year or more, suddenly see the green sprout appear, and a lilly come forth. How could this happen, we say, and like Kingsolver’s biologist friend, we may say God planted it, or it’s a miracle. These flowers she is telling us are called out in a series of amazing coincidences, including the blanket of female rains. An annual that survives is seemingly not dead after one appearance, but is simply lying in wait, ready to be called out to bloom again when the timing and circumstances are right. It may be called out long after we are gone, but its power to bloom remains. I remember planting some Cosmos in our garden in Maine some years ago thinking, here is an easy to grow annual. The seeds brought forth nice, tall, beautiful flowers, and I thought that was the end of them. If I wanted more, I would have to plant them, but then a couple of years later, here and there a few cosmos began to appear. It was no annual, one time appearance, something had called a chosen few out to bloom again.
From an historical and Unitarian Universalist perspective, there is also a miracle in the Easter resurrection story. While we would usually focus on the life of Jesus rather than the stories of what happened after he died, whom he appears to and why on Easter morn is significant. From a traditionalist point of view believers must explain why the newly resurrected Jesus appears first to Mary Magdalene. Jane Schaberg, a scholar who has written The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene says that Jesus intended for her to be his successor, and that is why the resurrection is announced to her first. It is also what she represents. Even speaking to an unattached woman at this time was considered illegal, and yet Jesus not only consorted with women like this, he named one, the one who was his closest follower, as the one who would carry on the egalitarian movement whose mission was to put an end to the oppression of the world’s powerless. The resurrection then was a way to pass on a vision for the renewal of values for all of society. The idea was that there would be a new world order.
The new order proclaimed by the resurrection story is hardly what occurred. The traditions from the early Christian church denigrated women and a pervasive misogyny prevailed. The two modes of being for women in the church were Mary the virgin mother, and Mary Magdalene, the whore. The church that was created excluded women from all positions of power, including the priesthood, and offered the lame theological proof of the image of the male founder of the faith. His follower and successor was turned into a prostitute. What the church did not contemplate was her power to soothe people’s pain, as her popularity rose when she was perceived as more human, than other saints, due to her inclination to sin. While the church offered the miracle of a resurrected dead body offering salvation through one path, they destroyed the real power of resurrection in this life, which is discovering the egalitarian spiritual power lying latent in each of us, ready to bloom when we have the courage to bring it forth.
No one really knows any details of the Easter story. Why did a group of followers believe Jesus had come back to life? All we know is that they did come to believe that he still lived. Was it the power of the message or an empty tomb? The Christian tradition that won the historical battle has given their version of truth. But now we live in times when believers and nonbelievers alike are excited by alternative visions of what the truth could have been. In this case I think Sebastian Junger is correct. The pursuit of the things that could have been true are more profound, and of course also more difficult for us to proclaim and to achieve. This is why Mary Magdalene is so compelling. Why does a woman who is given such short shrift in the Gospels account appear front and center in the most significant event in Christian history - Jesus’ resurrection.
This brings us back to the full meaning of miracle. Perhaps the most miraculous portion of this story is that Jesus with his resurrection appearance before Mary is telling the world that the true way for men and women to bloom into the fullness of their being is to forge a new way of being with each other, and a new way of being in family. Henceforth, he says families must be based not on domination and control and power over another, but in a equal partnership where there is freedom in our choices, more shared roles, and a rejection of violence. We would be naive to believe that much has changed in the wake of the feminist movement of the 1970’s other than freedom for women to work more and more and more. And women’s bodies are still the object of the traditional perception of Mary Magdalene- that of whore. Men are beginning to share more in nurturing children, but far too often, no one is paying attention. The miracle would be if we could ever perceive the kind of power sharing and equal gender nurturing that Jesus apparently envisioned in this resurrection appearance.
Do you believe it? I believe we could miraculously change the world if we followed this resurrection story. It is that simple and that difficult. In his book, The Left Hand of God, Rabbi Michael Lerner says that the liberals in American politics must make a new spiritual covenant with American families and this must consist of a society where it is safe for love and intimacy, that supports caring rather than competition, generosity rather than selfishness. In yesterday’s Globe, Scotty McLennan reminded us in speaking about the death of William Sloane Coffin that we have mostly abandoned the poor and the mentally ill, and forgotten Jesus’ outrage at the injustices of the world. I have seen some hope for this egalitarian miracle in the legalizing of same sex marriage. Cultivating and affirming loving relationships in all their family forms means we have broadened the circle of love. Long ago our Universalist forebears became leaders in the battle for women’s rights because their theology demanded it of them. If God loves and saves everybody, then the logical extension of that belief was that everybody was equal, and therefore we must create a mirror society of that heaven here on earth. That is the resurrection truth then and now; we are called out like those annual flowers, and while it may not be in our life times when the whole world flowers, we know it will bloom. It will bloom with that attempt of Jesus to hand on an egalitarian vision to Mary Magdalene. The Easter message is that a new world is coming, and it is up to us to bring it forth with our lives.
Closing Words - "The Easter Miracle" by Jacob Trapp
I am amazed to the point of ecstasy
at the miracle of awareness.
Life brings me its freshness as an ineffable gift.
Every moment renews my vision.
Death is permission granted to other modes of life to exist,
so that everything may be ceaselessly renewed.
The ploughshare of sorrow,
breaking the heart,
opens up new sources of life.
The land bursts again into bloom.
The possible and the future are one.
The possible strives to come into being,
and can be, if we help.
Without sacrifice, there is no resurrection.
Nothing grows, flowers and bears fruit,
save by giving.
All that we try to save in ourselves
wastes and perishes.
All things ripen for the giving’s sake,
and in the giving are consummated.
“The Renewal of Values” - Mark Harris
Audio (mp3)
Opening Words - from "Miracles" by Walt Whitman,
Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with anyone I love or sleep in the bed at night with anyone I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every square foot of the interior swarms with the same.
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim - the rocks - the motion of the waves - the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?
Sermon
There is a new book by Sebastian Junger called A Death in Belmont. Junger won fame and riches a new years ago with his best selling book, The Perfect Storm, about the 1991 Noreaster and the sinking of the sword fishing boat, the Andrea Gail. Junger’s new book pertains to a murder in Belmont in the early 1960’s, when Bessie Goldberg was slain, and a black man who was working at her house that day was eventually convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the killing. The twist in the case is that Albert DeSalvo, who later confessed to being the infamous Boston Strangler, who was terrorizing Boston at this time, was working on a construction job at Junger’s parent’s house on the same day of the murder, just down the street from the Goldberg’s. In the book Junger makes an interesting claim about nonfiction. He says, “Maybe the truth isn’t even the most interesting thing about some stories, I thought; maybe the most interesting thing about some stories is all the things that could be true. And maybe it’s in the pursuit of those things that you understand the world in its deepest most profound sense.” The historian in me wants to take some exception to that claim because I have been taught that we should do our utmost to discover as much of the truth as we can about life events. Yet when it comes to Easter events, and the life of Jesus, Junger’s statement seems completely accurate.
Easter celebrates a miracle that probably most every Unitarian Universalist would declare is physically impossible. No person who is dead ever comes back to life. This very belief has always made this an awkward holiday for us. In response we usually talk about the renewal of the earth in spring or the resurrection of the human spirit after a particularly painful personal trauma. There is a natural or metaphorical bringing back to life of that which is declared dead, but nothing supernatural. Because it is Easter though, we often wrestle with the story. Who was this man, and why did his disciples believe he had come back to life? But it is not just us. Much of the world seems to want to do the same, especially at this time. Just look at your best seller lists.
First, there is The DaVinci Code, which every other person in the world seems to have read, and now the other half will get their chance with all the various paperback versions. The Times Book Review made note of this, and wondered if the scratch and sniff version would be appearing soon. The movie is due next month. There has been the lawsuit in England, where the authors of the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail argued that Dan Brown stole their material. While Brown prevailed in the lawsuit, it was great publicity for his accusers, who, of course, now have their own new book out. Now Brown has a big fence around his house to keep out the publicity seekers. What’s great about all this from a religious seekers perspective is that it reflects the very point that Junger is trying to make. Does speculation on those things that could have happened leads us in the direction of deeper spiritual truths? I believe it does. With The Da Vinci Code, perhaps the most intriguing speculation for both traditional and liberal believers alike is that Jesus was intimately involved or even married to Mary Magdalene, and that they produced a royal line of progeny who continue to populate the world.
More Biblical speculation has also come up with the newly released Gospel of Judas, yet another Gnostic Gospel, all of which show that there were a variety of beliefs about Jesus and who he was, and what his message was, especially during the first three centuries of Christian tradition. While one Catholic priest declared in the title of his Globe editorial that there are “No revelations in Gospel of Judas,” it seemed to me that he was simply defending church doctrine. Those who are wedded to one truth are usually reluctant to join Junger in the speculation of what could have happened. While believers might want to dismiss the Gnostics as fools who failed to see Jesus’ mission in its true, read Catholic, interpretation, why not consider alternatives? The alternative idea is that Jesus asked Judas to betray him. While none of the Gospels are exactly clear as to the cause of Judas’ betrayal (or even if it actually happened), it is not absurd to suppose that something like arranging a political arrest might foment the coming of a cosmic or at least an earthly revolution. What turns traditional belief on its head is the idea that the villain in the story might actually be the hero. We like clean lines of good and bad. What all of these alternate Gospels inform us with is that no body possess the ultimate truth, and we should not be too quick to dismiss what could be true. The truth is, we simply do not know.
This may seem second nature to Unitarian Universalists. We are affirmed when others are open to a variety of spiritual truths. We like to speculate on who Jesus was as sexual or political being. We are quick to ask was he or could he have been this or that. Yet today rather than talk about the fascinating possibilities, or tell you that doubt is the only handmaiden of truth, I am going to actually declare that there is one unconvertible truth about him that is present in the resurrection stories. I am also going to say that if we had the courage to live and to deliver this message to the world, it would foment miraculous changes in societies and cultures everywhere. While the evangelicals have declared how they speak for America’s values, I think it is time for liberals to renew their foothold in the moral landscape of America by voicing a central value that we represent, but also one that is plainly evident in the Gospel stories about the resurrection.
There are really two parts to this Easter declaration. What do we mean by miracle, and what is this story about Jesus. Let’s start with the miracle. As you heard in the children’s story, there are a couple of ways to look at the idea of miracle. There are those who believe that God causes supernatural events, like the bodily resurrection of Jesus, to occur. We try to be as generous as we can with those who hold these kinds of beliefs without dismissing them outright. We can certainly affirm that there are many unexplained mysteries in the world. A more likely definition of miracle for us pertains to those kinds of events that through sheer will power, determination, luck and timing occur when we would have thought that the likelihood was very remote. The 1980 Olympic gold medal winning hockey team cones to mind, with the TV announcer intoning, Do you believe in miracles?
We often call something a miracle when an invention or its use, the timing of an action, or the sheer courage or skill of a person or group, result in an earth shattering event which changes history. Was the invention of the printing press a miracle because it allowed the mass production of the Bible, so that people all over Europe could read the texts for themselves, and follow Luther’s idea that the word of God was meant to be read and understood by everyone in the priesthood of all believers, not just a small select group who would inform the masses what the texts said and what they meant. Would we also say the words of Tom Paine’s “Common Sense” helped to miraculously stop all the great armies of Europe with its revolutionary invective? Was Lincoln right when he said that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s words on the evils of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin miraculously brought about a war that finally led to the end of this horrible institution?
In her book Conversations with Children, Edith Hunter quotes a little boy who says “A miracle is something that seemed like it couldn’t happen, but it did, and you can hardly believe it.” She then goes on to distinguish between strange miracles, like Jesus coming back to life, and common miracles which is more what Whitman describes in our opening words. He seems to be saying that everything that happens in nature is a miracle. This is similar to Emerson who wrote that the Christian church speaks of miracles, but “all of life is a miracle.” While much of the natural progression of life is miraculous, we lose sense of the significance of the word, if we see everything as miracle. So we might think of extraordinarily ordinary things as miracles. For many of us seeing our children be born, or viewing the Northern Lights, ending some form of addiction that has severely impaired relationships and living, , or being part of a mass movement that changed history, so that human life inclines ever more toward peace and justice; these are some of the miracles of life.
In her book Small Wonder, Barbara Kingsolver writes about the seeds that flower in the desert in southern Arizona in her essay, “Called Out.” I know I have been astounded when a flower that is labeled an annual suddenly flowers again after its advertised single appearance has long since gone by. We have often taken left over lilies from Easter, for instance, let them dry up, been told that they would not flower again, and yet after a year or more, suddenly see the green sprout appear, and a lilly come forth. How could this happen, we say, and like Kingsolver’s biologist friend, we may say God planted it, or it’s a miracle. These flowers she is telling us are called out in a series of amazing coincidences, including the blanket of female rains. An annual that survives is seemingly not dead after one appearance, but is simply lying in wait, ready to be called out to bloom again when the timing and circumstances are right. It may be called out long after we are gone, but its power to bloom remains. I remember planting some Cosmos in our garden in Maine some years ago thinking, here is an easy to grow annual. The seeds brought forth nice, tall, beautiful flowers, and I thought that was the end of them. If I wanted more, I would have to plant them, but then a couple of years later, here and there a few cosmos began to appear. It was no annual, one time appearance, something had called a chosen few out to bloom again.
From an historical and Unitarian Universalist perspective, there is also a miracle in the Easter resurrection story. While we would usually focus on the life of Jesus rather than the stories of what happened after he died, whom he appears to and why on Easter morn is significant. From a traditionalist point of view believers must explain why the newly resurrected Jesus appears first to Mary Magdalene. Jane Schaberg, a scholar who has written The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene says that Jesus intended for her to be his successor, and that is why the resurrection is announced to her first. It is also what she represents. Even speaking to an unattached woman at this time was considered illegal, and yet Jesus not only consorted with women like this, he named one, the one who was his closest follower, as the one who would carry on the egalitarian movement whose mission was to put an end to the oppression of the world’s powerless. The resurrection then was a way to pass on a vision for the renewal of values for all of society. The idea was that there would be a new world order.
The new order proclaimed by the resurrection story is hardly what occurred. The traditions from the early Christian church denigrated women and a pervasive misogyny prevailed. The two modes of being for women in the church were Mary the virgin mother, and Mary Magdalene, the whore. The church that was created excluded women from all positions of power, including the priesthood, and offered the lame theological proof of the image of the male founder of the faith. His follower and successor was turned into a prostitute. What the church did not contemplate was her power to soothe people’s pain, as her popularity rose when she was perceived as more human, than other saints, due to her inclination to sin. While the church offered the miracle of a resurrected dead body offering salvation through one path, they destroyed the real power of resurrection in this life, which is discovering the egalitarian spiritual power lying latent in each of us, ready to bloom when we have the courage to bring it forth.
No one really knows any details of the Easter story. Why did a group of followers believe Jesus had come back to life? All we know is that they did come to believe that he still lived. Was it the power of the message or an empty tomb? The Christian tradition that won the historical battle has given their version of truth. But now we live in times when believers and nonbelievers alike are excited by alternative visions of what the truth could have been. In this case I think Sebastian Junger is correct. The pursuit of the things that could have been true are more profound, and of course also more difficult for us to proclaim and to achieve. This is why Mary Magdalene is so compelling. Why does a woman who is given such short shrift in the Gospels account appear front and center in the most significant event in Christian history - Jesus’ resurrection.
This brings us back to the full meaning of miracle. Perhaps the most miraculous portion of this story is that Jesus with his resurrection appearance before Mary is telling the world that the true way for men and women to bloom into the fullness of their being is to forge a new way of being with each other, and a new way of being in family. Henceforth, he says families must be based not on domination and control and power over another, but in a equal partnership where there is freedom in our choices, more shared roles, and a rejection of violence. We would be naive to believe that much has changed in the wake of the feminist movement of the 1970’s other than freedom for women to work more and more and more. And women’s bodies are still the object of the traditional perception of Mary Magdalene- that of whore. Men are beginning to share more in nurturing children, but far too often, no one is paying attention. The miracle would be if we could ever perceive the kind of power sharing and equal gender nurturing that Jesus apparently envisioned in this resurrection appearance.
Do you believe it? I believe we could miraculously change the world if we followed this resurrection story. It is that simple and that difficult. In his book, The Left Hand of God, Rabbi Michael Lerner says that the liberals in American politics must make a new spiritual covenant with American families and this must consist of a society where it is safe for love and intimacy, that supports caring rather than competition, generosity rather than selfishness. In yesterday’s Globe, Scotty McLennan reminded us in speaking about the death of William Sloane Coffin that we have mostly abandoned the poor and the mentally ill, and forgotten Jesus’ outrage at the injustices of the world. I have seen some hope for this egalitarian miracle in the legalizing of same sex marriage. Cultivating and affirming loving relationships in all their family forms means we have broadened the circle of love. Long ago our Universalist forebears became leaders in the battle for women’s rights because their theology demanded it of them. If God loves and saves everybody, then the logical extension of that belief was that everybody was equal, and therefore we must create a mirror society of that heaven here on earth. That is the resurrection truth then and now; we are called out like those annual flowers, and while it may not be in our life times when the whole world flowers, we know it will bloom. It will bloom with that attempt of Jesus to hand on an egalitarian vision to Mary Magdalene. The Easter message is that a new world is coming, and it is up to us to bring it forth with our lives.
Closing Words - "The Easter Miracle" by Jacob Trapp
I am amazed to the point of ecstasy
at the miracle of awareness.
Life brings me its freshness as an ineffable gift.
Every moment renews my vision.
Death is permission granted to other modes of life to exist,
so that everything may be ceaselessly renewed.
The ploughshare of sorrow,
breaking the heart,
opens up new sources of life.
The land bursts again into bloom.
The possible and the future are one.
The possible strives to come into being,
and can be, if we help.
Without sacrifice, there is no resurrection.
Nothing grows, flowers and bears fruit,
save by giving.
All that we try to save in ourselves
wastes and perishes.
All things ripen for the giving’s sake,
and in the giving are consummated.
"Forgive Us Our Debts" by Mark W. Harris - April 9, 2006
“Forgive Us Our Debts” - Mark Harris
First Parish of Watertown - April 9, 2006
Audio (mp3)
Opening Words - “The Hummingbird” by Mary Oliver
It’s morning, and again I am that lucky person who is in it.
And again it is spring,
and there are the apple trees,
and the hummingbird in its branches.
On the green wheel of his wings
he hurries from blossom to blossom,
which is his work, that he might live.
He is a gatherer of the fine honey of promise,
and truly I go in envy
of the ruby fire at his throat,
and his accurate, quick tongue,
and his single-mindedness.
Meanwhile the knives of ambition are stirring
down there in the darkness behind my eyes,
and I should go inside now to my desk and my pages.
But still I stand under the trees, happy and desolate,
wanting for myself such a satisfying coat
and brilliant work.
Sermon - “Forgive Us Our Debts”
Our father (and mother) who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors (or forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us), and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory forever and forever. Amen. Those words, the Lord’s Prayer, are etched in my brain. As a person who grew up in a Christian church, I recited those words every Sunday. In my 1950’s rural, two room school house, I also recited those words every day with all my classmates. The separation of church and state had not hit my hometown yet. I can become a 21st century humanist, Unitarian Universalist and read every Buddhist scripture or Hindu Bhagavad-Gita that falls into my lap, and still, I will never erase the prayer of Jesus I have committed to memory. Of course I learned the Protestant “trespasses” version, while my Catholic friends were reciting “debts”. If you look at the original aramaic, which was Jesus’ language, the forgiveness of debts, which is Matthew’ s version or forgiveness of sins, which is Luke’s version, both mean the same thing. The prayer keeps coming back to me because this phrase, “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” is so prominent, and now so relevant to our times. We are a nation of debtors.
The story from James McBride’s book, The Color of Water about the failure of his brother to memorize his Bible story or verse reminded me of all those passages I committed to memory as a boy that I then recited before the congregation, and my parents. I am sure my mother would not have spanked my butt like this if I failed to recite my assignment, but I would still have felt her disappointment, especially if like McBride’s brother, I failed to put any effort into it. His mother clearly believed that everyone owed so much to God, she wanted to convey that to her children. Like my parents, she said, that unless you educate yourself, you will be a nobody. Her power to influence her children was evident by the fact that she put all 12 of them through college, and they became extraordinary people. And they continued to respond to the debt they owed to her, as when she expressed a need like, “I’m hungry,” and her influence quickly prevailed. While we often fail to appreciate the debt we owe to our parents as children, it often becomes clear as we mature, and become parents or grow older ourselves. McBride, who was black, once asked his white mother, what color God was, and she responded that God had no color, but was the color of water. God is a spirit who does not like black or white people better, but loves all people. She wanted them to understand others, and realize what debts they owed to life.
How do we think about debt? Mostly we imagine the context of financial issues, especially borrowing money, and not the spiritual or emotional debts we owe to others. The traditional religious orientation I heard was forgive us our debts, but most of us learned that it was a horrible thing to accumulate debt, and that if we did there was no forgiveness. The American ethos is that there is no free lunch, and that the best way to avoid the embarrassment of debt is to always say, I paid my way. Debt stalks us. When I was first married, my wife insisted that I pay off my credit card debt. Although it was not a large debt, it is something that eats away at your financial health and well being. We have the illusion of keeping up with our debts by paying the minimal amount, but it is akin to the federal government paying on the interest of the national debt, which is something, but the actual debt continues to grow. Our nation as a whole and countless individuals are both up to their ears in debt.
The assumption we usually make with debt is that it is always the fault of the person. We believe they are simply irresponsible spenders. While those people do exist, they are more the exception than the rule. Furthermore, the empathy expressed by Jesus for those with financial woes, is increasingly hard to find among our fellow citizens. Just last year there were sweeping changes in the bankruptcy laws, so it became clear that no one was going to forgive debts. The problem is that most of those people who seek bankruptcy protection are not exactly living on easy street. In fact about half of those people who file for bankruptcy are doing so because of excessive medical expenses. Why not instruct the politicians to do something about medical costs rather than punish the victims of these ever higher bills?
While there is genuine lack of forgiveness for debtors, the paradox is that we increasingly live off of our debt, and those who finance our debt find ever new ways to drive us further into debt. My wife hates debt, and always pays our credit card bills on time without fail. Recently we had a small bill that was mailed over the President’s Day holiday, and as a result we were charged both a late fee plus interest on the account for being one day late. This is for a customer who has never been late. I called to complain about the bill, and the representative said she would expunge both the charges. A month passed, and then the next bill arrived. Although those initial fees were removed, now we had a new residual interest charge of a couple dollars. This was, I guess, the interest on the interest that they had supposedly subtracted from the bill in the first place. Living off of our debts, or beyond our means has become common these days. Once upon a time when people considered purchasing a house they asked such questions as what do we need or how much can we afford. But today those purchases have nothing to do with need, but instead are based upon the maximum debt you can afford to carry. So some people carry mortgages where they only pay down interest rather than principle, a sure path to oblivion.
Some of this debtors approach to life is the found in the belief that we have the right to have everything we want - our own house, all the furniture and the right car now, and can pay for it later. Have we mortgaged our future because we believe we can have it all now? This is one of the concerns that Kevin Phillips writes about in American Theocracy. One of the three broad trends that he sees threatening America’s future is “the astonishing levels of debt current and prospective that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating.” In the first days of the Iraq war, our troops surrounded the Iraqi oil ministry, but failed to guard the National Museum, which was subsequently looted. Where is our sense of debt? Do we honor the past and the development of culture or do we protect the consumption of resources? This is where the two kinds of debt intersect. Does the debt we accumulate on our desires for material goods and the appearance of success destroy our other more religious and moral obligations, the debt we owe to the next generation, our posterity?
Some of you may not be aware that one of the founders of Universalism was imprisoned for debt. John Murray, was a Methodist preacher in England, who was converted to universal salvation by the preaching of James Relly. Unfortunately, his theological change resulted in his being voted out by the Methodists. What does loss of job often do to your financial situation? In modern times job loss or divorce are right up there with medical misfortune as causes of catastrophic debt, not irresponsible spending. So what happened to poor John Murray next? After he was arrested for debt, his only son died, and then his wife was taken ill, only to die in 1769. Of course his friends and relatives deserted him, because he was now an apostate Universalist. His own health declined, too, and of course all these medical bills meant, you guessed it, he ended up in Newgate prison for an indefinite term, only to be rescued by his brother-in-law. Finally, he resolved to come to America in 1770, because he realized it was a good way to “quit the world.” Debt and loss had devastated him, and there was neither forgiveness nor sympathy. Under what circumstances do we forgive the debtor? Murray came to the New World with the resolve never to preach again, but he met a man who believed that this preacher was sent by a higher power to bring his message to the new world. After Murray’s ship became stuck on a sand bar, he went ashore, and met Thomas Potter, who struck a bargain with Murray, that if the wind did not change in three days, and the ship remained stuck, it would be a sign that he should preach. The ship remained stuck, and the Universalist message was soon heard throughout the land; a message where God loves all, and saves all, including the debtor.
Without the forgiveness of his relative, where would the founder of Universalism have remained? Forgiveness in the prayer of Jesus is related to debts, sins and trespasses. We mostly think of sins and trespasses as synonyms. Yet growing up in rural Massachusetts I was conscious that the trespasses of the prayer were similar to the property boundary signs everywhere which said “no trespassing.” This was usually in the context of not wanting anyone on your land, or in this hunting culture, making sure that there were no hunters crossing your land. It was a reminder that someone owned this land, and it was not you, and you had no right to be there. Who owns the land has always been a religious concern. Hebrew scriptures call for a Jubilee year when all debts are canceled. This is proclaimed in the context that God is the ultimate owner of all that we own, and what you call yours will never actually be yours. This is directly related to who owns the earth’s resources, and whether we bear some debt to the earth to use its gifts wisely, and preserve its resources that we have wantonly used, and sometimes destroyed. We recall our debt to the earth which sustains us in life.
The prayer says, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” This means we cannot be forgiven unless we are ready to forgive. How much are you ready to forgive is the question. We always know some people who we might label sponges. According to Bruce Chilton, who wrote Rabbi Jesus, this was Jesus concern. You see as he began preaching more and more, he had to work less and less. What this meant was no carpentry jobs. So he was dependent upon the good will of the people who heard him preach. They had to feed him and his scraggly retinue of disciples. It is sort of like feeding the high school team when it rolls through your house. What this meant was that Jesus’ mother and brothers were obligated to pay back his debts, because to not be hospitable was a grievous sin. This reminds me of the children’s book Frederick by Leo Lionni. Frederick is a mouse who does not help the other mice gather food for the winter, but instead gathers thoughts and colors. The other mice begin to think of him as a sponge and a malingerer, but when they run out of food, he nourishes the mice with his meditative words and images of the beauty of the four seasons and the earth they inhabit.
They forgive his debt of not gathering food because he offers something else. There is a deeper debt, of spiritual sustenance, that we sometimes fail to recognize. Unitarian Universalists are often uncomfortable with the word sin, but in this context, it is no different than debt. Sin is our inability to recognize our debts. Traditionally, it is our failure to recognize what we owe to the source of life or God, but it also means what happens to our life when we fail to recognize our debts - debts to the earth and its resources, debts to our parents, debts to the children and the future, debts to each other, and our debt of gratitude for all of these. What was especially powerful about what Jesus was saying was that he was disturbed by what people abstained from doing rather than by what they did. This was a person who did very little moral judging of others. Remember he sat down to eat with those who were labeled unclean, and he said they were already forgiven. So the debtor, who is despised by everyone, who is the person we do not want to forgive, is not judged the great sinner. He or she is forgiven. Clearly the one who profits off the debt of another is more morally reprehensible. While we might see this as outdated or primitive, the deeper truth whatever our feelings about money making, is that the one who profits from another’s pain is the greater sinner. He or she has the greater debt to pay to God, or to the community. The greater sinners were not those who had done wrong - the people we would typically condemn , but rather those who could do right, and failed to do so. This is the person who could forgive, and didn’t do it. Forgive my debts, he says, as I forgive others. There was an opportunity to forgive, to be kind, to comfort, to help another, to show love to your neighbors, and you did not do it. That is the greater debt. So you must forgive others, so that you might understand your debts. It is not debts of omission that count. I could not pay my bill. It is debts of commission that hurt more. What could I have done for this person in need that I failed to do?
I have struggled over the years with the Lord’s Prayer - those words that were etched in my brain. As a young Unitarian Universalist who was still a Christian, I bristled at the patriarchal God of the Father, and refused to lead a recitation of it in my first settled ministry. In my next ministry it was also recited weekly, and I changed the liturgy there as well, so that it was alternated with other prayers from different traditions. Yet its words still come to me, even in my humanist guise of today. Despite its layering of Christian traditions, there lies a deep truth that Jesus recognized of finding forgiveness for the debts we owe, but have failed to act upon. We often fail to recognize these debts of ours especially if we are judging others as debtors. It may be harder to see the right things we could have done, but failed to do. This is a specially crucial lesson for those of us middle class folk who by and large probably feel that we are mostly free of great moral lapses. We say to ourselves that we are the good people. We haven't sent anyone to debtors prison or guarded an oil ministry today. It is true comparatively speaking that I have not done a great deal of wrong. I am a good guy. But then the question confronts us. How many debts do we have that we have failed to pay? And so we must forgive ourselves or find forgiveness for these missed opportunities with each other, because once we have done that, we can stop kicking ourselves for not doing them, and take advantage of recognizing the debts we owe that we can pay off. What have you left unsaid and undone? What can you give? We need to forgive ourselves for the debts we have accumulated because we need each other that we might act on the debts we owe - to those in pain who need our comfort, to those who are hungry who need us to bring them bread, to this good earth which needs us to take care of it, to those we love who nurtured us into being, and to those who will go on after we are gone. All these are our debts to forgive, so that now, we can begin to pay them back with interest in how we live our lives.
Closing words - from e. e. cummings
i thank You God for most this
amazing
day; for the leaping greenly spirits
of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and
for everything
which is natural which is infinite
which is yes
(i who died am alive again
today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this
is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:
and of the gay
great happening, illimitably earth)
How should tasting touching
hearing seeing
breathing any - lifted from the no
of all nothing - human merely
being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake
and
now the eyes of my eyes are
opened)
First Parish of Watertown - April 9, 2006
Audio (mp3)
Opening Words - “The Hummingbird” by Mary Oliver
It’s morning, and again I am that lucky person who is in it.
And again it is spring,
and there are the apple trees,
and the hummingbird in its branches.
On the green wheel of his wings
he hurries from blossom to blossom,
which is his work, that he might live.
He is a gatherer of the fine honey of promise,
and truly I go in envy
of the ruby fire at his throat,
and his accurate, quick tongue,
and his single-mindedness.
Meanwhile the knives of ambition are stirring
down there in the darkness behind my eyes,
and I should go inside now to my desk and my pages.
But still I stand under the trees, happy and desolate,
wanting for myself such a satisfying coat
and brilliant work.
Sermon - “Forgive Us Our Debts”
Our father (and mother) who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors (or forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us), and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory forever and forever. Amen. Those words, the Lord’s Prayer, are etched in my brain. As a person who grew up in a Christian church, I recited those words every Sunday. In my 1950’s rural, two room school house, I also recited those words every day with all my classmates. The separation of church and state had not hit my hometown yet. I can become a 21st century humanist, Unitarian Universalist and read every Buddhist scripture or Hindu Bhagavad-Gita that falls into my lap, and still, I will never erase the prayer of Jesus I have committed to memory. Of course I learned the Protestant “trespasses” version, while my Catholic friends were reciting “debts”. If you look at the original aramaic, which was Jesus’ language, the forgiveness of debts, which is Matthew’ s version or forgiveness of sins, which is Luke’s version, both mean the same thing. The prayer keeps coming back to me because this phrase, “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” is so prominent, and now so relevant to our times. We are a nation of debtors.
The story from James McBride’s book, The Color of Water about the failure of his brother to memorize his Bible story or verse reminded me of all those passages I committed to memory as a boy that I then recited before the congregation, and my parents. I am sure my mother would not have spanked my butt like this if I failed to recite my assignment, but I would still have felt her disappointment, especially if like McBride’s brother, I failed to put any effort into it. His mother clearly believed that everyone owed so much to God, she wanted to convey that to her children. Like my parents, she said, that unless you educate yourself, you will be a nobody. Her power to influence her children was evident by the fact that she put all 12 of them through college, and they became extraordinary people. And they continued to respond to the debt they owed to her, as when she expressed a need like, “I’m hungry,” and her influence quickly prevailed. While we often fail to appreciate the debt we owe to our parents as children, it often becomes clear as we mature, and become parents or grow older ourselves. McBride, who was black, once asked his white mother, what color God was, and she responded that God had no color, but was the color of water. God is a spirit who does not like black or white people better, but loves all people. She wanted them to understand others, and realize what debts they owed to life.
How do we think about debt? Mostly we imagine the context of financial issues, especially borrowing money, and not the spiritual or emotional debts we owe to others. The traditional religious orientation I heard was forgive us our debts, but most of us learned that it was a horrible thing to accumulate debt, and that if we did there was no forgiveness. The American ethos is that there is no free lunch, and that the best way to avoid the embarrassment of debt is to always say, I paid my way. Debt stalks us. When I was first married, my wife insisted that I pay off my credit card debt. Although it was not a large debt, it is something that eats away at your financial health and well being. We have the illusion of keeping up with our debts by paying the minimal amount, but it is akin to the federal government paying on the interest of the national debt, which is something, but the actual debt continues to grow. Our nation as a whole and countless individuals are both up to their ears in debt.
The assumption we usually make with debt is that it is always the fault of the person. We believe they are simply irresponsible spenders. While those people do exist, they are more the exception than the rule. Furthermore, the empathy expressed by Jesus for those with financial woes, is increasingly hard to find among our fellow citizens. Just last year there were sweeping changes in the bankruptcy laws, so it became clear that no one was going to forgive debts. The problem is that most of those people who seek bankruptcy protection are not exactly living on easy street. In fact about half of those people who file for bankruptcy are doing so because of excessive medical expenses. Why not instruct the politicians to do something about medical costs rather than punish the victims of these ever higher bills?
While there is genuine lack of forgiveness for debtors, the paradox is that we increasingly live off of our debt, and those who finance our debt find ever new ways to drive us further into debt. My wife hates debt, and always pays our credit card bills on time without fail. Recently we had a small bill that was mailed over the President’s Day holiday, and as a result we were charged both a late fee plus interest on the account for being one day late. This is for a customer who has never been late. I called to complain about the bill, and the representative said she would expunge both the charges. A month passed, and then the next bill arrived. Although those initial fees were removed, now we had a new residual interest charge of a couple dollars. This was, I guess, the interest on the interest that they had supposedly subtracted from the bill in the first place. Living off of our debts, or beyond our means has become common these days. Once upon a time when people considered purchasing a house they asked such questions as what do we need or how much can we afford. But today those purchases have nothing to do with need, but instead are based upon the maximum debt you can afford to carry. So some people carry mortgages where they only pay down interest rather than principle, a sure path to oblivion.
Some of this debtors approach to life is the found in the belief that we have the right to have everything we want - our own house, all the furniture and the right car now, and can pay for it later. Have we mortgaged our future because we believe we can have it all now? This is one of the concerns that Kevin Phillips writes about in American Theocracy. One of the three broad trends that he sees threatening America’s future is “the astonishing levels of debt current and prospective that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating.” In the first days of the Iraq war, our troops surrounded the Iraqi oil ministry, but failed to guard the National Museum, which was subsequently looted. Where is our sense of debt? Do we honor the past and the development of culture or do we protect the consumption of resources? This is where the two kinds of debt intersect. Does the debt we accumulate on our desires for material goods and the appearance of success destroy our other more religious and moral obligations, the debt we owe to the next generation, our posterity?
Some of you may not be aware that one of the founders of Universalism was imprisoned for debt. John Murray, was a Methodist preacher in England, who was converted to universal salvation by the preaching of James Relly. Unfortunately, his theological change resulted in his being voted out by the Methodists. What does loss of job often do to your financial situation? In modern times job loss or divorce are right up there with medical misfortune as causes of catastrophic debt, not irresponsible spending. So what happened to poor John Murray next? After he was arrested for debt, his only son died, and then his wife was taken ill, only to die in 1769. Of course his friends and relatives deserted him, because he was now an apostate Universalist. His own health declined, too, and of course all these medical bills meant, you guessed it, he ended up in Newgate prison for an indefinite term, only to be rescued by his brother-in-law. Finally, he resolved to come to America in 1770, because he realized it was a good way to “quit the world.” Debt and loss had devastated him, and there was neither forgiveness nor sympathy. Under what circumstances do we forgive the debtor? Murray came to the New World with the resolve never to preach again, but he met a man who believed that this preacher was sent by a higher power to bring his message to the new world. After Murray’s ship became stuck on a sand bar, he went ashore, and met Thomas Potter, who struck a bargain with Murray, that if the wind did not change in three days, and the ship remained stuck, it would be a sign that he should preach. The ship remained stuck, and the Universalist message was soon heard throughout the land; a message where God loves all, and saves all, including the debtor.
Without the forgiveness of his relative, where would the founder of Universalism have remained? Forgiveness in the prayer of Jesus is related to debts, sins and trespasses. We mostly think of sins and trespasses as synonyms. Yet growing up in rural Massachusetts I was conscious that the trespasses of the prayer were similar to the property boundary signs everywhere which said “no trespassing.” This was usually in the context of not wanting anyone on your land, or in this hunting culture, making sure that there were no hunters crossing your land. It was a reminder that someone owned this land, and it was not you, and you had no right to be there. Who owns the land has always been a religious concern. Hebrew scriptures call for a Jubilee year when all debts are canceled. This is proclaimed in the context that God is the ultimate owner of all that we own, and what you call yours will never actually be yours. This is directly related to who owns the earth’s resources, and whether we bear some debt to the earth to use its gifts wisely, and preserve its resources that we have wantonly used, and sometimes destroyed. We recall our debt to the earth which sustains us in life.
The prayer says, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” This means we cannot be forgiven unless we are ready to forgive. How much are you ready to forgive is the question. We always know some people who we might label sponges. According to Bruce Chilton, who wrote Rabbi Jesus, this was Jesus concern. You see as he began preaching more and more, he had to work less and less. What this meant was no carpentry jobs. So he was dependent upon the good will of the people who heard him preach. They had to feed him and his scraggly retinue of disciples. It is sort of like feeding the high school team when it rolls through your house. What this meant was that Jesus’ mother and brothers were obligated to pay back his debts, because to not be hospitable was a grievous sin. This reminds me of the children’s book Frederick by Leo Lionni. Frederick is a mouse who does not help the other mice gather food for the winter, but instead gathers thoughts and colors. The other mice begin to think of him as a sponge and a malingerer, but when they run out of food, he nourishes the mice with his meditative words and images of the beauty of the four seasons and the earth they inhabit.
They forgive his debt of not gathering food because he offers something else. There is a deeper debt, of spiritual sustenance, that we sometimes fail to recognize. Unitarian Universalists are often uncomfortable with the word sin, but in this context, it is no different than debt. Sin is our inability to recognize our debts. Traditionally, it is our failure to recognize what we owe to the source of life or God, but it also means what happens to our life when we fail to recognize our debts - debts to the earth and its resources, debts to our parents, debts to the children and the future, debts to each other, and our debt of gratitude for all of these. What was especially powerful about what Jesus was saying was that he was disturbed by what people abstained from doing rather than by what they did. This was a person who did very little moral judging of others. Remember he sat down to eat with those who were labeled unclean, and he said they were already forgiven. So the debtor, who is despised by everyone, who is the person we do not want to forgive, is not judged the great sinner. He or she is forgiven. Clearly the one who profits off the debt of another is more morally reprehensible. While we might see this as outdated or primitive, the deeper truth whatever our feelings about money making, is that the one who profits from another’s pain is the greater sinner. He or she has the greater debt to pay to God, or to the community. The greater sinners were not those who had done wrong - the people we would typically condemn , but rather those who could do right, and failed to do so. This is the person who could forgive, and didn’t do it. Forgive my debts, he says, as I forgive others. There was an opportunity to forgive, to be kind, to comfort, to help another, to show love to your neighbors, and you did not do it. That is the greater debt. So you must forgive others, so that you might understand your debts. It is not debts of omission that count. I could not pay my bill. It is debts of commission that hurt more. What could I have done for this person in need that I failed to do?
I have struggled over the years with the Lord’s Prayer - those words that were etched in my brain. As a young Unitarian Universalist who was still a Christian, I bristled at the patriarchal God of the Father, and refused to lead a recitation of it in my first settled ministry. In my next ministry it was also recited weekly, and I changed the liturgy there as well, so that it was alternated with other prayers from different traditions. Yet its words still come to me, even in my humanist guise of today. Despite its layering of Christian traditions, there lies a deep truth that Jesus recognized of finding forgiveness for the debts we owe, but have failed to act upon. We often fail to recognize these debts of ours especially if we are judging others as debtors. It may be harder to see the right things we could have done, but failed to do. This is a specially crucial lesson for those of us middle class folk who by and large probably feel that we are mostly free of great moral lapses. We say to ourselves that we are the good people. We haven't sent anyone to debtors prison or guarded an oil ministry today. It is true comparatively speaking that I have not done a great deal of wrong. I am a good guy. But then the question confronts us. How many debts do we have that we have failed to pay? And so we must forgive ourselves or find forgiveness for these missed opportunities with each other, because once we have done that, we can stop kicking ourselves for not doing them, and take advantage of recognizing the debts we owe that we can pay off. What have you left unsaid and undone? What can you give? We need to forgive ourselves for the debts we have accumulated because we need each other that we might act on the debts we owe - to those in pain who need our comfort, to those who are hungry who need us to bring them bread, to this good earth which needs us to take care of it, to those we love who nurtured us into being, and to those who will go on after we are gone. All these are our debts to forgive, so that now, we can begin to pay them back with interest in how we live our lives.
Closing words - from e. e. cummings
i thank You God for most this
amazing
day; for the leaping greenly spirits
of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and
for everything
which is natural which is infinite
which is yes
(i who died am alive again
today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this
is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:
and of the gay
great happening, illimitably earth)
How should tasting touching
hearing seeing
breathing any - lifted from the no
of all nothing - human merely
being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake
and
now the eyes of my eyes are
opened)
"Are We a Peace Church?" by Mark W. Harris - April 2, 2006
“Are We a Peace Church?” Mark W. Harris
April 2, 2006 - First Parish of Watertown
Opening Words - from “Timesweep” by Carl Sandburg
There is only one horse on the earth
and her name is All Horses.
There is only one bird in the air
and his name is All Wings.
There is only one fish in the sea
and her name is All fins.
There is only one man in the world
and his name is All Men.
There is only one woman in the world
and her name is All Women.
There is only one child in the world
and the child’s name is All Children.
There is only one Maker in the world
and her children cover the earth
and they are named All God’s Children.
Readings:
The History Teacher by Billy Collins
Trying to protect his students’ innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.
And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.
The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
“How far is it from here to Madrid?”
“What do you call the matador’s hat?”
The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom
on Japan.
The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart, mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,
while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.
Forgotten Wars by Carl Sandburg
Be loose. Be easy. Be ready.
Forget the last war.
Forget the one before.
Forget the one yet to come.
Be loose and easy about the wars
whether they have been fought
or whether yet to be fought -
be ready to forget them.
Who was saying at high noon today:
“Is not each of them a forgotten war
after it is fought and over?”
how and why it came forgotten?
how and what it cost forgotten?
and was he there at Iwo Jima, Okinawa
or places named Cassino, Anzio, the Bulge?
and saying now:
“Let the next war before it comes
and before it gets under way
and five or six days sees its finish
or fifty years sees it still going strong
-- let it be now a forgotten war.
Be ready now to forget it.
Be loose, be easy now.
The next war goes over in a flash - or runs long.”
Sermon
Jill Carroll was released on Thursday. Most of the time we can live as though we don’t have to think about the fact that there is a war going on. It is not like the war my parents endured. That was a total effort, and every life was disturbed. I heard about gas rationing coupons, and the lack of rubber and steel, all gone to the war effort. My father, who was 4-F was a civil defense officer, preparing for an attack at any time. His parents feared for the brother who was a prisoner of the Japanese, who once was reported dead, but later confirmed alive. They call it “the good war” now, It was fought to stop a madman who wanted to take over the world. The third anniversary of the War in Iraq has recently passed. But this war has not been a good war. Some days we seem to forget it is going on. If you watch Channel 7 news, they are probably more likely to tell you about the latest in plastic surgery or how we should shed tears that Vinateri and Damon, athletic icons, are both gone. This infomercial excuse for news does not say how many Iraqis, Sunnis or Shiites, American soldiers, or reporters were lost today or yesterday. It is like Carl Sandburg says, we want to forget about it.
But Jill Carroll was released on Thursday. I live most of my days as though their is no war going on. I feel guilty that I have not participated in more protests, or written more letters, or gone to more meetings to oppose the war. I suppose there is a certain feeling of helplessness, too. After all it is a war built on lies. The Arab League was negotiating for Saddam to leave, but we couldn’t wait. The inspectors found no weapons, but we couldn’t wait. There were no terrorists. There were no weapons. Saddam was not an international threat. But then there were oil fields. It is an old story of “you have what I need, and I am going to make sure I can control what I need.” So we have ignored diplomacy, and gone to war to feed an appetite for oil. Now there are terrorists, and they have weapons, and the threat is greater. And the latest is that the President now feels that the next President can deal with it. How soon forgotten. There are no happy thoughts for Channel 7 to report.
Then there is Jill Carroll. As I lived my days of running to school, preaching and teaching, going to meetings and shooting baskets with the boys, I thought of Jill Carroll. Perhaps because she was the U Mass Amherst journalism major, and I thought of my own son Joel, whose background is the same. What if this were him? Perhaps it was when she was weeping to be released, and I waited for the day when her headless body would appear. She then appeared, almost like Jesus from the dead. Is there hope here from one so young released unharmed? We saw her sister, her Dad, and right here in Boston, her paper the Christian Science Monitor. She was one of us, and all we wanted was for this young woman to have the chance to live her life, to see the sun come up day after day in a long life that would bring her many measures of joy and sorrow. It was a relief to know that this one life continues.
Putting a face on war brings meaning to it. Mostly, we who sit in this room have never had to get personal about this war or any other. As a young man I feared the lottery for draft for Vietnam, but even my low number was relatively meaningless, as my student deferment carried me through to safety. The soldiers were the boys who lived down by the river in the town of Orange, the poorer part of town. They were the ones who went and died. My privilege as an educated, rich boy pulled me through. How many of us today know a family who has suffered a loss in Iraq, one of the 2,300 dead? Those who traditionally have no voice are not heard, and it is we the privileged who must speak our words of outrage. During my childhood and adolescent years, there was no subject that occupied my interest more than the study of war. From 12 to 22, I became an expert on the Civil War. Having read about Picket’s Charge so many times, and the 15,000 Confederates who charged the Union center made me feel like I knew those names on both sides, and the last time I was there, I looked over the field at Gettysburg and cried.
I often have thought about what the effects of war do to our sense of meaning in life. I believe this is why we don’t want to think about war. Is there some innate blood lust in us, as Billy Collins implies with the children who hear the teacher lie his way through history so it will appear that humans tell long boring stories that make the enemy fall asleep rather than senselessly pummel one another like the children on the playground who bully and beat up the weak ones with glasses. Do we lie or forget so we don’t have to face the truth about what humans do to one another? I have thought about this in the context of church life in Britain, where no one goes to church, and young people drink themselves silly in pubs while finding solace in professional soccer teams. Perhaps the church has become a lifeless institution, but at least historically religion gave a context of meaning to life. Where is meaning found now in the wake of two World Wars and a failed empire. It is not riding on the coattails of an American President. Think about all that loss in war so up close and personal - bomb after bomb. Where do you turn for meaning? How could a traditional belief in God continue when clearly no loving deity would allow such carnage. Where was God in the Holocaust, the Jewish theologians asked, and many concluded, he was dead.
Perhaps the most meaningful theology to come out of this period was that the God we once knew is dead. No one holds back the strings on the hand we raise in anger. The poet Judith Wright says the will to power destroys the power to will. And we must be the ones who will not use the weapons we have made, and will not to choose kill even though we have to power to do so. In the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes was a young privileged man who probably could have bought his way out of this trauma by hiring a willing immigrant to substitute for him. Instead he went to war, was wounded three times, and as Louis Menand has written, the war burned a hole in his life. He always refused to read histories of the conflict, but he recalled his former comrades with emotion. The hole was his loss of meaning. His one lesson from the war was that certitude leads to violence. Always believing you are right is the surest way to provoke war in the home, in the town, in the nation, in the world. What was destroyed was the loving God and the people who always do the loving thing from his Unitarian faith. Out of this human turmoil the philosophy called Pragmatism was born. In life all believing is betting - you are taking a chance. The only sure thing is that we are the agents of our own destiny. Don’t let the the will to power, destroy the power to will. So the question becomes, what will we will?
Throughout most of our history Unitarians and Universalists have worked for a more peaceful world. Building on the Christian belief that the peacemakers are blessed, Unitarian leader William Ellery Channing founded the first peace society in America. Before 1800, Universalist Benjamin Rush proposed that a Department of Peace be created to balance the Department of War, now Defense. Then in 1790 the Universalists declared in convention that all churches be commended to “cultivate a spirit of peace and brotherly love so that all people would be considered brethren.” These efforts continued throughout our history. The famous story about Thoreau being in jail was in the context of his protest of the Mexican War. Adin Ballou was a Universalist who formulated a pacifist belief in nonresistance that influenced Tolstoy and Gandhi. In the 20th century there were pacifists and draft resisters and conscientious objectors who have been active in our liberal faith. At the same time, there were those who quit the church over the level of antiwar activities during Vietnam. Before that in the two World Wars there were pacifists who were forced from their pulpits. And a particularly ugly incident occurred at a national Unitarian meeting during World War I, when John Haynes Holmes pointed out the shortcomings of the war, only to be followed to the podium by former President William Howard Taft who called upon all Unitarians to support a resolution in favor of that war. The resolution passed along with economic sanctions against those ministers and churches who opposed the war. Holmes promptly quit the Unitarian ministry. While individual Unitarians and Universalists have stood up for peace at all costs, we have never been a declared pacifist church like the Quakers.
The question might be raised as to whether we are becoming a peace church. While those who fear a violation of our principle of the free search for truth might protest this kind of development, it has been increasingly clear since Vietnam that few members of our societies are willing to support war efforts. A few years ago our former student minister declared from this pulpit that he was a pacifist. That view hardly ruffles any feathers these days, but historically it would have. The First World War, which was a horrible, senseless bloodletting fought in trenches was once called the war that would end all wars. Following that war a statue was erected in Orange, Massachusetts that same home town where my old friends marched off to Vietnam.The statue in the town square depicts a returning veteran explaining the futility of war to a young boy. The statue was designed by a Universalist minister, Wallace Fiske, and I remember being told that it was controversial because it imparted an unpatriotic, antiwar message.
It is a grave concern that peace has been considered unpatriotic time and again. While the pacifist position would no longer be considered controversial among UUs, and seems like the peaceful and loving position to take in such a violent world, it is not a position I believe in. Please note that I am not against it because it violates our UU freedom, or because I believe that our freedom means that we should not take political positions. There are UUs who follow both of those paths, but not me.To me freedom in this instance can be something that paralyzes you to do nothing, except that you refuse to take a stand. No, I am not a pacifist because I believe war is sometimes necessary. Would you be a pacifist in response to Hitler or the institution of slavery? I am too much a historian to be a pacifist. I have studied war far too long to believe that humans as a species can ever stop their desires for power and control over others. I also think it shows a failure to understand human nature. I have seen too many aggressive children on the playground. As long as we perpetuate systems of haves and have nots, there will be war. The first steps in becoming peaceful people would be to work for a more equitable distribution of resources world wide, and for more equitable economic resources for all the people of our country.
It is certainly true that in recent years we have increasingly been a peace promoting church, and the supposed war on terror has been fought on a basis that few of us could support. Terror has been used as an excuse to promote a policy that is based on always being prepared for war, and even more sinister, is the new doctrine of preemptive war, where we strike first against any enemy whom we deem dangerous to national security. Here the idea of a just war fought for defensive purposes goes completely awry, as we can attack without provocation and figure out why it was a good way to defend ourselves later. This policy along with the pure aggression that started the war in Iraq in the first place shows that military might and war have become the policy of choice over negotiation and compromise and understanding of one another. One does not have to be a pacifist to see the immorality of recent policies.
The problem with the pacifist position is that it is absolutist, and its precludes the possibility that there might be some cataclysmic war inducing event which we might want to support for our own defense or some greater good. In the present it is hard to see the dividing line between war and peace, where we are always preparing for war, but the effort is never named. Like George Orwell predicted in 1984, we can experience the doublespeak danger of war becoming peace, and peace war. Several things are clear. Our principles assert that we believe in one world, and so politically we have supported world federations and efforts toward world governments and peace rather than the dominance of a superpower acting in an imperialistic fashion. This means we value an Iraqi life as much as an American one. Our vision of a just and equitable world coupled with a persistent activism to stop arms production and sales, and to counter military solutions with more peaceful means of negotiation might mean increasingly we are a religious tradition that embraces a strong preference for peace and will only embrace war in extreme circumstances.
Back in February the Globe published an article on the enduring cost of war. A study of Civil War veterans showed that these soldiers suffered lifelong health problems, mental disorders and premature death. War kills in body and spirit. The results of this study probably seem self-evident. Of course war makes its participants go crazy. But it is so painful, we forget. Soldiers from Iraq come home the same way. We see the effect of war in Jill’s Carroll’s silent weeping on the videotape. Pacifist or not, we must speak out more consistently and clearly on the insanity of our current military policies. Many of the soldiers returning from the Civil War suffered from what was called soldier’s heart, terrible nervous afflictions which maimed the human psyche. The God who was once often affirmed as the supporter of one side of a war or the other is gone - all sides suffer loss. What’s left is pain without meaning. Now it is up to us to create meaning in response to our current violent path to peace. First, we have to stop forgetting the toll of war. We must remember. Second, we have to tell a different truth than the one the history teacher presents. We tell the real truth. Third, we have to join with others and force a public debate on the immoral nature of a government that conducts business through war and aggression as its means to peace. Together we can live lives that reflect peaceful coexistence in our homes, in our work, and in our towns. We have the tradition. We have the vision for one world. We know our voices for peaceful coexistence can be heard.
In our story today, Darrick spoke of Jane Addams and another Unitarian Emily Green Balch going to Europe to meet with heads of state to get them to do something about ending the war and making peace. Jane Addams said, “two women traveling to Europe to stop the World War, ha! That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” Then Balch replied, “But somebody must do something, and if we always think that the someone is somebody else - then no one will do a thing! This time the someone is me!” Both women won Nobel Peace Prizes - each was someone who did something. While we are not an official peace church because our freedom rejects dogmatic positions, each of our members, each one of us, can will to live, a life of peace.
Closing Words - from Martin Luther King, Jr.
Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill ill have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men and women willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of stagnation.
April 2, 2006 - First Parish of Watertown
Opening Words - from “Timesweep” by Carl Sandburg
There is only one horse on the earth
and her name is All Horses.
There is only one bird in the air
and his name is All Wings.
There is only one fish in the sea
and her name is All fins.
There is only one man in the world
and his name is All Men.
There is only one woman in the world
and her name is All Women.
There is only one child in the world
and the child’s name is All Children.
There is only one Maker in the world
and her children cover the earth
and they are named All God’s Children.
Readings:
The History Teacher by Billy Collins
Trying to protect his students’ innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.
And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.
The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
“How far is it from here to Madrid?”
“What do you call the matador’s hat?”
The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom
on Japan.
The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart, mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,
while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.
Forgotten Wars by Carl Sandburg
Be loose. Be easy. Be ready.
Forget the last war.
Forget the one before.
Forget the one yet to come.
Be loose and easy about the wars
whether they have been fought
or whether yet to be fought -
be ready to forget them.
Who was saying at high noon today:
“Is not each of them a forgotten war
after it is fought and over?”
how and why it came forgotten?
how and what it cost forgotten?
and was he there at Iwo Jima, Okinawa
or places named Cassino, Anzio, the Bulge?
and saying now:
“Let the next war before it comes
and before it gets under way
and five or six days sees its finish
or fifty years sees it still going strong
-- let it be now a forgotten war.
Be ready now to forget it.
Be loose, be easy now.
The next war goes over in a flash - or runs long.”
Sermon
Jill Carroll was released on Thursday. Most of the time we can live as though we don’t have to think about the fact that there is a war going on. It is not like the war my parents endured. That was a total effort, and every life was disturbed. I heard about gas rationing coupons, and the lack of rubber and steel, all gone to the war effort. My father, who was 4-F was a civil defense officer, preparing for an attack at any time. His parents feared for the brother who was a prisoner of the Japanese, who once was reported dead, but later confirmed alive. They call it “the good war” now, It was fought to stop a madman who wanted to take over the world. The third anniversary of the War in Iraq has recently passed. But this war has not been a good war. Some days we seem to forget it is going on. If you watch Channel 7 news, they are probably more likely to tell you about the latest in plastic surgery or how we should shed tears that Vinateri and Damon, athletic icons, are both gone. This infomercial excuse for news does not say how many Iraqis, Sunnis or Shiites, American soldiers, or reporters were lost today or yesterday. It is like Carl Sandburg says, we want to forget about it.
But Jill Carroll was released on Thursday. I live most of my days as though their is no war going on. I feel guilty that I have not participated in more protests, or written more letters, or gone to more meetings to oppose the war. I suppose there is a certain feeling of helplessness, too. After all it is a war built on lies. The Arab League was negotiating for Saddam to leave, but we couldn’t wait. The inspectors found no weapons, but we couldn’t wait. There were no terrorists. There were no weapons. Saddam was not an international threat. But then there were oil fields. It is an old story of “you have what I need, and I am going to make sure I can control what I need.” So we have ignored diplomacy, and gone to war to feed an appetite for oil. Now there are terrorists, and they have weapons, and the threat is greater. And the latest is that the President now feels that the next President can deal with it. How soon forgotten. There are no happy thoughts for Channel 7 to report.
Then there is Jill Carroll. As I lived my days of running to school, preaching and teaching, going to meetings and shooting baskets with the boys, I thought of Jill Carroll. Perhaps because she was the U Mass Amherst journalism major, and I thought of my own son Joel, whose background is the same. What if this were him? Perhaps it was when she was weeping to be released, and I waited for the day when her headless body would appear. She then appeared, almost like Jesus from the dead. Is there hope here from one so young released unharmed? We saw her sister, her Dad, and right here in Boston, her paper the Christian Science Monitor. She was one of us, and all we wanted was for this young woman to have the chance to live her life, to see the sun come up day after day in a long life that would bring her many measures of joy and sorrow. It was a relief to know that this one life continues.
Putting a face on war brings meaning to it. Mostly, we who sit in this room have never had to get personal about this war or any other. As a young man I feared the lottery for draft for Vietnam, but even my low number was relatively meaningless, as my student deferment carried me through to safety. The soldiers were the boys who lived down by the river in the town of Orange, the poorer part of town. They were the ones who went and died. My privilege as an educated, rich boy pulled me through. How many of us today know a family who has suffered a loss in Iraq, one of the 2,300 dead? Those who traditionally have no voice are not heard, and it is we the privileged who must speak our words of outrage. During my childhood and adolescent years, there was no subject that occupied my interest more than the study of war. From 12 to 22, I became an expert on the Civil War. Having read about Picket’s Charge so many times, and the 15,000 Confederates who charged the Union center made me feel like I knew those names on both sides, and the last time I was there, I looked over the field at Gettysburg and cried.
I often have thought about what the effects of war do to our sense of meaning in life. I believe this is why we don’t want to think about war. Is there some innate blood lust in us, as Billy Collins implies with the children who hear the teacher lie his way through history so it will appear that humans tell long boring stories that make the enemy fall asleep rather than senselessly pummel one another like the children on the playground who bully and beat up the weak ones with glasses. Do we lie or forget so we don’t have to face the truth about what humans do to one another? I have thought about this in the context of church life in Britain, where no one goes to church, and young people drink themselves silly in pubs while finding solace in professional soccer teams. Perhaps the church has become a lifeless institution, but at least historically religion gave a context of meaning to life. Where is meaning found now in the wake of two World Wars and a failed empire. It is not riding on the coattails of an American President. Think about all that loss in war so up close and personal - bomb after bomb. Where do you turn for meaning? How could a traditional belief in God continue when clearly no loving deity would allow such carnage. Where was God in the Holocaust, the Jewish theologians asked, and many concluded, he was dead.
Perhaps the most meaningful theology to come out of this period was that the God we once knew is dead. No one holds back the strings on the hand we raise in anger. The poet Judith Wright says the will to power destroys the power to will. And we must be the ones who will not use the weapons we have made, and will not to choose kill even though we have to power to do so. In the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes was a young privileged man who probably could have bought his way out of this trauma by hiring a willing immigrant to substitute for him. Instead he went to war, was wounded three times, and as Louis Menand has written, the war burned a hole in his life. He always refused to read histories of the conflict, but he recalled his former comrades with emotion. The hole was his loss of meaning. His one lesson from the war was that certitude leads to violence. Always believing you are right is the surest way to provoke war in the home, in the town, in the nation, in the world. What was destroyed was the loving God and the people who always do the loving thing from his Unitarian faith. Out of this human turmoil the philosophy called Pragmatism was born. In life all believing is betting - you are taking a chance. The only sure thing is that we are the agents of our own destiny. Don’t let the the will to power, destroy the power to will. So the question becomes, what will we will?
Throughout most of our history Unitarians and Universalists have worked for a more peaceful world. Building on the Christian belief that the peacemakers are blessed, Unitarian leader William Ellery Channing founded the first peace society in America. Before 1800, Universalist Benjamin Rush proposed that a Department of Peace be created to balance the Department of War, now Defense. Then in 1790 the Universalists declared in convention that all churches be commended to “cultivate a spirit of peace and brotherly love so that all people would be considered brethren.” These efforts continued throughout our history. The famous story about Thoreau being in jail was in the context of his protest of the Mexican War. Adin Ballou was a Universalist who formulated a pacifist belief in nonresistance that influenced Tolstoy and Gandhi. In the 20th century there were pacifists and draft resisters and conscientious objectors who have been active in our liberal faith. At the same time, there were those who quit the church over the level of antiwar activities during Vietnam. Before that in the two World Wars there were pacifists who were forced from their pulpits. And a particularly ugly incident occurred at a national Unitarian meeting during World War I, when John Haynes Holmes pointed out the shortcomings of the war, only to be followed to the podium by former President William Howard Taft who called upon all Unitarians to support a resolution in favor of that war. The resolution passed along with economic sanctions against those ministers and churches who opposed the war. Holmes promptly quit the Unitarian ministry. While individual Unitarians and Universalists have stood up for peace at all costs, we have never been a declared pacifist church like the Quakers.
The question might be raised as to whether we are becoming a peace church. While those who fear a violation of our principle of the free search for truth might protest this kind of development, it has been increasingly clear since Vietnam that few members of our societies are willing to support war efforts. A few years ago our former student minister declared from this pulpit that he was a pacifist. That view hardly ruffles any feathers these days, but historically it would have. The First World War, which was a horrible, senseless bloodletting fought in trenches was once called the war that would end all wars. Following that war a statue was erected in Orange, Massachusetts that same home town where my old friends marched off to Vietnam.The statue in the town square depicts a returning veteran explaining the futility of war to a young boy. The statue was designed by a Universalist minister, Wallace Fiske, and I remember being told that it was controversial because it imparted an unpatriotic, antiwar message.
It is a grave concern that peace has been considered unpatriotic time and again. While the pacifist position would no longer be considered controversial among UUs, and seems like the peaceful and loving position to take in such a violent world, it is not a position I believe in. Please note that I am not against it because it violates our UU freedom, or because I believe that our freedom means that we should not take political positions. There are UUs who follow both of those paths, but not me.To me freedom in this instance can be something that paralyzes you to do nothing, except that you refuse to take a stand. No, I am not a pacifist because I believe war is sometimes necessary. Would you be a pacifist in response to Hitler or the institution of slavery? I am too much a historian to be a pacifist. I have studied war far too long to believe that humans as a species can ever stop their desires for power and control over others. I also think it shows a failure to understand human nature. I have seen too many aggressive children on the playground. As long as we perpetuate systems of haves and have nots, there will be war. The first steps in becoming peaceful people would be to work for a more equitable distribution of resources world wide, and for more equitable economic resources for all the people of our country.
It is certainly true that in recent years we have increasingly been a peace promoting church, and the supposed war on terror has been fought on a basis that few of us could support. Terror has been used as an excuse to promote a policy that is based on always being prepared for war, and even more sinister, is the new doctrine of preemptive war, where we strike first against any enemy whom we deem dangerous to national security. Here the idea of a just war fought for defensive purposes goes completely awry, as we can attack without provocation and figure out why it was a good way to defend ourselves later. This policy along with the pure aggression that started the war in Iraq in the first place shows that military might and war have become the policy of choice over negotiation and compromise and understanding of one another. One does not have to be a pacifist to see the immorality of recent policies.
The problem with the pacifist position is that it is absolutist, and its precludes the possibility that there might be some cataclysmic war inducing event which we might want to support for our own defense or some greater good. In the present it is hard to see the dividing line between war and peace, where we are always preparing for war, but the effort is never named. Like George Orwell predicted in 1984, we can experience the doublespeak danger of war becoming peace, and peace war. Several things are clear. Our principles assert that we believe in one world, and so politically we have supported world federations and efforts toward world governments and peace rather than the dominance of a superpower acting in an imperialistic fashion. This means we value an Iraqi life as much as an American one. Our vision of a just and equitable world coupled with a persistent activism to stop arms production and sales, and to counter military solutions with more peaceful means of negotiation might mean increasingly we are a religious tradition that embraces a strong preference for peace and will only embrace war in extreme circumstances.
Back in February the Globe published an article on the enduring cost of war. A study of Civil War veterans showed that these soldiers suffered lifelong health problems, mental disorders and premature death. War kills in body and spirit. The results of this study probably seem self-evident. Of course war makes its participants go crazy. But it is so painful, we forget. Soldiers from Iraq come home the same way. We see the effect of war in Jill’s Carroll’s silent weeping on the videotape. Pacifist or not, we must speak out more consistently and clearly on the insanity of our current military policies. Many of the soldiers returning from the Civil War suffered from what was called soldier’s heart, terrible nervous afflictions which maimed the human psyche. The God who was once often affirmed as the supporter of one side of a war or the other is gone - all sides suffer loss. What’s left is pain without meaning. Now it is up to us to create meaning in response to our current violent path to peace. First, we have to stop forgetting the toll of war. We must remember. Second, we have to tell a different truth than the one the history teacher presents. We tell the real truth. Third, we have to join with others and force a public debate on the immoral nature of a government that conducts business through war and aggression as its means to peace. Together we can live lives that reflect peaceful coexistence in our homes, in our work, and in our towns. We have the tradition. We have the vision for one world. We know our voices for peaceful coexistence can be heard.
In our story today, Darrick spoke of Jane Addams and another Unitarian Emily Green Balch going to Europe to meet with heads of state to get them to do something about ending the war and making peace. Jane Addams said, “two women traveling to Europe to stop the World War, ha! That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” Then Balch replied, “But somebody must do something, and if we always think that the someone is somebody else - then no one will do a thing! This time the someone is me!” Both women won Nobel Peace Prizes - each was someone who did something. While we are not an official peace church because our freedom rejects dogmatic positions, each of our members, each one of us, can will to live, a life of peace.
Closing Words - from Martin Luther King, Jr.
Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill ill have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men and women willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of stagnation.