Monday, October 30, 2006
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Monday, October 02, 2006
"Loving Calvin Again, For the First Time by Mark W. Harris - October 29, 2006
“Loving Calvin Again for the First Time” by Mark W. Harris
First Parish of Watertown - October 29, 2006
Given at Andover Newton Theological School on October 25, 2006
Opening Words - from Robert French Leavens
Holy and beautiful the custom which brings us together,
In the presence of the Most High:
To face our ideals,
To remember our loved ones in absence,
To give thanks, To make confession,
to offer forgiveness,
To be enlightened, to be strengthened.
Through this quiet hour breathes the worship of ages,
The cathedral music of history.
Three unseen guests attend,
Faith, hope, and love
Let all our hearts prepare them place.
Service notes: Today, you will not hear the sermon announced in the newsletter. I will save that for another time. Instead my sermon today is a slight revision of one I gave Wednesday at Andover Newton Theological School. On that day, the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association and the president of the United Church of Christ were together in an evening program on the same podium at Andover Newton. To those unfamiliar with our history, the Unitarian side of our tradition and the Congregational side of the UCC tradition once represented the same church. Our church here in Watertown was founded as a congregational (small c) church in 1630. These were the Puritan churches of Massachusetts that were organized as the state church for the commonwealth. They followed the theological teachings of the Protestant reformer John Calvin. I often tell people that a quick understanding of our history on the Unitarian side is that the Congregational church split in half in the early 1800’s. Over the years the Unitarians and their ex-partners have cooperated in many ways, but theologically the UCC has remained in mainstream Christianity, while we have become pluralistic with some among us still calling themselves UU Christians. Because of the event at Andover Newton, Darrick Jackson, our former student minister here, invited me to speak at the weekly chapel there, and suggested that because of the historic conversation which took place on Wednesday evening between the presidents of the UUA and the UCC, that I might share some of my thoughts on the Unitarian/Trinitarian controversy of 200 years ago. Harvard was the primary training school for ministers, and the controversy began in earnest in 1805 when they elected an acknowledged liberal to be the professor of divinity. Theological conservatives responded by founding Andover Seminary, and a 30 year battle ensued.
Reading - from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well do we perform our role? With how much assurance do we perform it? I suppose Calvin’s God was a Frenchmen, just as mine is a middle westerner of New England extraction. Well, we all bring such light to bear on these great matters as we can. I do like Calvin’s image, though, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy us. I believe we think about that far too little. It would be a way into understanding essential things, since presumably the world exists for God’s enjoyment, not in any simple sense, of course, but as you enjoy the being of a child even when he is in every way a thorn in your heart. “He has a mind of his own,” Boughton used to say when that son of his was up to something. And he meant it as praise, he really did.
Sermon - “Loving Calvin Again For the First Time” - Mark W. Harris
On this date exactly two centuries ago, Henry Ware had already assumed his place as Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, signaling that it had been captured by the liberals, Jedediah Morse was plotting ways to expose this liberal heresy, and dreaming of founding Andover seminary, a school that he perceived would train clergy up in the real Christian faith, and not the so-called Boston religion that was jettisoning theology. The Standing Order of Congregational Churches in Massachusetts broke apart in the nineteenth century because they could not embrace both its Calvinist and Unitarian poles. Evidence of this historic split is seen across this state. If you travel to the location of my former parish in Milton, you will see the Unitarian Congregational Church on one side of the town green and the Trinitarian Congregational Church on the other with an ugly modern town hall in between representing the separation of church and state. If you are looking at the churches from the street, the Unitarians, of course, are on the left side of the green.
Massachusetts, as you may or may not know was the last state to disestablish a state church, and did so in 1833. One scholar has called this the most significant event in Unitarian history because the liberals, whose ministers and property were largely being supported by tax dollars, were fooled into thinking they were leading a large denomination. After 1833 the freedom to not affiliate with any church became an option, and people left in droves. Henceforth, the Unitarians had to run successful pledge drives and be evangelical. While many of us can talk about money now, evangelical has always been a dirty word. In his, “Sober Thoughts on the State of the Times, Henry Ware, Jr. remarked that the result of fighting over differing doctrines meant for the Unitarians, that, I quote, “we are a community by ourselves.” Ware characterized the separation as a “crisis of unspeakable interest to us.” It was a crisis because Ware said the Unitarians had to figure out the character of their institutions, the nature of their faith, and how faithful they were going to be to the gospel.
While Baptists, Universalists and others were struggling to define their faiths and reach out to new converts, as they battled the establishment, their Congregational counterparts were enjoying the fruits of a steady stream of tax paying parishioners. Many of these, especially on the Unitarian side did not care for theological disputations. In fact Ware, Jr. said that many people became attached to Unitarian parishes because they disliked Calvinism, but liked nothing else. They were not only anti-Calvinist, Ware said, they were anti-everything, and had some vague idea that religion was kind of a good thing, but it should never be “severe or urgent.” I think the Unitarians were denying their emotions because the fight was severe. Congregations not only split, and ministers lost their pulpits, but in Dedham they even turned the church building so they would not have to look at each other. I think my favorite story of the split occurred at Second Church Dorchester, where the parishioners were getting fed up with John Codman’s refusal to exchange pulpits with liberals. The parish had voted for his dismissal, but they were waiting for a church council to actually confirm this. One Sunday, Warren Pierce, a liberal who was principal of Milton Academy was invited to preach. A group of liberals went to church early to guard the pulpit against any attempt by Codman to recapture his place. As it turned out Codman got up earlier than Pierce, came to church and conducted worship from the floor, since the pulpit was barricaded by liberals. After Pierce arrived he waited Codman out, and then the pulpit guard let him in, so that the liberals could conduct their own worship. Being no fools, the liberals decided it would be a mistake to leave the pulpit unguarded, and so Pierce was fed his lunch in the pulpit, and then conducted the afternoon service. As you can imagine Codman then returned to conduct his own afternoon service. After all this it became evident to the liberals that the Trinitarians were in the majority as they had more people there for services, and so the liberals withdrew their claims on the parish, and went on to found the Third Religious Society in Dorchester.
In the wake of the Unitarian controversy, the Trinitarians began to tell the now familiar joke that the Unitarians kept the silver, and we kept the faith. People have often remarked on the affinity between financial success and those who chose the less demanding theological position of Unitarianism. I think Perry Miller once remarked that the aspiring capitalist did not want to lie around waiting to be filled with the holy spirit when he could be out making money. Then of course liberals made a correlation between those who God favored, and those who did well materially. Salvation became less and less a sudden emotional revelation of God’s grace on a troubled heart, and more and more a slow educational process, whereby one learned faith more than experienced it. Liberals began to emphasize what each human being was capable of achieving. Career and educational development led to the most cultured and successful kind of person, so much so that salvation no longer pertained to what God could do for you, so much as what you could do for yourself. James Freeman Clarke called it salvation by character. What we need to remember in reflecting upon this old Congregational fight was that it was not a battle primarily fought over the Trinity, and in some ways it is unfortunate that we use that language. It is sometimes said that Unitarianism developed out of Calvinism because Calvin put such a strong emphasis on the sovereignty of God, and thus de-emphasized Jesus. In Protestantism, we don’t see that suffering person on the cross any longer. He is not there for us. In fact, it was the suffering nature of humanity that was the primary reason for the Congregational rift, and not the humanization of Jesus. To make a long story short, liberals rejected original sin, scoffed at predestination, and began a march down the road of affirming the positive character of human nature all the way to Emerson’s notion that the divine dwells within each of us. So the real fight was over the doctrine of human nature. Liberals said we do not want to feel bad about ourselves, and fled from a perceived theology where there was nothing good in them, they were totally dependent upon God’s grace, and where they might go to hell anyway, despite all the good works they performed. It just wasn’t fair.
I had an individual experience of this as a child, when the conservative Congregational church of my youth, which was not part of the United Church of Christ because it was too liberal, made me feel sinful and useless. I rejected this church, and embraced Unitarian Universalism because it allowed me to use my mind to discover a loving God who affirmed my inherent human goodness and worth. The elders of my childhood church probably felt the UCC and the UUA, all the liberals, abandoned theology in favor of the human potential movement and politics so that everybody gets into heaven, and we should all just be nice to each other. I saw the church of my childhood as still trying to affirm Calvin with sin, death and damnation. I had images of Jonathan Edwards’ wrathful God dangling me over the fires of hell like a loathsome spider. With this image of God in mind, John Lowell wrote, “Are You a Christian or a Calvinist?” reflecting his belief that Calvinism was too bloodthirsty to even be considered Christian. If we who claim the Puritan heritage once loved Calvin, we found we no longer did so in mainstream Protestantism. So why would anyone, who once rejected this seemingly repugnant theology ever want to love Calvin again, for the first time? I want to use the remainder of my time to tell you why I believe we should reaffirm this common UCC/UUA heritage.
While the battle was over their respective doctrines of human nature, the split occurred because the Calvinists did not want to abandon specific theological positions, and the Unitarians wanted to be tolerant of all positions within a broad Christian framework. What this eventually meant was that doctrine no longer mattered. Theology was replaced by ethics, and many came to believe you were Christian if you were a good person. Parker’s Pure Religion made people wonder if Jesus mattered. And Emerson’s oversoul made God into a universal force rather than a paternal being, so that Henry Ware Jr. concluded it might as well be atheism. Unitarianism then continued its long march through humanism and now pluralism. Liberals by the 21st century had developed a very tolerant perspective. We say we value everybody else’s point of view. So we have the goodness of religion in general, but we lack perspective on the particular. What this means especially for Unitarian Universalists is that we may have no singular perspective, except valuing everybody else’s perspective. I cringe every time I hear about a colleague who says to a congregation or a search committee I want to reflect your theology, thus implying that he /she has no theology of their own, but desires to be a mere mirror of the people. While I have some reservation about much of what he says, Sam Harris in his book, The End of Faith makes the crucial observation that we liberals often become so tolerant of every perspective under the sun that we let violent, misogynist and crack pot religion off in the name of pluralism.
Now there is also an interesting paradox here. We are at once tolerant of others, but we are also invariably right. This was brought home to me this summer when I was the theme speaker for a history conference on Unitarian Universalists and Class. As I researched my fourth lecture, I became deeply disturbed about the heritage I love and teach. I discovered something I should have been aware of, but mostly was not. In the late 19th century an America eugenics movement began to develop hand and glove with social darwinism. What was so disturbing was that into the 20th century the leaders of this eugenics movement, many of whom were also leaders of the social gospel movement, were our very own liberal Unitarians, Universalists and Congregationalists. It made sense once I reflected upon it. Salvation by character meant all the best educated, most successful people were Unitarians. They were the top of the heap, and if everyone was just like us, the world would be a better place, even the kingdom of God would be revealed. It was a short step to we have the best blood and the most culture and respectability, and those other kinds of people - poor, black, immigrants, what we now call developmentally disabled - those populations need to be brought under control. The result was the prevention of certain kinds of people from marrying, and a broad state by state program of sterilizations. It puts an entirely different perspective on such liberal issues as birth control, euthanasia and even the antiwar movement. Some people were pacifists because they believed the “defectives” got to stay home, and the genetically superior people were killed off. The elite moral aristocracy, that is our liberal religious heritage believed it knew what was best for America. Hitler learned a great deal from the American eugenics movement.
Many of us would surely say that was then, and this is now, but I wonder. When I studied James Fowler’s stages of faith, I remember thinking that I was at the top of his religious hierarchy, which placed the rational, educated types as the most enlightened.. Often when we have no particular perspective, and claim to understand all of the other perspectives, we reflect our superiority to all of them. This hierarchy puts us above everyone else. We sometimes joke that liberals love people in general, but hate them in particular. Locally, I think many of the liberals feel like the “townies” get in the way of our implementing the truly enlightened positions, and we may try to do so without listening to their struggles. This summer at the conference on class one of the most painful things was to hear from several people how difficult it was to be part of a Unitarian Universalist congregation if you had experienced failure in any way, either in your own life or with your children. People stayed away from church if they could not emulate their fellow successful parishioners. I thought how sad this was, that we could not feel each other’s pain and sadness. But then I thought of that Calvinist church of my youth which I rejected. It was made up of people who once would have been called sinners - the addicted, the shunned, those hurt by life in some way. It became clear why I wanted to love Calvin again.
Last year I gave a lecture on the 200th anniversary of Hosea Ballou’s Treatise on Atonement, which was the seminal work on Universalism, and the universal salvation it reflected. Universalists were a small, evangelical group who had to battle against the established church here in Massachusetts to be recognized as legitimate. Universalism is an interesting corrective to Unitarianism especially in its early embrace of Calvinism, which has mostly been wiped from our historical memory. That is unfortunate because it is the kind of corrective I believe liberals need today. What it does is help me see how rejecting Calvin means rejecting equality and community and understanding our common humanity.
Ballou did that in three ways. He said God’s loving intention for humanity is salvation. God is not going to defy God’s own intention. God means for us to be saved, and we will be saved. Universal salvation meant that everyone goes to heaven. There are no distinctions. It took the moral superiority of all groups, including the liberals, and said this is garbage. No one is any better than anyone else. Remember the liberal seems to talk equality, but historically it is equality on the basis of becoming exactly like me. Ballou said we all have a place in the choir, as God’s grace fills us without us having to “do” anything.
The second issue that Ballou makes us look at directly relates to the classless idea of salvation. Historically, salvation has been about how I am going to get into heaven. And for some it seemed that worldly success, money or that Harvard degree meant that you were earmarked for the pearly gates. Ballou said no, you are all going to get in. Salvation then was not about self-fulfillment, it was about communal sanctification. No one is saved unless everyone is saved. So Ballou takes our personal, materialistic, selfish, get ahead of your neighbor, I’m better than you, idea of salvation (heavenly then, earthly now), and says no. He says if someone is hungry or enslaved, then God’s intention of “happifying” the human race is being denied. God wants everyone to experience the joy of salvation. Now you might be saying that with predestination my idea of loving Calvin goes right out the window. Granted, Ballou does give me a chance to embrace a different kind of pluralism where all truths become salvific, but it is not quite the same. For me, it has do with original sin, and the value of seeing sin as part of the human spirit with the end result the creation of a holy commonwealth.
In Ballou’s scheme of salvation, sin is never denied, and everyone participates in it. One of the values of believing in original sin, which Ballou eventually rejected, is that it unites the human race and prevents us from making distinguishing judgments between sinner and non sinners, saved and non saved. I am not suggesting we embrace original sin again, but rather look at liberalism’s failure to understand the human condition, and the struggles that regular people have. Ballou’s theology acknowledges the incredible brokenness of life that most of us do experience in one way or another. This reality which is reflected in every day’s Boston Globe was expounded upon by Martin Luther King in his essay “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” where he said he cherished liberalism’s use of reason, but then went on to say “The more I observed the tragedies of history, and man’s shameful inclination to choose the low road, the more I came to see the depths and strength of sin . . I came to feel that liberalism had been too sentimental concerning human nature and that it leaned toward a false idealism. I also came to see that liberalism’s superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin.”
One of the values of recognizing sin in this theological matrix is that we recognize that every single person struggles. In her novel Gilead, Marilynne Robinson in her reflections on the modern day Calvinism she embraces writes of how Boughton recognizes that the thorn in his side that his son represents, and the reflection that he has a mind of his own are really praise for his very human being. This being is damaged in some way, and lives in a broken world, and yet is loved for his very being despite the fact, that “he is up to something.” Calvin’s sense of sin is important because it makes us one human race of equals, and it also recognizes the secret struggle of each person. Liberalism, at least the Unitarianism I have known, has sometimes ignored those struggles, and it has reflected a moral and intellectual superiority that has made it difficult for regular people to affirm it. When Robinson quotes Calvin she reaffirms this because when we live and strive for ourselves alone, or seek only our own advantage, we violate the commandments in a most basic way. This is why, as with Ballou and Calvin, we must embrace the human race “without exception in a single feeling of love.” Liberalism taught me to love myself, but its extreme implementation of this leads us to neglect love of neighbor. Instead of learning only to love ourselves and nurture our own spiritual development, we would begin to build communities with all of our neighbors.
The other night I was watching Al Gore’s film on Global Warming, “An Inconvenient Truth.” During the film Gore talks about how his family had raised tobacco for generations, it had been something they always did, and it had given them a good livelihood. The tragic irony of this, and the ignorance of what evil we can perpetrate without even knowing it came when he shared how his sister had died of lung cancer. What goes around comes around. It made me think of the dark skinned boy with the Armenian name who moved to my rural town in Western Massachusetts when I was a boy. He was new. He was foreign. We called him names and we beat him up. Forty years later I moved to the town with the largest Armenian population outside of Armenia. The evil I had done in bullying him came back to me. What we have done to the earth comes back to haunt us. The last thing that I love about Calvin is that his central doctrine was the sovereignty of God. This sounds severe for a liberal to be preaching, but what we liberals have often lacked in our arrogance and pride of achievement and know it all answers is humility before the creation. We have failed to have due reverence for all the greatness that is much more great than we. And perhaps in these days of melting polar ice caps that is the message of Calvin that must beat strongest in our hearts. Get on your knees before this creation and be startled into action before the rushing waters flood your pride out of existence. Marilynne Robinson posits that we are actors on God’s stage here for the enjoyment of the sovereign. We liberal Congregationalists and Unitarians have depicted Calvin as a bad guy for a long time, and yet through his legacy we may once again feel a common sense of frailty and struggle, we may feel a sense of common humanity and unity, and we may feel a sense of reverence for and humility before the great powers of creation. Calvin foresaw the creation of holy commonwealths not individual fiefdoms of salvation. There is still time if we could embrace this urgent need to feel the joy of the creation, and act to save it.
Closing Words - from Hosea Ballou
If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good. Let us endeavor to keep the unity of the spirit in the bonds of peace.
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First Parish of Watertown - October 29, 2006
Given at Andover Newton Theological School on October 25, 2006
Opening Words - from Robert French Leavens
Holy and beautiful the custom which brings us together,
In the presence of the Most High:
To face our ideals,
To remember our loved ones in absence,
To give thanks, To make confession,
to offer forgiveness,
To be enlightened, to be strengthened.
Through this quiet hour breathes the worship of ages,
The cathedral music of history.
Three unseen guests attend,
Faith, hope, and love
Let all our hearts prepare them place.
Service notes: Today, you will not hear the sermon announced in the newsletter. I will save that for another time. Instead my sermon today is a slight revision of one I gave Wednesday at Andover Newton Theological School. On that day, the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association and the president of the United Church of Christ were together in an evening program on the same podium at Andover Newton. To those unfamiliar with our history, the Unitarian side of our tradition and the Congregational side of the UCC tradition once represented the same church. Our church here in Watertown was founded as a congregational (small c) church in 1630. These were the Puritan churches of Massachusetts that were organized as the state church for the commonwealth. They followed the theological teachings of the Protestant reformer John Calvin. I often tell people that a quick understanding of our history on the Unitarian side is that the Congregational church split in half in the early 1800’s. Over the years the Unitarians and their ex-partners have cooperated in many ways, but theologically the UCC has remained in mainstream Christianity, while we have become pluralistic with some among us still calling themselves UU Christians. Because of the event at Andover Newton, Darrick Jackson, our former student minister here, invited me to speak at the weekly chapel there, and suggested that because of the historic conversation which took place on Wednesday evening between the presidents of the UUA and the UCC, that I might share some of my thoughts on the Unitarian/Trinitarian controversy of 200 years ago. Harvard was the primary training school for ministers, and the controversy began in earnest in 1805 when they elected an acknowledged liberal to be the professor of divinity. Theological conservatives responded by founding Andover Seminary, and a 30 year battle ensued.
Reading - from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well do we perform our role? With how much assurance do we perform it? I suppose Calvin’s God was a Frenchmen, just as mine is a middle westerner of New England extraction. Well, we all bring such light to bear on these great matters as we can. I do like Calvin’s image, though, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy us. I believe we think about that far too little. It would be a way into understanding essential things, since presumably the world exists for God’s enjoyment, not in any simple sense, of course, but as you enjoy the being of a child even when he is in every way a thorn in your heart. “He has a mind of his own,” Boughton used to say when that son of his was up to something. And he meant it as praise, he really did.
Sermon - “Loving Calvin Again For the First Time” - Mark W. Harris
On this date exactly two centuries ago, Henry Ware had already assumed his place as Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, signaling that it had been captured by the liberals, Jedediah Morse was plotting ways to expose this liberal heresy, and dreaming of founding Andover seminary, a school that he perceived would train clergy up in the real Christian faith, and not the so-called Boston religion that was jettisoning theology. The Standing Order of Congregational Churches in Massachusetts broke apart in the nineteenth century because they could not embrace both its Calvinist and Unitarian poles. Evidence of this historic split is seen across this state. If you travel to the location of my former parish in Milton, you will see the Unitarian Congregational Church on one side of the town green and the Trinitarian Congregational Church on the other with an ugly modern town hall in between representing the separation of church and state. If you are looking at the churches from the street, the Unitarians, of course, are on the left side of the green.
Massachusetts, as you may or may not know was the last state to disestablish a state church, and did so in 1833. One scholar has called this the most significant event in Unitarian history because the liberals, whose ministers and property were largely being supported by tax dollars, were fooled into thinking they were leading a large denomination. After 1833 the freedom to not affiliate with any church became an option, and people left in droves. Henceforth, the Unitarians had to run successful pledge drives and be evangelical. While many of us can talk about money now, evangelical has always been a dirty word. In his, “Sober Thoughts on the State of the Times, Henry Ware, Jr. remarked that the result of fighting over differing doctrines meant for the Unitarians, that, I quote, “we are a community by ourselves.” Ware characterized the separation as a “crisis of unspeakable interest to us.” It was a crisis because Ware said the Unitarians had to figure out the character of their institutions, the nature of their faith, and how faithful they were going to be to the gospel.
While Baptists, Universalists and others were struggling to define their faiths and reach out to new converts, as they battled the establishment, their Congregational counterparts were enjoying the fruits of a steady stream of tax paying parishioners. Many of these, especially on the Unitarian side did not care for theological disputations. In fact Ware, Jr. said that many people became attached to Unitarian parishes because they disliked Calvinism, but liked nothing else. They were not only anti-Calvinist, Ware said, they were anti-everything, and had some vague idea that religion was kind of a good thing, but it should never be “severe or urgent.” I think the Unitarians were denying their emotions because the fight was severe. Congregations not only split, and ministers lost their pulpits, but in Dedham they even turned the church building so they would not have to look at each other. I think my favorite story of the split occurred at Second Church Dorchester, where the parishioners were getting fed up with John Codman’s refusal to exchange pulpits with liberals. The parish had voted for his dismissal, but they were waiting for a church council to actually confirm this. One Sunday, Warren Pierce, a liberal who was principal of Milton Academy was invited to preach. A group of liberals went to church early to guard the pulpit against any attempt by Codman to recapture his place. As it turned out Codman got up earlier than Pierce, came to church and conducted worship from the floor, since the pulpit was barricaded by liberals. After Pierce arrived he waited Codman out, and then the pulpit guard let him in, so that the liberals could conduct their own worship. Being no fools, the liberals decided it would be a mistake to leave the pulpit unguarded, and so Pierce was fed his lunch in the pulpit, and then conducted the afternoon service. As you can imagine Codman then returned to conduct his own afternoon service. After all this it became evident to the liberals that the Trinitarians were in the majority as they had more people there for services, and so the liberals withdrew their claims on the parish, and went on to found the Third Religious Society in Dorchester.
In the wake of the Unitarian controversy, the Trinitarians began to tell the now familiar joke that the Unitarians kept the silver, and we kept the faith. People have often remarked on the affinity between financial success and those who chose the less demanding theological position of Unitarianism. I think Perry Miller once remarked that the aspiring capitalist did not want to lie around waiting to be filled with the holy spirit when he could be out making money. Then of course liberals made a correlation between those who God favored, and those who did well materially. Salvation became less and less a sudden emotional revelation of God’s grace on a troubled heart, and more and more a slow educational process, whereby one learned faith more than experienced it. Liberals began to emphasize what each human being was capable of achieving. Career and educational development led to the most cultured and successful kind of person, so much so that salvation no longer pertained to what God could do for you, so much as what you could do for yourself. James Freeman Clarke called it salvation by character. What we need to remember in reflecting upon this old Congregational fight was that it was not a battle primarily fought over the Trinity, and in some ways it is unfortunate that we use that language. It is sometimes said that Unitarianism developed out of Calvinism because Calvin put such a strong emphasis on the sovereignty of God, and thus de-emphasized Jesus. In Protestantism, we don’t see that suffering person on the cross any longer. He is not there for us. In fact, it was the suffering nature of humanity that was the primary reason for the Congregational rift, and not the humanization of Jesus. To make a long story short, liberals rejected original sin, scoffed at predestination, and began a march down the road of affirming the positive character of human nature all the way to Emerson’s notion that the divine dwells within each of us. So the real fight was over the doctrine of human nature. Liberals said we do not want to feel bad about ourselves, and fled from a perceived theology where there was nothing good in them, they were totally dependent upon God’s grace, and where they might go to hell anyway, despite all the good works they performed. It just wasn’t fair.
I had an individual experience of this as a child, when the conservative Congregational church of my youth, which was not part of the United Church of Christ because it was too liberal, made me feel sinful and useless. I rejected this church, and embraced Unitarian Universalism because it allowed me to use my mind to discover a loving God who affirmed my inherent human goodness and worth. The elders of my childhood church probably felt the UCC and the UUA, all the liberals, abandoned theology in favor of the human potential movement and politics so that everybody gets into heaven, and we should all just be nice to each other. I saw the church of my childhood as still trying to affirm Calvin with sin, death and damnation. I had images of Jonathan Edwards’ wrathful God dangling me over the fires of hell like a loathsome spider. With this image of God in mind, John Lowell wrote, “Are You a Christian or a Calvinist?” reflecting his belief that Calvinism was too bloodthirsty to even be considered Christian. If we who claim the Puritan heritage once loved Calvin, we found we no longer did so in mainstream Protestantism. So why would anyone, who once rejected this seemingly repugnant theology ever want to love Calvin again, for the first time? I want to use the remainder of my time to tell you why I believe we should reaffirm this common UCC/UUA heritage.
While the battle was over their respective doctrines of human nature, the split occurred because the Calvinists did not want to abandon specific theological positions, and the Unitarians wanted to be tolerant of all positions within a broad Christian framework. What this eventually meant was that doctrine no longer mattered. Theology was replaced by ethics, and many came to believe you were Christian if you were a good person. Parker’s Pure Religion made people wonder if Jesus mattered. And Emerson’s oversoul made God into a universal force rather than a paternal being, so that Henry Ware Jr. concluded it might as well be atheism. Unitarianism then continued its long march through humanism and now pluralism. Liberals by the 21st century had developed a very tolerant perspective. We say we value everybody else’s point of view. So we have the goodness of religion in general, but we lack perspective on the particular. What this means especially for Unitarian Universalists is that we may have no singular perspective, except valuing everybody else’s perspective. I cringe every time I hear about a colleague who says to a congregation or a search committee I want to reflect your theology, thus implying that he /she has no theology of their own, but desires to be a mere mirror of the people. While I have some reservation about much of what he says, Sam Harris in his book, The End of Faith makes the crucial observation that we liberals often become so tolerant of every perspective under the sun that we let violent, misogynist and crack pot religion off in the name of pluralism.
Now there is also an interesting paradox here. We are at once tolerant of others, but we are also invariably right. This was brought home to me this summer when I was the theme speaker for a history conference on Unitarian Universalists and Class. As I researched my fourth lecture, I became deeply disturbed about the heritage I love and teach. I discovered something I should have been aware of, but mostly was not. In the late 19th century an America eugenics movement began to develop hand and glove with social darwinism. What was so disturbing was that into the 20th century the leaders of this eugenics movement, many of whom were also leaders of the social gospel movement, were our very own liberal Unitarians, Universalists and Congregationalists. It made sense once I reflected upon it. Salvation by character meant all the best educated, most successful people were Unitarians. They were the top of the heap, and if everyone was just like us, the world would be a better place, even the kingdom of God would be revealed. It was a short step to we have the best blood and the most culture and respectability, and those other kinds of people - poor, black, immigrants, what we now call developmentally disabled - those populations need to be brought under control. The result was the prevention of certain kinds of people from marrying, and a broad state by state program of sterilizations. It puts an entirely different perspective on such liberal issues as birth control, euthanasia and even the antiwar movement. Some people were pacifists because they believed the “defectives” got to stay home, and the genetically superior people were killed off. The elite moral aristocracy, that is our liberal religious heritage believed it knew what was best for America. Hitler learned a great deal from the American eugenics movement.
Many of us would surely say that was then, and this is now, but I wonder. When I studied James Fowler’s stages of faith, I remember thinking that I was at the top of his religious hierarchy, which placed the rational, educated types as the most enlightened.. Often when we have no particular perspective, and claim to understand all of the other perspectives, we reflect our superiority to all of them. This hierarchy puts us above everyone else. We sometimes joke that liberals love people in general, but hate them in particular. Locally, I think many of the liberals feel like the “townies” get in the way of our implementing the truly enlightened positions, and we may try to do so without listening to their struggles. This summer at the conference on class one of the most painful things was to hear from several people how difficult it was to be part of a Unitarian Universalist congregation if you had experienced failure in any way, either in your own life or with your children. People stayed away from church if they could not emulate their fellow successful parishioners. I thought how sad this was, that we could not feel each other’s pain and sadness. But then I thought of that Calvinist church of my youth which I rejected. It was made up of people who once would have been called sinners - the addicted, the shunned, those hurt by life in some way. It became clear why I wanted to love Calvin again.
Last year I gave a lecture on the 200th anniversary of Hosea Ballou’s Treatise on Atonement, which was the seminal work on Universalism, and the universal salvation it reflected. Universalists were a small, evangelical group who had to battle against the established church here in Massachusetts to be recognized as legitimate. Universalism is an interesting corrective to Unitarianism especially in its early embrace of Calvinism, which has mostly been wiped from our historical memory. That is unfortunate because it is the kind of corrective I believe liberals need today. What it does is help me see how rejecting Calvin means rejecting equality and community and understanding our common humanity.
Ballou did that in three ways. He said God’s loving intention for humanity is salvation. God is not going to defy God’s own intention. God means for us to be saved, and we will be saved. Universal salvation meant that everyone goes to heaven. There are no distinctions. It took the moral superiority of all groups, including the liberals, and said this is garbage. No one is any better than anyone else. Remember the liberal seems to talk equality, but historically it is equality on the basis of becoming exactly like me. Ballou said we all have a place in the choir, as God’s grace fills us without us having to “do” anything.
The second issue that Ballou makes us look at directly relates to the classless idea of salvation. Historically, salvation has been about how I am going to get into heaven. And for some it seemed that worldly success, money or that Harvard degree meant that you were earmarked for the pearly gates. Ballou said no, you are all going to get in. Salvation then was not about self-fulfillment, it was about communal sanctification. No one is saved unless everyone is saved. So Ballou takes our personal, materialistic, selfish, get ahead of your neighbor, I’m better than you, idea of salvation (heavenly then, earthly now), and says no. He says if someone is hungry or enslaved, then God’s intention of “happifying” the human race is being denied. God wants everyone to experience the joy of salvation. Now you might be saying that with predestination my idea of loving Calvin goes right out the window. Granted, Ballou does give me a chance to embrace a different kind of pluralism where all truths become salvific, but it is not quite the same. For me, it has do with original sin, and the value of seeing sin as part of the human spirit with the end result the creation of a holy commonwealth.
In Ballou’s scheme of salvation, sin is never denied, and everyone participates in it. One of the values of believing in original sin, which Ballou eventually rejected, is that it unites the human race and prevents us from making distinguishing judgments between sinner and non sinners, saved and non saved. I am not suggesting we embrace original sin again, but rather look at liberalism’s failure to understand the human condition, and the struggles that regular people have. Ballou’s theology acknowledges the incredible brokenness of life that most of us do experience in one way or another. This reality which is reflected in every day’s Boston Globe was expounded upon by Martin Luther King in his essay “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” where he said he cherished liberalism’s use of reason, but then went on to say “The more I observed the tragedies of history, and man’s shameful inclination to choose the low road, the more I came to see the depths and strength of sin . . I came to feel that liberalism had been too sentimental concerning human nature and that it leaned toward a false idealism. I also came to see that liberalism’s superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin.”
One of the values of recognizing sin in this theological matrix is that we recognize that every single person struggles. In her novel Gilead, Marilynne Robinson in her reflections on the modern day Calvinism she embraces writes of how Boughton recognizes that the thorn in his side that his son represents, and the reflection that he has a mind of his own are really praise for his very human being. This being is damaged in some way, and lives in a broken world, and yet is loved for his very being despite the fact, that “he is up to something.” Calvin’s sense of sin is important because it makes us one human race of equals, and it also recognizes the secret struggle of each person. Liberalism, at least the Unitarianism I have known, has sometimes ignored those struggles, and it has reflected a moral and intellectual superiority that has made it difficult for regular people to affirm it. When Robinson quotes Calvin she reaffirms this because when we live and strive for ourselves alone, or seek only our own advantage, we violate the commandments in a most basic way. This is why, as with Ballou and Calvin, we must embrace the human race “without exception in a single feeling of love.” Liberalism taught me to love myself, but its extreme implementation of this leads us to neglect love of neighbor. Instead of learning only to love ourselves and nurture our own spiritual development, we would begin to build communities with all of our neighbors.
The other night I was watching Al Gore’s film on Global Warming, “An Inconvenient Truth.” During the film Gore talks about how his family had raised tobacco for generations, it had been something they always did, and it had given them a good livelihood. The tragic irony of this, and the ignorance of what evil we can perpetrate without even knowing it came when he shared how his sister had died of lung cancer. What goes around comes around. It made me think of the dark skinned boy with the Armenian name who moved to my rural town in Western Massachusetts when I was a boy. He was new. He was foreign. We called him names and we beat him up. Forty years later I moved to the town with the largest Armenian population outside of Armenia. The evil I had done in bullying him came back to me. What we have done to the earth comes back to haunt us. The last thing that I love about Calvin is that his central doctrine was the sovereignty of God. This sounds severe for a liberal to be preaching, but what we liberals have often lacked in our arrogance and pride of achievement and know it all answers is humility before the creation. We have failed to have due reverence for all the greatness that is much more great than we. And perhaps in these days of melting polar ice caps that is the message of Calvin that must beat strongest in our hearts. Get on your knees before this creation and be startled into action before the rushing waters flood your pride out of existence. Marilynne Robinson posits that we are actors on God’s stage here for the enjoyment of the sovereign. We liberal Congregationalists and Unitarians have depicted Calvin as a bad guy for a long time, and yet through his legacy we may once again feel a common sense of frailty and struggle, we may feel a sense of common humanity and unity, and we may feel a sense of reverence for and humility before the great powers of creation. Calvin foresaw the creation of holy commonwealths not individual fiefdoms of salvation. There is still time if we could embrace this urgent need to feel the joy of the creation, and act to save it.
Closing Words - from Hosea Ballou
If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good. Let us endeavor to keep the unity of the spirit in the bonds of peace.
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"Believing, Not Seeing" a sermon by Mark W. Harris, October 15, 2006
“Believing, Not Seeing” - Mark W. Harris
First Parish of Watertown - October 15, 2006
Opening Words - from May Sarton
Come out of the dark earth
Here where the minerals
Glow in their stone cells
Deeper than seed or birth.
Come into the pure air
Above all heaviness
Of storm and cloud to this
Light-possessed atmosphere.
Come into, out of, under
The earth, the wave, the air.
Love, touch us everywhere
With primeval candor.
Reading - from What We Believe But Cannot Prove ed. by John Brockman
(selection by Janna Levin)
Sermon -
On Friday the Boston Globe metro section featured a picture of a procession of Catholic priests, including Cardinal O’Malley. At the front of this group were two priests dressed in white cassocks carrying a glass encased object. It turns out that they were marching along with the preserved human heart of a sainted French priest. This relic has been brought to America to inspire the faithful, and was on display at the local seminary, and then this weekend in a couple of churches so that people can view it. I had heard that this object was coming to Boston because the Cardinal had remarked that he hoped it would motivate men to become interested in entering the ranks of a disappearing priesthood. Now if you or I were carrying around the heart of an animal or a deceased relative the local authorities would be trying to send us to McLean Hospital for psychiatric disturbance or give us the Edgar Allen Poe award for the macabre behavior of mutilating corpses. Yet here is the press reporting it as though it were an every day activity of the church. We brought in “the heart” today so people would love God more. Meanwhile the saints body is back in France inspiring the faithful there, because, as you may or may not know, a saint’s body purportedly defies natural law and does not deteriorate like you or I.
Here is the perfect example of seeing and believing. More often than not those who belong to religious institutions must simply believe as an act of faith. We cannot see God, nor do we know anyone who was there when Jesus rose from the tomb or Mohammed received the Koran or Joseph Smith the Book of Mormon. We accept religious truth based on what is called the revealed word or truths that are handed down in print or by tradition. Those who accept these truths accept them based on someone else’s word, but cannot actually see the truth of this for themselves. The exceptions are those things that are preserved that you can see for yourself in order to bolster your faith position. Thus we have the endless efforts to prove the Shroud of Turin miraculously captured the image of the risen Christ. Is it a forgery or the real thing? And then we use scientific methods to prove its validity or lack thereof. In the case of the heart, we don’t know if someone injected it with embalming fluid or not. Here it is, they say, and you too can witness the miracle. It almost feels like Dr Seuss’ Grinch feeling his heart growing inside his chest as he is filled with the Christmas spirit of generosity and love.
There is a long tradition of humans needing to be shown something in order to believe it. In scripture we have the famous story of doubting Thomas, the disciple who would not believe that Jesus, his master, has returned from the dead and defied natural law. Just like you or I saying no human heart is preserved because it came from some saint’s chest cavity, Thomas was saying, look I know they hanged you on a cross and put you in a tomb, thus you should be lifeless. By tradition Thomas says, let me touch you, and feel for myself even after he has seen the resurrected Christ. I won’t fully believe, he says, unless I can have material proof by touching the scars on your hands and putting my hand in the wound in your side. Even what he sees with his eyes may be an apparition or ghost. The story is a paradigm for all Christians who will never be able to see in order to believe. So there is this natural human inclination to be shown things in order that we might believe, and yet the story also carries the lasting truth that the deepest and most profound things in life must be accepted on faith, without seeing.
This has not stopped people from trying to find scientific proof for their beliefs. From earliest times God was identified directly with the sun and moon, earthquakes and storms. Later the beauty of nature was seen as an emblem of God’s majesty and order. I am sure the Unitarian and Transcendentalist identification of a spark of divinity in every observable part of the world had to do with the loss of their belief in miracles and Biblical revelation. While God no longer spoke through the texts, the force was evident in the serenity of the river, and in the changing seasons of nature. Many 19th century Universalists, and some Unitarians found their scientific proof for life after death with their belief in mediums and ghostly messages form beyond the grave. Who among us did not sat down with our friends during adolescence huddled around a Ouija Board trying to discern the future of our own lives or tried to speak to some departed relative? When I was a teenager this was intriguing stuff, and we all wondered out loud sometimes if the plastic three legged pointer was being pushed by one of our friends as a joke, or if it was really spelling out secret truths about us or our families from the great beyond.
You may remember that life after death, clearly a state that could be believed, and not seen was central to the original message of Universalism. Hosea Ballou and others said that a loving God’s plan for creation was that all humans would enter the afterlife immediately upon death, thus rejecting the concept of hell as a place for punishment and damnation. The advent of spiritualism gave Universalists an opportunity to scientifically prove their central doctrine to be true. Some Universalist churches were won over to spiritualism in their entirety, while others split and dissension was evident within the ranks. John Allen, a Universalist minister who trained in Malden served for a time here in Watertown at the Universalist church over on Water Street. He was a reformer who tried to convince other Universalists to adopt his abolitionist position. His preaching about social issues caused conflict within the congregation. After he left the ministry he became especially active in spiritualism, and advocated the reproductive elevation of the human race through spirit contact. This contact became more than spiritual as he soon founded a utopian society that advocated free love.
Communicating directly with the dead shows our obsession with proving our most profound beliefs about life and its meaning. We desperately want to know what is true, and whether we can believe it or not. Seeing is believing is a concept as old as humankind. It is certainly a marketing device with all kinds of products from cleaning agents to the latest computer gadgetry. Look what can be done now, the commercial intones, and we are suppose to marvel at human ingenuity and inventiveness. There are no limits. And even if there are limits, showmen and hucksters have long tried to provide people with a visual proof that something is true, even if it all sham and fraud. P. T. Barnum, the great Universalist circus master concocted real mermaids and ancient Methuselahs in order to entice people to believe. Is it real or not? Mediums appeared on broadway soliciting information from the spirit world. Much of this was later exposed as mere trickery, and scientists such as Charles Darwin called for its dismissal as having any scientific validity. It is said that Unitarians were less likely than Universalists to both wholeheartedly accept this belief in spirits, and to confront their fellow parishioners about it. I had a period in my life where I strongly believed in reincarnation, and once was hypnotized in order to return to a former life. Yet I am now unconvinced, but still a little intrigued. I told Andrea that the byline for the sermon was three words that began with “G” - God, Ghosts and Gravity. She said she would choose Gravity, and then speculated that I would choose Ghosts. We finally agreed that the word, Genes, would be a fourth g word that might be something we could believe in, but could not see.
Yet ghosts are something we believe in when we experience them or see them. It is that room with the unaccounted cold breeze or the strange noises, or the floating apparition. When it came to the spirit world historically, Unitarians were less committed than the Universalists because they were more likely to say the mind had produced these apparitions, or that they were produced by something that existed but we had not fully understood yet, but would someday. Universalists were more literal. Andrea is probably right that I am more susceptible to a belief in these seemingly non scientific leaps of faith. What about you? What kinds of things do you believe in, but cannot see?
I seem to recall that William James, who was a man who tried to prove the scientific validity of life after death once said, “whatever you believe to be true is true.” Seeing something often helps us understand how others once became inspired. Many of you know that Monhegan is an island off the coast of Maine that inspired artists in the late 19th century and became a destination for many who wanted to express their visual impressions of nature. I have long wanted to visit there and did so this summer. Seeing it enabled me to understand just how they would have become inspired - the high cliffs overlooking the breaking surf were at once awesome and beautiful. I was moved to understand how it attracted them. What this tells me is that seeing or hearing things helps us understand and express the inexpressible. During my time on Monhegan I took many photographs with my digital camera. There were my children in various poses, a few angles on a shipwreck, and of course the natural wonder of the highest rocky cliffs in Maine. At about the same time that Unitarians and Universalist were speculating about the scientific truth of life after death, a new technology for capturing visual images was being invented - photography. Oliver Wendell Holmes, another Unitarian, saw how photography would change our view of the physical world, and wrote about it in a famous essay from 1859. It was magic to some, how an image could be captured forever. We have often heard stories of how certain native cultures feared that the camera could capture their soul.
The revolution that Holmes foresaw was that henceforth form was divorced from matter. Whereas they were once inextricably connected, now one could have the form of anything and everything and take it anywhere. Holmes realized that for many people this was all they needed to experience something. We see the image, and a few different angles of it, and we have been there. It is the beginning of virtual life. I suspect many of us can relive the experience of being places where we have taken photographs. We glance back thorough the photo album, and there is the castle or the cathedral, or the boat trip all over again. Holmes also recognized a danger in this. We could live simply with the image of something or what he called the fruit, but we did not need the core. For some, experiencing the ball game from their living rooms is all they need, and the core is too bothersome, but many other aspects of life may be only simulations or recreations of the real, and we are asked to reconsider the question of whether what we see is worthy of belief, or worse what we believe is all sham created to pick our pocket or defraud our souls. What we see we learned with the very foundations of photography may not be worth our beliefs, even as it gives us endless possibilities of varieties of experience. Holmes wrote, “Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth.” We see that the spiritual can be relegated to the superficial.
For many the idea of a physical reality for God, the first of our believing G’s began to fade as soon as material explanations were found for ordinary events. Science showed that there were material mechanisms behind the reality of nature, and not spirits. Where did this leave the second of our G’s Ghosts? As we have seen, they became the subject of scientific explanations, but mostly became superfluous because they were either so otherworldly, hoaxes or nonexistent. For a long time people believed that the physical evidence of the world - its beauty and laws were proof of an architect or creator. Even some of the early liberals believed in a God who created the world, and then went away so that it might function without interference from beyond. One of the fundamental problems even today with those intelligent design theorists is that if you say that God and the world are unchangeable then you leave no room for any dynamic interplay in the universe. Divine spirits cannot act in a universe that is so circumscribed, and thus God might as well be dead. But then more recent scientific G’s like Gravity and Genes have shaken the foundations of those unimpeded, predictable laws. How have they done this? I do not want to make this into a sermon on physics or biology, quantum mechanics or evolution, but it seems to me what is clear about these modern sciences is not the predictability of laws or even the depth of our knowledge, but an acknowledgment that knowledge is always incomplete, and that there is something about the nature of life that is very uncertain. With Darwin, we have learned that natural selection makes every evolutionary development contingent and unpredictable, and of course every unpredictable event has an influence on the unpredictability of the future.
Your typical Unitarian Universalist would have the most problem with believing not seeing the first two of our G’s - God and ghosts. I am reluctant to use those words because they seem to imply a separation of the material and spiritual worlds. While none of us believes in that big material God, there is no reason to say that the only alternative is praying to the law of gravity. We are even mistaken if we think the purpose of science is to give meaning to life. Science explains how and why things happen, and not what they mean. So if a scientist says my knowledge proves that the human species has no purpose, he or she is standing outside of science. We as religious people are the ones who must either believe or not believe that there is a purpose to existence. As Andrea said it is my inclination to believe in Ghosts. I think what that might indicate is that I am inclined to say that a spiritual world exists. Our reading today makes us wonder if any of life is real. And yet a quick glance of the newspapers makes it all seem too real. The violence, the mayhem, and the selfishness makes us want to turn from it sometimes and imagine something else as real. Yet in response to such cynicism and despair, I must say that I can still assert two central things that I believe but cannot see or prove. Loosely speaking those are compassion and potential.
Every one of us can repeat instances of deceit and treachery, hurt and pain when it comes to love, but I would guess that each and every one of us also believes in its truth as surely as we do the ticking of our hearts. I think we also believe that our hearts can grow just as surely as the Grinch’s did in that famous story. Many of you have heard me tell the traditional story of the two brothers. One of the brothers was a single man, and the other had a family with children. They each took pity on the other for very different reasons. The one with the family said that I must share my harvest with my brother because he is all alone with no one to look out for him. The brother who was alone said, my brother has this big family and needs as much foodstuffs as possible to sustain them. Each night the other would sneak over to the home of the other, and fill the others granary. In the morning each would awake to discover that they continued to have a miraculously full granary when they thought they were bringing their stores to their sibling. Finally one night they accidentally met half between each other’s houses, and embraced when they realized how they had cared for the other’s needs. It is sometimes said the first temple was built on the site of their embrace.
What the story teaches us is a very profound belief that none of us can prove, and yet we know we can feel it in our hearts, and that when we act on this love our lives and the world will be a better place. We build community where we express our concern and compassion for one another. I believe in compassion and love because despite all evidence to the contrary, I know that just as human treachery might knock me into the ditch, so too human concern for each other will move my brother or sister to come down and help me. I know in my heart that I do not want to see fellow creatures suffer. I believe in compassion. I have seen profound self-sacrifice.
I have been abandoned as I lay injured by the sea. I have been rescued as I lay injured by the sea. My heart believes in the rescue. My heart believes you care.
What this means spiritually is that what we know of God occurs when we respond to each in love. There within the human every day experience is where God appears or we create God with the compassion of our lives. I think if we believe in God we must say that God grows with us as we discover the well of compassion within. These second two G’s - gravity and genes are already in more scientific mode. The reading shows us that most of us have done experiments with gravity since day one. We don’t expect liquids to fly. We are true believers, and scarcely know why. Gravity hold us to earth and genes are predictive of who we will be and become. It is of course mere accident that that we humans have come into being at all. At this time in the evolutionary chain, all we know is that we are among the survivors, really no better than any other who has made it thus far. More than survival though, our being here shows that we have adapted and changed and grown so that we are filled with potential. If we do believe in God we know that from a divine perspective, we are a product of chance. That chance comes into play when we makes choices as to how we respond to the vicissitudes of life. We have freedom to commit acts of great evil or great love. We have great potential, and I believe in our ability to act on that potential to produce greatness.
Traditionally liberals have believed in progress. I am not sure that onward and upward forever is true to our human condition, as our nature does not seem to change very much, and the potential for destruction is great. One only needs to reflect on what nuclear war, genocide, or global warming may produce. Yet this potential, this possibility has given us medical miracles, a ever deepening understanding of human rights and responsibilities - that slavery and torture are wrong, and equality and freedom are right, and that we continue to grow in knowledge, and can use that knowledge to build a better world. In many ways we have, and I believe we still can. This is our potential that I believe in, that we can build a better, cleaner, and more just world. So I believe in human compassion, and I believe in human potential. Often I don’t see them, but I have enough experience of them, enough feeling for them to know them to be true. And together they bring hope. Compassion and potential mean hope. We can and must do it. May it be the destiny that we believe in our hearts that we are meant to fulfill.
Closing Words - from Oliver Morton
I’ve always found belief a bit difficult; most of what I believe to be true lies far beyond my ability to prove it. As far as knowledge goes, I’m a consumer and sometimes a distributor, not a producer. My beliefs are based on faith in other people and in processes and institutions. The same is true for most of us. Those who can prove their beliefs in their own field of expertise still rely on faith in others when it comes to others fields . . . I suppose the real question is, What do I believe that I don’t think anyone can prove? In answer, I’d put forward the belief that there is a future much better, in terms of reduced human suffering and increased human potential, than the present, and that one part of what will make it better is a greater, subtler knowledge of the world at large. . . It is not an easy thing for me to make myself believe. But it is what I want to believe, and on my best days I do.
First Parish of Watertown - October 15, 2006
Opening Words - from May Sarton
Come out of the dark earth
Here where the minerals
Glow in their stone cells
Deeper than seed or birth.
Come into the pure air
Above all heaviness
Of storm and cloud to this
Light-possessed atmosphere.
Come into, out of, under
The earth, the wave, the air.
Love, touch us everywhere
With primeval candor.
Reading - from What We Believe But Cannot Prove ed. by John Brockman
(selection by Janna Levin)
Sermon -
On Friday the Boston Globe metro section featured a picture of a procession of Catholic priests, including Cardinal O’Malley. At the front of this group were two priests dressed in white cassocks carrying a glass encased object. It turns out that they were marching along with the preserved human heart of a sainted French priest. This relic has been brought to America to inspire the faithful, and was on display at the local seminary, and then this weekend in a couple of churches so that people can view it. I had heard that this object was coming to Boston because the Cardinal had remarked that he hoped it would motivate men to become interested in entering the ranks of a disappearing priesthood. Now if you or I were carrying around the heart of an animal or a deceased relative the local authorities would be trying to send us to McLean Hospital for psychiatric disturbance or give us the Edgar Allen Poe award for the macabre behavior of mutilating corpses. Yet here is the press reporting it as though it were an every day activity of the church. We brought in “the heart” today so people would love God more. Meanwhile the saints body is back in France inspiring the faithful there, because, as you may or may not know, a saint’s body purportedly defies natural law and does not deteriorate like you or I.
Here is the perfect example of seeing and believing. More often than not those who belong to religious institutions must simply believe as an act of faith. We cannot see God, nor do we know anyone who was there when Jesus rose from the tomb or Mohammed received the Koran or Joseph Smith the Book of Mormon. We accept religious truth based on what is called the revealed word or truths that are handed down in print or by tradition. Those who accept these truths accept them based on someone else’s word, but cannot actually see the truth of this for themselves. The exceptions are those things that are preserved that you can see for yourself in order to bolster your faith position. Thus we have the endless efforts to prove the Shroud of Turin miraculously captured the image of the risen Christ. Is it a forgery or the real thing? And then we use scientific methods to prove its validity or lack thereof. In the case of the heart, we don’t know if someone injected it with embalming fluid or not. Here it is, they say, and you too can witness the miracle. It almost feels like Dr Seuss’ Grinch feeling his heart growing inside his chest as he is filled with the Christmas spirit of generosity and love.
There is a long tradition of humans needing to be shown something in order to believe it. In scripture we have the famous story of doubting Thomas, the disciple who would not believe that Jesus, his master, has returned from the dead and defied natural law. Just like you or I saying no human heart is preserved because it came from some saint’s chest cavity, Thomas was saying, look I know they hanged you on a cross and put you in a tomb, thus you should be lifeless. By tradition Thomas says, let me touch you, and feel for myself even after he has seen the resurrected Christ. I won’t fully believe, he says, unless I can have material proof by touching the scars on your hands and putting my hand in the wound in your side. Even what he sees with his eyes may be an apparition or ghost. The story is a paradigm for all Christians who will never be able to see in order to believe. So there is this natural human inclination to be shown things in order that we might believe, and yet the story also carries the lasting truth that the deepest and most profound things in life must be accepted on faith, without seeing.
This has not stopped people from trying to find scientific proof for their beliefs. From earliest times God was identified directly with the sun and moon, earthquakes and storms. Later the beauty of nature was seen as an emblem of God’s majesty and order. I am sure the Unitarian and Transcendentalist identification of a spark of divinity in every observable part of the world had to do with the loss of their belief in miracles and Biblical revelation. While God no longer spoke through the texts, the force was evident in the serenity of the river, and in the changing seasons of nature. Many 19th century Universalists, and some Unitarians found their scientific proof for life after death with their belief in mediums and ghostly messages form beyond the grave. Who among us did not sat down with our friends during adolescence huddled around a Ouija Board trying to discern the future of our own lives or tried to speak to some departed relative? When I was a teenager this was intriguing stuff, and we all wondered out loud sometimes if the plastic three legged pointer was being pushed by one of our friends as a joke, or if it was really spelling out secret truths about us or our families from the great beyond.
You may remember that life after death, clearly a state that could be believed, and not seen was central to the original message of Universalism. Hosea Ballou and others said that a loving God’s plan for creation was that all humans would enter the afterlife immediately upon death, thus rejecting the concept of hell as a place for punishment and damnation. The advent of spiritualism gave Universalists an opportunity to scientifically prove their central doctrine to be true. Some Universalist churches were won over to spiritualism in their entirety, while others split and dissension was evident within the ranks. John Allen, a Universalist minister who trained in Malden served for a time here in Watertown at the Universalist church over on Water Street. He was a reformer who tried to convince other Universalists to adopt his abolitionist position. His preaching about social issues caused conflict within the congregation. After he left the ministry he became especially active in spiritualism, and advocated the reproductive elevation of the human race through spirit contact. This contact became more than spiritual as he soon founded a utopian society that advocated free love.
Communicating directly with the dead shows our obsession with proving our most profound beliefs about life and its meaning. We desperately want to know what is true, and whether we can believe it or not. Seeing is believing is a concept as old as humankind. It is certainly a marketing device with all kinds of products from cleaning agents to the latest computer gadgetry. Look what can be done now, the commercial intones, and we are suppose to marvel at human ingenuity and inventiveness. There are no limits. And even if there are limits, showmen and hucksters have long tried to provide people with a visual proof that something is true, even if it all sham and fraud. P. T. Barnum, the great Universalist circus master concocted real mermaids and ancient Methuselahs in order to entice people to believe. Is it real or not? Mediums appeared on broadway soliciting information from the spirit world. Much of this was later exposed as mere trickery, and scientists such as Charles Darwin called for its dismissal as having any scientific validity. It is said that Unitarians were less likely than Universalists to both wholeheartedly accept this belief in spirits, and to confront their fellow parishioners about it. I had a period in my life where I strongly believed in reincarnation, and once was hypnotized in order to return to a former life. Yet I am now unconvinced, but still a little intrigued. I told Andrea that the byline for the sermon was three words that began with “G” - God, Ghosts and Gravity. She said she would choose Gravity, and then speculated that I would choose Ghosts. We finally agreed that the word, Genes, would be a fourth g word that might be something we could believe in, but could not see.
Yet ghosts are something we believe in when we experience them or see them. It is that room with the unaccounted cold breeze or the strange noises, or the floating apparition. When it came to the spirit world historically, Unitarians were less committed than the Universalists because they were more likely to say the mind had produced these apparitions, or that they were produced by something that existed but we had not fully understood yet, but would someday. Universalists were more literal. Andrea is probably right that I am more susceptible to a belief in these seemingly non scientific leaps of faith. What about you? What kinds of things do you believe in, but cannot see?
I seem to recall that William James, who was a man who tried to prove the scientific validity of life after death once said, “whatever you believe to be true is true.” Seeing something often helps us understand how others once became inspired. Many of you know that Monhegan is an island off the coast of Maine that inspired artists in the late 19th century and became a destination for many who wanted to express their visual impressions of nature. I have long wanted to visit there and did so this summer. Seeing it enabled me to understand just how they would have become inspired - the high cliffs overlooking the breaking surf were at once awesome and beautiful. I was moved to understand how it attracted them. What this tells me is that seeing or hearing things helps us understand and express the inexpressible. During my time on Monhegan I took many photographs with my digital camera. There were my children in various poses, a few angles on a shipwreck, and of course the natural wonder of the highest rocky cliffs in Maine. At about the same time that Unitarians and Universalist were speculating about the scientific truth of life after death, a new technology for capturing visual images was being invented - photography. Oliver Wendell Holmes, another Unitarian, saw how photography would change our view of the physical world, and wrote about it in a famous essay from 1859. It was magic to some, how an image could be captured forever. We have often heard stories of how certain native cultures feared that the camera could capture their soul.
The revolution that Holmes foresaw was that henceforth form was divorced from matter. Whereas they were once inextricably connected, now one could have the form of anything and everything and take it anywhere. Holmes realized that for many people this was all they needed to experience something. We see the image, and a few different angles of it, and we have been there. It is the beginning of virtual life. I suspect many of us can relive the experience of being places where we have taken photographs. We glance back thorough the photo album, and there is the castle or the cathedral, or the boat trip all over again. Holmes also recognized a danger in this. We could live simply with the image of something or what he called the fruit, but we did not need the core. For some, experiencing the ball game from their living rooms is all they need, and the core is too bothersome, but many other aspects of life may be only simulations or recreations of the real, and we are asked to reconsider the question of whether what we see is worthy of belief, or worse what we believe is all sham created to pick our pocket or defraud our souls. What we see we learned with the very foundations of photography may not be worth our beliefs, even as it gives us endless possibilities of varieties of experience. Holmes wrote, “Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth.” We see that the spiritual can be relegated to the superficial.
For many the idea of a physical reality for God, the first of our believing G’s began to fade as soon as material explanations were found for ordinary events. Science showed that there were material mechanisms behind the reality of nature, and not spirits. Where did this leave the second of our G’s Ghosts? As we have seen, they became the subject of scientific explanations, but mostly became superfluous because they were either so otherworldly, hoaxes or nonexistent. For a long time people believed that the physical evidence of the world - its beauty and laws were proof of an architect or creator. Even some of the early liberals believed in a God who created the world, and then went away so that it might function without interference from beyond. One of the fundamental problems even today with those intelligent design theorists is that if you say that God and the world are unchangeable then you leave no room for any dynamic interplay in the universe. Divine spirits cannot act in a universe that is so circumscribed, and thus God might as well be dead. But then more recent scientific G’s like Gravity and Genes have shaken the foundations of those unimpeded, predictable laws. How have they done this? I do not want to make this into a sermon on physics or biology, quantum mechanics or evolution, but it seems to me what is clear about these modern sciences is not the predictability of laws or even the depth of our knowledge, but an acknowledgment that knowledge is always incomplete, and that there is something about the nature of life that is very uncertain. With Darwin, we have learned that natural selection makes every evolutionary development contingent and unpredictable, and of course every unpredictable event has an influence on the unpredictability of the future.
Your typical Unitarian Universalist would have the most problem with believing not seeing the first two of our G’s - God and ghosts. I am reluctant to use those words because they seem to imply a separation of the material and spiritual worlds. While none of us believes in that big material God, there is no reason to say that the only alternative is praying to the law of gravity. We are even mistaken if we think the purpose of science is to give meaning to life. Science explains how and why things happen, and not what they mean. So if a scientist says my knowledge proves that the human species has no purpose, he or she is standing outside of science. We as religious people are the ones who must either believe or not believe that there is a purpose to existence. As Andrea said it is my inclination to believe in Ghosts. I think what that might indicate is that I am inclined to say that a spiritual world exists. Our reading today makes us wonder if any of life is real. And yet a quick glance of the newspapers makes it all seem too real. The violence, the mayhem, and the selfishness makes us want to turn from it sometimes and imagine something else as real. Yet in response to such cynicism and despair, I must say that I can still assert two central things that I believe but cannot see or prove. Loosely speaking those are compassion and potential.
Every one of us can repeat instances of deceit and treachery, hurt and pain when it comes to love, but I would guess that each and every one of us also believes in its truth as surely as we do the ticking of our hearts. I think we also believe that our hearts can grow just as surely as the Grinch’s did in that famous story. Many of you have heard me tell the traditional story of the two brothers. One of the brothers was a single man, and the other had a family with children. They each took pity on the other for very different reasons. The one with the family said that I must share my harvest with my brother because he is all alone with no one to look out for him. The brother who was alone said, my brother has this big family and needs as much foodstuffs as possible to sustain them. Each night the other would sneak over to the home of the other, and fill the others granary. In the morning each would awake to discover that they continued to have a miraculously full granary when they thought they were bringing their stores to their sibling. Finally one night they accidentally met half between each other’s houses, and embraced when they realized how they had cared for the other’s needs. It is sometimes said the first temple was built on the site of their embrace.
What the story teaches us is a very profound belief that none of us can prove, and yet we know we can feel it in our hearts, and that when we act on this love our lives and the world will be a better place. We build community where we express our concern and compassion for one another. I believe in compassion and love because despite all evidence to the contrary, I know that just as human treachery might knock me into the ditch, so too human concern for each other will move my brother or sister to come down and help me. I know in my heart that I do not want to see fellow creatures suffer. I believe in compassion. I have seen profound self-sacrifice.
I have been abandoned as I lay injured by the sea. I have been rescued as I lay injured by the sea. My heart believes in the rescue. My heart believes you care.
What this means spiritually is that what we know of God occurs when we respond to each in love. There within the human every day experience is where God appears or we create God with the compassion of our lives. I think if we believe in God we must say that God grows with us as we discover the well of compassion within. These second two G’s - gravity and genes are already in more scientific mode. The reading shows us that most of us have done experiments with gravity since day one. We don’t expect liquids to fly. We are true believers, and scarcely know why. Gravity hold us to earth and genes are predictive of who we will be and become. It is of course mere accident that that we humans have come into being at all. At this time in the evolutionary chain, all we know is that we are among the survivors, really no better than any other who has made it thus far. More than survival though, our being here shows that we have adapted and changed and grown so that we are filled with potential. If we do believe in God we know that from a divine perspective, we are a product of chance. That chance comes into play when we makes choices as to how we respond to the vicissitudes of life. We have freedom to commit acts of great evil or great love. We have great potential, and I believe in our ability to act on that potential to produce greatness.
Traditionally liberals have believed in progress. I am not sure that onward and upward forever is true to our human condition, as our nature does not seem to change very much, and the potential for destruction is great. One only needs to reflect on what nuclear war, genocide, or global warming may produce. Yet this potential, this possibility has given us medical miracles, a ever deepening understanding of human rights and responsibilities - that slavery and torture are wrong, and equality and freedom are right, and that we continue to grow in knowledge, and can use that knowledge to build a better world. In many ways we have, and I believe we still can. This is our potential that I believe in, that we can build a better, cleaner, and more just world. So I believe in human compassion, and I believe in human potential. Often I don’t see them, but I have enough experience of them, enough feeling for them to know them to be true. And together they bring hope. Compassion and potential mean hope. We can and must do it. May it be the destiny that we believe in our hearts that we are meant to fulfill.
Closing Words - from Oliver Morton
I’ve always found belief a bit difficult; most of what I believe to be true lies far beyond my ability to prove it. As far as knowledge goes, I’m a consumer and sometimes a distributor, not a producer. My beliefs are based on faith in other people and in processes and institutions. The same is true for most of us. Those who can prove their beliefs in their own field of expertise still rely on faith in others when it comes to others fields . . . I suppose the real question is, What do I believe that I don’t think anyone can prove? In answer, I’d put forward the belief that there is a future much better, in terms of reduced human suffering and increased human potential, than the present, and that one part of what will make it better is a greater, subtler knowledge of the world at large. . . It is not an easy thing for me to make myself believe. But it is what I want to believe, and on my best days I do.
"Breaking the Law" by Mark W. Harris, October 1, 2006
October 1, 2006 - “Breaking the Law”
Mark W. Harris - First Parish of Watertown
Opening Words - from Henry David Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts”
The fate of the country does not depend upon how you vote at the polls - the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot box once a year, but on what kind of man (or woman) you drop from your chamber into the street every morning. The question is not whether you or your grandfather, seventy years ago, did not enter into an agreement to serve the devil, and that service is not accordingly now due; but whether you will not now, for once and at last, serve God - in spite of your own past recreancy, or that of your ancestor -- obeying that eternal and only just CONSTITUTION, which He, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written in your being.
Reading - “i sing of Olaf glad and big” by e. e. cummings (adapted)
I sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war
a conscientious object-or
his well beloved colonel (trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but - though an host of overjoyed
noncoms (first knocking on the head
him) do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments --
Olaf (being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds, without getting annoyed
“I will not kiss your ‘stinking’ flag.”
straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)
but -- though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation’s blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skillfully applied
bayonets toasted hot with heat --
Olaf ( upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
“There is some ‘dung’ I will not eat.”
our president, being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellow SOB
into a dungeon, where he died
Christ (of His mercy infinite)
I pray to see; and Olaf, too
preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me: more blond than you.
Sermon
When I was a boy I loved stories about Robin Hood. There was this television series whose theme song infected my brain - “Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen, Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men , feared by the bad, loved by the good.” In my mind he became the archetypal outlaw - he robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. Perhaps we all like stories about heroes who are victims of injustice, who then defy the evil authority, and prove their moral rectitude with acts of bravery and justice. I think we like myths of people who embody a kind of rebellious spirit, and make up their own rules. It fits a streak of American libertarianism that says I am the ultimate authority. Sometimes we have imparted the heroic title on people who are no more than common thieves. Think of the James gang or Bonnie and Clyde or even Butch and the Sundance Kid or the lead characters in the movie The Sting. Like these latter stories we may even think it amusing that someone can break the law with style or flair, and get away with it, at least for a time, before they die in a hail of bullets.
This kind of character may be especially appealing to a Unitarian Universalist. We are perhaps the archetypal religious rule breakers. We historically have defied creeds and dogmas, and anyone telling us how or what to believe. We have always fought for the freedom to question and to doubt religious laws. We embrace the word heretic with a special glee. So a new follower of our unique religious path might say, free at last, free at last. I will decide whether there is a God or not, heaven or not, Jesus or not, commandments or suggestions. So probably most of you represent religious viewpoints that are attracted by a sermon title of breaking the law. You hate rules, don’t you?
I often feel conflicted about rules and laws. As a Unitarian Universalist, and a child of the 1960’s, I am firmly in the camp of defying authority. I look upon governments as corrupt and deceitful, and want to invoke the power of the people to speak their truth. My childhood Sunday School teach said, this is the one true word of God, and you must believe it. Instead, I thought I could determine what the one true word was for me, and eventually I became a minister who told other liberals that you must follow your own heart to find religious truth. Yet despite all these streaks of rebelliousness, I was brought up in a home where it was important to follow the rules. There was no negotiation around the things that needed to be done - chores, homework, respect for parents, respect for property. I was taught to be a good, honest, hard working, responsible citizen. I try to hold doors for people, and stop for all red lights.
Stopping for red lights? Does anyone do this anymore? You have to be from another planet if you have not noticed that everyone seems to believe that red means green these days. If your light turns green, you have to make sure that no one is barreling through the other way because more often than not, the person who was 500 feet up the street has accelerated to 60 miles an hour in order to beat the light that turned red ten seconds ago. Look out! Then if you actually stop for a red light, it turns out you have to be careful that the person behind you is not assured that you are going through the light, and has accelerated so they can whiz through on your tail. So what do you do when you can’t stop or go? Somehow we have pushed the limits of the law to see where it will break. How long is it acceptable to keep going through the red light? It could be our behavior is different if the police are watching, if no one is around, or more likely if there are people around and they are pressuring us to go through a light, especially those “no turn on red” right hand turns where no one wants to obey the restriction. I would opine that I will walk instead rather than take my life in my hands at a red light, but did you ever try to walk across the street where there is a crosswalk, or even a light for pedestrians? I always fear I or my kids are going to end up like that famous children’s book, Flat Stanley.
So what do we do with all these people who are breaking the law? Well, we have to be more cautious now because this is clearly a law whose limits have been broadened. We may avoid those streets or places where drivers exhibit especially egregious behavior, such as Watertown Square. Or we may try to show our outrage. When people don’t stop at cross walks I am standing in, I often yell at them. Of course there is always the response of being a more responsible example. We can say, I don’t care what everyone else does. I am going to stop at red, and go on green, or treat yellow like caution, rather than its new definition, which is “go like hell.” But don’t forget that you can still be victimized. When you stop at a red light, the person behind you may be determined that they are going through, which means you are about to pay the price for their lack of patience, self-importance and disregard of the law.
The moral question for us is when can we we disregard the rules. Our children’s story today gives us an introductory example. Libraries are notorious for wanting their patrons to follow the rules - you must have your card to take out books, and if they are overdue you must pay a fine, and the rule everyone knows, you must be quiet. Even Library Lion, whose greatest strength is the power of his roar, eventually learns these rules and is quite helpful. But then the librarian falls and breaks her arm, and the Lion, in order to help her, uses his roar. The value of her life, her well being and safety, trumps any rule about behavior in the library. The person, we believe, is more important than the rule. This would make sense for us theologically. I often draw a sharp distinction between our approach to religious questions and those of more traditional faiths. They have rules of faith, and it is up to the individual to place their life in the context of those rules. They must ask, how do I fit in? In contrast, rather than start with the right rules, we start with the person, and ask what is right for him or her. Of course this approach has its obvious limits. If everyone determines his/her own rules then you take the chance of developing chaos or anarchy.
This was the concern of our Puritan ancestors when they had to confront the rebellious Anne Hutchinson. She came to the new world, a follower of Puritan preacher John Cotton. Cotton, like many of the early settlers in Watertown, was a firm believer in Congregational polity. But Anne was no latter day liberal. She was concerned that the idea of good works was eroding the central Puritan belief in the power of God’s grace working directly on the soul, so that one did not measure the assuredness of conversion by outward behavior or the affirmation of church elders. In Anne’s view, she was the only one who could judge whether grace had entered her heart. Her defiance of the minister in Boston in the wake of running her own Bible study groups, led to her exile to Rhode Island. So despite her radical religious individualism, Anne’s theology was dependent upon God speaking directly to her with no need for the parameters of community rules. This was almost a libertarian view, which we should not confuse with liberal. Liberals do believe in choice, and we believe in democracy, but libertarian often seems to mean I’ll do exactly what I want to do with the fewest rules and laws to govern me as possible. This is seeking freedom for the self above all, whereas I like to think that those of us who ascribe to the Unitarian Universalist faith seek freedom for all, so that when it comes to breaking the law, it is a violation that has some higher community and national purpose not what will serve my needs.
The example of breaking the rules or law that stands out most for me was when I was President of the student council in high school. We had a dress code which forbid the wearing of blue jeans, and mini skirts. I can still see my friend Sally Frye kneeling before some teacher who had a ruler, and he was measuring how many inches her skirt rose above the ground. I think she failed the test, and was sent home to change. One day I decided that in order to protest this unjust, at least to me, rule, I would wear blue jeans to school. The idea was to show the school administration that we should be allowed to wear these pants, but since it was a violation of the rules I was immediately sent to the office, given a brief suspension and sent home. My parents, who didn’t cotton to this kind of rebellion against the rules, were furious, and the principal said this was a bad example for the President to be setting. Nevertheless, I felt I made my point, and it led to a more democratic process for changing the rules, which through negotiation, we proceeded to do.
I believed in freedom of expression, which meant that no one had the right to control what we wore to school. Since those rebellious days, I have learned some of the other side of this freedom. Freedom to wear what you want means that those kids who have the money to afford all the popular and expensive brand names put competitive pressure on everyone to have the right clothes and the right look. Having a uniform, which I once thought a terribly repressive idea, actually removes this economic and fashion conscious pressure that may lead to undue competition and even confrontation. I have also learned that a uniform can help a slovenly student actually look neat and clean, but I suppose that is a repressive judgment of mine.
What exactly did the blue jean incident teach me? It was a mixed bag. I think I learned I could change things that I thought were unfair or arbitrary, but perhaps the way I carried out the protest was childish, and could have been done in a manner that caused less embarrassment for both me and the school administration. But of course high school students sometimes take joy in making administrators look like fools. Sometimes we cannot change a rule or law so easily, and must resort to more drastic measures to right an injustice. John J. Miller has written, “Laws are only words written on paper, words that change on society’s whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges and policeman. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion or economic status, is a fool.”
We come to realize that in some instances there is a higher call to justice that makes breaking a law perfectly justifiable. This is exemplified best in our history by the legality of slavery. Thoreau understood that there was a larger human sin in slavery itself making it unjust to be an agent of this injustice. Therefore , he applauded those who defied the Fugitive Slave Law, like those who refused to hand over Anthony Burns, a slave who was captured in Boston. Note in the opening words he speaks of follow a higher constitution than that written by Jefferson and Adams. That higher constitution is of course the divine given source of being. The Transcendentalists believed that one was freer the higher the law one obeyed. Thoreau especially admired Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Unitarian minister who attacked the courthouse where Burns was held, and John Brown, the man responsible for the famous raid on Harper;s Ferry. He admired them because they were not bought off by the tactics of politics. Thoreau knew if they looked at practical matters they might not do what they did. They would hold themselves back from following the higher law. The politician is not able to follow the higher law because he or she is constantly looking for tactics or half-measures of compromise that do not actually achieve true freedom. He wrote, the law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.” Thoreau concluded that if we would save our lives we must fight for them.
In recent history many of us think of Martin Luther King, as someone who broke the law to achieve justice. King once reminded us that everything Hitler achieve was done legally, and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did was illegal. It was this kind of pride in the justice of illegal acts that made King once say, “I knew I was a convicted criminal, but I was proud of my crime.” King once described the experience of standing in Westminster Abbey, and thinking about how the British Empire had exploited the people of India and Africa. The sheer beauty of that church was stunning to him. Then he thought of the hymns and the anthems that people would go there to sing. And then he thought that the church never stood against the system of oppression. Instead, it gave moral stature to this exploitation. But then King went on to say that even when the church won’t take a stand, there is a principle alive in the universe, injected there by God. And that principle is that all of us, all men and women, must respect the dignity and worth of all human personality. You need to listen for this principle. For in all your power, “if you don’t straighten up, if you don’t stop exploiting people, This principle in some tangible form is going to rise up and break the backbone of your power. And your power will be no more.”
King was the inheritor of a long line of civil disobedience, which is often traced through Jesus, Thoreau, and Gandhi. What they followed as acts of disobedience were not indiscriminate disobedience. We must look for the specific things, which because they are unjust, should be disobeyed. This is much different that the figure who defies authority simply because they don’t like something or it gets in the way of their practicing their freedom. For example, our conscientious objector might object to all wars, and it is unjust to make him serve in what he believes is an immoral capacity. The C.O. ee cummings depicts is forced against his will, and if the state does that, or we allow the state to do that, what will it do next? At what point do we break the law, because the laws that are being enforced are unjust? Think of our own former minister David Rankin hiding draft dodgers in the parsonage attic during the Vietnam era. This is a critical question these days because we have a government that chooses to hold people in illegal detention. We have a government that wants us to give a blanket waiver for crimes people have committed in the name of antiterrorism. We have a government that takes what amounts to international law, the Geneva Convention, and chooses to interpret it as its wishes, to justify whatever it wants to do. King never would have said I don’t have to follow this law, because I will do what I want to do, but rather found laws which were unjust or were being immorally implemented or ignored. He said we must be obedient to just laws. We should follow the rules where they are just, and not follow them where they are unjust. We should not have Presidents who say I will operate above the law, and neither should we think, I am more special than anyone else, and therefore I can do what I want.
Ultimately each one of us must ask, what is right? Sometimes in tax returns people do a little cheating. Sometimes in driving we makes turns to get around the law. We justify what we do by saying everyone else is doing it, or no one is looking, or it won’t hurt anyone. Yet we must try to uphold community standards. There is a rule at the Faire on the Square that no dogs are allowed. Yesterday, my wife Andrea was telling someone who approached the information booth that she could not bring her dog in. Andrea understood that this woman had planned to bring her dog, but dogs are a problem because they interfere with service dogs, and some people are afraid of them. A large crowded, noisy faire is no place for a dog, but despite the rule the woman gave Andrea an angry middle finger gesture and proceeded to go into the fair. Too many people think it is their perfect right to disobey whatever they want for their own benefit or right. And yet they are probably the last to recognize the rights of everyone else. When it comes to breaking the law, we should be less concerned with what I deserve, and more concerned with what we all deserve. We deserve a democracy where the leaders do not promote injustice and illegalities. We deserve a world where everyone should have the right to love the person they choose, man or woman. A C.O., must risk a great deal for what they believe is unjust. Many have risked for civil rights and justice. When would you break the law? What if same sex marriage becomes illegal again? What if abortion becomes a crime? What if the state descends further into imprisoning whoever they wish? As Thoreau said, “it is not so much desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.”
Closing words - from Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
Mark W. Harris - First Parish of Watertown
Opening Words - from Henry David Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts”
The fate of the country does not depend upon how you vote at the polls - the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot box once a year, but on what kind of man (or woman) you drop from your chamber into the street every morning. The question is not whether you or your grandfather, seventy years ago, did not enter into an agreement to serve the devil, and that service is not accordingly now due; but whether you will not now, for once and at last, serve God - in spite of your own past recreancy, or that of your ancestor -- obeying that eternal and only just CONSTITUTION, which He, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written in your being.
Reading - “i sing of Olaf glad and big” by e. e. cummings (adapted)
I sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war
a conscientious object-or
his well beloved colonel (trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but - though an host of overjoyed
noncoms (first knocking on the head
him) do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments --
Olaf (being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds, without getting annoyed
“I will not kiss your ‘stinking’ flag.”
straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)
but -- though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation’s blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skillfully applied
bayonets toasted hot with heat --
Olaf ( upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
“There is some ‘dung’ I will not eat.”
our president, being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellow SOB
into a dungeon, where he died
Christ (of His mercy infinite)
I pray to see; and Olaf, too
preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me: more blond than you.
Sermon
When I was a boy I loved stories about Robin Hood. There was this television series whose theme song infected my brain - “Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen, Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men , feared by the bad, loved by the good.” In my mind he became the archetypal outlaw - he robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. Perhaps we all like stories about heroes who are victims of injustice, who then defy the evil authority, and prove their moral rectitude with acts of bravery and justice. I think we like myths of people who embody a kind of rebellious spirit, and make up their own rules. It fits a streak of American libertarianism that says I am the ultimate authority. Sometimes we have imparted the heroic title on people who are no more than common thieves. Think of the James gang or Bonnie and Clyde or even Butch and the Sundance Kid or the lead characters in the movie The Sting. Like these latter stories we may even think it amusing that someone can break the law with style or flair, and get away with it, at least for a time, before they die in a hail of bullets.
This kind of character may be especially appealing to a Unitarian Universalist. We are perhaps the archetypal religious rule breakers. We historically have defied creeds and dogmas, and anyone telling us how or what to believe. We have always fought for the freedom to question and to doubt religious laws. We embrace the word heretic with a special glee. So a new follower of our unique religious path might say, free at last, free at last. I will decide whether there is a God or not, heaven or not, Jesus or not, commandments or suggestions. So probably most of you represent religious viewpoints that are attracted by a sermon title of breaking the law. You hate rules, don’t you?
I often feel conflicted about rules and laws. As a Unitarian Universalist, and a child of the 1960’s, I am firmly in the camp of defying authority. I look upon governments as corrupt and deceitful, and want to invoke the power of the people to speak their truth. My childhood Sunday School teach said, this is the one true word of God, and you must believe it. Instead, I thought I could determine what the one true word was for me, and eventually I became a minister who told other liberals that you must follow your own heart to find religious truth. Yet despite all these streaks of rebelliousness, I was brought up in a home where it was important to follow the rules. There was no negotiation around the things that needed to be done - chores, homework, respect for parents, respect for property. I was taught to be a good, honest, hard working, responsible citizen. I try to hold doors for people, and stop for all red lights.
Stopping for red lights? Does anyone do this anymore? You have to be from another planet if you have not noticed that everyone seems to believe that red means green these days. If your light turns green, you have to make sure that no one is barreling through the other way because more often than not, the person who was 500 feet up the street has accelerated to 60 miles an hour in order to beat the light that turned red ten seconds ago. Look out! Then if you actually stop for a red light, it turns out you have to be careful that the person behind you is not assured that you are going through the light, and has accelerated so they can whiz through on your tail. So what do you do when you can’t stop or go? Somehow we have pushed the limits of the law to see where it will break. How long is it acceptable to keep going through the red light? It could be our behavior is different if the police are watching, if no one is around, or more likely if there are people around and they are pressuring us to go through a light, especially those “no turn on red” right hand turns where no one wants to obey the restriction. I would opine that I will walk instead rather than take my life in my hands at a red light, but did you ever try to walk across the street where there is a crosswalk, or even a light for pedestrians? I always fear I or my kids are going to end up like that famous children’s book, Flat Stanley.
So what do we do with all these people who are breaking the law? Well, we have to be more cautious now because this is clearly a law whose limits have been broadened. We may avoid those streets or places where drivers exhibit especially egregious behavior, such as Watertown Square. Or we may try to show our outrage. When people don’t stop at cross walks I am standing in, I often yell at them. Of course there is always the response of being a more responsible example. We can say, I don’t care what everyone else does. I am going to stop at red, and go on green, or treat yellow like caution, rather than its new definition, which is “go like hell.” But don’t forget that you can still be victimized. When you stop at a red light, the person behind you may be determined that they are going through, which means you are about to pay the price for their lack of patience, self-importance and disregard of the law.
The moral question for us is when can we we disregard the rules. Our children’s story today gives us an introductory example. Libraries are notorious for wanting their patrons to follow the rules - you must have your card to take out books, and if they are overdue you must pay a fine, and the rule everyone knows, you must be quiet. Even Library Lion, whose greatest strength is the power of his roar, eventually learns these rules and is quite helpful. But then the librarian falls and breaks her arm, and the Lion, in order to help her, uses his roar. The value of her life, her well being and safety, trumps any rule about behavior in the library. The person, we believe, is more important than the rule. This would make sense for us theologically. I often draw a sharp distinction between our approach to religious questions and those of more traditional faiths. They have rules of faith, and it is up to the individual to place their life in the context of those rules. They must ask, how do I fit in? In contrast, rather than start with the right rules, we start with the person, and ask what is right for him or her. Of course this approach has its obvious limits. If everyone determines his/her own rules then you take the chance of developing chaos or anarchy.
This was the concern of our Puritan ancestors when they had to confront the rebellious Anne Hutchinson. She came to the new world, a follower of Puritan preacher John Cotton. Cotton, like many of the early settlers in Watertown, was a firm believer in Congregational polity. But Anne was no latter day liberal. She was concerned that the idea of good works was eroding the central Puritan belief in the power of God’s grace working directly on the soul, so that one did not measure the assuredness of conversion by outward behavior or the affirmation of church elders. In Anne’s view, she was the only one who could judge whether grace had entered her heart. Her defiance of the minister in Boston in the wake of running her own Bible study groups, led to her exile to Rhode Island. So despite her radical religious individualism, Anne’s theology was dependent upon God speaking directly to her with no need for the parameters of community rules. This was almost a libertarian view, which we should not confuse with liberal. Liberals do believe in choice, and we believe in democracy, but libertarian often seems to mean I’ll do exactly what I want to do with the fewest rules and laws to govern me as possible. This is seeking freedom for the self above all, whereas I like to think that those of us who ascribe to the Unitarian Universalist faith seek freedom for all, so that when it comes to breaking the law, it is a violation that has some higher community and national purpose not what will serve my needs.
The example of breaking the rules or law that stands out most for me was when I was President of the student council in high school. We had a dress code which forbid the wearing of blue jeans, and mini skirts. I can still see my friend Sally Frye kneeling before some teacher who had a ruler, and he was measuring how many inches her skirt rose above the ground. I think she failed the test, and was sent home to change. One day I decided that in order to protest this unjust, at least to me, rule, I would wear blue jeans to school. The idea was to show the school administration that we should be allowed to wear these pants, but since it was a violation of the rules I was immediately sent to the office, given a brief suspension and sent home. My parents, who didn’t cotton to this kind of rebellion against the rules, were furious, and the principal said this was a bad example for the President to be setting. Nevertheless, I felt I made my point, and it led to a more democratic process for changing the rules, which through negotiation, we proceeded to do.
I believed in freedom of expression, which meant that no one had the right to control what we wore to school. Since those rebellious days, I have learned some of the other side of this freedom. Freedom to wear what you want means that those kids who have the money to afford all the popular and expensive brand names put competitive pressure on everyone to have the right clothes and the right look. Having a uniform, which I once thought a terribly repressive idea, actually removes this economic and fashion conscious pressure that may lead to undue competition and even confrontation. I have also learned that a uniform can help a slovenly student actually look neat and clean, but I suppose that is a repressive judgment of mine.
What exactly did the blue jean incident teach me? It was a mixed bag. I think I learned I could change things that I thought were unfair or arbitrary, but perhaps the way I carried out the protest was childish, and could have been done in a manner that caused less embarrassment for both me and the school administration. But of course high school students sometimes take joy in making administrators look like fools. Sometimes we cannot change a rule or law so easily, and must resort to more drastic measures to right an injustice. John J. Miller has written, “Laws are only words written on paper, words that change on society’s whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges and policeman. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion or economic status, is a fool.”
We come to realize that in some instances there is a higher call to justice that makes breaking a law perfectly justifiable. This is exemplified best in our history by the legality of slavery. Thoreau understood that there was a larger human sin in slavery itself making it unjust to be an agent of this injustice. Therefore , he applauded those who defied the Fugitive Slave Law, like those who refused to hand over Anthony Burns, a slave who was captured in Boston. Note in the opening words he speaks of follow a higher constitution than that written by Jefferson and Adams. That higher constitution is of course the divine given source of being. The Transcendentalists believed that one was freer the higher the law one obeyed. Thoreau especially admired Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Unitarian minister who attacked the courthouse where Burns was held, and John Brown, the man responsible for the famous raid on Harper;s Ferry. He admired them because they were not bought off by the tactics of politics. Thoreau knew if they looked at practical matters they might not do what they did. They would hold themselves back from following the higher law. The politician is not able to follow the higher law because he or she is constantly looking for tactics or half-measures of compromise that do not actually achieve true freedom. He wrote, the law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.” Thoreau concluded that if we would save our lives we must fight for them.
In recent history many of us think of Martin Luther King, as someone who broke the law to achieve justice. King once reminded us that everything Hitler achieve was done legally, and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did was illegal. It was this kind of pride in the justice of illegal acts that made King once say, “I knew I was a convicted criminal, but I was proud of my crime.” King once described the experience of standing in Westminster Abbey, and thinking about how the British Empire had exploited the people of India and Africa. The sheer beauty of that church was stunning to him. Then he thought of the hymns and the anthems that people would go there to sing. And then he thought that the church never stood against the system of oppression. Instead, it gave moral stature to this exploitation. But then King went on to say that even when the church won’t take a stand, there is a principle alive in the universe, injected there by God. And that principle is that all of us, all men and women, must respect the dignity and worth of all human personality. You need to listen for this principle. For in all your power, “if you don’t straighten up, if you don’t stop exploiting people, This principle in some tangible form is going to rise up and break the backbone of your power. And your power will be no more.”
King was the inheritor of a long line of civil disobedience, which is often traced through Jesus, Thoreau, and Gandhi. What they followed as acts of disobedience were not indiscriminate disobedience. We must look for the specific things, which because they are unjust, should be disobeyed. This is much different that the figure who defies authority simply because they don’t like something or it gets in the way of their practicing their freedom. For example, our conscientious objector might object to all wars, and it is unjust to make him serve in what he believes is an immoral capacity. The C.O. ee cummings depicts is forced against his will, and if the state does that, or we allow the state to do that, what will it do next? At what point do we break the law, because the laws that are being enforced are unjust? Think of our own former minister David Rankin hiding draft dodgers in the parsonage attic during the Vietnam era. This is a critical question these days because we have a government that chooses to hold people in illegal detention. We have a government that wants us to give a blanket waiver for crimes people have committed in the name of antiterrorism. We have a government that takes what amounts to international law, the Geneva Convention, and chooses to interpret it as its wishes, to justify whatever it wants to do. King never would have said I don’t have to follow this law, because I will do what I want to do, but rather found laws which were unjust or were being immorally implemented or ignored. He said we must be obedient to just laws. We should follow the rules where they are just, and not follow them where they are unjust. We should not have Presidents who say I will operate above the law, and neither should we think, I am more special than anyone else, and therefore I can do what I want.
Ultimately each one of us must ask, what is right? Sometimes in tax returns people do a little cheating. Sometimes in driving we makes turns to get around the law. We justify what we do by saying everyone else is doing it, or no one is looking, or it won’t hurt anyone. Yet we must try to uphold community standards. There is a rule at the Faire on the Square that no dogs are allowed. Yesterday, my wife Andrea was telling someone who approached the information booth that she could not bring her dog in. Andrea understood that this woman had planned to bring her dog, but dogs are a problem because they interfere with service dogs, and some people are afraid of them. A large crowded, noisy faire is no place for a dog, but despite the rule the woman gave Andrea an angry middle finger gesture and proceeded to go into the fair. Too many people think it is their perfect right to disobey whatever they want for their own benefit or right. And yet they are probably the last to recognize the rights of everyone else. When it comes to breaking the law, we should be less concerned with what I deserve, and more concerned with what we all deserve. We deserve a democracy where the leaders do not promote injustice and illegalities. We deserve a world where everyone should have the right to love the person they choose, man or woman. A C.O., must risk a great deal for what they believe is unjust. Many have risked for civil rights and justice. When would you break the law? What if same sex marriage becomes illegal again? What if abortion becomes a crime? What if the state descends further into imprisoning whoever they wish? As Thoreau said, “it is not so much desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.”
Closing words - from Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.