First Parish of Watertown

“Darwin’s God” for Earth Day - Mark W. Harris

First Parish of Watertown - April 22, 2007


Opening Words - from Susan Griffin

We know ourselves to be made from this earth. We know this earth is made from our bodies. for we see ourselves. And we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature. The red-winged blackbird flies in us, in our inner sight. We see the arc of her flight. We measure the ellipse. We predict its climax. We are amazed. We are moved. We fly. We watch her wings negotiate the wind, the substance of the air, its elements and the elements of those elements, and count those elements found in other beings, the sea urchin’s sting, ink, this paper, our bones, the flesh of our tongues with which we make the sound “blackbird,” the ear with which we hear, the eye which travels the arc of her flight. And yet the blackbird does not fly in us but is somewhere else free of our minds, and even now free of our sight, flying in the path of her own will.

Sermon

I saw a stupid movie this week. Andrea and I took the boys to see “Are We Done Yet,” which as you may or may not know is a sequel to “Are We There Yet?” In this movie a blended family moves to the country and buys a house which turns out to a be a disaster, but eventually all the anger and tears turn to joy and love prevails, and the house is rebuilt. At one point the Dad, named Nick encounters a little chipmunk who he is lovingly communing with, when out of nowhere a large shrieking owl soars through the open window, scoops up the chipmunk, and flies out another open window, to enjoy his tasty supper. Of course it was suppose to be a time to laugh, but the real irony is that cute little, cuddly nature is not so nice when the realities of life and death are added to the picture. Many of us were aware of the realities of nature this week. First, there was the nor’easter pounding the coast, just as Andrea and I drove off to Maine to open our cottage. Our beach was cascaded with debris, and houses just below us were inches from being hit. People in Saco at Ferry Beach were not so lucky. Surf Street where we walk every summer was wiped out, with houses toppled, and the road crumbled. We also had a grim example of a human being whose anger and pain exploded in the worst example of personal violence in US history - 33 dead in Blacksburg. How do we explain such an incident? It becomes difficult for the religious person to quote passages such as Psalm 8, where the writer calls out to God, when I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers . . . what is man, that thou art mindful of him? For thou has made him a little lower than the angels .”

In our sadness and grief over how the creation and its creatures can all go wrong, the more common response to the universe might be that which Jesus purportedly made on the cross, “My God, why have you forsaken us? But perhaps we are asking all the wrong questions in all the wrong places. In the last decade or so there has been an ongoing battle between liberals and evangelicals over the heart and soul of America. With the films we are showing over the next two months, you will see that portions of both camps are trying to coalesce around the issue of how we care for God’s creation. Bear in mind that this is not an easy alliance. Whether they are quoting Psalm 8 or the Psalm 22 that Jesus uttered on the cross, evangelicals believe that God makes things happen with a larger purpose in mind, and are hard pressed to accept purely random events or human freedom. I sometimes hear UUs say everything happens for a reason, and wonder what they mean. If God has some reason to provoke a man to gun down 32 people, it is not a God I want to believe in. If we can fashion some meaning from our grief and loss, or change behaviors in people and cultures as well, then perhaps there is a larger meaning we can fashion, but this is after the fact. This need to find religious truth in something which lacks meaning reminds me of the evangelical revulsion toward the scientific theory of evolution. Many evangelicals want to believe that the Biblical account of creation is also good science. As religious liberals we argue that it is an ancient metaphor which has both poetic and religious meaning, but it is only one of many creation stories about the origins of the world, and it has no scientific validity. The problem is that liberals want to argue good science versus bad, and the evangelicals are not really talking about science at all.

The origin of human life as they believe it to be has more to do with how they view the meaning of life than it does scientific beginnings. Several years ago Ellen Goodman reported from a reader from Grey, Maine, who wrote to her and said, “the real issue is not creationism versus Darwinism. The real issue is, “Does God exist?” I remember some late night talks with my father about evolution. He would always end up saying, “you’re not going to tell me I come from some ape.” Of course he didn’t want to think of himself as coming from some lesser animal. He wanted to believe that he was truly a child of God, and not of King Kong. But there was also a moral implication. If we are just another animal then we have no innate moral sense, and cannot control what we do. Animals act on impulse and instinct alone. Perhaps the most painful aspect is not simply that we are just another animal, but that we have no special place at the pinnacle of God’s creation. We are not really created in God’s image; the Bible isn’t really true, and the creation is some kind of random crap shoot. If we are not created by God in our present form for his special purposes, then evangelicals conclude, life has no meaning. It is important for us to understand how difficult accepting evolution is for a creationist. It is not about science; it is about the complete meaning and value of life.

It is unfortunate that evangelicals make the jump from evolution to atheism, or worse that there is no meaning in life unless we operate under the auspices of a God who is in total control of everyone and everything. While there are no factual discoveries of science, evolution is about as close as we can come to say this is how nature is. But these discoveries in no way lead us to ethical conclusions about how we should behave or the meaning and purpose of life. Evolution after all has been variously depicted as a winners and losers kinds of science. Do we want a survivalist mentality forming the basis of our morality? These questions about morality and meaning are what religion should be concerned with. We know that creationism is no valid kind of science, but neither is evolution a very good religious substitute. We do need to make a distinction between Darwinism and evolution, because Darwinism has usually been an interpretation of Darwin’s theory that the survival of the fittest point of view is not random chance. Some said that Darwin's God was one who favored and preserved certain species, the ones that survived, and this was the purpose of evolution. But Evolution is more about change, and how organisms adapt to change, and evolution is blind as far as favoring or preserving species. Michael Dowd, a Unitarian Universalist, who travels the country telling what he calls, The Great Story discovers a religious perspective rooted in evolution. Dowd says we have always viewed the creator as a mechanistic clock maker who is outside of creation acting upon it. Darwin’s God then needs to be one that is in the creation with us, and not over us. Dowd says that the whole of reality is creative, and that we are part of that process. God is the sum of this creative process, and meaning emerges from the process, just as new life forms emerge. Where I disagree with Dowd is that he sees science as theology, and makes all change creative, thus giving it a positive spin, where other scientists prefer to call this change, emergence. The crucial question is where the human moral obligation comes from, as creativity alone will not provide that. Thus we may need to return to religious story and myth to find meaning.

People sometimes say that the problem with substituting evolution for the creation stories is that it is simply cold, hard science. Marilynne Robinson in her book, The Death of Adam makes two key points with regard to the Biblical stories that we can still find helpful. What is perhaps most apparent about global warming is that we see human defects are sufficient to bring the whole world down. Think she says, of the consequence of Adam’s actions. They are driven from the garden, the traditional fall, but that fall is presented as the fate of the whole living world. The story makes clear that our species could put an end to life on the planet. That grim fact needs to be infused into the creativity equation. Despite this potential fall, there is this idea of being created in God’s image. Psalm 8 speaks to the cold distance of an outside creator, and reduces the distance to nothing. Whatever there is of God is with us here and now. God visits us, is mindful of us, and so the miracles of the creation are not beyond us in an external creation or creator, but are in us and with us. This is the scene of the moral directives, and the divine potential for miraculous truth and justice must emanate from us, especially if we have people espousing a Darwinism of competitive combat of good, better, best. We cannot look beyond the world to a great mystery to save us, when we must invoke the moral imperative with what we see before our eyes.

The God in us calls us to use our moral imaginations to save the world from the destruction we could bring upon ourselves. A few weeks ago we had a wonderful lay led service given by three of our members. They told why involvement in the environment is so important to us now. Jean Merkl reminded me of two things, especially relevant to Unitarian Universalists. Most of us do not grow up in nature. We are city dwellers who must find the garden in our own backyards. Too often we liberals have assumed we could only find meaning in pristine nature, because we have the economic resources to find our own garden by buying up land, living in a leafier suburb, or vacationing in nature. We may even have substituted a beneficent nature for a beneficent God. Yet Thoreau’s Concord and Merrimack Rivers are not always peaceful and sublime. Sometimes they flood, and homes are destroyed and people die. Even if we believe God is the force behind evolution, it feels like a painful pill to swallow. A God who loves each of us is hard to reconcile with evolution. Annie Dillard tells us that “evolution loves death more than you or me.” There is no right and wrong in nature. Once upon a time I made the unfortunate choice of getting in the path of a rogue wave and was crushed on rocks and frozen in water, but it wasn’t the rocks fault. The universe does not care about me, but as Dillard says, what I can do is crawl out of the wave, if I survive, and shake my fist, and say, Shame! Of course we cannot presuppose that the universe is intended to be moral. It is not. But out of this world of chance and death, the universe has produced wonderful us. And you cannot have life without death. It is that simple. Dillard as much as admits that the world has signed a compact with the devil. But it loves death not so you and I can have some packaged salvation to save us from our fate, or even that my life is eternal, but for the larger truth that life goes on. It is life that must be eternal, and life that must be celebrated for its miraculous and divine nature.

A couple of months ago Mark was preaching about interconnections. In that sermon he spoke of the Quabbin Reservoir, which is the part of Massachusetts which I hail from. My son Dana is named for one of the drowned towns. Some years ago in an article about the Quabbin, an accidental created wilderness, it stated that forms of aquatic life that existed in deep water lakes in New England in prehistoric times had been spawned again in the waters of Quabbin. The appearance of this life reminds us that we do not always make the choice that Adam did in the creation story. We can be the engines of evolution that drive it to recreate life, and not destroy it.

For 18 of the last 22 years I have lived in Watertown or just over the border in Nonantum. It is congested here with roads and malls and small house lots; some would call it urban. I like it here, even if my colleague who lives in Wellesley chides me for relishing the non-bucolic sounds of sirens. There are some days over all these years when I have chosen to avoid the business sections of town, and drive down Charles River Road, and pretend momentarily that I am cruising through nature’s beauty, like a return to the old fishing grounds of the Micmacs. What is interesting about this impression of nature of getting away from the ugly chaos of urban life to the soothing effects of nature is the idea that nature will heal us from ourselves. We need to get away from what we have created to be whole; it is almost a hatred of self. This is a romanticized view of nature that we have often embraced as liberals. We say we have to get back to a more natural garden rather than use our own hands to create a garden for all. The second thing I liked about Jean’s talk was that there was no sense of class privilege of who gets to have what resources, but that to create a garden for all, we need to share more equitably in the resources. It is not about me having the politically correct coffee, but about producing food to feed all those who are hungry. How do we find balance between nature and community?

Wallace Stevens wrote the poem Sunday Morning to portray how he absented himself from church forever. Religion is played out as a future sun worship which replaces the Jesus cult.

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.

In the end he gives up an abstract heaven for the pleasures of this wonderful earth. Stevens finds ultimate meaning in this creativity. The modern problem of meaning is that he feels no kinship with a natural world that seems indifferent to human pain and suffering. He cannot find a God who relieves the pain. The chaos of historical events in the larger world and the emotional intensity in our private lives shows no larger pattern of ordered meaning like the evangelicals hope to portray through their lives beginning with an ordered creation story. Is there a third alternative whereby meaning is forged not through an orderly God who controls nature, or through a romantic, but naive nature worship?

How can we invest the indifference of nature with religious meaning? In her book, The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry writes, “When the roar of the flood waters come, water and rocks and trees are mutely indifferent, but when the myth maker recounts the story of the flood, the tree is invested with the capacity of compassionate speech: I, too, feel the waters rising, and see that you will drown; take hold of this branch.” So the indifferent tree can be made to save the person from a sure death. While the world may confront us with chaos and death, we can respond with words or actions that will not allow death the sting of victory. We find and create pockets of meaning out of the circumstances we find ourselves in. The creation myth of Genesis has often been portrayed as an ordered sequence of events where God has a linear plan for exactly how life will unfold. Wallace Stevens says we can create islands of solitude, and this is where Annie Dillard places her concept of freedom. We must know that the freedom we have can be used to create beauty, and not urban blight.

We use our human touch to heal and restore nature. This is what the famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted wanted to do. While the rich could get away to the country, he wanted to create natural settings in the city where all people regardless of class, could be restored from the stresses of city life. He knew of the curative power of natural scenery, as we all do simply by the lift we feel with the arrival of spring and the color of daffodils in our eyes. Everyone should be given a chance to be healed by divine beauty. Religiously speaking it would be like the famous pools in Jerusalem, where it was reputed that just north of the temple, there was a pool called Bethesda where anyone could go to be healed. How can our hands recreate Eden in our own lives? Our Green Sanctuary program points each of us in this healing direction - a smaller footprint, use of more local and natural resources, using our bodies more, cleaning up our refuse, creating gardens. We all play a hand in creating and seeing these natural settings. As Olmsted said, “What better worth doing well than planting trees? Each of us has the ability to find the creative capacity to help Darwin’s God live in our lives, and in our community. We plant the tree, and it speaks to us of helping life continue, and making Eden be real. We feel the spiritual oneness of the creation, not only when we get away to the ocean or forest, but when we help create it with our hands in the communities we inhabit. While we may not be able to find the creator God any longer, it is up to us to recognize the divine creativity of the world in ourselves and in the communities we build. At times we need to rest from the world, to remember how attached to it we are. Evolution reminds us that this is our moment in the sun now. The divine in us reminds us to let ourselves shine by healing the earth with our lives and our actions, so that this world we call home remains the only garden there ever was or will be.




Closing Words - from Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
or grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

“The Paranoid Style” Mark W. Harris

April 15, 2007 - First Parish of Watertown

Sermon

About two months ago I wrote an email to an old friend who is also a ministerial colleague. He and I have known each other for many years, and I have always considered him a friend. We always laugh and tell stories when we get together for lunch and talk about the church we both served once. In the email I told him I missed him and would like to get together for lunch. In the two months that have elapsed, I have not seen an email from him appear in my box, and my original email was not returned. Why didn’t he write back with a cheery note saying, “Great, let’s get together soon.” This does not sound like much of a problem. Of course I could write another email or even give him a call. Then, if I didn’t hear back there might be more grounds for suspicion. The non-paranoid person probably thinks, oh, he accidentally deleted it, or it got lost amid the hundreds of emails he receives daily. He’ll come across it eventually. Perhaps it got lost in cyber space. He is probably busy with his church life, and simply does not have time to reply. It is not about you. Try again, and don’t worry so much about it. But if you tend to be a little paranoid about these things, then the suspicion grows, even before you attempt that second contact. I begin to imagine the worse. He doesn’t like me anymore, and does not want to see me. Maybe I insulted his spouse somehow, or maybe he is saying bad things about me to other colleagues. Did I do something or say something to make him mad? Of course I can make up all kinds of paranoid stories about why my friend has not been in touch. I can make it a best case or a worst case scenario, but if I never make the follow up contact, it may remain a mystery that reflects a paranoid style of relationship. Assume the worse. Think conspiracy.

The paranoid style means you are suspicious about lots of things that happen in your life, in history, and especially about political activities in the world. I never thought much about conspiracy theories about myself or about events n the world until I was in college and read a little novel by Thomas Pynchon called, The Crying of Lot 49. It is probably the only Pynchon novel I will ever read because this one is short and somewhat accessible, and the others are thicker than bricks and even more dense in terms of deciphering what exactly the author is talking about. I recall that The Crying of Lot 49 had a main character called Oedipa Mass who was named the executor of an old boy friend’s estate. Lot 49 refers to the number assigned to his valuable stamp collection that is to be sold at the estate auction. There is this symbol of a postal horn that keeps showing up in odd places, and then we learn that there is this centuries old private postal company called Tristero. All I remember is I began to think, what if some group is trying to manipulate history? What if they can control what happens? I began to look askance at all those green postal containers that the US post office claims are where they store things. I wondered if these were the postal stops for this secret organization still. I could come to see why all the mail sent to and from Great Britain seems to disappear. Then again is it conspiracy or sheer incompetence? I remember Oedipa was followed around by a hippie band called the Paranoids. We begin to wonder if she has encountered a secret Tristero Empire. She considered whether Tristero was real or she had hallucinated it or it was a plot against her. Was someone after her? Then the novel ends in mystery as she waits for a secret bidder to appear to buy the the stamp collection.

This kind of fictional conspiracy may seem far fetched and good fun, and yet consider the recent popularity of The Da Vinci Code. We had the story of a secret Catholic orders trying to manipulate events, and keeping the truth about what happened to Jesus Christ hidden from his followers for centuries. Many were intrigued by the possibilities of Jesus being married or having children with a lineage being carried on. Did the Church perpetrate religious lies as gospel truth for centuries? How much of it is truth and how much of it is fantasy? The Catholic church with its secret orders, and cloistered religious folk and celibate priesthood has long been an organized hierarchy that people have looked askance at. A great deal of information was kept hidden during the sex abuse scandal, and we certainly felt there was a conspiracy of lies to prevent the abusive priests form being exposed to criminal prosecutions once the general populace knew the grim truth. Do you believe there was a conspiracy among the hierarchy to keep the truth from being told.? We would probably all say yes. The first Presidential election I remember well was that between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. At the time some political pundits wondered if we elected a Catholic president would he be controlled by the Pope? After all, wasn’t this the church that demanded obedience from its membership? There may be plotting at the Vatican to control the political landscape in America they said.

Even though my generation was nurtured on the Kennedy election, the immorality of the Vietnam War, and Nixon’s lies, which began decades before when he became a great paranoid who believed in the conspiracy of falling dominoes of Communism, the paranoid style in American politics has been present throughout our history, and was made famous by the revelations of the historian Richard Hoftstader in an article by that name. He said that this style was characterized by exaggeration, suspiciousness and fantasies of conspiracy. What is especially intriguing about his ideas is that he is not speaking about some clinical psychiatric condition, but rather a mode of expression that is common to people who are more or less normal. I think that means us. How do we see the world, and how do we respond to it in the ways we express ourselves. Is someone out to get us or take advantage of us? Does this person or group want to persecute us because of what we did to them or their children? It is not just in recent decades when people in my generation envisioned some kind of all embracing conspiracy going on. It didn’t begin with the rock group the Buffalo Springfield singing, “Paranoia strikes deep, into your heart it will creep, it starts when you’re always afraid, you step out of line, the man come, and take you away.”

The paranoid style has been used in grandiose ways throughout our history. Hitler believed there was an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world, or at least its finances, and he blamed Germany’s demise on the Jews, and used that belief to produce the greatest horror in history. It wasn’t true, but he convinced a nation that it was. Listen to Herman Goering the propagandist of the Third Reich: “Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a Fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship . . The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.” If the people think they are under attack or exposed, it is easy to bring them along to your point of view. This sounds like our recent history. We could go on and on seeing the paranoid style emerging time and again in history, and in politics. How much of a conspiracy is there to destroy an American way of life? It has dominated much of our thinking in recent times. Like theories about Pearl Harbor being a manipulated piece of history to bring about our entry into World War II, there are those who have theorized that the 9/11 bombings were all a hoax. Were these things perpetrated to bring us into war? People begin to see evidences of changes in the world, and call for us to awake from our blindness to what is being lost, or else all will be lost.

Throughout history there have often been fears about the rising tide of religious infidelity. Thomas Jefferson was accused of this godlessness which of course caused political mayhem and immorality. Joseph Priestley was associated with the French Revolution and its godlessness and radical politics of inclusiveness, and he found his laboratory and home burned, as well as all the Unitarian churches in Birmingham, and eventually was hounded out of of England when it became clear that no one in his family would be given jobs, and his life was threatened at all times. When people don’t like what you believe in, there can be be good reasons to be paranoid or fearful that you will be the victim of some conspiracy. What happens is that we develop mythic stories about how horrible the people are who we don’t like or are different from the mainstream. Did you know the first Muslim has been elected to the House of Representatives, and there is even the first avowed atheist, too: Pete Stark a Unitarian Universalist from California. Paranoia from some people leads them to ask, What are we coming to? Pretty soon the government will be infiltrated by more of these types, and then what? The conservatives say liberals conspire to let these types in, and before you know it they will be taking over. Think of those Catholics and wondering what goes on behind closed doors But then mythic stories merged with truth in recent history, and everyone became paranoid, including the priests wondering why does everyone look at me like that? And what parent would want their son to be an altar boy? We want the truth to be told.

This is where we begin to change the paranoid style. It is a curious thing that once upon a time in America the conspiracy theorists were the right wingers. It was the Joe McCarthy’s saying there is a Communist conspiracy to take over the word - domino after domino, but that has shifted so that today it is with the left that the paranoid style dwells. We see evil forces out there conspiring to control all the world’s economic goods and oil, and doing whatever is necessary to see that that kind of economic and military control continues, and sometimes even conspires to manipulate events such as using the 9/11 attacks as part of a strategic plot to control events in the world. Of course we have no way of really knowing what might have been planned, or what unfolded as the chaos of history and politics and people collided. I think we liberals may be tempted to believe in conspiracy because we have seen so many lies occur, such as in the torture of prisoners and the disappearance of weapons of mass destruction. What we ultimately want is truth. We are determined that information will be shared in as a complete a fashion as possible and that negotiations will be more transparent. Liberals may feel more paranoid these days, but that does not mean that we are in any way going to fall victim to the style of being paranoid. We rejoice that the first Muslim congressman has been elected. I think most of us believe that more truth will be revealed, and more justice lived not when we falsely believe that someone is trying to destroy our way of life, but that together we can build a deeper, more meaningful life together when more people sit at the table. We don’t see history as some kind of colossal battle between good and evil where one force is trying to overtake the other, where Muslim dominos sometime feel like communist ones. We don’t see the world that way. While we do realize that some people do evil things in service to their own selfishness and greed and fear, we are determined to create a world where no one has to believe that someone else is out to get them, and therefore they must destroy them. No, we believe in working together and understanding each other.

The paranoid style reminds me very much of the lessons I have learned in my life. It helps me to see how the paranoid style can creep into any of our lives when the truth is not readily told and the negotiations are anything but transparent. It creeps in also when we are determined to win, and so perhaps we promote our point of view by manipulating the truth or negotiating behind closed doors. Al Gore has reminded us that the truth is often inconvenient. We may think our friend or family member may not want to hear it, and so we hide it, or tell someone else, but not the person who needs to hear it. We could go a long way towards not feeling so paranoid if we had the whole story. I don’t know why my friend has not been back in touch. The quickest way to dispel my paranoia is to find out the truth. I can have all the projections in the world making me paranoid, but they will not solve any issue until someone tells me the truth. So what does that mean for us? Answer the darn email! Tell the truth. Or if it is some politician or some town official who is being evasive or making you crazy, do everything in your power to learn the truth. The truths we don’t know, not the rumors or gossip, are the ones we should be concerned about. Kurt Vonnegut, one of the most entertaining novelists of our time died this week. In a letter to the Globe after his death, the writer said that the lesson he learned from Vonnegut was that it is your responsibility to smuggle truth to people under any cover you can create

This leads directly to the second factor that will dispel paranoia in our lives. Be reliable and do what you will say you are going to do. Follow through. This sounds like a three step lesson in how to be a committee member at First Parish. But think about it. When do you get paranoid? Well I begin to feel that way, when I see that nothing is happening, and it seems to me that something is suppose to happen. I thought they said the car would be finished by 11, but now it is four and they have not called back. What would it do for me and you if that mechanic called back and said, “It is taking me a little longer than I thought.” When he fails to do that you begin a paranoid litany in your brain of transmissions and brakes as the debit card deductions begin to mount to the sky. Let people know what to expect.

So people will be less paranoid if you tell the truth, and if you are reliable, but the third truth we need to learn to dispel paranoia is the realization that people are also just incredibly fallible. Yes, we make mistakes all the time, and often seem to have a hard time admitting we make them. So while it may seem there is a conspiracy in Britain to lose the mail, they really are incredibly incompetent, and just can’t seem to get it right. I have felt that about one or two service providers that the church has. Am I being paranoid? Are they fixing it all the time to just improve our credit rating, or are they doing their best to fix it all forty five times they have been called in the last two weeks? I really don’t know, and that is part of the problem. We often don’t know for sure, but we are dooming ourselves to paranoia if we expect perfection all the time from most any type of person we know. This is one of our political problems, too. Do we really think that leaders that are this flawed can come up with a fool proof plan of conspiratorial genius? Rather unlikely.

Finally, we come back to the issue of whether we want to think the worst of people. Not only is no one smart or clever enough to manipulate our lives, but we are assuming some grandiose plan that simply cannot be carried out, and is in fact, making us more paranoid than we already are. In the larger world, think of all the forces that create and act on any particular historical moment. Do we believe that any one person or group can manipulate history? It is unlikely because things just happen in history, and no one is manipulating them. Moses and the Hebrews got lucky when those Egyptians chariots got stuck in the mud of the Reed Sea. Did God plan it that way, or was there some kind of conspiracy between Moses and Pharaoh to kill off that particular General? Bad things happen it is true, and some are planned, but if we believe someone is manipulating a big picture we forget, that so much happens by chance, and so much does not happen by sheer incompetence and laziness. Part of Kurt Vonnegut’s epitaph on his grave will be, "We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too lazy to try very hard." Let’s hope not. What this also shows is that the real world is difficult enough, and we all suffer so many misfortunes that sometimes it feels like someone else is out to get us. But chances are they are not. Their or our imperfection may mean that we didn’t learn the truth, or we didn’t follow through, or we made a mistake, even more than once, but finally sometimes life just happens that way. Nobody planned it, and so we should not let ourselves be afflicted by deeper fantasies than what we know as truth. What happens sometimes in politics is that theories, such as vaccinations cause autism, get covered as news. And soon this news is the truth, and we all get paranoid. Gossip sometimes works that way, too. We should save the paranoid style for the real truth, the verifiable truth, and we should all share more of it with each other. As should those folks we call leaders. In the reading today from Kurt Vonnegut, he shared how important it is that we have religion in our lives. This from the great skeptic. He says young people need stable communities where values are imparted in this chaotic world. We don’t need any more of the paranoid style. We need truth telling to each other, loving transparency and honesty. Letting go of the paranoid style, and building compassionate communities such as this. Then when we hand it on to those who follow, we can feel grateful and assured that what we dreamed will continue on. So it goes.



Closing Words - from Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

“The Muslim Jesus” Mark W. Harris
April 8, 2007 - First Parish of Watertown

Opening Words (Responsive)

For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come. (Song of Songs 2)

We look not at things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal (II Corinthians 4)

We believe in God, and that which hath been sent down to us, and that which hath been sent down to Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and the tribes; and that which hath been given to Moses and to Jesus, and that which was given to the prophets from their Lord. No difference do we make between any of them. (Surah 2, Qur’an)

And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. (Matthew 6)


Reading - from “These Branching Moments” by Rumi
from Surah 19, “Mary”, Qur’an


Sermon - “The Muslim Jesus”

Many years ago when I was taking Clinical Pastoral Education, one of my fellow aspiring clergy, who happened to be training for the Episcopal priesthood, said to me one day in one of our group therapy sessions that because I was a Unitarian, and refused to believe in the saving grace of Jesus Christ, I was going to hell. Perhaps you have a family member or other acquaintance who has pronounced the same sentence of eternal flames on you simply because you have darkened the doors of this infernal church. Throughout our history, Unitarian Universalists have been accused of doctrinal heresy. Picture yourself, for instance, sitting in a Methodist congregation. You might be singing the following lyrics, even on some Sunday around Easter, when the belief in Jesus’ death on the cross to atone for our sins is rewarded with a bodily resurrection. There you would be glorifying God with these words lifted up in song, “The Unitarian fiend expel, And chase his doctrine back to hell.” It sounds like the lyricist Charles Wesley did not like us much, but in fact, if you continued to sing, the following line would help you understand the real target of his religious intolerance. “Root out thine Unitarian foe . . ., the crescent by the cross o’erthrow.” Who was he condemning? (Muslims or Islam)

This kind of antipathy between Muslims and Christians did not end with the Crusades, or with the 17th century when Wesley wrote these lyrics, or even now, when some people have made every living Muslim a potential terrorist lurking under our beds. Yet what is of particular relevance to us on an Easter Sunday, is why this traditionally foreign faith to most Americans is identified as Unitarian. Is there some deeply meaningful commonality that we have heretofore been unwilling or unable to recognize? The use of Unitarian in reference to Muslim doctrine
in the eighteenth century was quite common. Edward Gibbon, the famous historian discussed the spread of Islam, in language such as, the march of the Unitarian armies and the advance of the Unitarian banners. After 1800 that usage of Unitarian changed, and we were rewarded with the heretical name.

As I have studied Unitarian history, I have been particularly intrigued by the fact that the first appearance of organized Unitarianism occurred in countries that ordered on the Ottoman Empire, and the Sultan, Suleman the Great, purposefully supported the monarchy of the only Unitarian king in history. Was there some kind of theological affinity that made this affirmation manifest, in people we would otherwise perceive as unlikely companions? The primary common factor we see is the denial of the divinity of Christ, and that Jesus never asked to be worshipped, (Surah 5) but there are also aspects of faith such as affirmation of many truths, tolerance of others and creating a just world that deserve our attention. What did it mean that the Qur’an states that “there shall be no coercion in matters of faith,” ( Surah 2) and then the first edict of toleration in history appeared in Transylvania. We see ourselves as unlikely companions because of our traditional Western prejudice toward those people we have labeled foreign or ignorant or violent. Look at our own Unitarian Universalist Principles, where “We affirm Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves.” Where is Islam, the third Western religion of the book? It is ignored or lumped in with other world religions. We usually say we evolved out of Christianity, which evolved out of Judaism, but what role did Islam play, particularly in light of our eastern European origins? Does the Muslim Jesus have something to teach us, and can he help us find a deeper faith?

This week I was speaking to our church friend and member Habis Obyat. Habis was telling me that in the Middle East it seems like they revere Jesus more than we do here in America. I thought of this in the context of Christianity and how it is conceived of as a salvation religion. Whenever I recall my childhood faith to my wife Andrea, I say, the goal was to be saved. She responds that she just doesn’t get it. Saved from what? Jesus for most Christians, especially evangelicals, is a tool for salvation; if you believe, you get the big prize. Unitarian Universalism has never been a salvation religion, but rather is an ethical faith. You don’t believe in Jesus in order that you might get a first class ticket to the next world, you follow Jesus so that you might become an ethical person and can then help build a society based upon strong moral principles. There is a story about Jesus from the Sufis, an ecstatic branch of Islam. It is said that people would make fun of Jesus and curse him, but that he would answer back with prayers in their names. His disciples would ask him why he didn’t get angry or curse them back. Jesus responded that “he could only spend of what he had in his purse.” How can we come to carry this kind of compassionate purse?

This is so different from the kind of purse that Abu Kassem carried in our children’s story today. His purse is full of the riches of the world, and all he does is hold fast to his possessions, like the worn out sandals. But he cannot give, as long as he only imagines what he can get, or how much of the world he can use for his own gain. So his worldly possession that he cannot let go of becomes his curse. Jesus reminds us in the opening words that while we become obsessed with clothing, a traditional Easter contest to see who can have the newest suit or dress, we cannot see the natural beauty, or spirit that is in us. Recognize, he says , that you are already clothed like the lilies of the field. Perhaps the real resurrection of Easter is trying to find a spiritual path whereby we can act from the purse of love and understanding, . It is hard for any of us to change based on that kind of love. Even when we want to effect social change like end a war, or stop global warming, we often act out of anger or fear. There is another Sufi tale about a holy man and his student. They are walking along a quiet road when they see dust rising in the distance. A beautiful carriage pulled by six horses approaches from a distance. They soon realize that the carriage is not going to slow down or veer to avoid hitting them. They had to throw themselves out of the way into a nearby ditch by the side of the road. They got up quickly. The student was about to curse them, but noticed that his teacher was running after them calling, “May all of your deepest desires be satisfied.” The student was befuddled, and asked, “why would you wish something so good for people who would just as soon run us over, and hurt us?” The teacher replied, “Do you think that if their deepest desires were satisfied, they would go around treating others as they treated us?

How do our deepest desires become satisfied or how can we act out of a purse that is filled with compassion? It is extremely difficult in our modern age. On Thursday I was at a seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society. We were talking about the relationship between the religious and political lives of the people during the American Revolutionary period. What role did religion play in bringing about revolution. Someone asked about the spirituality of these people. The historian said that what some of these colonial people possessed was an old fashioned word, piety. And he went on to define piety as discipline of body, mind and soul. Spirituality is a buzz word these days, that often seems like another commodity Americans want to acquire. Give me the checklist for how I can be spiritual, but unfortunately that checklist is a personal how to list for how someone may be able to feel better about themselves. Yet too often it lacks depth or knowledge or compassion for others. It lacks piety. It says what I feel is true. This is illustrated in a wonderful Muslim story about Jesus. Jesus met a man, and asked, “What are you doing?” The man replied that he was devoting himself to God. Jesus then asked, “Who is caring for you?” “My brother,” said the man. Jesus said, “Your brother is more devoted to God than you are.”

Today Islam is going through a reformation that is tearing it apart, and we can only hope it can be put back together. Reza Aslan, the author of No god But god, says that the London bombings of a few years ago are symptomatic of this reformation. This is a traditional faith that has to confront the modern world; a modern world that has often abused the people who hold this faith. They are asking what is in our purse? Are we going to run people over, or are we going to live together in peace by finding our deepest desires? The bombers were British and Muslim, immigrants and natives both torn against themselves, and most of the bombs were set off in the poor, immigrant East End of London. So how we can we, the most modern of faiths, that has often eschewed tradition, learn from Islam, and what it has to say about Jesus, the one prophet who we have consistently considered, but not exactly embraced. I think what we can learn has to do with piety and reverence, discipline and knowledge.

First, there is knowledge. We need to know each other. The other day when I was talking to Habis, he told me that every child in Jordan learns about Judaism, Christianity and Islam. One of the reasons for this is they are all viewed as true revelations, and Islam teaches that. In the Qur’an it says, “we believe in what has been revealed to us, just as we believe in what has been revealed to you” (Surah 29). We are used to Christianity claiming exclusive truth for itself, and certainly believe that Islam follows that exclusive path, too. But Muhammad did not think of himself as coming to cancel out other religions. He did not contradict the prophets. His message is the same as that of other prophets, including Jesus, who predicted Muhammad’s coming. It has even been suggested that if he had known about other religions, such as Buddhism, he would have endorsed them, too. Muhammad is quoted as saying, that there is no piety in turing east or west; piety is found in serving God. It had always been my understanding that Allah was the Muslim name for God, but in fact Allah is not one faith’s special exclusive name, but is the God of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, who taught equally valid revelations. All these religions of the book come from the same divine sources. So, like Unitarian Universalism, there is a sense in Islam of all religions being true, and it is also saying, have the discipline to learn these truths, and not be indifferent to them.

We learn reverence for God or the sacred, by not elevating the status of the prophets to the divine. The Qur’an teaches that Jesus’ prophethood should not exaggerated. He is only a messenger of God, and a spirit sent by God, and warns, “do not believe in three.” For Muslims he is a divinely inspired human, but never the son of God. Jesus or ‘Isa has a miraculous birth, his mother Mary is held in high regard, and he is a healer. It also appears that the crucifixion is denied, and that Jesus lives on. Some say he will return in a second coming. While these may only have a passing interest for us, what is central is that God is but one God, or one spirit, and there is no idolatry of any people, places, or things. When the focus is placed on this one holy entity then there is a feeling of reverence before this oneness. Although it is a difficult word for Unitarian Universalists, one can even see how submission to or reverence for a sacred source of life could bring some humility into our hearts that we do not have or need to have all the answers all the time, but are willing to live out of a sense of holy awe for the creation. So it is a unitarian God or sacred source that we can focus all of our attention on, give all our love to this cosmos or this earth, and heal it with our compassion and not our anger and hate.

The Muslim Jesus can lead us to knowledge of faith, and reverence for the sacred. Jesus is the apostle of this oneness. For Muslims there is a continuity of revelation. The same message comes from every prophet, and that is submit to God. We can think in terms of thankfulness for life, awe in the face creation and love for our fellow creatures who share our lives with us and bring us care, comfort and meaning. We can find this message within our own communities. There is even the tradition within Islam that prophets are chosen from among the people. They make no distinctions, and the local Imams are the interpreters of the knowledge and the traditions. The great Hindu/Sufi poet Kabir asks. Do you believe there is some place, or some truth that will make the soul less thirsty? All that we seek is available to us here and now. And so, too, the kingdom that Jesus spoke of in the Christian scriptures, becomes the community we try to achieve in this world in Islam. We said before that Islam is not a salvation religion like Christianity, but rather is an ethical faith calling us to use what we have in our purses to achieve a just world.

Knowledge and reverence lead to discipline, and thus piety of mind, soul and body. Some scholars claim that the Qur’an suggests that Jews and Christians feel a special status merely by claiming the name of those faiths based on history or birth or tribe, rather than based on conduct or morality. Status is not based on where you come from, or what you claim, but rather upon what you do, or how much integrity you have. Fundamentally Islam asks us how do we seek the sacred in this world? Christians traditionally separated religion and politics, but Muslims never did, as we can see by those who want to establish Muslim law today in state form. But how do traditions change and grow, and empower our lives today? One can see this conflict over tradition in the film “The Queen,” which I saw a few weeks ago. The story centers around Queen Elizabeth II, and her response to the death of Princess Diana in a car accident in Paris. We see that a life of tradition defines her, and she cannot break free from it. Even as the people are clamoring for some kind of public mourning, she insists that they not show emotion and above all respect their family’s privacy. She refuses to allow change to define her. Tony Blair’s wife, Cherie, sees all the royals as completely lost in tradition and formality, and one of Blairs aides remarks at one point, “Save these people from themselves.” Yet Blair sees the value of the tradition, and how the people look to the tradition, and even though they want the tradition to evolve and change, they still realize that their whole sense of identity is born from the tradition. This is what Muslims today struggle with. The Muslim Jesus can help us see the need for a greater grounding in tradition. We cannot throw it away as Cherie Blair is depicted wanting to do in the movie. When we look to the traditions and see the ethical and spiritual example of Jesus, we find a liberating force calling us to confront the injustices and hypocrisies of our time.

Rumi was a Sufi mystic and poet who was born in Afghanistan, and lived in the 13th century. The reading from him today in many ways echoes the teachings of the prophets. We hear the voice of the Muslim Jesus. Do the prophets come to unite or to sever? All prophets speak the truth. Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as one being better than another. We need to ask how much integrity is there in it? How much of love? So appearances of faith and, rules for worship are meaningless. What’s right is whatever and however your loving tells you.

On Friday afternoon as I was finishing this sermon, Martha Scott emailed me a CNN commentary from Ronald Martin, . Martin said in part, “As we celebrate Holy Week, our focus is on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But aren't we also to recommit ourselves to live more like Jesus? Did Jesus spend his time focusing on all that he didn't like, or did Jesus raise the consciousness of the people to understand love, compassion and teach them about following the will of God? In fact, I've grown tired of people who pimp God. That's right; we have a litany of individuals today who are holy, holy, holy, sing hallelujah, talk about how they love the Lord, but when it's time to walk the walk, somehow the spirit evaporates.” Martin writes about how those who call themselves Christians rail against abortion and gay rights, and yet have lost touch with their own personal piety and compassion for others when it comes to poverty and homelessness. They are the ones who would just as likely drive their carriage so as to force you into the ditch. There is no loving there. There is no Jesus there. So we wish that their deepest desires be satisfied, just as Jesus would. The Muslim Jesus is the real Christian Jesus, too, and the Jewish Jesus as well, and even the Buddhist - the Jesus we should claim on Easter, and the real resurrection of love we need. It is a return to piety - discipline of body, mind and spirit - to learn more about each other, to live lives of integrity of self with respect for others, and to focus on and be grateful for this creation. Ultimately, we dream of peace among people and nations. Muslims saw Jesus as the great prophet of peace. He was the one who would come again at the end of time. May we learn from one another, and from the traditions. May we live lives of love and peace, and not anger and fear. As Rumi says, The flute does not play the music. It is you the flute player. Together, let us draw on the living tradition of the prophet, and play the music of the sacred oneness of the creation.






Closing Words - from Kabir

I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty.
You don’t grasp the fact that what is most alive of all is inside your own house;
and so you walk from one holy city to the next with a confused look!

Kabir will tell you the truth: go wherever you like, to Calcutta or Tibet;
if you can’t find where your soul is hidden,
for you the world will never be real!


Story for All Ages - Abu Kassem’s Slippers from Fruit of Leaves of Ibn Hijjat Al-Hamawi

Did I forget something today (my shoes). Oh my gosh, I am wearing slippers. Kind of gross slippers, too aren’t they? Hmm. Well my story today is called Abu Kassem’s slippers. Long ago Abu Kassem was a wealthy merchant who was known throughout Baghdad for his riches, and for his selfishness, and for his slippers, which were a sign of his penny pinching, cheap, ways. He held on to every possession he had, and would not let go of anything . These slippers were old and dirty and tattered, and every cobbler in the city would sigh when they thought of these slippers. Every day Abu Kassem would shuffle through the bazaar looking for bargains. One day he came upon a collection of little glass bottles and cups, and he bargained and bargained until he got a cheap price, and then he bought them. . Then he came across an oil of roses, which he bargained for, that he might fill the glasses that his house might smell good. He had struck a good bargain on both counts, and to congratulate himself he decided he would go to the public baths, which were common back then hundreds of years ago. There he met an old friend Hassam, who said, look at those slippers, even a beggar would throw them away., but you with all your possessions cannot part with anything. There is still a lot of wear in them, Abu Kassem said, and he slipped them off and headed into the baths. It just so happened that the mayor of Baghdad decided to have a bath that very day. He went in and placed his slippers on the floor near to where Abu Kassem had placed his old slippers. Well, the mayor had new slippers. When Abu Kassem came out of the baths, he could not locate his own slippers , but instead saw these new ones. He decided his friend Hassam must have been feeling generous and bought him some slippers. He put them on. After he left, the mayor came out of the baths and could not find his slippers. His aides looked everywhere, but could only find the slippers of Abu Kassem, who was known for having these disgusting old smelly slippers. The mayor sent for Abu Kassem, and fined him for taking his slippers, and immediately took them back.

Abu Kassem had to pay so much for such wretched slippers, but at least now he would get rid of them, and they would give him no more trouble, and so he flung them into the Tigris River. But a few days later some fishermen hauled them up in their nets. They recognized the disgusting slippers, and threw them through Abu Kassem’s window. The slippers proceeded to knock over his new crystal collection, and his great bargain was lost. The miser was beside himself. These slippers shall do me no more harm he declared. He took a shovel, dug a hole in his tulip garden, and buried the wretched slippers. Some neighbors observed his digging and thought he must be digging up buried treasure. I will go and tell the caliph , they said, because any buried treasure belongs to the state.. Abu Kassem stood before the caliph or governor, where is the treasure? he said When Abu Kassem said there was no treasure, but that he was only burying slippers, he was laughed at. The governor thought he was lying. Finally he had to pay a large fine, and then went home. He dug up the slippers. Cursed things. Will I never rid myself of them? He decided he would go way out to the country, and drop them in a isolated pond. Now he said I have seen the last of them. But when he returned he discovered that the pond was actually a reservoir, and so his slippers had fouled the drinking water. The workmen on the pipes had recognized his disgusting slippers He was gong to go to jail, he was told, but he was able to pay a large fine, and once again arrived home with his unwanted slippers. What could he do.? How could he get rid of the slippers? He would burn them. So he put them on the roof to dry. But a dog spied them from another roof, and jumped over and started chewing on them. He tossed them around until they fell off the roof onto a woman who was passing below. She was pregnant, and the slippers knocked her off balance and she fell and sprained her ankle. Her husband took Abu Kassem to a judge and demanded payment for this injury. He had to put his hand in his pocket yet again. He begged the court for mercy. Lord judge he said, have mercy. These slippers have been my curse. Their tricks have reduced me to poverty. Let this be enough. So the judge being a merciful man took the slippers, but said to him Abu Kassem hear the voice of wisdom. You cannot hold on to every possession forever, you must let go of things, And so he did from that day forth. On Easter we remember the words from Jesus that we said earlier that we should not worry about clothes, about the value of things, but should see the beauty in nature and in ourselves and not be attached to things. Don’t let what you own, own you.