First Parish of Watertown

“Founders and Freedom” by Mark W. Harris

January 20, 2008 - First Parish of Watertown, MA

Opening Words from Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road” (Section 5)

From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
Listening to others considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

I inhale great draughts of space,
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.

I am larger, better than I thought,
I did not know I held so much goodness.

All seems beautiful to me,
I can repeat over to men and women You have done such good to me
I would do the same to you,
I will recruit for myself and you as I go,
I will scatter myself among men and women as I go,
I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them,
Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me,
Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me.

Readings - from “The Time for Freedom Has Come” by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Many liberals, of the north as well as the South, when they list the unprecedented programs of the past few years, yearn for a “cooling off “ period; not too fast, they say, we may lose all that we have gained if we push faster than the violent ones can be persuaded to yield.
This view, though understandable, is a misreading of the goals of the young Negroes . . . theirs is a revolt against the whole system of Jim Crow and they are prepared to sit-in, kneel-in, wade-in, and stand-in until every waiting room, rest room, theater and other facility throughout the nation that is supposedly open to the public is in fact open to Negroes, Mexicans, Indians, Jews or what have you. Theirs is a total commitment to this goal of equality and dignity. And for this achievement they are prepared to pay the costs - whatever they are - in suffering and hardship as long as may be necessary.
Indeed, these students are not struggling for themselves alone. They are seeking to save the soul of america. They are taking our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. In sitting down at the lunch counters, they are in reality standing up for the best in the American dream. They courageously go to the jails of the South in order to get America out of the dilemma in which she finds herself as a result of the continued existence of segregation. One day historians will record this student movement as one of the most significant epics of our heritage. . .
In an effort to understand the students and to help them understand themselves, I asked one student I know to find a quotation expressing his feeling of our struggle. He was an inarticulate young man, athletically expert and far more poetic with a basketball than with words, but few would have found the quotation he typed on a card and left on my desk early one morning: “I sought my soul, but my soul I could not see, I sought my God, but he eluded me,
I sought my brother, and I found all three.”

“Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes

Sermon - “Founders and Freedom” by Mark W. Harris

Every time I hear “God Bless America,” I involuntarily cringe. It is a kind of visceral liberal reaction to mixing God with politics. I feel like it is yet another attempt by conservative forces to convince us that we are a nation that is especially favored by God. The song seems like pure schmaltz bellowed out by some matronly figure, reminding us how smug we should be because of our innate goodness. I had this reaction again recently when I attended the Watertown inaugural ceremony at the Commander’s Mansion. I am sure I thought, why do we have to bring God into this?. The song was vivified by the experience of September 11, as it become a rallying cry of a beleaguered nation calling for a blessing. Now every baseball game on the major league level features it as well. While the emotional reaction is to distrust the motive, I have discovered that I should look deeper. “God Bless America,” was actually written as a peace song. It does unite faith and freedom, but it really asks us not to affirm that we are favored, but that we are in need of greater guidance. I am rethinking my cringing.

If a Unitarian Universalist were to hear the words State and Religion juxtaposed with the words Freedom and Liberty, it would be the latter two that you would expect the liberal to espouse, while he or she might flee from the authoritarian implications of the others. It might shock you to know that this has not always been true. If you go back nearly three centuries to the 1630’s you may not be surprised that those conservative Puritans brought a state church from old England, and set it up here, so while they had freedom from the old church to establish their new church, the new version allowed even less dissent than the old. Then as the 1600’s passed into 1700’s and 1800’s more and more dissenters argued that they should have the freedom to worship as they wished. Eventually most were given the right to form their own churches, but in certain towns, churches of various denominations were susceptible to being declared illegitimate by the authorities, and forced to battle legally for their right to exist. The Universalists in Gloucester took the Parish Church to court to win this right. What is perhaps most astounding about all this is that while a wing of liberal thought developed within the Congregational Church here in Massachusetts, saying that the faith they espoused should be ethical and non dogmatic, giving each person the right of private judgment about beliefs, there was no corresponding effort among those same liberal Congregationalists to disestablish the state church. We are the children of that church. Years ago I read about the Baptists in my home town of New Salem having property seized, and threatened with jail for failure to pay Minister’s Rates, and then had an epiphany when I recognized that same phrasing still existing on our First Parish endowments as, “The Ministerial Fund.” This is the Parish Church that was established for the entire town to follow without exception, and even as we began to develop our Unitarian, non dogmatic faith that welcomed a broad spectrum of thought, we continued to argue that we should exist as the arm of the state that brings civic morality and religion to the whole community. How did our Unitarian ancestors reconcile freedom and authority? How do you? What are the implications for the full expression of freedom in the creation of the beloved community? Do we feel an internal conflict as Unitarian Universalists that we are uncertain how to reconcile with our lives?

Many of you may have seen the cover story of the most recent Unitarian Universalist World magazine. Called “Divine Order and Sacred Liberty,” the article by Forrest Church looks at how the founders of our nation developed competing visions for they what they hoped would ultimately redeem the nation’s soul. Despite his slave holding, Thomas Jefferson, is often depicted as the champion of those who advocated the wall of separation between church and state. Feeling that religious choice is a very private matter, Jefferson argued that a state should make no law regarding the establishment of religion. He counted this belief and its subsequent embodiment as the statute for religious freedom of his home state of Virginia among his most precious accomplishments. Several different religious groups followed his strong advocacy of separation, including our own Universalists, whom Forrest Church curiously ignores in the article. Drawing on their faith in Gospel liberty, the Universalists eventually became the group here in Massachusetts who filed the law to end the state church system. Jefferson and his political followers believed God, as discerned by these founders in the divine order of nature, had endowed all of us with certain rights, recalled immemorially as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” If the natural order of things is that we should not be subject to any tyranny of body, mind or soul, then any establishment of religion is wrong. We should remember that “the wall” was designed to separate church from state, and not religion from politics. They are different.

I would guess that most of us probably resonate strongly with this idea of sacred liberty. We feel we cannot find true happiness in life unless we are free to pursue our own faith, ideals and chosen vocation. We want to do and be and have what is most meaningful to us. Yet this provided only half of the battleground for America’s soul. The other half was articulated by Jefferson’s opponents in the famous election of 1800. Jefferson was viciously attacked for being an atheist and infidel who would destroy the values of the young republic. Seen as a firm supporter of the French Revolution where reason had supplanted Christianity, the opposition foresaw a government established under the dictates of a potential reign of terror that could bring chaos, violence and unbelief to America. This was the same fear that had driven Joseph Priestley from his native England to the shores of America. The chemist and Unitarian minister established the earliest Unitarian churches in Pennsylvania, but liberals in New England were slow to claim any connection whatsoever. Priestley had a completely human understanding of Jesus, and like his friend Jefferson, advocated a total separation of church and state. Liberals here in New England did not want to embrace Priestley because both his politics and his religion were too radical for them. This meant that freedom and liberty were on one side of the political and religious divide while order and public morality were on the other.

To us public morality sounds like evangelicals trying to force their views of private religious issues upon the society at large, but that is an extreme reaction, and ultimately it would mean we fail to understand the public role of religion in our nation’s life. Evangelicals today might wrongly try to convince you that the founders of our nation were committed Christians, who established a Christian nation. All of the founders, including Jefferson, certainly believed that there was a public religious element to the moral virtues we aspire to as a nation, but the important aspect to his party was that there be no establishment of any particular sect. In their private faith, many of the founders were what we would called Deists. They believed in a God who created the universe, like a clockmaker setting it in motion with certain laws to govern it, but this was also a God who was not active in the world’s day to day affairs. The establishing and keeping of the divine intent of justice and equality were in human hands. Keeping the general religious purpose of a just society was something we should all play a part of in our political lives. Privately this meant that no one should be forced to follow a specific faith. When the United States negotiated a treaty with Tripoli in the 1790’s, the document says that the United States was not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, and thus it had no character of enmity against Islamic nations, laws or the religion. This would have been in keeping with the intent of the wall of separation, and so even atheists would be protected religiously, but what about the public role of religion?

A few weeks back our own Michael Collins wanted to have a discussion in the wake of the Mitt Romney speech about the role of his Mormon faith in the presidential campaign. Because he professes a faith that has some unusual, shall we say, odd precepts, the Romney campaign feared that people would vote against him based on his private religious faith which some called a cult. Romney tried to exhibit his faithful religious credentials to conservatives who are weighing his worthiness. Candidates have to be pretty open about their faith these days, and for much of the public it cannot be a private affair. This shows how courageous it was for UU Pete Stark from California to declare his avowed atheism. To this point no such professed candidate could ever be elected President. One of the great problems in any campaign is not so much how much pandering they do to extol their religious positions, but that they more often seem willing to abandon any religious conviction if its means they will be elected. Some would sell out God and their mother if it meant victory. Can Romney be a good Mormon and a good President if it means he has to impose Mormon morality on all of us? That might be the end of alcohol, and passionate kissing, but it could also mean the return of polygamy in the long run, if there are any men out there who desire multiple wives. These kinds of litmus tests are medieval, and we would end up like England when it was bouncing back and forth between Catholic and Anglican in the 1500’s, and they were still burning people at the stake. It is a good thing if our candidates are inspired by religious values, but they cannot be the specific tenets of each faith, but the more general public religious values that Jefferson first voiced with a calling for justice and equality. If God is telling them certain things that they want to apply to all of us, then we need to know what those things are. I think it is fine for a candidate to say he accepts Jesus as his savior, but if he wants us all to believe that, then there is an issue. This was an inherent problem with Romney’s speech. He spoke of religion and freedom and freedom and religion as if they were divinely ordained partners, but then he left atheists out of his multi layered religious equation, and equated them with the failed secular approach of all of Europe. He wants people who will get down on their knees and pray.

It was a public element of religious faith that lay behind the Congregationalists in Massachusetts who affirmed the state church. Today we might see it as our freedom being sacrificed to the establishment of authority. This is what we ultimately fear when candidates begin to talk about how far they will go to implement their religious values. In New England the ministers of Parish churches such as ours were called public teachers of piety, religion and morality for the town. In a sense this was distinguished from their role as minister of the church, where they baptized babies, married and buried and converted new members to the faith. It is really the role I take on when I coordinate a Martin Luther King breakfast. I am trying, if you will to bring public religious values to the community consciousness. Part of my colleague Mike Clark’s job description over at the Methodist Church is to minister to the groups who use St. John’s building. In a way it is public ministry of affirmation, healing, values, and support. We may be calling the community to aspire to their better selves, take care of one another in their needs or respect one another in their differences so that they might listen to one another and find common ground. The affirmation of public religious values for a community might strike fear in the hearts of those who would see it as an infringement upon their liberty, to insinuate that there is something public about religion. For the nation, public religion means calling us to a higher purpose, common dream or vision of our larger selves in the world. In fact, I have always believed that part of my role in serving a church is to perform a public function in the community to help us work together toward some common good, calling us all to our better, more communicative, peaceful selves. John Portz was telling me that one of our conservative pundits in town considered it a crossing of church and state boundaries when the Helen Robinson Wright Fund gave money to the Lowell School to help pay for a mediator in a continuing parent battle, but it seems to me that this is precisely where a religious voice needs to be heard, in helping a community see its larger vision of creating empathy and understanding. Obviously Watertown has a way to go before achieving this goal.

Times have changed. While we once seemed authoritarian because we wanted to preserve public religious values in the form of a state church, I believe we need to reconsider not the form, but the value of affirming a larger community of faith. We have, if anything, become extreme supporters of the values inherent in sacred liberty. While freedom has its virtue in the form of self-expression and fulfillment, it has also been the preferred formula for Unitarian salvation ever since the disestablishment of the state church. What can I do to achieve salvation, became the formula for individual success in life, so that the best job and the best education resulted in the affirmation that achieving these were signs that you had fulfilled the holy purpose of your life. Because we were a faith grounded not in one overriding theological foundation or formula for salvation, but in the individual expression of the ever growing, ever improving self, there was less need to invoke a community connection to a larger whole. All we needed to do was live a good individual life. Coupled with this emphasis on individual achievement as a sign of salvation was an inherent antiauthoritarianism. Our clergy were already called forth from the people in Puritan congregational polity, and thus there was no setting apart of an authority figure as providing some means of salvation, and there was no dogma for them to impart. You can see it as a kind of do it yourself, personal faith. I see hope in the principles of Universalists, who were part of the sacred liberty supporters long ago, but nevertheless envisioned salvation in the creation of
the beloved community, where everybody was affirmed by God equally, and all were saved. This faith helped them become early supporters of women’s rights because it was a theology of equality, but it also points us towards deeper public issues.

Most Unitarian Universalist these days are strong advocates of sacred liberty. We believe everybody should have a chance and everybody is equal. Yet these ideas of access and equality are not congruent with the realities of the lives of many Americans. There was an interesting book published last year called The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality by Walter Michaels. His thesis is that affirming diversity leads us away from the true social inequalities that grip our nation, and perplex each one of us. He says liberals have tended to embrace diversity where it means individual freedom or liberty for those who have embraced identity politics. He writes, “A society free not only of racism, but of sexism and of heterosexism is a neoliberal utopia where all the irrelevant grounds for inequality (your identity) have been eliminated and whatever inequalities are left are therefore legitimated.” So multiculturalism becomes a corporate management tool, and as long as we feel liberated in our identity then we have achieved salvation. We are ostensibly fully accepted and affirmed by the society in its current socioeconomic stratification. As long as we succeed and are accepted, do the have nots really matter any more? Further, as long as you don’t display ill will towards the poor and homeless, then there are never any grounds for attacking capitalism. It is a non issue. While the affirmation of individuals and their freedom to be who they are has been wonderful and liberating it has only been so for those groups centered upon identity, and thus socioeconomic class has nothing to do with the liberation or justice for all we could have been fighting for.
Here is our critical internal conflict. We are free to be individual successes, but that makes us the privileged ones, too. How can we challenge an order that seems at once unfair, but has been a boon to us as well?
We liberals have been afraid of public religion, but in fact, it could be an expression of our vision, or our dream of who we could all be as a people, not just the fragmented groups we have been affirming. One thing about public religion is that it means that those in authority are not afraid to express their religiosity. Historically this overt expression of faith has frightened us. Yet a greater expression of our faith to each other means that we will have deeper relationships. We will trust the people. Instead of avoiding these deeper responses to each other in the service of respecting every person’s freedom, we could seek a larger vision for Unitarian Universalism beyond the expression of everyone has their own private spot on the pluralistic smorgasbord. Is there room for a unified common faith that merges these individual expressions into a religion for a one world, as Kenneth Patton once described it. This might also lead us closer to expressing a common faith for all of America that would echo the visions of Dr. King and Langston Hughes so that America could be America again. We could find our soul in deeper relationships with those who are different from us. It is one of the beautiful applications of our faith that I often see here in Watertown - rich and poor, renters and owners all together supporting one another in the faith. There is one spirit of love that resides in each heart, and it is meant not to reflect a dog eat dog winner, or crushing the weak, but an America where we lift each other up in common bonds, and we truly reflect on our economic inequities and live in more compassionate ways. Our public religious expression is not about how right we are, but is a living embodiment of the story of the Good Samaritan, where Jesus tells about a Jew who is stripped and robbed by thieves, and then his own kin will not help. This is not an uncommon reality in our world. The response in the story, and hopefully in our very souls calls us to have a relationship, to help this stranger, and come to know him. Become Samaritans. It echoes Dr. King’s story of the inarticulate student. He couldn‘t find his soul. He couldn’t find God, but then he sought his brother,who may well have been lying in a ditch like the Jew in Jesus’ famous story. And he found all three. May we revive a common religious vision that does the same.



Closing Words - Response: “How Long?”
from Martin Luther King, Jr. “Our God is Marching On”
We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself,
a society that can live with its conscience . . .
I know you are asking today, “How long will it take? I come to say to you . . .
however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long because truth pressed to earth will rise again.

(and you ask)How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever.
How long? Not long, because you still reap what you sow.
How long? Not long, because the arm of the moral universe is long but it
bends toward justice,
How long? Not long, ‘cause mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, and (Truth) is marching on.

“Single-Minded Salvation” - Mark W. Harris

January 13, 2008 - First Parish of Watertown

Call to Worship - from Donald Robinson

Know one place well.
And from the heart of that one place
Let your wisdom grow strong to take in the world.
Know well the grasses and trees.
Know well the brooks and hills.
Know well the heart of some single spot on this little planet Earth,
And you shall be wise to comprehend all the stars in heaven.
A heaping together of many little things cannot bring wisdom.
Rather wisdom is the growing big of one small thing.
Who has traveled far on the earth and reckoned the distance of the stars
May not be so wise as he who has lived fully,
Though his travels be bounded by the mountains about his home.

Know one place well.
And love that place, love wholly.
And you shall be wise to comprehend all the stars.

Readings
from Faster by James Gleick

“Just Desserts” by Madeleine B. Kane

It’s risky to drive while you eat,
Most especially pasta with meat:
Slurping red sauce is rash—
You might very well crash
And leave evidence trails head to feet.

from The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh
“Washing the Dishes to Wash the Dishes”

Sermon “Single-Minded Salvation” - Mark W. Harris

(Reading quickly) I was planning on writing a sermon this week on multitasking. I was going to do my research online because that seemed like an appropriate avenue in this world of web sites, text messaging, cell phones and all the other instant forms of communication. I found an article on multitasking on the Time Magazine web site, but suddenly all these other Windows popped up. Before my eyes there was an article called, “Do Monkeys Pay for Sex?” It seems if you are a primate with good grooming skills you can get extra rewards. But just then my computer chirped at me that an e-mail had arrived. I am trying to run this Martin Luther King breakfast, so finding out quickly if we had a good PA system was important. Now I had two windows open. No, make that three because I still had the sex crazed monkeys article, too, plus the outline of this sermon, or whatever it was. Am I going too fast? I needed some good closing words, and thought of the W. H. Auden poem, “ Clocks cannot tell our time of day - For what event to pray, Because we have no time, because - We have no time until - We know what time we fill . . . Yet another window, but I didn’t think the reading fit anyway. Then the new oil burner repair person arrived because we had no heat at church. Remember how it was last Sunday? Ditto. He wanted to know where the boiler is. And Nancy had the order of service all ready to proof. Let me look at that. Oh, what did you say, yes 65 degrees is good. Oh another e-mail. Not hymn 65. No, that ring was my cell phone. Wait a minute, I don’t have a cell phone. Oh it was my computer playing a song. Oh, yes, music could relax me while I am working. Except when a song plays, I just have to sing along.

As soon as I closed that window, I was back with the poetry, and a voice was shouting Hello, hello. It was inviting me to buy a review of some current poetry, or better yet I could shop and donate to some Dead Poets Society, and if I did that who knows how many windows I would have opened, that was another click or two away. I finally got back to the Time magazine site. Suddenly the Dallas Cowboys quarterback head popped up, but the question was not about the Super Bowl, but do you know who he is dating? Not that I cared, but I soon learned that it is Jessica Simpson, not to be confused with the odd yellow family from Springfield, USA that my sons seem to watch 24-7, but of course they can watch and eat, and play video games all at the same time. My sons that is, not the Simpsons. And then there is homework, too. My sons are part of the M generation, which, I as a baby booming Luddite cannot seem to fit in to. And just then my computer froze . . . Too many windows open. So much for multitasking.

So... is there a sermon? I was finally able to close out the monkeys, even as my computer kept sounding the chirp of new e-mails. As you might have guessed the word multitasking came from computer scientists in the 1960’s. It was first used for a single computer that served multiple users on a network. These computers alternated tasks, but on a very refined time scale. However, if there was more than one processor running then multitasking was indeed possible. Society latched on to the term, with people applying the machine like skill to their own central processing unit, the brain. Multitasking begins in the service of efficiency, and that is the way we like to think of the way we manage our offices, our households, and our personal schedules. I have certainly tried that here at First Parish sometimes. I can be looking at e-mails, and working on a document, and talking to someone on the phone all at the same time. Is that what you want from a minister though? Is ministry about efficiency, or saving time or is it more about being truly present to you or to whatever I am doing? Would you feel listened to and cared for by me, if you knew I was doing two or three things at once?

Last week my friend Harlan was visiting Boston. Harlan and I went to seminary together, and he was now a Vice President with the UUA. During dinner in Cambridge, he pulled out his Iphone, and I was quite intrigued as he showed me pictures of his daughter’s wedding, an e-mail about a UUA program, his schedule of meetings, and the weather the next few days, all at the flick of a finger. I think he visited Itunes, too, as we were discussing my own recent obsession with the old rock group, the Byrds. Oh, and this device is a phone , too, or what it was advertised as being in the first place. But what struck me more than anything was not the convenience or efficiency of this technological marvel, but that it was a toy for my friend, an adult gadget that he liked playing with. Nevertheless, I came home feeling a desire for one of these had been kindled. I wanted one. The bells and whistles had sucked me in. All these features. It is easy to be convinced that we all need something like this, but the overriding question is why? The camera is not as good as a fine camera, so if you want to take pictures, why not bring your camera along? Do we really need to check messages and e-mails every five minutes, as it distracts us from the very people we are with, who we might otherwise relate to if we were paying attention. It can also distract us from what we are doing with deadly results.

I am someone who lives without a cell phone. The nurse from Dana’s school was asking me somewhat incredulously this week, “Now is it true that you have no cell phone?” She really wanted to fill in the blank on her information form, and I was unable to accommodate her. I certainly feel pressure to adapt to the rest of the culture. It was even inconvenient when our phone and internet were out a couple of weeks ago. The cable company wanted to call to tell me when they would (read that wouldn’t) be coming to our house. I had to say, leave a message at work. We now believe we need to be able to be in touch with everyone at all times and in all places. This past summer I was especially annoyed at my conference at Ferry Beach, when, in the middle of a lecture, one of my colleagues cell phones began to ring, and he proceeded to answer it. He was speaking loudly to his wife who was informing him that she was at the beach. Why? I can see the value of cell phones, but it seems to me that those who drive their cars and talk on their cell phones have become a menace to public safety, and their own brain function.

The impetus behind this sermon is my observation of auto drivers who seem unable or unwilling to pay attention to the task they have primarily undertaken when they get behind the wheel. As a pedestrian and fellow driver who watches people make turns without paying attention to who is in the sidewalk or what vehicle approaches and instead are more focused on their phone conversation, or try to look at their phone messages, text message a friend, or take a picture of the other car they are about to crash into, I feel there needs to be some curb on this usage. There are also those who converse on their phones in public, who have completely sacrificed personal privacy for a public exposure of their inmost secrets to strangers. Yet while I hear all their personal details, the overindulgence of their personal lives means they neglect the social and community obligations of public courtesy and civil discourse. They act as if I don’t exist. I get the details of their latest fight with the boy friend, but they don’t even give me a nod hello. The greater dangers are seen in the examples of the story in the news recently of the man who was text messaging his girl friend and then crashed into and killed a teenage boy. The humorous limerick we had as a reading today was based on a news story of a hit and run driver who was caught because of the spaghetti sauce on his clothes. A recent article about multitasking in the Atlantic Magazine revealed the author confessing how his car sailed off the highway after his phone signaled him with its chirp noise that a picture had just been sent to him. One look down led to his flight over a barbed wire fence down the embankment. The desire to get many things done all at once, or done instantly is reflective of the longing we feel to do more, be more, and have more, all combined to make us falsely believe that this will somehow make us among the most successful, accomplished people we know. The overriding problem is the personal isolation and even alienation. Everyone is in their own world, and consequently we neglect who we are with, and what we are doing.

There is a current Sprint commercial espousing the personal effectiveness you can feel from implementing their phones and networks, but the implication is that you look like you have multiple personality disorder. The commercial ends with these words, “They don’t know how many of you there are,” and we see a big person and lots of little clones. Part of the problem is that most of us of the older generations are adapting to this new world. We may feel a certain technological drift. If we are not plugged in, as was true of us recently with our internet and phone down, we feel cut off from the rest of the technological world. Most of us have become well aware that work in recent years, for nearly all of us, has become technologically reconfigured with e-mails and web sites. Even if sermons are still the norm, we clergy may wonder if we will need more visuals so that people can follow them or not find them boring, or if they need to be shorter, or simpler because of shorter attention spans coupled with the sad truth that people do not read as much anymore, at least not things of any great length. We worry that once work is reconfigured, the rules of technology start to govern everything else. Rosalind Williams, the daughter of former member Roz McFarland writes in her book Retooling, that technological drift becomes technological momentum, which begins to feel like technological determinism.

This technological brave new world does not mean that machines need to control us. We believe in choices, but so often these devices that always promise our greater freedom usually mean more work, more diversions, and a kind of frenzy to have it all in order to be able to do your work faster, but faster soon becomes more. We want to be able to do this work not only more efficiently, but we also want to do be able to do it everywhere and all the time. I had an interesting experience this past summer having a lap top computer and internet access for the first time in Maine. Having it present meant that it was available for constant access. Granted we had some major church business to consider with the humanitarian parole of the Obyat family, but a few phone calls might have sufficed. What was suppose to mean vacation can easily turn into a time of more work for any one of us if we make the choice of open access to all our time and space. If I am always plugged in and focused on work, then I can never be present in other places I go, so vacation then becomes work. It is almost a perverse understanding of our opening words. I know one place well, and that is my work place because I am there all the time no matter where I am physically. If you are in London or Prague or Owls Head, Maine your spiritual well being would be better served by being present in those places rather than plugging in to a network that takes you some place else. Rebel when you are on vacation and say, I like it fine right here. It reminds me of the television commercial of the singer, Beyonce, who is depicted on tour in Australia, but because of a frantic pace, she has to buy her child the local boomerang online.

If multitasking is a product of the frenzied desire for productivity no matter where we are, then we need to reflect on what will make us more appreciative of the place we are, beyond unplugging our computers and phones. We turn to the landscape, the culture, and the people who we take time to come to know in a deeper, more intimate way. If multitasking upsets the natural flow of time and place, it also destroys concentration. Granted I grew up listening to baseball games on the radio - not while cleaning or cooking or reading the newspaper, but just sitting on my parents verandah with a cold drink in hand while the voice of Curt Gowdy or Ned Martin smoothly and soothingly echoed in my ears the litany of balls and strikes, hits and outs in my mind. I was present to their voices, and used my imagination to see the very live action of Teddy Ballgame and the other players, just as the generation before had listened to Superman or Green Lantern save the world from evil incursions with their ears riveted to a voice and their minds created images of a dream world come to life. Now we may listen to the radio while driving or working or something . .. but we never listen only. It became background noise long ago, just as TV has, too

Needless to say I was a student who needed to go to his room to do his homework. I suppose I was and am the stereotypical male who can only do one thing at a time. We think of the slow plodding Cro-Magnon man who must pay attention to the one task at hand or else all is lost. We may even ridicule him. But it is not just men. We sometimes assume that women are more adept at multiple things because of motherhood, such as stirring the pot and keeping an eye on the toddler. In fact the greatest cause of death among children in colonial times was not from illness, but from falling into the fireplace. Just who can pay attention to all these diversions? We still have those Cro-Magnon brains. My brother always did his homework in front of the television. I will say he finished it, but his grades in fact languished behind mine in high school. I was more concerned I think that it not just be done, but that it be done well. This is something that is often lost as well in our multitasking frenzy. We get it done, but we don’t care what it looks like or what the results are. It’s over. And so I went off to my room for quiet, to concentrate, to do what I hoped was a good job. I sometimes see one of my own sons try to do homework, as the ever present Simpsons echo in the background. He can’t do it. He tries to concentrate, but cannot focus on one thing. We get so used to multitasking that even when we concentrate, as Walter Kirn writes, “we concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re suppose to be concentrating on.” There is so much going on, and its all over the place, we can never find the one focus we need.

While we might think that multitasking activities help us get more done, the truth is we actually hurt our brains, get less done, and make more mistakes, while all the while whipping ourselves into a confused state. The overloading of attention means you lose ability to pay attention. We create an attention deficit culture. My sermon writing at church with all its computer options and other interruptions is a good example of how multitasking is bad for productivity. I didn’t get the sermon done, and so I took time away from my family and from myself yesterday because I could not focus on doing a good job on the one thing that needed to be done. All this frenzy also changes us as people. Multitasking actually slows our thinking down, and physiologically it ages us with its stress on the brain, and the confusion and tiring usage it undergoes. And so the quality of our ideas and the depth of our perception become muddled when we multitask. Some of this is driven by the crazy schedules we keep. It is difficult in our modern world to survive economically, but we can make choices not to be so plugged in all the time, and moreover to focus on what we are doing that we might produce something that reflects focus and dedication.

In June at the end of a trip to Berkeley and Albuquerque, I visited the Acoma Pueblo west of Albuquerque. On top of the mesa there is a village that has been occupied since the 1100’s. The Natives there became virtual slaves to the Spanish settlers, and were forced to build a mission church in 1629, a year before our church founders set foot here in Watertown. They constructed this church of St. Stephen by carrying forty foot beams from forty miles away, special Ponderosa pine for the roof. The catch was that their vicious conquerors forbid them from letting the beams touch the ground. Can you imagine the focus required to carry the trunks, shifting from shoulder to shoulder? This same ability to pay attention to what they are doing, in this case at the risk of losing a life or limb, is carried over to the hand made pottery shaped by their caressing fingers and then beautifully painted. This little piece I bought from one of the women, has little scallops in the top, reflective of the shape of the mesa. Think of carrying that tree up from the valley floor.

This same human gift to be present for what we are doing is seen in this modern tale, The Cricket Story. It seems two friends were walking down the sidewalk of a busy city during rush hour. There was all sorts of noise in the city; car horns honking, feet shuffling, people talking! And amid all this noise, one of the friends turned to the other and said, “I hear a cricket.” The friend responded, “No way. How could you possibly hear a cricket with all this noise? You must be imagining it. Besides, when have you seen a cricket in the city?” But she insisted, and said, “let me show you.” They went across the street to a big planter with a tree in it, and then, pushing back some leaves, she found a cricket. The friend said, “That’s amazing! you must have super hearing.” But she said, “No, my hearing is normal. Watch I’ll show you.” She then took some change out of her purse, and threw it on the sidewalk. Despite the noise of rush hour, everyone within thirty feet turned to see where the sound of the money was coming from. “See,” she said, “It’s all a matter of what you are listening for.” Sometimes our spouses and our children know when we are not listening. It is one thing to be present in body, but another to focus and pay attention to the one thing we are listening for. What if that sermon, that loved one who is standing before you, that project, gets your sole attention and focus. True personal salvation will come in that singleness of focus. I am with you. I am doing this now. That is the greatest gift we can give to ourselves and each other, in response to our penchant to become slaves to multitasking and diversions in the modern world. It is being present right now to the one thing that is with you, and giving that one thing your complete heart and mind. It is choosing to close the other windows and washing the dishes to wash the dishes. True freedom. Singularity of focus. What is before us now. Done well. It is the way to try to live.

Closing Words - “Each Thing Measured by the Same Sun” by Linda Gregg

Nothing to tell. Nothing to desire.
A silence that is not unhappy.
Who will guess I am not
backing away? I am pleased
every morning because the stones
are cold, then warm in the sun.
Sometimes wet. One, two three days
in a row. Easy to say yes and no.
Realizing this power delicately.
Remembering the cow dying on the ground,
smelling dirt, seeing a mountain
in the distance one foot away.
Making a world in the mind.
The spirit still connected to the body.
Eyes open, uncovered to the bone.

“The Bible and Religious Liberals” - January 6, 2008

Mark W. Harris - First Parish of Watertown

Call to Worship - ”Miracle” by Susan Griffin

It all happened on the water
Jesus’ walking
the fishermen watching
from their boats.
When they picked up their nets
they half expected
a miraculous catch
but it was as ordinary
as the rest of the day.
Only some of them understood.
This is how it always is
with a vision.
Jesus walked on the water
only once,
This wasn’t science.
What was it the fishermen were
supposed to see.
A man moving over the surface
of the sea as if it were
some other substance like ground.
Was this all there was?
Picture yourself
you are out there on the water
you look at the horizon.
you are so used to seeing the part
of the sky
it’s become
part of your eyes.
Then you blink, staring
you turn to shake your companion.
This was not what you expected to see.
Not even what you wished for.
What difference does it make
a man walking on the water?
But even so the day
going on as it usually does
is cut with a certain clarity
and you, you feel an inexplicable
happiness, the water
beneath you, the
bright air above.


Readings - “Poem for Flora” by Nikki Giovanni

when she was little
and colored and ugly with short
straightened hair
and a very pretty smile
she went to sunday school to hear
‘bout nebuchadnezzar the king
of the jews

and she would listen

shadrach, meshach and abednego in the fire

and she would learn

how god was neither north
nor south east or west
with no color but all
she remembered was that
Sheba was black and comely

and she would think

i want to be
like that

from The Women’s Bible by Elizabeth Cady Stanton

I think that the doctrine of the Virgin birth as something higher, sweeter, nobler than ordinary motherhood, is a slur on all the natural motherhood of the world. I believe that millions of children have been as immaculately conceived, as purely born, as was the Nazarene. Why not? Out of this doctrine, and that which is akin to it, have sprung all the monasteries and the nunneries of the world, which have disgraced and distorted and demoralized manhood and womanhood for a thousand years. I place beside the false, monkish unnatural claim of the Immaculate Conception my mother, who was as holy in her motherhood as was Mary Herself.

from Questions of Faith, excerpt by Madeleine L’Engle

The Bible is true. It’s not entirely factual, but it’s true. That’s hard for a lot of people to understand. Fact and truth are not the same. I love what Karl Barth said: ‘I take the Bible far too seriously to take it literally.’ Some of the Bible is history and some of the Bible is story, and we don’t always know which is which. But it doesn’t matter. What I’m looking for in the Bible is truth. If you look at the great protagonists in the Old and New Testaments, not one of them is qualified to do what God is asking that individual to do. (In a sense we’re all unqualified.) God goes to great pains to pick the unqualified. If you were starting a nation, would you pick a woman past menopause and a man a hundred years old? That doesn’t seem sensible, but that’s what God did. The message is clear. If you think you’re qualified, you might believe you did a good job. If you know you’re unqualified, you realize you can only accomplish something because you’re empowered by God. (or some greater form of love)


Sermon -

In 1959 Pete Seeger’s publisher called him and asked him to write a new song that would become popular. In the publisher’s view Seeger wrote too many protest songs which did not sell, and he wanted Seeger to produce something like “Goodnight Irene.” Seeger’s response was to take the poetic Biblical words of Ecclesiastes Chapter 3, and set them to music. He added the famous Turn, Turn, Turn, and also a final line, “A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late,” to give it his seal as yet another protest song for peace. But how wrong could the publisher be? This reflection on the turns of life, and its ultimate longing of protest for peace became a #1 gold hit for the rock group the Byrds in 1965. I was enraptured by that song. I discovered Biblical words could be hip. Soon this song was followed by Jesus Christ Superstar and all the rest. It was an amazing revelation to my 14 year old mind that this old seemingly lifeless book could contain such radical enduring truths. I thought I had rejected this relic only a couple of years before when my Sunday School teacher told me that the true creation account did not include evolution or more importantly the eventual appearance of those fascinating creatures called dinosaurs. Now, with the ever turning changes of life, I sang of harmonic balance in the creation, the yin and yang of life, as David Crosby, an original Byrd, once said of this song. Those Byrds took me soaring.


It was important for me to see that Biblical poetry and stories had enduring value, just as I was ready to reject these ancient texts. I was beginning to fall into a trap which I believe many adult Unitarian Universalists fall into. We like Karl Marx, can easily come to believe that religion is an opiate of the masses, and that it is something that primitive or ignorant cultures adopt, but that as soon as we understand that human knowledge can bring us answers to all the questions that plague culture and society, there will be no need for religion, or the scriptures that are used to affirm its validity. As someone who loved dinosaurs I was ready to embrace science as the modern solution to everything. Science did provide many answers to human questions, and much fascinating knowledge - but where were the mythic stories, the meaning, the wholeness and purpose of life and the loving community values? I was forgetting about the power of story and myth, I was forgetting about historic precedent. I was forgetting about human pride. I was forgetting about the enduring themes of culture and literature. I was forgetting about the social power of identifying with these Biblical people and their enduring struggles to know God, and consequently know freedom, and justice and peace. I was forgetting about the depth of textual sources where the deepest meanings of living are revealed in archetypal tales of Gods and human longings and struggles. Turn, Turn, Turn turned me back to the beginning of an understanding of the centrality of the Bible in my faith development, even as I entered the Unitarian Universalist path.

There would be no Unitarian Universalist faith without the Bible. From the beginning of Christian history there were those individuals who were more interested in a relationship with an inspiring ethical leader rather than salvation from a God incarnate in human form who ascended into heaven. These people, and others like them wanted to use scriptures to teach them how to live rather than as a proscriptive how-to book on gaining access to heaven. Thanks to a revival of interest in scholarship and learning there were individuals in the 1500s who wanted to use their minds to read scripture and they discovered that the verses used to affirm the doctrine of the Trinity were not part of the earliest manuscripts but were added at a later date. In reading the scriptures they concluded that Jesus believed he was less than God, and that his sacrifice on the cross was intended for all people, and not just a select few. They were Unitarian because they believed in one God not three, and Universalist because they believed that a loving God offered a message of equal embrace for all. That was the conclusion they made from using reason to read the scriptural words. There is a story told about the great Universalist leader Hosea Ballou, whose Baptist father was disturbed that his son was preaching universal salvation, which seemed to ignore the threat of hell, which most people seemed to think was necessary in order to induce good behavior. His father caught Hosea reading in the kitchen one day, and asked him what book he had in his hands. The boy answered that it was a Universalist book. The elder Ballou said he would not allow such immoral literature in his house. Knowing his father was watching, Hosea hid the book in the woodpile. With the intent of destroying this book, his father searched though the split logs to find that the despised book was the Bible.

There would be no Unitarian Universalist faith without the scriptural words. We are founded on faith in the word. Catholicism was based in ritual and sacrament and tradition. They learned the Biblical stories visually through stained glass. For the first 1500 years of the church’s history most lay people couldn’t read, and they didn’t have books even if they could read. Protestantism happened because the word of God was transmitted through the book, and each and every person could read the book and understand the message for him or herself. The center of the Catholic church was the altar where the wafer was transformed into the body and where the magic words the people could not understand were uttered, and tradition was reenacted again and again. Protestantism happened because all of this tradition became very corrupt and authoritarian, but it also happened because of books and reading and the words. Meaning was found in the words; words preached from the pulpits, words read in the Bible, and ever since we have wanted our children to read and understand and grow in knowledge. Originally this Bible was their first reading book. And so when they read, “In Adam’s Fall we sinned all,” they were well aware of the story, and the doctrinal truths they derived from it.

Many of you might say that is fine that the Bible was instrumental in the Protestant reformation, or the Puritan migration to the new world, and the consequent growth of knowledge, but that is ancient history. How relevant is it now? Stephen Prothero, the author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- and Doesn’t , would argue that it is quite relevant. He says we as a people are woefully ignorant about religion and its sacred texts, and because of that we have a hard time making sense of a world where people kill and make peace in the name of Christ or Allah. I was brought up on Biblical passages read daily in the classroom of my two room schoolhouse, but that ended definitively in the 1960’s when we decided to have no Bible in the classroom. While the Supreme Court did not end the discussion of religion in school, it may as well have. I am one who believes the Bible should be taught in a non denominational way in schools, but the problem is that every group wants it taught their way, and fundamentalists would probably see the historical, literary, critical approach to the Bible as the liberal way, and they would balk. Yet even fundamentalists are woefully ignorant of the Bible. They talk about having Jesus in their hearts, but they know little of what he said or did. So we have individuals who love to call themselves Christian, but they don’t know anything about Christianity. It reminds me of the people in the religious knowledge surveys who identify Joan of Arc as Noah’s wife. Prothero wonders, How can you have a conversation about religion when you have so little knowledge of it or its sources?

A few months back, Roberta asked me to lead a breakfast meeting on why we should have Biblically literate children. Since we only had a handful there, I decided the subject might be worthy of a larger audience. This year our children are learning Bible stories in their Religious Education small groups. I was quite impressed one Sunday night at dinner when my son Dana was able to retell the entire confrontation between little David and Goliath the gigantic champion of the Philistines. The shepherd boy used his ability to shoot down wolves at 100 yards with a slingshot to replicate that skill with the sword bearing warrior. David reminded me of how Biblical characters were once models for many of us. We learned about David slaying Goliath so that we would come to believe not simply that all things are possible because of belief in God, but that the little guy, the underdog, the loser can with practice and training and courage and pluck even overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles and prove victorious. But the meaning is more universal and enduring than these kinds of personal inspirational models such as Nikki Giovanni describes when the little black girl Flora wants to be like the Queen of Sheba, although it is no small potatoes for a black girl to dream of being powerful and beautiful in our culture.

Beyond the little boys and girls who may identify with these stories, why might the Bible inspire our lives? First, there is what I referred to above as historical precedent. Stephen Prothero says the Bible is the scripture of American politics. By that he does not mean we are a Christian nation, but rather that the Jewish and Christian mythos informs our moral and historical understanding as a people; our foundations as a culture. Biblical scholar, Robert Alter writes that the Bible helped shaped our collective lives. Recently in the Globe, in the wake of his new translation of the Psalms, Alter wrote, “I think certain modes of imagination by which we conceive who we are, the nature of the human animal, once they get started in the culture, maintain a certain momentum, and continue to shape us.” This might be as far reaching as the Puritans seeing themselves as the new Jews who established the city on a hill in the new promised land of milk and honey, or perhaps the nature of human beings to conceive of themselves as made in a divine image or the moral codes that govern society.

If the Bible shaped our collective lives as a people, and provides some measure of citizen knowledge, then it also inspired individual movements for freedom and peace. African Americans saw themselves as reliving the enslaved lives of the Jews in Egypt. Martin Luther King said the struggle of Moses and his devoted followers as they sought to get out of Egypt . . . “is the story of every people struggling for freedom. It is the first story of man’s explicit quest for freedom” This had long been their story from the black Moses Harriet Tubman right through to the Civil Rights movement when they sang the spiritual “Go Down Moses,” and shouted, let my people go. The Bible story became a people’s cry for freedom. So, too, the example of Jesus inspired the quest for peace and justice in America and the world from Thoreau’s civil disobedience to Adin Ballou’s pacifism to Tolstoy and Gandhi and King. There is the social power of identifying with these Biblical people and their enduring struggles to know God, and consequently know freedom, and justice and peace.

We also need to know the Bible because of enduring themes of culture and literature. In college I read William Faulkner and found a Christ myth in the story of Joe Christmas in Light in August. From Shakespeare to Melville, knowing the Bible stories means that we can understand literature. Not knowing them means we may not have a clue. When Jonah goes down with the whale, it is relived in Ahab and the great white creature he pursues. In Melville’s Billy Budd, the main character is an innocent Christ figure who is sacrificed. Beyond the cultural ability to discern mythic tales in literature. There are deeper truths to inform us as to what the great questions of life are, and how these ancient cultures responded to them. In an essay in the New York Times Book Review, “Prescribed Reading,” physician Jerome Groopman talks about a course he teaches each year to medical students on how we engage with life’s existential mysteries; birth, death, and how we understand suffering. He says insight into this is not found in clinical textbooks, but rather in various narratives of illness he has the students read. The students learn how the experience of illness touches every aspect of human emotion and behavior. They also see in the background of many of the books they read, the themes of one of the world’s oldest books, the Bible. They see it not as the revealed word of God, or even as literature, but as a source book on human psychology that ferrets out the dilemmas of medicine. In Tolstoy’s, Death of Ivan Ilyich, the narrative mirrors the passion story of Jesus. Tolstoy finds the abiding love of God an adequate response to the meaninglessness of suffering. We may think of how Job responds to overwhelming sickness and the loss of all he has. We may ask how much of this is my fault? Did my negative emotions bring on illness? All of these stories bring on the yearnings of the patient's soul for understanding and healing, or at least acceptance, and even if the response seems wrong or archaic, the questions are timeless, as we continue to wonder what can I do, how can I respond to this ache in my body and soul? Groopman says both atheist and believer alike should turn to the Bible to frame how to deal with life’s great questions of suffering. Years ago when a young parishioner in Milton came down with a fast moving debilitating illness, one of the first things I suggested to him was to read the book of Job. Here the deepest meanings of living are revealed in archetypal tales of Gods and human destinies.

These stories of suffering help us see that these ancient ways of seeking religious insight give us a context for trying to understand if the universe has a purpose. Unitarian Universalists in the quest for using their minds to find what is literal truth in scriptures have sometimes failed to grasp the power of story and myth. When Thomas Jefferson removed all the miracle stories from the Gospels in his version of the scriptures, he gave us a very ethical Jesus, but what was lost was the miraculous nature of his life and all of life. Sometimes in the quest for scientific truth, we lose all sense of story, and miracle and wonder. Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her Woman’s Bible wanted us to see that her mother was just as holy in her motherhood as Mary, but we may miss the sacred quality of this very archetypal event or image if we only see it as mundane. We see miracles when we look for them.

Like Jonah, all of us are afraid of our responsibilities, and the times we live in make us want to run away like he did. But if we don’t face up to the chaos of life, then the dark night of our souls, our whale, will swallow us. Unitarian Universalists have sometimes eschewed Bible stories, not only because we think of them as old fashioned or out of date, but because they depict too many treacherous, vengeful acts, and it is not the humans we are talking about, but God. Human nature is what it is, and modern culture shows no evidence that our predilection towards violence has abated. I think the Bible helps us understand human failings and false pride better than most stories - floods, towers, death and resurrection, betrayal and loss, creation. But it also points us in the direction of freedom, justice, healing and reconciliation, and ultimately love. These are what Carl Jung once considered archetypes of the soul, and I believe there is something of universal meaning in them that we should all know and recognize about life.

UUs can play a key role in helpful us make the Bible inspiring and meaningful again for ourselves, our children and our culture at large. Granted some of those begets are pretty boring, and the injunctions about menstruation once made Universalist minister Abner Kneeleand take the Bible and fling it across a sanctuary and pronounce it garbage. But we should not be so literal about truth, that we throw the story and the miracle out in our rejection of fundamentalist ideology. As Madelyn L’Engle said in our reading, the Bible teaches us a great deal about truth; life and death, illness and suffering. Jesus’s birth is one of those archetypal births - the hopes and fears of all the years are met in one new life. We should not fear that a Biblical story can inspire us still. In fact we should use our reason to spread knowledge about the Bible, and our communities of concern and compassion can be harbingers of hope for better days to come. In the Bible, God usually picks the unqualified - Jonah and Moses, Jesus born in a stable, the lowly fisherman, and Mary the Magdalene. It is all about David against Goliath. And you and I. The idea is not to care if the story is true or not. As nations, as communities, and as people, the meaning is found in discovering the truth in the words - the questions, the struggles, the evolving spirit. It is that simple. Yes, I know there are other Scriptures that bring meaning, other words that inspire us as much or more, but it all began for our nation, our community, and for many of us individually, with the Bible. It is with those words that we begin to find meaning.

Closing Words: John 1:1-5 (adapted)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word was in the beginning with God; all things were made through the Word, and without the Word was not anything made that was made. In the Word was life, and the Word was the light of men and women and children. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.