a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday February 20th, 2005
I got to thinking the other day about just how much of our heritage as Americans we carry around with us in the form of spare change. From the American Revolution to the Second World War, from the Old Dominion to the New Deal -- I can give you a pretty interesting history lesson for just 41 cents, yet how many of us ever really think about the legacy represented by the handful of loose coins we set on the top of our dresser when we empty our pockets at night?
The largest of these coins, both in value and actual size, is generally the quarter. There are, of course, a couple of coins that are larger, but these seldom seen and even more seldomly spent oddities are not nearly so widely-circulated as the ubiquitous "two-bits" bearing the image of George Washington, First President of the United States and "Father" of our country, "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." Washington is perhaps the most iconic of all our Presidents: his image not only appears on the quarter, but also the dollar bill and in the most prominent place (naturally) Mount Rushmore. Our nation's Capital is named for him, as is Mount Washington (which I'm told is the highest peak in New England) and the State of Washington where I was born: the only state in the union to bear the name of any President. Washington was also the only American President ever to be elected unanimously by the Electoral College, and without even the fuss and bother of a General Election. And, of course, it's really his birthday ( February 22nd) that we celebrate as "President's Day" this weekend.
As kids we all heard the legendary story of Washington chopping down the cherry tree, and then taking responsibility for his action with the memorable declaration "I cannot tell a lie;" while as adults perhaps we have learned to draw inspiration from his leadership in times of great adversity -- keeping the Continental army together at Valley Forge, crossing a frozen Delaware River to attack the Hessians at Trenton on Christmas Eve (another iconic image), leading by the courage of his personal example at a moment in our history when mere survival was a triumphant victory, and the outcome of the matter was still very much in doubt. Yet I suspect that Washington is most appreciated by historians for what he DIDN'T do -- for his insistent refusal of more magnificent titles in preference for the simple "Mr President," and for his retirement from public life after serving two terms in that office -- a precedent which has only been broken once in the entire history of our nation.
Thomas Jefferson, whose portrait appears on the nickel, was perhaps both the most personally accomplished, and also the most complicated and enigmatic, of all our Presidents. He was also a Unitarian, as well as the President I personally admire most, despite his increasingly obvious flaws. Like Washington before him, Jefferson was a Virginian and a slave-holder, whose wealth and leisure (along with the liberty to enjoy them) were made possible by the forced labor of others. Jefferson was well aware of the evils of slavery, and also of his complicity in its preservation through his own participation in a society that was dependent on it. "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just," he wrote. "His justice cannot sleep forever." Yet he was never able (or perhaps never willing) to win his own economic independence from a system of oppression he abhorred on moral and ethical grounds.
Like many enlightened Southerners of his day, Jefferson believed that slavery was already on the decline, and that the ban on the further importation of slaves from Africa which took effect during his Presidency would hasten its eventual extinction, never realizing that the acquisition of his Louisiana territory, together with the invention of the cotton gin, were already beginning to create an even more brutal and oppressive system of slavery than Jefferson ever knew at Montecello. The owners of northern textile mill like those in Lowell, many of them wealthy Boston Unitarians, implicitly colluded in this dehumanizing process of repression and commodification, and complained vocally when their own clergy dared to bring politics into the pulpit by speaking out in favor of abolition, or in condemnation of things like the Mexican War, or the "conspiracy of loom and lash" which dominated the American economy throughout the ante-bellum period.
The internal slave market which arose to supply the burgeoning demand for plantation labor in the deep South would within a generation see hundreds of thousands of African Americans sold "down the river" each year to the cotton producing states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. By the 1820's, young healthy males could be purchased for $500 in Virginia (or perhaps just across the Potomac river, in the nation's capital), and then sold for three times that amount in New Orleans; while the value of young women often depended upon their perceived potential as "breeders." The sanctity of marriage and family ties meant nothing on the auction block; children were routinely separated from their mothers, and husbands from their wives, and the entire dehumanizing system was grounded in an evolving ideology of racism which basically served to rationalize and justify certain members of a family owning (and selling) their own biological brothers and sisters as property. It's an especially ugly chapter in American history, involving kidnapping, rape, calculated exploitation and brutal oppression, and we are still living with its legacy today, despite the great strides this nation has made in the area of race relations in our own lifetimes.
Thomas Jefferson's personal biography helps illuminate this aspect of our national history as well . A potent combination of circumstantial, anecdotal, and (more recently) hard scientific evidence (in the form of DNA testing) has now convinced all but the most recalcitrant historians that Jefferson was indeed the father of the children of his slave Sally Hemings, who was both 30 years his junior and the half-sister of his deceased wife Martha. Nowadays I suspect that many would find the difference in their ages more scandalous than the difference in their races (notwithstanding the fact that Sally's own ancestry was only one-quarter African, and at least two of her own children were able to "pass" as "white"). But we also are beginning to understand that our ideas of "race" are simply socially constructed fictions which, nevertheless, continue to exercise surprising power over our lives and our daily interactions with one another, as well as the distribution of wealth, power, privilege and opportunity within our society itself. The descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings should remind us all that nothing in this life is truly black or white, and that the emphasis should rightfully be on "American" rather than "African" or "European" or any other descriptive adjective.
Of course, it was Abraham Lincoln who took the "self-evident" truths articulated by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created equal [and] ...endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," and persuasively transformed them into a shared intellectual foundation for our liberal democracy -- a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" -- as well as the rationale for putting an end to legal slavery in the United States once and for all, a mere "four score and seven years" after Jefferson first inspired Colonial Americans to seek their own independence from Great Britain. And a hundred years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and put in his two cents worth, demanding that America honor the promissory note written by Jefferson and Lincoln, rather than allowing it to come back marked "insufficient funds." King's dream that "the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood," and that his own children "will someday live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" simply reflects the reality that often our differences are only skin-deep, while the table of brotherhood is more than just a metaphor. The real challenge is transforming the sweltering heat of injustice and oppression into an oasis of freedom and justice, by rising up and living out the true meaning of America's self-evident truth, that we are all created equal...
America has never really had an openly Gay President, although historians have long speculated about James Buchanan, a life-long bachelor whose wealthy fiancee Anne Coleman broke off their brief engagement when Buchanan was 28, and may even have taken her own life shortly afterwards. Buchanan's best friend and roommate for 23 years was William Rufus King; the two of them were virtually inseparable, and collectively known (at least in some private circles) as "Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy." More recently, some historians have also grown interested in Lincoln's sexuality, pointing to his well-known lack of interest in women as a young man, his troubled and stormy marriage to Mary Todd, a four year relationship with a man named Joshua Speed (with whom Lincoln shared a bed when they were bachelor roommates in the late 1830's), and a fairly well documented incident in which President Lincoln again shared his bed with another man -- this time one of his bodyguards, a Captain David V. Derickson, possibly on more than one occasion, when Mrs. Lincoln was away from home. The evidence is hardly conclusive, but it is highly provocative, and like Jefferson's mid-life relationship with a teenaged slave needs to be better understood in the context of its own time. But I do think it's safe to say that had Captain Derickson been a woman, the obvious conclusion would seem far less ambiguous. Today's "Log Cabin" Republicans take their name from this speculation about the sexual orientation of our sixteenth President; and if it were to turn out to be true that Lincoln was bisexual, would he be any less of a great President because of it?
The humble penny may be the smallest denominated coin buried down in the deepest corner of our pockets, but what it lacks in monetary value it makes up for in durability. We've been minting Lincoln Cents since 1909 -- the 100th anniversary of Lincoln's birth; it is the longest issued coin in United States history, and has been struck and circulated in greater numbers than any other coin in the history of the world. The first Washington quarters were minted in 1932; the first Jefferson nickels six years later, in 1938. Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson routinely occupy the top three spots on lists of America's most distinguished Presidents -- their faces each grace our currency as well as our coinage, and of course all three are carved on Mount Rushmore as well. The first Roosevelt dime was minted in 1946 -- just a year following his death, which occurred shortly after the beginning of his fourth term as President.
As I mentioned earlier, FDR is the only American President to serve more than two terms in office. Elected for the first time at the height of the Great Depression in 1932, he proposed a series of government initiatives which collectively were known as the New Deal -- and resulted in things like the Tennessee Valley Authority and rural electrification, the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and of course the Social Security Administration. He later led our nation during the Second World War, only to die at the age of 63 with victory just over the horizon. Afflicted with polio, which would eventually confine him to a wheelchair, he kept the true extent of his disability a secret from the general public, while at the same time mastering the relatively new communications technology of radio in order to broadcast his message directly to the citizens in the form of his popular "fireside chats." And he was, of course, in his own day vigorously opposed by conservatives at every turn, who saw his government sponsored programs of regulation and relief as an absolutely un-American flirtation with Socialism.
In 1941 FDR also articulated his idea of the "Four Freedoms" which he felt were the universal rights of all humanity: Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Belief, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. The first two are already quite familiar to us; the latter two comprise a positive mandate for peace and prosperity which in some ways goes beyond more traditional understandings of both Freedom and Liberty, but is likewise a natural and obvious extension of those same principles. Using the definitions I borrowed last week from historian David Hackett Fischer, Roosevelt not only believed in protecting the liberty of individuals to worship and express their opinions as they saw fit, he also recognized that the Freedom to belong and to participate fully in a free society required a certain degree of physical security...both with regard to economic sustenance and the protection from physical violence. A free market cannot be a fair market without some sort of regulation. Without honest rules and the power to enforce them, the rich simply get richer while the poor get poorer, as the strong take advantage of the weak.
Recently there's been talk in certain conservative circles about replacing Roosevelt's portrait on the dime with that of Ronald Reagan. The advocates of this are basically the same people who would also like to dismantle the rest of FDR's New Deal legacy...including Social Security...but I probably don't need to spell out how I feel about the idea. Franklin Roosevelt and the dime just somehow seem made for each other. In FDR's day, for example, you could still actually buy something for a dime... breakfast and a cup of coffee if you were lucky, or at the very least a couple of beers. "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" was an anthem of the Great Depression and the New Deal, while the "March of Dimes" campaign against polio also began during Roosevelt's Presidency, and eventually resulted in an effective vaccine against that crippling disease. A coin bearing Reagan's image should likewise reflect the achievements of his administration, as well as his own personal struggle with Alzheimer's Disease. I have a few ideas. But I'm sure you can think of plenty of ideas of your own.
If history teaches us anything, it is that appearances can be deceiving, and that sometimes the truth is not only more complicated than we know, it is more complicated than we CAN know. All history is "revisionist," in that historians look to the past with a different perspective than that of those who lived it. They ask different questions, they have a better knowledge of outcomes, they have less personal investment in the disagreements and controversies of times past. Yet the study of history is the study of humanity itself in all its variation and diversity -- interesting not only for what it can teach us about our ancestors, but also for what it can teach us about ourselves. And for that reason alone, it is worthy of our close attention.
*********
READING: "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?"
They used to tell me I was building a dream
And so I followed the mob.
When there was earth to plow or guns to bear,
I was always there, right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream
With peace and glory ahead --
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?
Once I built a railroad, I made it run,
Made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad, now it's done --
Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower, up to the sun,
brick and rivet and lime.
Once I built a tower, now it's done --
Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once in khaki suits, gee, we looked swell
Full of that Yankee Doodle-de-dum.
Half a million boots went slogging through hell,
And I was the kid with the drum.
Say, don't you remember they called me Al,
It was Al all the time.
Why don't you remember, I'm your pal --
Say, buddy, can you spare a dime?
Once in khaki suits, ah, gee, we looked swell
Full of that Yankee Doodle-de-dum.
Half a million boots went slogging through hell,
And I was the kid with the drum.
Say, don't you remember they called me Al,
It was Al all the time.
Why don't you remember, I'm your pal --
Buddy, can you spare a dime?
E. Y. Harburg and Jay Gourney, 1932 (as recorded by Bing Crosby)
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Sunday, February 13, 2005
A FAITH FOR THOUGHTFUL SOULS
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday February 13th, 2005
There was an op-ed piece in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, written by David Hacket Fischer, who is a professor of history just down the road here at Brandeis University, that I found so interesting and thought-provoking that I thought I'd share a little of it here with you today. It's called "Freedom's Not Just Another Word." "There is no one true definition of liberty and freedom in the world, " Fischer writes, "though many people to the left and right believe that they have found it. And, yet, there is one great historical process in which liberty and freedom have developed, often in unexpected ways...."
***
...Equally surprising are the origins of our English words liberty and, especially, freedom. They have very different roots. The Latin libertas and Greek eleutheria both indicated a condition of independence, unlike a slave.... Freedom, however, comes from the same root as friend, and Indo-European word that meant "dear" or "beloved." It meant a connection to other free people by bonds of kinship or affection, also unlike a slave. Liberty and freedom both meant "unlike a slave." But liberty meant privileges of independence; freedom referred to rights of belonging.
We English-speakers are possibly unique in having both "liberty" and "freedom" in our ordinary speech. The two words have blurred together in modern usage, but the old tension between them persists like a coiled spring in our culture. It has inspired an astonishing fertility of thought. Americans have invented many ideas of liberty and freedom. Some are close to independence, others to rights of belonging. Most are highly creative combinations. For most people they are not academic abstractions or political ideologies, but inherited ideas that we hold as what Tocqueville called "habits of the heart." They tend to be entire visions of a free society, and we seen them in our mind's eye through symbols and emblems....
The Civil War...was a conflict between visions of liberty, freedom, union and rights of belonging on one side; and ideas of states' rights, separation and liberty to keep a slave on the other. Many competing images of liberty and freedom appeared in the Progressive Era, and again in the 1930's when President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "broader definition of liberty" and "greater freedom, greater security" were fiercely opposed by the conservative Liberty League. It happened again in the 1950's and 60's, with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of freedom as rights of belonging, and Barry Goldwater's impassioned idea of liberty as independence from intrusive government. But perhaps the most fertile period of invention was the late 20th century. Through 16 generations, American ideas of liberty and freedom have grown larger, deeper, more diverse and yet more inclusive in these collisions of contested visions....
The catch, of course, is that people become more truly free only when the central ideas are respected: liberty as the rights of individual independence, freedom in the rights of collective belonging. Many on the right and left continue to call for one idea without the other, but the strongest ground is in the center, where they come together.... [New York Times, Feb 7, 2005]
***
Unitarian Universalism sometimes has a reputation of being kind of an "intellectual" religion -- perhaps because historically it has tended to attract a disproportionate number of highly-educated people, as well as numerous "free thinkers" and other independent spirits in general. But the faith itself is actually quite simple. I sometimes like to summarize it as "One God at most, and we're all in this together." These two historical confessions: that God is One, and All Souls belong to him (or her -- assuming God even has a gender) are the twin theological doctrines which gave "Unitarianism" and "Universalism" their names.
But what truly makes Unitarian Universalism a simple faith is the method by which we arrive at our beliefs. Most religions present the new believer with a complicated set of doctrines and creeds which comprise "the Faith" -- the Catechism of the Roman Catholic church, for example, is hundreds of pages long (not that too many actual Catholics actually think about that all that often). But for many religious denominations, Faith and Belief are considered one and the same. And if your beliefs deviate from "the one true faith" you are considered a heretic: someone who has rejected the faith (and with it the authority of the church) by choosing to believe a different way. But here at the First Religious Society (just like at every other UU church I know of) we are all basically heretics, because the basic premise of this religious tradition is that the authority for religious belief comes from within the individual rather than from some sort of external institution. Faith begins with our own human experience examined in the light of human reason, and thus we naturally expect our beliefs to change and evolve over time as we ourselves grow and mature in faith.
A few years ago now some clever advertising copywriter even put this idea in the form of a slogan: "Religion that puts its faith in you." I suppose there are a lot of other religions who can also summarize their core beliefs on a bumpersticker, but "Religion that puts its faith in you" has a very different feel to it than "God said it, I believe it, and that settles it." In the place of an authoritarian hierarchy, Unitarian Universalists look to personal authenticity and mutual accountability as the ultimate arbiters of religious truth. It's this believe in religious liberty that makes us religious liberals: not only do we live our faith, but our faith emerges from our own lives. Our experiences both shape our beliefs and inspire our actions, not because we are told we should believe a certain way, but because we have discovered for ourselves the truth of what we believe. Which is a lot different from having no beliefs, or being free to believe whatever we like. There are lots of things I would LIKE to believe, but I can't believe them because I know that wishful thinking doesn't make it so. If you remember nothing else about this morning's sermon, remember this. Unitarian Universalists are NOT people who are free to believe whatever we want. We are people who are COMPELLED to believe what our reason and our experience tell us to be true.
But because of the respect we have for freedom of conscience, and the high degree of latitude and tolerance we try to practice with regard to any particular individual's set of beliefs, people who are accustomed to more rigidly authoritarian religious traditions sometimes have a difficult time figuring out just where Unitarian Universalism belongs in the taxonomy of religious denominations. Is it a form of liberal Christianity, or some sort of post-Christian eclecticism, or perhaps even an entirely new religion altogether? Depending on who you're talking to, the answer to all of these questions is a qualified "Yes." From an historical perspective at least, both Universalism and Unitarianism are solidly rooted in the broad Judeo-Christian tradition. The original founders of this church and others like it were very much inspired by the teachings of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets, and the questions they asked about God and the Bible, about ethics and morality, were very much informed by the religious culture in which they lived.
But as that culture grew more theologically diverse, those early Unitarians and Universalists diversified right along with it...indeed, often leading the way. Because the only limitation on the freedom of belief is the integrity of one's own thoughts, 19th century Unitarians and Universalists were pioneers in both the academic study of World Religions, and ecumenical dialogue with non-Christian religious believers. Of course, more orthodox Christian missionaries also often attempted to learn everything they could about the cultures where they served in order to be able to more effectively convert "the natives" to Christianity, and often found themselves profoundly transformed by that process instead. But the Unitarian belief the God is One, and the Universalist belief that All Souls are equally loved by their Creator, made this sort of interest in mutual conversation rather than conversion especially appropriate.
The basic intellectual congeniality of both Unitarianism and Universalism to the notion of inter-faith dialogue was further reinforced by an idea know at the time as "Natural Religion," which essentially held that whatever is Ultimately True about Religion continues to be true whether anyone actually believes it or not, and that the various "religions" of the world simply represented humanity's historical attempts to understand and articulate this more universal "natural" religion in terms appropriate to a particular historical and cultural context. Scrape away these cultural overlays, and the "thoughtful soul" will discover the same basic set of beliefs...which are true simply because they are true, and not because they have been revealed to a particular group of people through some sort of miraculous, supernatural Act of God. Faithful Seekers of Truth should therefore feel completely uninhibited about taking inspiration wherever they may find it, realizing that ultimately all Religious Truth originates from the same Divine Source.
Of course, over time this practice of "sampling" from all the world's religious traditions led to two very obvious additional questions. First, how much non-Christian content can someone assimilate into their personal belief system and still call themselves a Christian? And second, is it really possible to "borrow" a particular religious belief or practice from another cultural faith tradition without unavoidably changing it (some would even say degrading it) into something entirely different? Put another way, can religious faith exist by itself, WITHOUT a cultural context? Or do we, as human beings, unavoidably live within specific "belief communities" which shape our worldviews in ways so pervasive they remain essentially invisible to us? Issues of cultural appropriation and cultural exchange take on a particular relevance in an era when economic globalization threatens the integrity of indigenous and non-Western cultures in ways unimaginable to 19th century Christian missionaries. And it has also led some to suggest that Unitarian Universalism's theological commitment to religious liberty, the free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and the inclusive use of the democratic process in congregational governance make it particularly well suited to emerge as a new, Universal religion for the Third Millennium.
And who knows? It may happen someday. But personally, I'm a lot more interested in what happens a lot closer to home. This congregation has been meeting Sunday mornings here on this hill in Carlisle for nearly 250 years now. Naturally, a lot of things have changed in all that time, but a lot of things have stayed pretty much the same as well. Our worship service, for example, continues to be the center of our life together -- a time when we set aside the more "worldly" concerns of day to day living in order to concentrate on the "spiritual" things that give life meaning. And it still consists of music, readings, prayers and a sermon...just as it has for generations. We continue to place a great deal of emphasis on religious education: not only for our children, but also for ourselves, teaching and learning from one another. We still enjoy fellowship with one another -- eating together, enjoying one another's company, taking an active interest in the lives of our fellow church members. We continue to care for one another pastorally, looking out for one another at times of illness or other kinds of personal crisis. And we continue to reach out into the larger community, both in the attempt to be of service to our neighbors and fellow creatures, and also to invite them to become our partners in our continuing efforts to do God's work in the world, so far as God has given us light to understand the meaning and intention of that work.
And in this regard, the First Religious Society looks a lot like other churches, who also "believe" in Worship, Education, Fellowship, Pastoral Care, and Community Outreach. This is what churches do -- it's the reason they exist, their "mission" in the world and "Good News" for human kind. It's no great secret; it's not rocket science -- but it does require a certain amount of discipline, and commitment, and devotion to values and principles larger than ourselves. Jim Wallis says that "the left doesn't get it, and the right gets it wrong." But I like to think that there are still a few liberals left at least who do kinda "get it," at least most of the time, even if we don't always get it perfectly right on every occasion. Humility, repentance, accountability -- the willingness to listen as much as we talk, and to take a genuine interest in the lives of those different from ourselves, especially those less fortunate than ourselves, "the poor, the vulnerable, the left behind." Are these "liberal" values -- the progressive values of freedom and liberty -- or "conservative" values, which we seek to sustain and preserve from generation to generation, as time-tested vehicles of spiritual progress? And why can't it be both...since both are obviously important to human happiness, and meaningful lives in community?
I can't begin to tell you how much joy, and pride, I feel at being able to step into this pulpit Sunday after Sunday, here in this beautiful white-steepled New England meeting house, knowing that I am part of a living tradition that for more than two centuries has affirmed and defended both the liberties of individual conscience, AND the God-given right of All Souls to participate fully in a free society. And if at times I seem a little outspoken it's because I know, like Barry Goldwater knew, that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" and "moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." And I also know that "All Souls" means ALL Souls" -- no exceptions, no reservations, no excuses.... And while we may often fall short of those spiritual benchmarks -- we are, after all, only human -- that doesn't mean we should give up on them, or that our aspirations are somehow without merit. This church is not a sanctuary for perfect people. It's a place where we can come, just as we are, in order to encourage and support one another in our efforts to go out from this place better people than we were when we came in, knowing that the One God (at most) who gave us life loves each of us just as much as we love our own children, and that come what may, we are ALL in this together....
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday February 13th, 2005
There was an op-ed piece in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, written by David Hacket Fischer, who is a professor of history just down the road here at Brandeis University, that I found so interesting and thought-provoking that I thought I'd share a little of it here with you today. It's called "Freedom's Not Just Another Word." "There is no one true definition of liberty and freedom in the world, " Fischer writes, "though many people to the left and right believe that they have found it. And, yet, there is one great historical process in which liberty and freedom have developed, often in unexpected ways...."
***
...Equally surprising are the origins of our English words liberty and, especially, freedom. They have very different roots. The Latin libertas and Greek eleutheria both indicated a condition of independence, unlike a slave.... Freedom, however, comes from the same root as friend, and Indo-European word that meant "dear" or "beloved." It meant a connection to other free people by bonds of kinship or affection, also unlike a slave. Liberty and freedom both meant "unlike a slave." But liberty meant privileges of independence; freedom referred to rights of belonging.
We English-speakers are possibly unique in having both "liberty" and "freedom" in our ordinary speech. The two words have blurred together in modern usage, but the old tension between them persists like a coiled spring in our culture. It has inspired an astonishing fertility of thought. Americans have invented many ideas of liberty and freedom. Some are close to independence, others to rights of belonging. Most are highly creative combinations. For most people they are not academic abstractions or political ideologies, but inherited ideas that we hold as what Tocqueville called "habits of the heart." They tend to be entire visions of a free society, and we seen them in our mind's eye through symbols and emblems....
The Civil War...was a conflict between visions of liberty, freedom, union and rights of belonging on one side; and ideas of states' rights, separation and liberty to keep a slave on the other. Many competing images of liberty and freedom appeared in the Progressive Era, and again in the 1930's when President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "broader definition of liberty" and "greater freedom, greater security" were fiercely opposed by the conservative Liberty League. It happened again in the 1950's and 60's, with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of freedom as rights of belonging, and Barry Goldwater's impassioned idea of liberty as independence from intrusive government. But perhaps the most fertile period of invention was the late 20th century. Through 16 generations, American ideas of liberty and freedom have grown larger, deeper, more diverse and yet more inclusive in these collisions of contested visions....
The catch, of course, is that people become more truly free only when the central ideas are respected: liberty as the rights of individual independence, freedom in the rights of collective belonging. Many on the right and left continue to call for one idea without the other, but the strongest ground is in the center, where they come together.... [New York Times, Feb 7, 2005]
***
Unitarian Universalism sometimes has a reputation of being kind of an "intellectual" religion -- perhaps because historically it has tended to attract a disproportionate number of highly-educated people, as well as numerous "free thinkers" and other independent spirits in general. But the faith itself is actually quite simple. I sometimes like to summarize it as "One God at most, and we're all in this together." These two historical confessions: that God is One, and All Souls belong to him (or her -- assuming God even has a gender) are the twin theological doctrines which gave "Unitarianism" and "Universalism" their names.
But what truly makes Unitarian Universalism a simple faith is the method by which we arrive at our beliefs. Most religions present the new believer with a complicated set of doctrines and creeds which comprise "the Faith" -- the Catechism of the Roman Catholic church, for example, is hundreds of pages long (not that too many actual Catholics actually think about that all that often). But for many religious denominations, Faith and Belief are considered one and the same. And if your beliefs deviate from "the one true faith" you are considered a heretic: someone who has rejected the faith (and with it the authority of the church) by choosing to believe a different way. But here at the First Religious Society (just like at every other UU church I know of) we are all basically heretics, because the basic premise of this religious tradition is that the authority for religious belief comes from within the individual rather than from some sort of external institution. Faith begins with our own human experience examined in the light of human reason, and thus we naturally expect our beliefs to change and evolve over time as we ourselves grow and mature in faith.
A few years ago now some clever advertising copywriter even put this idea in the form of a slogan: "Religion that puts its faith in you." I suppose there are a lot of other religions who can also summarize their core beliefs on a bumpersticker, but "Religion that puts its faith in you" has a very different feel to it than "God said it, I believe it, and that settles it." In the place of an authoritarian hierarchy, Unitarian Universalists look to personal authenticity and mutual accountability as the ultimate arbiters of religious truth. It's this believe in religious liberty that makes us religious liberals: not only do we live our faith, but our faith emerges from our own lives. Our experiences both shape our beliefs and inspire our actions, not because we are told we should believe a certain way, but because we have discovered for ourselves the truth of what we believe. Which is a lot different from having no beliefs, or being free to believe whatever we like. There are lots of things I would LIKE to believe, but I can't believe them because I know that wishful thinking doesn't make it so. If you remember nothing else about this morning's sermon, remember this. Unitarian Universalists are NOT people who are free to believe whatever we want. We are people who are COMPELLED to believe what our reason and our experience tell us to be true.
But because of the respect we have for freedom of conscience, and the high degree of latitude and tolerance we try to practice with regard to any particular individual's set of beliefs, people who are accustomed to more rigidly authoritarian religious traditions sometimes have a difficult time figuring out just where Unitarian Universalism belongs in the taxonomy of religious denominations. Is it a form of liberal Christianity, or some sort of post-Christian eclecticism, or perhaps even an entirely new religion altogether? Depending on who you're talking to, the answer to all of these questions is a qualified "Yes." From an historical perspective at least, both Universalism and Unitarianism are solidly rooted in the broad Judeo-Christian tradition. The original founders of this church and others like it were very much inspired by the teachings of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets, and the questions they asked about God and the Bible, about ethics and morality, were very much informed by the religious culture in which they lived.
But as that culture grew more theologically diverse, those early Unitarians and Universalists diversified right along with it...indeed, often leading the way. Because the only limitation on the freedom of belief is the integrity of one's own thoughts, 19th century Unitarians and Universalists were pioneers in both the academic study of World Religions, and ecumenical dialogue with non-Christian religious believers. Of course, more orthodox Christian missionaries also often attempted to learn everything they could about the cultures where they served in order to be able to more effectively convert "the natives" to Christianity, and often found themselves profoundly transformed by that process instead. But the Unitarian belief the God is One, and the Universalist belief that All Souls are equally loved by their Creator, made this sort of interest in mutual conversation rather than conversion especially appropriate.
The basic intellectual congeniality of both Unitarianism and Universalism to the notion of inter-faith dialogue was further reinforced by an idea know at the time as "Natural Religion," which essentially held that whatever is Ultimately True about Religion continues to be true whether anyone actually believes it or not, and that the various "religions" of the world simply represented humanity's historical attempts to understand and articulate this more universal "natural" religion in terms appropriate to a particular historical and cultural context. Scrape away these cultural overlays, and the "thoughtful soul" will discover the same basic set of beliefs...which are true simply because they are true, and not because they have been revealed to a particular group of people through some sort of miraculous, supernatural Act of God. Faithful Seekers of Truth should therefore feel completely uninhibited about taking inspiration wherever they may find it, realizing that ultimately all Religious Truth originates from the same Divine Source.
Of course, over time this practice of "sampling" from all the world's religious traditions led to two very obvious additional questions. First, how much non-Christian content can someone assimilate into their personal belief system and still call themselves a Christian? And second, is it really possible to "borrow" a particular religious belief or practice from another cultural faith tradition without unavoidably changing it (some would even say degrading it) into something entirely different? Put another way, can religious faith exist by itself, WITHOUT a cultural context? Or do we, as human beings, unavoidably live within specific "belief communities" which shape our worldviews in ways so pervasive they remain essentially invisible to us? Issues of cultural appropriation and cultural exchange take on a particular relevance in an era when economic globalization threatens the integrity of indigenous and non-Western cultures in ways unimaginable to 19th century Christian missionaries. And it has also led some to suggest that Unitarian Universalism's theological commitment to religious liberty, the free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and the inclusive use of the democratic process in congregational governance make it particularly well suited to emerge as a new, Universal religion for the Third Millennium.
And who knows? It may happen someday. But personally, I'm a lot more interested in what happens a lot closer to home. This congregation has been meeting Sunday mornings here on this hill in Carlisle for nearly 250 years now. Naturally, a lot of things have changed in all that time, but a lot of things have stayed pretty much the same as well. Our worship service, for example, continues to be the center of our life together -- a time when we set aside the more "worldly" concerns of day to day living in order to concentrate on the "spiritual" things that give life meaning. And it still consists of music, readings, prayers and a sermon...just as it has for generations. We continue to place a great deal of emphasis on religious education: not only for our children, but also for ourselves, teaching and learning from one another. We still enjoy fellowship with one another -- eating together, enjoying one another's company, taking an active interest in the lives of our fellow church members. We continue to care for one another pastorally, looking out for one another at times of illness or other kinds of personal crisis. And we continue to reach out into the larger community, both in the attempt to be of service to our neighbors and fellow creatures, and also to invite them to become our partners in our continuing efforts to do God's work in the world, so far as God has given us light to understand the meaning and intention of that work.
And in this regard, the First Religious Society looks a lot like other churches, who also "believe" in Worship, Education, Fellowship, Pastoral Care, and Community Outreach. This is what churches do -- it's the reason they exist, their "mission" in the world and "Good News" for human kind. It's no great secret; it's not rocket science -- but it does require a certain amount of discipline, and commitment, and devotion to values and principles larger than ourselves. Jim Wallis says that "the left doesn't get it, and the right gets it wrong." But I like to think that there are still a few liberals left at least who do kinda "get it," at least most of the time, even if we don't always get it perfectly right on every occasion. Humility, repentance, accountability -- the willingness to listen as much as we talk, and to take a genuine interest in the lives of those different from ourselves, especially those less fortunate than ourselves, "the poor, the vulnerable, the left behind." Are these "liberal" values -- the progressive values of freedom and liberty -- or "conservative" values, which we seek to sustain and preserve from generation to generation, as time-tested vehicles of spiritual progress? And why can't it be both...since both are obviously important to human happiness, and meaningful lives in community?
I can't begin to tell you how much joy, and pride, I feel at being able to step into this pulpit Sunday after Sunday, here in this beautiful white-steepled New England meeting house, knowing that I am part of a living tradition that for more than two centuries has affirmed and defended both the liberties of individual conscience, AND the God-given right of All Souls to participate fully in a free society. And if at times I seem a little outspoken it's because I know, like Barry Goldwater knew, that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" and "moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." And I also know that "All Souls" means ALL Souls" -- no exceptions, no reservations, no excuses.... And while we may often fall short of those spiritual benchmarks -- we are, after all, only human -- that doesn't mean we should give up on them, or that our aspirations are somehow without merit. This church is not a sanctuary for perfect people. It's a place where we can come, just as we are, in order to encourage and support one another in our efforts to go out from this place better people than we were when we came in, knowing that the One God (at most) who gave us life loves each of us just as much as we love our own children, and that come what may, we are ALL in this together....
Sunday, January 30, 2005
ON THE VAGARIES OF NATURE
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday January 30th, 2005
It's so nice to see so many of you back in church this morning, after last weekend's amazing snowstorm. And for those of you who weren't here last Sunday (which is basically all of you), we had a pretty amazing time. Like Woody, I was trained to believe that "the church never closes" -- that no matter how bad the weather may be, someone (by which is generally meant the minister) should always be here to open the doors and turn on the lights and feed the flock on Sunday morning. But after this last round of blizzards, I've also come to see the wisdom of the other side of the question, which is that "church will always be here" too -- and if the weather is so severe that you feel like you're taking your life in your hands to venture out, please don't...because we'll still be here the following week, and the week after that and the week after that.
As some of you know, I was actually scheduled to exchange pulpits last weekend with my colleague Jennifer Brooks, who is now the settled minister on Nantucket. This is something we'd been talking about for a long time, and planning for about a month, mostly so that Jennifer could have a Sunday off without having to worry about writing a new sermon; but on Saturday morning we both looked at the forecast and decided not to press our luck, not because we were worried about making the journey, but because neither of us were sure that we would be able to get back, or even whether there would be a congregation for the other to preach to when we each got to where we were going. And in retrospect that turned out to be a wise decision (and neither of us had to worry about preparing a sermon anyway). But it's not always easy to find someone to cover for you when you live on an island and need a Sunday off, and having lived on Nantucket myself for two years, I understand what that's about. In many ways, it's these small collegial courtesies that bind us together as a religious movement: as much as our denominational structures, as much as our shared values and beliefs, as much as our common history, it's the little things like watching out for one another and helping out in times of need that create a faith community. Mutual Care, Consultation, Admonition, Participation, Recommendation and Relief: these are the "six ways of Communion" described in the Cambridge Platform of 1648, which is the historical document on which our own congregational polity is (I suppose I should say) penultimately based -- since ultimately the Platform itself looks back to Scripture for its basic principles. But pulpit exchanges fulfill four of the six (Care, Consultation, Participation and Relief), and potentially touch on the other two (Admonition and Recommendation) as well.
Here in Carlisle, we had a much easier time of it than they did on Nantucket. The scripture says "wherever two or three are gathered," so with half-a-dozen we actually had souls to spare. Myself and Molly, Bryan and the twins, and Tom Lockwood (who had signed up to be the greeter)...so except for the choir (which was scheduled to perform in Lexington last Sunday anyway), we were fully staffed and ready to go...(except that I was going to have to lead the singing!) We shoveled out a path to the front door, then came inside and put the kettle on. I preached a brief sermon of one sentence: "Thank you all for coming out and God bless us every one" (basically, the same sermon I preach every week, only with fewer illustrations); then we cut up the coffee cake that my housekeeper Joanne had baked for the visiting minister, and settled in for a great conversation about old movies, and EMT training, and (of course) the Welcoming Congregation, which I want you to know we got all worked out in about ten minutes, with the twins and I mostly listening.
I won't try to recreate that conversation, since one of the things I've learned over the years is that often times the process of having the conversation itself is just as significant as the outcome. But I do want to remind people that, when all is said and done, that the process of becoming a Welcoming Congregation is NOT about how any of us individually may feel personally about what other people may or may not do with one another privately; it's about how we, as a community, can best affirm publicly our shared belief in "the inherent worth and dignity of every person." It's about how do we practice what we preach, which I know (as a preacher myself) is not always the easiest thing to do.
But I'm optimistic, and I'll tell you why. It's because I believe that despite all the various opinions I've heard expressed on the subject over the last several months, our hearts are basically in the right place on this issue. I suspect that all of us know people who are gay (and nowadays most of us even know that we know them) -- friends or colleagues or family members -- and I simply can't imagine that any one of us would want our own loved ones NOT to feel welcome in this church. It's simply unimaginable. So it's really not so much the goal, as it is the best path to the goal, that is the topic of conversation. And I also know that there are some people who prefer a broad and general statement like "All Are Welcome Here," and others who feel that we need a more precise and specific statement of welcome at this particular moment in history. And this is a little trickier. As a writer, for example, I've been taught to prefer precision over vagueness, yet I also can appreciate the evocative power of a strong, universal declaration. What I don't understand is why it has to be one or the other, and why we can't have one of each.
Let's face it, statements like this are a dime a dozen. And as I'm sure you've heard me say many times before (and will doubtlessly hear me say many times again): the one great advantage of talk being cheap is that we can afford to do a lot of it. And if we talk politely and use our indoor voices, the only price we really pay is the opportunity cost of not moving forward as quickly as we may like, which will hopefully be recovered through less friction and fewer wrong turns down the road. Finding just the right balance between action and deliberation is never easy; and at some point we do indeed have to move forward, hopefully all together and in the same direction. But in the meantime, we need to weigh the difficulties of having this conversation against the consequence of failing to have it, which are potentially quite profound indeed.
But that's not really what I want to talk about here this morning. What I really want to tell you about is another pulpit exchange that took place right here in Massachusetts over 175 years ago. At one AM on the morning of Saturday May 31st, 1828, the Reverend Henry Ware Jr., age 35, one of the principal organizers of the American Unitarian Association and minister of Boston's historic Second Church located on Hanover Street in the North End, departed the city by stagecoach bound for Northampton, (which was at the time Unitarianism's western-most outpost), in order to fulfill a preaching engagement he had made there with the minister of that newly-organized Unitarian congregation, his brother-in-law the Reverend Edward Brooks Hall. It was (naturally) a dark and stormy night, and at some point in his journey Ware became exposed to the elements. He arrived in Northampton late Saturday evening both greatly fatigued and soaked to the bone, and suffering from a persistent cough and difficult breathing. After passing "a very uncomfortable night," and "notwithstanding the continuance of these symptoms," Ware "went into the pulpit" the next day and preached both the morning and the afternoon services. Still no better the following morning, Ware ignored the advice of those around him (who encouraged him to remain in Northampton and rest) and resolved instead to return to Boston. He took some medicine (probably some form of narcotic), and set out for home, traveling by horseback in the company of a friend. They made it about 25 miles before they were obliged to stop for the night. At this point Ware's "powers of endurance had been taxed to the utmost, and he went to bed completely exhausted, with every indication of an approaching fever." On Tuesday morning he reluctantly agreed to summon the local physician, who diagnosed "severe inflammation of the lungs" and prescribed both bleeding and other "active treatment" (I hate to think what that might have been) which soon reduced the patient "to a state of extreme prostration."
In the meantime, Ware's companion had continued on to Boston in order to inform both his family and the church of Henry's illness. Henry's wife Mary, then seven months pregnant, set out immediately to join her husband, while the members of the Standing Committee made arrangements to hire one of Ware's young protégés, the 25-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson, to fill the pulpit at Second Church until their minister should recover his health, at a salary of $15 per Sunday. But Ware never really did recover his health, so the following spring the Proprietors of the Second Church in Boston did what any responsible religious society would have done in those days: they voted to hire Emerson as Ware's permanent assistant, and then, in the hope that fresh air, good food, and the Italian sunshine would do for their minister's health what a summer in Worcester and a winter in Brookline could not, raised an additional $1000 in order to send Henry and Mary on what turned out to be an 17 month long European tour.
When the Wares finally returned to Boston in the summer of 1830, Henry formally resigned his position at Second Church in order to assume new duties as the Professor of Pulpit Eloquence and the Pastoral Care at Harvard, a position that had been created specifically for him in his absence. The following spring he published a thin devotional manual titled "On the Formation of the Christian Character," in which he described the purpose of the religious life as "giving your heart a permanent bias toward God." Written during his recuperation in Europe, and a best-seller in its day, The Formation of Christian Character went through 15 different editions, and was popular among both Unitarians and more traditional Christians alike. Even Henry David Thoreau owned a copy (and we know how he felt about buying what he could just as easily borrow).
Emerson likewise was intimately familiar with the contents of Ware's little book, and the two men continued to remain friends throughout their lifetimes, despite the eventual divergence of their ideas. Emerson was apparently never really that comfortable in his ministry at Second Church. An eloquent preacher but an ambivalent pastor, and the orphaned son of a minister who had grown up in his grandfather's parsonage just down the road from here in Concord, Emerson felt both forced into the ministry by the weight of family tradition and yet constrained by the limitations of the profession as well. He eventually resigned his position at Second Church in 1832, ostensibly over a disagreement with the Standing Committee about whether or not to continue to celebrate the Lords Supper, but in reality in order to be free to travel to Europe himself, and to begin a new career as an author and lecturer.
Emerson's first book, Nature, was published in 1836, and in many ways mirrors the same devotionalist perspective of Ware's little volume in its concern for ethics and practical morality, while at the same time representing a much more spiritual -- even mystical -- attitude toward God and the Natural World than Ware would have been comfortable with. Two years later, when Professor Ware's students at Harvard invited Mr. Emerson to address their graduating class on a refulgent summer evening in the chapel at Divinity Hall, the subsequent controversy over Emerson's assertion that "the soul knows no persons" nearly split the Unitarian movement permanently into two wings -- one liberal Christian, the other Transcendentalist -- and in many ways it was only the respect which both groups shared for their former professor that kept the two sides in dialog with one another.
Emerson sincerely believed that the principle theme of his Divinity School Address: that it was the task of the minister to acquaint men and women "firsthand with deity" -- was simply a restatement of Ware's own ideas about giving the heart a permanent bias toward God. What he failed to appreciate was how profoundly most Unitarians of the day were attached to the idea of a personal God. Even when they described God as a "spirit," (which they often did) they also clung to the metaphor of God as a loving parent, and of human beings as God's children. For Henry Ware Jr, the difference between faith in a personal God and a belief in some sort of Emersonian "Oversoul" was the difference between "the condition of a little child that lives in the presence of a judicious and devoted mother, an object of perpetual affection, and of another that is placed under the charge of a public institution, which knows nothing but a set of rules...." "[T]ake away the Father of the universe," he wrote, and "mankind becomes but a company of children in an orphan asylum." Our 19th century Unitarian forebearers argued about Emerson's "latest form of infidelity" for an entire generation. But in the end, it was their ability to lift up the things they agreed on, rather than stubbornly focusing on the points of disagreement, that allowed Unitarianism to move forward -- west from Northampton to exotic, faraway places like Meadville Ohio, and St Louis Missouri, and eventually even San Francisco California, all within that same generation.
I also find it interesting to note that 175 years later, here at the beginning of the 21st century, Ralph Waldo Emerson's name is a household word, while Henry Ware Jr. is all but forgotten except by a few historians like myself. The Second Church where they both preached is essentially out of business -- after a series of mergers and relocations, in 1972 it eventually merged one final time with Boston's original First Church to form the First and Second Church in Boston. In fact, of the three Unitarian Churches that occupied Boston's North End in Ware and Emerson's day, only one is even still standing -- the so-called "New North" church (also on Hanover Street) -- and it's beautiful Charles Bullfinch designed meeting house is now occupied by St. Stephen's Catholic Church, which is best remembered as the church where Rose Kennedy used to worship. (I did check to see whether the Archdiocese of Boston might be putting it up for sale, but apparently it's a keeper). And here in Carlisle, we still celebrate the Lord's Supper once a year -- on Maundy Thursday -- which I'm proud to say makes us one of the few remaining holdouts in the entire denomination.
But the larger point is this: times change, and unless churches learn to change with them, they eventually become irrelevant. But even as we learn to change with the times, we must also remember to hold on to the things that are truly important: things like our belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and the importance of giving our hearts a permanent bias toward God, and acquainting ourselves firsthand with Deity. Thank you all for coming out. And God bless us, every one.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday January 30th, 2005
It's so nice to see so many of you back in church this morning, after last weekend's amazing snowstorm. And for those of you who weren't here last Sunday (which is basically all of you), we had a pretty amazing time. Like Woody, I was trained to believe that "the church never closes" -- that no matter how bad the weather may be, someone (by which is generally meant the minister) should always be here to open the doors and turn on the lights and feed the flock on Sunday morning. But after this last round of blizzards, I've also come to see the wisdom of the other side of the question, which is that "church will always be here" too -- and if the weather is so severe that you feel like you're taking your life in your hands to venture out, please don't...because we'll still be here the following week, and the week after that and the week after that.
As some of you know, I was actually scheduled to exchange pulpits last weekend with my colleague Jennifer Brooks, who is now the settled minister on Nantucket. This is something we'd been talking about for a long time, and planning for about a month, mostly so that Jennifer could have a Sunday off without having to worry about writing a new sermon; but on Saturday morning we both looked at the forecast and decided not to press our luck, not because we were worried about making the journey, but because neither of us were sure that we would be able to get back, or even whether there would be a congregation for the other to preach to when we each got to where we were going. And in retrospect that turned out to be a wise decision (and neither of us had to worry about preparing a sermon anyway). But it's not always easy to find someone to cover for you when you live on an island and need a Sunday off, and having lived on Nantucket myself for two years, I understand what that's about. In many ways, it's these small collegial courtesies that bind us together as a religious movement: as much as our denominational structures, as much as our shared values and beliefs, as much as our common history, it's the little things like watching out for one another and helping out in times of need that create a faith community. Mutual Care, Consultation, Admonition, Participation, Recommendation and Relief: these are the "six ways of Communion" described in the Cambridge Platform of 1648, which is the historical document on which our own congregational polity is (I suppose I should say) penultimately based -- since ultimately the Platform itself looks back to Scripture for its basic principles. But pulpit exchanges fulfill four of the six (Care, Consultation, Participation and Relief), and potentially touch on the other two (Admonition and Recommendation) as well.
Here in Carlisle, we had a much easier time of it than they did on Nantucket. The scripture says "wherever two or three are gathered," so with half-a-dozen we actually had souls to spare. Myself and Molly, Bryan and the twins, and Tom Lockwood (who had signed up to be the greeter)...so except for the choir (which was scheduled to perform in Lexington last Sunday anyway), we were fully staffed and ready to go...(except that I was going to have to lead the singing!) We shoveled out a path to the front door, then came inside and put the kettle on. I preached a brief sermon of one sentence: "Thank you all for coming out and God bless us every one" (basically, the same sermon I preach every week, only with fewer illustrations); then we cut up the coffee cake that my housekeeper Joanne had baked for the visiting minister, and settled in for a great conversation about old movies, and EMT training, and (of course) the Welcoming Congregation, which I want you to know we got all worked out in about ten minutes, with the twins and I mostly listening.
I won't try to recreate that conversation, since one of the things I've learned over the years is that often times the process of having the conversation itself is just as significant as the outcome. But I do want to remind people that, when all is said and done, that the process of becoming a Welcoming Congregation is NOT about how any of us individually may feel personally about what other people may or may not do with one another privately; it's about how we, as a community, can best affirm publicly our shared belief in "the inherent worth and dignity of every person." It's about how do we practice what we preach, which I know (as a preacher myself) is not always the easiest thing to do.
But I'm optimistic, and I'll tell you why. It's because I believe that despite all the various opinions I've heard expressed on the subject over the last several months, our hearts are basically in the right place on this issue. I suspect that all of us know people who are gay (and nowadays most of us even know that we know them) -- friends or colleagues or family members -- and I simply can't imagine that any one of us would want our own loved ones NOT to feel welcome in this church. It's simply unimaginable. So it's really not so much the goal, as it is the best path to the goal, that is the topic of conversation. And I also know that there are some people who prefer a broad and general statement like "All Are Welcome Here," and others who feel that we need a more precise and specific statement of welcome at this particular moment in history. And this is a little trickier. As a writer, for example, I've been taught to prefer precision over vagueness, yet I also can appreciate the evocative power of a strong, universal declaration. What I don't understand is why it has to be one or the other, and why we can't have one of each.
Let's face it, statements like this are a dime a dozen. And as I'm sure you've heard me say many times before (and will doubtlessly hear me say many times again): the one great advantage of talk being cheap is that we can afford to do a lot of it. And if we talk politely and use our indoor voices, the only price we really pay is the opportunity cost of not moving forward as quickly as we may like, which will hopefully be recovered through less friction and fewer wrong turns down the road. Finding just the right balance between action and deliberation is never easy; and at some point we do indeed have to move forward, hopefully all together and in the same direction. But in the meantime, we need to weigh the difficulties of having this conversation against the consequence of failing to have it, which are potentially quite profound indeed.
But that's not really what I want to talk about here this morning. What I really want to tell you about is another pulpit exchange that took place right here in Massachusetts over 175 years ago. At one AM on the morning of Saturday May 31st, 1828, the Reverend Henry Ware Jr., age 35, one of the principal organizers of the American Unitarian Association and minister of Boston's historic Second Church located on Hanover Street in the North End, departed the city by stagecoach bound for Northampton, (which was at the time Unitarianism's western-most outpost), in order to fulfill a preaching engagement he had made there with the minister of that newly-organized Unitarian congregation, his brother-in-law the Reverend Edward Brooks Hall. It was (naturally) a dark and stormy night, and at some point in his journey Ware became exposed to the elements. He arrived in Northampton late Saturday evening both greatly fatigued and soaked to the bone, and suffering from a persistent cough and difficult breathing. After passing "a very uncomfortable night," and "notwithstanding the continuance of these symptoms," Ware "went into the pulpit" the next day and preached both the morning and the afternoon services. Still no better the following morning, Ware ignored the advice of those around him (who encouraged him to remain in Northampton and rest) and resolved instead to return to Boston. He took some medicine (probably some form of narcotic), and set out for home, traveling by horseback in the company of a friend. They made it about 25 miles before they were obliged to stop for the night. At this point Ware's "powers of endurance had been taxed to the utmost, and he went to bed completely exhausted, with every indication of an approaching fever." On Tuesday morning he reluctantly agreed to summon the local physician, who diagnosed "severe inflammation of the lungs" and prescribed both bleeding and other "active treatment" (I hate to think what that might have been) which soon reduced the patient "to a state of extreme prostration."
In the meantime, Ware's companion had continued on to Boston in order to inform both his family and the church of Henry's illness. Henry's wife Mary, then seven months pregnant, set out immediately to join her husband, while the members of the Standing Committee made arrangements to hire one of Ware's young protégés, the 25-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson, to fill the pulpit at Second Church until their minister should recover his health, at a salary of $15 per Sunday. But Ware never really did recover his health, so the following spring the Proprietors of the Second Church in Boston did what any responsible religious society would have done in those days: they voted to hire Emerson as Ware's permanent assistant, and then, in the hope that fresh air, good food, and the Italian sunshine would do for their minister's health what a summer in Worcester and a winter in Brookline could not, raised an additional $1000 in order to send Henry and Mary on what turned out to be an 17 month long European tour.
When the Wares finally returned to Boston in the summer of 1830, Henry formally resigned his position at Second Church in order to assume new duties as the Professor of Pulpit Eloquence and the Pastoral Care at Harvard, a position that had been created specifically for him in his absence. The following spring he published a thin devotional manual titled "On the Formation of the Christian Character," in which he described the purpose of the religious life as "giving your heart a permanent bias toward God." Written during his recuperation in Europe, and a best-seller in its day, The Formation of Christian Character went through 15 different editions, and was popular among both Unitarians and more traditional Christians alike. Even Henry David Thoreau owned a copy (and we know how he felt about buying what he could just as easily borrow).
Emerson likewise was intimately familiar with the contents of Ware's little book, and the two men continued to remain friends throughout their lifetimes, despite the eventual divergence of their ideas. Emerson was apparently never really that comfortable in his ministry at Second Church. An eloquent preacher but an ambivalent pastor, and the orphaned son of a minister who had grown up in his grandfather's parsonage just down the road from here in Concord, Emerson felt both forced into the ministry by the weight of family tradition and yet constrained by the limitations of the profession as well. He eventually resigned his position at Second Church in 1832, ostensibly over a disagreement with the Standing Committee about whether or not to continue to celebrate the Lords Supper, but in reality in order to be free to travel to Europe himself, and to begin a new career as an author and lecturer.
Emerson's first book, Nature, was published in 1836, and in many ways mirrors the same devotionalist perspective of Ware's little volume in its concern for ethics and practical morality, while at the same time representing a much more spiritual -- even mystical -- attitude toward God and the Natural World than Ware would have been comfortable with. Two years later, when Professor Ware's students at Harvard invited Mr. Emerson to address their graduating class on a refulgent summer evening in the chapel at Divinity Hall, the subsequent controversy over Emerson's assertion that "the soul knows no persons" nearly split the Unitarian movement permanently into two wings -- one liberal Christian, the other Transcendentalist -- and in many ways it was only the respect which both groups shared for their former professor that kept the two sides in dialog with one another.
Emerson sincerely believed that the principle theme of his Divinity School Address: that it was the task of the minister to acquaint men and women "firsthand with deity" -- was simply a restatement of Ware's own ideas about giving the heart a permanent bias toward God. What he failed to appreciate was how profoundly most Unitarians of the day were attached to the idea of a personal God. Even when they described God as a "spirit," (which they often did) they also clung to the metaphor of God as a loving parent, and of human beings as God's children. For Henry Ware Jr, the difference between faith in a personal God and a belief in some sort of Emersonian "Oversoul" was the difference between "the condition of a little child that lives in the presence of a judicious and devoted mother, an object of perpetual affection, and of another that is placed under the charge of a public institution, which knows nothing but a set of rules...." "[T]ake away the Father of the universe," he wrote, and "mankind becomes but a company of children in an orphan asylum." Our 19th century Unitarian forebearers argued about Emerson's "latest form of infidelity" for an entire generation. But in the end, it was their ability to lift up the things they agreed on, rather than stubbornly focusing on the points of disagreement, that allowed Unitarianism to move forward -- west from Northampton to exotic, faraway places like Meadville Ohio, and St Louis Missouri, and eventually even San Francisco California, all within that same generation.
I also find it interesting to note that 175 years later, here at the beginning of the 21st century, Ralph Waldo Emerson's name is a household word, while Henry Ware Jr. is all but forgotten except by a few historians like myself. The Second Church where they both preached is essentially out of business -- after a series of mergers and relocations, in 1972 it eventually merged one final time with Boston's original First Church to form the First and Second Church in Boston. In fact, of the three Unitarian Churches that occupied Boston's North End in Ware and Emerson's day, only one is even still standing -- the so-called "New North" church (also on Hanover Street) -- and it's beautiful Charles Bullfinch designed meeting house is now occupied by St. Stephen's Catholic Church, which is best remembered as the church where Rose Kennedy used to worship. (I did check to see whether the Archdiocese of Boston might be putting it up for sale, but apparently it's a keeper). And here in Carlisle, we still celebrate the Lord's Supper once a year -- on Maundy Thursday -- which I'm proud to say makes us one of the few remaining holdouts in the entire denomination.
But the larger point is this: times change, and unless churches learn to change with them, they eventually become irrelevant. But even as we learn to change with the times, we must also remember to hold on to the things that are truly important: things like our belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and the importance of giving our hearts a permanent bias toward God, and acquainting ourselves firsthand with Deity. Thank you all for coming out. And God bless us, every one.
Sunday, January 16, 2005
STILL STRIDING TOWARD FREEDOM
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday January 16th, 2005
Of all the things that can and have been said about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, there’s one thing in particular that is patently untrue. Regardless of what you may have heard or been told elsewhere, there is absolutely no truth whatsoever to the rumor that Dr. King was, in fact, a Unitarian Universalist without knowing it. Yes, it’s true that he wrote his doctoral thesis at Boston University comparing the work of the relatively obscure Unitarian theologian Henry Nelson Wieman with that of the far more famous Paul Tillich; and also that his philosophy of non-violent civil disobedience was inspired to a large degree by an essay by Henry David Thoreau...but don't be fooled. Dr. King was a Baptist minister, a man whose political sympathies and social conscience were directly informed by his understanding of the Christian faith. And this faith both inspired and empowered Dr. King to change the way that Americans live with one another, and in the process earned him a form of immortality in the hearts and minds of individuals like myself, who have grown up in a society shaped by his vision of social justice and his dream of racial pluralism.
But as some of you here will undoubtedly remember, Martin Luther King Jr. has not always been held in such high esteem. During his own lifetime he was often viewed with suspicion, and even outright hatred, by both his enemies and sometimes even his friends. He was accused (and not without cause) of sexual immorality and also (with much less cause) of being a communist sympathizer. He was spied on by the FBI, frequently a target of both personal vilification and physical attack, and spent more than one night locked up in jail for "offenses" that today many of us would applaud. Supporters of the Civil Rights Movement likewise sometimes grew impatient with his philosophy of non-violent resistance, -- at times some of them even referred to their leader as “Martin Loser King” -- while others simply resented that so much public praise and adulation should be directed at a single individual, when so many others had also sacrificed and put their own lives on the line. For thirteen years -- from his public leadership of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott at the age of 26 to his murder in Memphis a few months after his 39th birthday, Martin Luther King Jr. was, for many Americans, the public face of the Civil Rights movement. And in the years since his death, his image and reputation have essentially become iconic of that profound moment of historic transformation in American Society.
It requires a very special sensitivity to bring religious values to bear in the political arena. Without this sensitivity, the results of such activity all too often reek of demagoguery, rather than reform. And it all begins with an understanding of the nature of power, and the rationale behind our constitutional separation of Church and State. Governments govern by the Power of Law. And in a democratic society such as ours, this power is legitimized by the consent of the governed--it is structured by a social contract, the Constitution, and must apply equally to all: the majority and the minority alike. The people elect representatives who are responsible for monitoring and enforcing these laws, and these representatives are accountable to the people for seeing that the rights of all are protected. At least this is what I was taught in my high school civics class. But the bottom line when it comes to the Power of Law is the Power of the Police, and if you break the law, if you violate the social contract, if you steal something or murder someone or refuse to pay your taxes, you can expect a visit from a armed officer of the law, who will use all the means at his or her disposal to compel your conformity to the social contract.
But the power of Religion and of the Church is of an entirely different nature. The power of the Church resides in the authority of its traditional ethical teachings, and in its ability to persuade or influence people to follow them. As the etymology of the word reveals, "religion" is that thing which "binds us again" to our higher moral and ethical obligations as human beings. Its authority derives from its ability to inspire, which is why, for example, if you decide at some point that you no longer wish to contribute financially to your Church because maybe you don’t like the person who is in charge or what’s going on there, no one is going to show up at your door with a warrant and a pistol and handcuffs. The worse the Church can do is send someone around to listen to your concerns, appeal to your better motives and maybe convince you to change your mind.
Now I know there are some who would say, cynically, that governments govern at the point of a gun, while churches maintain themselves solely through the power of guilt. But these sentiments reflect only the underside of moral and legal authority, which are perhaps best understood simply as the Power to help make us Good, and the Power to prevent us from being Evil to one another. And they are not simply two sides of the same coin. The fact of the matter is that the power of the State and the power of the Church are radically different from one another, both in their nature and in their effect; and they are fundamentally incompatible when mixed within a single institution. When Churches attempt to give their moral influence the power of law, we end up with things like the Spanish Inquisition, or more recently, Prohibition; while when Governments assume for themselves the moral authority of religion, we find ourselves with situations like the McCarthy witch-hunts, or on military Crusades in faraway corners of the world, sometimes even "destroying" a country in order to "save" it.
Perhaps in a perfect universe, this tension between Church and State would not exist. Perhaps with perfect leaders: wise, just, compassionate, decisive...the need for a Constitutional separation between Church and State would disappear. But I suspect that in such a world, the need for Churches and States and perhaps even leaders themselves would also disappear. And, of course, this is far from being a perfect world. And despite frequent claims to the contrary, our leaders are far from perfect leaders. We need the protection of the Rule of Law to keep us from exploiting one another. And we need Religion to help us become more fully human. The existence of each helps to correct the abuses of the other; and in their proper relationship, allow us to move hesitantly forward toward what we hope will be a less IMPERFECT world.
In many ways, it is precisely because human beings are at once both political and religious that we have insisted on this strict separation between the powers of the Church and the powers of the State. The separation between religion and politics, or even between spirituality and patriotism, can never be so tidy. It almost goes without saying, but one's political sympathies will inevitably be influenced to some degree by one's religious values, and I do not see how it can be otherwise, regardless where you may fall on the spectrum between liberal and conservative. Thus the issue of Leadership, of wielding power within institutions, becomes critically important. For in the absence of perfection, the best we can hope for is sensitivity and judgment, and an honest and humble recognition of the limits which our imperfections place upon us.
Leadership itself is a vague and imperfect art. Most times it is thrust upon us, through no fault of our own, as part of our institutional roles. Let me explain what I mean by this. This afternoon when you are home watching the Patriots play the Colts, you will notice that every time the teams line up for a play, it is the Quarterback who calls the signals. The Quarterback has this power by virtue of no reason other than being the Quarterback; and the issue of how the Quarterback got to be the Quarterback in the first place, or whether this is the first-string Quarterback or the back-up Quarterback or perhaps even the punter substituting for the Quarterback has absolutely nothing to do with the way that power is distributed there in that moment at the line of scrimmage. The authority resides within the role. And this is true of institutions as small as a family. Your mother is your mother simply because she is your mother, and not necessarily by virtue of any special qualifications for the job. Within that role she is charged with certain responsibilities, and from that role, draws the authority to meet them.
Within an institution like government, an individual who wields power by virtue of role is generally known as a bureaucrat. And since bureaucrats are hardly the most popular kinds of people within a democracy, there is a tendency for the people to look elsewhere to fill the highest leadership positions. Specifically, we look to individuals with "charisma"--who wield power by virtue of their personal "gifts." Once again, these gifts are not necessarily related to one's ability to do the job. Rather, they reflect one's ability to pretend to perfection: the force of one's personality, the ability to inspire loyalty or to project a certain image, the strength of one's Will, and the willingness to muster the required resources to impose that will upon the rest of the world. Charismatic leadership is glamourous and seductive, wild and untamed; it undermines entrenched bureaucratic power through its ability to work outside of established channels, and to gather power directly to itself. At its worst, it is simply the Power of Law unto Itself; and thus it reveals itself as the power which corrupts, and when held absolutely, corrupts absolutely.
There is yet a third kind of leadership which can be seen in contrast to either bureaucratic leadership by role or charismatic leadership by personal gifts, and this is what I like to think of as prophetic leadership by virtue of personal faith and example--the kind of leadership exemplified in the life of Martin Luther King Jr. It is the leadership of the power of religion unto itself, of altruism and self-sacrifice, of the SURRENDER of the Will to some higher value or ideal. This type of leadership wields power by empowering others, and through its willingness to stand as a witness to what is right, rather than as a force which bends others to its will. A prophet is someone who speaks on behalf of others, and prophetic leadership attempts to inspire each of us to our highest potential, while deepening the level at which we approach our existence in this world. And it is not dependent upon any resource but truth, and the willingness to follow that truth wherever it may lead.
The society which Martin Luther King Jr prophetically envisioned has yet to come about. There is still plenty of poverty, racism, and oppression in America; there is still plenty of injustice and prejudice to go around. But the society which King confronted has all but disappeared, at least in the mainstream of American life. We live today in a fundamentally different nation than we did a half-century ago; and while there are still those who would like to turn back the clock, I feel confident that deep in their hearts most Americans still believe that the way to the future lies forward, and that we will never return to a system of American apartheid. Old Jim Crow lies a-moulderin' in his grave; and for most Americans at least, the content of one's character truly has become more important than the color of one's skin.
Yet "Injustice anywhere," as Martin Luther King wrote from his cell in the Birmingham City Jail, "is a threat to justice everywhere." And not just injustice, but ignorance, prejudice, intolerance and hatred threaten all of us for whom liberty and a “free and responsible search for truth and meaning” are deeply-felt religious principles which form the foundation of our personal ethical standards and moral values. Whether we wish to admit it or not, we live within the interrelatedness of One World: in King’s words "an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." Martin Luther King Jr. recognized this, and he also recognized the power of Truth, boldly witnessed and proclaimed, to sweep away the injustice and repression which so often lurks in the unlit corners of such a world. This power is primarily, although not exclusively, a religious power; it is a power which is often purchased with the blood of martyrs or "Witnesses" (as the word means in Greek), who through the courage of their convictions find the strength to Stride Toward Freedom even in the face of overwhelming odds, whose lives become a testimony to their faith in the essential decency of human kind, and the ultimate authority of Goodness over Evil.
It is a power which is not threatened by our diversities, but which draws its strength from our more fundamental unity. It is a transformative power, a transcendent power -- a wholeness which calls us to a greater holiness. Not the holiness of "holier than thou," but rather one which recognizes that "there, but for the grace of God, go I" -- that is to say, a holiness which is rooted in one's sense of connectedness to all things, and the humble recognition that we are, each of us, so tiny, and yet so precious, in the eyes of the Infinite Absolute.
For all his many shortcomings, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. exemplified these values, this holiness. He understood that the prelude to direct action was the discipline of self purification -- for evil is powerless when confronted openly by honest men and women. But he was also not afraid to go to where freedom was not, and say "I am for it" -- and for this he deserves to be honored, and even idolized I suppose; not only through our admiration of him and the things he accomplished, but through our imitation as well, as we too endeavor to Stride Toward Freedom still, in our religious lives, and as citizens of a single community of humankind....
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday January 16th, 2005
Of all the things that can and have been said about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, there’s one thing in particular that is patently untrue. Regardless of what you may have heard or been told elsewhere, there is absolutely no truth whatsoever to the rumor that Dr. King was, in fact, a Unitarian Universalist without knowing it. Yes, it’s true that he wrote his doctoral thesis at Boston University comparing the work of the relatively obscure Unitarian theologian Henry Nelson Wieman with that of the far more famous Paul Tillich; and also that his philosophy of non-violent civil disobedience was inspired to a large degree by an essay by Henry David Thoreau...but don't be fooled. Dr. King was a Baptist minister, a man whose political sympathies and social conscience were directly informed by his understanding of the Christian faith. And this faith both inspired and empowered Dr. King to change the way that Americans live with one another, and in the process earned him a form of immortality in the hearts and minds of individuals like myself, who have grown up in a society shaped by his vision of social justice and his dream of racial pluralism.
But as some of you here will undoubtedly remember, Martin Luther King Jr. has not always been held in such high esteem. During his own lifetime he was often viewed with suspicion, and even outright hatred, by both his enemies and sometimes even his friends. He was accused (and not without cause) of sexual immorality and also (with much less cause) of being a communist sympathizer. He was spied on by the FBI, frequently a target of both personal vilification and physical attack, and spent more than one night locked up in jail for "offenses" that today many of us would applaud. Supporters of the Civil Rights Movement likewise sometimes grew impatient with his philosophy of non-violent resistance, -- at times some of them even referred to their leader as “Martin Loser King” -- while others simply resented that so much public praise and adulation should be directed at a single individual, when so many others had also sacrificed and put their own lives on the line. For thirteen years -- from his public leadership of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott at the age of 26 to his murder in Memphis a few months after his 39th birthday, Martin Luther King Jr. was, for many Americans, the public face of the Civil Rights movement. And in the years since his death, his image and reputation have essentially become iconic of that profound moment of historic transformation in American Society.
It requires a very special sensitivity to bring religious values to bear in the political arena. Without this sensitivity, the results of such activity all too often reek of demagoguery, rather than reform. And it all begins with an understanding of the nature of power, and the rationale behind our constitutional separation of Church and State. Governments govern by the Power of Law. And in a democratic society such as ours, this power is legitimized by the consent of the governed--it is structured by a social contract, the Constitution, and must apply equally to all: the majority and the minority alike. The people elect representatives who are responsible for monitoring and enforcing these laws, and these representatives are accountable to the people for seeing that the rights of all are protected. At least this is what I was taught in my high school civics class. But the bottom line when it comes to the Power of Law is the Power of the Police, and if you break the law, if you violate the social contract, if you steal something or murder someone or refuse to pay your taxes, you can expect a visit from a armed officer of the law, who will use all the means at his or her disposal to compel your conformity to the social contract.
But the power of Religion and of the Church is of an entirely different nature. The power of the Church resides in the authority of its traditional ethical teachings, and in its ability to persuade or influence people to follow them. As the etymology of the word reveals, "religion" is that thing which "binds us again" to our higher moral and ethical obligations as human beings. Its authority derives from its ability to inspire, which is why, for example, if you decide at some point that you no longer wish to contribute financially to your Church because maybe you don’t like the person who is in charge or what’s going on there, no one is going to show up at your door with a warrant and a pistol and handcuffs. The worse the Church can do is send someone around to listen to your concerns, appeal to your better motives and maybe convince you to change your mind.
Now I know there are some who would say, cynically, that governments govern at the point of a gun, while churches maintain themselves solely through the power of guilt. But these sentiments reflect only the underside of moral and legal authority, which are perhaps best understood simply as the Power to help make us Good, and the Power to prevent us from being Evil to one another. And they are not simply two sides of the same coin. The fact of the matter is that the power of the State and the power of the Church are radically different from one another, both in their nature and in their effect; and they are fundamentally incompatible when mixed within a single institution. When Churches attempt to give their moral influence the power of law, we end up with things like the Spanish Inquisition, or more recently, Prohibition; while when Governments assume for themselves the moral authority of religion, we find ourselves with situations like the McCarthy witch-hunts, or on military Crusades in faraway corners of the world, sometimes even "destroying" a country in order to "save" it.
Perhaps in a perfect universe, this tension between Church and State would not exist. Perhaps with perfect leaders: wise, just, compassionate, decisive...the need for a Constitutional separation between Church and State would disappear. But I suspect that in such a world, the need for Churches and States and perhaps even leaders themselves would also disappear. And, of course, this is far from being a perfect world. And despite frequent claims to the contrary, our leaders are far from perfect leaders. We need the protection of the Rule of Law to keep us from exploiting one another. And we need Religion to help us become more fully human. The existence of each helps to correct the abuses of the other; and in their proper relationship, allow us to move hesitantly forward toward what we hope will be a less IMPERFECT world.
In many ways, it is precisely because human beings are at once both political and religious that we have insisted on this strict separation between the powers of the Church and the powers of the State. The separation between religion and politics, or even between spirituality and patriotism, can never be so tidy. It almost goes without saying, but one's political sympathies will inevitably be influenced to some degree by one's religious values, and I do not see how it can be otherwise, regardless where you may fall on the spectrum between liberal and conservative. Thus the issue of Leadership, of wielding power within institutions, becomes critically important. For in the absence of perfection, the best we can hope for is sensitivity and judgment, and an honest and humble recognition of the limits which our imperfections place upon us.
Leadership itself is a vague and imperfect art. Most times it is thrust upon us, through no fault of our own, as part of our institutional roles. Let me explain what I mean by this. This afternoon when you are home watching the Patriots play the Colts, you will notice that every time the teams line up for a play, it is the Quarterback who calls the signals. The Quarterback has this power by virtue of no reason other than being the Quarterback; and the issue of how the Quarterback got to be the Quarterback in the first place, or whether this is the first-string Quarterback or the back-up Quarterback or perhaps even the punter substituting for the Quarterback has absolutely nothing to do with the way that power is distributed there in that moment at the line of scrimmage. The authority resides within the role. And this is true of institutions as small as a family. Your mother is your mother simply because she is your mother, and not necessarily by virtue of any special qualifications for the job. Within that role she is charged with certain responsibilities, and from that role, draws the authority to meet them.
Within an institution like government, an individual who wields power by virtue of role is generally known as a bureaucrat. And since bureaucrats are hardly the most popular kinds of people within a democracy, there is a tendency for the people to look elsewhere to fill the highest leadership positions. Specifically, we look to individuals with "charisma"--who wield power by virtue of their personal "gifts." Once again, these gifts are not necessarily related to one's ability to do the job. Rather, they reflect one's ability to pretend to perfection: the force of one's personality, the ability to inspire loyalty or to project a certain image, the strength of one's Will, and the willingness to muster the required resources to impose that will upon the rest of the world. Charismatic leadership is glamourous and seductive, wild and untamed; it undermines entrenched bureaucratic power through its ability to work outside of established channels, and to gather power directly to itself. At its worst, it is simply the Power of Law unto Itself; and thus it reveals itself as the power which corrupts, and when held absolutely, corrupts absolutely.
There is yet a third kind of leadership which can be seen in contrast to either bureaucratic leadership by role or charismatic leadership by personal gifts, and this is what I like to think of as prophetic leadership by virtue of personal faith and example--the kind of leadership exemplified in the life of Martin Luther King Jr. It is the leadership of the power of religion unto itself, of altruism and self-sacrifice, of the SURRENDER of the Will to some higher value or ideal. This type of leadership wields power by empowering others, and through its willingness to stand as a witness to what is right, rather than as a force which bends others to its will. A prophet is someone who speaks on behalf of others, and prophetic leadership attempts to inspire each of us to our highest potential, while deepening the level at which we approach our existence in this world. And it is not dependent upon any resource but truth, and the willingness to follow that truth wherever it may lead.
The society which Martin Luther King Jr prophetically envisioned has yet to come about. There is still plenty of poverty, racism, and oppression in America; there is still plenty of injustice and prejudice to go around. But the society which King confronted has all but disappeared, at least in the mainstream of American life. We live today in a fundamentally different nation than we did a half-century ago; and while there are still those who would like to turn back the clock, I feel confident that deep in their hearts most Americans still believe that the way to the future lies forward, and that we will never return to a system of American apartheid. Old Jim Crow lies a-moulderin' in his grave; and for most Americans at least, the content of one's character truly has become more important than the color of one's skin.
Yet "Injustice anywhere," as Martin Luther King wrote from his cell in the Birmingham City Jail, "is a threat to justice everywhere." And not just injustice, but ignorance, prejudice, intolerance and hatred threaten all of us for whom liberty and a “free and responsible search for truth and meaning” are deeply-felt religious principles which form the foundation of our personal ethical standards and moral values. Whether we wish to admit it or not, we live within the interrelatedness of One World: in King’s words "an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." Martin Luther King Jr. recognized this, and he also recognized the power of Truth, boldly witnessed and proclaimed, to sweep away the injustice and repression which so often lurks in the unlit corners of such a world. This power is primarily, although not exclusively, a religious power; it is a power which is often purchased with the blood of martyrs or "Witnesses" (as the word means in Greek), who through the courage of their convictions find the strength to Stride Toward Freedom even in the face of overwhelming odds, whose lives become a testimony to their faith in the essential decency of human kind, and the ultimate authority of Goodness over Evil.
It is a power which is not threatened by our diversities, but which draws its strength from our more fundamental unity. It is a transformative power, a transcendent power -- a wholeness which calls us to a greater holiness. Not the holiness of "holier than thou," but rather one which recognizes that "there, but for the grace of God, go I" -- that is to say, a holiness which is rooted in one's sense of connectedness to all things, and the humble recognition that we are, each of us, so tiny, and yet so precious, in the eyes of the Infinite Absolute.
For all his many shortcomings, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. exemplified these values, this holiness. He understood that the prelude to direct action was the discipline of self purification -- for evil is powerless when confronted openly by honest men and women. But he was also not afraid to go to where freedom was not, and say "I am for it" -- and for this he deserves to be honored, and even idolized I suppose; not only through our admiration of him and the things he accomplished, but through our imitation as well, as we too endeavor to Stride Toward Freedom still, in our religious lives, and as citizens of a single community of humankind....
Sunday, January 9, 2005
IF YOU FEAR CHANGE, LEAVE IT HERE
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday January 9th, 2005
[extemporaneous introduction]
I've been thinking quite a bit here lately about how much the meaning of the word "Red" has changed just in the course of my own lifetime. Nowadays to be a "Red" apparently means to be a socially-conservative Religious fundamentalist who typically resides in either the South or the Midwest, and for whom "moral values" was the most important consideration in the recent election. Which is, of course, vastly different from what it meant to call someone a "Red" when I was young(er). Back then (as I'm sure all ya'll already know), "Red" was slang for Communist, or perhaps by association, communist sympathizer (or what some today might call a "liberal") -- the radicals who invented Social Security, and not the ones who want to "privatize" it.
And I was delighted to discover (when I got to be of an age when I could appreciate what it meant) that I actually have authentic Reds on both sides of my family tree. The first was my mother's Uncle Al Glotzer, a New York Jew and fiery young Bolshevik back in the days when that actually meant something, who at one point even traveled to Turkey to consult the exiled Leon Trotsky on an obscure point of Marxist ideology, and was pressed into service as one of his bodyguards. And the other was my father's uncle, "Big Bill" Baldwin -- a minor Wobblie in the forests of the Pacific Northwest who was eventually blacklisted by the timber barons, and forced to eek out a living working in the underground economy as a shade-tree mechanic.
Of course, by the time I was old enough to appreciate what they had done, you would never have been able to tell by looking at them. My uncle Al was a semi-retired court stenographer who split his time between his rent-controlled Manhattan apartment and his modest place on Martha's Vineyard; while my uncle Bill turned out not to be my uncle at all: we learned at his death that he and my Auntie Lala had been living together "without benefit of clergy" for nearly half-a-century, not because "Big Bill" was ideologically opposed to the bourgeois institution of marriage, but because Lala knew that her own mother (my great-grandmother) would never have approved of her being married to a Red! And since Bill had apparently not filed an income tax return in all those years either, his estate turned out to be a real mess -- although I did inherit a box of rather interesting books, including a big bundle of Robert Ingersoll tracts and a hardbound copy of Edward Bellamy's utopian classic "Looking Backward."
The start of a New Year is a natural time for people to think about Change. It's part of our culture: this is the season when we gaze back retrospectively at where we've been, or look forward in anticipation of where we are headed, and if we don't like what we see, we resolve to change. Of course, contemplating change is a whole lot easier than actually changing for real, because there's always a price to pay for change, which brings me to the title of today's sermon: "If You Fear Change, Leave It Here." This was the small, hand-written sign taped to the tip jar in the espresso cafe in Eugene, Oregon where I used to go practically every day when I was finishing up my doctoral dissertation. I really liked this sign, because it struck me as just the right combination of subtle tweak to my self-consciousness about being such a strong creature of habit, as well as a clever reminder that there was something tangible I could do to break out of my own little self-absorbed world of dissertation writing and (in a small way at least) contribute toward changing someone else's life for the better. If you fear change, leave it here. Those seven little words were worth an extra twenty cents a day, or about a dollar a week, for the employees of the cafe who made my tall double non-fat latte every morning. Perhaps not a whole lot in and of itself. But when you multiply by the number of people who, life myself, visited that cafe on a near-daily basis, it starts to add up in a hurry.
We all have different reactions to change. Some people are so change resistant that even the slightest disruption of their familiar routine is enough to upset them profoundly, while others routinely like to shake things up just for the excitement of doing things differently for a change. But most of us, I suspect, are somewhere in between -- we appreciate the novelty of an occasional change of scene, while at the same time feeling nostalgic about the familiar things we hope will never change. And of course, not all changes are created equal; there are also various levels of change, some of which feel more disturbing than others.
For example, many so-called "changes" are merely superficial, or on the surface. The appearance changes, but not the real essence of the thing itself. Superficial change is sometimes compared to "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic," but I'm not so sure this is really fair. Not every little bump in the night is a collision with an iceberg; sometimes, if all you want to do is get out of the wind, or maybe get a better tan, rearranging deck chairs is a perfectly good response. Furthermore, the notion of the "tipping point" suggests that sometimes small, incremental changes which improve quality in key areas, or a few select new additions which enhance what one is doing already, can often create a ripple effect which extends well beyond their immediate impact. And likewise it is also quite possible to attempt dramatic, sweeping changes which never really get beneath the surface of a problem, and often end up creating more problems than they solve.
The real secret to creating meaningful, effective, substantive change is to focus on changing attitudes as well as behavior. It is so much easier to do things differently when you have also learned how to see them differently, and this improved perspective -- a "changed mind" -- is not only the first step, but also the most important step, in creating truly significant changes in one's life, or in an institution, or even in society itself. Of course, not every new idea is a good one, and not all change is for the better. Yet generally speaking, the more expansive one's perspective, the easier it is to distinguish the good ideas from the bad ones. When we allow meaningless details to distract us from looking at the bigger picture, or a false sense of urgency to prevent us from taking a longer view, we end up running the dual risk of changing things that don't really need to be changed at all, while shortsightedly failing to change the things that will truly make a difference in the long run.
Which brings us at last to the most difficult, most challenging, and perhaps most frightening thing about change, which is the frequent failure to recognize that some form of change is not only necessary, but inevitable. The only thing constant in life is change. And yet, it also so happens that the more things change, the more they remain the same. And between these two truisms is the daunting task of distinguishing between reactive or reactionary change, which typically struggles to resist changes in the larger environment by reinventing the past as a bulwark against the future, and adaptive or progressive change, which attempts to anticipate these larger changes and respond to them in fresh, creative and innovative ways.
I want to change the subject here slightly for just a moment, and say a word or two about some of the changes that are taking place in the Church. And not so much this particular church, but rather "the Church" in general, beginning with the evangelical church, the "Red" church. Evangelical Christianity is no longer just the warm, fuzzy, feel-good religion I remember from when I was a kid. And who knows? -- maybe it never really was that way to begin with. But it seems to me that the Good News about redeeming lost souls through the power of God's love has taken on kind of a hard edge of late, and perhaps even developed a bit of a mean streak to go along with it. It's become more aggressive, and discovered a fondness for throwing its weight around in order to get its own way. The so-called traditional "mainline" churches, on the other hand, at times seem to have lost touch with many of their historically sources of inspiration: the Social Gospel, Liberation theology, the Civil Rights movement. As its membership has grown relatively older, and dwindled in absolute numbers over the past quarter of a century, the Mainline church has started to look inward, attending to the needs of its own remaining members and their children, and to the maintenance and preservation of its property and facilities, rather than attempting to save the world by serving humanity in a spirit of compassion and Social Reform.
In addition to its new-found political agenda, the Evangelical church has continued to explore new and dynamic forms of public worship, to develop strong, innovative teaching ministries, and to pursue its traditional evangelical emphasis on making new converts and "winning souls for Christ," together with more generalized missionary efforts intended to transform society and reshape it along "Christian" lines. Meanwhile the Mainline churches have, for the most part, continued to cling to their traditional forms and methods of worship and education, as if by preserving practices that are in some cases centuries old, they are somehow "keeping the faith" as well; and have often shied away from even the appearance of attempting to impose their own views on others, in the name of religious pluralism and freedom of belief.
These are all just generalizations of course, drawn from the research of those who study this sort of thing for a living. There are plenty of exceptions across the board -- exceptional churches who buck the trends and make their own rules, who embrace change rather than reacting against it, and take advantage of the opportunity to shape their own futures rather than clinging desperately to the past. They know that things are going to change whether they want them to or not, and have decided to change their own attitude about the need for change in order to become part of the cutting edge rather than one of its victims. So I thought I'd wrap up here this morning simply by talking briefly about three of the most common "attitude changes" within exceptional Mainline churches that have helped transform them into vital and dynamic spiritual communities for the 21st century.
The first of these is something I know some of you have heard me talk about on other occasions, and that is transforming an existing spirit of Fellowship to a broader spirit of Hospitality. Most churches see themselves as friendly places, and most of them are...for the people who are already part of the community. But often good intentions go astray: churches put up signs or even run advertisements declaring that "all are welcome," but then when someone new actually shows up at the door they are basically ignored (so as not to put any undo pressure on them), and then if they do decide to stick around anyway, they are quickly assigned to a committee, asked to make a financial contribution, and then carefully monitored by the more "experienced" members of the congregation in order to prevent them from attempting to make any changes to "the way we've always done it here."
It's such a common phenomenon that I could probably take this same sermon into just about any church in the country: Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Unitarian -- it doesn't really matter -- and about half the congregation would be thinking "that's just what happened to me." And of course we never hear anything at all from the ones who decided NOT to stick around. But a Spirit of Hospitality intentionally seeks out newcomers, and invites them in as guests. People are greeted by name, and made to feel welcome just as they are, regardless of whether they really "fit in" or may eventually become active members of the congregation. The subtle distinctions between "insider" and "outsider" are minimized or eliminated; perhaps more importantly, the primary question of the day becomes "what can our church do to make our guests feel more at home?" rather than "what can these newcomers do for us?" A Spirit of Hospitality is not about church growth. Its about making sure that people who are seeking something different in their lives can find what they are looking for.
A second important attitude change is the transformation of an existing culture of Conservation and Stewardship into a Culture of Generosity and Abundance. Conservation and Stewardship are about the responsible use of scarce and precious resources, which are assumed to be limited and therefore need to be strictly and frugally allocated. It's a zero-sum game, which borrows from Peter to pay Paul, and where there is never enough to go around. A culture of generosity and abundance begins with a different set of assumptions. It assumes that "where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also" and then asks people to put their hearts into the things they truly value most. Churches never have enough money to do everything they dream of doing, but they always seem to find the money to do the things they really want to do, or feel that they they must. A culture of generosity and abundance lifts up a vision of possibility rather than one of neediness, and then invites people to become partners to help create it. Which is not to suggest that resources are unlimited, or should be allocated foolishly. But often it is only our own sense of limitation that holds us back, and when we overcome that, we become capable of accomplishing together more than we ever dreamed possible.
The final important attitude change I wanted to mention this morning is the transition from an ethic of Faithfulness to one of Mission and Vocation. The ethic of Faithfulness is about remaining true to one's beliefs, and to the values of one's society or community of faith. And there is certainly nothing wrong with that, just like there is nothing wrong with Fellowship, or Conservation and Stewardship either. But an ethic of Mission and Vocation asks that you go beyond mere faithfulness to a discernment of what you personally have specifically have been called to do in this world, and then offers the encouragement to actually go out and do it. In other words, it's not really enough just to "keep the faith;" one also needs to "spread the faith," to put it to work to make a difference in your own life and in the lives of others. Call to mind again that wonderful verse from the letter of James: "Show me your faith apart from you works, and I by my works will show you my faith." But it's not really a matter of "showing off" -- rather, we bring our faith to life by putting it to work, and thus give our lives larger meaning in the process.
Adopting these kinds of changed attitudes isn't always easy, especially if the other attitudes are working just fine for you, and you don't really see the need to change. But I also hope that as you continue to explore these themes in the weeks and months and years ahead, that you will remain open and receptive to the possibility of real change -- some of it apparently superficial, some of it more difficult and substantial, and some of it quite possibly deeply profound indeed. Because the work of the church -- of this church, and every church -- is to change people's lives for the better. And that is certainly something that none of us need fear.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday January 9th, 2005
[extemporaneous introduction]
I've been thinking quite a bit here lately about how much the meaning of the word "Red" has changed just in the course of my own lifetime. Nowadays to be a "Red" apparently means to be a socially-conservative Religious fundamentalist who typically resides in either the South or the Midwest, and for whom "moral values" was the most important consideration in the recent election. Which is, of course, vastly different from what it meant to call someone a "Red" when I was young(er). Back then (as I'm sure all ya'll already know), "Red" was slang for Communist, or perhaps by association, communist sympathizer (or what some today might call a "liberal") -- the radicals who invented Social Security, and not the ones who want to "privatize" it.
And I was delighted to discover (when I got to be of an age when I could appreciate what it meant) that I actually have authentic Reds on both sides of my family tree. The first was my mother's Uncle Al Glotzer, a New York Jew and fiery young Bolshevik back in the days when that actually meant something, who at one point even traveled to Turkey to consult the exiled Leon Trotsky on an obscure point of Marxist ideology, and was pressed into service as one of his bodyguards. And the other was my father's uncle, "Big Bill" Baldwin -- a minor Wobblie in the forests of the Pacific Northwest who was eventually blacklisted by the timber barons, and forced to eek out a living working in the underground economy as a shade-tree mechanic.
Of course, by the time I was old enough to appreciate what they had done, you would never have been able to tell by looking at them. My uncle Al was a semi-retired court stenographer who split his time between his rent-controlled Manhattan apartment and his modest place on Martha's Vineyard; while my uncle Bill turned out not to be my uncle at all: we learned at his death that he and my Auntie Lala had been living together "without benefit of clergy" for nearly half-a-century, not because "Big Bill" was ideologically opposed to the bourgeois institution of marriage, but because Lala knew that her own mother (my great-grandmother) would never have approved of her being married to a Red! And since Bill had apparently not filed an income tax return in all those years either, his estate turned out to be a real mess -- although I did inherit a box of rather interesting books, including a big bundle of Robert Ingersoll tracts and a hardbound copy of Edward Bellamy's utopian classic "Looking Backward."
The start of a New Year is a natural time for people to think about Change. It's part of our culture: this is the season when we gaze back retrospectively at where we've been, or look forward in anticipation of where we are headed, and if we don't like what we see, we resolve to change. Of course, contemplating change is a whole lot easier than actually changing for real, because there's always a price to pay for change, which brings me to the title of today's sermon: "If You Fear Change, Leave It Here." This was the small, hand-written sign taped to the tip jar in the espresso cafe in Eugene, Oregon where I used to go practically every day when I was finishing up my doctoral dissertation. I really liked this sign, because it struck me as just the right combination of subtle tweak to my self-consciousness about being such a strong creature of habit, as well as a clever reminder that there was something tangible I could do to break out of my own little self-absorbed world of dissertation writing and (in a small way at least) contribute toward changing someone else's life for the better. If you fear change, leave it here. Those seven little words were worth an extra twenty cents a day, or about a dollar a week, for the employees of the cafe who made my tall double non-fat latte every morning. Perhaps not a whole lot in and of itself. But when you multiply by the number of people who, life myself, visited that cafe on a near-daily basis, it starts to add up in a hurry.
We all have different reactions to change. Some people are so change resistant that even the slightest disruption of their familiar routine is enough to upset them profoundly, while others routinely like to shake things up just for the excitement of doing things differently for a change. But most of us, I suspect, are somewhere in between -- we appreciate the novelty of an occasional change of scene, while at the same time feeling nostalgic about the familiar things we hope will never change. And of course, not all changes are created equal; there are also various levels of change, some of which feel more disturbing than others.
For example, many so-called "changes" are merely superficial, or on the surface. The appearance changes, but not the real essence of the thing itself. Superficial change is sometimes compared to "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic," but I'm not so sure this is really fair. Not every little bump in the night is a collision with an iceberg; sometimes, if all you want to do is get out of the wind, or maybe get a better tan, rearranging deck chairs is a perfectly good response. Furthermore, the notion of the "tipping point" suggests that sometimes small, incremental changes which improve quality in key areas, or a few select new additions which enhance what one is doing already, can often create a ripple effect which extends well beyond their immediate impact. And likewise it is also quite possible to attempt dramatic, sweeping changes which never really get beneath the surface of a problem, and often end up creating more problems than they solve.
The real secret to creating meaningful, effective, substantive change is to focus on changing attitudes as well as behavior. It is so much easier to do things differently when you have also learned how to see them differently, and this improved perspective -- a "changed mind" -- is not only the first step, but also the most important step, in creating truly significant changes in one's life, or in an institution, or even in society itself. Of course, not every new idea is a good one, and not all change is for the better. Yet generally speaking, the more expansive one's perspective, the easier it is to distinguish the good ideas from the bad ones. When we allow meaningless details to distract us from looking at the bigger picture, or a false sense of urgency to prevent us from taking a longer view, we end up running the dual risk of changing things that don't really need to be changed at all, while shortsightedly failing to change the things that will truly make a difference in the long run.
Which brings us at last to the most difficult, most challenging, and perhaps most frightening thing about change, which is the frequent failure to recognize that some form of change is not only necessary, but inevitable. The only thing constant in life is change. And yet, it also so happens that the more things change, the more they remain the same. And between these two truisms is the daunting task of distinguishing between reactive or reactionary change, which typically struggles to resist changes in the larger environment by reinventing the past as a bulwark against the future, and adaptive or progressive change, which attempts to anticipate these larger changes and respond to them in fresh, creative and innovative ways.
I want to change the subject here slightly for just a moment, and say a word or two about some of the changes that are taking place in the Church. And not so much this particular church, but rather "the Church" in general, beginning with the evangelical church, the "Red" church. Evangelical Christianity is no longer just the warm, fuzzy, feel-good religion I remember from when I was a kid. And who knows? -- maybe it never really was that way to begin with. But it seems to me that the Good News about redeeming lost souls through the power of God's love has taken on kind of a hard edge of late, and perhaps even developed a bit of a mean streak to go along with it. It's become more aggressive, and discovered a fondness for throwing its weight around in order to get its own way. The so-called traditional "mainline" churches, on the other hand, at times seem to have lost touch with many of their historically sources of inspiration: the Social Gospel, Liberation theology, the Civil Rights movement. As its membership has grown relatively older, and dwindled in absolute numbers over the past quarter of a century, the Mainline church has started to look inward, attending to the needs of its own remaining members and their children, and to the maintenance and preservation of its property and facilities, rather than attempting to save the world by serving humanity in a spirit of compassion and Social Reform.
In addition to its new-found political agenda, the Evangelical church has continued to explore new and dynamic forms of public worship, to develop strong, innovative teaching ministries, and to pursue its traditional evangelical emphasis on making new converts and "winning souls for Christ," together with more generalized missionary efforts intended to transform society and reshape it along "Christian" lines. Meanwhile the Mainline churches have, for the most part, continued to cling to their traditional forms and methods of worship and education, as if by preserving practices that are in some cases centuries old, they are somehow "keeping the faith" as well; and have often shied away from even the appearance of attempting to impose their own views on others, in the name of religious pluralism and freedom of belief.
These are all just generalizations of course, drawn from the research of those who study this sort of thing for a living. There are plenty of exceptions across the board -- exceptional churches who buck the trends and make their own rules, who embrace change rather than reacting against it, and take advantage of the opportunity to shape their own futures rather than clinging desperately to the past. They know that things are going to change whether they want them to or not, and have decided to change their own attitude about the need for change in order to become part of the cutting edge rather than one of its victims. So I thought I'd wrap up here this morning simply by talking briefly about three of the most common "attitude changes" within exceptional Mainline churches that have helped transform them into vital and dynamic spiritual communities for the 21st century.
The first of these is something I know some of you have heard me talk about on other occasions, and that is transforming an existing spirit of Fellowship to a broader spirit of Hospitality. Most churches see themselves as friendly places, and most of them are...for the people who are already part of the community. But often good intentions go astray: churches put up signs or even run advertisements declaring that "all are welcome," but then when someone new actually shows up at the door they are basically ignored (so as not to put any undo pressure on them), and then if they do decide to stick around anyway, they are quickly assigned to a committee, asked to make a financial contribution, and then carefully monitored by the more "experienced" members of the congregation in order to prevent them from attempting to make any changes to "the way we've always done it here."
It's such a common phenomenon that I could probably take this same sermon into just about any church in the country: Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Unitarian -- it doesn't really matter -- and about half the congregation would be thinking "that's just what happened to me." And of course we never hear anything at all from the ones who decided NOT to stick around. But a Spirit of Hospitality intentionally seeks out newcomers, and invites them in as guests. People are greeted by name, and made to feel welcome just as they are, regardless of whether they really "fit in" or may eventually become active members of the congregation. The subtle distinctions between "insider" and "outsider" are minimized or eliminated; perhaps more importantly, the primary question of the day becomes "what can our church do to make our guests feel more at home?" rather than "what can these newcomers do for us?" A Spirit of Hospitality is not about church growth. Its about making sure that people who are seeking something different in their lives can find what they are looking for.
A second important attitude change is the transformation of an existing culture of Conservation and Stewardship into a Culture of Generosity and Abundance. Conservation and Stewardship are about the responsible use of scarce and precious resources, which are assumed to be limited and therefore need to be strictly and frugally allocated. It's a zero-sum game, which borrows from Peter to pay Paul, and where there is never enough to go around. A culture of generosity and abundance begins with a different set of assumptions. It assumes that "where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also" and then asks people to put their hearts into the things they truly value most. Churches never have enough money to do everything they dream of doing, but they always seem to find the money to do the things they really want to do, or feel that they they must. A culture of generosity and abundance lifts up a vision of possibility rather than one of neediness, and then invites people to become partners to help create it. Which is not to suggest that resources are unlimited, or should be allocated foolishly. But often it is only our own sense of limitation that holds us back, and when we overcome that, we become capable of accomplishing together more than we ever dreamed possible.
The final important attitude change I wanted to mention this morning is the transition from an ethic of Faithfulness to one of Mission and Vocation. The ethic of Faithfulness is about remaining true to one's beliefs, and to the values of one's society or community of faith. And there is certainly nothing wrong with that, just like there is nothing wrong with Fellowship, or Conservation and Stewardship either. But an ethic of Mission and Vocation asks that you go beyond mere faithfulness to a discernment of what you personally have specifically have been called to do in this world, and then offers the encouragement to actually go out and do it. In other words, it's not really enough just to "keep the faith;" one also needs to "spread the faith," to put it to work to make a difference in your own life and in the lives of others. Call to mind again that wonderful verse from the letter of James: "Show me your faith apart from you works, and I by my works will show you my faith." But it's not really a matter of "showing off" -- rather, we bring our faith to life by putting it to work, and thus give our lives larger meaning in the process.
Adopting these kinds of changed attitudes isn't always easy, especially if the other attitudes are working just fine for you, and you don't really see the need to change. But I also hope that as you continue to explore these themes in the weeks and months and years ahead, that you will remain open and receptive to the possibility of real change -- some of it apparently superficial, some of it more difficult and substantial, and some of it quite possibly deeply profound indeed. Because the work of the church -- of this church, and every church -- is to change people's lives for the better. And that is certainly something that none of us need fear.
Sunday, December 19, 2004
WHEN CHRISTMAS WAS A CRIME
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday December 19th, 2004
Early before dawn on the morning of December 26th, 1776, the Continental Army under the command of General George Washington ferried across the partially frozen Delaware river and attacked a garrison of Hessian mercenaries occupying the town of Trenton, New Jersey. Surprise was complete; according to legend at least, most of the Germans were still sleeping off the riotous Christmas celebration they had tied on the night before. One American soldier described the battle in his diary this way: "Hessian population of Trenton at eight am: 1,408 men and 39 officers; Hessian population at nine am: zero." Over 900 of the German troops were killed or captured, at the cost of only two American lives. On the body of Colonel Ralls, the German commander, the Americans found a letter from a British loyalist warning of Washington's imminent attack. The letter was still unopened.
Ralls had been a victim of his own preconceptions: no "Christian" army would launch an attack on Christmas Day! But these were not Catholics, nor Lutherans, nor even Anglicans that the German mercenaries were up against. They were, for the most part, Congregationalists from New England, inheritors of a Puritan legacy which viewed the celebration of Christmas as a "Popish superstition," a "wanton, Bacchanalian feast," and in some jurisdictions here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a criminal offense punishable by a fine of five shillings and confinement in the stocks. These New Englanders had little care for Yule logs and Mistletoe, wassail and Carols and Christmas pudding. Theirs was a tradition of "pure" Christianity, stripped of the trappings of Druidic witchcraft and Roman syncretism. When they wanted to feast, they declared a Day of Thanksgiving and ate Turkey and Cranberries. And there was certainly plenty of thanks being given on the day their captured Hessian prisoners were paraded through the streets of Philadelphia. The dwindling Patriot army had finally won an important victory, and Congress reacted by voting to allow Washington to continue his command.
Although attitudes had certainly moderated somewhat by the time of George Washington, the underlying sentiments of 17th century Puritanism were still quite influential in Revolutionary New England. Puritan religion was based on three simple precepts: a deeply abiding sense of original sin and the total depravity of human kind; a personal awareness of the regenerative power of God's grace through His predestined election of a few unworthy souls for salvation; and a compelling notion of service and religious duty in thanks for God's gift of unconditional election. The Puritans saw themselves as embarked upon an errand into the wilderness, an errand to create a "city upon a hill," a beacon to all the world which would shine as an example of the ideal Christian community, ruled and regulated according to God's Holy Ordinances as revealed in Scripture.
They took themselves and their mission seriously, yet they were also fine scholars, who were well aware of the pagan origins of most Christmas traditions, and who believed that God would turn His back upon their community should they stray from their stern covenant into the festive merriment of the traditional Yuletide holiday. The frivolous actions of just a few might easily bring down God's wrath upon the entire colony. Thus the magistrates were empowered to arrest and punish blasphemers, Sabbath breakers, and anyone else whose ideas or actions might endanger the stability of their perfect Christian community, including those who celebrated Christmas, whether by feasting, or abstaining from labor, or in any other way marking the occasion as something special or out of the ordinary. For the Puritans, Christmas was a day like any other day; to observe otherwise was not only to risk the wrath of God, but to place oneself in danger of criminal prosecution as well.
The Puritan attitude towards Christmas may seem a bit extreme to us today. But then again, the Puritans never did have much of a reputation as a fun-loving bunch. Nowadays, while we might complain about the "commercialization" of Christmas, or the emotional stress of entertaining our friends and families, few of us give much serious thought to the essentially pagan origins of the holiday, nor, I suspect, would we be particularly concerned about them if we did. The evolution of an obscure 4th century Turkish Bishop, St. Nicholas, into a rotund, white bearded "jolly old elf," who dresses in red, owns a herd of flying reindeer, and lives at the North Pole raises few eyebrows; nor are we troubled by the amazing coincidence that December 25th also happens to be the birthday of the Greek God Adonis, the Egyptian God Horus, and the Persian God Mithra, all of whom were well entrenched on the winter solstice long before a virgin gave birth to a savior in a stable in Bethlehem, and laid him in a manger wrapped in swaddling clothes.
Instead, we trim our trees and adorn our homes with holly and mistletoe much as the Celts did centuries ago; we exchange cards and brightly wrapped gifts; bake pies and cookies and cakes; we sing of miracles, of peace on earth, good will to all; and hang our stockings by the chimney with care. We tell ourselves, with a wink, that "Christmas is for Children," all the time knowing that the best parts of Christmas are really for adults, and are often completely lost upon the avaricious little monsters, who scoff at movies like "It's a Wonderful Life," write letters to "Santa" that require extra postage, ransack our closets behind our backs, and just don't seem to quite understand what the whole thing's really all about. Adults tolerate children at Christmas, I think, because we remember that we were once children ourselves. Indeed, if in any sense "Christmas is for Children," it is for the inner children who live within us still, and are now finally old enough to truly understand the message of peace, hope and innocence embodied in this season.
When my kids were younger and still living at home, we had a tradition in our household of only celebrating Christmas every other year. This unorthodox practice dated back to my ex-wife’s first divorce, and an agreement she had with her ex-husband that the kids would spend every other Christmas with him. On those years, Margie simply skipped Christmas at her house altogether, which worked out pretty well for her, since she’s never really been that big of a “Christmas person” anyway; she always associates this time of year with a couple of very unpleasant memories: the untimely death of her mother, when Margie was only 21, and also the death of her own second-born child, Nathan, from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, a few years after that. So she always kind of appreciated having a built-in excuse to take it easy during the holidays.
And the first year we were married, I think both Jake and Steph kinda assumed that because I was a minister, I HAD to celebrate Christmas every year whether I wanted to or not. So when I announced that we would continue the previous tradition, at first they didn't take me seriously. But after a couple of weeks, when there wasn't any tree, and there weren't any lights, and there weren't any mysterious packages from the Mall hidden in any of our closets, they began to get a little worried. I think they'd both been looking forward to really cleaning up that year, on having two Christmases, with twice the usual amount of candy, and twice the usual number of presents: a real orgy of "ripping," as they so delicately described it, with all the attendant excitement and attention. And I can certainly understand that wish; I suppose in many ways, it's every kid's dream: a Christmas that never ends.
I don't know how many of you have ever had to face this situation of sharing children with a former spouse over the holidays, but it's a fairly common thing these days, and it can be kind of tricky, both logistically and emotionally. There's a real temptation to over-react, to set yourself up in competition with the other person to see who can provide the "better" Christmas, which all too often boils down to who has the deepest pockets. Kids know this, of course, and they play it up for all its worth: not maliciously, I think, but rather because they're not really old enough to know any better. Children have very tangible minds: they like things that they can see and touch. Money is no object with children, because they don't really understand it, although this has its advantages too; the most popular Christmas gift I ever purchased for my children was a 99 cent Nerf ball, which I bought one Christmas Eve as an afterthought while browsing through a local drug store on another last-minute errand.
Yet it is this very quality we find so endearing in children which convinces me that Christmas is wasted upon them. Until one develops the capacity to appreciate the intangibles of Christmas, the holiday remains merely a celebration of consumption: shallow, superficial, and ultimately disappointing. We might as well imitate the Puritans and eliminate it all together, for it adds nothing to the quality of our lives, it simply distracts us from the things that are ultimately important.
The delighted squeal of children on Christmas morning is a transitory thing; it passes away and is soon forgotten: the adults tend to remember it far longer than the kids do. The cries of hungry children who do not have enough to eat are far more persistent, yet even when we pause long enough to hear them cry, it often seems as though there is realistically very little any one of us can hope to do in order to meet that urgent need. Perhaps, if we are conscientious, we try to do our share, and hope that with the help of others, it will be enough. But it never really is enough. Yet it is between these two contrasting extremes that the real meaning of Christmas, the real Spirit of Christmas, can be found. It is found the story of a baby born in a stable because there was no room at the inn, born far from home, on the longest night of the year, to bring a light into the world; incarnating, if you will, the very real possibility that both greed and poverty can be transcended through the simple expedient of profound human relationship, to one another and to the divine, uniting kings and shepherds, animals and angels, in common service to a sovereign mystery, to the appearance of a new star in the sky.
And perhaps it never really happened; perhaps it is nothing but a myth. But the possibility still exists, in the power of the story to help us see beyond the tangible, to reach out to the things we can not touch, and hold them firmly in our hearts all the same.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday December 19th, 2004
Early before dawn on the morning of December 26th, 1776, the Continental Army under the command of General George Washington ferried across the partially frozen Delaware river and attacked a garrison of Hessian mercenaries occupying the town of Trenton, New Jersey. Surprise was complete; according to legend at least, most of the Germans were still sleeping off the riotous Christmas celebration they had tied on the night before. One American soldier described the battle in his diary this way: "Hessian population of Trenton at eight am: 1,408 men and 39 officers; Hessian population at nine am: zero." Over 900 of the German troops were killed or captured, at the cost of only two American lives. On the body of Colonel Ralls, the German commander, the Americans found a letter from a British loyalist warning of Washington's imminent attack. The letter was still unopened.
Ralls had been a victim of his own preconceptions: no "Christian" army would launch an attack on Christmas Day! But these were not Catholics, nor Lutherans, nor even Anglicans that the German mercenaries were up against. They were, for the most part, Congregationalists from New England, inheritors of a Puritan legacy which viewed the celebration of Christmas as a "Popish superstition," a "wanton, Bacchanalian feast," and in some jurisdictions here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a criminal offense punishable by a fine of five shillings and confinement in the stocks. These New Englanders had little care for Yule logs and Mistletoe, wassail and Carols and Christmas pudding. Theirs was a tradition of "pure" Christianity, stripped of the trappings of Druidic witchcraft and Roman syncretism. When they wanted to feast, they declared a Day of Thanksgiving and ate Turkey and Cranberries. And there was certainly plenty of thanks being given on the day their captured Hessian prisoners were paraded through the streets of Philadelphia. The dwindling Patriot army had finally won an important victory, and Congress reacted by voting to allow Washington to continue his command.
Although attitudes had certainly moderated somewhat by the time of George Washington, the underlying sentiments of 17th century Puritanism were still quite influential in Revolutionary New England. Puritan religion was based on three simple precepts: a deeply abiding sense of original sin and the total depravity of human kind; a personal awareness of the regenerative power of God's grace through His predestined election of a few unworthy souls for salvation; and a compelling notion of service and religious duty in thanks for God's gift of unconditional election. The Puritans saw themselves as embarked upon an errand into the wilderness, an errand to create a "city upon a hill," a beacon to all the world which would shine as an example of the ideal Christian community, ruled and regulated according to God's Holy Ordinances as revealed in Scripture.
They took themselves and their mission seriously, yet they were also fine scholars, who were well aware of the pagan origins of most Christmas traditions, and who believed that God would turn His back upon their community should they stray from their stern covenant into the festive merriment of the traditional Yuletide holiday. The frivolous actions of just a few might easily bring down God's wrath upon the entire colony. Thus the magistrates were empowered to arrest and punish blasphemers, Sabbath breakers, and anyone else whose ideas or actions might endanger the stability of their perfect Christian community, including those who celebrated Christmas, whether by feasting, or abstaining from labor, or in any other way marking the occasion as something special or out of the ordinary. For the Puritans, Christmas was a day like any other day; to observe otherwise was not only to risk the wrath of God, but to place oneself in danger of criminal prosecution as well.
The Puritan attitude towards Christmas may seem a bit extreme to us today. But then again, the Puritans never did have much of a reputation as a fun-loving bunch. Nowadays, while we might complain about the "commercialization" of Christmas, or the emotional stress of entertaining our friends and families, few of us give much serious thought to the essentially pagan origins of the holiday, nor, I suspect, would we be particularly concerned about them if we did. The evolution of an obscure 4th century Turkish Bishop, St. Nicholas, into a rotund, white bearded "jolly old elf," who dresses in red, owns a herd of flying reindeer, and lives at the North Pole raises few eyebrows; nor are we troubled by the amazing coincidence that December 25th also happens to be the birthday of the Greek God Adonis, the Egyptian God Horus, and the Persian God Mithra, all of whom were well entrenched on the winter solstice long before a virgin gave birth to a savior in a stable in Bethlehem, and laid him in a manger wrapped in swaddling clothes.
Instead, we trim our trees and adorn our homes with holly and mistletoe much as the Celts did centuries ago; we exchange cards and brightly wrapped gifts; bake pies and cookies and cakes; we sing of miracles, of peace on earth, good will to all; and hang our stockings by the chimney with care. We tell ourselves, with a wink, that "Christmas is for Children," all the time knowing that the best parts of Christmas are really for adults, and are often completely lost upon the avaricious little monsters, who scoff at movies like "It's a Wonderful Life," write letters to "Santa" that require extra postage, ransack our closets behind our backs, and just don't seem to quite understand what the whole thing's really all about. Adults tolerate children at Christmas, I think, because we remember that we were once children ourselves. Indeed, if in any sense "Christmas is for Children," it is for the inner children who live within us still, and are now finally old enough to truly understand the message of peace, hope and innocence embodied in this season.
When my kids were younger and still living at home, we had a tradition in our household of only celebrating Christmas every other year. This unorthodox practice dated back to my ex-wife’s first divorce, and an agreement she had with her ex-husband that the kids would spend every other Christmas with him. On those years, Margie simply skipped Christmas at her house altogether, which worked out pretty well for her, since she’s never really been that big of a “Christmas person” anyway; she always associates this time of year with a couple of very unpleasant memories: the untimely death of her mother, when Margie was only 21, and also the death of her own second-born child, Nathan, from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, a few years after that. So she always kind of appreciated having a built-in excuse to take it easy during the holidays.
And the first year we were married, I think both Jake and Steph kinda assumed that because I was a minister, I HAD to celebrate Christmas every year whether I wanted to or not. So when I announced that we would continue the previous tradition, at first they didn't take me seriously. But after a couple of weeks, when there wasn't any tree, and there weren't any lights, and there weren't any mysterious packages from the Mall hidden in any of our closets, they began to get a little worried. I think they'd both been looking forward to really cleaning up that year, on having two Christmases, with twice the usual amount of candy, and twice the usual number of presents: a real orgy of "ripping," as they so delicately described it, with all the attendant excitement and attention. And I can certainly understand that wish; I suppose in many ways, it's every kid's dream: a Christmas that never ends.
I don't know how many of you have ever had to face this situation of sharing children with a former spouse over the holidays, but it's a fairly common thing these days, and it can be kind of tricky, both logistically and emotionally. There's a real temptation to over-react, to set yourself up in competition with the other person to see who can provide the "better" Christmas, which all too often boils down to who has the deepest pockets. Kids know this, of course, and they play it up for all its worth: not maliciously, I think, but rather because they're not really old enough to know any better. Children have very tangible minds: they like things that they can see and touch. Money is no object with children, because they don't really understand it, although this has its advantages too; the most popular Christmas gift I ever purchased for my children was a 99 cent Nerf ball, which I bought one Christmas Eve as an afterthought while browsing through a local drug store on another last-minute errand.
Yet it is this very quality we find so endearing in children which convinces me that Christmas is wasted upon them. Until one develops the capacity to appreciate the intangibles of Christmas, the holiday remains merely a celebration of consumption: shallow, superficial, and ultimately disappointing. We might as well imitate the Puritans and eliminate it all together, for it adds nothing to the quality of our lives, it simply distracts us from the things that are ultimately important.
The delighted squeal of children on Christmas morning is a transitory thing; it passes away and is soon forgotten: the adults tend to remember it far longer than the kids do. The cries of hungry children who do not have enough to eat are far more persistent, yet even when we pause long enough to hear them cry, it often seems as though there is realistically very little any one of us can hope to do in order to meet that urgent need. Perhaps, if we are conscientious, we try to do our share, and hope that with the help of others, it will be enough. But it never really is enough. Yet it is between these two contrasting extremes that the real meaning of Christmas, the real Spirit of Christmas, can be found. It is found the story of a baby born in a stable because there was no room at the inn, born far from home, on the longest night of the year, to bring a light into the world; incarnating, if you will, the very real possibility that both greed and poverty can be transcended through the simple expedient of profound human relationship, to one another and to the divine, uniting kings and shepherds, animals and angels, in common service to a sovereign mystery, to the appearance of a new star in the sky.
And perhaps it never really happened; perhaps it is nothing but a myth. But the possibility still exists, in the power of the story to help us see beyond the tangible, to reach out to the things we can not touch, and hold them firmly in our hearts all the same.
Sunday, December 5, 2004
THE FLAME THAT WOULDN'T DIE
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday December 5th, 2004
READING: 1 Maccabees 4: 34-59
When I was a child, growing up in a Unitarian Universalist Sunday School, I always had a lot of fun when we were given the opportunity to celebrate Hanukkah. We lit the candles in the Menorah, we played with Dreidels, we heard the story of the lamp that burned for eight straight days, when there was only a one day supply of oil. In the predominately Catholic neighborhood where we lived, "The Feast of Lights" seemed like our Unitarian-Universalist answer to Advent — not only did it avoid a lot of problematic issues like the Virgin Birth, but it also introduced us to the whole idea of cross-cultural celebrations of the Winter Solstice: the coming of Light into the world, in the season where nights are long and darkness reigns, and it had the added advantage of eight straight days of presents. (In our house that particular tradition only lasted one year, by the way; in subsequent years my parents would only concede to allowing us to open one gift of our choice on Christmas Eve).
I always had a little trouble, though, understanding this business about the lamp that burned for eight days in the temple. After all, a one-day supply of oil is a one-day supply of oil; if the lamp burned for eight days, obviously that was an eight-day supply: someone simply must have made a mistake when they were doing the inventory. I just didn't see what all the fuss was about. Maybe there was a clever priest (or more likely, a building and grounds chair), who was somehow able to adjust the flame and stretch the supply, make the oil last longer than it should have. There was nothing miraculous about that; my mom did that sort of thing all the time. She called them “leftovers.” So I guess I just had a strong humanist streak from a very early age, because it was years before I was able to understand that the flame of the Menorah was only a symbol of the real miracle. The temple had been defiled, but the faith had endured, and triumphed. This is the real miracle of the Feast of Dedication.
Let me share with you a little more of the history behind the the story of Hanukkah. In the year 167 BCE the Selucid emperor Antiochus IV ordered the rededication of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem to the worship of Zeus. The Selucids were one of three dynasties which had emerged from the remnants of Alexander the Great's empire following his death a century and a half earlier. Based primarily in what is now Syria, the Selucids were almost constantly at war with a second post-Alexandrian dynasty, the Ptolemies, who were located in Egypt. Even in that day, there were already significant Jewish communities in both Babylonia (which was controlled by the Selucids) and Alexandria (the capital of the Ptolemies). Life in the diaspora had already begun; while Judaea, the original home of the Jewish people, served as something of a buffer between these two Great Powers of the ancient world, and was constantly buffeted by the ebb and flow of their political and military ambitions.
Controlled by the Ptolemies until the start of the second century BCE, Judea eventually came under the hegemony of the Selucids following their decisive victory over the Ptolemies at the Battle of Banyas, which took place near the headwaters of the Jordan River. To a significant degree, this development was welcomed by many of the Jewish inhabitants of Judaea, because the Ptolemies had been great Hellenizers, which is to say they were fond of introducing Greek customs and practices into the cultures they ruled. The Jewish community in Alexandria, for example, had been deeply influenced by Greek philosophy; and it was their Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint, that would eventually become a key factor in the rapid spread of Christianity among the Greek-speaking Gentiles of the Roman Empire.
Selucid rule, on the other hand, appeared to promise the practice of a more authentically Hebrew Judaism, such as existed in Babylonia. But this expectation was not to be borne out. Roman influence in the Eastern Mediterranean was growing; in order to pay for his increasingly expensive military adventures, as well as shield his empire from the threat of Rome, Antiochus IV greatly increased the level of taxation in Judaea, plundering the treasury of the temple in Jerusalem, and also cracking down on dissident Jewish groups who resented the burdens imposed by their Greek-speaking rulers, and who sought the freedom to manage their own affairs. In order to pacify the region, Antiochus IV accelerated the Hellenization of Judaea, siding with those Jews who were sympathetic to Greek ideas and culture, and doing everything within his power to eliminate the practice of Judaism as a distinctive religious faith.
This is the background of the Maccabean revolt. The Maccabees were a guerrilla insurgency who took to the hills in order to resist these changes. Their leader was initially a priest named Mattathias Maccabaeus, who not only refused to offer pagan sacrifice in the Jewish temple where he served, but also reportedly killed the first Jewish apostate who had attempted to do so. When Mattathias himself later died, leadership of the guerrilla army fell upon the shoulders of his oldest son, Judas Maccabaeus, who was eventually able to drive the Selucids out of the city of Jerusalem, and re-dedicate the temple there to the worship of the Hebrew God Yahweh, as we heard in the passage from the First Book of Maccabees I read earlier this morning. This is the origin of Hanukkah — the Festival of Dedication — the only major festival in Judaism not explicitly rooted in the Torah.
There are some major ironies contained within the story of Hanukkah. The Maccabean revolt was a war fought for the purpose of religious liberty — the only such revolt of its kind recorded in ancient history — yet the Maccabees themselves were hardly the religious liberals of their day. They were more akin, perhaps, to modern fundamentalists in their attitudes and practices with respect to their religion; and I suppose if you were Antiochus IV, you might even have called them terrorists. Likewise, the only records of their achievements which have survived were written in Greek, most likely by members of the Jewish community in Alexandria. Although the Maccabees were able to defeat the Selucids at Jerusalem, their position there was anything but secure; thus, a few years later, they entered into a military alliance with the Romans — an act which virtually insured the eventual subjugation of the Jewish people, and the loss of a national Jewish homeland for 2000 years. By the time of Christ, it was Rome who ruled in Judaea; in 70 AD Roman soldiers demolished the temple which Judas Maccabaeus had fought so hard to reconsecrate. Only a portion of a single wall, now known as the "Wailing Wall," was left standing.
Yet the flame of the Maccabees still burns. And the ironies, tragic ironies, still continue. Deep down in my heart of hearts, I have always been something of a closet Zionist. Perhaps this stems, in part, from having had a Jewish grandfather (on my mother’s side), and more recently a brother who has converted to Judaism, and whose wife’s extended family includes Holocaust survivors. But whatever the reason, I’ve always taken pride in the independence of the modern state of Israel, and in the contributions of Judaism in general to Western thought, culture, and civilization. The flame of the Hanukkah Menorah symbolizes the light of that contribution, as well as the persistent struggle of the Jewish people to preserve their religious faith and practice in the face of almost constant anti-semitic persecution and oppression. Zionism reflects the burning aspiration of Jews for a nation of their own, a place to call home. But there is also a shadow cast by Zionism: a shadow which those of us who like to consider ourselves friends of Israel are sometimes reluctant to explore. Hanukkah is a celebration of Light and Hope, Joy and Compassion — in many ways it represents the very best of what religion has to offer us here in this world. Even in the shadow of September 11th and the subsequent war on terror, there are no doubt still many Jews, many people of all faiths the world over, who are deeply troubled by the current “hard line” policies of the Sharon government toward the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza, and who lament the apparent disappearance of hope for a negotiated peace based on principles of mutual tolerance, reasonable accommodation, and sympathetic understanding. It doesn’t matter whether you call it a fence or a wall, trying to confine a “problem” behind concrete and barbed wire in the hopes that it will eventually go away has never really been an effective strategy. Nor does the role of armed oppressor come naturally to the Jewish spirit; and this too, is a lingering irony of the legacy of the Maccabees, whose military victories ultimately brought ruin to their nation.
In his Hanukkah story "The Power of Light," Isaac Bashevis Singer tells of two Jewish children, David and Rebecca, hiding in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto following its destruction by the Nazis during the Second World War. On the first night of Hanukkah, David finds some matches and a candle while foraging in the rubble, and returns to their hiding place to share his discovery. Singer writes:
Now David pronounced the benediction over the Hanukkah candle, and Rebecca said "Amen." They had both lost their families, and they had good reason to be angry with God for sending them so many afflictions, but the light of the candle brought peace into their souls. That glimmer of light, surrounded by so many shadows, seemed to say without words: Evil has not yet taken complete dominion. A spark of hope is still left.
For some time David and Rebecca had thought about escaping from Warsaw. But how? The ghetto was watched by the Nazis day and night. Each step was dangerous. Rebecca kept delaying their departure. It would be easier in the summer, she often said, but David knew that in their predicament they had little chance of lasting until then. Somewhere in the forest there were young men and women called partisans who fought the Nazi invaders. David wanted to reach them. Now, by the light of the Hanukkah candle, Rebecca suddenly felt renewed courage. She said, "David, let's leave."
"When?" [David asked.]
"When you think it's the right time," she answered.
"The right time is now," David said. "I have a plan."
For a long time David explained the details of his plan to Rebecca. It was more than risky. The Nazis had enclosed the ghetto with barbed wire and posted guards armed with machine guns on the surrounding roofs. At night searchlights lit up all possible exits from the destroyed ghetto. But in his wanderings through the ruins, David had found an opening to a sewer which he thought might lead to the other side. David told Rebecca that their chances of remaining alive were slim. They could drown in the dirty water or freeze to death. Also, the sewers were full of hungry rats. But Rebecca agreed to take the risk; to remain in the cellar for the winter would mean certain death.
When the Hanukkah light began to sputter and flicker before going out, David and Rebecca gathered their few belongings. She packed the remaining food in a kerchief, and David took his matches and a piece of lead pipe for a weapon.
In moments of great danger people become unusually courageous. David and Rebecca were soon on their way through the ruins. They came to passages so narrow they had to crawl on hands and knees. But the food they had eaten, and the joy the Hanukkah candles had awakened in them, gave them the courage to continue. After some time David found the entrance to the sewer. Luckily, the sewage had frozen, and it seemed that the rats had left because of the extreme cold. From time to time David and Rebecca stopped to rest and to listen. After a while they crawled on, slowly and carefully. Suddenly they stopped in their tracks. From above they could hear the clanging of a trolley car. They had reached the other side of the ghetto. All they needed now was to find a way to get out of the sewer and to leave the city as quickly as possible.
Many miracles seemed to happen that Hanukkah night. Because the Nazis were afraid of enemy planes, they had ordered a complete blackout. Because of the bitter cold, there were fewer Gestapo guards. David and Rebecca managed to leave the sewer and steal out of the city without being caught. At dawn they reached a forest where they were able to rest and have a bite to eat.
After a week of traveling by night and hiding by day, David and Rebecca meet up with a group of Jewish partisans hiding in the forest. It is now the final night of Hanukkah, and the children play dreidel on the stump of an oak tree while others keep watch. More and more refugees join them, and they slowly make their way to Israel, assisted by the Haganah: an organization which worked to smuggle Jewish refugees out of Nazi-occupied Europe and into the Holy Land. They finish school, marry, and find a small house with a garden in a suburb of Tel Aviv. Singer concludes his story by writing:
I know all this because David and Rebecca told me their story on a Hanukkah evening in their house in Ramat Gan about eight years later. The Hanukkah candles were burning, and Rebecca was frying potato pancakes served with applesauce for all of us. David and I were playing dreidel with their little son, Menahem Eliezer, named after both of his grandfathers. David told me that this large wooden dreidel was the same one the partisans had played with on that Hanukkah evening in the forest in Poland. Rebecca said to me: "If it had not been for that little candle David brought to our hiding place, we wouldn't be sitting here today. That glimmer of light awakened in us a hope and strength we didn't know we possessed. We'll give the dreidel to Menahem Eliezer when he is old enough to understand what we went through and how miraculously we were saved."
Although it’s not really clear from the story, I like to think that their child, Menahem Eliezer, would be about my age this Hanukkah. OK, maybe a few years older. No doubt he has long since learned the story of his parents' rescue; perhaps by now he even has children or even grandchildren of his own, with whom he has also shared the dreidal, with its four Hebrew letters: nun, gimel, he, shin -- "a great miracle happened there." And this holiday season, may we as well share in the miracle of the Flame that wouldn't die, recalling even in this season of darkness our essential connectedness to the whole of humankind, and our renewed dedication to the timeless principles which allow our faith to endure.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday December 5th, 2004
READING: 1 Maccabees 4: 34-59
When I was a child, growing up in a Unitarian Universalist Sunday School, I always had a lot of fun when we were given the opportunity to celebrate Hanukkah. We lit the candles in the Menorah, we played with Dreidels, we heard the story of the lamp that burned for eight straight days, when there was only a one day supply of oil. In the predominately Catholic neighborhood where we lived, "The Feast of Lights" seemed like our Unitarian-Universalist answer to Advent — not only did it avoid a lot of problematic issues like the Virgin Birth, but it also introduced us to the whole idea of cross-cultural celebrations of the Winter Solstice: the coming of Light into the world, in the season where nights are long and darkness reigns, and it had the added advantage of eight straight days of presents. (In our house that particular tradition only lasted one year, by the way; in subsequent years my parents would only concede to allowing us to open one gift of our choice on Christmas Eve).
I always had a little trouble, though, understanding this business about the lamp that burned for eight days in the temple. After all, a one-day supply of oil is a one-day supply of oil; if the lamp burned for eight days, obviously that was an eight-day supply: someone simply must have made a mistake when they were doing the inventory. I just didn't see what all the fuss was about. Maybe there was a clever priest (or more likely, a building and grounds chair), who was somehow able to adjust the flame and stretch the supply, make the oil last longer than it should have. There was nothing miraculous about that; my mom did that sort of thing all the time. She called them “leftovers.” So I guess I just had a strong humanist streak from a very early age, because it was years before I was able to understand that the flame of the Menorah was only a symbol of the real miracle. The temple had been defiled, but the faith had endured, and triumphed. This is the real miracle of the Feast of Dedication.
Let me share with you a little more of the history behind the the story of Hanukkah. In the year 167 BCE the Selucid emperor Antiochus IV ordered the rededication of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem to the worship of Zeus. The Selucids were one of three dynasties which had emerged from the remnants of Alexander the Great's empire following his death a century and a half earlier. Based primarily in what is now Syria, the Selucids were almost constantly at war with a second post-Alexandrian dynasty, the Ptolemies, who were located in Egypt. Even in that day, there were already significant Jewish communities in both Babylonia (which was controlled by the Selucids) and Alexandria (the capital of the Ptolemies). Life in the diaspora had already begun; while Judaea, the original home of the Jewish people, served as something of a buffer between these two Great Powers of the ancient world, and was constantly buffeted by the ebb and flow of their political and military ambitions.
Controlled by the Ptolemies until the start of the second century BCE, Judea eventually came under the hegemony of the Selucids following their decisive victory over the Ptolemies at the Battle of Banyas, which took place near the headwaters of the Jordan River. To a significant degree, this development was welcomed by many of the Jewish inhabitants of Judaea, because the Ptolemies had been great Hellenizers, which is to say they were fond of introducing Greek customs and practices into the cultures they ruled. The Jewish community in Alexandria, for example, had been deeply influenced by Greek philosophy; and it was their Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint, that would eventually become a key factor in the rapid spread of Christianity among the Greek-speaking Gentiles of the Roman Empire.
Selucid rule, on the other hand, appeared to promise the practice of a more authentically Hebrew Judaism, such as existed in Babylonia. But this expectation was not to be borne out. Roman influence in the Eastern Mediterranean was growing; in order to pay for his increasingly expensive military adventures, as well as shield his empire from the threat of Rome, Antiochus IV greatly increased the level of taxation in Judaea, plundering the treasury of the temple in Jerusalem, and also cracking down on dissident Jewish groups who resented the burdens imposed by their Greek-speaking rulers, and who sought the freedom to manage their own affairs. In order to pacify the region, Antiochus IV accelerated the Hellenization of Judaea, siding with those Jews who were sympathetic to Greek ideas and culture, and doing everything within his power to eliminate the practice of Judaism as a distinctive religious faith.
This is the background of the Maccabean revolt. The Maccabees were a guerrilla insurgency who took to the hills in order to resist these changes. Their leader was initially a priest named Mattathias Maccabaeus, who not only refused to offer pagan sacrifice in the Jewish temple where he served, but also reportedly killed the first Jewish apostate who had attempted to do so. When Mattathias himself later died, leadership of the guerrilla army fell upon the shoulders of his oldest son, Judas Maccabaeus, who was eventually able to drive the Selucids out of the city of Jerusalem, and re-dedicate the temple there to the worship of the Hebrew God Yahweh, as we heard in the passage from the First Book of Maccabees I read earlier this morning. This is the origin of Hanukkah — the Festival of Dedication — the only major festival in Judaism not explicitly rooted in the Torah.
There are some major ironies contained within the story of Hanukkah. The Maccabean revolt was a war fought for the purpose of religious liberty — the only such revolt of its kind recorded in ancient history — yet the Maccabees themselves were hardly the religious liberals of their day. They were more akin, perhaps, to modern fundamentalists in their attitudes and practices with respect to their religion; and I suppose if you were Antiochus IV, you might even have called them terrorists. Likewise, the only records of their achievements which have survived were written in Greek, most likely by members of the Jewish community in Alexandria. Although the Maccabees were able to defeat the Selucids at Jerusalem, their position there was anything but secure; thus, a few years later, they entered into a military alliance with the Romans — an act which virtually insured the eventual subjugation of the Jewish people, and the loss of a national Jewish homeland for 2000 years. By the time of Christ, it was Rome who ruled in Judaea; in 70 AD Roman soldiers demolished the temple which Judas Maccabaeus had fought so hard to reconsecrate. Only a portion of a single wall, now known as the "Wailing Wall," was left standing.
Yet the flame of the Maccabees still burns. And the ironies, tragic ironies, still continue. Deep down in my heart of hearts, I have always been something of a closet Zionist. Perhaps this stems, in part, from having had a Jewish grandfather (on my mother’s side), and more recently a brother who has converted to Judaism, and whose wife’s extended family includes Holocaust survivors. But whatever the reason, I’ve always taken pride in the independence of the modern state of Israel, and in the contributions of Judaism in general to Western thought, culture, and civilization. The flame of the Hanukkah Menorah symbolizes the light of that contribution, as well as the persistent struggle of the Jewish people to preserve their religious faith and practice in the face of almost constant anti-semitic persecution and oppression. Zionism reflects the burning aspiration of Jews for a nation of their own, a place to call home. But there is also a shadow cast by Zionism: a shadow which those of us who like to consider ourselves friends of Israel are sometimes reluctant to explore. Hanukkah is a celebration of Light and Hope, Joy and Compassion — in many ways it represents the very best of what religion has to offer us here in this world. Even in the shadow of September 11th and the subsequent war on terror, there are no doubt still many Jews, many people of all faiths the world over, who are deeply troubled by the current “hard line” policies of the Sharon government toward the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza, and who lament the apparent disappearance of hope for a negotiated peace based on principles of mutual tolerance, reasonable accommodation, and sympathetic understanding. It doesn’t matter whether you call it a fence or a wall, trying to confine a “problem” behind concrete and barbed wire in the hopes that it will eventually go away has never really been an effective strategy. Nor does the role of armed oppressor come naturally to the Jewish spirit; and this too, is a lingering irony of the legacy of the Maccabees, whose military victories ultimately brought ruin to their nation.
In his Hanukkah story "The Power of Light," Isaac Bashevis Singer tells of two Jewish children, David and Rebecca, hiding in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto following its destruction by the Nazis during the Second World War. On the first night of Hanukkah, David finds some matches and a candle while foraging in the rubble, and returns to their hiding place to share his discovery. Singer writes:
Now David pronounced the benediction over the Hanukkah candle, and Rebecca said "Amen." They had both lost their families, and they had good reason to be angry with God for sending them so many afflictions, but the light of the candle brought peace into their souls. That glimmer of light, surrounded by so many shadows, seemed to say without words: Evil has not yet taken complete dominion. A spark of hope is still left.
For some time David and Rebecca had thought about escaping from Warsaw. But how? The ghetto was watched by the Nazis day and night. Each step was dangerous. Rebecca kept delaying their departure. It would be easier in the summer, she often said, but David knew that in their predicament they had little chance of lasting until then. Somewhere in the forest there were young men and women called partisans who fought the Nazi invaders. David wanted to reach them. Now, by the light of the Hanukkah candle, Rebecca suddenly felt renewed courage. She said, "David, let's leave."
"When?" [David asked.]
"When you think it's the right time," she answered.
"The right time is now," David said. "I have a plan."
For a long time David explained the details of his plan to Rebecca. It was more than risky. The Nazis had enclosed the ghetto with barbed wire and posted guards armed with machine guns on the surrounding roofs. At night searchlights lit up all possible exits from the destroyed ghetto. But in his wanderings through the ruins, David had found an opening to a sewer which he thought might lead to the other side. David told Rebecca that their chances of remaining alive were slim. They could drown in the dirty water or freeze to death. Also, the sewers were full of hungry rats. But Rebecca agreed to take the risk; to remain in the cellar for the winter would mean certain death.
When the Hanukkah light began to sputter and flicker before going out, David and Rebecca gathered their few belongings. She packed the remaining food in a kerchief, and David took his matches and a piece of lead pipe for a weapon.
In moments of great danger people become unusually courageous. David and Rebecca were soon on their way through the ruins. They came to passages so narrow they had to crawl on hands and knees. But the food they had eaten, and the joy the Hanukkah candles had awakened in them, gave them the courage to continue. After some time David found the entrance to the sewer. Luckily, the sewage had frozen, and it seemed that the rats had left because of the extreme cold. From time to time David and Rebecca stopped to rest and to listen. After a while they crawled on, slowly and carefully. Suddenly they stopped in their tracks. From above they could hear the clanging of a trolley car. They had reached the other side of the ghetto. All they needed now was to find a way to get out of the sewer and to leave the city as quickly as possible.
Many miracles seemed to happen that Hanukkah night. Because the Nazis were afraid of enemy planes, they had ordered a complete blackout. Because of the bitter cold, there were fewer Gestapo guards. David and Rebecca managed to leave the sewer and steal out of the city without being caught. At dawn they reached a forest where they were able to rest and have a bite to eat.
After a week of traveling by night and hiding by day, David and Rebecca meet up with a group of Jewish partisans hiding in the forest. It is now the final night of Hanukkah, and the children play dreidel on the stump of an oak tree while others keep watch. More and more refugees join them, and they slowly make their way to Israel, assisted by the Haganah: an organization which worked to smuggle Jewish refugees out of Nazi-occupied Europe and into the Holy Land. They finish school, marry, and find a small house with a garden in a suburb of Tel Aviv. Singer concludes his story by writing:
I know all this because David and Rebecca told me their story on a Hanukkah evening in their house in Ramat Gan about eight years later. The Hanukkah candles were burning, and Rebecca was frying potato pancakes served with applesauce for all of us. David and I were playing dreidel with their little son, Menahem Eliezer, named after both of his grandfathers. David told me that this large wooden dreidel was the same one the partisans had played with on that Hanukkah evening in the forest in Poland. Rebecca said to me: "If it had not been for that little candle David brought to our hiding place, we wouldn't be sitting here today. That glimmer of light awakened in us a hope and strength we didn't know we possessed. We'll give the dreidel to Menahem Eliezer when he is old enough to understand what we went through and how miraculously we were saved."
Although it’s not really clear from the story, I like to think that their child, Menahem Eliezer, would be about my age this Hanukkah. OK, maybe a few years older. No doubt he has long since learned the story of his parents' rescue; perhaps by now he even has children or even grandchildren of his own, with whom he has also shared the dreidal, with its four Hebrew letters: nun, gimel, he, shin -- "a great miracle happened there." And this holiday season, may we as well share in the miracle of the Flame that wouldn't die, recalling even in this season of darkness our essential connectedness to the whole of humankind, and our renewed dedication to the timeless principles which allow our faith to endure.
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