Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Religion in society

  • Election Day Sermon

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained more than the usual amount of extemporaneous remarks and improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading comes from the Election Day sermon of an early minister of this church. In May, 1776, Samuel West, then minister of our congregation, was invited to preach the Election Day sermon before the Massachusetts colonial legislature. West preached a carefully balanced and beautifully written justification for rebelling against King George. Before I read a fairly long extract from this sermon, I will only say that Samuel West uses the term “magistrate” in much the same way that we would use the term “elected official.”

    “If magistrates are no farther ministers of God than they promote the good of the community, then obedience to them neither is nor can be unlimited; for it would imply a gross absurdity to assert that, when magistrates are ordained by the people solely for the purpose of being beneficial to the state, they must be obeyed when they are seeking to ruin and destroy it. This would imply that men were bound to act against the great law of self-preservation, and to contribute their assistance to their own ruin and destruction, in order that they may please and gratify the greatest monsters in nature, who are violating the laws of God and destroying the rights of mankind. Unlimited submission and obedience is due to none but God alone. He has an absolute right to command; he alone has an uncontrollable sovereignty over us, because he alone is unchangeably good; he never will nor can require of us, consistent with his nature and attributes, anything that is not fit and reasonable; his commands are all just and good; and to suppose that he has given to any particular set of men a power to require obedience to that which is unreasonable, cruel, and unjust, is robbing the Deity of his justice and goodness, in which consists the peculiar glory of the divine character, and it is representing him under the horrid character of a tyrant.

    “If magistrates are ministers of God only because the law of God and reason points out the necessity of such an institution for the good of mankind, it follows, that whenever they pursue measures directly destructive of the public good they cease being God’s ministers, they forfeit their right to obedience from the subject, they become the pests of society, and the community is under the strongest obligation of duty, both to God and to its own members, to resist and oppose them, which will be so far from resisting the ordinance of God that it will be strictly obeying his commands. To suppose otherwise will imply that the Deity requires of us an obedience that is self-contradictory and absurd, and that one part of his law is directly contrary to the other; i.e., while he commands us to pursue virtue and the general good, he does at the same time require us to persecute virtue, and betray the general good, by enjoining us obedience to the wicked commands of tyrannical oppressors. Can any one not lost to the principles of humanity undertake to defend such absurd sentiments as these? As the public safety is the first and grand law of society, so no community can have a right to invest the magistrate with any power or authority that will enable him to act against the welfare of the state and the good of the whole. If men have at any time wickedly and foolishly given up their just rights into the hands of the magistrate, such acts are null and void, of course; to suppose otherwise will imply that we have a right to invest the magistrate with a power to act contrary to the law of God, — which is as much as to say that we are not the subjects of divine law and government.”

    (Full sermon online here.)

    The second reading is very brief, and it comes from Section C-2.1 of the bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association, of which we are a member congregation.

    “We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote:…

    “The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large….”

    Sermon

    It’s election day on Tuesday, a day when registered voters will be selecting national, state, and local candidates, and deciding on a number of ballot questions, and I want to talk with you this morning about the election. No, I’m not going to endorse any specific candidate because I don’t think that’s something a minister should do. No, I’m not going to talk much about the presidential election, because even though the presidential campaign has dominated the news, it is only a small part of this coming election.

    And since I’m a big supporter of the separation of church and state, I want to begin by telling you why I think it is appropriate for me to preach about election day. One of the peculiarities of Unitarian Universalism is that we, as a matter of religious principle, assert the value of the democratic process, and we have religious reasons for doing so. We are religious supporters of democracy. You may ask why this is so.

    To begin with, we value democratic process because we have found that the best form of church governance for us is centered in a democratic local congregation — this is known as congregational polity. We believe strongly in the use of reason and the importance of personal conscience, and so instead of giving primary importance to distant, faceless hierarchies, we have chosen to make the local church the center of religious authority. Of course we also make sure that we have strong connections to other Unitarian Universalist congregations, but those are connections between equals rather than hierarchical relationships.

    Then within the local congregation, we value democratic process because we think no one person has complete access to the truth. Over the last few centuries, we have discovered that it makes sense to listen to all people, not just the rich and powerful people; — no one person has all the answers, and just because someone is in a position of authority does not mean that their answers are better than ours. We have found that a good democratic process is the best way to take advantage of the insights of a wide range of people, so that we can gradually get closer to the truth.

    So because of this, and perhaps some other reasons, we value democratic process as a matter of religious principle. I trust you have noticed that, although we assert the value of the democratic process as a religious principle, that is not the same thing as asserting the value of democracy as it is practiced in local, state, and national levels here in the United States. We can support any democratic process that matches our religious standards for democracy; and so it is that Canadian Unitarian Universalists can be just as supportive of their parliamentary form of democracy as we are of democracy in the United States; and any Unitarian Universalist can be supportive of democracy as practiced by the United Nations. I say all this because I want to be clear that we Unitarian Universalists are not tied to any specific instance of democratic government;– indeed, we may find that our religious values require us to be critical of some democratic governments. Nor are we tied to any specific political party;– indeed, we often find that our religious values require us to be very critical of both major political parties here in the United States, and critical of all the minor political parties as well. Our ideal of democratic process is just that — an ideal, and we often find that reality does not measure up to our ideal.

    Given that we support democratic processes, I have three things I’d like to talk with you about in this election day sermon. I’d like to talk about whether it is your duty to vote; I’d like to talk about what role religion should play in politics; and I’d like to talk about several specific issues that confront us in the coming election.

    …

    Let’s start with the easiest bit first, whether or not it is your duty to vote. Of course we must remember that a fair number of our members and friends are not eligible to vote, whether due to their nationality or age or whatever. With those exceptions in mind, it is my firm conviction that Unitarian Universalism does NOT require us to vote in any election.

    I’ll bet you thought I was going to say that everyone had to vote. But remember the second reading this morning:– we affirm and promote “the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large….” Thus, if voting violates your deeply-held principles such that is against your conscience to do vote, then as a religious principle, you should not vote. This is what we might call “principled non-voting.”

    Principled non-voting can mean that you refuse to vote at all, or it can mean that you refuse to choose between candidates whom you feel are unacceptable as a matter of principle. There have been times when I have refused to vote for a candidate for a particular office because I felt none of the candidates was morally acceptable.

    You might also engage in principled non-voting when you get into the voting booth and discover to your surprise that you have no idea how to choose between two candidates. My favorite example of are the elections for governor’s council here in Massachusetts — it’s almost impossible to find out what the candidates stand for, and more than once I have chosen to not vote for anyone for governor’s council as a matter of principled non-voting.

    There’s another possibility for principled non-voting, a possibility which I don’t think applies to anyone in this church. If someone gets into the voting booth and realize that they can’t vote for a particular candidate because of skin color, or gender, or anything else, then I suggest that it is best for them not to vote at all. We’ve been hearing about this in the current presidential campaign — there are people who will refuse to vote for Barack Obama because he’s black; and there were people who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton in the primaries because she’s a woman, or who will refuse to vote for Sarah Palin because she’s a woman. Here in our congressional district, no doubt there are people who will refuse to vote for Barney Frank because he’s gay. It should be obvious that if there’s someone who refuses to vote for a particular candidate because of skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or what-have-you — then that someone should engage in principled non-voting, and simply not vote for or against either candidate.

    None of this is news to anyone here, I’m sure. Out of religious conviction, we should take advantage of the right to vote, unless voting violates our conscience, in which case principled non-voting is perfectly acceptable.

    …

    Now let’s talk about what role religion should play in politics.

    In the first reading this morning, we heard from the 1776 Election Day sermon by Rev. Samuel West, the minister of our church back in the late 18th century. This is a fairly typical Revolutionary sermon that tries to justify rebellion against the British government, while acknowledging the necessity for maintaining civil order. It is a fairly typical 18th century sermon because West obviously believes that the universe runs according to rational and reasonable laws and principles; that God is a rational being; that human beings are generally rational beings but that we also need a government to keep us from acting wickedly towards one another; and that government is a necessary institution to promotes the general good of humankind. All this is pretty standard stuff out of your high school American history class.

    But I get something more out of what West has to say. He tells us that as long as magistrates “promote the good of the community,” then they are doing God’s work; but when magistrates do not promote the good of the community, they are no longer doing God’s work but instead are “pests of society.” Over the past few years, we have seen a number of American politicians claiming that God is on their side, but Samuel West puts the lie to such claims;– God isn’t on any politician’s side, God is on the side of goodness and justice. King George claimed that God was on his side, but Samuel West said that King George was wrong. Politicians can bring government into alignment with the law of God and the law of reason, says West — but politicians can not bring God into alignment with their political views.

    Whether or not we believe in God, I think Samuel West is onto something here. He is telling us that what’s most important about a politician is the results they achieve. Conversely, he tells us quite directly (and I quote), “whenever [magistrates] pursue measures directly destructive of the public good they cease being God’s ministers.” I interpret this to mean that we should pay very little attention to what politicians say about their religion — but we should pay a great deal of attention to what politicians do to make this world a better place. The proof is in the pudding.

    Given that principle, I believe that politicians should keep their religion out of their politics, and let the rest of us be the judge of whether or not they are acting in a moral and ethical manner. Of the four major-party presidential and vice-presidential candidates, I feel John McCain and Joe Biden have been pretty good at not talking about their personal religious beliefs. However, I have at times been uncomfortable with Sarah Palin and Barack Obama, both of whom at times have seemed to me to inject a little too much of their religion into their politics. Obama has been making a point of the fact that he’s a Christian, which is perhaps understandable considering the racial and religious slurs that have been thrown at him; but sometimes I feel he has talked too much about his Christian faith. Palin, for her part, has been a little too forthcoming about her Christian faith, and about her support for creationism. At the same time, I have also noticed that it’s the woman and the black man who feel they have to talk a lot about their religions, and it may be that both John McCain and Joe Biden have the luxury of being able to dodge questions about their religious faiths because they are white men.

    Maybe the real problem is that American voters push their politicians into talking about religion. It should not matter to us whether a politician is a Pentecostal, a Congregationalist, an Episcopalian, or a Roman Catholic — nor should it matter to the politician. Colin Powell was on the television program “Meet the Press” last week, and he said the following: “Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s, No, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim kid believing that he or she could be president?” We will answer that there’s nothing wrong with a Muslim kid believing that he or she could be president someday. We also know that too many people in America today would only accept a Christian as president. This is wrong — it should not matter what religion a politician adheres to, as long as they are moral and ethical in their actions. I don’t know what to do about this problem, except to point out that it exists — and to reaffirm that we don’t care what religion a politicians holds, as long as they try to keep their religion out of their politics.

    …

    I’d like to end this sermon by alerting you to five issues that I think we Unitarian Universalists should pay close attention to as we evaluate the various candidates for state and national offices.

    First, as Unitarian Universalists, we trace our religious heritage back to the great teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. If what was written about him is even a little bit accurate, Jesus was deeply concerned with the fate of poor and disadvantaged people. He taught that the first should be last, and the last should be first — which I take to mean that we should take care of the poor before we take care of the rich. Thus, when evaluating any political candidate, I suggest we ask ourselves how this candidate will care for poor and disadvantaged people.

    The second issue is also drawn from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was quite firm that we should work for peace; indeed, he is reported to have said, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” There are many different ideas of how to achieve peace, and I have talked with people in the military and people who are peace activists whom I would call peacemakers. Also, peace goes beyond international affairs and includes peace in our local communities as well. While we might disagree about how to achieve peace, I suggest that when evaluating any political candidate we ask ourselves if this candidate is committed to peace.

    The third issue also comes from the teachings of Jesus. You may remember that Jesus told us to love our neighbors. And Jesus was quite clear that every human being is our neighbor, that human love must cross race, ethnic group, class, and gender. Based on this principle, we Unitarian Universalists fight racism and sexism and all forms of prejudice. Therefore, I suggest that when evaluating any political candidate, we should ask ourselves whether this candidate sees all persons as their neighbor, and ask ourselves whether this candidate will fight racism, sexism, and all forms of discrimination.

    The fourth issue I’d like to mention is the principle of ecojustice. As Unitarian Universalists, we are affirm the importance of the web of all existence of which we are a part, and we are committed to maintaining human and non-human communities in a sustainable fashion. The word “ecojustice” implies that economic justice and ecological justice cannot be separated and are of equal importance. With this in mind, I suggest that when we evaluate any political candidate, we will want to consider whether this candidate is committed to ecojustice and to sustainability.

    Finally, as Unitarian Universalists we are committed to the use of reason. We are in favor of extending human knowledge through science, and we believe it is good to be an intellectual. Thus I would suggest that when we evaluate a political candidate, we spend some time considering whether the candidate supports science and scientific research, supports the use of reason in making decisions, and supports being an intellectual.

    …

    We Unitarian Universalists cherish freedom of thought. We don’t hold with religious dogma, and I’d like to believe that we don’t hold with political dogma either. What I have tried to outline in this election day sermon is (I hope) not dogma, but rather matters of principle:–

    As a matter of principle, we should either vote on Tuesday; either that, or we may choose to engage in principled non-voting. Forgetting to vote, however, or being to lazy to vote, are not valid options for us.

    As a further matter of principle, we should resist the temptation to mix religion and politics. We should pretty much ignore what politicians say about their religion — but we should pay a great deal of attention to what politicians do to make this world a better place. We don’t care if a presidential candidate is Muslim or Christian or atheist; what matters to us is whether that politician will provide principled and ethical leadership.

    Finally, there are five issues that, as a matter of principle, I feel should be of concern to every Unitarian Universalist:– caring for the poor people in the world; peacemaking; opposing discrimination in all its forms; sustainability or ecojustice; and the importance of reason, science, and the intellect.

    I will close by reminding you that these are only suggestions. I expect that you are a reasonable, thoughtful human being; I expect that you will listen to your conscience; and I expect that you will participate in democracy based on your own deeply-held principles.

    May we each live out our highest principles, according to conscience, on election day.

  • Working Hard, Hardly Working

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    First reading — “What We Live For” read responsively.

    Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry

    They say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.

    As for work, we haven’t any of any consequence. We have the Saint Vitus’ dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still.

    If I should only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of town

    –notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman,– but would forsake their work and follow that sound.

    I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that is which appears to be.

    [From Walden, H. D. Thoreau, adapted DH.]

    The second reading is a historical reading. It comes from a sermon preached by Duncan Howlett from this very pulpit on March 4, 1945. At that time, the entire city of New Bedford was in an uproar because of an action by the War Manpower Commission, the government agency charged with mobilizing labor for the war effort during the Second World War. The War Manpower Commission tried to forcibly transfer workers from various textile mills, into other mills which were producing tire cord. Both mill owners and organized labor felt this was an unnecessary action, and Duncan Howlett articulated why in this sermon. He said in part:

    “Down beneath a worker’s natural aversion to leave his present job, down beneath the usual aversion to carrying a heavier work load than necessary; there are motives far more fundamental, which are keeping the workers out of the night shift at the tire cord mills. Most of these men have workers have men very close to them facing the enemy overseas. Iwo Jima is not so far from New Bedford as some might think. Brothers, fathers, husbands, and sweethearts of New Bedford workers are there, and they are with Eisenhower and MacArthur too. The workers know what production means to the fighting man overseas.

    “Consider the record of this city for patriotism: Almost complete freedom from strikes, Army and Navy Es flying everywhere…; War Bonds oversubscribed in each drive, and the Red Cross blood bank more than supplied on its quarterly visits. Why in view of all this, and with the rest of the nation calling in question its patriotism, has New Bedford failed even under duress to transfer workers to the tire cord mills?

    “The real reasons are these: The workers are not reassured by the fact that labor disputes are now pending before the War Labor Board. Workers at these mills are not given company-provided insurance as they are at the other textile mills in the city.

    “Most important of all the deep-seated complaints of the workers, however, is the fact that the transferees have no assurance they will not lose their seniority rights. Seniority means a great deal to the worker….

    “But I do not believe even these factors whould dissuade New Bedford workers from manning the third shift at the tire cord mills if they believed that the lives of their loved ones depended upon it. They are not convinced that these forcible transfers are necessary, and for two reasons….”

    [From a pamphlet edition of this sermon published by First Unitarian church in New Bedford.]

    Sermon

    That passage we just heard from the sermon by Duncan Howlett raises an interesting question for me. Howlett seems to assume that there is a sort of promise between the worker and the employer. It is true that the workers about which he speaks were members of a union, so whatever promises existed between workers and employer were enforced by a contract reached through collective bargaining. Nevertheless, Howlett does assume that workers would be treated according to certain standards. The whole point of his sermon is that some of these promises were going to be violated by the War Manpower Commission. He said, “The forced transfer of workers here is unnecessary and unfair and down underneath we sense we are resisting [the War Manpower Commission] for reasons beyond our own workers, and beyond our own needs. High principle is involved….”

    And what is that high principle that is involved? At the end of the sermon, Howlett said: “Let us put human personality first always. Let us not forget the endowment of our Creator to each of us. Let us remember, in fine, that we do God’s will insofar as we care for his children, that is to say, insofar as we guard the rights of our fellowman. Remembering this, let us continue in the faith of our forefathers, faith rooted in the wisdom, power and majesty of almighty God, issuing in the rights of man.” And that is how Duncan Howlett summed up the moral underpinnings of the relationship between workers and employers back in 1945.

    Here we are, sixty-odd years later. Whatever moral underpinnings to the relationship between worker and employer that may have existed back in 1945 are not so readily apparent today.

    There was a time after the Second World War when a whole generation assumed there were promises made between workers and employers. One promise went something like this:– as long as you were a reasonably capable worker, there would be a job for you until you were ready to retire. (For many workers, that was actually an explicit promise enforced by a labor union, and in 1953 nearly a third of all workers were represented by a union.) We should also be clear that this promise was not extended to huge segments of that generation:– for example there was an assumption that women would stop working once they got married; and many persons of color certainly couldn’t count on having a job the same way white persons could. Nevertheless, many people in that post-War generation did assume that as long as you were a reasonably capable worker, you could be pretty sure of a job.

    Whatever the assumptions may have been back in 1945, we certainly make no such assumptions today. I don’t know anyone today who has much expectation that we can count on having the same job all our lives. These days, companies routinely lay people off because of accounting decisions made in some far away office. Companies can and do reduce salaries or benefits or working for no apparent reason at all:– so, a year ago I was talking to someone who worked for a big company; this fellow was at a meeting where the company announced that they were cutting benefits substantially, and when someone asked the spokesman why the company was doing this, he replied, “Because we can, that’s why.” The old assumptions no longer hold; workers can’t count on much in the way of promises these days.

    As a result, most workers today do not count on having a job for very long. The routine advice that career counselors now give us is that as soon as we take a new job, we should be looking for the next job. People in their twenties and thirties fully expect to change jobs every two or three years, and they expect to change careers several times during their working life. A couple of years ago, I was talking with someone who supervised a fairly large staff, and she talked about how this affects her as a supervisor. She said that young workers just out of school will quit their jobs if they don’t get what they want within a few months. She was frustrated by this tendency because she works for an employer which is actually respectful of workers; if those young workers would just be patient, she said, they’d get all they wanted. But workers no longer feel they have the option to be patient. No young worker now expects a company to make or to keep any promises, or do anything for workers. Young workers no longer have any patience for employers, because they have seen all too often that employers don’t have patience for them.

    Speaking for myself, as someone who supervises employees in a church, I know that the rule of thumb for churches is that we should try to retain employees for at least seven years. It takes that long to break even, after you factor in the costs of hiring a new staff person and the costs of the inevitable inefficiency that comes with a new staff person. In churches, and in the non-profit sector in general, managers are constantly seeking out increased efficiency due to the rising cost of running a non-profit. And yet we face increased inefficiency because staff won’t stick around for long; we are paying the price of employers who show no loyalty to workers.

    No one is happy with this situation. I am not an economist, nor a political scientist, so I will propose no solutions to this problem. But I am a minister, and I can ask this: As religious people, how can make sense of this problem?

    To begin with, I believe we have to talk openly and honestly about this problem. Now historically, most churches have not been places where we talk about work. We might talk about our jobs when we are socializing with other church folks, but my experience in churches has been that most church people rarely talk about work itself. I guess that jobs are somehow understood as being non-spiritual.

    I should add that our own church is somewhat of an exception to my general experience. I believe that we are more likely to talk about our work, and about work in general. Our members and friends get up during the candles of joy and concern, and talk about our jobs: talk about not having work, talk about changing jobs, and so on. The simple fact that we often mention our jobs in the course of a worship service is, I believe, a little unusual, in a good way.

    We should talk about work at church. Our jobs take up a significant percentage of our time. Our church should be a safe place for us to talk about the moral and spiritual implications of this significant part of our lives. We should be able to talk about not having work, since unemployment can be very difficult. And then there’s retirement: for many people, retirement can lead to some intensive self-reassessment, so we should be able to talk about the moral and spiritual implications retirement.

    Not only should our church be a place where we talk about our own experiences of work, I feel our church can also be a place where we can reach out to those who are younger and less experienced than are we. I’m specifically thinking about how we might reach out to high school and college students. From the very beginning of my time here, members and friends of this church have said we should extend some kind of outreach to the students at UMass Dartmouth and at Bristol Community College. There are many reasons why reach out to the religiously liberal college students in our area, but one of the most important reasons is that many or most college students find themselves in the middle of what amounts to a spiritual crisis: they are figuring out what work they can do that will earn them a living, while providing some kind of meaning and purpose in their own lives. This spiritual crisis can extend from a person’s teens right through their twenties. Our church can be a place where people of all ages can talk about the moral and spiritual implication of work, and where older workers can listen to and offer advice to younger people.

    And we can go beyond the narrow bounds of our own personal lives. Religion is supposed to help us to contemplate the broader implications of personal matters. When someone we love dies, our religion not only helps us with that immediate death, but our religion can help us to contemplate the broader meaning of death. When we have a child, when we marry, our religion can help us to contemplate the broader meaning of new life, or of the creation of a new family. When it comes to work, religion can help us contemplate broader meanings.

    All the great religious traditions of the world do, in fact, help us to contemplate the broader meaning of the work we do. I am most familiar with the Christian tradition, and the meaning of work is woven throughout the Christian scriptures. Jesus is best known for his religious pronouncements, but I’ve always found that Jesus often talks about work. I’d like to take just a moment on two of the things Jesus says about work.

    First, Jesus tells us that we shouldn’t take our work too seriously. For example, he says: “No one can be a slave to two masters. No doubt that slave will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and disdain the other. You can’t be enslaved to both God and a bank account! That’s why I tell you: Don’t fret about your life — what you’re going to eat or drink — or about your body — what you’re going to wear. There is more to living than food and clothing. ” That’s what Jesus says in the book known as the Gospel of Matthew, as translated by the Jesus Seminar. And what he says here sounds strikingly similar to what Henry David Thoreau tells us in the first reading we heard this morning, when he says, “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.” Much of what Henry Thoreau said was, in fact, merely an elaboration of Jesus’ political and economic philosophy of giving higher priority to spiritual matters than to financial matters.

    Secondly, Jesus also talks directly about the realities of work and workers, as in this long parable:

    “Heaven’s imperial rule is like a proprietor who went out the first thing in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the workers for a silver coin a day he sent them into his vineyard.

    “And coming out around 9 a.m. he saw others loitering in the marketplace and said to them, ‘You go into the vineyard too, and I’ll pay you whatever is fair.’ So they went.

    “Around noon he went out again, and at 3 p.m., and repeated the process. About 5 p.m. he went out and found othes loitering about and says to them, ‘Why do you stand around here idle the whole day?’

    “They reply, ‘Because no one hired us.’

    “He tells them, ‘You go into the vineyard as well.’

    “When evening came the owner of the vineyard tells his foreman: ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages staring with those hired last and ending with those hired first.’

    “Those hired at 5 p.m. came up and received a silver coin each. Those hired first approached thinking they would receive more. But they also got a silver coin apiece. They took it and began to grumble against the proprietor: ‘These guys hired last worked only an hour but you have made them the equal to us who did most of the work during the heat of the day.’

    “In response he said to one of them, ‘Look, pal, did I wrong you? you did agree with me for a silver coin, didn’t you? Take your wage and get out! I intend to treat the one hired last the same way I treat you. Is there some law forbidding me to do with my money as I please? Or is your eye filled with envy because I am generous?’ ” [Mt. 20.1-14]

    In this parable about work, Jesus asks us to contemplate the idea of an employer who treats his workers better than we expect. This parable may seem absurd because most of us who have worked have experienced being stiffed by an employer. Not many of us have experienced being treated better than we expected to be treated. Jesus asks us to contemplate an absurd world, which he calls “heaven’s imperial rule,” in which employers are more moral than they need to be.

    We live in an era when employers are becoming less moral rather than more moral. Big corporations no longer make any pretence of behaving morally towards their workers. Global capitalism has become amoral, that is, it has no morals at all. It used to be that the ideal was that people would go in business to provide something that the world needed, and would make a profit on the way there. But no longer. Now you’re simply supposed to find a business that will make you money.

    Our religion, this church, can give us a place where we can ask: what does it mean to work for a living? Morally speaking, what does it mean to be in business, or what does it mean to work in a certain industry? What does it mean to receive fair wages, and what does it mean to try to offer fair wages to all workers? Morally speaking, what does it mean when we can no longer count on our jobs, when we can no longer count on our employees? Our church is one place where we can, and should, have conversations about the amorality of our current economic system.

    And as we consider how our current economic system is amoral, we will want to think about whether it is possible to create a moral alternative. At the most immediate level, we might wish to talk about whether it’s even possible in the current business climate for employers to treat workers decently. Duncan Howlett’s sermon operated at this immediate level of fairness.

    And then we will wish to get deeper into this topic. What would it look like if we had a truly moral and just economic system? Do we turn to Henry David Thoreau, with his thought that most of our work is nothing more than a sort of St. Vitus’s dance? Or do we go even further than that and try to find truth in the absurd parables of Jesus in which the whole world is turned topsy-turvy?

    I don’t know that we will ever find answers to these questions. Nor do I think there will ever be simple answers to the moral and spiritual questions of work. But we can address those questions….

  • Creation Speculation

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading is probably familiar to you. It is from the first chapter of the Book of Genesis from the Hebrew Bible, in the poetic King James translation:

    1 “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
    2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
    3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
    4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
    5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
    6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
    7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
    8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
    9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
    10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
    11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
    12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
    13 And the evening and the morning were the third day….”

    …

    The second reading is from the Mahabharata, the central book of the Hindu tradition, in the new University of Chicago translation:

    Poets have told it before, poets are telling it now, other poets shall tell this history on earth in the future….

    When all this was without light and unillumined, and on all its sides covered by darkness, there arose one large Egg, the inexhaustible seed of all creatures. They say this was the great divine cause, in the beginning of the Eon; and that on which it rests is revealed as the true Light, the everlasting Brahman. Wondrous it was and beyond all imagining, in perfect balance in all its parts, this unmanifest subtle cause that is that which is and that which is not.

    From it was born the Grandfather, the Sole Lord Prajāpati, who is known as Brahmā, as the Preceptor of the Gods, as Sthāṇu, Manu, Ka, and Parameṣṭhin. From him sprang Dakṣa, son of Pracetas, and thence the seven sons of Dakṣa, and from them came forth the twenty-one Lords of Creation. And the Person of immeasurable soul, the One whom the seers know as the universe; and the Viśve Devas, and the Ādityas as well as the Vasus and the two Aśvins. Yakṣas, Sādhyas, Piśācas, Guyakas, and the Ancestors were born from it, and the wise and impeccable Seers. So also the many royal seers, endowed with every virtue. Water, Heaven and Earth, Wind, Atmosphere, and Space, the year, the seasons, the months, the fortnights, and days and nights in turn, and whatever else, has all come forth as witnessed by the world. Whatever is found to exist, moving and unmoving, it is all again thrown together, all this world, when the destruction of the Eon has struck. Just as with the change of the season all the various signs of the season appear, so also these beings at the beginning of each Eon. Thus, without beginning and without end, rolls the wheel of existence around in this world, causing origin and destruction, beginningless and endless.

    There are thirty-three thousand, thirty-three hundred, and thirty-three Gods — this is the summing up of creation.

    [Mahābhārta 1.25-39, trans. J. A. B. van Buitenen in “The Mahābhārta, vol. 1: The Book of the Beginning”, University of Chicago, p. 21.]

    Sermon

    Recently, I realized that I have never given a sermon addressing creationism or “intelligent design.” I never saw the need to do so. There’s no real need for one Unitarian Universalist to stand up in front of a bunch of other Unitarian Universalists and state that intelligent design, or “creation science,” or whatever they’re calling it these days, is nothing more than religious dogma barely covered with a thin veneer of alleged science. Everyone here knows that “intelligent design” is not science. If a proponent of intelligent design says to us, “But evolution is just a theory,” we all know enough to say, “Yeah, and the theory of gravity is just a theory, but if you throw yourself at the floor it’s going to hurt all the same.” For a Unitarian Universalist to preach a sermon against intelligent design is about as sporting as shooting fish in a barrel.

    At the same time, those creationists — sorry, those proponents of intelligent design — are so loud and insistent that they tend to drown us out. Something like a third of all adults in the United States believe evolution is false, and although we take great joy in pointing out that all those people are perfectly willing to take advantage of the advances of medical science, which are firmly based on evolutionary theory, the fact remains that all those people are injecting their dogmatic theology into our lives. And that forces us to spend quite a bit of our precious time debunking the Bible, to the point where we often get sick and tired of the Bible. We get so sick of hearing people say, “But God created the earth in seven days, it says so right in the Bible, so the scientists must be wrong” — that we just want to do away with the Bible altogether.

    So although we don’t need a sermon debunking creationism, I do think it’s worth preaching a sermon about the value of religious creation stories. I’m not going to try to convince you to read the Bible, but I am going to try to convince you that the creation story contained in the Bible is a worthwhile part of our religious inheritance.

    1. To begin with, let us be clear what the Bible is, and what it is not. The Bible is a collection of books which includes many books full of stories. The book of Genesis contains several dramatic and arresting stories: the story of Noah and the flood, the story of Abraham and Isaac, the story of Joseph and his technicolor dream coat, the story of Eve and Adam,– and the story of how God created the universe. All these stories are strung together in a more-or-less coherent narrative that begins at the beginning, and winds up with the establishment of the people of Israel as the chosen people of their God.

    When you think about it this way, it’s obvious that the book of Genesis has more in common with a novel than with a collection of scientific treatises. The creation story in Genesis is not a systematic scientific explanation for how the universe came to be; it’s a story that reveals something about the character of God and humanity. It is not a book full of precise scientific proofs. The philosopher Aristotle tells us that it is the mark of an educated person “to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.” [Nich. Eth. I.2, 1094b] We know that it is foolish to read the book of Genesis looking for the kind of certainty science can bring to certain subjects; but we should be equally clear that the Bible can reveal to us something of the poetic truth about our human selves, and something of the poetic truth about our place in the universe; topics which do not allow the same kind of precise scientific knowledge.

    Religion is meant to help us find meaning in life (among other things). A scientist might be able to look at a flower and tell us its place in a taxonomic scheme, reveal to us its place in the wider ecosystem, show us its inner anatomy; we may well feel a sense of wonder at this but we are unlikely to feel enough emotion that we need to wipe tears from our eyes. A poet can look at the same flower, and write for us a poem that will cause us to weep, or to rejoice, or discover profound feelings or thoughts about that flower; and we may well need to wipe tears from our eyes after the poet speaks to us. But the poet and the scientist do not contradict each other; they only reveal to us a different aspect of the same flower. Religion is yet another way of knowing the flower: religion may help us to look at that flower and know our relationship to it, and so help us to understand our place in the universe and the flower’s place in the universe; not through the precise taxonomic understanding used by the scientist, nor through the metaphorical and emotional understanding used by the poet, but through an understanding of how everything is connected and bound together. The book of Genesis locates that connection in the personage of God; the New Testament locates that connectedness in the Kingdom of Heaven; but we could simply call it the Web of Life through which we are connected with all that is living and non-living.

    That, in fact, is what the creation story in the book of Genesis tells us. Genesis tells us about a God that created everything, including us human beings. Genesis tells us that we are connected through God to all that is: the sun and moon and stars and sky and plants and animals and the other human beings. A literal reading of Genesis would try to tell us that there is a literal personage called God who created all these things; but such a literal interpretation of God immediately runs into all kinds of logical inconsistencies; such a literal interpretation tries to turn Genesis into precise scientific knowledge, when it is really religious understanding.

    An equally literal reading of Genesis would dismiss the whole book out of hand because it does not conform to scientific facts and theories as we know them. Many of the Bible-debunkers who are active today fall into this intellectual trap; they accept the arguments made by creationists and literalists that the Bible is literally true. Such literal interpretations try to turn Genesis into science, when it is really religion. It would be far more accurate to understand God, not as a literal personage, and not as a scientific explanation, but as the Web of Life through which we feel and know a deep connection to all life and to all that is.

    2. We can gain a deeper understanding of the creation story in Genesis if we take the time to look at other creation stories from other world religions. I happen to love the imagery in the creation story of the Mahabharata:– the one large Egg which arose, from which time began, and out of which came everything in the universe. From that great Egg came Brahmā, and from that came all the gods, and the ancestors, and the seers and sages;– and “Water, Heaven and Earth, Wind, Atmosphere, and Space, the year, the seasons, the months, the fortnights, and days and nights in turn, and whatever else, has all come forth” from that Egg.

    In this Hindu story of creation, just as in the creation story in Genesis, we learn of the connectedness of all things. The details of the Hindu creation story are quite different from those in the Hebrew creation story. But both tell of the Web of Life that connects us human beings with the earth and sky, with water and wind, with all beings including all human beings.

    Back when my mother was teaching Sunday school in a Unitarian church in the 1950s, there was a curriculum called Beginnings of Earth and Sky, which presented a number of different creation stories to school-aged children; and today we still teach our Unitarian Universalist children a variety of creation stories. We do this for good reason. Of course we want our children to know the creation story in Genesis, a story that is central to our own religious inheritance; but we want them to know other creation stories as well, so they can begin to understand how all religions begin with a sense of wonder at the universe, a sense of how everything is interconnected through the one Web of Life; indeed, we want them to have a sense of how all religions are utterly different while remaining deeply connected. All these creation stories, all these religions, are different, but each can help human beings to understand who we are and where we are situated in the universe, and so lead us to find meaning and connection in our lives.

    3. I said that we are open to learning the creation stories of other cultures and other religions. That raises an interesting question: Do we need a creation story of our own? Quite a few people would respond that yes, we do need a new creation story that is all our own. A year ago I heard two Unitarian Universalists, Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow, speak about a new creation story that they think Unitarian Universalists and other religious liberals should adopt. They want us to adopt a new creation story put forth by a fellow named Brian Swimme, who tells a creation story founded on modern science, a creation story that links contemporary astronomical theories about the beginnings of the universe, with evolutionary theories about the beginnings of life on this planet.

    There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Anyone can sit down and write their own creation story. And for some people, Brian Swimme’s creation story has become an important part of their religious understanding. I’ll admit my bias: I’m not enthralled by this or other similar modern creation stories. I’m not particularly interested in mixing my religious creation stories with science; especially considering how science has a way of evolving and moving forward; and for me science has its own beauty that will is diminished by mixing it with story-telling.

    More to the point, none of these modern creation stories is anywhere near as lovely as the Genesis creation story, or the creation story in the Mahabharata. You’d have to be a pretty good poet to compete with the beauty of the poetry of the King James version of Genesis, and frankly Brian Swimme and other creators of modern creation stories are not a particularly good poets. And you’d have to be a pretty good storyteller to compete with the generations of people who told and retold and polished both the Hindu creation story and the Genesis story before they were finally set down in writing. If you’re going to come up with your own creation story, you’re facing an uphill battle to create something to equal the beauty of these age-old stories. For that matter, you’re facing an uphill battle if you’re going to compete with the beauty of scientific theories that have been honed over the decades by a whole community of scientific researchers. So if you want to create, or find, a new, modern creation story, more power to you — but I don’t give you a very good chance of making a success of it.

    Personally, I prefer to stick with the creation story in Genesis. Even though the creationists and the other literalists and fundamentalists have done a pretty good job of wrecking Genesis, it has one deep strength. The central theme of Genesis, as with most of the Hebrew Bible, is the theme of justice. Genesis aims to hold us to high ethical and moral standards. Those high ethical and moral standards have been perverted at times by being inappropriately associated with guilt and shame; the same literalists who say that Genesis tells us that God created the universe in seven days also try to tell us about “original sin,” a phrase that appears nowhere in Genesis, and which is simply a figment of their imaginations. But in spite of these perversions of Genesis, it remains a book founded on the principle of equal justice for all human beings.

    The real creation story in Genesis tells us that we are connected through the Web of Life with all that is; it is through this connection t hat we know our inherent worth and dignity, and thus our right to equal justice no matter who we are. Furthermore, the creation story in Genesis can give us what we’d now call an ecological approach to justice. We can read the creation story in Genesis thusly: Earth was given as a garden to human beings, and indeed to all beings. And if Earth is a garden, then we are the gardeners who are supposed to keep things growing well. As gardeners, we nurture and help things grow; and in so doing we are connected with the cycle of life and death. As gardeners, we are ethically and morally responsible for nurturing the garden so that all beings have access to life and the means for life; we have a moral responsibility to facilitate the interconnectedness of the Web of Life.

    So it is that I don’t yet want to abandon the Genesis creation story. Even though the creationists have twisted Genesis to their own purposes, that doesn’t affect the true meaning of the story. Even though science presents a different truth to us, that doesn’t do away with the importance of the Genesis story. The creation story in Genesis tells us about our responsibility to nurture all life and respect all beings; through its poetry it tells us that we are connected to the entire Web of Life.