Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Religion in society

  • 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.

  • Moses and the Underground Railroad

    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 from the Torah, the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 34 in its entirety:

    “Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho, and the Lord showed him the whole land: Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, and the Plain—that is, the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees—as far as Zoar. The Lord said to him, ‘This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, “I will give it to your descendants”; I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.’ Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, at the Lord’s command. He was buried in a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor, but no one knows his burial place to this day. Moses was one hundred and twenty years old when he died; his sight was unimpaired and his vigour had not abated. The Israelites wept for Moses in the plains of Moab for thirty days; then the period of mourning for Moses was ended.

    “Joshua son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom, because Moses had laid his hands on him; and the Israelites obeyed him, doing as the Lord had commanded Moses.

    “Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. He was unequalled for all the signs and wonders that the Lord sent him to perform in the land of Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his servants and his entire land, and for all the mighty deeds and all the terrifying displays of power that Moses performed in the sight of all Israel.”

    [NRSV]

    The second reading is from an article written by William L. Van Deburg, a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The article is titled, “Frederick Douglass: Maryland Slave to Religious Liberal”:

    “It would be a mistake to portray [Frederick] Douglass as a piously conservative Christian. His biographers have correctly noted that he was not orthodox in his doctrine. His belief that religion should be used as an instrument for social reconstruction led him to despise the passive attitude shown by many Negro ministers.

    “As he progressed in his abolitionist career, Douglass was influenced by those champions of Reason, Transcendentalism, and Unitarianism whose doctrines he had condemned. In and 1848 essay, he noted that the destiny of the Negro race was committed to human hands. God was not wholly responsible for freeing those in bondage. By 1853, he was willing to criticize Henry Ward Beecher’s reliance on God to end slavery. If Beecher had been a slave, Douglass noted, he would have been ‘whipped … out of his willingness’ to wait for the power of Christian faith to break his chains.

    “Increasingly, enlightenment terminology crept into Douglass’s writings and speeches. Negroes were adjudged to be ‘free by the laws of nature.’

    “The slaves’ claim to freedom was ‘backed up by all the ties of nature, and nature’s God.’ Man’s [sic] right to liberty was self-evident since ‘the voices of nature, of conscience, of reason, and of revelation, proclaim it as the right of all rights.’…

    “Douglass was also affected by the words of transcendentalist preacher Theodore Parker. The [Unitarian] minister’s ideas on the perfectibility of man [sic] and the sufficiency of natural religion were eventually incorporated in the abolitionist’s epistemology. In 1854, Douglass noted, ‘I heard Theodore Parker last Sabbath. No man preaches more truth than this eloquent man, this astute philosopher’.”

    [in By These Hands: A Documentary History of African American Humanism, ed. Anthony Pinn (New York: NYU Press, 2001), pp. 89-90.]

    Sermon

    The great old story of Moses — the story of how Moses led the Hebrew people up out of Egypt, up out of slavery, and on to the promised land, a land of milk and honey — is one of the most inspiring stories in the Bible. It is a story that has inspired oppressed peoples everywhere. And it is a story that has troubled the oppressors mightily, to the point where some American slave owners made special Bibles for their slaves by literally cutting out the book of Exodus, so as not to give their slaves any ideas that the Christian religion promoted freedom. The story of Exodus has been central to the African American church tradition; it is a story that inspired people like Martin Luther King. Exodus is a story that today continues to inspire freedom-loving people around the world:– from the radical Christians in Latin America who engage in liberation theology, to the members of the oppressed Dalit caste in India.

    What a powerful story Exodus is! The Hebrews went down to Egypt; and over time Pharaoh, the king of the Egyptians, enslaved them. Then a powerful Hebrew leader rose up, a man named Moses — of course, we now realize that Moses’s sister Miriam was just as important as Moses in leading the Hebrews to freedom, it’s just that she mostly got written out of the Bible, but I digress — anyway, a powerful Hebrew leader rose up, a man named Moses. After a series of personal trials and tribulations, the slave Moses rose to a position of power and influence within the Pharaoh’s court. And then a day came when Moses’s God, the God of Israel, appeared to him and said it was time for the Hebrew people to go free. Naturally, Pharaoah didn’t want the Hebrew people to go free; he wanted to keep his slaves; but with the help of the God of Israel, Moses unleashed a series of disasters on Pharoah and on Egypt. After suffering ten increasingly horrible disasters, Pharoah at last said that the Hebrews could go free.

    And so the Hebrew people packed up and left Egypt. Almost before they were out of sight, Pharaoh regretted his rashness, freeing his slaves!, and he sent his army out to bring them back. The Egyptian army pursued the Hebrew people to the edge of the Red Sea. Moses and his people were trapped between the Egyptian army and the sea, and just when it appeared that all was lost, the God of Israel opened a path for them across the sea — and then drowned the pursuing Egyptian army.

    So far, the God of Israel comes across as pretty remarkable:– a God who inflicts disasters on your enemies, up to and including drowning pursuing armies. If you were one of the hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans in the United States in the early 19th century, the God of Israel might be your kind of god, a god you would want to have on your side:– a god who could lead you out of the horrors of the life you were in; a god who could get you across the Ohio River while drowning your pursuers behind you; a god who was unequivocally on the side of the oppressed peoples of this world.

    You will notice that I said, the God of Israel might be the kind of God you want to have on your side. If you read the story of Exodus carefully, you might begin to question certain episodes in that story. Above all, you might have question what happens after God leads Moses and the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt. Above all, you might question those forty years God has them wandering about in the wilderness.

    Now it is true that many escaping slaves who followed the Underground Railroad to freedom had their own versions of wandering in the wilderness. Harriet Jacobs, in her book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, tells how she escaped from her master, but then had to live for seven long years in a tiny attic over her grandmother’s house, which she describes as follows: “A small shed had been added to my grandmother’s house years ago. Some boards were laid across the supports at the top, and between these boards and the roof was a very small attic, never occupied by anything but rats and mice. The attic was only nine feet long and seven wide. The highest point was three feet high. There was no admission for either light or air.” Jacobs tells how stifling hot this attic became in the summer, how cold in the winter;– you could say it was her own version of the wandering in the wilderness.

    Thus the story of Exodus might help provide meaning to the possible delays and the inevitable dangers that an escaping slave might encounter. And yet, you can’t get around the fact that Moses never made it to the Promised Land. As we heard in the first reading, Moses died before he ever got to freedom; God did not let him get to freedom alive. For someone seeking freedom from oppression, this could be seen as a very serious flaw in the story!

    There’s another serious problem with the story of Exodus:– We know perfectly well that it just isn’t that far from Egypt to the Promised Land. The only way it could take you forty years to travel from Egypt across the Sinai Peninsula to the Promised Land of Canaan is if you deliberately went around in circles; or if someone deliberately led you around in circles. Forty years to travel a couple of hundred of miles! — if we only traveled a mile a day, it wouldn’t even take a year to go that distance. Isn’t this the same old thing that oppressed peoples always hear?: “Wait a while, the time isn’t ripe yet.” When you hear that phrase, you can be pretty sure that “wait a while” means “never,” or at least, “not in your lifetime.” Moses lived to be 120 years old, but died before he reached freedom; this is a serious problem with the story of Exodus, a problem that could lead one to question whether the Bible is truly a book of liberation.

    Indeed, people like Frederick Douglass began to entertain questions about the orthodox interpretations of the Bible. We heard in the second reading this morning from the distinguished historian William L. Van DeBurg, who tells us that Frederick Douglass drifted further and further from orthodox Christianity over the course of his life. When Douglass first escaped from slavery and came here to New Bedford, he seems to have been fairly close to an orthodox Christian viewpoint. Yes, he hated the blatant hypocrisy exhibited by the some of the Christian slave-owners, enough so that he wrote, “of all the slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst.” Yet as a slave he had joined a Methodist church in Baltimore, and when he came here to New Bedford he joined an African American Methodist church here; and he was orthodox enough that in his one documented visit to First Universalist Church of New Bedford, he argued forcefully against the heretical doctrine of universal salvation, and he would not join the Universalist church in spite of the fact that his friend and mentor Nathan Johnson was a Universalist.

    That was in 1841; yet by 1870, Douglass had drifted far from orthodox Christianity. In a letter he wrote in 1870, reprinted in the anthology By These Hands: A Documentary History of African American Humanism, we discover that Frederick Douglass’s religious journey had taken him far down the path of free thought. Anthony Pinn, who edited By These Hands, points out that by 1870, Douglass had become unwilling “to acknowledge the role of God in the progress of African Americans.” In this 1870 letter, Douglass wrote:

    “I have no doubt that the avowal of my liberal opinions will drive many from me who were once my friends and even exclude me from many platforms upon which I was a welcome speaker, but such is the penalty which every man must suffer who admits a new truth into his mind….

    “As to my not going far enough, I have to say, that while I am free to follow my convictions wherever they may lead — I deem it wise to avow those which are perfectly formed, clearly defined, and about which I am entirely undisturbed by doubts of any sorts. I bow to no priests either of faith or of unfaith. I claim as against all sorts of people, simply perfect freedom of thought.”

    In his typically clear prose, Douglass outlines what might be the guiding mantra for many of Unitarian Universalists today: we follow our convictions wherever they may lead; we deem it wise to avow only those convictions which are well-formed; we bow neither to fundamentalist Christians nor to fundamentalist atheists; and we claim perfect freedom of thought. Douglass tells us that freedom from bondage is necessary but not enough; freedom from racism is necessary but not enough; our thoughts too must be free. We must be free in body; we must be free in society; and we must be free in the realm of thought, even if that leads us away from orthodox religion.

    The received wisdom has long been that all African Americans, Frederick Douglass included, belong to the Black Church. Through careful research, the African American humanist theologian Anthony Pinn has conclusively proved that there is a strong strain of humanist religious expression in African American life, going back beyond Frederick Douglass at least into the middle 19th century.

    Yes, the Black Church has been a key institution in African American life. As Frederick Douglass and other African Americans over the last 150 years have known, the Black Church is one of the key institutions where African Americans could join together in voluntary association in order to have some influence in the wider world. Yet Anthony Pinn has documented how important the humanist strain of thought has been to African Americans. For example, Pinn points out that the anonymous men and women who composed blues songs felt no need to inject God into their songs; the blues are humanist songs, where human beings face life without reliance on the supernatural intervention of a divine being. In many other examples, Pinn documents humanist thought in African Americans from the slave days down through the 20th century.

    Why should there be such a strong strain of humanist thought, or at least non-theistic thought, among African Americans? Simply put, for some people the existence of slavery in the United States serves as an acid test for Christian belief systems in the United States. How could a God who is supposed to be a loving God allow the atrocity of chattel slavery to exist? How could a God who is supposed to love all human beings equally allow the evils of racism to permeate every aspect of our culture, even down to this very day? You probably know all the orthodox Christian justifications: that we human beings are miserable sinners who have messed up the world so badly that things like slavery can exist, and it will only be through God that we can be rid of such evils; probably after we die and go to heaven, if indeed we are allowed to be one of the ones who gets to go to heaven. You may even know some of the arguments of black liberation theology: James Cone has famously said that Jesus is black, and other African American Christian theologians have pointed out that it is white Christianity, not God, that is to blame.

    But for some people — indeed, for quite a few people of all races — these justifications sound inadequate. For these people, there is too big a gap between the stated moral ideals of orthodox Christianity and the realities of slavery, and the realities of racism. These are the people who turn away from American Christianity: some, like Malcom X, turn to non-Christian religions like Islam; but for many more, the best alternative is humanism or non-theism, that is: the best alternative is to question belief in God.

    And there are many who give up on organized religion altogether; but I don’t think that’s the right approach. Giving up doesn’t accomplish anything. Only half of all United States citizens vote — they have given up on participating in the political process — but that accomplishes less than nothing, because all that means is that someone else is going to make your decisions for you. Passivity is rarely a good solution to any problem. Similarly, we see many people who have given up on organized religion; they let the fundamentalist Christians take over the churches, and they let money-grubbing exploiters take over the New Age religious movements, and they let the cults and the Scientologists take over everything else.

    Thus I believe with all my heart that there is a place for a religious movement which tells people, not how they might get into heaven later, but rather how we might all get a little bit of heaven into this world right now. This, I believe, is where Moses went wrong. He put too much emphasis on the idea that he would get to go to heaven after he died; which was fine for him I suppose; but if he had paid more attention to getting his people into the Promised Land now, instead of himself into heaven later, all his people could have crossed the desert in six or seven months. I don’t believe that Moses needed to choose between heaven and the Promised Land; he could have had both. The African Americans who escaped slavery on the Underground Railroad to the Promised Land of New Bedford, or one of the other safe havens for escaped slaves: they discovered that if they could snatch an opportunity to ride on the Underground Railroad, they could get to the Promised Land of freedom in their own lifetime, and still be ready to get to heaven after they died.

    William R. Jones, an African American and a Unitarian Universalist theologian, wrote an essay back in 1974 in which he showed that the biggest religious difference of opinion is not between people who believe in God, and people who disbelieve in God. The biggest religious difference of opinion is between those people who say trust in God for everything and do nothing for yourself on the one hand; and on the other hand those people who say whether or not you believe in God it is up to us human beings to create justice and righteousness here and now, in this present world.

    Moses started out as the second kind of person — he did, after all, get the Hebrews out of Egypt, and that took some doing. But in that forty-year trek across the Sinai Peninsula, it seems to me that Moses wound up trusting too much in God to the point where he didn’t do enough for himself or the Hebrew people.

    Frederick Douglass was always that second kind of person. He started out life with a deep and sincere belief in God; but he didn’t let that belief keep him from taking a ride on the Underground Railroad. Later in life, he came to have deep questions about the orthodox Christian God; but he continued to do his best to create justice and righteousness here and now, in his present world.

    Here in our church, we don’t care whether you believe in God or not; personally, I find myself like Frederick Douglass, not willing either to avow or disavow a belief in God; like Douglass, “I bow to no priests either of faith or of unfaith.”

    Here in this church, it is not your belief or disbelief in God which matter; what matter is whether you and I, like Frederick Douglass, will take it upon ourselves to create justice and righteousness here and now, in this present world.

  • Martin, Malcolm, and Henry

    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 from Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”:

    “There was a time when the church was very powerful — in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.” But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests.

    “Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent — and often even vocal — sanction of things as they are.

    “But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.”

    [from this site, accessed 19 January 2008.]

    The second reading is from the essay “On Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau:

    “Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less despondent spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her—the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, “But what shall I do?” my answer is, “If you really wish to do anything, resign your office.” When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned from office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.

    Sermon

    Tomorrow is the day we celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. You all know the story of Martin Luther King: how he came to be one of the central leaders in the fight against desegregation here in the United States; how he fought nonviolently for true equality for African Americans; how he was finally assassinated, killed because he was too successful. You all know equally well how the fight for true equality for African Americans has not yet been won; how racial discrimination continues in many diverse and insidious forms here in the United States; and you know that many of us try to continue the struggle for true equality and an end to discrimination.

    Thus, for many of us Martin Luther King’s birthday has become a day to reflect on the ongoing struggle to end discrimination, and to reflect on how we ourselves might continue that struggle. That is what I’d like to do this morning; and since we are in a church, I’d like to reflect on certain religious aspects of the struggle to end discrimination. But I’m going to pursue a somewhat unusual path: instead of just focusing on Dr. King, I’m going to tell you three stories about Dr. King and about two other Americans who fought for freedom in their own ways: Malcolm X, and Henry David Thoreau.

    Each of these three Americans were similar, because each one of them engaged in a little bit of rebellion; that’s what I’d like to talk with you about today, rebellion. Most of American religion has not been particularly friendly towards rebellion. Most American religions possess a rather hierarchical idea of the universe, with God in charge at the top of the hierarchy, and all the rest of us somewhere a good bit lower down than God. With this hierarchical idea of the universe comes the notion that rebellion is dangerous, because if rebellion gets out of hand, it could escalate and even threaten God’s role at the very top of the hierarchy. And so my purpose in telling these three stories will be to show how and when rebellion might be, not a threat to the cosmological order of the universe, but rather a means to save the world and save ourselves.

     

    I’ll begin with the easiest story to tell, the story about Martin Luther King, about why he went to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, how he wound up in jail there, and why he felt moved to write the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

    In 1963, the city of Birmingham, Alabama, was heavily segregated. African Americans faced plenty of discrimination in Birmingham in those days: less than a tenth of all black citizens were registered to vote; blacks earned, on average, about half of what whites earned; and the downtown businesses enforced strict segregation, even to having segregated lunch counters. Since you have to start somewhere in the fight for equality, the black leadership of the city decided to start by concentrating on the segregation in downtown businesses. They called for boycotts, which cause declines of more than a third in downtown business. The city retaliated by withholding tens of thousands of dollars in aid to poor black families. The black community responded with a six-week total boycott of all downtown businesses. The city government retaliated again: Bull Connor, a strict segregationist and the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, told downtown businesses that if they did not obey the city’s segregation laws, he would take away their business licenses.

    At this point, the black leadership of the city decided to get confrontational, and engage in civil disobedience. Wyatt Tee Walker, then executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, dubbed the movement “Project C” — the “C” stood for “Confrontation.” The black leadership in Birmingham called on Martin Luther King to come and participate in these acts of civil disobedience, and he came. Black citizens picketed, they staged sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, kneel-ins in segregated white churches, and other actions that aimed to get so many black citizens arrested that they would overwhelm the police force and force the city to take action against desegregation. The city responded by banning all protests by black citizens — a clearly unconstitutional act — the city would stop at nothing to keep segregation in place.

    On April 12, 1963, Martin Luther King himself was arrested. He was held in the Birmingham Jail, where he was not allowed to call his wife, who had just given birth to their fourth child; nor was he allowed to consult a lawyer unless prison guards were present. While he was in jail, eight prominent white clergymen wrote a public letter chastising King for engaging in civil disobedience. These white clergymen pointed out the dangers of King’s actions, and called on King and all African Americans in Birmingham to “observe the principles of law and order and common sense”; they called his actions “unwise and untimely.”

    King sat in the Birmingham jail and wrote a letter to these eight clergymen, and we heard an excerpt from this letter in the first reading this morning. In one of the most famous passages from the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King wrote: “Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was ‘well timed’ in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never’.” This was King’s justification for engaging in “unntimely” and rebellious civil disobedience: if he waited for justice to take its course, he might well wait forever. So it is that Dr. King engaged in rebellion; rebellion against unjust laws; rebellion against the white sense of timeliness. He was called to rebel against human laws in order to save the world.

     

    The second story I would like to tell this morning has to do with an act of civil disobedience that helped to inspire Martin Luther King.

    Henry David Thoreau lived most of his life in his parents’ house in Concord, Massachusetts. His mother, Cynthia Thoreau, was an Abolitionist and a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Henry helped his mother send fugitive slaves towards the North Star; and his biographer, Walter Harding, has said that Henry Thoreau probably met every prominent Abolitionist of the day “across his mother’s dining table” (Days of Henry Thoreau p 201)

    Henry Thoreau was friendly with Bronson Alcott, another resident of Concord, Massachusetts, a prominent Abolitionist, and the father of Louisa May Alcott. In 1843, Bronson Alcott, like some other Abolitionists, refused to pay the Massachusetts poll tax as a protest against a government that supported slavery. A prominent citizen of the town of Concord paid Bronson’s poll tax for him, rather than see him go to jail. But Bronson’s action planted a seed in Henry Thoreau’s heart, and by 1846 Henry decided that he would refuse to pay his own poll tax as a protest against slavery. In late July, 1846, Thoreau was living out at Walden Pond, and he came into town one day to run an errand. Sam Staples, the town constable, told Henry that he had better pay his poll tax or Sam would have to put him in jail; Henry told Sam that he guessed that in that case Sam had better put him in jail; which is just what Same did.

    There’s an apocryphal story that Ralph Waldo Emerson came to town that day and saw Henry in jail, and said, “Henry, what are you doing in jail?” to which Henry replied, “Waldo, what are you doing out of jail?” Thoreau knew he had to go to jail to save his own self-respect, to save his own soul.

    Henry Thoreau spent only one night in jail, because the next day someone paid his poll tax for him. It is safe to say that Henry Thoreau did not risk as much when he went to jail, as Martin Luther King risked when he went to jail. Thoreau was a white man in a white town and he came from a comfortably middle-class and respectable family; he did not risk beatings and intimidation and death threats the way Dr. King did. Yes, Thoreau further damaged his already tarnished reputation among other Concord residents, and I don’t want to diminish that damage; as someone who lived the first forty-two years of his life in a small town, I can attest to the pettiness and small-mindedness that can poison life in a small town; but risking that is very different than risking your life.

    What makes Thoreau’s experience important is that it prompted him to write his most famous essay, “On Civil Disobedience.” In that essay, he distinguishes between human laws and justice, saying, “Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents on injustice.” Thoreau also that honest people sometimes have to “rebel and revolutionize.” So it is that there are times when we have to obey higher laws and rebel against human laws; only in so rebelling can we save the world; maybe that’s the only we can save our own souls as well.

     

    Now we come to the third story, which also briefly involves a jail in Concord, Massachusetts. In 1946, a young man named Malcolm Little was arrested for burglary. He was sentenced and spent a night or two in the jail in Concord, Massachusetts, before being transferred to his ultimate prison destination. Malcolm Little had been a small-time criminal who had drifted through life without much purpose or direction. But while in prison he discovered books, and his mental horizons expanded. He also discovered Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, which prompted him to engage in some critical thinking about the nature of racism in America.

    By the time he was released from prison in 1952, Malcolm Little was following the thinking of Elijah Muhammad, and spoke of white people as “white devils” who would one day return to subjugation under the black man. He went off live in Chicago near Elijah Muhammad, and under Muhammad’s influence changed his name to Malcolm X, thus shedding what Muhammad called his “slave name,” the name that his family had had imposed on them by some white slave owner.

    Malcolm X remained with the Nation of Islam as a high-ranking official until 1963. But then he discovered that Elijah Muhammad was having extramarital affairs with young women, even though this was explicitly forbidden by the tenets of their religion. Malcolm X confronted Elijah Muhammad, who basically told Malcolm not to question his authority. Malcolm X decided he could not obey a hypocrite and adulterer, that he had to obey the higher laws of his religion; and so he left the Nation of Islam.

    By 1964, Malcolm X was deepening his study of Islam, and he began to question the version of Islam he had learned from Elijah Muhammad. In particular, Malcolm noted that Muslims throughout the world deemed the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, as one of the Five Pillars of Islam; but Elijah Muhammad said the hajj was unnecessary. Malcolm decided to find out for himself, he decided to follow his own quest for truth; he rebelled against the orthodoxy he had gotten from the Nation of Islam, and made the pilgrimage to Mecca.

    While he was at Mecca, he discovered a great truth about racial harmony. He found himself on hajj, on pilgrimage, with Muslims of all races, of all skin colors. While he had already been developing a sense of the oneness of humanity, during that great and holy pilgrimage, as he stood side-by-side with white people, black people, brown people, people of all colors, it seems to me that Malcolm came to a deep realization of what oneness truly meant. In his “Autobiography,” co-written with Alex Haley, Malcolm said, “The earth’s most expensive and pernicious evil is racism, the inability of God’s creatures to live as One, especially in the Western world.” Malcolm’s rebellion against the orthodoxy he had received from others, led him past the narrow opinions of others and into a profound understanding of the oneness of all humanity.

     

    Each of these three people — Martin Luther King, Henry David Thoreau, and Malcolm X — had to rebel against the opinions and judgments of those who surrounded them. Martin Luther King was criticized by those eight white clergymen for stirring up trouble in Birmingham, Alabama; but he rose above their opinions, and allowed himself to be led by higher laws. Henry David Thoreau had to face the opinions of people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called Thoreau’s act of civil disobedience “mean and skulking, and in bad taste”; but he rose above such opinions, and allowed himself to be led by higher laws. Malcolm X had to face the adverse opinions of the Nation of Islam, and was eventually assassinated by members of the Nation of Islam; but Malcolm rose above all that, to assert the essential oneness of all humanity over and above the evils of racism.

    In each case, each of these three engaged in an act of rebellion; both Martin and Malcolm explicitly rebelled against the opinions of religious leaders. Religion has too often been used to keep people from the truth; to force an orthodoxy on us that keeps us from thinking for ourselves, that keeps us from perceiving eternal truths. William R. Jones, the African American humanist theologian and Unitarian Universalist minister, has written that rebellion can be soteriologically authentic; translating that out of theological jargon, Dr. Jones is telling us that sometimes we have to rebel in order to save the world and to save our own souls.

    The consequences of rebellion can be severe. Henry Thoreau was marginalized by his community, and garnered little fame or respect during his lifetime. Malcolm X was assassinated because he dared to proclaim the oneness of humanity. Martin Luther King was assassinated for his work against racism. But I would suggest that what we learn from the example of each of these three great human beings is that the consequences for not rebelling might be equally severe: the loss of one’s essential humanity. But sometimes we must risk rebellion in order to save our humanity, in order to save the world.