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 ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading, an adaptation of Isaiah 61, was read responsively (#571 from Singing the Living Tradition

    The spirit of God has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,

    To bind up the brokenhearted,

    To proclaim liberty to the captives and release the prisoners,

    To comfort all who mourn,

    To give them a garland instead of ashes,

    The oil of gladness instead of mourning,The mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit,

    They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations, the devastations of many generations.

    You shall be named ministers of our God.

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

    “Some years ago, the State met me in behalf of the church, and commanded me to pay a certain sum toward the support of a clergyman whose preaching my father attended, but never I myself. ‘Pay it,’ it said, ‘or be locked up in jail.’ I declined to pay. But, unfortunately, another man saw fit to pay it. I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster; for I was not the State’s schoolmaster, but I supported myself by voluntary subscription. I did not see why the lyceum should not present its tax-bill, and have the State to back its demand, as well as the church. However, at the request of the selectmen, I condescended to make some such statement as this in writing:– ‘Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined.’ This I gave to the town-clerk; and he has it. The State, having thus learned that I did not wish to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on me since; though it said that it must adhere to its original presumption that time. If I had known how to name them, I should then have signed off in detail from all the societies which I never signed on to; but I did not know where to find a complete list.”

    So ends this morning’s readings.

    ELECTION DAY SERMON

    My original plan for today was to preach a sermon titled “Love All Beings.” It was going to be part of a series of sermons on Unitarian Universalist views of God. But I decided to hold off on preaching that particular sermon, and instead I’m going to preach a sermon on what it means to be a religious liberal, a Unitarian Universalist, in today’s political climate.

    You see, Tuesday is Election Day, and I decided that I had better preach an Election Day sermon. As these mid-term elections got closer, I found myself growing very uncomfortable thinking about how religious liberals deal with politics. Sometimes we act as if we believe we can effect a complete separation of our liberal faith and our politics. Alternatively, some of us confuse liberal religion with liberal politics and seem to operate under the belief that if we are registered with the Democratic party we have fulfilled our religious obligations in the public sphere.

    Both these beliefs are actually false. I say this even though I myself have at different times acted as if I believed one of these two things. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I needed to preach an Election Day sermon that would lay out some of the ways we religious liberals could come to terms with politics.

    At present, we mostly don’t deal with politics at all. Oh, sure, we do our little social action projects, and most of us are registered to vote. But for the most part, we Unitarian Universalists don’t do politics as Unitarian Universalists; we do politics simply as non-religious citizens. The end result is that politicians can safely ignore us — and they do.

    It used to be different. Sixty years ago, Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, DC, was such an influential preacher that the Washington newspapers would hold their Monday editions until they got the text of his sermon to print. Senators and representatives attended All Souls in those days, and a few were even members there. Or take an example closer to home: Sixty years ago, when Duncan Howlett occupied this pulpit here in New Bedford, a few people with political power and influence actually listened to what he had to say..

    Today, All Souls Church in Washington, DC, has a great preacher in the person of Rob Hardies, but no one outside of that church community much cares what Rob Hardies preaches. (Which is too bad, because Rob Hardies is a really good preacher who addresses matters of deep concern to all Americans.) Here in New Bedford, while it is true that we have a vibrant and exciting church community, I can assure you that no one outside of our little congregation pays much attention to the sermons preached from this pulpit. Indeed, as the primary preacher in this church, my experience has been that the only time anyone from the community bothers to call me is when they’re hoping to get money or volunteer hours from First Unitarian

    We can be safely ignored precisely because we have subscribed to those two false beliefs that make us very easy to ignore. We have a false understanding of the separation of church and state — of course we believe strongly that the government should not sponsor any church or religious body — but individually we have too often acted as if our personal religious beliefs can not inform our personal political beliefs. And too many of us hold to the false notion that liberal religion is the same thing as liberal politics, acting as if you can’t be a member of a Unitarian Universalist church unless you are also a member of the Democratic political party. Two false assumptions that have led us into political irrelevancy.

    So let’s look closely at that first false assumption, which stems, I think, from a real misunderstanding of what separation of church and state means. And to explain this, I’m going to recount a story about Henry Thoreau. Back in 1840, as we heard in the first reading this morning, Henry Thoreau ran afoul of the tax authorities in Concord, Massachusetts. His biographer Walter Harding tells the story this way:

    It had been the custom in Massachusetts for the churches to assess their members for financial support and to have the town treasurers collect for them along with the town assessments. The First Parish Church [that was the Unitarian church in that town], apparently assuming that Thoreau was a member both because his family owned a pew there, added his name to their tax rolls in 1840. When Thoreau received his church tax bill, he marched down to the town office and announced he would refuse to pay it. ‘Pay or be locked up in jail,’ they replied. But before the issue could be decided, someone else paid the tax over Thoreau’s protest and the town officials were ready to drop the matter. Not so Thoreau however for he knew the subject would be raised another year. He demanded that his name be dropped from the church tax rolls and, at their suggestion, filed with the town selectmen a statement [to that effect]….” [pp. 199-200]

    As I read this story to you, I’m sure some of you are thinking to yourselves, “See, that story about Thoreau just proves that we have to be ever vigilant at maintaining the separation of church and state.” Except that’s not what it proves. This story proves that Henry Thoreau fought to keep church and state separate in the public realm precisely because he did not separate religion and politics in his own private life. In his private life, he had moved away from the old-fashioned Unitarianism of his childhood church towards the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Therefore, his public and political action of civil disobedience was an expression of his deep personal religious beliefs. Thoreau got involved in political civil disobedience precisely because of his personal religious understandings.

    Today, we may falsely assume that we can separate religion and politics in our personal lives, and therefore unlike Henry Thoreau we religious liberals today are reluctant to let our religious faith influence our political actions. Most of us won’t even mention our religious affiliation in public. When we go out and do social justice, how many of us explicitly say to others that we are doing social justice as an expression of our Unitarian Universalist faith? When you suggest that idea to us Unitarian Universalists, we tend to get a hunted look in our eyes. What, talk about how our religious faith has transformed our lives and led us to try to change the world?

    The interesting thing is that younger Unitarian Universalists seem to be far more willing to live out their faith than us older Unitarian Universalists. The young people I know who grew up as Unitarian Universalists and who are now in their late teens and twenties are proud of their religious affiliation. When they go do social justice, they wear little flaming chalice pendants around their necks, and they wear t-shirts and have tattoos proclaiming that they are Unitarian Universalists. They talk openly about their liberal faith, and how their religious faith has transformed their lives.

    It should be obvious that if we aren’t open about who we are as religious individuals, our liberal faith will continue to remain irrelevant in the public and political sphere. We should not wonder why the religious right gets all the political attention: they are more than willing to talk openly about how their conservative Christian faith informs the way they live. Let me assure you that I am not suggesting that we should imitate the way those on the religious right talk about their conservative faith; I am not suggesting that we should aggressively proselytize in the way those good folks do. That would be completely out of character for us. But I am saying that we could learn a few things from our young people, maybe by wearing a chalice emblem — it doesn’t have to be tattoo, it can be a discreet lapel pin like this — or by not being afraid to say that yes, I am a Unitarian Universalist, and it has changed my life.

    Now on to the second false assumption, that we can equate Unitarian Universalism with liberal politics. Historically, that simply isn’t true. Millard Fillmore was a Unitarian, and he certainly could not be considered politically liberal. In the 20th C., we have Senator Leverett Saltonstall and President William Howard Taft, both Unitarians and both relatively conservative politically. Or consider the current case of two science fiction writers, Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, both of whom are Unitarian Universalists. Bradbury is a Republican and a political conservative; Vonnegut is a classic liberal or even left-wing Democrat; yet both feel comfortable within Unitarian Universalism. Indeed, some conservative Unitarian Universalists argue convincingly that the classically conservative values of liberty and lack of government interference in private life are more in line with Unitarian Universalism than today’s liberal politics. However, I would say that it is a mistake to confuse political positions with religious values; religious values may inform political positions, but those religious values remain distinct from any political expressions they might result in.

    I would put it this way: our religious faith cannot be constricted within the bounds of any political party. I agree with Jim Wallis, the evangelical Christian who also happens to be a political progressive, when he says, “Religion doesn’t fit neatly in the categories ‘left’ and ‘right’…. It should challenge left and right.” [Weekly Standard, 4/11/2005 link]

    Our liberal faith should challenge both the political liberals and the political conservatives, we should challenge both the Democrats and the Republicans. As a general principle, we can challenge the political liberals and the political conservatives with our liberal religious message of tolerance and inclusiveness. For example, we can challenge the Democrats to take religion seriously, we can challenge them to include religious people within their political party. For another example, we can challenge the Republicans to take liberal religion seriously, we can challenge them to include liberal religious people in their political party.

    Which brings us to the first reading this morning, the responsive reading based on the passage from the Hebrew prophet Isaiah. I can imagine a Republican stealing a phrase from Isaiah, and saying: We need to proclaim liberty to the captives, those who have been held captive by Saddam’s regime in Iraq. I can imagine a Democrat stealing almost the same phrase from Isaiah, and saying: We need to release the prisoners, the prisoners that have been unjustly held in Guantanomo Bay prison. But wily old Isaiah, like so many prophets, does not allow any political party to feel comfortable. He calls us to release the prisoners and to proclaim liberty to the captives — and then he calls us to bind up the brokenhearted, to comfort all who mourn, and to give them a garland instead of ashes.

    Isaiah is calling us far beyond mere politics. He is calling each of us to a universal ministry in our lives. He is calling us to bring about the reign of heaven here on earth, not so we can be re-elected, not because it matches what the polls say, but because it is the right thing to do. That is the challenge religion issues to politics.

    The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously asked who is our neighbor, that we should love him; and answered that it does not matter the color of our neighbor’s skin, that our neighbors are black as well as white. In so saying, Rev. King offered a religious critique of the political situation of his day, based on the religious principle of loving one’s neighbor. He offered a religious ground for what became political action. In the early 1970’s, feminist theologians like Mary Daly pointed out that God loved women as much as God loved men, and this religious critique — that women were just as fully human as men — based on the religious principle of loving one’s neighbor, later turned into political action.

    Martin Luther King and others like him started by making clear their religious understandings. Then they held politics accountable to those religious values. I can clarify this better if I offer you an example. We Unitarian Universalists say that we value and affirm the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part; this grows out of our Transcendentalist heritage which saw the divine in Nature, and out of our acceptance of evolution which tells us that we are really no better than any other living being, and out of our liberal understanding of how to read the Bible. Thus, when we engage as Unitarian Universalists in political action to protect the environment, we do so because of this religious understanding, which means we are not tied to some specific political means to reach that end. We might work with the Democratic party to adopt more government regulations to protect the environment, but we might also work with the Republican party to loosen regulations and provide tax cuts and other incentives for green businesses. We know the religious end which we hope to achieve; we do not need to restrict ourselves to a single partisan political means to reach that end.

    I find I must end this Election Day sermon with a final admonition to all us — and here I’m admonishing myself as well as you. We religious liberals act as if our religion should be small, inarticulate, poorly funded, and disorganized. Yet this is so silly, because we have really important religious understandings to bring to the wider world. Right now, we could offer some deep insight into how saving the environment is a religious, spiritual, and moral matter. In the face of widespread environmental problems, it has become actually immoral and unethical for us to keep our personal religious understandings separate from our personal political understandings.

    So let’s become articulate, well-funded, well-organized, and big. We can adopt modern management techniques, use the Internet and other new media to market ourselves to younger people, we can listen to the church growth consultants who give us proven methods to grow. We can let our religion infiltrate our personal politics at the same time we fight to keep religion out of public politics. We can imitate the young Unitarian Universalists who openly declare their Unitarian Universalism by wearing chalice pendants or getting chalice tattoos or wearing lapel pins. And we can talk openly about how Unitarian Universalism has supported us and has transformed our lives.

    So we could do these things, and if we did, by the time the 2008 elections roll around, this church could be a force to be reckoned with here in New Bedford. Let’s do it.

  • Which Sexual Revolution?

    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) 2006 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading is from the book Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History by David Allyn, a scholarly history of the sexual revolution in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In this excerpt, Allyn seems to be posing the question, “Whose sexual revolution was it, anyway?” He writes:

    ‘In the radical organizations of the New Left, women found that they were often taken for granted: they were expected to answer phones, cook meals, do laundry, and provide sexual companionship — in other words, to be secretaries, housekeepers, and concubines. Male radicals were often as sexist as their own fathers were…. [And] male hippies in communes were not much better than their activist counterparts. Former hippie Elizabeth Gipps says, “I remember screaming one day when the men were theoretically meditating while the women were cleaning the floors around them.”…

    ‘By many accounts, young men in the sixties were indifferent to their female partner’s sexual needs. One woman recalls, “Of course, most guys expected you to ‘put out’ just because they bought you dinner. But every time I had sex I felt like I was dealing with someone from another planet. They guys just didn’t get it. They wanted instant gratification…. Once I asked a guy to [give me an orgasm] while we were making love and he looked at me like I was certifiably insane.”…’

    The second reading is from the Bible, the Song of Solomon chapter 7, verses 10-13, a book of the Bible that praises the delights of lovemaking:

    I am my beloved’s,
    and his desire is for me.

    Come, my beloved,
    let us go forth into the fields,
    and lodge in the villages;

    let us go out early to the vineyards,
    and see whether the vines have budded,
    whether the grape blossoms have opened
    and the pomegranates are in bloom.
    There I will give you my love.

    The mandrakes give forth fragrance,
    and over our doors are all choice fruits,
    new as well as old,
    which I have laid up for you, O my beloved.

    SERMON — Which Sexual Revolution?

    Those of you who come to church each week may notice that I’ve been doing a series of sermons exploring the dimensions of feminist theology. This is the third sermon in that series.

    There’s a joke among Unitarian Universalist ministers that in our churches it’s easier to preach about sex than about money. We do have the reputation of being one religious tradition that is quite willing to talk openly about sex and sexuality. That reputation has a certain amount of truth in it, for we have no religious belief that sex and sexuality are evil. If someone quotes Bible passages that allegedly prove that sex is evil, we Unitarian Universalists are likely to quote other Bible passages that prove that sex is fun and good. We heard one such Bible passage in the second reading this morning, a passage from the Song of Solomon. The Song of Solomon is one of the sexiest poems in our culture, thus proving our point that the Bible is sex-positive.

    Indeed, some of our critics have suggested that once upon a time we were overly enthusiastic in our embrace of the sexual revolution. After all, we feel that women and men should have the right to use the contraception of their choice; we feel that we should rely on individual women to exercise their individual consciences to determine whether or not to have an abortion; we do not believe that premarital sex is a sin; we do not believe that homosexuality is a sin; and we believe that women and girls are just as good as men and boys. Each of these views conflicts with the religious views of some other religious traditions.

    When we say that we embraced the sexual revolution, we should really ask ourselves, Which sexual revolution did we embrace? Did we embrace the sexual revolution that says, “When it comes to sex, anything goes”? — and there are people who say, or at least imply, “Well, but if you allow gays and lesbians in your church, next thing you know you’ll be having orgies in the sanctuary on Sunday mornings.”

    I must inform you, however, that that isn’t true. I have never seen an orgy in a Unitarian Universalist church. In fact, I have to say that on average the Unitarian Universalists I know are more straight-laced than the North American. Yes, we affirm that sex and sexuality are a normal part of who we are — yes, we affirm that sex and sexuality are an integral part of our religious selves — but affirming these things does not logically lead to the conclusion that we have orgies in church.

    At the same time, there is a grain of truth in the accusation that Unitarian Universalists did engage in the part of the sexual revolution that said, “When it comes to sex, anything goes.” Some Unitarian Universalists had some wild times in the 1960’s and 1970’s and, I’m afraid, even into later decades. In this sense, we are no different than the wider population. Yet we are different from the wider population, for one simple reason: feminist theology and feminist thinking have been perhaps the most important force within Unitarian Universalism since the late 1960’s.

    So it is that there are many parts of the sexual revolution that we can, indeed, affirm: that individuals have the right to use contraception, that individual women have the right to decide whether to have an abortion, that sex and sexuality are natural and normal, that women and girls are just as good as men and boys, and so on. Feminist theology can give us a good, solid grounding for our views on sex and sexuality. What we have to do is to tease out the several different strands that ran through the sexual revolution, to figure out what it is that we can affirm based on feminist theology, and what we may want to reject based on feminist theology. To make this a little more clear, I’d like to tell you a bit of the story of a typical Unitarian Universalist church, the church that I grew up in, and what happened in that church as it went through the years of the sexual revolution.

    When I was a child — this was in the 1960’s — our church had a young, dynamic minister. Although the congregation had been older and graying, this young dynamic minister supposedly attracted younger families, many with children, to the church. On the whole, everyone thought he was a good thing for the church.

    At some point in the late 1960’s, however, opinion began to turn against him. Some said they didn’t like him because he had become an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War. Others hinted that something darker was going — one woman told my mother, “If only you knew what I know about our minister!…” Whatever the cause, or causes, attendance began to drop. By 1970, when my father was the head usher, he remembers that there would be only forty or so people on a Sunday morning, where there used to have two hundred people. By 1971, that minister had been forced out. All this happened when I was a child, and I don’t remember much of it myself.

    In late 1974, my older sister started going to the youth group at the church. By the winter of 1975, she had talked me into attending as well. She hadn’t been going to the youth group before that fall, and I had stayed away as well. I don’t remember exactly why we stayed away from church in those years, but I do remember that prior to 1975 I perceived the youth group as filled with scary kids who did lots and lots of drugs and had lots and lots of sex. I guess if you’re a little older than I, the sudden availability of drugs and sex in the 1960’s might have seemed exotic and liberating; but for many people around my age, drugs and sex also became associated with certain amount of fear. One of my best friends had almost been sucked under by drugs in sixth grade, and I still remember talking to an older girl who had lost her virginity at sixteen and who said, “Sex really isn’t that great,” with a tone of voice that said more than the words themselves.

    But back then, my perception was that the sex and drugs had been cleaned out of our church’s high school youth group sometime before 1974, which made it feel safe enough for me to join. The new assistant minister was our youth advisor, and he was the one who told me about the accusations against the minister who had ostensibly been fired for his stance against the Vietnam War. The assistant minister said, “Didn’t you know that he had been having sex with someone in the congregation?” I hadn’t heard that accusation before.

    Since then, I have wondered how many of the accusations about the youth group were true. Were those kids really having lots of sex and doing lots of drugs? Or were the teenagers a convenient scapegoat for people to blame when they could not talk about the minister’s alleged indiscretions? I don’t think I’ll ever really know the truth of what went on.

    Meanwhile, there was another revolution going on all around me, the women’s liberation movement. I still remember when the little bright green hymnal supplements appeared in the pews. It contained some of our most familiar hymns rewritten to remove gender-specific language. I remember hearing about women ministers for the first time — not women ministers from the musty past, but women ministers who were active right then, in nearby Unitarian Universalist churches. Not only that, but there were two women in our own congregation who were preparing to be ministers, and who were duly ordained by our church — although those ordinations happened after I had left home for college.

    And women were taking on increasingly prominent leadership roles in the congregation. When my mother first joined that church, she was invited to be on the Flower Committee, and later was invited to teach Sunday school — traditional women’s roles in that church, and in many churches. (For the record, she tried joining the Flower Committee, but soon quit in a certain amount of disgust — in her own way, Mom was an early feminist.) But fifteen years later, when I was in the church youth group, it was becoming more and more acceptable for women to serve in any leadership role in the church. I should rephrase that: by fifteen years later, women had insisted on breaking down the barriers of discrimination that had existed in church leadership.

    So it is that I myself witnessed at least two revolutions within my own church. One sexual revolution centered around what used to be called “free love.” Another revolution, a feminist revolution, centered around women’s liberation. These two revolutions have been linked together in the popular imagination, but as I experienced them they were quite different. The so-called “free love” that I witnessed involved little or no feminist awareness. The feminist revolution, at least the part of it that I witnessed, was not about having lots of sexual intercourse, it was about women fighting to gain some measure of equality with men.

    As I said earlier, I’m not telling you this not because you should care that much about my personal experiences, but more because I think that my experiences were not uncommon among people who grew up in liberal churches. Indeed, when I talk to some other people my age who grew up in that time, they have much more outrageous stories than I do — adult youth group advisors who were sleeping with kids in their youth groups, churches where the lay leaders played at “wife-swapping,” ministers who were sleeping with many women and men in their congregations, open marriage workshops at churches, and on and on. I’m afraid we have to admit that our Unitarian Universalist churches, and liberal churches in general, sometimes went past the boundaries of acceptable sexual behavior.

    So where are those acceptable boundaries of sexual behavior? That is a question that I am just beginning to answer. One thing that helped me make sense out of the sexual revolution was a scholarly study called Make Love, Not War, the book by David Allyn that was the source of the first reading this morning. One of Allyn’s most interesting insights is that the sexual revolution can mean different things to different people. Some of the sexual revolutions that Allyn identifies include:

    — wide availability of birth control pills, thus allowing women to have more control over whether or not to have children;
    — a growing acceptance of premarital sex;
    — a series of legal decisions that broadened First Amendment protections to include works previously defined as “obscene”;
    — experiments in free sex, group sex, open marriages, and group marriages;
    — the end of laws banning interracial marriages;
    — growing acceptance of masturbation as a normal expression of sexuality;
    — the increasing commercialization of sex and sexuality;
    — the erosion of the “double standard” that said that men could sleep around but women were supposed to remain monogamous;
    — homosexuality getting changed from something that was considered shameful into gay liberation and gay pride.

    When I began to look for acceptable boundaries of sexual behavior, I realized that women experienced the sexual revolution differently than men did, as we heard in the first reading this morning. Improved birth control supposedly freed women to enjoy sex in new ways — yet, as often as not, women remained mired in traditional, repressive gender roles, providing sex, and doing the cleaning while the men were supposedly meditating.

    So when I began to look for acceptable boundaries of sexual behavior, I realized that a good question to ask is this: How did the different aspects of the sexual revolution affect women and girls? Some aspects of the sexual revolution improved the lives of women (and really the lives of men too): access to birth control, the end of interracial marriage, acceptance of masturbation as normal, broadened First Amendment rights, equal rights for gays and lesbians, the end of the double standard. Other aspects of the sexual revolution did not improve the lives of women and girls. The ever-increasing commercialization of sex and sexuality has not made women’s lives better; instead, commercialization of sex has tended to dehumanize women, to turn women into commodities, into things. Free love and open relationships may have made some women’s lives better, but all too often free love and open relationships have been used as excuses by men to have sexual escapades. Back in the 1970’s, when they called it “wife-swapping,” the fact that it wasn’t called “husband-swapping” pretty much lets you know that it was the men who ran that show. Free love and open relationships have often proved to be harmful to the well-being of women and children in other ways: when free love and open relationships lead to the break up of stable homes, children can suffer emotionally, and women can suffer financially.

    So it is that not every aspect of the sexual revolution has been good for women. And the insights of feminism and feminist theology can help us sort out which parts of the sexual revolution we might want to affirm, and which parts of the sexual revolution we may choose to be more critical of.

    Sex is a beautiful, wonderful thing. We could say with equal correctness that sex and sexuality are gifts given from God; or say that sex and sexuality are a natural part of human experience and are affirmed in the most ancient religious traditions. However you choose to word it, sex and sexuality cannot be considered evil; they are good. When you read religious texts about sex, like the Song of Solomon, you also realize the incredible power in sex and sexuality.

    It is a power that we have to continually learn to use for good: a power that can bring us closer to the ultimate truths of the universe. As is true with anything that powerful, it can also be used for evil. From the perspective of feminist theology, sex and sexuality are evil when they are used to control or harm another person. Thus, sex and sexuality are evil when they cause one person to ignore another person’s humanity; they are evil when they are used to hurt or injure another person.

    Then we can move beyond a narrowly woman-centered theology to draw wider conclusions. When homosexuality is used as an excuse to beat up and shoot gay men, as happened last winter at Puzzles Lounge here in New Bedford, that’s an example of sexuality being used to evil ends. When marriage between people of different skin colors is illegal, that’s an example of sexuality being used to evil ends. When same sex marriage is made illegal, that’s an example of sexuality being used to evil ends. In each case, the sexual revolution has worked to end evil, has worked as a force of good in the world.

    Drawing inspiration from parts of our religious tradition like the Song of Solomon, and drawing inspiration from our own positive sexual experiences, I’d like to be able to say that we have a sex-positive religion. We can affirm sex and sexuality as an essential part of our selves. We can affirm sex and sexuality when it makes us more fully human. We can go further, and affirm sex and sexuality that go so far as to provide divine experiences. Yet feminist theology also helps us to understand where we can draw firm boundaries, so that sex and sexuality remain positive, life-affirming experiences for all person, no matter what your gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation; no matter who you are.

    So may it be.

  • Working Stiffs

    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) 2006 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    I have three Labor Day readings for you this morning.

    The first reading is from an interview with John Taylor Gatto published last year in Working Stiff Review. Gatto, an award-winning teacher in New York City for 30 years, is best known for his book Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling in America. Gatto says:

    “Although I went to college at Cornell and Columbia, my first real job which I put my heart and mind into as an independent young man was as a cab driver working the night shift from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., six days a week. I loved it. The money was good, the scenery and association in constant flux, the absence of supervision a spectacular bonus.

    “Although all of my people on the Italian and German sides of the family aspired to white collar utopia, and many of them made it, the idioms, principles, and appreciations were, without any apology, working class for all of us. My own lifelong sympathies have remained with those who work; the harder the better….

    “I was a cruising cabbie, always hunting for fares. Lots of miles on the odometer, as opposed to the guys who wait in lines. With hundreds, or thousands, of other cruisers in competition, the fat payoffs came from imagining unlikely places where a fare might appear, and then calculating which lane would give you the best chance to snag it from the others. So a real stretching of the mind was one lesson, as just rolling around was a guarantee of empty pockets. Another lesson was how to focus exclusively on the business. Stopping for lunch, dinner, coffee, conversations, and phone calls was the way run of the mill cabbies came to think that the work was dismal and low-paid. I pushed my cab steadily for 12 hours, took my pleasure from the passengers and the sights, and almost never stopped. When checking in at shift’s end, people would casually ask what I’d booked, and were frequently amazed. “How much? That’s impossible,” they’d say….”

    The second reading comes from Walden by Henry David Thoreau, from the chapter titled “Economy”:

    “…For myself I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one. The laborer’s day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other.

    “In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely…. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.”

    The third and final reading comes from the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of the sayings of Jesus that was first written down sometimes between the year 50 and the year 100.

    “The [Father’s] imperial rule is like a woman who was carrying a [jar] full of meal. While she was walking along a distant road, the handle of the jar broke and the meal spilled behind her [along] the road. She didn’t know it; she hadn’t noticed a problem. When she reached her house, she put the jar down and discovered that it was empty.” (Thomas 97.1-4, Jesus Seminar translation)

    SERMON — “Working Stiffs”

    Here in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century, we seem to have two options in life. We can work hard, and take our pleasure in the work, or we can somehow put together a pile of money so that we may retire in comfort and devote our lives to pleasure. We are working stiffs, every one of us. Even if you run Microsoft and have more money than Warren Buffet, it seems that we are worthwhile only for the work we do and the money we have made, or good only for the work we once did and the money we once made.

    In the first reading this morning, John Taylor Gatto talks about how much he loves work. He says: “My own lifelong sympathies have remained with those who work; the harder the better.” I feel the same way. I’m one of those people who doesn’t mind working sixty or more hours a week, even at the expense of family and friends; and generally speaking I like to hang out with others who like work as much as I do. However, it does sometimes occur to me that there might be more to life than work, or escape from work.

    Whether or not you like work as much as I do, you too are part of this society where we are told that work, hard work, is the highest value in life. I suspect that it has occurred to you, too, that there might be more to life than work, or more to life than escape from work. On this Labor Day weekend, let us therefore take the time to reflect on work, and the importance of work to our larger lives.

    I like the image John Taylor Gatto gives us of what it’s like to be a cabbie: cruising the streets twelve hours a day, seventy-two hours a week, using your imagination, stretching your mind, being the best cabbie possible. And I like the way he sets forth an alternative option. As a cabbie, you don’t have to push yourself that hard, you don’t have to use your imagination, and you don’t have to stretch your mind in order to work harder. You can, instead, use your imagination to figure out ways to escape from work: to stop for lunch, to stop for conversation, to stop work for phone calls, or other means of escape; to escape from work that could just as easily numb your mind as it could stretch your mind.

    Later in that same interview, Gatto is asked what he believes is “the primary objective of compulsory education.” Gatto, an award-winning teacher who worked for thirty years providing compulsory education to young people, replies thus:

    “The primary objective [of compulsory education] is to convert human raw material into human resources which can be employed efficiently by the managers of government and the economy. The original purposes of schooling were to make good people (the religious purpose), to make good citizens (the public purpose), and to make individuals their personal best (the private purpose). Throughout the 19th century, a new Fourth Purpose began to emerge, tested thoroughly in the military state of Prussia in northern Europe. The Fourth Purpose made the point of mass schooling to serve big business and big government by extending childhood, replacing thinking with drill and memorization, while fashioning incomplete people unable to protect themselves from exhortation, advertising, and other forms of indirect command. In this fashion, poor Prussia with a small population became one of the great powers of the earth. Its new schooling method was imitated far and wide, from Japan to the United States.”

    So says John Taylor Gatto. I’m not sure I fully accept his historical analysis. It’s too much to blame poor schooling solely on Prussian innovations. For example, in 1837, Henry David Thoreau got a job as a public school teacher in the town of Concord, Massachusetts. It was a working class school, for the town’s few elite students generally attended the private Concord Academy.

    After two weeks, Nehemiah Ball, one of the members of the school committee, stopped in to observe Thoreau’s teaching. Mr. Ball did not like the fact that Thoreau used no corporal punishment, that is, he did not beat the students as part of his pedagogical technique. Mr. Ball admonished Thoreau that he had better beat the students to maintain proper discipline. Thoreau randomly beat three or four students, handed in his resignation, and went off to start his own school based on sounder educational principles. We now know, as did Thoreau, that beating students is not necessary for good education. Beating students does not serve to teach them how to be a good person, or how to be a good citizen in a democratic society, or how to be their personal best; it only serves to teach them how to submit to authority. In New England of 1837, increasing industrialization meant an increasing need for factory workers; factory workers don’t need initiative of their own, so teaching them to submit to authority was a lesson that some people may have wanted to teach those working class students.

    But Thoreau came to believe that there was that of evil in working at any job, not just working class jobs. This is different from saying that he thought there was evil in hard work, for Thoreau worked hard. But he worked hard at what he thought was important, not at what someone else thought was important. He worked hard at reading the classical Greek authors and the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita and the Analects; he worked hard at writing, he worked hard in his father’s pencil factory, and at his own business of land surveying. But he also wrote: “I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely…. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.”

    Thoreau’s statement remains true today, but only in part. If you’re a white man from a middle class or upper class background, it isn’t necessary to earn your living by the sweat of your brow. If you’re a white woman, the story is a little different — you’ll have to sweat a little harder, because a man doing the same work will earn a third more money than you do. That is, if you even get the job; in many lines of work, it remains difficult for women to get a job at all. A news story this week reported that even though half of all graduates from law schools are now women, far less than half of the law clerks for Supreme Court justices (jobs that go to recent graduates) are women. Many jobs are not yet fully open to women.

    And what if you are not white — it is even more difficult for someone who is not white to get a job. Thoreau extols the virtues of becoming a day laborer. It’s fine to be a day laborer when, like Thoreau, you are a white man who has lived your whole life in a stable community where you have lots of connections and find it easy to work at day labor jobs you choose, when you choose to work. It is a far different thing to be a person of color and a day laborer in one of the huge and anonymous cities of the early 21st century, standing on the street beside Home Depot waiting for someone, anyone, to come by and hire you for a few hours at an hourly rate that might not even be enough to buy your food and clothes and pay your rent.

    Thoreau is probably on the right track in his attempt to understand what it means to work, and what role work should play in our lives. But I don’t think he really understands what it means to be poor. Not that I myself do. To really understand what it means to be poor, I always find it helpful to turn to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

    Jesus’s teachings about the poor do not make us comfortable. Indeed, he taught that the poor, those who are truly destitute, are more likely to get into heaven than middle class or working class people; that is to say, a beggar is more likely to get into heaven than a working stiff; a homeless person is more likely to get into heaven than those of us who can afford to pay for a roof over our heads.

    This teaching of Jesus gets even more complicated for us Unitarian Universalists. Most Unitarian Universalists believe that heaven isn’t just some distant place that you get to go to after you die; while it may be that for some of us, we are most likely to believe that the kingdom of heaven is something that is being established right here and now on earth, during our lifetimes. Some scholars translate “kingdom of heaven” as “God’s imperial rule”; thus heaven is the state of recognizing God’s rule over human beings. Some of us Unitarian Universalists might put it that way, or we might say: heaven is the state of recognizing that that which is good and true and real should rule our lives, rather than that which is false and evil and unreal.

    However you put it, if we are to believe that heaven is supposed to be here and now, what are we to make of Jesus’s teaching that it is easier for the poor to get to heaven than it is for working stiffs to get to heaven? Surely Jesus does not mean to imply that there is anything saintly or virtuous about not having a roof over your head, not having enough to eat.

    In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus tells a little parable that might help us understand what he means. Now remember, the Gospel of Thomas was one of the gospels that was rejected by the early Christian church; it is not one of the four generally accepted canonical gospels. Fundamentalist Christians and more orthodox Christians do not accept the Gospel of Thomas as giving the genuine teachings of Jesus. But most serious scholars, and many religious liberals, accept the Gospel of Thomas as being just as genuine as the other four gospels. I particularly like the Gospel of Thomas because I find in it parables and sayings that don’t occur in the rest of the Bible; these parables and sayings of Jesus haven’t been explained over and over again by generation upon generation of church-goers. We can hear them today, and they can sound just as shocking and discomforting as when Jesus first said them nearly two thousand years ago.

    So it is with the third reading this morning. Jesus said: “[God’s] imperial rule” — that is, heaven — “is like a woman who was carrying a [jar] full of meal.” This jar would likely have been a large pottery vessel made to carry flour, or meal, in. “While she was walking along a distant road, the handle of the jar broke and the meal spilled behind her [along] the road. She didn’t know it; she hadn’t noticed a problem. When she reached her house, she put the jar down and discovered that it was empty.”

    I can easily imagine just such a thing happening: you’re walking along carrying some flour back from the mill so you can bake bread. You’re carrying it in a big pottery vessel, which you sling over your shoulder using a rope or strap. This pottery vessel is heavy of its own accord, so when the handle of the vessel breaks off, and it tips so that the flour gradually trickles out as you’re walking, you don’t notice it. Then when you get home, after all that work, you find that you’ve got nothing left in the jar, you just have an empty, broken jar. But how on earth is that like God’s imperial rule? –how is that like heaven?

    The only way I can make sense out of this parable of Jesus is by remembering that the poor and the homeless are more likely to get into heaven than I am. This parable of Jesus seems to imply that working hard is ultimately unimportant. I suspect the woman in the parable was a hard worker: women in that time and place didn’t have much of a choice, they had to work hard, taking care of children, cooking, cleaning, with probably very little leisure. Yet here Jesus is telling us that heaven occurs when the all the results of your hard work dribble away when you’re not even noticing; the kingdom of God will come to this earth when what you have worked and striven for has dribbled away.

    In this sense, maybe Henry Thoreau is correct when he tells us that men and women don’t need to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows. And for all that John Taylor Gatto loves to work, for all that he was willing to push himself for twelve hours a day in a taxicab, he says that the highest priority for education should be to make good citizens (the public purpose of education), to make individuals their personal best (the private purpose), and to make good people (the religious purpose). If the kingdom of God is here and now on earth, if you are to be a part of that kingdom of God, it does not matter whether you are homeless; what matters is that you are, somehow, a good person.

    I believe that Jesus is warning us that hard work does not, in and of itself, make us into good people. I believe he is telling us that hard work can indeed can get in the way of being a good person. It can get in the way if we let the hard work become an end in itself, if we let the hard work dominate who we are as persons. We are not here on this good earth simply in order to work; we are here to search after truth and goodness; if work gets in the way of that search, we will not know the heaven that is here on earth.

    I began by saying that here in the United States today, we seem to have two options in life: work hard and take our pleasure in the work, or work hard in order to get enough money to retire in comfort and devote our lives to pleasure. But Jesus’s ancient teachings challenge us to remember that work is all there is to life. Jesus’s words remind us that we have not yet created that kingdom of God here on earth, the kingdom he spoke of where everyone is able to labor for her or his own needs while contributing to the greater good, where no one is out of work or homeless and everyone is treated fairly and decently. We have not yet accomplished this greater work of humanity. May we continually challenge ourselves to work towards that great end.