Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Unitarian Universalism

  • The Eighth Principle

    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) 2007 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    I chose the readings this morning because I wanted you to hear the voices of non-white people who are Unitarian Universalists. And I’ll be reading publicly-available writings by two people I happen to know, Kon Heong McNaughton, and Alicia Roxanne Ford.

    The first reading is by Alicia Roxanne Ford, poet, Unitarian Universalist minister, who also happens to be a black woman born on the Caribbean island of Tobago.

    “At thirteen I sat on the beach watching the sun set. Do you know that moment… the moment when the sun first meets the horizon? The kiss lightly ‘hello’ — then the embrace begins? That moment when sun and sea seem to melt seamlessly into one effortless creation… new every evening and at the same time birthing dusk — if you are observant, careful — you will see the moon and maybe, just maybe a brave star. Depending on your angle, it will seem as though the coconut trees are offering a blessing — and the waves are humming a prayer. At thirteen — just for one evening, one private moment, I had the right angle and there was an instant in all of this that I could not tell where I began/ended — it was not the sun, but I who melted seamlessly…and it was I who nodded my lean body offering a blessing… my tears were waves praying for World. In that one moment, god was everywhere in all things and beyond all; transcendent and immanent — in that one moment, I heard the sea calling…. Calling. And without knowing why, I gave myself.

    “…At the cornerstone of that calling and my own theological outlook is ‘respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part’ as well as a deep appreciation for the ‘direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder…which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.’ Coming to this ecclesial body has been a blessing… in many ways, it had to be this one free church movement and no other. While the Unitarian Universalist movement remains a work in progress, what is significant at this time for me is that we remain so — willing to engage and live into what it means to be wholly alive, struggling with race/class/gender/sexism/religious pluralism/political conflict and so on — all of which shapes us as we seek to shape and influence them. As challenging as it often is, what draws me and keeps me here is the opportunity to wrestle in community — as well as opportunities to live out my authentic theological praxis.”

    [Ellipses are Alicia’s. http://uusankofa.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=9, accessed 25 October 2007]

    The second reading is from “Why I am a UU: An Asian Immigrant Perspective,” by Kok Heong McNaughton. Kok Heong writes:

    “I am an ethnic Chinese born and raised in Malaysia….

    “I first heard the word ‘Unitarian’ in 1976 from a Taiji student of mine who was a member of the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos. This was back when transcendental meditation was the ‘in’ thing. I was comparing Taiji as a meditation in movement with transcendental meditation and this student said to me, ‘Oh yes, we meditate in our church.’ This intrigued me. What kind of church does meditation? She said, ‘Unitarian Church.’ I said, ‘Never heard of it.’ I looked in my Chinese-English dictionary and I couldn’t find a translation of the word.

    “Talk about miracle! I heard the word for the second time that week when I met a young woman at the Newcomer’s playgroup who also attended the Unitarian Church. When I indicated an interest, instead of giving me an earful, she simply called up the church office and put me on their newsletter mailing list. Through reading the newsletter, I followed the activities of this church for several months before attending my first service.

    “This was a service about Amnesty International. It blew my mind. Back home in Malaysia, I grew up without political freedom. As students, we were told to avoid any involvement in politics. Our job was to study. Leave politics to the politicians. Accept the status quo. Don’t rock the boat. You’ll be OK. Try to make trouble? You’ll mysteriously disappear and rot in a jail somewhere. Here I was flabbergasted because here’s a group of people whose passion was to free political prisoners in third world countries! I never knew about Amnesty International. I suddenly felt this connection of humankind for one another, that there are people here in the free world who care enough to fight against injustices in the world. I never knew of a church that would take a stand on human rights issues. I had thought that all one does in a church was to sing hymns, praise the Lord, pray for one another’s salvation, and put money in the collection basket.

    “After that first service, I returned again and again. The more I found out about Unitarian Universalism, the more it fitted. I particularly appreciated the use of science and reason to explore and to determine for oneself what is the truth, what are myths, what to accept and what to reject in building one’s own unique theology. I didn’t have to take everything on blind, unquestioning faith. Another aspect of Unitarian Universalism that makes me feel special as an Asian American is the emphasis on cultural, ethnic and religious diversity. I didn’t have to check a part of me at the door and to pretend to be who I wasn’t. My ethnic differences were not only accepted, but they were affirmed and upheld. People were interested in what I had to share: I teach Taiji and Qigong, I taught Chinese cooking classes, I bring ethnic foods to our potlucks, I even share my language with those who were interested. I am often consulted about Taoist and Buddhist practices and readings, and asked if I thought the translations were accurate. My opinion mattered. This not only gives me pride in my culture, but it also encourages me to dig deeper into my own heritage, to find out more in areas where my knowledge and expertise are lacking. It helps me to look at my heritage with fresh eyes.”

    Sermon

    Each fall, I try to devote at least one sermon to the so-called “seven principles.” For those of you who have never heard of the “seven principles,” they come from article 2.1 of the Bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association. We are a member congregation of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and as such we have agreed to affirm and promote these seven principles. And for those of you who may not yet be familiar with them, here are the seven principles:

    We affirm and promote: “The inherent worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity and compassion in human relations; acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations; a free and responsible search for truth and meaning; the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large; the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all; respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”

    Mind you, these seven principles are not a creed, nor are they a statement of religious belief. As Unitarian Universalists, we’re not particularly concerned with what you believe; but we do care about what people do with their lives. As I read them, these seven principles are a call to action. As we live our lives, we aim to treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves; to promote justice, equity, and compassion; to accept each other and encourage one another in spiritual growth; to always engage in a search for truth and meaning; to affirm and promote democratic process; to work towards the goal of world community; and to respect our planet earth.

    We often talk about these seven principles, but it seems to me that there’s at least one more principle, an eighth principle if you will, that we need to talk about. If you read a little further in Article 2 of bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association, you will come to section 2.3, which reads as follows:

    “The Association declares and affirms its special responsibility, and that of its member congregations and organizations, to promote the full participation of persons in all of its and their activities and in the full range of human endeavor without regard to race, ethnicity, gender, disability, affectional or sexual orientation, age, language, citizenship status, economic status, or national origin and without requiring adherence to any particular interpretation of religion or to any particular religious belief or creed.”

    This is what I call the eighth principle. Each week, we read a slightly modified version of this eighth principle at the very beginning of our worship services. It lies at the very core of who we are as a congregation here in First Unitarian in New Bedford. Although it is related to the other seven principles, this eighth principle goes beyond those other seven because it tells us that we have a “special responsibility” to live out the ideals of justice and equality for all persons in our congregations and in the wider world. This morning, I’d like to focus on one way in which we Unitarian Universalists have tried to live out this “eighth principle” of ours. And to do that, let’s go back in time….

    A few forward-looking Unitarians and Universalists have always been at the forefront of racial justice. Our own John Murray Spear, the first minister of First Universalist church, one of our antecedent churches, helped form an interracial congregation here in New Bedford in the 1830’s. Unfortunately, we had our share of segregationists, too, and an even bigger number of people who didn’t care one way or the other. But by the 1950’s, there was a growing awareness among Unitarians and Universalists that racial equity and racial justice lies at the heart of our religious tradition.

    I’ll give you one minor example of how that growing awareness played out in the 1950’s. My mother, who was not a particularly unusual Unitarian, was a schoolteacher, and in the early 1950’s she got a job working in the Wilmington, Delaware, school system, teaching in an integrated school. She told us how one day she was walking down the street holding the hands of two kindergarteners, when a man drove by and shouted a racial epithet at her — both of those children happened to be African American children, and that man shouted “nigger lover” at her, a truly offensive thing to say where those children could hear it. I’m sure that man didn’t care much about giving offense. But when he called her a lover, he spoke some truth: she was a lover of her fellow human beings: as a typical Unitarian of her day, my mother followed the moral principle that you should love your neighbor as yourself; and she also followed the growing moral awareness that you should fight racism in the wider society.

    Well, that is just one tiny incident among many others. A few of our churches became integrated and even truly inter-racial: First Unitarian in Chicago, Arlington Street Church in Boston, and others besides. The Unitarians and the Universalists merged together in 1961. Then in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King sent his famous telegram to the leaders of all denominations, asking them to come to Selma, Alabama, to support his non-violent efforts to desegregate that city. Over one hundred Unitarian Universalist ministers, and more than one hundred Unitarian Universalist laypeople, heeded Dr. King’s call and traveled to Alabama. Proportionately speaking, this was a large number of Unitarian Universalists, since we have always been a numerically small denomination — numerically small, but influential beyond our numbers.

    One of the Unitarian Universalist ministers who heeded Dr. King’s call was James Reeb. On March 9, Reeb and two other Unitarian Universalist ministers walked out of a cafe in Selma, and were attacked by some white men who called them “niggers,” and badly beat them. James Reeb died of that beating two days later. Of course black Americans were being beaten and killed with alarming frequency, but James Reeb’s death galvanized many people in the white establishment: that a white minister might be beaten to death because of his efforts to fight racism forced white America to confront some of the violence and hatred that racism spawned. Within days of Reeb’s death, the president of the United States made a special statement supporting civil rights.

    The Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association was meeting when they heard that James Reeb had died, and they adjourned the meeting and immediately flew to Selma, where they reconvened their meeting. Rev. Victor Carpenter said of this action: “What a symbol! No other denomination could or did make such a profound statement of denominational solidarity with teh Civil Rights movement or such an affirmation of the movement’s black leadership.” [1983 Minns lecture]

    I tell you this story so that you can hear about the high point of Unitarian Universalist anti-racist work. Unfortunately, in the late 1960’s, we Unitarian Universalists lost a great deal of momentum when our denomination was rocked by what has come to be known as the Black Empowerment Controversy.

    By 1967, African Americans constituted about one percent of all Unitarian Universalists enough so that African American Unitarian Universalists started to connect with one another. On October 6, 1967, at a Unitarian Universalist gathering called “The Emergency Conference on the Black Rebellion,” 37 African American Unitarian Universalists got together and framed a plan of action. They called for African American representation on key denominational committees; subsidies for African American ministers; and a new social justice organization to be called the Black Affairs Council which would staffed entirely by African Americans and would be financed by the Unitarian Universalist Association in order to further justice for African Americans. You will notice that their central goal was to increase numbers of African Americans in leadership roles within the denomination.

    To make a long story short, the Black Affairs Council was accused of being a separatist group. The notion of empowering African American ministers and lay leaders was difficult for white Unitarian Universalists to understand. The denomination voted to fund the social justice initiatives of the Black Affairs Council, and then when the budget got tight in 1969, funding was cut without adequate explanation. It is estimated that half of all African American Unitarian Universalists quit our denomination because of this controversy. For example, a young African American man named Bill Sinkford, who was president of the national youth organization in the late 1960’s, left Unitarian Universalism out of frustration.

    It took us a couple of decades to recover from that controversy. Let me give you a vivid image of our recovery. I told you how young Bill Sinkford quit Unitarian Universalism. Two decades later, he decided to come back; he became a Unitarian Universalist minister; and in June, 2001, he was elected to the presidency of our denomination, the first African American leader of a historically white denomination in the United States. I would argue that Bill Sinkford’s leadership has been the most inspiring since the merger of Unitarians and Universalists in 1961.

    While Bill Sinkford was away from our denomination, two other movements for full equality and full inclusion swept our denomination. In the 1970’s and early 1980’s, the feminist movement changed Unitarian Universalism: we got rid of the old sexist language in our hymns and in our bylaws, we changed our principles and purposes and included a seventh principle based on ecofeminist thinking, and we encouraged women in leadership roles until now half of all Unitarian Universalist ministers are women. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, we moved towards full acceptance of all persons regardless of sexual orientation, and we have gotten far enough in that effort that more than half our congregations are officially recognized as open and welcoming to gay, lesbian, and transgender persons, and we have gotten to the point where it is possible for a Unitarian Universalist minister to be openly gay, lesbian, or transgender.

    And finally, in the last ten years, I have sensed a move back towards making racial justice a priority, the way it was for us in the 1960’s. I think two different things are causing us to move in this direction. On the one hand, racism is on the increase in our wider society: schools are becoming more segregated, prisons are disproportionately filled with people of color, we’re even starting to see new attempts at poll taxes to keep people of color from voting.

    On the other hand, many people in their twenties and thirties, and even up to those of us in our forties, have come to expect a truly multiracial society. It is our positive ideal. I’ll speak for myself for just a moment: I feel more comfortable in multiracial settings, to the point where I really don’t want to be a member of an all-white church. I’m not the only one who feels this way. Lots of people who grew up as Unitarian Universalists were brought up believing in the ideal of a multiracial society — lots of other people who didn’t grow up as Unitarian Universalists were brought up with those same values — we truly believe in a multiracial society. So here we all are, and one of the first things we want to do is make our churches multiracial.

    Notice that I said “multiracial.” Since the days of the Civil Rights movement, we have come to recognize that racism takes many different forms. There is racism against African Americans, but there is also racism against Asian Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, Pacific Islanders, and so on. Recently, we have people like Tiger Woods and Barack Obama pointing out that they come from mixed-race backgrounds. While we have to recognize that the legacy of slavery has caused a unique set of problems for people of African descent, we also know that racism takes on many insidious forms. Indeed, we can go beyond racism and say that oppression takes on many different forms: the oppression of women, the oppression of sexual minorities, the oppression of people who don’t speak English as their native language, the oppression of people who didn’t happen to be born here in the United States. All these different kinds of oppression are kinds of evil that we must fight.

    I would like to suggest to you that the fact that we can recognize the religious dimension of all these different kinds of oppression offers us an amazing religious opportunity. As a religious people, we know that we are called to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. We read it in the Hebrew Bible, and the Christian scriptures, in the Confucian Analects, indeed in all the great religious literature. We hear it from all the great religious and moral leaders down through the ages: Buddha, Jesus, Mother Ann Lee of the Shakers, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King. And we know from our own reasoning processes that this is a great moral truth. In our time, in these United States, racism is one of the greatest issues that confronts us and requires us to act. As a religious people, we are concerned with what we do with our lives. So it makes sense that we should apply our religious principles to the issue of racism.

    And here in First Unitarian Church, we are already doing that. Our church is in fact multiracial — I’d prefer it if we were more multiracial, but there is no way can anyone can say that we are a totally lily-white church. Less visibly, we also incorporate a diversity of ethnic groups. If English isn’t your native language, no one minds; if you were born in another country, no big deal. We are also at the forefront of fighting discrimination against gay, lesbian, and transgender persons. We are a church that is truly living out the “eighth principle” of Unitarian Universalism.

    To put it most positively, we like diversity; and we are willing to actively work towards becoming an even more multiracial, multiethnic, diverse congregation. We know that means that we’re going to be involved in anti-racism and anti-discrimination work at many different levels: here in our church perhaps, certainly in the wider New Bedford community, in the country as a whole.

    We know it won’t be easy at times. But it is an essential part of our religious values, and so we will persevere; and we will, my friends, we will overcome.

  • Salvation by Character

    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) 2007 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading comes the first chapter of Little Women, by the Unitarian author and abolitionist Louisa May Alcott. Little Women tells the story about three sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, growing up together. In this scene, the four sisters are waiting for their mother to come home:

    “…Jo immediately sat up, put her hands in her pockets, and began to whistle. ”  ‘Don’t, Jo — it’s so boyish!’ [said Amy]

    ”  ‘That’s why I do it,’ [said Jo]

    ”  ‘I detest rude, unladylike girls!’

    ”  ‘I hate affected, niminy-piminy chits!

    ”  ‘   “Birds in their little nests agree,”  ‘ sang Beth, the peacemaker, with such a funny face that both sharp voices softened to a laugh, and the ‘pecking’ ended for that time.

    ”  ‘Really, girls, you are both to be blamed,’ said Meg, beginning to lecture in her elder-sister fashion. ‘You are old enough to leave off boyish tricks, and to behave better, Josephine. It didn’t matter so much when you were a little girl; but now you are so tall, and turn up your hair, you should remember that you are a young lady.’…

    ”  ‘As for you, Amy,’ continued Meg, ‘you are altogether too particular and prim. Your airs are funny now, but you’ll grow up an affected little goose if you don’t take care. I like your nice manners and refined ways of speaking when you don’t try to be elegant, but your absurd words are as bad as Jo’s slang.’…

    [A few pages later, the girls’ mother, Mrs. March, comes home. She reads them a letter from their father, a chaplain in the Civil War, who tells his daughters to do their duty faithfully.]

    “Mrs. March broke the silence that followed… by saying in her cheery voice, ‘Do you remember how you used to play Pilgrim’s Progress when you were little things? Nothing delighted you more than to have me tie by piece bags on your backs for burdens, give you hats and sticks and rolls of paper, and let you travel up through the house from the cellar, which was the City of Destruction, up, up, to the housetop, where you had all the lovely things you could collect to make a Celestial City.’

    ”  ‘What fun it was, especially going by the lions, fighting Apollyon, and passing through the valley where the hobgoblins were!’ said Jo.

    ”  ‘I liked the place where the bundles fell off and tumbled downstairs,’ said Meg.

    ”  ‘My favorite part was when we came out on the flat roof where our flowers and pretty things were, and all stood and sang for joy up there in the sunshine,’ said Beth.

    ”  ‘I don’t remember much about it, except that I was afraid of the cellar and the dark entry, and always liked the cake and milk we had up at the top. If I wasn’t too old for such things, I’d rather like to play it over again,’ said Amy, who began to talk of renouncing childish things at the mature age of twelve.”…

    …

    The second reading by Dana McLean Greeley, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association from 1961 to 1969. Greeley wrote this piece in 1980.

    “There are two categories of people — at least two — that I worry about in our American society today. The first is made up of those people who are concerned primarily that they shall be saved in the next world, who don’t believe in the open encounter, who think that faith is just for the other world, who have no interest in charity, or politics, or social reform.

    “And the second category of people that I worry about are those who have no faith to begin with — no conviction, no commitment, no hope. They don’t believe in anything better than what they have known in the past. They are faithless and uninspired; and I look for no good works, no change in their lives, no change in society from them.

    “Faith is supposed to produce good works. We must improve our community and our world, all the time, in every way possible. No city in this country, or anywhere else, is yet good enough or hopeless or beyond improvement. No church, no business, is good enough or beyond improvement. Even character is part of our good works. We are not saved by faith, and our civilization is not saved by faith, without character. Character is not achieved in a vacuum. It means human relationships, and daily duties, and honesty, and generosity, and sympathy and mercy. It means accepting our responsibility and doing our best, wherever we can. Faith without character… is dead.”

    [Greeley, Forward through the Ages, p. 95.]

    Sermon

    Back in 1886, a Unitarian minister by the name of James Freeman Clarke came up with what he called “Five Points of a New Theology,” and in these five points he captured state-of-the-art Unitarian theology for the late 19th C. His five points were: the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and progress onwards and upwards forever. At some point in my years in a Unitarian Universalist Sunday school in the 1960’s, I must have learned these five points of theology, without meaning to do so — because when I ran into them twenty-some years later in theological school, I realized that I knew them more or less by heart.

    Indeed, though we are now critical of Clarke’s gender-specific language, and though now some of us no longer need the idea of God, his five points have remained of interest up to the present day, a hundred and twenty-one years after he wrote them. We are unlikely to talk of the “fatherhood” of God these days, but we most certainly talk about that which nurtures and guides us, which some call God and some might call the highest and best in humankind. We certainly don’t talk about “the brotherhood of man,” but we most certainly do talk about the goal of world community with peace and justice and equal rights for all. We still talk about the spiritual leadership of Jesus, although we are likely to add other spiritual leaders who are also important to us, such as Gotama Buddha and Moses and others. The horrors of the mid-20th C. made us less certain about “progress onwards and upwards forever,” but we are still willing to talk about — and strive towards — making this world a better place, step by step, bit by bit, to the best of our abilities.

    Yet, curiously enough, of all the five points that James Freeman Clarke outlines, the one to which we seem to pay the least attention is “salvation by character.” That sounds so old-fashioned, doesn’t it? Since 1886, we seem to be less and less sure of personal salvation. These days, we rarely, if ever, talk about personal salvation in our Unitarian Universalist churches, so concerned are we with saving the world. Personal salvation is something we do on our own time, and we surely don’t call it “salvation” — we talk about personal growth, we say that we are improving our psychological well-being; we go see a psychologist, or we sign up for self-help workshops. We only seem to talk about how our church is going to save the world, and we seemingly have neglected or forgotten the possibility that our church might just possibly help us to save our own selves.

    I think I would like to revive an emphasis on salvation by character. Partly, I want to do this because I know that my Unitarian Universalist faith saved me. When I was in my twenties and struggling with what I wanted to do with my life, my Unitarian Universalist church provided me with an ethical compass, and it gave me a community of people with whom I could talk about the big issues in life (and heaven knows that I didn’t have those kinds of conversations at my job). My membership in Unitarian Universalist churches has made me a better person, has improved my character; thus I am more than willing to talk about salvation by character, because I have experienced it. That’s my personal reason for wanting to talk about salvation by character.

    But I have a larger reason for wanting to talk about salvation by character. My friend Greg Stewart, now the minister of the Unitarian Universalist church in downtown San Francisco, has said, “Our philosophy [as Unitarian Universalists] is: Be out in the world six days a week, and then come in here and tell us how that informs your faith.” Greg was talking about how we integrate our social justice work with our religious faith. A great majority of Unitarian Universalists seem to be heavily involved in good works — we work in social service jobs or in human services or in public service or in the non-profit world, and/or we are involved in volunteer activities in the community, and/or we are the kind of people to whom friends turn in times of need, and/or we are artists who make the world a more beautiful place, or whatever it is that we do to improve the world around us. This is what Greg Stewart is telling us: we are already doing all this good work six days a week out there in the world, and then we can come to church one day a week to try to make sense of what we are doing. And I’ll add this to what he said: when we come to church one day a week, we often find that we are tired, and hurting, and even overwhelmed by all that we do to save the world. The problems of the world are huge; it is easy for us to get worn down by the thought of all the work that needs to be done; it is easy for us to lose our way, to become discouraged, to lose our sense of direction. It is even possible to become bitter and disillusioned. So it is that at times we find that we need a little salvation for our own selves.

    One of the ways that we find salvation here at church is that we tell stories to one another. Stories contain power that we should not dismiss lightly. The old story of salvation, that grand old story that is still told in many orthodox Christian churches, has great power. The old story of salvation has helped many people through hard times, by telling them that even if life is miserable and horrible here and now, some day you’ll go to heaven and all will be well, and God will wipe the tears from your eyes, and so on. Now we Unitarian Universalists discovered that that old story of salvation may have been comforting, but it has some horribly big problems. There’s the little problem that not everyone gets to go to heaven because some people burn in hell which makes many of us Unitarian Universalists not want to go to heaven in solidarity with the oppressed souls in hell (even if we were eligible to go to heaven, but we’re not because we’re heretics). There’s also the little problem that if people put all their efforts into making themselves good now so that you’ll get into heaven in the future, they have a tendency to ignore the fact that if we all worked at making the world a better place now, we could create a heaven here on earth. In the face of these pretty serious problems, we have rejected the old story of salvation.

    I’d like to suggest that instead of the old story of salvation, we tell two new stories of salvation. One story we tell ourselves is that, if we work hard enough, we can create a kind of heaven here on earth, that we can save the world. That’s a story we tell ourselves over and over again. But there’s another story of salvation that we need to tell ourselves more often, and that is the story of personal salvation, the story of salvation by character.

    The story of salvation by character lies at the core of our Unitarian identity. And as it happens, here in our church, we have a huge image that represents the story of salvation by character. Behind me is a gorgeous Tiffany glass mosaic, installed in this church in 1911. It is spectacular in its own right, for its artistry and for its sheer size. But the real interest for me is what the mosaic portrays.

    Look up, and you can see a pilgrim ascending a rough and narrow path that has been cut into the side of a precipitously steep mountain path. No, he’s not Jesus, a common misconception — he’s simply an ordinary pilgrim, dressed in a sort of medieval hooded cloak, with a sturdy walking which he keeps in his right hand, presumably to help keep him from tumbling headlong into the deep ravine close beside him. You will notice that there is no handrail on this steep path. You will notice that our pilgrim is not attached to a climbing rope, and neither carrabiners nor pitons are hidden beneath his cloak. There aren’t even any convenient roots for him to cling to. He’s on his own. No wonder he steadfastly looks upwards — he’d surely get dizzy or ill if he looked down into the deep ravine at his right-hand side.

    I said that he’s on his own, but that’s not quite true. There’s an angel hovering behind him, on his outboard side. Now the authorities debate endlessly about angels. There is, for example, a debate about their physical existence: Do angels have an actual physical existence, or are they insubstantial, incorporeal? In the Western tradition, the theologians tell us that angels are invisible and that they have no gender, although they can take on human form. Artists in the West have traditionally portrayed the otherwise invisible angels as beings that look like humans, except with the addition of wings; and quite often, the artists have not given definite gender to angels. We can see all this here in our Tiffany mosaic. Frederick Wilson, the artist who created this image, portrays the angel in the classic Western manner, as a human-like being with wings, a being who is ambiguously gendered. I’ve climbed up on a tall stepladder to look at that angel; I’ve stood up in the balcony and stared at it through binoculars; and say what you will, that angel is ambiguously gendered, or maybe a transgender angel. And of course Frederick Wilson shows us the angel; he has to show us the angel; if he didn’t show us the angel, it would be easy to miss the point of the mosaic. But while we can see the angel, the pilgrim doesn’t seem to be able to see the angel at all; at least, he gives no evidence of seeing it.

    Supposedly, the mosaic depicts a scene from an old hymn by the Unitarian hymnodist Eliza Scudder, although the connection seems somewhat tenuous to me. But to me, our mosaic fits right in with our Unitarian worldview. In the late 19th C., more than one Unitarian church had a picture of the “straight and narrow way” behind the pulpit. Many Unitarians of my grandparents’ generation saw life as a dangerous path, and what kept you out of danger was your good character. Remember that, in our Western culture, angels are messengers from God, and I suspect that back in 1911, when this mosaic first went up, the Unitarians in this congregation understood it that way. They did not believe that the angel was a physical being that could reach out and keep the pilgrim from bodily falling into the ravine. Rather, they would have understood this mosaic as a metaphor: the angel represents a whisper from God, or a whisper from your conscience — for after all, what is your conscience but the voice of that which is highest and best in you? — and it is that whisper of conscience that keeps us walking safely up the steep and dangerous path of life. We might say that our mosaic is an elaborate metaphor for the Unitarian concept of salvation by character.

    We find this same old Unitarian idea in the popular children’s book Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Alcott, who was an active Unitarian her whole life, believed strongly in the cultivation of one’s moral character. In the first reading this morning, we heard how the four girls who are the heroines of Little Women struggled with the burden of their personal imperfections; and how they understood their struggles to be like progress of a pilgrim struggling from the lowest depths up, up, up to the raptures of cake and milk in the Celestial City at the top, at the end of the journey. Little Women tells the story of how life is in some sense a struggle to overcome one’s personal imperfections, to achieve slavation through the force of good character. Louisa May Alcott also tells us that there is always a guiding hand to help us, which we may understand literally as the guiding hand of parents, or more figuratively, the guiding hand of God.

    We still tell ourselves this story of salvation by character. Some would not talk about God, but would talk about the guidance of that which is highest and best inside us, or the moral compass of natural law and human community. Some of us would in fact talk about spirits or angels which guide us, and others would refer to the guidance of the Goddess. The details have changed, the story may no longer be as important as it once was, but we still tell ourselves this story of salvation by character.

    In the early part of the 20th C., we Unitarians became more and more interested in saving the world, and less and less interested in saving ourselves. We are still concerned with personal improvement, but we are more concerned with world improvement. Now we are more likely to tell ourselves about salvation through social justice. We see ourselves as pilgrims down in the valley — the valley of racism, the valley of ecological crisis, the valley where there are too many homeless people, the valley where too many people can’t get the basics of life. We struggle upwards along a dangerous path, striving to make this world a better place. I know that’s how I look at the pilgrim, as someone who strives for justice in the world.

    But I am mindful of what Dana McLean Greeley taught: that “We are not saved by faith, and our civilization is not saved by faith, without character.” In other words, it is not enough to serve soup at the soup kitchen; social justice work alone is not enough; we must also improve our human relationships with friends and loved ones and with those whom we would help. It is not enough to send a generous check to a good cause once in a while; we must also attend to our daily duties, we must attend to our good character. Good character and social justice work go hand in hand. Good character alone is not enough; and social justice work without character is dead.

    So it is that we go out in the world six days a week, and we do what we can to make this old world a better place. Then once a week, we come in here, and we reflect on what it is that we are doing; we take the time to pause reflect on our own personal progress; we take time to reach out and seek the guidance of a helping hand, whether that helping hand comes in the form of God, and angel, or simply a supportive church community. So we come here each week, to find new strength, so that we may venture back out into the world, and make that world a better place for all.

  • Maja Capek and an Immigrants’ Church

    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) 2007 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading comes from an unsigned manuscript in the church archives. This manuscript, titled “How our church began,” gives the history of North Unitarian Church. I should explain that when the author refers to a “Bohemian man,” she means someone who literally came from Bohemia, a part of Europe now part of Germany and the Czech Republic. Thus, the “Bohemian man” is a recent immigrant to the United States.

    “In the year 1889 Mr. Paul Revere Frothingham came to New Bedford as assistant minister to Mr. Potter who was the minister of the Unitarian Church on Union and Eighth St. He had a very pleasing personality and was liked very much by young and old alike.

    “In the year 1892 Mr. Potter tendered his resignation and Mr. Frothingham then became minister of the church.

    “It wasn’t long after Mr. Frothingham became minister that he began looking around to see what he would do to improve the community. With Mrs. Frothingham they started a club for girls, called ‘Girls Social Union’ they met in the chapel of the Unitarian Church. There were classes in sewing, millnery, & cooking, besides having fun playing all sorts of games. This was given free of charge to any girl who was interested in becoming a member.

    “In 1894 It was decided to hire rooms in the North end of the city 1651 Purchase St. where the firls could meet and they would be nearer their homes as they all lived in the north end of the city. It was in the same rooms Mr. Frothingham established a free kindergarten and secured a trained teacher for the children. Later this kindergarten was taken over by the city and called the ‘North end Day Nursery.’

    “The beginning of this movement is quite interesting, for at that time a Bohemian man living in the north end, having read of the day nursery and of a sermon by Mr. Frothingham translated was deeply impressed, and said this is what I believe, and would like my children to go to the Sunday school where Mr. Frothingham is the minister. The children went to Sunday school, soon other children joined, and this was the beginning of our Sunday school. Don’t know the exact year but think it might [be] 1896 or 1897.

    “Sunday school was held in a house 1378 Acushnet Ave. just across from St. Anthony’s church…. The Sunday school became so large in attendance that we were over crowded, so Mr. Frothingham decided we should have a place of our own. So in 1901 Unity Home was built….”

    The second reading, from another manuscript in our church archives, is by Audrey Steele and gives her memories of North Unitarian Church.

    “I started to attend Unity Home Sunday School when I was four years old.

    “I have many fond memories of the years I attended there as I was growing up.

    “We were a happy, congenial family-oriented congregation made up of many nationalities. All the children were close friends…. The Sunday School teachers I remember most were Miss Hanford, Miss Seguin, and my favorite Esther Grundy Grew….

    “In those days we learned a lot from the Bible and we were taught the Unitarian creed which was popular and believed by the congregation. I will always remembeer we were taught, the fatherhood of god, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, the salvation of character and the progress of mankind onward and upwards forever. We had many fine ministers. Those I remember most are Mrs. Robert Cross who was the church director for many years, Mrs. Majda [sic] Capek for her interest in the young people. She planned many things to do at the church service as on mother’s day we would give each of the ladies attending church a plant or some flowers. She loved flowers. Before Mrs. Capek died I received a nice note from her saying she also had fond memories of Unity Home and especially of the young people.”

    Sermon

    This is the second in a series of occasional sermons about the history of our congregation. We are the direct institutional descendants of three congregations:– First Congregational Society (Unitarian) of New Bedford; First Universalist Church of New Bedford; and North Unitarian Church (Unitarian). 2008 will mark the three hundredth anniversary of the oldest of our three antecedent churches, First Congregational Society, later First Unitarian; in honor of that anniversary, this fall I plan to tell you about several unsung heroes and heroines from all three of our antecedent churches.

    In the first sermon in this series, I told the story of John Murray Spear, and I said I consider him to be the most remarkable minister who was ever called to serve in one of these three churches. Well, he may be the most remarkable, but only if he is tied for first place with Maja Capek, minister at North Unitarian Church from 1940 to 1943.

    Marie Veruna Oktavec Capek, known as Maja, was born in 1888 and grew up in the city of Chomutov, then in Western Bohemia, now in the Czech Republic. As a young woman, she rejected Catholicism — the religion that had been imposed on her land by an invading army centuries before — and became quite liberal in her religious outlook, though not a member of any specific church. She, with her sister and parents, emigrated to the United States in 1907, graduated from Columbia University’s School of Library Science, and began working in a branch of the New York Public Library. There she met another Czech emigre, Norbert Capek, and though he was 47 and eighteen years older than she, they fell in love and married in 1917. Capek was a Baptist minister at that time — or rather, he was barely a Baptist minister, since he was suspected of liberal tendencies and accused of heresy. As a married couple, he and Maja drifted further into religious liberalism, until at last Norbert left the Baptist ministry, and in 1920 he and Maja joined the Unitarian church in East Orange, New Jersey, where they were then living.

    But all this while, Maja and Norbert considered themselves to be only in temporary exile from their true home, and when the new country of Czechoslovakia was formed in the aftermath of the First World War, they longed to return there and start a liberal church. They appealed to the American Unitarian Association, who provided money and moral support, and off they went, back to Prague.

    In Prague, Norbert and Maja Capek organized a church that grew from nothing, to some three thousand two hundred full members in twenty short years — and another five thousand Czechs, while not officially members, considered themselves Unitarians. This was the congregation that ordained Maja Capek into the ministry in 1922 [?]. In the late 1930’s, the Prague church headed by the Capeks was the largest Unitarian church in the world.

    But larger events would prevent the further growth of Unitarianism in Czechoslovakia. Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938. In February, 1939, Maja and Norbert decided that Maja should go to the United States, to speak to Unitarian churches across the country and raise funds for relief work in Czechoslovakia. As they said good-bye, both Maja and Norbert knew it could be the final time they saw each other.

    Maja went on her lecture tour, and soon it became clear that she would not be able to return to Czechoslovakia during the Nazi occupation. She settled in the north end of New Bedford, where there was a large population of Czechs, Bohemians, and other people who had come from central Europe. And she became a part of North Unitarian Church.

    Now I must back up a little bit, and tell you about North Unitarian Church. As we heard in the first reading this morning, Paul Revere Frothingham, the minister at First Unitarian during the 1890’s, and his wife decided to get their church involved in outreach in the greater New Bedford community. Since Unitarians have long been involved in education reform, it is not surprising that the Frothinghams started working with kids: first by creating a girls’ after-school program, then a Sunday school, and then a free kindergarten. They were so successful in their efforts at attracting children, particularly children from the central Europeans who lived in the North End of New Bedford, that it soon became necessary to have a dedicated space for all these children’s programs.

    A father of one these children, a recent immigrant who may not have been fluent yet in English, was naturally curious about these programs, and the church that was sponsoring them. Someone had translated Mr. Frothingham’s sermons into his native language, and he said: But this is what I believe about religion! I am a Unitarian! What began as an outreach to children grew to become a liberal religious movement among their parents. And so the Frothinghams and First Unitarian founded Unity Home in rented rooms in the North End, as a religious outreach to religious liberals in the immigrant community there.

    Unity Home seems to have begun with a Sunday school, but it was quickly followed in 1895 by a branch of the Women’s Alliance of Unitarian and Other Liberal Christian Women — the national organization that later became the Women’s Alliance, and still later the Unitarian Universalist Women’s Federation. Other activities for adults and children followed, and by 1901 First Unitarian built a building for Unity Home. This new building included a chapel, and by 1904 regular religious services were begun, led by a Mr. Brunton, and held under the auspices of First Unitarian. Music was supplied by a talented quartet of singers chosen from the ranks of the Sunday school. A succession of men and women were directors of Unity Home over the next few two decades, some of whom were ministers; at other times, it appears that the minister of First Unitarian led worship services in Unity Home. Finally, on May 8, 1920, the religious community at Unity Home incorporated as a separate congregation. First Unitarian continued to own the building called Unity Home, but the religious congregation which met in Unity Home was officially and legally called North Unitarian Church.

    North Unitarian Church had its ups and downs. The church ordained a Mr. Pratt to the Unitarian ministry in 1924, but he soon left. Following his departure, there was a Sunday school but no worship services at North Unitarian from 1924 through 1938. Beginning in 1939, Duncan Howlett, minister here at First Unitarian and arguably the greatest minister at First Unitarian during the 20th C., began working with the people of North Unitarian Church to resume worship services. Howlett found a student minister named Robert Holden to lead services for a year. And then, out of the chaos of the Second World War, North Unitarian Church encountered some amazing good luck; a Unitarian minister named Maja Capek decided to settle in the North End of New Bedford.

    Even though Maja Capek must have been worried sick about her husband Norbert, who had been taken into custody by the Gestapo, she managed to help revive North Unitarian Church. Her ministry at North Unitarian lasted from late 1940 through most of 1943. As we heard in the second reading, she did much work with the young people of the church. She introduced the annual Flower Service, an innovation of the Prague Unitarian church that we still observe each year; indeed, the Flower Service or Flower Communion has spread to nearly every Unitarian Universalist congregation in North America.

    Maja Capek also re-vitalized North Unitarian as a church, as something more than a community center and a Sunday school, with the result that in 1941 a re-organized North Unitarian could once more affiliate with the American Unitarian Association — which proved to be important because it meant that North Unitarian could draw on the resources of the American Unitarian Association to find a new minister once Maja Capek left. By 1944, Maja Capek was working at the headquarters of the American Unitarian Association in Boston, doing work for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, helping to provide relief to Europeans ravaged by the Second World War.

    I tell you these two interlocking stories — the story of Maja Capek, and the story of North Unitarian Church — because these stories have a great relevance to our church today. By 1971, the membership of North Unitarian Church had gotten so small that it ended its legal existence and merged back into First Unitarian. Sometimes we think of First Unitarian Church as an old New England Yankee church — and no doubt about it, we are an old New England Yankee church — but we also have this amazing history of welcoming recent immigrants into our liberal religious community. Of course, we all know that today, our church is still has some New England Yankees as members, and on any given Sunday morning there might be four or five of us out of forty people present in the worship service. Yet on any given Sunday morning, a fifth of the people present here might have been born in one of six or seven different countries. On any given Sunday, another fifth of the people present here might be the children of immigrants.

    The stories of North Unitarian Church and of Maja Capek tell us that you can be a religious liberal regardless of where you were born. Our Unitarian Universalist faith includes people who are Native Americans, and people who immigrated to New England twelve or thirteen generations ago, and people who were born in another country but now live here. Our faith knows no national boundaries, our faith is not specific to a certain people, or a certain language. Fifty years ago, Unitarians promoted a religion founded on reason, a religion that affirmed “the fatherhood of god, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus of Nazareth, salvation by character, and progress onwards and upwards.” We still welcome anyone who craves a religion founded on reason, a religion that looks upon the universe with awe, that believes that all humanity must learn to work together, that acknowledges the great religious leaders of the past like Jesus, that finds salvation in the improvement of our personal characters, and believes in progress through the work of men and women of good will. Among everything else that we are, we are still a church of immigrants, just as we were in the days of Maja Capek’s ministry here in New Bedford.

    And the interlocking stories of Maja Capek and North Unitarian Church have yet another layer of meaning. As a member congregation of the Unitarian Universalist Association, we have covenanted to affirm and promote the principles and purposes of the Association. One of those principles states that we shall affirm and promote “the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.” Although the current wording of this principle only dates back to 1985, nevertheless Unitarians have actively supported world community for centuries. Maja Capek lived out this principle in her life: she was one of the ones who resisted the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, that is, she resisted a military invasion that destabilized all of Europe, a military invasion that threatened to extinguish the flickering light of world community that had begun to shine in the early 20th century. North Unitarian Church also lived out an ideal of world community, right within the walls of the old Unity Home building that once stood on Tallman Street in the north end of New Bedford. No matter what your national origin, you were welcomed into North Unitarian Church.

    We have inherited the legacy of North Unitarian Church, and we have inherited the legacy of Maja Capek. Here at First Unitarian Church, we affirm and promote the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all. We hold this goal because we know that all persons, all peoples, in the world have equal rights for peace, liberty, and justice. We stand up against tyrants because tyrants threaten our sacred principle of free inquiry. We stand up against tyrants because tyrants threaten our sacred value of love for all humankind. We remember the legacy of Maja Capek and North Unitarian Church by continuing to welcome all persons, regardless of nationality or citizenship status, into our congregation. We continue the legacy of Maja Capek and North Unitarian Church — and the legacy of both First Unitarian and First Univeersalist — by working in the world towards the goal of world community.

    So it is that we continue to honor the memory of Maja Capek — a woman who built up a church here in New Bedford that welcomed immigrants, a woman who stood up against the tyranny of Nazism, an amazing woman who deserves to be remembered by future generations.