Humanism – Dan Harper

“Option D”

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, California, at the 9:30 and 11:00 worship services. As usual, the sermon and story below are reading texts. The actual sermon as preached, and story as told, contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon and story copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

Story — “The Golden Calf”

This is an old, old story about the ancient prophet Moses. Moses was the man who led the Israelites out of slavery, and helped them escape into the desert. They wandered in the desert, looking for a land to call their own. At last they camped at the base of Mount Sinai.

Moses climbed up Mount Sinai, up to the very top. At the top of the mountain, the god known as Yahweh spoke to him. Yahweh said, “All of you Israelites are going to be my special, chosen people. I will take care of you, and you must promise to obey me over all the other gods and goddesses.”

Moses went back down Mount Sinai to tell the Israelites. It’s always good to have a god looking out for you, so the Israelites agreed to obey Yahweh. Moses went back up Mount Sinai. “They all promised to obey you,” Moses said to Yahweh.

“Well, just to make sure,” said Yahweh, “I’m going to appear at the top of this mountain as a dense dark cloud, filled with thunder and lightning. You come back up the mountain, and all the Israelites will know that I talk to you directly.”

Moses went back down Mount Sinai. Yahweh appeared at the top of the mountain as a dense cloud. Moses went back up the mountain to talk with Yahweh. The Israelites watched.

Moses entered the dense cloud at the top of the mountain. Yahweh told Moses about all the rules and laws the Israelites would have to obey. Yahweh started with ten basic laws, the Ten Commandments: no stealing, no murdering people, no lying; and a law saying the Israelites weren’t allowed to worship any other god or goddess besides Yahweh.

Moses brought the Ten Commandments down to the Israelites. But there were still more laws. Moses had to climb up and down that mountain quite a few times to bring back all the laws.

Once Moses stayed on top of the mountain for a really long time. The Israelites thought Moses and Yahweh had abandoned them. The Israelites decided to make a new god. They took gold and made it into the shape of a calf — a golden calf. They invented a new religion to worship the golden calf, and had a big party to celebrate. Just as the party was really getting going, Moses came back down the mountain.

“What’s going on here?” Moses said. “Don’t you remember that you promised not to worship any other gods?”

The Israelites looked a little shamefaced, but no one apologized.

“Who’s on my side?” said Moses angrily. “If you still like Yahweh best, come with me!” A few people joined him. Moses made sure they all had swords, and then told them to go and kill anyone who was still worshipping that golden calf.

And they did.

This is a strange story. Moses had already told everyone that killing was against Yahweh’s laws, so when he killed people didn’t he break Yahweh’s law? On the other hand, wasn’t it stupid for the Israelites to make a golden calf, and then worship the thing they had just made?

I think this story is supposed to make us stop and think about religion. I think this story is telling us: don’t do something because someone tells you to, or because everyone else is doing it. Seek out the truth, hang out with other people who think for themselves, and remember how easy it is to make mistakes.

[Exodus 31.18-32.25, with reference to the events of Exodus 19-31. I used the New International Version when writing this story.]

Sermon — “Option D”

Get out your number 2 pencils. Do not let your mark stray outside the oval, and check off at least one, but no more than one choice. Are you ready? Here’s the question:

Do you believe in God? Choose one of the following: (A) Yes. (B) No. (C) Don’t care or don’t know.

Many, maybe most, people in our contemporary Western society believe those are the only three possible answers to that question. Do you believe in God? Yes. No. Don’t know or don’t care.

Christian fundamentalists like Pat Robertson, and humanist fundamentalists like Richard Dawkins, would deny that that third option exists — they believe you have to answer yes or no — they live in theological world that operates solely under Boolean logic.

Unitarian Universalists, on the other hand, want option D: All of the above. Since Western society does not give us option D, we take our number 2 pencils and fill in all three ovals, which does tend to mess up the scoring of this particular multiple choice test. This morning, I would like to tell you a little bit about how we came to be this way — why it is that we refuse to restrict ourselves to simplistic answers to the question, Do you believe in God?

———

Let me go tell you a little bit of the historical story behind our Unitarian Universalist attitudes towards God.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Unitarian ministers like Francis Ellingwood Abbott and Octavius Brooks Frothingham caused a ruckus within Unitarianism by preaching “Free Religion” — what we today would call religious humanism [Dorrien 2001], although they still used words like “Christ” and “God.” By the end of the 19th century, free religionists were everywhere: Eliza Tupper Wilkes, the Unitarian preacher who first spread Unitarianism here in Palo Alto in the 1890s, was one of those who allied themselves with the Free Religion position in the Western Unitarian Conference. [Tucker 1990]

By the 1930s, John Dietrich and other Unitarian and Universalist ministers were preaching what they had come to call humanism — religion with humanity at its center, not God. The humanists found themselves engaged in active debate with the theists, people like William Wallace Fenn, Unitarians and Universalists who felt no need to dismiss the concept of God. In the first half of the 20th century, the debate between the theists and the humanists was vigorous, sometimes stupidly acrimonious, but often quite fruitful.

But not all Unitarians and Universalists could be characterized as either humanist or theist. There was E. Stanton Hodgin, who had been minister at the radical Los Angeles Unitarian church, and then minister at the fairly stodgy New Bedford, Massachusetts, Unitarian church. When Stanton Hodgin was asked to sign the Humanist Manifesto in 1933, he refused — he didn’t want religion reduced to anything that remotely resembled a creed. And when Hodgin wrote his autobiography in 1948, he gave it the title Confessions of an Agnostic Clergyman — he refused to let himself be put into a theological box.

I give you some of this history so that you realize that the conversations between the humanists and the theists have been going on in Unitarianism and Universalism for one and a half centuries. Plenty of smart people have participated on both sides of these conversations. If one side could prove the existence or non-existence of God, they would have done so by now.

Let me move ahead in time to 1973, when William R. Jones published his controversial book titled Is God a White Racist? In that book he made a crucial advance in the debate between humanists and theists, which he further clarified in his 1975 article “Humanism and Theism: The Chasm Narrows.” [Note 1] Jones said that the battles for liberation — liberation of African Americans, liberation of women, liberation of third world peoples — would force theists to a position that he called “humanocentric theism.” Getting rid of the theological jargon, what Jones meant was simple: There are two basic types of theism. First, there’s the theism that says that everything is God’s will, and humanity has little or no freedom of decision. Second, there’s the theism that says God exists yet we human beings have freedom to make decisions — and that being the case, this second type of theism, humano-centric theism, functionally looks very much like humanism. Jones is African American, and he was active in the Civil Rights struggle; speaking as a humanist, he almost seems to be saying: Instead of arguing about whether God exists, let’s just acknowledge that humanists and theists are different, move beyond that, and work together to end racism.

Let me jump ahead to 2002. In that year, Carole Fontaine, a Unitarian Universalist who is professor of Biblical studies at Andover Newton Theological School, posed an interesting question: What will it take to form a global conscience for planet Earth? Part of her answer was that theists and humanists need to work together. And she contended that we Unitarian Universalists are uniquely placed to build bridges between traditional theists and secular humanists so that, for example, we can do human rights work together. Thus, Fontaine believes we Unitarian Universalists need to “reconstitute Jesus as a human rights guy…. I like Jesus. He’s my guy. The fact that he’s executed on trumped-up political charges — I mean, he’s the Stephen Biko of the first century. We can work with this!” [Note 2. Fontaine 2003.] So Carole Fontaine goes a step further than William R. Jones — not only should humanists and theists be working together on social justice — but those theists and humanists in Unitarian Universalist congregations, already so experienced in humanist-theist dialogue, have a special role in the wider world, because we are the ones who can get the traditional theists and the secular humanists to work together.

Now you begin to see why we Unitarian Universalists want to choose option D. There are those who believe in God; there are those who don’t believe in God; there are those who don’t know or don’t care; and then there’s us. We do all of the above, and that is our unique strength, that is the unique contribution we have to make to the world.

———

We Unitarian Universalists refuse to be boxed in by either-or theological choices. James Luther Adams, perhaps the most prominent Unitarian Universalist theologian of the twentieth century, started out as a traditional Christian. He became a Unitarian and a religious humanist at about the same time. Later on in life, he thought of himself as a theist, a liberal Christian; although he was a very liberal Christian, active in feminist critiques of God-images. When I look back at my own religious journey, I have been successively a non-traditional theist, a non-traditional humanist, and now I call myself a religious naturalist; as a religious naturalist, I can use God-talk or not as I wish, and still be theologically consistent. Someone once asked a Universalist minister what it was, exactly, that Universalists stand for. “We don’t stand,” he said, “we move.” [Fisher 1921]

And this brings us back to that story I told at the beginning of the worship service, that old, old story about Moses and the golden calf. You remember the story: Moses and the Israelites make promises to the god Yahweh; in return for Yahweh’s protection, Moses and the Israelites promise (among many other things) to refrain from killing each other, and to refrain from worshipping other gods or goddesses. Yet when Moses is gone for a while, the Israelites start worshipping a golden calf, and then Moses kills a whole bunch of the Israelites for doing so.

Before I go any further, I have to make something clear to those of you here this morning who might be new to Unitarian Universalism. We Unitarian Universalists do not take the Bible literally, any more than we take Shakespeare literally. Did Moses really go up onto Mount Sinai and speak to a god whom he called Yahweh? Yes and no. Did Macbeth really see Banquo’s ghost in Shakespeare’s play “Macbeth”? Yes and no. In each case, there is a literal answer, an answer which is fairly trivial and ultimately rather boring; and there is also a non-literal answer, an answer which relates to moral and spiritual truths, and it is in answering this latter question that we can be transformed at our deepest levels of being.

We Unitarian Universalists have traditionally understood the story of Moses and the golden calf to be a story calling upon us to reject idolatry. Let me explain one way we Unitarian Universalists might define idolatry:

When the Israelites made the golden calf, they were guilty of idolatry: instead of coming to terms with the complexities of moral and ethical thinking encapsulated in the laws of Yahweh, the Israelites tried to take a set of religious concepts that were really quite complicated and subtle, and they tried to reduce those concepts to something that was showy but empty and useless. When Moses ignored the law of Yahweh that prohibited killing, so that he could angrily kill anyone who worshipped the golden calf, he was guilty of idolatry. He took a set of religious concepts that were complicated and subtle, and he cut out all the parts he didn’t like. So Moses ignored the law against killing so that he could enforce the law against worshipping another god; and in one of the Bible’s moments of supreme irony he exchanges one form of idolatry for another form of idolatry. Both types of idolatry are the same in that they place undue significance on something of little or no significance.

(I cannot resist digressing here for just a moment to point out that the usual American method of reading the Bible is the first form of idolatry. Most Americans, when they read the Bible, take this complicated, layered, fascinating collection of literature written over a period of thousands of years, and reduce it to simplistic moralism. Most Americans read the Bible the way they’d read the latest thriller by Dan Brown, when we should be reading the Bible the way we read Shakespeare, reading it as literature that offers something to everyone from the groundlings to the most sophisticated intellectuals.)

Historically, we Unitarian Universalists have resisted idolatry with all the power of our beings. The Unitarians of my grandparents’ generation realized that the crosses that had appeared in some Unitarian churches were idols — symbols that had taken on undue significance. My aunt and uncle belonged to the Unitarian church in Lexington, Massachusetts, and in the late 1940s that church developed a really beautiful Christmas eve service, where the whole church started out in darkness, and gradually a few candles were lit, then a few more, and at the end of the service everyone was holding a lit candle and the combined light of all those individual candles lit up the whole church. As this candlelight service evolved, someone threw in a dramatic moment when an internally-lit cross rose up in front of the pulpit — a nice piece of theater, a sort of dramatic reminder that Christmas is central to the Christian tradition. And so for some years, that internally-lit cross would rise up on Christmas Eve — until the year when they decided that the symbolism was heavy-handed, that it was a form of idolatry. So that big old cross got stuffed in a garbage can, and placed in front of the church, where (it is said) it provoked a great deal of comment about those Godless Unitarians among certain more literally-minded residents of the town.

I remember the first time the minister introduced the flaming chalice into a worship service in the Unitarian Universalist church I grew up in. I was sitting next to my mother, a lifelong Unitarian, and as he lit the match she muttered under her breath, “Graven images” — which is an old-fashioned way of accusing that minister of idolatry. I don’t think the flaming chalice is inherently idolatrous, but if we place undue significance on what is essentially an insignificant object, then it becomes idolatrous. The flaming chalice began as a symbol used by the Unitarian Service Committee during the Second World War, and really it is a symbol of our commitment to social justice work. This congregation’s habit of extinguishing the chalice strikes me as tending towards the idolatrous, as placing undue significance on a very simple symbol.

Another obvious example of something here in our church which can be interpreted as idolatrous is the branch which hangs in this room. I don’t mind having a branch hanging on our wall; it’s a nice piece of decor. But when I am uncomfortable when I hear people attributing symbolic significance to that branch; that, it seems to me, is placing undue significance on what is, after all, just a branch. And I’m sure some of you disagree with me, and you will politely let me know about your disagreement after the worship service. We need polite disagreement if we are to keep ourselves from falling into idolatry. Because people like me — mystics who want to get rid of all symbols — we can create another kind of idolatry, an idolatry of simplicity where we try to place undue significance on plainness and complete lack of ornamentation.

Anything can become an idol, a graven image, a golden calf. Even if we got rid of all the symbols, our whole building could become a graven image, if we place undue significance on it. We don’t even need a building in order to be a congregation; all we need is each other, and the search for truth, and a commitment to make the world a better place.

The golden calf was an crude attempt to fix the truth in a calf made of gold. Let us be sure that we do not try to fix the truth in some material object — the truth will not be held in a golden calf, nor in a flaming chalice, nor in the branch, nor in this building. The truth may be held for a time in a community of people, as long as that community of people remains flexible and willing to evolve. We may be comforted, for a time, by our building, or by the flaming chalice, but do not confuse such comfort with truth. Truth and comfort are united only in a community of people. If this building crumbles into dust, we will still be able to take comfort in each other, we will still be able to take comfort in this religious community, we will still know the truth that we can change the world for the better. We gain strength from each other, from our shared religious community; and we take that strength out beyond our community to heal a world that desperately needs healing.

———

Do you believe in God? Choose one of the following: (A) Yes. (B) No. (C) Don’t care or don’t know. (D) All of the above. As Unitarian Universalists, our choice is clear: we choose option D. We choose to remember that we have debated this question for a century and a half, with very intelligent people arguing for very different answers, and we no longer expect a definitive answer. We choose an answer that puts us in a unique position to help heal the world. We choose to resist an idolatry that would limit us to simplistic answers to religious questions.

Selected References

Dorrien, Gary. The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001.
Fisher, Lewis Beals. Which Way? A Study of Universalists and Universalism. Boston: Universalist Publishing House, 1921. [p. 9]
Fontaine, Carole. “Strange Bedfellows? human Rights, Scripture(s), and the Seven Principles.” Journal of Liberal Religion, Winter, 2003; www.meadville.edu/journal/2003_fontaine_4_1.pdf accessed October 2009.
Hodgin, E. Stanton. Confessions of an Agnostic Clergyman Boston: Beacon Press, 1948.
Jones, William R. Is God a White Racist?. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973, 1997.
———. “Theism and Religious Humanism: The Chasm Narrows.” The Christian Century, May 21, 1975, pp. 520-525.
Tucker, Cynthia Grant. Prophetic Sisterhood: Liberal Women Ministers of the Frontier, 1880-1930. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1991.

The Weary Blues

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 improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading was the poem “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes. This poem is not included here due to copyright restrictions.

The second reading was the poem by Langston Hughes, titled “The Ballad Of The Landlord” This poem is not included here due to copyright restrictions.

Sermon — “The Weary Blues”

This is Black History Month, and in three sermons this month I proposed to speak to you about three different Black poets; more specifically, about three American poets of African descent. Last week, I spoke about James Weldon Johnson; and this week I would like to speak about Langston Hughes.

If you were here last week, you heard me say that poets make the world; and I meant that in a broad sense of poetry, where poets make language and language makes our world. This is not some supernatural magic trick; rather it is a statement about the basic being of the universe. There is a fundamental connection between language — between what we speak and hear and write and read — a connection between language, and the very core of That Which Is.

I want to be careful to tell you exactly what I mean by a poem. A poem is not just something that sits there on the page, and you read it, or your high school English teacher makes you read it, and that’s the end of it. A poem is language that is meant to change you, and maybe change the world around you. A few poems are meant to be looked at, like paintings, but mostly you have to say poems aloud for them to change you, or change the world around you; and if you can chant them or intone them or sing them, sometimes that increases their power.

I’d even say that poetry and music are much the same thing; — two points on a continuum that stretches from ordinary conversation to the most abstract music. It is not always clear to me where the spoken word ends, and music begins. What is clear to me is the power of poetry, and music, to change us; more specifically, the power of poetry and music to heal us, to heal our souls, to heal our selves.

But how does this happen? How is it that poetry heals and changes us? This is why I want to speak with you this morning about the poems of Langston Hughes. More than most poets, his poetry is musical. More than most poets, his poetry has the power to heal and change and transform. And his poetry has helped me to understand a little bit of how it is that music transforms and heals us.

…

Just before the sermon, I read one of Langston Hughes’s best-known poems, “The Ballad of the Landlord.” This is a poem that tells a story, which goes something like this:

Here’s a man (or is it a woman?) who lives in a run-down old house. This house is some place in the United States, and it’s sixty or seventy years ago, and the landlord appears to me to be white. At least he acts like a white person of sixty or seventy years ago; because he has an African American tenant, he doesn’t bother fixing the roof, or fixing the broken-down steps that lead up to the front door of the old run-down house.

The landlord has stopped by to collect the rent. The tenant reminds him about all that’s wrong with the house. The landlord doesn’t pay any attention. The tenant gets increasingly frustrated, and finally says, I’m not going to pay you any rent, and if you keep talking so high and mighty, why I’ll sock you one. But the landlord is white, and doesn’t stand for being threatened by black folk. The landlord calls the cops, who arrest the tenant. The tenant is charged and convicted of assault, and sent to jail.

Through this whole poem, we know the landlord is in the wrong. We know that the tenant’s anger is justified, and we’re rooting for the tenant. When we get to the end of the poem, when the full force of the law is used to perpetuate injustice, we share in the anger of that tenant, and we know we have to work to correct that kind of injustice in the world. Even though this is just a made-up story, we hear the ring of truth in it — for all good poems are true; truth is what makes them good poems. We hear the ring of truth, and we hear as well a call to heal and change a world in which such injustice can exist.

When we address injustice in the world, we are healing the world. That’s what this poem does; and that reveals to us a connection between poetry and religion, since religion is also supposed to heal the world. This is a significant point for us religious liberals, because we tend to dismiss the fact that healing is a central part of religion. Too much of religion is obsessed with faith healing, miraculous cures where some father God makes it all better without much effort on our part. We are right to dismiss such kinds of religious healing. Yet we cannot dismiss the fact that healing is central to religion. Part of the purpose of religion is to heal the world; part of the purpose of religion is to heal our souls when we are damaged by the injustice of the world.

When I say “healing,” I don’t necessarily mean sitting there passively and waiting for some healing energy to do its work. The story of the tenant and the landlord force us to confront an ethical problem: the full power of the law and the police can be used to cause injustice. Once you start chewing over that ethical problem, it’s hard to simply sit there and enjoy the beauty of the poem. We find that the poem calls us to do something. How does this poem heal and change the world? — the poem calls us to rouse ourselves and heal the world by correcting injustice.

…

It is very good that poetry heals and changes the world, and I know that will help heal me in the long run, but sometimes I need some more personal healing. It’s fine and noble to say that I’m going to go out and heal the world, but sometimes life has got me down so that I don’t have the energy to do that. What then? Forget the world for a moment — how is poetry going to heal me?

To answer that, I’d like to speak about the blues. “The Ballad of the Landlord” makes us want to heal the world, but another poem by Langston Hughes, “The Weary Blues,” describes to us how to heal our own souls.

And what are the blues? The African American humanist theologian Anthony Pinn is one of those who has pointed out that the blues are a form of musical expression through which “enslaved Africans wrestled with existential questions forced by the absurdity of slavery.” Pinn tells us: “Through this music, they sought to make sense of the world and provide a framework for life. Within the spirituals, the manner in which traditional religious doctrine dominated this rationale for life is apparent. However,… there were other forms of musical expression that did not embrace the basic doctrine of the Christian church, or other traditional forms of religious expression.”

Now Anthony Pinn is a theologian, which means that he is somewhat caught up in the theory. What I have found is that when you put his theory in practice, you find that the blues can be a legitimate form of religious expression; some blues songs are a kind of humanist hymn. They provide serious answers to religious and existential questions. When you’re singing the blues, if you have trouble in mind, you don’t call on God to solve all your troubles — you laugh to keep from crying; you go down by the riverside and rock those blues away; and you know that somehow the sun’s gonna shine on you someday — these are humanist hymns because you don’t call on God to fix your problems for you. In the poem “The Weary Blues,” there is no God who comes down to solve the problems of the unnamed musician who is singing and playing the piano; there is no God to come and take away the pain of living. The musician plays and sings, and that heals him, a little. He is not completely healed; but at least he can sleep that night. So it is that the blues have a healing power.

None of this rules out traditional religious music as healing music. Traditional religious music that calls on God can heal the soul, too. But sometimes religious music pretends to heal, when it really doesn’t heal. Religious music, and religion itself, pretends to heal when it merely distracts us with God and deadens us to the pain and anguish we experience in the here and now; and by deadening us, the pain appears to go away, but we don’t actually heal. The same is sometimes true of the blues: sometimes the blues pretend to heal us, but instead distract us with a catchy melody and a danceable beat, serving merely to deaden us to the pain we’re in.

When the pain we feel is deadened, but nothing else happens, that is false healing. Rather than deadening pain, the blues give us enough distance so that we can feel the pain without becoming overwhelmed by it; herein lies the power of the blues. The music and the poetry of the words channel the pain into something constructive rather than destructive. True healing allows us to regain strength and wholeness. The poetry of the blues allows us to regain strength and wholeness: it is musical poetry that has the power to heal us and change us.

Of course that is also the purpose of these Sunday morning worship services. We come here to be healed, we come here to feel we can be made whole. And how do we do this? We do this with words and with poetry and with musical poetry. We have conversations together; we listen to the spoken word; we listen to poetry and scripture that is read aloud; we sing songs together. You may have a conversation on a Sunday morning after church where someone says something to you that somehow changes you for the better; just a small thing, just a small change for the better; but that small change may do more to heal you than all the sermon and poetry and songs during the worship service; and in that sense, that conversation is a kind of poetry (for you, at that time). I have never heard a sermon that is poetry the way Langston Hughes writes poetry, but I have heard sermons that in a specific time and place healed my soul, and for that moment there were better poetry than anything Hughes ever wrote.

Poetry has power in it; it has the power to heal us. What we try to do here on Sunday morning is kind of poetry. We create a time and a place where words and poetry and music can heal and change us. We get through the pain of living, we get through the anger at injustice, and in doing so we aim to hold onto our dreams.

…

We aim to hold on to our dreams. It’s not a good idea to defer dreams for too long, because deferred dreams can turn into anger — and once you get mired in anger and pain, you wind up deferring your dreams. There’s an awful lot of pain and anger that comes with living. When you think of all the injustice that exists in the world, how can we possibly get rid of all the anger? When sadness enters our souls, how can we possibly get rid of all the pain? I don’t think it’s possible to get rid of all the anger and pain — the world is too full of anger and pain — but we can be sure the anger and pain doesn’t hold us down.

So it is that healing from pain and anger requires us to hold onto our dreams. We have to get through the pain that life can bring; that doesn’t mean we have to get rid of pain, we just have to get through it. We have to get through the anger; that doesn’t mean we have to get rid of it, we just have to get through it.

Langston Hughes wrote a poem called “Dream-Dust” that goes like this:
  Gather out of star-dust
    Earth-dust,
    Cloud-dust,
    Storm-dust,
  And splinters of hail
  One handful of dream-dust
    Not for sale.

Poetry collects from life the earth-dust, the cloud-dust, the storm-dust, the splinters of hail, and distills these elements of life into dream-dust. In this way, poetry helps us hold onto our dreams.

If you come to church regularly, you have heard me say that religious scriptures are a kind of poetry; religious scriptures at their best distill the elements of life and make dreams out of them. Holding on to dreams is one of the things we do in our religious communities; it’s one of the things we try to do here each Sunday. We collect the elements of life — the joys and sorrows, the pain and the joy — and we take an hour or so each week to distill dreams out of our lives. Some of the dreams are personal — your dreams, my dreams. Some of the dreams belong to us all, like the dream of an earth made fair and all her people one. Our religious community is based on poetry, both the poetry of ancient religious scriptures and contemporary poetry like that of Langston Hughes. We come here to hold onto dreams, keeping them safe until they can become reality.

All too often our dreams get deferred. For African Americans, the dream of true equality has been deferred too long; indeed, for too many racial and ethnic minorities, the dream of equality has been deferred for too long. Sometimes the world around us seems to conspire to keep our dreams from becoming a reality. When that happens, we have to do something that allows us to hold on to our dreams. Like that old dream of earth made fair and all her people one — we have been dreaming that dream from more than two thousand years, and while sometimes we seem to make some progress towards it, that dream has not yet become our reality. Yet we keep that dream bright and untarnished. So it is that poetry, and communities founded on poetry, helps us to hold on to our dreams.

…

How is it that poetry heals and changes us? Poetry heals us and changes us by calling to rouse ourselves and go out and heal the world by correcting injustice. Poetry heals us and changes us by allowing us to get through the pain of living, to get through the anger at injustice. Poetry heals us and changes us by helping us to hold onto our dreams, and keep them bright and untarnished. Communities that are founded on poetry, like our church community, do the same thing: in communities like this one, we are healed and changed by healing the world; we are healed by having a place to deal with personal pain and heartache; we are healed and changed by the dreams that we hold together.

And when we are healed and changed, we might just find that we have renewed strength to go out and help to heal the world.

Lift Every Voice and Sing

Readings

The first reading was poem by James Weldon Johnson, the poem “O Black and Unknown Bards.” It is not included here due to copyright restrictions.

The second reading is from James Weldon Johnson’s autobiography Along This Way.

“I admit that through my adult life I have lacked religiosity. But I make no boast of it; understanding, as I do, how essential religion is to many, many people. For that reason, I have little patience with the zealot who is forever trying to prove to others that they do not need religion; that they would be better off without it. Such a one is no less a zealot than the religionist who contends that all who “do not believe” will be consigned to eternal hell fires. It is simply that I have not felt the need of religion in the commonplace sense of the term. I have derived spiritual values in life from other sources than worship and prayer. I think that the teachings of Jesus Christ embody the loftiest ethical and spiritual concepts the human mind has yet borne. I do not know if there is a personal God; I do not see how I can know; and I do not see how my knowing can matter. What does matter, I believe, is how I deal with myself and how I deal with my fellows. I feel that I can practice a conduct toward myself and toward my fellows that will constitute the basis for an adequate religion, a religion that may comprehend spirituality and beauty and serene happiness….

The human mind racks itself over the never-to-be-known answer to the great riddle, and all that is clearly revealed is the fate that man must continue to hope and struggle on; that each day, if he would not be lost, he must with renewed courage take a fresh hold on life and face with fortitude the turns of circumstances. To do this, he needs to be able at times to touch God; let the idea of God mean to him what it may.”

Sermon — “Lift Every Voice”

This year, during Black History Month, I wanted to speak with you about Black poets; more specifically, about American poets of African descent.

I want to speak to you about poets out of a deep theological concern. Poets make the world; taking poetry in its broadest sense. When I say that poets make the world, I don’t mean that they wave a magic wand, or wave their hand and say magic words, and — Poof! — they create some object, like a stage magician. But I do mean to say that there is a basic connection between language — between what we speak and hear and write and read — a connection between language, and the very core of our beings.

Thus it is that poets make the world: their poems are not expressions of feelings so much as they are manifestations of our existence. This is why religious scriptures are so powerful to us: they are a form of poetry, and like all great poems religious scriptures make the world anew. There was nothing like it in the world before, when some ancient poet captured the essence of Moses in his words to Pharaoh: Let my people go. There was nothing like it in the world before, when some ancient poet captured the essence of Gotama Buddha in the words: There is a middle path that leads to peace of mind. There was nothing like it in the world before, when some ancient poet captured the essence of Jesus in the words: Love your neighbor as yourself. When I say that poets make the world, I don’t necessarily mean people who who write things in a form which your high school English teacher would tell you is a poem. What I mean by poets are those masters of language who, through their language, change our beings; poets are those who transform us and the world.

As religious liberals we are always open to new sources of inspiration. This is what we mean when we say that we are not orthodox: we do not have one correct source for religion, one book or text that is frozen for all time. We remain open to new sources of inspiration; revelation is not sealed for us, revelation continues to emerge around and through us. And today, revelation continues to emerge most clearly, I believe, in poetry, or in works of prose that function as poetry.

Now you know why I want to talk with you about poets, and their poetry. And why talk specifically about Black poets? Well, there are many things in our society that I would like to transform, but one of the great moral problems facing us in the United States today is the problem of systemic racism — and when I say “systemic racism,” I am not concerned with individual prejudice but rather with that impersonal system of racial inequality that continues to permeate American society. White, black, no matter what color our skin, none of us likes systemic racism. So how can we transform this reality or systemic racism? I’m afraid that too many of our white poets have ignored this compelling moral question; and so I find myself turning to certain African American poets.

…

In this first sermon in this series on Black poets, I thought I’d begin with the most influential Black poet. No, I’m not going to talk about Alice Walker, or Gwendolyn Brooks, or Langston Hughes, or — name the famous African American poet you might think I should preach on. I’m going to begin with James Weldon Johnson, in the full knowledge that his may be an unfamiliar name.

Yet I will say without doubt (without doubt in my mind, anyway) and without equivocation that James Weldon Johnson is our most influential Black poet. I am aware that there are some English professors in our congregation, and I would be foolish to make a judgment about literary quality; so I will not claim that James Weldon Johnson is our best African American poet. So Johnson is not our best poet, nor our most famous poet, but I still claim him as our most influential poet. And I make that claim on the basis of one poem he wrote, a poem which was written as a hymn.

Here’s the story of that hymn. The year was 1900; the place, Jacksonville, Florida. James Johnson and his brother Rosamond had been in New York City writing popular songs for Broadway; at the time of this story, they were back in their hometown and James was working as a school principal. Here is how James tells the story:

“A group of young men decided to hold on February 12 a celebration of Lincoln’s birthday…. My thoughts began buzzing around a central idea of writing a poem on Lincoln, but I couldn’t net them. So I gave up the project as beyond me…. My central idea, however, took on another form. I talked over with my brother the thought I had in mind, and we planned to write a song to be sung as part of the exercises. We planned, better still, to have it sung by school children — a chorus of five hundred voices.

“I got my first line:– Lift ev’ry voice and sing. Not a startling line, but I worked along grinding out the next five. When, near the end of the first stanza, there came to me the lines:

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us

the spirit of the poem had taken hold of me. I finished the stanza and turned it over to Rosamond.

“In composing the two other stanzas I did not use pen and paper. While my brother worked at his musical setting I paced back and forth on the front porch, repeating the lines over and over to myself…. As I worked through the opening and middle lines of the last stanza… I could not keep back the tears, and made no effort to do so. I was experiencing the transports of the poet’s ecstasy. Feverish ecstasy was followed by that contentment — that sense of serene joy — which makes artistic creation the most complete of human experiences.”

That’s how James Weldon Johnson describes writing the poem which became the hymn “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” I wanted to read that aloud because it helps explain why sometime when I sing “Life Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” tears come to my eyes. There is something in that poem that worked on Johnson while he was writing the poem, and which still works on me today.

Johnson finished the poem, his brother set it to music, and they sent it to their music publisher in New York, and got enough mimeographed copies to distribute to their children’s chorus; they taught it to the children; the new song was a great success; and James and Rosamond went back to writing songs for Broadway. But the song took on a life of its own. Within a few decades, it had spread throughout much of the United States, and had been adopted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. James Johnson said that his song got its widest distribution, not through copies obtained from his music publisher, but through “printed or typewritten copies of the words pasted in the backs of hymnals and the songbooks used in Sunday schools, Y.M.C.A’s, and similar institutions.” In other words, the song took on a life of its own; it spread because it touched something deep within people’s hearts; and it spread beyond Black America to White America as well.

So why did this poem — not a great poem, perhaps — why did it become such an influential poem? I can think of a number of reasons why this poem is so influential. It is influential because Johnson’s words rang true; even if his words aren’t great poetry, his words have the ring of truth. It is influential because we sing this poem: we embody this poem with our breath and our voices, and then it blends together with the other voices singing it around us, and takes on a peculiar power in this way. It is influential because it is easy to memorize: I have a poor memory, and even I can remember most of the first verse.

For all these reasons, we still sing this song more than a century after it was written; it is still considered the African American national hymn; and I continue to be impressed how, when you start singing this hymn with a group of Americans, how many of them (even us white Americans) know at least some of the first verse. And if a poem — I mean “poem” in the broader sense of the word — if a poem is going to transform us, one way that happens best is if we know that poem by heart, and if we say it (or sing it) aloud; and the power of that poem to transform us increases even more if it is a poem that we say or sing together.

I have some thoughts on how this song transforms us. For many of us who live in the United States, “freedom” and “liberty” seem to have become tired words. “Freedom” — that old stuff, we don’t need to hear about that, that all got taken care of in 1776. “Liberty” — well, the Liberty Bell is cracked, and that should tell you about the state of liberty in this country. What James Johnson manages to do in “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” is to remind us that freedom and liberty were not won in 1776; nor were they won on January 1, 1863; nor were they won when the Civil rights Act was signed; nor, most probably, will they ever be completely won for any of us, black or white or whatever our skin color. When I sing “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” I am reminded that human beings have a hard time living up to their ideals; and I am reminded that freedom and liberty are a process, not an end-state.

…

Johnson was in his twenties when he wrote “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” He went on to write other, better-regarded poems and novels and books. Perhaps his best-known book of poems is a small volume called God’s Trombones, beloved of religious liberals. But I’d like to skip past all that, skip ahead to a book he put together with his brother Rosamond in 1925 when he was in his mid-fifties.

This was their Book of American Negro Spirituals. It is but one of many collections of African American songs and spirituals, but it is important, I think, in large part because Johnson placed one of his best poems at the beginning of the book, the poem we heard in the first reading this morning, “O Black and Unknown Bards.” This poem tells us why we should pay attention to a book of African American spirituals. Johnson elaborates on the thoughts in the poem in his prose introduction to the book, in which he says:

“To supply [the slave] trade Africa was raped of millions of men, women, and children. As many as survived the passage were immediately thrown into slavery. These people came from various localities in Africa. They did not all speak the same language. here they were, suddenly cut off from the moorings of their native culture, scattered without regard to their old tribal affiliations, having to adjust themselves to a completely alien civilization, having to learn a strange language, and, moreover, held under an increasingly harsh system of slavery; yet it was from these people this mass of noble music sprang; this music which is America’s only folk music and, up to this time, the finest distinctive artistic contribution she has to offer the world…. Take, for example, ‘Go Down, Moses’: there is not a nobler theme in the whole musical literature of the world….”

Johnson is telling us about the power of poetry to transform the world. Now we could argue the relative merits of African American spirituals, and whether they are indeed the only American folk music, and so on, and so on. There is a place for such scholarly arguments, but Johnson is making a poetic argument here. He is telling us this: Faced with an impossible situation — an alien civilization, the degradations of slavery, a strange new language — faced with these harsh conditions, African Americans made poetry; and with their poetry, they transformed their souls with nobility, and so transformed the world around them.

These songs continue to transform us, transform all of us here in America. Yes, these old spirituals have a special place in the cultural lives of African Americans, but their poetry can transform all of us. When we sing or listen to these songs, we get connected to those early people of African descent who were forced to come live in America; and we understand the nobility of their souls, a nobility that allowed them to retain their humanity in the face inhuman conditions.

So it is that all of us — African Americans, European Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans — we all are made a little more noble, and that nobility becomes a part of who we are as a people. This nobility breaks down systemic racism, just a little. By allowing us to share in that nobility of soul, we find our own souls becoming a little more noble, and such nobility can serve as a sort of vaccine against impersonal, infectious systemic racism taking hold in our souls.

…

I wanted to close with brief word about James Weldon Johnson’s understanding of religion. We heard some of his ideas on religion in the second reading this morning. Given the ideas on religion he expresses, I like imagine that Johnson would have felt quite at home in our Unitarian Universalist church. He would even have felt at home in this church back when he wrote those words in 1933, back when the minister here was a staunch humanist named Stanton Hodgin — well, he would have felt welcome here except for the fact that he was black, and in 1933 this church was very definitely a white church. Those were different times back then, racially speaking.

Be that as it may, I still like to imagine what Johnson would have felt if he could show up in our church today. I like to imagine saying to him: You know, what you said back in 1933 — that’s pretty much what I preach from the pulpit; and what you say is pretty much what we do in our church: we don’t have religion in the commonplace sense of the term (which is these parts means orthodox Christianity); we try to practice conduct towards ourselves and our neighbors that constitutes our basis for religion; we feel Jesus is a great spiritual and ethical thinker who inspires us; and each day, if we would not be lost, we take a fresh hold of life, and we renew our courage to do this by touching the face of God, whatever God may mean to each one of us individually.

These religious ideas permeate all of Johnson’s poetry. He is not one of our best known American poets. But he is a deeply human poet, and a humane poet. Even if the critics don’t place him into the first ranks of American poetry, his humanity counts for a great deal. No, he didn’t write anything that is considered as great as T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”; but far more people know and have memorized and have been transformed by “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.”

By singing “Life Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” or any of the songs in The Book of American Negro Spirituals, we become for that moment poets ourselves. We bring that written poetry to life by singing, or even just saying the words aloud. In so doing, we transform ourselves, we transform the world, we create new understandings of what it is to be human in America, we make ourselves just a little bit more noble.