Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Western Religious Traditions

  • Athena

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

    Readings

    The first reading is an Orphic Hymn to the ancient Greek goddess Athena:

    “Only-begotten, noble race of Zeus, blessed and fierce, who joyest in caves to rove: O warlike Pallas, whose illustrious kind, ineffable, and effable we find: magnanimous and famed, the rocky height, and groves, and shady mountains thee delight: in arms rejoicing, who with furies dire and wild the souls of mortals dost inspire. Gymnastic virgin of terrific mind, dire Gorgon’s bane, unmarried, blessed, kind: mother of arts, impetuous; understood as fury by the bad, but wisdom by the good. Female and male, the arts of war are thine, O much-formed, Drakaina, inspired divine: over the Phlegraion Gigantes, roused to ire, thy coursers driving with destructive dire. Tritogeneia, of splendid mien, purger of evils, all-victorious queen. Hear me, O Goddess, when to thee I pray, with supplicating voice both night and day, and in my latest hour give peace and health, propitious times, and necessary wealth, and ever present be thy votaries aid, O much implored, art’s parent, [bright]-eyed maid.”

    [#32, The Hymns of Orpheus. Translated by Thomas Taylor (1792). Modern edition: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.]

    The second reading is from Pseudo-Apollodorus, a Greek mythographer of the second century of the common era. It tells the story of how the ancient Greek city of Attika came to choose Athena as their special goddess:

    “Kekrops, a son of the soil, with a body compounded of man and serpent, was the first king of Attika… In his time, they say, the gods resolved to take possession of cities in which each of them should receive his own peculiar worship. So Poseidon was the first that came to Attika, and with a blow of his trident on the middle of the acropolis, he produced a sea which they now call Erekhtheis. After him came Athena, and, having called on Kekrops to witness her act of taking possession, she planted an olive tree, which is still shown in the Pandrosion. But when the two strove for possession of the country, Zeus parted them and appointed arbiters, not, as some have affirmed, Kekrops and Kranaus, nor yet Erysikhthon, but the twelve gods [and goddesses]. And in accordance with their verdict the country was adjudged to Athena, because Kekrops bore witness that she had been the first to plant the olive. Athena, therefore, called the city Athens after herself, and Poseidon in hot anger flooded the Thriasian plain and laid Attika under the sea.”

    [Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3.14.1, trans. Frazer.]

    Sermon

    This is the second of a short series of sermons on Greek goddesses. This morning I would like to speak about Athena, goddess of wisdom and of war; but before I do so, let me remind you why I think it is a good idea to preach about Greek goddesses in a Unitarian Universalist church.

    Beginning in the 1970’s, we Unitarian Universalists began to realize that, when it comes to religion, women were often “overlooked and undervalued.” We actively worked to root out sexism from our shared faith. In the 1980’s, we rewrote our principles and purposes using gender-neutral language, and in the 1990’s, under the influence of ecofeminism, we added a principle about our commitment to respect the interdependent web of all life. In 1993, we published a new hymnal that included feminist hymns and songs. And many of our congregations were very active in addressing sexism at the local level. Over the past thirty or forty years, we have changed our selves and our attitudes, and have done away with a significant amount of sexism within Unitarian Universalism.

    But of course the surrounding culture is still dominated by the idea of a male father god, and it is very hard for any of us to escape this idea. It is easiest to see the effects of the surrounding culture on our children: like it or not, they do learn the idea that God is a white man with a white beard sitting on a cloud somewhere up in the sky, and it can b e hard to talk t hem out of that idea. Thus we find ourselves devoting a significant amount of time in our Sunday school presenting the children with alternative ideas about God;– last year in the Sunday school, we spent much of the year with the children’s book “Hide and Seek with God,” a book which presents alternative God-images from the Christian tradition and from other world religions. This is the kind of thing we do so that our children can get past the idea that God is an old white man with a white beard sitting on a cloud.

    Of course, as much as we don’t want to admit it, we adults are also influenced by the surrounding culture. Sometimes we catch ourselves making the assumption that the dominant male images of God are in fact the only images of God. For example, I have noticed that when people talk about the pro-atheism books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the discussions of these books tend to assume that God is singular, all-powerful, all-knowing; in other words, assume that God is the typical patriarchal male God of traditional Christianity. Both the atheists and the supporters of God weaken their arguments when they ignore the fact that there is more than one god-image out there.

    In spite of recent scholarship which has uncovered female god-images in the Bible, and in other world religions, too many of us adults cleave to the old god-image of a white man with a beard sitting on a cloud somewhere up in the sky. Yes, even we Unitarian Universalists fall into this trap. We forget that Unitarian minister Theodore Parker was addressing his liberal Christian prayers to father God and mother God back in the 1850’s; and we Unitarian Universalists often forget that god-images can be either male or female, or gender-neutral, or differently gendered, or that gender does not even apply to the divine.

    To keep myself from falling into the trap of thinking that the divine must be male, I like to spend some time thinking about the goddesses, like the Greek goddesses, who are a part of our Western culture. It’s not that I’m going to worship or believe in these goddesses; but remembering that our Western culture has lots of female god-images helps keep me from falling into the cultural trap of assuming that all god-images must be male. It’s a way of examining and challenging my unconscious assumptions.

    Now you know why I’m preaching a series of sermons on Greek goddesses. Now let me turn our attention to Athena, a goddess who challenges many of our assumptions.

    …

    And to begin to tell you how Athena can challenge our assumptions, I should begin by telling you the story of Black Athena. Back in 1987, a scholar named Martin Bernal published a book titled Black Athena. In this book, Bernal stated his belief that the roots of Greek culture — and therefore the roots of all the Western European culture that sprang from it — the roots of ancient Greek culture lay in Africa. On the face of it, this is not a particularly remarkable thing to say. All the cultures of the ancient Near East, all the gods and goddesses of the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean world, seem to have been interrelated. Certainly the African culture of Egypt is an older culture than ancient Greek culture. So to say that the Egyptians had tremendous influence on the later cultures of ancient Greece should not be very controversial.

    And the ancient Greeks knew that Athena herself had a connection to Africa. Plato, in his dialogue the Timaeus, tells us that in Egypt, there is a city called Saïs, and the citizens of that city have a guardian goddess: “The citizens have a deity for their foundress; she is called in the Egyptian tongue Neith, and is asserted by them to be the same whom the Hellenes call Athena…” [Timaeus 21e, trans. Jowett]. Thus Plato said that the Greek goddess Athena was somehow related to the Egyptian goddess Neith. It was an obvious connection to make: both Athena and Neith were goddesses of war and goddesses of weaving, and they shared other characteristics as well.

    But when Martin Bernal wrote his book Black Athena he created a storm of controversy. One of the things that made his book controversial was Bernal’s image of a dark-skinned Athena. In our world, which is so conscious of skin color and race, it was shocked some white people, and some people of color, to think that the goddess Athena might have been black,– when for all these years most of us in the Western world have thought of Athena as being white.

    We sometimes try to erect hard-and-fast boundaries in realms where there are no hard-and-fast boundaries. Racial and cultural boundaries appear to have been more permeable in the ancient Near East than we may want to believe. Ancient Near East gods and goddesses moved from one culture to another, and from one religion to another. Indeed, when I hear Wisdom revered in the Bible as a female figure of goddess-like importance, as in the responsive reading this morning, I wonder what other goddesses she was related to, and even if she was perhaps related to Athena, who was also a goddess of wisdom.

    I imagine there was a web of cultural connections throughout the ancient Near East: connections between various goddesses and gods; connections between the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa; connections between peoples of all different skin colors from black to white to various shades of brown. In our minds, we have divided the world into distinct continents, and people into distinct races, but some of the divisions that we make are too arbitrary.

    I started out saying that Athena might help us to be aware that the divine might just as well be female as male, or have no gender at all. The image of an African Athena can help us be aware that the divine might have black, brown, or white skin color, or be utterly beyond human racial categories. So this is another way in which thinking about Athena helps us to challenge our assumptions about our god-images.

    One of the things that has bothered me about Athena is that she is both the goddess of wisdom, and the goddess of war. Since I think of war as a kind of madness, it seemed to me that Athena was combining two contradictory elements within her. How could she embody both war and wisdom?

    The poet Robert Graves gives us a clue as to how this might be so. Graves says that although she is indeed the goddess of war, Athena “gets no pleasure from battle, as [the god] Ares and [the goddess] Eris do, but rather from settling disputes, and upholding the law by pacific means.” [The Greek Myths]

    What particularly interests me is that Athena does not reject violence altogether. But when she does go to war it is for good reason; and should she decide to go to war, she uses her wisdom to develop adequate strategy and tactics, so that she never loses a battle. Ares, the male god of war, likes violence for the sake of violence, and he is often defeated because of his inability to plan out his strategy and tactics. [Graves, Greek Myths, 25.a] By contrast, Athena does not like to go to war, but she will do so if justice requires her to do so. Athena’s attitude towards war has helped to challenge my assumptions about peacemaking.

    Last June, Rev. William Schulz gave a talk on his Unitarian Universalist theology of peacemaking. Schulz, a Unitarian Universalist minister, was president of Amnesty International from 1993 to 2006. Schulz said that in his years at Amnesty International, he “was exposed on a daily basis to the most sordid and gratuitous violence.” He saw, over and over again, and sometimes first-hand, the results of torture and government-sanctioned violence. In the face of such acts of violence, he felt that he could not uphold the ideal of complete and utter pacifism. He said he could not believe in what he called the impossible ideal of complete pacifism; instead, he believed that sometimes true justice requires military intervention.

    As an example, Schulz said that if the United States military had enforced a no-fly zone over Darfur over the past three or four years — and such enforcement would include the possibility of shooting down aircraft which violated the no-fly zone — then much of the genocide now going on in Darfur could have been avoided. For that reason, Schulz does not support the way the war in Iraq has been handled because he believes that the Iraq war has so over-extended the United States military that we have been unable to respond to other, more urgent, humanitarian situations such as the genocide in Darfur.

    William Schulz might get along quite well with Athena. Like Athena, he believes that any use of violence has to be guided by justice. Like Athena, he also believes that any use of violence has to be guided by long-range strategy and tactics, so that one’s military forces don’t become overextended. When I say that Schulz would get along well with Athena, I don’t mean that literally of course; to the best of my knowledge, Schulz is a humanist, and I don’t believe he is a goddess-worshipper. But like Athena, Schulz challenges us to move beyond the traditional Western Christian notions of religious pacifism, to go beyond the old Christian teachings on “just war theory.” Both Athena and William Schulz value practical wisdom over abstract adherence to principles, and they challenge us to consider the possibility of a theology of peacemaking that allows for limited use of violence in order to prevent more violence.

    Athena has led us quite far afield, hasn’t she? First she challenged us to rethink our religious images of race and gender. Then she challenged us to rethink our religious notions of pacifism and peacemaking. Where will she lead us next?

    In the second reading this morning, we heard how both Poseidon, the god of the sea, and Athena tried to take possession of the city of Athens. Poseidon laid claim to Athens by striking his trident on the ground, which opened up a well filled with sea-water; but this salty water was not of much use to the Athenian citizens. Then Athena came along and planted an olive tree; this tree produced food, cooking oil, and wood for the Athenians. Presumably, no one living in Athens had ever seen an olive tree before, because cultivated olives are not native to Greece. Not surprisingly, the Athenian citizens said that Athena had made the best claim to their city, and she became their ruling goddess. This is why we call the city Athens even today; it is the city named after Athena.

    In the past few months, I have found reason to think about this story of how Athena gave the olive tree to Athens. On January 19, the New York Times ran a story titled “A New Global Oil Quandary,” the opening paragraph of which read: “Rising prices for cooking oil are forcing residents of Asia’s largest slum, in Mumbai, India, to ration every drop [of cooking oil]. Bakeries in the United States are fretting over higher shortening costs. And here in Malaysia, brand-new factories built to convert vegetable oil into diesel sit idle, their owners unable to afford the raw material. This is the other oil shock.”

    You see, for much of the world, particularly the developing world, cooking oil represents an important source of calories. Even if you grow your own food you almost have to go out and buy cooking oil because it is hard to make it on your own. Right now, the price of cooking oil is rising very rapidly around the world. All food prices are rising rapidly; in the past year, the worldwide price of food has risen more than fifty percent. In some places, people are spending more than eighty percent of their income on food. Food riots have been taking place from Mexico City to Haiti to Indonesia. Military analysts tell us that the rising price of food is contributing to global insecurity.

    When we first hear the story of how Athena gave the olive tree to the people of Athens, it sounds — quaint. How nice! the people get a tree from Athena, and they make her the goddess of the city. But in a world with shortages of cooking oil, suddenly the story doesn’t sound so quaint. The gift of a tree that provides both food and cooking oil is a gift of survival, a gift that prevents starvation. In the modern world, such a gift could prevent wars and violence. We are already seeing violence and instability resulting from rising food prices; whereas access to reasonably-priced food and cooking oil would tend to lead to a peaceful world.

    The story of Athena and the olive tree challenges us to think about the relationship between food and war and peace. No wonder those ancient Athenians prayed to the goddess Athena: they were praying for food security, which meant that they were also praying for peace. Athena challenges us to understand the relationship between food and security; she challenges us to consider food supply in any theology of peacemaking.

    These old stories about the goddess Athena challenge our religious ideas of race, gender, war and peace, and food security. And these various issues seem to me to be interconnected, that they are woven together in the larger religious issue of peacemaking. True peacemaking requires us to have the wisdom to understand the underlying causes of violence; as much as I might prefer the complete pacifism of Jesus of Nazareth, true peacemaking in today’s world may well require us to have enough wisdom to know when it is appropriate to use limited military force in order to prevent further violence.

  • Artemis

    April 6, 2008 — “Artemis” — FUNB

    Readings

    The first reading is Callimachus’s first hymn to the Goddess Artemis, verses 1-46:

    “Artemis we hymn — no light thing is it for singers to forget her — whose study is the bow and the shooting of hares and the spacious dance and sport upon the mountains; beginning with the time when sitting on her father’s knees — still a little maid — she spake these words to her sire:

    ”  ‘Give me to keep my maidenhood, Father, forever: and give me to be of many names, that Phoebus may not vie with me. And give me arrows and a bow — stay, Father, I ask thee not for quiver or for mighty bow: for me the Cyclopes will straightway fashion arrows and fashion for me a well-bent bow. But give me to be Bringer of Light and give me to gird me in a tunic with embroidered border reaching to the knee, that I may slay wild beasts. And give me sixty daughters of Oceanus for my choir — all nine years old, all maidens yet ungirdled; and give me for handmaidens twenty nymphs of Amnisus who shall tend well my buskins, and, when I shoot no more at lynx or stag, shall tend my swift hounds.

    ”  ‘And give to me all mountains; and for city, assign me any, even whatsoever thou wilt: for seldom is it that Artemis goes down to the town. On the mountains will I dwell and the cities of men I will visit only when women vexed by the sharp pang of childbirth call me to their aid even in the hour when I was born the Fates ordained that I should be their helper, forasmuch as my mother suffered no pain either when she gave me birth or when she carried me win her womb, but without travail put me from her body.’ …

    “And her father smiled and bowed assent. And as he caressed her, he said: ‘…Take, child, all that thou askest, heartily. Yea, and other things therewith yet greater will thy father give thee. Three times ten cities and towers more than one will I vouchsafe thee — three times ten cities that shall not know to glorify any other god but to glorify the only and be called of Artemis. And thou shalt be Watcher over Streets and harbours.’ So he spake and bent his head to confirm his words.

    “And the maiden faired unto the white mountain of Crete leafy with woods; thence unto Oceanus; and she chose many nymphs all nine years old, all maidens yet ungirdled. And the river Caraetus was glad exceedingly, and glad was Tethys that they were sending their daughters to be handmaidens to the daughter of Leto.”

    [Callimachus, Hymns and Epigrams. Hymn III, vv. 1-46. Trans. A.W. and G.R. Mair. Loeb Classical Library, vol. 129. London: William Heinemann, 1921.]

    The second reading are two brief myths or fables attributed to Galius Julius Hyginus, a Roman writer who lived in the first century of the common era in Spain. Since he was Roman, he calls Artemis by her Roman name, which is Diana.

    Myth 180. “ACTAEON

    “Actaeon, son of Aristaeus and Autonoe, a shepherd, saw Diana bathing and desired to ravish her. Angry at this, Diana made horns grow on his head, and he was devoured by his own dogs.”

    Myth 181. “DIANA

    “When Diana, wearied from constant hunting in the thickly shadowed valley of Gargaphia, in the summertime was bathing in the stream called Parthenius,– Actaeon, grandson of Cadmus, son of Aristaeus and Autonoe, sought the same place for cooling himself and the dogs which he had exercised in chasing wild beasts. He caught sight of the goddess, and to keep him from telling of it, she changed him into a stag. As a stag, then, he was mangled by his own hounds.”

    (Galius Julius Hyginus then proceeds to list the names of the more than eighty dogs, separated as to males and females, who devoured Actaeon.)

    [The Myths of Hyginus, trans. and ed. Mary Grant. University of Kansas Publications in Humanistic Studies, no. 34. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960.]

    Sermon

    This is the first of a short series of sermons on Greek goddesses. You may well wonder why I would preach a sermon on a Greek goddess;– let alone why I would preach a series of sermons on Greek goddesses. And I thought I had better tell you why before I actually tell you about the Greek goddess Artemis, who is the subject of this morning’s sermon. Here is why:

    When I was a teenager in the 1970’s growing up in a Unitarian Universalist church, we Unitarian Universalists began to realize that, even in our denomination, women and girls were often overlooked and undervalued. We Unitarian Universalists finally figured out that sexism pervaded our shared liberal faith; and we set about changing that. We rewrote our principles and purposes. We put together a new hymnal. Many local churches went through honest self-appraisal about their attitudes towards women and girls. And to a large extent, we managed to change our selves and our attitudes, and we did eradicate a significant amount of sexism within Unitarian Universalism.

    We were able to change our selves, but we could not change several thousand years of religious history. We could not change the culture which surrounds us, a culture which assumes that God is male. We could not change the sacred texts of the Western religious tradition we claim as our own, sacred texts which mention men far more than they mention women. Because of this, we Unitarian Universalists try to keep up with Biblical scholarship which points out where women appear in the Bible, and which tells us that women may have written parts of the Bible. But we can’t change the fact that Western religious tradition depicts God as male.

    Why is this such a problem? Well, as an adult I find I can distance myself from the surrounding culture, and hold on to my own opinion that the divine does not have a specific gender. But what about our children? God is like sex and Santa Claus –they’re going to hear about it on the playground — we can say that we won’t tell the children that God is male, but they’re going to hear about it anyway.

    I think about the girls that troop out of here to go to Sunday school each week — Sophia and Amanda and Jessica and Asia and Stephanie and Tahlia. I want them to know that God can be pictured as male or female. Not that I want them to believe in any particular goddess or god — as far as I’m concerned, they don’t have to believe in any god at all — but I do want them to know that the divine can be female just as well as it can be male.

    As it happens, many children go through a stage where they are fascinated by stories of strong, powerful beings. Early on, they love dinosaurs, especially Tyrannosaurus Rex and other huge saurian carnivores. A fascination with strong powerful dinosaurs is often followed by a fascination with gods and goddesses:– I remember when I was nine or ten, my favorite book was D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. At this age, many children are fascinated by tales of gods and goddesses.

    And many of us who were fascinated by Greek goddesses and gods when we were children find that those old stories have sunk deep into our religious consciousness. To this day, when I hear people talking about the feminine aspects of the divine, I immediately think of powerful Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. The Greek goddesses and gods are just as much a part of our Western cultural tradition as are the figures in the Bible; alhough we are unlikely to worship the Greek gods and goddesses, as Christians still worship the God of the Bible, still those Greek goddesses and Gods live deep in our cultural consciousness.

    Thus I believe in teaching children about the Greek goddesses and gods — especially teaching children about Greek goddesses. Our girls, and our boys, deserve to have some knowledge of these strong, powerful religious figures; not least so that our children can begin to understand that women can be fully valued in religion, despite the fact that the dominant Western religious traditions tend to devalue and overlook women.

    Now that you know why I want to preach about Greek goddesses, let me tell you about Artemis, my personal favorite Greek goddess; and tell you why I think our children, girls in particular, might want to know about Artemis.

    At the most literal level, we might wish to tell our children about Artemis because Artemis choose as her followers nine year old girls. Admittedly, these nine-year-olds were not ordinary human children; these were sixty daughters of the old ocean god Oceanus, and thus had the blood of an immortal god running in their veins. (I suspect that there are some ordinary human girls who may well be disappointed to find out that they are not themselves eligible to join Artemis’s band.)

    But I do think it’s worth telling children, especially girl-children, that there is at least one goddess who so values girls that she deliberately chooses girls to be her followers. I am glad that the Christian scriptures specifically mention that Jesus wanted the little children to be able to come to him. However, much of the Western religious tradition basically ignores children. That being the case, I think it’s worth telling girls that Artemis did value their contributions.

    And Artemis really is a good alternative religious role model for girls. Artemis in no way represents the standard stereotyped roles that are pushed onto girls by the surrounding culture. In a culture like ours that promotes sexualized clothing for pre-pubescent girls; in a culture where you can buy Lego kits for girls which are packaged in pink and advertised as less difficult to assemble; in a culture where it has been documented that girls’ self-esteem plummets as they approach puberty — it’s not a bad thing for girls to know about a powerful goddess who is strong, self-assured, and competent.

    Artemis is in no way a stereotypical girl. She wears sturdy outdoor clothing appropriate for the slaying of wild beasts; and I really doubt that she wears anything that is pink. She is adept with her bow, and she is the best of hunters. She lives on her own in the mountains, and while she has female attendants she is not dependent on any man. Indeed, Artemis is not impressed with the males who do fall in love with her, feeling no need to soothe wounded male egos:– when the river-god Alpheius fell in love with her and pursued her, she easily eluded him and sent him on his way, pursued by the mocking laughter of her attendants. Artemis is quite capable of taking care of herself.

    We don’t have to encourage girls to grow up to be exactly like Artemis, of course. Not every girl is going to want to live in the mountains and hunt wild game. But we do need to offer girls a wider range of religious figures whom they can have as possible role models. The Christian tradition offers girls precious few good role models: Miriam, Esther, Ruth, and a few other strong capable women. And look how many more role models the Christian tradition offers to boys! So while we’re not going to encourage girls to be just like Artemis, nevertheless she is a goddess in the Western tradition who can be an alternative role model for our girls.

    I have said that Artemis breaks down the gender-role stereotypes that so pervade the surrounding culture. One of these stereotypes is of enough importance that it deserves special mention.

    In the first reading this morning, we heard how Artemis got Zeus, her father and the leader of all the other gods and goddesses, to promise that Artemis would never have to marry. Generally speaking, Western culture tells girls and women that, no matter what else they might do with their lives, marriage should be one of their ultimate goals. Even today, when so many more jobs and professions are open to women, the old feeling still persists that women should think of marriage before a career.

    That’s why Artemis is such a good alternative role model for girls. Marriage simply doesn’t interest Artemis; she has other things to do with her life. Mind you, I think it’s a fine thing for people who want to get married to go out and get married;– but there are those girls and boys who would rather not get married. There is nothing in our religious views that demands we get married; marriage is a choice for us, it is a covenant into which we may enter voluntarily. Therefore, it behooves us to offer role models for those among us who choose not to get married. In the Christian tradition, Jesus never gets married, so boys have at least one powerful role model of an unmarried male religious figure. Perhaps we could offer Artemis to girls as a possible unmarried role model. True, she is not as central to our religious tradition as is Artemis; but then, Artemis is a goddess while Jesus in our view is simply human.

    There’s another reason why Artemis can be a good role model for those among us who may not choose to marry. Although Artemis does not marry herself, she values children. She is the goddess of childbirth; and she likes children enough to want to have sixty nine-year-old girls for her attendants. It’s not that she hates children or marriage, it’s just that she has made a conscious choice not to have children of her own, nor to be married. In a culture that can push girls to want to be married and mothers first, and everything else second,– it’s good for girls to know that they can be feminine and be a woman without having to get married or have children.

    I have one last thing to say about why Artemis deserves our attention. In the second reading this morning, we heard two different versions of the story of Artemis and Actaeon. In essence, the story goes like this: Actaeon, who is a man, is out hunting when he happens upon Artemis and her attendants skinny-dipping in a river. Actaeon is pretty creepy. When he sees Artemis and her nine-year-old nymphs attendants bathing, the obvious and polite thing would be for Actaeon to leave as quickly as possible. Depending on which version of the story you choose, Actaeon either stands there are stares at Artemis, or he tries to rape Artemis.

    Women in our culture obviously have to put up with this kind of male behavior on a regular basis. In 2000, the U.S. Department of Justice released a report which said that 17.6 percent of American women said they “had been the victim of a completed or attempted rape at some time in their life.” Worse yet, all too often the woman is made to feel that somehow she is to blame for being attacked.

    But Artemis doesn’t feel that she is to blame. Whether Actaeon was trying to rape her, or was invading her privacy by staring at her, Artemis assumes that he is to blame. She takes immediate action against him: she turns Actaeon into a deer; and then she gets his dogs to bring him down and devour him. We may not like the violence that ends this story. But nevertheless it is a powerful story because it helps to counteract the message that a woman who is sexually assaulted or even just stared at is somehow to blame. The story makes it clear that Actaeon should have know better; and he has to pay the price for his inability to control his momentary impulse. Personally, I would not try to explain this story in this way to children. But I do believe it is worth telling children this and other stories about this powerful and self-reliant goddess.

    I believe in telling children stories about the goddess Artemis, just as I’m telling you stories about Artemis, so that we can have a religious role model of a strong, powerful, independent woman. As with any religious story, we need not take it as literal truth; we understand that it is poetic truth. As with any religious story, we know it is not the only religious story out there; it is one among many stories that we value for their poetic truths. But it’s good for us to know that our Western religious tradition, our own cultural inheritance, has strong female role models.

    One of the nice things about being a Unitarian Universalist is that we can open ourselves up to religious influences like these. I told you that when I was nine or ten, I loved the Greek myths, and I read D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths over and over again. I told you that because I was fascinated by Greek goddesses and gods when I was a child, now that I’m an adult I find that those old stories have sunk deep into my religious consciousness. So it is today that I have firm and very distinct images of the feminine aspects of the divine. Nor am I unique in this:– whether we come across the Greek goddesses in childhood, or when we are adults, we religious liberals know that we can accept the wisdom and the insights in these old stories;– we do not have to take theses stories literally, but still they can be a part of our religious lives.

    I’m glad that Artemis is a part of my religious consciousness, so that I have an example of a strong, self-reliant woman who stands up to sexual harrassment, who doesn’t worry about gender stereotypes, and who loves living in the mountains. As we continue to work together to reshape our understandings of gender, as we work together to build a land where women and men can truly be equals, Artemis is a good goddess to have on our side.

  • Paul the Organizer

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

    Readings

    The first reading is from an essay by James Luther Adams titled “The Indispensable Discipline of Social Responsibility: Voluntary Associations.”

    “…the theorists of democracy have asserted that only through the exercise of freedom of association can consent of the governed become effective; only through the exercise of freedom of association can the citizen in a democracy participate in the process that gives shape to public opinion and to public policy….”

    [The Essential James Luther Adams ed. George Kimmich Beach (Boston: Skinner House, 1998), p. 183]

    The second reading is from the Christian scriptures, Paul’s first letter to the Christian community at Thessalonica, as translated by Hugh Schonfield. Written about the year 51, this letter may be the earliest Christian document still in existence. The passage I’ll read, 1 Thes 5.11-21, offers Paul’s advice to the small house church in Thessalonica:

    “Encourage one another and fortify each other, as indeed you are doing.

    “But I do beg you, brothers, to acknowledge those who work so hard among you and act as your leaders in the Master, and advise you. Hold them in extra-special affection for their work. Be at peace among yourselves.

    “I appeal to you, brothers, give fair warning to the disorderly, encourage the fainthearted, stand by the weak, be patient with all. See to it that none renders to any injury for injury, but always do the right thing by each other and everyone else. Always be cheerful, pray constantly, give thanks for everything; for this is God’s will… for you. Do not still the Spirit, or scorn prophecies. Test everything; retain the good. Refrain from anything that looks at all wrong….”

    Sermon

    This is the second in a series of sermons on Paul of Tarsus. As I said in last week’s sermon, in many ways Paul was, for a long time, my least favorite character in the Bible. I disliked Paul so much that I ignored him as much as possible. But then, when I was the Director of Religious Education at the Unitarian Universalist church in Lexington, a fellow by the name of Dan Fenn offered me another take on Paul of Tarsus. Dan pointed out that almost single-handedly, Paul managed to organize the followers of Jesus into a far-flung but cohesive religious movement. Thus, what Dan admired about Paul was Paul’s organizational genius.

    And Dan Fenn knows something about organizations and the people who lead organizations. He is a Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and at their School of Business, and a senior associate at the John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs at UMass/Boston. Before he went to the Kennedy School of Government, Dan was on the executive staff of President John F. Kennedy from 1961 to 1963, the vice-chairman of the U.S. Tariff Commission from 1963 to 1969. Dan is something of an expert on organizations and organizational strategy, and so when he calls Paul of Tarsus an organizational genius, his opinion carries a certain amount of authority.

    When I started thinking about Paul as an organizational genius, I found myself looking at him from an entirely new perspective. I started thinking about the organizational challenges Paul faced. At the most basic level, Paul was trying to build an organization that stretched across the entire eastern half of the known world of his time, from northern Africa through the Middles East, into Greece, and finally to Rome itself. This far-flung organization consisted of small communities of twenty to forty people, with no clear leadership structure, and plenty of internal conflict. Furthermore, the people in these early house churches were often poor and often uneducated, they were frequently persecuted and sometimes put to death, and unlike many churches today they had no money, no buildings, and no paid staff.

    In short, if you want to learn about true grassroots organizing, you would do well to study Paul of Tarsus. And if you want to learn how to build an organization at the most fundamental level, the level of connecting people through personal relationships, again you would do well to study Paul of Tarsus. Even though today we live in a vastly different social setting than Paul, basic human relationships have not changed; and because the fundamental building blocks of Paul’s organization were basic human relationships, we can still learn from him today.

    Now we Unitarian Universalists have been accused of being badly organized. You probably know the old joke:– the newcomer is visiting a Unitarian Universalist church for the first time, and when a church member welcomes her to the church, she says, Look I’m just visiting here, I really don’t want to have anything to do with organized religion. To which the church member replies, Oh good, you’ll fit right in here, we’re a very disorganized religion.

    This old joke actually points us towards two related problems that both stem from the fact that we are part of a society that is drifting away from democratic principles. On the one hand, some people who compare our organizational structures to the authoritarian organizational structures of corporate America accuse us of being disorganized. On the other hand, other people, who are so opposed to corporate authoritarianism that they see any organizational structure at all as bad, accuse us of being too organized.

    But both these accusations misunderstand how we are organized, and why we have organized ourselves the way we have. Let’s start with the “how” — how is it that we organize ourselves?

     

    The most important thing to understand about our Unitarian Universalist organization is covenant. A covenant is a set of voluntary agreements that we make to one another. Now you may have other ideas of what covenant means, but in old New England churches like ours, the word “covenant” has a very specific and distinctive meaning. Our meaning of “covenant” is even listed in that most British of dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary — which states, “Church Covenant: the formal agreement made and subscribed by the members of a Congregational church in order to constitute themselves a distinct religious society. (An important feature of Congregational polity in New England.)” Remember that, while we are a Unitarian Universalist church, we are direct descendants of the congregational tradition, and indeed the legal name of this church up through the 1940’s was “First Congregational Society in New Bedford.” So instead of a creed or a dogma or some such set of beliefs, we are organized around a covenant, a formal agreement that our members make with one another.

    Three hundred years ago, when this church was founded, our covenant was a long, formal, written document. Today we really don’t have this kind of formal written document. And in that way, we are more like the earliest Christian communities in Paul’s day. So back in the year 51, Paul wrote a letter to the Christian community at Corinth, telling them: “Encourage one another and fortify each other, as indeed you are doing…. acknowledge those who work so hard among you and act as your leaders…. Be at peace among yourselves…. give fair warning to the disorderly, encourage the fainthearted, stand by the weak, be patient with all. See to it that none renders to any injury for injury, but always do the right thing by each other and everyone else. Always be cheerful, pray constantly [today we might say, be sure to engage in regular spiritual practice]…. Do not still the Spirit, or scorn prophecies. Test everything; retain the good. Refrain from anything that looks at all wrong….” (Wouldn’t these words would make a reasonable covenant for a Unitarian Universalist church today!)

    Christianity has changed a great deal in the two thousand years since Paul wrote this letter. Today, the Catholic church and most Protestant churches have creeds and hierarchies; but in Paul’s day, those early Christian communities has no creeds, a very loose organizational structure, and no church hierarchy. Today, most Christian churches around the world exclude women from leadership positions; in Paul’s day, there were lots of women in leadership positions. Today, many Christian churches depend on rules and regulations; but in Paul’s day, they depended on good relationships. So it is that in his letter, Paul tells that Christian community at Corinth how to build good relationships with one another.

    And so it is today with us. We no longer have a formal covenant. But in the two and a half years that I have been here, I have pieced together an informal covenant, based on our church bylaws and (more importantly) based on the values that we hold dear. Each Sunday morning, I read that informal covenant at the very beginning of the worship service. In its current version, it goes something like this: “Here at First Unitarian, we value our differences of age, gender, race, national origin, class, sexual orientation, physical ability, and theology. We are bound together, not by a creed, but by our covenant: In the spirit of love, we come together to seek truth and goodness, to find spiritual transformation in our lives, to care for one another, and to promote practical goodness in the world. Wherever your spiritual journey began, wherever you are headed, you are welcome in this meeting house.”

    And periodically, one of you will come up to me and tell that I don’t have it quite right, and suggest a change — I make the change, and keep reading it every week until someone suggests another change. Although it’s been almost a year since Tryne Costa suggested to me the most recent change, which was to say that everyone is welcome in this meeting house.

    Our covenant, whether formal or informal, is our greatest strength, organizationally speaking. We are organized on the basis of our relationships with one another, and our relationships with the wider world, and our relationships with that which is eternal, which some of us call God and come of us call by other names. Corporate managers will look at us and tell us that we are disorganized; extreme anti-authoritarians will look at us and tell us that we are too restrictive; but I think we have exactly the right amount of organization.

     

    But why should this matter? What religious difference does it make? To tell you what religious difference this makes, I have to tell you a little bit about James Luther Adams, the greatest Unitarian theologian of the 20th century.

    James Luther Adams left an evangelical Christian upbringing to become a Unitarian. He served as a Unitarian minister in a number of congregations in the 1920’s, and then he decided to become a theologian. As part of his theological studies, he traveled to Germany in 1927, because Germany was where the greatest theologians of the day lived. Unfortunately, by 1927, Germany also had Nazis. James Luther Adams told this anecdote about his 1927 trip:

    “In 1927 in the city of Nuremburg, six years before the National Socialists [or Nazis] came to power, I was watching a Sunday parade on the occasion of the annual mass rally of the Nazis. Thousands of youth… had walked from various parts of Germany to attend the mass meeting of the party. As I watched the parade, which lasted for four hours and which was punctuated by trumpet and drum corps made up of hundreds of Nazis, I asked some people on the sidelines to explain to me the meaning of the swastika, which decorated many of the banners. Before very long I found myself in a heated argument. Suddenly someone seized me from behind and pulled me by the elbows out of the group with which I was arguing… and propelled [me] down a side street and up into a dead-end alley. As this happened, I assure you my palpitation rose quite perceptibly…. At the end of the alley, my uninvited host swung me around quickly, and he shouted at me in German, ‘You fool. Don’t you know? In Germany today when you are watching a parade, you either keep your mouth shut, or you get your head bashed in.’ …then he smiled… ‘I am an anti-Nazi.’…”

    After this dramatic incident, Adams asked himself what he, an ordinary American citizen, had done “to prevent the rise of authoritarian government” in his own country. He asked himself, just as we might ask ourselves, “What disciplines of democracy (except voting) have you habitually undertaken with other people which could serve in any way to directly affect public policy?”

    Adams realized that one of the things that the Nazis did was that they effectively abolished freedom of association. You could join the Nazi party; you could join one of the German churches that was a tool of the Nazi party; but you could not freely associate with any group you chose. For example, there were underground Christian churches that explicitly disavowed Nazism; these churches were banned by the Nazis, precisely because the Nazis aimed at smothering all dissent.

    Based on his experiences in Nazi Germany, James Luther Adams concluded that “only through the exercise of freedom of association can consent of the governed become effective; only through the exercise of freedom of association can the citizen in a democracy participate in the process that gives shape to public opinion and to public policy.”

    Let me put it more dramatically: By coming to this church, by exercising your right to freely and voluntarily assemble, you are engaging in democratic process. At the most concrete level, you can learn leadership skills that you can immediately utilize in the public policy arena. And by joining our individual voices together, we can make political leaders listen to our ideas on issues like equal marriage and global warming and anti-racism. And the simple existence of our church as a healthy institution helps to keep authoritarianism at bay.

    James Luther Adams points out that the early Christian communities of Paul’s day were communities that organized around covenants. By dispersing power and responsibility (remember, we’re talking about the early church, not today’s church) — by dispersing power and responsibility, those early churches broke through the old social structures of the Roman Empire and tried to create new, more egalitarian structures.

    Of course, after a couple hundred years the Christian church got sucked in by the Roman Empire, and all that early egalitarianism got smushed under the weight of authoritarianism. But today, free churches like ours still hold the potential for breaking through the old social structures — just as some of our Unitarian Universalist congregations have broken through the old racist social structures — just as some of our Unitarian Universalist congregations are trying to break through the old social structures that have so badly damaged our environment.

     

    Let me put this another way. Increasingly, American society is split up by socio-economic class, it is split up by race and ethnicity, it is split up by language, it is even split up by age. Here in New Bedford, we have been split up into lots of small groups: we have the Spanish speakers and the Portuguese speakers and the English speakers, and other language groups besides; we have black and white and various shades of brown; we people who identify strongly with various ethnic groups; we have fairly rigid class stratification; we put our elders into assisted living facilities and we keep our children out of sight in the schools. We have fewer relationships with fewer people. All this weakens democracy, and makes us vulnerable to authoritarianism.

    Here in our church, however, we fight off authoritarianism. We work to transcend boundaries of language, race, ethnicity, and age. We learn how to work together to promote social change and practical goodness in the wider world. All this grows out of our voluntary agreement with one another, it all grows out of the covenant we make.

    In so doing, we have but inherited the legacy of that organizational genius, Paul of Tarsus. He taught those early Christians to build their communities through developing good human relationships. He told them, “Be at peace among yourselves.” He said, “Encourage the fainthearted, stand by the weak, be patient with all.” He said, “See to it that none renders to any injury for injury, but always do the right thing by each other and everyone else.”

    We may word our covenant somewhat differently today, but the basic principle is the same: By means of a covenant, a voluntary agreement among ourselves, we build good relationships between ourselves and with that which is greater than ourselves; and with our covenant, we create a community out of which can emerge a truly open society, a society founded on true peace and true justice, a kind of heaven here on earth.