Category: Western Religious Traditions

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2007 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading comes from the Hebrew prophets, the book of Hosea. I have to do a little explaining here. In this reading, it is the prophet Hosea who is speaking; he lived about 750 years before Jesus was born. He is criticizing the religious and political leaders of his land, the Northern Kingdom of Israel. For poetic purposes, he refers to the religious and political leaders by the name “Ephraim” — so every time you hear the name “Ephraim,” substitute “our current leadership.” I also have to explain who “Baal” is — Baal was another god who was in direct competition with Yahweh, the god of Israel. (There was also a competing goddess named Asherah, but she isn’t mentioned in this passage.)

By a prophet the Lord brought Israel up from Egypt,
    and by a prophet he was guarded.
Ephraim has given bitter offence,
    so his Lord will bring his crimes down on him
    and pay him back for his insults.
When Ephraim spoke, there was trembling;
    he was exalted in Israel;
    but he incurred guilt through Baal and died.
And now they keep on sinning
    and make a cast image for themselves,
idols of silver made according to their understanding,
    all of them the work of artisans.
‘Sacrifice to these,’ they say.
    People are kissing calves!
Yet I have been the Lord your God
    ever since the land of Egypt;
you know no God but me..

[New Revised Standard Version, Hosea 12.13-14; 13.1-3, 4]

The second reading is from the book “Returning” by Dan Wakefield. In this passage, he is talking about his experiences as a member of King’s Chapel, the oldest Unitarian congregation in North America. I must tell you that, while I agree with some things in this passage, there are some things I strongly disagree with:

“I learned the church was really family because we worked hard and close enough with one another to get mad and argue as well as sing hymns together. I found myself one evening, after an inspiring session of a class called “Introduction to the New Testament,” standing in the downstairs hall of the parish house shouting at [my close friend] Judy in an argument over the course of the religious education program while our family members walked past us. I knew we were family because we went to our minister as the mediating father, and we got our mutual frustration out. We realized what had brought us together in the first place was the work we had done, and we got past our differences. I knew we were family because I heard gossip about all this and other human conflicts of other family members, and we kept returning to ties that went deeper even than our own egos, and I knew that only happened in families that shared some vision beyond their individual beings.

“I knew we were a family because we often behaved towards our minister as if he were the father of all 395 of us, as well (through his office) the local representative of God, “our Father who are in heaven.” The Reverend Carl Scovel makes no claim to power or glory and yet we see him walk up into that high pulpit every Sunday morning, and that is a lot closer to Whoever is up there above than we are. Sometimes we seemed to me like those early Israelites, a small band of people looking for security and freedom, with Carl as our Moses on Tremont Street, going up to get the Word and bringing it back down to us as we grumbled and strayed and returned.”

So end this morning’s readings — and in the sermon I’ll tell you what I so strongly disagree with in this last reading.

Sermon

This is the third in a series of sermons that tell about that great Jewish leader, Moses.

One of the quaint aspects of the old story of Moses is that his god, Yahweh, expects Moses to worship no other god — not only that, but that Yahweh expects that they will not put anything else on the same level of importance as Yahweh. How quaint! — that Yahweh expects Moses and the people of Israel to remain true to their promises to Yahweh, and to each other… Or, as we might say today using today’s buzzwords, How quaint! — that Yahweh expects Moses and the people of Israel to stay focused on their mission, and their vision for the future; and Yahweh expects Moses and the people of Israel to honor their covenant, their sacred promises to their god and to each other.

We can also phrase it this way: Yahweh expects the people of Israel to get rid of false idols. Many Unitarians and many Universalists, through much of the twentieth century, spent a great deal of energy getting rid of false idols. Idols are those things to which people grant more importance than they deserve. There’s a great story about the Unitarian church in Lexington center, Massachusetts. In the 1950’s, they used to have a Christmas eve candlelight service during which an internally-lit cross would suddenly appear in the darkness. While you can imagine that this might have produced an interesting visual effect, the congregation realized that it was a little bit over-the-top, that they didn’t agree with its theology, in short it was an idol — it got far more importance than it deserved. The cross wound up stuck in a trash can on the sidewalk in front of the church — right on the battle green in Lexington center. You can imagine what the rest of the town said: “Those Unitarians are at it again — throwing out their cross.” And to get rid of false idols, you have to be willing to face a certain measure of disapproval from others who may not understand why you’re doing what you do.

We Unitarian Universalists have a long history of getting rid of false idols. It isn’t just extraneous visual symbols, we try to get rid of ideas that serve as false idols. We have long known that much of the Christian religion we inherited from the past contained things that were not essential. To use the words of Theodore Parker, religion contains that which is permanent, and that which is transient. The teachings of Jesus, as they came from his mouth, still warm with his breath, contain permanent truths; as did the teachings of Buddha, and Moses, and Mohammed, and Lao Tze, and many others. But those teachings were passed on from generation to generation, and as the years passed, accretions of transient religion grew onto the permanent teachings: transient creeds and dogmas, even some fantasies. The history of human religion has been the history of people getting distracted by unimportant things.

Today, we are again in danger of worshipping false idols; we are once again getting distracted by unimportant things. Let me name three of those things. We have made a false idol of individualism. We have made false idol of social justice work. And we have made a false idol of intimacy. These three false idols are dangerous. Worshipping them distracts us from far more important things, like our covenant, our sacred promises to each other. The old words of that ancient Jewish prophet, Hosea, rings in our ears, especially if we revise them slightly:

We make a cast image for ourselves,
idols made according to our understanding.
‘Sacrifice to these,’ we say.
People are kissing calves!

Hosea tells us how to break away from idolatry. He uses poetic language, and it is tempting to take it literally, that is to give more importance to its transient menaing than to its permanent truths, but we won’t take it literally. Hosea has the god Yahweh say this:

Yet I have been the Lord your God
ever since the land of Egypt;
you know no God but me.

Hosea is reminding his people, the people of Israel, that they have a covenant, that is, that they have promises which they have sworn to keep. When Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, they made a covenant together, they made promises that they swore they would keep. Their covenant had a vertical dimension: they promised to remain true to their god, Yahweh, and to ignore other gods and goddesses. Their covenant had a horizontal dimension: they promised to stick together, and to be true to one another in spite of any obstacles they faced.

And they wound up facing huge obstacles. They were enslaved together in Egypt; and their covenant together allowed them to stick together so that they could stand up to Pharaoh and escape from slavery. They were lost in the wilderness together; and their covenant allowed them to find food together, to stay disciplined, to stay focused on their goal of reaching the Promised Land. So the old Bible stories say happened in the time of Moses.

Hundreds of years later, in the time of Hosea, the people of Israel faced other obstacles. In the time of Hosea, the leaders of Israel were self-centered, they used their positions of power so they could have comfortable lives and do whatever they wanted; but they did not provide leadership to Israel. Hosea tells us that Ephraim (that is, the leadership of Israel) “was exalted in Israel,” but that now Israel’s leadership “has given bitter offense” and “incurred guilt through Baal.” To incur guilt through Baal is a poetic, prophetic formulation. It may literally mean that the leaders of Israel literally worshipped the god Baal even though their position demanded that they should worship only Yahweh; but more poetically, Hosea is accusing the leaders of Israel of betraying their promise to the people of Israel.

Hosea uses poetic, prophetic words to accuse the people of Israel of not living up to their covenant; that is, he accuses them of neglecting their promises to one another. When he says they worship Baal, he is telling us that they have neglected their promises.

As for us Unitarian Universalists today, no one can accuse us of literally worshipping the god Baal. But we have our own false idols that have cause us to neglect our covenant, our sacred promises to one another. Let us now go back and look at each of the three false idols I spoke of earlier.

We Unitarian Universalists worship the false idol of individualism. We say: If you don’t do it my way, I won’t participate. We say: I can believe whatever I want, so I don’t have to listen to you or anyone else. We take our individualism to such extremes that our community suffers as a result. And when I say “we,” I’m including myself! Ralph Waldo Emerson taught us trust the still, small voice of conscience within; he taught us how to trust ourselves so that we don’t get pulled into false actions because we just followed the crowd. But by teaching us self-trust, Emerson didn’t mean for us to mistrust the rest of the world. By worshipping the false idol of individualism, we neglect our sacred promise to live in harmony with each other and with the natural world.

We Unitarian Universalists worship the false idol of social justice. We say: We have to make social justice happen before we do anything else. We even say: The core work of the church is social justice work. These statements contain kernels of truth: the problems of the world are so pressing, work for social justice cannot be delayed; and the core of our moral and ethical teachings tells us that we must heal a broken world. Yet these statements are also false. If we really believed that the core work of First Unitarian were social justice work, if we really believed that we have to do social justice work before anything else, we’d sell this building tomorrow, fire the musicians and the minister, end Sunday morning worship, and channel all our money, and all our effort, towards solving the problems of the world. But what we do here is to build up a community, a community bound by high ideals and sacred promises; and from the strength we gain here, we send each other out into the world, carrying our high ideals, carrying our vision of an earth made fair and all her people free. If we worship the false idol of social action, we neglect our sacred promise to worship together — to build a community.

We Unitarian Universalists worship the false idol of intimacy, and this is the most pernicious and evil idol of them all. We say: we must always like each other, and be nice to one another. We say: conflict is bad. We say: we must all know one another intimately. Yet to say these things is to ignore that fact that a covenant lies at the center of who we are. I have heard it said that “church should be like a big happy family.” It should be obvious how wrong that is, because if this church were like a family then someone has got to be the parents and someone has got to be the children; and I don’t know about you, but I refuse to be either childlike or parental. No: we enter into covenant together as responsible and mature adults; we make promises to one another as equals.

This brings us to the second reading this morning, the reading from the book Returning, by Dan Wakefield. I have lots of respect for Dan Wakefield, both as a writer and as a human being, and I think he has some deep and useful insights into what a church can be, what a church should be. Unfortunately, he gets his insights all mixed up with the common stereotyping of churches as families, and he gets mixed up in some bad theology. So let’s sort through what he says, and find out what seems to be good and useful. First of all, we can dispense with his faulty theology. No minister, not even Carl Scovel, is any closer to God (assuming God exists) than any other human being. God is not “up there” somewhere; if God exists, God is the light within us, or the love we express through our actions; if God exists, God is closer than the vein on your neck. The only reason Carl Scovel or any Unitarian Universalist minister climbs up into a high pulpit is a simple pragmatic reason: so people in the congregation can see and hear better. The only reason Carl Scovel, or any other Unitarian Universalist minister, seems relatively important is because ministers can serve as embodiments of a church’s covenant.

Second, we can dispense with Dan Wakefield’s tendency to let his own psychological issues color his understanding of church. A little later on in the book, Dan Wakefield writes: “I sometimes ‘projected’ onto the minister angers and suppositions that I later realized had nothing to do with the man Carl Scovel because when I examined the matter, he had said or done nothing whatsoever to provoke such a response.” In other words, if Dan Wakefield saw Carl Scovel as a father figure — for that matter, if Dan Wakefield saw God as a father figure — that has more to do with Dan Wakefield than it has to do with Carl Scovel, or with God.

And yet although we must reject the supposition that churches should be like families, we cannot deny that many times we who are in churches often act as though we are a part of a big “church family.” Sometimes we wind up treating the minister as a father-figure or a mother-figure — heaven help me, I’ve been guilty of that myself. Sometimes we wind up treating another church member as a parent-figure, or we wind up treating another church member as a sibling-figure, or we wind up treating another church member as a child-substitute. This does happen; this is reality; and in this sense, Dan Wakefield is right: churches can sometimes feel like families.

The problem with treating your church like a family is that you may have a very different understanding of a family than do other members of the church. Let me give you an example from my own experience (of course I have disguised identities so you cant’ tell who I’m talking about): Two church members, both men, both saw the church as their family; one of these men came from an abusive family where his mother abused him emotionally; the other man came from a fairly healthy family where he had a good relationship with his mother. Both of them served on the church board; both tended to view the minister (who was a woman) as if she were a mother-figure. As you can imagine, one man wanted to drastically limit what the minister could do, and the other man had a much more trust in the minister. This was not a healthy situation for either of the men, nor for the minister.

So we need to be extremely careful when we say “church is like family.” Yes, our churches can function like families, and sometimes you can understand a church better by viewing it as if it were a family. But it is dangerous to hold that up as a goal, as an ideal towards which we might strive, because we have such different feelings about families. To some people, a family might mean the ultimate in friendly intimacy; to other people a family might mean a deadly kind of intimacy that chokes and destroys. So it is that intimacy serves as a false idol in our churches.

Yet when Dan Wakefield tells about getting into a shouting match at church with a friend of his, he reveals something of critical importance. Dan Wakefield is telling us something that we all know to be true: churches are full of conflict, and fighting is a common part of church life. I know this is true of this church: as is true in any human community, there are conflicts, fights, and even feuds here at First Unitarian. Fights are bad if you just fight for the sake of fighting; but conflict can be good if it serves a higher purpose.

Dan Wakefield says that he and his friend Judy took care of their shouting match by going “to our minister as the mediating father,” and so they got their “mutual frustration out.” His story gets one things wrong: the minister was not serving in the role of “mediating father.” Dan Wakefield might have thought that his minister was serving as a mediating father — I’d be very curious to know if his friend Judy thought the same thing — but actually, his minister was serving as a representative of the entire church community, and as such the minister served as an embodiment of the church’s covenant.

Every church has a covenant, a set of promises that the people of that church make to one another. King’s Chapel has a very explicit written covenant, which goes like this: “In the love of truth and in the spirit of Jesus Christ, we unite for the worship of God and the service of man.” This old Unitarian covenant, written by James Freeman Clarke in 1886, is still used in Unitarian churches from Dublin to Illinois to the Khasi Hills of India. When Dan and his friend Judy took their disagreement, their shouting match, to their minister as the embodiment of their church’s covenant, they were reminded at some level that their purpose was to come together for worship and service. They were reminded of the love of truth: to get at truth often requires disagreement and conflict. As long as conflict aims to get at truth — as long as conflict isn’t about personalities — conflict in churches is necessary and good. And it is a covenant that allows conflict to be managed so that it can aim at truth.

Families do not have such covenants. Families with children do have a sort of implicit covenant, that parents will care for and raise the children to be adults. Marriage is a type of covenant as well, so if a family has a married couple there is a covenant between at least those two people. But it should be obvious that these family covenants differ from church covenants in their intent, and in who is covered by the covenant.

Churches cannot long exist without covenants. Let’s say that Dan Wakefield and his friend Judy had been members of a church with no covenant, or with a weak covenant. When they got into their shouting match, there would be nothing that could draw them back from their own personal conflict to be reminded of their higher purpose as a part of that church.

That’s why the prophet Hosea is so insistent in reminding his people to remain true to their covenant. To ignore a covenant can mean death for a religious community. Speaking in a prophetic, poetic voice, Hosea tells the people of Israel to remain true to Yahweh their god; in other words: remain true to your covenant; remain true to the sacred promises you made to each other. And Hosea tells us what happens when the people of Israel drift away from their covenant: incompetent and dishonest leaders, whom he calls Ephraim, could gain power. Hosea accuses those incompetent and dishonest leaders of worshipping Baal; that is to say, Hosea accuses them of abandoning the covenant of the people of Israel.

And so Hosea has Yahweh say, “Worship no god but me.” That’s a shorthand way of saying: “Stick to your sacred covenant!” Don’t let extraneous matters distract you from your higher purpose. Don’t be distracted by false idols, even when they are fashioned from gold and silver. Hosea tells us: stick to your covenant — stick to your promises.

Dan Wakefield gives us a picture of a happy, healthy church. In a happy, healthy church, you can get into conflicts, shouting matches even. As long as you stick to the covenant, conflict can lead to truth. Moses knew this, and when the people of Israel strayed from their purpose, when they let extraneous matters creep in, he called them back to their covenantal promises with one another. Hosea told us this. And now may we turn away from our false idols, and remain true to our sacred promises to each other: to transform our own lives, to care for one another and promote practical goodness in the world, and to seek together after truth and goodness.

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2007 Daniel Harper.

Story

If you were here in church last week, you heard the story of how Moses led the ancient Israelites out of slavery, away from the mean old Pharaoh, and into freedom. This week, we’ll hear another story about Moses.

So Moses and all the Israelites escaped from mean old Pharaoh, and Moses led them into the desert. They had to cross the desert, hot and dry, in order to get to the Promised Land, the place where they could live in peace and freedom.

They walked and they walked, day after day, for three whole months, until at last they reached Mount Sinai. They decided to camp there for a while, and they set up their tents.

Moses left his brother Aaron in charge of the campsite. Moses climbed Mount Sinai, and there he talked to his God, who gave him rules and laws for the Israelites. There were laws against stealing, against murdering people, against lying. There was a law against worshipping any other god or goddess. The first ten laws God gave to Moses are sometimes called the “Ten Commandments.” And most of these laws still make sense today.

Moses went back down the mountain bringing those first ten laws to the Israelites. Next day, Moses climbed back up the mountain for more laws. God gave him lots of laws. Some of these other laws sound strange to us today, like the law that said if one ox hurts another ox, the owner of the first ox has to sell it and divide the money with the owner of the second ox, and the owner of the second ox has to butcher it and divide the meat with the owner of the first ox. God had many laws and rules for Moses to bring to the Israelites. Moses had to climb up and down that mountain quite a few times.

Then came a time when Moses stayed on top of the mountain for a really long time.

Back at the campsite, the Israelites began to wonder where Moses had disappeared to. Some people decided that maybe Moses and the God of the Israelites had abandoned them. They went to Aaron and said, “Make us a new god.”

Aaron told them to bring all their gold jewelry. He melted it all down, and made a calf from it — a golden calf.

When the people saw the pretty golden calf, they said, “This is our god now, the god who led us out of Egypt.”

Aaron made an altar for the golden calf, and said, “We’ll have a big celebration tomorrow for our new god.” The next day, they worshipped their new god, and they cooked lots of food, and drank lots of wine.

Up on top of Mount Sinai, the God of the Israelites became aware of what was going on down in the camp of the Israelites. God said, “Those Israelites have made a new god for themselves! They made a calf out of gold, and then they offered it sacrifices, and worshipped it; just as they used to offer sacrifices to me, and worship me! They are no good — no good at all. I will strike them down and destroy them. And then I will lead you to the Promised Land by yourself.”

But Moses convinced God to give the Israelites another chance. Then he hustled down to the base of Mount Sinai.

What a sight met his eyes when he got there! People were dancing, and laughing, and eating, and drinking, and generally having a wild time. Moses stood at the gate of the camp, and he roared out, “Who is still loyal to the God of the Israelites? Come to me if you are!”

Quite a few people ran to Moses and said they were still loyal to the God of the Israelites.

“Go and get your swords,” Moses said to them. “Our God has told me that we have to kill off all the people who aren’t loyal to him.” And that’s what they all did: they killed all the ones who worshipped the golden calf.

But that’s not quite the end of the story. Moses had to go back up to the top of Mount Sinai and apologize to the God of the Israelites. God said that Moses had done the right thing; God said the people who worshipped the golden calf would get punished; and God sent an angel to help the Israelites on their long journey. But God also sent a plague to the Israelites, and many of them got sick.

Here’s what I get from this story: The Israelites were wrong to have made themselves a golden calf, after they had promised to be follow Moses’s leadership, and follow the God of the Israelites. I don’t like the tact that Moses killed off those who disagreed with him, but then I remind myself that it’s just a story. It’s just a story, but it’s a good story about remaining true to your ideals, and true to your community.

[Story based on the book of Exodus, mostly ch. 32]

Readings

The first reading comes from the book of Exodus in the Torah, and tells about the time when the Israelites had only just escaped from Egypt.

“The whole congregation of the Israelites set out from Elim; and Israel came to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had departed from the land of Egypt. The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, ‘If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’ ”

[Exodus 16.1-3, New Revised Standard Version]

The second reading is from the book Leadership for the Twenty-First Century by Joseph C. Rost:

“Followers are part of the leadership relationship in a new paradigm of leadership. What is different about the emerging view of followers is the substantive meaning attached to the word and the clarity given to that understanding. The following five points give the concept of followers substance and clarity.

“First, only people who are active in the leadership process are followers. Passive people are not in a relationship. They have chosen not to be involved. They cannot have influence. Passive people are not followers.

“Second, active people can fall anywhere on a continuum of activity from highly active to minimally active, and their influence in the leadership process is, in large part, based on their activity, their willingness to get involved, their use of the power resources they have at their command to influence other people….

“Third, followers can become leaders and leaders can become followers in any one leadership relationship. People are not stuck in one or the other for the whole time the relationship exists…. This ability to change places without changing organizational positions gives followers considerable influence and mobility.

“Fourth, in one group or organization people can be leaders. In other groups and organizations they can be followers. Followers are not always followers in all leadership relationships.

“Fifth, and most important, followers do not do followership, they do leadership. Both leaders and followers form one relationship that is leadership. There is no such thing as followership in the new school of leadership. Followership makes sense only in the industrial leadership paradigm, where leadership is good management. Since followers who are subordinates could not do management (since they were not managers), they had to do followership. No wonder followership connoted subordination, submissiveness, and passivity. In the new paradigm, followers and leaders do leadership. They are in the leadership relationship together. They are the ones who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes….. Followers and leaders develop a relationship wherein they influence one another as well as the organization and society, and that is leadership.” [pp. 108-109]

Sermon

If you were here last week, you heard a sermon about Moses. And this week, here’s another one: the second sermon in a series about that great Jewish leader, Moses.

The words to the old African American hymn, the one we just sang, go something like this:

When Israel was in Egypt’s land
Oppressed so hard they could not stand
The Lord told Moses what to do:
to lead the tribe of Israel through.
Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land
Tell old Pharaoh, to let my people go.

The story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt is a story of escape from slavery, a story of how to reach freedom. No wonder this story had special meaning for the African Americans who were enslaved in this country. No wonder they created hymns to tell the story of Moses. No wonder the white slave-owners sometimes tried to prevent African Americans from having access to the complete Bible; the story of Moses is potentially explosive, it is revolutionary.

It is a story that continues to have revolutionary potential, even today. Some religious liberals dismiss the Bible as being outdated. But we religious liberals would do well to remember that one reason the old stories of Moses have survived for thousands of years is because these stories contain great power. We religious liberals who are struggling to make this world a better place would do well to remember that we could tap into the power that is in the old story of Moses; a power that could change us for the better. And this morning, I would like to look at two parts of that story that might have some small power to change us.

The first part of the Moses story that we heard was the story of the golden calf. Moses goes up Mount Sinai to talk with the God of the Israelites. He’s gone a long time. The Israelites get impatient waiting for Moses to return, so they make themselves a new god: they make a calf out of gold, and they build it an altar, and they worship it.

Nor are we surprised to hear this. We have all witnessed this kind of thing happening in our own lives: Someone emerges as a leader in a community, and things start to change. But then the leader gets caught up in the big picture, forgetting the details, and so his or her followers go astray, they lose their sense of mission and direction, they start pursuing false ideas (or to use some current buzzwords in the non-profit sector, “they dilute their mission”). When the leader returns to earth, he or she finds the community in disarray; chaos reigns; nothing is getting done.

When I hear the story about Moses and the golden calf, I have two observations. First, I observe that Moses probably should have trained Aaron better so that take his place when he went up Mount Sinai. This is a classic problem in churches and non-profits: leaders often forget to train their replacements. Clearly, this problem goes back thousands of years. Second, I observe that the Israelites couldn’t stay focussed on their mission for that relatively short time when Moses was on the mountain. This is another classic problem in churches and non-profits: people forget to stay focussed on their mission, and get distracted by useless things like making golden calves. Clearly, this is another problem that has been going on for thousands of years.

In the first reading this morning, we heard a second part of the Moses story. The Israelites have escaped from Egypt, they have escaped from bondage and slavery. But to their dismay they discover that escaping from bondage is not easy. They find themselves in the wilderness. They do not know where their next meal is coming from. Egypt may have been bad, but at least they got fed. In the sonorous poetry of the King James version of the Bible, the Israelites say: “Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

Nor are we surprised to hear this. We have all witnessed this kind of thing happening in our own lives: A new leader takes a community of people in a bold new direction, and pretty soon the complaints begin. People say, Maybe the old ways didn’t work so well, but at least we were comfortable. People say, let’s go back to the old ways, let’s go back to the flesh pots. People start digging in their heels; they find little ways of demonstrating their discontent. Everything grinds to a halt.

When I hear this part of the story, I have two observations. First, I observe that Moses seems to have forgotten one key task of a leader. Moses should have read this month’s issue of the Harvard Business Review, in which there is an article titled, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail.” The article points out a great and ancient truth of leadership: leaders have to “use every vehicle possible to communicate the new vision and strategies”; often they have to communicate their vision far more often than they expect. [Harvard Business Review, January, 2007, pp. 99 ff.] Clearly, this was a problem thousands of years ago, and Moses did not adequately communicate his vision for the Israelites. Second, I observe that the Israelites indulged themselves inn being passive. OK, Moses didn’t adequately communicate his vision, and OK, you didn’t have enough to eat; but come on, Israelites, can’t you go out and look for food on your own? Clearly, this was a problem thousands of years ago: the Israelites sank into passivity.

Half a century ago, another great leader took inspiration from the story of Moses and the Israelites. Half a century ago, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., found himself in an explosive situation. He was the minister of a church here in the United States. Let me be more specific: he was the Black minister of a Black church in a time and a country where to be Black meant to suffer from oppressive laws and an oppressive social system, where to be Black meant to be treated as less than fully human.

When he was still in his twenties, Martin Luther King found himself thrust into a situation where he was in a position to provide critical leadership to Black people in the United States. And it is clear that he studied carefully how he might provide effective leadership. He knew the story of Moses in his bones; he knew the great courage of Moses, but he also knew all about the problems Moses faced. He studied other great leaders, like Mahatma Gandhi; he studied theorists like Henry David Thoreau. He knew how to lead.

From all this, Martin Luther King was able to communicate a powerful vision, a vision which he preached and proclaimed over and over again. He thrilled people with his vision. I still get chills when I read or hear his “I Have a Dream” speech: “Let freedom ring, let it ring from every village and hamlet” — powerful words, words with the power to move us to action. And to back up this powerful vision, Martin Luther King had specific strategies to mobilize his followers to action, strategies like non-violent resistance and civil disobedience.

But there is more to the story of Martin Luther King than just a powerful vision, and specific strategies. Martin Luther King had great followers. He had truly great followers. A great leader is nothing without great followers. And this brings us to the second reading this morning, the reading by Joseph Rost. This second reading is written in such dry academic prose that even though Rost is one of the best leadership theorists alive, you may have missed what he was talking about — as your head nodded and you drifted slowly off to sleep. So let me bring out three key points in what Rost had to say.

First, true leadership brings about real change. Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt — that’s real change. Martin Luther King changed the laws of the land — that’s real change. Real leadership lead to real change.

Second, people who are passive aren’t engaged in change; by definition. There are three categories of people: leaders and followers, both of whom effect change; and passive people, who do nothing except perhaps try to maintain the status quo.

Third, sometimes followers have to become leaders. Followers can’t just go off and do their own thing when they feel like it. In order to effect real change, followers have to stay in relationship with their community, and at times they may have to step forward and become leaders.

And while Joseph Rost doesn’t say this explicitly, let me add a fourth point: Many times, people don’t want to change. They show they don’t want change by remaining passive. This was true of Israelites. This was true of many people, black and white, during King’s time. This seems to be true of religious liberals today.

Let me say a little more about religious liberals today. I should remind you that the phrase “religious liberal” does not refer to politics; it does not refer to Democrats who happen to go to church. To be a religious liberal is to take a liberal approach to religion, to not be a fundamentalist.

Many religious liberals today do not wish to effect change — even though they may say they want to effect change. From what I’ve observed in half a dozen Unitarian Universalist churches over the past twenty years, on the whole we religious liberals have been resisting real change in a very specific way. We say we want to change the world, to fix all the things that are wrong with the world — as long as we don’t have to change anything in our nice, comfortable churches. Even though we are too small to effect real change in this broken world, we keep our churches small through passivity. We stay small even though demographic evidence shows that there are millions of people trying to get into our churches because they believe in what we are doing; yet we keep them out through passivity, and through hyper-individuality.

For these are our two primary ways of resisting change: passivity, and hyper-individuality.

By passivity, I mean sitting still and doing nothing. It’s just like the Israelites when they sat in the wilderness, doing nothing about it except to wish they were back in slavery in Egypt. We can see this happening in all the liberal churches right now; we can find people who, when asked to follow a larger vision, simply do nothing. I know I have been guilty of passivity; many of our Unitarian Universalist congregations have been guilty of passivity; Unitarian Universalism as a whole has been guilty of passivity.

By hyper-individuality, I mean wanting everything to be done your way. When a leader comes along and proposes real change, the hyper-individualist will say, Well that’s not the way I would do things, so count me out; I don’t want to follow you, nor will I step forward as a leader. Do you see how this is just another form of passivity?– because the hyper-individualist winds up doing nothing. They say that preachers often preach the sermon they need to hear, and I know that hyper-individuality is my besetting sin, the way I usually choose to resist change. HPyper-individuality runs rampant in Unitarian Universalist churches; hyper-individuality runs rampant in liberal religion.

But passivity gets us nowhere. We need good leaders, and we need good followers.

Good leaders need good followers. Martin Luther King could not have done what he did without good followers. He needed people who chose to get involved. He needed people who would become deeply involved, for he was calling on people to put their lives on the line. He needed people who could step forward and become leaders when he was in jail. He needed other leaders to come and be followers, just as Dana Greeley, the then-president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, left his presidential duties and traveled to Alabama to follow Dr. King. And Martin Luther King needed followers who did not see themselves as subordinates, but who saw themselves as full participants in the great endeavor of leading this country towards an acceptance of full equality for African Americans.

Martin Luther King succeeded in large part because he could mobilize huge numbers of people in the Black churches. Since then, the health of the Black church has declined, but in those days people in the Black churches knew how to be followers, and they knew how to be leaders. Martin Luther King also succeeded in part because he was able to call on large numbers of people in the liberal churches. Since then, the health of the liberal churches — churches like this one — has declined, but in those days we knew how to be leaders, and we knew how to be followers.

I tell you this because we need to rebuild the liberal churches — we need to rebuild this church. If a new Martin Luther King came along today, we would not be ready. We need to remember how to be good leaders — and we need to remember how to be good followers.

Personally, I believe the biggest issue facing us today as a religious people is global climate change and environmental destruction. I am waiting for new Martin Luther Kings to emerge, leaders who will galvanize us to end environmental destruction. And these new leaders will show us how poor people, and communities of color, and other people on the margins, are disproportionately affected by environmental destruction. They will show us that when Hurricane Katrina hit, poor people and African American communities bore the brunt of the destruction; when hazardous waste is dumped, rarely does it get dumped in the white suburbs; when the sea level rises due to climate change, it will be the poor people in places like New Orleans who will suffer the most.

These new leaders will have a vision for us, a vision of a new kind of freedom: freedom to enjoy and participate in an economically and ecologically sustainable future, no matter what color your skin might be — a sustainable future for us, for our children, for their children, for all the generations to follow.

I am already aware of new leadership emerging all around us, new religious leaders who are ready to galvanize the liberal churches. We need to make sure we are ready when the call comes. When someone comes along and says, Let’s create the Promised Land right here and right now! Let us create a society of ecological and economic balance, a heaven of ecojustice! — when that call comes, may each of us, and may this church, be ready to answer that call.