Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Western Religious Traditions

  • Paul the Puritan

    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 is from the book The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, by Wayne Meeks:

    “Since we do not meet ordinary early Christians as individuals, we must seek to recognize them through the [collective groups] to which they belonged and to glimpse their lives through the typical occasions mirrored in the [Biblical] texts. It is in the hope of accomplishing this that a number of historians have recently undertaken to describe the first Christian groups….

    “To write social history, it is necessary to pay more attention than has become customary to the ordinary patterns of life in the immediate environment within which the Christian movement was born…. [T]to the limit that the sources and our abilities permit, we must try to discern the texture of life in particular times and particular places….”

    [Meeks, p. 2]

    The second reading is from the Christian scriptures, the book known as Matthew:

    “When the Pharisees heard that [Jesus] had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He said to him, ‘  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”.  ‘  ”

    [Matthew 22.34-39]

    Sermon

    Paul of Tarsus is one of my least favorite characters in the Bible. Paul appears to be in favor of slavery, and opposed to those who would put an end to slavery. Paul appears to be a sexist jerk who believes that women are inferior to men. Paul is often quoted by fundamentalist Christians who hate homosexuality. As I say, Paul is perhaps my least favorite character in the Bible.

    Knowing this prejudice of mine, I decided to preach a series of sermons on Paul, of which this is the first. I wanted to find out if Paul’s opinions and pronouncements really are as bad as I think they are. I wanted to find out if I’m treating him unfairly, to find out if I’m prejudiced against him. I wanted to take some time to look at Paul to see if he is as bad as I feared; if he is as bad as I feared, to honestly state that; and if he possesses redeeming features, to honestly state what redeeming features he might possess.

    In the process of preparing these sermons, I discovered that I had been trying to understand Paul as if he were alive and preaching here and now, in the United States in the 21st century. That’s what most of us do. We have all learned that the Christian scriptures, the New Testament, is an important book in our Western culture; we are told that it is a book that is still relevant to us here and now; and we have learned that we are just as capable of understanding and interpreting the Bible as any preacher or priest or scholar or self-proclaimed prophet. These notions taken together tend to make us believe that the Christian scriptures were written specifically for our times, and that they provide answers for today’s problems.

    Yet while it is true that there is that which is permanent and universal in every worthy work of literature; while it is true that the Christian scriptures can inspire us and cause us to think deeply about current moral and ethical issues; nevertheless, the Christian scriptures were written nearly two thousand years ago by people who lived in a vastly different culture, within a vastly different society. So in reading the Christian scriptures, we must be careful to sort out the universal and permanent truths from those truths which may have been useful two thousand years ago, but which no longer remain useful to us today.

    Paul’s writings on slavery constitute the most obvious example of views which may have been useful two thousand years ago, but which are no longer useful. Paul wrote several of the books of the Christian scriptures, and he never states that slavery is wrong. Indeed, before slavery was made illegal in the United States, white American slaveholders both in the South and here in the North used Paul’s words as justification that it was morally acceptable to own slaves. In the last century, we Americans finally came to realize that slavery is morally wrong; we finally came to know that slavery is (there is no other word for it) sinful; and therefore we now know that Paul was utterly wrong when he said that slavery was morally acceptable. Knowing that, we are free to look at everything Paul says in the Bible, and question whether or not it is still true for us today.

    It’s pretty clear that Paul is wrong about slavery. But I have discovered that on the interrelated issues of gender and sexuality, Paul is not quite the hate-filled Puritan that I had thought. Are women as good as men in Paul’s view? Does Paul forbid homosexuality? Let’s ask these questions, remembering that society in Paul’s day was very different than our own society. Paul lived under the rule of the Roman Empire, and the Roman Empire had very different laws regarding marriage than we do; and Roman culture had very different ideas about sexuality than we do. Not only that, but we have to remember that Paul was born a Jew, and that in his day the Jesus movement was closely allied with Judaism; indeed, some scholars will say that in Paul’s day Christianity was nothing more than a sect of Judaism. The Jews living under Roman rule had their own notions of marriage, and still different notions of sexuality — notions that sometimes parallel our own present-day notions, and sometimes seem completely alien to our present-day notions.

     

    Let me give you some specific examples of what I mean. And I’ll begin with what Paul says about homosexuality, since one of the biggest conflicts in American religion today has to do with the place of gays and lesbians in religion.

    Now modern-day fundamentalists tell us that Paul said that homosexuality is a sin. However, fundamentalists often misunderstand what Paul was saying, because they seem to assume that life in the Roman Empire was exactly the same as life here and now. So when they read Paul’s letter to the Romans, where Paul says —

    “For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.” [Romans 1.26-27]

    — when the fundamentalists read this passage, they immediately interpret it to mean that Paul said that homosexuality is sinful. They’re assuming that the Roman world, Paul’s world, was exactly the same as our world. But the ancient Roman world really didn’t have a concept of homosexuality the way we do. Paul wrote in ancient Greek, and ancient Greek does not have a single word for homosexuality that corresponds exactly to our present-day word. And even in English translation, you don’t find the word “homosexuality”; you don’t find the word “gay” or “lesbian.” So at the most literal level, it seems to me that this passage has nothing to do with homosexuality as we know it today:– the only way you can make this passage say something about homosexuality is if you put it there out of your own value system.

    Going beyond the most literal level, we can ask: What do we know about sex and homosexuality in the Roman Empire of Paul’s time? In their recent book In Search of Paul, John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan Reed ask this question, and they come up with an interesting answer. In their view, sexual intercourse in the Roman Empire was often about older, wealthy men having power over women and teenaged boys. In depictions of the sexual act Roman art, women are often shown as being passive under, subordinate to, or controlled by men; whereas men are shown as being in a position of power over women. When Roman art shows two men engaging in a sexual act, what is usually shown is a teenaged or pre-pubescent boy being passive under, subordinate to, or controlled by an older man. In short, Roman art often shows sex as an act whereby older, wealthy men have power over women and boys.

    Crossan and Reed show that this attitude was pervasive in the Roman Empire. However, the smaller Jewish culture of which Paul was a part had different understandings of sex. Crossan and Reed claim that Jews of the time understood sexual intercourse mostly as a way to make babies. Thus it seems to me that when Paul complains about “unnatural acts,” he might well be speaking as a Jew who is appalled by Roman sexual practices, between opposite sex couples and between same sex couples.

    Consider, too, that Paul acknowledges Jesus as he religious leader. Now Jesus said (quote): ”  ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  ” I take the first of these commandments to mean that we are all of equal worth in the sight of God; and I take the second of these to mean that our relations with one another should be relations based on love, not on control or subordination. Therefore, any sexual act that is not based on love, that requires subordination or control, would be “unnatural.” Or we could say with equal truth that a person who degrades the humanity of someone else with a sexual act, that person is doing something that is not based on love and therefore goes against Jesus’s two greatest commandments. Perhaps when Paul objected to “unnatural acts,” he really was objecting to relationships where one partner degrades or dominates the other.

    If this is true, then it seems to me that Paul is passing along a permanent and universal truth:– sex and sexuality should not be coercive. Sex and sexuality should not require that one person has to have power over another person, or degrade another person, or control another person. Rather, sex and sexuality should be expressions of love — expressions of both erotic love and non-erotic love — that allow for equality between two persons.

     

    You may object to this, and say: Isn’t it true that Paul was a sexist pig, who thought women should be subordinate to men? If you’ve ever spent any time talking with fundamentalists, you will quickly find out that most of them believe this. And indeed, some of the writings that have been attributed to Paul say precisely this. One such passage appears in Paul’s first letter to the Christian community at Corinth:

    “For a man ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image and reflection of God; but woman is the reflection of man. Indeed, man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man..” [1 Cor. 11.7-9]

    Women were created for the sake of men — on the face of it, it seems pretty clear that Paul is telling us that he believes women are not as good as men.

    But while fundamentalists surely believe this, we religious liberals might not want to jump to their conclusions before we think for ourselves. We religious liberals know that English translations of the Bible are full of mistakes; furthermore, we know that the people who translated the Bible into English sometimes wind up pushing their own theological beliefs. Going back further in time, we know that parts of the Bible come from oral tradition and so represent poetic truths more than accurate historical facts; furthermore, we know that later editors and copyists inserted words and phrases into existing Biblical texts, and that they even made up entire books of the Bible, just so they could push their own theological beliefs.

    Knowing all this, we should listen carefully when Biblical scholars propose alternate interpretations of the Christian scriptures based on textual and other evidence. Back in 1975, scholar Elaine Pagels wrote a book asserting that many of the anti-woman passages that we find in Paul were actually inserted by later editors (who had their own anti-woman theology to promote). Pagels believes the evidence shows that both women and men took on significant leadership roles within the early Christian communities, and that women had a surprising degree of equality, given the general subordination of women in the wider Roman Empire. Thus it could well be that Paul himself was not a sexist, that he believed in the equality of women and lived out that belief in the early Christian communities. Not that Paul was some kind of early advocate for women’s rights, but perhaps, as is so often the case, the fundamentalists and the orthodox Christians hijacked Paul’s words to push their own theology.

     

    Yet it does seem pretty sure that Paul objects to “fornication,” that is, having sexual relations outside a socially sanctioned relationship. This hits home for me, because for the past eighteen years my partner and I have lived together, yet for lots of reasons (including feminist critiques of the institution of marriage), we have never married.

    But even here, I think we can find some common sense in what Paul says, if we will look at his social situation. Here, I draw on my extensive knowledge of what it’s like to be a part of a small religious community. Because we must remember that those early Christian communities were small. The early Christian communities met in one another’s houses. They had fewer people present at a worship service than we do — say, between twenty and forty people who showed up regularly. And many of the members of one of those early Christian communities would be related, or they would be a part of an extended family and associated servants and slaves living in the same household. These Christian communities that Paul knew, and that he wrote for, were small and very intimate.

    From my own experiences in several small churches, I can tell you that Paul’s advice makes a good deal of sense. If you’re a part of a church where there’s less than two hundred people showing up each week, my advice to you echoes Paul’s advice: don’t sleep around with members of that church. I can support this advice with a simple observation: in a church with less than two hundred people, when a couple breaks up, one member of that couple is probably going to have to leave that church. In all my years of working in small churches, I can think of only one exception to this rule: a couple who had a very amicable divorce, and who had custody of their children on alternate weekends; on the weekend when a parent had custody of the children, he or she got to go to church while the other parent stayed home. But the rest of the time, when a couple in a small church breaks up, one member of that couple will leave the church.

    Thus, in a small church like ours, Paul’s injunction against fornication, against sleeping around, proves to be good sound advice. If you’re in a church with two hundred people, it will be different. But when you’re in a small church, if you sleep around with other members of the church, everyone will know, and it could get messy. Paul speaks with a moral certainty I still don’t trust; but as a matter of common sense, I find I agree with him.

     

    I started out believing that Paul was the kind of sexual puritan I can’t stand. But it may be I was misinterpreting Paul as badly as the fundamentalists do:– they assume that everything he says is right; I assumed that most of what he says is wrong; both of us assumed that Paul’s social context was exactly the same as ours. We forget that Paul lived in a different world from ours.

    Once we sort this out, some of what Paul says has the ring of permanent religious truth. Every religious teacher passes on some teachings which are of utmost importance to his or her immediate followers; but which are of no possible use to succeeding generations. And every great religious teacher passes on at least some teachings which are eternally true, which partake of the wisdom of the ages. The fundamentalists go to one extreme, and say that everything that Paul says is of utmost importance to us today; some folks go to the other extreme, and dismiss Paul as someone of no possible relevance to us today.

    But there is a third way: to tease out that which is of permanent importance, from that which is not. May this third way be the way of those of us who call ourselves religious liberals.

  • Christmas Envy

    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 this morning comes from the ancient story of Joseph, as it is told in the Torah. The Hebrew Joseph has been sold into slavery down in Egypt by his brothers, and though he had a kind master, after a time he was thrown into jail on unjust charges. Meanwhile, the rule of Egypt, Pharaoh, had a very unpleasant dream one night, and that’s where this reading picks up the story:

    “In the morning, Pharaoh’s spirit was troubled; so he sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt and all its wise men. Pharaoh told them his dreams, but there was no one who could interpret them to Pharaoh.

    “Then the chief cupbearer said to Pharaoh, ‘I remember my faults today. Once Pharaoh was angry with his servants, and put me and the chief baker in custody in the house of the captain of the guard. We dreamed on the same night, he and I, each having a dream with its own meaning. A young Hebrew was there with us, a servant of the captain of the guard. When we told him, he interpreted our dreams to us, giving an interpretation to each according to his dream. As he interpreted to us, so it turned out; I was restored to my office, and the baker was hanged.’

    “Then Pharaoh sent for Joseph, and he was hurriedly brought out of the dungeon. When he had shaved himself and changed his clothes, he came in before Pharaoh. And Pharaoh said to Joseph, ‘I have had a dream, and there is no one who can interpret it. I have heard it said of you that when you hear a dream you can interpret it.’ Joseph answered Pharaoh, ‘It is not I; God will give Pharaoh a favorable answer.’ Then Pharaoh said to Joseph, ‘In my dream I was standing on the banks of the Nile; 18and seven cows, fat and sleek, came up out of the Nile and fed in the reed grass. Then seven other cows came up after them, poor, very ugly, and thin. Never had I seen such ugly ones in all the land of Egypt. The thin and ugly cows ate up the first seven fat cows, but when they had eaten them no one would have known that they had done so, for they were still as ugly as before. Then I awoke. I fell asleep a second time and I saw in my dream seven ears of grain, full and good, growing on one stalk, and seven ears, withered, thin, and blighted by the east wind, sprouting after them; and the thin ears swallowed up the seven good ears. But when I told it to the magicians, there was no one who could explain it to me.’

    “Then Joseph said to Pharaoh, ‘Pharaoh’s dreams are one and the same; God has revealed to Pharaoh what he is about to do. The seven good cows are seven years, and the seven good ears are seven years; the dreams are one. The seven lean and ugly cows that came up after them are seven years, as are the seven empty ears blighted by the east wind. They are seven years of famine. It is as I told Pharaoh; God has shown to Pharaoh what he is about to do. There will come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt. After them there will arise seven years of famine, and all the plenty will be forgotten in the land of Egypt; the famine will consume the land. The plenty will no longer be known in the land because of the famine that will follow, for it will be very grievous. And the doubling of Pharaoh’s dream means that the thing is fixed by God, and God will shortly bring it about. Now therefore let Pharaoh select a man who is discerning and wise, and set him over the land of Egypt. Let Pharaoh proceed to appoint overseers over the land, and take one-fifth of the produce of the land of Egypt during the seven plenteous years. Let them gather all the food of these good years that are coming, and lay up grain under the authority of Pharaoh for food in the cities, and let them keep it. That food shall be a reserve for the land against the seven years of famine that are to befall the land of Egypt, so that the land may not perish through the famine.’

    “The proposal pleased Pharaoh and all his servants….”

    …

    The second reading is also from the Torah, from Exodus 20.17:

    “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

    Sermon

    I have to tell you, Christmas is not one of my favorite holidays. You can probably guess why: it’s the commercialization of Christmas that I dislike. Here’s a holiday that started out as a celebration of the a celebration of the return of longer days after the winter solstice; then Christians turned the solstice celebration into a celebration of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth; then in 17th C. Massachusetts, the Puritans banned Christmas and even made it illegal to celebrate the holiday; in the 19th C., Christmas got Victorianized into a sentimental holiday for families to celebrate together; and finally in the 20th C. Christmas got transmogrified yet again, this time into a holiday of excessive consumption.

    If you recall the old medieval Christian list of the “seven deadly sins” — lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride — it will be immediately apparent to you that Christmas today, in the 21st C., is a blatant glorification of envy. Christmas envy is the natural outcome of the ongoing evolution of the commercialization of Christmas. These days, we expect to give and to receive lavish gifts at Christmas. Even those who don’t celebrate Christmas find themselves getting sucked into the Frenzy of gift-giving and money-spending — atheists buy generic holiday gifts, Jews give Hanukkah presents, and pagans have solstice gifts. And if we don’t have the money to afford expensive gifts for all our near relations and close friends, we feel that we have somehow failed. Worse yet, if we don’t receive lots of fancy gifts — the latest laptop of video game, expensive clothing, exclusive perfume, whatever it is you long for — if we don’t receive expensive gifts, we feel somehow cheated.

    I define this Christmas excess as a species of envy. It is covetousness. We covet what we don’t have. We covet what our neighbors do have — whether those neighbors are our actual flesh-and-blood neighbors, or the virtual neighbors that we see on television or in photographs in magazines or on the World Wide Web. Rather than coveting our neighbor’s spouse or ox or donkey, we covet our neighbor’s toys and gadgetry and lifestyle.

    But you already know all this. We all know about Christmas envy. Every year, pundits and preachers rail against the commercialization of Christmas, and every year we ignore them. Envy it may be, but it’s also good fun. It’s fun to find just exactly the perfect gift for someone you love. It’s even more fun to watch that person as he or she opens that gift, to see his or her face light up with pleasure. And it’s fun to receive gifts; it’s fun to get cool things, of course, but it’s also fun to see what someone thinks is just the perfect gift for you, because it reveals something of their character, and it reveals something of how they understand their relationship to you.

    So I will not join the preachers and pundits who tell us that we should stop giving gifts at this time of year. If you want to give Christmas gifts or Hanukkah gifts or solstice presents at this time of year, I say: Go for it! Moderation in all things, of course, so don’t go into debt, but if you find gift-giving to be fun, then why not have some fun.

    And having said that, I want to turn to the old story of Joseph that is found in the book of Genesis, beginning at chapter 37, and really extending right through the end of the book of Genesis into the beginning of the book of Exodus. Te weekly Torah portion for the sabbath which comes during Hanukkah comes from the middle of the story about Joseph, and we heard part of that weekly Torah portion in the first reading this morning. But before I get to the first reading, let me remind you of the story of Joseph.

    It all begins in the land of Canaan. This is the beginning of the story as it is told in the Torah:

    “Now Jacob was settled in the land where his father had sojourned, the land of Canaan…. At seventeen years of age, Joseph tended the flocks with his brothers… And Joseph brought bad reports of them to his father. Now [Jacob] loved Joseph best of all his sons, for he was the child of his old age; and he had made him an ornamented tunic. And when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of his brothers, they hated him so that they could not speak a friendly word to him.” [Genesis 37.1-4, the New Jewish Publication Society translation]

    As you can see, envy lies at the beginning of this story. Joseph’s brothers are envious of his coat of many colors, a coat given to him by their father. Actually, his brothers are envious of the fact that their father loved Joseph better than any of them, but the coat serves as the symbol for the greater love their father bestowed on Joseph. And they are really annoyed when Joseph tells them about a dream he had one night, in which all his brothers and even his father and mother would wind up bowing down to him.

    So what do Joseph’s brothers do? They attack him, tie him up, rip off his distinctive coat of many colors, and then they sell him to a passing caravan as a slave. Off went the caravan, taking Joseph with them. Joseph’s brothers smeared his coat with some blood, then off they went to tell their family that Joseph must have been devoured by wild animals. They may have been envious of Joseph, but I feel that was taking things a little too far: selling your brother into slavery just because you’re envious of him!

    Fast forward a little bit, and we find Joseph, now a slave, taken to Egypt and sold to one Potiphar, who is the chief steward of Pharaoh, the king and ruler of all Egypt. Joseph prospers for a while, but then winds up getting thrown into prison on the basis of false testimony — of course, as a slave, we can be sure that Joseph was not allowed to testify in his own defense. So now Joseph is not only a slave, he is in prison: this is what his brother’s envy has done!

    While Joseph is in prison, he gets something of a reputation as an interpreter of dreams. He manages to correctly interpret the dream of a fellow prisoner, and that prisoner is later pardoned by the Pharaoh, and returned to his old job as Pharaoh’s cupbearer. Well, one night, Pharaoh has a dream: In the dream, he sees seven beautiful cows come up out of the Nile River, the greatest river in Egypt, and the cows grazed contently in the grass along the river. Then seven scrawny, emaciated, sickly cows come up out of the Nile River, and they ate up all the beautiful cows. At that point, Pharaoh awakened. But he fell asleep and dreamed a second time: this time, he dreamed of seven plump ripe ears of grain that sprout, only to be swallowed up by seven thin, scrawny, misshapen ears of grain.

    And this brings us to the second reading this morning. In the second reading, Pharaoh called all his magicians and other wise people, and asked them the meaning of these dreams. No one was able to figure out what these dreams meant. But Pharaoh’s cupbearer remembered that Joseph could interpret dreams accurately, so Pharaoh brought Joseph up out of prison. Sure enough, with the help of the God of the Israelites, Joseph was able to correctly interpret Pharaoh’s dreams: there will be seven years of plenty, followed by seven years of famine. Therefore, said Joseph to Pharaoh, during the seven years of plenty you must put aside enough grain that when the seven years of famine come you can feed all the people.

    Pharaoh liked this idea — and that’s where the second reading left off. Pharaoh gave Joseph oversight over all food production, with the power to take surplus grain and store it in the Pharaoh’s granaries. By this point, some six or seven years had passed since Joseph was kidnapped by his brothers and sold into slavery. The seven years of prosperity came, just as in Joseph’s interpretation of the dream, and Joseph went out and bought up something more than a fifth of all the grain produced throughout Egypt. And then the seven years of famine came. The farmers produced very little grain. The Egyptians came to the Pharaoh’s granaries and bought grain from Joseph, the Pharaoh’s representative. The famine continued over the next few years, and when the people ran out of money, Joseph took their cattle in exchange for grain, and when they ran out of cattle, he accepted title to their land in exchange for grain. So it was that by the end of the seven years of famine, Pharaoh owned all the land and all the cattle in all of Egypt — thanks to Joseph’s good management.

    The famine extended even as far as Canaan, where Josephs’ father Jacob and all his brothers still lived. Starving, Joseph’s brothers came to buy grain from Pharaoh. They didn’t recognize Joseph when they came before him to buy grain; and they did indeed bow down before Pharaoh’s representative, just as Joseph’s dream had predicted all those years ago.

    In the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbi Joshua ben Levi tells us that twenty-two years elapsed from Joseph’s first dream, the dream that predicted that his brothers would all bow down to him, to the moment when Joesph’s brothers actually did bow down to him in reality. Twenty-two years to wait for a dream to come true! Twenty-two years of kidnapping, enslavement, and imprisonment! Twenty-two years is a significant portion of a human lifespan. And based on this, Rabbi Joshua ben Levi tells us that that we ourselves can expect to wait as much as twenty-two years to fulfill our own dreams. [“Miketz,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Miketz&oldid=175158548 (accessed December 7, 2007).]

    This is a good story to remember at this time of year; it is a good antidote to Christmas envy. Envy arises in part because we want something now; we see our neighbor’s ox or donkey or video game, and we want it now. Even if it’s completely impossible! Envy arises in part when we are hard on ourselves, when we set ridiculously high expectations for ourselves. It is easy to think that we must have perfect lives. And too often, “perfect” is defined for us by someone else; someone else defines perfect for us as we should all be living in a house in the suburbs with 2.5 children, 3 cars, a dog, and a lucrative career in business that allows us to buy fun electronic gadgets. Nor should we have to wait for this dream of perfection to be accomplished.

    Or maybe perfect is defined like this: if you’re a man, “perfect” means you look like Matt Damon, and if you’re a woman “perfect” means you look like Lindsay Lohan, and if you’re transgender, or don’t have white skin, or are over 35, well you’re just out of luck and you can never be perfect. In other words, our society makes it impossible to be perfect, and too often we wind up striving for a kind of perfection that just doesn’t exist.

    The story of Joseph reminds us that mostly life is not perfect at all. Our lives, just like Joseph’s life, our lives are full of setbacks and disasters and impediments, and our lives most certainly lack perfection. Yet like Joseph we have dreams, and our dreams might not be unreasonable. But Rabbi Joshua ben Levi reminds us that dreams can take decades to come true. And the story of Joseph reminds us that even if our dreams do come true, they may come true in ways that we could not have imagined. When Joseph first dreamt that his brothers would bow down to him, do you think could possibly have imagined how that would come true? — with Joseph working for Pharaoh, so that really his brothers weren’t bowing down to him at all, they were bowing down to this representative of the all-powerful Pharaoh.

    If you want to go out and have the perfect Christmas, and spend thousands of dollars and get the perfect lavish gift for everyone on your list and host the perfect Christmas party in your suburban house with 2.5 children, I for one won’t stand in your way (especially if I’m one of the people for whom you will purchase the perfect lavish gift, and by the way I could use a new computer).

    But I’m also here to tell you that it’s OK to lower your standards for Christmas, or Hanukkah or solstice or whatever you celebrate. You do not have to give the perfect gift to everyone — and if your children complain that they didn’t get very good gifts this year, feel free to do what a mom of my acquaintance did; when her son complained that he “didn’t get anything good this year,” she told him that if he didn’t want his gifts she would be happy to send them to someone who would appreciate them. You do not have to give the perfect gift to anyone, and you do not have to receive the perfect gift yourself. You do not have to send out Christmas cards (or the Hanukkah cards which I see in the stores these days) — it is perfectly fine to delay and send out Valentine’s Day cards instead. You do not have to decorate your house unless you feel like it. You do not have to attend parties unless you want to do so.

    In fact, as your minister I will tell you that there are only two things you have to do to meet your complete religious obligations as a Unitarian Universalist at this time of year. You must give a gift to, or otherwise help, someone less fortunate than yourself; and you must take the time to light a candle and sit in silence watching it burn. If you want, you can meet both those religious obligations by coming to the Christmas eve candlelight service here on December 24, lighting a candle, and giving some money when we pass the collection plate for a charity. Or you can simply go home tonight and light a candle after sunset, and after the candle burns down write a check to the charity of your choice. Or whatever.

    Everything else about this season is optional. If you want to go all out and celebrate madly, that’s fine. But this can be a stressful time of year, and you don’t need to be hard on yourself. Which means that you don’t need to envy anyone else’s gifts, or anyone else’s celebration.

    So take it easy. And I really mean it about lighting that candle: it really is a religious obligation to sit quietly on a regular basis, even for a minute or two, and do nothing. Sitting quietly gives you a chance to put things in perspective, to reflect on dreams deferred, to understand that you and your soul are more important than whatever gadget your neighbor owns. It’s the sure cure of Christmas envy.

  • No God But Me!

    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 was 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.