Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Western Religious Traditions

  • The Weary Blues

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

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

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

    Sermon — “The Weary Blues”

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

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

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

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

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

    …

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

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

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

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

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

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

    …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    …

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

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

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

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

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

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

    …

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

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

  • Lift Every Voice and Sing

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

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

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

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

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

    Sermon — “Lift Every Voice”

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

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

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

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

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

    …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    …

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

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

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

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

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

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

    …

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

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

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

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

  • The Parable of the Empty Jar

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

    Readings

    Upon seeing the title of this sermon in the church newsletter, Everett Hoagland, member of this congregation and a poet, suggested a reading from the Tao te Ching for this worship service. I was thinking about using something from the Tao te Ching as a reading, and Everett found exactly what I was looking for, in a new translation by the poet Stephen Mitchell:

    We join spokes together in a wheel,
    but it is the center hole
    that makes the wagon move.

    We shape clay into a pot,
    but it is the emptiness inside
    that holds whatever we want.

    We hammer wood for a house,
    but it is the inner space
    that makes it livable.

    We work with being,
    but non-being is what we use.

    The second reading comes from the Gospel of Thomas, chapter 97:

    Jesus said, “The kingdom of the [Father] is like a certain woman who was carrying a [jar] full of meal. While she was walking [on the] road, still some distance from home, the handle of the jar broke, and the meal emptied out behind her [on] the road. She did not realize it; she had noticed no accident. When she reached her house, she set the jar down and found it empty.” [trans. Lambdin (1988)]

    Sermon

    Back in 1945 in Egypt, Mohammed Ali Samman and his brother by pure chance happened to uncover an earthenware vase. Inside that vase were ancient handwritten manuscripts, containing many previously unknown books, what we now call the Nag Hammadi library. The most famous of the books is what we now know as the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings of Jesus that was written down somewhere around one thousand nine hundred years ago.

    I find the Gospel of Thomas to be a particularly interesting book. Although many of the sayings of Jesus recorded in it are similar to the sayings of Jesus we already knew from the gospels recognized by the Christian churches, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; yet other sayings in the Gospel of Thomas are recorded nowhere else.

    Now we know what we’re supposed to think the sayings of Jesus mean, because for the past two thousand years the Christian churches have been telling us what they mean. But the Gospel of Thomas is not an official Christian book. Therefore, those sayings of Jesus that appear in the Gospel of Thomas, and nowhere else are of particular interest to me. The Christian churches have not been telling us what they mean, so we can look at them with fresh eyes, listen to them with openness.

    When I first read the Gospel of Thomas all the way through a few years ago, I was particularly struck by chapter 97, which we heard in the first reading this morning. I re-read that short little parable several times over, asking myself: What was Jesus trying to tell us? Part of the reason it’s so hard to understand is that it’s so short; perhaps all that got written down was the merest outline of a longer parable. So as I thought about this parable, I began to imagine it more fully. I filled it out, and this is how I imagined it went:

    Jesus and his followers were traveling from village to village in Judea so that Jesus could teach his message of love to whomever would hear it. They had spent the day in a village where some people wanted to hear what Jesus had to say, and many others didn’t seem to care. That evening, they stayed on the outskirts of the village, and as they were eating dinner, one of the followers asked, “Master, what will it be like when the kingdom of heaven is finally established?”

    “Let me tell you a story that will explain,” said Jesus, and he told this story….

    “Once upon a time, there was a woman, just an ordinary woman who happened to live in a very small village that had no marketplace of its own. At the harvest season, the crops having been gathered in, the woman decided to walk to a larger village, just two or three miles away, where there was a market.

    “She started off early in the morning. She brought along some things her family had grown to sell in the market, and she brought along a large pottery jar with two big handles. Since she was an ordinary villager, or course she did not have fancy bronze jars, she just had an ordinary earthenware jar that had been made in her village. The potter who lived in her village was not very good at what he did, so her jars were without decoration, and not very well made.

    “She arrived at the marketplace, and sold everything she had brought. Then she purchased a large amount of meal, that is, coarsely-ground flour. She filled her jar with the meal, tied the handle with a strap of cloth, and slung the jar over her back.

    “The path home was steep and rough, and by now the day was hot. She walked along, putting one foot in front of the other, and she did not notice anything besides the heat and the rough path.

    “But one of the handles to the jar broke off, and the jar slowly tipped to one side. Bit by bit, the coarsely-ground flour spilled out on the path behind her. Bit by bit, the jar tipped even further. Before she reached home, all the flour in that jar had spilled out.

    “At last the woman reached home. She put the jar down, and discovered that it was empty. That is what the Kingdom of Heaven will be like.”

    ——

    That’s how I imagined the Parable of the Empty Jar might have been told in a fuller version. That helped me visualize the parable. Next I thought about how I could better understand the parable, and I began with three assumptions:

    First, I assumed that traditional Christian theology was not going to be able to adequately explain this parable; I made this assumption because I noticed that orthodox Christians tend to ignore the Gospel of Thomas in general, and this parable in particular. (Indeed, I decided that this parable was especially interesting because I couldn’t see how traditional Christians could possibly incorporate it into their theology.) Thus, I assumed that I should go beyond the boundaries of conventional Christian theology.

    Second, I assumed that “Thomas” or whoever wrote this parable down was a theologian, and so he (or she) had some kind of theological bias. It appears that whoever wrote this parable down was a Gnostic, that is, a member of that branch of early Christianity which taught that there are secret and hidden teachings of Jesus. The Gnostics seem to have believed that Jesus left secret teachings that were never written down, but which they passed on by word of mouth to those who were initiated into their religious communities. So perhaps we are meant to be confused by this parable, and this is part of the theological bias of this parable. At the same time, as a Unitarian Universalist, I’m used to understanding and working around other people’s theological biases, so I assumed that, alien as it might be, I could still make some sense out of it.

    Third, I assumed that even though the Gospel of Thomas is not a part of the standard Christian Bible, it’s still an interesting and useful book. I assumed that any book about Jesus that was written within two or three generations after the death of Jesus is worth reading; such ancient books are likely to have some interesting or useful insight into the world of Jesus, or at least into the world of the early followers of Jesus.

    Those were my three assumptions. If we start with those assumptions, we don’t have to try to make the Parable of the Empty Jar fit into conventional Christian theology, and we don’t have to reject it simply because it’s not in the official Bible. Furthermore, we know that it has been retold by someone with a Gnostic Christian bias, but we don’t have to let that affect us. Finally, we know that it’s worth trying to understand this parable insofar as it might give us some additional insight into the thought of Jesus of Nazareth. Starting with these three assumptions, let’s see what the Parable of the Empty Jar has to say to us.

    The first thing I notice is the that Parable of the Empty Jar tells us that emptiness somehow is the same as the Kingdom of Heaven. This is not traditional Christian theology, where the Kingdom of Heaven means a place you go after you die — emptiness is not a place, emptiness is just empty. Not only is this not traditional Christian theology, it seems to have a passing resemblance to another great religious tradition, the tradition of Taoism. In the Tao te Ching, the central book of Taoism, we find that passage which we heard in the second reading this morning:

    We shape clay into a pot,
    but it is the emptiness inside
    that holds whatever we want.

    Is this just coincidence? Does the idea of emptiness occur anywhere else in the Christian tradition?

    Once we start looking, we find that images of emptiness and nothingness do appear elsewhere in the Christian scriptures. I think of the story of the rich young man who comes to Jesus, says he has observed all the commandments, upon hearing which Jesus tells him: “Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” (Bible geeks note: this is from Mk. 10.21 [also Mt. 19.21; Lk. 18.22] RSV.) An empty bank account is equated with the kingdom of heaven. I think also of that passage in Jesus’s most famous sermon, the so-called Sermon on the Mount, where he says that we shouldn’t worry so much about material things; we shouldn’t even worry about clothing, he says: “And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” (Mt. 6.28-29) An empty clothes closet is equated with the kingdom of heaven. Jesus even empties out his family, as in the story where his mother and brothers and sisters have come to see him, to which he replies: “Who are my mothers and my brothers [and my sisters]?… Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.” (Mk. 3.33, 35)

    Obviously, the Jesus tradition has a way of talking about emptiness that is quite different from the Taoist tradition; I’m not trying to tell you that they’re the same thing. The teachings of Jesus are more likely to advise us to pay less attention to material things, and instead pay greater attention to matters of the spirit; whereas the Taoist tradition, at least in my limited understanding of it, is more likely to instruct us in how to empty our minds as a form of spiritual discipline. Yet in both traditions, we do seem to find the idea that in order for us to be connected with that which is most important in life, we have to empty our lives of non-essential things; we even have to empty our lives of things we thought were essential, but which we are assured are in fact inessential.

    While there are distinct differences, I think that both Taoism and the Jesus tradition are telling us that if we want to truly understand the world, we can’t rely on ordinary ways of thinking and being. Lao-tse, who allegedly wrote the Tao te Ching, invites us to empty our minds so that we may better know what he terms the Tao, the Way; Jesus invites us to empty our lives so that we may better know what he calls the Kingdom of Heaven — which he sometimes also calls the Way. Both traditions are inviting us to step out of the ordinary way of thinking and being, and step into a new way of thinking and being.

    I believe it’s very important that both Jesus and Lao-tse talk about the “Way.” They don’t talk about “the place we’re going to get to eventually”; they talk about the way, the path, the journey. We can see this in the Parable of the Empty Jar. Jesus says that the empty jar is like the kingdom of heaven, but he also tells us the process by which the jar becomes empty: first the handle of the jar breaks, then the jar empties out over time (and we know that it must happen slowly, or otherwise the woman would immediately become aware that the jar was suddenly empty), and then the woman gets home and realizes that the jar is empty. We also know that the process will continue after that moment when the woman discovers that the jar is empty: she will be shocked, she will wonder how it happened; and then she will have to figure out what to do next — will she borrow flour form someone else? will she be forced to rely on her extended family and the community for help? In other words, will the emptiness of the jar force her to use her network of relationships? And perhaps this is this the kingdom of heaven:– not the emptiness of the jar itself, but the inescapable network of mutuality that binds each of us to the rest of humanity, to the rest of the ecosystem, to what we might call the Web of Life.

    We have come a long way from the original parable; nothing that I have said can be found in that very short parable. None of this can be found there, but in the process of thinking about that parable, perhaps this is the direction we must come. We have not come down the well-trodden path of traditional Christianity, which tends to reject the Gospel of Thomas, or tends to interpret the Parable of the Empty Jar as a conventional parable telling us to accept Christian orthodoxy. Instead, by looking into the empty jar, by looking into emptiness, perhaps we have come face to face with reality — face to face with a reality that doesn’t have firm and final answers, a reality that is always changing, reality that is a process.

    Not that I think that I have just uncovered the one final, correct interpretation of the Parable of the Empty Jar. This is a process, a path, a way — it is not a final definition that can be pinned down like a dead butterfly in a display case. And to make that point, let me tell you the rest of the story of the Parable of the Empty jar, as I imagined it happening:

    You remember that as I imagined it happening, one of his followers asked him what the Kingdom of Heaven would be like, and in response Jesus told the Parable of the Empty Jar. He concluded the parable by saying, “At last the woman reached home. She put the jar down, and discovered that it was empty. That is what the Kingdom of Heaven will be like.”

    As I imagine it, when Jesus stopped talking, his followers respectfully waited a little while longer, because they did not think that could be the end of the parable. But Jesus had nothing more to say. They all sat in silence for a while, and one of the followers finally said, “Master, I’m not sure I understand.”

    But Jesus did not explain further, and eventually he went off by himself to sleep. The followers sat up for a while talking about the story.

    “It is like the story when the prophet Elijah goes to the widow of Zarephath,” said one of the followers. “God told Elijah to go there and she would feed him, but the widow did not even have enough flour for herself and her son. Elijah tells her to bake three loaves anyway, and she finds that she does have enough flour after all, for God has provided for her. Indeed, the jar of flour is still just as full as it was before Elijah had arrived. Jesus is telling us that in the Kingdom of God, we will not have to worry where our food comes from.”

    “You mean like when Jesus said, the lilies in the fields don’t go to work and yet they have enough to eat,” said one of the other followers. “Perhaps you are right, but I think Jesus is telling us that we will find the Kingdom of God in the most unexpected places. He also taught us that the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, a seed so small you can hardly see it, but one that grows into a huge plant.”

    “Perhaps you are right,” said a third follower, “but a mustard seed can grow, and an empty jar of flour cannot grow into anything but hunger. I think Jesus is talking about the poor, who will inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. Like the woman in the story, those who have nothing, who are poor and hungry and have no flour at all. She will be one of the ones who inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.”

    No one else had anything to say, and they sat in silence for a while. At last, another one of Jesus’s followers stood up.

    “I don’t think any of us really understand that story,” she said, “but Jesus got us to think hard about what the Kingdom of God is like. We have thought about it, and we have talked about it, and now it’s time to sleep, because just like the woman in the story, we have a long walk ahead of us tomorrow.”

    ——

    That’s what I think about the Parable of the Empty Jar: I don’t think any of us knows exactly what it means. I don’t know exactly what the Parable of the Empty Jar means, but it makes me reflect on life from a new perspective; and maybe that is the real point of any parable. And I suspect that the real point of this parable, the real point of any parable told by Jesus, is not to give us a final answer about something, but to make us think in new ways. The best teachers, the greatest teachers, are not the ones who give us all the answers. The greatest teachers are the ones who make us think for ourselves, who move us into new ways of being in the world, who turn us towards a way of being in the world that makes the world a better place while it allows us to be more human, which we might call the Kingdom of Heaven. And perhaps the first step is to empty ourselves of the old ways of being, so that we can move into the ways of being.