Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Western Religious Traditions

  • 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.

  • Humanism in Our Time

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

    Readings

    First reading — “Gods” by Langston Hughes

    “The ivory gods,
    And the ebony gods,
    And the gods of diamond and jade,
    Sit silently on their temple shelves
    While the people
    Are afraid.
    Yet the ivory gods,
    And the ebony gods,
    And the gods of diamond-jade,
    Are only silly puppet gods
    That the people themselves
    Have made.”

    …

    Second reading — Margaret Atwood, “In the Secular Night” from her book Morning in the Burned House (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), p. 6.

    Sermon

    This morning, I’d like to speak with you about humanism. Humanism is a religious system that does not require a belief in God. In my opinion, humanism has been the most influential thought system in Unitarian Universalism over the past century. This is not to say that all of us Unitarian Universalists are humanists — although about 45 per cent of us are — but the simple fact that many Unitarian Universalists don’t feel the need to believe in God, nor to accept any divine or supernatural agency whatsoever, has, I believe, helped keep us from drifting into rigidity of thought, and has contributed in other ways to the overall health of Unitarian Universalism.

    I suppose I had better define humanism before we go any farther. Although humanism does not ask any belief in God, it is not the same as atheism. Atheism tends to be defined by what it rejects — it rejects a supernatural God — whereas humanism tends to be defined by what it affirms — the boundless potential of human life. Nor is humanism the same as the rejection of religion; the people who reject religion generally don’t come to church, whereas there are plenty of humanists in our churches.

    I’d say the defining characteristic of humanism is this: humanism places human beings at the center of religion. Humanists don’t place God at the center of religion — indeed, most of the humanists I know don’t pay much attention to God, and many humanists would simply reject the whole notion of God. What humanists want to do is to make sure that religion is centered around human beings. In so doing, the humanists have helped us in our work for justice and liberation; they have changed the way we provide comfort to one another; and they have helped us better understand what it means to be a part of a religious community. Let’s take a look at each of these three humanist contributions.

    I/ And let’s start with justice and liberation. Originally, Western religion taught us that the reason we should be nice to one another is because the Bible says so, and the Bible says so because God says so, and if we follow God’s plan everything will be fine. But during the twentieth century, some people began to question whether God had a good plan for humanity.

    When I was young, my parents were friends with a couple who had escaped Germany during the 1930s; they had been born Jewish, and as the Nazis came to power they knew they couldn’t survive in Germany. By the time I knew them, they refused to have anything to do with religion. I remember one of them asking how anyone could believe in God, since to believe in God meant believing in a God who would allow millions of Jews to be slaughtered in concentration camps. How could the horrors of the Holocaust be a part of God’s plan?

    And then there’s the racism endemic in the United States. When you look at the horrors of racism — shortened life spans, violence against people of color, an inordinate quantity of environmental problems located within communities of color, and so on — how could all this be part of the plan of a supposedly good God?

    Back in 1971, Dr. William R. Jones wrote a book titled, “Is God a White Racist?” Dr. Jones, an African American humanist theologian who also happens to be a Unitarian Universalist minister, had a subtle answer to the question posed in this title. He said that if we believe in a God-centered religion, then God must be a white racist because God allows the evil of racism to continue unchecked. But, says Jones, there’s another possibility, which is to have a human-centered religion where we take responsibility for fighting the evils of the world. The real divide is not between those who believe in God and those who don’t believe in God — Dr. Jones says that the real divide is between the people who have a God-centered religion, and the rest of us who know that we have to go out there and do the hard work of making the world a better place. So it is that Dr. Jones outlined one of the most important aspects of humanism: that human beings must take responsibility for their own destinies.

    You probably know the old joke about the fellow who is trapped in a flood. As the flood waters cover the street in front of his house, he lifts his eyes up to heaven and prays to God to get him out of the flood. Just then, a police officer drives by and asks him if he wants a ride to higher ground. No, he tells her, I’ll stay right here and wait for God to save me. Well, the flood waters keep rising until he has to move up into the second story of his house to stay dry, and just then some guy comes by in a boat and asks the man if he wants a ride to higher ground. No, says the man, I’ll stay right here and wait for God to save me. Well, the flood waters keep rising, and finally the man is up on the roof of his house. Just then, a woman in a balloon comes floating by and asks the man if he wants a ride to higher ground. No, says the man, I’ll stay right here and wait for God to save me. Well, finally the flood waters rise up so high that the man is perched on top of the chimney of his house. He looks up into the sky and says, God, what’s the matter? I prayed to you to save me. And this big booming voice comes out of the sky saying, Look, pal, I sent you a car, then I sent you a boat, and finally I sent you a balloon, what more do you want?

    This old joke gives us a basic humanist truth: that whether or not we believe in God, we human beings have to take charge of our own destinies. Humanists teach us that if you believe in God, you don’t wait around for some miraculous divine act to make the world a better place — you take the initiative yourself, and when your street is flooded and that police officer drives by, you get in her car and drive safely to higher ground.

    Notice that someone who believes in a human-centered God acts almost exactly the same way that a humanist would act. The only difference is that the humanist wouldn’t bother to pray to God in the first place. But the end result is that same: whether we’re trying to escape from a flood — or trying to end racism, for that matter — it’s up to us to take action to make the world a better place.

    II/ Because humanism challenges the orthodox notions about God, humanism can also be a comfort to those of us who do not experience religion the way the orthodox tell us we’re supposed to experience religion. Let me give you an example from my life, not because I think I’m particularly interesting, but because I think it’s a representative example.

    For the last eight years of her life, my mother had supra-nuclear palsy, a particularly aggressive form of Parkinson’s disease that typically kills you in less than a decade. This disease led to all kinds of other problems, and at one point about three years before she died there was a time when she was in the hospital, and I was scared. I remember going to visit her in the hospital, and then going out to take a long walk along this road near the hospital. While I was walking, I decided to try prayer:– why not? I was a Unitarian Universalist, and prayer has long been one of our central spiritual practices, and I felt I needed some kind of spiritual practice to get me through that time.

    So I started praying. Mind you, I wasn’t praying to ask God to somehow miraculously heal my mother, because I knew that ultimately wasn’t possible; rather, I was praying as a way to try to connect with something larger than myself, in order that I might find some peace, some relief from being scared and sad. I gave it my best shot, but praying did absolutely nothing for me. So I stopped praying. Eventually, I took my cue from those great Unitarians Emerson and Thoreau, and found a healing spiritual practice in spending time outdoors in Nature. After my mother finally died, I spent a lot of time walking and canoeing and fishing — and it was that non-traditional spiritual practice, the spiritual practice of spending time outdoors in Nature, rather than praying to God, that comforted me and helped me through my grief.

    One of the greatest gifts humanism has given to us has been to show us that spiritual comfort does not require belief in the traditional Christian God, nor does spiritual comfort require participating in the traditional Christian spiritual practices such as prayer. The humanists have shown us that spiritual comfort is, above all, a human phenomenon; and because individual human beings differ from one another, because different human cultures differ greatly from one another, it is therefore obvious that each individual human being may have different spiritual needs, and may find spiritual comfort in different ways. I know many people who find great comfort in praying; I know many of you find great comfort in praying; but some of us happen to be made up differently, and we find our spiritual comfort in non-traditional ways. By emphasizing the human dimension of spiritual practices, humanists have relieved all us of feeling inadequate if it should happen that we don’t find comfort in traditional spiritual practices.

    III/ Next I’d like to consider how it is that humanism has strengthened our local Unitarian Universalist churches, strengthened our local religious communities. Most Christian churches are united around beliefs: if you believe certain things about God, then you belong in a certain kind of church. But thanks to the humanists we Unitarian Universalists know we don’t have to believe in God at all, and this strengthens our conviction that we can find unity without adhering to any specific set of beliefs about God.

    Because we are not united by a specific set of beliefs about God, we rely on something else to hold us together in religious community: we are held together by the idea of covenant, that is, by a set of promises that we make to one another about how we are going to treat each other. Another way to say this is to say that we can be held accountable to one another for our behavior. You can’t be a Unitarian Universalist just because you have some specific set of beliefs — you become a Unitarian Universalist when you make a commitment to a religious community that you will live your religion by treating other people with the same dignity and respect that you yourself deserve.

    I believe humanists have helped us to realize that we can not only hold each other accountable for our behavior — but logically speaking, those of us who believe in God can also hold God accountable for God’s behavior. It’s like the old joke:

    A woman goes down to the beach with her grandson. The little boy is playing in the waves when suddenly a huge wave comes out of nowhere and swallows up the little boy and drags him out into deep water. The woman stand for a moment in shock, watching where her little grandson was playing. She can’t swim, he’s completely disappeared anyway, what else can she do but pray to God. So this is what she does, she prays to God to return her grandson. Nothing happens, but the woman is absolutely insistent, she refuses to give up. Nothing happens, but she just prays louder. Finally, this voice comes down from heaven, saying, “All right, enough already, here’s your grandson back.” Out of nowhere, a wave comes, crashes on the beach, and there’s her grandson, completely unhurt, although he looks pretty wet, dirty, and disheveled. The woman look up to where the voice came from and says, “He had a hat.”

    OK, so this is just a joke, but it seems to me that there’s some deep truth in this joke. If there is a God, it is completely unjust for that God to take the life of an innocent young boy playing on the beach. And if all that is true, then when the grandmother prays to God to correct this injustice, the boy should be fully restored to her; even if his hat is missing, it is not good enough. The woman in this joke holds God accountable to the highest ideals of religion; just as Prometheus holds the gods accountable.

    Do you remember the ancient Greek story of Prometheus? — it is a favorite story of many humanists. Prometheus was the fellow who stole fire from the Greek gods and brought it down to humankind, so that human beings could live better lives. For his disobedience, of course, the gods punished Prometheus; but humankind got to keep the knowledge of making fire. Once Prometheus had given fire to humankind, the gods realized that they could not take fire away from humankind, they couldn’t take away fire which relieved so much human suffering; for if they took away fire, then the gods would be shown to be cruel and heartless. In this way, Prometheus held the gods accountable to their highest ideals.

    It is in this way that humanists uphold rebellion as a key religious value. Humanist rebellion is not a blind, destructive, striking-out at authority; humanist rebellion is carefully calculated to build community by holding ourselves and others to the highest ideals of humanity.

    Rebellion for the sake of rebellion is a waste of time. But rebellion for the sake of upholding the highest ideals of humanity:– this was the life work of Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. This is the kind of rebellion that we need in our religious communities:– a rebellion that never settles for good enough, a rebellion that is willing to take on sacred cows, a rebellion that holds us accountable to the highest ethical standards. Humanism reminds us: religious belief is useless if you don’t live out your religious beliefs in the real world; and humanists suggest to us that belief should be a lower priority than making the world a better place.

    Before I end I do want to acknowledge that humanism is capable of its own excesses. In some of our Unitarian Universalist congregations I have seen a phenomenon I call “humanist fundamentalism,” where no one is allowed to believe in God, or even use the word “God” in a worship service. Some of these humanist fundamentalists, just like Christian fundamentalists, can be annoying and oppressive.

    However, unlike other kinds of fundamentalism, and unlike plain old atheism, humanism contains its own corrective to “humanist fundamentalism.” In its highest and best form, humanism cares little about what others believe, while it cares deeply about making this present world a better place to live. The best humanists don’t care so much you may or may not believe, but they do care about bringing out the best of humanity in each one of us.

    Humanists remind us to place human beings at the center of religion, humanists remind us to uphold the highest ideals of humankind. By downplaying the importance of belief in God (or disbelief in God), humanists help all religious people to stay focused on what is most important about religion: that religion should be focused on human beings. When we remember to keep religion focused on human beings, thus helps us to create healthy religious communities in which we are accountable to one another; it helps us in our work for justice and liberation; it helps us to provide spiritual comfort to one another, and spiritual comfort to ourselves. So it is that religion be a gift and a pleasure to us, to help us to spread the light of love throughout the world.

  • Demeter and Persephone

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

    Readings

    The first reading is an excerpt from an Orphic Hymn to Persephone:

    “…Persephone divine,
    come, blessed queen, and to these rites incline:
    only-begotten, Hades’s honoured wife,
    O venerable Goddess, source of life:….
    O vernal queen, whom grassy plains delight,
    sweet to the smell, and pleasing to the sight:
    whose holy form in budding fruits we view,
    earth’s vigorous offspring of a various hue:
    espoused in autumn, life and death alone
    to wretched mortals from thy power is known:
    for thine the task, according to thy will,
    life to produce, and all that lives to kill.
    Hear, blessed Goddess, send a rich increase
    of various fruits from earth, with lovely peace:
    send health with gentle hand, and crown my life
    with blest abundance, free from noisy strife;
    last in extreme old age the prey of death,
    dismiss me willing to the realms beneath,
    to thy fair palace and the blissful plains
    where happy spirits dwell, and Hades reigns.”

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

    The second reading is from the mythographer Apollodorus, and it tells the best-known version of the story of Persephone’s abduction:

    [1.5.1] Plouton [or Hades] fell in love with Persephone, and with Zeus’s help secretly kidnapped her. Demeter [her mother] roamed the earth over in search of her, by day and by night with torches. When she learned from the Hermionians that Plouton had kidnapped her, enraged at the gods she left the sky, and in the likeness of a woman made her way to Eleusis….
    [1.5.3] When Zeus commanded Plouton to send Kore [or Persephone] back up, Plouton gave her a pomegranate seed to eat, as assurance that she would not remain long with her mother. With no foreknowledge of the outcome of her act, she consumed it. Askalaphos, the son of Akheron and Gorgyra, bore witness against her; in punishment for which Demeter pinned him down with a heavy rock in Hades’s realm. But Persephone was obliged to spend a third of each year with Plouton, and the remainder of the year among the gods.

    [Pseudo-Appollodorus, Bibliotheca. Trans. Keith Aldrich as The Library of Greek Mythology by Apollodorus. Lawrence: Coronado Press, 1975).]

    Sermon

    This is the third in a series of sermons on Greek goddesses. This morning I would like to speak about Demeter and Persephone: Demeter was the goddess of the seasons, of farming and husbandry, of marriage, and of the cycle of life and death; while Persephone, her daughter, was the goddess of the underworld, goddess of the dead, and also the goddess of springtime.

    But before I begin talking about the myths relating to Demeter and Persephone, I’d like to remind you — as if you need reminding — that myths are slippery things. The ancient mythographers, who collected and wrote down the ancient Greek myths (and who, by the way, were all men), offer many different versions of any given myth; and because myths come from oral tradition we might suspect that there were as many different versions of a myth as there were persons who retold that myth.

    After centuries of Christian dominance in Western culture, we are accustomed to think of religion as being based on written texts;– we are accustomed to think that religion is the same no matter where you are on the world;– and we are still influenced by the Christian idea of orthodoxy: that there is one and only one true interpretation of religion, an interpretation which is overseen by a central religious authority. But Greek myths were not based on written texts, they were based on oral poetry and more importantly on rituals that were acted out in various sacred places. Greek myths varied from place to place, so that the story of Demeter and Persephone varied from Athens to Sicily. And there was no central authority to interpret the myths or Greek religion; the myths were interpreted variously by the priests and priestesses in the various sacred places, and interpreted variously by each mythographer, each poet, each philosopher.

    As a result, the ancient Greeks could not pretend that there was any one true and final interpretation of their religion; nor did they think there was any one true and final answer to their religious questions. Different points of view led to different understandings of the gods and goddesses, their children, and their liaisons.

    In this sense, Greek myths are much like family stories. The stories we tell about our families are notoriously slippery. One child in a family has a wonderful childhood, filled with love and magic and wonder; another child in the same family has a miserable childhood; and when these siblings grow up, and tell their stories to one another, they are astonished at how different their stories are; it can seem as if they grew up in two different families. Similarly, a child may have a lovely childhood, completely unaware that one parent lives a gloomy, depressed life; or vice versa.

    Myths are slippery things, and families are slippery things. And this morning I’m going to talk about the mythical family of Demeter and Persephone.

    1. In the second reading this morning, we heard one of the more familiar mythical stories about how Persephone was abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld, and that familiar story goes something like this:

    Once upon a time, Hades, the god of the underworld, was looking for a queen to rule along with him. Somehow, he happened to see Persephone, who was also known as Kore. Something about her captivated him. He went to Zeus, the ruler of all the Olympian gods, and he asked Zeus’s permission to marry Persephone. Now probably Hades asked Zeus’s permission simply because Zeus was the ruler of the other Olympian gods. But others say that Zeus lay with Persephone first, and they had a child together. And still others say Zeus was Persephone’s father. Well, whatever the family relationships might have been, Hades asked to marry Persephone and have her become the queen of the underworld. Zeus would neither grant his permission nor deny his permission. Hades took this as tacit consent from the ruler of the gods.

    One spring day, Persephone was out wandering in a field, far from her mother Demeter. She was not alone, however; some say that she was with friends of hers who were nymphs, the daughters of Oceanus; but others say she was with the great goddesses Artemis and Athena. Whomever she was with on that spring day, the fields were filled with flowers: crocuses, irises, hyacinths, roses. One flower in particular captivated Persephone, and that was the narcissus. She wandered away from her friends to seek out this particularly beautiful flower.

    Persephone reached down to pluck one particularly fine blossom, when suddenly the ground opened up. Hades came up out of the ground, riding in a gold chariot drawn by magnificent immortal horses. He caught her up, and took her in the chariot, wheeled the horses around, and sped back into the ground.

    Oddly enough, almost no one seems to have heard Persephone cry out. Her friends did not hear her; Zeus, up on Mount Olympus, didn’t hear her (although perhaps he didn’t want to); none of the other Olympian gods or goddesses heard her, though they are all usually so good at hearing things like that. Later, when Demeter began her search for her daughter, the goddess Hecate, who had been sitting inside her cave, said she had heard Persephone’s cries; and Helios, the Sun, way up in the sky, far above Mount Olympos, said he heard her cries. But that was later.

    When Demeter missed Persephone, she became absolutely frantic. Where had her daughter gone? She went all over the land and all over the sea looking for Persephone. No one, neither god nor mortal, would tell her the truth of where Persephone had gone. At last, after ten days, Hecate came forward and told this story: she said she did not know who had stolen Persephone away, but that she had heard Persephone’s voice. Then Demeter stormed up to see Helios, the Sun. Helios said he thought Zeus had given Persephone to Hades, for he had seen Hades had come up out of the earth and steal her away. But Zeus denied any role in this, and said Persephone should stay with Hades.

    I said Demeter was frantic, and soon she was prostrated with grief, and would no longer allow food to grow on the wide earth; nor would she let the seasons progress in their usual way. Famine spread across the earth, and human beingss began to die. At last, in order to prevent all life on earth from being destroyed, Zeus told Demeter that she could have Persephone back — that is, as long as Persephone had not eaten anything at all during her time with Hades in the underworld.

    When Persephone came back to the upper world, her mother greeted her joyously, and springtime came again on the earth. But when Demeter asked her if she had eaten anything in the underworld, Persephone said she had eaten several pomegranate seeds. Some say she ate four seeds, others say she ate six, or seven; some say that Persephone was tricked into eating the seeds, others say she ate them unknowingly, and still others say she ate them by choice.

    For whatever reason Persephone ate the seeds, the end result was the same: she had to spend part of every year in the underworld. Each year, Persephone descends to the underworld to spend so many months there; and while she is away, her mother Demeter grieves, it is wintertime, and nothing can grow upon the earth. When Persephone returns to the upper world, Demeter becomes glad again, and springtime returns.

    That’s the story. But I want to know why Persephone ate those seeds. Was it because Hades tricked her into it? Did she eat the seeds without thinking? (such a scenario seems unlikely). Did she choose to eat them? We don’t get a definite answer; yet such an answer would tell us whether Persephone decided on her own to stay in the underworld, or whether she was forced into staying.

    Now there’s another story that says when Persephone had grown up, all the Olympian gods fell in love with her. Now Persephone could have followed the example of Artemis and Athena, and demanded that she never have to marry; but she did not. Well, all these gods were pursuing her, and her mother got worried:– what if old lame Hephaistos became her husband? So Demeter took Persephone away, and hid her in a deep dark cave behind stalactites and stalagmites that should have kept all the gods away from her. But Zeus found a way to sneak in, and he and Persephone had a child together, much to Demeter’s dismay. This story raises an interesting question:– Did Persephone want to get married to someone, but Demeter kept interfering?

    What is missing in all these myths is Persephone’s point of view. We hear an awful lot about what Demeter went through. But what was Persephone thinking and feeling?

    2. I said that both myths and family histories are slippery things. It is nearly impossible to catch hold of either one; they slip away from any final understanding. Yet if we try to adopt Persephone’s point of view, perhaps we could find new perspectives on this old story. The problem is that we don’t quite know what Persephone’s point of view might have been. So we have to speculate instead. For example:

       a) What if Persephone felt that Demeter was an over-protective, controlling mother? Persephone could have seen that other goddesses were able to get away from their parent’s protection. Athena, for example, was born to her mother inside Zeus’s head. When she came of age, Athena started forging armor for herself, and the pounding of her hammer on the anvil gave Zeus such headaches that the other gods had to cut open Zeus’s head. Out sprang Athena, fully grown, fully armored, and not to be messed with. There was no question about Athena’s father or mother controlling her life. As for Artemis, who was also a daughter of Zeus:– while she was still a child, she asked for, and got, privileges from Zeus including weaponry, attendants, and the right to never marry. Once again, there was no question about Artemis’s father or mother controlling her life.

    Persephone could have seen all this, and yet there she was, another daughter of Zeus, and Demeter her mother rarely let her out of sight. Perhaps she saw Athena and Artemis as powerful, actualized women, and she might have asked herself: Why not me?

       b) So what if we retold the story of Persephone like this: Persephone goes out into that field alone, and up out of the ground comes Hades. Hades grabs her, which surprises the heck out of her, and so she screams. But then she thinks: Hades is a very powerful god, and maybe this is a way to get away from her mother — not only that, but she will get to be a queen of the underworld. The gold chariot confirms what she had heard, that Hades is fantastically rich — after all, he has access to all the riches that lie underground, which includes gold, silver, gems, and the like. And if you can get past the idea that he is the god of the dead, maybe he’s an OK guy after all.

    She grabs at her chance, stops screaming, and goes off with Hades into the underworld. It’s not the best marriage in the world. And the underworld can get a little grim, filled as it is with dead people. She’s not sure she wants to stay in Hades. But when she hears that her mother is crying and threatening that there won’t be any springtime until she gets her Persephone back — how familiar that all sounds — well, when Persephone hears that her mother has gotten permission to come down to the underworld and fetch her back, Persephone quickly eats some pomegranate seeds, knowing this will mean she won’t be able to stay with Demeter.

    That’s one way we could retell the story of Persephone. In this version of the story, Persephone goes from one bad family situation into another bad family situation. And then in the end, she has to split her time between these two unhappy families.

       c. So here’s another way to retell this story. Let’s assume that Persephone is a much more powerful goddess than we have thus far given her credit for being. Remember, all these myths were written down by men who had a vested interest in maintaining that male gods were more powerful than female goddesses). In fact, there is an ancient myth that it was Persephone who first created human beings:– one day, she was crossing a river, saw some clay, and fashioned the clay into a human shape; she got Zeus to breathe life into the figure; and thus Zeus had power over human beings while they were alive, but Persephone had power over them after they died. And in another story, it is said that Persephone was not the daughter of Zeus at all, nor of Demeter. So Persephone seems to be very powerful, and in control of her life. What if we retold her story like this:

    Persephone is happy to be the goddess of springtime, and to work with Demeter. But Persephone feels that Demeter is trying to take too much power from her; trying to control her, the goddess who created humankind, who takes charge of human beings once they die! So Persephone arranges to meet up with Hades, while Athena and Artemis, two other powerful goddesses, provide cover for her. Zip! — she and Hades disappear below the ground. It’s a great strategic alliance: Persephone is the goddess who rules over dead human beings, while Hades is the god of the underworld where the dead go.

    At the same time, Persephone knows that she will have to return to the upper world once a year, to fulfill her other role as the goddess of the springtime. Demeter messes up the plan a little bit by freaking out and running all over the place. To calm her down, Persephone gets Hecate and Helios to say that Persephone is safe in the underworld; but Demeter isn’t satisfied, so Persephone carefully eats half a dozen pomegranate seeds, and goes to the upper world to calm Demeter down.

    Let’s remember that Demeter may or may not be Persephone’s mother. When Demeter sees Persephone, she is ecstatic — she once more has the goddess of springtime working with her. “Not so fast,” says Persephone; “I may be the goddess of springtime, but I’m also goddess of the dead — and by the way, the two are closely related, in case you hadn’t noticed, Demeter. And I’ve eaten half a dozen pomegranate seeds to symbolize my commitment to the entire cycle of life, from birth through death.”

    And that’s yet another retelling of the story of Persephone, one which may hang together better than the old story told by the ancient mythographers.

    3. I began by saying that mythical stories are slippery things; just as the stories we tell about our families are slippery things. We have seen this in the mythical family story of Demeter and Persephone. A great deal depends on who tells the story. This story was told from Demeter’s point of view, but if we try to imagine how Persephone would tell it, we might come up with a very different way of understanding the story.

    And as we grow older, we retell our own stories over and over — to our selves, and to the people we love. Sometimes, someone else tells our own story for us, and we accept their telling of the story — as when sometimes our parents tell us what kind of person they expect us to be, and we blindly accept what they say, and live out their expectations. Persephone could just accept the stories that others tell about her: Hades abducted her, someone made her eat pomegranate seeds, Demeter came and returned her to the upper world, then Zeus ruled she had to split her time between the two worlds. Or Persephone could retell her story so that she claims her own power as both the goddess of springtime, and the goddess of the dead.

    There’s another religious way of summing all this up: We are alive, and so we fear death, and try to avoid it. But Persephone knows that death and life are intertwined; she knows both the giving of life in springtime, and she knows the ultimate ending of death. Persephone recognizes the power life in Demeter, and the power of death in Hades, and she manages to give them both their due. We ask ourselves: Can we reach that true integration of valuing life while honoring death? And we ask ourselves another question that Persephone raises: Can we claim our individual power in the face of death, which renders us ultimately powerless?

    One last very short myth about Persephone before I end: It is said that when Persephone goes into the ground accompanying Hades, that is really an even older myth about planting seeds in the cold ground in springtime; we plant seeds is what appears to be dead earth, only to have it grow, and thrive, and come to harvest, and so feed us and make us grow.