This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2007 Daniel Harper.
Readings
The first reading was a short poem by Alan Powers titled “Carpenter’s Son.” Copyright laws do not permit the reproduction of an entire poem, so it is not reproduced here.
The second reading is from the autobiography of Edward Emerson Simmons, the man who painted the picture that is reproduced on your order of service. He told this story about this painting:
“In the year 1888 I sent two pictures to the Royal Academy which were duly accepted and hung. Imagine my joy when a large and formidable communication found it way to my studio in Paris, asking the price of one of my canvases and signed by the Chantry Bequest. This was a well-known fund created to buy pictures for the government to place in its permanent galleries, and everyone knew that, once the price had been asked, it amounted to the same thing as a sale….
“The picture, which I called ‘The Carpenter’s Son,’ was a simple pose of one of my children in my studio. A blond boy with a light shining over his head sat dreaming, instead of sweeping out the shop, while his mother, in the back, told his father what a worthless son he had begotten. The shavings had accidentally fallen in the form of a cross [which you can see at the bottom right], and the light seemed to be a halo. The [Glasgow] Scotsman came out with a scathing denunciation of the work (not at the idea, mind you) but because, as they said, I had been sacrilegious enough to paint Christ in the costume of a French peasant boy! Of course, the Chantry bequest did not buy — for the first time — after asking the price.”
Sermon
The stories we tell about ourselves, about our beliefs, and about the world around us — these stories are vital to who we are. I believe that one of the most important tasks of religion is to shape the stories we tell about ourselves and about our lives, to the end that our stories affirm life and love; and to the end that the arc of our stories’ narratives bend towards justice.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. The opening hymn this morning was a wassail song, and without a story, it would be nothing more than a silly song sung at Yuletide. But instead, we tell two stories about this wassail song.
The first story we tell goes like this: Years ago in England, during the Yuletide season less wealthy people would walk around to the wealthy households in their village and sing wassail songs. The wealthy householders were required by anceint custom to give food, drink, and money to the wassailers. When we tell this story, we are saying that Yuletide is a time of year to remember ordinary people who may not have much money.
The second story goes like this: Some folklorists believe that these apple wassail songs grew out of ancient pre-Christian rituals meant to re-awaken the fertility of apple trees at the time of the winter solstice. We know that hard apple cider was an important drink in the days before everyone had guaranteed access to clean, drinkable water because the modest alcohol content helped reduce the number of pathogens present; thus cider apples were a vital crop to ensure health. This second story tells us that the Christmas season holds many remnants of the old earth-centered pagan religions, religions which contained superstitions we may no longer follow, but which contained some good hard common sense.
So you see, the stories we tell about ourselves and about our traditions help us to shape those traditions in meaningful ways. This morning, I’d like to tell some stories about a painting that was central to the life of our church, a painting that is relevant to the Christmas season. And I believe these stories reveal a great deal about who we are and what we stand for.
Let me begin at the beginning. In 1888, the American painter Edward Emerson Simmons painted a painting which he called “The Carpenter’s Son.” You’ll find a reproduction of the painting on the cover of your order of service. This large painting by Simmons — some four feet wide and five and a half feet tall — showed a boy in a carpenter’s shop, sitting on a saw horse, surrounded by wood shavings and saw dust; while in the background two adults, presumably the boy’s parents, seem to be talking about him. The boy, rather than working, is simply sitting and staring meditatively off into space.
Simmons showed “The Carpenter’s Son” at the 1888 Paris Salon, then later at the Royal Academy in England, and also in Glasgow, Scotland. In 1892 Simmons sold the painting to Amelia Jones of New Bedford. When Amelia Jones purchased it, Simmons wrote her a letter which said in part:
“Dear Miss Jones,
“There is little to tell you of the picture that you have greatly pleased me by wishing to own. The picture was painted in the season of 1888 and being unsatisfactory to me was scraped out, to a great extent and repainted, with my older boy as a model for the boy in the foreground.
“It was painted at St. Ives — of cat fame — in the extreme east of Cornwall, England. The result of the repainting was an unusual success at the Royal Academy — joined to an offer of purchase from the trustees of the Chantry fund — withdrawn — I suspect from the opposition of the English Church people.
“When sent to Scotland — Glasgow — it caused me to be the amused object of much fury and denunciation from the “Scotsman” — if I remember the paper….
“I know very little of how the details of Christ’s surroundings should be told. I imagined no one knows enough to be worth listening to. Therefore we younger men fall back upon our own time — believing that man has always been fundamentally the same….
“Faithfully, Edward E. Simmons.”
This was, in fact, a heretical painting. As it happens, Simmons was raised a Unitarian. His father, George Simmons, was a Unitarian minister who was also a fervent abolitionist. Not only was Edward raised a Unitarian, but he grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, in the day when several great Unitarian writers and thinkers lived there — Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Alcott family, the poet Ellery Channing, and others — and as a boy, Simmons met and conversed with many of these radical Unitarians. Edward Emerson Simmons had radical Unitarianism in his very bones, and for the rest of his life he called himself a Concord Unitarian.
When a Concord Unitarian goes to paint a picture of Jesus of Nazareth, he does not paint an orthodox picture of Jesus. Instead of painting some saintly, unearthly, barely human figure, Simmons choose one of his own boys as a model — not because that was what Jesus would have looked like, but because, good Concord Transcendentalist that he was, he believed that Jesus was fully human, and that human beings have been pretty much the same down through the ages; you can be sure that if Simmons had been African American, the boy in the picture would have been African American; had Simmons been Native American, the boy would have been native American; you get the idea.
Well, I’m sure you get the idea, but the orthodox Christians of the day did not get the idea. They did not like the painting one bit, because Jesus looked too human — he looked just like an ordinary boy who could have been anyone’s son — which they thought sacrilegious. Indeed, there are people today who do not like this painting.
And who purchased this heretical painting from Edward Simmons? Amelia Jones, a member of First Unitarian in New Bedford, that’s who. She bought it, sent it off to be shown at the great 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and then it came to hang in her house in New Bedford, the house that is now the Rotch-Jones-Duff House and Garden Museum just down County Street from here.When Amelia Jones died, she gave the painting to First Unitarian Church. What better place for such a painting to hang?
This heretical painting hung for many years in our Parish House. If you talk to some of the people who grew up in this church, the painting was very much present in their consciousnesses. Here was a painting of a child who looked like an ordinary kid, yet this ordinary-looking kid grew up to be one of the great religious leaders of all time. Such a painting must have been an inspiration to at least some of the children in this church!
Older people might have seen something a little different in this painting: Here’s this boy just sitting there and staring off into space when he is clearly supposed to be sweeping out his father’s carpentry shop — if you look closely at the front of your order of service, you can see the broom on the floor that Jesus has abandoned. And there in the background are his parents, clearly talking about their son. His mother is pointing to Jesus as if to say, “Look, he’s dropped his broom again, he’s just sitting there staring off into space.” And we can imagine his father saying, “He’d make a good carpenter some day if he’d just pay attention to what he’s supposed to be doing!”
Or more generally we could say: What Edward Emerson Simmons has done in his painting of Jesus is to imagine what Jesus must have been like as a fully human boy. Being a Concord Unitarian, Simmons did not restrict himself to what might be found in the Bible. Unitarians like Edward Simmons feel comfortable telling new stories about the historical figure who was Jesus, whether or not those new stories might offend the orthodox.
In true Unitarian Universalist fashion, there are many more stories for us to tell about this painting. Alan Powers, a poet and member of this church, tells another story in his poem: he tells us of a Jesus who was the son of an ordinary working class family, a Jesus who began his life dealing with very concrete things and who went on to teach in very concrete metaphors and parables; a man who in the end was put to death for his radical religious and social views. There is more than one story to tell about this painting, just as there is more than one story to tell about Jesus.
Now let me finish the story of the painting itself. In 1993, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., planned a centennial exhibit of works of art that had been exhibited in the great 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, and they asked to borrow “The Carpenter’s Son.” So the painting was cleaned, and insured, and shipped off to Washington, where it hung from March through September, 1993, in the show “American Art from the 1893 World’s Fair.” After that show, the painting came back and hung once more in its accustomed place in our Parish House.
And then in 1996, disaster struck. A vandal broke into our church, tipped over one of the grandfather clocks in the Parish House, broke the nose off one of the statues here in the sanctuary, and slashed a huge piece out of the middle of “The Carpenter’s Son.” The clock and the statue could be repaired, but with the piece gone from the painting, it was worthless. It was a great tragedy in the life of the congregation, and if you ask someone who was here that Sunday morning when they discovered the damage, they can tell you what a horrible shock it was.
When I first arrived here at First Unitarian two and a half years ago, I heard the story of this painting. Whenever someone told me the story of the vandalism, they would add the fact that, horrendous as the destruction of the painting was, at least the insurance settlement made it possible for the church to install an elevator in improve handicapped accessibility. I liked this twist that the people of this church add to the story of the vandalism: this church took an act of vandalism, and turned it into an act of justice for persons with disabilities. How very like the Unitarian Universalist stories about Jesus! for we emphasize Jesus’s acts of social justice, we emphasize his deep humanity and his empathy with all persons.
Then came our own Unitarian Universalist mini-miracle. Just over a year ago, the Women’s Alliance of this church donated a new refrigerator for the kitchen. As the old refrigerator was being removed, the man who was moving it saw something had been thrown behind it. He called to Claudette Blake, our church administrator, and she immediately realized that what she was seeing was the missing piece of the painting: there was the face of the boy Jesus. And, something of a miracle, the vandal had not slashed through the boy’s face — I like to believe that the vandal’s essential humanity asserted itself and prevented him or her from being that destructive.
It turned out that the insurance company now owned the painting, and until we could buy it back we had to keep it safely locked up; we sent it up to an art restoration expert to hold for us. We also realized that we could not keep the painting any longer. We knew this building is not secure enough to house important works of art, nor do we have financial resources to restore the painting. Thanks to behind-the-scenes work on the part of many church members, the Rotch-Jones-Duff House and Garden Museum agreed to purchase the painting from us, for the $20,000 that we had to pay the insurance company for it. What better place for the painting? The Rotch-Jones-Duff House used to be Amelia Jones’s house, and it was where the painting hung before it came here. Besides, the Rotch-Jones-Duff House could restore the painting and make it accessible to a wider public.
I particularly like to think that the painting will have a wider audience, once it is restored. It will take perhaps another year before the painting is finally restored that is, assuming that the Rotch-Jones-Duff House is able to complete their fundraising, for as of now they have only $18,000 of the $30,000 needed to pay for the restoration. Many good people are working on raising funds, including our own Nancy Crosby and Bob Piper, and needless to say many members and friends of First Unitarian have given or are planning to give money to help pay for the restoration. Perhaps by next Christmas, a wider public will once again be able to see Edwards Simmons’s Unitarian vision of a Jesus who was a great religious genius and whose birthday is worth celebrating, but a Jesus who is fully human.
I like the idea that in this way we are spreading one of our Unitarian stories about Christmas out to a world that needs to hear it. The world needs to hear our stories of a Jesus who cared more about creating a heaven here on earth, than getting people into some heaven in the sky. The world needs to hear our stories about a Christmas holiday that is not about spending more money, but is rather about remembering a religious prophet and sage who with his very humanity taught us about the essential humanity of all persons. The world needs to hear these stories, because it matters what stories we tell.