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 from an essay by James Luther Adams titled “The Indispensable Discipline of Social Responsibility: Voluntary Associations.”
“…the theorists of democracy have asserted that only through the exercise of freedom of association can consent of the governed become effective; only through the exercise of freedom of association can the citizen in a democracy participate in the process that gives shape to public opinion and to public policy….”
[The Essential James Luther Adams ed. George Kimmich Beach (Boston: Skinner House, 1998), p. 183]
The second reading is from the Christian scriptures, Paul’s first letter to the Christian community at Thessalonica, as translated by Hugh Schonfield. Written about the year 51, this letter may be the earliest Christian document still in existence. The passage I’ll read, 1 Thes 5.11-21, offers Paul’s advice to the small house church in Thessalonica:
“Encourage one another and fortify each other, as indeed you are doing.
“But I do beg you, brothers, to acknowledge those who work so hard among you and act as your leaders in the Master, and advise you. Hold them in extra-special affection for their work. Be at peace among yourselves.
“I appeal to you, brothers, give fair warning to the disorderly, encourage the fainthearted, stand by the weak, be patient with all. See to it that none renders to any injury for injury, but always do the right thing by each other and everyone else. Always be cheerful, pray constantly, give thanks for everything; for this is God’s will… for you. Do not still the Spirit, or scorn prophecies. Test everything; retain the good. Refrain from anything that looks at all wrong….”
Sermon
This is the second in a series of sermons on Paul of Tarsus. As I said in last week’s sermon, in many ways Paul was, for a long time, my least favorite character in the Bible. I disliked Paul so much that I ignored him as much as possible. But then, when I was the Director of Religious Education at the Unitarian Universalist church in Lexington, a fellow by the name of Dan Fenn offered me another take on Paul of Tarsus. Dan pointed out that almost single-handedly, Paul managed to organize the followers of Jesus into a far-flung but cohesive religious movement. Thus, what Dan admired about Paul was Paul’s organizational genius.
And Dan Fenn knows something about organizations and the people who lead organizations. He is a Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and at their School of Business, and a senior associate at the John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs at UMass/Boston. Before he went to the Kennedy School of Government, Dan was on the executive staff of President John F. Kennedy from 1961 to 1963, the vice-chairman of the U.S. Tariff Commission from 1963 to 1969. Dan is something of an expert on organizations and organizational strategy, and so when he calls Paul of Tarsus an organizational genius, his opinion carries a certain amount of authority.
When I started thinking about Paul as an organizational genius, I found myself looking at him from an entirely new perspective. I started thinking about the organizational challenges Paul faced. At the most basic level, Paul was trying to build an organization that stretched across the entire eastern half of the known world of his time, from northern Africa through the Middles East, into Greece, and finally to Rome itself. This far-flung organization consisted of small communities of twenty to forty people, with no clear leadership structure, and plenty of internal conflict. Furthermore, the people in these early house churches were often poor and often uneducated, they were frequently persecuted and sometimes put to death, and unlike many churches today they had no money, no buildings, and no paid staff.
In short, if you want to learn about true grassroots organizing, you would do well to study Paul of Tarsus. And if you want to learn how to build an organization at the most fundamental level, the level of connecting people through personal relationships, again you would do well to study Paul of Tarsus. Even though today we live in a vastly different social setting than Paul, basic human relationships have not changed; and because the fundamental building blocks of Paul’s organization were basic human relationships, we can still learn from him today.
Now we Unitarian Universalists have been accused of being badly organized. You probably know the old joke:– the newcomer is visiting a Unitarian Universalist church for the first time, and when a church member welcomes her to the church, she says, Look I’m just visiting here, I really don’t want to have anything to do with organized religion. To which the church member replies, Oh good, you’ll fit right in here, we’re a very disorganized religion.
This old joke actually points us towards two related problems that both stem from the fact that we are part of a society that is drifting away from democratic principles. On the one hand, some people who compare our organizational structures to the authoritarian organizational structures of corporate America accuse us of being disorganized. On the other hand, other people, who are so opposed to corporate authoritarianism that they see any organizational structure at all as bad, accuse us of being too organized.
But both these accusations misunderstand how we are organized, and why we have organized ourselves the way we have. Let’s start with the “how” — how is it that we organize ourselves?
The most important thing to understand about our Unitarian Universalist organization is covenant. A covenant is a set of voluntary agreements that we make to one another. Now you may have other ideas of what covenant means, but in old New England churches like ours, the word “covenant” has a very specific and distinctive meaning. Our meaning of “covenant” is even listed in that most British of dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary — which states, “Church Covenant: the formal agreement made and subscribed by the members of a Congregational church in order to constitute themselves a distinct religious society. (An important feature of Congregational polity in New England.)” Remember that, while we are a Unitarian Universalist church, we are direct descendants of the congregational tradition, and indeed the legal name of this church up through the 1940’s was “First Congregational Society in New Bedford.” So instead of a creed or a dogma or some such set of beliefs, we are organized around a covenant, a formal agreement that our members make with one another.
Three hundred years ago, when this church was founded, our covenant was a long, formal, written document. Today we really don’t have this kind of formal written document. And in that way, we are more like the earliest Christian communities in Paul’s day. So back in the year 51, Paul wrote a letter to the Christian community at Corinth, telling them: “Encourage one another and fortify each other, as indeed you are doing…. acknowledge those who work so hard among you and act as your leaders…. Be at peace among yourselves…. give fair warning to the disorderly, encourage the fainthearted, stand by the weak, be patient with all. See to it that none renders to any injury for injury, but always do the right thing by each other and everyone else. Always be cheerful, pray constantly [today we might say, be sure to engage in regular spiritual practice]…. Do not still the Spirit, or scorn prophecies. Test everything; retain the good. Refrain from anything that looks at all wrong….” (Wouldn’t these words would make a reasonable covenant for a Unitarian Universalist church today!)
Christianity has changed a great deal in the two thousand years since Paul wrote this letter. Today, the Catholic church and most Protestant churches have creeds and hierarchies; but in Paul’s day, those early Christian communities has no creeds, a very loose organizational structure, and no church hierarchy. Today, most Christian churches around the world exclude women from leadership positions; in Paul’s day, there were lots of women in leadership positions. Today, many Christian churches depend on rules and regulations; but in Paul’s day, they depended on good relationships. So it is that in his letter, Paul tells that Christian community at Corinth how to build good relationships with one another.
And so it is today with us. We no longer have a formal covenant. But in the two and a half years that I have been here, I have pieced together an informal covenant, based on our church bylaws and (more importantly) based on the values that we hold dear. Each Sunday morning, I read that informal covenant at the very beginning of the worship service. In its current version, it goes something like this: “Here at First Unitarian, we value our differences of age, gender, race, national origin, class, sexual orientation, physical ability, and theology. We are bound together, not by a creed, but by our covenant: In the spirit of love, we come together to seek truth and goodness, to find spiritual transformation in our lives, to care for one another, and to promote practical goodness in the world. Wherever your spiritual journey began, wherever you are headed, you are welcome in this meeting house.”
And periodically, one of you will come up to me and tell that I don’t have it quite right, and suggest a change — I make the change, and keep reading it every week until someone suggests another change. Although it’s been almost a year since Tryne Costa suggested to me the most recent change, which was to say that everyone is welcome in this meeting house.
Our covenant, whether formal or informal, is our greatest strength, organizationally speaking. We are organized on the basis of our relationships with one another, and our relationships with the wider world, and our relationships with that which is eternal, which some of us call God and come of us call by other names. Corporate managers will look at us and tell us that we are disorganized; extreme anti-authoritarians will look at us and tell us that we are too restrictive; but I think we have exactly the right amount of organization.
But why should this matter? What religious difference does it make? To tell you what religious difference this makes, I have to tell you a little bit about James Luther Adams, the greatest Unitarian theologian of the 20th century.
James Luther Adams left an evangelical Christian upbringing to become a Unitarian. He served as a Unitarian minister in a number of congregations in the 1920’s, and then he decided to become a theologian. As part of his theological studies, he traveled to Germany in 1927, because Germany was where the greatest theologians of the day lived. Unfortunately, by 1927, Germany also had Nazis. James Luther Adams told this anecdote about his 1927 trip:
“In 1927 in the city of Nuremburg, six years before the National Socialists [or Nazis] came to power, I was watching a Sunday parade on the occasion of the annual mass rally of the Nazis. Thousands of youth… had walked from various parts of Germany to attend the mass meeting of the party. As I watched the parade, which lasted for four hours and which was punctuated by trumpet and drum corps made up of hundreds of Nazis, I asked some people on the sidelines to explain to me the meaning of the swastika, which decorated many of the banners. Before very long I found myself in a heated argument. Suddenly someone seized me from behind and pulled me by the elbows out of the group with which I was arguing… and propelled [me] down a side street and up into a dead-end alley. As this happened, I assure you my palpitation rose quite perceptibly…. At the end of the alley, my uninvited host swung me around quickly, and he shouted at me in German, ‘You fool. Don’t you know? In Germany today when you are watching a parade, you either keep your mouth shut, or you get your head bashed in.’ …then he smiled… ‘I am an anti-Nazi.’…”
After this dramatic incident, Adams asked himself what he, an ordinary American citizen, had done “to prevent the rise of authoritarian government” in his own country. He asked himself, just as we might ask ourselves, “What disciplines of democracy (except voting) have you habitually undertaken with other people which could serve in any way to directly affect public policy?”
Adams realized that one of the things that the Nazis did was that they effectively abolished freedom of association. You could join the Nazi party; you could join one of the German churches that was a tool of the Nazi party; but you could not freely associate with any group you chose. For example, there were underground Christian churches that explicitly disavowed Nazism; these churches were banned by the Nazis, precisely because the Nazis aimed at smothering all dissent.
Based on his experiences in Nazi Germany, James Luther Adams concluded that “only through the exercise of freedom of association can consent of the governed become effective; only through the exercise of freedom of association can the citizen in a democracy participate in the process that gives shape to public opinion and to public policy.”
Let me put it more dramatically: By coming to this church, by exercising your right to freely and voluntarily assemble, you are engaging in democratic process. At the most concrete level, you can learn leadership skills that you can immediately utilize in the public policy arena. And by joining our individual voices together, we can make political leaders listen to our ideas on issues like equal marriage and global warming and anti-racism. And the simple existence of our church as a healthy institution helps to keep authoritarianism at bay.
James Luther Adams points out that the early Christian communities of Paul’s day were communities that organized around covenants. By dispersing power and responsibility (remember, we’re talking about the early church, not today’s church) — by dispersing power and responsibility, those early churches broke through the old social structures of the Roman Empire and tried to create new, more egalitarian structures.
Of course, after a couple hundred years the Christian church got sucked in by the Roman Empire, and all that early egalitarianism got smushed under the weight of authoritarianism. But today, free churches like ours still hold the potential for breaking through the old social structures — just as some of our Unitarian Universalist congregations have broken through the old racist social structures — just as some of our Unitarian Universalist congregations are trying to break through the old social structures that have so badly damaged our environment.
Let me put this another way. Increasingly, American society is split up by socio-economic class, it is split up by race and ethnicity, it is split up by language, it is even split up by age. Here in New Bedford, we have been split up into lots of small groups: we have the Spanish speakers and the Portuguese speakers and the English speakers, and other language groups besides; we have black and white and various shades of brown; we people who identify strongly with various ethnic groups; we have fairly rigid class stratification; we put our elders into assisted living facilities and we keep our children out of sight in the schools. We have fewer relationships with fewer people. All this weakens democracy, and makes us vulnerable to authoritarianism.
Here in our church, however, we fight off authoritarianism. We work to transcend boundaries of language, race, ethnicity, and age. We learn how to work together to promote social change and practical goodness in the wider world. All this grows out of our voluntary agreement with one another, it all grows out of the covenant we make.
In so doing, we have but inherited the legacy of that organizational genius, Paul of Tarsus. He taught those early Christians to build their communities through developing good human relationships. He told them, “Be at peace among yourselves.” He said, “Encourage the fainthearted, stand by the weak, be patient with all.” He said, “See to it that none renders to any injury for injury, but always do the right thing by each other and everyone else.”
We may word our covenant somewhat differently today, but the basic principle is the same: By means of a covenant, a voluntary agreement among ourselves, we build good relationships between ourselves and with that which is greater than ourselves; and with our covenant, we create a community out of which can emerge a truly open society, a society founded on true peace and true justice, a kind of heaven here on earth.