This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2007 Daniel Harper.
Readings
The first reading comes from the Hebrew prophets, the book of Hosea. I have to do a little explaining here. In this reading, it is the prophet Hosea who is speaking; he lived about 750 years before Jesus was born. He is criticizing the religious and political leaders of his land, the Northern Kingdom of Israel. For poetic purposes, he refers to the religious and political leaders by the name “Ephraim” — so every time you hear the name “Ephraim,” substitute “our current leadership.” I also have to explain who “Baal” is — Baal was another god who was in direct competition with Yahweh, the god of Israel. (There was also a competing goddess named Asherah, but she isn’t mentioned in this passage.)
By a prophet the Lord brought Israel up from Egypt,
and by a prophet he was guarded.
Ephraim has given bitter offence,
so his Lord will bring his crimes down on him
and pay him back for his insults.
When Ephraim spoke, there was trembling;
he was exalted in Israel;
but he incurred guilt through Baal and died.
And now they keep on sinning
and make a cast image for themselves,
idols of silver made according to their understanding,
all of them the work of artisans.
‘Sacrifice to these,’ they say.
People are kissing calves!
Yet I have been the Lord your God
ever since the land of Egypt;
you know no God but me..
[New Revised Standard Version, Hosea 12.13-14; 13.1-3, 4]
The second reading is from the book “Returning” by Dan Wakefield. In this passage, he is talking about his experiences as a member of King’s Chapel, the oldest Unitarian congregation in North America. I must tell you that, while I agree with some things in this passage, there are some things I strongly disagree with:
“I learned the church was really family because we worked hard and close enough with one another to get mad and argue as well as sing hymns together. I found myself one evening, after an inspiring session of a class called “Introduction to the New Testament,” standing in the downstairs hall of the parish house shouting at [my close friend] Judy in an argument over the course of the religious education program while our family members walked past us. I knew we were family because we went to our minister as the mediating father, and we got our mutual frustration out. We realized what had brought us together in the first place was the work we had done, and we got past our differences. I knew we were family because I heard gossip about all this and other human conflicts of other family members, and we kept returning to ties that went deeper even than our own egos, and I knew that only happened in families that shared some vision beyond their individual beings.
“I knew we were a family because we often behaved towards our minister as if he were the father of all 395 of us, as well (through his office) the local representative of God, “our Father who are in heaven.” The Reverend Carl Scovel makes no claim to power or glory and yet we see him walk up into that high pulpit every Sunday morning, and that is a lot closer to Whoever is up there above than we are. Sometimes we seemed to me like those early Israelites, a small band of people looking for security and freedom, with Carl as our Moses on Tremont Street, going up to get the Word and bringing it back down to us as we grumbled and strayed and returned.”
So end this morning’s readings — and in the sermon I’ll tell you what I so strongly disagree with in this last reading.
Sermon
This is the third in a series of sermons that tell about that great Jewish leader, Moses.
One of the quaint aspects of the old story of Moses is that his god, Yahweh, expects Moses to worship no other god — not only that, but that Yahweh expects that they will not put anything else on the same level of importance as Yahweh. How quaint! — that Yahweh expects Moses and the people of Israel to remain true to their promises to Yahweh, and to each other… Or, as we might say today using today’s buzzwords, How quaint! — that Yahweh expects Moses and the people of Israel to stay focused on their mission, and their vision for the future; and Yahweh expects Moses and the people of Israel to honor their covenant, their sacred promises to their god and to each other.
We can also phrase it this way: Yahweh expects the people of Israel to get rid of false idols. Many Unitarians and many Universalists, through much of the twentieth century, spent a great deal of energy getting rid of false idols. Idols are those things to which people grant more importance than they deserve. There’s a great story about the Unitarian church in Lexington center, Massachusetts. In the 1950’s, they used to have a Christmas eve candlelight service during which an internally-lit cross would suddenly appear in the darkness. While you can imagine that this might have produced an interesting visual effect, the congregation realized that it was a little bit over-the-top, that they didn’t agree with its theology, in short it was an idol — it got far more importance than it deserved. The cross wound up stuck in a trash can on the sidewalk in front of the church — right on the battle green in Lexington center. You can imagine what the rest of the town said: “Those Unitarians are at it again — throwing out their cross.” And to get rid of false idols, you have to be willing to face a certain measure of disapproval from others who may not understand why you’re doing what you do.
We Unitarian Universalists have a long history of getting rid of false idols. It isn’t just extraneous visual symbols, we try to get rid of ideas that serve as false idols. We have long known that much of the Christian religion we inherited from the past contained things that were not essential. To use the words of Theodore Parker, religion contains that which is permanent, and that which is transient. The teachings of Jesus, as they came from his mouth, still warm with his breath, contain permanent truths; as did the teachings of Buddha, and Moses, and Mohammed, and Lao Tze, and many others. But those teachings were passed on from generation to generation, and as the years passed, accretions of transient religion grew onto the permanent teachings: transient creeds and dogmas, even some fantasies. The history of human religion has been the history of people getting distracted by unimportant things.
Today, we are again in danger of worshipping false idols; we are once again getting distracted by unimportant things. Let me name three of those things. We have made a false idol of individualism. We have made false idol of social justice work. And we have made a false idol of intimacy. These three false idols are dangerous. Worshipping them distracts us from far more important things, like our covenant, our sacred promises to each other. The old words of that ancient Jewish prophet, Hosea, rings in our ears, especially if we revise them slightly:
We make a cast image for ourselves,
idols made according to our understanding.
‘Sacrifice to these,’ we say.
People are kissing calves!
Hosea tells us how to break away from idolatry. He uses poetic language, and it is tempting to take it literally, that is to give more importance to its transient menaing than to its permanent truths, but we won’t take it literally. Hosea has the god Yahweh say this:
Yet I have been the Lord your God
ever since the land of Egypt;
you know no God but me.
Hosea is reminding his people, the people of Israel, that they have a covenant, that is, that they have promises which they have sworn to keep. When Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, they made a covenant together, they made promises that they swore they would keep. Their covenant had a vertical dimension: they promised to remain true to their god, Yahweh, and to ignore other gods and goddesses. Their covenant had a horizontal dimension: they promised to stick together, and to be true to one another in spite of any obstacles they faced.
And they wound up facing huge obstacles. They were enslaved together in Egypt; and their covenant together allowed them to stick together so that they could stand up to Pharaoh and escape from slavery. They were lost in the wilderness together; and their covenant allowed them to find food together, to stay disciplined, to stay focused on their goal of reaching the Promised Land. So the old Bible stories say happened in the time of Moses.
Hundreds of years later, in the time of Hosea, the people of Israel faced other obstacles. In the time of Hosea, the leaders of Israel were self-centered, they used their positions of power so they could have comfortable lives and do whatever they wanted; but they did not provide leadership to Israel. Hosea tells us that Ephraim (that is, the leadership of Israel) “was exalted in Israel,” but that now Israel’s leadership “has given bitter offense” and “incurred guilt through Baal.” To incur guilt through Baal is a poetic, prophetic formulation. It may literally mean that the leaders of Israel literally worshipped the god Baal even though their position demanded that they should worship only Yahweh; but more poetically, Hosea is accusing the leaders of Israel of betraying their promise to the people of Israel.
Hosea uses poetic, prophetic words to accuse the people of Israel of not living up to their covenant; that is, he accuses them of neglecting their promises to one another. When he says they worship Baal, he is telling us that they have neglected their promises.
As for us Unitarian Universalists today, no one can accuse us of literally worshipping the god Baal. But we have our own false idols that have cause us to neglect our covenant, our sacred promises to one another. Let us now go back and look at each of the three false idols I spoke of earlier.
We Unitarian Universalists worship the false idol of individualism. We say: If you don’t do it my way, I won’t participate. We say: I can believe whatever I want, so I don’t have to listen to you or anyone else. We take our individualism to such extremes that our community suffers as a result. And when I say “we,” I’m including myself! Ralph Waldo Emerson taught us trust the still, small voice of conscience within; he taught us how to trust ourselves so that we don’t get pulled into false actions because we just followed the crowd. But by teaching us self-trust, Emerson didn’t mean for us to mistrust the rest of the world. By worshipping the false idol of individualism, we neglect our sacred promise to live in harmony with each other and with the natural world.
We Unitarian Universalists worship the false idol of social justice. We say: We have to make social justice happen before we do anything else. We even say: The core work of the church is social justice work. These statements contain kernels of truth: the problems of the world are so pressing, work for social justice cannot be delayed; and the core of our moral and ethical teachings tells us that we must heal a broken world. Yet these statements are also false. If we really believed that the core work of First Unitarian were social justice work, if we really believed that we have to do social justice work before anything else, we’d sell this building tomorrow, fire the musicians and the minister, end Sunday morning worship, and channel all our money, and all our effort, towards solving the problems of the world. But what we do here is to build up a community, a community bound by high ideals and sacred promises; and from the strength we gain here, we send each other out into the world, carrying our high ideals, carrying our vision of an earth made fair and all her people free. If we worship the false idol of social action, we neglect our sacred promise to worship together — to build a community.
We Unitarian Universalists worship the false idol of intimacy, and this is the most pernicious and evil idol of them all. We say: we must always like each other, and be nice to one another. We say: conflict is bad. We say: we must all know one another intimately. Yet to say these things is to ignore that fact that a covenant lies at the center of who we are. I have heard it said that “church should be like a big happy family.” It should be obvious how wrong that is, because if this church were like a family then someone has got to be the parents and someone has got to be the children; and I don’t know about you, but I refuse to be either childlike or parental. No: we enter into covenant together as responsible and mature adults; we make promises to one another as equals.
This brings us to the second reading this morning, the reading from the book Returning, by Dan Wakefield. I have lots of respect for Dan Wakefield, both as a writer and as a human being, and I think he has some deep and useful insights into what a church can be, what a church should be. Unfortunately, he gets his insights all mixed up with the common stereotyping of churches as families, and he gets mixed up in some bad theology. So let’s sort through what he says, and find out what seems to be good and useful. First of all, we can dispense with his faulty theology. No minister, not even Carl Scovel, is any closer to God (assuming God exists) than any other human being. God is not “up there” somewhere; if God exists, God is the light within us, or the love we express through our actions; if God exists, God is closer than the vein on your neck. The only reason Carl Scovel or any Unitarian Universalist minister climbs up into a high pulpit is a simple pragmatic reason: so people in the congregation can see and hear better. The only reason Carl Scovel, or any other Unitarian Universalist minister, seems relatively important is because ministers can serve as embodiments of a church’s covenant.
Second, we can dispense with Dan Wakefield’s tendency to let his own psychological issues color his understanding of church. A little later on in the book, Dan Wakefield writes: “I sometimes ‘projected’ onto the minister angers and suppositions that I later realized had nothing to do with the man Carl Scovel because when I examined the matter, he had said or done nothing whatsoever to provoke such a response.” In other words, if Dan Wakefield saw Carl Scovel as a father figure — for that matter, if Dan Wakefield saw God as a father figure — that has more to do with Dan Wakefield than it has to do with Carl Scovel, or with God.
And yet although we must reject the supposition that churches should be like families, we cannot deny that many times we who are in churches often act as though we are a part of a big “church family.” Sometimes we wind up treating the minister as a father-figure or a mother-figure — heaven help me, I’ve been guilty of that myself. Sometimes we wind up treating another church member as a parent-figure, or we wind up treating another church member as a sibling-figure, or we wind up treating another church member as a child-substitute. This does happen; this is reality; and in this sense, Dan Wakefield is right: churches can sometimes feel like families.
The problem with treating your church like a family is that you may have a very different understanding of a family than do other members of the church. Let me give you an example from my own experience (of course I have disguised identities so you cant’ tell who I’m talking about): Two church members, both men, both saw the church as their family; one of these men came from an abusive family where his mother abused him emotionally; the other man came from a fairly healthy family where he had a good relationship with his mother. Both of them served on the church board; both tended to view the minister (who was a woman) as if she were a mother-figure. As you can imagine, one man wanted to drastically limit what the minister could do, and the other man had a much more trust in the minister. This was not a healthy situation for either of the men, nor for the minister.
So we need to be extremely careful when we say “church is like family.” Yes, our churches can function like families, and sometimes you can understand a church better by viewing it as if it were a family. But it is dangerous to hold that up as a goal, as an ideal towards which we might strive, because we have such different feelings about families. To some people, a family might mean the ultimate in friendly intimacy; to other people a family might mean a deadly kind of intimacy that chokes and destroys. So it is that intimacy serves as a false idol in our churches.
Yet when Dan Wakefield tells about getting into a shouting match at church with a friend of his, he reveals something of critical importance. Dan Wakefield is telling us something that we all know to be true: churches are full of conflict, and fighting is a common part of church life. I know this is true of this church: as is true in any human community, there are conflicts, fights, and even feuds here at First Unitarian. Fights are bad if you just fight for the sake of fighting; but conflict can be good if it serves a higher purpose.
Dan Wakefield says that he and his friend Judy took care of their shouting match by going “to our minister as the mediating father,” and so they got their “mutual frustration out.” His story gets one things wrong: the minister was not serving in the role of “mediating father.” Dan Wakefield might have thought that his minister was serving as a mediating father — I’d be very curious to know if his friend Judy thought the same thing — but actually, his minister was serving as a representative of the entire church community, and as such the minister served as an embodiment of the church’s covenant.
Every church has a covenant, a set of promises that the people of that church make to one another. King’s Chapel has a very explicit written covenant, which goes like this: “In the love of truth and in the spirit of Jesus Christ, we unite for the worship of God and the service of man.” This old Unitarian covenant, written by James Freeman Clarke in 1886, is still used in Unitarian churches from Dublin to Illinois to the Khasi Hills of India. When Dan and his friend Judy took their disagreement, their shouting match, to their minister as the embodiment of their church’s covenant, they were reminded at some level that their purpose was to come together for worship and service. They were reminded of the love of truth: to get at truth often requires disagreement and conflict. As long as conflict aims to get at truth — as long as conflict isn’t about personalities — conflict in churches is necessary and good. And it is a covenant that allows conflict to be managed so that it can aim at truth.
Families do not have such covenants. Families with children do have a sort of implicit covenant, that parents will care for and raise the children to be adults. Marriage is a type of covenant as well, so if a family has a married couple there is a covenant between at least those two people. But it should be obvious that these family covenants differ from church covenants in their intent, and in who is covered by the covenant.
Churches cannot long exist without covenants. Let’s say that Dan Wakefield and his friend Judy had been members of a church with no covenant, or with a weak covenant. When they got into their shouting match, there would be nothing that could draw them back from their own personal conflict to be reminded of their higher purpose as a part of that church.
That’s why the prophet Hosea is so insistent in reminding his people to remain true to their covenant. To ignore a covenant can mean death for a religious community. Speaking in a prophetic, poetic voice, Hosea tells the people of Israel to remain true to Yahweh their god; in other words: remain true to your covenant; remain true to the sacred promises you made to each other. And Hosea tells us what happens when the people of Israel drift away from their covenant: incompetent and dishonest leaders, whom he calls Ephraim, could gain power. Hosea accuses those incompetent and dishonest leaders of worshipping Baal; that is to say, Hosea accuses them of abandoning the covenant of the people of Israel.
And so Hosea has Yahweh say, “Worship no god but me.” That’s a shorthand way of saying: “Stick to your sacred covenant!” Don’t let extraneous matters distract you from your higher purpose. Don’t be distracted by false idols, even when they are fashioned from gold and silver. Hosea tells us: stick to your covenant — stick to your promises.
Dan Wakefield gives us a picture of a happy, healthy church. In a happy, healthy church, you can get into conflicts, shouting matches even. As long as you stick to the covenant, conflict can lead to truth. Moses knew this, and when the people of Israel strayed from their purpose, when they let extraneous matters creep in, he called them back to their covenantal promises with one another. Hosea told us this. And now may we turn away from our false idols, and remain true to our sacred promises to each other: to transform our own lives, to care for one another and promote practical goodness in the world, and to seek together after truth and goodness.