Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Household Gods

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

    Readings

    The first reading was from book II of Virgil’s Aeneid:

    [506] “Perhaps, too, you may inquire what was Priam’s fate. When he saw the fall of the captured city, saw the doors of his palace shattered, and the foe in the heart of his home, old as he is, he vainly throws his long-disused armour about his aged trembling shoulders, girds his useless sword, and rushes to his death among his thronging foes. In the middle of the palace and beneath the open arch of heaven was a huge altar, and hard by an ancient laurel, leaning against the altar and clasping the household gods in its shade. Here, round the shrines, vainly crouched Hecuba and her daughters, huddled together like doves swept before a black storm, and clasping the images of the gods. But when she saw even Priam harnessed in the armour of his youth, ‘My poor husband,’ she cries, ‘what dreadful thought has driven you to don these weapons? Where are you rushing to? The hour calls not for such aid or such defenders, not though my own Hector were here himself! Come hither, pray; this altar will guard us all, or you will die with us!’ Thus she spoke, then drew the aged man to her and placed him on the holy seat.”

    The second reading was from the Hebrew scriptures, the Prophets, Zechariah 10-12:

    Ask rain from the Lord
      in the season of the spring rain,
    from the Lord who makes the storm clouds,
      and he will give them showers of rain,
      to everyone the vegetation in the field.
    For the household gods utter nonsense,
      and the diviners see lies;
    they tell false dreams
      and give empty consolation.
    Therefore the people wander like sheep;
      they are afflicted for lack of a shepherd.

    Sermon — “Household Gods”

    Some years ago, I got in trouble in a class I was taking. This class was a creative writing workshop, and it was taught by a fellow who had published quite a few short stories in prestigious magazines. I no longer remember his name, and if you heard his name you probably wouldn’t recognize it — nevertheless, he was an experienced and accomplished writer.

    Each week, we all had to submit short stories to be read over and critiqued by the class. Each week we would have to read a short story by a published writer, and all the stories written by our classmates, and comment intelligently on each of these stories. Now I have never been able to write a short story that was any good; non-fiction I can do, but fiction is beyond me; but there I was taking that class because I needed the credits and it was the only class that would fit into my schedule. Since I like to read and I’m never shy about expressing my opinions, I was always happy to read all of the week’s stories and then talk about them in class; but I wasn’t very good at writing stories.

    One week I submitted yet another boring story, the inconsequential plot of which hinged on one of the characters talking about her household gods. And to make a long story short (as it were), our teacher ridiculed my story because he had never heard of household gods and wanted to know why they were in the story. What, he asked me, his voice dripping with sarcasm, did I mean by household gods, anyway? Well, I knew my mother had talked about household gods, and I more or less knew that household gods were a sort of cultural metaphor for that which is important to one’s household. This did not satisfy him, and we moved on to the next story, and eventually I passed that class.

    In spite of the fact that neither that teacher nor I knew what they were, household gods do indeed exist. The ancient Roman gods and goddesses included not just the major public deities like Juno and Jupiter and Diana; there were also minor deities that lived in each Roman household, and these were the household gods. Sixty years ago, when my mother was in high school, high school kids learned a certain amount of ancient Latin, and a certain amount of ancient Roman culture; and so my mother’s generation has been exposed to Latin writers such as Livy and Virgil.

    These days there aren’t many people who have studied Latin, who would know what a household god might be. My writing teacher had never heard of them at all, and although I had heard my mother mention them I knew nothing more than that. Yet if you look hard enough, you can still find household gods in the nooks and crannies of our culture:– there is a science fiction novel in which Roman household gods sends a modern woman back in time to live in ancient Rome; they do crop up in literature now and then; come to find out, there’s even a folk music group called The Household Gods. I suspect that evenn those of us who never studied Latin continue to have a vague notion that there might be guardian deities within our households.

    And I suspect that many of us, though we may hotly deny it, are still under the influence of some household gods. We may not admit it, but we have let unacknowledged household gods into our homes. And this prompts me to ask: what are household gods, and what function might they still carry out in our homes?

    …

    Let me begin by describing ancient Roman household gods. Not that this is going to be a historically accurate description — ancient Roman history covers hundreds of years, and the form and worship of household gods evolved continually over that time span. But a general description will suit our purposes.

    The first thing to know is the ancient Roman term for household gods: they were called “lares.” An 1894 book called “The Mythology of Greece and Rome” says this about the Lares:

    “The Lares… were the tutelary deities of the house and family…. They were commonly supposed to be the glorified spirits of ancestors, who, as guardian deities, strove to promote the welfare of the family. The seat of their worship was also the family hearth in the atrium, where their images of wood or wax were generally preserved in a separate shrine of their own (Lararium). The Lares received an especial degree of veneration on the first day of every month; but… they took part in all the domestic occurrences, whether of joy or sorrow. …They also received their share at every meal of particular dishes, and were crowned with garlands on the occasion of every family rejoicing. When a son assumed the toga virilis (that is, when he came of age), he dedicated his bulla (a gold or silver ornament, like a medal, which was worn round the neck during childhood) to the Lares, amidst prayers and libations and burning of incense. When the father of the house started on a journey or returned in safety, the Lares were again addressed, and their statues crowned with wreaths, flowers and garlands being their favorite offerings.”

    This makes the household gods seem rather charming, doesn’t it? You have these little household gods made out of wood or wax or terracotta, which represented your ancestors or your guardians; and they lived in their own little niche next to the fireplace, and they promised to look out for you and your family. If anything happened to your family, whether good or bad, you’d go spend some time with your household gods. When you had a nice meal, you’d give them a little bit of it; if something good happened in your family, you’d put flowers on them. You’d pay attention to them before someone in your family went traveling, and you’d pay attention to them again when that person returned safely home. I particularly like the fact that the household gods liked flowers and garlands best — I’m not so happy with gods and goddesses that demand blood sacrifices (which can be disgusting and messy) or burnt offerings (which is a waste of good food), but it’s always nice to have an excuse to put flowers in your house.

    Those who could afford to do so built a special wall niche into their home, a house altar or lararium, in which the household gods were placed; and some of these house altars are decorated with paintings that might show one of more of the household gods. In one of the houses in Pompei, that ancient Roman city that got buried by a volcano, archaeologists uncovered a house altar on which was painted a representation of a snake with a beard and a crest on top of its head; this was the “lars familiaris,” a sort of protective power associated with the household. So it was that these household gods had their own place within a Roman house.

    And if you were a Roman, you hoped that your household gods offered you some kind of protection. Of course, it didn’t necessarily work out that way. After all, that house altar in Pompei didn’t protect its household from being buried by that volcanic eruption. And when the ancient Greeks conquered Troy and went through the city killing and looting, the household gods of Priam, the king of Troy, could not save him; as the Roman poet Virgil tells us in the Aeneid, his poetic story of the Trojan war:
    “When [Priam] saw the fall of the captured city, saw the doors of his palace shattered, and the foe in the heart of his home, old as he is, he vainly throws his long-disused armour about his aged trembling shoulders, girds his useless sword, and rushes to his death among his thronging foes. In the middle of the palace and beneath the open arch of heaven was a huge altar, and hard by an ancient laurel, leaning against the altar and clasping the household gods in its shade. Here, round the shrines, vainly crouched [his wife] Hecuba and her daughters, huddled together like doves swept before a black storm, and clasping the images of the [household] gods. But when she saw even Priam harnessed in the armour of his youth, ‘My poor husband,’ she cries, ‘what dreadful thought has driven you to don these weapons? Where are you rushing to? The hour calls not for such aid or such defenders, not though my own Hector were here himself! Come hither, pray; this altar will guard us all, or you will die with us!’ Thus she spoke, then drew the aged man to her and placed him on the holy seat.”
    But of course the altar of the household gods did not protect Priam in the least, for the next part of the Aeneid tells how he was slaughtered by the Greeks.

    Even though I don’t believe that Roman household gods offer some sort of magical protection, I like this idea of having household gods. I’m not looking for household gods which can provide a comprehensive insurance policy for my house and family, but I do like the way the ancient Romans used the household gods to create a religious and spiritual center in their households. I do not believe that religion is something we can do for just one hour on those Sunday mornings when we actually get out of the house and get to church; nor do I believe that religion is something that can only be done in a special place called a church. Religion is my way of living humanely, and dealing with setbacks, and appreciating the crazy beauty and mystery of life. I do not want to reinstate the ancient Roman household gods in my house, but it’s not enough for me to do religion an hour a week.

    …

    Our direct spiritual forebears, New England Protestant Christians, did not have household gods; but they did have manage to integrate religion and spirituality into their daily lives. Their religion was not limited to an hour on Sunday mornings.

    These days, we Unitarian Universalists think of ourselves as “post-Christian” — some of us still consider ourselves Christian individuals, and some of us want nothing to do with Christianity. Yet although we are post-Christian, that does not mean that we have to throw out every part of the Christian tradition. We’ve taken the cross out of our church, but we still call it a church; we may not read the Christian scriptures much, but we still follow the Christian rule of meeting once a week on Sundays. So I think it is worth taking a look at the old Christian home religious practices that used to be a part of our New England religious tradition.

    One of those Christian practices, once so common in New England households, was the practice of daily prayers. In our own tradition — we come from the Radical Reformation and the Free Churches — the governing principle for daily prayer is quite simple: each individual is guided by the Spirit, and so we did not require a complicated scheme of specific prayers to memorize and certain words to say. We still value extemporaneous prayer, and we sometimes still teach our children how to pray in this fashion. My favorite example of this is a bedtime prayer that the Rev. Christopher Raible wrote about. He suggested that parents sit with their children each night and use this format for bedtime prayers:

      Tonight I am thankful for… (then you say some of the good things that happened to you today)
      And tonight I am sorry for… (then you talk about the things you feel sorry for doing or saying)
      Tomorrow I hope for… (and you talk about things you hope for and how you think you can make them happen).

    In the old days in New England, prayers were something everyone said on a daily basis. There were many other daily prayers that people used, the most common one being the practice of saying grace before meals.

    The other common household practice from the Free Church tradition is the practice of keeping the Sabbath day. I don’t know anyone who keeps the Sabbath day any more, although a Hundred years ago, Unitarian and Universalist families did keep the Sabbath. Ellen Tucker Emerson, one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s daughters, wrote a description of how the Emerson family kept the Sabbath day together as a family:

    “Sunday was then kept rigidly the children of these days would say, but Father and Mother considered it kept easily, while Grandma thought it not strictly enough observed…. Every Sunday I was to learn a hymn. Most of them had five verses of four lines, sometimes they had six….”

    Ellen Emerson goes in some detail, so I will skip ahead:

    “I am trying to show what was Mother’s method in the religious education of her children, to have them made familiar with many hymns, and with all the interesting Bible stories. To accustom them to hearing some serious writing read aloud to them regularly, to make it a habit to omit play on Sunday and have it a day devoted to church and religious study at home. When Eddy got to be perhaps three or even earlier she began to read aloud to us when we were all in bed Mrs Barbauld’s Prose Hymns and often a story-book of a religious character…. This was not always done, for I remember as if it continued a long time the practice of singing before we went upstairs… we used to sit on our three stools round Mother and sing it with her…. She had a little blue book of morning and evening prayers, and I think she read aloud one of those prayers.”

    This all sounds rather charming — if we lived a hundred and fifty years ago. But which of us today would like to devote all day Sunday to memorizing hymns, and listening to serious writing read aloud, and hearing Bible stories, and reading prayers aloud, and singing a few hymns before bedtime? Which of us would like to tear children and grand children away from video games and MySpace to participate in such things? And how many of our children or grandchildren would easily consent to such things all day every Sunday? The children I know would sooner have a wall-niche constructed next to the fireplace, and pour out libations to little statues of household gods — and they would only do that, I suspect, until they got bored with it.

    …

    Most of the households I know no longer include much religious practice at home. Some households are quite good at saying bedtime prayers with young children; I know a few households that actually eat dinner together every night and even say grace before they eat; I know a few households where families sing hymns or hymn-like songs together. But I don’t know of any households where someone regularly reads aloud from “serious writing.”

    If anything, I think the pagans among us do the best job of including religion in daily life within the household. I know quite a few pagan households that regularly say grace or in some way bless food before eating it. I know quite a few pagan households that incorporate regular religious rituals in their home life; and in the best Free Church tradition, they often make up these rituals themselves, as the Spirit moves them. I know of pagan households that have some kind of house altar, not unlike the house altars of the ancient Romans. And I even know some pagan households where children are taught religious songs and chants, and where people actually read aloud to each other from religious writings.

    What about my own household? Traditionally — back in the days when Ralph Waldo Emerson’s children were young — clergy were supposed to be exemplars for living a good religious life. My friend Rabbi Michael is still such an exemplar — he keeps the Sabbath, and his three children keep the Sabbath. But I am not such a good role model: my life partner is pretty much unchurched, and I’m not going to impose my religious practices on her, so we don’t do any of the things I’ve talked about. Yes, I do keep a Sabbath day each week — my Sabbath day is Friday, because that’s what fits into my busy schedule, and every Friday I don’t do any unnecessary work, and I make an effort to read serious writing, and good Transcendentalist that I am I try to engage in my spiritual practices of writing and reading. But these are things I do on my own, not things I do with the rest of my household.

    Many of us are no longer able to fit the old Free Church religious rituals into our home lives; and perhaps we no longer want to do so. But wouldn’t it be nice to do something at meal times besides turning on the television set? Wouldn’t it be nice to devote some time each week to a consideration of the most important things in life, rather than spending all our leisure time playing video games and sending inconsequential email messages? And if we can’t observe the old Free Church religious rituals, still less will we return to the ancient Roman rituals surrounding the household gods. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a reason to bring fresh flowers into your house? Wouldn’t it be nice to have little rituals to observe when someone in your household was goind away on a trip, or returning home? or rituals to observe when your children or grandchildren came of age?

    Of course these days most of use lead lives that no longer give us any time to observe such rituals outside of an hour-long worship service on Sunday mornings. And I want to emphasize that many of us are not going to be able to impose our religion on our households. Those are the facts of life for many of us.

    But pay attention to those facts of life. A little while ago, I said that I do not believe that religion is something we can do for just one hour on those Sunday mornings when we actually get out of the house and get to church; nor do I believe that religion is something that can only be done in a special place called a church. I will go further than that — like it or not, we are religious beings; doing religion is one of the ways we make sense out of the world. You can choose to get rid of conscious religion in your life — you don’t have to say grace before meals or force your children to say bedtime prayers nor do you have to go to church on Sunday mornings. You can choose that you’re not going to do those things. But you will have to find some way to make sense out of the world, and if you don’t do that consciously, you will do it unconsciously.

    Our culture is constantly telling us to make sense out of the world by having more stuff — we get that new video game, or that new iPhone, or that new Toyota Prius, or that new house, and suddenly our world makes sense — for a time, it makes sense. But all religious rituals have to be repeated over and over again, and so we go out and buy more stuff; and we work longer hours so we can buy more stuff; and we make our children study hard and send them to lots of afterschool activities so that they can succeed and get the best jobs with a high salary — and buy more stuff.

    Religion is my way of living humanely, and dealing with setbacks, and appreciating the crazy beauty and mystery of life. I do not wish to reinstate the ancient Roman household gods in my house; I do not wish to reinstate the home religious practices of Ellen Emerson’s family. But I need something more than an hour a week to feed my soul. I know that household gods still exist, and even if we don’t acknowledge them or know what they are they are still a powerful force, and they are living in our households right now. In our Free Church tradition, we don’t have to follow certain procedures and formulas; but we do have to give ourselves space to be moved by the spirit. We should pay attention to the household gods we are willing to admit into our households.

    What will our household gods be? Will we worship consumer goods? Or can we find a way to update some of the old religious practices? Can we devote some time each day to meditation and prayer? Can we set aside time each day to reflect on what we have done, and what we hope to do? Even if we do nothing more than bring fresh flowers into our households, if we do it with the intention of focusing ourselves on the highest things, if we do it as an expression of our wonder and joy and awe before the mysteries of life,– I think that will be enough.

  • Generations

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

    Readings

    The first reading was from a family memoir by the poet Lucille Clifton:

    “Mammy Ca’line raised me,” Daddy would say. “After my Grandma Lucy died, she took care of Genie and then took care of me. She was my great-grandmother, Lucy’s Mama, you know, but everybody called her Mammy like they did in them days. Oh she was tall and skinny and walked straight as a soldier, Lue. Straight like somebody marching wherever she went. And she talked with an Oxford accent! I ain’t kidding. Don’t let nobody tell you them old people was dumb. She talked like she was from London England and when we kids would be running and hooping and hollering all around she would come to the door and look straight at me and shake her finger and say, ‘Stop that Bedlam, mister, stop that Bedlam, I say.’ With an Oxford accent, Lue! She was a dark old skinny lady and she raised my Daddy and then raised me, lest till I was eight years old when she died. When I was eight years old. I remember everything she ever told me, cause you know when you that age you old enough to remember things. I remember everything she ever told me, Lue, even though she died when I was eight years old. And then I knowed about what she remembered cause that’s how old she was when she got here. Eight years old.”

    The second reading was from the same family memoir by the poet Lucille Clifton:

    “Walking from New Orleans to Virginia,” Daddy would say, “you go through Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. And that’s the walk Mammy Ca’line took when she was eight years old. She was born among the Dahomey people, and she used to say ‘Get what you want, you from Dahomey women.’ And she used to tell us about how they had a whole army of nothing but women back there and how they was the best soldiers in the world. And she was from among the Dahomey people and one day her and her Mama and her sister and her brother was captured and throwed on a boat and on a boat till they landed in New Orleans. And I would ask her how did you get captured, Mammy, and she would say that she was a child and I would ask her when did it happen, Mammy, and she would say ‘In 1830 I walked from New Orleans to Virginia and I was eight years old.’ And I would ask her what was it like on the boat and she would just shake her head. And it seems like so long ago, you know, because when I was asking her this it must have been 1908 or ‘9. I was just a little boy. I was a little boy and my Mama was working in the tobacco plant and my Mammy Ca’line took care of me and I took care of my brothers and my sister. My Daddy Genie was dead. He died young. He was my real Grandmother Lucy’s boy and of course she was dead too. Her name was Lucille just like my sister and just like you. You named for Dahomey women, Lue.”

    Sermon — “Generations”

    This is the last in a month-long series of sermons on poetry and religion. On the first Sunday in February, I gave a sermon on the poetry of James Weldon Johnson; the next week on the poetry of Langston Hughes; last week, Jorge Pereira gave a sermon on the poetry of Niki Giovanni; and this week I’d like to speak to you about the poetic prose of Lucille Clifton.

    When I say that I’m preaching on the topic of poetry and religion, I’d using “poetry” in its broadest sense. Some poetry is written in verse, some is written in prose. I mean poetry in the sense of what the ancient Greeks called poesis, which was a kind of making. We might say that poets make the world. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that when we read certain poems, those poems make us anew, remake us, and in that sense our world is made anew.

    Or put it this way: In a post-Christian religion like ours, where do we turn for religious inspiration? If ours were an orthodox Christian faith, we would know to turn to the Christian scriptures, and to orthodox Christian writers, for inspiration. Since ours is a post-Christian faith, we can still turn to the Christian scriptures for inspiration,– and some of us indeed do read the Christian scriptures to help us on our spiritual journeys, while others of us have no interest in the Christian scriptures. Yet all of us recognize that the world has changed since the days when Christian scriptures were written down. We know that revelation is still going on all around us, and we are open to the idea of finding religious and spiritual inspiration in other literature: in any of the scriptures of any of the world religions, for example; and we are willing to look for religious revelation in any literature where we sense the religious or the spiritual.

    For us, spiritual writing does not need to contain the word “God” any more than it needs to contain the word “Allah” or “Buddha” or “Confucius.” Spiritual writing does need to be poetic; that is, it needs to reveal our deepest selves to us, it needs to reveal what truly is around us. It doesn’t matter whether poetic spiritual takes the form of verse or of prose — the form matters less than the effect it has upon us. Does it remake us? Then it is poetry; then it may be spiritual and religious.

    I said I am preaching this month on poetry and religion. Specifically, I am preaching about poetry written by American poets of African descent. I wanted to speak about American poets because I wanted to address some of the immediate spiritual and moral issues that confront us as people living in this time and place. In our country, one of the key moral and spiritual issues that we are continuing to deal with is the ongoing legacy of slavery. We now have a new president who is of African descent, and the fact that he was of African descent made history. At this time last year, there were still those who said a Black man wouldn’t be elected president, and the fact that people could say this and be widely believed, tells us that the legacy of slavery continues in our country today. Since religion concerns itself with matters of morality, and since the legacy of slavery remains a central moral issue, this moral issue should be the concern of any religion that claims to take morality and ethics seriously. And if we as a post-Christian religion are going to be serious about the legacy of slavery, we cannot rely solely on ancient scriptures; we will also read American poets of African descent in order to make spiritual sense of this national moral issue.

    And so this week, I’d like to speak about the African American poet Lucille Clifton. In particular I’d like to speak about her poetic memoir called “Generations.”

    …

    Let me tell you part of the story of “Generations”; let me tell you that part of the story which concerns a woman who came from Africa, known by the name of Caroline, and which tells about her descendants down to the poet herself. This is the story as it was told to Lucille Clifton by her father, Samuel.

    In 1822, a girl was born to the Dahomey people of West Africa. She never told any of her descendants what her African name was, so we don’t know what she was originally named. When she was eight years old, she and her brother and sister and mother were captured and taken to New Orleans and put into slavery.

    She and her brother and sister and mother survived the Middle Passage — something she would not talk about later in her life — and arrived in New Orleans in 1830. She was made to walk from thence to Virginia. In Virginia, she was sold to a white man named Bob Donald; her brother was sold to another white man nearby; and her mother was sold off somewhere else, Caroline never knew where. Caroline lived as a slave from the time she was eight. She heard about Nat Turner’s slave rebellion; she heard about John Brown’s daring raid.

    Caroline’s master owned an orchard, and one day while she was working in the orchard, an older slave named Louis Sale drove his white master’s carriage past the orchard, saw Caroline, and asked his master to buy her to be his wife. Louis was born in 1777, so he was 43 years older than Caroline; but Caroline was bought and they were married, legally married in fact. Caroline’s new master had her trained as a midwife. They named their eldest daughter Lucille, or Lucy.

    Well, Lucy was a strong-willed woman. The Civil War came, Emancipation came, and white carpetbaggers came down south. Lucille had a baby with one of those white carpetbaggers, a man named Harvey Nichols. The baby boy’s name was Gene, and he was born with a withered arm. Lucille went out one night with a rifle, and shot Harvey Nichols in a crossroads. Amazingly, she wasn’t lynched, because (says the poet’s father) she was from Dahomey women; so she became the first African American woman to be legally hanged in the state of Virginia.

    The little boy Gene was raised by Caroline, now known as Mammy Caroline. He grew up to be a ladies’ man, and “wild.” (When Samuel Clifton told this story to his daughter, he said that Gene was “just somebody whose Mama and Daddy was dead.”) Gene has a little boy who was named Samuel (this is the Samuel who is telling the story), and when Samuel was four or five years old, Gene used to take him into beer gardens and have him whip other little boys on a bet. Gene died when Sam was five, so Mammy Caroline raised him, too, until she died when he was eight years old.

    This is how Lucille Clifton summarizes these generations in her memoir:

    “‘The generations of Caroline Donald, born free among the Dahomey people in 1822 and died free in Bedford Virginia in 1910,’ my Daddy would say, ‘and Sam Louis Sale, born a slave in America in 1777 and died a slave in the same place in around 1860
    are Dabney and Gabriel and Sam and Helen and John and Lucille,
    called Lucy
    who had a son named Gene by a man named Harvey Nichols
    and then
    she killed him,
    and this boy Gene with a withered arm had three sons and a daughter
    named Willie and Harvey and Samuel and Lucille
    and Samuel who is me
    named his boy Sam and
    his daughter Lucille.
    We fooled em, Lue, slavery was terrible, but we fooled them old people We come out of it better than they did.’”

    …

    So it is that Lucille Clifton’s poetic memoir begins to remake the world. “‘We fooled em, Lue, slavery was terrible, but we fooled them old people We come out of it better than they did.’” This poetry remakes something that needs to be remade. We’ve got slavery in our shared national story, and we don’t quite know what to do with it. We try to balance the story of slavery with the story of Emancipation, but in my view that never quite balances out. We’ve got Jim Crow and racism in our shared story, too, and again we don’t quite know what to do with it. We try to balance the story of racism with the story of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement, except that racism didn’t end with Martin Luther King. So what do we do with the story of slavery, and with its sequel, institutionalized racism?

    Lucille Clifton adds something to our shared story; this is what poets do, they reshape our shared stories. Lucille Clifton adds Caroline to the story, a Dahomey woman who was born free and then enslaved and then emancipated, and who died free. Caroline, who talked with an Oxford accent. Caroline, who remembered from her girlhood a whole army of Dahomey women, women who were the best fighters around. Caroline, who makes slavery personal, as we think about a crazy and immoral economic system that would enslave a powerful Dahomey woman. Lucille Clifton tells us that her father said this about slavery: “It ain’t like something in a book, Lue. Even the good parts was awful.” And so this poetic memoir that I read in a book manages to take slavery out of the book and make it real, for when you read this book the poetry makes you feel as if you know Mammy Caroline; and even the good parts of slavery were awful.

    Lucille Clifton adds her own children to the story, the great-great grandchildren of Caroline. Speaking of her own children, Lucille Clifton says: “They walk with confidence through the world, free sons and daughters of free folk, for my Mama told me that slavery was a temporary thing, mostly we was free, and she was right.” And so this poetic memoir remakes the world for us by telling us that slavery was a temporary thing, It was something that humans made, and eventually they unmade it. This gives us the hope that all such human-made evils can someday be unmade, if we will but put our minds to unmaking them.

    Lucille Clifton tells her family’s story about how they survived slavery through the generations, and so she remakes the world.

    …

    You see now, don’t you, that telling our stories and religion are somehow mysteriously linked? After all, what is the Bible but the stories of the children of God? and out of these stories a grand religion has grown. For that matter, what is the Koran but the story of how Allah revealed himself to Mohammed? and out of that story another grand religion has grown. And what are the Buddhist suttras but stories of how Gotama Buddha lived his lives and taught his followers? and out of those stories yet another grand religion has grown. Somehow, religions grow out of stories — not out of just any old story, but out of a kinnd of poetry.

    There is a moral point here, too. We all tell stories about ourselves. Those stories can shape the way we live, and the way we shall act in the future. Poets are a kind of storyteller who can shape, not just themselves, but the rest of us as well; because poets can shape the way we tell our own personal stories.

    As I read Lucille Clifton’s story of the generations of her family, I found myself wondering about my own family’s story. If I were a poet — and I’m not — what could I say about my own people? My mother’s people lived in this part of the world for many years: the lands east of Providence, the Cape, and the Islands. Living where they did, along the coast, these people earned a living from the sea. Some of them earned a living in the whaling trade, and I have no doubt that some of them earned at least part of their living in the slave trade, because these weren’t the ship owners and wealthy merchants and they earned their living where they could.

    Now some of my mother’s family came from Martha’s Vineyard, and in the middle of the 19th century we lose track of some of them. Where did they come from? Were they simply swamp Yankees who had so little money that they didn’t get included in any written records? Islands being what they are, I sometimes wonder if one or two might have been colored folk who slipped onto the island from somewhere else and were passing as white; it’s unlikely but not outside the realm of possibility. Surely there are some Americans who are both descended from slaves, and from those who engaged in the slave trade. We like to think to separate the American story into black and white, but it is more complex than that.

    Our national story is far more complex than the simplistic story that appears in high school history books. We Americans are descended from Dahomey women and from white slave traders. As a people, we are descended from abolitionists, white and black, and from slave owners in the south and in the north. We are descended from Caroline Donald and from Harvey Nichols. And our story goes far beyond simple black and white: we are descended from Azoreans and Cape Verdeans and Irish and English and Wampanoag and Vietnamese and on and on.

    Telling our stories in all their complexity is a matter of national morality. If we can tell our national story in all its complexity, some day we will be able to look at ourselves and our neighbors and say: We all are free children born of free folk. We will remake ourselves into a truly free people. That is what poets like Lucille Clifton help us to do: she tells a very personal story, but in her personal story is something of the national moral dilemma.

    …

    This is where it gets religious. This is where I tell you about the basic Universalist theology that underlies our religious faith, the certainty that there is inherent worth and goodness and dignity in all persons.

    As Americans, we are descended from all these people, and there is some goodness in all our forefathers and foremothers, in spite of our national tragedies and our national moral disgraces. Slavery was a national tragedy and a disgrace, and we’re still not done with it. The way the Europeans pushed Indians off the land was a tragedy, and we’re still not done with it. This goes back still further: the way the English pushed my Welsh ancestors off the land, so that they had to come and settle here in southern Massachusetts, was a tragedy, and in Wales they’re not done with that tragedy yet. These are all tragedies that continue today.

    As a religious matter, we know that it doesn’t do any good to cover up these old tragedies; just as they Bible doesn’t cover up some of the ancient horrific tragedies of slavery and wars and rapine and conquest. Covering up tragedies only makes us feel worse. But we need our poets to tell our tragedies to us in ways that make sense. Our poets can tell us how things are so that we appreciate that within each of us that is worthy of dignity and respect.

    We are all worthy of dignity and respect. Our best poets will have to keep on telling us this until we have finally freed ourselves, and freed our children. That kind of freedom will come only when we know, in our heart of hearts, that every person is worthy of dignity and respect; acknowledging that is the road to true freedom.

  • Covenant of Abraham

    Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Dan Harper. Delivered to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Santa Cruz County, Aptos, California. The sermon as actually delivered differed in some respects from this text.

    Sermon

    One of the fun things about preaching in another Unitarian Universalist church is that I get to check out what other congregations are like. I love to exchange pulpits with other Unitarian Universalist ministers because every church that I visit does several things better than my church does, and then I steal those good ideas and bring them to my church.

    And in return for those good ideas that I steal from the churches I visit, I often try to brings some news of what our church is doing.

    Here’s what’s going on with us: Our church was established by the Massachusetts Bay colonial government in June, 1708, and so we have been having a year-long birthday party for the church’s three hundredth birthday. As part of our three hundredth birthday, we have been researching the history of our congregation. The congregation started out with the typical Puritan theology of Massachusetts Bay, but it liberalized significantly beginning about 1750, so that by 1848 the church called John Weiss, a radical free religionist and post-Christian Transcendentalist, as their new minister.

    I will not say that everyone in the congregation would consider themselves to be post-Christian or non-Christian, because they didn’t. But I will say that it was not some specific theological position that held them together, and I will add that they were willing to tolerate both Christian and humanist minister. Since 1848, our church has had a mix of Christians and humanists and other theological positions.

    Naturally the question arose: if the congregation was not bound together by theology, what was it that was strong enough to keep them together for three hundred years? The answer was quite simple: covenant bound us together.

    And what, you may well ask, do I mean by “covenant”? Well, to begin with, covenant is the center of our religious tradition. As Unitarian Universalists, we are less concerned about what individuals believe:– we can believe in God or not; we do not require anyone to subscribe to a specific creed or dogma. Instead of being organized around specific beliefs, we are organized around a set of promises that we make to one another, and that set of promises is called a covenant. There is no requirement for us to have a written covenant. Yet in our tradition there is always a covenant at the center of our congregations, whether it happens to be an explicit written covenant, or an implicit unwritten covenant.

    In our church, we have not had a written covenant since the ministry of John Weiss, that is, since the 1850s. Yet while we have no written covenant, we have always had a strong implicit covenant. When I arrived at the church, I got curious about the implicit, unwritten covenant. What was it? I listened to members and friends talk about what the church meant to them, and I read through the church bylaws, and other formal documents. Based on what I had heard, and what I had found that had been written down, I wrote up a rough version of our unwritten, implicit covenant. I started reading my rough version of this covenant before the worship service each week. As time went by, people would gently correct me — tell me things I had left out, things that didn’t belong, tell me how to word things better. After about two years, this is what I was reading each week:

    “Here at First Unitarian in New Bedford, we value our differences of age, gender, race, national origin, class, sexual orientation, physical and mental ability, and theology. We are bound together, not by some creed or dogma, but by our covenant: We come together in love to seek after truth and goodness, to find spiritual transformation in our lives; and in the spirit of love we care for one another and promote practical goodness in the world.”

    This is how I tried to articulate the promises that we in our congregation make to one another. Mind you, my version was pretty rough and far from perfect! Then our Committee on Ministry got involved, and they held a series of open meetings, interviewed people, did more research, and they came up with a better written version of our covenant, which goes like this:

    “We come together as a religious community upholding freedom of conscience, right relationship, and the inherent worth of all people. We value our diversity, and pledge to care for one another in the spirit of love and to promote justice and kindness in the world.”

    You can see that this new written version is smoother and more concise (it was written by one of the poets in our church); and next Sunday, our congregation is going to vote on whether or not this will become a formal, written covenant for us. But no matter how that vote goes, what’s written down isn’t what’s most important about a covenant. Any written covenant merely puts into writing a set of promises that already exists at the core of who we are as a congregation. A covenant describes our way of being together as a religious community. And in our tradition, the way we make ourselves into a religious community is through our covenant, that is, through a set of promises that we make. It may be easier for everyone if we put our covenant into writing — it definitely makes it easier for newcomers to figure out who we are — but really what’s important about any covenant is the way we live it out in real life.

    I think I can make this clearer to you if I tell you where our idea of covenant comes from.

    You probably know that the idea of covenant is at the center of three major world religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All three of these religions trace themselves back to the figure of Abraham in the Hebrew Bible. Abraham, says the Hebrew Bible, made a covenant with the god whose name cannot be pronounced, whom we’ll call Adonai. Let me tell you the story of Abraham and his covenant with Adonai (for those of you who are Bible geeks, this is in Genesis 12-18, 20-22):

    The story begins in most ancient times. There’s that flood, where Noah built the ark; somewhere in there there’s the Tower of Babel; anyway, one of Noah’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandsons was a man named Abram, or Avram. (If I counted right, that’s ten generations from Noah to Abram; it would be as if Noah was the first members of our New Bedford church, and Abram was one of his descendants living today.)

    As the story opens, Abram is living in a place called Haran with his wife Sarai, and his father Terah. Terah dies, and Abram decides to move into the land of Canaan — he and his family are semi-nomadic, they live in tents and move around a lot. But how does Abram decide it’s time to move into Canaan? Adonai — this is the same god named Adonai who told Noah to build the ark because there was a flood coming — Adonai appears to Abram, and tells him: “Go you forth from your land, from your kindred, from your father’s house, to the land I will let you see. I will make a great nation of you and will give you blessing and will make your names great…” (Everett Fox trans., Gen. 12.1-2) In other words, Adonai promises certain things to Abram — blessings, greatness, and so on — if Abram will promise in return to do what Adonai says, beginning with going into the land of Canaan. This is the beginning of Adonai’s covenant, or set of promises, with Abram.

    Abram tells everyone to pack up, and they all move into Canaan. When they get there, Adonai appears to Abram and says again, I’m giving this land to you and your descendants. So Abram builds a temple to Adonai, which probably was a platform made out of stones, an altar to offer up burnt offerings.

    Then there was a famine in the land, and so Abram had to go to Egypt, and he underwent all kinds of adventures there, but Adonai looked out for him the whole time. And Adonai kept promising Abram that the land of Canaan was going to belong to him and to his descendants. Problem was, Abram had no descendants; he and Sarai were in their nineties, and they didn’t have any children. But Adonai tells Abram not to worry, and promises yet again that all this land will belong to him and to his descendants. And Adonai makes more promises — he adds to the covenant with Abram — as follows: Abram has to change his name to Abraham, and his wife’s name to Sarah; Abraham has to make sure every man in his tribe is circumcised; Abraham has to promise that he and all his kinfolk and all his descendants will keep Adonai as their god, and obey Adonai. In return, Adonai promises that Abraham and Sarah will have a son; they will have lots of descendants, who will make great nations; some of his descendants will be kings; he and his descendants will own the land of Canaan in perpetuity.

    To which Abraham responds: “Whaddya mean, Sarah and I are gonna have a son? I’m ninety-nine years old, for Pete’s sake, and Sarah is ninety. How are we gonna have a child?” But Adonai says, “Trust me.” So Abraham trusts him, goes back, and makes all his male kinfolk and all his male slaves get circumcised. Then Adonai, being all-powerful, makes sure that Sarah gets pregnant. Abraham and Sarah are overjoyed when they have a baby boy, whom they name Isaac.

    Then Adonai tests Abraham. Adonai appears to Abraham, and tells him: OK, you have to sacrifice Isaac to me. Sacrifice, as in kill your son, and offer him up as a burnt offering on that altar you made for me. Sacrifice, as in murder your son because Adonai tells you to do so.

    (At this point in the story, I can’t resist interjecting a little parenthetical comment: I am glad that the children are up in the Sunday school, and not with us right now to hear this story. I really don’t want to tell one of our children about God telling someone to kill his child; it sends the wrong message to our children. We really want to be careful about the Bible stories we tell to our kids. Now back to the story:)

    So Abraham says, Yes, Adonai, whatever you say, and he takes Isaac out to the stone altar, lays Isaac down under a big pile of firewood, and gets ready to kill him and burn his body. At the very last minute, Adonai stops Abraham from killing Isaac, and makes a sheep appear magically, so Abraham kills the sheep and turns it into a burnt offering instead of his son.

    If you’re like me, your first reaction will be: What a gruesome story! — how could Adonai test a father in this way? — and how could a father actually consent to sacrifice one of his children? Based on such a reaction, we might conclude: The whole reason Abraham is willing to kill his own son is because of his covenant with Adonai; because of the promises he has made to his god Adonai. This does not make covenants seem particularly attractive.

    But before we jump to conclusions, let’s stop for a moment and do a more considered analysis of the story. If we put aside traditional Christian and Jewish notions of god for just a moment, we realize the story is not quite as simple as we might have though. First of all, it is clear from the Hebrew Bible that Adonai had competition, that there were other gods and goddesses out there. Abraham didn’t have to choose Adonai; he could have chosen another god, or no god at all. Abraham chose Adonai freely, and furthermore it seems to me that Abraham went into the covenant with his eyes wide open; he knew that the benefits Adonai offered would come at a high price.

    And if we pause to give this story even more careful consideration, we would have to ask ourselves why we are taking this story so literally. Is this story any worse than the fairy tales we read to children? Think about the story of Hansel and Gretel, where the witch eats children, which is pretty gruesome. Think about all those other fairy tales where parents kill their children. Yet we don’t take fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel literally; we treat them as a myths, as stories which often contain psychological truths, but which are not literally true. We can treat story of Abraham and Isaac in the same way.

    Considered as a myth containing psychological truth, the story of Abraham and Isaac can tell us something important about covenants. You will recall that a covenant is a set of promises where you promise something, and get something in return. Take the implicit unwritten covenant of the New Bedford church: in our implicit covenant with one another, we promise to come together in love; we promise to seek truth and goodness; we promise to transform ourselves spiritually; we promise to care for one another; and we promise to go out and make the world a better place. We promise those things, and in return we get to be part of a community based on love; we get companions to accompany us on the often unpleasant journey towards truth and goodness; we get other people caring for us; and we get help as we try to change the world into a better place.

    When I look at the unwritten New Bedford covenant, the first thing that I notice is that these promises are hard to keep. Come together in love? — in every church I’ve been a part of, that has been a promise that has been broken as much as it has been observed: people behave just as badly in church as they do out of church! Companions on the journey to truth and goodness? — that means people telling me when I’m being stupid and avoiding the truth, and letting me know when I have done something wrong; it hurts when people let me know that I’m stupid or wrong. Care for one another? — it’s hard to actually care for one another, especially back in New England where often people don’t want to be cared for, and where the general culture is to keep people at arm’s length and neither ask for nor receive help. Change the world into a better place? — that’s hard work, and we often disagree on how to accomplish that, and besides it takes time away from doing fun things like watching TV and playing video games.

    These promises we make to one another are idealistic, and they are difficult to keep. Sometimes I think it would be easier to just swallow the creeds they want you to believe in a fundamentalist church — it might be easier than actually having to live out the promises we make to other people, the promises we make to something greater than our selves.

    So we come back to the story where Adonai told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. It is a psychologically impossible act, yet somehow Abraham brought himself to do it — or at least, he started to do it, until Adonai said, Stop! you don’t really have to kill Isaac. Similarly, we make impossible promises to one another as part of our covenant; the promises we make to each other don’t involve any actually killing of our firstborn children. Yet the promises we make to each other are demanding in their own way because we know that some god isn’t going to come along at the last moment and say, “Just fooling! you don’t really have to treat each other with love, or go off together on a search for truth, or care for others (and be cared for!), or make the world a better place.” We know that we will have to follow through on our own promises.

    This is why I find the story of Abraham and Isaac so powerful: because it tells me a psychological truth. The story reminds me that it is hard to keep promises; the story reminds me that it is hard to be a part of a caring religious community. We know that even though we make promises to one another, they are promises that are hard to keep; and because we are imperfect human beings, we will occasionally break our promises to one another. And yet, the story tells us another psychological truth: that even though at times it will seem impossible for us to keep our promises to one another, we can find a way to do it; and we can find a way that won’t involve killing anyone.

    At this point you may well ask: Why not just forget about these old fairy tales? Why not just do away with covenants, and even religion, altogether?

    Ralph Waldo Emerson allegedly said, “A person will worship something — have no doubt about that.” When you find out what someone worships, then you will have a measure of that person. In our society, there are lots of things to worship: People worship money and consumer goods (I’ll bet most of us do this, to a greater or lesser extent); and if someone worships consumer goods, you have the true measure of that person, someone who worships something impermanent that will wear out as soon as the warranty ends. People worship sports and pop musicians and celebrities; and there you have the true measure of those people, because they worship figures of fantasy who will fade away when they are no longer pretty, or musical, or able to play sports well.

    The point of our covenant is that we are worshipping something greater, more permanent, and much more significant. When we establish a covenant, we are saying that we shall worship that which is greater than our selves, which some of us call God and some of us prefer to call the highest and best in humanity. When we establish a covenant, we are saying that our worship is not done on bended knee and with a great show of ritual, but rather it is done is our daily lives, in the way we live out our promises. When we establish a covenant amongst ourselves, we are saying that we want to establish goodness and truth that our children will carry on after us, goodness and truth that will last for generations.

    In this way, our covenant lies at the center of our religious community. We can ignore each other’s religious beliefs. But people certainly notice what I do with my life, how I live out my values. The point of a covenant is to establish a community that helps me live out my values; a community that supports me when I am weak or suffering or when I don’t have the strength to live out my values. A covenant provides a community in which I can (and will) transform myself, so that I can in turn go out and transform the world into a better place.

    All this goes back to that old, old story about the covenant that Abraham made with Adonai. At first, it seems like a crazy story. But when you think about it, you realize it’s telling us something important: it’s telling us that if we want to live out our highest values in the world, it will not be easy to do so, and we know we won’t be able to do it alone.