Life Issues – Page 5 – Dan Harper

The Global Financial Crisis

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

I was going to preach a nice historical sermon this morning, part of a serires on the 300th anniversary of this church. But with the crisis in the global financial markets over the past week, this morning I will instead be preaching on the economy.

The first reading this morning is from the Hebrew Bible, the Prophets, the Book of Isaiah, verses 16-18 and 21-26 of the first chapter:

Cease to do evil;
Learn to do good.
Devote yoruselves to justice;
Aid the wronged.
Uphold the rights of the orphan;
Defend the cause of the widow.
“Come, let us reach an understanding,”
— says the Lord…
The faithful city
That was filled with justice,
Where righteousness dwelt —
But now murderers [dwell].
Your silver has turned to dross;
Your wine is cut with water.
Your rulers are rogues
And cronies of thieves,
Every one avid for presents
And greedy for gifts;
They do not judge the case of the orphan,
And the widow’s cause never reaches them.

Assuredly, this is the declaration
Of the Sovereign, the Lord of Hosts,
The Mighty One of Israel:
“Ah, I will get satisfaction from My foes;
I will wreak vengeance on My enemies!
I will turn My hand against you,
And smelt out your dross in a crucible,
And remove all your slag:
I will restore your magistrates as of old,
And your counselors as of yore,
After that you shall be called
City of Righteousness, Faithful City.”

[New Jewish Publication Society translation]

The second reading is from “The Miracle of Mindfulness,” the 1975 book by Thich Nhat Hanh, who is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk. He writes:

“Thirty years ago, when I was still a novice at Tu Hieu Pagoda, washing the dishes was hardly a pleasant task. During the Season of Retreat when all the monks returned to the monastery, two novices had to do all the cooking and wash the dishes for sometimes well over one hundred monks. There was no soap. We had only ashes, rice husks, and coconut husks, and that was all. Cleaning such a high stack of bowls was a chore, especially during the winter when the water was freezing cold. Then you had to heat up a big pot of water before you could do any scrubbing. Nowadays one stands in a kitchen equipped with liquid soap, special scrubpads, and even running hot water which makes it all the more agreeable. It is easier to enjoy washing the dishes now. Anyone can wash them in a hurry, and sit down and enjoy a cup of tea afterwards. I can see a machine for washing clothes, although I wash my own things out by hand, but a dishwashing machine is going a little too far!

“While washing the dishes one should only be washing dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes. At first glance, that might seem a little silly: why put so much stress on a simple thing? But that’s precisely the point. The fact that I am standing there and washing these bowls is a wondrous reality. I’m being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my thoughts and actions. There’s no way I can be tossed about mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves.” [pp. 3-4]

Sermon

Well, as I said earlier, this morning I had planned to preach on a nice safe historical topic. I was going to preach on the history of our covenant here in our church. We would have taken a nice historical trip back in time, and I would have told you wonderful things about the three hundred year history of our church.

But then current events intruded. The stock market dropped 678.91 points on Friday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped 39.4% since October 10, 2007. The pundits in the news media are freely making comparisons with the great crash of 1929, when the Dow Jones dropped 89% from September, 1929, to July, 1932.

The financial situation in this country has gotten worrisome. The financial situation in the whole world has gotten worrisome! I’m worried, and I’ll bet most of you are worried too.

The financial situation in our church is worrisome, too. We have become overly dependent on our endowment, which provides more than half our operating budget. Our endowment is now dropping in value. That means the income from our endowment is dropping as well.

Forget the church, many of us are finding that our personal financial situations are worrisome! If you’re like me and much of your retirement money is invested in stocks, you have been watching your retirement savings dwindle. Hey, I still have an account in Washington Mutual — you know, that bank that almost went belly up a couple of weeks ago? — and I’m in the process of getting my money out. On top of what’s going wrong with stocks and the banks, the price of everything is going up. And for those of you who own your own home — well, we’re all expecting property values to drop.

OK. We all know what’s going on, and I don’t need to recap the news for you. What I’d like to do this morning is to talk with you about how we might respond to this crisis religiously, as Unitarian Universalists. Religion is supposed to help us make sense out of this crazy world we live in; as Unitarian Universalists, can we make sense out of the global financial crisis? Religion is also supposed to help us answer the question, “What ought I do?” — can we figure out what Unitarian Universalism is calling us to do in these times?

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I’d like to begin with our prophetic response to this crisis. Now, by “prophetic,” I don’t mean that we can see the future. I mean “prophetic” in the sense of those old Biblical prophets who went around telling everyone what’s wrong with society — the kind of prophet we heard in the first reading this morning. As Unitarian Universalists, what is our prophetic response to this financial mess?

We know that greed is one of the primary causes of this financial crisis. Let me give you an example of how we know this is true. Earlier this week, Richard Fuld had to testify before Congress. Fuld was the president of Lehman Brothers, fourth largest investment bank in the United States until they filed for bankruptcy on September 15. Fuld testified to Congress that he took home three hundred million dollars in pay and bonuses over the past eight years — that’s an average of 37.5 million dollars a year. He was quoted as testifying to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, quote “I don’t expect you to feel sorry for me.”

No, we don’t feel sorry for you, Mr. Fuld. You were greedy. Now you are sitting pretty in your designer suits while the rest of us schlumps have to deal with the mess you have left behind. It is hard to feel sorry for any of the investment bankers who made their millions before the stock market started to fall. We don’t feel sorry for them, we just call them greedy and selfish.

Greed has driven the stock market for quite some time now. But actually, greed has driven our whole society for some time now. We have been convinced that we can get something for nothing. We have all dreamed of buying a house that goes up and up in value so that when we sell it, we make out like bandits — houses have become an investment that will make us rich (we hope) rather than a place to live. Everything has become an investment. I’ve dreamed those dreams, and I’ll bet lots of you have, too. Alas, those dreams come down to greed: wanting something we don’t have, that we can obtain for no real effort.

Selfishness plays a part, too. How can someone like Richard Fuld take home three hundred million dollars and think he really deserves all that money? There’s an element of selfishness in such an attitude. Yet selfishness extends beyond the Richard Fulds of this country down to our economic level. I discovered recently that according to a recent study, less than half of all Americans give any money to charity. It gets worse — when you look at those of us who do give money to charity, most of us give very, very little money away. Indeed, most of the charitable giving in this country comes from a small minority of people who are very generous. Yet most Americans have substantial discretionary spending. Michael Durrall, a financial consultant to churches, tells us that most church members could double their charitable giving and not notice a change in their lifestyle. (Obviously, he is referring to the fifty percent of Americans who give any money at all to charity, because for the other half who give nothing, doubling zero is still zero and so obviously they would not see any change to their lifestyle if they doubled their charitable giving.)

But let’s go back to the leaders of this country — and I mean the financial leaders of this country, who may or may not be our elected leaders. Our financial leaders have set a general example of greed and selfishness that is appalling; it is time that we stop letting them lead us into greed and selfishness. One way we make sense out of this financial crisis is through prophetic response to this appalling greed that has taken over our country:– we condemn the current culture of greed and selfishness, and call for new standards of ethical financial leadership.

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We need to do that, but we also need to acknowledge our personal responses to this financial crisis. The financial situation is bad right now, and we have to make personal sense from this mess we’re in. Many of us — me included — are fearful, worried, even angry. I don’t know about you, but one of the things I’m dealing with right now is keeping my fear and worry under control. In order to keep fear and worry under control, I have been engaging in

First, I’ve been thinking in terms of living simply. “Simplify, simplify,” said Henry David Thoreau. The point of living simply is to focus on what’s of greatest importance. The latest electronic gadget is not of greatest importance. In the second reading this morning, Thich Nhat Hanh reminds me how much we take for granted. We have access to laundry machines! We have things like dish detergent, and running water! We have more than we usually remember that we have. When I can remember how much I already have, I face away from the greed that tells me that I need all the latest appliances. I don’t need those things — I suppose I could even learn to be like Thich Nhat Hanh, and wash out my clothing by hand. It might be a good way to be mindful of all I do have.

Of course, those of you who have children may have a hard time with this approach. Children have become very vulnerable to marketers, and when all their friends at school have a cell phone, or a certain video game, then they absolutely have to have one too. It is harder for people with children to practice simple living. At the same time, the real point for all of us is not to practice simple living the way Henry Thoreau did — we don’t have to go out and live by Walden Pond — rather, it will be enough to practice simpler living. We can simplify, but not to the point of giving everything up.

My second spiritual practice for these times that I am working on is the spiritual practice of giving money away. I am doing this because I know that those of us who do not risk getting put out on the street have a special responsibility to increase our charitable giving in order to support those who are more financially vulnerable than we are.

Now for some years, I have had a spiritual goal of giving away ten percent of my income (that’s pre-tax income) each year. I’ve been working on this for a while now, and in 2005 I was up to giving away eight percent of my income. That felt like a spiritual accomplishment, and it felt good. It was one of the best things I’ve done in my spiritual life — I felt more centered, and more focused on what’s truly important in life. Well, then my partner found herself with less and less work, and as our household income declined, and we kept cutting back, and one of the things I had to cut back temporarily was my charitable giving. Now I’m down to giving away five percent of my income.

But this financial crisis have strengthened my resolve to increase my charitable giving back up to eight percent, and then on to ten percent of my income. This will not be an easy goal to attain, and I’m not going to let myself feel guilty if I don’t make it to my goal as quickly as I’d like. This is not about guilt; rather, I’m suggesting that this kind of thing can be a spiritual goal for all of us. By giving away part of our income, we turn ourselves away from the predominant greed and selfishness of our society — and I will tell you from my own experience that this has the effect of reducing my own personal fear and worry.

So it is that part of my personal response to the financial crisis has been to calm my fears and worries by engaging in two personal spiritual practices that relate to the financial crisis: living more simply, and giving part of my income away. I don’t mean to imply that you need to take on either of these spiritual practices yourself. But I do want to say that each of us can find personal spiritual practices which can help to calm our fears and worries, and to strengthen the best part of our selves.

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Now I’d like to talk just a little bit about what we can do here together as a church. What might this church’s spiritual response be to this financial crisis?

I’ve already hinted at one answer, when I said that those of us who can do so should think about those who are more vulnerable than we are. So it is that here in the church we can focus our energies on what we can do to help out the surrounding community. Indeed, we are already doing this. For example, Bill Bennett, Maryellen Kenney, and Ted Schade have taken over the operation of Universal Thrift because Lorial Laughery-Weincek, who was running the thrift store, is recovering from illness and will be unable to return to volunteering for quite a while. Fill, Maryellen, and Ted knew that in times like these, our community needs that thrift store, so they stepped in. Universal Thrift provides decent clothing and housewares at very affordable prices to people who can’t afford anything else. (In fact, the thrift store accepts vouchers from social service agencies for people who really have not money whatsoever.)

Perhaps it’s time for us expand this service to the community. Maybe we can mobilize more volunteers to go out and find good cheap clothing and housewares, get them ready for sale, and then sell them for very cheap prices to people who need them. Since we already have a thrift shop in place, right now, I would judge that this is the most spiritually important work that we can do. By doing something tangible for the community, we are also engaging in a communal spiritual practice — because when we do good in the world, we are helping to strengthen the best part of our selves.

(By the way, the thrift store also happens to make money for us, because many of the people who shop in the store are not destitute, but simply want good value. Thus our thrift store represents the new concept of social innovation, where charitable organizations can make money while doing good. The money we make through the thrift store goes directly into our operating budget, which means it helps pay for heat and building maintenance. It is now our biggest fundraiser.)

The thrift shop is just one example of what we can do to set up our church so that we transform the world around us into a better place, while at the same time transforming ourselves for the better. We also send a crew once a month to help serve at the soup kitchen. In another, more personal, example, we can each be sure to bring one canned good every week for the food pantry box, so that we can continue to support the Shepherd’s Staff food pantry.

These are very tangible thing we can do, but it is equally important for us to do something far less tangible, and that is to offer our liberal religious witness to the world. We know that some of the conservative religious folks will say that the way out of the financial crisis is to trust in some Daddy God who will fix everything for us. We know that the prosperity gospel folks will be out in full force telling people that you just have to believe in their God, and you will get rich. We know that some of the most conservative religious folks will even try to tell us that the financial crisis has been brought upon us as a judgment form God because we legalized same sex marriage and abortion and women’s rights and so on. We want this church to keep its doors open, and to grow ever bigger, so that we can counteract some of the problematic religious messages that are out there.

We need to be a big strong church so we can counteract these other religious messages. We need to be a big strong voice for liberal religion so that we can tell the world:– This happened because we were stupid and no Daddy God is going to clean up after us, so we’re responsible for cleaning up our own mess. We need to tell the world:– No one is going to get rich just because they believe in the right God, and in fact let’s get away from the greed that says we should be rich. We need to be sure to tell the world:– This financial crisis did not come about because we legalized same sex marriage or gave women the vote. That means that all of us who showed up here this morning are doing exactly the right thing:– by simply showing up here on Sunday morning, we are affirming our religious values. The more of us who show up here on Sunday morning, the better we can counteract all those negative religious messages that are out there.

Finally, let us remember that church is supposed to be fun. If this financial crisis continues, we’re all going to need to have some fun. If you volunteer down at the thrift shop, it’s supposed to be fun because you get to volunteer with like-minded people. If you volunteer in the Sunday school, passing on our religious values to our children in order to help the next generation move away from greed and selfishness,– well, teaching Sunday school is supposed to be fun, because you get to play with kids, and you get to meet the other Sunday school teachers. The same is true for volunteering with any program in this church. Or you can show up for the Independent Film Series tomorrow night, and watch a great movie, and then talk about it with other thoughtful intelligent people — and having thoughtful intelligent conversations is exactly what we need to be doing right now, so we can start to figure out a new moral and ethical direction for our society. All these things are fun, and all these things are free, and all these things have a positive influence on us and one the world.

We need some positive influences in our lives right now. We need to be able to make sense out of the financial mess that’s happening around us, and we need to feel that we can do something to deal with that mess. It would be easy to let fear and worry take over our lives right now. What I have suggested is that we don’t let fear and worry take over our lives. We can offer a prophetic response, and say that greed and selfishness have contributed to the financial mess that we’re in. We can take personal spiritual action, transforming our lives, strengthening our selves so that we can better face the financial crisis. We can band together in this church, so that together our liberal religious witness can transform the world around us. By doing these things, we strengthen that which is best in ourselves.

People Are Basically Good

Reading

From Hosea Ballou’s “Treatise on Atonement,” 3rd. ed.

The origin of sin has, among Christians in general, been very easily accounted for; but in a way, I must confess, that never gave me any satisfaction, since I came to think for myself on subjects of this nature. A short chimerical story of the bard, Milton, has given perfect satisfaction to millions, representing the introduction of moral evil into the moral system which we occupy. The substance of the account is: Some time before the creation of man, the Almighty created multitudes of spiritual beings, called angels. Some of these creatures of God were much higher in dignity and authority than others, but all perfectly destitute of sin, or moral turpitude. One dignified above all the rest, stood Prime Minister of the Almighty, clothed with the highest missive power, and clad with garments of primeval light; obsequious to nothing but the high behest of his Creator, he discharged the functions of his office with promptitude and dignity, suited to the eminence of his station, and to the admiration of celestial millions. But when it pleased Jehovah to reveal the brightness of his glory and the image f the Godhead in humanity, he gave forth the command (see Psalm xcvii. 7), “Worship him, all ye gods.” And (Heb. i. 6) “and again, when he bringeth the first begotten into the world, he saith, and let all the angels of God worship him.” Lucifer, Son of the Morning (as Christians have called him), surprised at the idea of worshipping any being but God himself, looked on the Son with ineffable disdain, and in a moment grew indignant, brushed his strongest pinions, and waved his wings for the throne of God, challenged supremacy with the Almighty, and cast his eye to the sides of the north as a suitable place to establish his empire. Legions of spirits followed this chief in rebellion, and formed a dangerous party in the kingdom of the Almighty. The Son of God was invested with full power as Generalissimo of Heaven, to command the remaining forces, against the common enemy. And in short, after many grievous battles between armies of contending spirits, where life could not, in the least, be exposed, Lucifer and his party were driven out of Heaven, leaving it in peace, through in a great measure, depopulated!

God, having created the earth, and placed the first man and woman in a most happy situation of innocence and moral purity, without the smallest appetite for sin, or propensity to evil, the arch Apostate enviously looked from his fiery prison, to which he was consigned by a command of the Almighty, and beholding man placed in so happy a situation, and in a capacity to increase to infinite multitudes, by which the kingdom of Heaven would be enlarged, was determined to crop this tree in the bud. He, therefore, turns into a serpent, goes to the woman and beguiles her, gets her to eat of a fruit which god had forbidden, by which means he introduced sin into our system.

I have not been particular in this sketch, but it contains the essence of the common idea. I shall now put it under examination, looking diligently for the propriety of accounting for the origin of moral evil in this way….

Sermon

One of the most basic propositions of Unitarian Universalism is the simple statement that people are basically good. We Unitarian Universalists know perfectly well that all of us human beings have our problems, and we know perfectly well that some human beings are worse than others. But we are firmly convinced that on the whole, and taken as an average, human beings are basically good.

This is a simple conviction to state: people are basically good. This simple conviction of ours comes out of a long history of theological reflection from both our Unitarian heritage and our Universalist heritage. Let me just briefly outline something of the history of our conviction that people are basically good.

From our Unitarian heritage, we inherit the concept that people have a certain freedom of choice; that we have some measure of free will that allows us to make moral choices. And with this concept of the freedom to make moral choices, we have also inherited the concept that, if we are given the option, we human beings tend to choose what is good over what is evil. As Unitarians, we feel that if given the option, human beings will make morally good choices.

From our Universalist heritage, we inherit the concept that all human beings will be redeemed in the end. Originally, this concept came from the Universalist understanding that God is essentially good, that God is so good that God will redeem each and every human being and allow each and every human being into heaven. Those old Universalists felt that ultimately it is God who is so good that God will redeem us human beings, but at the same time they were quite sure that every human being had enough goodness so as to be capable of being redeemed. As Universalists, we feel that all human beings have goodness as a part of our constitution.

Well, these old concepts have evolved and changed over the centuries. Today, as Unitarian Universalists, we might articulate these concepts somewhat differently. Today we would be more likely to speak of “the inherent worth and dignity of every person,” we would affirm and promote “justice, equity, and compassion in human relations,” and because we trust that people are basically good we would assert that everyone should participate in governance and would therefore affirm the “use of the democratic process in our congregations and in society at large.”

That is the briefest outline of the history of our conviction that people are basically good. But of course this conviction leads to certain complications in practice. I suspect most of you would in general go along with this notion that people are basically good, yet I also suspect that each one of us here might wish to qualify this statement in various ways. We might wish to expand upon what we mean when we say that we are convinced that people are basically good. Let us therefore take some time to expand upon this simple statement.

(1) Let us begin with the notion that we can all be redeemed. This is a fine proposition to state in the abstract, but it is a challenging moral standard to live out. I’ll give you an example of what I mean.

On Sunday, July 29, just four weeks ago today, James Adkisson of Powell, Tennessee, went into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, during their weekly worship service and he opened fire with a shotgun. The children of the church were about to begin a musical production in the worship service. Adkisson killed two people and wounded six others. He left a letter at his home that morning saying he hated the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church for its liberal views, and for its support for gays and lesbians. In addition, his ex-wife, who had a restraining order out against him because of his violence, was a former member of that church, so he apparently hated the church for that, too.

Now in this example, a self-professed hater of religious liberals enters a Unitarian Universalist church during a children’s play and kills and wounds eight people with a shotgun. If the members of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church believed in original sin or if they believed in hell, they’d give up on that guy. They would have said: that Adkisson is going to straight to hell. They would have siad: See how hard it is to escape from the bonds of original sin? Adkisson is damned for all eternity. But that’s not what the poeple of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church have said.

John Bohstedt, a member of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, took issue with some of the media coverage of the recent shootings at his church. Bohstedt, a retired history professor from the University of Tennessee, sent an email message to Michael Paulson, religion correspondent at the Boston Globe, giving his viewpoint about what really happened:

“An eyewitness who was protecting her children a few feet from the gunman said it was remarkable how everyone was doing exactly what they needed to do — subduing the gunman, calling 911, tending to the victims, and evacuating the sanctuary….

“The reason I am saying all this is — Media have done much to make us a fearful people — to emphasize the danger in the world. Real life is often NOT like that, and in this case — evil was overcome efficiently by LOVE.

“I have been studying the behavior of crowds for decades, in old documents and in our University of Tennessee football stadium, and more often than not there is METHOD in the ‘madness’ of crowds — the METHOD of our Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church is organized Love.”

So said a member of the church where this shooting took place.

We Unitarian Universalists do believe in the power of love. We may not all believe in God any more, but we are pretty sure that anyone can be redeemed — or more properly, we believe people can redeem themselves if they wish to. This is like the old Universalist belief that, while we surely don’t understand how it happens, God somehow manages to redeem even hate-filled destructive persons like the killer at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church. We would say: James Adkisson is capable of redemption — with a lot of help, and acknowledging the very real possibility that we probably won’t want trust him in one of our Unitarian Universalist churches ever again.

Redemption remains mysterious to us. People whom we think are beyond redemption manage to redeem themselves; others who seem capable of redemption never manage to find redemption. But I’m pretty certain that redemption has to be something that we strive after actively. You can’t just wait passively for someone else to be redeemed, you can’t just wait passively for yourself to be redeemed. We have to encourage redemption in others, and when it is necessary we have to actively seek redemption for ourselves. The basic goodness of human beings is not a passive characteristic; it is an active process.

So you see, being convinced that people are basically good is not mere abstract belief:– this conviction forces us to seek after redemption for ourselves, and to encourage redemption in others.

(2) How else might we expand on the simple statement that people are basically good? One obvious way we do this is that we organize our church communities around our simple conviction that people are basically good. Thus our church communities are organized on the basis of trust: if people are basically good, we should be able to trust them, right? Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. I’ll give you an example of what I mean.

Back on a Sunday morning in February of 2001, the New Bedford Standard-Times ran a front-page article that included allegations that a recently retired minister of this church had engaged in [quote] “inappropriate sexual behavior towards ten women in his former congregation.” Now mind you, these were allegations, and the Standard-Times also published a statement by the recently retired minister that the allegations were not true. And so in such a situation, it may become difficult to know whom to trust — are the allegations true or false? Whom do you believe? In such a situation, it would be easy to give up on trust altogether, give up trusting the church community at all.

Let me give you a less serious violation of trust, from my own experience. A couple of decades ago, someone from the Unitarian Universalist church I was then attending called me up and asked me to volunteer for something. I asked her about it, and then said that I did not wish to volunteer. Why not? she asked. I said because I felt the program concerned involved cultural misappropriation; at which point, she raised her voice and told me in no uncertain terms that I should reconsider. She came pretty close to yelling at me. Let me tell you, it is not pleasant to have a church leader raise their voice at you, and question your integrity. It took me a year before I wanted to volunteer for anything at that church again. I mean, why stick around a church when someone treats you like that?

It is much easier to just run away from the church and stop trusting that church community. In fact, now that I think about it, it would be much easier to just accept that people are basically evil. If I could just accept that people are basically evil, then I could stop trusting anyone except a small circle of people I have decided are trustworthy. Of course, if one of those people I have decided to trust then violates that trust, then I’d really be in the soup, wouldn’t I? I wouldn’t be sure if I could trust anyone at all.

We build our church communities on trust in part because the alternative is so grim: if we’re not willing to trust our church community, then we’re left with a pretty small circle of people whom we can trust. At the same time, we are realistic about trust. We have to be realistic. Yes, people may be basically good, but people are never perfect. Anyone can do bad things to someone else. We are also quite clear that some of us are less likely to do evil things than others. Jim Adkisson, the man who shot people at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, has proven that he is more likely to do evil things than me. When we base our communities on trust, realistically we have to understand that there are some people we just cannot accept into our church communities. Thus we would say that when it comes to James Adkisson — no, he cannot come into this church!

This means we also expect certain behavioral standards of each other. If someone violates those standards, we may have to call them on it. When that woman raised her voice at me, I wish I had had the courage to say: “Hey, stop yelling at me, that’s not acceptable!” And of course, calling someone else on their behavior is not always possible: if you’re being physically or emotionally abused by someone, I’m here to tell you that you need to get away from that person; don’t waste time calling them on their behavior, just get out. Yet generally speaking, we should expect the people around us to live up to certain behavioral standards; and it is up to each one of us, and up to us as a community, to gently maintain a high level of trust in our church community.

It’s up to us to maintain a high level of trust in our church. Trust requires forgiveness. I guarantee you, nearly everyone whom you trust will violate your trust in some way, large or small. We may trust our parents, but most of us can give some example of how our parents violated our trust in some way, whether large or small. The same is true of spouses, relatives, friends,– and all of us here at church. Now again, if you’re in an abusive situation, you need to know that forgiveness need not be face-to-face;– sometimes trust has been so violated that forgiveness has to take place at a distance. But the general point here is that in order to trust anyone again, we have to forgive those who trespass on our trust. In order to continue trusting, we must reach forgiveness in the honesty of our own hearts.

So you see, being convinced that people are basically good is not mere abstract belief:– this conviction requires us to trust one another, and it requires forgiveness; and boy is it difficult to trust and to forgive!

(3) How else might we expand on the simple statement that people are basically good? Let me give you one example of how we live out this conviction of ours here in our church.

Because we are convinced that people are basically good, we are convinced that when we’re born, we are not somehow stained with evil. That’s why we do child dedications, not baptisms. (Explain how this works.)

I don’t mean to imply that children are like little angels — they’re not. They need firm guidance from us adults, and they need firm boundaries re: acceptable behavior. The opposite of goodness in human beings is often not evil, but chaos and lack of social structure. We are social animals who live within social constructs that we must maintain.

Thus, living out our belief that people are basically good requires that we train up the next generation in how to act so that we can teach them how to be good instead of chaotic. This is why I want to be in a church that has children in it: because while I am convinced that people are basically good, I know too that I have a moral responsibility to help move humanity towards increased goodness through raising children; and that responsibility is yours whether or not you have children of your own, whether or not.

Again we see that being convinced that people are basically good requires more than abstract belief: it requires the hard work of raising up the children and moving them away from chaos. This is hard work!

…

Well, when I started out, you may have thought that this was going to be one of those feel-good sermons. You may have expected me to talk about people’s essential goodness — and instead, here I mentioned mentioned murder, and clergy misconduct, and other difficult topics. On top of that, I have said that we have responsibilities:– we’re supposed to keep children from being so chaotic, and practice forgiveness, and base our church communities on trust, and encourage redemption.

After all that, original sin may start to sound very attractive! It almost seems easier to just accept that people are basically evil, tainted with something called original sin, that will prevent them from being good, dooming most people to an eternity of torment after death.

So, if you want to believe that people are basically evil, I for one will fully understand — it is the easier path — even though it involves a certain amount of self-loathing. But I’m going to remain convinced that people are basically good — even though it requires me to help move children away from being so chaotic, and practice forgiveness, and base our church in trust, and encourage redemption. Even though it requires work on my part, I’m going to stick with the proposition that people are basically good.

Memories of Things Past

Remembrances

On this day, Memorial Day, we take time to remember those who have died in the past year. We pause now to remember those from this church community who have died since Memorial Day in 2005; and we pause to remember those from our own lives who have died since Memorial Day in 2005.

In the past year, several members and friends of this congregation have died. I will read the names of members and friends of this church who died in the past year, followed by a moment of silent meditation:

Phyllis Grosswendt
Patricia Tansey
Philemon Pete Truesdale

In the past year, someone you knew may have died. If you would like, in a moment I’ll ask you to speak the name of that person, or those people, aloud; and you may say that name aloud at any time, when your heart moves you to do so, not worrying if someone else is also saying a name at the same time.

To say these names aloud is to keep alive the memory of that person. So it is that I invite you to say the name of persons you knew who have died since last May; or to sit in communal silence as any names are spoken….

We pause to remember the dead; may remembrance help to bring peace, may it help to heal. Amen.

Readings

The first reading this morning is Orphic Hymn no. 76, as translated in 1792 by Thomas Taylor. This is a hymn to Mnemosyne, the Goddess of Memory.

“The Fumigation from Frankincense.
The consort I invoke of Jove divine,
source of the holy, sweetly-speaking Nine;
Free from th’ oblivion of the fallen mind,
by whom the soul with intellect is join’d:
Reason’s increase, and thought to thee belong,
all-powerful, pleasant, vigilant, and strong:
‘Tis thine, to waken from lethargic rest
all thoughts deposited within the breast;
And nought neglecting, vigorous to excite
the mental eye from dark oblivion’s night.
Come, blessed power, thy mystic’s mem’ry wake
to holy rites, and Lethe’s fetters break.”

…

The second reading this morning is from Marcel Proust’s book Swann’s Way, as translated by Lydia Davis:

It is a waste of effort for us to try to summon [the past], all the exertions of our intelligence are useless. The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect….

…One day in winter, as I returned home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, suggested that, contrary to my habit, I have a little tea. I refused at first and then, I do not know why, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump cakes called petites madeleines that look as though they have been molded in the grooved valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, oppressed by the gloomy day and the prospect of another sad day to follow, I carried to my lips a spoonful of tea in which I had let soften a bit of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause. It had immediately rendered the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather, this essence was not merely inside me, it was me. I had ceased to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Where could it have come from — this powerful joy? I sense that it was connected to the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it went infinitely far beyond it, could not be of the same nature. Where did it come from? What did it mean? How could I grasp it? I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third that gives me a little less than the second. It is time for me to stop, the virtue of the drink seems to be diminishing. Clearly, the truth I am seeking is not in the drink, but in me….

[Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1. Trans. Lydia Davis, pp. 44-45.]

Sermon

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, a holiday originated by the African American community of Charleston, South Carolina, as a way of remembering those who had died in the Civil War fighting to end slavery. Since its origins as a holiday meant to commemorate the Union soldiers of the Civil War, the scope of Memorial Day has broadened. It is now a day on which we commemorate all those family, friends, and loved ones who have died. The central purpose of Memorial Day is captured in its name: Memorial Day is a day to remember.

So it is that Memorial Day and religion overlap. One of the central functions of religion, and of religious organizations, is to help us remember. This is true on a very broad scale — for example, one of the main purposes of the Christian religion is to keep alive the memory of Jesus of Nazareth. This is true on the local level — part of what our church, First Unitarian in New Bedford, does is to keep alive the memories of what liberal religion has accomplished in New Bedford; which is why it is important for us to celebrate our 300th anniversary this year. And this is also true at the personal level — our religion can help us to remember key moments in our lives, moments like birth and marriage; and to remember key persons in our lives who have died.

The ancient Greeks personified memory into a minor goddess, the goddess Mnemosyne; her opposite was the goddess Lethe, the goddess of forgetfulness. As we heard in the first reading this morning, Mnemosyne was supposed to link the intellect with the soul; she was the goddess of reason and thoughtfulness; it was she who could break us free from the bonds of the dark oblivion of forgetfulness. Because of her ties to reason and thoughtfulness, I think of Mnemosyne as the Greek goddess who is of perhaps greatest interest to those of us who are religious liberals today. Memory links our souls, our spiritual selves, with our intellect and our reasoning selves.

1. A dozen years ago, I was fortunate enough to meet Barbara Marshman. A lifelong Universalist, Barbara became a religious educator, an ordained minister of religious education. She was perhaps the most creative and interesting religious educator I have known, and she had a deep insight into children.

Once I went to a workshop that Barbara led, where she said that her key to success was to ask children in her Sunday schools, “What do you remember?” Unitarian Universalist Sunday schools do not require children to memorize Bible verses, nor would we count our Sunday school a success if the children memorized lots of Bible verses; nor do we have formal testing, for we don’t require children to memorize facts about religion. We want children to learn how to lead religious lives, and from a pedagogical standpoint it’s an interesting problem to figure out how to test them to see if they’ve learned what we hope for them to learn. So pedagogically speaking, when Barbara Marshman asked children what they remembered, she was testing them to see if they had learned what we hope for them to learn. But asking children what they remember is more than some kind of test.

I remember the first time I tried asking a group of children what they remembered. It was a Memorial Day weekend, and I gathered together the few children who actually came to Sunday school and sat down with them and asked them what they remembered from a year at church. Of course, I anticipated that they would tell me things they had learned in their Sunday school classes. Well, it took a little while to explain to some of the younger children what I wanted, and to remind them that the church year started in September, and when September was. Then an eight-year old girl raised her hand and said, “Do we have to talk about the things we did in Sunday school, or can we talk about anything?” Somewhat surprised, I replied, “You can talk about anything, I suppose.” And then they began to raise their hands to tell me what they remembered from church. I still vividly remember that the first child who raised her hand remembered seeing a baby get dedicated during a church service. And I also remember that less than half the children remembered something they learned during Sunday school.

Over the years, I have continued to ask children what they remember from going to church, often on Memorial Day weekend. I still some notes I took a few years ago when I asked children this question at another church. Here are some of the things those children remembered from a year at that church: they remembered singing the doxology every week during the worship service; they remembered playing card games at an intergenerational potluck dinner; they remembered acting as an usher with their parents and greeting people coming into the worship service; they remembered lighting the flaming chalice during a worship service; they remembered participating in the no-rehearsal Christmas pageant; they remembered helping to take the offering during the worship service. What strikes me about what children remember is that they have the most vivid memories of participating in worship services, and they also have vivid memories of times when they are allowed to participate with adults in various church events. In short, one of the most important things children learn at church is that they are a part of a community.

Now these children also remembered specific church school lessons as well. But I have noticed that the lessons children seem to remember best are the lessons when they are doing something together with others. When we tell them a story, they may or may not remember that story; but if we help them to act out the story together, they are far more likely to remember it. They remember games, and they remember cooperative projects that they do together. Here again, the children are learning what it means to be a part of a religious community.

Barbara Marshman said to ask children what they remember about church, and what they seem to remember best is the communal aspects of church. To be entirely honest with you, I don’t think we Unitarian Universalists are very good at getting children to learn what is popularly known as “Bible literacy,” that is, characters and stories and facts from the Bible. Nor have we been very good at getting children to know much about world religions, nor much about Unitarian Universalist history. But in the past couple of decades, I think we have been very good at teaching children how they can be a vital part of a religious community, which is a far more difficult thing to teach them — and, I think, far more important in the long run. I don’t care as much about Bible literacy as I want children to know that this church is safe community for them; I want children to know that there are lots of caring adults out there besides their parents, adults who want them to succeed in becoming wonderful human beings. Those memories will shape them, shape them in positive ways, shape them for years to come in ways we can barely imagine.

The same is true of us adults, too. Think about your own religious past; and think about how those memories have shaped you; and think about how you can shape those memories as you move forward in your spiritual journey. And then think about the times this church has provided a safe community for you; a safe place to reflect on who you are; the times when this church has been a community which supported you as you strive to become the best person you can become.

To put it another way: we become our memories. Thus one of the most important religious acts is the act of shaping our memories, such that we turn ourselves towards wholeness and becoming the best persons we can become.

2. Part of moving towards wholeness is not just remembering, but also learning how to keep our memories from taking over our lives. An obvious example of this would be the person who has suffered serious grief, the worst grief you can imagine. It would be easy to let an unbearable grief take over your life; but letting grief take over your entire life is unlikely to lead towards spiritual wholeness. This is an extreme example, but there are less extreme examples.

In the second reading this morning, we heard a charming anecdote written by Marcel Proust. Proust tells us that one day when he was an adult, his mother served him tea with a little cake called a petite madeleine; he dipped the cake into his tea and when he tasted it, something he hadn’t tasted since childhood, that taste released a whole horde of childhood memories. Tastes and smells seem to prompt old memories; you’ll taste or smell something and suddenly you’re transported back in memory to another time. For Proust, this initial memory led him to start writing a massive six-volume novel, a project that took him the rest of his life to finish. The fact that Proust lived with his parents until they died, and never really went out on his own, and spent the last years of his life in a sound-proofed bedroom, may make us view him with a little bit of alarm: yes, he was a great artist, and yes he wrote great books, but I’m not sure I would want my memories to take over my life like that.

Yet this does happen to many of us. Sometimes our memories take over our lives. I don’t think it’s a good thing to have memories take over our lives; it’s just as bad as forgetting completely. So what I’d like to do is to talk with you for a bit about grief, and how memory and grief are linked together.

What happens when someone close to us dies? If you know someone close to you — a family member, friend, or loved one — is going to die, grieving might start even before that person is dead. When someone close to you does die, most people experience numbness for about three months. Of course, everyone is different, and there are no absolute rules. But for most of us, when someone dies, you’re numb, and you don’t feel much or think much or remember much. Because they are numb, some people make the mistake of thinking the grief is over, they no longer need to remember, and they can just get on with life.

Usually, after about three months of numbness, serious grieving sets in. More than one person reports that they think they’re doing fine when suddenly they start crying for no apparent reason — it’s not uncommon to be driving by yourself in the car, when suddenly you burst into tears; for some people the crying is so violent that they have to pull over to the side of the road. However it happens, the real deep grief begins. It is a peculiar state of affairs; as I have both witnessed it and experienced it, this deep grief mixes up recent memories, often of the last month or day of the loved one’s death, and much older memories. I believe this is may be because the pain of deep grief is so intense that the memories get all jumbled up.

Most people experience at least a year of deep grief when someone close to them dies, and then another year of serious grief when the memories really start to bubble up. Thus, grieving is a time to feel sad, and it is also a time to devote oneself to remembering, a time to let memories bubble up, a time to come to terms with memories. This intensive time spent remembering can and should be a time to deal with powerful memories; which is another way of saying, it is a time to deal with our deepest selves, and to grow spiritually and emotionally.

I want to be sure to acknowledge that there are other kinds of loss besides losing someone to death:– there’s the loss of innocence, there’s the loss of self, there’s the loss that comes with the end of a relationship. Each kind of loss requires a greater or lesser amount of grief. I am told that the death of one’s child leads to the greatest grief possible; but I have also seen other kinds of loss, the loss of innocence for example, lead to debilitating grief; so I refuse to predict or judge which loss will cause how much grief. I also want to acknowledge that loss and the memories that come with loss can be unmanageable, and more often than not we have to accept help from those around us in order to deal with grief, loss, and the associated memories.

I also wish to say that I worry when people get frozen in grief, loss, or memories. Unfortunately, the wider culture prompts us to become frozen in one of two ways. On the one hand, the surrounding culture tells us that we should ignore grief. On the other hand, the dominant Christian culture that obsesses on the death and execution of Jesus while ignoring his life can prompt us to cling to death or loss while ignoring life. Neither extreme is productive; both extremes are life-denying.

Thus it seems to me that a central purpose of a religious community should be to help us cherish our memories, while making sure we don’t get frozen in the past. On the grand scale, religion should help us remember a great religious prophet like Jesus, but above all religion should help us remember the living teachings of that prophet rather than the manner of his death. On the communal scale, religion should help us remember the whole story of our religious community — in our case, all three hundred years of our story — so that we may remember how our religious community has successfully lived out our values in the world, rather than dwelling on whatever defeats we may have suffered. Finally, on the personal scale, religion and religious community can help us remember the lives and deeds of those who went before us so that we may live out the best in their lives.

3. On the personal scale, one of the most important functions of a religious community is to help us remember the dead. To remember the dead is, of course, an intensely personal act. But it is also a communal matter. When we hold memorial services in this church, what we try to do above all is to remember the person who has died — that’s why we call it a memorial service. In other religious traditions, there are different customs: thus, in the dominant religious culture of our immediate area, it seems to be very important to have the dead body present during the funeral service, and it seems to be very important to talk about abstract beliefs in God; this is because in many religions what is most important is to focus on the fact of death, and relate that fact of death to belief in God and the afterlife. This is perfectly fine, but I prefer what our religious tradition generally does, which is to focus less on the fact of death and instead focus more on how that person lived his or her life; rather than focusing on one moment of death, we try to focus on a lifetime of memories.

And we do that in a communal setting. What is most powerful to me about our memorial services are the people of the religious community that show up, often at an inconvenient time, to bear witness to the memories. So it is that those memories take on a larger significance.

What we’re really doing at a memorial service is telling the story of someone who has just died. These stories are powerful, powerful things: these stories pass on the stored memories of other people; these stories pass on the accumulated wisdom of our religious community. And this, by the way, is what we’re doing with our children in the Sunday school: we are preparing them to take their place in the religious community, to become a part of this community of memory, so that they can pass along the stories to the next generation.

A trend that I have observed I find very encouraging : and that is the trend of asking people to tell their own stories before they die — preferably long before they die! I don’t know about you, but more than once I have walked out of a memorial service thinking, I wish I had known more about that person before she or he died. So I am encouraged when I see things like small groups ministries where people can tell their stories, or spiritual autobiography classes, or times in worship services where each week someone get two or three minutes to tell their own story.

Let me end by telling you a story about a Sunday school class from another church:

There was a Sunday school class for fifth and sixth graders. Three adults signed up to teach that Sunday school class, including one retired man who had never taught Sunday school before — he told me that the main reason he signed up was that he was trying to get over the death of his wife, who had died a year previously. Well, these three adults planned everything very carefully, and took their responsibilities very seriously, and they were all prepared on the opening day of Sunday school — and only one child showed up. They came to me afterwards, and said that maybe they had better let that one boy join another Sunday school class. But we asked him, and he said he had a pretty good time, and that he would be back. But the teachers had to change all their lesson plans, for they had planned for a big class. The retired man taught the next class, and he devoted the whole class to field grass, something he cared deeply about since he had been a botanist who spent his career studying field grass — of course, what he was really talking about was himself, he was telling that boy who he was. Time went on, and I discovered that the boy’s father was suffering from a debilitating disease that took about ten or fifteen years to kill. And at the end of the church year, that boy went to Sunday school just about every Sunday, and when we asked him what he remembered best about church that year, he said — the class when we talked about grass.

So we move forward through the ages, learning from the generations that precede us, bringing up the generations that follow us.