Dan Harper | Sermons

  • 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.

  • The Weary Blues

    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 the poem “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes. This poem is not included here due to copyright restrictions.

    The second reading was the poem by Langston Hughes, titled “The Ballad Of The Landlord” This poem is not included here due to copyright restrictions.

    Sermon — “The Weary Blues”

    This is Black History Month, and in three sermons this month I proposed to speak to you about three different Black poets; more specifically, about three American poets of African descent. Last week, I spoke about James Weldon Johnson; and this week I would like to speak about Langston Hughes.

    If you were here last week, you heard me say that poets make the world; and I meant that in a broad sense of poetry, where poets make language and language makes our world. This is not some supernatural magic trick; rather it is a statement about the basic being of the universe. There is a fundamental connection between language — between what we speak and hear and write and read — a connection between language, and the very core of That Which Is.

    I want to be careful to tell you exactly what I mean by a poem. A poem is not just something that sits there on the page, and you read it, or your high school English teacher makes you read it, and that’s the end of it. A poem is language that is meant to change you, and maybe change the world around you. A few poems are meant to be looked at, like paintings, but mostly you have to say poems aloud for them to change you, or change the world around you; and if you can chant them or intone them or sing them, sometimes that increases their power.

    I’d even say that poetry and music are much the same thing; — two points on a continuum that stretches from ordinary conversation to the most abstract music. It is not always clear to me where the spoken word ends, and music begins. What is clear to me is the power of poetry, and music, to change us; more specifically, the power of poetry and music to heal us, to heal our souls, to heal our selves.

    But how does this happen? How is it that poetry heals and changes us? This is why I want to speak with you this morning about the poems of Langston Hughes. More than most poets, his poetry is musical. More than most poets, his poetry has the power to heal and change and transform. And his poetry has helped me to understand a little bit of how it is that music transforms and heals us.

    …

    Just before the sermon, I read one of Langston Hughes’s best-known poems, “The Ballad of the Landlord.” This is a poem that tells a story, which goes something like this:

    Here’s a man (or is it a woman?) who lives in a run-down old house. This house is some place in the United States, and it’s sixty or seventy years ago, and the landlord appears to me to be white. At least he acts like a white person of sixty or seventy years ago; because he has an African American tenant, he doesn’t bother fixing the roof, or fixing the broken-down steps that lead up to the front door of the old run-down house.

    The landlord has stopped by to collect the rent. The tenant reminds him about all that’s wrong with the house. The landlord doesn’t pay any attention. The tenant gets increasingly frustrated, and finally says, I’m not going to pay you any rent, and if you keep talking so high and mighty, why I’ll sock you one. But the landlord is white, and doesn’t stand for being threatened by black folk. The landlord calls the cops, who arrest the tenant. The tenant is charged and convicted of assault, and sent to jail.

    Through this whole poem, we know the landlord is in the wrong. We know that the tenant’s anger is justified, and we’re rooting for the tenant. When we get to the end of the poem, when the full force of the law is used to perpetuate injustice, we share in the anger of that tenant, and we know we have to work to correct that kind of injustice in the world. Even though this is just a made-up story, we hear the ring of truth in it — for all good poems are true; truth is what makes them good poems. We hear the ring of truth, and we hear as well a call to heal and change a world in which such injustice can exist.

    When we address injustice in the world, we are healing the world. That’s what this poem does; and that reveals to us a connection between poetry and religion, since religion is also supposed to heal the world. This is a significant point for us religious liberals, because we tend to dismiss the fact that healing is a central part of religion. Too much of religion is obsessed with faith healing, miraculous cures where some father God makes it all better without much effort on our part. We are right to dismiss such kinds of religious healing. Yet we cannot dismiss the fact that healing is central to religion. Part of the purpose of religion is to heal the world; part of the purpose of religion is to heal our souls when we are damaged by the injustice of the world.

    When I say “healing,” I don’t necessarily mean sitting there passively and waiting for some healing energy to do its work. The story of the tenant and the landlord force us to confront an ethical problem: the full power of the law and the police can be used to cause injustice. Once you start chewing over that ethical problem, it’s hard to simply sit there and enjoy the beauty of the poem. We find that the poem calls us to do something. How does this poem heal and change the world? — the poem calls us to rouse ourselves and heal the world by correcting injustice.

    …

    It is very good that poetry heals and changes the world, and I know that will help heal me in the long run, but sometimes I need some more personal healing. It’s fine and noble to say that I’m going to go out and heal the world, but sometimes life has got me down so that I don’t have the energy to do that. What then? Forget the world for a moment — how is poetry going to heal me?

    To answer that, I’d like to speak about the blues. “The Ballad of the Landlord” makes us want to heal the world, but another poem by Langston Hughes, “The Weary Blues,” describes to us how to heal our own souls.

    And what are the blues? The African American humanist theologian Anthony Pinn is one of those who has pointed out that the blues are a form of musical expression through which “enslaved Africans wrestled with existential questions forced by the absurdity of slavery.” Pinn tells us: “Through this music, they sought to make sense of the world and provide a framework for life. Within the spirituals, the manner in which traditional religious doctrine dominated this rationale for life is apparent. However,… there were other forms of musical expression that did not embrace the basic doctrine of the Christian church, or other traditional forms of religious expression.”

    Now Anthony Pinn is a theologian, which means that he is somewhat caught up in the theory. What I have found is that when you put his theory in practice, you find that the blues can be a legitimate form of religious expression; some blues songs are a kind of humanist hymn. They provide serious answers to religious and existential questions. When you’re singing the blues, if you have trouble in mind, you don’t call on God to solve all your troubles — you laugh to keep from crying; you go down by the riverside and rock those blues away; and you know that somehow the sun’s gonna shine on you someday — these are humanist hymns because you don’t call on God to fix your problems for you. In the poem “The Weary Blues,” there is no God who comes down to solve the problems of the unnamed musician who is singing and playing the piano; there is no God to come and take away the pain of living. The musician plays and sings, and that heals him, a little. He is not completely healed; but at least he can sleep that night. So it is that the blues have a healing power.

    None of this rules out traditional religious music as healing music. Traditional religious music that calls on God can heal the soul, too. But sometimes religious music pretends to heal, when it really doesn’t heal. Religious music, and religion itself, pretends to heal when it merely distracts us with God and deadens us to the pain and anguish we experience in the here and now; and by deadening us, the pain appears to go away, but we don’t actually heal. The same is sometimes true of the blues: sometimes the blues pretend to heal us, but instead distract us with a catchy melody and a danceable beat, serving merely to deaden us to the pain we’re in.

    When the pain we feel is deadened, but nothing else happens, that is false healing. Rather than deadening pain, the blues give us enough distance so that we can feel the pain without becoming overwhelmed by it; herein lies the power of the blues. The music and the poetry of the words channel the pain into something constructive rather than destructive. True healing allows us to regain strength and wholeness. The poetry of the blues allows us to regain strength and wholeness: it is musical poetry that has the power to heal us and change us.

    Of course that is also the purpose of these Sunday morning worship services. We come here to be healed, we come here to feel we can be made whole. And how do we do this? We do this with words and with poetry and with musical poetry. We have conversations together; we listen to the spoken word; we listen to poetry and scripture that is read aloud; we sing songs together. You may have a conversation on a Sunday morning after church where someone says something to you that somehow changes you for the better; just a small thing, just a small change for the better; but that small change may do more to heal you than all the sermon and poetry and songs during the worship service; and in that sense, that conversation is a kind of poetry (for you, at that time). I have never heard a sermon that is poetry the way Langston Hughes writes poetry, but I have heard sermons that in a specific time and place healed my soul, and for that moment there were better poetry than anything Hughes ever wrote.

    Poetry has power in it; it has the power to heal us. What we try to do here on Sunday morning is kind of poetry. We create a time and a place where words and poetry and music can heal and change us. We get through the pain of living, we get through the anger at injustice, and in doing so we aim to hold onto our dreams.

    …

    We aim to hold on to our dreams. It’s not a good idea to defer dreams for too long, because deferred dreams can turn into anger — and once you get mired in anger and pain, you wind up deferring your dreams. There’s an awful lot of pain and anger that comes with living. When you think of all the injustice that exists in the world, how can we possibly get rid of all the anger? When sadness enters our souls, how can we possibly get rid of all the pain? I don’t think it’s possible to get rid of all the anger and pain — the world is too full of anger and pain — but we can be sure the anger and pain doesn’t hold us down.

    So it is that healing from pain and anger requires us to hold onto our dreams. We have to get through the pain that life can bring; that doesn’t mean we have to get rid of pain, we just have to get through it. We have to get through the anger; that doesn’t mean we have to get rid of it, we just have to get through it.

    Langston Hughes wrote a poem called “Dream-Dust” that goes like this:
      Gather out of star-dust
        Earth-dust,
        Cloud-dust,
        Storm-dust,
      And splinters of hail
      One handful of dream-dust
        Not for sale.

    Poetry collects from life the earth-dust, the cloud-dust, the storm-dust, the splinters of hail, and distills these elements of life into dream-dust. In this way, poetry helps us hold onto our dreams.

    If you come to church regularly, you have heard me say that religious scriptures are a kind of poetry; religious scriptures at their best distill the elements of life and make dreams out of them. Holding on to dreams is one of the things we do in our religious communities; it’s one of the things we try to do here each Sunday. We collect the elements of life — the joys and sorrows, the pain and the joy — and we take an hour or so each week to distill dreams out of our lives. Some of the dreams are personal — your dreams, my dreams. Some of the dreams belong to us all, like the dream of an earth made fair and all her people one. Our religious community is based on poetry, both the poetry of ancient religious scriptures and contemporary poetry like that of Langston Hughes. We come here to hold onto dreams, keeping them safe until they can become reality.

    All too often our dreams get deferred. For African Americans, the dream of true equality has been deferred too long; indeed, for too many racial and ethnic minorities, the dream of equality has been deferred for too long. Sometimes the world around us seems to conspire to keep our dreams from becoming a reality. When that happens, we have to do something that allows us to hold on to our dreams. Like that old dream of earth made fair and all her people one — we have been dreaming that dream from more than two thousand years, and while sometimes we seem to make some progress towards it, that dream has not yet become our reality. Yet we keep that dream bright and untarnished. So it is that poetry, and communities founded on poetry, helps us to hold on to our dreams.

    …

    How is it that poetry heals and changes us? Poetry heals us and changes us by calling to rouse ourselves and go out and heal the world by correcting injustice. Poetry heals us and changes us by allowing us to get through the pain of living, to get through the anger at injustice. Poetry heals us and changes us by helping us to hold onto our dreams, and keep them bright and untarnished. Communities that are founded on poetry, like our church community, do the same thing: in communities like this one, we are healed and changed by healing the world; we are healed by having a place to deal with personal pain and heartache; we are healed and changed by the dreams that we hold together.

    And when we are healed and changed, we might just find that we have renewed strength to go out and help to heal the world.