Dan Harper | Sermons

  • African Wisdom

    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.

    The first reading is from Cornel West’s 2004 book Democracy Matters. West is professor of religion at Princeton University. In the chapter titled “The Crisis of Christian Identity in America,” West writes:

    “The religious threats to democratic practices abroad are much easier to talk about that those at home. Just as demagogic and antidemocratic fundamentalisms have gained too much prominence in both Israel and the Islamic world, so too has a fundamentalist strain of Christianity gained far too much power in our political system, and in the hearts and minds of citizens. This Christian fundamentalism is exercising and undue influence over our government policies, both in the Middle East crisis and in the domestic sphere, and is violating fundamental principles enshrined in the Constitution; it is also providing support and ‘cover’ for the imperialist aims of empire. The three dogmas that are leading to the imperial devouring of democracy in America — free-market fundamentalism, aggressive militarism, and escalating authoritarianism — are often justified by the religious rhetoric of this Christian fundamentalism. And perhaps most ironically — and sadly — this fundamentalism is subverting the most profound, seminal teachings of Christianity, those being that we should live with humility, love our neighbors, and do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Therefore, even as we turn a critical eye on the fundamentalisms at play in the Middle East, the genuine and democratic Christians among us must unite in opposition to this hypocritical, antidemocratic fundamentalism at home. The battle for the soul of American democracy is, in large part, a battle for the soul of American Christianity, because the dominant forms of Christian fundamentalism are a threat to the tolerance and openness necessary for sustaining any democracy. Yet the best of American Christianity has contributed greatly to preserving and expanding American democracy. The basic distinction between Constantinian Christianity and prophetic Christianity is crucial for the future of American democracy….”

    [pp.]

    The second reading is from a speech titled “Protect Human Rights, Protect Planetary Rights,” which was given by Wangari Maathai at the initial meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council, in Geneva, Switzerland on June 19, 2006. Ms. Maathai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her work in protecting the environment in Kenya. In her speech, Ms. Maathai said in part:

    “The Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 was… historic because it emphasized, for the first time, the need for the world: to rethink peace and security vis-à-vis the environment, to recognize the close linkage between sustainable management of resources, good governance and peace.

    “You will remember that some people wondered aloud, ‘What is the relationship between peace and trees or peace and the environment?’ That was the challenge! To reflect and discover the linkage between our ability to maintain peace, respect for human rights, and the way we govern ourselves and manage our limited resources. Unless we understood this linkage, we would continue to deal with symptoms of war and conflicts. Yet the root cause of most conflicts is the desire to access and control the limited resources on our planet earth. We find many justifications for our actions because we are not willing to say upfront what drives our willingness to violate the rights of other human beings. We often argue that our actions are for the good of our victims. We know better what is good for them. Sometimes we many even claim that the divine have been in touch with us and has entrusted us with the power to decide the destiny of others.

    “Therefore, to pre-empt conflict we must consciously and deliberately manage resources more sustainably, responsibly and accountably. We also need to share these resources more equitably both at the national level and at the global level. The only way we can do so is if we practise good governance.”

    Sermon

    Originally, I had planned to preach a sermon titled “African Souls” this Sunday. I decided to preach a political sermon instead. No, I’m not going to endorse a presidential candidate; the Board of Trustees would prefer that I don’t endanger the tax-exempt status of our congregation. Rather, I’m going to preach about the absence of morals and religious values in American politics — that is, the absence of morals and religious values with which I feel comfortable — and I’m going to suggest that we might turn to some overlooked sources to find morals and religious values that we religious liberals could inject into American political life.

    To begin with, let me see if I can be more precise about this absence of morals and religious values in American politics. Many politicians do talk about morals and religious values, and they often couch this talk in terms of moderate or conservative Christianity. However, they typically seem to profess the curious form of Christianity known as “prosperity Christianity,” whose adherents seriously believe that “God desires Christians to be prosperous” [Partridge 2004, 91]; many of our politicians seem to seriously believe that the mark of a good Christian is being rich, whereas it’s a moral failure to be poor or even middle-class. I’m not making this up, as Dave Barry is wont to say: prosperity Christianity really does exist, and scholars tell us that in liberal, free-market economies, the prosperity gospel actually promotes church growth.

    But for someone like me, the accumulation of money and wealth, while pleasant enough, does not tell me much about the ultimate meaning of life; nor does it represent an adequate moral framework. If our only purpose in life is to accumulate wealth and protect free-market economics, then I would say that we Americans no longer seem to have a larger purpose in life; our only purpose is to get lots of money. We see this tendency in our politicians: it is a commonplace to say that American politicians are beholden to the moneyed interests that elected them, which is another way of saying they really don’t believe in anything at all, except money.

    Of course this is an age-old problem, arising from an age-old question: Do we hold ourselves to some sort of higher value system, or is the only true value political expediency? In the Western religious tradition of which we are a part, this problem goes back at least to the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who converted to Christianity, and who incorporated Christianity into the political life of the Roman Empire by watering down its more radical teachings. As Cornel West says, “The Roman emperor Constantine’s incorporation of Christianity within the empire gave Christianity legitimacy and respectability but robbed it of the prophetic fervor of Jesus.” [West 2004, 147] The early prophetic Christians had striven towards the timeless values of living in humility, loving your neighbor, and doing to others as you would have them do to you; whereas Constantinian Christians were willing to compromise these values in order to gain political power and protection. This tension exists as well among religious folk who aren’t Christians: do you take a prophetic stance and declare your deepest values despite the inevitable political cost of doing so? — or do you find political expediency more important than clinging mindlessly to certain values? — or is there some middle ground between these extremes?

    I take this question very seriously. How do we balance our highest moral and religious values with political expediency? Sadly, I find that the mainstream political writers in this country do not help me answer this question as a religious person — because in today’s United States, most of the religious folk who write about politics are either political conservatives who are also conservative Christians (you know who they are); or politically liberals who are moderate-to-conservative Christians (people like Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine); but neither group offers me much religious inspiration. Thus I find myself looking outside the American political mainstream for inspiration. And, appropriately enough for Black History month, recently I have been most inspired by contemporary Africans and people of African descent. So in order to explore this question of how we balance our moral and religious values with political expediency, I’m going to tell you three stories of Black history — not Black history from decades ago, but Black history being made right now.

     

    I’d like to begin with Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan citizen who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. Wangari Maathai is a truly remarkable woman on many counts. She was the first woman in East and Central Africa to receive a doctoral degree; after receiving her master’s degree at the University of Pittsburgh in the United States, in 1971 she was awarded a Ph.D. in biology by the University College of Nairobi. She worked as a professor of veterinary anatomy at the University of Nairobi for many years. She was elected to the Parliament of Kenya, and served as Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources from 2003 to 2007.

    But the most remarkable thing that Wangari Maathai did was to found an organization called the Green Belt Movement back in 1977. Dr. Maathai became aware that the countryside of Kenya was undergoing significant environmental degradation [Maathai 2006, 121]. Being a trained scientist, she couldn’t help wondering about the causes of these changes in the environment: what had lead to this deforestation, devegetation, and unsustainable agriculture that she observed? She decided that part of the problem lay in practices imported by the European powers who colonized Africa. She said,

    “Many aspects of the cultures of our ancestors had protected Kenya’s environment. Before the Europeans arrived, the peoples of Kenya did not look at trees and see timber, or at elephants and see commercial ivory stock, or at cheetahs and see beautiful skins for sale. But when Kenya was colonized and we encountered Europeans, with their knowledge, technology, understanding, religion, and culture — all of it new — we converted our values into a cash economy like theirs. Everything was now perceived as having a monetary value. As we were to learn, if you can sell it, you can forget about protecting it.” [Maathai, Unbowed: A Memoir, (New York: Knopf, 2006), p. 175]

    Thus, Dr. Maathai began to question the free market values. Using free market values, what is most important is whether or not you can sell something: if you can, it has value, but its value lies in how much money you can get for it. However, she saw this was a questionable kind of moral value scheme.

    In one of the most famous incidents from her career as a social activist, in 1989 she became aware that the government of Kenya was preparing to sell off Nairobi’s Uhuru Park. Remember that in 1989, the government of Kenya was a one-party state run by the corrupt political regime of President Daniel Arap Moi. Dr. Maathai already knew that this corrupt regime did things like clear-cutting forests that were supposed to be protected. But the proposed destruction of Uhuru Park was too blatant to be dismissed: President Moi was going to illegally turn over the land of this national park to some of his close business associates so that they could build a 60-story skyscraper that was of questionable economic benefit to anyone. So Dr. Maathai notified the press, wrote letters to the international community, and generally stirred up questions about the proposed development. The government slandered her, calling her a “wayward” woman. But Dr. Maathai persevered, and continued to make efforts to work with the government to resolve the problem. In the end, she won her point: the government decided to abandon their plans to develop Uhuru Park.

    In this story of Uhuru Park, we can see how Dr. Maathai made connections between democratic principles, sustainability and environmentalism, and larger moral issues. She made it clear that democratic principles require openness and transparency in all government dealings; she held the government to the highest standards of fair governance. She made it clear it was not acceptable to destroy a park in the middle of Nairobi just so that some people could profit under free-market principles. She was able to show the women of Kenya that a woman could have power and influence; indeed, within a decade, Dr. Maathai herself had been elected a member of Parliament.

    Over the course of her career, Dr. Maathai has consistently stood up for her highest moral values. She is a Christian, the kind of Christian who takes seriously the Christian teaching that we must consider the plight of poor and powerless persons. She acts on behalf of such people as a matter of moral principle. Her deep moral values allow her to see the essential connections between women’s rights, democracy, environmental activism, and sustainable practices. But she is also willing to work with the government — even to work within the government as a member of Parliament — in order to further her highest moral goals.

    We Americans often feel that we ought to be helping out those backward Africans; but here is an example of how we might learn a great deal from an African woman who is more advanced than we are: we can learn from Wangari Maathai’s ability to use morality and ultimate meaning to transform the world around her, creating a sustainable and democratic society.

     

    We don’t have to travel as far as Kenya, however, to find Black history in the making. Dr. Cornel West, a brilliant philosopher who happens to be of African descent, is another person making history now. He has been inspiring me to think in new ways about morality and religious values in a free market world, and about how to balance my religious values with political expediency.

    I have long been interested in Cornel West as a thinker. My undergraduate degree is in philosophy, so I first learned about Dr. West through his work on American pragmatism, particularly his 1989 book The American Evasion of Philosophy.

    But I got interested in Cornel West as a person back in 2001. At that time, Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, reportedly chastised Cornel West for doing things like recording a rap CD and working on political campaigns. Summers apparently thought West should focus on publishing scholarly books; but West said he thought Summers was just being disrespectful. So West left Harvard for Princeton; and I have to say, I don’t blame him. I don’t like this idea that we have to distinguish between scholarly intellectual activity on the one hand, from popular and political action on the other hand. That’s an artificial distinction, akin to the artificial distinction that says religion should not try to change the world.

    In any case, when his book titled Democracy Matters was published in 2004, I bought it immediately. I wanted to hear what this topnotch thinker, and interesting person, had to say about the current state of American democracy.

    Dr. West says that the greatest threats to American democracy “come in the form of… three dominating, antidemocratic dogmas.” As a Unitarian Universalist who hates dogma in any shape or form, that helps me to understand what I find so frustrating about American politics today:– American politics is dominated by dogmas, that is, by beliefs that are taken on faith alone and which cannot be questioned in public without risking censure from those in authority.

    Dr. West names those three dogmas: free-market fundamentalism; aggressive militarism; and escalating authoritarianism. As a religious liberal, I found myself nodding in agreement. Yes, our obsession with free-market economics is a kind of fundamentalism, something we are supposed to believe in literally and without question, just like fundamentalist religion. Yes, our militarism goes far beyond the idea of loving our neighbors. Yes, I do see escalating authoritarianism in the United States, and it reminds me of fundamentalist religions which demand unquestioning obedience.

    In short, Dr. West makes the case that a certain kind of fundamentalist Christianity is dominating American culture, forcing us to think and act as if we are fundamentalists ourselves. For example, when it comes to free-market economics, we are supposed to either accept the concept without question, or reject it completely and be branded as a “pinko” heretic — thus effectively stifling any possible religious objections to free-market principles. No wonder I have been feeling so alienated from the American political scene — as a religious liberal, I am anti-dogmatic and anti-authoritarian, and so I simply cannot feel comfortable in an American political scene that has been shaped in the image of fundamentalist Christianity.

    From his liberal Christian perspective, Dr. West puts it this way: “The battle for the soul of American democracy is, in large part, a battle for the soul of American Christianity, because the dominant forms of Christian fundamentalism are a threat to the tolerance and openness necessary for sustaining any democracy.” I took that statement to heart, and that is one of the reasons I now preach on the Bible so often. The fundamentalists have so much power in our country that they have taken the Bible, a book that is all about how we are supposed to take care of our neighbors and help the poor and oppressed; they have taken the Bible and turned it into an excuse for ignoring the poor, oppressing women, and invading foreign countries. As Cornel West might say, rather than putting religion in service of authoritarianism, it’s time for us to reclaim the prophetic function of religion.

     

    I have one more example of Black history in the making, but this example is very short, because it is so new. Back in 2004, a group of students at Makerere Univeristy in Mampala, Uganda, started small Unitarian Universalist congregation. I have been told that they found out about Unitarian Universalism via the World Wide Web, although I have been able to find very little in the way of solid information about this congregation.

    This small group of students kept meeting, and they have grown until now, four years later, they have 150 members in Kampala, and another 50 members in another region outside the city. Their Web site says that they are mostly English-speaking, that they dress casually, and that their worship services are lively. And, in a statement that reminds me of our own congregation, they say that they welcome all people, no matter what age, sex, culture, or skin color. That’s about all I can tell you about the Unitarian Universalists in Uganda, except to add that a central focus of their congregations is an AIDS outreach program. Small as they are, they have begun an ambitious program to support children with AIDS, and children who are AIDS orphans.

    I am very curious about this four-year-old congregation. How did they grow from nothing to 200 members in two congregations in just four years? This is an especially remarkable achievement given the general religious climate in Uganda is quite conservative — the fastest-growing religious groups are Pentecostals, evangelical mega-churches spouting prosperity gospel, and the like. How has this group of Unitarian Universalists grown as fast as they have? I suspect part of their secret for success is that they reject the idea of a free-market prosperity gospel:– they know you don’t go to church to learn how to become rich, you go to church to live out the timeless values of living in humility, loving your neighbor, and doing to others as you would have them do to you. Expediency is less important to them than actually living out their deepest values.

     

    As I watch the Democrats and the Republicans during the presidential primaries, I am really unsure that either party is going to be able to put political expediency in service of their highest moral values; I worry that they will,, as usual, sacrifice their values to political expediency. So I turn elsewhere for inspiration on how to live out my own values inn the real world — I turn to people like Wangari Maathai, Cornel West, and the Ugandan Unitarian Universalists. These three examples of Black history in the making; these three examples of Africans and African Americans living out their values in the world; these are three examples are inspiring me as I try to live out my moral and religious values in the real world.

  • Singing for Freedom

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading is by Bernice Johnson Reagon, scholar, composer, and singer in the a capella group Sweet Honey in the Rock:

    “I have had singing in my life since I was a young child. However, my experience with the performance of music form a formal concert stage came by way of the Civil Rights Movement and a group called the SNCC Freedom Singers. We were a group of a capella singers, but we were first field secretaries for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the organization of the Movement formed by student leaders who left their campuses to work full-time against racial injustice in the United States. The Freedom Singers… began to travel throughout the country singing freedom songs to anybody who would listen. Being a fighter for freedom in the Movement meant that our stages were wherever we were, and the songs were a way of coming together, holding each other and proclaiming our determination as citizens to fight racism in this land of our birth. The Freedom Singers sang in concert halls, schools, living rooms, clubs, folk festivals, in elementary, junior, and senior high schools, in colleges and universities. As a group, our concerts were often a way of introducing and connecting people who wanted to find ways to be a part of the Movement, to the culture and energy of activism taking place….

    “As a singing participant in the Movement, I began to notice how well the old songs we knew fit our current situation. Many of the freedom songs we sang we had learned as spirituals, sacred songs created by slaves. Our struggle against racism often found us reaching for connections with those who had during the nineteenth century fought to end slavery in this country….”

    [If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me: The African American Sacred Song TraditionUniversity of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. 100, 104]

    The second reading is from the book Sing and Shine On: A Teacher’s Guide to Multicultural Song-leading by Nick Page. Nick is a composer, conductor, and teacher who is a Unitarian Universalist who grew up in our church in Lexington, Massachuestts. Nick writes:

    “An interdependent system is one in which every action affects every other action. A forest fire in Brazil affects the weather in Moscow by creating huge dust clouds that eventually float over Russia. Every element in an ecosystem depends on every other element, even the so-called nonliving elements such as minerals, oxygen, and sunlight. Yes, light is an integral element of all life. The sun is food for many of earth’s life forms. Physicists speak of photons of light as being interchangeable. When the light from an object hits a person, only some of it bounces off. Most of the photons are absorbed in the person. Its energy becomes that person’s energy. This is how incredible interdependence is — everything is constantly becoming everything else — as when you spend a lot of time in a forest or at a beach. More than memory remains with you after you have left.

    “After a powerful singing celebration, I leave with the power of the event still with me. The sense of harmony and connectedness remains. This feeling of being connected to everything is an incredible feeling — truly transcending. We walk in beauty, in harmony with the world around us.

    “The meanings of the survival of the fittest do not work in the context of an interdependent system. A herd of caribou, for example, survive by caring for each other, protecting each other from harm. And yes, the wolf survives by attacking the caribou, but the wolf attacks the weakest member of the herd, thus enduring the strength of the herd as a whole. The survival instinct is universal. Competition and cooperation are both parts of this instinct.

    “When we sing together, our cooperation and interdependence become the perfect analogy for the interdependence and cooperation within nature….

    “Although we humans claim that it is independence from each other that we crave, we truly cannot live without each other or other forms of living things. All life is interdependent with all other life. We have many kinds of bacteria that live inside our bodies. Without them, we could not digest our food. The bacteria are not separate guests inside us — they are part of us, what biologists call host/parasite relationships. We aren’t as independent as we think. This also applies to our place in both our cultures and the natural world. We are very interdependent creatures.”

    Sermon

    Why is singing so important to our religion? In a one hour worship service, we sing together four times, totaling perhaps ten minutes of singing; in other words, approximately one sixth of each worship service is devoted to singing together. Why do we devote so much of our worship service to singing? In a traditionally Christian church, we would sing together in order to glorify God; however, in a Unitarian Universalist congregation, some of us do not believe in God, others of us may believe in some form of God or divinity but don’t see that singing to that God or divinity is necessary, and of course there are those who do sing hymns in order to glorify God or the divine; but we have no consensus, so we can’t say that we all sing to glorify God because that would not be a true statement for all of us. So why do we Unitarian Universalists sing in church? It seems to me that we sing together for the purpose of transforming ourselves and transforming the world.

    About a year ago, I read Bernice Johnson Reagon’s book, If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me. Now Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon is someone for whom I have the deepest respect. I first came to know her as a singer and the founder of the a capella singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and I have respect for her fantastic voice and musicianship. But Dr. Reagon is also a scholar, and I respect her scholarship into African American music and folk traditions, and her work in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, and the fact that she has been awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant. She is also a social activist, who first became active in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and has never stopped fighting for social and racial justice — I believe I first heard her singing live at a 1978 rally in Washington, D.C., for the ill-fated effort of putting women’s rights in the U.S. constitution. So anyway, Bernice Johnson Reagon is one of my heroines.

    Thus I was particularly struck by one thing in particular that she wrote in her book If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me. She said: “As a singing participant in the [Civil Rights] Movement, I began to notice how well the old songs we knew fit our current situation. Many of the freedom songs we sang we had learned as spirituals, sacred songs created by slaves. Our struggle against racism often found us reaching for connections with those who had during the nineteenth century fought to end slavery in this country.” When Bernice Johnson Reagon and other members of the Civil Rights Movement needed songs to lift them up during the long hard fight for civil rights, they were able to draw on their vast repertoire of spirituals, that is of sacred music that they learned in church.

    Although I have been hanging around Unitarian Universalist churches all my life, I can’t say that I have such a vast repertoire of sacred songs to draw upon; but then, I don’t have a particularly good memory for music; I’d say I know less than a dozen songs from our hymnal by heart all the way through, if you don’t count the Christmas carols. However, most of the hymns that I do know all the way through tend to be the songs that are related to social justice and transforming the world. I know Holly Near’s “We Are a Gentle Angry People” by heart because years ago I sang it at pro-choice rallies. I know “We Shall Overcome” because when I was a child we had that song on Pete Seeger’s album of songs from the Civil Rights Movement, which we played over and over and over again. Of course I know “This Little Light of Mine,” which I probably learned in my Unitarian Universalist Sunday school, but which I know by heart because I have sung it at events like last year’s Christian Peace Witness for Iraq.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing is true of many of you. Unitarian Universalists tend to be politically active, so even if you are new to Unitarian Universalism, chances are pretty good that you have run into such songs as “Gonna Lay Down My Sword and Shield,” a staple in the American peace movement, or “We Are a Gentle Angry People,” well-known at gay pride events, or “Lift Up Every Voice and Sing,” the African American national anthem, or “Step By Step the Longest March,” an old union song — and each of these songs is also in our gray hymnal. Singing songs like these is inherently a religious act, because it can help us to transcend our narrow selves and experience deep interconnection with other people and the entire universe. And singing has the power to help transform the world for the better, which is also an essentially religious act — at least, in my understanding of what religion is, or should be.

    But this may not be entirely obvious as yet. So let me give you three examples of how singing can be transformative.

     

    Let us begin with the most dramatic example of all: the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, which has been called the “singingest movement ever.” And I’d like to give you a very specific example of how singing empowered people, how singing allowed people to draw strength from one another.

    Candie Anderson was one of the people who got arrested during the sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee, in February of 1960 — forty-eight years ago this month. She was an exchange student at Fisk University, a white student at a black university. The African Americans of Nashville had already begun to push at the segregationist policies and laws, and by the end of 1959, students were being trained in how to do direct non-violent protest. Then on February 1, 1960, off in Greensboro, North Carolina, four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College sat down at that segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter, asked to be served, and got national press coverage. Their action galvanized the students in Nashville. On February 13, the Nashville students staged their first large-scale sit-ins, and they kept at it all month long.

    Candie Anderson, that young white exchange student at Fisk University, wasn’t sure at first what she should do. She asked herself: “The biggest question for me was the rather lonely one of what can a white student do? What would my presence at the lunch-counter mean? Would I alienate and enrage the community to a greater extent than the Negro students? Or would it whos that this is more than a Negro problem? I didn’t know….” She decided that she was going to stand in solidarity with her black friends and fellow students, and she, too, participated in the sit-ins.

    By February 27, the white segregationists started to fight back. When the students from Fisk and other area colleges staged a sit-in, this time they were met with violence, and more than eighty students were arrested. Candie Anderson and a few of the other white students who were participating in the sit-ins also were arrested — but when they got to the prison, she had a shock awaiting her. Here’s what she wrote about it:

    “We were crammed into a narrow hallway to await booking and I studied the faces around me. Many were calm and serious, some were relaxed… a few were really frightened. But there was a unity — a closeness beyond proximity. It was a shock then to be suddenly removed from this large coherent group and thrust into a lonely cell with only one other girl, the only other white female. We protested and inquired why we could not join the large group of Negro girls across the hall. The entire jail was segregated…. The contact which became more real then was vocal. Never have I heard such singing. Spirituals, pop tunes, hymns, and even old slurpy love songs all became so powerful. The men sang to the women and the girls and the girls down the hall answered them. They shouted over to us to make sure we were joining in…. We sang a good part of our eight hour confinement that first time. The city policemen seemed to enjoy the singing….” [Sing for Freedom, Guy and Candie Carawan, p. 22.]

    This is part of what Bernice Johnson Reagon means when she says, “the songs were a way of coming together, holding each other and proclaiming our determination as citizens to fight racism in this land of our birth.” Songs have the power to draw people together, to unify them in an expression of truth and beauty. Songs help us express our deepest commitments in a way that can make them understandable even by those who oppose us: Candie Anderson wrote that on the date of the first trials in Nashville, as the students were going into the courthouse, she saw something remarkable. She wrote: “I looked out at the curb where the police were patrolling, and caught one big burly cop leaning back against his car, singing away [about] “Civil Rights”… He saw me watching him, stopped abruptly, turned, and walked to the other side of the car.” [Ibid., p. 24] So wrote Candie Anderson. And this is precisely what the poet William Congreave meant when he said, “Music has charms to soothe the savage breast,/ To soften rocks, or to bend a Knotted Oak.”

     

    Let me give you another example of how songs transformed the world. This story takes place in central Europe after the First World War, when the Czech and Slovak people were finally allowed to form the new country of Czechoslovakia, after having been dominated by the Austrian Empire for centuries. The Austrians had imposed Roman Catholicism on the Czechs and the Slovaks, but as soon as Czechoslovakia was liberated from Austrian domination, the citizens of this new country began to form their own churches.

    Norbert and Maja Capek were two Czech people who had fled their homeland because of the Austrians. They had both become Unitarians while in the United States. When Czechoslovakina independence came, Norbert and Maja Capek returned to their new country, and they started a Unitarian church, because they felt that the principles of religious freedom inherent in Unitarianism were perfect for their new country. So they started a Unitarian church in Prague, and in fifteen years it became the largest Unitarian church in the world.

    One of the difficulties they faced in starting their own church was what songs they should sing. The old songs from the Catholic tradition came with memories of political domination; they needed new songs for their new religion. So Norbert began writing songs for his church; he wrote hundreds of songs; and some of his songs became so popular that they entered into the folk music of the land, and they are still sung today in the Czech Republic.

    When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the Capeks decided that Maja would leave for the United States, where she could raise money for relief efforts; so she came here, and as it happens she wound up living the New Bedford, and became the minister of the old North Unitarian church in our city. Norbert stayed in Czechoslovakia, and he was quickly imprisoned by the Nazis. At first, he was held in Dresden prison; and while he was there, to keep up his spirits, and the spirits of the others whom the Nazis had imprisoned, he wrote songs. Let me read you an English translation of one of the songs he wrote in Dresden prison:

    “In the depth of my soul
    There where lies the source of strength
    Where the divine and the human meet,
    There, quiet your mind, quiet, quiet.
    Outside let lightning reign,
    Horrible darkness frighten the world.
    But from the depths of your own soul
    From that silence will rise again
    God’s flower.
    Return to your self,
    Rest in your self,
    Live in the depths of your soul
    Where the divine and the human meet….
    There is your refuge.”

    I would like to tell you that Norbert Capek’s songs gained his release from prison, but such is not the case: he died in Dachau prison camp in 1942. This is a story that does not have a happy ending. But while his songs did not gain his release from prison, I feel sure that they did gain him some measure of inner freedom, inner comfort and peace. And the songs that he wrote over the course of his life did leave a lasting legacy: his songs transformed individuals, and his songs helped to transform a national culture.

    This is a remarkable thing: that a song, something completely insubstantial and evanescent, can change people

    In the second reading this morning, we heard one possible explanation of why this is so. In the second reading, Nick Page, a singer, choral director, and composer, tells us that we are all interconnected, and we are interconnected with the entire earth. Nick tells us that while he is singing with other people, he gets a deep feeling of that interconnectedness, and that even afterwards (he says): “The sense of harmony and connectedness remains. This feeling of being connected to everything is an incredible feeling — truly transcending. We walk in beauty, in harmony with the world around us.”

    So says Nick Page, and I think he’s right. Nick talks about how singing can literally transform us at a biological level. For a very crude example, I would point out that one reason we sing a song right before the sermon is so that we can all stand up and get some oxygen into our lungs, which means it is less likely that any of us will fall asleep during the sermon. There are also physical phenomena in singing that physically affect our biological beings. Additionally, songs help us to encounter the beauty and mystery of this world, songs can open to us the wonder of the universe. The act of singing transforms us physically, biologically, emotionally, and spiritually.

     

    Singing transforms us, but singing may be an endangered species. Rather than sing yourself, it’s so much easier to sit back and check out music videos on YouTube, or plug into your iPod’s earphones. And if you do sing yourself, you don’t have to sing directly to other people: you can go off by yourself and record your singing, or you can sing through a microphone; both of which are fine things to do, but what is lost in those cases is the direct contact between singers, or between a singer and an audience. Part of the sacred beauty of singing arises when you hear it directly, unmediated by any electronics; because even the best electronics attenuate the highest overtones, even the best electronics change the music subtly so that it doesn’t have the same physical and emotional effect on us. If you’re a listener, much of music’s power comes from being face-to-face with the musician, and a live performance that is technically flawed but where you connect directly with another person is far more powerful than any recording, or any amplification can be.

    I’ll give you an example of what I mean: Sometimes when I stand here and sing a hymn while Randy is playing the organ, I suddenly find myself literally resonating with the notes of our organ. The organ and the human body produce sound in very similar ways, similar enough that you can find your lungs and throat vibrating in sympathetic vibration to the organ. And when you are singing with other people, when you really get in tune with the other people, if you listen carefully you will hear a whole world of overtones opening up in the music. And when we are singing with the marimba, as we are doing today, the sound of the marimba fills this room, and when we sing along, we are drawn up into the sound.

    What I am describing of course are moments of transcendence: when we transcend ordinary experience and become aware of how we are interconnected with the universe. When I go to church, I hope for those moments of transcendence; I don’t always get them, but I hope for them. There are moments of passive transcendence, as when we sit and listen to transcendently beautiful music; but what I value most are the moments of active transcendence, when I am an active participant in transcending.

    This is why I think we sing in church: to experience little moments of transcendence. This does not imply that we must sing as well as Billie Holliday or Placido Domingo or Paul McCartney. The students from Fisk University who sang in the Nashville jail weren’t professional singers, but their singing helped them to transcend their situation. Norbert Capek was not a great singer, but his songs helped him and others to transcend Dresden prison.

    And this is equally true of ordinary people in ordinary life today. Perhaps you read the article in last week’s Sunday New York Times, describing song circles or community singalongs — many of which happen to meet in Unitarian Universalist churches — these are groups of ordinary people who come together to sing, and when these ordinary people sing together, so the article said, something extraordinary can happen. In our culture today, we are taught to be passive consumers of music; but when we sing together, we are no longer mere passive consumer: we are creating something ourselves. That means we are resisting the forces that seek to make us less than human and oppress us by turning us into mere consumers; but when we sing together, we find that we are fully human and spiritual beings who transcend mere consumerism.

    Singing is an ordinary act, it is something babies do without thinking about it. But singing together is also transcendent. By transcending the ordinary, we wing as a path to liberation:– both spiritual liberation, and literal liberation from the oppressive forces that seek to dominate us. We sing to know our interconnectedness:– in a world where there is so little community, where we are fragmented by race, age, class, singing can serve to build connections between us. The singer Holly Near says: We are singing for our lives. We are indeed.

  • Moses and the Underground Railroad

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading is from the Torah, the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 34 in its entirety:

    “Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho, and the Lord showed him the whole land: Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, and the Plain—that is, the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees—as far as Zoar. The Lord said to him, ‘This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, “I will give it to your descendants”; I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.’ Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, at the Lord’s command. He was buried in a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor, but no one knows his burial place to this day. Moses was one hundred and twenty years old when he died; his sight was unimpaired and his vigour had not abated. The Israelites wept for Moses in the plains of Moab for thirty days; then the period of mourning for Moses was ended.

    “Joshua son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom, because Moses had laid his hands on him; and the Israelites obeyed him, doing as the Lord had commanded Moses.

    “Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. He was unequalled for all the signs and wonders that the Lord sent him to perform in the land of Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his servants and his entire land, and for all the mighty deeds and all the terrifying displays of power that Moses performed in the sight of all Israel.”

    [NRSV]

    The second reading is from an article written by William L. Van Deburg, a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The article is titled, “Frederick Douglass: Maryland Slave to Religious Liberal”:

    “It would be a mistake to portray [Frederick] Douglass as a piously conservative Christian. His biographers have correctly noted that he was not orthodox in his doctrine. His belief that religion should be used as an instrument for social reconstruction led him to despise the passive attitude shown by many Negro ministers.

    “As he progressed in his abolitionist career, Douglass was influenced by those champions of Reason, Transcendentalism, and Unitarianism whose doctrines he had condemned. In and 1848 essay, he noted that the destiny of the Negro race was committed to human hands. God was not wholly responsible for freeing those in bondage. By 1853, he was willing to criticize Henry Ward Beecher’s reliance on God to end slavery. If Beecher had been a slave, Douglass noted, he would have been ‘whipped … out of his willingness’ to wait for the power of Christian faith to break his chains.

    “Increasingly, enlightenment terminology crept into Douglass’s writings and speeches. Negroes were adjudged to be ‘free by the laws of nature.’

    “The slaves’ claim to freedom was ‘backed up by all the ties of nature, and nature’s God.’ Man’s [sic] right to liberty was self-evident since ‘the voices of nature, of conscience, of reason, and of revelation, proclaim it as the right of all rights.’…

    “Douglass was also affected by the words of transcendentalist preacher Theodore Parker. The [Unitarian] minister’s ideas on the perfectibility of man [sic] and the sufficiency of natural religion were eventually incorporated in the abolitionist’s epistemology. In 1854, Douglass noted, ‘I heard Theodore Parker last Sabbath. No man preaches more truth than this eloquent man, this astute philosopher’.”

    [in By These Hands: A Documentary History of African American Humanism, ed. Anthony Pinn (New York: NYU Press, 2001), pp. 89-90.]

    Sermon

    The great old story of Moses — the story of how Moses led the Hebrew people up out of Egypt, up out of slavery, and on to the promised land, a land of milk and honey — is one of the most inspiring stories in the Bible. It is a story that has inspired oppressed peoples everywhere. And it is a story that has troubled the oppressors mightily, to the point where some American slave owners made special Bibles for their slaves by literally cutting out the book of Exodus, so as not to give their slaves any ideas that the Christian religion promoted freedom. The story of Exodus has been central to the African American church tradition; it is a story that inspired people like Martin Luther King. Exodus is a story that today continues to inspire freedom-loving people around the world:– from the radical Christians in Latin America who engage in liberation theology, to the members of the oppressed Dalit caste in India.

    What a powerful story Exodus is! The Hebrews went down to Egypt; and over time Pharaoh, the king of the Egyptians, enslaved them. Then a powerful Hebrew leader rose up, a man named Moses — of course, we now realize that Moses’s sister Miriam was just as important as Moses in leading the Hebrews to freedom, it’s just that she mostly got written out of the Bible, but I digress — anyway, a powerful Hebrew leader rose up, a man named Moses. After a series of personal trials and tribulations, the slave Moses rose to a position of power and influence within the Pharaoh’s court. And then a day came when Moses’s God, the God of Israel, appeared to him and said it was time for the Hebrew people to go free. Naturally, Pharaoah didn’t want the Hebrew people to go free; he wanted to keep his slaves; but with the help of the God of Israel, Moses unleashed a series of disasters on Pharoah and on Egypt. After suffering ten increasingly horrible disasters, Pharoah at last said that the Hebrews could go free.

    And so the Hebrew people packed up and left Egypt. Almost before they were out of sight, Pharaoh regretted his rashness, freeing his slaves!, and he sent his army out to bring them back. The Egyptian army pursued the Hebrew people to the edge of the Red Sea. Moses and his people were trapped between the Egyptian army and the sea, and just when it appeared that all was lost, the God of Israel opened a path for them across the sea — and then drowned the pursuing Egyptian army.

    So far, the God of Israel comes across as pretty remarkable:– a God who inflicts disasters on your enemies, up to and including drowning pursuing armies. If you were one of the hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans in the United States in the early 19th century, the God of Israel might be your kind of god, a god you would want to have on your side:– a god who could lead you out of the horrors of the life you were in; a god who could get you across the Ohio River while drowning your pursuers behind you; a god who was unequivocally on the side of the oppressed peoples of this world.

    You will notice that I said, the God of Israel might be the kind of God you want to have on your side. If you read the story of Exodus carefully, you might begin to question certain episodes in that story. Above all, you might have question what happens after God leads Moses and the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt. Above all, you might question those forty years God has them wandering about in the wilderness.

    Now it is true that many escaping slaves who followed the Underground Railroad to freedom had their own versions of wandering in the wilderness. Harriet Jacobs, in her book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, tells how she escaped from her master, but then had to live for seven long years in a tiny attic over her grandmother’s house, which she describes as follows: “A small shed had been added to my grandmother’s house years ago. Some boards were laid across the supports at the top, and between these boards and the roof was a very small attic, never occupied by anything but rats and mice. The attic was only nine feet long and seven wide. The highest point was three feet high. There was no admission for either light or air.” Jacobs tells how stifling hot this attic became in the summer, how cold in the winter;– you could say it was her own version of the wandering in the wilderness.

    Thus the story of Exodus might help provide meaning to the possible delays and the inevitable dangers that an escaping slave might encounter. And yet, you can’t get around the fact that Moses never made it to the Promised Land. As we heard in the first reading, Moses died before he ever got to freedom; God did not let him get to freedom alive. For someone seeking freedom from oppression, this could be seen as a very serious flaw in the story!

    There’s another serious problem with the story of Exodus:– We know perfectly well that it just isn’t that far from Egypt to the Promised Land. The only way it could take you forty years to travel from Egypt across the Sinai Peninsula to the Promised Land of Canaan is if you deliberately went around in circles; or if someone deliberately led you around in circles. Forty years to travel a couple of hundred of miles! — if we only traveled a mile a day, it wouldn’t even take a year to go that distance. Isn’t this the same old thing that oppressed peoples always hear?: “Wait a while, the time isn’t ripe yet.” When you hear that phrase, you can be pretty sure that “wait a while” means “never,” or at least, “not in your lifetime.” Moses lived to be 120 years old, but died before he reached freedom; this is a serious problem with the story of Exodus, a problem that could lead one to question whether the Bible is truly a book of liberation.

    Indeed, people like Frederick Douglass began to entertain questions about the orthodox interpretations of the Bible. We heard in the second reading this morning from the distinguished historian William L. Van DeBurg, who tells us that Frederick Douglass drifted further and further from orthodox Christianity over the course of his life. When Douglass first escaped from slavery and came here to New Bedford, he seems to have been fairly close to an orthodox Christian viewpoint. Yes, he hated the blatant hypocrisy exhibited by the some of the Christian slave-owners, enough so that he wrote, “of all the slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst.” Yet as a slave he had joined a Methodist church in Baltimore, and when he came here to New Bedford he joined an African American Methodist church here; and he was orthodox enough that in his one documented visit to First Universalist Church of New Bedford, he argued forcefully against the heretical doctrine of universal salvation, and he would not join the Universalist church in spite of the fact that his friend and mentor Nathan Johnson was a Universalist.

    That was in 1841; yet by 1870, Douglass had drifted far from orthodox Christianity. In a letter he wrote in 1870, reprinted in the anthology By These Hands: A Documentary History of African American Humanism, we discover that Frederick Douglass’s religious journey had taken him far down the path of free thought. Anthony Pinn, who edited By These Hands, points out that by 1870, Douglass had become unwilling “to acknowledge the role of God in the progress of African Americans.” In this 1870 letter, Douglass wrote:

    “I have no doubt that the avowal of my liberal opinions will drive many from me who were once my friends and even exclude me from many platforms upon which I was a welcome speaker, but such is the penalty which every man must suffer who admits a new truth into his mind….

    “As to my not going far enough, I have to say, that while I am free to follow my convictions wherever they may lead — I deem it wise to avow those which are perfectly formed, clearly defined, and about which I am entirely undisturbed by doubts of any sorts. I bow to no priests either of faith or of unfaith. I claim as against all sorts of people, simply perfect freedom of thought.”

    In his typically clear prose, Douglass outlines what might be the guiding mantra for many of Unitarian Universalists today: we follow our convictions wherever they may lead; we deem it wise to avow only those convictions which are well-formed; we bow neither to fundamentalist Christians nor to fundamentalist atheists; and we claim perfect freedom of thought. Douglass tells us that freedom from bondage is necessary but not enough; freedom from racism is necessary but not enough; our thoughts too must be free. We must be free in body; we must be free in society; and we must be free in the realm of thought, even if that leads us away from orthodox religion.

    The received wisdom has long been that all African Americans, Frederick Douglass included, belong to the Black Church. Through careful research, the African American humanist theologian Anthony Pinn has conclusively proved that there is a strong strain of humanist religious expression in African American life, going back beyond Frederick Douglass at least into the middle 19th century.

    Yes, the Black Church has been a key institution in African American life. As Frederick Douglass and other African Americans over the last 150 years have known, the Black Church is one of the key institutions where African Americans could join together in voluntary association in order to have some influence in the wider world. Yet Anthony Pinn has documented how important the humanist strain of thought has been to African Americans. For example, Pinn points out that the anonymous men and women who composed blues songs felt no need to inject God into their songs; the blues are humanist songs, where human beings face life without reliance on the supernatural intervention of a divine being. In many other examples, Pinn documents humanist thought in African Americans from the slave days down through the 20th century.

    Why should there be such a strong strain of humanist thought, or at least non-theistic thought, among African Americans? Simply put, for some people the existence of slavery in the United States serves as an acid test for Christian belief systems in the United States. How could a God who is supposed to be a loving God allow the atrocity of chattel slavery to exist? How could a God who is supposed to love all human beings equally allow the evils of racism to permeate every aspect of our culture, even down to this very day? You probably know all the orthodox Christian justifications: that we human beings are miserable sinners who have messed up the world so badly that things like slavery can exist, and it will only be through God that we can be rid of such evils; probably after we die and go to heaven, if indeed we are allowed to be one of the ones who gets to go to heaven. You may even know some of the arguments of black liberation theology: James Cone has famously said that Jesus is black, and other African American Christian theologians have pointed out that it is white Christianity, not God, that is to blame.

    But for some people — indeed, for quite a few people of all races — these justifications sound inadequate. For these people, there is too big a gap between the stated moral ideals of orthodox Christianity and the realities of slavery, and the realities of racism. These are the people who turn away from American Christianity: some, like Malcom X, turn to non-Christian religions like Islam; but for many more, the best alternative is humanism or non-theism, that is: the best alternative is to question belief in God.

    And there are many who give up on organized religion altogether; but I don’t think that’s the right approach. Giving up doesn’t accomplish anything. Only half of all United States citizens vote — they have given up on participating in the political process — but that accomplishes less than nothing, because all that means is that someone else is going to make your decisions for you. Passivity is rarely a good solution to any problem. Similarly, we see many people who have given up on organized religion; they let the fundamentalist Christians take over the churches, and they let money-grubbing exploiters take over the New Age religious movements, and they let the cults and the Scientologists take over everything else.

    Thus I believe with all my heart that there is a place for a religious movement which tells people, not how they might get into heaven later, but rather how we might all get a little bit of heaven into this world right now. This, I believe, is where Moses went wrong. He put too much emphasis on the idea that he would get to go to heaven after he died; which was fine for him I suppose; but if he had paid more attention to getting his people into the Promised Land now, instead of himself into heaven later, all his people could have crossed the desert in six or seven months. I don’t believe that Moses needed to choose between heaven and the Promised Land; he could have had both. The African Americans who escaped slavery on the Underground Railroad to the Promised Land of New Bedford, or one of the other safe havens for escaped slaves: they discovered that if they could snatch an opportunity to ride on the Underground Railroad, they could get to the Promised Land of freedom in their own lifetime, and still be ready to get to heaven after they died.

    William R. Jones, an African American and a Unitarian Universalist theologian, wrote an essay back in 1974 in which he showed that the biggest religious difference of opinion is not between people who believe in God, and people who disbelieve in God. The biggest religious difference of opinion is between those people who say trust in God for everything and do nothing for yourself on the one hand; and on the other hand those people who say whether or not you believe in God it is up to us human beings to create justice and righteousness here and now, in this present world.

    Moses started out as the second kind of person — he did, after all, get the Hebrews out of Egypt, and that took some doing. But in that forty-year trek across the Sinai Peninsula, it seems to me that Moses wound up trusting too much in God to the point where he didn’t do enough for himself or the Hebrew people.

    Frederick Douglass was always that second kind of person. He started out life with a deep and sincere belief in God; but he didn’t let that belief keep him from taking a ride on the Underground Railroad. Later in life, he came to have deep questions about the orthodox Christian God; but he continued to do his best to create justice and righteousness here and now, in his present world.

    Here in our church, we don’t care whether you believe in God or not; personally, I find myself like Frederick Douglass, not willing either to avow or disavow a belief in God; like Douglass, “I bow to no priests either of faith or of unfaith.”

    Here in this church, it is not your belief or disbelief in God which matter; what matter is whether you and I, like Frederick Douglass, will take it upon ourselves to create justice and righteousness here and now, in this present world.