Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Martin, Malcolm, and Henry

    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 Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”:

    “There was a time when the church was very powerful — in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.” But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests.

    “Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent — and often even vocal — sanction of things as they are.

    “But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.”

    [from this site, accessed 19 January 2008.]

    The second reading is from the essay “On Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau:

    “Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less despondent spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her—the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, “But what shall I do?” my answer is, “If you really wish to do anything, resign your office.” When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned from office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.

    Sermon

    Tomorrow is the day we celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. You all know the story of Martin Luther King: how he came to be one of the central leaders in the fight against desegregation here in the United States; how he fought nonviolently for true equality for African Americans; how he was finally assassinated, killed because he was too successful. You all know equally well how the fight for true equality for African Americans has not yet been won; how racial discrimination continues in many diverse and insidious forms here in the United States; and you know that many of us try to continue the struggle for true equality and an end to discrimination.

    Thus, for many of us Martin Luther King’s birthday has become a day to reflect on the ongoing struggle to end discrimination, and to reflect on how we ourselves might continue that struggle. That is what I’d like to do this morning; and since we are in a church, I’d like to reflect on certain religious aspects of the struggle to end discrimination. But I’m going to pursue a somewhat unusual path: instead of just focusing on Dr. King, I’m going to tell you three stories about Dr. King and about two other Americans who fought for freedom in their own ways: Malcolm X, and Henry David Thoreau.

    Each of these three Americans were similar, because each one of them engaged in a little bit of rebellion; that’s what I’d like to talk with you about today, rebellion. Most of American religion has not been particularly friendly towards rebellion. Most American religions possess a rather hierarchical idea of the universe, with God in charge at the top of the hierarchy, and all the rest of us somewhere a good bit lower down than God. With this hierarchical idea of the universe comes the notion that rebellion is dangerous, because if rebellion gets out of hand, it could escalate and even threaten God’s role at the very top of the hierarchy. And so my purpose in telling these three stories will be to show how and when rebellion might be, not a threat to the cosmological order of the universe, but rather a means to save the world and save ourselves.

     

    I’ll begin with the easiest story to tell, the story about Martin Luther King, about why he went to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, how he wound up in jail there, and why he felt moved to write the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

    In 1963, the city of Birmingham, Alabama, was heavily segregated. African Americans faced plenty of discrimination in Birmingham in those days: less than a tenth of all black citizens were registered to vote; blacks earned, on average, about half of what whites earned; and the downtown businesses enforced strict segregation, even to having segregated lunch counters. Since you have to start somewhere in the fight for equality, the black leadership of the city decided to start by concentrating on the segregation in downtown businesses. They called for boycotts, which cause declines of more than a third in downtown business. The city retaliated by withholding tens of thousands of dollars in aid to poor black families. The black community responded with a six-week total boycott of all downtown businesses. The city government retaliated again: Bull Connor, a strict segregationist and the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, told downtown businesses that if they did not obey the city’s segregation laws, he would take away their business licenses.

    At this point, the black leadership of the city decided to get confrontational, and engage in civil disobedience. Wyatt Tee Walker, then executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, dubbed the movement “Project C” — the “C” stood for “Confrontation.” The black leadership in Birmingham called on Martin Luther King to come and participate in these acts of civil disobedience, and he came. Black citizens picketed, they staged sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, kneel-ins in segregated white churches, and other actions that aimed to get so many black citizens arrested that they would overwhelm the police force and force the city to take action against desegregation. The city responded by banning all protests by black citizens — a clearly unconstitutional act — the city would stop at nothing to keep segregation in place.

    On April 12, 1963, Martin Luther King himself was arrested. He was held in the Birmingham Jail, where he was not allowed to call his wife, who had just given birth to their fourth child; nor was he allowed to consult a lawyer unless prison guards were present. While he was in jail, eight prominent white clergymen wrote a public letter chastising King for engaging in civil disobedience. These white clergymen pointed out the dangers of King’s actions, and called on King and all African Americans in Birmingham to “observe the principles of law and order and common sense”; they called his actions “unwise and untimely.”

    King sat in the Birmingham jail and wrote a letter to these eight clergymen, and we heard an excerpt from this letter in the first reading this morning. In one of the most famous passages from the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King wrote: “Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was ‘well timed’ in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never’.” This was King’s justification for engaging in “unntimely” and rebellious civil disobedience: if he waited for justice to take its course, he might well wait forever. So it is that Dr. King engaged in rebellion; rebellion against unjust laws; rebellion against the white sense of timeliness. He was called to rebel against human laws in order to save the world.

     

    The second story I would like to tell this morning has to do with an act of civil disobedience that helped to inspire Martin Luther King.

    Henry David Thoreau lived most of his life in his parents’ house in Concord, Massachusetts. His mother, Cynthia Thoreau, was an Abolitionist and a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Henry helped his mother send fugitive slaves towards the North Star; and his biographer, Walter Harding, has said that Henry Thoreau probably met every prominent Abolitionist of the day “across his mother’s dining table” (Days of Henry Thoreau p 201)

    Henry Thoreau was friendly with Bronson Alcott, another resident of Concord, Massachusetts, a prominent Abolitionist, and the father of Louisa May Alcott. In 1843, Bronson Alcott, like some other Abolitionists, refused to pay the Massachusetts poll tax as a protest against a government that supported slavery. A prominent citizen of the town of Concord paid Bronson’s poll tax for him, rather than see him go to jail. But Bronson’s action planted a seed in Henry Thoreau’s heart, and by 1846 Henry decided that he would refuse to pay his own poll tax as a protest against slavery. In late July, 1846, Thoreau was living out at Walden Pond, and he came into town one day to run an errand. Sam Staples, the town constable, told Henry that he had better pay his poll tax or Sam would have to put him in jail; Henry told Sam that he guessed that in that case Sam had better put him in jail; which is just what Same did.

    There’s an apocryphal story that Ralph Waldo Emerson came to town that day and saw Henry in jail, and said, “Henry, what are you doing in jail?” to which Henry replied, “Waldo, what are you doing out of jail?” Thoreau knew he had to go to jail to save his own self-respect, to save his own soul.

    Henry Thoreau spent only one night in jail, because the next day someone paid his poll tax for him. It is safe to say that Henry Thoreau did not risk as much when he went to jail, as Martin Luther King risked when he went to jail. Thoreau was a white man in a white town and he came from a comfortably middle-class and respectable family; he did not risk beatings and intimidation and death threats the way Dr. King did. Yes, Thoreau further damaged his already tarnished reputation among other Concord residents, and I don’t want to diminish that damage; as someone who lived the first forty-two years of his life in a small town, I can attest to the pettiness and small-mindedness that can poison life in a small town; but risking that is very different than risking your life.

    What makes Thoreau’s experience important is that it prompted him to write his most famous essay, “On Civil Disobedience.” In that essay, he distinguishes between human laws and justice, saying, “Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents on injustice.” Thoreau also that honest people sometimes have to “rebel and revolutionize.” So it is that there are times when we have to obey higher laws and rebel against human laws; only in so rebelling can we save the world; maybe that’s the only we can save our own souls as well.

     

    Now we come to the third story, which also briefly involves a jail in Concord, Massachusetts. In 1946, a young man named Malcolm Little was arrested for burglary. He was sentenced and spent a night or two in the jail in Concord, Massachusetts, before being transferred to his ultimate prison destination. Malcolm Little had been a small-time criminal who had drifted through life without much purpose or direction. But while in prison he discovered books, and his mental horizons expanded. He also discovered Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, which prompted him to engage in some critical thinking about the nature of racism in America.

    By the time he was released from prison in 1952, Malcolm Little was following the thinking of Elijah Muhammad, and spoke of white people as “white devils” who would one day return to subjugation under the black man. He went off live in Chicago near Elijah Muhammad, and under Muhammad’s influence changed his name to Malcolm X, thus shedding what Muhammad called his “slave name,” the name that his family had had imposed on them by some white slave owner.

    Malcolm X remained with the Nation of Islam as a high-ranking official until 1963. But then he discovered that Elijah Muhammad was having extramarital affairs with young women, even though this was explicitly forbidden by the tenets of their religion. Malcolm X confronted Elijah Muhammad, who basically told Malcolm not to question his authority. Malcolm X decided he could not obey a hypocrite and adulterer, that he had to obey the higher laws of his religion; and so he left the Nation of Islam.

    By 1964, Malcolm X was deepening his study of Islam, and he began to question the version of Islam he had learned from Elijah Muhammad. In particular, Malcolm noted that Muslims throughout the world deemed the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, as one of the Five Pillars of Islam; but Elijah Muhammad said the hajj was unnecessary. Malcolm decided to find out for himself, he decided to follow his own quest for truth; he rebelled against the orthodoxy he had gotten from the Nation of Islam, and made the pilgrimage to Mecca.

    While he was at Mecca, he discovered a great truth about racial harmony. He found himself on hajj, on pilgrimage, with Muslims of all races, of all skin colors. While he had already been developing a sense of the oneness of humanity, during that great and holy pilgrimage, as he stood side-by-side with white people, black people, brown people, people of all colors, it seems to me that Malcolm came to a deep realization of what oneness truly meant. In his “Autobiography,” co-written with Alex Haley, Malcolm said, “The earth’s most expensive and pernicious evil is racism, the inability of God’s creatures to live as One, especially in the Western world.” Malcolm’s rebellion against the orthodoxy he had received from others, led him past the narrow opinions of others and into a profound understanding of the oneness of all humanity.

     

    Each of these three people — Martin Luther King, Henry David Thoreau, and Malcolm X — had to rebel against the opinions and judgments of those who surrounded them. Martin Luther King was criticized by those eight white clergymen for stirring up trouble in Birmingham, Alabama; but he rose above their opinions, and allowed himself to be led by higher laws. Henry David Thoreau had to face the opinions of people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called Thoreau’s act of civil disobedience “mean and skulking, and in bad taste”; but he rose above such opinions, and allowed himself to be led by higher laws. Malcolm X had to face the adverse opinions of the Nation of Islam, and was eventually assassinated by members of the Nation of Islam; but Malcolm rose above all that, to assert the essential oneness of all humanity over and above the evils of racism.

    In each case, each of these three engaged in an act of rebellion; both Martin and Malcolm explicitly rebelled against the opinions of religious leaders. Religion has too often been used to keep people from the truth; to force an orthodoxy on us that keeps us from thinking for ourselves, that keeps us from perceiving eternal truths. William R. Jones, the African American humanist theologian and Unitarian Universalist minister, has written that rebellion can be soteriologically authentic; translating that out of theological jargon, Dr. Jones is telling us that sometimes we have to rebel in order to save the world and to save our own souls.

    The consequences of rebellion can be severe. Henry Thoreau was marginalized by his community, and garnered little fame or respect during his lifetime. Malcolm X was assassinated because he dared to proclaim the oneness of humanity. Martin Luther King was assassinated for his work against racism. But I would suggest that what we learn from the example of each of these three great human beings is that the consequences for not rebelling might be equally severe: the loss of one’s essential humanity. But sometimes we must risk rebellion in order to save our humanity, in order to save the world.

  • 300th Anniversary Celebration

    The sermon below was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford as part of a special worship service anticipating the three hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the congregation. 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 was read by Honorable Scott Lang, Mayor of New Beddford.

    The first reading is an act of the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that is the first written record of the establishment of the congregation which became First Unitarian Church in New Bedford:

    [1st SESS.] PROVINCE LAWS (Resolves, etc.). — 1708-9.
    CHAPTER 8.

    Legislative Records of the Council, viii., 360
    Executive Records of the Council, iv., 566.

    VOTE FOR PROVIDING A MINISTER FOR DARTMOUTH. £. 60, PER ANNUM, ALLOW’D AS A SALARY FOR MR SAMLL HUNT.

    WHEREAS it has bin reported & represented to this Court, at a Session in the Year past, by her Majesties Justices of the Court of General Sessions of the Peace for the County of Bristol sitting in Court, That the Town of Dartmouth within the said County, having been several Times presented, & complained of for not Providing them selves of a Minister, as by Law is directed, And that the necessary Orders by them made thereupon, as by Law they are impower’d, not being duly observed, but eluded, and render’d ineffectual for Remedy thereof, They remaining destitute of such a Minister; And Mr Samuel Hunt Minister having been lately treated & prevailed with to go, & reside there, & serve them in the Work of the Ministry;

    Resolved that the said Mr Hunt be sent to the said Town of Dartmouth to be their Minister, And that Provision be made by this Court as the Law directs, for his honourable Support & Maintenance.

    And that the Sum of Sixty Pounds be allowed as a Salary for the said Minister for the Year ensuing, And in Case his Abode there shall be for less Time, in the same Proportion. [Passed June 8.

    The second reading was read by Rev. Bette McClure, pastor of the First Congregational Church in Fairhaven.

    The covenant of “The Second Church in New Bedford” (now Fairhaven Congregational Church) was written in 1794, doubtless under the influence Dr. Samuel West, when the Second Church amicably separated from the mother church in Acushnet. We no longer have the original church covenant, so this represents the earliest covenant still in existence.

    “We whose names are hereunto subscribed, having been called to the Faith and Fellowship of the Gospel, do in the first place humbly acknowledge ourselves unworthy of so great a favor, and desire with all the heart to adore and admire that free rich grace of his, which triumphs over so great unworthiness: and we desire in an humble reliance on the grace of God promised in the Gospel to all those who sincerely trust in Him, thankfully to lay hold on his covenant and to choose the things that please Him.

    “We declare our serious belief of the Christian religion, as contained in the sacred Scriptures, which we own as the only test and standard of Christian faith and practice. We heartily resolve and engage, by Divine assistance, to conform our lives to the rules of God’s holy word so long as we live in the world. We give ourselves up to the Lord Jehovah, and avouch Him this day to be our God and Father, through Jesus Christ, and receive Him as the everlasting portion of our souls. We give ourselves up to Jesus Christ, and receive him as the great head of the church, and rely on him as our Prophet, Priest, and King, and trust in his grace to bring us to eternal blessedness. We acknowledge the Holy Ghost as our comforter and guide. We acknowledge ourselves to be under the most sacred obligation to glorify God by a strict conformity to all his laws and ordinances, and particularly in the duties of a Church state and body of people associated for obedience to Him in all the ordinances of the gospel, depending on his gracious assistance for the faithful discharge of the duties thus incumbent on us. We do promise by the help of divine grace to walk together as a Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in the faith and order of the gospel, so far as the same shall be made known unto us; conscientiously attending the public worship of God, the ordinances of the Gospel, viz. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the discipline of the church, and all Christ’s holy institutions and ordinances in communion with one another, carefully avoiding sinful stumbling blocks and contentions as becomes Disciples of Christ, united in the bonds of Love and Fellowship. — We do also by baptism present our offspring with us unto the Lord.

    “And this we do in a reliance on the atoning blood of Jesus Christ for the pardon of our sins, humbly praying that the great Shepherd of the the Sheep would prepare and strengthen us to every good work to do his will, working within us that which is well pleasing in his sight. To whom be glory for ever and ever, Amen.”

    Sermon — “Forward through the Ages”

    Three hundred years ago, Massachusetts Puritan congregations were governed by two distinct bodies. On the one hand, there was the church: the church was concerned with matters of the spirit, and had charge of the worship services and communion. On the other hand, the town government had control over such practical matters as paying the minister’s salary and maintaining the meetinghouse.

    But most of the people who lived in the old town of Dartmouth — remember that the old town of Dartmouth included what we now know as Westport, Dartmouth, New Bedford, Fairhaven, Acushnet, and parts of other towns — most of the people who lived here were not Puritans; they had little interest in having their town tax dollars support a church that they would not attend. And so, as we heard in the first reading, the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts decided on June 8, 1708, to establish a government-sanctioned Puritan church in Dartmouth, by voting that an orthodox Puritan minister be settled here. This act of the state legislature represents the oldest extant written record of our congregation.

    I’m sure you noticed this was not a voluntary matter for the town of Dartmouth: the Massachusetts state legislature was going to give them a minister whether they liked it or not. Nor did town residents have a choice in which minister they would get: Samuel Hunt having been prevailed upon to go and serve as minister in Dartmouth, the state legislature resolved that he should be sent here. The Massachusetts Puritans wanted their colony to be a shining example to the rest of the world of the integration of religion into civic life; and they were resolved that Dartmouth should shine as well, whether or not Dartmouth wanted to.

    There was also a spiritual beginning for our church, about which we have no written record. In those days, New England Puritan congregations each had a covenant, a document that stated the conditions for admission to membership in the church. Such a covenant would be the written record of the beginning of spiritual side of our church, but that document has been lost; all we have is the oral tradition that a few Puritan families began meeting together as early as 1696. The second reading, written by the church members in 1794, represents the oldest extant covenant that we have.

    And perhaps you noticed that the covenant was a voluntary agreement. It begins with this phrase: “We whose names are hereunto subscribed, having been called to the Faith and Fellowship of the Gospel,…” — which is to say, you decided whether or not you wished to sign the covenant. You did not have to sign it; you were perfectly welcome to attend worship services if you did not sign it; signing it was a voluntary act.

    Religion has to do with the eternal and permanent, but looking back over three hundred years of our church history I am also aware of how much of our religion is evanescent and impermanent. I would not want to be a part of the old 18th century Puritan church;– I would not want to listen to three-hour sermons; I am not comfortable with the wording of the old covenant; I would not wish to be a part of a government-sanctioned church. But I am also aware that our congregation has kept coming back to certain eternal and permanent truths: the truth that we should organise around a voluntary agreement; the truth that we want to serve as a shining example to the world so that we may make the world a better place.

    We have changed again and again. We have had to change; the world has changed around us. Our task is to sort through all the changes to find that which is permanent and eternal.

     

    By the mid-19th century, First Unitarian Church (then known as First Congregational Society, Unitarian) was a wealthy church. The church grew in wealth and influence in the middle 1820’s, when a number of wealthy Quakers left New Bedford Friends Meeting to be a part of this congregation. By the time we built this building in 1838, the congregation paid cash for it, and had surplus cash left over when the builders were paid off. Following the Civil War, during the long tenure of William Potter as minister, the pews in this church were filled with wealthy and influential people through the early 20th century. Mr. Potter, being concerned with the health of this city, has been credited by some with convincing some of the wealthy men in this congregation to move their capital out of the whaling industry, and into textile mills. This admirable act of persuasion helped create new jobs that allowed New Bedford to remain prosperous even as the whaling industry collapsed. But this act of persuasion also shows how, at that moment in our history, we stood at the center of power, money, and influence in this city.

    Contrast that with the experience of First Universalist Church, who were never at the center of power, money, and influence. In the 1830’s and 1840’s, the members of First Universalist and their minister, John Murray Spear, were ardent abolitionists. People like Nathan Johnson, who was active in the Underground Railroad, belonged to that church. They were so ardent in their abolitionism, that they upset some of the powerful men who ran the city (some of whom were Unitarians), and who favored a gradual end to slavery that wouldn’t upset the economy too much. But the Universalists were such ardent abolitionists that John Murray Spear was eventually chased out of town for being too much of an abolitionist. Though not at the center of power, the Universalists still worked for positive change.

    During much of the 19th century, First Unitarian was filled with wealthy and influential people; First Unviersalist was not. This was only a quirk of fate, an evanescent and impermanent state of affairs. But both First Unitarian and First Universalist aimed to make the world a better place — the one by providing jobs and improving the economy; the other by ending the moral outrage of slavery — and that passion for positive change is what is permanent and enduring.

     

    Let’s move forward in time three quarters of a century, to 1958, when we celebrated our 250th anniversary. The 1950’s in the United States were a strange time for churches. The historian Lawrence Cremin has called it the period of Civic Religion:– a time when everyone knew that a sort of generic Protestant Christianity was the civic religion of the land. The prayers that were said in schools were Protestant prayers; all our presidents were Protestants. My friend Mike Durrall tells the story of an American town in the 1950’s where the residents voted to decide who was the town’s best Christian; and the only Jew living in town won the vote.

    During the 1950’s, churches that seemed even vaguely Protestant filled up with people. You didn’t have to advertise your Protestant church; individuals and families voluntarily showed up and joined the church. In 1957, our church experienced its highest attendance since the Depression. We averaged over 140 adults in the main worship service every Sunday; and about 80 children and 10 adult teachers in Sunday school; for a total of some 230 people. Many United States churches recorded their highest attendance in the mid-1950’s.

    By 1967, ten years later, the average attendance of First Unitarian was half what it had been in 1957. Our attendance has generally declined ever since. Nor are we alone: most American churches have declined in attendance ever since the 1950’s; indeed, we are doing better than the majority.

    We can no longer assume that people will just show up at church; nor can we assume that once they find their way here they will know how to get involved, or even what to do once they come through the front door. That was merely an evanescent and impermanent social truth of the 1950’s, which has now dissolved. Yet we continue to adhere to the permanent and eternal truth that membership in our church must be voluntary; we refuse to coerce people into joining our church, even if that means a decline in attendance.

     

    Now let us move forward in time to 2008, the year of our three hundredth anniversary. In this postmodern age, we are in the middle of another set of social changes that once again is forcing us to change the way we do church: forcing us to find new ways to embody the eternal and permanent.

    Let me give you one small example of what I mean. Over the past two years, the Religious Services Committee and I have been experimenting with new ways of conducting worship services. In initiating these changes, I had been inspired by the innovations of the Emergent Church movement.

    The Emergent Church movement started when a number of evangelical Christians realized that an entire generation of Americans, Generation X, was drifting away from church. The majority of Gen-Xers were steeped in a postmodern mindset that questioned authority; questioned absolutes and demanded multiple points of view; was more interested in aesthetics than ontology; and loved the feeling of ancient and medieval religious forms. And so the Emergent Church movement created worship services that questioned authority by bringing the preacher out of the unassailable pulpit and down on the floor among the congregation; included many voices in the worship service, not just the preacher’s voice, to present more than one point of view; emphasized the arts and new media rather than systematic theology; and brought the feel of ancient and medieval religion into their services. And because the Emergent Church movement knew that Gen-Xers did not grow up in churches, they explained every element of the worship service.

    I had been inspired by this Emergent Church movement, and the Religious Services Committee and I started using some their ideas in our worship services. We brought the minister out of the pulpit for parts of the service. We began using worship associates, so you’d hear more than just one voice. We’re working on including more arts in worship: poetry, and fabric arts, and lighting up our Tiffany mosaic, and putting art on the cover of the order of service. Fortunately, we already have this neo-Gothic building, so we already have that medieval feeling. And we have begun explaining every element of the worship service.

    None of this has changed the eternal and permanent truths of religion; indeed, all these changes in our worship service are evanescent and impermanent, and will be swept away by future changes. But in the mean time, we have begun to attract people in their 20’s and 30’s to our worship services; and our average attendance this past fall was up 20 percent.

     

    We are in the middle of many changes right now. Change never ceases. It is easy to get lost in the changes. We look back over our three hundred year history, and witness all the changes:– the change from the old Calvinist theology to our current religious naturalism; the change from the three-hour Puritan sermons, to our current worship services filled with music and the arts; the change from being a church of the wealthy and elite, to our current diverse church with people from all economic strata and from different races and ethnicities — we witness all these changes, and wonder what remains constant.

    At least two things have remained constant. First, we are organized around a voluntary agreement, a covenant. This lies at the core of who we are: religion must be voluntary, not coercive.

    And secondly, like that old Puritan church, we too try to be an example to the rest of the world. We aim to make this world a better place, to make this world into a kind of heaven on earth.

    In closing, let me mention two ways we aim to make this world a better place. First, we aim to fight the discrimination that continues to pervade our society. Following the example of old First Universalist Church, we aim to fight the ongoing racial and ethnic discrimination that is a legacy of slavery in the U.S., and model a truly multi-racial community here. We stand up for the equality of men and women, and we do this in a city which continues to be a very sexist place. We stand up for the rights of gay and lesbian persons, so that recently we were in the middle of the fight for equal marriage rights. All this we do as an expression of the eternal and permanent religious truth that all persons have equal dignity and worth. And as we build common bonds among diverse groups of people, we find ourselves to be well-placed to take on another huge moral problem facing our era:– and that is the devastation wrought by global climate change — both the ecological and economic devastation, a devastation that is already having a greater impact on the poor and on communities of color.

    Bound together by our voluntary covenant, we can move forward through the ages:– we acknowledge and celebrate the past, but we can leave that which is evanescent and impermanent behind. Bound together by our voluntary covenant, we shall continue to take up new moral and ethical problems, as we engage the changes in the society around us, and try to bring about a heaven here on earth.

  • Paul the Organizer

    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 an essay by James Luther Adams titled “The Indispensable Discipline of Social Responsibility: Voluntary Associations.”

    “…the theorists of democracy have asserted that only through the exercise of freedom of association can consent of the governed become effective; only through the exercise of freedom of association can the citizen in a democracy participate in the process that gives shape to public opinion and to public policy….”

    [The Essential James Luther Adams ed. George Kimmich Beach (Boston: Skinner House, 1998), p. 183]

    The second reading is from the Christian scriptures, Paul’s first letter to the Christian community at Thessalonica, as translated by Hugh Schonfield. Written about the year 51, this letter may be the earliest Christian document still in existence. The passage I’ll read, 1 Thes 5.11-21, offers Paul’s advice to the small house church in Thessalonica:

    “Encourage one another and fortify each other, as indeed you are doing.

    “But I do beg you, brothers, to acknowledge those who work so hard among you and act as your leaders in the Master, and advise you. Hold them in extra-special affection for their work. Be at peace among yourselves.

    “I appeal to you, brothers, give fair warning to the disorderly, encourage the fainthearted, stand by the weak, be patient with all. See to it that none renders to any injury for injury, but always do the right thing by each other and everyone else. Always be cheerful, pray constantly, give thanks for everything; for this is God’s will… for you. Do not still the Spirit, or scorn prophecies. Test everything; retain the good. Refrain from anything that looks at all wrong….”

    Sermon

    This is the second in a series of sermons on Paul of Tarsus. As I said in last week’s sermon, in many ways Paul was, for a long time, my least favorite character in the Bible. I disliked Paul so much that I ignored him as much as possible. But then, when I was the Director of Religious Education at the Unitarian Universalist church in Lexington, a fellow by the name of Dan Fenn offered me another take on Paul of Tarsus. Dan pointed out that almost single-handedly, Paul managed to organize the followers of Jesus into a far-flung but cohesive religious movement. Thus, what Dan admired about Paul was Paul’s organizational genius.

    And Dan Fenn knows something about organizations and the people who lead organizations. He is a Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and at their School of Business, and a senior associate at the John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs at UMass/Boston. Before he went to the Kennedy School of Government, Dan was on the executive staff of President John F. Kennedy from 1961 to 1963, the vice-chairman of the U.S. Tariff Commission from 1963 to 1969. Dan is something of an expert on organizations and organizational strategy, and so when he calls Paul of Tarsus an organizational genius, his opinion carries a certain amount of authority.

    When I started thinking about Paul as an organizational genius, I found myself looking at him from an entirely new perspective. I started thinking about the organizational challenges Paul faced. At the most basic level, Paul was trying to build an organization that stretched across the entire eastern half of the known world of his time, from northern Africa through the Middles East, into Greece, and finally to Rome itself. This far-flung organization consisted of small communities of twenty to forty people, with no clear leadership structure, and plenty of internal conflict. Furthermore, the people in these early house churches were often poor and often uneducated, they were frequently persecuted and sometimes put to death, and unlike many churches today they had no money, no buildings, and no paid staff.

    In short, if you want to learn about true grassroots organizing, you would do well to study Paul of Tarsus. And if you want to learn how to build an organization at the most fundamental level, the level of connecting people through personal relationships, again you would do well to study Paul of Tarsus. Even though today we live in a vastly different social setting than Paul, basic human relationships have not changed; and because the fundamental building blocks of Paul’s organization were basic human relationships, we can still learn from him today.

    Now we Unitarian Universalists have been accused of being badly organized. You probably know the old joke:– the newcomer is visiting a Unitarian Universalist church for the first time, and when a church member welcomes her to the church, she says, Look I’m just visiting here, I really don’t want to have anything to do with organized religion. To which the church member replies, Oh good, you’ll fit right in here, we’re a very disorganized religion.

    This old joke actually points us towards two related problems that both stem from the fact that we are part of a society that is drifting away from democratic principles. On the one hand, some people who compare our organizational structures to the authoritarian organizational structures of corporate America accuse us of being disorganized. On the other hand, other people, who are so opposed to corporate authoritarianism that they see any organizational structure at all as bad, accuse us of being too organized.

    But both these accusations misunderstand how we are organized, and why we have organized ourselves the way we have. Let’s start with the “how” — how is it that we organize ourselves?

     

    The most important thing to understand about our Unitarian Universalist organization is covenant. A covenant is a set of voluntary agreements that we make to one another. Now you may have other ideas of what covenant means, but in old New England churches like ours, the word “covenant” has a very specific and distinctive meaning. Our meaning of “covenant” is even listed in that most British of dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary — which states, “Church Covenant: the formal agreement made and subscribed by the members of a Congregational church in order to constitute themselves a distinct religious society. (An important feature of Congregational polity in New England.)” Remember that, while we are a Unitarian Universalist church, we are direct descendants of the congregational tradition, and indeed the legal name of this church up through the 1940’s was “First Congregational Society in New Bedford.” So instead of a creed or a dogma or some such set of beliefs, we are organized around a covenant, a formal agreement that our members make with one another.

    Three hundred years ago, when this church was founded, our covenant was a long, formal, written document. Today we really don’t have this kind of formal written document. And in that way, we are more like the earliest Christian communities in Paul’s day. So back in the year 51, Paul wrote a letter to the Christian community at Corinth, telling them: “Encourage one another and fortify each other, as indeed you are doing…. acknowledge those who work so hard among you and act as your leaders…. Be at peace among yourselves…. give fair warning to the disorderly, encourage the fainthearted, stand by the weak, be patient with all. See to it that none renders to any injury for injury, but always do the right thing by each other and everyone else. Always be cheerful, pray constantly [today we might say, be sure to engage in regular spiritual practice]…. Do not still the Spirit, or scorn prophecies. Test everything; retain the good. Refrain from anything that looks at all wrong….” (Wouldn’t these words would make a reasonable covenant for a Unitarian Universalist church today!)

    Christianity has changed a great deal in the two thousand years since Paul wrote this letter. Today, the Catholic church and most Protestant churches have creeds and hierarchies; but in Paul’s day, those early Christian communities has no creeds, a very loose organizational structure, and no church hierarchy. Today, most Christian churches around the world exclude women from leadership positions; in Paul’s day, there were lots of women in leadership positions. Today, many Christian churches depend on rules and regulations; but in Paul’s day, they depended on good relationships. So it is that in his letter, Paul tells that Christian community at Corinth how to build good relationships with one another.

    And so it is today with us. We no longer have a formal covenant. But in the two and a half years that I have been here, I have pieced together an informal covenant, based on our church bylaws and (more importantly) based on the values that we hold dear. Each Sunday morning, I read that informal covenant at the very beginning of the worship service. In its current version, it goes something like this: “Here at First Unitarian, we value our differences of age, gender, race, national origin, class, sexual orientation, physical ability, and theology. We are bound together, not by a creed, but by our covenant: In the spirit of love, we come together to seek truth and goodness, to find spiritual transformation in our lives, to care for one another, and to promote practical goodness in the world. Wherever your spiritual journey began, wherever you are headed, you are welcome in this meeting house.”

    And periodically, one of you will come up to me and tell that I don’t have it quite right, and suggest a change — I make the change, and keep reading it every week until someone suggests another change. Although it’s been almost a year since Tryne Costa suggested to me the most recent change, which was to say that everyone is welcome in this meeting house.

    Our covenant, whether formal or informal, is our greatest strength, organizationally speaking. We are organized on the basis of our relationships with one another, and our relationships with the wider world, and our relationships with that which is eternal, which some of us call God and come of us call by other names. Corporate managers will look at us and tell us that we are disorganized; extreme anti-authoritarians will look at us and tell us that we are too restrictive; but I think we have exactly the right amount of organization.

     

    But why should this matter? What religious difference does it make? To tell you what religious difference this makes, I have to tell you a little bit about James Luther Adams, the greatest Unitarian theologian of the 20th century.

    James Luther Adams left an evangelical Christian upbringing to become a Unitarian. He served as a Unitarian minister in a number of congregations in the 1920’s, and then he decided to become a theologian. As part of his theological studies, he traveled to Germany in 1927, because Germany was where the greatest theologians of the day lived. Unfortunately, by 1927, Germany also had Nazis. James Luther Adams told this anecdote about his 1927 trip:

    “In 1927 in the city of Nuremburg, six years before the National Socialists [or Nazis] came to power, I was watching a Sunday parade on the occasion of the annual mass rally of the Nazis. Thousands of youth… had walked from various parts of Germany to attend the mass meeting of the party. As I watched the parade, which lasted for four hours and which was punctuated by trumpet and drum corps made up of hundreds of Nazis, I asked some people on the sidelines to explain to me the meaning of the swastika, which decorated many of the banners. Before very long I found myself in a heated argument. Suddenly someone seized me from behind and pulled me by the elbows out of the group with which I was arguing… and propelled [me] down a side street and up into a dead-end alley. As this happened, I assure you my palpitation rose quite perceptibly…. At the end of the alley, my uninvited host swung me around quickly, and he shouted at me in German, ‘You fool. Don’t you know? In Germany today when you are watching a parade, you either keep your mouth shut, or you get your head bashed in.’ …then he smiled… ‘I am an anti-Nazi.’…”

    After this dramatic incident, Adams asked himself what he, an ordinary American citizen, had done “to prevent the rise of authoritarian government” in his own country. He asked himself, just as we might ask ourselves, “What disciplines of democracy (except voting) have you habitually undertaken with other people which could serve in any way to directly affect public policy?”

    Adams realized that one of the things that the Nazis did was that they effectively abolished freedom of association. You could join the Nazi party; you could join one of the German churches that was a tool of the Nazi party; but you could not freely associate with any group you chose. For example, there were underground Christian churches that explicitly disavowed Nazism; these churches were banned by the Nazis, precisely because the Nazis aimed at smothering all dissent.

    Based on his experiences in Nazi Germany, James Luther Adams concluded that “only through the exercise of freedom of association can consent of the governed become effective; only through the exercise of freedom of association can the citizen in a democracy participate in the process that gives shape to public opinion and to public policy.”

    Let me put it more dramatically: By coming to this church, by exercising your right to freely and voluntarily assemble, you are engaging in democratic process. At the most concrete level, you can learn leadership skills that you can immediately utilize in the public policy arena. And by joining our individual voices together, we can make political leaders listen to our ideas on issues like equal marriage and global warming and anti-racism. And the simple existence of our church as a healthy institution helps to keep authoritarianism at bay.

    James Luther Adams points out that the early Christian communities of Paul’s day were communities that organized around covenants. By dispersing power and responsibility (remember, we’re talking about the early church, not today’s church) — by dispersing power and responsibility, those early churches broke through the old social structures of the Roman Empire and tried to create new, more egalitarian structures.

    Of course, after a couple hundred years the Christian church got sucked in by the Roman Empire, and all that early egalitarianism got smushed under the weight of authoritarianism. But today, free churches like ours still hold the potential for breaking through the old social structures — just as some of our Unitarian Universalist congregations have broken through the old racist social structures — just as some of our Unitarian Universalist congregations are trying to break through the old social structures that have so badly damaged our environment.

     

    Let me put this another way. Increasingly, American society is split up by socio-economic class, it is split up by race and ethnicity, it is split up by language, it is even split up by age. Here in New Bedford, we have been split up into lots of small groups: we have the Spanish speakers and the Portuguese speakers and the English speakers, and other language groups besides; we have black and white and various shades of brown; we people who identify strongly with various ethnic groups; we have fairly rigid class stratification; we put our elders into assisted living facilities and we keep our children out of sight in the schools. We have fewer relationships with fewer people. All this weakens democracy, and makes us vulnerable to authoritarianism.

    Here in our church, however, we fight off authoritarianism. We work to transcend boundaries of language, race, ethnicity, and age. We learn how to work together to promote social change and practical goodness in the wider world. All this grows out of our voluntary agreement with one another, it all grows out of the covenant we make.

    In so doing, we have but inherited the legacy of that organizational genius, Paul of Tarsus. He taught those early Christians to build their communities through developing good human relationships. He told them, “Be at peace among yourselves.” He said, “Encourage the fainthearted, stand by the weak, be patient with all.” He said, “See to it that none renders to any injury for injury, but always do the right thing by each other and everyone else.”

    We may word our covenant somewhat differently today, but the basic principle is the same: By means of a covenant, a voluntary agreement among ourselves, we build good relationships between ourselves and with that which is greater than ourselves; and with our covenant, we create a community out of which can emerge a truly open society, a society founded on true peace and true justice, a kind of heaven here on earth.