Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Working Hard, Hardly Working

    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

    First reading — “What We Live For” read responsively.

    Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry

    They say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.

    As for work, we haven’t any of any consequence. We have the Saint Vitus’ dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still.

    If I should only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of town

    –notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman,– but would forsake their work and follow that sound.

    I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that is which appears to be.

    [From Walden, H. D. Thoreau, adapted DH.]

    The second reading is a historical reading. It comes from a sermon preached by Duncan Howlett from this very pulpit on March 4, 1945. At that time, the entire city of New Bedford was in an uproar because of an action by the War Manpower Commission, the government agency charged with mobilizing labor for the war effort during the Second World War. The War Manpower Commission tried to forcibly transfer workers from various textile mills, into other mills which were producing tire cord. Both mill owners and organized labor felt this was an unnecessary action, and Duncan Howlett articulated why in this sermon. He said in part:

    “Down beneath a worker’s natural aversion to leave his present job, down beneath the usual aversion to carrying a heavier work load than necessary; there are motives far more fundamental, which are keeping the workers out of the night shift at the tire cord mills. Most of these men have workers have men very close to them facing the enemy overseas. Iwo Jima is not so far from New Bedford as some might think. Brothers, fathers, husbands, and sweethearts of New Bedford workers are there, and they are with Eisenhower and MacArthur too. The workers know what production means to the fighting man overseas.

    “Consider the record of this city for patriotism: Almost complete freedom from strikes, Army and Navy Es flying everywhere…; War Bonds oversubscribed in each drive, and the Red Cross blood bank more than supplied on its quarterly visits. Why in view of all this, and with the rest of the nation calling in question its patriotism, has New Bedford failed even under duress to transfer workers to the tire cord mills?

    “The real reasons are these: The workers are not reassured by the fact that labor disputes are now pending before the War Labor Board. Workers at these mills are not given company-provided insurance as they are at the other textile mills in the city.

    “Most important of all the deep-seated complaints of the workers, however, is the fact that the transferees have no assurance they will not lose their seniority rights. Seniority means a great deal to the worker….

    “But I do not believe even these factors whould dissuade New Bedford workers from manning the third shift at the tire cord mills if they believed that the lives of their loved ones depended upon it. They are not convinced that these forcible transfers are necessary, and for two reasons….”

    [From a pamphlet edition of this sermon published by First Unitarian church in New Bedford.]

    Sermon

    That passage we just heard from the sermon by Duncan Howlett raises an interesting question for me. Howlett seems to assume that there is a sort of promise between the worker and the employer. It is true that the workers about which he speaks were members of a union, so whatever promises existed between workers and employer were enforced by a contract reached through collective bargaining. Nevertheless, Howlett does assume that workers would be treated according to certain standards. The whole point of his sermon is that some of these promises were going to be violated by the War Manpower Commission. He said, “The forced transfer of workers here is unnecessary and unfair and down underneath we sense we are resisting [the War Manpower Commission] for reasons beyond our own workers, and beyond our own needs. High principle is involved….”

    And what is that high principle that is involved? At the end of the sermon, Howlett said: “Let us put human personality first always. Let us not forget the endowment of our Creator to each of us. Let us remember, in fine, that we do God’s will insofar as we care for his children, that is to say, insofar as we guard the rights of our fellowman. Remembering this, let us continue in the faith of our forefathers, faith rooted in the wisdom, power and majesty of almighty God, issuing in the rights of man.” And that is how Duncan Howlett summed up the moral underpinnings of the relationship between workers and employers back in 1945.

    Here we are, sixty-odd years later. Whatever moral underpinnings to the relationship between worker and employer that may have existed back in 1945 are not so readily apparent today.

    There was a time after the Second World War when a whole generation assumed there were promises made between workers and employers. One promise went something like this:– as long as you were a reasonably capable worker, there would be a job for you until you were ready to retire. (For many workers, that was actually an explicit promise enforced by a labor union, and in 1953 nearly a third of all workers were represented by a union.) We should also be clear that this promise was not extended to huge segments of that generation:– for example there was an assumption that women would stop working once they got married; and many persons of color certainly couldn’t count on having a job the same way white persons could. Nevertheless, many people in that post-War generation did assume that as long as you were a reasonably capable worker, you could be pretty sure of a job.

    Whatever the assumptions may have been back in 1945, we certainly make no such assumptions today. I don’t know anyone today who has much expectation that we can count on having the same job all our lives. These days, companies routinely lay people off because of accounting decisions made in some far away office. Companies can and do reduce salaries or benefits or working for no apparent reason at all:– so, a year ago I was talking to someone who worked for a big company; this fellow was at a meeting where the company announced that they were cutting benefits substantially, and when someone asked the spokesman why the company was doing this, he replied, “Because we can, that’s why.” The old assumptions no longer hold; workers can’t count on much in the way of promises these days.

    As a result, most workers today do not count on having a job for very long. The routine advice that career counselors now give us is that as soon as we take a new job, we should be looking for the next job. People in their twenties and thirties fully expect to change jobs every two or three years, and they expect to change careers several times during their working life. A couple of years ago, I was talking with someone who supervised a fairly large staff, and she talked about how this affects her as a supervisor. She said that young workers just out of school will quit their jobs if they don’t get what they want within a few months. She was frustrated by this tendency because she works for an employer which is actually respectful of workers; if those young workers would just be patient, she said, they’d get all they wanted. But workers no longer feel they have the option to be patient. No young worker now expects a company to make or to keep any promises, or do anything for workers. Young workers no longer have any patience for employers, because they have seen all too often that employers don’t have patience for them.

    Speaking for myself, as someone who supervises employees in a church, I know that the rule of thumb for churches is that we should try to retain employees for at least seven years. It takes that long to break even, after you factor in the costs of hiring a new staff person and the costs of the inevitable inefficiency that comes with a new staff person. In churches, and in the non-profit sector in general, managers are constantly seeking out increased efficiency due to the rising cost of running a non-profit. And yet we face increased inefficiency because staff won’t stick around for long; we are paying the price of employers who show no loyalty to workers.

    No one is happy with this situation. I am not an economist, nor a political scientist, so I will propose no solutions to this problem. But I am a minister, and I can ask this: As religious people, how can make sense of this problem?

    To begin with, I believe we have to talk openly and honestly about this problem. Now historically, most churches have not been places where we talk about work. We might talk about our jobs when we are socializing with other church folks, but my experience in churches has been that most church people rarely talk about work itself. I guess that jobs are somehow understood as being non-spiritual.

    I should add that our own church is somewhat of an exception to my general experience. I believe that we are more likely to talk about our work, and about work in general. Our members and friends get up during the candles of joy and concern, and talk about our jobs: talk about not having work, talk about changing jobs, and so on. The simple fact that we often mention our jobs in the course of a worship service is, I believe, a little unusual, in a good way.

    We should talk about work at church. Our jobs take up a significant percentage of our time. Our church should be a safe place for us to talk about the moral and spiritual implications of this significant part of our lives. We should be able to talk about not having work, since unemployment can be very difficult. And then there’s retirement: for many people, retirement can lead to some intensive self-reassessment, so we should be able to talk about the moral and spiritual implications retirement.

    Not only should our church be a place where we talk about our own experiences of work, I feel our church can also be a place where we can reach out to those who are younger and less experienced than are we. I’m specifically thinking about how we might reach out to high school and college students. From the very beginning of my time here, members and friends of this church have said we should extend some kind of outreach to the students at UMass Dartmouth and at Bristol Community College. There are many reasons why reach out to the religiously liberal college students in our area, but one of the most important reasons is that many or most college students find themselves in the middle of what amounts to a spiritual crisis: they are figuring out what work they can do that will earn them a living, while providing some kind of meaning and purpose in their own lives. This spiritual crisis can extend from a person’s teens right through their twenties. Our church can be a place where people of all ages can talk about the moral and spiritual implication of work, and where older workers can listen to and offer advice to younger people.

    And we can go beyond the narrow bounds of our own personal lives. Religion is supposed to help us to contemplate the broader implications of personal matters. When someone we love dies, our religion not only helps us with that immediate death, but our religion can help us to contemplate the broader meaning of death. When we have a child, when we marry, our religion can help us to contemplate the broader meaning of new life, or of the creation of a new family. When it comes to work, religion can help us contemplate broader meanings.

    All the great religious traditions of the world do, in fact, help us to contemplate the broader meaning of the work we do. I am most familiar with the Christian tradition, and the meaning of work is woven throughout the Christian scriptures. Jesus is best known for his religious pronouncements, but I’ve always found that Jesus often talks about work. I’d like to take just a moment on two of the things Jesus says about work.

    First, Jesus tells us that we shouldn’t take our work too seriously. For example, he says: “No one can be a slave to two masters. No doubt that slave will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and disdain the other. You can’t be enslaved to both God and a bank account! That’s why I tell you: Don’t fret about your life — what you’re going to eat or drink — or about your body — what you’re going to wear. There is more to living than food and clothing. ” That’s what Jesus says in the book known as the Gospel of Matthew, as translated by the Jesus Seminar. And what he says here sounds strikingly similar to what Henry David Thoreau tells us in the first reading we heard this morning, when he says, “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.” Much of what Henry Thoreau said was, in fact, merely an elaboration of Jesus’ political and economic philosophy of giving higher priority to spiritual matters than to financial matters.

    Secondly, Jesus also talks directly about the realities of work and workers, as in this long parable:

    “Heaven’s imperial rule is like a proprietor who went out the first thing in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the workers for a silver coin a day he sent them into his vineyard.

    “And coming out around 9 a.m. he saw others loitering in the marketplace and said to them, ‘You go into the vineyard too, and I’ll pay you whatever is fair.’ So they went.

    “Around noon he went out again, and at 3 p.m., and repeated the process. About 5 p.m. he went out and found othes loitering about and says to them, ‘Why do you stand around here idle the whole day?’

    “They reply, ‘Because no one hired us.’

    “He tells them, ‘You go into the vineyard as well.’

    “When evening came the owner of the vineyard tells his foreman: ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages staring with those hired last and ending with those hired first.’

    “Those hired at 5 p.m. came up and received a silver coin each. Those hired first approached thinking they would receive more. But they also got a silver coin apiece. They took it and began to grumble against the proprietor: ‘These guys hired last worked only an hour but you have made them the equal to us who did most of the work during the heat of the day.’

    “In response he said to one of them, ‘Look, pal, did I wrong you? you did agree with me for a silver coin, didn’t you? Take your wage and get out! I intend to treat the one hired last the same way I treat you. Is there some law forbidding me to do with my money as I please? Or is your eye filled with envy because I am generous?’ ” [Mt. 20.1-14]

    In this parable about work, Jesus asks us to contemplate the idea of an employer who treats his workers better than we expect. This parable may seem absurd because most of us who have worked have experienced being stiffed by an employer. Not many of us have experienced being treated better than we expected to be treated. Jesus asks us to contemplate an absurd world, which he calls “heaven’s imperial rule,” in which employers are more moral than they need to be.

    We live in an era when employers are becoming less moral rather than more moral. Big corporations no longer make any pretence of behaving morally towards their workers. Global capitalism has become amoral, that is, it has no morals at all. It used to be that the ideal was that people would go in business to provide something that the world needed, and would make a profit on the way there. But no longer. Now you’re simply supposed to find a business that will make you money.

    Our religion, this church, can give us a place where we can ask: what does it mean to work for a living? Morally speaking, what does it mean to be in business, or what does it mean to work in a certain industry? What does it mean to receive fair wages, and what does it mean to try to offer fair wages to all workers? Morally speaking, what does it mean when we can no longer count on our jobs, when we can no longer count on our employees? Our church is one place where we can, and should, have conversations about the amorality of our current economic system.

    And as we consider how our current economic system is amoral, we will want to think about whether it is possible to create a moral alternative. At the most immediate level, we might wish to talk about whether it’s even possible in the current business climate for employers to treat workers decently. Duncan Howlett’s sermon operated at this immediate level of fairness.

    And then we will wish to get deeper into this topic. What would it look like if we had a truly moral and just economic system? Do we turn to Henry David Thoreau, with his thought that most of our work is nothing more than a sort of St. Vitus’s dance? Or do we go even further than that and try to find truth in the absurd parables of Jesus in which the whole world is turned topsy-turvy?

    I don’t know that we will ever find answers to these questions. Nor do I think there will ever be simple answers to the moral and spiritual questions of work. But we can address those questions….

  • People Are Basically Good

    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.

    Reading

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

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

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

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

    Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    …

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

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

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

  • Humanism in Our Time

    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

    First reading — “Gods” by Langston Hughes

    “The ivory gods,
    And the ebony gods,
    And the gods of diamond and jade,
    Sit silently on their temple shelves
    While the people
    Are afraid.
    Yet the ivory gods,
    And the ebony gods,
    And the gods of diamond-jade,
    Are only silly puppet gods
    That the people themselves
    Have made.”

    …

    Second reading — Margaret Atwood, “In the Secular Night” from her book Morning in the Burned House (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), p. 6.

    Sermon

    This morning, I’d like to speak with you about humanism. Humanism is a religious system that does not require a belief in God. In my opinion, humanism has been the most influential thought system in Unitarian Universalism over the past century. This is not to say that all of us Unitarian Universalists are humanists — although about 45 per cent of us are — but the simple fact that many Unitarian Universalists don’t feel the need to believe in God, nor to accept any divine or supernatural agency whatsoever, has, I believe, helped keep us from drifting into rigidity of thought, and has contributed in other ways to the overall health of Unitarian Universalism.

    I suppose I had better define humanism before we go any farther. Although humanism does not ask any belief in God, it is not the same as atheism. Atheism tends to be defined by what it rejects — it rejects a supernatural God — whereas humanism tends to be defined by what it affirms — the boundless potential of human life. Nor is humanism the same as the rejection of religion; the people who reject religion generally don’t come to church, whereas there are plenty of humanists in our churches.

    I’d say the defining characteristic of humanism is this: humanism places human beings at the center of religion. Humanists don’t place God at the center of religion — indeed, most of the humanists I know don’t pay much attention to God, and many humanists would simply reject the whole notion of God. What humanists want to do is to make sure that religion is centered around human beings. In so doing, the humanists have helped us in our work for justice and liberation; they have changed the way we provide comfort to one another; and they have helped us better understand what it means to be a part of a religious community. Let’s take a look at each of these three humanist contributions.

    I/ And let’s start with justice and liberation. Originally, Western religion taught us that the reason we should be nice to one another is because the Bible says so, and the Bible says so because God says so, and if we follow God’s plan everything will be fine. But during the twentieth century, some people began to question whether God had a good plan for humanity.

    When I was young, my parents were friends with a couple who had escaped Germany during the 1930s; they had been born Jewish, and as the Nazis came to power they knew they couldn’t survive in Germany. By the time I knew them, they refused to have anything to do with religion. I remember one of them asking how anyone could believe in God, since to believe in God meant believing in a God who would allow millions of Jews to be slaughtered in concentration camps. How could the horrors of the Holocaust be a part of God’s plan?

    And then there’s the racism endemic in the United States. When you look at the horrors of racism — shortened life spans, violence against people of color, an inordinate quantity of environmental problems located within communities of color, and so on — how could all this be part of the plan of a supposedly good God?

    Back in 1971, Dr. William R. Jones wrote a book titled, “Is God a White Racist?” Dr. Jones, an African American humanist theologian who also happens to be a Unitarian Universalist minister, had a subtle answer to the question posed in this title. He said that if we believe in a God-centered religion, then God must be a white racist because God allows the evil of racism to continue unchecked. But, says Jones, there’s another possibility, which is to have a human-centered religion where we take responsibility for fighting the evils of the world. The real divide is not between those who believe in God and those who don’t believe in God — Dr. Jones says that the real divide is between the people who have a God-centered religion, and the rest of us who know that we have to go out there and do the hard work of making the world a better place. So it is that Dr. Jones outlined one of the most important aspects of humanism: that human beings must take responsibility for their own destinies.

    You probably know the old joke about the fellow who is trapped in a flood. As the flood waters cover the street in front of his house, he lifts his eyes up to heaven and prays to God to get him out of the flood. Just then, a police officer drives by and asks him if he wants a ride to higher ground. No, he tells her, I’ll stay right here and wait for God to save me. Well, the flood waters keep rising until he has to move up into the second story of his house to stay dry, and just then some guy comes by in a boat and asks the man if he wants a ride to higher ground. No, says the man, I’ll stay right here and wait for God to save me. Well, the flood waters keep rising, and finally the man is up on the roof of his house. Just then, a woman in a balloon comes floating by and asks the man if he wants a ride to higher ground. No, says the man, I’ll stay right here and wait for God to save me. Well, finally the flood waters rise up so high that the man is perched on top of the chimney of his house. He looks up into the sky and says, God, what’s the matter? I prayed to you to save me. And this big booming voice comes out of the sky saying, Look, pal, I sent you a car, then I sent you a boat, and finally I sent you a balloon, what more do you want?

    This old joke gives us a basic humanist truth: that whether or not we believe in God, we human beings have to take charge of our own destinies. Humanists teach us that if you believe in God, you don’t wait around for some miraculous divine act to make the world a better place — you take the initiative yourself, and when your street is flooded and that police officer drives by, you get in her car and drive safely to higher ground.

    Notice that someone who believes in a human-centered God acts almost exactly the same way that a humanist would act. The only difference is that the humanist wouldn’t bother to pray to God in the first place. But the end result is that same: whether we’re trying to escape from a flood — or trying to end racism, for that matter — it’s up to us to take action to make the world a better place.

    II/ Because humanism challenges the orthodox notions about God, humanism can also be a comfort to those of us who do not experience religion the way the orthodox tell us we’re supposed to experience religion. Let me give you an example from my life, not because I think I’m particularly interesting, but because I think it’s a representative example.

    For the last eight years of her life, my mother had supra-nuclear palsy, a particularly aggressive form of Parkinson’s disease that typically kills you in less than a decade. This disease led to all kinds of other problems, and at one point about three years before she died there was a time when she was in the hospital, and I was scared. I remember going to visit her in the hospital, and then going out to take a long walk along this road near the hospital. While I was walking, I decided to try prayer:– why not? I was a Unitarian Universalist, and prayer has long been one of our central spiritual practices, and I felt I needed some kind of spiritual practice to get me through that time.

    So I started praying. Mind you, I wasn’t praying to ask God to somehow miraculously heal my mother, because I knew that ultimately wasn’t possible; rather, I was praying as a way to try to connect with something larger than myself, in order that I might find some peace, some relief from being scared and sad. I gave it my best shot, but praying did absolutely nothing for me. So I stopped praying. Eventually, I took my cue from those great Unitarians Emerson and Thoreau, and found a healing spiritual practice in spending time outdoors in Nature. After my mother finally died, I spent a lot of time walking and canoeing and fishing — and it was that non-traditional spiritual practice, the spiritual practice of spending time outdoors in Nature, rather than praying to God, that comforted me and helped me through my grief.

    One of the greatest gifts humanism has given to us has been to show us that spiritual comfort does not require belief in the traditional Christian God, nor does spiritual comfort require participating in the traditional Christian spiritual practices such as prayer. The humanists have shown us that spiritual comfort is, above all, a human phenomenon; and because individual human beings differ from one another, because different human cultures differ greatly from one another, it is therefore obvious that each individual human being may have different spiritual needs, and may find spiritual comfort in different ways. I know many people who find great comfort in praying; I know many of you find great comfort in praying; but some of us happen to be made up differently, and we find our spiritual comfort in non-traditional ways. By emphasizing the human dimension of spiritual practices, humanists have relieved all us of feeling inadequate if it should happen that we don’t find comfort in traditional spiritual practices.

    III/ Next I’d like to consider how it is that humanism has strengthened our local Unitarian Universalist churches, strengthened our local religious communities. Most Christian churches are united around beliefs: if you believe certain things about God, then you belong in a certain kind of church. But thanks to the humanists we Unitarian Universalists know we don’t have to believe in God at all, and this strengthens our conviction that we can find unity without adhering to any specific set of beliefs about God.

    Because we are not united by a specific set of beliefs about God, we rely on something else to hold us together in religious community: we are held together by the idea of covenant, that is, by a set of promises that we make to one another about how we are going to treat each other. Another way to say this is to say that we can be held accountable to one another for our behavior. You can’t be a Unitarian Universalist just because you have some specific set of beliefs — you become a Unitarian Universalist when you make a commitment to a religious community that you will live your religion by treating other people with the same dignity and respect that you yourself deserve.

    I believe humanists have helped us to realize that we can not only hold each other accountable for our behavior — but logically speaking, those of us who believe in God can also hold God accountable for God’s behavior. It’s like the old joke:

    A woman goes down to the beach with her grandson. The little boy is playing in the waves when suddenly a huge wave comes out of nowhere and swallows up the little boy and drags him out into deep water. The woman stand for a moment in shock, watching where her little grandson was playing. She can’t swim, he’s completely disappeared anyway, what else can she do but pray to God. So this is what she does, she prays to God to return her grandson. Nothing happens, but the woman is absolutely insistent, she refuses to give up. Nothing happens, but she just prays louder. Finally, this voice comes down from heaven, saying, “All right, enough already, here’s your grandson back.” Out of nowhere, a wave comes, crashes on the beach, and there’s her grandson, completely unhurt, although he looks pretty wet, dirty, and disheveled. The woman look up to where the voice came from and says, “He had a hat.”

    OK, so this is just a joke, but it seems to me that there’s some deep truth in this joke. If there is a God, it is completely unjust for that God to take the life of an innocent young boy playing on the beach. And if all that is true, then when the grandmother prays to God to correct this injustice, the boy should be fully restored to her; even if his hat is missing, it is not good enough. The woman in this joke holds God accountable to the highest ideals of religion; just as Prometheus holds the gods accountable.

    Do you remember the ancient Greek story of Prometheus? — it is a favorite story of many humanists. Prometheus was the fellow who stole fire from the Greek gods and brought it down to humankind, so that human beings could live better lives. For his disobedience, of course, the gods punished Prometheus; but humankind got to keep the knowledge of making fire. Once Prometheus had given fire to humankind, the gods realized that they could not take fire away from humankind, they couldn’t take away fire which relieved so much human suffering; for if they took away fire, then the gods would be shown to be cruel and heartless. In this way, Prometheus held the gods accountable to their highest ideals.

    It is in this way that humanists uphold rebellion as a key religious value. Humanist rebellion is not a blind, destructive, striking-out at authority; humanist rebellion is carefully calculated to build community by holding ourselves and others to the highest ideals of humanity.

    Rebellion for the sake of rebellion is a waste of time. But rebellion for the sake of upholding the highest ideals of humanity:– this was the life work of Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. This is the kind of rebellion that we need in our religious communities:– a rebellion that never settles for good enough, a rebellion that is willing to take on sacred cows, a rebellion that holds us accountable to the highest ethical standards. Humanism reminds us: religious belief is useless if you don’t live out your religious beliefs in the real world; and humanists suggest to us that belief should be a lower priority than making the world a better place.

    Before I end I do want to acknowledge that humanism is capable of its own excesses. In some of our Unitarian Universalist congregations I have seen a phenomenon I call “humanist fundamentalism,” where no one is allowed to believe in God, or even use the word “God” in a worship service. Some of these humanist fundamentalists, just like Christian fundamentalists, can be annoying and oppressive.

    However, unlike other kinds of fundamentalism, and unlike plain old atheism, humanism contains its own corrective to “humanist fundamentalism.” In its highest and best form, humanism cares little about what others believe, while it cares deeply about making this present world a better place to live. The best humanists don’t care so much you may or may not believe, but they do care about bringing out the best of humanity in each one of us.

    Humanists remind us to place human beings at the center of religion, humanists remind us to uphold the highest ideals of humankind. By downplaying the importance of belief in God (or disbelief in God), humanists help all religious people to stay focused on what is most important about religion: that religion should be focused on human beings. When we remember to keep religion focused on human beings, thus helps us to create healthy religious communities in which we are accountable to one another; it helps us in our work for justice and liberation; it helps us to provide spiritual comfort to one another, and spiritual comfort to ourselves. So it is that religion be a gift and a pleasure to us, to help us to spread the light of love throughout the world.