Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Creation Speculation

    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 probably familiar to you. It is from the first chapter of the Book of Genesis from the Hebrew Bible, in the poetic King James translation:

    1 “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
    2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
    3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
    4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
    5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
    6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
    7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
    8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
    9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
    10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
    11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
    12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
    13 And the evening and the morning were the third day….”

    …

    The second reading is from the Mahabharata, the central book of the Hindu tradition, in the new University of Chicago translation:

    Poets have told it before, poets are telling it now, other poets shall tell this history on earth in the future….

    When all this was without light and unillumined, and on all its sides covered by darkness, there arose one large Egg, the inexhaustible seed of all creatures. They say this was the great divine cause, in the beginning of the Eon; and that on which it rests is revealed as the true Light, the everlasting Brahman. Wondrous it was and beyond all imagining, in perfect balance in all its parts, this unmanifest subtle cause that is that which is and that which is not.

    From it was born the Grandfather, the Sole Lord Prajāpati, who is known as Brahmā, as the Preceptor of the Gods, as Sthāṇu, Manu, Ka, and Parameṣṭhin. From him sprang Dakṣa, son of Pracetas, and thence the seven sons of Dakṣa, and from them came forth the twenty-one Lords of Creation. And the Person of immeasurable soul, the One whom the seers know as the universe; and the Viśve Devas, and the Ādityas as well as the Vasus and the two Aśvins. Yakṣas, Sādhyas, Piśācas, Guyakas, and the Ancestors were born from it, and the wise and impeccable Seers. So also the many royal seers, endowed with every virtue. Water, Heaven and Earth, Wind, Atmosphere, and Space, the year, the seasons, the months, the fortnights, and days and nights in turn, and whatever else, has all come forth as witnessed by the world. Whatever is found to exist, moving and unmoving, it is all again thrown together, all this world, when the destruction of the Eon has struck. Just as with the change of the season all the various signs of the season appear, so also these beings at the beginning of each Eon. Thus, without beginning and without end, rolls the wheel of existence around in this world, causing origin and destruction, beginningless and endless.

    There are thirty-three thousand, thirty-three hundred, and thirty-three Gods — this is the summing up of creation.

    [Mahābhārta 1.25-39, trans. J. A. B. van Buitenen in “The Mahābhārta, vol. 1: The Book of the Beginning”, University of Chicago, p. 21.]

    Sermon

    Recently, I realized that I have never given a sermon addressing creationism or “intelligent design.” I never saw the need to do so. There’s no real need for one Unitarian Universalist to stand up in front of a bunch of other Unitarian Universalists and state that intelligent design, or “creation science,” or whatever they’re calling it these days, is nothing more than religious dogma barely covered with a thin veneer of alleged science. Everyone here knows that “intelligent design” is not science. If a proponent of intelligent design says to us, “But evolution is just a theory,” we all know enough to say, “Yeah, and the theory of gravity is just a theory, but if you throw yourself at the floor it’s going to hurt all the same.” For a Unitarian Universalist to preach a sermon against intelligent design is about as sporting as shooting fish in a barrel.

    At the same time, those creationists — sorry, those proponents of intelligent design — are so loud and insistent that they tend to drown us out. Something like a third of all adults in the United States believe evolution is false, and although we take great joy in pointing out that all those people are perfectly willing to take advantage of the advances of medical science, which are firmly based on evolutionary theory, the fact remains that all those people are injecting their dogmatic theology into our lives. And that forces us to spend quite a bit of our precious time debunking the Bible, to the point where we often get sick and tired of the Bible. We get so sick of hearing people say, “But God created the earth in seven days, it says so right in the Bible, so the scientists must be wrong” — that we just want to do away with the Bible altogether.

    So although we don’t need a sermon debunking creationism, I do think it’s worth preaching a sermon about the value of religious creation stories. I’m not going to try to convince you to read the Bible, but I am going to try to convince you that the creation story contained in the Bible is a worthwhile part of our religious inheritance.

    1. To begin with, let us be clear what the Bible is, and what it is not. The Bible is a collection of books which includes many books full of stories. The book of Genesis contains several dramatic and arresting stories: the story of Noah and the flood, the story of Abraham and Isaac, the story of Joseph and his technicolor dream coat, the story of Eve and Adam,– and the story of how God created the universe. All these stories are strung together in a more-or-less coherent narrative that begins at the beginning, and winds up with the establishment of the people of Israel as the chosen people of their God.

    When you think about it this way, it’s obvious that the book of Genesis has more in common with a novel than with a collection of scientific treatises. The creation story in Genesis is not a systematic scientific explanation for how the universe came to be; it’s a story that reveals something about the character of God and humanity. It is not a book full of precise scientific proofs. The philosopher Aristotle tells us that it is the mark of an educated person “to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.” [Nich. Eth. I.2, 1094b] We know that it is foolish to read the book of Genesis looking for the kind of certainty science can bring to certain subjects; but we should be equally clear that the Bible can reveal to us something of the poetic truth about our human selves, and something of the poetic truth about our place in the universe; topics which do not allow the same kind of precise scientific knowledge.

    Religion is meant to help us find meaning in life (among other things). A scientist might be able to look at a flower and tell us its place in a taxonomic scheme, reveal to us its place in the wider ecosystem, show us its inner anatomy; we may well feel a sense of wonder at this but we are unlikely to feel enough emotion that we need to wipe tears from our eyes. A poet can look at the same flower, and write for us a poem that will cause us to weep, or to rejoice, or discover profound feelings or thoughts about that flower; and we may well need to wipe tears from our eyes after the poet speaks to us. But the poet and the scientist do not contradict each other; they only reveal to us a different aspect of the same flower. Religion is yet another way of knowing the flower: religion may help us to look at that flower and know our relationship to it, and so help us to understand our place in the universe and the flower’s place in the universe; not through the precise taxonomic understanding used by the scientist, nor through the metaphorical and emotional understanding used by the poet, but through an understanding of how everything is connected and bound together. The book of Genesis locates that connection in the personage of God; the New Testament locates that connectedness in the Kingdom of Heaven; but we could simply call it the Web of Life through which we are connected with all that is living and non-living.

    That, in fact, is what the creation story in the book of Genesis tells us. Genesis tells us about a God that created everything, including us human beings. Genesis tells us that we are connected through God to all that is: the sun and moon and stars and sky and plants and animals and the other human beings. A literal reading of Genesis would try to tell us that there is a literal personage called God who created all these things; but such a literal interpretation of God immediately runs into all kinds of logical inconsistencies; such a literal interpretation tries to turn Genesis into precise scientific knowledge, when it is really religious understanding.

    An equally literal reading of Genesis would dismiss the whole book out of hand because it does not conform to scientific facts and theories as we know them. Many of the Bible-debunkers who are active today fall into this intellectual trap; they accept the arguments made by creationists and literalists that the Bible is literally true. Such literal interpretations try to turn Genesis into science, when it is really religion. It would be far more accurate to understand God, not as a literal personage, and not as a scientific explanation, but as the Web of Life through which we feel and know a deep connection to all life and to all that is.

    2. We can gain a deeper understanding of the creation story in Genesis if we take the time to look at other creation stories from other world religions. I happen to love the imagery in the creation story of the Mahabharata:– the one large Egg which arose, from which time began, and out of which came everything in the universe. From that great Egg came Brahmā, and from that came all the gods, and the ancestors, and the seers and sages;– and “Water, Heaven and Earth, Wind, Atmosphere, and Space, the year, the seasons, the months, the fortnights, and days and nights in turn, and whatever else, has all come forth” from that Egg.

    In this Hindu story of creation, just as in the creation story in Genesis, we learn of the connectedness of all things. The details of the Hindu creation story are quite different from those in the Hebrew creation story. But both tell of the Web of Life that connects us human beings with the earth and sky, with water and wind, with all beings including all human beings.

    Back when my mother was teaching Sunday school in a Unitarian church in the 1950s, there was a curriculum called Beginnings of Earth and Sky, which presented a number of different creation stories to school-aged children; and today we still teach our Unitarian Universalist children a variety of creation stories. We do this for good reason. Of course we want our children to know the creation story in Genesis, a story that is central to our own religious inheritance; but we want them to know other creation stories as well, so they can begin to understand how all religions begin with a sense of wonder at the universe, a sense of how everything is interconnected through the one Web of Life; indeed, we want them to have a sense of how all religions are utterly different while remaining deeply connected. All these creation stories, all these religions, are different, but each can help human beings to understand who we are and where we are situated in the universe, and so lead us to find meaning and connection in our lives.

    3. I said that we are open to learning the creation stories of other cultures and other religions. That raises an interesting question: Do we need a creation story of our own? Quite a few people would respond that yes, we do need a new creation story that is all our own. A year ago I heard two Unitarian Universalists, Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow, speak about a new creation story that they think Unitarian Universalists and other religious liberals should adopt. They want us to adopt a new creation story put forth by a fellow named Brian Swimme, who tells a creation story founded on modern science, a creation story that links contemporary astronomical theories about the beginnings of the universe, with evolutionary theories about the beginnings of life on this planet.

    There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Anyone can sit down and write their own creation story. And for some people, Brian Swimme’s creation story has become an important part of their religious understanding. I’ll admit my bias: I’m not enthralled by this or other similar modern creation stories. I’m not particularly interested in mixing my religious creation stories with science; especially considering how science has a way of evolving and moving forward; and for me science has its own beauty that will is diminished by mixing it with story-telling.

    More to the point, none of these modern creation stories is anywhere near as lovely as the Genesis creation story, or the creation story in the Mahabharata. You’d have to be a pretty good poet to compete with the beauty of the poetry of the King James version of Genesis, and frankly Brian Swimme and other creators of modern creation stories are not a particularly good poets. And you’d have to be a pretty good storyteller to compete with the generations of people who told and retold and polished both the Hindu creation story and the Genesis story before they were finally set down in writing. If you’re going to come up with your own creation story, you’re facing an uphill battle to create something to equal the beauty of these age-old stories. For that matter, you’re facing an uphill battle if you’re going to compete with the beauty of scientific theories that have been honed over the decades by a whole community of scientific researchers. So if you want to create, or find, a new, modern creation story, more power to you — but I don’t give you a very good chance of making a success of it.

    Personally, I prefer to stick with the creation story in Genesis. Even though the creationists and the other literalists and fundamentalists have done a pretty good job of wrecking Genesis, it has one deep strength. The central theme of Genesis, as with most of the Hebrew Bible, is the theme of justice. Genesis aims to hold us to high ethical and moral standards. Those high ethical and moral standards have been perverted at times by being inappropriately associated with guilt and shame; the same literalists who say that Genesis tells us that God created the universe in seven days also try to tell us about “original sin,” a phrase that appears nowhere in Genesis, and which is simply a figment of their imaginations. But in spite of these perversions of Genesis, it remains a book founded on the principle of equal justice for all human beings.

    The real creation story in Genesis tells us that we are connected through the Web of Life with all that is; it is through this connection t hat we know our inherent worth and dignity, and thus our right to equal justice no matter who we are. Furthermore, the creation story in Genesis can give us what we’d now call an ecological approach to justice. We can read the creation story in Genesis thusly: Earth was given as a garden to human beings, and indeed to all beings. And if Earth is a garden, then we are the gardeners who are supposed to keep things growing well. As gardeners, we nurture and help things grow; and in so doing we are connected with the cycle of life and death. As gardeners, we are ethically and morally responsible for nurturing the garden so that all beings have access to life and the means for life; we have a moral responsibility to facilitate the interconnectedness of the Web of Life.

    So it is that I don’t yet want to abandon the Genesis creation story. Even though the creationists have twisted Genesis to their own purposes, that doesn’t affect the true meaning of the story. Even though science presents a different truth to us, that doesn’t do away with the importance of the Genesis story. The creation story in Genesis tells us about our responsibility to nurture all life and respect all beings; through its poetry it tells us that we are connected to the entire Web of Life.

  • Mother of Us All

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

    Readings

    The first reading is by James Lovelock, the person who developed the “Gaia hypothesis” that the Earth taken as a whole acts as if it is a living being:

    “…Had it been known then that life and the environment are closely coupled, Darwin would have seen that evolution involved not just the organisms, but the whole planetary surface. We might then have looked upon the Earth as if it were alive, and known that we cannot pollute the air or use the Earth’s skin — its forest and ocean ecosystems — as a mere source of products to feed ourselves and furnish our homes. We would have felt instinctively that those ecosystems must be left untouched because they were part of the living Earth.

    “So what should we do? First, we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act; and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can. Civilisation is energy-intensive and we cannot turn it off without crashing, so we need the security of a powered descent….

    “Unfortunately our nation is now so urbanised as to be like a large city and we have only a small acreage of agriculture and forestry. We are dependent on the trading world for sustenance; climate change will deny us regular supplies of food and fuel from overseas.

    “We could grow enough to feed ourselves on the diet of the Second World War, but the notion that there is land to spare to grow biofuels, or be the site of wind farms, is ludicrous. We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate.

    “Perhaps the saddest thing is that Gaia will lose as much or more than we do. Not only will wildlife and whole ecosystems go extinct, but in human civilisation the planet has a precious resource. We are not merely a disease; we are, through our intelligence and communication, the nervous system of the planet. Through us, Gaia has seen herself from space, and begins to know her place in the universe.

    “We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady. So let us be brave and cease thinking of human needs and rights alone, and see that we have harmed the living Earth and need to make our peace with Gaia. We must do it while we are still strong enough to negotiate, and not a broken rabble led by brutal war lords. Most of all, we should remember that we are a part of it, and it is indeed our home.”

    [This opinion piece by Dr. Lovelock is from The Independent (London), 16 January 2006.]

    The second reading is from Homeric Hymn no. 30 to Gaia. Please excuse the gender-specific language of this old translation from ancient Greek:

    To Gaia, the Mother of All.

    I will sing of well-founded Gaia (Earth), mother of all, eldest of all beings. She feeds all the creatures that are in the worlds, all that go upon the goodly land, and all that are in the paths of the seas, and all that fly: all these are fed of her store. Through you, O queen, men are blessed in their children and blessed in their harvests, and to you it belongs to give means of life to mortal men and to take it away. Happy is the man whom you delight to honour! He has all things abundantly: his fruitful land is laden with corn, his pastures are covered with cattle, and his house is filled with good things. Such men rule orderly in their cities of fair women: great riches and wealth follow them: their sons exult with everfresh delight, and their daughters in flower-laden bands play and skip merrily over the soft flowers of the field. Thus is it with those whom you honour O holy goddess, bountiful, wife of starry Heaven; freely bestow upon me for this my song substance that cheers the heart!

    [Homeric Hymns, ed. & trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Loeb Classics (Cambridge, Mass.: Havard Press, 1914.)

    Sermon

    This is the fourth and final sermon in series of sermons on Greek goddesses. You may recall that when I began this series, I said that the ancient Greek goddesses are examples of female god images from our own Western culture — these are goddesses who are an integral part of our Western cultural inheritance. For this final sermon on Greek goddesses, I would like to speak with you about Gaia, or Mother Earth. And while the previous goddesses I spoke about — Artemis, Athena, Demeter, and Persephone — are no longer all that familiar to us, we all know and are familiar with Mother Earth, Mother Nature, the goddess who comprises all living beings on the broad earth.

    Furthermore, the ancient Greek goddess Gaia is of interest today because today we face vast ecological problems. These ecological problems require a religious response from us. A few of our Christian brothers and sisters do a better job — they’re the ones who talk about “creation care,” meaning that God created the earth so we better not mess it up, because if we do we’re going against God’s will. I don’t happen to feel comfortable with that theology, but I respect the fact that this a genuinely religious response to the ecological crisis.

    So what might be a genuine Unitarian Universalist religious response to the ecological crisis? Of course we already promote religious respect for the Earth; people in this congregation do this in a variety of ways. Some among us are neo-pagans, and may in fact understand the Earth as worthy of religious veneration. Some among us are humanists, with a religious appreciation of the importance of scientific insights, including the insights of ecology and climate science. Some among us — and this is our oldest religious tradition — are Transcendentalists, and like Emerson and Thoreau we feel that there is some transcendent reality in Nature.

    These are three of our religious approaches, and we could probably come up with several more. It would be easy to emphasize the differences among us. Instead, let’s meditate for a while on the ancient Greek goddess Gaia, a Mother goddess who is part of our Western cultural inheritance, and see where such meditation leads us.

    1. To begin with, I’d like to tell you a little about that ancient Greek goddess, Gaia. In the second reading this morning, we heard an ancient Greek hymn to Gaia, extolling her many virtues. She is the “eldest of all beings,” the first to emerge from the chaos that existed at the beginning of everything. Gaia “feeds all the creatures that are in the worlds, all that go upon the goodly land, and all that are in the paths of the seas, and all that fly.” It is she upon whom we human being depend for our very lives, and she can either bless human beings with a good harvest, or remove from them the means of life. If the ancient Greek goddess Gaia smiles upon humanity, then our farms produce good food for us, our houses are “filled with good things,” our cities are orderly, our sons “exult with everfresh delight,” and our “daughters in flower-laden bands play and skip merrily over the soft flowers of the field.”

    All of which makes old Mother Earth sound like a delightful goddess indeed. But the ancient Greeks knew a Gaia who had her dark side, too; a goddess who was quite different from the sanitized versions of Mother Earth that seem to float around popular culture today. Let me tell you one of the gorier stories about Gaia:

    In the beginning was Chaos, which was unformed stuff, or some say a bounded gap. Out of Chaos emerged Gaia, Mother Earth. Now after some indeterminate time, Gaia bore a son, who was named Ouranos, or the Heavens. Ouranos and Gaia had various children together, among whom was born Cronos.

    Ouranos did not like some of his children, and he took his children Cottus and Briareos and Gyes and hid them away beneath the Earth. Gaia was angry at Ouranos for doing this, and she asked her other children to wreak revenge on their father. But only Cronos would follow Gaia’s plan — he took the sickle she gave him, ambushed his father, and castrated him. That was the end of Ouranos’s rule.

    And there are many more rather grim stories involving Gaia: stories of monsters, stories where Gaia gets involved in a war with some other gods, more stories of revenge and hatred. There is a dark side to the ancient Greek goddess named Gaia. She was not all flowers and greenery; she was capable of wrath and destruction as well.

    Our ancient Greek cultural inheritance portrays Mother Earth as a primal religious power. Gaia is not a greeting-card version of Mother Earth:– she is a powerful Mother Earth, who nurtures but who also participates fully in the total life cycle of birth and death. She is a goddess who is in some sense beyond real human comprehension. So the first part of our meditation on Mother Earth recognizes her great power.

    2. From ancient Greek myths we jump forward a few thousand years to modern science, and we find that the name “Gaia” appears in the scientific world. Perhaps you have heard of the Gaia hypothesis. First proposed by James Lovelock in the 1960s, this scientific hypothesis proposed that the earth is a self-regulating system. as I understand it, the proponents of Gaia theory state that it is possible to understand the Earth as a living being, in the very specific sense that the Earth can be understood as the complex interaction of various systems. These interactions can best be modeled using non-linear mathematics, and a serious study of these interactions require scientists to look beyond the confines of their specific disciplines, so that biologists have to consider the effects of geology, and atmospheric and hydrospheric science on life forms, and vice versa.

    Lovelock is a serious scientist who has an undergraduate degree in chemistry and doctorates in medicine and biophysics. In spite of his academic credentials, his use of the name “Gaia” turned out to be quite controversial. Some scientists seemed to think that using the name of an ancient Greek goddess made it seem as if Lovelock was proposing that the self-regulating system of the earth is somehow conscious and capable of willful action. Lovelock has explicitly denied that he intended this, and he has said that he does not believe that we should consider the Earth as a thinking, feeling being. And in the ensuing years, others have begun talking about earth systems science, or geophysiology — terms which are perhaps less inflammatory.

    While the term “Gaia theory” may sound imprecise to some scientists, from a metaphorical standpoint I think that name can be useful to us. We all know that widespread worship of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses has long since died out. But using the name for an ancient goddess might help us keep in mind the complexity embodied by Gaia theory — just as those ancient goddesses were complex and in some sense impossible for us humans to understand, the complexity of the relationships between the various systems of the planet Earth is beyond our current comprehension, and impossible to model with any degree of accuracy. This in turn might help us to be aware that our actions may have consequences that we cannot foresee and that we do not intend. And that should prompt us to be wary of anyone who proposes a simplistic solution to the ecological problems facing us.

    We know that we should be wary of simplistic answers to complex questions; we know that human beings often do things that turn out to be pretty stupid in retrospect; and we know that the solutions to life’s problems are rarely simple. We don’t have to know anything about the non-linear mathematics behind Gaia theory to understand this. So the second part of our meditation on the goddess Gaia reminds us that while we know a lot more about how the universe works than did the ancient Greeks, there’s an awful lot that we still don’t understand.

    3. And now I’d like to turn to consider our own religious tradition. For me, one of the central points of our Unitarian Universalist tradition is that we are ultimately hopeful. In spite of everything that is wrong with the world, we continue to believe that the arc of the universe tends towards justice; we continue to believe that love is the most powerful force in the universe. Even in the face of evidence that things are not going particularly well, we continue to believe that we can make a positive difference in the world.

    Right now, there is a fair amount of evidence that things are not going particularly well. I mentioned the scientist James Lovelock earlier; in the first reading this morning, from a recent article by Lovelock, he calmly states his belief that we are already past the tipping point of global climate change. Many of us would disagree with Lovelock on this point, but even so there’s plenty of other evidence that things are not going well in the world. If you pay attention to the news you can find plenty of evidence that implies that the world is currently in a handbasket, and it is not heaven to which we are headed to in that handbasket.

    It is in times like these that we need hope. I would suggest that the image of Mother Earth can serve as a powerful symbol of hopefulness. Mother Earth is a mother. By definition, mothers are mothers because they have children: whether they have biological children or other kinds of children, by definition mothers care for children, nurture them, believe in them. Referring to this image as Gaia might help remind us that this remains an image, a symbol, not reality; that we are constantly striving to turn that image into reality. But it is an image that can lead us forward in hopefulness.

    Raising children is an act of hope. Whenever we see a child, whenever we see new life starting out, we have the hope that this child will be one of the ones who helps make the world a better place. In the first reading this morning, James Lovelock says that human civilization should be the heart and mind of this planet. Whenever we see a child, we have the hope that this child will participate in the great work of maintaining civilization as the heart and mind of our planet. Yes, we adults do our part, to the best of our ability: but we always hope that the children in our lives will soar beyond our own efforts.

    I would say that children are central to my religious outlook, even though I have no children of my own. Caring for children is central to my religious outlook, because in caring for children lies my hope for the future. For me, a central purpose of any religious community must be to raise children to help them become good adults; to instill in them the idea that there is more to life than being a good consumer; that we human beings must always strive to reach the highest moral and ethical ideals. In this sense, religious communities act like the best of mothers: nurturing, caring for, and believing in the children in our midst. As Unitarian Universalists, we can believe whatever we wish about God; but we are religiously called to create a religious community that nurtures the rising generations. This is how we live out the essential hopefulness of our Unitarian Universalist faith.

    So in closing, let me say: happy Mother’s Day. Care for the children. Care for the earth. The two are synonymous. And mothers are central to it all.

  • Music Sunday

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

    Reading

    The first reading was Poem no. 54 by Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa), from Selected Poems of Fernando Pessoa, trans. Peter Rickard (Edinburgh Bilingual Library, 1971), p. 152. Copyright laws do not permit the reproduction of complete poems without permission.

    Meditation

    I offer you this meditation on music and religion:

    When it is a part of a worship service, music is not a performance. Music is always a mutual creation, created by the musician and those who listen to the music. Today, our culture assumes that music is purely the creation of the musician, and so when we go to hear a concert we sometimes forget that that concert would not exist without our energy and concentration.

    And indeed, some popular music concerts are merely shows, where the performers don’t actually play the music, they simply dance and lip-synch along to a hit recording. Or, more commonly, the music is played, but it is played to reproduce as exactly as possible every last inflection of a well-known recording, with no place for the musicians sensing the listeners and incorporating something of their souls into the music. This is music that is played without respect or regard for the listener, because the listener is forced into an utterly passive role.

    Music that is played in a worship service is the complete opposite of this. In a worship service, there is no audience, there is a congregation, which includes the musicians. Every person in a congregation is a full participants in the worship service. As a preacher, I can tell you that I get immediate and direct feedback from the congregation during the worship service, and they can and do affect the course of a sermon; and from talking with church musicians, I know they find the same thing is true for them.

    But far more importantly, congregations come back week after week; the people in a congregation participate in an ongoing conversation with the musicians and other worship leaders. Sometimes, particularly in this congregation, the people in the congregation do indeed talk directly with the musicians. But there is something deeper than that going on. The people in the congregation are the ones who provide the true power of a weekly worship service; those of us who are worship leaders work to focus the energy of the congregation, but it is the congregation who ultimately determines what we are together, and who we are becoming.

    Fernando Pessoa tells us that the answer to the question of life “lies beyond the gods.” I would say that if there is an answer to the question of life, it lies in direct intuition of that which is transcendent. There is that which is transient in religion — and so the ancient gods of Olympus were merely transient, because when ancient Greek culture died, they died — but there is that which is permanent in religion — and so it is that we seek that which is truly transcendent. We can experience something of that transcendent reality in music. And when we listen to music together as a congregation, we not only experience that transcendent reality, we co-create it: we hear our corporate selves into a new existence.

    This morning we shall together hear into reality a beauty transcends our daily cares; and, as we do every Sunday, we participate in the divine transcendent through the co-creation of beauty together.

    And so, at the end of Randy’s sermon, I invite you to pause for a minute of silent reflection — to let the music sink into our souls.

    Sermon

    The sermon consisted of Music Director Randy Fayan playing the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, J. S. Bach, BWV 582