Dan Harper | Sermons

  • The Eighth Principle

    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) 2007 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    I chose the readings this morning because I wanted you to hear the voices of non-white people who are Unitarian Universalists. And I’ll be reading publicly-available writings by two people I happen to know, Kon Heong McNaughton, and Alicia Roxanne Ford.

    The first reading is by Alicia Roxanne Ford, poet, Unitarian Universalist minister, who also happens to be a black woman born on the Caribbean island of Tobago.

    “At thirteen I sat on the beach watching the sun set. Do you know that moment… the moment when the sun first meets the horizon? The kiss lightly ‘hello’ — then the embrace begins? That moment when sun and sea seem to melt seamlessly into one effortless creation… new every evening and at the same time birthing dusk — if you are observant, careful — you will see the moon and maybe, just maybe a brave star. Depending on your angle, it will seem as though the coconut trees are offering a blessing — and the waves are humming a prayer. At thirteen — just for one evening, one private moment, I had the right angle and there was an instant in all of this that I could not tell where I began/ended — it was not the sun, but I who melted seamlessly…and it was I who nodded my lean body offering a blessing… my tears were waves praying for World. In that one moment, god was everywhere in all things and beyond all; transcendent and immanent — in that one moment, I heard the sea calling…. Calling. And without knowing why, I gave myself.

    “…At the cornerstone of that calling and my own theological outlook is ‘respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part’ as well as a deep appreciation for the ‘direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder…which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.’ Coming to this ecclesial body has been a blessing… in many ways, it had to be this one free church movement and no other. While the Unitarian Universalist movement remains a work in progress, what is significant at this time for me is that we remain so — willing to engage and live into what it means to be wholly alive, struggling with race/class/gender/sexism/religious pluralism/political conflict and so on — all of which shapes us as we seek to shape and influence them. As challenging as it often is, what draws me and keeps me here is the opportunity to wrestle in community — as well as opportunities to live out my authentic theological praxis.”

    [Ellipses are Alicia’s. http://uusankofa.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=9, accessed 25 October 2007]

    The second reading is from “Why I am a UU: An Asian Immigrant Perspective,” by Kok Heong McNaughton. Kok Heong writes:

    “I am an ethnic Chinese born and raised in Malaysia….

    “I first heard the word ‘Unitarian’ in 1976 from a Taiji student of mine who was a member of the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos. This was back when transcendental meditation was the ‘in’ thing. I was comparing Taiji as a meditation in movement with transcendental meditation and this student said to me, ‘Oh yes, we meditate in our church.’ This intrigued me. What kind of church does meditation? She said, ‘Unitarian Church.’ I said, ‘Never heard of it.’ I looked in my Chinese-English dictionary and I couldn’t find a translation of the word.

    “Talk about miracle! I heard the word for the second time that week when I met a young woman at the Newcomer’s playgroup who also attended the Unitarian Church. When I indicated an interest, instead of giving me an earful, she simply called up the church office and put me on their newsletter mailing list. Through reading the newsletter, I followed the activities of this church for several months before attending my first service.

    “This was a service about Amnesty International. It blew my mind. Back home in Malaysia, I grew up without political freedom. As students, we were told to avoid any involvement in politics. Our job was to study. Leave politics to the politicians. Accept the status quo. Don’t rock the boat. You’ll be OK. Try to make trouble? You’ll mysteriously disappear and rot in a jail somewhere. Here I was flabbergasted because here’s a group of people whose passion was to free political prisoners in third world countries! I never knew about Amnesty International. I suddenly felt this connection of humankind for one another, that there are people here in the free world who care enough to fight against injustices in the world. I never knew of a church that would take a stand on human rights issues. I had thought that all one does in a church was to sing hymns, praise the Lord, pray for one another’s salvation, and put money in the collection basket.

    “After that first service, I returned again and again. The more I found out about Unitarian Universalism, the more it fitted. I particularly appreciated the use of science and reason to explore and to determine for oneself what is the truth, what are myths, what to accept and what to reject in building one’s own unique theology. I didn’t have to take everything on blind, unquestioning faith. Another aspect of Unitarian Universalism that makes me feel special as an Asian American is the emphasis on cultural, ethnic and religious diversity. I didn’t have to check a part of me at the door and to pretend to be who I wasn’t. My ethnic differences were not only accepted, but they were affirmed and upheld. People were interested in what I had to share: I teach Taiji and Qigong, I taught Chinese cooking classes, I bring ethnic foods to our potlucks, I even share my language with those who were interested. I am often consulted about Taoist and Buddhist practices and readings, and asked if I thought the translations were accurate. My opinion mattered. This not only gives me pride in my culture, but it also encourages me to dig deeper into my own heritage, to find out more in areas where my knowledge and expertise are lacking. It helps me to look at my heritage with fresh eyes.”

    Sermon

    Each fall, I try to devote at least one sermon to the so-called “seven principles.” For those of you who have never heard of the “seven principles,” they come from article 2.1 of the Bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association. We are a member congregation of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and as such we have agreed to affirm and promote these seven principles. And for those of you who may not yet be familiar with them, here are the seven principles:

    We affirm and promote: “The inherent worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity and compassion in human relations; acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations; a free and responsible search for truth and meaning; the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large; the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all; respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”

    Mind you, these seven principles are not a creed, nor are they a statement of religious belief. As Unitarian Universalists, we’re not particularly concerned with what you believe; but we do care about what people do with their lives. As I read them, these seven principles are a call to action. As we live our lives, we aim to treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves; to promote justice, equity, and compassion; to accept each other and encourage one another in spiritual growth; to always engage in a search for truth and meaning; to affirm and promote democratic process; to work towards the goal of world community; and to respect our planet earth.

    We often talk about these seven principles, but it seems to me that there’s at least one more principle, an eighth principle if you will, that we need to talk about. If you read a little further in Article 2 of bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association, you will come to section 2.3, which reads as follows:

    “The Association declares and affirms its special responsibility, and that of its member congregations and organizations, to promote the full participation of persons in all of its and their activities and in the full range of human endeavor without regard to race, ethnicity, gender, disability, affectional or sexual orientation, age, language, citizenship status, economic status, or national origin and without requiring adherence to any particular interpretation of religion or to any particular religious belief or creed.”

    This is what I call the eighth principle. Each week, we read a slightly modified version of this eighth principle at the very beginning of our worship services. It lies at the very core of who we are as a congregation here in First Unitarian in New Bedford. Although it is related to the other seven principles, this eighth principle goes beyond those other seven because it tells us that we have a “special responsibility” to live out the ideals of justice and equality for all persons in our congregations and in the wider world. This morning, I’d like to focus on one way in which we Unitarian Universalists have tried to live out this “eighth principle” of ours. And to do that, let’s go back in time….

    A few forward-looking Unitarians and Universalists have always been at the forefront of racial justice. Our own John Murray Spear, the first minister of First Universalist church, one of our antecedent churches, helped form an interracial congregation here in New Bedford in the 1830’s. Unfortunately, we had our share of segregationists, too, and an even bigger number of people who didn’t care one way or the other. But by the 1950’s, there was a growing awareness among Unitarians and Universalists that racial equity and racial justice lies at the heart of our religious tradition.

    I’ll give you one minor example of how that growing awareness played out in the 1950’s. My mother, who was not a particularly unusual Unitarian, was a schoolteacher, and in the early 1950’s she got a job working in the Wilmington, Delaware, school system, teaching in an integrated school. She told us how one day she was walking down the street holding the hands of two kindergarteners, when a man drove by and shouted a racial epithet at her — both of those children happened to be African American children, and that man shouted “nigger lover” at her, a truly offensive thing to say where those children could hear it. I’m sure that man didn’t care much about giving offense. But when he called her a lover, he spoke some truth: she was a lover of her fellow human beings: as a typical Unitarian of her day, my mother followed the moral principle that you should love your neighbor as yourself; and she also followed the growing moral awareness that you should fight racism in the wider society.

    Well, that is just one tiny incident among many others. A few of our churches became integrated and even truly inter-racial: First Unitarian in Chicago, Arlington Street Church in Boston, and others besides. The Unitarians and the Universalists merged together in 1961. Then in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King sent his famous telegram to the leaders of all denominations, asking them to come to Selma, Alabama, to support his non-violent efforts to desegregate that city. Over one hundred Unitarian Universalist ministers, and more than one hundred Unitarian Universalist laypeople, heeded Dr. King’s call and traveled to Alabama. Proportionately speaking, this was a large number of Unitarian Universalists, since we have always been a numerically small denomination — numerically small, but influential beyond our numbers.

    One of the Unitarian Universalist ministers who heeded Dr. King’s call was James Reeb. On March 9, Reeb and two other Unitarian Universalist ministers walked out of a cafe in Selma, and were attacked by some white men who called them “niggers,” and badly beat them. James Reeb died of that beating two days later. Of course black Americans were being beaten and killed with alarming frequency, but James Reeb’s death galvanized many people in the white establishment: that a white minister might be beaten to death because of his efforts to fight racism forced white America to confront some of the violence and hatred that racism spawned. Within days of Reeb’s death, the president of the United States made a special statement supporting civil rights.

    The Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association was meeting when they heard that James Reeb had died, and they adjourned the meeting and immediately flew to Selma, where they reconvened their meeting. Rev. Victor Carpenter said of this action: “What a symbol! No other denomination could or did make such a profound statement of denominational solidarity with teh Civil Rights movement or such an affirmation of the movement’s black leadership.” [1983 Minns lecture]

    I tell you this story so that you can hear about the high point of Unitarian Universalist anti-racist work. Unfortunately, in the late 1960’s, we Unitarian Universalists lost a great deal of momentum when our denomination was rocked by what has come to be known as the Black Empowerment Controversy.

    By 1967, African Americans constituted about one percent of all Unitarian Universalists enough so that African American Unitarian Universalists started to connect with one another. On October 6, 1967, at a Unitarian Universalist gathering called “The Emergency Conference on the Black Rebellion,” 37 African American Unitarian Universalists got together and framed a plan of action. They called for African American representation on key denominational committees; subsidies for African American ministers; and a new social justice organization to be called the Black Affairs Council which would staffed entirely by African Americans and would be financed by the Unitarian Universalist Association in order to further justice for African Americans. You will notice that their central goal was to increase numbers of African Americans in leadership roles within the denomination.

    To make a long story short, the Black Affairs Council was accused of being a separatist group. The notion of empowering African American ministers and lay leaders was difficult for white Unitarian Universalists to understand. The denomination voted to fund the social justice initiatives of the Black Affairs Council, and then when the budget got tight in 1969, funding was cut without adequate explanation. It is estimated that half of all African American Unitarian Universalists quit our denomination because of this controversy. For example, a young African American man named Bill Sinkford, who was president of the national youth organization in the late 1960’s, left Unitarian Universalism out of frustration.

    It took us a couple of decades to recover from that controversy. Let me give you a vivid image of our recovery. I told you how young Bill Sinkford quit Unitarian Universalism. Two decades later, he decided to come back; he became a Unitarian Universalist minister; and in June, 2001, he was elected to the presidency of our denomination, the first African American leader of a historically white denomination in the United States. I would argue that Bill Sinkford’s leadership has been the most inspiring since the merger of Unitarians and Universalists in 1961.

    While Bill Sinkford was away from our denomination, two other movements for full equality and full inclusion swept our denomination. In the 1970’s and early 1980’s, the feminist movement changed Unitarian Universalism: we got rid of the old sexist language in our hymns and in our bylaws, we changed our principles and purposes and included a seventh principle based on ecofeminist thinking, and we encouraged women in leadership roles until now half of all Unitarian Universalist ministers are women. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, we moved towards full acceptance of all persons regardless of sexual orientation, and we have gotten far enough in that effort that more than half our congregations are officially recognized as open and welcoming to gay, lesbian, and transgender persons, and we have gotten to the point where it is possible for a Unitarian Universalist minister to be openly gay, lesbian, or transgender.

    And finally, in the last ten years, I have sensed a move back towards making racial justice a priority, the way it was for us in the 1960’s. I think two different things are causing us to move in this direction. On the one hand, racism is on the increase in our wider society: schools are becoming more segregated, prisons are disproportionately filled with people of color, we’re even starting to see new attempts at poll taxes to keep people of color from voting.

    On the other hand, many people in their twenties and thirties, and even up to those of us in our forties, have come to expect a truly multiracial society. It is our positive ideal. I’ll speak for myself for just a moment: I feel more comfortable in multiracial settings, to the point where I really don’t want to be a member of an all-white church. I’m not the only one who feels this way. Lots of people who grew up as Unitarian Universalists were brought up believing in the ideal of a multiracial society — lots of other people who didn’t grow up as Unitarian Universalists were brought up with those same values — we truly believe in a multiracial society. So here we all are, and one of the first things we want to do is make our churches multiracial.

    Notice that I said “multiracial.” Since the days of the Civil Rights movement, we have come to recognize that racism takes many different forms. There is racism against African Americans, but there is also racism against Asian Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, Pacific Islanders, and so on. Recently, we have people like Tiger Woods and Barack Obama pointing out that they come from mixed-race backgrounds. While we have to recognize that the legacy of slavery has caused a unique set of problems for people of African descent, we also know that racism takes on many insidious forms. Indeed, we can go beyond racism and say that oppression takes on many different forms: the oppression of women, the oppression of sexual minorities, the oppression of people who don’t speak English as their native language, the oppression of people who didn’t happen to be born here in the United States. All these different kinds of oppression are kinds of evil that we must fight.

    I would like to suggest to you that the fact that we can recognize the religious dimension of all these different kinds of oppression offers us an amazing religious opportunity. As a religious people, we know that we are called to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. We read it in the Hebrew Bible, and the Christian scriptures, in the Confucian Analects, indeed in all the great religious literature. We hear it from all the great religious and moral leaders down through the ages: Buddha, Jesus, Mother Ann Lee of the Shakers, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King. And we know from our own reasoning processes that this is a great moral truth. In our time, in these United States, racism is one of the greatest issues that confronts us and requires us to act. As a religious people, we are concerned with what we do with our lives. So it makes sense that we should apply our religious principles to the issue of racism.

    And here in First Unitarian Church, we are already doing that. Our church is in fact multiracial — I’d prefer it if we were more multiracial, but there is no way can anyone can say that we are a totally lily-white church. Less visibly, we also incorporate a diversity of ethnic groups. If English isn’t your native language, no one minds; if you were born in another country, no big deal. We are also at the forefront of fighting discrimination against gay, lesbian, and transgender persons. We are a church that is truly living out the “eighth principle” of Unitarian Universalism.

    To put it most positively, we like diversity; and we are willing to actively work towards becoming an even more multiracial, multiethnic, diverse congregation. We know that means that we’re going to be involved in anti-racism and anti-discrimination work at many different levels: here in our church perhaps, certainly in the wider New Bedford community, in the country as a whole.

    We know it won’t be easy at times. But it is an essential part of our religious values, and so we will persevere; and we will, my friends, we will overcome.

  • Pride, Prejudice, and Politics

    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) 2007 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading is from the Christian scriptures, the book of Matthew. In the opinion of scholars in the Jesus Seminar, this passage represents an accurate oral tradition of words originally spoken by Jesus of Nazareth.

    “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, [Greek: a denarius] he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the market-place; and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. [Greek: a denarius] Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. [Greek: a denarius] And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? [Greek: a denarius] Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ [Greek: Is your eye evil because I am good?] …”

    [NRSV, Matthew 20.1-15]

    The second reading comes from the book The Parables of Jesus by Richard Q. Ford. Ford is a psychotherapist who also holds a Master of Divinity degree, and he has contributed scholarly articles to publications by the Jesus Seminar. This second reading is a commentary on the first.

    “Earlier in the day the landowner volunteers to some of the day laborers an ambiguous message: he intends to pay them ‘whatever is right.’ Does he mean, in the Hellenistic sense, ‘what is right according to custom’ or does he mean, in the Hebraic sense, ‘what is just in the eyes of God’?

    “By the end of the day, however, the landowner has moved away from his earlier ambiguity. By evening, when the work is done, he claims to be limiting himself merely to what is lawful. He says, ‘Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?’ The Greek ouk exestin moi means, more literally, ‘Is it not lawful for me…?’ or ‘It is not permitted to me…?’ He is no longer appealing, albeit ambiguously, to what might be understood as God’s just ways; he has now limited himself to customary legal obligations. Under cover of generously enhancing the expected daily wage, the landowner may have shifted the terms of his publicly declared honor.

    “Yet the owner cannot seem to free himself from his ambivalent desire to fit into the Hebraic norm. Using a double negative, he returns a second time to his ambiguous claim to be just. He describes his actions to a complaining day laborer with these words: ‘I am doing you no wrong.’ The Greek is ouk adiko so. The verb here, adikeo, is from the same stem as the earlier dikaios. The landowner’s phrase literally means, ‘I am not doing to you what is not right,’ or, in the Hebrew, biblical sense, ‘I am doing you no injustice.’ Strip away the double negative and there remains the echo of his earlier seeming promise to be just….”

    [Richard Q. Ford, The Parables of Jesus: Recovering the Art of Listening, p. 116]

    Sermon

    You may well have forgotten to plan your celebration for this year, but October 24 is United Nations Day. Let me tell you a story that has to do with the United Nations.

    In the spring of 2002, I was serving as the Director of Religious Education for First Parish in Lexington, Massachusetts. It’s a classic white New England church sitting right on the Battle Green in Lexington center, so naturally a fair number of tourists stop by wanting to see the church. As the educator on staff, I often wound up showing visitors around. One day, three or four people wanted to see the sanctuary, so I cheerfully took them in. They looked around, listened to my little spiel about how the interior had been much modified and almost nothing remained of the original 1847 interior. Then one of them, a youngish woman, cast a baleful glance on the United Nations flag that stood in a prominent place in the sanctuary, directly across from the United States flag.

    “You’ve got the wrong flag flying, that’s for sure,” she said calmly and spitefully. I ended the tour without telling them how First Parish Lexington had been the church of the Minutemen, who fought for freedom and justice for all, back on April 19, 1775. I couldn’t get rid of those tourists fast enough.

    As you probably notice, we here in New Bedford also have a United Nations flag in our sanctuary. We do so for religious reasons. The principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association specifically state that our congregations have covenanted to affirm and support “the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all,” and we Unitarian Universalists have long supported the United Nations as a solid first step towards world community.

    Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, it became acceptable and even fashionable to belittle the goal of world community. I often feel that most of our United States politicians, of both parties, continue to downplay the goal of a world community. Our politicians seem intent on proving that we know what is best for the world. I would put this in moral terms: here in the United States, we are full of pride. We pride ourselves in being the best country in the world; we pride ourselves on being the democracy that every other country should model themselves after; we pride ourselves on our honesty, on our forthrightness, on our high moral character.

    And some of that pride is justified. I do think this is the best country in the world — yes, the United States has some real imperfections, but it’s basically a good place to live. I do feel that we in the United States hold high ideals for honesty, forthrightness, and high moral character, even if we don’t live up to our high ideals. I am less certain about our democracy — lobbyists have far too much power in Washington right now, and we face many problems in our democratic institutions — but at least we seem to be facing up to our problems, if not in Washington, then at the state and local levels.

    It’s our pride that is a moral problem. Many citizens of the United States think we are God’s gift to the world — and I mean that literally. There are many residents of United States who think God is on our side, that God treats us specially, that God has designated us a “city on a hill,” a beacon of light to serve as an example to the rest of the world. Such an attitude constitutes immoral pride; for if you believe in God, you shouldn’t presume to know what God is thinking; and if you don’t believe in God, you shouldn’t presume to say what God believes. Such pride is immoral or sinful, because it damages human relationships. And the best way I can explain how it does damage is by way of the story we heard in the first reading.

    Let me retell the story. It’s harvest time, autumn, time to harvest the grapes to make wine. A certain landowner, the owner of a large vineyard, faces a labor shortage. So he goes down to the village center where he finds a bunch of day laborers hanging out. He points to a bunch of them, and says, So how come you guys are all standing around doing nothing? They tell him that they have no work that day. OK, he says, You want work, you come work in my vineyard, and at the end of the day I’ll pay you whatever is fair. Why don’t the day laborers ask the landowner how much the wages will be? Perhaps they feel that if they bargain the landowner will just pick someone less troublesome.

    The day laborers start working, and the landowner realizes that he needs even more workers to meet his deadline. He goes back a couple more times to pick up some more day laborers. He goes and gets the last batch of day laborers just a couple of hours before quitting time. At the end of the day, when it comes time to pay off the day laborers, he pays them all exactly the same. Even the guys who only worked a couple of hours get a full day’s wages. Not surprisingly, the day laborers who worked the longest grumble at this. But the landowner says to them, “Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”

    Traditionally, conventional Christians have interpreted this parable in the following conventional manner: no matter when you convert to Christianity, you get to go to heaven when you die. You convert when you’re twelve years old, and you live to be ninety-seven, you get to go to heaven. You convert when you’re minutes from death, you get to go to heaven. Doesn’t matter how long you’re a converted Christian down here on earth, you get the same reward — you get the same wages — you get to go to heaven when you’re dead.

    In the 18th C., lots of reasonable, rational New Englanders figured out that it’s best to wait until the last possible minute to convert to Christianity. Good old New England common sense. If you think about it, probably the worst thing you could do would be to become a Christian and then do something bad that might keep you from getting into heaven. A much better policy was to hold off on being a church member, hold off on becoming an official Christian, until you only had a few minutes to live. That way, there’s less chance for messing things up. And no matter when you become an official Christian, according to this conventional interpretation, you still get to go to heaven.

    I believe the conventional Christian interpretation of that parable is completely wrong. Instead, here’s what I think that parable is trying to tell us.

    In Jesus’s day, the big landowners had accumulated their land by buying up land from smaller landowners. When the Romans took over Judea, Jesus’s homeland, they gradually began raising taxes on land. As the taxes went up, a few landowners found they could not pay their taxes, and so they lost their land. As the taxes kept going up, more and more landowners lost their land — and a few rich people bought up all the smaller parcels of land, assembling them into large farms and vineyards.

    This practice, however, was completely contrary to traditional Hebrew law and practice. In the book of Leviticus, God tells the Hebrew people that “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants. Throughout the land that you hold, you shall provide for the redemption of the land. If anyone of your kin falls into difficulty and sells a piece of property, then the next-of-kin shall come and redeem what the relative has sold.” [Lev. 25.23-25] In other words, according to traditional Hebraic law, no one was supposed to accumulate large parcels of land. In other words, the landowner in the parable was holding the land illegally!

    But there’s more on this topic in the book of Leviticus: “And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow, or reap the aftergrowth, or harvest the unpruned vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you: you shall eat only what the field itself produces.” [Lev. 25.10-12] This passage is of great interest to us today because it clearly demonstrates that the old Hebraic law was found on principles of eco-justice; that is, that ecological justice and economic justice went hand-in-hand. In Leviticus, God tells the people that they must let the land lie fallow, in order to give it a rest. And in practically the same breath (as it were, assuming that God breathes), God tells the Hebrew people that they must forgive each other’s debts.

    The old Hebraic law held that no human being should exploit or take advantage of another human being. The principle is even broader than that: no human being is supposed to take advantage of or exploit the earth. Jesus tells us in the parable that non-exploitation is the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is not something that we are supposed to wait for after death; if we follow some basic principles of liberty, justice, and equity, we can establish the kingdom of heaven here on earth.

    Knowing this, the parable begins to make much more sense. Those day laborers? Some of them were the original owners of the land on which they now have to work for day laborer’s wages. They know that the landowner holds their land unjustly under the terms of Hebraic law; he’s the legal owner under Roman law, but not under Hebraic law. Thus, no wage that he can pay them will ever be fair. And according to Leviticus he should return their land to them anyway, on the next jubilee year.

    But the landowner cannot see this because his judgment is clouded with pride, and with prejudice. He feels prejudice against the day laborers; he does not see them as people who are equal to him, as Hebraic law would have it; instead, he is prejudiced against them simply because they had the misfortune to lose their land to the Roman invaders. He is full of pride; just because he was lucky enough to amass or to inherit a large landholding, he feels in his pride that he can do whatever he wants to everyone else.

    Let’s see if we can apply this parable of pride, prejudice, and politics to the United Nations. Please note: I’m not claiming that Jesus had the United Nations in mind when he told this story two thousand years ago. Nor am I claiming that I have the one, true, final interpretation of Jesus’s parable, because I believe that there is no one, true, final interpretation; Jesus meant his parables to allow multiple interpretations to get us to think hard about big issues. So it is this parable helps us to think hard about pride, prejudice, and international politics.

    In the second reading this morning, we heard from Richard Ford’s book The Parables of Jesus: Recovering the Art of Listening. Ford asks us to set aside the old, conventional interpretations of the parable, and to extend our sympathies beyond the big landowner to include the day laborers. He asks us to listen to this parable from a new perspective, the perspective of the Hebrew listeners who first heard Jesus tell it; the Hebrew listeners who would have known that the big landowner got his land holdings contrary to Hebrew law.

    Richard Ford points out that the big landowner in the parable is unable to listen carefully to the grumbling of the day laborers. When the day laborers grumble about their pay, the landowner says, Hey stop grumbling! so what if I paid some of you more than you deserve! The landowner, says Ford, is torn between a desire to appear entirely fair and just, and his inability to understand the perspective of the day laborers because of his inability to listen carefully and deeply to them.

    People like the landowner, who have a lot of power over others, don’t have to listen to the people in their power. Because they have so much power, they don’t even have to try to listen deeply, carefully, and honestly to others. The parable shows that even when such powerful people mean to be just and honest, they can appear unjust and dishonest to others. Thus it is even more important that those with power listen carefully and deeply to those without much power.

    At the moment, there is not much careful and honest listening going on in the United States political arena. Our political discourse, both here at home and abroad, is dominated by outrage. Subsequent to the attacks of September 11, 2001, we had a right to be outraged, and it is perhaps understandable that our political discourse was then dominated by outrage. But politics in the United States is still dominated by outrage, although today much of it is mock outrage. Republicans are outraged — just outraged! — that Democrats would dare to question the way the generals in Iraq are conducting the war. Democrats are outraged — just outraged! — that Republicans are using so much force to combat terrorism. I am outraged! says one politician. The other politician responds, No, I am outraged! With all the outrage going back and forth, there is little or no chance for any deep and careful listening to go on.

    All this outrage — outrage on the part of the Democrats, and outrage on the part of the Republicans — is nothing more than pride and prejudice. We can hear echoes of the landowner in the parable — I don’t have to listen to you, because I know I’m right! Prejudice grows out of that pride, a prejudice that prevents real listening. Pride and that prejudice prevent us from listening to each other — and prevent us in the United States from listening to the rest of the world.

    We Unitarian Universalists value the goal of world community, with peace, liberty, and justice for all persons, everywhere in the world. In order to reach that goal, we need to put aside our outrage, whether it is real outrage or mock outrage, and listen deeply to those around us. Those of us who are Democrats must listen carefully to Republicans, and we might just find that Republicans are correct in saying that some threats to international peace and liberty require the use of military force. Those of us who are Republicans must listen carefully to Democrats, and we might just find that Democrats have recognized some real threats to international justice and liberty in the way force is being used.

    And we residents of the United States, we must listen carefully to the rest of the world. We are the ones in power — you and me and everyone who lives in the United States. We have to make a serious effort to understand how less powerful countries see things. True democracy only works when people truly listen to one another. It is up to us to make sure that we have healthy, working international forums where true dialogue can take place.

    Perhaps we can all think about this on Wednesday, October 24, which is United Nations Day. As we celebrate United Nations Day, we can ask: How can we — you and I — further the goal of world community, with peace, liberty, and justice for all persons? Can we — you and I — learn to leave our outrage behind, so that we might listen deeply to all persons?

  • Salvation by Character

    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) 2007 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading comes the first chapter of Little Women, by the Unitarian author and abolitionist Louisa May Alcott. Little Women tells the story about three sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, growing up together. In this scene, the four sisters are waiting for their mother to come home:

    “…Jo immediately sat up, put her hands in her pockets, and began to whistle. ”  ‘Don’t, Jo — it’s so boyish!’ [said Amy]

    ”  ‘That’s why I do it,’ [said Jo]

    ”  ‘I detest rude, unladylike girls!’

    ”  ‘I hate affected, niminy-piminy chits!

    ”  ‘   “Birds in their little nests agree,”  ‘ sang Beth, the peacemaker, with such a funny face that both sharp voices softened to a laugh, and the ‘pecking’ ended for that time.

    ”  ‘Really, girls, you are both to be blamed,’ said Meg, beginning to lecture in her elder-sister fashion. ‘You are old enough to leave off boyish tricks, and to behave better, Josephine. It didn’t matter so much when you were a little girl; but now you are so tall, and turn up your hair, you should remember that you are a young lady.’…

    ”  ‘As for you, Amy,’ continued Meg, ‘you are altogether too particular and prim. Your airs are funny now, but you’ll grow up an affected little goose if you don’t take care. I like your nice manners and refined ways of speaking when you don’t try to be elegant, but your absurd words are as bad as Jo’s slang.’…

    [A few pages later, the girls’ mother, Mrs. March, comes home. She reads them a letter from their father, a chaplain in the Civil War, who tells his daughters to do their duty faithfully.]

    “Mrs. March broke the silence that followed… by saying in her cheery voice, ‘Do you remember how you used to play Pilgrim’s Progress when you were little things? Nothing delighted you more than to have me tie by piece bags on your backs for burdens, give you hats and sticks and rolls of paper, and let you travel up through the house from the cellar, which was the City of Destruction, up, up, to the housetop, where you had all the lovely things you could collect to make a Celestial City.’

    ”  ‘What fun it was, especially going by the lions, fighting Apollyon, and passing through the valley where the hobgoblins were!’ said Jo.

    ”  ‘I liked the place where the bundles fell off and tumbled downstairs,’ said Meg.

    ”  ‘My favorite part was when we came out on the flat roof where our flowers and pretty things were, and all stood and sang for joy up there in the sunshine,’ said Beth.

    ”  ‘I don’t remember much about it, except that I was afraid of the cellar and the dark entry, and always liked the cake and milk we had up at the top. If I wasn’t too old for such things, I’d rather like to play it over again,’ said Amy, who began to talk of renouncing childish things at the mature age of twelve.”…

    …

    The second reading by Dana McLean Greeley, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association from 1961 to 1969. Greeley wrote this piece in 1980.

    “There are two categories of people — at least two — that I worry about in our American society today. The first is made up of those people who are concerned primarily that they shall be saved in the next world, who don’t believe in the open encounter, who think that faith is just for the other world, who have no interest in charity, or politics, or social reform.

    “And the second category of people that I worry about are those who have no faith to begin with — no conviction, no commitment, no hope. They don’t believe in anything better than what they have known in the past. They are faithless and uninspired; and I look for no good works, no change in their lives, no change in society from them.

    “Faith is supposed to produce good works. We must improve our community and our world, all the time, in every way possible. No city in this country, or anywhere else, is yet good enough or hopeless or beyond improvement. No church, no business, is good enough or beyond improvement. Even character is part of our good works. We are not saved by faith, and our civilization is not saved by faith, without character. Character is not achieved in a vacuum. It means human relationships, and daily duties, and honesty, and generosity, and sympathy and mercy. It means accepting our responsibility and doing our best, wherever we can. Faith without character… is dead.”

    [Greeley, Forward through the Ages, p. 95.]

    Sermon

    Back in 1886, a Unitarian minister by the name of James Freeman Clarke came up with what he called “Five Points of a New Theology,” and in these five points he captured state-of-the-art Unitarian theology for the late 19th C. His five points were: the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and progress onwards and upwards forever. At some point in my years in a Unitarian Universalist Sunday school in the 1960’s, I must have learned these five points of theology, without meaning to do so — because when I ran into them twenty-some years later in theological school, I realized that I knew them more or less by heart.

    Indeed, though we are now critical of Clarke’s gender-specific language, and though now some of us no longer need the idea of God, his five points have remained of interest up to the present day, a hundred and twenty-one years after he wrote them. We are unlikely to talk of the “fatherhood” of God these days, but we most certainly talk about that which nurtures and guides us, which some call God and some might call the highest and best in humankind. We certainly don’t talk about “the brotherhood of man,” but we most certainly do talk about the goal of world community with peace and justice and equal rights for all. We still talk about the spiritual leadership of Jesus, although we are likely to add other spiritual leaders who are also important to us, such as Gotama Buddha and Moses and others. The horrors of the mid-20th C. made us less certain about “progress onwards and upwards forever,” but we are still willing to talk about — and strive towards — making this world a better place, step by step, bit by bit, to the best of our abilities.

    Yet, curiously enough, of all the five points that James Freeman Clarke outlines, the one to which we seem to pay the least attention is “salvation by character.” That sounds so old-fashioned, doesn’t it? Since 1886, we seem to be less and less sure of personal salvation. These days, we rarely, if ever, talk about personal salvation in our Unitarian Universalist churches, so concerned are we with saving the world. Personal salvation is something we do on our own time, and we surely don’t call it “salvation” — we talk about personal growth, we say that we are improving our psychological well-being; we go see a psychologist, or we sign up for self-help workshops. We only seem to talk about how our church is going to save the world, and we seemingly have neglected or forgotten the possibility that our church might just possibly help us to save our own selves.

    I think I would like to revive an emphasis on salvation by character. Partly, I want to do this because I know that my Unitarian Universalist faith saved me. When I was in my twenties and struggling with what I wanted to do with my life, my Unitarian Universalist church provided me with an ethical compass, and it gave me a community of people with whom I could talk about the big issues in life (and heaven knows that I didn’t have those kinds of conversations at my job). My membership in Unitarian Universalist churches has made me a better person, has improved my character; thus I am more than willing to talk about salvation by character, because I have experienced it. That’s my personal reason for wanting to talk about salvation by character.

    But I have a larger reason for wanting to talk about salvation by character. My friend Greg Stewart, now the minister of the Unitarian Universalist church in downtown San Francisco, has said, “Our philosophy [as Unitarian Universalists] is: Be out in the world six days a week, and then come in here and tell us how that informs your faith.” Greg was talking about how we integrate our social justice work with our religious faith. A great majority of Unitarian Universalists seem to be heavily involved in good works — we work in social service jobs or in human services or in public service or in the non-profit world, and/or we are involved in volunteer activities in the community, and/or we are the kind of people to whom friends turn in times of need, and/or we are artists who make the world a more beautiful place, or whatever it is that we do to improve the world around us. This is what Greg Stewart is telling us: we are already doing all this good work six days a week out there in the world, and then we can come to church one day a week to try to make sense of what we are doing. And I’ll add this to what he said: when we come to church one day a week, we often find that we are tired, and hurting, and even overwhelmed by all that we do to save the world. The problems of the world are huge; it is easy for us to get worn down by the thought of all the work that needs to be done; it is easy for us to lose our way, to become discouraged, to lose our sense of direction. It is even possible to become bitter and disillusioned. So it is that at times we find that we need a little salvation for our own selves.

    One of the ways that we find salvation here at church is that we tell stories to one another. Stories contain power that we should not dismiss lightly. The old story of salvation, that grand old story that is still told in many orthodox Christian churches, has great power. The old story of salvation has helped many people through hard times, by telling them that even if life is miserable and horrible here and now, some day you’ll go to heaven and all will be well, and God will wipe the tears from your eyes, and so on. Now we Unitarian Universalists discovered that that old story of salvation may have been comforting, but it has some horribly big problems. There’s the little problem that not everyone gets to go to heaven because some people burn in hell which makes many of us Unitarian Universalists not want to go to heaven in solidarity with the oppressed souls in hell (even if we were eligible to go to heaven, but we’re not because we’re heretics). There’s also the little problem that if people put all their efforts into making themselves good now so that you’ll get into heaven in the future, they have a tendency to ignore the fact that if we all worked at making the world a better place now, we could create a heaven here on earth. In the face of these pretty serious problems, we have rejected the old story of salvation.

    I’d like to suggest that instead of the old story of salvation, we tell two new stories of salvation. One story we tell ourselves is that, if we work hard enough, we can create a kind of heaven here on earth, that we can save the world. That’s a story we tell ourselves over and over again. But there’s another story of salvation that we need to tell ourselves more often, and that is the story of personal salvation, the story of salvation by character.

    The story of salvation by character lies at the core of our Unitarian identity. And as it happens, here in our church, we have a huge image that represents the story of salvation by character. Behind me is a gorgeous Tiffany glass mosaic, installed in this church in 1911. It is spectacular in its own right, for its artistry and for its sheer size. But the real interest for me is what the mosaic portrays.

    Look up, and you can see a pilgrim ascending a rough and narrow path that has been cut into the side of a precipitously steep mountain path. No, he’s not Jesus, a common misconception — he’s simply an ordinary pilgrim, dressed in a sort of medieval hooded cloak, with a sturdy walking which he keeps in his right hand, presumably to help keep him from tumbling headlong into the deep ravine close beside him. You will notice that there is no handrail on this steep path. You will notice that our pilgrim is not attached to a climbing rope, and neither carrabiners nor pitons are hidden beneath his cloak. There aren’t even any convenient roots for him to cling to. He’s on his own. No wonder he steadfastly looks upwards — he’d surely get dizzy or ill if he looked down into the deep ravine at his right-hand side.

    I said that he’s on his own, but that’s not quite true. There’s an angel hovering behind him, on his outboard side. Now the authorities debate endlessly about angels. There is, for example, a debate about their physical existence: Do angels have an actual physical existence, or are they insubstantial, incorporeal? In the Western tradition, the theologians tell us that angels are invisible and that they have no gender, although they can take on human form. Artists in the West have traditionally portrayed the otherwise invisible angels as beings that look like humans, except with the addition of wings; and quite often, the artists have not given definite gender to angels. We can see all this here in our Tiffany mosaic. Frederick Wilson, the artist who created this image, portrays the angel in the classic Western manner, as a human-like being with wings, a being who is ambiguously gendered. I’ve climbed up on a tall stepladder to look at that angel; I’ve stood up in the balcony and stared at it through binoculars; and say what you will, that angel is ambiguously gendered, or maybe a transgender angel. And of course Frederick Wilson shows us the angel; he has to show us the angel; if he didn’t show us the angel, it would be easy to miss the point of the mosaic. But while we can see the angel, the pilgrim doesn’t seem to be able to see the angel at all; at least, he gives no evidence of seeing it.

    Supposedly, the mosaic depicts a scene from an old hymn by the Unitarian hymnodist Eliza Scudder, although the connection seems somewhat tenuous to me. But to me, our mosaic fits right in with our Unitarian worldview. In the late 19th C., more than one Unitarian church had a picture of the “straight and narrow way” behind the pulpit. Many Unitarians of my grandparents’ generation saw life as a dangerous path, and what kept you out of danger was your good character. Remember that, in our Western culture, angels are messengers from God, and I suspect that back in 1911, when this mosaic first went up, the Unitarians in this congregation understood it that way. They did not believe that the angel was a physical being that could reach out and keep the pilgrim from bodily falling into the ravine. Rather, they would have understood this mosaic as a metaphor: the angel represents a whisper from God, or a whisper from your conscience — for after all, what is your conscience but the voice of that which is highest and best in you? — and it is that whisper of conscience that keeps us walking safely up the steep and dangerous path of life. We might say that our mosaic is an elaborate metaphor for the Unitarian concept of salvation by character.

    We find this same old Unitarian idea in the popular children’s book Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Alcott, who was an active Unitarian her whole life, believed strongly in the cultivation of one’s moral character. In the first reading this morning, we heard how the four girls who are the heroines of Little Women struggled with the burden of their personal imperfections; and how they understood their struggles to be like progress of a pilgrim struggling from the lowest depths up, up, up to the raptures of cake and milk in the Celestial City at the top, at the end of the journey. Little Women tells the story of how life is in some sense a struggle to overcome one’s personal imperfections, to achieve slavation through the force of good character. Louisa May Alcott also tells us that there is always a guiding hand to help us, which we may understand literally as the guiding hand of parents, or more figuratively, the guiding hand of God.

    We still tell ourselves this story of salvation by character. Some would not talk about God, but would talk about the guidance of that which is highest and best inside us, or the moral compass of natural law and human community. Some of us would in fact talk about spirits or angels which guide us, and others would refer to the guidance of the Goddess. The details have changed, the story may no longer be as important as it once was, but we still tell ourselves this story of salvation by character.

    In the early part of the 20th C., we Unitarians became more and more interested in saving the world, and less and less interested in saving ourselves. We are still concerned with personal improvement, but we are more concerned with world improvement. Now we are more likely to tell ourselves about salvation through social justice. We see ourselves as pilgrims down in the valley — the valley of racism, the valley of ecological crisis, the valley where there are too many homeless people, the valley where too many people can’t get the basics of life. We struggle upwards along a dangerous path, striving to make this world a better place. I know that’s how I look at the pilgrim, as someone who strives for justice in the world.

    But I am mindful of what Dana McLean Greeley taught: that “We are not saved by faith, and our civilization is not saved by faith, without character.” In other words, it is not enough to serve soup at the soup kitchen; social justice work alone is not enough; we must also improve our human relationships with friends and loved ones and with those whom we would help. It is not enough to send a generous check to a good cause once in a while; we must also attend to our daily duties, we must attend to our good character. Good character and social justice work go hand in hand. Good character alone is not enough; and social justice work without character is dead.

    So it is that we go out in the world six days a week, and we do what we can to make this old world a better place. Then once a week, we come in here, and we reflect on what it is that we are doing; we take the time to pause reflect on our own personal progress; we take time to reach out and seek the guidance of a helping hand, whether that helping hand comes in the form of God, and angel, or simply a supportive church community. So we come here each week, to find new strength, so that we may venture back out into the world, and make that world a better place for all.