Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Singing for Freedom

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

    Readings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Moses and the Underground Railroad

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

    Readings

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

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

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

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

    [NRSV]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Sermon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Martin, Malcolm, and Henry

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

    Readings

    The first reading is from Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”:

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

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

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

    [from this site, accessed 19 January 2008.]

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

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

    Sermon

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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