Dan Harper | Sermons

  • African Earthkeepers

    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 titled “The Earthkeeper’s Call.” It comes from the African Initiated Churches in Zimbabwe. It tells in part how the African Initiated Churches teamed up with traditional religious groups to plant trees in Zimbabwe.

    After chimurenga [the Zimbabwean revolution]
    the earth was scorched and barren
    and the Spirit of God urged prophets:
    “Cry, the empty gullies, the dying plains —
    clothe the naked land of the forebears!”
    And hope returned.
    Healing hands, young leaves of trees.

    Heeding the call
    they came:
    black multitudes
    churches of the poor:
    billowing garments…
    red, white, blue, resplendent green
    bearing holy staves, cardboard crowns.
    Cursed descendants of Ham,
    rejects of white mission,
    lift the fallen banner of Spirit
    kingdom’s cornerstone
    where souls of people, tree souls meet.

    Prophets shouted:
    Repent! Confess!
    I bare earth with axe and fire
    rape forests without return
    sledge-rip gullied meadows
    turn earth’s water to trickling mire.
    Confess and baptize… the land!
    Oust the demons of neglect.
    From Jordan emerge
    with bonded hands, new earth community…

    Proclaim new heaven
    new earth in black Jerusalem…
    where weary traveler
    finds cool in shade
    rustle of leaves
    fountains spring
    clear water of life.

    The second reading is from the book “African Earthkeepers: Wholistic Interfaith Mission.” This passage tells about how some African Initiated Churches have used religious means to prevent environmental destruction. You should know that these particular Christian churches call evildoers “wizards,” in keeping with traditional African cultural understandings, and that as translations of Shona words, “wizard” and “wizardry” have nothing to do with Harry Potter or Gandalf.

    “In the earthkeeping churches the nuances regarding wizardry are inevitably more varied and subtle than during the war [for Zimbabwean independence]. In contrast to the execution or torture of war traitors, wanton tree-fellers or poachers of wildlife will, upon prophetic detection, either be temporarily barred from taking the eucharist or, in the event of repeated transgression of the earthkeeper’s code, be excommunicated altogether. The key figures in the Association for African Earthkeeping Churches are only too aware of a common guilt which, in a sense, makes all of us ‘varoyi’ — death destroyers. To this they readily admit, which in itself is a sure sign of accepting collective responsibility for environmental restoration. There is a vast difference, however, between admitting guilt prior to committed participation in conservationist programmes, and deliberate deforestation or related destructive action in the face of a protective environmental code. It is this attitude of selfish environmental exploitation, regardless of the will of the community and the destruction caused to nature, which the prophets condemn as the evil of uroyi [wizardry], to be stamped out at all costs.” [p. 166]

    Sermon

    This is the first in a series of three sermons for Black History Month. Although often Black History Month is a time to celebrate and explore the Black Diaspora, in today’s sermon I’m going to talk about contemporary Africa.

    If you attend worship services here regularly, you will know by now that I have a special interest in ecological theology and spirituality. Nor I am alone in this interest: many other people in this congregation are also committed to ecological theology and spirituality. Speaking for myself, I find myself nodding in agreement with the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released yesterday which says there is “unequivocal series of evidence [showing that] fossil fuel burning and land use change are affecting the climate on our planet.” I feel equally strongly that my religion has to address the realities of that environmental crisis; in fact, if my religion does not address the environmental crisis in real and meaningful ways, why, I’ll go find another religion that does.

    I said our whole world is involved in this environmental crisis. It’s easy to forget that. It’s all too easy to concentrate on our environmental problems right here in North America, and ignore the rest of the world. It’s easy, for example, to conveniently forget that when sea levels start rising due to global warming, the country of Bangladesh is going to be much worse off than New Bedford — thousand, even millions of Bangldeshis could be affected by even a modest increase in sea levels. It’s easy to forget, for another example, that the air in some Chinese cities is so polluted that no birds can live in those cities, and that lung diseases are rampant among the human inhabitants of those cities. It’s easy to forget, for another example, that the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are predicting an increase in the already serious droughts and desertification in sub-Sahara Africa.

    It’s easy for us here in North America to forget that the environmental crisis is world-wide. In my more cynical moments, I sometimes think that predominantly white North America manages to ignore environmental crisis in countries where most of the people do not have white skin. In my less cynical moments, I sometimes wonder how these other places are coping with environmental crisis. Many places in the world are already deeper into the crisis than we are. Maybe we could learn from them.

    A year ago, I happened to stumble across a book titled African Earthkeepers: Wholistic Interfaith Mission, by Marthinus L. Daneel. In this book, Daneel tells the story of an interfaith earthkeeping project that unites Christians and traditional African religious groups in Zimbabwe. The project didn’t happen overnight, and the story of this interfaith earthkeeping effort goes something like this:

    Before the war for majority rule in Zimbabwe, ecological problems were already appearing. Overgrazing was common — putting too much livestock onto the land had the result that the plants the animals preferred to eat couldn’t reseed themselves, leaving bare soil. Soil erosion became common, and big gullies began to appear in the land where the soil washed away. Firewood had become scarce, more and more trees were cut for cooking fires, and forests began to shrink in size. All these trends were exacerbated by the fact that a tiny white minority controlled most of the land, which they farmed for profit, not to supply local food, selling much of their crops abroad.

    Zimbabwe achieved independence from white minority rule in the mid-1980’s. Many of those who fought for black majority rule hoped that a redistribution of land would lead to greater equity through better ecological balance. This was not to be so, for the war for independence, and its aftermath, devastated the countryside. Widespread destruction of forests left the land vulnerable to erosion. People were evicted from where they had lived, and wound up squatting on common lands. On top of that, a severe drought lasted through most of the 1980’s up to 1992.

    In his book, Marthinus Daneel says that it was bad enough to see the poorly-conceived settlement plans lead to further environmental destruction. But it was something else to see “callous profiteers” grab up forest lands and clear-cut the trees to sell as firewood for a quick profit, leaving the land exposed to soil erosion. And it was something else to see squatters pushed into the drainage area of Lake Kyle, where they quickly cut down large sections of the forest, leaving the bare soil to drain into the lake.

    “Worst of all was the invasion of Mount Mugabe,” Daneel writes. Exploitative profiteers managed to grab land on the sacred mountain, cutting down the wild fruit trees that grew there, selling them for firewood. Not only was it ridiculous to destroy a food source just to make a quick profit; the people of the area, both Christians and those who practiced traditional religion, thought of the trees as sacred. “These greedy exploiters desecrated the holy grove,” writes Daneel. “Soon the mountain was dying.” [p.9]

    Daneel and others watched the land being destroyed, and slowly a resolve grew in them to somehow stop the destruction. Daneel, who is Christian, tells about a key moment for him, when he was talking with one of the leaders of the traditional religion. Both of them felt the environmental crisis had a spiritual side to it. In Daneel’s Christian churches, there was a growing feeling that the church’s must become keepers of God’s creation. For their part, the traditional religious groups were upset by the destruction of the sacred groves, and they felt that unless something was done to fix the situation they could expect retribution from the spirit world. A key moment came when the two groups decided that they must work together — that these two religions, long at odds with one another, must put aside their differences and address the problem of environmental disaster together. It’s as if Unitarian Universalists teamed up with fundamentalist Christians become earthkeepers together.

    Out of the collaboration of these two groups emerged the project of planting trees. Not only was planting trees a religious act, it was also pragmatic: planting trees meant stabilizing river banks; it meant planting fruit trees that can become food sources; it meant preventing soil erosion from overgrazed lands; it meant fighting back against desertification. Remember, too, that they couldn’t just raise money and drive over to the local nursery to buy saplings; there were no commercial nurseries; if they wanted trees they would have to create nurseries and grow the trees from seeds.

    The traditionalists formed a group called AZTREC, the Association of Zimbabwean Traditional Ecologists, and the Christians formed a group called Association for African Earthkeeping Churches, or AAEC. Together, they declared the “war of the trees,” and set a goal of growing a million trees from seed every year, and then planting those trees where most needed. By the year 2000, the year Daneel wrote his book, they had almost reached that goal, surviving several serious droughts and overcoming serious financial and logistical challenges.

    Remember that this was an interfaith religious movement. To me, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the religious movement is that both the Christians and the traditionalists declared that destroying trees was evil and not acceptable from a religious point of view. This is what we heard in the second reading this morning. The Christian churches would publicly expose persons who engaged in tree-cutting or environmental destruction, ask them to repent, and if the evildoers would not repent, they would be excluded from the eucharist, the central religious rite of the church; and if their actions continued after that, they would be excommunicated. On the traditionalist side, their leaders declared that destruction of trees would lead to the most dire consequences for individuals, and for the community. Traditional spirit mediums told the people that if environmental destruction continued, the spirits would continue to withhold the rains, and the severe drought would continue. Christian prophets denounced individual evildoers and profiteers. In short, both Christians and traditionalists declared that environmental destruction was evil, that environmental destruction was against religious principles, and that individuals who participated willfully in environmental destruction would be penalized by their religious communities.

    I said at the beginning that perhaps we could learn from this African movement. Now the history of North American involvement in Africa has been generally paternalistic, especially here in the United States. When we think of Africans at all, which is not very often, we have a tendency to think: Those Africans, they are so poor and ill-educated, I’ll send a check to help out one of those poor starving African children I see in the advertisements. When our government sends aid money, the money usually comes with restrictions and advice, with an underlying assumption that Africans don’t know enough to handle their money, and that their governments are all corrupt anyway (as if we have no governmental corruption here in the United States, as if the lobbyists don’t have undue influence here in out own country). We tend to look at Africa paternalistically, and we think that we can offer help to them, but how on earth could such a poor continent help us out.

    Well, I think the African idea of turning environmental destruction into a religious matter is an idea we could learn from. I think the African idea of interfaith cooperation to stop environmental destruction is an idea we could learn from. I even think the idea of declaring environmental destruction to be evil is an idea we could learn from. So I say we should listen to and learn from these Africans who plant trees.

    First of all, let’s be a lot more explicit about turning environmental destruction into a religious matter. If we did that, we might come up with some interesting results. Then anything we do to stop environmental destruction could be seen as an act of prayer or meditation, a spiritual practice, which in turn could mean that whatever we do to stop environmental destruction is not a thankless chore but rather it is an act of spiritual beauty. If stopping environmental destruction becomes a religious matter, for some of us it will become easier to channel the whole force and power of mind, heart, and soul into that effort. If healing the earth becomes a religious matter, we might just find that we heal our own souls by healing the earth. Therefore, I say: let’s make earth healing, earthkeeping, a central part of our shared religion.

    Second of all, let’s figure out a way to make earth healing and earthkeeping an interfaith activity. I believe interfaith cooperation should be especially important for Unitarian Universalists. We already have lots of expertise in this area — we have Christians, humanists, Jews, pagans, and Buddhists in our congregations as it is, we already know how to do interfaith dialogue at a very intimate level. We can translate religious terms on the fly. When a fundamentalist Christian says “creation care,” we can translate into secular humanist terms: “ecological sustainability” — into pagan terms: “honoring the Goddess” — and so on. In fact, I think we might borrow the two African terms, “earth healing” and “earthkeeping,” and perhaps use them to substitute for more theologically loaded terms. We Unitarian Universalists should be out there making contacts with other religious groups, and building interfaith cooperation for earth healing and earthkeeping.

    Third, it’s time for us to declare that environmental destruction is evil. It is perhaps the greatest evil of our time. It is a religious evil. I know we hear too many comparisons to the evil of the Nazis and the Holocaust, but in this case I believe that comparison is apt; right now, environmental destruction is causing genocide as entire species are deliberately pushed towards extinction. It may cause further genocide as poor countries and communities of color are forced to bear the heaviest burden of environmental destruction.

    We Unitarian Universalists tend to be reluctant to declare that something is evil. The term “evil” has been misused and misappropriated, especially in religious circles, and we don’t want to continue that misuse. We are even more reluctant to declare that a person is evil. We say that we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all persons. And from our Universalist heritage, we retain that old sense that God will save all souls, that there will be universal salvation, no matter what.

    Yet I don’t think we can avoid calling the current environmental destruction “evil.” Huge numbers of people are going to die if we don’t do something about global climate change; and the people who will suffer most will be the peoples who have been historically marginalized: communities of color, the poor, those without political power. We have already seen this tendency at work in New Orleans, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. What happened to the poor neighborhoods in New Orleans was evil, insofar as the disaster continues to have worse consequence3s than it should have had. And we can’t avoid calling the current environmental destruction evil because we know that there is a small number people, of profiteers, who benefit from environmental destruction. The big oil companies have been actively working against public policy initiatives to reduce oil consumption so that we may reduce the production of greenhouse gasses — insofar as they have done so, the oil companies and their executives are doing evil.

    Those are just three things we could learn from this African movement for earthkeeping. If we had more time this morning, I would love to explore at least two other things we could learn from them. I would love to talk about how earthkeeping and earth healing could be further integrated into our worship services — for example, those African Initiated Christian churches plant trees as a part of a worship service. And I would love to talk more about the significance of planting trees, how tree planting becomes both a pragmatic act, and an act of religious earth healing.

    So it is that I believe we can learn something of critical importance from an African interfaith environmental group. I hope that you see, as I do, how we can learn from the mother continent of Africa. We can learn that earthkeeping and earth healing should be a religious task, not just a political task. We can learn that such a huge task requires us to work in close cooperation with other religious groups. And I believe we can learn practical, pragmatic ways of accomplishing earthkeeping.

    So may our religious tradition learn from African religious traditions; so may we learn to become earthkeepers, and earth healers.

  • No God But Me!

    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 from the Hebrew prophets, the book of Hosea. I have to do a little explaining here. In this reading, it is the prophet Hosea who is speaking; he lived about 750 years before Jesus was born. He is criticizing the religious and political leaders of his land, the Northern Kingdom of Israel. For poetic purposes, he refers to the religious and political leaders by the name “Ephraim” — so every time you hear the name “Ephraim,” substitute “our current leadership.” I also have to explain who “Baal” is — Baal was another god who was in direct competition with Yahweh, the god of Israel. (There was also a competing goddess named Asherah, but she isn’t mentioned in this passage.)

    By a prophet the Lord brought Israel up from Egypt,
        and by a prophet he was guarded.
    Ephraim has given bitter offence,
        so his Lord will bring his crimes down on him
        and pay him back for his insults.
    When Ephraim spoke, there was trembling;
        he was exalted in Israel;
        but he incurred guilt through Baal and died.
    And now they keep on sinning
        and make a cast image for themselves,
    idols of silver made according to their understanding,
        all of them the work of artisans.
    ‘Sacrifice to these,’ they say.
        People are kissing calves!
    Yet I have been the Lord your God
        ever since the land of Egypt;
    you know no God but me..

    [New Revised Standard Version, Hosea 12.13-14; 13.1-3, 4]

    The second reading is from the book “Returning” by Dan Wakefield. In this passage, he is talking about his experiences as a member of King’s Chapel, the oldest Unitarian congregation in North America. I must tell you that, while I agree with some things in this passage, there are some things I strongly disagree with:

    “I learned the church was really family because we worked hard and close enough with one another to get mad and argue as well as sing hymns together. I found myself one evening, after an inspiring session of a class called “Introduction to the New Testament,” standing in the downstairs hall of the parish house shouting at [my close friend] Judy in an argument over the course of the religious education program while our family members walked past us. I knew we were family because we went to our minister as the mediating father, and we got our mutual frustration out. We realized what had brought us together in the first place was the work we had done, and we got past our differences. I knew we were family because I heard gossip about all this and other human conflicts of other family members, and we kept returning to ties that went deeper even than our own egos, and I knew that only happened in families that shared some vision beyond their individual beings.

    “I knew we were a family because we often behaved towards our minister as if he were the father of all 395 of us, as well (through his office) the local representative of God, “our Father who are in heaven.” The Reverend Carl Scovel makes no claim to power or glory and yet we see him walk up into that high pulpit every Sunday morning, and that is a lot closer to Whoever is up there above than we are. Sometimes we seemed to me like those early Israelites, a small band of people looking for security and freedom, with Carl as our Moses on Tremont Street, going up to get the Word and bringing it back down to us as we grumbled and strayed and returned.”

    So end this morning’s readings — and in the sermon I’ll tell you what I so strongly disagree with in this last reading.

    Sermon

    This is the third in a series of sermons that tell about that great Jewish leader, Moses.

    One of the quaint aspects of the old story of Moses is that his god, Yahweh, expects Moses to worship no other god — not only that, but that Yahweh expects that they will not put anything else on the same level of importance as Yahweh. How quaint! — that Yahweh expects Moses and the people of Israel to remain true to their promises to Yahweh, and to each other… Or, as we might say today using today’s buzzwords, How quaint! — that Yahweh expects Moses and the people of Israel to stay focused on their mission, and their vision for the future; and Yahweh expects Moses and the people of Israel to honor their covenant, their sacred promises to their god and to each other.

    We can also phrase it this way: Yahweh expects the people of Israel to get rid of false idols. Many Unitarians and many Universalists, through much of the twentieth century, spent a great deal of energy getting rid of false idols. Idols are those things to which people grant more importance than they deserve. There’s a great story about the Unitarian church in Lexington center, Massachusetts. In the 1950’s, they used to have a Christmas eve candlelight service during which an internally-lit cross would suddenly appear in the darkness. While you can imagine that this might have produced an interesting visual effect, the congregation realized that it was a little bit over-the-top, that they didn’t agree with its theology, in short it was an idol — it got far more importance than it deserved. The cross wound up stuck in a trash can on the sidewalk in front of the church — right on the battle green in Lexington center. You can imagine what the rest of the town said: “Those Unitarians are at it again — throwing out their cross.” And to get rid of false idols, you have to be willing to face a certain measure of disapproval from others who may not understand why you’re doing what you do.

    We Unitarian Universalists have a long history of getting rid of false idols. It isn’t just extraneous visual symbols, we try to get rid of ideas that serve as false idols. We have long known that much of the Christian religion we inherited from the past contained things that were not essential. To use the words of Theodore Parker, religion contains that which is permanent, and that which is transient. The teachings of Jesus, as they came from his mouth, still warm with his breath, contain permanent truths; as did the teachings of Buddha, and Moses, and Mohammed, and Lao Tze, and many others. But those teachings were passed on from generation to generation, and as the years passed, accretions of transient religion grew onto the permanent teachings: transient creeds and dogmas, even some fantasies. The history of human religion has been the history of people getting distracted by unimportant things.

    Today, we are again in danger of worshipping false idols; we are once again getting distracted by unimportant things. Let me name three of those things. We have made a false idol of individualism. We have made false idol of social justice work. And we have made a false idol of intimacy. These three false idols are dangerous. Worshipping them distracts us from far more important things, like our covenant, our sacred promises to each other. The old words of that ancient Jewish prophet, Hosea, rings in our ears, especially if we revise them slightly:

    We make a cast image for ourselves,
    idols made according to our understanding.
    ‘Sacrifice to these,’ we say.
    People are kissing calves!

    Hosea tells us how to break away from idolatry. He uses poetic language, and it is tempting to take it literally, that is to give more importance to its transient menaing than to its permanent truths, but we won’t take it literally. Hosea has the god Yahweh say this:

    Yet I have been the Lord your God
    ever since the land of Egypt;
    you know no God but me.

    Hosea is reminding his people, the people of Israel, that they have a covenant, that is, that they have promises which they have sworn to keep. When Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, they made a covenant together, they made promises that they swore they would keep. Their covenant had a vertical dimension: they promised to remain true to their god, Yahweh, and to ignore other gods and goddesses. Their covenant had a horizontal dimension: they promised to stick together, and to be true to one another in spite of any obstacles they faced.

    And they wound up facing huge obstacles. They were enslaved together in Egypt; and their covenant together allowed them to stick together so that they could stand up to Pharaoh and escape from slavery. They were lost in the wilderness together; and their covenant allowed them to find food together, to stay disciplined, to stay focused on their goal of reaching the Promised Land. So the old Bible stories say happened in the time of Moses.

    Hundreds of years later, in the time of Hosea, the people of Israel faced other obstacles. In the time of Hosea, the leaders of Israel were self-centered, they used their positions of power so they could have comfortable lives and do whatever they wanted; but they did not provide leadership to Israel. Hosea tells us that Ephraim (that is, the leadership of Israel) “was exalted in Israel,” but that now Israel’s leadership “has given bitter offense” and “incurred guilt through Baal.” To incur guilt through Baal is a poetic, prophetic formulation. It may literally mean that the leaders of Israel literally worshipped the god Baal even though their position demanded that they should worship only Yahweh; but more poetically, Hosea is accusing the leaders of Israel of betraying their promise to the people of Israel.

    Hosea uses poetic, prophetic words to accuse the people of Israel of not living up to their covenant; that is, he accuses them of neglecting their promises to one another. When he says they worship Baal, he is telling us that they have neglected their promises.

    As for us Unitarian Universalists today, no one can accuse us of literally worshipping the god Baal. But we have our own false idols that have cause us to neglect our covenant, our sacred promises to one another. Let us now go back and look at each of the three false idols I spoke of earlier.

    We Unitarian Universalists worship the false idol of individualism. We say: If you don’t do it my way, I won’t participate. We say: I can believe whatever I want, so I don’t have to listen to you or anyone else. We take our individualism to such extremes that our community suffers as a result. And when I say “we,” I’m including myself! Ralph Waldo Emerson taught us trust the still, small voice of conscience within; he taught us how to trust ourselves so that we don’t get pulled into false actions because we just followed the crowd. But by teaching us self-trust, Emerson didn’t mean for us to mistrust the rest of the world. By worshipping the false idol of individualism, we neglect our sacred promise to live in harmony with each other and with the natural world.

    We Unitarian Universalists worship the false idol of social justice. We say: We have to make social justice happen before we do anything else. We even say: The core work of the church is social justice work. These statements contain kernels of truth: the problems of the world are so pressing, work for social justice cannot be delayed; and the core of our moral and ethical teachings tells us that we must heal a broken world. Yet these statements are also false. If we really believed that the core work of First Unitarian were social justice work, if we really believed that we have to do social justice work before anything else, we’d sell this building tomorrow, fire the musicians and the minister, end Sunday morning worship, and channel all our money, and all our effort, towards solving the problems of the world. But what we do here is to build up a community, a community bound by high ideals and sacred promises; and from the strength we gain here, we send each other out into the world, carrying our high ideals, carrying our vision of an earth made fair and all her people free. If we worship the false idol of social action, we neglect our sacred promise to worship together — to build a community.

    We Unitarian Universalists worship the false idol of intimacy, and this is the most pernicious and evil idol of them all. We say: we must always like each other, and be nice to one another. We say: conflict is bad. We say: we must all know one another intimately. Yet to say these things is to ignore that fact that a covenant lies at the center of who we are. I have heard it said that “church should be like a big happy family.” It should be obvious how wrong that is, because if this church were like a family then someone has got to be the parents and someone has got to be the children; and I don’t know about you, but I refuse to be either childlike or parental. No: we enter into covenant together as responsible and mature adults; we make promises to one another as equals.

    This brings us to the second reading this morning, the reading from the book Returning, by Dan Wakefield. I have lots of respect for Dan Wakefield, both as a writer and as a human being, and I think he has some deep and useful insights into what a church can be, what a church should be. Unfortunately, he gets his insights all mixed up with the common stereotyping of churches as families, and he gets mixed up in some bad theology. So let’s sort through what he says, and find out what seems to be good and useful. First of all, we can dispense with his faulty theology. No minister, not even Carl Scovel, is any closer to God (assuming God exists) than any other human being. God is not “up there” somewhere; if God exists, God is the light within us, or the love we express through our actions; if God exists, God is closer than the vein on your neck. The only reason Carl Scovel or any Unitarian Universalist minister climbs up into a high pulpit is a simple pragmatic reason: so people in the congregation can see and hear better. The only reason Carl Scovel, or any other Unitarian Universalist minister, seems relatively important is because ministers can serve as embodiments of a church’s covenant.

    Second, we can dispense with Dan Wakefield’s tendency to let his own psychological issues color his understanding of church. A little later on in the book, Dan Wakefield writes: “I sometimes ‘projected’ onto the minister angers and suppositions that I later realized had nothing to do with the man Carl Scovel because when I examined the matter, he had said or done nothing whatsoever to provoke such a response.” In other words, if Dan Wakefield saw Carl Scovel as a father figure — for that matter, if Dan Wakefield saw God as a father figure — that has more to do with Dan Wakefield than it has to do with Carl Scovel, or with God.

    And yet although we must reject the supposition that churches should be like families, we cannot deny that many times we who are in churches often act as though we are a part of a big “church family.” Sometimes we wind up treating the minister as a father-figure or a mother-figure — heaven help me, I’ve been guilty of that myself. Sometimes we wind up treating another church member as a parent-figure, or we wind up treating another church member as a sibling-figure, or we wind up treating another church member as a child-substitute. This does happen; this is reality; and in this sense, Dan Wakefield is right: churches can sometimes feel like families.

    The problem with treating your church like a family is that you may have a very different understanding of a family than do other members of the church. Let me give you an example from my own experience (of course I have disguised identities so you cant’ tell who I’m talking about): Two church members, both men, both saw the church as their family; one of these men came from an abusive family where his mother abused him emotionally; the other man came from a fairly healthy family where he had a good relationship with his mother. Both of them served on the church board; both tended to view the minister (who was a woman) as if she were a mother-figure. As you can imagine, one man wanted to drastically limit what the minister could do, and the other man had a much more trust in the minister. This was not a healthy situation for either of the men, nor for the minister.

    So we need to be extremely careful when we say “church is like family.” Yes, our churches can function like families, and sometimes you can understand a church better by viewing it as if it were a family. But it is dangerous to hold that up as a goal, as an ideal towards which we might strive, because we have such different feelings about families. To some people, a family might mean the ultimate in friendly intimacy; to other people a family might mean a deadly kind of intimacy that chokes and destroys. So it is that intimacy serves as a false idol in our churches.

    Yet when Dan Wakefield tells about getting into a shouting match at church with a friend of his, he reveals something of critical importance. Dan Wakefield is telling us something that we all know to be true: churches are full of conflict, and fighting is a common part of church life. I know this is true of this church: as is true in any human community, there are conflicts, fights, and even feuds here at First Unitarian. Fights are bad if you just fight for the sake of fighting; but conflict can be good if it serves a higher purpose.

    Dan Wakefield says that he and his friend Judy took care of their shouting match by going “to our minister as the mediating father,” and so they got their “mutual frustration out.” His story gets one things wrong: the minister was not serving in the role of “mediating father.” Dan Wakefield might have thought that his minister was serving as a mediating father — I’d be very curious to know if his friend Judy thought the same thing — but actually, his minister was serving as a representative of the entire church community, and as such the minister served as an embodiment of the church’s covenant.

    Every church has a covenant, a set of promises that the people of that church make to one another. King’s Chapel has a very explicit written covenant, which goes like this: “In the love of truth and in the spirit of Jesus Christ, we unite for the worship of God and the service of man.” This old Unitarian covenant, written by James Freeman Clarke in 1886, is still used in Unitarian churches from Dublin to Illinois to the Khasi Hills of India. When Dan and his friend Judy took their disagreement, their shouting match, to their minister as the embodiment of their church’s covenant, they were reminded at some level that their purpose was to come together for worship and service. They were reminded of the love of truth: to get at truth often requires disagreement and conflict. As long as conflict aims to get at truth — as long as conflict isn’t about personalities — conflict in churches is necessary and good. And it is a covenant that allows conflict to be managed so that it can aim at truth.

    Families do not have such covenants. Families with children do have a sort of implicit covenant, that parents will care for and raise the children to be adults. Marriage is a type of covenant as well, so if a family has a married couple there is a covenant between at least those two people. But it should be obvious that these family covenants differ from church covenants in their intent, and in who is covered by the covenant.

    Churches cannot long exist without covenants. Let’s say that Dan Wakefield and his friend Judy had been members of a church with no covenant, or with a weak covenant. When they got into their shouting match, there would be nothing that could draw them back from their own personal conflict to be reminded of their higher purpose as a part of that church.

    That’s why the prophet Hosea is so insistent in reminding his people to remain true to their covenant. To ignore a covenant can mean death for a religious community. Speaking in a prophetic, poetic voice, Hosea tells the people of Israel to remain true to Yahweh their god; in other words: remain true to your covenant; remain true to the sacred promises you made to each other. And Hosea tells us what happens when the people of Israel drift away from their covenant: incompetent and dishonest leaders, whom he calls Ephraim, could gain power. Hosea accuses those incompetent and dishonest leaders of worshipping Baal; that is to say, Hosea accuses them of abandoning the covenant of the people of Israel.

    And so Hosea has Yahweh say, “Worship no god but me.” That’s a shorthand way of saying: “Stick to your sacred covenant!” Don’t let extraneous matters distract you from your higher purpose. Don’t be distracted by false idols, even when they are fashioned from gold and silver. Hosea tells us: stick to your covenant — stick to your promises.

    Dan Wakefield gives us a picture of a happy, healthy church. In a happy, healthy church, you can get into conflicts, shouting matches even. As long as you stick to the covenant, conflict can lead to truth. Moses knew this, and when the people of Israel strayed from their purpose, when they let extraneous matters creep in, he called them back to their covenantal promises with one another. Hosea told us this. And now may we turn away from our false idols, and remain true to our sacred promises to each other: to transform our own lives, to care for one another and promote practical goodness in the world, and to seek together after truth and goodness.

  • God of 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) 2007 Daniel Harper.

    Story

    If you were here in church last week, you heard the story of how Moses led the ancient Israelites out of slavery, away from the mean old Pharaoh, and into freedom. This week, we’ll hear another story about Moses.

    So Moses and all the Israelites escaped from mean old Pharaoh, and Moses led them into the desert. They had to cross the desert, hot and dry, in order to get to the Promised Land, the place where they could live in peace and freedom.

    They walked and they walked, day after day, for three whole months, until at last they reached Mount Sinai. They decided to camp there for a while, and they set up their tents.

    Moses left his brother Aaron in charge of the campsite. Moses climbed Mount Sinai, and there he talked to his God, who gave him rules and laws for the Israelites. There were laws against stealing, against murdering people, against lying. There was a law against worshipping any other god or goddess. The first ten laws God gave to Moses are sometimes called the “Ten Commandments.” And most of these laws still make sense today.

    Moses went back down the mountain bringing those first ten laws to the Israelites. Next day, Moses climbed back up the mountain for more laws. God gave him lots of laws. Some of these other laws sound strange to us today, like the law that said if one ox hurts another ox, the owner of the first ox has to sell it and divide the money with the owner of the second ox, and the owner of the second ox has to butcher it and divide the meat with the owner of the first ox. God had many laws and rules for Moses to bring to the Israelites. Moses had to climb up and down that mountain quite a few times.

    Then came a time when Moses stayed on top of the mountain for a really long time.

    Back at the campsite, the Israelites began to wonder where Moses had disappeared to. Some people decided that maybe Moses and the God of the Israelites had abandoned them. They went to Aaron and said, “Make us a new god.”

    Aaron told them to bring all their gold jewelry. He melted it all down, and made a calf from it — a golden calf.

    When the people saw the pretty golden calf, they said, “This is our god now, the god who led us out of Egypt.”

    Aaron made an altar for the golden calf, and said, “We’ll have a big celebration tomorrow for our new god.” The next day, they worshipped their new god, and they cooked lots of food, and drank lots of wine.

    Up on top of Mount Sinai, the God of the Israelites became aware of what was going on down in the camp of the Israelites. God said, “Those Israelites have made a new god for themselves! They made a calf out of gold, and then they offered it sacrifices, and worshipped it; just as they used to offer sacrifices to me, and worship me! They are no good — no good at all. I will strike them down and destroy them. And then I will lead you to the Promised Land by yourself.”

    But Moses convinced God to give the Israelites another chance. Then he hustled down to the base of Mount Sinai.

    What a sight met his eyes when he got there! People were dancing, and laughing, and eating, and drinking, and generally having a wild time. Moses stood at the gate of the camp, and he roared out, “Who is still loyal to the God of the Israelites? Come to me if you are!”

    Quite a few people ran to Moses and said they were still loyal to the God of the Israelites.

    “Go and get your swords,” Moses said to them. “Our God has told me that we have to kill off all the people who aren’t loyal to him.” And that’s what they all did: they killed all the ones who worshipped the golden calf.

    But that’s not quite the end of the story. Moses had to go back up to the top of Mount Sinai and apologize to the God of the Israelites. God said that Moses had done the right thing; God said the people who worshipped the golden calf would get punished; and God sent an angel to help the Israelites on their long journey. But God also sent a plague to the Israelites, and many of them got sick.

    Here’s what I get from this story: The Israelites were wrong to have made themselves a golden calf, after they had promised to be follow Moses’s leadership, and follow the God of the Israelites. I don’t like the tact that Moses killed off those who disagreed with him, but then I remind myself that it’s just a story. It’s just a story, but it’s a good story about remaining true to your ideals, and true to your community.

    [Story based on the book of Exodus, mostly ch. 32]

    Readings

    The first reading comes from the book of Exodus in the Torah, and tells about the time when the Israelites had only just escaped from Egypt.

    “The whole congregation of the Israelites set out from Elim; and Israel came to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had departed from the land of Egypt. The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, ‘If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’ ”

    [Exodus 16.1-3, New Revised Standard Version]

    The second reading is from the book Leadership for the Twenty-First Century by Joseph C. Rost:

    “Followers are part of the leadership relationship in a new paradigm of leadership. What is different about the emerging view of followers is the substantive meaning attached to the word and the clarity given to that understanding. The following five points give the concept of followers substance and clarity.

    “First, only people who are active in the leadership process are followers. Passive people are not in a relationship. They have chosen not to be involved. They cannot have influence. Passive people are not followers.

    “Second, active people can fall anywhere on a continuum of activity from highly active to minimally active, and their influence in the leadership process is, in large part, based on their activity, their willingness to get involved, their use of the power resources they have at their command to influence other people….

    “Third, followers can become leaders and leaders can become followers in any one leadership relationship. People are not stuck in one or the other for the whole time the relationship exists…. This ability to change places without changing organizational positions gives followers considerable influence and mobility.

    “Fourth, in one group or organization people can be leaders. In other groups and organizations they can be followers. Followers are not always followers in all leadership relationships.

    “Fifth, and most important, followers do not do followership, they do leadership. Both leaders and followers form one relationship that is leadership. There is no such thing as followership in the new school of leadership. Followership makes sense only in the industrial leadership paradigm, where leadership is good management. Since followers who are subordinates could not do management (since they were not managers), they had to do followership. No wonder followership connoted subordination, submissiveness, and passivity. In the new paradigm, followers and leaders do leadership. They are in the leadership relationship together. They are the ones who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes….. Followers and leaders develop a relationship wherein they influence one another as well as the organization and society, and that is leadership.” [pp. 108-109]

    Sermon

    If you were here last week, you heard a sermon about Moses. And this week, here’s another one: the second sermon in a series about that great Jewish leader, Moses.

    The words to the old African American hymn, the one we just sang, go something like this:

    When Israel was in Egypt’s land
    Oppressed so hard they could not stand
    The Lord told Moses what to do:
    to lead the tribe of Israel through.
    Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land
    Tell old Pharaoh, to let my people go.

    The story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt is a story of escape from slavery, a story of how to reach freedom. No wonder this story had special meaning for the African Americans who were enslaved in this country. No wonder they created hymns to tell the story of Moses. No wonder the white slave-owners sometimes tried to prevent African Americans from having access to the complete Bible; the story of Moses is potentially explosive, it is revolutionary.

    It is a story that continues to have revolutionary potential, even today. Some religious liberals dismiss the Bible as being outdated. But we religious liberals would do well to remember that one reason the old stories of Moses have survived for thousands of years is because these stories contain great power. We religious liberals who are struggling to make this world a better place would do well to remember that we could tap into the power that is in the old story of Moses; a power that could change us for the better. And this morning, I would like to look at two parts of that story that might have some small power to change us.

    The first part of the Moses story that we heard was the story of the golden calf. Moses goes up Mount Sinai to talk with the God of the Israelites. He’s gone a long time. The Israelites get impatient waiting for Moses to return, so they make themselves a new god: they make a calf out of gold, and they build it an altar, and they worship it.

    Nor are we surprised to hear this. We have all witnessed this kind of thing happening in our own lives: Someone emerges as a leader in a community, and things start to change. But then the leader gets caught up in the big picture, forgetting the details, and so his or her followers go astray, they lose their sense of mission and direction, they start pursuing false ideas (or to use some current buzzwords in the non-profit sector, “they dilute their mission”). When the leader returns to earth, he or she finds the community in disarray; chaos reigns; nothing is getting done.

    When I hear the story about Moses and the golden calf, I have two observations. First, I observe that Moses probably should have trained Aaron better so that take his place when he went up Mount Sinai. This is a classic problem in churches and non-profits: leaders often forget to train their replacements. Clearly, this problem goes back thousands of years. Second, I observe that the Israelites couldn’t stay focussed on their mission for that relatively short time when Moses was on the mountain. This is another classic problem in churches and non-profits: people forget to stay focussed on their mission, and get distracted by useless things like making golden calves. Clearly, this is another problem that has been going on for thousands of years.

    In the first reading this morning, we heard a second part of the Moses story. The Israelites have escaped from Egypt, they have escaped from bondage and slavery. But to their dismay they discover that escaping from bondage is not easy. They find themselves in the wilderness. They do not know where their next meal is coming from. Egypt may have been bad, but at least they got fed. In the sonorous poetry of the King James version of the Bible, the Israelites say: “Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

    Nor are we surprised to hear this. We have all witnessed this kind of thing happening in our own lives: A new leader takes a community of people in a bold new direction, and pretty soon the complaints begin. People say, Maybe the old ways didn’t work so well, but at least we were comfortable. People say, let’s go back to the old ways, let’s go back to the flesh pots. People start digging in their heels; they find little ways of demonstrating their discontent. Everything grinds to a halt.

    When I hear this part of the story, I have two observations. First, I observe that Moses seems to have forgotten one key task of a leader. Moses should have read this month’s issue of the Harvard Business Review, in which there is an article titled, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail.” The article points out a great and ancient truth of leadership: leaders have to “use every vehicle possible to communicate the new vision and strategies”; often they have to communicate their vision far more often than they expect. [Harvard Business Review, January, 2007, pp. 99 ff.] Clearly, this was a problem thousands of years ago, and Moses did not adequately communicate his vision for the Israelites. Second, I observe that the Israelites indulged themselves inn being passive. OK, Moses didn’t adequately communicate his vision, and OK, you didn’t have enough to eat; but come on, Israelites, can’t you go out and look for food on your own? Clearly, this was a problem thousands of years ago: the Israelites sank into passivity.

    Half a century ago, another great leader took inspiration from the story of Moses and the Israelites. Half a century ago, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., found himself in an explosive situation. He was the minister of a church here in the United States. Let me be more specific: he was the Black minister of a Black church in a time and a country where to be Black meant to suffer from oppressive laws and an oppressive social system, where to be Black meant to be treated as less than fully human.

    When he was still in his twenties, Martin Luther King found himself thrust into a situation where he was in a position to provide critical leadership to Black people in the United States. And it is clear that he studied carefully how he might provide effective leadership. He knew the story of Moses in his bones; he knew the great courage of Moses, but he also knew all about the problems Moses faced. He studied other great leaders, like Mahatma Gandhi; he studied theorists like Henry David Thoreau. He knew how to lead.

    From all this, Martin Luther King was able to communicate a powerful vision, a vision which he preached and proclaimed over and over again. He thrilled people with his vision. I still get chills when I read or hear his “I Have a Dream” speech: “Let freedom ring, let it ring from every village and hamlet” — powerful words, words with the power to move us to action. And to back up this powerful vision, Martin Luther King had specific strategies to mobilize his followers to action, strategies like non-violent resistance and civil disobedience.

    But there is more to the story of Martin Luther King than just a powerful vision, and specific strategies. Martin Luther King had great followers. He had truly great followers. A great leader is nothing without great followers. And this brings us to the second reading this morning, the reading by Joseph Rost. This second reading is written in such dry academic prose that even though Rost is one of the best leadership theorists alive, you may have missed what he was talking about — as your head nodded and you drifted slowly off to sleep. So let me bring out three key points in what Rost had to say.

    First, true leadership brings about real change. Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt — that’s real change. Martin Luther King changed the laws of the land — that’s real change. Real leadership lead to real change.

    Second, people who are passive aren’t engaged in change; by definition. There are three categories of people: leaders and followers, both of whom effect change; and passive people, who do nothing except perhaps try to maintain the status quo.

    Third, sometimes followers have to become leaders. Followers can’t just go off and do their own thing when they feel like it. In order to effect real change, followers have to stay in relationship with their community, and at times they may have to step forward and become leaders.

    And while Joseph Rost doesn’t say this explicitly, let me add a fourth point: Many times, people don’t want to change. They show they don’t want change by remaining passive. This was true of Israelites. This was true of many people, black and white, during King’s time. This seems to be true of religious liberals today.

    Let me say a little more about religious liberals today. I should remind you that the phrase “religious liberal” does not refer to politics; it does not refer to Democrats who happen to go to church. To be a religious liberal is to take a liberal approach to religion, to not be a fundamentalist.

    Many religious liberals today do not wish to effect change — even though they may say they want to effect change. From what I’ve observed in half a dozen Unitarian Universalist churches over the past twenty years, on the whole we religious liberals have been resisting real change in a very specific way. We say we want to change the world, to fix all the things that are wrong with the world — as long as we don’t have to change anything in our nice, comfortable churches. Even though we are too small to effect real change in this broken world, we keep our churches small through passivity. We stay small even though demographic evidence shows that there are millions of people trying to get into our churches because they believe in what we are doing; yet we keep them out through passivity, and through hyper-individuality.

    For these are our two primary ways of resisting change: passivity, and hyper-individuality.

    By passivity, I mean sitting still and doing nothing. It’s just like the Israelites when they sat in the wilderness, doing nothing about it except to wish they were back in slavery in Egypt. We can see this happening in all the liberal churches right now; we can find people who, when asked to follow a larger vision, simply do nothing. I know I have been guilty of passivity; many of our Unitarian Universalist congregations have been guilty of passivity; Unitarian Universalism as a whole has been guilty of passivity.

    By hyper-individuality, I mean wanting everything to be done your way. When a leader comes along and proposes real change, the hyper-individualist will say, Well that’s not the way I would do things, so count me out; I don’t want to follow you, nor will I step forward as a leader. Do you see how this is just another form of passivity?– because the hyper-individualist winds up doing nothing. They say that preachers often preach the sermon they need to hear, and I know that hyper-individuality is my besetting sin, the way I usually choose to resist change. HPyper-individuality runs rampant in Unitarian Universalist churches; hyper-individuality runs rampant in liberal religion.

    But passivity gets us nowhere. We need good leaders, and we need good followers.

    Good leaders need good followers. Martin Luther King could not have done what he did without good followers. He needed people who chose to get involved. He needed people who would become deeply involved, for he was calling on people to put their lives on the line. He needed people who could step forward and become leaders when he was in jail. He needed other leaders to come and be followers, just as Dana Greeley, the then-president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, left his presidential duties and traveled to Alabama to follow Dr. King. And Martin Luther King needed followers who did not see themselves as subordinates, but who saw themselves as full participants in the great endeavor of leading this country towards an acceptance of full equality for African Americans.

    Martin Luther King succeeded in large part because he could mobilize huge numbers of people in the Black churches. Since then, the health of the Black church has declined, but in those days people in the Black churches knew how to be followers, and they knew how to be leaders. Martin Luther King also succeeded in part because he was able to call on large numbers of people in the liberal churches. Since then, the health of the liberal churches — churches like this one — has declined, but in those days we knew how to be leaders, and we knew how to be followers.

    I tell you this because we need to rebuild the liberal churches — we need to rebuild this church. If a new Martin Luther King came along today, we would not be ready. We need to remember how to be good leaders — and we need to remember how to be good followers.

    Personally, I believe the biggest issue facing us today as a religious people is global climate change and environmental destruction. I am waiting for new Martin Luther Kings to emerge, leaders who will galvanize us to end environmental destruction. And these new leaders will show us how poor people, and communities of color, and other people on the margins, are disproportionately affected by environmental destruction. They will show us that when Hurricane Katrina hit, poor people and African American communities bore the brunt of the destruction; when hazardous waste is dumped, rarely does it get dumped in the white suburbs; when the sea level rises due to climate change, it will be the poor people in places like New Orleans who will suffer the most.

    These new leaders will have a vision for us, a vision of a new kind of freedom: freedom to enjoy and participate in an economically and ecologically sustainable future, no matter what color your skin might be — a sustainable future for us, for our children, for their children, for all the generations to follow.

    I am already aware of new leadership emerging all around us, new religious leaders who are ready to galvanize the liberal churches. We need to make sure we are ready when the call comes. When someone comes along and says, Let’s create the Promised Land right here and right now! Let us create a society of ecological and economic balance, a heaven of ecojustice! — when that call comes, may each of us, and may this church, be ready to answer that call.