Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Giving Thanks — To Whom?

    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) 2006 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading this morning is from Mourt’s Relation, a journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, written in 1622. This reading gives the story of the first Thanksgiving celebration in the words of one of the Pilgrims who was actually there [source of this version].

    “You shall understand, that in this little time, that a few of us have been here, we have built seven dwelling-houses, and four for the use of the plantation, and have made preparation for divers others. We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas, and according to the manner of the Indians, we manured our ground with herrings or rather shads, which we have in great abundance, and take with great ease at our doors. Our corn did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown, they came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom.

    “Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after have a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the company almost a week, at which time amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”

    Instead of the usual second reading this morning, we’ll have a story instead: the old story of Thanksgiving. This is a story that you already know. But even though you’ve heard it about a million times, we tell it every year anyway, to remind ourselves why we celebrate Thanksgiving.

    The story begins in England. In England in those days, every town had only one church, and it was called the Church of England. You had to belong to that church, like it or not. It’s not like it is here today, where families get to choose which church they want to go to — back then, there were no other churches to choose from! But a small group of people decided they could no longer believe the things that were said and believed in the Church of England.

    When they tried to form their own church in England, they got in trouble. They moved to Holland, where they were free to practice their own religion, but they felt odd living in someone else’s country. Then they heard about a new land across the ocean called America, a place where they could have their own church, where they could live the way they wanted to. They found a ship called the Mayflower, and made plans to sail to America. These are the people we call the Pilgrims.

    After a long, difficult trip across a stormy sea, the Pilgrims finally came to the new land, which they called New England. But the voyage took much longer than they had hoped, and by the time they got to New England, it was already December. Already December — it was already winter! — and they had to build houses, and find food, and try to make themselves comfortable for a long, cold winter.

    It got very cold very soon. The Pilgrims had almost nothing to eat. The first winter that the Pilgrims spent here in New England was so long and cold and hard, that some of the Pilgrims began to sicken and die. Fortunately, the people who were already living in this new land — we call them the Indians — were very generous. When the Indians saw how badly the Pilgrims were faring, they shared their food so at least the Pilgrims wouldn’t starve to death. Half the Pilgrims died in that first winter, yet without the help of the Indians, many more would have died.

    After that first winter, things went much better for the Pilgrims. Spring came, and the Pilgrims were able to build real houses for themselves. They planted crops, and most of the crops did pretty well. The Pilgrims went hunting and fishing, and they found lots of game and caught lots of fish.

    By the time fall came around again, the Pilgrims found that they were living fairly comfortably. To celebrate their good fortune, they decided to have a harvest celebration. They went out hunting, and killed some turkeys to eat at their celebration. They grilled fish, and ate pumpkin pie, and we’re pretty sure they had lobster, wild grapes and maybe some dried fruit, and venison. However, they probably did not call their holiday “thanksgiving,” because for them a thanksgiving celebration was something you did in church. At that first celebration, they did not go to church.

    Their harvest celebration lasted for several days, with all kinds of food, and games, and other recreation. The Indian king Massasoit and some of his followers heard the Pilgrims celebrating, and dropped by to see what was going on. In a spirit of generosity, the fifty Pilgrims invited all ninety Indians to stay for dinner. Imagine inviting ninety guests over to your house for Thanksgiving! More than that, in those days only the Pilgrim women prepared and cooked meals, but there were only four Pilgrim women old enough to help with the cooking — four women to cook food for a hundred and forty people!

    The Indians appreciated the generosity of the Pilgrims, but they also realized that there probably wasn’t going to be quite enough food to go around. So the Indians went hunting for a few hours, and brought back lots more game to be roasted and shared at the harvest celebration. At last all the food was cooked, and everyone sat down to eat together: men and women, adults and children, Indians and Pilgrims.

    That’s how the story of Thanksgiving goes. As you know, the Pilgrims called their first town “Plymouth,” and as you know, they also started a church in the town of Plymouth. But did you know that a hundred and eighty years later, that church became a Unitarian church? That church in Plymouth is now a Unitarian Universalist church. So it is that we Unitarian Universalists have a very important connection with the Pilgrims, and a special connection with Thanksgiving.

    SERMON — Giving thanks — to whom?

    In a way, this sermon is the second in a series of sermons on Unitarian Universalist views on God, in which we will address the question: If Thanksgiving is for giving thanks, to whom do we give thanks?

    For it is indeed time to celebrate Thanksgiving once again. Needless to say, those of us who are religious liberals know how to celebrate Thanksgiving; yet liberal religion can also lead to a certain amount of tension at Thanksgiving time. For example:– Of course we make the traditional turkey with stuffing and all the trimmings; yet many religious liberal families have at least one person who is a vegetarian or vegan as part of their spiritual practice, which means that we also have to have the traditional tofu with all the trimmings. Oh, and by the way, the vegetarians can’t eat the stuffing or the gravy either, because of the meat in them; which can cause further confusion in the kitchen, and a certain tension at the dining table.

    Or perhaps the vegetarians and vegans in your household bow to peer pressure on Thanksgiving, which can lead to a different kind of tension: for them. I was a vegetarian for maybe fifteen years, because in college I read the book Diet for a Small Planet and learned that it took six pounds of grain to produce one pound of turkey, which meant that every time you ate a pound of turkey you were stealing five pounds of food from the mouths of starving people around the world. Being a good religious liberal, I immediately stopped eating meat, in order to save the world. Except at Thanksgiving. After a couple of years of being a vegetarian, I got sick of fending off the turkey, and I’d just quietly eat what was put on my plate. Feeling guilty the whole time: I’m taking food out of the mouths of starving people!

    Turkey’s not the only food that can cause tension; other traditional Thanksgiving foods like mashed potatoes, winter squash, and turnips can lead to tension, too. In my household, part of our spiritual practice is to eat locally-grown food as much as possible, to remind us that we are rooted in the local ecosystem. But at Thanksgiving, we often run short of time and have to compromise our principles by buying at least some of our vegetables at the supermarket, which at this time of year generally means buying vegetables trucked or flown in from thousands of miles away. I have little doubt that Carol and I will find ourselves at one of the big supermarkets along Route 6 at eight o’clock this Wednesday evening; I will hold up a butternut squash, and Carol will hiss, “That was flown all the way from California, it might as well be soaked in diesel fuel”; and we’ll both feel horribly guilty. But we’ll buy it anyway, and eat it, and probably imagine that we taste the diesel fuel.

    Tension also arises for many religious liberal families when it is time to say grace before the meal. I grew up as a Unitarian Universalist, and we never said grace before meals the rest of the year. At Thanksgiving, however, Mom or my aunt Martha or someone else would tell us kids, before we started eating, that we all had to say grace together. In our household it could be a little awkward, saying grace. Sometimes we just held hands and had a moment of silence, which I liked best. The awkwardness went on until the year our oldest cousin, Nancy, joined the youth group in her Unitarian Universalist church. “I’ll say grace,” she said that year. “I’ll say the grace we use in youth group. ‘Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub, yay, God!’” We laughed, but it worked for us, and it reduced the tension around saying grace.

    If your family includes rabid atheists, or those who follow more conservative religious paths, there can be even more tension. But even entirely Unitarian Universalist families that say grace before dinner every day can still feel a little tension at that moment. Why? Because in our culture, to say grace most often implies that we are giving thanks to a traditional Christian god. But we have such high standards for ourselves, we won’t settle for an unquestioned acceptance of traditional religious concepts. The Unitarian Universalist Christians do not have a traditional conception of God, and may not be willing to settle for the traditional understanding of saying grace; certainly the religious humanists, the pagans, the Transcendentalists, the pantheists and panentheists, and all the other Unitarian Universalist theological varieties, will not settle for a traditional understanding of saying grace. If we are giving thanks when we say grace, we would like to know to whom, or to what, exactly, we are giving thanks.

    That is the question I’d like to explore with you this morning. If Thanksgiving means giving thanks, to whom are we giving thanks? –or to what are we giving thanks? We will not find one answer to this question; nor will we have time to explore all possible answers; it may be that there are as many answers to this question as there are people in this room. Yet let us outline a few responses to this question, as a beginning to deeper understanding.

    Let’s start with those of you who are Unitarian Universalist Christians. If you’re a Unitarian Universalist Christian, it should be obvious that you give thanks to God — that’s God spelled capital-G, Oh, D-as-in-dog. It’s spelled the same way, but to the Unitarian Universalist Christian God probably does not look much like the orthodox Christian God. Because of our Unitarian heritage most of us don’t see Jesus as God; and because of our Universalist heritage we can affirm universal salvation for all beings (meaning that there is no such thing as hell). That idea of universal salvation comes about because the God of the Unitarian Universalist Christian is a loving God. This loving God, who will never damn us to eternal torment, is also a God who is active in our lives by helping us to create justice in the world — for what is justice, but an expression of radical love? The story of Jesus is important to Unitarian Universalist Christians, not because it tells that Jesus is God, but because it shows how God is concerned to help the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized, the downtrodden people of the world. And the story of Jesus shows us how God can provide personal support to those people who, like Jesus, advocate for the poor and the oppressed. If you are a Unitarian Universalist Christian, you are not giving thanks to a bearded man in a white robe up in the sky: you give thanks for the love, and for the vision of justice that God brings.

    Next, let us turn to the Unitarian Universalist pagans. Unitarian Universalist pagans are a diverse bunch. For some Unitarian Universalist pagans the divine is manifested in multiple goddesses and gods, and for others there is a single Goddess. Yet even when there is a single Goddess, she manifests herself in more than one guise; for example, as three different stages of life: Maiden, Matron, and Crone. You don’t have to interpret this literally: the phases of the Goddess or the various goddesses and gods can represent different aspects of ourselves, such as the different stages of life represented by maiden, matron, and crone; or different aspects of the world around us, such as the seasons or the phases of the moon. This rests on good psychological common sense: you don’t have to take the goddesses and gods entirely literally; as Carl Jung pointed out, various goddesses and gods can serve as concrete personifications of abstract qualities like love and strength and wisdom and shared power.

    In addition to embodying good psychological common sense, Unitarian Universalist paganism is explicitly feminist, and it is explicitly ecological. If you’re a feminist, paganism lets you say “Goddess” instead of struggling with that masculine pronoun for God. If you’re an environmentalist, paganism offers a religious outlook that find divinity in Nature, meaning there’s a religious reason for not wrecking the natural world. If you are a Unitarian Universalist pagan, you can offer thanks for the true equality of men and women, girls and boys; and you can offer thanks for the wonder and beauty of Nature.

    A third major group among us is the Unitarian Universalist humanists. Humanists have no need for some transcendent being or deity, no need for God or Goddess, or gods and goddesses; humanists find no need to believe in supernatural beings that can’t be proven to exist. Unlike some humanists, Unitarian Universalists still think of themselves as religious; and as religious humanists, they see that religion can be an enormous force for good in the world. Religion offers a moral framework that can tap into the accumulated wisdom of the human race; divorced from ancient creeds and beliefs, a religious community can seek together for human answers to human questions. If you are a Unitarian Universalist humanist, you might offer thanks for the miracle of evolution, the gift of life, and the human community which is capable of doing good (if we work at it). But you don’t have to offer thanks to a being or personification; you can just be thankful.

    If we had the time this morning, I could go on and talk about other Unitarian Universalist theologies: pantheism and deism and Transcendentalism and existentialism, and many other kinds of “isms.” We don’t have time; our potluck Thanksgiving lunch awaits us.

    But remember this: the lovely thing about being a Unitarian Universalist is that we can draw inspiration from all these “isms.” We can give thanks for the God of justice and love; we don’t have to believe in such a god, but it’s a good concept if we would but truly live up to it! We can give thanks for the wonder and beauty of Nature and for the interconnected web of life; even if you see nothing transcendent in them, we’d die without an ecosystem, so why not give thanks for it! We can be thankful for the miracle of evolution, the gift of life, and the human community which is slowly learning how to do more and more good; even those who believe in God or the Goddess can also give thanks for evolution and human community.

    We Unitarian Universalists should give thanks for the diversity of our theological viewpoints. This diversity can create tension in our life together as a religious community; but it is a good tension, one which furthers our quest for truth and goodness. Whether pagan, Christian, humanist, undecided, or none of the above, we recognize that no one of us will ever have the absolute answer. We have such high ideals for ourselves, we Unitarian Universalists; we worry about having theological tension; but the only way we can remove the tension is when we finally attain to ultimate truth, a day which may never come. In the mean time, the tension is good; the tension keeps us from being complacent; the tension keeps us moving ever onwards in the search for truth and goodness.

    Someday perhaps we’ll get all the way to truth and goodness, and I like to think that day will come:– a day when there is no more poverty, no more injustice, no more racism, no more war, a day when every state recognizes same sex marriage as legal, a day when the prisons are empty because crime has ended. Someday, maybe we’ll get there; then we’ll really have something to be thankful for. In the mean time, let us give thanks for our high ideals for ourselves — and let us give thanks for the tension those high ideals create in this gathered community.

  • Election Day Sermon

    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) 2006 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading, an adaptation of Isaiah 61, was read responsively (#571 from Singing the Living Tradition

    The spirit of God has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,

    To bind up the brokenhearted,

    To proclaim liberty to the captives and release the prisoners,

    To comfort all who mourn,

    To give them a garland instead of ashes,

    The oil of gladness instead of mourning,The mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit,

    They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations, the devastations of many generations.

    You shall be named ministers of our God.

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

    “Some years ago, the State met me in behalf of the church, and commanded me to pay a certain sum toward the support of a clergyman whose preaching my father attended, but never I myself. ‘Pay it,’ it said, ‘or be locked up in jail.’ I declined to pay. But, unfortunately, another man saw fit to pay it. I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster; for I was not the State’s schoolmaster, but I supported myself by voluntary subscription. I did not see why the lyceum should not present its tax-bill, and have the State to back its demand, as well as the church. However, at the request of the selectmen, I condescended to make some such statement as this in writing:– ‘Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined.’ This I gave to the town-clerk; and he has it. The State, having thus learned that I did not wish to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on me since; though it said that it must adhere to its original presumption that time. If I had known how to name them, I should then have signed off in detail from all the societies which I never signed on to; but I did not know where to find a complete list.”

    So ends this morning’s readings.

    ELECTION DAY SERMON

    My original plan for today was to preach a sermon titled “Love All Beings.” It was going to be part of a series of sermons on Unitarian Universalist views of God. But I decided to hold off on preaching that particular sermon, and instead I’m going to preach a sermon on what it means to be a religious liberal, a Unitarian Universalist, in today’s political climate.

    You see, Tuesday is Election Day, and I decided that I had better preach an Election Day sermon. As these mid-term elections got closer, I found myself growing very uncomfortable thinking about how religious liberals deal with politics. Sometimes we act as if we believe we can effect a complete separation of our liberal faith and our politics. Alternatively, some of us confuse liberal religion with liberal politics and seem to operate under the belief that if we are registered with the Democratic party we have fulfilled our religious obligations in the public sphere.

    Both these beliefs are actually false. I say this even though I myself have at different times acted as if I believed one of these two things. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I needed to preach an Election Day sermon that would lay out some of the ways we religious liberals could come to terms with politics.

    At present, we mostly don’t deal with politics at all. Oh, sure, we do our little social action projects, and most of us are registered to vote. But for the most part, we Unitarian Universalists don’t do politics as Unitarian Universalists; we do politics simply as non-religious citizens. The end result is that politicians can safely ignore us — and they do.

    It used to be different. Sixty years ago, Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, DC, was such an influential preacher that the Washington newspapers would hold their Monday editions until they got the text of his sermon to print. Senators and representatives attended All Souls in those days, and a few were even members there. Or take an example closer to home: Sixty years ago, when Duncan Howlett occupied this pulpit here in New Bedford, a few people with political power and influence actually listened to what he had to say..

    Today, All Souls Church in Washington, DC, has a great preacher in the person of Rob Hardies, but no one outside of that church community much cares what Rob Hardies preaches. (Which is too bad, because Rob Hardies is a really good preacher who addresses matters of deep concern to all Americans.) Here in New Bedford, while it is true that we have a vibrant and exciting church community, I can assure you that no one outside of our little congregation pays much attention to the sermons preached from this pulpit. Indeed, as the primary preacher in this church, my experience has been that the only time anyone from the community bothers to call me is when they’re hoping to get money or volunteer hours from First Unitarian

    We can be safely ignored precisely because we have subscribed to those two false beliefs that make us very easy to ignore. We have a false understanding of the separation of church and state — of course we believe strongly that the government should not sponsor any church or religious body — but individually we have too often acted as if our personal religious beliefs can not inform our personal political beliefs. And too many of us hold to the false notion that liberal religion is the same thing as liberal politics, acting as if you can’t be a member of a Unitarian Universalist church unless you are also a member of the Democratic political party. Two false assumptions that have led us into political irrelevancy.

    So let’s look closely at that first false assumption, which stems, I think, from a real misunderstanding of what separation of church and state means. And to explain this, I’m going to recount a story about Henry Thoreau. Back in 1840, as we heard in the first reading this morning, Henry Thoreau ran afoul of the tax authorities in Concord, Massachusetts. His biographer Walter Harding tells the story this way:

    It had been the custom in Massachusetts for the churches to assess their members for financial support and to have the town treasurers collect for them along with the town assessments. The First Parish Church [that was the Unitarian church in that town], apparently assuming that Thoreau was a member both because his family owned a pew there, added his name to their tax rolls in 1840. When Thoreau received his church tax bill, he marched down to the town office and announced he would refuse to pay it. ‘Pay or be locked up in jail,’ they replied. But before the issue could be decided, someone else paid the tax over Thoreau’s protest and the town officials were ready to drop the matter. Not so Thoreau however for he knew the subject would be raised another year. He demanded that his name be dropped from the church tax rolls and, at their suggestion, filed with the town selectmen a statement [to that effect]….” [pp. 199-200]

    As I read this story to you, I’m sure some of you are thinking to yourselves, “See, that story about Thoreau just proves that we have to be ever vigilant at maintaining the separation of church and state.” Except that’s not what it proves. This story proves that Henry Thoreau fought to keep church and state separate in the public realm precisely because he did not separate religion and politics in his own private life. In his private life, he had moved away from the old-fashioned Unitarianism of his childhood church towards the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Therefore, his public and political action of civil disobedience was an expression of his deep personal religious beliefs. Thoreau got involved in political civil disobedience precisely because of his personal religious understandings.

    Today, we may falsely assume that we can separate religion and politics in our personal lives, and therefore unlike Henry Thoreau we religious liberals today are reluctant to let our religious faith influence our political actions. Most of us won’t even mention our religious affiliation in public. When we go out and do social justice, how many of us explicitly say to others that we are doing social justice as an expression of our Unitarian Universalist faith? When you suggest that idea to us Unitarian Universalists, we tend to get a hunted look in our eyes. What, talk about how our religious faith has transformed our lives and led us to try to change the world?

    The interesting thing is that younger Unitarian Universalists seem to be far more willing to live out their faith than us older Unitarian Universalists. The young people I know who grew up as Unitarian Universalists and who are now in their late teens and twenties are proud of their religious affiliation. When they go do social justice, they wear little flaming chalice pendants around their necks, and they wear t-shirts and have tattoos proclaiming that they are Unitarian Universalists. They talk openly about their liberal faith, and how their religious faith has transformed their lives.

    It should be obvious that if we aren’t open about who we are as religious individuals, our liberal faith will continue to remain irrelevant in the public and political sphere. We should not wonder why the religious right gets all the political attention: they are more than willing to talk openly about how their conservative Christian faith informs the way they live. Let me assure you that I am not suggesting that we should imitate the way those on the religious right talk about their conservative faith; I am not suggesting that we should aggressively proselytize in the way those good folks do. That would be completely out of character for us. But I am saying that we could learn a few things from our young people, maybe by wearing a chalice emblem — it doesn’t have to be tattoo, it can be a discreet lapel pin like this — or by not being afraid to say that yes, I am a Unitarian Universalist, and it has changed my life.

    Now on to the second false assumption, that we can equate Unitarian Universalism with liberal politics. Historically, that simply isn’t true. Millard Fillmore was a Unitarian, and he certainly could not be considered politically liberal. In the 20th C., we have Senator Leverett Saltonstall and President William Howard Taft, both Unitarians and both relatively conservative politically. Or consider the current case of two science fiction writers, Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, both of whom are Unitarian Universalists. Bradbury is a Republican and a political conservative; Vonnegut is a classic liberal or even left-wing Democrat; yet both feel comfortable within Unitarian Universalism. Indeed, some conservative Unitarian Universalists argue convincingly that the classically conservative values of liberty and lack of government interference in private life are more in line with Unitarian Universalism than today’s liberal politics. However, I would say that it is a mistake to confuse political positions with religious values; religious values may inform political positions, but those religious values remain distinct from any political expressions they might result in.

    I would put it this way: our religious faith cannot be constricted within the bounds of any political party. I agree with Jim Wallis, the evangelical Christian who also happens to be a political progressive, when he says, “Religion doesn’t fit neatly in the categories ‘left’ and ‘right’…. It should challenge left and right.” [Weekly Standard, 4/11/2005 link]

    Our liberal faith should challenge both the political liberals and the political conservatives, we should challenge both the Democrats and the Republicans. As a general principle, we can challenge the political liberals and the political conservatives with our liberal religious message of tolerance and inclusiveness. For example, we can challenge the Democrats to take religion seriously, we can challenge them to include religious people within their political party. For another example, we can challenge the Republicans to take liberal religion seriously, we can challenge them to include liberal religious people in their political party.

    Which brings us to the first reading this morning, the responsive reading based on the passage from the Hebrew prophet Isaiah. I can imagine a Republican stealing a phrase from Isaiah, and saying: We need to proclaim liberty to the captives, those who have been held captive by Saddam’s regime in Iraq. I can imagine a Democrat stealing almost the same phrase from Isaiah, and saying: We need to release the prisoners, the prisoners that have been unjustly held in Guantanomo Bay prison. But wily old Isaiah, like so many prophets, does not allow any political party to feel comfortable. He calls us to release the prisoners and to proclaim liberty to the captives — and then he calls us to bind up the brokenhearted, to comfort all who mourn, and to give them a garland instead of ashes.

    Isaiah is calling us far beyond mere politics. He is calling each of us to a universal ministry in our lives. He is calling us to bring about the reign of heaven here on earth, not so we can be re-elected, not because it matches what the polls say, but because it is the right thing to do. That is the challenge religion issues to politics.

    The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously asked who is our neighbor, that we should love him; and answered that it does not matter the color of our neighbor’s skin, that our neighbors are black as well as white. In so saying, Rev. King offered a religious critique of the political situation of his day, based on the religious principle of loving one’s neighbor. He offered a religious ground for what became political action. In the early 1970’s, feminist theologians like Mary Daly pointed out that God loved women as much as God loved men, and this religious critique — that women were just as fully human as men — based on the religious principle of loving one’s neighbor, later turned into political action.

    Martin Luther King and others like him started by making clear their religious understandings. Then they held politics accountable to those religious values. I can clarify this better if I offer you an example. We Unitarian Universalists say that we value and affirm the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part; this grows out of our Transcendentalist heritage which saw the divine in Nature, and out of our acceptance of evolution which tells us that we are really no better than any other living being, and out of our liberal understanding of how to read the Bible. Thus, when we engage as Unitarian Universalists in political action to protect the environment, we do so because of this religious understanding, which means we are not tied to some specific political means to reach that end. We might work with the Democratic party to adopt more government regulations to protect the environment, but we might also work with the Republican party to loosen regulations and provide tax cuts and other incentives for green businesses. We know the religious end which we hope to achieve; we do not need to restrict ourselves to a single partisan political means to reach that end.

    I find I must end this Election Day sermon with a final admonition to all us — and here I’m admonishing myself as well as you. We religious liberals act as if our religion should be small, inarticulate, poorly funded, and disorganized. Yet this is so silly, because we have really important religious understandings to bring to the wider world. Right now, we could offer some deep insight into how saving the environment is a religious, spiritual, and moral matter. In the face of widespread environmental problems, it has become actually immoral and unethical for us to keep our personal religious understandings separate from our personal political understandings.

    So let’s become articulate, well-funded, well-organized, and big. We can adopt modern management techniques, use the Internet and other new media to market ourselves to younger people, we can listen to the church growth consultants who give us proven methods to grow. We can let our religion infiltrate our personal politics at the same time we fight to keep religion out of public politics. We can imitate the young Unitarian Universalists who openly declare their Unitarian Universalism by wearing chalice pendants or getting chalice tattoos or wearing lapel pins. And we can talk openly about how Unitarian Universalism has supported us and has transformed our lives.

    So we could do these things, and if we did, by the time the 2008 elections roll around, this church could be a force to be reckoned with here in New Bedford. Let’s do it.

  • No God But You and 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) 2006 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading is from Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America, by James Turner.

    “On an autumnal day in 1869, Charles Eliot Norton sat down in his Swiss resort to write to his friend and confidant John Ruskin. Norton moved with ease among the most eminent writers of England and America. Son of the distinguished Unitarian theologian Andrews Norton, he had helped to found the magazine Nation and had recently retired as editor of the North American Review. He counted among his intimates James Russell Lowell, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Frederick Law Olmsted, and shared friendships as well with such men as Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, Louis Agassiz, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Few men were as well positioned to register the early tremors of any slippage in the primordial strata of Anglo-American culture.

    ” ‘There is a matter on which I have been thinking much of late,’ he confessed to Ruskin. ‘It does not seem to me that the evidence concerning the being of a God, and concerning immortality, is such as to enable us to assert anything in regard to either of these topics.’ As he tried to sort out the implications of his loss of faith, Norton wondered, ‘What education in these matters ought I to give my children?… It is in some respects a new experiment.’

    “It was in many respects a new experiment. For over a thousand years Europeans had assumed the existence of God. Their faith might be orthodox or heretical, simple or complex, easy or troubled — and for serious, thoughtful people, it was very often troubled, complex, even heretical. Yet failing to believe somehow in some sort of deity was not merely rare; it was a bizarre aberration. Then, in Norton’s generation, thousands, eventually millions of Europeans and Americans began to abandon their belief in God. Before about the middle of the nineteenth century, atheism or agnosticism seemed almost palpably absurd; shortly afterward unbelief emerged as an option fully available within the general contours of Western culture, a plausible alternative to the still dominant theism.” [pp. 1 ff.]

    The second reading is from the Christian scriptures, Matthew 12.28. In this passage, the radical Jesus has gone to Jerusalem, and has already upset the authorities.

    “One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’ — this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

    So end this morning’s readings.

    SERMON — “No God but You and Me”

    Just to warn you: this is the first in an occasional series of sermons this year on Unitarian Universalist beliefs about God.

    Growing up as I did, a Unitarian Universalist in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the dominant religious influence in my life was religious humanism — or, as some people prefer to term it, religious atheism — the religious position that says that there is no God, no divine power of any kind, nothing supernatural about the world. I grew up in a church where most of the church members did not believe in God. Even though our minister at the time was an avowed Unitarian Christian, to the best of my recollection he never tried to impose his particular understanding of God on the congregation — not that it has ever been possible to impose such understandings on Unitarian Universalists.

    Not that I had all that much to do with the minister of the church. As a child, my church experience was mostly shaped by Sunday school classes, by adults who were friendly to me, by children’s chapel, and, later on, by youth group. We learned about God in Sunday school, to be sure. We were even given Bibles when we got to fifth grade. We had no pictures on the walls of the Sunday school classrooms that supposedly represented God. If we wanted to believe in God, that was fine; and if we didn’t want to believe in God, that was fine, too.

    When I was older and a part of the church youth group, we talked about all kinds of things, including God and whether or not each of us believed in God. Our youth advisor was the assistant minister of the church, and as it happened he did believe in God. (In fact, he later left Unitarian Universalism and became a minister in the United Church of Christ, although he later told me the reason he switched denominations had nothing to do with theology and everything to do with the fact that the United Church of Christ was more active in prison, which struck me as a very Unitarian Universalist sort of attitude.) The discussion from my youth group days that I remember most vividly had nothing to do with God; it was a discussion of Zen Buddhism, and ko-ans, and satori or enlightenment. When I was in youth group, I was much more interested in understanding what it meant to achieve enlightenment, than I was in arguing over God’s alleged nature or existence.

    I tell you all this by way of an excuse. The end result of my upbringing is that I’m not particularly interested in arguments about whether or not God exists. When someone tells me that she doesn’t believe in God, I’m likely to respond, What are the characteristics of the God in which you do not believe? When someone tells me that he does believe in God, I’m likely to respond in much the same way, What are the characteristics of the God in which you do believe? In asking these questions, I have found that there are nearly as many descriptions of the characteristics of God, as there are believers and non-believers combined. That doesn’t make me any more or less likely to believe in God myself, but it does make me far less likely to argue with someone over the existence or non-existence of God, because more often than not the person you argue with is arguing about a different God than you are arguing about. Such arguments seem fruitless to me. Such arguments seem like a kind of idolatry, where idolatry means attributing too much importance to something, an importance far beyond its actual worth.

    Now I’ve made my excuses about why I’m not particularly interested in arguing with you about whether or not God exists. Yet I remain very interested in the way different beliefs about God affect how people act in the world. And I suspect that my indifference to arguments about God’s existence, and my interest in how beliefs affect people’s actions, has very much to do with the fact that I was surrounded by humanists and atheists when I was a child. The humanists and atheists I knew didn’t give two hoots about what you believed, but they cared a great deal about what you did. And the humanists and atheists I knew were staunchly opposed to idolatry in any form; they taught me that action is always more important than belief.

    The Unitarian Universalist humanists I have known have all cared deeply about what people do with their lives. I have a theory about why this is so. As Unitarian Universalists, we are heirs to the great traditional of liberal Western Christianity. The liberal Christian tradition in the West has emphasized one teaching above all others. Other Christians have emphasized the mysteries of the Trinity, or the rules by which Christians are supposed to live, or they have emphasized the final fate of humanity, or humanity’s sinfulness, or fear of a vengeful God, or the liberating power of a God who’s on your side, or Jesus as Lord and Savior, or one of many other aspects of Christianity. But liberal Christians have emphasized one simple teaching, summed up in the words of Jesus that we heard in the second reading: “The first [commandment] is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

    Those of you who are particularly observant will have noticed that Jesus says a few different things in this passage. First, being a good observant Jew, Jesus recites the Shema Yisrael: “Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad” — and forgive my bad pronunciation of the Hebrew. “Shema Yisrael,” which means: Hear O Israel; “Adonai,” a word we translate as “Lord” and which is substituted because it is improper to say the true, proper name of God aloud; “Eloheinu” meaning roughly “our god,” as long as you remember that this isn’t a name of God; “Echad,” which tells us that God is one, or that Jesus pays homage to God alone. This prayer formula, which comes from the book of Deuteronomy chapter 6 verse 4, is something Jesus would probably have said each and every day when he prayed.

    Then Jesus adds the next verses from Deuteronomy, as was likely done by Jews in his time as it is by Jews in our time. In Deuteronomy, the story is told that God says to Moses: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” Jesus knew this old story about Moses. So after repeating the Shema, that’s what Jesus says next: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”

    This is the first of two great commandments that liberal Christianity inherited from Jesus, who inherited it from Moses and the ancient writers of the book of Deuteronomy. When certain Unitarian Universalists chose no longer to believe in the God of Moses, or the God of Jesus, then as inheritors of this tradition, they were left with the second great commandment of Jesus, to wit: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

    This second great commandment also comes from the books about Moses, this time to the book of Leviticus, chapter 19, verse 18. In this part of Leviticus, God is speaking to Moses, giving rules for good and moral conduct, and God says, “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am [Adonai].” Or, as Everett Fox more dramatically translates it, “You are not to take-vengeance, you are not to retain-anger… but be-loving to your neighbor (as one) like yourself: I am [Adonai].”

    Remove God from liberal Christianity, and what is left is this second commandment, this powerful moral injunction: Love your neighbor as yourself. Do not take vengeance, do not retain anger: be loving towards your neighbor who is another human being like yourself. And this has proven to be an adequate foundation on which to build religious humanism in the Unitarian Universalist tradition. Indeed, this has proven to be an adequate common ground for Unitarian Universalism as a whole to maintain its integrity as a coherent religious tradition, in spite of the fact that we differ widely in our views of the divine. The liberal Christians among us still repeat the other parts of Jesus’s dictum, that God is one and to love God with all your heart, etc.; and they say, love your neighbor as yourself. The Jews among us might still affirm that passage from Deuteronomy (or they might not); and they say, love your neighbor as one like yourself. The Pagans among us might pay homage to the Goddess, and they would say treat other beings with the respect you yourself are due. The humanists among us see no need for any gods or goddesses, and they affirm that we must love one another as we would ourselves be loved.

    I sometimes think that could more difficult to be a humanist and not believe in God, than to be someone who believes in a God or gods or goddesses. If the universe does not include some sort of benevolent higher power, perhaps it is harder to maintain one’s faith in the goodness of the universe, and particularly the goodness of human beings. For if there is no higher power, if it’s just you and me, then who are we to blame for evil? Love other people as we would love ourselves — those are fine words to say, but in a world filled with evil, it may be hard to live those words into reality. Ours is a world in which some people torture other people; when I read the horror stories of what torturers do to fellow human beings, I find it difficult or impossible to love those torturers as my neighbor. Whereas perhaps if there is a god or goddess, he or she or it would perhaps be able to love even torturers. Or what about people who engage in genocide? –how am I supposed to love them? If there is no higher power, if it’s just you and me, then you know who we must blame for evil — we must blame humanity, we must blame ourselves.

    So we come to one of the great teachings of the humanists. The humanists have taught us that we must take full responsibility for our own actions. We cannot blame evil on God, or on the devil, or on mischievous spirits. We human beings have to take responsibility for evil, because ultimately evil is caused by us human beings.

    The great gift that we all have received from the humanists, from the atheists, is a great big mirror. Instead of looking up at some abstract heaven for answers, the humanists have taught us all that we should look in a mirror first, and ask ourselves for the answers. That also means looking in the mirror and seeing our own limitations. We are limited beings; we don’t have all the answers. Even if you believe in God, or in goddesses and gods, or in some kind of higher power, you must learn how to know yourself; and next you must learn how to love yourself; and you must also learn how to love your neighbor as yourself. All this comes from the great gift that humanists have given to all of us.

    I said earlier that the humanists and atheists I knew were staunchly opposed to idolatry in any form; where idolatry means attributing too much importance to something, an importance far beyond its actual worth. It is fine if you are someone who finds God indispensable to your understanding of the universe; I know that I cannot understand the universe without some sort of higher transcendent power. It’s fine if you are a theist who believes in God, but religious humanism teaches us that to love your neighbor as yourself is of first importance; actions are more important than beliefs; what you do with your beliefs is far more important than the niggling little details of whatever beliefs you might have.

    Jesus reduced his religion to two great commandments, but the second is greater than the first. Yes, you should love your God (or goddess, or the universe) with all your heart, mind, and being. But then, love your neighbor as yourself. The first commandment cannot be complete without the second commandment. If you believe in God, the only way to prove that you truly are a believer is to love your neighbor as yourself. If you are a humanist, and you believe that there is no God but you and me, you still show your devotion in the same way: by loving your neighbor as yourself.