Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Teach Our Children Well

    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 a poem titled “Toys” by Coventry Patmore, an English poet who lived in the middle of the 19th C.

    My little Son, who look’d from thoughtful eyes
    And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise
    Having my law the seventh time disobeyed,
    I struck him, and dismiss’d
    With hard words and unkiss’d,
    — His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
    Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep
    I visited his bed,
    But found him slumbering deep,
    With darken’d eyelids, and their lashes yet
    From his late sobbing wet.
    And I, with moan,
    Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
    For, on a table drawn beside his head,
    He had put, within his reach,
    A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone
    A piece of glass abraded by the beach.
    And six or seven shells,
    A bottle with bluebells,
    And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
    To comfort his sad heart….

    The second reading this morning is from the book 25 Beacon Street, a memoir written by Dana MacLean Greeley, Unitarian Universalist minister and long-time president of the Unitarian Universalist Association. He writes:

    “I dream every once in a while that I am still faced with taking high school graduation examinations, or that I haven’t completed by work. I did complete it and was graduated, but I had devoted myself probably too much to church work, and to athletics, and to being president of my high school class, and never was as brilliant in my studies as my brothers and sisters. One of our daughters once wrote in an autobiographical sketch for college admission (we didn’t see it until it came back) that her grades in school were not as good as they might have been because always when she was going to study her father said that there was a young people’s meeting at church, and that that was just as important. This seems to have been the theory in my own youth.”

    SERMON — “Teach Our Children Well”

    Let me begin with the first reading today, the excerpt from the poem by Coventry Patmore. The poet is sitting at his desk trying to write a poem — now I’m imagining this, and this is not exactly what the poem says — but there’s the poet doing important grown-up things, not wanting to be bothered his son. But his son does bother him, a little boy whom I imagine to be about seven or eight years old, “who look’d from thoughtful eyes /And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise.” I imagine that the boy asks his father a question, like, “Daddy, why are sea-shells smooth inside?” His father says, “Son, don’t bother me now. Daddy’s trying to work.”

    I imagine the boy is silent for what seems to his seven-year-old self to be an impossibly long time — say, about five minutes. Even though his father said, “Don’t bother me now”, “now” must be long past. The boy says, “Daddy, why are sea-shells smooth inside?”

    His father snaps back at him, “Can’t you see that I’m busy? Not now.” I imagine that this exchange goes back and forth between father and son until the father spanks the boy and sends him to bed without any supper, and without a good night kiss. Now of course back in the 19th C. when Coventry Patmore wrote this poem, spanking your child was still socially acceptable; whereas today, spanking is no longer something you’d put in a poem; first of all because you know spanking doesn’t accomplish anything, and second of all because it is believed that spanking generally does more harm than good. If this poem had been written today, the poet would have said,

    Having my law the seventh time disobeyed,
    I took away his video game and dismiss’d
    Him to bed early, with hard words, and unkiss’d…

    After which the poem continues,

    — His Mother, who was patient, being dead.

    Perhaps the boy’s now-dead mother would have been more patient; perhaps the father is still grieving his wife’s death. Whatever the case may be, the father sends his son off to find comfort in a red-veined stone, a piece of beach glass, and sea shells. All these are worthy objects of a child’s wonder; but how much more could that little boy have found in those objects of wonder if his poet-father had taken the time to look at them with him.

    A century and a half later after this poem was written, we claim that we have a much more enlightened attitude towards children. Now we know all about the developmental stages of children, we know that children cannot act like little adults. Those old Victorians believed children should be seen and not heard, but now we encourage children’s questions, and encourage their interaction with the adult world.

    Yet for all that we think we are enlightened when it comes to children, our society has become quite good at keeping children out of sight and out of mind. We do not allow children to accompany their parents to the workplace; even though we know that for the first two centuries of European settlements here in New England, when our forebears farmed, and kept shops, and fished the inshore waters, children were always a part of adult life. We have created a society where the norm is to place children together in schools, places where only a few adults come into contact with them. By putting children in schools, the rest of us don’t have to deal with children for a significant portion of each day. Furthermore, in the past decade we have created more and more after-school programs where again we can keep children out of the mainstream of society. We still keep children out of sight and out of mind.

    Today’s attitude towards children is a change from a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago, religious liberals, along with allies like the philosopher John Dewey, created what they called “progressive education.” Progressive education meant educating children for democracy, getting children out of the schools and into the real world, in a controlled manner, so they could begin to understand and address the deep-rooted social ills of our society. Progressive education means telling children that this world could be better than it is now; that we can improve the world and make “progress onwards and upwards forever.”

    “Progress onwards and upwards forever” — that phrase is part of an old Unitarian affirmation of faith that was used in North Unitarian church in New Bedford’s North End, before North Unitarian merged into this church. “Progress onwards and upwards forever” is a religious concept: it represents our Unitarian belief that we should not wait until some afterlife to experience heavenly bliss; that we cannot wait until some hypothetical second coming; that we should try to institute heaven here on earth, and now in our lifetimes, to the extent that we are able.

    A very different religious understanding now colors our understanding of schools and schooling: namely, that heaven and heavenly bliss must wait until after we are dead; that we will have to wait until some second coming for things to get better; and that humanity does not have it in its power to do much to change the world here and now; except, perhaps, to anticipate the Second Coming. These days, there is a push to educate children to conform to authority; instead of pushing them to think for themselves, to better themselves, to better the world.

    Which brings us to the second reading. In our second reading this morning, we heard how Dana Greeley, a prominent Unitarian Universalist minister and a president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, was brought up. Dana Greeley’s parents believed in the best kind of progressive education:– progressive education that aimed to nurture full, well-rounded human beings. His parents supported academic schooling; but they felt it was equally important that Dana Greeley participate in church. His parents saw that going to church would give the young Dana Greeley high ideals that he would live up to; would nurture his sense of wonder at the universe; that going to church would give their son a framework of high morality for him to live up to; and, more pragmatically, church would give their son with lots of opportunities for leadership development. In short, going to church would help turn their son into a well-rounded human being.

    Here at First Unitarian, we can still offer these four things to children and teenagers. We have high ideals: when they are young we tell children that Unitarian Universalists have minds that think, hearts that love, and hands that are ready to serve; and as they get older, we help them deepen their thinking about their high ideals, challenging them to live out those ideals. We nurture a sense of wonder at the universe; whether our kids choose to call that wonder “God” or by some other name is less important than that they realize that we should all be struck with awe by the wonder of a new birth or the mystery of death, or the complex beauty that results from biological evolution. We still give young people a framework of high morality, steeping them in the knowledge that the world is imperfect and that each of us must do our part to make the world a better place; and that we as individuals are also imperfect but perfectible. Finally, we have leadership opportunities for young people, particularly teenagers: we allow them to become members of this congregation; and though, sadly, we still don’t allow them a full vote at congregational meetings, we allow them to serve on committees, and to have at least some voice in the governance of this congregation.

    Let me give you an example:– When a child or teenager comes to First Unitarian, they come to one of the few places in our society that offers a deep and holistic sense of what it means to cherish the earth. A young person might feel deeply about ecological issues. A young person might learn all kinds of facts about global climate change. But here in our church, we unify the emotional and the intellectual into a spiritual whole. We have high ideals, that we are able to, and have the moral duty to halt environmental disaster. To this we add a sense of awe and wonder, we see the world as sacred, an expression of God if you prefer, just as Ralph Waldo Emerson and the other Unitarian Transcendentalists did. Then we give kids a framework for high morality, a sense of duty and self-discipline that allows them to work to better an imperfect world. Finally, we give them manageable and age-appropriate leadership development opportunities, so that they can actually do something with their high ideals and morality and sense of awe and wonder.

    While the MCAS, our state’s standardized test, may serve its purpose, it cannot do for young people what our church can do. If we insist that our children attend school so that they may pass the MCAS and get their high school diplomas, we must also insist that our children attend church so that they may learn what it means to be a good person, and learn how to make the world a better place.

    Well over a century ago, Unitarian and Universalist churches figured out that if you really want to effect social change, then go teach high ideals to children. You can fix one social justice problem, but it’s like sticking your finger in a leaking dike, and another hole is sure to open up somewhere else in the dike. We have to teach our children to build a whole new dike, one that won’t crack and leak at all. And we have been doing this kind of religious education for over a century.

    I’ll put this in fancier language. As Unitarian Universalists, we hold a deep and unshaken belief in the possibility of progress onwards and upwards forever; we hold a deep belief that we can institute heaven here on earth, now during our lifetimes. And we know that education is central to human progress. Therefore, our programs for young people must be at the very center of our Unitarian Universalist churches; and historically, that has been true for us Unitarian Universalists. It is no accident that our religious education programs are well-known outside of Unitarian Universalist circles; even though we are a tiny denomination, comprising less than one percent of the United States population, other denominations have looked to us for ideas and inspiration for their own religious education programs.

    Yet as a movement, we have drifted away from our high ideals for religious education. The past ten years marked a time of decline in our historic commitment to religious education. Salaries for religious educators in our churches have been dropping in terms of constant dollars. Worse yet, it is harder to find volunteers who take joy in teaching children and youth.

    It would be easy for us here at First Unitarian to fall prey to this wider trend. For example, seeing that we only have a few children, we could have slashed the Director of Religious Education position. But that didn’t happen. This fiscal year, I recommended a modest increase in salary for the Director of Religious Education position, but your elected Board of Trustees overrode my recommendation and provided for an even bigger increase in hours and salary. Then the congregational meeting approved that bigger increase, and furthermore, members and friends of this congregation increased their pledges on average ten percent over last year to help pay for that increase (I myself increased my pledge to over five percent of my gross income to help meet the budget).

    We have the money — although we still need volunteers who will take joy in teaching our children….

    *****

    That’s about where I was planning to end this sermon when I sketched it out a week ago. Then I got a telephone call from our brand-new, enthusiastic Director of Religious Education, Erin Dunn. Erin said she was in the hospital again, that they didn’t know what was wrong with her heart, but that she was not allowed to continue working. She had been in the hospital four times in the past month. So Erin resigned before she could recruit teachers for our Sunday school, before she could organize the schedule for our youth advisors, before she could get the Religious Education Committee up and running.

    We have a great Sunday school program all ready to go, but we don’t have the people to make it happen. We need to figure out a way to support a religious education program to help our church’s children — Sophia and Amanda and Peter and Kyle and all the others — grow up to save the world. I can help in this effort, but I’m finding I cannot do it alone. We all have to pull together to keep our programs for young people going — not just parents (I’m not a parent!), but all of us.

    Nor is such an effort entirely altruistic on our part, because a truly excellent religious education program will bring us all a deep satisfaction, if for no other reason than we are hard-wired genetically to strive constantly for the continuation and improvement of the human species. We need good organizers to serve on the Religious Education Committee, we need Sunday school teachers to carry out a teaching ministry with kids, and yes we could use some more pledge increases because the budget is still going to fall a little short. But what I am really calling on us to do is to align our personal attitudes with our deepest religious beliefs and longings. Of course we won’t speak harshly to children and send them off to their rooms alone, as the father in the poem did. But we can’t ignore our young people, either. Let us learn how to treat all children the way Dana Greeley’s parents and his church did: seeing in our children the best hope for our future, nurturing and caring for our children as a deeply-satisfying religious and spiritual discipline.

    To raise up children to be good people, knowing they an bring about a heaven here on earth, is one of the chief religious wonders and joys we can experience as a community. For us to do so will only lead to greater joy for each of us personally — joy, though not necessarily greater comfort — but definitely the joy and spiritual satisfaction that comes in knowing we are living out our deepest beliefs.

  • Ingathering water ceremony, 2006

    This water ingathering service was led by Rev. Dan Harper. As usual, the text below is a reading text. The actual worship service deviated from the text due to ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

    Introduction to the Water Ingathering Ceremony

    Those of us who live near the ocean know well that the sea gathers people from all over the world, brining vastly different cultures in contact with each other. In the book Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana tells how he shipped as a common sailor, before the mast, in 1834, to engage in trade along the then-wild coast of California. Dana spent several months of that two years curing hides on the beach near the mission of San Diego, where a truly international group had gathered on the beach:

    “We were sitting at dinner in our little room, when we heard the cry of ‘Sail ho!’ … and there, sure enough, were two sails coming round the point, and leaning over from the strong north-west wind, which blows down the coast every afternoon. The headmost was a ship, and the other, a brig. … As they drew nearer, we soon discovered the high poop and top-gallant forecastle, and other marks of the Italian ship Rosa, and the brig proved to be the Catalina, which we saw at Santa Barbara, just arrived from Valparaiso. They came to anchor, moored ship, and commenced discharging hides and tallow. … and the beach, for several days, was all alive. The Catalina had several Kanakas [or Polynesians] on board, who were immediately besieged by the others, and carried up to the oven, where they had a long pow-wow, and a smoke. Two Frenchmen, who belonged to the Rosa’s crew, came in, every evening. … Several of the Italians slept on shore at their hide-house; and there, and at the tent in which the Fazio’s crew lived, we had some very good singing almost every evening. The Italians sang a variety of songs-barcarollas, provincial airs, etc.; in several of which I recognized parts of our favorite operas and sentimental songs. … One young man, in particular, had a falsetto as clear as a clarionet.
    “The greater part of the crews of the vessel’s came ashore every evening, and we passed the time in going about from one house to another, and listening to all manner of languages. The Spanish was the common ground upon which we all met; for every one knew more or less of that. We had now, out of forty or fifty, representatives from almost every nation under the sun: two Englishmen, three Yankees, two Scotchmen, two Welshmen, one Irishman, three Frenchmen (two of whom were Normans, and the third from Gascony,) one Dutchman, one Austrian, two or three Spaniards, (from old Spain,) half a dozen Spanish-Americans and half-breeds, two native Indians from Chili and the Island of Chiloe, one Negro, one Mulatto, about twenty Italians, from all parts of Italy, as many more Sandwich Islanders, one Otaheitan, and one Kanaka from the Marquesas Islands.

    “The night before the vessels were ready to sail, all the Europeans united and had an entertainment at the Rosa’s hide-house, and we had songs of every nation and tongue. A German gave us ‘Och! mein lieber Augustin!’ the three Frenchmen roared through the Marseilles Hymn; the English and Scotchmen gave us ‘Rule Britannia,’ and ‘Wha’ll be King but Charlie?’ the Italians and Spaniards screamed through some national affairs, for which I was none the wiser; and we three Yankees made an attempt at the “Star-spangled Banner.” After these national tributes had been paid, the Austrian gave us a very pretty little love-song, and the Frenchmen sang a spirited thing called “Sentinelle! O prenez garde a vous!” and then followed the melange which might have been expected. When I left them, … they were all singing and talking at once, and their peculiar national oaths were getting as plenty as pronouns.”

    So writes Richard Henry Dana. Here in our church, in the port city of New Bedford, we gather together as people descended from many different lands, from many different peoples. We are Yankees and Irish and Italian and Portuguese, we are descended from the peoples of Africa and the native peoples of North America, our families spoke Spanish and English and Portuguese. Let us take two minutes, 60 seconds, and hear from each other: If you are moved to do so, say out loud your ethnic identity or identities: where your people come from, whom you consider yourself to be. Don’t wait for others to finish before you speak, just speak as soon as the spirit moves you. Let us begin now.

    [People speak as moved]

    Rain is what lets the cool green hills of earth stay green; rain falling from dark rain clouds; clouds made up of evaporated water from lakes and oceans; lakes and oceans fed by networks of rivers and streams and brooks that we call watersheds; watersheds wherein grow the plants and herbs and trees and shrubs that make up the cool green hills of earth. That is one part of the vast cycle of water; and we too are part of the cycle of water, water we drink and wash in and depend upon to grow our food; everything living thing is part of the cycle of water. So it is that we linked by water to the blue-green hills of earth and to every living thing; so it is that we are all linked to each other by our dependence on water.

    When we gather here to begin a new church year together, we participate in a ritual gathering of the waters. If you get the church newsletter, you were invited to bring a small amount of water that somehow represents your summer: some of the water you used to water your garden, perhaps; or water from one of the city or town beaches that you visited this summer; or water from a place you visited; or water from a stream or river nearby that is important to you. If you didn’t get the church newsletter, or if you forgot, don’t worry: we have cups of water here for you to use; when your turn comes, you can pour one of these little cups of water into the communal bowl and tell us what it represents from your summer.

    Here is how we will do this: Please line up here, to my right and your left. When your turn comes, step up onto the platform. Speak clearly into the microphone, say your name, and tell us in one or two sentences what your water represents. Please be aware that there are lots of people who will want to speak, and that we usually try to end our worship services no later than five after noon, and limit your remarks accordingly. Tell us just enough to make us curious, so that people will want to approach you during social hour and ask you about your summer.

    I’ll start us off. My name is Dan Harper. This summer my partner Carol and I spent the summer taking care of a cat in Cambridge, and this is Cambridge tap water.

    [PEOPLE ADD THEIR WATER]

    We have all added our water to this common bowl, as a symbol that we have gathered together again in community. We can no longer separate this water back out into its constituent parts; I can not remove my Cambridge tapwater from this bowl; and this a symbol, too, a symbol that our covenant with each other will keep us together in the face of adversity.

  • Working Stiffs

    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

    I have three Labor Day readings for you this morning.

    The first reading is from an interview with John Taylor Gatto published last year in Working Stiff Review. Gatto, an award-winning teacher in New York City for 30 years, is best known for his book Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling in America. Gatto says:

    “Although I went to college at Cornell and Columbia, my first real job which I put my heart and mind into as an independent young man was as a cab driver working the night shift from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., six days a week. I loved it. The money was good, the scenery and association in constant flux, the absence of supervision a spectacular bonus.

    “Although all of my people on the Italian and German sides of the family aspired to white collar utopia, and many of them made it, the idioms, principles, and appreciations were, without any apology, working class for all of us. My own lifelong sympathies have remained with those who work; the harder the better….

    “I was a cruising cabbie, always hunting for fares. Lots of miles on the odometer, as opposed to the guys who wait in lines. With hundreds, or thousands, of other cruisers in competition, the fat payoffs came from imagining unlikely places where a fare might appear, and then calculating which lane would give you the best chance to snag it from the others. So a real stretching of the mind was one lesson, as just rolling around was a guarantee of empty pockets. Another lesson was how to focus exclusively on the business. Stopping for lunch, dinner, coffee, conversations, and phone calls was the way run of the mill cabbies came to think that the work was dismal and low-paid. I pushed my cab steadily for 12 hours, took my pleasure from the passengers and the sights, and almost never stopped. When checking in at shift’s end, people would casually ask what I’d booked, and were frequently amazed. “How much? That’s impossible,” they’d say….”

    The second reading comes from Walden by Henry David Thoreau, from the chapter titled “Economy”:

    “…For myself I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one. The laborer’s day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other.

    “In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely…. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.”

    The third and final reading comes from the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of the sayings of Jesus that was first written down sometimes between the year 50 and the year 100.

    “The [Father’s] imperial rule is like a woman who was carrying a [jar] full of meal. While she was walking along a distant road, the handle of the jar broke and the meal spilled behind her [along] the road. She didn’t know it; she hadn’t noticed a problem. When she reached her house, she put the jar down and discovered that it was empty.” (Thomas 97.1-4, Jesus Seminar translation)

    SERMON — “Working Stiffs”

    Here in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century, we seem to have two options in life. We can work hard, and take our pleasure in the work, or we can somehow put together a pile of money so that we may retire in comfort and devote our lives to pleasure. We are working stiffs, every one of us. Even if you run Microsoft and have more money than Warren Buffet, it seems that we are worthwhile only for the work we do and the money we have made, or good only for the work we once did and the money we once made.

    In the first reading this morning, John Taylor Gatto talks about how much he loves work. He says: “My own lifelong sympathies have remained with those who work; the harder the better.” I feel the same way. I’m one of those people who doesn’t mind working sixty or more hours a week, even at the expense of family and friends; and generally speaking I like to hang out with others who like work as much as I do. However, it does sometimes occur to me that there might be more to life than work, or escape from work.

    Whether or not you like work as much as I do, you too are part of this society where we are told that work, hard work, is the highest value in life. I suspect that it has occurred to you, too, that there might be more to life than work, or more to life than escape from work. On this Labor Day weekend, let us therefore take the time to reflect on work, and the importance of work to our larger lives.

    I like the image John Taylor Gatto gives us of what it’s like to be a cabbie: cruising the streets twelve hours a day, seventy-two hours a week, using your imagination, stretching your mind, being the best cabbie possible. And I like the way he sets forth an alternative option. As a cabbie, you don’t have to push yourself that hard, you don’t have to use your imagination, and you don’t have to stretch your mind in order to work harder. You can, instead, use your imagination to figure out ways to escape from work: to stop for lunch, to stop for conversation, to stop work for phone calls, or other means of escape; to escape from work that could just as easily numb your mind as it could stretch your mind.

    Later in that same interview, Gatto is asked what he believes is “the primary objective of compulsory education.” Gatto, an award-winning teacher who worked for thirty years providing compulsory education to young people, replies thus:

    “The primary objective [of compulsory education] is to convert human raw material into human resources which can be employed efficiently by the managers of government and the economy. The original purposes of schooling were to make good people (the religious purpose), to make good citizens (the public purpose), and to make individuals their personal best (the private purpose). Throughout the 19th century, a new Fourth Purpose began to emerge, tested thoroughly in the military state of Prussia in northern Europe. The Fourth Purpose made the point of mass schooling to serve big business and big government by extending childhood, replacing thinking with drill and memorization, while fashioning incomplete people unable to protect themselves from exhortation, advertising, and other forms of indirect command. In this fashion, poor Prussia with a small population became one of the great powers of the earth. Its new schooling method was imitated far and wide, from Japan to the United States.”

    So says John Taylor Gatto. I’m not sure I fully accept his historical analysis. It’s too much to blame poor schooling solely on Prussian innovations. For example, in 1837, Henry David Thoreau got a job as a public school teacher in the town of Concord, Massachusetts. It was a working class school, for the town’s few elite students generally attended the private Concord Academy.

    After two weeks, Nehemiah Ball, one of the members of the school committee, stopped in to observe Thoreau’s teaching. Mr. Ball did not like the fact that Thoreau used no corporal punishment, that is, he did not beat the students as part of his pedagogical technique. Mr. Ball admonished Thoreau that he had better beat the students to maintain proper discipline. Thoreau randomly beat three or four students, handed in his resignation, and went off to start his own school based on sounder educational principles. We now know, as did Thoreau, that beating students is not necessary for good education. Beating students does not serve to teach them how to be a good person, or how to be a good citizen in a democratic society, or how to be their personal best; it only serves to teach them how to submit to authority. In New England of 1837, increasing industrialization meant an increasing need for factory workers; factory workers don’t need initiative of their own, so teaching them to submit to authority was a lesson that some people may have wanted to teach those working class students.

    But Thoreau came to believe that there was that of evil in working at any job, not just working class jobs. This is different from saying that he thought there was evil in hard work, for Thoreau worked hard. But he worked hard at what he thought was important, not at what someone else thought was important. He worked hard at reading the classical Greek authors and the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita and the Analects; he worked hard at writing, he worked hard in his father’s pencil factory, and at his own business of land surveying. But he also wrote: “I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely…. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.”

    Thoreau’s statement remains true today, but only in part. If you’re a white man from a middle class or upper class background, it isn’t necessary to earn your living by the sweat of your brow. If you’re a white woman, the story is a little different — you’ll have to sweat a little harder, because a man doing the same work will earn a third more money than you do. That is, if you even get the job; in many lines of work, it remains difficult for women to get a job at all. A news story this week reported that even though half of all graduates from law schools are now women, far less than half of the law clerks for Supreme Court justices (jobs that go to recent graduates) are women. Many jobs are not yet fully open to women.

    And what if you are not white — it is even more difficult for someone who is not white to get a job. Thoreau extols the virtues of becoming a day laborer. It’s fine to be a day laborer when, like Thoreau, you are a white man who has lived your whole life in a stable community where you have lots of connections and find it easy to work at day labor jobs you choose, when you choose to work. It is a far different thing to be a person of color and a day laborer in one of the huge and anonymous cities of the early 21st century, standing on the street beside Home Depot waiting for someone, anyone, to come by and hire you for a few hours at an hourly rate that might not even be enough to buy your food and clothes and pay your rent.

    Thoreau is probably on the right track in his attempt to understand what it means to work, and what role work should play in our lives. But I don’t think he really understands what it means to be poor. Not that I myself do. To really understand what it means to be poor, I always find it helpful to turn to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

    Jesus’s teachings about the poor do not make us comfortable. Indeed, he taught that the poor, those who are truly destitute, are more likely to get into heaven than middle class or working class people; that is to say, a beggar is more likely to get into heaven than a working stiff; a homeless person is more likely to get into heaven than those of us who can afford to pay for a roof over our heads.

    This teaching of Jesus gets even more complicated for us Unitarian Universalists. Most Unitarian Universalists believe that heaven isn’t just some distant place that you get to go to after you die; while it may be that for some of us, we are most likely to believe that the kingdom of heaven is something that is being established right here and now on earth, during our lifetimes. Some scholars translate “kingdom of heaven” as “God’s imperial rule”; thus heaven is the state of recognizing God’s rule over human beings. Some of us Unitarian Universalists might put it that way, or we might say: heaven is the state of recognizing that that which is good and true and real should rule our lives, rather than that which is false and evil and unreal.

    However you put it, if we are to believe that heaven is supposed to be here and now, what are we to make of Jesus’s teaching that it is easier for the poor to get to heaven than it is for working stiffs to get to heaven? Surely Jesus does not mean to imply that there is anything saintly or virtuous about not having a roof over your head, not having enough to eat.

    In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus tells a little parable that might help us understand what he means. Now remember, the Gospel of Thomas was one of the gospels that was rejected by the early Christian church; it is not one of the four generally accepted canonical gospels. Fundamentalist Christians and more orthodox Christians do not accept the Gospel of Thomas as giving the genuine teachings of Jesus. But most serious scholars, and many religious liberals, accept the Gospel of Thomas as being just as genuine as the other four gospels. I particularly like the Gospel of Thomas because I find in it parables and sayings that don’t occur in the rest of the Bible; these parables and sayings of Jesus haven’t been explained over and over again by generation upon generation of church-goers. We can hear them today, and they can sound just as shocking and discomforting as when Jesus first said them nearly two thousand years ago.

    So it is with the third reading this morning. Jesus said: “[God’s] imperial rule” — that is, heaven — “is like a woman who was carrying a [jar] full of meal.” This jar would likely have been a large pottery vessel made to carry flour, or meal, in. “While she was walking along a distant road, the handle of the jar broke and the meal spilled behind her [along] the road. She didn’t know it; she hadn’t noticed a problem. When she reached her house, she put the jar down and discovered that it was empty.”

    I can easily imagine just such a thing happening: you’re walking along carrying some flour back from the mill so you can bake bread. You’re carrying it in a big pottery vessel, which you sling over your shoulder using a rope or strap. This pottery vessel is heavy of its own accord, so when the handle of the vessel breaks off, and it tips so that the flour gradually trickles out as you’re walking, you don’t notice it. Then when you get home, after all that work, you find that you’ve got nothing left in the jar, you just have an empty, broken jar. But how on earth is that like God’s imperial rule? –how is that like heaven?

    The only way I can make sense out of this parable of Jesus is by remembering that the poor and the homeless are more likely to get into heaven than I am. This parable of Jesus seems to imply that working hard is ultimately unimportant. I suspect the woman in the parable was a hard worker: women in that time and place didn’t have much of a choice, they had to work hard, taking care of children, cooking, cleaning, with probably very little leisure. Yet here Jesus is telling us that heaven occurs when the all the results of your hard work dribble away when you’re not even noticing; the kingdom of God will come to this earth when what you have worked and striven for has dribbled away.

    In this sense, maybe Henry Thoreau is correct when he tells us that men and women don’t need to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows. And for all that John Taylor Gatto loves to work, for all that he was willing to push himself for twelve hours a day in a taxicab, he says that the highest priority for education should be to make good citizens (the public purpose of education), to make individuals their personal best (the private purpose), and to make good people (the religious purpose). If the kingdom of God is here and now on earth, if you are to be a part of that kingdom of God, it does not matter whether you are homeless; what matters is that you are, somehow, a good person.

    I believe that Jesus is warning us that hard work does not, in and of itself, make us into good people. I believe he is telling us that hard work can indeed can get in the way of being a good person. It can get in the way if we let the hard work become an end in itself, if we let the hard work dominate who we are as persons. We are not here on this good earth simply in order to work; we are here to search after truth and goodness; if work gets in the way of that search, we will not know the heaven that is here on earth.

    I began by saying that here in the United States today, we seem to have two options in life: work hard and take our pleasure in the work, or work hard in order to get enough money to retire in comfort and devote our lives to pleasure. But Jesus’s ancient teachings challenge us to remember that work is all there is to life. Jesus’s words remind us that we have not yet created that kingdom of God here on earth, the kingdom he spoke of where everyone is able to labor for her or his own needs while contributing to the greater good, where no one is out of work or homeless and everyone is treated fairly and decently. We have not yet accomplished this greater work of humanity. May we continually challenge ourselves to work towards that great end.