Dan Harper | Sermons

  • Transcendental Ecology

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper. 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 the book Walden, by Henry David Thoreau, from the chapter titled, “Sounds”:

    “What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

    “I did not read books the first summer [I lived at Walden Pond]; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time…. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.

    The second reading is from the Hebrew prophets, the book of Isaiah, chapter 24, verses 5 and 6:

    The earth lies polluted
    under its inhabitants;
    for they have transgressed laws,
    violated the statutes,
    broken the everlasting covenant.

    Therefore a curse devours the earth,
    and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt….

    SERMON — “Transcendental Ecology”

    In case you haven’t noticed, the historically liberal churches have been shoved off to the margins in the United States. Historically liberal churches such as the Episcopalians, the Congregationalists, the Methodists, the northern Baptists, the Disciples of Christ, the Presbyterians, the Quakers, and yes the Unitarian Universalists, have been losing members and influence for some forty years now. We used to be at the center of things. Forty years ago, during the Civil Rights movement, when Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called on church leaders to come stand beside him, we in the historically liberal churches went and stood. Some religious liberals even died for Civil Rights, including two Unitarian Unviersalists: Rev. James Reeb, and Viola Luizzo. At that time, we engaged with the outer world, and our opinions actually mattered.

    Since that time, Unitarian Universalists and all the other historically liberal churches have been steadily losing membership and influence. (We Unitarian Universalists have actually been gaining members in the past twenty years, at about one percent a year; which however is not enough to keep up with population growth but at least we’re not shrinking like all the other liberal churches.) I sometimes feel that we religious liberals have spent the last forty years in a kind of a daze; we have spent the last forty years gazing at our navels. Sure, individual religious liberals work harder than ever to make this a better world — but as a group, as a liberal religious church, we are far from the centers of power and influence.

    Of course, you know who is at the centers of power and influence. While we religious liberals have been gazing at our navels, the Religious Right, a loose coalition of many of the fundamentalist churches, some of the evangelical churches, televangelists, billionaires, and other conservative Christians, has gained in power and influence. The Religious Right has enormous influence in Congress and in the White House. The Religious Right is extremely well-funded. The Religious Right has charismatic preachers, some of whom have built churches of upwards of thirty thousand members. We are shrinking and increasingly irrelevant; they get to elect presidents.

    I think it’s time for us to change. For the past forty years, we religious liberals have been coming to our beautiful church buildings, politely sad because global warming and massive species extinctions are destroying living beings that we consider sacred. Perhaps we even gently wring our hands, and we say we don’t quite know what to do. We know that environmental destruction is a religious issue. We know that one of the roots of the ecological disaster we face today is the simple religious fact that Western religion has mis-interpreted that passage in the Bible, the one where God gives us dominion over all other living beings, to mean that we can rape the earth and destroy at will. We know, too, that the Religious Right is happy for their God to have dominion over the United States, and for men to have dominion over women, and for men in the United States to have dominion over all over living beings — and when they say dominion, they don’t mean it in a nice, polite way, they mean domination. We religious liberals know all that, and when we leave our beautiful churches after coffee hour, we seem to forget all this until we next come to church, maybe four weeks from now. We conveniently forget that the ecological disaster we are now facing has deep religious roots.

    I think it’s time for us to change. We no longer have the luxury of sitting quietly in our beautiful liberal churches. We no longer have the luxury of chatting politely with our friends at coffee hour about everything except the religious roots of the ecological crisis (to say nothing of the religious roots of gay-bashing, the religious roots of the widening gap between rich and poor, and so on). We no longer have the luxury of being able to separate our polite religion from the rough-and-tumble of real-world events; we no longer have the luxury of hiding our religious faith from the world.

    That being the case, I’m going to try to set an example here this morning. I’m going to speak here publicly about my deeply-held religious faith, a religious faith that drives me to try, against all hope, to save what’s left of the natural world from further destruction. Maybe what I say seems a little raw; maybe I’m making one or two people feel uncomfortable. We have gotten out of the habit of speaking of our deeply-held religious beliefs here in our liberal churches; we have, in fact, gotten out of the habit of being religious. But that’s what ministers are for: to set the best example we know how to set, and to call people to be religious.

    So let’s talk religion.

    I’m a Transcendentalist. When I was about sixteen, I had a transcendental experience. I was sitting outdoors at the base of Punkatasset Hill in my home town of Concord, Massachusetts, with my back against a white birch tree. There was this alley of white birches that someone had planted along an old farm road, and the fields on either side were still, at that time, mowed for hay twice a year. So I was just sitting there on a beautiful late spring day, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of the oneness of everything. I mean, this was an overwhelming experience, I really don’t have the words to describe it. Since then, I’ve had numerous other transcendent experiences, some more powerful than others.

    What do these transcendental experiences mean? Well, I suppose I’m still trying to make sense out of those experiences. When I was about twenty, I found William James’s book Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he describes the various mystical experiences that people have. James said that perhaps a quarter of the population have mystical experiences of one sort or another, and in his descriptions of the various kinds of mystical experiences I could see the outlines of my own mystical experiences. But James’s book didn’t tell me about the meaning of my mystical experiences.

    I found something of the meaning of my transcendental experiences in a book by my fellow townsman, Henry Thoreau. I had always disliked Thoreau when I was a child; when you grow up in Concord, and go to the Concord public schools, you get force-fed Thoreau and Emerson, and Alcott and Hawthorne for that matter. I don’t take well to force-feeding and so dismissed Thoreau. But at last I found that Thoreau’s book Walden probably described what I had been experiencing better than anything else, especially when he writes:

    “I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, …until by the sun falling in at my west window… I was reminded of the lapse of time.”

    I discovered that I, too, love a broad margin to my life. That broad margin is a margin to my life in which I have the time and the space to be able to be rapt in a revery, to reflect on the ultimate meaning of the universe. It is also a margin to my life where I can reflect on the difference between real religion, and religion as it is imperfectly practiced in the world around me.

    When I have been able to sit “rapt in a revery,” I have come to the inescapable conclusion that there is a unity which binds all human beings together, which binds all living beings together — which, indeed, binds us human beings to the non-living world as well, to the sun and the moon and the stars above and the rocks under our feet.

    I can put this into scientific terms if you’d like: all parts of the ecosystem are interconnected, these interconnections can be modeled in terms of systems theory using feedback loops and non-linear relationships; and to harm one part of an ecosystem will have wide repercussions throughout the ecosystem. I find I am quite comfortable with scientific language. I can also put this into the language of Christianity if you’d like: God’s creation consists of earth, moon, sun, and stars; of the ocean and all the creatures that live there; of the birds of the air; of the plants that grow and the animals that live on the earth; of human beings. And to harm one part of God’s creation is to do violence to God. I find I am reasonably comfortable with Christian language. Or if you like, I can also put this into the one of the dialects of neo-paganism, which might sound something like this: the Goddess who is Gaia, earth mother, mother of all that lives; the Goddess who is the Moon Goddess who sets the rhythms of the seasons; it is she whom we love and must respect, and to harm the ecosystem is to harm the Mother Goddess. I find I am reasonably comfortable with neo-Pagan language, too!

    Right now, the specific language is less important than the fundamental underlying insight. In fact, we could even put this in words that the Religious Right might recognize:

    The earth lies polluted
    under its inhabitants;
    for they have transgressed laws,
    violated the statutes,
    broken the everlasting covenant.

    Yes, we have broken our covenant, our promises, to the earth.

    I am told by some religious liberals that in speaking this way, I’m not being decorous, I’m not being polite. My religious faith sets me on fire; I know that my faith can transform the world; I know that my faith can change the religious attitudes that lead to dominion theology and global ecological catastrophe; but I am told by some Unitarian Universalists that I am not polite, because I’m trying to change this nice comfortable little religion we’ve had for the past forty years.

    Maybe that’s the problem: mine is not a comfortable faith. I have not been made comfortable by having transcendental experiences that cause me to sit rapt in a revery on a summer morning; I have not been made comfortable by the religious realization that my contribution to global warming and habitat destruction is morally wrong; I have not been made comfortable in the knowledge that our churches must grow quickly or sink into complete and total irrelevancy as the Religious Right gains more and more influence in the United States; I am not comfortable knowing that it is up to me and other religious liberals to combat the misguided religion of domination that is the Religious Right.

    I suspect that I’m probably passing along some of my discomfort to you. I keep challenging you, I know; I am not the warm, cuddly pastor that I would kind of like to be. I would love to be able to stand up here week after week, and be able to preach warm, comforting sermons. I would love to be able to sit with you each week and pass on comfortable religious thoughts as you live out your life. It would be so much easier if we could just keep on with our small, comfortable little church; for after all, growth just means more work for us. I wish I could be a warm comfortable cuddly pastor, in a nice relaxed sleepy little church; but I don’t think either you or I have that luxury.

    My friends, the world is changing around us. Very rapidly. Ten years ago, I would have laughed at the idea that these United States could turn into a theocracy run by a Religious Right who distorts Jesus of Nazareth’s message of love into a message of hate and intolerance, who use the Bible to justify ecological disaster. Ten years ago I would have laughed at this idea; now I believe such a theocracy is a remote but all-too-real possibility. It will be a theocracy based on a religion of domination: men dominating women, the rich dominating the poor, straight people dominating gays and lesbians, and above all humanity dominating and destroying the rest of the natural world. Because, they will say, it is God’s will.

    If such a theocracy comes, we in the liberal churches will have no one to blame but ourselves. We have let our religion become optional, sort of like joining a country club, or supporting National Public Radio. We have let the Religious Right steal the moral and ethical teachings of Jesus and the other Jewish prophets away from us. We have let the political liberals to completely separate environmentalism from religion. We have let our churches dwindle in size, even though we are told that our churches get more newcomers and visitors, relative to our size, than the churches of the Religious Right. And we have been coming to church when we feel like it, staying comfortable, looking always inward.

    My friends, I know that many of you are facing serious personal challenges. There are people in this congregation who have are facing so much that they don’t have any energy left over for anything except staying alive. But that, too, is a very different thing from having a country-club church; when life is that overwhelming, you are not in a position to have a safe comfortable religion; life is not letting you have safety and comfort. If we could start remembering that the world is not a comfortable place for most people, maybe we could offer each other a lot more comfort.

    I’d like to invite you to join me in remaking liberal religion; in remaking this liberal church. I invite you to be on fire with your liberal religious faith. I invite you to feel your religion so deeply that when life overwhelms you, your religion becomes a source of strength. I invite you let your religious convictions of love, compassion, and justice draw you into passion and commitment to heal the world. I invite you to be moved by your deeply-held religious belief that all living beings are sacred, that the whole ecosystem is sacred.

    If we did that, this church, First Unitarian in New Bedford, would once again become a force to be reckoned with. As it stands now, a few people are impressed with our beautiful building, and maybe with our past exploits; but aside from that, our little congregation of less than a hundred people is safely ignored. But if we choose to do so, we could change the world. We could do it, if you choose to….

  • A Universalist Easter

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon and story copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading comes from the Christian scriptures, the book known as the Gospel of Mark. In this snippet, the rabbi Jesus quotes from the Torah, first from Deuteronomy, and then from Leviticus:

    “One of the teachers of the law [asked Jesus]… ‘Of all the commandments, which is the most important?’

    “‘The most important one,’ answered Jesus, ‘is this: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” The second is this: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no greater commandment than these.’” [Mk. 12.28-30]

    The second reading this morning, which I take in part as a commentary of the first reading, comes from the Treatise on Atonement, written by the great Universalist preacher Hosea Ballou in 1805. I should add that the First Universalist Church in New Bedford, which merged with this church in 1930, traces its history back to the moment when Hosea Ballou once preached in New Bedford. Ballou wrote:

    “The belief that the great Jehovah was offended with his creatures to that degree, that nothing but the death of Christ, or the endless misery of mankind, could appease his anger, is an idea that has done more injury to the Christian religion than the writings of all its opposers, for many centuries. The error has been fatal to the life and spirit of the religion of Christ in our world; all those principles which are to be dreaded by men, have been believed to exist in God; and professors [of Christianity] have been molded into the image of their Deity, and become more cruel than the uncultivated savage! A persecuting inquisition is a lively representation of the God which professed Christians have believed in ever since the apostacy. It is every day’s practice to represent the Almighty so offended with man, that he employs his infinite mind in devising unspeakable tortures, as retaliations on those with whom he is offended.” [p. 147]

    So end this morning’s readings, with these scornful words of Hosea Ballou.

    Story for all ages

    This morning, I’m going to tell the Unitarian version of the Easter story. This is the Easter story I heard as a child, and I thought I’d share it with you this Easter. Why is our version of the story different? When we retell that story, we don’t assume that Jesus was God. And that leads to all kinds of little changes that add up in the end…. Tell you what, let’s just listen to the Unitarian story of Easter and find out.

    If you were here to hear last week’s story, we left Jesus as he was entering the city of Jerusalem, being welcomed by people carrying flowers and waving palm fronds.

    On that first day in Jerusalem, Jesus did little more than look around in the great Temple of Jerusalem — the Temple that was the holiest place for Jesus and for all other Jews. Jesus noticed that there were a number of people selling things in the Temple (for example, there were people selling pigeons), and besides that there were all kinds of comings and goings through the Temple, people carrying all kinds of gear, taking shortcuts by going through the Temple.

    The next day, Jesus returned to the Temple. He walked in, chased out the people selling things, and upset the tables of the moneychangers. Needless to say, he created quite a commotion! and I imagine that a crowd gathered around to see what this stranger, this traveling rabbi, was up to. Once the dust had settled, Jesus turned to the gathered crowd, and quoted from the Hebrew scriptures, the book of Isaiah where God says, “My Temple shall be known as a place of prayer for all nations.” Jesus said it was time that the Temple went back to being a place of prayer — how could you pray when there were people buying and selling things right next to you? How could you pray with all those pigeons cooing?

    I don’t know about you, but I think Jesus did the right thing in chasing the pigeon-dealers, the moneylenders, and the other salespeople out of the Temple. But the way he did managed to annoy the powerful people who ran the Temple. It made them look bad. They didn’t like that.

    In the next few days, Jesus taught and preached all through Jerusalem. We know he quoted the book of Leviticus, where it says, “You are to love your neighbor as yourself.” He encouraged people to be genuinely religious, to help the weak and the poor. Jesus also got into fairly heated discussions with some of Jerusalem’s religious leaders, and he was so good at arguing that once again, he made those powerful people look bad. Once again, they didn’t like that.

    Meanwhile, other things were brewing in Jerusalem. The Romans governed Jerusalem at that time. The Romans were also concerned about Jesus. When Jesus rode into the city, he was welcomed by a crowd of people who treated him as if he were one of the long-lost kings of Israel. That made the Romans worry. Was Jesus planning some kind of secret religious rebellion? How many followers did he have? What was he really up to, anyway?

    Jesus continued his teaching and preaching from Sunday until Thursday evening, when Passover began. Since Jesus and his disciples were all good observant Jews, after sundown on Thursday they celebrated a Passover Seder together. They had the wine, the matzoh, the bitter herbs, all the standard things you have at a Seder. (By the way, if you’ve ever heard of “Maundy Thursday,” which is always the Thursday before Easter Sunday, that’s the commemoration of that last meal; and while not all Bible scholars agree that least meal was in fact a Seder, many scholars do think it was a Seder.)

    After the Seder, Jesus was restless and depressed. He had a strong sense that the Romans or the powerful religious leaders were going to try to arrest him for stirring up trouble, for agitating the people of Jerusalem. He didn’t know how or when it would happen, but he was pretty sure he would be arrested sometime.

    As it happened, Jesus was arrested just a few hours after the Seder. He was given a trial the same night he was arrested, and he was executed the next day. The Romans put him to death using a common but very unpleasant type of execution known as crucifixion. (And the day of Jesus’ execution, the Friday before Easter, is called “Good Friday,” a day when many Christians commemorate Jesus’ death.)

    Because the Jewish sabbath started right at sundown, and Jewish law of the time did not allow you to bury anyone on the Sabbath day, Jesus’ friends couldn’t bury him right away. There were no funeral homes back in those days, so Jesus’ friends put his body in a tomb, which was a sort of cave cut into the side of a hill. There the body would be safe until they could bury it, after the Sabbath was over.

    First thing Sunday morning, some of Jesus’ friends went to the tomb to get the body ready for burial. But to their great surprise, the body was gone, and there was a man there in white robes who talked to them about Jesus!

    When I was a child, my Unitarian Universalist Sunday school teachers would tell me that what had probably happened is that some of Jesus’ other friends had come along, and had already buried the body. You see, there must have been a fair amount of confusion that first Easter morning. Jesus’ friends were upset that he was dead, and they were worried that one or more of them might be arrested, too, or even executed. The burial must have taken place in secret, and probably not everybody got told when and where the burial was. Thus, by the time some of Jesus’ followers had gotten to the tomb, others had already buried his body.

    Some of Jesus’ followers began saying that Jesus had risen from the dead, and following that several people even claimed to have spoken with him. But in our Sunday school, we say that we Unitarian Universalists don’t actually have to believe that Jesus actually arose from the dead. It’s just that his friends were so sad, and missed him so much, that they wanted to believe that he was alive again.

    SERMON — “A Universalist Easter”

    I’ll start this morning by telling you a fairly stupid Unitarian Universalist joke. It seems that two Unitarian Universalists died and went to heaven. Somewhat to their surprise, they found themselves standing in line in front of a pair of large pearly gates, waiting to talk with someone who was unmistakably St. Peter. When they finally got to St. Peter, he asked them what religion they were, and they said, “Unitarian Universalists.”

    “Unitarian Universalists?” said St. Pete. “Well, even though you’re heretics, you did so much social justice work on earth I’m going to let you in to heaven, instead of sending you to hell.”

    The two Unitarian Universalists look at each other, and finally one of them says, “You mean you actually send people to hell?!” — using the exact tone of voice that vegetarians use when they say to you, “You mean you actually still eat meat?”

    “Oh yes,” says St. Peter.

    So the two Unitarian Universalists start chanting, “One two three four, we won’t go in heaven’s door/ Five six seven eight, we are going to close hell’s gates,” and next thing you know they’re picketing the Pearly Gates carrying signs saying, “God Unfair to the Damned,” and “Ban Eternal Torment.”

    Needless to say, we Unitarian Universalists don’t believe in hell. To a Unitarian Universalist, the concept of eternal torment is most likely to be a fable used by certain religious leaders to try to frighten people into good behavior; and the more cynical among us would add that “good behavior” is defined as that sort of behavior that helps keep those certain religious leaders in power. We don’t believe in hell, and indeed the concept of hell is likely to fill us with a certain amount of righteous indignation, just as we heard in the stupid joke with which I began this sermon.

    While we usually take this for granted, I would like us to take the time to explore a little of why we Unitarian Universalists don’t believe in those hoary old stories of hell and eternal torment. Easter seems like one of the best days on which to do this exploration; because some of our more traditional Christian brothers and sisters know Easter as the holiday where Jesus (they would say “Christ”) rose up from the dead; and they would echo the words of Paul of Tarsus, who wrote: “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures…”; the third day being, of course, Easter. This is what our more traditional Christian brothers and sisters say and believe with all their hearts and minds; but we know this to be wrong, we know in our hearts and in our heads and in the depths of our soul that this is simply wrong. Let us, therefore, articulate why it is wrong.

    At the most basic level, whether or not you yourself believe in God, it is quite clearly stated in the Christian scriptures that God is love. God is love; and God loves all persons, even the poor and oppressed. That God loves the poor and oppressed is one of the more remarkable innovations of Christianity; most earlier religious traditions were quite willing to neglect the poor and oppressed. Yet if God is love, and if God loves all persons no matter how despicable they might seem on the surface — how could that kind of god dispose of any person by throwing them into hell for eternal torment? To say that God would throw people into hell is illogical on an intellectual level; and it violates emotional logic as well, because a God of love would obviously be incapable of such vicious hatred.

    That’s the argument at the most basic level; and really we shouldn’t have to go beyond that argument. God is love; therefore God will not damn anyone. Once we make that argument, it is up to people with other beliefs to explain to us why a God of love would dispose of persons; it is up to people with other beliefs to explain to how “love” can include torture, humiliation, and eternal torment. Nor do you have to believe in God yourself to make this most basic argument, because really what we are doing is pointing out the impossible contradictions bound up in the idea of the traditional Christian hell.

    Let me give you an example of how this basic argument works. Each year on the second Sunday in September, a mile-long stretch of Solano Street in Berkeley is taken over by a street fair called the Solano Stroll. 250,000 people come to watch the clown parade (think Rasta clowns instead of Bozo the clown), to eat fantastic food, to listen to music from rock and roll to the Royal Hawaiian ukulele band; there are art cars, jugglers, and more. Naturally, the Unitarian Universalist church sets up a booth — these are obviously our kind of people. Well, the year I served at the Berkeley church, the organizers of the Solano Stroll put the Unitarian Universalists right next to a booth full of fundamentalist Christians. Some of these good people came over to find out what we believed in; needless to say, they were a little shocked by us. They wanted to argue with me, and we went back and forth, until I finally told them that everyone gets to heaven because God is love. That took some of the wind out of their sails. You could see the wheels turning in their heads, and almost hear them thinking: “If I tell him that he’s going to go to hell, he’s going to say, ‘You mean you don’t believe in a God of absolute love?’, and then he could say that I don’t believe that God is all-powerful….” And pretty soon, they all drifted away. All except for one young man whom I think I may have convinced; he kept talking to me, wanting to know more; but eventually he, too, went back to his friends.

    So it is that the old Universalist ideas retain their power even today, 200 years after Hosea Ballou. Universalism has a saving message for many people, if they can but hear it.

    Using traditional Christian language, we could say that message like this: “God is love; everyone gets to go to heaven: doesn’t matter whether you’re rich or poor; doesn’t matter what religion you follow; doesn’t matter whether you’re gay or straight; doesn’t matter what color your skin is; doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman: all that matters is that because you are a human being you are deserving of love.”

    Or we could use less traditional religious language, and actually leave out the word “God” altogether. We could say, “Love is the most powerful force in the universe; not television love, but the deep love we must have for all human beings; we know that all persons are worthy of dignity and respect no matter how much money they may have, no matter what religion they belong to, no matter what their sexual orientation, no matter what their racial or ethnic identity, no matter what their gender:– for your worth and dignity are an inherent part of you as a human being.”

    Recently, I’ve been going even further beyond traditional religious language. I’m now willing to say that love is the most powerful force in the universe and I’m willing to extend that love to other living beings along with human beings. This isn’t romantic love; nor is this sentimental love limited to those animals and plants that I find cute and cuddly. It’s a love that extends to all living beings, to the entire biosphere, as ultimately sacred; and even though we have to eat other living beings in order to survive, we can do so with a sense of reverence; even though we have to fight against things like the influenza virus, we can do so in reverence for the awful beauty which is truly a part of all living things. But this is a pretty radical notion; and there are still quite a number of philosophical and theological points I’m trying to figure out. And I have to say I don’t recommend trotting out universal love for the biosphere when you get into a discussion with some of the more traditional Christians.

    Yet no matter what kind of religious language we use, we can affirm the central principle of Universalism. Traditionally, Universalism referred to the universal salvation of all persons; in other words, everyone gets to go to heaven. Go beyond the old traditional language, and universalism calls us to recognize the inherent worth and dignity of all persons here and now. Go even further beyond traditional religious language, and we might say that all living beings should be valued, and saved from extinction, as we try to create an ecojustice heaven here on earth. But always, love is the central principle.

    And I firmly believe that Jesus of Nazareth was a Universalist, although he wouldn’t have called himself that. But clearly he knew the power of love. He said that all the teaching of the old religious sages and prophets came down to two simple points: Love your God with all your heart and mind and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. By the way he said this, you know that Jesus’s God loved all persons without distinction; and so we are told did Jesus live out his life, consorting with the poor and the downtrodden, hanging out not with the elite but with ordinary fishermen, and with tax collectors and prostitutes. When he spoke of love two thousand years ago, it was in a time and place that was quite different from our time and place; and today some of us might say that we shall love the universe with all our heart and mind and soul, and love our neighbors as ourselves. No matter how we say it, we remain in the tradition of the great teachings of Jesus: ours is a religion with love at the center; ours is not a religion that threatens eternal torment to anyone.

    And why then do we celebrate Easter, if we don’t believe that Jesus rose from the dead in order to save us from eternal torment? I think Hosea Ballou, that old Universalist preacher, would say that Easter is a chance, not for us to recall that Jesus died to atone for our sins; but rather, that Jesus lived to help us reconcile ourselves to God, and to God’s love.

    Today, we are likely to tell Jesus’s story in a different way, like this: Jesus was arrested on trumped-up political charges, and then he was executed to serve the interests of the powerful elite of Roman-ruled Judea. Jesus’s message of love threatened to change the way the political establishment worked; Jesus’s teachings threatened to replace a corrupt political establishment with a heaven here on earth based on love and resulting in true justice and true peace. That is why Jesus was executed; and we remember his story in order to remember that love is the ultimate subversive act, one which has the potential to bring about true peace and true justice in our world.

    Nor do we necessarily believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead. But we do know that his ideas, his teachings, his message of love, did indeed rise up to take on a new life after he was executed. Those ideas are still alive; they are with us even today. Even though Jesus was executed, love remains powerful. Love is constantly renewed; even when we think it is dead, love rises up and astonishes us with its power.

    May your life be renewed by love; and may you find new life in the firm knowledge that you, too, are worthy of love.

  • The Pluralism Project

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon and story copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading this morning is from A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation, by Diana Eck, a professor of comparative religions at Harvard University:

    “…for all the discussion about immigration, language, and culture, we Americans have not yet really thought about it in terms of religion. We are surprised to discover the religious changes America has been undergoing. We are surprised to find that there are more Muslim Americans than Episcopalians, more Muslims than members of the Presbyterian Church USA, and as many Muslims as there are Jews — that is, about six million. We are astonished to learn that Los Angeles is the most complex Buddhist city in the world, with a Buddhist population spanning the whole range of the Asian Buddhist world from Sri Lanka to Korea, along with a multitude of native-born American Buddhists. Nationwide, this whole spectrum of Buddhists may number about four million. We know that many of our internists, surgeons, and nurses are of Indian origin, but we have not stopped to consider that they too have a religious life, that they might pause in the morning for a few minutes’ prayer at an altar in the family room of their home, that they might bring fruits and flowers to the local Shiva-Vishnu temple on the weekend and be part of a diverse Hindu population of more than a million. We are well aware of Latino immigration from Mexico and Central America and of the large Spanish-speaking population of our cities, and yet we may not recognize what a profound impact this is having on American Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, from hymnody to festivals.” [pp. 2-3]

    Story for all ages — “What Is Palm Sunday?”

    Today is Palm Sunday. Probably most of you have heard of Palm Sunday, but you may not know what, exactly, Palm Sunday is. I am going to tell you the story of Palm Sunday as I learned it as a Unitarian Universalist kid. And you should know that the things I am going to tell you about happened long ago. It is hard now to know exactly what happened all those years ago, but here’s the story I learned it.

    *****

    A rabbi named Jesus lived in the land of Judea some 2,000 years ago. Jesus went from town to town in a land called Judea teaching about religion. Jesus wasn’t exactly an official religious leader, as the Pharisees were. But many people listened to his teachings anyway — probably because he treated everyone with respect, even people who were poor or homeless or sick. And because what he preached made so much sense — he said religion was simple: love your God with all your heart and all your mind, and treat other people the way you would like to be treated.

    Jesus did most of his teaching in the countryside, but at last he and his followers (who were called the disciples) decided they would go to Jerusalem for Passover. Just as it is now, Jerusalem was the most important city for Jews. Since Jesus and his disciples were Jewish, celebrating Passover in Jerusalem was especially meaningful.

    They left the town they were in, a town called Jericho, and began to walk to Jerusalem. Remember, there were no cars or planes or trains in those days, so they had to walk all the way. Jesus was tired — he had been teaching and preaching sermons and he was just plain worn out. As they got close to Jerusalem, he asked his disciples to see if they could find an animal for him to ride. The disciples went to a farm nearby, and borrowed a foal for Jesus.

    There were crowds and crowds of people on the way in to Jerusalem for Passover. Many them had seen Jesus before, and had heard his teachings about religion, and some of these people thought Jesus was the greatest religious teacher and leader around. They began to point at Jesus, and call out to him.

    Meanwhile, all these people were pouring in to Jerusalem for Passover, one of the most sacred days of the year for Jews. People began to sing a hymn that seemed to fit what they were doing — they sang:

    Enter into his gates with thanksgiving
    And into his courts with praise.
    Serve the Lord with gladness,
    Come before his presence with singing.
    Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord!

    People were in a happy, festive mood. They gathered flowers (maybe that’s why we have so many flowers in church today), and picked leaves from palm trees, and carried them along. Someone started singing again:

    Hosanna! Hosanna!
    Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord.

    All these people singing and walking into Jerusalem together! Some of the people who thought Jesus was the greatest religious teacher and leader around began to give him flowers, and wave the palm leaves over him.

    I think at this point Jesus became uncomfortable. He didn’t mind that people liked him. He didn’t mind that they thought that he was a good religious teacher. But the singing, and the people giving him flowers and waving palm leaves over him — those were the kinds of things that people did for new kings of Jerusalem, back in the olden times, hundreds of years before Jesus lived.

    But in Jesus’s time the Romans were the rulers of Jerusalem. It was dangerous for these people to treat Jesus like one of the kings of old. Could some of the people hope that Jesus would stand up to the Romans, or even rebel against them? Jesus knew that it was dangerous for them to even think about such things. Jesus rode into Jerusalem with all the people waving palm fronds over him, but he was thinking about what the Romans might do.

    *****

    And if you want to know what Jesus did once he got into Jerusalem, if you want to know how the Romans reacted to him — well, you’ll have to wait until next week when I tell the rest of the story.

    SERMON — “The Pluralism Project”

    Back in 1997, I was the religious educator at First Parish in Lexington, working with senior minister Helen Cohen and assistant minister Paul Rasor. Looking back, those two years were very exciting times, because I was working with two exceptionally smart, well-educated people. Helen had been an English professor for eight years before going into ministry; Paul had been a law professor for fifteen years, then became a minister, and at that time he was pursuing his doctoral degree in theology at Harvard. Beyond that, these were two very intelligent people. Staff meetings would last for two hours: the first hour was devoted to necessary planning and other business, and the next hour was usually devoted to talking about religion and theology. I got to sit for an hour or more each week and listen to these two smart people talk about religion and theology! Often we would get so engrossed in our conversations, we would continue them at lunch, walking down the street to a cheap Chinese restaurant, where Paul would further amaze us by picking up jello with chopsticks.

    One day during a staff meeting, Paul pulled out a small, cheaply-printed book, with one of those plastic comb bindings, bearing the title World Religions in Boston. The book was the work of “The Pluralism Project,” which was headed by Diana Eck, a professor of comparative religion at Harvard. Eck started out studying the religions of India, making trips to India to do field work, until she realized that there were enough Hindus and Sikhs and other people from India in eastern Massachusetts that she could really do her field work without ever leaving home. This started her looking for non-Christian religious groups within, say, an hour’s drive of Harvard.

    The most recent edition of this book was printed in 2000, and now it’s maintained on Harvard’s Web site. Let me list for you some of the varieties of non-Christian religious centers found within an hour’s drive of Harvard University:

    Baha’is; all kinds of Buddhists, Nichiren Shu Buddhists, Zen Buddhists, Sokka Gokai Buddhists, various Tibetan Buddhists, Therevada Buddhists, Mahayana Buddhists; lots of Hindus, Hare Krishnas or ISKCON, mainstreams Hindus, a Hindu center based in the old Unitarian church in Woburn; traditional Jains and less-traditional Jains; plenty of Jews of course, Reform Jews, Hasidic Jews, Conservative Jews, Orthodox Jews; lots of Muslims, Shi’ite Muslims, Ismaili Muslims, Muslims allied with the Nation of Islam, Sunni Muslims in Worcester, Sufis; indigenous Native American traditions including Nipmucs and Wampanoags; plenty of neo-Pagans including witches and Unitarian Universalist pagans; Sikhs; Taoists; Zoroastrians;– oh, and “The Pluralism Project” visited 25 Beacon Street in Boston and found the headquarters of the Unitarian Universalists.

    When Paul showed me this book back in 1997, I was amazed. I had heard about the book before, but I had never sat down with it and looked through its pages to see the incredible diversity of religious institutions in the greater Boston area. I never knew such diversity existed.

    The book had an entry for each religious institution, and each entry gave and address and phone number, and a picture of the institution’s building. Each entry gave a short history of the religious institution, and described what took place there, including times and days for regular meetings or worship services, and for special festivals. Entries also listed the name of the main religious leader or contact person, the approximate membership of the institution, and the ethnic composition. So, for example, in the most recent edition of this book you could learn that the Zoroastrian Association of the Greater Boston Area, or ZAGBA, is located at 53 Firecut Lane in Sudbury; ZAGBA sponsors lectures, classes for children, lectures for adults, and celebrations of festivals, but you have to call in advance for times and dates; Mrs. Paratsu Dubash and Mrs. Koresh Jungawala are the presidents of the association; ZAGBA has 82 members; and members are primarily of Parsi and Iranian ethnicity.

    Now: I started off by saying that Helen Cohen and Paul Rasor and I had many a theology discussion, and I’ll bet when you heard the word “theology” you thought that we talked about obscure and arcane things like atheism vs. agnosticism, or inductive arguments for God vs. metaphysical arguments for God. Actually, the theology we talked about wasn’t obscure or arcane. We pretty much talked about real-world theology. And when you come right down to it, discussing the rich variety of religious institutions in the wider community is one way of doing theology.

    Sometimes, in Unitarian Universalist circles, we tend to get a limited view of theology: we think theology is arguments about whether or not God exists; and mostly when we think of those arguments for or against God, we are thinking of a God that pretty closely resembles the generic Christian God. That’s what we tend to limit theology to. If we’re really radical, we can imagine adding Pagans to the conversation, so that maybe we’re talking about God, the Goddess, or nothing at all. But when we start to imagine having a religious conversation with a Zoroastrian, can we even imagine where to start? Don’t they believe life is a battleground between good and evil? Doesn’t that mean we can assume that they basically believe in God and Satan? — or do we have to leave behind all our preconceptions, and approach a conversation with a Zoroastrian with the assumption that we are essentially ignorant?

    To me, the Pluralism Project, this exploration of the religious diversity around us, becomes a kind of descriptive theology. We’re doing theology at the most basic level, saying: Here is one kind of religion, and this is the building they use, and this is when they meet (by the way, they don’t meet on Sundays, or even once a week!), and here’s the name of a contact person. At this level, we don’t even know what beliefs these people hold — we have entered a religious realm where we can’t assume anything at all, where we have to start with the most basic things.

    We don’t even know if the concept of “belief” is important to all these different religious groups! When the Hindu temple in Ashland, Massachusetts, was opened, the community brought a statue of Vishnu and Ganesha, two of their gods, to the temple. These statues were bathed in water and flowers, people sung hymns to them; does this mean that these Hindus believe that Vishnu and Ganesha are actually incarnated in these statues? –or is it that when we ask these question, we are imposing our understanding of Western Christianity on something completely different? Perhaps these were simply ritual actions that don’t involve belief the way we understand it? I just don’t know.

    You can see that simply identifying and describing the variety of religious groups in your community can be a theological act:– and it can be a profoundly unsettling act as well. We still have a myth that the United States is basically a Christian country. Even we Unitarian Universalists fall into that trap: we sometimes feel we are a minority religious tradition because we don’t have to believe in God, and we can be pagans if we want to, or atheists if we want to. But compared to Zoroastrians or Sikhs, we can’t claim to be a minority tradition at all! We still meet in what we call a church, and our worship service looks pretty much like the Methodists down the street, and we still meet on Sundays. If we started looking at the real religious diversity of the United States, we might have to change our own self-definition.

    So you see, part of the theology that results from the Pluralism Project is a better understanding of who we are. We Unitarian Universalists not really Christians any more (though of course some of us are Christians); but we sure do look a lot more like Christians than we look like Zoroastrians or Muslims or Baha’is. Getting this kind of understanding of ourselves — that we’re not quite who we thought we were — can be a little unsettling.

    And indeed, Diana Eck, in her book A New Religious America, talks about how our new religious landscape requires a new way of seeing thing. She says, “Envisioning the new religious America in the twenty-first century requires an imaginative leap. It means seeing the religious landscape of America, from sea to shining sea, in all its beautiful complexity. Between the white New England churches and the Crystal Cathedral of California, we see the sacred mountains… of the Native peoples,… the mosque in the cornfields outside Toledo, the Hindu temples perched atop the hills of Pittsburgh and Chicago….” [p. 11]

    I’ve been trying to take that imaginative leap here in the greater New Bedford area. When I arrived here last summer, I was given the impression that most of the people in New Bedford are Christians, except the Jews. But in the eight months I’ve lived here, I have heard about Buddhists, Muslims, Baha’is, Sikhs, Wampanoags, and Hindus who live within an hour’s drive of this church. The presence of Haitians makes me wonder if there might be some Afro-Caribbean religions nearby. The presence of the large Mayan community makes me wonder if some of them brought an indigenous religion with them. And of course I can’t forget the other non-Christians: the Jews, the New Age folks, the Unitarian Universalists, the various neo-Pagans in the area such as Wiccans and Druids. So while the majority of the population of this area probably is nominally Christian, we can no longer overlook the growing religious diversity of greater New Bedford.

    In this religious landscape of growing diversity, we Unitarian Universalists find ourselves in a very interesting situation. As a religious institution, we aren’t quite Christian any more, but we’re still close enough to Christianity that we can understand their language. We have a long tradition of learning what we can about other religious traditions, and we have learned a little bit about the tolerance that is required to encounter other religious traditions; I might add that such religious tolerance is one of our central values. Within our own congregations, we have atheists and Christians and Pagans and people who do Buddhist meditation and people who grew up Jewish; and with this rich mix within our own walls we have had lots of practice in conversations between quite different religious viewpoints. All of these things perfectly place Unitarian Universalists to facilitate inter-religious dialogue. (By the way, if you want to start practicing the skills needed for inter-religious dialogue, you can start in social hour after the worship service: ask someone what they believe in, and listen openly and respectfully to what they say; it’s great practice.)

    Let me be more specific about how individual Unitarian Universalists can do this work in our wider community. Out of our experiences, we have learned two basic skills that we can use to facilitate inter-religious dialogue. First of all, start with the most basic details and knowledge before you get to the hard questions. Second of all, we can start practicing how to do inter-religious dialogue.

    The first step is to focus on details. The first time pagans came in to my childhood Unitarian Universalist church, we had to start with the most basic things: ah ha! — you Pagans get into a circle to worship, you address a Goddess, you have eight main seasonal holidays, you pay attention to the full moon;– OK now, more traditional Unitarian Universalists sit in straight rows, we sometimes address God or we leave out deities altogether, we observe Christmas Eve and maybe Easter, and we observe summer by not having any Sunday school.

    Another detail we’re good at is asking what books another religious group reads. As a kid sitting through Unitarian Universalist worship services, I heard reading from Buddhist sutras, from the Koran, from the Bhagavad Gita (actually, I had to read the Bhagavad Gita when I was in youth group), and so on. So when I ran into, say, a Buddhist, I at least knew what a sutra was, and I had actually heard a passage from the Diamond Sutra — those kinds of things are great ways to open up a conversation. And that’s the first, most important, step in inter-religious dialogue: finding some starting point for the conversation.

    The second step is to find some larger goal on which to focus; that way, when we’re talking with another religious group, we have some common ground where we can start. It also gives us a purpose behind those dialogues, beyond mere curiosity. I’m sure you can imagine lots larger goals with which everyone in our community could agree: ending hunger, stopping violence in the streets, and so on. Less obviously, I have been thinking that ecological justice might be another good place to search for larger goals. There are ecological movements among many religious traditions. Could we find allies for our environmental work in places we haven’t yet considered? Maybe if we could connect with, say, some Buddhist ecologists, we could find some new ideas.

    But the most important point in all this is that we don’t have to do anything special; we just have to remain open to the religious diversity that already surrounds us. We don’t have know anything about Sikhism, we just have to be ready to point it out when we see some Sikhs. When we meet someone who is Haitian, we can remember to ask: What religion do you follow? –and if they should happen to say, Santeria, then we can say: Tell me about it.

    When it comes to religion, we Unitarian Universalists are pretty good at being open. In the changing religious landscape of the United States, we can be leaders in such openness. We can be leaders in listening openly and respectfully to the religious beliefs of others. When we meet someone from another religious tradition, we simply say: tell me about your religion. And that simple act has the power change the religious landscape around us.