Dan Harper | Sermons

Tag: Book of Genesis

  • Who Knows What’s True?

    Sermon copyright (c) 2026 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Readings

    The first reading was the first half of one of the more troubling stories from the Bible, from Genesis chapter 22.

    Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!”

    “Here I am,” Abraham replied.

    God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love — Isaac — and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”

    Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.” Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, “Father?”

    “Yes, my son?” Abraham replied.

    “The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”…

    The second reading was by Rev. Dr. William R. Jones, a humanist Unitarian Universalist minister, from his essay “Theism and Religious Humanism: The Chasm Narrows”:

    Abraham’s situation, when he is commanded to slay Isaac, represents the human situation. Forced to decide whether he is addressed by God or Moloch and given the impossibility of demonstrating whose voice he hears, Abraham … must decide the source of the command, and in the final analysis his judgment of the source determines the value of the command. If he concludes that the decree is from God, it is morally imperative. If, however, he decides that it is Moloch’s voice that he hears, the order must be rejected. But clearly, only Abraham can make this crucial decision.

    Sermon

    In the first reading, we heard the first half of the story of Abraham and Isaac, which is one of the more troubling stories in the Hebrew Bible. While this story has been interpreted and reinterpreted in many different ways, I’d like to draw on it as a way for us to think about truth. How do we know what is true, and what is false? Who is it that knows what is true? And along the way, I’ll also make a connection between truth and justice.

    I’ll begin by retelling the whole story, interspersed with some of my own interpretation and commentary. As usual, my interpretation and commentary are provisional, so after the sermon please tell me where I went wrong.

    Before I begin, I have to say a little bit about the names for the God of the Israelites. In this story, two names for God appear: Elohim, and the name that is spelled Y-H-W-H, which we English speakers often pronounce as “Jehovah.” Explaining why these two different names are used to refer to the same deity would get us into fairly deep waters, so I’m going to skip over that for now; but as I retell the story of Abraham and Isaac, I’ll use the names “Jehovah” and “Elohim” to show where the original text had two different Hebrew names.

    The story begins with Elohim deciding to test Abraham. Elohim says to him, “Abraham!”

    And Abraham replies to Elohim, “Here I am.”

    Elohim says to Abraham, “I want you to take your only son, Isaac, whom you love. I want you to go to the place called Moriah. When you get there, I’m going to show you a mountain where you will sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering.”

    At this point, I’ll pause to interject some commentary. The Biblical story remains silent at what goes through Abraham’s head when Elohim speaks to him. I can imagine many different thoughts he might have had. For one thing, Abraham might not be entirely sure that this is actually Elohim speaking. One of the Canaanite gods, a deity named Moloch who is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as existing at this time, was kind of notorious in those days for requiring child sacrifices, so Abraham might be concerned that this is actually Moloch speaking, not Elohim. For another thing, I imagine that Abraham would wonder what Sarah, Isaac’s mother, would think about all this, and I imagine that Abraham is going to want to talk this over with Sarah. That’s enough of my commentary; let’s get back to the story.

    So the next morning, Abraham gets up real early, loads up his donkey, wakes up Isaac and two of the family servants, and cuts a bunch of wood so he can do a burnt offering. Then they all set out for Moriah. It takes them most of three days to get where they can see the place about which Elohim told Abraham. Abraham turns to the two servants, and says, “You two stay here with the donkey. I’m going over there with the boy. We’ll worship by offering up a burnt offering, and then we will come back to you.”

    Another pause for commentary: I like how Abraham says, “WE will come back to you.” To my way of thinking, this means that he fully expects that he is not going to have to kill Isaac, that both he and Isaac will be returning to the servants. To put it another way, Abraham is pretty sure that he is not being deceived by the evil deity Moloch, that something else is going on here; he is feeling his way towards the truth. Now back to the story.

    Abraham takes the bundle of wood that they had carried for the past three days, and gives it to Isaac to carry. Abraham carries the fire (remember, they didn’t have matches or lighters, so he’s carrying some kind of live embers) and the sacrificial knife. They walk along together, and Isaac says, “Father, I see we’ve got the wood and the fire, but where’s the lamb we’re going to sacrifice?”

    Abraham says, “Don’t worry, Elohim is going to provide the lamb for the burnt offering.” And then they get to the place that Elohim told Abraham about, and Abraham builds an altar, and sets up the wood for a fire. Then he ties up Isaac and puts him on top of the wood. Then Abraham picks up the knife….

    Another pause for commentary: At this point Abraham must be wondering if he has correctly discerned the truth. Who was it that spoke to him? Was it Moloch, the evil god who demands child sacrifices, or was it Elohim, the good god? If it was Elohim, then Elohim is waiting until the last possible moment to keep him from killing his son. Determining the truth has become a life and death matter! Now back to the story.

    Just at this moment, the angel of Jehovah calls out, “Abraham!” And Abraham replies to the angel from Jehovah, “Here I am.” And the angel says, “Don’t do anything to the boy. Now I know you fear Jehovah, because you didn’t hold back when you were asked to sacrifice your only son.”

    A quick pause for commentary: You will notice that in this short passage, Genesis 22:11 and 12, the deity is referred to as Jehovah, not as Elohim. Some Biblical scholars believe that this short passage was added into the original story. We’ll come back to this in a moment, but now back to the story.

    So Abraham looks up from the sacrificial altar, and sees a ram caught by its horns in a nearby thicket. He goes over to the ram, grabs it, and sacrifices it as a burnt offering instead of Isaac. Abraham names the place “Elohim Will Provide.” Which gives rise to a proverbial saying, “On the mountain of Elohim it will be provided.”

    Another pause for commentary. If you leave out the short passage about the angel from Jehovah, the story still works. But without the passage with the angel from Jehovah, we wind up with a different story. The philosopher Omri Boehm puts it this way: “In the original narrative, Abraham ultimately disobeys God’s command, sacrificing the ram ‘instead of his son’ by his own decision. [But] the interpolated figure of an angel takes out of Abraham’s hand not just the knife but the responsibility for stopping the trial: It takes a story that culminates in Abraham’s ethical disobedience as the symbol of faith, and makes it into one that celebrates obedience….” Boehm goes on to cite the great medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides, who found two levels of meaning in this story — the familiar meaning of obedience to the deity, and another meaning of disobedience. Or maybe it’s not disobedience, but something else instead? The story is almost over, so let’s finish it, then think about this some more. (1)

    The angel of Jehovah calls to Abraham a second time and says, “I swear by myself, declares Jehovah, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, 18 and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.” So speaks Jehovah. Abraham and his son and his servants head back home. So ends the story. (2)

    Now that the story is over, I’d like to think with you about a question: Is there a difference between the parts of the story with Elohim, and the parts of the story with Jehovah? Biblical scholars continue to debate this question, and I’m not qualified to give a definitive answer. But I would like to consider what Rev. Dr. William R. Jones said in the second reading this morning:

    “Abraham … must decide the source of the command, and in the final analysis his judgment of the source determines the value of the command. If he concludes that the decree is from God, it is morally imperative. If, however, he decides that it is Moloch’s voice that he hears, the order must be rejected. But clearly, only Abraham can make this crucial decision.”

    Jones would have agreed with Omri Boehm that the story of Abraham could be interpreted to mean, not that Abraham is to be celebrated for his obedience to God, but rather that Abraham is to be celebrated for using his free will to figure out the truth of the matter. Jones was a humanist who did not believe in the literal truth of God, but he believed in the deeper truth of this story — that we human beings are sometimes confronted with impossible ethical decisions, and when that happens it is up to us to make “the crucial decision.”

    William R. Jones implies that Abraham makes this crucial decision alone, without talking to other people. To me, this is a crucial point — must we make ethical decisions like this entirely on our own? Ralph Waldo Emerson, who started out as a Unitarian minister and who remains one of our greatest Unitarian theologians, also seems to think that we make big ethical decisions on our own, solely in consultation with some kind of divine power. In his essay titled “Greatness,” Emerson quoted one of his intellectual mentors, Mary Rotch, as saying:

    “I do not pretend to any commandment or large revelation, but if at any time I form some plan, propose a journey or a course of conduct, I perhaps find a silent obstacle in my mind that I cannot account for. Very well, — I let it lie, thinking it may pass away, but if it do not pass away I yield to it, obey it. You ask me to describe it. I cannot describe it. It is not an oracle, nor an angel, nor a dream, nor a law; it is too simple to be described, it is but a grain of mustard-seed, but such as it is, it is something which the contradiction of all mankind could not shake, and which the consent of all mankind could not confirm.”(3)

    Thus Emerson believes that some kind of divine voice or divine guidance can require our obedience, to the point where we cannot be shaken in our decision even though the rest of humankind says we are wrong. We can see how this might apply to the story of Abraham and Isaac. Under the urging of a voice claiming to be Elohim, Abraham forms the plan of sacrificing his son Isaac. But it’s not clear to me whether Abraham is obedient to the voice of Elohim, or to the messenger from Jehovah, or whether instead he finds a silent obstacle in his mind that prevents him from killing Isaac, an obstacle for which he cannot account. From whence does that obstacle come? Does it come from Elohim, or Jehovah? Or does that silent obstacle come from a sense of truth and justice to which even Elohim is obedient? Abraham lets that obstacle lie there, thinking it might pass away, but it does not. And when the time comes to actually sacrifice Isaac, that silent obstacle stops him — or perhaps it stops Elohim from letting him proceed.

    Here is where I part ways with Ralph Waldo Emerson, and with Dr. William Jones. I do not believe that this kind of ethical decision-making is a solitary occupation. Yes, it is critically important that we learn to make these kinds of ethical decisions on our own, but we must also check in with other people to confirm whether or intuitive insight into truth is correct. Emerson himself had occasion to insist that we check in with other people to make sure our insights are correct. Jones Very, one of Emerson’s younger proteges, was a talented poet who also suffered from periodic bouts of mental illness. Emerson was impressed by Jones Very’s poetic talent, but Emerson was also aware of his mental illness. One time, so the story goes, Jones Very brought some poems to Emerson to read. When Emerson ventured to make some small criticism of the poems, Jones Very said that the poems had been dictated to him by God, and therefore no valid criticism could be offered. To this Emerson responded dryly that surely God knew enough to use correct spelling and grammar. In other words, Emerson knew that no matter how it might seem that our insights are divinely inspired, we have to check in with other people.

    Because of this, when I hear the story of Abraham and Isaac, I tend to believe that some important bits got left out of the story. When Elohim first tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, I have to imagine that Abraham goes immediately to his wife Sarah to talk it over. I can imagine Abraham saying, This is what Elohim said to me; but can this be Elohim, or is it really Moloch who is trying to deceive me? I also imagine Abraham must have talked this over with other leaders in his clan. The decision to kill his only son is not a decision that he can make alone. Abraham and Sarah, along with other leaders and their close associates in the clan — they must all talk this over together, to determine if what Abraham has heard is the truth. Yes, the burden of final decision and of action ultimately rests on Abraham’s shoulders alone; but he is not alone in making his decision. Like all humans, Abraham is a limited and fallible being; at the same time, he is always a part of humankind; and so he must rely on other humans to help him determine truth.

    I am not saying, however, that truth is relative, or that truth is made up by humans, or that truth is nothing more than a human construct. Not only is that not something I believe, it is also not something that appears in the story of Abraham and Isaac. In the story of Abraham and Isaac, there exists an ultimate truth to which both Abraham and Elohim are answerable. Abraham must answer to Elohim, who is his god; but both Abraham and Elohim must answer to absolute truth and justice. Elohim, being answerable to that absolute justice, would never have let Abraham sacrifice Isaac. Abraham is also answerable to that absolute sense of justice, but being a mere human being, his vision is cloudy; he can’t always be certain that he perceives absolute truth and justice with absolute clarity. The drama of the story arises from his lack of certainty; Abraham knows that Elohim is answerable to absolute justice, and Abraham must judge whether Elohim would actually tell him to kill his son, or whether he is being deceived by a false deity like Moloch.

    Like Abraham, all of us human beings cannot see absolute truth and justice with absolute clarity. Because we cannot see clearly, it is possible for us to believe that there is no ultimate justice in the universe. Yet just because we can’t see it clearly doesn’t mean truth and justice don’t exist. And so we are forced to ask, “Who knows what is true?” Our own time, the mid-twenty-first century, is filled with things that prevent us from perceiving with clarity: social media algorithms, fake news, AI-generated falsehoods, and so on. We thus may be tempted to believe that all we have to do is to listen to an inner voice to know what is true, even if what I hear my inner self saying contradicts what you believe is true. If we rely only on ourselves, we may not realize that we have been deceived by Moloch.

    The great philosopher Jurgen Habermas, who died two weeks ago, believed in the power of communication between human beings as a way to arrive at ultimate truth and justice. In this belief, Habermas differed with many people today who are convinced that there is no one single truth; that there are many truths and many kinds of justice, no one of which pertains to all humankind. We see this in our current political debates here in the United States. Many political liberals and many political conservatives no longer believe that we can arrive at a single sense of truth that applies to us all. Both liberals and conservatives accuse the other of creating fake news. Some political conservatives have decided that there is only one way to interpret the history of America, and they want to ban any competing interpretations. Some political liberals have decided that different identity groups have different truths, and that those not included in a given identity group cannot question truths claimed by that identity group. Thus in our time it seems few people believe that truth is universal; and few people believe we must work with other people, including people we disagree with, to establish what is true, and to establish a truly just society.

    I find myself agreeing with Jurgen Habermas: there is an ultimate sense of truth and justice in the universe. Limited being that I am, I can sense it only dimly by myself. As a limited being, I may have some small insight into this ultimate truth and justice; perhaps there is that of the divine in me that gives me that insight, or perhaps there is a divinity that sends messengers to me with notice of what is true and just. The story of Abraham and Isaac tells me that even if I have some small insight into ultimate truth and justice, I may still be forced to make decisions that wrack my soul.

    But I believe we should not interpret the story of Abraham and Isaac as telling us that we must make these decisions alone, by ourselves, as rugged individualists. The story of Abraham and Isaac is but one episode in the larger story told in the book of Genesis; and the book of Genesis tells but one part of the much larger story that is told in the entirety of the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible is not merely a collection of stories about individuals, but it is rather a larger story of a group of people. Thus, when the Hebrew Bible tells a story of an individual, that individual’s story must be understood as being a part of the larger story of a people. While the story in the Hebrew Bible tells of one people, it implies a still larger story that includes all peoples, all of humankind. In that larger story, the story that includes all humankind, we discover that there is an ultimate truth, there is ultimate justice; that ultimate truth and justice apply to all humankind equally. This is, in fact, one of the origins of our modern conception of justice and human rights for all human beings.

    Each individual and each group of people perceives a small part of this larger truth. When we Unitarian Universalists perceive a small part of this larger truth, we like to proclaim the inherent dignity and worthiness of all human beings. We like to say that although we can perceive it but dimly, we know the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. We also know that we human beings are easily deceived. And so we pay great attention to the story of Abraham and Isaac. When we commit ourselves to a course of action, we might discover that if we look up from the task in front of us, and turn around, we might see a ram caught in the thicket behind us. We listen for the promptings of ultimate truth and justice, knowing that we can never perceive them with absolute clarity, but also knowing that by relying on other people we can overcome some of our human fallibility.

    Notes

    (1) Omri Boehm, Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity (New York Review Books, 2025), pp. 143-144. I do not agree with everything Boehm says in this book, but his interpretation of the story of Abraham and Isaac is similar to that of William R. Jones, while offering more detail than Jones’s brief discussion.
    (2) Story of Abraham adapted from NRSV and NIV, Genesis 22:1-19.
    (3) Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Greatness,” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904), v.8, pp. 309-310. In an endnote, the editors state, “These were the words of Miss Mary Rotch of New Bedford, and they made deep impression on Mr. Emerson, when in 1834 he was invited to preach for a time in that city.”

  • Garbage

    Sermon and moment for all ages copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Moment for All Ages

    Members of the Sunday school sang the song “Garbage” by Bill Steele.

    Roger Weiss has posted “Garbage” sung by the songwriter online. Bill Steele had originally posted this recording on his own website, but after his death in 2018 his website disappeared. For Roger Weiss’s remembrance of Bill Steele, along with more recordings, go here.

    Readings

    The first reading was a poem by Ada Limon, “The Origin Revisited.”

    The second reading was from “The Edge of the Sea” by Rachel Carson.

    Hearing the rising tide, I think how it is pressing also against other shores I know—rising on a southern beach where there is no fog, but a moon edging all the waves with silver and touching the wet sands with lambent sheen, and on a still more distant shore sending its streaming currents against the moonlit pinnacles and the dark caves of the coral rock.…

    Once this rocky coast beneath me was a plain of sand; then the sea rose and found a new shore line. And again in some shadowy future the surf will have ground these rocks to sand and will have returned the coast to its earlier state. And so in my mind’s eye these coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality—earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.

    Sermon: “Garbage”

    The First Parish children’s programs — both our summer ecology camp, and the Sunday school — have been singing the song “Garbage” by Bill Steele. This has become a favorite song of several of our kids. Partly, it has become a favorite song because they sing it as fast as possible — maybe twice as fast as you heard it earlier this morning. Obviously, that’s too fast to really understand the words, but they all have the words memorized. They know exactly what the song means.

    The other reason I think they like the song is because it has meaning for them. Today’s kids seem to be very aware of problems like plastic pollution of the ocean, so even though this was a topical song written back in 1969 to convince peopple to stop filling in San Francisco Bay, it still has meaning for today’s kids. In 2009, Steele told an interviewer, “Writing topical songs can be frustrating because they go out of currency very quickly. What’s frustrating about this one is that 40 years after it was written, it is still current. From the environmental standpoint, it’s frustrating that we haven’t done anything about it, and that this problem is still with us after all this time.”

    I don’t know how the kids feel about it, but for me the most powerful verse is the third verse. That’s the verse that tells us that we’re not only filling up the Bay with garbage, and filling the air with garbage, we’re also filling up our minds with garbage. The song tells how Mr. Thompson goes home after a hard day at work, and settles down to read a newspaper story about “the mayor’s middle name,” which he finishes just in time to watch the All-Star Bingo Game on television. Today it’s more likely to be TikTok and Instagram than newspapers and television, but the phenomenon remains the same — most of us spend way too much time on trivia. While it is important to stay abreast of the news in a democracy, we don’t really need to know about the mayor’s middle name, any more than we need to know about Joe Biden’s dog’s behavior, or that Donald Trump does not own a dog.

    We fill our minds with information of no value, and Bill Steele wanted us to convince us that that was analogous to the way garbage was being dumped into San Francisco Bay back in 1969. I’d even extend that metaphor somewhat. Great tracts of San Francisco Bay were filled in with garbage and other landfill during the 1960s and 1970s. But that kind of landfill liquifies during an earthquake. The U.S. Geological Survey tells us that “When the ground liquefies, it may lose its ability to support buildings and other structures.” Thus, don’t build your house on garbage, because the garbage won’t provide stability in moments of crisis. If we fill our minds with garbage, we will not have a secure foundation on which to build wisdom or ethics. The first time our mind is shaken by some catastrophic event, all that garbage will turn to mush.

    Of course there are alternatives to filling our minds with garbage. This is supposed to be the role of the great spiritual and ethical traditions throughout human history. And indeed, the environmental movement has been cast as a kind of spiritual battle. We are told that we must recycle more, and buy electric cars, and eat more plant-based food. If we could just rid ourselves of our individual spiritual failings — our lack of recycling, our consumption of meat, our gas-guzzling cars, and so on — we could solve the environmental crisis.

    I’ve become convinced that the environmental crisis we’re currently facing does have spiritual roots, but I don’t believe that the roots of the environmental crisis lie in ridding ourselves of our individual spiritual failings. We’re not going to solve the environmental crisis by addressing our individual sins of not recycling enough, not eat plant-based foods, and so on. Instead, I feel one of the main roots of the environmental crisis comes from a collective misinterpretation of the Bible. Specifically, I feel that our society collectively buys into a gross misinterpretation of the so-called “dominion clause” in the book of Genesis, chapter 1, verse 27, which goes like this:

    “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’”

    This passage has been widely interpreted by Western Christians, Jews, and atheists to mean that God gave humankind god-like powers over every other living thing, meaning we humans have permission to do whatever we like to the non-human world. The historian Lynn White thought this misinterpretation of the Bible dated back to medieval times. I don’t know about that, but I do know that in the late twentieth century a theological viewpoint called Dominion theology became very influential. This theology is based on a misinterpretation of that passage in Genesis, teaching that God has given god-like powers to humans, so they can do whatever they want. Dominion theology goes further than this, teaching that men should have dominion over women. And dominion theology also teaches that Christians should be in charge of all human political affairs. Humans have power over non-humans; male humans have power over female humans; male Christian humans have power over everyone else.

    In my opinion, dominion theology is spiritual and religious garbage. Nevertheless, a great many people are filling up their minds with this garbage — not just conservative Christians, but secular people are also being influenced by it. Now the secular people should know better, but let’s look at why dominion theology is religious and spiritual garbage.

    According to Genesis, God created all the creatures that live on the earth, in the seas, and in the skies; God also created all the plants and every other living thing. Periodically during this creation process, God stopped, looked at the latest creations, and “saw that it was good.” That is: God did not stop, look at the latest creations, and say, “Gee, I hope some day the human beings make this animal or that plant go extinct.” Nor does God ever say, “Gee, I hope the humans use their garbage to fill in San Francisco Bay, which by the way I created to be a home for ‘every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm’.” Nowhere in the Bible does God say that humankind is supposed to trash the world.

    Not only that, but the very next passage in the Bible states that men and women are equal. This upends another major tenet of dominion theology. Genesis 1:27 says, “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” You’ll notice that God had both male and female characteristics, since both males and females were created in God’s image (if this is hard for you to imagine, that’s no surprise since we limited mortals can’t entirely comprehend God anyway).

    Contrary to what the proponents of dominion theology claim, here’s what those passages in the book of Genesis actually say: Humankind may have a great deal of power over the nonhuman world, but we are supposed to use that power to take care of God’s creation. God created both women and men in God’s image, which means that women are just as good as men. As for Christians being in charge of everyone else, nowhere in the book of Genesis does that come up. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that Christians are supposed to run the United States. This is garbage theology. Yet this is the garbage that has been filling many people’s minds.

    So why do people allow their minds to be filled up with this kind of garbage? I suspect that part of the problem is that more than a few people in the United States today feel a sense of spiritual emptiness. They’re tired of conventional organized religion — and let’s face it, too much of conventional organized religion today feels spiritually empty — but they want something that fills that spiritual void they sense within. Then they hear about this spiritual movement that sounds pretty convincing, that gives them a purpose, that makes them feel a part of something larger than themselves, and they decide it fills the spiritual void they have been feeling.

    There are also a good many people who don’t consciously accept dominion theology, but still act in accordance with some of of its values. Yet these people have unthinkingly accepted the tenets of dominion theology. Even though these people may not want conservative Christians running the United States; even though these people may believe that women are just as good as men; they are providing unthinking support to dominion theology.

    So what are we to do about dominion theology? How can we promote the opposite of dominion theology — how can we promote the careful stewardship of planet Earth, the equality of men and women, the separation of church and state?

    Today, a great many liberal Christians and Jews are pushing back against dominion theology. These liberal Christians and Jews are saying: Hey, this is our God and our Bible, and dominion theology has gotten it all wrong. Yes, we believe God created the nonhuman world; but while we humans may have dominion over the nonhuman world, dominion was given to us in order to care for God’s creation. And our Bible teaches that “God created humankind in his image…male and female he created them”; that is, women are just as good as men. Oh, and by the way, it says nothing in the Bible about Christians running the United States. This is some of what liberal Jews and Christians are saying. And if you’re a liberal Christian or a liberal Jew, you can be a part of this; you can say: Hey, stop trying to throw your dominionist garbage into our religion.

    In addition to that, what all of us can do — whether we’re Christians or Jews or atheists or Buddhists or Haven’t-figured-it-out-yet-ists — we can all offer a compelling spiritual alternative to dominion theology. Part of our spiritual alternative will be that we have reverence for all life; we respect all life. We have equal reverence for all human beings, equal respect for all human beings, no matter what their gender. We value all the wonders of Nature and all the wonders of humankind; or, as we might phrase it, we affirm and support the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part. Lastly, we can talk about love being the most powerful force in the universe, and we can teach that principle to other people by doing our best to live it out in our own lives.

    We can offer a positive spirituality to replace a negative spirituality. Dominion theology is essentially a negative spirituality; it is not cheerful and filled with love, it is depressing and filled with feelings of sinfulness and inadequacy. We want to replace that with a positive spirituality, a spirituality of hope and of love; a spirituality that helps us live our lives as if we are all connected.

    One way we communicate our positive spirituality is the way we live our lives. Another way we communicate our positive spirituality is through the arts. This is exactly what we did with the two readings we heard this morning. Ada Limon, poet laureate of the United States, wrote about a positive poem about how the beauty of the non-human world can support us and sustain us spiritually. Rachel Carson wrote a prose passage about feeling connected to everything. By reading this poem and this prose aloud, we are creating a positive spirituality. That’s one of the most important things we do here in the Meetinghouse each week: we use the arts to create positive spirituality together.

    Of course there’s more to it than that. The concrete environmental problems we face — invasive plants and plastics in the ocean and so on — require concrete action. But concrete actions will be so much the stronger when they are supported by a positive spirituality; concrete actions are more effective when they are backed up by hope, and by love.

  • Creation Speculation

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

    Readings

    The first reading is probably familiar to you. It is from the first chapter of the Book of Genesis from the Hebrew Bible, in the poetic King James translation:

    1 “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
    2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
    3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
    4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
    5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
    6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
    7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
    8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
    9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
    10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
    11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
    12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
    13 And the evening and the morning were the third day….”

    …

    The second reading is from the Mahabharata, the central book of the Hindu tradition, in the new University of Chicago translation:

    Poets have told it before, poets are telling it now, other poets shall tell this history on earth in the future….

    When all this was without light and unillumined, and on all its sides covered by darkness, there arose one large Egg, the inexhaustible seed of all creatures. They say this was the great divine cause, in the beginning of the Eon; and that on which it rests is revealed as the true Light, the everlasting Brahman. Wondrous it was and beyond all imagining, in perfect balance in all its parts, this unmanifest subtle cause that is that which is and that which is not.

    From it was born the Grandfather, the Sole Lord Prajāpati, who is known as Brahmā, as the Preceptor of the Gods, as Sthāṇu, Manu, Ka, and Parameṣṭhin. From him sprang Dakṣa, son of Pracetas, and thence the seven sons of Dakṣa, and from them came forth the twenty-one Lords of Creation. And the Person of immeasurable soul, the One whom the seers know as the universe; and the Viśve Devas, and the Ādityas as well as the Vasus and the two Aśvins. Yakṣas, Sādhyas, Piśācas, Guyakas, and the Ancestors were born from it, and the wise and impeccable Seers. So also the many royal seers, endowed with every virtue. Water, Heaven and Earth, Wind, Atmosphere, and Space, the year, the seasons, the months, the fortnights, and days and nights in turn, and whatever else, has all come forth as witnessed by the world. Whatever is found to exist, moving and unmoving, it is all again thrown together, all this world, when the destruction of the Eon has struck. Just as with the change of the season all the various signs of the season appear, so also these beings at the beginning of each Eon. Thus, without beginning and without end, rolls the wheel of existence around in this world, causing origin and destruction, beginningless and endless.

    There are thirty-three thousand, thirty-three hundred, and thirty-three Gods — this is the summing up of creation.

    [Mahābhārta 1.25-39, trans. J. A. B. van Buitenen in “The Mahābhārta, vol. 1: The Book of the Beginning”, University of Chicago, p. 21.]

    Sermon

    Recently, I realized that I have never given a sermon addressing creationism or “intelligent design.” I never saw the need to do so. There’s no real need for one Unitarian Universalist to stand up in front of a bunch of other Unitarian Universalists and state that intelligent design, or “creation science,” or whatever they’re calling it these days, is nothing more than religious dogma barely covered with a thin veneer of alleged science. Everyone here knows that “intelligent design” is not science. If a proponent of intelligent design says to us, “But evolution is just a theory,” we all know enough to say, “Yeah, and the theory of gravity is just a theory, but if you throw yourself at the floor it’s going to hurt all the same.” For a Unitarian Universalist to preach a sermon against intelligent design is about as sporting as shooting fish in a barrel.

    At the same time, those creationists — sorry, those proponents of intelligent design — are so loud and insistent that they tend to drown us out. Something like a third of all adults in the United States believe evolution is false, and although we take great joy in pointing out that all those people are perfectly willing to take advantage of the advances of medical science, which are firmly based on evolutionary theory, the fact remains that all those people are injecting their dogmatic theology into our lives. And that forces us to spend quite a bit of our precious time debunking the Bible, to the point where we often get sick and tired of the Bible. We get so sick of hearing people say, “But God created the earth in seven days, it says so right in the Bible, so the scientists must be wrong” — that we just want to do away with the Bible altogether.

    So although we don’t need a sermon debunking creationism, I do think it’s worth preaching a sermon about the value of religious creation stories. I’m not going to try to convince you to read the Bible, but I am going to try to convince you that the creation story contained in the Bible is a worthwhile part of our religious inheritance.

    1. To begin with, let us be clear what the Bible is, and what it is not. The Bible is a collection of books which includes many books full of stories. The book of Genesis contains several dramatic and arresting stories: the story of Noah and the flood, the story of Abraham and Isaac, the story of Joseph and his technicolor dream coat, the story of Eve and Adam,– and the story of how God created the universe. All these stories are strung together in a more-or-less coherent narrative that begins at the beginning, and winds up with the establishment of the people of Israel as the chosen people of their God.

    When you think about it this way, it’s obvious that the book of Genesis has more in common with a novel than with a collection of scientific treatises. The creation story in Genesis is not a systematic scientific explanation for how the universe came to be; it’s a story that reveals something about the character of God and humanity. It is not a book full of precise scientific proofs. The philosopher Aristotle tells us that it is the mark of an educated person “to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.” [Nich. Eth. I.2, 1094b] We know that it is foolish to read the book of Genesis looking for the kind of certainty science can bring to certain subjects; but we should be equally clear that the Bible can reveal to us something of the poetic truth about our human selves, and something of the poetic truth about our place in the universe; topics which do not allow the same kind of precise scientific knowledge.

    Religion is meant to help us find meaning in life (among other things). A scientist might be able to look at a flower and tell us its place in a taxonomic scheme, reveal to us its place in the wider ecosystem, show us its inner anatomy; we may well feel a sense of wonder at this but we are unlikely to feel enough emotion that we need to wipe tears from our eyes. A poet can look at the same flower, and write for us a poem that will cause us to weep, or to rejoice, or discover profound feelings or thoughts about that flower; and we may well need to wipe tears from our eyes after the poet speaks to us. But the poet and the scientist do not contradict each other; they only reveal to us a different aspect of the same flower. Religion is yet another way of knowing the flower: religion may help us to look at that flower and know our relationship to it, and so help us to understand our place in the universe and the flower’s place in the universe; not through the precise taxonomic understanding used by the scientist, nor through the metaphorical and emotional understanding used by the poet, but through an understanding of how everything is connected and bound together. The book of Genesis locates that connection in the personage of God; the New Testament locates that connectedness in the Kingdom of Heaven; but we could simply call it the Web of Life through which we are connected with all that is living and non-living.

    That, in fact, is what the creation story in the book of Genesis tells us. Genesis tells us about a God that created everything, including us human beings. Genesis tells us that we are connected through God to all that is: the sun and moon and stars and sky and plants and animals and the other human beings. A literal reading of Genesis would try to tell us that there is a literal personage called God who created all these things; but such a literal interpretation of God immediately runs into all kinds of logical inconsistencies; such a literal interpretation tries to turn Genesis into precise scientific knowledge, when it is really religious understanding.

    An equally literal reading of Genesis would dismiss the whole book out of hand because it does not conform to scientific facts and theories as we know them. Many of the Bible-debunkers who are active today fall into this intellectual trap; they accept the arguments made by creationists and literalists that the Bible is literally true. Such literal interpretations try to turn Genesis into science, when it is really religion. It would be far more accurate to understand God, not as a literal personage, and not as a scientific explanation, but as the Web of Life through which we feel and know a deep connection to all life and to all that is.

    2. We can gain a deeper understanding of the creation story in Genesis if we take the time to look at other creation stories from other world religions. I happen to love the imagery in the creation story of the Mahabharata:– the one large Egg which arose, from which time began, and out of which came everything in the universe. From that great Egg came Brahmā, and from that came all the gods, and the ancestors, and the seers and sages;– and “Water, Heaven and Earth, Wind, Atmosphere, and Space, the year, the seasons, the months, the fortnights, and days and nights in turn, and whatever else, has all come forth” from that Egg.

    In this Hindu story of creation, just as in the creation story in Genesis, we learn of the connectedness of all things. The details of the Hindu creation story are quite different from those in the Hebrew creation story. But both tell of the Web of Life that connects us human beings with the earth and sky, with water and wind, with all beings including all human beings.

    Back when my mother was teaching Sunday school in a Unitarian church in the 1950s, there was a curriculum called Beginnings of Earth and Sky, which presented a number of different creation stories to school-aged children; and today we still teach our Unitarian Universalist children a variety of creation stories. We do this for good reason. Of course we want our children to know the creation story in Genesis, a story that is central to our own religious inheritance; but we want them to know other creation stories as well, so they can begin to understand how all religions begin with a sense of wonder at the universe, a sense of how everything is interconnected through the one Web of Life; indeed, we want them to have a sense of how all religions are utterly different while remaining deeply connected. All these creation stories, all these religions, are different, but each can help human beings to understand who we are and where we are situated in the universe, and so lead us to find meaning and connection in our lives.

    3. I said that we are open to learning the creation stories of other cultures and other religions. That raises an interesting question: Do we need a creation story of our own? Quite a few people would respond that yes, we do need a new creation story that is all our own. A year ago I heard two Unitarian Universalists, Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow, speak about a new creation story that they think Unitarian Universalists and other religious liberals should adopt. They want us to adopt a new creation story put forth by a fellow named Brian Swimme, who tells a creation story founded on modern science, a creation story that links contemporary astronomical theories about the beginnings of the universe, with evolutionary theories about the beginnings of life on this planet.

    There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Anyone can sit down and write their own creation story. And for some people, Brian Swimme’s creation story has become an important part of their religious understanding. I’ll admit my bias: I’m not enthralled by this or other similar modern creation stories. I’m not particularly interested in mixing my religious creation stories with science; especially considering how science has a way of evolving and moving forward; and for me science has its own beauty that will is diminished by mixing it with story-telling.

    More to the point, none of these modern creation stories is anywhere near as lovely as the Genesis creation story, or the creation story in the Mahabharata. You’d have to be a pretty good poet to compete with the beauty of the poetry of the King James version of Genesis, and frankly Brian Swimme and other creators of modern creation stories are not a particularly good poets. And you’d have to be a pretty good storyteller to compete with the generations of people who told and retold and polished both the Hindu creation story and the Genesis story before they were finally set down in writing. If you’re going to come up with your own creation story, you’re facing an uphill battle to create something to equal the beauty of these age-old stories. For that matter, you’re facing an uphill battle if you’re going to compete with the beauty of scientific theories that have been honed over the decades by a whole community of scientific researchers. So if you want to create, or find, a new, modern creation story, more power to you — but I don’t give you a very good chance of making a success of it.

    Personally, I prefer to stick with the creation story in Genesis. Even though the creationists and the other literalists and fundamentalists have done a pretty good job of wrecking Genesis, it has one deep strength. The central theme of Genesis, as with most of the Hebrew Bible, is the theme of justice. Genesis aims to hold us to high ethical and moral standards. Those high ethical and moral standards have been perverted at times by being inappropriately associated with guilt and shame; the same literalists who say that Genesis tells us that God created the universe in seven days also try to tell us about “original sin,” a phrase that appears nowhere in Genesis, and which is simply a figment of their imaginations. But in spite of these perversions of Genesis, it remains a book founded on the principle of equal justice for all human beings.

    The real creation story in Genesis tells us that we are connected through the Web of Life with all that is; it is through this connection t hat we know our inherent worth and dignity, and thus our right to equal justice no matter who we are. Furthermore, the creation story in Genesis can give us what we’d now call an ecological approach to justice. We can read the creation story in Genesis thusly: Earth was given as a garden to human beings, and indeed to all beings. And if Earth is a garden, then we are the gardeners who are supposed to keep things growing well. As gardeners, we nurture and help things grow; and in so doing we are connected with the cycle of life and death. As gardeners, we are ethically and morally responsible for nurturing the garden so that all beings have access to life and the means for life; we have a moral responsibility to facilitate the interconnectedness of the Web of Life.

    So it is that I don’t yet want to abandon the Genesis creation story. Even though the creationists have twisted Genesis to their own purposes, that doesn’t affect the true meaning of the story. Even though science presents a different truth to us, that doesn’t do away with the importance of the Genesis story. The creation story in Genesis tells us about our responsibility to nurture all life and respect all beings; through its poetry it tells us that we are connected to the entire Web of Life.