humanism – Dan Harper

“Option D”

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, California, at the 9:30 and 11:00 worship services. As usual, the sermon and story below are reading texts. The actual sermon as preached, and story as told, contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon and story copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

Story — “The Golden Calf”

This is an old, old story about the ancient prophet Moses. Moses was the man who led the Israelites out of slavery, and helped them escape into the desert. They wandered in the desert, looking for a land to call their own. At last they camped at the base of Mount Sinai.

Moses climbed up Mount Sinai, up to the very top. At the top of the mountain, the god known as Yahweh spoke to him. Yahweh said, “All of you Israelites are going to be my special, chosen people. I will take care of you, and you must promise to obey me over all the other gods and goddesses.”

Moses went back down Mount Sinai to tell the Israelites. It’s always good to have a god looking out for you, so the Israelites agreed to obey Yahweh. Moses went back up Mount Sinai. “They all promised to obey you,” Moses said to Yahweh.

“Well, just to make sure,” said Yahweh, “I’m going to appear at the top of this mountain as a dense dark cloud, filled with thunder and lightning. You come back up the mountain, and all the Israelites will know that I talk to you directly.”

Moses went back down Mount Sinai. Yahweh appeared at the top of the mountain as a dense cloud. Moses went back up the mountain to talk with Yahweh. The Israelites watched.

Moses entered the dense cloud at the top of the mountain. Yahweh told Moses about all the rules and laws the Israelites would have to obey. Yahweh started with ten basic laws, the Ten Commandments: no stealing, no murdering people, no lying; and a law saying the Israelites weren’t allowed to worship any other god or goddess besides Yahweh.

Moses brought the Ten Commandments down to the Israelites. But there were still more laws. Moses had to climb up and down that mountain quite a few times to bring back all the laws.

Once Moses stayed on top of the mountain for a really long time. The Israelites thought Moses and Yahweh had abandoned them. The Israelites decided to make a new god. They took gold and made it into the shape of a calf — a golden calf. They invented a new religion to worship the golden calf, and had a big party to celebrate. Just as the party was really getting going, Moses came back down the mountain.

“What’s going on here?” Moses said. “Don’t you remember that you promised not to worship any other gods?”

The Israelites looked a little shamefaced, but no one apologized.

“Who’s on my side?” said Moses angrily. “If you still like Yahweh best, come with me!” A few people joined him. Moses made sure they all had swords, and then told them to go and kill anyone who was still worshipping that golden calf.

And they did.

This is a strange story. Moses had already told everyone that killing was against Yahweh’s laws, so when he killed people didn’t he break Yahweh’s law? On the other hand, wasn’t it stupid for the Israelites to make a golden calf, and then worship the thing they had just made?

I think this story is supposed to make us stop and think about religion. I think this story is telling us: don’t do something because someone tells you to, or because everyone else is doing it. Seek out the truth, hang out with other people who think for themselves, and remember how easy it is to make mistakes.

[Exodus 31.18-32.25, with reference to the events of Exodus 19-31. I used the New International Version when writing this story.]

Sermon — “Option D”

Get out your number 2 pencils. Do not let your mark stray outside the oval, and check off at least one, but no more than one choice. Are you ready? Here’s the question:

Do you believe in God? Choose one of the following: (A) Yes. (B) No. (C) Don’t care or don’t know.

Many, maybe most, people in our contemporary Western society believe those are the only three possible answers to that question. Do you believe in God? Yes. No. Don’t know or don’t care.

Christian fundamentalists like Pat Robertson, and humanist fundamentalists like Richard Dawkins, would deny that that third option exists — they believe you have to answer yes or no — they live in theological world that operates solely under Boolean logic.

Unitarian Universalists, on the other hand, want option D: All of the above. Since Western society does not give us option D, we take our number 2 pencils and fill in all three ovals, which does tend to mess up the scoring of this particular multiple choice test. This morning, I would like to tell you a little bit about how we came to be this way — why it is that we refuse to restrict ourselves to simplistic answers to the question, Do you believe in God?

———

Let me go tell you a little bit of the historical story behind our Unitarian Universalist attitudes towards God.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Unitarian ministers like Francis Ellingwood Abbott and Octavius Brooks Frothingham caused a ruckus within Unitarianism by preaching “Free Religion” — what we today would call religious humanism [Dorrien 2001], although they still used words like “Christ” and “God.” By the end of the 19th century, free religionists were everywhere: Eliza Tupper Wilkes, the Unitarian preacher who first spread Unitarianism here in Palo Alto in the 1890s, was one of those who allied themselves with the Free Religion position in the Western Unitarian Conference. [Tucker 1990]

By the 1930s, John Dietrich and other Unitarian and Universalist ministers were preaching what they had come to call humanism — religion with humanity at its center, not God. The humanists found themselves engaged in active debate with the theists, people like William Wallace Fenn, Unitarians and Universalists who felt no need to dismiss the concept of God. In the first half of the 20th century, the debate between the theists and the humanists was vigorous, sometimes stupidly acrimonious, but often quite fruitful.

But not all Unitarians and Universalists could be characterized as either humanist or theist. There was E. Stanton Hodgin, who had been minister at the radical Los Angeles Unitarian church, and then minister at the fairly stodgy New Bedford, Massachusetts, Unitarian church. When Stanton Hodgin was asked to sign the Humanist Manifesto in 1933, he refused — he didn’t want religion reduced to anything that remotely resembled a creed. And when Hodgin wrote his autobiography in 1948, he gave it the title Confessions of an Agnostic Clergyman — he refused to let himself be put into a theological box.

I give you some of this history so that you realize that the conversations between the humanists and the theists have been going on in Unitarianism and Universalism for one and a half centuries. Plenty of smart people have participated on both sides of these conversations. If one side could prove the existence or non-existence of God, they would have done so by now.

Let me move ahead in time to 1973, when William R. Jones published his controversial book titled Is God a White Racist? In that book he made a crucial advance in the debate between humanists and theists, which he further clarified in his 1975 article “Humanism and Theism: The Chasm Narrows.” [Note 1] Jones said that the battles for liberation — liberation of African Americans, liberation of women, liberation of third world peoples — would force theists to a position that he called “humanocentric theism.” Getting rid of the theological jargon, what Jones meant was simple: There are two basic types of theism. First, there’s the theism that says that everything is God’s will, and humanity has little or no freedom of decision. Second, there’s the theism that says God exists yet we human beings have freedom to make decisions — and that being the case, this second type of theism, humano-centric theism, functionally looks very much like humanism. Jones is African American, and he was active in the Civil Rights struggle; speaking as a humanist, he almost seems to be saying: Instead of arguing about whether God exists, let’s just acknowledge that humanists and theists are different, move beyond that, and work together to end racism.

Let me jump ahead to 2002. In that year, Carole Fontaine, a Unitarian Universalist who is professor of Biblical studies at Andover Newton Theological School, posed an interesting question: What will it take to form a global conscience for planet Earth? Part of her answer was that theists and humanists need to work together. And she contended that we Unitarian Universalists are uniquely placed to build bridges between traditional theists and secular humanists so that, for example, we can do human rights work together. Thus, Fontaine believes we Unitarian Universalists need to “reconstitute Jesus as a human rights guy…. I like Jesus. He’s my guy. The fact that he’s executed on trumped-up political charges — I mean, he’s the Stephen Biko of the first century. We can work with this!” [Note 2. Fontaine 2003.] So Carole Fontaine goes a step further than William R. Jones — not only should humanists and theists be working together on social justice — but those theists and humanists in Unitarian Universalist congregations, already so experienced in humanist-theist dialogue, have a special role in the wider world, because we are the ones who can get the traditional theists and the secular humanists to work together.

Now you begin to see why we Unitarian Universalists want to choose option D. There are those who believe in God; there are those who don’t believe in God; there are those who don’t know or don’t care; and then there’s us. We do all of the above, and that is our unique strength, that is the unique contribution we have to make to the world.

———

We Unitarian Universalists refuse to be boxed in by either-or theological choices. James Luther Adams, perhaps the most prominent Unitarian Universalist theologian of the twentieth century, started out as a traditional Christian. He became a Unitarian and a religious humanist at about the same time. Later on in life, he thought of himself as a theist, a liberal Christian; although he was a very liberal Christian, active in feminist critiques of God-images. When I look back at my own religious journey, I have been successively a non-traditional theist, a non-traditional humanist, and now I call myself a religious naturalist; as a religious naturalist, I can use God-talk or not as I wish, and still be theologically consistent. Someone once asked a Universalist minister what it was, exactly, that Universalists stand for. “We don’t stand,” he said, “we move.” [Fisher 1921]

And this brings us back to that story I told at the beginning of the worship service, that old, old story about Moses and the golden calf. You remember the story: Moses and the Israelites make promises to the god Yahweh; in return for Yahweh’s protection, Moses and the Israelites promise (among many other things) to refrain from killing each other, and to refrain from worshipping other gods or goddesses. Yet when Moses is gone for a while, the Israelites start worshipping a golden calf, and then Moses kills a whole bunch of the Israelites for doing so.

Before I go any further, I have to make something clear to those of you here this morning who might be new to Unitarian Universalism. We Unitarian Universalists do not take the Bible literally, any more than we take Shakespeare literally. Did Moses really go up onto Mount Sinai and speak to a god whom he called Yahweh? Yes and no. Did Macbeth really see Banquo’s ghost in Shakespeare’s play “Macbeth”? Yes and no. In each case, there is a literal answer, an answer which is fairly trivial and ultimately rather boring; and there is also a non-literal answer, an answer which relates to moral and spiritual truths, and it is in answering this latter question that we can be transformed at our deepest levels of being.

We Unitarian Universalists have traditionally understood the story of Moses and the golden calf to be a story calling upon us to reject idolatry. Let me explain one way we Unitarian Universalists might define idolatry:

When the Israelites made the golden calf, they were guilty of idolatry: instead of coming to terms with the complexities of moral and ethical thinking encapsulated in the laws of Yahweh, the Israelites tried to take a set of religious concepts that were really quite complicated and subtle, and they tried to reduce those concepts to something that was showy but empty and useless. When Moses ignored the law of Yahweh that prohibited killing, so that he could angrily kill anyone who worshipped the golden calf, he was guilty of idolatry. He took a set of religious concepts that were complicated and subtle, and he cut out all the parts he didn’t like. So Moses ignored the law against killing so that he could enforce the law against worshipping another god; and in one of the Bible’s moments of supreme irony he exchanges one form of idolatry for another form of idolatry. Both types of idolatry are the same in that they place undue significance on something of little or no significance.

(I cannot resist digressing here for just a moment to point out that the usual American method of reading the Bible is the first form of idolatry. Most Americans, when they read the Bible, take this complicated, layered, fascinating collection of literature written over a period of thousands of years, and reduce it to simplistic moralism. Most Americans read the Bible the way they’d read the latest thriller by Dan Brown, when we should be reading the Bible the way we read Shakespeare, reading it as literature that offers something to everyone from the groundlings to the most sophisticated intellectuals.)

Historically, we Unitarian Universalists have resisted idolatry with all the power of our beings. The Unitarians of my grandparents’ generation realized that the crosses that had appeared in some Unitarian churches were idols — symbols that had taken on undue significance. My aunt and uncle belonged to the Unitarian church in Lexington, Massachusetts, and in the late 1940s that church developed a really beautiful Christmas eve service, where the whole church started out in darkness, and gradually a few candles were lit, then a few more, and at the end of the service everyone was holding a lit candle and the combined light of all those individual candles lit up the whole church. As this candlelight service evolved, someone threw in a dramatic moment when an internally-lit cross rose up in front of the pulpit — a nice piece of theater, a sort of dramatic reminder that Christmas is central to the Christian tradition. And so for some years, that internally-lit cross would rise up on Christmas Eve — until the year when they decided that the symbolism was heavy-handed, that it was a form of idolatry. So that big old cross got stuffed in a garbage can, and placed in front of the church, where (it is said) it provoked a great deal of comment about those Godless Unitarians among certain more literally-minded residents of the town.

I remember the first time the minister introduced the flaming chalice into a worship service in the Unitarian Universalist church I grew up in. I was sitting next to my mother, a lifelong Unitarian, and as he lit the match she muttered under her breath, “Graven images” — which is an old-fashioned way of accusing that minister of idolatry. I don’t think the flaming chalice is inherently idolatrous, but if we place undue significance on what is essentially an insignificant object, then it becomes idolatrous. The flaming chalice began as a symbol used by the Unitarian Service Committee during the Second World War, and really it is a symbol of our commitment to social justice work. This congregation’s habit of extinguishing the chalice strikes me as tending towards the idolatrous, as placing undue significance on a very simple symbol.

Another obvious example of something here in our church which can be interpreted as idolatrous is the branch which hangs in this room. I don’t mind having a branch hanging on our wall; it’s a nice piece of decor. But when I am uncomfortable when I hear people attributing symbolic significance to that branch; that, it seems to me, is placing undue significance on what is, after all, just a branch. And I’m sure some of you disagree with me, and you will politely let me know about your disagreement after the worship service. We need polite disagreement if we are to keep ourselves from falling into idolatry. Because people like me — mystics who want to get rid of all symbols — we can create another kind of idolatry, an idolatry of simplicity where we try to place undue significance on plainness and complete lack of ornamentation.

Anything can become an idol, a graven image, a golden calf. Even if we got rid of all the symbols, our whole building could become a graven image, if we place undue significance on it. We don’t even need a building in order to be a congregation; all we need is each other, and the search for truth, and a commitment to make the world a better place.

The golden calf was an crude attempt to fix the truth in a calf made of gold. Let us be sure that we do not try to fix the truth in some material object — the truth will not be held in a golden calf, nor in a flaming chalice, nor in the branch, nor in this building. The truth may be held for a time in a community of people, as long as that community of people remains flexible and willing to evolve. We may be comforted, for a time, by our building, or by the flaming chalice, but do not confuse such comfort with truth. Truth and comfort are united only in a community of people. If this building crumbles into dust, we will still be able to take comfort in each other, we will still be able to take comfort in this religious community, we will still know the truth that we can change the world for the better. We gain strength from each other, from our shared religious community; and we take that strength out beyond our community to heal a world that desperately needs healing.

———

Do you believe in God? Choose one of the following: (A) Yes. (B) No. (C) Don’t care or don’t know. (D) All of the above. As Unitarian Universalists, our choice is clear: we choose option D. We choose to remember that we have debated this question for a century and a half, with very intelligent people arguing for very different answers, and we no longer expect a definitive answer. We choose an answer that puts us in a unique position to help heal the world. We choose to resist an idolatry that would limit us to simplistic answers to religious questions.

Selected References

Dorrien, Gary. The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001.
Fisher, Lewis Beals. Which Way? A Study of Universalists and Universalism. Boston: Universalist Publishing House, 1921. [p. 9]
Fontaine, Carole. “Strange Bedfellows? human Rights, Scripture(s), and the Seven Principles.” Journal of Liberal Religion, Winter, 2003; www.meadville.edu/journal/2003_fontaine_4_1.pdf accessed October 2009.
Hodgin, E. Stanton. Confessions of an Agnostic Clergyman Boston: Beacon Press, 1948.
Jones, William R. Is God a White Racist?. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973, 1997.
———. “Theism and Religious Humanism: The Chasm Narrows.” The Christian Century, May 21, 1975, pp. 520-525.
Tucker, Cynthia Grant. Prophetic Sisterhood: Liberal Women Ministers of the Frontier, 1880-1930. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1991.

The Weary Blues

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 improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading was the poem “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes. This poem is not included here due to copyright restrictions.

The second reading was the poem by Langston Hughes, titled “The Ballad Of The Landlord” This poem is not included here due to copyright restrictions.

Sermon — “The Weary Blues”

This is Black History Month, and in three sermons this month I proposed to speak to you about three different Black poets; more specifically, about three American poets of African descent. Last week, I spoke about James Weldon Johnson; and this week I would like to speak about Langston Hughes.

If you were here last week, you heard me say that poets make the world; and I meant that in a broad sense of poetry, where poets make language and language makes our world. This is not some supernatural magic trick; rather it is a statement about the basic being of the universe. There is a fundamental connection between language — between what we speak and hear and write and read — a connection between language, and the very core of That Which Is.

I want to be careful to tell you exactly what I mean by a poem. A poem is not just something that sits there on the page, and you read it, or your high school English teacher makes you read it, and that’s the end of it. A poem is language that is meant to change you, and maybe change the world around you. A few poems are meant to be looked at, like paintings, but mostly you have to say poems aloud for them to change you, or change the world around you; and if you can chant them or intone them or sing them, sometimes that increases their power.

I’d even say that poetry and music are much the same thing; — two points on a continuum that stretches from ordinary conversation to the most abstract music. It is not always clear to me where the spoken word ends, and music begins. What is clear to me is the power of poetry, and music, to change us; more specifically, the power of poetry and music to heal us, to heal our souls, to heal our selves.

But how does this happen? How is it that poetry heals and changes us? This is why I want to speak with you this morning about the poems of Langston Hughes. More than most poets, his poetry is musical. More than most poets, his poetry has the power to heal and change and transform. And his poetry has helped me to understand a little bit of how it is that music transforms and heals us.

…

Just before the sermon, I read one of Langston Hughes’s best-known poems, “The Ballad of the Landlord.” This is a poem that tells a story, which goes something like this:

Here’s a man (or is it a woman?) who lives in a run-down old house. This house is some place in the United States, and it’s sixty or seventy years ago, and the landlord appears to me to be white. At least he acts like a white person of sixty or seventy years ago; because he has an African American tenant, he doesn’t bother fixing the roof, or fixing the broken-down steps that lead up to the front door of the old run-down house.

The landlord has stopped by to collect the rent. The tenant reminds him about all that’s wrong with the house. The landlord doesn’t pay any attention. The tenant gets increasingly frustrated, and finally says, I’m not going to pay you any rent, and if you keep talking so high and mighty, why I’ll sock you one. But the landlord is white, and doesn’t stand for being threatened by black folk. The landlord calls the cops, who arrest the tenant. The tenant is charged and convicted of assault, and sent to jail.

Through this whole poem, we know the landlord is in the wrong. We know that the tenant’s anger is justified, and we’re rooting for the tenant. When we get to the end of the poem, when the full force of the law is used to perpetuate injustice, we share in the anger of that tenant, and we know we have to work to correct that kind of injustice in the world. Even though this is just a made-up story, we hear the ring of truth in it — for all good poems are true; truth is what makes them good poems. We hear the ring of truth, and we hear as well a call to heal and change a world in which such injustice can exist.

When we address injustice in the world, we are healing the world. That’s what this poem does; and that reveals to us a connection between poetry and religion, since religion is also supposed to heal the world. This is a significant point for us religious liberals, because we tend to dismiss the fact that healing is a central part of religion. Too much of religion is obsessed with faith healing, miraculous cures where some father God makes it all better without much effort on our part. We are right to dismiss such kinds of religious healing. Yet we cannot dismiss the fact that healing is central to religion. Part of the purpose of religion is to heal the world; part of the purpose of religion is to heal our souls when we are damaged by the injustice of the world.

When I say “healing,” I don’t necessarily mean sitting there passively and waiting for some healing energy to do its work. The story of the tenant and the landlord force us to confront an ethical problem: the full power of the law and the police can be used to cause injustice. Once you start chewing over that ethical problem, it’s hard to simply sit there and enjoy the beauty of the poem. We find that the poem calls us to do something. How does this poem heal and change the world? — the poem calls us to rouse ourselves and heal the world by correcting injustice.

…

It is very good that poetry heals and changes the world, and I know that will help heal me in the long run, but sometimes I need some more personal healing. It’s fine and noble to say that I’m going to go out and heal the world, but sometimes life has got me down so that I don’t have the energy to do that. What then? Forget the world for a moment — how is poetry going to heal me?

To answer that, I’d like to speak about the blues. “The Ballad of the Landlord” makes us want to heal the world, but another poem by Langston Hughes, “The Weary Blues,” describes to us how to heal our own souls.

And what are the blues? The African American humanist theologian Anthony Pinn is one of those who has pointed out that the blues are a form of musical expression through which “enslaved Africans wrestled with existential questions forced by the absurdity of slavery.” Pinn tells us: “Through this music, they sought to make sense of the world and provide a framework for life. Within the spirituals, the manner in which traditional religious doctrine dominated this rationale for life is apparent. However,… there were other forms of musical expression that did not embrace the basic doctrine of the Christian church, or other traditional forms of religious expression.”

Now Anthony Pinn is a theologian, which means that he is somewhat caught up in the theory. What I have found is that when you put his theory in practice, you find that the blues can be a legitimate form of religious expression; some blues songs are a kind of humanist hymn. They provide serious answers to religious and existential questions. When you’re singing the blues, if you have trouble in mind, you don’t call on God to solve all your troubles — you laugh to keep from crying; you go down by the riverside and rock those blues away; and you know that somehow the sun’s gonna shine on you someday — these are humanist hymns because you don’t call on God to fix your problems for you. In the poem “The Weary Blues,” there is no God who comes down to solve the problems of the unnamed musician who is singing and playing the piano; there is no God to come and take away the pain of living. The musician plays and sings, and that heals him, a little. He is not completely healed; but at least he can sleep that night. So it is that the blues have a healing power.

None of this rules out traditional religious music as healing music. Traditional religious music that calls on God can heal the soul, too. But sometimes religious music pretends to heal, when it really doesn’t heal. Religious music, and religion itself, pretends to heal when it merely distracts us with God and deadens us to the pain and anguish we experience in the here and now; and by deadening us, the pain appears to go away, but we don’t actually heal. The same is sometimes true of the blues: sometimes the blues pretend to heal us, but instead distract us with a catchy melody and a danceable beat, serving merely to deaden us to the pain we’re in.

When the pain we feel is deadened, but nothing else happens, that is false healing. Rather than deadening pain, the blues give us enough distance so that we can feel the pain without becoming overwhelmed by it; herein lies the power of the blues. The music and the poetry of the words channel the pain into something constructive rather than destructive. True healing allows us to regain strength and wholeness. The poetry of the blues allows us to regain strength and wholeness: it is musical poetry that has the power to heal us and change us.

Of course that is also the purpose of these Sunday morning worship services. We come here to be healed, we come here to feel we can be made whole. And how do we do this? We do this with words and with poetry and with musical poetry. We have conversations together; we listen to the spoken word; we listen to poetry and scripture that is read aloud; we sing songs together. You may have a conversation on a Sunday morning after church where someone says something to you that somehow changes you for the better; just a small thing, just a small change for the better; but that small change may do more to heal you than all the sermon and poetry and songs during the worship service; and in that sense, that conversation is a kind of poetry (for you, at that time). I have never heard a sermon that is poetry the way Langston Hughes writes poetry, but I have heard sermons that in a specific time and place healed my soul, and for that moment there were better poetry than anything Hughes ever wrote.

Poetry has power in it; it has the power to heal us. What we try to do here on Sunday morning is kind of poetry. We create a time and a place where words and poetry and music can heal and change us. We get through the pain of living, we get through the anger at injustice, and in doing so we aim to hold onto our dreams.

…

We aim to hold on to our dreams. It’s not a good idea to defer dreams for too long, because deferred dreams can turn into anger — and once you get mired in anger and pain, you wind up deferring your dreams. There’s an awful lot of pain and anger that comes with living. When you think of all the injustice that exists in the world, how can we possibly get rid of all the anger? When sadness enters our souls, how can we possibly get rid of all the pain? I don’t think it’s possible to get rid of all the anger and pain — the world is too full of anger and pain — but we can be sure the anger and pain doesn’t hold us down.

So it is that healing from pain and anger requires us to hold onto our dreams. We have to get through the pain that life can bring; that doesn’t mean we have to get rid of pain, we just have to get through it. We have to get through the anger; that doesn’t mean we have to get rid of it, we just have to get through it.

Langston Hughes wrote a poem called “Dream-Dust” that goes like this:
  Gather out of star-dust
    Earth-dust,
    Cloud-dust,
    Storm-dust,
  And splinters of hail
  One handful of dream-dust
    Not for sale.

Poetry collects from life the earth-dust, the cloud-dust, the storm-dust, the splinters of hail, and distills these elements of life into dream-dust. In this way, poetry helps us hold onto our dreams.

If you come to church regularly, you have heard me say that religious scriptures are a kind of poetry; religious scriptures at their best distill the elements of life and make dreams out of them. Holding on to dreams is one of the things we do in our religious communities; it’s one of the things we try to do here each Sunday. We collect the elements of life — the joys and sorrows, the pain and the joy — and we take an hour or so each week to distill dreams out of our lives. Some of the dreams are personal — your dreams, my dreams. Some of the dreams belong to us all, like the dream of an earth made fair and all her people one. Our religious community is based on poetry, both the poetry of ancient religious scriptures and contemporary poetry like that of Langston Hughes. We come here to hold onto dreams, keeping them safe until they can become reality.

All too often our dreams get deferred. For African Americans, the dream of true equality has been deferred too long; indeed, for too many racial and ethnic minorities, the dream of equality has been deferred for too long. Sometimes the world around us seems to conspire to keep our dreams from becoming a reality. When that happens, we have to do something that allows us to hold on to our dreams. Like that old dream of earth made fair and all her people one — we have been dreaming that dream from more than two thousand years, and while sometimes we seem to make some progress towards it, that dream has not yet become our reality. Yet we keep that dream bright and untarnished. So it is that poetry, and communities founded on poetry, helps us to hold on to our dreams.

…

How is it that poetry heals and changes us? Poetry heals us and changes us by calling to rouse ourselves and go out and heal the world by correcting injustice. Poetry heals us and changes us by allowing us to get through the pain of living, to get through the anger at injustice. Poetry heals us and changes us by helping us to hold onto our dreams, and keep them bright and untarnished. Communities that are founded on poetry, like our church community, do the same thing: in communities like this one, we are healed and changed by healing the world; we are healed by having a place to deal with personal pain and heartache; we are healed and changed by the dreams that we hold together.

And when we are healed and changed, we might just find that we have renewed strength to go out and help to heal the world.

Humanism in Our Time

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

First reading — “Gods” by Langston Hughes

“The ivory gods,
And the ebony gods,
And the gods of diamond and jade,
Sit silently on their temple shelves
While the people
Are afraid.
Yet the ivory gods,
And the ebony gods,
And the gods of diamond-jade,
Are only silly puppet gods
That the people themselves
Have made.”

…

Second reading — Margaret Atwood, “In the Secular Night” from her book Morning in the Burned House (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), p. 6.

Sermon

This morning, I’d like to speak with you about humanism. Humanism is a religious system that does not require a belief in God. In my opinion, humanism has been the most influential thought system in Unitarian Universalism over the past century. This is not to say that all of us Unitarian Universalists are humanists — although about 45 per cent of us are — but the simple fact that many Unitarian Universalists don’t feel the need to believe in God, nor to accept any divine or supernatural agency whatsoever, has, I believe, helped keep us from drifting into rigidity of thought, and has contributed in other ways to the overall health of Unitarian Universalism.

I suppose I had better define humanism before we go any farther. Although humanism does not ask any belief in God, it is not the same as atheism. Atheism tends to be defined by what it rejects — it rejects a supernatural God — whereas humanism tends to be defined by what it affirms — the boundless potential of human life. Nor is humanism the same as the rejection of religion; the people who reject religion generally don’t come to church, whereas there are plenty of humanists in our churches.

I’d say the defining characteristic of humanism is this: humanism places human beings at the center of religion. Humanists don’t place God at the center of religion — indeed, most of the humanists I know don’t pay much attention to God, and many humanists would simply reject the whole notion of God. What humanists want to do is to make sure that religion is centered around human beings. In so doing, the humanists have helped us in our work for justice and liberation; they have changed the way we provide comfort to one another; and they have helped us better understand what it means to be a part of a religious community. Let’s take a look at each of these three humanist contributions.

I/ And let’s start with justice and liberation. Originally, Western religion taught us that the reason we should be nice to one another is because the Bible says so, and the Bible says so because God says so, and if we follow God’s plan everything will be fine. But during the twentieth century, some people began to question whether God had a good plan for humanity.

When I was young, my parents were friends with a couple who had escaped Germany during the 1930s; they had been born Jewish, and as the Nazis came to power they knew they couldn’t survive in Germany. By the time I knew them, they refused to have anything to do with religion. I remember one of them asking how anyone could believe in God, since to believe in God meant believing in a God who would allow millions of Jews to be slaughtered in concentration camps. How could the horrors of the Holocaust be a part of God’s plan?

And then there’s the racism endemic in the United States. When you look at the horrors of racism — shortened life spans, violence against people of color, an inordinate quantity of environmental problems located within communities of color, and so on — how could all this be part of the plan of a supposedly good God?

Back in 1971, Dr. William R. Jones wrote a book titled, “Is God a White Racist?” Dr. Jones, an African American humanist theologian who also happens to be a Unitarian Universalist minister, had a subtle answer to the question posed in this title. He said that if we believe in a God-centered religion, then God must be a white racist because God allows the evil of racism to continue unchecked. But, says Jones, there’s another possibility, which is to have a human-centered religion where we take responsibility for fighting the evils of the world. The real divide is not between those who believe in God and those who don’t believe in God — Dr. Jones says that the real divide is between the people who have a God-centered religion, and the rest of us who know that we have to go out there and do the hard work of making the world a better place. So it is that Dr. Jones outlined one of the most important aspects of humanism: that human beings must take responsibility for their own destinies.

You probably know the old joke about the fellow who is trapped in a flood. As the flood waters cover the street in front of his house, he lifts his eyes up to heaven and prays to God to get him out of the flood. Just then, a police officer drives by and asks him if he wants a ride to higher ground. No, he tells her, I’ll stay right here and wait for God to save me. Well, the flood waters keep rising until he has to move up into the second story of his house to stay dry, and just then some guy comes by in a boat and asks the man if he wants a ride to higher ground. No, says the man, I’ll stay right here and wait for God to save me. Well, the flood waters keep rising, and finally the man is up on the roof of his house. Just then, a woman in a balloon comes floating by and asks the man if he wants a ride to higher ground. No, says the man, I’ll stay right here and wait for God to save me. Well, finally the flood waters rise up so high that the man is perched on top of the chimney of his house. He looks up into the sky and says, God, what’s the matter? I prayed to you to save me. And this big booming voice comes out of the sky saying, Look, pal, I sent you a car, then I sent you a boat, and finally I sent you a balloon, what more do you want?

This old joke gives us a basic humanist truth: that whether or not we believe in God, we human beings have to take charge of our own destinies. Humanists teach us that if you believe in God, you don’t wait around for some miraculous divine act to make the world a better place — you take the initiative yourself, and when your street is flooded and that police officer drives by, you get in her car and drive safely to higher ground.

Notice that someone who believes in a human-centered God acts almost exactly the same way that a humanist would act. The only difference is that the humanist wouldn’t bother to pray to God in the first place. But the end result is that same: whether we’re trying to escape from a flood — or trying to end racism, for that matter — it’s up to us to take action to make the world a better place.

II/ Because humanism challenges the orthodox notions about God, humanism can also be a comfort to those of us who do not experience religion the way the orthodox tell us we’re supposed to experience religion. Let me give you an example from my life, not because I think I’m particularly interesting, but because I think it’s a representative example.

For the last eight years of her life, my mother had supra-nuclear palsy, a particularly aggressive form of Parkinson’s disease that typically kills you in less than a decade. This disease led to all kinds of other problems, and at one point about three years before she died there was a time when she was in the hospital, and I was scared. I remember going to visit her in the hospital, and then going out to take a long walk along this road near the hospital. While I was walking, I decided to try prayer:– why not? I was a Unitarian Universalist, and prayer has long been one of our central spiritual practices, and I felt I needed some kind of spiritual practice to get me through that time.

So I started praying. Mind you, I wasn’t praying to ask God to somehow miraculously heal my mother, because I knew that ultimately wasn’t possible; rather, I was praying as a way to try to connect with something larger than myself, in order that I might find some peace, some relief from being scared and sad. I gave it my best shot, but praying did absolutely nothing for me. So I stopped praying. Eventually, I took my cue from those great Unitarians Emerson and Thoreau, and found a healing spiritual practice in spending time outdoors in Nature. After my mother finally died, I spent a lot of time walking and canoeing and fishing — and it was that non-traditional spiritual practice, the spiritual practice of spending time outdoors in Nature, rather than praying to God, that comforted me and helped me through my grief.

One of the greatest gifts humanism has given to us has been to show us that spiritual comfort does not require belief in the traditional Christian God, nor does spiritual comfort require participating in the traditional Christian spiritual practices such as prayer. The humanists have shown us that spiritual comfort is, above all, a human phenomenon; and because individual human beings differ from one another, because different human cultures differ greatly from one another, it is therefore obvious that each individual human being may have different spiritual needs, and may find spiritual comfort in different ways. I know many people who find great comfort in praying; I know many of you find great comfort in praying; but some of us happen to be made up differently, and we find our spiritual comfort in non-traditional ways. By emphasizing the human dimension of spiritual practices, humanists have relieved all us of feeling inadequate if it should happen that we don’t find comfort in traditional spiritual practices.

III/ Next I’d like to consider how it is that humanism has strengthened our local Unitarian Universalist churches, strengthened our local religious communities. Most Christian churches are united around beliefs: if you believe certain things about God, then you belong in a certain kind of church. But thanks to the humanists we Unitarian Universalists know we don’t have to believe in God at all, and this strengthens our conviction that we can find unity without adhering to any specific set of beliefs about God.

Because we are not united by a specific set of beliefs about God, we rely on something else to hold us together in religious community: we are held together by the idea of covenant, that is, by a set of promises that we make to one another about how we are going to treat each other. Another way to say this is to say that we can be held accountable to one another for our behavior. You can’t be a Unitarian Universalist just because you have some specific set of beliefs — you become a Unitarian Universalist when you make a commitment to a religious community that you will live your religion by treating other people with the same dignity and respect that you yourself deserve.

I believe humanists have helped us to realize that we can not only hold each other accountable for our behavior — but logically speaking, those of us who believe in God can also hold God accountable for God’s behavior. It’s like the old joke:

A woman goes down to the beach with her grandson. The little boy is playing in the waves when suddenly a huge wave comes out of nowhere and swallows up the little boy and drags him out into deep water. The woman stand for a moment in shock, watching where her little grandson was playing. She can’t swim, he’s completely disappeared anyway, what else can she do but pray to God. So this is what she does, she prays to God to return her grandson. Nothing happens, but the woman is absolutely insistent, she refuses to give up. Nothing happens, but she just prays louder. Finally, this voice comes down from heaven, saying, “All right, enough already, here’s your grandson back.” Out of nowhere, a wave comes, crashes on the beach, and there’s her grandson, completely unhurt, although he looks pretty wet, dirty, and disheveled. The woman look up to where the voice came from and says, “He had a hat.”

OK, so this is just a joke, but it seems to me that there’s some deep truth in this joke. If there is a God, it is completely unjust for that God to take the life of an innocent young boy playing on the beach. And if all that is true, then when the grandmother prays to God to correct this injustice, the boy should be fully restored to her; even if his hat is missing, it is not good enough. The woman in this joke holds God accountable to the highest ideals of religion; just as Prometheus holds the gods accountable.

Do you remember the ancient Greek story of Prometheus? — it is a favorite story of many humanists. Prometheus was the fellow who stole fire from the Greek gods and brought it down to humankind, so that human beings could live better lives. For his disobedience, of course, the gods punished Prometheus; but humankind got to keep the knowledge of making fire. Once Prometheus had given fire to humankind, the gods realized that they could not take fire away from humankind, they couldn’t take away fire which relieved so much human suffering; for if they took away fire, then the gods would be shown to be cruel and heartless. In this way, Prometheus held the gods accountable to their highest ideals.

It is in this way that humanists uphold rebellion as a key religious value. Humanist rebellion is not a blind, destructive, striking-out at authority; humanist rebellion is carefully calculated to build community by holding ourselves and others to the highest ideals of humanity.

Rebellion for the sake of rebellion is a waste of time. But rebellion for the sake of upholding the highest ideals of humanity:– this was the life work of Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. This is the kind of rebellion that we need in our religious communities:– a rebellion that never settles for good enough, a rebellion that is willing to take on sacred cows, a rebellion that holds us accountable to the highest ethical standards. Humanism reminds us: religious belief is useless if you don’t live out your religious beliefs in the real world; and humanists suggest to us that belief should be a lower priority than making the world a better place.

Before I end I do want to acknowledge that humanism is capable of its own excesses. In some of our Unitarian Universalist congregations I have seen a phenomenon I call “humanist fundamentalism,” where no one is allowed to believe in God, or even use the word “God” in a worship service. Some of these humanist fundamentalists, just like Christian fundamentalists, can be annoying and oppressive.

However, unlike other kinds of fundamentalism, and unlike plain old atheism, humanism contains its own corrective to “humanist fundamentalism.” In its highest and best form, humanism cares little about what others believe, while it cares deeply about making this present world a better place to live. The best humanists don’t care so much you may or may not believe, but they do care about bringing out the best of humanity in each one of us.

Humanists remind us to place human beings at the center of religion, humanists remind us to uphold the highest ideals of humankind. By downplaying the importance of belief in God (or disbelief in God), humanists help all religious people to stay focused on what is most important about religion: that religion should be focused on human beings. When we remember to keep religion focused on human beings, thus helps us to create healthy religious communities in which we are accountable to one another; it helps us in our work for justice and liberation; it helps us to provide spiritual comfort to one another, and spiritual comfort to ourselves. So it is that religion be a gift and a pleasure to us, to help us to spread the light of love throughout the world.