Dan Harper | Sermons

Tag: Martin Luther King Jr.

  • Another View of Easter

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below has typographical errors, missing words, etc.

    Easter is one of those holidays that has spread out beyond its original religious setting. For Christians, Easter is the culmination of Holy Week, a week of religious observance. Holy week begins with Palm Sunday, which commemorates the arrival of Jesus of Nazareth into Jerusalem to celebrate Pesach, or Passover (remember they were all observant Jews). Then there’s Maundy Thursday, which according to tradition was when Jesus and his followers had a Seder. Good Friday is a solemn observance of when the Romans executed Jesus. Then Easter Sunday is the joyous celebration of the resurrection of Jesus.

    Now all this was confusing to me as a Unitarian Universalist child. By the rigid religious divisions that existed in Massachusetts back then, Unitarians were called Protestants. But — just like here in Cohasset — the Unitarian congregation I grew up in started out as a Puritan church. For those who inherited the Puritan tradition, there was only one holy day, and that was Sunday; any other holiday was considered to be mere superstition. As a result, when I was a child I didn’t understand Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and all the rest. Even today, I have to admit I still default to the Puritan tradition that says Sunday is the only holy day.

    Some years ago, I was the Director of Religious Education at First Parish in Lexington, which like our congregation started out as a Puritan church. One year, just like this year, Easter happened to fall on the Sunday closest to April 19 or Patriots Day. Most of you probably think of Patriots Day — if you think of it at all — as that three day weekend in April when they run the Boston Marathon. But if you live in Lexington or Concord, you quickly learn that Patriots Day is when all good Americans celebrate the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

    Now as the oldest church in Lexington, First Parish in Lexington was the church of the Minutemen. On the Sunday closest to Patriots Day, there would always be men dressed up in Minuteman costumes, and women wearing 18th century dresses. In my recollection, the Sunday nearest Patriots Day was also the only Sunday during the year when they celebrated communion. In the Unitarian tradition, communion typically is a simple commemoration of the Last Supper. But in First Parish in Lexington, it became more than a commemoration of the Last Supper; with the men and women in 18th century garb, and with the congregation’s 18th century communion silver making its annual appearance, communion also become a sort of historical reenactment of 18th century communion services. Then when Patriots Day fell close to Easter, there would also be an Easter celebration layered on top of all that.

    While this may sound weird and confusing, this is actually the way most religions operate. Pop culture, local history, and religious traditions get all mushed together, making a glorious celebratory mash-up. The fundamentalist Christians and the hard-core atheists are both highly critical of this kind of cultural mash-up, because (as they rightly point out) it does not make rational sense. This is why atheists and conservative Christians criticize Easter eggs, and the Easter Bunny, and Minutemen at Easter services in Lexington. But for the rest of us, cultural mash-ups are loads of fun. We eat our chocolate eggs, we don’t worry about the contradictions, and we welcome the Minutemen on Easter.

    One reason I happen to be thinking about all this is because yesterday was the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, and today is Easter. I went to the celebration in Concord yesterday, and there is something inside me fully expecting someone to walk through the door of our 18th century meetinghouse, all dressed up in 18th century garb.

    Another reason I happen to be thinking about all this is because over the last century or so, liberal Christians have been thinking about Easter and Holy Week in new ways. The Christian tradition makes it clear that Jesus and his followers went into Jerusalem to celebrate Pesach, or Passover. Pesach celebrates the Exodus, when the ancient Israelites escaped from the bondage and political oppression they experienced in Egypt. In the time of Jesus, Jews no longer lived in Egypt, but they were once again oppressed, this time by the Roman Empire. In an essay published last week in the New York Times, Episcopal priest Andrew Thayer wrote that Palm Sunday celebrations “often miss an uncomfortable truth about Jesus’ procession: At the time, it was a deliberate act of theological and political confrontation. It wasn’t just pageantry; it was protest.”(1)

    In this interpretation of the Easter story, Jesus came, not just to save souls for heaven, but also to push back against the economic policies of the Roman Empire that kept so many Jews living in poverty. Jesus may have wanted to get people into heaven after they died, but he was also seriously concerned about the well-being of people here and now, while they were still alive.

    If we think about Palm Sunday in this way, we might think about Easter differently, too. Instead of making a theological point about the salvation of individuals, we could also think of Easter as a holiday that celebrates the resilience of an entire community. Although it sometimes gets obscured, the central purpose of Christianity is to be a community with the goal to take care of all who are poor and downtrodden. The Romans could kill Jesus, but they could not kill an entire movement devoted to taking care of those who are less fortunate.

    When we think about the Easter story in this way, then it doesn’t seem quite so odd that First Parish in Lexington sometimes had men in Minuteman suits show up on Easter Sunday. Even thought the political situation at the time of the American Revolution was very different from the political situation in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus — even though the underlying philosophies of the Jesus movement and the American Revolution had important differences — nevertheless, both Jesus’s followers, and the architects of the American republic, had a sense that each and every human personality was something to be cherished. When the founders of the United States said that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights,” they were drawing on an ethical tradition that goes back to Jesus; that tradition goes even further back, to the book of Leviticus in the Hebrew Bible, where it says: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (2). This is the ethical tradition of the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do to you; and this same idea is not exclusive to Judaism and Christianity, but appears in somewhat different forms in nearly every human culture throughout history.

    We live in a time when there are deep divisions in our country. I think most Americans still profess devotion to the Golden Rule — whether we use the words of Leviticus, or one of the other great ethical and religious traditions where the same principle is articulated. But we are deeply divided about how to apply this principle in real life. Does the Golden Rule apply to LGBTQ people? Does the Golden Rule apply to people who are poor? Does the Golden Rule apply to immigrants? Does the Golden Rule apply to both Republicans and Democrats?

    While most Americans seem to agree that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves, we currently have bitter disagreements on how this might play out politically. And in our bitter disagreements, some of us have been descending into outright hatred. Sometimes we seem to forget that the Golden Rule applies not just to people who share our religion and our politics, but also to the people of other religions, and to people from other countries, and even to people who belong to a different political party.

    This country experienced similar deep divisions back in the 1960s and 1970s. I was a child and teenager in those decades, and I remember listening to the news on television and hearing about the assassinations, the bombings, and the people throwing rocks at school buses right here in eastern Massachusetts.

    Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., captured the feeling of that era in his 1968 speech at Grosse Point High School, when he retold the story of the Good Samaritan. This is the story, as you may remember, of the man who was going over the dangerous mountain road from Jerusalem to Jericho. This man was attacked by robbers, severely beaten, and left to die by the side of the road. A priest and a Levite — both solid upstanding citizens — walked by, saw the man lying there, and hurried away; King says that no doubt they both worried that this was a trap set by robbers to lure them in so that they would be robbed. Then a Samaritan — a member of a despised religious minority — came by, but he stopped to help. King concluded the story by saying: “…the first question that the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”(3)

    By telling this story, Dr. King revealed an essential problem of human ethics. We know from the Golden Rule that we are called upon to help others; but over and over again, we think only of what will happen to us. Considering just our own country, we have seen this happen again and again in American history: over and over again, we have forgotten this high ideals of the American Revolution, and we have reverted back to a primitive selfishness. In a sermon he gave in 1967, Dr. King said that over and over again Jesus tried to show human beings how to follow the Golden Rule, but that over and over again we turn away from the truth — just as the priest and the Levite turned away from the man who had been beaten and left lying by the side of the road — just as the Roman Empire turned away from the truth of the golden Rule when they executed Jesus on trumped-up political charges. But although too often we turn away from the Golden Rule, we also feel that there is another way. Dr. King put it this way: “[People] love darkness rather than the light, and they crucified [Jesus], and there on Good Friday [when Jesus died] it was still dark, but the Easter came, and Easter is an eternal reminder of the fact that the truth crushed [to] earth will rise again.”(4)

    And that is my Easter hope for you. Even though the deep divisions in our country are crushing the truth of the Golden Rule at the moment — even though the hatred that exists in our country is crushing the truth of this ancient teaching from the Hebrew Bible that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves — despite everything that’s going on around us, Easter is an eternal reminder that the truth crushed to earth will rise again.

    Notes

    (1) Andrew Thayer, “Palm Sunday Was a Protest, Not a Procession,” New York Times, 13 April 2025.
    (2) Leviticus 19:18.
    (3) Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Other America,” speech at Grosse Point (Mich.) High School, 14 March 1968. In the opening sentence of this speech, King recognized the minister of the Unitarian Universalist church in Grosse Point, Rev. Harry Meserve; Meserve had served as the minister of First Parish in Cohasset in the late 1930s. Text from the Grosse Point Historical Society website: https://www.gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech/index.htm accessed 19 April 2025.
    (4) Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Christmas Sermon,” Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, 24 December 1967.

  • Martin Luther King, Jr., for Times Like These

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below may have typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make any corrections.

    Readings

    The first reading is from the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

    “How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an ‘I it’ relationship for an ‘I thou’ relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong….”

    The second reading is another excerpt from the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

    “Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jail with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment.”

    Sermon: MLK for Times Like These

    The readings this morning were excerpts from Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” King wrote that letter in response to a public letter from eight White clergy — seven Christians and one Jew — who together wrote what they titled “A Call for Unity,” which they published in the main Birmingham, Alabama, newspaper. In their letter, these eight White clergy said: “We are now confronted by a series of demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens directed and led in part by outsiders. We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.” And their letter concluded by saying, “We appeal to both our white and Negro citizenry to observe the principles of law and order and common sense.”

    King wrote his reply to these well-meaning but narrow-minded clergy while he was in the Birmingham jail, having been arrested for taking part in the demonstrations which so bothered those White clergy. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he showed these eight clergy how they were wrong: that the principles of law and order should guarantee all American citizens equal rights; that American citizens should not have to wait for human rights; that he himself was not an “outsider” but rather someone caught up in the same fight for human rights as the Black people of Birmingham. And then King asked: “Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world?”

    This question has bothered Unitarian Universalists, and the rest of American organized religion, ever since. We know those eight White clergy were misguided in their critique of King; we know they were misguided in their critique of the whole non-violent Civil Rights movement. At the same time, we secretly worry that King’s critique of organized religion might be correct: that organized religion would prefer to maintain the status quo, rather than to make the world a better place.

    Conservative Christians respond to this secret worry by insisting that the primary purpose of organized religion is saving individual souls, preparing persons to get into heaven after they die. Go ahead and worry about making the world a better place if you want to, they say, but your top priority should always be saving saving souls for heaven. We actually see a similar response in other religious traditions; as one example, some Buddhists will tell you that your top priority should be spending time on your personal practice in order to achieve Enlightenment. These conservative religious groups answer Dr. King’s question by saying that they are not especially interested in saving the nation or the world.

    We see a different response from those of us on the progressive wing of religion — Unitarian Universalists, progressive Christians and Jews, engaged Buddhists, and so on. Religious progressives really do believe that the primary purpose of organized religion is to try and make the world a better place. This is certainly true for Unitarian Universalists. Our old “seven principles” talked about the inherent worthiness of every human personality; the important of the democratic process; caring for the interdependent web of existence; and so on. The new Unitarian Universalist principles, adopted last June, talk about justice, equity, pluralism, generosity, and so on. We do our best to stay focused on saving the world.

    The interesting thing about Dr. King was that his approach included both the impulse to save your own soul, as well as the impulse to save the world. The sociologist Jonathan Rieder put it this way: “King’s message was that God wanted you to deliver yourself. His gospel of freedom mixed responsibility [and] spiritual recovery…. This emphasis on the need for a change in Black consciousness aligned him with the most diverse cultural streams: the traditional American idea of being born again; its secular incarnation in … identity as a project of self-fashioning…. [and] It also jibed with the Exodus story: The Israelites needed forty years in the wilderness to get their minds right, so they would cease their whining….” So writes sociologist Jonathan Rieder.

    Dr. King taught that it’s not enough to just go out and solve the world’s problems. We also have to solve our own personal problems. Maybe even we even have to figure out whether we’re a part of the problem. Dr. King tells us that personal and global problems may be linked. You can’t take on responsibility for solving the world’s problems unless you deal with your own internal personal problems. And you can’t solve your own internal personal problems until you also take on responsibility for helping to solve the world’s problems.

    But how, you may wonder, does this pertain to the Exodus story? We usually read the Exodus story as a quaint fable, a primitive attempt at history. We chuckle a little at the naïveté of the story. We know that it’s only about 350 miles from Egypt to the Promised Land. If you take forty years to walk 350 miles, that works out to about 125 feet per day. How naive to think that Moses would take forty years to lead his people that short a distance.

    But instead of reading Exodus story as a primitive attempt at history, we can read it as a sophisticated metaphorical account of internal psychological growth and change. You begin in a mental state that you want to escape from. What do you have to do to free yourself from that mental state? With that in mind let’s consider one episode from Exodus, the story of the golden calf. It goes something like this:

    During their psychological journey from the fleshpots of Egypt to the freedom of the Promised Land, Moses has his people camp out at the base of Mount Sinai. While the people are making camp and taking care of the day-to-day necessities of survival in the desert, Moses climbs up Mount Sinai to talk with God. God tells Moses that he and his people are now under God’s special care. All they have to do is promise not to worship other gods. Then God provides insightful rules for living, given to Moses in the form of laws inscribed on stone tablets.

    There comes a time when Moses stays on top of the mountain for a really long time. The people camped out at the bottom of the mountain begin to grow uneasy. They worry that Moses isn’t going to come back. Is he lost in meditation and contemplation? Has their new God has abandoned them? So they decide to make a different god. Aaron, the brother of Moses, gets the people to make a calf out of gold. Aaron and the people invent new ways to worship this god of their own invention. They worship this god, share a big meal, then begin to celebrate together.

    At that moment, Moses comes back down the mountain. “What’s going on here?” he said. “Don’t you remember your commitment to stay focused on one spiritual task? Yet here you all are, distracted from your goal by some deity that you invented. And seriously people, a baby cow covered in gold? — this is not something that is worth worshipping.”

    Moses takes the golden calf, burns it, grinds it up into a powder, dissolves it in water, and makes the people drink it. The people look a little shamefaced at first, but then some of them point out that Moses had been gone for a long time. For all they knew, Moses and his god had given up on them and gone somewhere else. Next Aaron tries to calm Moses down, telling him, “You know the people, they are bent on evil.” But Moses perceives these are merely attempts to placate him. He sees that the people are still running wild, and that they have no intention of actually improving their behavior.

    “Who’s on my side?” said Moses angrily. “If you’re still committed to your original promises, if you can see that the golden calf is merely a distraction from your serious purpose, come with me!” Some of the people joined him. Moses made sure they all had swords, and then told them to go and kill anyone who still worshipped that golden calf.

    So they did.

    Now, if you read Exodus as if it’s naive history, this story of the golden calf sounds brutal, and it seems difficult to understand. But if we read Exodus as a psychological journey, the story of the golden calf makes more sense.

    Think of it this way: Here we all are, on our journey to the Promised Land, the land where we will live in peace and plenty. But the journey to the Promised Land takes longer and proves more difficult than we had expected. The length and the difficulty of the journey causes us to get distracted by meaningless and trivial things. The only way to get ourselves back on track is by completely cutting out the trivial distractions. Yet those trivial distractions are pleasant, and cutting them out proves painful. If this is the general outline of the psychological journey described in the story of the golden calf, it doesn’t take much to imagine specific applications of this story to real life.

    To take one example, the story of the golden calf might serve as a metaphor for how my friends in recovery programs describe their psychological journey out of addiction. The road to recovery takes longer than expected, and it’s more difficult than is expected. You may know the principles needed to recover from addiction, whether you’re following a twelve-step program or some other program. But it’s easy to abandon those abstract principles for the empty pleasure of trivial distractions. Sometimes successful recovery requires the harsh act of cutting ties with old friends, people who might drag one back into addiction.

    To take another example, the story of the golden calf can resemble the journey of taking up a serious spiritual practice. Your spiritual practice, whether it’s meditation or some other practice, seems like such a good idea when you start out. But there often comes a time when your progress slows and stops. You grow weary of the effort required. You think to yourself: Maybe things weren’t so bad in the old days when you weren’t committed to this spiritual practice. Wouldn’t it be so easy to give it up? And so maybe you drop your spiritual practice for a time, and revert to your old way of being. When you realize that your spiritual practice really was doing you good, you find it can be wrenching to return to that spiritual practice, it can require the harsh acting of cutting out whatever trivial pursuits took the place of your spiritual practice.

    To take one more example, the story of the golden calf can also resemble the journey towards some social justice goal. When you first start working for racial justice, for example, you’re invigorated and enthusiastic. Then there are the inevitable setbacks; the political climate becomes hostile; the party in power uses barely concealed racist vocabulary; the people who resist racial justice are spreading disinformation. You grow weary of the work. You begin to feel that you only have enough energy for your ordinary day-to-day tasks, and you pull back from racial justice. Yet something happens — another racially motivated killing, another law supporting racial inequality, whatever — and you find that you cannot simply ignore the problem. You find yourself forced to return to the hard work of establishing racial justice here in the United States.

    If we read the story of Exodus as a psychological metaphor, it can apply to all these situations: to personal recovery; to personal spiritual growth; to making the world a better place. If we understand the story of Exodus as a psychological journey, it also helps us perceive the interrelations between all these things — between our personal recovery, and our personal spiritual, and our communal quest for making the world a better place. All these thing are interrelated.

    Martin Luther King understood the psychological truth that all these things are interrelated. Our own personal spiritual growth cannot be separated from our communal quest to make this a better world. Our own personal recovery from pain and trauma cannot be separated from the communal attempt to recover from the wrongs arising out of our shared history. This psychological truth runs through all of King’s speeches and sermons and writings: correcting injustice in the world cannot be separated from caring for our own individual spiritual health.

    I would suggest to you that this part of Dr. King’s message may be especially relevant to us in these times. Our country is faced with major problems that we must solve — racial injustice, economic injustice, ecological problems, the list goes on. Yet the psychological truth is that taking care of the world requires us to take care of our individual selves. If we neglect our own spiritual and emotional and physical health, we won’t be able to work on the world’s problems. If we ignore the world’s problems, our own personal health will suffer.

    Thus you see: we cannot achieve our goal of the earth made fair and all her people free, unless we simultaneously cultivate our own spiritual health. That is one reason why we gather here each week: to take care of ourselves, while also considering how to care for the world. And so it is we continue to live out Dr. King’s teachings.

  • Who Deserves Our Love?

    Sermon copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. Once again this week, more than the usual number of typos and errors, but I didn’t have time to correct them — sorry!

    Readings

    The first reading was June Jordan’s poem “Alla Tha’s All Right, but”

    The second reading was June Jordan’s poem “A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades”

    The final reading was from Jordan’s introduction to her book of poems titled “Passion.”

    In the poetry of the New World, you meet with a reverence for the material world that begins with a reverence for human life, an intellectual trust in sensuality as a means of knowledge and unity… and a deliberate balancing … of sensory report with moral exhortation.

    Sermon: “Who Deserves Our Love?”

    The English language has some distinct limitations. For example, we only have one word for “love.” Contrast this with ancient Greek, which has half a dozen words that can be translated by the one English word “love.” This creates some problems for us English speakers, because we’re the inheritors of the Western intellectual tradition which extends back to ancient Greece. When you’re speaking English and you hear the word “love,” you have to automatically do some internal translation.

    When this person says “love,” do they mean erotic or romantic love? Do they mean the love that can exist between good friends? What about the love that exists between parents and children, which is different than the love that exists between good friends, because where friends are more or less equal, there’s an imbalance of power between parent and child — at least there is when the child is young. Then there’s love of oneself, which is a virtue when it’s tied to ordinary self respect, but is a vice when it becomes self-obsession.

    Finally, there’s a kind of selfless love, the kind of love where you continue to love even when you get nothing out of it. The early Christians picked up on this last kind of love — the ancient Greek name for it is “agape” — and integrated it into their conception of God, and their formulation of the Golden Rule. The story of the Good Samaritan is a story of agape-type love.

    As English speakers, we have all these different kinds of love sort of mushed together into the one word. This can cause a certain amount of confusion. But I think it’s also useful for people like Unitarian Universalists, who spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out how we can be the best people possible. We also spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to get through the day to day challenges that life throws at us, things like the death of people we love, or betrayals by people we thought we loved, and so on. Life rarely breaks down into neat, tidy categories. So I find it helpful to know that love doesn’t necessarily break down into neat tidy categories either.

    And this brings me to the book of poetry that June Jordan published way back in 1980. The title of the book is “Passion.” The poems in the book cover a wide range. There are poems about passionate erotic and romantic love, as we heard in the first reading — and here I should point out that June Jordan was part of the LGBTQ+ community, so when she’s talking about passionate erotic and romantic love, she’s not restricting that love to opposite sex attraction. June Jordan also has a couple of poems in that book that are about rape. These particular poems are pretty graphic, and I find them very difficult to read — I’m giving you fair warning, in case you decide to pick up this book and read through it. But these poems are included for a reason. Jordan wants us to understand how for her as a woman, passionate erotic love can also become something twisted.

    There are also poems about relationships between equals, the love of friendship between equals. That’s what we heard in the second reading, the poem titled “A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades.” I’ll read you the last few lines of the poem again:

    Make up your mind! They said. Are you militant
    or sweet? Are you vegetarian or meat? Are you straight
    or are you gay?
    And I said, Hey! It’s not about my mind

    I love this poem because I’ve had this sort of thing happen to me in my own friendships. And I’ve done this to others. We humans tend to put each other into boxes. We put people into boxes based on skin color, age, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, immigration status, political party…. Let me pause here and focus on political party, because that’s where people are putting other people into boxes a lot right now. And it’s pretty ugly. I hear Republicans talking about “Sleepy Joe” Biden, and I hear Democrats talking about “Dementia Donald” Trump. There’s no love lost here — there’s no love present here, none at all, just rank stereotyping and sometimes naked hatred.

    This is what we humans do. We strive for love. We want to create a world where all people are loved equally. But when reality confronts us with other people who are doing things which we find distasteful or reprehensible or misguided, we can switch from universal love to individual hatred pretty quickly.

    I feel like this has become a spiritual crisis in our country. There is a lot of demonization going on all around us. Going back to June Jordan’s poem, we all find ourselves saying unpleasant things about other people — that other people are too racist or too anti-racist, that other people are too much of a nationalist, that other people are too stupid, or too angry, or too idealistic. This kind of thing tips over into demonization very quickly. We demonize people, imagining them as demons rather than humans, when we feel those other people are too angry, or too old, or too different. To which June Jordan replies — “Hey! it’s not about my mind.” She’s right. Demonization is always about the mind of the person who does the demonizing. I’ve done my share of demonizing recently, mostly aimed at politicians and public figures with whom I don’t agree, and that demonizing that I do is more about me than about the person at whom I direct it. When I demonize someone, it damages me, and it damages our public discourse.

    We need to find a way out of this — a way out of these demonizing behaviors that dominate our public discourse right now. To do so, I’m going to go back to one of our great spiritual resources, our Universalist tradition.

    The early Universalists were Christians, of course, and not all of us now are Christians. But those early Universalists got at some universal truths through their liberal Christian tradition. One of those truths is encapsulated in the phrase, “God is love.” If you’re a Christian, this phrase might focus you on the Christian God. From that perspective, this phrase defines God as being all about love. If you’re not a Christian, though, this phrase can still make sense. Here in the West, the term “God” serves as a philosophical placeholder for the object of our ultimate concern. So this phrase need not be taken literally. It can be understood quite simply as saying that love is our ultimate concern.

    The old Universalists wanted everyone to see the truth of that phrase, “God is love.” They understood that if God is love, there can be no such thing as eternal damnation, because love must eventually overpower hatred and evil. Instead, hell is something that happens here on earth, during our lifetimes, when we forget that love is supposed to be our ultimate concern. In particular, hell can arise here on earth when one group of people demonizes another group of people. Of course it feels hellish to be on the receiving end of the hatred that comes with racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ageism, and so on. But hell also arises in the hearts of those who demonize others. When we demonize others we throw ourselves into hell, into a place where hatred is more important than human connection.

    So the old Universalists wanted us to get ourselves out of any hell that is here and now. They wanted everyone to truly feel in their bones that love is the most powerful force in the universe. They wanted to build their religious communities centered on love. The early Universalist Hosea Ballou put it like this: “If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, and if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good.”

    Over the next century or so, the Universalists pulled back from that early trust in the power of love. The power of evil seemed so strong that they returned to the old idea that there must be some kind of punishment after death. They decided that God would in fact condemn some people to hell, it just wouldn’t be forever. In other words, they decided that God might be love, but that God’s love had limits to it.

    But in my view, they weren’t really thinking about God, they were thinking about themselves. They weren’t asking: Who deserves God’s love? Or to put it in non-theistic terms: Who deserves to be included in our ultimate concern? Instead, they were asking: Who deserves my love? IThey were saying: ’m not so concerned with ultimate concerns, I’m narrowly concerned with whom do I love? And whom do I not love? Even: whom do I hate?

    Now remember the different meanings that the word “love” has in the English language. Of course we limit our romantic love to our romantic partners. Of course we limit parent-child love to our own families. Of course we limit the kind of love that exists in friendships to our friends. But there is also that larger love, that unconditional love, which extends to all of humanity.

    It takes a truly great person to be able to extend universal unconditional love to all persons. Martin Luther King, Jr., was able to extend a universal unconditional love even to the White racists who beat him and jailed him and reviled him, the people who hated him and did everything they could to keep him in the little box they constructed for him. When I say he extended a universal love to the White racists, I don’t mean that he wanted to become best friends with them. I don’t mean that he liked them. I don’t even mean that he loved them personally. What he did was to see that even those White racists had an inherent worthiness, they had an inherent human dignity. From within his progressive Christian world view, he saw that God loved those White racists, and he respected that universal love.

    By doing this, Martin Luther King, Jr., set an example for the rest of the world. In fact, he changed the world. His understanding of universal love changed the world. It might not have seemed like it at the time, but his unconditional love for all humanity, expressed through nonviolent action, changed even those White racists permanently.

    Universal love is a real spiritual challenges right now. I don’t know about you, but I’m not as good a person as Martin Luther King, Jr. I find it quite difficult to turn the other cheek. Yet when I think about it, it’s pretty clear that responding to hatred and demonization with more hatred and demonization is probably just going to make things worse. I’m not as good as Martin Luther King, Jr., so I’m not sure that I can rise to the level of feeling that universal love.

    What I can do — what all of us can do — is to do a little less demonizing. Asking ourselves to stop demonizing certain very public figures, such as the leading politicians of the other political party, is probably too much to ask. If you’re a member of one political party, you don’t have to love politicians in the other political party. Start small. Start with people you know here on the South Shore who are of a different political persuasion than you. When we see people who are different from us face to face, we can disagree with them, but we can also try to remember that they, too, are deserving of universal love.

    This is going to be difficult in this election year — and this is an election cycle that promises to be especially rancorous. But here’s what I’ve found. Every time I manage to stop myself from demonizing some political figure, I feel a tiny sense of relief. I feel better about myself, too; I like myself better. I find that I’m also just a little bit nicer to my spouse. It’s not a huge effect, but I can notice the difference. I’m a little bit happier, I’m a little more at peace with myself and with the world.

    Perhaps this is part of what Martin Luther King, Jr., was trying to tell us with his theory of nonviolent action. Real change begins within our hearts and minds, and then spreads outwards to affect others.