A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence

February 13, 2005


When the great Unitarian theologian Henry Ware began his sermon at the dedication, in 1825, of the first meeting-house that stood on this site — he spoke of Ezra and his countrymen returning from captivity in Babylon to begin rebuilding temple. Unfriendly eyes watched them and asked them, "Who hath commanded you to build this House?" Ezra's answer 2,500 years ago was: "We are the servants of the God of heaven and earth."

Well, sure. That's what they all say. Whatever. But Henry Ware was talking to fellow religious liberals who couldn't be satisfied with an answer like that. When Northampton's first Unitarians broke with the stern Calvinism that then prevailed and completely dominated the Town Meeting, they were commanded by "no audible voice, no messenger specially commissioned."

They had done what they had done, been willing to stand alone in the face of popular opinion, because of an inner necessity. He put it this way:

The voice of conscience is the voice of the Deity. The call of duty is the call of God.

Your duty to yourselves commanded you to build this house. You are bound . . . to acknowledge no human master in religious things . . .

Your duty to your families urged you;

The cause of . . . liberal principles required it of you; for these [principles] — "every where spoken against," . . . — demand the countenance and favor of their friends, and are to spread through their labors and sacrifices.

The cause of . . . the great principles of the reformation required it; for they demand . . . institutions which shall maintain the equal rights of disciples, and frown upon all assumption of spiritual dominion, and reject all interposition of creeds and forms . . .

Influenced by these various motives — which, to [the one] who feels them, have all the authority of a divine command — you have erected this house.

What should command us, he said, is — his words — "the posture of things around us, and . . . the condition in which we stand." We know this place has to be here, and we know we must write its next chapter, make it a place of consequence.

And so Rev. Kent was able to declare in his dedicatory sermon 100 years ago:

So this church says to those who enter its walls, not "Tremble! Fear! Submit!" but, "See how beautiful is your home! See how gracious, how tender, how pure are the characters and the lives that have been lived amid opportunities and difficulties like yours! See what your life may be, if you will open your heart to the gracious and uplifting influences with which you are surrounded, and strive in faith and courage for the realization of the better self within you."

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I want to talk about Place. The experience of "place" and a "home" is the answer to the terrible sense of "dislocation." Living in an alien land. That is how our founders had felt.

They couldn't live in a world of Total Depravity, where it was believed that human beings are completely depraved with no good in them whatever and no capability of doing good. They couldn't live in universe where certain elect were to be God's special chums and the rest consigned to eternal torment. They couldn't live in a world of near-total religious totalitarianism where thinking for yourself was not a very good idea.

It was a hostile world in which this Congregation was founded. When, just after the construction was begun in 1825, a storm ripped apart the first framing of the walls, they said, See, an act of God to stop the heretics! But they kept building. When they got finished, the Greek Revival architecture didn't look very "churchy." Our other half, the Free Congregational Society of Florence, whose Cosmian Hall didn't look a bit churchy, was regularly denounced — occasionally even by the Unitarians — as lunatic fringe.

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The Northampton of 2005 feels pretty hospitable to the far-seeing vision of those who went before us in this place, and today the crowd at Cosmian Hall would feel very comfortable in Florence. And — this must be said — First Churches today is an accommodating home for progressive views.

But still we might feel like strangers is a strange land. Day by day, does not this land, where most of us have lived all our lives, feel more and more an alien land, where we are not home?

A nation governed less daily by the principles that our Unitarian forebears — both Presidents Adams, and Jefferson, and Franklin, and the Universalist Benjamin Rush — enshrined in the Declaration of Independence? — governed, instead, by something that looks more and more like a gestapo?

This past year eleven states voted their hatred for those of us who are gay and lesbian and there will be more to come. And what has become of the right to a fair trial, of respect for the world community, of civil liberties, of stewardship of our imperiled earth?

How can we feel ourselves at home where the values we cherish are held in open contempt?

v

I found a treasure at Powell's, the famous used bookstore in Chicago. It's an essay Emerson wrote, entitled "Home," one you never find in the volumes of his works because at two or three places a number of pages are missing from the manuscript.

He seems to explain my feelings, when he says, speaking of someone whose sense of place is no longer really about merely physical places, certain pieces of real estate you can find on a map. He says:

"All places are alike to him: for that which is with him constitutes place. He is place and whatsoever is not with him in spirit is abroad and vagabond."1

And he goes on: Most people, he says:

". . . are disconcerted and wear a look of utter helplessness the moment they are taken out of their routine and miss their usual meal, their fireside corner, their desk and slippers."

But then he talks about those who have found the real meaning of place in themselves. Of such a person, he says, her or his life

"is not lodged in these things, but in laws which he greets reappearing wherever he goes, finds nature still, and so himself, in untrodden wilds; in terrific dangers; in shipwrecks; in conflagration; in mobs; in his own deathbed; and is not possibly to be lifted off his feet,—is not possibly disconcerted. . . . His face indicates that he feels himself at home . . ."

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Here, today, we celebrate both a people who are themselves place; and the house they built, in which we can be cheered by each others' faces, and voices, and dreams, and hope, and passion, and courage, and love. Here we are reminded again and again of that bold vision and brave hope that joins us.

We share a deepening revulsion about what is happening around us, a democracy that now stands in peril, a benumbed public.

And here we gather, to find out if it is possible, somewhere, for there to be a community built of finer stuff, premised on a higher estimate of human beings, and not founded on the sand of cultured despair and sophisticated cynicism? Hasn't the world always been that sort of place? Is it possible for there to be some other kind of place?

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Elsewhere Emerson said this:

A healthy soul stands united with the Just and the True, in the way that a magnet is related to the north, so that he or she seems to others like a window between them and the sun, and whoso journeys towards the sun, journeys towards that person.

Those who journey toward the sun journey toward each other. We come here because we ourselves bear within ourselves both Place and Home and we are therefore drawn to each other, and to the stimulation of sensitive minds and hearts, and to the faith each of us holds in the other even when we ourselves doubt the divine sources of our own lives.

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But in our coming together we expect anything but static unchanging sameness, because this place is always changing.

Our lives flow from a source that is always new and creative, and that is our true home.

And we who come here, and the details of our lives, and the ideas we think and the deeds we do, flow from the same source from which all nature flows. Nature knows no permanent fixtures: the Universe is fluid and ever-changing. We see what is now: but there are those moments of insight when we see beyond what is now and sense and feel that from which it flows. Our own evolution never ceases.

That is one of the reasons we have always gathered here.

New continents are built on the ruins of an old planet; new arts supplant the old. And that which builds is better than that which is built.

A circle of hearts and minds expands and evolves. You and I would not likely wish to attend the Unitarian or Universalist church of 1825 or 1905. It isn't just that the walls used to be red. For starts, you would have wanted to hear from some other spiritual writings than the Christian Bible and you would have wanted to hear it from some women as well as from men. You wouldn't have liked the hymns, either — which is why I've chosen, for the last two hymns today, two hymns from the dedication in 1874 of Cosmian Hall.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the home of my former congregation, Unity Temple. A young member of the congregation named Frank Lloyd Wright designed a thing of sublime brilliance. Yet it must be said that I saw a newly-unearthed photograph of the building when it was only 14 years old and I couldn't believe how bad it already looked. Subsequent advances in engineering have enabled the poured concrete to hold together and not crumble, the cantilevered roof overhangs to stay up and not sag, and the 14 roofs not to leak. It has never looked as good as it looks now.

And so it is with the life of our minds and spirits. Old questions no longer need answers because they are found to be the wrong questions and new questions engage our imagination. With every new influx of the Divine Life into the mind comes new questions, and old ones are discarded. You would not come here if you didn't understand that — and require the company of others who do.

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Like our forebears, we are not in the world so the world can remain as it is. Nor do we remain changeless: because all things renew, germinate. And while we are quiet and attentive to the Central Life of all things, and while our pores are open to the divine wind, we don't grow old, but grow young, and every moment is new, and life is a series of surprises, and in all of this, we are at home, and we are place. We have not really lost what is past, because we have all the powers and energies of the past, but we have them all new.

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In a time and in a land where often it's hard to feel "home," this place reminds me that our home and country are so broad and wide that we cannot possibly ever really leave it. We find place and home in spiritual affinities, in a common vision and shared passions, in an irrepressible hope for this world of life.

A new and higher consciousness, and broader and deeper wholeness: that is the place we seek.

"I think you thought there was no such place for you," wrote Adrienne Rich, "and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it . . ."

Here — may you find that greater sense of Place and Home. May we know it, and share it, in these lives of ours and in this community of vision that evermore ignites hope and opens worlds of human possibility. May this place be a home to those who live their lives on the scale of their hope and their vision.

1 From Ralph Waldo Emerson's lecture, "Home," delivered in Boston, December 1838, p. 29. Page references are in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. III, ed. Robert E. Spiller & Wallace E. Williams (Cambridge, Mass., Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1972).


Parting

Ken Patton:

This house is for friendships,

A haven in trouble,

An open room for the encouragement of our struggle.

It is a house of prophecy, outrunning times past and times present in visions of growth and progress.

This house is a cradle for our dreams, the workshop of our common endeavor.


Meditate

In this home to ages and generations
In this place of memory and hope
Where gathered those of bold vision and brave hope
Here again
We, too, gather: in reverent thanksgiving

Some enter this place

To meet the coming day, and to shape it,
And in its unfolding, to discover our own unfolding:

And come to know

In this silence

And call us to the tasks we have to fulfill in our time


First set of readings

First voice:
Henry Ware Jr, 1825, the dedicatory sermon:

You did not rashly and tumultuously rush to division and hurry on to schism; but you waited to consider, you perused deliberately the current of events, you carefully paused to assure yourselves that you construed them aright, and you severed the ancient tie, which you longed to maintain, only when you found that fidelity to conscience and the interests of truth peremptorily demanded it. The voice of conscience is the voice of the Deity. The call of duty is the call of God.

Your duty to yourselves commanded you to build this house. You are bound, in the liberty which the gospel has proclaimed, to acknowledge no human master in religious things . . .

Your duty to your families urged you; for the children whom God has given you in charge, it is required that you rear in early attachment to the principles and institutions of the religion you love, and ensure to them a free admission to their rights and privileges . . .

The cause of . . . liberal principles required it of you; for these — "every where spoken against," . . . — demand the countenance and favor of their friends, and are to spread through their labors and sacrifices.

The cause of . . . the great principles of the reformation required it; for they demand the multiplication of institutions which shall maintain the equal rights of disciples, and frown upon all assumption of spiritual dominion, and reject all interposition of human creeds and forms . . .


Second voice:
1905, Archibald M. Howe of Cambridge, at the Cornerstone-laying:

During the earliest years of the 19th century theologians throughout this Commonwealth were divided upon their theories of the attributes of the unknown, and bitter was their controversy. The followers of Calvin, the leaders who followed Jonathan Edwards with zeal based upon conviction maintained that the Almighty was an angry God who assigned men to eternal torments.

The followers of Channing asserted that the Almighty was the Father of all, not the awful Jehovah, and incapable of such anger or injustice as was attributed to him. Besides this was the issue that men were totally depraved, held by the so-called Orthodox, and the possibility of salvation through the merits of human character held by the heterodox.

In Northampton a small number of men and women of independent opinions associated themselves together, and on Washington's birthday of the year 1825, created the Second Congregational Society. . . .

The earliest public meetings were in the town hall, which at times was crowded by those who came to hear their first minister, Rev. Edward Brooks Hall.

In a few weeks plans for the church building were made, and May 25th, 1825, about seventy-nine years ago, the corner-stone was laid with Masonic ceremony. Charles E. Forbes, then clerk of the society, the founder of your noble library . . . , delivered the address. . . .

The frame of the building was partly raised, when, June 17th or thereabouts, as if to commemorate the sturdy fight of fifty years before for principle against overwhelming physical force at Bunker Hill, a gale of wind threw down the timbers and rendered many of them worthless, whereupon some idle tongues proclaimed that this was a providential dispensation; but the society voted to build at once, and to call a minister with a salary of three hundred and twenty-five dollars a year and board.

Such in brief is the origin of that sanctuary where for more than seventy-five years men and women sought to maintain a pure religious faith inspired by the devotion of brave human souls to the rights of man.

They were instructed by those who had adopted their philosophy not long after the revolution. William Ellery Channing, Buckminster and Aaron Bancroft of Worcester . . . had impressed their views upon independent minds . . .

It is interesting to learn from letters written in 1823 and 1824, commending Mr. Bancroft's sermons, one by John Adams to Mr. Bancroft, another by Thomas Jefferson to John Davis at one time Governor of Massachusetts, that the second and third Presidents of the United States, were agreed upon adopting our religious faith . . .

To-day we come together to dedicate this place again, not exactly after the manner of the Fathers, but with as large a hope that the building to be erected may never be desecrated by hypocrisy or light mindedness. More than ever before do we pledge this church to the Truth that maketh all men free, for the hope for truth enlarges with the scope and variety of human knowledge. . . .

My friends, we are to uphold a cause that must prevail. It is so momentous and so fundamental in its importance that it . . . [must] be based upon "doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with thy God" . . .

To discriminate as to what justice and mercy are in this world, to be truly self respecting, incapable of demagoguery or base compromise, these are requirements met only by a "just man without idols." . . .

Again we set at the corner of the wall that is to sustain our house of worship and service the stone which the builders of 1825 consecrated to God and to truth.


First voice:

The list of contents of the corner-stone was then read by Thomas M. Shepherd, as follows: A silver-plated copper plate containing historical data and reaffirming the principles upon the former plate; current United States coins of the present year; Louisiana purchase postage stamps; lists of pastors and church officers; photograph of the church destroyed by fire June 7, 1903; copy of last installation services; Hampshire Gazette and Springfield Republican celebration editions; official 250th anniversary celebration programs; order of corner-stone exercises; inventory of contents.


Second set of readings


The minister, Mr Kent, June 6, 1905, at the Cornerstone-laying:

Our gaze is not only toward the past. We behold the present and its need, the future and its possibilities. Our faces are toward the morning . . .

Though every church were to-day destroyed as the venerable building that stood upon this spot was destroyed by fire, the inexorable need of the human soul would create new, and at the heart of the new would be these divine realities of the old. So this stone becomes also the symbol of our faith in the eternal triumph of freedom, reverence, truth and love. It is the symbol of our devout desire that in the house which shall rest upon it, worship shall find a home, the truth shall be taught and received in freedom, and love be tenderly nurtured and cherished. It is the symbol of our aspiration that from this place there shall go forth in years to come an influence even more inspiring, more uplifting, more sanctifying than in the years that are passed . . .

Henry Ware Jr, 1825, the dedicatory sermon:

Influenced by these various motives — which, to him who feels them, have all the authority of a divine command — you have erected this house. Being now assembled to set it apart to the purposes for which it is designed, it may not be unprofitable to turn your attention for a few moments to the consideration of those purposes. The topic is suitable to the day, and cannot but accord with the feelings with which you open the doors of this sanctuary.