A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
April 6, 2003
I sat, on Friday, in Worcester, with my colleague Unitarian Universalist ministers in the Clara Barton District, and for some significant part of the day we shared our anguish and struggle with our work during these days of war, and the hijacking of our government by the doctrine of fundamentalist fanatics. Seldom have a few hours been so much to the point for me and it was obviously so for many others that day in Worcester.
We all felt the tremendous weight of the responsibility we bear. It is the challenge to get this right, find the inner resources to do it, and fulfill the calling of these times: for truth-telling in a time of lies; for being responsible and faithful to reality; for personal authenticity and clarity; for laying hold on that most difficult thing, hope, when our nation is headed on a disastrous course and we know we're a tiny minority, feeling particularly powerless.
A common theme was the singular fact of Unitarian Universalist ministry — the responsibility and privilege that it is to be stewards of this treasure, of this great movement, this faith of the free, as the hymn goes — in whose dear name we labor, whose law, whose liberty, whose light is our blest possession. We sang it at the Installation. Another one we didn't sing — but it's often sung at such events, recalls those who went before us and says "What they dreamed be ours to do, hope their hopes, and seal them true." How are we going to do that?
Well, darned if tomorrow isn't the two hundred twenty-third birthday of William Ellery Channing — the luminous founding spirit of Unitarianism in America. Channing, too, struggled with all this, but without the benefit of this heritage of Unitarianism in America, which he would have to begin.
Max Weber said he'd devoted himself to reading Channing's writings and noted, "Channing bases his views on exceptionally lofty sentiments. His view of what constitutes the essence of religion is highly original and often grand in its scope, albeit scarcely Christian."
Now Channing championed a very peculiar idea. It's this.
The idea is simply that human beings are not, in their essence, mean and small, evil and repulsive in the sight of God, not totally separated from God, not lost and depraved — as the churches of New England had always preached. No, proclaimed Channing, human beings are, in their essence, magnificent, creation's grandest achievement — to date anyway. This is not a doctrine any brutal dictator ever espoused, nor the doctrine of any nation willing to manipulate whole nations as pawns in their quest for supreme power, or of any government prepared to serve the greed of the richest at the expense of the most vulnerable. But it was the doctrine of William Ellery Channing and we need it today.
In 1828, Dr. Channing delivered a sermon entitled "Likeness to God." Now understand what it was to say, in New England in the 1820s — to say that you and I have "a kindred nature to God" and flat-out deny the dogma of original sin and of a remote, vengeful god.
And here is Dr. Channing proclaiming the potential divinity of human nature and an immediate access to the divine. And he went on to spell out the chief aim of religion: what he called self-culture, which means to cultivate the divine self which bears a likeness to God.
What kind of life was it that left us with a religious movement bearing the name he gave it, "Unitarian"?
Smothered in scarfs and cloaks against the Boston wind, Channing was a five foot tall invalid, weighing 100 pounds only when soaked with the rain. Yet his magnificently affirmative life radiates still a strangely compelling power.
He grew up in Newport, Rhode Island, where the family belonged to a church that featured hell-fire and damnation preaching, which they couldn't hack, so they stayed away.
He went to live with his uncle, a minister, in New London, and the uncle tutored him, tutored him so well that he passed the admission examinations and entered Harvard at the age of 14, being graduated at the age of 18. He got a job as a tutor in Virginia and spent a year and a half among Southerners who prospered through the institution of slavery. So revulsed was he by their luxurious lifestyle at the expense of slaves that he refused to spend any money on clothing and withdrew into an ascetic isolation. He spent a lot of time reading and getting very little food, sleep, or social life. He studied long hours in a poorly lighted and ill-heated building. As a result he did severe damage to his health, damage from which he never fully recovered.
He returned to Harvard as a theological student and in 1802 was interviewed by the Cambridge Association of Ministers. Somehow he got through the interview without their figuring out that he didn't believe in the Trinity and other planks of Calvinism. In 1803, at 23, he was called to be minister of the Federal Street Church in Boston, which, as I mentioned, moved to the corner of Arlington and Boylston Streets in 1859 and became Arlington Street Church. You will see his monument across the street.
And he set about his work, in this New England just in the wake of the Great Awakening, a revival movement that was a new variation of Calvinism, an attempt to bring back the religion of the Puritans, that revival that had seen Jonathan Edwards preach his dread-inspiring "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." It was a religion of Original Sin, Total Depravity, and Predestination. Human beings are born already sinners, unworthy to breathe the air of God's creation but wicked in every part, utterly helpless but for God's mercy, but not everybody was going to see God's mercy. Because the preaching of the Calvinists had it that God, being quite sovereign and unaccountable to anyone, could and did select those whom he, He, chose to save, or predestine even before their birth to be saved, and those whom God had so predestined would be saved no matter what, and those whom God had predestined for damnation could not be saved no matter what they did. And that accounted easily and conveniently for the existence of an underclass in society of poor, uneducated and unemployed, and who turn to crime and violence. You didn't worry about social reform; you simply understood that there were the elect and there were the damned. God had his reasons, don't even ask.
There had been others daring to question this scheme. But no one would upset the religious world like Channing. Channing's voice can almost still be heard on those streets if you listen hard enough.
In 1819, it seemed like a good time for an important statement of the new religious vision, and Channing was asked to make it in an ordination sermon in Baltimore. It's been called the most important sermon ever preached in America. He took some ninety minutes to deliver the thing, don't complain about me, and it was a manifesto defining the religious issues that distinguished the new liberal religion from the commonly-held orthodox beliefs. He said that Jesus, that great prophet and example, was human, not God. And he declared the goodness of God, a goodness that renders the doctrine of human depravity and perversion, and the doctrine of eternal damnation, renders these blasphemous. He took exception to the idea that Jesus died to appease an angry God, his own father.
The sermon was printed in several languages, reissued in edition after edition, the largest press run of anything that had yet been published in America. It would be difficult to describe the tremors that resulted. Within six years the American Unitarian Association would be founded, and Channing would be asked to lead it, though he would refuse. He had made a mark so large history would not have forgotten him, had he stopped here, but he did not.
In 1830 he traveled to the West Indies, and there he spent time meeting and conversing with slaves. When he returned he was further challenged by a very difficult conversation with Samuel J. May, among Unitarian ministers one of the early champions of the movement to challenge slavery and end it. And Sam May pushed Dr. Channing to take his own bold idea very seriously — to dare to face the implications of his vision of the worth and dignity and divinity of every person — for the three million held in bondage by the Southern slavocracy, with the complicity of the wealthy merchant class in the North. Sam May knew he was speaking with an awful lot of temerity to the one person whom he, and most people in Boston, admired more than anyone else, and he stopped, both astonished and afraid at what he had just dared to say. He describes what happened next:
"I awaited his reply in painful expectation. The minutes seemed very long that elapsed before the silence was broken. Then in a very subdued manner and in the kindliest tones of his voice he said, "Brother May, I acknowledge the justice of your reproof. I have been silent too long."1
Nobody in Boston was quite so much reviled as William Lloyd Garrison, among the earliest and surely the boldest of the abolitionists. Even the best of Boston's moral leaders couldn't bring themselves to speak of him without an obligatory castigation of his extremism. Even Dr. Channing made known his disapproval of Garrison's agitating.
The Massachusetts legislature had before it a bill to make it a crime to publish any criticism of Southern slavery, and there was a committee hearing on the bill.
To everyone's surprise the door of the committee-room opened, and there stood Dr. Channing — who rarely ventured out. Everyone knew his distaste for Garrison's radicalism. The legislators were delighted to see him. Come, won't you join us, Dr. Channing!
As they watched in stunned silence, he strode past them, to the far side of the room, where he clasped the hand of William Lloyd Garrison — and sat beside him.2
During the next ten years Boston would hear Channing's voice address those public issues not much heard about from the pulpits of the land. But Channing would not lay the suffering of the poor and the underclasses of society at the door of some Divine Predestination. He attacked the existence of poverty, inadequate housing, unsanitary conditions and disgraceful malnutrition, the ravages of the merchants' greed, the lack of education for the masses, and all that diminished the human spirit. And line by line, issue by issue, he came closer to the foundation stones of privilege and power in his Brahmin congregation. And now it's 1840.
It was a cold, gray Sunday morning in January of 1840.3 Channing was leaving his Boston parsonage to walk to the Federal Street church. He was on his way to preach the last sermon of his life, save one, from the pulpit of the only church he had ever served.
Earlier that month, one of Channing's closest friends, the Reverend Charles Follen, had died in a shipboard fire. Dr. Follen had been a longtime leader in he Massachusetts Antislavery Society, the only group in the state which was working to outlaw slavery. To the powerful families in Boston, Follen was too much. These merchants had too much to lose in the abolition of slavery.
Follen's family, as well as the Antislavery Society were forbidden from holding the memorial service in Follen's own church in East Lexington. Channing proposed that he himself perform it at Federal Street Church, and they requested the use of the Church, as was the custom, from its Standing Committee. At first the request was granted, but then the Standing Committee unanimously reversed itself and said "No."
The Committee's decision left Channing, always frail of health, sick and desolated. That night his wife had to help him into bed; he couldn't sleep.
So on this gray cold Sunday morning, Channing put on his silk pulpit gown. Over his shoulders his wife placed his cape. He stopped by his study to pick up the morning's sermon. Only this morning it wasn't a sermon; it was a memorial service for Charles Follen.
As he walked toward Federal Street, there was a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. To preach Follen's memorial service in spite of the decision of the Standing Committee would mean the end of his life's career. Channing had worked hard to become a minister, and harder yet to make the Federal Street Church into an influential center of Boston's life. After today, it would all be over. It was a cold morning, but as he walked, he could feel his palms sweat.
It had begun to rain. He entered the church and removed the damp cape. Every member of the Standing Committee was present, their stone faces somber. He climbed the stairs to the pulpit, placed the memorial service on the lectern, looked out over the congregation, and began to speak. He said of his friend Follen that he was one to whom "the most grievous sight on earth was the sight of a human oppressed, trodden down by his brother. To lift him up, to make him free, to restore him to human dignity . . . this seemed to him the grandest work on earth, and he consecrated himself to it with his whole soul." He would climb the steps of that pulpit only once more, two years later, shortly before his death in 1842. He received no more salary. He spent his last days travelling about to preach against slavery.
Maybe you've remember Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. The main character embraces one supremely bad idea, and around this idea he ceaselessly builds his life. It's the story of the inexorable, relentless power of one bad idea embodied in one person's life in such a way as to ruin several people's lives.
And William Ellery Channing grasped and proclaimed a supremely good idea; and proclaimed it, and applied it, and he embodied it.
And it becomes our story. It is why we are Unitarian Universalists. We can make it the story of our lives, but be warned, that is hard to do.
How overwhelming must have seemed the might of the social, economic, and political forces that enslaved those millions without almost any opposition. The nation then was firmly in the control of the most stupendous engines of greed, arrogance, and moral incapacity, all driven by a supremely cynical view of human beings — just as it is now.
Just as it is now, and how great must be the weight of it, and the anguish, and the helpless anger awakened in anyone whose eyes are open, whose soul has not shut out the truth.
Then, as now.
You might find this story as depressing as our own times. Where is the hope? Look closer.
Dr. Channing had faith in the power of this sublime idea: the magnitude of our humanity, the divinity of the human. And this is what happened.
One day, a brilliant young woman volunteered to be Channing's secretary. She'd once heard him a decade earlier when she had been eleven years old. And here she is a decade later — Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, volunteering to be Dr. Channing's secretary, did this for several years — and there would be long walks where she would reflect on his sermons and challenge him to think more fully, clearly, and boldly.
And through that association, Channing drew not only Elizabeth Peabody, but also Bronson Alcott, and the man who would become the best-known educator in America, Horace Mann, into a new approach to education: the idea that if you touch that likeness to God in a child, speak to the divine seed, you can discover in the child a spirituality, a wisdom, a destiny, a strength that defied the popular Calvinist notions about educating children.
Elizabeth Peabody brought the kindergarten to America and went to work with Bronson Alcott, who opened a stunning experiment in progressive education, the Temple School in Boston.
Eventually Horace Mann got himself elected to the state legislature, where he began a series of radical changes in American education. And then he became the first Massachusetts Commissioner of Education, and then filled the seat in Congress vacated by the death of another Unitarian, John Quincy Adams. He introduced the common public school, where all children would have a common experience regardless of wealth or class, public schools paid for with public money. He fought for better buildings, and decent pay for teachers.
Elizabeth Peabody's sister Sophia married Nathaniel Hawthorne. And Nathaniel Hawthorne ran the Salem Lyceum, and there he invited Emerson, and Thoreau, and Horace Mann to lecture and to be heard by the public. Then he wrote The Scarlet Letter, a story of the cruel age of Puritanism, when the natural man or woman was regarded as incurably corrupt, and when infractions of the social code were avenged by barbarous punishments.
A young graduate of Harvard who had been transported by Channing's preaching became the prophet of the next stage of this unfolding Unitarian vision. I mean, of course, Ralph Waldo Emerson. From the company of souls passing through his home in Concord — after he left the parish ministry because the Unitarian Church was not yet willing to change — from that company went forth Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, and so many more. After Channing was barred from his pulpit for his anti-slavery preaching and activity, Theodore Parker was filling his Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society with 7,000 members, and among them were Senator Sumner and William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist.
That is not the whole of the story. Channing's shocking idea stirred others, too. Dorothea Dix believed it, and went forth from his church to create hospitals for the mentally ill. Joseph Tuckerman believed it and went forth not just to provide social services for the poor, but to challenge the roots of poverty. Others started a hospital for women, women whose status in society meant lousy medical care — and the hospital first operated out of Channing's church, and today it is Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, one of the five greatest hospitals in America.
Channing had a young friend, the legal scholar Charles Sumner, who became the single greatest and most persistent champion of opposition to slavery and to the Fugitive Slave Law in the United States Senate.
When Channing died, in 1842, Senator Sumner said this:
What seemed to me a sight almost sublime, was this weak old man, almost fading out of life, with a voice affected by the debility of his frame, uttering words that pass mountains and seas, overcoming the impediments of distance and boundaries, and . . . pleading trumpet-tongued for humanity, for right, for truth.
I looked around the room on Friday at my colleagues. I thought of a few hundred Unitarian Universalists in Northampton, and in Oak Park; a couple hundred thousand Unitarian Universalists in a thousand congregations in this country where we must live our lives and do our work, looking at that ubiquitous flag with broken hearts.
We must renew our faith in our own humanity, our humanity, which is itself our hope. For it is our very humanity that looks upon brutality, violence, greed, and suffering and say No, there has to be a better way, —
these outworn primitive impulses must give way to a higher stage of human unfolding, we must continue this long journey out of the barbarism of the past to a new consciousness, toward that highest of human possibilities, Love, guided on that journey by Love.
Let us hold fast — as Dr. Channing taught us — hold fast to "a faith in the greatness of the human soul — that faith which looks beneath the" [meanest and the more brutal of which we are capable] "and discerns in the depths of the soul a divine principle, a ray of the Infinite Light, which may yet break forth and shine as the sun."
Camus said,
Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation . . . I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished, by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every [person], on the foundation of his [or her] own sufferings and joys, builds for all.
Let us therefore have faith — great faith — in the work of our own hands, and minds, and voices — as we go forth from here, as you have done day in and day out, year upon year, you, whose deeds and works, in uncounted ways and places, negate the crudest implications of history.
Dr. Channing left much undone, many tasks for us to take up. "What [he] dreamed be ours to do, hope [his] hopes, and seal them true."
2 James Freeman Clarke. Anti-Slavery Days. New York: R. Worthington, 1884, pp. 104f.
3 I am indebted to Charles Scot Giles for this telling of the story. It's contained in a 1980 Channing Bicentennial publication by the Unitarian Universalist Association.
In the midst of tumult we seek a peace we have known and would know today, and in all our days.
Disturbing peace, requiring of us that we remain awake, that we notice, and weep, and sometimes rage —
How great the peace that is the assurance of solid ground beneath us, and ourselves united with the great family of life, and not separated, apart; —
The assurance of conscience that is yet alive, the assurance of the unconquered power of love whose banner alone we would own
The quiet peace of inner reckonings faced, of a pure heart, of inner tumult stilled even while we are not sure of our way, and travel wild paths not before travelled:
For Love is the pathway we have chosen, and in Love is our confidence —
and today we come to renew our faith in that humanity that rises and surges and grows and unfolds within us. We acknowledge the gravity of the challenges and threats,— acknowledge that we do not know what is to come or what tasks another day will bring.
Yet a quiet, certain peace assures us that we shall meet the challenges of the day, for we are expressions of this great universe of life, and life is a roaring engine of creative strength.
It moves and surges among us, through us; — and in this gathered silence, we may be still and know its great peace.
William Ellery Channing, his sermon Likeness to God, 1828.
True religion consists . . . making us more and more partakers of the Divinity. . . . The likeness to God, of which I propose to speak, belongs to man's higher or spiritual nature. It has its foundation in the original and essential capacities of the mind. . . .
God can be known and enjoyed only through . . . kindred attributes . . . To understand a great and good being, we must have the seeds of the same excellence. . . .
Whence do we derive our knowledge of the attributes and perfections which constitute the Supreme Being? I answer, we derive them from our own souls. The divine attributes are first developed in ourselves . . . The idea of God, sublime and awful as it is, is the idea of our own spiritual nature, purified and enlarged to infinity. In ourselves are the elements of the Divinity. . . .
That unbounded spiritual energy which we call God, is conceived by us only through consciousness, through the knowledge of ourselves. . . . The Infinite Light would be for ever hidden from us, did not kindred rays dawn and brighten within us.
. . . We believe in the Divine infinity through something congenial with it in our own breast. . . . To me it seems that the soul, in all its higher actions, in original thought, in the creations of genius, in the soarings of imagination, in its love of beauty and grandeur, in its aspirations after a pure and unknown joy, and especially in . . . the spirit of self-sacrifice . . . , has a character of infinity. There is often a depth in human love, which may be strictly called unfathomable. There is sometimes a lofty strength in moral principle, which all the power of the outward universe cannot overcome. There seems a might within, which can more than balance all might without.
. . . To honor [the Divine] is not to tremble before [it] as an unapproachable sovereign, not to utter barren praise which leaves us as it found us. It is to become what we praise. . . . It is to thirst for the growth and invigoration of the divine principle within us.
. . . I cannot but pity the man who recognizes nothing godlike in his own nature. . . .
Twenty-five years after his death, James Freeman Clarke said of William Ellery Channing:
"At the time when Channing began to preach, a certain lethargy prevailed in the church. The ideas of human nature, of freedom, of reason, and of progress, filled him with prophetic enthusiasm. Who that ever heard him can forget that solemn fire in his eye, that profound earnestness of tone, which took and held captive all minds, from the beginning to the end of his discourse? There was nothing like it, nor second to it, in any pulpit in America. It was not oratory, it was not rhetoric: it was pure soul, uttering itself in thoughts clear and strong as the current of a mighty stream. The earth seemed good to live in, while we listened to him. It was a great thing to be a human. Life was too short for what we wanted to do in it. . . His sympathy with every attempt to improve the age, came from his generous interest in truth, and his large expectation.