A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
November 17, 2002
Sometimes it feels so safe in the Pioneer Valley.
But I needn't remind you that in January, the job of Majority Leader of the House of Representatives will pass to the representative of the 22nd Congressional District of Texas, the Gulf Coast, home to more than half of the nation's petrochemical production and a quarter of its oil refining. Its representative serves its interests well. Tom DeLay has declared global warming a myth and a fraud. He has pledged to release the nation from the shackles of environmental regulation. He's heavily funded by the tobacco industry, and he's devoted to preventing any FDA regulation of tobacco. A fiery fundamentalist, he regularly rants against gay people and the other usual targets of new-right rhetoric.
So it's good to remember other times that looked every bit as hopeless.
It is good to have a place where we can feel safe, and reassured in the comforting realization that there are others who care. A place where you can find support in the unfolding of our lives, share the joys of life, and laugh. And where, meanwhile, we can be carrying on the good fight.
Cindy and Lee have mentioned the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. I wonder if you have thought about this.
When, after millennia of Christian antisemitism, when churches were actively and consciously lending their moral authority and respectability to antisemitism, —
In 1933 Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli pledged his enthusiastic support for Adolph Hitler and he shepherded through the Reich Concordat that made peace between the Church and the new Third Reich — 1933, the very year when the virulent antisemitic campaign began. In 1933, the world looked the other way. Nineteen thirty-three: — that year, the Unitarian General Assembly voted a resolution which read: we "greatly deplore the persecution of the Jews in Germany as a violation of equity, tolerance and humanity."
Cardinal Pacelli would go on to become Pope Pious XII, and even in 1942, in his Christmas Eve broadcast, he would still trivialize and deny the Nazi Final Solution.
Meanwhile, between 1934 and 1938, Unitarian staffers were traveling in Europe and reporting back on conditions among the refugees from Nazi-occupied lands. In 1936, the General Assembly passed another resolution deploring the "suffering of victims of religious and civil oppression." In post-depression, isolationist America, these calls were not popular.
When in October 1938 Hitler seized Czechoslovakia — home of the huge Prague Unitarian church — American Unitarians were stunned, and in December our Board of Directors responded with what they called a "service mission to Czechoslovakia."
American Unitarian representatives arrived in Prague as the Nazi troops were marching into the city, which held a quarter of a million refugees. Their difficult, persistent efforts got thousands of refugees across the borders safely, one by one. To this day, little is known about the underground escape route they created. But the rescue list included intellectuals and anti-Nazi political leaders, and other relief agencies often referred their "hot cases" to the Unitarians. If only they could have rescued Norbert Çapek, the great minister of the huge Unitarian Church in Prague. He died at Dachau for daring to oppose Hitler.
In August 1940, two Unitarian representatives returned from Europe, barely escaping arrest and detention. Later, after the fall of almost all of Europe, they returned to Marseilles and Lisbon to carry out a child emigration project from those cities.
In May 1940 this emergency relief effort became the Unitarian Service Committee. But it had to answer a question: Was its mission to do politically-neutral humanitarian work, or was it to be an upfront mission of human rights? After a lot of debate, the Service Committee chose not to be neutral: it took a stand for democracy and human rights, a controversial decision at the time, and still today. In April 1941, the Service Committee adopted as its seal a flaming chalice symbol, designed by Hans Deutsch, a refugee from Paris who had been a noted painter and musician, and who now worked in the Committee's Lisbon office. That chalice would become the symbol for our Unitarian Universalist movement.
There are so many other examples of the prophetic role that has fallen to Unitarian Universalists — or rather, that UUs have taken hold of because our hearts and minds and souls would not have it any other way.
A few years back, during the Ministry Days before General Assembly, the annual fifty-years-in-ministry address was presented by Rev. Ray Manker. With sly delight, he organized the address around his FBI file, courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act.
I have spoken, and will surely speak again, of the heroic figures in our Unitarian and Universalist past — names like Moncure Conway, Emerson and Channing and William Henry Channing, our own Charles Burleigh and Lydia Maria Child, and many more than there is time to name — who stood against the popular tide, — even while preachers all across the American South proclaimed slavery to be divinely ordained and right, when at the North, there was mostly silence.
Or, fast-forward a few years, when preachers all across the American South preached segregation, calling anybody who questioned the established order "communists." I found, in the UUA archives, the file of a UU minister in Indiana who, just for being a UU minister in Indiana, was followed, wiretapped, and harassed by the FBI until his mind could bear it no longer, and he spent his last days in a mental hospital. The entire Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association went to march with Martin Luther King at Selma in 1965, a few days after a UU minister, Jim Reeb, was murdered there for joining King in a march to demand the right to vote in Alabama.
I still remember a scene from August 1986: There is Jerry Falwell and then-President P.W. Botha of South Africa posing for pictures together, in that time when South African racism was a religious article of faith, a doctrine of the Dutch Orthodox Church. On that very day, Rev. Alan Boesak, president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and member of the opposition United Democratic Front, had no sooner been released from prison when he was charged with subversion for urging withdrawal of foreign investment in South Africa.
Nelson Mandela was in prison.
And a critical moment had come for South Africa, and the world was watching and masses of black workers were organizing. And before the Senate of the United States was a bill already passed by the House of Representatives but opposed by the President Reagan, a law to impose sanctions on South Africa.
And Mr. Falwell appeared on the evening news, in South Africa, right at President Botha's side, to say that he is firmly against any sanctions and he wants millions of Christians, that's his words, to buy Krugerrands. He says the real threat is Communism, and it's those Communists who've been stirring up the black people.
I was in Bangor, Maine at the time, and even the religion columnist in the very, very reactionary Bangor Daily News took exception to Mr. Falwell's South Africa episode. Said Falwell ought to stick to preaching the Bible and stay away from politics. But was that his problem? Are religion and spirituality really purely private matters?
I say the problem is not that he should "stick to religion." I say his religion, and mine, and yours, leads directly into whatever involvement or noninvolvement we have in this world. It flows directly into how we see this whole world of life and struggle.
It does not surprise me that Mr. Falwell's fundamentalist community opposed Martin Luther King and pilloried him as a Communist, and that many fundamentalist institutions were among the last in America to remain segregated. Two centuries earlier, would he not have been among those who proved that slavery was ordained by God on the basis of the Bible? I give you an example of a good Congregationalist sermon in 1749:
Slaves should serve God because he made them and appointed them to be slaves and because they have souls to be saved . . . This God they must love . . . not least because he brought them out of a land of darkness and ignorance to a country where they might learn a sure way to heaven.
I say, look to your religion. Your fundamental assumptions about life, about the nature of humans and the universe. It matters what you believe.
Last month was the anniversary of the birth of someone else who visited South Africa, who understood the public side of spirituality. One hundred thirty-three years ago [1869], Mohandus K. Gandhi was born.
Gandhi spent nearly 20 years in South Africa, and there he developed his understanding of the pursuit of justice as a religious passion and spiritual discipline. His story is matter for another sermon.
Now — Mr. Falwell is devoted to the preservation of the letter of the old law, to the maintenance of the parameters of the mind that were set so long ago. He is to that tradition, that system of authority, what Vaclav Havel would call a bureaucrat of the Bibliocracy, "an `innocent' tool of an `innocent' anonymous power, legitimized by . . . ideology . . . and abstraction" but not by "personal responsibility to human beings as persons and neighbours." He needs take no personal responsibility for what he says — but can, by blaming it on St. Paul or God, speak words of exclusion and condemnation and tell us he had to say it, St. Paul made him say it, the ancient Book of Leviticus made him say it. His is a freeze-dried religion — you just take the world-view, the fears and understandings and rules, of an ancient time and place — add water and stir! But when you do that it comes back with a rotten stench of decay.
Here is a critical difference between Gandhi and Falwell. Gandhi transcended the particular limitations of his native religious tradition. He was a universalist. Not because he belonged to our denomination, but because he could look beyond the limitations of his own ancient religious tradition and find for himself the universal spiritual sources that inspired many religious paths and which must yet evolve. That noble word, universalism, lives on in our name because it is essential and vital to what must happen next in this fraught, this challenged, this imperiled, this radiantly promising world.
People have always brought their religious passions into the public square. When Massachusetts was debating a bill to protect the rights of gay and lesbian people, I represented the Unitarian Universalist Association to lobby for its passage. But the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Boston had us outstaffed, even on that issue, and on quite the other side.
But it comes down to a contest of passions, doesn't it? Who cares the most passionately about their dream?
When Gilbert Wakefield, the Unitarian theologian who dared criticize the mutually-beneficial deal between the corrupt Bishop of Landaff and the corrupt British government — when Gilbert Wakefield was sentenced in 1799, he told the court, "For myself, I tell you freely, no sentence of this court, or any other terrestrial tribunal, no malice of an illiberal accuser, no persecutions, no fines, no imprisonments, shall tear from my breast the glorious consolations of this day; the glory of resisting and exposing a system, as I esteem it, of irreligion, venality, and murder, at the hazard of all personal convenience, with resolution unshaken and integrity unseduced."
I had never heard of Gilbert Wakefield's story, but I found its yellowed pages in an old Unitarian library in London. I found what he wrote in his journal — writing from prison with both his passion and his humor still intact: "Nothing needs hinder me from considering these iron barricades as a style of ornamental architecture peculiar to the fancies of this country." He would spend his last two years of life in Dorchester Gaol for daring to speak as prophets must speak.
And Theodore Parker died just short of his 50th birthday. He wore himself out, working night and day in the face of obstacles we can scarcely imagine, striving for high and holy ends. As my colleague Forrest Church said at the funeral of his father, the great Senator Frank Church of Iowa, he had lived a life worth dying for.
These stories constitute part of our own scriptures, our own sacred story. And when I read them I know that I, and we, are responsible for more than a mediocre and commonplace quality of purpose in this world; that we are bearers of values so lofty and visionary that they cannot but affect the kind of lives we live.
And if the challenge of the times, then and now, is a contest of passions — where does the passion come from? Of what are convictions — not just opinions, but convictions — made?
How does anyone get to the place where your own experience of life, your own intuitive capacities, your own reason, and the force of your own soul have led you to this place on your journey and given you some light, and you insist on that light, and won't settle for just identifying with the prevailing assumptions and dogma of your surroundings?
No one gets there immediately or automatically. It takes the chemistry of powerful and emancipating ideas, blended together with a real sense of your own selfhood, and how you, your human capacities, belong to this drama. It takes senses open to see, and hear, and feel the current and pulse, and anguish and promise of the times. It takes some inkling, some vision of how all these things might interact in some great cauldron of creative energy.
Until that happens, we are not fully ourselves. We are not, as Abraham Maslow would put it, "self-actualizing" people. Maslow once wrote:
Self-actualizing people are, without one single exception, involved in a cause outside their own skin, in something outside of themselves. They are devoted, working at something, something which is very precious to them — some calling or vocation in the old sense, the priestly sense . . . One devotes his [or her] life to the law, another to justice, another to beauty or truth.
These heroic forebears of ours took on the crucial challenges of their times. For our time, the script is not written, though many of the characters and sub-plots are present.
Today we have a bold new possibility because of the commitment of one member, and it can become reality if that commitment stirs something in more of us and we're prepared to share it. We can cross a threshhold in our effectiveness. Above and beyond the considerable costs of running and staffing and housing the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence, we can have an effectiveness beyond our doors.
You know, it is a disgrace that the United States gives about zero point one percent of its gross domestic product in aid to the world's dispossessed, or in any form of foreign aid at all — a quarter of what Europeans give, a seventh of what some Scandanavian nations give — and a tiny fraction of our real human responsibility. But we are hardly better! But is it possible that we can engage in real mission? Be more than a fact, but a factor, in our community and world?
What if we had a Mission Budget — with the congregation deciding each year how to spend it? We can begin that this year if the possibility excites you. Fifty thousand dollars has been committed to begin, if you and I rise to the challenge as well.
We have occasion, in this place, among this company of people,
to hear and see and feel the pulse of the times
to devote ourselves to extending our own consciousness and engaging important, transformative ideas
to come to understand ourselves, our human capacities and particular callings in these times
to dream dreams and see visions
to challenge one another and support one another
and so to assemble the makings of a fire, the chemistry of transformation. The spiritual power of this community is great, because it is a mighty river of the passions, loves, and vision of the others who have gone before, and of you and me.
1 In "The Democratic Soul," Religion & Values in Public Life, VI.1., Fall 1997, published by the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard Divinity School.
2 January 1998
3 "Uttarpara Speech," in Karmayogin, II, p.3.
4 The Life Divine, XIX, p. 891.
5 Aurobindo, "The Teachings of Sri Aurobindo."
6 Aurobindo, "The Teachings of Sri Aurobindo."
I'm reading first from the Indian mystic and philosopher, Sri Aurobindo:
The first process of yoga is . . . to open the ranges of this inner being and to live from there outward, governing his outward life by an inner light and force. In doing so he discovers in himself his true soul, which is not this outer mixture of mental, vital, and physical elements, but something of the reality behind them, a spark from the one divine fire. He has to learn to live in his soul . . . 6
And from the Nobel prize-winning physicist Ilya Prigogine:
It is quite remarkable that we are at a moment both of profound change in the scientific concept of nature and of the structure of human society . . . As a result, there is a need for new relations between [human] and nature and between [human] and [human]. . . . We know that societies are immensely complex systems involving a potentially enormous number of bifurcations [that is, turning points, like forks in the road] . . . . We know that such systems are highly sensitive to fluctuations. This leads both to hope and a threat: hope, since even small fluctuations may grow and change the overall structure. As a result, individual activity is not doomed to insignificance. On the other hand, this is also a threat, since in our universe the security of stable, permanent rules seem gone forever. We are living in a dangerous and uncertain world that inspires no blind confidence. . . .
And finally, a few lines from some sermons of Theodore Parker in Boston, in the 1850s.
Our politics, being mainly controlled by [the merchant] class, are chiefly mercantile, the politics of pedlers. . . . Hence we have many politicians, and raise a harvest of them every year, that crop never failing . . . ; but we have scarce one great statesman who can step before his class, beyond his age, . . . leading the people and giving us new ideas to incarnate in the multitude, his word becoming flesh. . . .
||11 a.m. only Our political morals, you all know what they are, the morals of a huckster. . . . The number of slaves in the United States is considerably greater than our whole population when we declared Independence, yet how much talk will a tariff make, or a public dinner: how little the welfare of three million men! Shall respectable men say, "We do not care what sort of a Government the people have, so long as we get our dividends." . . . This class of men buys up legislators, consciously or not, and pays them, for values received. . . It can manufacture governors, senators, judges, to suit is purposes, as easily as it can make cotton cloth . . . (furthermore,) the metropolitan churches are, in general, as much commercial as the shops. ||11 a.m. only
Our mercy pulls a few out of the water; it does not stop the hole, nor light the bridge, nor warn people of the peril! We need the great Charity that palliates effects of wrong, and the greater Justice which removes the Cause.
Poverty will not be removed til the causes thereof are removed . . . we need both palliative charity and remedial justice.
If a minister is to promote religion, he (or she) is to meddle with the state, business, the perishing classes, literature, science, morals, manners, everything that affects the welfare of humankind.
* Quotes in this section from Theodore Parker's Works, VII, Discourses of Social Science (London: Trubner and Co., 1864), and other volumes, and Theodore Parker's Experience as a Minister (Boston: Rufus Leighton Jr., 1859), quoted in Richard Gilbert, The Prophetic Imperative: Unitarian Universalist Foundations for a New Social Gospel (Boston: UUA, 1980).
We gather as we are, bearing with us strife and joys, and today we come longing for something more than bread alone.
Some bring bright hope and the promise of new achievements;
Others come burdened with heartbreak and obstructed pathways.
All of us come seeking purposes higher than our frustrated plans, higher even than our grandest ambitions. We bring these lives, these selves, wanting to know the meaning of our days, needing to know that our lives will have been worth the living.
So let there be Vision. Let our eyes be opened, that we may See.
Above the noise and tumult, let us Hear.
Let us Know that which is more true than the facts of our lives.
Beneath the surface of things let us see and know the real and the true.
And then let us dare to live — the real and the true —
Let our lives flow from some deep well, from the Immensity beyond the Silence, and so be filled with radiance, with great stores of energy and good hope and overflowing Love.
Let it flow —
Theodore Parker:
Our mercy pulls a few out of the water; it does not stop the hole, nor light the bridge, nor warn people of the peril! We need the great Charity that palliates effects of wrong, and the greater Justice which removes the Cause.
Annie Dillard:
You are evolution; you have only begun to make trees. You are God: are you tired? finished?
Go in peace: the work of peace is in your hands.