A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
March 28, 2004
A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
March 28, 2004
This is about shaking the tree . . . shaking the spiritual tree.
That is, the act of asserting something that flies in the face of the accepted popular dogma.
The act of asserting anything, really — has about it a certain quality of audacity.
I have in my library two books, old and yellowed, published in 1878 and 1883, by James Freeman Clarke, a very gutsy progressive Unitarian minister in the mid-19th century who left a tremendous impact on how we understand and practice our faith. He put laypeople and women in the pulpit and placed the governance of his Church of the Disciples in the hands of laypeople, among other things. He was there — in the midst of two of the most wrenching and challenging tremors to shake modern religious life — not as a spectator but as a participant. The first battle was about Calvinism with its dim view of human beings headed straight for hellfire so why try to change the world anyway; and the second was in fact about trying to change the world, the battle over slavery.
And in James Freeman Clarke's book, Anti-Slavery Days, I found a story about another Unitarian minister who had just spent the day at an anti-slavery meeting and then found himself at a dinner-party with a Southern Christian gentleman, whose beliefs and culture put him on a conversational collision-course with that gutsy Unitarian minister, Samuel May.
Here's what the Southern Christian gentleman said to Sam May. As you hear it, I wonder if you know what your answer would be. He launches into Rev. May and asks,
I should like to know what business you have with this thing at all? What business is it of yours, sir? It is our own affair altogether. You people here in the North have nothing to do with it. You are doing mischief and making trouble by all you try to do.
What business is it of ours, anyway?
Now, of course, that conversation came from a century and a half ago. We know what the right answer to the slavery question was. It isn't a bit controversial anymore. That one's easy for us.
A century and a half from now, think — what will be the shame and disgrace of our time, now? In this 2004 where we live, where it's still controversial. What will be the blindingly obvious no-brainer 150 years from now? If there is anyone left to contemplate these things 150 years from now.
I have sometimes heard the sincere concern sincerely voiced — if we speak out, yes, out from the heart and soul of our spirituality — against the profligate use of fossil fuels, against the greed behind it and the government policies that promote it — what if somebody is offended, walks out and never comes back? If we say only what people want to hear — how will history, if there is any, remember us?
Please think about this very seriously.
We are a very tolerant people, we UUs. We are extremely uneasy when we feel that we're invoking judgment.
Yet our whole spiritual history is the story of people who made judgments and shook the tree. History remembers them with great honor because of it.
The story of Rev. May and the Southern Christian gentleman ends pretty well, by the way. The rest of the passage is a description of a masterful piece of respectful listening and earnest speaking on the part of Sam May, at the end of which the Southerner concludes that Rev. May is right about slavery. I say the story ends pretty well because we don't learn what happens when he returns to the South, to his associates, to his family, to his church. It couldn't have been pretty. Did he dare shake the spiritual tree? Did he manage to do it well and effectively?
All this assumes having convictions, and being committed to them with passion. It means that 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 it means that you have insisted on that light, and not settled for just identifying with the prevailing assumptions and dogma of your surroundings.
But to judge: — oh, in politically correct America, isn't that unspiritual?
Listen. We are always making judgments; we have to.
There are: little day-to-day judgments — the failure to make which would render us wholly and utterly inactive. You'd never even decide what to have for dinner, or whether to have it at all.
There are pretty important judgments but judgments that are personal — recycling my trash doesn't require speaking out or judging what somebody else is or isn't doing.
But there's another kind of judgment, and sometimes we have to enter the fray. These judgments may lead to a shout from the heart, making a hard call, loud and clear.
The Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to distinguish between "compassion" and what he called "idiot compassion" that is simply an abdication of discriminating wisdom and the loss of the moral fiber to voice it.
Yes, sometimes we have shake the tree. Not in a paternalistic way, if it's about the rights and wellbeing of others. That's why we have to stop to ask, first, "What are you going through," and then, on the sacred branch of our only voice — we must insist; insist for us all.
And when we do so, we are called upon to do a remarkable thing. It may feel paradoxical, but it's necessary, and we have to do it, and there is no legitimate way out of the human responsibility to do it.
And it's this:
We have to hold our judgment, our conviction, our truth — with the sort of humility that never shields that judgment or conviction or truth from examination and reëxamination. We have to be prepared to subject our deepest convictions to questioning and hold ourselves open to new truth. We have to do that . . .
. . . at the same moment that we take this judgment or conviction or truth not as some academic abstraction, but as "working truth." We have to take the next step, climb out on the limb, speak our truth — as working truth until we learn otherwise.
It's obvious why this is so. So much is at stake today. If we love this world and the life of this world and those who will come after us — we have to care. Human beings hold astonishing powers for good or for ill. Not just the quality of the future, but whether or not there will be one — are up for grabs.
And listen — others have already entered the fray.
The policies by which our country is now governed are mightily influenced by the religious far right. Did I have to tell you that?
Or consider this: The four Catholic dioceses in Massachusetts started this year by mailing out a million leaflets condemning the lives of gay and lesbian people and calling for our exclusion from the protections of marriage. Then they conducted a series of rallies throughout the state. And now they are conducting what they call an unprecedented crusade to elect legislators who support their view and defeat those who don't.
I object not to the fact that they speak — if they are truly convinced, they should speak; — I object because the case they make is built on contorted logic and dishonesty, and because it's ignorant and bigoted. And I object because sometimes it is spoken hypocritically by people who are saying what they are expected to say in public, while saying something else in their secret hearts or perhaps to their friends.
Harsh words sometimes have to be spoken. How do we do that without demeaning the human beings who hold what we believe are disastrously misguided views?
It's not easy. And you know what? We might not get it right all the time. But what is the alternative?
William Sloane Coffin put it like this:
We must carry on a lover's quarrel with the world
So that when we depart this life
We may leave behind
a little more truth
a little more peace
a little more beauty.
And sometimes it can be done quite brilliantly. I'm something of a student of the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s. It still takes my breath away to fathom the spiritual triumph Dr. King and those around him achieved — and before him Gandhi — doing this difficult thing very well. Both of these led movements of soul and spirit. It was daunting and demanding.
I know of no more stunning example than what Theodore Parker had to say when Daniel Webster died. Daniel Webster had been a leading voice for abolition and freedom — until southern politicians offered him the Whig nomination for President if he would switch and support the Southern position. He betrayed the cause. He thought that as President he could build America into a great economic power, and for that, he was willing to betray a few slaves — and the fate of four million enslaved people didn't figure in his calculus. And then the Southern delegates to the Whig convention betrayed him and he got not one single southern vote in ballot after ballot.
And he dies, and the Sunday following, Theodore Parker is to speak. I've read nothing like that sermon. Toward the end, he said:
Boston now mourns for him. She is too late in her weeping. She should have wept her warning when her capitalists filled his right hand with bribes. Webster fell prostrate, but was Boston more innocent than he? . . . It was [Boston] that ruined him.
It was partly by Boston's sin that the great man fell. I pity his victims; you pity them too. But I pity him more, oh, far more! Pity the oppressed, will you? Will you not also pity the oppressor in his sin?
His address was an indictment of the whole culture and not just Daniel Webster — how different from what political leaders dare to do. To tell the nation not what they want to hear, what will get votes — but what, for the sake of all, they must hear.
And then he pleaded for forgiveness for the fallen Webster.
And sometimes our words bear fruit and we get to see it.
I know something about those earnest fundamentalists who are caught in a sincere but nonetheless oppressive belief. I spent quite a few years as a religious fundamentalist who believed every word of the Bible, who couldn't understand the demands of black Americans or women for equal treatment under the law, and who believed that homosexuality was about the most loathsome evil in God's universe.
Can I diminish the humanity of someone who believes such things? I was that person. I know my own sincerity during those years. I know the filtering and editing of what I was allowed to know and to think during those years. I know the way power controls knowledge. I know what it took to get over, the struggle of transformation.
I will always be grateful to those who shook my spiritual tree. They were many. You can be sure their hard words didn't meet with a grateful hearty Thank You. Some never got to see anything more than my defensive façade, never got to see how the subversive seeds they planted took root.
I know, too, that we always have more to learn. Never is our understanding complete. Insights have come to us, and light; and there can be no doubt that more and greater insights, more penetrating light, will come. And Gandhi said, "The seeker after truth must be humble as the dust."
Sometimes it's painful to learn. When I was just out of seminary in 1974 I remember well preaching about the crucifixion of Jesus, with the usual antisemitic overtones not so subtly written into the Gospel accounts. But I wasn't in the controlled environment of the seminary any longer, and my audience wasn't restricted to people who uncritically accepted the views of the gospel writers, and one of them was Jewish. I had to hear him, and receive his anger, or I couldn't learn. Lucky for me and for anybody who has to listen to me, he dared to rebuke a friend.
But please — I hope you won't ask me to tell you that this challenging work of ours is any less challenging than it is, to lay out a way to do this that won't be demanding and that won't stretch us. I can't do that. We gather here not only for our own sake but to change the world.
And each of us has to find our place in this work, and we as a center for this necessary spiritual movement have to figure out how to make this Unitarian Society into an engine of our vision. I'm talking about something that demands not less than everything.
But when we make that fundamental commitment and do it in a community that shares a covenant and a vision —
— then — for me, personally — engaging this work is not ultimately depressing but exhilarating. Facing the truth of our times in the company of such a community is not depressing but reassuring. Nothing leaves me more despairing than to be among people who don't care and don't want to know. At the heart of this work and this spiritual community there is a great energy of love.
And when it's that love that moves us, we can be pretty sure we'll know the difference between the fearful passivity of silence, the mere lashing out denigrates the other, and the bold and prophetic speech that comes from tough love.
What we are called upon to do is all about love: your love, mine, for the vision of life we cherish, for Life Itself, for that brilliant energy that runs through everything, that is our very lives, that is at work in this world to make real that "different trinity" that appears on our sign — respect, justice, freedom — for the sake of this threatened world. It will be love, our love, that makes this work a joy.
Copyright © 2004 F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.
We are gathered as we are, joyfully and yet with sorrow, proud and
yet with humility, in hope but also with fear.
Never far from us is the knowledge that we have not always lived the truth we love, fulfilled the dream of what we might be. Yet the dream and the hope, some deep knowledge of what is true and real, remain with us, draw us forward on this journey and don't abandon us.
And though with humility, we know that our lives bear truth and dreams of a world transformed and suffering ended, where oppression has ceased, where every life might flourish in freedom, a world crowned with joy.
We gather as those who have labored for that dream, raised our voices for it, sacrificed for the love of that dream.
Some are tired today, and discouraged, and fearful. Let us bear one another up in this faith, in this hope. Let us know know joy in the beauty of our dream and in the good that has already been won, in the renewal of the earth around in Spring and the Life and Spirit that renews our minds and hearts. Let us hear speaking deeply within the call and the promise of this day, and all our days, in this silence.
Theodore Parker, April 1858.
These are five great evils of mankind to-day, whence many lesser ones proceed . . . We are to outlearn these five evils — war, wicked government, slavery, selfish antagonism in society, the degradation of woman. We shall outgrow these things. . . . One of the mightiest of man's helpers is this religous faculty in us; this, nothing else, can give us strength to do that work. . . . So a church must protest against all wrong which it knows to be wrong; promote all right which it knows to be right. It is a church for that very purpose, and nothing less. . . .
Let the prayers of the Protestant churches be answered to-night; let all the white men and women in the United States be converted to the ecclesiastic theology which is taught in orthodox meeting-houses . . . — suppose there are fifteen millions who are . . . made to believe in the creeds of the revival ministers; let all these be added to the church next Sunday, . . . it would not abate one of those five great evils — war, political corruption, slavery, selfish antagonism in society, nor the degradation of woman! Such a conversion is not a step towards removing any one of these evils — nay, it is a step away from that work. Such a conversion would entail inferiority on a woman; retard the progress of civilization, the moralization of mankind; add to the fetters of the slave; strengthen the tyrant's hand; increase the chances of prospective war,, and add to its horrors when it broke out. For it would bless all these iniquities in the name of God . . .
We want a revival of religion . . . ending in a world full of noble men and women, all their faculties developed well, they serving God with that love that casts out fear. . . . a theology which shall meet the people's want, a natural and just idea of man, of God, of the relation between them . . . .
If a [person] is filled with this religion, it will not let him rest. He must speak, whether men hear or whether they forbear.
Tess Gallagher, from "Refusing Silence"
. . . I admit
I delayed. I was the Empress
of Delay. But it can't be
put off now. On the sacred branch
of my only voice — I insist.
Insist for us all,
which is the job
of the voice, and especially
of the poet. Else
what am I for, what use
am I if I don't
insist?
There are messages to send.
Gatherings and songs.
Because we need
to insist. Else what are we
for? What use
are we?
I delayed. I was the Empress
of Delay. But it can't be
put off now. On the sacred branch
of my only voice — I insist.
Insist for us all,
which is the job
of the voice, and especially
of the poet. Else
what am I for, what use
am I if I don't
insist?
There are messages to send.
Gatherings and songs.
Because we need
to insist. Else what are we
for? What use
are we?