A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
January 30, 2005
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
January 30, 2005
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
This past New Year's holiday I visited, for the first time, my former congregation in Oak Park, just outside Chicago. On a sunny Thursday I went with a friend to see Millennium Park, part of Grant Park in downtown Chicago stretching northward and eastward from the Art Institute. It was only a dream when I lived there only three years ago. But here it was: Frank Geary's spectacular bandshell and bridge, lots of amazing urban art, and the opening up of a big area previously pretty much wasted, but which now connects the Loop with the North Michigan Avenue area. The younger Mayor Daley has achieved something more than the mere preservation of what Daniel Burnham first conceived. He's improved on it, carried it forward in a way its original designer would have loved. You had to marvel at what it's possible to do with a few disused acres of land.
The real reason for the trip was to conduct a couple of weddings for old friends at their famous building, Unity Temple, designed by a young member, Frank Lloyd Wright — who was then little known. He led the next generation of great architects. While Burnham stuck to classical styles of architecture, Wright broke dramatically with them. He sometimes considered Unity Temple his best work.
The Temple has never looked as good as it does now after the latest million-dollar restoration. Wright's design was breathtaking and brilliant. But 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. 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. Like the Millennium Park project, the latest restorations were an advance on an original brilliant design.
Daniel Burnham was the pioneering nineteenth-century architect and city planner whose plan for Chicago was truly far-sighted. He unveiled it a year after Unity Temple was opened — in fact in the same year that Unity Temple was re-opened after Wright's innovative heating system failed to heat the building and conventional radiators were installed.
Burnham had been the chief of construction for the World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and his plan for Chicago grew out of it. Its boulevards, gardens, classical-facade buildings and rings of park and woodlands became the model for city planning in America. When he built the Flatiron Building in New York, he pioneered the skyscraper.
Maybe you remember what Daniel Burnham famously said.
Make no little plans,
they have no magic to stir [the] blood
and probably themselves will not be realized.
Make big plans,
aim high in hope and work,
asserting itself with ever-growing insistence.
remembering that a noble, logical diagram
once recorded will never die,
but long after we are gone be a living thing,
As a tiny minority — one-third of one percent of the population — compared with Catholics who represent about 25 percent and Baptists, at 16 percent — we Unitarian Universalists belong to a small community grown accustomed to obscurity. Maybe the obscurity is comforting because it is familiar. A street-person living in a refrigerator carton might not want to leave it if it's become familiar and reliable rather than venture change. I think it was a therapist who told me that one day when I was thinking inside a very small box!
Make small safe plans. They won't ask much of you and you'll have the comfort of knowing not much is going to change or require much adaptation.
That's not what they were thinking 180 years ago when our forebears separated from the Calvinist First Church down the block and organized the Second Congregational Society right where we are sitting. It isn't what they were thinking when 142 years ago our radical forebears founded the Free Congregational Society of Florence.
Since that time, different perils threaten the human community and even life on earth. Since then, there are new possibilities for human attainment. Since then, the conception of human rights and dignity and the circles of humanity included in our inclusive vision have broadened. When we read the noble declaration on the back wall from 1863, we can recognize some categories that are missing. We've advanced, extended, our Gospel.
It is for us to live and extend this Unitarian Universalist spiritual tradition, as stewards of its future, to write its next chapter.
Last week I visited with British Unitarian friends. In the 19th century, Unitarians were a real power in Britain and at the forefront of so many reforms. But last week I visited their General Secretary, Jeffrey Teagle, in his new offices — in the basement of our own historic Essex Hall headquarters, the basement where they have had to move their offices so they can lease out the upper floors. They've shrunk precipitously for the last century until hardly anybody even knows they're there. When I first visited there four years ago, there had just appeared, in a newspaper religion column, an enquiry by a man who wanted a spiritual home but just didn't believe the tenets of the Anglican church. He wanted to know where he could turn. And the Anglican Bishop of Oxford had written in response to say that, well, there used to be Unitarians, but they're gone now!
Jeff Teagle immediately issued a response to the effect that rumours of their death were exaggerated. But what had happened?
One of the things I learned that most surprised me was that British Unitarians don't pledge! — have no concept of pledging. The Anglican Church is state-supported, so pledging just never became part of their culture. It should have. There are now only somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 Unitarians in all of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. They've learned somehow to think very, very small.
What became of the noble vision of Britain's great Unitarians? what became of the noble tradition of Joseph Priestley, James Martineau, Gilbert Wakefield — who thundered against capital punishment and slavery and compromised clergy in the 1700s, William Hazlitt — prophet of imagination, Florence Nightingale? What became of the movement that founded the Guardian newspaper?
You probably never heard of the nineteenth century London Unitarian minister, Rev. Richard Price, but he was probably the most influential theoretician of the American Revolution with his famous writings on civil liberty and American independence, published all over the world and widely read on both sides of the Atlantic. Richard Price gave fully twenty percent of his income. But today the practice of pledging doesn't even exist there.
Yet — the real record of our commitments, the truest register of our aspirations and convictions — are our calendars and our checkbooks.
We pledge. Yes, we do. We pledge just enough so that we manage to pay our basic expenses and our best dreams never quite get funded.
Every year your board faces what you might think of as an annual root-canal. We decide what gets cut from our dream budget.
In the brochure that our members and pledgers should have gotten last week, Elaine Garofoli writes about "sad" money, which pays the inescapable bills, and "happy" money, which, once those bills are paid, goes on to express and realize our best dreams.
Today we launch our annual Stewardship campaign, when we're all asked to commit, to the best of our ability to foresee the year ahead, to a pledge.
Three hundred fifty years ago, our pledge would have come in the form of a tax bill from the town. No choice about that. You might have been supporting a hell-and-brimstone Calvinist church whose message you deplored. Now it comes to us as choice. You don't have to do it at all. If you do, it's up to you what it is you give your money to. Now it comes as an invitation to loose the grip of our attachments and unfold into more fully evolved beings.
There is good news. UUs have begun to take this decision really seriously. All across North America, Unitarian Universalists are learning to commit seriously to our vision, our message, our work in this world. We are fast moving away from our status held all during the last decade or more as the very worst per capital givers on the American religious scene, just behind the Christian Scientists. That's changing fast.
And here at USNF, we've seen some tremendously gratifying growth in our members' commitment.
Last year, when a member who might well wonder sometimes how they're going to pay their rent — told me they were pledging five percent of their income, it galvanized my resolve to pledge at the same percentage rate. I'll do so again this year.
It's how we say that our being here as a Unitarian Universalist spiritual community and a Unitarian Universalist prophetic witness — matters, and not only matters: matters supremely.
Remember the stark contrast this past year between our message and that of the Bishop Dupre and the whole Archdiocese when the equal right to marry was at stake! Do you think it matters? This past week, when the new Secretary of Education, on her second day on the job, cowed Public Broadcasting into canceling a children's cartoon program because, in a show about maple syrup season in Vermont, two same-sex couples appeared — do you think it matters whose religious voice is getting heard and whose isn't? Secretary Spellings was responding to a hate-filled, fear-mongering campaign by the religious right that declared that the show, "Postcards from Buster," would "homosexualize" our children.
This past week I happened to be flipping through channels when The 700 Club ran a "news documentary" about a true believer who, in the name of Jesus, commanded the tsunami to slow down and let him escape. Now Pat Robertson's network treated this as a serious news story with, of course, the purpose of putting out the Gospel according to Pat Robertson: — a message of a God who spares his special chums and lets them escape but doesn't mind drowning in the most horrific of deaths 280,000 people who don't have the codeword, and breaking a million hearts, and exposing millions to sorrows and deprivations —
Do you think that message has nothing to do with the kind of world we're making? with the idea that we can ship off, to war-prisons or, far worse, countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia — people who have been convicted of no offense, in most cases not even charged with anything — so they can be tortured, humiliated on our behalf by people who are not subject to American law, — because they're apparently not God's Chosen people like us? — you think the hugely powerful radical right religious juggernaut has nothing to do with the betrayal of liberty and justice and humanity itself?
Do you think it has nothing to do with the fact that the radical right government, which it has put in place, shows only contempt for the increasingly desperate pleas of the world's scientists that — as yet another major report said just this last week — we have only ten years to completely change our relationship with oil and energy and profit and greed — if it isn't already too late?
We deplore that message. We offer a serious spiritual alternative.
But note well: they, and not we, had established a huge broadcasting empire, and had bought the time on Channel Three. Which of us is thinking big, and which small?
I know you've heard plenty about the things that imperil our world from me already and I guess you know you'll hear more. But the question is,
Is it possible to raise at least some small, but potentially influential part of the next generation of Americans, to see themselves and the world and their relationship to this world of life differently than our generations did?
Is it possible that we could turn this place into a downtown spiritual retreat with enlightened programming on a far larger scale than we have ever done, for the growth of the human spirit? Where we can feel the great tide of love that embraces our whole selves reaching farther, more deeply, into this world?
Is it possible that we can secure the additional space in which to do these things?
Is it possible that we can begin to operate on something approaching the scale and seriousness with which those huge right-wing religious establishments do, and begin really, seriously, to counter their influence?
Is it possible that we can do things on the scale of our dreams? can we fulfill our dreams?
Even when we have our doubts about whether the direction of this nation can be changed, whether the conditions on this Earth that nurture and support life can be saved from the ravages of greed and folly — whether a more human world and more fulfilled lives — are possible —
We must make no little plans,
because they have no magic to stir the blood
We must make big plans,
aim high in hope and work,
remembering that a noble and just dream
At what still remains of the great Essex Church in Kensington, London, last Sunday, the thirty people gathered sang this next hymn with a hopefulness, and a passion, and a grandeur with which I've never heard it sung. I want for us to sing it now. Wonders Still the World Shall Witness.
Comments: minister@uunorthampton.org
Theodore Parker:
We look to the future, a future to be made:
On this winter's day in the warmth of this company of care and vision:
In a time of false assurances, let there be opened in us a vision of the real and the true and the enduring.
In a time that lures us with glittering diversions, let there be opened in us a vision of the path of authentic life.
In a time of deepening fear, let there be opened in us boldness, courage.
Give us eyes to see and hearts to hold and hands to grasp the promise of a day.
Sharon Salzberg:
We can never know how our actions will ripple out and affect others. We may, through force of habit, disparage ourselves, considering an action to be inadequate, or resign ourselves to its certain mediocrity, but we can't possibly know the ultimate result of anything we do.
An Inuit song—
And I thought over again
My small adventures
As with a shore wind I drifted out
In my kayak
And thought I was in danger
My tears,
Those small ones
That I thought so big
For all the vital things
I had to get and to reach
And yet, there is only
One great thing,
The only thing
To live to see in huts and on journeys
The great day that dawns,
And the light that fills the world.
Daniel Hudson Burnham, 1909:
Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir [the] blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order, and your beacon, beauty. Think big."