Category: Religion in society

Fourth Anniversary

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2007 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading this morning comes from the Christian scriptures, Matthew 5.38-48. Jesus said:

“‘You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

“‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.'”

So said Jesus of Nazareth, according to the Christian scriptures.

The second reading this morning comes from the Hebrew scriptures, Psalm 34.14

“Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it.”

Sermon

This morning, I had planned to preach the last in a series of sermons on Chinese religion and philosophy. But I changed my mind, and decided to preach a sermon titled “Fourth Anniversary.”

We Unitarian Universalists are both Christian and not-Christian; I like to say we are “post-Christian.” I like being a post-Christian. As a post-Christian, I can hold on to the best of the Christian tradition; and through the use of reason I can reject the parts of the Christian tradition that are obviously wrong-headed.

It’s just after the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and I find myself holding on to the best of the Christian tradition. And I believe the best of the Christian tradition can be found in what is popularly known as the “Sermon on the Mount.” This is a sermon that was supposed to have been preached by the great rabbi and spiritual leader Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus and his disciples were going through the countryside in the land of Judea. Rumors began to spread through the countryside that a great and good and wise man was preaching with such authority and such deep humanity, that he was said to be the Messiah, the Chosen One who would lead the Jewish people into righteousness and freedom. Thousands of people flocked to hear this great man preach. His disciples found him a hill on which he stood while the people gathered around him. And there he preached a sermon that contained the core of his beliefs.

In that sermon, Jesus of Nazareth preached: “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” [5.14-16]

And then he also preached what we heard in the first reading this morning:

“‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your [God] in heaven; for [God] makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly [God] is perfect.'”

Taken as a whole, the Sermon on the Mount comprises what is arguably the highest and best statement of Christian ethics. On this fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I would like us to reflect on the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” To help explain what he meant by this, he offered a dramatic example of how we are to live this out in our own lives, saying:

“‘You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also….” [5.39-40]

That, my friends, is an utterly ridiculous statement. If anyone strikes us on the right cheek, there is no way that we are going to just stand there and offer our left cheek also; we would either call the cops, sue the jerk who hit us, call the domestic abuse hotline, or simply walk away. But to just stand there, waiting to be hit on the other cheek — we are not going to do that, it is asking to be hurt.

Or take a more extreme example. When the fanatics hijacked those jets and flew them into the World Trade Center towers, our natural impulse was to strike back, to invade Afghanistan. Of course we invaded Afghanistan. We sought justice. We sought justice for the hundreds of people who died in terror on those jetliners. We sought justice for the thousands who died in the twin towers: the people who burned to death, the people who jumped to their deaths rather than be burned. Of course we invaded Afghanistan to hunt down terrorists; we could not sit passively waiting for the terrorists to strike again.

The Christian tradition tells us that some wars can be just wars. Thomas of Aquinas, one of the greatest Christian thinkers, said, “In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged.” We fulfilled the first criterion, because our sovereign powers, the President and Congress, approved the invasion of Afghanistan. Thomas Aquinas continued, “Secondly, a just cause is required, namely that those who are attacked, should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault. Wherefore Augustine says: ‘A just war is wont to be described as one that avenges wrongs….'” Clearly, we had been wronged; clearly we fulfilled this second criterion as well. Thomas Aquinas says we must meet yet a third criterion for a just war: “Thirdly, it is necessary that the belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil. Hence Augustine says: ‘True religion looks upon as peaceful those wars that are waged not for motives of aggrandizement, or cruelty, but with the object of securing peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of uplifting the good.'” And when we invaded Afghanistan, we assuredly felt that our object was to secure the peace, to punish evildoers, and to uplift the good.

And then we took another short step; on March 20, 2003, we invaded Iraq. That was but a short step further along the same path. Wasn’t it? Wasn’t the invasion of Iraq justifiable? Can the invasion of Iraq be justified religiously as a just war?

Most Christian religious leaders and thinkers did not believe that the invasion of Iraq was justifiable. A typical example: on March 9, 2003, former president Jimmy Carter, a Christian and a deep thinker in his own right, said:

“As a Christian and as a president who was severely provoked by international crises, I became thoroughly familiar with the principles of a just war, and it is clear that a substantially unilateral attack on Iraq does not meet these standards. This is an almost universal conviction of religious leaders, with the most notable exception of a few spokesmen of the Southern Baptist Convention who are greatly influenced by their commitment to Israel based on eschatological, or final days, theology.”

Jimmy Carter, who has studied Christian just war theory and who has updated that theory to account for the way the world works today, had an updated list of criteria for a just war. But he said that the 2003 invasion of Iraq failed all his criteria for what constitutes a just war. And he asserted that most Christian religious leaders and thinkers agreed with him.

Perhaps some of you believed then, and believe now, that the invasion of Iraq was justified. And I know that you can make sound arguments that invading Iraq was politically justifiable, that it was a pragmatic act. Our president has made exactly such arguments. Many of our Congressional leaders made exactly such arguments as Congress voted overwhelmingly to invade Iraq; and while some of those Congressional leaders have since changed their minds, it does not seem to me that they changed their minds on the basis of religious conviction. Politically, the invasion of Iraq seems to have been justifiable.

I readily admit that I am not competent to argue whether the invasion of Iraq was politically justifiable. I am not a politician, and I know I am somewhat naive when it comes to politics. But to anyone within the Christian tradition — even to those of us who are post-Christians — the invasion of Iraq was not religiously justifiable. To Christians and to post-Christians, the invasion of Iraq must be considered immoral and wrong.

These are harsh words. To say that the invasion of Iraq was immoral and wrong, is to accuse our elected leaders of being immoral. And because we live in a democracy, this means that the entire electorate has allowed immorality to rule our foreign policy. We have allowed the United States to become an immoral nation. Even more harshly, those of us in this room who can legally vote, or who participate in the political process in any other way, have aided and abetted an immoral war.

These are harsh words, because if we acknowledge that we ourselves have aided and abetted an immoral war; we have aided and abetted immorality. This fact rose up into my consciousness as the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq approached — the fact that I myself was in some small sense participating in an immoral war.

A week an a half ago — on Friday, March 16 — there was a Christian Peace Witness for Iraq down in Washington, D.C. To mark the fourth anniversary of the immoral invasion of Iraq, scores of Christian religious leaders planned to commit civil disobedience in front of the White House. They planned to trespass on White House grounds and commit the radical act of praying for peace. Thousands of other Christians were going to light candles and surround the White House with light, surround the White House with prayers for peace.

I called up my friend Elizabeth — she’s a Quaker and a pacifist who lives in Washington — and asked here if she was going to participate in this Christian Peace Witness for Iraq. Yes, she said. I said the whole thing seems hopeless, and that praying for peace seemed hopelessly impractical. Well, said Elizabeth, we can’t do anything else, but at least we can pray. So I told Elizabeth that if she’d put me up for the night, I’d come down and pray for peace in front of the White House while other ministers and clergypeople got arrested for praying.

A week ago Friday, at about eleven o’clock, there I stood in front of the White House in the freezing cold, snow on the ground, along with two or three thousand other people. The organizers announced that the people who were going to commit civil disobedience should get ready. Beside me, one man said to another, “OK, Rev., guess this is it. You’ve got my cell phone number?” The other man, presumably a minister, was an older African American man whom I guessed to be about 70 — and I give that description of him so you realize that this wasn’t the stereotypical crowd of young white hippie peaceniks. The minister nodded and said, “Yes, I’ve got it, and I’ll call you when it’s time to bail me out.”

What a ridiculous thing for a seventy year old minister to do: to stand in front of the White House on a freezing cold night, and get arrested for praying for peace. I almost decided to join that 70-something minister right then and there. What a silly thing to do, to get arrested like that. It’s as silly as turning your left cheek should someone strike you on your right cheek. It’s standing there in silent witness to immorality and violence: not turning away, not striking back, not seeking legal redress, but standing there as if to say: “What you are doing is wrong, is immoral.”

When we are told to turn the other cheek, it’s usually put in such a way that it means we are supposed to be meek and mild and to accept whatever crap is dished out to us. That’s not what it means to turn the other cheek. To turn the other cheek is to stand up in the face of immorality, to stand up against that which is wrong, to stand up in witness that there is a better way to live. Therefore, I do not recommend to you turn the other cheek. If you stand there in the face of immorality and violence, chances are that you’ll just get hit on the other cheek; or maybe you’ll get arrested for praying. Better to put up with immorality. Don’t turn the other cheek.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said: “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others….” I have told you not to turn the other cheek. Maybe if we just ignore the war in Iraq, it will go away. Or maybe you agree with the political expediency of the war in Iraq, and you think we should continue to fight it with increased troop levels.

On the other hand, we cannot justify the war in Iraq on religious grounds. So it is I tell you that we must somehow figure out how to let our lights shine: that is, we must somehow figure out how to proclaim the immorality of this war; we must somehow figure out how to ask forgiveness for our own complicity in the prosecution of this war; we must let the light of love shine in the darkness of violence. May our very being, the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts, become prayers for peace.

Election Day Sermon

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading, an adaptation of Isaiah 61, was read responsively (#571 from Singing the Living Tradition

The spirit of God has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,

To bind up the brokenhearted,

To proclaim liberty to the captives and release the prisoners,

To comfort all who mourn,

To give them a garland instead of ashes,

The oil of gladness instead of mourning,The mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit,

They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations, the devastations of many generations.

You shall be named ministers of our God.

The second reading this morning is from the essay “Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau:

“Some years ago, the State met me in behalf of the church, and commanded me to pay a certain sum toward the support of a clergyman whose preaching my father attended, but never I myself. ‘Pay it,’ it said, ‘or be locked up in jail.’ I declined to pay. But, unfortunately, another man saw fit to pay it. I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster; for I was not the State’s schoolmaster, but I supported myself by voluntary subscription. I did not see why the lyceum should not present its tax-bill, and have the State to back its demand, as well as the church. However, at the request of the selectmen, I condescended to make some such statement as this in writing:– ‘Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined.’ This I gave to the town-clerk; and he has it. The State, having thus learned that I did not wish to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on me since; though it said that it must adhere to its original presumption that time. If I had known how to name them, I should then have signed off in detail from all the societies which I never signed on to; but I did not know where to find a complete list.”

So ends this morning’s readings.

ELECTION DAY SERMON

My original plan for today was to preach a sermon titled “Love All Beings.” It was going to be part of a series of sermons on Unitarian Universalist views of God. But I decided to hold off on preaching that particular sermon, and instead I’m going to preach a sermon on what it means to be a religious liberal, a Unitarian Universalist, in today’s political climate.

You see, Tuesday is Election Day, and I decided that I had better preach an Election Day sermon. As these mid-term elections got closer, I found myself growing very uncomfortable thinking about how religious liberals deal with politics. Sometimes we act as if we believe we can effect a complete separation of our liberal faith and our politics. Alternatively, some of us confuse liberal religion with liberal politics and seem to operate under the belief that if we are registered with the Democratic party we have fulfilled our religious obligations in the public sphere.

Both these beliefs are actually false. I say this even though I myself have at different times acted as if I believed one of these two things. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I needed to preach an Election Day sermon that would lay out some of the ways we religious liberals could come to terms with politics.

At present, we mostly don’t deal with politics at all. Oh, sure, we do our little social action projects, and most of us are registered to vote. But for the most part, we Unitarian Universalists don’t do politics as Unitarian Universalists; we do politics simply as non-religious citizens. The end result is that politicians can safely ignore us — and they do.

It used to be different. Sixty years ago, Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, DC, was such an influential preacher that the Washington newspapers would hold their Monday editions until they got the text of his sermon to print. Senators and representatives attended All Souls in those days, and a few were even members there. Or take an example closer to home: Sixty years ago, when Duncan Howlett occupied this pulpit here in New Bedford, a few people with political power and influence actually listened to what he had to say..

Today, All Souls Church in Washington, DC, has a great preacher in the person of Rob Hardies, but no one outside of that church community much cares what Rob Hardies preaches. (Which is too bad, because Rob Hardies is a really good preacher who addresses matters of deep concern to all Americans.) Here in New Bedford, while it is true that we have a vibrant and exciting church community, I can assure you that no one outside of our little congregation pays much attention to the sermons preached from this pulpit. Indeed, as the primary preacher in this church, my experience has been that the only time anyone from the community bothers to call me is when they’re hoping to get money or volunteer hours from First Unitarian

We can be safely ignored precisely because we have subscribed to those two false beliefs that make us very easy to ignore. We have a false understanding of the separation of church and state — of course we believe strongly that the government should not sponsor any church or religious body — but individually we have too often acted as if our personal religious beliefs can not inform our personal political beliefs. And too many of us hold to the false notion that liberal religion is the same thing as liberal politics, acting as if you can’t be a member of a Unitarian Universalist church unless you are also a member of the Democratic political party. Two false assumptions that have led us into political irrelevancy.

So let’s look closely at that first false assumption, which stems, I think, from a real misunderstanding of what separation of church and state means. And to explain this, I’m going to recount a story about Henry Thoreau. Back in 1840, as we heard in the first reading this morning, Henry Thoreau ran afoul of the tax authorities in Concord, Massachusetts. His biographer Walter Harding tells the story this way:

It had been the custom in Massachusetts for the churches to assess their members for financial support and to have the town treasurers collect for them along with the town assessments. The First Parish Church [that was the Unitarian church in that town], apparently assuming that Thoreau was a member both because his family owned a pew there, added his name to their tax rolls in 1840. When Thoreau received his church tax bill, he marched down to the town office and announced he would refuse to pay it. ‘Pay or be locked up in jail,’ they replied. But before the issue could be decided, someone else paid the tax over Thoreau’s protest and the town officials were ready to drop the matter. Not so Thoreau however for he knew the subject would be raised another year. He demanded that his name be dropped from the church tax rolls and, at their suggestion, filed with the town selectmen a statement [to that effect]….” [pp. 199-200]

As I read this story to you, I’m sure some of you are thinking to yourselves, “See, that story about Thoreau just proves that we have to be ever vigilant at maintaining the separation of church and state.” Except that’s not what it proves. This story proves that Henry Thoreau fought to keep church and state separate in the public realm precisely because he did not separate religion and politics in his own private life. In his private life, he had moved away from the old-fashioned Unitarianism of his childhood church towards the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Therefore, his public and political action of civil disobedience was an expression of his deep personal religious beliefs. Thoreau got involved in political civil disobedience precisely because of his personal religious understandings.

Today, we may falsely assume that we can separate religion and politics in our personal lives, and therefore unlike Henry Thoreau we religious liberals today are reluctant to let our religious faith influence our political actions. Most of us won’t even mention our religious affiliation in public. When we go out and do social justice, how many of us explicitly say to others that we are doing social justice as an expression of our Unitarian Universalist faith? When you suggest that idea to us Unitarian Universalists, we tend to get a hunted look in our eyes. What, talk about how our religious faith has transformed our lives and led us to try to change the world?

The interesting thing is that younger Unitarian Universalists seem to be far more willing to live out their faith than us older Unitarian Universalists. The young people I know who grew up as Unitarian Universalists and who are now in their late teens and twenties are proud of their religious affiliation. When they go do social justice, they wear little flaming chalice pendants around their necks, and they wear t-shirts and have tattoos proclaiming that they are Unitarian Universalists. They talk openly about their liberal faith, and how their religious faith has transformed their lives.

It should be obvious that if we aren’t open about who we are as religious individuals, our liberal faith will continue to remain irrelevant in the public and political sphere. We should not wonder why the religious right gets all the political attention: they are more than willing to talk openly about how their conservative Christian faith informs the way they live. Let me assure you that I am not suggesting that we should imitate the way those on the religious right talk about their conservative faith; I am not suggesting that we should aggressively proselytize in the way those good folks do. That would be completely out of character for us. But I am saying that we could learn a few things from our young people, maybe by wearing a chalice emblem — it doesn’t have to be tattoo, it can be a discreet lapel pin like this — or by not being afraid to say that yes, I am a Unitarian Universalist, and it has changed my life.

Now on to the second false assumption, that we can equate Unitarian Universalism with liberal politics. Historically, that simply isn’t true. Millard Fillmore was a Unitarian, and he certainly could not be considered politically liberal. In the 20th C., we have Senator Leverett Saltonstall and President William Howard Taft, both Unitarians and both relatively conservative politically. Or consider the current case of two science fiction writers, Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, both of whom are Unitarian Universalists. Bradbury is a Republican and a political conservative; Vonnegut is a classic liberal or even left-wing Democrat; yet both feel comfortable within Unitarian Universalism. Indeed, some conservative Unitarian Universalists argue convincingly that the classically conservative values of liberty and lack of government interference in private life are more in line with Unitarian Universalism than today’s liberal politics. However, I would say that it is a mistake to confuse political positions with religious values; religious values may inform political positions, but those religious values remain distinct from any political expressions they might result in.

I would put it this way: our religious faith cannot be constricted within the bounds of any political party. I agree with Jim Wallis, the evangelical Christian who also happens to be a political progressive, when he says, “Religion doesn’t fit neatly in the categories ‘left’ and ‘right’…. It should challenge left and right.” [Weekly Standard, 4/11/2005 link]

Our liberal faith should challenge both the political liberals and the political conservatives, we should challenge both the Democrats and the Republicans. As a general principle, we can challenge the political liberals and the political conservatives with our liberal religious message of tolerance and inclusiveness. For example, we can challenge the Democrats to take religion seriously, we can challenge them to include religious people within their political party. For another example, we can challenge the Republicans to take liberal religion seriously, we can challenge them to include liberal religious people in their political party.

Which brings us to the first reading this morning, the responsive reading based on the passage from the Hebrew prophet Isaiah. I can imagine a Republican stealing a phrase from Isaiah, and saying: We need to proclaim liberty to the captives, those who have been held captive by Saddam’s regime in Iraq. I can imagine a Democrat stealing almost the same phrase from Isaiah, and saying: We need to release the prisoners, the prisoners that have been unjustly held in Guantanomo Bay prison. But wily old Isaiah, like so many prophets, does not allow any political party to feel comfortable. He calls us to release the prisoners and to proclaim liberty to the captives — and then he calls us to bind up the brokenhearted, to comfort all who mourn, and to give them a garland instead of ashes.

Isaiah is calling us far beyond mere politics. He is calling each of us to a universal ministry in our lives. He is calling us to bring about the reign of heaven here on earth, not so we can be re-elected, not because it matches what the polls say, but because it is the right thing to do. That is the challenge religion issues to politics.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously asked who is our neighbor, that we should love him; and answered that it does not matter the color of our neighbor’s skin, that our neighbors are black as well as white. In so saying, Rev. King offered a religious critique of the political situation of his day, based on the religious principle of loving one’s neighbor. He offered a religious ground for what became political action. In the early 1970’s, feminist theologians like Mary Daly pointed out that God loved women as much as God loved men, and this religious critique — that women were just as fully human as men — based on the religious principle of loving one’s neighbor, later turned into political action.

Martin Luther King and others like him started by making clear their religious understandings. Then they held politics accountable to those religious values. I can clarify this better if I offer you an example. We Unitarian Universalists say that we value and affirm the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part; this grows out of our Transcendentalist heritage which saw the divine in Nature, and out of our acceptance of evolution which tells us that we are really no better than any other living being, and out of our liberal understanding of how to read the Bible. Thus, when we engage as Unitarian Universalists in political action to protect the environment, we do so because of this religious understanding, which means we are not tied to some specific political means to reach that end. We might work with the Democratic party to adopt more government regulations to protect the environment, but we might also work with the Republican party to loosen regulations and provide tax cuts and other incentives for green businesses. We know the religious end which we hope to achieve; we do not need to restrict ourselves to a single partisan political means to reach that end.

I find I must end this Election Day sermon with a final admonition to all us — and here I’m admonishing myself as well as you. We religious liberals act as if our religion should be small, inarticulate, poorly funded, and disorganized. Yet this is so silly, because we have really important religious understandings to bring to the wider world. Right now, we could offer some deep insight into how saving the environment is a religious, spiritual, and moral matter. In the face of widespread environmental problems, it has become actually immoral and unethical for us to keep our personal religious understandings separate from our personal political understandings.

So let’s become articulate, well-funded, well-organized, and big. We can adopt modern management techniques, use the Internet and other new media to market ourselves to younger people, we can listen to the church growth consultants who give us proven methods to grow. We can let our religion infiltrate our personal politics at the same time we fight to keep religion out of public politics. We can imitate the young Unitarian Universalists who openly declare their Unitarian Universalism by wearing chalice pendants or getting chalice tattoos or wearing lapel pins. And we can talk openly about how Unitarian Universalism has supported us and has transformed our lives.

So we could do these things, and if we did, by the time the 2008 elections roll around, this church could be a force to be reckoned with here in New Bedford. Let’s do it.

Which Sexual Revolution?

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading is from the book Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History by David Allyn, a scholarly history of the sexual revolution in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In this excerpt, Allyn seems to be posing the question, “Whose sexual revolution was it, anyway?” He writes:

‘In the radical organizations of the New Left, women found that they were often taken for granted: they were expected to answer phones, cook meals, do laundry, and provide sexual companionship — in other words, to be secretaries, housekeepers, and concubines. Male radicals were often as sexist as their own fathers were…. [And] male hippies in communes were not much better than their activist counterparts. Former hippie Elizabeth Gipps says, “I remember screaming one day when the men were theoretically meditating while the women were cleaning the floors around them.”…

‘By many accounts, young men in the sixties were indifferent to their female partner’s sexual needs. One woman recalls, “Of course, most guys expected you to ‘put out’ just because they bought you dinner. But every time I had sex I felt like I was dealing with someone from another planet. They guys just didn’t get it. They wanted instant gratification…. Once I asked a guy to [give me an orgasm] while we were making love and he looked at me like I was certifiably insane.”…’

The second reading is from the Bible, the Song of Solomon chapter 7, verses 10-13, a book of the Bible that praises the delights of lovemaking:

I am my beloved’s,
and his desire is for me.

Come, my beloved,
let us go forth into the fields,
and lodge in the villages;

let us go out early to the vineyards,
and see whether the vines have budded,
whether the grape blossoms have opened
and the pomegranates are in bloom.
There I will give you my love.

The mandrakes give forth fragrance,
and over our doors are all choice fruits,
new as well as old,
which I have laid up for you, O my beloved.

SERMON — Which Sexual Revolution?

Those of you who come to church each week may notice that I’ve been doing a series of sermons exploring the dimensions of feminist theology. This is the third sermon in that series.

There’s a joke among Unitarian Universalist ministers that in our churches it’s easier to preach about sex than about money. We do have the reputation of being one religious tradition that is quite willing to talk openly about sex and sexuality. That reputation has a certain amount of truth in it, for we have no religious belief that sex and sexuality are evil. If someone quotes Bible passages that allegedly prove that sex is evil, we Unitarian Universalists are likely to quote other Bible passages that prove that sex is fun and good. We heard one such Bible passage in the second reading this morning, a passage from the Song of Solomon. The Song of Solomon is one of the sexiest poems in our culture, thus proving our point that the Bible is sex-positive.

Indeed, some of our critics have suggested that once upon a time we were overly enthusiastic in our embrace of the sexual revolution. After all, we feel that women and men should have the right to use the contraception of their choice; we feel that we should rely on individual women to exercise their individual consciences to determine whether or not to have an abortion; we do not believe that premarital sex is a sin; we do not believe that homosexuality is a sin; and we believe that women and girls are just as good as men and boys. Each of these views conflicts with the religious views of some other religious traditions.

When we say that we embraced the sexual revolution, we should really ask ourselves, Which sexual revolution did we embrace? Did we embrace the sexual revolution that says, “When it comes to sex, anything goes”? — and there are people who say, or at least imply, “Well, but if you allow gays and lesbians in your church, next thing you know you’ll be having orgies in the sanctuary on Sunday mornings.”

I must inform you, however, that that isn’t true. I have never seen an orgy in a Unitarian Universalist church. In fact, I have to say that on average the Unitarian Universalists I know are more straight-laced than the North American. Yes, we affirm that sex and sexuality are a normal part of who we are — yes, we affirm that sex and sexuality are an integral part of our religious selves — but affirming these things does not logically lead to the conclusion that we have orgies in church.

At the same time, there is a grain of truth in the accusation that Unitarian Universalists did engage in the part of the sexual revolution that said, “When it comes to sex, anything goes.” Some Unitarian Universalists had some wild times in the 1960’s and 1970’s and, I’m afraid, even into later decades. In this sense, we are no different than the wider population. Yet we are different from the wider population, for one simple reason: feminist theology and feminist thinking have been perhaps the most important force within Unitarian Universalism since the late 1960’s.

So it is that there are many parts of the sexual revolution that we can, indeed, affirm: that individuals have the right to use contraception, that individual women have the right to decide whether to have an abortion, that sex and sexuality are natural and normal, that women and girls are just as good as men and boys, and so on. Feminist theology can give us a good, solid grounding for our views on sex and sexuality. What we have to do is to tease out the several different strands that ran through the sexual revolution, to figure out what it is that we can affirm based on feminist theology, and what we may want to reject based on feminist theology. To make this a little more clear, I’d like to tell you a bit of the story of a typical Unitarian Universalist church, the church that I grew up in, and what happened in that church as it went through the years of the sexual revolution.

When I was a child — this was in the 1960’s — our church had a young, dynamic minister. Although the congregation had been older and graying, this young dynamic minister supposedly attracted younger families, many with children, to the church. On the whole, everyone thought he was a good thing for the church.

At some point in the late 1960’s, however, opinion began to turn against him. Some said they didn’t like him because he had become an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War. Others hinted that something darker was going — one woman told my mother, “If only you knew what I know about our minister!…” Whatever the cause, or causes, attendance began to drop. By 1970, when my father was the head usher, he remembers that there would be only forty or so people on a Sunday morning, where there used to have two hundred people. By 1971, that minister had been forced out. All this happened when I was a child, and I don’t remember much of it myself.

In late 1974, my older sister started going to the youth group at the church. By the winter of 1975, she had talked me into attending as well. She hadn’t been going to the youth group before that fall, and I had stayed away as well. I don’t remember exactly why we stayed away from church in those years, but I do remember that prior to 1975 I perceived the youth group as filled with scary kids who did lots and lots of drugs and had lots and lots of sex. I guess if you’re a little older than I, the sudden availability of drugs and sex in the 1960’s might have seemed exotic and liberating; but for many people around my age, drugs and sex also became associated with certain amount of fear. One of my best friends had almost been sucked under by drugs in sixth grade, and I still remember talking to an older girl who had lost her virginity at sixteen and who said, “Sex really isn’t that great,” with a tone of voice that said more than the words themselves.

But back then, my perception was that the sex and drugs had been cleaned out of our church’s high school youth group sometime before 1974, which made it feel safe enough for me to join. The new assistant minister was our youth advisor, and he was the one who told me about the accusations against the minister who had ostensibly been fired for his stance against the Vietnam War. The assistant minister said, “Didn’t you know that he had been having sex with someone in the congregation?” I hadn’t heard that accusation before.

Since then, I have wondered how many of the accusations about the youth group were true. Were those kids really having lots of sex and doing lots of drugs? Or were the teenagers a convenient scapegoat for people to blame when they could not talk about the minister’s alleged indiscretions? I don’t think I’ll ever really know the truth of what went on.

Meanwhile, there was another revolution going on all around me, the women’s liberation movement. I still remember when the little bright green hymnal supplements appeared in the pews. It contained some of our most familiar hymns rewritten to remove gender-specific language. I remember hearing about women ministers for the first time — not women ministers from the musty past, but women ministers who were active right then, in nearby Unitarian Universalist churches. Not only that, but there were two women in our own congregation who were preparing to be ministers, and who were duly ordained by our church — although those ordinations happened after I had left home for college.

And women were taking on increasingly prominent leadership roles in the congregation. When my mother first joined that church, she was invited to be on the Flower Committee, and later was invited to teach Sunday school — traditional women’s roles in that church, and in many churches. (For the record, she tried joining the Flower Committee, but soon quit in a certain amount of disgust — in her own way, Mom was an early feminist.) But fifteen years later, when I was in the church youth group, it was becoming more and more acceptable for women to serve in any leadership role in the church. I should rephrase that: by fifteen years later, women had insisted on breaking down the barriers of discrimination that had existed in church leadership.

So it is that I myself witnessed at least two revolutions within my own church. One sexual revolution centered around what used to be called “free love.” Another revolution, a feminist revolution, centered around women’s liberation. These two revolutions have been linked together in the popular imagination, but as I experienced them they were quite different. The so-called “free love” that I witnessed involved little or no feminist awareness. The feminist revolution, at least the part of it that I witnessed, was not about having lots of sexual intercourse, it was about women fighting to gain some measure of equality with men.

As I said earlier, I’m not telling you this not because you should care that much about my personal experiences, but more because I think that my experiences were not uncommon among people who grew up in liberal churches. Indeed, when I talk to some other people my age who grew up in that time, they have much more outrageous stories than I do — adult youth group advisors who were sleeping with kids in their youth groups, churches where the lay leaders played at “wife-swapping,” ministers who were sleeping with many women and men in their congregations, open marriage workshops at churches, and on and on. I’m afraid we have to admit that our Unitarian Universalist churches, and liberal churches in general, sometimes went past the boundaries of acceptable sexual behavior.

So where are those acceptable boundaries of sexual behavior? That is a question that I am just beginning to answer. One thing that helped me make sense out of the sexual revolution was a scholarly study called Make Love, Not War, the book by David Allyn that was the source of the first reading this morning. One of Allyn’s most interesting insights is that the sexual revolution can mean different things to different people. Some of the sexual revolutions that Allyn identifies include:

— wide availability of birth control pills, thus allowing women to have more control over whether or not to have children;
— a growing acceptance of premarital sex;
— a series of legal decisions that broadened First Amendment protections to include works previously defined as “obscene”;
— experiments in free sex, group sex, open marriages, and group marriages;
— the end of laws banning interracial marriages;
— growing acceptance of masturbation as a normal expression of sexuality;
— the increasing commercialization of sex and sexuality;
— the erosion of the “double standard” that said that men could sleep around but women were supposed to remain monogamous;
— homosexuality getting changed from something that was considered shameful into gay liberation and gay pride.

When I began to look for acceptable boundaries of sexual behavior, I realized that women experienced the sexual revolution differently than men did, as we heard in the first reading this morning. Improved birth control supposedly freed women to enjoy sex in new ways — yet, as often as not, women remained mired in traditional, repressive gender roles, providing sex, and doing the cleaning while the men were supposedly meditating.

So when I began to look for acceptable boundaries of sexual behavior, I realized that a good question to ask is this: How did the different aspects of the sexual revolution affect women and girls? Some aspects of the sexual revolution improved the lives of women (and really the lives of men too): access to birth control, the end of interracial marriage, acceptance of masturbation as normal, broadened First Amendment rights, equal rights for gays and lesbians, the end of the double standard. Other aspects of the sexual revolution did not improve the lives of women and girls. The ever-increasing commercialization of sex and sexuality has not made women’s lives better; instead, commercialization of sex has tended to dehumanize women, to turn women into commodities, into things. Free love and open relationships may have made some women’s lives better, but all too often free love and open relationships have been used as excuses by men to have sexual escapades. Back in the 1970’s, when they called it “wife-swapping,” the fact that it wasn’t called “husband-swapping” pretty much lets you know that it was the men who ran that show. Free love and open relationships have often proved to be harmful to the well-being of women and children in other ways: when free love and open relationships lead to the break up of stable homes, children can suffer emotionally, and women can suffer financially.

So it is that not every aspect of the sexual revolution has been good for women. And the insights of feminism and feminist theology can help us sort out which parts of the sexual revolution we might want to affirm, and which parts of the sexual revolution we may choose to be more critical of.

Sex is a beautiful, wonderful thing. We could say with equal correctness that sex and sexuality are gifts given from God; or say that sex and sexuality are a natural part of human experience and are affirmed in the most ancient religious traditions. However you choose to word it, sex and sexuality cannot be considered evil; they are good. When you read religious texts about sex, like the Song of Solomon, you also realize the incredible power in sex and sexuality.

It is a power that we have to continually learn to use for good: a power that can bring us closer to the ultimate truths of the universe. As is true with anything that powerful, it can also be used for evil. From the perspective of feminist theology, sex and sexuality are evil when they are used to control or harm another person. Thus, sex and sexuality are evil when they cause one person to ignore another person’s humanity; they are evil when they are used to hurt or injure another person.

Then we can move beyond a narrowly woman-centered theology to draw wider conclusions. When homosexuality is used as an excuse to beat up and shoot gay men, as happened last winter at Puzzles Lounge here in New Bedford, that’s an example of sexuality being used to evil ends. When marriage between people of different skin colors is illegal, that’s an example of sexuality being used to evil ends. When same sex marriage is made illegal, that’s an example of sexuality being used to evil ends. In each case, the sexual revolution has worked to end evil, has worked as a force of good in the world.

Drawing inspiration from parts of our religious tradition like the Song of Solomon, and drawing inspiration from our own positive sexual experiences, I’d like to be able to say that we have a sex-positive religion. We can affirm sex and sexuality as an essential part of our selves. We can affirm sex and sexuality when it makes us more fully human. We can go further, and affirm sex and sexuality that go so far as to provide divine experiences. Yet feminist theology also helps us to understand where we can draw firm boundaries, so that sex and sexuality remain positive, life-affirming experiences for all person, no matter what your gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation; no matter who you are.

So may it be.