Religion in society – Page 16 – Dan Harper

Working Stiffs

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

I have three Labor Day readings for you this morning.

The first reading is from an interview with John Taylor Gatto published last year in Working Stiff Review. Gatto, an award-winning teacher in New York City for 30 years, is best known for his book Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling in America. Gatto says:

“Although I went to college at Cornell and Columbia, my first real job which I put my heart and mind into as an independent young man was as a cab driver working the night shift from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., six days a week. I loved it. The money was good, the scenery and association in constant flux, the absence of supervision a spectacular bonus.

“Although all of my people on the Italian and German sides of the family aspired to white collar utopia, and many of them made it, the idioms, principles, and appreciations were, without any apology, working class for all of us. My own lifelong sympathies have remained with those who work; the harder the better….

“I was a cruising cabbie, always hunting for fares. Lots of miles on the odometer, as opposed to the guys who wait in lines. With hundreds, or thousands, of other cruisers in competition, the fat payoffs came from imagining unlikely places where a fare might appear, and then calculating which lane would give you the best chance to snag it from the others. So a real stretching of the mind was one lesson, as just rolling around was a guarantee of empty pockets. Another lesson was how to focus exclusively on the business. Stopping for lunch, dinner, coffee, conversations, and phone calls was the way run of the mill cabbies came to think that the work was dismal and low-paid. I pushed my cab steadily for 12 hours, took my pleasure from the passengers and the sights, and almost never stopped. When checking in at shift’s end, people would casually ask what I’d booked, and were frequently amazed. “How much? That’s impossible,” they’d say….”

The second reading comes from Walden by Henry David Thoreau, from the chapter titled “Economy”:

“…For myself I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one. The laborer’s day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other.

“In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely…. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.”

The third and final reading comes from the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of the sayings of Jesus that was first written down sometimes between the year 50 and the year 100.

“The [Father’s] imperial rule is like a woman who was carrying a [jar] full of meal. While she was walking along a distant road, the handle of the jar broke and the meal spilled behind her [along] the road. She didn’t know it; she hadn’t noticed a problem. When she reached her house, she put the jar down and discovered that it was empty.” (Thomas 97.1-4, Jesus Seminar translation)

SERMON — “Working Stiffs”

Here in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century, we seem to have two options in life. We can work hard, and take our pleasure in the work, or we can somehow put together a pile of money so that we may retire in comfort and devote our lives to pleasure. We are working stiffs, every one of us. Even if you run Microsoft and have more money than Warren Buffet, it seems that we are worthwhile only for the work we do and the money we have made, or good only for the work we once did and the money we once made.

In the first reading this morning, John Taylor Gatto talks about how much he loves work. He says: “My own lifelong sympathies have remained with those who work; the harder the better.” I feel the same way. I’m one of those people who doesn’t mind working sixty or more hours a week, even at the expense of family and friends; and generally speaking I like to hang out with others who like work as much as I do. However, it does sometimes occur to me that there might be more to life than work, or escape from work.

Whether or not you like work as much as I do, you too are part of this society where we are told that work, hard work, is the highest value in life. I suspect that it has occurred to you, too, that there might be more to life than work, or more to life than escape from work. On this Labor Day weekend, let us therefore take the time to reflect on work, and the importance of work to our larger lives.

I like the image John Taylor Gatto gives us of what it’s like to be a cabbie: cruising the streets twelve hours a day, seventy-two hours a week, using your imagination, stretching your mind, being the best cabbie possible. And I like the way he sets forth an alternative option. As a cabbie, you don’t have to push yourself that hard, you don’t have to use your imagination, and you don’t have to stretch your mind in order to work harder. You can, instead, use your imagination to figure out ways to escape from work: to stop for lunch, to stop for conversation, to stop work for phone calls, or other means of escape; to escape from work that could just as easily numb your mind as it could stretch your mind.

Later in that same interview, Gatto is asked what he believes is “the primary objective of compulsory education.” Gatto, an award-winning teacher who worked for thirty years providing compulsory education to young people, replies thus:

“The primary objective [of compulsory education] is to convert human raw material into human resources which can be employed efficiently by the managers of government and the economy. The original purposes of schooling were to make good people (the religious purpose), to make good citizens (the public purpose), and to make individuals their personal best (the private purpose). Throughout the 19th century, a new Fourth Purpose began to emerge, tested thoroughly in the military state of Prussia in northern Europe. The Fourth Purpose made the point of mass schooling to serve big business and big government by extending childhood, replacing thinking with drill and memorization, while fashioning incomplete people unable to protect themselves from exhortation, advertising, and other forms of indirect command. In this fashion, poor Prussia with a small population became one of the great powers of the earth. Its new schooling method was imitated far and wide, from Japan to the United States.”

So says John Taylor Gatto. I’m not sure I fully accept his historical analysis. It’s too much to blame poor schooling solely on Prussian innovations. For example, in 1837, Henry David Thoreau got a job as a public school teacher in the town of Concord, Massachusetts. It was a working class school, for the town’s few elite students generally attended the private Concord Academy.

After two weeks, Nehemiah Ball, one of the members of the school committee, stopped in to observe Thoreau’s teaching. Mr. Ball did not like the fact that Thoreau used no corporal punishment, that is, he did not beat the students as part of his pedagogical technique. Mr. Ball admonished Thoreau that he had better beat the students to maintain proper discipline. Thoreau randomly beat three or four students, handed in his resignation, and went off to start his own school based on sounder educational principles. We now know, as did Thoreau, that beating students is not necessary for good education. Beating students does not serve to teach them how to be a good person, or how to be a good citizen in a democratic society, or how to be their personal best; it only serves to teach them how to submit to authority. In New England of 1837, increasing industrialization meant an increasing need for factory workers; factory workers don’t need initiative of their own, so teaching them to submit to authority was a lesson that some people may have wanted to teach those working class students.

But Thoreau came to believe that there was that of evil in working at any job, not just working class jobs. This is different from saying that he thought there was evil in hard work, for Thoreau worked hard. But he worked hard at what he thought was important, not at what someone else thought was important. He worked hard at reading the classical Greek authors and the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita and the Analects; he worked hard at writing, he worked hard in his father’s pencil factory, and at his own business of land surveying. But he also wrote: “I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely…. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.”

Thoreau’s statement remains true today, but only in part. If you’re a white man from a middle class or upper class background, it isn’t necessary to earn your living by the sweat of your brow. If you’re a white woman, the story is a little different — you’ll have to sweat a little harder, because a man doing the same work will earn a third more money than you do. That is, if you even get the job; in many lines of work, it remains difficult for women to get a job at all. A news story this week reported that even though half of all graduates from law schools are now women, far less than half of the law clerks for Supreme Court justices (jobs that go to recent graduates) are women. Many jobs are not yet fully open to women.

And what if you are not white — it is even more difficult for someone who is not white to get a job. Thoreau extols the virtues of becoming a day laborer. It’s fine to be a day laborer when, like Thoreau, you are a white man who has lived your whole life in a stable community where you have lots of connections and find it easy to work at day labor jobs you choose, when you choose to work. It is a far different thing to be a person of color and a day laborer in one of the huge and anonymous cities of the early 21st century, standing on the street beside Home Depot waiting for someone, anyone, to come by and hire you for a few hours at an hourly rate that might not even be enough to buy your food and clothes and pay your rent.

Thoreau is probably on the right track in his attempt to understand what it means to work, and what role work should play in our lives. But I don’t think he really understands what it means to be poor. Not that I myself do. To really understand what it means to be poor, I always find it helpful to turn to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus’s teachings about the poor do not make us comfortable. Indeed, he taught that the poor, those who are truly destitute, are more likely to get into heaven than middle class or working class people; that is to say, a beggar is more likely to get into heaven than a working stiff; a homeless person is more likely to get into heaven than those of us who can afford to pay for a roof over our heads.

This teaching of Jesus gets even more complicated for us Unitarian Universalists. Most Unitarian Universalists believe that heaven isn’t just some distant place that you get to go to after you die; while it may be that for some of us, we are most likely to believe that the kingdom of heaven is something that is being established right here and now on earth, during our lifetimes. Some scholars translate “kingdom of heaven” as “God’s imperial rule”; thus heaven is the state of recognizing God’s rule over human beings. Some of us Unitarian Universalists might put it that way, or we might say: heaven is the state of recognizing that that which is good and true and real should rule our lives, rather than that which is false and evil and unreal.

However you put it, if we are to believe that heaven is supposed to be here and now, what are we to make of Jesus’s teaching that it is easier for the poor to get to heaven than it is for working stiffs to get to heaven? Surely Jesus does not mean to imply that there is anything saintly or virtuous about not having a roof over your head, not having enough to eat.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus tells a little parable that might help us understand what he means. Now remember, the Gospel of Thomas was one of the gospels that was rejected by the early Christian church; it is not one of the four generally accepted canonical gospels. Fundamentalist Christians and more orthodox Christians do not accept the Gospel of Thomas as giving the genuine teachings of Jesus. But most serious scholars, and many religious liberals, accept the Gospel of Thomas as being just as genuine as the other four gospels. I particularly like the Gospel of Thomas because I find in it parables and sayings that don’t occur in the rest of the Bible; these parables and sayings of Jesus haven’t been explained over and over again by generation upon generation of church-goers. We can hear them today, and they can sound just as shocking and discomforting as when Jesus first said them nearly two thousand years ago.

So it is with the third reading this morning. Jesus said: “[God’s] imperial rule” — that is, heaven — “is like a woman who was carrying a [jar] full of meal.” This jar would likely have been a large pottery vessel made to carry flour, or meal, in. “While she was walking along a distant road, the handle of the jar broke and the meal spilled behind her [along] the road. She didn’t know it; she hadn’t noticed a problem. When she reached her house, she put the jar down and discovered that it was empty.”

I can easily imagine just such a thing happening: you’re walking along carrying some flour back from the mill so you can bake bread. You’re carrying it in a big pottery vessel, which you sling over your shoulder using a rope or strap. This pottery vessel is heavy of its own accord, so when the handle of the vessel breaks off, and it tips so that the flour gradually trickles out as you’re walking, you don’t notice it. Then when you get home, after all that work, you find that you’ve got nothing left in the jar, you just have an empty, broken jar. But how on earth is that like God’s imperial rule? –how is that like heaven?

The only way I can make sense out of this parable of Jesus is by remembering that the poor and the homeless are more likely to get into heaven than I am. This parable of Jesus seems to imply that working hard is ultimately unimportant. I suspect the woman in the parable was a hard worker: women in that time and place didn’t have much of a choice, they had to work hard, taking care of children, cooking, cleaning, with probably very little leisure. Yet here Jesus is telling us that heaven occurs when the all the results of your hard work dribble away when you’re not even noticing; the kingdom of God will come to this earth when what you have worked and striven for has dribbled away.

In this sense, maybe Henry Thoreau is correct when he tells us that men and women don’t need to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows. And for all that John Taylor Gatto loves to work, for all that he was willing to push himself for twelve hours a day in a taxicab, he says that the highest priority for education should be to make good citizens (the public purpose of education), to make individuals their personal best (the private purpose), and to make good people (the religious purpose). If the kingdom of God is here and now on earth, if you are to be a part of that kingdom of God, it does not matter whether you are homeless; what matters is that you are, somehow, a good person.

I believe that Jesus is warning us that hard work does not, in and of itself, make us into good people. I believe he is telling us that hard work can indeed can get in the way of being a good person. It can get in the way if we let the hard work become an end in itself, if we let the hard work dominate who we are as persons. We are not here on this good earth simply in order to work; we are here to search after truth and goodness; if work gets in the way of that search, we will not know the heaven that is here on earth.

I began by saying that here in the United States today, we seem to have two options in life: work hard and take our pleasure in the work, or work hard in order to get enough money to retire in comfort and devote our lives to pleasure. But Jesus’s ancient teachings challenge us to remember that work is all there is to life. Jesus’s words remind us that we have not yet created that kingdom of God here on earth, the kingdom he spoke of where everyone is able to labor for her or his own needs while contributing to the greater good, where no one is out of work or homeless and everyone is treated fairly and decently. We have not yet accomplished this greater work of humanity. May we continually challenge ourselves to work towards that great end.

Dads to the rescue

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper. 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 comes from the Torah, the book of Genesis, chapter 22, verses 1-8:

‘After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.” Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So the two of them walked on together.’

The second reading is an excerpt from a long poem titled “Seed Catalog” by poet Robert Kroetsch:

My father was mad at the badger: the badger was digging holes in the potato patch, threatening man and beast with broken limbs (I quote). My father took the double-barreled shotgun out into the potato patch and waited.

Every time the badger stood up, it looked like a little man, come out of the ground. Why, my father asked himself — Why would so fine a fellow live below the ground? Just for the cool of the roots? The solace of dark tunnels? The blood of gophers?

My father couldn’t shoot the badger. He uncocked the shotgun, came back into the house in time for breakfast. The badger dug another hole. My father got mad again. They carried on like that all summer.

Love is an amplification
by doing/ over and over.

Love is a standing up
to the loaded gun.

Love is a burrowing.

One morning my father actually shot at the badger. He killed a magpie that was pecking away at a horse turd about fifty feet beyond and to the right of the spot where the badger had been standing.

A week later my father told the story again. In that version he intended to hit the magpie. Magpies, he explained, are a nuisance. They eat robin’s eggs. They’re harder to kill than snakes, jumping around the way they do, nothing but feathers.

Just call me sure-shot,
my father added.

SERMON — “Dads to the Rescue”

Our Western cultural tradition has at least two ways of talking about fathers, and these two ways are represented by our two readings this morning. One way of talking about fathers is dramatic, big, astounding, and — a little bit crazy. The other way of talking about fathers is muted, down-to-earth, not very exciting, and a lot more realistic. Both these views of fathers have religious implications, but I hope to show that for our religious community, the second way of talking about fathers is probably going to be more productive for us.

Our Western religious traditions paint an ambiguous picture of fatherhood. Within the Christian tradition, Jesus of Nazareth tells us to think of God as an ideal father, fair and loving; but Jesus also tells his followers to abandon their human fathers to follow only their heavenly father. Within the pagan traditions as I have experienced them, men and maleness and fathers are respected, but the emphasis has been on the Goddess and motherhood, and sometimes fatherhood is pushed off to the side. In our own congregation, we see a higher attendance on the Sunday of Mother’s Day than we do on the Sunday of Father’s Day. Not that anyone is bad-mouthing fathers in any of these situations — but it does seem to me that we don’t quite know what to make of fathers; or what to make of men when you come right down to it.

These ambiguous feelings towards fathers get summed up in the rather peculiar story of the time when God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. What a dramatic story it is!– Abraham has Isaac all ready to kill on the scrificial altar, and at the last minute God steps in and says to Abaraham, No you don’t really have to kill your son, this was just a test of your loyalty to me, and you passed the test. From a modern point of view, of course our first response to God’s request is something along these lines: You say you want Abraham to sacrifice his son, but then it’s just a loyalty test? –what, are you crazy?! And then we stop ourselves and realize that perhaps Abraham felt that his relationship to God was like a father-son relationship, and what do you do when your father asks you to do something crazy? Loyalty to something big and abstract can be tricky indeed.

I’m afraid, however, that that takes me right back to my initial reaction: You want Abraham to sacrifice his son? –God, are you crazy?! Yet somehow I do admire Abraham for upholding his loyalty to God, there’s a little piece of me that admires Abraham for having the confidence in his God to know that somehow things will turn out all right. But then I think, How can God ask this of Abraham? –how can God ask this man to kill his son? Why does God need to test his children in this way?

If you want to engage in pop psychology, perhaps you could say that this story points up just how complicated the relationships between fathers and their children can be. It may be that this story, like so many of the old, old myths that have come down to us, carries in it a grain of truth; perhaps the grain of an uncomfortable truth: parents do test their children; parents are not as simple as the sentiments on greeting cards.

But there’s another way of perceiving fathers that’s not so flashy, yet it really is just as pervasive in Western culture. This other way of perceiving fathers is low-key, down-to-earth, and probably closer to reality. We can see this second way of perceiving fathers at work in the second reading, the poem about the father and the badger.

The poem starts off with a kind of cliche: father heading off to kill a marauding animal. But then he can’t stand to kill the badger. Finally, he shoots at the badger, but he still can’t stand to kill it, so he almost deliberately misses, and to his surprise he kills a magpie. In the end, though, he has to tell the story so that he meant to kill the magpie — in the end, it seems as though the father in the poem has to live up to what men in our culture are supposed to do and be.

Actually, I prefer to think that the father in the poem knows perfectly well what he’s done. He felt he should shoot at the badger, but he didn’t want to hit the badger; in that sense, his aim was perfect, perfect because he missed the badger. Now by chance, he happened to hit a magpie, but that doesn’t make his aim any less perfect, so when he says, “Just call me sure-shot,” he’s only telling the truth.

And this portrait of a father is far closer to reality;– at least far closer to the real world as I’ve experienced it. Fathers, like all human beings, are complex, fallible, wonderful beings, mixtures of good and less-good motivations, complex mixtures of highest ideals and random happenings. Waht we see in this anecdote is that the poet’s father influences him so very strongly, strongly enough that he writes a poem about it, through a series of small actions. For, as the poet says, “Love is an amplification/ by doing over and over.”

There is a theological point in all this. But it’s not the stereotypical kind of theological point. We get no insights into deep metaphysics; we get no revelations into the ultimate nature of God or the universe; we do not receive ultimate instruction in the meaning of life. Rather, this raises a theological point in my favorite area of theology, ecclesiology. Ecclesiology is the study of how congregations work in real life, and also of the ideals to which congregations should aspire. I happen to be particularly fascinated by ecclesiology because it is a study of how human beings can be in practical community together while trying to uphold our highest ideals; and therefore I believe ecclesiology has implications for the wider society, as we try to figure out how to live out our highest ideals without making an utter mess out of life.

So let’s get back to fathers, and from there we’ll see how fathers fit into ecclesiology.

Fathers can have a huge influence in the lives of their children. Indeed, any man, even men like me without any children of my own, can have an influence in the lives of the young people in their immediately surrounding community. The real problem is that too many men choose not to influence the lives of young people. I see this in congregational life all too often: usually, only a few men step forward to teach Sunday school. One of the things I like about our congregation is that half our Sunday school teachers this year were men.

One of the primary purposes of human life is to raise up the next generation. While parents have special responsibilities, we’re all charged with that task. In our Western culture, women have been pretty good at nurturing young people; but it does seem to me that we men don’t have such a well-defined role. Maybe it’s the influence of stories like God and Abraham and Isaac — who wants to be that kind of father-figure? I’d rather be like the father who doesn’t shoot at the badger, even if I wish he didn’t brag about killing the magpie.

Recently I’ve been looking around, and it seems to me that there are large numbers of young men who are adrift in the world, young men in their teens and early twenties. They’re just floating along, nobody has taught them how to use a compass, in fact nobody has so much as given them a compass, so they’re directionless; so they live their lives with no other purpose than playing video games, or getting drunk, or some other essentially pointless task. Some of these young men founder: they join gangs and get killed, or they wind up killing someone else; or they drift from job to job and never really get anywhere. If these young men were literally adrift — if they were literally drifting in small boats on the ocean — the Coast Guard would come out and rescue them. But no one is coming to rescue these young men.

I don’t know about the other men here this morning, but I know I did my share of drifting when I was in my teens. But mostly, I was fortunate in having a father and lots of other men around me who took me seriously, and helped give me direction. Mostly, they helped give me direction by showing me how to work. You may want to tell me that there are better ways to give a young man direction than by just showing him how to work, and you’re probably right; but at least knowing how to work kept me from sliding into too many video games, or too much drink, or something equally pointless and time-wasting, like joining a gang.

I’d like to think it would be better if my religion could have given me some direction, but just as Western religion is a little too ambiguous on what it means to be a father, it’s a little too ambiguous on what it means to be a man. Jesus is a fine role model in a limited way, but nothing in our religious tradition religion tells us whether or not Jesus had children, and if he did what kind of father he was; nothing in our religious tradition tells us what Jesus was like when he was working in his father’s carpentry shop, whether he was good with the tools or not; nothing in our religious tradition tells us if Jesus was married, and if he was what kind of marriage he had and how he treated his spouse. It’s very fine that we are told how Jesus preached and taught; but preaching and teaching about religion is the center of most men’s lives. Sure, we are concerned about the ultimate questions in life, and we appreciate Jesus’s responses to those questions. But as a man, I would feel better about Western religion if Jesus could be a role model for the concerns that I face every day.

I do a little better with Moses, although his marriage doesn’t seem to have been anything particularly good. Moses as a role model is more helpful to me, on a day-to-day basis, than Jesus. But even Moses isn’t quite good enough. I look for good male role models, and I just don’t seem to find them in the religious scriptures of our Western tradition.

Where I have found good male role models has been in local congregations. One of the things I liked about going to church when I was in my teens was that there were plenty of men who took me seriously. I remember lots of men who would speak to me, not as an equal, maybe, but as someone worthy of respect; for example, when we were ushering together, one man once told me why he still thought of himself as a Universalist, fifteen years after the merger with the Unitarians; that he would talk to me about serious topics, treating me as full human being, meant a lot to me. Other men talked to me about their careers, even about their disappointments. And the men at church held me to high standards, mostly by the examples they set with their own lives. By taking me seriously, they showed me that I too could follow their example and become a man who lived a life worth living, that I could accomplish something, that I could learn the self-control to become one of them.

Our religious scriptures tend towards the dramatic exciting stories that don’t seem to apply to daily life; but our congregations can be places where men can learn practical living from each other by example. And one of the things we can learn from each other, here in our congregations, is how to reach out to and mentor younger men out in the wider world: fathers with young sons can learn this from older men who have been through it already; and the rest of us can learn how to reach out to young men in the workplace or in the community, to nephews and other relations.

Our congregation should be a place where we figure out how to lives the best life possible, where we figure out how to become the best human beings we can become. Our own congregation is, in large part, that kind of place. And we have to figure out how to reach out to each other; how to extend that helping hand to someone else if that’s called for; or how to be a role model, when that’s called for. That’s true for all of us, men and women, of all ages. Our congregation is supposed to be a place where you can come if you’re feeling adrift, and where someone will at least hand you a metaphorical compass so you know what direction you’re headed in.

And I want to propose this as a good religious model for fatherhood: that a father is someone who can help us find direction when we’re feeling a little adrift. In extreme cases, a father can be like the Coast Guard coming in to rescue someone from a life raft after the ship went down, to rescue and get that person back to shore.

I also want to suggest that father-figures don’t have to be your actual father. As we know from the story of Abraham and Isaac, sometimes fathers can do some pretty stupid things. Sometimes you need a father-figure to rescue you from your actual father. That’s an extreme situation, but I also want to suggest that it doesn’t hurt for young men to have more than one father-figure in their lives. All fathers are going to be limited, fallible human beings, just like the father in the poem who misses the badger and hits the magpie, and later claims he meant to hit the magpie when we know he meant no such thing. So it’s not a bad idea for young men to have lots of men whom they can turn to if need be. We also know from the example of the Coast Guard that when they take on a rescue at sea, they don’t send in just one person, they send in a rescue team. Rather than just having one dad come to the rescue, we want to have multiple dads who are able to come to the rescue, if need be.

I keep telling you why this congregation is important, and here I am, giving you another reason why we need to have a strong, healthy congregation. But I feel an especial urgency about this reason. Young people are not treated well by our culture; too many young people lack meaning and direction in their lives; too many young people are allowed to go adrift. I can see this happening around me; and at the same time, I know from my own observation and from sociological studies that congregations like ours are quite good at providing support and direction for young people. Thus, there is a moral urgency to this task of keeping our congregation strong and healthy, so that we can support young people. We can make a difference in this area by committing ourselves to a steady course of small actions; for, as the poet says, “Love is an amplification/ by doing over and over.”

So this is yet another sermon where I exhort you to live up to our highest religious ideals; to live up, not to the dramatic stories in religious scriptures, but to live up to the ideals of a supportive, mentoring community. But of all the sermons I’ve preached this year, I think perhaps I feel most strongly about this topic: we need to look after our children and teens and young adults; in extreme instances, we need to be in a position to rescue young people who are adrift. And as this is my last sermon for you until August, that means you get to chew on this topic all summer long….

Remembering at Memorial Day

Readings

The first reading this morning is a poem by the English poet Seigfried Sassoon, who fought in the trenches in the First World War. The poem is titled, “Suicide in the Trenches”:

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of run,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again….

The second reading was a poem by Elizabeth Bishop titled “One Art.” Unfortunately, copyright laws do not permit us to reproduce complete poems that are still protected under copyright.

SERMON — “Remembering”

Religions are pretty good at remembering. You might say that the central act of religion is to keep memories alive. In the Western tradition, Christianity has, for the past two thousand years, managed to keep the memory of a certain rabbi from Nazareth named Jesus; and for perhaps three thousand years Judaism has managed to keep alive the memory of the exodus from Egypt, when Moses led his people out of bondage and into the Promised Land. In Persia, the Parsees or Zoroastrians have kept alive the memory of the prophet Zarathustra for three thousand years. In India and the Far East, Buddhists have kept alive the memory of Siddhartha Gotama for some twenty-five hundred years. So religions are adept at keeping ancient memories alive.

Religions are also good at helping us keep more recent memories alive. I don’t mean just remembering our own narrow religious tradition, or the ways we remember the tiny little histories of our local congregations. I’m thinking more of the ways in which our religious communities help us to remember our own lives; to remember what is past and done but still lives on in our hearts.

We keep alive the memories of people whom we loved, whom we still love, but who are now dead; or who have otherwise passed out of our lives. I will say from my own experience that such memories are rarely without pain: it is only human to feel pain when you remember someone who has died. Our religious communities can give us a way to deal with that pain, perhaps even to make sense out of that pain. Most obviously, when someone dies, you hold a memorial service for that person. I know when my mother died several years ago, her memorial service helped me to deal with the pain and the grief. Not that such a religious service lessens the pain and the grief, but we human beings seem to welcome such ritual actions. Belonging to a religious community doesn’t necessarily lessen the pain and the grief either. But there is something about being part of a group of people who are willing to talk about death and pain and loss, especially where some or most of the people in that group have gone through their own pain and grief and loss. Being part of such a group helps you make sense out of death; not because the tenets of that religious community can adequately explain death; but because you are with a group of people who are willing to face death together.

One result of all this is that the buildings which house religious communities can wind up holding lots of memories. This church building in which we sit this morning has seen four memorial services in the past year, and hundreds of others in the 168 years during which it has stood here. These walls hold so many memories. In fact, these walls quite literally hold memories: the Tiffany mosaic behind me was given in 1911 as a memorial to Judge and Mrs. Oliver Prescott, by their three children, Oliver Prescott, Jr., Mrs. Frederick Stetson and Miss Mary R. Prescott. On the back wall of this room is a memorial, where families have put up plaques with the names of members and friends of this church who have died. We are literally and metaphorically the repository of memories; the memories of the generations.

I cannot help but add that one of the best reasons for supporting this church is to keep it as a repository for such memories. Obviously, a church building is far more than a repository of memories; it is first and foremost a home for a living community. But the members of that living community have their memories, and there is almost nowhere else in our society where we have a physical space where we can remember; the only other place I can think of would be cemeteries, but cemeteries lack the vitality that churches get from also housing a living community. In churches memories can remain as living memories; churches look backwards in memory, but also forwards to the next generations; and of course churches remain above concerned with the present.

I’ll say something else about this church. Here in this place, we make an effort to come face-to-face with the truth, even if that truth is less than comfortable. When it comes to memories, we remember, yes; but we don’t feel we have to sugar-coat our memories. Thus when we look back at our Christian heritage, we remember what is good about that heritage; but we also try to look unflinchingly on what it less than good about that heritage; we are willing to acknowledge that our Christian heritage has some unsavory episodes in its long history. This same attitude guides us when we look back at the past of our own church: we remember what is good about our church’s past, but we acknowledge that both good and bad things have happened here. And if you choose to do so, this church will support you if you choose to apply this same attitude when you look back at your own past: because we know that no human being is wholly good, we know that it’s acceptable to remember both the good and the bad things about the dead. In our faith tradition, we try to remain open to the whole truth of the world around us.

By remaining open in this way to the whole of truth, by accepting the wholeness of our memories, we are performing something of a counter-cultural act. One of the things I’ve noticed is that the society around us sometimes tries to mold the past into a more comfortable image. I see this tendency in people’s personal lives; when, for example, people blame a personal weakness on their parents instead of taking personal responsibility for their own actions. Or when, for example, rather than apologizing and saying “I’m sorry,” we see people hiding behind lawyers and law suits. We see this tendency at a national level as well; when, for example, any critical statement about United States foreign policy in Iraq and the Middle East is said to be unpatriotic and even treasonous. And we see this in our own religious institutions; when, for example, people refuse to acknowledge past problems and misdeeds in religious institutions, preferring instead to remain silent or to deny that anything bad ever happens in a church.

Our society seems to encourage an attitude of refusing to accept responsiblity for oneself; and I see this in part as a failure of memory. When I carefully search my own memory of my own actions, I find many examples of times when I was less than a good person; and I find that the society around me offers me too many ways to excuse myself. When I look back at the history of my beloved Unitarian Universalist religion, I find instances of racially segregated churches, instances of sexism, instances of misconduct on the part of ministers, and — my personal pet peeve — instances of bias on the basis of socio-economic status. And when I look back at the history of my country, a country in which I have pride, a country which I love, I find less-than-savory episodes: I could start with killing native Americans, work my way up through the slavery of Africans, and so on up to the present day. All these things represent in part a failure of memory: if you forget that 95% of the Indians in New England died within 20 years of the arrival of European settlers, you can forget about any possible problem.

I don’t mean to imply that we each have to take all the burdens of the world on our shoulders; nor do I mean to imply that any one person has to bear the full burden of responsibility for, let us say, slavery. Nor am I saying that I want you to go out and remember only the worst things about yourself, or to remember only the worst things about someone you love who is now dead. But what I am saying is that we need to remember as honestly as we possibly can.

The first reading this morning gives an example of what I mean. The poet Siegfried Sassoon served with the English military in the trench warfare in the First World War, and he writes of a young soldier who, while initially carefree, gets worn down by the trench warfare and commits suicide. Sassoon writes: “He put a bullet through his brain. / No one spoke of him again.” That, my friends, is a failure of memory.

Which brings us to our second reading, the poem by Elizabeth Bishop, which says:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, faster:
places, names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

None of these will bring disaster. And what Elizabeth Bishop is telling us is quite simple: you can’t cling tightly to everything. Indeed, in this life of ours, we had better master the art of losing, for there is much to lose, as Elizabeth Bishop says at the end of the poem:

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Say it!) like disaster.

The art of remembering is an art of holding on; and it has to be coupled with the art of losing, or the art of letting go. We need them both. We need to be able to hold on to memories; but at times in our lives, we need to be able to let go again.

There is a difference between the failure of memory, of which I spoke a moment ago, and the art of letting go. The failure of memory in the way I’m talking about it is really a refusal to remember things correctly; it’s an attempt to create a past that never was.

The trick is to learn how to balance the art of remembering, of holding on; over against the art of losing, or of letting go. You can watch this happen inside yourself when someone you love dies. Elizabeth Bishop tells us that even when you lose someone you love, “the art of losing’s not to hard to master”; for when someone you love dies, you may feel at first as if you can’t possibly let go, and yet somehow you do, for you don’t really have a choice. And when you love is dying, or has just died, it surely does feel like disaster. And then you have to be careful to find the right balance: by not succumbing to that sense of disaster on the one hand, and by continuing to remember on the other hand.

I started out by saying that religions are pretty good at remembering, and I said that perhaps the central act of religion is keeping memory alive. A religious community gives each person in that community a context in which to hold memories; and a healthy religious community gives each person in that community assistance in letting go of memories when the time is right. To say this is merely to affirm a great human truth. When we human beings lose some person, or even some thing like an ideal or a place, when we lose that which we care for deeply, we are struck with grief. Yet we manage to move on, we manage to keep on living; and that means that some measure of grief has to slip away. Being part of a religious community is a way to help that very human process move forward in its course; because a religious community has seen this process happen over and over again, always with starkly individual differences, but always in the same grand human pattern.

And a religious community can help us keep that balance between holding on and letting go. The reason we want to keep that balance is so that we can move forward in our lives — so that we can move forward together in our communal life as a church, as a community, and a country. We don’t want to get stuck. When someone you love dies, it’s easy to get stuck in grieving; and while perhaps we never stop grieving, we must also find a way to live out our lives, to live out what was best in the life of whomever it was who died. I’d say that’s the truest expression of grief.

So, too we must keep the balance between remembering, and letting go; so that we might move forward in our communal life, in our political life. On Memorial Day, we remember all those who died in military service of our great country; we remember them, and we recall the ideals they fought and died for. And by remembering, we can commit ourselves to work for the highest of those ideals — some of the old ideals may no longer apply in today’s world, and those we can let go of — but we remember the highest ideals.

In the Unitarian Universalist church of my childhood, I learned early on what those highest ideals were, and I learned them as religious ideals. Those ideals were, and are:– the ideal of humankind learning to live together as one interconnected, interdependent community;– the ideal of each and every human being having a voice in how he or she is governed;– the ideal of a world where a person’s essential humanity means more than their race or creed or national origin.

Our religion exists in part to keep those highest ideals of humanity alive. Our liberal faith has long upheld the ideal of democratic process, and the ideal that all persons are important and of worth, and most importantly the ideal that each and every human being is worthy of respect, and of love. We have not always lived up to our ideals, both in our own religious community, and in our lives in the wider world. But we hold on to those ideals, and we remain open to new and deeper understandings of those ideals. And on this Memorial Day, we commit ourselves once again to a world where all persons shall be known as our brothers and sisters.

May it be so.