Religion in society – Page 3 – Dan Harper

The Great Man Fallacy

Sermon copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. Once again this week, lots of typos and errors in the text, which I didn’t have time to correct.

Readings

The first reading was from the essay “Where Is the Love?” by the poet June Jordan.

“…Virtue is not to be discovered in the conduct of the strong vis-a-vis the powerful, but rather it is to be found in our behavior and policies affecting those who are different, those who are weaker, or smaller than we. How do the strong, the powerful, treat children? How do we treat the aged among us? How do the strong and the powerful treat so-called minority members of the body politic? How do the powerful regard women? How do they treat us?

“Easily you can see that, according to this criterion, the overwhelming reality of power and government and tradition is evil, is diseased, is illegitimate, and deserves nothing from us — no loyalty, no accommodation, no patience, no understanding — except a clear-minded resolve to utterly change this total situation and, thereby, to change our own destiny.”

The second reading was from the Christian Scriptures, the Good News of Mark, chapter 9, verses 33-35. This translation is from “The Five Gospels,” translated by Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar.

“When [Jesus] got home, he started questioning [his followers,] ‘What were you arguing about [while we were] on the road?’ They fell completely silent, because on the road they had been bickering about who was greatest. He sat down and called the twelve and said to them, ‘If anyone wants to be “number one,” that person has to be last of all and servant of all.’”

The third and final reading was from the Talmud, Pirkei Avot 6:5, translated by Rabbi Shraga Silverstein.

“Do not seek greatness for yourself, and do not lust for honor. More than your learning, do! And do not lust for the table of princes. For your table is greater than theirs, and your crown is greater than theirs, and your Master is trusted to pay you the wage of your work.”

Sermon: “The Great Man Fallacy”

We’re in the middle of a presidential election year, and the Myth of the Great Man dominates our understanding of leadership. I like to define the “The Myth of the Great Man” as the belief that the only way you can have an effective nation, or an effective organization, is if you have a Great Man (can you hear the capital letters?) in the top leadership slot. The Myth of the Great Man explains why Americans place so much emphasis on the election of the U.S. president and congresspeople, yet mostly ignore the role of staffers and career bureaucrats and the other people who do most of the actual work of writing and enforcing our laws. The Myth of the Great Man also explains why the chief executive officers of American companies get paid 671 times more than the average worker, because those companies believe they need to pay big bucks to attract a Great Man as CEO.

I believe that the Myth of the Great Man is just a myth. Actually, calling this a “myth”is a slander to real myths. After all, a myth is a form of truth, whereas this is nothing but a fallacy. Let’s be honest and call it the Great Man Fallacy.

I don’t know where the Great Man Fallacy came from. But I do know that Jesus of Nazareth is commonly misinterpreted as being one of those Great Man leaders. This means there’s a religious dimension to the Great Man Fallacy, one which even infects Unitarian Universalism. I believe the Great Man Fallacy gets in the way of our communal religious life. More insidiously, it also gets in the way of our personal spiritual lives. That’s why I wanted to talk with you about the Great Man Fallacy this morning.

The Christian scriptures tell us that Jesus of Nazareth did not believe in the Great Man Fallacy of leadership. In several places in the Christian scriptures, Jesus makes it quite clear that there is only one being who is great, and that one being is God. Even though many people now believe that Jesus is God, Jesus himself explicitly told his followers that all of his virtues come from God the parent, not from himself. Thus Jesus says (in the book of Mark, chapter 10, verse 18), “Why do you call me good?… No one is good except God alone.” [NRSV]

Not only that, but Jesus quite clearly tells his followers that none of them is any better than any of the others. We heard this in the second reading. The followers of Jesus were bickering among themselves about which one was the greatest. Jesus stopped them by saying that if anyone wants to be the greatest, that person must be the last and least, and the servant of all the others. As I understand this, Jesus’s reasoning is pretty straightforward: If you try to be a leader by being the greatest, you’re usurping the rights and responsibilities of God.

Over time, the Western Christian tradition forgot this part of Jesus’s teachings, as it increasingly relied on a hierarchy where certain men were considered greater than all other men and women. Yet anyone who looked closely at the Christian scriptures could still see that Jesus didn’t have a hierarchical understanding of leadership. Instead, Jesus clearly had an egalitarian understanding of leadership.

In some ways, the egalitarian understanding of leadership continued in the West, not in Christianity, but in rabbinic Judaism. The Talmud makes it clear that the rabbis could, and did, disagree with one other; authoritarian hierarchy is absent. For example, when a man went to Rabbi Shamai and asked to be taught the entire Torah while standing on one foot, Rabbi Shamai pushed him away, telling him the Torah was not something you learned in five minutes. The man went to see Rabbi Hillel, who disagreed and said the whole Torah could be summed up in the sentence, “What is hateful to you, don’t do that to someone else,” which you could repeat while standing on one foot. Rabbi Hillel then said everything else in the Torah is there to explain that one simple law, which requires a lifetime of study, so maybe the two rabbis agreed more than they disagreed. Nevertheless, the rabbis could, and did, disagree. The Talmud carefullygives the opinions of different rabbis, rather than a single answer which you’re supposed to believe is the truth. This is a more egalitarian understanding of leadership.

Obviously I’m oversimplifying things. Western Christianity has also had ongoing arguments and debates. But Christianity is prone to accepting the pronouncements of those in authority as the Gospel truth. If the minister or the bishop or someone in authority says it, then it’s less likely that someone else is going to argue with it. And this has become the norm throughout Western culture. Just as Western Christians are prone to accepting the pronouncements of their leaders without question, so too in the secular West we are prone to accepting the pronouncements of our leaders without questioning them as much as we should. This is how religion supports the Great Man Fallacy. The West was shaped by Western Christianity hierarchy, and now we actually believe that those who have the most prominent positions in society, or the most money, or the most followers — these are the people who are ordained by God to be the real leaders.

You can see how this works in the corporate world. Steve Jobs didn’t consider himself to be the last of all and the servant of all the other workers at Apple; Steve Jobs was the boss man, he was the most important, he told his minions what to do. And we’re seeing this happen with increasing frequency in the political world, as we’re increasingly asked to accept the authority of leading politicians without question.

But the great Man Fallacy also plays out here in our own congregation. The Great Man Fallacy even plays out in our own personal spiritual lives. Let me explain.

We know that according to the First Parish bylaws, and according to centuries of Unitarian Universalist tradition, it is the members of the congregation who are actually in charge at First Parish. The members of First Parish have the power to call a minister, and the members of the congregation can dismiss any minister should that minister not live up to the expectations of the members. (That happened here in 1796, when this congregation dismissed Josiah Crocker Shaw when he committed adultery.) At First Parish, the members are the ultimate authority.

However, as the current minister, I can tell you that once a minister is called, there seems to be a slight tendency for the members to begin deferring to the the minister. I’ve had people say to me, “Well, you’re the leader, what do you think?” Actually, I’m not the leader; it’s more correct to say I’m one of the leaders. I’m happy to give my opinion — if I have an opinion on the topic at hand — but I don’t expect my opinion to be taken as the Gospel truth. There are plenty of people here with more leadership experience, and who know far more than I do about many things. I may have my opinions about how the worship service should go, but I defer to the gathered wisdom of the Music and Worship Committee. I may have my opinions about the religious education of our children, but really members of the Religious Education Committee (most of whom are parents) and our Director of Religious Education (who has a doctorate degree in developmental psychology) are far better informed on the subject than I am. I may have my opinions about governance, but the members of the Parish Committee have much greater experience with governing this congregation than I ever will, and so while I might sometimes disagree with them, I am also happy to defer to theme when they know better than I.

The goal of a minister, or any leader, in a Unitarian Universalist congregation is not to be the Great Man, is not to be the Big Boss. Leaders of Unitarian Universalist congregations should not try to be Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, or Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Individual leaders are not the Deciders, because ultimately the Annual Meeting decides. The buck doesn’t stop with individual leaders, because ultimately the buck stops with the members.

It turns out this is true beyond Unitarian Universalist congregations. Leadership actually comes from all the people in an organization. Leadership theorist Phillip Rost points out that you can’t have good leadership unless you also have good followership. Because they’re in a mutual influence relationship, leaders and followers are constantly changing positions. Sometimes you’re a leader, sometimes you’re a follower. There’s no one Great Man in charge, because leadership is a collaborative process. Leadership involves everyone working together to make real changes that reflect our mutual purposes.

If we get rid of the Great Man Fallacy, this can change the way we do spirituality within our religious community. I, as the minister, may be a spiritual leader, but so are you. Everyone in this room will be a spiritual leader at some point. Similarly, everyone in this room will be a spiritual follower at some time (including me).

If everyone can be leader and follower, this changes how we treat the least among us. In the first reading, poet June Jordan says that virtue is not to be found by looking at how the powerful treat the strong. We learn nothing about virtue by seeing how Elon Musk treats Donald Trump, or how Joe Biden treats Mark Zuckerberg. We discover virtue by looking at how those with some power treat those with less power.

Here’s how that might work in our own congregation. We might ask: How do the adults treat the children? Robert Pazmiño, a scholar and a lay leader in his progressive Christian church, said every committee in a church should have a youth member, someone under the age of 18. As I understand Bob, this means that when your leadership teams include young people, and if those young people have real power and authority, then your religious community can make real spiritual progress. The spiritual progress of a religious community is not measured solely by how long its members can meditate, or how often they attend weekly services. The spiritual progress of a religious community is best measured by how the community treats those who are less powerful.

Our individual spiritual progress can also be measured in part by how we treat those who are less powerful than ourselves. And I also believe that our individual spiritual progress must in part be measured by our participation in the leadership of our religious community. Like any individual spiritual practice, this can feel intimidating. Leadership as a spiritual practice is hard work. Leadership as a spiritual practice means coming face to face with those areas where we fall short.

The members and friends of First Parish are actually quite good at leadership as a spiritual practice. If you’ve been a part of First Parish for more than a year or two, you’ve probably already done some kind of spiritual leadership. Teaching Sunday school, singing in the choir, serving on a committee, ushering, helping make lobster rolls, setting up social hour — all these are leadership roles. But they’re not leadership in the mode of the Great Man Fallacy. When you sing bass in the choir, you’re not like Steve Jobs telling everyone else what to do. You don’t go around telling everyone that you’re the greatest, and everyone else has to kowtow to you (especially if you’re a bass). Instead, this is more what Philip Rost describes, where followership and leadership go hand in hand.

This is the kind of leadership that Jesus was talking about when he said the best leaders are servants. And providing leadership through helping others is where the real spiritual growth happens. Take the Property Committee, for example. Doesn’t seem like there’s much opportunity for spiritual growth working on the Property Committee. But if you can lead a project that helps the children in Carriage House Nursery School, or if you can help lead a project that restores the exterior and interior of our historic Meetinghouse — by so doing, you have touched people’s lives, and you will find both spiritual reward and spiritual growth. Or if you serve on the Outreach Committee, and help figure out how to make the best use of the very limited funds at the committee’s disposal, there is both spiritual reward and spiritual growth in that, too.

Or I’ll give you a couple of examples from my own life. In the Unitarian Universalist congregation of my childhood and young adult years, my family always ushered once a month, which may seem like the most mundane thing you could do in a congregation; but looking back, I felt it led to some real spiritual growth, as I learned how to be a welcoming presence and how to represent my Unitarian Universalist community to newcomers. In another example, I feel that teaching Sunday school has led me to more personal spiritual growth than anything else I’ve ever done; it’s also been the most difficult spiritual practice I’ve ever done, and it took me years to get good at it; but the spiritual benefits far outweigh anything else I’ve done. And all these leadership positions — ushering, teaching Sunday school, serving on a committee, and so on — are egalitarian leadership, because we all participate together to make our shared religious community work.

I believe the spiritual practice of participatory, egalitarian leadership can be the most fulfilling of all spiritual practices. It is through the spiritual practice of leadership and followership that we help heal the world, by using our collective and collaborative power to make the world better for those who are less powerful than ourselves. It is through the spiritual practice of leadership and followership that we help heal ourselves, by pulling ourselves out of the isolation and loneliness that is so prevalent in society today — and that is the first necessary step towards healing the whole world.

Is Religion in Decline?

Sermon copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. As usual, the sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. There are more than the usual number of typos and errors in the text, for which I apologize.

Readings

The first reading was an excerpt from “The Jain Bird Hospital in Delhi” by William Meredith.

The second reading is from Annie Dillard’s book Teaching a Stone To Talk:

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. ”

Sermon — “Is Religion in Decline?”

I love the second reading, the one by Annie Dillard. Although she addresses her comments to Christians, I feel they apply to anyone who goes to regular religious services. Here we all are, contemplating the huge and awful mysteries of life; we should all be wearing crash helmets. And I love the first reading, too. We may not be followers of Jainism, and we may not run a bird hospital in Delhi. But we are like them every time we attempt to live out our values among the seemingly inconsequential events of life.

Keep those thoughts in mind. But now I’m going to turn to the subject of Daoist priests. To help answer the question of whether religion is in decline, I’m going to tell you about a modern-day Daoist priest named Li Bin. Journalist Ian Johnson met Mr. Li in 2009 in New York City, and then renewed their acquaintance in 2015 when Johnson went to China for an extended stay. Johnson tells Li Bin’s story in “The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao.”

Li Bin is a ninth generation “yinyang” man, or daoshin, a Daoist priest. He grew up in the countryside. There he learned how to be a yinyang man from his father, Li Manshan, who had learned it from his father, Li Qing, and so on back through ninth generations. Li Qing had kept the daoshin tradition alive through Mao ze Dong’s Cultural Revolution, hiding their ritual texts and ritual objects from the Red Guards. Then in the 1990s, the Chinese government began to see Chinese religion as a cultural asset. And so the Li family can now work openly as yinyang men.

Li Bin did not set out to be a yinyang man. But after he failed the test to get into high school, Li Bin joined his father and his grandfather in the family business. The main money-making business for yinyang men (and they are all men) is conducting traditional funeral services. When someone dies, the family will call in the yinyang men to organize and conduct a funeral which usually lasts for two days.

So here’s what happens when Li Bin and his father are called to conduct a funeral. First, they negotiate a fee with the family. A portion of the fee goes towards subcontractors, such as the musicians who play during the two-day service; families with more money can afford more musicians for their funerals. Li Bin and his father are both excellent musicians, but when they can they add up to four other musicians to their ensemble.

The yinyang men and the other musicians arrive at eight in the morning on the first day. One of the yinyang men writes a formal announcement of the death. This announcement is worded as if it is told by the eldest son of the deceased. The announcement is written in classical Chinese, so the yinyang men must both know classical Chinese characters (which is difficult in of itself) and must be excellent calligraphers (which is perhaps more difficult).

After the announcement has been written, they all put on the robes of Daoist priests, along with hats with the sun on the front and the moon on the back. Together they process to the family’s house, where they proceed to play music and sing Daoist scriptures. In the breaks between playing music, the yinyang men write magical symbols on pieces of paper. These strips of red paper will be used to seal the coffin. The first day is punctuated with other small ceremonies, such as burning strips of paper that represent the material goods of the deceased person, who will need those things when they arrive in the world of the dead.

The yinyang men calculate the most auspicious place for the grave. They prepare the coffin using the strips of paper they made earlier. The family bow to the coffin, while a picture of the deceased person looks down at them. After the coffin is lowered into the ground, the children of the deceased person sweep the grave.

There’s much more to it than this; I’m leaving out many details. But you get the idea. The Daoist priest must be a good musician, and a good calligrapher — so he must be something of an artist. The Daoist priest must also be skilled in geomancy and fortune-telling and other mystical arts — so he is also like what we in the West think of as a priest, a person in tune with the mystical parts of the universe. And the Daoist priest must know the traditional death rituals of his culture — so he is also what folklorists call a “tradition bearer.”

In the past, generations of yinyang men lived and worked in the same village for generations, where they knew pretty much everyone. But Li Bin realized the villages were quickly disappearing. Everyone who could was moving to the cities for economic opportunity, and for that matter the cities were expanding and taking over the villages. As a result, Li Bin decided to move to the city. He still works with his father back in his home village, but much of his business now comes from city people.

The city people are detached from tradition. They don’t know proper funeral traditions. Educated people are the worst. Not only does Li Bin have to tell them the correct things to do, they don’t want to pay for the full ritual. Because the city people don’t want to pay, Li Bin has to bring in cheaper musicians (who are not very good, but who cost less). As a result, the younger people at funerals may ignore the traditional music, and instead listen to pop music or do karaoke.

Despite the cultural changes that come with urbanization, Li Bin can still make a good living as an urban yinyang man. But when he considers his teenaged son, he does not want his son to become a yinyang man.

The cultural changes Li Bin is confronting in China remind me of some of the cultural changes I’m seeing as a Unitarian Universalist minister in the United States. Let me explain.

Over my twenty years as a minister, I have noticed that fewer and fewer people turn to clergy based in congregations for their memorial services. A whole cottage industry of memorial service officiants has grown up, ranging from trained clergy who specialize solely in rites of passage, to people who have no formal training but who feel deeply called to this kind of work. (The same is true, by the way, of marriages — increasingly, couples are asking professional officiants or even friends to officiate at their weddings.)

Even those people who do ask me to officiate at a memorial service are doing more and more of the service themselves. Twenty years ago, a family would come to me for a memorial service, and I’d tell them what to do. Now I’m more likely to act as a sort of consultant to support families in creating their own service. I consider this to be a good thing. A memorial service should be something that comforts the family of the person who has died. It should not be a rigid religious rite. I like that families want to be the ones deciding what to do and how to do it. I like my new role of telling families what works best from a pragmatic standpoint, helping them achieve whatever vision they have for their memorial service. The only downside I see is that sometimes families take on a lot of work, and it causes them a bit too much stress. On the other hand, families mostly like being able to come up with creative and moving ways to personalize their memorial services.

It would be nice to give you some examples, to tell you about some of the beautiful memorial services I’ve helped families arrange. But those are not my stories, and to preserve confidentiality I’m not going to talk about them. However, I can tell you what Carol and I did for her father Ed’s memorial service last March. When Ed died, he was living in a retirement community, and we knew that many of his friends were tired out from attending memorial services. So we announced that we were going to have a celebration of Ed’s life. We invited people to come to one of the community rooms, help drink up Ed’s wine cellar, have snacks, and share any memories of Ed that they liked. We didn’t want the celebration of Ed’s life to go on forever, and we scheduled it an hour and a half before the dinner hour so it would end naturally after about an hour. And we made sure people understood that we wanted to keep it positive — yes, there were tears, but everyone was grateful to keep the focus on Ed’s life.

This was a non-traditional memorial service — if for no other reason than you usually don’t drink wine and eat snacks during a memorial service. Twenty years ago, I don’t think we could have gotten away with something like that. But urbanization has changed everything. Very few people live their whole lives in the same town; most people have moved from where they were born, and we are no longer restricted to unquestioned rituals into which we were born.

Drawing again from my own family’s experiences — because it would be inappropriate for me to share some other family’s experience — I’ll give you an example of how we are no longer restricted to the old ways of doing things. When my mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness, she made clear what she wanted when she died. Her ethnic and religious tradition called for a church service led by the minister, and burial in the family plot in a coffin without embalming. Since my mother’s family came from Nantucket, this entailed some logistical difficulties — after she died, her body had to be flown to Nantucket within a couple of days. On the island we had a Unitarian graveside service conducted by the Unitarian minister on Nantucket, who read a standard graveside service — we had no input into what he said or did. Then we returned to the mainland, where the minister led her memorial service in her Unitarian church a week after she had died.

Contrast that with what happened when my mother’s twin sister died some two decades later. My mother’s twin was cremated. The memorial service was held when it was convenient for her children and others to fly to her retirement home — and the service was not held in a Unitarian church but at the retirement home. Those who could not attend the service in person, including one of her daughters, participated via videoconference. In the memorial service itself, the Unitarian minister played a much smaller role. The old rituals no longer bound us.

These examples from my family are just a couple of specific examples of the increasing diversity of today’s memorial services. American death rituals have changed considerably just in the past twenty years. And they’re continuing to change. Even if you’ve lived your entire life here in Cohasset, even then you’re no longer bound to the rituals of the town and ethnic tradition in which you grew up. And fewer and fewer people feel restricted to the rituals of any formal religious affiliation. This does not mean that religion is in decline — this simply means that our rituals are changing.

Yet even as our religious lives change, we can still choose to find support in a congregation, in this congregation. As a part of this congregation, you can ask fellow congregants for help and support, you can draw on the minister’s experience and training, you still have a community behind you. But these are our choices; religion is not dictated to us from on high.

So it is that we can choose to have our religious life be deeply embedded in a chosen community, supported by people we know and like. And when we come to major life-changing events, the presence of this chosen community can make death and new life feel less like a mystery and more like something that’s a natural part of life and of living. Rather than being unknowable and remote, religion is now what we do together, as we live life from day to day, as we confront mystery and difficulty and sadness and joy and death and beauty.

Roll Down like Waters

Readings

The first reading was a poem by Clint Smith, “For Your First Birthday.”

The second reading was from the Hebrew Bible, the book of Amos, chapter 5, verses 21 through 24.

I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.

Sermon: “Roll Down Like Waters”

The birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is a time for everyone in the United States to refer back to his writings and speeches and reinterpret them once again. We do this every year, and by this point in the history of the United States, it can seem like there’s nothing left to say. Maybe we should just skip it this year. The thing is, preachers love to quote Dr. King, because he was such a good writer — such a good stylist — and there’s something incredibly satisfying about saying aloud his words. Being a preacher myself, there’s no way I’m going to pass up this opportunity to read aloud something written by Dr. King. So, like it or not, you’re going to get yet another sermon about Dr. King and his legacy — even if I have nothing original to say.

Yet people continue to find novel and interesting ways to interpret King’s thinking. For example, King famously said that he wanted his children to live in a land where “they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Recently, this quote has been used by some conservative politicians and pundits to help bolster the claim that we should not teach critical race theory or the history of racism in our schools. This is certainly a creative use of King’s words, but it’s probably not what he intended.

On the other side of the political spectrum, liberal politicians take pleasure in invoking King’s words, but they tend to do so selectively. For example, they pass lightly over King’s pointed critique of capitalism, as when he said: “We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that Capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor — both black and white, both here and abroad.” [The Three Evils of Society, 1967] In today’s society, it would be political suicide to criticize capitalism quite so openly. And so political liberals creatively interpret King by leaving out some important parts of his message.

And I think something we all tend to forget these days is that King was a progressive Christian minister. Today, Christianity’s reputation has suffered as a result of the clergy abuse scandal, the hypocrisy of Christians who demonize LGBTQ people, the refusal of the largest Christian denominations to allow women clergy, and for many other reasons. We live in a time when progressive Christians feel the need to apologize for being Christian. As a result, I think many of us, including Unitarian Universalists, either try to apologize for King’s progressive Christianity, or try to ignore King’s supposedly outdated religious convictions.

It’s a mistake to dismiss his religious convictions so readily. King was a serious intellectual, earning his doctorate degree from Boston University in systematic theology with a dissertation titled “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.” (Weiman, by the way, was a very progressive Christian theologian who late in life joined a Unitarian church.) With his progressive Christianity in mind, let’s look at one Bible passage that King repeatedly invoked. This was the passage we heard in the second reading today, from the Hebrew Bible, the book of Amos, chapter 5, verses 21 through 24.

The words we ehard are not the words of the human prophet. Amos was giving the actual words of his god, whom Amos knew as Yahweh. And Yahweh is not happy with humankind. God tells humankind that they have strayed from God’s core ethical and moral teachings. In particular, God calls out the privileged people who rule over the country where Amos lived. God tells the privileged people that they “trample on the poor” and “afflict the righteous,” that they take bribes and “push aside the needy.”

Amos was probably a real person. At the time he lived, the historic land of Israel was split into two countries, the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom. In those days, there was no distinction between politics and religion, for that distinction only dates back to the European Enlightenment. So the power of King Jeroboam II and the power of the official cult of Yahweh were the same thing. Thus, by repeating the words of his god, the prophet Amos was taking on the entire establishment. Amos’s prophecy makes clear that the king’s rule was against the will of God. The cultic leaders wrongly interpreted the will of God — so says Amos.

This helps us understand why Amos reports God as saying, “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.” God is telling the humans in charge of the northern kingdom that they were doing things that were completely against the will of God; no amount of festivals or church services or solemn assemblies on the part of the humans could make God ignore what they were doing wrong. As to what they were doing wrong, the Biblical scholar Norman Gottwald sums it up like this:

Amos was attacking “the patriotic and pious … reaction that had gained currency among the upper classes during the prosperous reign of Jeroboam II. The greedy upper classes, with governmental and judicial connivance, were systematically expropriating the land of commoners so that they could heap up wealth and display it gaudily in a lavish conspicuous consumption economy.” [The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction, Gottwald, 1985]

Knowing this, we can better understand how King might find the book of Amos attractive. From the perspective of Black Americans in the mid-twentieth century, the American establishment had kept Blacks in low-paying jobs that supported the increasingly comfortable lives of the elite, all of whom were then White. And just like the greedy upper classes used their religion to maintain their position during the reign of King Jeroboam II, the elite White rulers of mid-twentieth century America used their interpretation of the Christian religion to maintain the status quo that benefited them.

If you remember King’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he was responding to well-to-do ministers who were part of the White establishment of Birmingham, Alabama. These White ministers criticized the Civil Rights Movement in a public statement in which they called King and his allies “extremists.” King responded directly to this criticism by telling these Christian ministers: “Was not Amos an extremist for justice: ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an everflowing stream.’” Later on in that same letter, King told these White ministers:

“So the question is not whether we will be extremists but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? Perhaps the south, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”

This helps us understand why King quoted Amos so often. No doubt in the days of King Jeroboam II, the greedy upper classes called the prophet Amos an extremist. In much the same way, King was called an extremist in his day. Both of them said things that were uncomfortable to hear. And that discomfort was intended to provoke people to take action. I would go so far as to say that if we don’t feel uncomfortable when we hear King’s words, we’re not paying attention.

But sometimes King translated the passage from Amos differently than the version we so love to quote. The Hebrew word “mishpat,” usually translated as “justice,” can also be translated as “judgement.” So in his essay “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” King wrote: “Yes America, there is still the need for an Amos to cry out to the nation: ‘Let judgement roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.’”

This translation, while equally valid, sounds more challenging. “Let judgement roll down” — in fact, this almost sounds threatening, and it may better translate the sense of the original. The prophet Amos was telling the people of his day that their God would judge their actions. Amos saw himself as spreading the words of Yahweh, and Yahweh was telling the people in power that they must stop supporting injustice. The purpose of the book of Amos is for the rich and powerful to realize that, despite the stories they liked to tell themselves, all was not well in their land.

Martin Luther King spread a similar message to America in the 1950s and 1960s. While the American economy was booming in those years, Black Americans were mostly excluded from prosperity. In response, King preached the message that his God wanted all persons to be treated with love and dignity; and while King was most focused on how America treated Black Americans, his message included persons of all races who were treated unfairly. King preached the uncomfortable message that if some people were excluded from prosperity, then his God would let judgement roll down like waters.

In our own time, Black Americans still face job discrimination, and people of all races face increasing economic inequality. This can seem overwhelming. Yes, we have made progress since King’s day, but so much remains to be done before we have true equality in America. But I will leave you with the thought that King’s message was ultimately a hopeful message. Speaking at the National Cathedral in March, 1968, King said, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” When King said this, he was paraphrasing the great abolitionist and Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker. Back in 1853, Parker preached a sermon in Boston where he said: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”

No wonder Martin Luther King paraphrased this passage from Theodore Parker so frequently. I understand this as a message of hope. When Theodore Parker preached this sermon, slavery was the law of the land, and it seemed impossible that America would ever put an end to it. A century later, Martin Luther King paraphrased Parker’s words, and Jim Crow was the law of the land, and it seemed impossible that America would ever put an end to it. Yet we did put an end to slavery, and we did put an end to Jim Crow, and we can and will put an end to the other injustices that still confront us.

The arc of the moral universe may be long, and from where we stand today we do not see where it finally comes to rest. Yet we know deep within ourselves that we are moving towards justice — slowly, perhaps, but inexorably. We have not yet overcome injustice. But some day, sooner rather than later, we shall overcome injustice and build a land where we let justice roll down like waters, and peace like an everflowing stream.