Unitarian Universalism – Page 24 – Dan Harper

The Carpenter’s Son

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 was a short poem by Alan Powers titled “Carpenter’s Son.” Copyright laws do not permit the reproduction of an entire poem, so it is not reproduced here.

The second reading is from the autobiography of Edward Emerson Simmons, the man who painted the picture that is reproduced on your order of service. He told this story about this painting:

“In the year 1888 I sent two pictures to the Royal Academy which were duly accepted and hung. Imagine my joy when a large and formidable communication found it way to my studio in Paris, asking the price of one of my canvases and signed by the Chantry Bequest. This was a well-known fund created to buy pictures for the government to place in its permanent galleries, and everyone knew that, once the price had been asked, it amounted to the same thing as a sale….

“The picture, which I called ‘The Carpenter’s Son,’ was a simple pose of one of my children in my studio. A blond boy with a light shining over his head sat dreaming, instead of sweeping out the shop, while his mother, in the back, told his father what a worthless son he had begotten. The shavings had accidentally fallen in the form of a cross [which you can see at the bottom right], and the light seemed to be a halo. The [Glasgow] Scotsman came out with a scathing denunciation of the work (not at the idea, mind you) but because, as they said, I had been sacrilegious enough to paint Christ in the costume of a French peasant boy! Of course, the Chantry bequest did not buy — for the first time — after asking the price.”

Sermon

The stories we tell about ourselves, about our beliefs, and about the world around us — these stories are vital to who we are. I believe that one of the most important tasks of religion is to shape the stories we tell about ourselves and about our lives, to the end that our stories affirm life and love; and to the end that the arc of our stories’ narratives bend towards justice.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. The opening hymn this morning was a wassail song, and without a story, it would be nothing more than a silly song sung at Yuletide. But instead, we tell two stories about this wassail song.

The first story we tell goes like this: Years ago in England, during the Yuletide season less wealthy people would walk around to the wealthy households in their village and sing wassail songs. The wealthy householders were required by anceint custom to give food, drink, and money to the wassailers. When we tell this story, we are saying that Yuletide is a time of year to remember ordinary people who may not have much money.

The second story goes like this: Some folklorists believe that these apple wassail songs grew out of ancient pre-Christian rituals meant to re-awaken the fertility of apple trees at the time of the winter solstice. We know that hard apple cider was an important drink in the days before everyone had guaranteed access to clean, drinkable water because the modest alcohol content helped reduce the number of pathogens present; thus cider apples were a vital crop to ensure health. This second story tells us that the Christmas season holds many remnants of the old earth-centered pagan religions, religions which contained superstitions we may no longer follow, but which contained some good hard common sense.

So you see, the stories we tell about ourselves and about our traditions help us to shape those traditions in meaningful ways. This morning, I’d like to tell some stories about a painting that was central to the life of our church, a painting that is relevant to the Christmas season. And I believe these stories reveal a great deal about who we are and what we stand for.

Let me begin at the beginning. In 1888, the American painter Edward Emerson Simmons painted a painting which he called “The Carpenter’s Son.” You’ll find a reproduction of the painting on the cover of your order of service. This large painting by Simmons — some four feet wide and five and a half feet tall — showed a boy in a carpenter’s shop, sitting on a saw horse, surrounded by wood shavings and saw dust; while in the background two adults, presumably the boy’s parents, seem to be talking about him. The boy, rather than working, is simply sitting and staring meditatively off into space.

Simmons showed “The Carpenter’s Son” at the 1888 Paris Salon, then later at the Royal Academy in England, and also in Glasgow, Scotland. In 1892 Simmons sold the painting to Amelia Jones of New Bedford. When Amelia Jones purchased it, Simmons wrote her a letter which said in part:

“Dear Miss Jones,

“There is little to tell you of the picture that you have greatly pleased me by wishing to own. The picture was painted in the season of 1888 and being unsatisfactory to me was scraped out, to a great extent and repainted, with my older boy as a model for the boy in the foreground.

“It was painted at St. Ives — of cat fame — in the extreme east of Cornwall, England. The result of the repainting was an unusual success at the Royal Academy — joined to an offer of purchase from the trustees of the Chantry fund — withdrawn — I suspect from the opposition of the English Church people.

“When sent to Scotland — Glasgow — it caused me to be the amused object of much fury and denunciation from the “Scotsman” — if I remember the paper….

“I know very little of how the details of Christ’s surroundings should be told. I imagined no one knows enough to be worth listening to. Therefore we younger men fall back upon our own time — believing that man has always been fundamentally the same….

“Faithfully, Edward E. Simmons.”

This was, in fact, a heretical painting. As it happens, Simmons was raised a Unitarian. His father, George Simmons, was a Unitarian minister who was also a fervent abolitionist. Not only was Edward raised a Unitarian, but he grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, in the day when several great Unitarian writers and thinkers lived there — Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Alcott family, the poet Ellery Channing, and others — and as a boy, Simmons met and conversed with many of these radical Unitarians. Edward Emerson Simmons had radical Unitarianism in his very bones, and for the rest of his life he called himself a Concord Unitarian.

When a Concord Unitarian goes to paint a picture of Jesus of Nazareth, he does not paint an orthodox picture of Jesus. Instead of painting some saintly, unearthly, barely human figure, Simmons choose one of his own boys as a model — not because that was what Jesus would have looked like, but because, good Concord Transcendentalist that he was, he believed that Jesus was fully human, and that human beings have been pretty much the same down through the ages; you can be sure that if Simmons had been African American, the boy in the picture would have been African American; had Simmons been Native American, the boy would have been native American; you get the idea.

Well, I’m sure you get the idea, but the orthodox Christians of the day did not get the idea. They did not like the painting one bit, because Jesus looked too human — he looked just like an ordinary boy who could have been anyone’s son — which they thought sacrilegious. Indeed, there are people today who do not like this painting.

And who purchased this heretical painting from Edward Simmons? Amelia Jones, a member of First Unitarian in New Bedford, that’s who. She bought it, sent it off to be shown at the great 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and then it came to hang in her house in New Bedford, the house that is now the Rotch-Jones-Duff House and Garden Museum just down County Street from here.When Amelia Jones died, she gave the painting to First Unitarian Church. What better place for such a painting to hang?

This heretical painting hung for many years in our Parish House. If you talk to some of the people who grew up in this church, the painting was very much present in their consciousnesses. Here was a painting of a child who looked like an ordinary kid, yet this ordinary-looking kid grew up to be one of the great religious leaders of all time. Such a painting must have been an inspiration to at least some of the children in this church!

Older people might have seen something a little different in this painting: Here’s this boy just sitting there and staring off into space when he is clearly supposed to be sweeping out his father’s carpentry shop — if you look closely at the front of your order of service, you can see the broom on the floor that Jesus has abandoned. And there in the background are his parents, clearly talking about their son. His mother is pointing to Jesus as if to say, “Look, he’s dropped his broom again, he’s just sitting there staring off into space.” And we can imagine his father saying, “He’d make a good carpenter some day if he’d just pay attention to what he’s supposed to be doing!”

Or more generally we could say: What Edward Emerson Simmons has done in his painting of Jesus is to imagine what Jesus must have been like as a fully human boy. Being a Concord Unitarian, Simmons did not restrict himself to what might be found in the Bible. Unitarians like Edward Simmons feel comfortable telling new stories about the historical figure who was Jesus, whether or not those new stories might offend the orthodox.

In true Unitarian Universalist fashion, there are many more stories for us to tell about this painting. Alan Powers, a poet and member of this church, tells another story in his poem: he tells us of a Jesus who was the son of an ordinary working class family, a Jesus who began his life dealing with very concrete things and who went on to teach in very concrete metaphors and parables; a man who in the end was put to death for his radical religious and social views. There is more than one story to tell about this painting, just as there is more than one story to tell about Jesus.

Now let me finish the story of the painting itself. In 1993, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., planned a centennial exhibit of works of art that had been exhibited in the great 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, and they asked to borrow “The Carpenter’s Son.” So the painting was cleaned, and insured, and shipped off to Washington, where it hung from March through September, 1993, in the show “American Art from the 1893 World’s Fair.” After that show, the painting came back and hung once more in its accustomed place in our Parish House.

And then in 1996, disaster struck. A vandal broke into our church, tipped over one of the grandfather clocks in the Parish House, broke the nose off one of the statues here in the sanctuary, and slashed a huge piece out of the middle of “The Carpenter’s Son.” The clock and the statue could be repaired, but with the piece gone from the painting, it was worthless. It was a great tragedy in the life of the congregation, and if you ask someone who was here that Sunday morning when they discovered the damage, they can tell you what a horrible shock it was.

When I first arrived here at First Unitarian two and a half years ago, I heard the story of this painting. Whenever someone told me the story of the vandalism, they would add the fact that, horrendous as the destruction of the painting was, at least the insurance settlement made it possible for the church to install an elevator in improve handicapped accessibility. I liked this twist that the people of this church add to the story of the vandalism: this church took an act of vandalism, and turned it into an act of justice for persons with disabilities. How very like the Unitarian Universalist stories about Jesus! for we emphasize Jesus’s acts of social justice, we emphasize his deep humanity and his empathy with all persons.

Then came our own Unitarian Universalist mini-miracle. Just over a year ago, the Women’s Alliance of this church donated a new refrigerator for the kitchen. As the old refrigerator was being removed, the man who was moving it saw something had been thrown behind it. He called to Claudette Blake, our church administrator, and she immediately realized that what she was seeing was the missing piece of the painting: there was the face of the boy Jesus. And, something of a miracle, the vandal had not slashed through the boy’s face — I like to believe that the vandal’s essential humanity asserted itself and prevented him or her from being that destructive.

It turned out that the insurance company now owned the painting, and until we could buy it back we had to keep it safely locked up; we sent it up to an art restoration expert to hold for us. We also realized that we could not keep the painting any longer. We knew this building is not secure enough to house important works of art, nor do we have financial resources to restore the painting. Thanks to behind-the-scenes work on the part of many church members, the Rotch-Jones-Duff House and Garden Museum agreed to purchase the painting from us, for the $20,000 that we had to pay the insurance company for it. What better place for the painting? The Rotch-Jones-Duff House used to be Amelia Jones’s house, and it was where the painting hung before it came here. Besides, the Rotch-Jones-Duff House could restore the painting and make it accessible to a wider public.

I particularly like to think that the painting will have a wider audience, once it is restored. It will take perhaps another year before the painting is finally restored that is, assuming that the Rotch-Jones-Duff House is able to complete their fundraising, for as of now they have only $18,000 of the $30,000 needed to pay for the restoration. Many good people are working on raising funds, including our own Nancy Crosby and Bob Piper, and needless to say many members and friends of First Unitarian have given or are planning to give money to help pay for the restoration. Perhaps by next Christmas, a wider public will once again be able to see Edwards Simmons’s Unitarian vision of a Jesus who was a great religious genius and whose birthday is worth celebrating, but a Jesus who is fully human.

I like the idea that in this way we are spreading one of our Unitarian stories about Christmas out to a world that needs to hear it. The world needs to hear our stories of a Jesus who cared more about creating a heaven here on earth, than getting people into some heaven in the sky. The world needs to hear our stories about a Christmas holiday that is not about spending more money, but is rather about remembering a religious prophet and sage who with his very humanity taught us about the essential humanity of all persons. The world needs to hear these stories, because it matters what stories we tell.

A Box for Thanksgiving

This intergenerational worship service was conducted by Rev. Dan Harper, with Marybeth Truran, DRE, 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, prayer, and story copyright (c) 2007 Daniel Harper.

Prayer

This is an intergenerational worship service, and there are some children present. Therefore, this seems like a good time to talk about how we Unitarian Universalists do prayer and meditation.

When it comes to prayer, there’s only one firm rule for us Unitarian Universalists: you don’t have to pray or meditate if you don’t want to, but you do have to stay calm and quiet so you don’t disturb other people.

As a Unitarian Universalist child, I learned that when you pray, you just sit comfortably and quietly, with your eyes open and your head up. I learned that the most important thing is to be quiet and peaceful inside yourself. As you get older, you may discover other ways to pray or meditate, but this is a good place to start. So now let’s begin our prayer and meditation time by sitting quietly. If you’re sitting next to someone you love, you can lean up against them, and even put your arm around them if you want.

Let us join our hearts and minds in the spirit of prayer and meditation; first we’ll listen to some spoken words, then we’ll sit in silence for a short time; and we’ll end by listening to music.

Let us begin by remembering the American servicemen and servicewomen who will find themselves in Iraq and Afghanistan this Thanksgiving. We hope for them that they may have a peaceful Thanksgiving; and we give thanks for the service they offer to their country. And we give thanks for all those who work to make this world a better place: firefighters and social activists and doctors and social workers and teachers and everyone who works for peace and justice.

In this Thanksgiving season, may we give thanks for who we are, exactly as we are. Maybe we could be better, or worse for that matter, but we give thanks: that we are still breathing; that there are people who love us; that the sun moves steadily in its course; that we are who we are.

Reading

The reading this morning is from “Mourt’s Relation,” a journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, written in 1622. This reading gives the story of the first Thanksgiving celebration in the words of one of the Pilgrims who was actually there.

“You shall understand, that in this little time, that a few of us have been here, we have built seven dwelling-houses, and four for the use of the plantation, and have made preparation for divers others. We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas, and according to the manner of the Indians, we manured our ground with herrings or rather shads, which we have in great abundance, and take with great ease at our doors. Our corn did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown, they came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom.

“Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, so that we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the company almost a week, at which time amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted; and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”

[Taken from a printed version of this early document. The language and spelling have been modernized.]

Story

Instead of the usual second reading this morning, we’ll have a story instead: the old story of Thanksgiving. This is a story that you already know. But even though you’ve heard it about a million times, we tell it every year anyway, to remind ourselves why we celebrate Thanksgiving.

The story begins in England. In England in those days, every town had only one church, and it was called the Church of England. You had to belong to that church, like it or not. It’s not like it is here today, where families get to choose which church they want to go to — back then, there were no other churches to choose from! But a small group of people decided they could no longer believe the things that were said and believed in the Church of England.

When they tried to form their own church in England, they got in trouble. They moved to Holland, where they were free to practice their own religion, but they felt odd living in someone else’s country. Then they heard about a new land across the ocean called America, a place where they could have their own church, where they could live the way they wanted to. They found a ship called the Mayflower, and made plans to sail to America. These are the people we call the Pilgrims.

After a long, difficult trip across a stormy sea, the Pilgrims finally came to the new land, which they called New England. But the voyage took much longer than they had hoped, and by the time they got to New England, it was already December. Already December — it was already winter! — and they had to build houses, and find food, and try to make themselves comfortable for a long, cold winter.

It got very cold very soon. The Pilgrims had almost nothing to eat. The first winter that the Pilgrims spent here in New England was so long and cold and hard, that some of the Pilgrims began to sicken and die. Fortunately, the people who were already living in this new land — we call them the Indians — were very generous. When the Indians saw how badly the Pilgrims were faring, they shared their food so at least the Pilgrims wouldn’t starve to death. Half the Pilgrims died in that first winter, yet without the help of the Indians, many more would have died.

After that first winter, things went much better for the Pilgrims. Spring came, and the Pilgrims were able to build real houses for themselves. They planted crops, and most of the crops did pretty well. The Pilgrims went hunting and fishing, and they found lots of game and caught lots of fish.

By the time fall came around again, the Pilgrims found that they were living fairly comfortably. To celebrate their good fortune, they decided to have a harvest celebration. They went out hunting, and killed some turkeys to eat at their celebration. They grilled fish, and ate pumpkin pie, and we’re pretty sure they had lobster, wild grapes and maybe some dried fruit, and venison. However, they probably did not call their holiday “thanksgiving,” because for them a thanksgiving celebration was something you did in church. At that first celebration, they did not go to church.

Their harvest celebration lasted for several days, with all kinds of food, and games, and other recreation. The Indian king Massasoit and some of his followers heard the Pilgrims celebrating, and dropped by to see what was going on. In a spirit of generosity, the fifty Pilgrims invited all ninety Indians to stay for dinner. Imagine inviting ninety guests over to your house for Thanksgiving! More than that, in those days only the Pilgrim women prepared and cooked meals, but there were only four Pilgrim women old enough to help with the cooking — four women to cook food for a hundred and forty people!

The Indians appreciated the generosity of the Pilgrims, but they also realized that there probably wasn’t going to be quite enough food to go around. So the Indians went hunting for a few hours, and brought back lots more game to be roasted and shared at the harvest celebration. At last all the food was cooked, and everyone sat down to eat together: men and women, adults and children, Indians and Pilgrims.

That’s how the story of Thanksgiving goes. As you know, the Pilgrims called their first town “Plymouth,” and as you know, they also started a church in the town of Plymouth. But did you know that a hundred and eighty years later, that church became a Unitarian church? That church in Plymouth is now a Unitarian Universalist church. So it is that we Unitarian Universalists have a very important connection with the Pilgrims, and a special connection with Thanksgiving.

Sermon

The Universalist poet Edwin Markham wrote a famous little poem that goes like this:

    They drew a circle that shut me out —
    Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.
    But Love and I had the wit to win:
    We drew a circle that took them in.

If you had grown up in a Universalist church 50 or 60 years ago, chances are good that you would have learned that poem by heart. It’s still a good little poem to think about. And this week, I’ve been thinking about how we keep drawing larger and larger circles in our lives, drawing more and more people into the circle of Love.

When you walked into the service this morning, you received a small box with some objects inside it. You may be wondering what that box is for, and why there are some things inside it. I hope you opened your box and thought, as you looked inside, Why on earth have Dan and Marybeth given us such an odd collection of things? What on earth to a cranberry, a sticker, and a penny have in common?

The objects in that box are there so I can talk to you about five circles of love — five concentric, and widening, circles of love. Since it’s Thanksgiving time — and the whole purpose of Thanksgiving is to remember what we are thankful for — I’ll also talk to you about how you might feel thankful for these five circles of love.

First, pick up your box and hold it in your hands. OK, now stop looking at the box, and look at your hands instead, because the first thing I’d ask you to think about is your self. You are a sacred and special person. That is one of our fundamental religious beliefs: that each person is worthy of dignity and respect; that each person has infinite value. You are you, and that is a good thing to be!

When you look at your hands, I hope you will remember to love yourself. And I hope you’ll remember to be thankful for being you — thankful for being alive, for being human in all your imperfect and glorious being.

Now, if you have not already done so, open your box. Inside you will find a sticker with a flaming chalice, which is a symbol of our Unitarian Universalist faith. There’s a story about how the flaming chalice came to be the symbol of our faith community. Back around 1940, as the Second World War was spreading throughout Europe, the Unitarian Service Committee was hard at work in Europe. The Unitarian Service Committee got Unitarians here in the United States to donate clothing and food to send overseas to Europe, to give to refugees who were cold and hungry — our own church, First Unitarian, filled up a huge truckload of clothing to send overseas.

When they got to Europe, people from the Unitarian Service Committee discovered that almost no one over there had heard of them — even though there were Unitarians in Europe, the people they had to deal with had no idea what a Unitarian was. The head of the Unitarian Service Committee, a man named Charles Joy, had an idea. He got an artist to draw a very official-looking logo for the Unitarian Service Committee — a logo with a flaming chalice inside a circle. They stamped this logo on all the boxes of clothing, and on all the paperwork, so that everything looked more official, which made it easier to get things past suspicious soldiers and across borders. That is the origin of the flaming chalice: it was a logo that helped us Unitarians to help people in need.

That’s why you have a flaming chalice in your box: to remind you to be thankful for your church, to be thankful for a religious community that doesn’t care what you believe but does care that we all work to make this world a better place. And that is the second concentric circle of love: the love and care that can come from our religious community.

Next, take out the penny. On the penny, you will find the words: “United States of America.” The penny is there to remind us to be thankful for our country. Not that we have to be thankful for everything about our country — in fact, some of us are not at all thankful about the fact that our country is at war right now, nor are we thankful for the fact that we can’t seem to provide decent health care for many of our citizens, nor are we thankful that there is a lot of injustice in our country.

But we are thankful for the highest ideals of our country. Look at the front of the penny, and you will see a picture of Abraham Lincoln, who was perhaps our greatest president. Abraham Lincoln lived in a time when there were still slaves in this country, but he finally realized that if we really followed the highest ideals of our country, we could not allow slavery to continue — and so Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which made slavery illegal.

We are thankful for the highest and best ideals of this country — the ideal that states that every person has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — or the ideal that states that the government shall not tell us what religion to practice. And the third circle of love, in our widening circles of love, is the love of true democracy, a democracy that will affirms the inherent worth and dignity of all persons.

Now, if you haven’t already taken it out, take out the cranberry. If you are brave, you might even want to eat it — although I have to warn you, cranberries are tart and sour. I happen to like tart, sour, crunchy fruit, so I eat cranberries raw all the time — but I admit that I am unusual and not many people like to eat them raw. Most people cook cranberries with lots of sugar, and make cranberry sauce — a bright red sauce that’s sweet yet tart, soft and yummy.

Why is there a cranberry in your box? The cranberry is in the box to remind us to be thankful for the food we eat. When the Pilgrims first came to this part of the world in 1620, they did not have enough food to eat, and many of them sickened and died. There is an old story that the Indians who were their neighbors showed the Pilgrims cranberries (which they may have called “sassamanash”), and told them that these tiny bright red fruit were good to eat. In the first month or two, when they had so little food, the Pilgrims went out and found cranberries growing in the wild, and they dried some of the fruit to last all winter. Cranberries are full of vitamin C and other good vitamins, and eating cranberries probably helped to save the lives of some of the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims were thankful for cranberries, and they were thankful for whatever food they could get, and they were especially thankful for the generous Indians who helped keep all of them from starving to death.

The cranberry reminds us to be thankful for all the people who help us to get the food we need. The Pilgrims were thankful for Indians, who first showed them the cranberries, and said they were good to eat. Today, we are thankful for the farmers and farm workers that grow the food we eat. And that is the fourth circle of love: the love that comes from all those who help us meet our daily needs; the love that grows out the interdependent web of all existence.

Now there’s one last thing that I would like you to look at, and that is the box. This box comes to us from the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. You will see pictures on the box, pictures of people from several different countries. These pictures are there to remind us that we are part of a world community. There are pictures of people from Louisiana, from Sudan, from Latin America, from all around the world. These pictures remind us that we are part of a world community; and that is our fifth, and widest, circle of love: the love we extend to all persons everywhere in the world.

If you want to, you can take on a little social justice project with this box. If you want to, you can put this box on your dining room table, or your kitchen table, or wherever you eat most of your meals. Every time you sit down to eat between now and Christmas, you can put some money into the box. If you eat three meals a day, you’ll eat about a hundred meals between now and Christmas. If you put a dime in the box every time you sit down to eat, you’ll have ten dollars by Christmas time. (If you put a dollar in, you’ll have a hundred dollars!) If you decide to take on this little social justice project in your home, we will collect these boxes on the Sunday before Christmas — and we will send the money that we have collected to the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. And the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee will take that money and send it around the world — to help people in South America have access to clean and safe water supplies — to help people who have survived natural disasters, including those who are still recovering from Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana — to help people in Africa to ensure a safe food supply — and to help many more people around the world. The only thing that I would ask is that if you put lots of change in this Guest at Your Table box, could you please take the time to go down to the bank and convert that change either to bills or to a check? — otherwise, we’ll have a hard time counting all those coins!

Of course, you may have your little social justice project that you do at this time of year — so don’t feel that you have to take on the Guest at Your Table box, unless you really want to! The real point is to find a way to remember all these widening circles of love, and to give thanks for each one of them. Look at yourself in the mirror and give thanks for your self, for you are a person of infinite value. When you walk in to this church on a Sunday, give thanks for the love we all receive from this community of faith. Even when you are frustrated and outraged by our country, give thanks for the ideals of our country, ideals which, if we would but live up to them, would extend dignity and respect to all persons. When you sit down to eat, give thanks for the earth and the food that comes from the earth and all the workers who grow our food, and know that this is yet a wider circle of love. And finally, may we give thanks for the whole world and all the people in the world, and may we work towards a world community that truly does extend love everywhere.

    They drew a circle that shut me out —
    Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.
    But Love and I had the wit to win:
    We drew a circle that took them in.

The Eighth Principle

Readings

I chose the readings this morning because I wanted you to hear the voices of non-white people who are Unitarian Universalists. And I’ll be reading publicly-available writings by two people I happen to know, Kon Heong McNaughton, and Alicia Roxanne Ford.

The first reading is by Alicia Roxanne Ford, poet, Unitarian Universalist minister, who also happens to be a black woman born on the Caribbean island of Tobago.

“At thirteen I sat on the beach watching the sun set. Do you know that moment… the moment when the sun first meets the horizon? The kiss lightly ‘hello’ — then the embrace begins? That moment when sun and sea seem to melt seamlessly into one effortless creation… new every evening and at the same time birthing dusk — if you are observant, careful — you will see the moon and maybe, just maybe a brave star. Depending on your angle, it will seem as though the coconut trees are offering a blessing — and the waves are humming a prayer. At thirteen — just for one evening, one private moment, I had the right angle and there was an instant in all of this that I could not tell where I began/ended — it was not the sun, but I who melted seamlessly…and it was I who nodded my lean body offering a blessing… my tears were waves praying for World. In that one moment, god was everywhere in all things and beyond all; transcendent and immanent — in that one moment, I heard the sea calling…. Calling. And without knowing why, I gave myself.

“…At the cornerstone of that calling and my own theological outlook is ‘respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part’ as well as a deep appreciation for the ‘direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder…which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.’ Coming to this ecclesial body has been a blessing… in many ways, it had to be this one free church movement and no other. While the Unitarian Universalist movement remains a work in progress, what is significant at this time for me is that we remain so — willing to engage and live into what it means to be wholly alive, struggling with race/class/gender/sexism/religious pluralism/political conflict and so on — all of which shapes us as we seek to shape and influence them. As challenging as it often is, what draws me and keeps me here is the opportunity to wrestle in community — as well as opportunities to live out my authentic theological praxis.”

[Ellipses are Alicia’s. http://uusankofa.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=9, accessed 25 October 2007]

The second reading is from “Why I am a UU: An Asian Immigrant Perspective,” by Kok Heong McNaughton. Kok Heong writes:

“I am an ethnic Chinese born and raised in Malaysia….

“I first heard the word ‘Unitarian’ in 1976 from a Taiji student of mine who was a member of the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos. This was back when transcendental meditation was the ‘in’ thing. I was comparing Taiji as a meditation in movement with transcendental meditation and this student said to me, ‘Oh yes, we meditate in our church.’ This intrigued me. What kind of church does meditation? She said, ‘Unitarian Church.’ I said, ‘Never heard of it.’ I looked in my Chinese-English dictionary and I couldn’t find a translation of the word.

“Talk about miracle! I heard the word for the second time that week when I met a young woman at the Newcomer’s playgroup who also attended the Unitarian Church. When I indicated an interest, instead of giving me an earful, she simply called up the church office and put me on their newsletter mailing list. Through reading the newsletter, I followed the activities of this church for several months before attending my first service.

“This was a service about Amnesty International. It blew my mind. Back home in Malaysia, I grew up without political freedom. As students, we were told to avoid any involvement in politics. Our job was to study. Leave politics to the politicians. Accept the status quo. Don’t rock the boat. You’ll be OK. Try to make trouble? You’ll mysteriously disappear and rot in a jail somewhere. Here I was flabbergasted because here’s a group of people whose passion was to free political prisoners in third world countries! I never knew about Amnesty International. I suddenly felt this connection of humankind for one another, that there are people here in the free world who care enough to fight against injustices in the world. I never knew of a church that would take a stand on human rights issues. I had thought that all one does in a church was to sing hymns, praise the Lord, pray for one another’s salvation, and put money in the collection basket.

“After that first service, I returned again and again. The more I found out about Unitarian Universalism, the more it fitted. I particularly appreciated the use of science and reason to explore and to determine for oneself what is the truth, what are myths, what to accept and what to reject in building one’s own unique theology. I didn’t have to take everything on blind, unquestioning faith. Another aspect of Unitarian Universalism that makes me feel special as an Asian American is the emphasis on cultural, ethnic and religious diversity. I didn’t have to check a part of me at the door and to pretend to be who I wasn’t. My ethnic differences were not only accepted, but they were affirmed and upheld. People were interested in what I had to share: I teach Taiji and Qigong, I taught Chinese cooking classes, I bring ethnic foods to our potlucks, I even share my language with those who were interested. I am often consulted about Taoist and Buddhist practices and readings, and asked if I thought the translations were accurate. My opinion mattered. This not only gives me pride in my culture, but it also encourages me to dig deeper into my own heritage, to find out more in areas where my knowledge and expertise are lacking. It helps me to look at my heritage with fresh eyes.”

Sermon

Each fall, I try to devote at least one sermon to the so-called “seven principles.” For those of you who have never heard of the “seven principles,” they come from article 2.1 of the Bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association. We are a member congregation of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and as such we have agreed to affirm and promote these seven principles. And for those of you who may not yet be familiar with them, here are the seven principles:

We affirm and promote: “The inherent worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity and compassion in human relations; acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations; a free and responsible search for truth and meaning; the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large; the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all; respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”

Mind you, these seven principles are not a creed, nor are they a statement of religious belief. As Unitarian Universalists, we’re not particularly concerned with what you believe; but we do care about what people do with their lives. As I read them, these seven principles are a call to action. As we live our lives, we aim to treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves; to promote justice, equity, and compassion; to accept each other and encourage one another in spiritual growth; to always engage in a search for truth and meaning; to affirm and promote democratic process; to work towards the goal of world community; and to respect our planet earth.

We often talk about these seven principles, but it seems to me that there’s at least one more principle, an eighth principle if you will, that we need to talk about. If you read a little further in Article 2 of bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association, you will come to section 2.3, which reads as follows:

“The Association declares and affirms its special responsibility, and that of its member congregations and organizations, to promote the full participation of persons in all of its and their activities and in the full range of human endeavor without regard to race, ethnicity, gender, disability, affectional or sexual orientation, age, language, citizenship status, economic status, or national origin and without requiring adherence to any particular interpretation of religion or to any particular religious belief or creed.”

This is what I call the eighth principle. Each week, we read a slightly modified version of this eighth principle at the very beginning of our worship services. It lies at the very core of who we are as a congregation here in First Unitarian in New Bedford. Although it is related to the other seven principles, this eighth principle goes beyond those other seven because it tells us that we have a “special responsibility” to live out the ideals of justice and equality for all persons in our congregations and in the wider world. This morning, I’d like to focus on one way in which we Unitarian Universalists have tried to live out this “eighth principle” of ours. And to do that, let’s go back in time….

A few forward-looking Unitarians and Universalists have always been at the forefront of racial justice. Our own John Murray Spear, the first minister of First Universalist church, one of our antecedent churches, helped form an interracial congregation here in New Bedford in the 1830’s. Unfortunately, we had our share of segregationists, too, and an even bigger number of people who didn’t care one way or the other. But by the 1950’s, there was a growing awareness among Unitarians and Universalists that racial equity and racial justice lies at the heart of our religious tradition.

I’ll give you one minor example of how that growing awareness played out in the 1950’s. My mother, who was not a particularly unusual Unitarian, was a schoolteacher, and in the early 1950’s she got a job working in the Wilmington, Delaware, school system, teaching in an integrated school. She told us how one day she was walking down the street holding the hands of two kindergarteners, when a man drove by and shouted a racial epithet at her — both of those children happened to be African American children, and that man shouted “nigger lover” at her, a truly offensive thing to say where those children could hear it. I’m sure that man didn’t care much about giving offense. But when he called her a lover, he spoke some truth: she was a lover of her fellow human beings: as a typical Unitarian of her day, my mother followed the moral principle that you should love your neighbor as yourself; and she also followed the growing moral awareness that you should fight racism in the wider society.

Well, that is just one tiny incident among many others. A few of our churches became integrated and even truly inter-racial: First Unitarian in Chicago, Arlington Street Church in Boston, and others besides. The Unitarians and the Universalists merged together in 1961. Then in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King sent his famous telegram to the leaders of all denominations, asking them to come to Selma, Alabama, to support his non-violent efforts to desegregate that city. Over one hundred Unitarian Universalist ministers, and more than one hundred Unitarian Universalist laypeople, heeded Dr. King’s call and traveled to Alabama. Proportionately speaking, this was a large number of Unitarian Universalists, since we have always been a numerically small denomination — numerically small, but influential beyond our numbers.

One of the Unitarian Universalist ministers who heeded Dr. King’s call was James Reeb. On March 9, Reeb and two other Unitarian Universalist ministers walked out of a cafe in Selma, and were attacked by some white men who called them “niggers,” and badly beat them. James Reeb died of that beating two days later. Of course black Americans were being beaten and killed with alarming frequency, but James Reeb’s death galvanized many people in the white establishment: that a white minister might be beaten to death because of his efforts to fight racism forced white America to confront some of the violence and hatred that racism spawned. Within days of Reeb’s death, the president of the United States made a special statement supporting civil rights.

The Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association was meeting when they heard that James Reeb had died, and they adjourned the meeting and immediately flew to Selma, where they reconvened their meeting. Rev. Victor Carpenter said of this action: “What a symbol! No other denomination could or did make such a profound statement of denominational solidarity with teh Civil Rights movement or such an affirmation of the movement’s black leadership.” [1983 Minns lecture]

I tell you this story so that you can hear about the high point of Unitarian Universalist anti-racist work. Unfortunately, in the late 1960’s, we Unitarian Universalists lost a great deal of momentum when our denomination was rocked by what has come to be known as the Black Empowerment Controversy.

By 1967, African Americans constituted about one percent of all Unitarian Universalists enough so that African American Unitarian Universalists started to connect with one another. On October 6, 1967, at a Unitarian Universalist gathering called “The Emergency Conference on the Black Rebellion,” 37 African American Unitarian Universalists got together and framed a plan of action. They called for African American representation on key denominational committees; subsidies for African American ministers; and a new social justice organization to be called the Black Affairs Council which would staffed entirely by African Americans and would be financed by the Unitarian Universalist Association in order to further justice for African Americans. You will notice that their central goal was to increase numbers of African Americans in leadership roles within the denomination.

To make a long story short, the Black Affairs Council was accused of being a separatist group. The notion of empowering African American ministers and lay leaders was difficult for white Unitarian Universalists to understand. The denomination voted to fund the social justice initiatives of the Black Affairs Council, and then when the budget got tight in 1969, funding was cut without adequate explanation. It is estimated that half of all African American Unitarian Universalists quit our denomination because of this controversy. For example, a young African American man named Bill Sinkford, who was president of the national youth organization in the late 1960’s, left Unitarian Universalism out of frustration.

It took us a couple of decades to recover from that controversy. Let me give you a vivid image of our recovery. I told you how young Bill Sinkford quit Unitarian Universalism. Two decades later, he decided to come back; he became a Unitarian Universalist minister; and in June, 2001, he was elected to the presidency of our denomination, the first African American leader of a historically white denomination in the United States. I would argue that Bill Sinkford’s leadership has been the most inspiring since the merger of Unitarians and Universalists in 1961.

While Bill Sinkford was away from our denomination, two other movements for full equality and full inclusion swept our denomination. In the 1970’s and early 1980’s, the feminist movement changed Unitarian Universalism: we got rid of the old sexist language in our hymns and in our bylaws, we changed our principles and purposes and included a seventh principle based on ecofeminist thinking, and we encouraged women in leadership roles until now half of all Unitarian Universalist ministers are women. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, we moved towards full acceptance of all persons regardless of sexual orientation, and we have gotten far enough in that effort that more than half our congregations are officially recognized as open and welcoming to gay, lesbian, and transgender persons, and we have gotten to the point where it is possible for a Unitarian Universalist minister to be openly gay, lesbian, or transgender.

And finally, in the last ten years, I have sensed a move back towards making racial justice a priority, the way it was for us in the 1960’s. I think two different things are causing us to move in this direction. On the one hand, racism is on the increase in our wider society: schools are becoming more segregated, prisons are disproportionately filled with people of color, we’re even starting to see new attempts at poll taxes to keep people of color from voting.

On the other hand, many people in their twenties and thirties, and even up to those of us in our forties, have come to expect a truly multiracial society. It is our positive ideal. I’ll speak for myself for just a moment: I feel more comfortable in multiracial settings, to the point where I really don’t want to be a member of an all-white church. I’m not the only one who feels this way. Lots of people who grew up as Unitarian Universalists were brought up believing in the ideal of a multiracial society — lots of other people who didn’t grow up as Unitarian Universalists were brought up with those same values — we truly believe in a multiracial society. So here we all are, and one of the first things we want to do is make our churches multiracial.

Notice that I said “multiracial.” Since the days of the Civil Rights movement, we have come to recognize that racism takes many different forms. There is racism against African Americans, but there is also racism against Asian Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, Pacific Islanders, and so on. Recently, we have people like Tiger Woods and Barack Obama pointing out that they come from mixed-race backgrounds. While we have to recognize that the legacy of slavery has caused a unique set of problems for people of African descent, we also know that racism takes on many insidious forms. Indeed, we can go beyond racism and say that oppression takes on many different forms: the oppression of women, the oppression of sexual minorities, the oppression of people who don’t speak English as their native language, the oppression of people who didn’t happen to be born here in the United States. All these different kinds of oppression are kinds of evil that we must fight.

I would like to suggest to you that the fact that we can recognize the religious dimension of all these different kinds of oppression offers us an amazing religious opportunity. As a religious people, we know that we are called to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. We read it in the Hebrew Bible, and the Christian scriptures, in the Confucian Analects, indeed in all the great religious literature. We hear it from all the great religious and moral leaders down through the ages: Buddha, Jesus, Mother Ann Lee of the Shakers, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King. And we know from our own reasoning processes that this is a great moral truth. In our time, in these United States, racism is one of the greatest issues that confronts us and requires us to act. As a religious people, we are concerned with what we do with our lives. So it makes sense that we should apply our religious principles to the issue of racism.

And here in First Unitarian Church, we are already doing that. Our church is in fact multiracial — I’d prefer it if we were more multiracial, but there is no way can anyone can say that we are a totally lily-white church. Less visibly, we also incorporate a diversity of ethnic groups. If English isn’t your native language, no one minds; if you were born in another country, no big deal. We are also at the forefront of fighting discrimination against gay, lesbian, and transgender persons. We are a church that is truly living out the “eighth principle” of Unitarian Universalism.

To put it most positively, we like diversity; and we are willing to actively work towards becoming an even more multiracial, multiethnic, diverse congregation. We know that means that we’re going to be involved in anti-racism and anti-discrimination work at many different levels: here in our church perhaps, certainly in the wider New Bedford community, in the country as a whole.

We know it won’t be easy at times. But it is an essential part of our religious values, and so we will persevere; and we will, my friends, we will overcome.