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.
Bridging ceremony
Each year, a few young people from this church end their time in high school. Usually after they are through with high school, they head off to find a job, to join the military, or to attend college or further education. And often that means that these young people move out of town, or have busy schedules that don’t permit them to come to church as often.
Our young people enrich the life of this church immeasurably. They bring their own perspective to church life, they bring their own talents and enthusiasms. Sometimes, they can help to challenge the assumptions of older generations, which can inject new energy and life into this church. So when the end of high school requires some young people to move on, it’s a real loss to the church.
But it’s also a time of excitement. We are so pleased that these young people are entering a new phase of life! They may not be around as much as in the past, but we want them to know that we will always be glad to see them here, that we hope they continue to be a part of this church. We want them to know, too, that we will support them as they make the big transition away from high school and into something new — we will support them in their dreams, and their emerging new lives.
This is our chance to recognize these people in what has become known as a “Bridging Ceremony,” bridging the gap between youth and adulthood.
***
First, I’d like to ask anyone who, like me, spent part or all of their growing-up years in a Unitarian, Universalist, or Unitarian Universalist church, to join me up here at the pulpit.
Next, I’d like to ask everyone who is in high school, and those adults who have served as youth advisors, to come stand up here in front of the pulpit.
Jarrod Hines and Dani Everton have graduated from high school and both will be attending Bristol Community College. Would you two please join us up here in the pulpit?
Welcome, Dani and Jarrod! We welcome you into the community of adult Unitarian Universalists.
Those of us standing here at the pulpit also grew up as Unitarian Universalists, and we have either stayed, or we have come back. Know that you will be welcomed into other Unitarian Universalist churches (and if you aren’t welcomed, you can do what some of us did and demand to be welcomed in!). Know that you will always be welcome here — come back and visit, or remain here as members.
And I deliver this charge to all the adults in this church: whenever you meet a young adult who grew up in a Unitarian Universalist church, you have the privilege and the responsibility to welcome them here in this church — just as other Unitarian Universalist congregations will have the privilege (and responsibility) to welcome some of our young people into their congregations.
Readings
The first reading this morning comes from Kenneth Patton:
“The family is the center of devotion; we declare it so. The child justifies the family, for no child survives without its nurture. We live for the family, more than we live for nation, corporation, or religion. Parents have one superlative function, to bring new lives into the world, to share in the creation of persons. The old man, sorting essential works from trivia, knows fatherhood was the best of what he had to do.”
[Patton, Hymns for Humanity.]
(I would add, that those of us whose families are child-free are equally responsible for children, for all children, the children of humanity.)
The second reading consists of two aphorisms from Ben Franklin’s 1739 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanac:
“Honour thy Father and Mother, i. e. Live so as to be an Honour to them tho’ they are dead.”
“Let our Fathers and Grandfathers be valued for their Goodness, ourselves for our own.”
So end this morning’s readings. Though I have to admit, as I thought about these two sayings, the less sure of them I became. The sermon will, in part, be an attempt to make these sayings a little less slippery.
Sermon
“Can you fix it, Dad?” I’m not sure I ever asked that exact question of my own father, but it’s the classic question for children to ask of their parents.
And right at the outset, I should point out that even though we’re in the fourth wave of feminism in North America, our culture still thinks that men are better at fixing things and women are better at nurturing;– thus, in families with two parents of opposite gender, when we hear the question, “Can you fix it?” many of us are likely to imagine that the child is asking her or his father to fix something. Of course, that’s not necessarily the case in the real world. In my family of origin, both my mother and my father were equally good at fixing things for us when we were small. So both mothers and fathers are perfectly good at fixing things. But because it’s Father’s Day today, I’m going to talk about fathers.
“Can you fix it, Dad?” It seems to me that young children are most likely to ask to have very concrete things fixed:– a broken doll loses its arm, or a broken toy truck loses a wheel, and the child asks, “Can you fix it?” What adult could resist such an appeal from a child? Dad bends down and fixes the doll or the toy truck. Maybe it’s not the best repair job in the world, but from the child’s point of view it’s a miracle, and the child is impressed by Dad’s love and power and kindness.
A string of repair jobs follows. Dad stitches together a toy tiger which has somehow lost its head. The repair jobs get more complex. The child presents Dad with a broken tricycle, and Dad has to ask some friends at work how in tunket you repair a broken spoke on a tricycle, and then Dad has to borrow a spoke wrench, find out where you can buy a tricycle spoke, turn the cussed thing upside down, tell the child to go away so as not to hear Dad’s swearing, and repair the stupid thing. At last it’s done, and again the child is impressed by Dad’s love and power and kindness — and perhaps has learned some new words too boot.
These repair jobs get progressively more difficult. The difficulty increases exponentially with the age of the child. Soon they get so difficult that even Dad can’t fix it. The family cat or dog dies, the child is at last old enough to understand death, and the child realizes that Dad can’t fix death. The family experiences discrimination of some kind, the child is old enough to realize the emotional impact of discrimination, and the child sees that Dad can’t seem to do anything about it. In my own case, Dad and I were playing baseball in the back yard. I pitched the ball to Dad, he hit a little pop fly straight at me, and I was too slow and clueless to either duck or put my glove in front of my face. The ball whacked me on the forehead, and though it didn’t hurt that much, that whack on the head provided a moment of enlightenment that made me realize first of all that Dad couldn’t protect me from myself; and then I realized that Dad couldn’t fix my essential inability to play team sports.
At some point, each one of us realizes that our parents aren’t all-powerful. That moment came for me with a dramatic whack on the head when I was seven or eight years old. That’s a pretty common age for children to come to the realization that our parents aren’t quite as all-powerful as we had originally believed. The effects of this realization can reach far and wide in the child’s life. The effects can be relatively trivial — not long after I got that whack on the head, I gave up on baseball, joined the Cub Scouts, and followed in Dad’s footsteps by pursuing outdoors sports like fishing and boating and hiking.
Or the effects can be quite profound….
By the age of seven or eight, many children have finally become aware that their parents are not all-powerful, and I think that’s why many traditional religions have a rite of passage for children of that age. Some traditional Christian churches allow children to participate in their first communion when the child is seven or eight. Although I can’t accept the theology behind it, the ritual of first communion makes good psychological sense. Just when the child has come to doubt that his or her own father is all-powerful and capable of fixing anything, the religious community comes along and affirms the existence of an all-powerful father-God with whom one can have mystical union through the ritual of communion.
Of course, the idea of an all-powerful father-God doesn’t work any better in the long run than the idea that your own flesh-and-blood father is all-powerful. In some traditional religious communities, people of that religion learn to talk to their father-God through prayer and they might even ask, “Can you fix it, Father? Can you fix it, God?” From what I’ve seen, the notion that God can fix anything only lasts until the teenage years. But the moment always seems to come when the young person’s prayer goes unanswered, at which point the young person either has to develop a more subtle way of understanding God, or the young person winds up rejecting the notion of an all-powerful father-figure and often rejecting her or his childhood religion. Both options seem to be perfectly valid — perfectly valid, that is, as long as the young person comes to realize that the world is a flawed place, filled with injustice and many kinds of evils, and that there is no one out there — not your own dad, not God — who can fix your life and make everything all better.
And if you want to know why some young teenagers seem to be really, really cranky, who wouldn’t be cranky when you have to face up to the fact that the world is filled with injustice and evil and no one’s going to fix it for you?
We adults know that the world is filled with injustice and evil, and we know that no one is going to fix things for us. When I hear the question, “Can you fix it, Dad?”, I have a twinge of nostalgia, remembering my days as a young child when I thought Dad could fix anything. As an adult, I now know that no one can fix everything. From my religious point of view, that means that I can’t honestly believe in a God that is all-knowing, completely good, and all-powerful — because such a God would surely know when bad things happen to me, such a God would want to fix the bad things that happen to me, and such a God would have the power to fix the bad things that happen to me. And since bad things keep happening to me, the evidence leads me to conclude that there is no God that is all-knowing, completely good, and all-powerful. The answer to the question, “Can you fix it, Dad?” is always — No, not really.
Many people, when they reach to this conclusion, just give up the whole notion of God — I’ll talk about that option in just a moment. But many people find alternative ways to understand God, and I’ll tell you about two such God-concepts that happen to be current in Unitarian Universalist circles.
First, there’s so-called “process theology,” which I have to admit that I don’t fully understand. But as I understand it, the process theologians tell us that God is changing and growing and evolving — that’s why it’s called “process theology,” because God is in process. Well, that would imply that God is not all-knowing, completely good, and all-powerful. It’s sort of like when you go into the photocopy shop, and you see the sign on the wall that says, “Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick two.” So maybe if you walk into the office of a process theologian, you’d see a sign on the wall that says: “All-knowing. Completely good. All-powerful. Pick two.” But I’ll tell you what it’s really like. It’s really like your younger self suddenly realizing that your Dad can’t fix everything in the world, and that he is fallible and growing and changing, just as you yourself are. That’s process theology.
Another way that some Unitarian Universalists understand God goes under the general heading of Transcendentalism. Transcendentalism is a pretty vague term these days, and it can include everyone from Emersonians to Goddess worshippers to ecological activists. Most Transcendentalists see divinity in the processes of Nature, and some would even say that all of Nature is divine, is God. Transcendentalists impress me as being essentially optimistic, believing that the arc of the universe tends towards goodness, which leads to them fighting against human-created injustice. If Transcendentalists had to choose from all-knowing, completely good, and all-powerful, I think most of them would choose just one — that God is completely good — the rest is up to us. And that’s like your younger self realizing that what your dad really offers you is his love, and pretty much everything else is going to be up to you.
What about those among us who don’t believe in God? There are many ways to not believe in God, but I’ll just talk about the one most common option that happens to be current in Unitarian Universalist circles today.
The best-known option for religious people who don’t believe in God is humanism. I would define humanism as deep trust in the human capacity for good. Humanists also acknowledge that humans beings do not always act in good ways, which means that we have to figure out how to build a society that helps us act in the best ways possible. Humanism requires of us that we work together with other human beings to address the very real problems that we’re facing. Perhaps humanism can best be compared to your younger self coming to the long, slow realization that your dad is not superhuman, but that he is human just like you, he’s just another human being that maybe you can work with to address the world’s problems.
At some point in your life, you realize that your dad can’t fix everything because your dad is fallible, and he is growing and changing. At some point in your life, you realize that what your dad really offers is his love, and even though it must be admitted that not all dads are able to offer that we can acknowledge more generally that love is the most powerful force in the universe. At some point in your life, you realize that your dad is fully human, with all that statement implies.
I began by asking the questions: “Can you fix it, dad?” The short answer is no. When I finally figured that out, I got along much better with my dad; and it was easier on my dad when he knew that I knew that he couldn’t fix everything about my life. I know my dad can’t fix the world. My dad doesn’t try to fix my world. We’ve gotten to the point where we just talk like two human beings.
And what do Dad and I talk about? Well, we often talk about what’s wrong with the world; that is to say, we often talk about what needs to be fixed.
I don’t want to speak for my dad, but I think he and I both agree that the primary moral and ethical problem confronting anyone living in the United States today is the fact that we are involved in a long-running war in Iraq. My dad and I both happen to believe that the Iraq war is immoral and unethical; but neither one of us believes that some father-God is going to come and end the war for me. Nor do we believe that the United States has some father-God on my side, and that therefore anyone who disagrees with our country is automatically wrong.
That is to say, we do not believe that some magically powerful figure is going to fix all the problems of the world. And that means that we know full well that if something is going to be done about the war in Iraq, it’s up to us to do it. Dad belongs to Veterans for Peace — he’s a veteran of the Second World War — and he marches with the Veterans for Peace in town parades. He also witnesses for peace in his Unitarian Universalist church. For my part, I preach peace from this pulpit once in a while — not so much as to bore you — and I try to carve out enough time to witness publicly for peace; so I joined some Quakers in a public witness for peace in front of the Capitol building in Washington, DC, a couple of months ago.
I no longer say to my father, “Can you fix it, dad?” Now we say to each other, “How can we fix it together?” My wish for fathers, and for all parents, is that their children grow and mature enough so that they can ask that same question of their children: How can we fix it together? And my wish for all children is that they might have a relationship with their parents where they can ask: How can we fix it together? This will not be possible for all parents nor for all children; it is an ideal, limited by the realities of parent-child relationships.
But if I had one wish on this Father’s Day, this is what I would wish: That, to the extent possible, children will grow up and mature to the point where they can look their parents steadily in the eye and say, Let’s work together to fix this mess we’re in. That allows us to value our parents for their Goodness, and it allows us to value ourselves for our own goodness. So we would honor the human race, honor ourselves by fixing injustices as best we can, slowly building a heaven here on earth.