This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.
Readings
The first reading, an adaptation of Isaiah 61, was read responsively (#571 from Singing the Living Tradition
The spirit of God has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
To bind up the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives and release the prisoners,
To comfort all who mourn,
To give them a garland instead of ashes,
The oil of gladness instead of mourning,The mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit,
They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations, the devastations of many generations.
You shall be named ministers of our God.
The second reading this morning is from the essay “Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau:
“Some years ago, the State met me in behalf of the church, and commanded me to pay a certain sum toward the support of a clergyman whose preaching my father attended, but never I myself. ‘Pay it,’ it said, ‘or be locked up in jail.’ I declined to pay. But, unfortunately, another man saw fit to pay it. I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster; for I was not the State’s schoolmaster, but I supported myself by voluntary subscription. I did not see why the lyceum should not present its tax-bill, and have the State to back its demand, as well as the church. However, at the request of the selectmen, I condescended to make some such statement as this in writing:– ‘Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined.’ This I gave to the town-clerk; and he has it. The State, having thus learned that I did not wish to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on me since; though it said that it must adhere to its original presumption that time. If I had known how to name them, I should then have signed off in detail from all the societies which I never signed on to; but I did not know where to find a complete list.”
So ends this morning’s readings.
ELECTION DAY SERMON
My original plan for today was to preach a sermon titled “Love All Beings.” It was going to be part of a series of sermons on Unitarian Universalist views of God. But I decided to hold off on preaching that particular sermon, and instead I’m going to preach a sermon on what it means to be a religious liberal, a Unitarian Universalist, in today’s political climate.
You see, Tuesday is Election Day, and I decided that I had better preach an Election Day sermon. As these mid-term elections got closer, I found myself growing very uncomfortable thinking about how religious liberals deal with politics. Sometimes we act as if we believe we can effect a complete separation of our liberal faith and our politics. Alternatively, some of us confuse liberal religion with liberal politics and seem to operate under the belief that if we are registered with the Democratic party we have fulfilled our religious obligations in the public sphere.
Both these beliefs are actually false. I say this even though I myself have at different times acted as if I believed one of these two things. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I needed to preach an Election Day sermon that would lay out some of the ways we religious liberals could come to terms with politics.
At present, we mostly don’t deal with politics at all. Oh, sure, we do our little social action projects, and most of us are registered to vote. But for the most part, we Unitarian Universalists don’t do politics as Unitarian Universalists; we do politics simply as non-religious citizens. The end result is that politicians can safely ignore us — and they do.
It used to be different. Sixty years ago, Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, DC, was such an influential preacher that the Washington newspapers would hold their Monday editions until they got the text of his sermon to print. Senators and representatives attended All Souls in those days, and a few were even members there. Or take an example closer to home: Sixty years ago, when Duncan Howlett occupied this pulpit here in New Bedford, a few people with political power and influence actually listened to what he had to say..
Today, All Souls Church in Washington, DC, has a great preacher in the person of Rob Hardies, but no one outside of that church community much cares what Rob Hardies preaches. (Which is too bad, because Rob Hardies is a really good preacher who addresses matters of deep concern to all Americans.) Here in New Bedford, while it is true that we have a vibrant and exciting church community, I can assure you that no one outside of our little congregation pays much attention to the sermons preached from this pulpit. Indeed, as the primary preacher in this church, my experience has been that the only time anyone from the community bothers to call me is when they’re hoping to get money or volunteer hours from First Unitarian
We can be safely ignored precisely because we have subscribed to those two false beliefs that make us very easy to ignore. We have a false understanding of the separation of church and state — of course we believe strongly that the government should not sponsor any church or religious body — but individually we have too often acted as if our personal religious beliefs can not inform our personal political beliefs. And too many of us hold to the false notion that liberal religion is the same thing as liberal politics, acting as if you can’t be a member of a Unitarian Universalist church unless you are also a member of the Democratic political party. Two false assumptions that have led us into political irrelevancy.
So let’s look closely at that first false assumption, which stems, I think, from a real misunderstanding of what separation of church and state means. And to explain this, I’m going to recount a story about Henry Thoreau. Back in 1840, as we heard in the first reading this morning, Henry Thoreau ran afoul of the tax authorities in Concord, Massachusetts. His biographer Walter Harding tells the story this way:
It had been the custom in Massachusetts for the churches to assess their members for financial support and to have the town treasurers collect for them along with the town assessments. The First Parish Church [that was the Unitarian church in that town], apparently assuming that Thoreau was a member both because his family owned a pew there, added his name to their tax rolls in 1840. When Thoreau received his church tax bill, he marched down to the town office and announced he would refuse to pay it. ‘Pay or be locked up in jail,’ they replied. But before the issue could be decided, someone else paid the tax over Thoreau’s protest and the town officials were ready to drop the matter. Not so Thoreau however for he knew the subject would be raised another year. He demanded that his name be dropped from the church tax rolls and, at their suggestion, filed with the town selectmen a statement [to that effect]….” [pp. 199-200]
As I read this story to you, I’m sure some of you are thinking to yourselves, “See, that story about Thoreau just proves that we have to be ever vigilant at maintaining the separation of church and state.” Except that’s not what it proves. This story proves that Henry Thoreau fought to keep church and state separate in the public realm precisely because he did not separate religion and politics in his own private life. In his private life, he had moved away from the old-fashioned Unitarianism of his childhood church towards the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Therefore, his public and political action of civil disobedience was an expression of his deep personal religious beliefs. Thoreau got involved in political civil disobedience precisely because of his personal religious understandings.
Today, we may falsely assume that we can separate religion and politics in our personal lives, and therefore unlike Henry Thoreau we religious liberals today are reluctant to let our religious faith influence our political actions. Most of us won’t even mention our religious affiliation in public. When we go out and do social justice, how many of us explicitly say to others that we are doing social justice as an expression of our Unitarian Universalist faith? When you suggest that idea to us Unitarian Universalists, we tend to get a hunted look in our eyes. What, talk about how our religious faith has transformed our lives and led us to try to change the world?
The interesting thing is that younger Unitarian Universalists seem to be far more willing to live out their faith than us older Unitarian Universalists. The young people I know who grew up as Unitarian Universalists and who are now in their late teens and twenties are proud of their religious affiliation. When they go do social justice, they wear little flaming chalice pendants around their necks, and they wear t-shirts and have tattoos proclaiming that they are Unitarian Universalists. They talk openly about their liberal faith, and how their religious faith has transformed their lives.
It should be obvious that if we aren’t open about who we are as religious individuals, our liberal faith will continue to remain irrelevant in the public and political sphere. We should not wonder why the religious right gets all the political attention: they are more than willing to talk openly about how their conservative Christian faith informs the way they live. Let me assure you that I am not suggesting that we should imitate the way those on the religious right talk about their conservative faith; I am not suggesting that we should aggressively proselytize in the way those good folks do. That would be completely out of character for us. But I am saying that we could learn a few things from our young people, maybe by wearing a chalice emblem — it doesn’t have to be tattoo, it can be a discreet lapel pin like this — or by not being afraid to say that yes, I am a Unitarian Universalist, and it has changed my life.
Now on to the second false assumption, that we can equate Unitarian Universalism with liberal politics. Historically, that simply isn’t true. Millard Fillmore was a Unitarian, and he certainly could not be considered politically liberal. In the 20th C., we have Senator Leverett Saltonstall and President William Howard Taft, both Unitarians and both relatively conservative politically. Or consider the current case of two science fiction writers, Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, both of whom are Unitarian Universalists. Bradbury is a Republican and a political conservative; Vonnegut is a classic liberal or even left-wing Democrat; yet both feel comfortable within Unitarian Universalism. Indeed, some conservative Unitarian Universalists argue convincingly that the classically conservative values of liberty and lack of government interference in private life are more in line with Unitarian Universalism than today’s liberal politics. However, I would say that it is a mistake to confuse political positions with religious values; religious values may inform political positions, but those religious values remain distinct from any political expressions they might result in.
I would put it this way: our religious faith cannot be constricted within the bounds of any political party. I agree with Jim Wallis, the evangelical Christian who also happens to be a political progressive, when he says, “Religion doesn’t fit neatly in the categories ‘left’ and ‘right’…. It should challenge left and right.” [Weekly Standard, 4/11/2005 link]
Our liberal faith should challenge both the political liberals and the political conservatives, we should challenge both the Democrats and the Republicans. As a general principle, we can challenge the political liberals and the political conservatives with our liberal religious message of tolerance and inclusiveness. For example, we can challenge the Democrats to take religion seriously, we can challenge them to include religious people within their political party. For another example, we can challenge the Republicans to take liberal religion seriously, we can challenge them to include liberal religious people in their political party.
Which brings us to the first reading this morning, the responsive reading based on the passage from the Hebrew prophet Isaiah. I can imagine a Republican stealing a phrase from Isaiah, and saying: We need to proclaim liberty to the captives, those who have been held captive by Saddam’s regime in Iraq. I can imagine a Democrat stealing almost the same phrase from Isaiah, and saying: We need to release the prisoners, the prisoners that have been unjustly held in Guantanomo Bay prison. But wily old Isaiah, like so many prophets, does not allow any political party to feel comfortable. He calls us to release the prisoners and to proclaim liberty to the captives — and then he calls us to bind up the brokenhearted, to comfort all who mourn, and to give them a garland instead of ashes.
Isaiah is calling us far beyond mere politics. He is calling each of us to a universal ministry in our lives. He is calling us to bring about the reign of heaven here on earth, not so we can be re-elected, not because it matches what the polls say, but because it is the right thing to do. That is the challenge religion issues to politics.
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously asked who is our neighbor, that we should love him; and answered that it does not matter the color of our neighbor’s skin, that our neighbors are black as well as white. In so saying, Rev. King offered a religious critique of the political situation of his day, based on the religious principle of loving one’s neighbor. He offered a religious ground for what became political action. In the early 1970’s, feminist theologians like Mary Daly pointed out that God loved women as much as God loved men, and this religious critique — that women were just as fully human as men — based on the religious principle of loving one’s neighbor, later turned into political action.
Martin Luther King and others like him started by making clear their religious understandings. Then they held politics accountable to those religious values. I can clarify this better if I offer you an example. We Unitarian Universalists say that we value and affirm the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part; this grows out of our Transcendentalist heritage which saw the divine in Nature, and out of our acceptance of evolution which tells us that we are really no better than any other living being, and out of our liberal understanding of how to read the Bible. Thus, when we engage as Unitarian Universalists in political action to protect the environment, we do so because of this religious understanding, which means we are not tied to some specific political means to reach that end. We might work with the Democratic party to adopt more government regulations to protect the environment, but we might also work with the Republican party to loosen regulations and provide tax cuts and other incentives for green businesses. We know the religious end which we hope to achieve; we do not need to restrict ourselves to a single partisan political means to reach that end.
I find I must end this Election Day sermon with a final admonition to all us — and here I’m admonishing myself as well as you. We religious liberals act as if our religion should be small, inarticulate, poorly funded, and disorganized. Yet this is so silly, because we have really important religious understandings to bring to the wider world. Right now, we could offer some deep insight into how saving the environment is a religious, spiritual, and moral matter. In the face of widespread environmental problems, it has become actually immoral and unethical for us to keep our personal religious understandings separate from our personal political understandings.
So let’s become articulate, well-funded, well-organized, and big. We can adopt modern management techniques, use the Internet and other new media to market ourselves to younger people, we can listen to the church growth consultants who give us proven methods to grow. We can let our religion infiltrate our personal politics at the same time we fight to keep religion out of public politics. We can imitate the young Unitarian Universalists who openly declare their Unitarian Universalism by wearing chalice pendants or getting chalice tattoos or wearing lapel pins. And we can talk openly about how Unitarian Universalism has supported us and has transformed our lives.
So we could do these things, and if we did, by the time the 2008 elections roll around, this church could be a force to be reckoned with here in New Bedford. Let’s do it.