Athena

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) 2008 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading is an Orphic Hymn to the ancient Greek goddess Athena:

“Only-begotten, noble race of Zeus, blessed and fierce, who joyest in caves to rove: O warlike Pallas, whose illustrious kind, ineffable, and effable we find: magnanimous and famed, the rocky height, and groves, and shady mountains thee delight: in arms rejoicing, who with furies dire and wild the souls of mortals dost inspire. Gymnastic virgin of terrific mind, dire Gorgon’s bane, unmarried, blessed, kind: mother of arts, impetuous; understood as fury by the bad, but wisdom by the good. Female and male, the arts of war are thine, O much-formed, Drakaina, inspired divine: over the Phlegraion Gigantes, roused to ire, thy coursers driving with destructive dire. Tritogeneia, of splendid mien, purger of evils, all-victorious queen. Hear me, O Goddess, when to thee I pray, with supplicating voice both night and day, and in my latest hour give peace and health, propitious times, and necessary wealth, and ever present be thy votaries aid, O much implored, art’s parent, [bright]-eyed maid.”

[#32, The Hymns of Orpheus. Translated by Thomas Taylor (1792). Modern edition: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.]

The second reading is from Pseudo-Apollodorus, a Greek mythographer of the second century of the common era. It tells the story of how the ancient Greek city of Attika came to choose Athena as their special goddess:

“Kekrops, a son of the soil, with a body compounded of man and serpent, was the first king of Attika… In his time, they say, the gods resolved to take possession of cities in which each of them should receive his own peculiar worship. So Poseidon was the first that came to Attika, and with a blow of his trident on the middle of the acropolis, he produced a sea which they now call Erekhtheis. After him came Athena, and, having called on Kekrops to witness her act of taking possession, she planted an olive tree, which is still shown in the Pandrosion. But when the two strove for possession of the country, Zeus parted them and appointed arbiters, not, as some have affirmed, Kekrops and Kranaus, nor yet Erysikhthon, but the twelve gods [and goddesses]. And in accordance with their verdict the country was adjudged to Athena, because Kekrops bore witness that she had been the first to plant the olive. Athena, therefore, called the city Athens after herself, and Poseidon in hot anger flooded the Thriasian plain and laid Attika under the sea.”

[Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3.14.1, trans. Frazer.]

Sermon

This is the second of a short series of sermons on Greek goddesses. This morning I would like to speak about Athena, goddess of wisdom and of war; but before I do so, let me remind you why I think it is a good idea to preach about Greek goddesses in a Unitarian Universalist church.

Beginning in the 1970’s, we Unitarian Universalists began to realize that, when it comes to religion, women were often “overlooked and undervalued.” We actively worked to root out sexism from our shared faith. In the 1980’s, we rewrote our principles and purposes using gender-neutral language, and in the 1990’s, under the influence of ecofeminism, we added a principle about our commitment to respect the interdependent web of all life. In 1993, we published a new hymnal that included feminist hymns and songs. And many of our congregations were very active in addressing sexism at the local level. Over the past thirty or forty years, we have changed our selves and our attitudes, and have done away with a significant amount of sexism within Unitarian Universalism.

But of course the surrounding culture is still dominated by the idea of a male father god, and it is very hard for any of us to escape this idea. It is easiest to see the effects of the surrounding culture on our children: like it or not, they do learn the idea that God is a white man with a white beard sitting on a cloud somewhere up in the sky, and it can b e hard to talk t hem out of that idea. Thus we find ourselves devoting a significant amount of time in our Sunday school presenting the children with alternative ideas about God;– last year in the Sunday school, we spent much of the year with the children’s book “Hide and Seek with God,” a book which presents alternative God-images from the Christian tradition and from other world religions. This is the kind of thing we do so that our children can get past the idea that God is an old white man with a white beard sitting on a cloud.

Of course, as much as we don’t want to admit it, we adults are also influenced by the surrounding culture. Sometimes we catch ourselves making the assumption that the dominant male images of God are in fact the only images of God. For example, I have noticed that when people talk about the pro-atheism books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the discussions of these books tend to assume that God is singular, all-powerful, all-knowing; in other words, assume that God is the typical patriarchal male God of traditional Christianity. Both the atheists and the supporters of God weaken their arguments when they ignore the fact that there is more than one god-image out there.

In spite of recent scholarship which has uncovered female god-images in the Bible, and in other world religions, too many of us adults cleave to the old god-image of a white man with a beard sitting on a cloud somewhere up in the sky. Yes, even we Unitarian Universalists fall into this trap. We forget that Unitarian minister Theodore Parker was addressing his liberal Christian prayers to father God and mother God back in the 1850’s; and we Unitarian Universalists often forget that god-images can be either male or female, or gender-neutral, or differently gendered, or that gender does not even apply to the divine.

To keep myself from falling into the trap of thinking that the divine must be male, I like to spend some time thinking about the goddesses, like the Greek goddesses, who are a part of our Western culture. It’s not that I’m going to worship or believe in these goddesses; but remembering that our Western culture has lots of female god-images helps keep me from falling into the cultural trap of assuming that all god-images must be male. It’s a way of examining and challenging my unconscious assumptions.

Now you know why I’m preaching a series of sermons on Greek goddesses. Now let me turn our attention to Athena, a goddess who challenges many of our assumptions.

…

And to begin to tell you how Athena can challenge our assumptions, I should begin by telling you the story of Black Athena. Back in 1987, a scholar named Martin Bernal published a book titled Black Athena. In this book, Bernal stated his belief that the roots of Greek culture — and therefore the roots of all the Western European culture that sprang from it — the roots of ancient Greek culture lay in Africa. On the face of it, this is not a particularly remarkable thing to say. All the cultures of the ancient Near East, all the gods and goddesses of the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean world, seem to have been interrelated. Certainly the African culture of Egypt is an older culture than ancient Greek culture. So to say that the Egyptians had tremendous influence on the later cultures of ancient Greece should not be very controversial.

And the ancient Greeks knew that Athena herself had a connection to Africa. Plato, in his dialogue the Timaeus, tells us that in Egypt, there is a city called Saïs, and the citizens of that city have a guardian goddess: “The citizens have a deity for their foundress; she is called in the Egyptian tongue Neith, and is asserted by them to be the same whom the Hellenes call Athena…” [Timaeus 21e, trans. Jowett]. Thus Plato said that the Greek goddess Athena was somehow related to the Egyptian goddess Neith. It was an obvious connection to make: both Athena and Neith were goddesses of war and goddesses of weaving, and they shared other characteristics as well.

But when Martin Bernal wrote his book Black Athena he created a storm of controversy. One of the things that made his book controversial was Bernal’s image of a dark-skinned Athena. In our world, which is so conscious of skin color and race, it was shocked some white people, and some people of color, to think that the goddess Athena might have been black,– when for all these years most of us in the Western world have thought of Athena as being white.

We sometimes try to erect hard-and-fast boundaries in realms where there are no hard-and-fast boundaries. Racial and cultural boundaries appear to have been more permeable in the ancient Near East than we may want to believe. Ancient Near East gods and goddesses moved from one culture to another, and from one religion to another. Indeed, when I hear Wisdom revered in the Bible as a female figure of goddess-like importance, as in the responsive reading this morning, I wonder what other goddesses she was related to, and even if she was perhaps related to Athena, who was also a goddess of wisdom.

I imagine there was a web of cultural connections throughout the ancient Near East: connections between various goddesses and gods; connections between the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa; connections between peoples of all different skin colors from black to white to various shades of brown. In our minds, we have divided the world into distinct continents, and people into distinct races, but some of the divisions that we make are too arbitrary.

I started out saying that Athena might help us to be aware that the divine might just as well be female as male, or have no gender at all. The image of an African Athena can help us be aware that the divine might have black, brown, or white skin color, or be utterly beyond human racial categories. So this is another way in which thinking about Athena helps us to challenge our assumptions about our god-images.

One of the things that has bothered me about Athena is that she is both the goddess of wisdom, and the goddess of war. Since I think of war as a kind of madness, it seemed to me that Athena was combining two contradictory elements within her. How could she embody both war and wisdom?

The poet Robert Graves gives us a clue as to how this might be so. Graves says that although she is indeed the goddess of war, Athena “gets no pleasure from battle, as [the god] Ares and [the goddess] Eris do, but rather from settling disputes, and upholding the law by pacific means.” [The Greek Myths]

What particularly interests me is that Athena does not reject violence altogether. But when she does go to war it is for good reason; and should she decide to go to war, she uses her wisdom to develop adequate strategy and tactics, so that she never loses a battle. Ares, the male god of war, likes violence for the sake of violence, and he is often defeated because of his inability to plan out his strategy and tactics. [Graves, Greek Myths, 25.a] By contrast, Athena does not like to go to war, but she will do so if justice requires her to do so. Athena’s attitude towards war has helped to challenge my assumptions about peacemaking.

Last June, Rev. William Schulz gave a talk on his Unitarian Universalist theology of peacemaking. Schulz, a Unitarian Universalist minister, was president of Amnesty International from 1993 to 2006. Schulz said that in his years at Amnesty International, he “was exposed on a daily basis to the most sordid and gratuitous violence.” He saw, over and over again, and sometimes first-hand, the results of torture and government-sanctioned violence. In the face of such acts of violence, he felt that he could not uphold the ideal of complete and utter pacifism. He said he could not believe in what he called the impossible ideal of complete pacifism; instead, he believed that sometimes true justice requires military intervention.

As an example, Schulz said that if the United States military had enforced a no-fly zone over Darfur over the past three or four years — and such enforcement would include the possibility of shooting down aircraft which violated the no-fly zone — then much of the genocide now going on in Darfur could have been avoided. For that reason, Schulz does not support the way the war in Iraq has been handled because he believes that the Iraq war has so over-extended the United States military that we have been unable to respond to other, more urgent, humanitarian situations such as the genocide in Darfur.

William Schulz might get along quite well with Athena. Like Athena, he believes that any use of violence has to be guided by justice. Like Athena, he also believes that any use of violence has to be guided by long-range strategy and tactics, so that one’s military forces don’t become overextended. When I say that Schulz would get along well with Athena, I don’t mean that literally of course; to the best of my knowledge, Schulz is a humanist, and I don’t believe he is a goddess-worshipper. But like Athena, Schulz challenges us to move beyond the traditional Western Christian notions of religious pacifism, to go beyond the old Christian teachings on “just war theory.” Both Athena and William Schulz value practical wisdom over abstract adherence to principles, and they challenge us to consider the possibility of a theology of peacemaking that allows for limited use of violence in order to prevent more violence.

Athena has led us quite far afield, hasn’t she? First she challenged us to rethink our religious images of race and gender. Then she challenged us to rethink our religious notions of pacifism and peacemaking. Where will she lead us next?

In the second reading this morning, we heard how both Poseidon, the god of the sea, and Athena tried to take possession of the city of Athens. Poseidon laid claim to Athens by striking his trident on the ground, which opened up a well filled with sea-water; but this salty water was not of much use to the Athenian citizens. Then Athena came along and planted an olive tree; this tree produced food, cooking oil, and wood for the Athenians. Presumably, no one living in Athens had ever seen an olive tree before, because cultivated olives are not native to Greece. Not surprisingly, the Athenian citizens said that Athena had made the best claim to their city, and she became their ruling goddess. This is why we call the city Athens even today; it is the city named after Athena.

In the past few months, I have found reason to think about this story of how Athena gave the olive tree to Athens. On January 19, the New York Times ran a story titled “A New Global Oil Quandary,” the opening paragraph of which read: “Rising prices for cooking oil are forcing residents of Asia’s largest slum, in Mumbai, India, to ration every drop [of cooking oil]. Bakeries in the United States are fretting over higher shortening costs. And here in Malaysia, brand-new factories built to convert vegetable oil into diesel sit idle, their owners unable to afford the raw material. This is the other oil shock.”

You see, for much of the world, particularly the developing world, cooking oil represents an important source of calories. Even if you grow your own food you almost have to go out and buy cooking oil because it is hard to make it on your own. Right now, the price of cooking oil is rising very rapidly around the world. All food prices are rising rapidly; in the past year, the worldwide price of food has risen more than fifty percent. In some places, people are spending more than eighty percent of their income on food. Food riots have been taking place from Mexico City to Haiti to Indonesia. Military analysts tell us that the rising price of food is contributing to global insecurity.

When we first hear the story of how Athena gave the olive tree to the people of Athens, it sounds — quaint. How nice! the people get a tree from Athena, and they make her the goddess of the city. But in a world with shortages of cooking oil, suddenly the story doesn’t sound so quaint. The gift of a tree that provides both food and cooking oil is a gift of survival, a gift that prevents starvation. In the modern world, such a gift could prevent wars and violence. We are already seeing violence and instability resulting from rising food prices; whereas access to reasonably-priced food and cooking oil would tend to lead to a peaceful world.

The story of Athena and the olive tree challenges us to think about the relationship between food and war and peace. No wonder those ancient Athenians prayed to the goddess Athena: they were praying for food security, which meant that they were also praying for peace. Athena challenges us to understand the relationship between food and security; she challenges us to consider food supply in any theology of peacemaking.

These old stories about the goddess Athena challenge our religious ideas of race, gender, war and peace, and food security. And these various issues seem to me to be interconnected, that they are woven together in the larger religious issue of peacemaking. True peacemaking requires us to have the wisdom to understand the underlying causes of violence; as much as I might prefer the complete pacifism of Jesus of Nazareth, true peacemaking in today’s world may well require us to have enough wisdom to know when it is appropriate to use limited military force in order to prevent further violence.

Artemis

April 6, 2008 — “Artemis” — FUNB

Readings

The first reading is Callimachus’s first hymn to the Goddess Artemis, verses 1-46:

“Artemis we hymn — no light thing is it for singers to forget her — whose study is the bow and the shooting of hares and the spacious dance and sport upon the mountains; beginning with the time when sitting on her father’s knees — still a little maid — she spake these words to her sire:

”  ‘Give me to keep my maidenhood, Father, forever: and give me to be of many names, that Phoebus may not vie with me. And give me arrows and a bow — stay, Father, I ask thee not for quiver or for mighty bow: for me the Cyclopes will straightway fashion arrows and fashion for me a well-bent bow. But give me to be Bringer of Light and give me to gird me in a tunic with embroidered border reaching to the knee, that I may slay wild beasts. And give me sixty daughters of Oceanus for my choir — all nine years old, all maidens yet ungirdled; and give me for handmaidens twenty nymphs of Amnisus who shall tend well my buskins, and, when I shoot no more at lynx or stag, shall tend my swift hounds.

”  ‘And give to me all mountains; and for city, assign me any, even whatsoever thou wilt: for seldom is it that Artemis goes down to the town. On the mountains will I dwell and the cities of men I will visit only when women vexed by the sharp pang of childbirth call me to their aid even in the hour when I was born the Fates ordained that I should be their helper, forasmuch as my mother suffered no pain either when she gave me birth or when she carried me win her womb, but without travail put me from her body.’ …

“And her father smiled and bowed assent. And as he caressed her, he said: ‘…Take, child, all that thou askest, heartily. Yea, and other things therewith yet greater will thy father give thee. Three times ten cities and towers more than one will I vouchsafe thee — three times ten cities that shall not know to glorify any other god but to glorify the only and be called of Artemis. And thou shalt be Watcher over Streets and harbours.’ So he spake and bent his head to confirm his words.

“And the maiden faired unto the white mountain of Crete leafy with woods; thence unto Oceanus; and she chose many nymphs all nine years old, all maidens yet ungirdled. And the river Caraetus was glad exceedingly, and glad was Tethys that they were sending their daughters to be handmaidens to the daughter of Leto.”

[Callimachus, Hymns and Epigrams. Hymn III, vv. 1-46. Trans. A.W. and G.R. Mair. Loeb Classical Library, vol. 129. London: William Heinemann, 1921.]

The second reading are two brief myths or fables attributed to Galius Julius Hyginus, a Roman writer who lived in the first century of the common era in Spain. Since he was Roman, he calls Artemis by her Roman name, which is Diana.

Myth 180. “ACTAEON

“Actaeon, son of Aristaeus and Autonoe, a shepherd, saw Diana bathing and desired to ravish her. Angry at this, Diana made horns grow on his head, and he was devoured by his own dogs.”

Myth 181. “DIANA

“When Diana, wearied from constant hunting in the thickly shadowed valley of Gargaphia, in the summertime was bathing in the stream called Parthenius,– Actaeon, grandson of Cadmus, son of Aristaeus and Autonoe, sought the same place for cooling himself and the dogs which he had exercised in chasing wild beasts. He caught sight of the goddess, and to keep him from telling of it, she changed him into a stag. As a stag, then, he was mangled by his own hounds.”

(Galius Julius Hyginus then proceeds to list the names of the more than eighty dogs, separated as to males and females, who devoured Actaeon.)

[The Myths of Hyginus, trans. and ed. Mary Grant. University of Kansas Publications in Humanistic Studies, no. 34. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960.]

Sermon

This is the first of a short series of sermons on Greek goddesses. You may well wonder why I would preach a sermon on a Greek goddess;– let alone why I would preach a series of sermons on Greek goddesses. And I thought I had better tell you why before I actually tell you about the Greek goddess Artemis, who is the subject of this morning’s sermon. Here is why:

When I was a teenager in the 1970’s growing up in a Unitarian Universalist church, we Unitarian Universalists began to realize that, even in our denomination, women and girls were often overlooked and undervalued. We Unitarian Universalists finally figured out that sexism pervaded our shared liberal faith; and we set about changing that. We rewrote our principles and purposes. We put together a new hymnal. Many local churches went through honest self-appraisal about their attitudes towards women and girls. And to a large extent, we managed to change our selves and our attitudes, and we did eradicate a significant amount of sexism within Unitarian Universalism.

We were able to change our selves, but we could not change several thousand years of religious history. We could not change the culture which surrounds us, a culture which assumes that God is male. We could not change the sacred texts of the Western religious tradition we claim as our own, sacred texts which mention men far more than they mention women. Because of this, we Unitarian Universalists try to keep up with Biblical scholarship which points out where women appear in the Bible, and which tells us that women may have written parts of the Bible. But we can’t change the fact that Western religious tradition depicts God as male.

Why is this such a problem? Well, as an adult I find I can distance myself from the surrounding culture, and hold on to my own opinion that the divine does not have a specific gender. But what about our children? God is like sex and Santa Claus –they’re going to hear about it on the playground — we can say that we won’t tell the children that God is male, but they’re going to hear about it anyway.

I think about the girls that troop out of here to go to Sunday school each week — Sophia and Amanda and Jessica and Asia and Stephanie and Tahlia. I want them to know that God can be pictured as male or female. Not that I want them to believe in any particular goddess or god — as far as I’m concerned, they don’t have to believe in any god at all — but I do want them to know that the divine can be female just as well as it can be male.

As it happens, many children go through a stage where they are fascinated by stories of strong, powerful beings. Early on, they love dinosaurs, especially Tyrannosaurus Rex and other huge saurian carnivores. A fascination with strong powerful dinosaurs is often followed by a fascination with gods and goddesses:– I remember when I was nine or ten, my favorite book was D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. At this age, many children are fascinated by tales of gods and goddesses.

And many of us who were fascinated by Greek goddesses and gods when we were children find that those old stories have sunk deep into our religious consciousness. To this day, when I hear people talking about the feminine aspects of the divine, I immediately think of powerful Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. The Greek goddesses and gods are just as much a part of our Western cultural tradition as are the figures in the Bible; alhough we are unlikely to worship the Greek gods and goddesses, as Christians still worship the God of the Bible, still those Greek goddesses and Gods live deep in our cultural consciousness.

Thus I believe in teaching children about the Greek goddesses and gods — especially teaching children about Greek goddesses. Our girls, and our boys, deserve to have some knowledge of these strong, powerful religious figures; not least so that our children can begin to understand that women can be fully valued in religion, despite the fact that the dominant Western religious traditions tend to devalue and overlook women.

Now that you know why I want to preach about Greek goddesses, let me tell you about Artemis, my personal favorite Greek goddess; and tell you why I think our children, girls in particular, might want to know about Artemis.

At the most literal level, we might wish to tell our children about Artemis because Artemis choose as her followers nine year old girls. Admittedly, these nine-year-olds were not ordinary human children; these were sixty daughters of the old ocean god Oceanus, and thus had the blood of an immortal god running in their veins. (I suspect that there are some ordinary human girls who may well be disappointed to find out that they are not themselves eligible to join Artemis’s band.)

But I do think it’s worth telling children, especially girl-children, that there is at least one goddess who so values girls that she deliberately chooses girls to be her followers. I am glad that the Christian scriptures specifically mention that Jesus wanted the little children to be able to come to him. However, much of the Western religious tradition basically ignores children. That being the case, I think it’s worth telling girls that Artemis did value their contributions.

And Artemis really is a good alternative religious role model for girls. Artemis in no way represents the standard stereotyped roles that are pushed onto girls by the surrounding culture. In a culture like ours that promotes sexualized clothing for pre-pubescent girls; in a culture where you can buy Lego kits for girls which are packaged in pink and advertised as less difficult to assemble; in a culture where it has been documented that girls’ self-esteem plummets as they approach puberty — it’s not a bad thing for girls to know about a powerful goddess who is strong, self-assured, and competent.

Artemis is in no way a stereotypical girl. She wears sturdy outdoor clothing appropriate for the slaying of wild beasts; and I really doubt that she wears anything that is pink. She is adept with her bow, and she is the best of hunters. She lives on her own in the mountains, and while she has female attendants she is not dependent on any man. Indeed, Artemis is not impressed with the males who do fall in love with her, feeling no need to soothe wounded male egos:– when the river-god Alpheius fell in love with her and pursued her, she easily eluded him and sent him on his way, pursued by the mocking laughter of her attendants. Artemis is quite capable of taking care of herself.

We don’t have to encourage girls to grow up to be exactly like Artemis, of course. Not every girl is going to want to live in the mountains and hunt wild game. But we do need to offer girls a wider range of religious figures whom they can have as possible role models. The Christian tradition offers girls precious few good role models: Miriam, Esther, Ruth, and a few other strong capable women. And look how many more role models the Christian tradition offers to boys! So while we’re not going to encourage girls to be just like Artemis, nevertheless she is a goddess in the Western tradition who can be an alternative role model for our girls.

I have said that Artemis breaks down the gender-role stereotypes that so pervade the surrounding culture. One of these stereotypes is of enough importance that it deserves special mention.

In the first reading this morning, we heard how Artemis got Zeus, her father and the leader of all the other gods and goddesses, to promise that Artemis would never have to marry. Generally speaking, Western culture tells girls and women that, no matter what else they might do with their lives, marriage should be one of their ultimate goals. Even today, when so many more jobs and professions are open to women, the old feeling still persists that women should think of marriage before a career.

That’s why Artemis is such a good alternative role model for girls. Marriage simply doesn’t interest Artemis; she has other things to do with her life. Mind you, I think it’s a fine thing for people who want to get married to go out and get married;– but there are those girls and boys who would rather not get married. There is nothing in our religious views that demands we get married; marriage is a choice for us, it is a covenant into which we may enter voluntarily. Therefore, it behooves us to offer role models for those among us who choose not to get married. In the Christian tradition, Jesus never gets married, so boys have at least one powerful role model of an unmarried male religious figure. Perhaps we could offer Artemis to girls as a possible unmarried role model. True, she is not as central to our religious tradition as is Artemis; but then, Artemis is a goddess while Jesus in our view is simply human.

There’s another reason why Artemis can be a good role model for those among us who may not choose to marry. Although Artemis does not marry herself, she values children. She is the goddess of childbirth; and she likes children enough to want to have sixty nine-year-old girls for her attendants. It’s not that she hates children or marriage, it’s just that she has made a conscious choice not to have children of her own, nor to be married. In a culture that can push girls to want to be married and mothers first, and everything else second,– it’s good for girls to know that they can be feminine and be a woman without having to get married or have children.

I have one last thing to say about why Artemis deserves our attention. In the second reading this morning, we heard two different versions of the story of Artemis and Actaeon. In essence, the story goes like this: Actaeon, who is a man, is out hunting when he happens upon Artemis and her attendants skinny-dipping in a river. Actaeon is pretty creepy. When he sees Artemis and her nine-year-old nymphs attendants bathing, the obvious and polite thing would be for Actaeon to leave as quickly as possible. Depending on which version of the story you choose, Actaeon either stands there are stares at Artemis, or he tries to rape Artemis.

Women in our culture obviously have to put up with this kind of male behavior on a regular basis. In 2000, the U.S. Department of Justice released a report which said that 17.6 percent of American women said they “had been the victim of a completed or attempted rape at some time in their life.” Worse yet, all too often the woman is made to feel that somehow she is to blame for being attacked.

But Artemis doesn’t feel that she is to blame. Whether Actaeon was trying to rape her, or was invading her privacy by staring at her, Artemis assumes that he is to blame. She takes immediate action against him: she turns Actaeon into a deer; and then she gets his dogs to bring him down and devour him. We may not like the violence that ends this story. But nevertheless it is a powerful story because it helps to counteract the message that a woman who is sexually assaulted or even just stared at is somehow to blame. The story makes it clear that Actaeon should have know better; and he has to pay the price for his inability to control his momentary impulse. Personally, I would not try to explain this story in this way to children. But I do believe it is worth telling children this and other stories about this powerful and self-reliant goddess.

I believe in telling children stories about the goddess Artemis, just as I’m telling you stories about Artemis, so that we can have a religious role model of a strong, powerful, independent woman. As with any religious story, we need not take it as literal truth; we understand that it is poetic truth. As with any religious story, we know it is not the only religious story out there; it is one among many stories that we value for their poetic truths. But it’s good for us to know that our Western religious tradition, our own cultural inheritance, has strong female role models.

One of the nice things about being a Unitarian Universalist is that we can open ourselves up to religious influences like these. I told you that when I was nine or ten, I loved the Greek myths, and I read D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths over and over again. I told you that because I was fascinated by Greek goddesses and gods when I was a child, now that I’m an adult I find that those old stories have sunk deep into my religious consciousness. So it is today that I have firm and very distinct images of the feminine aspects of the divine. Nor am I unique in this:– whether we come across the Greek goddesses in childhood, or when we are adults, we religious liberals know that we can accept the wisdom and the insights in these old stories;– we do not have to take theses stories literally, but still they can be a part of our religious lives.

I’m glad that Artemis is a part of my religious consciousness, so that I have an example of a strong, self-reliant woman who stands up to sexual harrassment, who doesn’t worry about gender stereotypes, and who loves living in the mountains. As we continue to work together to reshape our understandings of gender, as we work together to build a land where women and men can truly be equals, Artemis is a good goddess to have on our side.

A Unitarian Universalist Easter

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) 2008 Daniel Harper.

Story — “The Story of Easter”

This morning, I’m going to tell the Unitarian Universalist version of the Easter story. If you were here to hear last week’s story, we left Jesus as he was entering the city of Jerusalem, being welcomed by people carrying flowers and waving palm fronds.

On that first day in Jerusalem, Jesus did little more than look around in the great Temple of Jerusalem — the Temple that was the holiest place for Jesus and for all other Jews. Jesus noticed that there were a number of people selling things in the Temple (for example, there were people selling pigeons), and besides that there were all kinds of comings and goings through the Temple, people carrying all kinds of gear, taking shortcuts by going through the Temple.

The next day, Jesus returned to the Temple. He walked in, chased out the people selling things, and upset the tables of the moneychangers. Needless to say, he created quite a commotion! and I imagine that a crowd gathered around to see what this stranger, this traveling rabbi, was up to. Once the dust had settled, Jesus turned to the gathered crowd, and quoted from the Hebrew scriptures, the book of Isaiah where God says, “My Temple shall be known as a place of prayer for all nations.” Jesus said it was time that the Temple went back to being a place of prayer — how could you pray when there were people buying and selling things right next to you? How could you pray with all those pigeons cooing?

I don’t know about you, but I think Jesus did the right thing in chasing the pigeon-dealers, the moneylenders, and the other salespeople out of the Temple. But the way he did managed to annoy the powerful people who ran the Temple. It made them look bad. They didn’t like that.

In the next few days, Jesus taught and preached all through Jerusalem. We know he quoted the book of Leviticus, where it says, “You are to love your neighbor as yourself.” He encouraged people to be genuinely religious, to help the weak and the poor. Jesus also got into fairly heated discussions with some of Jerusalem’s religious leaders, and he was so good at arguing that once again, he made those powerful people look bad. Once again, they didn’t like that.

Meanwhile, other things were brewing in Jerusalem. The Romans governed Jerusalem at that time. The Romans were also concerned about Jesus. When Jesus rode into the city, he was welcomed by a crowd of people who treated him as if he were one of the long-lost kings of Israel. That made the Romans worry. Was Jesus planning some kind of secret religious rebellion? How many followers did he have? What was he really up to, anyway?

Jesus continued his teaching and preaching from Sunday until Thursday evening, when Passover began. Since Jesus and his disciples were all good observant Jews, after sundown on Thursday they celebrated a Passover Seder together. They had the wine, the matzoh, the bitter herbs, all the standard things you have at a Seder. (By the way, if you’ve ever heard of “Maundy Thursday,” which is always the Thursday before Easter Sunday, that’s the commemoration of that last meal; and while not all Bible scholars agree that least meal was in fact a Seder, many scholars do think it was a Seder.)

After the Seder, Jesus was restless and depressed. He had a strong sense that the Romans or the powerful religious leaders were going to try to arrest him for stirring up trouble, for agitating the people of Jerusalem. He didn’t know how or when it would happen, but he was pretty sure he would be arrested sometime.

As it happened, Jesus was arrested just a few hours after the Seder. He was given a trial the same night he was arrested, and he was executed the next day. The Romans put him to death using a common but very unpleasant type of execution known as crucifixion. (And the day of Jesus’ execution, the Friday before Easter, is called “Good Friday,” a day when many Christians commemorate Jesus’ death.)

Because the Jewish sabbath started right at sundown, and Jewish law of the time did not allow you to bury anyone on the Sabbath day, Jesus’ friends couldn’t bury him right away. There were no funeral homes back in those days, so Jesus’ friends put his body in a tomb, which was a sort of cave cut into the side of a hill. There the body would be safe until they could bury it, after the Sabbath was over.

First thing Sunday morning, some of Jesus’ friends went to the tomb to get the body ready for burial. But to their great surprise, the body was gone, and there was a man there in white robes who talked to them about Jesus!

When I was a child, my Unitarian Universalist Sunday school teachers would tell me that what had probably happened is that some of Jesus’ other friends had come along, and had already buried the body. You see, there must have been a fair amount of confusion that first Easter morning. Jesus’ friends were upset that he was dead, and they were worried that one or more of them might be arrested, too, or even executed. The burial must have taken place in secret, and probably not everybody got told when and where the burial was. Thus, by the time some of Jesus’ followers had gotten to the tomb, others had already buried his body.

Some of Jesus’ followers began saying that Jesus had risen from the dead, and following that several people even claimed to have spoken with him. But in our Sunday school, we say that we Unitarian Universalists don’t actually have to believe that Jesus actually arose from the dead. We can choose to believe that his friends were so sad, and missed him so much, that they wanted to believe that he was alive again.

That’s our Unitarian Universalist version of the Easter story. Now, the children are invited to stay for the whole worship service, and Dan and I believe that it’s good for children to attend an entire worship service once in a while, just so they know what it’s like. There are Easter coloring books at the back of the church, to help children sit quietly through the service.

Prayer

Because the children are present this Sunday, I’ll talk briefly 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 quiet so you won’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 in the spirit of prayer and mediation, first with spoken words, then with a time of silence, and ending with a musical response.

As we do each week in this time of war, we think of all those in Iraq and Afghanistan. March 20 marked the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. On this Easter Sunday, when we think of Jesus who is called the prince of Peace, we pray for peace in the Middle East.

Thursday marked the date of the spring equinox, when daytime and nighttime are of equal length. May we take the time to enjoy the lengthening days; may we take the time to look for signs of spring, the return of life after the long winter.

May we also take time to think of all those in our immediate community who are suffering. May those who are troubled in mind and spirit find comfort and healing; may those who need it find peace; may those who need help find it.

Readings

The first reading is Our Kind of Story:

What comes to mind when Jesus is mentioned? Where to begin?

Jesus was a Galilean Jew. Most men had beards at the time. Many men wore their hair long in a braid down their backs — maybe that’s what Jesus did. He would have eaten with his hands from a common bowl. He no doubt wore his clothes many days in a row. He would not have brushed his teeth.
We have no reason to believe that Jesus thought himself to be the Messiah, or believed in heaven, or in angels. These were ideas later ascribed to him by his followers.

Most Unitarian Universalists find it easy to imagine this kind of human Jesus.

But at this time of year, we don’t get off quite so easily, because the resurrection shows up on our calendars on Easter Day.

What are we to do? We might take a look at the Book of Mark, written 70 years after Jesus’ birth. It’s a compilation of the oral tradition that already existed about Jesus. In Mark, Jesus is crucified, and after the Sabbath, Mary Magdalene and Mary set off to find his body to anoint it.

But the body isn’t there. Scholars agree that the original book of Mark ends with the women fleeing in terror. The two Marys don’t tell a soul, and Jesus never shows up again.

Wow! Imagine if the early Christians had let that story stay in print as it was first told, ending as it did in a frightened failure of nerve. It took a couple hundred years, but finally someone did add a new ending to the Book of Mark. Now, at the end of the story, Jesus appears again as if he were not dead.

Some people think that resurrection has to be about the resuscitation of a corpse. Of course not. Dead people don’t come back to life. At least that’s not our kind of story.

For us, it’s like this: We know that when something as wonderful as the message of Jesus comes along, in real life it does not die forever. The message comes back to life. We know that when goodness, and righteousness, and love emerge in the midst of humanity, they continue to rise up and come back to us.

We know that hope does not die. Hope comes back to life.

[Adapted from a sermon by Rev. Jane Rzpeka published in the April, 2006, issue of Quest. Available online here.

Offertory — We are a free church, and no ecclesiastical hierarchy, and no governmental agency, has any authority over us. We maintain our status as a free church by accepting no money from any outside source. In addition to their annual pledges, our members and friends may choose to give an additional donation during our Sunday worship service as a public witness that we are and shall remain a free church. If you are a visitor or a newcomer you may let the collection boxes pass with a clear conscience.

The second reading comes from the Christian scriptures, the gospel of Mark.

When evening came, since it was the preparation day (that is to say, the day before the Sabbath), Joseph of Arimathea, a distinguished councillor, arrived who was also himself awaiting the Kingdom of God. He ventured to go to Pilate and ask for the body of Jesus. Pilate was surprised that he had died so quickly, and having sent for the centurion asked if he was already dead. When the centurion confirmed it, Pilate granted Joseph the corpse. After purchasing a linen winding sheet Joseph took Jesus down, swathed him in the linen, and laid him in a tomb quarried out of the rock: he then rolled a boulder against the entrance of the tomb. Mary of Magdala and Mary mother of Jesus observed where he was laid.

When the sabbath day was ended, Mary of Magdala, Mary mother of James, and Salome brought spices in order to go and anoint him. And very early in the morning of the day after the sabbath they came to the tomb as soon as the sun was up. “Who is going to roll away the boulder for us from the entrance of the tomb?” (it was very massive) they asked themselves. But when they came to look they saw that the boulder had been rolled aside.

On entering the tomb they were startled to see a young man sitting on the right side clad in a flowing white robe. “Do not be alarmed,” he said to them. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene who was crucified. He has risen. He is not here. Look, here is the place where he was laid. Go now and tell his disciples, and Peter particularly, he is preceding you to Galilee. You will se him there just as I told you.”

They fled from the tomb, for they were trembling and unnerved. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

[Mark 15.42 – 16.8.]

Sermon

Unitarian Universalism was born in May, 1961, when two long-time religious groups, the Universalist Church of America and the American Unitarian Association, consolidated and became the brand-new Unitarian Universalist Association. Thus the Unitarian Universalist Association will be forty-seven years old this May.

I would argue that when the Unitarians and the Universalists formally voted to consolidate and become a new legal entity, they also became a new religious entity. We’re not really Unitarians and more, and we’re not really Universalists; we’re Unitarian Universalists which is something quite different. And as religious groups go, we’re still relatively young. Yes, we can trace our Universalist churches in North America back into the 1760s, and yes King’s Chapel in Boston was calling itself Unitarian as early as 1785. And yes, if you go to Europe you can find Unitarians in the 1400s; and yes, there were people preaching unitarian and universalist doctrines not long after Jesus died. But this amalgamation called Unitarian Universalism — that’s something new and different.

What makes us different? Right off the top of my head, I can name three things that make us different. First, when the feminist revolution started in the 1960s, we were ready for it and we adopted feminist theology wholeheartedly; so that now half our ministers are women, and our principles and purposes reflect feminist theology and gender-neutral language. Second, we have made the decision that we are going to be a truly multicultural religion, in a country where most religious groups are racially divided; and in 2001 we became the first historically white denomination in the United States to elect a person of color as our president. Third, we can only be described as a post-Christian religion; for while many of us would call ourselves Christians, more than half of us would not.

And this brings us to Easter, and leads us to ask ourselves how it is that we Unitarian Universalists understand Easter. The old Unitarians had a pretty straightforward interpretation of Easter:– they knew that Jesus wasn’t God, which meant Easter became a more human drama. The old Universalists had a pretty straightforward interpretation of Easter:– they knew that hell doesn’t exist, which meant everyone gets to go to heaven, which meant that Jesus didn’t “die for our sins”. But what about us Unitarian Universalists — how is it that we understand Easter? Here’s one way we might tell the Easter story.

So on Good Friday, Jesus of Nazareth was put to death, and since his followers were Jewish, they didn’t want to bury him on the Sabbath day, which lasted through Saturday night. First thing on Sunday morning, then, two people who were particularly close to him, two women named Mary who were particularly important leaders in the little group of followers, went to reclaim Jesus’s body. But the body was gone — maybe the Romans took it away to discourage Jesus’s followers, maybe there was miscommunication among Jesus’s followers, who knows what happened — but the body was gone.

Looking back two thousand years later, we can understand why some people wanted to say that Jesus rose from the dead; that’s a very easy way to explain away his body’s disappearance. But as feminists, we might want to tell the story differently. Yes, someone took the body away — if it was due to political or religious skulduggery, then we say, A pox upon those who perpetrated such an evil deed. But we also admire those women for having the presence of mind to leave the tomb as quickly as possible so that they wouldn’t get arrested — as feminists, we know that sometimes you have to save your own body from destruction so that you can take care of the next generation.

And so those women went back to the other followers of Jesus, and the followers of Jesus organized themselves, and began to spread out over the countryside, forming new little communities throughout the ancient Near East. Within a generation after the death of Jesus, we know that there were many strong women leaders in those early Christian communities — we know, because we read about them in Paul’s letters. They had formed communities so that they could pass on the wisdom of Jesus to succeeding generations — they made sure that their children would be raised with the highest moral and ethical ideals.

That’s one way that we Unitarian Universalists would tell the story of Easter, based on our understanding of feminist theology. Here’s another way we might tell the story:

Jesus managed to transcend cultural and ethnic barriers. That the story he told of the Good Samaritan? — that was a story of how someone from one ethnic minority, a Samaritan, was willing to help someone from another ethnic minority, a Jew, in a time of trouble. Jesus taught that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves — and he said that we had to do this across ethnic and racial boundaries.

Now this kind of teaching was troubling for the authorities of the Roman Empire. The Romans had united a huge empire through military force, and they kept their empire together by forcing everyone to conform to Roman religion, Roman standards, and Roman laws. The Romans ruled, not by loving their neighbors, but by dominating their neighbors.

So when, in the obscure province of Judea, there was a crazy religious prophet named Jesus who preached the radical doctrine that all peoples could learn to live together in harmony, the local officials determined that he was a possible threat to Roman rule, and for the purposes of internal Roman security he had to be arrested and put to death.

But although they managed to execute Jesus of Nazareth, they were completely unable to kill off his high ideals. His body might have died, but his teaching lived on:– that we can learn to love our neighbors, even though they may be a different racial or ethnic group than we are; that we can learn how to united and create a truly just and peaceful world, even as people around us try to exploit racial divisions to divide us.

That might be another way we Unitarian Universalists tell the story of Easter, based on our understanding of multicultural ideals. And there’s another way we might tell the story. As a post-Christian faith, we find we are not limited by the old Christian dogmas of Easter, and we are open to multiple points of view, and multiple personal interpretations of Easter. So we could even tell the Easter story like this:

So Jesus was a Jewish preacher and social activist who demanded justice for all persons, no matter what their ethnic background, no matter what economic status. In his fight for human rights and social justice, he ran afoul of powerful political figures and religious leaders in a Jerusalem that was dominated by the Roman Empire. He was arrested on trumped-up charges, and sentenced to death in a trial that proceeded without any sense of true justice. He was publicly executed using a particularly violent form of execution to serve as an example to everyone else that they had better just sit down, shut up, and toe the Roman line. And when several of his closest associates went to claim his body for burial, it was gone. But, his followers decided, what mattered wasn’t the physical body of Jesus. What truly mattered was the life of justice that Jesus lived. What truly mattered was what he taught. What truly mattered was to carry his work forward into the future, so that future generations might live better lives. In this post-Christian telling of the Easter story, we discover that we do not have to believe in some miraculous resurrection in order to believe in what Jesus taught — there are many ways to believe in Jesus

The story of Easter does matter for us. We may not understand Easter the way the older, more traditional Christian groups understand it. We may not even understand Easter quite in the same way that the older Unitarian and Universalist groups understood Easter. We may even have differing points of view about Easter among ourselves — individually we may range from liberal Christians to atheists, we might have pagan, Jewish, or Buddhist viewpoints. But we can all understand Easter as a story of how one man, Jesus of Nazareth, was executed for teaching justice and love — and we can all celebrate how the truth he taught lived on even after his death.