Water ingathering ceremony

The words below were used by Rev. Dan Harper to introduce the annual water ingathering ceremony at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, what is below is a reading text. Text copyright (c) 2007 Daniel Harper.

Introduction to water ingathering

Water links all persons together in the cycle of life. Let me explain how that is literally true. A human being contains on the order of 10 to the 27th molecules of water — 10 to the 27th is a huge number, a one with 27 zeros after it. On an average day, we each probably consume about 10 to the 25th water molecules (that is, if I did my math right), and excrete the same amount. The water that comes out of us continues on in the water cycle, draining into the ocean, evaporating, forming clouds, and raining down again — so you are linked to the ocean and the sky, and to all living things that partake in the water cycle. You can also consider this historically. Since water molecules are pretty much indestructible, and since such a huge number of water molecules passes through us each day, there’s a decent chance that some of the water molecules currently in your body were formerly in the body of Socrates, Gotama Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, and/or Hildegard of Bingen. So it is scientifically true that water links all beings.

It is also poetically true to say that water links us all together. Standing on the edge of the Rio Grande River, the poet Jimmy Santiago Braca writes:

I’ve come here after drinking all night,
come here after betraying myself and others I’ve loved
come here and offered all the shame and guilt to this river,
to take it down river, pouring it out into the Gulf of Mexico
there for the whales to spout it up in the air…
to cleanse it, joining me
    in their wholeness, their completeness.
I breathe part of its being in me….

When we gather here to begin a new church year together, we participate in a ritual gathering of the waters. If you get the church newsletter, you were invited to bring a small amount of water that somehow represents your summer: some of the water you used to water your garden, perhaps; or water from one of the city or town beaches that you visited this summer; or water from a place you visited; or water from a stream or river nearby that is important to you. If you didn’t get the church newsletter, or if you forgot, don’t worry: we have cups of water here for you to use; when your turn comes, you can pour one of these little cups of water into the communal bowl and tell us what it represents from your summer.

Here is how we will do this: Please line up here, to my right and your left. When your turn comes, step up onto the platform. Speak clearly into the microphone, say your name, and tell us in one or two sentences what your water represents. Please be aware that there are lots of people who will want to speak. Tell us just enough to make us curious, so that people will want to approach you during social hour and ask you about your summer.

I’ll start us off. My name is Dan Harper. This I went to visit some cousins I hadn’t seen in twenty years, and this water is from their house….

Labor of Love

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.

Responsive reading

“A Magnificent and Generous Economy”

Ellen Emerson, daughter of Lidian and Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote this about her mother: “One of Mother’s talents was making something out of nothing and there was room to afford it great play.

“Every rag of remains of her days of fine dressing was used in one way or another with great ingenuity till there was nothing left of it. Every garment could be made to serve a second term.

“Whenever Mother saw an opportunity she spread out the wearing-out things and the stores in the bundle-trunk and devised intricate plans, having someone at hand to baste as fast as she could arrange the pieces.

“Almira Flint, the daughter of one of the farmers, came to sew for us and told me afterwards that Mother taught her how to do many things by telling her how, and simply expecting her to do it; she made her a carpenteress, an upholsteress, a paper-hanger, a dress-maker.

“Almira had naturally a true eye and a skilful hand, a spirit also that hated to give up. She wouldn’t say I can’t, so she and Mother were always triumphant together over many successes. Every economy and skill that she learned of Mother she used at home.

“Economy was natural to Mother. She knew she was practicing a vigilant, active and inventive economy in all departments of her housekeeping.

“To her economy was a large science with many intricate and minute ramifications. Her economy did not lie in going without.

“Instead she wished everything to serve all the purpose it could. She was, as naturally, magnificent and generous.”

From The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, by Ellen Tucker Emerson. Adapted by Dan Harper.

Readings

The first reading is from The Case of the Perjured Parrot by Erle Stanley Gardner (1939).

Perry Mason regarded the pasteboard jacket, labeled “IMPORTANT UNANSWERED CORRESPONDENCE,” with uncordial eyes.

Della Street, his secretary, looking crisply efficient, said with her best Monday-morning air, “I’ve gone over it carefully, Chief. The letters on top are the ones you simply have to answer. I’ve cleaned out a whole bunch of the correspondence from the bottom.”

“From the bottom?” Mason asked. “How did you do that?”

“Well,” she confessed, “it’s stuff that’s been in there too long.”

Mason tilted back in his swivel chair, crossed his long legs, assumed his best lawyer manner and said, in mock cross-examination, “Now, let’s get this straight, Miss Street. Those were letters which had originally been put in the ‘IMPORTANT UNANSWERED’ file?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve gone over that file from time to time, carefully?”

“Yes.”

“And eliminated everything which didn’t require my personal attention?”

“Yes.”

“And this Monday, September twelfth, you take out a large number of letters from the bottom of the file?”

“That’s right,” she admitted, her eyes twinkling.

“And did you answer those yourself?”

She shook her head, smiling.

“What did you do with them?” Mason asked.

“Transferred them to another file.”

“What file?”

“The ‘LAPSED’ file.”

Mason chuckled delightedly. “Now there’s an idea, Della. We simply hold things in the ‘IMPORTANT UNANSWERED’ file until a lapse of time robs them of their importance, and then we transfer them to the ‘LAPSED’ file. It eliminates correspondence, saves worry, and gets me away from office routine, which I detest….

***

The second reading is by W. E. B. DuBois, taken from his essay, “To His Newborn Great-Grandson.”

The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you, and the world’s need of that work. With this satisfaction, and this need, life is heaven or as near heaven as you can get. Without this — with work which you despise, which bores you, with work which the world does not need — this life is hell.

Sermon

That last reading, the passage from W. E. B. DuBois, has been sticking in my head since I ran across it about six months ago. DuBois says, “The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you, and the world’s need of that work.” When I first read it, I liked this idea. Your work, whatever it might be, returns to us two things: whatever satisfaction each of us gets out of whatever work we do, and the world’s need of that work. As near as I can tell, this is a true statement.

But the more I thought about this, the less I liked it. DuBois may have been speaking the truth, but I’m not sure I like the truth he was speaking. I say this because a good bit of the work I have done in my life has been pointless and not particularly necessary. By DuBois’s standards, that would mean that I have lived a goodly part of my life in a kind of hell. I say this also because I know lots of people who have fairly meaningless jobs that provide little satisfaction. This would seem to imply that a fair percentage of the population is living in a kind of hell.

To better explain what I mean, let me tell you a little bit about one particular job I had — not that I think my life is particularly interesting, but rather I think this particular job is fairly representative of a lot of jobs out there. Twenty years ago, I was working as a salesman in a family-owned lumber yard, with about 80 employees. Probably ninety percent of our sales was to building contractors, with the rest to individual homeowners. I thought of it as a pretty decent place to work. The salespeople were treated with a certain amount of respect, at least as long as we kept our sales figures up. There wasn’t much room for advancement, but you could make a career there, as witnessed by a couple of older salesmen who had worked there for decades. We were required to work fifty hours a week, and sometimes you’d find yourself working sixty hours in a week, but when you punched the time clock at the end of the day, you could completely forget about the job. And the compensation was excellent — I made a heck of lot more money selling building materials than I make as a minister, with much better benefits besides.

So I had a decent job. However, considered in light of DuBois’s words, my job was pretty pitiful. The world has no particular need of lumber salespeople. Basically, my job was to sell as much building materials as possible, with as high a profit margin as possible. It was best for me when I could sell to contractors building big luxury homes — best for me, but not so good for the world. And I got no great satisfaction out of the job. Don’t get me wrong, I thought then and I still think now that it was a decent job, and I’m still mildly proud of the fact that my last two years there I was top gross and top net among the inside sales staff. But I got my satisfaction elsewhere in my life. Therefore, considered in light of DuBois’s words, the work I did at my job was pretty pitiful.

Let us consider another kind of work. In the responsive reading this morning, we heard a little bit about the work that Lidian Jackson Emerson did in her life time; this comes from a biography that Lidian’s daughter, Ellen, wrote of her. After she married Ralph Waldo Emerson and became a housewife, Lidian could be quite sure that the world needed her work. In the New England of her era, children were cared for by women, the food was cooked by women, and the houses were managed by women; and while it might not be personally satisfying to all people, if we’re going to survive as a species, the children must be cared for, the food cooked, and households must be managed.

This is not to say that the work itself necessarily satisfied her. Lidian had a small but adequate income of her own from an inheritance. Before her marriage to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lidian Jackson had devoted her life to charitable works, to reading and study, and to her Unitarian faith; she was thirty-three when she finally married, and you get the sense from Ellen’s biography that becoming a housewife — the endless details of caring for children, cleaning, cooking, and so on — consumed her time but did not entirely satisfy her. Yet she made of the work what she could. As we heard in the responsive reading, she took her work seriously and performed it well. She may not have taken her satisfaction from the inherent joys of the work, but rather from the knowledge that it was necessary work and that she did it well.

You can understand that my work as a salesman differed from Lidian Jackson Emerson’s work as a housewife and mother. The human species will not survive without someone like Lidian Jackson Emerson to raise the children, prepare the food, and take care of the household. As for my old job, the world would be no worse off if there were no lumber salespeople. After I quit my job as a salesman, I went to work for a carpenter, and I found myself in a job where the work I was doing was necessary: we would go repair the roof of someone’s house, for example, and at the end of a day’s work I would know that I had accomplished something that really was worth doing.

So much of the work we do these days seems relatively meaningless; so many of the jobs we fill seem pointless. We live in the information economy now, and a lot of our country’s wealth is generated from moving information around, which may be satisfying but which is not as elementally necessary as raising a child. Then there are those of us who work in big bureaucracies, or in big factories, where you can feel as if you’re just a replaceable cog on an insignificant wheel, going round and round in circles. Jobs are increasingly anonymous, workers are increasingly replaceable, and sometimes the work we do seemingly gets farther and farther away from the real world.

Our work is increasingly divorced from meaning, and I am convinced that has become one of the great spiritual crises of our time. We are afraid that if we cross-examined ourselves, as Perry Mason cross-examined Della Street in the first reading this morning, that we would discover that much of the work with which we occupy ourselves could have been left undone, and transferred into a file marked “LAPSED,” and ignored; and no one would notice the difference.

That is why I don’t much like DuBois’s words — because they ring true. He said: “The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you, and the world’s need of that work. With this satisfaction, and this need, life is heaven or as near heaven as you can get. Without this — with work which you despise, which bores you, with work which the world does not need — this life is hell.” I am lucky that I have never had work that I absolutely despise, nor have I had work that was entirely unnecessary; and the most boring work that I had at least compensated me well. But much of the work I have done over the years has been meaningless and not particularly necessary. Having talked with some of you about your work, I know that some of you feel similarly. Those of us who have had these experiences, according to DuBois, have lived — or are living — in a kind of hell.

In order for work to be satisfying, it must fill some great need in the world, and it must bring inner satisfaction to the worker herself or himself. One of the great spiritual questions is this: “What is my place in the world?” Good work helps us answer this question, because if we know what we are giving to the world that the world needs, then we know a part of how we stand in relation to the world; from this knowledge can come an inner spiritual satisfaction. Another great spiritual question is: “What ought I to do with my life?” Good work helps us to answer this question, because if we know we are filling some need in the world, we know a part of what we ought to do with life; from this knowledge can come an outward-directed spiritual satisfaction.

So what do we do to heed DuBois’s warning against “work which you despise, which bores you, work which the world does not need”? I don’t have any final answer to this question, but I do have some possible answers.

First, let’s remember that we’re not talking about financial satisfaction; we’re talking aobut spiritual satisfaction. Work that brings you lots of money can still be work that leaves you in some kind of personal hell. We all need enough money to pay the rent, put food on the table, buy some clothing, pay the utilities, and support charity. Aside from that, money need not enter into this discussion. Second, let’s remember that we’re not necessarily talking about a paid job at all. Lidian Jackson Emerson didn’t get paid for her work as a housewife and mother; but she had work nonetheless, work which she was able to make magnificent and generous. Having made those two clarifying points, what can we do to heed DuBois’s warning against work which we despise, which bores us, work which the world does not need?

One possible answer is the Henry David Thoreau answer. At one point in his life, Henry David Thoreau suggested doing as little work as possible — he recommended working as a day-laborer when you needed cash, but aside from that he advocated living off the land by living as simply as possible and growing as much of your own food as possible. Instead of working a regular job as a farmer or tradesman or schoolteacher, Thoreau chose to tune in to the transcendent reality of Nature, turn on to the wisdom of the world’s religions found in the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, and the Confucian Analects, and basically he chose to drop out of the comfortable bourgeois life he was expected to lead. This is a very real possibility even today. I actually did this for a year or two — lived cheaply, worked three days a week, and spent my time reading and studying. However, in order to do this, I had no car or dental care, and it was only possible because I had no children to raise. It’s also important to remember that when Thoreau lived in accordance with his suggestions, he was very active: he finished writing a book

What can we do to heed DuBois’s warning against work which we despise, which bores us, work which the world does not need? Here’s another possible answer. If you currently have a soul-deadening job with no redeeming social value, one possibility is to quit your job, and hope you can find another job that is more satisfying. This is the sort of thing that books like “Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow” tell you to do — and to give credit to that particular book, the author tells you that you better have a day job to pay the bills while you find that spiritually satisfying job, and she also suggests that you live as simply as possible. It’s also important to remember that if you come from a relatively well-to-do background, this possibility is more likely to work, because you are more likely to receive financial and material support from your family while you’re finding your new and satisfying job, and your network of family and friends will be more likely to include good contacts for finding a job.

Another possible answer is found in Frederick Douglass’s first paid work. In his 1881 essay, “My Escape from Slavery, Douglass writes about escaping from slavery to New Bedford, and then finding work:

“The fifth day after my arrival [her wrote], I put on the clothes of a common laborer, and went upon the wharves in search of work. On my way down Union street I saw a large pile of coal in front of the house of Rev. Ephraim Peabody, the Unitarian minister. I went to the kitchen door and asked the privilege of bringing in and putting away this coal. “What will you charge?” said the lady. “I will leave that to you, madam.” “You may put it away,” she said. I was not long in accomplishing the job, when the dear lady put into my hand TWO SILVER HALF-DOLLARS. To understand the emotion which swelled my heart as I clasped this money, realizing that I had no master who could take it from me,—THAT IT WAS MINE—THAT MY HANDS WERE MY OWN, and could earn more of the precious coin,—one must have been in some sense himself a slave. My next job was stowing a sloop at Uncle Gid. Howland’s wharf with a cargo of oil for New York. I was not only a freeman, but a free working-man, and no “master” stood ready at the end of the week to seize my hard earnings.”

So wrote Frederick Douglass, and from him we learn what we already know: If you are able to work, and able to keep the money you earn for yourself and your family, there is spiritual satisfaction in not being in bondage. There is a larger principle at work here: Work that leads to liberation and freedom, however circuitously, can be spiritually satisfying work.

And that leads us to another possible answer to our question, which is related to this last answer. It is possible to hold down a pointless job, or to have no job at all, and to find your spiritual satisfaction elsewhere. This applies as well to those people who are retired, or students who are not yet working. in the work of repairing the world. I have done so — I have had a relatively meaningless job, but when I punched out at the end of the day or the end of the week, I then did good work by volunteering in my church and in the wider community. This is what Frederick Douglass did. I do not imagine that shoveling coal for Ephraim Peabody provided enough spiritual nourishment for a man whose soul was as broad and deep as Frederick Douglass’s was; but on his own time, he began to speak out against slavery, and so he wound up changing the world for the better.

I leave you with this one final thought: Those words from DuBois come from an essay he addressed to his grandson. And I believe this is the key to everything we have considered this morning: somehow we have to pass on to our children, and other youth in our community, what it means to have good work; somehow we have to let them know that there is more than one way to find good work in this world. May that be the work of all of us here: to let young people know what it means to have good work.

Universalism for Such a Time as This

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 comes from “Treatise on Atonement,” written in 1805 by the Universalist minister and theologian Hosea Ballou. Ballou visited New Bedford in the late 1820’s, and his preaching led to the establishment of First Universalist Church, which merged with this congregation in 1930. In arguing for the truth of the doctrine of universal salvation, Ballou wrote:

“I would argue again, from a reasonable idea, admitted by all, namely, that mankind, in their moral existence, originated in God. Why, then, do we deny his final assimilation with the fountain from whence he sprang? The streams and rivulets which water the hill-country run in every direction, as the make of land occasions. They are stained with various mines and soils through which they pass; but at last they find their entrance into the ocean, where their different courses are at an end, and they are tempered like the fountain which receives them. Though man, at present, forms an aspect similar to the waters in their various courses, yet, in the end of his race, I hope he will enjoy an union with his God, and with his fellows.”

[Treatise on Atonement, 3rd edition, 3.iii.]

***

The second reading this morning comes from the book “Foundations of Faith,” by the Universalist minister and theologian Albert Zeigler, published in 1959.

“The power of traditional Universalism was that, in its teaching of universal salvation, it spoke to every man of his infinite value. As the ancient Hebrew saw himself to be of divine importance, rescued and chosen by God; as the orthodox Christian found his eternal significance in the sacrifice of the Son of God for his welfare; so the Universalist saw his and all men’s divine stature and destiny in the unfailing love of God. If [the phrase] ‘universal salvation’ does not today carry that message to us, we must find another way to sing the great gospel that every person and what he does and how he does it is of ultimate concern, of infinite significance.”

Sermon

We call ourselves “Unitarian Universalists,” a cumbersome name that came about in 1961 when the American Unitarian Association merged with the Universalist Church of America. These days, many of us leave off the second half of our name — instead of saying “Unitarian Universalist,” we just shorten our name to “Unitarian.” We call ourselves “Unitarian” not just because it’s a shorter name, but also because some of the old Universalist ideas seem thoroughly outdated.

Take, for example, the idea of universal salvation — the idea for which Universalism was originally named. Back in the 18th C., most people living in British North America, later the United States of America, believed that if you were good you’d get to go to heaven when you died, but if you were bad, you’d spend all eternity in the torments of hell after you died. But in the middle part of the 18th C., a few radical preachers in North America began to question the doctrine of eternal punishment for sin. These radical preachers, people like George DeBenneville in Philadelphia and Caleb Rich in Massachusetts began to teach that God is loving, and therefore God would not condemn anyone to eternal torment; they said that everyone gets to go to heaven. In short, they preached the idea of universal salvation, that everyone gets saved.

When the Universalist preacher John Murray arrived in the New World in 1770, this radical new idea began to spread more widely British North America. John Murray preached about universal salvation through the mid-Atlantic states and New England, greatly raising the profile of the emerging movement.

Murray and other early Universalist preachers faced ridicule and scorn for daring to preach that everyone would be saved. The more orthodox Christians believed you had to threaten people with hell and damnation to get them to behave well; they said that Universalists would destroy society be teaching that hell doesn’t exist — for if the people didn’t believe in hell, then they would indulge themselves in evil and sinful behavior. To which the Universalists drily replied that there was plenty of evil and sinful behavior in spite of the threat of hell, and they pointed out that in general Universalists behaved better, or at least no worse, than the rest of society. The early Universalists were great debaters; they had to be; for wherever they tried to start a new Universalist church, the orthodox Christians would challenge them to a debate.

On one memorable occasion, John Murray was telling a crowd about Universalism when his opponents began throwing stones in the windows. In his autobiography, Murray later recalled, “At length a large rugged stone, weighing about a pound and a half, was forcibly thrown in at the window behind my back; it missed me. Had it sped as it was aimed, it must have killed me. Lifting it up, and waving it in the view of the people, I observed: This argument is solid and weighty, but it is neither rational nor convincing.”

The Universalist movement in America reached its peak in the middle of the 19th C. At one time, it had perhaps the fifth largest membership of any denomination in the United States. But then a funny thing happened. The other Protestant churches began to leave behind the idea of hell. The other Protestant ministers stopped preaching hellfire and damnation, at least, in the larger, more powerful denominations. After 80 or 90 years of debating, the Universalists basically won the debate, and it killed them.

Because of this, because there wasn’t much to distinguish Universalism from other mainstream Protestant denominations, Universalism began a long, slow decline. The denomination declined greatly in power and influence, and in the 1930’s began cooperating more and more with the Unitarians, until finally in 1961 the Unitarian and the Universalist denominations merged.

By the time of that 1961 merger that created the Unitarian Universalist Association, Universalism seemed almost irrelevant. In 1961, the big theological debates were about the death of God, not about hell and damnation. By 1961, probably half of all Universalists were humanists and didn’t believe in God anyway, let alone believe in damnation or salvation. To many Universalists, Universalism seemed little more than a pleasant tradition, a traditional holdover from times long past, charming but more than a little antiquated. Maybe they felt that the belief in hell was disappearing.

But here we are 46 years later, and belief in hell has not disappeared. In a Gallup Poll conducted in May, 2007, 69% of the American population reported that they believe in hell. The current president of the United States and many of our other elected representatives believe in hell, and believe in damnation. If these people believe in hell, that says to me that they believe in a God who is vengeful enough to condemn some human souls to eternal misery and torment. These are people who believe in the power of vengeance, who may believe that vengeance is as acceptable as diplomacy, and who may believe that vengeance is stronger than love and compassion. I sometimes wonder if such beliefs have an influence on foreign policy decisions — I suspect they do have an influence, although it seems to be an indirect influence, an unconscious influence.

And while I cannot prove it, I suspect the widespread belief in hell affects domestic policy decisions as well. Someone who believes in hell believes that some people are disposable. Hell, by definition, is a place where God disposes of some non-trivial number of souls, implying that at least some souls are disposable. If your religion tells you that some people are disposable, I would tend to think that such a belief could influence your decisions regarding domestic policy.

But because I don’t believe in hell myself, I have to admit that I don’t know how such a belief would affect a person’s actions. The real point is that hell has made a come-back in popular culture in the United States. Therefore, I believe it is time for us to dust off our old Universalist beliefs, look them over, and see what parts of Universalism could be useful to us in such a time as this.

Let us begin be stating Universalist beliefs in positive terms. Instead of saying that Universalists don’t believe in hell and eternal damnation, let us state what it is that Universalists believe in. And we may wish to use different language to state our beliefs positively. In 1959, Albert Ziegler said that if the phrase “universal salvation” no longer has much meaning for us, we need to find another way of saying the same thing. With that in mind, let me offer three positive statements of Universalist belief, and then apply them to a current issue in our community.

Albert Ziegler gave one positive statement of Universalist beliefs when he said, “The power of traditional Universalism was that, in its teaching of universal salvation, it spoke to every man of his infinite value.” Today, we would remove the gender-specific language, saying that Universalism speaks to every person, to all people, of their infinite value. A second statement of Universalist beliefs may be found among the so-called seven principles of Unitarian Universalism, the principle that states that we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of all persons. We could put these two statements together, saying: Each and every person is of infinite value, and so we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of all persons. There are no disposable human beings.

And here’s a third way of restating and updating traditional Universalist beliefs: all human beings share in the same final destiny. We heard one statement of that in the first reading this morning. Originally, the phrase “final destiny” was meant to refer to heaven, or final union with God. Today, when we are worrying about the effects of global climate change, when the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set its Doomsday Clock a little closer to midnight, when we are engaged in a war that seems to be out of control — today, the term “final destiny” may take on a somewhat different meaning. If our species is going to survive, we had better figure out how to treat each other, and treat the earth, better. As the saying goes, we had better all hang together, or we will all hang separately.

Now let’s apply these issues to a current issue in our community, an issue that has particular relevance to our church. Our church bylaws specifically state that we will not discriminate against persons because of their gender, race, national origin, class, sexual orientation, physical ability. And each week when I read the welcoming words before our worship service, I say, “Here at First Unitarian, we value our differences of age, gender, race, national origin, class, sexual orientation, physical ability, and theology.” On one level, this is simply another way of saying that we value the inherent worth and dignity of all persons. But on a deeper level, this is a pretty radical statement.

Our community, the greater New Bedford region, is a community that, on the surface, is relatively peaceful and tolerant. But like much of New England, there are deep divisions between the people who live in our community. We are divided by age — our youth are divided from older people, sometimes in very public and acrimonious arguments; our elders are often divided from younger people. We are divided by race — while we don’t have much outright racial violence, you can still find lots of racial division and racial discrimination in our community. We are divided by national origin — with the current uncertainty around immigration, and the recent raid at the Michael Bianco plant, our community is divided by national origin. We are deeply divided by class — with physical divisions between wealthy and not-so-wealthy neighborhoods, and psychic divisions because lower income people feel politically voiceless.

I could go on, but you get the point: we have some significant divisions in our community. I hasten to assure you that our community is fairly peaceful, certainly more peaceful than some other cities in Massachusetts. And I hasten to assure you that we a relatively tolerant community; compared to much of the United States, we are quite tolerant indeed. So compared to the rest of the world, you could truthfully say that we’re doing quite well.

And within our church, I think we manage to do better than even the surrounding community. Compared to the surrounding community, First Unitarian is a relatively tolerant place. No, we’re not perfect — far from it — but compared to the rest of the world, you could truthfully say that we’re a fairly tolerant and welcoming place.

But as a Universalist, I want to go further than that. If our community is relatively tolerant compared to the rest of the world, why not take it to the next level? If our church is relatively tolerant compared to our community, why not take it to the next level? We may be good, but surely we can be better. As a Universalist, I am an incurable optimist. I know every person has inherent worth and dignity, and I want to try to live my life as if that’s really true. And I want to hold this up as an ideal for the whole community.

I may be an optimist, but I also want to know how we could make this idea into reality. Speaking realistically, I know we’re not going to completely erase racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, ableism, or other forms of discrimination in the greater New Bedford area. Nor are we going to completely erase all discrimination within our own church.

Yet I do believe it is possible for us to get better at acting as if each and every person has inherent worth and dignity. I don’t have any final answers, but I believe it would be helpful to talk more openly about the divisions that do exist in the surrounding community. Not that we should indulge ourselves in guilt and shame, for in my experience guilt and shame are not particularly effective ways to change people’s behavior. But we do need to be able to talk openly about continuing racism in our community — discrimination such as racism, sexism, homophobia, discrimination based on economic status, and so on. Thus a key skill for us to practice will be to listen deeply and carefully to one another — for it is impossible someone to talk openly unless the rest of us listen deeply and openly.

I believe that we have to spend more time talking about and examining our religious and theological reasons for ending discrimination. We have some compelling religious reasons to do away with discrimination, not just from our Universalist side, but also from our Unitarian side. I believe, too, that we have to be able to clearly state, in religious terms, why we believe each person has inherent worth and dignity. Once we can talk about our faith, once we can clearly articulate what we value and who we are, it is but a few short steps to living out our values in day-to-day life.

I believe that in this church we have to act always as if all people are valuable. Perhaps this is one of the first steps we can take towards living out our religious beliefs:– to practice living out our religious beliefs here in a relatively safe church community. Racism and sexism and homophobia and classism have been around for centuries, and we’d be naive to think we can put an end to them tomorrow. But as a first step, perhaps we can put an end to them for a couple of hours each Sunday, while we’re here at church.

And so we wind up facing the age-old question: How do we live out our deeply-held beliefs? How do we live out our most cherished values? As you would expect, I don’t have any firm and final pronouncements to offer — no person can tell person exactly how to live out his or her values. But I raise this as an important issue, a key issue for us. And I do believe that the religious insights of Universalism have much to offer us. We know that all persons are of equal value, we know that there are no disposable human beings, we know that all human beings share in the same final destination. Once we are clear about those religious values, all we have to do is figure out how to act upon them.