“Is God a White Racist?”

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 this morning comes from Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, written by Frances Anne Kemble in 1838-1839. Ms. Kemble was born in England, became a famous actress, and left the stage to marry Pierce Butler of Philadelphia, a respectable Unitarian man of wealth — who was also the owner of seven hundred slaves on a vast plantation in Georgia. Mr. Butler took Ms. Kemble to live on that plantation during the winter of 1838-1839. Her journal from that time paints a harshly realistic portrait of the institution of slavery, and in this excerpt she tells of the role of churches in maintaining slavery:

“Some of the planters are entirely inimical to any [prayer meetings], and neither allow their Negroes to attend worship of to congregate together for religious purposes, and truly I think they are wise in their own generation. On other plantations, again, the same rigid discipline is not observed; and some planters and overseers go even father than toleration, and encourage these devotional exercises and professions of religion, having actually discovered that a man may become more faithful and trustworthy, even as a slave, who acknowledges the higher influences of Christianity, no matter in how small a degree. Slaveholding clergymen, and certain piously inclined planters, undertake, accordingly, to enlighten these poor creatures upon these matters, with a safe understanding, however, of what truth is to be given them, and what is not; how much they may learn to become better slaves, and how much they may not learn, lest they cease to be slaves at all. The process is a very ticklish one, and but for the Northern public opinion, which is now pressing the slaveholders close, I dare say would not be attempted at all. As it is, they are putting their own throats and their own souls in jeopardy by this very endeavor to serve God and Mammon. The light that they are letting in between their fingers will presently strike them blind, and the mighty flood of truth which they are straining through a sieve to the thirsty lips of their slaves, sweep them away like straws from their cautious moorings, and overwhelm them in its great deeps, to the waters of which man my in nowise say, thus far shall ye come and no farther.

“The community I now speak of, the white population of Darien [Georgia], should be a religious one, to judge by the number of churches it maintains. However, we know the old proverb, and, at that rate, it may not be so godly after all. Mr. [Butler, her husband] and his brother have been called upon at various times to subscribe to them all; and I saw this morning a most fervent appeal, extremely ill-spelled, from a gentleman living in the neighborhood of the town, and whose slaves are notoriously ill-treated, reminding Mr. [Butler] of the precious souls of his human cattle, and requesting a farther donation for the Baptist Church, of which most of the people here are members. Now this man is known to be a hard master; his Negro houses are sheds not fit to stable beasts in; his slaves are ragged, half-naked, and miserable; yet he is urgent for their religious comforts, and writes to Mr. [Butler] about “their souls — their precious souls.” He was over here a few days ago, and pressed me very much to attend his church. I told him I would not go to a church where the people who worked for us were parted off from us as if they had the pest, and we should catch it of them. I asked him, for I was curious to know, how they managed to administer the sacrament to a mixed congregation? He replied, oh, very easily; that the white portion of the assembly received it first, and the blacks afterward. A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another, even as I have loved you. Oh what a shocking mockery!”

So ends the first reading. Ten years after Ms. Kemble wrote this journal, her husband Pierce Butler divorced her, in large part due to her opposition to slavery, and he managed to retain custody of their children. Ms. Kemble returned to England, and finally published her journal in 1863, to show the justice of the Emancipation Proclamation.

The second reading comes from the 1971 book Is God a White Racist? by William R. Jones. Jones is a theologian, and African American, a humanist, and a Unitarian Universalist minister. His theological concepts have been a major influence on me personally; unfortunately his uncompromising language has scared away the wide audience he deserves.

“It has often been said that asking the right question is as important as supplying the correct answer. Whether correct of incorrect, this generalization describes the purpose in this book. To paraphrase Kant’s admonition, my objective is to force the black theologians and their readers to pause a moment and, neglecting all that they have said and done, to reconsider their conclusions in the light of another question: Is God a white racist? My concern throughout is to illuminate the issues this pregnant question introduces into the arena of black theology and religion. The black theologian, I contend, cannot avoid this issue of divine racism….

“No doubt the combination of terms ‘divine’ and ‘racism’ is novel — some will say blasphemous. But the ideas and categories the concept expresses are time-honored and familiar themes in philosophy and theology. To raise the question of divine racism is actually to revive a perennial issue in black religion: what is the meaning, the cause, and the ‘why’ of black suffering?…

“In a more general vein the issue of divine racism is simply another way of addressing the traditional problem of evil and human suffering. ‘The Problem of Suffering Revisited’ is an apt description of a central emphasis of this book….

“An obvious place to look for parallels to the black experience in religion is the theological treatment of Jewish oppression, the suffering of another ethnic minority. One work stands out here, Rabbi Richard Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz. His analysis of Jewish suffering forced me to pose a troublesome question that he does not explicitly consider: Is God an anti-Semite? The implications of his study for my own explorations in black theology were direct and immediate. In the light of black suffering, a suffering that may exceed that of the Jews, the unsettling question becomes: Is This is the second in a series of three sermons for Black History Month. Black History Month is, in part, a time to celebrate our heroes and heroines who are black; and this morning I’d like to speak with you about one of my black heroes, William R. Jones.

Chances are that you’ve never heard of William R. Jones before this morning. He’s a theologian, and these days when most people hear the word “theology” they either fall asleep from boredom, or run screaming from the room. Worse yet, he’s a humanist theologian, which is to say that in his view religion can do just fine without a concept of God; and I’m afraid most of United States culture today tends to revile rather than revere humanists. On top of that, he happens to be a Unitarian Universalist, and being a theologian in our tiny heretical denomination is not exactly a path to fame and fortune. For all these reasons, chances are good that you’ve never heard of William R. Jones before this morning.

I also have to acknowledge that there are those of you in this room this morning who couldn’t give two hoots about theology. You’re probably not going to like William R. Jones, or this sermon. As always, if this sermon bores you, you have permission to fall asleep, write in your journal, read, or let your mind drift; as long you don’t bother anyone else. Because there are some of us who care deeply and passionately about theology, some of us who think theology has the capacity to change the world for the better. I know theology is out of fashion, but sometimes I have to preach sermons for those of us who are theology-lovers.

William R. Jones is one of my heroes because he makes theology, and therefore organized religion, relevant to the real world. Jones concerns himself with human suffering and the problem of evil, and he is interested in figuring out how organized religion can actually make a positive difference in the world. He is particularly interested in the evil of racism, and he points out that organized religion could do a lot better in terms of combating the evil of racism.

In the first reading this morning, we heard a little bit about how organized religion in the 19th C. managed to perpetuate the evil of slavery. Fanny Kemble writes:

“I saw this morning a most fervent appeal, extremely ill-spelled, from a gentleman living in the neighborhood of the town, and whose slaves are notoriously ill-treated, reminding Mr. [Butler] of the precious souls of his human cattle, and requesting a farther donation for the Church, of which most of the people here are members. Now this man is known to be a hard master; his Negro houses are sheds not fit to stable beasts in; his slaves are ragged, half-naked, and miserable; yet he is urgent for their religious comforts, and writes to Mr. [Butler] about ‘their souls — their precious souls’.”

All too often, that kind of thing has been typical of the way organized religion in the United States has dealt with slavery; and later with racism. Organized religion in the United States has had a persistent tendency to ignore real evil and real human suffering in this world, and to concentrate instead on getting people into heaven after they’re dead. Fanny Kemble said there was a difference between the truth of religion, and the way religion was actually carried out; she said, “The light that they are letting in between their fingers…” — that is, the little bit of true religion that the white slave owners allowed their slaves to have — that little bit of light “will presently strike them blind, and the mighty flood of truth which they are straining through a sieve to the thirsty lips of their slaves, sweep them away like straws from their cautious moorings, and overwhelm them in its great deeps, to the waters of which man may in nowise say, thus far shall ye come and no farther.” In other words, Fanny Kemble felt that the truth of religion, the permanent core of religion, would one day win out and the flood of truth would wipe away human suffering and evil.

Unfortunately, Fanny Kemble apparently was wrong. In the 19th C., plenty of churches in both the North and the South condoned slavery. In the 20th C., plenty of churches in both the North and the South practiced outright racism. Why, there was even a handful of Unitarian Universalist congregation which did not allow African Americans to become members of their congregations right up into the 1960’s. Even today, Sunday morning at 11:00 is probably the most racially segregated hour of the week. Yes, it is true that some churches in the 19th C. fought against slavery, and some churches in the 20th C. have fought against racism. But they have been in the minority, and the majority of churches have remained silent or passive. So far, no flood of truth has yet come out of organized religion to wipe out all human suffering and evil.

I’ll grant that true religion should not permit the evils of racism. The problem is, “true religion” (whatever that might be) only exists in the form of embodied human communities. Thus when William R. Jones asks his uncomfortable question, “Is God a white racist?”, the real answer appears to be — as far as most white congregations are concerned, anyway — yes.

Even if you don’t believe in God, as is true of many Unitarian Universalists, the fact remains that much of organized religion in the United States has not been particularly good at addressing the evil of racism. So even if you don’t believe in God, you might ask: is organized religion racist? You might begin to ask: is my own congregation racist? You might even ask: Should we just do away with organized religion altogether?

These are some of the uncomfortable questions that William R. Jones raises. These questions are particularly uncomfortable because most of us have asked these questions of ourselves. But William R. Jones was brave enough to raise these questions in public, bringing all the weight of his intelligence and learning to bear on these questions. Jones even goes further, and he asks whether the historically black churches have actually practiced the liberation that they preached; and in light of this he states, “The initial task of the black theologian is to liberate the black mind from the destructive ideas and submissive attitudes that checkmate any movement towards authentic emancipation.” [p.67] And Jones goes even further than that: he asks us to consider when and if rebellion might be an appropriate and necessary response; and in light of this, he even asks whether those who are oppressed might have to “seek a realignment of power”; in short, whether those who are oppressed must engage in rebellion. [p. 43]

I said that Jones was brave to ask these questions in public. Years later, in 1997, Jones wrote that his book “triggered a xenophobic response. Most black theologians decided that Is God a White Racist was not a faithful trustee of liberation theology’s philosophy and practice, nor of the black religious tradition. In fact, they found it to be a fraudulent traitor to these traditions. As a result of this criticism, Is God a White Racist was essentially removed from the theological market and consigned to the pariah status of Ralph Ellison’s ‘invisible man.'” [p. xi] Jones paid a price for asking these difficult questions — he was made something of a pariah by black theologians. Of course white theologians simply ignored Jones, and ignored his questions.

Yet we can’t ignore those questions, can we? We know that Jones asked — continues to ask — the correct questions. In the face of continuing racism here in the United States — the de facto segregation of many public schools, the de facto segregation of most suburban communities, the reality that in many communities you can get pulled over by the local police for the crime of DWB, driving while black — in the face of continuing racism, those of us who belong to some sort of organized religion have to face up to the question of whether or not our religion, our congregations, allow God to be a divine racist.

So now I’m going to tell you how William R. Jones saved organized religion for me. Well, maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but only a little. But William R. Jones helped me to see that organized religion could make a difference, at a time when I had become quite discouraged with Unitarian Universalism.

A few years ago I was working as a Director of Religious Education three-quarter time while attending theological school half-time. Religious education was fun, because you got to work with these cool Unitarian Universalist kids who were so open and receptive. Because I’m a Universalist, I have a strong religious belief that every person is worthy of dignity and respect, so I would teach this to kids. Based on my Universalist principles, I would teach radical feminism to girls and boys in a Unitarian Universalist Sunday school, and they really got it, and suddenly you’re surrounded by these young people who really believe in their heart of hearts that girls are just as good as boys. Based on my Universalist principles, I would teach Unitarian Universalist kids that homophobia is bad, and we would give them a safe place to discover their own sexual identities as they matured. Teaching anti-racism was a little more difficult because the congregation I was serving at that time was mostly white, but by the time they were teenagers those kids were anti-racists; and based on Universalist principles, they started noticing that their church was predominantly white, and they didn’t particularly like it.

That’s what we do with our Unitarian Universalist kids. We teach them Universalism, that all persons are equally worthy of dignity and respect. As they grow up and look at us, they start to look at the way we adults run our congregations. When the kids do that, all too often they find that our Unitarian Universalist congregations don’t live up to the Universalist ideals that we adults taught them in Sunday school.

As a religious educator, this began to really bother me. What could I tell kids when they realized that our congregations aren’t living up to the ideals we teach? I wasn’t going to lie to them and tell them that everything was really just fine in our congregations. Obviously I wasn’t going to try to tell them about original sin, or God’s will, because I don’t believe in those things. And I didn’t want to tell them to leave organized religion altogether. So I was stuck. That’s when William R. Jones became my hero.

In a 1974 essay, William R. Jones said two things that saved organized religion for me, and gave me something to tell to Unitarian Universalist kids. First, he said that his religion “permits but does not dictate a human response of rebellion as soteriologically authentic.” Let me translate this sentence from theological jargon into plain English. “Soteriologically” simply means having to do with salvation — what it is that will save your soul. Jones is saying that rebelling against injustice can save your soul. Not that religion requires you to rebel, but if you decide that rebellion is necessary, it can save you. Even if it means rebelling against God, or against the way things are.

Second, Jones talked about the “functional ultimacy of humankind.” If we translate that sentence into ordinary English, it basically means we have to act as if we are the ultimate authority in the universe. Even if you believe in a God that rules the universe, you have to act as if you are the ultimate authority, not God. And if you don’t believe in God, you can’t blame things on chance, or on evolution, or on fate — you still have to act as if you are the ultimate authority.

Which means that rather than worrying too much about whether or not God is a white racist, we should accept the fact that we have to act as if we are the ultimate authority, and as if we have the ultimate responsibility. In other words, if we find racism in organized religion, the racism is there because we human beings have put it there. We heard that in the first reading this morning, when Fanny Kemble told us how white people twist and pervert religion in order to perpetrate the incredible injustice of slavery. William R. Jones tells us that if we find something evil in organized religion, it’s only there because we put it there.

But of course if we put it there, we can get rid of it. This is where rebellion comes in handy. You can save your soul by rebelling against injustice. It might cost you your life, as was true with Martin Luther King, Jr. But the very act of a human being rebelling against human injustice is an act of salvation.

That’s how William R. Jones saved organized religion for me, by pointing out how rebellion could be a saving force in my life, and by pointing how I have to act as if I am ultimately responsible for what’s going on in my organized religion. So when I look around at this congregation and notice that it’s ninety percent white, I don’t blame it on God and I don’t throw up my hands in despair — I just say that this must be a problem that was created by human beings so it is a problem that can be solved by human beings. I might also get a little rebellious and engage in subversive acts. Like I might engage in the subversive act of telling you that instead of sending your minister out into the wider community to do good works, I might focus my attention on this congregation so that together we might engage in the much more subversive act of creating an intentionally multiracial, multigenerational community here within these walls — and we might also grow this congregation so that instead of fifty of us, there would be three hundred and fifty of us, and our power would multiply exponentially to the point where there would be so many of us we could really effect change in the surrounding community.

In any case, I began by telling you that William R. Jones is a hero of mine, and now you know why — because he saved organized religion for me. Here is what this hero of mine taught me:

Is God a white racist? — only if we allow God to be a white racist. Is organized religion hypocritical? — only if we allow it to be hypocritical. Do we have to remain a congregation that’s ninety percent white? — only if we allow ourselves to remain that way. Do our congregations contradict the ideals that we teach our children? — only if we allow them to do so.

We hold it in ourselves to rebel against injustice and oppression — and such rebellion can be the act that saves our souls.

African Earthkeepers

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 is titled “The Earthkeeper’s Call.” It comes from the African Initiated Churches in Zimbabwe. It tells in part how the African Initiated Churches teamed up with traditional religious groups to plant trees in Zimbabwe.

After chimurenga [the Zimbabwean revolution]
the earth was scorched and barren
and the Spirit of God urged prophets:
“Cry, the empty gullies, the dying plains —
clothe the naked land of the forebears!”
And hope returned.
Healing hands, young leaves of trees.

Heeding the call
they came:
black multitudes
churches of the poor:
billowing garments…
red, white, blue, resplendent green
bearing holy staves, cardboard crowns.
Cursed descendants of Ham,
rejects of white mission,
lift the fallen banner of Spirit
kingdom’s cornerstone
where souls of people, tree souls meet.

Prophets shouted:
Repent! Confess!
I bare earth with axe and fire
rape forests without return
sledge-rip gullied meadows
turn earth’s water to trickling mire.
Confess and baptize… the land!
Oust the demons of neglect.
From Jordan emerge
with bonded hands, new earth community…

Proclaim new heaven
new earth in black Jerusalem…
where weary traveler
finds cool in shade
rustle of leaves
fountains spring
clear water of life.

The second reading is from the book “African Earthkeepers: Wholistic Interfaith Mission.” This passage tells about how some African Initiated Churches have used religious means to prevent environmental destruction. You should know that these particular Christian churches call evildoers “wizards,” in keeping with traditional African cultural understandings, and that as translations of Shona words, “wizard” and “wizardry” have nothing to do with Harry Potter or Gandalf.

“In the earthkeeping churches the nuances regarding wizardry are inevitably more varied and subtle than during the war [for Zimbabwean independence]. In contrast to the execution or torture of war traitors, wanton tree-fellers or poachers of wildlife will, upon prophetic detection, either be temporarily barred from taking the eucharist or, in the event of repeated transgression of the earthkeeper’s code, be excommunicated altogether. The key figures in the Association for African Earthkeeping Churches are only too aware of a common guilt which, in a sense, makes all of us ‘varoyi’ — death destroyers. To this they readily admit, which in itself is a sure sign of accepting collective responsibility for environmental restoration. There is a vast difference, however, between admitting guilt prior to committed participation in conservationist programmes, and deliberate deforestation or related destructive action in the face of a protective environmental code. It is this attitude of selfish environmental exploitation, regardless of the will of the community and the destruction caused to nature, which the prophets condemn as the evil of uroyi [wizardry], to be stamped out at all costs.” [p. 166]

Sermon

This is the first in a series of three sermons for Black History Month. Although often Black History Month is a time to celebrate and explore the Black Diaspora, in today’s sermon I’m going to talk about contemporary Africa.

If you attend worship services here regularly, you will know by now that I have a special interest in ecological theology and spirituality. Nor I am alone in this interest: many other people in this congregation are also committed to ecological theology and spirituality. Speaking for myself, I find myself nodding in agreement with the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released yesterday which says there is “unequivocal series of evidence [showing that] fossil fuel burning and land use change are affecting the climate on our planet.” I feel equally strongly that my religion has to address the realities of that environmental crisis; in fact, if my religion does not address the environmental crisis in real and meaningful ways, why, I’ll go find another religion that does.

I said our whole world is involved in this environmental crisis. It’s easy to forget that. It’s all too easy to concentrate on our environmental problems right here in North America, and ignore the rest of the world. It’s easy, for example, to conveniently forget that when sea levels start rising due to global warming, the country of Bangladesh is going to be much worse off than New Bedford — thousand, even millions of Bangldeshis could be affected by even a modest increase in sea levels. It’s easy to forget, for another example, that the air in some Chinese cities is so polluted that no birds can live in those cities, and that lung diseases are rampant among the human inhabitants of those cities. It’s easy to forget, for another example, that the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are predicting an increase in the already serious droughts and desertification in sub-Sahara Africa.

It’s easy for us here in North America to forget that the environmental crisis is world-wide. In my more cynical moments, I sometimes think that predominantly white North America manages to ignore environmental crisis in countries where most of the people do not have white skin. In my less cynical moments, I sometimes wonder how these other places are coping with environmental crisis. Many places in the world are already deeper into the crisis than we are. Maybe we could learn from them.

A year ago, I happened to stumble across a book titled African Earthkeepers: Wholistic Interfaith Mission, by Marthinus L. Daneel. In this book, Daneel tells the story of an interfaith earthkeeping project that unites Christians and traditional African religious groups in Zimbabwe. The project didn’t happen overnight, and the story of this interfaith earthkeeping effort goes something like this:

Before the war for majority rule in Zimbabwe, ecological problems were already appearing. Overgrazing was common — putting too much livestock onto the land had the result that the plants the animals preferred to eat couldn’t reseed themselves, leaving bare soil. Soil erosion became common, and big gullies began to appear in the land where the soil washed away. Firewood had become scarce, more and more trees were cut for cooking fires, and forests began to shrink in size. All these trends were exacerbated by the fact that a tiny white minority controlled most of the land, which they farmed for profit, not to supply local food, selling much of their crops abroad.

Zimbabwe achieved independence from white minority rule in the mid-1980’s. Many of those who fought for black majority rule hoped that a redistribution of land would lead to greater equity through better ecological balance. This was not to be so, for the war for independence, and its aftermath, devastated the countryside. Widespread destruction of forests left the land vulnerable to erosion. People were evicted from where they had lived, and wound up squatting on common lands. On top of that, a severe drought lasted through most of the 1980’s up to 1992.

In his book, Marthinus Daneel says that it was bad enough to see the poorly-conceived settlement plans lead to further environmental destruction. But it was something else to see “callous profiteers” grab up forest lands and clear-cut the trees to sell as firewood for a quick profit, leaving the land exposed to soil erosion. And it was something else to see squatters pushed into the drainage area of Lake Kyle, where they quickly cut down large sections of the forest, leaving the bare soil to drain into the lake.

“Worst of all was the invasion of Mount Mugabe,” Daneel writes. Exploitative profiteers managed to grab land on the sacred mountain, cutting down the wild fruit trees that grew there, selling them for firewood. Not only was it ridiculous to destroy a food source just to make a quick profit; the people of the area, both Christians and those who practiced traditional religion, thought of the trees as sacred. “These greedy exploiters desecrated the holy grove,” writes Daneel. “Soon the mountain was dying.” [p.9]

Daneel and others watched the land being destroyed, and slowly a resolve grew in them to somehow stop the destruction. Daneel, who is Christian, tells about a key moment for him, when he was talking with one of the leaders of the traditional religion. Both of them felt the environmental crisis had a spiritual side to it. In Daneel’s Christian churches, there was a growing feeling that the church’s must become keepers of God’s creation. For their part, the traditional religious groups were upset by the destruction of the sacred groves, and they felt that unless something was done to fix the situation they could expect retribution from the spirit world. A key moment came when the two groups decided that they must work together — that these two religions, long at odds with one another, must put aside their differences and address the problem of environmental disaster together. It’s as if Unitarian Universalists teamed up with fundamentalist Christians become earthkeepers together.

Out of the collaboration of these two groups emerged the project of planting trees. Not only was planting trees a religious act, it was also pragmatic: planting trees meant stabilizing river banks; it meant planting fruit trees that can become food sources; it meant preventing soil erosion from overgrazed lands; it meant fighting back against desertification. Remember, too, that they couldn’t just raise money and drive over to the local nursery to buy saplings; there were no commercial nurseries; if they wanted trees they would have to create nurseries and grow the trees from seeds.

The traditionalists formed a group called AZTREC, the Association of Zimbabwean Traditional Ecologists, and the Christians formed a group called Association for African Earthkeeping Churches, or AAEC. Together, they declared the “war of the trees,” and set a goal of growing a million trees from seed every year, and then planting those trees where most needed. By the year 2000, the year Daneel wrote his book, they had almost reached that goal, surviving several serious droughts and overcoming serious financial and logistical challenges.

Remember that this was an interfaith religious movement. To me, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the religious movement is that both the Christians and the traditionalists declared that destroying trees was evil and not acceptable from a religious point of view. This is what we heard in the second reading this morning. The Christian churches would publicly expose persons who engaged in tree-cutting or environmental destruction, ask them to repent, and if the evildoers would not repent, they would be excluded from the eucharist, the central religious rite of the church; and if their actions continued after that, they would be excommunicated. On the traditionalist side, their leaders declared that destruction of trees would lead to the most dire consequences for individuals, and for the community. Traditional spirit mediums told the people that if environmental destruction continued, the spirits would continue to withhold the rains, and the severe drought would continue. Christian prophets denounced individual evildoers and profiteers. In short, both Christians and traditionalists declared that environmental destruction was evil, that environmental destruction was against religious principles, and that individuals who participated willfully in environmental destruction would be penalized by their religious communities.

I said at the beginning that perhaps we could learn from this African movement. Now the history of North American involvement in Africa has been generally paternalistic, especially here in the United States. When we think of Africans at all, which is not very often, we have a tendency to think: Those Africans, they are so poor and ill-educated, I’ll send a check to help out one of those poor starving African children I see in the advertisements. When our government sends aid money, the money usually comes with restrictions and advice, with an underlying assumption that Africans don’t know enough to handle their money, and that their governments are all corrupt anyway (as if we have no governmental corruption here in the United States, as if the lobbyists don’t have undue influence here in out own country). We tend to look at Africa paternalistically, and we think that we can offer help to them, but how on earth could such a poor continent help us out.

Well, I think the African idea of turning environmental destruction into a religious matter is an idea we could learn from. I think the African idea of interfaith cooperation to stop environmental destruction is an idea we could learn from. I even think the idea of declaring environmental destruction to be evil is an idea we could learn from. So I say we should listen to and learn from these Africans who plant trees.

First of all, let’s be a lot more explicit about turning environmental destruction into a religious matter. If we did that, we might come up with some interesting results. Then anything we do to stop environmental destruction could be seen as an act of prayer or meditation, a spiritual practice, which in turn could mean that whatever we do to stop environmental destruction is not a thankless chore but rather it is an act of spiritual beauty. If stopping environmental destruction becomes a religious matter, for some of us it will become easier to channel the whole force and power of mind, heart, and soul into that effort. If healing the earth becomes a religious matter, we might just find that we heal our own souls by healing the earth. Therefore, I say: let’s make earth healing, earthkeeping, a central part of our shared religion.

Second of all, let’s figure out a way to make earth healing and earthkeeping an interfaith activity. I believe interfaith cooperation should be especially important for Unitarian Universalists. We already have lots of expertise in this area — we have Christians, humanists, Jews, pagans, and Buddhists in our congregations as it is, we already know how to do interfaith dialogue at a very intimate level. We can translate religious terms on the fly. When a fundamentalist Christian says “creation care,” we can translate into secular humanist terms: “ecological sustainability” — into pagan terms: “honoring the Goddess” — and so on. In fact, I think we might borrow the two African terms, “earth healing” and “earthkeeping,” and perhaps use them to substitute for more theologically loaded terms. We Unitarian Universalists should be out there making contacts with other religious groups, and building interfaith cooperation for earth healing and earthkeeping.

Third, it’s time for us to declare that environmental destruction is evil. It is perhaps the greatest evil of our time. It is a religious evil. I know we hear too many comparisons to the evil of the Nazis and the Holocaust, but in this case I believe that comparison is apt; right now, environmental destruction is causing genocide as entire species are deliberately pushed towards extinction. It may cause further genocide as poor countries and communities of color are forced to bear the heaviest burden of environmental destruction.

We Unitarian Universalists tend to be reluctant to declare that something is evil. The term “evil” has been misused and misappropriated, especially in religious circles, and we don’t want to continue that misuse. We are even more reluctant to declare that a person is evil. We say that we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all persons. And from our Universalist heritage, we retain that old sense that God will save all souls, that there will be universal salvation, no matter what.

Yet I don’t think we can avoid calling the current environmental destruction “evil.” Huge numbers of people are going to die if we don’t do something about global climate change; and the people who will suffer most will be the peoples who have been historically marginalized: communities of color, the poor, those without political power. We have already seen this tendency at work in New Orleans, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. What happened to the poor neighborhoods in New Orleans was evil, insofar as the disaster continues to have worse consequence3s than it should have had. And we can’t avoid calling the current environmental destruction evil because we know that there is a small number people, of profiteers, who benefit from environmental destruction. The big oil companies have been actively working against public policy initiatives to reduce oil consumption so that we may reduce the production of greenhouse gasses — insofar as they have done so, the oil companies and their executives are doing evil.

Those are just three things we could learn from this African movement for earthkeeping. If we had more time this morning, I would love to explore at least two other things we could learn from them. I would love to talk about how earthkeeping and earth healing could be further integrated into our worship services — for example, those African Initiated Christian churches plant trees as a part of a worship service. And I would love to talk more about the significance of planting trees, how tree planting becomes both a pragmatic act, and an act of religious earth healing.

So it is that I believe we can learn something of critical importance from an African interfaith environmental group. I hope that you see, as I do, how we can learn from the mother continent of Africa. We can learn that earthkeeping and earth healing should be a religious task, not just a political task. We can learn that such a huge task requires us to work in close cooperation with other religious groups. And I believe we can learn practical, pragmatic ways of accomplishing earthkeeping.

So may our religious tradition learn from African religious traditions; so may we learn to become earthkeepers, and earth healers.

No God But Me!

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 the Hebrew prophets, the book of Hosea. I have to do a little explaining here. In this reading, it is the prophet Hosea who is speaking; he lived about 750 years before Jesus was born. He is criticizing the religious and political leaders of his land, the Northern Kingdom of Israel. For poetic purposes, he refers to the religious and political leaders by the name “Ephraim” — so every time you hear the name “Ephraim,” substitute “our current leadership.” I also have to explain who “Baal” is — Baal was another god who was in direct competition with Yahweh, the god of Israel. (There was also a competing goddess named Asherah, but she isn’t mentioned in this passage.)

By a prophet the Lord brought Israel up from Egypt,
    and by a prophet he was guarded.
Ephraim has given bitter offence,
    so his Lord will bring his crimes down on him
    and pay him back for his insults.
When Ephraim spoke, there was trembling;
    he was exalted in Israel;
    but he incurred guilt through Baal and died.
And now they keep on sinning
    and make a cast image for themselves,
idols of silver made according to their understanding,
    all of them the work of artisans.
‘Sacrifice to these,’ they say.
    People are kissing calves!
Yet I have been the Lord your God
    ever since the land of Egypt;
you know no God but me..

[New Revised Standard Version, Hosea 12.13-14; 13.1-3, 4]

The second reading is from the book “Returning” by Dan Wakefield. In this passage, he is talking about his experiences as a member of King’s Chapel, the oldest Unitarian congregation in North America. I must tell you that, while I agree with some things in this passage, there are some things I strongly disagree with:

“I learned the church was really family because we worked hard and close enough with one another to get mad and argue as well as sing hymns together. I found myself one evening, after an inspiring session of a class called “Introduction to the New Testament,” standing in the downstairs hall of the parish house shouting at [my close friend] Judy in an argument over the course of the religious education program while our family members walked past us. I knew we were family because we went to our minister as the mediating father, and we got our mutual frustration out. We realized what had brought us together in the first place was the work we had done, and we got past our differences. I knew we were family because I heard gossip about all this and other human conflicts of other family members, and we kept returning to ties that went deeper even than our own egos, and I knew that only happened in families that shared some vision beyond their individual beings.

“I knew we were a family because we often behaved towards our minister as if he were the father of all 395 of us, as well (through his office) the local representative of God, “our Father who are in heaven.” The Reverend Carl Scovel makes no claim to power or glory and yet we see him walk up into that high pulpit every Sunday morning, and that is a lot closer to Whoever is up there above than we are. Sometimes we seemed to me like those early Israelites, a small band of people looking for security and freedom, with Carl as our Moses on Tremont Street, going up to get the Word and bringing it back down to us as we grumbled and strayed and returned.”

So end this morning’s readings — and in the sermon I’ll tell you what I so strongly disagree with in this last reading.

Sermon

This is the third in a series of sermons that tell about that great Jewish leader, Moses.

One of the quaint aspects of the old story of Moses is that his god, Yahweh, expects Moses to worship no other god — not only that, but that Yahweh expects that they will not put anything else on the same level of importance as Yahweh. How quaint! — that Yahweh expects Moses and the people of Israel to remain true to their promises to Yahweh, and to each other… Or, as we might say today using today’s buzzwords, How quaint! — that Yahweh expects Moses and the people of Israel to stay focused on their mission, and their vision for the future; and Yahweh expects Moses and the people of Israel to honor their covenant, their sacred promises to their god and to each other.

We can also phrase it this way: Yahweh expects the people of Israel to get rid of false idols. Many Unitarians and many Universalists, through much of the twentieth century, spent a great deal of energy getting rid of false idols. Idols are those things to which people grant more importance than they deserve. There’s a great story about the Unitarian church in Lexington center, Massachusetts. In the 1950’s, they used to have a Christmas eve candlelight service during which an internally-lit cross would suddenly appear in the darkness. While you can imagine that this might have produced an interesting visual effect, the congregation realized that it was a little bit over-the-top, that they didn’t agree with its theology, in short it was an idol — it got far more importance than it deserved. The cross wound up stuck in a trash can on the sidewalk in front of the church — right on the battle green in Lexington center. You can imagine what the rest of the town said: “Those Unitarians are at it again — throwing out their cross.” And to get rid of false idols, you have to be willing to face a certain measure of disapproval from others who may not understand why you’re doing what you do.

We Unitarian Universalists have a long history of getting rid of false idols. It isn’t just extraneous visual symbols, we try to get rid of ideas that serve as false idols. We have long known that much of the Christian religion we inherited from the past contained things that were not essential. To use the words of Theodore Parker, religion contains that which is permanent, and that which is transient. The teachings of Jesus, as they came from his mouth, still warm with his breath, contain permanent truths; as did the teachings of Buddha, and Moses, and Mohammed, and Lao Tze, and many others. But those teachings were passed on from generation to generation, and as the years passed, accretions of transient religion grew onto the permanent teachings: transient creeds and dogmas, even some fantasies. The history of human religion has been the history of people getting distracted by unimportant things.

Today, we are again in danger of worshipping false idols; we are once again getting distracted by unimportant things. Let me name three of those things. We have made a false idol of individualism. We have made false idol of social justice work. And we have made a false idol of intimacy. These three false idols are dangerous. Worshipping them distracts us from far more important things, like our covenant, our sacred promises to each other. The old words of that ancient Jewish prophet, Hosea, rings in our ears, especially if we revise them slightly:

We make a cast image for ourselves,
idols made according to our understanding.
‘Sacrifice to these,’ we say.
People are kissing calves!

Hosea tells us how to break away from idolatry. He uses poetic language, and it is tempting to take it literally, that is to give more importance to its transient menaing than to its permanent truths, but we won’t take it literally. Hosea has the god Yahweh say this:

Yet I have been the Lord your God
ever since the land of Egypt;
you know no God but me.

Hosea is reminding his people, the people of Israel, that they have a covenant, that is, that they have promises which they have sworn to keep. When Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, they made a covenant together, they made promises that they swore they would keep. Their covenant had a vertical dimension: they promised to remain true to their god, Yahweh, and to ignore other gods and goddesses. Their covenant had a horizontal dimension: they promised to stick together, and to be true to one another in spite of any obstacles they faced.

And they wound up facing huge obstacles. They were enslaved together in Egypt; and their covenant together allowed them to stick together so that they could stand up to Pharaoh and escape from slavery. They were lost in the wilderness together; and their covenant allowed them to find food together, to stay disciplined, to stay focused on their goal of reaching the Promised Land. So the old Bible stories say happened in the time of Moses.

Hundreds of years later, in the time of Hosea, the people of Israel faced other obstacles. In the time of Hosea, the leaders of Israel were self-centered, they used their positions of power so they could have comfortable lives and do whatever they wanted; but they did not provide leadership to Israel. Hosea tells us that Ephraim (that is, the leadership of Israel) “was exalted in Israel,” but that now Israel’s leadership “has given bitter offense” and “incurred guilt through Baal.” To incur guilt through Baal is a poetic, prophetic formulation. It may literally mean that the leaders of Israel literally worshipped the god Baal even though their position demanded that they should worship only Yahweh; but more poetically, Hosea is accusing the leaders of Israel of betraying their promise to the people of Israel.

Hosea uses poetic, prophetic words to accuse the people of Israel of not living up to their covenant; that is, he accuses them of neglecting their promises to one another. When he says they worship Baal, he is telling us that they have neglected their promises.

As for us Unitarian Universalists today, no one can accuse us of literally worshipping the god Baal. But we have our own false idols that have cause us to neglect our covenant, our sacred promises to one another. Let us now go back and look at each of the three false idols I spoke of earlier.

We Unitarian Universalists worship the false idol of individualism. We say: If you don’t do it my way, I won’t participate. We say: I can believe whatever I want, so I don’t have to listen to you or anyone else. We take our individualism to such extremes that our community suffers as a result. And when I say “we,” I’m including myself! Ralph Waldo Emerson taught us trust the still, small voice of conscience within; he taught us how to trust ourselves so that we don’t get pulled into false actions because we just followed the crowd. But by teaching us self-trust, Emerson didn’t mean for us to mistrust the rest of the world. By worshipping the false idol of individualism, we neglect our sacred promise to live in harmony with each other and with the natural world.

We Unitarian Universalists worship the false idol of social justice. We say: We have to make social justice happen before we do anything else. We even say: The core work of the church is social justice work. These statements contain kernels of truth: the problems of the world are so pressing, work for social justice cannot be delayed; and the core of our moral and ethical teachings tells us that we must heal a broken world. Yet these statements are also false. If we really believed that the core work of First Unitarian were social justice work, if we really believed that we have to do social justice work before anything else, we’d sell this building tomorrow, fire the musicians and the minister, end Sunday morning worship, and channel all our money, and all our effort, towards solving the problems of the world. But what we do here is to build up a community, a community bound by high ideals and sacred promises; and from the strength we gain here, we send each other out into the world, carrying our high ideals, carrying our vision of an earth made fair and all her people free. If we worship the false idol of social action, we neglect our sacred promise to worship together — to build a community.

We Unitarian Universalists worship the false idol of intimacy, and this is the most pernicious and evil idol of them all. We say: we must always like each other, and be nice to one another. We say: conflict is bad. We say: we must all know one another intimately. Yet to say these things is to ignore that fact that a covenant lies at the center of who we are. I have heard it said that “church should be like a big happy family.” It should be obvious how wrong that is, because if this church were like a family then someone has got to be the parents and someone has got to be the children; and I don’t know about you, but I refuse to be either childlike or parental. No: we enter into covenant together as responsible and mature adults; we make promises to one another as equals.

This brings us to the second reading this morning, the reading from the book Returning, by Dan Wakefield. I have lots of respect for Dan Wakefield, both as a writer and as a human being, and I think he has some deep and useful insights into what a church can be, what a church should be. Unfortunately, he gets his insights all mixed up with the common stereotyping of churches as families, and he gets mixed up in some bad theology. So let’s sort through what he says, and find out what seems to be good and useful. First of all, we can dispense with his faulty theology. No minister, not even Carl Scovel, is any closer to God (assuming God exists) than any other human being. God is not “up there” somewhere; if God exists, God is the light within us, or the love we express through our actions; if God exists, God is closer than the vein on your neck. The only reason Carl Scovel or any Unitarian Universalist minister climbs up into a high pulpit is a simple pragmatic reason: so people in the congregation can see and hear better. The only reason Carl Scovel, or any other Unitarian Universalist minister, seems relatively important is because ministers can serve as embodiments of a church’s covenant.

Second, we can dispense with Dan Wakefield’s tendency to let his own psychological issues color his understanding of church. A little later on in the book, Dan Wakefield writes: “I sometimes ‘projected’ onto the minister angers and suppositions that I later realized had nothing to do with the man Carl Scovel because when I examined the matter, he had said or done nothing whatsoever to provoke such a response.” In other words, if Dan Wakefield saw Carl Scovel as a father figure — for that matter, if Dan Wakefield saw God as a father figure — that has more to do with Dan Wakefield than it has to do with Carl Scovel, or with God.

And yet although we must reject the supposition that churches should be like families, we cannot deny that many times we who are in churches often act as though we are a part of a big “church family.” Sometimes we wind up treating the minister as a father-figure or a mother-figure — heaven help me, I’ve been guilty of that myself. Sometimes we wind up treating another church member as a parent-figure, or we wind up treating another church member as a sibling-figure, or we wind up treating another church member as a child-substitute. This does happen; this is reality; and in this sense, Dan Wakefield is right: churches can sometimes feel like families.

The problem with treating your church like a family is that you may have a very different understanding of a family than do other members of the church. Let me give you an example from my own experience (of course I have disguised identities so you cant’ tell who I’m talking about): Two church members, both men, both saw the church as their family; one of these men came from an abusive family where his mother abused him emotionally; the other man came from a fairly healthy family where he had a good relationship with his mother. Both of them served on the church board; both tended to view the minister (who was a woman) as if she were a mother-figure. As you can imagine, one man wanted to drastically limit what the minister could do, and the other man had a much more trust in the minister. This was not a healthy situation for either of the men, nor for the minister.

So we need to be extremely careful when we say “church is like family.” Yes, our churches can function like families, and sometimes you can understand a church better by viewing it as if it were a family. But it is dangerous to hold that up as a goal, as an ideal towards which we might strive, because we have such different feelings about families. To some people, a family might mean the ultimate in friendly intimacy; to other people a family might mean a deadly kind of intimacy that chokes and destroys. So it is that intimacy serves as a false idol in our churches.

Yet when Dan Wakefield tells about getting into a shouting match at church with a friend of his, he reveals something of critical importance. Dan Wakefield is telling us something that we all know to be true: churches are full of conflict, and fighting is a common part of church life. I know this is true of this church: as is true in any human community, there are conflicts, fights, and even feuds here at First Unitarian. Fights are bad if you just fight for the sake of fighting; but conflict can be good if it serves a higher purpose.

Dan Wakefield says that he and his friend Judy took care of their shouting match by going “to our minister as the mediating father,” and so they got their “mutual frustration out.” His story gets one things wrong: the minister was not serving in the role of “mediating father.” Dan Wakefield might have thought that his minister was serving as a mediating father — I’d be very curious to know if his friend Judy thought the same thing — but actually, his minister was serving as a representative of the entire church community, and as such the minister served as an embodiment of the church’s covenant.

Every church has a covenant, a set of promises that the people of that church make to one another. King’s Chapel has a very explicit written covenant, which goes like this: “In the love of truth and in the spirit of Jesus Christ, we unite for the worship of God and the service of man.” This old Unitarian covenant, written by James Freeman Clarke in 1886, is still used in Unitarian churches from Dublin to Illinois to the Khasi Hills of India. When Dan and his friend Judy took their disagreement, their shouting match, to their minister as the embodiment of their church’s covenant, they were reminded at some level that their purpose was to come together for worship and service. They were reminded of the love of truth: to get at truth often requires disagreement and conflict. As long as conflict aims to get at truth — as long as conflict isn’t about personalities — conflict in churches is necessary and good. And it is a covenant that allows conflict to be managed so that it can aim at truth.

Families do not have such covenants. Families with children do have a sort of implicit covenant, that parents will care for and raise the children to be adults. Marriage is a type of covenant as well, so if a family has a married couple there is a covenant between at least those two people. But it should be obvious that these family covenants differ from church covenants in their intent, and in who is covered by the covenant.

Churches cannot long exist without covenants. Let’s say that Dan Wakefield and his friend Judy had been members of a church with no covenant, or with a weak covenant. When they got into their shouting match, there would be nothing that could draw them back from their own personal conflict to be reminded of their higher purpose as a part of that church.

That’s why the prophet Hosea is so insistent in reminding his people to remain true to their covenant. To ignore a covenant can mean death for a religious community. Speaking in a prophetic, poetic voice, Hosea tells the people of Israel to remain true to Yahweh their god; in other words: remain true to your covenant; remain true to the sacred promises you made to each other. And Hosea tells us what happens when the people of Israel drift away from their covenant: incompetent and dishonest leaders, whom he calls Ephraim, could gain power. Hosea accuses those incompetent and dishonest leaders of worshipping Baal; that is to say, Hosea accuses them of abandoning the covenant of the people of Israel.

And so Hosea has Yahweh say, “Worship no god but me.” That’s a shorthand way of saying: “Stick to your sacred covenant!” Don’t let extraneous matters distract you from your higher purpose. Don’t be distracted by false idols, even when they are fashioned from gold and silver. Hosea tells us: stick to your covenant — stick to your promises.

Dan Wakefield gives us a picture of a happy, healthy church. In a happy, healthy church, you can get into conflicts, shouting matches even. As long as you stick to the covenant, conflict can lead to truth. Moses knew this, and when the people of Israel strayed from their purpose, when they let extraneous matters creep in, he called them back to their covenantal promises with one another. Hosea told us this. And now may we turn away from our false idols, and remain true to our sacred promises to each other: to transform our own lives, to care for one another and promote practical goodness in the world, and to seek together after truth and goodness.