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October 8, 2000 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

October 8, 2000

Theist, A-Theist, Non-Theist, Poly-Theist: The Character of Belief

I have always appreciated this teaching of the Pygmy people of Africa for what it says about speech, our words, but this morning I offer it for its primary teaching about God:

    In the beginning was God,
Today is God
Tomorrow will be God.
Who can make an image of God?
He has no body.
He is as a word
    Which comes out of your mouth.
That word? It is no more,
It is past, and still it lives!
So is God.

The pygmy live as simply, as closely to the earth, as any people ever have, or ever will again, yet they seem to have captured the essence of what the great theologian Paul Tillich termed Ultimate Reality, or most religions call God.

God, or at least the nature of God, has always been in contention, even in religions where contention was not allowed, for as one generation moved out from another, new questions, new ideas, new interpretations, or revivals of much older interpretations would arise. As people became more mobile, traveling farther from the village, these questions multiplied, for as one people witnessed another worshiping different gods or goddesses, or in different ways, new religious questions arose, and inevitably, new understandings. I do not expect that this will ever change, which reminds us of the saying that the only unchanging thing is change.

Theism is the word religions, particularly philosophers of religion, use to mean an understanding of God. Today, I wanted to talk about the different ways such belief is understood, or in some cases, rejected.

Generally speaking, God, the understanding of God, is far more rigid for conservative or fundamental believers, and for them God is more likely to be an intervening spirit who acts for, or on behalf of, humankind; a God who directly answers prays for intervention. Generally, the understanding of God is far more liberal for more liberally minded believers. God is less intervention-oriented, and more a Spirit of Love, the Spirit of Life or the universe, and often the understanding of God is as something that is and not something that does.

If we look at God from the Hebrew scriptures (also called the Old Testament by Christians) for our understanding of God, which is where Judaism, Islam and Christianity, that is, most of the western world, look for their conceptualizations of God, then we see that God as depicted in the book of Genesis, is a like a human being. That text tells us directly that God made man in his image. We have God walking and talking with Adam and Eve. The text in the King James version, Chp3:8, reads: "And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day."

God was immediate, overseeing his creation, but over time, God becomes more removed from humanity until, by the time of Moses in the book of Exodus, God is in a pillar of fire or in a burning bush, no longer like a human, but a great rather terrifying spirit, and Moses says no man has seen the face of God. (One of many contradictions to be found in the Bible.) The Bible, which for us Unitarians is a book or really a collection of books—that’s what the word Bible means—that tell the story of humankind’s search for answers to the great mysteries of life, and a history of that long seeking.

God as the Judeo-Christian-Islamic peoples understand God, or Him, as God is usually spoken of as male, is a single entity, a singular being, which is why these religions are called Monotheistic. Monotheism, or a belief in one god is actually a fairly new concept if we look at the long history of human development, and much of what is recorded in the first four books of the Hebrew scriptures is a story of a people who are turning from the normal beliefs in many gods to this unusual belief in only one.

The archeological record makes it pretty clear that for the hundreds of thousands of years of human development prior to the rise of the peoples of the Middle East whose story is told in the Bible, there were tribal religions, strands of which are still present today in tribal religions. The tribal or primitive religions were and are mainly focused in nature, which makes a lot of sense if your life is so close to Nature. Gods, goddesses, spirits, demons, sprites, brownies, trolls and fairies were all various types of spirits that inhabited, that lived in the world, not away or separate from it. God was in a mountain or the very mountain, god was water, air, fire; gods were in or part of everything that was part of people’s lives.

But all religious understanding changes over time, even tribal religions, and especially religion in those parts of the world that we call, perhaps foolishly, the civilized world. The oldest evidence of an over-arching creator spirit is that of the Mother Goddess, and thousands of depictions of this Mother Earth, Mother Goddess, have been unearthed around the globe.

So most of the world, we probably can safely say all of the world, worshipped local deities that cared for, watched over, were totems for clans or tribes. This understanding of gods/goddesses as caretakers or protectors is also ancient, and among the earliest ways people understood Ultimate Reality.

Polytheism, of course, is the belief in many gods, goddesses, or spirits, and that is what most people believed, was the "norm," as we say today, in the Middle East or the Fertile Crescent area we learned about in school. That area or arc from the north coast of the Persian Gulf, much of what now is Iran, Iraq, Syria, Israel, Jordan, around to the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The land of the Tigress and Euphrates rivers where civilization arose, and that is because this is the area where agriculture developed, allowing what had been nomadic peoples, subsistence survivors who had to move from place to place, to settle down and develop permanent homes. With this permanence came settled communities which grew ever larger, and those larger communities led to a greater need for codes of behavior for communal living. Much of what we see in ancient religion are these codes of conduct, how to behave, what to eat, how to dress, who will be the leaders, how to govern, how to worship.

The first evidence of monotheism is in ancient Egypt, which had the highest development of society 6000-10,000 years ago. It was in Egypt that the first great library was developed, it was, as it were, the USA of that period. Under the pharaoh Anhkaten monotheism rose up, with the belief in Ra, the sun god as the one and only god. Most modern theologians agree that the monotheism of the ancient Hebrews most likely came from Egypt, and there is one bit of evidence that the story of Moses leading the people out of Egypt is based in some truth, for there exists a stella—a large stone pillar, that mentions the slave people of Israel.

Now the Bible tells the story of the people of Israel as an exiled people enslaved in Egypt, and Moses who is reared in the house of the Pharaoh by the Pharaoh’s daughter (many of us remember the story of the baby Moses found in a basket in the bulrushes by the Pharaoh’s daughter from our Sunday School days). Moses later becomes the leader of his people, and after many dramatic moments recorded in Exodus, he leads them across the Red Sea to freedom, and then they wandered in the desert for forty years before they finally looked down on the "land of milk and honey," in Canaan, where they are told by God that they are to make their home.

This particular episode in the Bible troubled me deeply as a youngster, who had to read the Bible daily in my devout household. The Bible tells us that God told the people to go down and kill every man, woman, child and domestic animal, and claim the land for the Chosen people. This always seemed a strange and unnecessarily cruel way for God to get the job done.

It must have been in these early years of my life that I started thinking what I would do if I were the Supreme Being--and I would not have done a thing like that. Why didn’t God just make them disappear, or move away, instead of be slain? That is the sort of question that I would answer to myself with, "If I were God, I would just have all the people there vanish. In fact, if I were God, I would make all the bad people vanish, then there would be only good people, and so on. As you can see, I am not God.

Yet, questioning the what, how, who, and where of God is quite evident in these Bible texts, and this is equally true in other religions around the world. Buddhism and Hinduism also have ancient scriptures, indeed many of the Hindu scriptures are far older than the Bible, but in these there is also a development from local, tribal deities to a larger monotheistic concept. In modern Hinduism, Brahman is the supreme God, and all the gods and goddesses are depictions of the different facets of the godhead. Buddhism in the main moves God inward, so that the God you see inside is what you can know of God now, and that you must go through one or many lives until you reach Nirvana, or past the need of God. This is true of Hinduism too, for remember that Gotama, the Buddha, was Hindu, and Buddhism comes directly from India.

Over time all religions change, and this has been especially evident in the western world. In ancient Israel’s move to monotheism, we have stories of the people of Israel doing battle to do away with Astarte, or Asherah the supreme goddess of that area, or Baal, the ruling god—they were brother-sister consorts, a common theme of the time and area. We are told in one episode in Jeremiah, that the women who are fearing for their children and families stand up to the local authorities and state they will continue to make "cakes for the Queen of Heaven" as Asherah was called, so the process did not happen as cleanly and smoothly as might seem on the surface.

As we read through the Hebrew scriptures, and certainly evident in the New Testament story of Christianity, we see over time that God had moved far away, to Heaven, and God no longer walks with the people, or speaks directly to them—at least not where anyone else can hear. From the time of Moses we have God talking through a single leader, giving him the directions or code of ethics for the Israelites, the Ten Commandments. More and more God uses the priesthood as the conduit for the people to know his will.

Another thing I would not do if I were God, for obvious reasons. Give people power and you know what happens!

All this to get us to the next phase of understanding, which is A-theism, and if you note the title of the sermon in your Order of Service, I put the A and the Non before Theism, to emphasize that atheism and nonthesism are about having no belief in God. Atheism is distinguished by the belief, sometimes fundamental belief, that there is no God. Non-theism is a newer concept, with implies that the person simply does not see a need for God. The distinction is slight; the way atheism and nontheism differ is more a matter of semantics. With the exception that some atheists declare that there is no God with the same certainly that believers do, and for my part, I don’t think we can be is what led Pascal, the 17th Century mathematician and religious philosopher to propose his famous notion of belief as a wager. Since, he said, we had no proof God does or does not exist, the safe bet was to go with God.

I like how the comedian Frank Miles put it when he said: "The philosopher Pascal said you had to bet that there was a God or there wasn’t, but you couldn’t avoid the wager. Kind of like a comic Let’s Make a Deal: Do you want to have fun in this life?—or trade it for what’s behind the final curtain?"

Many people take the route of agnosticism, which is to say, I have no experience of or see no indication that there is a God, but I cannot prove that there is not a God either; I just don’t know. This is the ground I claim for myself. And most agnostics leave the door open (I certainly do) for the possibility that there may be some Ultimate Reality like God, but we cannot understand, see, or know it as we at this stage of human development.

But the understandings we have in the present time about God vary dramatically, and we have many of these within our Unitarian Universalist faith. Some people believe that God is an active part of their lives, others that God is what we see in the unselfish love people show to one another. Many who see God as the Spirit of Life or Love, rarely believe that God intervenes in the affairs of humankind.

Few people, regardless of religious belief, have the belief or faith of the devout woman who had an absolute faith in God’s providence. One day she while driving she found herself in a terrifying situation, with a car speeding up behind her, another passing just in front of her, and yet another coming rapidly at her from a road on the left. She did not know what to do, and so she just threw up her hands, and cried, "Lord, take the wheel!"

Much more common for Unitarian Universalists is the understanding of God that Black Elk, a holy man of the Oglala Sioux, gave when he said:

Perhaps you have noticed that even in the very lightest breeze you can hear the voice of the cottonwood tree; this we understand is its prayer to the Great Spirit, for not only [people], but all things and all beings pray to [the Great Spirit] continually in differing ways.

For the Great Spirit is everywhere; [and] hears whatever is in our minds and hearts, and it is not necessary to speak to [the Great Spirit] in a loud voice.

My greatest concern today is how quickly people, even UUs, can be to put God in a box. This, they say, is God, this is the only way God is, and there is no room for difference. Whether the box has God the intervening source of all who is acting in our lives or the God that is said to be only desire of human longing, God gets locked up in the box of certainty, held up as a showpiece of belief. Well, if I were God, I would not want to be in any one person’s or religion’s box, for that seems far too much to me about power over others and less about freedom.

There is more than enough room for many different understandings of God, more than enough time for us to learn how God might be manifested in the lives of people, and more than enough need for us to have our growing beliefs and let others have theirs—the only caveat is, that their belief does not rob me of mine.

When we feel that we have the only correct answer to who or what is God, or even if there is a God, or when we hear other people declaim their absolute ownership of God, we have to question motive. "Why do I need so desperately to have people believe what I believe?" Within our UU faith we have many beliefs. We are a rare and beautiful thing in this freedom of religious expression. The character of our faith, the character of any faith, is the degree to which we can truly love our fellow beings. The character of love is no more clearly manifested than in our belief of and willingness to honor freedom of individual difference of individual belief.

For me, this is the only way we will ever see or know anything that is god-like.

 

October 15, 2000 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

October 15, 2000

Can The USA be the World’s Caretaker?

As I have been reading various papers and magazines, and listening to the election debates, I have been struck by the claims, plenty and large, about how humanitarian and compassionate the different parties see themselves. For, it strikes to the very core of human conscience that to some degree or another our country must be a caring country that tries to take care of all its people and even to reach out to the peoples in other countries that are not so prosperous as our own. This is not a new message.

The election made me think of Pat Paulsen, the comic who used to appear on the old Laugh In comedy show, and regularly ran for President, who once said: "All the problems we face in the United states today can be traced to an unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian."

In the book of Genesis, in the Hebrew scriptures, we have one of the oldest questions of humanity’s ethical pondering. Cain, jealous that his brother’s offering was accepted by God, while his was not, kills his brother. God asks Cain where Abel is, and Cain responds: "Am I my brother’s keeper?" God presses on and asks, "What have you done? The voice of your brother cries to me from the ground."

Rabbis, priests, and ministers have been using this episode to drive home the point of our need for brotherly love ever since.

To what extent are we responsible for our brothers and sisters? That is the question I put before us today, as we consider what our role as a the world’s superpower might have to do with the ethical call to care for one another that is offered in our Seven Principles; the second and the sixth particularly.

As luck would have it, someone mailed to me a modern retelling of the fable the "Grasshopper and the Ant" that also offers an interesting perspective on this subject.

In the original Aesop’s version, the ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper, though, has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.

In the modern version, the ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he and others are cold and starving. CBS, NBC, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

The upshot of a long series of legal and political maneuvering, with a great deal of publicity highlighting the plight of the grasshopper, eventually places the grasshopper in the ant’s home, eating the remainder of the ant’s food, and when it’s all said and done, the grasshopper, lazy as ever, winds up once again with no food, and allows the house to go to wrack and ruin where eventually a gang of spiders moves in a takes over.

Now what is the moral of this new morality tale? I would suggest that it is: If you help lazy ne’er-do-wells it all winds up with no one better off.

I wish I believed that that would be how most people would read the modern version, but I fear that more often than not, people read it as justification for one group having a great deal, while another has none, suggesting that it is all due to their innate laziness or inability of some sort to be as prosperous as they are. The Victorians simply laid it all at the feet of God, saying, in effect, that God intended it to be that one group should have all the wealth and power, while others should be colonized, servants, the lower orders if you will.

Today, we have a somewhat more difficult time coming to the same conclusions, yet we manage quite well, talking about trickle-down economic theories of one sort or another that say we leave it to the rich to take care of the poor, through capital reinvestment or similar versions of economics. The catch is that all of these ideologies have some elements of truth, often a great deal of truth, in them.

Yet, we seem to need a regular reminder that the wealthy, persons or countries, did not get wealthy without the help of the poorer peoples, or at the very least, not without many of their resources. The people of Victorian England must have deluded themselves considerably to believe that their tiny island nation could have produced the tremendous wealth that allowed that country to become the great empire that it did. Such a great empire that the common saying was the "sun did not set on the British Empire."

Seamus Heaney, a Nobel Laureate poet, the Ralph Waldo Emerson poet in residence at Harvard, talked about Beowulf in his 2000 Commencement Address. Beowulf is the greatest literary work of Old English (really far more Germanic to modern ears), and for those of us who studied English literature usually denotes the beginning of English literature. A new translation by Heaney was published this summer. Beowulf is a great epic poem (Germanic in its origins as well) that tells the story of a village in the Dark Ages, really the hall of the King Hrothgar in Denmark, who establishes "the light of order, civility, and art inside this hall." Order, civility, art—all the hallmarks of a great civilization. The problem for this noble, good and wise king is the monster Grendel, who is always prowling and circling about the great hall. The story is focused on the hero Beowulf who comes from outside the community and battles with Grendel and his equally monstrous mother, who both represent the forces of evil and destruction. Beowulf is victorious and brings peace to the people once more. Beowulf, then is a savior. This story has a theme repeated throughout history.

Now what is interesting, is that Seamus Heaney in his address puts the Great Hall in the same context as the great institution, like Harvard, or great society, like the United States. He states that these great institutions or foundations "not only hold promise of fulfillment for those within them, but they can prompt feelings of relegation in those outside them." He goes on to say that while these foundational places do a great deal of good, that we need them, there remains the need to acknowledge those who are on the outside. As he states: "Whatever else had happened in our time, there has been a recognition of the human affront of relegation and segregation, of the injustice of exclusion on the grounds of race or gender or class or economic status."

Which brings us back to the Ant and the Grasshopper. What, if any, obligation did the Ant have to help the Grasshopper?

As I have read and studied the problems of the poor, the disadvantaged, these last many years, I find that there are no easy answers to the problem as a whole, nor could there ever be. Such problems always require a breakdown into the various components, or in terms of the global picture; we must always look close to home, or in segments of population to really understand the dynamics of wealth and poverty.

It is very easy to claim the problem is that the prosperous are hardworking, intelligent, and insightful, while the poor are ignorant, lazy, or debauched. Yet, you and I know from our own experience that nothing is that categorical. True you do find the occasional ant and grasshopper scenario. Don’t we all have at least one of each in our larger families? But to suggest that a people or population as a whole are either diligent or lazy is shameful, and is an example of the "relegation" that Seamus Heaney was talking about. That is, just relegating a whole group into one or the other camp, while ignoring the multiple factors that lead to either.

Sadly, underlying the Ant and the Grasshopper tale is a healthy dose of racism. For the Ant and the Grasshopper represent whole groups, while we know that there are these sorts of people in all races, all classes--all groups. We know in fact, that no group survives in this evolutionary planet without working to survive. If you pay attention to population studies, it would appear that all groups are doing a very good job biologically speaking.

Laurie Garrett, the health and science reporter for Newsday since 1988, who has covered world health issues, especially in the U.S., Africa, India, and Russia. To read this 750 page tome is to read a sad, often repeated tale of woe. Where millions suffer from famine and disease because they are powerless, while others in democratic societies do far better as the people wield the dramatic power of the vote to see that problems are addressed that lead to these horrific situations.

What Garrett details in her book is one decade of abuse after another, where power and corruption lead to major catastrophes while the poor standby all but helpless.

And you might be surprised to learn that just throwing money at the problem or more accurately, throwing money to the leadership in the areas where these problems are most critical, is not her idea of an answer to these pressing issues.

What Garrett, and Heaney, Sen, and Galbraith all touch on is the shameful state of equality and justice, where people are denied basic information or education and freedom to have a say in their own lives.

Amartya Sen, a Nobel Laureate in economics at Harvard, originally from India, also gave a commencement address this year and touched on the same themes as Heaney, but from the economist’s viewpoint. He stated: "There is a basic need to recognize that despite the big contributions that a global economy can undoubtedly make to global prosperity, we also have to confront the far reaching manifestations of global inequality." Sen points out forcefully, as his mentor John Kenneth Galbraith has before him, that: "The role of institutions has to be assessed in terms of the ‘countervailing power’ they exercise over one another."

Garrett repeatedly shows that for most of the great famines and epidemics that seem to strike with such regularity, especially in Africa and India, corruption in the halls of government is more often than not the root cause. Further, these same corrupt institutions continue their patterns when world powers step in to offer aid, so that a band aid of assistance is offered, with most of the monies allotted for real aid, and further growth and development, are pocketed by the ruthless who work to maintain their power.

So where does that leave us as we try to see through the fog of political propaganda from all sides? What are you and I to make of our country and the positions it takes toward the poorer peoples of the world?

Naturally, I am preaching to choir here, for you show by your regular participation in this congregation your deep concern for the sad and frightening issues of poverty, neglect, and relegation. But it is easy to see that for much of our population, especially that near fifty percent who won’t take the time to vote, that either they are part of the group that feels powerless, or the group for whom it is more comfortable, more comforting one supposes, to cast all these complex issues into a simple fable that suggest we are a world of ants and grasshoppers.

The fable leads us to believe that the ant and the grasshopper had the same starting point, the same access to food and shelter, the same opportunities, and the only difference is that the ant was industrious and the grasshopper was indolent. We know this is not the easy answer we can use to consider the world’s problems, the biggies of poverty, famine, disease, over-population.

We can see clearly if we read broadly or even much at all on the subject, and certainly those like Laurie Garrett, Professors Sen and Galbraith, those who have attempted to study the workings of global economy and global health issues, see that the real problem is inequality.

The fable of the ant and the grasshopper then becomes something like this: The Ant over time had managed to get control of all the food supplies in the area, systematically making treaties and agreements with the Grasshopper, who in his simpler, indeed spiritual, non-materialistic approach to life, was happy to help since it appeared that they both would be better off if he trusted the Ant. Or so the Ant promised. Yet, it turned out that the Ant began to gather all the food, took the best places for his summer and winter homes, and kept encouraging the Grasshopper to help him, so that he too could one day have a summer and winter home. The Grasshopper sees the changes happening, but by the time he feels the inequality of his situation, and goes to the local authority, the Bee, for help, the Bee who has been hearing the Ant tell of the lazy, sloppy, ignorant ways of the Grasshopper for a long time, assumes that the Grasshopper has what he deserves, and offers a week’s worth of food and some grass mats to help him through the winter.

The moral in this story and in this sermon is that the stories we hear depend on the tellers’ vested interest. It requires a conscientious effort to look deeper into the lives of the peoples of Bangladesh, Zaire, or Appalachia to truly understand what has caused their poverty and real inequality of life.

Garrett draws us back to the greatest age of public health consciousness in the 19th Century (a period we UUs can take especially pride as many of these great social justice leaders came from our ranks—I’ll talk about some of these next week in my sermon on famous UUs.). She writes: "The nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century creators of America’s public health systems would have found this emphasis on individualism amid such grand prosperity shocking. For them, the health of a community was the key measure of its success, and if pestilence and death stalked even one small segment of the population it was a stark indication of the community’s political and social failure."

But the question I posed in my sermon title remains hanging in the air. Can the U.S.A., be the world’s caretaker? And the answer is "No!" That is not our role. But we most assuredly have a role, one that we cannot dismiss if we hope for our country to remain strong not only throughout our own lifetimes, but for the future of our children and their children. Which is in itself the very heart of the matter.

How can people be corrupt? Why are they able to gather up so much for themselves while all around them people are suffering or dying? The short answer is "extreme egotism." That trait of being so completely focused on self, that all others do not matter. A hint of which is what Garrett details in her phrase "emphasis on individualism."

George Carlin, always quick to assess the mood the country once quipped: " I don’t believe there’s any problem in this country, no matter how tough it is, that Americans, when they roll up their sleeves, can’t completely ignore."

I have seen repeatedly that when people come face to face with disease, poverty, all sorts of struggles, or if these happen to the people they love, most people have a tremendous capacity for compassion. Even dictators and corrupt officials show their underlying capacity for generosity when it comes to their own families. But the invisible barriers go up for those whose names and faces have no meaning. There is no compassion or empathy for those others who are the great mass of people who do the labor, make the small dollars or whatever currency, that get paid out in taxes or for inflated costs for basic necessities, all of which will eventually add up to one person’s great wealth.

The ‘Great Society" as we were once termed, is only great when we have compassion for our brothers and sisters in the world. Our own spiritual lives, our spirits demand an accounting for ourselves in light of our accounting for others. That requires true interest, which requires real study into the problems that cause famine and disease and the on-going poverty in nations around the world where it simply makes no sense.

Amartya Sen points out that there has been no famine where freedom and democracy are present; a clear indicator that the people must first have access to the major road to freedom, which is education. A people kept downtrodden, through ignorance have few choices, are easy to manipulate and, especially in these days of high technology, find themselves wholly unequipped to work against the forces that subjugate them. This is our role, from my perspective. To help people have freedom that allows free flow of information, for with information, all these peoples will eventually fight for the comforts of life, you and I take for granted. Almost everyone wants the Ant’s prosperity, but not everyone wants to use the same means to get it.

For us who strive to be a people of conscience, to teach our children that to "do unto to others as you would have them do unto you" is a great and noble virtue, then at the very least we have to accept that there are many, profoundly complex answers to the awful poverty that still exists in parts of the country and worldwide.

Our role is to be truth tellers, not rationalizers of a status quo that suits us very well, thank you, while relegating millions to the status of the Grasshopper, or worse.

We are the most powerful, the wealthiest nation that has ever existed on this planet. We, who represent just a small portion of the world’s population, use the majority of the world’s resources. Like the Victorians, from whom we modeled much of our behavior, we find it convenient to get from abroad what we don’t have here. So our role has become global no matter how much Pat Buchanan and others like him would like to pretend that it isn’t, wanting in effect that we should be a walled nation. We never were a walled nation, totally independent of the rest of the world, and we never will be. The tea at the Boston Tea Party didn’t come from New Jersey!

Not one of us here this morning, is here without an intimate contact with other people from around the world. The clothes we are wearing very likely were sewn together in another poor country, also underclothes, our shoes, handbags and wallets. Even if they are labeled "Made in the USA," most likely many of the component materials, silk, cotton, petroleum, rubber, etc., came from another, poorer country. We of the USA are not an island unto ourselves, never have been, and never will be—especially not now as we clearly have become part of a large global economy.

Our role is support, economic and educational. And equally important must be our role of monitor or how the resources we give are used. Do the millions of dollars sent to fight an Ebola outbreak go for medicine, hospitals, education, or do they wind up in the hands of corrupt officials? Do the tons of grain we ship for famine relief indeed go to the starving, or as Garret depicts in a number of recent events, to corrupt officials who then sell it?

As has been just as true for public assistance programs right here at home, the ability to grant monies for all kinds of worthy projects, food, education, housing, often is so mismanaged that the people it was intended for see little if any of it. Why is it that management is so lacking? That is what we need to ask of our elected officials—often. How are you managing our resources?

While the USA cannot be the world’s caretaker, we cannot forget that the world helps us to have all we value so highly. That obligates us to consider the needs of the world for ultimately it will all come back home. We see it in the emerging power of the Middle East whose leaders have a lot to say about how much you and I pay for this winter’s fuel oil.

Our compassion needs always to extend beyond our own front doors to others, which is not about sacrificing all we hold dear, but holding it just dear for others as well. This is what it means to be a caring people of faith.

 

October 22, 2000 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

October 22, 2000

Famous Unitarians, Universalists, and UUs

In order to talk about some of the famous Unitarians, Universalists, and UUs, it is always helpful to start with a bit of history, and that primary point we clergy often turn to when looking at Protestant religious history is the Reformation. The Protestant Reformation is not the absolute beginning of Unitarian and Universalist thought, but in terms of what we look like today it is that event to which we most often turn to get our bearings.

The Reformation was that period in the mid-1500s, the priest Martin Luther set off when he challenged, indeed protested, the doctrines and practices of the Church—The Church, no other allowed—that opened the flood gates of questioning that eventually led to the protestors forming many different churches and societies. It was during this period that many of the religious debates began that eventually led to the great number of denominations we have presently with in Protestantism. Much of it happened in Transylvania.

While nowadays we in this country have a hard time not thinking of Dracula movies when we hear the name, that area of Eastern Europe, now mostly around Romania, was the crossroads of the civilized world. It was in the middle of important trading routes, and as all major cities are these days, the latest of whatever existed came the way of the Transylvanians. Unitarian beliefs got a foothold first in this area.

Transylvania had the first and only Unitarian king, King John Sigismund. There are still many Unitarian churches throughout this Romania-Hungary area, and we have several Partner Church relationships, with a church here paired with one there. When I was serving the large Concord, MA, congregation, the minister the Rev. Gary Smith visited their partner church with several members of the congregation, and invited the minister and his family there to visit us. This stole I am wearing today came from that partner church.

It was in 1568, and the Unitarian bishop Francis David prepared to debate the trinity with the Calvinist bishop Melius. Melius told David, "If I win this debate, you will be executed." David responded, "If I win this debate, you and everyone else in this country will be given complete religious freedom and the tolerance due to every child of Man."

Eventually, when King Sigismund, the first king to accept and promote religious tolerance died at a rather young age, Bishop David was executed for heresy. It was not until the 18th Century in England that those beliefs once again gained prominence and were brought to this country by the scientist Joseph Priestley, for whom our district is named. Priestly is one of the famous Unitarians, and most famous for discovering oxygen and CO2, among other things.

I have broken my topic into three parts, for it is important in our history that we were initially two different denominations. The Unitarians, the Universalists, and now since our merger in 1961, we are Unitarian Universalists. I confess to often wishing they had chosen one or the other, or some new name so we wouldn’t have this mouthful of uni-s to deal with all the time; imagine the trouble I have putting our congregation’s name in the space allotted on ordinary forms.

One of my favorite sayings about the difference between these two parts of our being was best said by the Rev. Thomas Starr King, who once said, to paraphrase, "The difference between the Universalists and the Unitarians is the that the Universalists believe that God is too good to damn them, and the Unitarians believe that they are too good to be damned."

Two other famous Unitarians often quoted in UU pulpits are Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau was the great poet, philosopher, naturalist, pre-Thorstin Veblin proponent of the simple life, and Emerson, also a great poet, who is often said to be the greatest philosopher our country has ever produced, was also a Unitarian minister, son of a Unitarian minister, all of them at Concord, MA. In 1846, Thoreau was arrested and spent one night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax. He had done this as a protest against both slavery and the Mexican War which in the process of being fought to gain more slave territory. Emerson visited Thoreau that night in jail, and said, "Henry, why are you there?" To which Thoreau replied, "Waldo, why are you not here?"

Universalists are often called the heart and the Unitarians the head. It was the Universalists, a smaller, more rurally centered Christian group, brought to this country by the Englishman John Murray, that first claimed as a religious principle that God could not be both all-powerful and loving and send his creation to hell for eternity. The Universalist theological position was that while those who had done evil would undoubtedly be punished for some period in the afterlife, eventually God would bring all his creation back to wholeness, hence, universal salvation.

There is a story that this Christian woman who believed in eternal hellfire and damnation found out about Universalism, the idea that everybody would go to heaven was completely shocking and horrified her. She confronted a Universalist saying: "So, this Universalism means you can do anything you want to do: steal, rape, kill."

The Universalist replied, "Is that what you want to do: steal, rape, kill?"

One of the most famous Universalist is Olympia Brown, because she was the first woman in this nation to be ordained a minister. No other denomination had ever been so brave, especially in the light of the teachings of Paul that appear to forbid women to speak in church. It was not long until a whole cadre of women ministers came out of Universalism and Unitarianism, but mostly from our Universalist side. They were many of the bravest and best, for much of their ministry was to go out to the frontier to preach their message of God’s complete love.

There is one often told joke that when a Christian dies, he will go along the path until he finds the sign that reads, "This way to Heaven." When the UU dies and finds himself on that road and sees that sign, he looks around for the sign that reads, "This way to a Discussion about Heaven."

Margot Adler, National Public Radio correspondent, a Pagan UU, and also daughter of the famous philosopher, Mortimer Adler, said: "I am attracted to Unitarian Universalism and have made this religion my home because of its traditions of skepticism and rationality."

Probably humanism and skepticism are often what moderns associate with Unitarian Universalism. It is true that we UUs consider skepticism a valuable trait, and one we encourage in ourselves, and in our children as well. I often have considered since my conversion to Unitarian Universalism, that in most traditional religions—certainly that in which I war reared-- religion is only area where people are not encouraged to have skepticism. No logic in that!

It does lead to a good UU story: Once upon a time, there was a well-dressed man who came into a small town looking to mail a letter. He asked a youngster, "Excuse me, son, can you tell me how to get to the post office?"

The little boy looked up at the man, turned around and pointed to the place right there on Main Street. The man said to the boy, "Say, you look like an intelligent young lad. I’m the Rev. Billy Beauregard, and I’m having a tent meeting outside town tonight. I’d like you and your parents to come, and I’ll show you The Way to the Lord."

The little boy, who was a Unitarian, said bluntly, "That’s a pretty tall order for a guy who can’t find his way to the post office."

Rationality and skepticism were the hallmarks for most of our country’s founding fathers. Quite to the contrary of what you hear from the un-or mis-educated of the Religious Right, most of those men where strongly in the camp of the Enlightenment, and were responsible for the greatest period of flourishing of Unitarianism in this land. Of all the presidents, five have been Unitarian, only the Episcopalians have had more, with seven to their credit. John Adams; John Quincy Adams, (both of these men, along with others of the Adams’ family, are buried in the Quincy, MA, church, many visitors visit that crypt beneath the historic First Parish); Thomas Jefferson; Millard Fillmore, the 13th President; and William Howard Taft, the 27th. Jefferson, whom we claim, though some say we take liberties in doing, replied to his friend, Joseph Priestley, in a letter, that he believes that religious liberal thought would one day be the norm throughout the land, and that while there were no churches in his area of Virginia, he would have to be content to be Unitarian alone until such time as one was founded. Clearly identifying himself as Unitarian, which is what Deism was really all about at that time.

All historians note the influence of Unitarians on our country, with leaders from Paul Revere, the Adams and Jefferson, Edward Everett Hale, and far more who were revolutionaries whose names are not known, but in the great churches of both Unitarian and Universalist faiths who were the greatest supporters of not only freedom for the colonies, but later for abolition of slavery, all the way down to the first half of the 20th Century and Roger Baldwin, founder and first Director of the ACLU, and it goes on. Senator Cohen, Secretary of Defense is a Unitarian from Maine.

One who certainly should not be forgotten was the Rev. Dr. Edward Everett Hale who was once one of the most famous preachers in the United States who was the chaplain of the U.S. senate when he was asked, "Do you pray for the senators, Dr. Hale?"

The great man replied, "No, I look at the senators and I pray for the country."

Charles Darwin, whose investigations into the theory of evolution brought one of the most phenomenal changes in human history, especially after the publication of the Origin of the Species, is another of our most famous Unitarians.

Many of the great minds that we associate with this country’s development were also Unitarian: Horace Mann who is credited with creating the foundation for public education; Daniel Webster, who put together our first dictionary; Horace Greeley of newspaper fame and of, Go west, young man, fame; Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great, and very literary, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel Morse, those two communications greats.

Scientists, such as Maria Mitchell, the first great astronomer of this country, and in the 20th Century, Linus Pauling. Great humanitarians like Albert Schweitzer, Henry Eliza Fallen, and Horatio Alger, Mary Livermore, a Universalist, was important for her work to establish sanitary systems during the Civil War, then later for her work for women’s suffrage. Clara Barton, who founded the Red Cross. Other great leaders in that early feminist cause were: Susan B. Anthony, Antoinette Blackwell, Margaret Fuller, who was also a noted intellectual and author.

Authors abound in our ranks: Thoreau and Emerson, as mentioned, but to include our English Unitarian family, Charles Dickens and Beatrix Potter. Back to this country, we have William Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Alcott family of Concord, MA, and of modern fame, Rod Serling, to name just a few.

Other artists include those such as, Gilbert Stuart, who painted the most famous picture of George Washington that hangs in Capitol rotunda, Bela Bartok, the great Hungarian composer and pianist, and the noted folk singer Pete Seeger.

Two of the most noted American architects, Buckminister Fuller, noted for his geodesic dome, and Frank Lloyd Wright, both Unitarian, and Fuller was from an historic Unitarian family as well.

Another of interest is P.T. Barnum of circus fame, noted for a number of great thoughts, but mostly for his unforgettable, "There’s a sucker born every minute." Not so much a statement about his ability to take advantage of that, but more about the foolish, unquestioning nature of so many.

Sophia Fahs and Angus Maclean, who developed a religious education system and curriculum that was used and copied across the country helping to get the Sunday School movement put forward in churches where no such thing had existed as a separate part of the program.

And, today, we have in our number, Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund.

Then, of course, there are all those important UUs who sit in the pulpit every Sunday, some who are famous within their particular fields of work, other who will be one day, and all of us, like myself, who have no fame, but we know that without the environment that our liberal religious faith provides, we could well have missed having most of those I have talked about this morning, and we have no way of knowing which of our members, especially those young ones we nurture with such care and hope for their futures may one day make a notable mark for the betterment of humanity. I am certain, that we have right now, in our UU congregations across this country and around the world, children who one day will make a mark for the betterment of humankind.

We are here for each Unitarian Universalist, famous and not famous, to have a place that encourages us to challenge ourselves, and to challenge others, to make it comfortable for differences of opinion to be heard; a home for those who make the comfortable among us squirm when we become complacent about the importance of religious freedom. Right now, we must continue to be those brave enough to fight for the rights of minorities, of the gay and lesbian community particularly, which now seems to be the target group for much of the religious bigotry we see and hear today. We want to have courage, and we can learn to have courage to go against the grain and be truthful in our beliefs, and in our understanding that acceptance is important in a world that is growing more and more pluralistic. This is not always easy. We wouldn’t expect that it should be, but we know in our heart of hearts that the truth does set us free.

To all those foremothers and forefathers in the faith, let us say a prayer of gratitude for the models they have placed before us, and let us in our small ways continue to fuel the light of knowledge, questioning, and hope that Unitarian Universalism represents to the world.

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