The Post Modern Preacher

Sermon for tomorrow at huumms

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:00:27 -0500

We sit in a place of history. On this land, in these halls walked legends of our faith. Those superstars of yester year who shined so bright that they are like the Bono, Madonna, or Cher of today. Ralph Waldo, Henry David, William Ellery, I do not have to say their last name for you to know who they are. Superstars like E. E. Cummings graced these same halls, as did Theodore Parker, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Samuel Joseph May, and Henry Ware. This is the who’s who of men in the Unitarian tradition. Some famous names, these superstars from our past. Sadly this historical list lacks anyone who was not a white man. Still, something tells me that Abigail Adams, Mary White Ovington, and Susan B. Anthony might have had a home here if our current cultural values were present through the nineteenth century. Those values arrived at by the work of some of our predecessors I just named.

Imagine with me, if you will the work of our predecessors. On whose back are we standing? Tell me what the values of these people were? I do not foresee a future where I will keep a sword and loaded pistol in my desk as I write my sermons in case the powers of this world try to remove those in the church who are made free in sanctuary. What would it be like to speak for complete equality in a society were only the rich receive education while the poor children are sold into the working force at a young age if they have any hope of feeding themselves. The predecessors, what were they thinking when they spoke for freedom in a society which held humans in life long bondage. The predecessors, what did they have going through their mind when they spoke of equality when women were property to their fathers or husbands without even property rights. These giants, these superstars who flew in the face of culture, of propriety, the social pariahs of their worlds where they lacked the privilege of General Assemblies, of UUMA chapter meetings, of clergy fellowships since orthodox protestant clergy labeled them heretics fought on and on for what was moral and what was just with crumbs of sustenance in the days before email and ubiquitous cell phones when friends are an instant message away. Yet still, our culture shines because of their presence. Those before you let their light shine.

Whose chalice fire really burned bright and enlightened our world? I would like to focus on the story of a few of our superstars. Many of you know what September 11th, 2006 marked, the five-year anniversary of a great tragedy. How many of you also know it was the hundredth anniversary of Gandhi launching his first campaign of nonviolence. A century of nonviolence prompted by his reading of Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. For some of us living in Walden Pond, maybe we should remember that spending some of that time out in the woods of Emerson’s back yard prompted our boy Henry David to sit in jail instead of paying war taxes. For some of us still living in our quiet contemplation and our righteous indignation against the current administration maybe we should get out of Walden Pond and take that liberal enlightenment to the real world where people are still dying in wars while we hide in our suburban churches. If a society jails a just person unjustly, the only place for the just is in prison. Something tells me this star of our history whose work inspired Gandhi and through Gandhi empowered Martin Luther King would challenge us to burn just as bright.

Another shining star of our past from this very region, the couple whose work inspired the flaming chalice as our denominational symbol does not receive a whole lot of credit. Reverend Waitstill and Martha Sharp, two thirds of America’s presence amongst the Yad Vashem, the righteous of nations are superstars of our past. Their story is often unsung, since Waitstill was the seventeenth minister asked to go to Prague by the Unitarian Service Committee. They shepherded Unitarian and Jewish people, primarily children out of Nazi occupied Eastern Europe, and escaped from Prague the day before their arrest would have happened at the hands of the Gestapo. Their rest was short lived since they soon went to Portugal to continue the work of rescuing those under Nazi rule. This couple worked the black market of Vichy France to provide milk to the children in occupation and forged documents to ferry people to safety. The seventeenth minister asked did this. The work of the Unitarian Service Committee inspired Hans Deutsch to design the first chalice artwork as a logo for the USC. This logo, adopted by the Unitarian Universalist Association and the great majority of our congregations shines with the light of our predecessors.

Still in the early half of the twentieth century, we had another predecessor who shined brightly. I know many of you have seen our churches perform the flower communion. Have we told the story where this ritual comes from? Like many, I love our New England history, but this comes from the original home of Unitarianism in Eastern Europe. Norbert Capek was born in 1870, and spent his first forty years in southern Bohemia. A Baptist originally, but after fleeing to America due to oppression he experienced from voicing his concern about the impending World War he learned of Unitarianism and by 1920 converted to be part of the Unitarian ministry. As a native of the Czech Republic, he returned to Prague after World War I to form a liberal ministry. While in Prague, he saw the problem of a closed communion, or even a communion of bread and wine which would exclude some attendees, but recognized the need we have for ritual and community so he asked congregants to bring a flower each week to fill the church, and return home with a different flower as a sign of the transformative beauty of faith. When the Nazi regime entered and occupied Prague, he preached on the importance of freedom and justice. Despite being offered the opportunity to return to America, he pastored and preached on freedom and justice. This brought the ire of the Gestapo who deported him to Dachau in 1941, and his death at Nazi hands a year and a half later. In the face of brutal oppression, his light shined ever on.

Here we stand, in the halls of academia which were graced by some of our past superstars which demand a legacy. So how do we stand up to that legacy. The world has a need for our light, since last I checked our nation still occupies countries unjustly, but we have a chalice. While the poor of this country eat diets of under nourishing food, we have a light. While the inner city school districts have money stripped from them, condemning another generation to ignorance, illiteracy, and further separating the power of the haves from the have nots we have some oil left to burn to kindle our own chalice light. It is not just the work of our predecessors which makes this tradition so vibrant, so powerful and meaningful. James Reeb and Violla Liuzzo didn’t think Thoreau had cornered the market on social justice when they were killed shining their Unitarian Universalist flame. From 2005’s General Assembly in Fort Worth where we were challenged to burn down Walden Pond and get out of our liberal complacency to live into the legacy of Civil Disobedience we let our chalice burn bright. At 2006’s General Assembly in St. Louis we were encouraged with the words of Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Ella’s Song that those of us who believe in freedom cannot rest until the killing of every black mother’s son means just as much as the killing of a white mother’s son. “Not needing to clutch for power, not needing the light just to shine on me  I need to be one in the number as we stand against tyranny.” Our tradition chose to shine the light of the recently departed in the 2007 General Assembly where the late Reverend Marjorie Bowens Wheatley, whose prophetic work on race relations being a matter of faith was lifted up as a brilliant flame coming from the chalice of Unitarian Universalism. These inspired stories are only a few of the examples where our light can change the world if only we live into our message. We can enact a new world, one where through our diligence people see the light of compassion instead of only our icy glare of intellectual elitism. We can transform people’s lives if we offer them the sacred message f Unitarian Universalism instead of hiding in our timidity and woundedness. Our light can rise up like a star on the horizon, leading the way to change.

How can we live into this legacy and current challenge to shine? My hope, my prayer is that it lives in all of you. We, the future of Unitarian Universalist ministry are the ones who will be casting the sparks that will light new chalices for the generations to come. We are called on to be the light. Our actions, our charge is to be as bright as we can, to shine wherever we go. Our light can no longer be hid; our message can no longer be whispered apologetically. As a denomination we have anemic growth from bickering in our pews about how we don’t want to change, we don’t want to grow, we don’t like this or that theological term all because we as religious professionals have not inspired our congregants to live the Unitarian Universalist message. Ours is a faith of transformation, of heresy, of protestation where we choose instead of blindly accepting the way things have always been done. Here in New England that is even more necessary since we are the church on the green, we are the church that people see in every city, town, and village center where we can both be the beacon to the community or drown in the weight of our history. Our light might go out if we fail to shine it so brightly that even those with their eyes held shut by the strength of rigidity and dogmatic humanism will have no choice but to be awed by the possibility it offers and warmed by the heat our chalices can produce if we but stoke the flame. What does our faith offer when it loses that heat, that light, that transformative quality? Will it be just another footnote of well-intentioned people who did well but now are trampled underfoot, or will we be the beacons that shine the way for liberal religion into the twenty first century. I choose to let my light shine.

Playing Poker and Ministerial Presence

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:13:16 -0500

I enjoy playing poker, but as a grad student my income doesn't support gambling with any considerable stakes. A minister friend introduced me to some of his congregants who host a low stakes tournament every few months and this past Saturday I played. The event struck me as a bit odd because it is one of the many times where I treated as different for being a religious professional. I was introduced as the minister at school to several of the people at the event and had to let them know it was ok to use foul language around me, and that I was no holy man who might be offended by their comments. I started off well in the tourney, then went on tilt and was out by the third blind change. A good sized chunk of the players present were active laity at this specific congregation, and it was interesting to see them act with their proverbial hair down around their minister and this "minister at school." There was still some reservation, but they were very friendly. Even in their warmth, it seemed as though I was a bit apart. Perhaps even on the poker table I do not lose the ministerial presence in their eyes. It hits like a weight of responsibility to see the separation made real. A coworker asked me today to help him design a wedding service. His friend is getting married now that she and her significant other have their second child on the way. He's doing the internet ordination so he can sign their certificate on the cheap. I was amused when he asked me what he had to say to make the thing official and he was confused when I didn't give a simple answer. When I told him I had readings and we could sit down with the couple to design a service he was confused since he thought I meant bible readings. More and more such things happen where people around me use me as a ministerial resource or think me a minister when I'm not that far along in the process. Three semesters of seminary does not a minister make, nor does the four months of field ed I've done for the district. Often I look at the respect and responsibility folks place on my identity as a religious professional in awe. Who am I to be this? It is a question I wrestle with. Who am I to lead, when I am just as much a wanderer in this quest to find a little meaning? Who am I to lead, when I'm being just as deceitful as the next when bluffing a hand at poker? Perhaps that is why we should all ask who are we not to lead.

Season Come to a Close

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:38:02 -0500

The semester has come to a close, with the relief of completion. I attended the HUUMS holiday party on Saturday, and realized the difference of the culture between Harvard Div folk and those of us at BU. Me in my jeans felt a bit out of place with the folks in suits and dresses. I've seen the class analysis speaking of problems in discussing power and authority because UUs are middle to upper class, but it rejects the tradition of the working class Universalists. Especially outside of New England, there are many who come from privilege, but are not upper class and experience working class values. Maybe that is something we forget when we point to the demographics of education, but for those of us who are only the second generation of college goers in our families, we hold more to Garth Brooks' Friends in Low Places than to the Brandenburg Concerto. Not all of our congregations have Tiffany stained glass or are Kings Chapel. I wonder how much of our claiming privilege and wealth insults the congregations in places like Roxbury or Flint?

It's been a long time since I rock and rolled

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 09:47:32 -0500

Last weekend was the New England regional fall conference of the UUA. Functionally, no one from Maine was there and only a handful of NH/VT folks. Several items had me thinking, and wondering if my conception of ministry is the same as others. Is worship the most important thing our congregations do? I would say no at this point. Maybe that view will some day change, but the importance of congregations is bringing people together in relationship. Worship can be a mechanism of that function, and it is a fundamental element to the community. The greek terms for church life seem applicable, church is about leitourgia (worship), but also diakonia(service), koinonia(community), kerygma(proclamation), and didache(teaching). All of them are fundamental and none supercede the others. Secondly, where does one draw the line between prophetic voice and pastoral presence? While it is important to speak the truth to power, how does it get said with rebuke in one hand and consolation in the other?

Some words have power

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 21:16:31 -0500

From Elie Wiesel, the comment being about the torment and anguish Abraham had when God demanded he sacrifice Isaac.

It wasn't that he suffered; we Jews know that God gives you no special place because you suffered. What matters is what you do based on that suffering.

Reflection on God

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 16:01:46 -0500

This week for Theology II, we have been asked to summarize our notion of God in one page. Hardly fair, since one page is so limited and it only gives the briefest sketch of what our understanding is. However, it is something I want to chew on, so I've placed my statement below:

Many people have written tomes on the nature of God. Before attending BU, my favorite notion of God was Whiteheadian Process. Creativity bounded by conception as a persuasive force pulling the past into the future where possibility could be played out was much cleaner for me then notions of a three in one, imminent and transcendent at once nonsuffering, unchanging, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient God.

I am Unitarian. The oneness of God prevents God existing as a discernable three. This ends up touching on many doctrines. To the best of my understanding, the trinity is doctrine because the death on the cross has to atone for the sins of humanity. Something about the atonement seems so false to me. How can my sins be paid with the blood of another? How can any sins be atoned for? No amount of remorse undoes the damage done by wrong doing. Our best is healing the wounds instead of pretending they don’t exist. Again, we come upon another doctrine, that of Christology. If I view Jesus as a healer and a prophet, his work to heal the wounds of those around him makes much more sense than serving as a paschal scape goat for the wrongdoings of humanity. He was killed not to show revelation that humanity killed God and God suffered, he was killed because he spoke truth to power and revealed a better way of living and a new faith for all.

Since I have touched on atonement and Christology, to complete this view of God I need to reflect on pneumatology and theodicy. When folks deify the holy spirit, I wonder why they forgot about the Hebrew Scriptures. God moves through the lives of people with the Ruach Elohim. This breath/spirit was not a separate person but an agency of the one divine. Why have they exalted the agency of God up to Godhood itself? I do not know the answer to that question. For the justice of God, I return to process. When I think of metaphors to use for God I end up with a blues guitarist. Improving on the guitar knows some boundaries, but not hard and fast rules. Sometimes a wrong note gets played or a note is bent in a way that sounds off. Ultimately the music controls itself as much as the musician. In many ways, that is how I see God. The metaphor of a divine musician playing along at creation, drawing it into a tight composition that is a real expression of the outpouring of the joy and love of creation sounds more tangible to me than the consequent and primordial natures of divine reality but both speak to the same meaning. God, the fellow sufferer who understands, God, the musician who feels the pain of the wrong notes but moves on with the composition anyway because ultimately the blues will out.

Ad Campaigns, Marketting, Evangelism, Language

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 21:25:10 -0500

With the big news of the national ad campaign in Time, the splash campaign in the SF Bay, and thoughts of what I will be doing with the MBD, I am often struck by how inarticulate we UUs are about our message. The ad for the Bay Area begins with descriptions of what UUs are not and doesn't bring in the positivity until halfway into the commercial. Do people really go to church for what they won't be recieving? I don't go to an Indian restaurant because I don't want McDonald's, I go because I want tikka masala and samosas. Why is it that there is an ethos of shame around our message? Why do we time and time again begin with taglines like you don't have to believe in God to come to our churches. As clever as it sounds, "You have questions, so do we" doesn't really say much about us either. Some alternate wordings could make the statement stronger. Something like, "Unitarian Universalism, where we have the courage to live in the questions." This statement boldly claims that we don't just have questions (who doesn't) but that we live in them. The statement says we don't have cheap grace. What about claiming that everyone is welcome to come to our table. Our congregations might not be so friendly to the more conservative minded but they are welcome to our table even if our faith will challenge their belief. We could even crib Anselm's tagline of "faith seeking understanding" as our message since we do not divorce our thinking heads from our feeling hearts. Maybe we want to feel some level of shame since there is no profession of our sins so we cannot with clear conscience move past our guilt. Are we so hurt by our pasts that we have to preface who we are with who we are not? Why do we parade our woundedness as a red badge of courage? Today, I heard a comment from a fellow UU seminarian that the title of religion is problematic for UUism and we are perhaps better labelled a movement. Do you go to a building on Sunday mornings to sing songs, hear wisdom, and listen to the exegesis of texts and moral encouragement from a movement? Do you go to a movement to wed or to have a memorial of your life? Do you go to a movement for counselling when life is hard? Why are we afraid to say religion? There are many atheistic religions. Well, by many I mean sects of Buddhism, Confucianism, with the door open to other traditions of which I am ignorant. There are Buddhist churches. Yet, our churches shouldn't be called churches, they should be called meeting houses... I hope one day we can get over ourselves. I hope we can find our way in our spiritual journey without prefaces of what we don't believe or do. I hope one day we can see any spiritual journeyor who is authentic in their path and call them friend, even if their spiritual guide isn't the Roshi or Lama of the week and is instead perhaps Julian of Norwich. Maybe one day we will let people learn from Marian traditions as much as we allow folk to learn from Kuan Yin. Maybe someday we can talk of Mohammed instead of Rumi.

Annie Dillard put it well

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 21:36:08 -0500

From Annie Dillard

Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

This whole summer I've felt a frustration while leading worship. Who am I, this stumbling, trembling, young man to lead the worship and spiritual practice of those whose paths I will never walk? Who am I to play about with games I cannot comprehend invoking the name of God when my own understanding of divinity is so fleeting? The best I can do is understand the relationship I have with my fellow spiritual travellers and I've been chartered to somehow relate their needs to the greater than essence which we all glimpse at some point but never hold onto because of the terrible power of enormity that such divinity holds. I wonder if this is why the Norse forced Odin to lose an eye to gain the knowledge of runes, or if the Greeks made Prometheus live in perpetual agony on his rock for giving humanity fire. Jacob was injured wrestling the angel, and Jesus was hung up on the cruel tree to give some form of revelation. With this cost, this suffering, why do we dare wake the sleeping God? Partly because when you feel that explosion of TNT, you can only have the same rush by creating larger explosions. Maybe we need, maybe I need this drastic transformation as the ends of my faith. Maybe it is because as I am, I am not now enough and in the worship and the community I am turned more to an awareness of the waking God through the relationship we have in our communities. God is there in the laughter at the mistakes, God is in there at the lukewarm singing of hymns and the barely mumbled prayers as much as God is there when the liturgics make me tremble. I don't know where this path is leading me, what changes this community enacts within me. I know my hand is being held by those who have come before and it holds onto those who will come after me.

Happenings with the District

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 16:11:36 -0500

The morning was spent with Terasa at the District Office going over plans for my field ed this year. The end goal is the creation of a marketing task force for the MBD after identifying stake holders and developing congregational buy-in over the course of the coming year. There is the potential that Boston would be the site for the 07-08 big blitz UUA marketting campaign much like what the Bay Area is experiencing this year but the groundwork needs to be established sooner rather than later. Part of the groundwork is educating our congregations on radical hospitality. What does it mean to be genuinely welcoming? How do you great the new comer and how do you develop the spiritual gift of making space for the stranger? The number one demographic response to churches that do not grow is the feeling that the congregation is one big happy family. Mid size churches and large churches grow, in jargon program sized churches and corporate sized churches grow. Small churches-pastoral sized churches just don't have the capacity to grow. I wonder how I'm going to couch this in theological language for my University? We are proclaiming a welcome which rings of evangelism but also nurturing faith communities toward healthy welcoming behavior which is almost discipleship. At times I feel a difficulty translating UU parlance to mainline protestent parlance, almost as if they are seperate languages.

Reach out and touch faith

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 22:01:43 -0500

It is a bittersweet thing, the summer ending and the fall encroaching. Boston cools from the summer heat and today I wore a hoodie as I biked to and from work. Summer has never been my favorate season. I don't sleep well in the oppression of heat and humidty. They weigh upon me in almost spiritual ways, with clawing discomfort and unshakeable perturbation. Fall brings about renewal. Fall gives hope. Fall means more work, with the district, with class, with my job, and perhaps with ASC. Tonight I had dinner with my classmate who is the most catholic Catholic I know. He's preaching at Cambridge Unitarian Universalist the week from Sunday on Interfaith Worker Justice. I was able to show him some of the nuances to our particular style of worship, and through some of my sermons illustrate what we do, and the problems of worship sans a single truth. In his first life, he was an editor with an education from Cornell. Perhaps I put too much stock in names, but having him read and approve of my sermons reassured me. I struggle and doubt a lot that I am playing at things far greater than I will ever understand when I lead congregations in worship. The word in the sermon is our form of communion where each has the chance to be invited to a sacred place or turned away with boredom as the preacher prattles on. I've been jamming again of late. Since much of my summer took creative juices to keep up with the sermon writing while keeping full time hours at BU, I had my guitar collect dust for the better part of July and August. With writing put aside for a time, I am able to play again. The calluses on my left hand had died down so I get the hot sharp pain after an hour strumming but it feels good as accomplishment. Belting out some Johnny Cash or some Richard Shindell or some Gary Jules feels cathartic. It touches that special place inside where I find calm and solace. Music with song and strum becomes prayer, more reverent than the kneeling with my prayer beads and for a moment I am become Elohim, creator of worlds.

Sermon for Sunday

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 21:03:24 -0500

My final sermon for Barnard. This sermon has its roots in a sermon I heard from Rev. Max Coots in my childhood. Those Crazy Universalists Growing up in Northern New York, the Universalists touched my family tree. My grandmother was a Universalist in Henderson Harbor Before converting for marriage to my grandfather. My guess is her family was also Universalist, but that I do not know. I am also guessing many of you never heard of Henderson Harbor. It is a small town on the shore of Lake Ontario, not that much bigger than here in Barnard. One of those sleepy villages where you don’t have to lock the doors at night but you know your neighbors’ names and their families, and the comings and goings about the town. Everyone seems to know everyone, and has opinions on everyone. These small towns and villages were the heart of the Universalist movement. Oh, the Universalists were considered those crazy heretics, much like the Unitarians, but the Universalists were not the big city folk. The message of Universalism in America fit the countryside. The life of the yeoman farmer, the small town tradesmen, these were hard lives. Long hours of work with the cattle, back breaking days clearing and plowing the rocky New England soil, these people sure could have used a message of hope and of eternal salvation for all instead of a limited atonement for the elect. From horse back and from preaching stand the early American Universalists took literally the charge by John Murray to go out on the highways and byways of this land and give them not hell, but hope. Who was this man, John Murray, who had the nerve, the temerity, the gumption to charge preachers with give them not hell, but hope? What kind of life enabled this man to have such love for fellow humanity? If you imagine a life of privilege, you would be wrong. This founder of American Unitarianism grew up in England. With the death of his wife, his eyesight beginning to fail, and jail waiting for his debts, John left England in misery and took a ship for America. The ship exited a sign when it reached America. Inclement weather brought this ship to the Jersey shore instead of the Port of New York, and Murray’s sloop happened upon Potter’s Field. The Potter family had created a chapel, waiting for the day the Lord would give them a preacher who would tell of universal salvation. How coincidental that Murray’s ship would arrive? His eyesight failing, his wife dead across the ocean, Murray accepted the charge to preach the message of universal salvation. This is quite a story, but it does not end there. Even if it had, Murray’s optimism and hope would be something to speak of in our history annals. However, he went on to evangelize this message only to be egged, stoned, jeered, and slandered as a papist, an agent of the Anglican Church, or a agent of the crown. Despite such inhumanity, he continued to press on, spreading the message of universal salvation. He established the first Universalist congregation of America in Gloucester despite persecution by the local established church that did not acknowledge his ordination. This was some form of perseverance, or perhaps stubbornness. Whichever, he gave much of himself in the creation of a counter to the prevailing Calvinism of his day. While the two were at odds about the nature of Universalism, his successor as the torchbearer of Universalism, Hosea Ballou, preached at this very church. I’m sure over the years you have heard sermon after sermon about Ballou, but time after time I hear of him I am blown away. He was self educated and came to the same conclusions about the nature of the trinity that the Harvard educated Unitarians espoused. However, they still disdained him as a country hick and refused to see their spiritual brethren in the Universalists for another hundred and fifty years. The Universalism Ballou preached was different than the Universalism that Murray preached. Ballou believed and taught that there was no damnation in the afterlife, and that we pay for our sins here on earth, not some here after. Murray’s theological view included Hell, but only for a time until sins had been atoned through punishment. Something about Ballou’s optimism strikes me. He grew up on a New England farm, where one bad season could spell disaster for the family. Yet, his view of any afterlife was one where all received salvation. Again, someone coming up from a life far harder than any of ours proclaiming hope for all, hope for everyone. Often times, I feel like the Universalists are the lost children since our merger. While I accept that humanism plays a deep role in our tradition, those misfit children Universalist Christians like myself seem like orphans in our midst. Oh, the past forty years our denomination has churned out activist minister after activist minister, but when I’ve asked who our next great theologian is, I’ve been challenged by those in our denomination, even those preparing for our ministry who say we can’t use the term theology because it requires this and that supposition which offends their humanist principles. To this challenge, I wonder what happened since Ballou and Murray. The answer is somewhat simple. Well, we succeeded in evangelizing the message of Universalism to the masses. Amongst my classmates of the mainline denominations, I would wager the vast majority believes in a form of universal salvation. Even the Catholic doctrine under Rahner gives the possibility for salvation for all righteous people, even if they are not Catholic or even Christian. Since we were the churches in the rural lands, in the fringes, when World War I happened and the move to the cities happened, our rural churches dried up and our members went to those Methodist and Baptist and Anglican churches with Pastors who followed the message of Murray and Ballou as much as Wesley and Williams. Meeting houses such as this one struggled to survive. Meeting houses such as these, in the rural crossroads where ministers would ride their circuits sold their buildings and the congregations were put to rest. This troubles me, because while our population is more urban than it was two centuries ago, the need for hope stays on. A friend of mine grew up in Spanish Harlem. I can tell you stories of how he was beaten and abused by the NYPD. He was the oldest in a family whose dad was largely absent. Still, he managed to escape and I met him in college. He made it, he escaped from the gang land which eventually put his brother into jail. However, college wasn’t so easy for him. To help pay for it, he entered the National Guard. His basic ended in 2000. In 2001 he was activated for cleanup of the Pennsylvania crash site of the 9/11 flight, and once he’d cleaned up the remains of those women and men who died for ideology he continued active duty guarding the subways of Manhatten. So much for getting his education. When we went into Iraq, he was called again to active duty. In a tour which incrementally went from nine to fifteen months, he served as a machine gunner for his base. In the heat, in the sand, in the squalor of a nation torn apart by war and bloodshed he found God. When he came back, he couldn’t sleep through the night. He was jumpy around loud noises. He couldn’t accept he was safe. However, he didn’t lose his faith. When I asked him why he believes, despite the horror he has experienced in his life the answer he gave me echoed the charge Murray gave the circuit riders two centuries ago. He told me he believes because he has hope. Hope for a better tomorrow. Hope for a better world for what kids he may have. Hope was the key to his faith. Hope because there has to be a better way. Hope because there must be something more than this. Hope because greed cannot win over human lives for all time. For people like my friend, I say we have a theological message. For people like my friend I say we still have something to spread through evangelizing the highways and byways of this nation. For people like my friend I say we need to proclaim the message of universal hope. From the rural poor of two centuries ago, to the urban poor of today can we do anything but put forth the message that there is hope? A better way can be found. We can escape the same old cycles of retributive violence. This is difficult work. To my understanding, the UUA only has a single urban mission which serves the urban poor of Boston. Why can’t we expand this beyond Boston? Yeah, sure, Roxbury has a need for us, but why aren’t we in Brooklyn, the Bronx, North of 110th in Manhattan? Why aren’t we in Compton, why aren’t we in South Central LA? Why aren’t we doing mission work in Flint? If we have evangelized the hope of universal salvation, why can’t we evangelism hope itself? Why can’t we offer ourselves as shining examples of life lived in a way that lets others hope? Why can’t we grow deeper in our faith, put past our former hurts with religion and offer to people deep theological answers for hope instead of answers to bring meaning to our suffering? The more I know, and the more I grow in my faith, the more I question more than the more I answer. I guess that is the way of knowledge. The more we know, the more we know we do not know. However, I refute and refuse those who say we can’t have theology. I refute and refuse those who want to turn our tradition to sterile and sedate knowledge instead of real, deep, messy love. Why, because love happens even when our spouses die, love happens when our bodies fail, love happens when we have no means, love happens when our education is poor. That is something which can give us hope. Will the people say Amen.

The draft of the coming Sunday's sermon

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 20:54:27 -0500

Yes, I am having a posting surge tonight. The travel to and from New York for the weekend of the 7th and 8th along with last week's journey to Vermont on the 15th has really put me behind in time to edit the electronic texts of the sermons so they would match what I preached. Without further ado, my sermon for Sunday Music, some say it is the universal language. Out of nothing, music, beauty, the vibrating air makes beauty. Music. Music, something we argue about back and forth. Contemporary, traditional, meaningful, inspired, void of meaning, void of spirit, void of soul, alive, plugged in, music. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. Music. From soothing the savage beast to singing awake the light to mourning our blues, there is something sacred about music. Many of us will not profess certain religious beliefs, or say certain religious phrases but in the moment of song we will sing them. Through history, creativity and artistry were used as devotion in religion. Our opening hymn, Come Come Whoever You Are comes from a poem by Rumi. Rumi was the greatest poet of the Sufi tradition, Sufis being mystical Muslims. The poem, as translated into English reads: Come, Come, Whoever You Are Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times Come, yet again, come, come. Put to music, this sing-able song goes on and on and tells of a greeting, an invitation, a welcome. Whoever you are, you are welcome here. In the midst of the words, an emotion comes across. Warmth. Loose yourself in the words as you repeat them again and again. Come, come whoever you are, wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. Come, yet again come. Come, come, whoever you are. The song sings the core of Universalism. Whoever you are, what ever you have done, come. Your past actions, your past deeds, they do not bar your entrance to our caravan. Ours is one of hope, we have no despair here. We will not reject you here. We do not judge you here. Come, yet again come. Singing the Man Down Singing has often served as a form of resistance and a form of community building. Our hymnal contains songs which brought people from the margins together to rise up against oppression. From the psalm reading, we find an ancient protest song from the days when our spiritual forebears were held in Babylonian Captivity. Our hymnal holds many such song which were used to protest and rally people on the margins, including the Quaker hymn How Can I Keep From Singing and De Colores. From the Psalmist’s words in Psalm 137, what would it feel like to have your homeland ravaged by a foreign nation? How could you live your life in captivity in a foreign land? Would you be able to touch your harps in exile? If you were a captive, could you sing a song of America for your captor’s mirth? Would you be able to sing your most beloved, most sacred hymns for your captor’s mirth? The Babylonians maintained control over their conquered lands by forcibly moving the governing populations to other parts of their empire, fragmenting families, breaking wills, and separating those who could lead internal rebellions. In this scenario, far from your home, your temple destroyed, how could we sing, sing the Lord’s song, in a foreign land? Yet the Israelites did sing. They kept their music. The exiles wrote this psalm of lament, and the psalms were the hymns of the ancient Israelite people. “How Can I Keep From Singing” is an old Quaker hymn. Honestly, until recently I had no idea it was in our hymn book. A little more than a year ago I had the pleasure of leading worship with traveling folk musician Joe Jencks. In one service, he lead the song on his guitar and afterward gave the assembled worshippers a lesson in the song. Its history dates the song back to the middle of the nineteenth century, and it was used to protest the Vietnam War, as well as the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavian republics through translation. This song gave inspiration from those facing genocide, because hearing that far off song, the one that can be faintly heard above the worst strife and horror of the human condition gives us the hope which allows us to keep on singing. In the darkest hours of our lives, the song leads us to believe that tyrants will fall, that our friends are with us in spirit, that truth lives. How can I keep from singing? “De Colores” is a Mexican folk song which was used by the migrant farm workers as a rallying hymn. Under the efforts of Cesar Chavez, the song rallied the immigrant laborers together to gain solidarity. De Colores speaks of colors we see in flowers during springtime or when the sunlight shines through a rift in the cloud during rain. The light hearted, inclusive song helped rally workers on the very fringes of economic sustenance pull together and earn more equity in their wages. The song, along with the nonviolent resistance tactics championed by Cesar Chavez helped sing down the economic injustice of the poor. The universal call, of all the colors makes me proud that the song is included in our hymnal. It is a song of worship and of praise. Blue Like Jazz These songs with their revolutionary message only touch at the ways music has had an effect on our lives. The songs make up more than we can express with words. In his book, Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller wrote the following about music: "I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolves. But I was outside the Baghdad Theatre one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes and he never opened his eyes. After that I liked jazz music. Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way. I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened. I was watching BET one night, and they were interviewing a man about jazz music. He said jazz music was invented by the first generation out of slavery. I thought that was beautiful because, while it is music, it is very hard to put on paper; it is so much more a language of the soul … The first generation out of slavery invented jazz music. It is a music birthed out of freedom. And that is the closest thing I know to Christian spirituality. A music birthed out of freedom. Everybody sings their song the way they feel it, everybody closes their eyes and lifts up their hand." Think about Miller’s words. He didn’t like jazz because it didn’t resolve. Something about those seventh chords just don’t resolve. The music doesn’t sound complete. There is hesitation. The music itself lets you feel unfinished, kind of like God. Thinking like the Divine, in the process of ex nihilo creation, coming through like jazz, maybe an improv. Playing what sounds good, feeling through the creation, not knowing where it is going to go but letting the journey take its course. Telling the story of the song at the pace the song wants to take and ending in beauty even with a few blue notes here and there seems a lot more like any notion of Divine creation I can follow than any other I have heard. Coda Something exists in that place where creation is happening. In the air when those sounds are being formed from nothing we are in the presence of something divine where alienation, tribulation, sorrow all are worked through to a place where any can come. Music places us in a sacred space. This brings us full circle to Plato’s idea in the James Luther Adams excerpt. Music transcends cultures. Music is more than a game or a set of rules. Music is a dance of life. Artistry and creativity do not escape us from reality, they ground us in creation. As Adams said It is not escape from reality; it is rather the rediscovery of a center of meaning and power, of a center that is a symptom and sign of faith – ultimately not a human achievement but a gift of grace. Music was Adams’ connection to God, from playing violin for his father’s worship services as a boy to the song and the music coming from the churches he served or worshiped, to the only elements of his funeral which he selected, being the time of Sunday afternoon and which music would play. Music was the prelude and postlude of his spiritual life. From the hymn leading to us, may your life be as a song, resounding with the dawn to sing awake the light. Then softly serenade the stars ever dancing circles in the night. Let the music break you from the now and connect you with those who have sung the song before your birth and those who will sing the song long after we are gone. Let the music move you from the desperate individuality and isolation of disconnection and bend your voice to the harmony of community. Bend your voice together with those around you in a communion of the spirit. Bend your voice in worship of this time together, of the greater presence we find in this space and with one another.

Sermon from the 8th

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 20:09:15 -0500

Delivered to May Memorial (my home congregation) so there are some inside references. Stephen Schwartz’ song, By My Side, is a duet about two spiritual journeyers. Really, the song is about Jesus leaving the adulterer whom he saved from stoning. However, let us use the image of two spiritual journeyers. One leaves the other. The song begins almost mournfully by the journeyer who is being left behind, “Where are you going? Where are you going? Can you take me with you? For my hand is cold and needs warmth. Where are you going?” When the song is sung well, the sadness is tangible. The mourning of separation is very real and visceral. As many of you know, last summer I left my job, sold or gave away most of my belongings, and moved to Boston. What I kept with me were memories and stories of my time here at May Memorial. In my first weekend at Boston, I saw the plaque to Sam May’s father in King’s Chapel. I met Gene Navias, the minister emeritus of Arlington Street Church and relative of our MRE Jennifer. For that weekend, it indeed felt like a small world. I hope that I can tell the story in this time together how May Memorial has remained by my side. “By My Side” continues with a response by the journeyer who is departing. In response to the question, “where are you going?” The lyric answers, “Far beyond where the horizon lies, where the horizon lies, and the land sinks into mellow blueness.” The spiritual road that each must be walked is long; the journey goes farther than we can see. This journey takes us; this journey took me past anything I could envision. The journey is vocation. Living life as it is meant to be lived is a struggle, a challenge. Finding the way far beyond where the horizon lies takes time, takes ambition, takes courage, and begins with a step. The lyrics continue, “Oh, please, take me with you. Let me skip the roads with you. I can dare myself, dare myself. I can dare myself. I’ll put a pebble in my shoe, and watch me walk, watch me walk. I can walk, I can walk. I shall call the pebble dare.” This response to the length of the journey is one of hope. The journeyer has no idea how long this journey will take but the journeyer resolved to follow. When I first heard the song, I wondered what did it mean that the journeyer put a pebble in her shoe. Walking a far journey with the burden of a pebble in your shoe is pain most of us can imagine. The needling of a pebble between the soul of your foot and the shoe is something you are unable to miss. The pebble, called dare, is the reminder that your guide has left you, but the guide’s presence is with you. My first semester, I had a class on conflict transformation that seemed to echo the experience of May Memorial. We went over listening circles, peace making circles, church covenants, and my papers for the class ended up being related to the life at May during my stay here. The feelings of pain and anxiety of uncertainty came back to me with story after story of congregations that self destructed over what seemed to be small issues. The guide and the memory sat between my soul and my foot as I traveled. It was a way I could dialogue with May from afar. In my mind, I was able to replay events and see other outcomes and develop moral imagination for what better ways of being in community would be. The pebble showed memory and possibility. The pebble showed hope in healing. The song lyrics continue, “and when we both have had enough I will take him from my shoe and say, ‘Meet your new road.’ Then I’ll take your hand finally glad, finally glad that you are here.” The journeyer understands now that being physically departed from her companion does not preclude the presence of the companion in her life. This concept is one of spiritual importance. After much travel with the pain of the pebble in her shoe, she feels the real presence of the companion with her. The companion was there all the time, but the pain of the pebble needed to remind her again and again with step after step the presence of the companion and through the journey, she understands that her partner has not left and can not leave her. The notion that one is in union with something other than oneself is a theological concept with a lot of mileage. Kant wrote of the synthetic union of identity and difference. The self was in union through relation with the other while at once being separated or different from the other. At once we are one and we are different. At once, the world is one, and the world is different. Amongst the existentialists, Tillich and Rahner specifically, this notion of the union of self and difference describes the relationship that humanity has with the Divine. The limited self is in relation with the unlimited nonself. Further, because we are aware of our limited self, we can find comfort in this union because in our relation to it gives us a taste of the immortal while living our mortal lives. The relationship at once is supportive and challenging. This concept, it seems esoteric. I’ll try language that is clearer than what Kant, Hegel, Cusa, Bonaventure, Augustine, or my beloved existentialists used. We are objects that see, but we are objects of a world of seeing. Without this world, and without seeing the “I” in this world, we have nothing. This word, of which we are a subject, exists because we experience it, and we exist because we experience. This relationship, the union of the self and difference, of one being for and with another is fundamental and hold my understanding of God and our ancestors. Tillich explained, “God stands against the world in so far as the world stands against him, and he stands for the world, thereby causing it to stand for him. This mutual freedom from each other and for each other is the only meaningful sense in which the “supra” in “supranaturalism” can be used.” Relationality between the human and the divine can support as we stand for one another but the weight of each is on one another, moving one another, changing one another. Sam May continues to work in the world in this way, inspiring, pushing, and changing us to be more inclusive, more accepting of children, better at race relations. This congregation in the embodiment of Sam May’s spirit challenges me to learn more, to grow faster and larger as I understand the scope of faith. The weight and the presence of this church, this congregation is one that cannot and will not leave from me nor I from it. In the synthetic union, we are one. This is the very heart of religion. Religion eludes mission statements, creeds, and doctrines. Religion only exists within people. Religion only exists within people who turn from base preliminary concerns to relationship and togetherness. Religion exists when we work to end the estrangement we have from one another and convert toward community. Turning to us instead of just I, converting to community instead of selfish individualism is the holy act of conversion. That is the moment when we can take the pebble out of our shoe and finally be glad that we are here. We then can talk about walking, and we can talk about talking. In this space, where we can talk about our walks and we can talk about our talks we can discover our spiritual selves. Last Christmas Eve, John Marsh spoke of finding home for ourselves in the dark. While the dark lets us be more of ourselves than the often times blinding light of societal norms, in the dark we still need one another. We need the presence and the relationship to build on what is inside of us, to unleash the potential inside of us. The union of ourselves as a whole, the world as a whole, and each as an individual gives us the power to let our lives speak. Letting our lives speak empowers each of us to find our vocation and live our life as it is meant to be lived. As Parker Palmer wrote, the dark inside lets us shed the masks that we hide behind. If we accept the gift of ourself, we need the empowerment of the community, of the relationship with the other, of being with the other to survive as our true self we have no choice but to empower others and to support them as they become their true selves with whom we relate. These are namaste moments, moments when the divinity that is inside of me sees and honors the divinity that is inside of you. Moments when that spark of something special rises up from the dark, not shining light which restrains and confines, but light that empowers others to shine with their own lights until a great flash of colors springs out all singing we are one. We are together. We make the rainbow when we let ourselves exist in union with one another because we are so much more together than we can be alone. This is the interdependent web of life. More than token words to appease environmentalists, it is a vast rainbow of you and me and they and he and she and ze and us all distinct but all one in a glorious mystery of community. From the lyrics Bruce Springsteen used for Hold On, covering Pete Seeger, “Now only thing I did was wrong Stayin' in the wilderness too long Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on The only thing we did was right Was the day we started to fight Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.” The pebble is our wilderness. The pain of separation, the anxiety of separation, that is our struggle in the wilderness. We are looking for our horizon, our prize. As we walk, we hold on. We put the pebble in our shoe. We walk to this place, knowing we have far more to walk in our lives and we hold on. We all are walking far beyond where the horizon lies but we hold on. So much is in store for each of us still to come, so much in store for our youngest and for our oldest on the journey of our lives and we hold on. So much further to go with the pebble Dare in our shoe reminding us of this community, this space, each other, one another, this family, this community, this love and we hold on. But when we walk we can take the pebble from our shoe and realize we have been together the whole time. We do not need a painful reminder that we are together, that we have not really parted ways. We cannot ever really leave one another because by giving our love, by being in community, we are one and that is why we hold on.

Last Sunday's sermon

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 19:53:04 -0500

The world is made up of stories, not atoms. We carry our thoughts in stories, our histories in stories, our lives in stories. Our stories tell not only who we were, but who we are, what we value, what we want others to know of us, and what we want to teach our successive generations. Reality is often bypassed with the telling of stories. A friend of mine put it well, all stories, even all histories are fish stories. The real details of the day were put aside in the retelling to highlight items the teller wishes to emphasize. The fish was this big; back in my day we walked uphill both ways barefoot in the snow and we liked it; Davy Crockett could stare down a bear. These all are embellishments which didn’t really happen but aid in the telling of stories. When telling, and reading stories, keeping the idea that all stories are fish stories in mind helps us interpret the story. When we take a story seriously, we look beyond the face value of the words. What is the story trying to communicate to us? What was life like in the setting of the story and how was that different from our own setting? Is the bad guy really a bad guy or is he being portrayed in a dark light by the narrator? Is the hero all she’s cracked up to be or are her deeds magnified to epic proportions and her righteousness exaggerated? What is being said? Perhaps more importantly, what is not being said? From the Numbers reading, we see the first Unitarian Universalists in the Hebrew Scriptures. Korah, Dathan, and Abiram go before Moses and Aaron and tell them, “You have gone too far! The entire congregation is holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them. So why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the lord?” These three troublesome congregants come upon Moses and Aaron, the Israelite “ministers” if you will, and tell them the whole congregation is holy. They are accusing Moses and Aaron of taking on too much, of excluding, of not being transparent enough. Claims I’m sure you all have heard in Unitarian Universalist walls. Moses and Aaron responded with was something I’m sure many ministers through out time have done. The two of them secretly prayed for the earth to swallow up these discontented congregants. The story tells us that God answered, and swallowed these men. Moses and Aaron take the stance that these unruly congregants were sinful men, and tell the Israelites that the demise of these unruly men was God’s punishment. What is the setting of the story, the wilderness journey from Egypt to Canaan, a time when the tribes needed decisive leadership. What is taking place? The priestly authority is being upheld over the general population’s leadership. Who are the players, three lay leaders and the priestly authority of Moses and Aaron. The author set up the heroes to be the golden children of Israel. Moses, the greatest of Israel’s prophets, Aaron, the first of Israel’s priests both are pitted against Korah the Levite and Dathan and Abiram the Reubenites. These three aren’t natural allies. The Levites were the priestly tribe; the Reubenites were a non priestly tribe. Something starts to look a little fishy with the storytelling. This forces us to ask the question, who wrote this story? The editing of the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures comes from four sources according to our best scholarship. The Jahwistic and the Eloistic traditions come from the old oral traditions of the Israelite people. These traditions were brought together by a third source which edited them to form single volumes such as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. This source is the Priestly source which had its hand in editing the details of the story. The priestly editing places Korah the Levite in with the two Reubenites to show the hierarchy of priesthood, with the Aaronides having the greatest authority when God exonerates both Aaron and Moses while consuming Korah and the Reubenites. We know that this is a priestly edit because the story was referenced in Deuteronomy, but Korah was not included, only the Reubenites. The trio of disgruntled congregants laid charges against Moses similar to the charges Moses laid against pharaoh. “You take too much on yourself” “God is with us all, why do you exalt yourself before the Lord?” “You brought us up out of a land flowing with milk and honey only to kill us in the wilderness.” Moses, speaking as the voice of the priests, tells them not to test him, but to have God judge. By having God decide, he is removed from suspicion or from question. Moses and Aaron are able to receive vindication without qualification in the story when God chooses to take up Korah, Abiram, and Dathan. This story opens up for us a glimpse of Ancient Israelite culture. The narrative offers the beliefs and convictions of a people who are our spiritual ancestors. The act of challenging authority is placed in a setting. Not all challenges are equal. When Moses went before Pharaoh, he was in one setting. When Korah, Dathan, and Abiram went before Moses and Aaron, they were in a different setting. When we vote we are in one setting challenging authority. When we engage in protests, marches, sit ins, or rallies we are in other settings. The setting gives us a context for the action. What does this narrative teach us? People question authority. People question religious authority. In ancient Israel, it was unwise to question authority if you valued your life. The punishment for upsetting order was divinely sanctioned death. However, it also foreshadows the oppression we can feel from oppressive religious leaders. The hints at the truth of the complaints are plentiful. Imagery similar to the complaints Moses brought before Pharaoh are used, and even Moses does not know if God will respond to him or to the trio. It is only God’s will and God’s will alone which can decide who has authority and who has power. Those who falsely claim in God’s name will be struck down. The narrative gives us a grey picture. We cannot be sure of authority other than the divine sanction of Aaron and Moses. We know that in the troubled times of the early kingdom, following authority was something that needed to be communicated. The stories of the wilderness were told which warned the Israelites about the consequences of disobeying God when they were forced to turn back from the Promised Land when they refused to invade as Moses and God ordered them. This story is one with a context, with shape, with a time and a place that while supernatural, is very real in our world’s history. The events don’t need to have literal truth for them to have literary truth. So now what? I’m guessing you are wondering what the analysis of the story has to do with me. I’m not someone in the wilderness with the tribes of Israel sometime in the fourteenth century BCE. I’m not someone in Jerusalem in the ninth century BCE. Why do I care about interpretation? The answer to this question of interpretation is critical to understand where we come from. A classmate of mine made the claim if everyone read scripture with an open heart, we’d all come to the same conclusions. Not only is this idea naive, it is dangerous. The way we treat stories is the way we perceive the world and the means we have to decipher our past and discern what is “Truth.” If we allow ourselves to see only one answer in a text, in a story, we blind ourselves with the notion that there is only one right truth, one right way. What we take from the text will be different from the person next to us because we come in with different experiences, different attitudes, and these shape which way we will respond to the words. In a way, this story in Numbers foreshadows the events of Jesus’ life. He challenged the authority of the time, the Pharisees, he sent away the money changers and the casters of lots from the temple. His reward for challenging authority was a death as mythical as the death of Korah, of Dathan, and of Abiram. Nailed to a tree atop a mount after scourging with a whip for fifty lashes crowned with thorns sounds as literary and poignant as the ground opening up and fire erupting to claim only those who supported Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. When you speak truth to power, prepare to pay greatly with your safety and your life. The narrative of Jesus was threatening to the moral order because it claimed a retelling of the truth to power story. Here, dieing was not an end punishment for rising up against authority. The cost of mortal life was the payment for a new way of living where the covenant of God no longer was only for the chosen few. God was for the many. God’s love extended to all. Our Universalist ancestors read this story to find the truth that any salvation existant must be for all. Again, why do we care? Because truth finds its way in these stories to our hearts and minds. We learn from them because they are our folk lore. We learn from them because our culture is steeped in them. We learn from them because if we don’t learn to interpret them literarily and honestly we lose the battle of faith to those who interpret them literally. Stories impart wisdom in ways direct statements cannot. They provide warnings and wisdom and lore and beauty in settings of ages past, giving links to our ancestry, to our history, to our roots. Stories should be taken seriously

Howard Thurman

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 12:43:33 -0500

Honestly, before attending BU, I knew little about Howard Thurman. I knew his name, and that he'd mentored Martin Luther King at BU, and that his works had a place in the back of the hymnal. When I moved to Boston about a year ago, I made an effort to get to know more about the first black dean of a predominatly white university. It was my first real introduction to personalism. I'm now reading his work, Jesus and the Disinherited, and its introduction challenges me. In the greeting, Thurman mentions the work of the Children of Azusa. Most UU's will miss the reference. The start of the modern Pentacostal movement was in the Azusa Street Revival. The Azusa Revival was originally racially mixed, primarily of the holiness movement denominations. It gave way to a style that many attribute to the Black Church, but Pentacostalism grew a divide between the races with the unfortunate work of Charles Parham. Many UU churches I've been to fall in line with the "frozen chosen" where we have our quiet, our rigidity, and our sedentary worship. Yet we publish the works of a man whose sympathies were in the more charismatic/pentacostal camp. I'm a fan of the early postcolonial views I'm reading in the book, because it shows where the roots of James Cone and Cecil Cone were fertilized. It has the male only language of its age, but a start of postliberal theology rings through the pages. Maybe we Unitarian Universalists can tone down our rhetoric at the charismatics and learn the difference between Charismatic/Pentacostal and Fundamentalist. If Beacon publishes Thurman, perhaps some already have.