The Transient and the Permanent in Religion

16 November 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us find a spiritual North Star to steer by when we are torn between life’s over-rated pleasures and its under-rated treasures.

We want to feel the difference between being opportunistic and being authentic, and learn how we can better choose the one that gives us more and better life.

Let us find the determination not to do what we should not do, the courage to do what we should do, and that elusive wisdom that lets us tell the difference.

How often we chase after things we don’t need, like dogs chase cars, not knowing what good they’d do us if we caught them. Can we learn to yearn for what we need rather than what we merely want?

And as for our lives – if they can’t be as long as we would like, can they be as rich and rewarding as we wish?

These are just some of the questions we feel along life’s path on this day as on many days. We offer them up, to speak them out loud in the hope that the person who hears them will be us.

Amen

SERMON: The Transient and the Permanent in Religion

There’s something exhilarating about being present when high ideals and aspirations are discussed, even if all we do is listen. We consult experts in diet, exercise, ecology, finances and a few dozen other areas, all important, all with a few really gifted and motivated people available to pass on their inspiring visions to us, and it feels well worth the money we’ve spent. In the meantime, we stay overweight, out of shape, eating poorly, handling our finances poorly, and the rest of it. Still, it’s inspiring.

Hearing about gifted religious visionaries and prophets is like this, too. This is the third in the series of three sermons on the early 19th century thinkers who helped define Unitarianism as a separate religion in America, a religion that was derived from, but distinct from, liberal Christianity. All three men were in their 30s when they delivered the sermons that Unitarian students are still required to read. William Ellery Channing was 38 when he delivered the sermon called “Unitarian Christianity” in 1819. Ralph Waldo Emerson was 35 when he gave his address at the Harvard Divinity School – the last time he was invited to speak there for 30 years. The minister I want to talk about today was Theodore Parker, who was just 31 when he delivered a sermon called “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” in 1841. I have to say that Parker is my favorite of the three, and was from the first time I read their sermons nearly thirty years ago.

Parker was an almost mythic person. Born the eleventh child of a farmer, he grew up very poor. He was mostly self-educated, then wound up graduating from Harvard Divinity School. By the time he entered the ministry, he could read twenty languages. After he died, at the age of 49, it was discovered that his library was the largest personal library in America, with about 50,000 volumes. His biographer (Henry Steele Commager) said that Parker wrote notes in the margins of almost all of them. If he actually read them all, that would be almost three books a day from the day he was born.

At his peak, he preached to around 3,000 people, the largest audience in America – without a microphone. His sermons routinely lasted over an hour, were thoroughly researched and brilliantly written. Besides being the most powerful and combative voice of liberal religion in America – he was far more combative than either William Ellery Channing or Ralph Waldo Emerson – he was ferociously active on behalf of women’s rights, prison reform and especially anti-slavery causes in the 1840s and 1850s, well before that was a cause most Unitarians would touch. That was partly because many wealthy Unitarians made a lot of money from the business of slavery, and partly because it was a rude subject, not suited to high-class cocktail hours. They looked to their ministers for comfort, not challenge.

He was part of the Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape from the South. One story about him that shows both his courage and his ferocity is about the time that he performed a wedding ceremony for two escaped slaves, holding a Bible in one hand and a pistol in the other, to shoot anyone who tried to stop him.

Martin Luther King once said, “We begin to die the day we become silent about the things that matter.” As far as I can tell, Parker never had one of those days in his life. He was uninhibited in his writings against dishonest religion. The things he said in just this one sermon defined the theological debates in America for the next generation, and are still relevant and powerful.

But I want you to hear his words, because he was very good with words. So imagine, if you can, sitting in a Unitarian church on May 19, 1841, when American Christianity – including Unitarianism – was still quite supernatural and often so conservative that it would feel a bit like today’s right-wing Christianity. Imagine hearing some of these words spoken by a brilliant and fiery 31-year-old preacher. (I’ve paraphrased some of these excerpts, to transport them from early 19th to early 21st century ways of speaking.) –

While true religion is always the same thing, in each century and every land, the Christianity of the People, which is the religion that is accepted and lived out; has never been the same thing in any two centuries or lands.

Anyone, who traces the history of what is called Christianity, will see that nothing changes more from age to age than the doctrines taught as Christian, and insisted on as essential to Christianity and personal salvation. What is falsehood in one area passes for truth in another. The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and “only infallible rule” of the next. The stream of Christianity, as men receive it, has caught a stain from every soil it has filtered through, so that now it is not the pure water from the well of Life, which is offered to our lips, but streams troubled and polluted with [a lot of] dirt.

Since our various theologies are so transient, why do we need to accept the teachings of men, as though they were the word of God?

Almost every sect, that has ever been, makes Christianity rest on the personal authority of Jesus, rather than the immutable truth of the doctrines themselves. It is hard to see why the great truths of Christianity should rest on the personal authority of Jesus, any more than the axioms of geometry rest on the personal authority of Euclid, or Archimedes. The authority of Jesus, as of all teachers, must rest on the truth of his words.

Wasn’t Jesus our brother; the son of man, as we are; the Son of God, like ourselves? His excellence, was it not human excellence? His wisdom, love, piety, — sweet and celestial as they were, — are they not what we also may attain? In him, as in a mirror, we may see the image of God. Viewed in this way, how beautiful the life of Jesus is.

God’s word will not change, for that word is Truth. From this Jesus subtracted nothing; to this he added nothing.

Christianity is a simple thing; very simple. It is absolute, pure Morality; absolute, pure Religion; the love of man; the love of God.

Real religion gives men new life.

One hundred sixty-seven years later, many of these words would still send most believers into fits of apoplexy.

For Parker, the only sanction that religion requires “is the voice of God in your heart; the perpetual presence of Him, who made us – Christ and the Father abiding within us.” This is the permanent religious core of genuine Christianity, for Parker; the rest is transient and dispensable – including the creeds, orthodoxies, rituals, costumes, and if yo think about it, even the churches and ministers. (Gary Dorrien, The Making of Liberal Theology, 1805-1900, p. p. 86).

As you can hear – though Parker seemed not to hear it – the logical implications of his insights pulverized the intellectual foundations of Christianity, theism, and all religions, reducing them to little more than ways of talking about high morals and ideals – which of course can be done without using any religious language at all.

Even if his ministerial colleagues couldn’t articulate it, they must have felt the force of this earthquake in the foundations of their comfortable faith, because they reacted by cutting him off from the privileges of ministerial fellowship. Nearly all of the Boston area ministers refused to exchange pulpits with him, and some refused to speak to him (Dorrien, p. 88).

The Unitarian ministers told Parker it was his moral duty to resign from the Unitarian Association, but he was both too bright and too shrewd to make it that easy for them. He said they would have to expel him, thereby showing they do have a creed. They backed down – my image is that they had their tails between their legs. And so, as one historian puts it, “The first Unitarian heresy trial was over (Dorrien, p. 90).”

Parker believed the time had come to sweep away all religious authorities except the authority of reason and spiritual intuition (Dorrien, p. 99).

True Christianity, he said, is not about the death or divinity of Christ, but about the death of sin and the life of holy goodness in our heart: “Each man must be his own Christ, or he is no Christian (Dorrien, p. 99).” He defined real Christianity simply as “Being Good and Doing Good” – not needing any miracles or supernaturalism or creeds – or churches or ministers. This drew complete outrage from nearly all clergy, including the Unitarians.

At first, Parker naively hoped that American Unitarianism could become America’s best religious hope, but within a few years, decided that it was so unwilling to see or to think that there was no hope for it.

It’s a little confusing that he continued to insist on calling himself a Unitarian – especially since the leading Unitarian ministers wouldn’t claim him, swap pulpits with him or speak to him, and wanted him to resign.

But Unitarianism was a complex thing in the Boston of his day. It was a religion of the upper class, associated with intelligent, educated and sophisticated people, and Parker wasn’t willing to let go of that identity, which he had worked so hard to earn. He had grown up as a very poor boy, worked hard, married a very wealthy woman. They moved in those social circles – though Parker’s anti-slavery work really ended their welcome there, too. I think that giving up the “Unitarian” label would have felt to him like losing that social and personal identity.

He wanted the rest of the Unitarians to grow into the larger and more honest understanding of religion that he had found. He said the Unitarians were “standing still, and becoming more and more narrow and bigoted from year to year-. There is little scholarship and less philosophical thinking among the Unitarians,” he wrote. “Some of them engage in the great moral movements of the day, such as the anti-slavery movement. But the sect as such is opposed to all [intellectual] reforms (Dorrien, p. 101).”

His opponents used his notorious radical social activities to label and smear him, partly so they wouldn’t have to answer his powerful critiques of their unexamined but comfortable religion.

So Theodore Parker lived the powerful contradiction of preaching to the largest crowd in America while being deeply alienated from the Unitarians, and spurned as unbearable by most respectable high-class socialites (Dorrien, p. 103). No matter how fierce he was in public, he grieved his whole adult life in private over the continual attacks and rejection from the people and the denomination to whom he believed he offered valuable but unwanted help.

In January of 1859, he was told that he was dying of tuberculosis. It did not diminish his spirit, and one of the most inspiring things he ever wrote, he wrote in his Journal after receiving this death sentence: “I am ready to die… nothing to fear. When I see the Inevitable I fall in love with her (John White Chadwick, Theodore Parker: Preacher and Reformer, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1900, p. 352).”

Since his wife had money, they could travel. He left Massachusetts to spend his last year traveling Europe, and settled in Rome. He would die in Italy in 1860. A few months before he died, he wrote another memorable line to a friend: “I have had great powers” he said, “and have only half used them (Chadwick, p. 371).”

All three of the great Unitarian preachers of the early 19th century were absolutely brilliant men who stood head-and-shoulders above almost everyone around them – though whether any of them can really be called Unitarian is a different matter.

William Ellery Channing, who named “Unitarian Christianity,” refused to join the Unitarian Association when it first began in 1825, fearing it would just dumb down religion and lure people to the lowest common denominator where they wouldn’t think for themselves, but would look for some sort of creeds (or principles) to recite. To put it in modern terms, Channing feared that the Unitarian Association would grow into a narcissistic cult, where people were taught to worship the kinds of things that their kind of people believed – that’s a working definition of narcissism. And their churches would tell them when they entered just what those things were that their kind of people needed to believe, and maybe even print them on wallet-sized cards. And that’s one element of a cult.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most famous of the three, called Unitarianism “corpse-cold,” and was not considered a Unitarian by any of the leading ministers of his day. He thought Unitarianism had become smug, shallow and irrelevant.

And Theodore Parker, the most brilliant of them all, was blacklisted from all the Unitarian pulpits in Boston because of his liberal thinking, was told he should resign from the Unitarian Association, and told that he wasn’t a real Unitarian. One member of the church where he delivered his most famous sermon even said that he’d rather see every Unitarian church burned to the ground than to see Parker’s beliefs preached from a single pulpit.

The important truth is that these three men stood out against the background of Unitarians of their day because the overwhelming majority of Unitarian ministers of their day were not memorable, and their beliefs and actions are hard to look back on with much admiration when we hear these stories. This is true, of course, of all the great visionaries of history: they only stand out because the vast majority of people around them couldn’t see or wouldn’t pursue the vision they saw so clearly.

So these three men were prophets of a higher truth than almost any Unitarians would or could see, though they continue to inspire new Unitarian ministers who are still required to read them. The righteous words of those who opposed them are long, and deservedly, forgotten.

These three weren’t serving Unitarianism, and they were all pretty clear about it. They were serving what Parker finally labeled as the Permanent in religion: True Religion, Absolute Religion, Honest Religion. And throughout history, those voices have always been a tiny minority in all religions – Unitarians are no better or worse than the rest.

We like to think that we listen to serious religious thinkers the way orchestras listen to the concert “A” that is played before all rehearsals and concerts, for them to tune to, though that’s not really true, because we so seldom do tune to their visions in any life-changing way. We really listen to them the same way we listen to all the other experts and motivational speakers in so many other areas: diet, exercise, ecology, finance and the rest of them. We may not be motivated enough or courageous enough to follow them down the demanding path of getting into our best spiritual shape, but we’re at least serious enough to listen, and to carry home some fertile seeds in the form of ideas.

There haven’t been many thinkers in any religion who wanted to move beyond the easy comfort of fitting in with like-minded people. That’s still why we come to church, isn’t it – to enjoy the company of like-minded people? Just think of how strong that gravitational attraction is for you, and how much effort it would take to break free of that gravitational pull. That’s a measure of how unlikely it is that great prophets will ever really effect the changes they see. I think that’s why we’re actually happier with these outspoken types after they’ve died, when we can treat them reverently rather than seriously.

But if these prophets, including Theodore Parker, are right, then getting in spiritual shape is as easy and as hard as actually thinking about who we are and why we are here, about what is most worth believing and doing.

This seems to be what all the prophets have said in their many different ways: Confucius, Lao-Tzu, the Buddha, the biblical prophets, Jesus, Mohammad, all the way up to relatively minor – but still stirring – people like Channing, Emerson and Parker.

These were people at the Olympic level of spiritual development, no matter how out of shape they may have been in other ways – none of them was in very good financial shape, for instance, and I don’t think any of them lifted weights. They were both empowering and troubling people. They didn’t exist just to tell us that we’re really special just as we are, or that this business of authenticity is easy. They said, as Jesus put it, that the road was narrow and very few ever wanted to take it, even though it was open to all. They said salvation was free, but it wasn’t cheap. It’s about transformation, not blithely following along with a group of like-minded people.

Yet they are mesmerizing, aren’t they? They’re like charismatic self-help gurus, only moreso. I keep thinking of some of the words Theodore Parker wrote near the end of his life: “I have had great powers – and have only half used them (Chadwick, p. 371).”

There, at least, is where Parker was so much like the rest of us: we all have great powers that we have only half used. Isn’t that one reason we come here – to keep being exhorted to develop the other half of our great powers, and to use them to help ourselves and our world come alive? We come seeking wholeness, and so often we don’t want to admit that, if only we will, we can have it.