A NEW-FASHIONED CHRISTMAS

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday December 23rd, 2007



I have to confess, I always cry during the final scene of Frank Capra's classic Christmas film "It's a Wonderful Life." In fact, I've done it so often now, I'm beginning to feel a little like Pavlov's Dog: Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed embrace, and tears begin to form in the corners of my eyes. It's not as if I don't know what's coming; I must have seen the movie dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of times. But it still hasn't lost its power to affect me; I still turn on the waterworks every time it airs.

For those of you who are still not familiar with the story, in the movie Jimmy Stewart plays a character named George Bailey, the good-hearted, self-sacrificing President of the Bailey Building and Loan in the sleepy little town of Bedford Falls. The only other financial institution in town is a bank owned by a greedy, unethical man named Potter, who would like nothing more than to put the Building and Loan out of business. Then one Christmas, in the excitement of season, George's absent-minded Uncle Billy misplaces an $8000 bank deposit. Potter finds it, but keeps it for himself, knowing that the Building and Loan is about to be audited. George discovers the shortfall on Christmas eve, and, anticipating scandal and ruin, contemplates suicide in the belief that his life insurance policy makes him worth more dead than alive.

So Clarence Oddbody, a rather bumbling Angel Second Class, is sent to earth to earn his wings by showing Jimmy Stewart what life would have been like in the town of "Pottersville" had George Bailey never been born. The climactic final scene, the one that always brings tears to my eyes, is when the citizens of Bedford Falls rise up in support of George, pledging their personal savings in order to make up the $8000 deficit. And maybe it is a corny story: honesty and virtue triumph over greed and opportunism, Clarence earns his wings, and everyone in Bedford Falls lives happily ever after, with the possible exception of Potter the banker. But corny or not, it still makes me cry, every time; in fact, sometimes just thinking about it is enough to start me sniffling with sentimentality.

A cynical Divinity School classmate of mine once insinuated that the real reason I always cry at the end of "It's a Wonderful Life" is because I wish that my Church Annual Budget Drives would be so serendipitously successful. I thought that rather a cheap shot, actually; there I was, all choked up, daubing my red eyes with my shirt sleeve, while my classmate sat comfortably in an overstuffed chair, swilling egg nog and impugning my sincerity. And I honestly don't know why "It's a Wonderful Life" always effects me the way it does. I often cry at the end of movies -- the first time I see them -- but I no longer weep at the end of "Terms of Endearment," and it’s all I can do now to keep from snickering out loud when Ali McGraw dies at the end of "Love Story."

But "It’s a Wonderful Life" gets me every time. So maybe it is just the corny plot. Because I want very much to believe that virtue triumphs over greed, that honesty triumphs over opportunism; that the life of one truly good-hearted, self-sacrificing individual human being really does make a difference in the world, and is appreciated by those who have benefited from that difference. And maybe I also want to become a little bit more like George Bailey myself, want to be able to look back at it all someday and say "It truly was a Wonderful Life!"

The plain fact of the matter though, is that over the years a lot of the “Joy” has started to evaporate out of Christmas for me. Oh, I'm sure the holiday will have its moments --Christmas generally surprises me that way at some point in the season-- but on the whole, to my way of thinking, the best thing about this Christmas will be December 26th, when the hassle of the holiday will finally over and there are 364 days before I have to go through it again.

My problem is not so much with the holiday itself, as it is with the expectations we set for it. Every year I start out with such good intentions, and every year it seems as though I can’t get my Christmas letter finished on time, or I'm still shopping at the very last minute, and of course I invariably end up feeling a little awkward and embarrassed about receiving presents I don't really want or need.

I generally enjoy giving gifts, but I resent trying to find something "perfect" for everyone I know; I would much rather shop thoughtfully for one or two people than worry about forgetting someone who hasn't forgotten me. I’m also not that keen on red and green; they are OK by themselves, but together they are incredibly garish colors, particularly for a necktie. Not that my personal favorites, Purple and Crimson, would look any better. But at least no one is going to be heartbroken if I decide its not the sort of thing I want to wear to church on Sunday morning.

At least I don't really fret that much any more about the "commercialization" of Christmas. Nowadays I find that sort of thing relatively easy to ignore. What I can't ignore is that nagging feeling that somehow I ought to be enjoying myself more than I am, that it's somehow all my fault if everyone around me isn't full of the holiday spirit, or that I have some sort of serious, pathological personality disorder because I'm saying "Merry Christmas" and feeling "Bah, Humbug." We do expect an awful lot out of ourselves this time of year. It's no wonder that so many of us come to feel disappointed, or even depressed, in this supposed season of Peace and Good Will.

Personally, I find far more joy in the memories of Christmas Past than I do in the anticipation of Christmas Yet to Come. Memory is thankfully a selective thing, a fact which can in itself make memory a double edged sword. Were those old fashioned Christmases really as good as we remember them to be? The more fondly we recall them, the more pressure we put upon ourselves to make this year's Christmas "the best Christmas ever" -- to out-do years of accumulated recollections in one huge orgy of holiday merriment.

Or, in some cases, to make up for them. For although it is in the nature of things to remember best the good times while gradually forgetting the bad, there are certain times that are just so terrible there's no forgetting them, no matter how hard one tries. Every one of us, I suspect, harbors memories of both kinds: the Christmas we endeavor to recreate, and the one we hope we'll never see again. And both influence our expectations of the current holiday season, the Spirit of Christmas Present.

And then, just beyond our personal holiday ghosts, lurk our cultural Christmas traditions: sleigh bells and mistletoe, stockings hung by the chimney with care, Jack Frost nipping at your nose -- things which make perfect sense if you lived here in Maine, or in rural Vermont or upstate New York a century ago, but which can be awfully confusing for a small child growing up in a condominium in Southern California. Over the Freeway and to the Beach to Grandmother's house we go? Throw another Yule log on the hibachi?

The first year I lived in Texas I received a card from my brother asking me whether I was going to decorate a cactus for Christmas. But it didn’t take me too long to appreciate the advantages of being able to draw upon Mexican Christmas traditions as well as those of Northern Europe. To my way of thinking, Piñatas filled with candy and candle-lit Luminarios lining the sidewalk beat the heck out of having to shovel a foot of snow just to get to the firewood. I love looking at pictures of a one-horse open sleigh dashing through the snow dragging a freshly-cut Christmas tree back to grandmother’s house, but it’s not really something I feel compelled to do personally.

There is, of course, a symbolic quality to tradition as well, in that tradition often points to meanings which lie beyond itself. But traditions also tend to take on meanings all their own, through repetition if nothing else, as our personal experiences intersect with it and are shaped and influenced by it. A child who has grown up with an expectation of a "White Christmas" is going to be disappointed if it doesn't snow, just as children who have always smashed a piñata won't feel as though Christmas is really Christmas unless they go home with a pocket full of candy.

But whatever traditions we chose to observe, the one thing we must never allow ourselves to forget is that this is a religious holiday we celebrate here in the shadow of the winter solstice. And the thing we celebrate is not so much the miraculous birth of a special infant some 2000 years ago, as it is the knowledge that, indeed, the life of one good-hearted, self-sacrificing, honest, virtuous, compassionate individual can make a difference, has made a difference, and still continues to make a difference, here in the here and now; and that this difference is appreciated by those of us who have benefited from it, who still believe in Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All. Call him George Bailey of Bedford Falls; call him Y'shua ben Joseph of Nazareth, the Annointed Messiah, King of Kings, the Prince of Peace, the Christ Child: call it whatever you like, It's a Wonderful Life. It's the life we celebrate at Christmas, the miracle of a new light come into the world.

A living tradition can be a bridge to our appreciation of that miracle, while empty traditions are often barriers to our ever experiencing it for ourselves. And we bring our traditions to life not through the futile attempt to resurrect the Spirit of Christmas Past, but by our openness to life in the here and now, our willingness to let honesty and virtue, good-heartedness and self-sacrifice, live within us, take vitality from our laughter, and courage from our tears.

I used to feel kind of embarrassed about always crying at the end of "It's a Wonderful Life." After all, it's not a very manly thing to do -- you'd think I was still a small child or something. Lately I find that I don't worry about that kind of thing too much, at least not among my friends. Because Christmas truly is a holiday for the child within us all. For those still young enough to believe in Santa, still naive enough to believe that the world can be saved by a child, and for all of us who want to believe in people like George Bailey, and in Clarence, an Angel Second Class, who is counting on help from the likes of us to help him earn his wings.

***

READINGS: Two Christmas poems by Ursula Askham Fanthorpe

BC : AD

This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect.
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.


What The Donkey Saw

No room in the inn, of course,
And not that much in the stable
What with the shepherds, Magi, Mary,
Joseph, the heavenly host -
Not to mention the baby
Using our manger as a cot.
You couldn’t have squeezed another cherub in
For love or money.

Still, in spite of the overcrowding,
I did my best to make them feel wanted.
I could see the baby and I
Would be going places together.

WHEN CHRISTMAS WAS A CRIME

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish in Portland, Maine
Sunday December 16th, 2007

Early before dawn on the morning of December 26th, 1776, the Continental Army under the command of General George Washington ferried across the partially frozen Delaware river and attacked a garrison of Hessian mercenaries occupying the town of Trenton, New Jersey. Surprise was complete; most of the Germans were still sleeping off the riotous Christmas celebration they had tied on the night before. One American soldier described the battle in his diary this way: "Hessian population of Trenton at eight am: 1,408 men and 39 officers; Hessian population at nine am: zero." Over 900 of the German troops were killed or captured, at the cost of only two American lives. On the body of Colonel Ralls, the German commander, the Americans found a letter from a British loyalist warning of Washington's attack. The letter was unopened. Ralls had been a victim of his own preconceptions: no "Christian" army would launch an attack on Christmas Day!

But these were not Catholics, nor Lutherans, nor even Anglicans that the German mercenaries were up against. They were, for the most part, New England Congregationalists, inheritors of that Puritan legacy in which the celebration of Christmas was seen as a "Popish superstition," a "wanton, Bacchanalian feast," and in some jursidictions here in what was then still part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a criminal offense punishable by a fine of five shillings and confinement in the stocks.

These New Englanders had little care for Yule logs and Mistletoe, wassail and Carols and Christmas pudding. Their's was a tradition of "pure" Christianity, stripped of the trappings of Druidic witchcraft and Roman syncretism. When they wanted to feast, they declared a Day of Thanksgiving and ate Turkey and Cranberries. There was plenty of thanks being given on the day the captured Hessian prisoners were paraded through the streets of Philadelphia. The dwindling Patriot army had finally won an important victory, and Congress voted to allow Washington to continue his command.

Although attitudes had moderated somewhat by the time of George Washington, the underlying sentiments of 17th century Puritanism were still quite influential in Revolutionary New England. Puritan religion was based on three simple precepts: a deeply abiding sense of original sin and the total depravity of human kind; a personal awareness of the regenerative power of God's grace through His predestined election of a few unworthy souls for salvation; and a compelling notion of service and religious duty in thanks for God's gift of unconditional election. They saw themselves embarked upon an errand into the wilderness, an errand to create a "City upon a Hill," a beacon to all the world which would shine as an example of the ideal Christian community, ruled and regulated according to God's Holy Ordinances as revealed in Scripture.

They took themselves and their mission seriously, yet they were also fine scholars, who were well aware of the pagan origins of most Christmas traditions, and who believed that God would turn His back upon their community should they stray from their stern covenant into the festive merriment of the Yuletide holiday. The frivolous actions of just a few might easily bring down God's wrath upon the entire colony. Thus the magistrates were empowered to arrest and punish blasphemers, Sabbath breakers, and anyone else whose ideas or actions might endanger the stability of their perfect Christian community, including those who celebrated Christmas, whether by feasting, or abstaining from labor, or in any other way marking the occasion as something special or out of the ordinary. For the Puritans, Christmas was a day like any other day; to observe otherwise was not only to risk the wrath of God, but to place oneself in danger of criminal prosecution as well.

The Puritan attitude towards Christmas may seem a bit extreme to us today. But then, the Puritans never did have much of a reputation as a fun-loving bunch. Nowadays, while we might complain about the "commercialization" of Christmas, or the emotional stress of entertaining our friends and families, few of us give much thought to the essentially pagan origins of the holiday, nor, I suspect, would we be particularly concerned about them if we did. The evolution of an obscure 4th century Turkish Bishop, St. Nicholas, into a rotund, white bearded "jolly old elf," who dresses in red, owns a herd of flying reindeer, and lives at the North Pole raises few eyebrows; nor are we troubled by the amazing coincidence that December 25th also happens to be the birthday of the Greek God Adonis, the Egyptian God Horus, and the Iranian God Mithra, all of whom were well entrenched on the winter solstice long before a virgin gave birth to a savior in Bethlehem, and laid him in a manger wrapped in swaddling clothes.

Instead, we trim our trees and adorn our homes with holly and mistletoe much as the Celts did centuries ago; we exchange cards and brightly wrapped gifts; bake pies and cookies and cakes; we sing of miracles, of peace on earth, good will to all; and hang our stockings by the chimney with care. We tell ourselves, with a wink, that "Christmas is for Children," all the time knowing that the best parts of Christmas are really for adults, and are often completely lost upon the avaricious little monsters, who scoff at movies like "It's a Wonderful Life," write letters to "Santa" that require extra postage, ransack our closets behind our backs, and just don't seem to quite understand what the whole thing's really all about. Adults tolerate children at Christmas, I think, because we remember that we were once children ourselves. Indeed, if in any sense "Christmas is for Children," it is for the inner children who live within us still, and are now finally old enough to truly understand the message of peace, hope and innocence embodied in this season.

In my household when my kids were young, we had a tradition of only celebrating Christmas every other year. This unorthodox practice dates back to my former wife’s first divorce, and an agreement she had with her ex-husband that the kids would spend every other Christmas with him. This worked out pretty well for Margie, because she had never really been that big a “Christmas person;” she associates this time of year with a couple of very unpleasant memories: the untimely death of her mother, when Margie, was only 21, and also the death of her own second-born child from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome a few years later. So she always kind of appreciated having a built-in excuse to take it kind of easy this time of year.

But after Margie, and I were married, I think the kids both assumed that, because I was a minister, I HAD to celebrate Christmas every year. So when I announced that we would continue the tradition, at first they didn't take me seriously. But after a couple of weeks, when there wasn't any tree, and there weren't any lights, and there weren't any mysterious packages from the Mall hidden in any of our closets, they began to get a little worried. I think they'd both sorta been looking forward to really cleaning up that year, on having two Christmases, with twice the usual amount of candy, and twice the usual number of presents: a real orgy of "ripping," as they so delicately described it, with all the attendant excitement and attention. And I can understand that wish, I guess; in many ways, it's every kid's dream: a Christmas that never ends.

I don't know how many of you have ever faced this situation of sharing children with a former spouse over the holidays, but it's a fairly common thing these days, and it can be kind of tricky, both logistically and emotionally. There's a real temptation to over-react, to set yourself up in competition with the other person to see who can provide the "better" Christmas, which all too often boils down to who has the deepest pockets.

Kids know this, of course, and they play it up for all its worth: not maliciously, I think, but rather because they're not really old enough to know any better. Children have very tangible minds: they like things that they can see and touch. Money is no object with children, because they don't really understand it, although this has its advantages too; the most popular Christmas gift I ever purchased for my children was a 99 cent Nerf football, which I bought one Christmas Eve as an afterthought while browsing through the local drug store on another last-minute errand.

Yet it is this very quality we find so endearing in children which convinces me that Christmas is wasted upon them. Until one develops the capacity to appreciate the intangibles of Christmas, the holiday remains merely a celebration of consumption: shallow, superficial, and ultimately disappointing. We might as well imitate the Puritans and eliminate it all together, for it adds nothing to the quality of our lives, it simply distracts us from the things that are ultimately important.

The delighted squeal of children on Christmas morning is a transitory thing; it passes away and is soon forgotten: the adults tend to remember it far longer than the kids do. The cries of hungry children who do not have enough to eat are far more persistent, yet even when we pause long enough to hear them cry, it often seems as though there is realistically very little any one of us can hope to do in order to meet that urgent need. Perhaps, if we are conscientious, we try to do our share, and hope that with the help of others, it will be enough. But it never really is enough.

Yet it is between these two contrasting extremes that the real meaning of Christmas, the real Spirit of Christmas, can be found. It is found the story of a baby born in a stable because there was no room at the inn, born far from home, on the longest night of the year, to bring a light into the world; incarnating, if you will, the very real possibility that both greed and poverty can be transcended through the simple expedient of profound human relationship, to one another and to the divine, uniting kings and shepherds, animals and angels, in common service to a sovereign mystery, to the appearance of a new star in the sky. And perhaps it never really happened; perhaps it is nothing but a myth. But the possibility still exists, in the power of the story to help us see beyond the tangible, to reach out to the things we can not touch, and hold them firmly in our hearts all the same.

THE FLAME THAT WOULDN'T DIE

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church of Portland, Maine
Sunday December 9th, 2007

READING: 1 Maccabees 4: 34-59

***
When I was a child, growing up in a Unitarian Universalist Sunday School, I always had a lot of fun when we were given the opportunity to celebrate Hanukkah as part of our Sunday School curriculum. We lit the candles in the Menorah, we played with Dreidels, we heard the story of the lamp that burned for eight straight days, when there was only a one day supply of oil. In the predominately Catholic neighborhood where we lived, "The Feast of Lights" seemed like our Unitarian-Universalist answer to Advent — not only did it avoid a lot of problematic issues like the Virgin Birth, but it also introduced us to the whole idea of cross-cultural celebrations of the Winter Solstice: the coming of Light into the world, in the season where nights are long and darkness reigns, and it had the added advantage of eight straight days of presents. (In our house that particular tradition only lasted one year, by the way).

I always had a little trouble, though, understanding this business about the lamp that burned for eight days in the temple. After all, a one-day supply of oil is a one-day supply of oil; if the lamp burned for eight days, obviously that was an eight-day supply: someone simply must have made a mistake when they were doing the inventory. I just didn't see what all the fuss was about. Maybe there was a clever priest (or more likely, a sexton), who was somehow able to adjust the flame and stretch the supply, make the oil last longer than it should have. Or maybe they just asked around, and everybody pitched in what they had. I mean, isn’t that what people do in times of crisis?

But there was nothing particularly miraculous about that; my mom used to do that sort of thing all the time. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” You don’t have to be a native Mainer to appreciate the importance of a little old-fashioned frugality, combined with a generous helping of Yankee ingenuity. I guess I always just had a very strong humanist streak from a very early age, because it was years before I was able to understand that the flame of the Menorah was only a symbol of the real miracle. The temple had been defiled, but the faith had endured, and triumphed. This is the real miracle of the Feast of Dedication.

Let me share with you a little more of the history behind the the story of Hanukkah. In 167 BC the Selucid emperor Antiochus IV ordered the rededication of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem to the worship of Zeus. The Selucids were one of three dynasties which had emerged from the remnants of Alexander the Great's empire following his death a century and a half earlier. Based primarily in what is now Syria, the Selucids were almost constantly at war with a second post-Alexandrian dynasty, the Ptolemies, who were based in Egypt. Even in that day, there were already significant Jewish communities in both Babylonia (which was controlled by the Selucids) and Alexandria (the capital of the Ptolemies); life in the diaspora had already begun; while Judaea, the original home of the Jewish people, served as something of a strategic buffer between these two Great Powers of the ancient world, and was constantly buffeted by the ebb and flow of their political and military ambitions.

Controlled by the Ptolemies until the start of the second century BC, Judea eventually came under the hegemony of the Selucids following their decisive victory over the Ptolemies at the Battle of Banyas, which took place near the headwaters of the Jordan River. To a significant degree, this development was welcomed by many of the Jewish inhabitants of Judaea, because the Ptolemies had been great Hellenizers, which is to say they were fond of introducing Greek customs and practices into the cultures they ruled. The Jewish community in Alexandria, for example, had been deeply influenced by Greek philosophy; and it was their Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint, that would eventually become a key factor in the rapid spread of Christianity among the Greek-speaking Gentiles of the Roman Empire.

Selucid rule, on the other hand, appeared to promise the practice of a more authentically Hebrew Judaism, such as existed in Babylonia. But this expectation was not to be borne out. Roman influence in the Eastern Mediterranean was growing; in order to pay for his increasingly expensive military adventures, as well as shield his empire from the threat of Rome, Antiochus IV greatly increased the level of taxation in Judaea, plundering the treasury of the temple in Jerusalem, and also cracking down on dissident Jewish groups who resented the burdens imposed by their Greek-speaking rulers, and who sought the freedom to manage their own affairs. In order to pacify the region, Antiochus IV accelerated the Hellenization of Judaea, siding with those Jews who were sympathetic to Greek ideas and culture, and doing everything within his power to eliminate the practice of Judaism as a distinctive religious faith.

This is the background of the Maccabean revolt. The Maccabees were insurgent guerrilla fighters who took to the hills in order to resist these changes. Their leader was initially a priest named Mattathias Maccabaeus, who not only refused to offer pagan sacrifice in the Jewish temple where he served, but also reportedly killed the first Jewish apostate who had attempted to do so. When Mattathias himself later died, leadership of the guerrilla army fell upon the shoulders of his oldest son, Judas Maccabaeus, who was eventually able to drive the Selucids out of the city of Jerusalem, and re-dedicate the temple there to the worship of the Hebrew God Yahweh, as we heard in the passage from the First Book of Maccabees I read earlier this morning. This is the origin of Hanukkah — the Festival of Dedication — the only major festival in Judaism not explicitly rooted in the Torah.

There are some major ironies contained within the story of Hanukkah. The Maccabean revolt was a war fought for the purpose of religious liberty — the only such revolt of its kind recorded in ancient history — yet the Maccabees themselves were hardly the religious liberals of their day. They were more akin, perhaps, to modern religious fundamentalists in their attitudes and practices; and I suppose if you were Antiochus IV, you might even have called them terrorists. Likewise, the only records of their achievements which have survived were written in Greek, most likely by members of their rival Jewish community in Alexandria. Although the Maccabees were able to defeat the Selucids at Jerusalem, their position there was anything but secure; thus, a few years later, they entered into a military alliance with the Romans — an act which was virtually to ensure the eventual subjugation of the Jewish people, and the loss of a national Jewish homeland for 2000 years. By the time of Christ, it was Rome who ruled in Judaea; in 70 AD Roman soldiers demolished the temple which Judas Maccabaeus had fought so hard to reconsecrate — only a portion of a single wall, now known as the "Wailing Wall," was left standing.

Yet the flame of the Maccabees still burns. And the ironies, tragic ironies, still continue. Deep down in my heart of hearts, I have always been something of a closet Zionist. Perhaps this stems, in part, from having had a Jewish grandfather (on my mother’s side), but whatever the source, I’ve always taken pride in the independence of the modern state of Israel, and in the contributions of Judaism in general to Western thought, culture, and civilization. The flame of the Hanukkah Menorah symbolizes the light of that contribution, as well as the persistent struggle of the Jewish people to preserve their religious faith and practice in the face of 2000 years of almost constant anti-semitic persecution and oppression. Zionism reflects the burning aspiration of Jews for a nation of their own, a place to call home.

But there is also a shadow cast by Zionism: a shadow which those of us who consider ourselves friends of Israel are sometimes reluctant to explore. Hanukkah is a celebration of Light and Hope, Joy and Compassion — in many ways it represents the very best of what religion has to offer us here in this world. Even (or perhaps especially) in the context of a “global war on terror,” there are no doubt still many Jews, many people of faith all the world over, who are deeply troubled by the Israeli government's recent history and policies regarding the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza, and who continue to hope for a permanent and lasting peace based on mutual tolerance, reasonable accommodation, and sympathetic understanding. The role of Oppressor does not come naturally to the Jewish spirit; and this too, is a lingering irony of the legacy of the Maccabees, whose military victories ultimately brought ruin to their nation.

In his Hanukkah story "The Power of Light," Isaac Bashevis Singer tells of two Jewish children, David and Rebecca, hiding in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto following its destruction by the Nazis during the Second World War. On the first night of Hanukkah, David finds some matches and a candle while foraging in the rubble, and returns to their hiding place to share his discovery. Singer writes:

...Now David pronounced the benediction over the Hanukkah candle, and Rebecca said "Amen." They had both lost their families, and they had good reason to be angry with God for sending them so many afflictions, but the light of the candle brought peace into their souls. That glimmer of light, surrounded by so many shadows, seemed to say without words: Evil has not yet taken complete dominion. A spark of hope is still left.

For some time David and Rebecca had thought about escaping from Warsaw. But how? The ghetto was watched by the Nazis day and night. Each step was dangerous. Rebecca kept delaying their departure. It would be easier in the summer, she often said, but David knew that in their predicament they had little chance of lasting until then. Somewhere in the forest there were young men and women called partisans who fought the Nazi invaders. David wanted to reach them. Now, by the light of the Hanukkah candle, Rebecca suddenly felt renewed courage. She said, "David, let's leave."

"When?" [David asked.]

"When you think it's the right time," she answered.

"The right time is now," David said. "I have a plan."

For a long time David explained the details of his plan to Rebecca. It was more than risky. The Nazis had enclosed the ghetto with barbed wire and posted guards armed with machine guns on the surrounding roofs. At night searchlights lit up all possible exits from the destroyed ghetto. But in his wanderings through the ruins, David had found an opening to a sewer which he thought might lead to the other side. David told Rebecca that their chances of remaining alive were slim. They could drown in the dirty water or freeze to death. Also, the sewers were full of hungry rats. But Rebecca agreed to take the risk; to remain in the cellar for the winter would mean certain death.

When the Hanukkah light began to sputter and flicker before going out, David and Rebecca gathered their few belongings. She packed the remaining food in a kerchief, and David took his matches and a piece of lead pipe for a weapon.

In moments of great danger people become unusually courageous. David and Rebecca were soon on their way through the ruins. They came to passages so narrow they had to crawl on hands and knees. But the food they had eaten, and the joy the Hanukkah candles had awakened in them, gave them the courage to continue. After some time David found the entrance to the sewer. Luckily, the sewage had frozen, and it seemed that the rats had left because of the extreme cold. From time to time David and Rebecca stopped to rest and to listen. After a while they crawled on, slowly and carefully. Suddenly they stopped in their tracks. From above they could hear the clanging of a trolley car. They had reached the other side of the ghetto. All they needed now was to find a way to get out of the sewer and to leave the city as quickly as possible.

Many miracles seemed to happen that Hanukkah night. Because the Nazis were afraid of enemy planes, they had ordered a complete blackout. Because of the bitter cold, there were fewer Gestapo guards. David and Rebecca managed to leave the sewer and steal out of the city without being caught. At dawn they reached a forest where they were able to rest and have a bite to eat....

After a week of hiding by day and traveling at night, David and Rebecca met up with a group of Jewish partisans hiding in the forest. It was now the final night of Hanukkah, and the children played dreidel on the stump of an oak tree while others kept watch. More and more refugees joined them, and slowly they made their way to Israel, assisted by the Haganah: an organization which worked to smuggle Jewish refugees out of Nazi-occupied Europe and into the Holy Land. They finished school, married, and found a small house with a garden in a suburb of Tel Aviv. Singer concludes his story by writing:

...I know all this because David and Rebecca told me their story on a Hanukkah evening in their house in Ramat Gan about eight years later. The Hanukkah candles were burning, and Rebecca was frying potato pancakes served with applesauce for all of us. David and I were playing dreidel with their little son, Menahem Eliezer, named after both of his grandfathers. David told me that this large wooden dreidel was the same one the partisans had played with on that Hanukkah evening in the forest in Poland. Rebecca said to me: "If it had not been for that little candle David brought to our hiding place, we wouldn't be sitting here today. That glimmer of light awakened in us a hope and strength we didn't know we possessed. We'll give the dreidel to Menahem Eliezer when he is old enough to understand what we went through and how miraculously we were saved...."

I’ve always liked to thing that this child, Menahem Eliezer, would be about my age this Hanukkah. No doubt he has long since learned the story of his parents' escape and rescue; no doubt by now he has children, and perhaps even grandchildren, of his own, with whom he has also shared the dreidal, with its four Hebrew letters: nun, gimel, he, shin -- "a great miracle happened there." And this holiday season, may we as well share in the miracle of the Flame that wouldn't die, recalling even in this season of darkness our essential connectedness to the whole of humankind, and our renewed dedication to the timeless principles which allow our faith to endure.

HOME FOR THE HOLY DAYS

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday December 2nd 2007

***
READING: "Feast Days," from Tickets for a Prayer Wheel by Annie Dillard

Let me mention
one or two things about Christmas.
Of course you've all heard
that the animals talk
at midnight:
a particular elk, for instance,
kneeling at night to drink,
leaning tall to pull leaves
with his soft lips,
says, alleluia.

That the soil and fresh-water lakes
also rejoice,
as do products
such as sweaters
(nor are plastics excluded
from grace),
is less well known.
Further:
the reason
for some silly-looking fishes,
for the bizarre mating
of certain adult insects,
or the sprouting, say,
in a snow tire
of a Rocky Mountain grass,
is that the universal
loves the particular,
that freedom loves to live
and live flesh full,
intricate,
and in detail.

God empties himself
into the earth like a cloud.
God takes the substance, contours
of a man, and keeps them,
dying, rising, walking,
and still walking
wherever there is motion
***

[extemporaneous introduction]

I grew up in what I suppose one might think of as a nominally Catholic neighborhood. Most of my playmates had names like Ridley, O'Hare, Callahan; and they were never available to play on Wednesday afternoons because it conflicted with their catechism classes. The smell of macaroni and cheese wafted through the air on Friday evenings; conversations were ripe with references to nuns, confession, and who had given whom their Saint Christopher medal; and the season of Lent was serious business — there was no candy or ice cream to be found anywhere on our block, except perhaps at my house, making me a pretty popular kid for the six weeks prior to Easter.

Of course, these are just the perceptions of a twelve year old child nearly four decades ago now. But to my mind then, there were a lot of advantages to being the only Unitarian-Universalist family in a neighborhood such as this. We went to the library on Wednesday afternoons, often ate steak for Friday dinner (when my dad would return home from a week of business travel), and I never had to worry about how much of my private life I ought to reveal each week to the man dressed in black in the little box, sitting behind a screen like the Wizard of Oz.

But every year as the month of December rolled around, I began to wonder whether I might be missing out on something: the Advent wreaths, with their four purple candles and the solitary white one; the Advent calendars, with those amazing little windows — one window for each day that remained in the countdown to Christmas. I was fascinated by those windows, with their tiny paper shutters; and behind each and every shutter, something different, something special, there in the window. And each window more amazing than the previous one; and oh! — what a privilege to be the child selected to open the window for the day!

I recall one year, after much urging on my part, my parents broke down brought home an Advent calendar for our family. I could hardly wait! In fact, I didn't wait: as soon as I was alone in the house I opened all of the little shutters on the very first day, and then had to try to close them up again so my parents wouldn't notice (which of course they did). But it didn't make any difference; the magic had already gone out of the thing anyway: the anticipation, the mystery, had disappeared.

I suppose that had I actually been reared a Catholic, I would have gone to confession years ago and told the priest in the box about my little indiscretion, and that would have been the end of it. Instead, I recall this memory every Advent season, and reflect upon my youthful impatience, and the priceless gift it stole from me. As Unitarian Universalist kids we studied ALL of the winter "Holy Days" in our Sunday School classes this time of year. We learned about Hanukkah, and various other winter "festivals of light" — it really wasn't all that different from being in the public schools, only better and more fun. And yet, there was a strangeness to it all as well — a feeling, almost, of being on the outside looking in. We might overhear adults complain about the "commercialization" of Christmas, but where was the "holiness" to replace the secular holiday? We went to elaborate parties, and were thoroughly "entertained," but would we have actually offered hospitality to a pregnant woman far from home? Food and football and family obligations; shopping and snowmen and time off from school — the holiday season was defined by its possibilities for sloth, avarice and gluttony, rather than by qualities of any particular religious significance.

In the secular world, the holiday season begins Thanksgiving Day, with its parades, its traditional football rivalries, and of course, “Black Friday, and the big Mall and Department store sales which begin the countdown of "shopping days" til “Xmas.” And it ends, at last, on New Year's Day, with one final blow-out party, more parades and more football games, and a plethora of unkept promises that somehow this next year will be different than the last.

But within the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, the four weeks prior to Christmas are known as the season of Advent, and harbor a far different connotation. The word "Advent" comes from the Latin adventus and means "to" or "toward [the] Coming." Interestingly enough, it's the same Latin root as our English word "adventure," which my Webster's defines as "a bold undertaking in which hazards are to be encountered and the issue staked upon unforseen events" In the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, the four weeks of Advent are a time both of joyous anticipation for the birth of the child Christ, and also of solemn preparation for the unforseen "Second Coming" at the end of time, when all the world shall be judged.

In the Medieval Church, Advent was observed with the same strict penitence as Lent, and even today Roman Catholicism prohibits the solemnization of marriage during this period. It's this mythic tension between the physical presence of the deity here in this world, in the innocent form of an infant child; and the ultimate sovereignty of Divine Creation and Judgement, which gives this season it's peculiar ethos: We look toward the Coming of we know not what, in anticipation and fear of a transformation for which we can never be fully ready or prepared....

“God empties himself
into the earth like a cloud.
God takes the substance, contours
of a man, and keeps them,
dying, rising, walking,
and still walking
wherever there is motion...”

My very favorite holiday movie of all time is still Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," in which Jimmy Stewart plays a character by the name of George Bailey, who sacrifices his ambitions of a college education and world travel in order to remain in the tiny town of Bedford Falls and manage the Bailey Building and Loan following the untimely death of his father. You’ve all seen this movie, right? I mean, none of you have been living on another planet for the past 50 years. At the critical turning point of the story, as George is about to commit suicide by leaping from a bridge, he is given an opportunity, by a rather amusing yet inept Angel Second Class named Clarence, to see what this little town would have been like had George Bailey never been born. All the lives he had touched, all the people he had helped, all of the good that he had done, suddenly become conspicuous through their absence — and George comes to see that despite the difficulties, despite the frustration, despite the disappointment and even the dispair, he really did have a wonderful life.

Not many of us are given this kind of opportunity: to open up a little window and see the effect of our lives upon the world, the multitude of ways in which that tiny spark of the divine within us all exerts its influence for the good on those around us. A little piece of God in human form, "dying, rising, walking, and still walking wherever there is motion." No doubt we see it first more easily in others than we do within ourselves. But this is the message of the Advent season: the coming of light into the world, the coming of goodness into the world, the opening of a shuttered window, which allows us a glimpse our own potential divinity, reflected in the face of an innocent child; yet which also calls us simultaneously to accountability for that gift in the instant that it is revealed to us. Will you chose a wonderful life? Or will you hide your lamp under a bushel, prefering to curse the darkness than to light a single candle?

Many Unitarian Universalists, I find, are uncomfortable with the mythic dimensions of religious meaning. We like the tangible, the pragmatic, the rational; all this heavy-handed symbolism leaves us feeling a little uneasy in the stomach. We scoff at the notion of an infant God, a virgin birth, of angels, and astrologers who left their homes and followed a star in the sky to a distant land. We prefer to speak of the coincidence between the Christmas season and the winter solstice, or to trace the evolution of the holiday and identify its cross-cultural parallels; we want to throw open all the windows at once and shine the light of reason into every nook and cranny. All too often we seem to forget that much of the meaning is in the waiting, the preparing, the anticipation — that as we allow the story to unfold at its own speed, as we participate in it in "mythic time," other levels of meaning are revealed to us which are not readily comprehensible to the analytical mind.

We're always in such a hurry! We have shopping to do and packages to wrap, cards to write, meals to cook and cookies to bake — at times it seems as though we'll never get caught up. Yet in our haste to get everything under control the real opportunities often pass us by; or rather, are quickly left behind in the whirlwind of activity to get it all done. Jesus built furniture in Nazareth for thirty years before he did anything truly worthy of remembrance! Insight in particular is not always the product of a linear process; more often our learning tends to be circular, as we return again and again to that which initially sparked our curiosity, only to discover that we understand it a little better each time. Time is meaningless when it comes to Truth. Let the story speak to you in its own voice, in its own language, on its own terms, and eventually the message, in its own good time, will become crystal-clear.

Christmas is an invitation to participate in a miracle: a miracle of change, of growth, of renewal and transformation — but mostly a miracle of possibility and hope, the promise of a thing rather than the thing itself. It's the drama of a child born in a stable to a very special destiny, and the anticipation of that destiny by those who may never live to see its fulfillment, but who nevertheless take the time to respond to the call for preparation. Is this the child who has been born king of the Jews, the Messiah, the Christ, sleeping in a feed trough in the midst of all these animals? And this is the mother, this naive teenaged girl, who swears she's never been with a man? From unlikely origins comes the King of Kings, the Prince of Peace, to preach the Good News that we, too, are God's children, inheritors of a special destiny regardless of the circumstances of our birth or background.

The story of Advent is the story of the Adventure of Life: that "bold undertaking in which hazards are to be encountered, and the issue staked upon unforseen events." It is a lesson in learning to wait upon the unknown; a lesson in the suspense of disbelief and the confidence of hope, of patient trust in the process of living between the margins of our accidental birth and our inevitable mortality. It teaches us to open the shutters one window at a time, and fully savor the vision which we find there: a promise, a potential yet to be realized, a helpless child who will someday become a most remarkable adult, and reveal to the world an authentic glimpse of the divine....

CIDER, MAIZE, AND GRATITUDE

a homily delivered by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday November 18th, 2007


READING: “After Apple-Picking” by Robert Frost

***
One of the great things about being historically-minded is that it really can (and often does) give a person an entirely different perspective on just about everything in life. I know that a lot of people think of history as “boring” -- just a lot of talk about war and politics and the kind of people who are interested in that sort of thing, plus trying to memorize a bunch of meaningless dates that all sound the same after awhile, or the names of people you’ve never met and are never going to meet because they’ve gone to meet their Maker long before any of us were even born. But this is just the superficial view. History is really all about people just like you and me; in its most extensive understanding, it’s the study of everything that Human Beings have ever done or thought or felt since, well, the beginning of time. It’s about tradition and heritage, but mostly it’s about understanding why things are the way they are by learning how they used to be, and how they got to be this way.

For example, take this symbolic communion meal of cornbread and cider we’re about to celebrate. I’m sure you’ve all probably heard that “an Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away,” but how many of you knew that, according to historians, the apple is probably the earliest fruit actually cultivated by human beings, which is really pretty amazing when you think about it. Before there were any vineyards or olive groves, or any cultivated citrus fruits; before peaches, pears, plums, figs, dates, cherries, apricots and all the rest, there were apple orchards. So you see, there’s a reason that “A is for Apple.” And there are over 7500 different varieties or “cultivars” known today, all of which are descended from a single ancestoral variety, which can still be found growing wild in the mountains of Central Asia, in the region between the countries of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and China.

Modern apples basically come in three different types. There are the sweet, so-called “dessert” apples (which are the kind that you can just pick and eat right off the tree, or nowadays more typically after bringing them home from the supermarket); then there are cooking or baking apples (which are generally a lot more tart than the dessert apples, but release their more subtle flavors when cooked); and finally there are cider apples -- which are far and away the majority of the cultivars, which makes a lot of sense when you stop to think about it. Because of all the beverages which have historically been available to human beings (including plain old water), cider is both one of the simplest and one of the safest...not to mention one of the tastiest.

Furthermore, thanks to what some would call the “miracle” of fermentation, cider also gets “hard,” even if you pretty much just leave it alone -- which makes it both easy to store and preserve, and also gives it all sorts of other historically desirable qualities. As those of you who may have read Michael Pollan’s excellent book The Botany of Desire already know, this is basically what the legendary “Johnny Appleseed” was doing when he planted all those apple seeds out in the Ohio territory back at the start of the 19th century. John Chapman was essentially a very eccentric, mystically-inspired Swedenborgian real estate speculator, who tried to anticipate the westward expansion of the young United States, and planted his orchards in such a manner so that by the time that the pioneer farmers caught up, there would be mature apple trees waiting for them. And although as an adult he apparently never even owned a pair of shoes, when he died he reportedly left his sisters an estate worth several million dollars.

This same intoxicating quality of apples also puts a rather interesting twist on the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. You know, I’ve never really understood the doctrine of Original Sin, at least not on a thelogical level; but maybe it was really just that Adam and Eve decided to throw a little party, drank a little too much cider, did some things that maybe they shouldn’t have and which they regreted and were ashamed of later, and the tried to cover it all up; but naturally God found out anyway, and threw them out to fend for themselves. Nothing particularly original about THAT story, is there? It’s more like the oldest mistake in the book. Which is another big advantage of being interested in history; we get to learn from the mistakes of our ancestors, rather than having to make them all again ourselves.

The Cornbread, of course, has a history all its own. Maize, or “Indian Corn” as it was known to the Europeans, is a New World crop, native to the Americas; and for the Native Americans it was one of the “Three Sisters” (along with beans and squash) that provided much of the basis for their diet. The three crops were grown together in fields of small, cultivated hills -- the cornstalk doubling as a beanpole for the beanstalk, with the squash planted around the base, and a fish head at the bottom of the hole for fertilizer. This was the agricultural technique which, according to folklore, Squanto taught to the Pilgrims at Plymouth -- and combined with plentiful fish and game, as well as other native American plants like potatoes, tomatoes, wild rice, wild onions, and of course here in this part of the world, blueberries and maple syrup, it allowed the indigenous inhabitants to eat pretty well most of the time. Cooking was easy. Often they simply combined the meat and vegetables into a thick soup called sagamite, or else steamed their food in the ground just like we would at an old-fashioned clambake today.

And sometimes they would make and eat popcorn, or grind the dried kernels into a coarse cornmeal and cook it as a quick bread, kind of like a tortilla. But it wasn’t until the arrival of the Europeans that people started to bake actual cornbread and eat it as a staple of their diet, just as they baked bread with the milled flour of more traditional cereal grains like wheat or rye: grains which, like the colonists themselves, were brought over from the old country and planted here in the Americas. But until these grains were well established in the New World, cornbread was a staple of the Pilgrim diet: a creative combination of the old and the new, of innovation and tradition which is now an important part of our own cultural heritage as well.

Which brings me to the point of all this culinary history. When we think of the traditional Christian Communion -- the Eucharist -- we think of a symbolic meal comprised of the two staple foods of the ancient world -- bread baked from wheat, and wine fermented from grapes. It is both a reenactment of a traditional Passover meal, but more importantly, a making sacred of that which is ordinary: a sacramental act to commemorate Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.

But the symbolism also works on at least two other levels as well. Communion is a celebration of community -- not just in the sense of breaking bread together, but also symbolized by the very foods themselves: think of how the grain of the fields and the fruit of the vine become as one in the bread and the wine. And then there is also the fact that these foods are alive, with yeast; which is what causes the wine to ferment, and the bread to rise (even if, for Passover, it is baked before it has the chance to rise too much, to symbolize the sudden urgency of the Exodus from Egypt). And in the New Testament, these are both metaphors for the Kingdom of God as well: the New Wine which the old wineskins cannot contain, or the leaven which was hid in a measure of flour, until the whole loaf was leavened.

The food we serve at our own symbolic meal shares these same properties. But it also reflects the heritage of THIS region of the world, and the bringing together of traditional English and Algonquin cuisines, just as they did at the celebration of the First Thanksgiving so many years ago.

And at the end of the day, it really is about Giving Thanks, and expressing our gratitude for the great gift that is life itself. We were, each of us, born into this world naked and helpless. But through the compassion and generosity of others -- beginning most commonly with our parents and immediate family, but including as well friends and neighbors, members of the extended community (including our communities of faith) and of society as a whole, we are protected and nurtured and helped to grow to maturity.

And the ONLY appropriate response to this great gift is one of Gratitude, combined with the commitment to imitate the example of our ancestors, with our own generous and compassionate service to others whose needs are often even greater than our own.

Armistice and Remembrance

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Armistice Day, Sunday November 11th, 2007


***
In 1933, the members of the Oxford Union, a student debating society affiliated with England's Oxford University, voted the following proposition: "Resolved, that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King or Country." In his subsequent history of the Second World War, Winston Churchill pointed to this "shameful" resolution as an example of the "lethargy and blindness" which caused the British nation "to cower from the menace of foreign peril, frothing pious platitudes while foemen forged their arms." He added: "It was easy to laugh off such an episode in England, but in Germany, in Russia, in Italy, in Japan, the idea of a decadent, degenerate Britain took deep root and swayed many calculations."

One of the supposed lessons of the Second World War, which we have heard repeated so often in our own time to justify American military operations in foreign lands, is that the appeasement of tyrants by reasonable men and women only fuels the fires of their evil aspirations; that peace is best maintained through strength, and by constant vigilance in the defense of freedom. But the students of the Oxford Union in 1933, who as children had helplessly witnessed from afar as their fathers, their uncles, and their elder brothers perished senselessly in the mechanical slaughter of the trenches along the Western Front, had drawn from that experience very different lessons of war and peace. Their resolution reflected not their decadence, nor their degeneracy, and certainly not their cowardice (as they would so shortly have the chance to demonstrate), but rather their profound commitment that never again should the civilized world allow itself to become engulfed by warfare.

Today is Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of the First World War. And I want to use this opportunity to talk a little about issues of war and peace in a larger context, because it seems to me that much of the original spirit of this holiday has been lost in recent times, and especially in recent days. We now celebrate "Veterans Day,” on which we honor the sacrifices of those who served in wartime; we talk about the heroes of the “Greatest Generation,” who defended freedom and democracy from the threat of Fascist totalitarianism a half-century ago, and how their legacy has now descended on to us. We talk passionately of the need to “support our troops,” regardless of how we may feel personally about the policies of our government which have put them in harm’s way. But we tend to ignore the original sense of the word "Armistice" -- literally, a setting aside of arms. And I personally would like to see a little more of that sentiment observed on this holiday.

The desire for genuine peace, it seems to me, is a universal concern among religious people of good faith, and has been for as long as human history has been recorded. "Blessed are the Peacemakers,” it tells us in Scripture, “for they shall be called God's Children." Peacemaking is more than just the elimination of the threat of war. It is also an active, dynamic, creative way of living which seeks to cultivate the seeds of true harmony and justice even as it cuts away at the roots of conflict and discord, and thus it invariably operates at two distinct levels. The first level might be thought of as one of policy -- the pragmatic things which governments or other organizations do or fail to do to in order to avoid the possibility of war. The second level is one of individual contribution and commitment -- a devotion to peace based on values and principles which are fundamentally religious in nature.

These two levels of peacemaking -- policy and personal commitment -- are quite distinct, although they are also profoundly interdependent; and both of course are subject to the "judgment of history," to which our politicians so frequently appeal. Yet the lessons both of history and of religion are by no means always clear or unambiguous. If, indeed, Churchill was correct in attributing at least some of the blame for the Second World War to the strident pacifism typified by the students of the Oxford Union, it is equally important to remember that it was the similar sentiments expressed by students and others in the 1960's which eventually brought an end to our nation's military involvement in Southeast Asia, just as it was a naive application of the opposite "lesson" which got us involved in that conflict in the first place. Familiarity with policy without the corresponding personal investment simply reduces us to the status of "armchair strategists" -- war and peace become somebody else's problem, while we stand around the sidelines and second-guess. And likewise commitment and action without a solid understanding of the lessons of history leaves open the very real possibility of becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution -- resulting in a situation where well-intentioned acts merely serve to create the opposite effect from what was intended.

The tragic irony of our current situation in Iraq and Afghanistan is rooted in precisely this kind of “disconnect” between the pragmatic and the idealistic. I am enough of a historian to know that there are times when the use of military force is an appropriate option. There are times, in fact, when it is the only option. But the methods we use to pursue our goals must never be allowed to undermine the very values we aspire to defend. How can be claim to be champions of freedom and democracy when we so freely disregard the same democratic liberties that so many American veterans have fought and died to protect? When emotions run high, as they did in the days immediately following the 9/11 attacks, it is easy to motivate people to follow a course of action which promises to strike decisively at the heart of the problem, and then to justify those actions with the claim that desperate times call for desperate measures. But the real lesson of history is that actions, ultimately, speak louder than words; that rhetoric can only conceal reality for a limited time; and that when our deeds contradict our cherished values and principles, our values and principles become the ultimate losers, and we ourselves become our own worst enemies.

By the 11th of November, 1914, a mere three months after the outbreak of hostilities, the Great Powers of Europe found themselves locked into a stalemated war of attrition which none of them had wanted, but which national pride and rigid mobilization schedules had drawn them to like moths to a candle. After the initial German offensive was blunted by French reinforcements literally rushed to the front in Parisian taxicabs, and the bloody battles in Flanders during the "race to the sea," in which four-fifths of the original British Expeditionary Force were killed, the conflict became deadlocked in a seemingly endless routine of bombardments, raids, and "standing to," in which 5000 men might perish on a "quiet" day, and casualties soared into the hundreds of thousands during "major" offensives, which often resulted in only a few hundred yards of territory lost or gained and the "exchange [of] one wet-bottomed trench for another."

Writing in her book The Guns of August, historian Barbara Tuchman observes that: "...with the advent of winter came the slow deadly sinking into the stalemate of trench warfare. Running from Switzerland to the Channel like a gangrenous wound across French and Belgian territory, the trenches determined the war of position and attrition, the brutal, mud-filled, murderous insanity known as the Western Front." Only after both sides had succeeded in slaughtering an entire generation of young men, while at the same time bankrupting their economies and subjecting their civilian populations to various degrees of hardship and privation, did the influx of fresh troops and war materiel from across the ocean help break the stalemate and cause the German government to sue for peace.

Twenty-five years later, French and German armies once again faced each other along the Western Front, from behind the fortifications of the Maginot and Siegfried lines, in an episode which became known as the Phoney War or "Sitzkrieg." This time the French soldiers were under orders not to fire at Germans they observed moving on the other side of the no-man's land -- because, after all, it would only encourage them to fire back.

Subsequent historical analysis suggests that had the Allies acted decisively within the first few weeks or months of the war, Hitler might easily have been defeated in short order -- indeed, the officers of the German General staff, who also recalled the terrible lessons of 1914, were ready to dispose of their Fuhrer themselves and sue for peace at the first opportunity. But instead the Allies refused to act, and when the Blitzkrieg finally fell in the west, in the spring of the following year, the fortifications of the Maginot line were rapidly bypassed by the German Panzers, France fell in a matter of weeks, and only the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force in small, civilian-owned boats from Dunkirk preserved the possibility of any resistance in the west.

Perhaps no one could have foreseen the coming of a Hitler in 1918, when at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month the guns stopped firing along the Western front. Confined to a military hospital recovering from a poison gas attack, this insignificant Austrian corporal felt betrayed and disgraced by his country's surrender to the Allies; while the punitive conditions of the Treaty of Versailles created more than enough resentment among the vanquished to enable his later rise to power on a platform of cultural pride, ethnic hatred, and restored national honor.

Had the victors of the Great War agreed to a just and honorable peace, Hitler might simply have remained a failed artist and frustrated member of the lunatic fringe. It's difficult to say about these things. But the inevitable temptation to punish our enemies rather than behaving generously in victory is rarely a pattern conducive to real peace. Peacemakers everywhere might well take to heart the sentiments of Abraham Lincoln, who served as Commander in Chief during America’s bloodiest and most bitter war, that one best destroys one's enemies by making them one's friends.

That opportunity existed on Armistice Day in 1918, and in many ways it should remain a valid agenda for all peacemakers today. Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points," first articulated shortly after America's entry into the Great War, provide an insightful context for the understanding of such a peace which has not lost its currency even after four generations. I know 14 points may seem like a lot -- in fact, a French diplomat at the time, Georges Clemenceau, pointed out that "The Good Lord had only ten!" -- but the essence of Wilson's vision can be summarized without the need for delving in to his specific proposals for individual nation-states.

Wilson called for an end to secret treaties and military alliances, and their replacement by "Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at" and diplomacy which "shall proceed frankly and always in the public view." He insisted on "Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas," and "the removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace." He called for a general reduction of national armaments "to the lowest points consistent with domestic safety," and for the "free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all [territorial] claims," with "strict observance of the principle that in determining questions of sovereignty, the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined."

Above all, Wilson called for the formation of "a general association of nations...under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to the great and small alike." This basic framework of international law, embodying so much of that simple schoolhouse ethic of fair play on a level field, is the legacy which the college professor and Nobel Laureate who served as our 28th President has left to posterity; and on many levels it might still serve well as a foundation for our nation's current foreign policy.

Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” articulated many of these same sentiments in a much more simple and straightforward manner. To the traditional American liberties of Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Belief, FDR added “Freedom from Want” and “Freedom from Fear” – two very tangible benefits of basic personal and economic security which flow from a long and lasting Peace, and perhaps define in pragmatic and palpable terms, the “blessings of Liberty” we hope to secure for ourselves and our posterity. And yet it seems to me that something is horribly wrong when we believe that our own liberty can only be secured through the violent domination of others, and at the expense of their safety and prosperity.

When it comes to the more personal, spiritual aspects of Armistice Day, the lessons are not so easy to summarize. The experience of war on almost any level frequently results in two almost entirely contradictory realizations. The first is a healthy level of cynical skepticism concerning anything which has not been adequately tested by fire; and the second an equally irrational optimistic hope that the sacrifices made by one’s self and one's comrades have not been in vain, and that beyond the unspeakable horror of the battlefield lies an equally unspeakable promise of a better way, which somehow can and will redeem the lives of those who have suffered and died on our behalf, and bring meaning to an activity which is intrinsically without meaning.

Without this optimistic belief in the redemptive power, not so much of violence, but of personal sacrifice, perhaps there would never be another war. Yet without it there could certainly be no hope of an enduring peace either -- for without a willingness to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves, in time the innocent would once more fall victim to the ambitious, and fear and avarice again displace the values of tolerance and compassion at the heart of our society.

And so we must continue to speak out in defense of those whose voices have been silenced, and who are no longer capable of defending themselves, in the naive expectation that somehow, someday, it will all make a difference. This skeptical hope, this cynical optimism born of suffering and sacrifice, is perhaps the most critical legacy of Armistice Day. It is a lesson we simply cannot afford to forget if we truly wish to create a safer, more prosperous, more peaceful world....

“In Flanders Fields the poppys blow, between the crosses row on row, that mark our place; and in the sky the larks, still bravely singing, fly scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved, and now we lie in Flanders fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe: to you from failing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders fields....”

In his ground-breaking work of literary and social criticism The Great War and Modern Memory, former Rutgers University professor and World War Two veteran Paul Fussell draws a sharp distinction between the somber tone of the first nine lines of John McCrae’s famous poem, and the “recruiting poster rhetoric” and "propaganda argument...against a negotiated peace....” articulated in the final six. “Words like stupid and vicious would not seem to go too far,” Fussell rages. “It is grievously out of contact with the symbolism of the first part, which the final image of poppies as sleep-inducers fatally recalls.”

And yet sometimes keeping faith with the dead is far more complicated than simply renewing old quarrels, and taking up the torch from failing hands and carrying it once more into the breach. Sometimes holding high the torch demands an entirely different set of actions and attitudes altogether....

{the following bracketed passage was dropped from the sermon preached on Sunday morning, in the interest of time}

[In a on-line essay written just this past week, military historian Lt. Col. William Astore (Ret.) describes a scenario in which “...the world's finest military launches a highly coordinated shock-and-awe attack that shows enormous initial progress. There's talk of the victorious troops being home for Christmas. But the war unexpectedly drags on. As fighting persists into a third, and then a fourth year, voices are heard calling for negotiations, even ‘peace without victory.’ Dismissing such peaceniks and critics as defeatists, a conservative and expansionist regime -- led by a figurehead who often resorts to simplistic slogans and his Machiavellian sidekick who is considered the brains behind the throne -- calls for one last surge to victory. Unbeknownst to the people on the home front, however, this duo has already prepared a seductive and self-exculpatory myth in case the surge fails....”

“The United States in 2007?” Astore asks. “No, Wilhelmine Germany in 1917 and 1918, as its military dictators, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and his loyal second, General Erich Ludendorff, pushed Germany toward defeat and revolution in a relentless pursuit of victory in World War I. Having failed with their surge strategy on the Western Front in 1918, they nevertheless succeeded in deploying a stab-in-the-back myth, or Dolchstoßlegende, that shifted blame for defeat from themselves and Rightist politicians to Social Democrats and others allegedly responsible for losing the war by their failure to support the troops at home.....The German Army knew it was militarily defeated in 1918. But this was an inconvenient truth for Hindenburg and the Right, so they crafted a new ‘truth:’ that the troops were ‘unvanquished in the field.’ So powerful did these words become that they would be engraved in stone on many a German war memorial....”

“Given the right post-war conditions,” Astore concludes, “the myth of the stab-in-the-back can facilitate the rise of reactionary regimes and score-settling via long knives -- just ask Germans under Hitler in 1934. It also serves to exonerate a military of its blunders and blind spots, empowering it and its commanders to launch redemptive, expansionist adventures that turn disastrous precisely because previous lessons of defeat were never faced, let alone absorbed or embraced. Thus, the German military's collapse in World War I and the Dolchstoß myth that followed enabled the even greater disaster of World War II....”]

I profoundly doubt that the nine million French, German, British, Russian, Austrian, Belgian, Italian, Turkish, and American soldiers (I could go on)...soldiers who were slaughtered in the carnage of that Great “War to End All Wars,” rested much more peacefully knowing that within a generation, another estimated seventy million soldiers and civilians would be joining them in that euphemistic “sleep” from which no one ever wakes. The danger of appeasing foreign tyrants is only half the lesson; for the other half, we must look to the Students of the Oxford Union, who understood in ways which we can never fully understand, the dangers of forgetting the unavoidable horror of war itself, and of blind obedience to authority which is out of touch with the human consequences of its commands....



READING: The "Four Freedoms"
Franklin D. Roosevelt's Address to Congress January 6, 1941

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want -- which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear -- which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor-- anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

To that new order we oppose the greater conception -- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.

Since the beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in change -- in a perpetual peaceful revolution -- a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions -- without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.

This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.

To that high concept there can be no end save victory.

The Time of Your Life

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday November 4, 2007 - Dia de los Muertos


PRAYER:

Some days the Spirit summons us to bow our heads in reverence, and kneel humbly before the awesome presence and power of all Creation.

Other days we are inspired to lift our eyes skyward to the horizon and toward the heavens, to cast our gaze upon the hills from whence comes our strength.

The Spirit moves where it will; we hear the sound of it, but we know not whence it comes nor whither it goes.

We feel its presence like the wind upon our faces; like a rustling breeze amidst the branches of trees.

The cold, bitter, biting winds of winter, which leave our lips numb and chilled.

The fresh, fragrant gusts of blossoming life in spring.

A cool, summer sea breeze blowing gently over the face of the water.

A breath of fresh air on a brisk autumn morning.

But whatever the season of the year,

And whatever the season of our lives,

The Spirit Calls to us....

Speaking to us out of the whirlwind,

Speaking to us out of the silence,

Calling to us to give Voice to its Truth.

Through our words,

And our deeds,

And our lives....


***
[Extemporaneous Introduction: “Emergency Back-up Sermon Generator”]

I’ve been thinking an awful lot about Time this past week, and not just in terms of this whole annual “Spring Forward, Fall Back” routine. Rather, I’ve been thinking about Time as a measure of our Lives, and of the various ways in which we, as post-modern 21st century men and women, do or do not live our lives in time to the rhythms of the Universe.

And with these reflections have come a momentary period of contemplation upon the nature of Time itself as well; and how our understanding of Time -- what it is, what it means -- has changed over the years as a result of our changing lifestyles. For example, is Time fundamentally linear or circular? Does it progress from beginning to end, or rather repeat itself seasonally for all eternity? Or maybe it’s a little of both. Or maybe it’s really neither. Maybe all the Time we will ever truly know or have is right now in this moment: and the past is just a memory, the future merely a dream. And how can we be sure from one moment to the next whether what we THINK we are experiencing is really real, and not simply some figment of our imagination, an orderly structure we impose upon our subjective experience of a fundamentally chaotic Universe?

We can come back to these abstract metaphysical speculations any time we like; they’ve been around since time immemorial, and I’m not really sure that anyone has actually figured them out yet...except maybe Stephen Hawking. But I do just want to remind everyone here once again why we observe this particular holiday: because this is once more the time of the year when the ancient, pre-Christian Northern European “pagans” -- the Germans, the Scandinavians, the Celts -- believed that the World of the Living and the World of the Dead were at their closest proximity.

And if we simply pause and take a moment to look at the world from their perspective, you’ll see that it all makes perfect sense. This is the Season when the great Circle of Life enters into its period of dark, cold, deathlike dormancy. From life to death to rebirth in the spring, the cycle repeats...yet here in the heart of Autumn is the threshold between the last lingering days of the living and the eternal night that is death. It is a liminal time, when the boundaries are indistinct, and spirits might move freely from one realm to the other.

And of course, over time, and with the coming of Christianity, All Hallows Eve became All Saints Day, and the Feast of All Souls, (and in some Latin American cultures, Dia de los Muertos -- “The Day of the Dead”). Just as the birth of Christ came to be commemorated four days following the longest night of the year; and the miracle of Easter, of course, reoccurs annually in the Spring, on the first Sunday following the first full moon following the vernal equinox. Human beings learned how to tell time in the first place from the heavens. The only real problem is that now we know that the Clockwork Universe tends to run a little slow.

Most of us probably don’t think about it that often, but the reason there are seven days in a week and four weeks to a month is that it takes 28 days for the moon to wax and wane from new to full to new again. But for some inexplicable reason, although mathematically there 360 degrees in a circle, there are actually 365 days to a year, which tends to throw a little glitch into the easy and elegant symmetry of 60 seconds to a minute and 60 minutes to a degree, all of it so neatly divisible by Pi.

And what a difference a day makes. A day, of course, is the amount of time it takes for the earth to revolve once around its axis: a period of time which, by convention, consists of twenty-four hours of daylight and darkness, give or take a few seconds. But the problem, of course, is that the earth wobbles as it spins, and it’s orbit also has a little tilt to it, which means that depending on how far north or south you may be at any given time of the year, within that same 24-hour period some “days” are noticeably longer than others...or at least that part of the day that happens in daylight.

And when does a day properly begin anyway? Does the new day dawn at sunrise, when the rooster crows and awakens all within earshot from their sleep? Or perhaps it’s more reasonable to wait until sunset, at the end of the day, which would logically mark the beginning of the next day as well. Or perhaps it’s really most logical to begin the new day at the Meridian -- high noon -- when the Sun is directly overhead, and thus equidistant in terms of time between dawn and dusk. This is the way a sundial works: one of the world’s oldest and most reliable timepieces. And it is also how sailors at sea have historically marked the time, since it is so essential to their ability to calculate their location, no matter where they may find themselves upon the globe.

But to begin a new day at midnight -- as we do these days -- seems completely arbitrary, especially since without some sort of artificial timepiece, there is really no good way of even telling when midnight is.

The time was that every local community set its clocks by the heavens; they looked up into the sky, figured out when the sun was directly overhead, set the big hand and the little hand straight up to twelve noon, and thus divided the day evenly into two equal halves: Ante-Meridian and Post-Meridian, AM and PM. It wasn’t until the development of railroads in the 19th century that the perceived need for more reliable timetables created a push for “Standard” time -- so that noon in Portland would be the same as noon in Boston or noon New York, even though the sun shines on us a lot sooner here “Down East” than it does in those other places.

And once the timekeepers learned that they could break faith with the heavens and tinker with time, all sorts of mischief was soon in the works. Farmers have always tended to work from dawn to dusk, regardless of when or where they have lived. But modern office and factory workers tend to work in eight hour shifts (typically from nine to five), forty hours a week...so as the days grow longer and the evenings more pleasant, why not simply move nine AM a little earlier in the day, so that folks can save a little more daylight for the evening after work?

And of course, the great irony is that the further we drift from living in harmony with the natural rhythms of the seasons, the more we become a civilization of clock-watchers laboring under artificial light, only to feel like there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done that we want to get done. At the end of the day, it often seems as though all that our many so-called time-saving technologies have done for us is to accelerate the pace of life itself, leaving us with less time left over for ourselves than our ancestors enjoyed even just a generation ago.

Then again, as the saying goes, we can always sleep when we’re dead....

None of us really knows for certain the measure of our days. We can consult the actuarial tables; we can look to our family medical histories; we can simply cross our fingers, close our eyes, and try not to think about it very much at all. But it’s all just speculation; a little educated guess-work. At some point each of us figures out that we probably have a lot less life left in front of us than is already behind us, but even this is simply an abstraction, because let’s face it -- the past IS history, while each new day is a new beginning. And likewise, there are many who would say that it’s not so much the time we have left to live, as it is the amount of life we squeeze out of the time we do have left...

But the real secret, it seems to me, to truly getting the most out of life in the time we have been given, is to learn how to live life fully present in each moment. And believe me, this is really hard, especially for those of us whose imaginations tend to fly off at the drop of a hat far into the distant future, while at the same time lingering nostalgically over days long past, and procrastinating shamelessly about whatever is near at hand.

But to aspire to live life fully present in the moment, taking each day as it comes while still moving forward toward some future goal, -- patiently, persistently, tenatiously...one day, one step, at a time -- still cherishing those fond memories of good times we might wish would last forever, and letting go of those bitter memories that only hold us back -- it’s a worthy ambition, even though we may never fully achieve it before we die. To live each day as if it were our first, and not just potentially our last...it’s the challenge we all face every day of our lives, no matter how many years we may have already lived.

Which brings us at long last to that age-old question, what happens to us after we die?

The short answer is easy: nobody really knows -- or at least not anybody alive today. And the Scientific answer isn’t really all that much more complicated. Our hearts stop beating, we take our final breath, the synapses in our brains fire for the last time, and the complex organic compounds that make up our bodies slowly but inexorably begin to decay, returning once more to the earth from whence they came.

But is that really the end of “us?” -- a few pounds of chemicals and an awful lot of H2O, recycled back into the system to be used in some other combination. What about our individuality, our unique personality, our “soul” -- that essential “spark” that makes us who we are, and which gives our life meaning?

And I’m sure there are some who would suggest that if this really WERE all that there is, than maybe our lives ARE meaningless....

But I know in my heart that our lives HAVE meaning. I know how much the lives of the people commemorated on this table by these pictures, and these flowers, and these candles, have meant to all of you. And so I know that there is more to life than merely living, and that are deaths are merely another moment in time.

Pray with me now, won’t you?

Loving Creator of all that is, who gives us life and gives our lives meaning... We dwell in this place for but a brief time, yet within this eyeblink on the face of eternity, so much has been given to us. And so we give thanks for this great gift of life, and for the lives of all those who have touched or own, and helped make us who we are today, in this moment. May our own lives speak as testimony to their worthiness, and may their presence among us never be forgotten....

REMEMBERING MICHAEL SERVETUS

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday October 28, 2007


One of the great joys about my job in general, and about this job here at First Parish in particular, is that I literally get to go to work each day surrounded by history. I get to witness it, I get to be a part of it, and who knows? -- in time, working together, we may even get an opportunity to make a little of it ourselves. A few weeks ago I shared with you some words by author Lesley Poles Hartley, just at they were shared with me by one of my professors when I was beginning my doctoral studies: "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." And as a terminally-educated historian, I am also an avid and enthusiastic armchair tourist— I delight in exploring what the past has to show me, simply for the experience of seeing the world through different eyes.

Of course, there is also a practical side to this exploration. "Those who cannot remember the past," Harvard philosopher George Santayana once observed,"are condemned to repeat it." And Santayana himself was merely echoing the sentiments of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote his history of the Peloponnesian War out of a belief that an exact knowledge of the past was a useful aid to the interpretation of the future. Thucydides understood the real reason that history repeats itself. Times may change, but people seldom do — the same passions, ambitions, weaknesses and appetites that motivated human behavior in the ancient world are still very much with us today. In its essence, history is simply the story of what it means to be human: how we have reacted to the challenges of the past, and how we might be expected to react to the challenges of the future.

Of course, as a Unitarian Universalist minister, I have yet another interest in a very specific of kind of history. Because for a denomination as theologically diverse and pluralistic as our own, our history — that is to say, our shared heritage and our living tradition — is one of the few things that we all have in common, and in many ways is the “glue” that binds us together as single religious movement. Our history reveals the common elements that have come together to make us what we are today. Through the lives and experiences of our spiritual forebearers, we see reflected many of the same purposes and principles Unitarian Universalists aspire to live by today. Yet we often see them in a context dramatically different from our own, which by its mere strangeness can help us to see and understand ourselves from a radically different perspective.

And when I say that I get to come to work each day literally surrounded by history, I literally mean literally. For example, when I climb these pulpit steps each week, it’s difficult not to notice the memorials here on the wall to three of my illustrious predecessors in this pulpit: Thomas Smith, Samuel Deane, and Ichabod Nichols, who collectively served and led this congregation for a total of 132 years (from 1727 to 1859), an era which included some of the most significant events in this congregation’s history, including both its gradual theological evolution from Puritan Calvinism to Unitarianism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as well as the construction of this Meeting House in 1825, at a total cost of slightly more than $18,000 (which, believe me, was a lot more money back in those days than it sounds like today).

But if you look closely at these memorials, you’ll notice that they all end the same way: “Died in this Ministry” followed by a date...which is a pretty morbid thought to have in mind as one enters this pulpit, until you stop to do the math. Thomas Smith was “ordained over” this congregation in 1727 at the age of 25, and “died in this ministry” 68 years later at the age of 93. Samuel Deane was called here at the age of 31 to serve as Parson Smith’s colleague in 1764 (when Smith himself was still a mere spring chicken in his 62nd year of life), and “died in this ministry” in 1814 at the age of 81, after a 50 year term of service. And Ichabod Nichols (whose openly professed Unitarianism caused such a stir in the community when he first arrived here in 1809) was ordained as Deane’s colleague one month shy of his own 25th birthday, and served this congregation a mere 40 years before dying in this ministry at the relatively young age of 74.

You can read a lot more about these ministers (as well as the many others who have served this congregation) on the First Parish Website. So far my own contribution to that history is merely one sentence, basically acknowledging that I’ve arrived; but I hope (with your help) that we can accomplish a few things more worthy of remembrance before writing the final word on my tenure in this pulpit.

And the person whose life (and death) I really want to talk about today actually comes from a very different era of our history altogether. Michael Servetus is known to historians by his literary Latin nom de plume, but he probably would have been known to his closest friends (if he’d had any) as Miguel Serveto alias Michel de Villeneuve: humanist and reformer, author and editor, physician, astrologer, heretic and martyr... it makes for an interesting business card, to say the least. He is often identified as the "founder" of Unitarianism, yet I doubt many contemporary Unitarian Universalists would find much comfort in his doctrine or even much pleasure in his company today. He was arrogant, at times even obnoxious, smug in his abundant intellectual gifts and uncompromisingly certain of his religious convictions. In a word, he was a typical 16th century reformer, filled with mystical confidence and passionate in his heady quest for the restitution of an uncorrupted Christian faith.

As best historians can tell, Migual Serveto was born in the year 1511 in the Spanish town of Villanueva. The name Servetus, as I mentioned earlier, is the Latin form of his Spanish surname, and comes to us from his books, which were, of course, written in Latin. His father, Antonio, was a minor noble and public notary; his brother Juan a Catholic priest. For centuries the Iberian peninsula had boiled with religious strife: Sephardic Jews, Moslem Moors and Castilian Catholics all inhabiting the same land, at times co-existing, at others fighting ruthlessly for political and cultural dominance. The Catholics eventually emerged on top, at about the same time Columbus sailed for the New World in 1492; and two decades later the influence of the Spanish Inquisition, which attempted to root out those remaining Jews and Moslems who refused to convert to Christianity, was still very much in evidence during Servetus's boyhood.

At the age of 14, Servetus went to work as a secretary to the Franciscan scholar Juan de Quintana, and two years later took a sabbatical from this service in order to undertake the study of Law at the University of Toulouse in France. It was doubtlessly here that he began the theological speculations that were eventually to lead him to his place in history. Servetus was evidently very much troubled by the "problem" of the Moslems and Jews in Spain. If Christianity represented a true revelation from God On High, why were the Moors and the Jews so reluctant to convert? The answer, obviously, lay in the doctrine of the Trinity, which a pious Moslem or Jew could only understand as the worship of three Gods.

At Toulouse, Servetus was exposed for the first time to the text of the Scriptures in their original Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, as well as the writings of some of the early Church fathers, particularly Irenaeus and Tertullian, which were starting to become available through the scholarship of Renaissance humanists like Erasmus. While Servetus could find reference to "the father," "the son," and "the holy spirit," in his readings, nowhere in the Bible could he find their relationship described in the terms used by the Council of Nicea in 325 to define the limits of Christian Orthodoxy. The Greek word homousia (in Latin, consubstantial) — "one essence" or "substance" — simply does not occur anywhere in the New Testament; and for Servetus its absence from Scripture was highly significant. Was it not possible that God the Father alone was Eternal, and that Christ his Son was a created being, a manifestation of the divine Godhead but not co-equal with it? Would not this kind of theology allow Christians, Moslems and Jews to worship together, as common children of the same Creator?

We can’t be sure exactly how far Servetus had developed this line of thought while a student at Toulouse, but in 1529 he returned to the service of Quintana, whom he accompanied to the lavish Papal coronation of Charles the Fifth as Holy Roman Emperor in the spring of 1530. Servetus was evidently shocked by the corruption and affluence of the Papacy, just as many other would-be Protestant reformers had been shocked before him. That summer he slipped away from the royal court, and shortly afterwards surfaced in the Protestant town of Basel. And a year later, when Servetus was still only 20 years old, he published his first book, De Trinitatis Erroribus or "On The Errors of the Trinity," a work which was to brand him as a hunted heretic for the remainder of his life.

Servetus may have been arrogant, but he was not stupid. He knew that he had written a controversial book, and therefore arranged to have it secretly printed in Strasbourg. He honestly (or perhaps naively) hoped and believed that the truth of his ideas would be readily perceived and quickly accepted, and therefore he sent complimentary copies to all of the prominent reformers and humanists of the day. Initial response was mixed, but as the months passed the criticisms became more and more negative. Servetus had managed to come up with something to offend just about everyone: not only had he done away with the doctrine of the Trinity, but he also had taken issue with the efficacy of infant baptism, and with Luther's doctrine of Justification by Faith.

By June of 1532, only a year after its publication, sale of Servetus's book had been banned in the towns controlled by the Reformers, and a warrant for his arrest had been issued by the Catholic Inquisition as well. His own brother Juan was instructed by the Spanish authorities to travel to Germany and lure Servetus back into Catholic hands, so that justice against heretics might appropriately be carried out. Meanwhile, Servetus himself apparently even contemplated fleeing incognito to the New World in order to escape the repercussions of his writing.

But instead he fled to France, taking on the assumed name Michel de Villenueve. He eventually settled in Lyon, where he took up work as an editor for the publishers Melchior and Gaspard Trechsel. Servetus lived secretly in France for some 20 years, editing editions of Ptolemy's Geography and of the Bible itself, studying medicine for a time at the University of Paris, and lecturing on Astrology in order to support his studies, a practice which nearly lead to the discovery of his true identity.

Servetus was also evidently quite successful as a physician, and made a name for himself in the history of medicine as the first to note the aeration of blood in the lungs. He never married, possibly out of fear that he would be unable to keep his past a secret from his wife. His passion for theology never waned. When John Calvin's Institutes started to appear in publication, Servetus obtained copies and read them eagerly. He initiated a secret correspondence with Calvin (whom he may actually have met in person earlier in Paris in 1533), and they exchanged some 30 letters, which over time grew increasingly heated and abusive in tone. Both men wrote under assumed names to protect their identities: Calvin used the name Charles Despeville; while with characteristic boldness, Servetus used his own name as a pseudonym, in order to hide his identity as Michel de Villenueve. When Calvin started to refer Servetus to the Institutes for answers, instead of bothering to answer his questions directly, Servetus responded by returning pages of Calvin’s book with every paragraph marked with insulting marginal annotations. He also sent Calvin a manuscript of his own work-in-progress, The Restitution of Christianity, the Latin title of which, Christianismi Restitutio, was an obvious pun on Calvin's own Institutio. When Calvin finally broke off the correspondence, Servetus wrote again asking for the return of his manuscript; Calvin never responded, and the manuscript would eventually surface in evidence at Servetus's trial.

Having learned his lesson in 1531, Servetus took even greater precautions to insure that his new book could not be traced back to him. The presses were set up secretly in an abandoned house on the outskirts of town, the printers themselves had no knowledge of what they were printing, and the new manuscript (Calvin was still in possession of the original draft) was burned page by page as soon as it was set in type. The printing was completed on January 3rd, 1553. A few copies were sent to a sympathetic bookseller in Frankfort, and the remainder moved secretly to the home of a friend in Lyon.

A printed copy somehow came into the hands of Calvin during the month of February; perhaps it was sent by Servetus himself. By now Calvin had figured out that the Servetus with whom he had earlier corresponded was indeed the notorious heretic of two decades earlier, and he promptly conspired to deliver Servetus into the hands the Inquisitors in Lyon, having an associate write a letter in which were included the first four pages of Servetus's book.

Let me take a moment to explain the significance of this. While the various reformers often bickered among themselves, never before had they betrayed one of their own to agents of the Pope. It simply wasn't done. Moreover, when this initial evidence proved inadequate for the Inquisition's needs, Calvin forwarded parts of Servetus's earlier correspondence with him, which being in Servetus's own handwriting were not so easily denied. By this time Servetus was already under arrest, but having successfully practiced medicine in the community for some years he was not without friends, and with their help he was able to effect an escape. But the copies of his book were discovered and burned, along with an effigy of his body. So complete was the destruction that only three of that original printing of a thousand still exist today.

The final chapter of the story is perhaps the most interesting of all. On Sunday August 13th, 1553, Michael Servetus was arrested as he left church in the city of Geneva. The preacher that day was John Calvin. Servetus was accused of heresy, blasphemy, immorality and sedition, to list the major charges. He languished in a dungeon for several months, subjected to frequent "vigorous" interrogation, afflicted by vermin, denied decent food or even an occasional change of clothes, his spirit and morale gradually withering away, yet his religious convictions never faltering. He was at last formally tried and found guilty on the 26th of October, and sentenced to be burned to death at the stake the following morning, 454 years ago, yesterday, in only his 42nd year of life. It is reported that his final words were "O Jesus, Son of the Eternal God, have pity on me." More than one historian has noted that had he merely changed the position of the adjective and prayed for deliverance to "Jesus, the eternal son of God," his views would have been considered acceptable by the court.

It has also been noted that Servetus had a far greater impact on the shape of Protestant Christianity in death than he ever made during his lifetime. Never before had one Reformer been responsible for the execution of another for reason of religious belief, and John Calvin lost a great deal of respect and credibility among his peers by having become the first. Reformers who had been harsh in their condemnation of Servetus's theological opinions while he was alive now found themselves defending his right to hold them against Calvin's obvious abuse of secular power. The widespread acceptance of the ideal of religious tolerance was still centuries away — in fact, I often wonder whether it has yet to be achieved. But in the aftermath of the martyrdom of Servetus, all of Western Civilization took its first hesitant steps towards its realization.

The standard narrative histories of the life and death of Servetus routinely emphasize the importance of the latter at the expense of the former. They tend to characterize Servetus personally as a brilliant yet idealistically headstrong young heretic, and an outspoken firebrand who nevertheless maintained the courage of his convictions even unto death, and thus became a martyr to the cause of Religious Freedom. But it seems to me that this dramatic narrative needs to be read alongside those of people like Thomas Smith, and Samuel Deane, and Ichabod Nichols, who also gave their lives in the pursuit of Spiritual Truth and in defense of Religious Liberty, and whose faithful service has also made it possible for us to enjoy those same freedoms today....

Michael Servetus.
Died in this Ministry,
October 27, 1553....