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....
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Sunday, October 21, 2007
CONFESSIONS OF A ZEN BAPTIST
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday October 21st, 2007
OPENING WORDS: from Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism In Translations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1896), 283-84
A large part of the pleasure that I have experienced in the study of Buddhism has arisen from what I may call the strangeness of the intellectual landscape. All the ideas, the modes of argument, even the postulates assumed and not argued about, have always seemed so strange, so different from anything to which I have been accustomed, that I felt all the time as though walking in Fairyland. Much of the charm that the Oriental thoughts and ideas have for me appears to be because they so seldom fit into Western categories.
***
Listening last week to Rabbi Sky tell that story about the monastery in the woods, where all the brothers treated one another with such respect, because they were told that the Messiah was living among them, reminded me of a Buddhist monastery I once heard about, located on a small island in the South Pacific, where the monks essentially lived in complete silence.
With the exception of the absolute minimum amount of non-verbal communication required for safety, the monks basically only spoke twice a day. Every morning when they came in for breakfast at the conclusion of their morning meditation, the Abbot would wait until everyone was seated, and then he would stand up at the head of the refectory and chant “Good Morning.” And all of the other monks would chant back in unison “Good Morning,” before eating their humble meal together in silence.
And then at night, at the conclusion of the evening meal, the Abbot would again stand at the head of the refectory and chant “Good Evening,” and all of the monks would answer “Good Evening,” before heading back to their cells to sleep.
Now there was one young monk, recently arrived on the island from the United States, who really struggled to fit in with this discipline. And after a few months of this routine, he was nearly at the breaking point. So one morning, when the Abbot stood up at the head of the refectory and chanted “Good Morning,” and all of the other monks chanted back “Good Morning,” this one rebellious monk chanted instead “Good Evening.”
There is silence, and then there is silence. The Abbot gazed out across the crowded room, carefully scrutinizing the face of each monk. And then he said, [singing] “Some [-one/en-]chanted evening....”
On one level, my sermon this morning deals with a very personal subject: it is essentially the story of how my own study of Buddhism when I was younger eventually helped me to better understand and appreciate my culturally Christian roots, and also helped make me into a better Unitarian Universalist minister in the process. But it also deals with topics far more wide-ranging in their scope. Nearly half a century ago, in the midst of what we have now come to think of as “the Cold War,” historian Arnold Toynbee observed that a thousand years hence, when the historians of that day sit down to write the history of ours, they will care little about this brief period of conflict between the Communist nations of Eastern Europe and those more liberal nations to the West who enjoy a somewhat freer polity. Rather, what they will really want to know is what happened to both Christianity and to Buddhism when these two great world religions encountered one another for the first time. "Buddhism has transformed every culture it has entered, and Buddhism has been transformed by its entry into that culture,” Toynbee remarked. “The coming of Buddhism to the West may well prove to be the most important event of the Twentieth Century.”
Toynbee, of course, certainly had (and has) his critics: equally brilliant intellectuals somewhat more grounded in their imagination, who essentially have dismissed Toynbee’s work as “metaphysics masquerading as history.” But we need only look back a thousand years ago to appreciate the essential insight of Toynbee's opinion. Who among us can remember who won the Hundred Years War, much less why it started, or what was at stake? Perhaps Agincourt or Joan of Arc may ring a bell; maybe we have seen a movie or two set in that period. But when we think about the legacy of Christianity's first encounter with Islam, and the reintroduction of Aristotelian science into western Europe, at the subsequent Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment of Christendom (not to mention those little things called “the Crusades,”) we discover that the legacy of that encounter is still very much alive and with us today. The deep currents of human history move slowly, but they carry before them the tide of all civilization.
My story, of course, is my own, but I also suspect that in many ways it is somewhat typical of those deeper cultural currents. Like many young people, I first became interested in the great questions posed by Religion during my adolescence, and turned first for answers to what I have now come to think of as the “feel good” Christianity of popular culture, the faith I saw all around me. I was fascinated by the idea of being “born again,” and with the idealism of making a lift-transforming commitment to something larger than myself, of devoting my loyalty to a transcendent being who loved me like a father loves his children, and in whose eyes all human beings are brothers and sisters. I admired the great ethical and spiritual insights I discovered in the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount and in the wisdom of the parables and the Golden Rule; I was excited by the drama of a Last Judgment, and a final showdown between good and evil.
Yet it also bothered me that the popular Cultural Christianity presented to me on television and through the efforts of evangelical student groups didn't really add up for me intellectually. I was particularly bothered by the whole idea of being “saved” and the doctrine of original sin and vicarious atonement which stood behind it. I mean, even as a teenager I knew I wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t really lie or cheat or steal (or at least not so you’d notice), and I certainly hadn’t murdered anyone (much less committed adultery). I was reasonably good about honoring my mother and father (at least for a teenager, that is), and I thought that coveting my neighbors possessions was just part of the American Way.
And I suppose I could have been a little better about not taking the Lord’s name in vain, and remembering the Sabbath and keeping it holy. But I certainly wasn’t worshipping any other Gods before him, or making any graven images. But it bothered me. How could a Just and Loving God possibly hold anyone accountable for something that supposedly happened long before they were even born, and what was something so simple and innocuous as professing faith in Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior going to do to change it?
I suppose that had I been a better algebra student, I would have realized that the two terms simply canceled one another out: that since I didn't do anything in particular to get myself into this state of sin in the first place, I shouldn't feel too compelled to do anything especially onerous to get out of it either. But by that point it had all started to seem like a giant scam: Christ the Cosmic Repo Man, who redeemed our souls from their debt to the Devil only to charge a higher rate of interest, and threaten us with the same punishment of eternal damnation if we failed to make the payments.
And while we’re at it, what was all this nonsense about the Virgin Birth? What kind of God would get a young girl pregnant out of wedlock in the first place, and without even asking her opinion on the matter, much less her consent? If God had created the World in seven days six thousand years ago, what about those dinosaurs I’d heard so much about, whose decomposed remains powered the wheels that made our entire civilization go round? Walking on the water; rising from the dead...it all started to sound like just another fairy tale intended to frighten young children into doing what their parents told them. I had more faith in astrology, and in the existence of life on other planets.
I suppose what originally attracted me to Buddhism was the fact that it seemed so different from the Christianity I saw around me - so much more pristine, honest, and contemplative: the "exotic wisdom of the orient" standing in sharp contrast to the materialism and hypocrisy of popular evangelical Christianity. Of course, I didn't really know that much about Buddhism in those days either: just what I saw on television, or read in books by popularizers like Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, and DT Suzuki. In time I would come to see that there were just as many strange Buddhist superstitions as there were silly Christian ones, and that miracles like the Buddha's building of 40,000 Stupas (or temples) across the island of Sri Lanka in a single night made little things like walking on the water look like small potatoes. But by then I was already in Divinity school, and had learned enough that it didn't bother me any more.
Within the Christian tradition, Ultimate Reality has typically been characterized as something "wholly other" from human beings: a sovereign God, Creator of the Universe by Word alone, from whom we are alienated by our sinful nature, and yet who, as sovereign, demands both our Worship and our Obedience, has been revealed to us through history as recorded in the Scripture, and ultimately, through God's Word incarnate in human flesh, Jesus Christ, the Anointed King and Son of God, the ˇperfect” human being. This basic theological paradigm, perhaps with different emphases, is shared in its essence by every Christian group known to history, and (with the exception of the “Jesus” part) by the monotheistic faiths of Judaism and Islam as well. God stands outside the world, as its Creator and its Judge; we live within the world, as creatures, waiting to be judged.
At its worst, when fundamentalist literalism rears its head, this world view often results in a rigid, fatalistic, uncompromising style of faith -- a faith based on blind Obedience rather than the fullness and fulfillment of human potential. Yet at its best, it manifests itself through a profound sense of social justice (in obedience to God's will); a sensitivity to the linear flow of history and our destiny within it, a recognition of our accountability for our choices and actions, and of our responsibility both to the generous and compassionate Spirit which created us, and to our fellow human beings.
But Buddhism, in many ways, is based on an entirely different set of assumptions. The Buddha was the "awakened one" -- the one who came to see the true Nature of our human existence. Born Siddhartha Gautama, the son of an Indian King, it was prophesied at his birth that he would become either a great king himself, a World Conqueror; or a great religious leader, a World Renouncer. His father (who naturally wished to see his son continue in the family business of conquering things) went to great lengths to insure that the young Prince gain no knowledge of the profound pain and suffering which accompany human existence, and typically provide the catalyst for our religious yearnings.
Yet destiny is not to be denied, and after a series of excursions into the countryside during which the young prince discovered the existence of poverty, disease, old age and death, the man who was destined to become the Buddha left his father's house and began a career as a wandering Ascetic, practicing all sorts of disciplines and mortifications in order to gain the wisdom he desired.
After a period of years during which he had grown no closer to his goal, he sat down one day beneath a Bo tree, vowing not to move from that spot until he achieved enlightenment. A passerby mistook him for a deity and offered him some nourishment, and that night Siddhartha discovered the Dharma, the Four Noble Truths of the Middle Way. All Existence consists of Suffering, through an endless series of deaths and rebirths; and the cause of this suffering is our human "Thirst" for the finite and transient things of this world, "conditional" things, which “come into being and pass away.”
Yet there is an escape from this destiny of endless sorrow, through the Middle Way of the Noble eight-fold path: right Views, right Intention, right Speech, right Action, right Livelihood, right Effort, right Mindfulness, and right Concentration: a balanced approach of Spiritual Wisdom, Ethical Conduct, and Mental Development leading to the detachment and liberation of our personalities from conditional reality, and the eventual extinction of our "selves" in the vast emptiness which fills the spaces between the endlessly changing web of impermanent "things."
Unlike Christianity's emphasis on the authority and revelation of an unchanging, sovereign God, Buddhism expresses itself through a deeply contemplative analysis and existential response to the human condition, and a profound sensitivity to the interrelatedness of all things in a changing, natural world.
There are exceptions to these broad generalizations of course. The various "pure land" sects of Buddhism, for instance, express a world view very similar to that of traditional Christianity; while the writings of Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart or Julian of Norwich reveal a sensitivity to the essential emptiness of this world which would feel quite familiar to a Buddhist monk sitting in meditation. Nevertheless, on the whole the one Great Commandment to Christians remains: "Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and love thy neighbor as thyself;" while a pious Buddhist would feel far more at home with this aphorism attributed to the 13th century Zen monk Dogen: "To study the way is to study the self; to study the self is to lose the self; to lose the self is to be enlightened by all the world."
Scholars point out that already the encounter between Buddhism and Christianity here in the half century since Toynbee first make his observation has subtlety started to influence both of these two great religions. For Buddhism, it has meant a renewed interest in the importance of history, and a deeper recognition of the social justice imperatives which accompany religious conviction. For Christianity, it has meant a resurgence of interest in contemplative spirituality, and a more profound appreciation for the ecological interconnectedness of our planet.
Yet for someone who is neither (strictly speaking) a practicing Buddhist nor a confessing Christian, but rather a life-long Unitarian Universalist, who believes that all Truth (as we know it) is merely part of a much larger mystery, at once both harmonious and contradictory, and that no creed or dogma is ever safe from the inquiries and scrutiny of Reason and Experience, the dialog between these two great religious traditions is just beginning to bear fruit. And it promises to us a deeper understanding of the life of faith itself, which recognizes that the future is the result of what we do in the moment, yet appreciates the subtle web of interdependent relationships that bind us all together: a faith sensitive to the mystical unity between ourselves and Ultimate Reality, yet capable of deliberate and deeply-committed Social Action to insure that Justice and Compassion ultimately triumph over Evil.
It promises a religion in which "sin" is not so much transgression, but rather alienation from the Divine Source of Life Itself, manifested through our desire (or thirst) for things which are ultimately not important and which pass away; and where “Repentance" is not based on guilt, but rather represents a "Transformation of Mind,” a letting go of our attachment to temporary things in favor of a commitment to ethical conduct, the constant search for greater wisdom, and a deeply personal devotion to the contemplation of the mysteries of human existence.
It is a faith which recognizes that it is not enough to "see" the Divine, one must also learn to BE divine, (or perhaps more accurately, learn how to get our own egos out of the way so that The Divine may be in us); that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and that one must first lose one's life in order to find it.
For to study the Way is to study the Self, to study the Self is to lose the Self, to lose the Self is to be Enlightened by all the World.
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday October 21st, 2007
OPENING WORDS: from Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism In Translations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1896), 283-84
A large part of the pleasure that I have experienced in the study of Buddhism has arisen from what I may call the strangeness of the intellectual landscape. All the ideas, the modes of argument, even the postulates assumed and not argued about, have always seemed so strange, so different from anything to which I have been accustomed, that I felt all the time as though walking in Fairyland. Much of the charm that the Oriental thoughts and ideas have for me appears to be because they so seldom fit into Western categories.
***
Listening last week to Rabbi Sky tell that story about the monastery in the woods, where all the brothers treated one another with such respect, because they were told that the Messiah was living among them, reminded me of a Buddhist monastery I once heard about, located on a small island in the South Pacific, where the monks essentially lived in complete silence.
With the exception of the absolute minimum amount of non-verbal communication required for safety, the monks basically only spoke twice a day. Every morning when they came in for breakfast at the conclusion of their morning meditation, the Abbot would wait until everyone was seated, and then he would stand up at the head of the refectory and chant “Good Morning.” And all of the other monks would chant back in unison “Good Morning,” before eating their humble meal together in silence.
And then at night, at the conclusion of the evening meal, the Abbot would again stand at the head of the refectory and chant “Good Evening,” and all of the monks would answer “Good Evening,” before heading back to their cells to sleep.
Now there was one young monk, recently arrived on the island from the United States, who really struggled to fit in with this discipline. And after a few months of this routine, he was nearly at the breaking point. So one morning, when the Abbot stood up at the head of the refectory and chanted “Good Morning,” and all of the other monks chanted back “Good Morning,” this one rebellious monk chanted instead “Good Evening.”
There is silence, and then there is silence. The Abbot gazed out across the crowded room, carefully scrutinizing the face of each monk. And then he said, [singing] “Some [-one/en-]chanted evening....”
On one level, my sermon this morning deals with a very personal subject: it is essentially the story of how my own study of Buddhism when I was younger eventually helped me to better understand and appreciate my culturally Christian roots, and also helped make me into a better Unitarian Universalist minister in the process. But it also deals with topics far more wide-ranging in their scope. Nearly half a century ago, in the midst of what we have now come to think of as “the Cold War,” historian Arnold Toynbee observed that a thousand years hence, when the historians of that day sit down to write the history of ours, they will care little about this brief period of conflict between the Communist nations of Eastern Europe and those more liberal nations to the West who enjoy a somewhat freer polity. Rather, what they will really want to know is what happened to both Christianity and to Buddhism when these two great world religions encountered one another for the first time. "Buddhism has transformed every culture it has entered, and Buddhism has been transformed by its entry into that culture,” Toynbee remarked. “The coming of Buddhism to the West may well prove to be the most important event of the Twentieth Century.”
Toynbee, of course, certainly had (and has) his critics: equally brilliant intellectuals somewhat more grounded in their imagination, who essentially have dismissed Toynbee’s work as “metaphysics masquerading as history.” But we need only look back a thousand years ago to appreciate the essential insight of Toynbee's opinion. Who among us can remember who won the Hundred Years War, much less why it started, or what was at stake? Perhaps Agincourt or Joan of Arc may ring a bell; maybe we have seen a movie or two set in that period. But when we think about the legacy of Christianity's first encounter with Islam, and the reintroduction of Aristotelian science into western Europe, at the subsequent Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment of Christendom (not to mention those little things called “the Crusades,”) we discover that the legacy of that encounter is still very much alive and with us today. The deep currents of human history move slowly, but they carry before them the tide of all civilization.
My story, of course, is my own, but I also suspect that in many ways it is somewhat typical of those deeper cultural currents. Like many young people, I first became interested in the great questions posed by Religion during my adolescence, and turned first for answers to what I have now come to think of as the “feel good” Christianity of popular culture, the faith I saw all around me. I was fascinated by the idea of being “born again,” and with the idealism of making a lift-transforming commitment to something larger than myself, of devoting my loyalty to a transcendent being who loved me like a father loves his children, and in whose eyes all human beings are brothers and sisters. I admired the great ethical and spiritual insights I discovered in the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount and in the wisdom of the parables and the Golden Rule; I was excited by the drama of a Last Judgment, and a final showdown between good and evil.
Yet it also bothered me that the popular Cultural Christianity presented to me on television and through the efforts of evangelical student groups didn't really add up for me intellectually. I was particularly bothered by the whole idea of being “saved” and the doctrine of original sin and vicarious atonement which stood behind it. I mean, even as a teenager I knew I wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t really lie or cheat or steal (or at least not so you’d notice), and I certainly hadn’t murdered anyone (much less committed adultery). I was reasonably good about honoring my mother and father (at least for a teenager, that is), and I thought that coveting my neighbors possessions was just part of the American Way.
And I suppose I could have been a little better about not taking the Lord’s name in vain, and remembering the Sabbath and keeping it holy. But I certainly wasn’t worshipping any other Gods before him, or making any graven images. But it bothered me. How could a Just and Loving God possibly hold anyone accountable for something that supposedly happened long before they were even born, and what was something so simple and innocuous as professing faith in Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior going to do to change it?
I suppose that had I been a better algebra student, I would have realized that the two terms simply canceled one another out: that since I didn't do anything in particular to get myself into this state of sin in the first place, I shouldn't feel too compelled to do anything especially onerous to get out of it either. But by that point it had all started to seem like a giant scam: Christ the Cosmic Repo Man, who redeemed our souls from their debt to the Devil only to charge a higher rate of interest, and threaten us with the same punishment of eternal damnation if we failed to make the payments.
And while we’re at it, what was all this nonsense about the Virgin Birth? What kind of God would get a young girl pregnant out of wedlock in the first place, and without even asking her opinion on the matter, much less her consent? If God had created the World in seven days six thousand years ago, what about those dinosaurs I’d heard so much about, whose decomposed remains powered the wheels that made our entire civilization go round? Walking on the water; rising from the dead...it all started to sound like just another fairy tale intended to frighten young children into doing what their parents told them. I had more faith in astrology, and in the existence of life on other planets.
I suppose what originally attracted me to Buddhism was the fact that it seemed so different from the Christianity I saw around me - so much more pristine, honest, and contemplative: the "exotic wisdom of the orient" standing in sharp contrast to the materialism and hypocrisy of popular evangelical Christianity. Of course, I didn't really know that much about Buddhism in those days either: just what I saw on television, or read in books by popularizers like Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, and DT Suzuki. In time I would come to see that there were just as many strange Buddhist superstitions as there were silly Christian ones, and that miracles like the Buddha's building of 40,000 Stupas (or temples) across the island of Sri Lanka in a single night made little things like walking on the water look like small potatoes. But by then I was already in Divinity school, and had learned enough that it didn't bother me any more.
Within the Christian tradition, Ultimate Reality has typically been characterized as something "wholly other" from human beings: a sovereign God, Creator of the Universe by Word alone, from whom we are alienated by our sinful nature, and yet who, as sovereign, demands both our Worship and our Obedience, has been revealed to us through history as recorded in the Scripture, and ultimately, through God's Word incarnate in human flesh, Jesus Christ, the Anointed King and Son of God, the ˇperfect” human being. This basic theological paradigm, perhaps with different emphases, is shared in its essence by every Christian group known to history, and (with the exception of the “Jesus” part) by the monotheistic faiths of Judaism and Islam as well. God stands outside the world, as its Creator and its Judge; we live within the world, as creatures, waiting to be judged.
At its worst, when fundamentalist literalism rears its head, this world view often results in a rigid, fatalistic, uncompromising style of faith -- a faith based on blind Obedience rather than the fullness and fulfillment of human potential. Yet at its best, it manifests itself through a profound sense of social justice (in obedience to God's will); a sensitivity to the linear flow of history and our destiny within it, a recognition of our accountability for our choices and actions, and of our responsibility both to the generous and compassionate Spirit which created us, and to our fellow human beings.
But Buddhism, in many ways, is based on an entirely different set of assumptions. The Buddha was the "awakened one" -- the one who came to see the true Nature of our human existence. Born Siddhartha Gautama, the son of an Indian King, it was prophesied at his birth that he would become either a great king himself, a World Conqueror; or a great religious leader, a World Renouncer. His father (who naturally wished to see his son continue in the family business of conquering things) went to great lengths to insure that the young Prince gain no knowledge of the profound pain and suffering which accompany human existence, and typically provide the catalyst for our religious yearnings.
Yet destiny is not to be denied, and after a series of excursions into the countryside during which the young prince discovered the existence of poverty, disease, old age and death, the man who was destined to become the Buddha left his father's house and began a career as a wandering Ascetic, practicing all sorts of disciplines and mortifications in order to gain the wisdom he desired.
After a period of years during which he had grown no closer to his goal, he sat down one day beneath a Bo tree, vowing not to move from that spot until he achieved enlightenment. A passerby mistook him for a deity and offered him some nourishment, and that night Siddhartha discovered the Dharma, the Four Noble Truths of the Middle Way. All Existence consists of Suffering, through an endless series of deaths and rebirths; and the cause of this suffering is our human "Thirst" for the finite and transient things of this world, "conditional" things, which “come into being and pass away.”
Yet there is an escape from this destiny of endless sorrow, through the Middle Way of the Noble eight-fold path: right Views, right Intention, right Speech, right Action, right Livelihood, right Effort, right Mindfulness, and right Concentration: a balanced approach of Spiritual Wisdom, Ethical Conduct, and Mental Development leading to the detachment and liberation of our personalities from conditional reality, and the eventual extinction of our "selves" in the vast emptiness which fills the spaces between the endlessly changing web of impermanent "things."
Unlike Christianity's emphasis on the authority and revelation of an unchanging, sovereign God, Buddhism expresses itself through a deeply contemplative analysis and existential response to the human condition, and a profound sensitivity to the interrelatedness of all things in a changing, natural world.
There are exceptions to these broad generalizations of course. The various "pure land" sects of Buddhism, for instance, express a world view very similar to that of traditional Christianity; while the writings of Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart or Julian of Norwich reveal a sensitivity to the essential emptiness of this world which would feel quite familiar to a Buddhist monk sitting in meditation. Nevertheless, on the whole the one Great Commandment to Christians remains: "Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and love thy neighbor as thyself;" while a pious Buddhist would feel far more at home with this aphorism attributed to the 13th century Zen monk Dogen: "To study the way is to study the self; to study the self is to lose the self; to lose the self is to be enlightened by all the world."
Scholars point out that already the encounter between Buddhism and Christianity here in the half century since Toynbee first make his observation has subtlety started to influence both of these two great religions. For Buddhism, it has meant a renewed interest in the importance of history, and a deeper recognition of the social justice imperatives which accompany religious conviction. For Christianity, it has meant a resurgence of interest in contemplative spirituality, and a more profound appreciation for the ecological interconnectedness of our planet.
Yet for someone who is neither (strictly speaking) a practicing Buddhist nor a confessing Christian, but rather a life-long Unitarian Universalist, who believes that all Truth (as we know it) is merely part of a much larger mystery, at once both harmonious and contradictory, and that no creed or dogma is ever safe from the inquiries and scrutiny of Reason and Experience, the dialog between these two great religious traditions is just beginning to bear fruit. And it promises to us a deeper understanding of the life of faith itself, which recognizes that the future is the result of what we do in the moment, yet appreciates the subtle web of interdependent relationships that bind us all together: a faith sensitive to the mystical unity between ourselves and Ultimate Reality, yet capable of deliberate and deeply-committed Social Action to insure that Justice and Compassion ultimately triumph over Evil.
It promises a religion in which "sin" is not so much transgression, but rather alienation from the Divine Source of Life Itself, manifested through our desire (or thirst) for things which are ultimately not important and which pass away; and where “Repentance" is not based on guilt, but rather represents a "Transformation of Mind,” a letting go of our attachment to temporary things in favor of a commitment to ethical conduct, the constant search for greater wisdom, and a deeply personal devotion to the contemplation of the mysteries of human existence.
It is a faith which recognizes that it is not enough to "see" the Divine, one must also learn to BE divine, (or perhaps more accurately, learn how to get our own egos out of the way so that The Divine may be in us); that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and that one must first lose one's life in order to find it.
For to study the Way is to study the Self, to study the Self is to lose the Self, to lose the Self is to be Enlightened by all the World.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
HEART(H)FIRE
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday October 7, 2007
Last week I mentioned in passing that when I first met Fred Lipp last summer, he had given me some excellent advice about looking for inspiration for my sermons by going out into the streets of Portland; and this past week I actually found some.
Last Monday afternoon I was making a home hospice visit at the request of a social worker who had phoned the church, and while I was there one of the nurses (who was just completing a 24-hour shift) discovered that her car had been towed from the street outside the house. So I offered to give her a lift out to the tow yard on Warren Avenue, and on the way there we talked about all the things you might imagine two people would talk about in that situation: about how annoying it is to have your car towed, and how angry it can make you feel, which is probably why tow truck operators themselves often seem so hostile and rude, since that’s all they get day in and day out from the people whose cars they have towed....
And eventually we arrived at the tow yard, and she got out and paid her $65 tow fee (cash) and collected her car, and I drove back to the church for an evening meeting with the Membership Committee. And after that meeting broke up, a little a later than expected, I drove back home, but couldn’t find a spot to park on my street, so instead I parked just around the corner, not realizing that even though my street gets swept on Wednesday nights, that particular cross street is swept on Mondays....
You can all see where this is going, right?
Sure enough, I woke up Tuesday morning, and discovered that MY car had been towed. But fortunately I knew exactly where to go and how much cash to bring with me, and was even able to get a ride from Carl Laws (who had come into the church office to get a little work done, because HIS office was without power after the big natural gas explosion Monday over in South Portland), which led to lunch afterwards and a visit to the nearby Evergreen cemetery to see the graves of Horatio Stebbins and Quillen Shinn.
But there’s more. For the fourteen years I lived in Portland Oregon, I had the same license plate (CLERIC), and when I moved to Massachusetts I was delighted to discover that it was also available there as well. This plate has saved me a lot of tickets over the years, most of which I’m probably not even aware of. But when I arrived here in Maine (where vanity plates cost next to nothing compared to other states), I discovered that CLERIC was already taken, so I had to get this plate instead (CLERIC-2).
And at the time my car was towed, this plate (MA) was still on the bumper, while this one (ME) was in the window until I could find a screwdriver to swap them out. And because of that, the City of Portland Traffic Enforcement Officer who had my car towed in the first place actually wrote me TWO tickets: one on this plate, and one on this one -- which required yet another trip (this one, fortunately, just down the street to City Hall) to get that all sorted out and to settle my account with the government.
But it’s moments like these which make me wonder how I would have felt being a minister back in the days when churches like First Parish were supported by tax revenues, and ministers actually had the authority (if they chose to exercise it) to cite people and have them fined (or on ocassion even confined in the stocks) for failing to attend services on Sunday morning. I wonder whether folks back then, when they saw their pastor approaching them on the street, felt a little the way we do when we witness a tow-truck driver hooking up our car, and if in turn that is why those old-time Puritan preachers never seem to be smiling in their portraits, and why their theologies seem so stern and dark and grim to us today?
We’ll never really know for sure, of course, because one thing I can be certain of as a historian: no Puritan ever had their car towed for parking overnight on the wrong street, and therefore we will never find a primary source document in which they describe their experience of the church in precisely those terms. But it might have felt a little like that. For some of them, at least.
One of the things I really love about being a historian is that it does give me the opportunity from time to time to see the world through the eyes of people whose experience of it was very different from my own. It’s like travel, or (as one of my professors once put it): “The past is another country; they do things different there.” Back in colonial times, and in the early days of the Republic (when Maine was still a colony of Massachusetts), churches like First Parish really were tax-supported public institutions; not part of the government, per se, (because the Puritans believed very strongly in the separation of church and state, and especially the government should keep its nose out of the church’s business), but rather a rather interesting amalgam of several overlapping organizational entities which we would basically consider synonymous today.
Ministers, for example, basically wore two hats. On the one hand, they were elected public officials who received their salaries out of public funds -- “Public Teachers of Morality” who were responsible for educating both Children and Adults in the fundamentals of the Christian faith, and also for enforcing various ordinances prescribing a certain level of decency and piety and morality in the larger community (kind of like a dogcatcher, I like to think -- not a big office, but an important one). And on the other hand they were also the Pastor of the local church, a much more honorific position which was typically not compensated at all.
The Church itself was understood as a communion of the Mystical Body of Christ -- a community of the “saved” who worshipped and enjoyed fellowship together, and who looked to the Pastor as the shepherd of their flock. And this organization was legally distinct from the Parish (which was both a specific geographic area along with all of the people living therein, whether they were members of the church or not). And the Meeting House was a physical structure owned by the taxpayers of the Parish, but utilized both by the church and by any other public organization which need a place to meet.
And finally the Congregation was basically whoever showed up on Sunday mornings (and, in most places, also Sunday afternoons) -- a “promiscuous assembly of believers and seekers” which varied a bit from week to week, depending on who was actually sitting in the pews.
And that was the situation until 1819, when a Constitutional convention meeting on this very site pointedly decided NOT to include a tax-supported, established church in the Constitution of the newly-established State of Maine. And although I haven’t had a chance to go to the library and actually look up the details, my supposition (which is to say, my educated guess) is that shortly afterwards First Parish would have essentially been “privatized.”
A separate “Religious Society” would have been incorporated to take the place of the Parish, and the Meeting House itself converted into what amount to condominiums. Each of these pews you are sitting in would have been sold to individuals (who were collectively known as “the Proprietors”), who would have then been taxed each year for the support of the minister and the on-going maintenance of the Meetinghouse itself. Which is also why each of these pews still has a little door on it (so that the proprietor of that pew could close out any unwanted intruders), and also how we can still tell who sat where 150 years later.
Over time, the Society would have gradually come into possession of some of these pews itself, either by seizing them for non-payment of taxes, or because no one had stepped forward to buy them in the first place. Some of these pews would have essentially become “rentals,” while others (typically up in the gallery) would have been “free seats” open to anyone who wished to show up and sit in them.
Eventually, in 1908, the Proprietors of the Pews of the First Parish Church in Portland decided to give up their individual equity positions in the Meeting House, and create in its place a Trust which would hold title to the Meeting House (along with any bequests which had been received for its upkeep), and maintain it for the benefit of the congregation that worships here. The total value of that Trust in 1908 (exclusive of the value of the Meetinghouse itself) was only $1800; today it is worth about $1.8 million, so you can see that the Trustees have actually done pretty well for us over the years.
And there is actually not just one endowment fund, but three: a fund restricted specifically for the preservation and upkeep of the Building; a fund which belongs to the Society itself (and whose proceeds flow directly into our operating budget) and finally a (much smaller) fund whose proceeds are available to be used “at the Discretion of the Minister.”
But the main thing I wanted to say about all this it that the Trustees are basically responsible for seeing to it that we can keep the doors open and a roof over our heads, and they have done an admirable job of that over the years. But it’s the responsibility of the people sitting in these pews to make certain that something worthwhile is happening in here once we have all walked through those doors, and to make certain that the little doors on the pews themselves are always open, and that anyone (and everyone) who wishes to is welcome to sit down and join us.
We are the beneficiaries of a generous and visionary legacy. And it is our duty (and frankly, our privilege), to act in a manner worthy of that trust, and to hand the gift down to those who will follow us in even better shape than we received it.
And it’s in this context that I want to talk briefly about the idea of “heart(h)fire,” which is a wonderful concept that the leadership team of this congregation came up with at their annual retreat the year before I arrived here. Here’s the definition they wrote at the time: “A source of positive energy, the heart(h)fire is fed, and as it grows, we get back warmth and light that spills beyond our borders and draws in those passing by.”
It’s a wonderful image, and the thing that makes it all possible is represented by that central letter “H” within the parentheses. That “H” stands for “Hospitality” -- for the willingness to open up our circle and invite those who have been attracted by the beacon of our fire to join us around the glowing hearth, and be warmed there alongside us, as we learn to share our lives with one another, heart to heart.
Which (since this is stewardship month) brings us to the all-important topic of feeding the fire....
There are lots of different expenses involved in the day to day operation of an organization as large and complex as First Parish, but the most expensive item in any church budget of any size is almost always personnel: people and payroll. And this tends to put leaders like myself in kind of an awkward situation, because on the one hand we certainly want to model the same virtues of gratitude and generosity we proclaim from these high pulpits, and yet on the other we also struggle with all of the same challenges each of you do to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads, pay off our student loans and put our own kids through college, and perhaps even someday being able to afford to retire.
And we typically attempt to do all this on compensation which tends to lag well behind that of other professionals with similar educational credentials and institutional responsibilities, who work in fields where vows of “poverty, chastity, and obedience” are not necessarily essential features of the historical and cultural landscape.
And don’t get me wrong, because I do have a roof over my head, and I’m clearly not hurting for things to eat, and I’ve actually already paid off all my student loans (including those for the PhD), and both of my children are likewise terminally educated. And depending upon how much longer I want (and am able) to work, I still have another 15-20 years before I really need to start worrying about how to support myself in retirement (although I’ve certainly started thinking about it well before now).
But on behalf of ministers everywhere, and especially on behalf of all of the hard-working staff here at First Parish, I want you to know that second only to your active participation and personal encouragement, the single most important thing you can do to demonstrate that you believe that the work of this church is valuable and worthwhile is to support it generously through your financial contributions.
Because (as I’m sure many of you know from your own experiences in the workplace,) the challenge these days of providing competitive compensation and adequate benefits (including health insurance and a retirement plan), or even just keeping salaries even with inflation, is often staggering.
So in effect, what I’m challenging you to do today is to commit to becoming the kind of employer you all wish you had in your own careers, rather than discounting the importance of the work we are trying to do together here by attempting to walk that narrow tightrope between traditional New England frugality and old-fashioned tightfisted parsimony, and struggling year after year to “just get by” by trying to do the things that ought to matter most to us as cheaply as we can.
I know it won’t happen overnight. But it’s a worthy goal to strive for, and one which reflects the important values of justice and equity we so frequently express in public.
For my own part, about five years ago (while I was going through my divorce), I made a promise to myself that however that all worked itself out, afterwards I was going to figure out a way to live comfortably within my means on 80% of my actual income. And with that other 20% -- half I was going to save for myself (in addition to the money I was already saving for retirement), for the proverbial rainy day, or in case (for example) I wanted to make a down payment on another house someday, or maybe just so that I could buy a sailboat and explore Down East.
So half for myself, and the other half -- 10% of my total income -- I was going to give away: 5% to my “routine” philanthropies like the church, and public broadcasting, and the many colleges and universities I attended (all of whom, of course, have their hands out constantly despite the outrageous amount of tuition they’ve collected from me already); and the other 5% to whatever I feel like at the time (including special projects at the church, or in other churches that I have served over the years).
And don’t get me wrong -- we’re not talking about a huge amount of money here; and it has taken me quite awhile to get to the place where I actually had enough control over my income and expenses to be able to do this intentionally. But it also feeds my own “heart(h)fire,” to know that I have empowered myself to distribute my own wealth in a worthwhile way that reflects my personal values. And on that note, here is my pledge card for the 2008 calendar year, and also a check for the first installment here in 2007.
And believe me, this feels a LOT better than handing over $65 in cash to the tow-truck driver on Tuesday morning, or paying my parking ticket at City Hall on Tuesday afternoon.
But don’t just take my word for it.
Like everything else we do here at First Parish, all I’m really suggesting that you try it out for awhile in your own lives, and then decide for yourselves whether or not I’m telling the truth....
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday October 7, 2007
Last week I mentioned in passing that when I first met Fred Lipp last summer, he had given me some excellent advice about looking for inspiration for my sermons by going out into the streets of Portland; and this past week I actually found some.
Last Monday afternoon I was making a home hospice visit at the request of a social worker who had phoned the church, and while I was there one of the nurses (who was just completing a 24-hour shift) discovered that her car had been towed from the street outside the house. So I offered to give her a lift out to the tow yard on Warren Avenue, and on the way there we talked about all the things you might imagine two people would talk about in that situation: about how annoying it is to have your car towed, and how angry it can make you feel, which is probably why tow truck operators themselves often seem so hostile and rude, since that’s all they get day in and day out from the people whose cars they have towed....
And eventually we arrived at the tow yard, and she got out and paid her $65 tow fee (cash) and collected her car, and I drove back to the church for an evening meeting with the Membership Committee. And after that meeting broke up, a little a later than expected, I drove back home, but couldn’t find a spot to park on my street, so instead I parked just around the corner, not realizing that even though my street gets swept on Wednesday nights, that particular cross street is swept on Mondays....
You can all see where this is going, right?
Sure enough, I woke up Tuesday morning, and discovered that MY car had been towed. But fortunately I knew exactly where to go and how much cash to bring with me, and was even able to get a ride from Carl Laws (who had come into the church office to get a little work done, because HIS office was without power after the big natural gas explosion Monday over in South Portland), which led to lunch afterwards and a visit to the nearby Evergreen cemetery to see the graves of Horatio Stebbins and Quillen Shinn.
But there’s more. For the fourteen years I lived in Portland Oregon, I had the same license plate (CLERIC), and when I moved to Massachusetts I was delighted to discover that it was also available there as well. This plate has saved me a lot of tickets over the years, most of which I’m probably not even aware of. But when I arrived here in Maine (where vanity plates cost next to nothing compared to other states), I discovered that CLERIC was already taken, so I had to get this plate instead (CLERIC-2).
And at the time my car was towed, this plate (MA) was still on the bumper, while this one (ME) was in the window until I could find a screwdriver to swap them out. And because of that, the City of Portland Traffic Enforcement Officer who had my car towed in the first place actually wrote me TWO tickets: one on this plate, and one on this one -- which required yet another trip (this one, fortunately, just down the street to City Hall) to get that all sorted out and to settle my account with the government.
But it’s moments like these which make me wonder how I would have felt being a minister back in the days when churches like First Parish were supported by tax revenues, and ministers actually had the authority (if they chose to exercise it) to cite people and have them fined (or on ocassion even confined in the stocks) for failing to attend services on Sunday morning. I wonder whether folks back then, when they saw their pastor approaching them on the street, felt a little the way we do when we witness a tow-truck driver hooking up our car, and if in turn that is why those old-time Puritan preachers never seem to be smiling in their portraits, and why their theologies seem so stern and dark and grim to us today?
We’ll never really know for sure, of course, because one thing I can be certain of as a historian: no Puritan ever had their car towed for parking overnight on the wrong street, and therefore we will never find a primary source document in which they describe their experience of the church in precisely those terms. But it might have felt a little like that. For some of them, at least.
One of the things I really love about being a historian is that it does give me the opportunity from time to time to see the world through the eyes of people whose experience of it was very different from my own. It’s like travel, or (as one of my professors once put it): “The past is another country; they do things different there.” Back in colonial times, and in the early days of the Republic (when Maine was still a colony of Massachusetts), churches like First Parish really were tax-supported public institutions; not part of the government, per se, (because the Puritans believed very strongly in the separation of church and state, and especially the government should keep its nose out of the church’s business), but rather a rather interesting amalgam of several overlapping organizational entities which we would basically consider synonymous today.
Ministers, for example, basically wore two hats. On the one hand, they were elected public officials who received their salaries out of public funds -- “Public Teachers of Morality” who were responsible for educating both Children and Adults in the fundamentals of the Christian faith, and also for enforcing various ordinances prescribing a certain level of decency and piety and morality in the larger community (kind of like a dogcatcher, I like to think -- not a big office, but an important one). And on the other hand they were also the Pastor of the local church, a much more honorific position which was typically not compensated at all.
The Church itself was understood as a communion of the Mystical Body of Christ -- a community of the “saved” who worshipped and enjoyed fellowship together, and who looked to the Pastor as the shepherd of their flock. And this organization was legally distinct from the Parish (which was both a specific geographic area along with all of the people living therein, whether they were members of the church or not). And the Meeting House was a physical structure owned by the taxpayers of the Parish, but utilized both by the church and by any other public organization which need a place to meet.
And finally the Congregation was basically whoever showed up on Sunday mornings (and, in most places, also Sunday afternoons) -- a “promiscuous assembly of believers and seekers” which varied a bit from week to week, depending on who was actually sitting in the pews.
And that was the situation until 1819, when a Constitutional convention meeting on this very site pointedly decided NOT to include a tax-supported, established church in the Constitution of the newly-established State of Maine. And although I haven’t had a chance to go to the library and actually look up the details, my supposition (which is to say, my educated guess) is that shortly afterwards First Parish would have essentially been “privatized.”
A separate “Religious Society” would have been incorporated to take the place of the Parish, and the Meeting House itself converted into what amount to condominiums. Each of these pews you are sitting in would have been sold to individuals (who were collectively known as “the Proprietors”), who would have then been taxed each year for the support of the minister and the on-going maintenance of the Meetinghouse itself. Which is also why each of these pews still has a little door on it (so that the proprietor of that pew could close out any unwanted intruders), and also how we can still tell who sat where 150 years later.
Over time, the Society would have gradually come into possession of some of these pews itself, either by seizing them for non-payment of taxes, or because no one had stepped forward to buy them in the first place. Some of these pews would have essentially become “rentals,” while others (typically up in the gallery) would have been “free seats” open to anyone who wished to show up and sit in them.
Eventually, in 1908, the Proprietors of the Pews of the First Parish Church in Portland decided to give up their individual equity positions in the Meeting House, and create in its place a Trust which would hold title to the Meeting House (along with any bequests which had been received for its upkeep), and maintain it for the benefit of the congregation that worships here. The total value of that Trust in 1908 (exclusive of the value of the Meetinghouse itself) was only $1800; today it is worth about $1.8 million, so you can see that the Trustees have actually done pretty well for us over the years.
And there is actually not just one endowment fund, but three: a fund restricted specifically for the preservation and upkeep of the Building; a fund which belongs to the Society itself (and whose proceeds flow directly into our operating budget) and finally a (much smaller) fund whose proceeds are available to be used “at the Discretion of the Minister.”
But the main thing I wanted to say about all this it that the Trustees are basically responsible for seeing to it that we can keep the doors open and a roof over our heads, and they have done an admirable job of that over the years. But it’s the responsibility of the people sitting in these pews to make certain that something worthwhile is happening in here once we have all walked through those doors, and to make certain that the little doors on the pews themselves are always open, and that anyone (and everyone) who wishes to is welcome to sit down and join us.
We are the beneficiaries of a generous and visionary legacy. And it is our duty (and frankly, our privilege), to act in a manner worthy of that trust, and to hand the gift down to those who will follow us in even better shape than we received it.
And it’s in this context that I want to talk briefly about the idea of “heart(h)fire,” which is a wonderful concept that the leadership team of this congregation came up with at their annual retreat the year before I arrived here. Here’s the definition they wrote at the time: “A source of positive energy, the heart(h)fire is fed, and as it grows, we get back warmth and light that spills beyond our borders and draws in those passing by.”
It’s a wonderful image, and the thing that makes it all possible is represented by that central letter “H” within the parentheses. That “H” stands for “Hospitality” -- for the willingness to open up our circle and invite those who have been attracted by the beacon of our fire to join us around the glowing hearth, and be warmed there alongside us, as we learn to share our lives with one another, heart to heart.
Which (since this is stewardship month) brings us to the all-important topic of feeding the fire....
There are lots of different expenses involved in the day to day operation of an organization as large and complex as First Parish, but the most expensive item in any church budget of any size is almost always personnel: people and payroll. And this tends to put leaders like myself in kind of an awkward situation, because on the one hand we certainly want to model the same virtues of gratitude and generosity we proclaim from these high pulpits, and yet on the other we also struggle with all of the same challenges each of you do to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads, pay off our student loans and put our own kids through college, and perhaps even someday being able to afford to retire.
And we typically attempt to do all this on compensation which tends to lag well behind that of other professionals with similar educational credentials and institutional responsibilities, who work in fields where vows of “poverty, chastity, and obedience” are not necessarily essential features of the historical and cultural landscape.
And don’t get me wrong, because I do have a roof over my head, and I’m clearly not hurting for things to eat, and I’ve actually already paid off all my student loans (including those for the PhD), and both of my children are likewise terminally educated. And depending upon how much longer I want (and am able) to work, I still have another 15-20 years before I really need to start worrying about how to support myself in retirement (although I’ve certainly started thinking about it well before now).
But on behalf of ministers everywhere, and especially on behalf of all of the hard-working staff here at First Parish, I want you to know that second only to your active participation and personal encouragement, the single most important thing you can do to demonstrate that you believe that the work of this church is valuable and worthwhile is to support it generously through your financial contributions.
Because (as I’m sure many of you know from your own experiences in the workplace,) the challenge these days of providing competitive compensation and adequate benefits (including health insurance and a retirement plan), or even just keeping salaries even with inflation, is often staggering.
So in effect, what I’m challenging you to do today is to commit to becoming the kind of employer you all wish you had in your own careers, rather than discounting the importance of the work we are trying to do together here by attempting to walk that narrow tightrope between traditional New England frugality and old-fashioned tightfisted parsimony, and struggling year after year to “just get by” by trying to do the things that ought to matter most to us as cheaply as we can.
I know it won’t happen overnight. But it’s a worthy goal to strive for, and one which reflects the important values of justice and equity we so frequently express in public.
For my own part, about five years ago (while I was going through my divorce), I made a promise to myself that however that all worked itself out, afterwards I was going to figure out a way to live comfortably within my means on 80% of my actual income. And with that other 20% -- half I was going to save for myself (in addition to the money I was already saving for retirement), for the proverbial rainy day, or in case (for example) I wanted to make a down payment on another house someday, or maybe just so that I could buy a sailboat and explore Down East.
So half for myself, and the other half -- 10% of my total income -- I was going to give away: 5% to my “routine” philanthropies like the church, and public broadcasting, and the many colleges and universities I attended (all of whom, of course, have their hands out constantly despite the outrageous amount of tuition they’ve collected from me already); and the other 5% to whatever I feel like at the time (including special projects at the church, or in other churches that I have served over the years).
And don’t get me wrong -- we’re not talking about a huge amount of money here; and it has taken me quite awhile to get to the place where I actually had enough control over my income and expenses to be able to do this intentionally. But it also feeds my own “heart(h)fire,” to know that I have empowered myself to distribute my own wealth in a worthwhile way that reflects my personal values. And on that note, here is my pledge card for the 2008 calendar year, and also a check for the first installment here in 2007.
And believe me, this feels a LOT better than handing over $65 in cash to the tow-truck driver on Tuesday morning, or paying my parking ticket at City Hall on Tuesday afternoon.
But don’t just take my word for it.
Like everything else we do here at First Parish, all I’m really suggesting that you try it out for awhile in your own lives, and then decide for yourselves whether or not I’m telling the truth....
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