A homily delivered by the Rev Dr Tim W Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday March 29th, 2009 (Stewardship Sunday)
It’s a familiar enough story, one I’m certain almost all of us have heard at some point or another in our lives (although far fewer of us, I suspect, have really given it the thought it deserves). It’s the Tuesday before Passover, and Jesus is teaching openly in the Courtyard of the Gentiles outside the Temple in Jerusalem, protected from arrest by the large crowd of people who have thronged around him to listen to him debate with the Scribes and the Pharisees, the Lawyers and the Scholars who represent the interests of the wealthy temple elites. And he’s just said one of the single most-memorable things attributed to him in the Gospels, responding to a question about whether or not it is lawful for a faithful Jew to pay taxes to Rome by asking to see a Roman coin and then asking whose image was on it. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars, and to God the things that are God’s.” And then while his adversaries looked on in speechless amazement,
Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people put in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins worth only a fraction of a penny. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said “Truly, I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. For they all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything, all she had to live on.” [Mark 12: 41-44; cf Luke 21: 1-4]
I’ve never been quite certain how best to interpret this passage. The fact that Jesus is talking only with his disciples makes me think that this is primarily a private object lesson in the virtues of generosity, sacrifice, and commitment: a foreshadowing, perhaps, of the ultimate sacrifice Jesus is about to make himself. But I also can’t help but think that it is also an implicit criticism of the wealthy givers, who may contribute much more in absolute terms, but are still contributing out of their abundance, as well as a condemnation of the entire temple system itself, which demanded such donations even from the most vulnerable members of society. The wealthy still have plenty left over after they have made their contribution. But the widow holds back nothing. Two copper lepta, two “mites” in the King James Version, and she throws them both in, not even holding back one for herself. Her faith, her trust, her confidence that somehow this day she will be given her daily bread (and perhaps even forgiven her debts), is without reservation. Her own love of God and love of neighbor inspire that confidence, and that trust, and guides her away from the kinds of temptation that ultimately lead to evil.
In the letter I wrote to be sent out with the other Stewardship materials, I mentioned that in times of financial uncertainty such as these, none of us can really feel secure in our position, but that the need people have for the church itself is at the same time greater than ever. And those of us who are still fortunate enough to be able to give out of our abundance have a special responsibility to our neighbors, because even though none of us are unaffected by the downturn, we still have the ability to make a difference in meeting this greater need. And in doing so, not only do we make it possible for our less-fortunate neighbors to benefit from our generosity, we also find fulfillment personally. We are empowered to act as agents of compassion and generosity and creativity and gratitude; we become messengers (angeloi = angels) -- of God’s Good News.
But what about those of us on the other side of the coin? Those of us who have lost our jobs, or are living on fixed (or even declining) incomes, and who are personally feeling the effects of the downturn as a week-to-week struggle just to keep body and soul together? How are we supposed to respond? And I’d like to suggest that our response is no different than anyone else’s; and that with trust and compassion and generosity and creativity and gratitude, we too can become empowered and fulfilled, despite our precarious financial situations.
Throughout this Stewardship campaign, and really over the entire course of my brief tenure here, I’ve spoken about the “three T’s” of Time, Talent, and Treasure as the foundation upon which a healthy church community must be built. Time is perhaps the easiest, and the most important of the three. For better or worse, when you become unemployed Time is suddenly something you have a lot more of in your life. And you need to use it wisely; but one very excellent use of Time is to spend it in church on Sunday mornings. Just showing up makes a huge difference in the quality of EVERYONE’S experience here -- it increases the energy, it increases the intensity, it increases the vitality of the entire Act and activity of Worship. And it costs you next to nothing; a couple of hours out of your day, and a little gasoline for your car, unless you live close enough to walk, or can arrange (like I do) to catch a ride with a neighbor. So even when times are tough economically, the gift of YOUR time can have a huge impact, and makes a big difference in the quality of our collective lives.
And the same is true of your Talent. You may not be working full time for a paycheck, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t still be productive, or contribute to the prosperity of our community in other ways. And I’m not just talking now about the church community either. The larger Portland community can also no doubt benefit from your talents, while getting out of the house and out among the people begins that all-important process of networking and connection-building that generally leads both to finding another job, and also to making new friends who perhaps share many of your same interests and values, and might even make fine additions to THIS community.
And then finally there is the Treasure. This year in particular it is important that EVERYONE make some sort of pledge to the church, simply so we can use that information in the budgeting process, rather than simply relying on historical guesstimates based on past performance and future expectations, as we have in years past.
But the most important pledge you make is the one you make to yourself. When you sit down and think about your priorities, and what you honestly feel you can afford to do, what does that add up to, and are you willing to PROMISE YOURSELF that you will make that contribution happen?
Suppose, for example, you were to commit to yourself to attending EVERY Sunday Service next year, and that every Sunday morning you will drop a twenty dollar bill in the collection plate. Your annual contribution would add up to over a thousand dollars, which is approximately the same amount as our current average pledge.
But suppose twenty dollars is too much. Suppose you can only commit to ten, or to five. These are still pretty significant
contributions, when you start to add them up over dozens and dozens of contributors.
Even in the best of times, approximately two-thirds of the money contributed to First Parish comes from fewer than one-third of the contributors. And when times become tough that ratio becomes even more pronounced. But whether you are a major donor or simply a small contributor, it requires everyone’s participation in order for us to fulfill our mission as Portland’s Original Faith Community, providing a Warm & Welcoming Place here in the Heart of the City.
Again, as I said in my letter, for over three centuries now, through Wars and Fires and Panics and Recessions and a Great Depression, the People of First Parish have come together to sustain that vision, and to fulfill that mission. Rich or poor, working or looking for work, retired or just setting out on a career, we ALL need to set a good example for one another, and for the larger Portland community, by generously contributing what we can. The responsibility is now in OUR hands. And frankly, I can’t think of anyone I would trust with it more.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
MR JEFFERSON’S LEGACY
***
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday March 15th, 2009
OPENING WORDS: “Question with boldness even the existence of God, because, if there is one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear....” -- Thomas Jefferson
***
How many of you saw in the news last week, that Northern New England has now officially surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the “least churched” region of the country? Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest myself (as well as serving the majority of my ministerial career there), I was immediately struck by two closely-related thoughts. The first was a memory of something that was said about me during a celebratory farewell “roast” at the conclusion of my first settled ministry in Midland, Texas, where the new search committee had already started to survey the church membership regarding their prevailing theological views, and had discovered that after four years of my preaching there, I had managed to DOUBLE the number of atheists in the congregation!
My second thought was that even though I have now served here in New England for twice the time I was in West Texas (two years on Nantucket, four years in Carlisle Massachusetts, and now two years here in Portland), I can hardly claim to take credit for this current change of affairs. But I do feel a little like that proverbial gentleman who moved from Texas to New England, and lowered the average IQ in both regions. And the real irony, of course, is that for most of American history: certainly through the colonial period, and continuing on through the early national period and into the Irish and Italian immigrations, New England has been one of the most heavily-churched regions of the nation, and the underlying reasons for these changes are at heart of the topic I have chosen for today.
As most of you MUST know by now, this past winter I’ve been preaching a series of sermons on a topic I’ve been calling “UU-DNA” -- those things about our faith tradition that are so basic and fundamental about who we are and how we got to be this way that they might as well be part of our institutional genetic code. So far I’ve spoken about the importance of Congregational Polity and Local Control, the essential role of personal experience in determining what we believe, and the always-troublesome Problem of Evil: why do bad things happen to good people? And finally this month I’m finishing up with a two-parter on “Mr Jefferson’s Prophecy” and “Mr Jefferson’s Legacy” -- our third President’s erroneous 1823 prediction that “there is not a young many alive today who will not die a Unitarian,” and what we actually got instead: a “Wall of Separation” between church and state which delineated a radically new religious landscape for a new, young nation here in the new world, as well as creating the circumstances for the evolution of the dramatically different religious environment in which we live today.
Frankly, I’m not sure that ANYONE living at the end of the 18th century could have accurately predicted the kind of religious environment we now live in at the beginning of the 21st. Those two hundred and more years -- beginning with the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (and covering a lot more history than I suspect anyone wants to hear this morning) -- have resulted in the creation of an explicitly secular civil society that is also, without a doubt among the most fervently-devoted religious cultures in the world. And how this happened is to a large degree the direct result of a bitter political confrontation between two Unitarian Presidents two centuries ago, and the very different roles which they saw religion playing both in their own lives and in society as a whole.
America’s first President, George Washington, was a soldier and a farmer, a Deist and a Freemason -- first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen -- but hardly a great intellectual or philosopher when it came to matters of religion. He was, however, extremely sensitive to the role that precedent and public ritual would play in the formation of this new nation’s identity, and absolutely opposed to linking that identity too closely to any particular faith or sectarian denomination.
So instead it was Washington’s two Unitarian successors -- John Adams and Thomas Jefferson -- who actually framed the terms of the subsequent public debate. The personal relationship between Adams and Jefferson was a complicated one, as well as something that has fascinated me since I was just a child. In 1776 they worked closely together to draft the Declaration of Independence and shepherd it through the Continental Congress, thus setting the 13 colonies out together on the road to revolution. A quarter of a century later they were bitter political rivals, whose conflicting values in both religion and politics provide the background for the story I want to tell today. And then, after nearly another quarter-century of retirement from public life, during which they attempted to explain themselves to one another though a long and in many ways intimate correspondence, their lives and names became locked together for eternity in the annuls of American History by the shared date of their respective deaths: July 4th, 1826 -- the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration.
But it’s the election of 1800 -- an election that in many ways was even MORE pivotal than the election last fall -- that provides the background and the context for the subsequent tale. The issue of the separation of church and state was hardly new in 1800, and even dates back to well before the 1st Amendment and the creation of a national Constitution which enshrined it as a principle of Federal law. And yet even now it is easy to overlook that the question actually has two parts in addition to two sides, which we can see very clearly in the language of the amendment itself: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
It’s the so-called “Establishment Clause” with its intent of keeping the Church out of the business of government, that we generally think of today when we think of the purpose of the amendment nowadays. But in many ways the “Free Exercise” clause has been even more important. This is the part of Federal law, which prohibits the state from getting involved in the business of the church, that has for most church leaders (historically, at least) been a much greater concern than whether or not they may someday get a chance to dictate the policies of government. The Free Exercise clause not only assures that individual churches will be left free to attend to matters of faith as they see fit, it also guarantees that every individual will be free to pick and choose their own church (including NO church) as suits their own conscience and temperament. In other words (as I’m sure you’ve heard it said before), freedom OF religion also includes freedom FROM religion, or at least after you’ve reached the age when your parents can no longer compel you to attend.
None of this debate, by the way, either then or now, has ever assumed a separation of Religion and Politics. If Politics is basically the practice of living together in civil society (and is sometimes defined as the “art of the possible”), while Religion reflects our best and highest values, morals, and principles (as well as an occasional belief in miracles), they NEED one another in order bring out the best of the “body politic,” and help us to understand that we are all one people in the same boat together. James Madison once famously observed that “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” and the same could easily be said of churches. And yet, to be reminded from time to time that there are indeed angels out there, and that we need to be attentive to their messages, can often do a great deal to bring people together, even though it sometimes also runs the risk of driving them apart also runs the risk of driving them apart.
It was just this sort of impasse that brought Adams and Jefferson (and their respective supporters) to such bitter loggerheads in 1800. Jefferson was in private a deeply religious man, but he was also a deeply private man, who liked to keep his religious views to himself, and shared them only with his closest and most trusted friends. His Unitarian beliefs that God is One, a Providential Spirit who set all things in motion at the creation of the Universe, and who likewise endowed all human beings with certain “natural” and “inalienable” rights; together with his deeply-held conviction that Jesus was a man and a great moral teacher whose teachings can be summed up by the Golden Rule, were in essence identical to those of his political rival. But unlike Jefferson (who tended to believe that the solution to everything was “more liberty”), Adams also believed that MOST human beings NEEDED some sort of moral instruction (as well as some form of consistent, external social constraint) if they were to be kept on the “straight and narrow.”
Had the stakes seemed smaller, these two once and future friends might have reconciled their differences through honest and open dialogue, which of course is exactly what they attempted to do in retirement. But at the time, it seemed instead that the election of 1800 represented a critical watershed in the brief history of the young American republic. Would its future be found in a return to the “tyrannical” aristocratic practices of Great Britain, and its established Anglican church? Or would it follow the slippery slope of the French Revolution, which had guillotined both priests and princes in its brutal “Reign of Terror?” Jefferson and his followers of course most feared the former, while the supporters of Adams (the New England Standing Order clergy chief among them) attempted to portray Jefferson as a potential “Infidel in Chief,” who wanted nothing more that to confiscate every Bible in the land, and bring an end to religion altogether.
Jefferson won that bitterly-contested election, and of course neither side’s worst fears were realized. Instead, the next quarter-century of small-”d” small “r” “democratic-republican government subsequently became known as “the Era of Good Feelings,” at least when it came to politics. On the religious front, Jefferson’s election was accompanied by something neither he nor Adams could have really predicted: the beginning of the so-called “Second Great Awakening,” a period of frontier revivals and camp meetings, which would sometimes go on for weeks at a time. What was true in American politics also became true for American religion; each and every individual soul now enjoyed the liberty to decide for themselves what their faith would be, although that faith often bore very little resemblance to the more sophisticated beliefs of someone like Jefferson, whose ultimate faith in liberty had helped make freedom of belief a reality.
This same period in our history also saw the beginning of the disestablishment of the tax-supported Standing Order here in New England. Maine put an end to tax-supported religion in 1820, right here on this spot, with the drafting of its original state constitution. Stubborn Massachusetts (still dominated by Unitarians, but not for much longer) was the last to give in, in the mid-1830’s, opting instead for universal, tax-supported public education as a means for inculturating the immigrant classes with American values (while at the same time leaving them to worship in their own churches on Sunday mornings, and to complain about the burden of double taxation, just as the Baptists had, when they set out to create their own system of parochial schools).
And of course the greatest irony of all is that once freed from their obligation to be all things to all people, churches instead became free to seek out their own natural constituencies, and to shape their message in precisely the terms they needed to in order to appeal most strongly to their target audience. For Catholic churches this generally took place in ethnic terms, with an emphasis on holding on to their own. But for Protestant churches, ethnicity (at least among immigrant populations) was simply one element of ever-shrinking significance, when compared to factors like education and social class, theological doctrine, worship style, even geographic proximity and the personality (or reputation) of the minister. Over the course of the past 200 years, the American church has become an enterprise, which has in that time marketed itself more or less aggressively depending upon the tenor of the times and its own level of institutional energy.
Denominations like ours, with a long history of seeing ourselves as a “public” church attempting to live up to Jefferson’s Prophecy, have often been slow to adopt this “entrepreneurial” approach to religion. And in many cases we’ve been able to afford not to; our deep roots and broad social networks have allowed us to preserve our self-image as “America’s Real Religion,” along with the elusive goal of winning everyone over to our way of thinking. But thanks to Mr. Jefferson’s legacy, I can comfortably predict that this is never going to happen. We may someday become slightly more numerous than one in a thousand, but even to achieve that we need to look very carefully at who we are and where we come from, and the essence of our mission to the communities we choose to serve. We need to be honest, forthright, and unashamed about our beliefs, our values, our goals, our principles, and our practices...and we need to lift them up high, so that all may see and that those who agree can easily find us here. We need to invite our friends, and support this church with our time, and our talent, and yes our treasure...even when times are tough, and we are nervous ourselves about whether or not we will even have a job a year from now. And above all, we must all hang together, because if we fail to do so (to paraphrase Mr Franklin at the signing of the Declaration) we will all most certainly be left to hang separately, and alone -- from a metaphorical , if not a literal, noose of our own making.
READING:
To Messrs. Nehemiah Dodge and Others A Committee of the Danbury Baptist Association in the State of Connecticut
January 1, 1802
Gentlemen,
The affectionate sentiments of esteem and approbation which you are so good as to express towards me, on behalf of the Danbury Baptist Association, give me the highest satisfaction. My duties dictate a faithful and zealous pursuit of the interests of my constituents, and in proportion as they are persuaded of my fidelity to those duties, the discharge of them becomes more and more pleasing.
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.
I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection and blessing of the common Father and Creator of man, and tender you for yourselves and your religious association, assurances of my high respect and esteem.
Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday March 15th, 2009
OPENING WORDS: “Question with boldness even the existence of God, because, if there is one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear....” -- Thomas Jefferson
***
How many of you saw in the news last week, that Northern New England has now officially surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the “least churched” region of the country? Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest myself (as well as serving the majority of my ministerial career there), I was immediately struck by two closely-related thoughts. The first was a memory of something that was said about me during a celebratory farewell “roast” at the conclusion of my first settled ministry in Midland, Texas, where the new search committee had already started to survey the church membership regarding their prevailing theological views, and had discovered that after four years of my preaching there, I had managed to DOUBLE the number of atheists in the congregation!
My second thought was that even though I have now served here in New England for twice the time I was in West Texas (two years on Nantucket, four years in Carlisle Massachusetts, and now two years here in Portland), I can hardly claim to take credit for this current change of affairs. But I do feel a little like that proverbial gentleman who moved from Texas to New England, and lowered the average IQ in both regions. And the real irony, of course, is that for most of American history: certainly through the colonial period, and continuing on through the early national period and into the Irish and Italian immigrations, New England has been one of the most heavily-churched regions of the nation, and the underlying reasons for these changes are at heart of the topic I have chosen for today.
As most of you MUST know by now, this past winter I’ve been preaching a series of sermons on a topic I’ve been calling “UU-DNA” -- those things about our faith tradition that are so basic and fundamental about who we are and how we got to be this way that they might as well be part of our institutional genetic code. So far I’ve spoken about the importance of Congregational Polity and Local Control, the essential role of personal experience in determining what we believe, and the always-troublesome Problem of Evil: why do bad things happen to good people? And finally this month I’m finishing up with a two-parter on “Mr Jefferson’s Prophecy” and “Mr Jefferson’s Legacy” -- our third President’s erroneous 1823 prediction that “there is not a young many alive today who will not die a Unitarian,” and what we actually got instead: a “Wall of Separation” between church and state which delineated a radically new religious landscape for a new, young nation here in the new world, as well as creating the circumstances for the evolution of the dramatically different religious environment in which we live today.
Frankly, I’m not sure that ANYONE living at the end of the 18th century could have accurately predicted the kind of religious environment we now live in at the beginning of the 21st. Those two hundred and more years -- beginning with the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (and covering a lot more history than I suspect anyone wants to hear this morning) -- have resulted in the creation of an explicitly secular civil society that is also, without a doubt among the most fervently-devoted religious cultures in the world. And how this happened is to a large degree the direct result of a bitter political confrontation between two Unitarian Presidents two centuries ago, and the very different roles which they saw religion playing both in their own lives and in society as a whole.
America’s first President, George Washington, was a soldier and a farmer, a Deist and a Freemason -- first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen -- but hardly a great intellectual or philosopher when it came to matters of religion. He was, however, extremely sensitive to the role that precedent and public ritual would play in the formation of this new nation’s identity, and absolutely opposed to linking that identity too closely to any particular faith or sectarian denomination.
So instead it was Washington’s two Unitarian successors -- John Adams and Thomas Jefferson -- who actually framed the terms of the subsequent public debate. The personal relationship between Adams and Jefferson was a complicated one, as well as something that has fascinated me since I was just a child. In 1776 they worked closely together to draft the Declaration of Independence and shepherd it through the Continental Congress, thus setting the 13 colonies out together on the road to revolution. A quarter of a century later they were bitter political rivals, whose conflicting values in both religion and politics provide the background for the story I want to tell today. And then, after nearly another quarter-century of retirement from public life, during which they attempted to explain themselves to one another though a long and in many ways intimate correspondence, their lives and names became locked together for eternity in the annuls of American History by the shared date of their respective deaths: July 4th, 1826 -- the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration.
But it’s the election of 1800 -- an election that in many ways was even MORE pivotal than the election last fall -- that provides the background and the context for the subsequent tale. The issue of the separation of church and state was hardly new in 1800, and even dates back to well before the 1st Amendment and the creation of a national Constitution which enshrined it as a principle of Federal law. And yet even now it is easy to overlook that the question actually has two parts in addition to two sides, which we can see very clearly in the language of the amendment itself: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
It’s the so-called “Establishment Clause” with its intent of keeping the Church out of the business of government, that we generally think of today when we think of the purpose of the amendment nowadays. But in many ways the “Free Exercise” clause has been even more important. This is the part of Federal law, which prohibits the state from getting involved in the business of the church, that has for most church leaders (historically, at least) been a much greater concern than whether or not they may someday get a chance to dictate the policies of government. The Free Exercise clause not only assures that individual churches will be left free to attend to matters of faith as they see fit, it also guarantees that every individual will be free to pick and choose their own church (including NO church) as suits their own conscience and temperament. In other words (as I’m sure you’ve heard it said before), freedom OF religion also includes freedom FROM religion, or at least after you’ve reached the age when your parents can no longer compel you to attend.
None of this debate, by the way, either then or now, has ever assumed a separation of Religion and Politics. If Politics is basically the practice of living together in civil society (and is sometimes defined as the “art of the possible”), while Religion reflects our best and highest values, morals, and principles (as well as an occasional belief in miracles), they NEED one another in order bring out the best of the “body politic,” and help us to understand that we are all one people in the same boat together. James Madison once famously observed that “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” and the same could easily be said of churches. And yet, to be reminded from time to time that there are indeed angels out there, and that we need to be attentive to their messages, can often do a great deal to bring people together, even though it sometimes also runs the risk of driving them apart also runs the risk of driving them apart.
It was just this sort of impasse that brought Adams and Jefferson (and their respective supporters) to such bitter loggerheads in 1800. Jefferson was in private a deeply religious man, but he was also a deeply private man, who liked to keep his religious views to himself, and shared them only with his closest and most trusted friends. His Unitarian beliefs that God is One, a Providential Spirit who set all things in motion at the creation of the Universe, and who likewise endowed all human beings with certain “natural” and “inalienable” rights; together with his deeply-held conviction that Jesus was a man and a great moral teacher whose teachings can be summed up by the Golden Rule, were in essence identical to those of his political rival. But unlike Jefferson (who tended to believe that the solution to everything was “more liberty”), Adams also believed that MOST human beings NEEDED some sort of moral instruction (as well as some form of consistent, external social constraint) if they were to be kept on the “straight and narrow.”
Had the stakes seemed smaller, these two once and future friends might have reconciled their differences through honest and open dialogue, which of course is exactly what they attempted to do in retirement. But at the time, it seemed instead that the election of 1800 represented a critical watershed in the brief history of the young American republic. Would its future be found in a return to the “tyrannical” aristocratic practices of Great Britain, and its established Anglican church? Or would it follow the slippery slope of the French Revolution, which had guillotined both priests and princes in its brutal “Reign of Terror?” Jefferson and his followers of course most feared the former, while the supporters of Adams (the New England Standing Order clergy chief among them) attempted to portray Jefferson as a potential “Infidel in Chief,” who wanted nothing more that to confiscate every Bible in the land, and bring an end to religion altogether.
Jefferson won that bitterly-contested election, and of course neither side’s worst fears were realized. Instead, the next quarter-century of small-”d” small “r” “democratic-republican government subsequently became known as “the Era of Good Feelings,” at least when it came to politics. On the religious front, Jefferson’s election was accompanied by something neither he nor Adams could have really predicted: the beginning of the so-called “Second Great Awakening,” a period of frontier revivals and camp meetings, which would sometimes go on for weeks at a time. What was true in American politics also became true for American religion; each and every individual soul now enjoyed the liberty to decide for themselves what their faith would be, although that faith often bore very little resemblance to the more sophisticated beliefs of someone like Jefferson, whose ultimate faith in liberty had helped make freedom of belief a reality.
This same period in our history also saw the beginning of the disestablishment of the tax-supported Standing Order here in New England. Maine put an end to tax-supported religion in 1820, right here on this spot, with the drafting of its original state constitution. Stubborn Massachusetts (still dominated by Unitarians, but not for much longer) was the last to give in, in the mid-1830’s, opting instead for universal, tax-supported public education as a means for inculturating the immigrant classes with American values (while at the same time leaving them to worship in their own churches on Sunday mornings, and to complain about the burden of double taxation, just as the Baptists had, when they set out to create their own system of parochial schools).
And of course the greatest irony of all is that once freed from their obligation to be all things to all people, churches instead became free to seek out their own natural constituencies, and to shape their message in precisely the terms they needed to in order to appeal most strongly to their target audience. For Catholic churches this generally took place in ethnic terms, with an emphasis on holding on to their own. But for Protestant churches, ethnicity (at least among immigrant populations) was simply one element of ever-shrinking significance, when compared to factors like education and social class, theological doctrine, worship style, even geographic proximity and the personality (or reputation) of the minister. Over the course of the past 200 years, the American church has become an enterprise, which has in that time marketed itself more or less aggressively depending upon the tenor of the times and its own level of institutional energy.
Denominations like ours, with a long history of seeing ourselves as a “public” church attempting to live up to Jefferson’s Prophecy, have often been slow to adopt this “entrepreneurial” approach to religion. And in many cases we’ve been able to afford not to; our deep roots and broad social networks have allowed us to preserve our self-image as “America’s Real Religion,” along with the elusive goal of winning everyone over to our way of thinking. But thanks to Mr. Jefferson’s legacy, I can comfortably predict that this is never going to happen. We may someday become slightly more numerous than one in a thousand, but even to achieve that we need to look very carefully at who we are and where we come from, and the essence of our mission to the communities we choose to serve. We need to be honest, forthright, and unashamed about our beliefs, our values, our goals, our principles, and our practices...and we need to lift them up high, so that all may see and that those who agree can easily find us here. We need to invite our friends, and support this church with our time, and our talent, and yes our treasure...even when times are tough, and we are nervous ourselves about whether or not we will even have a job a year from now. And above all, we must all hang together, because if we fail to do so (to paraphrase Mr Franklin at the signing of the Declaration) we will all most certainly be left to hang separately, and alone -- from a metaphorical , if not a literal, noose of our own making.
READING:
To Messrs. Nehemiah Dodge and Others A Committee of the Danbury Baptist Association in the State of Connecticut
January 1, 1802
Gentlemen,
The affectionate sentiments of esteem and approbation which you are so good as to express towards me, on behalf of the Danbury Baptist Association, give me the highest satisfaction. My duties dictate a faithful and zealous pursuit of the interests of my constituents, and in proportion as they are persuaded of my fidelity to those duties, the discharge of them becomes more and more pleasing.
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.
I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection and blessing of the common Father and Creator of man, and tender you for yourselves and your religious association, assurances of my high respect and esteem.
Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States
Sunday, March 1, 2009
MR JEFFERSON’S PROPHECY
***
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday March 1st, 2009
OPENING WORDS: “Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.... Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal.” --Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia.
***
“ I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine of one only God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian....”
These words may be new to you, but we are coming up now on the 187th anniversary of their composition, and I personally have been living with their haunting irony for most of my adult lifetime. They stand before me like a taunting challenge from a heckler in the back of the room: if you’re so smart, why ain’t your rich? If you’re so famous, why haven’t I heard of you? And if your religion is so great, why aren’t there a lot more of Unitarian Universalists?
There are a little over 300 million Americans alive today, approximately half of whom are, have been, or will be young men. On the other hand, there are only about 250 thousand Unitarian Universalists living in the United States, and only 39% of those are male. Of course, I’m talking about certified members now. If you look instead at census and polling data, those numbers improve a litte; according to Gallop and the Pew Charitable Trust, approximately three to six-tenths of one per cent of Americans consider themselves to be Unitarians, Universalists, or some combination thereof. Even so, the basic reality is that to be a Unitarian Universalist is to be one in a thousand. Or to put it another way, if you were going to mingle in a random group of people [obviously not here, but maybe at the mall], your chances of running into another Unitarian there would be approximately 250 times WORSE than my chances of surviving cancer for the next five years!
This Winter I’ve been preaching a series of sermons on something I call “UU DNA” -- the things about “our liberal movement in theology” which are so distinct and ubiquitous that they might be thought of as part of our “genetic make-up.” So far I’ve spoken about the “promiscuous” nature of our unique version of Congregational Polity, about the importance of Personal Religious Experience as the principal source of religious authority, and also about Unitarian Universalist responses to the Problem of Evil: “why bad things happen to good people.” And those sermons can now all be found on our church website; [I believe you can get to them by clicking on my face at the firstparishportland.org homepage}. And now today and again in a couple of weeks we come to the conclusion of this series, by examining this lingering and sometimes haunting sense of challenge and expectation -- as well as missed opportunity and squandered potential -- that still sometimes colors our image of ourselves two centuries after Jefferson made his prediction. If we’re so great, why aren’t there more of us? In fact, why have so many people never even heard of us at all?
But before we tackle those questions, I’d first like to look a little more closely at Jefferson’s own Unitarian credentials. Denominational historians generally consider Jefferson to be one of five Unitarian or Universalist presidents. But unlike the other four: John and John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore, and William Howard Taft -- all of whom have tangible records of church membership and denominational involvement -- Jefferson considered himself “content to be a Unitarian by myself,” and was never formally affiliated with any Unitarian church or organization.
Part of this is simply a matter of geography and historical timing. Jefferson was born in 1743, and died at his home at Montecello in Virginia on July 4th, 1826 [the same day John Adams died at his home in Massachussets]. For approximately two/thirds of his life, Liberal Christianity (at least in America) would have been known simply as that; it was not until after 1805 (and the election of Henry Ware Sr. as the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, at the beginning of Jefferson’s second term as President) that the term “Unitarian” began to come into use to describe the liberals, and it was really not until a decade later, at William Ellery Channing’s 1819 sermon at the ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore (Unitarianism’s southernmost congregation at that time) that the label “Unitarian Christianity” was publicly used by the liberals themselves, to describe the doctrines they felt defined their faith.
By that time there were already one hundred or more congregations who were Unitarian in all be name [including this one here in Portland], but they were mostly here in New England; only Joseph Priestly’s church in Philadelphia, an offshoot of British Unitarianism, was an exception to this rule. It was not until 1825 -- a mere 13 months (actually, a year, a month, a week and a day) before Jefferson and Adams’s deaths, that the American Unitarian Association was formally organized in Boston.
Jefferson was a great admirer and supporter of Priestly, and probably even attended services at Priestly’s church in Philadelphia while living and serving in the Government there; he was certainly familiar with Priestly’s writings, which were an inspiration for his own infamous “Jefferson Bible.” But as a public figure whose religious opinions were already controversial, Jefferson was reluctant to have his name invoked in theological disputes, and therefore tended to keep his personal faith a private matter, to be discussed only among close friends and those who shared his views. Yet despite having been born too soon to enjoy what some have called “the Golden Age of Unitariansim, “ there is certainly no doubt in my own mind, as a historian, that when Jefferson died as an old man of 83, he died a Unitarian.
But just exactly what did being a Unitarian mean in Jefferson’s day? A good portion of Jefferson’s creed we heard in this morning’s reading: that God is One, and that Jesus was a great spiritual teacher, who taught that our highest duty in life is to Love God with all our hearts, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Beyond that though, Jefferson’s personal faith embodied three additional features typical of Unitarianism then and now. The Unitarian historian Earl Morse Wilbur has described these qualities as “Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance,” and in many ways they still characterize the continuity in liberal religion from Jefferson’s day until our own.
By Freedom is meant the very idea of religious liberty or “liberalism” itself: the Freedom of Conscience which entitles (and obligates!) the seeker to believe whatever their Reason and their Experience tell them to be true. Reason, in turn, places its trust in what was then sometimes called “Natural Theology” rather than revelation-- a belief in “Nature and Nature’s God” whose eternal truths are self-evident, and best discerned and understood through scientific observation and logical inquiry, rather than through some sort of supernatural revelation. Jefferson’s co-revolutionary Benjamin Franklin once quipped that “so convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” But in more serious moments, the distinction between “rationality” and “rationalization” is easily discerned by “reasonable” human beings.
It’s the question of Tolerance that more frequently causes stumbling. The value of Freedom dictates a broad latitude of belief and opinion, since each is free to follow their own conscience. The value of Reason, on the other hand, is constantly asking that nagging question: “How far can we open our minds before our brains fall out?” Jefferson’s notion of a “marketplace” of religious ideas, where each religion is brought before the tribunal of Reason and Free Inquiry, proved itself somewhat naive and ineffective in the context of a complete separation of Church and State, where mere “toleration” gave way to an environment of diversity and pluralism where the mere idea of a dominant “true religion” seems absurd.
In his book Revolutionary Spirits: The Enlightened Faith of America’s Founding Fathers, my friend and Divinity School classmate Gary Kowalski describes what happened next:
**By defining the individual as a spiritual free agent within an unregulated religious marketplace, the founders opened the field to revivalists vying to save souls by whatever means possible -- promises of heaven or threats of hell packaged in terms the roughest pioneers could comprehend.
**A changing theology propelled America’s conversion. An earlier generation held that only God could deliver sinners into a state of grace. There was little human beings could do to hasten or prevent a dynamic of redemption that was entirely in the hands of the Almighty. But evangelists in the nineteenth century agreed that a more popular, extemporaneous preaching style might help ready the reprobate to receive the divine influx. Droning sermons gave way to more dramatic altar calls. Showmanship entered the pulpit. The two former presidents [Adams and Jefferson], with their high-minded, philosophic discourse were at a persuasive disadvantage. [p 190]**
Unlike Jefferson, John Adams believed that there was a place for an established church in the new United States, and had his views prevailed that church would have no doubt resembled some form of Unitarianism. But with the First Amendment and Jefferson’s “wall of separation,” future generations faced a very different landscape than the one their ancestors had known. [But this is territory we will explore next time, when we examine “Mr Jefferson’s Legacy.” ]
***
READING: letter from Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Waterhouse, June 26, 1822
To Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse
Monticello, June 26, 1822
Dear Sir, -- I have received and read with thankfulness and pleasure your denunciation of the abuses of tobacco and wine. Yet, however sound in its principles, I expect it will be but a sermon to the wind. You will find it as difficult to inculcate these sanative precepts on the sensualities of the present day, as to convince an Athanasian that there is but one God. I wish success to both attempts, and am happy to learn from you that the latter, at least, is making progress, and the more rapidly in proportion as our Platonizing Christians make more stir and noise about it. The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man.
1. That there is one only God, and he all perfect.
2. That there is a future state of rewards and punishments.
3. That to love God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself; is the sum of religion.
These are the great points on which he endeavored to reform the religion of the Jews. But compare with these the demoralizing dogmas of Calvin.
1. That there are three Gods.
2. That good works, or the love of our neighbor, are nothing.
3. That faith is every thing, and the more incomprehensible the proposition, the more merit in its faith.
4. That reason in religion is of unlawful use.
5. That God, from the beginning, elected certain individuals to be saved, and certain others to be damned; and that no crimes of the former can damn them; no virtues of the latter save.
Now, which of these is the true and charitable Christian? He who believes and acts on the simple doctrines of Jesus? Or the impious dogmatists as Athanasius and Calvin? Verily I say these are the false shepherds foretold as to enter not by the door into the sheepfold, but to climb up some other way. They are mere usurpers of the Christian name, teaching a counter-religion made up of the deliria of crazy imaginations, as foreign from Christianity as is that of Mahomet. Their blasphemies have driven thinking men into infidelity, who have too hastily rejected the supposed author himself, with the horrors so falsely imputed to him. Had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from his lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christian. I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine of one only God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.
But much I fear, that when this great truth shall be re-established, its votaries will fall into the fatal error of fabricating formulas of creed and confessions of faith, the engines which so soon destroyed the religion of Jesus, and made of Christendom a mere Aceldama; that they will give up morals for mysteries, and Jesus for Plato. How much wiser are the Quakers, who, agreeing in the fundamental doctrines of the gospel, schismatize about no mysteries, and, keeping within the pale of common sense, suffer no speculative differences of opinion, any more than of feature, to impair the love of their brethren. Be this the wisdom of Unitarians, this the holy mantle which shall cover within its charitable circumference all who believe in one God, and who love their neighbor! I conclude my sermon with sincere assurances of my friendly esteem and respect.
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday March 1st, 2009
OPENING WORDS: “Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.... Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal.” --Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia.
***
“ I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine of one only God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian....”
These words may be new to you, but we are coming up now on the 187th anniversary of their composition, and I personally have been living with their haunting irony for most of my adult lifetime. They stand before me like a taunting challenge from a heckler in the back of the room: if you’re so smart, why ain’t your rich? If you’re so famous, why haven’t I heard of you? And if your religion is so great, why aren’t there a lot more of Unitarian Universalists?
There are a little over 300 million Americans alive today, approximately half of whom are, have been, or will be young men. On the other hand, there are only about 250 thousand Unitarian Universalists living in the United States, and only 39% of those are male. Of course, I’m talking about certified members now. If you look instead at census and polling data, those numbers improve a litte; according to Gallop and the Pew Charitable Trust, approximately three to six-tenths of one per cent of Americans consider themselves to be Unitarians, Universalists, or some combination thereof. Even so, the basic reality is that to be a Unitarian Universalist is to be one in a thousand. Or to put it another way, if you were going to mingle in a random group of people [obviously not here, but maybe at the mall], your chances of running into another Unitarian there would be approximately 250 times WORSE than my chances of surviving cancer for the next five years!
This Winter I’ve been preaching a series of sermons on something I call “UU DNA” -- the things about “our liberal movement in theology” which are so distinct and ubiquitous that they might be thought of as part of our “genetic make-up.” So far I’ve spoken about the “promiscuous” nature of our unique version of Congregational Polity, about the importance of Personal Religious Experience as the principal source of religious authority, and also about Unitarian Universalist responses to the Problem of Evil: “why bad things happen to good people.” And those sermons can now all be found on our church website; [I believe you can get to them by clicking on my face at the firstparishportland.org homepage}. And now today and again in a couple of weeks we come to the conclusion of this series, by examining this lingering and sometimes haunting sense of challenge and expectation -- as well as missed opportunity and squandered potential -- that still sometimes colors our image of ourselves two centuries after Jefferson made his prediction. If we’re so great, why aren’t there more of us? In fact, why have so many people never even heard of us at all?
But before we tackle those questions, I’d first like to look a little more closely at Jefferson’s own Unitarian credentials. Denominational historians generally consider Jefferson to be one of five Unitarian or Universalist presidents. But unlike the other four: John and John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore, and William Howard Taft -- all of whom have tangible records of church membership and denominational involvement -- Jefferson considered himself “content to be a Unitarian by myself,” and was never formally affiliated with any Unitarian church or organization.
Part of this is simply a matter of geography and historical timing. Jefferson was born in 1743, and died at his home at Montecello in Virginia on July 4th, 1826 [the same day John Adams died at his home in Massachussets]. For approximately two/thirds of his life, Liberal Christianity (at least in America) would have been known simply as that; it was not until after 1805 (and the election of Henry Ware Sr. as the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, at the beginning of Jefferson’s second term as President) that the term “Unitarian” began to come into use to describe the liberals, and it was really not until a decade later, at William Ellery Channing’s 1819 sermon at the ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore (Unitarianism’s southernmost congregation at that time) that the label “Unitarian Christianity” was publicly used by the liberals themselves, to describe the doctrines they felt defined their faith.
By that time there were already one hundred or more congregations who were Unitarian in all be name [including this one here in Portland], but they were mostly here in New England; only Joseph Priestly’s church in Philadelphia, an offshoot of British Unitarianism, was an exception to this rule. It was not until 1825 -- a mere 13 months (actually, a year, a month, a week and a day) before Jefferson and Adams’s deaths, that the American Unitarian Association was formally organized in Boston.
Jefferson was a great admirer and supporter of Priestly, and probably even attended services at Priestly’s church in Philadelphia while living and serving in the Government there; he was certainly familiar with Priestly’s writings, which were an inspiration for his own infamous “Jefferson Bible.” But as a public figure whose religious opinions were already controversial, Jefferson was reluctant to have his name invoked in theological disputes, and therefore tended to keep his personal faith a private matter, to be discussed only among close friends and those who shared his views. Yet despite having been born too soon to enjoy what some have called “the Golden Age of Unitariansim, “ there is certainly no doubt in my own mind, as a historian, that when Jefferson died as an old man of 83, he died a Unitarian.
But just exactly what did being a Unitarian mean in Jefferson’s day? A good portion of Jefferson’s creed we heard in this morning’s reading: that God is One, and that Jesus was a great spiritual teacher, who taught that our highest duty in life is to Love God with all our hearts, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Beyond that though, Jefferson’s personal faith embodied three additional features typical of Unitarianism then and now. The Unitarian historian Earl Morse Wilbur has described these qualities as “Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance,” and in many ways they still characterize the continuity in liberal religion from Jefferson’s day until our own.
By Freedom is meant the very idea of religious liberty or “liberalism” itself: the Freedom of Conscience which entitles (and obligates!) the seeker to believe whatever their Reason and their Experience tell them to be true. Reason, in turn, places its trust in what was then sometimes called “Natural Theology” rather than revelation-- a belief in “Nature and Nature’s God” whose eternal truths are self-evident, and best discerned and understood through scientific observation and logical inquiry, rather than through some sort of supernatural revelation. Jefferson’s co-revolutionary Benjamin Franklin once quipped that “so convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” But in more serious moments, the distinction between “rationality” and “rationalization” is easily discerned by “reasonable” human beings.
It’s the question of Tolerance that more frequently causes stumbling. The value of Freedom dictates a broad latitude of belief and opinion, since each is free to follow their own conscience. The value of Reason, on the other hand, is constantly asking that nagging question: “How far can we open our minds before our brains fall out?” Jefferson’s notion of a “marketplace” of religious ideas, where each religion is brought before the tribunal of Reason and Free Inquiry, proved itself somewhat naive and ineffective in the context of a complete separation of Church and State, where mere “toleration” gave way to an environment of diversity and pluralism where the mere idea of a dominant “true religion” seems absurd.
In his book Revolutionary Spirits: The Enlightened Faith of America’s Founding Fathers, my friend and Divinity School classmate Gary Kowalski describes what happened next:
**By defining the individual as a spiritual free agent within an unregulated religious marketplace, the founders opened the field to revivalists vying to save souls by whatever means possible -- promises of heaven or threats of hell packaged in terms the roughest pioneers could comprehend.
**A changing theology propelled America’s conversion. An earlier generation held that only God could deliver sinners into a state of grace. There was little human beings could do to hasten or prevent a dynamic of redemption that was entirely in the hands of the Almighty. But evangelists in the nineteenth century agreed that a more popular, extemporaneous preaching style might help ready the reprobate to receive the divine influx. Droning sermons gave way to more dramatic altar calls. Showmanship entered the pulpit. The two former presidents [Adams and Jefferson], with their high-minded, philosophic discourse were at a persuasive disadvantage. [p 190]**
Unlike Jefferson, John Adams believed that there was a place for an established church in the new United States, and had his views prevailed that church would have no doubt resembled some form of Unitarianism. But with the First Amendment and Jefferson’s “wall of separation,” future generations faced a very different landscape than the one their ancestors had known. [But this is territory we will explore next time, when we examine “Mr Jefferson’s Legacy.” ]
***
READING: letter from Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Waterhouse, June 26, 1822
To Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse
Monticello, June 26, 1822
Dear Sir, -- I have received and read with thankfulness and pleasure your denunciation of the abuses of tobacco and wine. Yet, however sound in its principles, I expect it will be but a sermon to the wind. You will find it as difficult to inculcate these sanative precepts on the sensualities of the present day, as to convince an Athanasian that there is but one God. I wish success to both attempts, and am happy to learn from you that the latter, at least, is making progress, and the more rapidly in proportion as our Platonizing Christians make more stir and noise about it. The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man.
1. That there is one only God, and he all perfect.
2. That there is a future state of rewards and punishments.
3. That to love God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself; is the sum of religion.
These are the great points on which he endeavored to reform the religion of the Jews. But compare with these the demoralizing dogmas of Calvin.
1. That there are three Gods.
2. That good works, or the love of our neighbor, are nothing.
3. That faith is every thing, and the more incomprehensible the proposition, the more merit in its faith.
4. That reason in religion is of unlawful use.
5. That God, from the beginning, elected certain individuals to be saved, and certain others to be damned; and that no crimes of the former can damn them; no virtues of the latter save.
Now, which of these is the true and charitable Christian? He who believes and acts on the simple doctrines of Jesus? Or the impious dogmatists as Athanasius and Calvin? Verily I say these are the false shepherds foretold as to enter not by the door into the sheepfold, but to climb up some other way. They are mere usurpers of the Christian name, teaching a counter-religion made up of the deliria of crazy imaginations, as foreign from Christianity as is that of Mahomet. Their blasphemies have driven thinking men into infidelity, who have too hastily rejected the supposed author himself, with the horrors so falsely imputed to him. Had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from his lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christian. I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine of one only God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.
But much I fear, that when this great truth shall be re-established, its votaries will fall into the fatal error of fabricating formulas of creed and confessions of faith, the engines which so soon destroyed the religion of Jesus, and made of Christendom a mere Aceldama; that they will give up morals for mysteries, and Jesus for Plato. How much wiser are the Quakers, who, agreeing in the fundamental doctrines of the gospel, schismatize about no mysteries, and, keeping within the pale of common sense, suffer no speculative differences of opinion, any more than of feature, to impair the love of their brethren. Be this the wisdom of Unitarians, this the holy mantle which shall cover within its charitable circumference all who believe in one God, and who love their neighbor! I conclude my sermon with sincere assurances of my friendly esteem and respect.
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