Chalice Lighting
Words of Martin Luther King, Jr. -- “Every[one] must decide whether he [or she] will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most precious and urgent question is, What are you doing for others?”
Readings
1.Nineteenth Century – Theodore Parker
Slavery, some Southerners were saying, had rescued black Africans from cannibalism and wild animals, and had even provided them with the opportunity of becoming Christians! This is the language of salvation. What the Abolitionists described as a living Hell, Southern apologists depicted as no less than the Salvation of black human beings who would have had no other chance for it. But, Theodore Parker was never content with the simplistic view that the North was good and the South was bad. These are his words:
“Slavery, the most hideous snack with Southern regions breed … came crawling North, fold on fold, and ring on ring, and coil on coil, the venomed monster came; then Avarice the foulest worm which Northern cities gender in their heat, went crawling South: with many a wiggling curl, it wound along its way. At length they met, and twisting up in their obscene embrace, the twin became one monster … there was no North, no South, they were one poison.” [Parker, Discourse on Webster, from Commager, Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusader, p.230]
2. Twentieth Century – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“To be a Negro in America is to hope against hope. … Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. It means seeing your mother and father spiritually murdered by the slings and arrows of daily exploitation, and then being hated for being an orphan.” [Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967]
3.Nineteenth Century – Theodore Parker
Parker hated violence. He struggled with the problem of what place, if any, it had in the conflict between freedom and bondage into which he had thrown himself. Here is a passage from his Defense, which expresses his negotiations with himself around violence:
“I am not a man who loves violence. I respect the sacredness of human life. But this I say, solemnly, that I will do all in my power to rescue any fugitive slave from the hands of any officer who attempted to return him to bondage. I will resist him as gently as I know how, but with such strength as I can command; I will ring the bells, and alarm the town; I will serve as head, as foot, or as hand to any body of serious and earnest men, who will go with me, with no weapons but their hands, in this work. I will do it as readily as I would lift a man out of the water, or pluck him from the teeth of a wolf, or snatch him from the hands of a murderer. What is a fine of a thousand dollars, and jailing for six months, to the liberty of a man? My money perish with me, if it stand between me and the eternal law of God. I trust there are many … in this house to secure the freedom of every fugitive slave in Boston, without breaking a limb or rending a garment.”4.Twentieth Century – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. King’s words: “Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love.”
Meditation
O, my quiet mind,
take me to a place where I may rest.
Calm me so that I may hear that which matters.
Here may we find strength to live through our days,
days that bring questions larger than we can answer;
days that bring dilemmas we cannot solve.
Here may we find forgiveness
for that which we wish we had not done,
And for that which we have left undone, unfinished, or broken.
Here may we find courage to see our life
in the context of the world,
So that we may know what we need to do,
and what we cannot do;
Courage to speak when speaking is called for;
Courage to be silent when words are useless or gating;
And courage to act when we feel frightened or powerless.
Here may we find hope with which to try again,
and to face whatever flows before us.
May we grow together in our gathering.
Let us be silent together.
Sermon – “Two Lives, One Dream:
Theodore Parker and Martin Luther King, Jr.”
It’s been four, maybe five years now, that we’ve designated January as “Unitarian Universalist Identity Month.” The idea was initiated by Sue Philley, a former Director of Religious Education in the church. She felt that our members and friends would like an opportunity to know more about UU religious heritage. In past Januarys, we’ve dedicated three or four January Sunday services to the topic. We got to know famous UU’s from the past – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, William Ellery Channing, Dorothea Dix, and Susan B. Anthony. We’ve examined the evolution of our theology from liberal Christianity to Transcendentalism, and on to Humanism and the new spirituality.
This January, we have scheduled just this one Sunday service to address the topic. It’s one of many changes that have been occurring in the last year.
There is so much changing in our church now. Michael McGee brings us a whole new energy in his ministry, and there’s a whole new energy in the team ministry practice that Michael and I, and this whole congregation has embarked upon. We’ve been enjoying the input from two Interim professionals in these past three years, and will have a spanking brand-new Minister or Director of Religious Education this summer. High energy, transitions, and trying out new ideas are our hallmark now. We are evolving into a church on the cutting edge – pioneering Team Ministry and the small-group program known as “Covenant Groups.” We are growing in numbers, which is moving us into a “Strategic Planning process” to look ahead and plan for growth and new horizons.
UUCA is changing. We, ourselves, are living through a UU identity shift.
And, we aren’t alone. All of our churches are experiencing the shifting sands of change as well. That is what happens when you have a non-dogmatic, non-creedal religion: Shift happens!!!
What will happen to our nice little UU Identity Month tradition, I can’t say. We’ll look forward to next January to find out!
So, why did I pick the Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker, who lived from 1810 to 1860, to talk about as a significant part of our UU heritage and identity, on this, the Martin Luther King weekend?
First, I’d like to see a show of hands of those who have been familiar with Theodore Parker. (The show of hands during the first service amounted to about an eighth of the congregation; in the second service, it was less.)
A little over one hundred years separated the two ministers, but not their activist zeal to free African Americans and restore to them their basic human rights. King, who was raised in a society engulfed by racial oppression and humiliation, believed that he had a social and moral responsibility to educate the nation about the evils of racism. Parker, raised in an earlier society, no less acquainted with racial oppression and humiliation, believed that he had a social and moral responsibility to educate the nation about the evils of slavery.
The Abolitionist Movement was a reform movement during the 18th and 19th centuries. Often called the antislavery movement, it sought to end the enslavement of Africans and people of African descent in Europe, the Americas, and Africa itself. It also aimed to end the Atlantic slave trade carried out over the Atlantic Ocean between Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
The historical roots of abolitionism lay in black resistance to slavery. As early as the 1500s, Africans enslaved by Europeans would attempt to escape or kill their captors, or themselves.
The brutality of the Atlantic slave trade and of slavery itself played an important motivating role in the origins of the abolitionist movement. Those subjected to the slave trade suffered horribly: they were chained, branded, crowded into disease-ridden slave ships, and abused by ship’s crews. Many Africans died on the ships well before they arrived in the Americas.
Once in the colonies, slaves were deprived of their human rights, made to endure dreadful conditions, and forced to perform backbreaking labor.
Despite the horrors of the slave trade and slavery, white opposition to the institution developed slowly.
The economies of many of the colonies were based on huge plantations that required large labor forces in order to be profitable. Also, views of society at the time were very hierarchical, and many people simple accepted the fact that classes of people they considered lower than themselves should be enslaved. Also, because so many believed that blacks were culturally, morally, and intellectually inferior to whites, the system wasn’t about to change quickly or easily. It was not until the early 18th century that attitudes began to change.
By the late 1700s, Christian morality, new ideas about liberty and human rights that came about as a result of the American and French revolutions, and economic changes, led to an effort among blacks and whites to end human bondage.
In the late 18th century, an age of revolution began to bring out ideas about equal rights. These ideas became a powerful force against slavery. In the past, servitude and slavery had been taken for granted as part of a class system in which the rich dominated the poor, and those of the lower classes were not allowed to advance socially. But, then, the Industrial Revolution, bringing with it increased economic opportunity and power to the lower and middle classes, began to undermine the system as well.
Also on the scene – the 18th century European intellectual movement known as the Age of Enlightenment asserted that all human beings had natural rights.
The American Revolution (1775-1783) and the French Revolution (1789-1799), widely seen as revolutions by citizens against oppressive rulers, transformed the values of the Enlightenment into a call for universal liberty and freedom.
Enter Theodore Parker, in the early 19th century.
The Abolitionist movement preceded Parker, and followed after him right into the Civil War, but he became a strong voice of opposition to slavery, particularly during the time of the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. That law enabled Slave Owners or their representatives to enter free states in the North, capture runaways, and return them to the South.
Parker and others formed a Vigilance Committee to prevent seizure of any blacks in Boston. He was made ‘minister-at-large’ for all fugitive slaves in the city.
When he learned that slave-catchers were on the trail of two members of his congregation – William and Ellen Craft who were fugitives from Georgia – he hid them in his house. He wrote: “For the first time I armed myself, and put my house in a state of defense. For two weeks I wrote my sermons with a sword in the open drawer under my inkstand, and a pistol in the flap of the desk, loaded, ready…..”
In a book called, The Right of Revolution, the author, Truman Nelson describes how Parker dealt with the two slave catchers who were pursuing the Crafts:
Roving bodies of men were organized to follow the slave hunters… whenever they appeared in public, to dog them and harass them with jostlings and threats… just short of murder… Parker’s plan of mobbing the salve hunters every time they appeared… worked so well that the gentlemen spent most of their time in their room at the United States Hotel. Members of the Vigilance Committee invaded the hotel and began to fill the corridors and hang about… Finally, the landlord’s patience and composure broke down. He came to see Parker and said the slave hunters wanted to see him. Here Parker made his key play. He told them that he had come to save them from harm; that he was the only man in Boston who could save them from mob violence, that he had already diverted such an attack. They held out for a while, boasting that they could get plenty of help if they needed it, but Parker assured them that it would be suicidal for them to stay another night in Boston and that the men in the corridors were hanging about on his orders, to give the salve hunters a safe conduct to the New York train…. After an hour or so of meditation, the slave hunters left, never to return.”
Theodore Parker then re-married the Crafts. Their earlier marriage had been nullified by the State of Georgia. He gave them each a Bible and a sword, rather than a ring, and had them pledge: “With this sword, I thee wed.” He then put them on a boat to England, where slavery had already been abolished.
He was always against slavery, but it took a while until he became ready to resist it. As a young man he taught for a few years. During that time, several parents pressured him to remove a little colored girl from his classes. His memory of that incident as a failure of his own courage is what may have driven him in later years to action for reform. He preached on occasion against slavery in his early years of his ministry in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, but it wasn’t until he moved to serve a church in Boston that had been formed just for him that he became active in the abolitionist cause.
Theodore Parker, who is remembered by all Unitarian Universalist ministers today as the first role model of minister as social activist, thought he would lead the life of a parish minister and scholar, not a social reformer. He was a big reader all his life, and had an amazing memory of all that he read. He learned Greek and Latin, and several other languages as well. He came from a family of farmers – five generations of them in Lexington, Massachusetts.
He applied to Harvard College, and was accepted in 1830, but didn’t have the money to attend. He was allowed to take the examinations for his course of study without enrolling, and was granted an honorary degree in 1834. He then attended Harvard Divinity School and graduated in 1836. The following year he was ordained minister of the Unitarian Church in West Roxbury.
Parker became a theological reformer as well as a social one. He was one of the Transcendentalists, a good friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Both men gave groundbreaking talks, -- classic addresses that represent turning points in the history of American Unitarianism. Both were controversial. The difference is that Emerson left his ministry position – left the church – while Parker remained a Unitarian minister and fought to reform the Unitarian Association from within.
Parker’s part of the stirring and shaking of Unitarianism came in a sermon he gave in 1841 called, “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity.” Very simply put, Parker asked the people of his day to consider Christianity of the past as dead and gone. He was ready to promote a new Christianity, one that always speaks of the day and is current. He frankly said that some people were living a ghost type of religion in Christianity, and there was more to God than what the old dogma’s allowed.
As an aside, Parker often referred to God as Father and Mother. He was a prominent supporter for the cause of women’s rights in mid-nineteenth century America.
Parker claims that people are allowing theology to stand between themselves and God. The permanent is the growth and fulfillment of the religious conscience found naturally in humans. The permanent was Christianity’s moral truth. The transient, that which passes, are particular doctrines and rigid orthodoxies. The transient is window dressing, the creeds, the holy books, rituals, and cosmologies. The rites that were regarded as essential in one Age, are abandoned by another; the heresy of one generation becomes the orthodoxy of the next. Great teachers, like Jesus, are always needed to sharpen our awareness of the truth, but they are not the truth themselves; they are passing messengers. Truths were found by reason, intuition, and study, and as such, were not dependent on the messenger or miracles.
Those of you who were here for my recent sermon on the radical Episcopalian Bishop – now retired – John Shelby Spong, may realize the similarities. Spong and Parker seem cut from the same cloth, including their strong interest in biblical scholarship. They both sought to find evidence of the historical Jesus and the authenticity of his life and teachings in the context of those ancient times. Spong also has been a reformer from within the church, and an activist in social causes. Both have received criticism and hostility from those within their churches, and others, who held more orthodox views.
Theodore Parker’s social conscience was certainly derived from his theology. His belief that each person held the divine within them would have him act to oppose anything that diminished or destroyed the rights freedom of individuals. His pulpit increasingly changed from theology to politics and the human situation. The fact that abolitionism especially would dominate most of his life from then on hardly meant that he had abandoned theology: in fact he was putting it into practice.
For Parker, the Abolitionist, slavery was a perpetual state of violence not only against human beings, but against God. For Parker the Transcendentalist, God was present in the far reaches of the cosmos and in every human soul, urging us constantly to freedom and truth telling.
Theodore Parker, so busy with his reading, his studying, his preaching and lecturing, his ministerial duties, his travelling, his activism, became ill with tuberculosis. He and his wife traveled to Italy in 1859 for rest and study. But Theodore Parker did not recover. He died in May of 1860, 49 years old. He is buried in the English Cemetery in Florence, Italy. His gravestone reads:
His name is engraved in marble
His virtues in the hearts of those he helped
to free from slavery and superstition
Tomorrow, at Noon, we will come together in this sanctuary with members of two other churches – the Mt. Zion Baptist Church, and Our Lady Queen of Peace Catholic Church – in an interfaith celebration of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King was a messenger of truth. His dream that “one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed – we hold these truths to be self-evident that all [people] are created equal” is still before us as a vision. Racism clings to us as dust continually kicked up along a parched path.
I hope that many of you will be here tomorrow to witness and participate in the ongoing struggle for freedom and human rights. And I ask those of you who come to bring with you the memory of the Reverend Theodore Parker, who fought in the very same trenches over a hundred years ago – hand in hand – over time – with Dr. King – and with all of us on our way to the promised land.
Benediction
These are the words of the Reverend Theodore Parker:
May ours be a religion which, like sunshine, goes everywhere;
its temple, all space;
its shrine, the good heart;
its creed, all truth;
its ritual, works of love;
its profession of faith, divine living.”
-Amen and shalom!
