Names We Should Know

A Sermon by
Rev. John E. Gibbons

Delivered Sunday, October 8, 2000

At The First Parish in Bedford

Ten years ago, when I began this ministry, the Parish Committee and I drew a time line on which we wrote significant events in the life of the church as we remembered them: the last several ministers—Gil Phillips (who sometimes wrote his sermons over cocktails at the Balfour house on North Road), David Pohl (who resigned soon after Mrs. Balfour suggested that he had not purchased enough at the annual Plant Fair), Robert Henry Holmes (who presided over the first building addition in 1960 the building of the first addition), David Weissbard (who initiated our tradition of creative lay services), Bill Schulz (who later became president of the Unitarian Universalist Association and is now executive director of Amnesty International), long-time activist Jack Mendelsohn (who while he served here was also an adviser to Jesse Jackson and traveled to Cuba and Syria), and interim minister Doug Strong (our first openly gay minister who once delighted the congregation by serving an ice cream communion). On the time line, the Parish Committee remembered the first time jokes were told in Sunday sermons; they recalled actions First Parish took in opposition to the Vietnam War; they remembered the generosity of Abigail Bacon; they remembered the really ugly color that these walls used to be painted, and much more.

Thomas Jefferson once said that "The world belongs to the living" and, in a real sense, this church stands for what we stand for; it is as courageous, and caring and generous as we are. Ours is not a dead faith. As Huckleberry Finn once said, "I don’t place much stock in dead people," and if what we do together fails to make a difference in our lives and our world, well then, what good is it?

Our memories and our lives are very important, and yet they do not tell the whole story, or even most of it, because to really understand who we are as a church it is necessary to go beyond that which our memories recall. It is necessary for us, in our lives, to honor the intellectual and spiritual inheritance of those who came before us.

Harry Meserve, another UU minister, once said, "It is a curious error to suppose you can carry on effectively a great liberal tradition while remaining at the same time ignorant, or almost ignorant, of the beliefs and achievements of the people who have handed that tradition over to you.

I was motivated to preach this sermon when, over the summer, I attempted some interior decoration here by proposing that this sign be hung. Now, some opposed my proposal because they thought this sign might have been acquired illegally. I’ll have you know I paid $60 for this sign in a respectable antique shop. Its provenance is clear! But I was more shocked when several older members of this congregation objected because the name Channing meant nothing to them. Carol Channing? Stockard Channing? I’ll say more later, but William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) was the preacher, prophet, hero and colossus of American Unitarianism.

Kaiser Wilhelm once visited the observatory in Bonn and asked the resident astronomer a friendly question, "Well, my dear Arlander," he said. "What’s new in the starry sky?" "Ah," the old astronomer replied, "But does your Majesty already know the old?"

History offers us a ground for our values (as folksinger Billy Jonas would have said it, a "grounnnnnD"), a focus for our faith. "Where a more orthodox religion might appeal to revelation or hierarchical judgment or the final authority of Scripture, we do rely on our individual experience, but this must be our individual experience tempered by tradition and tested against the insights and conviction of the gathered community. This is our way of discovering religious truth."

With the rest of this sermon, I’m going to give you a whirlwind of hardly-even thumbnail sketches of important people from our history, but I’m going to repeat what I just said because it’s the real take-home message today and it’s the real antidote to the absolutely-true but absolutely irrelevant observation that here you can believe anything you want to believe: A more orthodox religion may appeal to revelation or hierarchical judgment or the final authority of Scripture, we in contrast do rely on our individual experience, but this must be our individual experience tempered by tradition and tested against the insights and conviction of the gathered community. This is our way of discovering religious truth.

First of all, Unitarian Universalist ideas have arisen throughout human history, not because someone has taken on that label as though they were choosing among registered trademark brand-names (Subaru, Oldsmobile, Buddhism, Christianity, Calvin Klein, Starbucks, Sufism or Unitarian Universalism), but rather Unitarian Universalists have arisen because people of all religious traditions, beliefs and unbeliefs have yearned for, discovered and celebrated—not only ideas— but…

an entire way of life that is free of superstition, rigid dogma, binding creed and unaccountable authority, a way that respects both reason and intuition;

Ours is a way of life that is not blind to evil but which honors the human capacity for good, for love and for justice;

and ours is a way of life that is unafraid of difference, which—by crossing all the boundaries and categories that so often separate and divide—celebrates all the diversities of ideas and identities.

There could be other beginning points (the Greek Origen, the Egyptian Akhnaten, Jesus, Buddha, the goddess-poet Sappho), but let’s start with

Servetus (1511-1553): A Spanish physician who wrote a book titled On the Errors of the Trinity. He reasoned that the Trinity is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible (it’s not) and that the Jesus of the creeds and the church is not the Jesus of the Gospels; and that a pompous church that kisses the feet of priests bears no resemblance to biblical ideals. Servetus thought his arguments were utterly reasonable but he was nonetheless declared a heretic by John Calvin (now remember that the word "heretic" means one who chooses and a theme here is people who do not just accept what they are told but who choose their beliefs and actions). Another characteristic of our forbears is that their liberalism got them in big trouble; and so when Servetus went to Geneva to persuade Calvin of his errors, Servetus was instead arrested, tried, and burned at the stake on October 27, 1553.

Another early liberal was Sebastian Castellio, a Frenchman who lived at the same time as Servetus. He protested the burning, drowning, dismemberment and torturing of heretics, saying "When you burn a man you do not destroy an idea; you burn a man."

Francis David, I hope, is a name that rings a bell. With our active partnership with a Unitarian church in Transylvania, and Francis David having been the founder of Transylvanian Unitarianism, his name has been invoked here many times. It was Francis David who, in the 16th century, won a great series of religious debates, thus converting the king, John Sigismund and making him the first and only Unitarian king in history. John Sigismund was also the first and only Unitarian gay king in history, but that’s another story. After winning the debates, Francis David stood upon a rock on the outskirts of the city of Kolozsvar and is said to have converted the entire city to Unitarianism, and many of you who have made pilgrimages to Transylvania have seen that rock. Influenced by Francis David, King John issued the Edict of Torda, the first declaration of religious freedom in the west. "God is One" (Egy Az Isten in Hungarian) was and is the rallying cry of these Unitarians. When King John died and his conservative successor had Francis David imprisoned in the mountaintop castle at Deva, "God Is One" were the words he scratched into the stone wall of his cell before he died in 1579. What were his crimes? Francis David believed fervently in the worship of God, not of any intermediaries—not icons, or saints, or the Virgin Mary, or even Christ. Prayers, he said, should not end "in the name of Jesus Christ" because Jesus was a man—not a god—a man who was passionate in his love of God. The rulers of Transylvania passed a law prohibiting "innovation" in church matters, but Francis David said no: the church must always change, be renewed and be relevant to the needs of the present. He was martyred for that faith, but his convictions are continuous with who we are—here—today.

Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) was an English scientist—the discoverer of oxygen—who was also a Unitarian minister. He fervently believed that religion ought to be subject to the same rigors of reason as is science; that the love of truth ought to permeate all human endeavor. Such a notion threatened the revealed truths of the orthodox church; riots were incited, and a Birmingham mob burned Priestley’s church, his home, his library and his laboratory. Throwing off the shackles of authority, Joseph Priestley came to America where he continued religious and scientific research, formed friendships with liberal statesmen like Washington, Adams and Jefferson, and established two Unitarian churches in Pennsylvania. That established in Northumberland in 1794 is the first in America to call itself Unitarian.

William Ellery Channing was, of course, related to Marcia Ellery Stern who sits over there. One of Channing’s many biographers is Jack Mendelsohn, who sits over there. Channing deserves a sermon unto himself, but you should know that he was minister of Boston’s Federal Street Church from 1803 until his death in 1842. Federal Street was the predecessor of Arlington Street Church, and it is said that when the doors of Arlington Street Church are opened wide, the preacher in the pulpit looks eye-to-eye with Channing whose statue is across the street in the Public Garden. Instead of human depravity, Channing preached the human capacity to choose the good. Reminiscent of Francis David’s defense of innovation, Channing said, "Do not feel as if Christianity has spoken its last word. It is the characteristic of divine truth that it is infinitely fruitful." Slight in stature and frail in health, it was Channing’s deep and inclusive intellect and spirituality, his insistence upon human potential to aspire even unto a likeness to God; and his slow but certain realization that spiritual reformation requires social reformation and an engagement with the great issues of one’s time…these he so powerfully affirmed that during his lifetime most of the churches of the standing order in Massachusetts and New England divided (as happened here in Bedford) into one church more conservative orthodox and trinitarian and one more liberal progressive and Unitarian. William Ellery Channing is most responsible for breathing life into the free, reasoned, responsible and hopeful faith we call Unitarianism.

John Murray and Hosea Ballou are our forefathers on the Universalist side of the family. The differences between Unitarians and Universalists, who merged to form one UU Association in 1961, were as much sociological as they were theological. The Unitarians were largely urban, college (and especially Harvard) educated, and professional. The Universalists were largely rural, more self-educated, and more agricultural or working class. If the Unitarian heresy was to regard Jesus as more of a moral exemplar rather than a risen Christ or savior, the Universalist heresy was to assert that a loving God would not damn any soul to any outer darkness of hell—all people, bar none, are embraced by God’s love.

John Murray, a minister who adopted Universalist views in England, led a tragic life: his wife died and when he could not pay his debts he was imprisoned. Upon his release he sailed to America determined to give up preaching and to get a real job. Alas, his ship was grounded on the shores of Good Luck, New Jersey in 1770 where he met a farmer named Thomas Potter who told Murray that he had built a chapel and was awaiting a preacher who would teach the salvation of all humanity. This is one of the great cockamamie stories of our heritage. Murray tried to flee Potter but was eventually persuaded to preach. These were among his words: "Go out into the highways and by-ways of America, your new country. Give the people, blanketed with a decaying and crumbling Calvinism, something of your new vision. You may possess only a small light but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. Give them, not Hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God." For people who are tortured by feelings of guilt and judgment and condemnation, I do not know of more timelessly relevant words. John Murray went on to become the minister of the first Universalist Church in America, in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1779.

If Channing was the father of Unitarianism, Hosea Ballou was the father of Universalism. And somehow he must be related to Melinda Ballou. Preaching in Boston at the same time as Channing, Hosea Ballou was the first Universalist to assert that God is a parent more than a judge; that Jesus was an exalted human being not a god, and that that religion ought not bind us to narrow beliefs but encourage us to think freely.

I haven’t mentioned a single woman. And I’ve talked enough anyway.

Margaret Fuller was part of the great transcendentalist ferment of the first quarter of the 19th century: a feminist, an activist, a utopian, a reformer and a Unitarian. Susan B. Anthony, also a Unitarian and a reformer and suffragette, said, "Failure is impossible!" And Olympia Brown, a Wisconsin Universalist, was in 1863 the first woman to be ordained by any American denomination. Last year, while doing research in the Bedford Historical Society, I discovered another great feminist, Phebe Hanaford. She was the first New England woman to be ordained a minister. Her son, Howard, became the minister of the Congregational church here in Bedford, but she—along with her female partner of 40 years, Ellen Miles—preached here at First Parish!

In the 20th century, John Haynes Holmes was a pacifist, a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP and perhaps the principal inspirer of our minister emeritus Jack Mendelsohn.

African-American names: Ethelred Brown and Lewis McGee. The Unitarian Universalist record here is appalling: We told these men that they were welcome to be UU ministers but they’d have to bring their own congregations with them because no white congregation could reasonably expect to have a minister of color! It is a credit to the liberating essence of Unitarian Universalism—and not to our institutional racism—that these and other people of color persevered and asserted their right to carry the Unitarian Universalist mantle.

It’s hard to know where to begin a sermon like this, or where to end it. But—with so many names still omitted—the time has come to say enough. If you want a Biblical text for this sermon, it is that of the apostle Paul speaking to the church at Corinth: "You are not your own. You were bought with a price."

Or perhaps we might cite the Major General in Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. He had bought the ruins of an ancient chapel, including the adjoining graveyard: "With the estate," he says, "I bought the chapel and its contents. I don’t know whose ancestors they were, but I know whose ancestors they are."

When we get involved in a church like this, in a faith like this, you may think you come here by yourself, but indeed you soon inherit a whole bunch of relatives. You, my friends, are the heirs of this mighty cloud of witnesses, of Servetus and Francis David, of Priestley, and Channing, Murray, Ballou, Olympia Brown, Phebe Hanaford and all the rest.

What they dreamed be ours to do, hope their hopes and seal them true.