The First Parish in Bedford Unitarian Universalist 75 The Great Road, Bedford, Massachusetts 01730 On the Common 781-275-7994

The Post-New Orleans World

A sermon by Rev. John Gibbons

delivered on Sunday, September 18, 2005

at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

 Thoughts to Ponder at the Beginning:

I think over again my small adventures
my fears
those small ones that seemed so big

For all the vital things
I had to get and to reach

And yet there is only one great thing
the only thing

To live to see the great day that dawns
and the light that fills the world.

                        Old Inuit Song

I travel light; as light,

That is, as a man can travel who will
Still carry his body around because
Of its sentimental value.

                        Thomas Mendip

 Opening Words

Bears

 The first time my wife Karen and I were up in the mountains of Montana, we were awed and even a little frightened by the scale and power of the wilderness. Whether buildings or bridges or even hiking trails, the creations of human beings seemed by comparison precariously inadequate, hopelessly finite, fragile.  Back East, nature must be preserved and revered.  High in the Rockies, it was the opposite. Here we had to be wary of nature lest, in a blind moment, she consume us all. Everywhere, signs warned of bears. They can run, swim and climb faster than any human being. And they have been known to attach without provocation. Stories circulated about an unwary hiker just a few months ago who…

Karen and I drove up to the end of the road at Two Medicine Lake, where there is a log cabin, general store and a little boat which can ferry you to the trailhead on the far shore. Inside, watching hummingbirds dart to and fro around a feeder, having a cup of coffee, I met Charlie Slocum, a retired biology teacher from Minnesota, who spends his summers working for the National Park Service. In the pristine Eden air, I understood why he had returned now for a score of summers. But I was also more than casually concerned about being eaten by a grizzly.

“Get many bears up here, do you?” I asked.

“Sometimes we get quite a few.”

“How ‘bout on that easy trail around the lake over there? Any chance of running into any this morning—so near the store…?”

He paused long enough to hear the question behind the question and took a slow sip of his coffee. “If I could tell you for sure there wouldn’t be any bears, it wouldn’t be a wilderness now would it?”

I thanked him for his candor and we went on our hike. Maybe that is all it ever comes down to: You can walk where things are predictable—or you can enter the wilderness. Without the wilderness, there can be neither reverence nor revelation.

 Reading

Household Gods

by Carl Scovel, minister emeritus, King’s Chapel, Boston Massachusetts.

There they sit in the old photograph. My grandfather Carl in suit, vest, and high-button shoes in an armchair, reading a book. My grandmother Louise, prim and upright in a long silk dress, also reading a book. Between them on a table sits Aunt Martha. No, not a relative, but a clock, one of hundreds produced after the Civil War by the Union Manufacturing Company of Bristol, Connecticut, and bought in 1870, I’d guess, by my great-grandfather, Dwight Scovel, a Presbyterian minister in upstate New York.

Aunt Martha is twenty-six inches high, fifteen inches wide, and five inches deep. She has a tall glass door; the top half shows the clock face, and the lower half shows a man under a tree with a guitar at his feet and a church in the background. It is labeled “View in Italy.”

Great-grandfather Dwight took the clock from one small town manse to another in upstate New York until he built a house and settled in Clinton, beside Oriskany Creek. When he died at the age of eighty-five, his son Carl (the only minister among the children) adopted it and dubbed it “Aunt Martha.”

In 1912 Grandfather Carl took it with him to Cortland, New York, where he served the First Presbyterian Church until his death in 1932. Only a few months after Carl died, his widow, my Grandmother Louise, took it with her to China in 1933 when she came to live with her physician son, Fred, who was my father, and the rest of us in Jining, China. (No, you never heard of this city, and you probably never will again.) Aunt Martha stood in my grandmother’s small living room in the small house where she lived near us until she left in the summer of 1941, having heard that war might break out between the United States and Japan.

Dad took the clock at that point, and after December 7, 1941, knowing the Japanese might take our possessions, he hid Aunt Martha in a corner of the attic. We left the house first for an internment camp and later for the United States, but we returned to China after the war. Dad went back to the old house and found Aunt Martha just where he’d left her. He took her to our new digs in the city of Hwaiyuan.

From there Aunt Martha went to Canton in 1948 (I have a photograph of her in the dining room there) and then back to the States (Bath, New York) for two years starting in 1951. In 1953 my folks went to India to run a hospital for six years. On leaving the foreign mission field in 1959, they moved to a modest house overlooking the Hudson River in Stony Point, New York. There Aunt Martha had her longest stay, from 1959 to 1987, almost thirty years.

My father died in 1986, and no one was left to wind Aunt Martha in the evening. Our mother had Alzheimer’s and eventually went to a nursing home. In that year, 1987, Aunt Martha came to the King’s Chapel parsonage on Beacon Street in Boston, where she rested in an alcove halfway up the first floor stairs.

She’s come a long way.

My father called her one of his Lares and Penates, and it took me a while to understand that she was one of the movable “gods” of our household. She went with us from place to place, like the Ark of the Covenant with the ancient Hebrews, and she gave us a sense of connection with America as we moved around China and India. If you’ve spent a lifetime moving, or even if you’ve made but one painful move, you know what I mean.

You may yourself have some Lares and Penates—a vase, an old photograph, treasured books, a set of candlesticks—the locus of divinity. They are your small gods and, like all gods, will crumble or get lost, but while they are yours, they give you the sense of permanence that comes in the long run from the One who does not change or crumble, the Eternal, who is ever there, wherever we are.

 The Sermon:

 This sermon is some sort of reflection on that once said by the author E.B. White who observed that, “In the morning, often I am torn between the impulse to savor the world, and the desire to save it.”  “This,” White said, “can make it difficult to plan the day.”

 On our first September Sunday indoors, together again, I would have us savor this moment, this air, this light, the beauty of this place; I would have us delight in one another’s presence.  I would have us say, “Ah, it is good!”

 Yet again, on a day when hundreds of thousands of people are homeless and untold numbers have died due, not to acts of God, but due in much measure to poverty and the malignant neglect of governments (that would include us, by the way, and not only our president), on such a day I would have us scream and shout.

 Such malignant neglect would be on our Gulf Coast, certainly, but also in Transylvania and in Afghanistan and Iraq and Gaza and Darfur and everywhere that inequity and poverty and, in some cases, genocide, have been allowed to perpetuate.  On such a day as this, I would have us save lives and souls, seek salvation and demand salvation, scream, shout and get to work until “justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

 Torn between the impulse to savor and the desire to save, it can be difficult to preach a sermon.

 A few months ago, I was in a meeting here with a community organizer – there’s a new group called MICAH, metropolitan congregations acting for hope, that I hope First Parish will be increasingly involved with – and at that meeting there was some sort of slight disagreement and I said something conciliatory to bring the two sides together.  After the meeting, the organizer said privately to me, “You know, you’re something of a de-polarizer;” and in the language of those who would sharpen the issues, call one thing right and another wrong, calling me a de-polarizer was not a compliment!  It is true: I often try to find commonalities more than differences; and in this case today, I would have us savor and save the world.  Indeed, I believe that we are all the more inspired to save the world – and to act politically – when we are just as keen to savor the world, its people and particularities.

 Hearing Carl Scovel’s words about Aunt Martha and his family’s “household gods” – I had to look up Lares to know what he was talking about – that’s l-a-r-e-s and Penates – they were ancient Roman household gods – I got to thinking about how his clock made trips around the world, through wars and revolutions, and I presume is still ticking in J.P. where Carl is now retired. 

 And, hearing about Aunt Martha, I thought about the people along the Gulf Coast – and in Transylvania and elsewhere – who grabbed what they could carry or who lost everything, clocks and all swept away.

 We’ve been reading news stories about such things, about the photographs that were lost – or saved – or the birth certificates; or the household gods.  Friday’s paper described the New Orleans rabbi who from a boat sought the temple’s Torah, and – like a body once living – respectfully buried the scrolls that could not be saved.

 For some time last week, thinking about the hurricane and the floods, people and things lost and people and things saved, I mused about household gods and the stuff we carry.  I came across some lists of stuff carried by famous people.  In a book called Journeys of Simplicity, Traveling Light, it says that the American naturalist John Muir once walked a thousand miles, collecting plant specimens, from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico.  He carried:

“In a rubberized bag, comb, brush, towel, soap, change of underclothing, copy of Burn’s poems, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wood’s Botany, small New Testament, journal, map, and a plant press.”

For weekend trips, the French painter Marcel Duchamp carried: “Never a suitcase, two shirts worn one atop the other, and a toothbrush in his jacket pocket.”

The same book lists the things a slave named John Jack could not carry with him after he died.  John Jack lived up the road from here, was enslaved to a cobbler in Concord but bought his own freedom and when he died in 1773, he left all he owned to an elderly slave named Violet: “Eight acres in the Great Fields and Great Meadows; a good pair of oxen, a cow and a calf; some farming tools; a Bible and psalm book; seven barrels of cider.”

 Here’s a list of the things Henry David Thoreau took with him on a 12-day canoe trip and – I won’t read it to you – it’s a long list: 28 pounds of pork, multiple pairs of heavy clothes, microscope, fry pan, six lemons, $24 and a lot more.  And then there was another side to him, the Thoreau who lived at Walden Pond with “a bed, table, desk and three chairs,” little else.

 And included is the advice of Jesus of Nazareth:  “Take nothing for your journey save a staff, no knapsack, no bread, no money, not two coats, be shod with sandals.  Go preach heaven is at hand; heal the sick, cleanse the lepers; raise the dead; cast out devils.”

 And, so too, the last possessions of Gandhi are listed: Two dinner bowls, a wooden fork and spoon; diary, prayer book, eyeglasses; three porcelain monkeys – speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil (a gift from a Japanese Buddhist); watch, spittoon, letter openers, two pairs of sandals.

 One more I liked from this book: Twelve hundred years ago in China a middle-aged man named P’ang Yun loaded everything he owned onto a boat and sank it all in the Tun-t’ing Lake.  After that, we are told, “he lived like a single leaf.”

 Now I know you wonder where I’m going with all this, and that’s OK, but after reading that book of lists, I also remembered Tim O’Brien’s book, The Things They Carried, which is a meditation inspired by the stuff American soldiers carried in Vietnam.

 "First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carries letters from a girl named Martha, a college student back in New Jersey. He loves her, and though he knows she doesn't love him, he hopes she will. He often daydreams about romantic vacations with her. He wonders if she is a virgin. His love sometimes distracts him from taking care of his soldiers.

 "Henry Dobbins is a big man who liked to eat, so he carries extra food.

 "Ted Lavender was scared, so he carried tranquilizers, which he took until he was shot and killed.

 "Dave Jensen is worried about disease, so he carries soap and a toothbrush. They all carry heavy helmets and boots.

 "Kiowa carries a bible--he is a deeply religious Baptist.

 "Mitchell Sanders carries condoms, and Norma Bowker carries a diary.

 "Rat Kiley, the medic, carries comic books.

 "Almost everyone carries, or 'humps,' photographs.

" The men carry some amazingly heavy physical and emotional burdens. Jimmy Cross, the leader of the platoon, carries navigation tools and the responsibility of taking care of his soldiers.

 "They all carry as much as they can, for entertainment and protection, including awe and fear of the things they carry.

 "Jimmy Cross receives a pebble from Martha the week before Lavender dies. She says she found it on the Jersey shoreline, right where the land separated from the water, and she thought it symbolized her feelings toward him. He doesn't understand this, but he thinks it is romantic. He wonders who she was with that day. He keeps the pebble under his tongue and thinks about walking with Martha, not carrying anything.

"Norman Bowker carries a thumb cut from a dead Vietnamese teenage soldier. Mitchell Sanders cut it off and gave it to him, saying he could see a moral in all this. When Henry Dobbins asked what the moral was, Sanders just told him, 'there it is.'

"They carry many things--diseases, each other. Usually the men are brave, but sometimes when they are being attacked they become terrified and cry and scream and make promises to God. They are ashamed afterward. They don't want to look cowardly in front of the others. They tell jokes to distance themselves from their grief and fear.

 "They all dream about simply lying down and not getting up, or shooting off their own toe, so that they can be taken out of the war. They dream about not having to carry anything anymore."

 I’ve been trying to get you to think or daydream about your household gods, the things you carry, cherish and savor.  Have you an Aunt Martha, a household god that you’d save if you could?  Think about your cherished possessions, something you’ve had perhaps for generations or perhaps something newer.  Is there something in your pocket right now (or a pebble under your tongue) that is a kind of talisman, special only to you?

 I’d actually like you to spend the next 3 or 4 minutes talking to the person next to you.  My question is, Have you any household gods which you would save if you could? What has your family carried for generations?   What do you carry?  What little things comfort you or give the sense or the illusion of permanence?  Talk among yourselves!

 Last Friday, at our discussion group at Carleton-Willard, I shared some of the lists and musings I’m sharing with you now and people shared their personal lares and penates, their household gods.  But then our parishioner Earl Anderson said that after his wife died, he didn’t want any of the old stuff, the wedding pictures, the mementoes.  None of it meant anything anymore.  He’d have to start over, make a new life without her and indeed he has.  You can ask him about this; he’ll tell you.

 I think Earl discovered the truth in something that Carl Scovel said.  “A vase, an old photograph, treasured books, a set of candlesticks…. They are your small gods and, like all gods, will crumble or get lost.”  Carl finished that essay saying that small gods give us a sense of permanence that, in the long run, comes only from a larger more eternal One who is ever there.  Knowing Carl, I know that he has a sense of a God that meets that need for permanence.  Of course, you’re welcome to that kind of interpretation, too, but for me, that’s not quite enough.

And here’s where we come full circle and I try to put in words how, in a “post-New Orleans post-Gulf Coast world,” we might savor, save and plan our days.

We all have our household gods.  We cherish them, mourn when they crumble and damn the politics, the racism, the classism, the incompetence that tolerates inadequate levees or evacuation plans. 

There’s a new t-shirt, by the way.  It says, “Make levees, not war!”

And traveling light is also wise: Jesus, Gandhi and Thoreau on his pork-free days had it right.  It’s all going to crumble, get lost or be swept away in a flood.

But the question that burns in my mind has to do with these lares and penates, these household gods.  I’m quite sure – I am convinced - that our household gods – yours and mine – are too small.  Our household gods are too small.

Never would I diminish the things lost in the hurricane and floods: the houses, the photos, the property, the things little and big, the tsatchkes and the torahs that are gone.  But if we are to redeem the land and the lives that were lost, we as a people, we as a nation, we as global citizens must make the earth our household.

In another essay, E.B.  once wrote: "To hold America in one's thoughts is like holding a love letter in one's hand -- it has so special a meaning. Since I started writing this column snow has begun falling again: I sit in my room watching the re-enactment of this stagy old phenomenon outside the window. For this cameo of New England with snow falling, I would give everything. Yet I know that this very loyalty, this respect for one's native scene -- I know that such emotions have had a big part in the world's wars. Who is there big enough to love the whole planet?"

My colleague Marilyn Sewell in Portland, Oregon preached recently about how we hear a lot from most religious groups about those who live in sin.  Unitarian Universalists, she says, “tend to be uncomfortable with sin, the word, if not the practice.”  “But,” she says, “countries too can behave immorally, and the United States has been doing just that for a long time.”

Having taken the land from indigenous peoples and built this nation on the backs of slaves and poor people, we’ve almost routinely coveted our neighbor’s goods, minerals, water, oil.  We have stolen, born false witness.  And “we will have,” Marilyn says, “precisely the kind of country that we allow.”  So she advises, “If you are living in sin, well, stop it.  Then let’s make our church a refuge for all who would join us in trying to live out of live-giving values.”

Of course, Americans and people from around the world will provide relief to the Gulf Coast and there are many heart-warming stories of generosity and compassion.  We will, however, miss the most important thing if we fail to redress the grievances and the inequities that allowed such a catastrophe to occur.  Of course, one need not look so far as the Gulf Coast for we tolerate such inequities in Boston and Lowell and here hidden, too, in the suburbs.  

Marilyn concluded her sermon about the hurricane saying that she wants the Portland church to serve the people who show up there on Sunday, more and more of them; but she also wants to get the message of liberal religion out there and to provide progressive leadership for that city and, indeed, our country. 

Here at First Parish, we would do no less.  In our personal lives, in the lives of our children and families, our community, our nation and our globe, forging connections across all generations and boundaries, the only reason we exist is to change ourselves and our world.

Here, in this small old weathered, worn and still-proud place, amongst ourselves – the humble odd likes of you and me – let us make as our gods that which is worthy of all people, of all colors and classes and orientations.  Let us make as our gods that which is worthy of our true household, this earth.  This day and in whatever easy and hard days are to come, let us savor and save; and may we love this whole planet.

In the spirit of the poet Adrienne Rich, “Our hearts are moved by all we cannot save: So much has been destroyed.  We have to cast our lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.”  Amen.