First Parish Bedford UU

A sermon by Rev. John E. Gibbons

Delivered on Sunday, September 18, 2011

At The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

 

 

Every year at this time I revert to the behavior of a small child. “You need to get up and go to church,” I’m told.” “Why?” I ask. You need to write a sermon, I’m told. “Why?” I ask. Why do we do this to ourselves year after year? Why can’t church start in, say, November? (I’d settle for October.) Why? Who are all these people, Megan, and why are they here?

 

Were we living in the 18^th century, the answer to these questions would be simple: We MUST go to church. It’s the law. If we did not go to church the tithingman would come knocking and, for Sabbath truancy, we might be fined or be put in stocks and humiliated on the Town Common. No matter what the weather, be it hot or cold, in rain or snow or mud, in the 18^th century, going to church was the law.

 

Recalling this history last month, I hatched an idea for a sermon. Not only was church-going the law, but before 1729 there was no Bedford and the people who lived in these parts had to go to church – so I remembered – in either Concord (five or so miles that way) or in Carlisle (five or so miles that way). So burdensome was it that people hereabouts petitioned the legislature for permission to establish a new town. “In the extreme difficult seasons of heat and cold,” they pleaded, “we …say of the Sabbath, Behold what a weariness is it!”

 

Recalling this history last month – and very much in need of a sermon for today - it occurred to me that a sermon might be conjured were I to test out this allegation, that is, were I to walk to these neighboring towns and see for myself what a weariness is it.

 

Thus it was a few Sunday mornings ago that I packed my lunch and set out for Carlisle, in a light rain. From our parsonage, I walked here, then continued out Carlisle Road. I walked to the Concord River where I paused, ate an apple, and observed a young man with his fishing pole, lying on his back on a rock, talking on his cell phone.

 

Along the way, I noticed things I don’t usually see: how Carlisle Road, like many of our roads, is bordered by ancient stone walls. There were fields of purple loosestrife. I also saw more trash than I ordinarily notice, lots of beer and vodka bottles apparently thrown from cars. It gives me pause about the condition of those behind the wheel. And, when I am driving, I’m accustomed to seeing big well-maintained houses, McMansions even, and manicured suburban lawns; but on foot I noticed shabby, even empty homes as well, and while things are lush and green and growing, I noticed lots of places overgrown, and among the weeds some abandoned cars. These towns, I noticed, are not all affluent.

 

Eight miles and two hours later I arrived at the Carlisle church, quite damp. Ten people were in attendance and their minister spoke about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1838 Divinity School Address, that milestone in Unitarian history when Emerson advised the young theologues to preach not scripture nor tradition nor platitudes but rather “life, passed through the fire of thought.”

 

During the service, however, I was distracted by a plaque on the wall that celebrated the founding of the Carlisle church…in the year 1758. Now wait a minute. Bedford was founded in 1729. Bedford is older than Carlisle. Gradually during the service, it dawned on me that I had misremembered our history: people from these parts did not have to walk to Concord or Carlisle, they had to walk to Concord or Billerica. I know this history.  I’ve told it to hundred of schoolchildren. I know it; I really do. But when it came to actually walking to church, I walked to the wrong town!

 

It occurred to me that, prior to 1729, if someone from here, thinking they were walking to church, walked instead in the direction of Carlisle, they likely would have been eaten by bears and never returned. Or, had they survived and returned from such a misadventure, they would thereafter likely have been known as the village idiot. Hmmm.

 

Anyway, I enjoyed the fellowship of the Carlisle Unitarian Universalists and, after their coffee hour of lemonade and Manchego cheese (from Whole Foods), I resumed my walk home. I climbed down at the Concord River, ate my sandwich of leftover sliced huge U-10 scallops (also purchased at Whole Foods), and I honored the legacy of wayward Carlisle and Bedford youth by drinking a beer at the trash-strewn riverbank, and watched while a Vietnamese fisherman hauled in a big carp which he proudly promised to fry for dinner. By the time I returned home, it had been a sixteen-mile walk…very pleasant, though to the wrong town.

 

So the next Sunday I walked to Billerica, not quite so far – down Old Billerica Road, past Carleton-Willard, across Middlesex Turnpike to 3A, then to Billerica Center. Again, I noticed things I would otherwise have missed: meadows and wildflowers, ponds and wetlands, the sprawling house of Bedford patriot John Willson, killed at the Battle of Lexington and Concord. Between here and there, there’s a Mormon temple I’d never noticed before; as well as a storefront psychic and palm-reader, and a house decorated with garden gnomes and ceramic swinging frogs hanging from trees. And again I arrived in church somewhat damp where there were 20 people present and we heard a sermon on the history of the Billerica church. 

 

In the 1840’s, for example, it was raised and turned 180 degrees, pivoted – they say - on a single cannonball. Though he never served there, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Boston pulpit is in Billerica, picked up at a yard sale in 1844. Their church burned two days after Christmas in 1967 and people recalled that fire first-hand. After church they served Cheese-Its, fruit, Pepsi and coffee (purchased at Market Basket), and I hiked back, stopping at the cemetery - filled with Jacquith’s, Stearns, and Fosters - where an early minister named Henry Cumings is buried (with his three wives) and, sitting on his grave, I paused to eat my sandwich (haddock, leftover from a wedding reception the day before) and drink my beer.

 

The following Sunday, it was time to walk to Concord. That was August 28, the day of Hurricane Irene.  In the morning I received an email from Meredith McCulloch:

 

 

Leaving home at about 8am, I was soaked to the bone by the end of our driveway. I walked here, then continued on the path behind the Middle School, then across Concord Road (by the day care center) and through the woods into Great Meadows. By now my shoes were so soaked that I made no pretense of avoiding mud or puddles but went straight through. My wife Sue suggested that it would be more authentic to the 18^th century if, whenever possible, I stayed off the paved road and so I followed the dike down to the river, turtles crossing my path, then toward Concord, though in the wind and sheets of rain, it was hard to tell. Sue essentially told me, when faced with a choice, to ignore any signs and to take the path less-traveled by. As the storm grew in intensity, I began to suspect that Sue had seen an opportunity to direct me deep into a wilderness from which I might never return. 

 

Eventually (and I do mean eventually) I emerged on a paved road with mansions behind tall iron gates and guardhouses, and some time later I realized I was at Minuteman Park, by the Old North Bridge. From there I made it (sprinting occasionally when I heard ominous groaning coming from the wind-bent trees overhead) to Concord Center where, in front of the Colonial Inn the water was nearly to my knees. Soon I was sitting on the steps of First Parish, eating my sandwich (leftover tuna sashimi), drinking my beer, and watching branches blow and limbs crash. Of course, there was a notice posted on the church door, that due to the hurricane the service was, understandably, cancelled.

 

I returned to Bedford, this time by the road, again noticing meadows and fertile farmlands down to the river, realizing that where today there is Scimone’s and New England Nurseries, there used to be many farms, barns and farmstands, some now renovated and upscale, others dilapidated.

 

As I crossed into Bedford, a vehicle from the National Guard pulled over and a young man asked if I was OK. “Just out for a walk?” he asked. I suspected that a village somewhere had reported their idiot to be missing.

 

At Evans Avenue, however, I did stop at the McCulloch’s house to assure Meredith that I still was of sound body. I was way too wet to sit down. John offered me a tissue for my glasses but that too seemed pointless.

 

Eventually, and I do mean eventually, I returned home. Sue did not seem too disappointed. I said of the Sabbath, Behold what a weariness is it!

 

So it was that in 1729 the Great and General Court allowed the inhabitants of this region “to establish a town called Bedford, provided that was built a suitable house for the public worship of God, and that a learned orthodox minister of good conversation was procured, making provision for his comfortable and honorable support; and likewise be provided a school to instruct their youth in writing and reading.”

 

And here we are.

 

A sermon should probably have some sort of take-away message and while I commend walking to church in this or that town – on a lovely day it is not a weariness but a pleasure – that is not the essence of my experience.

 

I commend noticing.  As was said by Willa Cather, “The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”

 

There are important realities – like this blue marble spaceship Earth – that one can only see from a far distance, hurtling through space. And there are wondrous things to be seen from the driver’s or passenger’s seat of a car, just ask Jack Kerouac or any teenager with a crisp new driver’s license.  Bicycling, I also know, offers another finer slower lens and shutter. Walking, slower still, further fills our senses.

 

“I have traveled widely,” said Henry Thoreau, “in Concord.”

 

The point is to notice, and the truth is that you need not move a muscle. When I spoke of some of these things last week at Carleton-Willard, one of our member/residents said that, indeed, her life has slowed since she moved there; and that she notices more.

 

I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s poem, “Wild Geese”:   

 

 

Seated, just as you are, you are perfectly poised to notice that that is of ultimate importance. Here in this room, you may travel widely.

 

Oh, I found another poem I want to read to you. This is “Reluctance,” by Robert Frost.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Frost wends and walks as one season ends but another has not yet begun, “the heart is still aching to seek, but the feet question ‘Whither?’

 

My heart still aches to seek, yet my feet, too, question ‘Whither?’ So perhaps does your heart and feet.

 

But one thing I’ll tell you: I’m not planning any more long solitary walks, not any time soon. The walk that begins today is our walk together as a congregation, as people of faith (howsoever non-traditional that faith may be), as people committed to a mission of changing the world and changing ourselves, living lives of joy and meaning.

 

There will be adventures and misadventures; probably we’ll get lost (but all who wander are not lost). We’ll ask: What are you thinking? We’ll try not to be hit by falling trees, try not to poke out eyes.  The sun will rise, the sun will set, and we will have lunch. 

 

These old pews offer themselves to your imagination, calling to you like wild geese, harsh and exciting, over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

 

(John sings…)

 

 

In the Book of Hebrews, Chapter 11, verse 8 it is written, “And Abraham went out from his home in Ur, knowing not whither he was going.”

 

So do we all my friends. So do we all. Welcome to the journey out from our homes and going home again.