|
By Rev. Preston K. Mears Jr.
August 1, 2010
I consider it to be a privilege for me to be here among family and
friends—all fellow travelers in our life journey—and to share
something of how it is I stand among you. For the record, I am a
priest in good standing in the Episcopal Church licensed by the
Bishop of the Diocese of Washington and canonically resident in the
Diocese of New Hampshire. Gene Robinson is my Bishop who knows what
I am doing, where I am at and is okay with it. Identity wise, I
consider myself both to be an Episcopalian and a member of Davies
Memorial UU Church. Who Davies is and who we are becoming are very
important to me.
First let me cover two biographical basics:
• Fifty years ago, I met my wife, a “cradle Unitarian.”
We had enlisted in a Quaker, American Friends Service Committee
college service work group. That we both had signed up for a service
project is its own statement about what we wanted to be about with
our lives.
• I went to seminary in the 60’s. We were actively
caught up in the Civil Rights and Peace Movements. Academically, I
became fascinated with early church history, with the range, extent
and nature of the impact of the Gospel, the Good News. The message
in the early church was an exciting and liberating one. It was also
the context out of which Trinitarian doctrine and a paternalistic
church emerged and that Emperor Constantine legalized. Early church
history was, for me, about freedom and possibilities, not
limitations.
I will say some more about the significance of early church history,
but, for the moment let me just say that my studies left an open
door for me to be comfortable being a member of Davies along with my
identity as a Christian.
But, first, let me back up a bit. My father was an Episcopalian and
I was raised up as an Episcopalian. The small church I grew up in
had a Victorian type stained glass window of Jesus as the Good
Shepherd complete with a crook and a lamb and little children.
Furthermore, the members of the church, the church services, the
programs for kids and youth were consistent with the image of the
Good Shepherd. My High School biology teacher, a member, was always
glad to see me and welcomed me with a smile, which didn’t keep me
from getting a “C” one marking period when I messed up on a test.
But that was okay; he knew I could do better, and I did. The whole
message was of kindness, acceptance, and knowing ourselves as a
people who are loved and who can be loving people. Choosing love
over anger and hope over fear, the fundamental underlying message of
creation, has worked for me in family, community and work lo these
70 years of my life.
I just read the Good Shepherd passage from Matthew. Often the Gospel
is dismissed as sentimental and, well, childish and unsophisticated.
Maybe, as a child, I responded to the sentimental, stuffed teddy
bear, feel good kind of imagery. We human beings do seem to have a
need to make things soft, cozy and agreeable. But, maybe I was also
responding to something more.
As adults we run the risk of wanting to trivialize and then dismiss;
we also want those around us to agree with us. It happened in the
early church and impacted the written record called “Scripture.” It
impacted what stories and accounts were saved and then how they were
interpreted. But, even so, sometimes we do have echoes of an early
message that transcends the institutional and the political. Let’s
stay with the familiar Good Shepherd account that is generally
sentimentalized and then dismissed. For example, the original Greek
word translated as “children” is “technia;” literally meaning
“little ones.” In the context of the times it could include children
and it also included every day, ordinary people—people who struggle
to survive from one day to the next.
To understand this, remember that the Old Testament is an account of
a wandering, nomadic people finding a place in the sun based on a
covenant of 10 commandments. It is also, overtime, an account of
increasing institutionalization, formalization, ritualization and
then conflict by competing groups as to who had correctly mastered
the terms of the Covenant and were in charge. By the time of Jesus,
popular opinion had it that one needed to be well off and well above
“the little people” in order to keep up with all of the requirements
necessary to a proper covenantal relationship with God, to wit, to
be some body. Some of you may remember the story of Jesus telling
the rich young man to give up his wealth. That was a totally radical
idea since one needed at least some wealth to have the time and
means to obey all the requirements. In context, the message was more
about standing the established order of things on its head—and not
simply a put down of wealth.
At that time, there was a jockeying around for primacy between the
upstart Pharisees and the Sadducees. Both questioned a country
preacher/teacher named Jesus who was turning the world upside down.
Jesus was bypassing them and saying that God’s love was for everyone
and especially “the little ones.” My point here is that the Good
Shepherd story was more than sentimental, it was radical.
The something more that I responded to in the Good Shepherd story,
in seminary and for the women and the African Americans who were my
classmates: We are all, each and everyone of us fully and equally
part of each other and everyone else. We found that anything,
including attitudes and assumptions that diminished another,
diminished us. Does that not sound something like any of the seven
principles that speak of “justice” and “the interconnected web of
life?” I do not think it accidental that martyrs from the civil
rights movement included a Unitarian and an Episcopalian seminarian,
a classmate of mine. The call to march together, to listen to each
other, to learn from each other, to sustain each other is the same.
The descriptive terms of this was referred to in some circles as
“the social gospel” and “liberation theology” in others. The idea is
that we are all called to be as fully human as we can possibly be
and, in order for that to happen, we have to challenge, change,
reform the social structures and cultural norms that enslave. The
speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave voice to this social
gospel, this liberation theology. And, as does happen in history,
the spokesperson of the freeing word ends up being killed for them.
I want to go back, just for a moment, to my reference to the impact
of my studies of the early church and how it those were a freeing
experience for me. I had to free myself of my language and culture
and immerse myself in another one. The tracks and records are not
clear so much so that the first two and a half centuries have been
referred to as “the tunnel period.” You see, in the early going,
episodic persecutions by the Romans limited what could be safely
recorded and kept. Some believers, caught up in the apocalyptic
language frequently used, believed that the end of time was close at
hand, and so there was no need for written records or organized
archives. Finally, there was in the third century, a push by the
converted Emperor Constantine to have the Christian faith, and its
record, “normalized” and agreed to by all. As in the politics of
today, there were winners and losers. Any versions of the diverse
Christian record not part of the “official” record were declared
heretical and destroyed. The process was not unlike how American
History tends to be sanitized and regularized regarding slavery and
racism So, the record we have is spotty.
One of the things that impressed me in that early history was the
variety of ways in which people tried to understand and articulate
the stories and message of the early church experience. There were
the people who believed the message to be Holy, the messenger
therefore Holy and that it only seemed that Jesus was crucified.
There were the Manicheans who thought there had to be a transcendent
God behind the Old Testament God and Jesus. A transcendent God could
not suffer from the evil in the world. Then there was broad and
varied group known as the Gnostics. Some of them might have been
precursors to Unitarians. They considered the knowledge, the “Word”
to be key and the physical messenger secondary or even incidental.
The Gospel According to St, John, who was something of a Gnostic,
begins: “En arche O Logos…” “In the beginning was the Word…” One of
my early favorites of the second century was Origen. He might have
been one of the first Universalists as he felt that the message of
God’s love in and through Jesus was so powerful that ultimately even
the devil would be redeemed. A century later the powers that be
decided that Origen went too far and declared his writings to be
heretical.
Part of what I found to be freeing in these studies was that the
common thread was one of care and consideration for all members. It
was this dynamic more than any other one thing that spread the
Gospel. Also, through those studies, I could see a human process of
trying to both sort out the sensible from the ridiculous. Then, in
the third century, the conversations ultimately narrowed down to the
Doctrine of the Trinity. The “winners” of that debate then had the
Emperor Constantine enforcing this “normalized” version of
Christianity as the only acceptable version. He was trying to run an
empire and a considered a “unified” church essential to his, he
believed, godly task of running an empire.
Understanding something of the debate and the process led me to
understand that today’s issues are not about varieties of pantheism
but of universal human rights versus a limited empirical view of
reality, power and greed. Our contemporary world view simply
translated says: “What you see is what you get, nothing else really
counts and so I am going to get all I can for me and mine!” The
recent events of the economy, the oil spill disaster and the pure,
unadulterated greed that was expressed in the Wall Street hearings
make the point.
I am not the only Davies Member, by the way, to speak of the
Doctrine of the Trinity. Dr. Christopher Bell in his book, The Black
Clergy’s Misguided Worship Leadership, points to the doctrine and
its use as a major brick in the Christian religion to keep people
obedient to the authority figures. At one level, it was an effort to
define and preserve a life-giving message; at another level, it was
also political and controlling just as Dr. Bell describes. My
studies freed me from being defined by a third century debate.
I was struck just this past week about the merit of Dr. Bell’s
viewpoint in his book. Laurie and I took a week off and drove the
Northern half of the Blue Ridge Parkway, then went down to the Old
Salem part of Winston-Salem, NC and then on to the historic part of
Smithfield, VA. The Blue Ridge Parkway, by the way, is beautiful and
I highly recommend it. On this trip we stopped at various museums
and museum shops. I took stock of the books and literature being
sold in these very mainstream shops in light of the kind of
experiences I have had going back into the sixties and in light of
conversations and experiences we have here at Davies. I found book
after book after book on the Civil War. I found only one book, just
one book, that took a serious look at the social, political,
economic and religious factors that enshrined slavery in our
history: Greed, the need for cheap labor and empirical power was the
mover and shaker. The one book I found is written by a Wake Forest
professor of history, Anthony S. Parent, Jr. and is entitled Foul
Means. One of the quotes the book finds is from the colonial era in
Virginia. The planters legislated the “Christianizing of the
Africans” specifically and economically in order to make them
obedient and docile.
I don’t have an easy answer as to why a messenger and a message came
to be a tool of oppression, on the one hand, and, on the other, a
message that freed me and many of my colleagues to look beyond the
boundaries of our time. One of our observations, looking at early
church history, was to conclude that the church lost its way with
Constantine, that the prophetic voice of speaking truth to power was
taken over by the Constantine establishment, just as was the case
with a majority of the Virginia planters who used the appearance of
piety to support the slave system.
Some people want to argue about the messenger and not the message as
it speaks to this time and place. At the end of the day, to me, the
call is to hear the message and to live it out as best we can in
this place and time. The differences between the fact that I
initially heard the message in an Episcopal Church sitting under a
stained glass window of the Good Shepherd and that Laurie got the
message in a Unitarian Fellowship and wonderful Sunday School
classes based on the religious stories collected by Sophia Fahs is
not as important as the fact that we heard the message and that we
are here together with you, people who have also heard a message of
love and are responding as well.
The challenge to be fully alive requires that we be loving and
caring so that we open ourselves to learn from each other more than
we can ever learn by ourselves, to enjoy the variety and richness of
human experience and not to limit ourselves, our neighbors nor
anyone else by bigotry and inherited blindness. To be loving and
caring means listening carefully to each other and being patient
with each other even when we say or act in ways that we don’t
understand. We do need to be loving and caring for our own sakes and
for the sake of our children. Also, our world and our society needs
our leavening—the hurt of racism is very real and still very much
with us.
Just to underscore the need, I mentioned to you the line up of books
we saw on our trip. The lack of literature that tells the whole
story about slavery and the Civil War is its own statement. Another
underscoring of the need: The recent events with Sherry Sherrod of
the USDA make a similar point in their own way.
As most of you know, I am very recently retired from the USDA and
not insensitive to its history, issues and priorities. Sherry
Sherrod had shared her experience regarding racism and her work in
USDA and had reflected on it in a thoughtful way in a speech. It
should not surprise us that someone might come along and cynically
manipulate her speech for some selfish, twisted reasons. USDA
officialdom, perhaps out of fear of being perceived as racist,
dismissed her. I would like to think that if any of the relevant
officials were members of this church that they would have known to
stop and listen carefully to the person and not just a collection of
words. Maybe they would have reacted differently if they had the
experience we have of a trust, a willingness to suspend judgment so
that we might learn, and a knowledge that we are on a shared
journey.
Here we want to be a loving and caring people who listen and learn
from each other and from all of human history and all of its great
teachers. It is not enough to be “politically correct;” it is to
know that we are on a faith journey, that we are all growing as
people and that we are committed to that growth. To me, this is the
basic “Word” I have found in the Gospels and have come to appreciate
in other places and people as well.
As I said at the beginning, I met a fellow person on this journey of
life 50 years ago; we are still on that journey with our Unitarian
and our Episcopalian identities intact. For us, this congregation of
folk, is the best place we know of in these environs for us to
continue our journey, to grow within ourselves and to be a message
of hope.
I thank you for our time together, and your patience with me!
● ● ●
|
