Sermon

Let My People Go

The Rev. Jack D. Bryant

Hope Unitarian Church

February 29, 2004

First Reading:

Afterward Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, so that they may celebrate a festival to me in the wilderness.’” But Pharaoh said, “Who is the Lord, that I should heed him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and I will not let Israel go.” Then they said, “The God of the Hebrews has revealed himself to us; let us go a three days journey into the wilderness to sacrifice to the Lord our God, or he will fall upon us with pestilence or sword."” But the king of Egypt said to them, “Moses and Aaron, why are you taking the people away from their work? Back to your labors!” Pharaoh continued, “Now they are more numerous than the people of the land and yet you want them to stop working!” That same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people, as well as their supervisors, “You shall no longer give the people straw to make bricks, as before; let them go and gather straw for themselves. But you shall require of them the same quantity of bricks as they have made previously; do not diminish it, for they are lazy; that is why they cry, ‘Let us go and offer sacrifice to our God.’ Let heavier work be laid on them; then they will labor at it and pay no attention to deceptive words.”

Second Reading: Howard Thurman. Jesus and the Disinherited. Pages 11-13.

Many and varied are the interpretations dealing with the teachings and the life of Jesus of Nazareth. But few of these interpretations deal with what the teachings and the life of Jesus have to say to those who stand, at a moment in human history, with their backs against the wall.

To those who need profound succor and strength to enable them to live in the present with dignity and creativity, Christianity often has been sterile and of little avail. The conventional Christian word is muffled, confused, and vague. Too often the price exacted by society for security and respectability is that the Christian movement in its formal expression must be on the side of the strong against the weak. This is a matter of tremendous significance, for it reveals to what extent a religion that was born of a people acquainted with persecution and suffering has become the cornerstone of a civilization and of nations whose very position in modern life has too often been secured by a ruthless use of power applied to weak and defenseless peoples.

. . .

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that I have heard a sermon on the meaning of religion, of Christianity, to the man who stands with his back against the wall. It is urgent that my meaning be crystal clear. The masses of men live with their backs constantly against the wall. They are the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed. What does our religion say to them? The issue is not what it counsels them to do for others whose need may be greater, but what religion offers to meet their own needs. The search for an answer to this question is perhaps the most important religious quest of modern life.

Sermon

Before there was Martin Luther King, Jr., there was Howard Thurman. Born in 1900, he was a contemporary of Martin Luther King, Sr. Growing up in Florida there were only three high schools that blacks could attend. Driven by a hunger for learning and the love of his family he left home to live with a distant relative and work to pay his way through high school. But it was a close thing. He arrived at the train station - on his way to that relative’s home - and bought his ticket for the trip only to discover there was an extra charge for his baggage - a single trunk that held all his worldly possessions. Lacking even one penny beyond the cost of his ticket he sat down and began to cry, believing his dream of attending high school was over. Then an act of grace happened. A man - a black man wearing overalls - asked him why he was crying. When Thurman explained the situation the man replied, “If you are trying to get out of this damn town to get an education, the least I can do is to help you. Come with me.” The stranger - who did not offer his name - paid for the luggage and walked away without another word or a glance back.

I suspect the stranger never knew that Thurman finished high school, earned an undergraduate degree from Morehouse College in Atlanta and another degree from Rochester Seminary in New York, became a college professor at Morehouse, founded the first interracial church in America and then became Chaplain and Professor of Theology at Boston University - the first African American to be dean of chapel at a major white institution of higher learning.

In 1935 he traveled to India where he met Gandhi and began to teach and to preach and to live the belief that freedom and justice for African Americans could come through the principles of non-violence. His life became the foundation for the movement that blossomed into fullness in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., the son of his friend. In the words of Benjamin E. Mays, Thurman was a man who “generated in the minds of young negroes the idea of freedom. . . . When they heard or read [him], for the first time they experienced a free man and his freedom was contagious.” And read him, they did, for he wrote twenty books and became known as a scholar, a preacher, a mystic, and a prophet.

On this last day of February I wouldn’t be surprised if most of you had never heard of Howard Thurman. His were the shoulders - the shoulders of a giant - upon whom others stood. It is not surprising that we remember those whose careers he made possible. But over the years he has become an important figure for me. His words move my soul, and in his words I experience a connection with Christianity and the African American community - because I believe much of what he says about Christianity in general and the black experience in particular has application for Unitarians.

His words - the words I read this morning - are about Christianity from the perspective of an African American whose grandmother had been a slave - a grandmother who helped to raise him and who always asked him to read from the bible when he visited her - but she always refused to let him read from any of the letters of Paul. When asked why, she explained that as a young girl while a slave on a southern plantation the master always had a white minister lead church services for the slaves - and that white minister would always read from the letters of Paul.

The experience of slavery had a profound influence on the shaping of African American religion. Jesus is honored and revered in the black church, but I believe the heart and soul of black Christianity is to be found in the story of Exodus, in the story of the slaves set free, in the story of Moses who declared that God himself had said, “Let my people go.” It is that story that has been the primary interpretive lens of Christianity for African Americans. It has produced a religious tradition that understands suffering and the need for freedom. It is a religious tradition that is focused on salvation in the form of freedom. But the salvation the black church has traditionally offered has been a corporate salvation - not salvation for the individual, not freedom for the individual, but freedom and salvation for the community as a whole. I believe that is why Thurman says what he does in this morning’s reading - that most of the interpretations of the life of Jesus offer nothing for those who have their backs against the wall in the present moment.

Our own liberal religious tradition has a profoundly different understanding of salvation. Liberal religion for the last hundred years has emphasized freedom as salvation - not unlike the black church - but our salvation has been salvation and freedom for the individual - not the community. And at the same time, we have offered little or nothing for those who have their backs against the wall in the present moment because the individual freedom we have offered has been an intellectual freedom. To paraphrase Howard Thurman, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that I have heard a sermon on the meaning of liberal religion to the men and women who stand with their backs against the wall. Too many sermons proclaim what we don’t believe. Too many sermons proclaim an intellectual elitism that looks down upon and mocks those who are weak.

At their best Unitarian pulpits are full of thunderous words calling upon us to do for others who have less than us. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is our duty and obligation to help those in need. What would have happened to Howard Thurman if a stranger had not stopped and helped him? How would our world be different? There is no question that helping others is part of the religious obligation. As Robert Ingersoll said, "Real religion means the doing of justice. Real religion means the giving to others every right you claim yourself. Real religion consists of duties of man to man, in feeding the hungry, in clothing the naked, in defending the innocent, and in saying what you believe to be true." But that is not all of religion - although for the last hundred years followers of liberal religion have acted as if it was - which is why I believe liberal religion - Unitarianism - is subject to the same criticism that Thurman leveled against traditional Christianity.

Amidst all our intellectual postering, we have too often failed to offer anything for the man or woman who stands in the moment with his or her back against the wall. When the weight of the world falls upon you, what is there about our religion that will hold you up, that will support and sustain you through the worst of times? I believe we offer little more than stoicism for the person who suffers. Of course, you can always tell the person who is suffering that Unitarians have the highest average SAT scores of all religious groups in the United States. I am certain that will cheer people up and help them get through the situation.

Most Unitarians are well educated. We have the highest average income of any religious group in the United States. You may not live in a mansion, but statistically, you live a life that is economically comfortable, a life of privilege compared to the world at large. Very few Unitarians have ancestors who were slaves. While Howard Thurman’s grandmother was working on the plantation, our religious ancestors were owners of the cotton mills in New England - leading to the remark - during the years leading up to the Civil War - that the church bells of New England were stuffed with cotton. William Ellery Channing, the most famous of all nineteenth century Unitarian ministers, was denied permission by his congregation to perform a funeral service for an abolitionist friend. We don’t seem to have the background of suffering that African Americans have experienced. But I believe suffering is a universal. I believe every person - from time to time - finds himself or herself against the wall. I believe that is a shared human experience that unites us. And in the unity of that experience we seek to find something that will sustain us when we experience everything as being against us.

“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. . ..

I suspect all of us know those words. I remember memorizing the twenty-third psalm while in high school. I’ve heard it often all through my life. In both the Jewish and Christian traditions it is a reminder that God is with you. It is a reminder that no matter what happens to you that the ultimate source of the Universe is concerned about you, not in the abstract, not in theory, but in practice, in reality.

We don’t hear those words often in Unitarian churches. When I was looking for a responsive reading this morning I was surprised to discover they were in the back of our hymnal. I was surprised because not only have Unitarians alienated themselves from the belief that God is concerned about us in any concrete form, we have - as a movement - alienated ourselves from God.

I don’t entirely disagree with that. I rejected the classical idea of God when I was twenty years old. Classical theism - with its belief in a God who is a supernatural being, all powerful, all knowing, and all loving - makes no sense to me. And when I threw out God I also threw out the twenty-third psalm. For years I was an atheist. But over time I came to believe that atheism was totally dependent on classical theism - it was just its mirror image - and as such suffered from the same flaws and limitations. Both positions became untenable to me. Since then I have struggled to find a way to redefine God so as to avoid the problems I perceive in both theism and atheism. And I have wondered from time to time if I would ever again be able to unambiguously embrace the language of the twenty-third psalm. That question remains unanswered, but more and more I have come to believe that for religion to be religion it must be more than what Robert Ingersoll declared. I have come to believe that a religion of ethics and morality is insufficient because I see nothing in such a religion that will support us when our backs are against the wall, I see nothing that can raise in us a sense that the ultimate source of the universe stands with us in the worst of times. I see nothing in such a religion that can offer us a liberal religious version of the twenty third psalm.

Earlier I said that stoicism was one of the few things we had to offer. There’s something to be said for stoicism. It is not without its merits. But I do not believe stoicism can every completely satisfy the religious need. As Anne Morrow Lindbergh said,

Stoicism is courageous, but it is only a halfway house on the long road. It is a shield, permissible for a short time only. In the end one has to discard shields and remain open and vulnerable. Otherwise, scar tissue will seal off the wound and no growth will follow. To grow, to be reborn, one must remain vulnerable - open to love but also hideously open to the possibility of more suffering.

I believe the stoicism we offer is derived from our understanding of religion as essentially moral and ethical. We’ll do the right thing. That’s all that matters. We don’t need any of that religious mumbo jumbo. But I think our atheism is itself a form of stoicism, a shield we have adopted to protect ourselves. But ultimately, if we are to have a religion that can offer us something for when our backs are against the wall, we must discard our theological stoicism and run the risk of once again being hideously hurt.

Howard Thurman understood Christianity as too often retreating in its formal expression into a religion of the strong against the weak. It is, he said,

[a] matter of tremendous significance, for it reveals to what extent a religion that was born of a people acquainted with persecution and suffering has become the cornerstone of a civilization and of nations whose very position in modern life has too often been secured by a ruthless use of power applied to weak and defenseless peoples.

Unitarianism, a religion born out of a sense of freedom that came from the personal experience of the divine - an experience that did not require a mediator, whether a priest or Jesus - has retreated into a religion of mind without heart. And that is important because it reveals how a religion born of the heart has become the cornerstone for a religion that glorifies intellectual superiority and explains the need to help others not because of a divine mandate, but as a form of intellectual and ethical noblese oblige - and in doing so, has abandoned any basis for addressing the need of the individual who stands with her back against the wall.

What is it that shall comfort us when the world has abandoned us? What is it that shall restore our souls? What is it that shall cause us to lift up our eyes beyond ourselves and let us know that we are not alone? “Let my people go, so that they may celebrate a festival to me in the wilderness.” The story of Exodus is more than a story of freedom from slavery of the body. It is a story about freedom of the soul. Slavery of the body ended in the nineteenth century. Slavery of the soul will continue as long as there are religions that are the cornerstone of civilizations based on the “ruthless use of power applied to weak and defenseless peoples” - whether that power is political power or an intellectual aristocracy of the mind. I believe we would do well to reexamine the story of Exodus and to ask ourselves what is it that will make us free - free in the knowledge that there is more to life than stoicism - free in the knowledge that the ultimate source of the universe is concerned with each of us.

Amen.