STANDING ON THEIR SHOULDERS
1/6/08 Summit UU Fellowship
Rev. Kathleen A. Green
Over the next few Sundays, I’ll be introducing you to some interesting characters. Not just the ‘heroes’ of our religious heritage, but just as important, some of the companions of our heroes - companions that we too can claim. Unfortunately, our first guest couldn’t be here because of a previously arranged engagement. But let me tell you about him. His name is Commitment.
“Commitment has kind eyes. He wears sturdy shoes. Everything is very vivid when he is around. It is wonderful to sit and have lunch in his gardens around harvest time. You can taste in the vegetables that the soil has been cared for.
Because Commitment is so serious, he loves clowns and balloons and fools and limericks. He has four daughters, grown now, but when they were little they always took him to the circus.
There is something special about the way Commitment gazes at the new moon. I wish I knew how to explain it. He is such a simple man, and yet he is mysterious. He is more generous than most people. His heart is open. He is not afraid of life. He is married to Joy.”
I would also like to introduce you to another companion of our heroes, Faith.
***** (read by Service Associate, Toni Rogers)
“Faith lives in the same apartment building as Doubt. When Faith was out of town visiting her uncle in the hospital, Doubt fed the cat and watered the asparagus fern. Faith is comfortable with doubt because she grew up with him. Their mothers are cousins. Faith is not dogmatic about her beliefs like some of her relatives. Her friends fear that Faith is a bit stupid. They whisper that she is naïve and she depends on Doubt to protect her from the meanness of life. In fact, it is the other way around. It if Faith who protects Doubt from Cynicism.”
About five years ago, in an issue of US News and World report, there was an article on heroes and heroism. A list of heroic traits in the introductory article for the magazine claimed that heroes are those who:
o go beyond the call of duty,
o act wisely under pressure,
o risk their life, their fortune, or their reputation,
o champion a good cause, and
o serve as a calling to our higher selves.
Let’s consider that last one - the one that matters most to us for our purposes this morning.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow said “A religious life is defined by its efforts to ask and engage age-old spiritual questions: What is the good life? What is a good man, what is a good woman? What is a good society and what is my relation to it? What are my obligations to society? What is best for my children? What is Justice? Truth? Virtue? What is my relation to nature, to death, to aging, suffering, illness? How can I live a meaningful life? What is my responsibility to my brother and sister? Who are my brothers and sisters? What shall I be loyal to? What must I be ready to die for?” (Quoted in F. Forester Church's Born Again Unitarian Universalism.)
Those are the questions that our heroes answer far more satisfactorily than even the greatest of our philosophers - for the simple reason that unless we see our ideals, our dreams, our values, manifest through the lives of real human beings, those ideals, dreams, and values are nothing more than mere abstractions. We learn best who we are, who we can be, who we wish to be through the life stories of others. Our heroes help us tell the stories we want for our own lives. And then they help us breathe life into those stories - into reality.
Meet Michael Servetus:
A sixteenth century Spaniard who was martyred in the Reformation for openly criticizing the doctrine of the trinity. He is considered by many as an early Unitarian. While studying law in France, he read the Bible and was quite surprised to find that nowhere was the trinity explicitly mentioned or defined. He was known to engage in theological disputes on a regular basis; much more often than would be tolerated! Servetus went to Strasburg where in 1531, he published On the Errors of the Trinity. He had hoped that his book would persuade the new Protestant establishment to re-think the orthodox Trinitarian doctrine and adopt his own. Much to Servetus’ disappointment, this did not happen. He was a man ahead of his time. A Lutheran reformer, commenting on Servetus’ work, lamented, “As for the Trinity you know I have always feared this would break out some day. Good God, what tragedies this question will excite among those who come after us!”
Servetus did write a second volume, but it did nothing to engender sympathy to his theology. His books were confiscated and the Supreme Council of the Inquisition in Spain began proceedings to summon him. He fled to Paris assumed a new name, Michel de Villeneuve. After a stint as an editor, he became a medical student at the University of Paris and a few years later became the personal physician of the Archbishop of Vienne. Celebrated as a pioneering physician, Servetus was the first to publish a description of the blood’s circulation through the lungs. Servetus spent his spare time preparing his major theological treatise , The Restoration of Christianity, and he began a fateful secret correspondence with an old acquaintance, John Calvin. By this time, Calvin had authored Institutions of Christian Religion and was pastor and chief reformer of Geneva; the most prestigious figure in the Reform branch of Protestantism.
Servetus sent Calvin a manuscript of his yet unpublished work and Calvin reciprocated by sending a coy of his own. Servetus returned it with abusive annotations. On the day Calvin broke off the correspondence relationship, he wrote to a colleague that should Servetus ever come to Geneva, “if my authority is of any avail I will not suffer him to get out alive.” How true that would be.
In 1553, when Servetus published The Restoration of Christianity, he sent an advance copy to Geneva. The printed text included thirty of this letters to Calvin. Soon afterward, at Calvin’s behest, the identity of “Michel Villeneuve” was betrayed to the Catholic Inquisition in Vienne . After his arrest and interrogation, Servetus managed to escape from the prison. He was making his way to northern Italy where, he believed, there were people receptive to his writings. He made his way across the border to Geneva but was recognized at a Geneva church service. Servetus was arrested and tried for heresy by Protestant authorities.
The secular officials were unable to establish that Servetus was an immoral disturber of the public peace. Nevertheless, he made damaging theological statements in the course of a written debate with Calvin. The Council of Geneva, after receiving the advice of churches in four other Swiss cities, convicted Servetus of anti-trinitarianism. Calvin asked that Servetus be mercifully beheaded. The Council insisted he should be burned at the stake. It has been purported that Servetus was burned at the stake with a copy of his first heretical work On the Errors of the Trinity strapped to his leg. Spectators were impressed by the tenacity of Servetus’ faith. Perishing in the flames, he is said to have cried out, “O Jesus, Son of the Eternal God, have pity on me!” One witness observed that Servetus, defiant to the last, might have been saved if he had only called upon “Jesus, the Eternal Son.” A few months later Servetus was again executed, this time in effigy, by the Catholic Inquisition in France. Many Protestants approved the Genevan sentence. But there were others who were not so sure that heretics ought to be put to death. John Calvin answered his critics by arguing that to spare Servetus would have been to endanger the souls of many. Sebastian Castellio answered Calvin by declaring that “to kill a man is not to protect a doctrine; it is but to kill a man. When the Genevans killed Servetus, they did not defend a doctrine; they but killed a man.”
Many of our Unitarian and Universalist heroes, throughout the ages, are heretics! Servetus did not believe people are totally depraved, as Calvin’s theology supposed. He thought all people, even non-Christians, were capable of improvement and justification. He did not restrict the benefits of faith to a few recipients of God’s stingy privilege of grace, as did Calvin’s doctrine of the elect. Rather, grace abounds and human beings need only the intelligence and free will which they possess, to grasp it. He held that God was present in and a part of all creation. This feature of Servetus’ theology was especially obnoxious to Calvin. At the Geneva trial, he asked Servetus, “What, wretch! If one stamps the floor would one say that one stamped on your God?”
Aspects of Servetus’ theology influenced those who later founded Unitarian churches in Poland and Transylvania. Public criticism of those responsible for his execution inspired Unitarians and other groups to develop and institutionalize their own heretical views. Widespread aversion to Servetus’ death has been taken as signaling the birth in Europe of religious tolerance. Although Michael Servetus has now no real disciples and never had any, it has been said that his pioneering life and the tragedy of his death did inaugurate, in a sense, the history of modern liberal religion.
We stand upon the shoulders of Michael Servetus.
In this nation, both Unitarians and Universalists were at the forefront of ethical and social reform. According to Dr. Edward Frost, Senior Minister Emeritus of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta, "the Universalists were the first denomination in America to denounce slavery, in 1790. They were among the first to advocate birth control as public policy. Among the Universalists were one of the founders of the nation, Benjamin Rush; Clara Barton, the founder of the Red Cross; Adin Ballou, the pacifist who influenced Leo Tolstoy, Ghandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr..
"Unitarians also have heroes. The English scientist, Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen in the 1770s, was a British clergyman who sided with the revolutionaries in America and France. His neighboring British clergy incited mobs against him and burned down his house and laboratory and drove him from the country. [The very religious intolerance that drove out thousands of others.] Priestley came to America, where he founded Unitarian churches in Pennsylvania and preached to John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson."
These are the shoulders we stand upon today. We stand upon many shoulders – those who have gone before. Heroes in our personal ancestry and heroes in our religious ancestry. Women and women who have helped to mark the path and lead the way on our collective journey towards peace-making, justice-seeking, and compassion-driven living.
Meet Abner Kneeland
A social activist in Boston in the 1830’s – from the Univeralist side of our merged denominational history. He was a writer, feisty crusader, and theological radical. Abner Kneeland was a Universalist minister for a while. Universalists at that time were arguing that by the end of time, all souls will be with god in heaven and none left in hell, the more radical among them arguing that there is no hell. However, Kneeland took matters even further. In both his religious and his social beliefs, he got way out ahead of the pack. The belief that was the overt cause of his imprisonment was his pantheism, perceived as atheism. He believed that God and nature are synonymous. That may not seem very radical to us today, but to have aired such views openly in 1833 got Abner Kneeland sixty days in jail.
Kneeland was an itinerant preacher for a year and a half before being called to the Univeralist Church of Langdon, New Hampshire. While there, he served two years in the state legislature. He was temporarily removed from fellowship because he resigned from a church to work in a dry goods shop specializing in bonnets, owned by his new wife. Such commercial employment was felt to be unfitting for a man of his calling. A Rev. Lemuel Willis wrote, “It must have appeared ludicrous enough to persons who had seen this large man, of stately appearance, in the sacred desk proclaiming with earnestness and solemnity the Everlasting Gospel, now behind the counter measuring off tape by the yard, selling nails by the pound, and disposing of dress pattern by the piece! He poor man, had ‘fallen into temptation and a snare.’” The business failed in two years and Kneeland did return to ministry, though signs of trouble were evident. Kneeland expressed doubts about the Bible’s authenticity. Kneeland was increasingly open in proclaiming the Bible to have been written by people, not God, and to contain errors, meanness, and nonsense. His commitment to Christianity itself was questionable, whereas he was taken with progressive political plans and ideas like the Freethought Movement. He was dismissed from several congregations and wound up resigning from the Universalist ministry and from Universalism. This was a good thing for Kneeland as he was free to pursue his thought and headed off to edit the Boston Investigator – a paper devoted to social reform on behalf of such causes as a national educational system, abolition of slavery and imprisonment for debt, women’s rights, and the betterment of the ‘working classes’.
Former UUA president Bill Schulz notes, “it was not only philosophically that Kneeland outdistanced his contemporaries and the generation to come after him. His social views were even more startlingly progressive for his era. In his support for birth control, his approval of interracial marriage, his conviction that women can not only claim equal right to men but equal worth, Kneeland anticipated views still being widely debated more than a century after he died.”
Universalism itself was a radical movement at that time; scary to many on the ground that if there is no fear of eternal damnation for those who do wrong, chaos will ensue. Imagine what an embarrassment Kneeland was to Universalists, who had a hard enough time trying to convince society that they were not a threat to all this is right and decent!
Just as damaging was the charge that if you accept a liberal view of God, like Unitarians and Universalists had done, you are on the fast track to downright atheism. Kneeland didn’t actually consider himself an atheist at all. He kept trying to tell people that he believed that everything is God. But he did not believe in the God that Universalists did, and he said so. He said so in print. And a grand jury indicted him for blasphemy, “alleging that the defendant, on Dec. 20, 1833, unlawfully and wickedly composed, printed and published in a newspaper called the Boston Investigator, of which he was the editor and publisher, a certain scandalous, impious, obscene, blasphemous and profane libel, in which he ‘did willfully blaspheme the holy name of God, by denying and scornfully reproaching God, his creation, government, and final judging of the world, and by reproaching Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost, and scornfully reproaching the holy word of God,’” which was (and is) illegal.
It has been argued that Kneeland was being prosecuted as much for his political views as for his religious beliefs. Here is a part of the summation by the prosecuting attorney at Kneeland’s trial:
“Gentlemen, Blasphemy is but one part of the system introduced among us. It is to lead the way to atheism…Atheism is to dethrone the Judge of heaven and earth; a future state of rewards and punishments, is to be described as a nursery bug-bear; moral and religious restraints are to be removed by proclaiming death to be an endless sleep; marriage is to be denounced as an unlawful restraint on shifting affections…; illicit sexual intercourse to be encouraged by physiological checks upon conception; the laws of property are to be repealed as restriction upon ‘the greatest possible good’…Abner Kneeland and his detestable dissemination of obscenity, and impiety, and blasphemy…may be considered by his acts and doctrines to be the common enemy of the human race…”
Good for you, Abner. Good for you!
We stand on the shoulders of Abner Kneeland.
Hero: a defender, supporter, or promoter of somebody or something
Hero: a remarkable person - a personal example of excellence or achievement
Hero: somebody who is admired for outstanding qualities
Heroes such as Michael Servetus and Abner Kneeland were companioned by Commitment and Faith.
And let’s not forget that our heroes are not gods for our idolatry or saints of perfection. Heroes are flawed, but they are heroic figures nonetheless - all the more so for being imperfect. They reveal the potential within every fallible human being for a greatness of spirit. They set an example that is not beyond us - an invitation that calls us to live out our own deepest loves and highest ideals, to live courageously, faithfully, with integrity and principle.
Our Unitarian and Universalist heroes, remind us that ours is a longstanding and worthy tradition. Our roots go deep into the soil of ancient Israel, the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean, as well as Europe of both the Christian and the pre-Christian eras. Our religious values and expressions were not created in a commune during the psychedelic sixties. We come from a long line of men and women - a people united through time - who were remarkable for the way they lived out their deepest convictions and highest values within cultures and societies that often did not or would not understand or accept their beliefs or their ways of faith expression. Our UU heroes’ lives and works are the clear and continuing expressions of many of our shared core values and beliefs. We are all of us - regardless of our particular individual theologies, philosophies or practices - the spiritual descendents and heirs of, for example, the Transylvanian Unitarian Francis David, who said, "We need not think alike to love alike." We have ancestors in Universalist Hosea Ballou, who reminds us that "If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good."
While the particular theologies of our religious heroes may not be entirely relevant to all of us today, the stories of how these heroes came to their beliefs, how they then risked everything to live them out - those stories are relevant. In addition to linking us to our rightful tradition and embodying the values and dreams that are still cherished today, they also serve as our teachers of the possible. They call us to acknowledge what is possible, and to become our own true best humanely human selves.
We are standing on the shoulders of others in gratitude and reverence, with a responsibility; a call to continue marking the path, leading the way on our collective journey toward peace-making, justice-seeking, and compassion-driven living.
May it be so.
