"Philosophy, Ethics . . . . "

A sermon by Dave Weissbard

delivered at

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

02/06/05

Last Sunday, on our Bring-a-Friend Sunday, I undertook a sermon responding in more depth than I had the time to on Question and Answer Sunday, to what I understood as the question raised by a member of the congregation: namely, “If nothing really matters and we die with nothing, why do we work so hard to be ‘good’ and do ‘right?’” I understood the question as asserting the first part, “nothing really matters and we die with nothing,” thus making the last part the operative question, “why do we work so hard to be “good” and do “right?” [I conceded mid-sermon that those words might also be read as a challenge to the assumption: “Since we work so hard to be good and do right, how can people believe that nothing really matters?”]

I spent the first part of the sermon focusing on the nihilistic philosophical perspective that there is no eternal or supernatural “meaning” to the universe; and on what is to many of us the corollary of that, which is that we use reason, the empirical method, to seek to understand life. I suggested that means that most Unitarian Universalists do not rely on a supernatural dimension, but believe that most of what we can know and trust is what our reason sorts out from what our senses tell us about the real world in which we live.

I referred to a way of understanding religion, developed by James Hopewell, that differentiates on a continuum between empirical and charismatic religion on one dimension, and between those who believe that everything will come out all right and those who take a more tragic view on the other. Hopewell proposed that four congregations in a community might symbolically sit facing four differing directions: north for the empirical, east for the comic, south for the charismatic, and west for the tragic. A survey I did of this congregation several years ago suggested that our primary orientation was toward the northerly, empirical direction, evenly divided between the comic and tragic poles.

Much of the gap between empirical and charismatic religion is laid by many at the feet of Charles Darwin, the anniversary of whose birth will be celebrated this week. While I cited and agreed with the philosopher W.T. Stace, who insisted that the conflict between science and religion, which is really what this is about, was more ancient and fundamental than the conflict over Darwin, Darwin’s teachings played a central role in the history of this congregation. One of our greatest ministers, Dr. Thomas Kerr, was led by Darwin’s teachings out of the Baptist church and into this pulpit. I will have more to say about Darwin in a few moments.

In the second portion of my sermon, I suggested that humans have at least as much an inherent tendency to work for “good” and to do “right” as we have to do “wrong.” In contrast to Christian teachings about the sinful roots of human nature, most of us believe that the concepts of good and right are not external to the human, coming from some divine source, but rooted within our being. It is my contention, and not mine alone, that human beings have projected their ethical visions out onto a deity which has in essence reflected them back.

I cited an evangelical Christian minister, an imam, and a rabbi with whom I find some theological disagreement, but significant moral agreement in terms of the importance of our working to change the world to reflect the many “goods” on which we agree.

There may or may not be a plan or direction in the universe – perhaps entropy is inevitable, perhaps not. What experience teaches us is that there are people whose lives are observably full of meaning, who seek to make a difference, to make life more humane, and they inspire us to the possibilities of our own lives. “Why do we work so hard to do ‘good’ and be ‘right?’” Because we hear a voice within that tells us that we can make a difference, that what we do matters, that only we can do what we can do. That is reason enough.

The ellipses in the title of this morning’s sermon point in the direction of my working title for this sermon which was, borrowing from Paul Harvey, “And now, the rest of the story.”

I envisioned last Sunday’s sermon as pointing us, and our visitors, toward an understanding of what Unitarian Universalism is about. I do, indeed, believe that while we do not all agree, there is a fundamental tendency among Unitarian Universalists, and among us in this congregation, to be oriented toward the empirical approach to religion. That approach does not weaken, but I believe, strengthen our second orientation which is to ethical living. We work hard to seek the “right” and do the “good” not out of fear of punishment, nor out of a sense of duty to a deity, but because we rationally have come to the conclusion that this is the most fulfilling way to live.

As I reviewed what I had said, as I prepared my sermon for posting on the internet, I realized how much there was that I had intended to say, and that I felt should be said, that I did not have time to include last week. There is more to the story. And so, “the rest of the story.”

Critics, or people who did not find their needs satisfied in Unitarian Universalist churches have sometimes described our churches as intellectual debating societies. In his study of congregations, Hopewell found that those who are strongly oriented to any of the four poles, could not really grasp how the others could be attracted to the other poles.

This was underlined for me in the middle of this week when I attended the funeral for Bob Stormont, the bagpiper. Bob had played his pipes for funerals and weddings in This church, and his daughter, Sue, were our secretary many years ago. I was fond of Bob, so I went to the service. I had the kind of experience that many of you have reported after attending funerals in other churches. It was two hours long, so it had many wonderful elements in the eulogies delivered by his son and daughter, and grandsons, but there were theological dimensions to the service which I found not only curious, or foreign, but oppressive. I was as appalled by the inclusion of some ideas in that service as some who were comforted by that service would be appalled by their absence in one of our memorial services. I felt assaulted by the celebration in the service that my friend, who had been a declared “doubter,” following the death of his wife was able to be “born again” and assert his belief that Jonah had been swallowed by the fish.

[I still remember a local minister who publicly expressed how appalled him was by our memorial service chalice-extinguishing words that “in mystery we are born, in mystery we live, and in mystery we die.” There was no mystery to him, only Christ Jesus.]

My point is this: as important as our empirical and ethical orientation are to this church, there is also much more. Reason and ethics are necessary, but not sufficient, to understanding this church, and I believe it is important to get that on the record, lest any misunderstand.

The critics are not without their justification. There was a time when many Unitarian churches (more than Universalist ones) tended to be dryly intellectual. A surplus of rationalism, like too much of any good thing, can be as bad as its absence. The orthodox humanists and secularists among us tend to be highly suspicious of any ritual, like the lighting of a chalice, or joining hands to sing Shalom Havayreem, or the singing of hymns, or the use of “religious music” in our services. I can recall critics, particularly in my first congregation, who felt that my sermons were not sufficiently dispassionate – my predecessor had been a philosophy professor who infrequently stirred people up. That was, of course, why the leaders of the congregation had suggested it was time for him to move on.

Unitarians (not so much Universalists) rebelled against religion in which emotion was dominant by fleeing to the other extreme and adopting a style in which we attempted to exclude emotion and rely solely on reason. The fact that we have been referred to as “God’s frozen people” is not without basis. The fact is that just as many mainline Protestant churches have moved in the direction of reason, so have we moved in the direction of acknowledging that we do not live solely in our heads. We seek greater wholeness. What are the implications of this?

There was an interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor back in December which suggested there was “From Liberal Pews, a Rising Thirst for Personal Moral Code.” The article began:

Mainline Protestant congregations, known for emphasizing the social-justice and global-equity dimensions of the Gospel, are increasingly making space for airing parishioners’ day-to-day moral dilemmas, which they used to leave largely between an individual and God.

The article actually dealt with covenant groups, and cited many Unitarian Universalist churches as examples of this trend, along with an Episcopal church in Manhattan. The reporter, however, kept interpreting the groups largely in the moral context, rather than the interpersonal. I don’t believe most Unitarian Universalists are turning to these groups for moral instruction.

Covenant groups are, for us, a way of enhancing our human connections to one another. The greatest fallacy of a kind of pure nihilism is its emphasis on our existential isolation: our aloneness. I believe that one of the central functions of the church is to remind us that we are not, in fact, alone in the human experience. We are part of a diverse human family: most of us do not function well in isolation. We are social animals. Our joy is enhanced by sharing it; our sorrow becomes more bearable when we share it; our troubles become more manageable when we are supported by friends and loved ones.

The Rev. Ken Patton was one of the geniuses of the last generation of our clergy. He was responsible for the words of five of the hymns in our hymnal, and three of the readings in the back, including the opening words which I so often use, as I did this morning. It is true:

We arrive out of many singular rooms, walking over the branching streets. [OK, so maybe we drive, but he was a poet. We know what he meant.] We come to be assured that brothers and sisters surround us, to restore their images upon our eyes. We enlarge our voices in common speaking and singing. We try again that solitude found in the midst of those who with us seek their hidden reckonings. Our eyes reclaim the remembered faces; their voices stir the surrounding air. The warmth of their hands assures us, and the gladness of our spoken names. This is the reason of cities, of homes, of assemblies in the houses of worship. It is good to be with one another.

There it is. While some people suggest it is possible to be a Unitarian Universalist on one’s own, you just have to think liberal thoughts – I don’t believe it. It has a lot to do with the gathered community, with the quirky people, the familiar faces and voices. It is good to be with one another.

Further, human beings have powerful emotional dimensions and needs: we are not just thinking machines in which emotions represent static. Beauty is not rationally quantifiable, but we hunger for it.

It is not incidental that this is a beautiful building. It was the genius of the lead architect, Pietro Belluschi, that he could create a space for us in which no words need to be said in order for people to feel inspired. Just sit here and drink it in!

I mentioned earlier our use of ritual. There are some who would prefer that every service be different, while there are others for whom the general consistency and familiarity of our services bring comfort. The challenge of Unitarian Universalism is that whatever one person sees as a strength is likely to be viewed by another as a weakness, and by another as inconsequential.

It is a ritual of this church to stand at the close of most services, join hands, and sing Shalom Havayreem. Political questions were raised a couple of years ago about the choice of those words. In a sermon, I rationally suggested that they were not sacrosanct and proposed a modification. When the congregation was polled, some predictably objected to singing anything week after week, some liked the revised words, but the great majority expressed a preference for maintaining our tradition, imperfect as it might be. As the composer of the new words, I found myself week after week, slipping inadvertently into the old ones. Even today, if you listen carefully, you will discover that we are not all on the same page.

Music is, of course, part of the ritual which brings a whole other aesthetic dimension to our life together. Our music is important to this congregation. We sometimes forget that music can divide as well as unify. I remember being shocked in a Fireside series a couple of years ago when a new couple expressed strong disapproval of our music program: they considered it archaic. [They infrequently attend our services, if ever. It is safe to say that the music was not the only part of the church with which they were not comfortable.] For most of us, this church’s commitment to music is a strong attraction and part of the glue which holds us together.

The art works in the narthex, the banners that hang on this wall, the flowers that grace our shelf, the chalice, the fountain – all of these contribute to the non-rational dimensions of our life as a religious community, to the wholeness of our religious experience.

Our philosophy and ethics are important dimensions of whom we are as Unitarian Universalists, and as people, but they are not the whole of it: we cannot and do not dismiss the emotional needs we have as whole beings. What is important to our identity is that the rational is also part, and that it be highly valued.

There is a second element, beyond rejecting the split between the rational and the emotional, although it is related. Historically, there has been an attempt to separate the human species from the rest of the world – to affirm our superiority. The traditional Hebrew creation myths have been interpreted to say that everything that is beyond us was put here to serve us.

One of the dimensions of our religious life that has developed during the years of my ministry has been our growing realization that we are not outside the creation, but part of it.

I said earlier that I was going to come back to Darwin, and here we are. What many found threatening about Darwin’s discoveries was that he asserted our relationship to the rest of the animal kingdom. How dare he deny our specialness? No, how dare we deny our relatedness! All of the research into the human genome has demonstrated our relatedness to all the other living things on this planet. Our genes were not planted by a devil to lead us astray! We humans, regardless of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual preference – you name it – we are all related to one another as part of one family, and we are closely related to the other species of animals.

But even beyond our animal kinship, many of us have come to understand that we are also part of an ecosystem – what we refer to as an interconnected web of existence. We are organs in a planetary body – we do not exist on our own. We are dependent upon the air and water and the temperature of our planet. We cannot cavalierly go on plundering the planet as if our actions have no consequences.

Remember, however, that not everyone sees it the same way. Remember how Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of the Interior, James Watt, asserted in front of Congress that there was no need to protect the environment because “after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.” If you, as millions of Americans (a third of our population according to a recent Gallop poll) were to believe that the rapture is imminent, then all of this talk about ecology is irrelevant – in fact, a possible obstacle to some divine plan. According to Glenn Scherer, author of The Road to Environmental Apocalypse, millions of Christians believe environmental desecration should actually be welcomed or encouraged as a sign of the coming apocalypse. Those holding these beliefs have a great deal of power in America today. [See Grist magazine http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2004/10/27/scherer-christian/index.html ]

Last week I quoted Stace’s assertion that science and reason had triumphed over ignorance, and questioned whether he was living in an ivory tower. It is clear that he was.

What I am talking about here, however, is not just an empirical or philosophical commitment to the “interdependent web,” but what I believe is a kind of interior, gut knowledge, that the universe is our home.

Yesterday we celebrated the life of Bill Paulson, a fifty-year member of our congregation whom I would rank as among our highly empirical types. One of the readings I shared was a selection from Lord Byron which Bill had read at the funeral of his sister Gene:

What Byron expressed and Bill Paulson cherished, was an awareness below the level of our thinking, that we are a part of something far greater than ourselves.

All the elements of the Earth except hydrogen and some helium have been cooked by a kind of stellar alchemy billions of years ago in stars, some of which are today inconspicuous white dwarfs on the other side of the Milky Way Galaxy. The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff."

The awe that this awareness of our relatedness leads to is what some describe with the complex word “spirituality.” A simultaneous sense of both our finitude and our relatedness to all that is.

As I was working on last week’s sermon, a google search led me to a sermon by my friend Dick Gilbert in which he told a story from the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in 1994, that I think sums this up.

The Rev. Carl Scovel, Minister Emeritus of Kings Chapel in Boston, delivered the [Berry Street Essay]. Carl is a devout Unitarian Universalist Christian and spoke of what he called "The Great Surmise . . . . At the heart of creation lies a good intent, a purposeful goodness, from which we come, by which we live our fullest, and to which we shall at last return. . . . Our work on earth is to explore, enjoy, and share this goodness. `Too much of a good thing,' said Mae West, `is wonderful.' Sound doctrine."

Responding to this discourse was the Rev. Deane Starr, a good friend of Carl's for 30 years, an agnostic and iconoclast. He disputed Carl's confidence in this "good intent," saying he found conflict and a cosmic indifference to humanity at the heart of creation. He was puzzled at Carl's sense of loneliness, a gap filled for Carl by a loving concern at the heart of creation. Deane, the humanist, found his sense of ultimate community with nature.

Then this rational humanist stunned us by singing a song seldom heard among us, but which had been part of his pietistic past, the feeling for which remained. "I come to the garden alone where the dew is still on the roses. . . . and he walks with me and he talks with me." Then he led us in singing it most of us knew it! It was a strange but powerful moment.

Deane went on to explain: "My third son, Paul Michael, died of AIDS on December 31, 1992. I was positive that never again could I experience joy; I would have been content simply to find some release from anguish. I wondered whether I could find that relief by a return to the religion of my youth. Perhaps I could find comfort, once again, in the arms of Jesus. So I attended a little fundamentalist church in Naples, Florida. It didn't work; I left the service as deeply in pain as when I entered it. That evening, I took a sunset cruise out into the Gulf of Mexico. The sunset was unbelievable!

"The entire sky, from horizon to horizon, was aglow with color, reds, and purples, and pinks, and golds. Then the colors faded and that indescribable deep, deep indigo of late twilight filled the sky. The boat turned around to head back to Naples. There on the eastern horizon was a full and glorious golden moon.

realized that even though my son's being had been scattered, he remained a part of this awesome beauty. We can never contain the beauty in which we live and move and have our beings, but whether we live or whether we die, we are contained within this beauty."

That is what I call spirituality. Our Unitarian Universalist religion is not in conflict but congruent with what science teaches us, but it is about more than science, more than that which can be measured, or explained empirically. This was true for Dr. Kerr, our beloved minister in the 19^th century, and it is true for us today.

The word “Unitarian” has its origins in the theological dispute about the nature of the divine: whether God was three persons or one. Our spiritual ancestors insisted on the unity of God. There are some who suggest that we have outgrown that name because that is hardly a central issue to us today. I believe, however, that we are concerned with unity today: the unity, wholeness, of the person (combining both the intellectual and the emotional and spiritual); our unity as part of the human family; our unity as part of the animal world; our unity as a part of the whole web of existence.

In this sermon, when addressing our valuing of nature, I made reference to the position of some Evangelical Christians who express a lack of concern for, or even antipathy to that issue because of anticipation of “the rapture” when Jesus returns.

The stimulus for that section was a recent speech by Bill Moyers which I did not cite because it only served as a reminder of the relevance of things I have “known” and said before. Among those was reference to the articulation of that position by James G. Watt, while he was the first Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Reagan.

I subsequently received an e-mail pointing me to the “Powerlineblog.org” website which attacked Moyers and his article. Its author, John Hinderacker, tells of a phone call he received last week from Mr. Watt, categorically denying that he ever said such things or believed such things. The blog goes on to deny that Evangelicals anticipating the rapture are anti-environmental.

My memories of Watt’s position are contemporaneous – ie. from the ‘80's before he was driven from office for his rape of the environment and his insensitive remarks about “cripples, Jews and blacks” in his employ.

The Washington Post on 5/21/81 quoted Watt as saying, “My responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns.”

The AuSable Institute, an Evangelical Christian group supporting the environment, was quoted by the New York Times on 6/28/81 as “having expressed concern about statements made by a fellow evangelical, Interior Secretary James G. Watt, who has said that it is the duty of humanity to ‘occupy the land’ and has evoked the image of the ‘second coming of Christ’ in advocating expanded use of the earth’s resources before time runs out.”

By coincidence, Sunday’s Washington Post had an article on “The Greening of Evangelicals,” which suggests a turn “somewhat warily” toward environmentalism by the Christian Right. It included a reference to Watts’ statements, which the Post retracted the next day because they could not be proven. (The source of its 1981 quote was not documented.)

Having now scanned 300+ articles on Watts’ tenure at Interior and the number of court cases chastising him for disregard of environmental laws, I find it incredible that Watt now claims such intense commitment to the environment; but you will have to decide for yourselves. Revisionism?

A blogger brought to my attention an Op Ex article by Bill Moyers that appeared in the Jan. 30 Star Tribune entitled, "There is no tomorrow."

"Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, 'after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.'"

I have never thought, believed or said such words. Nor have I ever said anything that could be interpreted by a reasonable person to mean anything similar to the quote attributed to me.

The paragraph does have one true statement about me; I did serve as President Reagan's first secretary of the interior. I am very proud of being associated with such a great president. After 20-plus years of hindsight, I am delighted that the revolution I helped to bring about remains fixed in America.

The Moyers column tells the one truth about me; it also tells us many things about him. First, he did no primary or objective research for the truth, because there is no record, in congressional hearings or elsewhere, of such words attributed to me.

Because Moyers is at least average in intelligence and has a basic understanding of Christian beliefs, he knows that no Christian would believe what he attributed to me.

Because Moyers had the privilege of serving in the White House under President Lyndon Johnson, he knows that no person believing such a thing would be qualified for a presidential appointment or be confirmed by the Senate, nor would he, if confirmed and then saying such a thing, be allowed to continue in service.

Since Moyers must have known such a statement would not have been made, what was his motive in printing such a lie?

Did he want to demean or degrade a man who has been out of the public arena for 22 years? Did he seek to damage the cause of Christ by attributing lies to his followers? Did he want to try to damage the record of President Reagan by repeating such an outrageous claim?

One way out of the mess would be for Moyers to respond by saying, "I did not say you said that; I correctly reported that Grist magazine [or whoever] said you said that."

That is the cowardly way out. It is the sort of response many of the mainstream media gave when I was in the Cabinet and caught a news reporter or anchorman attributing quotes to me that I never made.

Another way to handle this matter, the way many in the mainstream media would handle it, would be to simply ignore the matter and continue on with the same ruthless disregard for the truth.

Or Moyers could simply apologize to me in the same space and with the same flair he used to impugn me; then the public might respect him as the honest man he should want to be.

The Moyers text was adapted from remarks he made when receiving the Harvard Medical School's Global Environmental Citizen Award. If the school honored him for environmental reporting, and if this example is typical of his reporting, I question its judgment in giving him the award.

In a recent speech that I made on religion and the environment ("There is no tomorrow," Jan. 30 Op Ex), I made a mistake in quoting remarks attributed to James Watt, former secretary of interior, by the online journal Grist without confirming them myself.

Because those or similar quotes had also appeared through the years in many other publications -- in the Washington Post and Time, for example, as well as in several books that I consulted in preparing my speech -- I too easily assumed their legitimacy.

Despite their widespread currency, I should have checked their accuracy before using them. Grist and the Washington Post have now published corrections concerning the quote attributed to Watt in 1981.

I talked to Mr. Watt on the phone and expressed my own regret at using a quote that I had not myself confirmed. I also told him that I continue to find his policies as secretary of the interior abysmally at odds with what I, as well as other Christians, understand to be our obligation to be stewards of the earth.

See also the speech delivered by Adam Werbach on “Is Environmentalism Dead?”

When I was eight years old, I made my first foray into environmental politics by circulating a petition among my schoolmates asking President Reagan to fire his religiously, anti-environmental Interior Secretary James Watt.

Tall, gaunt, and dressed in mortician's clothing, Watt was a dark angel from the future, bearing a grim message for environmentalism. He appeared at our doorstep with a message that we environmentalists, blinded by confidence in our strength at the grassroots and in Congress, could not hear.

Years earlier, Watt had founded the Mountain States Legal Foundation with the intention of helping corporations avoid compliance with environmental laws. But in the process, Watt and his colleagues helped develop a conservative, anti-environmental ideology. Like his environmental counterparts, Watt tapped into enlightenment mythologies to pit a supposedly "natural" marketplace against the "unnatural" laws of man.

Watt was both a Christian and an economic fundamentalist. He argued against conservation because, "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns. ... After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."

He was widely dismissed as a crank at the time, and the environmental movement, with its allies in Congress, pulled out all the stops to force his resignation. In the end, it was his Goldwater-esque lack of propriety, not his anti-environmentalism, which did him in.

A wave of outrage swept over Watt after he voiced opposition to allowing a radical, sinful band to sing at a Fourth of July event on the National Mall. Who were these Satanic souls? The Beach Boys. Watt then decided to attempt to save himself with an attempt to be politically correct. He boasted that his coal-advisory panel included "a black ... a woman, two Jews, and a cripple."

Watt tendered his resignation on Nov. 8, 1983.

Watt is long gone but his ideas are alive and well.