WHAT WOULD THEODORE PARKER DO?

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

November 4, 2007

SERMON

It is always a little perilous to reach back in history for exemplars of the religious life. The tendency is so strong to exaggerate for effect, to buff the profile and file off the rough edges so that the image we get is a bit superhuman, larger than life. I’ve found this to be true in our tradition with such figures as William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson on our Unitarian side, or John Murray and Hosea Ballou on the Universalist.

In this pantheon of our past, though, there is one figure who I find is consistently underrated, whose story often appears as little more than a footnote in quick summaries of our movement, and that’s the Unitarian Theodore Parker. And yet, in his time – the 1840s and 50s – Parker was one of the most influential preachers in the city of Boston, regularly drawing Sunday audiences of 2,500 people – nearly 2% of all non-Catholics in Boston – and often many more.

Even more important is what he was famous for. At a time when Americans were just beginning to waken to the emerging social ills of their growing nation, from lack of education to poverty and ill health, and most prominently the stain of human slavery, among American clergy Theodore Parker was arguably the most fearless, most tireless, most determined prophet of reform.

I have chosen Parker as my focus today as I continue my series this year intended to answer the questions arising from our strategic planning process: who are we, and who do we want to be? To remind you, I have already offered two propositions to answer those questions: We gather as a community to learn how to live what love teaches, and we invite and make room for the experience of wonder and the holy. Today I want to add to that list by suggesting that we regard ethical living and service to justice as religion’s truest witness.

It is not all that we are about. Spiritual exploration and the search for truth and meaning require a good deal of inner work as well as time to engage each other and the world apart from the breaking issues of the day. But we do not fully inhabit our faith until we live it, until it guides how we interact with others and society at large, until it helps open our eyes to a larger view of the world and the duty we owe to each other, in fact to all humankind, and to the earth.

Parker was born on a ramshackle farm in Lexington, Massachusetts, the 11th and last child of parents in their late 40s. Though poor, the family boasted the pedigree of Theodore’s grandfather, Captain John Parker, who, at the Battle of Lexington, famously told the colonists he commanded as the British regulars approached, “Don’t fire unless fired upon. But if they mean to have war, let is begin here.”

Parker enjoyed growing up on the farm, and all his life acquaintances would remark on his large farmer’s hands. But his remarkable intelligence clearly set him apart for other work. He had a nearly photographic memory, a seemingly limitless appetite for reading – as a minister he compiled the most extensive private library in Boston – and eventually learned about a dozen languages.

Family connections found him a place at Harvard. He prospered there, but he had to follow a slower pace than most for lack of money, teaching in private schools between his classes. The ministry appealed to him at an early age. His mother was devout and influenced him strongly.

He told the story of being a boy and coming upon a turtle in the middle of the road. His first impulse was to grab a large stick and smash it. As he raised the stick, Parker said, he heard a voice inside telling him it was wrong, and he put down the stick. He recounted the incident to his mother, who told him that what he heard was the voice of God within him, and that throughout his life he would be on the right path if he followed that voice.

Parker’s first settlement at a Unitarian church in West Roxbury came at a time when the Transcendentalist movement was first emerging, and he was intrigued by it. From his earliest days he had believed, as the Transcendentalists suggested, that religion “is deeply laid in nature and in the human heart.” He came to meet and admire Emerson, attended meetings of the Transcendentalist Club, wrote for the group’s magazine, “The Dial,” and was in the audience when Emerson gave his Divinity School Address at Harvard.

Parker, too, became drawn into the hubbub that followed, particularly around whether the Bible and its testimony of Jesus’ miracles was essential to religious faith. For Parker, Transcendentalism affirmed that religion amounts not to a unique, divine revelation that we receive from the beyond, but to the process of awakening to essential truths that live within each of us.

Though an admirer and able scholar of the Bible, Parker felt that it had no unique authority. What it teaches, he said, “we could find out all by ourselves at some period of our lives.” Its chief lesson, he felt, was what he called the essential nobility of human nature and our duty to one other. And yet, in his own day he saw little evidence that religion was at work on that task.

Christianity, he said, “nods over her Bible, and sleeps in her pew of a Sunday, while she makes slaves and keeps them, and strives to render the rich richer and the poor poorer all the week.”

Parker’s sermons took on an increasingly strident reformist tone, as he denounced the exploitation of labor, lack of education, and prisons that, he said, make more criminals than they mend. Parker was not alone among clergy in despairing of evil ways, but he was careful where he placed the blame. The injustices of society, he felt, were due far more to the selfishness of the strong than the failings of the weak. Human greatness was to be measured not by the fame or wealth one had accumulated, but by the service one had given to the world.

Ultimately, though, it wasn’t a social reformist talk, but an ordination sermon that raised Parker’s profile and made him a figure of controversy for the rest of his life. The topic he chose for himself in the sermon was “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity.” Parker’s candidate for the “permanent” was Jesus’ teachings, words so compelling, he said, that they sowed themselves into the hearts of his followers, who created what he called a religion of “pure morality” that has endured ever since.

The transient, he suggested, was everything else: the clergy, the creeds, the cathedrals, even the Bible, with its many contradictions, and the person of Jesus himself. For, it was the truth of Jesus’ teachings, not any personal authority of his that gave them their power. So, he said, “If it could be proved . . . that the gospels were a sheer fabrication, that Jesus never lived, still Christianity would stand firm.”

It was, to say the least, an unorthodox point of view and quickly got him in trouble. Orthodox ministers hooted that Parker finally proved what infidels Unitarians were, and Unitarian clergy, in turn, shrunk from the criticism. Most stopped associating with Parker at all and some even tried unsuccessfully to force him out of the ministers association.

As hurt as Parker was by this treatment, he didn’t back down. And while the clergy were scandalized, the notoriety brought increasing numbers of visitors to Parker’s church. In time Parker’s friends began organizing for him to speak at a venue in Boston. They rented a theater, the Melodeon, and after about a year of Parker splitting his time between West Roxbury and the Melodeon, he resigned his pastorate to become minister of the newly formed 28th Congregational Society.

It was an unusual congregation, made up of largely middle class Bostonians, evenly divided among men and women and, virtually unheard of at the time, racially integrated. The new location gave Parker more visibility and Sunday attendance rose; eventually they had to move to an ever larger location: the Boston Music Hall.

Parker’s hour-long sermons were earnest and artful, often packed with information – statistics on Boston’s population and commerce – urging sympathy for the downtrodden and acting by the privileged. But on no subject was his preaching more powerful than slavery. He came fairly late to the issue. It wasn’t until the mid 1840s that he joined the abolitionists, but quickly he rose to become one of their most powerful voices.

Against those who insisted slavery was a Southern problem, Parker argued that it was sustained by laws and commerce originating in the North. “Southern slavery,” he said, “is an institution which is in earnest. Northern freedom is an institution which is not in earnest.” His sermons and speeches emphasized that this “new crime against humanity” was corrupting the nation. Parker helped organize Vigilance Committees to protect fugitive slaves and even harbored them in his home, once marrying a couple before they fled for England.

Parker was clear on what he saw as the role of religion. Preaching on the occasion of his own installation at the Melodeon, he said that while the church exists to cultivate the heart, mind, and conscience, it should also “be the means of reforming the world.” Churches, he said, may preach good will, “but every almshouse . . . shows that the churches have not done their duty. . . . Every jail is a monument . . . that we are still heathens . . . and the gallows, . . . the embodiment of death, a sign of our infamy.”

“It seems to me,” he said, “that any church . . . which aspires to be a true church must set itself about this business . . . . The church that is to lead this century will not be a church on all fours; mewling and whining, its face turned down, its eyes turned back. It must be full of the brave spirit of the day” demanding “as never before freedom for itself, usefulness in its institutions; truth in its teachings, and beauty in its deeds.”

One hundred and sixty years later it’s not a bad goal for any church, and one that this church can claim some pride in working toward. This morning you heard testimony to how some of our members are reaching out to men in the Buncombe County Jail. Just last night the latest edition of our electronic Social Justice newsletter, The Flame, from our member Cathy Agrella, appeared in my e-mail inbox, detailing some of the amazing work we are doing now and opportunities for involvement in the future. Among other things I learned that we led the pack, raising more money than any other group in this year’s Crop Walk. Choose your passion: environmental awareness, peace studies, anti-racist work, equal rights, economic justice and so much more. There’s a place for you.

Of course, social justice is just a part of what we’re here for. We gather in worship each Sunday, and in classes, committees, choirs, covenant groups and social gatherings. On our own, we study or meditate, practice yoga or tai chi. We sit with each other in sorrow, in crisis, or in need. There are many dimensions to the religious life, to the life lived with intention, integrity and love. One of them is how we answer the question, what will I do to live what I believe, or borrowing Albert Schweitzer’s words, how can I make my life my argument?

There is no prescription to follow, no assigned path. We are each guided by our own gifts and our own predilections and circumstances to live as our values teach us to be of use, to find work, as Marge Piercy put it, that is real. In all that we do we can have no assurances that our best efforts will not be frustrated, disregarded or misunderstood. We can only know that we are acting out of our best selves, following what our hearts and minds tell us, that small voice, whatever its source.

We do, however, have the resource of community, a community committed to the inherent worth and dignity of all, to justice, equity and compassion. And joined as a community our strength is magnified.

There is no telling where the work that we begin will end. Theodore Parker had no way of knowing that his words in an antislavery speech describing democracy as “a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people” would be immortalized two years after his death in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Or that another of his images – that the arc of justice is long but it bends toward justice – would be adopted a century later by a 20th century prophet, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Obscure as Parker is to most people today, his ideas and images still resonate. Only last January the commentator Bill Moyers cited Parker as “the Hound of Freedom who helped to change America through the power of the word.” It is a power we each possess, in differing measure, to be sure, but true all the same. Our power is our voice, our capacity for action. Our religious heritage calls us to use them. For in using them, in living our truth, we draw closer to that center of integrity which gives our lives meaning.

We may follow different paths, find different stars to guide us on our way. But as we struggle for what it means to live an ethical life and to serve justice I want to suggest after this introduction today that we could all do a lot worse than asking ourselves the question, What would Theodore Parker do?