The Invitation of Christmas

December 24, 1961
Rochester

Christmas is both substantial and elusive. Unabashed materialism and uninhibited merry making is mixed with a sensitive spirituality and a restrained surge of feeling. This Christmas blend does not easily conform to description or exposition for Christmas emotion is strange and wondrous.

Consider the legendary, probably unhistorical wise men who followed a star and brought gifts to the baby of Mary and Joseph. The adoration of the Magi has inspired some of the greatest artists – Botticelli, Veroni, Da Vinci, Rubens ..., to name but a few.

Starting with that story, the flights of symbolic fancy are without end. The creative art and literature inspired by the star-led pilgrimage will never be stifled. Similarly moved, I have pondered the invitation of Christmas in the light of the star they beheld. Their star is a grand alliance of the necessities of human survival and the ideals of human aspiration.

The old legends tell us that the wise men were kings, or Magi, from the ancient East. Ancient followers of astrology, they believed they had charted the nativity of a king in the starry heavens. The desert is wide, barren and dangerous. But they followed the star that beckoned to them. That magnificent vision didn’t promise them wealth or offer ease. Rather, they gave wealth and embraced hardships.

That’s one of the difficulties of following stars, isn’t it? You have to give more than you get. At journey’s end on the star track you do not find a pot of gold; you give a pot of gold. Perhaps that’s why these men were wise. Their expectations were realized because they cherished no daydreams that wealth or power would come to them as a result of traveling the hard road of high ideals. But one never-ending reality of the invitation of Christmas is that the journey which ends in giving brings the experience of the highest. “And lo, the star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child was. ... and going into the house with Mary his mother ... they fell down and worshiped him.” Their reward at the end of the long road was not an acquisition, but an experience. It makes one think, does it not?

Caspar brought gold. Gold is solid, material and valuable. For millenia its enduring value has been a world-wide medium of exchange and a universal standard of wealth.

Gold is material, not spiritual. Why offer it to a spiritual leader? Another ancient legend of a powerful king tells us that hunger for gold so corrupted King Midas that he lusted that everything he touched he turned to gold. But the ecstasy turned to agony when the warm ... flesh of his beloved daughter had become hard, cold gold.

Midas’ desire had been to get, not give. Caspar gave gold. One of the winsome invitations of Christmas is to give our substance in the service of our ideals.

Frequently alleged “materialism” is painted as one of the great evils of our time. We are overly concerned with having things and getting more gadgets, from mink shoe brushes to swimming pools. One has but to tour anywhere in our country to know first-hand the mammoth production of things: grain, corn, pork, beef; office machines, camera, paper and parks; clothing, coffee and the kaleidoscope of things in our shopping plazas and innumerable shops; bell candle, crass and book manger, ... clothes and milk, these are things, material things. To say that materialism is evil is to say that life is evil, for life in our human experience depends on material!

We give material gifts that we should, according to our ability and taste. Everyone must live on the material things of the earth.

On the David Brinkley program the other night, the story of the Peruvian mountain village of Leticia provided a deeply moving instance. The opening scenes of this true story of 1961 show a little boy searching in vain for anything to eat in the rude shelter that was his .... But there is nothing. Neither he nor any other of the 300 children will have any breakfast. Listlessly they sat through school. But when the noon bell sounded, they moved eagerly. For at noon there is a meal provided by the Food for Peace program from the U.N.

Christmas proclaims that life in the world is divine. To ... that life to provide the conditions for growth, material goods must be available. Bread is material; milk is visible; clothing can be touched; shelter is substantial. Christmas invites us to ponder seriously how more steps can be taken in concert – as with the Food for Peace effort – to be quite materialistic in finding more ways to distribute the abundant goodness of earth’s production of food and fiber to the millions who are cold, hungry and sick.

Melchior, the second king, brought frankincense. This was an insubstantial gift – a fragrance permeating the air, a smoke that eludes the grasp, cannot be eaten nor worn as a coat.

The use of incense in worship has ancient roots. Long before Christmas, this was part of the Israelite ritual of sacrifice and the sacrificial ceremonies of many ancient cults as well.

As the cloud of incense swirled and lifted, the prayers of the faithful ascended to God. Another symbolic meaning was that the incense transferred to the divine sphere the most costly gifts that men could offer.

The use of incense did not come into general use in the Christian Church for several hundred years. From the 4th century on incense became part of the ritual of the mass. The mass is a sacrifice service. In the evolution of symbolism in the Roman Catholic Mass, incense has several symbolic meanings: (1) “the sweet savor of the knowledge of the Christ,” (2) “the prayers of the saints,” (3) “the majesty of God is veiled by clouds.”

Now, most of us would experience difficulty in accepting any of these meanings, literal or symbolic. But it may well be that for us, new meanings can permeate the fragrance of frankincense.

Not only must we put up our substance in the service of our ideals, but we must keep the ideals. By its mature an ideal is something one can’t touch. It is like vapor from frankincense, [it] slips from our grasp. But then as the Israelites followed a cloud of smoke by day , so the vision of great goals not yet won is the way men keep the sense of purpose.

Think again of those poor Peruvian mountain people who are being given grain for a noon meal for their hungry children. Far from corrupting them into parasitic dependence, the big gift from Food for Peace has given a new vigor to their ideals. The men of the village are constructing a community building to provide a kitchen and dining room for the children. So strong is their grateful motivation that they declined the offers of power equipment, and are building with their own tools and labor. This they can do for themselves and are proud to do it.

This is the basic interplay of substance and ideal. Each strengthens the other. We can understand both gifts – the gold of Caspar and the frankincense of Melchior.

Balthasar brought myrrh. Amid the prevailing joy of carol and hallelujah, the verse is sombre, ominous.

“Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume breathes a life of gathering gloom; sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, sealed in the stone-cold tomb.”

Myrrh, a precious gum resin, ... used in ancient embalming processes, symbol of the inevitability of death. Does it strike a wrong note? Is this the Christmas theme? Christian theology would assert that is part of the great scheme of salvation. The incarnate God must suffer and die for the sins of men. But even for those of us who have gone forward from ancient theology, there is a distinctive invitation symbolically carried by the bitter perfume of myrrh.

Yes, death comes to us all. Even the ... babe who may live to the oldest age is no less exempt than any of the innumerable sages who have entered this life, rejoiced and mourned, labored and rested and then passed from the scene. But, why, you may ask, bring this into Christmas joy? Simply this, our human life here is limited by time. Some of us are given a more bountiful grant of years and health than others. ... Nevertheless we may rejoice and participate in the happy helpful ways of human living; sing the carols; share the warmth if Christmas joy, for life is worth the living and we believe that death is worth dying.

Sunlight and shadow, joy and grief, life and death .... This is the great antiphony of experience and our happiness is deepened by sensitive awareness to it.

The Christmas invitation is made up of many sounds, sights, smells and activities. Underneath it all is the great release of more light, the great joy that new human life ... and the strange and wonderful compulsion to blend service, song, sympathy, wonder, revelry, in a totality of experience which provokes the ancient prophecy and promise, “peace on earth, good will to men.”

Editor’s note: this sermon was handwritten and in several places (indicated by ellipsis) the handwriting is illegible.

Universalism and the Incarnation

December 17, 1961
Rochester

Christmas is an adventure of faith as well as a many-splendored emotional experience. There is a cultural universality surrounding the mid-Winter festival. The human family has always known a sense of joyful release at the reprieve from lengthening dark as the world turns in its annual pattern [illegible] more light. People rejoiced in this experience ages before the Christians sought to sanctify the Winter Saturnalia by transforming the festival to the holy day of Jesus’ birth.

This reformation has never been wholly completed. The lusty ways of pagan joy still run their feverish course. The great feast, the flowing wine, the bacchanalian party are no less a part of the celebration than Christmas worship and the midnight mass. Too frequently however, the anxious details of package, party, card and hectic re-union get in the way of sufficient consideration of the theology of Christmas. The Christian Church has gathered the abundant mythologies of mid-Winter celebration and re-shaped them to a particular, unique, scheme of salvation: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself,” said Paul.

I would have you think with me about this theological doctrine of the Incarnation. There is little need to remind you that most Universalists believe that Jesus was human, not a deity. If Jesus embodied the divine spirit, the we too may share that spirit. Like you, like I, like all human beings, Jesus shared the experience of creatureliness. Or so most of us would believe.

This positive believe in the wholeness of the human Jesus should not deter us from a searching look at the idea or Incarnation. What was it? In what sense might it have confronted men and women with a spiritual experience that, paradoxically blended mystery and meaning?

The Christian faith conquered the ancient world because of the Incarnation, some historians believe. As has been cited recently, the belief that the supreme God could incarnate himself in human form was widespread in the early centuries following the time of Jesus. There were “Lords many and Gods many.” Caesar himself was deified, as well as the long procession of Egyptian, Asian and Greek dying-rising saviors. Tales of wonder and magic surround their birth, usually.

Because Christianity won over the others and persisted amid the swinging forces of changing times, it is more ingrained in our deep conditionings.

The idea of Incarnation in Christianity is inseparable from the idea of Redemption. Because man was unable to save himself, God assumed human form, came to Earth as a babe to begin three decades of life, uniquely human and divine, redeeming man from sin and death by Christ’s death on the cross and resurrection from the tomb.

This salvation scheme sometimes referred to as Christology, had the beginnings in the theology of Paul. With more mystical emphasis, it is the central theme of the gospel of John and the letters of John. The impact of this theology is indicated by the transforming of the seasonal celebrations of winter, Spring, Summer to the particular and unique Christian year, Christmas, Easter and Pentecost.

To the convinced Christian, the Incarnation of God in Christ was not to be compared to the Lords many and the Gods many of ancient times. The Incarnation of God in Christ was unique, datable. The Incarnation was so radical historically, that all time was to be separated henceforth forever in the great historical divide, the time B.C. and A.D. after the year of our Lord.

More than four hundred years were to elapse before the Christian Church would settle the theological difficulties of the man who was God and the God who was man. Christian orthodoxy demanded that the Incarnation should be real, not mythical or ghostly. The X [Christ] was human flesh, born of human mother. God had become man. Yet as one theologian pointed out, there was a difficult paradox for the “only thing God cannot do is cease to become God.”

Theologically, this was not fixed by official dogma until the council of Chalcedon, a.d. 451, when the Christian bishops gathered from the far-flung parts of the Empire. These men were no longer refugees from the catacombs, but leaders of an established, powerful institution which had experienced centuries of accretion of myth and ritual, centuries of power struggle and the sorting out of hierarchical positions, centuries of debate and accommodation with the other religions of antiquity, and centuries of conflict and amalgamation with the entrenched state religion of the Roman Empire.

The Council of Chalcedon pronounced that Jesus was wholly God and wholly man, two natures, “unconfused and undivided.”

Out of the vessels of ancient myth, vast as the seas, there was distilled this particular Christian idea of Incarnation: To a virgin there was born in Bethlehem the baby Jesus on a natal night which was the veritable hinge of history. The babe in the manger was very God and very man incarnated to save this sin-choked world.

I doubt if many people think seriously of the Incarnation theology at Christmas-time. The practices seem as much in accord with the seasonal origins of light, fire, evergreen, gift, party feast, as with the awful solemnity with which the incarnate God came into this world. Certainly in our land, the 65 million people or so, who have no formal or serious church attachment must place very light theological meaning to the event.

We in the liberal faiths to not accept the Incarnation in any literal or orthodox sense. An unbiased look at the world discloses that the Incarnation is not only not unique, it is not even a biblical idea in its theological complexity. In our world of 1961, there lives a person millions believe to be the Incarnation. The devout Tibetans believe that the young man, the Dalai Lama, now living in exile in India as the incarnation of their God. In Indian religion, Vishnu, in his role as Supreme God, is both Creator and moral guardian of the world. When foes threaten the values Vishnu loves, he incarnates himself so that he may defend the moral order. (See Hastings Enc. R.&E.).

If the Incarnation just does not capture our allegiance in its orthodox Christian theological claim, do we have any intellectual justification for the idea of the Incarnation? I choose the words “intellectual justification” for the reason that whatever our theological convictions, or lack of them, we are going on anyway with the festival ceremonies of Christmas, whether or not they have validity for the mind, because age-old emotions are in command at the season of returning light.

And there is reason for celebrating the idea of incarnation, even when the unique supernaturalism of Christian Incarnation has to be left behind.

We celebrate the wonder of life in its loveliest realization – the new babe in the manger of the poor. The story of the baby Jesus shakes us deeply because his is the universal story of parents who experience the shattering and mysterious compound love, fear, wonder, hope, blended with the fact of pain, the astonishment of human sacrifice and the miracle of human growth. We celebrate the creation of new life. Do you remember Stephen Vincent Benet's poem, “Nightmare for future reference”:

"That was the Second Year of the Third World war
The one between Us and Them....”

The poet goes on with laconic but terrifying (in the framework of a father speaking to his son) forebodings to tell of the hints of disaster:

The lab chief who was no longer permitted
guinea pigs for experiments and the steep slide
of the statistical curve of the birth rate:
“I didn’t ask them,
Not even your mother – she was strange those days --
But, two weeks later, I was back in the lines
And somebody sent me a paper --
Encouragement for the troops and all of that --
All about the fall of Their birth rate on their side.

I guess you know, now. There was still a day when we fought
And the next day, the women knew. I don’t know how they knew,
But they smashed every government in the world
Like a heap of broken china within two days
And we’d stopped firing by then. And we looked at each other.

......

Well, I’ve told you know. They tell you know at
eighteen.
There’s no use to tell before.
Do you understand?
That’s why we have the Ritual of the Earth.
The Day of Sorrow, the other ceremonies.
Oh yes, at first people hated the animals
Because they still bred, but we’ve gotten over that.
Perhaps they can work it better, when it’s their turn.
If it’s their turn – I don’t know. I don’t know at all.
You can call it a virus, of course, if you like that word,
But we haven’t been able to find it. Not yet. No
It isn’t as if it had happened all at once.
There were a few children born in the last six months
Before the end of the war, so there's still some hope.
But they’re almost grown. That’s the trouble... they’re almost grown.
Well, we had a long run. That’s something. At first they thought
There might be a nation somewhere – a savage tribe.
But we were all in it, even the Eskimos.
And we keep the toys in the stores, and the colored books
And people marry and plan and the rest of it.
But you see, there aren’t any children. They aren’t born.”

We know that to define human beginnings as the fertilization of ovum by sperm is to define only, not explain. The emergence of form, breath, blood, the wonder of new birth, the growth of limb, mind, emotion – all these are too wonderful for diagnostic words. At Christmas the carol, candle, crèche and evergreen speak to our hearts and with gladness we know that still children are being born and marvelous is the privilege of protecting that creative loveful gift of new life. The incarnation is still an occasion for renewal of both the ecstatic mystery and sense of gratitude that creative life forces are with us still, “the light that lighteth every man coming into the world.” No particularized theology may restrain that gladness.

Then, consider the incarnation in the aspect discussed by the great church historian Hans Leitzmann (A HISTORY OF THE EARLY CHURCH, vol I, pp. 166-8)

The Roman poet, Virgil had predicted a time when a savior, coming into the world as a divine child, would erase sin and usher in a golden age. The Romans thought Caesar Augustus was that divine incarnation. (Indeed for centuries to follow all Caesars were deified,) The age of Augustus was extolled as one which brought better fortune and lessening misery as Pax Romana brought universal peace. Temples of Peace, dedicated to Rome and Augustus were built in city after city. Says Lietzmann: “A community of feeling passed over the boundaries of the provinces and the differences of race, and created the vitally necessary ideology of the Roman Empire.” So it is today, too, whatever view one may hold of the incarnation theologically. At Christmas, the celebration of the birth of the divine child creates a community of feeling which is all too brief. There are legends of soldiers climbing from trenches and meeting friends in a Christmas battlefield truce. Most personnel men tell me how hard it is to discharge persons at Christmas. We are generous not only with family, but with good causes and needy people. Christmas is an incarnation, briefly, of the dreams of all mankind of a world as it should be, when there will be peace on earth, good-will to all men. On the babe in the manger we have projected the deepest yearnings of love and hope. Who would have it otherwise?

One thing more, asserted as a testimony of faith, not demonstrable or provable. If this proposition could be demonstrated in formidable logic or verifiable experiment, it would not require faith. The Incarnation has this symbolic meaning also – the Creator of the Universe is not alone in the impersonal energy of the atomic structure, not alone in the giant strength that moves the tides and charts the planets’ endless rounds. A God worthy of our worship is found not only in these exhibitions of astounding, mysterious force, but also the Creator is found in the high values and lovely experiences of human relationships. Significantly, there is only [the] NT definition of God, “God is love.” Paul Tillich, “God is not merely a word to represent the infinite power of the world, but the good that is there too.” The divine is identified with the human. William Blake, mystic poet put it this way,

“for mercy has a human heart
And pity a human face
And love the human form divine
And peace the human dress.
For mercy, pity, love and peace
Are man his child and care.”

The ever-new, universal incarnation cherishes a dream: there comes a time when the long night ebbs and more light shines on the babes of the world. When that glow moves silently, transforming shadow to light, then something in our blood, in our bones, cries out that no matter how dismal the prospect for human redemption, now alarming the portents of disaster, how grievous the blows with which we have been struck, there is a spirit of creation abroad in the world which call us to protect the innocent, to warm our homes with light and love, and to look high, reverently, to the eternal heavens, whose mysterious vastness of jeweled order suggests that the power behind all things moves in our hearts also.

--
Euripides

Editor’s note:

The following is attached. The page numbering is contiguous with the prior pages, but the prose appears to be a fragment. In addition, portions of the pages are torn away – indicated by an ellipsis. So it is a fragment of a fragment.

Dec. 12 in our calendar. We say “the days get longer then.” the men who worshiped the sun as his chief deity could say “My God is with me for a longer time each day.” Mere Light: Do not overlook for one moment that the urge to inhabit the beaches, to winter in Florida, to become tanned, to be in the sun and air in summer, is stirred not only consciously but unconsciously from other levels of our being by that age-old response of worship and love for the sun.

Even though our culture is quite sophisticated now, or so we think, how much our thinking is still bound up with “more light.” We speak of the need to bring enlightenment morally; we think in terms of bringing mankind from the darkness of war, disease and poverty in to the light of reason, charity and love.

Do you know the old Arabian legend of two devout followers of the Prophet who made a pilgrimage to Mecca? Abouk journeyed on foot; Selim was mounted on a camel. At nightfall both the pilgrims had reached a spring of water in the desert, where grew a few palm trees. They prepared to spend the ... hter. “It is a long and tedious journey,” ... contrary it is a short and pleasant trip,” countered Selim, “I was cheered by a mirage on the horizon wherein I saw the Holy City and the spires of its mosques.” “There was no mirage to be seen,” angrily declared Abouk, “there were instead legions of venomous ants in the sane that bit and poisoned my flesh.”

“Not a single ant was on the desert,” rejoined Selim.

The two pilgrims quarreled fiercely when a Holy Man, also journeying toward Mecca, came up. He listened to them patiently. “Peace, my brethren,” he said at last, “Let us leave alone those questions until tomorrow night to decide. In the meantime let Selim go on foot and Abouk ride the camel.”

The consented to this change of plans. On the next night it was Abouk who had seen the glorious visions and Selim who had been bitten by the ants.

“My brothers,” said the Holy Man, “We are all going to Mecca whether we walk or ride, but Selim cannot see what Abouk sees unless he stands where Abouk stands.” Abouk’s point of vision was ... gher. He had been lifted above the stings and ... weariness of the desert. He beheld ... and glorious, and did not mind the ants, dust, and heat. Perhaps the mirage was an aid all along the difficult road of swirling sands. But only when they were lifted up could Selim or About see this vision.

The days after Christmas are sure to come. There will be some bitter conflicts to resolve, tragic burdens to bear; news may come in the world that may make the Christmas message of “peace on earth, good-will to men,” seem a mockery. Yet it will have been better that we have seen the vision, it will have been better to hear the carols and bells, smell the evergreen, taste the wassail, known the joy of giving and sharing. “There are single moments in life that are worth the weariness of a score of years.”

Jesus and His Prayers

September 24, 1961
Rochester

There are at least two thought provoking aspects to the prayer life of Jesus: First, that he would be totally out of sympathy with people repeating traditional prayers in his name and assuming that these prayers were authentic religious experiences. Second, there is no doubt that prayer was the vital act of worship that Jesus cultivated and from which there came the marvelous moral courage and abundant spiritual reserves which Jesus possessed.

At first glance, these two propositions may seem contradictory, but I would offer the proposition that not only was the heart of Jesus’ religion a deep prayer experience, but also that he was plainly critical of most of the prayers which were repeated by the group at worship. If this is as I believe then there exists a religious obligation to face up to what prayer should be.

First of all, there are many difficulties in the way of discovering the authentic words and acts of Jesus. The only existing records are the gospels of the New Testament. The gospels were not written before the last three decades of the first century. Not one author had been a personal witness to anything Jesus did or heard one syllable from his lips. The gospels were compiled by men who believed Jesus to have been the Messiah who was momentarily to return in the glory of his second coming. Consequently the gospel writers were not biographers intent on writing an authentic portrait of a person and his times, but rather they were witnesses to a fervid belief that Jesus was the Christ. Therefore, the gospels were not so much historical or biographical, but rather theological. It was important to the early Christians to be able to convince prospective converts that the supernatural Christ could not have been shamefully executed as though he had been a criminal and that his second coming could be immediately expected to redeem all evil times.

Then, too these theological explanations were filtered for centuries through many editors. The oldest copy does not date before 375 a.d. Not only late first century beliefs and expectations are present in the New Testament, but also far later beliefs and explanations have found their imprint or made their revision.

Thus, most scholars will readily admit that there can be no successful effort to capture completely the historical Jesus – Jesus as he really was and the words he really said. But this loss does not mean that it is impossible to know anything about the real Jesus. We can have some confidence that there are nuggets in the gospels, particularly if the captivating reason might seem out of character for a developing church with an increasing body of liturgy and ritual. As Morton Enslin and other scholars have pointed out, if the saying of Jesus is hostile to the accepted practice of a young, growing, organizational church, we can feel some assurance that the real Jesus is speaking. Such an attitude would not be a likely fabrication, but rather might be the original Jesus.

The consideration of Jesus and his prayers present some vivid illustrations of what obviously are additions to the original core and also some fleeing impression of the difficult, but glorious way of Jesus’ personal religious life. Let’s look at some of the contrasts.

Consider that portion of the gospel of Mark which tells of the cursing and withering of the fig tree followed by a brief homily on prayer.

On the way from Bethany, Jesus is hungry. Although it is not the season for fig trees to bear fruit, Jesus curses the fig tree for not providing him with food, “may no one ever eat fruit from you again.” The gospel says that the next morning when the disciples passed by again and the tree was found to be withering away, Jesus said, “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you receive it and you will.” Then a sentence which is incorporated in the Lord’s Prayer is added.

Why question this strange anecdote as being an authentic happening? First of all, it is not true in Jesus’ experience, or yours or mine that if one believes that one receives a favorable answer to prayer, he will. It’s just not so. Then too, the destruction of a fig tree because it did not bear fruit out of season is hardly the act of a good, reasonable person, let alone a redeemer. But, if one was attempting to convince a disbeliever of the magical powers of a supernatural savior, such a legend might be impressive if received thoughtlessly. However, theological bragging is not the equivalent of historical validity.

The more one reads the gospels thoroughly, the more strengthened is the conviction that prayer for Jesus was the height of spiritual experience is not what has generally been taught in the Christian Church.

Perhaps you have noted how many times that for Jesus, prayer was a solitary experience, not a group ceremony. We all have been taught that at Gethsemane, Jesus prayed apart from his sleepy companions. Luke’s gospel (29) tells the story of the Mount of Transfiguration. Again Jesus prays alone while his disciples doze. The references to prayer are surprisingly few and the most intriguing conclusion is that Jesus consistently withdraws to a private place for prayers (Matt. 14/23; Luke 5/16; 9:18)

This is an insight we too frequently neglect. We live group lives, do things as groups – everything from government parleys to business conferences, to labor-management panels, to church buzz-sessions to psychiatric therapeutic groups. With no intention of denigrating the values of group interchange and the achieving of group consensus, attention can be called to Jesus; attitude as one we should not ignore. we are so swallowed up by the busyness of our lives, battered by immediate externals, that we need the experience of solitary reflection. We will benefit by the occasional healthy practice of facing up alone to the larger problems of life.

Call it prayer or what you will, to be alone and honest with ourselves and our God is one of the great disciplines and inspirations of living.

In the account of his solitary prayers, we are catching a glimpse of the real Jesus. This aspect of the prayer life of Jesus should not be forgotten when we consider the most widely used and most misunderstood of all the prayers of the Christian Church – the “Lord’s Prayer.”

Parenthetically, this is always an item for discussion in a Universalist Church. If the prayer is used regularly in the worship service, the question will surely be raised, “Why do we say the Lord’s Prayer?” Those taking this position will make the following case: Although freedom from creed is well-established in our church, most Universalists believe Jesus [was] human. Therefore he is not Lord and God. If, as some of our churches practice, the prayer is named “the prayer of Jesus,” the difficulties remain, because as we shall see, this is not a prayer of Jesus.

When this “Lord’s Prayer” is not used regularly in Universalist worship, then the parallel question is raised, “Why don’t we say it?” The case is made that for years it has been used and nobody has been hurt. Furthermore, that many public schools begin the school day with it, and that it is one of the liturgical and spiritual treasures of any group which had its origin in the historic Christian Church.

Whether or not regular congregational use of the Lord’s Prayer is both consistent with our tradition and desirable for our religious growth should be considered in the context of its origin and development.

The Lord’s Prayer as a part of group worship is not a prayer of Jesus, but a prayer which developed in the Christian Church and had not reached its present form when the gospels were completed. But we need to see what the gospels assert.

Most scholars agree that the basic core of this prayer is found in the first three verses of the 11th chapter of the gospel of Luke, “Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he ceased, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’ And he said to them, ‘When you pray, say: Father, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us; and lead us not into temptation.”

You will note the brief, prose style. It would seem to indicate that John had taught his disciples a certain specific prayer and that Jesus’ disciples, observing him praying apart, asked him for a form prayer that they might use.

But when we move to Matthew’s gospel, an entirely different situation confronts us. The prayer is poetic and is part of the Sermon on the Mount, which scholars agree is a compilation of sayings attributed to Jesus. It was not a sermon delivered at one time. The context is entirely different from that of Luke. Instead of being a prayer taught for group use, it is precisely and specifically the opposite. Jesus is sternly candid in warning his listeners that this is not a public prayer (Matthew 6:5 ff.)

“Beware of practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them; for then you will have no reward when you give alms, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites in the synagogues and in the streets that they may be praised by men. Truly, I say to you they have their reward....

“And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

“And in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this:
Our Father who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread;
and forgive us our debts
As we have also forgiven our debtors,
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.”

If we would follow Matthew, we would not say this prayer publicly at all. If we followed Luke, very little of what is thought of as the Lord’s Prayer would be used. In neither case would we ever use the doxology ending, “for thine is the power and the glory for ever and ever,” for this is in neither version. Almost surely it was a late liturgical doxology added by the Christian Church.

Then, too, many would call attention to Matthew’s version which is unlike Luke’s. Matthew’s gospel says “Pray then like this,” or “after this manner pray,” which would indicate that Jesus was not giving a set of words but a manner of approach. In other words, Jesus might have said, “use my method, but fashion your own prayers.”

People will continue to respond favorably, unfavorably, or neutrally to the group use of the “Lord’s Prayer.” This much seems assured, Jesus would mightily oppose the vain repetition of words. He had nothing but scorn for those who said prayers publicly because it was the thing to do or the acceptable practice to follow.

Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that Jesus was beloved by the poor people and rejects of society. He was hated by those who were rich and powerful and who defended the status quo or Roman occupation. Jesus was crucified, as Morton Enslin says well in his new book, not because he was misunderstood, but because he was understood. Society’s rulers could not abide what he was teaching and could not abide him. Aldous Huxley commended (Devils of Loudun, 767), “the corollary of ‘thy kingdom come’ is ‘our kingdom go.’” So don’t pray “Our Father thy kingdom come,” unless you are conscious that you are praying that our kingdom of war, waste, pride, selfishness, inertia and greed must go. You are praying for drastic, revolutionary change.

Above all, this prayer should not be a badge of conformity for public schools or religious institutions. Jesus was a prophet of God in his own time, believed as did his own age and spoke to his own age. There is much to be learned from Jesus and his prayers, not so much the words for there is no assurance that they were his. But shining throughout the layers of doctrine and liturgy is the purpose of Jesus’ prayers. Jesus prayed for communion with his Father God, to apprehend the conjunction with the great universal source of life and love. In Gethsemane, his agony was great – at first perhaps, he prayed that torture and execution would not strike, “let this cup pass from me, yet not as I will but as Thou will.”

When he had prayed, he received his reward. This was not a reversal of his doom, but a strengthening of his will to continue on the course he believed right.

It has been reported that he said to his sleeping disciples who would not stay awake to watch with him, “watch and pray that you may not be exposed to trial, one’s spirit is eager, but flesh and blood are weak.”

Prayer for Jesus was not only for communion with Father God, or with the reality which is at the heart of everything, but his prayers – note again the solitary nature of the agonizing prayers of hard decision – his prayers were also for the purpose of giving the human spirit command over the fears of the flesh, giving the best part of our nature the upper hand over the temptation to yield to the forces which destroy high values.

The famous preacher, Washington Gladden, once commented, “he who prays only for himself and his immediate family and friends must make his own prayer; the Lord’s prayer will not serve his purpose ... He who thoughtfully takes these words upon his lips takes it at the same time all human wants ....” (told by Robert Luccock, “Daily Meditations,” Christian Herald.)

If we would understand Jesus in his prayers, we must remember that he spoke to his own times and the needs of his times and we cannot be certain of his specific words. But if we would consider this prayer more than a trite convention, we must think of our times, not his, and reach out for that which we hold precious and renew our faithfulness to a world not yet realized, but for which we must acquire the courage and strength so that we may help to make it come true.

Running Into Trouble With God

March 19, 1961
Rochester

God is my subject today. But my object is to trouble you by proposing that uncritical beliefs about God may be shallow enough to wreck the vessel of faith. Furthermore, if your mind moves with your heart, you may discover a new horizon of meaning, for when the little gods are cast away, then, one day, the vision of the one god who is overall and through all and in you all may come to you.

A teacher of religion who is also a psychiatrist, Dr. Earl A. Loomis put it this way (p. 14), “There are three categories of God we must deal with. The first is God as he really is – and this we can’t ever know. The second is the idea of God as he is taught in our churches, the true, pure, gentle, lovely, benevolent, loving God. But there is a third category of God and here’s where we run into trouble. At some point in his life an individual begins to develop a private notion of God.

Consider God as a “private notion” and why it gets us in trouble.

Some years ago in a place far from here, a woman was quite indignant with me when I said that it was difficult for me to imagine God as a person – that while “heavenly father” could convey the image of creator, it was unsatisfactory for me to describe God. This good woman informed me vehemently, “If I didn’t have absolute faith that God was exactly like my dear dead father, why, life would not be worth living.”

This is the private notion of God and it can run into trouble. Human authority, particularly when speaking with too much authority, so that fears envelop the child or wild wishes glorify the parent or restrained hostilities create guilt feelings – all these emotional difficulties can place one’s parent on the throne of God.

There are other kinds of difficulties which run into trouble on this score. Sometimes the person who has a strong, but expressed wish for power over other people, will create for himself a vision of an all-powerful God whose power over people cannot be denied. Thus the god who is worshiped is not the eternal presence of love and creation but the distorted image of one’s power-hungry self.

Even though the maturing effects of a reasonable religion may dilute the self-image which is worshiped as God, these will continue to be the vibration of our self-image distorting the vision of God we seek to worship.

The great mystics of all religions have always claimed that the vision of ultimate reality comes only when our self has been forgotten and thus unencumbered by our [illegible] wishes and secret fears, we are able to contemplate the purity, [illegible], beauty and goodness of all that is.

But the mystic is rare among people and most of us have to contend with the difficulty that the one creating God of absolute goodness may be obscured by a number of lesser trivial gods of our anxieties and greeds. We run into trouble with God because we hold two faiths. One of them official, when we assent to official statements about the historic god of faith. The other faith, privately held, may be polytheistic, worshiping many gods.

A sociologist from another land though that the real god of the American people was the automobile; another distinguished scholar disagreed, saying that the god of middle-class America was the baby; other articles have been written to demonstrate the various gods we tend to worship – the glamorous movie star who is the sex-goddess; the almighty dollar; the god of material success; the god of social standing. Who can look long at the political hurley-burley and not be persuaded that there are many who have deposited all effort and hope on the altar of the god of political power. We have many depositories for our faith and worship.

In the current issue of the Universalist Leader there is a paragraph by Maude Royden about Shinto worship. “In the temples of Shintoism there are no images of gods. High up on the wall, but tilted so the worshiper sees himself reflected in it, there is a looking glass. A Shinto priest explained this by saying that no believer can see more of the godhead than is already in his heart; the mirror in which he sees only himself reminds him of this.”

This Shinto symbol emphasizes the difficulty we have with our personal version of God. True it is, that the believer can really experience God only in himself. But the experience is laborious to one who seeks God, for always our own self is reflected in the mirror of inwardness. We run into trouble unless we remain aware of this inescapable confusion between the self we admire and the true God we seek.

The poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson, once said, “the world is not a prison house but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell ’God’ with the wrong blocks.”

Because the self does get in the way when we try to see God, many persons ignore God except as he may be taught by a religious faith.

The limits of personal freedom are defined by a church which pronounces on matters of faith and morals, or on a church which requires creedal subscription or particular testimony of faith.

Dr. Loomis (THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE, p. 44) tells the story of the little girl observed by a neighbor. Pushing her doll carriage, she said “hello” as she walked by. Not long afterward she walked by again. Curiosity aroused, the neighbor asked, “What are you doing?”

“I’m running away,” the little girl said.

“But,” the man said, “you just seem to be going around the block, around and around and around.”

“Yes, I know,” the little girl answered, “I’m not allowed to cross the street.”

Not only does one not get far when severely limited by the church in what he believes God to be, but also one must recognize how much ideas of God have changed in the history of religious faiths.

Our own Judeo-Christian tradition is replete with these confusing changes. In the law codes of Deuteronomy we read (24/16) that God commanded Moses, “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers....” In II Samuel (21), however, we read that God had caused the crops to fail and that he was appeased and restored the land only when the descendants of Saul were hanged for his sins.

This is not a contradiction in a divine, unerring book, for we know that this is one instance among many where recognition of historical realities explains the difference. The story in II Samuel is a much older historical strain than the Deuteronomic law code of the 6th century B.C. A more primitive custom of revenge prevailed. The Deuteronomic code reflects a later time and more enlightened ways.

The point is that we run into trouble with God if we believe that he changed his mid about punishing children for the sins of their fathers. The idea of God had become transformed and people attached different moral qualities to him. As the moral standards of the people change, the character of their god alters and reflects the development of their social laws.

Take another instance: (Genesis 32/30) After Jacob’s famous wrestling match by the stream of Jabbok, that patriarch says, “I have seen God face to face and my life is preserved.” But when you turn to the 18th verse of the first chapter of the gospel of John you read “No man hath seen God at any time.” There is no need for laborious and awkward theological devices to reconcile the contradiction. An ancient, [illegible] story is not likely to agree with the elaborate theology of the Hellenized gospel of John, particularly when they are separated in time by considerably more than a thousand years. A different viewpoint about the nature of god should not surprise anyone. It would be ridiculous to argue that God had changed his mind as to whether he had been seen face to face at the river ford of Peniel.

In his book GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE, Harry Emerson Fosdick has a particularly fine chapter on the “Idea of God and how people’s beliefs about God changed. “

“Beginning with a story god or on a desert mountain, it ends with men saying ’God is spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and truth...

“Beginning with a god whose highest social vision was a tribal victory, it ends with the God whose worshipers pray for a world-wide kingdom of righteousness and peace....”

We run into trouble if we fail to acknowledge that the idea of God changes with people’s beliefs about the ways they want to live. When monarchs ruled their kingdoms, God was regarded a mighty king. As monarchs disappeared when their day had past, so the idea of God changed and people eagerly used Jesus’ concept of Heavenly Father.... As the masculine-dominated family beings to evaporate under the influence of society’s changing place for the status and authority of women, so God is referred to as less and less as the universal male parent. This is more obvious in the growing exaltation given to Mary by the Catholic Church, but there are many other indications as well.

Looked at from the standpoint of the multitude of ideas of God’s nature and power, held in different places in times, we cannot escape the judgment that God is a word-symbol which articulates the hopes and aspirations and prohibitions of a social group.

There is another sobering aspect to the idea of God illustrated by a story told of the famous surgeon, Sir William Asler. He was the honored guest at a London hospital and during the tour of inspection noted the abbreviation system on the patients’ charts. “SF for scarlet fever, TB for tuberculosis, D for diphtheria, and so on. All the illnesses seemed pretty well under control except one indicated by the symbol GOK.

“’I observe,’ said the famous doctor, ’that you have a sweeping epidemic of GOK on your hands. This is a symbol not in common use in American medical circles, just what is GOK?’

“’Oh,’ said one of the doctors, ’when WE can’t diagnose, God Only Knows.’”

As man’s diagnoses have become more informed and accurate, GOK appears less and less – once God was thought to be the thunderstorm and the lightning bolt, his hand touched the avalanche and stirred for the mighty water. Now men know more about these natural forces and do not see God directly in their force.

Does this mean that God is a symbol of our ignorance? That as knowledge grows his kingdom diminishes. Particularly, if we dispel all our scientific ignorance, will we then have no place or need for God?

To think of God as a symbol or a myth is not to denigrate the idea. God, as a symbol, is the way man ventures a grand comprehension of his hope for a high destiny and his commitment to more noble ways of living.

Myths have been defined as “the instruments by which we continually struggle to make our experience intelligible to ourselves. A myth is a large controlling image that gives “philosophic meaning to the facts of ordinary life. Without such images, experience is chaotic, fragmentary.... Myths perform the historical function of religion – they unify experience in a way that is satisfactory to the whole culture and the whole personality.” (MYTHS AND MYTHMAKING, Henry Murray, p. 355).

I was tempted to end the sermon at this point. I said I wanted to trouble you by pointing out the self-images that are reflected in personal ideas of God; attention has been called to a few of the attendant varieties of ways that God is a symbolic myth of central ideas and social controls of cultures.

Of course it is beyond the capacity of human experience, to know God as he really is. Some of you may think me either naïve or sentimental to affirm that one should not halt the search for God because people individually create God in their image or nationally use God as a symbolic premise to secure obedience to society. Our age has become analytical, skeptical of all we cannot see, critical of everything we cannot shape into a material artifact or a balanced equation.

Although we cannot know God as he really is, there are yearnings which may grasp realities not easily subjugated to logical propositions or verifiable experiment. The priestly writer of 1st Chronicles (16/26) might have been thinking along these lines when he notes, “for all the gods of the people are idols, but the Lord made the heavens.”

There is an anecdote printed in the SRL (12/10/60) which is helpful. The reporter’s little nephew said he was going outside to play with God.

“How do you play ball with God?”

“Oh, it’s easy,” the boy replied, “I just throw the ball up and God throws it down to me.”

The little boy knew that there is order and law in the universe. No matter what word symbol we use for ball or God, toss it up, it will come down. There is organized principle in this universe and the marvelous discoveries we make seem to confirm rather than deny that though we ever see through a glass darkly, that shadowed image stirs our hearts to deep ponderings about eternity and our place in a vast scheme of things.

Of course many profound scientists and philosophers see no reason for supposing that a creator god with purpose started it all. Many believe life an accidental alignment of the completely random behavior of atomic particles or amino acids or something. There is no proof to refute that belief.

Some of us, however, obey our hearts and take the leap of faith that behind all the confused experiences of our brief living, there is organized purpose for which our word “intelligent” would be completely inadequate. Or as the persuasive philosopher who wrote the letter to the Hebrews said, (11/3) “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God.”

This conscious faith does not com to most of us by another’s arguments. I do not believe that a faith in God deep enough to engulf in sensitivity all the vast troubles and fine hopes of this world comes easily with an unquestioned acceptance of routine beliefs. A faith for troubled time sand hopeful hearts comes with the experience of examining our self-images and saying”God is not that”; of looking critically at our national idols and saying, “God is none of these.” Our troubled lines sometimes achieve the blessing of deep faith by the authentic experiences of some aspects of the Creator. In the breathtaking experiences of the beauties of a mountain lake; or the shaking moments when thunderous surf crashes on ancient rock; in the times of higher human communication when persons demonstrate sacrificial [illegible] by their gifts of themselves to great cause; in the sense of presence that exists when one sits with a person whose life is ebbing fast and with eyes dim, but not fearful, looks on the past, present and future; when life begins – on these experiences one is beyond the expression of words but not thereby short off from the search for the presence of God.

Do you know the story of the rich man who wanted to collect jade (Earl Loomis – THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE, p. 59)? Although rich the man did not relish being cheated, “so he determined to seek instruction in jade grading from the most famous jade connoisseur in the world. Through a friend he was introduced to an expert on jade, and learned that the course consisted of twelve lessons and would cost a thousand dollars.

“That’s all right,” he said, “How do the lessons go?”

“You come here every week.” (p. 58 ff.)

Life is something like that. In our search for the deep things of most meaning, we grow in wisdom and understanding by distinguishing the false by the true and the true by the false. The lessons may be costly and indirect, too. But like Wordsworth in those “Lines Composed Above Tinturn Abbey,” we can persist in

“that serene and blessed mood,
In which the health of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood,
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of Joy,
We see into the life of things.”

APPENDED

Running Into Trouble With God

GOD AND FREUD, Leonard Gross, David McKay Company, Inc. NY, 1959
p. 38-39

“It was his study of psychiatry that finally brought Dr. Earl A. Loomis, M.D., to an understanding of the extreme variations in his religious life. He found out that, like many other people, he had not been taught an adequate conception of God.

“there are three categories of God we must deal with,” he explains now. “The first is God as he really is – and this we can’t ever know. The second is the ideal of God as taught in our churches, the true, pure, gentle, benevolent, loving God. The purest rendering of the religious message gives you this God.

“But there is a third category of God, and here’s where we run into trouble. At some point in his life an individual begins to develop a private notion of God. God is supreme; his father is supreme; therefore God must be like his father, only more so. If the father is rough, unkind, unpleasant, prohibitory then what is God if not all these things?

“God thus becomes an authority; eat this, do that, don’t don’t don’t. God is like the ancient Hebrew God. Yahveh is a jealous God to be feared, a God to whom we must make sacrifice.

"If love of God means destruction of life, then we’re in love with a Moloch."

His reference was to the Canaanite idol to whom children were sacrificed as burnt offerings in biblical times. While such sacrifices are unknown today, Dr. Loomis contends there are uses to which god is put by unenlightened individuals that are virtually as dangerous.
-----
Edwin Arlington Robinson quoted by Charles Milligan in the Xn Register, “The world is not a prison house but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell ’God’ with the wrong blocks.”

Measuring the Trivial and the Vital Religious Dimensions

February 5, 1961
Rochester

I would talk with you today about the distinction between the trivialities and the essentials of religion. My objective is to tempt you to schedule a program of research in the laboratory of your own totality of self – mind, emotions, hopes and satisfactions. To that end I want to tell an old Hindu fable, review something of the amazing statistics of religious life in America, speak of the strains that may have been a cause of religious prosperity and attempt to frame a statement of what is vital in religion.

“A tigress was attacking a herd of goats,” an old Indian fable goes, “when she gave birth to a cub and died. The cub grew up among the goats, so that all it ever knew were goat ways. It ate grass like a goat and it bleated like a goat. And one day when it was grown and a big tiger came to attack the herd, the grass-eating tiger was terrified. When the goats bleated in terror and ran away so did the grass-eating tiger. But the other tiger, dumbfounded to see such a strange fellow creature, bounded after it and caught it. While the grass-eating tiger set up a fearful bleating, and tried unsuccessfully to but its head against its captor, the other tiger dragged it to a pool and made it stare at its reflection in the water. ’See!’ the big tiger commanded, ’You are just like I.’ Then after a short hunt, it gave the grass-eating tiger some meat to eat. And while the grass-eating tiger chewed it with relish, marveling that it ever could have been contented with grass the other tiger exclaimed softly, ’Ah, now you begin to see there is no difference between us. Come – follow me in the life to which you belong!’

“So,” the sages of India say, “you should attend only to those who know who you are and what your true nature is. Be not misled into believing yourself a goat when you are truly a tiger.” (JOURNEYS ON THE RAZOR-EDGED PATH, Simons Roof, Crowell, 1959, p. 7/8).

The tiger found the life to which he belonged. But for persons, the appeasement of immediate hungers and instinctual satisfactions, which are enough for the tiger, are not enough. We are seeking what we call spiritual values and rewards. Recent American religious patterns portray designs which demonstrate that Americans are seeking a religious life to which they can belong and in which they can find satisfactory meaning.

[Inserted from marginal note: When religion participates in moral fraud it is worse than trivial.] Any candid new form of religion on the American scene will cause mixed emotions. Consider a little news item that appeared in a metropolitan newspaper not long ago (Cleveland Plain Dealer, Sept. 5). “A Lexington, KY minister announced today that he would name five persons in his Sunday night sermon he would like to see go to hell.”

“The Reverend E. Ray Jones of Gardenside Christian Church said ’I will mention the names of five living, active members I would like to see go to hell. I’ll probably have some of them mad at me before I’m through.’”

But religion on the American scene is more impressive than this kind of headline hunting. Religion has been accorded a recognition of status, for in the Feb. 1961 issue of FORTUNE, the expensive, expansive slick paper eulogy of business, science and recreation, the noted writer Russell Kirk writes on Protestantism in modern America – and whether it can hold its own. I recommend the article in its fullness to you, but let me also review a few of the author’s facts and conclusions.

There is visible testimony to the success, prestige and affluence of Protestantism in America. 35% of all Americans belong to Protestant Churches (in 1850, only 12% belonged). The Protestant Churches may receive as much as three billion dollars in 1961. The various denominations have a greater or lesser degree of control over more than five hundred colleges and universities. In the post-war period, particularly Protestant churches have boomed.

The growing suburbs have been the source of thousands of new churches, and Sunday schools have recorded fantastic increases in enrollment with corresponding pressure to construct new facilities.

Religion has become an institution with which America by and large considers affiliation necessary.

Ancient and bitter differences in doctrine have been smoothed out and there is a strong trend toward wider church union. This tendency is demonstrated both by denominational merger and the more audacious dreams of one big Church of Christ for all the major Protestant denominations.

However conservative Russell Kirk sounds a number of warning notes. Behind the impressive facades of concrete, brick and steel may reside a religiosity masked more by shallow sentimentality than serious theology; piety may be a role to be played on certain show occasions. The urge to union may indicate a bland imperviousness to real issues than a strong will to unite in the beauty of holiness. Kirk quotes a co-ed, “Yes, I believe in God, but I’m not nuts about him.”

There is another story making the rounds which indicates something of the trivial. The Pulpit Committee of the new church – hundreds of members, bursting Sunday school, bustling organization – is interviewing a candidate. The Chairman speaks to the prospective minister who has visions of lush living dancing in his head, “Now we don’t care what you talk about so long as you don’t preach about politics or religion.”

What’s it all about? Are the signs of life – buildings, budgets, bustlings – pointing like the fable of the tiger to the life to which we belong? Or, is American religious prosperity merely the sure index that religion has been diluted to an inoffensive status symbol of an acquisitive, competitive culture which would not and could not tolerate the condemnatory judgments of a truly prophetic religion? Are the American churches, in the words of liberal theologian James Luther Adams, guilty of “organized irrelevance?”

Questions such as these can only be between ambiguity and contradiction unless we take a look at the needs which have led to the resurgence of religion in America – a spurt which has characterized all of the main branches – Jewish and Roman Catholic as well as Protestant.

All periods of history have borne the pain of tension and uncertainty – but the 20th century has experienced far greater anxiety. Social change has moved at a more rapid pace than any period of history. In about fifty years we have changed from a horse and rail culture to 10 mile-a-minute jets. Families no longer live close but are scattered to far places. Changes have been innumerable and drastic. Change always is a disturbing experience and this unavoidable dynamism intensifies our anxieties and increases our yearning for that which will abide beyond all change. Religion has been a symbol of certainty amid change.

This same period of disrupting social change has been deeply scarred by two world wars whose effect will be enduring.

The social crisis of the conflict of interest – we want peace and we dislike to yield an iota of national privilege or possession – stirs us. We have not yet really achieved the balance between a world order of law and the particular interests of individual nations. Until we do, there will be continuing political anxiety and hostility.

This is of course complicated by the imminent threat of destruction by nuclear fission, disease broth or silent, odorless, paralyzing nerve gas. Ham the chimpanzee has pushed buttons in space and returned. But when human astronauts plunge into space, our anxiety will increase because of the utter destruction that awaits the pushing of certain buttons by astronauts. With no secrets in science, we know that every threat is matched with counter-threat and that to call a bluff may call down unspeakable havoc from stations in space.

Strain sits with us at our desks and agitates our nerves in time of decision. We don’t want to face the real responsibilities of citizens, yet it is quite clear that irresponsible leaders can do more damage than plundering a treasury – they can blunder into mistakes which cannot be redeemed.

Under this strident sense of strain, people have turned to religion seeking solace and the strength to live in anxious times. The mass, the communion, the sabbath – the ceremonies of life, growth, and death offer promise, surety, and speak of the worth of life.

These are our times and certainly if religion can be either trivial or vital, it becomes more and more imperative to devote ourselves to the vital and let the trivial lapse. But, nothing could be more deceiving than to assume that all virtue and promise lies with our particular approach. We will not separate the trivial from the vital by comparing the RC mass with Universalist symbolic communion. We will not identify permanent truth and transient error by placing Episcopal liturgy and evangelical testimonies on a rating scale. We will fail to find the secret of abundant faith merely by measuring the deficiencies of others against the virtues we allege for ourselves. What is vital in religion calls for more basic interpretation than the righteousness asserted by any one group, for such claim may have more than a little vein of self-righteousness. These times are both too somber and too promising.

Somewhere I clipped this quotation from children’s writing (Manas quoting NY publication called BIRTH), “Why were the saints saints? Because they were cheerful when it was difficult to be cheerful, and patient when it was difficult to be patient, died because they pushed on when they wanted to stand still and keep silent when they wanted to talk and were agreeable when they wanted to be disagreeable. That was all. it was quite simple and always will be.”

Saints were never the sole possession of any religion. There have been saints, too, who disavowed all usual ways of faith. Similarly there is both triviality and vitality in all ways of worshiping. There are good and bad adherents of all religions.

Think again of the words of Jesus from Matthew, “Go in by the narrow gate. For the wide gate has a broad road which leads to disaster, and there are many people going that way. The narrow gate and the hard road lead out into life, and only a few are finding it.”

To me, this scripture suggests two enduring religious vitalities. First, if religion is to be vital it must call forth the best of our potentialities, the positive part of our strength. This is a narrow gate, for it sets requirements beyond the usual. We can be respectable communicants of our faith and still resist the expression of our nobler impulses. In moments when we stand on a mount of vision we know full well that the life to which we belong demands more of our best selves. Speaking of the strait [sic?] gate, historian William Alva Gifford said, “the way is very strait and narrow. It leads towards love for one’s enemies, prayers for the persecuted, a preference for giving before receiving.” (STORY OF THE FAITH).

Consider the tragic but momentous life of Dr. Dooley. His life was brief and his suffering great. Certainly he shared a large portion of the misery that can be the human lot. Yet also consider the splendor of the good he did, the sufferings he eased and the lives he saved. Himself he could not save but the vitality of his life-spirit, his religion, moved him to exhibit the best he was; he lined up to the best he knew and it was a high standard indeed. It was a strait gate for Dr. Dooley for it called for his best in what he believed and in performing the action which was a consequence of his belief.

The second vitality of which I would speak is a hard road because it calls us to find some supreme loyalty, inclusive enough to include the good and evil of experience. This demands thought; this requires that we confront not only the joys, but the terrible mysteries of life in the search for that which is supreme and to which we confidently give our loyalty. Men have always called this the search for the presence of God or sometimes the quest for the good life, or the establishment of the Kingdom of God.

This vitality may be called spiritual, for one is deceived when one points to this or that and says “Lo, it is here; lo, it is there.”

Arthur E. Morgan, one time administrator of the TVA, educator and valiant advocate of community service, speaks of the powers of human thought and energy as a powerplant. We need to re-examine obsolete theologies with discrimination of thought and historical accuracy, fortified by our emotional drive, but the power “must be directed by the rudder of critical intelligence.” Human power directed by a rudder is vital to honest inspiring religion.

We have given to us a sense of strain in these times wherein the old faults of enmity, selfishness, greed are confronted with unthinkable weapons for their indulgence. The ways of religion are diverse, the new buildings and programs, the growing congregations and activated groups can be either trivial or momentous. The difference lies in the will to abide a faith which calls for the best that is in you; and in the persistent pursuit of a supreme loyalty – a Creator – and creative force – to which (or to whom) you can entrust your hopes and in the assurance of which you can overpower your fears of life and death. To such purpose and in such strength we may abide and in all our turning asides to lesser things, we may remember that we are ever called back to the best. We, too, can find the life to which we belong.

The Newness of Faith

January 1, 1961
Rochester

What’s new about faith? Perhaps some of you wore funny hats and blended your voices in “Auld Lang Syne” a few hours ago to mark the end of 1960 and the beginning of 1961. People paused to extend a a Happy New Year greeting, but the wheels of time maintained their ceaseless circling. The old became the new without rest and without haste.

Sometimes faith seems to be a dramatic and climactic event. John Wesley, founder of the great Methodist Church felt his heart grow warm as he read Luther’s Commentary on Romans – and from that moment on John Wesley was, seemingly, a new person. Other well-known and unknown persons experienced a conversion which begat a new faith as suddenly and shockingly as Paul’s vivid experience on the Damascus Road. In the old Greek myth, Athena springs full born from the head of Zeus. Athena was the goddess of wisdom, but notwithstanding the old myth, wisdom does not spring forth in sudden fullness, but requires seasoning and aging, even as 1961 could not be registered until 1960 had run out its time.

Or consider the newness of faith proclaimed in the strange old New Testament book of Revelation. The author lived in the late years of a period when the Romans were persecuting the Christians. The unknown author was captured by an overpowering feeling that the had a message for times of great trouble. His striking images and puzzling sayings were written for the understanding [of listeners in] his own time and have little relevance for ours. But in the 21st chapter, he indicates that the triumph of a faith was to come suddenly and all the old ways and ancient evils would be overturned in the twinkling of an age. “The I saw a new heaven, and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more....”

But the heavens are older than our capacity to understand and the earth is ancient. The new heaven and earth predicted by the apocalyptisist in Revelation has not arrived. In spite of the continuing prophecies and warnings of modern-day fundamentalists, we believe that this is not the way of our universe. Our universe is not one of whim, even the whim of a deity, but a cosmos of law.

What then is the “newness of faith”? I have begun a new ministry to you. You have commenced a new relationship of people to pastor. Mutually we have high hopes and great expectations. Most certainly we can wish each other a happy and productive new year. But, you know and I know that not all is new. If we were inclined to be naïve in our optimism, we should be tempered by remembrance of things past and know that no pastor and no people are perfect and our need for constantly connected networks of communication and understanding is as great as it always has been. When we are downcast by reversals or obstacles we should be cheered by achievement under difficulty in other times – in Charles Dickens’ words the worst of times can be the best of times.

One more clue to the newness of faith: when we take notice of someone who successfully resists being taken in, one way or another, we say, “he wasn’t born yesterday.” In the vernacular, “born yesterday” indicates gullibility and lack of wisdom in the ways of the world.

We face a great adventure in churchmanship and in the molding of a Universalist faith to serve our time and influence in some degree the ideas and customs of man. But we cannot say with John of Revelation, “Behold, I make all things new,” for the disclosure of our power, the restoration of our faith and the assurance that the enterprise and our efforts are worthwhile all grow from what has been achieved in times past and is our goodly heritage. Isaiah had words to fit a time for beginning again, (51-1 ff)

“Hearken to me, you know pursue deliverance,
you who seek the Lord;
look to the rock from which you were hewn,
and to the quarry from which you were digged”

The goodly heritage of Universalism has power and is sorely needed in our world. He who has eyes to see or ears to hear knows how the world is divided and tense from the Congo to the Caribbean The world has become a neighborhood geographically and it has not yet become a brotherhood morally. The power of Universalism will be disclosed when we weary not in our affirmation that all mankind is one family, generated by a universal Creator.

When we look to the rock from which we were hewn and to the quarry from which we were digged, we become aware that the power of the Universalist faith has always been this confidence in the worth of all human beings and faith in the essential goodness of all life.

We are going to stop apologizing for our small congregation by making it larger in number and wider in influence. People will respond to the magnetic power of confidence, reason and hope if we will but persist in making it known that we have a faith broad and deep that we will share.

You may be a bit skeptical that liberal religion has any power, outnumbered as we are in mammoth proportion or that we can exert reconciling influence in the world. To be sure, evidence is hard to come by to demonstrate that a faith both broad and deep, has had a good effect. But I am reminded of the argument between the sales manager and the advertising director. “I defy you,” said the sales manager, “to show me one order that advertising ever put on our books.” “I will,” answered the advertising man, “if you show me a single load of hay that the sun ever put in a barn.”

The newness of faith can disclose power two ways, achievement on our books and hay in the barn – no matter whose hay or whose barn. If we neglect either of these legitimate aspects of the work of the Church, we will fail to have the faith for our time, which was the pride and [responsibility] of those who preceded us.

If we neglect to put sales on the books – that is neglecting to increase the stated membership, failing to maintain a modern program of religious education, overlook the need to lift the level of giving, falling short of support for the continental program of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and in manifold other ways not carrying out the responsibilities of Churchmanship, then our power is short-circuited.

But also, if we fail to be seen, without which there would be no hay to be cut and dried, we will also be cutting off the power which should be ours. That is to say, as Universalists we need to support causes in community and world which support a growing understanding among the peoples of the world, which add to the consciousness that the epople of the world have the choice of life and death in their hands, which create a stronger consciousness of human need and a wiser appraisal of the nature and scope of cooperation.

Therefore if our ancient faith is to put on the newness which makes it valid for the sixth decade of the twentieth century, it must be relevant, not repetitious of outmoded answers to outdated problems.

When I consider this matter of relevance I am reminded of a story, both absurd and tragic, told by Bruce Cotton in his moving history of the Civil War, THIS HALLOWED GROUND (p. 301). General Burnside was hemmed in at Knoxville and could not be relieved until the Confederate army besieging the city was defeated. General Burnside had to reduce the daily food allowance to a small issue of salt pork and bread. Then, as Cotton tells the story, the Union forces won the [illegible]. “Before long full railroad connections with Chattanooga were restored, which meant that plenty of food and clothing could come in. Half of the army came gaily down to the station to greet the first train – a ten car freight train which when the doors were opened [it] turned out by some triumph of military miscalculation to be loaded with nothing but horseshoes.” To hungry men, such a train-load just wasn’t relevant.

Jesus was speaking of the need for relevance in religion in that part of the Sermon on the Mount where he asks, “What man of you if his son asks him for a loaf will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?”

The restoration of newness and strength of our faith depends on relevance, too. The stories of the heroes of our faith are stirring. Their deeds feed our pride in the past. John Murray, Hosea, Ballou, Clara Barton, Horace Greeley and many others represent lines of great religious significance. We will not forget them. But as we are particularly sensitive on January 1, time neither halts nor turns back and the repetition of time past would be but antiquarian incongruity.

We will call people to our cause by the kind of people we are and the contemporary issues to which we give our attention.

Henry Nelson Wieman [?] in his book THE SOURCE OF HUMAN GOOD discusses progress in history and suggests ways of measuring it. First, “widening the upper levels of society to include more people.” Second, “increasing diversity of intercommunicating individuals and groups.” Third, “each apprehending more of the meaning which others communicate.” Fourth, “each integrating more of this communicated meaning into his own life and personality.”

If I correctly understand the learned philosopher he is saying that progress is measured in including more people in the fortunate areas of social life and understanding more about the motives and hopes of others and being understood by them. As more meaning becomes cooperatively shared, then mankind progresses.

To such understanding of people, the problems that beset them and the rights they claim is where religion must base its modern relevance. The past is guide and the figure an ideal. The present can share ancient wisdom and dream the great dreams, but religion must be workable in the here and now. Any restoration of our faith must not neglect this for the past is gone and the future is not yet.

On this New Year’s Day, let me say this too. Any man or woman who has persisted in his work for the Church has known times of disillusion. Perhaps a great idea received no support or the necessary everyday chores of maintaining a church institution was left by default to a faithful few. People many times are too easily offended or callous to the crucial needs that arise again and again over the years. You could add to the list of difficulties and frustrations. In spite of all this, the cause of the Universalist Church is worthwhile and merits your continuing loyalty and patience. Jimmy Durante, the famous entertainer, wrote about some of the deeply moving experiences of his career in show business and in his words how you “can’t help meeting the cream of the crop – the nice folks.” He told of visiting a veteran’s hospital on Staten Island. As he went on with his inimitable act he saw two boys in the fifth row who had only one arm each. Durante wrote “when I come out with a joke, they applaud by beating their one hand against the other fella’s palm. This makes up nice folks and this I never forget.”

Church business is something like that and the things you never forget make it worthwhile. It always has been even when things went wrong. It is of the newness of faith to sense this sense of worth and vitality behind every passing scene and underlying every service of worship. We share service, fellowship and worship and find it good.

In his story of the great mountains of the world, Edward Lane (STORY OF MOUNTAINS, p. 39) told the story of Michael Croz, the great climber who died in a fall from the Matterhorn. Of him it was said, “it was only when he got above the range of ordinary mortals and was required to employ his magnificent strength and to draw upon his unsurpassed knowledge of ice and snow that he could be said to be really and truly happy.”

So it is with high religion – it makes demands on our strength and knowledge when we encounter it in its high ranges, but in its service we strengthen our character, our usefulness and yes, an an unsought consequence add to the sum of our happiness.

The old faith can take on an newness in the disclosure of the power of a religion of good-will, restored by its relevance to and by its enduring principle lending us assurance that action performed in its service are worthwhile.

Appended (apparently a benediction or prayer):

Once again the toll of bells, the lilt of gaiety and the somber still of holiday excesses remind us of the march of time.

When we look backward, may it be with acceptance of the events which cannot be reconstructed or changed; may it be with gladness as we review the joys and privilege which have been ours, even though the passing hours marked difficulty and sorrow as well as happiness; may we appraise ourselves without arrogance or excess guilt, acquiring wisdom from the good and bad events which have struck upon our lives; may we remember life’s glowing hours and not reject the spiritual experience of somberness and difficulty.

When we look forward may it be with hope and gladness. All that is past gathers in as we confront the mystery of hours not yet ticked off. Give strength to meet courageously whatever blows and suffering may await us in the unknown future. Give us zest to confront the joys and happiness which will come to us if we live with inner honesty and seek the fellowship of others and the ordinary routines of living in which the strength for the extraordinary is molded and [illegible]

May the year ahead be happy, useful and creative.

The Strengthening Agreement

November 20, 1960
Akron

This sermon celebrates our American Thanksgiving by reviewing some of the principles and deeds of the Pilgrim Fathers, tendering particular notice and honor toward that document which was their strengthening agreement – The Mayflower Compact.

Adjoining historic Burial Hill, at the head of Town Square in Plymouth, Massachusetts is an Italian Renaissance style church which houses the oldest, continuous church congregation in America. Since the Pilgrims landed from the Mayflower, there has been an unbroken record of parish affairs and a continuous ministry. The church building itself is the fourth in the series of buildings that have been constructed by this continuing congregation.

When you enter the church, you will observe three famous stained glass windows in the channel. The left window portrays a soldier, seated; by his left hand his sword rests in its sheath; his right hand likes on an open book on his knee.

This is the window if civil liberty. The soldier prefers democratic procedures, symbolized by his seated posture, the sheathed sword and the open book. Discussion and intelligence should be the mainstays of the social process. One has the right to speak, to gather peaceably, to have trial by jury, to elect by secret ballot, to gather in political convention without fear, to write an editorial conveying one’s convictions, even though that expression might be unpopular or radical. All these principles which have been grown under both support and struggle in America are symbolized by that soldier whose strength is ready to be used.

The right window depicts a minister holding a scroll of the law, with his arm on the scriptures, indicating our religious heritage. When the Pilgrims held that first American Thanksgiving feast, the autumn after that first dreadful year, they were not originating a holiday. The Indians who gathered with them also had a long history of celebrating harvest home. The Pilgrims found scriptural authority for harvest festival in the ancient Hebrew book of Leviticus (23 33/38). All peoples everywhere have been deeply moved always by the mystery of the harvest and the wonder of growing things which nourish the life of man. The ingathering festival, when thanks are offered to the creator for harvest abundance, is among the universal ceremonies and feelings of the human family.

In the center of this triumvirate of stained glass masterpieces is the Window of the Compact. The figure of civil liberty and the figure of religious celebration flank the central window which shows the Pilgrims gathering in the cabin of the Mayflower to sign the document known as the Mayflower Compact.

Because we live in an age of advertising superlatives when the “colossal” is merely mediocre and the average is described as super-colossal on a wide screen, yet, the language of the Compact may seem somewhat restrained and antiquarian, but like many old treasures, its quality endures. More important, the Compact is the original instrument of democratic government on this continent and from its key sentence one can traces the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights:

“We solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time as shall be thought most meete and convenient for the general good of the colony.”

Those who signed were not identical in their ideas – John Alden was a tradesman, Miles Standish a soldier and the people were of various backgrounds and classes. As George Williston pointed out in his provocative account of the Pilgrims, SAINTS AND STRANGERS, there were not only the Pilgrims from Holland, but also some of the passengers and crew were undesirables -- “strangers” -- recruited from the London streets by the company which financed the Pilgrim enterprise. But “Saints” and “Strangers” alike found in that Compact a strengthening agreement, which not only continued in strength and dignity as it fortified those principles which later received constitutional form, but also foreshadowed a strong strain of liberal thinking in the centuries to come. Let us consider again from whence the Pilgrims came and the course they took.

When Henry VIII too the Church of England out of the Roman Catholic Church, free religion and the rights of church members to govern their affairs was by no means an automatic by-product of that separation. Even the Cromwellian revolution maintained a church hierarchy in the form of the presbytery. In the sixteenth century, Robert Browne revolted against the idea of religion being enforced by civil law. Secretly he taught what today we refer to as the congregational form of church government. Believing that a church should be separate from the State, he insisted that the magistrate should have no coercive power over it. Each local church should be complete and bound only by voluntary allegiance to larger church bodies. Because of the implications in the Reformation doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” -- that all persons were equal before God – it followed that all members were equal in the church, with the same voting rights and the same privilege of holding office. Furthermore, Browne insisted that the whole purport of the New Testament vindicated this view of Church and State and represented gospel sanction for the equality of members.

One of the consequences of Browne’s efforts and thought was that the movement which is sometimes called the “Scrooby, Leyden, Plymouth” group. Vital to it was John Robinson, who never set foot on the shores of the new world, but without him the voyage could not have been organized, or the spirit maintained that carried the group through disastrous trials to their goal of permanent settlement.

About the year 1600, scattered persons from Scrooby and nearby towns on the East Coast of England gathered in a church organization with this covenant, “We, the Lord’s free people, join ourselves, by a covenant of the Lord, into a church-estate in the fellowship of the gospel, to walk in all his ways, made known or to be made known unto us, according to our best endeavors.” (Can you not see how one statement in the recent statement of principles of the Universalist Church could grow from this covenant, “we believe the authority of truth, known or to be known?”)

William Brewster, well-born and educated, was one of the dynamic spirits and ruling elder. Alert for heresy, the civil and religious authorities soon came after the small, reforming religious group and Brewster was jailed. The Pilgrims determined to escape to Holland but were betrayed by a sea captain in their first attempt. They eventually got away to Holland in 1608 after much suffering and persecution. Holland was not an entirely strange land for the group, as already two Separatists movements from England had established themselves in Amsterdam. But as these groups were characterized by internal dissension, the Scrooby group decided to go elsewhere. So they went to Leyden, textile center and home of a famous university. Soon John Robinson was elected pastor and the group grew in numbers. The Pilgrims were a welcome addition to the Leyden community and the Dutch magistrates remarked [on] their high qualities of conduct and character.

But some of the Scrooby Pilgrims were uneasy in Leyden. They still longed for the sovereignty of the English flag, even though they had been persecuted by English authorities; they missed the mother tongue and the opportunity to rear their children in English schools. Even more as William Bradford commented, “They were inspired with a great hope and inward zeal for the propagation of the gospel in the remote parts of the world, a mighty work in which they might be the stepping-stones for those who might follow in the paths where they had led.”

Permission to settle in the new world was not easy to obtain. Finally, a company of London merchants, known as the Adventurers secured the patent for the land and supplied capital.

John Robinson decided to stay in Leyden, but his contribution was creative and enduring. He came to believe strongly in the separation of Church and State. When the group was preparing to leave for the New World, he composed a letter of farewell and instruction and included his counsel that they should become a “body politick, using amongst yourselves civil governments,” and this became a part of the Mayflower Compact. He fortified their determination when he urged, “it is the first duty of man to inform his conscience aright; and then to follow the direction it gives.”

You know how the Pilgrims sailed August 1, but when the Speedwell proved to be unseaworthy, a second start, Sept. 2, was necessary with all the passengers aboard the Mayflower. Two and one-half months later, they reached Cape Cod bay after an arduous voyage. On November 11, 1620, they gathered in the cabin, signed the Compact and thus created the constitutional instrument which was their rule of government in the new world.

The Pilgrims represented a liberal element that softened the harsh and intolerant Puritanism which was to settle other parts of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. During the long ministry of Francis Kendall in the early nineteenth century, the Church became Unitarian. And for the last generation, The First Universalist Society has combined with First Parish Church.

The Compact was the first organized instrument of democracy produced in the colonies. From its recognition of the equality of persons has grown principles embodied in the town meeting form of civil government, the separation of church and state, toleration of heretical views and recognition of conscience as the final arbiter of man’s decisions.

There is a further consequence: The conjunction of the Thanksgiving festival with the celebration of the Mayflower Compact suggests a revealing insight into human growth in wisdom, courage and religious maturity.

The feast of harvest home is as old as the ages far removed from the earliest histories, when primitive man expressed the great surge of emotions he felt when the mystery of the fertile soil, the growing season and the time of harvest provided him with the roots and fruits which fed the family. With no laboratory knowledge of the germination, root, bud, blossom and fruition, early man felt abounding gratitude for the mysterious providence which enabled him to survive and eventually to plan, plant, and cultivate. In all places and times it has been good to sing praises for the beauty and fruitfulness of the earth.

But the agreement of the Compact, together with the ancient feeling of thankfulness for harvest home, proclaims something else about man. Man cannot be fully satisfied with a full belly only. In order to survive, food is the most primary substance to secure and sunsure [sic?]. The history of man clearly indicates that where food is unobtainable, high ideas of morality or spirituality are submerged in a flood of hunger pains. This is a fact of human existence, call it materialism or what you will, but people have to have something to live on before they reflect and act on ideas worth living for.

But as man in the more fortunate areas has been able to provide at least a minimum, subsistence level of necessities, he has been turned to other things. The Pilgrims in the cabin of the Mayflower agreed to a way of government which provided that laws were to be established by the body politic – that is, by the people themselves. They had committed themselves to self-government, asserting that man must be equal before the law and free before his God.

The human pilgrimage of man provides no unqualified assurance of man’s ability to grow in wisdom and stature. History has dark corners of evil when inhumanity, intolerance, unspeakable cruelty have provided considerable testimony to the weakness and moral inadequacy of the human being. But there has been a gradual refinement of ideas; certain values of freedom and human dignity have been emerging; and the religious festivals of mankind increasingly emphasize the better moralities that are beginning to be prized in the human venture. Thanksgiving is not only gratitude for the abundance of nature, but re-assertion and re-statement of the inalienable rights to worship according to conscience and to be equal before civil government. Christmas is not alone a theological proposition that sinful humanity could only be redeemed by God taking form and paying the sin-sacrifice for all men. Christmas has become more profound and poignant in its emerging theme that all human life is valuable. All babies whether born in the lacquered cradles of the wealthy or the poor straw of a stable, are of supreme worth.

Most ceremonies are ancient, but always there is needed the growth of principle, the re-evaluation of what is, in the light of what should be, a continuing recognition of advancing truth to refine and protect the best of the human venture. John Robinson in his farewell address to the Pilgrims at Leyden, said it best in his famous prophecy of a religion dedicated to advancing truth, “The Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth from his holy word.”