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Why Liberal Religious Preachers
Should Wear Robes Sermon delivered at All Souls Community Church
In Grand
Rapids, Michigan February 9, 2003
We have contrasted the Church with the Soul. In the soul then let the
redemption be sought. Wherever a man comes, there comes a revolution. The old is
for slaves. When a man comes, all books are legible, all things transparent, all
religions are forms. He is religious. Man is the wonder-worker. He is seen amid
miracles. All men bless and curse. He saith yea and nay, only. The
stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past,
that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by
representing him as a man – indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of
our theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not
was; that He speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity – a faith like Christ’s
in the infinitude of man – is lost. None believeth in the soul of man, but only
in some man or person old and departed… All men go in flocks to this saint or
that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they
love to be blind in public. They think society wiser than their soul, and know
not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world…. Once leave
your own knowledge of God, your own sentiment, and take secondary knowledge, as
St. Paul’s, or George Fox’s, or Swedenborg’s, and you get wide from God with
every year this secondary form lasts… that men can scarcely be convinced that
there is in them anything divine.
Let me admonish you… to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in
the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. Friends
enough you shall find who will hold up to your emulation … Saints and Prophets.
Thank God for these good men, but say, “I also am a man.” Imitation cannot go
above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity…
Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and
acquaint men at first hand with Deity. For all our penny-wisdom, for all our
soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have
sublime thoughts… [and] love to be caught up into [a] vision…
This November 1st I will have been preaching for twenty years, at
least 40 times a year, for a total of over 800 sermons, with maybe 20 not
preached in this robe, which is actually more formally called a Geneva gown. My
wife has heard almost all of the sermons I have delivered, and probably in
seeking some means of relief from having to sit through another one, since I
don’t preview them with her before they’re delivered, she asked me yesterday,
“Well, why do liberal religious preachers wear robes?” Since it is a challenge
for any preacher to put his sermon into one sentence, I responded with the first
thing that came to my mind: “Because they don’t wear anything underneath!”
Our outer garments are as much a part and _expression of the Self as our
interior emotions and needs, wrote philosopher William James, and sometimes more
so as when our outer garments symbolize what we are, or what we aspire to
become, or what is to us of ultimate value. Outerwear uncovers what clothes the
interior spirit! Martin Luther first preached in the black gown of the scholars
on October 9, 1524, instead of the vestments that the Church demanded its
priests wear. It was a revolution in theology as well as fashion! To this day
the Geneva gown symbolizes that it is in the free pursuit of knowledge,
represented by the educational academy, and not the rituals, sacraments, and
creeds of the church, wherein faith is deepened and a connection with God is
strengthened and maintained. Meaning in worship is transported by symbol, and
what the preacher or priest wears or doesn’t wear symbolizes what is sacred and
what is not; regardless of the intent of the celebrant! Wear the Church’s
vestments and it is the Church and its doctrines that is declared as the arbiter
of ultimacy. Wear your own clothing or a robe of your own choosing, and your
own, personal words and thoughts are declared to possess an ultimate status they
cannot claim, like quoting yourself and reading something you wrote during the
time in the liturgy reserved for sacred scriptures! But, this black gown, worn
as an academic outer garment, symbolizes that education not ignorance, new
discoveries not past revelations, understanding not naiveté, clarity of thought
not obscurity, the free and open exchange of ideas and not secrecy or
censorship, all sustain and serve faith, not starve it. It points to the pursuit
of knowledge not yet completed, and the humility one must wear also in the face
of a created world that only God can fully comprehend.
And as our Universalist religious tradition represents as a church for all
souls; anyone can answer a call that can gain one this dress: man, woman,
Republican, Democrat, transgendered, gay, straight, black, white, yellow, red.
Anyone can dawn the robe. It is a universal symbol. Every individual grows
spiritually through learning. When naiveté is allowed to exist, when ignorance
is encouraged to remain, when learning is dissuaded and access to information
contained, then someone is lording coercive power over others, which is the
antithesis of God and the freedom wherein God is made real in our lives. But it
is through the human activity of pursuing knowledge, about humanity and the
universe that is our home, that the mind becomes open to connecting with the
love of God and for creation, and the heart is liberated to love all souls as we
would love ourselves.
The pursuit of knowledge can lead one to the valley of mystery. In Southeastern
Oklahoma there is an oddity called the Heavener Runestone, which some scholars
claim is a Viking artifact from centuries ago. They trace the likelihood that
Vikings sailed through the Gulf of Mexico, up the Mississippi to the Arkansas
River, and up the Arkansas at least as far as the Runestone. There is little
dispute by historians that Vikings had landed in eastern North America long
before the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. In his new book “1491,” retired
British submarine commander Gavin Menzies argues that the Chinese discovered
America 71 years before Columbus’ arrival. Exploration is another form of the
innate human desire to know. Why did these people brave their journey only so
far and withdrew? What tempered their curiosity?
It’s difficult to argue we don’t possess some kind of innate curiosity about
ourselves and our world. But it is, perhaps, the one characteristic of human
nature that we consider with more uneasiness than any other. We are driven to
know, and we temper that and avoid that and disclaim that and fear that. Why
such a deep-seated ambivalence towards this characteristic of human nature? Why
do we fear this part of ourselves so?
One of the astronauts who recently perished in the Shuttle
diaster, Laurel
Clark, was a Unitarian Universalist from our Racine, Wisconsin, congregation,
and had delivered a stirring sermon there not long ago about the divine
dimensions of seeking to understand creation. In the past week I have heard
colleagues, friends, and cultural analysts respond to the deaths of those brave
Shuttle astronauts with the suggestion that we should curtail or even cease our
exploration of space. The reasons given are legitimate. We should turn our
attention to problems of our planet. Yes, we should. The money spent doesn’t
come close to equaling the practical returns. Probably right. We chase after
“God knows what” up there while we are on the verge of destroying ourselves down
here. Most certainly! Men and women have died, and for what? That may be the
real reason, right there. It wasn’t the trail of a jet plane or the tail of a
Cirrus cloud streaking across the sky. It was the dust out of which God was said
to have created man and woman in the Adam and Eve creation story. The dust of
ancient mythology, from which God fashioned us, was, inconceivably, captured on
tape! That’s it. We are deeply ambivalent about the human desire to know because
it is so deep we cannot control it, and it is somehow connected with death. The
trail of smoke is the symbol of that!
In the Genesis creation story Adam and Eve are commanded by God, “You may freely
eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” The
mythological meaning in the story is clear. Knowledge dispels naiveté and
ignorance. And the companion to knowledge is our human mortality. In the story,
God is worried that in eating the fruit humanity we “become like us,” like gods,
no longer ignorant or naïve, but responsible with God for the quality of life in
existence. But, knowledge is connected with death. The mythological truth of the
Adam and Eve story is its direct question: Are they better off not knowing what
the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil tastes like? Or, to say
it another way, is humanity better off shedding naiveté and ignorance, realizing
that human activity yields a world of woe or weal, and that sooner or later the
activity of gathering human knowledge yields the deeper knowledge of our own
mortality? Are we better off without knowledge, because inevitably all knowledge
leads to knowing we will die?!
Or, is the desire, the drive, the need, the longing and yearning to know who we
are and what the universe, our home, is like, to be scrubbed because knowledge
cannot be cutoff from death? Since meaning in worship is transported through
symbols, and this robe is a symbol of the innate human desire and drive and need
and longing to know, than like that trail of smoke that hid the disintegrating
Shuttle, this robe is also a symbol which hides the reality of death. I guess my
attempt at humor when my wife asked me why liberal religious preachers wear
robes, really had a double meaning. Underneath this robe the preacher is as
naked as when he leaves this world! The pursuit of knowledge that marks the
spiritual life is a dangerous one!
But when has the pursuit of knowledge not been the greatest risk of all? When
has life and death not been at stake any time an individual reaches out to know
more about humanity and the universe that is our home? Ask Darwin, Galileo,
Madame Curie, or the scientists that escaped Germany out of fear that the Nazis,
before anyone else, would discover the secret to splitting the atom. How many
people lost their lives because of what they knew or discovered or proclaimed as
true and which was a threat to others? Knowledge is power. It’s why, in the
story of Adam and Eve, its mythological dimensions were given as god-like! The
pursuit of knowledge has always been the greatest risk of all. It’s just been
revealed to us again how deeply connected are knowledge and death.
But, perhaps, the greatest risk involved in the pursuit of knowledge is not a
risk that we, at first, perceive, because we associate that risk only with
heroes and heroines who, we assure ourselves, are not like us. Yet, it is true
that the greatest risk makes us heroes and heroines of the everyday. The pursuit
of knowledge deals death to the old self! Knowledge means change. It means the
death of who we knew ourselves to be! Knowledge of necessity involves change and
growth, and it is the death of the old – the old culture, the old ways, the old
familiar, the old self – that is the greatest risk of all. And it is the origin
of our fear. Our fear of death is mirrored in our fear of change. This robe
pronounces that all of us will die, and to what, for what?
That’s the theological dimension of the pursuit of knowledge. It’s about power,
perhaps the greatest power in existence because it can shape evil and good! And
knowledge will change you. That’s why we fear it so.
The robe represents the soul that hungers for wisdom and thirsts for knowledge.
Liberal Religious preachers should wear robes especially in times like these,
when the innate quality that leads men and women to pursue knowledge, to know
who we are by knowing the universe which houses us, is under siege. The enemy of
this innate drive to knowledge has always been our fear. The fear that if we
learn something new about the universe that houses us we will destroy our
current understanding of who we are. The fear is that in knowing, somehow, we
will lose our self and our soul! It is a deeply ingrained fear, as deep as is
the innate quality itself. The fear manifests itself in the demand that
knowledge be curtailed; cloning, evolution, medical advance, and now space
travel. And it is true that pursuing knowledge does not necessarily lead to the
moral and ethical use of it. Advancements in physics lead to unfathomable bombs,
in medical science it led to biological weapons, and space exploration can lead
to an expansion of humanity’s destructive capabilities. Knowledge, and good and
evil are different. But they are related because neither good nor evil exists
without human knowledge. Liberal Religious preachers should wear robes to
symbolize that the pursuit of knowledge is a human quality that reflects a
divine one. Fear not, that the old heaven and earth pass away. We need not be
bound by old ways. We need not fear the ways of death. New knowledge declares
the old passes away, and there exists the possibilities of greater good, which
can outlive us all!
We have contrasted the Church with the Soul. In the soul then let the redemption
be sought. Wherever a man comes, there comes a revolution. The old is for
slaves. When a man comes, all books are legible, all things transparent, all
religions are forms. He is religious. Man is the wonder-worker… Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. AMEN. |
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