12On the next day much people that were come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem,

13Took branches of palm trees, and went forth to meet him, and cried, Hosanna: Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord.

14And Jesus, when he had found a young ass, sat thereon; as it is written,

15Fear not, daughter of Zion: behold, thy King cometh, sitting on an ass's colt.

For the third year now I attended the St. Patrick’s Day festivities in Conklin, Michigan, and for the second straight year I walked in the parade. Billed by locals as the world’s shortest parade, it is made up of tens of people walking a half block through the center of town to Finian’s Pub, while a few duty-bound folks stand on the sidewalk, instead of walking in the parade, because, as even in the days of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, there can be no parade without someone watching! Yet, as was declared openly and often on by many on Thursday, and even by me of German and English descent, “Everyone is Irish on this day.”

Even something seemingly ridiculous and enjoyable as the half block parade is not without meaning in addition to the fun. Walking behind the makeshift fiddle, fife, penny whistle, and drum corps, behind the couple who served as marshals, and behind the Gaelic banner, I thought about the historic plight of the Irish people. It was unavoidable, but of course brief because soon the pub was upon us! But I thought of the travails of the Irish people: the vicious conflict between Catholic and Protestant, the conquest by England, the Potato Famine. I remembered a few years before taking my son to see the Civil War battlefield at Fredericksburg, Virginia, and the famous charge of the Irish Brigade, when the 28th Massachusetts, bearing the colors of Ireland and made up of Irishmen who had escaped persecution and oppression in their homeland, charged up Marye Heights without the benefits of cover fire, to engage the Rebel troops on the ridge, themselves Irish and having escaped the same persecution and oppression in the same homeland, now slaughtering their brothers, cousins, and countrymen through their veil of tears. How ironic! How utterly tragic!

“Everyone is Irish on this day,” we cried last Thursday, and yet it is not really true. Each of us belongs to some people or peoples, and not to others. Although through sympathy one can understand something of what it meant to wear the green that day, everyone can’t really choose to be Irish on St. Patrick’s Day or on that day in Fredericksburg. Some “belongings” are chosen and some “belongings” are natural fact. The memory of a people is held in the memory of some and not of others because of the human condition of belonging.

We have spent a remarkable Lenten season walking together through the history of the demise of classical Western religious orthodoxy over the past two hundred years. I read in yesterday’s New York Times that there has been a movement afoot in some communities to pressure Imax theater owners not to show films that are favorable to evolution, using the fear of boycotts and demonstrations from the religiously orthodox, primarily Christian. I hope upon hearing that this morning and through having experienced this Lenten series, someone here will call up the owners of the local Imax to be assured it is not our community that is failing its young in terms of a scientific education. But, if you have been with us for part or all of this sermon series it should come as no surprise. Classical Western religious orthodoxy – in Christianity, the idea that an absolute and all-powerful Creator Deity enacted a grand Plan of Salvation, with human being plopped down as an actor in a cosmic plot of the Father sacrificing the Son for our sake - is intellectually dying. And things that are dying often make desperate final attempts at destroying something else at the time of its own demise.

The thinkers we’ve looked at occasioned the demise. Thomas Jefferson, whose declaration of human rights – “all men are created equal” as “endowed by the Creator” – eventually eroded away the foundation of orthodoxy’s claim that believers were favored by God and unbelievers punished. Robert Ingersoll’s claim that old and tired religion had to use fear, intimidation, eternal punishment, to coerce souls towards God revealed the way orthodoxy implicitly despises human nature and God; and that reason and the exercise of the free mind usher human being towards considering life and ultimacy very, very differently.

Charles Darwin deflated classical religion’s conception of the natural world and the universe. Evolution through natural – not supernatural - selection accounted better for the changes observed in Nature and, particularly, the gradual emergence of life from its smallest incarnation through its most complex, human being. Evolution reveals an increasing and incredible mutuality and interconnection over time. And lastly we considered Sigmund Freud and saw how old religion viewed human being as an entity. Classical Western religious orthodoxy contrived a Master Metaphysical Plan of all things; a Creator Deity enacting a grand Plan of Salvation, with human being plopped down as an actor in this cosmic plot of the Father sacrificing the Son for our sake. Freud viewed human being from the inside instead, and uncovered the inner turmoil of the mind and the way we project that outward and call it religion and a truth contained “out there.” Since Freud all truths must be considered as in some way human products, containing our own projections, partially or wholly, revealing human nature more than God’s truth the internal landscape of the mind and its emotions more than the external landscape of the universe!

After these thinkers orthodoxy and Western religions classically understood does not, did not, cannot, could not, and will not hold. It is a house of cards that falls under the weight of modern intellectual inquiry and modern revelations concerning human nature and the human condition. Thus, last week it became apparent that, as inheritors of a free faith tradition and its connection to the intellectual progress these thinkers represent, it is our challenge today to create a new faith; to make relevant the religious connotation of liberalis, liberal, to our time; a faith that is free, generous, and broadminded, to uncover in our reality the movement of the Spirit of liberalis. This has been the underlying intent of this sermon series all along: a spiritual reawakening that reads the world anew, with a foundation that whatever God is, whatever is ultimate in human existence, it is the saving Spirit of liberalis, working on and through us as freedom, generosity, and broadmindedness.

Last week we discovered this new view, this new reading of the world would be buttressed by the modern thinking that carried the old religion to its demise. Elizabeth Cady Stanton took Jefferson’s political declaration of equality and showed how it must be considered not in terms of its political ramifications, but in making real the religious truth behind it. Politically in her time, the 19th century, men and women did not possess equal political rights. While the political truth of Jefferson’s words were not non-existent - for they did apply to some and not to others – Jefferson’s words had not been considered for the religious truth they contained. If individual rights are endowed by a Creator, and not governments or religions, then every individual and every individual’s experience counts.

Every individual’s experience is in some way something new. A new revelation and a new way to read the world, that forms a new faith, an individuality. There exists a Spirit that saves an age from its everyday tyrannies, its daily intolerances, and the concrete instances of narrow-mindedness. The power and grace of this saving Spirit is its foundation, and what is the foundation of a liberal religious reading of the world: Every individual’s experience counts. Every woman’s experience, every man’s experience, and every child’s experience counts. The individual has an authority within his or her own experience that is primary, over tradition, past truths, old ways of thinking and believing, as cherished as are all of these. Faith of this kind is a pragmatic faith rooted in an individual’s experience. In Stanton’s time the ideal of Jefferson’s declaration of human equality was bandied about but it was not made concrete and real. Gross inequities abounded! Yet, Stanton “felt” that the self she was, and could become, was stifled by the traditions, the customs, the practices, the truths, the thinking, and the believing of the old ways. Her experience led her to proclaim the presence of new spirit and her example was of a new, pragmatic faith.

Today we continue building this new faith with the experience of William Edward Burghardt DuBois.

He was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, on the New York state line and due west of where 250 years before spiritual pilgrims had landed seeking religious freedom. His hometown had a population of about 5,000 at the time, and perhaps 25 were like DuBois of African-American descent. One biographer noted that “At age fifteen he became the local correspondent for the New York Globe. And in this position he conceived it his duty to push his race forward by lectures and editorials reflecting upon the need of Black people to politicized themselves.” (Gerald Hynes)

Like all New Englanders, particularly those in Massachusetts, DuBois wanted to attend Harvard, but had to settle for Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee instead. He spent two summers teaching blacks in rural Tennessee, and experienced the poverty, ignorance, and prejudice his people suffered but he had not previously seen. He also experienced in them an insatiable desire to learn. Later he returned East to get his doctorate at Harvard in 1895, as well as studying at the University of Berlin.

But in 1896 his life and study turned when he accepted a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania “to conduct a research project in Philadelphia's seventh ward slums. This responsibility afforded him the opportunity to study Blacks as a social system.” (Hynes) He used his proficiency in history, economics, and politics to develop the scientific study of social phenomenon; the way individuals form themselves into groups and the way various groups interact with one another. He studied human belonging, the natural ways we belong and the choices we make to belong. “This was the first time such a scientific approach to studying social phenomena was undertaken, and as a consequence DuBois is acknowledged as the father of Social Science.” (Hynes)

He conceived of African-Americans as a group, studied them as a people, and compared them as a people alongside of other peoples that form American society. As opposed to Booker T. Washington, who counseled blacks to win economic stature through industrial education, W.E.B. DuBois advocated for characteristics that would expand African Ameicans sense of belonging: “the right to vote, civic equality, [and] the education of youth according to ability.” He understood the meaning of politics as the quality of social relationships amongst groups in a culture, and the foundation of the American political system as a system of relationships amongst groups aimed towards liberty and justice for all individuals. He understood the political as a quality of belonging. For that to be realized in the world of “hard knocks” it was necessary to extend and protect the right to vote for all, civic equality for all, and education for all according to their ability and desire.

He was a radical, if by radical one means a devotee of the free mind symbolized by suffrage, a generosity of human affection symbolized by the bond of social equality, and a broadmindedness that is the yield of education. He was a radical all of his life because he would not settle for anything less in the relationships among groups, amongst peoples, that make up the social fabric of a society. He became a Communist sympathizer when the social fabric of his native country wouldn’t be woven into a design borne of its very own principles. He died on August 27, 1963, as a citizen of Ghana, on the eve of the famous Civil Rights March on Washington. The same trip that took my son and me to the Fredericksburg, Virginia battlefield of the Irish Brigade charge, also took us to Harper’s Ferry, where we saw the building that housed the second gathering of the Niagara Movement, initiated by DuBois along with others, and which later became the NAACP.

Among all the things he did, wrote, and represented, W.E.B. DuBois knew about the human need to belong; that we are social creatures. And he knew that the social groups to which we belong naturally by birth or by our choice, and which form part of our identity as individuals, and the belongings and relationships that give reality to freedom, become the fabric of a society. This fabric is formed by history and works on all of us in all situations, whether we recognize it or not. It is from this recognition that DuBois could prophetically pronounce in 1906 what we, looking back on all that made up the 20th century, can now so easily see: “THE PROBLEM of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” It was a problem in America, Germany, France, the former Yugoslavia, Africa, and everywhere else on the globe, probably because skin color is the most visible symbol of natural belonging.

The problem of social relationships and bonds, the problem arising from the natural fact that we belong to certain groups and not others, is the problem of the tragedy of human belonging. We step into that tragedy when we are born, and cannot avoid it. We favor those to whom we belong, and at best are indifferent to or, at worst, destroy those to whom we do not belong. Racism is the result of the tragedy of belonging that is race. DuBois wrote of this in his essay, “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” containing a peculiar instance in the Civil War: “No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth,—What shall be done with Negroes?”

When the armies of the North entered the South black slaves flooded to their camps. Was slave property contraband of war, or should this property be returned to its rightful owner? The white soldiers belonged to an army to which the black slave did not. The white soldier belonged to a government, the Union, and to its laws, to which the black slave did not. The white soldier belonged to a face the black slave did not. History is the record of the engagement of one belonging to another. Some of these engagements are of those which are chosen, and others of those which are natural fact. And history is the record of the tragedy of human belonging as human groups encounter one another. It was as true in the instance of the newly freed slaves as it was in the instance of the Southern Irishmen slaughtering the Northern Irishmen at Fredericksburg a few years before. Our natural belongings as human beings, and the choices we come to make as to the groups we will belong to, set us towards a path of clashing with others in other groups. It is tragic.

The Emancipation Proclamation, as DuBois noted, helped, but little in preparing the Union government, and later the defeated Southern Confedercy, for the influx of a newly freed peoples. The tragedies gave us Jim Crow, segregation, and another chapter of our country’s dealings with the tragedy of human belonging.

The same is true of religion and faith. We belong to a particular religion and to a particular faith tradition. In our faith tradition we understand faith as a chosen belonging, although others perceive faith as an inevitable, natural belonging by birth, as in, “I was born a Catholic and will always be a Catholic, regardless of what I choose.” But either way, the tragedy of human belonging rears its head in religion. To belong to a church or a faith tradition – and by that belonging to gain a religious identity – is not to belong to another. And in our time those faiths to which individuals do not belong, are far too many times declared to be false, dangerous, and in some instances, a justification for murder! How ironic! How tragic!

It is in our nature to belong. There is a social part of human nature that longs for and establishes social bonds of affection. And by the continent we are born on, the race we are born to, the part of the country we are born in, the economic station we are born at, there is a natural belonging. But all of these belongings, by choice and birth, will come to clash with the belongings of others. Thus is the human condition in 2005, in the time of the American Civil War, in the time that Jesus entered Jerusalem nearly 2000 years ago.

In that parade we celebrate as Palm Sunday there could have been no knowledge amongst any of the participants or the spectators that Jesus was God, although some may have conceived of him as a god. Three centuries later people declared him God, true, and initiated a time in Christian history when those who belonged to this orthodoxy of belief would wield terrible and destructive power over those whose experience and conscience would lead them not to belong to the orthodox faith. Surely, though, at that Palm Sunday parade some thought Jesus would wield god-like powers and vindicate them and the groups they belong to. To the Gentiles who followed Jesus, shouting “Hosanna” may have been the hope that Jesus would destroy the grip the Jews had on the religious life of the area. To the Jews who followed Jesus, shouting “Hosanna” may have been the hope that Jesus would destroy the grip that Rome had on every part of everyday life. Perhaps everyone saw in Jesus the vindication of the group they belonged to by choice or birth, something that occurs still today when pictures of Jesus look strikingly like the group that is worshipping him and adherents pronounce their beliefs as if they are his. We know the tragedy befalls all at the end of this week when shouts of loyalty become shouts of condemnation, and Jews and Gentiles and Romans and disciples, all except for a powerless few, abandon him to the tragedy of terror and death. How ironic! How tragic!

But he will hold to a possibility, a holy possibility that there exists a bond of affection that is more than the tragedy of human belonging. As he walks in that parade, with palm leaves being waved, he holds to a spirit amongst men and women that upholds the sanctity of the individual, even when as individuals we belong to different groups.

And W.E.B. DuBois held to a possibility, too, as an extraordinary man within the march of history, the parade of all souls that makes up our common human past. He, too, holds a holy possibility that there exists a bond of affection that is more than the tragedy of human belonging, in delivering this prophetic plea: “Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare. Thus in Thy good time [O God, the Reader] may infinite reason turn the tangle straight.”

And it is our faith tradition to hold to a possibility, a holy possibility that there exists a bond of affection that is more than the tragedy of human belonging. And it is our faith tradition to hold to the emergence of new truth from human experience, that revelation is not sealed; that the bonds of love keep open the gates of freedom, and that in the march and parade that is humanity’s time on this earth, there is an increasing mutuality and interconnection that is ever experienced and revealed anew.

After walking in that St. Patrick’s Day parade, and considering the plight of the Irish people as I marched, I emailed my Mother to confirm my understanding of the people to whom I belong by birth. I am of German and English descent. But, I found out something I had not known, something new revealed to me. Green has also always been the color of my blood, too! I have discovered I belong to more and more, until I can fully stand upright in faith tradition and realize that I belong to all souls, and they to me!

AMEN.