Sunday
July 12
Intimations of a Beloved Community
By Marsh Chapel
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Our gospel is a grim reminder of the prophetic precursor to Jesus, whose own death prefigures the Lord’s. My friend Jennifer, a celebrated New Testament scholar, once referred to the passage as ‘the only mother and daughter scene in the NT’ a way of sidestepping its bloody horror with a mordant, wry wit, a not unusual reaction to such a gruesome passage. Mark is foreshadowing the coming cross of Christ, by remembering John the Baptist.
We can do the same. There are those who at cost have paved the way, affirms our Scripture today. As we gather in summer worship this morning, here in historic Marsh Chapel, we may take some sustenance from such a reminder, and be inspired to remember those who paved a way for us. Who stands as a true precursor for your life and faith? As in these months and weeks, across this great land, a country yet filled with latent goodness, we brood about violence and prejudice, we may take some sustenance from such a direct reminder of the prophetic spirit, truth spoken for love in the face of adversity. Who risked friendship for the sake of you, as a friend? As, this summer, we meditate together upon the mighty theme of the Beloved Community, we might recall earlier intimations, prophetic voices, which paved our way, cut our trail, made a space and place in grace for our own hopes.
I have driven to you at dawn this morning along the Mohawk River. It is the same route John Dempster took on his way to New England to give life to Boston University, in 1839. Let your mind wander with me, this morning, ‘fifteen miles on the Erie Canal’. Think back and think west. Think precursors. This region bears the distinction of having given rise to many women and men who did not leave freedom to somebody else. Its price of eternal vigilance they provided in very daily, very personal, very local, very immediate ways. In the same manner by which we take for granted Niagara Falls, so close and so grand, we take these mighty stories for granted, saving stories of freedom and faith.
The Mohawk River, the Erie Canal. This is the land of Hiawatha (“who causes rivers to run”). Such musical names adorn this landscape: Canandaigua, Tioghnioga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Cuyahoga. Hiawatha, the great native leader of the Iroquois showed in the 15th century the critical need for union, for space and time in which to live together. His leadership was focused on common space, on collegial relations, on counsel together, and so he is harbinger of all the examples of faith and freedom to come up along the Mohawk and the Erie Canal. In nineteenth century verse:
All your strength is in your union
All your weakness in discord
Therefore be at peace henceforward
And as brothers live together
This is the land of Harriet Tubman. You may want to visit her home in Auburn, NY. (Her neighbor William Seward, Lincoln’s rival and Secretary of State, also from Auburn, bought Alaska, considered at the time a folly, an “ice-box”.) Tubman’s grand niece, Janet Lauerson, was on my church staff for a time in Syracuse, after we both migrated down from the far north country, not far from the burial place of John Brown. His body lies moldering under a ski lift near Lake Placid. He and Gerritt Smith, founder of Peterboro, were not compatiblists regarding slavery. As Lincoln would later say, they felt those who most affirmed slavery should start by trying it for themselves. Brown, Smith, Seward and others were the chorus before which Tubman could sing out the life of freedom, following the underground railroad. Remember her wisdom: “When I found I had crossed that line (on her first escape from slavery, 1845), I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything…I started with this idea in my head, ‘There’s two things I’ve got a right to…death or liberty’…’Twant me, ‘twas the Lord. I always told him, “I trust you. I don’t know where to go or what to do, but I expect you to lead me, and he always did.”
Now that we are as far west as Auburn, you will expect to hear something of Frederick Douglass, buried in Rochester. His burial plot is across the street from Strong Hospital. As one patient said, looking through the window, “it gives you something to think about”. Douglass printed his newspaper, the “North Star”, in Rochester, and through it developed a voice for a new people in a new era. At Syracuse University, 100 years later, it was Professor Roland Wolseley who developed the first national program in Black Journalism. Wolseley was formed in the faith under the great preaching of the best Methodist preacher in the 20th century, Ernest Freemont Tittle, when Wolseley’s young wife was Tittle’s secretary. Wolseley was my pastor parish chair for 10 years. Digressing, for a moment, where the vale of Onondaga meets the eastern sky, you might look in the Carrier Dome at the moving tribute to Ernie Davis, a young man from Elmira, who, a century after Douglass, and in the lifespan of Wolseley, gave tragic, courageous, and lasting embodiment to the common hope of racial justice, harmony and integration. He also played football. The voice of Douglass rings out against the harmonic background of Tittle, Wolseley, Davis and others. In the North Star, Douglass wrote: “The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle…If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its mighty waters.” Or maybe we should give the honor to his ally Sojourner Truth: “That…man…says women can’t have as many rights as man, cause Christ wasn’t a woman. Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with him!”
Susan B. Anthony did not leave the project of freedom to others. I wonder what sort of dinner companion she might have been. Her constant consort with governors and senators across the Empire state made her an early Eleanor Roosevelt. My grandmother grew up in Cooperstown and graduated from Smith College four years before she had the right to vote. My mother was born in Syracuse only a few years after full suffrage. My wife is a musician and teacher, my sister is a corporate attorney, many of my closest colleagues in ministry are female. I scratch my head to imagine a world without their voices. Syracuse produced Betty Bone Schiess, one of the first women ordained to ministry in the Protestant Episcopal church. One of the Philadelphia 11. We study her now in Introduction to Religion. One rainy day when my daughter Emily was 13 and had the flu, we met Schiess, at the druggist. The pharmacist called her name. I clamored over to investigate whether it were she, the famous Schiess. “Who wants to know?” she replied. As she left, after good banter, she turned in her slicker and totting an umbrella pronounced this blessing: “One day you will be a Methodist bishop”. I was about to reply when I realized she was speaking to Emily. ‘Thank you’, my daughter replied. Think about precursors whose prophetic voices and costly faithfulness paved your way. We may need such a brief reminder, this summer, that real change is real hard but it comes in real time when real people really work at it. So. You may visit the birthplace of suffrage and feminism in Seneca Falls. Anthony’s witness stands out among the witness of so many others: your grandmother, your mother, your sister, your wife, your daughter, your pastor, Betty Bone Schiess, and so many others. Who can forget the motto of Susan B. Anthony: “Failure is impossible” (on her 86th birthday, 1906), or her warning, “Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation.”
Sometimes the freedom train derailed. Not everything along the Mohawk River was perfect or turned round right. Exuberance can produce minor collisions. I want to talk to you about sexual experimentation, that is, a long time before the summer of love. Woodstock paled by comparison with the communal experiments along the Erie Canal during the nineteenth century. The Shaker Community and the Oneida Community perhaps can bracket our discussion. Under Mother Ann Lee, and starting in farm country near New Lebanon (Albany area), not far from from Tanglewood, and our BU musical program there, one of the current sponsors for WBUR, the shaking Quakers firmly and unequivocally addressed the matter of sex. They forbade it. Like the desert fathers and Qumran communities of old, they took Paul at his word and meditated fully on 1 Corinthians 7, ‘let those who have wives live as if they had none’. In the Shaker community, women and men came together only once a week, in worship, on Sunday morning, for ecstatic singing and dancing, like David in the ephod before the ark–hence their name, ‘shakers’. This made church attendance somewhat more than casual liturgical observance. I understand attendance was quite good. However, the practice did not amplify the community itself: infant baptisms lacked the requisite infant, and so were infrequent. Consequently the Shakers moved to Cleveland where they blended into Sherwood Anderson’s new Ohio, returning to the old ways of industry, monogamy, and frugality. In short, they became Methodists. Hear again the Shaker tune:
When true, simplicity is gain
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed
To turn, turn, will be our delight
‘Till by turning, turning, we come round right
Now, the Oneida’s. You may want to read the book, Without Sin, the best review in our generation of their somewhat different experiment. Also along the Erie Canal the Oneida community set out to find heaven on earth, the end of all oppressions, and even the hope that, as John H Noyes read from Revelation, “death itself will be no more”. Although I went to High School in Oneida I do not recall a full lesson on the matter of stirpiculture, the heart of the Oneida experiment. The Oneidas practiced “complex” marriage, in which every man was married to every woman and vice-versa, and sexual relations were freely permitted as long as the men practiced ‘continence’ to avoid pregnancy. Procreation was planned, through a deliberated, committee processed, but nonetheless free-love sharing of the marriage bed in the hope of producing a better race, a finer human being. (For those of you for whom this is more information than you require, I apologize) Three hundred in number at their greatest growth, the community produced bear traps and then silver, continuing, in some fashion, until just a few years ago. Of all the utopian experiments, the Oneida project is the most fascinating. After word got out about the doings and practices in Oneida, clergy in Syracuse banded together and ran them out of town, first to Canada and then to the Midwest. Noyes died on the trip, and the community disappeared, except in the silver on your dinner table, in wedding gifts, and in quality restaurants. Let us remember the love of freedom, as Noyes expressed it, even if we cannot affirm his methods: “I am free of sin and in a state of Perfection”.
Precursors remind us of what can be done. Another drum along the Mohawk you will find perhaps an unlikely name to include, that of Norman Vincent Peale. When we were at Union Seminary in New York the faculty there, both regularly and rightly criticized the inadequate theology of the Marble Collegiate Church. I remember James Sanders sternly referring to this famed congregation as the “First Church of Marduke”, (not an accolade). Of course you know that for fifty years, a graduate of Boston University, and Ohio Wesleyan, and a proponent of the power of positive thinking held forth, without notes, from the so-called Marduke pulpit. His son in law, Arthur Caliandro, followed him, with notes. You may not trust his theology. I myself am a critic, schooled as I was in the dour, German realism of Tillich, Niehbuhr, and company. You may find it too shallow. Everybody has their criticism of Norman Vincent Peale. Even Adlai Stevenson had gripes. When attacked from Marduke Stevenson defended his Christianity on the basis of the Apostle to the Gentiles, all this in 1956, and rounded out his peroration thus: “Sir, I am a Christian. As such, I find Paul appealing, but Peale, appalling.” You too may find Paul appealing and Peale appalling. But hold one thought. Peale began his preaching a stone’s throw from where my morning drive and this morning’s sermon began, this morning. In Syracuse, at University Methodist Church. He found there a happy people. He found there a positive people. He found there a hopeful people, an optimistic congregation. Why, they were so good to him that he relaxed and fell in love and married an SU coed, Ruth. My old, good friend Forrest Whitmeyer, a graduate of Boston Latin, knew them both well. It was that native buckeye spirit (Norman) married to that native orange soul (Ruth), and it produced the power of positive thinking, itself a form of faith and freedom not to be entirely forgotten. A time or two in the course of a full ministry, we might just remember Peale, positively. The Peales, Ruth and Norman both, did not leave the project of freedom to somebody else. It is biblical and faithful to remember Peale’s seven most important words: “You can if you think you can.” Yes, you can.
Intimations of a Beloved Community. God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Gimself. The faith of Jesus Christ and the freedom of Jesus Christ we offer you today. As Paul’s student writing in Ephesians put it: ‘In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance…so that we might live for the praise of his glory’. Our forebears were disinclined to leave the pursuit of freedom to others. They seized freedom in their own hands and by their own lives. They did not wait on others. They did not pause to seek a secret blessing. They did not wait until some ethereal sign emerged. They did not expect some magic insight. They preferred deliverance to diffidence. They glimpsed and then followed after intimations of a beloved community.
In earshot of our Lord’s teaching, in remembrance of the freedom and faith in our shared past, and especially on this Lord’s day, there is no avoiding a very personal question: as a Christian man or woman, what are you going to do to continue to expand the circle of freedom in our time? Where is your tribal council to create? Where is your slavery to escape? Where is your North Star to publish? Where is your franchise to find? Where is your libertinism to avoid? Where is your hope to share? How will you lift a hand?
And take heart. Have you watched the dawn come? This morning I drove due east, along the Mohawk river, into a full black sky, darker than a hundred midnights, down in the cypress swamp. It seemed forever before there was any light. But somewhere around 5am, imperceptibly, very gradually, black became dark blue, and dark blue a misty gray, and gray a lightened blue, and blue a bright sun. Little bit by little bit by little bit. Dawn came. Like the glory of the morning on the wave…
All that Mohawk river water falls finally into the ocean, running at the feet of Emma Lazarus’ poem:
Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breath free
The restless refuse of your teeming shore
Send these, the lost, the tempest tossed to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
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