Legend has it that Theodore Parker used to bring a pistol to his Boston pulpit. He is also said to have sat at his home study writing a sermon with a pistol and a sword on the table. (Of course, Parker did not have to contend with a keyboard, a monitor, a mouse and a bunch of wires.) Happily, there is no evidence that he ever fired his gun. And, I want to assure you, bringing a gun to the pulpit is not a practice I plan to follow here.
Today Parker is known as one of the three most famous early Unitarian ministers in the eighteenth century, the other two being William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson. With the passage of time he has become something of a Unitarian Universalist saint. In his life he was anything but. He was a highly controversial figure.
Parker kept a gun around as a public act of defiance. No, he was not advocating the right to keep and bear arms. He was protesting the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. That law, part of the great compromise of 1850, required that escaped slaves be captured and returned to their masters. It set up a federal agency to pursue fugitive slaves.
Parker was a leading voice in the anti-slavery movement. His church in Boston had several escaped slaves as members. At one time Parker even gave shelter to an escaped slave in his home, a clear violation of the law. He is said to have brought a gun to the pulpit and kept one on his desk in order to defend fugitive slaves should federal agents come and try to arrest them.
In fact, Parker was indicted for his defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act. However, he had so much public support that the authorities never brought him to trial. His case ended up being dismissed on a technicality.
Ah, but we are coming in near the end of the story. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Today Parker is included prominently in any course on Unitarian Universalist history. One of his sermons, “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” is read by everyone studying for the ministry and is considered one of the foundational texts of our movement.
Yet, as so often happens in life, the heroes we admire today were considered anything but heroes in their own time. Parker was a highly controversial figure, especially among his fellow Unitarian ministers.
Today I would have us look at his life and work for several reasons. First, of course, we should know something about our own history. It helps us see ourselves in the context of time and to understand where we are today. More importantly, though, I would have us take a look at Parker’s life and thought and reflect upon what lessons we might learn. Are his ideas still relevant? What lessons can we draw for our own lives as we look at his?
Theodore Parker was born in 1810, the youngest of ten children. Unlike so many prominent early Unitarian ministers, he did not come from a educated family. Parker’s family had a farm near Lexington, Massachusetts. His early life was filled with tragedy. By the time Theodore was 27, both of his parents and seven of his nine siblings had died—mostly from tuberculosis. His mother died when he was 12.
As you can imagine, these deaths affected him deeply. While his own theology moved far from its biblical Christian roots, he never lost his faith in the immortality of the soul.
He was a brilliant boy and something of a workaholic. He supported himself by becoming a schoolteacher at age 16. He longed to become a Unitarian minister and join the Boston elite. At 19 he passed the entrance exams for Harvard College, but could not afford the tuition. However, he took it upon himself to read the entire Harvard curriculum on his own. On his own he studied Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, theology, church history and biblical studies.
Despite his lack of a college degree, Harvard Divinity School accepted him in 1834 (at age 24) and granted him advanced standing. An unknown patron helped pay tuition. While in divinity school he worked as an instructor in Hebrew. While at Harvard he taught himself to read a different language every month. He claimed to be able to read 20 languages.
Upon graduation, at age 25, he took a post as minister of the small church it West Roxbury. The church only had 60 members. That left him lots of time for more study and writing. He read thousands of books and wrote dozens of articles for religious publications. Among the many books he read were books by German biblical scholars. As he read the new scholarship, Parker came to doubt such foundational beliefs as the reality of the miracle stories.
I should mention here that the Unitarians who founded the movement in American in the 1820’s and 30’s were very much liberal Christians. The vast majority of them still believed in the literal truth of the bible stories about miracles and the resurrection of Jesus. The early Universalists, for their part, were typically more conservative in their theology than the Unitarians. Both groups were reactions against the Calvinistic orthodoxy of their day, but their heresies were pretty small by our standards. Both the Unitarians and the Universalists were very much Christians. They were all Protestants. They differed in that they saw God as much less harsh and much more loving than Calvinists. The Universalists were Protestants who believed in universal salvation, the belief that everyone would go to heaven. The Unitarians were Protestants who were more open to learning and who believed the doctrine of the Trinity was an error.
However, once people open themselves to new historical scholarship, to philosophy, and to science, they are likely to end up far from where they started. This was the time when Ralph Waldo Emerson shocked the Unitarian establishment by suggesting that miracles were myths and by looking beyond Christianity for sources of religious inspiration. Parker became part of the group that called themselves Transcendalists. They relied more on intuition, personal experience, and nature than upon scripture.
Theodore Parker began to teach that Jesus had been inspired the same way you and I are inspired. Parker revered Jesus as the greatest spiritual teacher of all time. However, he argued that what Jesus taught were truths that did not depend on the authority Jesus any more than the theory of gravitation depends on the personal authority of Isaac Newton.
A watershed event occurred in May, 1841. Parker was asked to deliver the sermon at the ordination of Charles Shackford. This morning’s reading is taken from that sermon. It was a scandal. Three trinitarian guests were especially outraged and published an attack in the newspapers. (Ah, those were the days!) They accused Parker of no longer being a Christian. Beyond this, they challenged the Unitarian clergy of Boston for keeping within their membership a minister who was not a Christian.
Parker found himself an outcast among the Unitarians. In those days ministers regularly exchanged pulpits. Parker stopped receiving invitations. He was even urged to resign from the ministerial association, but he refused. The association considered expelling him, but were unwilling to impose what amounted to a credal test.
Meanwhile, some of Parker’s supporters came up with the idea that he should take his ideas directly to the people. They rented the Melodeon Theater. He began preaching there in 1845. Large crowds came. Attendance grew from 1000 to 2000 people per Sunday. This is far more attendance than any Unitarian Universalist congregation has today., They had to move from the Melodeon to the larger Boston Music Hall. He left his little parish in Roxbury and became minister of what was in effect a new congregation. Parker became a nationally known intellectual.
During this period of prominence and notoriety, Parker’s restless mind continued to develop. He moved further from traditional Christianity, even coming to the point where he thought Jesus had made some theological mistakes.
More important for his lasting reputation was a new perspective on religion and society. He became concerned with social class, poverty, and race. He became a passionate opponent of slavery. There is no small irony here, for most of us today would consider Parker a racist. He became fascinated with theories about race and came to believe that the Anglo-Saxon “race” was the most progressive. (Isn’t it odd that people don’t ever come to the conclusion that some other race than their own is the superior one.) He had some very romantic notions about creating an “industrial democracy” that promoted spiritual perfection. Yet he supported progressive causes like women’s suffrage, universal education, and efforts to alleviate poverty.
And, to his credit, he was willing to walk his talk. He actively supported getting escaped slaves into Canada. He openly defied the injustice of the Fugitive Slave Act. He even said publicly that slaves had a right to kill their masters. He was a secret supporter of John Brown, who led a failed attempt to start a slave rebellion.
In 1857, at the age of 47, Parker’s health began to fail. In 1859 he suffered a collapse brought on by tuberculosis. He and his wife left the cold Boston winter and went to the Caribbean. From there they took a trip to Europe. On that trip his heath worsened. He died in Florence, Italy, in May, 1860. He was a few months short of his 50th birthday.
Two weeks ago in my sermon I explored, with the help of a number of personal stories from our congregation, the challenges of being a religious black sheep.
What are we to make of a man like Parker, who managed to become a black sheep among the black sheep? What does his life have to teach us today, more than a century and a half later?
The first major lesson I learn is the one he taught in his most famous sermon, “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity.” In that sermon he noted how religious doctrines have changed over time. People have killed each other over theological differences that today seem trivial. In the second sentence of his sermon Parker uses the wonderful image of people “who are affrighted by the faintest rustle which a heretic makes among the dry leaves of theology.” Parker urged people not to get attached to doctrines or even to particular religious practices. It strikes me as good advice.
Fifty years from now, a hundred years from now, people will still be religious. The religious impulse is simply too deep in the human spirit. People will always ask the big questions about the meaning of life and their place in the cosmos. People will always struggle to live good lives and to teach their children essential moral lessons.
Yet what form will religion take? In Parker’s time, new insights were coming from far off places like India and Germany. Today cultures mix at the speed of light. Young people fall in love and get married across old boundaries of religion, race and culture. They have children that don’t fit in the categories that made sense a generation or two ago. We best not cling to what is transient.
Parker’s story also serves to remind us of the immense personal cost of being ahead of one’s time. Especially early in his career, while still a young man, the rejection by his fellow ministers must have been terribly painful. As I read his story I wondered what I would be willing to endure in order to defend my ideas. When do we stand and fight? When do we compromise? When do we just keep our mouths shut? It takes great wisdom to know the right thing to do and great courage to do it.
Would I have the courage to defend a runaway slave? What about a Nicaraguan mother here illegally who is about to be deported? What moral stands are we willing to take together as a congregation? Today we look back in shock to realize that most of Parker’s ministerial colleagues supported capturing slaves and sending them back to their masters.
Are we being just as short sighted today? Where will you and I draw the line?
Most importantly, you and I need to ask the same question that Theodore Parker asked. What is it that is essential in matters of religion? What is it that has lasting value? If doctrines come and go, our particular beliefs cannot be essential.
One of Parker’s lasting insights is that religion exists in time. It changes with the time. It always has. It responds to the world in which it exists. Parker’s answer was that it is religious experience that is fundamental.
And while today we would use different language, I think Parker was on to something vital.
Religion is not about what we think. Religion is about what we love.
Like Parker, I believe that religion begins with a profound experience—experience that is impossible to capture with language. There is nothing about this fundamental religious experience that is Christian or Buddhist or pagan or agnostic or Muslim. It is an experience of profound connection with the universe. For some people this experience is overwhelming, for others it is more subtle. Yet we have all experienced this at some time. It might be during quiet reflection. It might be looking at a sunset or at the stars on a clear night. It might be a mother holding a newborn—and the newborn being held. It might be playing or hearing music.
Think of your own life. You have felt this deep connection, this breaking down of the barriers that keep us separate from one another, that keep us at odds with the universe. Remember that feeling. Feel it again if you can.
Words that come closest to describing it are peace, awe, love, oneness, and harmony.
But that is just the beginning. That is the source, the wellspring.
From that feeling flows gratitude—the kind of gratitude Bob Drew shared in his chalice lighting.
And from that experience of connection comes compassion, for when we are truly connected your suffering is my suffering and mine is yours. Your joy is my joy.
And from compassion comes, just as day follows night, morality and a passion for equality and justice. A sense of connection leads to compassion and compassion leads to a desire to end suffering, to end exploitation, to end violence, to end racism, to end marginalization.
Religion begins as a powerful experience, becomes compassion and then becomes action to end suffering and create peace. Love flows. Love reaches out.
This is what it meant to be religious at the time of Jesus. This is what it meant in Boston in the 1840’s. This is what it means today and will mean a century from now.
And this is why we come together. We come to reaffirm our connection to life, to the universe, to each other. We come together to care for one another. We come together so that we can unite in taking compassion out into a world that desperately needs it.
This is the great insight of Theodore Parker. He helped to point us toward a way of being religious beings without being tied to dogma.
He was, it is true, a minister with a gun. More importantly, he was a minister who challenged us all to see beyond the fleeting opinions of our time.
May you and I respond to that challenge by being truly religious creatures. Let us allow what we feel most deeply and what we love most dearly guide our lives. That, my friends, is true religion. It always has been. It always will be.
Amen.