Weekly Sermons

Reading: Before You Came       
by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (Pakistani poet)
Translated by Agha Shahid Ali

Before you came,
things were as they should be:
the sky was the dead-end of sight,
the road was just a road, wine merely wine.

Now everything is like my heart,
a color at the edge of blood:
the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns,
the gold when we meet, the season ablaze,
the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames,
and the black when you cover the earth
with the coal of dead fires.

And the sky, the road, the glass of wine?
The sky is a shirt wet with tears,
the road a vein about to break,
and the glass of wine a mirror in which
the sky, the road, the world keep changing.

Don't leave now that you're here-
Stay. So the world may become like itself again:
so the sky may be the sky,
the road a road,
and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.
Sermon: Post-self-reliance.

Ralph Waldo Emerson went to church one Sunday morning in 1838, a couple of years after he had published his best-selling book Nature. Emerson's home church - and the home church of his ancestors - was in his hometown of Concord. But Emerson was not impressed with the preaching of Concord's new minister, Barzilai Frost.

Emerson would later give his famous Divinity School Address, and he described his reaction to Frost's preaching:

He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not learned.

I'm feeling postmodern today, so I'm telling stories on Emerson, whose star in the corner of the postmodern world I experience is not all light. It's often very frustrating to be a minister in a movement under Emerson's shadow. Knowing what I know about Emerson, if I had been Emerson, I would NOT have felt so free to publicly judge another minister - Emerson himself may have been a great preacher, but I've met English Majors who didn't know Emerson was a Unitarian minister. Perhaps this is because of his failures - failures I find far more serious than Barzilai Frost's.

Emerson had resigned as the minister of the Second Unitarian church in Boston in 1832, four years before publishing Nature, which was his first best-seller. Emerson's 3 or so years with Second Church were good years - the folks adored Emerson's preaching - and those same folks gently overlooked the fact that Emerson was a really terrible pastor. He was so bad at visiting and reaching-out to the people of his church that one famous example of his pastoral skills tells of the time when Emerson went to visit the family of an old revolutionary war veteran who was dying. Emerson was so awkward that the dying man woke up from his deathbed and told Emerson to go away.

Barzilai Frost, on the other hand, was profoundly present for the people of the First Parish of Concord - he was so beloved by the folks in that Unitarian church he served for decades that when I was in Concord for Sally Hamlin's ordination last June, I saw his picture displayed prominently in their Parish Hall. It's been there for about 150 years, and this is in part because even though Barzilai Frost was not the world-class public speaker that Ralph Waldo Emerson was, Frost was a good minister. Emerson should have regretted his judgments against Frost. The congregation he served felt Frost was a very good practitioner of his profession - he apparently succeeded where Emerson failed: Frost converted life into truth simply by being able to listen to and care for his people - his Unitarianism was far closer to what we would recognize as the Living Tradition: the practice of growing the community, nurturing the web of relationships that welcomes us with our individual narratives, complete in themselves... yet at the same time willing to risk the dangers of creating a larger, shared story about who we are together.

Emerson remains a powerful influence on me, on Americans and on Unitarian Universalists. I am still deeply inspired by his essay on the Oversoul. But one of his most influential essays he wrote in 1841, his essay on Self-reliance; I just read again after nearly 3 decades. I was deeply shocked by it.

Self-reliance was an essay that seized the attention of a young nation, seizing the right of access to "revelation" - that is, the inspirational voice of the Holy. Emerson reclaimed that living voice of the holy from the mouths of long-dead men and from the