“A Chafe and Grow Relationship”

We are going to take a look at Ralph Waldo Emerson today in celebration of the 200^th year of his birth.  I want to share with you how Emerson struggled to find an authentic expression of his faith in a Unitarian environment which was, contrary to what you might expect,  quite hostile to him.

Someone suggested to me in October that the sermon description for Columbus Day, which was about transitions, should have said so more clearly, since transitions are interesting and Columbus is boring. So I want to say up front, just in case you think Ralph Waldo Emerson is boring, (New Yorker – Big Dead White Male) that my focus this morning is the religious tension in his life – it is about wrestling with issues of faith.

This is a personal issue for me. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s relationship with Unitarianism was very rancorous – hard for him and for many, perhaps most Unitarians of his day.  And yet, from a historical perspective, this relationship which chafed so as it unfolded, turned out to be a growth-producing and fertile time for religious liberalism.  What bothers me is that today our denomination claims him as one of its finest with little institutional memory of how difficult we made his life at the time.  The truth of the matter is that he was shunned by many of his esteemed colleagues for his beliefs.

Let me give you some background. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the son of a distinguished Unitarian minister who was himself the seventh in an unbroken line of ministers dating back to Puritan days. The Emerson family prized learning and culture and was intimate with intellectuals of the day. Emerson’s father died when he was eight years old, leaving behind an impoverished wife and five sons, one who was mentally retarded and another mentally ill.

Emerson taught for awhile after graduating from Harvard but didn’t enjoy it. He was licensed to preach in 1826 at the age of 23. Three years later he married Ellen Tucker and was ordained the Unitarian pastor of the Second Church in Boston. Sadly, after 18 months of marriage his young wife died of tuberculosis and two of elder brothers also passed away.

In 1832  Ralph Waldo Emerson suddenly resigned his ministry. Some Emerson scholars attribute his resignation to a crisis of faith sparked by his family tragedies. Pastoral care did not come easily to him, and these were difficult circumstances in which to minister to others.   Some scholars believe he had simply started down the wrong career path and that he would have wanted to leave the ministry in any case. Emerson’s own explanation was straightforward - that he could no longer, in good conscience, administer the Lord’s Supper or communion.

He felt communion commemorated Jesus the person too much, and that Jesus himself would never have intended for communion to be a perpetual rite. He said, “I am so much a Unitarian as this: I believe the human mind cannot admit but one God, and that every effort to pay religious homage to more than one being goes to take away all right ideas…”

So he quit his ministry but not his relationship to the church. Emerson continued to preach on a substitute basis in neighboring parishes and attend Unitarian annual meetings.  He published the essays “Nature” and “An American Scholar”  during the next few years and became an accomplished lecturer.  In 1838 he was still using the title “reverend” when Harvard Divinity School students asked him to address them at their graduation. He spoke as a minister to the divinity students at this prestigious event, but he must have known that his criticisms of the church and his radical theology would be heard far beyond the Harvard walls.

He said Christianity dwelt with unfortunate exaggeration on the person of Jesus and that churches were wrong to speak of revelation as long ago and done, as if God were dead…. He felt using accounts of ancient supernatural miracles to verify the authenticity of his teachings and person was to distort religion into something grotesque.   Nature itself he declared to be a Scripture, a revelation from God and a true miracle… God, as such, he said, cannot be received at second hand.

Emerson considered all this consistent with the teachings of Jesus and seemed to be genuinely surprised at the magnitude of the controversy that followed. Up to now Biblical miracles had been accepted by Unitarian theologians as real and providential evidence. Many Unitarians felt their faith as they understood it to be threatened and undermined by these radical ideas from one of its own.

Today we claim Emerson proudly – but the truth at the time was much more complicated.  The newspaper the Christian Examiner said that to most Unitarian ministers, Emerson’s notions were “neither good divinity nor good sense.” The majority of his Unitarian colleagues turned their backs on him. Emerson was not invited to speak at Harvard, the citadel of Unitarianism, for a generation. To embrace his ideas was to risk marginalization and falling from social grace. Many of the notable Unitarians if they’d had their druthers would have booted him out of the denomination.  But the institution, then as now, had no means to do it. Although minimally tolerated, he still had an ample forum in which to speak his point of view.  To their great frustration the stir that his ideas created within the denomination gave him and his views even more attention.

Emerson himself could have walked away, he could have addressed other issues. In spite of how badly the relationship chafed,  he didn’t choose to sever his relationship with the Unitarians that would have him.  He continued to preach in Unitarian pulpits until 1846.

Looking back from the perspective of the 21^st century, we can see that Ralph Waldo Emerson never stopped struggling with his understanding of faith, and religious liberals never stopped wrestling with his assertions. It’s important to note that the strained relationship never stretched to the breaking point because over time it developed a historical dimension. Emerson’s long-term influence on liberal religion, has been profound. Over time, Unitarianism, Universalism and liberal wings within many traditions, caught up to and eventually embraced much of Emerson’s thinking. 

We shouldn’t forget this when we celebrate Emerson’s two hundred years.  Had there been a mechanism to throw him out, squash him or silence him and therefore end the relationship, the shape of liberal religion would be different.

Emerson’s struggle within Unitarianism and Unitarianism’s struggle with him still goes on in new forms in our churches today. I attended a retreat this past week with some 30 of my UU colleagues where our guest presenter was theologian Paul Rasor.  He stressed that each and every one of us, whether we can articulate it or not, has a theology which formulates our world view and affects the way we interpret the world and what we approve of and what we fear.

We strive to be able to worship respectfully together under one steeple. We feel called to opening up the conversation about God and the sacred, feeling that in this shrinking world religions can no longer worship in isolation asserting their faith claims as the only way to God or the sacred.

Our desire to do this, and our openness and respect  for others is much less fully realized than we know.  Our denomination as a whole respects various faith positions, and embraces a multitude of religious perspectives, but when we consider our individual UU churches in practice, we can see that some lean humanist, some are Buddhist, some Christian.  Full diversity exists in very few.  And where the status quo in any given church is challenged by a shift caused by an influx of newcomers with new beliefs – pagans in a humanist church, or Christians in a more Buddhist, meditative setting -- then trouble often, sadly arises.  

There is a question as to how far one heart and mind can stretch. It is hard work to make room for a different interpretation of the world. If worshipping among others with different beliefs doesn’t feel challenging – if it doesn’t at least chafe, then I would question the depth of one’s faith commitment.

Here in this church we have some who lean pagan, some who are humanist, some who lean Buddhist and some who lean Christian. When we chafe, as we will from time to time, our strength comes from our willingness to stay engaged  – in not writing another off. 

When we claim Ralph Waldo Emerson as a forefather of our liberal religion, we do well to remember the struggles he endured. He represented change, and any change is demanding and uncomfortable. If you find yourself chafing at the ascension  of some new idea  - or for that matter, at the resurgence of what you consider to be an old idea – work to keep your heart open.  Stay engaged. An opportunity for growth may be presenting itself.