This is the sermon I preached at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, Virginia on January 17, 2016. As always, you can listen to it if you prefer.
You’ve probably never heard the name Ephraim Nute. (But it is a pretty cool name, isn’t it?) You’ve also probably never heard about the 2011
book that Skinner House published about him:
The Incredible Story of Ephraim Nute: Scandal, Bloodshed, and
Unitarianism on the American Frontier. (And how’s that for a title?) I was on the Editorial Board of Skinner House
when the manuscript for The Incredible
Story was nearly passed over, and I was one of the people who argued –
somewhat passionately, as I remember – that we simply had to publish this book.
Ephraim Nute was a Boston-born Unitarian, ordained to
the ministry in 1845 at the age of 26.
He served congregations in Massachusetts for about a decade before
feeling the need for a new adventure. He
followed that urge by volunteering to go to Kansas to start a new church
there. The year was 1854, Kansas was
still a territory, and it was the year that Congress passed the now infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act which said that as these
territories were admitted as new states in the Union the settlers would decide
for themselves whether or not to legalize slavery. As you may remember from a U.S. History class,
these disputed territories were one of the matches that ignited the Civil
War. In Kansas, in 1854, the struggle
between anti-slavery activists and pro-slavery proponents was so fierce that
this period is referred to as, “bleeding Kansas.” Starting a congregation in that context is
the “adventure” Ephraim Nute signed on for.
When he left, one of the gifts given to him to help with his new
ministry was a revolver.
The story of “scandal, bloodshed, and Unitarianism on
the American frontier” is a pretty exciting one. If anyone knows a screenwriter looking for a
project, I’ll happily loan them my copy.
It’s that amazing. An
example: There’s a chapter in the book
titled, “Bibles and Breechloaders.” When
Nute would go back East to visit family, and friends, and the office of the
American Unitarian Association, he would return with his wagon loaded with cases
of books for his community. Only … the
cases were actually filled with the Sharps breech loading rifles.
These were the rifles some called, “Beecher’s Bibles,” because of
something the famous New England clergyman Henry Ward Beecher was reported to
have said (and I’m quoting here from an 1856 article in the New Your Tribune):
"He (Henry W.
Beecher) believed that the Sharps Rifle was a truly moral agency, and that
there was more moral power in one of those instruments, so far as the
slaveholders of Kansas were concerned, than in a hundred Bibles. You might just
as well. . . read the Bible to Buffaloes as to those fellows who [support
slavery]; but they have a supreme respect for the logic that is embodied in
Sharp's rifle."
The
Incredible Story of Ephraim Nute recounts his harrowing
journeys with those crates of “books” in his wagon, as well as all of the times
he was beaten, shot at, arrested, imprisoned, nearly lynched … All I can say is that the parish ministry has
certainly changed some since then! That,
and that there’s no question that this was a preacher who put his faith into action.
And he wasn’t alone.
Among our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors are people who risked
much in their support of the cause of abolition. In fact, at least one historian of religion
suggests that one of the reasons we see such slow growth in Unitarianism in and
around this period is because of the number of radical Unitarian preachers who
were so public in their opposition to slavery.
Not every one of our forebears would make us proud, of course – the
President who signed the Fugitive Slave Act into law, Millard Fillmore,
was a Unitarian, for instance. Yet in
1845, 170 Unitarian clergyman published an anti-slavery declaration in William
Lloyd Garrison’s magazine The Liberator, and a list of some of the most
active and well-known abolitionists would include quite a number of Unitarians
and Universalists. And our ancestors
were involved in less public ways as well:
- The belfry of our congregation in Olmsted, Ohio was a station on the Underground Railroad.
- Our congregation in West Roxbury, Massachusetts gave sanctuary in their building to several escaped slaves and Freedmen. Their Pastor, the Rev. Theodore Parker, kept a pistol in the pulpit, letting it be known that he would shoot anyone who tried to forcibly remove them. He kept a sword by his writing desk as well, because his home was a sanctuary also.
- Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an African American woman who drew huge crowds of New Englanders to her lectures on the anti-slavery circuit. Some say she was the most popular of all the abolitionist speakers of her day. She was also a Unitarian.
- The Rev. Samuel Joseph May, who served our congregation in Syracuse, New York, was known to take up collections during the Sunday service explicitly for the purpose of aiding fugitive slaves. (He also encouraged the Free Blacks in his congregation to sit up front rather than in the segregated back. But that’s another story.)
- In Pennsylvania, our congregations in Meadville and Philadelphia, along with a seminary the Unitarians established in Meadville, were all known stations on the Underground Railroad, as were the Universalist congregations in Indiana County and Girard.
I could keep going, of course, but this could easily
turn into a history lesson. (If it
hasn’t already done so for some of you!)
In my research I did come
across a history paper written in 2002 for a course at Starr King School for
the Ministry. It’s called, “Unitarian and Universalist Denominational
and Individual Involvement in the Anti-Slavery Movement Prior to the U.S. Civil
War.” Not quite as catchy as Scandal, Bloodshed and Unitarianism on the
American Frontier, but it’s quite an interesting paper nonetheless (even
though the author doesn’t even mention our dear Ephraim Nute even once!). [For
those who are interested I’ve printed out some copies that you can find in the
Church Office, and I’ll make sure that there’s a link to it when this sermon is published
online.] As I said earlier, a list of
those most active in the cause of abolition would include a number of
Unitarians and Universalists.
This is true of the women’s suffrage movement as
well. Judith Sargent Murray? One of ours.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Susan B. Anthony? Yep.
Them too. Jane Addams? Lucy Stone? Olympia Brown? Mary Rice Livermore? Julia Ward Howe? Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. In fact if you look at both the leaders and
the rank and file of pretty much all of the movements for justice in U.S.
history you’ll find Unitarians, Universalists, and Unitarian Universalists well
represented. Resisting injustice is not
something new for us; we’ve been at it for a long, long time.
That’s actually the reason I advocated for Skinner to
publish Bobbie Groth’s book about her great-great-grandfather, Ephraim Nute. I saw it as providing proof, if proof were
needed, that our modern movement’s strong anti-racism, anti-oppression emphasis
is not new but has roots that go deep. I
remember saying that the “incredible story of … scandal, bloodshed, and
Unitarianism on the American frontier” offered an explanation of why we 21st century Unitarian
Universalists see this work as so important.
Simply – it’s part of the makeup of who we are; it’s part of the truth
of who we’ve been.
Yet even though realizing that resisting injustice is
part of our faith tradition’s genome may point toward an explanation of why we are engaged in such work today, I am
not sure it says all that much about why
we are, and have been, engaged in such resistance. We’ve been there, we’ve been doing it, but why have we been there doing it?
This week I stumbled upon a pretty cool resource, a rather long page on
the website of our congregation in Albion, NY that contains … well … I lost
count of how many pithy quotes from Unitarian Universalists it has. One that sprang out at me is by the Rev.
Forrest Church,
“Unitarianism proclaims
that we spring from a common source; Universalism, that we share a common
destiny.”
This is part of the answer to that why.
From their beginnings, the theologies of the movements that merged into
us emphasized the unity of our human
family and the universality of human experience. You know the saying, “until all of us are
free, none of us is free”? That sense of
interconnectedness, of mutual responsibility, has been a part of our
theological understanding since the beginning.
Fundamentally, Unitarian Universalism is, and always
has been, a humanist faith. By this I
don’t mean that we are atheists at heart, although, of course, some of us are. Humanism has taken many forms
– from a religious Christian humanism to a secular transhumanism. So, saying that a person, or a faith
tradition, is “humanist” doesn’t really tell you all that much about their
understanding of, “the sacred and the holy.”
Well, actually, that’s not completely true. All
forms of humanism stress that here – this place, this world, this universe,
this “sphere of human experience,” if you will – is in-and-of-itself both sacred and holy, needing nothing out there to bless all that is right here. There’s a great line in a litany about what
our faith does, and doesn’t, affirm – “it is more important to get heaven into
people now, than to get people into heaven later.” Whatever may or may not come next, this world is where the action is. That’s humanism,
and that’s foundational to our movement.
And it’s because our faith tradition teaches that
“this world is where the action is” that we, as a people, have always been
drawn to the work of resisting injustice.
We look around us and see all the work there is to do. To paraphrase the words of the poet Adrienne
Rich (that you can find in the back of our hymnal at #463):
[Our hearts are] moved by all [we] cannot save:so much has been destroyed
[we] have to cast [our] lot with thosewho age after age, perversely,with no extraordinary power
reconstitute the world.
So much has been destroyed – so much is being destroyed – and looking around
ourselves we and our forebears have seen this and are compelled to act. And we are compelled to act because of one other aspect of our faith
tradition’s teachings – that Love is our foundation, our “ground of being.”
So when we look around us at all that we cannot save, all that has been destroyed and is being destroyed, we do so through eyes of Love and we are compelled by Love to do something. We are compelled to resist the injustices we see – it’s what we’ve always done and what we’re doing now, and what I fully expect Unitarian Universalists will keep doing as long as we last.
Now … there are those who say that every sermon should
end on an uplifting note, or a charge to action, or, as Arthur likes to put it,
a “so what?”. I guess I’d have to say
that this sermon is going to end on an “I thought you ought to know.” I thought you ought to know that our
Unitarian Universalist tradition has a long and storied history, an incredible
story of a people who can inspire and make us proud. I thought you ought to know that we are part
of something, friends, that’s larger than any of us, larger even than
TJMC. This community is part of
something larger than itself – a community that stretches far into the past and
will extend far into the future. And that community has always been on the
frontlines, always been resisting injustice, always been striving to create a
world of freedom and justice for everyone without exception. We are a part of that. We are a part of that.
Pax tecum,
RevWik
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