I had occasion this past week to address a group of theological school students about sermonic form. It is a subject that has taken up many a chapter of many a textbook over the years, but in my opinion, rarely done better than in 1944, the very year of my birth, by a very wise person named Halford Luccock, who identified ten basic forms for a sermon.

I will not bore you with the list, although over time you may see me try to exemplify most if not all of his ten types. But as he suggests is proper practice, you will rarely view his tenth form, rebuttal. As I told the class on Thursday, in keeping with Luccock’s advice, I have almost never used Sunday morning to rebut – but the temptation on me was strong this week.

I could only think of two times when I had given in to rebuttal in the past, the first of them in 1972, when our denomination, after years of study and with no small pride of accomplishment, came out with a course for teens and adults regarding human sexuality. It was a ground-breaking, sensitive, and thoughtful effort that was used not just by UUs like me but also by many groups outside our small number.

When it first came out, though, Newsweek magazine ridiculed the effort, strongly implying that we were trying to use sexual material as a lure to draw in new parishioners. You know how people speak of someone on his or her high horse? Well I assure you, I mounted the highest horse I could the following Sunday and rode into the pulpit of the First Church of Houlton, a small town in rural, northern Maine, to do battle with Newsweek magazine.

 In the many years since, I find I have mellowed a bit. Back then, I thought that people would think that things in print were probably true. But I moved to Wayland and came to accept that while it would be a nice, it was hardly predictable if, after being interviewed, a local paper even had you on the right side of an issue.

 There was this other one time, just before the Gulf War, when I was so badly misquoted that I took a part of a sermon to object. But really, I haven’t felt inclined to take a part of a sermon to rebut for many a year … until now. And now, it’s not one of the papers but a retired lawyer up the road in Sherborn, Ed Pawlick.

 Mr. Pawlick is upset, as many of us are from time to time. But Mr. Pawlick, a retired lawyer, has time and money enough to institute a crusade
-- in particular, a crusade against the law signed by former Governor William Weld that insures that the school systems of the Commonwealth express an equal respect for all citizens regardless of such differences as their sexual orientation.

 Mr. Pawlick is of the opinion that homosexuality is something against which our society needs to do battle; and he said so in a lengthy letter to all his fellow townspeople in Sherborn, at great length and at no small expense.

 Bless their hearts, the members of the Board of our church in Sherborn issued a thoughtful statement defending our denominational affirmation of persons of whatever sexual orientation or expression.

 Mr. Pawlick responded with an attack on the Board, the church’s minister, our movement, and on women, too, in another letter, almost as lengthy, sent to all residents of Wayland, Sudbury, Concord, Weston, and Wellesley.

 Any of us in leadership positions are left with the quandary of how to respond. At least one of my colleagues has decided the best route is to ignore Mr. Pawlick, lest one give him greater attention. At the opposite extreme are those who think his attacks should be publicly countered point by point.

 Your ministers here in Wayland, Kimi and I, have thought and talked about this matter at length, with much input from parishioners, all thoughtful and of differing advice. We still have a few hours to be convinced to change our course. But our plan for now is to do three things: First, we will submit a letter for this week’s town paper that says,

Dear friends,

 Many residents of Wayland and some surrounding towns received a twelve-page mailing last week from J. Edward Pawlick. In it, he continues his public attack on non-heterosexuals, and adds an attack on "Unitarians."

Both attacks are inaccurate and unfair. As Unitarian Universalist ministers, we can testify to numerous errors in Mr. Pawlick’s depiction of the religion of which we and the other members of the First Parish in Wayland are proud to be part.

But to the degree that his point is that our movement affirms ‘the inherent worth and dignity of every person’ – a phrase he deals with flippantly -- he is uncharacteristically correct. That is the first of our seven basic principles.

Reflecting that commitment, the First Parish in Wayland and other Unitarian Universalist congregations welcome gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons. And we promote justice, freedom, and equal treatment in the larger society for everyone.

And third, we will work with other Wayland clergy to produce a letter to the Crier/Tab that affirms the fact that while we may disagree on many issues, both theological and social, we respect each other for our sincerity and religious integrity, and deplore sectarian attacks of the sort in which Mr. Pawlick has engaged.

 I have also been asked to go a little farther and help people know how to rebut particular charges made by Mr. Pawlick. To that end, I will make myself especially easy to find at coffee hour by standing right in the middle of the room.

 Just a couple of the more common questions I can answer right now. The most disturbing seems to involve his claim that we show a sexually explicit film to our fifth graders. No, we don’t. There is a film strip that leaders can show in the course we have for youth and adults, as it may be helpful and appropriate; and for our youth, their parents know in advance that that’s a possibility.

  No, the response of the Sherborn church was not a violent attack on Mr. Pawlick, but a thoughtful attempt to respond to the crisis created by Pawlick’s first diatribe, which had been mailed town-wide. Copies of that statement are available downstairs.

 No, Unitarian Universalism did not ban God in 1933, we do not have a belief in atheistic socialism, and most of us get along just fine with most Orthodox Jews, Catholics, and Christians who study the Bible – people whom he says we attack. At one point, he headlines, "Unitarians Try to Silence Debate: Jews, Christians Attacked." But many of us are Jews and Christians! In fact, some of us are Christians who study the Bible.

 But I’m afraid that many of our Christians may not be of an acceptable sort to Mr. Pawlick. He thinks most of our Christian members "would probably respond that they believe that Jesus Christ was a wonderful human being, but not the Son of God." Of course, the choice is not that stark: one can think of Jesus as being other than uniquely the Son of God – as it would seem that Jesus did himself – and find him more than just wonderful, but a spiritual guide, a source of religious wisdom, and a model for living.

 As the Christian Holy Week begins, I thought I might lift up some of the values and lessons that seemed to matter most to Jesus, the things he might have most wanted the world to have learned from his efforts. At this point I will leave Mr. Pawlick behind, along with the thing that seems to matter most to him, attacking homosexuality. If Jesus ever said anything about homosexuality, no one bothered to remember it, although he did have some thoughts about being unkind. We’ll get to that in a moment.

 Now as the title gives away, when I first conceived this sermon, it was with the idea that I would have some fun with all the lists that have begun to float around as the century and the millennium head toward their ends. The list that seemed to draw the most attention there for a while was one that listed the 100 best novels ever written in English. This sparked a lot of debate, and several competitive lists. There were web sites you could go to on the Internet to comment on the original selections, or to vote in an open election.

 Personally, I found the discussion interesting, and the selections, too. Whereas the original scholarly panel had voted James Joyce’s Ulysses  number one, at least in the early voting the visitors to the on-line election preferred Dune, a work of science fiction, followed closely by all of Ayn Rand’s best sellers.

 One is reminded how many different worlds there are that people live in, even those who share a common interest, like reading; and how skewed a list can be, depending on who responds. The classic case happened two years ago when Time magazine solicited suggestions for whom they might include in special editions they were preparing to celebrate "the century’s outstanding figures in five broad categories."

 Somehow, the idea caught on big in Turkey, where residents responded as if it were a vote, or five votes, really, each giving them a chance to express by mail or Internet their high regard for Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, "the founder of modern Turkey." Before long, "results issued by Time showed Ataturk ahead in the ‘warriors and statesmen’ category with more than seven million votes. But," the story goes on, "Turks have been unwilling to stop there.

 "At various times during the campaign, Ataturk has led in every category. In the latest results he leads in just two. He narrowly leads Winston Churchill in votes for the century’s greatest statesman. And in the ‘heroes and adventurers’ category, he is far ahead of Nelson Mandela and the astronaut Yuri Gagarin.

 "The Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy is in fourth place, with more than 80,000 votes, suggesting that Turks are not the only ones having fun with the voting.

 "At one point Ataturk led Elvis, Madonna and Bob Dylan as the century’s greatest entertainer, was far ahead of Einstein and Marie Curie as the greatest scientist, and outpolled Henry Ford and Frank Lloyd Wright as the greatest among ‘builders and titans.’ He would probably still lead in those categories if editors at Time had not decided to move his votes into more reasonable categories." [New York Times, 11/28/97]

 I’ll only offer my favorite reading on this subject. It’s short. It’s the start of a column by one Jeff MacGregor. "Warning!" he writes. This is not a list. Nothing will be ordered, ranked or alphanumerically indexed. There will be no color-coding. No scales from 1 to 10. There might be an exploded 3-D pie chart or a Venn diagram somewhere toward the bottom; I haven’t decided yet. (As a concession, however, to those of you suffering from late-millennial list addiction, here: No. 17 – Fred Mertz, No. 18 – The Bay of Fundy, No. 19 – Pickled tongue.)" [New York Times, 8/9/98]

 But back to the question of Ulysses or Dune, Churchill or Ataturk – one is faced with a similar problem in naming what Jesus’ main points and concerns were – a lot depends on who’s doing the naming. The Bible is rich with various stories about Jesus, sayings by Jesus, reflections on him by others.

An argument can be made that what mattered most to Jesus was establishing that he was the Son of God, passing judgment on others, castigating religious leaders not part of his team, and pushing the notion that he was the only way to heaven. The fundamentalists’ Jesus really can be found in the Bible, even if it isn’t the Jesus I was taught about in Unitarian Sunday School.

That Jesus never believed he was a child of God any more than he thought that everyone is. My Sunday School Jesus was, well, a wonderful human being, who did wondrous good works, taught important attitudes toward life, and lived a life of dedication, caring, and courage. And that Jesus is right there in the Bible, too.

A nice thing has happened in the half century since I started Sunday School, or at least it seems nice to me: more and more, scholars are coming to think of my Sunday School Jesus as more real in a way than the other Jesus in the Bible, who they think was made up by his followers in the years after his death.

In his book, The Gospel According to Jesus, Stephen Mitchell refers to a "Jesus" in quotation marks, a creation of the early church, as distinct from Jesus, a person who lived once, whose life and teachings we can glimpse in the Bible, through the haze of later additions to the record. Mitchell is among a plethora of scholars at work on that project these days, trying to fashion their glimpses into coherent pictures.

So here is mine. The Jesus I think once walked the hills of Galilee, healing and preaching, and then went to his death in Jerusalem, would like it if the world heard him make these ten points:

10 - Be like a child, a fortunate child, in one of his or her better moments. (Remember, Jesus was never a parent.) Be like a child, trusting, playful, open, present, and alert to the wonder of life. [Mitchell 230]
9 - Our mission in life is to serve the needs of those whom we can help, even if it strains our patience. It strained Jesus’ at times. But he went on using the special gift he had to alleviate illness.
8 - he offered on Holy Week by his example: You have to do what you have to do. And sometimes it is not what you’d want, but what are you going to do? Chicken out? Skedaddle back to Capernaum? Sometimes one’s lot is hard to accept; but as best you can, you have got to try to bear it.
7 - What matters is not what one professes, but what one does.
6 - Live a simple, humble life. Don’t become attached to your wealth – better you should give it away. Trust in God to provide. Don’t worry, be happy. Let go of your ego, and your selfish desires. You have what you really need, and you always will. And when you pray, keep that simple, too.
5 - Don’t pass judgment. Who are any of us so righteous as to condemn another? Instead, forgive. Over and over and over, forgive.
4 - Know that you are loved by God, loved as you would be by an infinitely good, infinitely forgiving father. I won’t go into the details, but Stephen Mitchell is captivated by this emphasis of Jesus’, which he thinks is the result of Jesus’ longing for the father he never had, growing up as an so-called illegitimate child at a time when the stigma of it would have been high. For Mitchell, the very center of Jesus’ teaching is the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and the message that there is a father who welcomes the outcast without hesitation. That is God for Jesus, who begins his famous prayer, not really "Our Father," but literally, "Daddy."
Mitchell also thinks Jesus’ conflicted feelings about his mother contributed to one of Jesus’ more persistent points, a point one hesitates to put on the Top Ten list, though, except as an afterthought: for Jesus, your real family is your spiritual community, your actual family is a drag. Not all of Jesus’ Top Ten are points we have to like.
3 - Be good to everyone, even your enemies. I know, it’s said that Jesus could get into name-calling, table-turning, and the like. But is there any message more startling, more counterintuitive, or more memorable than this one? Be good to your enemies. In fact, comply with them, offer them all that they ask for and more. Never oppose evil with evil, but with non-violent, persistent love. From his lips to the ears of Thoreau, Ghandi,  and Martin Luther King, few of Jesus’ messages have reverberated more powerfully.
2 - The Kingdom of God is already here. All who know that already know they are part of it, as the rest of us could be, once we realize it. As Nietzsche said, "the good news" is that "true life, eternal life, has been found – it is not something promised, it is already here, it is within you: as life lived in love…."
And finally, #1, the Golden Rule, which occurs in some form in nearly all religions, concisely rendered by Jesus as, "whatever you want others to do to you, do to them." Good Jew that he was, Jesus knew that this was part of the most basic religious demand: to love God and love your neighbor, your neighbor being anyone else, even a stranger, even someone as disliked as a Samaritan was in his time and place. "This is the essence of the Law and the prophets," he said; "whatever you want others to do to you, do to them."

This week held special in Christian tradition, may the richness of Jesus’ religious insight echo for us anew. Amen.
 

Addendum
The letter to the Crier/Tab as it was actually submitted, following further discussion and suggestions from parishioners:

Dear friends,

 Many residents of Wayland and some surrounding towns received a twelve-page mailing last week. In it, the author attacks non-heterosexuals, Unitarians Universalists, the United Church of Christ, and women.  The attacks are inaccurate, unfair, and mean-spirited in tone.

As Unitarian Universalist ministers, we are proud that our movement affirms "the inherent worth and dignity of every person." It is the first of our seven basic principles. As a reflection of that commitment, our congregations strive to promote justice, freedom, and fair, equal treatment for all people, including those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.

We have been very saddened by the hurt the letter has caused in our community. But we have been heartened by the many expressions of dismay we have heard. It is a dismay we deeply feel, too.

    The Rev. Ken Sawyer
    The Rev. Kimi Riegel
    Ministers, The First Parish in Wayland
    (Unitarian Universalist)

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