I have excerpts from two sermons for us this week. In December 1961, Rev. David Harris Cole, who served us from 1959-1963, preached on The Religion of Humanism. A decade later, in April 1971, Rev. W. Edward Harris (1970-1983) told us about The Seven Deadly Sins of Liberalism. What ties these sermons together for me is the emphasis each minister placed on our responsibility to each other.

I’ve discovered through my spelunking in our archives that Unitarian Universalist ministers often can be counted on to give us history lessons from the pulpit. Rev. Cole trots through a history of Humanism that includes Confucious, ancient Greece, and the Renaissance. He believed that the 19th Century “got over-enthusiastic about the goodness of man” but gave it points for applying the scientific method to biblical scholarship. The 19th Century also ushered in reform movements in religion that are particularly important for our church – William Ellery Channing and John Murray. The reformists, he said, “preached that God was not a capricious creature arbitrarily ruling the Universe and Jesus was seen as a human being subject to the same natural laws as all people.” 

Many people, Rev. Cole preached, struggled with the “discoveries which science has brought to us concerning the nature of man and the Universe. Many will have been brought up in naïve churches where the light of modern science did not penetrate the stain-glass windows. Suddenly, the light dawns and the old Gods crumble. You begin to wonder what is man and his destiny and the old theories no longer seem valid.” 

Like every good shepherd, Rev. Cole brought comfort to his flock then. He told them about Stephen Crane’s story “The Open Boat.” There’s a shipwreck and “cruelly indifferent monstrous waves.” Against “this towering menace,” the four men in the boat “experience a poignancy of comradeship,” and against “the cosmic chill” they draw together as allies with common needs, sympathy, and relatedness. The men in the boat say, “If there is no help outside, then let us help each other.”   

                                                                                                                                                                     

If Rev. Cole was, to my way of thinking, a traditional Teach ‘em and Preach ‘em pastor, Rev. Harris was an outspoken advocate of Church Action. He wanted his congregation to stand for something. There were vital social issues and he did not believe that religion should stand outside that. He said, “I believe that a church – even one as diverse and individualistic as ours – has important and prophetic statements to make in the society as an advocate for change. This means embracing causes, engaging volatile and potentially divisive issues, and coming to some appropriate resolution and action on these issues.”

Rev. Harris then discussed a few issues that were current in his time: child care centers, government surveillance, data collection, apartheid, religion in schools, the war in Vietnam – and specifically the My Lai massacre, Lt. Calley’s conviction, and conscientious objectors. Regarding Civil Rights and Black churches, he said that “Dr. King changed everything. The churches got busy, they became engines for social change, and that was a great contribution, for in the process, he changed people.”

Believing that churches had a “responsibility to take social actions, to speak out, to act,” he proposed that our church create “a social responsibility committee.” The committee would “develop a process for our dealing with social issues so that we might be informed and have the opportunity to vote and take appropriate action thereon.” Rev. Harris seemed concerned that preserving the rights of individuals and safeguarding the rights of dissenting groups would be difficult, but he wanted to give it a try. “Other churches have been able to do so, without great harm to their unity and spiritual life.”