First Parish Sermon Archive

What a mixed lot we humans are, what a vast array of accomplishments, some admirable, some despicable, some poignant, some amusing. Of course the evidence of that is around us all the time, but paying attention to lives as they end brings it home to me, especially when I bundle ended lives together for a year.

Thus my usual method on this Memorial Day weekend Sunday combines Alexander Solzhenitsyn, arguably the most serious person of the last century, responsible for bringing the outrages of Joseph Stalin’s murderous regime in the Soviet Union to light, then taking his new country, the U.S., sternly to task for our own materialistic failures; with Bettie Page, a conventional young woman in the early ‘50s but for her views about the natural beauty of the human body and her willingness to display her own in pin-up photos that were enormously popular. A movie was recently made of her unusual story. There may have been one made of Solzhenitsyn’s story as well, but if so, it has been less publicized.

Those here for this particular yearly Sunday for the first time should be warned, I have a couple fields of interest to which I pay special, maybe inexcusable interest. One of particular notoriety is that of innovators, entrepreneurs, and others who have added aspects to our daily lives that are so commonplace by now we could forget that somebody invented them. An immigrant from Japan, Rocky Aoki took $10,000 he had made as a young man in the early ‘60s selling ice cream out of a truck and created the first of his many Benihana restaurants, which introduced not only Japanese food to the American market, but also the idea of dining as theater, with customers watching as chefs in dramatic fashion prepared meals before their eyes.

There was a time - I know, because I was there - when children did not watch TV much, even after it had been invented. Few families owned one in the early 1950s. But in 1947 Roger Muir helped create and produced “The Howdy Doody Show,” “perhaps the primary attraction [it has been said (NYTimes)] that brought baby-boomer children in from their after-school play….” That, and Hopalong Cassidy.

I have a few more of that sort, and then some of more serious accomplishment. The first I will pass over briefly. Jack Cover invented the Taser stun gun, which shoots electrified darts and is valued in law enforcement, although Amnesty International says at least 334 people have been killed thereby.

On a happier note, there were some classics of the rags to riches story, like Jack Simplot, “a billionaire who grew up in a sod-roofed cabin [in Idaho],” I read, “dropped out of school at 14, then marshaled luck, spunk, and inventiveness to fashion an entrepreneurial career that included inventing the first commercial frozen French fry,” which he contracted to sell to the new McDonald’s chain.

Steve Bernard did not start poor. He was a Notre Dame graduate, but he bounced around at various jobs all over the place, most recently installing sun roofs in cars, when at 33, despite having no experience in the field, he founded Cape Cod chips - a product that competed with Pringles potato chip crisps, whose inventor [Frederic Baur] also died, some of his ashes, at his request, being buried in a Pringles can.

The wealthier or more fashionable among us may have noted with interest the death of the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and of Earl Eaton, who was the backwoodsman who in his wanderings recognized the potential of the land in Colorado where he co-founded the ski resort at Vail.

Two innovators of loftier accomplishments, if you will: I mean, how can one not pay great honor to Michael DeBakey, whom many consider, said the Journal of the AMA, “the greatest surgeon ever,” especially for his advances and successes with heart and blood vessel operations. It matters, a lot.

It has also mattered to more than a million people in 300,000 families in 100 countries that they have good housing thanks to Habitat for Humanity, founded by Millard Fuller, whom Jimmy Carter called “one of the most extraordinary people I have known.” One of the ministers who spoke from this pulpit during my sabbatical encouraged people to live “lives that matter” in a way that took hold in some hearts. It is not just Fuller who achieved that, but also those whom his organization enabled, as do our Interfaith Hospitality Network, the several other First Parish social outreach programs, and the other agencies and causes that you are or may be involved in. Fuller’s life, an expression of his own religious faith, stands as a model.

Oh, and the creator of Thomas the Tank Engine, star of the TV show long beloved by children, died, David Mitton.

As always, I am very grateful to Polly Oliver, our music director, for her creative use of the opportunity to use works by people who have died, as well as to the choir and our soloists. To me, the beauty and the quirkiness of the morning’s music are a high point in our worship year. I say that even though the service only allows for a limited number of the possibilities, which I will name more of, knowing that, as the playwright Ben Hecht once said, “Old songs are more than tunes. They are little houses in which our hearts once lived.” [The New Yorker, 7/12&19/2004, 104]

Dennis Yost was lead singer on “Stormy,” “Spooky,” and “Traces of Love” for the Classics IV. The Four Tops were a huge act in the ‘60s with hit after hit like “I Can’t Help Myself [Sugar Pie Honey Bunch],” and “It’s the Same Old Song.” Don Helms was the steel guitar on Hank Williams’ country hits, and Jack Lawrence wrote “If I Didn’t Care” and the words to “Beyond the Sea.” Also gone are the lead singer on “Rama Lama Ding Dong” [George Jones], the man who wrote “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” [Robert Hazard], and jazz greats Isaac Hayes and Jimmy McGriff.

Molly Bee and Jimmy Boyd both died. Both had a big, big hit in 1952 - he at 12, she at 13 — with “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” It has been said that the now-late Earle Hagen “may be the most idly hummed composer of all time, at least among the baby-boom generation of television viewers who grew up in the 1960s,” his having written the theme songs to many of the most popular shows, like “The Andy Griffith Show,” “Mod Squad,” and “The Dukes of Hazard.”

Eartha Kitt? I doubt I can convey her fiercely seductive singing talent combined with the power of her political commitment. In 1968 at a White House luncheon the first lady asked her about the war in Viet Nam and her response - “You send the best of the country off to be shot and maimed. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot” - caused Lady Bird Johnson to cry and Kitt’s bookings in the States to so decline that she worked in Europe for a decade until Jimmy Carter invited her back to the White House and her Broadway career blossomed, along with her cabaret work.

Just as powerful as singers for justice were Odetta, in important ways the musical voice of the civil rights movement; and the great South African foe of apartheid, Miriam Makeba.

And then there was Bob Diddley, one of the founders of rock and roll, beginning in 1955. Born Ellas Bates, Mr. Diddley, noted Newsweek, “just radiated strange. But a good kind of strange….” He had an attitude, and a frenetic stage presence, and a powerful beat that influenced much of the music that followed.

MUSIC: “Bo Diddley”

Many screenwriters and playwrights died this year, like Horton Foote, who turned To Kill a Mockingbird into a movie script, and among other scripts wrote the fine movie “Tender Mercies,” one of the best and most respectful depictions of Christian religious life. Robert Anderson wrote “Tea and Sympathy” and its famous last line, as the headmaster’s wife is about to go to bed with the troubled student who lives with them, “Years from now … when you talk about this … and you will … be kind.”

A speech also famous has just six letters. It comes toward the end of William Gibson’s television play, “The Miracle Worker.” Helen Keller’s teacher, Annie Sullivan, has been trying to get Keller, who is blind and deaf, to understand language, the letters Annie makes on her hand. There is high drama leading to Annie’s making Helen pump water, some of which splashes onto Helen’s hand, while “Annie does what she has done so many times before, spells into Helen’s free palm. [I'm quoting now from the script.]

“‘Water,’ Annie says as she writes. ‘W, a, t, e, r. Water, it has a -‘

“[And now the miracle happens," writes Gibson. "We have moved close to HELEN'S face, and we see it change, startled, some light coming into it we have never seen there, some struggle in the depths behind it; and her lips tremble, trying to remember something the muscles around them once knew, till at last it finds its way out, painfully, a baby sound buried under the debris of years of dumbness.]

“HELEN: ‘Wah. Wah.’”

And next thing you know she’s doing word after word.

Dale Wasserman died. A former hobo, he wrote “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Man of La Mancha.” And most famously, Harold Pinter, known for [and I quote] “the undertow of danger that pervades his work,” the human existential fear at the core of his work, and his stage direction, “Pause,” as the dialog often did.

It is my custom on these yearly Sundays to put all my clippings on a table downstairs so you can find out more yourself about anyone whose name is about to flash by in passing because there are only so many minutes in an hour. In the world of entertainment, deaths included Dick Martin of Rowan and Martin; actors Natasha Richardson, Nina Foch, Ricardo Montalban, Patrick McGoohan of “The Prisoner” series, Harvey Corman, and of course Paul Newman; director and actor Sydney Pollack; dancer Cyd Charisse; and comedian George Carlin.

Names of the departed familiar to sports fans include Sammy Baugh in football; Preacher Roe, Herb Score, and Bobby Murcer in baseball; and Ingemar Johanson of Sweden, who was, for a time, against all odds, heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

Political figures include broadcaster Tim Russert and Paul Harvey, an unlikely pairing; Deep Throat Mark Felt; commentator and press secretary Tony Snow; political scientist Samuel Huntington; and Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell. And Jesse Helms. Of Russert, William Kristol wrote, “He died too young. But he lived more than a full life - a life overflowing with achievements, and friendships, and love, and joy.” Not bad. Conservative Paul Harvey’s most memorable moment came in 1970 when on the air he withdrew his support for the war in Viet Nam and urged Nixon to withdraw our troops, saying, “Mr. President, I love you, but you’re wrong.”

Ruth Greenglass died. She was married to Ethel Rosenberg’s brother. Faced with possible prosecution for her involvement in the spying that her husband and Ethel’s husband were up to sixty years ago, she testified that it was Ethel who took dictation of notes about America’s atomic weapons program from Ruth’s husband. Her husband agreed on the stand, and Ethel was convicted and executed. Years later, though, Ruth’s husband said in the course of lengthy interviews, “I frankly think my wife did the typing, but I don’t remember. I seldom use the word ‘sister’ any more; I’ve just wiped it out of my mind. My wife put her into it. So what am I going to do, call my wife a liar? My wife is my wife.” Chilling.

Among writers who died were Michael Crichton of Jurassic Park fame; the monumental Solzhenitsyn, whose death notice in The New York Times ran more than two full pages, which may be a record; and the social historian, premier interviewer, and voice of the underdog, Studs Terkel, creator of books like Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About It. In a memoir he wrote two years ago, at 94, Terkel wrote, “My curiosity keeps me going. My epitaph is all set: ‘Curiosity did not kill this cat.’ I took a vacation once - it involved a beach - and to tell you the truth, I had no idea what to do with it. It was torture. Work is life. Without it, there is no life.” And work he did, although his leftist political activities got him blacklisted from TV during the early ‘50s and he went back to radio.

When his friends gathered after his death, they hailed him for teaching “America how to listen and understand the unpretentious and the unpolished.” Howard Zinn said, ‘The pages of history are cluttered with the pronouncements of presidents and military heroes…. Studs brought people back into the pages of history, people with feelings, people with anguish and their joys….He was always concerned with what he called the “et cetera” of history. The people left out.’”

Other writers who died were Randy Pausch of The Last Lecture; Hortense Calisher; and Tony Hillerman, whose mystery novels set in the American Southwest demonstrated over and again that an outsider can write about cultures, like those of American Indians, in ways that are respectful and informative, designed to instill the same respect for native ways that he felt.

I usually note whose passing generated the most press, which may have been Solzhenitsyn, but two of the three other contenders, along with Paul Newman, were the writers John Updike and David Foster Wallace, although Wallace picked up extra pages in my collection from the alumni magazine of Amherst College, which we both attended. The Times ran a follow-up piece on him titled, “The Best Mind of His Generation.” There was additional attention because he committed suicide at 46, after having struggled long and hard with anxiety and depression. He is best known for writing the innovative novel Infinite Jest.

John Updike was best known for writing almost everything under the sun, criticism, novels galore of several sorts, essays, poetry. He is the only person on the list today I encountered in person on occasion, at Symphony Hall or the Museum of Fine Arts, down from his home on the North Shore. And a nice thing was, as distinctive as his features were, I never saw anyone bother him at all.

There is one more person I still want to mention in much more than just name, skipping ahead regrettably over the indomitable anti-apartheid crusader Helen Suzman, indomitable being the word of praise of her ally Desmond Tutu; artist Andrew Wyeth; Mr. Blackwell; Sonny von Bulow, after 28 years in a coma; and the Scottish immigrant Presbyterian minister [George Docherty] who got Congress to add “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 because, he said, back in Scotland they said “God save our gracious queen,” but God wasn’t in the pledge at all, as I would prefer; or Richard John Neuhaus, Lutheran pastor turned Catholic priest, who in 1994 along with Chuck Colson managed to forge an alliance between conservative Protestant and Catholic leaders to work together for conservative political goals.

But the one person I want to talk about more is the other figure from the world of religion who died this year, at 95, the multibillionaire John Templeton. To quote his death notice, “In a career that spanned seven decades, Mr. Templeton dazzled Wall Street, organized some of the most successful mutual funds of his time, led investors into foreign markets, established charities that gave away $70 million a year, wrote books on finance and spirituality and promoted a search for answers to what he called the ‘Big Questions’ in the realms of science, faith, God and the purpose of humanity.

“Along the way, he became one of the world’s richest men … and bestowed much of his fortune on spiritual thinkers and innovators: Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the physicist Freeman Dyson, the philosopher Charles Taylor and an array of prominent Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus.” [N.Y.Times]

He set up a foundation that “awards the Templeton Prize, one of the world’s richest, and sponsors conferences and studies reflecting the founder’s passionate interest in ‘progress in religion’ and ‘research or discoveries’ on the nebulous borders between science and religion.”

He was the first person from his home town in Tennessee to attend college, working his way through Yale during the Depression; won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford; earned a masters degree in law; and started work on Wall Street in 1937 at 24. Two years later, the year war broke out in Europe and the economy here had still not recovered, Templeton borrowed $10,000 and bought shares in 104 companies that were all selling for under a dollar. Thirty-four were in bankruptcy. “A few years later he made large profits on 100 of the companies; four turned out to be worthless.”

He bought a small investment firm, later established a growth fund in Canada, pioneered in foreign investments, and became very rich. In 1992 he sold all his funds and “turned to philanthropies that had interested him for decades. While he was an elder in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), he took a broad view of spirituality, espousing nonliteral views of heaven and hell and a shared divinity between humanity and God.”

Noting that there was no Nobel Prize for religion, he created his own, run by his foundation, which also allocates funds for “‘projects to apply scientific methodology to the study of religious subjects,’ with room for theoretical physics; evolutionary biology; cognitive science; and research into love, human purpose and the nature and origin of religious beliefs.”

Well, for a religion like ours that has never believed that science was an enemy or incompatible with spiritual health, even if the relationship can get skewed sometimes in one direction or the other, skeptically reductionist or credulously uncritical, Templeton’s efforts seem cause for interest and maybe hope. And those efforts have always seemed to me, the ones that I’ve read of or seen, to be open-minded and fair, which means they often present views I disagree with totally, but always in league with people with views like my own. Good for John.

And so you have it, this year’s as-ever-odd expression of our human capacity for all manner of living, bold, timid, enlightened, ignorant, virtuous and venal. May the best in us be inspired to carry the day in our own lives. Amen.