First Parish Sermon Archive

“REMEMBERING”

MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND SUNDAY

 

At the First Parish in Wayland

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

On May 30, 2010

 

For many a year, I have taken this Sunday, the day before Memorial Day, to remember some of the people who have died since the last such service whose departure should not go without notice taken.

 

 People in the entertainment business who died were so numerous I put their death notices on a table downstairs for folks to look through. I have done that before. Other times, I have read the names, and some people said they appreciated it. But I was talking about this service with one of you this week and the subject of the choral response being “See You Later, Alligator” came up. She had never heard of it. But it was a cultural phenomenon when it came out! Still, that was 1956, when rock and roll was new. It was so new, it still featured hits by middle-aged white guys like Bill Haley and the Comets — although by then, times had changed since the group’s first hits a few years earlier (“Rock Around the Clock” and “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”). Now there was Elvis, who did not sing in a plaid dinner jacket, as the Comets all did.

 

I realized that if you had to be at least six at the time to remember the song at all, you are now at least in your 60s. And most of you are not. So you may not be overly interested – you may be, but probably not — in hearing if Peter Graves, June Havoc, Gale Storm, Dale Hawkins, Al Martino, or one of the King Sisters died. They all did. You may not even care about Fess Parker – heck, you probably never wore a coonskin cap so you could also pretend to be Davy Crockett. When you were thirteen years old, your epitome of female beauty probably was not Jean Simmons.  

 

But maybe you remember the impact of “Maude” on TV, with Bea Arthur as a loud and liberated liberal in a sit com that took on topical issues. Or the impact of Mary Travers in Peter, Paul and Mary, and then as a solo performer still committed to progressive social causes. The group had hit after hit, numerous successful albums, appearances galore, combining a bohemian appearance, great harmonies, and songs that ranged from “If I Had a Hammer” or “The Great Mandela” to “Puff, the Magic Dragon.”

 

And it would be hard not to notice the role Lena Horne played for decade after decade in triumphing despite the obstacles for a woman of color in the worlds of music and the movies. When she finally got a major movie role in 1943, it was in an all-black musical, “Stormy Weather.” In films that followed, she was allowed to sing a song or two in scenes that could be cut for showing in the south. But she persevered, and in 1981 she began a 14-month run on Broadway in a critically-praised one-woman show.

 

Two final music people, if you will indulge me. Ellie Greenwich died. She co-wrote more pop hits from the early ’60s than you can imagine (“Chapel of Love,” “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy,” “Why Do Lovers Break Each Others Hearts,” “Be My Baby,” “Leader of the Pack,” “I Wanna Love Him So Bad,” “River Deep, Mountain High,” “Then He Kissed Me,” and “He’s the Kind of Boy You Can’t Forget”).

 

And Kate McGarrigle died, who with her sister Anna were about the most wonderful singers in creation, excepting our choir, of course. They were joined eventually by Kate’s children, Rufus and Martha Wainwright. We once heard Kate and Anna perform in a clubby setting in Westborough, sitting only a few yards away. It was absolutely the best.

 

Back to Lena Horne, though, and the struggle for racial justice in this land. Thank goodness for the likes of her and of Benjamin Hooks, longtime leader of the NAACP; and Dorothy Height, “a leader in the African-American and women’s rights movements who was considered both the grande dame of the civil rights era and its unsung heroine….”[1] Charles Moore bravely took the photos that helped America see the brutality of the attacks on demonstrators for civil rights. William Wayne Justice, a district judge in Texas, forced the integration of state schools there.

 

Hooks was a Baptist minister and always preached in a church on Sunday morning, wherever he was. So it was not surprising last July when at the 100^th anniversary of the NAACP he said, “Let’s fight on until justice runs down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream. Let’s fight on until there is no downsizing, until there is no glass ceiling. Let’s fight on until God shall gather the four winds of heaven; until the angel shall plant one foot on the sea and the other on dry land and declare that the time that has been will be no more.

 

“Fight on, until the lion shall lie down with the lamb. Fight on, until justice, righteousness, hopes, equality and opportunity is the birthright of all Americans.”[2]

 

Those who served the cause of justice and mercy abroad included Miep Gies, one of those who sheltered Anne Frank and her family during the German occupation of the  Netherlands; and Heinz Stahlschmidt, a German officer ordered to blow up Bordeaux in 1944, but who, “acting according to his Christian conscience,” he said, instead blew up the bunker with the stockpiled explosives.

 

There are others here at home, too, and not time to tell of the radical writer Howard Zinn or the real-life union organizer portrayed in the movies as Norma Rae. But I will not leave politics without telling you something about Walter Cronkite you will not hear anywhere else.

 

The obituaries all noted that as a newscaster, Cronkite was known as the most trusted person in America. The country at large began questioning the Vietnam War when Cronkite did. The country knew Watergate was to be taken seriously when Cronkite did so.

 

But the obituaries did not note that “as a boy, Cronkite was part of the Unitarian Church in Houston…. His father was one of the leaders of the congregation. It met in a hotel ballroom. Walter’s task was to set up chairs.”[3]

 

Veterans of this service know I indulge my fascination with the innovators, discoverers, makers and others who created things we might take for granted. You would think by now I had named every one of them in previous years, so numerous they have been already.

 

But in the last twelve months among those who died were those who founded Boston Market, formerly Boston Chicken, started nearby in Newtonville [Arthur Cores]; the Price Club, founded by … Sam Price; the Gap [Don Fisher]; EMC Storage [Richard Egan]; the Weather Channel [Frank Batten, Jr]; the ATM [John Shepherd-Barron]; the Chipwich Ice Cream Sandwich [Ricard LaMotta]; and the Vermont Country Store [Mildred Orton, who died at 99].

 

Sylvia Schur oversaw the creation of Clamato, Cran-Apple juice, and Metrecal. John Houghtaling invented the Magic Fingers bed. Elmer Winter co-founded Manpower Temp Agency. There were people who played major roles in creating the suburban shopping mall [Melvin Simon]; planned cities like Reston, Maryland [James Rossant]; the lubricant WD-40 [John Barry]; and SpeghettiOs [Donald Goerke].

 

People died who popularized the Steak and Ale, Bennigan’s, and Chili chains — all one person [Norman Brinker]; Sonic drive-ins [Troy Smith]; and Taco Bell [Glen Bell, Jr.]. People died who invented the trampoline [George Nissen], created Elderhostel, modernized and popularized the pop-up book, or was one of the two who first parachuted together to fight a forest fire.

 

And on the lighter side, what a year: the animator who created Gumbo; another claimant to authorship of the song, the Hokey Pokey [Robert Degen]; a co-creator of Woodsy Owl, who encouraged children to “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute,” developed for the Forest Service for the first Earth Day [Harold Bell]; and two giants in the field, right up there with the inventors of the hula hoop and Silly Putty.

 

Fred Morrison is widely credited as having designed the first commercial flying disc expressly manufactured and marketed as such [New York Times] – which is to say, the Pluto Platter, or, as it came to be known, the Frisbee.

 

But Curtis Allina received as much attention when he died – after all, it was he who, in the words of one obituary headline, “Put the Heads on Pez” which had been “an austerely packaged Austrian confectionary for adults [one that] took on vibrant new life as a children’s product.” [New York Times].

 

And then there were two innovators whose accomplishments were of serious importance: the agronomist Norman Borlaug and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who founded and nurtured the Special Olympics as part of her longtime devotion to the wellbeing of mentally retarded and otherwise developmentally challenged people. Her brother Ted Kennedy said in 2007, “You talk about an agent of change – she is it. If the test is what you’re doing that’s been helpful for humanity, you’d be hard pressed to find another member of the family who’s done more.”

 

Ted Kennedy himself died this year, but you probably already know that. Likewise the singer Michael Jackson – there’s not much I have to add to the talk about them, except to note in passing that they had in common lives of great accomplishment mixed with serious foibles. 

 

But back to Kennedy’s test, what a person does that is helpful for humanity, it is hard to top Norman Borlaug, who, it is said, “did more than anyone else in the 20^th century to teach the world to feed itself and whose work is credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives.” His “advances in plant breeding” – creating disease- and weather-resistant crops – “led to spectacular success in increasing food production in Latin American and Asia and brought him international acclaim. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” On Penn and Teller’s TV show, Penn Jillette described Borlaug – whom he has also said is his “biggest hero on the planet” – as “the greatest man who ever lived.”

 

Writers who died included David Foster Wallace, Thomas Disch, Milton Meltzer, Dick Francis, Louis Auchincloss, Erich Segal, Frank McCort, Robert Parker (whom I’ve been listening to in the car), Larry Gelbart, the economist Paul Samuelson, the anthropologist Clause Levi-Strauss, the literary scholar Richard Poirier (whose hero was Emerson for his self-contradictory “twistings and turnings”[4]) J. D. Salinger, and John Updike. And Forrester Church – I’ll get to him later.

 

I wonder if there is a book that more of us have read than Salinger’s Catcher in Rye, maybe more than once, probably not for many years. There is a coffee hour conversation to have.

 

I will spare you yet another reading of my favorite Updike poem, “A Pear like a Potato.” Instead, I offer another of his shorter poems, apropos although inaccurate:

            It came to me the other day

            Were I to die, no one would say,

            “Oh, what a shame! So young, so full

            Of promise – depths unplumbable!”

            Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes

            Will greet my overdue demise;

            The wide response will be, I know,

            “I thought he died a while ago.”

            For life’s a shabby subterfuge,

            And death is real, and dark, and huge.

            The shock of it will register

            Nowhere but where it will occur.

 

A danger for me in preparing for this service was, getting hooked on the innumerable books by the mathematician Martin Gardner, many of them collections of his monthly columns in the Scientific American magazine, but also puzzles; magic tricks; novels; annotated versions of such diverse works as “The Ancient Mariner,” Alice in Wonderland, “The Night Before Christmas” and “Casey at the Bat”; refutations of fads and pseudoscience; and others. Just in the last ten years he wrote 13 books, the last two last year; he was 94. Stephen Jay Gould once called him “the single brightest beacon defending rationality and good science against the mysticism and anti-intellectualism that surround us.”[5]

 

He loved paradoxes. The nature of time, too, and the implications – theoretical, of course – of a machine that could enable travel backwards or ahead in time. I will offer just one of the paradoxes, because I love the final line in it. One Saturday, a man is sentenced to be hanged. The judge says, “The hanging will take place at noon on one of the seven days of next week. But you will not know which day until you are so informed on the day of the hanging.” Back in his cell, the prisoner is told by his smiling lawyer, “The judge’s sentence cannot possibly be carried out…. They can’t hang you next Saturday. Saturday is the last day of the week. On Friday afternoon you would still be alive and you would know with absolute certainty that the hanging would be on Saturday. You would know that before you were told on Saturday morning. That would violate the judge’s decree…. This leaves Friday as the last day they can hang you. But they can’t hang you on Friday because by Thursday afternoon only two days remain: Friday and Saturday. Since Saturday is not a possible day, the hanging would have to be on Friday. Your knowledge of that fact would violate the judge’s decree again. So Friday is out. That leaves Thursday” and so forth until it is clear that the hanging cannot happen.

 

Three authors included the paradox in their writing, but one Michael Scrivner proved them wrong. He proposed that “’on Thursday morning, to [the prisoner’s] great surprise, the hangman arrives. Clearly he did not expect him…. The judge’s decree is now seen to be perfectly correct… ‘I think this flavour of logic refuted by the world makes the paradox rather fascinating,’ writes Scrivner. ‘The logician goes pathetically through the motions that have always worked the spell before, but somehow the monster, Reality, has missed the point and advances still.’”[6]

 

How often that is. The point sounds almost theological and makes a nice bridge into my final field of interest, the world of religion, whose representatives in this service are more numerous than ever: Oral Roberts, Rev. Ike, Mary Daley, Nancy Eiesland, Moishe Rosen, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, and the afore-mentioned Forrester Church.

 

Rosen founded Jews for Jesus back in 1973. Eiesland wrote The Disabled God, propounding a groundbreaking theology of disability.

 

Elizabeth Clare Prophet was the founder and leader of the Church Universal and Triumphant, which once had a membership in the tens of thousands. She wrote many books, still in print, published by the printing arm of Summit University, which she founded in Santa Barbara in 1973. The religion had its own ceremonies, sacraments, and beliefs that drew from Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Theosophy and relied on divine messages from “Ascended Masters, a pantheon of mystic saints and sages….”

 

She came to national attention in the late 1980s when several thousand of her followers gathered at a compound in Montana in response to Prophet’s warnings of an impending nuclear attack by the Soviet Union on the United States. “There they began stockpiling weapons, food and clothing in underground bomb shelters.

 

“Mounting tensions with local residents subsided when the predicted attack did not occur, and church members began returning home. At the same time, a looming face-off with the United States government was averted when church leaders agreed not to store weapons in return for a reinstatement of the church’s tax exempt status, which had been revoked in 1987.”[7]

 

I have a special fondness for this story because Ms. Prophet grew up as Betty Clare Wulf on quiet little South Street in Red Bank, New Jersey, right down the street from my wife Carol. Betty Clare played softball in Carol’s back yard. They couldn’t in play in Betty Clare’s back yard because of Betty Clare’s father’s elaborate system of coy ponds.

 

Rev. Ike built a large congregation in New York and a national TV audience with the message that money is a good thing, get lots of it, and send lots to me. Oral Roberts had an even larger audience for his faith healing services, plus a university.

 

And then there was Mary Daly, a self-described post-Christian, radical, lesbian feminist theologian, who said things like, “I hate the Bible. I always have.” She taught theology at Boston College which, being a Catholic school, decided not to give her tenure in 1968, but gave in after 1500 students signed a petition supporting her. After B.C. went co-ed, she wouldn’t let men in her classes, which was controversial, like when she give a talk at UUA General Assembly in the early ‘70s and took questions and comments only from women. No one spoke her mind as forcefully or clearly as Mary Daly, or called more attention to the oppression of women in Christianity, her own Catholic background in particular.

 

Which lets me close with Forrest Church, my one UU ministerial colleague who will ever rate a big obituary in the New York Times, complete with a photo of him in his robe, presumably addressing the congregation, his hands outstretched. Forrest was minister of All Souls church in Manhattan for just over thirty years, during which time Sunday attendance went from a hundred to over a thousand, and the congregation added one social service project after another. All the while he turned out about a book a year, good ones, about history, theology, life, death, and one about his father, former Idaho Senator Frank Church. Forrest died of cancer at 61, after years of such reversals of fortune that five times he gave what he believed would be his last sermon.

 

He had a few key ideas he repeated over and over. The best-known is, “Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. We are not the animal with tools or the animal with language, we are the religious animal,. We know we must die, and therefore question what life means”[8] “while attempting to create meaning in it.”[9]

He said his religious philosophy was simple: “Do what you can, want what you have, and be who you are.”[10] (One has to concede that Forrest did not always take his own advice, and caused a scandal when he and a married parishioner left their respective spouses to be married, as the Times duly recorded.)

 

Forrest was determined to defend the word “liberal,” as in the title to his book, God and Other Famous Liberals. One of you gave me an interview in which he asserted he was not only a liberal, but an evangelical liberal, saying that was “A person who preaches the Good News that people are being saved, the good news of hope, forgiveness, and service to the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden – as opposed to those who preach the bad news of judgment and punishment to people who happen to be of a different sexual orientation or happen to be … on the political left-wing.” Asked then how he defined “liberal,” Forrest said it means “open-minded, generous-spirited, kindhearted and openhanded.”

 

I had words I thought would go well as the benediction today. But then I came upon the benediction Forrest used every week in New York*, so I’ll use that, even if Forrest was more theistic than I, although in a liberal way. “God is not God’s name,” he wrote. “God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each.”[11]

 

At the end of his book Love and Death: My Journey through the Valley of the Shadow, Forrest addresses his reader and bids us farewell. “Go forth into this fragile, blessed world we share with laughter and tears at the ready. Love, work, and serve to a fare-thee-well. And then, when your own time comes, let go. Let go for dear life.”[12]

 

So may it be. Amen.    

 

 

 

 

 

*And now in our going may God bless and keep us,

May the light of God shine upon us and out from within us

And be gracious unto us and bring us peace.

For this is the day we are given.

Let us rejoice and be glad in it.