Interesting Times:

A Sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

September 15, 2002

By Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

It’s considered a curse to wish on someone that they be born into interesting times.  Cursed or not our times are interesting.  On Monday, the nation prepared to go into mourning, and Bush prepared to address the United Nations.  Monday Nelson Mandela said that if we look at the foreign policy history of the United States, particularly during the two Bush eras “you will come to the conclusion that the attitude of the United States of America is a threat to world peace.” On Tuesday, more than 3000 Non-governmental organizations met at the UN to build a world coalition for the alleviation of suffering and injustice.  On Thursday, Bush delivered his ultimatum to the UN to muscle the nation further toward war on Iraq.  By Friday, the newspapers were nearly forgetting that there had been real opposition to the war.  To call these interesting times would be an understatement. 

And in the very heart of this week our nation mourned the anniversary of the tragedy on September 11.  Our eyes were filled again with the powerful and devastating images of that day – the smoking towers, the fires and dust, the heroes, and the lost.  We have faced fire many times – and faced violence many times and every time we have choices about the way in which we will respond.  We face choices now.  We respond and out of our response we shape the choices we will next have to make.  That is the nature of history.

Too often we look for heroes to save the day – perhaps September 11 reminded us of the ordinariness of heroes.  Perhaps it was time.  Time to stop waiting and see ourselves in just that light.  Time to listen to history, to become interested in our interesting times.  Time to see the repeated images, hear the repeated cries, and answer them – ourselves.  The heroes sit here among us.  They have always sat among us – I am not speaking just of Unitarian Universalists – but it’s helpful to be reminded that we don’t stand alone – other ordinary Unitarians and Universalists have come before us, stood in the ashes of their times and seen paths over the ashes to hope.

This summer I returned to Atlanta – a city devastated by fire in the last stages of the Civil War.  I lived there for twelve years and I heard again and again of the suffering of that city – the unhealed wounds and the smouldering anger.  But I was there while Andrew Young was Mayor and his term helped to guide the city toward recovery and reconciliation – it had only taken one hundred years.  And there is more healing to do.

This week, as I explored history for patterns and pathways I read the diary of a young soldier encamped outside of Atlanta during the siege who recorded the daily events and the last throes of the Civil War.  A Wisconsin farmer, a Unitarian, and eventually, a Unitarian minister whose life was also lived in interesting times.  In a sermon written many years after the War he described another city after conflagration – Chicago. He spoke of the smoke clouding the horizon, the sidewalks too hot to walk on, and the swaying of the remnants of great walls as they would surrender and fall to the eroding heat.  Thus have great structures fallen in fire – so do they fall.

There’s no doubt -- it is easier for a city to recover from a momentous accidental fire – but under all conditions fires brand themselves into memory and into the soul of cities and define the character of the city and her people for the future.  How do we restore the souls of our cities, the souls of our people, the soul of our nation?  Do we have to wait for more momentous fire or can we find that flame within that enlightens the mind with virtue and stokes the heart into courage?

Jenkin Lloyd Jones, who was that young soldier, farmer, Unitarian, and eventually, minister asked the question this way.  What doth the spirit seem to say to the city? 

It said a great many things to Jenkin Lloyd Jones.  I know that a few years ago Marty Becker researched this man and found his path interesting – there is no doubt that we – this precious congregation that arose thirty years after his death. He traveled widely in Indiana doing what he called broadcasting the liberal religious spirit.  We might not be here had it not been for his fierce dedication to spreading the good news of Unitarianism.  He even gave a sermon in Lafayette in 1897 – at some hall whose name is lost to me until further research.  Perhaps he even stood in this building as he often worked with Jewish clergy and congregations. 

Jenkin was born in Wales on November 14,1843.  Before he was a year old his family of eight moved to America to find green fertile earth and shining hills along the Wisconsin River Valley in Spring Green – near Madison.  They were true Welsh folk – proud of their mother tongue, fiercely loyal to family, and wild at heart.  They were Unitarians but even amongst Unitarians, they were free thinkers.  Earnest as the day was long they were true to their family motto: “Truth against the world.”  But the Joneses – or as their neighbors sometimes called them – “the God – Almighty Joneses” were always deeply for the world. 

It was in that spirit that Jenkin enlisted for the Civil War – he joined to keep his two older brothers from the draft and he joined out of a fervor to end slavery. 

When the war ended, much as Jenkin loved his river valley, he felt a draw toward learning and larger service.  There had a been a few Unitarian clergy in earlier branches of the family tree, so he chose ministry and enrolled, poor as a church mouse, at Meadville Theological School in Meadville, Pennsylvania.  Jenkin took to learning with a passion.  He compensated for his time on the war front by intensive reading in addition to his studies and once he was out of school he became one biographer called “an inveterate buyer of books, even when he could not afford them.”  A short-coming often reported amongst Unitarian and Universalist ministers. 

As he finished school he signed on a missionary preacher for the Western Unitarian Conference – the Midwestern branch of what was then called the American Unitarian Association.  As a rural free thinker he was naturally drawn to the idea of broadcasting that reasoned faith to all the intellectually starved and adventurous folk on this western frontier. 

His marriage with Susan Barber – a force herself to be reckoned with – gave them each more energy.  They were both devoted to the growth of the faith and served together – their handwriting is often together on the same page, a passage of poetry sometimes straight-pinned by Susan onto one of Jenkin’s sermons.

In 1874 he was elected to be secretary of the Western Conference – this expanded his missionary work.  In country still deep in Calvinism, the Unitarians and Universalists brought a new voice – voice of love and reason, of acceptance and compassion in heaven and in earthly human hearts.  And a challenge to question and to engage reason in religion.

Feminism grew in such fertile soil – such as the Iowa Sisterhood formed from the courageous women who sought ministry and ordination in the last third of the nineteenth century.  When the churches in the East refused to settle them Jones found resources for them to broadcast the spirit of free religion onto the frontier.

He was optimistic about all that free minds could accomplish – he was convinced that religion – if liberated from dogma – could carry the human spirit higher than history could foretell.  And he was tireless in his work toward that ideal.  He was a man of his time and beyond his time --

For the last quarter of the nineteenth century and into the first quarter of the twentieth, he served as minister of All Souls Church in Chicago. 

It was people like Jones who made this heartland.  It can be hard to imagine that in the hearts of Midwestern farmers there was a radical spirit – but there were radical spirits aplenty in the Midwest as the nineteenth century turned.  He was a warm man, a strong colleague, a congregation builder.  He was ambitious – but not for himself.  He had a message and his passion was for that message.  He had ambition for the church but his vision for the church was that it should call every person – All Souls – to serve the evolving truth.  And Jones believed in the evolving power of human thought and being.  In a sermon, From Worm to Biped, he wrote: “Help us to understand something of the architecture of our own bodies; the mystery, the power and the sacredness of the heart through which courses the blood, of the lungs where the mystery of life is restored, strength renewed, and mind cleared.  We would think this morning and thinking, be led to feel the sanctities of the hour in which we live, the opportunities at which we have arrived, the inspirations that beckon us still.”

Jenkin was, indeed, beckoned by inspiration – but not to superhuman acts and not to the service of disembodied ideas – he served ideas that could work in the world.  Sometime we’ll talk about his collegial relationship with Jane Adams and his support of the Settlement house movement.  Sometime we’ll talk about his Sunday School materials.  Sometime we’ll preach with him throughout Indiana and Illinois.  Sometime we’ll speak of his love of science.

Sometime we’ll even talk about his nephew.  But each time will be a human story – a project – a gathering – a Sunday morning – a church meeting – a Sunday school class – an opportunity for people who hungered for a peculiar faith based in both reason and love to gather on common ground and put that faith into service.  He was a person of human acts and human miracles.

He was a life-long Unitarian – I know a few sit in this congregation.  As a life-long Unitarian he was always seeking those facets of the world’s faiths that bring us together, that speak of deep truths beyond creed.  Even among Unitarians and Universalists there were and are movements to adopt a creed -- to demand one set of beliefs about the nature of God and Jesus.  Jenkin worked, rather, in favor of a Unitarianism affirmed by Ethical Principles and not creeds.  The danger of creeds can threaten from within or without.  Today we can see the destructive force of exclusive religions, that claim the sole right to truth and Jenkin could see the same one hundred years ago. 

When Chicago was devastated by fire he wanted to see it rebuilt into the golden city that Felix Adler wrote of in his humanist hymn.  He wanted to see it rebuilt as a more just city cleansed of the corruption and neglect that had cursed it.  And he was disheartened to see it rebuild only partly in service to that brighter vision.  So it was that, as the city rebuilt, he looked ahead to the Chicago World’s Fair – the Columbian Exposition of 1893.  He had a vision of the new city – the new world that should have risen out of the ashes of the Chicago fire and he intended that, at least in part, the Exposition would also promote that vision – not simply a vision of arts, industry, and progress for a profit.

So it was that he found himself standing on the footbridge leading into the Fair and struck by the beauty and promise in all the people gathered there. To evoke this promise he participated in the creation of the First Parliament of World’s Religions.  It began on September 11 in 1893 and brought together and to Chicago religious leaders from around the world.  In the record of that event is printed Jenkins’s ambition – in the lists of great leaders who gathered and who spoke.  Though thanked for his hard work he did not put himself forward to speak – he sought to include the voices of those who had not been heard.  Because he could see the faith and devotion in his own heart he also saw and encouraged it in others.

Through the events of the Parliament Jenkin Lloyd Jones hoped to lay the groundwork for a fair world within the context of the world’s fair.   He said, “I saw the swaying thousands of human beings clothed in their right minds, warmed within with genial love…The critical statistician will probably decide that the nearly three quarters of a million people that passed within the gates of the Columbian Fair that day was the greatest mass of humanity that has ever gathered in the history of the world.  And the casualties of the day were probably not so great in number or as serious as if they had all stayed at home.”  Sounds like the vision of a man whose eyes have been filled with the crush of thousands before – rushing instead toward violence and death.  He was responsive to his time.  Hungry for truth and freedom rather than for power.  Eager to share and liberate rather than to achieve glory.

Jones was a person of human acts, who believed in human miracles – as Unitarian Universalists always have done.  He had to reckon with his conscience – as we all must do.  He ceased waiting for saviors and answered the call of his times himself.  We have each our own call – but his life was not large – only purposeful.  He had a faith – that lives among us now – I felt it among us last week.  I felt that faith at our congregational meeting as members of the congregation worked with care to express the concerns of their consciences and their hopes and worked to listen with embracing respect.  I felt it among us as some of us gathered on Wednesday – to grieve differently, honestly and to encounter our moment of history in community.

Friday night Bill Moyers finished his program NOW with words that reminded me of our human and democratic faith.  He said: "There is a beauty in humanity that shone through the dust and smoke of September 11.  It is that beauty that we must not loose sight of because it is our hope and it is the heart of democracy." 

So -- I think of us gathered here – not by accident nor because we agree on fundamentals of cosmology or creed but because we hunger for and hope to reveal the beauty that is the potent core of humanity.  This church is a sanctuary in a sometimes irrational world -- a harbor of hope in times that might trigger despair – it is a house of conscience bringing us not only together but more deeply within ourselves to think, to feel, and to respond to our interesting times.

As Jenkin said: “We would think, this morning and thinking be led to feel the sanctities of the hour in which we live.”  This is a sacred hour – as every hour is – a sacred hour of choice.  Made of cosmic dust and fire we cannot help but ignite -- we know the fires that humanity can set – terrible and tragic.  We know the depth of evil that can explode by our hand.  But we know also the intelligence and beauty – the creative fires of the mind and heart.  What doth the Spirit seem to say?  It is the voice of our times – times interesting, challenging, critical – it is the cry of our hour calling us to work.  What doth the spirit seem to say?  It is the voice of this world – and it is saying your name.