More Cautious Than Courageous
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
January 19, 2020

“I felt we would be supported by the white church,” lamented Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail. He thought white clergy would rise up in support of people of color, but instead, he said, “all too many… have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.”
There is a natural life cycle in the formation of religions. Often a new religion begins as a small sect breaking away from an established tradition; for example, the radical followers of Jesus, who traveled on foot throughout the Mediterranean region to spread the gospel. They gradually created a new way of life, first gathering small groups, then holding services in houses, usually centered around a meal. They were arrested, scorned, and treated as ‘other’, and wore that status as a badge of honor.
Over time, as a new religion’s numbers grow, it becomes important to focus on holding a new tradition together; to develop standards for common worship and common belief. And so the radical spirit begins to die down, to be replaced by increased conformity. The process reminds me of Paul’s letters in the New Testament to groups of early Christians. This is what Paul was trying to accomplish – simultaneously working to spread the message of Jesus’ teachings, and increasingly, over time, trying to hold these little farflung communities together and to remind them of the teachings, to establish a common identity and tradition. “No,” his letters would tell the Corinthians, or the Galatians, or the Ephesians. “That’s not what I said. That’s not what I meant. I told you to do it this way.”
Along the way, in the Christian tradition, congregations grew. They hired priests, developed a hierarchy with bishops, and built buildings. Eventually there were statues, and pews, and stained glass, and relics, and an entire infrastructure that had to be supported. Eventually the church became an institution, and much of its original passion, its energy, became directed into sustaining itself and caring for what it owns. It grew more content with the security of stained glass windows.
Our Universalist forebears followed a very similar trajectory, as handfuls of people at a time learned about the lifesaving message of a loving God who would not abandon them to an eternity of suffering and punishment. They gathered in homes. Here in Gloucester, those first few Universalists did the same: the history of Universalism in Gloucester observed that “…Believers multiplied; a little congregation was collected, who met frequently during the week at each other’s houses, and assembled on Sundays in the large parlor of the Sargent mansion…” (Richard Eddy, Universalism in Gloucester, 1892, p. 13). Later, in 1780, a ‘house of worship’, our original building, was constructed, which I showed you earlier. This house of worship ended its life as a barn on the Babson farm, replaced by this grand building. It is a natural human impulse to build, to grow, and to sustain and to protect what we have. We know how much of our time and attention today goes to maintaining this magnificent building.
And the reality for virtually any church, and any institution, is that during its life cycle it will move toward a more protective posture, to become content to hide behind its stained glass windows. Simply put, we have more to lose.
This month we are considering the topic of Integrity: how we achieve personal integrity and wholeness, and our national integrity, how we live up to our founding principles of freedom and equality. And today we will consider the integrity of religious traditions, and the congregations that carry those traditions forward.
For the past few years this congregation, along with our friends at the UU Society of Rockport, have been engaged in studying the history of slavery and abolition here on Cape Ann. Tomorrow is a very big day for us: we will be presenting the research on a website that will be made available to the public. The intention of this project and the website is to tell the truth about the presence of enslaved people here on Cape Ann and in the Northern United States. So often we have hidden behind a narrative that asserts that there was no slavery in areas such as this, that slavery existed in the South. According to that narrative, we don’t need to concern ourselves with the evil of slavery and its aftermath. We didn’t have anything to do with it.
Well, now we know more of the truth, and we are telling it. We have created a teaching tool for schools and for all interested people. We are lifting up voices from the past, bringing these lives out of the shadows, and making them important. And we are shining a light on the presence of the slave economy here on Cape Ann, and how so many institutions, including churches, benefitted from it. Beginning in the 17th century, slavery formed the foundation for most aspects of the economy of the United States. The unpaid labor that was forced to build homes, factories, government buildings, and churches made it possible for the people who exploited that unpaid labor to gain great wealth. The benefits are handed down, from one generation to the next, and so, even now, the lives of all Americans remain touched by slavery. It is still there, present below the surface in ways that most of us cannot see or name. And so, the Cape Ann Slavery and Abolition Trust set out to show us what is below the surface.
I have shared some of the findings from time to time. One important finding was, as I told you during our Wisdom Moment, that leaders of this congregation were involved in the slave trade. We have long prided ourselves on our story of having perhaps the first black Universalist: Gloster Dalton, who signed the charter creating this church. And yet, on the other hand, this congregation and this building that we love reaped the benefits of money made in the slave economy. We know that the land our building stands on was donated by the Pearce family, who lived up the street at 20 Church Street. We know that the Houghs, who owned schooners that went to Africa and brought back slaves illegally, owned pews both at this church and at the Rockport church. We have the stained glass window as living proof that these were important families, who were part of this congregation for generations. And we also know that the Sargent family owned slaves, including Judith Sargent, pictured on the wall there, and her first husband, John Stevens.
It was, of course, a different time. We understand that, and we hold all this information in context. But we must not hide it.
Our website, capeannslavery.org, talks about the moral dilemma that slavery presented in churches, and for ministers. There are mentions of the courage that was needed to preach against the evil of slavery to people who were benefitting from it, and who were benefactors of the church. It would take courage. How far would a minister dare to go? We know that Father Jones, the Reverend Thomas Jones, our second minister after John Murray, spoke up against slavery, and that when he conducted Gloster Dalton’s funeral he proclaimed that “all men are born free!” But apparently Thomas Jones was also friendly with the benefactors, who would have owned the pews and paid his salary.
Now, this would have been an especially big dilemma in Universalist churches, with our belief that all people share a common destiny, and therefore all have ultimate and equal worth. As far back as 1790 at the first Universalist Convention in Philadelphia the delegates approved a resolution stating that “We believe it to be inconsistent with the union of the human race…to hold any part of our fellow-creatures in bondage. We therefore recommend a total refraining from the African trade, and the adoption of prudent measures for the gradual abolition of slavery…” (Charles Howe, The Larger Faith, Boston: Skinner House Books, 1992, p. 12.)
The key words in this turned out to be ‘prudent’ and ‘gradual’. No one wanted to risk breaking apart a thriving, growing denomination. Southern Universalists objected to any efforts to promote abolition. And so, Universalists advocated slow change. A Convention of Universalists in 1843 passed a resolution that concluded: “…while we earnestly entreat all Christian and especially all Universalist slave holders to consider prayerfully the nature and tendencies of the relation they sustain, we recommend or countenance no measures of indiscriminate denunciation or proscription, but, appealing to the gospel, to humanity, and to their own consciences, we await in implicit confidence the perfect working of the principles of Divine and Universal Love. (in Ernest Cassara, ed., Universalism in America, Boston: Skinner House Books, 1971, p. 189-90.)
And so on the Universalists went, personally opposed to slavery, but unable and unwilling to take any more of a stand than to hope that Divine Providence would activate slaveowners’ consciences. They were no different than the white moderates Martin Luther King described 120 years later.
In 1846, as the Civil War loomed and the debates grew ever more heated, this church called a minister named Amory Dwight Mayo. This was his first pastorate, and he was a supporter of abolition and of rights for women. Mayo served this church for eight years. And when he returned in 1874 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of John Murray’s first sermon, he commented:
“I recollect in those old, explosive days before the war, when they sent back slaves from Boston to South Carolina, I used to stand up periodically, having packed my trunk the night before, and blaze away, like a whole battery, right in the face and eyes of you all, and then go home wondering at the little sensation my tremendous demonstration seemed to make. I didn’t understand then, that under the quiet surface of your Yankee reticence you all agreed with me.”96
It took courage. And no doubt there were lines that were not crossed, and things that were left unsaid, so as not to offend too much the people who supported this institution, in order to maintain that surface appearance of everyone agreeing with Reverend Mayo.
This has always been an issue in churches, and it always will be. We afford ministers the freedom of the pulpit, an ancient tradition, but how far does it go? What happened to ministers who argued for peace during World War I, as our own Reverend Levi Powers did? What happened to churches confronting the morality of the Vietnam War? How about during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s? This issue of integrity, of security versus speaking difficult truths, has always been a part of church life and always will be.
Let me ask you a provocative question: suppose (and this is totally theoretical) I wanted to install a Black Lives Matter banner on our building and our biggest pledgers were dead set against it. Or suppose I was speaking frequently about the need for gun control, and we had an important benefactor who belonged to the NRA. Or if we had wealthy climate crisis deniers? What if one of those people came to me and said that if I didn’t stop preaching my truth, that they would stop pledging? What would you want me to do?
And let me emphasize that I’ve never had a conversation like that here. I have never hesitated to speak my truth to you. I guess that underneath the quiet surface of your Yankee reticence, you all agree with me. I have never packed my trunk, although we are taught in seminary that we should preach as though we have our bags packed, and a cab idling outside.
In the years before and during the Civil War, ministers in Gloucester and Rockport didn’t tend to stay here that long. The research done for the website shows us that they often felt constrained, that they spoke out when they felt they could, but eventually, they moved away to areas where they could be more outspoken, or left the ministry altogether in order to work for social reforms. Reverend Mayo, after serving churches in the Midwest, ended up working in the south for educational reforms for the newly freed black children.
The reality is that many ministers don’t really want to cross that invisible line. We can all, ministers and congregation alike, get too comfortable. And so the church becomes less passionate, and takes refuge behind the stained glass.
Tomorrow, this church, together with the Rockport UU Society, will take a bold step into the future. We are stepping out from behind our stained glass, in our case, quite literally, to tell the truth about ourselves and our communities in a way that is practically unprecedented. We are choosing courage over caution. We are living into the legacy left us by John Murray, who told us to go out into the highways and the byways, giving people hope and courage. We are not waiting for the old narratives to quietly fade away. We are telling a new story, the story of people who were hidden away for too long, and we are sharing our part in the story. May our example inspire others to take equally bold steps into the future, so that we can together help move our country toward the truth and the healing that it so desperately needs.
I leave you this morning with the words of James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
May it be so,
Amen.

How do churches, once they have a great deal to lose: staff and buildings, stained glass and iconic bell towers, maintain their will to speak for the oppressed, for the vulnerable, for all those who need their voices