Like Sunshine: The life and theology of Theodore Parker

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship ofthe New River Valley, January Jamuary 5, 2003,by the Reverend Christine Brownlie.

Everyone needs heroes! Everyone needs to hear the stories of men and women whose lives are models of the kinds of virtues and character traits that we admire and would like to emulate. In the mid 90s, when I was in seminary, there was a lot of discussion about the importance of narrative as a way of teaching and reinforcing the shared values of the community. Stanley Hauerwas was one of the proponents of this view, and I was very impressed with his ideas about the value of story, probably because it resonated so deeply with my own experience as a child. My sisters and I loved to hear our mother’s stories about her childhood and adolescent years. Her parents were immigrants from Russia and the Ukraine and her life was very different from our own. From her stories we learned about the value of imagination, determination, self-reliance, and optimism. She didn’t realize the gifts she was giving us, and she often balked at telling us her stories, perhaps because for her they were painful memories of hard times. But we fed on them and learned important lessons which shaped our characters and our understanding of the realities of life. I’ve always loved biographies and history for the lessons we gain from the lives of those who have gone before us.

As a seminary student, I took a course in UU history and it was there that I was introduced to the life and works of Theodore Parker. I was in my mid-forties then, long past the stage of adolescent hero worship, but I was taken with the story of this man, who embodied so much of what I hoped to become and still strive for,Theodore Parker was born August 24^th, 1810. (I’ll confess to you that it is a source of delight to me that he and I share the same birthday.) He came from a family of farmers who had tilled the land near Lexington MA for five generations.

The youngest of eleven children, he was named Theodore, "gift from God," by his parents who were pious Christians. The poor, rocky land his parents farmed didn’t provide enough for this large family. To feed and clothe the family, his father worked as a mechanic: building pumps and cider presses, and shaping barrel staves and carving bowls from maple stumps.

His passion for religion probably came from his mother who spent her evenings teaching her children the hymns and ballads of her own childhood and reading stories from the Bible to them. She was concerned with their moral development and taught young Theodore the value of conscience and the importance of living a moral life. She supplemented the stories from the Bible with family stories of adventure and hardship, teaching her son the values and virtues that the family loved and lived.

One of the family values was a love of books and learning. John Parker, Theodore's father, was highly regarded in the community for his own education in secular as well as religious literature. He was involved with the development and supervision of the local school, choosing the teachers and establishing the curricula It was in that little schoolhouse that young Theodore began reading the Greek philosophers and learning Latin grammar.

His family realized early on that this last “gift of God” was different from the other children, and his parents expected him to be a lawyer or a politician. But Theodore wasn’t sure that his was his true path. He began teaching school while he was still a teenager. He carefully saved his small wages for what he really wanted to do — go to Harvard and become a minister. Theology fascinated him and he struggled with serious questions about the authenticity of the Bible and various doctrines. While teaching in Watertown MA, he began to find a focus for its emotional and spiritual passion. Living in a local boarding house, he met Lydia, his future wife, who taught Sunday school in the church of a liberal clergyman named Convers Francis. Eager to please this attractive young woman, Parker too became a teacher in the Sunday school too and he became a protégé of the minister who recognized his gifts.

A genial and kindly scholar, a man with broad learning, a liberal in religion and theology, Francis opened his extensive library to Theodore and engaged him with friendly guidance and encouragement. The liberal direction for his ministry was formed under Francis' wing and friendship with Francis linked him to literary Boston, to the men who would later become the Transcendentalist Club (whose shining star was Ralph Waldo Emerson).

The Transcendentalist movement was the perfect niche for Parker and he was an ardent support of what was called the Transcendentalist Gospel all his life. When you look at the cast of characters in this very small and highly regional group, you’re struck by the diversity of the minds that found a haven there. A later UU historian, Ocatavious Brooks Frothingham, explained the unlikely friendships in these words: Minds as opposite as Alcott and Parker met in communion here—Alcott going to the Mystics for inspiration; Parker resorting to them for rest.  Piety was a feature of Transcendentalism; it loved devout hymns, music, the glowing language of aspiration, the moods of awe and humility, emblems, symbols, expressions of inarticulate emotion, silence, contemplation, breathings after communion with the Infinite.  The poetry of Transcendentalism is religious, with scarcely an exception; the most beautiful hymns in our sacred collections, the only deeply impressive hymns, are by transcendental writers.

Perhaps Parker heard the familiar strains from his own childhood in these gatherings that offered a marriage of the intellectual and the devotional.

Like many of his intellectual contemporaries, Theodore looked to Europe for the latest ideas in philosophy and theology, and it was the Germans who fired his thinking. These scholars were applying reason to the Bible and beginning to see that there were inconsistencies and incongruities that suggested there were errors and glosses within the text. A new and very controversial school of Biblical scholarship called “Higher Criticism” was developing and religious liberals in American were studying German so that they could follow this new way of reading the bible and thinking about religion. The Unitarians were especially interested in this new approach and spent large sums of money for travel to acquire book, and they studied German so that they could read these erudite editions.

In Boston, William Ellery Channing was preaching that scholarship and reason were required to extract meaning from the Bible. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that the reliability of natural laws suggested that the use of supernatural miracles to validate Jesus’s divinity must be rejected. The Unitarian denial of the divinity of Jesus created an uproar in Boston elsewhere. When Emerson gave his infamous Divinity School address, challenging the graduates to look to the revelation in their own minds rather than the Biblical word, the battle lines were drawn.

Theodore Parker was a member of that graduating class and was profoundly moved by Emerson’s idea. When the Rev. Andrews Norton, a highly regarded and very conservative Unitarian minister, wrote some very critical responses to Emerson's address, Emerson ignored them. But Parker couldn't let the opportunity pass to take on Norton and other conservatives who attacked the whole Transcendtalist movement. To mask his identity he wrote his response under the pseudonym Levi Blodgett. In his response, he skillfully picked apart Norton's reasoning, pointed out errors in translation and demolished his logic. What Norton missed, he argued was that true religion was innate to the human spirit. The existence of God and the assurance of immorality were revealed most persuasively through intuition. Christianity was just one path among many around the world that pointed to a common inward truth. While Jesus was the greatest revelation of God, he wasn't the only way. God certainly could and may have already created other Christs and might yet create even greater Christs in the future.

Parker made his radical views more clear in his sermon “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” which was delivered at the ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore in 1841. In this sermon he made the radical claim that the essence of Christianity was not the person of Jesus, but in was the message that lie at the heart of Christianity: “Love to God and Love to man.” Indeed Jesus, the man was unnecessary except as the one who delivered the message that, in Parker’s view was utterly beautiful and simple.

Eager to gather up ammunition for the battle that was raging in Boston, several of Parker’s enemies attended the ordination and made sure that the sermon was published in full in the Boston newspapers. This kind of radical thinking was over-the-top — even for his Unitarian colleagues. One by one, they stopped offering him the opportunity to exchange pulpits. They stopped inviting him to their gatherings and when he did attend, he was shunned. Except for a very few loyal friends he was ostracized. If his colleagues could have ex-communicated him, they would have. But his West Roxbury congregation loved him and listened willingly to his heresy, but he had no pulpit opportunities in Boston.

A few friends arranged to rent the Music Hall in Boston so that Parker could have a place to preach. The hall was filled with people who were eager to be a witness to this lively controversy between the Transcendentalists and their foes. A few more serious folks who thought that Parker’s ideas offered them a new and viable approach to a “pure” Christianity came to hear his ideas. Over time, his audience grew and soon he was speaking to thousands of people — much to the annoyance of his enemies. Public speaking was a favorite medium for Parker whose informative and passionate style engaged his audiences and gave him a ways to spread his ideas to the masses

Parker believed that the religion he taught would one day be the religion of all “enlightened” men and women. As early as 1842, he offered a view of religion which claimed that “there is a natural supply for spiritual as well as for corporeal wants” and that this natural supply was provided by a loving God who was a near our souls as the Earth is to our bodies. This supply for our spiritual wants had many outlets and was not confined to Jews, Christians or Muslims, but is “co-extensive with the race.” Parker taught that God was revealed by the laws and beauty of Nature, by the teachings of religious and secular minds through the ages, and through personal practice and experience. He believed through the cultivation of reason, conscience, and religions, men and women would receive the inspiration they needed for their earthly pilgrimage. Religion was a living thing and God’s presence was still found in daily life.

Unlike Emerson, who gave up his ministry in the face of controversy, Parker continued to preach in his church every Sunday as well as lecturing up and down the East Coast and out West. Travel in those days by train, boat, horseback and buggy was exhausting and uncomfortable. Sleeping in decrepit inns, eating tainted food, and traveling long distances took a toll on his health. The more he became known, the greater his correspondence grew, soaking up more of his time. The extra traveling, lecturing, and letter writing meant he worked even harder when he was home to keep up with his scholarship. And he still had a large and growing congregation to attend to: visits to make to the sick as well as his other normal pastoral duties.

This demanding life would have been enough for most men, but Parker was also involved in some of the most important social concerns and movements of his time. He was an enthusiastic visitor and supporter of Brook Farm, the experimental commune formed by his good friend George Ripley. He supported Women’s rights, and he stood against the death penalty and slavery. What really sunk his scholarly pursuits was the passage of the fugitive slave law in 1850. With the passage of this law, slave owners and their agents could come North to reclaim their escaped slaves.

Slavery was always an anathema to him, but his readiness to resist it grew with the years. When he taught in Watertown as a young man, he succumbed to parental pressure to expel the child of a freedman who was attending his school. It was a failure of courage that perhaps drove him in later years for reform. While he preached on occasion against slavery in the early years of his ministry, his stance became more determined when two fugitive slaves who had joined his congregation were sought by bounty hunters. Parker was determined to protect them and he began to keep a gun with him in the pulpit and at his desk. He was indicted for violating the Fugitive act, but was never convicted and his parishioners were left alone.

Parker wasn’t satisfied with this moral victory. He stepped up his lecturing in support of the abolitionist cause. As 1860 approached he widely known and respected. The Unitarians were beginning to accept his Transcendentalist views on religion. The Massachusetts senators listened to his council. His correspondence with others of like mind grew more burdensome. By age 47, his health began to fail and he was diagnosed tuberculosis. When he was too ill to deliver his New Year's sermon in 1859, he and his wife left for Europe, hoping that he would rest and recover his health. It was too late. He died in Italy and was buried there, far from his beloved New England's soil. When the news of his death came to Boston, his colleagues were still so hostile that it was difficult to find someone to offer a memorial to him. William Ellery Channing was shocked by this lack of compassion and gave an eloquent eulogy for his friend.

I wish I had more time to tell you about this remarkable man who changed the face of Unitarianism and who held fast to his own faith and values despite a terrible cost. He was also a kind friend and a generous mentor to young ministers. He enjoyed young children and took an active interest in the lives of friends and congregants alike. He wrote stirring sermons, lovely prayers addressed to “Father Mother God,” and he was a fearless orator. I am grateful to him for his example and his teachings, and I hope in some small way that my own ministry will be a tribute to his generous and living influence on our way of the spirit.

May it be so!

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