Sermons

August 12, 2007
What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor?

What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor?
A sermon by the Rev. Mark Worth

READINGS:
1. From Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1982
"To many people 'metaphor' is merely a poetic ornament for illustrating an idea or adding rhetorical color to abstract or flat language. It appears to have little to do with ordinary language until one realizes that ordinary language is composed of 'dead metaphors,' some obvious, such as 'the arm of the chair' and others less obvious, such as 'tradition,' meaning 'to hand over or hand down.' Most simply, a metaphor is seeing one thing as something else, pretending 'this' is 'that' because we do not know how to think or talk about 'this,' so we use 'that' as a way of saying something about it...
...good metaphors shock, they bring unlikes together, they upset conventions, they involve tension, and they are implicitly revolutionary. The parables of Jesus are typically metaphorical in this regard, for they bring together dissimilars (lost coins, wayward children, buried treasure, and tardy laborers with the kingdom of God); they shock and disturb; they upset conventions and expectations and in so doing have revolutionary potential."

2. Humor from “Mr. Gradgrind’s Literal Answers to Rhetorical Questions,” by Paul Brians, Prof. of English at Washington State University, Pullman, WA, at www.wsu.edu/~brians/gradgrind.html
"People commonly ask empty rhetorical questions that rarely receive any sort of sensible answer... Of course, some questions are so ill-framed as to admit of no sensible answer. Example: Where have you been all my life? It so happens that this question has never been addressed to me; but if it were I should be at a loss to detail the many addresses at which I have resided and worked during the span of existence of some other person, even if I knew that person’s precise date of birth...
However, one can learn much from discovering facts that provide satisfactory answers to questions one might suppose at first glance to be pointless...
What is so rare as a day in June? June having 30 days, it is clear that days in April, September, and November are precisely as 'rare,' or as common, though they are slightly less common than days in January, March, May, July, August, October, and December. Days in February are the least common, of course, so it is nonsensical to consider June days as particularly rare.
How high the moon? It varies between 356,000 and 407,000 km in distance from the surface of the earth, its average distance being 384,000 km.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? No one well informed, of course, since the writer in question died in 1941...
How long has this been going on? Data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotrophy Probe produce an estimated age for the universe of 13.7 billion years, plus or minus a 1% margin of error."

THE SERMON
I was raised a Methodist, but left the Methodist Church in my teens because I couldn’t believe the words that were said in church. My Dad was the minister, and I respected my parents, so I kept attending church, but I had already left the church mentally. I could not say the words.
I could not say the words of the Apostle’s Creed, words that declared that “I believe” that God created the heavens and the earth (but I wasn’t sure there was a God), that Jesus was God’s only Son (If there is a God, aren’t we all God’s children, I asked myself?), that his mother was a virgin (I knew it wasn’t true because I knew about sex by then), and that Jesus sits in heaven at the right hand of God the Father (and since he is God the Son, and they are both God, he must be sitting next to himself, which is a pretty good trick). It went on to declare that I believed in “the resurrection of the body.” Which body? My healthy body at age 16 or my sick body that will die in old age? And why would I need a body in heaven?
To me, at age 16, the Apostle’s Creed was, at best, irrelevant, and at worst ridiculous, and I wouldn’t say words that weren’t true.
The Creed felt like a box, a confining little box constructed by someone in the Dark Ages (it didn’t come from the Apostles, but the present text comes from the 8th century). I didn’t fit into that box, and I wouldn’t say “I believe” if I didn’t believe it.
And there were other words I wouldn’t say. Once a month, during the communion service, we recited a prayer that said, “we are not worthy to gather up the crumbs under Thy table.” I was only sixteen or so, and hadn’t had much of a chance to sin so much that I was unworthy even for the crumbs. So I stopped and wouldn’t say the prayer. And if I couldn’t say the words – because they weren’t true – then I didn’t think I should take communion.
And then there were the miracles I had been taught in Sunday school. I considered Jonah being swallowed by a fish, Samson having his strength in his hair, Baalam’s talking donkey, Joshua making the walls of Jericho fall by blowing on a horn, and Jesus walking on water. They didn’t fit with what I knew to be true about how the world works. I had decided that I couldn’t trust the Bible, and I was certain that I was not a Methodist any more. I just couldn’t say things I didn’t believe.
When, in my early 20's, I found the Unitarian Universalists, I discovered a church that let me think for myself and didn’t just say, “It’s in the Bible so it must be true.”
And now here I am, a Unitarian Universalist minister. This is a church that allows me to think, where I’m not confined in a little box like the Apostle’s Creed. I’m thrilled to be part of a denomination, a movement, that honors freedom and reason and tolerance, a church that encourages me and you to build our own theology, to find our own beliefs and live by them.

Our problem with words ~
But what, then, do I believe, and what words do I use to describe those beliefs? I believe in love, in justice, in people working together to build a more peaceful and just world. I believe in awe and wonder and gratitude. I believe in relationships. I believe that I can become a better person than I am, and that we can build a better world than we have. And I believe in community, which is one of the reasons why I am here in this congregation.
And, I’ve come to realize, I believe in the strength and depth and beauty of poetry, myth and metaphor.
Many people have a problem with words, with language, especially around religion. Children take religious language literally. God, for instance, was an old man in the sky. We thought that Adam and Eve had been real people, and they lived in a garden with a talking snake. Noah collected two of all the different kinds of animals from the whole world – from Australia, North and South America, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Pacific Islands – and fit them all on that tiny little ark, and for forty days and forty nights the carnivores didn’t eat the herbivores. We believed these stories to be literally true, and didn’t realize that, when taken literally, they were clearly impossible. But when we grew older many of us rejected all of these ideas because we couldn’t believe in them literally anymore.
We had believed in the stories literally, and then we disbelieved in them literally. We couldn’t get past our literal understanding. We found it difficult to look at religious language as poetry or metaphor. We could not see the stories in a positive or constructive way as myth.
Simone Weil, in her book Waiting for God wrote, “There is a God. There is no God. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am sure my love is no illusion. I am quite sure there is no God in the sense that I am sure there is nothing which resembles what I can conceive when I say that word.” Weil is stating the classic problem of religious language. She is certain that her love is no illusion, and that feels holy; but she is also certain that none of her conceptions of the holy or the divine resembles her mental image of “God.”

Religious language as metaphor ~
In seminary one of the most helpful books I had to read was Prof. Sallie McFague’s Metaphorical Theology. She suggests that the fundamentalists on the right take religious language so literally – they say the Bible is literally the “Word of God” – that they have turned the Bible into an idol: they worship the Bible rather than the God who is described in the Bible. It is a form of idolatry that we might call “Bibliolatry.” If the Bible uses metaphorical language that describes God as a father, they take it literally and think that God is stuck in a male body, that God cannot also be a mother and a lover as well as a father.
But the people who wrote the Bible lived in a time when it was common to see things in the world as standing for other things. The ancient people who wrote the books of the Bible, and the readers for whom those ancient books were written, were actually much less literalistic than we are. They had a symbolic sensibility that saw many layers of meaning, with the literal layer suggesting meanings beyond itself. Later, in the Middle Ages, the professors and teachers of Church doctrine used what was called “the fourfold method of exegesis (interpretation),” in which three levels of interpretation followed the literal level. They saw the symbolism and metaphor in the biblical stories. But when the modern scientific era came along we started expecting everything to have one mathematically or scientifically correct literal answer.
Jesus spoke in metaphors all the time: In John we are told that he said, “I am the door,” but we don’t think that he was a block of wood. Ask Jesus a direct question (such as “What do I have to do to gain eternal life?”) and he tells a story rather than giving a literal answer. And the story he tells is one in which the bad guy, the Samaritan, turns out to be the good guy; and the good guys, the Priest and the Levite, turn out to be less than good.
In another famous parable we wind up imagining God as a loving father who welcomes home the Prodigal Son – even though Jesus never actually says it is a parable about God.
And so if Jesus spoke in metaphors and in parables, stories that don’t have to be taken literally, why can’t other Bible stories, like Adam and Eve and the Garden, be parables, too? Jesus himself becomes a parable about what God is like; he is a metaphor for God. And God is a metaphor for all that we hold to be sacred and beautiful and true.
Yes, I believe in God because I believe in metaphorical language. I don’t believe in an old white man in the sky – I’m an atheist when it comes to that god. But I believe in goodness, I believe in poetry and myth, in the beauty of music and wildflowers, in the power of the oceans and the mountains, in peace and justice, and in the ability of women and men to come together in community to make the world a better place – and so yes, I believe in what philosophers and theologians have called “The Ground of Being,” “The Creative Process,” and “Ultimate Reality,” in other words, God. God is a metaphor for the things that we hold to be sacred.
Joseph Campbell, famous for his “Power of Myth” Public TV series and his many books, opened up my thinking to help me appreciate the myths of Hinduism, Native Americans, Africans, and people from all over the world. Campbell was not afraid to say that the myths of Judaism and Christianity are also myths. But a myth is not a lie. Rather, it is a classic story that tells us a truth about the human condition.
Since the beginning of the scientific age we have lost the many layers of meaning and symbolism that language once had, and now we see only the literal meaning of the words. And since many of us can’t accept those words literally, we reject them literally. We have become skeptical of poetry, metaphor and myth, the music of language. We have lost the richness of myth and metaphor.

Jacob’s Ladder ~
A little while ago we sang, “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.” The idea of Jacob’s Ladder comes from a story in the Book of Genesis where the biblical patriarch Jacob, sleeping under the stars, had a dream in which there was a great ladder reaching to the heavens, and angels were ascending and descending the ladder. This story is rich with metaphor – some Jews say that the dream took place on the border of Canaan, the future Israel, and the angels ascending and descending were two groups of angels, those assigned to guard the Holy Land and those who had accompanied Jacob on the earlier part of his journey. Another Jewish interpretation says that the place where Jacob camped out was Mount Moriah, the future home of the Temple. The ladder is a bridge between heaven and earth, a symbol of the giving of the Torah. One Christian interpretation sees Jesus as being Jacob’s Ladder, that bridge between heaven and earth, the mediator between the divine and human.
For African-Americans who wrote the hymn, “Jacob’s Ladder” was a symbolic bridge to freedom – or even for a way back to the African homeland. They saw the Bible as poetry and metaphor that could be reinterpreted to give inspiration to their own struggles. A feminist writer gave us “We Are Dancing Sara’s Circle” to the same tune, in order to give feminine balance to the song. In the Bible, Sarah was Jacob’s grandmother.
These are only a few of the interpretations that have come out of Jacob’s dream. Certainly there are those who try to take even this story literally, even though we are clearly told that it was a dream. But because the story is such a rich metaphor it lays itself open to numerous interpretations. The best, richest and most effective religious language is metaphorical language.

Mr. Gradgrind’s Literal Answers ~
A little while back, someone wrote a letter to the UUWorld, our denominational magazine, saying that he didn’t like the fact that so many UU preachers were using metaphors. He said that in order for a metaphor to be useful it should be literally true. Well, then it isn’t a metaphor. We have folks on the left in our churches who take things as literally as the fundamentalists on the right. They both make the same mistake, taking religious language completely literally.
Just as the fundamentalists on the right insist that God is literally male, and that Jesus is literally God, and that the Bible is a science textbook, we have literalists on the left who reject all religious language because they are unable to see the metaphor. Just as the right has literalists, some of us get stuck in one literal interpretation and can’t translate it into poetry or metaphor.
I understand the temptation to take religious language literally. I did it in my youth, and sometimes I still do it. And as I’ve said, when it comes to the “Old White Man in the Sky”, I’m an atheist. I reject that small and limited god. But I believe in metaphor, and so I sometimes speak of the God that is a metaphor for our best deeds, greatest dreams and highest hopes, the Love that calls us to become better than we are. And I ask the literalists to be patient with those of us who use poetry and mythology and metaphor to explain our religious ideas and ideals.

Let’s be willing to laugh at ourselves. Paul Brians, a Professor of English at Washington State University, has appropriated a fictional character from Charles Dickens, Mr. Gradgrind. Brians has set up a web site where Mr. Gradgrind offers hilariously literal answers to rhetorical questions. The web site proclaims, “When you have had your surfeit of poetical whimsy and are ready for some good, hard facts, come here to be set straight.”
For those of us who are still struggling with metaphor, let us laugh at some more of his “literal answers to rhetorical questions”:
"Where have all the flowers gone?" Generally the petals of the flowering parts of plants wither and fall off to decay in the surrounding soil while the remainder is converted into fruiting bodies. However, the blossoms of early-flowering fruit trees such as plums and cherries are particularly subject to the destructive effects of spring rains.
"How are you going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paris?" Administered commodity prices resulting in an average profit per farmer of no more than $50,000 per annum should be adequate to discourage profligate trips to France.
"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." Although the poet neglects to enumerate them, providing instead a mere list, a simple inventory establishes that – if we omit the purely hypothetical posthumous final one – Elizabeth Barrett loved Robert Browning in precisely seven ways.
"Tell me why the ivy twines." Not all ivies do twine, of course: some are mere creeping vines. However, climbing ivies such as are commonly seen covering academic buildings maximize their exposure to light by using twining tendrils to affix themselves to other plants and objects in order to gain altitude and escape their shade.
"What shall we do with a drunken sailor?" D. Kolb and E.K.E. Gunderson’s study, “Alcoholism in the United States Navy” reports that attempts to prevent, diagnose and rehabilitate sailors suffering from alcohol-related problems are to a measurable degree superior to the older approach of simple hospitalization (published in Armed Forces and Society, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 183-194).
Amen.

"What shall we do with a drunken sailor (3x)
Early in the morning?
Wey-hey and up she rises (3x)
Early in the morning!

Put him in bed with the captain's daughter (3x)
Early in the morning!

Put him in the longboat 'till he's sober (3x)
Early in the morning!

Shave his belly with a rusty razor (3x)
Early in the morning!

Hang him from the mast like a Jolly Roger (3x)
Early in the morning!

Soak him in oil 'til he's grown flippers (3x)
Early in the morning!

Put him in the brig until he's sober (3x)
Early in the morning!"