Sermon  

“Changing History” The Rev. Rali Weaver.

On Sunday, November 8^th, 1648, eight men gathered and determined to found this church.

This church which so many of us hold as a source of nourishment and friendship was established for this purpose 371 years ago.

Even though the first church building in Dedham was founded on this lot and this is the First Pulpit, this is also considered to be the founding date of the Allin Congregational Church across the street. They are named after John Allin the first minister of this Church and are the holders of our same founding father’s vision.

You might ask how can that be? How can one side of the street be the founding church of the town and the other side of the street also be the founding church of the town. Some of you already know the answer. For the first 180 years of our history, from 1638 to 1818 our two (metaphorical) sides of the street were one, both worshiping together, both finding nourishment and friendship from the same preacher.

In 1818 something happened that changed the course of history.

In 1818 75% of this parish, who were the good and right electoral body of this parish, voted to call as pastor The Rev. Alvan Lamson to serve as minister to said parish.

Alvan Lamson’s picture sits on my left and your right. This smiling gentleman, called just out of seminary, served as the divining rod to our parish which separated neighbors and friends and kin from worshipping together—because having graduated from Harvard, Alvan Lamson was a Unitarian. That is to say he believed in the Unity of God.

It is hard to imagine today from our vantage point a minister could cause so much conflict that two separate churches must be formed.

And yet this is a part of our story.

The thing that fascinates me most about this story (even after telling it and hearing it told three years in a row) is this one issue- that the way the stories we tell ourselves affects the way that history unfolds.

It is quite easy for me to see the need now (191 years since Rev. Lamson was called to this parish) that there was need of more than one theological house and his call was the fuel needed to divide the lot.

Discomfort, disagreement, division these are the cornerstones upon which our church was founded.

At great personal discomfort our Puritan forbearers left all the comforts of their homeland to carve out a new life here.

At great personal discomfort our First Church forbearers separated to form these two separate parishes.

Throughout our history division and discomfort and disagreement have been sources for growth and change.

I believe that how we tell this story of the crisis of our founding in many ways affects the future vision we create for our Church and Parish.

This might be easy to see in a religion like Islam whose trilateral name in Arabic means both peace and the acceptance and submission to God. And has been translated to inspire people to live lives of both peace and extreme violence. The histories we tell inspire our actions and liberate our psyche to either goodwill or ill will.

In 2002 there was a documentary film titled the Weather Underground, which if you haven’t seen I highly recommend. In it they tell the story of a small group of leftist college radicals who through their evolution from young members of the group “Students for a Democratic Society” express violent opposition to war. The documentary explores the way that people can begin with the best intentions and become something they never meant to be based on the ideology or stories they tell themselves about what is right.

Bernadine Dohrn one of the founding members of the Weather Underground is quoted as saying: "There's no way to be committed to non-violence in one of the most violent societies that history has ever created."

As a result of this sense that the violence of the Vietnam War justified radical action the group issued a “Declaration of a State of War” against the United States in 1970. And followed with bombing attacks on government buildings and banks and attributed their actions to the “Weather Underground Organization” (WUO).

What struck me in the film was the faces of the educated, youthful, idealists who perpetrated this violence. The film awoke me to the fact that our actions are grounded in the justifications and stories that we tell ourselves and each other.

Thankfully most belief systems do not point us in the direction of such terrorist acts but even our history holds the story of a cannon being shot off into Rev Joshua Bates window. Rev. Bates was the last mutual pastor who served both the members of the Allin Congregational Church and First Church as one congregation. He was quite conservative and religiously Federalist, which meant he believed there should be a small group of elders who held sway over the rest of the religious body. This disagreed with the wider membership who had been used to and wanted to continue more local and widespread authority and so in 1809 several of the members of the parish shot off a cannon under his bedroom windows in the parsonage.

Now I can imagine several stories that might have justified a cannon being shot off under the minister’s window not the silliest being that he would not listen to anybody.

This piece of our history if viewed from several vantage points might give us even more perspective. It seems that there was no one in the parsonage when the cannon was shot, so we can imagine that the men were not trying to kill anyone. But what of the minister and his wife and children arriving home to the mess? How might we tell this story differently if we knew their first reaction? And what of the man or men who had to repair the parsonage for the minister and his family to live in for the next nine years?

And how old were the men who shot of the cannon? If they were young might we have more sympathy for their impulsive ways? If they were older might we take more seriously their concerns? Were the perpetrators drunk? Were they sober? Were they part of the membership who called Alvan Lamson to this parish upon Joshua Bates’ resignation? Or were they part of the fellowship who left this parish at Lamson’s call.

What could it have been like to feel so strongly at odds that you would shoot a cannonball through a man’s window and then have to listen to him preach and tolerate his organization of your parish for another 9 years?

These are only a few of the countless parts of the story that are missing.

The perspective of the person who tells the story colors our judgment and so often we do not have all the facts to complete the history.

What we can be mindful of is which lens we are looking through as we view each situation.

If we see ourselves as the lighters of the cannon under Joshua Bates’ window will we always be quick to respond in actions not words?

If we view ourselves as the man who had to repair the damage will we be vigilant not to allow anyone to destroy our property again?

If we identify with the Minister and his family returning home to the mess, would we be careful not to say or do anything to cause such a disruption in the future?

If we define ourselves as the parish, which is at the heart of the controversies that forced the Dedham Decision of 1820, how might this affect our vision of ourselves?

Will we strive for all eternity to avoid conflict in the future?

Or will we believe conflict is a necessary part of progress?

If how we tell the story affects how we behave in the future then perhaps it is time we tell a new story.

I want to tell the story of this founding Parish Church, which has taken responsibility for the Dedham people throughout history: how we fed and nourished the hungry during the turmoil within the colony before the revolutionary war, how we supported families during the war against the Wampanoag Indians, how we clothed the poor. I want to know where our pastors stood on abolition, celebrate parishioners who fought in wars. I know these stories of action are here too.

These are the stories I want us to publish on our website and the stories I want us to learn how to live today.

It is time to shift the perspectives of our history so that we see the full humanity in our stories. The friends and neighbors divided by Joshua Bates’ exclusionary theology, the faces of the people who walked in and out of these churches across the street from each other. How many were friends and neighbors who felt betrayed?

We have but four more years until our 375^th anniversary. I hope in that time we can find ways to retell our story in the most truthful light. Framing our history in the light of justice, seeing our ancestor’s actions as change agents in their time and reclaiming a truth that frees us to see ourselves as change agents in our time.

May we recognize time as our ally, and move and work in transformative ways, making our mark on history so that we free our descendants to create a liberating future that we cannot even imagine now.