A sermon by the Rev. James Marshall Bank

Minister, Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Easton, Maryland

for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Winston-Salem

August 6, 2006

James Marshall Bank was interim minister here from October 1999 to August 2000.

Our sermon this morning is historical, dealing with Ralph Waldo Emerson – who preferred to be called Waldo – and his rejection of the Lord’s Supper, which brought about the end of his ministry at the Second Church of Boston, Unitarian, his only settled ministry.

Like many of our Unitarian Universalist congregations across this country, we in this fellowship seldom if ever celebrate the Lord’s Supper, though there are a goodly number of our sister congregations that do so monthly, quarterly or at least several times a year.

The origins of our aversion to this tradition – that might bind us more closely to our Christian roots – most likely lie with Waldo Emerson and a sermon he preached just before surrendering his pulpit.

And thus it has immediate implications as well as historical. So I invite you to join me in pondering what happened all that time ago in early September 1832, when – using as his text the words from Paul’s letter to the Romans that “The Kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost” – Waldo Emerson closed the very few years of his active ministry.

But let me drop back a year or so to establish the setting for this event.

In early February of 1831, a year and five months after marrying Waldo, Ellen Tucker Emerson had died of tuberculosis. She was 20 years old and he was 28. They had met when she was 16 – and he 24 – and were in love when she was 17. This disparity in age, coupled with her extreme youth, was typical of the time – and so was the disease that killed her.

In hopes that her health would improve, they waited till she was 19 to wed, but her brief life had run its course that short time later. Yet from the day of her burial in her father’s tomb in Roxbury, Waldo Emerson would walk across town daily to visit and to try to communicate with her who, he said, “made [him] happy in [her] life & in [her] death [made him] yet happy in [her] disembodied state.” It was cold comfort.

Then, on the 29^th of March 1832, a year after her death, this notation is found in Emerson’s Journal: “I visited Ellen’s tomb & opened the coffin.”

Gay Wilson Allen, one of Emerson’s biographers, says the following about this action:

If . . . Ellen was buried in her father’s mausoleum, the opening of the coffin would have been a little less gruesome than digging it up out of the ground.

Yet even so, the act remains so unnatural as to seem almost insane.

And it is also unlikely that in that period in Boston the body was embalmed.

There is no indication that the coffin needed to be moved, only that it was opened to satisfy some morbid compulsion.

It may be significant that Emerson did not mention Ellen again in his Journal until November of 1832, when Margaret Tucker [Ellen’s sister] died, and he wrote: “Go rejoice with Ellen . . .”

But his cousin David Greene Haskins says that he continued his practice “until his departure for Europe [in December that year], of regularly walking out in the early morning to visit her grave in Roxbury.”

He had worshiped this child bride, and her loss was a bitter blow. He had loved her deeply, loved her passionately.

His acceptance of the call to serve the Second Church of Boston may well have been so that he would have the financial wherewithal that would permit him to marry her. And in turn, her loss may have pushed him away from the church and its ministry.

I don’t think that his opening of the coffin was as morbid or insane as Allen implies. I can think of a number of similar events that come down to us from that age when death was more common amongst the young. I think his opening of the coffin had more to do with his moving away from the attempt at communion with Ellen’s physical memory. When the coffin was opened, he had seen her in death – in full corruption. He might return to the tomb many times more, but after that day there was no question for him regarding what was inside. She was dead.

And so was Jesus.

The importance of the Galilean’s life remained, as did the importance of the life of Ellen Tucker, but now both were dead. In the light of both of these deaths, to continue to have import, religion had to change. And in June of that year, Emerson wrote to the Proprietors of the Second Church asking that he be released from conducting the Lord’s Supper as a part of his ministry, setting in motion the process that led to the termination of his ministry to that congregation. The Proprietors demurred, referring the letter to committee, which reported out that it could not approve his request.

It should be understood that Emerson was not the first Unitarian or the first New Englander to allege scruples regarding the Eucharist – or Lord’s Supper. Francis Dàvid, the Rumanian Unitarian leader of the 1500s, had done so and lost his life for the effort.

In New England, Gay Allen said:

The Lord’s Supper had often been the subject of controversy. The early Puritans believed that only members of the Church should take communion, and to become a member of the Church one had to offer evidence that God had chosen him [or her] as one of [God’s] “saints,” predestined to go to heaven. For an “unsaved” person to take communion was believed to be blasphemy.

Solomon Stoddard, the grandfather of Jonathan Edwards, had been savagely attacked by Increase Mather for accepting profession of faith and repentance as [the only] prerequisites for Church membership and communion

Later, the more liberal Congregational churches went even further [than Stoddard] and said that taking communion could aid in redemption and should therefore be open to everyone.

That far the Unitarians might go, but to discontinue the sacrament altogether was too great a step for it would deny to Jesus his role as mediator.

At a meeting of the congregation, five days after the Proprietors’ committee had responded, the congregation concurred. So Emerson left town to ponder his response. The church was closed for repairs anyway. But in September, when the repairs were finished, and he returned to the pulpit, Waldo Emerson brought his relationship with the congregation of the Second Church to a halt through the sermon he delivered.

Jesus, he said, had not meant to create an enduring meal in memory of himself. As a Jew he was merely observing the Passover with his disciples. His use of the terms “my body” and “my blood” with reference to the bread and wine was mere hyperbole.

St. John is right in quoting Jesus as saying in Chapter 6 of his Gospel, “The flesh profiteth nothing; the words that I speak to you, they are spirit and they are life.”

Paul’s purpose in Corinthians “is not to enjoin upon his friends the observance of the Supper, but to censure their abuse of it . . . to chide them for drunkenness.”

Indeed [and here I use Gay Allen’s summary of a part of the sermon], Christ came into the world to provide a living religion to take the place of the empty formalism of the Jewish religion, not to instigate new forms and rituals – [for to do so would be to lead many astray into idolatry.]

I turn to Emerson again:

“We [today] are not accustomed to express our thoughts or emotions by symbolical actions. . .

The use of the elements, however suitable to the people and the modes of thought in the East where it originated, is foreign and unsuited to affect us. . .

If I believed that [the Lord’s Supper] was enjoined by Jesus on his disciples, and that he even contemplated to make permanent this mode of commemoration [which was] every way agreeable to an Eastern mind, and yet on trial, it was disagreeable to my own feelings, I should not adopt it.

I should choose other ways, which he would approve more.

For what could he wish to be commemorated for?

Only that [humanity] might be filled with his spirit.

I find that other modes comport with my education and habits of thought.

For I chuse that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious.

I will love him as a glorified friend after the free way of friendship and not pay him a stiff sign of respect as [people] do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, the provoking each other to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a glow of love, an original design of virtue I call a worthy, a true commemoration. . .

Freedom is the essence of Christianity.

It has for its object simply to make [people] good and wise.

Its institutions should be as flexible as the wants of [humanity].

That form out of which the life and suitableness have departed should be as worthless in its eyes as the dead leaves that are falling around us.

Was Ellen Tucker Emerson one of those dead leaves Waldo mentions, along with the Lord’s Supper?

Was she at last disembodied and released into his mind? Was the organized church so released for him as well?

Though he preached in churches the rest of his life, he was never to serve as a settled minister again.

His scripture was broadened to include the writings of humanity from the Far East, the Middle East and the West. The language of God was communicated by science. The power of the word was in his writings as well as those of others. His successors were to be philosophers rather than ministers, and among them would be Friedrich Nietzche and many more.

In the summer of 1835 Waldo married Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, Massachusetts. A significant inheritance from Ellen had made his life easier. When combined with lecture fees, he had a reasonable yearly income. And when their second child, born in 1839, was a daughter, Lydian – as Waldo called his wife – promptly named the child Ellen Tucker, which pleased Waldo, who always loved – always worshiped – the bride of his youth and transferred a part of that love to this girl, who watched over him through the remainder of his life.