First Unitarian in New Bedford

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Excerpt from a 1943 sermon

An excerpt from "Miracle Man," a sermon delivered by Rev. Duncan Howlett at First Unitarian in New Bedford in spring, 1943.

After he left our congregation in 1946, Howlett went on to serve First Church in Boston, and All Souls Church in Washington, DC. Upon retiring from All Souls in 1968, he joined Hubert Humphrey's campaign staff. In the 1970's and 1980's he became deeply involved in the environmental movement, particularly in the area of land conservation and forestry. He wrote a number of books about liberal religion, one of which, No Greater Love: The James Reeb Story, is still in print. He is arguably the most prominent person ever to have served this congregation as minister. [Link to brief biography.]

"Miracle Man" was originally delivered without notes or manuscript, taken down stenographically, and later reworked by Mr. Howlett for printing. This passage from Mr. Howlett's sermon depicts Jesus of Nazareth, and the miracles attributed to him, in a way that most Unitarian Universalists of today would still find compelling. Even if the underlying scholarship is now quite dated, this delightful sermon, with its vivid depiction of the figure of Jesus, still reads well today.

...According to the story in Mark [1.21-27], when [Jesus] went into the synagogue on the Sabbath morning and preached to the people, "They were astonished at his doctrine, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes. This is saying a very great deal, for the scribes were the authorities on the Law in those days, and were presumed to have all authority.

In the mind's eye we can picture Jesus going into the synagogue that Sabbath morning and standing up to read from the Law as any rabbi would do. He then expounded what he had read to the people. How long he talked we do not know. But somewhere in the course of his homily, some kind of commotion broke out among his hearers. It was very much as if a member of the congregation were to start a rumpus on a Sunday morning during a sermon, for the gathering was comparable to this one.

A man described in the Bible as having an unclean spirit cried out and said, "Let us alone; what have we done with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth, the Holy One of God." Jesus interrupted his teaching and rebuked the evil spirit in the man, saying, "Hold thy peace and come out of him." According to Mark's story, the evil spirit came out of the man, and he was made whole. This was a miracle in the eyes of the people.

With the knowledge we have today, how do we understand this incident? We no longer believe that evil spirits live within people and speak through them. Nor do we believe that evil spirits lived within people two thousand years ago, for we have a very clear and adequate explanation for what the people of those days called evil spirits.

Those whom the ancients regarded as being "possessed," we call neurotic or deranged. People so deranged utter jibberish today exactly as they did then. But it was probably much more common in those days when people believed in spirits. It was easy to utter jibberish if you believed it was not you who were speaking, but the Devil which had taken possession of you.

It was much easier to develop a neurosis and to be beside yourself, if you believed that spirits could take hold of you and possess you. What you believe has a very great deal to do with what you do. It was quite common practice in those days to fall to the ground, froth at the mouth and utter jibberish, because you had seen others do it and because you believed yourself possessed.

Now anyone who has ever spoken before an assembly knows there is no greater terror to a speaker than a commotion in the audience to which he is speaking. It utterly destroys your power to speak; it destroys your power to command the audience's attention. If a commotion occurs within an audience, the speaker is likely not only to lose the attention of his hearers but to lose track of his own thought as well. He becomes utterly helpless.We don't know and shall never know what happened when Jesus was teaching the law in the synagogue that Sabbath day. It has always been my personal conviction that when the man cried out in the midst of his address, Jesus, confronted with a real emergency, used the command of people he had long since discovered within himself. He did so probably unaware of the full power that lay within him, not really knowing when he spoke whether he could command the respect of the men to whom he spoke and whether he could quiet him or not.

Sometimes a skilled speaker can quiet an unruly member of his audience by the force of his personality and a commanding use of his voice. This is difficult enough to do. To make one's way into the mind of a mentally deranged person, and to bring into that mind order and calm, is a vastly more difficult thing to do, particularly as a speaker to an audience. But that is exactly what Jesus did. By the sheer power of his personality, he made his way into the mind of a person so mentally deranged he was frothing at the mouth and uttering jibberish. It was an extraordinary accomplishment, a thing so striking that the people who saw is acclaimed it a miracle.

Jesus from that moment became a miracle-worker in the minds of those people who had heard him and seen what he did. This incident in the synagogue and those that followed through the remainder of the day were of the greatest importance in the life of Jesus. It was a day of self-discovery [for Jesus], equal to the experience of baptism [at the hands of John the Baptist]....