The Selkirk Grace by Robert Burns was jointly recited at the beginning of the Service and the main Reading was several verses of The Kirk of Scotland's Garland. The closing hymn was A Man's a Man for a' That.
Sermon: “The Immortal Memory of Robert Burns”
Well, there is a bit of role reversal here with someone born in the States, although with long and deep immersion in Scotland to the point of taking out citizenship decades ago, appearing before you to talk of your National Poet. But I'll do my best and rely on the fact that Burns is famous around the world and in many languages.
The UUA, an organisation which brings together roughly 1000 congregations, mostly in the States but with some in Canada, has a website of biographies of Unitarians and Universalists and there is an article on Robert Burns which lists his many connections to our liberal faith while acknowledging that he never joined a Unitarian or Universalist Church even though there were a few around during his life. Interestingly, the article was written by Revs Andrew Hill and Peter Hughes, two British Unitarian ministers.
Born in 1759, Burns’s birthday, 25 January, was used as the start and the end of the government's Homecoming Year to promote Scottish identity and tourism and economy. He had a relatively short life, dying aged 37, in 1796 of heart failure. His heart had been weakened by rheumatic fever when he was young. By 1800, four years after his death, his first biography was published in four volumes, by Scottish Unitarian, James Christie! It is believed by some scholars that his poem/ song "Scots wha hae" , 1793, alludes to the show trial and deportation of Dundee's Unitarian minister, Thomas Fyshe Palmer. Palmer had assisted in drafting a petition to the King and for this was deported to Australia. While he apparently flourished in the penal colony, he died on the way home and never saw Scotland again.
Last November and December, STV’s search for the Greatest Scot ever included both Stevensons, Logie Baird who invented television, Charles Rennie Mcintosh, Sir Walter Scott, Sean Connory, The Big Yin, and dozens of others. past and present who help to shape Scottish life and identity. Burns won, hands down as the Greatest Scot ever. Over the years his portrait has adorned various Scottish banknotes and I noticed last week a Bank of Scotland £5 note with Sir Walter on one side and Robert on the other.
Robert Burns: song collector, writer, poet, womaniser, scourge of hypocrisy in the Kirk, a failed farmer and an exciseman. His situation in 1786 was so desperate -- his marriage to Jean Armour had been annulled by her father, his farm was not producing because of (in part) poor soil, and he had been publicly disciplined by the Church of Scotland Presbytery that he resolved to go to the West Indies to make a new life. But he needed money for passage, so he published a book of poems. This received instant acclaim and on the back of that acclaim instead of moving to the West Indies he moved to Edinburgh and became part of “the scene” in the capital of Scotland.
I suppose at virtually all times and all religions to some degree there are tensions within the Community between those who want to keep things as they are and pass them on to the next generation intact without change as evidence of fidelity, as evidence of loyalty, as evidence of one’s spiritual discipline and religiosity, one the one hand. And on the other hand, there are those in the Community who say that whatever we have learned from the past we need to apply with creativity and sensitivity and perhaps even with love to apply to our current situation. It is not enough to take the heritage and pass it along as if we had no existence at all in the process. In Burns’s day in the Church of Scotland, the Kirk, these groups were called the Auld Licht and the New Licht. The Auld Licht were followers of John Knox, who himself had tried to follow the teachings of Jean Calvin in both theology and governance. The perennial tension between those who want to follow tradition fully as literally as possible and those who want to adapt tradition to current circumstances produced a few ministers, especially in Ayr, of the New Licht. Burns talks about some of these with favour in his poems. And then there are, in any tradition, those for whom tradition isn't a focus .... like Ralph Waldo Emerson, or even like Burns himself.
Burns's 'unconventional life-style' was at least partly based on a philosophy which rejected original sin and saw sex as a natural part of love. His father, (whether he was a Unitarian or not is debatable but I think the internal evidence is overwhelming that he was a classical Universalist) taught his children about the love of God as both a reality and a motivation for behaviour rather than fear of punishment. But even more for Rabbie Burns, it was his natural rejection of the hypocrisy of his critics that produced some very fine poetry. In the Kirk of Scotland’s Garland [our first Reading] he makes theological points about the Trinity and about the unfair treatment of New Licht ministers. Holy Willie, an elder in the Mauchline kirk , is mentioned as one of the hypocritical Auld Licht persecutors. He actually was the subject of a separate poem, Holy Willie’s Prayer:
“O Thou that in the heavens does dwell!
Wha, as it pleases best thysel,
Sends ane to heaven and ten to h-ll,
A’ for thy glory!
And no for ony gude or ill
They’ve done before thee.—
I bless and praise thy matchless might,
When thousands thou has left in night,
That I am here before thy sight,
For gifts and grace,
A burning and a shining light
To a’ this place.
What was I, or my generation,
That I should get such exaltation?
I, wha deserv’d most just damnation,
For broken laws
Sax thousand years ere my creation,
Thro’ Adam’s cause!
…..
Yet I am here, a chosen sample,
To shew thy grace is great and ample:
I’m here, a pillar o’ thy temple
Strong as a rock,
A guide, a ruler and example
To a’ thy flock.---”
Burns then continues with a list of Willie’s “indiscretions” and his attacks on others and finishes with:
“But L—d, remember me and mine
Wi’ mercies temporal and divine!
That I for grace and gear may shine,
Excell’d by nane!
And a’ the glory shall be thine!
Amen! Amen!
Burns believed that it was the way we led our lives rather than some Divine Election that made the difference. He believed that the church had become like a hangman's whip to keep the wretched in order through fear -- hardly a picture of love that any of us would recognise. The New Licht followers were trying to open the Kirk to new understandings, the Auld Licht fought back not just by appealing to tradition and Calvinist theology, but by falsely attacking the character of reformers. Burns used his considerable talents to expose this hypocrisy.
Some of his sarcastic wit is unfortunately not suitable for pulpit reading -- if you don't have a Burns' compendium at home, go to a library or website to sample it: it's very rewarding and refreshing.
Many of his poems have been translated into other languages and spread around the world for artistic and even philosophical reasons. I can remember a time, before the fall of the Iron Curtain, reading about a huge shipment of haggis being airlifted to Moscow for Burns’s Suppers there, where he is considered a Man of the People and his poems available in Russian.
However, consider also the spread of Scots around the world who took Burns with them: At the time of Union, the population of Scotland was around 2 million, that of England was around 4 million. So England had twice the population of Scotland. 200 years later and England has eight to nine times the population of Scotland, which in the meantime has grown to about 5 million. Are Scottish men or Scottish women not so fertile? Did they take very seriously the Calvinist condemnation of carnal knowledge? No, Scotland lived those years by exporting its greatest treasure, its people. The reason was poverty. The poverty of Scotland meant we did not have the work to support the babies we produced. So we gave them what for the time was probably the best education in Europe and sent them abroad, as engineers, as architects, as accountants, as politicians, and we now have a situation where our population is about 10% that of England and every country where English is spoken (and many where English is not native) contain communities who trace their roots back to Caledonia, often, it must be said, with an unrealistic idealised picture of life here.
Burns not only wrote poems and lyrics, he collected folk material and saved many oral works from extinction -- indeed he set standards in this area that were important to later collectors of oral tradition. Interestingly, two classical musicians who collected folk music from their traditions, Eduard Grieg and Bela Bartok, also had strong Unitarian connections.
Every year about this time, not just in Scotland but all over the world, Annual Burns’ Suppers take place: There’s the address to the Haggis, the Immortal Memory, the toast to the lasses and the response. There’s the set menu of haggis (vegetarian option now often available), neeps, and tatties. There’s the closing Auld Lang Syne. Barbara & I are going to one in East Kilbride tomorrow where I will give the Selkirk Grace and play a selection of Burns’s songs on my bagpipe. This Aberdeen congregation will be having a Burns’ Supper later this week. While these occasions include recitation of his poems and sometimes singing of his songs, it is the Immortal Memory is the annual reminder of his current influence and relevance. The Immortal Memory is the creative renewal of understanding that makes our appreciation of our Greatest Scot more than routine repetition of the past. It brings the issues and values of our day into our appreciation of his gifts.
I don't want to portray Burns as some kind of saint -- he had some major faults, especially his inability to keep his breeks on in the presence of women, but his fight against hypocrisy in religion stands like a shining beacon through the ages. Those of us who believe that religion can be a force of good and comfort and wholeness for both individuals and the community need to keep this message ever before us: whatever the rationality of our message, whatever the noble aims pursued in the public arena for human betterment, whatever glory and street-cred we get from mixing with folk in high places, if our members and our leaders are found to be hypocrits, not just these people but the whole endeavour will be seen as a sham and it will deservedly revolt those who most need what we are trying to provide. For me the contemporary importance of Robert Burns, aside from his impact on Scottish identity, is this fight against hypocrisy.
Unitarianism tries to be a religion where we say what we believe and if we don’t believe it we don’t say it, hence our rejection of creeds. But Unitarianism is also a religion that believes in a God, however defined, of Love. Our motivation for ethical action is patterning our lives on a God of love rather than a fear of judgment and punishment. Robert Burns’s life, tragically short even in the context of his time 200 years ago, illustrates both these aspects of our religion.
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