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	W.W.D.C.D?  
	Rev.  Edmund Robinson 
	Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield 
	September 17, 2000

"What would Jesus Do?"  is the slogan for a certain stripe of
Christian in the last few years.  Followers of this movement adopt
this question as the guide for all of their behavior in life.  I was
vaguely aware of this movement, and vaguely aware that there was a
line of products such as ballcapsball caps and coffeemugscoffee mugs
and jewelry embossed with the letters WWJD?  But it didn't strike me
with any particular force until I met Gail Tapscott, a UU minister
colleague last March with a bracelet on that had the letters WWMPD.
My curiosity got the better of me and I asked her what the letters
stood for.  She said "What would Mary Poppins do?"  I saw immediately
where she had come from:  instead of Jesus as the role model, why not
look at someone you really worshiped as a child?  She said she had
preached on that topic and it was her best-received sermon of the
year.  Since I am not above brazenly ripping off someone else's good
idea, I started thinking about who in my life, in my generation, would
fill this bill.

Now I'm going to keep you in suspense for a few more minutes, because
I want to point out that in examining this question as to childhood
heroes, I'm not intending in any way to put down Jesus as an ethical
standard.  I think ethical standards, guides for behavior, are some of
the best things we can take from the life and teachings of Jesus as
they have come down to us, and I really want to consider the
alternative, not to put down the folks that wear the WWJD jewelry or
bumper stickers, but to see what it might mean to have Jesus as a
standard by contrasting him with a childhood hero.

And I can't resist pointing out that the notion Jesus as an ethical
standard is classic Unitarianism.  The very blueprint of Unitarianism
is the sermon preached by William Ellery Channing in Baltimore in 1819
entitled "Unitarian Christianity."  In it Channing.  Channing says
that the Calvinists with their emphasis on Jesus' role in saving souls
from Hell miss the point of Jesus:

"Whilst we gratefully acknowledge that he came to rescue us from
punishment, we believe that he was sent on a still nobler errand,
namely to deliver us from sin itself, and to form us to a sublime and
heavenly virtue.  We regard him as a Savior, chiefly as he is the
light, physician, and guide of the dark, diseased, and wandering
mind....  With these impressions, we are accustomed to value the
Gospel chiefly as it abounds in effectual aids, motives, excitements
to a generous and divine virtue."

And this is the approach we still follow today.  Here is a quote from
a Question and Answer pamphlet published by the UU Church of Nashua,
New Hampshire.

Do you believe in Jesus?

"We do not believe that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin, performed
miracles and was resurrected from death.  We do admire and respect the
way he lived, the power of his love, the force of his example and his
system of values."

"Most UUs regard Jesus as one of several important moral and ethical
teachers who have shown humans how to live a life of love, service and
compassion.  Though some of us may question whether Jesus was an
actual historical figure, we believe his teachings are of significant
moral value."

So the idea of Jesus as an ethical paragon is classic Unitarianism and
now Unitarian Universalism.  However, there is a difference.  I expect
that the sentiments I just quoted would seem too watered-down for many
of those who wear the WWJD jewelry.

For I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing if we say Jesus
was a great man and we ought to follow his teachings and practice,
versus saying Jesus was the incarnation of the second person of the
Godhead, who had existed from all time, and who was sent to redeem the
sins of humankind.  If we are mortal, what does it mean to model our
behavior on a being who was immortal?

There is another even larger problem in taking Jesus as the ethical
model, and that is, which Jesus do we take?  If we really read the
Biblical accounts, Jesus is a most contradictory figure.  We are
accustomed to think of him as the Prince of Peace, but he said I came
not to bring peace but a sword.  At some points he seems a radical
egalitarian and at others an apologist for great disparities of
wealth.

So we see there are significant issues with the choice of Jesus as our
ethical standard-bearer.  But what other models do we have?  I want to
talk here about one from my own life, I'm sure that each of you have
many others.

The year was 1955.  The Robinson family was camped out in or near the
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and at 6 AM, there was Edmund, 7
years old, dressed in fake buckskin shirt and trousers, toy long rifle
over my shoulder, coonskin cap squarely atop my head, marching through
camp singing at the top of my voice.

[Choir sings Davy Crockett theme].

Yes, like many other American youngsters in that year, I had gotten
swept up by the first truly mass craze of modern times, Davy Crockett.
When Walt Disney aired the first episode in December of 1954, he was
already shooting the third and final episode, at which Crockett gets
killed at the Alamo.  He had no idea that the show would be an
overnight sensation, but by then it was too late:  they had already
killed off the hero, and so only three shows were made in that first
series.

Crockettmania swept the country.  In the summer of 1955, fully 30% of
all children's clothing sold in the United States was connected to
Davy Crockett.  Tennessee Ernie Ford's recording of the Ballad of Davy
Crockett went to the top of the charts.  Then within a year it was all
over, the lunchboxes languished in the stores, and the attention of
the public turned to hula hoops.  The first big mass craze had come
and gone.

It's interesting that this was not the first wave of popularity for
Crockett.  He was a legend in his own lifetime.  He had distinguished
himself fighting the Creek Indians under Gen.  Andrew Jackson in 1813,
and on the basis if that and his capacity to tell tall tales, he was
elected to the Tennessee Legislature in 1821 though he had virtually
no school education.  He was elected to Congress in 1828 on the wave
of popular sentiment in favor of Andrew Jackson, Crockett soon broke
with Jackson and he was adopted by the Whigs, Jackson's opponents, and
promoted as a folk hero.  That resulted in this book, Crockett's
purported autobiography, which was a best seller in the 1830s.

There was a Crockett almanac, which came out every year between 1830
and 1846, full of folksy sayings.  So people took Davy Crockett to
heart during his own lifetime.

But I don't want to dwell much here on the real Davy Crockett, because
what impacted me was the myth, not the man; specifically, Disney's
version of the myth.  So I haven't poured over this autobiography, and
I haven't checked books out of the library to find out who the real
Crockett was.  Rather, I went to the video store and rented Davy
Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.  Seeing the movie brought back to
me why this figure remains with me after 45 years.

Because it's my thesis here that childhood heroes like Crockett become
guides to our behavior through stealth, through the fact that we spent
so much of our emotional energy at some point in our lives watching
them and thinking them cool and daydreaming about them and trying to
emulate them in our lives.  And many of you will not have Davy
Crockett in your pantheon of heroes, but you might have Mary Poppins
or General Patton or Superman or Green Hornet or Anne of Green Gables
or Nancy Drew, Dorothy from Wizard of Oz or Luke Skywalker, depending
on your generation.  It's my idea that these heroes seep into our
brains and become big influences over our behavior whether we
acknowledge it or not.

So how does this work for me?  Davy Crockett in the Disney version
represents fearlessness, independence, and an easy sense of humor.  I
think that this fearlessness was what first grabbed me as a child; it
was about that time that I had had a few adverse encounters with the
school bully and came to the emotional realization that not everyone
in the world loved me as unconditionally or completely as my parents.
Not only was Davy Crockett unafraid of bullies, but he stood up to
them and vanquished them.  Wish fulfillment, here we come.

About ten years later I saw a movie with another paragon of
fearlessness, To Kill A Mockingbird, where the lawyer, played by
Gregory Peck, stands up to the bigotry and anger of his small-town
neighbors.  As I think back on this, it seems to me that I viewed this
hero through the template of Davy Crockett.

I certainly carry in my adult heart an admiration for people who stand
up fearlessly in the face of great odds, on the field of combat but
particularly in courts of law.  This is the peculiar hero worship of
the criminal defense lawyer.  Clarence Darrow is probably at the
pinnacle of this pantheon, but it includes many names you've never
heard of.  The criminal defense lawyer going up against the weight of
public opinion, the bloodthirsty news media, the police forces, the
hostile judges, with nothing but his own wit and a complete scoundrel
for a client, is somehow in my mind like Davy Crockett going into the
bush to try to capture a bear by grinning it down.  Sitting in the
courtroom deciding whether to ask that risky question on cross
examination, the criminal defense attorney might well remember Davy
Crockett's motto, "make sure you're right, then go ahead."

Ah, but there's the rub.  The limitation of this advice is that in
criminal defense, one can rarely be sure one is right.  In fact, the
same could be said of much of life.  Sometimes you have to play the
odds.  Sometimes you have to act in the face of uncertainty.

Now it's worth pondering the differences between the roles of Davy
Crockett and Jesus.  I never had an altar call for Davy Crockett,
never was urged by a preacher to accept him as my life savior.  I fell
in love with Davy Crockett and he just sort of wormed his way into my
psyche.  Many people consciously place Jesus at the center of their
psyche and intentionally try to keep him there.

But as I think about Davy's influence on the actual choices I make, I
realize some things about myself.  I'm reluctant to confront my fears,
because Davy is in there telling me I shouldn't have them.  I am
reluctant to talk about them because tough guys, those who face down
bears and Indians and the armies of Santa Anna, don't show fear.
Criminal defense lawyers don't show fear.  To show fear is to give the
adversary an advantage.  You disarm the bear just by grinning at it.

Well, I used to be able to manage a pretty bodacious grin myself,
though my abilities are somewhat impaired in the department just now.
But more to the point, I've found that a strong, solid, fearless
exterior gets in the way of open communication.  If you want to excite
fear, admiration and envy in people, grin and keep chargin'.  If you
want warmth, empathy and openness, it might be good to admit your
vulnerabilities once in a while.

So we reach the limits of what Davy Crockett can do for us as an
ethical model.  It's no accident that Davy's wife is only shown in the
movie twice, both times as she is unsuccessfully imploring Davy not to
go off on another adventure and leave her behind.

Do we have heroes as adults, and do they influence the way we move
through life?  It is interesting that Crockett's dates are 1786 to
1836, about the same lifespan as two of our denominational heroes,
Hosea Ballou for the Universalists and William Ellery Channing for the
Unitarians.  Both of these gentlemen faced a lot of opposition for
their faith, and both metaphorically grinned down a few bears in their
lifetimes.

According to mythologist Joseph Campbell, all stories about heroes are
really variants of one archetypal story.  Here's how he put it in his
1949 classic, The Hero With a Thousand Faces:

"The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle
past his personal and local historical limitations to the generally
valid, normal human forms.  Such a one's visions ideas and
inspirations come pristine from the primary springs of human life and
thought.  Hence, they are eloquent, not of the present, disintegrating
society and psyche, but of the unquestioned source through which
society is reborn.  His second solemn task and deed, therefore (as
Toynbee declares and as all the mythologies of mankind indicate) is to
return then to us, transfigured, and teach the lesson he has learned
of life renewed."

Indeed that's a pretty tall order for Davy Crockett.  He fulfills the
first part admirably, going forth to represent his fellow-settlers in
the state and national legislature.  He joins the fight for an
independent Texas.

But, how about the second part?  Does he come back, transformed?  Yes,
in a way, he is transformed from a living person to a legend, a
transformation which was already well on the way before the Alamo.
We've already seen how the 1950's craze was in part a recapitulation
of that of the 1830's.  Bravo for Joseph Campbell.

So Davy Crockett fills the bill of Campbell's hero archetype.  And so,
of course, does Jesus, and a lot more comfortably too.

One final point.  I think we put heroes to very different uses at
different stages of life.  When we are young, we look at heroes as
symbols of potency, endowed with super strength or wealth or cunning,
as was said in the song.  They are able to do the things we can't do -
yet.

As the years pass and we still can't quite leap tall buildings in a
single bound, we unload on the hero the responsibility of doing all
the things we'd otherwise have to do ourselves.  We say, "he can do
it, because he's a hero; I'm just a systems analyst."

And then there is the aspect of heroism most deadly in a domestic
context - a notion that heroes don't take out the garbage, balance
their checkbooks, vacuum the hall.  "Hey, I bet if I was Davy Crockett
you'd let me out of doin' dishes."

So I'd like to leave you with a few more words from Joseph Campbell,
but first I invite you to think of the heroes you've had in your life
and how they've influenced you.  What attracted you about them, and
what does that attraction say about the qualities you wanted in
yourself?

Here's what Campbell said about heroism today:

"The hero-deed to be wrought is not today what it was in the century
of Galileo.  Where then there was darkness, now there is light; but
also, where light was, there now is darkness.  The modern hero-deed
must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of
the coordinated soul.

"...  the problem is that of rendering the modern world spiritually
significant.

"...  Nor can the great world religions, as at present understood,
meet the requirement.  For they have become associated with the causes
of the factions, as instruments of propaganda and self-congratulation.
(Even Buddhism has lately suffered this degradation, in reaction to
the lessons of the West.)  The universal triumph of the secular state
has thrown all religious organizations into such a definitely
secondary, and finally ineffectual, position that religious pantomime
is hardly more today than a sanctimonious exercise for Sunday
morning., whereas business ethics and patriotism stand for the rest of
the week.  Such a monkey-holiness is not what the functioning world
requires; rather, a transmutation of the whole social order is
necessary so that through every detail and act of secular life the
vitalizing image of the universal god-man who is actually immanent and
effective in all of us may somehow be made known to consciousness."

Amen.