“For A’ That and A’ That” - A Sermon for Robert Burns

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Created on Sunday, 25 January 2009 00:00
Written by Gary E. Smith

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On the Occasion of the 250th Anniversary of the Birth of Robert Burns

The living tradition we share, reads our Unitarian Universalist statement of purposes, draws from many sources, and there in that list, found in the front of the grey hymnbook before you, all of the sources are listed: Jewish and Christian teachings, humanist teachings, wisdom from the world’s religions, even the Lion Dance of the Chinese New Year we saw earlier, as well as the words and deeds of prophetic men and women, the wisdom of the earth and the moon and the seasons.  And, from this pulpit, and in the stories for our children, the music we hear and sing, the readings and the prayers, we experience all these sources, week after week, this religious faith which does not confine us to just one definition of the holy.

The living tradition we share draws from many sources, we say, and now let me read to you the first of the sources, above the words about the words and the deeds, the wisdom and the teachings.  The first source, those Unitarian Universalists who gathered in General Assembly in 1984 and 1985 said, is a direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life. Ah, here in this transcendental town, we have transcendental mysteries, and that is where this sermon begins, here on this Sunday, January 25th, the 250th birthday of the Scottish poet Robert Burns.

Well, the sermon began with the inauguration of Barack Obama, too, his speech, the prayers, all the other speeches, the mall, the people, the sea of people, stretching out to the Washington Monument and beyond, the faces, more than white faces, the tears on more than white faces, the sermon begins there, too, and the sermon ties back to Robert Burns and his poetry and his passions and the sermon ties, too, into the bundle of transcending mystery and wonder, how else to explain it all, how moving this time of transition is, a non-partisan excitement, I think; there were Republican tears.  I saw them.

But, let us begin with Robert Burns, and may I say the worship team here turned on a dime this week, changed what had been planned, for when I read in last weekend’s newspapers that this was dear Mr. Burns 250th birthday today, and when I remembered other years here when we celebrated this occasion, most recently in 1995, Beth remembers, her first year with us, and Bob Peters read the same poem then, For a’ That and a’ That, I knew we must join the celebration.  So, thank you Beth, and thank you, Mr. Blackman and your bagpipes, too.

This sermon will have a certain left brain – right brain two-step on the way to the final hymn today; the left, just the facts, the rational, the analysis; the right, the imaginative, the pantheistic, the transcendent, the mystery, the wonder.  Where I begin with Robert Burns before I knew there WAS a Robert Burns is back in my ancestors, I suppose, more than a few drops of Scots-Irish blood in me from my mother’s family, coming to America, settling in the hills and rocky fields of western Maine.

I grew up next door to an Irish woman who lived to be more than a hundred, and, each year on her birthday, the bagpipers would come marching down the street, an awful and wonderful sound that drew us all outdoors.  Here was the woman who, when we went to the ocean would have us bring back a bottle of seawater so that she could smell and taste it.  In the 1950’s, her picture would be distributed to newspapers across the country as Notre Dame’s biggest football fan.  The team sent her an autographed ball.  Heady stuff for a little boy.

Early in our marriage, Eliz and I loved a show on Public Radio on Friday nights, Thistle and Shamrock, live from North Carolina, and then being in Asheville, North Carolina, one summer night and finding there quite serendipitously a Highlands Festival, exquisite music out of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I was transported: fiddle and voice, pipes and clogging well into the night.

And more than one graveside service in the span of my ministry, most of all, one in Maine, where a son piped at the grave for his Dad, a solitary figure over in the trees, spinning music with those sounds that so surpassed any words I could ever find.   This all led us to Sanders Theater so many years ago on a cold late January night to celebrate Burns’ birthday, Jean Redpath and all, the reading of his poems, the singing of his songs.  You are thinking right now: would he go on so about Polish polkas or Italian operas.  Well, no.

Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759.  He was self-educated, from very humble beginnings, a farm laborer himself.  He lived to be only thirty-seven, but shall we say he packed a lot into those years, any number of romantic entanglements, political controversies, misfortunes and poverty, and did I mention his romantic affairs?  One critic says that Burns was his own severest critic and managed to catalog most of his own faults.

One object of his satire was the church, and religion in general, and some Calvinist preachers he knew, in particular; the old school pastors, he said.  In his poem, Holy Willie’s Prayer, Burns takes on those who used their religion to hide their own hypocrisies and pretensions, certainly something that never happens in these days:

But I gae mad at their grimaces,
Their sighin, cantin, grace prood faces,
Their three-mile prayers, an hauf-mile graces,
Their raxin conscience,
Whose greed, revenge, an’ pride disgraces…

Burns had no problem himself with hypocrisy; he was (how shall we put this?) a high-spirited guy, and though all his escapades and deviltry could be listed here, what brought him the more notoriety was his delight in writing poems that rejoiced in his behavior.  He was definitely writing to be in your face.  One of his biographers says that parish squabbles and windy preachers amused him, and petty parish tyranny infuriated him, especially when provoked by his own behavior.

Burns wrote once that all my fears and cares are of this world: if there is another, an honest man has nothing to fear from it. This is a theology that is at the heart of the poem Bob Peters read earlier.

For a’ that and a’ that,
It’s comin yet, for a’ that,
That man to man the warld o’er,
Shall brothers be for a’ that.

And, I am thinking, when I hear and when I read those four lines, that this is what I saw on the National Mall on Tuesday.  We’d change more than our language in this day to brothers and sisters, but didn’t we see something of a world coming on Tuesday, wasn’t that why mothers and fathers brought their children to that event, wasn’t that why school classrooms gathered by televisions; it is a new world coming, for a’ that and a’ that.

This is the season of inauguration, of state of the union, state of the state, budget cuts, drastic budget cuts, cuts in aid to towns and cities, Dow Jones at 8000, investments shrinking, jobs on the line, uncertainty and dread, a need for hope; this room three weeks ago wrote all these hopes and fears on cards, what are our common worries, we wondered, and then we said: we’re all in this together, we’re all in this together, we’re all in this together.

For a’ that and a’ that,
Our toils obscure and a’ that,
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,
The man’s the gowd for a’ that.

Burns calls us to something better.  He extols honesty over show and hypocrisy, the false distinctions of class, the whispery constructions of wealth and how ephemeral it is.  These are the same headlines of our day, the Ponzi schemes, the McMansions built on speculation and lining up unsold on our Concord streets.

For a’ that and a’ that,
The tinsel show and a’ that,
The honest man, though e’er so poor
Is King o’ men for a’ that.

Then let us pray that come it may,
As come it will for a’ that,
That sense and worth o’er a’ the earth
Shall bear the gree, and a ‘ that!

Bear the gree: win the prize.  Shall bear the gree, and a’ that…  It’s comin yet… Robert Burns was writing in the late 18th century, at the time of the American and the French Revolution, remember; Burns was a poet, an observer, an honest man, one who could see something better, could see in human relationships, me to you, the possibility of something better.  Strip away the tinsel show, he said, and we’re more alike than it appears.  That’s what I will remember about this inauguration: wealth and show might have bought the seats up on the podium, secured even the tickets at the front, but the gates opened to the people’s mall and people came and came and came from across the country.

Robert Burns was a prophet.  He saw injustice and he named it.  He said once that his creed was: Lord, grant that we may lead a gude life! For a gude life make a gude end; at least it helps well! Mark Twain said some years later, We want heaven for the climate and hell for the company. Burns would have agreed.  Too many hypocrites in heaven.  In a letter to Frances Dunlap in 1789, Burns says, Whatever mitigates the woes, or increases the happiness of others, this is my criterion of goodness; and whatever injures society at large, or any individual in it, this is my measure of iniquity.

But I have said this sermon is a right brain/left brain two-step, and we are on the way here at the end, just before the haggis and the Auld Lang Syne, to less of an analysis of his lyrics and his life, and more to what has been called his transcendent gift of song.” How do you write these songs, he was asked once.  And this is what he said: I consider the poetic sentiment, correspondent to my idea of the musical expression, then choose my theme, begin one stanza, when that is composed – which is generally the most difficult part of the business – I walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in nature around me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy and workings of my bosom (remember William Blake is a contemporary), humming now and then the air with the verses I have framed.

When I feel my Muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, and there commit my effusions to the paper, swinging, at intervals, on the hind-legs of my… chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as my pen goes. We leave Burns there, by the fire, rocking back in his chair, his pen at the ready.  And as we do so, we salute the poets, those who take us from the time-bound to the transcendent, to whatever it is in these words and in this music that touches someplace within us.  For me, my soul sings with the bagpipe.  What is happening is more than words, as religion is more than words.  This morning, it would have been enough to hear the pipes and to hear the poem and to give thanks.

Then let us pray that come it may,
As come it will for a’ that,
That sense and worth o’er a’ the earth
Shall bear the gree, and a ‘ that!
For a’ that and a’ that,
It’s comin yet, for a’ that,
That man to man the warld o’er,
Shall brothers (and sisters) be for a’ that.