"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.