In 1841 Unitarian Minister Rev. Theodore Parker gave a famous sermon called “A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity” that made him very popular with the young upstarts, and reviled by the old establishment. But it is such an important sermon that UU seminary students are still required to read it today. Parker believed that there were some parts of Christianity, like “forms and doctrines” that were transient, that would change over the life of the church. But there were other parts of Christianity like “the divine life of the soul, love to God, and love to man” that would persist through the changes of time and culture.
“Already men of the same sect eye one another with suspicion, and lowering brows that indicate a storm, and, like children who have fallen out in their play, call hard names. Now, as always, there is a collision between these two elements. The question puts itself to each man, “Will you cling to what is perishing, or embrace what is eternal? This question each must answer for himself. (pp. 146-147)”
Today we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Unitarian Universalism, of the merger of 2 historic traditions. And as we do so I invite us to consider where we have been and where we are going; What is transient and what is permanent in our faith, now called Unitarian Universalism?
When the Unitarian association and the Universalist Associate merged in 1961, no one knew for sure what would happen. It’s true that if you made a theological continuum of all the protestant churches U and U often found themselves standing next to one another. But the two churches were different in important ways. There had been talk of union since 1865 but these differences had always held us apart in the past.
One of the most acute differences over the years is our relationship to Christianity. The founders of both movements understood themselves to be Christians, though many in the more mainstream traditions found there ideas so heretical that they were often accused of not being true Christians. Remember the Universalists were, at the time of their emergence, Trinitarians. They had no problem with the orthodox understandings of God, only an irreconcilable difficulty with the belief that an loving, all-powerful God would predestine eternal punishment for most of humanity. It was a different orthodoxy that distinguished the Unitarians. You may remember form earlier this year we talked about Joseph priestly who, way back in the 1700s, argued for the idea that Jesus was fully human, and that Jesus’ divinity had only been thought up in the 3rd century- long after Jesus lived and taught. The Unitarians had long believed that the humanity of Jesus was important, and that his divinity was less important than his teachings. Unitarians like Parker were already suggesting over 100 years ago that you could be a Christian without believing in miracles.
By the 1930s, humanism was an important part of both traditions, but was much more widespread among the Unitarians. (When the Humanist manifesto was signed in 15 of 34 signers were Unitarian). We oversimplify history when we portray Universalist Christians in conflict with Unitarian Humanists, because there were Christians and Humanists in both movements. The tension between more orthodox Christians and the swelling ranks of humanists begged the question -could the new merged association make room for both? Moreover, some folks felt that to be truly “Universalist” we needed to go beyond just the wisdom of the Christian tradition, to “the universal truths taught by the great prophets and teachers of humanity in every age and tradition” -- to a truly universal religion.
In 1959, the General Assembly of the two associations met in Syracuse New York. 1000 delegates were there. The Joint Merger Commission had spent 5 years seeking out the perspectives of UU congregations around the country. The Secretary of the Merger Commission said “it is safe to say that our societies have never responded in such numbers and with such seriousness as they did to the subject of merger.” In fact the merger was ultimately approved by a plebiscite representing 94 percent of Unitarian societies and 95 percent of Universalist societies. The Merger Commission worked for 5 years to prepare hundreds of pages of reports and study guides, and a 44 page "The Plan to Consolidate the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America" also called “the blue book” by the delegates who carried it throughout the Assembly.
One part of the plan proved to be most contentions. The new organization would need a statement of the “purposes and objectives” that could guide their new consolidated association. The commission had proposed this statement: “To cherish and spread the universal truths taught by the great prophets and teachers of humanity in every age and tradition, immemorially summarized in their essence as love to God and love to man.” The Universalists passed it in their first vote, but the Unitarian assembly had intense debate. Some folks thought it was too creed-like, but others wondered why it didn’t mention Jesus or our Judeo-Christian Heritage. The Unitarians countered with this: “To cherish and spread the universal truths taught by Jesus and the other great teachers of humanity in every age and tradition, and prophetically expressed in the Judeo-Christian tradition as love to God and love to man.” But this also couldn’t pass a vote on the Unitarian side, who felt like it stated too strongly our relationship to Christianity. Debate over wording of this statement created so much tension among the ranks, that it almost derailed the whole merger. Delegates debated late into the night, not wanting to give up, but not able to find something they could agree on, until finally they changed one word; our Judeo-Christian heritage” was changed to “the Judeo-Christian heritage.” Finally this statement could be approved by a majority of delegates.
A second area of concern was whether the smaller Universalist Church of America would loose itself in the larger American Unitarian Association. Would folks get lazy and say “Unitarian” instead of “Unitarian Universalist”? Would the Universalists lose their own unique history and identity? As a Unitarian Universalist congregation that was a Universalist congregation for its first 150 years, this is an important question for us. As we move into the future it is important that we, as a historic Universalist congregation, take a leadership role in preserving and uplifting our history. One way the Universalists hung onto their identity was by preserving our state conventions. If I understand correctly, before merger the Universalists also had one general association, but most of the decisions and power were in their state conventions, while the Unitarians had a more congregational polity. My favorite illustration of this is one Ginna gave me. In 1891 Rev. R. Neale was contracted by PUC to preach at Athens Church for 3 months, but the rule was that you must be in fellowship in Universalist tradition to serve a Universalist church. The PUC gave Rev. Neale 3 months to get into fellowship. So Rev. Neale applies for fellowship, but when the PUC convenes in Athens, perhaps in this very building, he does not attend but sends his lawyer to the hearing. As you might expect, his application for fellowship is rejected, and because there is NOT congregational polity-- that is the right of congregations to chose their own ministers-- the PUC closes the church, doors barricaded. A new board of the Athens church is elected, reengaging Mr. Neale who broke in through window, and started conducting services again. It is because he was “Enjoined in court of law” that we know this story at all- since it was reported in the news in the “Term of Court” blotter, wherein it quips that no word was give on the “spiritual fitness” of the lawyer. Now, post merger, the PUC does not have the power to give fellowship to ministers, but it does us stay connected to our Universalist roots, and the endowment of the PUC helps keep some of these historic Universalist churches alive.
Both denominations were active in social justice, and believed this to be an important part of their faith. Perhaps you remember that the first Universalist Minister, Olympia Brown, was also a tireless voice of women’s suffrage. Or Unitarian Dorothea Dix whose reporting on our treatment of the mentally ill lead to important reforms in the mid 1800s. Each denomination had their own service committee formed in the 1930s to witness against the Nazi invasions in Europe and to help refugees. And in fact the two worked closely together throughout their history and seemed to easily merge in 1963.. IN fact, it was in part their history of working together and being of similar mind about Social Justice work that was one of the cornerstones that made consolidation seem possible. But while Unitarians and Universalists were marching in Selma and Washington in the 1950s and 19602, the 1963 GA in Chicago failed to pass a non-discrimination clause. In 1969, just 8 years after merger, the Black Empowerment controversy erupted, marked at one dramatic moment by a walkout of our General Assembly. We came to realize that we had not even begun to address systemic racism and oppression in our own institutions. And so over the past few decades we have begun to take a hard look at our own institutions and to do the work of countering oppressions, but if this is work we really hope to do in a serious way, it is work that we must commit to into the future.
As in the larger culture, the black power movement empowered not only people of color but also women and GLBT persons to claim their power in this democratic country and within our movement. Senior ministers can still recall a time when there was not a single woman in our St. Lawrence District chapter of the Minister’s association, but now more than half of all ministers in our denomination today are women. Before merger all our GLBT clergy were closeted, and now our queer clergy and layfolks are at the heart of our movement- and at the heart of our “Standing on the Side of Love” campaign. We are chagrined to hear about the difficulty ministers from traditionally marginalized groups faced when looking for a congregation (and we have to assume that lay folks looking for welcoming congregations experienced the same barriers). But we have tried to look honestly at the structures of power and oppression, and we have committed ourselves to a path of change. We now require, for example, all congregations to participate in “Beyond Categorical Thinking” when they are in search. Starr King School for the Ministry, one of our 2 UU seminaries, includes as part of its core curriculum “Educating to Counter Oppressions.” As a movement we have begun to wake up to the realities of racism and overlapping oppressions, and have faith that we can change- that these institutional oppressions will be part of the “transient” in our movement.
IN the Commission on Appraisals report I mentioned before, they noticed a trend that folks want more heart than head from their churches in the last half of the 20th centuries. The Culture of the 1960s and 1970s changed our movement deeply. A new generation put aside study groups for encounter groups, and something stuck. On some fundamental way, what we wanted from our congregations changed from what our grandparents wanted. We want to feel connected to one another, we want chances to relate deeply in a way that, according to that report, is a change for who we are as a movement. That old old idea of an all-loving god may be better expressed in this time not as an important idea that can be argued by quick tongues and minds, but as a way for us to be in the world.
Universalists were at one time the 6th largest denomination in the country. We can see that here in the valley where there were at one time 7 Universalist congregations in the North Branch. Both the Unitarian and Universalist movements had shrunk over the years, as had many main line denominations. In the Commission on Appraisals report: “The Unitarian Universalist Merger 1961-1975” in 1975, there was already a perception that the great hopes of growth after merger were slowed by outside forces including this decentralization of church in our culture, and also that our cutting edge liberal ideas were no longer so cutting edge –that is to say that when our ideas became mainstream, one no longer had to take sanctuary in our congregations to hear our good news. Whereas at many points in our history we have had great clarity about who we were as a faith tradition, the changes to our movement and to the world over this past century have forced us to ask ourselves “What is transient and what is permanent in Unitarian Universalism.” The question we have been asking ourselves for over 50 years is “who are we?” and “what next?” what is the special calling of this faith tradition.
This fall you all sent me to the CENTER for Excellence in Ministry, and one of our presenters, Beth Zemsky, said during a panel discussion, that what she saw next not only for our movement, but for our culture as a whole, emerging in response to the rhetoric of individualism and security which has dominated our public discourse for the past decades, is a focus on interconnection and interdependence. As she spoke those words, I realized that actually, we’ve been talking around this for a while, about our interconnection and interdependence. I’ve heard us described over the past few decades as a “queer theology” that is to say not a theology for folks who are queer, but a theology which “goes both ways” as it were. I’ve heard us described as a cross-roads religion. And we covenant to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web, added to our principles only 25 years ago. We have known for a long time that our culture is out of balance in its pursuit of individual liberty. And I think of that night 50-some years ago when in the middle of what was probably unprecedented theological diversity, those 1000 delegates staid up deep into the night because they had faith that there was a way to stay connected while being authentic to individual difference and to our multiplicity. Think about the hateful horrible things we hear folks say in the media about other folks, folks who are different from them. This world needs us, Unitarian Universalists, to hang fast to our interdependence web, and to help others see it too. We must share the good news of our interconnection with those who don’t recognize how inextricably wound up in it we all are.
So when I ask myself what will remain at the core of Unitarian Universalism, what is transient and what is permanent, I think of our radical respect for our interdependence. I also think about our roots --hose roots going back hundreds of years, and our heroes who held for their contemporaries and for the future the light of reason, who were not afraid to speak their truth even when it meant personal sacrifice. And I think of our love of justice, and our deep roots in working for justice for more than a century. And now we bind our love of justice into that web- a web of intersecting identities, or staggering diversity -- knowing that this will not be a truly just world until there is justice for everyone in that web. We start with ourselves, our own association, our own congregation, our own hearts. And we express that web each Sunday when we gather in community. It is no longer enough for us to speak the truth to one another, we crave that interconnection. We practice love here in this place, not only because we have an innate longing for connection, but also because we believe that by practicing love, we help to create the world we dream of. When forms and doctrines fade away, I have faith that the good news we have to share about the love to the transcendent, love to one another, and love to this great web of life of which we are a part, these will never fade.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
The Dirt Beneath Our Feet (May 1, 2011)
I guess you could say that I’m an agnostic –there’s nothing that I know for sure about God. But at some point I made a theological leap that if I was going to believe in God, the God I could believe in was not separate from the world, but was deeply immanent in the world. If there was anything that was sacred, then everything was sacred. It is not enough simply to make that theological pronouncement, however, because such an audacious statement calls me to look deeply at all these manifold sacred things. Each living thing is a sacred text, and like the great sacred texts, new wisdom emerges as you live with those texts. What has surprised me in the years since I made that leap is that Once you put on your “everything is sacred glasses,” that is once you look at things as if you believe and trust that they are miraculous and sacred if you have the eyes to see, even the most ordinary of things begin to blow your mind
For years I have been singing the song “The Earth is our mother” and in my mind I pictured the globe- Gaia – our blue boat home. Recently, however, I heard Vandana Shiva, Physicist, Environmental Activist, talking about the role of earth in her culture in India. "For us,” she says “mud is not just the matrix of life in which we grow our plants, it's our building structure - it's our very sense of who we are." [quoted in a movie I recommend highly- Dirt! The Movie]
I realized she was talking about earth- the soil out of which we are all born. The soil which carries the building blocks of life, all those minerals and elements that make up our bodies, and the bodies of the plants and animals we eat. Says Physicist Fritjof Capra "The living organisms on earth have used the very same molecules of air, water and soil over and over again. Not just the same types of molecules but the very same molecules.", [Dirt! The Movie] Image singing that chant again- the earth is our mother, and picturing not the shining blue sphere, but a handful of dirt from your garden: the soil that feeds you and your children, the soil that turns fallen leaves and apple cores from garbage into life. As it says in the book of Genesis: [3: 19] “for out of [the ground] you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return.” The earth is our mother. It literally gives us life.
When I first read the passage by Wendell Berry we heard this morning, it awakened some deeper knowing in me- knowing in a deeper way what I had known since I was a child-- that everyone, everything I love as they die becoming part of the soil, and (I’ve been very clear with my family- when I die I want to be buried in a plain pine box) my own body will be part of that soil. I want to rejoin that millennia old chain of life, and when I die I want to rejoin it as soon as possible. When I thought of the soil that way, suddenly I was filled with an awe-filled reverence. That soil IS my ancestors, all our ancestors, all our loved ones, it is us.
As we saw in our opening meditation, dirt is not some inert material, soil is incredibly alive. I recently saw a movie called “Dirt! The Movie” and in it wine critic Gary Vaynerchuk said "With the amount of species that live in a teaspoon of dirt, I think it's very obvious dirt might be more alive than we are."
Because we live in a very fertile area, we take for granted that something will grow out of the ground, bidden or unbidden. We have to mow and cut back and sometimes even use poisons to keep thing from growing out of every bit of dirt. If we lived someplace like Africa we would know better. There about a third of the continent is dessert. Most of the continent is savannah, some naturally occurring, and much of it created when forests were cut down or burned to create farmland Nobel prize winner Wangari Maathai has devoted her life to planting trees to try to reclaim that desert, the desert that was created when we humans cut down or burned the trees and plants that held water and nutrients in the soil. Pierre Rabhi: Philosopher, Agro-ecologist Farmer turned philosopher has spent his life helping farmers in such arid landscapes to rebuild soil damaged through cultivation. He is quoted as saying "Africa is not poor. Ethiopia alone, if properly cultivated, could feed the entire African continent." [Dirt! The Movie.]
It is scary to realize that we in North America are not immune to this desertification. Our Top soil is not inert- not something that will always be there no matter what we do. We take it for granted, perhaps the same way we took our mothers for granted when we were children. The way we practice farming in modern times we lose six tons of topsoil for every ton of food produced "The Dust Bowl was an event, not quite on the same scale, but comparable to what happened after the last Ice Age. We made a really big change in the landscape just by bad farming practices” -- to quote urban arborist Bill Logan. [Dirt! The Movie ]
But this is not a sermon about science, this is a service about renewal. I am proposing that the earth itself- the soil is a kind of sacred text that can help us understand how to prevent the burn out, the desertification of our own hearts and minds, and can help us renew ourselves when we need it most.
I think we should start with roots. Roots hold the soil together. Roots draw water and nutrients down into the soil and up into plants. Without an interconnected of roots the soil washes away, or is blown away as in the days of the dust bowl. This is what causes desertification. This is why it is so important for farmers to plant cover crops in the off season- it keeps the soil healthy and whole when it is not producing crops. When we go through a storm, if we have laid down a web of connections, to one another, to our community, to the earth, it helps us stay whole during times of change or times of loss. Moreover, the deep roots help us through droughts, through times of scarcity. In times of drought the deep roots reach sources of water the more shallow roots cannot reach, they can also reach elements, nutrients from deep down. If the soil is low on phosphorous, say, but there is a layer several feet down the plants with deep roots can reach those nutrients that those annual plants with shallow roots cannot. Deep roots are the ones that take time to lay down, the roots that last from year to year, decade to decade. The earth teaches us that it is worth laying down roots slowly over many years, of keeping connected to the sources of nourishment and connection from long ago, because while we grow new roots every year, the plants that have deep roots have special sources of nourishment and strength to draw from. My grandfather told me once about how hard they worked to encourage their neighbors to plant a row of trees at the edge of their fields to help preserve the soil and slow the wind. Even in a life which depends on the annual crops, there must be trees, there must be deep roots for the health of the soil and of ourselves.
We also learn from the soil that we need change, and we need rest. A piece of land that has grown corn for too many years will bear less and less produce as the nutrients that corn needs are used up. Sometimes we need to just let the land rest- to lay fallow. By lay fallow we don’t mean that the bare dirt is just exposed to the sky for a year, we mean that it is uncultivated. In the same way rest for our soul is probably not sitting on the couch watching tv, but when soil is lay fallow it is “left to its own natural growth.” I guess for me this means to leave some time unscheduled sometimes- to be spontaneous and see what grows. Good farmers also rotate crops to keep the land fruitful. We all need change in those things we cultivate in our lives.
A natural ecosystem will find its own balance over the years if “left to its natural growth.” But when we cultivate land, when we cultivate ourselves, we have to very carefully keep track of the balance, to build a relationship of plants that are mutually supporting- elements that work in harmony with one another. It is widely known that it was the custom among the first nations people in this land to plant corn, squash and beans together- this is referred to as “the three sisters. Squash protects her sisters from weeds and shades the soil from the sun with her leaves, keeping it cool and moist. Beans help keep the soil fertile by converting the sun's energy into nitrogen filled nodules that grow on its roots. And the corn provides a trellis for the beans to climb. Or think of the compost pile. Most folks use a layering of dry and wet compost materials (lasagna is the common metaphor) Too much wet stuff and it will not get hot enough to transform. If there’s not enough oxygen it doesn’t transform (this is part of the problem with our current landfill system.) But once the right balance is achieved, the compost practically creates itself. What do you need for balance in your life right now?
And here’s the most amazing thing of all. What feeds the soil? Builds the soil? Waste. Death. Decay. Think about an old growth forest. There are trees there in all stages of life- young, old, and those laying there on the forest floor decaying. It can take a tree the size we see in our backyards about 20-25 years to decompose. All through that time it is food and habitat for many species of bugs, birds, rodents, bacteria, moss, even new trees. The leaves that drop from the trees in autumn become over the next few seasons the very food that will feed those trees and other members of the eco-system in future growing seasons. But what do we do in our own yards? We rake up all those leaves, haul away the dead trees, burn them or send them to landfill to keep things looking tidy. Then if we want to feed our yard we go buy fertilizer at the store. Here’s the wisdom I take from this scripture. What you need to feed your spirit is in you right now. It’s in your life, in your relationships, in the traditions and heritage you were born into. We so easily go looking far and wide to find food for the spirit, but all the basic building blocks are already around us. It’s in a story your grandmother told, memory of time shared with your father; it’s in this 400 year old religious tradition. Each generation does not have to start from scratch, but can let the leaves of past seasons, the lives of fallen trees that were the lives and work of our ancestors feed and nurture you. The same is true within your own life and spirit. You already know a lot. Experiences that may have seemed incidental at the time can come back to us later as wisdom. I never did become a professional ballet dancer, but I was so amazed to find that 20 years later all the work I did in ballet class as a child made yoga so much easier and fun for me as an adult. And as counter intuitive as it may seem, What you need to feed your spirit is in the loss you have experienced. Instead of raking loss and grief away to keep things tidy, sometimes the greatest gift we can give our spirits is to allow those griefs to remain where they are, to decay and change and be transformed into new life.
The main message I want to leave you with this morning is the same one we started with today. The earth, the sacred ground we walk upon, is our mother. All life comes from her, and she turns death back into new life. We must take care of her. We care for her by allowing deep roots to grow, by creating communities of balance, and by allowing the soil to rest and be renewed. The earth is our mother. She will take care of us. She will feed us and our children for generations to come if we remember to nurture and care for her.
For years I have been singing the song “The Earth is our mother” and in my mind I pictured the globe- Gaia – our blue boat home. Recently, however, I heard Vandana Shiva, Physicist, Environmental Activist, talking about the role of earth in her culture in India. "For us,” she says “mud is not just the matrix of life in which we grow our plants, it's our building structure - it's our very sense of who we are." [quoted in a movie I recommend highly- Dirt! The Movie]
I realized she was talking about earth- the soil out of which we are all born. The soil which carries the building blocks of life, all those minerals and elements that make up our bodies, and the bodies of the plants and animals we eat. Says Physicist Fritjof Capra "The living organisms on earth have used the very same molecules of air, water and soil over and over again. Not just the same types of molecules but the very same molecules.", [Dirt! The Movie] Image singing that chant again- the earth is our mother, and picturing not the shining blue sphere, but a handful of dirt from your garden: the soil that feeds you and your children, the soil that turns fallen leaves and apple cores from garbage into life. As it says in the book of Genesis: [3: 19] “for out of [the ground] you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return.” The earth is our mother. It literally gives us life.
When I first read the passage by Wendell Berry we heard this morning, it awakened some deeper knowing in me- knowing in a deeper way what I had known since I was a child-- that everyone, everything I love as they die becoming part of the soil, and (I’ve been very clear with my family- when I die I want to be buried in a plain pine box) my own body will be part of that soil. I want to rejoin that millennia old chain of life, and when I die I want to rejoin it as soon as possible. When I thought of the soil that way, suddenly I was filled with an awe-filled reverence. That soil IS my ancestors, all our ancestors, all our loved ones, it is us.
As we saw in our opening meditation, dirt is not some inert material, soil is incredibly alive. I recently saw a movie called “Dirt! The Movie” and in it wine critic Gary Vaynerchuk said "With the amount of species that live in a teaspoon of dirt, I think it's very obvious dirt might be more alive than we are."
Because we live in a very fertile area, we take for granted that something will grow out of the ground, bidden or unbidden. We have to mow and cut back and sometimes even use poisons to keep thing from growing out of every bit of dirt. If we lived someplace like Africa we would know better. There about a third of the continent is dessert. Most of the continent is savannah, some naturally occurring, and much of it created when forests were cut down or burned to create farmland Nobel prize winner Wangari Maathai has devoted her life to planting trees to try to reclaim that desert, the desert that was created when we humans cut down or burned the trees and plants that held water and nutrients in the soil. Pierre Rabhi: Philosopher, Agro-ecologist Farmer turned philosopher has spent his life helping farmers in such arid landscapes to rebuild soil damaged through cultivation. He is quoted as saying "Africa is not poor. Ethiopia alone, if properly cultivated, could feed the entire African continent." [Dirt! The Movie.]
It is scary to realize that we in North America are not immune to this desertification. Our Top soil is not inert- not something that will always be there no matter what we do. We take it for granted, perhaps the same way we took our mothers for granted when we were children. The way we practice farming in modern times we lose six tons of topsoil for every ton of food produced "The Dust Bowl was an event, not quite on the same scale, but comparable to what happened after the last Ice Age. We made a really big change in the landscape just by bad farming practices” -- to quote urban arborist Bill Logan. [Dirt! The Movie ]
But this is not a sermon about science, this is a service about renewal. I am proposing that the earth itself- the soil is a kind of sacred text that can help us understand how to prevent the burn out, the desertification of our own hearts and minds, and can help us renew ourselves when we need it most.
I think we should start with roots. Roots hold the soil together. Roots draw water and nutrients down into the soil and up into plants. Without an interconnected of roots the soil washes away, or is blown away as in the days of the dust bowl. This is what causes desertification. This is why it is so important for farmers to plant cover crops in the off season- it keeps the soil healthy and whole when it is not producing crops. When we go through a storm, if we have laid down a web of connections, to one another, to our community, to the earth, it helps us stay whole during times of change or times of loss. Moreover, the deep roots help us through droughts, through times of scarcity. In times of drought the deep roots reach sources of water the more shallow roots cannot reach, they can also reach elements, nutrients from deep down. If the soil is low on phosphorous, say, but there is a layer several feet down the plants with deep roots can reach those nutrients that those annual plants with shallow roots cannot. Deep roots are the ones that take time to lay down, the roots that last from year to year, decade to decade. The earth teaches us that it is worth laying down roots slowly over many years, of keeping connected to the sources of nourishment and connection from long ago, because while we grow new roots every year, the plants that have deep roots have special sources of nourishment and strength to draw from. My grandfather told me once about how hard they worked to encourage their neighbors to plant a row of trees at the edge of their fields to help preserve the soil and slow the wind. Even in a life which depends on the annual crops, there must be trees, there must be deep roots for the health of the soil and of ourselves.
We also learn from the soil that we need change, and we need rest. A piece of land that has grown corn for too many years will bear less and less produce as the nutrients that corn needs are used up. Sometimes we need to just let the land rest- to lay fallow. By lay fallow we don’t mean that the bare dirt is just exposed to the sky for a year, we mean that it is uncultivated. In the same way rest for our soul is probably not sitting on the couch watching tv, but when soil is lay fallow it is “left to its own natural growth.” I guess for me this means to leave some time unscheduled sometimes- to be spontaneous and see what grows. Good farmers also rotate crops to keep the land fruitful. We all need change in those things we cultivate in our lives.
A natural ecosystem will find its own balance over the years if “left to its natural growth.” But when we cultivate land, when we cultivate ourselves, we have to very carefully keep track of the balance, to build a relationship of plants that are mutually supporting- elements that work in harmony with one another. It is widely known that it was the custom among the first nations people in this land to plant corn, squash and beans together- this is referred to as “the three sisters. Squash protects her sisters from weeds and shades the soil from the sun with her leaves, keeping it cool and moist. Beans help keep the soil fertile by converting the sun's energy into nitrogen filled nodules that grow on its roots. And the corn provides a trellis for the beans to climb. Or think of the compost pile. Most folks use a layering of dry and wet compost materials (lasagna is the common metaphor) Too much wet stuff and it will not get hot enough to transform. If there’s not enough oxygen it doesn’t transform (this is part of the problem with our current landfill system.) But once the right balance is achieved, the compost practically creates itself. What do you need for balance in your life right now?
And here’s the most amazing thing of all. What feeds the soil? Builds the soil? Waste. Death. Decay. Think about an old growth forest. There are trees there in all stages of life- young, old, and those laying there on the forest floor decaying. It can take a tree the size we see in our backyards about 20-25 years to decompose. All through that time it is food and habitat for many species of bugs, birds, rodents, bacteria, moss, even new trees. The leaves that drop from the trees in autumn become over the next few seasons the very food that will feed those trees and other members of the eco-system in future growing seasons. But what do we do in our own yards? We rake up all those leaves, haul away the dead trees, burn them or send them to landfill to keep things looking tidy. Then if we want to feed our yard we go buy fertilizer at the store. Here’s the wisdom I take from this scripture. What you need to feed your spirit is in you right now. It’s in your life, in your relationships, in the traditions and heritage you were born into. We so easily go looking far and wide to find food for the spirit, but all the basic building blocks are already around us. It’s in a story your grandmother told, memory of time shared with your father; it’s in this 400 year old religious tradition. Each generation does not have to start from scratch, but can let the leaves of past seasons, the lives of fallen trees that were the lives and work of our ancestors feed and nurture you. The same is true within your own life and spirit. You already know a lot. Experiences that may have seemed incidental at the time can come back to us later as wisdom. I never did become a professional ballet dancer, but I was so amazed to find that 20 years later all the work I did in ballet class as a child made yoga so much easier and fun for me as an adult. And as counter intuitive as it may seem, What you need to feed your spirit is in the loss you have experienced. Instead of raking loss and grief away to keep things tidy, sometimes the greatest gift we can give our spirits is to allow those griefs to remain where they are, to decay and change and be transformed into new life.
The main message I want to leave you with this morning is the same one we started with today. The earth, the sacred ground we walk upon, is our mother. All life comes from her, and she turns death back into new life. We must take care of her. We care for her by allowing deep roots to grow, by creating communities of balance, and by allowing the soil to rest and be renewed. The earth is our mother. She will take care of us. She will feed us and our children for generations to come if we remember to nurture and care for her.
Monday, April 18, 2011
The Wisdom of Giving (April 17, 2011)
When I first joined my very first church as an adult, I knew that pledging was something every member was expected to do. I had grown up in a Unitarian Universalist church, and watched my parents pledge like clock work every year. As an older child I had even gotten my own little box of numbered envelopes to put my dollar in every week. But now that I was an adult I had a difficult question to answer. What was a responsible adult amount to give? I remembered that when I was young my parent’s church did a person to person canvas, which meant that someone would call them up, or even come visit, to talk to them about their pledge to the church. Now that I was an adult too, I wanted that conversation. I needed that conversation. I was afraid of that conversation. I wanted to be conscientious and do the right thing, but I wasn’t sure if I was up to the challenge.
The fear is that we will be asked to give more than we can give, whether it is to the church at Pledge time, to a loved one whose health is failing, or to a cause, like protecting the local water table from hydro-fracking chemicals. When we think about the poverty in the world, we almost instantly realize that we could give away everything we own and it would be barely a drop in the ocean. Sometimes I am afraid of being too stingy with both my money and time and love, and at the same time I am afraid of giving so much that I give myself away.
When I had been exposed to the rules in the Jewish and Christian scriptures as a teen-ager, I thought of them as an imposition on personal conscience and individual liberty. But after groping around how much to give, the idea of tithing started to seem somehow comforting and stable. Even the Hebrew scriptures, strict as they are some times, were not asking me to give away all my wealth, instead the book of Deuteronomy says [14:22] 22"You shall surely tithe all the produce from what you sow, which comes out of the field every year.” At the time the book of Deuteronomy was written they were talking about literally giving ten percent of your crops, but in recent centuries tithing has been understood in terms of annual income.
One of the 5 pillars of Islam is Zakāt - giving of 2.5% of one's possessions to charity each year. Zakat is expected of “every adult, mentally stable, free, and financially able Muslim, male and female.” The Muslim community also is responsible for making sure that these donations make their way to the folks who need it. It says in the Qur’an "The alms are only for the poor and the needy, and those who collect them, and those whose hearts are to be reconciled, and to free the captives and the debtors, and for the cause of Allah, and (for) the wayfarers; a duty imposed by Allah." (The Holy Qur'an 9:60). Islam offers a clear benchmark so observant Muslims can know when they have done their duty.
But you very rarely hear Unitarian Universalists talk about the biblical tithe, so how are we to know what is right and good? Well our UUA has created a “fare share giving guide” available on their website. It’s much less poetic than the Jewish or Islamic scriptural passages, but it generally ends up being between 2-7% of our adjusted gross income depending on how strongly you feel about this faith tradition. The first year I learned about this fair share guideline, I want to confess to you that it was a stretch for me to reach even that bottom rung—to contribute 2% of my family income to the church--but I also want to tell you that it felt great. It was a challenging but reasonable number, and it made me feel like I was supporting my church in a substantive way.
Then I head a colleague of mine explain, during a special fund drive, that he and his family had recently become tithers. Not just fare share givers, but tithers in the biblical sense. It blew my mind. Here he was, a young UU minister, still probably carrying his student loans from seminary, and he had committed himself to that ancient tradition of giving ten percent. Now I freely admit that this is still only a goal for me. But it is a goal. I challenge myself in good times and in bad to creep closer and closer to tithing myself.
Of course that dollar amount is higher in good times than in tight times, but we work hard to make sure that the percentage of our income that we give does not go down. I am encouraged in this by my favorite story about giving from the Christian Tradition. It is found in the Gospel of Luke:
This story reassures me when I worry that my small contribution doesn’t matter. According to the words of Jesus- and he was a man of few words- my pennies, your pennies are precious and important, even when they seem ridiculously small next to whatever Bill and Melinda Gates have been up to recently. The value of a gift can be determined not by how many zeros are at the end of it, but by what it means to you the giver, like the gift of the Widow’s mite, or the how the squirrel got his stripes. The size of our generosity is measured by what is in our hearts, not by the size of the check.
Furthermore, all of the religions traditions we’ve mentioned today are clear that there are many important ways of giving that do not involve money. In addition to Zakāt in the Islamic tradition, which is a required giving, there is also the concept of Saddka which means "voluntary charity". Saddka describes any time we give freely out of compassion, friendship or generosity. Abu Hurairah ,who was a companion of the prophet Muhammad, reported that the prophet said, "Every day the sun rises, charity is due on every joint of a person. Administering justice between two people is a charity; and assisting a man to mount his beast, or helping him load his luggage on it is a charity; and a good word is a charity; and every step that you take (towards a mosque) for daily prayers is a charity; and removing harmful things from the road is a charity."
Jesus also spoke about what are often called “acts of mercy.” His disciple Matthew tells of a time when [Matthew 25], Jesus was talking to his followers about the day of judgment:
In this spirit we at the Athens UU Church enter into our pledge season, trying to lift up the great variety of gifts that we offer on another. Of course we need all our members and friends to make a pledge to the ongoing health of the church: we need to keep the heat and lights on. We need crayons and construction paper and books for our children’s program. Our congregation needs our financial support to build and grow. But that is not enough to sustain a beloved community. When we take a casserole to one of our members who is going through a rough time, when we celebrate a young person’s success at the science Olympiad, or when we visit a member recovering from surgery in the hospital, these are the gifts we give that make us a beloved community.
Think of the great diversity of gifts which are necessary to keep the heart of this congregation beating. We need the gifts of those who patiently wash our mugs after coffee hour. We need folks who balance the Church’s accounts. We need folks who can lead worship, and folks who understand plumbing. We need folks who know how we can help bring justice to our world and we need folks who listen compassionately when we are troubled or in pain. We need folks who will sleep in bunk-beds so our youth can play flashlight tag and go on a silent vigil for their coming of age. We could not be the beloved community we are without all our great diversity of gifts.
Finally I want to think for a moment about why we give. The passage from the gospel of Matthew we talked about before implies that we help our fellows because on Judgment day we want to be found worthy, to sit at the right hand. In the UU tradition, especially as we are informed by our Humanist roots, we are not usually motivated to give because we hope for a reward in a future life, whether that be a place in heaven, or a better life in reincarnation, so let’s turn to the Anguttara Nikaya, (the gradual collection of the discourses of the Buddha) which lists a total of eight motives for giving, in the order from lowest to highest:
By giving without attachment to how our gift is used or how the favor might be returned some day, by giving unconditionally we cultivate generosity, we cultivate a beautiful mind. Generosity is thought, in all of these great religions, to be one of the best tools on the spiritual path; As Sri Swami Sivananda (A 20th century yogic master) writes:
Endnotes:
(From Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim - one of the Six major collections of the hadith in Sunni Islam, oral traditions relating to the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alms#5_Debts
(A.iv,236)
http://www.enabling.org/ia/vipassana/Archive/D/DeSilva/givingInThePaliCanonDeSilva.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakat
The fear is that we will be asked to give more than we can give, whether it is to the church at Pledge time, to a loved one whose health is failing, or to a cause, like protecting the local water table from hydro-fracking chemicals. When we think about the poverty in the world, we almost instantly realize that we could give away everything we own and it would be barely a drop in the ocean. Sometimes I am afraid of being too stingy with both my money and time and love, and at the same time I am afraid of giving so much that I give myself away.
When I had been exposed to the rules in the Jewish and Christian scriptures as a teen-ager, I thought of them as an imposition on personal conscience and individual liberty. But after groping around how much to give, the idea of tithing started to seem somehow comforting and stable. Even the Hebrew scriptures, strict as they are some times, were not asking me to give away all my wealth, instead the book of Deuteronomy says [14:22] 22"You shall surely tithe all the produce from what you sow, which comes out of the field every year.” At the time the book of Deuteronomy was written they were talking about literally giving ten percent of your crops, but in recent centuries tithing has been understood in terms of annual income.
One of the 5 pillars of Islam is Zakāt - giving of 2.5% of one's possessions to charity each year. Zakat is expected of “every adult, mentally stable, free, and financially able Muslim, male and female.” The Muslim community also is responsible for making sure that these donations make their way to the folks who need it. It says in the Qur’an "The alms are only for the poor and the needy, and those who collect them, and those whose hearts are to be reconciled, and to free the captives and the debtors, and for the cause of Allah, and (for) the wayfarers; a duty imposed by Allah." (The Holy Qur'an 9:60). Islam offers a clear benchmark so observant Muslims can know when they have done their duty.
But you very rarely hear Unitarian Universalists talk about the biblical tithe, so how are we to know what is right and good? Well our UUA has created a “fare share giving guide” available on their website. It’s much less poetic than the Jewish or Islamic scriptural passages, but it generally ends up being between 2-7% of our adjusted gross income depending on how strongly you feel about this faith tradition. The first year I learned about this fair share guideline, I want to confess to you that it was a stretch for me to reach even that bottom rung—to contribute 2% of my family income to the church--but I also want to tell you that it felt great. It was a challenging but reasonable number, and it made me feel like I was supporting my church in a substantive way.
Then I head a colleague of mine explain, during a special fund drive, that he and his family had recently become tithers. Not just fare share givers, but tithers in the biblical sense. It blew my mind. Here he was, a young UU minister, still probably carrying his student loans from seminary, and he had committed himself to that ancient tradition of giving ten percent. Now I freely admit that this is still only a goal for me. But it is a goal. I challenge myself in good times and in bad to creep closer and closer to tithing myself.
Of course that dollar amount is higher in good times than in tight times, but we work hard to make sure that the percentage of our income that we give does not go down. I am encouraged in this by my favorite story about giving from the Christian Tradition. It is found in the Gospel of Luke:
[Jesus] looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury. And He saw a poor widow putting in two small copper coins. And He said, 'Truly I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all of them; for they all out of their surplus put into the offering; but she out of her poverty put in all that she had to live on.'(Luke 21:1-4)
This story reassures me when I worry that my small contribution doesn’t matter. According to the words of Jesus- and he was a man of few words- my pennies, your pennies are precious and important, even when they seem ridiculously small next to whatever Bill and Melinda Gates have been up to recently. The value of a gift can be determined not by how many zeros are at the end of it, but by what it means to you the giver, like the gift of the Widow’s mite, or the how the squirrel got his stripes. The size of our generosity is measured by what is in our hearts, not by the size of the check.
Furthermore, all of the religions traditions we’ve mentioned today are clear that there are many important ways of giving that do not involve money. In addition to Zakāt in the Islamic tradition, which is a required giving, there is also the concept of Saddka which means "voluntary charity". Saddka describes any time we give freely out of compassion, friendship or generosity. Abu Hurairah ,who was a companion of the prophet Muhammad, reported that the prophet said, "Every day the sun rises, charity is due on every joint of a person. Administering justice between two people is a charity; and assisting a man to mount his beast, or helping him load his luggage on it is a charity; and a good word is a charity; and every step that you take (towards a mosque) for daily prayers is a charity; and removing harmful things from the road is a charity."
Jesus also spoke about what are often called “acts of mercy.” His disciple Matthew tells of a time when [Matthew 25], Jesus was talking to his followers about the day of judgment:
34Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father… 35for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” 37Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? 38And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? 39And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” 40And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me”.
In this spirit we at the Athens UU Church enter into our pledge season, trying to lift up the great variety of gifts that we offer on another. Of course we need all our members and friends to make a pledge to the ongoing health of the church: we need to keep the heat and lights on. We need crayons and construction paper and books for our children’s program. Our congregation needs our financial support to build and grow. But that is not enough to sustain a beloved community. When we take a casserole to one of our members who is going through a rough time, when we celebrate a young person’s success at the science Olympiad, or when we visit a member recovering from surgery in the hospital, these are the gifts we give that make us a beloved community.
Think of the great diversity of gifts which are necessary to keep the heart of this congregation beating. We need the gifts of those who patiently wash our mugs after coffee hour. We need folks who balance the Church’s accounts. We need folks who can lead worship, and folks who understand plumbing. We need folks who know how we can help bring justice to our world and we need folks who listen compassionately when we are troubled or in pain. We need folks who will sleep in bunk-beds so our youth can play flashlight tag and go on a silent vigil for their coming of age. We could not be the beloved community we are without all our great diversity of gifts.
Finally I want to think for a moment about why we give. The passage from the gospel of Matthew we talked about before implies that we help our fellows because on Judgment day we want to be found worthy, to sit at the right hand. In the UU tradition, especially as we are informed by our Humanist roots, we are not usually motivated to give because we hope for a reward in a future life, whether that be a place in heaven, or a better life in reincarnation, so let’s turn to the Anguttara Nikaya, (the gradual collection of the discourses of the Buddha) which lists a total of eight motives for giving, in the order from lowest to highest:
1. one gives with annoyance, or as a way of offending the recipient, or with the idea of insulting him.
2. fear also can motivate a person to make an offering.
3. one gives in return for a favor done to oneself in the past.
4. one also may give with the hope of getting a similar favor for oneself in the future.
5. one gives because giving is considered good.
6. "I cook, they do not cook. It is not proper for me who cooks not to give to those who do not cook." Some give urged by such altruistic motives.
7. some give alms to gain a good reputation.
8. still others give alms to adorn and beautify the mind.
By giving without attachment to how our gift is used or how the favor might be returned some day, by giving unconditionally we cultivate generosity, we cultivate a beautiful mind. Generosity is thought, in all of these great religions, to be one of the best tools on the spiritual path; As Sri Swami Sivananda (A 20th century yogic master) writes:
“By daily doing such acts of kindness and sympathy…His hard egoistic heart is gradually softened. He cultivates cosmic love. His heart expands. He has a wider outlook on life. He tries to feel his oneness with all beings. He learns that he can be happy only by making others happy, by serving others, by helping others, by removing the sufferings of others and by sharing what he has with others.”If you are, like me, someone who has struggled to know the best ways to share your gifts with the world, always wondering if it is enough, you are not alone. But giving is not just a fiscal question, it is a spiritual question and by struggling with it truly, we come closer to knowing our own hearts, and knowing what things are important in this life. We give our gifts not only because sharing makes the world a better place for ourselves and for others, but because it is a powerful path to spiritual growth. We Unitarian Universalists are called to give not because we are commanded to do so, nor because of some future reward, but because we know that cultivating a generous heart is its own reward.
Endnotes:
(From Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim - one of the Six major collections of the hadith in Sunni Islam, oral traditions relating to the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alms#5_Debts
(A.iv,236)
http://www.enabling.org/ia/vipassana/Archive/D/DeSilva/givingInThePaliCanonDeSilva.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakat
Thursday, March 24, 2011
We're On A Mission (March 20, 2011)
Do any of you remember a movie from 1991 called “City Slickers?” It’s kind of a screw-ball comedy with Billy Crystal in which a trio of suburban middle aged men busy with family and work go on vacation for 2 weeks driving cattle from Colorado to New Mexico with real live cowboys. Towards the end of the movie one of them, Curly, played by Jack Palance (Curly) turns to Billy Crystal and says
Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?
[holds up one finger]
Curly: This.
Mitch: Your finger?
Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don't mean [anything].
You must know what one thing is at the center of your life and devote yourself wholeheartedly to it. Every though this was as screwball a comedy as they come, I found myself overcome by tears throughout the end of the movie. Why? Because I was 21, and I was profoundly afraid of living my whole life without ever understanding that secret. I was terrified that I might die without ever having lived.
This begs the question- what does it mean to live, really live? Let’s pause now so each of us has a change to think of some moments in your own life when you felt like you were really alive…any moment that when you look back on it you said “I sure am glad I did that”...if more than one memory surfaces, begin to make a little collection of them, like beads on a string. There is an index card in your order of service, if you want to write them down, you can feel free to do that. Now look for any patterns you notice among those memories. What elements are there that you recognize, what do they have in common, like the string that holds the beads together? That, I submit, is your de facto mission. A mission is your reason for being, and here, collected on this string or on this index card are the moments when you have truly lived.
Now notice, does the pattern change over the course of your life? Is what is important to you now different than when you were a child or a teenager? I bet it has. See, mission is a fluid thing, it changes over time. And if we become conscious of it, we can guide it, we can make choices. Think about what might be missing from that string of memories. My father, who has been a musician nearly all his life said to me the other day “my one regret is that I never was part of a political protest” What things are there like that for you, the gap between what you have done, and what you feel would be a full and rich life. Notice what those missing things have in common. Adventure? Connection to other people? Quiet time for reflection? Because a mission is not about those individual acts, those acts are goals that support your mission. Mission is the thread that strings those all together. Now check out how that mission feel in your heart and body when you project it into your future. Does it make you excited or inspired, or maybe even a little afraid? Or do they make you feel heavy and tired: “I really AUGHT to…” Because as Rev. Howard Thurman wrote, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
Now notice any qualities that come to mind as you review your string of memories and dreams. Compassion? Courage? Beauty? I’ll give you an example of what I mean from the most well know mission statement in the western world today
“To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life and new civilizations
To boldly go where no man has gone before”
Boldness is the quality with which the crew of the Star Ship Enterprise want to seek new worlds. It would have been quite a different show if they had “prudently” gone, wouldn’t it?
The next step could be to turn that thread into a statement, but it is not required. Whenever I try to write a mission statement for my own life, I feel it looses something. So right now I’ve got a image of my son in my mind- because he reminds me more than anything about the important relationships in my life, and how I want to live deeply into them. I’ve also got a memory of Muir woods in my mind, because that old growth forest reminds me of all that is beautiful and at risk in this global eco-system we share. Then I’ve got a image of this church, reminding me of both my calling to serve you and my tradition, and also my own spiritual journey. Now the problem with Curly’s secret to live- one thing- is that most of us are doomed right from the start. Anyone who has a partner or children or friends and also has a job, or any kind of work they feel passionate about has more than one thing, and sometimes those things compete for our time and attention. So for me the principle at the center of these 3 things is balance. Balance is a very important word to me, an important principle in how I live my life. It is easy for me to get so passionate about my work that I forget to spend an afternoon goofing off with my son, or my partner. It is easy for us as a planet to get so carried away with producing new better products that we forget the impact on the earth. And I know when I feel balanced, I am more present in my own life. So I guess for myself rather than a mission statement I could arrange three images in a triangle, with the word balance linking them.
Every religion tries to answer the question burning in our souls “what is the meaning of life?” I believe that the answer, in this Unitarian Universalist tradition, is highly individual, but there are some common themes. The great UU religions educator Sofia Lyon Fahs said “the religious way is the deep way” So living life deeply is one secret your faith offers. Our tradition also teaches us that serving the common good is essential to a well lived life, As Rev. Rebecca Parker wrote:
“You must answer this question:
What will you do with your gifts?
Choose to bless the world.
So our tradition invites us to live our life deeply, and to serve the common good with our gifts. But neither of those things really gives us a “to do” list for when we wake up in the morning. That depends on our one thing. One can live deeply and serve the common good if you are an elementary school teacher, or a machinist, or a chiropractor. So it’s up to us to ask “what is the meaning of MY life” and our faith tradition calls us to make sure our own mission, our own reason for being, is guided by certain principles, like respect for the inherent dignity of every person, and the interdependent web of life of which we are all a part. It encourages us to live out a mission different from that of the culture at large which I believe is “the one who dies with the most toys wins” or “you can never be too rich or too thin”
When I was getting ready to go on maternity leave, I had just started my first full time settled ministry. I knew that managing my time would be a challenge. So I signed up for a seminar called “First Things First” from the folks at Franklin Covey. Now here’s the funny thing about this seminar – it’s designed for business people, but it has religious values at it’s center. It believes that even if your boss is paying for the seminar, you are allowed to put family on your list of “first things” It encourages us to keep our mission in front of us whenever we have our calendar out, to look at the schedule for April and say “where is my family in this? Where is that old growth forest? Where is my spiritual life- My faith tradition?” The primary message was that when we get up in the morning, we do the most important things first- one executive said he didn’t answer the phone or open his e-mail in the morning until he had made $40,000- so that when that unexpected call comes in the afternoon, or when your child comes home from school early with a fever, you have already done the most important thing, and you can end the day saying “well, I didn’t get it all done, but I got the most important thing (singular!) done.” So whether you’ve got a mission statement for yourself written on that card, or a group of images, I encourage you to put some expression of your mission wherever you are when you start your day. Maybe it is an index card taped to your computer screen, or your bathroom mirror. Or I noticed just as I was writing this sermon, that I’ve already got a photo of Nick and a terrarium right next to my computer screen, all I would have to do is add some symbol for my spiritual life in community and I would have a physical representation of my own mission right there on my desk, like a little altar. By keeping your own mission constantly before you, it increases the odds that you can live your life by that mission, by the thread of meaning that makes you come alive, instead of being buffeted by the events of your days, instead of getting sucked into a life of getting the most toys.
Now I want to change our focus from personal mission, to the mission of this community we all share. Take a moment of reflection now to think about those moments in the life of this community when you have said to yourself “I’m really glad I made it to church that day” and I don’t just mean to this building, because sometimes we do church in other places, like at Mt. Pisgah, or the Phoenix Kid’s café. If you like to write things down, take a second card and list or draw some of those memories. Are you starting to get a picture of the mission of this church? What string links together those precious gems of our life as a community, a string that reaches all the way back into our first days in 1809, and will lead us into our future. Take a moment to write down any words, phrases, images, pictures, symbols that reminds you of what is our reason for being, our reason for coming together. Now let’s read together our mission statement as a church:
Our mission is to provide a forum for liberal religious expression in an atmosphere which encourages spiritual growth and ethical living.
One question we are asking ourselves as a church right now is “does our mission, our actual lived mission, fit inside this statement?” Have we changed at all in what we put at our center, in the direction we are traveling since we wrote that statement? Is there anything we would add or remove to make that statement more accurate, more complete?
But that’s not the most important question. That question- is how do we best use the resources of our community, the gifts each person brings, and the legacy handed down from our founders over 200 years, to serve our mission? We want to be unified by a shared sense of mission, and to express that shared mission in the living out of our life together. When the board, or Committee on Ministry or the worship team or the Committee for environmental justice and sustainability or when I or Josh roll up our sleeves for the good of our church, what things do we put first? At the end of the day, how will we know that we have lived that day to the fullest, both in the life of this beloved community and in our own personal lives?
Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?
[holds up one finger]
Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don't mean [anything].
Mitch: But, what is the "one thing?"
Curly: [smiles] That's what *you* have to find out.
Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?
[holds up one finger]
Curly: This.
Mitch: Your finger?
Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don't mean [anything].
You must know what one thing is at the center of your life and devote yourself wholeheartedly to it. Every though this was as screwball a comedy as they come, I found myself overcome by tears throughout the end of the movie. Why? Because I was 21, and I was profoundly afraid of living my whole life without ever understanding that secret. I was terrified that I might die without ever having lived.
This begs the question- what does it mean to live, really live? Let’s pause now so each of us has a change to think of some moments in your own life when you felt like you were really alive…any moment that when you look back on it you said “I sure am glad I did that”...if more than one memory surfaces, begin to make a little collection of them, like beads on a string. There is an index card in your order of service, if you want to write them down, you can feel free to do that. Now look for any patterns you notice among those memories. What elements are there that you recognize, what do they have in common, like the string that holds the beads together? That, I submit, is your de facto mission. A mission is your reason for being, and here, collected on this string or on this index card are the moments when you have truly lived.
Now notice, does the pattern change over the course of your life? Is what is important to you now different than when you were a child or a teenager? I bet it has. See, mission is a fluid thing, it changes over time. And if we become conscious of it, we can guide it, we can make choices. Think about what might be missing from that string of memories. My father, who has been a musician nearly all his life said to me the other day “my one regret is that I never was part of a political protest” What things are there like that for you, the gap between what you have done, and what you feel would be a full and rich life. Notice what those missing things have in common. Adventure? Connection to other people? Quiet time for reflection? Because a mission is not about those individual acts, those acts are goals that support your mission. Mission is the thread that strings those all together. Now check out how that mission feel in your heart and body when you project it into your future. Does it make you excited or inspired, or maybe even a little afraid? Or do they make you feel heavy and tired: “I really AUGHT to…” Because as Rev. Howard Thurman wrote, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
Now notice any qualities that come to mind as you review your string of memories and dreams. Compassion? Courage? Beauty? I’ll give you an example of what I mean from the most well know mission statement in the western world today
“To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life and new civilizations
To boldly go where no man has gone before”
Boldness is the quality with which the crew of the Star Ship Enterprise want to seek new worlds. It would have been quite a different show if they had “prudently” gone, wouldn’t it?
The next step could be to turn that thread into a statement, but it is not required. Whenever I try to write a mission statement for my own life, I feel it looses something. So right now I’ve got a image of my son in my mind- because he reminds me more than anything about the important relationships in my life, and how I want to live deeply into them. I’ve also got a memory of Muir woods in my mind, because that old growth forest reminds me of all that is beautiful and at risk in this global eco-system we share. Then I’ve got a image of this church, reminding me of both my calling to serve you and my tradition, and also my own spiritual journey. Now the problem with Curly’s secret to live- one thing- is that most of us are doomed right from the start. Anyone who has a partner or children or friends and also has a job, or any kind of work they feel passionate about has more than one thing, and sometimes those things compete for our time and attention. So for me the principle at the center of these 3 things is balance. Balance is a very important word to me, an important principle in how I live my life. It is easy for me to get so passionate about my work that I forget to spend an afternoon goofing off with my son, or my partner. It is easy for us as a planet to get so carried away with producing new better products that we forget the impact on the earth. And I know when I feel balanced, I am more present in my own life. So I guess for myself rather than a mission statement I could arrange three images in a triangle, with the word balance linking them.
Every religion tries to answer the question burning in our souls “what is the meaning of life?” I believe that the answer, in this Unitarian Universalist tradition, is highly individual, but there are some common themes. The great UU religions educator Sofia Lyon Fahs said “the religious way is the deep way” So living life deeply is one secret your faith offers. Our tradition also teaches us that serving the common good is essential to a well lived life, As Rev. Rebecca Parker wrote:
“You must answer this question:
What will you do with your gifts?
Choose to bless the world.
So our tradition invites us to live our life deeply, and to serve the common good with our gifts. But neither of those things really gives us a “to do” list for when we wake up in the morning. That depends on our one thing. One can live deeply and serve the common good if you are an elementary school teacher, or a machinist, or a chiropractor. So it’s up to us to ask “what is the meaning of MY life” and our faith tradition calls us to make sure our own mission, our own reason for being, is guided by certain principles, like respect for the inherent dignity of every person, and the interdependent web of life of which we are all a part. It encourages us to live out a mission different from that of the culture at large which I believe is “the one who dies with the most toys wins” or “you can never be too rich or too thin”
When I was getting ready to go on maternity leave, I had just started my first full time settled ministry. I knew that managing my time would be a challenge. So I signed up for a seminar called “First Things First” from the folks at Franklin Covey. Now here’s the funny thing about this seminar – it’s designed for business people, but it has religious values at it’s center. It believes that even if your boss is paying for the seminar, you are allowed to put family on your list of “first things” It encourages us to keep our mission in front of us whenever we have our calendar out, to look at the schedule for April and say “where is my family in this? Where is that old growth forest? Where is my spiritual life- My faith tradition?” The primary message was that when we get up in the morning, we do the most important things first- one executive said he didn’t answer the phone or open his e-mail in the morning until he had made $40,000- so that when that unexpected call comes in the afternoon, or when your child comes home from school early with a fever, you have already done the most important thing, and you can end the day saying “well, I didn’t get it all done, but I got the most important thing (singular!) done.” So whether you’ve got a mission statement for yourself written on that card, or a group of images, I encourage you to put some expression of your mission wherever you are when you start your day. Maybe it is an index card taped to your computer screen, or your bathroom mirror. Or I noticed just as I was writing this sermon, that I’ve already got a photo of Nick and a terrarium right next to my computer screen, all I would have to do is add some symbol for my spiritual life in community and I would have a physical representation of my own mission right there on my desk, like a little altar. By keeping your own mission constantly before you, it increases the odds that you can live your life by that mission, by the thread of meaning that makes you come alive, instead of being buffeted by the events of your days, instead of getting sucked into a life of getting the most toys.
Now I want to change our focus from personal mission, to the mission of this community we all share. Take a moment of reflection now to think about those moments in the life of this community when you have said to yourself “I’m really glad I made it to church that day” and I don’t just mean to this building, because sometimes we do church in other places, like at Mt. Pisgah, or the Phoenix Kid’s café. If you like to write things down, take a second card and list or draw some of those memories. Are you starting to get a picture of the mission of this church? What string links together those precious gems of our life as a community, a string that reaches all the way back into our first days in 1809, and will lead us into our future. Take a moment to write down any words, phrases, images, pictures, symbols that reminds you of what is our reason for being, our reason for coming together. Now let’s read together our mission statement as a church:
Our mission is to provide a forum for liberal religious expression in an atmosphere which encourages spiritual growth and ethical living.
One question we are asking ourselves as a church right now is “does our mission, our actual lived mission, fit inside this statement?” Have we changed at all in what we put at our center, in the direction we are traveling since we wrote that statement? Is there anything we would add or remove to make that statement more accurate, more complete?
But that’s not the most important question. That question- is how do we best use the resources of our community, the gifts each person brings, and the legacy handed down from our founders over 200 years, to serve our mission? We want to be unified by a shared sense of mission, and to express that shared mission in the living out of our life together. When the board, or Committee on Ministry or the worship team or the Committee for environmental justice and sustainability or when I or Josh roll up our sleeves for the good of our church, what things do we put first? At the end of the day, how will we know that we have lived that day to the fullest, both in the life of this beloved community and in our own personal lives?
Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?
[holds up one finger]
Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don't mean [anything].
Mitch: But, what is the "one thing?"
Curly: [smiles] That's what *you* have to find out.
For You Were Strangers in That Land (March 6, 2011)
For weeks before this past year’s General Assembly, (where important decisions for our denomination are made by delegates from our congregations) The UUA board had been having special meetings, as had our executive for the UU Minister’s Association in preparation for what they knew would be a powerfully explosive issue. You see, while the country was calling for a boycott of Arizona after the passage of SB1070, (that law that required anyone who looked like they might not be a citizen to show their ID at any time), our own 2012 Assembly was scheduled to be held in Phoenix. The minister’s chat was abuzz for weeks before our annual meeting. Should we boycott, knowing we would forfeit over 600,000 in hotel cancellation fees? Many said yes, and even started passing the hat to make up to defray the cost of moving the assembly. DRUUM issued a statement which expressed concerns about the safety of our members who would be subject to racial profiling under this law, and LUUNA also issued a statement concerned that our Latino/a members would experience harassment by local law enforcement.
I was a supporter of the boycott, but the words of Rev. Susan Fredrick-Gray changed my mind. She is the minister of the church in Phoenix, Arizona and she and her congregation had been working with the local grass roots immigrant rights group Puente. She said that though the boycott might make us feel good for a moment now, this was not what our brothers and sisters in Arizona most directly affected by the laws wanted. They wanted us to come and stand by them, to come march, to come and witness. The discussion was passionate and emotions ran high. It was hard to know whether conscience called us to witness for justice. But you know what was absolutely clear? That our mandate here was justice, and that this law, SB1070 and the anti-immigrant sentiment behind it are unjust and immoral, and that we as UUs must stand against it as strongly as we can. Ultimately the Assembly voted to hold the assembly in Phoenix as planned, but to fundamentally change the nature of that assembly. We voted to advice the UUA board to hold a justice-oriented “General Assembly in Phoenix in 2012 with a business agenda limited to the minimum allowed by the bylaws. We asked the UUA administration to work with leaders in Arizona UU congregations to establish an Arizona immigration ministry; asked the board to work in accountable relationships with DRUUMM, LUUNA, ARE, Equual Access, TRUUST, and other stakeholders to maximize the safety of historically marginalized groups going to Phoenix; called on the UUA board to direct economic transactions during the 2012 General Assembly towards partners and allies; and called on the board to provide resources to build the capacity of UUs to stand in opposition to systemic racism.”
So really, when it came time to vote for the new Study Action Issue, the issue that we as an association of congregations would commit to studying and putting into action over the next 4 years, when it came time to decide which of the 6 issues folks around the country had put before the assembly, it seemed right that we would chose “Immigration as a moral issue.” There was a feeling of unity growing among us. We had heard our brothers and sisters speak about their pain in Arizona and around the country, and our hearts were turned.
So here we are, back in Pennsylvania, where Immigration is not in the forefront of local politics. Here in this congregation the other current issue “Ethical Eating” has been a powerful source of reflection and action for us together. I invite us, starting here and now, to join in solidarity with our sister congregation in Phoenix, with all our brothers and sisters around the country, around the world, and let our work begin in our own hearts.
Way back in my first year in Seminary, on my first election day in California, there was an issue on the ballot called proposition 187, which would make sure that undocumented immigrants could not receive medical care, or public education or other social services. The proposition was titled “Save our State” and the argument was that we could save 3 million dollars a year if we didn’t provide such services to undocumented immigrants. The language of the proposition was fiery: “The People of California find and declare as follows: That they have suffered and are suffering economic hardship caused by the presence of illegal aliens in this state. That they have suffered and are suffering personal injury and damage caused by the criminal conduct of illegal aliens in this state. That they have a right to the protection of their government from any person or persons entering this country unlawfully.”
I was, at that time, enrolled in a class called “Basic Buddhist Meditation” taught by a Theravadan Monk. One of my classmates brought to our seminar this seemingly complex issue. Our teacher Bhanti said- it’s simple. It’s a matter of compassion.” He had long been trying to explain to us the importance of compassion in Buddhist teaching, explaining that in Buddhist practice the goal is to let go of all things except compassion and equanimity, that we hold on to compassion right up to the moment of enlightenment. There was a stunned silence in the classroom as he reduced months of fiery politicking in the media to just one concept – compassion. Would it be more compassionate to provide medical assistance to a sick or injured person, or to deny it?
The Hebrew Scriptures also offer us a clear response to this tangled issue. The book of Leviticus, the one with all the laws, says: (Leviticus 19:33-34 ESV ) “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt"
What I think is important in this passage, is that you shall love the stranger as yourself. First of all, notice that it says we shall LOVE the stranger. Today’s rhetoric around undocumented immigrants is so rarely loving. And we shall love them as ourselves, yet laws like SB1070 create a separate class of human beings, somehow less human than those who are citizens of this country. As if basic human rights do not need to be applied to all humans; the right of mother and child to be together. The right to due process. The right to a speedy trial. But the Hebrew scriptures are clear – though this law recognizes the difference between stranger and native, and it acknowledges that the stranger is at risk when sojourning among us, it is clear that there is to be no difference in treatment. Why? Because we were strangers in the land of Egypt. Or, for any of us living in America who are not first nations people, we were strangers in this land. If we ourselves were not born in a different country, our parents or grandparents or great grandparents were. The scriptures call on our empathic imagination to remember that we have been strangers, and so ask us to treat the stranger as ourselves.
Now I know the call to pure compassion is always simplistic. We all fear, and rightly so, that if we pour ourselves out in utter compassion, we will use ourselves up, there will be nothing left to give. So one school of thought on immigration reform is that we need, literally, better boundaries. We need walls, barbed wire and an armed citizenry to defend our boundaries. Lets look again at that preamble to prop 187: “The People of California find and declare as follows: That they have suffered and are suffering economic hardship caused by the presence of illegal aliens in this state.” The perception is that undocumented immigrants drain our resources. But a study by the tax lawyer journal from the American Bar Association argues that the undocumented immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in social services. A 2005 New York Times article showed, for example that they pay about $7 billion annual to social security, with no hope of ever receiving a social security check.
Now look at the second sentence of prop 187 “That they have suffered and are suffering personal injury and damage caused by the criminal conduct of illegal aliens in this state. That they have a right to the protection of their government from any person or persons entering this country unlawfully.” We have a right to be protected from undocumented immigrants. Why do I need protection exactly? It is hard to gather conclusive data about the relationship of immigration and crime, but a number of studies, including one by the immigration Policy Center, based on U.S. Census Bureau data showed there was no increase in crime in relationship to undocumented immigrants, and a study by the public Policy Institute of California showed that cities with more immigrants have lower crime rates than comparable cities.
So the contention that we need protection from undocumented immigrants does not seem to be based on facts, it seems to be based on irrational fear. And that fear is not only directed at folks who are undocumented, but folks who LOOK or SEEM like they might be immigrants. That seems like racism pure and simple to me. Whenever we create a second class of humans, we are building oppressive structures. We cannot allow our immigration policy to be based on fear and xenophobia. It must be based in the reality of our shared lives together. This is where, since our very beginnings 400 years ago, the Unitarians come in. We bring the light of reason. The Study Action issue process starts with study. We begin with open minds to ask the basic questions about immigration: Who are the immigrants in our communities? What underlying factors contribute to global migration? And where are we complicit or accountable in these factors? We start our journey by asking questions, by paying attention, by inviting this issue into our “free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”
There are a lot of assumptions and half truths and downright lies out there in this debate about immigration. For example, the claim of prop 187 that undocumented immigrants costs us 3 million dollars a year in social services, when studies show this is simply not true. As a people of faith who believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person (not just of American Citizens) it to me that Unitarian Universalists are called to stand up for an immigration policy that is based on reason and facts, rather than fear.
We must also insist that our immigration policies and practices are based on compassion and not hate. UUs, along with other activists around the country, plead the case of Marlen Moreno, the woman we met in our opening reading. She is mother of 2 children, one of who is only 10 months old. She is married to a legal resident, and came to the US with her parents when she was only 13 – undocumented. For this, she went to jail for 4 months. ‘Detained” they call it. At our recent Movie night we watched a fictional movie called “the Visitor” in which the hero is “detained” while awaiting deportation. A voice near me said in the dark “what? You can’t walk in there to visit like that with only one security check!” and I remembered one of our member’s brothers, who was “detained” without any charge for 4 ½ months while awaiting deportation. Those being detained have no idea how long they will be incarcerated, are denied even basic information about the status of their case, are separated from family who face significant obstacles and sometimes expense to stay connected with them. Family visits are limited to one adult at a time, can last no longer than ½ hour and are conducted through a glass partition, using wall phones. She told me later that: “The truth is, contrary to the movie where the professor and the mom had nothing else to do but to visit the young man, most families do not visit inmates in detention because of the 1/2 hour restriction. How many people can afford to take a whole day off for a 1/2 hour visit? Processing visitors takes anywhere from 20 minutes to 1 hour, assuming you know to arrive an hour before "the count" when all visits are interrupted for 1 to 1-1/2 hours for the officers to account for all inmates. Young children do not visit.” Her brother is now in Hong Kong, they told him one morning he was leaving that very day. Marlen Moreno was just days away from being taken away from her family, deported, but activists phoned, faxed, called the press, and were able to delay her deportation for a year. Still her future is uncertain. When reason and compassion are applied to the way our system treats undocumented immigrants like criminals, how can they be justified? It can’t really be to save the taxpayers money; Atlanta news station WSB-TV reported that the annual cost to taxpayers just to detain and deport immigrants adds up to $2.6 billion.
While in jail for her civil disobedience in protest of SB1070, UU Rev. Wendy von Zirpolo reported: “While inside the Maricopa Jail garage, I saw a young Latino man dragged past me and behind some vans, calling out ‘I am not resisting arrest. I am not resisting arrest.’ When I saw him again, perhaps only ten minutes later, it was clear he had been beaten. Beaten badly.” Whatever concerns we may have about the economic impact of immigration policy on this country, the act of separating mother and child, the act of beating a prisoner, these are not compassionate acts, and they are not necessary in order to uphold the laws of this country. I call for a reform of our laws to make them just and compassionate, and reform of the ways we implement these laws, that they be carried out in just and compassionate ways.
Last July, about 100 UU ministers and lay-people, along with president Peter Morales, flew from around the country to be part of the non-violent civil disobedience in response to SB1070. Of the 83 protesters who were arrested that day, 26 were UUs, including President Morales. Our UU protesters were wearing those saffron yellow t-shirts with big hearts reading “standing on the side of love.” Rev. Paul Langston Daily, one of the ministers participating in the march wrote later in his blog: “At lunch today, a colleague told us she overheard some people saying “Hey, look over there, it’s the Love people”.
We are called by these 2 pillars of our heritage- by reason and by love. With reason we will ask the questions that so urgently need to be asked, with reason we will seek truth and justice. With love, with compassion we will act, affirming the inherent worth and dignity of all people. Will you accept this call? Will you take up the rights of the stranger in our land, as we have stood for civil rights so many times before? Lets reach out to our brothers and sisters around the country, around the world letting reason and love change this broken system to one of compassion and justice.
Resources:
http://www.uuworld.org/news/articles/165916.shtml
http://www.foodincmovie.com/about-the-film.php
http://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2011/01/workers-center-works-overtime-to-uncover-problematic-j-1-visa-program-in-local-economy/
J. Lipman, Francine, J. (Spring 2006). Taxing Undocumented Immigrants: Separate, Unequal and Without Representation. The Tax Lawyer. lso published in Harvard Latino Law Review, Spring 2006. Harvard.edu
Eduardo Porter (April 5, 2005). "Illegal Immigrants Are Bolstering Social Security With Billions". New York Times.
Eunice Moscoso (2007-02-27). "Study: Immigrants don't raise U.S. crime rate". Arizona Daily Star.
“Crime, Corrections and California: what does Immigration Have to Do with it” PPIC California Counts: Population Trends and Profiles V. 9 Number 3 Feb 2008 by Kristin F. Butcher, Anne Morrison Piehl.
Immigration as a Moral Issue (Congregational Study/ Action Issue for 2010-2014)
The Cost Of Illegal Immigration By Justin Farmer Posted: 12:16 pm EDT May 10, 2010
http://www.uuworld.org/news/articles/165916.shtml
http://www.uuworld.org/news/articles/167428.shtml “'Justice' General Assembly to be held in Phoenix: Days and nights of work result in a plan most can endorse” By Jane Greer 6.28.10 UU World
http://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2011/01/workers-center-works-overtime-to-uncover-problematic-j-1-visa-program-in-local-economy/
J. Lipman, Francine, J. (Spring 2006). Taxing Undocumented Immigrants: Separate, Unequal and Without Representation. The Tax Lawyer. Also published in Harvard Latino Law Review, Spring 2006. Harvard.edu
Eduardo Porter (April 5, 2005). "Illegal Immigrants Are Bolstering Social Security With Billions". New York Times.
Eunice Moscoso (2007-02-27). "Study: Immigrants don't raise U.S. crime rate". Arizona Daily Star.
“Crime, Corrections and California: what does Immigration Have to Do with it” PPIC California Counts: Population Trends and Profiles V. 9 Number 3 Feb 2008 by Kristin F. Butcher, Anne Morrison Piehl.
Immigration as a Moral Issue (Congregational Study/ Action Issue for 2010-2014)
The Cost Of Illegal Immigration By Justin Farmer Posted: 12:16 pm EDT May 10, 2010
http://www.standingonthesideoflove.org/blog/trials-begin-for-15-clergy-and-leaders-arrested-in-july-29th-sb-1070-protests-in-phoenix/
I was a supporter of the boycott, but the words of Rev. Susan Fredrick-Gray changed my mind. She is the minister of the church in Phoenix, Arizona and she and her congregation had been working with the local grass roots immigrant rights group Puente. She said that though the boycott might make us feel good for a moment now, this was not what our brothers and sisters in Arizona most directly affected by the laws wanted. They wanted us to come and stand by them, to come march, to come and witness. The discussion was passionate and emotions ran high. It was hard to know whether conscience called us to witness for justice. But you know what was absolutely clear? That our mandate here was justice, and that this law, SB1070 and the anti-immigrant sentiment behind it are unjust and immoral, and that we as UUs must stand against it as strongly as we can. Ultimately the Assembly voted to hold the assembly in Phoenix as planned, but to fundamentally change the nature of that assembly. We voted to advice the UUA board to hold a justice-oriented “General Assembly in Phoenix in 2012 with a business agenda limited to the minimum allowed by the bylaws. We asked the UUA administration to work with leaders in Arizona UU congregations to establish an Arizona immigration ministry; asked the board to work in accountable relationships with DRUUMM, LUUNA, ARE, Equual Access, TRUUST, and other stakeholders to maximize the safety of historically marginalized groups going to Phoenix; called on the UUA board to direct economic transactions during the 2012 General Assembly towards partners and allies; and called on the board to provide resources to build the capacity of UUs to stand in opposition to systemic racism.”
So really, when it came time to vote for the new Study Action Issue, the issue that we as an association of congregations would commit to studying and putting into action over the next 4 years, when it came time to decide which of the 6 issues folks around the country had put before the assembly, it seemed right that we would chose “Immigration as a moral issue.” There was a feeling of unity growing among us. We had heard our brothers and sisters speak about their pain in Arizona and around the country, and our hearts were turned.
So here we are, back in Pennsylvania, where Immigration is not in the forefront of local politics. Here in this congregation the other current issue “Ethical Eating” has been a powerful source of reflection and action for us together. I invite us, starting here and now, to join in solidarity with our sister congregation in Phoenix, with all our brothers and sisters around the country, around the world, and let our work begin in our own hearts.
Way back in my first year in Seminary, on my first election day in California, there was an issue on the ballot called proposition 187, which would make sure that undocumented immigrants could not receive medical care, or public education or other social services. The proposition was titled “Save our State” and the argument was that we could save 3 million dollars a year if we didn’t provide such services to undocumented immigrants. The language of the proposition was fiery: “The People of California find and declare as follows: That they have suffered and are suffering economic hardship caused by the presence of illegal aliens in this state. That they have suffered and are suffering personal injury and damage caused by the criminal conduct of illegal aliens in this state. That they have a right to the protection of their government from any person or persons entering this country unlawfully.”
I was, at that time, enrolled in a class called “Basic Buddhist Meditation” taught by a Theravadan Monk. One of my classmates brought to our seminar this seemingly complex issue. Our teacher Bhanti said- it’s simple. It’s a matter of compassion.” He had long been trying to explain to us the importance of compassion in Buddhist teaching, explaining that in Buddhist practice the goal is to let go of all things except compassion and equanimity, that we hold on to compassion right up to the moment of enlightenment. There was a stunned silence in the classroom as he reduced months of fiery politicking in the media to just one concept – compassion. Would it be more compassionate to provide medical assistance to a sick or injured person, or to deny it?
The Hebrew Scriptures also offer us a clear response to this tangled issue. The book of Leviticus, the one with all the laws, says: (Leviticus 19:33-34 ESV ) “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt"
What I think is important in this passage, is that you shall love the stranger as yourself. First of all, notice that it says we shall LOVE the stranger. Today’s rhetoric around undocumented immigrants is so rarely loving. And we shall love them as ourselves, yet laws like SB1070 create a separate class of human beings, somehow less human than those who are citizens of this country. As if basic human rights do not need to be applied to all humans; the right of mother and child to be together. The right to due process. The right to a speedy trial. But the Hebrew scriptures are clear – though this law recognizes the difference between stranger and native, and it acknowledges that the stranger is at risk when sojourning among us, it is clear that there is to be no difference in treatment. Why? Because we were strangers in the land of Egypt. Or, for any of us living in America who are not first nations people, we were strangers in this land. If we ourselves were not born in a different country, our parents or grandparents or great grandparents were. The scriptures call on our empathic imagination to remember that we have been strangers, and so ask us to treat the stranger as ourselves.
Now I know the call to pure compassion is always simplistic. We all fear, and rightly so, that if we pour ourselves out in utter compassion, we will use ourselves up, there will be nothing left to give. So one school of thought on immigration reform is that we need, literally, better boundaries. We need walls, barbed wire and an armed citizenry to defend our boundaries. Lets look again at that preamble to prop 187: “The People of California find and declare as follows: That they have suffered and are suffering economic hardship caused by the presence of illegal aliens in this state.” The perception is that undocumented immigrants drain our resources. But a study by the tax lawyer journal from the American Bar Association argues that the undocumented immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in social services. A 2005 New York Times article showed, for example that they pay about $7 billion annual to social security, with no hope of ever receiving a social security check.
Now look at the second sentence of prop 187 “That they have suffered and are suffering personal injury and damage caused by the criminal conduct of illegal aliens in this state. That they have a right to the protection of their government from any person or persons entering this country unlawfully.” We have a right to be protected from undocumented immigrants. Why do I need protection exactly? It is hard to gather conclusive data about the relationship of immigration and crime, but a number of studies, including one by the immigration Policy Center, based on U.S. Census Bureau data showed there was no increase in crime in relationship to undocumented immigrants, and a study by the public Policy Institute of California showed that cities with more immigrants have lower crime rates than comparable cities.
So the contention that we need protection from undocumented immigrants does not seem to be based on facts, it seems to be based on irrational fear. And that fear is not only directed at folks who are undocumented, but folks who LOOK or SEEM like they might be immigrants. That seems like racism pure and simple to me. Whenever we create a second class of humans, we are building oppressive structures. We cannot allow our immigration policy to be based on fear and xenophobia. It must be based in the reality of our shared lives together. This is where, since our very beginnings 400 years ago, the Unitarians come in. We bring the light of reason. The Study Action issue process starts with study. We begin with open minds to ask the basic questions about immigration: Who are the immigrants in our communities? What underlying factors contribute to global migration? And where are we complicit or accountable in these factors? We start our journey by asking questions, by paying attention, by inviting this issue into our “free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”
There are a lot of assumptions and half truths and downright lies out there in this debate about immigration. For example, the claim of prop 187 that undocumented immigrants costs us 3 million dollars a year in social services, when studies show this is simply not true. As a people of faith who believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person (not just of American Citizens) it to me that Unitarian Universalists are called to stand up for an immigration policy that is based on reason and facts, rather than fear.
We must also insist that our immigration policies and practices are based on compassion and not hate. UUs, along with other activists around the country, plead the case of Marlen Moreno, the woman we met in our opening reading. She is mother of 2 children, one of who is only 10 months old. She is married to a legal resident, and came to the US with her parents when she was only 13 – undocumented. For this, she went to jail for 4 months. ‘Detained” they call it. At our recent Movie night we watched a fictional movie called “the Visitor” in which the hero is “detained” while awaiting deportation. A voice near me said in the dark “what? You can’t walk in there to visit like that with only one security check!” and I remembered one of our member’s brothers, who was “detained” without any charge for 4 ½ months while awaiting deportation. Those being detained have no idea how long they will be incarcerated, are denied even basic information about the status of their case, are separated from family who face significant obstacles and sometimes expense to stay connected with them. Family visits are limited to one adult at a time, can last no longer than ½ hour and are conducted through a glass partition, using wall phones. She told me later that: “The truth is, contrary to the movie where the professor and the mom had nothing else to do but to visit the young man, most families do not visit inmates in detention because of the 1/2 hour restriction. How many people can afford to take a whole day off for a 1/2 hour visit? Processing visitors takes anywhere from 20 minutes to 1 hour, assuming you know to arrive an hour before "the count" when all visits are interrupted for 1 to 1-1/2 hours for the officers to account for all inmates. Young children do not visit.” Her brother is now in Hong Kong, they told him one morning he was leaving that very day. Marlen Moreno was just days away from being taken away from her family, deported, but activists phoned, faxed, called the press, and were able to delay her deportation for a year. Still her future is uncertain. When reason and compassion are applied to the way our system treats undocumented immigrants like criminals, how can they be justified? It can’t really be to save the taxpayers money; Atlanta news station WSB-TV reported that the annual cost to taxpayers just to detain and deport immigrants adds up to $2.6 billion.
While in jail for her civil disobedience in protest of SB1070, UU Rev. Wendy von Zirpolo reported: “While inside the Maricopa Jail garage, I saw a young Latino man dragged past me and behind some vans, calling out ‘I am not resisting arrest. I am not resisting arrest.’ When I saw him again, perhaps only ten minutes later, it was clear he had been beaten. Beaten badly.” Whatever concerns we may have about the economic impact of immigration policy on this country, the act of separating mother and child, the act of beating a prisoner, these are not compassionate acts, and they are not necessary in order to uphold the laws of this country. I call for a reform of our laws to make them just and compassionate, and reform of the ways we implement these laws, that they be carried out in just and compassionate ways.
Last July, about 100 UU ministers and lay-people, along with president Peter Morales, flew from around the country to be part of the non-violent civil disobedience in response to SB1070. Of the 83 protesters who were arrested that day, 26 were UUs, including President Morales. Our UU protesters were wearing those saffron yellow t-shirts with big hearts reading “standing on the side of love.” Rev. Paul Langston Daily, one of the ministers participating in the march wrote later in his blog: “At lunch today, a colleague told us she overheard some people saying “Hey, look over there, it’s the Love people”.
We are called by these 2 pillars of our heritage- by reason and by love. With reason we will ask the questions that so urgently need to be asked, with reason we will seek truth and justice. With love, with compassion we will act, affirming the inherent worth and dignity of all people. Will you accept this call? Will you take up the rights of the stranger in our land, as we have stood for civil rights so many times before? Lets reach out to our brothers and sisters around the country, around the world letting reason and love change this broken system to one of compassion and justice.
Resources:
http://www.uuworld.org/news/articles/165916.shtml
http://www.foodincmovie.com/about-the-film.php
http://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2011/01/workers-center-works-overtime-to-uncover-problematic-j-1-visa-program-in-local-economy/
J. Lipman, Francine, J. (Spring 2006). Taxing Undocumented Immigrants: Separate, Unequal and Without Representation. The Tax Lawyer. lso published in Harvard Latino Law Review, Spring 2006. Harvard.edu
Eduardo Porter (April 5, 2005). "Illegal Immigrants Are Bolstering Social Security With Billions". New York Times.
Eunice Moscoso (2007-02-27). "Study: Immigrants don't raise U.S. crime rate". Arizona Daily Star.
“Crime, Corrections and California: what does Immigration Have to Do with it” PPIC California Counts: Population Trends and Profiles V. 9 Number 3 Feb 2008 by Kristin F. Butcher, Anne Morrison Piehl.
Immigration as a Moral Issue (Congregational Study/ Action Issue for 2010-2014)
The Cost Of Illegal Immigration By Justin Farmer Posted: 12:16 pm EDT May 10, 2010
http://www.uuworld.org/news/articles/165916.shtml
http://www.uuworld.org/news/articles/167428.shtml “'Justice' General Assembly to be held in Phoenix: Days and nights of work result in a plan most can endorse” By Jane Greer 6.28.10 UU World
http://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2011/01/workers-center-works-overtime-to-uncover-problematic-j-1-visa-program-in-local-economy/
J. Lipman, Francine, J. (Spring 2006). Taxing Undocumented Immigrants: Separate, Unequal and Without Representation. The Tax Lawyer. Also published in Harvard Latino Law Review, Spring 2006. Harvard.edu
Eduardo Porter (April 5, 2005). "Illegal Immigrants Are Bolstering Social Security With Billions". New York Times.
Eunice Moscoso (2007-02-27). "Study: Immigrants don't raise U.S. crime rate". Arizona Daily Star.
“Crime, Corrections and California: what does Immigration Have to Do with it” PPIC California Counts: Population Trends and Profiles V. 9 Number 3 Feb 2008 by Kristin F. Butcher, Anne Morrison Piehl.
Immigration as a Moral Issue (Congregational Study/ Action Issue for 2010-2014)
The Cost Of Illegal Immigration By Justin Farmer Posted: 12:16 pm EDT May 10, 2010
http://www.standingonthesideoflove.org/blog/trials-begin-for-15-clergy-and-leaders-arrested-in-july-29th-sb-1070-protests-in-phoenix/
Friday, February 18, 2011
Our Forefather, Joseph Priestley (February 6, 2011)
Lesson for all Ages
One of the sources of our UU tradition is the wisdom of science, so
Today instead of a story we are going to do a science experiment
(light candle)
Can anyone tell me what will happen if I put this on the candle?
(put it out with candle snuffer we use to extinguish our chalice)
Why?
A candle needs oxygen to burn.
(relight candle, then put candle under jar until it goes out)
Who else needs oxygen? (we do)
How about a plant, does a plant need oxygen?
What do you think would happen if we put a plant in here?
(add plant, relight candle, put jar over both)
How’s the plant doing? Okay, keep an eye on it while we talk
Now when Joseph priestly was a little boy, people didn’t know about air. They just thought that between you and me was emptiness.
But then they made really good scales, and could see that a jar of air weighted more than a jar of nothing. But still they didn’t know what air was made of, and they didn’t know there was more than one kind of gas.
By doing this experiment, Priestly (who was a UU minister by the way, as well as an amateur scientist) Priestly showed that there is more than one kind of air- the kind that a fire needs to burn and the kind a plant needs to stay alive.
By the way, how is our plant doing?
Priestly found that not only would a plant do fine for 2 weeks even after a flame had burned away all the oxygen, but he also found that if you put a flame back in there 2 weeks later it would burn again, just like the first time!
But this is church, not science class, so what wisdom can we learn from this experiment?
That plants and animals need each other. We depend on each other; together we create the air that we breathe with nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide and some other gasses too.
It helps show is that we part of an interdependent web of life with all other living things.
Sermon
Joseph Priestly is almost the archetypal Unitarian. He was a heretic of the first order. He loved science, he loved dialogue and debate, the free exchange of ideas. He believed the religious system was filled with errors, and that the political system would benefit from a good revolution or 2. He spoke his mind no matter what the cost.
First, I want to tell you about Priestly the scientist- because that is what he is most famous for. Ironically, he was a minister and a school teacher when he made his most important discoveries. He had grown up in a family of religious dissenters from the Church of England, but he was a dissenter among dissenters, and was denied membership in the Independent church his family went to because of his heretical ideas. But he grew up to be a minister anyway, preaching at a congregation of about 60 people, just about the size of this congregation, and supplemented his income by starting his own school of 20 boys where he published his first book “Rudiments of English Grammar.” His grammar book helped get him a job at a bigger, more prestigious Dissenting school called the Warrington Academy. Somehow between preaching and teaching, he found time for his hobby- science. In particular he had the passion of his day for electricity and what was then called “Natural philosophy.” Electricity was in those days new and cutting edge. He bought the latest electricity gear for his lab, and after some work in the field, decided to write the first ever popular history of electricity. It was to be in English instead of Latin as was the usual language for books about science, so that the field of electricity would become more accessible to everyone. He headed to London to meet the leading thinkers in the field in hopes they would give him what he needed to write his book.
It was through his connections at the Warrington academy that he was Introduced to the Royal Society, and to Benjamin Franklin. In those days, the leading “electricians” hung out in the London Coffee House and called themselves “The Honest Whigs.” Their conversations swung from libertarian politics to the need for a “rational Christianity,” to theories of electricity liberally interspersed with wine and cheese and apple-puffs. The Honest Whigs were not only happy to welcome into their midst, loaning him the books and pamphlets he needed about the history of the study of electricity, and giving him information about their own studies on the subject, but they also encouraged him in his own research.
Priestly threw himself into this writing and research. In 1767 he published “The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments” which became the standard text on the subject and solidified his relationship to the scientific community. It was in this book that the story of Ben Franklin’s famous experiment with the kite and the key was first published. The book also contained some of Priestley’s own work and even a section called “A description of the most entertaining experiments performed by electricity.” His goal was not to set himself up as the keeper of secret specialized knowledge, but to encourage everyone to think and learn and experiment in the new and exciting arena of electricity.
That same year Joseph, his wife Mary and their 4 year old daughter Sally moved to Warrington where he got a new job as minister at the Mill-Hill Chapel. Though this was a bigger congregation, priestly still had plenty of time for his experiments. It was here that he made his most popular discovery, enabled through the serendipity that the temporary house he moved into while his new home was being renovated was right next to the Jakes and Nell brewery. He noticed that the fermenting vats gave off what he called “fixed” air, now called carbon dioxide, which had been discovered only 12 years before, and his neighbors humored him by letting him do experiments with the air over their vats. The discovery of soda water did not even take any fancy equipment, as it seems Priestley was able to carbonate regular water by pouring it back and forth from one cup to another. Now there was such a thing as sparkling water back then, it was mineral water taken from certain springs. It was a rare thing that had to be found and could not be made. Had priestly kept his knowledge to himself and sold it to industry, he could have been a wealthy man – think about today’s lucrative soda market. But Priestly believed in sharing information freely, and printed a pamphlet right away on how to do it yourself.
This happy discovery set Priestly on a new path- studying the chemistry of air and gas. His most important discoveries were yet to come. The first was the experiment I shared with the children earlier today- though I left out one of the main actors. Mice. Many a mouse met his or her demise in Priestley’s experiments both in electricity and in chemistry. Apparently priestly had been trapping mice in jars since he was a boy, and had noticed that they died pretty quickly if he sealed the jar. In 1771, he decided to compare the fate of a plant trapped in a jar. It amazed him that the sprig of mint he trapped fared so much better than the mice and frogs. Moreover, he found that if he put a mouse into a jar in which a flame had burned out, that the mouse would die at once. So he repeated the experiment with the flame and the mint, the experiment we did this morning with the children. In 1772 he introduced a mouse to the experiment, putting the mouse in the “restored air” and found that, as he described in his own words in a letter to Benjamin Franklin “The same mouse also that lived so well in the restored air, was barely recoverable after being not more than one second in the other. I have also had another instance of a mouse living 14 minutes, without being at all hurt, in little more than two ounce measures of another quantity of noxious air in which a plant had grown.” (p. 78)
This simple experiment was a major breakthrough. It changed not only how we thought we knew about air, but also what we thought we knew about the relationship between plants and people. Franklin wrote back to Priestly saying “I hope this will give some check to the rage of destroying trees that grow near houses, which has accompanied our late improvements in gardening, from an opinion of their being unwholesome. “ (p. 82) Writer Steven Johnson in his book “The Invention of Air” postulates that this discovery was one of the foundations on which eco-system science was built. For this discovery Priestly was awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society. Priestly kept experimenting with what as then called “Subtle fluids” which we now call gases, and was the first to identify 10 of them, one of them Oxygen.
This was the enlightenment, a time when new ways of thinking, new fields of knowledge were opening like scenic vistas to the thinkers of the day. Writes Priestley’s biographer “There were literally dozens of paradigm shifts in distinct fields during Priestley’s lifetime, watershed moments of sudden progress where new rules and frameworks of understanding emerged. Priestly alone was a transformative figure in four of them: chemistry, electricity, politics, and faith.” Schoolchildren still learn of the role his good friend Ben Franklin played in the American Revolution, and Franklin was eventually exiled from London in 1775 for his pro-revolutionary views. Priestly had also written a few pamphlets over the years against “forg[ing] chains for America” (p. 129); he became one of the leading supporters of American Independence in England, and his views were know in widening circles. Samuel Johnson, a pamphleteer against colonial freedom, is said to have commented: “Ah, Priestly. An evil man, Sir. His work unsettles everything.” (p. 129). But because during this time his patron was a Lord Shelburne, (in exchange for which Priestley was tutoring Shelburne’s 2 sons and maintaining his library), he seems to have kept his political views quiet during those years, grumbling to friends instead of continuing his stream of pamphlets. Eventually his political reputation caused Priestley to loose this sponsorship, as Shelburne had political aspirations. The loss of the sponsorship was a crushing financial blow, but Priestly met a new group of Enlightenment thinkers and captains of fledgling industrial society. They were called the Lunar Society, (or “the lunatics”) and many of them were willing to become Priestley’s “subscribers” and had instruments custom made for him.
Despite all the cool new gear, in this period Priestley turned his reformer’s gaze to religion. He and his friend Rev. Theophilus Lindsey founded the first Unitarian church in 1774. Priestley put forth in his book “History of the Corruptions of Christianity” the theory that since the first days of Christianity the religion had become corrupted in numerous ways. The idea of the divinity of Christ was one such “corruption” He traced the history of this thinking and found that in the very early church God occupied a higher position than his son, and it wasn’t until the last 3rd century that divinity was bestowed on Jesus. (Robinson p 22-23) He was on the cutting edge of heresy with the idea that Jesus was completely human. Priestly wrote that there was “no trace of the apostles having ever regarded their master in this high light” and also that “It cannot be said that anything is ascribed to him that a mere man (aided, as he himself says he was, by the power of God his Father) was not equal to.”) (quoted in Robinson p. 23)
In “The Corruptions” Priestly pulled apart every kind of miraculous or magical aspect of Christian theology, including the existence of the holy spirit, the trinity, predestination, the Eucharist, and the deification of saints. But Priestly understood himself to be a faithful Christian, faithful to Christianity in its pure form as it was originally practiced. He writes “this historical method will be found to be one of the most satisfactory modes of argumentation, in order to prove that what I object to is really a corruption of genuine Christianity, and no part of the original scheme” (p. 156). For Priestly, doing a historical analysis of Christianity and stripping away the miraculous and the magical, was part of the radical reform through which new paradigms had been born in the scientific and political worlds. His religious ideas were very influential to Thomas Jefferson who wrote in a letter to John Adams “I have read his Corruptions of Christianity, and Early Opinions of Jesus over and over again; and I rest on them…as the basis of my own faith.” Then as now presidential candidates were scrutinized for their beliefs, and Priestley’s work enabled Jefferson responded “I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others, ascribing himself every human excellence and believe he never claimed any other.” (p. 156)
Other folks were not so sympathetic. Archdeacon Samuel Horsley called Priestley’s writing an “extraordinary attempt…to unsettle the faith, and break up the constitution of every ecclesiastical establishment” (p. 158). Even his scientist friends could not all follow him into his religious dissent.
Priestly preached a sermon in 1785 called “The Importance and Extent of Free Inquiry” which included in it this metaphor “We are, as it were, laying gunpowder, grain by grain, under the old building of error and superstition, which a single spark may hereafter inflame, so as to produce an instantaneous explosion; in consequence of which that edifice, the erection of which has been the work of ages, may be overturned in a moment, and so effectually as that the same foundation can never be built upon again.” (p. 159) This sermon earned him the nickname of “gunpowder Joe,” but it was his political views that really got him into trouble.
Among the liberal thinkers Priestly hung out with, now calling themselves the “Constitutional Society” there was support of the French Revolution. It seemed a logical next step in political reform after the American Revolution so successfully had put in place a constitutional democracy. The opposition was the “Church and King” movement. They opposed the American Revolution, the French Revolution and they opposed reformation of the Church of England. They put an add in the Birmingham paper in response to one by the Constitution Society saying that “Whatever the modern republicans may imagine, or the regicidal propounders of the rights of men design, let us convince them there is enough loyalty in the majority of the inhabitants of this country to support and defend their King.” (p. 163) A mob formed the night of that event, and angered to find that the Constitutional Society had gone home 3 hours early, they burned down the New Meeting House, including a bonfire of books and pews on the front steps. They then burned down the Old Meetinghouse. Samuel Ryland, A friend of Priestly went to his home to warn him about the mob, and Priestly fled to his Ryland’s house. It was a good thing too, because they burned Priestley’s home and lab to the ground, destroying all his equipment and his library. Ryland and others had lost their homes as well. Priestly tried to live under the radar in England for a while, serving as a minister in London, but he was shunned by most of the members of the Royal Society for his religious and political views. When the French legislative assembly made him an honorary citizen in 1792, the public ire was re-awakened, and spewed forth in pamphlets and cartoons. Eventually Priestley followed his son Joseph Jr. to America where he was building a new settlement in Northumberland Pennsylvania.
His supporters in America welcomed him with open arms, and he was offered a position a the University of Pennsylvania in their Chemistry department, but Priestly chose the family life in Northumberland, and preached to the church there, and in Philadelphia whenever he could make the multiple day journey. Sadly his wife and son Harry died in the same year before their new home was even guilt. And before long Priestly was in trouble again. Old friend like John Adams began to distance themselves from his radical fiery sermons (much as presidential candidates today have had to do). Priestly was disillusioned with the way the principles of the revolution been implemented in a government that was not always true to its principles, more like the Monarchy against which they had rebelled. Members of the Adam’s administration wanted to have Priestley prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition Acts, the passage of which was in fact one of those acts which Priestly felt to violate the constitution of this young land.
He published a volume in 1799 called “Letters to the Inhabitants of Northumberland and its Neighborhood,” his last major work, in which he wrote “To find in America the same maxims of government, and the same proceedings, from which many of us fled form Europe, and to be reproached as disturbers of government there, and chiefly because we did what the court of England will never forgive in favor of liberty here, is, we own, a great disappointment to us, especially as we cannot now return.” (p. 195-6) Thomas Jefferson, still a great friend and admirer of Priestly wrote that the essays were “the most precious gifts that can be made to us… From the Porcupines of our country you will receive no thanks: but the great mass of our nation will edify and thank you.” (p. 196) and in fact when Jefferson became president Priestly wrote “for the first time in my life (and I shall soon enter my 70th year) I find myself in any degree of favor of the governor of the country in which I have lived, and I hope I shall die in the same pleasing situation.” (p. 200) And so he did, writing and editing in his very last days.
So what can we take from this story, the life of one of our founding fathers, a father of both modern chemistry, and of our Unitarian faith tradition. Certainly we can admire his capacity to help birth new paradigms, and to stand behind them even when it cost him dearly. We can, with Priestly, strip away those parts of religious tradition, even our own, that contradict what we know of this world, what we know of truth. But I think today what I want to lift up is that even a minister can be a scientist, and even a schoolteacher can make a difference in the world of politics. In this age of profound separation of fields, of increasing specialization, none of us should be afraid to stick a candle under a jar to see what happens, nor should we hesitate to study religious history to see what new things we can learn, nor should we be afraid to stand up for our political principles. We can see, as Priestly did, as so many of the great figures of the enlightenment did, that all this knowledge informs other knowledge, much as a plant restores air for the flame. It is in the intersection, the cooperation of all these things that a new paradigm is born.
Resources:
Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith Revolution and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.
David Robinson. The Unitarians and the Universalists. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985.
One of the sources of our UU tradition is the wisdom of science, so
Today instead of a story we are going to do a science experiment
(light candle)
Can anyone tell me what will happen if I put this on the candle?
(put it out with candle snuffer we use to extinguish our chalice)
Why?
A candle needs oxygen to burn.
(relight candle, then put candle under jar until it goes out)
Who else needs oxygen? (we do)
How about a plant, does a plant need oxygen?
What do you think would happen if we put a plant in here?
(add plant, relight candle, put jar over both)
How’s the plant doing? Okay, keep an eye on it while we talk
Now when Joseph priestly was a little boy, people didn’t know about air. They just thought that between you and me was emptiness.
But then they made really good scales, and could see that a jar of air weighted more than a jar of nothing. But still they didn’t know what air was made of, and they didn’t know there was more than one kind of gas.
By doing this experiment, Priestly (who was a UU minister by the way, as well as an amateur scientist) Priestly showed that there is more than one kind of air- the kind that a fire needs to burn and the kind a plant needs to stay alive.
By the way, how is our plant doing?
Priestly found that not only would a plant do fine for 2 weeks even after a flame had burned away all the oxygen, but he also found that if you put a flame back in there 2 weeks later it would burn again, just like the first time!
But this is church, not science class, so what wisdom can we learn from this experiment?
That plants and animals need each other. We depend on each other; together we create the air that we breathe with nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide and some other gasses too.
It helps show is that we part of an interdependent web of life with all other living things.
Sermon
Joseph Priestly is almost the archetypal Unitarian. He was a heretic of the first order. He loved science, he loved dialogue and debate, the free exchange of ideas. He believed the religious system was filled with errors, and that the political system would benefit from a good revolution or 2. He spoke his mind no matter what the cost.
First, I want to tell you about Priestly the scientist- because that is what he is most famous for. Ironically, he was a minister and a school teacher when he made his most important discoveries. He had grown up in a family of religious dissenters from the Church of England, but he was a dissenter among dissenters, and was denied membership in the Independent church his family went to because of his heretical ideas. But he grew up to be a minister anyway, preaching at a congregation of about 60 people, just about the size of this congregation, and supplemented his income by starting his own school of 20 boys where he published his first book “Rudiments of English Grammar.” His grammar book helped get him a job at a bigger, more prestigious Dissenting school called the Warrington Academy. Somehow between preaching and teaching, he found time for his hobby- science. In particular he had the passion of his day for electricity and what was then called “Natural philosophy.” Electricity was in those days new and cutting edge. He bought the latest electricity gear for his lab, and after some work in the field, decided to write the first ever popular history of electricity. It was to be in English instead of Latin as was the usual language for books about science, so that the field of electricity would become more accessible to everyone. He headed to London to meet the leading thinkers in the field in hopes they would give him what he needed to write his book.
It was through his connections at the Warrington academy that he was Introduced to the Royal Society, and to Benjamin Franklin. In those days, the leading “electricians” hung out in the London Coffee House and called themselves “The Honest Whigs.” Their conversations swung from libertarian politics to the need for a “rational Christianity,” to theories of electricity liberally interspersed with wine and cheese and apple-puffs. The Honest Whigs were not only happy to welcome into their midst, loaning him the books and pamphlets he needed about the history of the study of electricity, and giving him information about their own studies on the subject, but they also encouraged him in his own research.
Priestly threw himself into this writing and research. In 1767 he published “The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments” which became the standard text on the subject and solidified his relationship to the scientific community. It was in this book that the story of Ben Franklin’s famous experiment with the kite and the key was first published. The book also contained some of Priestley’s own work and even a section called “A description of the most entertaining experiments performed by electricity.” His goal was not to set himself up as the keeper of secret specialized knowledge, but to encourage everyone to think and learn and experiment in the new and exciting arena of electricity.
That same year Joseph, his wife Mary and their 4 year old daughter Sally moved to Warrington where he got a new job as minister at the Mill-Hill Chapel. Though this was a bigger congregation, priestly still had plenty of time for his experiments. It was here that he made his most popular discovery, enabled through the serendipity that the temporary house he moved into while his new home was being renovated was right next to the Jakes and Nell brewery. He noticed that the fermenting vats gave off what he called “fixed” air, now called carbon dioxide, which had been discovered only 12 years before, and his neighbors humored him by letting him do experiments with the air over their vats. The discovery of soda water did not even take any fancy equipment, as it seems Priestley was able to carbonate regular water by pouring it back and forth from one cup to another. Now there was such a thing as sparkling water back then, it was mineral water taken from certain springs. It was a rare thing that had to be found and could not be made. Had priestly kept his knowledge to himself and sold it to industry, he could have been a wealthy man – think about today’s lucrative soda market. But Priestly believed in sharing information freely, and printed a pamphlet right away on how to do it yourself.
This happy discovery set Priestly on a new path- studying the chemistry of air and gas. His most important discoveries were yet to come. The first was the experiment I shared with the children earlier today- though I left out one of the main actors. Mice. Many a mouse met his or her demise in Priestley’s experiments both in electricity and in chemistry. Apparently priestly had been trapping mice in jars since he was a boy, and had noticed that they died pretty quickly if he sealed the jar. In 1771, he decided to compare the fate of a plant trapped in a jar. It amazed him that the sprig of mint he trapped fared so much better than the mice and frogs. Moreover, he found that if he put a mouse into a jar in which a flame had burned out, that the mouse would die at once. So he repeated the experiment with the flame and the mint, the experiment we did this morning with the children. In 1772 he introduced a mouse to the experiment, putting the mouse in the “restored air” and found that, as he described in his own words in a letter to Benjamin Franklin “The same mouse also that lived so well in the restored air, was barely recoverable after being not more than one second in the other. I have also had another instance of a mouse living 14 minutes, without being at all hurt, in little more than two ounce measures of another quantity of noxious air in which a plant had grown.” (p. 78)
This simple experiment was a major breakthrough. It changed not only how we thought we knew about air, but also what we thought we knew about the relationship between plants and people. Franklin wrote back to Priestly saying “I hope this will give some check to the rage of destroying trees that grow near houses, which has accompanied our late improvements in gardening, from an opinion of their being unwholesome. “ (p. 82) Writer Steven Johnson in his book “The Invention of Air” postulates that this discovery was one of the foundations on which eco-system science was built. For this discovery Priestly was awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society. Priestly kept experimenting with what as then called “Subtle fluids” which we now call gases, and was the first to identify 10 of them, one of them Oxygen.
This was the enlightenment, a time when new ways of thinking, new fields of knowledge were opening like scenic vistas to the thinkers of the day. Writes Priestley’s biographer “There were literally dozens of paradigm shifts in distinct fields during Priestley’s lifetime, watershed moments of sudden progress where new rules and frameworks of understanding emerged. Priestly alone was a transformative figure in four of them: chemistry, electricity, politics, and faith.” Schoolchildren still learn of the role his good friend Ben Franklin played in the American Revolution, and Franklin was eventually exiled from London in 1775 for his pro-revolutionary views. Priestly had also written a few pamphlets over the years against “forg[ing] chains for America” (p. 129); he became one of the leading supporters of American Independence in England, and his views were know in widening circles. Samuel Johnson, a pamphleteer against colonial freedom, is said to have commented: “Ah, Priestly. An evil man, Sir. His work unsettles everything.” (p. 129). But because during this time his patron was a Lord Shelburne, (in exchange for which Priestley was tutoring Shelburne’s 2 sons and maintaining his library), he seems to have kept his political views quiet during those years, grumbling to friends instead of continuing his stream of pamphlets. Eventually his political reputation caused Priestley to loose this sponsorship, as Shelburne had political aspirations. The loss of the sponsorship was a crushing financial blow, but Priestly met a new group of Enlightenment thinkers and captains of fledgling industrial society. They were called the Lunar Society, (or “the lunatics”) and many of them were willing to become Priestley’s “subscribers” and had instruments custom made for him.
Despite all the cool new gear, in this period Priestley turned his reformer’s gaze to religion. He and his friend Rev. Theophilus Lindsey founded the first Unitarian church in 1774. Priestley put forth in his book “History of the Corruptions of Christianity” the theory that since the first days of Christianity the religion had become corrupted in numerous ways. The idea of the divinity of Christ was one such “corruption” He traced the history of this thinking and found that in the very early church God occupied a higher position than his son, and it wasn’t until the last 3rd century that divinity was bestowed on Jesus. (Robinson p 22-23) He was on the cutting edge of heresy with the idea that Jesus was completely human. Priestly wrote that there was “no trace of the apostles having ever regarded their master in this high light” and also that “It cannot be said that anything is ascribed to him that a mere man (aided, as he himself says he was, by the power of God his Father) was not equal to.”) (quoted in Robinson p. 23)
In “The Corruptions” Priestly pulled apart every kind of miraculous or magical aspect of Christian theology, including the existence of the holy spirit, the trinity, predestination, the Eucharist, and the deification of saints. But Priestly understood himself to be a faithful Christian, faithful to Christianity in its pure form as it was originally practiced. He writes “this historical method will be found to be one of the most satisfactory modes of argumentation, in order to prove that what I object to is really a corruption of genuine Christianity, and no part of the original scheme” (p. 156). For Priestly, doing a historical analysis of Christianity and stripping away the miraculous and the magical, was part of the radical reform through which new paradigms had been born in the scientific and political worlds. His religious ideas were very influential to Thomas Jefferson who wrote in a letter to John Adams “I have read his Corruptions of Christianity, and Early Opinions of Jesus over and over again; and I rest on them…as the basis of my own faith.” Then as now presidential candidates were scrutinized for their beliefs, and Priestley’s work enabled Jefferson responded “I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others, ascribing himself every human excellence and believe he never claimed any other.” (p. 156)
Other folks were not so sympathetic. Archdeacon Samuel Horsley called Priestley’s writing an “extraordinary attempt…to unsettle the faith, and break up the constitution of every ecclesiastical establishment” (p. 158). Even his scientist friends could not all follow him into his religious dissent.
Priestly preached a sermon in 1785 called “The Importance and Extent of Free Inquiry” which included in it this metaphor “We are, as it were, laying gunpowder, grain by grain, under the old building of error and superstition, which a single spark may hereafter inflame, so as to produce an instantaneous explosion; in consequence of which that edifice, the erection of which has been the work of ages, may be overturned in a moment, and so effectually as that the same foundation can never be built upon again.” (p. 159) This sermon earned him the nickname of “gunpowder Joe,” but it was his political views that really got him into trouble.
Among the liberal thinkers Priestly hung out with, now calling themselves the “Constitutional Society” there was support of the French Revolution. It seemed a logical next step in political reform after the American Revolution so successfully had put in place a constitutional democracy. The opposition was the “Church and King” movement. They opposed the American Revolution, the French Revolution and they opposed reformation of the Church of England. They put an add in the Birmingham paper in response to one by the Constitution Society saying that “Whatever the modern republicans may imagine, or the regicidal propounders of the rights of men design, let us convince them there is enough loyalty in the majority of the inhabitants of this country to support and defend their King.” (p. 163) A mob formed the night of that event, and angered to find that the Constitutional Society had gone home 3 hours early, they burned down the New Meeting House, including a bonfire of books and pews on the front steps. They then burned down the Old Meetinghouse. Samuel Ryland, A friend of Priestly went to his home to warn him about the mob, and Priestly fled to his Ryland’s house. It was a good thing too, because they burned Priestley’s home and lab to the ground, destroying all his equipment and his library. Ryland and others had lost their homes as well. Priestly tried to live under the radar in England for a while, serving as a minister in London, but he was shunned by most of the members of the Royal Society for his religious and political views. When the French legislative assembly made him an honorary citizen in 1792, the public ire was re-awakened, and spewed forth in pamphlets and cartoons. Eventually Priestley followed his son Joseph Jr. to America where he was building a new settlement in Northumberland Pennsylvania.
His supporters in America welcomed him with open arms, and he was offered a position a the University of Pennsylvania in their Chemistry department, but Priestly chose the family life in Northumberland, and preached to the church there, and in Philadelphia whenever he could make the multiple day journey. Sadly his wife and son Harry died in the same year before their new home was even guilt. And before long Priestly was in trouble again. Old friend like John Adams began to distance themselves from his radical fiery sermons (much as presidential candidates today have had to do). Priestly was disillusioned with the way the principles of the revolution been implemented in a government that was not always true to its principles, more like the Monarchy against which they had rebelled. Members of the Adam’s administration wanted to have Priestley prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition Acts, the passage of which was in fact one of those acts which Priestly felt to violate the constitution of this young land.
He published a volume in 1799 called “Letters to the Inhabitants of Northumberland and its Neighborhood,” his last major work, in which he wrote “To find in America the same maxims of government, and the same proceedings, from which many of us fled form Europe, and to be reproached as disturbers of government there, and chiefly because we did what the court of England will never forgive in favor of liberty here, is, we own, a great disappointment to us, especially as we cannot now return.” (p. 195-6) Thomas Jefferson, still a great friend and admirer of Priestly wrote that the essays were “the most precious gifts that can be made to us… From the Porcupines of our country you will receive no thanks: but the great mass of our nation will edify and thank you.” (p. 196) and in fact when Jefferson became president Priestly wrote “for the first time in my life (and I shall soon enter my 70th year) I find myself in any degree of favor of the governor of the country in which I have lived, and I hope I shall die in the same pleasing situation.” (p. 200) And so he did, writing and editing in his very last days.
So what can we take from this story, the life of one of our founding fathers, a father of both modern chemistry, and of our Unitarian faith tradition. Certainly we can admire his capacity to help birth new paradigms, and to stand behind them even when it cost him dearly. We can, with Priestly, strip away those parts of religious tradition, even our own, that contradict what we know of this world, what we know of truth. But I think today what I want to lift up is that even a minister can be a scientist, and even a schoolteacher can make a difference in the world of politics. In this age of profound separation of fields, of increasing specialization, none of us should be afraid to stick a candle under a jar to see what happens, nor should we hesitate to study religious history to see what new things we can learn, nor should we be afraid to stand up for our political principles. We can see, as Priestly did, as so many of the great figures of the enlightenment did, that all this knowledge informs other knowledge, much as a plant restores air for the flame. It is in the intersection, the cooperation of all these things that a new paradigm is born.
Resources:
Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith Revolution and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.
David Robinson. The Unitarians and the Universalists. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Where do we Go From Here: Martin Luther King’s Vision for the Future (January 16, 2011)
When I was a little girl growing up in a UU church, our minister often talked about Jesus in the context of 3 other heroes- Mahatma Gandhi, Susan B Anthony and Martin Luther King. So I knew at a young age that King was an important role model, was someone who lived a life of integrity, a life that today as when I was a child, reflects a vision of a more just and peaceful world. Our own Beacon Press has begun publishing a series of books from the Martin Luther King Archives -- some unpublished works, some which have been out of print for many years -- including his last book “Where do we Go From Here: Chaos or Community.” which has something to teach us about that vision, about our way into the future.
King wrote this book after more than a decade of action had brought into being important pieces of legislation, like the voter rights act, and the civil rights act, yet at this time the non-violent tactics of the civil rights movement were being questioned for those who felt that no progress could be made without violence. In the same year that the voter rights act was finally passed, just 3 months later 6 days of riots tore apart the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles- 34 people had been killed, thousands were injured or arrested. It seems the Watts riots of 1965 weight heavily on King’s mind as he wrote this book in 1967.
While acknowledging the tremendous strides for civil rights made in his lifetime, King felt strongly that there was more work to be done, and that all of us whether black or white, rich or poor were called to help create a more just world. In many ways the situation King describes is not very different from where we are today. The landmark legislation that broke down segregation and ended legalized discrimination has been passed, but creating a truly equal world for folks of all colors has yet to be achieved. Changing laws is not enough to change our culture, nor to change the hearts of all Americans.
Because, dear friends, though 40 years have passed injustice is not only a fact of King’s time, but of our own. King reminds us of many of the inequities our country faced in the late 1960s: the racial gaps in housing, education, jobs and poverty. He points out that in his time half of all Negros lived in substandard housing, had half the income of their white brethren, had twice the infant mortality. Those of us who gathered this past Tuesday to discuss King’s writing wondered how those statistics might be different today. It took a little digging, but I found some numbers that were really informative.
A 2009 Urban league report shows “that Blacks remain twice as likely to be unemployed, three times more likely to live in poverty and more than six times as likely to be imprisoned compared with whites.”
In education, for example, the progress has been substantial. In 1968, 70% of African Americans were high school drop-outs. Now, the figure is closer to 20% and there has been over a 300% improvement in the rate of African Americans who attend college But a significant gap persists. Barely half of African-American, Latino, and Native American students graduate from high school, with African American students graduating at 54%, Latinos at 56%, Native Americans at 51% and their white counterparts at 77%. WE have also seen progress in higher education. Fifty-five percent of African-American high school seniors go on to college these days, compared to 45 percent in 1970. But only 43 percent of African-Americans who enter college graduate – 20 percent lower than the rate for whites.
So though there have been significant strides, there is a long way to go. In the elementary schools only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys. Could this difference be explained by the economic circumstances of the students? It seems not, as poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, (this was measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.)
A really heartbreaking gap is in infant health and mortality. Dr. Michael Lu, a UCLA Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Public Health reported that African-American children are twice as likely as white children to be born at a low birth-weight, twice as likely to be born premature and more likely to die in infancy. African-American women are three to four more times likely to die in childbirth as white women. Again, income was factored in, and race alone seemed to have a significant impact on health.
King noticed how in his time folks in predominately black and poor urban areas had to pay more and travel farther for basic goods. Just last year community organizers in East Palo Alto finally achieved a victory; they now have a grocery store into their community after a decades long struggle from 1974 to 2009, when no grocery store could be convinced to locate in their city. Imagine that for 25 years in a city of 29,000 everyone had to leave the city to buy fresh groceries. Yet a 2008 MSNBC report shows that many urban centers still are without stores where residents can buy fresh healthy foods, which is particularly significant in neighborhoods where residents lack a car or decent bus routes to commute to grocery stores in more affluent arias. What organizers call “food apatite” continues even today.
When I grew up hearing stories of the civil right movement, I thought of racism and oppression as a thing of the past, overcome by our great legislative strides of the 1970s. But now it is clear to me that just because our laws say that persons of all races have equal rights, this does not guarantee that persons of all races will have equal opportunity. According to an ACLU 2009 study, “Black and Latino students attend schools more segregated today than during the civil rights era. Schools are still separate and not equal more than 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education.” Racism and racial injustice are alive and well today, and King challenges our complacency with his challenge that “with each modest advance the white population promptly raise the argument that the Negro has come far enough.” (p. 11)
We all know the violent and oppressive history of slavery in our country, but It bears repeating that most African Americans came here in chains, with out possessions, without rights, without even family ties. King reminds us that it was a practice for generations to tear families apart- to separate mothers and children, brothers and sisters. He reminds us that when slavery was finally abolished, at a time when the American Government granted white settlers millions of acres of land in the western U.S., “Four million newly liberated slaves found themselves with no bread to eat, no land to cultivate, no shelter to cover their heads. It was like freeing a man who had been unjustly imprisoned for years, and on discover his innocence sending him out with no bus fare to get home, no suit to cover his body, no financial compensation…to help him get a sound footing in society.” (p. 83-84) Or to quote Frederick Douglas “Emancipation granted the Negro freedom to hunger, freedom to winter amid the rains of heaven. Emancipation was freedom and famine at the same time.”
The systemic realities of broken families, separate and unequal education, discrimination and “blockbusting” in the housing market, and a history of profound poverty affected African-Americans in King’s time, and affect racial minorities in our time today. Legacies of poverty are handed down from generation to generation just as are legacies of education, property and privilege. It is easy to say “it’s been over 40 years since the civil rights legislation passed, why are we still talking about this?” But there has never been a sustained systematic program to overturn those basic inequalities, and the passage of time is not in and of itself a force that guarantees eventual justice. We know from Gandhi’s work in India that societal oppression and inequity can persist for centuries if unopposed. King responds “Based on the cruel judgment that Negroes have come far enough, there is a strong mood to bring the civil rights movement to a halt or to reduce it to a crawl. Negro demands that yesterday evoked admiration and support, today – to many – have become tiresome, unwarranted and a disturbance to the enjoyment of life.” (p. 12) To king the work of civil rights will not be ended until all those gaps- the education gap, the housing gap, the infant mortality gap are closed and the people of this country really do have equal opportunity.
I want to confess to you that I caught myself in this thinking sometime, to feel that because there has been this gap as long as I have been on this planet, it must somehow make sense, it is just “the way things are”. King cites Ruth Benedict’s definition of racism as: “the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to hereditary inferiority and another group is destined to hereditary superiority.” (p. 73) So how can I justify to myself the deep inequalities in our society unless at some level there is a seed of that racist notion that one ethnic group is destined to hereditary superiority?
Our Unitarian Universalist association has, through deep soul searching and attempts to understand the mistakes of its history, decided that we need to be held accountable. We believe that it is not for the European-American members of our churches to decide when racism has been eliminated from our communities, we ask our members of color to hold us accountable for creating an anti-oppressive institution. Because we know in the past 300 years we have allowed great injustices to go un-rectified, we have been content with a snail’s pace towards progress. We know that sometimes the pain of the oppressed is invisible to people of privilege.
We want to be held accountable, not only for our action but our inaction, for whatever injustice goes un-noticed or un-addressed. Our hearts are broken by this history and present reality of injustice, and we ask with King “Where do we go from here?” For King one of the most important answers to the question “where do we go from here” – is that we address poverty, the poverty which oppresses people of all races. White and black, Hispanic and Asian must join together to lift everyone out of poverty. He writes that “We are called to play Good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be beaten and robbed as they make their journey through lige. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it understand that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” (p. 198) King cites research that if we took just 2% of our GNP we could guarantee a job to every adult at a living wage, an amount similar to that spent on the war in Vietnam during his day. He notes, as so many have since, that we choose to prioritize the war overseas instead of our own war on poverty at home.
This was another important road forward for King, who called us to make a “peace offensive” waging peace around the world. He writes “If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war.” (p. 194) He wanted this not only because African-American men were dying in the war in Vietnam at twice the rate of white men, but also because he because he believed the only way we could be come a truly just and great nation, the only way for humanity to survive and reach its potential in this world we inescapably share with all nations and races, was to put an end to war. Writes King: “It is not enough to say ‘We must not wage war.’ It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.” (p. 195).
Given King’s courageous and principled commitment to non-violent action his call to end war should not surprise us. Further, he believed that non-violent action was the only possible path to create a peaceful world- it was an alternative to war. Where shall we go from here? If we chose war we choose a future of chaos, if we choose non-violence, there is a possibility of world community.
By 1967 African-American activists were beginning to question the practice of non-violence which seemed so slow. The saw that the non-violent method had lead to laws being changed, but that these laws were not being enforced, nor did racism cease. Non-violence felt to many like a perpetuation of the submissive attitude which had been required of African Americans for centuries. How much better, many thought, to express their anger and frustration more directly. Many activists were moved by Frantz Fannon’s book The Wretched of the Earth which counseled ”that violence is a psychologically healthy and tactically sound method for the oppressed… that violence is the only thing that will bring about liberation.”(p. 56) But King’s could not be turned around. His vision was for the future beyond the struggle for civil rights. He knew that black and white would have to live together in this country. He knew that there was an inescapable network of mutuality that bound us together saying: “In a real sense, all life is interrelated. The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich; the betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” (p. 191)
This resonates with our own 7th principle- the interdependent web of life. King’s vision for the future is one we UUs must take seriously, because he bases it on principles that are so much at the core of who we are. He is a universalist in the literal sense because he believes, with us, that “Deeply rooted in our religious heritage is the conviction that every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. ... There is no graded scale of essential worth. …. The worth of an individual does not lie in the measure of his intellect, his racial origin or his social position. Human worth lies in relatedness to God. An individual has value because he has value to God. Whenever this is recognized, ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ pass away as determinants in a relationship and ‘son’ and ‘brother’ are substituted.” (p. 102-3)
King issues a special charge to white liberals- those like the Unitarian Universalists, those of us who believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all persons. He wonders how we can look at these persistent inequities between the races in the United Sates, we who know the history of how power and oppression have moved in this country, and who have not yet committed to work to end these inequities, these injustices in our country and in the world.
“The white liberal must see that the Negro needs not only love but also justice. It is not enough to say, “We love Negroes, we have many Negro friends.” They must demand justice for Negroes. Love that does not satisfy justice is no love at all.” (p. 95) This is where Unitarian Universalists hear their call to racial justice today. We understand that we cannot let our passivity enable an un-just status quo. What King said in 1967, we have believed for a century or more, that “There is nothing to keep us from remolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.” (p. 199)
We, as a denomination, have issued our statement of conscience -- we know the work of racial justice is not finished, nor the work of economic justice, nor the eradication of violence in our world. We know that racism is not a black issue, class-ism is not an issue for the poor, and homophobia is not a gay issue. No matter who we are, these are our issues, because they stand between us and a just, peaceful world. We honor Martin Luther King’s birthday because the history of the civil rights history is American history, it is your history and mine. We celebrate today because King’s vision of the future is our vision of the future – a vision of not chaos but community. One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Endnotes:
King, Martin Luther Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community Boston: Beacon Press, 2010.
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-03-25/us/black.america.report_1_whites-blacks-urban-league?_s=PM:US Report sees 'sobering statistics' on racial inequality March 25, 2009
http://www.newsbatch.com/race.htm “Race and Ethnic Policy Issues” updated 2008
http://www.educationequalityproject.org/what_we_stand_for/achievement_gap “What Is The Achievement Gap?” Education Equality Project
“More African-Americans Attend College, But Graduation Lags” Post by News One in Nation on May 10, 2010 at 8:46 am http://newsone.com/nation/news-one-staff/more-african-americans-attend-college-but-graduation-lags/
“Black boys score far behind white students: Poverty alone doesn't seem to explain gap; expert cites 'racial differences'” By Trip Gabriel The New York Times updated 11/9/2010 4:41:51 PM ET http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40095887/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2010/05/05/racism-behind-disgracefulinfant-mortality-rates-among-africanamericans “Is Racism Behind High Infant Mortality Rates Among African-Americans?” By Megan Carpentier, RH Reality Check May 5, 2010 - 6:00am
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/peninsula&id=7118331 “East Palo Alto gets first grocery store” ABC Local News, Friday, November 13, 2009
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28300393/ns/health-diet_and_nutrition/ “Urban areas struggle to get grocers, fresh food Inner city ‘food deserts’ are instead loaded with fast food and fatty snacks” Associated press 12/18/2008
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=bc8c6994f8bbccf16cf0a83663f3a445 “Racial Inequality Still Going Strong in U.S.” San Francisco Bay View, News Report, Peter Phillips, Posted: Apr 27, 2009
King wrote this book after more than a decade of action had brought into being important pieces of legislation, like the voter rights act, and the civil rights act, yet at this time the non-violent tactics of the civil rights movement were being questioned for those who felt that no progress could be made without violence. In the same year that the voter rights act was finally passed, just 3 months later 6 days of riots tore apart the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles- 34 people had been killed, thousands were injured or arrested. It seems the Watts riots of 1965 weight heavily on King’s mind as he wrote this book in 1967.
While acknowledging the tremendous strides for civil rights made in his lifetime, King felt strongly that there was more work to be done, and that all of us whether black or white, rich or poor were called to help create a more just world. In many ways the situation King describes is not very different from where we are today. The landmark legislation that broke down segregation and ended legalized discrimination has been passed, but creating a truly equal world for folks of all colors has yet to be achieved. Changing laws is not enough to change our culture, nor to change the hearts of all Americans.
Because, dear friends, though 40 years have passed injustice is not only a fact of King’s time, but of our own. King reminds us of many of the inequities our country faced in the late 1960s: the racial gaps in housing, education, jobs and poverty. He points out that in his time half of all Negros lived in substandard housing, had half the income of their white brethren, had twice the infant mortality. Those of us who gathered this past Tuesday to discuss King’s writing wondered how those statistics might be different today. It took a little digging, but I found some numbers that were really informative.
A 2009 Urban league report shows “that Blacks remain twice as likely to be unemployed, three times more likely to live in poverty and more than six times as likely to be imprisoned compared with whites.”
In education, for example, the progress has been substantial. In 1968, 70% of African Americans were high school drop-outs. Now, the figure is closer to 20% and there has been over a 300% improvement in the rate of African Americans who attend college But a significant gap persists. Barely half of African-American, Latino, and Native American students graduate from high school, with African American students graduating at 54%, Latinos at 56%, Native Americans at 51% and their white counterparts at 77%. WE have also seen progress in higher education. Fifty-five percent of African-American high school seniors go on to college these days, compared to 45 percent in 1970. But only 43 percent of African-Americans who enter college graduate – 20 percent lower than the rate for whites.
So though there have been significant strides, there is a long way to go. In the elementary schools only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys. Could this difference be explained by the economic circumstances of the students? It seems not, as poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, (this was measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.)
A really heartbreaking gap is in infant health and mortality. Dr. Michael Lu, a UCLA Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Public Health reported that African-American children are twice as likely as white children to be born at a low birth-weight, twice as likely to be born premature and more likely to die in infancy. African-American women are three to four more times likely to die in childbirth as white women. Again, income was factored in, and race alone seemed to have a significant impact on health.
King noticed how in his time folks in predominately black and poor urban areas had to pay more and travel farther for basic goods. Just last year community organizers in East Palo Alto finally achieved a victory; they now have a grocery store into their community after a decades long struggle from 1974 to 2009, when no grocery store could be convinced to locate in their city. Imagine that for 25 years in a city of 29,000 everyone had to leave the city to buy fresh groceries. Yet a 2008 MSNBC report shows that many urban centers still are without stores where residents can buy fresh healthy foods, which is particularly significant in neighborhoods where residents lack a car or decent bus routes to commute to grocery stores in more affluent arias. What organizers call “food apatite” continues even today.
When I grew up hearing stories of the civil right movement, I thought of racism and oppression as a thing of the past, overcome by our great legislative strides of the 1970s. But now it is clear to me that just because our laws say that persons of all races have equal rights, this does not guarantee that persons of all races will have equal opportunity. According to an ACLU 2009 study, “Black and Latino students attend schools more segregated today than during the civil rights era. Schools are still separate and not equal more than 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education.” Racism and racial injustice are alive and well today, and King challenges our complacency with his challenge that “with each modest advance the white population promptly raise the argument that the Negro has come far enough.” (p. 11)
We all know the violent and oppressive history of slavery in our country, but It bears repeating that most African Americans came here in chains, with out possessions, without rights, without even family ties. King reminds us that it was a practice for generations to tear families apart- to separate mothers and children, brothers and sisters. He reminds us that when slavery was finally abolished, at a time when the American Government granted white settlers millions of acres of land in the western U.S., “Four million newly liberated slaves found themselves with no bread to eat, no land to cultivate, no shelter to cover their heads. It was like freeing a man who had been unjustly imprisoned for years, and on discover his innocence sending him out with no bus fare to get home, no suit to cover his body, no financial compensation…to help him get a sound footing in society.” (p. 83-84) Or to quote Frederick Douglas “Emancipation granted the Negro freedom to hunger, freedom to winter amid the rains of heaven. Emancipation was freedom and famine at the same time.”
The systemic realities of broken families, separate and unequal education, discrimination and “blockbusting” in the housing market, and a history of profound poverty affected African-Americans in King’s time, and affect racial minorities in our time today. Legacies of poverty are handed down from generation to generation just as are legacies of education, property and privilege. It is easy to say “it’s been over 40 years since the civil rights legislation passed, why are we still talking about this?” But there has never been a sustained systematic program to overturn those basic inequalities, and the passage of time is not in and of itself a force that guarantees eventual justice. We know from Gandhi’s work in India that societal oppression and inequity can persist for centuries if unopposed. King responds “Based on the cruel judgment that Negroes have come far enough, there is a strong mood to bring the civil rights movement to a halt or to reduce it to a crawl. Negro demands that yesterday evoked admiration and support, today – to many – have become tiresome, unwarranted and a disturbance to the enjoyment of life.” (p. 12) To king the work of civil rights will not be ended until all those gaps- the education gap, the housing gap, the infant mortality gap are closed and the people of this country really do have equal opportunity.
I want to confess to you that I caught myself in this thinking sometime, to feel that because there has been this gap as long as I have been on this planet, it must somehow make sense, it is just “the way things are”. King cites Ruth Benedict’s definition of racism as: “the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to hereditary inferiority and another group is destined to hereditary superiority.” (p. 73) So how can I justify to myself the deep inequalities in our society unless at some level there is a seed of that racist notion that one ethnic group is destined to hereditary superiority?
Our Unitarian Universalist association has, through deep soul searching and attempts to understand the mistakes of its history, decided that we need to be held accountable. We believe that it is not for the European-American members of our churches to decide when racism has been eliminated from our communities, we ask our members of color to hold us accountable for creating an anti-oppressive institution. Because we know in the past 300 years we have allowed great injustices to go un-rectified, we have been content with a snail’s pace towards progress. We know that sometimes the pain of the oppressed is invisible to people of privilege.
We want to be held accountable, not only for our action but our inaction, for whatever injustice goes un-noticed or un-addressed. Our hearts are broken by this history and present reality of injustice, and we ask with King “Where do we go from here?” For King one of the most important answers to the question “where do we go from here” – is that we address poverty, the poverty which oppresses people of all races. White and black, Hispanic and Asian must join together to lift everyone out of poverty. He writes that “We are called to play Good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be beaten and robbed as they make their journey through lige. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it understand that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” (p. 198) King cites research that if we took just 2% of our GNP we could guarantee a job to every adult at a living wage, an amount similar to that spent on the war in Vietnam during his day. He notes, as so many have since, that we choose to prioritize the war overseas instead of our own war on poverty at home.
This was another important road forward for King, who called us to make a “peace offensive” waging peace around the world. He writes “If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war.” (p. 194) He wanted this not only because African-American men were dying in the war in Vietnam at twice the rate of white men, but also because he because he believed the only way we could be come a truly just and great nation, the only way for humanity to survive and reach its potential in this world we inescapably share with all nations and races, was to put an end to war. Writes King: “It is not enough to say ‘We must not wage war.’ It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.” (p. 195).
Given King’s courageous and principled commitment to non-violent action his call to end war should not surprise us. Further, he believed that non-violent action was the only possible path to create a peaceful world- it was an alternative to war. Where shall we go from here? If we chose war we choose a future of chaos, if we choose non-violence, there is a possibility of world community.
By 1967 African-American activists were beginning to question the practice of non-violence which seemed so slow. The saw that the non-violent method had lead to laws being changed, but that these laws were not being enforced, nor did racism cease. Non-violence felt to many like a perpetuation of the submissive attitude which had been required of African Americans for centuries. How much better, many thought, to express their anger and frustration more directly. Many activists were moved by Frantz Fannon’s book The Wretched of the Earth which counseled ”that violence is a psychologically healthy and tactically sound method for the oppressed… that violence is the only thing that will bring about liberation.”(p. 56) But King’s could not be turned around. His vision was for the future beyond the struggle for civil rights. He knew that black and white would have to live together in this country. He knew that there was an inescapable network of mutuality that bound us together saying: “In a real sense, all life is interrelated. The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich; the betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” (p. 191)
This resonates with our own 7th principle- the interdependent web of life. King’s vision for the future is one we UUs must take seriously, because he bases it on principles that are so much at the core of who we are. He is a universalist in the literal sense because he believes, with us, that “Deeply rooted in our religious heritage is the conviction that every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. ... There is no graded scale of essential worth. …. The worth of an individual does not lie in the measure of his intellect, his racial origin or his social position. Human worth lies in relatedness to God. An individual has value because he has value to God. Whenever this is recognized, ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ pass away as determinants in a relationship and ‘son’ and ‘brother’ are substituted.” (p. 102-3)
King issues a special charge to white liberals- those like the Unitarian Universalists, those of us who believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all persons. He wonders how we can look at these persistent inequities between the races in the United Sates, we who know the history of how power and oppression have moved in this country, and who have not yet committed to work to end these inequities, these injustices in our country and in the world.
“The white liberal must see that the Negro needs not only love but also justice. It is not enough to say, “We love Negroes, we have many Negro friends.” They must demand justice for Negroes. Love that does not satisfy justice is no love at all.” (p. 95) This is where Unitarian Universalists hear their call to racial justice today. We understand that we cannot let our passivity enable an un-just status quo. What King said in 1967, we have believed for a century or more, that “There is nothing to keep us from remolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.” (p. 199)
We, as a denomination, have issued our statement of conscience -- we know the work of racial justice is not finished, nor the work of economic justice, nor the eradication of violence in our world. We know that racism is not a black issue, class-ism is not an issue for the poor, and homophobia is not a gay issue. No matter who we are, these are our issues, because they stand between us and a just, peaceful world. We honor Martin Luther King’s birthday because the history of the civil rights history is American history, it is your history and mine. We celebrate today because King’s vision of the future is our vision of the future – a vision of not chaos but community. One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Endnotes:
King, Martin Luther Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community Boston: Beacon Press, 2010.
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-03-25/us/black.america.report_1_whites-blacks-urban-league?_s=PM:US Report sees 'sobering statistics' on racial inequality March 25, 2009
http://www.newsbatch.com/race.htm “Race and Ethnic Policy Issues” updated 2008
http://www.educationequalityproject.org/what_we_stand_for/achievement_gap “What Is The Achievement Gap?” Education Equality Project
“More African-Americans Attend College, But Graduation Lags” Post by News One in Nation on May 10, 2010 at 8:46 am http://newsone.com/nation/news-one-staff/more-african-americans-attend-college-but-graduation-lags/
“Black boys score far behind white students: Poverty alone doesn't seem to explain gap; expert cites 'racial differences'” By Trip Gabriel The New York Times updated 11/9/2010 4:41:51 PM ET http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40095887/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2010/05/05/racism-behind-disgracefulinfant-mortality-rates-among-africanamericans “Is Racism Behind High Infant Mortality Rates Among African-Americans?” By Megan Carpentier, RH Reality Check May 5, 2010 - 6:00am
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/peninsula&id=7118331 “East Palo Alto gets first grocery store” ABC Local News, Friday, November 13, 2009
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28300393/ns/health-diet_and_nutrition/ “Urban areas struggle to get grocers, fresh food Inner city ‘food deserts’ are instead loaded with fast food and fatty snacks” Associated press 12/18/2008
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=bc8c6994f8bbccf16cf0a83663f3a445 “Racial Inequality Still Going Strong in U.S.” San Francisco Bay View, News Report, Peter Phillips, Posted: Apr 27, 2009
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