HomeGood morning!
It’s good to be with you this morning.
The sermon I am going to deliver this morning might in some places sound political to some, political in the sense of partisan. It is not. It does have some reflections on social issues in it. I was not with you for Martin Luther King Sunday and I am going to speak to about that a bit and about the Inauguration that happened on the Tuesday following, just twelve days ago. It is too big an event not to speak to.
Coincidently, today is the forty ninth anniversary of the first of the lunch counter sit-ins. It took place in North Carolina. Four young black students went to a local lunch counter and sat down in the white’s only section and waited to be served. This act spread and within a few weeks thousands of students were doing this all across the South. The local white leaders approached the local civil rights leaders of organizations like the NAACP and asked them to condemn the action as harmful to race relations and were surprised when those leaders said, “Oh, no; we support this act”.
The New York Times later that week reported that a few statewide interracial or white organizations also supported the sit-ins; they named two, one of which was the Unitarian Fellowship for Social Justice.
Like many of you, I am old enough to remember and remember vividly the events of the struggle against segregation and the terror of the Ku Klux Klan, though I was too young to have taken an active role.
When the bombing of the Birmingham Church happened in 1963, I was thirteen years old, so the four girls who died were about my age. I remember the deaths of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi, and I watched the films of the events at the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma and knew of the deaths preceding and following that march.
And just twelve days ago this nation inaugurated an African American as President.
Now I know that Barack Obama is of mixed race and identifies himself as such. And I believe in people defining their own identity and I see him as being mixed race. But in the history of this nation, those not identified as fully white were identified as Other. And I also know that in the future when children in school look in their history and social studies books at the pictures and names of the all of the Presidents of the United States, there is going to be a sudden obvious visual difference. And that difference makes a difference; it changes American history.
On election night my wife Genie and I watched the election results with differing responses. As the returns came in, she became more and more animated, jumping up and down on the couch and saying, “Isn’t this great Dave; isn’t this great!”
Me, I just sat in my seat, shaking my head, repeating over and over again, “I don’t believe it”. I was both elated and numb. I was feeling that way not because a particular candidate had won the election, or because a particular party had won, but because an
African American had been elected as President of the United States. The long roll of civil rights martyrs, those who suffered and died for freedom and equality had achieved something for America. Emmitt Till, Medgar Evers, Jimmie Lee Jackson, Unitarian Universalists Viola Liuzzo and Rev. James Reeb, and countless others many of whose name I do not and will never know challenged America to live up to her basic principles and beliefs and their sacrifice bore fruit with this election that brought change to our country. In recent weeks I have had a recurrent remembrance of the Christian claim that the blood of martyrs, soaked into the soil of the land, has the power to redeem a nation; on election night I felt redeemed, and felt that we as a nation had been redeemed. The people I have named did not live to see this day, but they gave their lives so that their children and grandchildren would. There is more to do, but change has come.
This election was a change event. But that is not the full picture. This could not have happened in 1968 or in 1988. Now, in 1968 I thought this could happen by 1988; but then, the whole world was changing with a new dawn rushing in. In 1968 I was convinced that we were going to end poverty, end war, end racism, cure cancer, fly to the moon and beyond: to Mars and the stars; and that we would do all of this by the year 2000. By 1988 I was more jaded, and I doubted that any of this—including the election of an African American as President—would happen in my lifetime. But it did happen in 2008. Part of the reason I kept saying “I don’t believe it” is that part of me did not believe that our nation was ready to do this. That part of my mind still had the view and perception of America as it was in 1968 and 1988 when this could not have happened.
That is to say, America had changed over the years. Something in the American psyche had shifted—just enough—and I had not seen it; I had not recognized it. And I know I was not alone in that. The tears of relief that flowed that night from the eyes of so many; Jesse Jackson standing mute in the crowd in Chicago, his eyes full of tears; a woman sitting on the floor of a church sobbing as her uncomprehending child looked on in puzzlement. Our children cannot know the weight of history that sometimes burdens us. They cannot know the suffering, the dashed hopes and deferred dreams of our lives, and that is a measure of our progress.
When I was seventeen years old I was at a youth conference at a Unitarian Universalist Church in Brooklyn. One of the other youth there asked me some variant of the question, “What are you going to be when you grow up?”. And I said, “A minister”. Now there is nothing particularly surprising about that since I am now nearly grown up and am a minister. But it surprised me because that was the first moment I knew that I was going to enter the ministry.
This must have been gestating within me for some time. Whether the question I was asked merely drew out from within me a decision that was already made, or alternatively, crystallized various strands that had been unconnected until that moment, I don’t know. But the question made clear to me what my life decision was.
The point is that something had changed within me, something had shifted, but I had not consciously been aware of it and so I was caught by surprise.
Now some folk, hearing this, might say to themselves, “Gee, this guy is pretty obtuse; he doesn’t notice much of anything, does he? Nothing within, nothing without”.
Well, I am not alone in that. William James, in his work The Varieties of Religious Experiences speaks of sudden conversions in which, as he describes it, after “subconscious incubation and maturing of motives deposited by the experiences of life…the results hatch out, or burst into flower”.
Change, of course, is a constant, and whether we are consciously aware of changes taking place within ourselves, in society, or in the universe, they are ongoing.
Back in December my mother was hospitalized with multiple problems. It was as if her body was simply shutting down. We were convinced we were losing her. She reports that one night a nurse came into her room, sat on her bed, took her hand and said, “You know, we haven’t given up on you. We believe you can get well. But we need for you to have hope, because hope helps a lot.”. Because of that conversation, my mother came to believe that she could get well, that she could have more life and happy life, and from that moment on she began to recover. She is now home from the hospital and doing well.
Did this happen? Did a nurse come into my mother’s room in the middle 0of the might and have this conversation with her? Probably. Nurses do that. On the other hand, could this have been my mother having a conversation with herself; could it have been my mother’s projection of her own inner thoughts? Perhaps. I have just recently re-read the Iliad and Odyssey and read the Aeneid for the first time. In these stories G0d and Goddesses bring messaged to people, but they often do so in disguise. They appear as someone you know and say, “You should do this” or “You can do that”. Could it have been a God or Goddess in disguise who sat on my mother’s bed that night. Could it have been an angel?
Not in my Humanist theology. But my Unitarian Universalism does not allow me to be dogmatic either way.
And of course, an angel is just a messenger. That is all the Greek word means, “Messenger”. When we bring good tidings of hope to anyone, we are angels.
That night, that nurse was an angel because she brought a word of hope, a word of possibility.
Some slogans for you:
Whatever happens is for the best.
All things are meant to be
When one door closes, another opens
God works in mysterious ways
God uses every evil to produce good
These are phrases are often spoken to people in pain; you may have heard them yourself; you may have said them yourself; I have said them on occasion. They have never felt right to me, especially when I am the one in pain; in fact, I kind of want to tell those people to go away. And yet…
Each is a statement that speaks to unseen change, unseen at least, by the individual. They speak to movement undetected that brings us to a new place in life or to a new place within ourselves. There is in the Christian tradition a faith in the movement of the spirit that is present even in the darkest of hours, a movement that is already transforming things.
That transformation may be happening in the world or in events, or it may be happening within us, or in our experience of events. You see, sometimes the change is not about physical health or financial health, but is instead about spiritual health, is instead about things like acceptance or about peace in the heart despite whatever is happening in our lives.
The universal metaphor is that there is at work within everything a hidden power that is moving towards transformation. Call it God or love, evolution or justice, it matters not; but believing in it gives hope and strength, and that matters much. Anyone can believe and know that wherever we are in life, whatever the sorrows or ills that fill our hearts, there are, both around and within us, things that are stirring, that are growing, and that will bring change. What is now only hoped for or only dimly seen will one day be reality if we continue to strive for it.
And so I can stand here before you this morning and say to those who face discrimination because of race or ethnic background or religion, “my brothers and sisters, your day too will come”. And I can say to those who face discrimination because they are women, or because they are gay, lesbian or bisexual, or because they are transgendered, “My sisters, my brothers, my siblings, your day too will come”.
It might not happen in our lifetime, we might not live to see it, but we can be part of bringing it into being; and if we strive to do so, it will happen in the lives of our children and our grandchildren. The day will come when they, with uncomprehending puzzlement, will hear that once this was a land where discrimination existed. And so the message in both our private and public sorrows is: never give up; hold on; keep striving--for it may well be that angels of mercy are already winging their way towards you bringing great news of freedom, of liberation, of hope, of comfort, of transformation. Somewhere within our lives, change, change unseen by us, has already come and merely waits to “hatch out, or burst into flower”.
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