This is the text of the sermon offered at the congregation I serve -- Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist -- on Sunday, February 21, 2016. It consists of three parts -- an introduction and conclusion that I delivered, and a middle section written by one of our lay Worship Weavers, Jeanine Braithwaite. As always, you can listen if you prefer.
Opening Words: "Those
of us who are alive in these times have a clear and evident mission. We have a
compelling moral purpose that can direct our lives and our energies: We are
about saving the world. So what is our part? The place is to begin at home-
that is, with ourselves. Notice what is life-denying and resist it. Live with
the moral authority that comes from compassion and non-violence. Form
communities of people who will sustain you in living as you wish to live,
whether they are study groups or alternative living arrangements or socially
responsible, sustainable businesses. Our congregations must be central
gathering places for such community."
Marilyn Sewell, "Reclaiming the
American Dream," in A People So Bold
Place names can provide interesting
glimpses into history. Some are pretty
obvious: Charlottesville, for instance,
was named after Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III. Others are a little more obscure. I can’t imagine how Boring, Oregon; Dismal, Tennessee;
Hell, Michigan; or Looneyville, Texas got their names. (I’m not sure I really want to know.) And then there are places like Hopedale,Massachusetts.
Hopedale got its name back in
the mid-19th century. The
famous Universalist, Rev. Adin Ballou (third cousin once removed of the even
more famous Hosea Ballou), his wife
Lucy, and two of their friends invested in 600 acres of land and created what
they called, “Fraternal Community Number One.”
Today we might call it an intentional community, or a commune. The Fraternal Community’s less formal name
was Hopedale, which means, roughly, hope in the valley, or the valley of hope.
Hopedale came into being
during a time when Utopian Communities were popping up all over the place. Places like Brook Farm, Fruitlands, New
Harmony, Oberlin, Oneida, Reunion, as well as a number of communities based on
the teachings of the French philosopher Charles Fourier. This is when the Shaker communities were
established, too.
And I mention all of this this
morning because this month we’ve been exploring what it might mean to think of
ourselves, we Unitarian Universalists, as “a people of desire.” This morning, specifically, we’re asking
ourselves what it means to be a people who “desire to build a better world.” So it’s worth noting that many of these
intentional, utopian communities were founded by Universalists, Unitarians, or
people who’d been influenced by the spirit of Transcendentalism – people who
believed that a better world was possible and set about building it. (I think it’s kind of funny, though, that some
of the rock star Transcendentalists like Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau were too invested
in the individual to join any community, however utopian.)
This impulse, this drive, this
desire to build a world that is more fair, more just, more economically and
ecologically sustainable, that is, simply put, better than the world we see
around us, is part of our genetic makeup as UUs. And it’s still alive today.
In 2008, for instance, a group of Unitarian
Universalist young adults began discussing the idea of creating an intentional
community, and in February of 2011 they moved into the house that is now called
the Lucy Stone Cooperative. A second
co-operative house, the Margeret Mosely Cooperative, is up and running as
well. These young adults are, as it was
put in article in UUWorld, “living
the values and traditions of Unitarian Universalism and focused on
sustainability, spiritual practice, and social change.”
Of course, many of us here are only a few
degrees of separation from Twin Oaks or its local sister communities Acorn and
Living Energy Farm. Several of us are
involved right now in one way or another with either Eco-village or Emerson Commons. This desire to build a better
world runs deep in our veins.
Not all of us are able to take part in
this kind of “building” project. Not all
of us would want to live in this kind of an intentional, cooperative
community. Yet all of us can be involved in making this world we
live in more like the world we would want
to live in. Jeanine signed up to weave
this morning because this topic of building a better world is near and dear her
heart – she has spent her professional career trying to make a difference. I think we should hear her story:
Our dream is a world free of poverty. These words appeared over the main entrance to the World Bank in Washington, DC in the early years of James Wolfensohn’s presidency of what insiders call “the Bank.” The Bank was chartered in 1944 as the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development, and was set up primarily to help Europe rebuild from World War II and only secondarily to assist countries to grow and develop. At that time, most developing countries were still colonies, but with the wave of independence for former colonies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, that development mission of the Bank became its major focus. Robert McNamara, president from 1968-1981, shaped the Bank to focus on poverty reduction, rather than investing primarily for economic returns. (Surprising many who protested him during his time as US Secretary of Defense in the early years of the Vietnamese war). I joined the Bank in 1994 and James Wolfensohn became President in 1995.
Wolfensohn was a charismatic leader who recommitted the organization to poverty reduction as its primary goal. The Soviet Union had collapsed in December 1991, and the Bank, along with other international organizations like the UN and the international Monetary Fund, had 15 new countries in the FSU—the former Soviet Union, six new countires from the former Yugoslavia, and a lot of work to integrate Eastern Europe and the FSU into the world economy. A Sovietologist and economist who had lived in Moscow in 1987-88, worked for the US Census Bureau on technical assistance after that during the end of the Gorbachev years when the USSR opened up, and written about the income distribution in the USSR, I joined the Bank to help the FSU join the world community of prosperous and democratic countries.
Margaret Mead famously said “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” In the Wolfensohn years, it was a heady experience to be part of a small group of Bank staff, trying to help the FSU and Eastern Europe to “transition.” Some countries succeeded at this while others did not. Russia is not a democracy now and never has been one, but changing the world is not that easy a thing to do even though I do believe deeply that it can be done, and I know it has been done.
The life of a World Bank staffer is not a commitment that everyone can or should make. The frequent international travel meant a lot of nights weeping in hotel rooms after talking to my children on the phone, causing me to reflect on trying to save the children of others while leaving my own behind. My older daughter Vivienne would tell me “I don’t like that Russian, I don’t like it when you speak that Russian” as she rightly associated hearing Russian on the phone meant another trip there. My younger daughter Kelly would cling to my leg as I tried to leave the house for the taxi waiting to take me to Dulles, begging me not to go. I would cry all the way to Dulles, then for another 16 or so hours on the plane or transiting airports.
But I kept getting on those planes, because I felt that I could both mother my children and help the children of others through setting up social programs to identify and help the poor. And the advent of video-chatting and finding the right partner who could be with our three children in our blended family while I traveled helped a great deal. I branched out to work on Latin America and then Africa in addition to the Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region.
I managed to team with others to do some great projects. I wrote a lot of good analyses of poverty and social protection in Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Hungary, Moldova, Kosovo, Swaziland, Botswana, South Africa. There’s a program in Turkey for the mothers of poor children to receive a small cash payment provided their kids stay in school and pre-schoolers go to health clinics. This means that 5 million children are living a better life there, and the original idea for this conditional cash transfer program came from me. But that spark would have gone nowhere without key people on the Turkish side, and required a huge number of Turks to implement as well as a small Bank tema.
Once Jim Wolfensohn left the Bank’s presidency in 2005, subsequent Presidents failed to follow his legacy. My own career stagnated along with the Bank, and the frenetic excitement of the early transition years faded as I worked on countries that had been poor since independence and were still poor. I was as committed as ever to the dream of a world free of poverty, but I did not like the direction the Bank was going. Its new slogan is now “end extreme poverty within a generation and boost shared prosperity.”
In 2009, the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy graduated its first class of master of public policy (MPP) students, and in August 2010, I resigned from the Bank and began teaching 80 percent time at “the University” as a commuter. And in August 2014, we moved and I transferred my membership from the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Rockville to TJMCUU.
After nearly 20 years, it was a big decision to leave my permanent staff position and a very tight community of people who intentionally did development work, but I realized that the best way that I personally could continue to fight poverty was to train the next generation of development workers, and that I did not always have to be the one to get up on the plane, that others (and particularly younger people) could and should.
Okay, I know some of you are saying,
“you’re just trying to make me feel guilty.”
I’m not. I’m really not. I know that most of us – “us,” me too –
aren’t the intentional community type.
And most of us haven’t had the kinds of opportunities Jeanine has had to
make a difference. So what about us?
I asked the Worship Weavers to brainstorm
and here’s a partial list of ideas:
- Attend a rally (or organize one);
- Raise your own awareness about important issues (and then help to raise other people’s);
- Vote (do you still need to register?)
- Run for office yourself (we’ve had several members over the years who served as Charlottesville’s Mayor, most recently Satyendra Huja);
- Support the work of the UUSC – the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee – by becoming a member (ask Edith Good if you don’t know how);
- Sign up to be a UU Chalice Lighter (a program that leverages small donations from UUs to generate large grants for congregations in need);
- Volunteer your time for a good cause (and you don’t even need to leave the church to do it! PACEM, IMPACT, the Soup Kitchen, the Food Pantry, the Meal Packets, the Book Bash in the Fall, the Giving Tree … I think you get the idea);
- Connect with people of other belief systems and cultures (it was really heartening to see how many of us accepted the invitation and experienced the warm welcome of the folks at the Islamic Society)
- Model in the congregation what we want the world to look like (healthy communication and assuming good intentions of one another are two good examples);
- Parents – raise the next generation to be better than this one.
Of course, there are as many possible ways
as there are people in the congregation!
More, even.
I know that lists like these can be
overwhelming – too many possibilities and too many causes vying for the too
little time and energy we have. I get
that. I was overwhelmed as I wrote it!
But Makenna Breading-Goodrich wasn’t
overwhelmed by all of the need around her.
She focused in on one thing. She
went door-to-door in her Phoenix neighborhood asking for coats, jackets, and
hoodies for homeless people. This past
December 12th she dropped off 1,000 of them at the Phoenix Rescue
Mission. Oh, I forgot to mention,
Makenna is in seventh grade.
12-year old Blare Gooch wanted to do
something after seeing a picture of a child crying on a news report about the
earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010.
He used the power of social media and soon was able to send 25,000 teddy
bears to the island, with another 22,000 that he gave to other non-profits. The next year he turned his sights on toys
and school supplies.
After Charlie Coons’ older brother
returned from volunteering in an orphanage in Jordon, she was moved by the
stories he told her of the conditions there.
She decided to make a fleece blanket to send them and asked some of her
friends to do it too. Soon the other
sixth graders in her school, as well as some other local volunteers, were able
to send off a package of 50 blankets.
She didn’t want to stop, so she founded HELP (Hope Encouragement Love
Peace), and that group has now sent over 700 blankets to orphanages in nine
countries. Did I mention that she was 11
when she started this?
10-year-old Tyler Page saw an episode of The Oprah Winfrey show about children in
Ghana being sold into slavery for as little as $20 US dollars. He and some friends put on a carwash and
raised enough money to save five children.
Tyler then asked his mom to help him, and the non-profit that he created
has since raised more than $50,000 toward rescuing more than 650 Ghanaian child
slaves.
Are you noticing a theme here? I had to eventually stop searching the
internet for stories because there are just so
many stories of young people who have not yet learned that “really, after
all, there’s only so much that one person can do,” or that “the world has so
many problems that anything I might do would just be a drop in the
bucket.” Both of these things are true,
of course. But these children didn’t
know that that was supposed to be the end of their plans.
There are two things I want all of us –
again, us – to notice in these
stories. First, as I just said these
kids didn’t worry about any of the things so many of us worry about. They just went ahead and did something. They did one
thing to try and make a difference.
So that’s a lesson. Just do something. Anything.
Just get started and do it.
And here’s the second thing – none of them
did these amazing things on their own. Yes.
4-year-old Alexandra Scott opened a
lemonade stand to raise money for doctors like the ones who were helping her
with the neuroblastoma she’d been battling since she was 1. But the $2,000 she raised wasn’t because her
lemonade was so good. It was because people
heard about what she was doing, and what they
did was to make a contribution to help her out.
Alex Scott died at the age of 8, but the effort she began is now Alex’s Lemonade
Stand Foundation and it has raised more than $1 million dollars for cancer
research.
She didn’t do it alone. Nobody
ever does it alone. Not really. And that means that you and I don’t have to
either. In fact, you and I don’t even
have to start anything ourselves; we can simply lend our support to those who
have. But in whatever way we can, we can be part of building the better world
we so deeply desire. And this desire is part of our Unitarian Universalist DNA; it's part of what it means for us to be "a people of desire." This is part of what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist.
Pax tecum,
RevWik
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