Resistance … Then and Now

This is the sermon I preached at the  Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist on Sunday, January 3rd, 2016.  It is not the sermon that had been advertised, nor the one I'd worked on with the lay worship weavers.  Instead, as I said in the introduction, "this sermon simply appeared unbidden.  But if you want to keep the Muses happy, you preach what they tell you."  As always, you can listen to it as well.

In 1963 the United States was in the midst of a cultural and moral crisis.   In one of our principle founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, our own Thomas Jefferson had written, “all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”  Today, not only would we change the gender specific language of the original, but we’ve found another way of saying essentially the same thing – people will resist change until the thing that needs changing hurts worse than the pain involved in making the change.  Because, after all, as each of us knows all too well from our own experiences, change is never easy and rarely entirely pleasant.

In 1963 the United States was in the midst of a cultural and moral crisis – African Americans had declared, in numbers and vehemence as never before as far as I know – that the system of racism being perpetrated was no longer sufferable.  African Americans were saying that they were no longer disposed to suffer this evil any longer, and they demanded that its form be abolished.  1963 was the year that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said that the time had come for our country to make good on the promissory note it had written when it had declared that “all men are created equal.”

It’s interesting -- the version of the Declaration that was ratified by Congress is not the one Jefferson had first written.  The biggest difference is a rather long condemnation in the original draft of the British slave trade, but I find an interesting change to the very first line, one which, if adopted, would have made the link between the Civil Rights movement and the vision of our founders even more resonant.  Instead of the, “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another …” that we’re familiar with, Jefferson had written, “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained …”  During the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s African Americans were declaring that it had become necessary to “advance from that subordination in which they had hitherto remained.”  The evil of racism was no longer sufferable and it was necessary that it be abolished.

As I said, in 1963 the United States was in the midst of a cultural and moral crisis.  In a very real sense a new American Revolution was underway and for our purposes this morning it provides us an entrée for looking at the idea, and the experience, of resistance.  That’s the theme we’ll be exploring this month – the question of what it means to be a people of resistance – and the Civil Rights movement demonstrates at least two different kinds of resistance.

First, perhaps most obviously, there were those who were rising up against, who were actively resisting, the systems of racist segregation – resisting both those institutions and individuals that passively profited by it as well as those that actively promoted it.  Then, of course, there were those who were resisting this resistance.

I keep coming back to 1963 because of two events that took place that year.  On September 15^th some people in Birmingham, Alabama decided to make a show of just how strong their resistance to this racial revolution was.  We’ve come to call this event the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing -- it destroyed a good part of the building, injured 22 people, and killed four little girls – girls who were about the ages my boys are today.  

As a response to this atrocity – which the Rev. Dr. King called, “one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity” – the called minister here, the Rev. Walter Royal Jones, draped the outside of the church in black crepe.  Roy Jones had been the head of the  UUA Commission on Race and Religion, so folks here should have known what they were getting, but maybe they thought that his having only been here for three months would have muted his more radical impulses.  But when he took it upon himself to make this public statement of solidarity, the Board quickly asked him to take it down.  

Although I imagine that few of us would ask him to do so today, we should not be too quick to judge them. No doubt there were some who were resisting his ministerial authority to take such an action on his own; and those who resisted putting the congregation into such an uncomfortable and perhaps even dangerous position; and those whose resistance grew from the notion that the Civil Rights movement was moving too fast; and, maybe, even those who resisted the idea that change was really necessary – one can be disposed to suffer evils for quite a long time when those evils are being committed against somebody else.

Jump to June of this year, when there was another act of violent resistance to the still overdue payment of our nation’s promissory note.  Much like the four men with the dynamite in Birmingham over 50 years ago, when Dylan Roof walked into the Emanuel African American Methodist Episcopal Church he was acting in resistance to the still ongoing efforts for the full recognition of African Americans as Americans -- hell, the full recognition of people of color as humans.  His action was part of a long line of violent resistance against any effort by Black Americans and their allies to strive to “advance from that subordination in which they have long hitherto remained.”  

In response to this atrocity I preached a sermon several of you told me was the sermon you’d waited four years to hear.  (See link below -- "From Not Again to Never Again.")  I also posted this Black Lives Matter sign behind me, and while I don’t want anyone to infer that I think of myself in Roy Jones’s league I’d simply note that this act, too, has met with considerable resistance and that I’ve also been asked to take down this very visual signal of commitment to the cause of racial justice.

Before addressing this resistance I want to tell you a brief story:

Many years ago, when I was a member of our congregation in Waltham, Massachusetts I was present on the Sunday when it’s Lead Minister – a friend and mentor – delivered a sermon on the need for comprehensive gun control in response to the proposed opening of a gun shop just a few blocks from the church’s building.  As he stepped into the pulpit to preach he took of his robe, saying that he was too upset, too angry, to step into that sacred space, that pulpit, as the Rev. Edwin Lane, M.Div. D.Min.  Instead, he wanted to be clear that it was just Ed who was talking to us.  It was a powerful moment.

I say this because I am not taking my robe off this morning, because I do not stand here now as just Wik.  Five years ago you called me to serve this congregation as its Lead Minister, to provide vision and direction and to preach and teach the truth as I understand it.  

This is the truth as I understand it:  we are, today, in the midst of a cultural and moral crisis the like of which we have not seen since the time of the Civil Rights struggles of the 50s and 60s.  The cancer that is racism has been eating away at our body politic since the first Africans dragged to this continent landed in Jamestown in 1619.  (One hundred years or so earlier if we remember the slave trade to Puerto Rico.)  And we – and I’m using that first person plural pronoun because I am a White American talking, now, primarily to other White Americans – we are seeing it with more heartbreaking clarity that many of us are used to.  And it makes us uncomfortable.  We don’t want to believe that things can be as bad as we are now increasingly unable to deny that they are.  We’d rather believe that we live in a world of colorblindness that is post-racial.  It hurts, having to face the reality that it is still important, still necessary, to affirm that Black lives matter.  It’s painful.  It’s deeply and profoundly disturbing.  

So we resist having to look at it.  That’s only natural.  After all, “all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”  And as I said earlier, it is far easier to be so disposed when the evils are directly affecting someone else and I remain relative … safe.  

Saying what I’m seeing, most of us – most White people in the U.S. today – are resisting acknowledging how truly evil the manifestations of racism are, and we resist the truth that until it is eradicated, until it is abolished completely and absolutely, we, ourselves, are suffering.  Many of us, maybe even most of us, resist the assertion that the reality we know is, in many ways, a fairy tale and is definitely and demonstrably not the reality of, soon, a majority of U.S. citizens.  And we so want to believe that if racism still exists it is in the thoughts and actions of a few mean spirited people that we resist acknowledging that the dangerous differences between White America and the America of people of color are systemic, built into the institutions and structures that support our entire society – education, employment, housing, food distribution, marketing, entertainment … even religion.

This resistance takes many forms, many of them completely unconscious.  And this morning, still robed, I say that one of the ways we do this is to insist on our “right” to a safe space of solace, away from the trials and troubles of the world.  One of the ways we do this – one of the ways we support and perpetuate the ongoing systems of racial injustice and oppression – is through our insistence that we are entitled to sanctuary.  You and I, we can close our eyes for an hour or so; I can choose when and where to confront racism and its devastating effects.  And because we can, we believe that it is our right to do so.  So we resist seeing that this freedom not to see is part of our White privilege, and our willingness to create sanctuaries in which to harbor ourselves in safe haven is part of the problem.

So … our question for the month is “What does it mean to be a people of resistance?”  Being a people of resistance means that our Unitarian Universalist faith demands of us that we resist the temptation to take advantage of our privilege (and again, I am using that first person plural pronoun intentionally).  Being a people of resistance means that we must resist the inclination to see problems like racism – that don’t usually affect us tremendously personally – as something “over there” happening to “those people.”  Even those of us who have Black family members and Black friends most often do not fully embrace racism as our problem.  But it must be our problem.  Thinking otherwise simply perpetuates the status quo even as we work to change it.

I do understand that not everyone will agree with what I’ve said here.  I know that some will continue to find the presence of this "garish" black and yellow sign on humble poster board to be an unnecessary and unwelcome reminder, in our sacred sanctuary, of the cruelty and unfairness of the country, the world, we live in.  I know that it is and will always be disturbing and distressful to many of you.  I know that there are some who will be angry as long as that sign stays up here, and I assume that there are those who will be upset enough to leave.  

I know these things, and so I remind you this morning that neither my ordination to the ministry nor your call and installation of me to the office I hold here makes the demand of me that I keep everyone happy and keep everyone here.  Quite the contrary.  “Preach the truth in love” is a command to say what I see in the world as kindly and caringly as I can, but not for a minute to falter from preaching that truth in order to keep the peace or for my own personal gain of your acceptance or appreciation. 

In fact, it’s often been said that the deepest calling of the professional ministry is to “comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.”  That is what I have been charged to do.  Our charge, as a people of resistance, is to recognize just how often we put ourselves in the wrong category.  This sign is an affliction to many here; I do understand that.  Yet know, too, that its presence here, in the sacred sanctuary and safe haven of a community that could choose to close its eyes and heart, is a great comfort, as well as a sign of hope, to many whom racism afflicts each and every minute of every day with no possibility of sanctuary or respite.  A friend said to me of our sign, “I just can’t overemphasize the power of that sign in a UU sanctuary….it means safety, warmth, love, commitment to hard uncomfortable work that must be done for us all to be free…..as a person of color, it makes the space a true sanctuary.”  

That is my message for this morning.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

If you'd like to read other sermons and blog posts I've written pertaining to racism, here are a few.  (You can also search for "racism" to find more)

• “From Not Again to Never Again” sermon following the shooting in Charleston, SC in which I announced my decision to hang the BlackLivesMatter sign.
•  “When Horrors Come Home,” sermon on the 50^th anniversary of the Birmingham bombings.
•  “To Wake or Not To Wake” post in response to Ta-Nahesi Coates’s book Between the World Me
• “In Memoriam; In Hope” post on the one-year anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO
• “We Should Refuse To Be Comforted,” words spoken at the interfaith prayer vigil following the Charleston shooting
• My post from a week or so ago in response to the lack of indictment in the case of the shooting of Tamir Rice.

When Horrors Come Home

This is the sermon I preached at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, Virginia on September 15th, 2013.  You can listen to the podcast to get the aural experience.

The Opening Words for the service were taken  an article in The Atlantic written by Andrew Cohen It is titled, “TheSpeech That Shocked Birmingham The Day AfterThe Bombings.”  We read the second paragraph of Cohen's introduction and then read nearly all of Charles Morgan, Jr.'s speech.  It is worth it to read the article in it's entirety -- Cohen does a masterful job of weaving Morgan's speech with his own contextualizing commentary.  A very powerful piece.

* * * * *

This isn’t going to be a particularly cheery sermon this morning.  I want to warn you in advance.  Not a lot of laugh lines in it; I know it’ll make some of us squirm.  It did me as I researched and wrote it.  Cried some, too.  Might still.  I just want you to be prepared.

Let’s say that it’s 9:00 in the morning.   People of all ages are coming in the Edgewood Lane door, but it’s largely families with kids.  And let’s say that it’s the morning of a youth-led service, so the energy is particularly high.  Parents are feeling proud; kids are excited.  It is, in short, a pretty ordinary morning.

And then an explosion rocks the building.  It’s like an earthquake, but bigger and louder.  The hall and the sanctuary almost immediately fill with smoke and dust.  All of the windows shatter.  That wall, right over there, collapses, and we can see that the Edgewood Lane door is gone.  So is part of the parlor.  And the steps outside.

We quickly learn that four of our children were killed in the blast.  Another lost one of her eyes.  Another twenty were injured.  In time we learn that one person – and as many as four people -- had planted up to fifteen sticks of dynamite in the bushes by those stairs.  They’d known that families used that entrance.  They’d wanted to kill our kids.

What would you do?  If that happened here, what would you do?  Where would you go?  Who would you be looking for in that chaos?  What would you be feeling?  What would you do?  What would you want to do in response?

Fifty years ago today that scene played out almost exactly at the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.  It was 10:22 in the morning.  It was a youth Sunday, and the children were coming up from their Sunday School classes preparing to lead the adult congregation in an exploration of the theme, “The Love That Forgives.”  Not all of the windows shattered – a stained glass window showing Jesus leading a group of children survived.  But it was damaged.  Jesus’ face had been blown out.

And four little girls lay dead.  This morning, in churches and other places of meeting all over this country their names are being read aloud:  Addie Mae Collins (age 14), Denise McNair (age 11), Carole Robertson (age 14), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14).  (Addie Mae Collins’ younger sister, Sarah, was the child who lost one of her eyes.)

This was not the first act of violence in Birmingham.  The city had earned for itself the nickname “Bombingham,” because of the number of times African American institutions had been bombed since World War I, and one neighborhood in particular --  made up almost exclusively of upper-middle class, African American homes -- had been dubbed, “Dynamite Hill.” 

Nor was this the first church to be bombed in Birmingham.  On Christmas in 1956, dynamite was placed where the Bethel Baptist Church and its parsonage connected.  The minister, the Rev. Frederick Lee Shuttlesworth, had his bed in that corner of his bedroom, and although the blast destroyed much of his home, he emerged unscathed.   When told by a policeman who’d responded to the scene, and who was also himself a Klansman, that he, Shuttelesworth, should leave town, the Reverend replied that he hadn’t been saved so that he could run.

A year latter, Shuttlesworth and his wife Ruby attempted to integrate the previously all-white public school system by enrolling their own children.  A mob of Klansmen attacked them.  The police never responded.   One of the men who attacked the Shuttlesworths was Bobby Frank Cherry, who six years later would place the dynamite under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church. The mob beat Shuttlesworth with chains and brass knuckles in the street, and somebody stabbed his wife . Shuttlesworth drove himself and Ruby to the hospital where he told his kids to always forgive.

The theme, 50 years ago today:  “The Love That Forgives.” 

The 16^th Street Baptist Church was the headquarters, if you will, of what came to be called the Birmingham Campaign, that spring and summer in 1963.  It was conveniently located across the street from Kelly Ingram Park, and made for an easy walk to downtown for nonviolent action.  Kelly Ingram Park, some will remember, is where Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor issued his infamous order to turn fire hoses on protestors – protestors who included young, elementary-aged children, and fire hoses that were set on a pressure that could strip bark from a tree and pull bricks out of their mortar.  The thousands of young people who participated in the so-called Children’s Crusade met up at the 16^th Street Baptist Church.

It was the Rev. Jim Bevel, who at the time was the Director of Direct Action and Director of Nonviolent Education for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who had had the brainstorm to actively involve young people in the campaign.  After the bombing at the church, and the deaths of Collins, McNair, Robertson, and Wesley, Bevel said that he thought the intent of the bombing was to say (and I’m paraphrasing here), “If you’re going to use your kids against us, we’ll use your kids against you.”  He’s gone on record as saying that he gave serious consideration to leaving the movement after the bombing – not because he’d been frightened off, or had become demoralized, but because he’d wanted to hunt down the people who were responsible and kill them himself.

If that happened here, what would you do?  What would you be feeling?  What would you want to do in response?

This week also saw the anniversary of another heinous terrorist attack – the attacks of September 11^th, 2001.  Nearly three thousand people died when madmen turned planes into bombs, bombs packed with human shrapnel.  And on Wednesday, those names were read.  Over the years I’ve read them myself from pulpits I’ve served – carefully recalling the name of each and every one.  It takes hours.

And one of the things that made those attacks so horrible was that they came quite literally out of the blue.  No one expected such a thing to happen, and that morning had been so beautiful.  I looked it up yesterday and it seems that it was lovely here that day; I know that it was one of those days that you could hardly help feeling good on where I was that morning in Maine; and my friends in New York have all said the same.  We were all feeling so good . . . until we weren’t.

And that’s I’m sure how the folks at the TennesseeValley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee were feeling on July 27, 2008, as they watched 25 of their kids performing the musical Annie, Jr.   That is, until a man who declared that he wanted to kill “liberals and Democrats” pulled a 12-gauge shotgun out of a guitar case and opened fire, killing two -- Greg McKendry and  Linda Kraeger – and wounding seven others.

And that’s how people’d been feeling a year earlier prior to the rampage in which a gunman killed 33 on the campus of Virginia Tech, and how it was in that movie theater in Aurora, Colorado just before 12 were killed and 70 injured. 

And less than six months later it was just an ordinary day-like-any-other day until 20 children, six teachers, and a gunman’s mother were killed in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.

What would you do if that happened here?  What would you want to do in response?

I told you I wasn’t going to be my usual ebullient self in this sermon.  How can I be?  History is littered with the rubble of far too many example of places that should have been safe havens being turned into slaughterhouses.  “If this could happen in a church,” they said in ’63, or a college campus, or a movie theater, or an elementary school for God’s sake, or in a street in the heart of New York City under a sky that was heartbreakingly blue . . .  If this could happen there . . .

What can any of us do?

Believe it or not, I have an answer.  I’m still Methodist and Presbyterian enough to think I know a few things, but don’t worry – I’m Unitarian Universalist enough to be clear that you don’t have to agree with me.  But here’s what I know.

We’ve also recently seen another anniversary.  September 5^th was the 5,774^th anniversary of the first Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and yesterday was the 5,774^th anniversary of the first Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  Every year over those millennia these High Holy Days have reminded the Jewish people that none of us lives a blameless life, that all of us are at least in some ways culpable for the sins of our own lives and those of the wider world around us.  And these Days of Awe, year after year, century after century, reinforce the idea that the only way to make a real difference in the way things are is to make a real difference in the way we are.

That’s what Charles Morgan, Jr. did with his speech on September 16^th, 1963, right?  That speech was an act of atonement.  That’s what, I think, our own Rev. Roy Jones was trying to do through his act of draping this church in black crepe in mourning fifty years ago.  That’s what I hope we’re ever learning better how to do in our Jefferson Legacies initiative as we strive to find ways to atone for the “sins of our fathers.”  That’s what I think each of us, and all of us, are called on to do . . . again and again and again . . . each time we are shown that the world has not yet become the Beloved Community we dream about.

The Russian writer and activist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in his book The Gulag Archipelago:

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Fifty years ago today four little girls were murdered by hatred and fear.  And each and every year, each and every day, each and every moment we have the opportunity to search our own lives, to acknowledge the ways in which we contribute to their continued ascendency in our world, and then to make the conscious choice to act, to act for love.

May it be so.

Pax tecum,

Rev Wik