delivered on Memorial Day Sunday at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Marietta
Be sure to read the accompanying text below prior to the sermon
Three points in the calendar remind me of my religious minority status – Christmas because I am a Unitarian, Easter because I am a Universalist, and Memorial Day because I am a pacifist. These days are not without meaning to me, but their meaning is not the same. This is an occasion to honor our departed heroes, but the heroes that call to me are not those who perished in mortal combat, but those who gave their lives in moral struggle. Those who were able to see beyond the boundaries of their own individual lives into the desperate need of human beings, who surrendered their lives not to preserve freedom for a nation, but to sanctify or recover or sustain the life and dignity of all people.
I mean no disrespect for the soldier. Though I cannot embrace that course as right or just for myself, I believe that all people must make choices that they find right or just in their own lives. I honor those choices. I do not deny the benefits I have derived from sacrifices in war. But we’ll honor them tomorrow, on the holiday.
Today, I want to consider the wisdom in the words of the prophet martin Luther King, Jr: “I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”
That’s not really what we come to church to hear. Certainly not a UU church. Maybe it’s just me. I want to dial it down a few, to say, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Religion is, after all, first and foremost a spiritual matter. The truth is contained within us, right? I believe that. I believe that whatever God we find is found in compassionate relationship among persons, or in mystical practice, or in nature. Everyday saints, everyday revelation, everyday miracles. That’s religion. With Thich Nhat Hanh, I believe that we are here to awaken to the illusion of our separateness. We are one. So let’s just all love one another and be done with it.
The trouble is, if history tells us anything, it shows that love isn’t really what we know how to do, as human beings. At our best, we tolerate. We have even identified tolerance as a great virtue. We legislate tolerance, proclaim it on our bumper stickers and demand it in our schools. I stand before you today to say, if nothing else, to hell with tolerance. Tolerance is what we do in response to a noisy neighbor that we don’t want to get into a fight with. Tolerance is what we give other people’s unruly children. Tolerance is our response to commercials interrupting broadcast programming. It is our response to something that we really wish we could be rid of, but that we can live with because of benefits that come with it or the costs of confronting it. Tolerance is what I got as a radical panentheist at a Trinitarian Christian seminary. It’s what I get from my brother who includes me but always points out that I’m included even though I’m gay and Unitarian Universalist. It’s what I get from the government as a political protester. I’m glad I got tolerance, rather than intolerance. I assent to the sentiment of King when he acknowledged that “law can’t make men love me, but if can keep them from lynching me, I think that’s a good thing.”
But tolerance is not the virtue of those who offer it; it is merely their compromise with an unpleasant reality. It doesn’t bring any real peace; it is the marginally acceptable alternative to acceptance, the carefully negotiated transaction made by those who prefer order to peace, those who prefer the mirage of community to the creative tension necessary to create real community. It isn’t fooling anyone, either. All the government tells me when they don’t run me off the capitol steps is that I’m not worth the trouble. But tolerance is the best that the government can do. We can, and must, do better.
It will mean climbing out of the hole of social acceptability that we dug for ourselves, moving from tolerance to a position of full participation in human community. Yes, that means appreciating diversity, honoring rather than tolerating our religious and cultural variety. But it means more. We can speak freely about religious diversity – I’ve heard it said that UU church is the place you can say anything you want about God, as long as you don’t say the word. Many of us speak openly outside of UU circles, to friends and neighbors and coworkers about why we go to that strange church and what it means to us. At least, where such talk is socially acceptable. We may be not so good at talking about more sensitive matters. We have learned here that condemnation of others is “against our religion” – a worthwhile conviction, up to a point.
We have contracted a terminal case of euphemism, I think. We aren’t quite so willing to talk about the things that have real religious meaning in our lives. What about AIDS? No, not in Nigeria or Kenya, but on Scenic Highway or Peachtree St. What about poverty and malnutrition and lack of access to medical care, in our neighborhoods? If we think it’s not here, that’s only because we have decided not to talk about it and chosen, consciously or unconsciously, not to see it all around us. What about domestic violence, addiction, economic exploitation? It’s a good move, I think, that our concerns here are not around heaven and hell, sin and salvation. But what are our religious priorities and values? Because we don’t share a single theology and therefore won’t agree on what’s important or appropriate in religious expression, do we just push it all aside and content ourselves with smiles and coffee and after-church pot luck suppers?
Perhaps I am overstating the case. I am known to do that. However, this concern was heightened for me recently at a service that focused on the death penalty. The sermon, presented by a dear friend, was drawn around a fact sheet about the death penalty in history and current practice. Though he included some of the most horrifying evidence, the preacher omitted the observation that “at least five of the people sentenced to death in Georgia had lawyers who referred to them in court as niggers.”
I made acquaintance with one of these men during a visit to the prison in Jackson. He is on death row, awaiting resentencing. Court documents state that he received inadequate representation. That’s an awful thing, but it happens and it doesn’t quite ignite our outrage. But the horror of Wiley Dobbs’ case is not that his lawyer was incompetent or lazy, though that may be true. It is not that his lawyer was a member of the judge’s family or that he showed contempt for his own client, though those things are clearly true. It is that the attorney, the one person with the sacred duty to represent his interests and to preserve his life and dignity, saw his client not as a human being but as a nigger, and behaved accordingly. Can we say that word in church? I believe not that we can, but that we must say it –out loud. Dobbs was not simply subjected to a racial epithet. He wasn’t called “the N word.” That’s easier, the polite way to say it. It doesn’t offend. But it also does not speak the truth of the event.
When my friend Daniel last traveled to New York, as he did often on business, he visited a popular gay cruising spot where he met a man who subsequently killed him. The horror here is not that the killer struggled unsuccessfully with his own sexual issues, though that may be true. It is not that he found overt expression of homosexual attraction disturbing, or that he objected to the presence of homosexual activity in this culture dominated by strong preference for heterosexual interaction, though these things are certainly true. The horror here, the kernel of truth in the tragedy, is that the young stranger saw my friend Daniel not as a human being, but as a faggot. I’m here to say that we must speak these things out loud.
It is good that we believe decent people don’t use those words. It is worthwhile to legislate tolerance, to forbid our children to repeat such terrible epithets. But if that’s all we can do, banning speech only makes it more scandalous, more attractive to our children. Do not think we banish hate crimes by silencing the language of hate – “faggot” is spoken daily by children on the playground, and our objection to its use only increases its power as an insult. Until we talk about what these words mean, out loud, showing the pictures of Emmett Till and Matthew Shepherd and talking about why representing a black man as a cartoon monkey is beyond the pale, or why a word that literally refers to fuel for the fire is not an appropriate synonym for “gay male”, we only create a false peace, a tolerance that is inauthentic and ineffectual.
In our covenant, we pledge to affirm and promote these seven principles. As we keep our language clean and our behavior within the bounds of polite society, we can affirm. We can claim to believe these things, tell each other we believe in them, speak and write and sing about them. In real life, we practice tolerance. Keep the unpleasant stuff at arm’s length. There’s still that whole “promote” business. Tolerance won’t cut it there. If we promote justice, dignity, democracy, pluralism, the free and responsible search, we honor these things in our real lives. Sometimes honoring one thing means rejecting its opposite. If we are not willing to confront injustice, we can’t promote justice. If we say that we believe that everyone deserves a safe home and adequate nutrition, but we do not work to arrest the social, economic and political forces that create homelessness and hunger, we make hypocrisy of our religion. If we claim to be outraged by Georgia’s status as the child exploitation capital of the nation, but don’t even talk about at church let alone send word to our state representatives, our claims have no meaning. If we say that we find it intolerable that a prisoner should be executed by the state while there is possibility of innocence, but do not speak out even as death warrants are issued, we have lied.
UUA runs these great ads in Time magazine – I love those things, and quote them often. They invite people who might see things as we do to come into our midst. We know that such people are many. More than ever identify themselves as “spiritual but not religious”, saying they “believe in some kind of god” but can’t relate to the teachings of any particular church.
So why aren’t they beating down our doors as soon as they hear about us? Because people can’t believe what we say about ourselves. Our actions speak louder. Folks out there don’t want to know what we say we believe, what we say we think is important, what we say we are about. They want to know that we actually believe and stand for something, that we do what we say we are about. What people hunger for is not tolerance, but authentic human expression. Tolerance may be the best the government can do, but it’s not the best we can do.
I know this – I’ve seen better. In March of 1965, more than 1/5 of Unitarian and Universalist ministers – a higher percentage by far than any other religion – came to Selma to march. Two Unitarian Universalists, a minister and a lay woman, were martyred in Alabama during March of that year. Plaques and letters of appreciation from SCLC, CORE and similar bodies hang in churches all over this country. Today, they speak to me only of tragic irony. After deadly struggle, we have sunken into self-satisfied conformity. Bill Sinkford speaks out and shows up at protests, with a handful of other UU clergy and lay members. That seems now to be anomaly within our body, like the Catholic Workers Movement existing in, but not quite relevant to, the Catholic church. We want to take credit for the eloquent language and bold action, but not get too involved. Perhaps there is too much at stake. Perhaps our covenant says what we want to affirm and promote but aren’t quite ready. Maybe, the time just isn’t right, right now.
Can you actually imagine that if ½, even ¼ of people who find the death penalty inhumane or too flawed in its use, showed up at the capitol one day, that there would be no change? Is it possible that if even 1/5 of the people who find it unconscionable that people die of malnutrition and common, treatable diseases under bridges and on benches miles or blocks from where we are, addressed their elected representatives and media outlets, that there wouldn’t be some real energy and resources devoted to solutions? Do we suppose that if 1/10 of those who say that devastation of Iraq and killing of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of uncounted civilians by our government is unacceptable, showed up somewhere, that TV news would still be more concerned with the sex lives of rock stars and dieting habits of talk show hosts?
We know better. But as we embrace tolerance as the universal goal, we learn to tolerate poverty, violence, suffering of all sorts. We are so reluctant to reject anyone, that we have now will not even object to anything. God knows, we don’t want to come off as self-righteous. We know it is possible to be righteous without being self-righteous. We saw it in King, and in James Reeb, in Medgar Evers, in Viola Liuzzo. We see it still in those who are not martyred for the cause – in Joseph Lowery and the Dalai Lama and Bill Sinkford. We can be righteous without being self-righteous. However, we cannot be righteous – that is, we cannot be authentic and fully human and committed to the truth that we claim – without offending somebody.
And I think we had better get to it.
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