by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

a sermon given on Sunday, Jan. 2, 2000

First Unitarian Church, Portland, OR

Welcome to the New Year! Every New Year brings the opportunity to reassess, to look at where we’ve been and where we’re going. Most of you probably have your New Year’s resolutions recorded by now. But this year is special, different—it is the beginning of a new century, a new millenium, and so we have quite a dramatic invitation to look ahead into the next century, and to make the future what we want it to be—not just our personal future, but the future of our society.

Well, you may say, I can make a resolution to lose 10 pounds—just as I resolved to do last year—or to learn Spanish or to meditate each morning at 6:00 AM—that seems at least sort of in the realm of my control. But let’s see—making sure everyone has medical care or closing the ozone layer—well, that’s quite a different thing. I have no control over that kind of thing.

But I am here today to say that you do. In fact, as I see it, you and only you—ordinary citizens like us—are the only ones who can do it. The first step is to imagine that our world could be different from the way it is—that is, take the radical step of just beginning to believe that things don’t have to be the way they have always been, that we can make other choices. Growing up, I simply accepted the world that I found myself in and said to myself, "Well, this is the way things are." I think most of us as children do that. But then as adults, we often continue in that mode: "Well, this is just the way things are." In my little Southern town, Blacks lived in unpainted shacks built on foundations of large rocks. There were no screens on the windows, only tar paper. Our Black maid, Christine, made $10.00 a week. I knew intuitively that something didn’t feel good about this arrangement, but who was I to say? The grown-ups made the rules. "That’s just the way things are."

But unbeknownst to me, at that very time, a young Black minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., was changing the rules. I didn’t find out about his revolution until the 60’s, when he was killed for saying that, no, things were not going to stay the same as they had always been. Whites in huge numbers began to listen, for the first time. The revolution is not complete, no, but we're on our way.

And how did this change happen? Because time and circumstance were ripe for it, and King and others gave the leadership it required. King was not the only one who gave his life, of course. There were the four little girls in Birmingham. And Medgar Evers. And a Unitarian Universalist minister named James Reeb. And others. People who were able to imagine a world where skin color would not determine worth, people who were willing to take the risk that things could be different, who put themselves on the line to make things different. Though some support came from Lyndon Johnson, the Civil Rights movement itself came from the bottom up, from the pain of people who decided to just say no. No, I will not give up my seat on the bus to that white man. No, I will not be refused service at the corner drug store. People imagined, people acted on their vision, and the world changed.

That is what I am asking of you this morning. Nothing less. I don’t know how you feel about the culture we live in, but simply said, I believe much of it to be sick. I believe it to be anti-life, in a most profound way. Let me explain.

We have technology that is moving so fast we can hardly keep up with it, everything from on-line shopping to gene splicing. Not that technology per se is bad—far from it: I don’t want to give up my computer and go back to carbon paper, that’s for sure. But we’re not asking the right questions about our technology. Right now, we’re asking only two questions: (l) Can we do it? and (2) Will it sell? So technology is proceeding more or less without an ethical or theological base. We need to ask questions like "Is this life-giving?" "Will this support our humanity, or degrade it?"

Technology is moving hand-in-hand, of course, with free market capitalism, an economic system that encourages unbridled growth. We’re being told that this kind of growth is a positive good. We hear statements like "We are enjoying the longest peacetime expansion in our history," as President Clinton said in his State of the Union address. But there’s a little problem with unbridled growth: the earth simply cannot sustain it. We are witnessing the destruction of life in massive, in some cases irretrievable ways, ways that no other generation has ever confronted, since the beginning of time: entire species are dying, rainforests are fast disappearing, global warming is already beginning. We know all this—have known it for years—but the warnings of our scientists are difficult to hear, because our economy depends on ever-increasing consumption.

We need a new yardstick to measure our so-called "growth," other than the commonly used GDP, or gross domestic product (formerly known as the GNP). One group of economists have suggested that the new measure should be called the GPI, or the Genuine Progress Indicator. You see, the GDP measures basically one thing: how much money is spent during a given year. But how this spending translates into human well-being—well, that’s another thing. The new measure, the GPI, adds a cost side to the growth ledger. For example, what is the cost to the environment for a certain product to be made? And it takes into account crucial pieces of the economy that don’t include a money exchange—the work of parents in the household, for instance. Now it’s interesting that the GDP and the GPI rose in tandem until the 1970’s, when the GPI began to turn downward. But people continued to spend money, so the GDP continued to climb, with every expenditure seen as a signal of well-being. By this reasoning the economic hero is a cancer patient going through an expensive divorce, whose car has just been totaled in a pile-up on the expressway. The economic bad guy would be the healthy person in a solid marriage who cooks at home and walks to work. The hero borrows and spends; the villain pays cash and saves for the kids’ college. Does this scheme somewhere lack logic?

Our brand of capitalism also has resulted in the worst kind of economic inequity. We are the least equal of any industrialized country today. Not since the late 19^th century robber barons have we seen anything approximating our poverty in the midst of plenty. Why is it that the Oregon Food Bank reports an increase of 17% in their requests this year, many of these coming from people who are working? Yes, the jobs are there, but the pay is too low to live on. Literally, many, many people who are working cannot pay for food and shelter.

Now whenever I talk about this disparity of resources, someone will come up to me after the service and set me right. The person usually begins, "I’m a fiscal conservative," and then basically goes on to tell me that I should stick to spirituality, because I just don’t understand how the economy works. My friends, all you have to do is walk out on that street, and there is prima facie evidence that our economy isn’t working for many, many people. When one woman has to go to bed hungry so that her children can eat and another woman goes into Saks Fifth Avenue and buys a purse for $350—on sale—something is wrong. When the children from one family get twenty toys each for Christmas and fill the living room with empty boxes and wrapping paper and bows on Christmas morning, and another family comes by the church—as one did just last week—and asks for just one gift for their little girl for Christmas, then something is wrong. No fancy economic theory can justify this situation.

And it is not just the poor who suffer. On some deep psychic level, we know that when we allow another to suffer, we also suffer. We have only one of two ways to go, in response to that deep knowing—we can repress it, or we can act. Most of us repress it most of the time, for it seems too overwhelming to confront. How can we face something this complicated, this much out of our control? I don’t want to hear anymore, we say. I don’t even want to read the newspaper anymore. And so we fall into apathy. Apathy comes from the Greek word apatheia, a word that means, literally, nonsuffering—the inability to experience pain.

That’s what repression does to us. It puts armor around our heart, so we won’t have to feel the pain. Trouble is, this deadening of self takes a huge toll on our energy, on our ability to feel love, to see the blue of the sky. The cost comes in our very capacity for joy. We try to escape suffering, only to suffer all the more. Many of us have noticed after traveling to foreign countries that the people there—though they have much less, materially speaking, than we have—they seem to have a depth of feeling and joy that eludes most Americans. We, who have more and bigger and better automobiles than any other people of the world, also indulge in this strange phenomenon called road rage. We speed through red lights and cross walks. Get out of my way, get out of my way! Where are we going? What are we running from?

As I said, we have a choice. We can repress our pain and submit to what is, in which case, as Ben Sable says, we will give our lives in the following way: CONSUME, OBEY, BE SILENT, DIE. How do you like that for a life scenario? A colorful character, Sable usually balances himself on a stack of caskets when he gives this message. We can live this way, or we can choose to feel and to act.

But before we act, we must speak to one another and listen, and we must imagine. We must gather in groups and speak with others about the pain of our own living, about the clutter in our lives, about the children we don’t understand, about the job that sucks the life out of us, about the days going by in a blur with nothing to show for them. If we allow our hearts to speak, we will discover very quickly that we are not alone. And in that knowledge comes the sense of community and caring that will support us on our journey to a better place. Our church is already beginning to form such groups in our work with MBBO (Metropolitan Broad-Based Organizing Project). You will hear more about this in coming days.

But it is not enough to speak of our pain. We must understand that our world is not irrevocably the way it is—our economic system, despite what some people believe—has not been divinely ordained. Human beings, real flesh and blood human beings, have made choices, and we can make different choices. What kind of society would you like to live in? How many hours would you work each day? What kind of consumer goods would you really need? How would the schools be different? What place would the automobile have in your new society? How would you divide the wealth? You could go on and on. Imagining.

I speak of imagination as being essential. I say this because the power of the human mind is both enormous and beautiful to behold. I believe that we can create a better way. And I speak the imagination of common folks like you and me, because I no longer believe that the solution to our social problems will come from the top down. I do not believe that our politicians will lead us to this new world—mainly because they are feeding at the trough of the rich. Who with any imagination, in fact, would go into national politics? Why do we have so few genuine leaders? The campaign finance system is corrupt and few can maintain their integrity in such a system.

So solutions are not likely to come from Washington. Nor will they come through a particular political ideology. I’m in fact frightened of people who believe that they have THE answer for all of the rest of us—because such thinking limits freedom and gives little room for the human imagination to work its magic. For over a hundred years now, we have oversimplified our economic choices—we have said, we can have either communism or capitalism. It seems pretty clear that capitalism has won out. But the excesses of capitalism have led us to terrible poverty, material poverty for many and spiritual poverty throughout the land. Can we not imagine a better way?

Our children know there is a better way—even at their tender age, they sense the spiritual vacuum. Here are some statements from children in response to the question, "What do you wish for our world?"

"From today on, even a crumb of bread musn’t be thrown away . . . ."

Maria Del Mar Casas, age 12, Spain

"I wish that every bomb, every shot, every death would be replaced by the smile of a child."

Daniela Eduarda de Magalhaes Carneiro, age 12, Portugal

"In my new world all must speak little, but speak the truth."

Vijay Vardhan, age unknown, India

"I wish that from the sounds of a violin came beautiful music, that would be heard all over the world and that all the hearts would be filled with love.

Lucas E. De Abreu, age 10, Brazil

Where would your imagination take you? I ask you this question because your consciousness, your vision, will determine the shape of your world, will determine even what you are able to see. I will share with you some of the shifts that I’m hoping for, and that I see signs of, already. A shift

--from expansion to balance

--from competition to co-operation

--from the worship of the machine to reverence for the earth

--from individuality to community

--from charity to justice

--from greed to moderation

--from knowledge to wisdom

--from narcissism and ego-centeredness to compassion for others

We need to ask different questions, which will lead us, of course, to different criteria for choice-making. In addition to asking, "Will it sell?" we might ask, "Will this product or service lead to wholeness for me and for the planet?" Instead of asking, "How much can I get?" we might ask, "How much do I need?"

And we need a different story, don’t we? Something other than CONSUME, OBEY, BE SILENT, DIE. What about a narrative that has an outline something like this: LIVE, LOVE, CREATE, AND LEAVE GIFTS FOR THOSE TO COME.

Well, how do we get there—to different questions, to a different story? First of all, we have to wake up to the pain. Not only do we need to read the paper, but we need to weep when we see what is there, what violence the world has come to. We need to mix with, to learn from, people who live on the edge: poor people, people of color, prostitutes, street people, transgendered people, people who make us feel uneasy because their lives are not like our own. We will learn what we must do only when we risk not knowing at all what to do. We have to "leave home," in a sense, leave our comfortable ways of being, to find ourselves and our calling. The Holy Spirit, you know, is not on the side of order and stability.

We need to develop a passionate discontent, an anger that picks us up and shakes us by the neck and will not let us go. Anger is a signal that transformation is called for. As ethicist Beverly Harrison has written, "Anger is a mode of connectedness to others and it is always a vivid form of caring. . . . . We need to recognize that where the evasion of feeling is widespread, anger does not go away or disappear. . . . it masks itself as boredom, ennui, low energy, or it expresses itself in . . . moralistic self-righteousness and blaming. . . . where feeling is evaded, there the power of love, the power to act, to deepen relation, atrophies and dies."

It is the pain, the felt discontent, you see, that leads to the passion for justice, that will rekindle the social imagination. But be wary of stopping there. For us to transform our society, change the ways we are organized, the ways we relate to one another, to do all this, we must be grounded in something larger than our own egos. Ego will always fail us, because it is self-referential. It always asks the question, "How will my importance be raised up? What will I get out of this?" The way of the Spirit is different, different from the grasping and manipulative ways we have learned. The Holy asks of us that we trust that our needs will be met, that we know that the state of the earth is more important than our own bank account or our own convenience, that sharing the bounty will lend us the only real joy. This is the way of the Holy.

The poet Rilke puts it like this, in a poem in which God speaks:

"You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you : beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life. . . . .

Give me your hand.

As Unitarian Universalists, we should be at the center of the conversation about this new world. Why? Because we have the character and the courage and the values for this task. We have leaders, wise and passionate people. There is only one thing that can stop us—ourselves. When we pull back from the sacred and act as if our faith were not central to our being. When we remain comfortable for too long, so that we cannot hear the cries of the forgotten. When we talk about justice and convince ourselves that talking is as good as acting. When we obsess about individual freedom and fail to bind ourselves together in community. We should be at the center. Increasingly, this church is—and I am proud of us for our strong witness in this community.

I guess the big question is, why do all this anyway? Why not just have another handful of potato chips and a beer and watch TV? We act because it is only in the act of resistance that we become clear, energized, truly alive. It is only when we stop being concerned with our own pain that we can free ourselves of pain.

We have only one time around, you know, in this life. Then we will have to reckon with what we have become. Listen to Martin Luther King, Jr., preaching about the day of reckoning:

"O there will be a day.

The question won’t be how many awards did you get in life.

Not that day.

It won’t be how popular were you in your social setting.

That won’t be the question that day.

The question that day will not be concerned whether you are a Ph.D. or a No.D.,

On that day the question will be "What did you do for others?"

Now, I can hear somebody saying,

"Lord, uh, I did a lot of things in life.

I did my job well . . . . Lord, I went to school and

studied hard. I accumulated a lot of money.

Lord, that’s what I did."

Seems as if I can hear the Lord of Light saying,

"But I was hungry, and you fed me not.

I was sick and you visited me not.

I was naked in the cold, and I was in prison

And you weren’t concerned about me,

so get out of my face!"

Much has been given us, and much is required. Let us love mercy and do justice. Let us care for the earth that is our home. Else what can we say to the children when they ask us about the world we have given them? What can we say to the children?

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Holy One, we ask for forgiveness. Forgive us for the hurt we have caused, forgive us for the good that we failed to do. As we move into this new year, this new century, this new millenium, give us imagination, give us passion, give us courage, that we might turn and face a new way, a way that leads to life, to hope, to honor. So be it. Amen.

BENEDICTION

My prayer for you is that you will be fully alive, fully given over to love in this New Year. Go in love and go in peace. Amen.

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning. Welcome to you in this New Year. May old hurts be forgotten, may new hope move within us in this time of new beginnings. Come let us worship together.

Copyright © 2000, by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.