by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We come together this morning

To pause,

To rest for a moment

On the forming edge of our lives,

To resist the headlong tumble

Into the next moment,

Let us claim for ourselves

Presence and gratitude and peace. 

Come, let us worship together!

It’s hard being a citizen in these days and times.  It’s hard turning on the radio in the morning and hearing about yet another beheading of a hostage, as I did this morning, and opening the paper and reading about the roadside bombs killing our young soldiers in Iraq.  It was hard to hear the news on Friday—the respected medical journal Lancet reported that since the beginning of the Iraq war, 100,000 lives have been lost.  One hundred thousand lives.  Most lost from aerial bombardment.  Each one a son or a daughter, each one cherished by a mother, a brother, a wife, a friend.  It’s hard just turning on the news and knowing that, yes, we as citizens are responsible for the policies of our government.  That’s one thing that our nemesis Bin Laden is right about.  In his current message to our country, he said, “It’s not Bush, it’s not Kerry, it’s the American people who must change the policies of the country.”  That hurts—because so many of us are trying so hard. 

Yes, it’s hard and sometimes it feels like futile and thankless work being a citizen.  But I’m here to tell you this morning that it’s anything but futile, anything but meaningless—it’s essential.  All noble causes, all progressive causes, started out as hopeless.  Always leaders of these causes, at the beginning, are laughed at.  But because it’s right—whether it’s abolition, or the right of women to vote, or the right of gays and lesbians to marry—because it’s right, at some point there is a turn, a tipping point in consciousness, and it comes about.  Our part is to simply keep doing what we know is right, for its own sake.  Not counting the cost.  Not depending upon the fruits of our work.  Doing what is right simply because it is right.  This is how we save our own souls, and this is why we were put on this earth—to grow spiritually, and to serve the greater good. 

In my sermon two weeks ago I talked about witnessing—I said that our very lives are the most powerful witnesses.  And we start there, at that same place, with citizenship—we start with living lives of integrity, because truly, as we have learned, the personal cannot be separated from the political.  When Alice Walker was a poor and relatively unknown writer, a major magazine asked her to do an autobiographical piece about growing up in the Deep South.  She wrote the piece, dredged it up out of the pain of her past, and then was asked by the editors to meet them at a fancy New York restaurant, where they insisted that she change the piece to make it more pleasant and sunny.  She resisted.  Finally one of the editors said, “Listen to us, Alice.  If you want us to publish your article, you have to make these changes.”  Walker needed the money, and even more she needed the exposure this major article would give her.  But she just gathered up her manuscript, and as she turned to leave, she said, “You listen to me.  All I have to do in life is save my soul.”

You see, for Alice Walker to abandon her truth would be to abandon not only herself, but to abandon her people—and really to abandon truth itself, and therefore to abandon all people, and to abandon her God.  This is spiritual death.  For her to write her truth is not just a personal endeavor—it is a witnessing that reaches into all of society, and it is the beginning of true citizenship: that is, being true to yourself, and truthful with others, about the experience of your own life.  That is the only place to begin.  There is no witnessing aside from this—good citizenship starts with personal integrity.

And then we go further, and we see the ignorance and confusion and pain and injustice around us, and we are led to ask ourselves, all this suffering—is all of this just personal circumstance?  Bad luck?  Or bad judgment, or worse than that wrongdoing, on the part of the sufferer?  Or is it possible that there are systems of oppression at work that are contributing to that suffering?  Is it possible that structures of authority are in place that favor the few and make use of the many?  Is it possible that the U.S. is not exactly a perfect meritocracy?  If we are growing spiritually, we cannot ignore the suffering of others.  We cannot say, as I have heard some say, well, there’s just nothing you can do for some people—people who live on the street—well, they want to be there.  You say so many people are hungry?  Children go hungry to school?  Well, our economic system works—some people are just going to fall through the cracks—there’s nothing you can do.  Nothing you can do?

If we are growing spiritually, we begin to see that we cannot separate ourselves from “those people”—those people who are suffering, and more and more their suffering begins to affect us—our minds, our hearts, our very bodies.  When they suffer, we suffer, for we begin to see that we are one.  We begin to understand that we must then be involved in what we call, sometimes in negative terms, politics—because politics determines everything from how much tax you pay and what kind of tax you pay to how often your dog is vaccinated.  Politics determines the quality of your drinking water, on the one hand, and also determines when your country goes to war.  Politics determines whether the money that you pay to your government goes to buy 5,000 hot lunches for poor children, or a single bomb of the thousands that have rained down on Iraq.

A week or so ago I heard an interview on Public Radio that was most disturbing to me.  The interviewer was going into the heartland and interviewing ordinary citizens in small towns, to see how they were feeling about the election coming up.  The interviewer asked a retired man in a town of around 1,800 in Nebraska, “Are there any problems in your town?”  “No, no, can’t say that there are.  No problems here,” he said.  And then the next question was, “Well, how do you feel about the war in Iraq?”  And he answered, “I don’t know much about that.  I don’t think much about that—it seems far away.  I just like to go out and play a lot of golf every day.”  His country is at war, and he has no opinion?  I can’t understand that.  Not interested in politics?  How could anyone not be interested in politics?  How could anyone not exercise the precious right to vote?  One really positive thing about this election is how many people are involved—how many new voters are being registered, how many people who are going to vote who might never have bothered.

Once we understand that we are our brother’s keeper, and that we are not just private persons, but citizens, then we take on those hard responsibilities.  Let me tell you the amazing story of one Portland man who did just that—he went from private pain to public conscience, from personal escape, to confrontation and reform.  His name is John Campbell. 

John was working as a top client services executive at a private market research firm when he decided to take some time off and consider his options for more meaningful work.  Spending more time at home, he began to discover that there was a drug house operating nearby in his neighborhood.  So like the good person he is, he began diligently talking to police, city officials, neighbors, and so forth.  He soon learned of four other drug houses in the neighborhood.  Everywhere he went, though, people said, “There’s really nothing we can do.”  There were always excuses.  “We need more evidence.”  Or “We have to change the laws in Salem.”  After months of trying and noisy disturbances from the drug-selling house across the street, John and his wife decided to move.  But immediately upon make that decision, he was hit with the realization that if he left the neighborhood, he was choosing an absolutely unacceptable reality, at least for him:  The country I live in, the greatest democracy and arguably the most powerful nation in the world, can’t solve this problem—can’t help the good people stay in their homes and make the bad people move. So he said to his wife, “Okay, we are still moving, but by God we have to fix this first.”  He did fix it, clearing the neighborhood of drug-dealers, through landlord-tenant laws.  He then parlayed the knowledge he had gained into his own training and consulting business helping police departments, public housing, citizen groups, and landlords create community-oriented, resident-driven solutions to public disorder and crime.  He now does this kind of consulting all over the nation.  When John was asked what pushed him to these changes in his life, he said he just could not stomach the idea of personally escaping the problem and leaving others to deal with it.  He said it is his way to think all the way through to the largest, most long-term ramifications of small personal decisions.  Yes, personal decisions like what kind of car you buy, what kind of food you eat.

We’re way past the point where we can say “my children, my house, my neighborhood…”  It’s not just people whose skin is the same color as my own, not just people who love the way I do, not just people in my social class.  We are not in this alone—we are part of the social fabric, and when one part of that fabric weakens, it can be torn asunder.

A story from another land, the story of Wangari Maathai, a native of Kenya, who was recently given the Nobel Peace Prize.  And for what?  Her activism started small, and again, started local: Maathai planted seven trees on Earth Day in 1977 to honor Kenyan women environmental leaders.  Then, realizing that the terrible deforestation that was going on in her country under the ruthless regime of President Daniel Moi, she began asking village women to plant trees.  Government foresters laughed at her idea—it took trained foresters to plant trees, they told her.  Because she didn’t listen, today Kenya has 30 million more trees, all planted by village women.  Maathai’s genius lies in recognizing the interrelation of local and global problems—her movement, the Green Belt Movement, as she called it, was good in itself, but these women also learned that they were not powerless in the face of autocratic husbands, village chiefs, and the corrupt President Moi.  The women began to control the supply of their own firewood, an enormous power shift for them.

When we begin to act, out of our own truth, in regard to what we know, even if it’s just one small deed—just planting a tree—our power grows, and then that power begins to feed on itself, and the next step and the next and the next appear.  “We don’t have to see the whole staircase,” said Martin Luther King, Jr.  “Just take the first step in faith.”

I don’t want to skirt around the fact that there is danger in being a change agent.  Campbell’s car was bombed twice, in front of his house.  Over the years, Maathai and members of the Green Belt movement have been jailed and even beaten for their protests.  King knew that he was courting death by following his call.  Being an activist is not safe, is not easy. 

This morning I want to share with you an affirmation that has meant a lot to me, for years, and it comes from the writing of Audre Lorde, the poet and non-fiction writer.  Now Audre Lorde was about four down—I say “four down” because she was (1) a woman, (2) African American, (3) a lesbian, (4) a political radical—so she was in a minority position in all those ways.  You might say in fact that she was down five, because she then contracted breast cancer, which she courageously fought for years before succumbing.  During her treatment, she wrote what she called The Cancer Journals, and I want to quote from that book this morning.  She wrote:  “I am learning to live beyond fear by living through it, and in the process learning to turn fury at my own limitations into some more creative energy.  . . . .   When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid.”  I have a postcard of Audre Lorde on my desk, her in a gorgeous purple robe, her hands in the air, her eyes shining, with this quotation underneath.  It gives me courage when I am afraid.

During these tense times, let’s not forget that humor is a great tool—it is a great tool for disarming evil, and it is a great way to keep us from taking ourselves too seriously and falling into prideful self-righteousness.  Some of you may have heard of the nonviolent uprising known as the Cha Cha Cha.  This took place in Northern Rhodesia, which would become Zambia.  The key element was non-cooperation with the colonial infrastructure.  After several months of this insurrection, the British chose a new administrator for the colony.  With a reputation as a strict disciplinarian, he was confident that he would soon whip those unruly natives into line.  But a native woman named Julia Chikamonenga organized a welcome party for this administrator at the Lusaka airport.  She enlisted the biggest women she could find and explained her plan.  When the new administrator stepped from his plane, he looked across a sea of huge Zambian women, all naked, singing songs of greeting.  When he finally got his mouth closed, he stepped back onto the plane and ordered the pilot to return him to London.  Within weeks Zambia was an independent nation.  Humor keeps us balanced, keeps our spirits light.  We have to take great care not to fall in cynicism and hate and demonizing of others—we have to watch what happens to us internally when we begin to fall into these negative ways of being.

There are certain qualities of character we need to remember to engage during these days ahead: these are modesty, balance, patience, and gentleness.  We need to seek a quiet calm at the center.  Above all, we must remember to keep our hearts open, for this is where true citizenship begins: this is the origin of compassion, presence, caring.  The open heart is what makes us truly vulnerable and paradoxically, at the same time, lends us courage.  The open heart is what enables us to stand in the midst of uncertainty with strength.  Know this, my people: know that we are in service to something larger than ourselves, and that the Power for Goodness working through all of time will ultimately prevail.  Be not afraid.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

God of all Time, God of all people, keep us steady at the core.  Release us from anxiety, and help us to know that in and through all that may come, let us stay present with our joy, our love of life, our faith that justice and compassion will one day prevail.  When fear threatens to close our hearts, help us to keep them open, that we might go forward with courage and devotion to the good.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

As you leave this place today, remember that many things can be shut down, but one thing that cannot be shut down is the power of the human heart.  Keep your heart open and supple and warm and generous in these trying times.

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Copyright 2004, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.