by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!  And welcome to each one of you!

Come into this circle of love and justice.

Come into this community of mercy, holiness, and health.

Come and you shall know peace and joy.

Come now, and let us worship together.

It’s Homecoming Sunday, and I am acutely aware this morning of, well, home and all those thousands upon thousands of displaced persons who now have no home.  Hurricane Katrina has dealt us a blow that is more catastrophic than any natural disaster this country has ever known.  We don’t know, can’t even begin to know, how many dead will be gathered up before the gathering is done.  

It’s also a special day in another way—four short years ago, on September 11, terrorists brought down the World Trade Center, in a melt-down so horrible it will never be forgotten.  And so we gather this morning in our church home, acknowledging our grief and wondering where to turn for answers. 

I think this is a time for profound reflection, a teaching moment for our country, if there ever was one.  With the events of 9/11 four years ago, we had an “enemy” of sorts, an amorphous terrorist movement, on which we declared war—a war that has unfortunately brought us only more terrorists. 

Well, it’s clear we cannot blame an outside enemy for the destruction wrought in the path of Katrina.  “Act of God,” we say.  But when the levees broke in New Orleans, that was no act of God.  And when thousands of people who had no means to evacuate at the approach of the hurricane were left to face the fury of the wind and the flooding of the waters, that was no Act of God.  And when the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, just didn’t show up, this was not an Act of God.  People died from the winds and waters of Katrina, yes, but people died mainly because of government policy, because of government priority, and because of government ineptness.

I have so many mixed feelings just now.  Since I am from Louisiana and have lived and worked in New Orleans, and have walked the streets that are now under water, I have a very visceral feeling of sadness and grief.  I feel anger at the lack of response to the victims, horror at the level of violence—the rapes and the murders.  And I have often been inspired by the goodness coming from so many.  According to two paramedics who were eye witnesses, the real heroes of the hurricane relief effort were the working class of New Orleans.  The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled.  The engineers, who rigged, nurtured, and kept the generators running.  Nurses who took over the mechanical ventilators and spent many hours manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive.  Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, “stealing” boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to roof tops.  Food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of hungry people.  Most of these workers had lost their homes and many had not heard from members of their families, yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20% of New Orleans that was not under water. What an amazing generosity of spirit!

I’ve tried to piece together the causes, and they are multiple, of this great wave of death.   But for this analysis I want to start where we should start in any organization—at the top—in this case, with the President of the United States.

Let me lay out the situation for you as I have come to see it.  One of the main reasons that New Orleans was so vulnerable to hurricanes is the gradual disappearance of the wetlands on the Gulf Coast which once made a kind of natural buffer against storms coming in over the water.  The disappearance of these wetlands is the result of environmental misuse over the past century.  We cannot place that at the door of any one person or political party.  It is a fact, though, that the present administration repealed protective policies which Clinton put in place for those wetlands, ordering federal agencies to stop protecting as many as 20 million acres, and allowing developers to drain thousands of acres of wetlands. 

When President Bush finally arrived on the scene—some four days after the event—he made the incredible remark, “Well, no one expected the levees to break.”  Actually, pretty much everyone who knew anything at all about New Orleans knew that the levees might break—in fact, scientists and academics had been publishing articles for some years saying that such a disaster was inevitable.  In spite of this warning, in June this administration axed $71.2 million from the budget of the New Orleans Corp of Engineers, a 44 per cent reduction.  Bush has cut or refused to fund New Orleans flood control every year since 2001.

But why was there no evacuation plan?  There was talk of one, after Hurricane Ivan—in fact a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers computer simulation had calculated that 65,000 could die in the city in the event of a direct hit of a category 3 hurricane.  Now picture those sitting around the conference table, laying plans for evacuation for Katrina.  Someone—I don’t know who—brought up the maybe 100,000 people who probably couldn’t get out, had no way to evacuate—and a silence fell over the meeting.  Just a silence, and then they moved on.  There was no plan.  Not from the State of Louisiana, and not from FEMA.  Now why is that?  Could it have anything to do with the fact that these 100,000 people were overwhelmingly poor and Black? 

Let me tell you what New Orleans is like.  It’s the Big Easy.  It’s historic buildings, Jackson Square, the red of azaleas in the spring; it’s drinks called Hurricanes in tall glasses; it’s Preservation Hall and jazz funerals that start with mourning and end in celebration; it’s beignets and chicory coffee; it’s Mardi Gras and parades; and Catholicism and voodoo side by side; it’s gumbo and red beans and rice; it’s Gallatoire’s and Delmonico’s and dozens more of the best restaurants you’ll find in the U.S. 

But there’s another New Orleans that you rarely see or hear about.  It’s a city almost 70% African American, a city where the Black population and the police are intensely hostile and distrustful, a city expecting 300 murders this year, most all of them in overwhelmingly Black neighborhoods.  It’s a city that is no stranger to corruption—in recent months police officers have been accused of everything from rape (while still in uniform) to drug running.  The city has an illiteracy rate of 40%, and Louisiana ranks 48^th in the country for teacher salaries.  Many young Black men from New Orleans end up in Angola Prison, one of the worst in the nation, a former slave plantation, where over 90% of the inmates eventually die in prison.  That’s the underside that the tourists don’t see.

And so what happened to the more than 100,000 people trapped in the city—the impoverished, the elderly, the ill—with no car, no bus fare, no place to go anyway?  Back to FEMA and our policy from the top down.  Michael Brown, the Director of the Agency, found himself woefully underqualified and underprepared for the emergency he was called upon to address.  His former job was commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association.  Brown stunned several TV interviewers last week when he admitted that he did not know about the 20,000 people seeking shelter at the New Orleans convention center until Thursday, 24 hours after it was featured in news reports. 

Now you might ask, why was someone like Michael Brown at the helm of this organization that is so crucial to the survival of our citizens in times of emergency?  Could it have something to do with the fact that he had a 30-year friendship with Joe Allbaugh, who managed George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign and became Bush’s first FEMA director?   It is widely known that since George Bush came into office FEMA has been increasingly filled with novices and political appointees.  And the consequences?   Of the survivors, the weakest, the oldest, the least able were left dying from exposure and dehydration and hunger and lack of medical care for 5 long days, on roof tops, in boats, on docks, sweltering in the unbearable heat of a New Orleans summer.

What has happened raises serious moral and ethical questions, questions that must be addressed by any people who consider themselves religious.  Questions like, “Who is my neighbor?”  Questions like, “Do all people have worth and dignity—or just some people?”

I’m talking about the human cost of policies and priorities.  What is the chief function of government, anyway?  Is it not, at base, to protect its people?  We have put billions of dollars into a program called Homeland Security, and now we have seen how well that program operates when a real emergency arises.  We need to ask ourselves the question, “What makes a nation safe, anyway?”  Is the real danger we should fear terrorists—or is it  internal decay that leaves a crumbling infrastructure, a faltering education system starved for funds, and a huge and growing underclass who have no hope for any kind of a viable future for themselves or their children?

I have said that this is a great learning moment for our nation, and I say this because, you see, the hidden alleys, the housing projects stinking of urine, the forgotten places of squalor and poverty and despair have been washed out into the open, have been washed up into the shores of our lives.  What we have not wanted to look at, we have had to look at—it’s in living color, on CNN, hour after hour after hour.  These are people, not just statistics, not just “the poor,” but people with real wounds—wounds of body and even greater wounds of heart, because they must feel that they have been treated as if they were nothing more than the trash floating on the flood waters.

This learning that I speak of is not just about New Orleans, of course.  Some of us are likely to get into the mode of, “Well, those Southerners, what do you expect?”  Please, I ask you, don’t do that.  New Orleans has become a metaphor for every major city in this country.  Everywhere there is a Watts.  Everywhere there is a Tenderloin, a South Side (Chicago).  In every major urban area there is a section where white people don’t venture, where taxi drivers won’t go after dark, where even the police are afraid to go, except in pairs.  In every city there are pockets of hopelessness and despair.  Wake up, America!  This is your country!  New Orleans is your country, writ large. 

What are the implications for our government’s policies in housing, education, health care, etc.?  How long do you think the privileged among us can insulate ourselves from the growing desperation of those who have no hope for a better life, who have nothing to lose?  Right now we have more citizens in prison than any other civilized country in the world—that’s how we’re handling the problem.  How many more jails can we build in this country?  We’ve got to get our priorities straight.  One group that I know about is selling T-shirts as a fund raiser for Katrina victims, and the T-shirts read “Make Levees, Not War!”  Funny, but that says a lot—with $300 billion spent so far in Iraq, I wonder where the money is now coming from to aid victims of Katrina.  We may have to depend on Sri Lanka.

You hear some religious groups talking about people living in sin—we don’t much talk like that, because, well, Unitarian Universalists tend to be uncomfortable with sin—the word, if not the practice.  But you know countries can behave immorally, too, countries can be living in sin, and I think the United States has been doing just that for a long time.  Perhaps the roots of that sin came at the very beginning, when we took the land from the indigenous people and pretty nearly wiped them out.  Then we built the country on the backs of indentured servants and hugely on slaves and on Chinese immigrants here in the West.  These people of color were always expendable, were they not?  And I remember years ago when I was a child, singing in church there in Louisiana: “Red and yellow, black, and white, they are precious in His sight.”  Were they ever precious in our sight?

In what ways are we living in sin?  As a country, I mean.  The systemic sins of poverty and racism are right in our faces now, as I have mentioned.  But these domestic sins, so to speak, are not unrelated to our foreign policy.  “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods”—remember that one of the 10 Commandments we all learned as children?  We have coveted and taken by economic pressure or by force our neighbors’ (that is, other countries’) goods—their land and all that is good on it and all that is good beneath it, its minerals and water and oil.  It is the oil that has been the most expensive in human life so far.  Next will be water.  “Thou shalt not steal,” but greed has driven us, and wasteful living.  “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” and so many lies come at us from high places that we begin to feel that we can hardly trust anyone. 

Just as a person who’s going down the wrong path needs to repent, so does our country need to repent.  What would that mean?  What kind of country could we be if we decided that moral leadership was our first priority?  Or at least, a priority? 

Our leaders could begin by simply speaking the truth.  Politicians would have the courage of their convictions, and would care about re-election, yes, but would care even more about doing the right thing.  We would set out in earnest to solve the problems of poverty; and racism is poverty’s brother, so we would shine a light on that, as well.  We would care for those who need care—people who are ill, who have mental problems, who are disabled, who are old and alone, for we would know that the character of a country is determined not by how much opportunity it gives the strong to grab more for themselves, but rather how it cares for the most fragile of its citizens.  We would make sure that every child has food and clothing and a quality education.  We would have a standing army, yes, but it would actually be for defense, not for pre-emptive strikes.  Or it might be used to defend the weak and helpless when genocide occurs in foreign lands. We would lead the rest of the world in setting environmental standards to ensure that this planet will continue to support life for the generations to come.  We would say that the Kyoto Treaty is much too conservative and work for a treaty with even more teeth.  (It is thought by some, of course, that global warming has contributed to the severity of our storms.)  We would encourage small businesses to flourish, and we would begin to know the people we trade with and the products they sell, and they would be accountable to us because they know us and care about us.  Can we do all that, and have a thriving economy?  Some would say no.  I say, with some imagination and sacrifice, yes, I think we can. 

We will have precisely the kind of country that we allow.  The structures, the rules and regulations, the norms of any culture are choices made by human beings, and human beings can make other choices.  So what are we called to do, in these challenging times?

The place to begin is with each individual and each home, with each of you here today.  If you are living in sin, well, stop it.  Then let’s make our church a refuge for all who would join us in trying to live out of life-giving values.  Right now, we are somewhat stymied in this church, because we are not fully funded—we want to be open to new folks, and we have to be able to serve them when they show up.  We desperately need a third minister, and some other staff, as well.  And we need to go ahead and build Eliot Center, the new Education and Community Building that you’ll be hearing much more about quite soon.  We need to match our vision with our generosity.  I personally feel called to put more time into media projects, to get out message of liberal religion out there. 

Portland, you know, is a progressive community that leads the country in so many ways.  Innovation starts here, and then goes East.  Our church, our choices, our voice is important, not just here in the city but we are influential in the State and nationally as well, in the Unitarian Universalist movement.  We can be a force that counts.

From the vast wasteland that is now my beloved New Orleans, perhaps something new and strong and better can grow.  And perhaps as we take a hard look at who we are as a nation, at the underside we had hidden from our eyes, and as we begin to look around in anguish and say to one another, no, we can’t go on living this way in this country, perhaps the flood waters that took so much life, will wash also away the denial, will make way for a new day, a new direction.  I want us—all of us—you and you and you and you and me—all of us to be a part of setting that direction.  The times call for it.  May we heed that call.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we pray for strength and courage.  We know that the task before us is huge, and we become tired and discouraged.  We give way to our distractions, to our addictions, because the challenge seems too much at times, and sometimes grief and sadness overwhelms us.  But we know that together and in partnership with the Holy that change is possible, that a new day can come.  We give ourselves to Your careful keeping.  Show us the way.  Amen.