by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

Good morning!

We come this day

To give thanks,

To make confession,

To remember who we are,

And to remember how we want to live.

Come now, and let us worship together!

So often we read stories in the newspaper about someone who has done something extraordinary—someone who has climbed an impossible peak of one kind or another, literal or figurative.  And we sigh, and we think to ourselves, “I could never do that.  I’m so—well, so . . . ordinary.”  The fact is that most people who do great things are not geniuses, are not any more gifted than many of the rest of us.  Do you know what the difference is?  I think the difference is that these people know that their lives do not belong to themselves, but belong to life itself.  That is the difference.  And all of us can qualify.

I was intrigued by these words of an East German dissident, Rudolf Bahro:  he said, “When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.”  Then I started thinking: this is who we are—we Unitarian Universalists are not afraid to be insecure.  We are out there on the edge—we are not afraid to search, to go deeper, to find the truth, even if the truth is unpalatable.  We are seekers who want to live out of that truth, not some kind of made-up world that might be more comfortable to live in.  Part of the reason that we can allow ourselves to be insecure is that we belong to a community called church that is strong and secure—secure in its mission, secure in its values. 

I would maintain that people who make a difference in this world are not without fear, but rather make a decision to act, in spite of their fears, and—this is the hardest part—to act with no assurance of success.  Like Moses, like Martin Luther King, Jr., or like Susan B. Anthony, we may not see the Promised Land—the promised land of peace and justice that we strive for—we do what is right, because it is right.  And systems of ethics evolve.  Consider the words of radical journalist I. F. Stone.  He said, “The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose—because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do, wins.”

When I read Stone’s words, I was reminded of my recent visit with three other people of the faith community to lobby Senator Gordon Smith concerning the war in Iraq.  We had specific questions about a timeline for getting out, concerns about the gargantuan budget for defense and Homeland Security, corruption in Iraq, etc.  We were coached by the lobbyist from Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon—he said, “Be specific about what you want, be polite and respectful.”  Smith’s aide here in Portland put us on a conference call with his aide in Washington. We introduced ourselves as people of faith and Smith’s aide revealed that his father was a Baptist minister and several of his relatives were ministers.  All very friendly.  But then he said to us, right off the bat, “Well, I’m willing to hear what you have to say, but Senator Smith has been very consistent in his position on the war in Iraq, and I don’t believe he will change his mind.”  Now I know I was supposed to be respectful, and I think I was, but I just had to comment, “Well, we know that lots of people are changing their minds about the war, daily they are changing their minds.  And as people of faith, we believe that anyone can be redeemed, including Senator Smith.”  I thought it was a little joke, but it ruffled his feathers.    

But now let me tell you about how this meeting got set up in the first place.  Curt Bell, one of our members, and several other people started an organization called People of Faith for Peace that has as its goal an on-going conversation about peace with our Senators and Representatives.  This is not a one-shot thing—this is a lobbying effort that will continue and continue and continue.  Even though we may think we’re not making any difference at all with our lobbying, with our marching, with our letters to the editor, we must be willing to fail over and over again until one day someone who believes as we believe succeeds, and peace becomes a way of life.  Curt Bell is a person who wants to make a difference—he is a scientist, not a public speaker, but he is learning, and he is amazingly effective.

Let me tell you about some other folks who’ve made a difference.  A historical figure—I’ve been reading about Abraham Lincoln recently: the book is called Lincoln’s Melancholy, and it’s by Joshua Shenk. Lincoln was a depressive personality—depression actually ran in his family, and so much of his problem was probably genetic. Besides being predisposed to depression, he was a sensitive man who endured tremendous losses.  He watched his mother die a painful death over a week’s time when he was nine, and his father was a cold, detached man who didn’t understand his son’s reflective nature and his need to study.  The one constant in young Abe’s life was his sister Sarah, and she died in childbirth.  He fell in love with a woman named Ann Rutledge, who died in a typhoid epidemic.  This death was the occasion of his first serious, full-blown depression.  One villager wrote that “Lincoln was locked up by his friends . . . to prevent derangement or suicide.”  Later on, he became despondent over his promising to marry one woman, then falling in love with another, but feeling he had to follow through on his promise to the first.  He doted on his children, and two of them died.  More than once Lincoln seriously considered suicide, because he suffered so terribly from this chronic depression. 

But then he came to a point of decision—he concluded that personal happiness was not fated to be his, it was not in his nature; but he decided that if he himself could not find contentment, perhaps he could use his life—his intellect, his energies—to do some good in the world.  And so he did.  This author Shenk makes a good case that Lincoln’s courageous endurance of his grief and suffering made him the wise and deeply compassionate man he became.  So this man who literally grew up in a log cabin, who was self-educated, who lost his mother, whose father never understood or approved of him, who lost his first love, who lost his beloved children—this man became the figure, in terms of his character, in terms of his stature, that no one else in American history can touch.

Another person who made a difference: I’ve also just finished reading the autobiography of Margaret Sanger.  Working as a nurse among the poor of New York City, Sanger was entreated by poor women, over and over again, “Please, Miss, tell me what should I do, not to have another baby right away?”  She was at a loss to answer this question, and when she asked doctors, they were of no help.

Then one incident pushed her over the line, gave her clarity about her life’s work.  She had been called to the home of a Mr. and Mrs. Sachs, as she refers to them.  When the husband, a truck driver with little income, came home, he had found their three young children crying and his wife unconscious from the effects of a self-induced abortion.  Sanger and the doctor worked hard to save the woman, and Jake, the husband was at hand, doing what he could.  Three weeks later, Sanger was preparing to leave the home after her final visit, and Mrs. Sachs said to her, “Another baby will finish me, I suppose?” 

Sanger told the doctor that Mrs. Sachs was terribly worried about having another baby.  The doctor was a kindly man who had heard this sort of thing so often that he just laughed and as he went out the door, he said, “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.  Tell Jake to sleep on the roof.”  Sanger looked at Mrs. Sachs and saw on her face a look of absolute despair.  “He can’t understand,” Mrs. Sachs said, “but you do, don’t you?  Please tell me the secret, and I’ll never breathe it to a soul.  Please!”

Sanger didn’t know what to tell her, but she promised to come back.  Night after night, the wistful image of Mrs. Sachs appeared before her, but she made all sorts of excuses to herself for not going back—she really felt helpless in the face of this woman’s need.  Then the telephone rang one evening three months later—it was Jake Sachs, and he was begging her to come, in an agitated voice.  She hurried into her uniform, grabbed her bag, and started out, dreading to enter that home again.  When she turned into the dingy doorway, she saw the three little children, and then she went to the bedside of their mother. Mrs. Sachs was in a coma and died within ten minutes.  Sanger folded her still hands across her breast, remembering how this woman had begged so humbly for the knowledge that was her right to have.  Mr. Sachs was pulling out his hair like an insane person and wailing, “My God! My God! My God!”  Sanger walked and walked and walked for hours through the hushed streets of New York.  The sun was just coming up, as she arrived at her home.  It was the dawn of a new day for her, too.  And now I want to quote from her autobiography—she ends this significant chapter saying, “I went to bed, knowing that no matter what it might cost, I was finished with palliatives and superficial cures; I was resolved to seek out the root of evil, to do something to change the destiny of mothers whose miseries were vast as the sky.”

Margaret Sanger, of course, began to do research about contraception, and eventually became the founder of Planned Parenthood International.  But it was a long, hard slog getting there.  She went all over the country with her message of contraception, and was thrown in jail eight times, once right here in Portland.  I want to tell you a little bit about that piece of history.  The year was 1916.  She writes, “My visit at Portland was delightful.”  She was invited by a church to address their congregation—I would like to think that was our church, but I don’t know.  She was invited to a lovely dinner.  But then when she began to distribute her pamphlet Family Limitation, she and others were arrested.  But listen to what happens next!  She writes, “I was tremendously gratified by seeing women for the first time come out openly with courage; <italics mine> over a hundred followed us through the streets to the jail asking, ‘Let us in too.  We also have broken the law.’”  You know, I would like to think that, again, some of the women in that group were from this church, and I just bet that they were.

There are so many examples—during the Civil Rights movement, the students of the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) decided to resume the Freedom Rides, over the objections of their mentors, the black ministers, who had been appalled at the violence of the Klan.  Student leader John Lewis, then only 21 and a Bible student at Nashville’s American Baptist Theological Seminary, asked the ministers:  “if not us, who?”  Then he added, “If not now, when?”  When the ministers refused to finance the purchase of bus tickets, the students borrowed the money from a numbers man in Nashville, and they brought the battle to the most difficult parts of the South.  They knew wherever they went, the media would go, and wherever the media went, the federal government would go, however reluctantly.  And people watched television and saw the violence of racism, and things began to change.  A few made a difference.

The Mothers of the Disappeared.  You have heard of the Disappeared—they were these women’s grown sons, taken away and murdered by the rightist military government of Argentina.  Ordinary, anonymous women—only 14 on that last day of April in 1977—they stood together in the most historic square of Buenos Aires, Argentina, stood next to the obelisk erected to celebrate their country’s freedom from Spanish colonialism.  The scarves they wore were the nappies that belonged to their children as babies, embroidered with the names of the disappeared.  By the last months of 1977, the movement had grown from 14 reluctant housewives to about 150 mothers, who were in touch with hundreds more.  On October 5 of that first year, they managed to place a half-page Mother’s Day ad in the newspaper, and followed that a few weeks later with a petition with 24,000 signatures.  News media and governments around the world began to take notice.  Fourteen ordinary women.  

We don’t have to think in terms of the grand and the heroic—in fact, that is a sure sign someone is on an ego trip.  We just need to get in touch with the best that is within us, and we need to pay attention to the quality of the community that is being built by our efforts.  There are people who are following this formula right here in this church community—more than a few.  I have already mentioned Curt Bell and his lobbying organization; there is Ann Pickar, who started a program of AIDS work in Africa; Carol Slegers and her work in Cuba; Dick Adams and his Zimbabwe Artists Project.  And there are others, too numerous to name, doing such good work, brave work, in this congregation. 

Right now the winter Olympic Games are on in Turin, Italy, and they are exciting to watch—in those contests, winning is everything.  Who is going to get the gold?  That’s the question.  But in the world of spirit, there is no such competition.  Everybody is invited to get the gold.  And what would that mean, spiritually?  It would mean simply to ally yourself with the good, to be of use.  To get out of that ego space of seeking personal happiness all the time and to go to a place where universal well-being is your deepest joy. 

Yes, it’s that easy.  And that difficult. 

You don’t have to win, you know, you don’t have to change the world.  You don’t have to prevail.  That’s really not in your control.  There are two promises, however, that that you can count on.  First of all, if you choose to give yourself away, you will be partnered in your endeavor, partnered by Something Unseen, but nevertheless as real as your own breath.  And second, I have to tell you that when people are willing to be used of the Spirit, amazing things happen.  The question is, are you ready to be amazed by your own power and beauty?  Are you ready for that measure of joy?

So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we feel so weak and vulnerable at times; at those times we hardly know how to care for ourselves, much less have energy for others.  Strengthen our spirits to be your people in the world.  Make us faithful.  Show us the path through the thicket of confusion and indecision.  Bring us to a place where we feel deep inside that we are doing what we were meant to do, being the person we were meant to be.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

You are not called to change the world, but you are called to witness and to act for the good, as you are able.  Go in love and go in peace.  Amen.