by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given December 2, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We come together this morning

To give thanks,

To make confession,

To offer forgiveness,

And to be strengthen in our living—

Come now, and let us worship together!

Perhaps you read the obituary yesterday—Evel (that’s spelled Evel) Knievel is dead.  Evel Knievel was a stunt man extraordinaire, famous in the 1960s for dressing in his star-spangled jumpsuit and jumping over—well, nearly everything.  When he was 27, he became the co-owner of a motorcycle shop.  To attract customers, he announced he would jump his motorcycle 40 feet over parked cars and a box of rattlesnakes and continue on past a mountain lion tethered at the other end.  (Never mind about animal rights.)  He did so, as promised, but fell short of his goal and came down on the rattlesnakes.  The audience was in awe, said the NY Times.  There was no report from the rattlesnakes.  He jumped over the fountains at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas in 1968, a stunt which put him in a coma for a month.  That could have been the end of his story—and his obituary should have been written in 1974, after he tried to jump 1,600 feet across Idaho’s Snake River Canyon and his parachute opened prematurely but no, he died last Friday, at age 69, of natural causes, having suffered almost 40 broken bones during the course of his career.  He was forced to retire in 1980, when he told reporters that he had become “nothing but scar tissue and surgical steel.”  Was Evel Knievel a man of courage?  He said of himself, “I’m a guy who is first of all a businessman.  I’m not a stunt man.  I’m not a daredevil.  I’m”—and he paused—“I’m an explorer.”

I find that statement very interesting.  There are all kinds of courage in this world.  There is sheer physical courage, like that of Evel Knievel—the courage to climb a difficult peak, perhaps a mountain no one else has climbed, or to ski on a challenging slope.  Perhaps this is a way of saying to death, hey, I know you’re there, and I’m not afraid, I’m going to meet you face to face.  You are living absolutely in the moment, absorbed with the challenge of just existing, and there is a kind of exhilaration that comes with these “extreme sports,” I am told.  “I’m an explorer,” Knievel said.  How far can I go?  What are the limits of the human body, the human spirit?

In preparing this sermon, I had to go no further than the door of my refrigerator, on which I put obituaries of people who have lived lives of courage, people who inspire me.  In fact, the working title of my sermon was “Dead People on My Fridge”—but then I thought that sounded too much like the title of a horror film, “Dead People in My Fridge,” so I changed the title to “They Have Given Me Courage.”  Well, who are the folks on my fridge?  I’ll tell you about some of them.

My # 1 is Elvis Presley.  Absolutely, Elvis had to be there.  I still have the now very faded obituary that came out in 1977 when Elvis died of an overdose.  Elvis had abused his body and his brain.  His closest relationships were in shambles much of the time, and in spite of his charisma and personal beauty and talent, Elvis often felt angry, inadequate, and profoundly depressed.  So, Marilyn, why have you chosen him, as you might ask, as one who gives you courage?  Because in spite of it all, he was his own person, and he went his own way.  Elvis was from working class roots—his father was a tenant farmer who spent some time in jail for writing a bad check.  He grew up listening to Southern church music, to blues, to Black gospel, and to country, and he put them all together—and he dared to move his body, catching the repressed sexuality of the 1950s, and giving us rock n’ roll.  He dared.  In one of his earliest appearances, he came out on stage and spit on the floor.  An onlooker later reported, “That’s when I knew that something different was about to happen.”  When asked by the recording studio that was considering making his first record, “Who do you sound like?” Elvis responded, “I don’t sound like nobody.”  And he didn’t.  And that’s why he gives me courage.  It’s not easy to “not sound like nobody” but yourself.  And I want to do that.

Another singer and really bad boy who is on my fridge is Johnny Cash.  His NY Times obit called him “the poet/songwriter of the working class.”  He knew what it meant to suffer poverty, to be rejected as a child.  He was an alcoholic, big time, and addicted to drugs for a while.  But he turned his life around, due to June Carter and Jesus.  He is the only singer I know who consistently sang in prisons, and his Folsom Prison album has to be one of the all-time great albums ever cut.  He was in constant pain in the last years of his life because of a botched surgery, and he refused to take pain killers because he was afraid that he would become addicted again.  He said the only time he was not aware of pain was when he was performing.  He’s one of my heroes.  He turned his pain into gain, and he loved the least of these, as the scripture admonishes us all to do.

Looking through my faded pages of obits, I see that of Philip Berrigan, who died in December of 2002.  He and his brother Daniel were priests who were on-the-edge war protestors during the Vietnam conflict.  Many Americans saw them as communists and traitors.  Young Philip became passionately involved in civil rights and anti-war activities after the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, and found himself frequently in trouble with his superiors and even with the law.  He served two prison terms for his anti-war activity.  While in prison, he prayed and he wrote.  “The Gospel the church preaches,” he said, “is a precise statement of the life it leads—a degenerate stew of behavioral psychology, affluent ethics and cultural mythology, seasoned by nationalist politics.”  He eventually fell in love with a nun and in a ceremony without witnesses the two declared themselves husband and wife.  They legalized their marriage in 1973, and the two were excommunicated.  In 2001, the premiere of a documentary about Berrigan was shown, but he couldn’t be there.  He was in Ohio, in prison, on charges of interference with a weapons system.  He was 77 years old at the time.  Philip Berrigan never stopped speaking truth to power.  He knew that there is a difference in what is legal and what is moral.  He kept going until he was all used up.  He is another of my heroes.

A woman who died almost a year ago today, whom I miss a lot, is Molly Ivins.  She was a Texas-based journalist, as most of you know, with an incisive satire that had no equal.  A couple of examples:  when Patrick Buchanan declared in 1992 at the Republican National Convention that America was engaged in a cultural war, she said that his speech “probably sounded better in the original German.”  When the Texas legislature was set to convene, she wrote: “Every village is about to lose its idiot.”  Molly grew up tall and big-boned and often felt out of place at the private schools she attended.  She wasn’t like the “other girls” and for sure wasn’t like Southern women of her generation, never hiding her feelings or her strength, or mincing her words.  She never married.  I mean, who would she have married?  I miss her feisty voice and her irreverence.  She just called it like she saw it.

The people I have mentioned thus far have the kind of courage that I might call “moral courage,” and that is in short supply.  They said yes to the uniqueness of their own voice, their own call.  They said no to convention, and they said no to authority, when necessary.  Others who live, in death, on my fridge, are people like the children’s TV personality Mr. Rogers, the film director Robert Altman, philosopher Richard Rorty, dancer Isadora Duncan, and the great minister/social justice advocate William Sloan Coffin.  Martin Luther King, Jr., isn’t on the fridge, but his vision of a just society, which he died for, is always before me. 

There are several pictures on my fridge of people who are not famous or even known to the public at all.  Nevertheless, these people and the memory of their deeds give me inspiration.  One is the iconic picture of Oklahoma City fire Captain Chris Fields carrying one-year-old Baylee Almon, gravely injured in the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City.  Baylee later died from her injuries.  This picture says it all, for me:  the strong fireman in all his bulky gear, carefully cradling the tiny child, hair matted, covered with ash, lying helpless in his big arms, with him looking in her face, that look saying, “Hang on, little one, hang on.” 

I’ve wondered at the tremendous power of this picture, which we’ve seen so often since it was taken that fateful day.  For me, it is the willingness of the strong to reach out for the weak, for someone to take the risk, for some person of courage to pull us out of whatever fire of pain and destruction we find ourselves in.  And it is a picture of maternal love, a modern-day Madonna picture, though the firefighter is male—the maternal life force that gives itself to protect and nurture the young.

Another rescue picture that I have on my fridge is dated May 24, 2003, and it is from the front page of the NY Times, showing little Emilie Kaide, age 2, being helped by several anonymous men from her flattened home in Corso, east of Algiers, following an earthquake.  Her eyes are bright, and she looks to be uninjured.  The caption on the picture tells us that the child’s cries for her mother, who was alive and well, led rescuers to the little girl two days after the earthquake killed more than 1,600.  They had despaired at finding anyone else alive.  OK, now think about it.  This little two-year-old was buried under rubble for two days, alone, and she kept crying out.  That’s the key.  She kept crying out.  What courage that must have taken, just to keep crying out, not to succumb to the darkness and the despair! 

Sometimes as individuals we have to cry out, have to ask for help, and that requires courage—and then we have to keep crying out as a people: for justice, for peace, for the dignity and worth of all people to be recognized—for people of all colors and ethnic groups, for those who love people of the opposite sex and for those who love people of the same sex, for the poor as well as the well-off.  We are not a quiet church, are we?  We do cry out.  And I hope we always will.

So what does it mean to live with courage?  Some people believe that people of courage are people who are not afraid.  No, in fact, it’s just the opposite: fear is an indispensable quality of courage.  Courage is not the absence of fear, but the capacity to act in spite of our fear.  I’ve been reading Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, a classic work that I somehow missed when it was first published back in 1973, and in this amazing book, he talks about the human need to repress our fears—fears of the chaos and fragility of life.  He says that when we choose to give up our illusions—our illusions that we are safe and in control—and sit with reality as it is, only then can we mature into the fully human—and he says “full humanness means full of fear and trembling, at least some of the waking day.”  So courage is not about being fearless.  It’s about being willing to rest in the uncertainty of our given lives, without reaching for protection from existence as it is. 

A while back a young man came to me, to discuss his call to ministry.  I felt it to be a genuine call, and him to have the qualities that ministry requires—which, incidentally, include humility and a deep questioning as to whether or not this is the right path.  It is not a path to be chosen lightly.  So as the conversation proceeded, he said that he was thinking about entering seminary, but that he was holding back.  “What is the problem?” I asked, thinking that he might be struggling financially or have family constraints.  And he said, “I’m afraid.”  And I said, “Well, we’re all afraid.  That’s no reason to not enter seminary.  I’m afraid every time I step into that pulpit to preach.  Fear is a given—but fear doesn’t keep us from doing what we know we want to do and need to do.”  (I belong to the kick-ass school of pastoral counseling.)

Some of you may have been to Florence, Italy, and seen Michelangelo’s magnificent statue of David.  I was privileged to see that statue, and I must have walked around David for an hour, looking at it from every angle.  Here is this man-child, full of humility, full of fear, going up against the mighty Goliath, with only a sling-shot—with only a sling-shot and faith.  Courage is about doing the right thing, even in the face of certain defeat.  Courage means standing up against something unjust or evil, even though it is not in your own best interest.  Courage comes, not from reason, but from profoundly felt Love, and that Love comes from a source beyond our selves and is beyond all reason.  Why else would someone be willing to rush into the fire—any kind of fire—and lose life or limb or reputation? 

We are moved to live lives of courage because we know that what we do matters to others—that just as courageous individuals have inspired us, our lives need to give courage to those who follow.  Our children—and I believe that all children are our children—our children need to see that we value virtue more than security, and that we know that love trumps fear every time.  Because we are all connected, in a multitude of ways—economically, emotionally, spiritually, even the physicists tell us, literally, physically connected—when we fail to live with integrity, we let down the whole community.  One reason that the sexual abuse tolerated by the hierarchy of Catholic Church is so serious is that all churches then are suspect, all ministers are suspect, God is even suspect. 

Our actions, for good or otherwise, spread like ripples from a stone thrown into the stream of our living, and we simply can’t afford to think that our deeds stop with our immediate circle or the people directly affected.  When we do act with courage, others follow.  I was moved to tears by the brave Burmese monks, some of them really only children, who went into the streets in protest a few months ago, and then watched while at first a few and then thousands of lay people joined them.  Yes, some monks were killed, and others beaten and jailed, but their actions will bear fruit.  It is only a matter of time. 

Life tests us in large and small ways, all the time.  Life asks us, “What are you made of?”  The easy thing to do is to look away and just go for a trip to the mall, or click on the TV set and open a bag of chips.  Or keep busy with this or that, to damp down the pain or the fear, to divert ourselves from the realities of life itself, and of our particular life.  But when we are able to say, yes, I’m afraid, and I’m going to move into that arena anyway, then courage changes us.  It stretches us, spiritually, and somehow we feel our stature increasing.  We become people of more candor, and we have little time for pretense.  And yet, a kindliness grows in us, because we know the power of fear and we understand how it can grasp any one of us.  In spite of circumstances, we become, miraculously, more emotionally available and more authentic, present in a richer way than we’ve ever been, and strangely confident, that confidence existing within the fear and shining through it. 

You see, fear challenges us, and courage asks us to be more than we have been.   When we dare to answer yes, Love takes us by the hand and shows us the way home.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we live with so much fear, so much of the time.  And yet we know that we are held by a Love that is more powerful than fear, even more powerful than death.  Let us be people of courage, then, living lives of faith, moving through and with our fears, becoming the people we were meant to become, both for our own sake and for the sake of those who follow.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

When fear comes knocking at your door, invite it in and say, “There is a place for you, yes, the world is a scary place.  Now let’s go do the work of Love.”  Go in love and go in peace.

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Copyright 2007, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.