by the Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given July 6, 2008

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

In preparation for the worship service today, I was exchanging emails this week with Joe O’Donnell, our organist, about the hymns we would be singing.  I suggested we sing American the Beautiful.  Joe send a thoughtful message back, that, in essence, asked, Do you think that’s a good idea?  There’s the original text… about God shedding his grace on thee.  Then there’s the part about brotherhood—without an easy way to also say something about sisterhood.  Joe’s message: could be problematic.  But I found myself wanting to sing that song.  Right now, at this time in our history, in seemed important.

This has been on my mind this week.  I think the disquiet was not so much about the words, but what it means to be patriotic.  I have to confess that for quite a few years now I don’t know quite what to do with the Fourth of July.  More often than not I’m ashamed of what we as a country are doing around the world.  I’m ashamed of how we use our power in the world.  Our folly is wreaking havoc and as a citizen I know that I share in the responsibility for all of this.

Too often these days patriotism gets boiled down to who is wearing their flag pin and who is not or who is most proud of their country.  We get caught up on symbols, even if they don’t say much at all about our patriotism.  I’m troubled criticism of our country suddenly becomes unpatriotic.  Sometimes love of country means acknowledging when we don’t live up to our ideals.

So it turns out that America the Beautiful was also written at a time where there were lots of questions about what America was about and how she was in the world.  The words were written by a woman named Katherine Lee Bates, a schoolteacher and poet.  In 1893 she was inspired by the 360-degree view from the top of Pikes Peak in Colorado.  She rode the train through the wheat fields of the Heartland.  But the song was not just about the beauty of the country.  She was concerned about where the country was going, and called us to crown our good with brotherhood and to confirm our soul in self-control, our liberty in law.  She asks God to mend our flaws and that success be nobleness, and every gain divine.  The words ask that self interest not come before the common good. She wrote during the Gilded Age, the days of the Robber Barrons and a growing divide between those with great wealth and those who lived in great poverty.  It was a time when the United States was pursuing an aggressive policy of expansionism, extending its political and economic influence across the country and around the world.[1]

Does that sound familiar?  Confirm our soul in self control.  Thy liberty in law.

So here we are, 232 years since the Declaration of Independence established our country. The ideals were—and are—revolutionary.  And yet in our time it seems we have fallen short.  In these times I so often don’t know what to do when I read the newspaper. So often I quickly get into that place of feeling powerless when I read about our folly around the world that results in so much violence and death and only seems to spark more violence and death.  So often it seems like those at the margins just keep getting pushed further and further to the margins, that nobody is looking out for them.  So often so many get put in the role of the other—immigrants, poor people, you name them—and they become the target for our collective fear and anger.

And so often it seems we have strayed so far from the ideas we are supposed to be upholding.  Just this week the New York Times ran an article revealing that the military trainers who came to Guantanamo Bay in 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.  Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training at the time.[2] But today it is our government who defends those techniques.  Now we’re the ones doing what the bad guys did.  Something is wrong with this picture.

These are the realities of our times.  As citizens, of course, we share in the responsibility. But it is easy to feel far away from that responsibility, isolated from others and from our country.  A natural response, I think, is to simply withdraw.  Denial is a normal response. In this process it is easy for us to see ourselves as autonomous and isolated.  We focus on our own needs.  When we talk about the role of government, we see it as something there to serve us.  We are the customers and we demand satisfaction.  It isn’t so much seen as what we will give but what we will take.

But we do have a responsibility.  We are stakeholders.  The country is not them but it is us.  That is a hard one for me to swallow sometimes.  I know it on one level.  I just don’t like to face it.  Part of the role of citizen is to call our country into account.  We need to witness to what we see.

Czech playwright and President Vaclav Havel once said: “There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth.”[3]

Finding our truth, understanding our truth, living our truth is the challenge that freedom presents to us.  Part of what patriotism asks of us is that we be clear about where we stand in the world and that we live with integrity and call on our government to live with integrity. That is a not an easy task, ever.  We struggle and we sometimes fail.  We don’t always say the right thing or do the right thing.  Sometimes we just feel overwhelmed. But I believe that as we witness to our beliefs in the long run we succeed.  We succeed when we get out of our comfort zones.  Truth is we need to be a lot more uncomfortable.

And sometimes we are handed opportunities.

Back in 2003, on Easter Sunday, I found myself in Indonesia, on the island of Java, at one of the great temples there.  Java is overwhelming Muslim and on this Sunday about a month after we had invaded Iraq, I was feeling anything but welcome.  In Yogjakarta it felt like I was one of about a half dozen Americans/Europeans in this city of several million people.  When I got there I felt like I was getting lots of dirty looks—I actually think some of that might have been my own fears—but also the fact that the most popular items seemed to t-shirts with Saddam Hussein’s face on them.  On top of this I was feeling sick about the war and feeling far, far away from home.

So it is Easter Sunday and I headed out at sunrise to a temple called Borobudur, an amazing 9th century temple.  It is a sprawling place.  You can go all over the place from one level to the next.  As I was walking around I was not talking with anyone, after a couple days in this place I found I wasn’t saying much.  I needed to be the quiet American.  And on top of that nobody was singing Lo the Earth Awakes Again like we do in church on Easter Sunday.  Here on this Sunday there were lots of school kids were there with their classmates.  They were looking around all over the place.  At some point I was asked to take a photograph.  This was good.  It was an excuse to pull out my camera as well.  The camera can break down barriers.  At some point a teacher approached me.  A class of Muslim school girls were there and they wanted the opportunity to speak English.  Would I sit down with them so that they could ask me questions?

With all the conflicts I was feeling, I was not reaching out but suddenly here was an invitation.  They asked me questions politely about where I lived and what I did.  After a while they asked a question about the war.  I was able to tell them that I didn’t agree with my president and most of the people I knew did not agree with the president.  I was able to tell them that what my country was doing made me angry and sad.  Their eyes grew wide.  I was also able to ask them about their lives and their country.  It was a gift on that Easter Sunday to be asked to tell a little bit about what it meant to be an American and to be received the way that I was.  Sometimes it doesn’t have to be as difficult as I might make it. 

No matter what the setting, we need to give voice to our anger and our sadness.  We need to give voice to our pride and our hope.  That is all part of freedom. That is all part of what our country is about.  It is all part of what is asked of us as citizens.  We can’t take all of that for granted, however.  If we’ve learned anything during this chapter in history I hope it is that we can’t take any of that for granted.

It is important to remember that we’re all in this together.  Forrest Church writes that back on July 4, 1776, immediately after the declaration of Independence was adopted, Congress entrusted Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams with the task of designing the Great Seal—finding a motto for the country.  Franklin toyed with the motto “Mind Your Business,” a double entendre evoking the spirits of American commerce and American individualism.  This was eventually rejected along with some other ideas.  In the final design there is an eagle holding both arrows and an olive branch but looking toward the olive branch, the sign of peace.  And with it a banner reading E pluribus unum, “out of many, one”, expressing what Church calls the essence of our nation’s creed.[4]

We are all in this together—that is important to remember—that unity must transcend our differences.  That we are more than just individuals.  Rabbi Hillel asked two thousand years ago, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I?”

Writer Sarah Vowell, in her book The Partly Cloudy Patriot, tells of living in New York in the weeks after Sept. 11.  She talks about how lonely it was to be an atheist in the context of an interfaith service that included Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Sikh, and Hindu clerics.  She said she was waiting in vain for someone to stand up and say that the only thing those of us who don’t believe in god have to believe in is other people and that New York City is the best place there ever was for a godless person to practice her moral code.

She writes: “The other day, in the subway at 5:30, I was crammed into my sweaty, crabby fellow citizens, and I kept whispering under my breath, “we the people, we the people” over the over again.  Reminding myself we’re all in this together and they had as much right—exactly as much right—as I to be in the muggy underground on the way to whatever they were on their way to.

“Once… I noticed a sign posted by the Metropolitan Transit Authority advising subway riders who might become ill in the train.  The sign asked that the suddenly infirm inform another passenger or get out at the next stop and approach the stationmaster.  Do not, repeat, do not pull the emergency brake, the sign said, as this will only delay aid.  Which was all very logical, but for the following proclamation at the bottom of the sign, something along the lines of “If you are sick, you will not be left alone.”  This strikes me as not only kind, not only comforting, but the very epitome of civilization, good government, i.e. the crux of the societal impulse.  Banding together, pooling our taxes, not just making trains, not just making trains that move underground with surprising efficiency at a fair price—but posting on said trains a notification of such surprising compassion and thoughtfulness, I found myself scanning the faces of my fellow passengers, hoping for fainting, obvious fevers, at the very least a sneeze so that I might offer a tissue.”[5]

Our country was founded on ideals that are not easy to live up to.  It is important for us as citizens to remember that we all fail sometimes, but we keep committing ourselves, nonetheless, to those ideals.  This is important to remember.  That is part of what love of country is about.  Calling ourselves to be of service to something greater.

Words of Tagore:

“I slept and dreamt
that life was joy.
I awoke and saw
that life was service.
I acted, and behold,
service was joy.”
 

Let us be ever mindful of the privilege we have, and ever mindful of the responsibility we have.  Ever mindful of our power.  Ever mindful of our hope.  As citizens, we are all works in progress.  As a country we are a work in progress.  Democracy, too, is a work in progress—never perfect, never completed.  But still, we live in hope about what it might become. 

PRAYER

Let us pray. Great spirit of life, bless us on this journey. On this day we pray for our country and her citizens. Help us to use our powers to heal and not to harm. Help us to be peacemakers. Grant us humility. May all people know health, may they know life, may they all know possibility. Help us, always, to build the common good and make our own days glad.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

Go forth into this summer day mindful of the power within you. Use your power well. Go in love and go in peace. Amen.

Copyright 2008, Rev. Thomas Disrud. All rights reserved.