Sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
January 16, 2005
First Reading:
from the 139th Psalm
You
search me, 0 Eternal, you sound my depths.
Standing or sitting, you know me.
You read my inner life like a scroll.
Whether I am awake or asleep
you study me, an open book.
You surround me, enclose me,
enfold me and embrace me.
Such intimacy stuns me;
it is far, far beyond my comprehension.
Where indeed could I go to escape your breath
soft upon my neck?
Where could I flee your glance?
Shall I climb up into the sky?
Ah no, you are there before me.
Shall I burrow into the earth which shall
one day claim me?
No, for you are already there.
If I say “I will hide among the shadows,
and ask night to hide me in its dark, deep folds,”
the dark will not hide me,
for night and noon are as the same to you.
You search me and know the innermost sanctuary of my heart;
Testing me, you know my anxious thoughts.
Waiting for me to turn from my offensive ways
you lead me in the way of everlasting peace.
Oh, what mysteries! How vast it all is!
Look! I now awaken from these my reveries
and here you are again!
Second Reading:
from Dreams from My
Father by Barack Obama
I
work as a lawyer active in the social and political life of Chicago, a town
that’s accustomed to its racial wounds and prides itself on a certain lack of
sentiment. If I’ve been able to fight off cynicism, I nevertheless like to think
of myself as wise to the world, careful not to expect too much.
And
yet, what strikes me most when I think about the story of my family is a running
strain of innocence, an innocence that seems unimaginable, even by the measures
of childhood. My wife’s cousin, only six years old, has already lost such
innocence: A few weeks ago, he reported to his parents that some of his first
grade classmates had refused to play with him because of his dark, unblemished
skin. Obviously his parents, born and raised in Chicago and Gary, lost their own
innocence long ago, and although they aren’t bitter—the two of them being as
strong and proud and resourceful as any parents I know—one hears the pain in
their voices as they begin to have second thoughts about having moved out of the
city into a mostly white suburb, a move they made to protect their son from the
possibility of being caught in a gang shooting and the certainty of attending an
underfunded school.
They
know too much, we have all seen too much, to take my parents’ brief union—a
black man and a white woman, an African and an American—at face value. As a
result, some people have a hard time taking me at face value. When people who
don’t know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it’s usually a
discovery, for I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or
thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to
the whites), I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching
of my eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am. Privately, they
guess at my troubled heart, I suppose—the mixed blood, the divided soul, the
ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds. And if I were to
explain that no, the tragedy is not mine, or at least not mine alone, it is
yours, sons and daughters of Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island, it is yours,
children of Africa, it is the tragedy of both my wife’s six-year-old cousin and
his white first grade classmates. So that you need not guess at what troubles
me, it’s on the nightly news for all to see, and that if we could acknowledge at
least that much then the tragic cycle begins to break down.
Sermon:
Imagine,
if you grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, and you’ve just graduated from college,
where would you go to look for work? That’s what a number of residents of
Altgeld Gardens housing project in the South Side of Chicago wondered when a
skinny young man, Barack Obama, came to work among them as a political
organizer. His autobiography, Dreams from My Father, tells the story of
his bi-racial identity and his longing to make sense of the racial divide in our
country and the world.
Barack
Obama tells his story, as the son of a loving, devoted mother from rural Kansas
and an absent father from Kenya who left the family when Barack was two years
old. It quickly became all too clear to him how race played a role in many
people’s lives, whether it was how the police responded to a petty crime, the
difference of treatment from a coach or a teacher, or the self-defeating coil of
rage that many young black men felt was the only thing they could call their
own. In high school and college, Obama learned firsthand the lure of drugs and
alcohol, that everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection. He attended
Occidental College and then transferred to Columbia University. The vastness of
New York City overwhelmed him such that he followed a highly disciplined
lifestyle for the sake of survival. Upon graduation, he decided he’d be a
political organizer, working for change. He says he was operating mainly on
impulse, with romantic images of the civil rights movement bolstering his spirit
and resolve. And he had this idea that organizing would provide a promise of
redemption to a young man who longed to make peace with his bi-racial heritage
and the broken relationship with the father who had deserted him.
His
fellow graduates deemed his plans noble but foolish as did others who met him.
During the year that he sought out an organizing job, he worked for a
corporation, where he may have been the only black man in the company, a source
of shame for him but a source of pride for the majority of the secretaries,
black women who wanted the best for him. When he talked of his organizing plans,
he could see they were disappointed. Only the security guard in the lobby was
willing to come right out and tell the young man that he’d be making a big
mistake, given his potential, to squander his life on political organizing. And
yet, the young Obama was willing to head for an unfamiliar city, in one of the
most dangerous neighborhoods in the nation, for a meager pittance of a salary to
try to get people to stand up for the sake of the betterment of their community.
As a
young organizer on the South Side, brand new to Chicago, Obama learned how to
talk with people—and not simply talk about issues. He learned that he needed to
get to know people’s stories well beyond the immediacy of issues. He learned to
look beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and opinions and seek out
instead some central explanation of themselves. He listened for stories full of
terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. For
these, he discovered, are sacred stories. They are the stories, when touched and
brought forth, which provide the driving force among people for real change. But
until such stories are reached, there is little or no chance of moving people to
work together.
Martin Luther
King Jr., was a political organizer of a different sort. He became a great
orator, he preached the truth as he saw it. He spoke to the hearts and souls
of so many and longed for a better tomorrow, when the color of their skin
wouldn’t limit their opportunities, their treatment from others, their freedom.
I’m told that
King briefly considered becoming a Unitarian Universalist minister. His theology
certainly fit. Instead he continued in the Baptist tradition in which his father
and grandfather served, where he could serve a predominantly black church; for
he believed that he was called to minister to people who knew discrimination
firsthand, the pain of injustice, and the despair of not having full control
over one’s own life. Indeed, that was whom Jesus had ministered to in his own
life.
If Martin
Luther King Jr., were here preaching to Unitarian Universalists today, I believe
he would challenge us, such that we would be made highly uncomfortable. I
believe he would say things similar to what he told the Ebenezer Baptist Church
in Atlanta thirty-eight years ago. In his sermon, “Guidelines for a Constructive
Church”, he told his Atlanta congregation, (here with considerable passages and
phrases cut out):
For those of
us who must keep the church going and keep it alive, we have certain basic
guidelines to follow:
To preach good
news to the poor, to heal the broken-hearted… to set at liberty they who are
captives.
You see the church is not a social club.
The church is not an entertainment center.
The church has a purpose.
The church is dealing with ultimate concern.
Sunday after Sunday, week after week,
people come to church with broken hearts,
they need a word of hope.
The church [is called to heal] the broken-hearted.
Secondly, the
role of the church is to free people,
people who are slaves to prejudices,
slaves to fear.
The church is called to set free those who are captive,
to set free those that are victims of the slavery of segregation and
discrimination
and those caught up in the slavery of fear and prejudice.
The church
must preach the acceptable year of the Lord,
not some period beyond history,
the acceptable year can be this year.
The acceptable year can be any year when we decide to do right,
when we stop throwing away the precious lives that we have been given,
when we keep our theology abreast with our technology,
when we keep the ends for which we live abreast with the means by which we live,
when we keep our morality abreast with our mentality.
The acceptable year is the year when leaders sit down at the conference table
and realize that unless humankind puts an end to war,
war will put an end to humankind,
when we will allow justice to roll down like waters
and righteousness like a mighty stream,
when we send to Congress and to state houses of our nation
people who will do justly, love mercy,
and who will walk humbly..,
when we do unto others as we will have them do unto ourselves.
These are our guidelines and if we will only follow the guidelines,
we will be doing what the church is called to do.
We won’t be a little social club.
We won’t be a little entertainment center.
But we’ll be about the serious business
of bringing love and justice to this earth…
What does it take to realize
the dream of Martin Luther King Jr.? The more I
reflect on his vision, the more I believe his theology is at the heart of what
made him and those that walked with him so effective. Rarely do we hear of the
religion, the personal faith that bolstered King’s spirits through the difficult
times.
For Martin
Luther King Jr., the civil rights movement was an expression of God in history,
and yet the divine, for him, also gets expressed in the experience of ordinary
people. In his book, Strength to Love, he writes, “I
am convinced of the reality of a personal God. It is a living reality that has
been vindicated in the experiences of everyday life. God is a living God, with
feeling, will; responsive to the deepest yearnings of the human heart. (God is
the one who) is able to make a way out of no way, and transform dark yesterdays
into bright tomorrows. This is our hope for becoming better human beings. This
is our mandate for seeking to make a better world.”
What kind of
God was Martin Luther King, Jr. talking about? King’s understanding of God was
not simplistic nor traditional. In seminary, his thesis compared the theology of
Henry Nelson Weiman with that of Paul Tillich. Weiman became a Unitarian and
Tillich was a longstanding favorite among agnostics. For Weiman, God emerges
through creative interchange, that is, through the authentic relationships human
beings have with one another. For Tillich, God is a symbol for that which is our
ultimate concern. Many people wouldn’t call what they call God as God, but both
twentieth century theologians were clear, that we as human beings have the
capacity to participate in the divine, what they call the divine, bringing it
forth within in our lives. The paradox however, is that we participate in the
divine when we are vulnerable, beyond the lures of haste and ambition.
Two decades
before King graduated from Morehouse College, another divinity student came
through the college, but he dedicated himself to music rather than ministry.
Thomas Dorsey is known in gospel circles as ‘the father of gospel music’. After
a personal tragedy, he demonstrated a faith that was not unlike that of Martin
Luther King’s. He was in St Louis when he learned that his pregnant wife had
taken ill. He rushed back home to Chicago and found that she had died in
childbirth. Their son died two days later. Thomas Dorsey locked himself in his
music room for three days, refusing to take food or company. When he emerged, he
had penned what is perhaps his most famous composition, “Precious Lord, Take My
Hand.” This gospel tune is in our hymnal. Some Unitarian Universalists question
why a song with Lord language would be included. Others objected to the
depressing words, “I am tired. I am weak. I am worn.” And yet, is there any
other song that so beautifully seeks solace at a time of profound personal loss?
I grew up in a
Unitarian Universalist fellowship without a minister that, in the 70s and 80s,
spoke of God and prayer only in contempt and jest. The congregation was imbued
with an arrogance and prideful disdain of all who believed in God, not unlike
how many Unitarian congregations today have a tacit “litmus test” about the
politics of its members. It saddened me then that people with faith in God were
made to feel unwelcome in the congregation of my childhood just as I am saddened
now that thoughtful people in our midst whose conscience guides them to vote
Republican are made to feel unwelcome by the politically ideological statements
of vocal members that don’t provide room for authentic dialog but instead simply
assert that anyone who doesn’t agree with them must be morally or intellectually
inferior. It saddens me when people retreat onto a pedestal disdainfully looking
down on others for any reason, for they have isolated themselves. It is
spiritual strength that allows us to say I have known disappointment, I have
known struggle, I know what it’s like to be weak and wary.
Our faith
tradition too often avoids dwelling on, let alone admitting, that we as human
beings go through times of despair, brokenness, and weakness. Some Unitarian
Universalist members of my own family refuse to sing such songs that say things
like amazing grace, so sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me, as if wretch
is a word that connotes weakness, or unworthiness that could never apply to
them. But the African-American tradition finds redemption in acknowledging just
such things. Perhaps that’s why the 139th psalm provides profound
solace and is so beloved among countless people who struggle for justice and
must face disappointment after disappointment, failure after failure.
I know the
majority of this congregation is deeply disappointed about the presidential
election. This week’s inauguration is a time of despair for many. For those
among us who put hours upon hours into the presidential election only to see
your candidate lose, it is easy to become cynical or retreat from such activism.
If Martin Luther King Jr. were here, he would surely find a way to speak out of
inspiring hope.
King
attributed much of his inspiration, hope, and courage to the example his father
provided him as a hardworking man who trusted the goodness of God and never lost
sight of his own dignity despite countless challenges that came his way. King
was a Baptist minister with a liberal theology that provoked him to provoke
himself and others to stand up to injustice. I imagine many of us wish we had
such a father figure that provided the moral framework for a life of courage.
Barack Obama wished that he had such a father for a long time, especially as he
learned that his father suffered from prideful disdain of others as his life
turned toward poverty and loneliness.
His father had
so much going for him. So many people saw a self-confident, strong-willed,
bright human being who connected with all sorts of people. But the political
winds in Kenya pitted Barack Obama’s father against the prevailing government.
When he was blacklisted from government jobs, he retreated into his meager home
for a decade and died penniless and lonely. Barack Obama made peace with his
deceased father and their broken relationship only when he came to acknowledge
both the dreams of his father for making the world a better place for
dark-skinned people as well as the challenge of learning how to deal with
disappointment after disappointment.
Obama says he
derives inspiration for his work from the African-American churches that provide
people with their backs against the walls the strength of hope and the dignity
to ward off despair, even when hopelessness and failures abound. In his own
work, first as organizer and then as lawyer, Obama has experienced more failures
than successes, but that doesn’t deter him from plodding forward.
Barack Obama,
in the preface to his book, writes:
“I have seen the
desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children
on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives
of children on Chicago’s South Side, how narrow the path is for them between
humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and
despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder—alternating
as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its
proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison
sentences and more sophisticated military hardware—is inadequate to the task. I
know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms
us all.”
I entitled
this sermon “Realizing the Dream” with both Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack
Obama’s father in mind. Both had big dreams. Both were well-educated and had
great charisma. But one man went on to lead the civil rights movement while the
other deserted his family and ended up impoverished and lonely.
On this
weekend when we celebrate the vision of Martin Luther King Jr., I could simply
point out all the awful things that are going on in neighborhoods just blocks
away and exhort you all to strive to make a difference. But I don’t do this, in
large part, because I personally am overwhelmed by the social ills that come to
a huge metropolitan area, whether it is Chicago or Mexico City, where I just
spent two weeks with my wife’s family.
It is hard to fully comprehend, but huge cities have overwhelming social
problems. And I have returned from my time away feeling utterly puny in the face
of all the injustice, all the violence, all the crime, all the helplessness that
is a considerable part of both Chicago and Mexico City. I think to myself, is
there really anything I can do to alleviate the profound suffering and injustice
that characterizes these cities? I am tempted to retreat into cynicism, shake my
head, and turn away from all that I cannot save. But as a sensitive human being,
I cannot live with myself by doing so. On this weekend in particular, as we
celebrate a man who put his faith in a God that both walks with us and manifests
in organized social change, I am reminded of the faith to which I believe we are
called. I am reminded of the audacious hope that King and so many others hold on
to even in the face of disappointment and injustice. I am reminded that perhaps
I need to cultivate a deeper faith in that reality that provides a way out of no
way.
It doesn’t
matter what you believe about God, but it matters how you carry on in the face
of struggle and disappointment. It doesn’t matter what losses you have incurred
in your life. What matters is whether you can empathize with others who are in
the depths of grief. It doesn’t matter what personal resources you have, it
matters how you are using the resources you have.
Prideful
disdain and emotional isolation so often eat away at the hearts of otherwise
thoughtful Americans. We have reason to hold out hope for even the most cynical,
emotionally protected people. In the depths of struggle, there is a reality that
can make a way out of no way, just as Martin Luther King Jr. exemplified in his
life.
Look to the
stories of the people among you, the sacred stories that go beyond people’s
opinions about issues. Listen for what is truly important to them. Take notice
of your own life story, look to what haunts you and inspires you, that which
offers deep transformation turning you toward clarity and conviction.
May it be so. Blessed be.
Amen.
© Copyright 2005 Rev.
Alan Taylor, All Rights Reserved.
