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Chalice Reflection & “A Different Way” – January 17, 2010

January 17th, 2010 No comments

Chalice Reflection
of
Martha Jackmauh

“A Different Way
We shall overcome some day!”
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
January 17, 2010 – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday

“I have a Dream” were the words that contained great insight that Dr. Martin Luther King frequently used to begin many of his speeches. His mind was enlightened because of his vast experiences and observations on many levels that brought him to speak out against human suffering. Many of the problems he addressed, of course, were those of racial and national conflicts.

He spoke of a Higher Consciousness whereby humans would be encouraged to face the reality that human suffering was caused by their lack of responsibility and awareness of their actions.

Reactive behavior and thoughtlessness are based on fear, pride, power, ego and greed…..all of which become an insatiable appetite and whereby people will do anything to anyone to maintain these horrific addictions.

Martin Luther King was an Evolutionary-Revolutionary…….one who was not afraid to speak his well-learned TRUTHS……and to pay the price.

We humans are part of nature and if you observe nature closely, you will see the same hostile behavior in order to protect their territories and species. This is reactive behavior for mere survival at the most fundamental levels.

Humans, of course, have these similar traits and when they ran out of resources, they would invade other territories and kill other humans. Then evolution proceeded from caves to the empire state building and wars have continued from stones to nuclear weapons. Because of these actions, the suffering goes on from generation to generation.

WHERE ARE WE NOW?
A DIFFERENT WAY!
WILL WE CHOSE TOTAL DESTRUCTION OR WAKE UP?

About twenty years ago I read the writings of an American Indian Chief, and he stated that the Afro-Americans would raise the consciousness of American Culture.

Thanks, in part, to Martin Luther King, we have an African-American Governor and President. “The times they are a changing.” After each of these elections, I had the privilege to take a bus to Cape Cod, walk around Hull and Boston and the African Americans I encountered would look deeply into my eyes….and I would look deeply back into their eyes and smile from my elated spirit……and…….likewise, their spirit shone back. A strong connection I did feel. I had never seen such peace and self-confidence radiate from them to such an extent before.

“WE SHALL OVERCOME SOME DAY”
“AND THE DAYS HAVE ARRIVED”

Fortunately, there are many groups of conscious people meeting together regarding the many levels of our human struggles and they are attempting to find ways to uplift all humans from the many places of deprivation and suffering, as well as the destruction of the planet.

Thank you to all the Evolutionary Revolutionaries……without weapons…..instead…..using their gifts of consciousness.

 

“A Different Way”

A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
January 17, 2010

Haiti is uppermost in the minds and hearts of us all—Haiti, the island nation to the south, its history so intimately linked with that of our own nation. This morning I invite us all to pray the prayer of Mother Theresa:

“May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.”

We usually don’t pray for a broken heart, but at this time when so many lives are broken, when an entire nation is rent asunder, how can our hearts not break? And if our hearts break, let’s hope that what fills that fault line is love, prayers of love, deeds of love, and the hard truths that only love will allow us to bear.

On this morning that we celebrate the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., just think. He couldn’t have done what he did if his heart hadn’t broken. He couldn’t have done what he did if the broken space of his heart hadn’t filled with love, including the hard truths that love called him to witness and preach.

Four days before King was murdered, he spoke at Washington, DC’s National Cathedral. His words span the decades:

“We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

Not so different from the words we sang just moments ago:

“Our world is one world: what touches one affects us all.”

In the 1960s, the tumultuous 60s, Dr. King decried racism, he led marches, he led sit-ins, he was arrested 30 times. In circles of power, he enjoyed all the popularity of an Old Testament prophet, a thorn in the side of the status quo. But his voice chafed even more so when he began speaking out against an unjust war, and when he linked racism and the unjust war of his day to economic disparity, and when he linked economic disparity to the scourge of poverty. Imagine how his words of that not so long ago Sunday landed in the laps of a probably not completely adoring congregation nestled into the pews of that great cathedral in our nation’s capital:

“We are challenged to rid our nation and the world of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, poverty spreads its nagging, prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world.”

No band-aids for Dr. King. Only abolition would do—abolition of racism, abolition of war, abolition of poverty. All are variations of violence. King sought a different way. His vision was peace and mutuality. His means were nonviolent resistance—not nonviolent passivity, but nonviolent resistance. His models were Jesus and Gandhi.

We can’t presume to know how Dr. King would have responded to what is happening in Haiti, but we can learn from his teachings and his life. Haiti is a cataclysm of nature; it is a catastrophe of economic disparity.

How is it that Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere but the second oldest republic in the Western Hemisphere? On December 5, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on the island and promptly called it La Isla Española (“the Spanish Island”). We commonly hear the term Hispaniola to refer to the entire island—what is now the Dominican Republic and the Republic of Haiti. Wave upon wave of colonial oppression followed, layered with wave upon wave of indigenous resistance. The French turned it into a slave colony; the slaves revolted, and on January 1, 1804, independence was declared, with Haiti as the name resurrected for this new republic, an indigenous name meaning “Land of Mountains.”

Unlike our own nation, slavery in Haiti was abolished as independence was proclaimed. Events in Haiti inspired abolitionists in this country while chafing the white privilege that has fueled our shameful history of slavery and racism. These realities, coupled with Haiti’s rich natural resources, positioned Haiti for long-term abuse by U.S. leadership, with only a few exceptions.

There are grounds humanitarian and historic for our nation to respond with generosity of spirit and resources to the crisis that is Haiti. This “Land of Mountains” that is home to 9 million neighbors is suffering fracture upon fracture. Economic disparity among nations is nowhere more acute than between Haiti and the United States. How this came about calls for all of us to do some heavy homework. In the meantime, we hear the cries of a people buried in rubble and crumpled in an infrastructure that gasps for breath.

We can act. From the core of our faith, we can act—and many of you already have—with an outpouring of generosity and justice. Within a day of the first horrific tremors, our Unitarian Universalist Association joined forces with our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, seasoned by decades of human rights work, including disaster responses to the events of 9/11, the Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the earthquake in Pakistan. As a justice organization, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee partners with grassroots organizations in the venue of the disaster. The intent is to reach the most marginalized and to complement the massive aid programs launched by larger emergency response organizations. I invite you to read the insert that you’ll find in your order of service to learn more about the UUSC approach.

Thanks to the leadership of our Outreach Committee and the full support of our Parish Committee president and your minister, our non-pledge offering this morning and next Sunday will be dedicated wholly to the UUSC/UUA Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund. Beginning in February and stretching through August, our 25% non-pledge plate offering will go to this fund.

In the spirit of Dr. King, our Unitarian Universalist Association and our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee offer a different way to give. There are many ways, and I honor each of them. There are many channels through which to do what we can to relieve the suffering, and I commend each of them. I am grateful that our president has committed at least $100 million to the Haitian relief effort. I am grateful that he has granted temporary protected status for 18 months to the estimated 100,000 Haitians who are in this country illegally and to the 30,000 Haitians who were facing deportation back to Haiti. I am heartened that so many in this nation and other nations of the world are reaching out with funds and expertise as the horrors of Haiti continue to unfold.

But I hearken back to the lessons of Dr. King. Crushing poverty, like the crush of the earth itself, is systemic and calls for a response of partnership over the long haul. It calls for generosity, yes. It calls also for us to learn about this island nation whose history and fate are so linked with our own. It calls for us to become informed advocates on behalf of practices and policies that will not just restore what was—and God knows in Haiti that was awful enough—but that will embody solidarity with the Haitian people.

Can we “let our hearts break so completely that the whole world falls in?” Can we fill those fractures with love that is just and lasting? As we ponder our gifts, I invite us to hear the words of my friend and colleague, Rev. Robbie Walsh.

Did you ever think there might be a fault line
passing underneath your living room:
A place in which your life is lived in meeting
and in separating, wondering
and telling, unaware that just beneath
you is the unseen seam of great plates
that strain through time? And that your life, already
spilling over the brim, could be invaded,
sent off in a new direction, turned
aside by forces you were warned about
but not prepared for? Shelves could be spilled out,
the level floor set at an angle in
some seconds’ shaking. You would have to take
your losses, do whatever must be done
next.

When the great plates slip
and the earth shivers and the flaw is seen
to lie in what you trusted most, look not
to more solidity, to weighty slabs
of concrete poured or strength of cantilevered
beam to save the fractured order. Trust
more the tensile strands of love that bend
and stretch to hold you in the web of life
that’s often torn but always healing. There’s
your strength. The shifting plates, the restive earth,
your room, your precious life, they all proceed
from love, the ground on which we walk together.

Amen.

 

Sources:

Vanessa Buschschluter, BBC News, Washington, “Troubled history: Haiti and US,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8460185.stm, January 16, 2010.

David James Duncan, “Let the Whole World Fall In,” Orion Magazine, July/August 2005.

“History of Haiti,” from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Haiti.

Naomi Klein, “Aristide in Exile,” The Nation, August 1, 2005.

“Our World Is One World,” Words and music: Cecily Taylor (1930 – ), in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 134.

Julia Preston, “Haitians Illegally in U.S. Given Protected Status,” Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, “Conditions remain critical in Haiti,” The New York Times, January 15, 2010.

http://www.uusc.org/content/conditions_remain_critical_haiti, January 15, 2010.

Robert R. Walsh, “Fault Line,” from Noisy Stones: A Meditation Manual, Skinner House Books, 1992.

Categories: Dr. Martin Luther King, Sermons Tags:

The Hopes and Fears of All the Years

January 18th, 2009 No comments
“The Hopes and Fears of All the Years”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
January 18, 2009

Just a month ago we would have been seasonally attuned to the strains of that 19th century Christmas carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Rev. Phillip Brooks, a Philadelphia minister, first authored the lyrics as a poem. He had recently visited Bethlehem and was inspired by the Christmas celebrations at the Church of the Nativity. Brooks later urged his church organist, Lewis Redner, to set his poem to music, and the lasting treasure of this carol came into being. It’s an enchanting carol and one that allows us to envision an enchanted village referenced by the Gospel writers Matthew and Luke in their accounts of the birth of the baby Jesus—in Brooks’ terms, “The everlasting Light.” The first verse concludes with the lyrical reference to what was long hoped for and at long last realized in Bethlehem: “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight.”

The ancient Jews had hoped for a Messiah who would deliver them from yet another oppressive force in a long history of oppression. This time it was the Roman occupation. It was in this milieu that Jesus was born, grew into manhood, taught, and was ultimately subjected to the horrific capital punishment so commonly decreed by the Roman Empire, crucifixion. The powers of Rome feared such a charismatic figure, who would bring to the oppressed a message of liberation. That message came in terms unexpected.

The Jesus deemed the Messiah didn’t arrive as a militant hero who would lead his people into a resistance in the tradition of the ancient Maccabees. He came with a force far more subtle and disarming, a liberation of heart and soul that would transform the hearts and souls and actions of women and men for millennia to come. The power of nonviolence was embodied in the brand of liberation brought by the babe of Bethlehem. Indeed, the hopes and fears of all the years were met in this tiny village, but in ways unexpected. Nonviolent resistance to the power of Rome wrought havoc with the images of what had been hoped for. The call of Jesus of Nazareth was not to take up arms, but to open hearts and minds. It was a Gospel of nonviolence, a Gospel of strategic love.

In the spirit of Jesus, but through a distinctly different window of faith, the person of Mahatma Gandhi brought liberation to an occupied India. It was a liberation just as hoped for and just as unanticipated. Through a decades-long strategy of non-violent non-cooperation, 1900 years after Jesus, Gandhi inspired his fellow countrymen to outwit and undermine the stranglehold of the British Empire. His strategy? Nonviolent resistance. It was savvy, intentional, and effective. Five months before Gandhi’s life came to an end, India won its independence from Great Britain. In January of 1950 the Republic of India was proclaimed. It will be 140 years ago this coming October that “the hopes and fears” of so many years for the people of India were met in Pobandar, a city on the shores of the Arabian Sea in western India, the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi.

Eleven years after Gandhi’s death, a rookie Baptist minister from the United States would visit Gandhi’s family in India. Martin Luther King, Jr. aspired to liberation in circumstances quite different from those faced by Gandhi or Jesus. Rather than an imperialist occupation, King strained at the shackles of Jim Crow racism in a nation whose early economy rested on the sin of slavery, the practice of buying and selling human beings as property. It is the fault line on which the economy of this nation was built—a tenuous foundation for any society. King’s ancestors were slaves. King and everyone who bore Negroid features carried the legacy of slavery in the brutal realities that marked Jim Crow America. It was a racism that was overt, and not just in the South. Many of the practices that the powers of this nation denied or ignored or both were as barbaric as those of the Roman Empire in Jesus’ day.

King’s meeting with Gandhi’s family was transformative for this 30-year-old Baptist minister from Atlanta. Through them he became intimately acquainted with the tactics of non-violent resistance used so effectively so recently however disparate the political context. He became intimately acquainted with the quality of leadership it had taken for Gandhi to convince his countrymen to adopt such tactics. To follow in the footsteps of Gandhi for the oppressed of India had been no easier than to follow in the footsteps of Jesus for the oppressed of Palestine.

Gandhi, along with the African American Bayard Rustin, served as core influences on this high energy young man with a mission. I find it not coincidental that we so seldom hear about Rustin’s influence, since Bayard Rustin was gay and on the far fringes of the political left. He was also a strong advocate and practitioner of non-violence, and King heeded his savvy counsel. Rustin, after all, bore the burdens of at least two counts of oppression.

King, armed with the legacy of a strong family, a deep faith, a doctorate from Boston University, and a passion for equal rights, became the lodestar of this recent chapter of the Civil Rights movement in these more or less United States. To follow in the footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to go to Selma, to march to Montgomery, to picket and boycott and resist nonviolently forces that had the imprimatur of “legal” was no easier than to follow in the footsteps of Gandhi for the oppressed of India or the footsteps of Jesus for the oppressed of Palestine.

As a white person, it is not for me to say what African Americans hoped for during the years of slavery and Reconstruction and Jim Crow, or for that matter, what my fellow Americans who are African American hope for now. I can only speak for myself as a woman who has known oppression as such that there is a seductive inclination to want someone else—some towering giant of a savior or Messiah—to do the job for me. Then I can follow along behind as the accolades are sung and the flowers strung. But such is not the way of discipleship, of non-violent resistance to oppression, of love.

Dr. King filled the shoes of leadership, but he was not a Messiah or a lone-star Savior. Charisma he embodied and used brilliantly, but he would not and did not “save” the oppressed. He led the oppressed. It took life-threatening sweat equity to walk the walk alongside him. The hopes and fears and yearnings of African Americans and every committed white ally were met in the Atlanta of King’s birthplace 80 years ago this month only in our glazed over memory; because King was a mesmerizing, remarkable, visionary, courageous leader, but neither he nor Gandhi nor Jesus Christ himself was a high riding derring-do superman of a Messiah.

King stood on the shoulders of Rustin and Gandhi, who stood on the shoulders of Jesus, who stood on shoulders that have faded into a certain degree of historical myopia, because, in the words of the late Unitarian Universalist minister, Clinton Lee Scott:

“…it is easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed the direction of their vision.”

Of Jesus of Nazareth, we have just an inkling of the life that he lived. The Gospels give no clues as to Jesus’ “shadow” sides. Of Gandhi, it may be said that he did not properly affirm the rights of women. Of King, it may be said that he strayed too easily into the affections of women other than his wife. All were humans with feet of clay. All were leaders who inspired and perspired and embodied hopes and fears that took root over years and years in people oppressed by fellow humans who were tied into the seemingly permanent knots of their own fears and who chose privilege and power over the common good.

It is no less so in our own day. While many in this congregation are hurting amid an economy that has been on a roller coaster ride for years—not months, years; while some in this congregation have known the oppression of other systems of government and yes, other approaches to faith so intensely that they can barely acknowledge the scars; while some in this congregation have known the oppressions of sexism and classism and ableism; while a few in this congregation have known the oppressions of racism and homophobia; and while almost all of us in this congregation have been complicit in some form of oppression—IF we are paying attention at all, we know that our nation is at a crossroads of moral choice.

Gathering as we did yesterday morning to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a program of fellowship and discernment, gathering as we are this morning in the framework of worship to honor the life and legacy of Dr. King and to anticipate a historical presidential inauguration, gathering as we are this morning with our children echoing the words of Dr. King, gathering as we are this morning with the increasingly familiar cadences of an eloquent President-Elect singing in our ears, we are at a crossroads of moral choice that is above all communal. What hopes and fears do we harbor? What hopes and fears do we own? What do we hope for? What do we fear? We stand uneasily on the shoulders of the prophets. We stand anxiously in this slice of history. And we hold hope. We hold hope.

How to dismount from the shoulders of the prophets? How to transform an uneasy stance into a steady walk? As people of faith, we’re called to meld our aspiring spirituality with that of the prophets—with Amos’ cry to “let justice roll down like water” (Amos 5:24); with Micah’s call “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly…;” with Jesus’ discomforting response to the trick question: “Who is my neighbor?”; with Gandhi’s perseverance against imperialist odds; with King’s unswerving proclamation that “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now;” and with Barack Obama’s declaration of our choice between “a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism” and the will to “come together” and take on the hard issues of our time in the service of a union that “may never be perfect” but “can always be perfected.”

What will it be? Come Tuesday, we will inaugurate Barack Obama as the 44th president of this nation, this union. Come Wednesday, we cannot expect President Obama to do the work for us. Without our will toward the common good, this union will falter. Without our will to transform an economy that serves the privileged few; without our will to transform what it means to be a functional member of the family of nations; without our will to pay our citizen’s fare share so that every woman, man, and child knows the rights of health care and decent housing and fine schools; without our will to justice that is as compassionate as it has been harsh; our 44th President cannot lead as I believe so many of us hope he will.

We are the vanguard. The hopes and fears of all our years will be met in a covenant of leadership whose promise can be realized only if we take up the mantle of everything we espouse—the worth and dignity of each of us and the connectedness of all—and “take one more step, say one more word, say one more prayer, and sing one more song” and then do it all again and again and again until our hopes for peace and compassionate justice are met and our fears of whatever power and privilege any of us might lose en route will dissolve in a great sigh of enlightened gratitude.

This is our now. It’s fierce, and it’s urgent. Amen.

Sources:

Amos, Micah, and The Gospel According to Luke in the Bible (Revised Standard Version)

Phillip Brooks (lyrics) and Lewis Redner (music), O Little Town of Bethlehem, described in Best-Loved Christmas Carols, Ronald M. Clancy, Edited by William E. Studwell, Christmas Classics, Ltd., North Cape May, NJ 2000, 68-69.

Indian independence movement, from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Independence_Movement

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi#cite_note-55.

Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam—A time to Break Silence,” Speech delivered at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City, April 4, 1967,
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm.

Martin Luther King, Jr., from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr#Influences.

Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union,” Speech delivered in Philadelphia, PA, March 18, 2008, http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hisownwords/.

Joyce Poley, “One More Step,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 168.

Clinton Lee Scott, “Prophets,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 565.

Categories: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday Sermon Tags: