March 29, 2015
Unitarian Universalist Church of Augusta
The twelfth chapter of the
Letter to the Hebrews in the Christian New Testament begins: “Therefore, since
we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off
everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run
with perseverance the race marked out for us.”
Written before the fall of
Jerusalem to Jews who were converts but may have been tempted to revert to
Judaism, the letter continually encourages those it addresses to stay the course,
not to “give up the pursuit of holiness” in that turbulent time. (http://www.biblica.com/en-us/bible/online-bible/scholar-notes/niv-study-bible/intro-to-hebrews/). Who are these witnesses that surround them?
Chapter 11 names them, characters from the Hebrew scriptures, such as Abel,
Abraham, Sarah, Moses. According to the author of this letter, the witnesses
from the scriptures, “who lived by faith, are encouraging the readers to
persevere in their faith” (http://www.biblica.com/en-us/bible/online-bible/scholar-notes/niv-study-bible/intro-to-hebrews/).
Rev. William Barber, North Carolina NAACP president refers to this
letter when he says,
"The…Scriptures declare that, when we stand for righteousness, when
we heed the call to do what is right, we are surrounded by a great cloud of
witnesses of those who died – or suffered and died – who have gone on but now
sit in glory, and they cheer us on." (http://www.wral.com/wednesday-protest-at-legislature-ends-in-handful-of-arrests/12545831/)
Heeding the call to do what’s right is something that we have been
commemorating this month, half a century after the Selma to Montgomery March in
1965. Wil and I were privileged to attend the UU Living Legacy conference in
Birmingham the days before the Re-enactment of the Selma Bridge Crossing on
March 8th.
There we heard from wonderful speakers: Dr Bernice King, Rev. Jeremiah
Wright, Rev. Dr. William Barber, Mark Morrison-Reed. We honored the families of
Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo, who were moved at the support
and compassion that washed over them at the conference, and that has
consistently been given to them these past 50 years by the UUA.
And, of course,
on Sunday March 8th, in the midst of a crowd that numbered about
80,000, there were 600 of us UUs walking together across the Edmund Pettus
Bridge, a moving remembrance of Bloody Sunday, when peaceful marchers were met
by violence from law enforcement officers. Someone that Sunday said, “they
should change the name of that bridge” – Pettus was a Confederate Brigadier
general and Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan; and another person spoke
up and said “You can’t change history”.
The people who were in the midst of the historic protest 50 years ago
did not always know that they were making history; many of them were afraid,
uncertain, and acting without the support of friends, family, and sometimes
even their churches. Yet today they are our cloud of witnesses as we do more
than just mark an anniversary – we are called on to transform a country and
indeed a world that still tramples on civil rights, still fails to respect the
inherent worth and dignity of every human person, still puts obstacles in our
path while we run our race. In the sacred work of doing justice, we will in
turn be the cloud of witnesses to future generations.
Who were the witnesses 50 years ago in Selma? There are
indeed too many to mention this morning; but they have to stand in the context
of the broader history of nonconformity and liberal religion. Ann Chierenza
writes that those who came seeking justice in the centuries before the Selma
heroes “were not all Unitarians by faith…but all shared the best humanitarian
instincts which characterize now as then the UU denomination. They were free,
they were unafraid, their minds were unfettered by orthodoxy, their love of
fellows passionate and unconfined. They had in common a curiosity and
enthusiasm about the world. They dared all.” (The Liberal Context, Issue 14, p.1)
Mark Morrison-Reed, whose book The Selma Awakening is a must-read in understanding how the civil
rights movement tested and changed Unitarian Universalism, says that Selma
doesn’t make sense without World War II. The war gave African-Americans
opportunities otherwise denied to them in peacetime; black veterans returned
from the war with changed expectations, with a changed self-perception, and a
different worldview. Morrison-Reed says that “there could be no returning to
the Jim Crow world that had existed before the war” (Morrison-Reed, The Selma Awakening, 2014, 72).
Our country fought against the Nazis and their cruel and
violent attempt to exterminate sections of society…and when the images of
Bloody Sunday burst onto the TV screens of Americans on Sunday March 7th
1965, interrupting the broadcast of the Nazi war crimes movie “Judgement at
Nuremberg”, many people saw the awful visual connection right away: the
president of the Birmingham UU Church Ethel Gorman wrote, “We felt shame for
our state as well as pity for the victims; and fear because law enforcement
officers acted like Nazi Storm Troopers” (72).
The day after Bloody Sunday, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr sent out a call across this country for clergy to join him in Selma for a
ministers’ march, in a dawn telegraph that contained these words: “The people
of Selma will struggle on for the soul of the nation, but it is fitting that
all America help to bear the burden.” (IX) Unitarian Universalists were already
there, the day before Bloody Sunday. A group of 72 people, who called
themselves “Concerned White Citizens of Alabama” marched to the Selma
Courthouse on March 7th, and read a statement in support of black
voting rights – half of those 72 people were UUs. Once the group made its
statement it took a police escort to get the 72 safely back to their starting
point, tempers were running high within the white community.
 |
| Photo from Mark Morrison-Reed, The Selma Awakening, 2014 |
Sixty UU ministers – then nearly 10% of the total of our
active congregational ministry – arrived in Selma within 2 days of Dr. King’s
call. Mark Morrison-Reed says that the reason for the strong UU response to the
call to clergy is relationship - between each other and to African-Americans.
James Reeb had already committed himself to working in the black Boston
communities of Roxbury and Dorchester. Another UU minister who came from
Massachusetts, Richard Norsworthy, arrived in Selma and lined up for a march
the day after Bloody Sunday. He was approached by a man who asked, ‘Why are you
here?’ Norsworthy reflected on the question, writing in his notebook, “Why am I
here? I have three sons. I just discovered that their backyard bordered on a
police state. They have rights and privileges not granted to all their
countrymen. Unless all the brethren receive all their rights, my sons may lose
theirs. I have three white sons and millions of black brothers. I cannot
distinguish between them as to what is most precious in life. I only know: All
men must be free!’ (in The Liberal Context, Issue 14, Spring
1965, p. 5)
Relationship – “I cannot distinguish between them as to
what is most precious in life”. When there’s a connection, its pull is what
compels you to act, Morrison-Read said in his address to us in Birmingham, and
he added, “Ideology places right belief before right relationship.” Yes,
ideology gives an excuse to terrorize, to harass, to beat, spit and curse at
people peacefully assembling, to bomb children in a church, to pull up
alongside a car driven by a woman at night and murder her on the highway… The
ideology of white supremacy was in full force 50 years ago. And its remnants
refuse to die in this country.
The Rev. Dr. William Barber spoke to us twice at the
Living Legacy conference – once during the Mass Meeting at Tabernacle Baptist
Church, and early the next morning at a Wake Up Session that truly was a
riveting wake-up call. He challenged us
to become that cloud of witnesses today, to build a stage that lifts the voices
of everyday people, to become moral dissenters. He quoted Psalm 94 to us: “justice will once again meet up with
righteousness,
and all whose heart is right will follow after.
Who will stand up for me against the wicked?
Who
will help me against evildoers?”
We need moral
dissent today, just as in every age.
In the South,
Barber said, poverty is as high now as in 1968, and there is a racialized
perception of Medicaid need, even though we know that whites are the majority
of recipients...The strategy of politicians has made poor whites vote against
their own interests, leading them - in an appropriate Palm Sunday reference -
“to protect what Jesus rode into Jerusalem on…”
Barber referred to
the prophet Hosea, saying that our leaders have gone whoring after power; and
it is up to us to build a movement that restores imagination, stirs compassion,
before talking about how to fix things; we must build a prophetic movement because
the heart of our country needs reviving, he said, and it is a job for everyone,
because in a hospital when ‘Code Blue’ is called, everybody comes to help.
The worship services during the voting rights campaign
50 years ago at Tabernacle Baptist Church and in Brown Chapel were “joyful,
confident, victorious worship” but as much as they were as worship services, so
too were the marches and the vigils – “this is what living religion is,” one of
the UU ministers there wrote, “The movement cannot be separated from the
church. It is the church in action.” (Norsworthy, 6)
And so the cloud of witnesses now has to include each
and every one of us. We can imagine James Reeb urging us on, to match his
passion and commitment; John Sullivan, a Quaker and a friend and colleague of
James Reeb, eulogized Reeb in his home church in Boston 50 years ago and
imagined Reeb asking, “Well, what’s the next step? His life can speak to us,”
Sullivan states, “and it says: Don’t flee from the sinking schools, get in them
and work on them. It says: don’t shrug at the school committee, get out the
vote. It says, don’t hide from the poor, embrace them. It says, don’t settle
for nice houses in the suburbs and rotten houses in the ghetto, change it
through every appropriate way, community organization, legislation, code
enforcement. And he might also say, not only is there a killer in the dark and
racist streets of the south but there is another killer, and that killer’s name
is non-involvement, apathy and lack of interest, it is self-concern. This was
the killer James Reeb was stalking and when he found him, he was going to wrap
him around with righteousness and justice and love.” ( Sullivan in Liberal Context, 16-7)
We have recently found another killer, a killer of black
men in Ferguson, in New York, in Atlanta, across America, a killer enacting
endemic, systematic racist violence that reminds us that Selma is not 50 years
ago, it is here and now. “Let us throw off everything that hinders and the
sin that so easily entangles” is the quote from Hebrews – UUs may flinch when
they hear the word ‘sin’ but let’s put it in its proper context. In Hebrew the
word means ‘to miss the mark’, as when an archer misses the bullseye on a
target.
We can see the sin of a
person, a group, an institution, a system, as ‘missing the mark’ when it comes
to failing to treat citizens of color with respect, with dignity. It is up to
us to speak out against the structural ‘sin that entangles’ a law enforcement
system, whose officers so easily seem emboldened to take human life; the sin of
a system that fines people for not wearing a seat belt, and then sends them to
jail when they can’t afford to pay the private probation penalties piled on the
original fine. The sin of a system that, in effect, has created a debtor’s
prison for citizens right here in Georgia…
“Let us throw off everything
that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles”.
What is it that hinders us from running the race marked out for
us? What will determine whether or not we show up, answer the call, make a
statement, witness with action? Is it a lack of relationship to someone in
these desperate circumstances?
Because James Reeb was
already working in the poor neighborhoods of Boston, his heart already set on
fire, his feet already itching to run the race, by the time he got to Selma.
Viola Liuzzo’s heart was already full of compassion, a mother of 5, who organized Detroit protests, attended Civil
Rights conferences, and worked with the NAACP before leaving her family to go
to Selma. And Jimmie Lee Jackson, who lived the discrimination of America, who
was a black veteran who had served his country but yet could not vote to elect
its leaders, he already had a direct relationship and experience with the
structural sin that was, and is, racism.
Now here in 2015 in west
Augusta, on the face of it there’s not an obvious way for us to situate
ourselves within the narrative of racism. But that didn’t stop that cloud of
witnesses who founded this congregation sixty-one years ago, and it didn’t stop
those witnesses who 50 years ago founded Open Door Kindergarten, the first
integrated kindergarten in Augusta. And it hasn’t stopped that cloud of
witnesses in this church from participating for many years now in the MLK
Parade and interfaith services, and in Augusta Pride; it hasn’t stopped
witnesses today from building real relationships across faiths, across races.
We personally, and
institutionally, can begin a systematic analysis of anti-racism,
anti-oppression and multiculturalism in every part of our own congregation as
we build the Beloved Community central to our mission statement. We can
initiate, not avoid, conversations about race, privilege, white supremacy; we
can engage in multicultural ministries; we can commit to social justice – a
term which some people dislike and need to reframe for themselves – everywhere
and everyday.
We can raise our voices
in prophetic witness which, in the words of Cornel West, “consists of human
acts of justice and kindness that attend to the unjust sources of human hurt
and misery. Prophetic witness calls attention to the causes of unjustified
suffering and unnecessary social misery.” (Paul Rasor, Reclaiming Prophetic Witness, 92) We are called to show
up with a cloud of witnesses that showed up for us. So long as we keep faith with them, we run the race
with them - we stand in good company.
May we be the ones who make it so, Blessed Be, Amen.
- Gaye Ortiz 3-29-2015
