Did you know that October 31st
is not only Halloween but Reformation Day? It was on that date in 1517 that Martin Luther famously is said to have nailed his 95 theses
to the door of the Catholic church in Wittenberg, Germany.
Reformation Day is a holiday in
Slovenia, Chile, and five of the German states. If you’d like to celebrate this
day that changed religious history then go to a website with a ‘Pin the Beard
on the Theologian’ game: http://churchhistoryabcs.com/Pin%20the%20Beard.pdf
You can photocopy John Calvin’s face
and then, in a version of ‘Pin the Tail on the Donkey’, blindfolded children
can try to pin a beard on it.
In our Unitarian Universalist
tradition, Reformation Day is bittersweet. Unitarianism was a challenge to
Trinitarianism and Catholicism, and it was able to survive and travel
throughout Europe as the Reformation spread. But John Calvin himself was the
person who secured the death of one of our most important figures, Michael
Servetus, who was put to death on October 27, 1553.
Servetus was burned at the
stake in Geneva, Switzerland, after being captured while escaping to Italy from
France, where the Catholic Inquisition had briefly held him as a heretic. Servetus
wrote about the fact that the Bible has no Trinitarian doctrine to back up the
insistence of Christianity of the existence of the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, and his writings fueled dissatisfaction with Catholicism and threatened
the credibility of Trinitarian Protestantism.
So Servetus had the dubious honor
of being wanted as a heretic by both factions of the Reformation, but his
horrible death made many people of faith call into question the punishment by
death of those who had different religious beliefs.
The right to
question and the importance of liberal religious freedom are values that come
from the struggles of Servetus, Francis David, John Biddle, and others, who
fought a valiant and often lonely battle against the religious status quo. So,
at this time of the year, rather than celebrate Luther’s hammer or Calvin’s
beard, I would rather mark the contribution of Servetus, which is summed up by
the inscription found on a monument to him in the vicinity of his execution:
“Michel Servet[us], . . . geographer, physician,
physiologist, contributed to the welfare of humanity
by his scientific
discoveries, his devotion to the sick and the poor, and the indomitable
independence of his intelligence
and his conscience
… His convictions were invincible. He
made a sacrifice of his life for the cause of the truth.”
(https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michael_Servetus#Quotes_about_Servetus)
I returned yesterday from five amazing days at the
Parliament of the World’s Religions in Salt Lake City, Utah. Most people I told
about it here in Augusta wanted to know why it was being held in Salt Lake
City, maybe thinking that somehow the Mormons were hosting this.
The answer I never had time to give is that the first
Parliament was held in Chicago in 1893, organized with the help of a Unitarian
minister, Jenkin Lloyd Jones. He was a promoter of Unitarianism in the Western
United States; he was a charter member of the Chicago Peace Society, and was a
supporter of women in ministry. There were 4000 attendees to the first
Parliament, which exposed many Americans for the first time to world religions.
The Parliament was re-established in 1993 in Chicago, and since then has been
held every five years in places like Barcelona, Spain and Melbourne, Australia.
The Parliament in Salt Lake City was organized very much in
the spirit of Rev. Jones, offering for the first time a Women’s Convocation,
featuring speakers such as Marianne Williamson and the dynamic Indigenous
Grandmothers.
As a UU minister who celebrates a faith that has ordained women
since the mid-19th century, I was able to be in solidarity with
Roman Catholic women who spoke up for women’s ordination.Pagan priestesses, whose panel
presentation included the theologian Starhawk and the Rev. Selena Fox, spoke of
the value of pastoral presence and worship expertise that I strive for in my
ministry. And the passion of Mother Maya Tiwari and Dr. Vandana Shiva in
lifting up the nurturing and creative strength of women made me want to widen
the circle of opportunity for women in our community, who care for their
families against the odds of poverty and illiteracy, and in our world, where
women still are not afforded dignity.
Jones would have been amazed that over 10,000 people from 80
nations and 50 faiths attended. One of the most impressive achievements of the
Parliament was an act of selfless service. Sikhs from all over the world
converged to offer Langar, a free meal that is central to Sikh hospitality.
Langar with Imam Jamal from the Augusta Islamic Center
Hundreds lined up every day to go into the hall and get not only their fill of
wonderful food, but also conversation with people sitting beside and across
from them.
Dialogue truly was a highlight of the Parliament. On my last
day there I went with another female UU minister to lunch and we ended up
sitting with a Mormon woman. We discussed our lives, our religion and what it
means to us in terms of our relationships and our lives. Each of us was moved
to tears when sharing things openly, and after lunch was over we exchanged warm
handshakes and a smile, wishing that we could have that kind of encounter
everywhere we go.
The challenge of the Parliament to the 10,000 who attended
came in the form of the theme: Reclaiming the Heart of Humanity. So many
speakers brought up the issue of climate change and how we must act so that
future generations can still inhabit this glorious planet. How we do that will
be determined by our ability to open our hearts to our fellow human beings and
reach out, despite - or perhaps because of - our diversity.
At the end of last week I traveled to Statesboro for our
monthly UU Coastal Cluster clergy meeting. The ministers from Charleston down
the coast to Brunswick,from
Columbia to Augusta to Statesboro, try to get together regularly to support
each other and get to know one another as people come and go in our area. We
move our meetings around so we can visit the churches and see the cities and
towns where we do ministry. It’s a time I treasure, to be with my colleagues in
fellowship.
This last meeting was a little uncertain for some of us who
were coming from the coast, but as of Friday the storm had not hit and we were
able to have a good meeting and return home safely. But since then, our coastal
UUs have had a rough time of it. The new interim minister in Columbia was
evacuated from her home, barely having unpacked from her move from Arkansas. As
we know from the news and from social media, a number of dams burst in South
Carolina and have made things much worse for the midland population than the
effects of the storm in the coastal towns of Savannah and Charleston.
Times like these make us aware of how little control we have
over our lives; many people inland, who watched the storm approaching the
coast, were thinking it wouldn’t affect them beyond heavy rain and maybe minor
flooding of roads. Now they have no power, no fresh water, they have left their
homes suddenly as dams burst and the gushing waters threaten to cut them off
from an escape route, or even to wash away their cars. How frightening to be
faced, especially if you are elderly and not as mobile, to have to evacuate and
not know how long you will be away from your home and from resuming life as
normal.
Now think of how that is true for all the refugees fleeing
Syria; the people displaced by the terrible mudslides in Guatemala; the storms
and flooding in the French Riviera…we truly are fortunate to be where we are,
secure in our homes, our lives, our family and friends close by or at least
able to be in touch by phone or email.
And finally, think about how you might be able to assist in
the rescue effort going on in these places. From donating water to folks in
South Carolina to sending off money to rescue organizations working in the
midst of the devastation of war, we can support one another as world citizens
and as human beings. We don’t know if one day we will be the ones in need of that
kind of support and compassion; the Golden Rule that Pope Francis so eloquently
evoked during his visit to this country still rings true for the way we can
model our faith: “Do to others what you would have them do to you.” As UUs the
“Do” is emphasized: “Deeds, not creeds.” Living our faith means never standing
still in the face of injustice, cruelty, crisis, or despair. We are fortunate
and, yes, blessed, to have our religious community to help us widen our vision
and renew our strength, as Mark Morrison-Reed reminds us:
“The central task of
the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all. There is
a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own
lives and the lives of others. Once felt, it inspires us to act for justice.”
This year on Sept 11th Paul Simon sang “American Tune” to
close the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The song is, in my interpretation, an
epiphany of despair, a realization of the failings of this country:
“...when I think of the road
We’re traveling on
I wonder what went
wrong…”
Paul Simon wrote American Tune
in 1973. The year before that, I remember how excited I was to be able to vote
in my first election. I was a volunteer for the George McGovern campaign, one
of those young idealistic Democrats who didn’t trust President Nixon and who
were dismayed at the turn the Vietnam war was taking. I honed my political
rhetoric by arguing with my dad every night at suppertime, The CBS Evening News
with Walter Cronkite in the background. If we weren’t disagreeing over the war,
we were arguing about the Watergate burglary in June of 1972, which was intended to
steal documents, related to the Pentagon Papers leak, from Daniel Ellsberg's
psychiatrist's office. I was sure it
would lose the election for Nixon… but he won by a landslide.
The Watergate Scandal: Congressional Hearings
Before long, Congress began to hold hearings about the break-in. By 1973 the Watergate scandal was destroying
everything we thought we knew about Washington politics, and it got downright
scary in October with a full-blown constitutional crisis – on October 20th
1973, the president fired Watergate “prosecutor Archibald Cox in what has become known
as ‘The Saturday Night Massacre’."
It was one of those moments in American
history when many Americans remember where they were when they heard the
announcement, and then the next breaking news, and the next, as events piled up
furiously on top of one another. John Chancellor reported on NBC news that
evening that “Because of the President's action, the attorney general resigned.
Elliott Richardson quit, saying he could not carry out Nixon's instructions.
Richardson's deputy, William Ruckelshaus, was fired because he, too, refused to
obey a presidential order to fire the special Watergate prosecutor. And half an
hour after the special Watergate prosecutor had been fired, agents of the FBI,
acting at the direction of the White House, sealed off the offices of the
special prosecutor, the offices of the attorney general and the offices of the
deputy attorney general. More than 50,000 telegrams poured in on Capitol Hill,
so many, Western Union was swamped. Most of them demanded impeaching the
president. The following Tuesday Congress filed 21 resolutions calling for
Nixon's impeachment.”
No wonder Paul Simon felt that he was a
long way from home…all of us watching this scandal unfold felt like the Statue
of Liberty was floating away, with
all the symbolism of the country being adrift in a crisis that no one had ever
experienced before.
I begin with this recollection because
the title of my sermon this morning, “The Ultimate Justice of the People”,
gives you an idea of what did in fact prevail in the Watergate scandal. Nixon
backed down an appointed a new special prosecutor and agreed to cooperate with
the investigation, which ultimately led to his impeachment and resignation.
But that phrase comes from another time when the American nation was at
crisis point of a different kind: these are words written and spoken by Abraham
Lincoln in his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861:
“Why
should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people?
Is there any better or equal hope, in the world?...By the frame of the
government under which we live, this same people have wisely given their public
servants but little power for mischief; and have, with equal wisdom, provided
for the return of that little to their own hands at very short intervals.”
Despite the reassurance
that he hoped to give to Southerners about his election as president,the
speech did not dissuade them from starting the civil war the following month.
Two major crises, just over a century apart, in
which the power given by the vote was challenged. But we are facing a
presidential election season this next year – in which we are already
knee-deep, with candidates, debates and campaign appearances – that may not
even allow large numbers of American citizens to cast a vote. And that is
because of restrictive legislation in many states that is a direct result of
the rollback of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court in June of 2013. And
what is more, this dismantling of the protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act
was orchestrated deliberately over decades, according to an in-depth article by
Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times
Magazine.
“the
United States was founded as an experiment in eighteenth-century republicanism…
it was understood that only men with property would vote, and publicly, since
they were the only people who could be trusted to vote with the commonweal, and
not private gain, in mind.” “In the first Presidential election, only six per cent
of Americans were eligible to vote.”
But voting became a violent ordeal by the
mid-1800s, when all white men could vote; in 1859 “eighty-nine Americans were
killed at the polls during Election Day riots.” “…the nation’s founders could
scarcely have imagined that the population of the United States, less than four
million in 1790, would increase tenfold by 1870. The revolutionary step of
providing printed ballots that voters had to read made it much harder for
immigrants, former slaves, and the uneducated poor to vote.”
You may know about the Jim Crow era, which marked
the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, and the difficulties it posed for black
Americans who wished to vote. If they were not physically attacked on their way
to the polls, they had poll taxes to pay; if they wanted to register to vote,
there were often civics or literacy tests to take, from which white voters were
exempt. Those of you who saw the film Selma
recall that the Dallas County, Alabama registrar’s office was only open during
business hours on the first and third Monday of each month, and new registrants
needed to bring someone who could vouch for them.
If blacks tried to register, just that simple act
could lose them their jobs – like employees of a nursing home in Selma in 1963,
who lost their jobs when they tried to register to vote. If blacks tried to
register to vote, they might have a loan called in or might be evicted from
their residence. And the intimidation of having your name printed in the local
newspaper as a voter applicant also was meant to keep blacks from even trying. (Teaching
Tolerance Viewer’s Guide)
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, marching for voting rights
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did away with these
practices that kept blacks from voting, and it contained special rules for
states and localities where discrimination was especially known to exist; these
places were not allowed to make any changes affecting voting without
‘preclearance’ from the Justice Department in Washington. Georgia was one of 9
entire states that qualified for this special treatment.
The Southern Strategy
The South was under Democratic control following
Reconstruction but the Voting Rights act upended the status quo, making it
almost impossible for conservative democrats to win primary elections against
progressives. Nixon saw the opportunity of more black participation in
elections to appeal on the basis of race, so that white voters in the South
elected Republicans – that’s come to be called the Southern strategy.
One of his advisors is quoted by Jim Rutenberg as
saying, “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner
the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans” (p 35).
Jesse Helms in North Carolina is one politician who benefitted by the Southern
strategy.
During the decades since the original act was
passed, Congress has voted several times to reauthorize it, but in the 1980s
John Roberts came to Washington as a court clerk and slowly began making his
way up the ladder until he became chief justice. His stance on voting rights
was that justice should be colorblind, which sounds good until you realize that
race-based decision-making is necessary when preceded by centuries of
segregation and discrimination. He argued that discrimination cases should be
hard to prove, a position that Republican senator Bob Dole disagreed with: “I
don’t know where we lost track after Abraham Lincoln” (Rutenberg, p 36) he
said, referring to the Reagan White House needing to show it cared about the
votes of Hispanics and African-Americans.
There were intentional political blocks to voter
accessibility: in 1990 President Bush vetoed the motor-voter bill which would
allow registration at other government agencies like the DMV, but Clinton
signed it when he took office; “following its passage, black registered voters
increased 10% by 1998” (38).
The next blocking tactic was to clean up voter
rolls, and the result was that many people were wrongly erased by being
mistakenly designated as felons. In Florida a disproportionate number were
black, more than 90% of whom voted for Al Gore in the 2000 election; of ballots
thrown out in the Florida election, 3 times as many came from black voting
precincts as from white precincts.” (39)
In 2005 the Georgia voter-ID law was up for a vote
in the statehouse; the law diminished black voting, and “Rep Sue Burmeister
said that was because blacks were less likely to vote if they were not being
paid to do so” (46). The law was invalidated, although upheld by the Supreme
Court once revised to allow those without ID to cast provisional ballots.
After 2010, a slew of new voter ID laws were passed
in 11 states, all almost identical, and by 2012, almost all suspended or
blocked by the state courts. Less than a year after President Obama’s
re-election the Shelby decision struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act,
with Chief Justice Roberts saying that the section had served its purpose and
race was no longer an issue. Justice Ruth Ginsberg fiercely disagreed, citing
Department of Justice figures since 1982 of more discrimination cases than
between 1965 and 1982. She famously stated, “Hubris is a fit word for today’s
demolition of the VRA” (47).
Our Fifth Principle
Paul Simon sings that Americans came on the ship
they called the Mayflower…and the Pilgrims and Puritans who settled in New
England so longed for a place where they could have their voices heard, their
liberties exercised and protected. The creation of the 5th principle –the right
of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations
and in society at large -arises
from that experience, and yet the definition of citizenship that informed the
Declaration of Independence excluded so many people for the privileged few.
It would have been a mystery to the founding
fathers, who wrote the immortal lines “all men are created equal” and “endowed
with certain inalienable rights”, that I was allowed to register to vote in
1972. And, as Parisa Parsa points out in her wonderful essay on the 5th
Principle (Brandenburg), our Puritan forebears, “credited with forming our
Unitarian polity, would not have envisioned the level of inclusiveness or low
threshold for membership that we do today.” They were determined to “resist
corrupt influence by ecclesiastical authority”, and so membership was
restricted to those who could testify “ to an experience of grace and full
conversion to the life of Christ”. This rule was meant to “preserve decision
making for the people who were considered most capable of being entrusted with
the well-being of society.” (76)
Parisa understands the desire behind this
restriction, because she identifies church as a place where “the democratic
process and the development of our own consciences become religious acts”. She
says that “in our religious lives, the democratic process requires trust in the
development of each individual conscience.” In the words of Theodore Parker,
“Democracy means not ‘I am as good as you are’ but ‘You are as good as I am’.
My connection with the sacred is only as precious as my willingness to
acknowledge the same connection in others.” (77)
With freedom of conscience comes accountability and
faithful unity, even in disagreement: that is our covenantal responsibility as
Unitarian Universalists; we pledge as much when we sign our congregational
covenant that hangs next to the office block. Parisa says that she values her
congregation, because they know that being fully present and showing some flaws
is infinitely more valuable than being correct in principle but disconnected
from real community.” (80)
The democratic process is messy and frustrating,
but voting – whether it is in our congregational meeting or in a precinct
voting booth - is “shorthand for taking interest in, and ownership of, the
process by which we as a community live our faith and choose to use our
collective power to shape our world in accordance with that faith.” (81)
Living my faith - that is why I drove to
Winston-Salem NC in July and in the heat of the day gathered at a Moral Monday
rally with the Rev. William Barber, Rev. Peter Morales our UUA President, Jim
Key the UUA Moderator, and 500-plus UUs among more than three thousand citizens
on the first day of a federal trial that will determine
whether parts of a controversial North Carolina voting law are constitutional.
Rev. Barber at the Winston-Salem Moral Monday Rally
Rev. Barber says that we are in the era of a 3rd
Reconstruction, but voting laws, like the one passed in North Carolina, are an
attempt at a third deconstruction. His catchphrase is “This is our Selma now”,
because in effect the gutting of the Voting Rights Act means that there are
less voting rights now than in 1965, when Dr King led marchers to demand
justice and an end to discrimination.
What will the verdict be on this law? We can only
hope that the rights of citizens to vote will be protected, not restricted. So
far every time it looks like civil rights are being threatened, the people of this
country have shown a resilience and have risen up in protest. It is an exercise
in compassion to fight for the rights of others.
The writer Sarah Ruth van Gelder describes several
consequences of our ability as American voters to be resilient, to expand our
circle of compassion, and to live into our 5th principle.
She writes:
"Participation
in the political process does not require us to sink to dirtypolitics
or reduce our vision to sound bites. As our circle of compassionhas
expanded, so have our capacities to keep ego from dominating our work,
to build movements based in distributed power, to listen deeply to the
fears and the hopes of those we are trying to reach, and to choose language
that communicates our common humanity and common aspirations.”
Conclusion
It is not true, despite the Chief Justice’s ruling,
that the goal of the civil rights movement has been achieved. Don’t forget
Dylan Roof’s justification for his murder of the 9 people in
Emmanuel Temple in Charleston—“You are raping our women and taking over our
country”.
James Noel reminds us in his essay that for African
Americans, there never was a period of not mourning those slain by racism.
Meanwhile black folks will continue to do what they must: “keep on keeping on .
. .” In the words of James Weldon Johnson, “We have come over the way that with
tears has been watered; we have come treading our way through the blood of the
slaughtered.”
Resilience: despite the disillusionment of what
followed, my first vote cast in 1972 was not my last, and I am committed to
help others to be able to exercise their right to vote this November and the
next and the next.
As Paul Simon ends his song, “Tomorrow is another
working day…” a glimmer of resilience, that after some rest we can go on, and
go forward, to protect the right of conscience and the democratic process.
Let
us have faith in the ultimate justice of the people.
