Unitarian
Universalist Fellowship of Beaufort
Rev. Dr.
Gaye Ortiz
November 22
2015
May the door to this church be wide
enough
to receive all who hunger for love,
all who are lonely for fellowship.
May it welcome all who have cares
to unburden,
thanks to express, hopes
to nurture.
May the door of this church be narrow
enough
to shut out pettiness and pride, envy
and enmity.
May its threshold be no
stumbling block
to young or straying feet.
May it be too high to
admit complacency,
selfishness and harshness.
May this church be, for all who enter,
the doorway to a richer and more
meaningful life.
Come, let us worship together.
“May this
synagogue be, for all who enter,
the doorway
to a richer and more meaningful life…”
- from the Mishkan
T’Filah
Our opening words this morning are
adapted from a prayer from a Reformed Jewish prayer book, and they are
sentiments that we all have in our hearts as we gather together in worship.
After all, what would we be here for, if not to do as our 3rd
principle asks, to affirm and promote acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth
in our congregations?
The last 3 words there - in our congregations - are important,
because anyone could follow their own spiritual path. One of the blessings of
membership is taking on the responsibility of encouraging our members to grow
spiritually alongside each other.
And as members we covenant with one another. Covenants began in
the ancient world as a way of contracting between rulers and their people, and
they are important in Judeo-Christian history and theology.
When our religious forebears settled in this country, they kept
the free church tradition alive by creating covenants such as the Cambridge
Platform of Church Discipline, which was written by the New England Puritans in
1648 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is a covenant of mutual promise.
Forrest Church paraphrased the Puritans' covenant like this:
We pledge to walk together
In the ways of truth and affection,
As best we know them now
Or may learn them in the days to come,
That we and our children may be fulfilled
And that we may speak to the world
In words and actions
Of peace and goodwill.
When we UUs read our covenants I wonder if we reflect on the
obligation that we are asked to assume. After all, a covenant is a promise, and
it’s a tool that helps us to reconcile ourselves within the community when we
fall out of covenant.
Assuming good intentions is hard for a lot of people; we
automatically think the worst when we hear things – usually from someone else –
that a person has done. When we don’t agree with what we’re hearing, we begin
to think negative or even awful things; we form assumptions that, if we were to
voice out loud to that person, would quickly prove to be false assumptions. The
covenant gives us a measuring stick; we can ask ourselves: when I am feeling
this way, is it going against what I promised to do? Can I give this person a break,
and stop assuming they are acting against my best interests or the church’s
best interests?
So in our congregations, when we have a problem, when we don’t
like what someone says (or what we’ve heard that they’ve said), instead of
fuming silently, or expressing our anger to someone else in the parking lot, we
are urged to approach the person with whom we differ directly – assuming good
intentions – to ask them to speak with us about what is concerning us. Using
‘I’ statements, not interrupting people when they are trying to answer your
question, not judging others by what they say…these are familiar parts of a
behavioral covenant, heard in meetings of a committee or the board of trustees,
and many of us feel these guidelines are vital to ensuring respectful
communication in congregational life.
Wouldn’t it be grand if everyone everywhere lived more
intentionally by a covenant of right relationship? I am not saying that all UUs
abide fully by the covenants they affirm…but we at least have the ability to be
called back to our best selves, because a covenant exists, for us, as a living
document, as part of what makes us UU.
Unfortunately, today I am speaking to the topic of ‘when people
don’t like what you say’ because we as Unitarian Universalists need to reflect
on what we say and what we do, and how we deal with feelings that are evoked in
people who disagree with us. People who feel threatened by our tolerance, our
inclusivity, our liberal religious and creed-less faith tradition. Those who,
in contrast to our opening words, do not
value our invitation to all who enter our church to see it as “the doorway
to a richer and more meaningful life”. They may see our congregation, instead,
as a pathway to godlessness, to immorality, to false prophets, and of course,
to damnation and hell. You may well know people who think that about us; some
of you may have family members who think that, and this surely weighs heavily
upon your hearts this morning.
On a Sunday morning in mid-July last
year, “something
pretty scary happened at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of New
Orleans.
Members of Operation Save America, a fundamentalist
anti-choice organization that is known for descending upon abortion clinics and
making life a living hell for anyone coming or going”, showed up as if to
attend the church service. During the service they began to verbally harass the
worshippers and to try to push anti-abortion pamphlets into their hands.
Imagine being in the sacred, silent space of meditation just as many of us do
every Sunday following Joys and Sorrows, and suddenly hearing shouts of “Abomination!” “You are going to
hell!” (http://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-ra-antiabortion-fanatics-invade-a-church-service-20140723-column.html#page=1)
What happened next was probably not what they expected
to happen, because that Sunday the church was commissioning youth leaders of
the UU College of Social Justice. These young people immediately circled around
the protesters and began singing. The minister asked the protesters to respect
the worship space and take their protest outside, and at that church leaders
began guiding them out of the sanctuary. The police were called, and they
arrived ready to intervene should things turn violent.
The director of religious education made sure the
children were safe; unfortunately the protesters had surrounded the church and
had identified the RE rooms. They pressed graphic pictures against the windows,
so the children were moved to an inner room. A note was left on the classroom
doors for parents so they would be aware of where the children had been taken.
The minister was able to continue with the service,
preaching “about how fundamentalism offers only one path of truth, whereas
liberal religion recognizes a diversity of paths, and that this offers us a
significant way to engage the challenges of our world.” Once the service
finished, Planned Parenthood members came to escort congregants safely back to
their cars.
As we know, especially from being in the Bible Belt, the
radicalized anti-choice movement is supported substantially by right-wing
politicians, and it feels empowered to threaten women’s reproductive rights
through legislation as well as public protest. Many of us UUs are members of
Planned Parenthood; some have been present to demonstrate on behalf of women’s
reproductive rights. We should all know that Planned Parenthood is in the front
line of protecting women’s rights and are publicly vilified for doing so.
The Supreme Court has ruled against safe boundaries of protest,
so that anti-choice protesters can engage in intimidating behavior without
buffer zones, inciting violence against abortion providers and those women who
choose to use their services as they are entitled to do under the law.“
The
LA Times reported that eight months ago, “the man in charge of the group that
invaded the Unitarian church in New Orleans, a fundamentalist Christian
minister named Philip “Flip” Benham, was convicted of stalking a North
Carolina abortion doctor, even passing out “wanted” posters of the physician. He was
sentenced to 18 months of probation and ordered to stop the harassment.
Benham’s group, Operation Save America, has blockaded clinic entrances,
violated the privacy of doctors and abortion clinic workers, and harassed women
seeking abortions.”
But in spreading
their message of hate wider, in New Orleans they violated the sacred space of
sanctuary… “or as Benham described
it on his website, “presented the truth of the Gospel in this synagogue of
Satan.”” (LA Times)
As a writer for UU World, Krista Taves, says, “This
protest was a violation of our sacred space, and when I say “our” I mean it.
We Unitarian Universalists are in sacred covenantal relationships of
mutuality. When one congregation is violated in this way, we are all
violated.”
Not only that,
but the deep religious vein that runs through American civic life as a whole respects
the sanctity of the church sanctuary; I believe that Operation Save America did
itself and its cause no favors by invading a worship space, because many
Americans will be appalled at this display of disrespect for religious freedom
of worship.
After all, we
reject the idea of Taliban fundamentalists enacting radical control of women in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, and even trying to stifle the right to women’s right
to education by nearly killing the schoolgirl Malala Yousafzi.
The minister who
led the service and kept her head was Deanna Vandiver; she calls the protesters
‘religious terrorists’ who have made us targets in the process of trying to
achieve their goals by violent means. At least the confrontation in the New
Orleans church that morning did not turn violent, due in large part to the
non-anxious reaction of those UUs present for the service. There was no yelling
or pushing back, but there was an affirmation through the actions and the
voices of the young people lifted up in song. There was a naming of what was
going on by the minister from the pulpit and a request to behave appropriately.
Then there was action to protect the children, secure the building, and call
for help.
Now, none of us
wants to think that our congregations need to be prepared for something like
the sanctuary invasion in New Orleans, but there are practical things we can
take away from that morning’s disruption.
The clergy of the
New Orleans churches were interviewed on the VUU, not the ABC show with Whoopi
Goldberg and Rosie O’Donnell, but the web broadcast of the Church of the Larger
Fellowship, which you can find on You Tube; that VUU episode is entitled
‘Defending Sanctuary.’ In that interview it was noted that there was a strategy
employed in that sanctuary that morning that we need to be ready to use should
any type of disruption occur in ours.
First, we need to
name what is happening. No matter who is in the pulpit, your Worship
coordinators also need to able to give clarity to the moment: the New Orleans
minister said, “What is happening at this moment is that someone is trying to
disrupt our service; please respect the sacred space of this sanctuary.” Rev.
Vandiver herself did not at first comprehend what was happening, and before she
heard the words they were using she thought the shouting was from someone who didn’t understand the
congregation’s tradition of silence during meditation.
So telling others clearly from the
pulpit also relieves the anxiety of those who cannot understand what is
happening, but this could be used at other times when there is a disruption in
the sanctuary.
The First Unitarian Universalist
Church of Minneapolis has a script under the podium with several paragraphs for
the worship leader to read in case someone is having a medical emergency or
there is violence erupting. But with a violent disruption it is vital to be
vocal about who we are; we do not tolerate violence or disrespect of our
sanctuary and our congregants.
The second thing is to have a protocol
kicking in, for the church leaders – greeters or board members, who know they
are responsible for physically removing the people who are disturbing the
service; third is to make sure everyone is safe and secure. An important lesson
is the easy access to the RE classrooms – what is needed to secure the building
in an emergency?
And the final step is a debrief
after all the activity is over. This helps to see what can be learned from the
experience, but also what we can do to respond what has happened. In the case
of the New Orleans disruption, they embarked on a media outreach campaign that used “this awful
experience as a tool to continue changing the hearts of this nation” (Taves).
You might have seen Rev Vandiver on
the MSNBC Rachel Maddow program soon after the sanctuary invasion. The message
the New Orleans UUs decided they want to pass on is “that religious people have
diverse ways of being pro-child and pro-family, and that religious liberalism
might just be where we can find the clearest embodiment of what it means
to be…pro-life in its truest sense.” (Taves)
New Orleans UUs
have said that this incident has not created a bunker mentality where they are
afraid of being under attack, but instead they feel it has driven them out even
more into the wider community. Their social justice committee is called the
community ministry team, and that name is proving to be quite accurate. They
said on the VUU that they are being seen as people of faith because of their
social justice stand, and that instead of ‘defending sanctuary’ they are now
focused on ‘expanding sanctuary’ to the disenfranchised and marginalized
elements of the wider community.
About the
invasion itself, there was no outcry from conservative Christian groups, who
usually are very sensitive to restrictions on their religious freedom of expression…and you might have heard
that the Democratic mayor, Mitch Landrieu, had issued a proclamation praising
Operation Save American for its ‘outstanding service to the city of New Orleans,
before the mayor’s office backtracked and said that this had been done in error!
As members of a
Unitarian Universalist congregation in the South, where sometimes we may feel
isolated, we do have support even though it may seem quite lonely at times. We
have a cluster of UU congregations, here in the eastern coastal area, one of
them of course being your sister congregation in Augusta. And the spirit of the
Cambridge Platform still lives on in the relationship that we can continue to
grow between our members. The relationship that we have with other area
communities of faith, is also a source of support. And we are of course a
source of support to them: in a meeting with the Interfaith Fellowship of
Augusta last fall, I heard the Imam of the Islamic Center talk about recent
threats phoned in to their center threatening on the eve of 9/11 to burn copies
of the Koran. We agreed that continuing our efforts together to educate the
community about faiths other than Christianity is the important work we need to
do.
Our support for
religious freedom is crucial to our identity as Unitarian Universalists. The
price we pay for our dedication to our faith has always been the threat of
violence – from the early days when Michael Servetus and Francis David paid
with their lives, Joseph Priestley being burned out of his home, Rev. James
Reeb and Viola Liuzzo martyred during the civil rights struggle.
We know, in the
history of Unitarian Universalism in the South, that liberal religion poses a
threat to prejudice and intolerance. We know that standing on the side of love
with the LGBT community was not easy in our communities, but that the
celebration was sweet this summer when the Supreme Court ruled for marriage
equality. Now we need to keep standing on the side of love as we work for
anti-discrimination measures in our cities and states.
And we know the
pushback, even among members of our own congregations, against those who dare
to say that Black Lives Matter. We know that at certain times on human history
lives of one segment of our population have not mattered, and we feel the need
to lift up our systemic bias, our ignorance and prejudice when it allows
violence with impugnity to go unchecked. And just this week we see legislators,
who should know better, or at least should know the US Constitution better,
attempting to bar Syrian refugees from coming to ‘our back yard’. Maybe they
need to remember as Thanksgiving approaches, as one person put it on Facebook
this week, that “just because white political refugees came to a new country
and massacred the natives doesn’t mean all political refugees will.”
What else can we do but circle round for freedom?
Lindasusan Ulrich says that we need to bring our whole selves to the work of
liberation. Our task is to “relentlessly widen the circle for others, including
those who would shut us out.”
We began this morning with the words of Edward Frost,
“It would be far worse for us if, in our fear, we doused the fire and ran,
alone, into the dark.” Let us pledge today to circle around the light of
freedom, inclusion, compassion, and love that our chosen faith provides for us.
May it be so, Blessed Be, Amen.
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