The Open Door

The Open Door

Unitarian Universalist Church of Augusta

May 17, 2015

It was probably this time of year - 6^th grade in Mrs Gavalas’ class, at Bayvale Elementary here in south Augusta. One day we were told we had some students visiting our classroom, and 2 black girls came and sat at the round table where I was sitting. I found out they were twins, June and Joan. They were there because at last – in 1965 – schools in Richmond County were being integrated. June and Joan looked scared and a little confused, but I got to know them when they started the next school year – and, when we went to Glenn Hills Junior High School together, their older sister Janet, who was a genius student and scooped up lots of academic prizes during her years there. June was a good friend, she was a real goofball and wore her Afro as big as she could! She became our daughter Molly’s godmother; today she is a successful psychiatrist who practices in Atlanta.

G.K. Chesterton writes (“Xmas Day”),

“Good News: but if you ask me what it is, I know not;

It is a track of feet in the snow,

It is a lantern showing a path,

It is a door set open.”

The door set open for June and Joan and Janet in the integration of schools here in Augusta was still firmly shut when Kay Sutherland moved here from California with her family. Kay was very much influenced in her attitudes toward racial equality by the work of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. her daughter Madhuri says. In the 1960s the UUs here in Augusta were especially impacted by his writings and speeches, including the Ware Lecture, given by Dr. King to the UU Association’s General Assembly in 1966. Remember what Dr. King wished for his four children: that one day they would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Kay was a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Augusta, where there was a congregation that had already made waves in the Augusta community by writing to the Chronicle about matters of race that didn’t match up with the prevailing conservative – and racist – feelings about segregation.

So in 1964 when a Quaker from New York named Rachel Du Bois came to Augusta to speak about improving communication among diverse groups, there was some difficulty finding a venue for her that would allow both black and white citizens to attend. The UU church opened its building for her and a large crowd showed up to hear her. 

After the meeting Du Bois was persuaded to stay another day, and to meet with a group of black and white women who were leaders in heir communities. These women asked DuBois specifically to help with ways to help their children combat the violence and prejudice from anti-integration forces in Augusta.

Five young women, black and white, all with college degrees and small children, asked to meet again soon. It was at that next meeting that the idea of a kindergarten was first suggested. After the idealistic idea, reality hit when they were rebuffed, snubbed, and rejected by churches turning them away when the group of women asked if they would host the kindergarten. 

An additional concern was financing the idea; the women were determined for it to be an independent school, with no sponsorship but also no fees that would prevent those families applying that could not afford to pay for their children to attend.  An affordable place that had the facilities and standards for a kindergarten was another concern – until Kay and her husband negotiated the UU building for a nominal fee. And so Open Door Kindergarten was founded in the spring of 1964.

The group of five then found two other women to become teachers – Jane Lester and Ella Stenhouse, and then formed a board of Trustees with Kay as the Chair. Lois Greenberg and Freddie Jackson were also board officers.

When we look back, the interfaith aspect of this nonsectarian, multiracial endeavor is so impressive – Jewish, Christian, Quaker, and Unitarian Universalist – and it was supported financially by many families of Augusta, both black and white. The Augusta Chronicle even ran an article about the kindergarten with a photo of the interracial board.

The day that the group decided to hold an Open House for preregistration turned out to be the same day of the march on Selma! Still, both classes filled up, and there were so many parents there that they ran out of punch, cookies, and application forms. When the day ended, 22 children, racially an even split, were enrolled.

This sermon comes 50 years after the first graduating class of the Open Door Kindergarten. Not only was the door to interracial education open to those children, when this first class graduated they all went on to complete their studies in local schools and many of them went on to college.

In the case of the kindergarten, another metaphor would have been just as appropriate for its name – a bridge instead of a door, because the exercise of creating the kindergarten built a sturdy, supportive bridge between diverse communities.

The women who asked for the extra meeting with Rachel DuBois were concerned about how to bring up their children in an environment that was poisonous in its institutionalized racism, but also concerned about the purpose of education itself. This desire to prepare their children for the changes and challenges of American society comes through in an early brochure for Open Door: “In keeping with the rapidly changing world, we felt Augusta needed a kindergarten which would reflect the continuing advances in education while building upon the heritage of the past.”  Building a bridge between the past and the future is the function of education, as they saw it. Also crucial to the founders was building a bridge between races: “In our rapidly shrinking world, the child who has experience in working on a give and take basis with persons, from backgrounds other than his own, has distinct advantages.”

Another bridge that the kindergarten built slowly but surely was between its children and the wider Augusta community. In a 1997 Friends Journal article by Faith Bertsche, several examples of the reaction of local people to the kindergarten give a flavor of just how radical the interracial school was:

One field trip the children went on was to the local fire department, and Bertsche says that her “heart stood still” as they arrived, because the firemen were lined up in a row to keep them out of the facility. But as the children got out of the cars and ran towards the firemen, they began to smile, and began lifting the children onto the fire trucks. Another time the children went to Bush Field airport, and were shown the inside of a real plane. It was a hot summer day and the teacher forgot to bring containers of water, so they went to a motel next door and asked inside if they could drink from the water fountain near the door. The motel manager told the teacher to leave and take the black child with her. People who were registering at the motel overheard, and immediately canceled their booking, picked up their luggage, and followed the teacher and child out of the motel. And one of the motel workers who had heard the manager’s remark met them outside with a drink for the child.

So in the process of creating an inclusive atmosphere for educating the children, the kindergarten also helped to challenge the status quo and to change attitudes in Augusta. It was housed here at this church for nearly 2 decades, until moving to the Congregation Children of Israel campus, where it operates today as Open Door Pre-K. It’s had 62 children enrolled this year.

The ‘Good News’ of ‘a door set open’…Opening a door sometimes takes courage – what is a door besides an entryway to another space, a transition between one mode of being to another? One of the ancient customs when a couple is married is to lift the bride over the threshold. It symbolizes protection, both because a bride who tripped over the threshold of her new home would irrevocably bring bad luck to her home and marriage, but also because the threshold of the home was thought to be rife with unattached evil spirits.

The women who founded Open Door were acutely aware that they might be opening a door to something that could be threatening or dangerous for the children, parents, and teachers. Initially the founders of the school were so focused on the commitment they had to the effort that they were not as concerned about safety as they suddenly became when the school was actually opening. Then they realized that they could be attacked or killed. Betty Hostetler, who played piano for the kindergarten music sessions, says that they were concerned that the big glass windows could have been broken by rocks thrown at them.

With violent attacks on churches and schools by opponents of integration a real possibility, the women – according to Bertsche – 

“had a long, prayerful afternoon one hot August day, not about our own safety but about the children’s safety and our concern for their parents… (who after all) were entrusting their children to our care.

"Our decision was to purchase a first aid kit and several pails of sand just in case we were the recipients of a fire bomb. Then it was decided that there would always be 3 women present during school hours. Next, we would take the matter up with all the parents at the first parent-teacher meeting. At that first meeting, the parents agreed with our actions, and the matter never came up again.” (Bertsche, 22)

The ‘Good News’ of ‘a door set open’…Doors can be opened – and they can also be shut. Augusta back in 1964 was full of people who shut the door on equality, who shut the door on justice, on decency and kindness and love for their fellow human beings, because they were a different color. The Open Door family refused to let that door stay shut, and their courage in reaching out and grabbing the doorknob and pulling the door open was a daring act of love.

Socrates writes, “Courage is not only knowledge of what is to be dreaded and what is to be dared, but knowledge of all goods and evils at every stage.” Galen Guengerich, Senior Minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City, interprets that quote to mean that “the essence of courage…is to pursue a goal that is morally worthy or stand up against a force that is morally repugnant, despite the risks involved. Courage is the knowledge of what is worthy and must be pursued, no matter if the road is long and the path unclear.” (Quest, CLF, March 2015, 2)

The director of the UU Service Committee, Bill Schulz, was once the executive director of Amnesty International. Guengerich recalls hearing Schulz say that, as a result of his work combating torture and dealing with torturers, he felt the belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person is a myth.

Now that is hard for a Unitarian Universalist to hear, because that after all is what we affirm in our first principle. But Schulz said that “there are too many malevolent hearts and too many god-forsaken places, where worth and dignity have no presence. Worth must be assigned and dignity must be taught, [and we cannot stand idly by and expect these to spring up magically]. Rather, in order for worth and dignity to exist, we must speak and act in a way that creates a place for them.”

And that is what the founders, staff, parents, and children of Open Door Kindergarten did for our city, our community, and our world – they created a place for worth and dignity to be created and flourish. They have made the First Principle of our UU faith tradition come alive.

We are honored today to have staff and families from the Open Door Pre-K here with us today. I’ve often thought that if our church ever decided to create a name for itself – besides the very descriptive UU Church of Augusta – that The Open Door would be a perfect name.

We pride ourselves on being a Welcoming Congregation. Our door has been open since 1954, welcoming all those who seek a place to grow their souls, where love is our religion, where freedom and reason and respect are values we try to live and embody through our beloved community.

Our own contributors to the first years of the Open Door Kindergarten deserve to be remembered today and always in the history of this church’s commitment to equality, liberty and justice for all. Kay Sutherland and Peggy Kelly are no longer with us, but Betty Hostetler is very much with us still. 

Those women who confounded the common prejudice and the legal framework of racism, in order to give their children the opportunity to enrich their education and their very lives, in a multiracial learning environment, each had an individual strength that connected with the others’ strength.

Together they called forth the best of each other, and their collective courage challenged the silence that held back too many of our citizens, our parents, our religious leaders, the silence that allowed racism, intimidation, violence and hate to dominate in this community.

Audre Lord writes about fear in relation to her own diagnosis of cancer in her essay, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”:

“In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality…what I most regretted were my silences…[times when I had] waited for someone else’s words…Of what had I ever been afraid? I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me, Your silence will not protect you.” (Quest, March 2015, 6)

Thinking today about the times we have been silent in the face of injustice, cruelty, violence, when faced with the threat of losing face or stature or privilege, we can be encouraged by the example of the Open Door founders who summoned the courage to act, who indeed set the door open for others to follow. Their work built bridges, their dedication to their children - and generations of children since - opened doors for us today, and inspires us to a better tomorrow.

I end with a blessing, in the words of Meg Riley:

May you find courage to do the work that is uniquely yours to do on this fragile planet. May you speak when words are needed, and be boldly silent when that is called for. May you know the deep care and connections that are everywhere around you, holding you in place no less surely than planets are held in their orbits. And may you hear the stars sing hallelujah when you dare to do and be exactly what is yours.” (Quest, March 2015, 6)

Blessed be, Amen.

Gaye Ortiz 5/14/2015

Committing to Climate Justice

Unitarian Universalist Church of Augusta

April 12, 2015

The other day on our church Facebook page I put a link to a short film that was sent to me – it’s called MOTHER: Caring for 7 Billion, and anyone can have free access to it on the web until April 22^nd; I found it interesting that there was a typo in the heading: it says,  “Earth Day Free Steaming Through April 2015”!

Yes, Chicken Little, the sky IS falling! Anyone who denies it after all the evidence from science is willfully ignorant and working against the planet’s best interests. Some of us are old enough to remember the TV ad with the slogan, ”It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature” – if we don’t know it by now, we soon will!

The impact of our earth, of nature in general and of climate change in particular, upon our lives and our spiritual identities, is the subject of our service today. For Unitarian Universalists, climate change is not only something that we are concerned about because of our seventh principle, but because it is a social justice issue.  Our Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations recognizes this in a statement on Global Warming/Climate Change:

“Environmental justice is the recognition that environmental degradation disproportionately harms those who are poor and marginalized, even while they derive less benefit and have less control over how our resources are used. These concerns are especially true with global warming/climate change. As weather patterns change, causing drought in some areas and flooding in others, poorer peoples lack the resources to respond to these disasters and bear the brunt of suffering when they happen.

Our Unitarian Universalist (UU) spiritual values call us to act on the personal, local, and national levels to adopt practices that will reverse global warming/climate change, and to do so in ways that are just and equitable.” (UU Guide to 2012 Preach-In, www.uua.org)

Climate Justice Month is a month-long spiritual journey for climate justice, from March 22 through April 22. Its organizers, Commit2Respond, have listed on its website three action goals for individuals, congregations, and organizations – 1. To shift to a low-carbon future 2. To advance the human rights of affected communities 3. To grow the climate justice movement.

The concept of Climate Justice is huge, and even taking one full month to reflect on what it means and how we can become committed to it doesn’t do it ‘justice’, no pun intended. So the Commit2Respond team divided up the month into 4 phases, beginning on World Water Day, which, fittingly, is when the Savannah Riverkeeper Tonya Bonitatibus came to speak here; I’d like to reflect that 4-part structure with our service this morning. Each of those phases will have a spiritual reflection to enrich our appreciation and deepen our understanding of the process we need to go through in order to commit to climate justice. With each phase, we will focus on an element of the Earth to ground that reflection. Denice will be helping with those reflections.

Starting on March 22^nd, the first week’s emphasis was "Rejoicing and Celebrating in Our Natural World." The Rev. Thomas Starr King said,

I believe that if, on every Sunday morning before going to church,…  we could fairly perceive, through our outward senses, one or two features of the constant order and glory of nature, our materialistic dullness would be broken, surprise and joy would be awakened, we should feel that we live amid the play of Infinite thought; and the devout spirit would be stimulated so potently that our hearts would naturally mount in praise and prayer. (Lessons from the Sierra Nevada, sermon, 1863)

We all have wonderful experiences of the world around us, and I love the way Kenneth Patton, the author of our closing hymn, “We Are the Earth Upright and Proud”, puts this sense of celebration: “And with its purpose strong, we sing earth’s pilgrim song, in us the earth is growing.” The element we focus on with rejoicing and celebrating in our natural world is water, and of course nothing can grow without water. Our connection with the natural world and its gifts, which are what we eat and drink, is an essential one for our continued existence.

When we think of the teeming life in rivers and oceans, the incredible and invisible underwater kingdom, we are humbled at how little we know about our planet. But water is at the heart of basic human rights, which everyday are under threat – even right here in the US. The media story last week about Peter Brabeck, the CEO of Nestle, is an example: water is a natural resource we should all be entitled to for survival, yet it’s being taken from a drought-stricken area of this country, California, and sold by a multinational corporation back to us. He says that this idea that every person has a right to water is ‘extreme.’ 

And finally, when we reflect on the role of water in our natural world, we grieve at the potential for loss due to climate change. Communities throughout the world are facing threats to their water access as a result of climate change.

* First Reading

Let us now read together the responsive reading from Thich Nhat Hanh, Water Flows:

Leader: Water flows from high in the mountains.

Water runs deep in the Earth.


All: Miraculously, water comes to us,


and sustains us all.

Leader: Water flows over these hands.

All: May I use them skillfully


to preserve our precious planet.

The second step in the process of committing to climate justice is to "Reckon with and Grieve the Loss We are Confronting." To me, the vastness of this earth makes it difficult for me to imagine the magnitude of destruction.

Just seeing images of the mountaintop mining in Kentucky causes me to grieve for the beauty of those mountains, and how they are left bare and scarred, after their precious interior materials have been gouged out for our use.
 “We are caught between two fears,” say Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone: “The fear that if we do nothing, our world will fall into crisis, and the fear of acknowledging how bad things are, because of the fear it brings up.” Matthew McHale from UU Ministry for Earth writes, “So many of us deal with this conflict by trying to push the crisis out of view. But we aren’t really free of it; it’s just sitting there like a pit in our stomach. We may try to numb the pain, but it numbs the joy as well. Our energy starts to sag, and we feel less alive. And…as a society we become unable to deal with the deepening crisis unfolding around us.”

Fire is the symbol of Reckoning because Fire signifies transformation, righteous anger and passion; in this phase of reflecting on climate justice, we are asked to explore where our energy comes from, and to reckon with the impacts and injustices of climate change. 

* Second reading

Fire is “too much with us; late and soon….”

Of late, terrorists made spectacle of massacre, setting ablaze a living man, in a cage.

Of late, 9/11, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dachau and Auschwitz,

Fiery crosses and lynching trees—hate’s infernos.

….

Soon (and now) fossils afire, we warm the oceans, parch the soil, turn trees to kindling.

Of late and soon, self-immolating, we set this world, our home, ablaze.

We make spectacle of massacre.

“For this, for everything, we are out of tune….

….

But let us never forget, never again—fire “changes everything.”


In the beginning was fire, and fire’s the seed of stars—
Ex ignis, we come from fire.


Fire, our first tool, warmed and gathered us.


Fire, need not and cannot and will not be, our blazing cage.

- Dr. Michael Hogue

McHale says, “By honoring our emotions, we begin to transform them. We recognize that our sadness and grief are manifestations of our deep love for the world. We recognize that our anger arises from our passion for justice. And we can then begin to use those emotions in service to helping heal our world.”

And so the third step in committing to climate justice is "Reconnecting with Front-Line Communities and with the Earth in All Her Glory." 
The Commit2Respond Team says that “being truly honest about the crisis we are facing returns us to our deep love for this world, for love is at the root of our sense of loss.

Today, we reconnect with that love and remember why we entered this process: because we love and are inextricably interconnected with all the beings of this earth and the earth itself. Hope lives in these connections. By reaching out to reconnect with our community, our neighbors, and our allies in this struggle to reclaim life for all, we re-source our souls for the work ahead. Reaching out reconnects us to our own well of inspiration and to relationships that make us resilient.

We know power is everywhere and can be used for good and for ill. The power of human connection can strengthen us. But power is not evenly distributed in our society. We carry this awareness in our connections, and commit to an awareness of our own power in relationship, the power of others, and different patterns of power in society. We choose to source our work with power that nourishes and works for justice—power that serves solidarity—and work against power that harms some and privileges others.”

Can we “commit to working in ways that share power, that redistribute power more fairly, and that use power to create a more beautiful world”?

Let us reflect on this task by using the symbol of air: it signifies breath, the breath that we all take as creatures of the planet in an atmosphere that sustains us, and which we need to keep clean. Clean air is life, and a precious gift. Breathing is balance; we should strive for balance in how we take and give back to the earth.

* Third Reading

“Listen to the air.

You can hear it, feel it,

smell it, taste it.

Woniya wakan, the holy air,

which renews all by its breath.

Woniya wakan, spirit, life, breath, renewal,

it means all that.

We sit together, don’t touch,

but something is there,

we feel it between us

as a presence.

A good way to start thinking

about nature

is to talk to it,

talk to the rivers, to the lakes,

to the winds,

as to our relatives.”

― John (Fire) Lame Deer

In Week Four, which is next week, we are asked to "Commit to A New Way." An obvious symbol for this final week, which ends on Earth Day, is Earth. This is the time for “bringing our vision into reality, fruition, culmination, committing to long-term actions that will create a paradigm shift and grow the climate justice movement”. As I mentioned, Commit2Respond suggests 3 goals for congregations to accomplish, which we can talk about after the service.

We have our work cut out for us; and how much better it would be if we had partners from other faith traditions – especially the ones we name as being the sources of our UU tradition – to join us in our commitment to save the planet.

The good news is that creation care is an ethic present in every major faith tradition. This was made clear in 1986 when Pope John Paul II invited major faith leaders to the town of Assisi, home of St Francis who loved nature. The resulting "Assisi Declaration" was a real challenge to world faiths to practice what they preach, signed as it was by Buddhist, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu leaders.

Just how do these world faiths express concern and care for the earth? For instance, the Koran says, “Assuredly the creation of the heavens and the earth is greater than the creation of humankind; yet most people understand not.” Because it is an Abrahamic faith, Islam stresses the role of humanity as stewards as does Judaism and Christianity.

"The Muslim Declaration on Nature" that came from the Assisi meeting says, “The central concept of Islam is… the unity of God. Allah is unity; and his unity is also reflected in the unity of man and nature. Unity…is maintained by balance and harmony. Therefore, Muslims say that Islam is the middle path and we will be answerable for how we have maintained balance and harmony in the whole of creation around us” (IPL)

We can read in the Judeo-Christian sacred texts the promise God made in the rainbow covenant with Moses never again to destroy the world by flood. There are also references in the Hebrew scriptures – in the Psalms, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Exodus, Job and Second Chronicles, that urge us to care for creation. Even though there is a clear ascetic strand of religious thinking and practice in Christianity that emphasizes denial of the world, in Judaism there is a more sustained and coherent reverence for the earth in its teachings down the centuries. Rabbi Abraham ben Moses, from the 12^th century, says “In order to serve God, one needs access to the enjoyment of the beauties of nature, such as the contemplation of flower-decorated meadows, majestic mountains, flowing rivers…For all these are essential to the spiritual development of even the holiest people.” (Interfaith Power and Light)

In the early history of the Christian church, the letter of Paul to the Romans says that the fate of creation is bound up with the fate of humanity (Rom 8:19-23). St Basil the Great and St Bonaventure also speak about the need to admire nature – in fact, Bonaventure declares: ”He…who is not illumined by such great splendor of created things is blind.” (IPL)

And Pope John Paul II’s feat in gathering religious leaders in Assisi to agree on their traditions’ emphasis on creation care is about to be topped by Pope Francis. He is working on a papal document, called an encyclical on climate justice. “The encyclical will be released in advance of Pope Francis’s address to the United Nations in September and before high-stakes climate negotiations in Paris at the end of the year. Naderev Sano, the Philippines’ climate commissioner said in an interview that this issue has been negotiated “at the political level for more than 20 years, and we look to Pope Francis to untangle this stalemate, because this issue is beyond merely a political issue. It is a profound moral issue that affects the whole world.” The Philippines was devastated by a typhoon in 2013 that killed more than 7,000 people, and its climate commission hopes the pope’s encyclical will be a “game changer for the international process.” (Interview, Democracy Now)

In an blog from Faith in Public Life, John Gehring predicts that Pope Francis’ toughest audience might well be here in this country. Some conservatives are already reacting, saying that “the pope is part of “the radical green movement that is at its core anti-Christian, anti-people, and anti-progress” (Stephen Moore, a Catholic economist at the Heritage Foundation in Washington).  But, Gehring reminds us, in classic conservative philosophy, conservative means “preserving what is good and being skeptical about the notion of progress at any price. Surely our fragile environment is an inheritance we don’t want to squander, and we’ve already paid too high a price for the progress we’ve made at the expense of our planet. As Pope Francis himself said, the environment is not just a legacy from the past, but a loan for our children.” 

("Can Francis break the US climate change stalemate?" April 7, 2015, 11:05 am | Posted by John Gehring http://www.faithinpubliclife.org)

So we UUs are not alone in wanting to protect our climate and our future, and our future generations.  As he recovers from a serious stroke, the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has just this week urged us to wake up to the critical task at hand: “There’s a revolution that needs to happen and it starts from inside each one of us. We need to wake up and fall in love with the earth.” ("Wake Up to the Revolution", Thich Nhat Hanh, April 6, 2015 http://www.lionsroar.com)

* Fourth Reading

Earth

By Rev. Mark Belletini

This is our earth.

It falls through heaven like a pearl in a glass of plum wine.

There are no other earths that I know of.

There are no other skies that we have mapped.

This is our earth.

The Oneness who gave birth to it

remains nameless.

There was no midwife then

to bring us word of the birth-cry.

We only rejoice that it is.

This is our earth.

Ice caps its head.  Glaciers clasp its feet.

Warm wind, like the breath of a lover,

breathes around its breast.

Mountains thrust up to the clouds, bringing joy.

Storms blow across its shores, bringing fear.

Silvery fish capture sunlight and haul it down

into the deep, as on shore, valleys spread

with ripening fruit.  Cities teem with the

Poor and disenfranchised in the shadow of

golden towers. Children live and also die.

Highways throb.  Monks sit in silence.  Mothers

work. Crickets chirp.  Teachers plan.  Engineers

design.  Fathers write letters.

People marry

with and without the blessings of law.

People cry.

They laugh, and brood, and worry and wait.

This is our earth.

There are no other earths.

Before its wonder, philosophers fall silent.

Before its mystery,

poets admit their words are shadow, not light.

And all the great names religious teachers

have left to us

Ishtar, Shekinah, Terra Mater, Suchness, Wakan Tanka, Gaia

suddenly refuse to announce themselves.

And so we too fall silent,

entering the time where words end

and reality begins.

And so it is up to us, by keeping our sense of interconnectedness through the Seventh Principle in mind, and by taking opportunities like the Commit2Respond’s Climate Justice Month, to become advocates for the earth. The ultimate aim of this month is to raise our own awareness of how precious our world is. To quote the Rev Judy Moores from the UU Church of Davis, California, it is “our ancestral home, our current home, and the only home that we will ever have – a place deserving of reverence, gratitude, wonder, love and care.” (UU Guide to Preach-in).

The Southern Baptist in me feels that this is the time for the Altar Call: asking all of you gathered here in this church today to make a faith commitment to be good stewards of the earth, to teach our children and our grandchildren to be good stewards as well, and to join our fellow spiritual travelers - in all world faiths and none - in spreading the good news - the Gospel – of creation care… while we still can. Can I get an Amen?

Gaye W. Ortiz

4-11-2015

* Readings for Climate Justice Sunday from the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC), Commit2Respond http://www.commit2respond.org

Selma: A Cloud of Witnesses

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 8^th.

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 8^th, 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 7^th 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 7^th, 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