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Reclaiming the ForgottenA Sermon offered by Rev. Wayne B. Arnason INTRODUCTION TO CANDLE LIGHTING: “The Destiny of our Democracy” It has been an emotional week for all of us, in our church and in this country. Not since the week following September 11, 2001, have I experienced so many people coming in, calling, or e-mailing us at the church to help process everything that they were feeling. One e-mail I received seemed particularly representative:
In writing back, the first thing that I said to this friend and fellow member of ours is that “you’re not alone”. The encouragement and support of like –minded people is one of the things that brings us to church on this first Sunday after the election, and every Sunday. I was reminded that the community of people who share our feelings is much bigger than our own congregation when I opened another e-mail I received on the day after the election. It was a message for all of us from Rev. Bill Sinkford, the President of our Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations across the country and around the world. Bill titled his letter “The Destiny of our Democracy” and his first words were not words of shock or sorrow but words of pride:
I want to echo those words of pride as we gather on the first Sunday in November. As we began this new church year, Kathleen and I expressed our hope that this would be a year when West Shore would be turned outward towards the larger community, seeking to know where we could serve and make a difference. I am so proud of the ways that we have done that, and particularly how the members of this church have responded to the challenges of this election. The Political Bazaar in early September set the tone and energized us for our GOTV involvement, and the reflections we undertook on the Soul of a Citizen reminded us that this is not only secular and civic work, it is religious work, and that the evangelicals are not the only people of faith who are out there engaging in the electoral process. President Sinkford’s letter continued:
I do too. I would say that there were more West Shore members and friends who gave their time to this election than any since Carl Stokes ran for Mayor of Cleveland. It was exciting to hear our members describe their diverse volunteer experiences with different activist groups and campaigns where they recognized other people they knew from church there with them doing the same thing. It was great to get to know other volunteers beyond our church and in doing so be proud to identify who we were and why we were there. There was a reminder, however, in Bill Sinkford’s Wednesday letter that is worth repeating this morning. He wrote :
Despite the fact that we can be as inclusive politically as we can be theologically, one of the striking experiences of this week for me has been the deep unanimity I have felt among all members of the congregation regarding the Passage of Issue 1, the constitutional amendment about marriage. Regardless of their party affiliation or even their feelings about whether state laws should be changed to permit gay marriage, the expressions of dismay and disgust at the passage of this discriminatory and bigoted amendment have been overwhelming. It is around Issue I that I have heard so much of the grief and so much of the fear about the future being expressed this week by our members. It was tempting to let go of the usual format for this service and simply create space for people to express this morning how they were feeling, because there is a need for that to happen. Late on Wednesday, we decided instead to create a special service that will allow all our members and friends to gather in a different style of worship than we can create in our sanctuary to share both our feelings and our faith. Your order of service has a notice of that special Service of Hope and Healing planned for tomorrow evening at 7 PM. Tamara Lebak will lead the service and Kathleen and I hope you will join us. This morning, we can still speak our fears, our grief and our faith through ritual, in silence and in song. Bill Sinkford ended his letter to all Unitarian Universalists with these words:
With this prayer, we invite any of you who may wish to come forward at this time to silently light a candle of community, of concern, of crisis, of caring, a candle that can be the expression of the feelings and prayers in your heart this week and this morning. As those who wish to light candles come forward, I invite all of us from our seats or as we come forward to join in quietly singing Holly Near’s anthem of affirmation, “Singing for our Lives” #170 in our hymnal. We’ll continue singing quietly, repeating all the verses again if necessary, until all who wish to light a candle have had a chance to do so. READING: On election night this week, Kathleen and I went to sleep relatively early, so when we woke up on Wednesday morning, we went directly to the television set. After a good cry, and a cup of coffee, it was time for spiritual practice. When she doesn’t meditate with me, Kathleen often will sit with the lectionary passage from the Bible for the upcoming week. Those of you who came to West Shore from previous church experiences may remember that many Christian ministers of different denominations base their sermons on a common schedule of Bible passages that are suggested as the theme scriptures for all the various Sundays of the church year. It’s rare that we do that, especially me, and I’m not exactly doing that today, but on Wednesday morning, when Kathleen looked up the lectionary passage for November 7, we felt compelled to offer it this morning as one of our readings. The passage comes from the Gospel of Luke, and it is contained in Luke’s rendition of what we commonly call from Mathew’s Gospel “The Sermon on The Mount”. My new RSV Bible titles this passage “Blessings and Woes”:
We were struck by this passage being chosen for this Sunday for several reasons, and among them was that just a couple of weeks ago, the Friday morning group was reading in Paul Loeb’s book of essays: “The Impossible Will Take a Little Longer”, a wonderful reflection on these very passages by the theologian Walter Wink, in an essay entitled “Jesus and Alinsky”. As a second reading today, let me offer these words from Walter Wink on the passage we have just heard: “Many who have committed their lives to working for change and justice in the world simply dismiss Jesus’ teachings about nonviolence as impractical idealism. And with good reason. “Turn the other cheek” suggests the passive, Christian doormat quality that has made so many Christians cowardly and complicit in the face of injustice. Rather than fostering structural change, such attitudes encourage collaboration with the oppressor… ‘But Jesus never behaved in such ways… His entire ministry is at odds with such a preposterous idea. He is, rather, warning against responding to evil by letting the oppressor set the terms of our opposition… Jesus suggests amplifying an injustice (through a clever and nonviolent response, such as turning the other cheek, removing your shirt and giving it also to the person who has taken your cloak, going the second mile with the person who has forced you to carry their pack for a first mile), all to expose the fundamental wrongness of legalized oppression… ‘To risk confronting the Powers-that-be with such clown-like vulnerability, to affirm at the same time our own humanity and that of those we oppose, to dare to draw the sting of evil by absorbing it – such behavior is unlikely to draw the faint of heart. But to people dispirited by the enormity of the injustices that crush us and the intractability of those in positions of power, Jesus’s words beam hope across the centuries. We need not be afraid. We can assert our human dignity. We can lay claim to the creative possibilities that are still ours, burlesque the injustice of unfair laws, and force evil out of hiding from behind the facade of legitimacy. “
SERMON: The United States of America was deeply divided into two very different cultures, two very different societies. As that division became more and more grave, the plight of poor, the homeless, and the mentally ill was not at the top of any political leader’s agenda. During this time of division and discontent, two very different Unitarians came to a crossroad in their lives. One of them was a man, a minister, who had literally and figuratively lost his voice. In the middle of his life, he had reluctantly given up a ministry that he had loved and in which he had thrived for twenty-five years, all because he no longer had the physical strength to bear the stress of preaching two services each Sunday. At midlife, he felt his career might be prematurely over, and he was not sure what to do next. The second Unitarian at a crossroads during this time was a woman, a teacher, who had struggled with her health for some years and who finally came to a point of breakdown in her late thirties. For five years, this woman was in retreat from the world, part of that time an invalid, part of it regaining her strength and her sense of purpose. For each of these Unitarians, the spirit within them and the world around them was at a crossroads. The e-mail I quoted from earlier this morning from a member of our church used that word in the e-mail’s subject line: the word “Crossroads”. Election years are definitely ones that create that feeling of crossroads. There are two choices – one road goes in one direction, and the other goes a different way. You choose, and you move on. While history tells us that there are these crossroads moments, in the life of a country or the life of an individual, history also reminds us that the crossroads metaphor may not always be the only one that can illuminate where we are standing. Roads have a way of swinging back across each other at new intersections. Sometimes where we are is not a crossroads but a clearing, and somebody has been given the machete and is the first to start clearing the path. But clearing the path may not the only way to make your journey through a jungle. The story I want to tell today is a story of both past and present, a story about our church members and a story about our country, a story of a time when the country was divided and the weakest among us were forgotten, and needed to be reclaimed as part of our body politic and our human family. As you may have already realized, the people whose stories I am going to tell did not reach their crossroads moments in today’s America --- their crossroads came in the second quarter of the 19th century, in the period between 1825 and 1840, five to six generations back from our time. Yet their crossroads speaks to us and speaks to our time in a way that I find both consoling and inspiring following the election season of 2004. Looking at church newsletters from around the country, I saw that most of my colleagues who announced their sermon titles in advance had wisely left the door open for whatever needed to be said on the Sunday after the election. I went a different direction, and decided to commit myself to what has become a tradition for me when I have a chance to preach on the first Sunday in November, the Sunday that follows All Saints Day. I have usually honored the saints of our UU tradition with a sermon that takes up one or more of the great lives who have lived among us. Sometimes they are famous to most of us, like a William Ellery Channing, or a Henry David Thoreau. Sometimes, however, they are not so famous, but almost forgotten spiritual ancestors of ours, ancestors that we need to re-claim, whose lives inspire & encourage. Such is the case today. Most of you have probably never heard of the Rev. Joseph Tuckerman, unless perhaps you are one of those in that profession well-represented among West Shore’s members, the profession of social work. Tuckerman’s place in history is that he is widely acknowledged as the first American social worker, the founder of the profession in this country. He is also the minister who lost his voice and his pulpit in mid-life. Joseph Tuckerman was born into a privileged family of Boston citizens in 1778. His father was a successful grain merchant and a founder of America’s first fire insurance company. He grew up in what was then a new suburb of central Boston, the South End, and followed an expected path of education at Harvard College, leading him into the ministry. His roommate and lifelong best friend at Harvard was William Ellery Channing. The new Rev. Tuckerman was called to his first and only parish settlement in 1801in the rural community of Chelsea, across the river from Boston. He married twice and married well, both times. His first wife Abigail died at only age 28 in 1807. His second wife, Sarah was the daughter of the wealthiest man in Tuckerman’s parish. The two marriages produced ten children, three of whom died in early childhood. Tuckerman’s parish ministry was very successful and uneventful, and it continued for twenty-five years. His efforts to deliver pastoral care, rites of passage and medicines to his far-flung parishioners during the long New England winters weakened his ability to withstand the numerous respiratory infections that were rampant at this time. Reluctantly, he scaled back his preaching role when he could no longer sustain himself for two services on Sunday, and finally, he felt obliged to retire in 1826. During Tuckerman’s quarter century in Chelsea, his home town of Boston had changed a great deal. The completion of the railroad out to the western parts of the state had made it easier for rural folks to migrate to the city in search of work. New immigrant communities from Europe were pouring into the city. Few of these new residents of Boston fit into the social class or theology of the predominant Unitarian churches of the city. They could not afford to buy their pews at church, even though the most progressive churches reserved a few empty pews in the back for those who could not afford their reserved family pew. By 1816 various charitable organizations to deal with social problems were being created both by and outside of the churches. An “Association for Mutual Improvement” was founded by Unitarian congregations to bring religious instruction to the poor in 1822. As the spiritual leader of the increasingly dominant Unitarian faction of churches in the Boston area, Tuckerman’s old friend William Ellery Channing was seeking to create new ways to spread the Unitarian Gospel as widely as possible. The American Unitarian Association was founded in Channing’s study in 1825, beginning only as an organization of individuals, not churches. One of Channing’s first suggestions was that this new Association should sponsor a ministry-at-large among the poor, to bring the church to them if they would not or could not come into the church. Who could serve in this role? Tuckerman’s resignation at Chelsea was perfectly timed. But he knew very little about the poor in Boston. His rural ministry and his upper class background had done little to prepare him for what he would be asked to do. Yet Tuckerman could not accept that his ministry was over at age 48. He accepted his old friend Channing’s invitation to serve, at an annual salary of $600. The situation facing the poor and mentally ill in America during the early 19th century was deplorable. There was no public education and no social safety net of any kind. For those who turned to crime and were caught, prisons were hell-holes. Intially the focus of Tuckerman’s work was religious instruction, although the mission statement of the Association for Mutual Improvement included the charge to “promote any plans of a public nature for improving the condition of society.” Tuckerman began the ministry simply by going down to the docks where Boston’s Fleet Center now stands and talking to people. After three months he had built relationships with fifty families. By the end of the first year he had contact with 170 families. Over the next five years, simply through visiting, talking, and assisting Joseph Tuckerman began to have an impact on the plight of the homeless, the working poor, the mentally ill, the alcoholic, the abandoned and uneducated children, and the prisoners in the city of Boston. All of these distinct social conditions and issues fell within his Ministry at Large. He was the first Unitarian community-based minister, a role to which half the students in UU seminaries today now aspire. He is seen as the founder of the profession of social work because he did not believe his mission to be only evangelical, but also practical. He offered concrete suggestions and a means of personal accountability for people to be able to improve their lives. He wrote compelling quarterly reports that attracted the attention of his powerful colleagues and friends in government and in the church. All of his work was based in a liberal theological perspective that believed that all people were children of God, that poverty and mental illness was not a punishment from God, that everyone could be educated, and that the church should serve all the people, and not just an elect few. It was a minority view during Tuckerman’s lifetime, and although it has become predominant in secular culture today, the full implications of this view of human nature have yet to be fulfilled in our society and still require advocacy and defense. Very interesting to me in light of present day debates about government support for faith-based social services is that Tuckerman believed that government should stay out of social service work. He believed that the spiritual and moral causes of poverty had to be addressed and that the churches were best equipped to do that. He would be in good company with today’s most conservative Republicans who would limit government’s role to grant funding for private and faith-based social service agencies. Joseph Tuckerman’s health problems finally caught up with him and he had to turn over most of his ministry to two new at-large ministry colleagues during the mid-1830’s. He became an evangelist for his model of community ministry and traveled in American and Europe to promote it. He died in 1840 in Cuba, where he had gone seeking a climate that would improve his health. As Tuckerman came to the end of his life, the other Unitarian ancestor I want to tell you about today was arriving at her crossroads. She was Dorothea Dix, widely recognized as the19th century’s foremost crusader for the mentally ill. Although Dix was 24 years younger than Tuckerman and her most significant life’s work was accomplished following his death, she knew and was inspired by Tuckerman and their two lives have some important links and contrasts. Both of them were profoundly influenced by William Ellery Channing’s vision of liberal Christianity and principles of the Unitarian movement which he articulated and which we embody to this day. Dix in fact was enthralled by Channing’s preaching the first time she walked into the Federal Street Church at the age of 21. Her intense compassion attracted her pastor’s attention, and Channing hired her as his children’s tutor. She was virtually a member of the Channing family as his children grew up. As this period of her life came to a close, however, Dorothea Dix suffered her physical and emotional breakdown, one which remains clouded in mystery. How much of it was physical and how much of it a mental illness? Channing arranged for her to recuperate with a friend in England for 18 months. As she recovered, she was asked to return to teaching in a Sunday School Class for women prisoners in the county house of correction. There Dorothea had her first encounter with the insane, who at that time were imprisoned rather than treated. It was commonly believed that the mentally ill had lost their human capacities and they were often treated worse than animals. This encounter was the beginning of Dorothea Dix’s calling. Unlike Tuckerman, however, she was not to focus her personal ministry on direct service, but instead to changing social policy. She was not alone in her effort. She realized that she had an ally in Horace Mann, a Unitarian lawyer and legislator who had already been instrumental in creating the first distinct hospital for the mentally ill in Massachusetts. When Mann went on to serve in Congress, Dix became the primary advocate in the state for the mentally ill. In 1843 Dix was asked to make a survey of all the jails and almshouses in the state to chronicle the conditions of the mentally ill. Her report, entitled “Memorial” shocked legislators and citizens in Massachusetts who did not realize treatment for the insane was so deplorable. The money available for the hospital Mann founded was increased, and Dorothea Dix had discovered a political methodology, which would become her life’s work. For the next twenty years, she moved from state to state with letters of introduction and commendation addressed to key state legislators. She would offer to conduct a similar survey of the conditions for the mentally ill in the state, and would publish the results. She visited every state east of Colorado during her career, and the creation of thirty hospitals for the treatment of the mentally ill was directly attributable to her efforts. She was most proud of the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum, and she actually lived there during her last years. Given Tuckerman’s aversion to excessive government involvement in relief for the poor and the mentally ill, it is striking that Dix’s one major defeat was a bill she advocated for in Congress that would provide permanent funding for mental health from the federal level. President Franklin Pierce killed the bill when it got to his desk because he feared it would encourage the states to seek more and more funding from the federal government for social services. Dorothea Dix was an extraordinarily skilful political operative and public speaker, but she operated in a world in which women were forbidden to participate in the political process. She was so successful because she kept a low public profile, worked behind the scenes, and stayed focused on her one issue. She never spoke out about slavery and never used her political capital and reputation among legislators to advocate for any other causes. I hold up these two lives for us to reclaim today precisely because the crossroads of an election requires us to look both forward and behind. I hold them up because these lives remind us of what the principles and purposes of the free church call us to do politically, before elections and after elections. On the list of the key issues in this election, how often , if ever, did you hear the issues of poverty, homelessness, and mental illness brought to the fore? Maybe in John Edwards “Two Americas” speech during the primary season, but that was about all. These were truly the forgotten people of this election campaign. One of the things that disappoints and angers me in the analysis of the results of this election is the media’s characterization of “moral values” as a significant concern for many voters, with those two words “moral values” being used as code for two social policy issues – abortion and gay marriage – that have been defined by the religious right and accepted by the media and the political parties as constituting the moral values agenda facing America in the next four years. As important as those issues are, they do not encompass the moral concerns of people of faith. The moral values agenda for the next four years must include the uplifting of the poor and the obscenity of the widening gap between the very rich and the underclass poor. The moral values agenda for the next four years must include the under funding of programs for the homeless, and the mentally ill, and the absurdity of working full time for the federal minimum wage and still being unable to afford a place to live. The moral values agenda for the next four years must include the full funding of the No Child Left Act, and the betrayal by legislators of their responsibility for fair funding for public schools. Many different political and religious leaders have articulated the wisdom that the true test of the moral integrity of any democratic society is how justly it deals with the most vulnerable and least powerful among us. We need to be out there proclaiming to the country that there is more than one kind of churchgoer in America. We all have a role to play individually through our political involvements and contributions in the uphill battle to move forward a wide variety of progressive issues that will not have sympathetic ears within the Administration or the next Congress. But as a Church, we have a special responsibility to advocate strongly for those who are the most vulnerable and the most oppressed within our society. We have a responsibility to do that through our own programs and we have a responsibility to join in interfaith coalitions that amplify our voice and that help us create a united religious voice that crosses denominational divisions. Sometimes that interfaith cooperation requires some compromises and some focus, as Dorothea Dix’s life reminds us. So we will continue to recognize the special role we have and the unique voice Unitarian Universalism brings for protection of the legal rights of all couples who wish to marry, but we will also work on issues of poverty and homelessness and racism with any church or minister who shares those concerns and wants to work with us. These issues are too important, and our debt to our ancestors is too great, for us to fade from this fight. When we look to all the saints of our liberal religious tradition, we are reminded again and again that beyond any crossroads we may arrive at, the road does continue on. We find in the lives of a Dix or a Tuckerman an affirmation of the truth spoken by Martin Luther King , that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This church will continue to walk the road that comprises that moral arc, and we will walk it together. Amen. Let’s conclude now by singing the traditional hymn of the season of all saints. Notice that the choir will offer the third verse on their own. BENEDICTION
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