America, the Beautiful
July 4, 2004
First Universalist Church of Yarmouth
Rev. Erik Walker Wikstrom
“Outsiders can destroy airplanes and buildings,
but only we the people have the power to demolish our own ideals.”
--Barbara Kingsolver
Opening Words: “The liberties of our country,
the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all
hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.
We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors:
they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure
and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It
will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation,
enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from
us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them
by the artifices of false and designing men.” ~ Samuel
Adams
Reading: “Nearly every generation faces
grave challenges to the liberties for which so many men and women
have fought--the liberties for which many of our ancestors placed
themselves in peril so that future generations could live in freedom.
Balancing freedom and security is our challenge. Let us heed the
words of Benjamin Franklin engraved on the base of the Statue of
Liberty, ‘They that give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.’
“The ultimate test of democracy is the will to protect the
rights of whomever we deem ‘the other.’ It is what matters
most in a nation struggling to realize the promise of liberty and
justice for all. It is a matter of conscience and faith.”
~ 2004 UUA Statement of Conscience: Civil Liberties
* * *
I don’t always follow this advice, but it’s been said
that you should begin a sermon with a joke. I’m honestly not
sure if this qualifies, but here’s one from Jay Leno. A few
months back he opened his show with the observation that if Iraq
was having difficulty coming up with a Constitution they could borrow
ours. “After all,” he said, “we’re not using
it.”
I know. Some of you are sitting there thinking, “Oh no.
A political sermon.” You’re thinking that church isn’t
the place for politics or, at least, the kind that I usually advocate.
Others, of course, are thinking, “At last! A political sermon,”
believing that these have been too few in a time such as this. Well,
this morning I have the rather unique opportunity to disappoint
everybody!
For those who don’t want politics, you’ll be disappointed
because, yes, this is going to be a political sermon. As I’ve
said before, I agree with Mohandas Gandhi’s famous observation
that those who say religion and politics should not mix do not truly
understand either. “Politics” does not just refer to
abstract laws passed by anonymous “politicians.” Real
people’s real lives are at stake; different policies can have
radically different results. It matters what happens in Washington
(and Augusta, and elsewhere) and if, “the circle of our concern
is wider and deeper that just those here in this place at this time,”
as we say at the Candle Stand each week, then it should matter to
us. There is no realm of life that is not touched by politics in
one way or another, nor is there any realm of life that is foreign
to those who “embrace life.” So if you don’t like
political sermons, I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint
you.
But, on the other hand, if you do like political sermons, if you’re
looking forward to the “explosive” sermon promised in
the week’s UUBuugle, then I’m probably going to disappoint
you, too, because it’s not going to be “that kind”
of political sermon. I’m not going to be bashing anybody,
hurling invectives, or patting myself and those who think like me
on the back for being better than “them,” whoever that
is. I’m not going to be listing the sins of the current administration
(or any other for that matter), although I think that that can and
should be done. But go see Fahrenheit 911 or read Amy Goodman’s
recent book The Exception to the Rulers if that’s
what you want.
Don’t get me wrong, I thought about taking this approach.
There is no question that I think we are living in extremely dangerous
times and that I am really very, very alarmed by what I see happening
in the world and here at home. It concerns me—and I couldn’t
find a word strong enough so I opted for that understatement—it
concerns me that dissent and even honest inquiry is being squelched
by every means available. I came across this quotation recently,
and it expresses my views perfectly:
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President,
or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not
only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the
American public.”
That, by the way, was said by our twenty-sixth President, Theodore
Roosevelt. At times like this I think of a passage from our own
Declaration of Independence that is probably not framed and hanging
on John Ashcroft’s wall:
“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of
these ends [namely, the securing of the rights of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness for its people] it is the right of
the people to alter or to abolish it.”
“My country right or wrong,” “you’re with
us or you’re with them,” that’s not.
There have been things said and done in the name of my country—in
my name—over the past couple of years that literally make
me sick. And there are things that truly frighten me. So I thought
about giving you today the homiletic equivalent of an attack ad,
but there are others who are far more qualified than I who have
already done so.
[As an aside and, maybe, another plug, I went to see Amy Goodman,
host of Democracy Now!, at General Assembly and read her
book before coming home and I highly recommend it. She describes
the proper role of the media as “to go where the silence is
and say something,” and she has most certainly done that over
and over again. She has stories to tell that need to be heard. And
while I haven’t seen Michael Moore’s new film, and while
he may be the left’s answer to Rush Limbaugh, his stuff always
gives you plenty to think about.]
But I decided that that kind of invective has already been hurled
and that I don’t need to do it. Besides, I’m not sure
that that’s really what I want to do from our pulpit, anyway.
You’ve called me to “speak the truth in love,”
and love has a way of getting lost in those diatribes. I think often
of Tich Nhat Hanh’s comment to the American anti-war movement
during the Vietnam War: “You people know everything about
writing protest letters, but nothing about writing love letters.
Until you can write love letters, there will never be peace.”
On September 16th 2001, a mere five days after the planes flew
into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and that Pennsylvania
field, in a sermon that caused a member of our own congregation
to resign after branding me a “traitor” to our country
(it started that early!), I said simply:
“I believe that a working definition of “evil”
could be “whatever distracts us from our essential relatedness.”
In other words, whatever convinces you that I am not your brother;
whatever gets me to think of you as anything less than my kin—that
thing is evil. So even this distinction of “good”
and “evil” can be seen as one of evil’s most
pernicious tools, for it tempts us to think of the evil and the
good as separate from one another.”
I could spend this morning telling us how bad they are. But what,
really, will that accomplish? How will that make anything better?
At GA one of the speakers, after a litany of the issues you or I
could easily name, said, “Am I preaching to the choir? Yes,
I'm preaching to the choir, and what I'm saying to the choir is,
‘get off your buts and sing!’” So that’s
my political sermon for this July 4th: Don’t just sit around
and gripe about it, don’t just get your dander and your blood
pressure up—do something about it.
And I think there are three things each of us should commit ourselves
to doing:
First, make sure we really know what’s going on. It can’t
really be argued anymore that we have a pure, free media; the evidence
is too overwhelming that what we receive in our newspapers and on
the evening news is largely “sanitized for our convenience.”
Even NPR toes the party line a surprising amount of the time. So
listen to Democracy Now!, CounterSpin, and Free
Speech Radio News (all of which can be heard on WMPG or online),
subscribe to Mother Jones, sign up for the automatic updates
from FactCheck.org (a web site that reconciles the claims made in
candidates ads with objective reality). Do what you can to make
sure that you are truly informed, because information is power.
You can’t change what you don’t know about.
Second, regardless of what the worst of the conspiracy theorists
will tell you, despite the pessimists’ and cynics’ worst
predictions, ours is still a government of the people, by the people,
and for the people. There may be entrenched interests with billions
of dollars at their disposal, but we have something even more valuable:
the vote.
Now I can’t—for reasons both legal and philosophical—tell
you for whom you should vote in November. That’s up to you.
But I can tell you—with all of the power of this pulpit—that
you must vote and, what’s more, that I believe it is our obligation
to do all that we can as individuals and as a congregation to see
to it that every woman and man who is eligible to vote does so.
Did you know over 40% of the people who were entitled to vote in
the last presidential election didn’t? Say what you want about
“hanging chads” and activist judges, but the true travesty
of the 2000 election is that nearly half of the people who had a
vote didn’t use it. Some of us, probably; certainly some of
the people we know.
There are those who say that it doesn’t matter, that the
deck is stacked. Others say that the electorate is too apathetic
and jaded—a recent headline in the online parody “newspaper”
The Onion declared that the majority of Americans are undecided
about which candidate to vote against. And then there are those
who say that we don’t have any real choices, that the two
parties are essentially the same, that anyone who’d really
deserve to win doesn’t any real chance of winning. To all
of these I’d say that we can’t announce the death of
democracy until we’ve given it a real try, and that until
all of us are engaged in the process we can’t say we’ve
really given it a try.
And that’s why I want to see us respond to the UUA’s
call to get involved with voter registration. First, see that each
and every one of us is registered to vote. Then, talk with our family
members, our friends, our barbers and mechanics. Take the risk of
bringing it up. Not, let me be clear, to see who they’re going
to vote for, not to try to champion one side against another, but
to see to it that our democracy has a fair chance of really working.
And then I’d like to see us link up in collaboration with
the NAACP, and Peace Action Maine, and other groups that are establishing
voter registration drives. Because the first step in mobilizing
the electorate is registering the electorate.
But there’s a third thing that I think we must do, and it
may even be the most important of the three while being, perhaps,
the most difficult: we need once again to simply love our country.
To believe in it, feel proud in it, for there is much to believe
in and much to make us proud.
We need to find a way to shed our cynicism and once again love
America’s promise, its possibility; its boundless optimism,
its heedless heroism, even its adolescent arrogance. We need to
unabashedly proclaim our love for our land while we reclaim for
ourselves its symbols and stories, corny and co-opted though they
be. This land is our land; this flag is our flag. And by believing
it, we can make it so.
Closing Words: “When I despair, I remember
that all through history the ways of truth and love have always
won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they
can seem invincible, but in the end they always fail. Think of it
always.” ~ Mohandas K. Gandhi
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