A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane D. Teichert
Paint Branch Unitarian Universalist Church
January 17, 2010
The sermon must begin now, but already this morning so many images are in our minds and so many feelings in our hearts– from the music, from the stories, and from the fact that on this day we honor a great leader who was cut down when there was still so much more for him to do–
Images of slave folks courageously escaping to freedom, free folks black and white braving risks to help them get there
Images of small children in a fierce storm boldly holding the house down as the wind threatens to lift it up
And images from these past few days: not of a storm, but of an earthquake, in which houses, cathedrals, hospitals, embassies, buildings of all kinds were not lifted up, but crushed– tens of thousands killed and wounded, millions hungry, thirsty and homeless.
And, too, here at home, images of the past year since the inauguration of our first African-American (actually, first bi-racial) president. Images of tea parties, rancor in Congress, democracy-destroying filibusters, astounding foreclosure rates—millions of families losing their homes—according to the NY Times, 2 million in 2009 and a projected 2.4 million more this year. And of a rescued economy no longer free-falling, continued suicide bombings (not yet successful in North America), as well as relative calm in Iraq; images of successful grassroots organizing for immigration reform, progress in re-regulating banks, environmental exposures, and food and drug standards; and at least some reforms likely of our sick health care system.
And, finally, images now receding from one year ago of joyous celebrations of that inauguration, and images even vaguer now of the year leading up to the election when people coming together—young and old, black and white, Latino, Asian— in a campaign that succeeded in electing Barack Hussein Obama, in some measure because it did bring people together, in one-on-one conversations, to share personal stories and hopes for change, through organized door-to-door canvassing and informally at the water cooler or coffee machine at work, on long distance phone calls with family or friends, sharing You Tube musical creations, and in email exchanges — so many images and feelings already this morning, many of them mixed… perhaps it would be best if I just stood here quietly for a while and said nothing, absolutely nothing.
In the silence we might gather the images and feelings together, to be reminded of them like a slide show in our heart’s eye, images and feelings appearing and disappearing, reappearing, leading us each into our own reflections…
So let us allow a reprise of the choir’s anthem [“Follow the Drinking Gourd” arranged by John Horman] to give us the space for reflecting. The anthem will be sung in four sections, interspersed through the sermon. Thank you so much to the choir and Music Director David Chapman for indulging me in this way this morning.
Slavery days were terrible times, times that stained our nation and left a legacy of prejudice, guilt, hatred, racism, internalized racism, violence, addictions, obvious racial bias in prison sentences and in many public and private institutions—it’s a legacy that is real, still, even today, of course, and it’s a history we share with Haiti, a former brutal slave colony under the French.
Let us recall our country’s original sin of slavery in these words by the Inauguration poet Elizabeth Alexander, from her “Little Slave Narrative #1: Master”
He would order the women to pull up their clothes
"in Alabama style," as he called it. He would whip them
for not complying. He taught bloodhounds
to chase down negro boys, hence the expression
"hell-hounds on my trail. He was fond of peach brand,
Put ads in the paper: Search high, search low
for my runaway Isaac, my runaway Joe,
his right cheek scarred, occasioned by buckshot,
runaway Ben Fox, very black, chunky made,
two hundred dollars live, and if dead,
bring his dead body, so I may look at it.
And what of our nation? How did it make its way to safety from that evil? The story of the Underground Railroad of the drinking gourd song speaks powerfully to Americans, of whatever race or ethnicity. I believe all American children need to know that story.
Being new to this area, I used the Internet to learn about that story here, to see if the Underground Railroad operated in this part of Maryland. The Maryland Historical Society has an interactive, informative website called Pathways to Freedom. Statements such as “Baltimore is thought to have been a major station…” suggest that slaves moving from the south through Washington and north may have passed through near here. The only related historic site in Prince George’s County listed is a jail where fugitive slaves and people who tried to help them were imprisoned, but in Montgomery County there are numerous sites, mostly in Sandy Spring and associated with the Quakers, but also in Rockville and Bethesda, as you may know.
From the documented history of the Underground Railroad, we know that un-told numbers of slaves freed themselves from bondage, by their own courage and intelligence-they weren’t all too afraid. Most of the conductors were probably black people, but we know that some white folks got involved; they weren’t all bigots and slaveholders. And we know that the Abolition movement, which included many Unitarian and Universalist ministers and lay people, played a role too.
But, sadly, non-violent resistance and organizing alone did not bring about an end to the slave system. The Civil War was nearly over when President Abraham Lincoln gave his second Inaugural Address. Six hundred thousand or more people had already been killed or died from injuries, ten times as many as are feared dead in Haiti.
Let us hear a few passages of that address:
“Both [sides of the conflict] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other…The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.”
… we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came…”
I want to return to the Biblical imagery in Lincoln’s address, but first, if we’re tracing our country’s “drinking gourds” along the way from the offense of slavery to the election and inauguration of its first African American president, we have to laud the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 60’s, especially on this holiday honoring its “drum major for freedom,” as he called himself.
We can’t very well tell its whole story this morning! One story will suffice, that of John Lewis, whose childhood memory I re-enacted with the children this morning. The story is in the Prologue to his compelling autobiography, Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, published in 1998.
Born in 1940, Lewis grew up in rural Alabama, where that memory was made and where much of his family still lives. They were a poor but close family, not very worldlywise. He tells about hearing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr on the family radio when he was in high school. His family did not know about King. It excited Lewis and moved him like nothing else. He was inspired and wanted to be like King. The only way he could go to colleage was to go to a free seminary in Nashville,Tennesse. At only eighteen years of age, Lewis got involved in leading the first non-violent sit-ins, first in Nashville, and then elsewhere—amazing stories of faith, organization, and sheer bravery. He played important roles in many of the movement’s key events. At age 23, he shared the podium with King at the 1963 March on Washington.
In 1964, he led the first March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama which was planned to protest the shooting by police and death of a young black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson. The march was brutally attacked by police after only six blocks, which led King to call for white clergy support from around the country for a second march from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965. Among those who heeded King’s call were many Unitarian Universalist ministers and lay people, including your minister, Rev. David Osborn, and ten of you, I’m told! Was anyone here this morning among those ten? (please raise your hands) or helped out, perhaps taking care of the children of those who went? Like the first march, the second one was turned around. Later that evening UU minister James Reeb was killed by white citizens, causing a national outcry which brought 6000 people to Alabama for a third and ultimately successful march to Montgomery, making it possible for President Lyndon Johnson to move the Voting Rights Act through Congress later that year.
But I digressed. Back to John Lewis’ story, in 1981 he was elected to Atlanta City Council and then in 1986 to Congress, where he has served ever since. His colleagues there refer to him as “the conscience of Congress.”
In fact, Congressman John Lewis was one of the first black leaders to break with his friend Senator Hillary Clinton. His change of heart came because of overwhelming support for Obama in his Congressional district. “Something’s happening in America, something some of us did not see coming,” Lewis said in the February before the election. “Barack Obama has tapped into something that is extraordinary. It’s a movement. It’s a spiritual event. It’s amazing what’s happening.” (The Atlanta JournalConstitution, 02/27/08)
In his second Inaugural Address, President Lincoln referred to American slavery as “an offense.” In the Biblical view, “offenses need come” or in other words they are to be expected (it’s the human condition to be imperfect) but “woe to the one who causes the offense.” Lincoln thought the horror of the Civil War was the “woe” to the offending nation for the evil of slavery.
We don’t have to believe in that punitive kind of God to find it helpful to consider our times in those term. If you were to use Lincoln’s Biblical imagery, what “offenses” do you see as causes of the “woes” the earth and the global economy face today? Climatechange denial and inaction? Greed and de-regulation in the American financial sector ?
Our endemic energy consumption?
To strike a Biblical note like Lincoln, “woe” has befallen us for these offenses! People are losing homes and jobs, many lost their investments. Global warming looms— images of Haiti today may be the images of global change tomorrow, hitting hardest the poor among us.
These are major storms, with fierce howling winds, and we can hardly believe it! In fact, when Georgia Congressman John Lewis tells his childhood story about surviving a storm (rre-enacted earlier in today’s service with the children), he says at first they could hardly believe it.
Lewis remembers being a small child of four on a day that turned stormy. He and his many cousins had been playing outside when the wind came up. His aunt called them all inside, into her small one-room wooden house. The storm was whipping around, the trees swaying, sheets of rain beating on the tin roof, and everyone was scared. Suddenly the wind was so fierce the house began to sway, the floor boards began to bend, and the corner of the room started lifting up!
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he writes. “None of us could. This storm was actually pulling the house toward the sky. With us inside it.”
His aunt told the fearful children to clasp hands and line up. They did, and then she led them, holding hands, toward the corner of the room that was rising. And from there they walked, all together, to the next corner the wind was lifting, and from there to wherever the wind went next. Until the storm abated.
“Fifteen children walking with the wind,” he says, “holding that trembling house down with the weight of our small bodies.” (p. 12).
“More than a half a century has passed since that day,” Lewis reflects in his 1998 autobiography, “and it has struck me more than once over those many years that our society is not unlike the children in that house, rocked again and again by the winds of one storm or another, the walls around us seeming at times as if they might fly apart. “It seemed that way in the 1960s,” he continues, “at the height of the civil rights movement, when America itself felt as if it might burst at the seams—so much tension, so many storms. But the people of conscience never left the house. They never ran away. They stayed, they came together and they did the best they could, clasping hands and moving toward the corner of the house that was the weakest…”
“Children holding hands, walking with the wind. That is America to me—not just the movement for civil rights but the endless struggle to respond with decency, dignity and a sense of brotherhood to all the challenges that face us as a nation, as a whole.” (p. 13)
The nation that our president swore to lead a year ago faces great challenges. The global economy and the global environment are in trouble. Do we respond with fear, by hunkering down, getting what we can, each with our own kind? Or do we respond with decency, dignity and care for our sisters and brothers worldwide?
We have a president who says he wants to lead us through the storm. We need to keep up the organizing to hold him to his words. Let us hold hands with him and each other, to walk together to where the weight of our bodies, our principles, our compassion, our anger, our wisdom and—especially—our hope can hold the place down, keep the chaos at bay, and send the howling wind far, far away… securing a future for the children of the world.
May we be people who never leave the house!
Let us follow the drinking gourd.