…Or Perish Together as Fools

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preached at the First Parish in Cambridge, Unitarian Universalist, June 28, 2015

I have both the great fortune and the great misfortune of being in First Parish’s pulpit this morning. I have the great fortune because this has been a historic week in which we have seen the arc of the moral universe bend more than slightly towards justice. The Supreme Court voted to legalize same sex marriage throughout the country. In an instant same sex marriage went from being legal in some states to being legal in all states. We here at First Parish have a right to feel both joyful and proud of this moment. We should feel joyful because our cherished belief that society must recognize the inherent worth and dignity of all people has come more than a step closer to being a reality. We should feel proud because this congregation has been a pioneer in the struggle for same sex marriage and the rights of the BGLTQI community for not years but decades. More than ten years ago congregants Susan Shepherd and Marcia Hams were the first lesbian couple in the state of Massachusetts, and the country, to obtain a marriage license after this state legalized same sex marriage. Their marriage license was issued by then Cambridge City Clerk Margaret Drury, also a member of our church.

The legalization of same sex marriage is not only thing we have to celebrate this morning. The horrific terrorist attack on Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina has prompted states across the South to reconsider the display of Confederate flags. This symbol of white supremacy may finally be consigned to the museum. Elsewhere in the South serious conversations are taking place about what it means to have streets named after the white slaveholders who rose up in arms against the federal government to preserve slavery. What does it mean that in Tennessee there are more than thirty public monuments to the slave trader, Confederate general, and leader of the Ku Klux Klan Nathan Forrester? What does it mean that there no public monuments to First South Carolina Volunteer Infantry? The regiment was the first in the Union Army to enlist black men.

The victory of same sex marriage and seriousness of the national conversation about the significance of symbols of the Confederacy prompted one of my Facebook friends to observe, “It’s a horrible week to be a racist homophobe.” And so, I have the great fortune of being with you this celebratory Sunday when find ourselves at one of the inflection points of history.

But I also have the misfortune of being with you the Sunday after our senior minister announced his resignation. If you are anything like me I imagine that most of you were shocked by Fred’s decision. Someone told me that when they first heard that Fred was resigning they thought it was an April Fools joke. And so, I know that there is a lot of confusion and that there are a lot of questions out there this morning about what is going to happen next. I know that our Standing Committee, Sue Phillips, the District Executive for the Massachusetts Bay District of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and Fred are all working together to ensure a smooth transition. We will have an interim minister starting in October. But more important than that is the fact that our work as a congregation will continue even without Fred. Our work on racial justice and our growth as a multiracial and multicultural community will continue. Our work fighting climate change will continue. Our work on rights for the GLBQTI community will continue. All of the important social service work that takes place in our buildings will continue. I joined this congregation because its vision is bigger than any of its ministers. Fred has been an important part of that vision and he has carried a lot of it. We should mourn his departure. But we should be confident that work of this congregation will continue.

In the spirit of continuing, we now turn to the text for this morning. It comes from Martin King. It is a phrase he said often and included in his last sermon “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” He delivered it March 31, 1968 at the National Cathedral. It was the last Sunday morning sermon that he ever gave. On the last Sunday of his life King warned us that we as a human species had two choices, “We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools.” Forty seven years after King’s death we are still stuck with those two choices. This is a celebratory Sunday. On a morning like this we can almost imagine ourselves on the mountain top with King gazing into the promised land. But if we are honest then we will admit that the promised land still lies off in the hazy distance. We are very much at risk of perishing together as fools.

We may stand in a moment of national grace but we as a human species are on the brink of an existential crisis. If we cannot use the week’s miraculous moments to help us put aside our petty, willful, self-blinding, differences then there will remain little hope for future generations. We have to learn to finally unite across race, class, sexual orientation, and other human divisor to confront the fact that we are ruining the planet and with it our species long term chances at survival.

Now, I could provide you with a lot of data to back-up this assertion. I could talk about the gathering terror of climate change. I could mention the frightening rate that animal species are going extinct. That the polar ice caps are melting. That the sea level is rising. That fresh water is becoming ever scarcer. That the deserts are expanding. That forests are shrinking. I could mention that these patterns are accelerating. But we are a conscientious congregation. I suspect that you know all of that.

So here is the question we are confronted with: How can we learn to unite so that we can overcome the human created threat of extinction? This is fundamentally a religious question. It has to do with what binds us together. Are we humans more united by petty spite or by the crisis that threatens our continued existence of this planet? What must we do to recognize that, as William Ellery Channing described us, we are all members of the great family of all souls?

I could pretend that I have the precise answers to these questions. I do not. I struggle with them mightily. This week has reminded me that their answers are as much a matter of grace as they are individual human agency. Grace is a word that has been bandied about a lot this week. It was the keystone of President Obama’s eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, senior minister of Mother Emmanuel Church. President Obama said, “As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind.”

Grace is usually understood as a gift from God. As President Obama put it, “According to the Christian tradition, grace is not earned. Grace is not merited. It’s not something we deserve. Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings.” Unitarian Universalist minister Marilyn Sewell put it slightly more humanist terms when she preached, “What we have by grace. Grace cannot be earned. It is not deserved. It something freely given, with no price attached.”

Grace for us as individuals shows up as the chance encounters that shift our lives. Grace is the soft rain, the aromatic flower, the glistening refracted sidewalk, the unexpected blue stone, that prompts a subtle shift in perspective, a pronounced change of mood. Grace is that one time you went a party, even when you didn’t feel like it, and met someone, if only for an evening, who reshaped your life. Grace is the smile of an infant that opens the visitas of parenthood. Grace is those extraordinary moments when we respond to the universe around us and recognize that if we are not perish together like fools then everything must change.

Grace for our society is different. It is the unanticipated and unforeseen events that open up the possibility of social transformation. It is Morris Brown leaving the white controlled Methodist church in Charleston, South Carolina to found the African Methodist Episcopal church, a denomination that has struggled for racial justice for two centuries. It is the transformation of the Civil War from a war to preserve the white man’s union to a war to abolish slavery. It is the great senator from Massachusetts Charles Sumner, whose statute sits just outside our sanctuary, calling for Reconstruction. He invoked the words of the Declaration of Independence and demanded “now the moment has come when these vows must be fulfilled to the letter.” It is Rosa Parks sitting down and starting the Montgomery Bus boycott. It is the transmutation of the assassinations of Jimmy Lee Jackson, James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo into the Voting Rights Act. It is Stonewall sparking the movement for liberation that just brought us same sex marriage. It is Bree Newsome scaling the flagpole outside of the South Carolina State House and tearing down the Confederate battle flag.

There is a secret to this kind of grace, something about it that we often forget. It takes preparation. This might seem like a contradictory statement. It brings about a question. If social grace is the unanticipated and unforeseen how can we prepare for it? My answer: social grace brings hoped for social change. The keyword in this answer is hope. Hope is the belief that our human nature contains within it the possibility of change for the better. That no matter how drear, oppressive, cruel, or unbearable the world is things can be better because our human actions can make a difference. That we can, to invoke Martin King, make a way out of no way. Hope leads us to diligently prepare for moments where grace can erupt and seize upon them as soon as they do. A tragedy may occur but it can be shifted to grace.

Think about the events in Charleston, South Carolina over the last couple of weeks. There was a white supremacist act of terror that took the lives of nine people. Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons, Sr., Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson were murdered. They were not killed just anywhere. They did not die in a shopping mall, a McDonalds, or an elementary school. They were gunned down in Mother Emmanuel Church, the founding congregation of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination.

An act of terror transformed into a moment of grace. Why? Because the congregation had been hoping, struggling, working, for that grace for almost two hundred years. It had helped it emerge before. It was a symbol for hope, for grace, for the truth that black lives matter. And so because the tragedy took place within its sanctified walls grace broke forth.

Now, I said earlier that the text for today’s sermon was “We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools.” I should apologize for the dated gendered language. But more than that I should admit that so far I have been talking like we human may yet recognize each as members of the same family. That the danger of perishing together as fools is not a grave threat. But it is.

When I conceived of this sermon my intention had been to preach about the difficulty of doing something about the climate crisis. I was going to admit to you that a couple of years ago I made a resolution. I was going to devote an hour a week to doing something about climate change. It was a modest goal. One I thought I could easily accomplish. All it meant was that I needed to set aside thirty minutes twice a week. But I soon faltered. Why? Because I constantly got caught up in the crises of the moment. Climate change is a slow burning issue. There is always something more pressing. Last summer I planned to do a series of sermons on religion and climate change. Michael Brown was murdered in Ferguson. Violence and instability in Central America prompted a massive influx of immigrant children. I spent my time preaching about racial, not environmental, justice.

So, I was going to talk with you about how the constant horrors we inflict upon each other gets in the way of us doing what we need to do to survive as a species. I was going to talk with you about my own despair and my own hope. I was going to confess my own paralysis and ineptitude. But grace got in the way. The events of the week reminded me of two things. First, any attempt at social change requires the social. My own futile attempts committing to work on climate change failed because I attempted to engage in the work by myself. I didn’t do it as part of a community. There was no one to encourage me. No one to hold me accountable. And, second, something about the recent events caused me to remember that white supremacy does not just rest in symbols or in acts of violence. It is about the systematic exploitation of black and brown bodies to produce wealth, wealth held primarily by white men. I also recalled that the symbols of hate can change. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s did not march with the flags of the Confederacy. They marched with the American flag.

It was my re-reading W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Black Reconstruction in America” that prompted this recollection. Du Bois’s text is probably the greatest work of American history ever written. In it he describes the formula for white supremacy. It is a system of racialized capitalism. The formula runs the exploitation of brown and black bodies plus the despoliation of the natural resources of the planet equals the foundation of white wealth. Let me say that again, the exploitation of brown and black bodies plus the despoliation of the natural resources of the planet equals the foundation of white wealth. As Du Bois put it, “the South built… an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected on cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture.”

Re-reading Du Bois in the midst of both national tragedy and national grace helped me to listen to the words of President Obama’s eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, “As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind.” It helped me to see that I had been blind to the links between the violence inflicted upon on black and brown bodies and the violence inflicted on the earth. Slavery exploited and destroyed black bodies. Slavery exploited and destroyed the natural resources of the South. If we are not going to perish together as fools then everything must change. We have to move beyond racialized capitalism. For that change to happen we need to figure out how to prepare for grace so that we can seize the unforeseen and unanticipated. And that is something we cannot do alone.

Before I conclude my sermon I want to give you a moment to think about how you can prepare for grace. And after that moment, I invite you, if you are comfortable, to turn to someone sitting near you and share with them what you can do. It can be something simple. It can be something more complicated. It does not matter. And it does not matter if you cannot think of something. You can listen. We have more wisdom together than we do alone. It is partially by sharing our wisdom that we can prepare for grace. I am going to ring this bell three times. The first time I ring it I invite you to sit in silence and think about how you can prepare for grace. The second time I ring it I invite you, if you are comfortable, to find someone to share with. The third time I ring it will be to call us back together. When I do there will an opportunity for a few you, if you wish, to share.

One thing that I plan to do to help prepare the way for grace is remember that white supremacy is a system of racialized capitalism. When I preach about ending racism I will remember to link racism to the exploitation the environment. When preach about climate change I will remember to link it to the exploitation of brown and black bodies. Is there anyone else who would like to share?

May the words we have spoken together help us prepare the way for grace. Some Sunday may this pulpit be able to declaim about the grace that helped us to change everything that must change. Some Sunday may we celebrate from this pulpit an end to the exploitation of black and brown bodies and an end to the exploitation of the earth. Some Sunday may we celebrate all of that grace as we celebrate the victory of same sex marriage today.

Amen, Aché, and Blessed Be.

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