The Power and Poverty of Freedom Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray October 11, 2015

Transcription

1 The Power and Poverty of Freedom Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray October 11, 2015 Reading Is This Your Religion? by A. Powell Davies. Our reading this morning is from an essay by Unitarian Minister, A. Powell Davies, who served at the All Souls UU Congregation in Washington, D.C. in the 1940 s and 50 s. We are the consummation of thousands of years of religious history. We are thousands of years that have stripped off superstition and battled with tyranny; thousands of years that struggled to take fear out of religion--to take it right out of human life; thousands of years that have marched, sometimes joyfully, sometimes in agony, toward spiritual emancipation. We are indeed the consummation of something. Yet in this world of blood and sorrow it is scarcely important, hardly worth mentioning, unless in addition we are the beginning of something, unless our religion is new--the religion that has always been new in every prophet who died rather than forsake it; the religion that has been buried over and over again in creeds and rituals and sacred sepulchers and yet has always come to live; the religion that today is new all over the earth, stammering itself into utterance in every language known to humankind. The religion that says freedom!--freedom from ignorance and false belief; freedom from spurious claims and bitter prejudices; freedom to seek the truth, both old and new, and freedom to follow it; freedom from the hates and greeds that divide humankind and spill the blood of every generation; freedom for honest thought, freedom for equal justice; freedom to seek the true, the good and the beautiful with minds unimpaired by cramping dogmas and spirits uncrippled by abject dependence. The religion that says humankind is not divided--except by ignorance and prejudice and hate; the religion that sees humankind naturally one and waiting to be spiritually united; the religion that proclaims an end to all exclusions--and declares a brother and sisterhood unbounded! The religion that knows that we shall never find the fullness of the wonder and the glory of life until we are ready to share it, that we shall never have hearts big enough for the love of God until we have made them big enough for the worldwide love of one another. 1

2 Sermon All this month, we are looking at what it means to be a people of freedom. Last week, we looked specifically at religious freedom and our history as Unitarian Universalists and how our history of persecution as religious liberals and heretics informs the way we guard religious freedom today. We know that religious freedom does not mean a freedom to discriminate against others as is it too frequently being used today. Religious freedom is rather freedom from persecution and imprisonment for one s faith or belief, and freedom from being forced into subservience to a particular faith. But freedom is not just a crucial principle in our religious tradition. It is also a foundational value in the United States. It s also a well-worn word in politics. It is a word capable of invoking soaring pride. It speaks to an ideal we all seek to live and know, but what do we really mean by freedom in the United States? And is it possible that the rhetoric of freedom has actually undermined freedom s power to shape our collective commitment to this crucial condition of life? This is the question I wish to explore today. Let s start with the definition of freedom. Freedom is a state of liberty as opposed to confinement; freedom is the power of self-determination, the ability to control one s own life, it means emancipation, liberation, a state of free will. A major theme of George Orwell s dystopian novel 1984 is the authoritarian government s (known as The Party) use of doublethink. Doublethink, which likely inspired what we call in common language today, doublespeak, is the art of using language in a way that deliberately disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. In the novel, the superstate of Oceania was a world of perpetual war, constant government surveillance and public manipulation. And they were masters of doublespeak. Doublespeak in politics is when powerful, patriotic, even moral language is used but with the underlying meaning of the words being contrary or empty. As a great example, one of the official slogans of the Party was War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. I can not help but think of Orwell, when so many of our recent overseas wars are named for freedom, like Operation Enduring Freedom, and when we use the language of freedom to protect discrimination, the way religious freedom is being misused today, and even the way that so many politicians speak as if a love of freedom lives in their hearts, but do not seemed concerned and will not touch the reality of mass incarceration in the United States. 2

3 The statistic that continues to shock me - and should shock us all - is that the U.S. contains five of the world s population but 25 percent of the world s incarcerated population, meaning one quarter of all the people imprisoned around the world are imprisoned in the U.S. 1 In fact, the United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, with over 2.3 million people behind bars. This is startling. And the US prison population from 1970 to 2005 (a matter of 35 years) grew 700 percent (the actual population in this time only grew 44 percent). This is the reality in what we say is the Land of Liberty. And what the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, and the incredible book by Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, have revealed is that our system, at many levels of municipal, state and federal government, is financially dependent on American s criminalization and imprisonment. In this Land of Liberty, and the Land of the Free, we create financial incentives and fund our governments through criminalizing the population. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of freedom - silent on the issue of mass incarceration, detention and criminalization - instead speaks only of birth control, marriage, health care, guns, taxes and war. What was it that Jesus said about looking at the speck of dust in your brother s eye but failing to notice the log within your own eye? But, before going any further, let s step back and remember that our love of freedom has never rung fully true. There is no idealized past to look back to on this one. The soaring rhetoric of liberty inscribed in our Declaration of Independence, what some call our American credo, that all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness, was written by the slave owning forefather of our country, Thomas Jefferson. And indeed, the document s proclamation of liberty stood in sharp contrast to the undeniable reality of slavery. And even after the brutal Civil War that brought an end to the institution of slavery, the struggle for equality, dignity and freedom continued, continues today. As the African American poet and writer, Langston Hughes, one of America s greatest poets - writing from the 1920 s through the 1960 s - says clearly in his poem Let America Be America Again, we have never been the land of freedom we claim to be, hope to be, dream to be. Hughes writes: 1 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). 3

4 Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above. (It never was America to me.) O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe. (There s never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this homeland of the free. ) Yes, we continue to make progress on many accounts, but there are losses as well. We have not reached the pinnacle of equality; and our present system is found lacking when compared to the soaring rhetoric of freedom that we hear so frequently through our radios and televisions and words of too many of our political leaders. Yet, freedom remains our aspiration. Even if the way it gets trotted out to defend every war and narrow political position undermines and impoverishes its meaning, this aspiration of freedom still has real power to inspire and challenge us. For it is the need and hope and love of freedom that has led human beings across history and into today, to march sometimes joyfully, sometimes in agony, toward full emancipation. So are we as a nation, a people of freedom? And I ask this question intentionally on this Sunday - a day when we mark National Coming Out Day and Indigenous People s Day, and when we must wrestle with the national holiday of Columbus Day - a holiday honoring the colonization of the Americas and the attempted genocide of Native peoples. Are we a people of freedom? Do we even know what freedom means? The Jewish Austrian psychiatrist, Victor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and author of the famous book, Man s Search for Meaning, writes that, Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger 4

5 of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. This is so important, this coupling of freedom and responsibleness. I cannot be free if you are not free. For, as I quoted Nelson Mandela last week, to be free is not merely to cast off one s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. This idea that freedom by itself, alone, has the capacity to degenerate into mere arbitrariness is why our rhetoric of freedom echoes so hollow when it is deployed to defend and protect individual religious preference, personal ideology, or the protection and benefits of privilege. What happens when my understanding of freedom infringes on your freedom? Whose privilege, whose ideology will carry the day? This is where we see the limits, the poverty of freedom if it is not coupled with a sense of relationship. True freedom is knowing that we cannot be free when others are oppressed. Freedom - the power of freedom - is in the call for equity and liberation and justice for all. And this freedom does not exist by itself, or in a vacuum, or as some idealized state. It exists in relationship, arising from how we live in ways that enhance each other s freedom. I opened this service with the words of the African American womanist writer bell hooks who says, The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. She argues that before we can get to freedom, we have got to learn to love, we ve got to choose love. And love is about relationship. It is about the connections we have to each other - to seeing and valuing the ways we are interdependent. Expecting freedom without love, separating freedom from an ethic of relationship and responsibleness, is how we can have such a powerful rhetorical proclamation of the inalienable right to liberty defining a nation that was built on domination, oppression and slavery. It s how today we can talk about liberty in terms of protecting wealth, guns, limiting birth control and protecting the right to discriminate against GLBTQ people and carry out wars in the name of freedom, all the while we incarcerate more people than we have ever done in history, all the while one out of every 32 Americans is under the control of the criminal justice system, either in prison or on parole or probation, this even as the crime rate has significantly declined over the last 30 years. It is because we look at freedom as an individual thing - separate from relationship, separate from our responsibilities to each other, separate from an ethic of love. 5

6 As religious people, we are a people of freedom, committed to religious freedom - but that commitment cannot be separated from the call to love one another. This is the beauty and power of A. Powell Davies words. He begins with the commitment to freedom, and to our history, part of which I shared last week, and the history of people throughout the earth who have battled against tyranny, and fear, but then he immediately links that religious freedom, the freedom to seek the truth, to a commitment to justice and to the love of one another. In his words, The religion that says freedom!--...freedom from the hates and greeds that divide humankind and spill the blood of every generation; freedom for honest thought, freedom for equal justice;...the religion that says humankind is not divided--except by ignorance and prejudice and hate; the religion that sees humankind naturally one...that proclaims an end to all exclusions--and declares a brother and sisterhood unbounded! Just as bell hooks calls us to choose love so that we can move to freedom, Davies goes from freedom right to love. He cannot talk about freedom without naming the prejudices and greeds and hate, the injustice and violence that prevents freedom from being fully realized. And he too cannot talk of freedom without talking about making our hearts big enough so that we can choose love. In one of the most precise and beautiful articulations of the challenge and the aspiration of the religious life he writes, The religion that knows that we shall never have hearts big enough for the love of God until we have made them big enough for the worldwide love of one another. When we choose love, we move toward freedom, we move toward God, toward beauty, toward our highest aspirations, toward the fullness of what lives within us. When we choose love, we begin to be the people of freedom, the people we aspire to be - the people we can be. Langston Hughes reminds us that still this truth is possible: O, let America be America again The land that never has been yet And yet must be the land where every man is free. The land that s mine the poor man s, Indian s, Negro s, ME Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again. 6

7 O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath America will be! May it be so - dear Langston, dear poet, dear prophet. 7