Resistance and Transformation: Taking Politics Public Unitarian Coastal Fellowship April 30, 2017 Rev. Sally B. White 1

Transcription

1 April 30, Resistance and Transformation: Taking Politics Public. In 1967, a public, interfaith worship service decrying the Vietnam War and the draft was held in a Unitarian Universalist Church. Some who attended the service were deeply grateful. Some members of the congregation were deeply angered, and vocal in their criticism. Political issues and social action can be divisive in congregations. How do we navigate the difficult terrain where public opinion meets free religion? Todays is the fourth in a series of sermons exploring Unitarian Universalist Social justice history. Reading: Words from a sermon preached in 1967 by Harvard graduate student Michael Ferber: There is a great tradition within the church and synagogue which has always struggled against the conservative and worldly forces that have always been in control. It is a radical tradition, a tradition of urgent impulse to go to the root of the religious dimension of human life. This tradition in modern times has tried to recall us to the best ways of living our lives: the way of love and compassion, the way of justice and respect, the way of facing other people as human beings and not as abstract representatives of something alien and evil. It tries to recall us to the reality behind religious ceremony and symbolism, and it will change the ceremony and symbolism when the reality changes... [ Sermon: On Monday evening, October 16, 1967, several hundred people gathered in the sanctuary of the Arlington Street Church, Unitarian Universalist, in

2 2 Boston. There, Arlington Street s minister, the Rev. Jack Mendelsohn, joined three other prominent ministers, a non-religious philosophy professor, and a group of students and seminarians in an interfaith worship service to protest the Vietnam War and the draft. Twenty-three-year-old Michael Ferber preached the sermon, titled A Time to Say No. In that sermon, he commented on the clergymen (for they were all men) who were present, observing that They know better than we do the long and bloody history of evils committed in the name of religion, the long history of compromise and subservience to political power, the long history of theological hairsplitting and the burning of heretics, and they feel more deeply than we do the hypocrisy of Sunday (or Saturday) morning. Perhaps the things that made some of us leave the church are the very things that made some of them become ministers, priests, and rabbis, the very things that bring them here today. Many of them will anger their superiors or their congregations by being here but they are here anyway. [ As the service unfolded, two hundred eighty young men of draft age came forward and laid down their draft cards, forfeiting their student immunity to the draft and inviting arrest for violating the draft law. The cards were collected and sent to the United States Justice department, so that the names of all who participated were known. In addition, sixty young men placed their draft cards in a single container and set fire to them from a single candle.

3 3 On the Sunday after that service, October , Rev. Jack Mendelsohn in his sermon discussed with his congregation the Monday night interfaith service and its repercussions. He quoted two letters he had received during the week. One was from a non-member, who wrote, I attended the service in your church on Monday I am one of the people who haven t been to church in years. I don t know whether I can express the feeling that I have that at that time, in that place something happened that was sacred in any sense of the word. The hymns, the prayers, the responsive readings, the speakers and most of all, the restrained courage of the young men resisting the draft contributed to an event that I shall never forget. Thank you for so much. The second letter was from a member, who wrote, I have no further interest in supporting the Arlington Street Church when you as the leader have apparently permitted and encouraged the burning of draft cards on the altar. It is unforgivable in my estimation. I think you will find many old friends feel this way. Please remove my name from the mailings. [quoted in Resistance and Transformation, Workshop 10, pp ]. That interfaith service was a service of Resistance, in the great tradition Michael Ferber named: the religious tradition that tries to recall us to the best ways of living our lives; the radical tradition of love and compassion, of justice and respect, of facing other people as human beings and not as abstract representatives of something alien and evil.

4 4 And it was a service of Disruption; a service that did not conform to the way we usually do things; a service that rattled and challenged and disturbed people within the congregation; that disrupted the status quo and business as usual; that frightened and frankly angered some people. The story of this Resistance service, as it was called, is part of our Unitarian Universalist social justice history, told in the adult religious education curriculum called Resistance and Transformation which we offered here as a class a couple of years ago [in 2015]. Knowing this history helps us to understand who we are as Unitarian Universalists in today s world, and how we have come to be this way. Knowing this history can strengthen and support us as a community of Resistance, struggling against those conservative and worldly forces that control, that promote an agenda of inequality and injustice; of domination and exploitation. And knowing this history can help us to understand and to disrupt deeply-rooted patterns of fear, of complacency, of avoidance or complicity that lead us to value what is comfortable or comforting more than what is transformative, or worldchanging. Rev. Mendelsohn, in his sermon, recognized and named the tension that he knew would follow in the wake of the Resistance service; in the wake of the decision to commit the church and its senior minister to, and I quote, the launching of a premeditated, long-range program of civil disobedience.

5 He elaborated: Resistance and Transformation: Taking Politics Public 5 after consultation, I had to judge whether or not this church could constructively incorporate into its ongoing life the tension, controversy and stress inevitably to come. No other church was available. It was this one or none. There were many sympathetic Clergymen. At least a hundred participated in the service here. But none had an established milieu capable of sustaining such use of their premises. For me, it came down to this. I had to decide that either this church could bear the pressure and grow stronger because of it, or that it could not, in which case it would have been necessary, in light of my own convictions, to support the students but resign my post here. I made the decision I did because I was persuaded of its rightness. [ One issue is the issue of right and wrong: what is morally, ethically, religiously defensible or compelling or necessary to promote or defend. On issues of right or wrong there are multiple points of view, multiple positions which can be sincerely held, persuasively argued, agreed with or disagreed with. In this Unitarian Universalist religious community, we value and encourage diversity of opinion and of conviction, and we celebrate this diversity as a strength, and a core value.

6 6 But a second issue is precisely the issue of diversity, and how we actually live out and live into our self-proclaimed promotion and affirmation of diversity of opinion. Rev. Mendelsohn in 1967 recognized that his decision to allow the Resistance service to be held in the Arlington Street Church would sorely test the congregation s stated commitment to diversity. He anticipated that it would, in his words, enrage, lacerate, and confound some members of the congregation and he was right. In making his decision, he weighed whether the church could bear the pressure and the tension of disrupting the predictable, the reassuring, the familiar pattern of church life. He recognized that there would be some who feared that their church was already too liberal, too edgy, too different. Some who wanted to be affirmed and comforted in church, who wanted their church to be a refuge from the struggles of the world and not a center of conflict and controversy. As a service of Disruption, the Resistance service placed the church in a position of civil disobedience, and even knowing the risks, that was intentional on Rev. Mendelsohn s part. Even as he acknowledged that Civil disobedience is a harsh, ghastly, contaminating business. It is morally credible only when there is irredeemable disillusionment with the lawful processes of protest and dissent, he also pointed out that some of those who are now most outraged by this present group of civil disobeyers would not be here at all except for the civil disobedience of their ancestors. that this nation would not exist but for the civil disobedience of its founding fathers. that the abolition of our vile system of slavery was spurred by

7 7 civil disobedience. that the voting franchise for women was fueled by civil disobedience. And then, Rev. Mendelsohn asked his congregation, Why then undertake it? Because, as Robert McAfee Brown testifies in his article in a current issue of LOOK,...there comes a time when the issues are so clear and so crucial that a [person] does not have the choice of waiting until all the possible consequences can be charted. There comes a time when a [person] must simply say, 'Here I stand, I can do no other, God help me.' When an issue of this magnitude is joined, when there are those who, having exhausted without effect every lawful means of opposing the monstrous crimes being committed in their name by their government, who cannot accept silence or inaction, and choose instead the Gethsemane of civil disobedience, how is the church to respond? [ We, here, fifty years after 1967, are presented with similar choices and similar challenges. When, in 2012, the ballot issue was marriage equality, this congregation served as the local epicenter of opposition to the proposed amendment to the North Carolina constitution. This was a stance of Resistance and there were those for whom it was also a deeply difficult Disruption. When forty-nine people were killed and then the gunman shot himself in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando last summer, our church hosted the only vigil in Carteret County, despite concerns that there might be repercussions or even danger to our building or our reputation an occasion

8 8 for Resistance, and also for Disruption. What we learned from the campaign against Amendment informed the process of organizing against drilling for oil and gas off the North Carolina coast, and the process last summer by which the congregation drafted and adopted a Statement of Conscience against North Carolina House Bill 2 processes that sought to hear and to honor a diversity of points of view, so that a vocal majority would not silence a reticent minority. Resistance with a concern to mitigate the stress and the tension of Disruption. When Indivisible Carteret asked to hold their meetings in our building, we asked only that they hold to their commitment to a non-partisan stance Resistance, knowing that for some the use of our building in this way will be distressing and Disruptive. As a Unitarian Universalist religious community we hold the tension between Resistance and acceptance. Between Disruption and accommodation. Between the tension of different points of view and the pressure to override our differences or overpower those who disagree. Between certainty about right vs. wrong and enthusiasm for diversity of opinion and the pain and the power of exploring that diversity. Between the pain of stubbornness and the power of cooperation. And there in the tension is all the promise and all the possibility of our faith: this faith of memory, whose history can warm your soul. This faith of prophecy and power, whose vision can change your heart.

9 9 Take a moment, now, in silence, to sit with the pain and the power. The bell will lead us into silence, and music will lead us out. May it be so. Bell Silence Music