Soul Force

Will Work for Souls

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham

www.secondparish.org

January 14, 2007

Sometimes it’s a little too easy to talk about Martin Luther King, Jr. He died almost 40 years ago, and in remembering now we can sometimes put a sentimental glow over his life and his achievements. We can even poke a little fun at Martin the philosopher with the kids as in our story this morning. I myself have a very good sermon about Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Reeb and the great struggle for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. That’s the period for which we remember King most fondly. We remember the start of his leadership against segregation in the Montgomery Bus Boycott sparked off by Rosa Parks ten years before Selma, the intervention of John F. Kennedy when King was in jail in Atlanta during the election of 1960, the soaring “I Have A Dream” speech from the March on Washington in 1963, the Nobel Prize for non-violence in 1964. Those are the shining moments we like to enshrine in our collective memories.

Selma also lives in the memory of Unitarian Universalists as a moment to remember with great pride. When King called for support from northern ministers, fully one-third of all Unitarian Ministers and the entire board of the Association went to Selma in answer to his call. Two of our members, Rev. James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo, were killed in the course of that struggle, and they along with Jimmy Lee Jackson, a black supporter who also died during the struggle, are memorialized in a plaque at UUA headquarters in Boston.

But the quest for racial justice got harder after Selma. The struggle came North, Boston and many other cities were torn apart by demands for the integration of neighborhoods and schools, black leaders who were not as committed as Martin to non-violence began to speak of Black Power, and Martin Luther King began to speak out for economic as well as racial justice and against the war in Vietnam. Toward the end of his life, he got to challenging more and more what people all across the country considered to be right and natural, and he lost more and more of his white allies as a result.

It’s easier to celebrate what King did, especially in those glory years in the South, than to consider what he might ask us to do if he were alive today. Let’s face it: a great deal of progress has been made, but racism and racial injustice hardly disappeared when laws were passed barring legal discrimination. What Jan, Ken & I are saying from our three pulpits today is that more Soul Work is needed, that we need to continue to be alive to the reality of racism in our society 39 years after Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated.

I want to tell two Jesus stories to set a context for our discussion and to suggest that our problems with racism today are neither new nor unique. When Jesus started his ministry, according to the Gospel of Luke, he went back to the town of Galilee where he had been raised and he proclaimed a year of Jubilee, the year of the Lord’s favor. And then he said to his listeners:

[Luke 4:23] "Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, 'Doctor, cure yourself!' And you will say, 'Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.'" 24 And he said, "Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown. 25 But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; 26 yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.

In other words, there’s no hometown advantage for Nazareth or for Israel. Then, he tells another story about the prophet Elisha and he gets them so mad that

[Luke 4:28] When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. 29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. 30 But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

The folks he grew up with didn’t much care for Jesus telling them that other people were privileged with God’s favor and they weren’t. We all want to favor our home town, our own people, to privilege our race or ethnic group.

The other story is about a situation where it seems Jesus has forgotten his own lesson of inclusiveness. This time he’s traveling and a non-Israelite woman demands his attention by shouting [Matt. 15:22]

"Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon." ²³ But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, "Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us." ²⁴ He answered, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." ²⁵ But she came and knelt before him, saying, "Lord, help me." ²⁶ He answered, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." ²⁷ She said, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table." ²⁸ Then Jesus answered her, "Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed instantly.

Even Jesus gets it wrong this time. Even he believes he supposed to stick to his own kind in this case. Of course, there are lots of other cases where he crosses ethnic and religious lines – the Samaritan woman at the well, for example – but if even Jesus could get it wrong, I suggest that relating to people who aren’t like us is hard work – soul work. Jesus didn’t get it right the first time, but he did do a course correction, and so can we when we need to.

We were reminded of the struggles over race here in the north this past week by the death of James Kelly, who galvanized the struggle to prevent the integration of public housing and schools in South Boston starting in 1975. Unitarian Universalists went through their own struggles after Selma as well, and here the story comes home to the UUA and to Second Parish. I’m basing my account on Victor Carpenter’s recent reconstruction of these events in Long Challenge: The Empowerment Controversy (1967-1977).

In October of 1967, a new direction in the discussion of race relations was introduced in the Unitarian Universalist Association at an Emergency Conference called to consider “A Unitarian Universalist Response to the Black Rebellion” after a summer during which there had been “riots in 31 American cities which left 86 persons dead, more than 2,000 injured and over 11,000 arrested.”[1] Blacks at the conference chose to organize themselves in a separate caucus to develop their own strategy for the conference, and discovered

…that their blackness could be a positive binding force of energy and promise. Henry Hampton, then a UUA staff member who would later achieve acclaim as producer of the Eyes on the Prize documentary series, reflected on the impact of the Caucus on its membership: “They went into the caucus meeting as middle-class Negroes who had done some individual work in civil rights, but many were far from the struggle and had little to show for it other than NAACP membership cards. When they came out of the caucus there were still middle class Negroes, but they were now black, seeking to work through the denomination, giving up the old attempts at harmony and peace for a program of action.”[2]

The caucus called for broad black representation within the board and staff of the UUA, subsidies for black ministers in the denomination, and for Beacon Press to seek out and publish black authors.

The cornerstone demand, upon which the others rested, was the creation of a UUA-affiliated organization to be known as the Black Affairs Council, to be financed by the UUA with $250,000 a year for a period of four years. The Black Affairs Council was to have sole authority and discrimination over how the money would be spent.[3]

Finally, these demands were all to be accepted or rejected as a whole with no modifications. Needless to say, the all-or-nothing nature of the demand raised hackles in the denomination both from the board of directors and from the General Assembly in Cleveland in 1968 the following year, but resolutions supporting the Black Affairs Council and its demands, including a levy on the churches in addition to their annual dues to the denomination, were passed in Cleveland five to two. Victor includes a personal note about his own reaction to these events:

Unlike many of my UU ministerial colleagues who were confused by what had happened at the Biltmore Conference, the news of the first assembly of what would become the BUUC was thrilling to me. Here in my country, black members of my own denomination were demanding the right to organize themselves and to control and direct their struggle for freedom within Unitarian Universalism, without the participation or the direction of white UUs. 1 was fresh from apartheid South Africa, where such proposals were not only unthinkable dreams, but illegal and punishable offenses. During the time of my ministry in Cape Town, any gathering of black people for purposes other than those sanctioned by whites was a dangerous and potentially imprisonable action. One year after my arrival in South Africa, Nelson Mandela had narrowly escaped being executed and had begun to serve a 27-year imprisonment on Robbin Island for his attempts to organize the South African freedom struggle. After five years in apartheid-land, what I was hearing from my two colleagues was all but unimaginable: black men and women asserting their right to define and lead their struggle for liberation. It was a dream beyond anything that I could have envisioned while in South Africa in the 1960s. And here it was being described to me as actually occurring in my own Unitarian Universalist denomination. I was stunned by the vision of the Black UU Caucus and thrilled by the prospect of the vision's implementation.[4]

The response here at Second Parish was less enthusiastic. As Bob Cashman tells the story in his “History of the Second Parish in Hingham: 1946-1996,”

The news from the General Assembly got mixed reviews here. Some hailed the actions as inspired and forward looking; some saw them as racism in reverse; most were sympathetic to the human issues involved but resented what they viewed as “taxation without representation….” Delegates were chosen [the following year for the 1969 General Assembly in Boston] and instructed to oppose [the initiative to approve the outcome of the 1968 General Assembly]. Motions were made to instruct the delegates to vote “no” on all resolutions, and even to dissociate Second Parish from the UUA. These motions were lost…. On the remaining issues, delegates were allowed to use their own judgment, but to look at all expenditures with a critical eye.[5]

The resolution to support the demands of the Black UU Caucus was narrowly defeated at the Boston General Assembly after a difficult and emotionally draining debate. Back here in Second Parish, a vote was taken to join the UU Christian Fellowship and a statement was passed which declared that

The Second Parish in Hingham is a religiously oriented church…. Most of us prefer conciliation and dialog, and repudiate disruptive and violent techniques of social reform…. We are, therefore, as church, a source of spiritual strength to people of several conflicting sociological and political points of view, and our organization is the stronger for the diversity.

We are well aware that in this we differ radically from the overall public image of the Unitarian Universalist Association…. [We] feel strongly that the time has come when the religiously oriented elements in the denomination should seek each other out and demand recognition as a legitimate faction in what professes to be a free church organization.[6]

Issues of racism were largely forgotten at UUA General Assemblies for over two decades, and I believe a similar silence has prevailed here at Second Parish; the next resolution dealing with race at a General Assembly was passed in 1992. Some incidents at the General Assembly two years ago in Fort Worth in which, among other things, some of our Unitarian Universalist youth of color were treated like bellhops by Assembly goers, have heightened our awareness that race as an issue in our denomination has not gone away. In response to a report on these incidents, delegates last June at the St. Louis General Assembly voted to engage in discussions in our congregations about racism in our midst and in our society as a whole. These sermons and conversations about Soul Works are our response to that resolution.

So what is required of us, what do we need from talking about racism and anti-racism? First, I believe that our souls are impoverished by the state of race relations in this country. We live in the whitest of white suburbs, and we find it very pleasant here. But our children lack the experience of diversity, and some of them at least can’t wait to leave and enter the “real” world. The experience our sons in Ridgewood, New Jersey, a similarly privileged community, were quite similar. They referred to the world of their high school and among their friends as “the bubble,” cut off from the real world by privilege and de facto segregation. At the same time, our children are intrigued by rap music and ghetto styles, sometimes as a form of rebellion, sometimes as a way of reaching across what appears to be a yawning chasm of separation between them and a culture which seems completely different from theirs. Social issues around us often revolve around race; the reality is that black children live in poverty, are disadvantaged from birth, and are more likely to die or end up in jail than white children.

In the first essay in Soul Works, James Cone, Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Seminary in New York suggests that

whites avoid race topics with African American because they do not want to engage black rage…. All I ask of whites is to put themselves in black people’s place in this society and the world, and then ask themselves what they would say or do if they were in black people’s place. Would you be angry about 246 years of slavery and 100 years of lynching and segregation? What would you say about the incarceration of one million of your people in prisons—one half of the penal population—while your people represent only 12 percent of the U.S. census? Would you get angry if your racial group used 13 percent of the drugs but did 74 percent of the prison time for simple possession? Would you caution the oppressed in your community to speak about their pain with calm and patience? What would you say about your sons who are shot dead by the police because their color alone makes them prime criminal suspects? What would you say about ministers and theologians who preach and teach about justice and love but ignore the sociopolitical oppression of your people? Black anger upsets only whites who choose not to identify with black suffering.[7]

I want to reframe this conversation in religious rather than political terms. I think there was some wisdom in the statement adopted in 1970 which declared Second Parish to be a “religiously oriented” church, specifically disavowing a particular political position. Indeed, I believe that one of our particular strengths here lies in our diversity of political beliefs and that we should cherish and cultivate it. On the other hand, as we meet “in the spirit of Jesus,” we should not forget what Jesus said before the people of his home town of Nazareth tried to throw him off the cliff. He quoted from the prophet Isaiah, saying,

[Luke 4:^18] "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, ¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

Surely proclaiming good news to the poor, release to the captives and letting the oppressed go free also involves political choices, that is, religiously motivated work which plays out by means of choices we make according to our respective consciences within our daily living as part of our membership in the commonwealth.

So what would Martin talk about if he were alive today? He would undoubtedly still be talking about economic justice as he did when he supported the garbage workers who struck in Memphis where he was assassinated. I suspect he would support an increase in the minimum wage. He would undoubtedly have something to say about the war in Iraq, just as he did about the war in Vietnam. Above all, I think he would remind us of our interconnectedness as Americans, as people of faith, as human beings. He might call us to Dorchester to help counter the violence there, as he once led a march from Roxbury to the Boston Common to protest inadequate educational opportunities there. He would call us to ourselves, and he would appeal to the better angels of our natures.

My spiritual companions, I don’t know the answers to the problems of racism, but I do know that racism is a terrible burden on our society. Its tentacles move through the ghettoes of our cities and inner suburbs and steal children’s lives. It results in contempt and fear and insecurity and a vain quest for insulation from danger which can never ultimately provide the safety we imagine it will. It is a particular kind of sin. I don’t like that word, but this seems like a place where it makes sense. If Jesus could change his mind in response to the insistent demands of someone from another ethnic group, another race, another country, we could use to reconsider as well. The first step is to acknowledge that racism exists and that we participate in it, and to do that we need to be willing to talk about it. That’s why we’ve set up this series of conversations starting after church at Cohasset. I hope you can join us. I can assure you Martin Luther King, Jr., would insist upon it.

Amen