It is good to be together again.
This afternoon the Unitarian Universalist
Legislative Ministry here in California, will be having a training here, after
church. Perhaps you saw the training on our church calendar, which is on our
website, maybe you saw Kevin Byrne’s request for volunteer help through our
weekly eBlast. Maybe this is the first you’ve heard of it. Anything’s possible.
The Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry of
California, or UULMCA for short, is one our largest and best organized
Legislative Ministries across our nation. In the past 10 years they’ve done a
lot of work, organized a lot of folks and made a real name for themselves in
Sacramento. Rev. Lindi Ramsey is just completed a decade of work with that
community ministry.
And we know a little bit about community
ministries here in this congregation. We have two ministers who work in their
“semi-retirement” for the greater good of the people of this very county. We
have Rev. Leroy Egenberger who has been working with veterans and their
families, helping them to adjust to life after military service, and we have
Rev. Bill Greer, whose ministry of feeding those who are hungry has deeply
infected and affected almost all of us. By its very nature, Rev. Leroy’s work
is quiet and contained. But not Rev.
Bill’s. If you have worked with Bill in
the kitchen, or served food in the last year, please raise your hand.
I am grateful for the work of both Bill and Leroy.
They do things that I cannot. I wouldn’t have time to run a program that feeds
hundreds of people each month, and I don’t have the training to do the
specialized work that Leroy does. They
are both tremendous assets to our congregation.
Rev. Lindi Ramsey is another person whose work I
am grateful for. When I arrived in Modesto 20 months ago, and Lindi called me
up to do some sort of political action, I responded, and so did Rev. Denis
Paul. We showed up in your bright yellow clergy shirts, and helped to hold
4,000 prayers from across theological and geological barriers, that were being
delivered to Governor Brown’s office, hoping they would inspire him to consider
more equitable immigration policies.
He was unable to answer our prayers that time, by
the way.
At the time we first met in person, I told Rev.
Lindi “I’m so new to California, and I'm so new to ministry, that I have no
idea which end is up with regard to the political and the social in California.
I also don’t feel like I have much time right now to figure it all out. So how
about we make a deal? When you need me to show up, you just call me, and I will
show up. You give me the talking points you want me to say to any media who
asks me, and I will say it. Our ministries are co-mingled.”
I have said similar things to both Leroy and Bill.
And so I have now been to Sacramento, to the State
Capitol, and petted the Golden Bear in front of the Governor’s office 3 times.
That is more times than I was EVER in the State Capitol of Michigan, where I
lived for 27 years and was a gay activist.
So when the UULM asked to hold a meeting here
today, I said “Yes!” and was inspired to talk with you this morning about a
year of social justice.
In June, Solange Gonçalves Atlman was a guest speaker in this congregation. Ms.
Altman is an immigration attorney and shared with the congregation a terrific
talk about immigration and the unjust laws that currently govern it here. She
told us heart breaking stories of children who, by no choice of their own, came
to be here in the U.S. without documentation.
She also quoted to us a rather famous story of an exchange between Henry
David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“In
1848 Henry David Thoreau, a transcendentalist, was arrested and jailed after
refusing to pay his poll tax, a tax that would be used to support slavery and
its extension through a war with Mexico intended to acquire its northern
territories. His friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson came to see him in jail, and
exclaimed upon seeing him, "What are you doing in there?" Thoreau
replied, "Waldo, the question is what are you doing out there?"
Thoreau's
brief detention became the inspiration for his essay, Civil
Disobedience. In that essay he explains that in a constitutional republic
like the United States, people often think that the proper response to an
unjust law is to try to use the political process to change the law, but to
obey and respect the law, in the mean time, until it is changed. But if the law
is itself clearly unjust, and the lawmaking process is not designed to quickly
obliterate such unjust laws, then Thoreau says the law deserves no respect and
it should be broken. He tells us that "it is not desirable to cultivate a
respect for the law, so much as for what is right."[1]
Immigration reform and the just treatment of those
in our community who among us without documentation is an issue that we take
seriously and work hard for in Unitarian Universalism. The very president of
our Association of Congregations was arrested in Arizona two years ago
protesting the treatment of so called “illegals.”
The UULMCA gave me my first chance to be a voice,
the voice of a religious leader, on the issue of reforming the laws for
immigration.
But the UULMCA does more than work to reform
immigration policies. They work on environmental issues, developing lay and
young leadership, and for years worked to coordinate efforts to provide
marriage equality for same sex couples here in California.
Let’s hope they can retire that topic once and for
all.
But it’s not just Rev. Lindi Ramsden and the
UULMCA who are doing the work. The UULMCA is, for me, a clearing house of
information. The UULMCA cannot do its work effectively without dedicated
Unitarian Universalists who work hard, who carry signs, who go to city council
meetings, who pack lunches, and hug those who are marginalized.
This year, though, I’m going to challenge us to focus
energy on Social Justice. I know, I know, we have that whole pesky “search for
a new minister” going on, and that whole “rethinking the way we fund our
Fellowship” thing, oh, and the whole “This is our 60th year
gathering together as a congregation,” thing.
All kidding aside, I think these are exactly the
reasons that we should really focus some serious energy into Social Justice.
I want to tell share with you and story I read on
the Ms. Magazine blog. It’s the story of a group of women in Israel who call
themselves “The Women of the Wall.”[2]
These women, who are of different branches of
Judaism, have been meeting together and praying together for 24 years, at the
Wailing Wall.
So what, you might say, people have been praying
at the Wailing Wall since Herod the Great started building the Second Great Temple in 19 BCE (before
common era, what used to be called “Before Christ”) and it was destroyed by the
Romans in the Frist Jewish-Roman war in 70 CE (what used to be called A.D.)
Well, it turns out that the Women of the Wall do
not pray in the tiny section of the Wall that the Ultra-Orthodox have decided
should be the section for the women. No, these women have the nerve to pray
wherever they want to, along the wall! Also, to the consternation of some, they
read aloud from the Torah, which according to some, is against Jewish Law.
In the 24 years they have been meeting, they have
been hassled, harassed, tear-gassed and arrested for praying together along the
Wall. Shira Pruce, who is the Public Relations Director for the Women of the
Wall, was interviewed for the article, and she reports that the ultra-orthodox
have used their political influence unduly in trying to restrain the freedom of
expression and religion expression in the democracy that is Israel.
I bring you this story from Ms. Magazine in part
to bring you back to the reading earlier by Emerson, that great radical, that
great free-thinker, who we are so often proud of. He says there are some things
that are fated, and that there is a nobility in accepting those things.
And yet his dear friend, Henry David Thoreau
challenged him on it. And this example of these women praying together offers
yet another challenge to that idea.
So, not to through Emerson out with the bathwater,
I ask you, what are the things in your life, in our collective lives, that are
noble to accept, and which are the ones we should work like Hell to change?
I have seen a bumper sticker that says “Well
behaved women rarely make history.”
I must confess that I love that bumper sticker.
Think of all the women in our faith’s history that
have re-shaped the world because they refused to accept the status quo, and
also think of the men who worked by their sides.
This, as well as a self-examining faith that
requires no statement of belief or creedal test, this is among the greatest
gifts and challenges of our legacy.
We are a people who work to improve the world
around us. We claim little, if any knowledge about the next world, the world
beyond death, even if there is one.
As unsure as we are about all of that, we are as
sure that it will take the hands of people like us to shape the world into a
more fair and just world for all.
Theodore Parker famously wrote “the arc of the
universe is long and it bends toward justice.” Well, the arc isn’t going to do
that all by itself. It’s going to require people to help shape that arc.
Working actively for social justice can do many
things for us as congregation. As we are out visible in the world, more people
will see us, more people who are like-minded to us may see us and wonder just
who those people over there are, and why do I keep seeing that group of lovely
folks at every social justice event I attend. Maybe I should go talk with them.
Working actively for social justice will catch the
attention of minister’s who are looking for just such an amazing group of
people who are here, in Modesto.
Working actively for social justice will help to
enrich our lives both individually and collectively, and aren’t we a
congregation about enriching lives?
So let us commit ourselves, in this our 60th
year as a Fellowship, let us renew our commitment to engaging in social justice.
You can start by staying around for this
afternoon’s meeting.
[1]
Unjust Laws: The Moral Case for Immigration Reform,” © Solange Gonçalves Altman, 2013
[2]
Misogyny at the Wall, http://msmagazine.com/blog/2013/08/05/misogyny-at-the-wailing-wall/
A Year of Justice
© The Rev. Joseph M Cherry
Written for and delivered to:
The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of
Stanislaus County
August 11, 2013
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