The Problem of Columbus Day

History has gotten a little more complicated since the mid-point of the 20th century. Time was there used to be a single narrative about the history of our nation. It was taught from coast to coast, Canada to Mexico.

It was a history that told tales where names of the heroes and the names of the villains were almost in two columns. The good guys and the bad buys. Us vs. Them. Usually, in this history, “them” included anyone whose family was not White, of Anglo-Saxon heritage and believed in the Protestant version of Christianity.

Times were simpler then…


Not the historical times that were being reported on mind you. Those were not simpler times at all. They could be, to quote Thomas Hobbes from his seminal work fro 1651 The Leviathan: And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."

But rather, history was simpler to report back then.


I had a dear friend who graduated from Dartmouth college in 1931 with a degree in American history. The American history he studied was most often the history of straight, white men, most of whom had died, and were universally seen as heroes.

Like many other academic disciplines, the Field of Study know as History has undergone some major changes in the last 80 years.

Learning history was simpler then, less nuanced.

You learned that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two of whom it could be argued were Unitarian, were great men. They were part of the pantheon of Founding Fathers, to be revered.

And that was that. History understood.

Except obviously, that wasn’t that.

There were of course sub-groups in our culture, those who’s stories had been discounted, ignored, left to neglect because the learned men of the time didn’t consider them worth studying.

Happily, this has been changing.  So now, as we study Jefferson, we learn about Sally Hemings, the slave woman who bore him six children. We begin to see that the same man who crafted words like “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” himself had feet of clay. Like all of us, Jefferson was both a man of his own time, but also a man striving toward a future of greater equality for all.

I know that when one read these words 237 years later, it may be difficult to reconcile Jefferson’s words with his actions.



It would be easy to shout words like hypocrisy at a moment like this.

But that would be a bad idea.

We cannot judge people with the values that we hold today, when they lived in a context different than our own.

Think of the moral struggles of our own time. Think, for example, about current hot, political topics. Think about in 237 years what our progeny might say about us and our inability to, for example, guarantee a living wage for all people; or that we put up with such barbaric practices as the death penalty.


Many of us know the old rhyme: In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-Two, Columbus sailed the ocean, blue.” We know that Columbus was looking for a short cut to Sub-Continental India, and instead “discovered” the New World.

I’m not really up here to debate the historicity and accuracy of all those things.

One of the things that Columbus did, even though it probably never entered his mind, what Columbus did was leave us, these 521 years later, he left us a giant controversy.


As early as 1792, celebrations were held to commemorate Columbus’s voyage to the Americas. In New York City, a celebration was held, and in Baltimore, MD a monument was dedicated to Columbus.  In 1892, a statue of Columbus was raised at Columbus Avenue in New York City. Further, at the Columbian Exposition held in Chicago that year, replicas of Columbus' three ships were displayed.

By 1886 Italian-Americans were promoting Columbus Day as a day of ethnic pride and in 1906, Colorado became the first state to recognize Columbus Day as a holiday. In the late 19th century, Italian-Americans were in desperate need of something to celebrate their culture, because at the time they, along with other immigrant groups, were very poorly treated, and frequently treated as “non-white.” Certainly, they were non-protestants, in a land where it would take another almost 80 years for a Catholic to be elected President of the United States, and he wasn’t even Italian, but Irish!


Now we have a conflict. In a similar way that the Italian-Americans wanted to lift up their cultural contributions to the Great Melting Pot that is our nation, so to, as their own voices began to be recognized and honored, so did the descendants of the people who were already in the Americas want to have their own history recognized and valued.

These two stories are at cross-purposes.

This is the Problem of Columbus Day.  Well, one of the problems of Columbus Day.


The exact specifics of Christopher Columbus’s trip to the Americas is of course very interesting for those who love history. There were four voyages, not all of them went smoothly, and now parts of his remains are in the Dominican Republic and some are in Spain. He was not Spanish by birth, Italian in fact, but before the modern Nation State of Italy, and he tried to get three other monarchs to sponsor his trip before Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand agreed to fund him.

In his first trip, only two of the ships actually completed the journey. The Santa Maria, Columbus’s Flag Ship ran aground on a coral reef and had to be abandoned.


All these facts, though, are sort of beside my point though. Interesting as they may be, accurate as they may or may not be, what is of interest to us today is the conflict that grows out of knowing a more complete picture of the story, not the minutiae of one version of the story.


On the one side, you have this Italian hero, celebrated by Italian-Americans in the late 1800’s. And they need a hero.

Their hero, though, is a villain to those people whose ancestors were already on this continent. The question of what we do to honor both of these stories in concert with each other, is in fact the Problem of Columbus Day.

Columbus was a very early explorer, certainly NOT the first European to find their way to the shores of what would eventually come to be known as “North America.” When he arrived, he found himself confronted by peoples who were not like him, but also who were not the Indians he expected to find.

Following Columbus came many others, and these people some unintentionally, some by design, ravaged the population of people who were already living here. Due to disease, poverty, conquest, subjugation and slavery, the indigenous population was decimated.

And there is a lot of pain and anger felt by their children.



This month’s theological theme is “unity and diversity.”

How can we hold, in just this one example—these two realities of history that surround one man—how can we honor both stories, deeply honor them, when they are so wildly divergent?


Unitarian Universalism enjoys a reputation in “church-circles” for being really excellent at doing interfaith work. About 18 months ago, I came back from a Minister’s Training to report to you how a Black Southern Baptist preacher, Rev. Dr. James Forbes, sang our praises regarding our leadership in Interfaith work, work that he sees as the future. But Dr. Forbes also said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that we needed to get our collective selves in gear, because the world needs us NOW and we are still too busy being “God’s still small voice.” He said, Stop it! Go out, and show the world what we can be if we work together!

I think one way in which we are able to work so well in Interfaith circles is that we have a faith that requires no testament, no single statement of belief, that we have no creed or dogma. We don’t feel the HONEST need to save people by showing them our way of believing, because we don’t, at our core, feel that people need to be saved.

This is a gift from our Universalist ancestors. It is a gift for which I am profoundly grateful and inspired.

Last month when I was attending a meeting with the Stanislaus County Interfaith Council we were planning the Interfaith Thanksgiving Service together. As I sat at the table with Christian and Sikh religious leaders, I was very pleased. Pleased to learn more about Sikhism, pleased be a part of something greater than just me.

I could do this more easily because I didn’t have a deep and serious investment in the outcome. I mean, I want the service to be a success, of course, but I didn’t walk in the door with an idea of how I thought it should look when all the planning was done.

Not having an idea about that, I’m less likely to be frustrated, upset, and even hurt if things turn out a way that is different than what I imagined they would be.


It’s easy not to have a deep investment in one, singular Interfaith Thanksgiving service. Easy because that service doesn’t represent hundreds of years of oppression, theft and other spoils of conquest.


Well, actually, it does, doesn’t it.

But what it also represents is people gathering together, intentionally gathering together, to heal the wounds of the past. To address the wrongs that have happened, something that religious liberals and political liberals are VERY GOOD at doing.

But in order for this to happen, we must come to the table not only ready to discuss what has happened that has wronged us, but we must also come to the table with the incredible sense that we are also prepared to forgive.


We must be prepared to sit at whatever table we do, at work, at church, with extended family, and while we’re passing along the mashed potatoes, we must also be prepared to share forgiveness.

To forgive someone who has wronged you does not mean that you pretend something didn’t happen. It means to move beyond that hurt and to search for the inherent worth that person has. It means to treat those persons with dignity.

If you want to see the brave, look at those who can forgive. If you want to see the heroic, look at those who can love in return for hatred.  — The Bhagavad Gita

This ancient book, like many others, has wisdom for us.

The problem of Columbus Day is in part that it represents two ethnic groups, each of whom have felt the need for the wrongs perpetrated against them, to be addressed.

And we are not addressing them.

Also, we have turned this day into a sales flyer, which only adds insult to injury.

Let us follow the wisdom of this Hindu Holy Book. “If you want to see the brave, look at those who can forgive. If you want to see the heroic, look at those who can love in return for hatred.”

Go forth from this, our sacred place, and practice bravery and heroism.

Unity & Diversity

On Friday evening I attended a concert of the Modesto Symphony Orchestra at the Gallo Center. The concert opened in a way that no other symphony concert I have ever attended opened. It started with the whole orchestra standing, playing our National Anthem.

When I played in the Modesto Band during the summer, each concert started with us playing The Star Spangled Banner, and this wasn’t so shocking to me. It was an outdoor venue, it was summer, and I’d played our National Anthem hundreds of times since I first picked up the clarinet in 1979.

But I’d never been in an orchestra, or seen an orchestra do this.

I guess I should also say that I am a sucker for the National Anthem. I know that the song is a struggle for many to sing because of the vocal range, I know that many don’t like the song as it’s original poem was inspired by a battle and a war.

So Friday night, as I stood in the Gallo Center, hand over my heart, singing our National Anthem, we get to the end and the lyric is “Oh, say does that Star Spangled banner yet wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?”

And for the first time in my life, my heart asked the question, “Does it?”

Yes, the Stars and Bars still flies over our land from sea to shining sea, but are we still the land of the free and the home of the brave?


One of the difficulties of writing a sermon that is based on current events is that current events keep changing, and one is trying to build a theological structure on shifting sands. Particularly in a 24 hour a day news cycle.

In today’s Reading from the Global Scripture, Methodist minister, Rev. Morgan Guyton takes a look at the “truthiness” of Representative Ted Cruz’s speech to the Iowa Family Leadership Summit.

This post modern “truthiness” that Cruz employs is not brave. Cruz is not being brave in the way that our National Anthem is asking about. Cruz is bold, true enough, and he’s learned about Christian Dominionism from his father, Rafael Cruz, a preacher in a very “fundamentalist” Christian Church.

But bold and brave are not the same thing.

Anyone can be bold. Even the words on your page can be bold, all you have to do is highlight them, and go to your word toolbar and hit b.

Brave though is more difficult. Bravery is about honesty, integrity and potentially dangerous consequences.

Bravery changes the world.

Kathrine Switzer, who in 1967, was the first woman to officially run in the Boston marathon was brave. She was actually assaulted on the course by some men, and then other men came to her aid, they surrounded her and ran with her.

In 2007, 50 year-old construction worker Wesley Autrey, had a seizure and collapsed, falling into the train tracks between the two rails. A 20 year-old stranger, seeing the train coming, jumped down into the tracks putting his body between Mr. Autrey and the train, holding him down to the ground as the train went over them. When the train stopped, Cameron Hollopeter shouted up to the crowd that had been silenced by shock, to “We’re both okay! Please tell the girls their Dad will be with them shortly.” The train cars were so close to the two men that Hollopeter’s hat was covered in grease from the train’s undercarriage.



What Ted Cruz, and the rest of the Republican Representatives have done with this government shut down is not bravery. This is not a partisan statement. I am not telling anyone from the pulpit who to vote for, or who not to vote for.

I am using the pulpit to speak about what is morally right and correct.

In his book 1984 George Orwell wrote:

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

Of course, the party that George Orwell is writing about when he wrote this book in 1948 was the party of Big Brother, not our American Republican Party.

What those representatives in Washington who have voted to halt the government have done is not bravery. It is not “good and responsible government.” It is wasteful.  I have read that estimates are that this shut down is costing the U.S. Government $300 Million dollars a day.

Wasting $300 Million dollars a day may be bold, and it may make a statement, but it is not bravery.

There are many things that make these actions upsetting, and listing them would take some great while. With the suffering of one program I can demonstrate the monstrosity of the power play going on in Washington DC right now. WIC, the program that helps poor women with infants and children feed there kids is on furlough.

The most vulnerable in our nation are the ones who are suffering the most right now, and it isn’t like the Members of the House of Representatives pay is being interrupted.


Are these the actions of “the Free”?

Yes, I suppose these actions could be seen as actions of free men and women.

But freedom is relatively easy, once you have it. It’s easy to abuse, and misapply. One can claim freedom to do just about anything.

In this nation we are free to do all sorts of things, but it doesn’t mean that they should be done. That they are the moral and correct things to do.

Right now, one of us could yell “Fire!” in the sanctuary. You are free to do so at any time, but if there is in fact no fire in the sanctuary, it is the wrong thing to do. It is immoral to do it, yet still you are free to do so.

I expect that you won’t, though. Because if nothing else, the minister will give you a very stern talking to.


So it’s true, that with their freedom, those who have voted to halt the government because they don’t like the Affordable Care Act, can do so. They are perfectly within their rights to do so. But in doing so, they are ignoring their responsibility.

I hope you’ll indulge me for a short minute while I quote an old Spiderman comic book.

It is in The Amazing Fantasy Comic #15, published in 1962 that Stan Lee first wrote a phrase that will forever be attached to his fictional Spiderman character. “…with great power there must also come—great responsibility.”


When one does not act with responsibility as one uses one’s freedom, a freedom hard won by the blood of many warriors, then one is most certainly NOT acting in bravery.


Unitarian Universalist minister, the Rev. Diane Dowgiert, captured the essence of why the government shutdown is shameful:

"There are moral issues at stake, which is why I care so much. The disconnect between elected officials and those they allegedly serve is apparent to me. To pit the interests of one group of people against those of another is, well, sinful. In this case it's federal employees against the medically uninsured. An orchestrated Faustian dilemma serves no one, except the already outrageously rich. Common folk cannot afford to be silent or complacent."

It is Rev. Diane’s phrase “To pit the interests of one group of people against those of another is, well, sinful”, that brings us to our home stretch, so to speak.


Here in this faith, we talk frequently of our unity and our diversity. We are rightly proud of our openness to peoples who are different than we are as individuals. Here in our congregations we have people who love differently, we have people who have different kinds of job and people who have ancestors from across the globe.

Here there are people of differing theological orientations. We go from those who will be frustrated that the minister used the phrase “theological orientation,” to those for whom a phrase like that makes their heart swell with possibilities.

We can have all these things because we are a free church.

We are not the only free church, mind you, but we are our free church. And in our free church we can have women clergy, we can have openly gay clergy, we can have clergy whose ancestry includes people who have been historically marginalized.

It might also be noted that we happily allow straight, white men to be clergy, too.

Our professional ministry reflects the people who are in our pews.


With all of this freedom, though, how are we practicing responsibility?

Are we ever on guard so that we never use the kind of “post-modern truthiness” that Mr. Cruz used in Iowa?

It would be easy to slip into using “truthiness.” You get a little information, you mind and heart responds to that news, and you begin to form an opinion. And then maybe you share that opinion. But have you checked on the facts? When an argument is logically sound, but not based on actual facts, it becomes “truthiness.”

I know this happens because I have been on the wrong end of truthiness. People have heard, surmised and shared all manner of things about why Rev. Joe has done X-thing, and by the time I actually hear about all of this, people are upset, mad, frustrated and even hurt.

In our diversity, we have many ways of approaching life and our shared life, together here.

In order to deepen and enrich our lives together, we must act responsibly with our freedoms together, and not, as Mr. Cruz has seemingly done, use personal agenda, disguised as moral outrage, as a weapon to get one’s way to the determent of others.



Our great diversity is, like all things it seems, a gift and a challenge.

Unitarian Universalism has spent decades trying to manage both the diversity that we have, and the diversity we wish for. Like many faiths, we believe that we have a message, a gospel, some good news for the wider world. We believe that our message of openness, a religion without creed and with little or no dogma, can welcome people of all sorts to our doors and into our pews.

I too, believe this is true.

But I also feel like it’s high time we change the way we engage in this work of seeking greater unity and diversity. For decades our sort of catch-phrase has been “unity in diversity.”

It’s true, you can find it on all manner of publications.


We should change the order of those words, though. Unity in diversity says that Unity is a given, that unity is our default, that we are united.

The truth is that we are not always united.

But we are always diverse.

We are diverse in our approach to what we believe. We are agnostics, atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Humanists, Muslims, Pagans all the way down the alphabet to Zoroastrians, and for many of us, we are some blend of these things and more.

Diverse is our default. It is inextricably part of who we are. We need to stop focusing on diverse, and start moving our energy to unity.

In order to move our faith forward, we must be willing to do what Ted Cruz and his co-hort is not willing to do, and that is act for the greater good.

Sometimes you have to just get in the boat, grab and oar and row, without being the one who determines where the boat is going. Not because you’re a blind sheep, willing to do whatever it is you’re told, but rather because you believe that the people you’ve chosen to travel with, your fellow congregants, your fellow Unitarian Universalists, because you believe that they, too, are working to make the world a better place, a more fair place, a more loving place.

This is what diversity in unity is about. We use our diverse talents and gifts in the service not of our own goals and agendas, but in service with others of amazing talents and gifts toward a larger goal.

I have quoted this passage from Theodore Parker before, and it’s oft quoted elsewhere, so you may have heard it before: “The arc of the universe is long and it bends toward justice.”

The arc will continue to bend with the work of many hands, many diverse hands, working together with a unified purpose.

Please join me in a moment of prayer.

Spirit of Love, may my own hands be one of a million pair that work in harmony with others, so that we may, each of us, play a small part in the bending of the arc of the universe toward justice.

Amen.