Right now, in the Oval
Office of the President of the United States, there is a rug.
It seems like an obvious
thing, to have a rug in an office, even one as spectacular as the Oval Office.
This is not the first rug to ever be there, nor will it be the last.
But truth be told, it
never occurred to me that there would be a rug in there. I just assumed it was
carpeted.
This rug was
commissioned by President Obama.
Apparently, this is a thing. Presidents get new rugs in their office.
Around the perimeter of
this rug are five quotes, and those five quotes are the reason that I’m even
talking about the rug with you this morning.
The five quotes around
the presidential rug are, according to Mr. Rich Ruggeri, President of Scott
Group Custom Carpets who created and donated the Presidential Rug:
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,
by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The arc of moral universe is long, but it
bends towards justice. That was Martin Luther King. The government of the
people, by the people, for the people, that was obviously President Abraham
Lincoln. No problem for human destiny is beyond human beings, that was
President John F. Kennedy. And then the last presidential quote was the welfare
of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us, and
that was President Theodore Roosevelt.[1]
The President chose
these quotes to serve as guide and inspiration to him during his impossible
work as President of the United States.
Now you may notice a
theme already. The second quote,
attributed by Mr. Ruggeri to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “The moral
arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Earlier Linda and I read to you two longer
quotes from ministers in both the 19th and 20th
centuries.
Melissa Block, NPR
Reporter, did this story about the presidential rug, and a second story in
which she uncovers the true origin of the Moral Arc quote, as well as a second
of the five quotes. Lincoln’s famous quote about the government of the people,
by the people and for the people? Turns out that President Lincoln borrowed
that phrase from none other than Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker.
So there you have it.
President Obama, perhaps unknowingly, reaching back to the lessons learned in
his childhood attending Sunday School at the First Unitarian Universalist
Church of Honolulu. Two of the five quotes around the oval office have clearly
Unitarian Universalist origins.
Now about this moral arc
of the universe business…
Theodore Parker’s sermon
from 1853 is terrific. It’s also written to be preached for about 90 minutes at
almost 9,000 words. Dr. King’s sermon is, as you would expect, invigorating.
Though I didn’t do a word count on his sermon, I listened to it as well as
read, and it was about 20 minutes.
There are common themes
between the two ministers and their sermons. Rev. Parker is addressing his
congregation in a time when slavery is still the law of the land, and he decries
this. In fact, Rev. Parker decried slavery a lot. To be fair, at first he
didn’t see the fight against slavery as his fight, but he was convinced by a
friend that it in fact WAS his fight, and fight Parker did. He was so outspoken
about abolition that many of the other ministers in Boston stopped talking to
him and he stopped being invited to ministerial gatherings….of his fellow
Unitarian ministers.
That’s right. Like all
people, we like to make the best of history, and not shine the flashlight of
truth too deep into the recesses of our history, but there was a time when an
Anti-Slavery Unitarian Minister was considered a trouble maker. Happily, with
the constant debate over just how involved the Unitarian ministers of Boston
ought to be in the fight over slavery, eventually we came out on the right side
of history, well before the Civil War.
But we didn't start off
that way.
It was a process.
As a faith, it took us
time to bend.
In his sermon, Of
Justice and the Conscience, Rev Parker writes:
Attraction is the most general law in the
material world, and prevents a schism in the universe ; temperance is the law
of the body, and prevents a schism in the members ; justice is the law of
conscience, and prevents a schism in the moral world, amongst individuals in a
family, communities in a state, or nations in the world of men. Temperance is
corporeal justice, the doing right to each limb of the body, and is the mean
proportional between appetite and appetite, or one and all ; sacrificing no
majority to one desire, however great, — no minority, however little, to a
majority, — but giving each its due, and all the harmonious and
well-proportioned symmetry that is meet for all. It keeps the proportions
betwixt this and that, and holds an even balance within the body, so that there
shall be no excess.[2]
But because this is not
a completed process, he also writes further along in his sermon, “Yet the mass
of men are always looking for what is just.”[3]
Implying that it is not yet readily found.
In Parker’s sermon he
lays out the idea that humanity is seeking the balance of justice because it is
a natural law, a law, that like gravity must be figured out. A natural law, to
his definition, is not one that we create, but that we discover has been there
all along, but only articulated by us as we develop as a species. To Parker,
Justice is a natural law, a law that is consistent with a Benevolent Diety.
Dr. King’s sermon is
full of imagery of mountains. He wrote and delivered his “Keep Moving this
Mountain” sermon for the Temple Israel in Hollywood. It’s natural, given his intended audience,
that Dr. King would use the story of Moses and the escape of the Jews from the
slavery of Egypt.
The trouble began, King
says, when the Jews realized that getting from slavery to the Promised Land was
going to be a lot of effort. From King’s sermon:
Moses stood up over and over again in Pharaoh’s
court and cried out, “Let my people go!” Pharaoh with a hardened heart refused
over and over again. But then came that glad day when the Red Sea opened and
God’s children were able to leave the darkness of Egypt and move on to the
other side. But as soon as they got out of Egypt they discovered that before
they could get to the Promised Land there was a difficult, trying wilderness
ahead. They had to realize that before they could get to the Promised Land,
they had to face gigantic mountains and prodigious hilltops.
And so, as a result of this realization, three
groups of people emerged. One group said in substance that “We would rather go
back to Egypt.” They preferred the flush parts of Egypt to the challenges of
the Promised Land. A second group that abhorred the idea of going back to
Egypt, and yet they abhorred the idea of facing the difficulties of moving
ahead to the Promised Land and they somehow wanted to remain stationary and
choose the line of least resistance. There was a third group, probably
influenced by Caleb and Joshua who had gone over to spy a bit and who admitted
that there were giants in the land but who said, “We can possess the land.”
This group said in substance that “We will go on in spite of...,” that “We will
not allow anything to stop us,” that “We will move on amid the difficulties,
amid the trials, amid the tribulations.”[4]
King then talks about a
very real, common experience of humanity:
In some real sense, we are all moving toward
some "promised land" of personal and collective fulfillment. In every
age and every generation, men have envisioned a promised land. Some may have
envisioned it with the wrong ideology, with the wrong philosophical
presupposition. But men in every generation thought in terms of some promised
land.[5]
And then Dr. King talks
about three metaphorical mountains that his contemporaries were dealing with,
just as Moses dealt with the mountains outside of Egypt. We must leave the
Mountain of Material Comfort, the Mountain of Racial Injustice and the Mountain
of Indifference Concerning Poverty.
We must, he instructs
his listeners, move out of the mountains and through the dangers of the land
between us and the Promised Land. Though the way, he acknowledges, will be made
with both physical and spiritual losses.
But these must be borne, he says, to bend the moral arc of the universe
toward justice.
At the conclusion of his
sermon, given over 100 years before Dr. King’s, Rev. Parker tells his listeners
that Justice may well be the Natural Law, the Will of the Loving God they
believe in, but
in human affairs the justice of God must work by
human means. Men are the measures of God's principles ; our morality the
instrument of his justice, which stilleth alike the waves of the sea, the
tumult of the people, and the oppressor's brutal rage. Justice is the idea of
God, the ideal of man, the rule of conduct writ in the nature of mankind. The
ideal must become actual, God's thought a human thing, made real in a reign of
righteousness, and a kingdom — no, a Commonwealth — of justice on the earth.
You and I can help forward that work. God will not disdain to use our prayers,
our self-denial, and the little atoms of justice that personally belong to us,
to establish his mighty work, — the development of mankind. You and I may work
with Him, and, as on the floor of the Pacific Sea little insects lay the
foundation of firm islands, slowly uprising from the tropic wave, so you and I
in our daily life, in house, or field, or shop, obscurely faithful, may prepare
the way for the republic of righteousness, the democracy of justice that is to
come. Our own (pg 101) morality shall bless us here; not in our outward life
alone, but in the inward and majestic life of conscience. All the justice we
mature shall bless us here, yea, and hereafter; but at our death we leave it
added to the common store of humankind. Even the crumbs that fall from our
table may save a brother's life. You and I may help deepen the channel of human
morality in which God's justice runs, and the wrecks of evil, which now check
the stream, be borne off the sooner by the strong, all-conquering tide of
right, the river of God that is full of blessing. [6]
Both of these men, these
amazing preachers of their time, call for justice for all of humanity. They
focus in part, but not exclusively, on the place of African Americans in our
society.
Each of these men issues
a call to action for people of good conscience to act in small and large ways
to bend the arc, not wait for the arc to be bent, but to bend the arc ourselves
toward justice.
If the arc of the moral
universe is going to be bent toward justice, it is we who must provide the
labor to make it so. As Rev. Parker tells us, Justice is a Natural Law, an
undeniable state of being, but it must be realized by us. As Dr. King tells us,
the path will not be easy, and suffering will be part of bringing Parker’s
ideals into being.
It’s hard to follow two
such giants in the theological, historical and rhetorical landscape of our
nation, but I would humbly add this message to you.
We must do what’s right.
We must add our own hands to the work of bending the universe. Like the people in the time of Parker and of
King, there are people who’s vision of what is fair and just is not the same as
our vision, and they are working as diligently, if not more so, than we are to
bring about their hopes for a world that feels “right” to them.
In leaving the metaphorical
mountains that Dr. King spoke about will be uncertainty and there will be hurt.
But there will be uncertainty and hurt in staying in the mountains, too, but
without the benefit of new vistas of beauty to discover along the way.
Let us spend 2015
answering the call of both our Unitarian forebear, Rev. Theodore Parker who
tells us that humanity is responsible for bringing the Commonwealth of Heaven
into reality here on Earth; and Dr. King’s call step out into the uncertain to
help create the world we dream of.
May the words and works
of the men and women whose examples we follow inspire us to live more fully
into our dreams.
Amen.
