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.
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