First Parish Unitarian UniversalistIf Not Now, When?
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
January 16, 2005
Readings
“I Have a Dream” (excerpt) Martin Luther King Jr., 1963 March on Washington
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me, and if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” –Hillel, 60 BCE-10 CE, Jewish Scholar in Babylonia
Sermon
On the first day of my preaching class at Harvard Divinity School, we sat spellbound watching a videotape of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” Speech, the highpoint of the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights.
What might have seemed like a completely unfair goal set for us by the two local (and white) Unitarian Universalist ministers who for years taught this preaching course at Harvard, was instead deeply, deeply moving to us as aspiring preachers, most but not all of us white, representing a variety of faith traditions.
It wasn’t a sermon, it was a speech. It wasn’t a congregation, but an already energized crowd of 300,000. King wasn’t behind a pulpit, but in front of the Lincoln Memorial . And, the public context at that moment… well, the times were electric with freedom’s potential. Indeed, as we sang earlier, the people had awoken that day with their minds stayed on freedom…
Still, on that first day of our preaching class, we dared to dream we could so inspire the congregations we would eventually, hopefully, serve.
Now, I don’t mean to compare myself to the man whose birth is honored throughout our nation this weekend. And, you my friends, may be more in number than the 40 or 50 who sat most Sundays in these pews when I first arrived as your minister, but you aren’t even 300 (yet!), never mind 300,000!
Nevertheless, it remains my dream to so inspire you. And on several occasions I have done so, for some of you at least. I’ve felt it and you’ve told me so. Most recently, for some of you, on Christmas Eve. And back in October, my pre-election day sermon on war, do we want it to be the force that gives us meaning? And last March, on the anniversary of the world wide, million person protest against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And on Memorial Day 2002, with my sermon on the word “God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and National Motto, which won the 2003 national award for the best sermon expressing Unitarian Universalist social values.
It remains my dream to be a prophetic, powerful preacher who inspires and re-inspires your involvement and mine in the freedom struggles, the peace struggles, the justice struggles, the environmental struggles of our day.
And so, now, with Martin Luther King’s own words about his public dream echoing in our ears, I want to tell you more about my dream. I want to be open with you about its sources and, also, about your part in making it a reality. I want to discuss it frankly. I might make you uncomfortable. For as the Talmudic rabbi Hillel so squarely put it, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me, and if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”
You see, I’ve been wondering about something in the past few months. I’ve been wondering why it is… that on the occasions that I preach one of these inspired, take-your-religion-to-the-public-square-kinds of sermons, I get a lot of positive feedback about the sermon on that day and even in notes and comments in the next week, but very little information back from you about what the sermon inspired you to do.
This is distressing to me. My aim as a preacher is not to garner accolades for myself or to make us feel relevant for the morning, or for the day or two after. My aim is for us to transform the world.
My wondering has sent me in two different directions. Here’s the first:
Am I sometimes inspiring you and then not hearing back from you about what you are doing to change the world, your own small piece of it, because you don’t think that I want to know? If so, jimmineee! Tell me! I’m going to wither away up here if I continue to feel like the energy that gets created between us during worship dissipates on your way out to the parking lot.
More importantly, I believe you need to hear each other’s stories. Ours is a here and now kind of religion—we don’t do what we do for some glory in the next life—we do it because it’s right to do in this life. It’s not easy to live that way and so we therefore derive energy and hope from each other’s stories about the right we’ve tried to do.
As Dr. King said, "We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” Where do we get that forever-hope, but from the encouragement, the empowerment, of each other’s stories?
Some of my favorite stories here come from one of our Welcoming Congregation workshops, Transgender 101, an introduction to the issues of transgender people, led by Stephanie Johnson and myself in November 2003. At the end of the workshop, a voluntary homework assignment was announced: to choose a gay pride button and wear it the next day at work or around town or wherever, noting one’s own thoughts and feelings as well as the responses of others. You may remember, because we printed some of the stories in the newsletter. I loved hearing those stories.
Jim wore his rainbow triangle button to his workplace… the bowels of a union operated power plant. That might have taken some courage, I thought. He reported that no one made fun of him or the button. In fact, much to his surprise, it led to lengthy discussions on society’s insensitivity to the gay community. And, one of the chief engineers revealed that his brother was gay and talked about the problems he has encountered because of the prejudice against gays in our society.
Elaine chose a button that said “I’m straight but not narrow” and wore it to the opening celebration at the new Canton Library, at which her late husband’s exquisite paintings were featured. An acquaintance stopped to say to her, “I don’t get it… Were you trying to lose weight, Elaine?”
I love hearing about how Unitarian Universalism has changed, or saved, your life. How it gave you the strength to stop drinking or make a career change or find strength after the death of a loved one. I love hearing about how you stood up for your UU principles in a way that was not easy for you, or worked to achieve a change inspired by our principles. We all need to hear these stories!
We have some amazing people in this congregation, we really do. It would be enough that Sondra Crosby’s full-time work at Boston Medical Center is with refugees seeking asylum in our country, many of them torture survivors. It would be enough! Yet, she and Alan also have adopted five children, a rainbow of wonderful kids, two of whom were adopted from Sierra Leone where they’d already seen terrible things. That would be enough! And yet, the oldest of them, Isatu, age 12, joined her mother on a medical mission to Guatemala this summer. That would be enough! Yet, Sondra also took time, with a colleague, to write a compelling letter to the editor of the Boston Globe (which you can see posted on our UU’s in the News Bulletin Board in the Parish Hall) denouncing the physicians who participate in torturing the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. More than enough!
Extraordinary people we have! We love to hear the stories.
We’re not all going to be like Sondra. But, you know, Martin Luther King Jr. was just a young minister, still new to Montgomery Alabama, an officer of the local NAACP chapter, with a two-week old baby (their first) at home—wasn’t that enough?-- when he got a five a.m. phone call asking him to endorse the impending bus boycott and to host its first planning meeting at his church. In fact, he didn’t say “yes” right away. Like a lot of us would do, he said, “let me think about it and you call me back.” (Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch, p. 133).
There are among you—likely, countless—stories of when you got a call—a literal phone call or a call from within yourself, that “still small voice”) to do something important, out of your comfort range, on behalf of your principles, and you said, “let me think about it” and when the call-back came, you said “yes.” Well, what happened after that “yes?” Tell us the story! Tell it, brothers and sisters! Telling it for the purpose of inspiring others is not bragging! Tell your stories!
And…, the second direction my wonderings have sent me is this: am I not hearing more stories from you because, in fact, you are not doing much to tell about, even those of you who are inspired by these sermons? And if that’s the case, why is it that a sermon that many of you experience as inspiring does not move you to doing something yourself?
Of course, I know that some of you are ill. And some are stretched beyond the possible with the demands of jobs, family, First Parish and your other civic commitments. Those are stories in need of telling, too, because they point out how frail and frayed the very fabric of our society is… That’s one aspect of our world in need of change right there!
Of course, I know that for some of you, your work on the job every day all day long, is your response to that call, and you just can’t be called upon for more. That’s fine. You’ve got plenty of stories to tell already.
But, it began to dawn on me that because activism is, somehow, in my very bones, perhaps I’ve been preaching with an assumption that that is the case for all of you. How off-putting! And, so, perhaps, those who agree with my stand on a particular public issue are happy and those who disagree are unhappy, and few feel called to do anything more than praise or complain about my sermon.
This dawning realization is a work in progress. My challenge now is to go deeper with you, to go underneath the public issues of peace and war, health care, gay marriage and so on, to why: not the why take this stand and not that stand in regard to the facts—those why’s you can get from other sources—but the why in regard to our principles, our shared values as Unitarian Universalists.
But, even that is not deep enough. The deeper question is why get involved? Why participate? Why try to change the world?
And, if activism’s not in your bones, how might I help you open your heart and your mind to learning its ways?
My colleague the Reverend Dick Gilbert reminds us as Unitarian Universalists that Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., exhorted us to be "drum majors for justice and righteousness." Gilbert asks, “How are UU's responding to that…call? Are we even in the parade?” He goes on, “I believe Unitarian Universalists, all of us, need a moral and spiritual check-up. Are we really committed, justice-making people? We need to do some soul searching as to whether we have mere opinions or have convictions upon which we are willing to act. Let's put the heft of the religious ‘left’ out there to build that ‘Beloved Community,’ [that World House in which all people’s of the earth may live in peace], of which Dr. King spoke. I'm re-‘soul’ing,” and Gilbert spelled that SOUL, “I’m re-‘souling’my marching shoes. How about you?” (www.uua.org)
How about you? What are we doing to re-soul our marching shoes?
King himself said, only two months before his death, “I just want to be there in love and in justice and in truth and in commitment to others, so that we can make of this old world a new world.” (“Drum Major Instinct,” 4 February 1968).
How about you? What are we doing to re-soul our marching shoes? If not now, when? If not now, when?
Benediction
...[Let us]…be there in love and in justice and in truth and in commitment to others, so that we can make of this old world… a new world. Amen. So may it be. Go in peace, gentle people.