First Parish Unitarian UniversalistWhen the Wind Lifts Your House
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane D. Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
January 14, 2007
Opening Words
Long ago, before the Civil War, there was an old sailor, a white man they called Peg Leg Joe, who did what he could to help free American slaves.
They called him Peg Leg Joe because one of his legs had been injured and was amputated below the knee, where a wooden peg was attached so he could walk okay. He wore a shoe on his Left foot and for the right, he had his peg foot; left foot, peg foot…that’s how he walked.
The story goes that Peg Leg Joe hired himself out as a carpenter on slave plantations in the American south. By day, he’d do his work and by night he’d teach the slaves a song that secretly told the way to freedom.
The song said “to follow the drinking gourd.” You’ve seen gourds, right? Just imagine…if you cut off the top part of it, you could use it to dip water out of a bucket and take a sip. Like a ladle.
Now, isn’t that strange? If you were a slave, how could you follow a ladle to freedom?
But, have you ever looked up in the night sky to see the stars? Have you ever seen the constellation called the Big Dipper? Doesn’t it look like a ladle? You could follow the Big Dipper, that drinking gourd in the sky, traveling at night so you wouldn’t be seen!
The songs says to follow the drinking gourd, and a riverbank, go between two hills to another river and then a great big river where an old man would be waiting in a boat to row you across. It would be Peg Leg Joe!
On the other side, a man would appear in the dark, you’d hide in his hay wagon, and he’d take you to what would be the first of many houses in which you would hide on your way north to safety and to freedom in Canada.
Follow the drinking gourd!
(Then the choir began its anthem “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” a haunting arrangement by John Horman. The children’s homily was from the Prologue to Congressman John Lewis’ autobiography, Walking With the Wind, featured also in the sermon).
Sermon
The sermon must begin now, but already this morning so many images are in our minds and so many feelings in our hearts-- from the music, from the stories, from the reading this morning—
slave folks courageously escaping to freedom, free folks braving risks to help them get there
small children in a fierce storm boldly holding the cabin down as the wind threatens to lift it up
a minister [Rev. Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley, author of the morning’s Responsive Reading, “A Litany of Restoration”), not yet sixty, with so much wisdom and commitment still to offer struck down by cancer, her truth-telling about prejudice stopped in mid-sentence, except in so far as we carry it on
— so many images and feelings already this morning… perhaps it would be best if I just stood here quietly for a while and said nothing, absolutely nothing.
In the silence we might gather the images and feelings together, to be reminded of them like a slide show in our souls, images and feelings appearing and disappearing, reappearing, leading us each into our own reflections…
So let us allow a reprise of the choir’s anthem [“Follow the Drinking Gourd” arranged by John Horman] to give us the space for reflecting. The anthem will be sung in sections, interspersed through the sermon. Thank you so much to the choir and Jim Chubet for indulging me in this experiment this morning.
As the music begins, let us reflect first… on the troubles we’ve seen in our own lives, not slavery surely, but troubles—the hardships we’ve suffered or are now suffering, the challenges, the obstacles, the depths to which we’ve sunk, the outrages we’ve seen other’s lives and in the world around us, the fears we’ve felt for ourselves, our loved ones, our nation, the world…. Let us ponder first on the troubles we’ve seen…
First part of anthem “Follow the Drinking Gourd” arranged by John Horman
Let us reflect next on our journeys out of these troubles… what have been our personal drinking gourds?— who or what we have we (or do we) follow in making it to safety— a twelve-step program, a best friend; a daily jog or sitting meditation; the glorious sunrise, a beloved pet; our goals and intentions, a peace-giving prayer, our god if by some name we worship; the children, the needy, the justice movement we give our best selves to… maybe even this sanctuary of memory and hope has been for you at times like a drinking gourd leading you to a safer home… Let us give thanks now for the drinking gourds that have shown us on our journey’s way…
Second part of anthem
The “underground railroad” images in the Drinking Gourd song speak powerfully to us all, of whatever race or ethnicity we might be. Those were terrible times, times that stained our nation and left a legacy of prejudice, guilt, hatred, racism, internalized racism, violence, addictions, obvious racial bias in prison sentences and in many public and private institutions—it’s a legacy that is real, still, even today.
Those were terrible times, so the courage of those who fled their masters at risk of recapture, torture, and death and the well-organized movement of free folks, black and white, to help them on their way… these inspire us even today.
For those of us and our children who are of European descent, the legacy of slavery might have been just guilt and apathy toward racial injustice in our own day, if not for these images of white people back then standing up to slavery, in actions that made a real difference, actions that housed and moved individual slaves on their way toward freedom.
For their own empowerment, all American children need to know the story of the Underground Railroad.
Did you know that it is said to have passed through Canton? Did you know that at least one home here is thought to have been a stop on that then-infamous, now heralded train track? It’s not far from Chapman Street, near the corner of Cedarcrest Road and Spring Lane, the house where Don Seaman’s grandmother lived when he was growing up. He remembers her showing him how to lift up the floor boards in a bedroom closet on the second floor, exposing a dark space down there along the chimney, and a ladder, where the unlawful travelers could be hidden if necessary. The Draper family no longer owns the home, but this is the story they passed down the generations about that house.
It’s also, Don told me, the house where he and his older brothers went when they wanted to run away from home—a temporary escape from their masters, his parents! But he says Grandma was no train conductor to freedom; she just gave them a snack and drove them back home.
From the history of the Underground Railroad, we know that un-told numbers of slaves freed themselves from bondage, by their own courage and intelligence--they weren’t all meek and afraid. And we know that some white folks challenged the status quo; they weren’t all meek and afraid, nor were they all bigots and slaveholders.
Let us call upon these non-violent resistors as heroes and role models for our day. Let us call upon their memory to help us guard against becoming inured and complacent to the bondage of fear that is ever with us, even today.
The so-called “war on terror” is called that precisely to tap our fear of another 9/11. Perversely.
For I believe the evidence that the American invasion of Iraq has made us more, not less, vulnerable to another such attack since then, by bringing Al Qaeda to Iraq where it hadn’t been before, by uniting Muslim countries in opposition to the United States who formerly were not aligned with each other, by showcasing extremist Muslims at the expense of moderates, and by diverting military resources away from Afghanistan and its border with Pakistan where at first U.S. military pursued the perpetrators of the attacks on that fateful day.
And, in many other, more subtle ways, we can see that fear has become both a tool of and an argument for alarmingly repressive actions by our own government. We should pay attention!
Yes, the details are overwhelming, and so tempting to ignore. Overwhelming like the fierce wind in the story the children helped me enact earlier this morning, but we ignore the details at our peril.
Just yesterday, for example, the New York Times (January 13, 2007, p. 1, 11) reported that the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, Charles Stimson, had elicited an outcry from people who pay attention. Last week, he listed during a radio interview more than a dozen top law firms whose lawyers are representing Guantanamo Bay detainees in federal court cases and then said, “I think, quite honestly, when corporate CEO’s see that [the law firms that represent them]… are [also] representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEO’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms…”
Do you hear what I hear, the fear he’s trying to provoke? He insinuates a threat of recriminations against lawyers who challenge the federal government in court. Our democracy relies on a balance of powers between the branches of the federal government. Won’t the judicial branch be useless if lawyers are afraid to represent clients whose cases challenge the federal government?
Furthermore, as the president of the American Bar Association is quoted as saying in response to Mr. Stinson, “Lawyers represent people in criminal cases to fulfill a core American value: the treatment of all people equally before the law. To impugn those who are doing this critical work—and doing it on a volunteer basis—is deeply offensive to members of the legal profession, and we hope to all Americans.”
Mr. Stimson’s statement is reprehensible also for two other reasons.
First, he violated another core American value, innocent until proven guilty, when he referred to the detainees as “terrorists” rather than “alleged terrorists.”
Second, how crass, but how true, to assert that CEO’s value their “bottom line” over the lives of the people who were killed on September 11, 2001. Is such greed what it means to be a “reputable” American corporation today?
Third part of anthem
Yesterday’s story discouraging lawyers from providing legal counsel to Guantanamo detainees, is just a small example of fear being promulgated. In this case, not to worry, it hasn’t gone un-noticed. When the lawyers are impugned, they let their outrage be known and they are not without connections to the media!
So, this story isn’t a big storm. It’s only a gust of wind. But we are in danger of becoming accustomed to the gusts and tired of paying attention, so that when a gust impugns and threatens more vulnerable, less well-connected people we won’t even know about it, and when a big storm comes, we won’t believe it.
In fact, when Georgia Congressman John Lewis tells his story about the house nearly being lifted by the storm, he says at first they could hardly believe it.
The story is in the Prologue to his compelling autobiography, Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, published in 1998. Born in 1940, Lewis grew up in rural Alabama, where much of his family still lives. As a teen he was deeply moved and excited hearing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr on the radio. He wanted to become a preacher like King, but his family was poor and he had done well in high school but not well enough to get a college scholarship. So he went to a free seminary for Black Baptists in Nashville.
In his second year there, eighteen year old Lewis got involved in leading the first sit-ins in Nashville, and then elsewhere—amazing stories of faith, organization and bravery. He became chairman of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), serving as a link between SNCC and, as they perceived it, Dr. King’s risk-aversive Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Eventually John Lewis was pushed out of SNCC by those who got impatient with non-violence. He was elected to Atlanta City Council in 1982, ran for Congress and won on his second try against his SNCC colleague Julian Bond. Lewis has served in Congress since 1986.
Lewis remembers being a small child of four on a day that turned stormy. He and his many cousins had been playing outside when the wind came up. His aunt called them all inside, into her small one-room wooden house. The storm was whipping around, the trees swaying, sheets of rain beating on the tin roof, and everyone was scared. Suddenly the wind was so fierce the house began to sway, the floor boards began to bend, and the corner of the room started lifting up!
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he writes. “None of us could. This storm was actually pulling the house toward the sky. With us inside it.”
His aunt told the fearful children to clasp hands and line up. They did, and then she led them, holding hands, toward the corner of the room that was rising. And from there they walked, all together, to the next corner the wind was lifting, and from there to wherever the wind went next. Until the storm abated.
“Fifteen children walking with the wind,” he says, “holding that trembling house down with the weight of our small bodies.” (p. 12).
“More than a half a century has passed since that day,” Lewis reflects, “and it has struck me more than once over those many years that our society is not unlike the children in that house, rocked again and again by the winds of one storm or another, the walls around us seeming at times as if they might fly apart.
“It seemed that way in the 1960s,” he continues, “at the height of the civil rights movement, when America itself felt as if it might burst at the seams—so much tension, so many storms. But the people of conscience never left the house. They never ran away. They stayed, they came together and they did the best they could, clasping hands and moving toward the corner of the house that was the weakest…”
“Children holding hands, walking with the wind. That is America to me—not just the movement for civil rights but the endless struggle to respond with decency, dignity and a sense of brotherhood to all the challenges that face us as a nation, as a whole.” (p. 13)
I’ve heard the great contemporary African American preacher, Rev. James Forbes of Riverside Church in New York City, thunder in his deep voice, “the Bible is all about NOT being fearful.” If there’s a theme, it’s that, he says. How many times do we read in the Bible, “Be not afraid,” “do not be afraid,” “do not fear,” “fear not…” we hear these injunctions in the scriptures over and over again, he says.
Fear is a necessary part of the human condition, it plays a survival role. And faith is a response to that fear—to not be immobilized, to not be cowered, to not be afraid.
Let us be people of conscience who never leave the house. Let us be among those who pay attention, who listen for the winds of fear.
And when the winds of fear lift the house, when fear threatens freedom, when it is the tool of, or the excuse for, repression, let us be among those who hold hands and walk together to where the weight of our bodies, our principles, our compassion, our anger, our wisdom and hope can hold the place down, keep the chaos at bay, and send the howling wind far, far away.
Let us follow the drinking gourd.
Last part of anthem.