sermon

INTRODUCTION: The Rev. Howard Thurman was one of America’s most prominent African-American ministers during the middle of the 20^th Century. He was also the pastor of the nation’s first intentionally, interracial congregations. It was located in San Francisco.

In one of his sermons he tells the story of his grandmother, who was born a slave on a plantation in Madison, Florida, which is in the northern edge of the state, just South of Valdosta, Georgia. She could neither read nor write, so as a young boy, when Howard Thurman visited her, she would have him read the Bible to her. But she would not let him read any of the books of St. Paul in the Christian New Testament. Dr. Thurman was curious about that, but as a young boy, he never asked her why.

Then when he was halfway through college, he was spending a few days with her near the end of his summer vacation. He got up enough nerve to ask her why she wouldn’t ever let him read anything from St. Paul. Here is her response. She said:

“During the days of slavery, the master’s minister would occasionally hold services for the slaves. Old man McGhee was so mean that he would not let a Negro minister preach to his slaves. Always the white minister used as his text something from Paul. At least three or four times a year he used as a text: ‘Slaves, be obedient to them that are your masters…as unto Christ.’ Then he would go on to show how it was God’s will that we were slaves and how, if we were good and happy slaves, God would bless us. I promised my Maker that if I ever learned to read, and if freedom ever came, I would not read that part of the Bible.”

I remember in a previous ministry settlement, during a service, I read from the book of Genesis. Later, a gay man who had served in the military, wrote me a letter filled with pain in which he asked how could I use any material from a book that had caused so many gay people so much pain?

It may well be that every one of us has some negative experience that lingers from our past, including our religious past, that hovers over us still. It doesn’t even have to be the distant past.

It is not unusual for me to counsel with participants in our congregation, who are facing very difficult choices in the present. Whichever choice they make seemingly is filled with pain and conflict.

So when the Buddha said, “Life is difficult,” he was describing us, and our time. Religious faith is not about removing us from difficulty. It doesn’t give us an umbrella to shield us from life’s storms. But it does give us freedom.

The late Mississippi writer and photographer Eudora Welty once said, “All serious daring starts from within.”

I had the opportunity to visit with Ms Welty many years ago, when she was one of the special speakers in Santa Barbara, California at a writers’ conference. None of us would think of that frail-looking little woman as the daring sort. Yet the truth is that she thought some of the most daring thoughts that a White Southern woman in Mississippi could think. She became one of the most articulate voices of change in a state that more than any other tried to hold on to its racist past. And serious daring, serious freedom, she said, begins within.

How long since we soared with eagles and ran with wolves? How long since our mind stretched and expanded, to try the new and the different? How long since we exercised that most precious gift of freedom?

The most serious daring that most of us face is within ourselves…daring to believe in ourselves…to close our ears to the “nabobs of negativity.”

The single biggest obligation I have as a minister is constantly to hold out before us the possibilities that each of us has, that we can change, that we can believe, that we can discover. The reason? because the religious enterprise is very simple. The message of a liberal religious congregation like ours is a very basic one; namely, to restore in each of us the expectancy and the hope that we were instilled with by the very act of being born. We were born to believe in our possibilities.

How do we do that? By exercising our capacity to believe. The most powerful system in the body is “the belief system.” The most powerful part of our body is not our arms or our legs, but it’s our capacity to believe. Our task in life is to discover those things in which we can truly believe, so as to release the power and force that comes from believing, to go from, “I can,” to “I will,” to “I do.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote of an incident that occurred during the early days of his involvement in the civil rights movement. He was in the Atlanta airport and needed to go to the restroom. At that time, in that southern city of Georgia, there were two sets of restrooms: one, for Whites, and one, for "Coloreds," as African-Americans were then called. The restrooms for Whites were larger, cleaner and nicer than the ones for African Americans. Dr. King chose to use the one for Whites.

As he started for the door, there was an old Black man who was shining shoes outside the door of the White restroom who tried to stop him. He said, "Hey, you can't go in there." Dr. King ignored him and went on in anyway, realizing later, that his fellow African American "didn't know he was free."

He had for so long been a victim of racism, of segregation, of inequality, that he didn’t know it was an offense against him. It was no longer something to protest, it was no longer something to try and change. His head was bowed before the oppression of segregation. His mental and psychic self-identity had long since been lost. And he had not only fully appropriated the injustice of it, but he had become its spokesperson: "Hey, you can't go in there." As Dr. King said, "That man didn't know he was free." He could go in either restroom if he so chose.

The most basic belief of faith is to say, we believe. We believe in the capacities that we have been given as a human being to love, to give, to hope, to dream, to dare.

The creed of this congregation is, We believe! It’s up to us to fill in the blank that follows.

But it’s not simply we believe by itself. It’s also a belief that we can make a difference. Serious daring is, believing that what we do, even if it’s only in our neighborhood, our family, our job, can make a difference. Faith challenges us to dare to make a difference.

We are not called upon to save the world, but to help our next-door-neighbor. We are not called upon to solve the problems of racism in our world, but to work on it right here in River City. We are not called upon to address the nation’s problems of juvenile justice, but to address it here in Ft. Myers. We are not called upon to feed the hungry of the world or house its millions of homeless. We are called upon to help the homeless in the backdoors of our city, who are living in the woods of this community. We can’t save the world, but we can have a part, even a small part, in making a difference…like all America did this past Tuesday.

Something very phenomenal happened this past week. But it was not what you might think. It was not the president getting rid of Donald Rumsfeld. It was not the Democrats beating the Republicans. Nor was it the liberals and moderates ganging up on the conservatives. Nor was it the number of women who were elected to high office.

No, the most important thing that happened last Tuesday was that nothing happened. There were no troops in the streets. There were no riots in the cities. The reason? We are a democracy. And democracy at its heart is all about “freedom.”

So where did we get our awareness of freedom? Where did we get the innate sense that all women and men are innately free? Why does America, despite all its warts and failures, still embody in our election last Tuesday the dream of freedom for much of the world?

There are many ways to answer that question: Roger Williams is one; the Founding Fathers another; the U.S. Constitution another. And on the list goes. But for us here in this service of worship, it’s more personal:

People, who don't think free, don't believe free. People, who aren't free within, are not inclined to grant that freedom to others.

As William Sloane Coffin, Jr., has said, "When unfree people chance on someone who really is free, who thinks freely, feels freely, and acts freely, their instinct is not to gain a like freedom, but to take her or his away."

Unfree people don't think freely, don't act freely, and never anticipate they're going to be free. For them freedom is little more than a slogan which makes it all right to take away the freedoms of those who differ from them.

Our freedom roots in the very essence of what it means to be a species of this Planet Earth. We have the potential of the universe within us. Everything out there is in here. We are made of the stuff of the stars. We were present at the inception of the Big Bang. We carry the history of the world within us.

Presupposing the constitution, presupposing any religion, is the reality that as one of the 30 million species on this planet, freedom is innate to our existence. We belong. We are a part. No one has the right to try and take away our freedom.

Knowing that to be true, how can we under estimate our freedom, and our ability to exercise our freedom? Freedom is never about the majority, it's about individuals. Martin Luther King, Jr. was only one individual who absolutized one truth and devoted his life to its accomplishment.

Changes in our society are not brought about by majorities. In fact, the majority of Americans didn't even have enough basic citizenship and care about this nation to get out and vote Nov. 5. Changes in our society are brought about by informed citizens who actively seek to insure freedom for all Americans.

So many unfree people want to identify free people as born sinners, that by nature we are sinful people. I think that’s grossly wrong. By nature, we are good. Were that not so, as I've said before and will say again many times, if we were bad by nature, we would feel good when we did bad, and when we did bad we would feel good. The reality is that every human being feels good when we do good and bad when we do bad because by nature we are good. The challenge is always to give rise to the good within us rather than the bad around us. And that is always a choice we have to make.

Think for just a moment, what incredible gifts we’ve been given. We can see. We can touch. We can feel. We can love. We can hear. We can speak. We can read. We can sing. We can walk. We can run. We can smile. We can laugh. We can eat. We can whistle. And on and on the list goes. What incredible capabilities we have.

And if you doubt what gifts those are, go with me some week to the hospital and visit someone who is fighting to regain one of those capabilities that we take so for granted. What a marvelous gift of a body we have been given. What an incredible time to be alive. What a world to be alive in.

CONCLUSION

Yesterday was Veterans Day, which commemorates the time in 1918, the 11^th month of the year, on the eleventh day at 11 a.m. in the morning, that the Great War ended. But now, Nov. 11^th also commemorates all the wars and all the veterans and soldiers who served in America’s military. I asked retired U.S. Navy Captain, Dr. Tom Hahn, who served in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, to write a word about it. Here is what he closed with:

“Unfortunately, the culmination of the wars and conflicts of recent decades have left me distrustful of our government and our leaders. It has disillusioned me regarding the established religions of the world. And, they have left me with a sense of shame regarding the reputation of the United States of America. But, don’t get me wrong: God (or whatever) bless my America and all you wonderful people who live in it, right or wrong. It makes me feel right that I did the best that I could.”

[1] Given November 12, 2006, at All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, Ft. Myers, Florida, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1901 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister: second in a three-part “Patriotic Series.”