January 16, 2005
Rev. Dr. Frank Carpenter,
D.Min.
St. John's Unitarian Universalist Church, Cincinnati, OH
In this spiritual moment, let us gather into our hearts all hopes and dreams, pain and sorrow that make this a transcending time. Let us be glad in our connections with one another, overcoming our separation from sources of hope and courage.
We are grateful for the sharings of our friends this hour, offering us the laughter and sadness of their lives, their family’s losses and triumphs.
As we connect this hour with our own sense of family, with the families of our friends, let us hold in mind the families of so many broken by natural and human caused disasters across our planet.
Let us recall those great ones who have struggled and sacrificed to bring relief to those who suffer, those who offered a drink of water, those who spoke truth to power, those who had a dream that uplifted all of us. Let us recall those who told us that peace is the path for our lives.
In this hour, let us overcome our separation from the love which binds us together and know the truth of our identity with all creation..
/silence/
Peace be with you. Amen.
We live in a moral universe. For this Dr King’s birthday Sunday, I think we honor him best by recalling that he did not consider morality, nonviolence a luxury, but a necessity, an expression of the way of things. However, it is all too easy to forget that we are part of, as Dr. King called it, “a single garment of destiny.” Please allow me to elaborate.
Among the interesting people I have met was the last survivor, Victor Heiser, of the great Johnstown Flood. When I was about 16 and he ninety we had lunch at the Harvard Club in New York City. He told me a story of that great flood on the head waters of our mighty Ohio.
As the waters were rising a fundamentalist preacher ran to the porch of his house. The liberal preacher of the town in a rush to leave town came by and offered him a ride. “No,” said the fundamentalist preacher, “God will save me.”
Soon the water had risen and the preacher was on the roof of the porch. A man came by in a boat, and offered to save him. ‘No,” said the fundamentalist preacher, “God will save me.”
Not long there after he was standing on the ridge pole, hanging on to the chimney for dear life. A helicopter came by, offering him a ladder. ‘No,” said the fundamentalist preacher, “God will save me.”
Well, the next thing he knew the preacher was standing before the throne of the almighty. The good lord was looking mighty surprised. “Why didn’t you save me?” asked the preacher.
“I tried, I tried,” said the good Lord. “I sent a preacher, a boat and a helicopter to give you a lift! What happened?”
I think it would be all too easy to find some amusement in this story and miss a significant message. I was reminded of this story by the many accounts of animals who escaped injury during the Asian tsunami. It is remarkable that very few animals: birds, dogs, elephants, were killed while thousands upon thousands of humans were. Some people speculate that animals have some sort of psychic powers humans do not.
One story that struck me the most was of an American reporter vacationing with his family in Sri Lanka. Early on the morning of the great wave, they were having breakfast, watching the ocean. Suddenly a crow flew onto their table and squawked at them. Shortly the crow left and then the wave swept over them.
There is now talk of developing an Asian tsunami warning system. Why do humans need a tsunami warning system when animals already have one? .... The animals all listen to one another, the warning calls of birds, barks of dogs, all telling one another of danger.
Why don’t we, why don’t human beings listen? Because we are not animals?
We have separated ourselves, disconnected from something very important. That is the point of the story about the evangelical preacher, who separated himself from others. That the animals are paying attention to natural cues and human beings are not shows we have separated ourselves from something.
This disconnection reaches great extremes in some cases, with people denying that they need to pay attention to reality at all. Recently Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor under the previous President Bush, noted dryly that the present administration had turned the word "realist" into a "pejorative.” [Maureen Dowd, DEFINING VICTORY DOWN, NY Times, January 9, 2005]
What have we separated ourselves from? As we honor Dr. King today, it seems to me we can best do that in asking, What did Dr. King call this ... this .. Something we have separated ourselves from.
What shall we call this, this sense of a moral order, of a moral universe? In
our reading this morning, Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed it in his essay “Compensation.”
Emerson was inspired to write that essay upon hearing a preacher proclaim the
age old doctrine that while bad people enjoy life now they will suffer in hell;
and while good people suffer now, they will live well in heaven. How horrible
a doctrine is that? If you don’t sin now, you can go to heaven and sin
for ever? What is that about?
No, for Emerson, the payment for bad behavior is not long delayed. “Tit for tat,” he says. What goes around comes around. Emerson does not hesitate to preach up this doctrine one single jot: “the league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a hostile front to vice... The laws and substances of nature – water, snow, wind, gravitation – become penalties to the thief.” Your may think Emerson wrong, but do not go confess your crimes to him. If you are contemplating being mean to someone, think twice, you’ll have to live with it.
What then shall we call
– do we call this moral order that Emerson describes, that was the whole
ministry of Dr. Martin Luther King to proclaim?
I am not preaching anything new to you, here. One of your former ministers,
Paul L’Herou, contributed the words to what is the most popular of our
Unitarian Universalist Principles. It was Paul who wrote the language for our
Seventh Principle: “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence
of which we are a part.” Yes, of which we are a part, not separated, not
disconnected from!
What else is Emerson talking about when he proclaims the moral order of nature?
What else does the crow squawk about on the breakfast table in Sri Lanka? We
are bound together as one. What effects one effects all.
What did Martin Luther King, Jr., call this? What did he call this sense of a moral order to the world we live in? Turn to our Responsive Reading this morning, # 584, read its title “A Network of Mutuality.” That’s what Dr. King called it. Read down the first sentence: “A Single Garment of Destiny” that’s what Dr. King called it. That’s what Dr. King called that thing, this reality, that thing we try to separate ourselves from, denying the squawk of the crow.
Dr. King preached social change through non-violence. Rather than picking up a gun, we should lay our bodies on the line for truth, speak truth to power. Unlike the preacher in my opening story, Dr. King was not separated from the moral order of human existence. He did not believe that if he preached non-violence, then God would reach down his hand and grant him immunity from the horrors that we human beings visit upon one another. Dr. King preached this, I believe, because he believed, as did Mohandas Gandhi, that non-violence is the truth of our being.
In our Responsive Reading, Dr. King considers this not just a high-minded thought, but a law of our being. He says, “We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.” He says this, not just because it is the nice thing to do, not just because it is the smart thing to do, but because we as human beings are entirely part of, to use an expression, part of “an interdependent web of all existence.”
What does it mean to pursue
peaceful ends through peaceful means?
In your household, do you live at peace with one another? Does peace bring greater
peace? If someone is out of line– a son drinking too much, beating them
at best may subdue them for the moment, but as a parent you loose respect. Abuse
generates resentment. Violence breeds violence; and peace brings peace.
I was reminded of this some months ago when I received a phone call from a woman I had dated when I was in my twenties. We had not spoken since. She decided to call me because, she said, her postman reminded her of me. She wondered why she was thinking of me and decided to check it out. She found out I am here in Cincinnati by calling her local Unitarian Universalist church.
She really wasn’t too sure why she called but several times she brought up her fear that she had hurt me. She was sorry to have hurt me. It took me a while to figure out why she might feel that way. It was after we talked I remembered that her family had moved out to California. We were engaged and I drove out to see her. I got there only to find she was going out with another man, a guy who took her biking in the desert. Not my style.
But I didn’t really feel she had anything to make amends for. I told her back in the late sixties we were all moving fast to figure out who we were and what we are about.
But her call offered me
something. Her wanting to make amends, if any, gave me a feeling of peace, of
connection with my life. It is the same when someone important to us dies, we
don’t want to feel separated from them. We want to feel that we have made
amends, offered and accepted forgiveness for the pain in which we have been
involved. There is no room for human beings in a world without forgiveness.
There is not room for us if we think we can live meanly, nastily. Recall our
story this morning form Africa: why did the tortoise grow a long tail like the
boa? “One person learns from another.” Ijap the tortoise told the
boa.
We live in a morally ordered world which we neglect to our diminishment. The
leader of the Czech democracy movement, Vaclav Havel, also followed this wisdom.
He felt that overthrowing the Communist regime was impossible. Instead of a
grand revolution, what he sought was to make the day to day lives of individual
people better. Havel describes the moral order of which we are a part:
At the basis of this world are values which are simply there, perennially, before we ever speak of them, before we reflect upon them and inquire about them. It owes its internal coherence to something like a “pre-speculative” assumption that the world functions and is generally possible at all only because there is something beyond its horizon, something beyond or above it that might escape our understanding and our grasp but, for just that reason, firmly grounds this world, bestows upon it its order and measure, and is the hidden source of all rules, customs, commandments, prohibitions and norms that hold in it. The natural world, in virtue of its very being, bears within it the presupposition of the absolute which grounds , delimits, animates and directs it, without which it would be unthinkable, absurd and superfluous, and which we can only quietly respect. Any attempt to spurn it, master it, or replace it with something else, appears, within the framework of the naturel world, as an expression of hubris for which humans must pay a heavy price... We must honor with the humility of the wise the bounds of that natural world and the mystery which lies beyond them, admitting that there is something in the order of being which exceeds all our competence; relating ever again to the absolute horizon of our existence which, if we but will, we shall constantly rediscover and experience. (John Dominic Crossan, IN SEARCH OF PAUL, 410 ff)
Dr. King said, We must purse peaceful ends through peaceful means. I believe that he stated this, not as a strategy, but as a moral law, part of the givenness of the world, what we call the interdependent web of existence and which Dr. King called a single garment of destiny.
Part of Dr. King’s struggle for non-violence, similar to what Gandhi thought of his own great failure, was that many people in the civil rights movement, the non-violence movement, thought that non-violence was only a strategy, and kept their guns under their beds. Gandhi died practicing non-violence, forgiving his murderer. Dr. King went up to the mountain and gave his life that we still hope for peace and freedom.
The sacrifice of this two men reflects the wisdom of those who know they are a part of the single garment of destiny. One of the most moving stories about the Asian tsunami that I heard was about some Americans in Malaysia. Their yacht was with a group of other Americans.
Immediately they understood
what was needed, unlike the other yachts. They set out to pull from the water
as many victims as they could. Their son, maybe 18 or so, took the lifeboat
and rowed out to pull people from the sea.
He made several trips and no elderly person accepted his rescue offer. They
pointed further out and insisted he fill his life boat with the children who
were struggling.
He became angry with other wealthy yacht owners who seemed only spectators, disconnected from the horror. He himself did the old people’s bidding and rescued as many youngsters as he could.
“Don’t take me, take the children. Save the children.” Save the children; such is the wisdom of living as part of the interdependent web, such is the wisdom in the sacrifice of Gandhi, of Dr. King.
Let us be at peace with one another. Let us pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.