Meditation
As we reflect this morning on our world and on our own lives, let us remember those who are in need:
there is hunger;
there is loneliness;
there is perhaps too much emptiness and self-centeredness
in our own lives.
We do not have the answers, the solutions to all the questions that are created by opening our eyes to the world.
But we do have the capacity to look through ourselves into the eyes of another.
We do have the cpacity to begin to understand our lives in the context of the oneness of all humankind.
We do have the capacity to grow in our full potential for nurturing life and life-giving forces on this planet.
May we find the strength and energy to reach out, to give, to touch the lives of those people in our world.
Let us pause in the silence to reflect upon our innermost thoughts, our innermost feelings......... (silence) ............ amen.
-Tim Haley, adapted by JRG
Reading for Two Voices: “Let Freedom Ring”
Readers: Rev. Joan Gelbein and Abe Gelbein
Joan Hubert Humphrey: “The struggle for equal opportunity in America is the struggle for America’s soul. The ugliness of bigotry stands in direct contradiction to the very meaning of America.”
Abe Paul Robeson: “Freedom is a precious thing, and the inalienable birthright of all who travel this earth.”
Joan Thomas Jefferson: (Declaration of Independence) “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable Rights, and among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Abe Roy Wilkins: “We have tried to create a nation where all men would be equal in the eyes of the law, where all citizens would be judged on their own abilities, not their race. ... We have believed in our Constitution. We have believed that the Declaration of Independence meant what it said. All my life I have believed in these things, and I will die believing them.”
Joan Harry S. Truman: “Freedom has never been an abstract idea to us here in the United States. It is real and concrete. It means not only political and civil rights, it means much more. It means a society in which man has a fair chance. It means an opportunity to do useful work. It means the right to an education. It means protection against economic hardship.”
Abe Harry S. Truman: “As a nation we are committed to the principle of freedom because we believe that all men are created equal. Freedom is a relationship between equals.”
Joan Elizabeth Cady Stanton (First Women’s Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York): “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.”
Abe James Thurber: “The most frightening study of mankind is man. I think he has failed to run the world, and that Woman must take over if the species is to survive. Almost any century now Woman may lose her patience with black politics and red war and let fly. I wish I could be on earth when to witness the saving of our self-destructive species by its greatest creative force. If I have sometimes seemed to make fun of Woman, I assure you it has only been for the purpose of egging her on.”
Joan Susan B. Anthony: “Join the union, girls, and together say Equal Pay for Equal Work.”
Joan Gloria Steinhem: (Response to a question on why she never married): “I can’t mate in captivity.”
Abe Alice Walker: “For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.”
Joan William Faulkner: “We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.”
Abe Archibald MacLeish: “What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, and instrument, a thing.”
Joan Gore Vidal: “Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex; many don’t; many respond to both. This plurality is part of our nature and not worth fretting about.”
Joan Elizabeth Cady Stanton: “Our ?pathway’ is straight to the ballot box, with no variableness now shadow of turning. ... We demand in the Reconstruction suffrage for all citizens of the Republic. I would not talk of Negroes or women, but of citizens.”
Abe Duke Ellington: “Freedom from hate unconditionally, freedom from self-pity. Freedom from the fear of doing something that would help someone else more than me. Freedom from the kind of pride that makes me feel I am better than my brother.”
Sermon
Benjamin Woodard is 3 years old. He’s my grandchild, the youngest of two sons of my daughter, Martha, and her husband, Craig. The family is visiting with us this weekend. He’s adorable, of course. And he’s smart and good-looking, of course. But, sometimes he’s also an example of an irrational despot, a pint-size dictator so taken up with wielding the word, “NO!” in the face of every attempt to find out what he wants, that the rest of us are having our patience sorely tested. “Time out!” my daughter Martha will say sometimes when the whines and the demands get to a point of no return. She sets the tyrant aside - away from us. He screams for his mother and stamps his feet. After a few minutes of this, Martha scoops him up, takes him to another room and calms him down with hugs, reassurances and words of reason. He returns, subdued, asks to sit on Mama’s lap, and gradually returns to his cadence of “No’s” and frowns and general “impossible-ness.”
I think to myself – how is Benjamin’s vigorous little stage of development a gift to us? This takes a while, but it then occurs to me, thinking about this sermon theme I’d been working on, that Benjamin’s early developmental “take” on what freedom is all about has some interesting effects on all of us.
He wants what he wants, when he wants it. His world revolves around his own needs. He is experimenting with how far he can go to control those around him and get what he wants. This is human. This is normal. It is also a challenge to deal evenly with a child who’s world is still narrow and self-centered, and who actually must be empowered to say, “This is who I am in the world – someone to reckon with - a new individual with a viable life force!
At this tender age of 3 it is indeed a challenge to apply firm and loving limits. A parent needs to know that, with love, time, patient consistency, and with the child’s health and well-being in mind, a compassionate human being, with a conscience, will slowly emerge in our midst. I’ve seen this happen, ---------but I am also saying prayers for Benjamin!
None of us are radically “free,” in the sense of “no limits;” and if there was a grown-up person around us behaving in that manner, we would think to ourselves, “How childish! How adolescent!” We would reveal our assumption that freedom - from constraints on any impulses - happens only on the bumpiest and most primitive parts of the road to growing up.
Total, unrestrained, impulsive freedom can be chaotic, even frightening in its effect on oneself and on others, and in its consequences.
In the sixties, Janis Joplin, the hippiest of the hip, sang these words that most of us remember: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
“Nothing left to lose?” Then if it’s all despair and hopelessness on the horizon, so, go do anything you like...anything that feels good. To hell with the consequences. Janis Joplin died young of a drug overdose.
America in the 1960s was an unusual decade - a lot of “breaking out;” a lot of rebelliousness and experimentation; a drug scene with its mind-altering effects, and the now-familiar peace symbol everywhere - even painted on cars - particularly VW Beetles and Microbuses. In those days, we were taking the idea and ideal of freedom into strange places.
You go back over 200 hundred years to the new-born United States of America of the 1760’s, 1770’s, and 1780’s, and you get a different sense of the idea of “Freedom.” Instead of despair and hopelessness, there was a vigorous sense that justice that must prevail over the forces of oppression. There was an exciting vision equality, a heady vision of freedom. For most patriots, there was a readiness to fight and die for these values.
So...welcome to Independence Day 2000! It is a holiday enshrined in our minds and hearts in which we celebrate the unanimous signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 by representatives of the thirteen united States of America. Two hundred and twenty-four years ago.
At the time of the signing, the thirteen colonies were under the rule of England’s King George III. Colonists were upset about paying taxes to England and having no representation in the English Parliament – “Taxation Without Representation.” The unrest resulted in rebellion. English troops were sent. In 1774, the 13 colonies sent delegates to Philadelphia to form the First Continental Congress to consider separation from British rule. In April, 1775, the King’s troops advanced on Concord, Massachusetts, and with the so-called “shot heard around the world,” the colonies’ war for independence had its unofficial beginning.
In May of 1776, the colonies again sent delegates to the Second Continental Congress, still hoping to work things out with England without declaring war. But, by June, it was hopeless, and a committee, headed by Thomas Jefferson, was formed to compose a formal declaration of independence. On July 4, 1776, the document was signed, and the rest, as they say, is history.
The bell in Independence Hall in Philadelphia was rung. Inscribed upon it, these words: “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants Thereof.”
Today, at the “shrine” in the National Archives, three parchment documents are on display. The most visible, enclosed in a heavy brass frame, standing like a tabernacle, high above the others, is the Declaration of Independence. Below it, on the surface of the “altar,” lie the Constitution and the federal Bill of Rights. Today the three documents seem parts of a whole; they are the “founding documents” of the United States, the Americans’ “charters of freedom.” Their texts have become “political scriptures,” in a phrase James Madison once used, that is, statements of belief and practice written during the American Revolution to which generation after generation of Americans have returned for guidance and direction. Over time, they came to define the Americans as a people.
The three documents were first created to perform distinct, complementary functions. The Declaration of Independence, as I said, was a revolutionary manifesto that proclaimed and justified the end of British rule over America. The Bill of Rights stated the basic rights of the American people, and the Constitution, created a new federal government that would, hopefully secure those rights.
The federal Bill of Rights took roughly a century and a half to exert the influence that made it a powerful national icon. The functions of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights also changed in ways that have served to obscure their original function.
It is important to understand the process of change these documents have undergone to know better what we are celebrating. Our understanding and practice of them is contemporary, and further along from the original context and intent that inspired them.
The Declaration of Independence had become somewhat obscure until the ratification of the Bill of Rights. It was this part of the Declaration that brought it back to life:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”Since neither the federal Constitution nor the Bill of Rights said anything about men being born (or created) equal or having inalienable rights, persons who continued to believe in the relevance of those ideas had to cite the Declaration of Independence. It was all they had. So, in the 1790’s, that old revolutionary manifesto began a rather dramatic comeback.
After the War of 1812, a new generation of Americans looked back to the Revolution with awe; they preserved as much from that time as possible, re-made the Founders into larger-than-life heroes, and their written testaments into holy writ.
In this new role, as a form of scripture, the Declaration of Independence proved very useful to one cause after another – that of workers, women, farmers - those who felt their equality of rights were being violated. The cause that claimed its authority most powerfully was that of abolitionism: if we were “created equal,” – that is, if no one was born with authority over another – if all legitimate authority came from consent, as the Declaration said, then slavery was profoundly wrong.
These strong ideas found a home in a new Republican Party of the 1850s. They took on the defense of the Declaration and its principles, which gradually assumed an entirely new function, not as a revolutionary manifesto, but as a statement of principles to guide and established government, like a bill of rights.
Abraham Lincoln was, of course, one of the great spokesperson of those views in his time. For him, the Declaration of Independence’s provision on equality was a sacred principle.
Lincoln wrote that “what they meant to do in the Declaration was simply to declare the right so that enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, and constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”
That was, really, a radical interpretation of the Declaration of Independence, one that went beyond what Thomas Jefferson probably imagined.
After the end of the Civil War, and after Lincoln’s death, republicans enacted the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which ended slavery and involuntary servitude; the Fourteenth Amendment talked about equal protection of the laws for all people; and the Fifteenth Amendment, said the right of American citizens to the vote could not be “denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” In the twentieth century, the Supreme Court began using the Fourteenth Amendment to make the states respect the Bill of Rights.
The story of the Americans’ “founding documents” is not a simple one. What we celebrate today is the birth of an idea, and the beginning of a process of internalizing and defining an ideal and putting it into practice.
What has happened to the ideal of freedom, lo these 224 years in internalizing and practicing?
I can only speak briefly about this long and complex process. We could set up a series of discussion groups and panels and lectures over the next few months, and do lots of reading, and all our work at education and awareness about these basic American values and their history and practice, would, probably leave us grounded only in the gray areas of this democracy we inhabit, both in body and spirit.
There is so much good. There is so much that is not good. What feels good to me is that the founders and those who continued to develop the founding documents, speak my language. They speak our Unitarian Universalist language: Liberty, freedom, equality, tolerance, -- affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of every person.
And we know how difficult it is for each of us to live our values. At best, we pay attention and get involved in the process of liberty for all; at worst we pay attention to our own needs and feelings and withdraw from the essential responsibility to our own self and to others that it takes to live in freedom.
As just one example, if I were not white, Caucasian - if I were black, African American - I’d experience deep reservoirs of anger and pain over the intractable prejudice in our society which continuously reduces my opportunities and rights.
As just one example, if I were a Native American, I’d feel the tearing pain of the deep and lingering injustice done to my people since “the white man” first stepped ashore in North America and proceeded to destroy my civilization.
As just one example out of many, again, if I were homosexual, I’d be frightened and furious about the power that religious and civil bigotry - expressed in ignorant law and erroneous superstitious beliefs - have had and continue to have over my supposed inalienable right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
As a woman, I do a deep-cringe at being treated as “the Second Sex.” I am constantly aware of the continuing struggle with sexual domination, of the long and often cruel oppression of women; of the diminishment of relationships and potentials because of gender differences. I certainly know significant loss of freedom, as my sisters do, as we know will not completely go away any day soon.
Freedom means living in relationships based on respect, dignity, and integrity. We are not there yet. Anytime someone is reduced to a label of WHAT they are, violence is done to that person. People are not about WHAT. WHAT someone is reduces that person to an object, a thing that can be categorized, distanced emotionally. People are about their own lives, their own experiences, their own stories.
The American way of life includes the practice of domination, greed, entitlement, and privilege. As long as these practices live together with our ideals of equality, tolerance , and freedom, we continue to find it very hard to progress beyond a concept - an ABSTRACTION of freedom. It seems to me impossible to have authentic freedom when there persists the abusive use of power over other people. What we struggle with is degrading inequality; matter-of-fact injustice; as if we are all sleeping, not fully aware of our own personal experiences of diminishment of relationships and possibilities ... because of being part of the larger system in which we live.
How schizophrenic to say we hold these truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, –- and I might add, that all men and women are created equal – that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, when you and I know there are so many American people who experience a societal system whose practices include racial, ethnic and gender hostilities, greed, domination, and violence. Tragically, this way of life as been in effect since the inception of American society and its impact upon the populace has been to erode the life-enhancing experiences of dignity and integrity.
Well, there....rain on the parade....duds in the fireworks......indigestion at the picnic. Who needs a holiday downer? I don’t know what got into me!
But, I DO know where to go to find hope and inspiration again. I pull out Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech. He, in my mind, has been elevated to a founder of this nation, so radical, so fundamental, and so brimming with integrity is his vision of a healthy America.
He spoke at the Lincoln Memorial in the late 1960s---
“So we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
“It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note ... Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given ...[it’s]... people a bad check; a check which has come back marked, “insufficient funds.” We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
- .. So I say to you, my friends, that even though we must face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed—we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
- .. And when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and hamlet, from every state and city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children ... will be able to join hands and to sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
Benediction
May this time we’ve shared, the spoken, words, the voice lifted in song, the quiet moments together send us forth from this place with new hope, fresh courage and firm resolve.
Go now, and may love go with you.
-Calvin Dame
