"From Conscience to Community:
Conscience in Democracy"
A sermon by Rev. Charles Blustein Ortman
For New Member Sunday and Our National Election,
November 2, 2008
INSTALLATION OF NEW MEMBERS:
New member installation is a special and rewarding time in the
life of the congregation. It's good for the new members to be recognized
and welcomed, and important for the older members to have the opportunity
to receive you into this community that together, we are becoming.
Together we will aspire to be: a religious community where trust
is in the potential, which resides in individuals and in the holy
process which works among people through caring and honest sharing
of perspectives; whose minds and hearts are opening to the deeper
spiritual significance of the ancient symbols, stories and texts;
who feel that there are many paths into the depths of the mystery
in which our lives are set, even as they seek the one path most
personally significant for them; who wish to walk in one company
together-for mutual support and benefit and toward the greater glory.
While there is much commonality in what brings many of us to this
faith community, our newcomers each arrive with a unique history
and with a wealth of individual gifts. Today, as these individuals
make their membership public, I would remind us all that joining
a Unitarian Universalist congregation may seem easy because all
you have to do is sign the book. But, be assured, it is a most demanding
step.
Joining the congregation is a covenant really. We covenant with
one another to be our best selves and to hold each other in high
expectation, to engage in life fully and lovingly - loving ourselves,
one another and the world. When you sign the membership book, you
make a promise, a promise that may sound simple-it should sound
simple-but which, if you "keep covenant," brings you into
intimate companionship with others who have also promised to live
with all the integrity you and they can together muster, in all
the years of your lives."
And so we ask, as you sign this book, to covenant with us and to
submit to the most rig-orous authority in religious and spiritual
matters-the authority of your own mind, heart, and conscience. We
ask that you sacrifice the security of unchallenged points of view,
and that you be open to change and growth. We ask that you be restless
in the pursuit of human rights, social justice, and world peace.
We ask you to remember that this is a community of aspiration, not
a congregation that has it all figured out. Part of being human
is the experience of failure, and part of being in religious community
is being there-to pick each other up when we have stumbled. And
we ask that you commit yourself to the service of this congregation
by your participation in it - with your love, and with your resources:
your talents, time and energies, your opinions, criticisms, and
your hopes. And more, we ask you to financially support this bold
religious venture. Together, we can continue to build a free religious
community in Montclair and in northern Essex County.
We know that you were attracted to this congregation because you
were already suppor-tive of many of the things that it stands for.
And we know that you are volunteering to join with us because these
impulses and goals fit well with who you are already. We are happy
to welcome you into the rich heritage of this congregation which
is now in its 111th year; into the rich heritage of our denominational
organizations which date back nearly 200 years; into the tradition
of heresy (a word that comes from a Greek root meaning to choose),
a tradition that goes back some two thousand years; and into the
heritage of a set of religious values that goes all the way back
to the earliest days of human awareness. May your membership here
be filled with meaning.
ANCIENT & MODERN READINGS:
Our first reading this morning is from the Hebrew Scriptures,
the Book of Lamentations:
How lonely sits the city
that once was full of people!
How like a widow she has become,
she that was great among the nations!
She that was a princess among the provinces has become a vassal.
She weeps bitterly in the night,
with tears on her cheeks;
among all her lovers
she has no one to comfort her;
all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they have become
her enemies.
In 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at the Ebenezer Baptist
Church in Atlanta on civil disobedience and the ascendancy of moral
law over governmental law. Our second reading is an excerpt from
that speech:
I say to you… that if you have never found something so dear
and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren't fit
to live.
You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great
opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some
great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse
to do it because you are afraid.
You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You're afraid
that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be
criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid
that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse
to take a stand.
Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are
just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.
And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated
announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.
You died when you refused to stand up for right.
You died when you refused to stand up for truth.
You died when you refused to stand up for justice."
SERMON:
Back in December of 2003, Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker Magazine
published the following piece:
"In October, the Los Angeles Times reported that [Lt. General
William (Jerry) Boykin], while giving Sunday morning talks in uniform
to church groups, had repeatedly equated the Muslim world with Satan.
Last June, according to the paper, he told a congregation in Oregon
that 'Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us
as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army.' Boykin
praised President Bush as a 'man who prays in the Oval Office,'
and declared that Bush was 'not elected' President but 'ap-pointed
by God.' The Muslim world hates America, he said, 'because we are
a nation of believers.'
There were calls in the press and from Congress for Boykin's dismissal,
but [secretary of defense Donald] Rumsfeld made it clear that he
wanted to keep his man in the job. Ini-tially, he responded to the
Times report by praising the General's 'outstanding record' and
telling journalists that he had neither seen the text of Boykin's
statements nor watched the videotape that had been made of one of
his presentations. 'There are a lot of things that are said by people
in the military, or in civilian life, or in the Congress, or in
the execu-tive branch that are their views,' he said. 'We're a free
people. And that's the wonderful thing about our country.' He added,
with regard to the tape, 'I just simply can't comment on what he
said, because I haven't seen it.' Four days later, Rumsfeld said
that he had viewed the tape. 'It had a lot of very difficult-to-understand
words with subtitles which I was not able to verify,' he said at
a news conference, according to the official transcript. 'So I remain
inexpert' - the transcript notes that he 'chuckles' at that moment
- 'on pre-cisely what he said.'" [Sources: Seymour M. Hersh,
the New Yorker, 15 December, 2003, p. 50]
Our fourth Unitarian Universalist principal is that we covenant
to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and
meaning. The fifth principle goes on to covenant that we will affirm
and promote the right of conscience and the use of the democratic
process within our congregation and in society at large.
It's clear in the foregoing piece from the New Yorker that neither
Lt. General Boykin nor Secretary Rumsfeld held much of any stock
in these particular religious values. By extension, and through
countless illustrations of similar disregard - of ranging magnitude
- it is clear that the current administration in Washington also
has little regard for truth, for the meaning that might be gained
from truth, for the right of conscience, and certainly for the democratic
process itself.
But before I get too far ahead of myself, I want to take a moment
to say how pleased I am to welcome our new members today. I'm pleased
for you new members, and I'm pleased for all of us. Our grand experiment
of creating a religion based in the democratic process is revitalized
by your presence and participation.
One of the themes we spoke of in our New UU classes was the dynamics
of balancing the needs and rights of the individual - the one -with
the requirements and the responsibilities of the community - the
many. As I said a few moments ago in our welcoming ceremony, this
is not a congregation that has it all figured out. We will make
mistakes. The religious challenge is to remain in relationship,
in community, while we pick one another up and learn once again
how to move forward. Some of the new words I added to our ceremony
this morning come from the late Reverend Roy Phillips, "Together
we will aspire to be a religious community where trust is in the
potential, which resides in individuals and in the holy process,
which works among people through caring and honest sharing of perspectives."
These are the values that keep the divisiveness so prevalent in
our culture at bay, here. Sometimes, not very often but sometimes,
differences of opinion among us, even here, can test these values.
But because of our covenant to be our best selves with one another,
our covenant to expect the best of each other, I have observed over
the years, that those very experiences of challenge have ended up
promoting clarity and generating a strengthening of our values,
and not an erosion of them.
On the other hand, our nation has not been so blessed. I remember
standing in this pulpit eight years ago, following the election
of 2000. At that time I said we would have to take on faith, the
spirit of unity that had been at the heart of our then new president's
campaign promises. We would need to take it on faith until such
time as we might learn that his agenda was other than what he had
promised. It did not take long for us to discover that the promises
had been false. It did not take long to discover that the president's
ideologically driven agenda for this country had little to do with
democratic values, with the sacred nature of human life, and with
the goal of world peace. What we learned was that the values of
this administration had far more to do with the promotion of hegemony
and of corporate greed.
This coming Tuesday we finally have the opportunity to vote in
a new government, with hopefully a new conviction for the kind of
civil values that don't just give lip service to, but are really
based on religious values, values which truly embrace all of humanity
and our planet. Tuesday is Election Day, and I have to agree with
so many of the politicians and the spin doctors who claim that this
is the most important election. At least it is in my lifetime.
Tuesday is Election Day, and on that day one of two things will
happen. Whichever one occurs, we will be called by it to be in the
world in new ways that will rely heavily on our abilities to be
good Unitarian Universalists, dedicated citizens of this country,
and com-mitted members of the global community. Whichever one of
these two possibilities occurs, it will call upon us to be activist
in the recreation and revitalization of the values that promote
truth, beauty, justice and compassion.
The first possibility that I'm talking about, the one I pray for,
is that Americans will go to the polls and elect a new president,
and that the person whom we elect will actually be the same person
who takes the oath of office, come January. The second possibility,
the one that I dread, is that there will be a repeat performance
of what happened in both of the last two elections - the theft of
democracy and of the office of the president from the American people.
Call me a cynic if you want, but I find the evidence that our democracy
has been breached and that our presidency stolen to be irrefutable
in the 2000 election and just as nearly compelling in 2004. Just
as Lt. General Boykin declared, President Bush was not elected to
office; he was appointed by God. Or at least he was appointed by
a number of people who felt they were acting on God's behalf. I
suspect that many of you find it the same way. But even for those
of you who may not, I think that this time around it is imperative,
regardless of who wins the vote in this election, (and believe me,
I do feel that it matters enormously who wins) but it is imperative
that our response be led by our quest for truth and meaning, led
by our affirmation of the democratic process, that we be tenacious
with our skepticism until we are satisfied that indeed the person
who takes the oath of office on January 20th, was the person who
will have been elected by the people this Tuesday.
And if we are not satisfied, with so much reason to question the
past, if the election is stolen again this time, and if we fail
to respond to that theft once again, the lamentation will be ours.
Our democracy will die, and it will have died because we failed
to stand up for right, because we failed to stand up for truth,
and because we failed to stand up for justice.
I'm not saying that I believe the election is going to be stolen.
I am saying that we have good reason to be vigilant. I am saying
that if our greatest fears are realized, if we find that it has
been stolen, we must be ready to respond. By being ready, I mean
that we have our religious values and principles intact. I mean
that it will be time to take to the streets, to demand that our
democracy be restored. I mean that we will do no harm to persons
or property, but that we will follow our Unitarian forbear, Henry
David Thoreau's call to civil disobedience.
If others with greater voices will lead the way, I will follow
behind him. If not, my promise to you is that I will stand at the
head of that line. And I will ask you to join me there.
And if those fears are not realize if my prayers, and I trust yours,
are answered, if we have good reason to be confident that the democratic
process has been honored - whoever might win on Tuesday - then it
will still be time for us to step up to the plate. It will be time
for us to join together, cleaning up the messes of the past eight
years. It will be time to join together to begin restoring the values
of democracy and respect for the integrity of all people, respect
of differing opinions as we work towards reuniting our country.
It will be time for us to join together to begin to restore our
role in the world community, as partners in the promotion of justice,
of common decency, of sustainable development and of the goal of
world community.
If the outcome of our election on Tuesday is one that upholds the
democratic process, I promise to promote these efforts in those
trenches as well. And I will ask you to join me there in the same
way. We have managed to dig ourselves into a very deep hole; it's
going to take all of us working together to get back out.
In fact we are ready to begin, at least, regardless the outcome.
We are much better situated if it is an honest outcome. But still,
our efforts in the formulation of New Jersey Together at Montclair
and in the creation of the New Jersey Unitarian Universalist Legislative
Ministries Programs provide us with excellent vehicles to give entry
into the meanngful work of community building and organizing, of
promoting our values in the world in a way that will actually have
a significant impact on creating the kind of communities and world
that better reflect the goodness of this universe that we are a
part of.
No one is legitimately appointed to the presidency of the United
States by God or anyone claiming to be God's intermediary. The job
of electing a president belongs to us, the American people. Our
rights and responsibilities to vote give us a crucial imperative
that we would do well to heed. We need to vote this coming Tuesday.
Our religious values call us to the voting booth!
We stand at a momentous threshold before a door that will indeed
swing one way or the other. It will either open to the renewal of
democracy, or slam shut on it. While we are not the ones who will
do the swinging of that door, we are the ones who will be left with
the very real, the very religious work of responding with integrity
and intention regardless the direction of that swing.
My colleague and a friend to many of us here, Jan Carlsson-Bull,
who is a member of our congregation, is also the minister of First
Parish UU in Cohasset, MA. Two weeks ago Jan told her congregation:
[This] is a harrowing time, and a wondrous time. It's a time for
us to transform our fear into respect for [our] interdependent web,
which sometimes tangles. It's a time for us to transform our fear
into respect, into reverence, into wonder, that we are [even] here
at all.
And since we are here at all, we are called to make the best of
it, to do the most with it, to secure the blessings of liberty on
ourselves and on our children, on our neighbors, on their children
- and who is not our neighbor - for all the generations to come.
So, may we hold ourselves and one another caringly and in great
expectation. May the Spirit of Life and Love be our guide in any
response we might muster. And may our passion for peace and justice
fuse our actions with our principles and our goals.
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