March 5, 2006

Rev. Henry Ticknor
Unitarian Universalist Church of the Shenandoah Valley

Our Sixth Principle

I was born in 1946 and immediately became a member of the first class of Baby Boomers.

In 1946, Dr. Benjamin Spock's book Baby and Child Care influenced millions of new and expectant parents including my own. An inventor Earl Tupper invented Tupperware and Drive-in theatres became a booming industry.

In 1948 Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in India; and Orville Wright and Babe Ruth died.

A year later the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb and Senator Joseph McCarthy warned of communist infiltration of the State Department; 14 million television sets were sold.

Mass production of penicillin and streptomycin reached record highs and electricity was generated from nuclear power for the first time.

In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick determined the structure of DNA.

Two years later Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led the first major event of the U.S. civil rights movement.

By 1956 we early boomers were celebrating our tenth birthday, only to bear witness to even more remarkable events: Nikita Khrushchev warned, 'We will bury you!' Then the Russians launched Sputnik and President Eisenhower sent the first troops into Arkansas to enforce desegregation.

President Kennedy took office in 1960 as the Berlin wall went up.

At the same time that Martin Luther King declared, "I have a dream," President Johnson declared his own 'war on poverty' and shortly thereafter he began planning the huge escalation of a war that ushered us into the controversial Vietnam era.

We remember newsreels of the Korean War, the atomic bomb tests that were shown on television and the air raid drills that were practiced in every school.

And in the mid nineteen sixties a song by the Kingston Trio became a minor hit. The name of the song was The Merry Minuet and the lyrics were by Sheldon Harnick. The words go like this:

What's that you say? Not much seems to have changed? It's true and in some ways these lyrics are as contemporary as they were forty-five years ago. It seems as true today as it did forty-five years ago that we human beings have not been able to put an end to war; to end environmental degradation; or to put limits on nuclear warheads. Ah yes, the more things change the more they do indeed seem to stay the same.

This morning I want to explore our sixth principle that reads, "We covenant to affirm and promote the goal of world community with peace liberty and justice for all."

It seems to me that this principle takes us beyond the narrower focus of the first principles that urge us to live in right relationship as individuals and as members of a religious community.

The sixth principle directs our attention outward beyond the confines of our homes and communities and impels us to ask what is our place in the global village.

The sixth principle asks not how we will relate to our immediate neighbors, but how we will relate to those who live in other countries, who embrace different religions and who have different cultural mores. It asks us to look beyond ourselves and to challenge injustice wherever it is present.

It seems to me that this principle challenges us to ask, "Is this who we are? Is this who we choose to be? Is what we read in daily headlines the way we really want to live? Is this the only way we know how to behave as human beings?"

It also asks us to consider if there might not be another way to view the world and asks us if we have the courage to explore exactly what that better world might look like.

Now, before you all get overwhelmed by the notion that your minister is urging you to go out and save the world, which of course is exactly what he is trying to do, let me share with you a story. A story taken from the accounts related in the Gospel of Matthew.

It is the story of John the Baptist who was by all accounts about as wild and wooly as they come. One might argue that he was about as warm and welcoming as Cruella DeVille.

In the Gospel account, John is a wild man on the margins of society who refuses to be tamed. He seems to be eccentric and undisciplined, shouting harsh words of impending disaster.

John, who would only later become known as the Baptist, exploded on to the public consciousness of First Century Palestine by shouting stern words of judgment in the midst of a barren wasteland.

Matthew describes John's clothing and diet saying he "wore camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food consisted of locusts and wild honey." In other words he ate bugs for lunch!

I doubt if his approach and style would work today. Today's televangelists in their designer suits and mega churches seem a far cry from somebody dressed in animal skins shouting words of God's imminent judgment to anyone who would listen.

No doubt anyone behaving in this way today would land themselves in a psychiatric hospital if not in jail. Who would take him seriously?

The days of a voice crying out in the wilderness seem to have come and gone. But it did have a good run while it lasted. We read in scripture of the amazing, godly things that happened in wild, uninhabited wilderness.

Great Biblical figures like Moses and Jesus came staggering out of the wilderness so deeply changed by encountering God, that whole nations took notice.

Well, this is a good story, and now I can see that some of you are thinking "Great, he wants us to put on sackcloth and cover ourselves in ashes and go out into the public square and preach the gospel of Unitarian Universalism.

And in a sense that is exactly what I'm trying to do. To speak out against injustice, to release the prisoners, to feed the hungry and to clothe the naked--Those are all grand goals but there is just so much that has to be done and my personal planner is already full. And anyway, my voice alone won't bring world peace, or cure AIDS, or solve the issues of the Middle East or lessen the genocide in parts of Africa. These are issues that are way beyond any one person's ability to solve."

And it may be so. Indeed, each of us is just one person with one voice and there is so much to be done. However, Edward Hale urges us to consider another approach. "I am only one," he writes, "But still I am one. I cannot do everything, But still I can do something.And because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something I can do."

John the Baptist was one voice crying out in the wilderness; but there have been other solitary voices crying out that injustice directed toward anyone is injustice directed toward everyone.

So here is another story.

On a winter afternoon a young woman was riding home after a long day's work. She was tired and weary from all of her toil. As she rode home she was asked by another to give up her seat so that he, a white man, could take his proper place on the crowded city bus. The young woman refused to relinquish her seat.

Of course this is the story of Rosa Parks and it has been told and retold many, many times. But this is just one aspect of her story and it does not do justice to the woman whose act of courage began the civil rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama.

That afternoon, I have no doubt that Rosa Parks was tired as she rode home; but she was no more tired than you or I after a long day's work. In fact, as one writer puts it, "Under other circumstances, she would have probably given her seat willingly to a child or an elderly person.

But this time Rosa Parks was not just physically tired, she was tired of the treatment she and other African Americans received every day of their lives.

The rest of Rosa Park's story is well recorded in American History; her arrest and trial; the yearlong bus boycott, and finally the ruling by the Supreme Court that segregation was unconstitutional.

Rosa Parks spoke with just one voice, but that one voice caught the attention of an entire country. "Our mistreatment was just not right," wrote Parks, "And I was tired of it. I kept thinking about my mother and my grandparents, and how strong they were. I knew there was a possibility of being mistreated, but an opportunity was being given to me to do what I had asked of others."

We have seen other examples of a single voice being heard around the world. We have seen Mahatma Gandhi leading by non-violent example when all India seemed ready to erupt in a blood bath. And, on the edge of Tienamen Square a lone Chinese dissident halted a column of tanks by sheer will and personal courage. We have seen the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Archbishop Desmond Tutu shouting words of peace to an angry mob in a South African township.

Indeed we may be only one, but we now know that even one voice can shatter the silence of ignorance, discrimination, and alienation.

But we do not always need to act alone. We can join with others to raise our voices. And within our own Unitarian Universalist history there is a strong record of single voices joining together to speak out against injustice.

In the 1930s both Unitarians and Universalists watched with apprehension the rise of Hitler and the Nazi fascism in post-World War I Europe. Hitler took power in January l933, and the American Unitarian Association, at its General Assembly later that year, passed a resolution stating that we "greatly deplore the persecution of the Jews in Germany as a violation of equity, tolerance and humanity."

Between l934 and 1938, the Reverends Charles Joy and Robert Dexter traveled abroad and reported back regularly on conditions among the refugees. In 1936, the GA delegates again passed a resolution regarding the "suffering of victims of religious and civil oppression." In post-Depression, isolationist America, these calls largely went unheeded.

Hitler seized Czechoslovakia in October 1938. The fall of that country stunned American Unitarians, who had close ties to Czech churches. In December the Board of Directors of the American Unitarian Association (this was before the merger of the Unitarians and Universalists) responded by approving Dr. Dexter's plan for a "service mission to Czechoslovakia."

In February, Martha and Waitstill Sharp, American Unitarian Association representatives, sailed for Europe "to see what could be done." They arrived in Prague as the Nazi troops were marching into the city, which held 250,000 refugees.

Waitstill, a minister on leave from the Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts church, and Martha, his wife, worked independently.

Martha worked primarily with refugees; her tedious, persistent efforts enabled many to cross borders safely, one by one. Meanwhile, Waitstill set up an underground escape route, about which little is known to this day.

Decades later, Martha would say only "Waitstill Sharp was a very courageous man." Their rescue list included intellectuals and anti-Nazi political leaders, and other relief agencies often referred their "hot cases" to the Unitarians. In August l940, the Sharps returned from Europe, barely escaping arrest and detention.

Later, after the fall of almost all of Europe, they returned to Marseilles and Lisbon to carry out a child emigration project from those cities.

In May 1940, as a response to the war efforts of these wise women and men, the Unitarian Service Committee was established as a standing committee of the AUA. Its mission was to investigate opportunities both in America and abroad...for humanitarian service.

And so, we can lend our voices to the work being done by the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. An organization dedicated to bringing together many voices to advance human rights and social justice around the world. We can lend our voices in partnership with those who confront oppression, disease and environmental waste. We can lend our voices to those working for marriage equity.

Writing in his book, Our Endangered Values, Jimmy Carter says, "...We as a people have to do better, particularly if we are blessed with the opportunity to demonstrate our worth. Leaders also have to be careful not to be too timid.... A country will have authority and influence because of moral factors, not its military strength; because it can be humble and not blatant or arrogant; because our people want to serve others and not to dominate others...

What are the goals of a person or a denomination or a country? They are remarkably the same: a desire for peace; a need for humility; commitment to human rights in the broadest sense of the words, based on a moral society concerned with the alleviation of suffering because of deprivation or hatred or physical affliction; and a willingness, even an eagerness, to share one's ideals, one's faith with others, to translate love in a person to justice."

I am sure that each one of us could name others throughout history that stood down the face of evil.

I am sure that each one of us can name a person who stands out in our minds as an exemplar of the voice in the wilderness. For some it may be Moses; for others Jesus, and still others will look to Gandhi or King and all the other voices that resonate through the ages.

But no matter by what name they are called, we will always remember those who have spoken out for freedom, for peace and liberty and justice for all.

So let us all be brave enough to speak out for what we believe is right. Let us speak out for justice, for the environment, for a fair and just immigration policy, for peace, for employers who pay a living wage, for affordable housing, for equal educational opportunity, and for the right to marry the person we love.

Let us be evangelists for our sixth principle as it calls each of us to affirm and promote the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.

Individually we may question whether our voice matters, whether our voice can be heard above the clamor of differing opinions but if we don't try we will never know what effect our voice might have--suppose Rosa Parks had compliantly changed her seat, or if King had stayed away from Washington, or if Albert Schweitzer had decided to practice medicine in the States rather than in Africa.

Just think how different the world might be if it wasn't for these voices in the wilderness.

The fault is not in trying to save the world and failing; the fault is in not trying. We may not be able do everything that needs to be done, but still we can do something.

And just because we cannot do everything let us not refuse to do the one thing we can do. If we don't speak up our voices will never be heard. But if each of us raises our voices in the wilderness our prayers will be heard. If each of us raises our voice we can translate love into justice, peace and liberty for all.

Amen and blessed be