If we were residents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, this past Monday would have been the annual observance of Patriot's Day—a regional holiday at best. I suppose to the somewhat politically incorrect among us it might to similar to this Commonwealth's observance of Lee—Jackson Day. I'm sure many of you could recite from memory all or part of the lines of poetry that begin:
Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
For the more athletically inclined Patriots Day is also the day of the running of the annual Boston Marathon.
Over this year in sermons and in religious education classes we have explored our seven Unitarian Universalist principles and purposes. I think I was motivated to write this particular sermon as the coda to our seven part series.
I was motivated to try and connect the dots, so to speak, and examine a life that I believe exemplifies these principles and the person who lived by them in reality as much as we might like to in practice.
Oh, and the connection to Patriots' Day? There really is none unless you consider the person I want to talk about this morning as one of New England's greatest patriots.
So, to begin.
During the past few weeks we have witnessed spirited demonstrations in the United States and France. While the issues in each country are seemingly quite different -- immigration and employment laws, respectively -- these protests are in fact strong evidence that the practices of civil disobedience are very much alive and well.
In the United States, the issue is immigration. On a recent Saturday, 500,000 people took to the streets of Los Angeles in defiance of proposed Congressional legislation that would make it a felony to aid an illegal immigrant.
Then on Monday, more than 40,000 students from all over Southern California staged a walkout, participating in one of the largest acts of civil disobedience by teenagers in recent memory.
In France, the protests have been larger and oftentimes more confrontational. On Tuesday, more than one million people protested a proposed government law that would make it easier to hire and fire young workers.
Union workers and members of socialist and leftist parties also joined students in a number of nationwide strikes.
The youth in France are angry because they believe that the proposed law, which seeks to increase the number of young people in the workforce by allowing employers a two-year period when they can fire workers aged under 26 without cause, would lead employers to treat young people as disposable labor.
But whatever the cause be it immigration issues, women's reproductive rights, the right to marry, or the peace movement it appears that the basic tenets of civil disobedience are indeed alive and well.
For some, civil disobedience is the act of disobeying a law on grounds of moral or political principle. It is an attempt to influence society to accept a dissenting point of view.
Although it usually uses tactics of nonviolence, it is more than mere passive resistance since it often takes active forms such as street demonstrations or peaceful marches.
Occasionally civil disobedience includes the occupation of buildings. As we saw during the civil rights protests civil disobedience can also include sit-ins, and the purposeful breaking of laws that were deemed to promote segregation.
Throughout the history of this country civil disobedience has played a significant role in many of the social reforms that we all take for granted today.
Events such as The Boston Tea Party, various anti-war/ peace movements, The Women's Suffrage Movement, the Abolition of slavery, the actions of labor unions that led to the eradication of child labor and improved working conditions established the 40-hour work week and improved job security and benefits.
Of course The Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and others, included sit-ins and illegal marches that helped bring an end to segregation.
In India, Gandhi brought about independence through the use of non-violent civil disobedience and in South Africa Nelson Mandela brought and end to apartheid using similar means.
And so many other causes such as the anti-nuclear movement and in an effort to protect the environment, protestors brought attention to their causes with acts of civil disobedience.
In all of these struggles, regular citizens like you and me had reached the conclusion that the legal means for addressing their concerns had not worked.
They had tried petitioning, lobbying, writing letters, going to court, voting for candidates that represented their interests, legal protest, and still their views were ignored.
In each of these movements, the protesters were compelled by deep moral convictions. Their distress was strong enough to motivate them to go against the grain, to sacrifice personal comfort, to face unknown danger, to give up their freedom and risk going to jail. Their love of truth and justice drove them to action.
The classic work on this issue is Henry David Thoreau's 1849 essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," or as it was first titled "Resistance to Civil Government," which states that when a person's conscience and the laws clash, that person must follow his or her conscience.
The stress on personal conscience and on the need to act now rather than to wait for legal change is recurring elements in civil disobedience movements.
The U.S. Bill of Rights asserts that the authority of a government is derived from the consent of the governed, and whenever any form of government becomes destructive, it is the right and duty of the people to alter or abolish it.
"On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" is an analysis of the individual's relationship to the state that focuses on why persons obey laws even when they believe them to be unjust.
Legends state that Thoreau's interest in acts of civil disobedience began when he was a student at Harvard and refused to pay a five-dollar fee for a Harvard diploma.
In fact, the Masters' degree he declined to purchase had no academic merit: Harvard College offered it to graduates "who proved their physical worth by being alive three years after graduating, and their saving, earning, or inheriting quality or condition by having five dollars to give the college."
However, according to Wendy McElroy, in an essay on Thoreau, Civil Disobedience is not an essay of abstract theory. She writes:
There were no income taxes and Thoreau did not own enough land to worry about property taxes; but there was the hated poll tax—a capital tax levied equally on all adults within the community.
Thoreau declined to pay the tax and so, in July 1846, he was arrested and jailed. He was supposed to remain in jail until a fine was paid which he also declined to pay. Without his knowledge, however, relatives settled the "debt" and a disgruntled Thoreau was released after just one night."
But from his brief time in jail comes a marvelous story that is probably part truth and part speculation. The story has it that Emerson happened by the Concord jail during Thoreau's brief incarceration and the following dialogue reportedly occurred:
The poet, and fellow Concord resident, Ralph Waldo Emerson, came to visit Thoreau in his jail cell and asked, "Henry, what are you doing here in jail?"
Thoreau is said to have replied "Waldo, are you against the war?"
To which Emerson responds, "Yes".
Henry David Thoreau was born into a modest New England Family. After Thoreau's death from tuberculosis in 1862, Emerson offered this description of his friend:
It was Thoreau's attempts to apply the principles he held so dearly in his daily life that led to his brief incarceration and ultimately to writing "Civil Disobedience."
But Thoreau was driven by more than just political motivations. In fact, if he were alive today, he might argue that politics as usual were far removed from what motivated him to address the wrongs he perceived all about him.
Curtis White, writing in an essay in a recent Harper's Magazine that bears the same title as this sermon, states that, "Henry David Thoreau's idea of disobedience is not only about antisocial unruliness; it is also the expression for a desire for the spiritual."
Thoreau held to the thinking of the transcendentalists. He believed in idealism over materialism; he viewed the world as an expression of the spirit and saw every human as an expression of a common humanity.
He believed that to be human is to possess certain moral understandings that result not so much from direct experience as a deep thoughtfulness.
His beliefs in transcendentalism led him to profess that everyone must be free to act according to his or her conscience in order to discover what for them the truth is.
As he states in Walden, "To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust. It is to solve the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically."
And so he wrote these well known words from a deep spiritual foundation, though in the end they also sound ever so practical and they sound as timely today as they did in 1849 when they were first printed. Thoreau wrote:
At the beginning of this somewhat rambling exposition, I mentioned that I thought this sermon would be the coda to our exploration of the seven principles.
I said that because in many ways I believe that Thoreau's life and writing is the embodiment of a life lived according to our Unitarian Universalist Principles.
I believe, as Chris White wrote, "That Thoreau has something critical to teach us about the relation of the personal to the political." And I believe that his concept of civil disobedience lies at the heart of who we are as a religious movement and as a community engaged in social justice and social action.
Thoreau was a great advocate for the individual. He believed that all persons have worth regardless their place in society, their religious beliefs, their socio-economic status, race and ethnicity.
He was an ardent advocate for justice, equity and compassion in all our relationships.
He went to this cabin on Walden Pond on a journey, a quest if you will, to try and discern what was true.
He deeply believed in the possibility of a world community characterized by peace and justice.
And he held a deep respect for the workings of nature and felt deeply that he was indeed a part of the interdependent web of all existence.
But mostly Thoreau taught us how to be good citizens. How to right the wrongs we perceive to exist in society; how to live a moral life; how to respect our neighbors; how to advocate for a culture of life over death.
Chris White says that Thoreau taught us that "We need to work inventively in the spirit of disobedience for the purpose of refusing the social order into which we happen to be born and putting in its place a culture of life giving things. In such a society, says White, "We could not only claim to be Christians; we'd actually act like Christians."
And so, in the end, civil disobedience is a spirit-filled response to the injustices of the world.
So let me end with Thoreau's own words:
I heartily accept the motto--"That government is best which governs least;" and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,--"That government is best which governs not at all;" and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure. . . .
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison....If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person.
Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.
If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.
This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, "But what shall I do?" my answer is, "If you really wish to do anything, resign your office."
Civil disobedience is what results when we pay attention to that voice still quiet voice inside each of us. As the Hebrew prophet Micah says, the spirit of disobedience is what calls us to "... to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God"
Amen