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Acting in
Faith
A sermon by
The Reverend Pam
Wat
Guest minister
Red River Unitarian Universalist Church
Denison, TX
Sunday, January 9, 2010
T
here is an African American spiritual,
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” that implores
the mythical chariot to “swing low” from
the heavens in order to bring one home—either
from slavery and back to Africa, or home in death
to God. Without trepidation, the songwriter says,
“If you get there before I do,
Coming for to carry me home,
Tell all my friends I’m coming, too.
Coming for to carry me home.
I’m sometimes up and sometimes down,
Coming for to carry me home,
But still my soul feels heavenly bound,
Coming for to carry me home.”
When I was a teenager and I began my drift away
from the faith of the Catholic Church of my
upbringing, I found my expression as a dancer,
and I found my spirituality in the choreography
and music of the Alvin Ailey American Dance
Theatre, a dance company from New York City
started by an African American man and which
brought to me an awareness and appreciation for
the tradition of African American spirituals—
songs which in many ways helped black slaves find
their way to freedom. As a teenager, I began
purchasing recordings of African American singers
Jessye Norman, Mahalia Jackson, Kathleen Battle
singing these songs of yearning, of hope and of
faith. These songs were born out of slavery, born
out of a kind of hardship that I could not have
imagined. But I wanted hope like that. I wanted
faith like that.
There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin sick soul.
It well might have been those spirituals that
ultimately guided me toward a liberal Presbyterian
Church which helped me find my call to
ministry—a path that ultimately led to seminary
and a transition to Unitarian Universalism. When
I was in seminary, our professors would often say
that we should preach with the bible in one hand
and the newspaper in the other (attributed to Karl
Barth). The point I guess is that our spirituality
and our religious teachings mean nothing if they
are not relevant to the events and concerns of our
day. As a Unitarian Universalist, I don’t always
preach with the Bible in one hand, but I do try (at
least figuratively) to hold the newspaper.
I don’t know what your newspaper here in
Denison is like, but in Denton we have the Denton
Record Chronicle. I am a daily subscriber which
means that on most days I get a good dose of
conservative opinion in our editorials and letters to
the editor. And every so often I get to experience
the opinions of Ann Coulter, nationally syndicated
columnist with a reputation for being conservative
and…blunt.
Right before Christmas she published a column
called, “Scrooge was a Liberal.” She then followed
up after Christmas with a column called, “Liberals
Give ‘Til it Hurts (You).” In these articles she laid
out some giving statistics for so-called liberal and
conservative politicians and made the claim that
liberals simply argue that the government should
be generous, but aren’t generous themselves and
that conservatives argue that the government
should not be involved in giving, but give
generously from their own wealth.
She cites a study which found that religious
conservatives gave the most. Religious liberals
(and she names Unitarians) came in second.
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Secular liberals came in third. Then secular
conservatives gave the least.
She says that the study “found that conservatives
donate more in time, services and even blood than other
Americans, noting that if liberals and moderates gave as
much blood as conservatives do, the blood supply would
increase by about 45 percent.”
Coulter cited giving statistics from George W.
Bush, McCain, Cheney and Rush Limbaugh. For
those years the lowest giving percentage was 10
percent of one’s income. The highest 77 percent of
one’s income to charity.
Their liberal counterparts gave significantly less. In
the years she cited, among the Obamas, Bidens,
Kerrys, Gores and Kennedys, no one gave above 7
percent of their income to charity. Most gave
significantly less than that amount. And a few gave
very close to nothing.
We could try to parse out the statistics and find
loopholes in her citations to prove her claim less
valid. I’m not interested in proving her wrong. I
am interested in creating a better world and I’m
interested in sitting with the possibility that we, as
liberal religious people (no matter how you
identify politically), could be doing more.
This little light of mine, I’m gonna’ let it shine. This
little light of mine, I’m gonna’ let it shine…
Last year I was in a conversation with some other
Unitarian Universalists. Good people. Leaders in
the faith really. And they were lamenting that we
have no great cause around which to rally. We
have no big fight to win. We don’t have abolition,
we don’t have women’s suffrage, or Nazi terror, or
Selma, or Vietnam. What is our great cause
around which to rally?
I was astonished by this conversation. No great
cause? Lesbian and gay marriage is a fight not yet
won. What about fighting against consumerism?
Or championing environmentalism? Let’s rally
around poverty. Let’s tackle immigration
legislation. No great cause? Seriously? And what
about our Standing on the Side of Love campaign?
While I agree it is sometimes ambiguous about its
specifics, the core message is one of anti-fear and
pro-love. And until the day comes when we can
open our newspapers and read about our world as
a place ruled by radical love and not by knee-jerk
fear, there are causes around which to rally.
So there we were. A group of big-hearted people
sitting around talking about what we used to do,
and talking about what we couldn’t do and what
we weren’t gonna’ do. We talked about what we
could be doing. And we didn’t get up from that
conversation with a plan of what to do.
Wade in the water. Wade in water children. Wade in
the water. God’s gonna’ trouble the water.
As liberal religious people we do come from a long
line of radical, community-changing people. We
come from the lineage of abolitionists, suffragettes,
civil rights marchers…
And there may not be quite so famous a march
going on right now, but we aren’t only in this to
make history. We are espousing and living our
faith. One thing that religious liberals and
conservatives do share is that our religions are, I
think, at their core designed to help us live well in
order that we may die well. That we may, as Mary
Oliver offers, say when it is all over that “all my life
I was a bride married to amazement. I was the
bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it is
over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life
something particular, and real. I don’t want to find
myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I
don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
Gandhi said that "Happiness is when what you
think, what you say, and what you do are in
harmony."
Our UU principles talk about “justice, equity, and
compassion in human relations.” They talk about
“the goal of world community with peace, liberty,
and justice for all” and “respect for the
interdependent web of existence of which we are a
part.” And we come from this tradition of
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Christianity that talks about the realm of God. My
partner has a bumper sticker that says, “the
Kingdom of God is within.” Maybe this realm of
God within is best witnessed when what we think,
what we say and what we do are in harmony.
When the beliefs of our liberal religion are spoken
and enacted here in this sanctuary and also out in
our wider communities.
difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I
almost laughed out loud…To think that such a
commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news
that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic
sweepstakes…if only everybody could realize this! But it
cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people
that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
(p22-23)
And once we find this uniqueness in our
humanity, this divinity of our personhood, this
specialness of our being, then we are obligated to
use this good in our world. We are not meant to
simply debate our purpose, or count one another’s
achievements and failings. We are not meant to be
the smartest in all things, or to have the best and
most. We are not even meant to make history, so
much as we are meant to share our good with
others.
Gilbert then goes on to talk about the distinction
we sometimes make between spiritual and social.
He says, “we tend to think of the spiritual as private—
that personal and untouchable zone of the soul whence
comes our strength. Social responsibility, on the other
hand, is public, what we do in the world. ” (p23)
But many of us go through life with blinders on.
We fail to see the strangers among us. We fail to
fully encounter our neighbors and even our friends
and family. Maybe we are too busy. Maybe we
will do it tomorrow. But what if tomorrow doesn’t
come? What if this is your very last day to make of
your “life something particular, and real”? What
then would you do with today?
UU minister Richard Gilbert (The Prophetic
Imperative: Social Gospel in Theory and Practice)
writes that “Father Thomas Merton felt called to
the monastery to escape the world and encounter
God. Instead, he found himself, not farther from
the world, but drawn ever closer to it…[Thomas
Merton] describes a transformative experience that
occurred one day on a city street:
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the
center of the shopping district, I was suddenly
overwhelmed with the realization that I love all those
people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could
not be alien to one another even though we were total
strangers. It was like walking from a dream of
separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world,
the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The
whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a
dream…This sense of liberation from an illusory
But perhaps they are not so different. He says that
“spirituality is overcoming our narcissism, our
preoccupation with a nonstop celebration of self. Selfinterest has shaped our moral convictions almost
exclusively.” (p23)
Gilbert sites public life as an “arena of religious
experience (p24) and argues that “a purely private
spirituality leads to a withering of the self, checking our
pulses instead of our responsibilities.” (p24)
“Social justice work is simply a natural spiritual
evolution. Mystical and militant inclinations need one
another. Social responsibility has too much centrifugal
force; it needs to be balanced by the centripetal pull of
inward spiritual experience to bring us back to the center
from which the wholeness comes.” (p24)
Theologian Joseph Sittler said that “Justice is love
operating at a distance.” (quoted in With Purpose and
Principle, p38)
We have achieved tremendous feats of justice over
the centuries. Indeed, as Unitarian Universalists,
we should be proud of our religious ancestors who
loved courageously in the face of racism,
oppression and genocide. Love was “operating at a
distance” when Unitarian Universalist ministers
went to Selma in March 1965 at the request Martin
Luther King, Jr. But as poet Denise Levertov
suggests, we are only beginning to know how to
love. Her poem Beginners goes like this:
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But we have only begun
To love the earth.
We have only begun
To imagine the fullness of life.
How could we tire of hope?
– so much is in bud.
How can desire fail?
– we have only begun
to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision
how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.
Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?
our vision forward. The religious conservatives
are doing the hard work of bringing their vision
forward. It so important to them that they sacrifice
from their riches to give to the cause. It is so
important that they evangelize at every street
corner and take every opportunity to share their
message and vision. But their vision doesn’t affirm
and promote the inherent worth and dignity of
every person. Their vision is not compassionate
toward all people. And I believe really strongly
that all people are made in love and made good. I
believe that all people should be cared for and it
doesn’t matter to me what religion they espouse or
even if they espouse none at all. And it doesn’t
matter whom they love or their gender identity. It
doesn’t matter what they do for a living or whether
they suffer from addiction or disease or illness. It
doesn’t matter where they live or if they have no
where to live.
too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.
But how important is that vision? How hard do
each of us want to work for our vision? Is a small
percentage of our income to the church and to
various charities enough, or do we have serious,
roll-up-your-sleeves kind of work to be done in
order to promote the vision? How committed are
we, as Unitarian Universalists, to creating a
different kind of world for our children and
children’s children? And are we committed enough
to the vision and the purpose to do that hard work?
Or will we sit back and be okay with the
fulfillment of the vision that our religious
conservatives are funding and promoting?
We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.
What is your faith calling you to do in your life, in
your community and in your world? Is there a
nagging in your soul that you have been ignoring?
So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,
When I looked back on this phrase about
preaching with the bible in one hand and the
newspaper in the other, I found it comes from a
phrase attributed to Christian theologian Karl
Barth. The phrase is actually not about preaching
but about how one reads the Bible. One should
read with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper
in the other. As Unitarian Universalists, the Bible
is not our only source of inspiration and guidance,
but the statement still has truth for us. We are
Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?
Not yet, not yet–
there is too much broken
that must be mended,
so much is in bud.
Could we build the Beloved Community we dream
of? Could we build the Beloved Community that
Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed of? If we are to
do so then we must do the hard work of bringing
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asked to live our lives with our faith in one hand
and the realities of our world in the other. We are
asked every day to live out our faith in radical
love, our faith in fighting against fear of one
another and of promoting freedom for the
oppressed. And our faith requires us to believe
what we believe in dynamic relation to the realities
and needs of our time and place. If we live in
isolation from our world then we are not practicing
our faith, but practicing some form of collective
narcissism that true spirituality is meant to
overcome.
Many years ago, a minister from Massachusetts,
Jack Mendelsohn concluded his book, “Being
Liberal in an Illiberal Age” with these words:
“Human nature and its champion, liberalism, suffer
these days from a wretched press. Those who would like
nothing better than to take control of our lives are
palpably encouraged that this is the best of all times for
fastening on us their pet pieties, nostrums, orthodoxies,
and chains. But these will be fatal days for the liberal
spirit, and for a human nature determined to take control
of its own spiritual destiny and biological survival, only
if this generation is without stalwarts who distill from the
essence of the predicament the wonder of halting,
imperfect, but coping solutions. I say unto you that
Unitarian Universalism provides, not by any means an
exclusive, but a special and inclusive place for such
stalwarts. These many years of laboring in its vineyards
have both chastened and deepened the pride I take in
calling it the religion of my heart and mind.” (pp179)
So then I ask that we make the faith of Unitarian
Universalism a source of freedom for all in this age
who are unjustly bound. Let it be the way home
for all who are lost and struck in fear. Let our faith
move us to live well that when our dying day
comes, we may die well.
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, it was coming for to carry
me home.
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, it was coming for to carry
me home.