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November 12, 2000 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

November 12, 2000

Repairing the World: A Time for Healing

Due to the inconsiderate nature of politics, this sermon, intended to be about closure and healing from the political standpoint, is yet to be finished. I was reminded this week of a statement President Woodrow Wilson made in 1919 to a gathering in St. Louis: "Things get very lonely in Washington sometimes. The real voice of the great people of American sometimes sounds faint and distant in that strange city. You hear politics until you wish that both parties were smothered in their own gas."

But, I was also reminded--perhaps more chagrined in the reading--of the Greek essayist Plutarch’s neutralizing dictum: "The conduct of a wise politician is ever suited to the present posture of affairs. Often by foregoing a part he saves the whole, and by yielding in a small matter secures a greater."
In the original planning for my remarks today, I assumed the election would be over, with my favored candidates all contemplating enjoying the fruits of their labors, but here we are today no closer to knowing for certain who our next president will be, but a lot closer to understanding the true importance of every vote. There is a large number of that fifty percent who did not vote who are surely kicking themselves for not putting forth a little more effort. I think most of us are learning a lot more about our democracy as a result, and for that I am most grateful, for ignorance of the political process is rampant in our country, myself included, and we are gaining one of the best civics lessons we could ever hope to have while all this is taking place. So there is a lot of good coming out of what is mainly being reported negatively.

As you may have been, too, I was surprised to learn that all absentee ballots were not counted in the election night returns, or indeed even beforehand. Further, someone noted on National Public Radio, that we are the only western country that has our election for the nation’s leader on a workday. Surely the election of the nation’s leaders warrants a day off, or having the elections on Saturday. Especially considering problems that arose in St. Louis when thousands of people were still in line at 7PM when the polls closed, and were denied an emergency stay to closing—well, I think most of us are finding ourselves a lot wiser nearly a week after the election day than we were before. Undoubtedly, there is still a lot to learn about the process as both sides are turning to the courts for resolution.

One of the main themes I have been hearing the last two or three days, is that either candidate is likely to come into the White House looking like a spoilsport, or worse; but, frankly, I am a lot less concerned about how either Gore or Bush comes through this, and much more concerned about how we, the voters, come out of it. I think the ultimate outcome will have a great deal to do with how well we turn out for future elections.

And, I know we are all going to be much more attentive to what the ballot looks like in the future!

Idaho, my home state, is a bastion of religious, conservative Republicans. In fact, I showed my socially liberal nature pretty early, and learned the cost of having it in that place, at that time, in 1960, after the television debate between Kennedy and Nixon. The next day or two, I said in a casual gathering of kids waiting to go into the classroom that I thought Kennedy would be the better president, and Becky Oderkirck slapped me in the face. More of what happened in that first of many political crises for your minister will come later.

In Jewish tradition is the phrase tikkun haloam, which has among its connotations, the idea of putting things right or into harmony. A principle part of what is driving our feelings and attitudes now, as the parties try to sort out who is the winner of the presidency, is the need to find harmony. And most of us were hoping that after all the angst and concern of the election season, we would now be in that time of figuring out how to move forward in the spirit of hope and cooperation. We are not there yet.

While it is true that we tend to want peace and harmony, there is also the drive to win, to be right, to get our way in any given contest between people. The degree of our discomfort is usually proportional to our willingness to move toward the center, or some sort of resolution. But it may be that we have to have the surgical equivalent of pain in order to get the healing we need.

Unlike the majority of media mouths I have been hearing since Wednesday, I do not think this is a bad thing we are experiencing. For far too long, we have had growing voter apathy in this country. More and more of potential voters have been sitting out elections, and why? Because they don’t care, seems to be the usual response, but I believe like Jim Hightower that people do care. They care a lot about most issues that affect their lives. It is what they believe about the political process that causes them to stay home and not cast their ballots.

Of course, there are those like Senator Mitch McConnell who Jim Hightower quotes as having once said that low voter turn out "showed that people are happy with the job we’re doing in Washington." Talk about self-delusion!

As Hightower states, people are not happy nor are they lazy, stupid, or apathetic about their lives. They do become apathetic about how much their vote counts, especially when we see that billions of dollars go into the political process that often tells a truer tale than most legislation, of the loyalties of many politicians. Voters do want to count, but all too many of us, myself included, often wonder how much we stack up to the soft and hard monies that corporations and various lobbies put into the mix. And perhaps, more often than not, we have been justified in our skepticism about the value of our votes. But this election makes all that different. For when it come down to the wire, literally in this situation, it is the voters who count most of all. And the self-flagellation I have heard from a couple of people who did not get to the polls, tells me they understand it in a way none in this generation of voters has experienced before.

I am glad for the delays, the counts and recounts, and hand counts, and the expected absentee voter counts. For once, we all count! Hallelujah! It’s about time!

Further, I am astonished at the hypocrisy of various pundits who say Gore should just give the race to Bush, as if Bush would do the same if the tables were turned. I don’t believe it for a minute. You do not put your heart and soul and thousands of hours of political speechmaking into the last year, to be a couple steps from you goal and then say, "Well, I guess I don’t care all that much". Either man would/should be expected to fight to the finish. So, don’t give me that, "It’s bad for the country to have to work through this recounting votes." That’s hooey! Nothing could be better for the country. I have not seen people so animated since the marches against the war in Vietnam.

As this morning’s reading pointed out, we the people have been feeling like it is not "our system," that there has been a takeover of our "electoral and governmental processes by a political class of professional politicians, big-money contributors, lobbyists, and the media." The later worries me more than the former. Power will always draw those interested in it; that is why our founders put together a system of checks and balances to make sure that too much power did not get vested in one place. Far more worrisome is the lack, the dearth, of independent reporting in the country.

Fifty years ago we had independent newspapers numbering in the hundreds, now just three major news entities own all but a handful of newspapers. And, as we now know about the television media who all ran down the same rabbit holes at the same time, there is precious little independence there. Where they used to do their own independent evaluations of election night results, they pooled their resources to one reporting agency, so the way one goes, they all go. We should be scared by these revelations, not by the need to count the votes.

Back in 1996, following the election, USA Today reported (again from Hightower): "most voters, 53 percent in Election Day exit polls, think the country is moving in the right direction." Yet, there was another near fifty-percent who did not think America was moving in the right direction, and witness this election with roughly 50% voting, up only slightly across the country from 1996, we do not know what they think, it could be they are satisfied, but just as likely that they are not.

The other voting 50% appear to be divided right down the middle. Save the less than one-percent that went to the third party candidates. Who, by the way, should have been there, regardless of how it affects the outcome for Republicans and Democrats. I am more than a little put out with the notion that Nader or Buchanan should not have run. That, my friends, is truly un-American! Every one of the voters who cast a ballot outside the mainstream parties were declaring that they do not think the way the Dems and Reps are running things is something to write home about. Every single one of us has the right and the privilege to cast our ballots according to our conscience, not to suit anybody else’s purpose. We Unitarian Universalists, of all people, should be the first to put that notion in its proper place. Are you, am I, supposed to act or vote according to the larger majority’s prevailing desires or opinions? Hell no!

(I was going to say Heck no, but realized like Carl Reiner who was writing a skit for Sid Caesar in the fifties, and the writers wanted to write, "War is hell." But the censors said you cannot say that on television, so they wrote, "War is heck!" making a far more potent, and a far funnier, statement about democracy.)

After all the sayings have been said, what counts in this presidential race is the counting. In the counting we are discovering more about how elections work than the vast majority of us ever would have known otherwise. We are seeing an ugly side of elections. We are learning that fraud and foolishness often have been a part of the process. We are hearing how people who had been standing in line for an hour or two could not go in and place their votes--hardworking, caring, people who wanted to vote. We are learning that ballots that have not been field-tested, as it were, can create a great deal of confusion. That people who feel the rush and push of the polling place make mistakes. A lot of people. And we are learning that we must get more involved in the earlier stages if we hope to not be victim to these problems ourselves. Florida, it turns out, has had many complaints about various election procedures there, and yet no legislation ever got through to make the needed changes. I bet there will be changes now.

I was seeing signs from protestors against any re-vote in South Palm Beach county in Florida that said, "If you can’t read, don’t vote." A reminder of the days when all sorts of conditions were placed upon the right to vote. You had to show that you were literate, which was effective in keeping a largely illiterate black population from ever changing their circumstances. Poll taxes to keep the poor out of the process. And many historians tell us the Electoral College was the privileged elite male guarantee of keeping a hold on the political process. Tests for voting have been abolished, and it may be that the next step is to do away with the Electoral College as well. It is certainly in need of scrutiny.

Regardless of which party you favor, I hope and trust that you favor above any ideology, the worth and dignity of every person, and the right of each one of us to cast a ballot for what we believe in. It is easy to stand back and say X votes do not really matter, but they matter if they are ours, yours and mine. I can tell you beyond any shadow of a doubt, that if I lived in South Palm Beach and thought that I had inadvertently mis-voted because of that goofy ballot, I would screaming from the housetops. And don’t give me those arguments that both the Republicans and the Democrats approved the ballot, that it was published in the paper before the election; sometimes, like the Firestone tires on Explorers, it isn’t until a thing is tried that its reliability is known.

Personally, I have used butterfly ballots a number of times, but I have never seen one put together in that fashion.

The other prevailing argument is that we may have to go to recounts in three or four other close elections. My response is, So what? I do not care if we have to recount every vote in the land if it means democracy happens. That’s what we claim to be all about in this country. We the people, we the voters matters. Nothing will create apathy like showing the American people that that is not true.

I doubt seriously whether the next president is going to do us much good or harm based on the virtually even nature of the house and senate, but how the next president gets to Capital Hill will be of greater importance in my opinion.

When I stated my opinion that Kennedy would be a better president than Nixon, I was saying something that no one in my family and few in the small town of Meridian, Idaho would say. The degree that any show of thought that varied from the norm of that place and time was exhibited in the slap I got from Becky Oderkirck. No doubt she grew up to be part of the conservative bastion from which she came. My response was just as important. I was raised to "turn the other cheek," so I did not slap back, indeed, I was so shocked by the action, that it would never have occurred to me, but I do remember saying through my shock, that I had a right to say what I thought, whether she liked it or not, capped off with the words: "This is America, not Nazi Germany!" I have never quit feeling that emotion that even if every other person I know is conservative, or fundamentally religious, I have the right to be me. To say what I think is right and true.

I am profoundly patriotic. Maybe it was all the post-World War II movies I used to watch in the fifties about the war and doing the right thing. Maybe it was having really wonderful history and government teachers. Maybe it was hearing and reading the free press. Maybe it was saying the Pledge of Allegiance every morning at school. Maybe it was all of those and the same thing that makes me profoundly devoted to this free faith of ours. All of which is to say, I am glad that Becky Oderkirck slapped my face, for I have never ceased to be determined to fight for those things I hold dear.

I would say to Messrs. Gore and Bush, political slaps in the face go with the territory, and what you learn from them will make you or break you. I hope and trust that both are up to the real tests of patriotism.

Comic Barry Crimmins said , "We have a presidential election coming up. And I think the big problem, of course, is someone will win."

My father said something following John Kennedy’s election that always has been powerful for me, an event he viewed negatively on two counts, the first being Kennedy’s Catholicism, the second his being a Democrat. He said that regardless of who wins the election, it is our patriotic duty to show respect for our nation’s president, even if you don’t like him. Now, I do not know if he would say that today, but I was proud of him for saying it then.

That is what I was going to preach about today, healing, how we learn to value the process even when it is painful. That is what I hope I have preached about. For as we examine all that is happening, and our reactions to it on a personal and a nation level, we are finding out more about our health and well-being as people. For the first time in a long time we are engaged in the process. We are experiencing the value of our participation or lack thereof. There will be a winner and a loser for the office of President of the United States, but I believe the real winners will be the voters if, and I repeat if, they see that they were the ones who made the decision.

We are a people of faith, but we are called to be a people of action for our faith. That is the spiritual message of where we go from here. Do we "walk the talk" as the saying goes? For every superficial analysis you and I hear over the next few days and weeks, remember the powerful messages that drive our spirits are the ones we want to be listening for. And that has little to do with convenience or comfort or ease or speed.

So may it be.

 

November 19, 2000 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

November 19, 2000

The Religious Need for Thanksgiving

I want you to stop and think for a moment about one experience in your life when you felt that sensation, that frame of mind, of being completely, wholly, utterly thankful. While you are thinking about it, I will share with you about one such experience I had. I believe I have had maybe only five or six such moments, and they have each affected me profoundly. Keep in mind, as well, that all of us have many moments of thankfulness that happen on a less memorable scale, and these, too, have an important impact on our lives.

This particular instance occurred about eleven years ago, when I was returning from Norfolk, VA, where my son and I had been visiting my daughter who was in the Navy. We were on our way home to the Boston area. The day was clear and bright, a chilly autumn day like this one. We had been in the air only minutes when the plane began to dip and lurch. The flight had few on board and it was evident that we were all becoming progressively more nervous. Indeed, within the next thirty minutes even the flight attendants were showing they, too, were frightened. I thought, and most of those sitting around me agreed, that the pilots must be drunk or worse. Again, it was a lovely, clear day. We could see no reason for the disturbance. All of this was exacerbated by the fact that the pilot did not once come on the intercom system to tell us what the problem was. The flight seemed interminable, even though in reality it is a fairly short haul. Finally, I saw Logan Airport come into view, and we roller-coastered toward the runway. There was no assurance we would land safely, even then, so when the jet finally had all wheels on the ground, you could hear a collective sigh, some of us even cheered. My son, and a number of other people who had been in tears, leaped up out of their seats for joy. Never before had I felt so thankful for the solid earth beneath me, and felt so even more when I walked off the plane onto the concourse.

When we think about Thanksgiving in this country, we tend to conjure up the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock scene, sitting around long tables with the Indians who helped them survive their first years, sharing in the bounty of the first good harvest in 1621. Peace and harmony and gratitude all rolled up into a nice, neat picture. Then as we became more enlightened about the downside of the picture for our Native American brothers and sisters, who, in large numbers, now view this as a day of mourning. The pilgrims who could not have survived without the Indians, turned on them and drove them out of the land the Pilgrims had decided to claim for God. The "city on the hill"; the "new Jerusalem."

We have a muddled picture of Thanksgiving as a holiday, which all too often causes us to have an equally muddled view of thanksgiving without the capital T.

I once heard the Rev. Peter Gomes at Memorial Church at Harvard talk about the need to rescue Thanksgiving from this image, from the Pilgrims at Plymouth, from the various attempts to merely list all those things for which we are grateful.

Gomes stated:

One way toward redeeming the familiar in our own too familiar American story of Thanksgiving is to realize that we do not give thanks for the Pilgrims. Rather, we give thanks for that God whom they adored . . . that God of all ages past and all ages yet to be.

Thanksgiving then, is only in part about our American history, not exclusive to it. Thanksgiving is about something that lies deep within each of us, and deep within our communities that needs must rise up and be recognized. We have a spiritual need and a religious need for thanksgiving.

Over my years of teaching, I collected a good many anecdotes, stories, and examples of various sorts from my and other teachers’ students. This piece has a note on it I wrote that says what this boy wrote was not any more trite than the Pilgrim and Thanksgiving stories that the kids had doled out to them (as indeed all of us who grew up here did). The subject was: " What the Pilgrims Found":

The land was hilly and stony. Sometimes it was stony and hilly. The stones were useful for making millstones and milestones. The Indians sharpened them. Stones they used for scalping and other social purposes. The hills were useful to watch Indians from. The Indians sometimes got there first. Then the hills were useless. The winters in New England were long. The summers were short. In keeping with the seasons, long underwear was worn in the winter. They wore short underwear in the summer.

The spiritual need, as I think this boy probably knew down deep, is not just about repeating the Pilgrim-Indian feast story, rather, to be thankful is spontaneous in us.

Those experiences such as the one I recounted, and those you each have thought about, all those rose up in us without anyone having to say, "Nancy, you need to be thankful." We just were/are. We do not know how not to be filled with gratitude, at least under normal conditions.

When I spent a summer doing my hospital chaplaincy training, I witnessed an example of a rare kind of ingratitude that we will usually only read about, an example that comes from what most people would term "mental illness." The case in point, was a young man who had attempted to take his life, and was found by his roommate who called 911. When he was brought round in the Emergency Room, he was filled with anger. He raged against his friend and the medical staff for interfering with his plan to take his own life. His friend was shocked and hurt that his actions were not appreciated. All the roommate could see or think was that a person would want to live, believing only a mentally unhealthy person would want to die. He could not fathom this lack of thankfulness.

Gratitude, that sense of thanksgiving that goes deep to the heart of humanity, arises most sharply when we do have a collapsing of life into the moment. When we are, as most often is the case, faced with the possibility or the reality that we may soon die. The near-miss, or the almost-didn’t-make it situations, usually bring our mortality up close and center. Death, or the end of something, like a job or a relationship, suddenly draws up to our very noses the possibility that we usually only felt or considered as a thing far away, quite distant from us. That is when and how we come to experience the spiritual nature of thankfulness.

All of life is spiritual, for spirituality is a continuum of feelings and reactions that range from the negative to the positive. Our lives are our spiritual reactions to our circumstances. Religion is what we do with our spirituality.

Religion rises up out of our being part of social groups we call communities. Because we live in communities, we have had to learn how to get along, and that is how we came to feel the need for ethics and morals. If we all lived solitary lives, we would have no need of that important realm of social life called moral values. (Though, one supposes we might find we feel some moral obligation to nature, to other animals, perhaps.) Moral values, the ethical beliefs all communities share about the sanctity of life, the need to respect one another and property, the need to live fairly and justly with one another arise out of our shared way of living. As we examine cultures around the world, we find that the root mores among different groups are essentially the same, it is the outward, public expression that varies so much. That outward, public expression is what we call culture and what we call religion; culture being the functional and the religious, and religion being the formalized spiritual practices.

Following that train of thinking, you begin, I hope, to see why I distinguished the religious need for Thanksgiving in my sermon title. We each will feel thankful in varying degrees for most of what we in our culture have encapsulated into our Thanksgiving Day. Some people, though, will be more thankful for food who have ever known the lack of it. There will be those among us today who are more thankful for family, for having lost, or nearly lost, loved ones. There are those of us who feel a deeper appreciation for peace, because we have fought in wars. And so it goes. What is common for us, what is the community tie for each of us here in this free faith, is that we too, as Rev. Gomes pointed out, understand that we need to lift up, to redeem from the ordinary or familiar the values that we all hold most dear. We will be thankful, have no fear, for what it is we hold with the finest silken thread, which is life itself. So it is only right and good that we should hold up grace and gratitude for special recognition.

So we say, to God, or to those specific or non-specific forces we believe direct our lives, or to the spirit of life that is us as a community—we say in the most public ways, the most ceremonial ways: "This is important!"; "Thankfulness and gratitude are important!"; "Let us make a ceremony, make rituals, for giving thanks."

Around the world, especially at this time of the year, festivals of thanksgiving are celebrated. Rites and rituals, the "showing of a doing," as one writer once put it, is how we take all that is our lives, and lift up those parts which we know are special and need special recognition. This, my friends, is what we do today, and what we will do Thursday on our national Thanksgiving Day. We will show by what we do, that we remember our own deep gratitude for life, for the very substances of life, for those examples our ancestors have given us of their gratitude. We will do this, because this is our religious need--our spiritual knowing of and our religious need for thanksgiving.

amen

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