October 3, 2004 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

October 3, 2004

Rejoicing the Law

I am sure that many of you watched the debate between the two presidential candidates this past week. As I watched both of them trying to establish their positions without saying anything that could possibly offend any of the potential swing voters, my thought was: I wish there were two women standing there; for, if there is anything most women have figured out, it is: You can’t please everyone. We all know that because we have all tried, and learned that you do some things because you have to, some things because you want to, and some things you just don’t do.

It reminded me of Winston Churchill who once was asked if he knew any professional women, he answered promptly, "I've never met any amateur ones."

Does it surprise you that women have only had the vote for 84 years, that is since 1920 with the ratification of the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution? Have you noticed how few women have held political office, and that only one, Geraldine Ferarro, ever ran for main party vice-president, and of course none for president?

Still, there are many places in this world where women have yet to get this far, so we can be thankful while still being irritated. Irritated, I say, because it is irritating how frustratingly slow a culture moves, and that coupled with the fact that no power is ever given away, it is always wrested away.

Dates, boring as they can be sometimes, have a lot to do with my sermon this morning. First of all, we note that in this period of the Jewish High Holy days, that in the Jewish calendar, this is the year 5765. Today is October 3, 5765. So, faithful Jews have been consciously practicing their faith for almost six-thousand years. During this period, it is written:

The annual cycle of weekly Torah readings is completed at this time. We read the last Torah portion, then proceed immediately to the first chapter of Genesis, reminding us that the Torah is a circle, and never ends. This completion of the readings is a time of great celebration. There are processions around the synagogue carrying Torahs and plenty of high-spirited singing and dancing. As many people as possible are given the honor of carrying a Torah scroll in these processions. This aspect of the holiday is known as Simkhat Torah, which means "Rejoicing in the Torah.

I was very much attracted to this phrase: Rejoicing in the Torah. (The Torah, by the way, is the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Pentateuch from the Greek.) In my study I learned that the reason for completing and beginning yet again the reading Torah, as the Sages explained:

To show that the Torah is beloved to us like a new object and not like an old command which a person no longer treasures. Since it is brand new to us, we all run to greet it.

Rejoicing in the Torah, keeping it fresh, being reminded of the teachings of the ancestors, re-learning the lessons of the past and applying them to the present, is such a positive way to live out one’s faith. It is also something we in western culture are not very good at; we seem to fall to Plato’s dictum that if we don’t learn from the past, we are doomed to repeat it.

But, here we are in the year 5765 of the Jewish calendar, and the gods only know what year in the earth’s calendar, with the election of either the 44th or the re-election of the 43rd President of the United States.

Some dates that caught my attention in this year 2004 C.E.:

1807 Women lose the right to vote in New Jersey. This had been the only state that allowed women to vote.

1848 A law passed by the state legislature gives women in New York the right to retain possession of property they owned prior to their marriage.

1893 New Zealand women had become the first in the world to gain the right to vote in the national election

Here’s a date I offer for our amusement:

In 1881, the New York YMCA announced typing lessons for women. Protests were made on the grounds that the female constitution would break down under the strain.

One cannot help remembering that Will Rogers once said that it is only the short memories of American voters that keep our politicians in office.

Our memories are unfortunately short for most of our history lessons, and not likely to improve dramatically in the future. We have become a sound-bite culture. Like so many dates that, while far less ancient than the Torah or the Jewish calendar, are nonetheless significant for us, especially when we consider just how short of a time we, as a people, have even had some of our freedoms and rights, like the right to vote.

Voting for women only became a right in September of 1920, so this is an anniversary month; and we now approach our national elections in November which is also a reminder of our rather recent history of democracy in this country.

I have mentioned from this pulpit before, that my grandmother, Bess Dean, who was in her twenties and a mother of a growing family in 1920, an uneducated woman, born of generations of farming folk, and was married to a farmer with whom she had a herd of kids, as she always termed them, (thirteen born, ten survived). My Grandma Dean had one great passion, and that was voting. She voted every opportunity our rural community presented, and would have no sooner missed a vote for president that cut off her own arm. That was because the right to vote was fresh in her memory, each election was like the Simkhat Torah for her: A constant reminder that the vote was a privilege and a time for rejoicing.

How many feel like that today? Clearly, when we are lucky if we can get 50% of the people out to vote in the national election, and far fewer for state and local elections, there are far too many people who neither rejoice in the law, nor believe they have voice in the direction the country will take. I find that both sad and misguided. I can tell you that Bess Dean had no doubt her vote counted, but she was far from believing that a vote alone was enough. She knew you had to have faith coupled with action.

Hear this from the League of Women Voters:

The first test of a healthy democracy is voter turnout. Our system is founded on the principle of "consent of the governed." This principle is weakened when fewer than half of all eligible voters are making decisions that affect everyone. How can we encourage the participation of all voters in our community?

Well, one answer to that question is that today we will be having a voter registration opportunity in our library to encourage you, regardless of party affiliation for we do not take partisan stands here, to get registered to vote if you have not had the opportunity to do so before because you are new to the area, moved, etc.

The whole business of suffrage that is the right to vote or the exercise of the right to vote, remained fresh for her because she knew how much was sacrificed to earn it. She had read it as her own present as it became our history.

Here are some of the things my grandmother grew up hearing from such places as the pulpit:

The Reverend John Williams: "God meant for women to reign over home, and most good women reject politics because woman suffrage will destroy society."

And a minister from Nebraska quoted scripture and said that God simply forgot to list one more commandment -- women shall not vote.

Even a Unitarian minister, Thomas Higgenson said, “Man and wife become one and that one is the husband.”

As you heard in the reading, many people who opposed woman suffrage believed that women were less intelligent and less able to make political decisions than men. The opponents of women voting argued that men could represent their wives better than the wives could represent themselves. And they also feared that women participating in politics would lead to moral decline and the end of family life. (I believe Grandma Dean’s many children discounted that notion!)

My Grandma was not a Unitarian, probably did not know there was such a thing, but the fact is she owed her vote in large measure to many Unitarian and Universalist women who worked, struggled, and gave up much of what was valued in reputation, in order for her to have that vote. Olympia Brown and Susan B. Anthony are the most notable, but there were many more and rather than give you a list of names, let it suffice that they were women like my grandmother who just knew instinctively that every adult human being in a democracy should have a say in how they are to be governed. Those women suffered great humiliations, grave injustices, in some cases lost everything, even a place in history, in order to achieve what they were not willing to live without. There were men who also supported this struggle for universal suffrage, many of them Unitarians and Universalists (Pastor Higgenson notwithstanding). This is our heritage. We UUs do not sit by and watch injustice without making some effort to correct it. This is, in large measure, the mission of any such community of faith, that we work together for the betterment of humanity in general, as well as for ourselves.

Here we are this day, this year, certainly on November 2nd, given an opportunity to rejoice in the law. Women and men alike, of all races, creeds, and political persuasion, who have a privilege not granted to millions to go say with their vote: This is what I want.

I read somewhere that a vote is really a prayer, and I rather like that thought. For a prayer is something we lift up God or the Unknown, but lift up in our own minds as what we most want. Voting is prayer as petition. Each vote is a petition of one person making a statement of conscience, and in doing so become arbiters of all those who fought for the vote yet never lived to actually vote.

To vote is to rejoice in the law that gives us this right, a right that, if we neglect it, we might lose. I do not think anything would quite prove to people that their votes do count than if it were to be suggested that we go back to the days of the Founding Fathers (so frequently lifted up as a time of glory), when only white men who were landowners could vote. I have a feeling that we would have about a 99% turnout in response to that.

Beloved, let us rejoice that we are citizens of a democracy, let us rejoice that we are members of a free faith with a heritage of fighting for freedom for all, above all, let us rejoice in the law.

So be it.

Reading:

“(Women are) unsuited to the vote because of physical weakness. Just getting to the polls is fatiguing, and once a woman arrived, she would have to mingle (in) the crowds of men who gather around the polls. . . and press her way to the ballot box. Assuming she reached the polling place, she might get caught in a brawl and, given(her) natural fragility, she would be the one to get hurt.”

“Allowing women to vote would lead to foreign aggression and war,” (because other nations would not respect a country in which women are a part of the government).

“A vote must be backed up with a gun. Women do not bear arms, and so they should not vote.”

“When women generally vote and hold office, nervous prostration, desire for publicity, and love of the limelight will combine to produce a form of hysteria already increasing in the United States.”

“There is mixed up with the women’s movement much mental disorder, (including) the insane craving of the suffragists to imitate men, and her pathological contempt for women’s work.”

“Women don’t have the intellectual capacity of men. Their brains are smaller, more delicate. . . Women’s minds seem to move in curves, circles, following lines more beautiful, perhaps, but irregular and disconcerting: Men’s minds seem to move in a straight line.”

“Men and women belong to separate spheres. If women were engaged in politics, they would neglect their duty as moral leaders, and the republic would soon collapse.”

(Mara Mayor, “Fears and Fantasies of the Anti-Suffragists,” Connecticut

Review 7(2), August, 1974, pp. 64-74, as cited on a Woman Suffrage web site. The statements about guns and separate sphere’s are from University of Rochester research.)

October 24, 2004 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D.Dean

October 24, 2004

The Spirituality of Voting

With a mere nine days left to Election Day and with the weight of religious example bearing down upon me, I come once again to the tradition of the Election Sermon. It is no secret that many pastors have used the pulpit to put forth their political views, and even Unitarian ministers have been known to tell their parishioners how to vote. To me this is counter-productive in every sense of that word, for Unitarians, being independent and frequently contrarian in their views and behavior, I imagine that is one sure way to have people vote the opposite of what I might indicate just to establish who’s boss.

So to establish my position early on, let me assure you that I am not here to tell you who to vote for; rather, I am here to tell you what I think should guide our voting. Ultimately, as Emerson so well stated in this mornings reading, none of us will live to see the perfection of human life, much less of politics or voting. Though to hear most politicians’ take on voting, you wouldn’t know that.

Will Rogers, one of the greatest cynics when it came to politics, as well as one our greatest humorists, once said: The short memories of American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.

He also famously stated: Papers today say, "What would Lincoln do today?" Well, in the first place, he wouldn't chop any wood, he would trade his ax in on a Ford. Being a Republican he would vote the Democratic ticket. Being in sympathy for the underdog he would be classed as a radical progressive. Having a sense of humor he would be called eccentric.

He also told this story:

A fellow in Vermont said to his mother one day, Mother, I don't believe you'd vote for God Himself if He ran on the Democratic ticket!

To which she replied: Of course not. If He switched parties at this late date, he wouldn't be very reliable, now, would He?

I start early with humor, for politics has a way of making me feel the truth of the old saw that if you don’t laugh you will cry.

While politics and certainly politicians often make us want to cry with their often laughable attempts to be everything to everyone, what makes me want to cry even more is how few people in this country believe in the power of their vote. Or further, how few people believe in the moral responsibility to vote. But, maybe this condition exists because people have separated their spirituality from their daily living, including voting.

One of the reasons we are hearing so much about voter registration drives this year is that so many people are still not registered to vote. In years, such as this, when the elections appear to be very close races, more people get involved to get out the vote. So from the standpoint of real voter participation, we can be very thankful for such neck-and-neck poll results. It has gotten many a lazy duffer off his/her keister and out to do something for the country.

I have seen and felt a more energized citizenry this year than since the Kennedy-Nixon election. This energy comes from the spirit, my friends. And we need a whole lot more of it on a regular basis.

Herein lies my message to you this morning.

Nothing seems to bring out the spirit more “wholly” that is w-h-o-l-l-y, than politics--really even more than religion. Why do you think this is so? Well, ponder that for a bit; I will be coming back to that later.

Of course, this year more than some others, politics is very much tied up with religion. We have preachers, bishops, lay-leaders from many denominations stating unequivocally that if the members of their respective faiths want to be right with God they have to vote for a particular candidate. They seem to stop at the Presidency, and don’t say quite so much about all the people down the line, unless of course the issue is abortion, in which case the followers are abjured to only vote for candidates who are against abortion. Well, single-issue voting does seem to mobilize people, but as Emerson would remind us yet again, it often is very short-sighted. Are we to believe that God would grant salvation over an anti-abortion vote, yet deny it for an anti-war vote. Somehow we have to look beyond single-mindedness if we are to get to the heart of the spiritual underpinning I would encourage for voting. For I have yet to see any single political candidate who could stand up for all human values and morality without contradiction.

This is the flaw in voting based on a single-issue, for whether God made the world, or it is a glorious coincidence, there is nothing simple about living a good life. There is nothing simple about making ethical-moral choices. There is nothing simple related to conscience. The real test of a life well-lived is not the isolated vote, or occasional moral pronouncement; rather, it is whether most of our decisions were based on ethical values considered in the light of the time, place, and options available at the time. There is no one way that never fails, I don’t care what platitudes are tossed about. None, not Jesus, Allah/God, Buddha, Krishna, nor the Almighty Dollar, has produced an unerring or infallible human life, much less an unerring or infallible politician. And anyone who says different is full of bologna!

Now I know that I am preaching to the mostly converted. I know that most Unitarians in their heart-of-hearts would say-whether they really believe it or not, I am not so sure-but most Unitarians would say that what matters most is that you vote. That we know that people of good will can come at these political issues from differing points of view and still be good people.

Ultimately, though, I think that the vast majority of people, Unitarian or otherwise, really believe that they know the right way to think about any given issue, but especially about for whom to vote for President. We human beings are made up of flesh and bone, brains and varying degrees of brawn, but we are, more than anything, made up of tremendous egos. We are ego-centered. That is not always a bad thing. We need a strong sense of self in order to survive. It becomes a bad thing when we live only for ourselves, and ignore the condition of others who are less fortunate. It becomes a bad thing when we cannot listen civilly to another person’s point of view without ridicule. It becomes a bad thing when we let our immediate comfort get in the way of our equally immediate responsibility or duty.

This is what the great men and women of faith down through history have tried to impress on we fallible human beings, that we are not islands but part of families including a greater human community. That we live best when we think about and treat others as we would wish for ourselves. And they all knew what a challenge that is for every one of us.

One writer for a religious magazine stated rather sagaciously the following recently:

While the war in Iraq is a major focus in this election there are many other things we need to think about before casting our votes. [T]he central question should not be, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" It should be, "How can 'we' --- all of us, especially the weak and the vulnerable --- be better off in the years ahead? How can we protect and promote human life and dignity? How can we pursue greater justice and peace?

This is at the heart of what I mean when I talk about voting as spiritual practice. Your life is the evidence of your spiritual beliefs and values. Regardless of whether you think of yourself as a spiritual person, you are. Everyone is. What everyone is not, is attentive to bringing his/her values into same plane. I have heard many people who identify themselves as good and religious people say things that run counter to fact. I always remember an uncle of mine, a very pious man, man of faith, a lay preacher, who believed firmly that he knew the mind of God when it came to what you were supposed to believe. I received quite a few lectures from this man about what was right and wrong. Yet, I heard him on many occasions dismiss whole groups of people as heathens, lost souls not worth sending government aid to help. And what he had to say about people nearby was frequently scathing. He was just so blooming sure of himself. I was taught to have great respect for him, but I found it next to impossible. He seemed to me to be a mean man, a hypocrite, and if he was God’s idea of a good man, I was in big trouble. I remember confronting him once, it was when Biafra, a small, poor African country, was in a terrible famine, and the government was talking about sending aid. He blustered about what a waste it was, and we had poor right here at home, and so on. I just asked simply if he didn’t think God expected us to care about those far from home as well. He launched in on an attack, not on my argument, but on me. He talked down to me, saying essentially that I didn’t know what I was talking about and my immortal soul was much in question, etc.

I pretty much came to the conclusion about that time that if anyone tells you that the condition of your soul is in question, that you are not following God as you should, I suggest you take heart and hope in the fact that you have just as long a phone cord to God as they do, maybe longer.

Recently, columnist E.J. Dionne said to Ralph Reed who used to head up the Christian Coalition: "I will absolutely defend your right to base your political conclusions on your religious beliefs. But I would be very grateful if you showed me where it is in the Gospels that Jesus endorses a cut in the capital gains tax."

Politics is about what people want. About our ego needs. We want comfort, security, wealth (which can be anywhere from comfort to conspicuous consumption based on the individual). We want opportunity, hope, justice. We want all these things for ourselves; but, to reflect yet again on the great religious teachers: do we want for others what we want for ourselves.

All of which reminds us that being a moral or ethical person is never simple.

Voting as spiritual practice means that you and I approach the ballot with heart and head engaged. Which means practically such considerations as these for example: While I wish heartily that all the people of this country would have every opportunity for a good job, health-insurance, retirement plans, I know that it all costs a lot of money. While I wish heartily we could always have peace, I know that there are those who will turn to violence and force our hand. While I wish deeply that no child would have poor schools, inadequate parenting and teaching, that we still have a lot of obstacles in the way of that ideal. While I wish that no one would suffer with terrible diseases, and that every effort would be made to find cures, that there are ethical choices that lie along the way.

All of these, and many more, will be tumbling in my head as I go to cast my vote. So my heart will speak to my head: How can we protect and promote human life and dignity? How can we pursue greater justice and peace? And my head will speak to my heart: No candidate will be perfect, the most I can ask is who will do the most for greatest good.

To take your values, your ethics, your beliefs and lay them alongside your decisions, this is spiritual practice. It is both the best and surest test of your spirit. That you walk out of the voting booth comfortable in your own heart that your decision was based on something higher than your immediate or personal gratification.

Earlier I said that nothing seems to bring out the spirit more wholly than politics--really even more than religion. I know your spirit is engaged. You care deeply that one or the other of the candidates will win the election and be the president for the next four years. So I am not asking you to be spiritual, you already are.

What I am asking of you is to put the same feeling you have toward the candidate you favor toward considering what this person’s election really means for you, for your family, your children, your aging parents, your neighbors, your town, and keep expanding it a far as you can to include all the human community. If you do that, then your vote will have great meaning. Your vote won’t be based on what you hate or despise. You vote will focus on moving just that little bit closer to peace and justice for the majority of decent human beings who make up the world. Your vote will be based on love.

So be it.