The Third Smooth Stone: Building The Community of Justice and Love
A SERMON BY REV LINDA HART
I believe I was misled in my childhood.
I have mentioned before that I grew up in a liberal activist family. In both quiet and public ways, my parents – and particularly my mother – engaged the issues of the day and did what they could to take action to address the wrongs they saw in the world.
I was trained into the activist life early. Somewhere in my archives of old things that I’ve saved are some clippings from newspapers. They are old enough now to have begun to disintegrate. There’s one about a group of people picketing outside the rental offices for an apartment complex in Virginia not far from where I grew up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. In it, they quote my mother, who was one of the people carrying signs demanding that there be open housing – that is, demanding that the management company let the flats to black people, something that was between rare and unheard of in those days in that part of the United States. I don’t remember now what my mother was quoted as saying, but down toward the end, the reporter noted that there were kids dripping popsicles – ice lollies – and getting cold drinks for the adults from a drug store at the end of the small parade of shops where the management company had their main office.
Another clipping shows a photo of my brother and me at one of the major marches that took place in DC, the final demonstration for the Poor People’s Campaign, the action that Martin Luther King was leading when he was shot in Memphis, Tennessee. The walk from the southern United States continued, a tent city had been set up in the centre of Washington, and people flooded in from all around the country to make demands for greater equality of all sorts: access to opportunities for employment, for making a decent living, and for a social net to care for those who were unable to find the resources that they needed to keep body and soul together.
You see, I was misled. I believed that what we did made the difference. The essential inequity that we could see in the segregated South was attacked and overcome. Black people were able to vote. Laws that kept them from participating in that central task of democracy were abolished, and equality was written into the law books. It was illegal to force people of colour to sit only in the back of the bus, or to refuse them service at lunch counters. It was illegal to offer them lesser education and, well, the lists could go on and on of the changes that were made because of the dedicated hard work and sacrifice that were offered up at the time.
It all seemed simple somehow, at least from a child’s perspective. As soon as we had fixed all those problems, then it was time to begin work on the Vietnam war, and we again marched and shouted slogans. There were thousands and thousands of people who turned out. We’d see friends and relations marching there, too. And we’d try to listen to all the inspiring things that people said, but even if we couldn’t hear, my mother assured me, it made a difference that we were there. Our bodies themselves were offering the protest, showing those in power that we cared enough to make our way there, to be present, to be counted.
And again, it seemed to make the difference. The war ended. We had done it.
But I was misled.
Strangely, it reminds me of our dog Susie, a sweet but somewhat vague cocker spaniel mix who was a fierce defender of our home. She had that seemingly innate dislike of people in uniforms of whatever variety, and she would become a cloud of buff coloured fur and noise when she saw a metre reader or letter carrier come near our door. In one of our houses she had a perch halfway up the stairs with a window that looked out to the street. Anyone who was suspicious – that is, anyone who had the audacity to come by would know that they ought not try to mess with us.
You see, her fierce defense worked every time. She barked. They went away. Not that one had anything to do with the other necessarily, but for her it worked, and I feel certain that she believed down to the smallest fibre in her being that she was responsible for keeping us safe from the interlopers who sought to do us harm.
We protested. The world changed, or at least the things that we were concerned about changed.
It is perhaps stretching it a bit to say that I’ve been barking all my life and puzzled why it didn’t work to do what it had always done, but it’s not so far from the truth.
And it’s why today’s smooth stone is hard to talk about: because I believe it to be so utterly true, and because when I look with adult eyes at the world, and how far we are from the community of love and justice, I feel tired, and discouraged.
It may be that the first two of this set of principles are about the expansiveness of the liberal way in religion. We affirm the continuously creating nature of truth, knowing that it can come from any source: God reveals Godself in the amazing moon, and in the growing body of scientific understanding of our world, no less than God is revealed in the tenderness of a child’s kiss.
The second is equally affirming, calling us to be in just relationship with each other, to recognise that all people deserve to be treated as human beings. It is the principle from which arises the liberal call to tolerance and acceptance and has within it the trust that all people have the capacity to lift up new truth and light in the world.
This third one, though pushes us: it suggests a moral obligation to make a community of love and justice. Adams won’t let us go on this. He is forceful in his articulation: this isn’t ethereal, no airy-fairy happy thinking allowed. It is a practical, hands-on principle that won’t allow us to simply sigh out our affirmation, not if we look at the world with open eyes. The third principle calls us into the world, to walk our talk, to live our religion not only in mindfulness and kindness, but by taking action to bring about material change in the world.
As discomforting as this can be – for who among us can claim to have lived up to such a call? – it is one of the essential elements of our religious life together. A well lived spiritual life of whatever stripe includes taking on that which challenges us most.
Our DIY kind of approach to religion can sometimes be construed to be an easy one that allows us to believe what we like, what pleases and soothes us. This principle helps to put us back on the earth, calls us to be active in the making of the world we would want, calls us to be engaged in building the kingdom here, reminds us that we are not exempt from making real the ideals of justice and love.
Yet the work seems so huge, so overwhelming that some mornings I just want to stay in bed, nothing to be done that would make any difference.
This is the see-saw that we’re on: the world and its troubles are so vast and so complicated that it can’t be solved with a bit of barking, no matter how well intentioned and full-hearted. On the other hand, there’s no way it can get fixed without it.
So here’s the thing with it, here’s the spiritual truth that comes from the weighing of the world and what we can do: The point isn’t to get it all fixed. That’s an impossibility. The point isn’t to find those magical powers that enable us to enact some transformation of the world. That’s an impossibility. The point isn’t to give into the inertia that grows from being overwhelmed. That’s spiritual death.
The point is to get up and keep trying. The point is to never give up, even knowing that it won’t be accomplished by you in your lifetime. The point is to do what you can. Keep barking, I say. Even knowing it all, keep barking.
You’ll be discouraged, yes. Disappointed? Yes, without a doubt. You’ll forget all about it for a week, a month, 10 years. No question that’s the case. But sometime, at some moment, you’ll see that obligation again, and you’ll take up whatever piece of work you can, and do it.
And here’s the good news of it all: you can’t fail. You can’t fail until you’re dead, and even then if you have given this task, this moral obligation your attention, you’ve done it.
‘God has not called me to be successful; He has called me to be faithful,’ said Mother Teresa of Calcutta. And it is no less true for you and for me. We will not get to that place, to the world that we dream. We will not make it, no matter our good intentions and our best actions. But we have the moral obligation, we who follow this liberal path in religion, to be about the work of the world: to make justice in the land, to increase the realm of love, to make the world as we would want it to be by living the world we want: embodying the best of what we know.
I am grateful to be older and wiser these days, to know that the successes that I thought we had on our own brought about were the fruits of larger movements and forces, the steady work of legislation, and the organised and carefully enacted public witness in many forms. I am grateful that though my part was small, still it mattered, it was a piece of the whole that brought about tremendous change, tremendous good.
The work is unfinished. It is ever unfinished, and we are called to be in it, however best we can be.
This day, may we take up that work still, again, anew.
So may it be.
Amen.
Prayer
Spirit of love and life,
you who call us to our days
and to the many tasks of our lives,
On this day of light,
may we see clearly:
let us see the world as it is
there is terror, destruction,
invisible poison in Japan.
New wars emerge: bombs fall in Libya,
Bahrain.
Old wars wear on.
The troubles of the world as too many
to name.
On this day of light,
open us in these moments to the wonder
of life,
open us to the mystery of our being,
and the being of all the universe.
Allow us to rest here, connected to all that is,
connected to the beauty,
the perfection,
the wholeness
the peace
that is ever ours.
In a few moments we will be carried away into the rest of our day,
into the coming week,
into plans and promises,
into our worries and wishes.
In the days to come, may we never lose sight of the wounds of the world that call out for our healing balm,
let us remember to lend our hands to the work
whatever it may be,
of making the community of love and justices
and may we, too, carry some small sliver of that connection with us
that our days may be illumined by the truth of our
beauty,
perfection
wholeness,
that our days may be touched by peace.
Amen