Why Not?
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
January 25, 2015
By Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Dedication
This morning’s sermon is dedicated to the memory of Alan Hyde, longtime member of BUUC, and the hope he lived into being through his love and service to this church.
Last weekend I was in Newport to officiate at the wedding of a friend. The day after the wedding I woke up early and went down to the hotel lobby where I was able to duck into a quiet alcove to read. My choice of reading material that morning was, shall we say, not the norm, for me or, I gather, for most. It was a eulogy...delivered in 1965 by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a memorial service for the Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist Minister from Roxbury, MA. Reeb had come to Selma, AL to advocate for the civil rights of African Americans and was attacked by white segregationists and died two days later of the injuries he sustained in the attack.
It is hard to read the words of Dr. King and not be awestruck by the both the eloquence and conviction of his words, but something else stayed with me after reading King’s eulogy of James Reeb. In addition to praising Reeb’s courage and honoring his sacrifice, King raised two questions, “Who killed James Reeb?” and “What killed James Reeb?” As to the question of who, King says, “the answer is simple and rather limited...He was murdered by a few sick, demented, and misguided men who have the strange notion that you express dissent through murder.”
King describes the question of what killed James Reeb as, “haunting, poignant, and desperate”. A question he says we are “forced” to ask and one, when we ask it, we find the “blame is wide and the responsibility grows.”
King goes on to say, James Reeb was murdered by the indifference of clergy who remain silent, the irrelevancy of a church that stands motionless amid social evil, the irresponsibility of politicians who descend into demagoguery, the brutality of law enforcement who practices lawlessness in the name of the law, the timidity of a federal government that funds foreign wars but fails to protect the life and liberty of it own citizens and even, King notes, “The cowardice of every Negro who tacitly accepts the evil system of segregation, who stands of the sidelines in the midst of a mighty struggle for justice.” These are not easy words to hear, indeed they are painful, perhaps more so because on some level we know they are true and not just for 1965, but today as well in 2015.
For Dr. King, the question of who killed James Reeb was straightforward. But it was not enough to advance the cause of justice. King knew if we stopped at who, we would never really understand why Reeb was killed. “Who” lets us keep our focus outside ourselves, sheltering us from our own prejudices and keeping us from seeing the ways we participate or cooperate in building and maintaining evil systems.
“What” forces us to look at the interconnectedness of our attitudes and prejudices and the social systems in which we live, systems we build, maintain, influence or change through our action or inaction. Dr. King is best known as a man of great vision, but he understood that in order to move toward that vision you have to know, name, and remove what stands in the way of your vision.
I wrote, “What If?”, our responsive reading this morning, as a devotional to be read at the opening of a meeting during my time as a Deacon at the Universalist Church of West Hartford in Connecticut but is more than that. It is a social justice statement. It reflects a vision or hope for the world that is markedly difference from our currently reality by asking what if...that is, by wondering what a just, and equitable world, where people are able to live fully, might be like.
In that respect it is not much different from the aspirational statements recorded in the founding documents of nations, or expressed in the mission or vision statements of sacred and secular institutions, or the covenants that bind communities together or even the prayers one might offer to God or release to the Universe. Where it differs, is in the last line where question is changed from what if to why not?
Now I don’t pretend to be a clever writer. I am however, a reflective person which is only to say that I tend toward curiosity.
Why not then, for me, is a perfectly logical follow up question to What if? Why not is, to me, a truth telling question because, answered honestly, it can reveal to us the truth of what’s in our way.
In words more graphic and graceful than my own, Victoria Safford speaks to the need of hope to be connected to the truth of current reality. “Our mission”, she writes, “is to plant ourselves at the gates of hope. Not the prudent gates of optimism or common sense, or self-righteousness, or cheerful ignorance, but a “different, sometimes lonely place, of truth-telling about your own soul...and its condition...from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be....We stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we’re seeing, asking them what they see.”
The vision spoken of the gate of optimism, common sense, self-righteousness...and the like is easy. It costs us nothing...and thus will achieve nothing. This is the kind of passive idealism that I carried my entire life until at age nineteen, a crisis of identity, manifest itself as depression, and for the first time in my young life, I was hospitalized, in a mental health unit.
My brief stay there had a far reaching impact on my social, political, and religious views. In the hospital I met and lived with people I had only previous been told about...people with mental illnesses and addictions, people on welfare, people without jobs or insurance, without visitors or even a home to return to once they were discharged.
These were the people for whom my optimism said that they will get the treatment they need, common sense said they need to learn or muster the willpower to “just say no”, my self-righteousness said, “get a job”, and to which cheerful ignorance proclaimed, “I’m sure it will all work out somehow.” Such expressions may, and I can say in my case, did reflect a genuine desire for a better world and improved situation for the people I met, but it nonetheless kept the focus outside myself, and thus free any sense of responsibility and ignorant of any connection to the people or situation just as the question of who killed James Reeb did. If we only express our vision by passively wondering or wishing “What if?” for ourselves or others it will never replace “What is.”
In order to move forward, to pursue the just world he envisioned Dr. King had to shift the question from who to what killed James Reeb. Likewise, we, as people of faith, called to plant ourselves at the gates of hope, in order to move forward, have to shift from asking questions like “What if?” in relation to our vision of a more peaceful, just and equitable world to “Why not?” That is, we must enter the sometimes lonely place of truth telling where passive wishing is replaced by hope stated and lived as an active pursuit in which we intentionally identify and work to remove obstacles to making “What if?” into “What will be.”
Indeed, Safford reminds us, “with our lives we make our answers all the time, to this ravenous, beautiful, mutilated, gorgeous world. However prophetic our words...our What ifs....it is not enough simply to speak. “What if?” helps point us toward hope, “Why not?” shows us how to pursue it by helping us locate and identify obstacles in our path, so we work to remove, go through or around them. “What if?” helps us imagine a just world, “Why not?” helps us live it into being.
Safford offers the example of a parishioner who began to live hope into being by seeking opportunities for resistance. As a faith, we saw this when many UU ministers, recognizing heterosexism as an obstacle to personal and religious liberty, chose to live hope into being by ceasing cooperation with state sanctioned oppression and refusing to sign marriage licenses in states where same-sex couples could not be legally wed. We saw it when people, of various faiths, ethnicities, and races, recognizing the role of systemic racism in the deaths of young black men, began to live hope into being by joining together in protest to affirm black lives matter. Every protest movement, act of resistance, legislative initiative or advocacy campaign in pursuit of social change and justice is an attempt to live hope into being.
Now, it is important to understand that entering the place of truth-telling...of daring to ask why not does not necessarily mean one has to march, chant or wave a sign at passersby at a protest. First and foremost it means being honest as Safford notes, about the condition of our own soul. What or where are my obstacles to living hope into being? Which do I have the ability and capacity to remove or work through alone and which do I need the help of others in partnership or community?
When I was in the hospital I found myself faced with the hard truth that what I had been told and believed about the people I had now met and lived with didn’t match and the solutions to their problems expressed through statements of optimism, common sense, self-righteousness or plain cheerful ignorance, by people who had likely never met them nor walked in their shoes, seemed almost cruel in their detached naivete.
It caused me to reflect on my beliefs and biases, things I’d been told, assumed, or simply accepted and how my attitudes and actions informed by those things are manifest through me in the world. Ultimately it began a gradual process of identifying and letting go of beliefs and assumptions, obstacles that prevented me from recognizing the common humanity shared by all people.
Removing or going around these obstacles has meant working to abandon the parroting or use of simplistic slogans like “just say no” and the rejection of degrading descriptors like “illegal immigrant”. It has meant speaking up and speaking out about mental illness and seeing and talking about addition as a complicated illness rather than a personal failing. It has meant learning about the systemic nature of things like racism, poverty, heterosexism and the like, and raising awareness and advocating for change in healthcare, corporate welfare, and civil rights legislation. It has led me to work with marginalized people, the developmentally disabled and mentally ill, people injured or sick, people who are lonely. It has meant returning to church as an adult and taking my spiritual needs and life seriously. It has meant debating religious ideas while respecting religious liberty in and outside seminary. It has meant condemning both terrorism and torture as an affront to human dignity and continually confronting my own personal biases and assumptions. And it has meant learning to be an out and proud married gay man.
Some of this I have done with others publicly in marches or protests or by inviting politicians, faith leaders and activists to my home and attending fundraisers. Some I have done alone writing letters or checks, making phone calls, signing petitions, or participating in some form of resistance. Some I have done as paid work, some as a volunteer...in the workplace and at the dinner table.
I mention all of this for two reasons. First, to illustrate the variety of ways one can respond to the question “Why not?” and remove or work through the obstacles revealed in asking that question. And secondly, to note that while the specific actions taken in response to asking “Why not?” may change, the pursuit of hope through action does not. It is, as so much in life, a practice, whose end is not necessarily ours to see, but which we nonetheless help shape and refine as we move towards it.
“What if?” “Why not?” At a workshop I attended last year, UU theologian Thandeka would follow every question she posed to our group with, “If I’ve asked the wrong question, answer the right one.” Now, “What if?” is not the wrong question, but its not the only question we need to ask. Being willing to ask and respond to the next question....”Why not?”....this is how we plant ourselves at the gates of hope, willing to face and speak the truth, and begin living hope into being...that we might be agents of social change and justice…and co-create the kind of world we dream, pray, and sing about week after week, year after year.
Anyone can imagine a better world wondering “What if?” Let us be a people who not only wonder “What if?”, but dare ask and respond with our lives, through words and deeds, “Why not?”
Amen and Blessed Be
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
January 25, 2015
By Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Dedication
This morning’s sermon is dedicated to the memory of Alan Hyde, longtime member of BUUC, and the hope he lived into being through his love and service to this church.
Last weekend I was in Newport to officiate at the wedding of a friend. The day after the wedding I woke up early and went down to the hotel lobby where I was able to duck into a quiet alcove to read. My choice of reading material that morning was, shall we say, not the norm, for me or, I gather, for most. It was a eulogy...delivered in 1965 by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a memorial service for the Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist Minister from Roxbury, MA. Reeb had come to Selma, AL to advocate for the civil rights of African Americans and was attacked by white segregationists and died two days later of the injuries he sustained in the attack.
It is hard to read the words of Dr. King and not be awestruck by the both the eloquence and conviction of his words, but something else stayed with me after reading King’s eulogy of James Reeb. In addition to praising Reeb’s courage and honoring his sacrifice, King raised two questions, “Who killed James Reeb?” and “What killed James Reeb?” As to the question of who, King says, “the answer is simple and rather limited...He was murdered by a few sick, demented, and misguided men who have the strange notion that you express dissent through murder.”
King describes the question of what killed James Reeb as, “haunting, poignant, and desperate”. A question he says we are “forced” to ask and one, when we ask it, we find the “blame is wide and the responsibility grows.”
King goes on to say, James Reeb was murdered by the indifference of clergy who remain silent, the irrelevancy of a church that stands motionless amid social evil, the irresponsibility of politicians who descend into demagoguery, the brutality of law enforcement who practices lawlessness in the name of the law, the timidity of a federal government that funds foreign wars but fails to protect the life and liberty of it own citizens and even, King notes, “The cowardice of every Negro who tacitly accepts the evil system of segregation, who stands of the sidelines in the midst of a mighty struggle for justice.” These are not easy words to hear, indeed they are painful, perhaps more so because on some level we know they are true and not just for 1965, but today as well in 2015.
For Dr. King, the question of who killed James Reeb was straightforward. But it was not enough to advance the cause of justice. King knew if we stopped at who, we would never really understand why Reeb was killed. “Who” lets us keep our focus outside ourselves, sheltering us from our own prejudices and keeping us from seeing the ways we participate or cooperate in building and maintaining evil systems.
“What” forces us to look at the interconnectedness of our attitudes and prejudices and the social systems in which we live, systems we build, maintain, influence or change through our action or inaction. Dr. King is best known as a man of great vision, but he understood that in order to move toward that vision you have to know, name, and remove what stands in the way of your vision.
I wrote, “What If?”, our responsive reading this morning, as a devotional to be read at the opening of a meeting during my time as a Deacon at the Universalist Church of West Hartford in Connecticut but is more than that. It is a social justice statement. It reflects a vision or hope for the world that is markedly difference from our currently reality by asking what if...that is, by wondering what a just, and equitable world, where people are able to live fully, might be like.
In that respect it is not much different from the aspirational statements recorded in the founding documents of nations, or expressed in the mission or vision statements of sacred and secular institutions, or the covenants that bind communities together or even the prayers one might offer to God or release to the Universe. Where it differs, is in the last line where question is changed from what if to why not?
Now I don’t pretend to be a clever writer. I am however, a reflective person which is only to say that I tend toward curiosity.
Why not then, for me, is a perfectly logical follow up question to What if? Why not is, to me, a truth telling question because, answered honestly, it can reveal to us the truth of what’s in our way.
In words more graphic and graceful than my own, Victoria Safford speaks to the need of hope to be connected to the truth of current reality. “Our mission”, she writes, “is to plant ourselves at the gates of hope. Not the prudent gates of optimism or common sense, or self-righteousness, or cheerful ignorance, but a “different, sometimes lonely place, of truth-telling about your own soul...and its condition...from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be....We stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we’re seeing, asking them what they see.”
The vision spoken of the gate of optimism, common sense, self-righteousness...and the like is easy. It costs us nothing...and thus will achieve nothing. This is the kind of passive idealism that I carried my entire life until at age nineteen, a crisis of identity, manifest itself as depression, and for the first time in my young life, I was hospitalized, in a mental health unit.
My brief stay there had a far reaching impact on my social, political, and religious views. In the hospital I met and lived with people I had only previous been told about...people with mental illnesses and addictions, people on welfare, people without jobs or insurance, without visitors or even a home to return to once they were discharged.
These were the people for whom my optimism said that they will get the treatment they need, common sense said they need to learn or muster the willpower to “just say no”, my self-righteousness said, “get a job”, and to which cheerful ignorance proclaimed, “I’m sure it will all work out somehow.” Such expressions may, and I can say in my case, did reflect a genuine desire for a better world and improved situation for the people I met, but it nonetheless kept the focus outside myself, and thus free any sense of responsibility and ignorant of any connection to the people or situation just as the question of who killed James Reeb did. If we only express our vision by passively wondering or wishing “What if?” for ourselves or others it will never replace “What is.”
In order to move forward, to pursue the just world he envisioned Dr. King had to shift the question from who to what killed James Reeb. Likewise, we, as people of faith, called to plant ourselves at the gates of hope, in order to move forward, have to shift from asking questions like “What if?” in relation to our vision of a more peaceful, just and equitable world to “Why not?” That is, we must enter the sometimes lonely place of truth telling where passive wishing is replaced by hope stated and lived as an active pursuit in which we intentionally identify and work to remove obstacles to making “What if?” into “What will be.”
Indeed, Safford reminds us, “with our lives we make our answers all the time, to this ravenous, beautiful, mutilated, gorgeous world. However prophetic our words...our What ifs....it is not enough simply to speak. “What if?” helps point us toward hope, “Why not?” shows us how to pursue it by helping us locate and identify obstacles in our path, so we work to remove, go through or around them. “What if?” helps us imagine a just world, “Why not?” helps us live it into being.
Safford offers the example of a parishioner who began to live hope into being by seeking opportunities for resistance. As a faith, we saw this when many UU ministers, recognizing heterosexism as an obstacle to personal and religious liberty, chose to live hope into being by ceasing cooperation with state sanctioned oppression and refusing to sign marriage licenses in states where same-sex couples could not be legally wed. We saw it when people, of various faiths, ethnicities, and races, recognizing the role of systemic racism in the deaths of young black men, began to live hope into being by joining together in protest to affirm black lives matter. Every protest movement, act of resistance, legislative initiative or advocacy campaign in pursuit of social change and justice is an attempt to live hope into being.
Now, it is important to understand that entering the place of truth-telling...of daring to ask why not does not necessarily mean one has to march, chant or wave a sign at passersby at a protest. First and foremost it means being honest as Safford notes, about the condition of our own soul. What or where are my obstacles to living hope into being? Which do I have the ability and capacity to remove or work through alone and which do I need the help of others in partnership or community?
When I was in the hospital I found myself faced with the hard truth that what I had been told and believed about the people I had now met and lived with didn’t match and the solutions to their problems expressed through statements of optimism, common sense, self-righteousness or plain cheerful ignorance, by people who had likely never met them nor walked in their shoes, seemed almost cruel in their detached naivete.
It caused me to reflect on my beliefs and biases, things I’d been told, assumed, or simply accepted and how my attitudes and actions informed by those things are manifest through me in the world. Ultimately it began a gradual process of identifying and letting go of beliefs and assumptions, obstacles that prevented me from recognizing the common humanity shared by all people.
Removing or going around these obstacles has meant working to abandon the parroting or use of simplistic slogans like “just say no” and the rejection of degrading descriptors like “illegal immigrant”. It has meant speaking up and speaking out about mental illness and seeing and talking about addition as a complicated illness rather than a personal failing. It has meant learning about the systemic nature of things like racism, poverty, heterosexism and the like, and raising awareness and advocating for change in healthcare, corporate welfare, and civil rights legislation. It has led me to work with marginalized people, the developmentally disabled and mentally ill, people injured or sick, people who are lonely. It has meant returning to church as an adult and taking my spiritual needs and life seriously. It has meant debating religious ideas while respecting religious liberty in and outside seminary. It has meant condemning both terrorism and torture as an affront to human dignity and continually confronting my own personal biases and assumptions. And it has meant learning to be an out and proud married gay man.
Some of this I have done with others publicly in marches or protests or by inviting politicians, faith leaders and activists to my home and attending fundraisers. Some I have done alone writing letters or checks, making phone calls, signing petitions, or participating in some form of resistance. Some I have done as paid work, some as a volunteer...in the workplace and at the dinner table.
I mention all of this for two reasons. First, to illustrate the variety of ways one can respond to the question “Why not?” and remove or work through the obstacles revealed in asking that question. And secondly, to note that while the specific actions taken in response to asking “Why not?” may change, the pursuit of hope through action does not. It is, as so much in life, a practice, whose end is not necessarily ours to see, but which we nonetheless help shape and refine as we move towards it.
“What if?” “Why not?” At a workshop I attended last year, UU theologian Thandeka would follow every question she posed to our group with, “If I’ve asked the wrong question, answer the right one.” Now, “What if?” is not the wrong question, but its not the only question we need to ask. Being willing to ask and respond to the next question....”Why not?”....this is how we plant ourselves at the gates of hope, willing to face and speak the truth, and begin living hope into being...that we might be agents of social change and justice…and co-create the kind of world we dream, pray, and sing about week after week, year after year.
Anyone can imagine a better world wondering “What if?” Let us be a people who not only wonder “What if?”, but dare ask and respond with our lives, through words and deeds, “Why not?”
Amen and Blessed Be
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