The following sermon was delivered on August 24, 2014 at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation Church of Delaware County in Media, PA.
Responsive
Reading: “Prophets” by Clinton Lee Scott
Always it is easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed
the direction of their vision.
It is easier blindly
to venerate the saints than to learn the human quality of their sainthood.
It is easier to glorify the heroes of the race…
than to give weight to
their examples.
To worship the wise is much easier than to profit by their
wisdom.
Great leaders are
honored, not by adulation, but by sharing their insights and values.
Grandchildren of those who stoned the prophet sometimes
gather up the stones to build the prophet’s monument.
Always it is easier to
pay homage to prophets than to heed the direction of their vision.
Sermon: Freeing Truth
What makes a prophet? Our responsive reading this morning
speaks about how it is “easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed the
direction of their vision.” But before we can even consider that point, there
is a much more basic one that we need to address: How do we select the people that
we think are worthy of our recognition? What have we decided makes a prophet?
I suggest that we start with a kind of resource that should
be fairly explicit in their description of “prophets” - religious texts. Let’s look
at one of the more obvious options, someone that I assume many of us probably
know thanks to either our childhood religion classes or Charlton Heston: Moses.
What was the first obvious sign that he was a prophet? I imagine that for many
people, the answer to that question might be something like “the burning bush.”
In the story, we know that at this bush Moses is singled out by God. He has an
exchange with God who identifies him as the person chosen to free the Hebrew
people from their experience of slavery. Moses repeatedly expresses doubt that
he is the right person for the job, but God assures him over and over again
that he will never be alone, and eventually Moses accepts his role as the one
chosen to confront Pharaoh and lead the Hebrew people out of Egypt.
Okay. That helps give me some idea of what makes a prophet,
but I think I need to do a little more research. How about another key example
from religion, maybe the Prophet Muhammad? His story is perhaps a little less
familiar to people in the United States, but for people who identify as Muslim,
nearly a quarter of the world’s population, it is arguably basic knowledge.
What was it that made him a prophet? According to the story of the first
Qur’anic revelation, Muhammad was also chosen by God. The way the story goes,
he was meditating in a cave and then all of a sudden felt a squeezing
sensation, as though an invisible presence was holding him in a crushing
embrace. It was in that moment that Muhammad was told by the angel Gabriel to
“Read!” After Muhammad protested, saying that he could not do so, he suddenly
was overcome with and spoke the words that became the first revelation of the
Qur’an. After that encounter, Muhammad still did not think he was a prophet, in
fact he thought he was losing his mind. But with the assurance of his wife
Khadija he began his legacy as a prophet.
In both of these stories, there is this shared theme of
being “chosen” for prophethood. More specifically, they seem to have been
chosen by God. If we look at their stories from this angle, we could argue that
Moses and Muhammad were singled out as leaders without really having a say in
the matter. They were even a little reluctant. From this perspective, it is
their being chosen that seems to be the most memorable evidence of their being
prophets. But is that an accurate picture? Is that even true of all prophets?
Let’s try widening our stories a bit and see what happens.
Before Moses encountered God in the burning bush outside of Egypt, he first
lived inside Egypt. He was the son of a Hebrew woman, born during a time when
the Pharaoh had commanded that all Hebrew boys be drowned in the river. In this
part of the story, we meet three people who are often overlooked: Moses’
mother, his sister Miriam, and Pharaoh’s daughter. Their roles in the story
seem inconsequential, two of them don’t even get names, but against this
backdrop, their actions are nothing short of heroic. Risking her own life,
Moses’ mother goes against the royal decree and conceals her son for three
months. Eventually, she can no longer hide him and places him in a basket by a
river. And you know what? My guess is she knew exactly what she was doing. She
knew who would show up next. That’s probably why her daughter, Moses’ sister
Miriam, watched from a distance to see what was happening to her baby brother. She
was waiting to play her part in this brave plan. Before much time passes, the
Pharaoh’s daughter comes to the river for her bath. She sees the basket, has it
retrieved, and when she opens it, realizes what happened. The Pharaoh’s
daughter knows about her father’s decree. But she also chooses to go against
it. Aided by Miriam, she returns Moses to his mother to have him nursed, and
eventually adopts him as her own son, so that he can grow up safely. What we
end up with is two courageous women among the oppressed in a society who risked
their lives for justice, and a woman who used her position of power to help
them save an innocent life.
What about the story of Muhammad? Before he encountered the
angel Gabriel in the cave, he was a merchant, married to the wealthy Khadija.
She belonged to a powerful tribe known as the Quraysh, and it was actually she
who proposed to Muhammad. That’s some modern-day gender-equality. Khadija did
not have to attach herself to a poor merchant - she chose to make that
relationship happen. And when Muhammad came down from the cave on that fateful
night, she did not have to tell him that he had in fact encountered an angel.
She chose to calm him down and believe in his story. When Muhammad began to
publicly share messages about economic justice and monotheism that angered
members of the wealthy and polytheistic Quraysh tribe that was Khadija’s own
family, she did not have to support him. She chose to encourage his words
rather than ask him to stay silent. When they were ostracized from society to
the point that their lives were threatened, Khadija did not even have to stay
with Muhammad. But she chose to do so. Like the women who saved the infant
Moses, she too risked her life for something that she knew was right – without
being told to do so. Moses’ mother, his sister Miriam, Pharaoh’s daughter,
Khadija - none of them had a moment when they were explicitly “called” or
“chosen.” But all four of them had moments when they made a choice.
Now I think I’m getting somewhere. If we look at the stories
from this angle, we see choice once again enter the prophethood equation, but
this time it is not by an external source. We could even argue that there
wasn’t a “God” character in their stories! By widening these stories, we
uncover other prophets - people who were not chosen to act, but who made a free
and responsible choice to act. No divine being delivered instructions through a
burning bush or an angel (wouldn’t that make our lives simpler?). They had to
decide for themselves what was worth risking their lives to achieve. They were fierce,
free-thinking women. And what their stories show us, the risks they took on, is
that prophets are not the select few who are chosen among us. Prophets are the
ones among us who make certain choices. Choices that few others realize that
they too can act upon.
I recognize that the stories of Moses and Muhammad may be
too far removed from our own experiences. They are only stories after all, and
we don’t necessarily know whether any of what is described in them actually
happened. So where else can we search for answers to the question about what
makes a prophet? As it turns out our Unitarian Universalist tradition has
something to offer. Among the six sources of our tradition, we claim to draw
upon the “words and deeds of prophetic men and women which challenge us to
confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the
transforming power of love.”
Great! We have a source that includes prophets. But it
doesn’t mention choices. So what can
we glean from this source in figuring out what makes a prophet? “Challenge.” Prophets
are people whose words and deeds challenge us. They do not say or do things
that are easy or free of any risk. They do not tell us to follow the normal or
traditionally accepted course of action. In fact, they do just the opposite. In
the words of Bernice Johnson Reagon, one of the founding members of the group
“Sweet Honey in the Rock,” prophets “lay down the world as it is,” and pursue a
new way of being, knowing full well that doing so comes with a price. This idea
fits nicely with another obvious source we can turn to in helping to define
what makes a prophet: the dictionary.
According to Merriam-Webster, a prophet in the religious
sense is one who “utters divinely inspired revelations.” That sounds like our
first story angle. But the next definition is a person “gifted with more than
ordinary spiritual or moral insights.” Someone who sees beyond what others see,
who “lays down the world as it is” because they have a different understanding
of what is happening around them. And that’s not all. If we look at the Greek
origins of the term, we see that it comes from the word prophetes, which means to “speak out,” “to declare,” or “to make
known.” Prophets don’t just see things differently, they share what it is that they
see.
Ok. I think I have it now. What makes a prophet? Prophets
teach new truths that challenge our understanding of reality, even if that
understanding is popular and loved. They are willing to speak what others might
be afraid to admit, and combat forms of oppression that others still deny or
even defend as the “law” or “justice.” And they do so in spite of the
isolation, criticism, persecution, dehumanization, and even death that may
follow. Like the women in our earlier stories, prophets are not necessarily
chosen. Prophets exemplify the difficult choices we have to make. They
demonstrate how we must live if we hope to “confront the powers and structures
of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.”
So if it is those difficult choices that make a prophet,
what stories can we draw upon to
challenge us? Who are the women and men who declared truths that were meant to
transform our society? There are some obvious answers to that question. Martin
Luther King and Gandhi quickly come to mind. Malala Yousafzai, a young education
activist who survived an attempt on her life by religious extremists. Or Ida B.
Wells, an anti-lynching advocate whose investigative journalism against
Southern racism led to many threats on her life. In our UU tradition, we have prophets
who led movements for the religious and social freedoms we now experience. Women
like Margaret Fuller and Olympia Brown. People like Theodore Parker who risked his
life to support abolition from the pulpit. Or Fannie Barrier Williams and
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who fought for the expansion of civil rights to
women and people of color. You might know of James Reeb, the UU minister who
was killed in 1965 by white segregationists while he was marching in Selma for
civil rights.
We can also look to Clarence Skinner, a Universalist
minister who was criticized for his pacifism during World War One. In his book,
The Social Implications of Universalism, he
celebrates that the prophets of our past gained for us the freedoms that we
enjoy today. He wrote: "The genius of Universalism is liberty. Its fathers
dared to challenge the olden tyrannies of ecclesiastical authority, &
interpret life in larger, more triumphant terms.” But that daring, he
acknowledges, comes with a cost: “Its prophets were stoned in the streets for
their daring,” and “ostracized by their contemporary complacent fellow
religionists.” Ultimately, he says, it was their willingness to fight the
“battles of religious and civil freedom” that granted for us the “unchallenged
right … to interpret the fundamentals of religion according to his conscience.”
But Skinner also writes to challenge us. “The fight for
freedom is never won. Inherited liberty is not liberty but tradition.” The
liberties that those before us fought to achieve? They are already outdated
concepts. The “freedoms” we were born into do not include everybody, in fact
some still exclude and even intentionally harm. Look at our alleged criminal
justice system, which is little more than a collection of practices designed to
dehumanize and imprison black and brown men and women. Here in Pennsylvania the
state’s budget practices and the growing “school-to-prison pipeline” show that
criminal justice has become a for-profit endeavor, often at the expense of our
children’s education. Or voting laws that claim to fight voter fraud, but in actuality,
seek to silence the voices of minority, low-income, immigrant, and even young
adult voters.
Skinner’s words, nearly a century old, capture a challenging
truth that we must engage if we are to live prophetically. He writes, “each
generation must win for itself the right to emancipate itself from its own
tyrannies, which are ever unprecedented and peculiar.” What we know as freedom
actually contains new forms of tyranny, new masked oppressions and structural injustices
that we have to find the courage to name and tear down. Just like the prophets
that have come before us, who made the difficult choice to risk their comfort
and safety in pursuit of a new way of being, we must now choose whether we will
live prophetically or passively. We have the option to “glorify the heroes” of
our human race by simply remembering them, or to “give weight to their
examples” by making new and difficult choices of our own. If the prophets of
our past were alive today, what choices do you think they would face? If we
want to “win an ever larger and more important liberty,” what decisions must we
now make?
“In times of moral crisis, moderation is a cop-out.” Irshad
Manji, the author of Allah, Liberty, and
Love, wrote those words, because she believes that we can do better. She
believes we have to do better. And
after the events of this summer, her words fuel the growing fire in my spirit. We
have been sinking deeper and deeper into a horrifying moral crisis, thanks to
the overt operation of sinister forces. But it is now time that we stop hiding
from a truth that stares us in the face and continues to violently claim lives.
It is a truth that some of us already know well, perhaps on a painfully
personal level. It is a truth that the events this summer, particularly in
Ferguson, Missouri reflect as the symbolic and microcosm examples of a larger
social epidemic.
The truth is, racism is a deeply embedded and rampantly active
force in our society. Three weeks ago, Michael Brown became another young man
murdered simply because of the color of his skin. As though his life being
violently taken away from his was not enough, the follow-up since has been
horrifying. There have been irrelevant and misleading stories circulated about
his activities prior to the shooting, in an effort to blame the victim for his
own death. There have been moves by officials to cover up and then justify the
brutal way in which he was killed. These deliberately misleading efforts
continue because there is a simple and undeniable truth: Michael Brown did not
deserve to die. His last words, with his hands up in the air were “I don’t have
a gun, stop shooting.” But that did not matter. Darren Wilson had already made
up his mind about how their exchange was going to end. Our society taught him
that he could get away with it. Our society, with its Jim Crow-based mass
incarceration system, its pop culture portrayals of racial minorities as
criminals, and its biased reporting against black victims of violence as
compared to white perpetrators, had taught Darren Wilson that black men had
less of a right to live. Even before the two crossed paths, Michael Brown’s
life was in danger simply because he was a young black man living in a
racially-hierarchical America.
The angering reality is that Michael Brown is not the only
example of this life-destroying truth that has occurred in recent weeks. Just a
few days before Michael was killed, John Crawford, a black, 22-year-old man,
was also shot and killed in an Ohio Walmart when officers thought that a BB-gun
he had purchased that day at that same Walmart was a real gun. His last words?
“It’s not real.” John Crawford is dead because he bought a BB gun. Yet somehow,
white “open-carry” activists are able to walk around family establishments like
Target and Chipotle with real rifles strapped to their backs and nobody shoots
to kill them. Before John Crawford, we saw video of Eric Garner being choked to
death in broad daylight by police officers using a banned chokehold to subdue him, ignoring his cries of “I can’t breathe.”
And these are just some of the stories that we have caught on camera. What
happens when nobody is watching?
The truth is that there is a disturbing and sinister force
at play here, and it is time that those of us with the power to say something
make our voices heard and our presence known. We must speak up. The individuals
who have organized in Ferguson during these last three weeks in response to
these deaths have highlighted just how far our society will go to deny the
violent reality of systemic racism. People have been threatened, arrested,
tear-gassed, shot, and dehumanized by a militarized police force who claim to
be keeping the peace. But how can there be peace when there is no justice for
the lives of these murdered men? How can there be peace when the first instinct
is to try to blame them for their deaths, to find some way to claim that they
were the threat, and not the other way around? It may seem too awful to be
true, but for the people whose lives are at risk the minute they walk out the
door, it is indeed a reality. In the words of James Baldwin, “we have to look
grim facts in the face because if we don’t, we can never hope to change them.”
This is the choice that faces us today. As other voices continue
to deny that Michael Brown, John Crawford, Eric Garner’s or hundreds of other deaths
this year had anything to do with the
color of their skin, we now have the choice to be prophets. To name the
difficult truth that racism has found new and more pervasive ways of operating
in our world – that the law treats black and brown lives as having less value
than white lives. We have a choice to live out the values that we proclaim to
uphold, by challenging the common narratives that serve to vilify and
dehumanize people of color, whether they relate to criminal justice,
immigration, education, or terrorism. Doing so involves great risk, not the
least of which is acknowledging that we have all been party to institutional
oppression. But we cannot let those risks stop us from responding to Clarence
Skinner’s challenge. Because those risks come with an amazing and essential
payoff: justice. And because we know can do better. We know that it is in our
nature to love and create, not hate and destroy. We know in our minds and in
our hearts that to let injustice stand, when we have the choice to confront the
truths sustaining its presence, is an act that violates our innate sense of compassion.
We know that real change is possible when there is the daring willingness to
sacrifice the false safety of the masking lies that we have believed about our
world and its social and political structures. If we are to live into the
values of equality, justice, compassion, dignity, and love that are essential
to our Unitarian Universalist tradition and inherent to all humankind, we must
be willing to recognize this difficult truth. If we are to succeed in our
efforts to defeat structures of evil, we must be willing to engage a new
understanding of the ways in which racism remains present today. We must be
willing to name the forces that we have allowed to unconsciously control our
lives and our social practices. And we must be willing to show the world that a
new way of being is possible.
The necessity to pursue this task is as clear as our fourth
principle – the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. This
principle is often interpreted as supporting one’s individual search, but today
I ask you to remember that this is not all it includes. The free and
responsible search for truth and meaning cannot just serve us as individuals –
it must move us as engaged and prophetic members of society. We cannot afford
to ignore that this principle also means asking difficult questions about
ourselves and our world. It cannot be a responsible search for truth if we decide
that some questions are too scary to ask, some problems are too big to solve, or
some histories are too long to explore. And it is not a responsible search for
meaning if we deny that there are explanations beyond those that are easy to
defend. Because to uncover these truths is not enough- we must also be willing
to risk sharing and defending them. In response to the events in Ferguson, one
woman who self-identifies as white wrote about her grappling with this process
as she raises her two blue-eyed, blonde-haired sons. She realized that she must
teach them about the racism present in society, and the privileges that come
with simply having their white skin. She realizes that she has to teach them
about this truth, because to ignore it means she risks letting them turn into
the people on the other side of the gun, the ones pulling the trigger.
There is one more element that helps make a prophet. We know
from our stories, UU sources, and dictionary definition, that prophets make the
difficult decision to proclaim challenging truths. And they do so because, as
other definitions suggest, they can predict the future. They prophesy about
what is to come. And their words are grounded not just in outrage but, more
importantly, in hope. Prophets speak difficult truths because they have a
vision for something better to come. They have hope for a more just and
peaceful world. They call attention to the tyrannies of our world because they
know that we can do better. And they see that change, however tremendous and
difficult it may be, is the only way to reach that beautiful future. It is what
moved Moses and Muhammad, Miriam and Khadija. It is what sustained Martin
Luther King and Ida B. Wells. It is what Irshad Manji knows when she writes
“All of us are chosen; a few of us recognize our choices and act on them.” The
prophets that have come before us made the choice to speak and act upon
difficult truths. They made the choice because they hoped, they knew, that
there was something better to come if they took that risk. And now, it is our
turn.
I have just one more story about prophets for you. Last
spring, I had the honor of teaching a group of youth the story of the Prophet
Muhammad. In some versions of the story, it is said that he was destined to be
a prophet because he had a mark on his body - the mark of a prophet. One of the
students in the class, Ellen, asked me a reasonable question: “What did it look
like?” I told her that I didn’t know, in fact none of the stories told us what
it looked like. And then I asked her, “What would be your mark?” She thought for a moment, and then said “A
circle.” “That’s interesting,” I responded. Why a circle?” She looked at me and
said, “Because it is finished but never ends.” She’s nine.
Racism should not be the pervasive and destructive force
that it is in our world today. But until we are willing to acknowledge its presence
as deeply embedded in our institutions and social norms, we will never see an
end to its violent effects. Unless we speak the truth – that there are actions
that we can no longer tolerate because we know we can do better –
discrimination and injustice will always claim innocent lives. Those who came
before us dared to challenge the tyrannies of their time, knowing that their
actions carried a price. In the words of Clarence Skinner, “Let us meet the
issues of our time with intellectual frankness and with moral courage. Let us
recognize the challenging facts of our day, and answer them with truth and with
reason.” The prophethood of Moses, Muhammad, Miriam, and Khadija may be
finished, but the need for prophets never ends. The power to confront evil and
injustice with love, compassion, and a universally-liberating truth is one we
all can possess. Let us learn to live prophetically, remembering that it does
not matter if we are chosen – it matters that we recognize that we have the
choice to see and build a greater freedom.
Benediction
We stand in this space today as holders of two
truths: the violent reality of racism and the beautiful reality of our innate
potential to be better. We now face a choice that others before us encountered:
to make known the truths we hold and move towards a greater future, or to
remain silent and allow injustice to prevail. As we leave this space today, let
us remember that it does not matter if we are chosen, it matters that we have
the choice to be prophets.
