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Sermon Index

THE RESTORATION OF AMERICA

by the Reverend John Parker Manwell
at the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore
on the 5th of November 2000

style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">The year was 1966. The place was the corner of 35th and Macomb Streets, in Northwest Washington. The Carter family had just moved there from the Southwest part of the citya black family with five children, moving into a solidly white and upscale area not far from the National Cathedral.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">Stephen L. Carter, in his book Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy, recalls that

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">My first impression was of block after block of grim, forbidding old homes, each of which seemed to feature a massive dog and spoiled children in the uniforms of various private schools. My two brothers and two sisters and I sat on the front steps, missing our playmates, as the movers carried in our furniture. Cars passed what was now our house, slowing for a look, as did people on foot. We waited for somebody to say hello, to welcome us. Nobody did ...

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">I watched the strange new people watching us, and wordlessly watching back, and I knew we were not welcome here. I knew we would not be liked here. I knew we would have no friends here. I knew we should not have moved here. I knew ...

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">And all at once a white woman arriving home from work at the house across the street turned and smiled with obvious delight and waved and called out Welcome! in a booming, confident voice I would come to love. She bustled into her house, only to emerge, minutes later, with a huge tray of cream cheese and jelly sandwiches, which she carried to our porch and offered around ... simultaneously feeding and greeting the children of a family she had never metand a black family at thatwith nothing to gain for herself except perhaps the knowledge that she had done the right thing. We were strangers, black strangers, and she went out of her way to make us feel welcome. This womans name was Sarah Kestenbaum, and she died much too soon, but she remains, in my experience, one of the great exemplars of all that is best about civility.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">Carter would go on to become a lawyer, like his father. He now teaches at Yale. Pretty clearly, it was this incident in his youth that stirred up in him an abiding curiosity about civility. How did the custom come about? What purpose does it serve? What moves us to be civil, and why should we try? As you may know, two years ago he published a book about it, a book that inspired this sermon.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">That was last summer, when I expected another negative election campaign. But remarkably, it has seemed to me quite civil. So the sermon has taken a different shape. Well come back to civility in a few minutes.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">Lets turn now to another idea behind this sermon. It comes from Rosemary Bray, a journalist turned UU minister, who preached from this pulpit two years ago. Her memoir, Unafraid of the Dark, is a moving account of her growing up years in a welfare family in south side Chicago, living in constant terror of her angry, abusive father. It tells of the mother, and teachers, who believed in her, and of her escape to Yale, and into journalism, leading to several years with the New York Times Book Review.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">During this period, hearing that the Times was considering a daily book review, she applied. During the interview, however, she was chagrined to be told that she was not yet ready. Most of the story clips she had submitted dealt with race, culture, and gender issues. The interviewer saw her as a one-issue writer. She belonged, he said, in one of the papers cultural sections.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">For him, evidently, these were not mainstream issues. Bray left, before her rising temper could overcome her civility. Afterwards, she would recall with some anger the apparent view of many people, and perhaps this man as well, that the rising assertiveness of blacks, women, gays and others was bringing about the dismantling of America. She, in contrast, saw them as in fact the restoration of America. They held the promise of moving our nation closer to the vision of our founders, who proclaimed that all men are created equal, but had only begun to see where this dream might lead in later generations.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">Bray would write:

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">The profusion of voices from people of color, from people of different sexualitiesthese voices were filling in the blanks about America that so many people had tacitly agreed to ignore. Because of this new energy, America was becoming less static and myth-bound. We were becoming the real, vibrant, sometimes dissonant country we were meant to be ...

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">For me, this contrast brought to mind the contrast between people who place the golden age in the distant past, and those who place it in the distant future.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">Some people live their lives lamenting the loss of long ago. Loss, for some, of a secure and dominant role for males, especially white ones, and a subservient role for women both white and black. Loss of clearly defined gender roles. Loss of a culture in which English was the only recognized language, Christianity the only visible religion, and Western Europe the dominant historical and cultural focus. Perhaps even in this church, some have experienced these losses, as we have broadened our horizon and recognized new voices in our midst. Familiar ways can become comfortable, and even longed-for change brings loss.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">Yet, despite the losses that change inevitably brings, there are people who live their lives relentlessly seeking change, seeking to shape it to their vision of a world more compassionate and fair to all its people. More often than not, this is how we as Unitarian Universalists see ourselves.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">In reality, of course, few of us live wholly in the past or in the future. We welcome some changes, resist and lament others. We find ourselves with different attitudes at different stages of our lives. Indeed, we may rejoice in some changes even as we struggle to adjust to themchanging gender roles, for example, and the broadening of the cultures and histories that influence our lives to include Asia, Africa, a different way of viewing even our own American history as we look again at our treatment of native peoples.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">What I want to say about this tension between hanging on to the past and welcoming the future is this: It's our challenge as religious people to be intentional about building a future that builds on the best of the past and continually peels away and replaces the worst.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">But the paradox is this: the best of the past is often its vision. History inevitably embodies injustice, which time gives us the perspective to see. But it is our history that has given us our dream of a world in which we recognize our kinship with all that is, reach out to our neighbors around the world and across the tracks as if they lived next door. The dreams of Moses and Jesus, the Buddha and Mohamed. Ancient dreams, deeply embedded in our culture.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">Always, we need those who will call us to embody the best of our dreams. Martin Luther King, Jr., knew this well. He called America to live up to its dream of equality for allby overcoming the inequality and repression which was the reality for so many in the society we inherited.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">In the words of our anthem, we dream of rulers who are just, clear as the morning light, as the fresh grass after the rain. The prophets of Israel would leave no doubt about what justice requiredgenerosity to the widow and orphan; care for the poor; a continuing faithfulness to Israels God, Yahweh. Again and again, they would denounce Israels rulers for falling short.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">Dr. King was our latter-day prophet, as well as a leader of his people. Again and again, he called America back to its stated values. It cost him his life, but he moved this nation toward justice. And his vision continues to summon us.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">On Tuesday, we vote. At least many of us will. Some of us, perhaps, and many of our fellow citizens, will not vote. Many say their votes do not count, make no difference. Both major parties are beholden to the rich and powerful; neither keeps its promises.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">The essence of religious faith is to keep hope alive, and to continue the struggle for a better world, against all the evidence that we cannot win, that evil prospers and love fails. I call us today to the faith we profess.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">No, my vote, your vote, may not visibly change the worldnot this week, not after a new President takes office, perhaps not even in our lifetimes. Change is a long-term business. But still our votes count. Still, we make a difference, even though we may not live to see it, may not be able to measure it. Our faith calls us to live in the struggle, for as long as it takes. For our lifetimes. For the sake of our children and grandchildren. We are not called to succeed. We are called to be faithful. To witness. To plant seeds. To plant sequoias. To give up because we cant see change happening is to betray our trust in the democratic process, the fifth great principle of our Unitarian Universalist faith.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">Part of the process is recognizing that we may not know enough to be sure we are right; indeed, we might be wrong, and others might be right. Part of the process is recognizing that even when others are wrong, they are still our neighbors. Democracy requires that we never write them off. It requires that we remember that after the election is over, they will remain our fellow citizens, entitled to our respect and cooperation no matter how much we may reject their views. This is why we must be civil. Not necessarily polite, but ultimately respectful of each other as human beings. Democracy, if it is to be healthy and stable, requires civility. Civility, if we are serious about respecting each other, requires democracy.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">There have been times when Unitarians were so sure of their views that they wanted to read their opponents right out of the church. Theodore Parker, for his outspoken abolitionism. John Haynes Holmes, for his pacifism. And in our own time, those who supported the war in Vietnam, or fought in it.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">Our faith calls us to resist this temptation. It calls us to remember that we might be wrong and that even when we are right, we must be ready to listen to the views of others, to keep our minds and hearts open and stay in relationship even with those we bitterly oppose.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">Therefore I say, Vote! Vote, even if we cant see how it will make a difference. Vote, even though we know things wont change overnight. Vote, yet be ready to lose and accept that the other side may not be as bad or as wrong as we fear. Trust that the winners will respect us, as we want to respect them. Trust the democratic process.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">I say, Vote! And hang in there. Keep up the good fight. Support the causes you believe in, keep the letters and e-mails going, turn out for the rallies. The political process doesnt stop with election day. It is continuous. But also keep up the conversation. Resist the temptation to demonize or write off those who disagree. They are our neighbors now, and will remain our neighbors after election day. Besides, God forbid, they might be right, just the least little bit right!

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">It may not be likelybut we might at least have something to learn! It can be an exercise in humility to look back, if we are old enough, at our religious and political views of 20 years ago, maybe even 30 or 40 years ago, and see how they have changed. If we could know what our children and grandchildren will say about our views, many years from now, it might be yet more humbling.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">Let us honor the democratic process, and remember the virtue of civility. Stephen Carter makes clear that its foundation is ultimately religious, as we are called to recognize that the stranger, even the enemy, is our neighbor, that were all traveling together on lifes journey. Civility isnt about pretending we all agree. It isnt even about pretending that we like each other. Its about treating each other with respect, in spite of all our differences, because in the end we are neighbors.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">As neighbors, let us be faithful about lifting up the dreams we have in common, in the face of all our differences. Let us honor the past for its dreams, let the dreams continually stretch us, and devote our lives to making those dreams a reality for our childrenthose great dreams of equality, and freedom, tolerance, and respect. Dreams that will keep on unfolding before us, demanding changes we cannot now even imagine, just as our ancestors could not have imagined the new voices so welcomed by Rosemary Bray. But they will keep unfolding, and we can make them real, if we vote on Tuesday. If we hang in there and take part in the democratic process, on Wednesday and a year from Wednesday, on every day of our lives.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">Until our dream of democracy becomes a reality. Until we have built a land where we bind up the broken, where the captives go free. Until we have restored America to live up to its dreams, and built the promised land.

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style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">Just one more thing: when someone moves in next door, visit them with cream cheese and jelly sandwiches. Thats a good way to feed our dreams.

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