Heeding the Advice of a Unitarian Friend

December 3, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER

Jack R. Harris-Bonham

Mystery of many names and Mystery beyond all naming, we joyfully gather here this morning in the presence of new friends and old acquaintances.

We’re thankful for the many and varied blessings that have been bestowed upon us. We hope that in the coming weeks we can be reminded of those who have less, who are impoverished both physically and spiritually.

May our thoughts turn into actions as the season of giving rapidly approaches. This morning we also hope and pray that the war, which rages in Iraq, will come to a peaceful and equitable end. So many have suffered and some many more will suffer until this war is over. We pray for that end.

Help us to listen carefully to the message of community that is being offered to us this morning. Remind all of us that community starts with risk and continues through risk and, if it is to be successful, the risking simply never ends. If we can’t risk, then we can’t have community. Also engender in us today the feeling of tolerance for those who do not hold the same opinions. Let us make room in our hearts for everyone – especially those with whom we have had problems.

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy, and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.

SERMON

Thank you for your warm welcome. It helps these trembling hands and shaky knees. Every time I approach a podium I think of an exchange with our daughter, Jillian. I’d been invited to deliver a commencement address and she had recently graduated from St. Edward’s here in Austin. So I thought, with her graduation fresh in her mind, I’d ask her for advice about speech making. What she told me was “Be funny, be clever, be brief.” Then she looked at me as only a twenty-two year old can look at her mother and said, “You don’t stand a chance.” It’s fear and trembling all the way to every podium now.

But you’ve made feel welcome and the hands and knees are a little more calm. Thank you. I especially want to thank Jack Harris-Bonham. Jack, it’s been a pleasure exchanging phone calls and e-mails with you. And I, of course, want to thank you, Mary. Because of you and people like you, Koinonia was able to survive some dangerous times. We’re grateful for your support over all these years.

I hope all of you will return this evening to see the documentary about Koinonia, Briars In the Cotton Patch . You’ll see what I mean about dangerous times – about those times when Koinonia was being shot at, dynamited. About the boycott when no one in the county would sell anything to or buy anything from this small group of people living together on a farm in southwest Georgia. You’ll learn of how Koinonia started a mail order business to survive. That same mail order business continues today and remains our main source of income. Among other things, we grow pecans – when that mail order business began in the 1950s, co-founder Clarence Jordan came up with the slogan: “Help us ship the nuts out of Georgia.” And we’re still shipping the nuts out of Georgia today. I’ve brought catalogues.

When you see the film, you’ll get a glimpse of how some impressive organizations were born at Koinonia? the most famous being Habitat for Humanity. And of how we continue today to serve others, of how we welcome visitors from all over the world. I hope you will want to come visit.

But this morning rather than focus on the story you will see in the film this evening, I wanted to share with you three stories, some thoughts about language, about labels, titles, what’s in a name.

Koinonia – it’s a Greek word found in the Christian Scriptures. It means “community,” “fellowship.” Truth is I had never heard the word and certainly had never heard of the place before visiting Americus, Georgia in May, 2003. Koinonia. I had never heard of it. Couldn’t spell it. Wouldn’t even attempt to pronounce it for months after I first saw the name. It was a chance visit. I was in a hurry to get back to Texas. I only stopped by Koinonia because I was being polite – at least outwardly. Someone had asked me to stop. Inwardly, “I don’t have time to stop at some farm. I’ve got to get back to Houston.” Eight months after that first brief visit, I was asked to be the director, twelve months after that first visit, I moved to Georgia. I wasn’t looking to leave Houston, to leave my home, my life, my work in Texas. But I did. And I had to face some things. One of the people that helped me to do that the most was my Unitarian friend, Carla.

Koinonia is an intentional Christian community. It started in 1942; about 25 of us live there now. We’ve pooled our talents and resources, we live simply, each according to need and together we take care of the farm and do whatever we can to help our neighbors and each other; we work for causes of social justice. Everybody is welcome at the farm – Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, Christian of any stripe though our fundamentalist friends seldom have much patience with us, seekers, non-seekers, Unitarians – all our welcome. I was and am comfortable with all that. But what I had to face when moving to Georgia was this word “Christian.” I never used it. Never called myself by that name. It would stick in my throat. I didn’t have that same problem with the label “Catholic.” I am a Catholic. I cut my teeth on the likes of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, co-founders of the Catholic Worker Movement, on the likes of the Jesuit social justice activists Dan and Phil Berrigan, of Mother Teresa, Saint Frances of Assisi, St. Theresa of Avila, Hildegarde of Bingen. I attended a university where serving the poor, the hungry, the prisoner, the orphan, the widow, praying, meditating, learning to think, appreciating other traditions and attending Mass were all on equal footing. I saw priests, nuns, brothers, lay people whose names will never be known give of themselves unselfishly, untiringly to others. When I said the word “Catholic,” these are the people that came to mind not the crazies who also bear that name. But “Christian” crazies, definitely the crazies. All that was lousy, awful, disgusting about them and that history – that was the image that made the word stick in my throat.

Then I moved to Koinonia. Founder Clarence Jordan, who died in 1969, was a New Testament Greek Scholar and a Baptist minister. A Baptist? Now that name conjured up some images for me. But from the beginning, the people at Koinonia have been a diverse group of people. That’s what I saw when I got there. What I also saw was a reluctance to use the word “Christian.” This intentional Christian community choking on its own name? Why? When did this happen? What made it so? And here I was coming to join Koinonia and I had the same problem. Then that Unitarian friend I mentioned helped us. I read from an e-mail she sent.

[Bren,] you said something at Mama’s [Caf] over breakfast that caught my attention, I didn’t want to let it go, or forget. And it seems more important now. Something about not letting people forget, or blow off, Koinonia’s Christian underpinnings, its foundation in the Gospel. And I wanna say, as a second generation Unitarian with a deep suspicion of anything that comes with a cross on it, YOU GO, GIRL!

It matters. Language matters, and calling yourself Christian, if you are, matters. Language – names, labels, they carry identity, and we’ve seen a genuinely creepy, sad and dangerous thing happen over the last 50 years or so – our names get stolen and corrupted, and we’re left without our identities, confused and robbed of the power our names held.

Remember “feminist?” It used to be a very simple word that meant a person who believes that the world should be run as if women matter. Then the Opposition stole it and twisted it. They took women’s anger with domestic violence, and called them “man haters.” They took women’s efforts to be heard and called it “strident.” It went on and on, even as essential feminist ideas became the law of the land. And the Opposition was really, really effective. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard a woman say, “I’m not a feminist, but?” then proceed to proclaim a perfectly ordinary feminist philosophy. But the Name, the Word, “feminist? is ickyickyicky and they won’t claim it. If you can’t describe yourself, can’t identify yourself – well – people like that have no power. Notice any feminist movers and shakers, and politicians or writers in the last ten years?

And “liberal.” Every great political effort that moved us a little closer to the ideals of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” had liberals behind it. But the Opposition got their teeth into the word. Have you heard it said without a derisive sneer any time since, oh, – 1975? And by the sheer force of repetition it worked. Now even the most dyed in the wool liberals struggle with words like “leftist” or”moderate” or “progressive” or any number of things that don’t quite fit. Because “liberal” sounds ickyickyicky, weak, wishy washy. But there were no liberals [that fit that description] marching in Selma, going to jail during Viet Nam, getting women the vote, or running the Underground Railroad. Not only do liberals lose the power and cohesion that comes from a name, they lose the great history that goes with it.

The same thing is happening with “Christian.” With the rise of the Radical Right, a small vocal camera-hungry group of extremists took over the label “Christian.” They identified their narrow, angry views as Christian views, claimed to be the voice of Christian America, and dagnab it if a lot of people didn’t believe them. Even my most ditzy apolitical friends associate “Christian? with hostile, ignorant, hateful people. Just like the women who mumble “I’m not a feminist, but?” liberal Christians have a fumbling discomfort with the word. And why wouldn’t they? The Christians of Leviticus are in charge of the name, and the Christians of the Beatitudes are homeless.

So, yeah, the Koinonia folks need to reclaim the name from the Nasties who grabbed it, and clean it up a bit, and wear it proudly on their sleeves. Otherwise the Nasties get to define you for the world, and you lose the great power, and the great history of the name.

Carla wrote this first part prior to the presidential election of 2004. She continued on after the election – I’ll have to wade a bit into her politics here – but you’ll see the point she wants to make. She finished the e-mail with this:

Now it’s after the election. I don’t know where my brain has been, or why I’m feeling so blind sided by it. This sudden revelation that many ordinary people voted for Bush because he seems better fit to be a “moral leader?” A moral leader? Since when is our national CEO supposed to be our moral leader? There are countries where they do that, but they’re not democracies, and the CEO isn’t called a president. So what inspired this vision of George Bush as Desmond Tutu – what has he identified as a key moral issue? Not poverty. Not hunger. Not illiteracy, social alienation, despair, addiction, violence. No, the great moral issue that he used to bring his voters to the polls – gay marriage. That is his idea of a great moral problem. And what’s scarier is that so many people agree with him. We desperately need to start a loud conversation in this country about what’s really important, and why. And we really need progressive Christians to reclaim their name and their history, and take the lead. They have history, they have credibility, they have the language, they can be heard by people on both sides of the Divide. And they can recognize a moral issue when they see one. Tell your hesitant Christians at Koinonia that we need them to save the country, and be snappy about it – Onward through the fog. [Your Unitarian Friend,] Carla.

Thank you, Jesus, for Unitarians. That’s what I really wanted to title this talk today, but I was afraid none of you would come.

What Koinonia went through in the 90s was perhaps more frightening, and certainly more insidious, than the bombs, bullets and boycott of the 50s. We grew “embarrassed?” about our name and slowly, over time, not at an instant death, but a slow eating away of our soul? Some of us forgot who we were. But not anymore.

Claim your name, live your name, embrace other names.

Claiming the name may be the easy part, but it is living it … By living it you become secure in it and if you truly are, you reach out to all other names, embrace them, learn from them. You don’t fear them. If you don’t fear them, you don’t harm them. I don’t have to tell you that Christians continually get into trouble because their actions don’t match their name. What happens though when they do? Remember recently, the attack on ten little Amish girls? Remember the response of the Amish? They went to the family of the killer and said, “Stay in your home here. Please don’t leave. We forgive this man.” That more than the senseless killing shocked us. It was the Christianity so many profess but which the Amish practiced that left us stunned.

Part of what you’ll see in the film tonight is the story of three Koinonia children. To our knowledge, they are the only white children in our nation’s history who had to go to court to win the right to be allowed to attend a public school. And, oh, my goodness, what they suffered at the hands of their classmates – but what may shock you more is their response to it. Greg Wittkamper was one of those children. He graduated from Americus High School in 1965. Forty-one years after his graduation, he was invited, for the first time, to his class reunion. Living your name matters. Finally, a group of Greg’s classmates reached out to him, apologized for what they had done to him. Greg sent us copies of the letters he received. Perhaps if there is time this evening, we can take a look at them, but for now I want to read you a story written by one of Greg’s classmates. It was sent to him along with a letter of apology asking him to come to the reunion. [ Greg & TJ ]

“What’s going on over there?”

“TJ’s fixing to whip Greg!”

“Naw!”

“Yea! He claims Greg called him a bad name in Mrs. Bailey’s government class, and he’s gonna beat his butt!”

TJ and the crowd caught up with Greg just as he reached [the baseball stadium parking lot] – Since we all knew he parked his car beneath a colored friend’s house a block beyond the park, it was not difficult to determine direction he would take after the dismissal bell rang. He was not dim-witted as to leave his vehicle on campus in the morning and expect to be able to drive it home.

Our class of 1965 was not the only class to study with “white sympathizers,” but we were the first to have colored students pictured in our annual. LBJ had just said they could go to school with us. We cussed them. We sneezed on them. We wanted to hurt them.”

[As teenagers in Georgia in 1965], we knew what was expected of us. We were to be seen in church regularly, we were to be at the football games in the fall whether on the field or in the stands, we were to look forward to voting for Democrats when we reached eighteen, and we were to have no use for people different from us.

Greg looked like us, yet he was drastically different from us. His family had taught him from the same Scriptures where we memorized verses, yet – but – well?

Well, Greg lived toward Dawson on a farm where Negroes and white folks lived and worked together. Back then the notion of whites and blacks living together was wrong! Caucasian teenagers approaching voting age in Sumter County in the middle of the 1960s were reared to believe nothing else. Some say this communal living is still wrong.

There must have been fifty of us standing four deep around a ten foot circle on this particular day. TJ challenged Greg to hit him first.

“Thomas, you know I did not call you a name, and you know I do not want to fight you,” Greg calmly replied.

“Knock hell out of him, TJ,” someone sneered.

Each witness knew Greg did not talk ugly, nor was he belligerent, but we wanted to see a fight. We wanted a victory.

History books will say Selma was worse, but there were not many newsman with cameras in Sumter County like there were near the Edmond Pettis Bridge during the Freedom March. Americus had beatings, shootings, and killings “

“Kick the crap out of him!” came another taunt.

TJ eventually threw the first punch – the only punch – landing it high on Greg’s face.

Greg winced and staggered backwards, maybe five steps. His knees buckled. He reached back with his left hand to cushion his fall. Greg did not fall. Nothing ever touched the ground other than his two feet.

Over the past forty years I have often recalled Greg’s inconceivable counter.

He hastily recovered and repositioned his full stature within arm’s length of the seasoned football player. Without one word, Greg clasped both his hands in the small of his back, jutted his chin forward toward his opponent and waited for the inevitable.

The inevitable did not happen. A coach came and the crowd dispersed. Greg whipped all fifty of us that afternoon without throwing a punch! I did not realize it until years later though.

I saw a sermon that afternoon. Because I did, I understand the Scriptures better today – one verse in particular.

As a boy, I, that day, went home feeling embittered about life and a miss opportunity to get even with someone I violently disagreed with. As a man, I admire a young man whose actions matched his words. I want to thank him for what he taught me.

Claim your name, live your name and if you do, you will embrace other names.

Over the past two years, several of us from Koinonia have traveled with an interfaith delegation to meet with Palestinians and Israelis who are working together for peace in that troubled part of the world. There are peacemakers there though it’s not their stories that are often told by the media or by the politicians.

I share, in closing, a story from my recent trip as an example of embracing other names.

“I am Palestinian,” he said. “I will tell you about four of my friends. When they were young boys, just children, the Israeli Army came into their home and killed an uncle right in front of them. They tried to move his body, but before they could, the bulldozers came and knocked down their house. They grew up with hearts set on revenge. One of them often brags to me why he’s here, in prison. But today I heard him and all his brothers. They were weeping. There was no bragging today. It was a letter that made them weep. They showed it to me. It was a letter someone had sent to their mother. I will read it to you.”

“My name is Sarah Holland. I am the mother of Micah who was killed by your son. I know he did not kill Micah because he was Micah. If he had known him, he would never have done such a thing. Micah was 28 years old. He was a student at Tel Aviv University working on his Masters in the Philosophy of Education. Micah was part of the Peace Movement. He had compassion for all people and he understood the suffering of the Palestinians. He treated all around him with dignity. Micah was part of the movement of the officers who didn’t want to serve in the Occupied Territories. But nevertheless, for many reasons, he went to serve when he was called up from the reserves.

What makes our children do what they do? Do they not understand the pain that they are causing – your son for having to be in jail for many years, and mine whom I will never be able to hold and see again, or see married, have a grandchild from him. I cannot describe to you the pain I feel since his death, nor the pain of his brother or his girlfriend or all who knew and loved him. All my life I have spent working for the causes of coexistence, both in South Africa and here. After Micah was killed, I started to look for a way to prevent other families, both Israeli and Palestinian, from suffering this terrible loss. I was looking for a way to stop the cycle of violence. Nothing for me is more sacred than human life. No revenge or hatred can ever bring my child back. After a year, I closed my office and joined the Parents? Circle, Families? Forum. We are a group of Israeli and Palestinian families who have all lost immediate family members in the conflict. We are looking for ways to create a dialogue with the long-term vision of reconciliation.

Then your son was captured. Afterwards, I spent many a sleepless night thinking about what to do. Could I be true to my integrity and the work that I am doing? This is not easy for anyone. I am just an ordinary person, not a saint. But I have come to the conclusion that I would like to find a way to reconcile. Maybe this is difficult for you to understand or believe. Yet, I know in my heart that this is the only path that I can choose, for if what I say is what I mean, it is the only way. I understand that your son is considered a hero by some. He is considered to be a freedom fighter fighting for justice and a viable Palestinian State. But I also feel that if he understood that taking the life of another may not be the way, if he understood the consequences of his act, then he could see that a non-violent solution is the only way for both nations to live together in peace. Our lives as two nations are so intertwined.

I give this letter to Nadwa, a Christian, and Ali, a Muslim, both members of Parents? Circle, two people I love and whom I trust to deliver it. They will tell you about the work that we are doing and perhaps it will create in you some hope for the future. I do not know what your reaction will be. It is a risk for me. However, I believe you will understand as it comes from the most honest part of me. I hope that you will show the letter to your son and that maybe in the future we can meet. Perhaps you will want to join the Parents’ Circle. Let us put an end to the killing and look for a way through mutual understanding and empathy to live a normal life free of violence.

With respect and hope, Sarah Holland”

When he had finished, the Palestinian prisoner neatly folded the letter then stared out the window as he spoke.

“This was the letter that my friends gave me to read. If everybody signed this letter, perhaps there would be peace. If governments would read? To me this Sarah Holland is wise. What she writes – this is the essence of what we must do, this process of reconciliation and dialogue, this sense of forgiving. Without them, I don’t care how many peace agreements you sign, without dialogue and reconciliation, without forgiving, without serving one another there will not be any quiet in this country for any of us.”

Thank you, Jesus, for Muslims and Jews – and Christians. And thank you for allowing this Christian to speak to you this morning. Thank you.