Podcast: Play in new window | Download
© Davidson Loehr
9 November 2008
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.
Video clips at Ustream
PRAYER:
(Ask veterans to stand, thank them.)
We pray for the bodies, minds and spirits of our soldiers on active duty now, that they may return home and may get the care they need.
And we remind ourselves – because we too easily forget – of the gratitude we owe to all veterans, past, present and future, for being willing to play that game of Russian Roulette we call military service. Any of them could have been sent into combat, and any of them could have been maimed or killed. No one else in our country is asked to offer that degree of sacrifice on behalf of political and military ambitions soldiers never fully understand, even as they are being shot at.
We pray, as people have prayed throughout history, for a time when soldiers and wars will not be necessary. But we don’t live in that world. And so we pray for the safety of our soldiers, and offer our heartfelt gratitude to all our veterans for their service.
Amen.
SERMON: The Audacity of Hope
Part A: Excited utterances
Tuesday’s presidential election was both a historic and exciting election. I want to talk about it, to look into this winning message of hope and change that carried Barack Obama to such a stunning victory of more than a two-to-one electoral vote. I want to wonder what it would take to make his hopes real, and whether it’s realistic to believe such change is possible.
But first, I just want to share, even to wallow in, some of the many excited utterances of this week. Here’s one:
“Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, is a date that will live in fame (the opposite of infamy) forever. If the election of our first African-American president didn’t stir you, if it didn’t leave you teary-eyed and proud of your country, there’s something wrong with you.” Those words came from the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman in a column he wrote for the New York Times two days ago, and they are a measure of the excitement that many people in our country and around the world feel this week.
Just consider the biography of the man we’ve elected President, against the whole history of the United States of America, and ask if it feels like you must be dreaming:
His father was born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father – our new President’s grandfather — was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.
But as Obama tells the story, “My grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that shone as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before.
“My parents imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren’t rich, because in a generous America you don’t have to be rich to achieve your potential.
“I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”
This is as perfect a Horatio Alger American Dream story as anyone is ever likely to have: the hard-working and determined person who succeeds despite overwhelming odds simply through what Martin Luther King called the content of his character. This is the American dream: from poor, powerless boy – or girl! – to the White House. He’s right: his story wouldn’t be possible in no other country on Earth.
Here are some more excited utterances, from this morning’s paper:
Maureen Dowd writes:
“I grew up in the nation’s capital, but I’ve never seen blacks and whites here intermingling as they have this week. Everywhere I go, some white person is asking some black person how they feel. I saw one white customer quiz his black waitress at length at a chic soul food restaurant downtown, over deviled eggs and fried chicken livers, about whether she cried when Barack Obama won. She said she did, and he said he wept like a baby.” (Maureen Dowd, “The Tracks of Our Tears,” 9 November 2008, The New York Times)
And Frank Rich writes with his edge, but also with some good insights:
“On the morning after a black man won the White House, America’s tears of catharsis gave way to unadulterated joy. Dawn also brought the realization that we were at last emerging from an abusive relationship with our country’s 21st-century leaders. The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place – in cities all over America.
“For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid – easily divided and easily frightened. This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics. It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media. We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included.
“So let’s be blunt. Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday night.” (Frank Rich, It Still Felt Good the Morning After, 9 November 2008, The NY Times)
Warm and hopeful messages came from countries all over the world, too many to read here. But I don’t want to leave our ministerial intern Brian Ferguson’s home country out, so here’s another excited utterance from Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond. He sent a message to Mr. Obama, in which he said, “It ushers in a new era of hope for the United States and its role in the world. This was a victory for optimism over pessimism, for hope over fear.” There’s that word, Hope.
Here’s how Obama put it Tuesday night at the start of his speech as the new President-elect of the United States of America:
“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
“It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.
“Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.”
My God – how long has it been since we have turned for a poetic and inspiring reading to one of our Presidents? Barack Obama may go down as one of the greatest orators in U.S. history. But it wasn’t just the excitement of election night that lifted him to that kind of eloquence. Here are just a few famous words he wrote about hope four years ago:
“Hope — Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!”
Those words came from his 2004 speech at the Democratic Convention, the speech that made him an instant national political figure – and helped get him a $2 million deal for three books. And that magical phrase, “The audacity of hope,” was the title of his best-selling 2006 book. But he got the message from his minister of twenty years, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. It was a sentiment that resonated with his whole life experience. It is that audacious hope with which he wants to infect us, all of us.
Part B: the Manger of Hope
I like etymology, the origin of word meanings, so I looked these two words up. An archaic meaning of Hope is “to have trust, confidence”.
And to be audacious means “to dare” – to dare something that others lack the hope, confidence and courage to dare.
But there’s something special about a message of hope. In his first book, Dreams from my Father, he wrote some very telling and very poignant words about it, reflecting on the powerful emotional effect that his first visit to Jeremiah Wright’s church more than twenty years ago had on him. The preacher, choir and congregation had taken up the word “Hope” in chants and shouts, and it had a transformative effect on a young Barack Obama:
“In that single [word] ‘hope’ I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black;…” He also compared them to the hopeful songs that slaves used to sing at night around the fire. Obama’s sentiments of hope have profoundly religious roots.
Voices of hope don’t come from the same place as voices of privilege, power and entitlement. Voices of hope are usually pretty powerless. I think this voice of hope that President-elect Obama has made his centerpiece could only come from someone outside the circles of those accustomed to privilege. Those who already own the country don’t need hope. They just need more power, more protection from those who have been disempowered, a few more politicians in their pockets, to pass a few more laws in their favor – which they don’t seem to have much trouble getting from either political party.
This is not to say that Barack Obama is powerless, without privileges, or even that he’s just an ordinary guy. He’s not. He is very, very bright and focused – remember that he has an undergraduate degree from Columbia University, graduated from Harvard Law School as president of the Harvard Law Review, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. I’m not sure we could over-state just how bright, focused and privileged our 44th President is.
But his privilege was earned, not bestowed. It came from his own achievements, not from his family or their entitlements. Our current president also attended elite schools. But he didn’t get into any of them on his own merit, and he did poorly at all of them. George W. Bush was pushed to the top by the financial and political ties of his family, in spite of his unimpressive personal achievements. Barack Obama rose to the top because of his personal achievements, but in spite of the complete lack of wealth or political power of anyone in his family.
As the son of a goat-herder from Kenya and a poor woman from Kansas, both dead now, Obama inherited both the right and the need to hope.
Here’s another kind of metaphor. Think of the different view of food that you can get from a gourmet, and from a man who has been hungry and poor for a long time. The gourmet can tutor you on the nuances of fine sauces and rare wines. She knows more about the subtle flavors of the most exquisite foods than anybody. But in some deeper ways, the hungry man can tell you even more important things about food, because he knows what he needs in order to live, and how much he needs it. That’s like the difference between the voice of power and privilege, and the voice of hope, too.
But Obama is hoping for something very different from Jesse Jackson and other civil rights activists of the 1970s. Here’s a line from his justly famous speech on race back on March 18th:
“…we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.”
Those are strong words! Obama is not an affirmative action candidate, nor a token played in the disingenuous game of racial reconciliation.
Some have talked about how he stands on the shoulders of people like Jesse Jackson and the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and there is certainly something absolutely true about that. But he also represents a profoundly different political ideology than the talk about race or sex thirty years ago. Then, liberals would often favor someone simply because they were black or female. Had Jesse Jackson been elected, we all knew that he would make a point of choosing black people for his key positions, as we expected that Geraldine Ferraro would have chosen women if she had been elected Vice President, using their political power to reward Their Kind with entitlements. But that’s just reverse racism and sexism, and morally it is no better than the original versions that have done so much damage.
Both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin continued to play on that reverse sexism this year in their very different campaigns, and many women were willing to vote for them largely because they were women, especially in the case of Hillary. As women, they belonged to a majority containing slightly more than half of the voting population and over half the general population.
But Obama had to be, and was, far more pragmatic. As the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, raised by a white grandmother in Hawaii, rising high into the intellectual and political elite through his own exceptional gifts – he didn’t belong to any majorities. Kenyans aren’t a majority in America, nor people born to parents of two different races, nor Hawaiians. The only majority Obama could appeal to was the majority of Americans. And as he said throughout his speeches over the past four years, he wasn’t appealing to red states or blue states, but to the United States. He wasn’t appealing to black America or white America, or to liberal America or conservative America, but just to the United States of America.
Think of it: a message of hope, spoken to and on behalf of the majority of our citizens, regardless of their political party, race or sex: that is a definition of post-partisan politics, which will be revolutionary if he means it and can pull it off.
If Obama is telling the truth, he is bringing a peaceful, profound, revolution. He says he’s looking for more than just a change of parties in the White House. Obama’s message isn’t about black empowerment. It’s about American empowerment, and human empowerment. This seemed to be the singular voice he brought, a voice that could have come only from outside all the majority groups.
Part C: My Own Audacious Hopes
We don’t know what kind of a president Barack Obama will make. If he plays the race card as Jesse Jackson did, he may become no more than a sensationalist President, notable only because he was black and brilliant, rather than becoming a truly sensational President because he was one of our very best.
I want to share some of my own audacious hopes for the next four years with you. You won’t agree with all of them, but you don’t come here only to have your biases confirmed, but also to hear things that might irritate you enough to make you think about your biases, and be more clear about why you’re going to stick with them, or change them.
I hope this wasn’t just a victory for the Democratic party, because the Democratic Party can not save us. I hope we won’t see four or eight more years of tit for tat, of vengeance on Republicans, and of liberal pork-barrel politics operating at the same low level as the Republican pork-barrel politics of the past eight years.
I hope I don’t like all of Obama’s appointments, and hope neither the Democrats nor the Republicans like them all either.
This has already started, as some prominent liberal voices have spoken out. Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder of Tikkun magazine and a longtime progressive activist, railed against Rahm Emanual as Obama’s choice for Chief of Staff, characterizing him as a right-wing Zionist ideologue. And Ralph Nader wasted no time saying that Obama is already too beholden to giant corporations for us to hope for any significant change. But if Obama is serious about post-partisan politics, then he will appoint a fair number of brilliant Republicans to key posts – people who won’t always agree with him, but who will be open and informed enough in their criticism to keep the possibility of meaningful change alive – and I hope he does that.
I hope he truly puts together a post-partisan cabinet that might help move us all beyond the partisan politics that have proven to be so petty and immature for the past few decades.
I don’t know what that would look like. I don’t even know what it should look like, because in politics as in all other areas, I can’t see very far beyond my own biases, and my biases aren’t good enough. We need to empower meaningful dialogue between many different biases if this is to become – as Obama has also promised – a government of the people, by the people and for the people. I hope he can empower meaningful and influential dialogue between whose biases go beyond mine, no matter how much in love with my own biases I can be.
So I hope we are all surprised and educated in the coming years, to find a president who actually keeps some of his major campaign promises, and moves our country ahead into brave new places it has never been before.
PART D. A Reality Check
Now, does any of this hope for radical change really make any real-world sense? Or is it just that it’s Sunday, so we huddle together in church to be anesthetized with swell-sounding bromides of neither depth nor breadth, to numb us until we can get outside in the actual world again? That sort of thing does happen, as you know. Are we just kidding ourselves, like a herd of little Pollyannas, or can such radical, hopeful, change really happen?
Well, several things suggest that it can. Proposition 8 in California, forbidding the marriage of gay people, won only by a slim margin. That was the one dramatic setback for many people. But let’s back off and see this through a longer lens. In the past eight years, the percentage of people who voted against the rights of gays to marry in California decreased from 61% to 52%. In four more years, it is almost certain to be the minority view. Massachusetts has already extended the right of marriage to all people. New York recognizes those marriages as legal, and soon Connecticut will join them. And on another front, in all three states where regressive abortion propositions were on the ballot, they failed. As I think we’ll see in the coming years, the coming defeat of racial and sexual regression will also be a significant defeat for conservative Christianity – normative Christianity – which has supported them. Christine Wicker, author of The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, has an essay from 6 November on the Huffington Post in which she talks about “the Jesus that lost this election,” and it is the angry, bigoted, hateful Jesus who many of us have learned to accept as the normative Jesus over the past couple decades (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-wicker/the-victorious-jesus_b_141701.html). Twenty years ago, all of this would have been as unbelievable as a black president, but it’s happening, and the momentum seems both clear and strong.
Two days ago, a man named Benedict Carey reported on the op-ed pages of the New York Times about a study showing that mutual trust between members of different races can catch on just as quickly, and spread just as fast, as suspicion and hatred can, and that mutual trust, once developed, travels like what he called a benign virus through an entire peer group. Radical change is possible, and it is happening. The fact that this report – which doesn’t contain much more than common sense to anyone who has made friends in racially mixed places – only came out this week rather than years ago is a sign of the role our media have played in helping to keep us at one another’s throats. Perhaps even the media can return to the days when they were actually the Fourth Estate, and took it as a sacred mission to keep us informed and educated. (A version of this article appeared in print on November 7, 2008, on page A20 of the New York edition.)
Paul Krugman the economist also wrote on Friday, quoting Franklin Delano Roosevelt who said, “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”
“And right now,” he says, “happens to be one of those times when the converse is also true, and good morals are good economics. Helping the neediest in a time of crisis, through expanded health and unemployment benefits, is the morally right thing to do; it’s also a far more effective form of economic stimulus than cutting the capital gains tax. Providing aid to beleaguered state and local governments, so that they can sustain essential public services, is important for those who depend on those services; it’s also a way to avoid job losses and limit the depth of the economy’s slump.
“So,” Krugman concludes, “a new New Deal isn’t just economically possible, it’s exactly what the economy needs.” (A version of this article appeared in print on November 7, 2008, on page A35 of the New York edition.)
I agree with our next President, that if we do this right, we have a righteous wind at our backs and that we stand on the crossroads of history. But the final quote this morning will come from Barack Obama, as he reveals what is at the core of his whole vision, the spirit that he actually says he will serve:
“In the end, then,” he says, “what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.” (from the 18 March speech on race).
I don’t always know what to say when politicians talk politics, but I hope many of these audacious dreams come true. I hope we here can find ways to move beyond both partisan and Unitarian biases to become agents of change in the broader kind of coalition that now calls us out.
And finally, I hope that if the new President of the United States asks us if we can grow beyond mere politics and ground our behavior instead in the highest teachings of the world’s great religions – to do unto others only as we would have them do unto us – I hope if he asks us whether we can do that, that as individuals and as a nation, we are able to rise up and shout YES WE CAN!
