CONFRONTING THE POWERS AND STRUCTURES OF EVIL
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young October 2, 2005

This is the second in a series of sermons this Fall having to do with our Unitarian Universalist principles. The usual first seven principles that you are familiar with seeing on the front of your Order of Service, has, on those Sundays where we're doing this series, been replaced with the second half of our Unitarian Universalist principles which are much less familiar.

The first source we did a few weeks ago had to do with direct experience in religion. It affirms that authentic religion comes, not from the authorities, from the various things people tell us we're supposed to do and supposed to believe, but what comes out of our own experience of our own lives. At that commission which 20 years ago put our principles together, much debate took place. It was important that this particular source: “The words and deeds of prophetic men and women that challenge us to confront the powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love. come immediately after direct experience,” come immediately after direct experience. This source has been that major a piece of our heritage.

One of the problems with that good old word “prophetic” is that it does not refer to predicting the future. It's not for fortune-tellers. This is about the Old Testament sense of prophecy. The Old Testament prophets were not trying to predict the future. Those who go prowling through the Bible trying to find out when the end of the world is going to come miss the whole point of the Old Testament prophets. The Old Testament prophets were standing up and saying, "Hey, you guys, if you keep doing this, here's what's going to happen." This was not a call for something in the future but a call to change now.

One of the characteristics of our Unitarian and Universalist heritage has been the rich tradition of prophetic women and men who have stood forth to say both to us and to the world, "If you keep doing it like this, bad things are going to happen. We need to change now." But it has not just been words; for one of the characteristics of that heritage has had to do with actually organizing that change.

Here in the U.S. one of the early pieces to come out of the Unitarian and Universalist movement was what was called the Sanitation Commission. The Sanitation Commission was probably single-handedly responsible for more of the extended longevity and health of human beings than all of the medical advances that have occurred since. It was getting rid of open sewers, arranging for clean drinkable water, reforming funery and burial practices. It had to do with making the environment of 19th century U.S. a healthier place to live.

Our UU heritage played a major role in the women's movement. From Abigail Adams, who kept harassing her president husband about women’s rights, through the long struggle to get women the right to vote. It sometimes comes as a great surprise to students in their civics classes that females have only been able to vote since early in the last century. Less than a hundred years have you been able to vote! Our involvement continued right down to the Women’s Liberation Movement, Title IX, Roe V. Wade, and the failed but successful Equal Rights Amendment.

The Unitarian Universalist Women in Religion Task Force, which initiated the process that resulted in our UU Principles included, among many heroic others, our own Rosemary Matson. She was a Charter Member and the first president of this congregation. She went on to do a number of things involved with theological education. Her work significantly contributed to the fact that Unitarian Universalist ministers are now just slightly over 50% female, the only denomination that even comes remotely close to that number.

Unitarians and Universalists were involved in the abolition movement. We didn't get the same press that the Quakers did, but the truth is that more pieces of the Underground Railroad ended in the north in Unitarian and Universalist congregations than ended in Quaker meeting houses.

That tradition of Prophetic Witness comes right on down into the civil rights movement. When Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the call from Selma, your then minister from this church, Gene Bridges, grabbed the next airplane. It was a Unitarian, sadly working for a Quaker organization at the time, but a Unitarian -- James Reed -- who was martyred along with two young black men in the melee that occurred.

From the very beginning of being called Unitarians we have been part of defending and promoting what has come to be known to you as the First Amendment to the Constitution. The whole issue of freedom of religious belief, expression and exercise has its roots in that 1568 Transylvanian Edict of Torda. Passed by Unitarians! It says, "No person shall have their person or property placed in jeopardy because of their religious opinions" period. At that time it was an absolutely unprecedented idea. Sadly, in much of the world today it is still an idea in the process of being born.

Our people have been involved from the very beginnings of the environmentalist movement, of trying to get we human beings to learn how to live in the real, natural world that surrounds us. One of the reasons why the Seventh Principle, the interconnected web of all existence, was added to our principles at the time we were forming them - the only principle that was added and put in without debate - is because in the mid-1980's we were very actively a part of the birth of what has come to be the environmentalist movement.

I have a t-shirt. The whole front of it is a list of names. If you were paying any attention in your high school civics class you would know almost every one of those names. Every one of them is a Unitarian or a Universalist.

Words and deeds! We have been intimately a part of the shaping of what we understand, what the nation understands, as American freedom.

One less than half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were Unitarians or Universalists. This is our heritage. This is a significant piece of the source that historically we draw from and that informs what we do in the communities in which our congregations exist. But it's more than that.

What this particular source affirms is that it's not naughty people that we are contending with. What it affirms is that we are contending with powers and structures of evil. We have a nasty habit of assuming that by evil we mean things like earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes. Other than that, evil has basically to do with naughty people. If we could just get people to stop being naughty, this assumption holds; then we wouldn't have any more evil in the world. One of the things that is hard to get through our heads is that most of the people who do things that we point to and say, "That was evil;" very few of them saw what they were doing as evil. We have this wonderful TV image that there are bad people out there who run around doing bad things and if we could just get all the bad people to stop it, everything would be OK.

What this particular source affirms and perceives is that the majority of the non-natural evil that occurs in society is a consequence of the structures that we permit to continue to organize our society. This is an idea that, interestingly enough, goes back to a completely misunderstood idea in St. Paul in the New Testament. St. Paul said, "We contend with principalities and powers." And his analysis, particularly in the Book of Romans, is a recognition of something that was not articulated in that form again until another bad guy came along. It is at the heart of Karl Marx’s analysis. You may not like - as I do not - his "fix" for the problem, but his analysis was cogent. It is not just bad people! It is the very ways in which we have passively permitted the structures of society to be organized that guarantee that evil consequences will occur.

These are not always the very obvious things. Much of the unnecessary evil that occurred as the result of hurricane Katrina was a consequence of inept social organization: appointing guys who help you in your political campaign to cushy jobs in government. Not just Republicans. This is something that presidents and parties who win elections have been doing as long as there have been parties and elections and people in power. We put "our guys" in the cushy jobs and God forbid one day one of them actually is required to be competent.

You see this phenomenon in racism. It is not that there are a bunch of people out there who hate people of different races because they have thought about it and decided, "Yes, what we're going to do is we're going to hate people of other races." It is that the ideas were inhaled right along with the atmosphere of the culture in which they were raised.

A member of my congregation, years ago, said, "You know, I used to say you can't legislate morality. I lived in the South and I was a racist pig. They changed the laws and made it illegal for me to act out the racism that I had just, you know, acquired from the atmosphere. The law made me change my behavior. It's the funniest thing," he said, "I began meeting black folk who were actually competent human beings that I never even knew existed."

Change the structures in which we live and possibilities can open up that did not exist before. It is those principalities and powers, those structures of evil, that are the major piece of what produced the evil consequences in our communities and our society.

We see the same phenomenon in sexism. Nobody ever took Tom Paine aside and said, "Hey, Tom, there are some competent women around that you might want to include in your rhetoric." It didn't happen in those days. Abigail and her sisters were shouted down.

We see it in homophobia, the fear of gay and lesbian people and the fear of their relationships. It's not something that somebody sat down and said, "Well, let's see. The rules are that people should all be heterosexual.” It is rather that for most people most of the time the experience of the diversity of sexual orientations is not something that is an affirmative part of their experience. Historically, we have structured the ways in which our communities are organized so that we only see the ''flaming fags". We do not see the really neat people who just happen, for whatever reasons, to love somebody of the same gender.

But finally, what this source affirms is that our response to evil, our response to the call from our prophetic women and men, is not simply to go out and play the power game. It is not to play adversarial games with the society out there until we have managed to convince a majority of people to shove it down the throats of everybody else. The affirmation here is that we do it by seeking justice; not just for us, not just for our folk, but for everybody. It affirms that we move from a compassion that refuses to leave anybody out.

One of my colleagues has written a variation on the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. In her version God gives Moses only one commandment and Moses comes back to wheedle the Ten Commandments out of God so that he can control his people. But the one commandment that God gave Moses was "Thou shalt not other." No one is outside the circle. We are called to make that leap of imagination that no one, even those with whom we deeply disagree, even those who are so caught up in the structures of society that the consequences of their behavior often may be evil, even those we don't like, or aren't attractive; no one is outside the circle. It is the transforming power of love that we are called to access and act out.

Now, I wish somebody would come up with a whole new word for this because "love" doesn't make it. Maybe it's Hollywood, maybe it's simply our native romanticism, but somehow love has been made to seem whimpy. For those of you who have raised children, for those of you who have dealt with spouses, for those of you who have dealt with a world in need, love calls us not to cripple.

That's what love means. It means giving in ways that empower. It means giving in ways, sharing in ways, being present to others in ways, that make the other more. It does not mean making the other dependent, but making the other freer.

“Our righteousness is to work for life and creativity,” says Kenneth Patten, “for we are saved by what we do and are. When we meet one another the universe is in confrontation, for we are the meaning. Look for no other. As we make our fateful contributions we balance the scales between good and evil. The way is joy. To love those we love, to succor those we cherish, to serve those who are available to us to be served. To add an ounce of mercy to the scales of history. To give our medicines for the health of the world. In so doing, we restore our sense of goodness and believe in humanity because we believe in ourselves. We give an edge to compassion over cruelty, to industry over sloth, to strength over weakness, to success over failure, to love over hate. We dispel some of the shame of history, some of our horror to be ourselves, prevailing over our shame to be human.”

Tom Paine's voice--yes, he was a Unitarian--still rings. “Lovers of humankind, time has found us once again. Take heed, for freedom is hunted around the globe and bat-eyed men and women regard her like a stranger. Shed the coils of evil people. Resist the ones who would enslave us and those who would make the crooked seem straight. (Does that sound familiar?) Take heed, for freedom has been given a warning to depart. Liberty is hunted round the globe, but let it not be so for we are called to sing a song of universal love for all humankind. Come join us, that this land may be reborn once again; that this earth might be reborn to be a bright beacon. Sing to freedom that we may know the full measure of our days.”

Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love.

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