A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Nina D. Grey

First Unitarian Church of Chicago

February 14, 2010

In a research article, “Unfair by Design,” author Lawrence Bobo wrote: “A sizeable 89 percent of African Americans affirmed the idea that the criminal justice system is biased against blacks, as compared to 38 percent of whites, a difference of some 51 percent points. Fifty-six percent of whites, on the other hand, felt the criminal justice system "gives blacks fair treatment," compared to only eight percent of blacks. The vast majority of African American men and women in this study perceived racial bias in the ways that police, juries, judges and other parts of the criminal justice system carry on their work. Why did they perceive so differently than the white people in the study did? Partly due to history …slavery, lynching and Jim Crow segregation, disparities of economic status and education, covenants to keep Black people out of neighborhoods; partly because of prior relationships with the police, courts and prisons; partly because of personal experiences of being targets of prejudice or the experiences of family or friends.  Their perceptions of racial bias were echoed by most studies. These studies have found significant disparities in every aspect of the criminal justice system.

The March 2009 study commissioned by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, for example, reports: “…although African Americans made up just 13 percent of the US population, they comprised 42 percent of inmates on death row nationwide in 2006, which translates to a rate of 4.7 times the rate for Whites. The effects of racism proliferate from one end of the criminal justice system to the other, beginning with arrests, and including long-term incarcerations and death row. One researcher, Free, notes: “…decisions to seek the death penalty show some of the most statistically strong racial disparity, especially when the victim is White and the defendant is African American.”

Not too long ago, we held a Forum that featured speakers from Campaign to End the Death Penalty, including at least one man who had been wrongfully convicted and is now free. The Campaign has a new speaking tour called “Lynching Then, Lynching Now, the roots of racism and the death penalty in America”. The thesis of the tour is that because of rampant racism in our criminal justice system and in the ways that the death penalty is applied, the death penalty today is as illegitimate as was lynching in its time.

Early in Mayor Daley’s project “One Book, One Chicago” he called on Chicagoans to read the book Night, by Elie Wiesel. In that book about the holocaust, the young Elie and his father, who are incarcerated in a concentration camp, have just returned from work.

They come upon a hanging of prisoners, not the first they have observed. This time there are three to be hanged, two adults and one child. As the hanging begins, one man calls out, “Where is God?” No one answers. The two adults die quickly.

But the child is too lightweight, and Elie, himself just a teenage boy, has to watch as the young boy struggles, taking more than a half hour to die. He and his father have to pass by the boy who is still not quite dead. The man calls out again, “Where is God Now?” And Elie hears the words inside himself. “There he is, hanging on the gallows.” It is a terrible scene of human cruelty.

You could interpret Elie’s inner cry as a silent howl of despair, despair that God is dying, God is dead. And probably it was. And today we can see another meaning in those words: “There he is, hanging on the gallows.” There God is, there love is, in that suffering child. God is that sacred being, that life force, that love force, that is in each of us. When humans torture each other to death, God dies. But God also lives on in the witnesses. God persists as the center of love, which is in us all. And love doesn’t die, it survives in our potential to do good, to be humane, to resist evil.

Once Elie Wiesel found his own voice of resistance, he broke his silence and wrote powerfully and spoke out again and again, as a force for love and good in the world.

It is the faith of Universalism that God, or the power of a greater love, is the core of existence, is who we are. We are all part of and potentially channels of that love. Each of us contains that sacred spark of worth and dignity no matter what.

We contain that spark of worth whether we are perpetrators or victims, whether we are bystanders or resisters, whether we are terrorists or murderers or saints, thieves or liars, or responsible, ethical human beings, mischievous or naïve, cynical adults or innocent children.

The truth of Universalism, with its roots in Christianity, is that none of us are separable from the body of humankind; none removed from the love of God, or none torn from the interdependent web of all existence. This worth and dignity is our first principle, the one Allan spoke of in his homily.* And our first principle is the basis for the second; inherent worth and dignity are the reasons that we seek justice, equity and compassion in human relations, not just for some, but for all.

There are, in this theology, no bad apples that taint all the rest. There is, in this theology, no reason to ever “throw away a key.” No matter how distorted a person’s life may become, he or she is redeemable. All are redeemable. Unlike a more Calvinist view in which some are damned and others saved, Universalism offers no justification for treating anyone other than you wish to be treated yourself; there is no justification for bias in our legal system, based on race, or class, or any of the ways that we categorize people. Instead if we understand that each is of worth and dignity we are called to be knowledgeable about those biases, to resist them, and to ameliorate the effects of them. Most importantly we are called to companion those whose lives are most deeply affected by the biases of the system.

Jesus said it. “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me….as you did these things to the least of these you did them to me.”

And the psalmist wrote: “For the Lord hears the needy and does not despise his own people who are prisoners.”

Love, companionship and friendship cannot survive in the oppressive climate of racism and inequality. So we are called to respect the worth and dignity of all; to counteract these distortions and biases in ourselves and others; and to work for the elimination of their effects in the criminal justice system. We are called to be in solidarity with prisoners who are victimized by these biases; to see the sacredness within each person beyond differences and beyond fear. This is part of what it means to visit the prisoner; it is what it means to be companions.

My friend Don Coleman, the retired co-minister of the University Church, went to prison for his political views a couple of years ago. It was easy to be his friend while he was in prison. I approved of his civil disobedience. I knew prison would be hard for anyone, so I certainly wanted to visit him there. And though there were obstacles to doing that, I filled out and signed the papers I needed to sign and waited until the prison system responded and finally I was on a list; and I visited him twice the last month of his two-month sentence. I went through the various doors, left personal things in a locker, and was able to sit near him in a room with other prisoners and visitors. Most visitors were family members.

It’s painful when someone we love is imprisoned. It may be hard to visit them. We may feel betrayed or angry, fearful or helpless.

And if it is difficult to visit someone we love, it is hard in a different way to visit someone in prison whom we do not know or don’t know well. We are uncertain about what to say or how to act with them. Those feelings can block us from visiting those who need our support: prisoners unjustly imprisoned; prisoners whose arrest, pre-trial incarceration or conviction may be influenced by racism; or prisoners who are mistreated while in prison. I am not talking about intimate friendships. I am talking about a relationship of compassion. I am talking about a relationship of respect for a person’s worth and dignity.

How do we befriend those who are in need of our companionship, our support? How do we demonstrate solidarity?

I suggest that we draw for inspiration on our Unitarian Universalist history, the history of Dorothea Dix, a 19th century Unitarian. She was horrified by prison conditions and spent all her adult life trying to improve them.  And we can draw on the history of our church’s Racial Justice Task Force, which developed a mothers’ and children’s project. They bought books that mothers in prison could read and record. Then the children could hear the stories in their mothers’ own voices. And we can be inspired by the history of Thandeka; and Naomi King, who while members of our church, led worship in a prison or jail.

And we can learn about the history of the UU Church of the Larger Fellowship, which has a new ministry for prisoners, which we can support.

How do we embody friendship and solidarity? I suggest that some of us learn about the disparities in the criminal justice system, from arrest through pre-trial incarcerations, which lead to longer jail sentences for minority prisoners.

The reality of disparity for minority prisoners is overwhelming and heartbreaking. But if it breaks our hearts, it will also open our hearts.

And some of us can sign up for court-watching. We can monitor the deportation hearings of immigrants, mostly Hispanic, whose only crime was to be here without documents, immigrants who are being torn from their families, their neighborhoods, their jobs, their lives.

And some of us can join with Ken Christiansen in monitoring how the closing of schools is disrupting the networks of support and the lives of our city’s young people.**

Why ought we be companions, befriending our brothers and sisters who are in jail or prison or at risk of imprisonment? Because, as reported in a 2001 study by Blumstein, “fully two percent of the Black population was incarcerated in 1999 and nearly one in ten black males in their twenties were in state or federal prison in 1999…nearly one in three black males in their twenties were under some form of criminal justice supervision….In some areas, more than half of black males in their twenties were under criminal justice supervision…”

Why ought we be companions, befriending our brothers and sisters who are in jail or prison or at risk for imprisonment? Because God is Where? There God is… in everyone of those young Black men. Because God is Where? Because there God is…there the potential of love and goodness and healing and transformation is… in everyone of us. Amen.

*Allan Lindrup, a member of the Racial Justice Task Force of the church, gave a brief homily at this service.
**Ken Christianson, of the Racial Justice Task Force also gave a brief homily at this service.