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Rev. Barbara H.
Gadon
Interim Senior
Minister
First Unitarian
Church of Chicago
Before I begin
my sermon, I would like to say a word or two acknowledging something that I
know a lot of our members and friends are thinking about this morning. There will be a congregational meeting after
the service today, in which we contemplate the board’s recommendation for some
property the church owns. If you are new
to our community, this is a decision that has taken a few years for the
congregation to wrap its collective brain around. We’re still working on it. People feel passionately, and it’s clear that
they don’t feel the same way. When I
first started hearing about Fenn House, and the long discussion you all have had
so far, it sounded to me like having gum in your hair. And the longer you worked at getting the gum
out, the more stuck it got. These are
the challenging things that come up in community life. I commend you all for coming back and working
together on this.
And so, knowing
a lot of people would be distracted by this, it’s tempting for a preacher to
switch topics. You could imagine a
sermon called “Be Nice.” Or, “Let Me Get that Gum Out For You”. But I decided not to do that. It’s January 15. It’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday, and you
don’t skip over celebrating Dr. King.
Not in this church.
So let’s relax,
and contemplate the legacy of Dr. King for awhile. Let us immerse ourselves in the values of his
that we hold dear: peace, justice, love,
hope. The beloved community. Let us bring ourselves fully and completely
to this moment.
* * * * * * * *
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It was three
years ago, Christmas break. Robert and I
were in Washington, D.C., as we usually are over the holidays, spending time
with friends who live in Arlington, two convenient blocks from the Metro. We like to buzz all over town on these trips,
pigging out on movies, museums and music.
In late December 2008, we decided to hit the capitol mall. The air was mild, but it snapped with
expectation. Washington was giddy. We watched scaffolding and bleachers being
set up for the inauguration. Hawkers of
t-shirts, coffee mugs, and other souvenir gew-gaws were doing a brisk
trade. We each bought an Obama
T-shirt. Probably the first presidential
t-shirt either of us had worn without a trace of irony. Like much of the nation, we were excited. The president that both of us had voted for
with more joy in our hearts than any other was about to take office.
That was three years
ago, and already we are already gearing up for Election 2012. I am happy to be living in Hyde Park at this
moment. I imagine it got pretty exciting
around here in ‘08, and it probably will again.
I have already been invited to a dance party fund-raiser for the
campaign. In our line dance class at the
63rd Street YMCA, we’ve been practicing the “Obama Yes We Can-Can”
for two weeks. I have high hopes that he
will be re-elected. The GOP is giving me
more and more reassurance of this every day.
But the old euphoria is definitely gone. Some cold realities have set in.
In three years,
he has gone from being “Barack Obama the First African American President”, to being
President Obama. With more than his share of frustrations. It’s easy for people to be critical. He came in with such an ambitious
agenda. The man carried such a sense of
grace and confidence in his very person, anything seemed possible. I have to admit to being shocked at the
mighty wall of opposition he has faced on the most reasonable of plans to move
our country forward. Three times in the
last year Republicans in Congress have almost shut the government down over
differences with the president on spending and taxes. He was forced to continue the Bush tax cuts,
even though most people don’t really think they are needed – including several
people who would lose money. Even policies
that began as Republican ideas – like the universal health care plan based on
the one Governor Mitt Romney enacted in Massachusetts - have become poison coming
from this administration. They don’t
have any other real solutions, but they can make sure he doesn’t succeed.
It’s been awful
to see my president’s faith in people’s common sense and his desire for
consensus make him look like he’s being beaten up for his lunch money. When asked why he didn’t push for raising the
debt ceiling in December 2010 when there was a Democratic majority in Congress,
he didn’t think it was necessary. He said at a press conference: “Nobody – Democrat or Republican, is willing
to see the full faith and credit of the United States collapse”. Well, it turns out they were. Three times. There has been considerable criticism from the
left, people expressing disappointment – saying he should have been tougher
here, more insistent there, and how could he have capitulated on that? We all seem to know just what he should have
done.
There is one
particular criticism that gets brought up by progressives. “The age of Obama has fallen tragically short
of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy,” writes Cornel West, in a blistering
editorial last August, when the King memorial was unveiled on the National
mall. “Instead of articulating a radical
democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the
form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and
housing”, West writes, “the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record
profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable.” (“Dr. King Weeps From His Grave,” New York
Times Opinion, August 25, 2011, by Dr. Cornel West)
It’s hard to
argue with this – it’s all true. I wish
I could see a more radical vision being fought for in Washington. But that doesn’t account for one thing. Barack Obama is not a radical. He never was.
While I have
certainly felt anger over the stalemates and noxious budget deals, it also
doesn’t quite seem fair to think that he would have tidied all this up in 3
years. Nor to think that anyone left of
Barack Obama could get elected. In his
monologue, “I Am Not Disappointed by Barack Obama”, African American novelist
and essayist Jake Lamar described one thing that has always helped him keep
perspective. He said, “I have never
forgotten that Barack Obama is a politician.”
People have not seemed able to accept this about the Obama, Lamar says,
in the way they would about Bill and Hillary Clinton. “There was something
about Barack Obama’s soaring rhetoric and incandescent charisma,” says Lamar,
“that led people to see him as a figure like Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Martin
Luther King, Jr.”
I don’t know if
this is true for you, but every year, whenever they show the footage of King’s
“I Have a Dream” speech, something takes over me. I will weep – with what? Hope? A sense of the possibility of our not having
to live with such division and hate. A
sense that we could be better, that it is real, that it’s not wrong to still
believe in it. And a version of this
happened when I heard Obama’s 2004 Speech at the DNC. He said there were not blue states and red
states, not black states and white states, but the United States of
America. And I believed him. I still do.
But seven years later, I need to work harder at finding that belief –
both in myself and in the world. The
real world.
He is not Dr.
King. For one thing, Dr. King never had
to run for public office. He could stand
outside and keep the role of the prophet, the preacher, the pastor to us
all. Members of our congregation are
carpooling tomorrow morning to Kingdom Baptist Church for an assembly with
Governor Quinn and other state politicians to honor King, and to challenge
public policy. I hope you’ll join
us. Dr. King inspires such action. You may see King as a revolutionary, as
Cornel West depicts him, “a courageous and visionary Christian blues man,
fighting with style and love,” unafraid to call America a “sick society” as he
saw his dream become in his own words a “nightmare”. Or you may see him as the non-violent hero,
pastor to the nation, that still believed in love as the most powerful force
for change between human beings. Both
are true. And both would be impossible
for a person to live up to. Even, dare I
say, Dr. King, himself, except in the sweetened haze of memory. King saw such deep frustration in his last
years. He moved up to Chicago to
organize workers here and was blocked at every turn. He lost his support from Lyndon Johnson when
he criticized the Vietnam War. At this
time,“72 percent of whites and 55 percent of blacks disapproved of his
opposition to the Vietnam War and his efforts to eradicate poverty in
America.” We seem to forget these
things.
And we seem to
forget the incredible expectations that we have laid on Barack Obama, what history,
in fact, expects him to be. Here is a
story from his campaign, described by David Remnick in the New Yorker. Obama is preparing his acceptance speech for
the nomination of his party.
On August 28th, just hours before his
speech at Mile High Stadium, in Denver, Obama had been rehearsing in a suite at
the Westin Hotel. That night, he would
appear before more than eighty-thousand people.
Now his audience was three: his
political strategist, David Axelrod; a speechwriter, Jon Favreau, and the
teleprompter operator. The rehearsal was
mainly an exercise in comfort, making sure that there was no awkward syntax, no
barriers to clarity. Late in the speech,
Obama came to a passage paying homage to the March on Washington, forty-five
years earlier to the day, when hundreds of thousands of people gathered near
the Lincoln Memorial to ‘hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his
dream.’ Suddenly Obama stopped. He couldn’t get past the phrase ‘forty-five
years ago.’
There was a catch in his voice.
Obama excused himself, and took a short, calming
walk around the room. (“The Joshua Generation: Race and the
Campaign of Barack Obama” by David Remnick, November 17, 2008, The New Yorker)
With the crazy,
24/7 nature of the campaign, his speechwriter, Jon Favreau said, there were only
a few moments when any of them really added it up, what the history really
was. Nor, I would suppose, had they
added up the expectations that go along with that history. More than the usual impossible things we
expect from the president of the United States.
Imagine all of that catching up to you, realizing it in the middle of
everything – realizing you couldn’t possibly live up to all of that. No one could.
Imagine the person who would realize it, and still do it.
Why is it that
we seem to forget all the things he has done?
As Jake Lamar says, “I’m not disappointed. I’m not disappointed by a president who
signed the most important piece of social legislation in 45 years, providing
health care coverage for 30 million Americans in need of it. I’m not disappointed by a President, who,
while disrupting Al Qaeda, has transformed US relations with the Muslim &
Arab worlds. [Now we could add, who has
kept his promise to pull troops out of Iraq, and is ending our involvement in
Afghanistan.] In revolutions from
Tunisia to Egypt, from Libya to Syria, I haven’t seen a single image of an
American flag being burned. That would
have been unimaginable before 2009. I’m
not disappointed by a president who has named two women to the Supreme
Court. I’m not disappointed by a
president who did away with the twisted Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in the
military. Or who has tried to maintain
civility with a hostile political opposition, a president who has maintained
the dignity of the office and sought constructive compromise. I’m not disappointed by a president who is a
shrewd, pragmatic, man of reason, who views politics as the art of the
possible.”
Now you may still feel your own
criticisms. You may not have voted for
Barack Obama, and you may not plan to do so in the upcoming election. I might not advertise that in Hyde Park, if I
were you, but this is your choice. Even
if you do vote for him, it would be wise to remember something important,
perhaps more important than anything else I’ve said this morning. That it’s not just up to the president to
make our country better. It was never up
to Dr. King to make our country – and us – better. It’s up to us.
To close, I
share these words with you from the Rev. Dr. Terasa Cooley. Her blog is called “Learn Out Loud”, and you
can find it on our denomination’s website, uua.org. I recommend it to you. She honors the passing of the great
Czechoslovakian statesman and writer Vaclev Havel with this quote: “’Hope is a state of mind, not of the
world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense,
is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in
enterprises that are obviously heading toward success, but rather an ability to
work for something because it is good.’
And Dr. Cooley writes, ‘How have we lost touch with this central
truth? How many feel betrayed because
the Obama administration did not bring about a new state of the world? How can we not answer this clarion call to
find in ourselves the courage to work for something because it is good?... What
have we done to nurture hope in the world?’”
Amen.
January 15, 2012
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