a sermon by Alan Taylor

delivered December 5^th, 1999

at the Woodinville Unitarian Universalist Church

You are salt for the earth. But if salt becomes tasteless, what can restore the saltiness? It is useless and can only be thrown out to be trampled under people's feet. You are light for the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. A lighted lamp is never put under a bucket but on a lamp-stand where it gives light to everyone in the house. Let your light likewise shine, so that others witness your good works and consequently praise your embodiment of truth. The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is clear and healthy, your whole being will be filled with light. But if your eye is full of envy, your whole being will be covered with darkness. If the light within you is extinguished, what a terrible darkness will prevail.

The term Satyagraha was coined by me. … Its root meaning is "holding on to truth," hence "force of righteousness." I have also called it love force or soul force. In the application of Satyagraha, I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not permit violence being inflicted on one’s opponent, but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For what appears truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by the infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on one’s self.

My first foray into a political activism was my involvement in college with Amnesty International. During a fundraiser, I single-handedly raised over $400. That was a lot back then. I wish I could claim my motivation was out of a heightened concern for political prisoners. It had much more to do with the fact that I had a crush on the group’s leader. Funny what can motivate a young person to act. For some of us, it takes awhile for our public actions to be motivated primarily by personal conscience.

Our Unitarian Universalist heritage has an inspiring list of ministers and lay people who have lived out their ideals in the public realm. One of my favorites is the namesake of my seminary, Thomas Starr King. Starr King was the son of a Universalist minister who died when Starr was young. As a boy he educated himself and at the age of 19 became a Universalist minister. This was in the 1840s. There wasn’t much relating between the Unitarians and the Universalists back then, but Starr King was one of a very few Universalists called to a Unitarian pulpit. He made a name for himself as an orator as he traveled to speak to crowds all over the north-eastern part of the U.S. Starr King was called the San Francisco church in. He again traveled far and wide to speak publicly, often about the abolition of slavery. Starr King is credited for swaying popular opinion towards Lincoln’s Republican Party—and for keeping California from seceding from the United States. His statue is one of two Californians that graces the Library of Congress today.

As anyone in social activism knows, getting people to pay attention to one another, let alone to really work together, is a challenging task. A young science teacher named Ariyaratne did just that. He was teaching at a prestigious Buddhist high school in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is the island country off the southern tip of India. It is the site of the last remnant of Terravaddin Buddhism. Most of the country comprises of remote, poor villages. Ariyaratne, the young teacher, took his students on a field trip. He brought them together with Buddhist monks and the locals of one of the villages. Despite being from different walks of life, these students, villagers, and monks got to know one another as they dug irrigation ditches and made thatched roofs for houses that had poor overhead protection. Work that produces sweat and achy muscles might not sound much like a holiday, especially getting your hands dirty with monks and villagers, but something wonderful happened. People who normally would not cross caste and class boundaries learned from one another.

The project generated the enthusiasm that gave birth to a nationwide movement for community self-development. A series of work projects were organized throughout rural Sri Lanka. These work projects were called Shramadana campaigns. "Shramadana" literally means the giving of human energy. Energy in our world usually takes taxes, tolls and the forced conscription of human labor. Shramadana is instead the voluntary sharing of energy. The movement was given the name Sarvodaya. "Sarvodaya" is a word originally coined by Gandhi to mean "the uplift or welfare of all." In Sri Lanka, the name was adopted with a Buddhist twist. In Sanskrit, sarva means "all," udaya, "awakening" as well as being raised up. So Sarvodaya meant for the Shramadana campaigns, "the awakening of all" or "everybody wakes up."

Joanna Macy, an American Buddhist and social activist, spent a year with the movement. She says, "The movement asserts that development can only be meaningful in terms of human fulfillment. While this fulfillment involves the production and consumption of goods, it entails a great deal more—such as unfolding the potential for wisdom and compassion. While contemporary conditions neither reflect nor encourage this potential, it is real and can be awakened." The Sarvodaya movement is willing to make use of technology, but the main focus is community development, the development of shared identity and mutual cooperation. Efficiency is secondary to working together. Each project begins with meetings, both informal and formal, to hear the concerns of the local villagers, to learn what will help the community. As people get personally invested in the projects of where they live, they learn their well-being is collectively in their hands.

This past week, the World Trade Organization came to town. Along with the delegates of 135 countries, thousands upon thousands of demonstrators met outside the closed meetings, seeking to voice their concern for the way the WTO operates and many of their rulings over the past four years. It was a long week. It was a hard week. The city of Seattle suffered millions of dollars of damage and lost revenue. The city’s leadership is under scrutiny. The messages of the majority of protesters were overshadowed by the uncivil and profoundly disrespectful actions of a few. I suspect we all are relieved that the WTO delegates and the masses of accompanying protesters have finally gone home.

On Monday afternoon, three thousand people packed into the First United Methodist Church where a truly interfaith set of religious leaders led a service of song, prayers, and hopes calling for the retirement of Third World debt. After two and a half hours, the crowd joined an even larger crowd that had gathered outside, to march to Safeco Exhibition Hall and surround that huge multi-acre block where the Opening Reception of the WTO was being held. Upon reaching and surrounding the mile long perimeter, people linked arms for ten minutes, sang songs, and then left peacefully. Despite a crowd of over 10,000, the event went unnoticed in most media sources. Should someone have thrown a brick through a window? No, I don’t think so, the message got across to people with influence. President Clinton told the WTO that Third World debt needs to be forgiven if one wants to achieve the goal of fair trade.

The next day, demonstrators took to the streets, snarling traffic. I saw big puppets, people singing, people chanting, and signs that ranged from truly enlightened to truly obscene. I also attended the huge labor march. Like the vast majority of demonstrators, I saw no tear gas, no police antagonism, no destruction of property. But like you, I have heard and read about what has happened in Seattle, and I grieve that a group of people violated the basic rules of non-violent protests—that no one causes damage to persons or property.

Several people in our church have expressed on the email list a diversity of thoughtful opinions on whether our church and your minister should be addressing the issues surrounding the WTO and its protests. I will, in time, respond to specific concerns raised. The situation has opened up an opportunity for you and me to explore what it means to be a church, a church that values a diversity of opinion. It has also created an opportunity for me to discern where my role as your minister ends and where my personal actions of conscience begin.

A minister cannot take positions that everyone agrees with. To do so would be super-human, or perhaps sub-human, for that would mean taking virtually no position. That doesn’t mean your minister doesn’t recognize other peoples points of view. It is important that I keep myself informed and can articulate my points of view without disrespecting others. When I express myself as a minister, I take care to do so prayerfully. It is our covenant with one another and our shared heritage that makes possible the freedom of the pulpit.

My actions as minister and citizen in regards to the WTO have been a matter of conscience. We are a faith tradition that urges people to discern and act in accordance with their personal convictions. Our Unitarian Universalist heritage includes scores of women and men, ministers and lay-leaders, who have taken a stand on what they believe will lead towards justice and freedom.

Our heritage also boasts some of the great advocates of non-violent demonstrations. Mohandas Karamachand Gandhi, the spiritual and political leader who brought the tactics of non-violent demonstration to the world’s attention, credits one of our spiritual heirs. Adin Ballou, a 19^th century Universalist, put into writing many of the precepts that Gandhi put into practice. Ballou was a vehement pacifist who taught that violence against one’s opponent is never justified, as long as the principles of non-violence are adhered to. Gandhi went further and developed the notion of truth-force, Satyagraha.

Our second hymn today comes from one of the primary teachings of the Buddha: Be ye lamps unto yourselves. Our Unitarian Universalist heritage has taught that we can actualize truth in our lives when we live according to the truth discerned by our individual conscience. I appreciate the Quaker understanding of the individual’s inner light. The light gets brighter when one joins others in discerning what is true. One’s inner light dims in isolation. It brightens with a free and responsible search with others for truth and meaning.

Gandhi’s notion of Satyagraha expresses the same truth. For what appears truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. Thus, it is incumbent on us to be patient with one another, even if it causes us inconvenience. This is a hard teaching for me, wanting to live in a culture whose pace encourages us to wait for no one—especially if our sole purpose is to make money.

That brings me back to this past week. There was, thankfully, no loss of life, no bombs, no violent insurgents besides the vandalism. Several police, in my mind, nobly restrained themselves. Thousands of protesters helped in the clean-up of the city. One photo showed a national guardsman holding a peace sign while several demonstrators cheered. Another showed a cop holding a flower amidst smiling protesters. What remains to be said?

Seattle has taken on the damage for the world. Our community is paying a price for the state of civil unrest that was precipitated by strong differences of opinion about how world trade should be governed. People from all over the country, indeed all over the world came here to voice concern with the process and policies of the WTO. Sometimes justice and the freedoms we hold dear require sacrifices. Not only in our personal lives, but now as a community, we are inconvenienced by those who seek to be heard. May we be ready to offer such sacrifice, staying true to the ideals of non-violence. May our city quickly return to normalcy despite the loss of millions of dollars.

Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of President Franklin Roosevelt, said something very wise: "You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ … You must do the thing you think you cannot do."

Eleanor Roosevelt was first lady for four terms, some saying she was the conscience of FDR’s presidency when his health declined. To the chagrin of many, she voiced her convictions, and lived them out. Sixty years ago, in 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution forbade Marion Anderson, an extraordinary contra alto, from singing in their hall, because she was black. Eleanor, furious at the exclusion, sponsored an outdoor concert featuring Ms. Anderson. This was but one of many radical actions she did. After her death, Adlai Stevenson said of her, "She would rather light candles than curse the darkness and her glow has warmed the world."

It is Hanukkah. May we light one candle for all we believe in, that anger won’t tear us apart. And light one candle to bring us together with peace as the song in our heart. Don’t let the light go out; its lasted for so many years. Don’t let the light go out, let it shine through our love and our tears. Happy Hanukkah.

Blessed be. Amen.