Heresy …Treason

A sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

On December 15, 2002

By Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

Reading

Ralph Waldo Emerson on Politics
In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born: that they are not superior to the citizen: that every one of them was once the act of a single man: every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case: that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better. Society is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men, and institutions, rooted like oak-trees to the center, round which all arrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such roots and centers; but any particle may suddenly become the center of the movement…. But politics rest on necessary foundations, and cannot be treated with levity. The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow, and the form of government which prevails, is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum.

Meantime the education of the general mind never stops.  The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures. The history of the State sketches in coarse outline the progress of thought, and follows at a distance the delicacy of culture and of aspiration.

A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom, or conquest, can easily confound the arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagant actions, out of all proportion to their means; as, the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the French have done.

Parties are also founded on instincts, and have better guides to their own humble aims than the sagacity of their leaders. They have nothing perverse in their origin, but rudely mark some real and lasting relation. Our quarrel with them begins, when they quit this deep natural ground at the bidding of some leader, and, obeying personal considerations, throw themselves into the maintenance and defense of points. Ordinarily, our parties are parties of circumstance, and not of principle; they are identical in their moral character, and which can easily change ground with each other, in the support of many of their measures. The vice of our leading parties in this country is, that they lash themselves to fury in the carrying of some local and momentary measure, nowise useful to the commonwealth. From neither party, when in power, has the world any benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with the resources of the nation.

Sermon

This week I learned that the doctor and noted poet Oliver Wendell Holmes played with Margaret Fuller in childhood and grew up among the Unitarian influences of Boston and Concord.  It is said that when he died he was sitting up talking with his son – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. the famous jurist – and then he simply stopped talking and was gone.  The poet Holmes, Sr. said “A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.” 

            There is promise and danger in our time – we live with hope and despair – with the battles that rage in the world – not between nations or states but between ideas – this is the time in which our deepest values are challenged by our greatest fears.

            Yet, this is our time -- we live increasingly in a world where the word and the use of words has fallen out of trust and favor -- where negotiation is seen as unviable.  A time in which our thoughts and words are considered suspect and possibly dangerous.  The weather is growing chilly here.  And it is time for the midwinter holidays.

Unitarian Universalists honor the world’s great faiths -- the faiths of the world that have been carved into history.  In Winter we light candles for Hanukkah, sing in the winter season, learn about Kwanzaa, sometimes light lights for Diwali.  There are numerous December holidays, if you open an Interfaith Calendar. And, we celebrate Christmas – the birth of the man Jesus who was faithful to his people and his religious tradition by raising questions – in the fine tradition of Jewish prophets before him.  Like prophets before him, he suffered the fate of his people – with his people -- suppression, oppression, and assassination.  I can intone his story from the book in which it is preserved. 

I look forward to Christmas – and … I long to celebrate another holiday, too – a holiday about that which breathes, lives, transforms, and speaks in the present.  I want a holiday in which the acts are fresh and alive – full of the fire of human aspiration – a story of living people – and ideas that bear inspiration and vision.  I want to celebrate the sharp edge of living.  A holiday that doesn’t obscure the perils and the power of the present in visions of sugarplums. A celebration of living -- living – people, thoughts, the web of life.  Living thoughts are the stuff of which our Unitarian Universalist faith is made.  Living thoughts are alive like blades of grass – yielding, soft, growing, and capable of slicing tender flesh.  They are tenuous, vibrant, vitalizing, and dangerous. 

I want a holiday that I don’t have to translate – but that’s asking too much.  I want for myself and for everyone of us, a holiday that takes my core values and makes them the stations of a great and revivifying celebration.

Of course, I have a one in mind.  It’s not foolproof – on the contrary -- heaven knows that both fools and wise ones not only challenge it – but are supposed to… and it’s not new, not really – it has been declared and re-declared as a holiday from Franklin Roosevelt through, I am not sure how many presidential administrations to, ironically, the present one.  It was shortly after the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act that these words were recorded for posterity:

“I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim December 10, 2001, as Human Rights Day; December 15, 2001, as Bill of Rights Day; and the week beginning December 9, 2001, as Human Rights Week.  I call upon the people of the United States to honor the legacy of human rights passed down to us from previous generations and to resolve that such liberties will prevail in our Nation and throughout the world as we move into the 21st century.”  Thus spoke the President.

So – in the spirit of honoring that legacy of human rights I am today celebrating and inviting you to celebrate as well -- the 211^th Anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights.  Let us celebrate that today’s treason – is tomorrow’s liberating vision.  This is something we know intimately as Unitarian Universalists.  We see it reflected in religious history as well.  Today’s heresy is tomorrow’s new revelation.  It is our responsibility to seek and honor those visions and revelations – even when they are called treasonous and heretical.  We are called to reverence the holy place where the two intersect. 

So I want a current holiday – downstairs the children are studying nativity scenes – reenactments of the birth of Jesus – a man who was politically inexpedient in his time.  I want a little scene, too, one we could really – in good conscience, put on the courthouse lawn, on our school lawns, or our state government buildings.  Instead of a manger there would be a room filled with figures of our founders.  Since it took decades – to craft the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the Figures would change over time -- from season to season – as the Constitution had from year to year.  Constitution, Election of President, Bill of Rights, further amendments.  At the time that the Bill of Rights was begun Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine were hard at work securing new relations with Europe.  So their little figures would go into temporary storage and we would find Madison, Hamilton, Washington, Morris, and so many others -- we would arrange them around the table where the new documents were birthed.  Hands outstretched, notebooks open, pens blotting.  At the actual times that documents had been signed, we would have living actors portraying these creators of our nations first laws. 

I’m not really kidding here.  The Bill of Rights is exciting and it’s troubling, too.  It’s a guide to the future and a relic of the past.  It was crafted because the Constitution, ratified in 1787 was not enough to bind together the wild and worried founding states.  Therefore, the Founders reconvened and amended the Constitution with the first ten Amendments. 

The Founders.  They were Revolutionaries in a true sense – they’d fought and won a war of independence.  But they were sure not revolutionaries as we’ve come to envision them -- rough guerillas struggling beyond the pale to wrestle freedom for the downtrodden.  They were educated, propertied, and often slaveholding men of influence.  They had to weigh their self-interests against their visions of freedom.  They dreamed of a nation – independent – but they quickly learned that there is no real independence – only interdependence.  In place of the English crown, they had to reckon with one another – with trade, taxation, representation – with neighbor states, with free men, women, diverse religious groups, and the reality of slavery in some and not in all states.

The Bill of Rights was framed in this conflict-drenched, post-revolutionary atmosphere – to secure and augment the rights of individuals over and against a central government.  Not against one another – but against and in tension with a government elected of, by, and for the people.  There was no evil other – no divinely appointed rulers – only one another – in the partnership of self-government. 

The Bill of Rights, like almost any human creation worth honoring is a creation out of tensions – balances – not just the checks and balances we learned about in grade school – but deep creative tensions – ambiguities even – and even unanswerable questions.

Executive, Judicial, Legislative – and throughout all is the individual.  This is a dance of tensions we watch even today in hope and anxiety again and again, as we may be facing an administration coming into being with fewer checks than ever before.

More deeply, though, these tensions are between different aspects of human character – human character tested in relationship.  Our forming democracy embodied and, particularly in the Bill of Rights, recognized those aspects of human character.  It sought to protect individuals in the balance. 

In ourselves we seek balance – at least if we are healthy – between rule and whim, habit and spontaneity, self-discipline and indulgence, generosity and greed, trust and fear, understanding and judgment, participation and isolation.  Usually we don’t swing wildly but move in that dance of tension between these aspects of ourselves.

In large part, what makes the Bill of Rights something to celebrate is that it stands upon the faith that we, humans, will endeavor to seek balance and be accountable within ourselves and with one another.  It’s also something to celebrate because it was crafted in a time of peril and vulnerability for this new nation.  Indeed, an act of creativity and of faith. 

And it was intended to be a living document.  The process for bringing amendments into being is by no means easy – perhaps, far too hard, but that very difficulty is grounded in the ideal that a citizen who is recognized as endowed with these rights – will engage – will participate – whole heartedly, in responsibility, generosity, and union, in strong and steady faith.

But, oh, how easily that strong and steady faith can weaken and shrivel in times of peril.  When fears are aroused, it is easy to see a burglar in every alley, a terrorist in every so called foreigner, a traitor in every protestor. 

On December 10 a coalition of Peace Groups in Goshen. Indiana was denied a permit to gather on the Courthouse Grounds.  A local leader whose name was lost in one of many computer crashes and now escapes my memory said that, while the lateness of the request was the reason the groups were denied the permit, he was relieved because, as a patriot he condemned the protest.  The founding Patriots would have been aghast.  They cherished the right to protest.  Divergent voices are needed to birth creative solutions to human problems. 

Remember Brother Berrigan, who said that behind every injustice is a bad theology?  We suffer in part from the theological tensions inherent in our Constitution and Bill of Rights.  “The form of government which prevails, is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it,” Emerson said.  It reflects our beliefs in the moral character of humans – inherently evil or self-interested, inherently open to learning and flexible, capable of heroism, goodness, and justice if given resources down to the soul.  He stood with Jefferson, Franklin, and Paine in this faith.  Yet, other founders were not so sure –our checks and balances are meant to help guide and ensure that we might choose the best.  We have the freedom to erode our Rights over generations by failing to make ourselves equal to and fit for them. 

It is tempting to limit the dialogue, to enshrine the past, and fear the future – but our founders – in spite of their advantage hoped for the best and highest for humanity.  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was tempted, among other shortcomings, to decide that words of strong protest were treasonous in times of war and conflict.  Yet, he was changed by his colleagues and by the American people.  When he wrote his new decision he recognized that views must change and need room to do so.  He said: “When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe… that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas--that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution.”

He was called a man without religion and criticized for skepticism, yet his faith was the deep faith of the founders.  It held that if government is made as it should: to educate, support, and empower the people to attain their natural rights – to be equal in fact as they’re equal at birth – that they will choose not only their own good – which is a deep and ethical life – but will choose the good of and for others – fairness and freedom.  It is a theology – a founding and grounding faith.

When we erode our freedom in times of conflict is as though we have thrown our own treasures into the flames.  We have declared our fear, not our faith.  Remember Michael Servetus – the 16^th century Spanish Unitarian who wrote a book objecting to the doctrine of the trinity?  His book was burned – nearly one thousand copies.  He was burned alive with one strapped to his waist – but three copies survived and made it into safe hands.  His ideas survived and moved Jefferson, Franklin, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.  Holmes, Jr, in 1935, on his deathbed, his family gathered around him as he paled so still that the doctor suspected that he was dead. He would check to see if the man’s feet were cold.  “After all,” the doctor said, “every man’s feet are cold as he dies.”  From the top of the bed, the fading Holmes spoke “Not Michael Servetus,” he said.

So, I suppose I challenge us to hold our own feet to the fire – a more life giving flame, however.  We can’t be given rights, we have to maintain them – not so much defending them as challenging ourselves – toward expanding wisdom, new horizons, more balance and inner strength.  And spreading them – not by force but by generosity and example.  That was the accomplishment of the Bill of Rights.  It has served – though not easily or fully – to sustain and expand our freedoms, bring universal suffrage, to protect the innocent, and the accused.  There is so much more to do – in Amendment Nine the Bill of Rights speaks of Rights not enumerated and it is through this gate that new rights emerge. 

There’s no Homeland Security without freedom or privacy, no land of the free in the home of the fearful. Let’s not buy faith in fear, but instead invest in faith that sustains and liberates.

What is heresy or treason?  Acts can devastate us.  Words offered in bad faith can erode our well-being.  They are offerings of bad faith at worst – attacks that cannot stand against stronger and deeper truths.  Although we have experienced evil events and those were real – our fears are… fears – some grounded – some only manufactured to sell arms and gas masks. 

The line between treason and social vision is ever moving.  Like the line of a pendulum – thin and swinging – dividing space that is all of one piece from itself – though only for a moment – only for a moment before the weight – the gravity-drag of truth -- pulls the line in another direction.  This is the same with the line between heresy and doctrine.  The treasons and heresies of one generation are the new insights of another.  They are the living thoughts of a religion or a government by, of, and for the people.  On a holiday store shelf I found cards with an American flag on it.  Beside it was another box wishing Peace on Earth – in honor of the birthday of Jesus and our ancient hopes.  May we forbid, as the people, that to wish Peace on Earth – spoken even aloud and in trumpets – should ever be found to treason.

So I celebrate our Bill of Rights – misunderstood, misused, and even endangered – it is worthy of our honor, our protection, and our exercise – after all – that is simply the exercise of our faith of the free.  Certainly a faith to celebrate in the cold midwinter.  Living thoughts are the stuff that our faith is made of – the stuff of which our nation was meant to be made.  Like fire – double-edged – life-giving, protective, illuminating, and dangerous.