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Drumbeat for Darfur UUSC Sunday March 25, 2007 The Rev. Barbara J. Pescan Annette Wallace, Worship Associate
Reading from a sermon by Rev. Terrence Ellen, Director of UUs for Social Justice, read by Craig Heinke
. . . . It is easy to pass by. And that is precisely why you and I must not. Before he got arrested on the steps of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington last April, Congressman Tom Lantos, the only survivor of the Holocaust ever elected to the U. S. Congress, pleaded eloquently that we have all see Cambodia and Rwanda happen in the recent past while our national and international response was either late of ineffectual or both. And he pleaded with all of us, by everything that we consider holy and humane, not to stand by in self-imposed helplessness or indifference again. Congressman James McGovern of Massachusetts, arrested alongside Tom Lantos, put it this way:
I firmly believe the entire civilized world must do all that’s humanly possible to shame the government of Sudan. Yes, the Bush administration has used the word “genocide” to describe the situation Darfur, and other world leaders have periodically made general calls for an end to the violence, but words must be accompanied by actions. Those who are horrified over the carnage in Sudan must be in that government’s face every single day. Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor, when describing the grim days in the Nazi death camps, has said that those in the camps felt not only tortured and murdered by the enemy, but also tortured and murdered by the world’s silence and indifference.
Sermon “Drumbeat for Darfur” Rev. Pescan
You know the old story: a religious scholar of the Law asks Jesus how to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks him what the Law says and the lawyer answers, "Love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and all your mind (Deuteronomy 6:5), and the parallel law of "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18) Jesus tells him he has answered correctly, but the lawyer then asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”
Jesus tells the parable of a man who was attacked and robbed and left to die by the side of a road. Not too long after, a priest walks by and sees the stricken figure and avoids him, presumably in order to maintain ritual purity. Similarly, a Levite sees the man and ignores him as well. Then a Samaritan passes by, and, despite the mutual antipathy between Samaritans and the Jewish population, he immediately renders assistance by giving him first aid and taking him to an inn to recover while promising to cover the expenses. He gives the innkeeper silver coins equal to an entire days wages for an average laborer.
At the conclusion of the story, Jesus asks the lawyer to say who of the three passers-by was the stricken man's neighbor. The lawyer is apparently unwilling to say, "The Samaritan," so he responds, "The one who helped him." Jesus responds with "Go and do the same." So a "neighbor" is anyone who needs your love and help. Jesus has turned the attention away from the question "To whom do I owe an obligation?" and to the question, "For whom do I feel compassion?"
In February of 1939, Rev. Waitstill Sharp, minister of the Wellesly Hills Massachusetts Unitarian Church, and his wife, Martha journeyed to Europe with their own money and money raised from the congregation and their friends. First they worked in Czechoslovakia for six months to help Jews leave the country, escaping just ahead of the Gestapo. Soon after they returned to America they were asked by the newly formed Unitarian Service Committee to return to Europe. They risked their lives again; in Marseilles, in the midst of the Vichy government, they were able to obtain visas and transport for 2000 men, women and children to get them out of occupied Europe, saving them from death in the concentration camps.
Rev. Sharp wrote to his congregation about leaving New York Harbor the first time, and passing the Statue of Liberty, “We live and work very much in its shadow,” and in that there was a sense of mission, of saving the world one person at a time. (UUSC video, Heroes of the Spirit) In 2006 the Sharps were the second and third Americans to be honored by Yad Vashem, posthumously, as persons Righteous Among the Nations, the highest honor given to non-Jews by the Jewish people.
It is in the spirit of Martha and Waitstill Sharp, honoring their sense of mission to save the world, one person at a time, that the UUSC has asked us to begin a drumbeat for Darfur; to sound the alert, to be “bearers of moral alarm” (Jehuda Bacon, Holocaust survivor) among ourselves, to our government, to the United Nations. Our Service Committee is asking us to open our hearts to the suffering of the people of Darfur, just as the Sharps and many others opened their hearts to the Jews of Europe.
There are forces arrayed within us and against us that militate against our recognizing that the people of Darfur are our neighbors. These forces are the same that were arrayed against the Sharps: these people are so far away; the problems are so huge, the devastation so vast; we are not smart enough, we do not know enough; the moral ground beneath our feet is not firm enough; Martha and Waitstill Sharp were different than we are, they were people of uncommon virtue and courage. This is how we stop ourselves. The government might stop us by saying that the United States has no money for such an effort. Even more callously they might say that the people of Darfur are poor and illiterate, and that desert area of the African continent has nothing strategic our economy wants. That is often called lacking the political will. My teacher, Bob Kimball, would call it all evasion.
Humanity has been trying since the Axial Age, for 2500 years, to understand what the Hebrew prophets, and Buddha and then Jesus were saying to answer the question, who is our neighbor? The prophets said, God does not want your burnt offerings, your praise, your songs of worship and propitiations, your lavish ceremonies. Go out and help someone. Jesus said, quoting the Law, said, Love your neighbor as yourself, and added, Even your enemies. The Buddha, he who was awake, told the people around him to open their hearts to their own suffering and the suffering of others.
David Pyle is a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army and at our Chicago seminary, Meadville/Lombard Theological School he is preparing to be a chaplain. He will be the ministerial intern next year at our church. He told me this story this week. He and his fiancée Sandy were driving home with a bag of fast food when they saw a man crossing the street hit by an oncoming car. David didn’t see the accident, just the man fallen on the pavement and the car speeding away in the rain. As his mind began to register what had happened, Sandy said to him, “David, Oh my God… there’s a man in the road.”
It took a moment, he considered making his turn and going on, thought that someone else would help, that it was raining and cold and he didn’t have his coat, but then his training kicked in. He parked the car in a lot nearby and ran back to help.
As I ran, I was convinced that by the time I got there…, there would be plenty of help, and I could go back to my car. I was sure that at least a dozen people would have stopped by then. But, as I turned the corner around the bank toward the intersection, the only person who had stopped was a homeless man, who was standing over his injured friend yelling at the passing cars, begging someone to stop.
Becoming the soldier that I once was [David served in Bosnia in the 1990’s], I somehow got two cars to stop and block traffic for us, creating a safe space in the intersection. One of the drivers called 911, and I used a towel from another to put pressure on two of the bleeding wounds of the injured man. When I had done all I could do medically, I just held the man’s hand, hoping that his head injury was not as serious as it looked. My mind registered the cars that drove by, some of their drivers yelling at us to quit blocking traffic, to pick him up and carry him out of the road. At that moment they were unimportant. Only the injured man mattered.
The ambulance came, and the drivers quickly picked the injured man up and headed for the hospital in the way they do when someone is seriously injured. The two drivers who had stopped continued on, and I went back to my car.
David tells me he’s been angry all week, at first with the actions of some of the people, and then at the people themselves, thinking “those people, those people,” the one who hit the man, the ones who drove by yelling. He meditated about it all week and came to understanding a bit about what he called “the wall of otherness between myself and those same people. Those people!”
When our anger is fueled by the actions others take that are contrary to our connectedness, that anger becomes the fuel for the kind of passion that can change the world.
But, when our anger moves, as mind did, from the actions that people take to the people themselves, what it does is create new barriers of “me vs. them.” It creates new separateness, and closes off the ability to feel compassion.
It is difficult to imagine, but we have to open our hearts to everyone in that situation, because we are all in the same boat --- the man in the road, the person in the car that hit him, the friend that stood over him in traffic, David, Sandy, perhaps waiting in the car and worried about what was happening, the two drivers that formed a safety barrier around the hurt man, the angry drivers in a hurry shouting to get him out of the road, the ambulance drivers --- everyone is in the same boat.
Before you can open your heart to others, the teachers say to let flash before you something that opens your heart completely.
Here’s an image that stays with me from Nicholas Kristoff’s columns in the New York Times. You may be aware he has made many trips to Africa. He tells that the women in the refugee camps in Chad have to go away from the camps to find wood for their cook fires. They have used all the wood close by, so the women have to go farther and farther from the camp to find wood.
When they go far from camp, the women run the risk of being beaten and raped by the janjaweed. “Janjaweed” is an Arabic colloquialism meaning “a man with a gun on a horse.” It also means bandit, because they used to steal cattle from the farmers in Darfur. But, now they are a militia supported by the Sudanese government to drive the Darfurians away from the land and water that have become scarce in northwestern Sudan. The men could go find wood for the cook-fires, but the janjaweed would kill the men. They only rape and beat the women.
Perhaps the Samaritan helps the Jew, beaten and left in the ditch, because he himself knew what it was to be wounded. But, you don’t have to be beaten and left in a ditch to be wounded; you don’t have to have been mistreated physically – raped, beaten, shot – to know the pain of that open wound all of us carry.
To open your heart completely, you might only need to take yourself back to when you held your child for the first time, and felt the love for which you had no words. There is pain even in the midst of the love for which we have no words.
To be aware of the inherent wound of being is both harsh and gentle at the same time. We don’t want to look at suffering. I used to be repulsed by the more graphic pictures of Jesus with his chest open to a view of his red heart. But, what makes the picture not an over-blown metaphor, not only an icon of a mythic figure whose suffering was only his --- is our understanding, our mindfulness, our experience of our own soft, wounded spot, and our awareness that it is our basic home, our human condition.
All you have to do to touch this soft spot is lower your eyes and let arise in you the very thing that you know that cuts you to the core.
I remember two-year old Christopher. He was the foster child of someone I knew in a church back East. The first time I met him he was in a leg and hip cast for a fracture of his femur. It was the kind of fracture that is caused only by someone much bigger grasping and twisting the leg very hard in two different directions. I held him one afternoon – he was quiet and let me hold him. I can still feel him on my lap; I can see his sad smile; I can feel the weight of that heavy cast; I can feel the weight of his heavy little life.
This memory, this image – whether you held your first child, or held Christopher, or met the women raped by the janjaweed, or blocked the traffic around the homeless man hit by a car --- this story of strangers and Samaritans is the open place through which you touch your soft spot. The soft spot, the wound that tells you of our common humanity that reaches beyond borders, conditions and tribe; our common humanity asks us to recognize in others what we find in ourselves – the wound that can only be eased by another gentle human touch.
Our soft spot is the same as theirs. There is no relative suffering, no comparisons that give us or deny us the right to acknowledge our common humanity. Our love is the same, too --- we love our lives, all of us, and all of us would like to live free of hunger and thirst, cold, fear and violence.
Ours are the first generations to be in touch with all of the rest of the world. Even the truth of the Holocaust came to us in bits and pieces, and let those who would deny it try --- the Germans kept very good records, and there are witnesses whose lives testify; their scars and numbers testify. But, ours are the first generations to be immediately in touch with the rest of the world. Unlike the priest and the Levite we cannot pass by on the other side of the road; because we are all in the middle of the road, now, every day. In our global village where the increasing numbers of all our tribes co-exist, we are not only aware of each other; we are in touch with all those others.
Only a few degrees of separation remove me from the women raped in Darfur. I could get Nicholas Kristoff on the phone or email him this week to thank him for telling their stories, and to ask him to keep telling them. David is the one degree of separation between me and the homeless man hit by a car that sped on into the rain. There was no separation between me and the child with the twist fracture of his femur --- I held him in my arms.
It is human to want to armor ourselves against pain --- to cradle our broken bone until we get it set; to wrap the wound in clean cloth to protect it; to shelter the hurt place. It seems harsh to let ourselves know of so much suffering and pain of the wounds of all those others in Darfur.
Touching the soft spot is the deepest baseline response to this human suffering, and it is the source of the passion and the compassion that informs our action. What religion is for is to remind us that touching this soft spot, this vulnerable awareness, is what binds us back to this source of our compassion; to remind us what we are for and of what we are capable.
Then, the most difficult part of what we are up against is the added imperative of opening our hearts to everybody in the situation. What will help the situation will come out of that big compassion that is directed toward yourself, your loved ones, strangers and the bloody beaten man in the ditch, and the one who beat him, who hit and run, who raped, and your enemy. The child soldiers, the janjaweed, the calamitous Sudanese government, our own government rhetoric without action, the United Nations.
This Sunday is Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Sunday, a day when UU congregations across the continent unite together to take a look at injustices in the world. Today is a day to also look at how our faith of deeds not creeds has worked and can work for a more just, sustainable future.
Over 400,000 people have died in this genocide. Two and a half million people have been driven from their homes. People are dying every day in refugee camps where conditions are unimaginable, and diseases such as HIV and hepatitis spread, and there is very little medical care. Another million people could die in the coming year from food shortages. Some 80% of the children in the region are suffering from malnourishment, tens of thousands of children have been orphaned, and current humanitarian efforts are only reaching 20% of the population. Five hundred to a thousand people are dying every day because of the crisis in Darfur. [Statistics from a sermon by David Pyle, adapted]
The people in Sudan are caught in a net of unrelenting evil --- the Darfurians, the janjaweed, the Sudanese government who arm the militias, the peacekeepers who risk their lives to be there, and the world that stands by, watching, is caught in this net, also.
When you ask me the inevitable question, “But, what can I do to stop the genocide in Darfur?” I will tell you to become informed, and keep being informed. I will tell you to support humanitarian relief and to involve yourself with others who are reading and thinking and supporting relief efforts such as UUSC’s presence. I will tell you to keep the pressure on our elected representatives in Congress by writing and calling in on Call In Days.
I will tell you to put pressure on the current occupant of the White House by writing and calling the Comment Line, 202-456-1111. I will tell you to put pressure on the United Nations --- write letters to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. I will tell you to continue to believe we can make a difference, or, if you don’t believe it yet, I will tell you to start to believe that, as Margaret Mead said, a small group of committed people is the only thing that ever has made a difference.
And, I will also tell you to develop courage for the long haul. Leaders are the people who keep their hearts open and who lead others to contemplate all of this clearly and compassionately --- with no melodrama or self-righteousness. That is another way to be with the suffering of the world.
We do not know what good may come of this. We do not know what will grow from such seeds. Two thousand men, women, and children are so few when compared with the six million. We may think the efforts of one of us, or even of all of us in this room, is too small a response to the immensities of genocide. But, in a world that would rather you let your skin get as tough as a rhinoceros hide and as dry as the desert, keeping your heart open it is the source of the strength of all the other responses. The prophets said so. Jesus said so. Buddha, the one who was awake, said so. We are so close; we are this close to figuring out the next steps . . .we must not stop now. We must cast our lot with all those others who did not despair, who, with Martha and Waitstill Sharp and their congregation, with those who did what they could do to make the world better, kinder, more loving, and more whole. And, no one knows what good those two thousand lives, lived unto their generations, might bring into the world.
Bonaro Overstreet wrote the poem, “Stubborn Ounces" with the sub-title, "To One who Doubts the Worth of Doing Anything If You Can't Do Everything."
You say the little efforts that I make will do no good: they never will prevail to tip the hovering scale where justice hangs in balance. I don't think I ever thought they would. But I am prejudiced beyond debate in favor of my right to choose which side shall feel the stubborn ounces of my weight.
And, so, may you live today and stubbornly bless the world, and may you be a blessing in the world, and know blessing, blessing, blessing. Amen.
Benediction –
Adrienne Rich, “Natural Resources” in Dream of a Common Language
My heart is moved by all I cannot save: So much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those, who, age after age, Perversely, with no extraordinary power, Reconstitute the world.
Unitarian Church of Evanston
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