Independence Day and moral courage for our times

I haven't been in the pulpit in several weeks, so what better day to return than the Fourth of July? Today we are using the readings for Independence Day: Deuteronomy 10:17-21, Matthew 5:43-48, Psalm 145 or 145:1-9

Here is my sermon for today:

* * *

When I think of church, I usually think of blessings, and I hope you do too. But the ancient sages would tell you there is another side to this:

Curses.

And curses can be instructive.

There is an old Chinese curse that Robert Kennedy was fond of quoting. The Chinese curse is this: “May you live in interesting times.”

“May you live in interesting times.”

We certainly live in interesting times, and we certainly can, if we chose, see it as a curse. On this Independence Day, our nation is at war in the Middle East and Central Asia; our economy is in its deepest slump since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Our environment is under assault in the air, and on the land, and in the sea. We have witnessed the calamity of the worst oil spill in history, driven by our addiction to cheap energy, and the calamity continues at this moment.

Our government sometimes seems adrift and out-of-touch, or paralyzed by partisan gridlock and media-driven extremism.

We live in interesting times.

We live in a time of great change, and that change impacts everything we do, every place we go, touching everyone we meet.

Children grow up and graduate, or don’t. Some of you face health issues, or a job change, or retirement.

Some of you are facing the loss of a loved one. The only thing inevitable in life is change.
Ours is not the first generation to live in interesting times or face relentless change.

Robert Kennedy, in 1966, in a speech in Capetown, South Africa, talked about the challenges of interesting times:

“They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind.”

Kennedy, who came to South Africa to lift up those, who at great personal risk to themselves, opposed apartheid, went on to say there is a quality above all other qualities needed during interesting times: Moral courage.

Kennedy said moral courage is in shorter supply than “bravery in battle or great intelligence.”
Moral courage is the strength of character that motivates someone to stand up and be counted precisely when it hardest to stand up.

Moral courage is that quality that says the conventional wisdom is not always right, that the action of one person can make a difference, especially when no one else thinks it possible, and especially when it matters the most, especially in interesting times.

And Robert Kennedy said this:

“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

On this Independence Day, it is moral courage that I especially want to celebrate.

Those who founded this nation lived in interesting times. They were told they could not win against the greatest superpower on earth, Great Britain. They did not always have moral courage, they faltered when it came to slavery.

But they had enough moral courage to prevail against Britain, and enough moral courage to shape a nation that is still young, still unfinished, still very much in need of moral courage.

You may not know this, but Independence Day is an official feast day of the Episcopal Church. Our church was founded in the tumult of the American War for independence.

And what better place to celebrate this feast day than here, at St. Paul’s Memorial Church, across the street from the great University founded by the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, and shaped by other founders of this nation especially James Madison.

Jefferson was 32 years old when he penned the Declaration, and today we celebrate not just our independence but also the moral courage of Jefferson and those he stood with on that 4th of July long ago.

We live in interesting times. We live in a time when moral courage is needed as never before.
Here is the thing about moral courage:

Sometimes moral courage comes in a huge moment for the entire world to see, as with George Washington at Valley Forge or Martin Luther King at the Selma bridge.

And sometimes – maybe most of the time – moral courage comes in the accumulation of small moments, in our daily life and work, and in places that don’t make headlines, and with people who are not celebrities.

Those moments have come right here in this church, like when Ted Evans, the rector of St. Paul’s, had the moral courage to stand up in the 1950s and declare that this parish – St. Paul’s Memorial Church – would not cooperate with a scheme to use churches in Charlottesville to educate only white children.

He paid a price in the community and with his bishop but Ted Evans stood his ground.

And some of you here today had the moral courage to stand with him, and to you we owe a debt of gratitude.

Those moments of moral courage continue here in this place today, and you are changing the world one rippled at a time. It all adds up.

Some of you are doing research on global warming or unlocking the mysteries of retroviruses. Some of you care for the sick, or teach our young people, or work in a day care center, or a soup kitchen or food pantry, or in our community garden as a volunteer, or you volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, or IMPACT or PACEM or The Haven.

Some of you work in your home or in a job to support your family. Some of you own a business that provides services and jobs in our community. Every one counts, everyone can have moral courage in every walk of life.

A way to measure our moral courage can be found in our biblical lessons today, the lessons that are assigned by the Episcopal Church specifically for Independence Day.

The lessons speak to having the moral courage to care for the poorest among us, the widows and orphans and immigrants. “You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” the Deuteronomist proclaims.

The psalmist tells us that greatness comes through compassion and kindness, not anger and violence.

And Jesus puts it squarely on the line: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

Strength comes not with force of arms but in the forgiveness of enemies, in protecting the vulnerable and in compassion for immigrants.

If I may add a personal note: My father fought in World War II, in the South Pacific, and he saw terrible things. He believed this country worth defending and he put his life on the line for that. Yet he taught me from a very young age that true patriotism is not about military might, but is about participating as a citizen, voting, paying taxes, getting involved in the community, making a difference.

Each time we live this way, each time we stand with the least among us, with the oppressed and forgotten, we bring the Kingdom of God a few steps closer, and we come a little closer to becoming fully the human being God would have us be.

It takes moral courage to live this way, and yet this I also know:

Within you is the fiber of moral courage because God put it there when you were born.
Moral courage ultimately comes as a gift of faith, in our hope for a better world unseen, a world we are partners in creating.

So on this Independence Day, may each of us have the strength and moral courage to be the hands and feet of Christ, and may these interesting times be not a curse but a blessing to us, and to those who come after us. AMEN

Photo of James Armstrong, who carried the flag across the Edmund Pettes Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, reenacting "Bloody Sunday" in 2005. Mr. Armstrong died in 2009. Photo in the Birmingham News.

Ginger Greene: Sunday in the park with Palma

You may not know that St. Paul's currently has a Peace Corps volunteer in South Africa, our own Ginger Greene. She is teaching school in Rustenburg, and is due back in Charlottesville in about a month. She has been sending delightful accounts of her experience, and below, with her permission, I am posting her last "adventure" from this past weekend. The photos are hers, and by the way, the rhinos next to her are made of plaster and is in a shop. The rhinos outside the passenger door are  real. Enjoy:

SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH PALMA

Palma picks me up after church in Rustenburg. I've just gone to the Anglican Church and she to the Afrikaan Protestant Church, and we're both ready for an adventure.

Which park shall it be this time? There's very little debate, because we both like Pilanesburg best, but there are others that we occasionally go to. Today, though, we agree on the Pilanesburg Game Preserve. It's about an hour's drive from Rustenburg.

It's a little cloudy—we're in the rainy season, and it can really pour down sometimes—but it's not going to rain for a while. It's pleasantly cool.
We get to the gate, a handsome thatched open-air building surrounded by craftspersons selling carved animals, masks, things like that. I would love to buy some but I know they will all break in my overstuffed suitcase when I go home, especially their little legs. So I look the other way. One of us checks out the map posted outside the ticket office; there are coloured pins (different colours for different animals) showing the latest reported elephant, lion etc. sightings; but we don't pay much attention because the animals are usually moving around and unlikely to be found in the same place twice.

Off we go, down a potholed but paved road that rapidly degenerates into a heavily potholed, dirt road with lots of gullies and big rocks. Palma nonchalantly steers her car, a big Mercedes, through and around the obstacles. She has been coming to this place for many many years and probably knows it better than most of the rangers. She has her favorite places for looking for hippos; she knows where the baboons lurk; she knows where the buffalo are supposed to be, although they seldom are—she's seen lots of buffalo, but for some reason never any in this park, so we're always on the lookout.

I should say SHE is on the lookout. Palma has eyes that are considerably sharper than the average eagle's. She can steer casually along the road, weaving around the potholes, all the time watching closely for animals on both sides; by contrast, I am squinting out of my window, trying to decide which little black shape is a bush and which is an impala. She always tells me to say "stop!" if I think I see something; I often do, but most of the time it turns out to be a shrub just pretending to be a gnu, or something like that. By contrast, she can spot anything four-legged about a half mile away, and decide instantly whether it's a roibok, a kudu, or one of the other many antelope-type animals here, or perhaps an elephant. And she's seldom wrong. I almost never recognize anything before she's already got it in sight.

"There! Look over there!" I will hear, as she brakes and pulls over, and I obediently squint out of her side of the car. Nothing but a lot of bushes and trees. "It's two elands! Just to the left of that clump of rocks!" I'm usually looking in the wrong direction and can't even find the clump of rocks, let alone the brownish-black shapes or the big horns of the elands. But Palma is very patient, and has had a lot of practice in giving directions. She points out a tree close to the road; look to the right of that tree for a dead tree; look straight between the two, there, over near the river…….Eventually I see them. Usually with my binoculars, once I can get them focused and pointed between the two trees. But Palma's patience is measureless, and she waits until I have had a good look. Then we drive on.

This scenario is repeated over and over. Sometimes the critter is right by the road, sometimes 100 meters away, sometimes much further. But I almost always end up getting a good look, and frequently a good picture too. (I can usually see the ones right next to the road all by myself.) Elephants, being pretty good-sized, should be fairly easy to spot; but they blend in with the background so well that I can't always pick them out unless they're waving their ears. 

One happy day, though, we were slowed down by traffic driving very slowly in front of us; and, looking ahead, we could see an elephant moving briskly down the road, heading past all the cars and coming in our direction. There was a lot of fast backing up; everybody wanted to get out of its way—elephants can do a lot of damage even if they're not in a bad mood, and when they get annoyed (as by people blowing the horn or throwing things) they can be extremely destructive. So we all scattered, as best we could, to get out of the way. Eventually it turned off into the bush and started across a field, and we all breathed a sigh of relief and got back on the road. I probably should have been worried but I thought it was rather entertaining.

On another memorable day we were again alerted by slow driving ahead of us. When the road curved we could see two male lions, strolling down the middle of the road in the same direction that we were going. They made me think of two elderly gentlemen walking home from church, in no hurry at all. Once again, everyone was very respectful, no horn blowing or driving past them, and soon they too turned off into a field and we continued on.

Sometimes we get really lucky and find ourselves moving through a really big herd of zebras, often with a lot of wildebeests mixed in. Zebras stay closer to the road than most animals, or maybe it's just that there are lots more of them; we have often driven along, seeing zebras on each side close enough to touch. Probably hundreds of them. They're not at all afraid of cars but I notice that, obedient to the rules, nobody ever gets out of the car to offer one of them a carrot. (I would like to but Palma won't let me.)

Giraffes are another treat. I can sometimes actually spot them on my own; those heads, weaving far above most of the bushes, are fairly easy to see. They often stalk nonchalantly across the road right in front of us, not even turning their heads to stare. One day recently we saw about a dozen of them, all slowly traveling together through the bush. Did you know that the collective noun for giraffes is "tower"? Very appropriate.

On one of our first trips we had been driving for 15 or 20 minutes when Palma braked and said Look! Right there by the road! And, omigod, there were two rhinos, grazing peacefully in the field to our left and almost close enough to touch. It was fascinating, but scary. I knew they were big, but up close (and with no fence to protect us) they are HUGE. But they didn't even look up, just kept on grazing. Fortunately these were the white variety, which are quite placid; the park also has some black ones, which are very dangerous on account of being both near-sighted and evil-tempered. They will charge at anything they see moving, and they don't bother to ask questions. (Those colours have nothing to do with their actual colour—all rhinos are a sort of medium gray. I'm not sure what those designators refer to.)

After a while the need to rest, and find a bathroom, becomes necessary. There are several "hides" in the park: little open-sided, thatchroofed huts with the necessary plumbing, benches inside to sit on, and fences that discourage most of the beasts from getting too close. Palma has as usual brought a well-stocked picnic basket, and we settle down to coffee, fruit (I had my first lichi fruit with her), and whispered conversation so as not to scare off any animals. The walls often have helpful posters showing birds and animals. Her (and now my) favourite hide is on a little lake where there are usually a few submerged hippos waiting to be admired. We always watch for a crocodile there but I have yet to see one. We notice a good many assorted birds around the lake as well—egrets, for example, and last week we saw two very large storks and a little one. It makes for a pleasant break.

Back on the road. This time we see several bunches of impala and springbok. They're so much fun to watch, bouncing gracefully over the ditches and speeding away. Often we have seen herds of 50 or more. An occasional elephant looms up in the distance. We rarely see elephants up close—at least, not during any of my trips—except for one memorable day when we saw a youngster chasing a group of impala, shaking his head and flapping his ears at them. Soon another, larger elephant came up to him and they had a head-to-head conversation. Apparently the bigger one, very likely a matriarch, was telling the boy that it's bad manners to frighten the impala, they haven't done anything to him. He stood there with his head down, suitably chastened.

We're getting near the gate now—the road has improved. And we're about ready for lunch. So we drive back into Rustenburg, and I edit my pictures in the camera over a glass of wine with Palma. It's been another memorable Sunday In The Park With Palma.

love to all,
Ginger