READING: Dudley Randall, born in Washington, D.C. in 1914, with B.A. and M.A. degrees, is a poet and was editor of Broadside Press, where he published collections of Black poets. (The American Reader, p. 336)

I appreciate the history behind my presence on this earth, the various cultural heritages that contribute to my identity. I am proud of my Scottish heritage. A tiny nation, it influenced modern history far beyond its size. It is a land of creative philosophers, scientists, engineers. It is land of brave soldiers and noble patriots who suffered from the power of an evil tyrant nation. It is a land of deep beauty and incredibly challenging weather. In this land were also crooks and thieves, who were themselves often as brutal as the English. It could be a land of uncompromising rules. With friends like the Scots, no one needed enemies.

I love my southern heritage. There is a civility and a gentleness that speaks of a generous heart. Southerners appreciate eccentricity (do you remember "Fried Green Tomatoes!"), one reason why our movement grows there. Yet, of course, there is a deep sense of tragedy about the south that cannot be denied. The heritage was born amidst slavery and indentured servitude. A class system grew from the latter that still haunts the south — and now the nation. If modern southerners are making progress in racial equality, their history still affects us all.

I am a patriotic American who believes that this nation embodies the most promising values for modern life. I believe in its founding principles, and I am proud our Unitarians were leaders in the Revolution. Yet it, too, is a heritage not without its flaws and weaknesses. When at its best, it amazes and impresses everyone, and consequently, its failures leave us in stunned wonderment at the perfidy of humanity.

1 Birmingham Sunday

I had just begun my senior year in high school. What a year it was to be: on August 28, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to a great crowd and the nation at the Lincoln Memorial, on September 15 Birmingham Sunday shocked us beyond words, and then Kennedy’s assassination only two months later, on November 22, left us bereft, without a sense of national hope. In the span of less than three months we went from King’s glory to Kennedy’s death. It was a tough time to be gaining a perspective on adult responsibility.

My family was in church, so we missed the early accounts of the bombing. I’m not sure when we first heard of it, but we soon saw television accounts. That night’s MYF meeting (I was President) was a somber affair, with all the passion of youth, alternately angry, disconsolate, loud debate, and soft crying. It was the next day’s photos in the Tennessean that struck home to me. There were the four little girls in their best Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes, now dead at the hands of folks who thought they were right, moral.

Part of me said, "This is what you must expect if you cause trouble, incite violence, rile up the stubbornly ignorant." I held the notion that integration could occur peacefully, that good people on both sides could work out an answer, that reason could cut through centuries of habit and culture. If it was not this Sunday thirty-nine years ago, then it was that day two months later, that sounded the death knell to my naivete on civil rights, and much more. One reason I am not a pacifist is that I believe there are too many people so without honor that appeals to honor have little effect. War, violence, slavery in whatever guise, are not caused by good folks who are just misunderstood. I do not believe in the devil, but I do believe in evil and evil people.

2. Transitions

I said that I was President of my Methodist Youth Fellowship, and I was trying mightily to make sense of religion in my world. I wanted to be like Jesus, but I knew I was very different. I was trying to change myself into someone new and adult. I was also struggling to respect who I already was. It is tough to choose one’s heroes and then not try to be exactly like them! Back then we lacked today’s advocates for self-awareness. It was still possible in my youth to want to be like some great person. We were not encouraged to form our self-identity with quite the force of today’s efforts.

I wanted to be peaceful. I wanted justice. I respected civility and gentleness and a positive attitude. I did not want to tear down my world, but just nudge it along a slightly different path. After the fall of 1963, it took me twenty years to recover some of those goals, for they died an agonizing death over the next few years. I became cynical, as all young people must if they are to lose their naivete. I became angry, as all modern people must, if they are the least sensitive to the terrible condition of so many of the world’s people. I felt a sense of betrayal by my values and my culture, as all young people must if they are to ever stand as an individual and confront their heritage. These are hard lessons to learn.

During all this, of course, I was also trying to get into college to study architecture. School was increasingly hard but fun. It was not just a world of civil rights and politics, but the fall of 1963 molded the person I was to become. I learned to be wary of authority, to hope but not to depend on hope, to love and respect my past but not to accept its values without question. It made me too serious, and I still am. There is evil in the world.

3. The violence that passes all understanding

What struck me about Birmingham Sunday was the violence — a bomb going off in church is somehow more violent than a bomb in the street. Attacking religion (church, mosque, temple, synagogue), emphasizes violence as a solution to political and social problems. Religion is confronted directly. Sanctuary is denied all, even little girls preparing to sing in the church choir. This is so monstrously evil that it becomes more than the death of four children. This strikes us in our homes, at our families, at our values.

As a struggling Methodist (for I had already found too many of Christianity’s doctrines difficult to accept), I wanted to build a world like that described by Jesus, where the meek inherited the earth. I wanted a peace that passes all understanding to settle the problems that we humans could not seem to solve. It seemed we could not even begin to understand the other side. For that peace I was willing to work, but I underestimated the foe.

There is a streak of violence and meanness in human beings that can be damped down, like a banked fire, so that we live most of our lives in a reasonable semblance of peaceful civility and generosity. However, this streak of violence can also be stirred by the poker of demagogues and tyrants, and a mighty fire of evil escapes its confines and consumes everything in its path. The everyday world has its evils, big and small, but routine hides their existence. Challenge the routine, however, and chaos results.

In chaos violence thrives. We saw violent protests for peace during the Vietnam War. We saw violent reactions from those on the Right. We saw violence take over our movies, televisions, and now our computers as their games are now the worst of all. Violence destroys; it is always evil.

4. From despair to hope without violence

One of my goals as a minister is to encourage the transition from despair to hope without violence, without vengeance. I believe it is a journey we must take, for if we do not, two terrible fates await is. Either we become immune to violence and evil in the world, or we fall prey to its blandishments, its demagogues, its easy answers. It is now easier than ever before in human history to ignore violence by submersing one’s self in material comforts and distractions. It has always been easy to go along with the crowd, to buy a "pig in a poke" as we used to say down home — something wrapped up nice but not all it was supposed to be. Demagogues always advocate vengeance, for it "sells" better than reason and hard work. But it never stops the chaos.

If we do not despair of the evil in the world, we are not alive, we are not thinking critically, we are ignorant. The poverty of billions — billions should depress you beyond words. The illiteracy, homelessness, disease, and slavery of hundreds of millions should stop you in your tracks with their pain and horror. The lack of freedom for so many of the world’s citizens is a disgrace. The lack of opportunity for fair wages, decent working conditions, and fair advancement ought to leave you furious. The destruction of our planet for callous, mercenary ends should make you weep.

The bombing of churches that kill little girls should make you stop whatever you are doing and whatever you are thinking and whatever you are accepting as true and good. For it is a scandal on humanity, a great dark scar. Is there an answer? Yes, but it is not a permanent answer. Hope and love and justice do not arrive as gifts, nor do they remain as permanent guests.

We create these virtues with the work of our lives, like washing dishes, day in and day out for as long as we live. Hope is not the easy answer; it is the hardest answer. Love is not the easiest human emotion; it is the most complex and contradictory. Justice is not simple, nor is it ever complete. This is why peace passes all understanding (in the Bible’s famous phrase). If I were designing the world, I would make moral acts easier and immoral acts more difficult. As has been pointed out to me on more than one occasion, however, I am not in charge of the world. It’s tough to be good.

Thankfully, I did not find the alternatives appealing. I remain, in many ways, that simple youth who accepted Jesus’ ideas, who wanted to make the world a better place, and who wanted to walk humbly with God. In 1963 I came to believe that the ideas were not all original to Jesus, that the world wanted to be an evil place, and that God had a more pressing engagement. If I wanted these goals, I must work for them, not wait for them.

We still have segregation in this nation. We are still homophobic. We are an impatient, violent people, often angry at things we cannot control, mad at a world that has become too complex, too big, too uncaring, too mean, to costly, just too much! We consider ourselves special, and wonder why the rest of the world doe not appreciate our own high opinion of ourselves.

The answer to all this is hope, a hope built on the confidence that we have made great strides, a hope built on the support of friends who gather to help us (as in this congregation), and a hope built on the great faith in the values of liberal religion. We have persevered for centuries with this faith and the hope it engenders. It leads away from despair and violence, towards love and justice. Journey with me along this path and you, too, can find hope.

Prayer: JEA

Henry David Thoreau wrote:

God of comfort who succors us in time of pain and anguish,

God of justice who inspires us when injustice seems all around us,

Grant us the courage and the will to smile, to laugh, to love

Even when things seem so awful, completely thwarting all that is good.

When we smile after great loss, it does not signify that we do not care;

When we laugh and show affection, it does not mean that we have forgotten;

When we show concern and mercy, it does not mean the evil was any less.

Ours is a hopeful and positive religion that understands evil,

Although we can never tolerate evil among us, we never be free of it either.

So, in the face of necessity, and for our common good, we love one another,

Even when not everyone we know can be trusted and evil folks abound.

Let us be about building a better world, not running away from an evil world.

May we have the courage to love and hope and act for justice. AMEN.