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The Call to Action
Reverend Brian J. Kiely, Regina Unitarian Fellowship,
November 16, 2003
Many, if not most of the people who come to this church
consider themselves to be people of faith. We may hold beliefs that
differ
from the folks sitting next to us, but that does not weaken my claim.
We are each persons of faith. We believe in something, whether it
is a god, life itself, a guiding moral principle, the ultimate triumph
of the human spirit or something I have not named.
But here is a question for this morning that has plagued religion
for centuries: Is it enough to simply believe? Is faith alone sufficient
to get us through? Or do we have to prove our faith through action?
Must faith be lived or simply embraced? Can we just believe or are
we expected to live those beliefs?
One reason why the religions of the world have never resolved this
brainteaser is that it is one of the most deeply personal questions
that can be posed. If one believes that faith should be tied to action,
well, how do you test the quality of another’s action? If someone
gave me the unlikely power to turn to all of you and say, “Thou
shalt go to church weekly, serve on a committee and give the church
10 per cent of your income and make one act of social justice each
month,” and even more implausibly, say you actually did any
of these things, how could anyone other than you tell if you did
so willingly and with open hearts or grudgingly for some other motive?
No one could tell. Only you would know.
Faith in all of its forms is beyond intimate. It is an intellectual
set of ideas turned into a possession of the heart by the nuances
of life’s events. Remembered messages from culture and family
give faith its dimension whether that be positive or negative in
aspect. Old joys and sorrows shape and sometimes haunt our faith.
New experiences test and reshape that faith. Each individual’s
faith is as personal as a fingerprint no matter which church they
attend or which religious label they adopt. Your faith belongs to
you and to you alone. No matter how well you speak about your faith,
no matter how perfectly you describe it, no one other than you will
ever truly understand its depths or its shallows, its waxing or its
waning, its colour or its texture.
Because of this unique character, I believe no one has the authority
-moral or otherwise - to dictate how you must life your faith. This
is especially true in the Unitarian Church where we refuse to even
adopt a common statement of belief. Instead we have seven principles.
They are wonderful things, but they are no creed. At best they serve
as guidelines for pondering religious questions, not blueprints for
prescribed action.
But to look at the Principles is to read seven statements that call
us to not only shape our beliefs, but to act upon them, to live them
everyday.
It is, for example, difficult to ‘affirm the inherent worth
and dignity of every person’ and remain silent while our Gay
and Lesbian friends in this country are attacked with such hostility.
All they seek are equal rights before the law.
It is a challenge to us to ‘affirm justice, equity and compassion
in human relations’ while watching the poor and homeless of
this province and this city become increasingly disenfranchised.
It is painful to ‘affirm the goal of world community with
peace, liberty and justice for all’ and then sit quietly by
while the Bush Administration in the United States makes a mockery
of this Principle both at home and especially in Iraq.
And how can one ‘affirm the interdependent web of all existence’ without
at least trying to walk more softly on the Earth?
When it comes right down to it, it is not easy to live by faith
alone, locked up in a private world of personal belief with the ‘Do
Not Disturb” sign hung on the doorknob.
Everywhere we turn there are calls to action.
“We are caught up in a network of mutuality, tied in a single
garment of destiny,” said Dr. King in our Responsive Reading, “Injustice
anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” And since we each
hope to receive justice and live within the safety that a just society
confers, we have an obligation to preserve and to protect justice,
to see it expanded where we can to enfold those who do not yet enjoy
its benefits. And if acting for justice purely on principle is not
sufficient motivation for you, then act out of enlightened self-interest.
In this province there are concerns about health care, about the
basic civil treatment of the First Nations people, not to mention
their basic civil rights, concerns about poverty and the rising dependence
on food banks and a host of other relevant and current issues.
It’s likely that at least one of these conditions affects
you directly, perhaps as a victim, perhaps as someone employed to
work on the problem, perhaps as someone who just knows people harmed
by these deteriorations of society.
There are calls to action everywhere.
In our reading, the Rev. Ann Orfald of Peterborough reminded us
that as Unitarians we inherit a tradition of responding to the call
to action:
Within our religious tradition, we have never been satisfied to
say, "God will take care of it. In the sweet by and by there
will be peace. In the world to come we will be free. In the end time
there will be justice." We have always taken the stance that
we are active agents in the process. We bear some responsibility
for the vision of a world at peace. This is not to deny the mystery.
It is not to discount a higher power, but we believe our actions
really do matter.
… Each act of compassion, each act of justice has a ripple
effect. Each person who does his or her part, even within their own
family and their own congregation, to live by these principles, has
contributed to the goal... What you do for each person you touch
influences the next person that he or she touches. The world is affected.
But is it enough? Is our small contribution enough to make a difference?
Our hymnbook has a number of impassioned readings about the call
to action, but one of my favorites has always been # 560 written
by Dorothy Day exactly because it answers the question of what one
person can do:
People say, what is the sense of our small effort.
They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step
at a time.
A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions.
Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that.
No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless.
There’s too much work to do.
Now I am not suggesting that we should lay aside all the things
and activities that make our lives pleasurable and livable and become
social justice monks wearing the hair shirt of white liberal guilt
and jumping on every single bandwagon that comes our way. For one
thing, if we did, there would be no time for families or jobs or
even the care of our own souls. No, we have to choose our battles
and our causes wisely - according to our hearts, according to our
beliefs and according to what we can realistically give in support.
To give everything of ourselves to a cause or concern is to lose
touch with our faith and our center as human beings. Too much of
anything, even good causes, is still an excess that leads to imbalance,
to burnout, to mental, physical and spiritual exhaustion. That kind
of martyrdom may be glorious, but it is not respectful of ourselves
or of our needs. It might not even be good for the cause, since we
lose perspective along the way. To only see the world in black and
white may prevent us from finding workable solutions that can be
found in the grey zone of the middle.
Each of us must find our own unique way to answer the call to action.
For some it’s demonstrations and protests or letter writing
and meetings. For others it’s volunteer work with someone who
needs our help. It can be as simple as a donation to a good cause,
or being kind and generous to someone who is different from you.
You can write a letter to a politician, or offer a pat on the back
to someone else who has. Or you could choose to join our meeting
on homelessness later today if only to give support by your presence,
and perhaps learn something at the same time.
There are as many ways to answer the call to action as there are
people in the world.
And then there is the responsibility of the church community. Again,
we must be careful with our resources. I have seen more than one
congregation reduced to collective inaction by the sheer volume of
good causes their members supported. It became impossible to focus
group energy enough to make progress on any one of them.
Indeed, that was the case for several years in the church I serve
in Edmonton. The social justice committee barely functioned since
it was largely a forum where individuals could promote ‘their’ cause.
In late Spring we set out to rectify that situation. We asked people
to submit their ideas and concerns. In a workshop open to all, everyone
who so desired was given five minutes to speak about why their issue
should be the top concern of the community for this year. There were
12 to 15 finally listed. Then participants got to vote for their
favorite three. The top half dozen vote getters were then presented
to the whole congregation on the following Sunday for a straw vote.
We asked our members and friends two things: 1. to vote for a single
issue and 2. to indicate whether or not they were willing to work
on that issue. We would not take on any issue that did not have people
willing to work on it.
In the end we picked three areas of focus for the time being. First,
we have joined a coalition of city groups working on affordable housing
and homelessness. Over 20 people volunteered to work on that project.
Second we have a group working on making sure that our new church
property will be as green a sanctuary as possible. Of course I don’t
mean we will decorate in Rider colours, but rather that we will make
the new church as environmentally friendly as possible. Finally,
and I am pleased to say we have accomplished this one already; we
have switched our Sunday morning coffee supplies to Fair Trade products.
This will ensure that coffee and tea farmers will get a fair price
for their work.
If we are a community that lives by its principles, then like the
individuals who comprise that community, we should be reasonably
expected to put those principles into practice both inside and outside
our walls.
And why should we do it? Well, it’s the right thing to do.
It can make us feel better. It might actually cause a change. But
most likely each small contribution falls like one more snowflake
on the branch of injustice. When enough flakes fall, the branch cracks
and breaks. A significant part of justice making is the building
of communities where injustice is not tolerated. Ideally that is
what our church can be, a place where injustice will not be tolerated.
Or as the Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed put it so eloquently in the Opening
Words:
The central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds
that bind each to all. There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered
amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others. Once
felt, it inspires us to act for justice.
It is the church that assures us that we are not struggling for
justice on our own, but as members of a larger community…
And finally, he call to action also calls us to decide what matters
to us, what we most believe. It calls us to name our faith… and
then to live it.
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