In our reading this morning we heard how Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Barack Obama has used this phrase in talking about issues like the struggle of African-Americans for civil rights – a process that is far from complete, in spite of his election. But, what neither King nor Obama has done is acknowledge the source of this idea. It comes from a sermon delivered by the Unitarian Minister, Theodore Parker. The sermon was passed on to Lincoln by his law partner, Thomas Herndon, and then used by the President.
In the sermon passed on by Herndon, Parker wrote: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways.” But: “I can calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience.” And, he went on: “from what I see, I am sure it bends toward justice.” The justice toward which Parker believed the moral arc of the universe was bending was the justice that should be available to everyone, not just those who could claim it because of their position in society.
Parker said justice was among the rights established in the Declaration of Independence, which both he and Lincoln regarded as the founding document of our nation. But while Lincoln joined Parker and the Founders in seeing the rights they wrote about as basic in a democratic society, Parker also saw them as rights basic to his Unitarian faith. In a sermon he gave at his installation as the minister of the church he served in Boston, Parker said that his task as a minister was to help the members of his church cultivate their hearts and minds so they could become instruments for “reforming the world.” His task, he said, was more to challenge than to comfort them, which is what he believed most of his colleagues were doing. Although they preached about “loving one’s neighbors as thyself,” Parker observed that they had little to say about how to do this – and he believed that it was expressing this, not talking about it, that we should be doing. In looking at the world around him Parker said: “every almshouse …shows that the churches have not done their duty… Every jail is a monument… that shows we are still heathens. [And] the gallows, the embodiment of death, is a sign of our infamy.” He went on: “It seems to me that any church … which aspires to be a true church must set itself about the business” of changing the world. “The church” that will “lead this century will not be a church on all fours; mewling and whining, its face turned down, its eyes turned back.” It will be the one demanding: “as never before, freedom for itself, usefulness in its institutions; truth in its teachings, and beauty [meaning loving kindness] in its deeds.”
Though Parker said this over 150 years ago, it’s still what churches need to do, whether its considering the food we eat, as we did last week, or the right of everyone in this country to a decent job and adequate health care. Though Lincoln was a deeply religious man, he was as critical of churches as was Parker. In a previous sermon I gave on Lincoln, I said:
Lincoln believed our country was in a struggle for its soul. He took us to war in defense of the beliefs set forth in the Declaration of Independence – and he ended up sacrificing his life in defense of those beliefs. Like many of the original founders, Lincoln didn’t “have much truck” with formal theology, saying: ‘The more a man knew of theology the further away he got from the spirit of Christ.’ And he refused to join a church because he couldn’t do so ‘without mental reservation.’ But, Lincoln went on to say: “When any church inscribes on its altar, as a qualification for membership, the Savior’s statement of the substance of the law and the Gospel – Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, with all thy heart and all thy soul and with all thy mind … and thy neighbor as thyself – that church will I join with all my heart and soul.”
The statement that came closest to this in the secular world, both Parker and Lincoln believed, was the description of inalienable rights contained in the Declaration of Independence. Along with Parker, Lincoln believed that just as the words of Jesus “gave spirit” to the Bible, the words of the Declaration “gave spirit” to our Constitution. As Parker put it, the words of the Declaration “fostered aspirations that if risen to, would establish the reign of righteousness, the kingdom of justice, which all noble hearts long for and labor to produce.” Lincoln believed, as did President Obama when he spoke about the moral arc of the universe, that if we would just remain true to the principles of the Declaration we would be responding, as Parker put it, to the “better angels” of our human natures.
In the Gettysburg Address, whose anniversary we celebrate this week, Lincoln again took an idea from Parker. Parker wrote in another of the sermons Herndon passed on to Lincoln:
The great political idea of America, the idea of the Declaration of Independence, is a composite of three simple ones:
Parker went on to say: “The American Revolution, with American history since, is an attempt to prove by experience this transcendental proposition … of politics.” The idea of: “a government of all, for all and by all,” by which Parker meant everyone, including those African-Americans then suffering from the crime of slavery. Lincoln believed the “idea of freedom” articulated in the Declaration of Independence was something that must only not “parish from this earth,” which is one of the reasons he took our nation to war.
In his reflection on the Declaration of Independence, Forrest Church, a contemporary spokesperson for our faith, says that its ideals should underlie both our life together as Unitarian Universalists and as Americans. As the Declaration says, we should: hold these Truths to be self-evident: that all people [all of us, women, men and children of all races, gender identities and preferences, and of all places of birth – all of us] “are created equal” and “are endowed by [our] Creator with certain inalienable rights [and], that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Church says these words “ring forth the good news that all people are entitled to equal justice and invested with equal dignity.” And as such they deserve “an equal chance to find happiness.” This was a radical statement at the time in which it was written; it was radial when Parker and Lincoln harkened back to it; and it continues to be so radical today there are people who can’t accept it. There are people who don’t believe others should have a chance at “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. There are people around us – and they are very vocal about it – who don’t want anything taken out of their pockets to provide the freedom, justice and happiness that might go with everyone being able to find a decent job and be provided with adequate health care.
But no matter what they say, or how loudly they proclaim that we shouldn’t have to care about others, there is nothing life-affirming, freeing or just about being poor or having to beg for help in an overcrowded emergency room. There is nothing life-affirming, freeing or just about telling people they have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, even though not every one has bootstraps on which they can pull. The loving God in which Parker, Lincoln, King and Obama (I think) – and certainly Jesus believed didn’t intend to see the children born in its image be damned to lives of misery because of the situations into which they born or circumstances of their lives, no matter what talk show hosts want to tell us.
I grew up in a good home, with a father who worked not only to take care of his wife and children, and the people he employed, but also his widowed mother and sister and my mother’s parents, who were left without any income during the Great Depression. Ironically, my father claimed he hated “That Man in the White House” who was President while he took care of his family, although all Franklin Roosevelt did was call on Americans to care for one another in the way my father was caring. Like Parker and Lincoln, what Roosevelt did was call on people to lend in bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice. I think our current President would like us to do the same and I wish he was able to command more authority in his call for it.
I also wish there was a march or a demonstration in which I could ask us to take part that would help him in being able to do this. But at the moment there isn’t. But even with such demonstrations there remains the possibility of reshaping some of the attitudes of Americans, including our own. For instance, the radical hospitality to which this congregation is committed shouldn‘t stop at the doors of our church. It has to reach beyond us if we’re going to be able to overcome the attitudes of those we believe that instead of loving our neighbors we should leave them to pull on their bootstraps.
Thinking back to the Declaration of Independence, as did Parker, Lincoln and King – and now Obama – Franklin Roosevelt talked about the freedoms to which he believed all Americans were entitled. He said our nation’s Founders were concerned about: “the supremacy of human rights everywhere,” not just for a few. He said: “equality of opportunity” requires “jobs for those who can work; security for those who need it; the ending of special privilege for the few; the preservation of civil liberties for all; [and] the enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.” Said Roosevelt: “the inner and abiding strength of our economic and political system is dependent upon the degree to which [we] fulfill these expectations.”
The “Man in the White House” who my father so disliked, but emulated in many ways, went on to say: “We know that individual liberty and individual happiness mean nothing unless both are ordered in the sense that one man’s meat is not another man’s poison.” In other words, one person’s income or medical care should not be “got up” as Parker would put it – at the expense of shutting other people out medical care or taking away their work. Roosevelt warned that if we didn’t understand this: “a rising tide of misery, engendered by our common failure” would “engulf us all” – and it might.
But, in spite of the trouble our country was then in, Roosevelt was an optimist because he believed in the “better angels” in our natures. But unless we are able show a bit more of our “better angels” today it’s going to be a long time before things get better for a lot or people, including some of us. There are people in this church who are being overwhelmed by medical expenses through no fault of their own. There are people in this church who have been out of work for months even though they are highly skilled. There are people in this church who have been out of work for a long time or now face the loss of their jobs. There are people in this church who are working for a lot less money than people with their skills deserve. And things are not only a lot worse for many of our neighbors; they are worse by orders of magnitude for people in other parts of the world. Roosevelt believed that the Americans of his time would be able to overcome the situations in which they found themselves not because they’d pull themselves up by their bootstraps but because they would realize they were in it together and that: “failure is not an American habit.”
Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, spoke in a similar vein when she said that in the past Americans had: “never failed to meet any challenge or threat which confronted us.” If this is true, why do those of us who care about the ideals of our Founders so easily give in to those who listen to the Blowhards on talk radio or the fright-mongering politicians we all too often elect to office? Instead of listening to them we should be asking people to understand the ideals on which our nation was founded. We should be asking them to reaffirm, as did Lincoln at Gettysburg, whose anniversary we celebrate this week: the “inalienable right” of everyone to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
To live up to this ideal doesn’t require being a member of one or another political party – or of any particular religion. It requires understanding that we are all God’s – all this Earth’s – children, and as such we are obligated to do all we can to ensure that the blessings we have are blessings available to others– and this includes the blessing of having meaningful work and adequate health care.
I don’t know how one can be a good American without believing this – or even less so, how one could be a good Unitarian Universalist. To be true to our faith, and to our country’s ideals, I believe we must understand, as our President put it in this morning’s reading: “each of us in our own ways” must put our hand on the moral arc of the universe so we can “bend it in the direction of justice.” In all the ways we can may we do it.
Comments for the Jefferson Unitarian Church
By Rev. Dr. David Sammons
November 11, 2009
THE ARC OF THE UNIVERSE IS LONG
Adapted From an Editorial in the On-line Magazine, Salon
On April 4, 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama, speaking on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, declared:
“Dr. King once said that the arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice. It bends toward justice, but here is the thing: it does not bend on its own. It bends because each of us in our own ways put our hand on that arc and we bend it in the direction of justice….”
Perhaps the most powerful occasion when Dr. King used these words came in the wake of the marches from Selma to Montgomery. The evening after the second of these marches segregationists attacked three of the Unitarian Universalist ministers who had eaten in one of the black community’s restaurants after the march. Selma’s public hospital refused to treat Rev. James Reebe, who was badly injured so he had to be driven two hours to a hospital in Birmingham, where he later died.
Two weeks after what came to be called Bloody Sunday, Dr. King assured a gathering of organizers, activists and community leaders that in spite of what happened they should not despair, “because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
In another address soon after Dr. King said:
“I know you are asking today: ‘How long will it take?’…
“I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth crushed to earth will rise again.
“How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever….
“How long? Not long, because you shall reap what you sow….
“How long? Not long,” he repeated, “because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”