On Saving The World
Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
January 16, 2000
Reading: Excerpts from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I've Been to the
Mountaintop" speech.
Today I want to do two things: the first is to reflect on leadership
and how people like Martin Luther King Jr. make change happen; and
the second is to think about how I make or don't make change happen in
my two roles as lawyer and as minister. I hope to justify this
descent from the sublime to the ridiculous by the end of my talk.
Tomorrow we honor Dr. King, certainly one of the most influential
figures in America's history in the 20th Century, a status recently
recognized by the push in the Catholic church to have him declared a
saint. He was one of the most eloquent speakers we have ever produced
- it is said that at Boston University Theological school, he took
seven preaching classes. I could take seven hundred and not be able
to preach like that.
Earlier this week, I saw the PBS special on Eleanor Roosevelt, and I
was struck by how much she accomplished for the good of the world in
the course of her lifetime. She did not have the eloquence of Dr.
King, and she came from a completely different social background. Yet
in her way, she may have contributed as much to whatever progress we
have made in race relations in the Twentieth Century as did he, and of
course she addressed a whole host of other social issues. Among other
things, she was principally responsible for the drafting of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and she got that through the
newly-founded United Nations over the strenuous opposition of the
Stalinist Soviet Union. She was a classic liberal and she was
outspoken and, as the first lady, she could not be ignored.
Well, these great people intersect with their times, and the world
seems to change because of what they do. We're inclined to think that
we would not have made the progress that we made if we hadn't had
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt. Though that
proposition is open to some debate. Some students of history hold
that whatever changes were going to take place were going to happen,
and the person who appeared to be the "great man" or the cause of the
change was really just a surfer riding the waves: the most visible
part of the forward movement, but not its force. Tolstoy, in the
epilogue to War and Peace, took this to the extreme by theorizing that
Napoleon didn't really lead an invasion of Russia in 1812 - it was
predestined that a group of people from Western Europe would march
across the Urals to the gates of Moscow, and Napoleon just appeared to
take credit for it.
Well, I don't know whether I buy the "great man" or, should we say,
"great person" theory of history, but if we listen closely to what
King was saying the night before he died, he wasn't claiming to be the
"great man." He was definitely placing his life and his work in
historical perspective, which is why the speech if so affecting in the
light of what happened the next day. But rather than
self-congratulation, his words can best be read as a hymn of
thanksgiving that he was allowed to live in such interesting times.
I think it behooves us to hear these words. We look at great people
of history somehow as exhibits in a museum, enclosed in glass cases,
and so much larger than life that they don't really have much
relationship to us or to what we do in our lives in the present.
But you know that that's an illusion, a trick of perspective. If you
had looked at Martin Luther King Jr. in the mid-1950's, you would
have seen a young minister who made a lot of mistakes, not the
commanding presence he later became. And that leads me to reflect on
myself, to use Dr. King's life as the occasion to ask myself what
I've been doing to save the world.
I do this not because it's world-shaking what I've done or haven't
done, or because I need your approval, or because I think I'm such a
great world-saver. I do this rather in the hopes that it might
stimulate some of you to think about ways you've been trying to save
the world.
I started on my journey into the ministry because of a sermon that I
heard at my home church in Charleston in about 1993. It was given by
Floy Deaton, a member of our church who was the executive director of
the Interfaith Crisis Shelter, the first homeless shelter in the city.
Her topic was "changing the world" and after speaking for about five
minutes, she threw it open to the congregation. She said, "I know
that many of you are doing things to change the world, and I want to
invite you to tell us all about it." I stood up and talked about my
work for the ACLU, but what I was really thinking was "Oh yeah,
changing the world. THAT's what I was supposed to be doing with my
life."
Like Dr. King, I, too, have been allowed to live in interesting
times. I was 6 when Brown v. Board of Education was decided, 12 when
the first sit-ins started, and just short of 20 when Dr. King was
assassinated. The first two black students came to my high school in
my junior year; that year I joined an interracial discussion group,
but that was the extent of my active and public involvement in the
Civil Rights Movement in the 1960's.
Looking back on those years, I fought a lot more racial battles around
the dinner table than I did on the streets. I knew I came for a
conservative family, but it was only after I went to law school that I
became aware that in the 1950's and 60's my family law firm had been
intimately involved in the state's policy of massive resistance to
desegregation. I guess that this gave me something to live down or
atone for. It definitely figured in my decision of where to practice
law: since the family firm was in Columbia, the state capital, I
would plop myself down in Charleston, where we could minimize the
opportunities for mutual embarrassment.
Though I was not heavily involved in the Civil Rights Movement, I was
heavily involved in college in what we had come to call simply The
Movement, by which we meant the entire struggle for peace and justice.
Looking back on it, the use of the one name masked a considerable
divergence in goals between black liberation, women's liberation,
ending the war in Vietnam, opposing the military/industrial complex,
avoiding the draft, wearing weird clothes and hair-dos, doing lots of
drugs and listening to high-volume rock music.
Nevertheless, like many Americans who came of age in the 60's, I
emerged from that decade with the conviction that there were many
things fundamentally wrong with American society and culture, and the
highest and best use of a life was to dedicate it to changing those
things. My favorite teacher was Charles Reich, who wrote a stinging
critique called The Greening of America, and my model for a minister,
as I mentioned last week, was our chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, he
of the burning draft cards.
When I graduated from college in 1970, I stayed around New Haven for a
year because - and this is really hard to say with a straight face in
2000, but it made good sense then - I was expecting the Revolution to
happen and I thought that would be a good place to be to intersect
history. They were indeed interesting times.
When the revolution didn't happen, my wife and I moved to Ann Arbor,
MI to consider our options. She wanted to go to law school, but the
only models of lawyers I had were the ones in my family. Finally we
read about a new law school that was being started in Washington DC
devoted to fundamental change. We quickly applied and became members
of the charter class at Antioch Law School. It was indeed almost the
opposite of conventional law schools. Most of the class were Movement
activists of one stripe or another. Over 50% were women, and probably
30% were minority, including many Native Americans. The school was
founded by the husband-and-wife team who had been the architects of
the Legal Services program in the Johnson Administration's War on
Poverty. We were educated in law a tool of social reform even as the
courts and legislatures were trying to close the door on using law
this way.
Once I was admitted to the bar. I started my legal career in the
public defender's office. What I got there is truly a worm's-eye view
of the justice system. During those years I learned to be a
passionate advocate of people whom the rest of society despised and
wanted to put away for long periods of time - an attitude I still
carry with me today.
My decision to go into the ministry reflected a feeling that I wasn't
doing enough in my law practice and other work to change the world.
In my law practice, I treid to make change happen for one client at a
time by getting their legal goals met in the justice system. My other
work had been a hodgepodge: In the late 70's I had been active in
opposing nuclear power, and I worked for individual rights and
liberties with the ACLU and I did what I could to desegregate the
inner-city schools as a member of a local school board in the 80's.
But I think at the time I heard that sermon, I decided it all wasn't
enough.
So here I am five years later, a minister and a lawyer with an
uncertain relationship between the two roles. As a lawyer, most of my
effort is still directed to saving the world one client at a time,
that is, to helping the client achieve his or her goals in the legal
system. But I also stand back and look at that system.
Right now, our law office has taken on several cases under
Massachusetts' new Sexually Dangerous Person statute. The statute
allows the state to civilly commit a sex offender for an indeterminate
period up to the rest of his life AFTER he has finished serving his
criminal sentence. They had a similar law on the books here until
1990, but then abolished it after a blue ribbon commission found that
the idea of civil commitments for sex offenders was a "legal, moral
and practical quagmire." At a hearing on reviving this pratice last
spring, 7 out of eight organizations who testified opposed reinstating
civil commitments. Yet the legislature passed it unanimously with no
debate.
When I first returned to practice this fall, I was a bit leery of
taking on sex offenders, wondering how it would sit with you folks and
with my fellow ministers. We like to present an image of ourselves as
the Good Guys, and here I was aligning myself with the most
politically-incorrect portion of our population. It is OK,
praiseworthy in the UU ministry, to champion the cause of battered and
abused women and children. What happens to someone who takes up the
cause of the batterers, molesters and rapists?
Yet as I read the statute and realized what the Commonwealth was doing
to these people, my sense of injustice became engaged, and I jumped in
with both feet. Sometimes a lawyer has to look at a case real hard to
find something good to say on his or her client's behalf, but in these
cases the injustice just screamed at me.
And yet I am frustrated at the limitations placed on me by my role as
a lawyer, and this echoes the feelings I had before entering the
ministry. I am called on to deal only with the legal problem, and
often the legal problem is not the biggest problem facing the person.
It isn't enough to win the case, somehow I also want to save the soul.
Nowhere was this as clear to me as my death-row client, John. John
had set a consistent goal for each of his lawyers in the 20 years he
was on death row: get my conviction overturned if you can. If you
can't, then I'd rather be executed than spend life in prison. I
fudged on this a couple of times, raising issues that, if successful,
would have avoided the death penalty but left him with a life
sentence. But ultimately I had to bow to his wishes and abandon those
issues. It was his life, and ultimately he paid with it.
We fought a good fight, but my wish as I look back over the fourteen
years I represented John, was that I could have somehow helped him
find a desire to live even under a life sentence. Though he had an
almost miraculous capacity for self-education and improvement - though
he never finished junior high school, he'd read all seven volumes of
the collected works of Swedenborg as well as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Joseph
Campbell - he never could believe in himself enough to find his own
life worth preserving. The facts of the crime were such that if the
case were tried twenty times, he would be convicted twenty times. The
case could not ultimately, be won. And in the end, as I sat with John
in his last hours in March of 1998, I didn't want to win the case. I
wish I could have won his soul, to make him love himself.
I think I am still working out of my 60's values, but operating in a
different theater. I used to see the country's problems as
structural, and I went to law school in part because I wanted to have
a knowledge of social engineering. Charles Reich used to say that the
people who ran the government and the big corporations were not evil,
they were decent people of limited consciousness caught up in evil
structures.
Now I see so many of the problems as spiritual, not structural. Take
racism: we have as a society taken a lot of structural steps to try
to address racism. We have passed anti-discrimination laws, we have
empowered large bureaucracies to enforce the laws. Yet racism remains
a problem in our society, and people of color remain disadvantaged. I
think this is because racism is primarily a spiritual illness. It is
a failure to recognize those of a different color as our brothers and
sisters, as fully human.
In a similar vein, my lawyer side looks at the problem of how we treat
sex offenders as structural, and I devote my energies to crafting
legal arguments to persuade a court that the new law is
unconstitutional. But the minister side of me recognizes that without
a spiritual change in the population at large, the legislature will
simply fix whatever problem the court finds and reenact the law. What
offends the minister side of me is that the law allows no room for
forgiveness or redemption, and this reflects a societal attitude.
I see the limitations of the law, and yet there are concrete results
possible in the law that are not possible in ministry. My fourteen
years of legal effort for John staved off execution and thus gave him
14 years of life. The clients who have been vindicated by the legal
results I obtained have had a chance to make it in life that no amount
of ministry could have given them.
And yet, I look at the life of Dr. King and say that the ability to
move people, the ability to talk to their deepest spiritual longings,
is the grandest and most satisfying, for it has the possibility not
just to change the world, but in some sense to save it.
It is in the end a false dichotomy, between spiritual and structural.
Dr. King certainly worked both; in some of his last speech that I
didn't read today, he was advising a boycott of Coca-Cola. He could
be grittily practical when he needed to be.
Indeed, the spiritual and the structural, the legal and ministerial,
the practical nd the visionary, are two sides of the same coin, and we
need to use whatever tools are available to us to bring about the goal
of making the world a better place and ourselves better people. For
in the end, to paraphrase Dr. King, it doesn't matter. It doesn't
matter whether you are a lawyer or a minister or a dental hygienist or
a software engineer or a full-time mother or a retired schoolteacher.
You play the hand you're dealt, and with the resources you have in
that hand, your brains and your courage and your heart, you can find a
way on some level to stand on the mountaintop and view the promised
land. Your eyes may see the glory, and now our voices may sing the
glory. In the red hymnal, number 566, "The Battle Hymn of the
Republic." First and last verses.
Amen.
Text file Source (historic): geocities.com/wakefielduu/sermonfiles/1999-2000
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