The Web of Accountability
A sermon by the Rev. Wayne Arnason
West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church
April 6, 2008
PART 1: The Polar Bears
As a kid growing up in Manitoba, Canada, I mostly heard bad press about polar bears. I had an interest in the Arctic and I enjoyed reading the stories of Arctic explorers. For them, the polar bears were a menace. My father would travel regularly on business to Churchill, Manitoba, where polar bears have always lived close to the town, and he would come back with stories about how much of a nuisance they were, getting into the garbage and occasionally wandering fearlessly around the streets of the town. I could easily see live polar bears in the Winnipeg Zoo, and they never quite lived up to their television image. They looked dirty and languid. I had little consciousness as a child of how deeply imbedded in their ecosystem the polar bears are, and how different they were when isolated from their ecological context.
Nowadays, I know so much more about polar bears than I ever learned in school growing up. They have become the poster children of the growing world wide movement of concern about climate change. They are the new canaries in the coal mine. We receive mailings and see videos with wrenching images of polar bears on small floes of ice staring out at an ocean that’s supposed to be a vast frozen landscape and instead has the consistency of a glass of ice water. In Churchill, Manitoba, they finally realized they had a gold mine and not a nuisance when they figured out that tourists would pay big bucks to come to their town to see the polar bears, and now climate change is drying up the gold.
In the early years of environmental activism, many of you will remember another Arctic animal that had a similar career as a poster child for environmental groups like Greenpeace: the baby harp seal. As I remember the way that the campaign to end or reduce the seal hunt was conducted, however, I notice one huge difference. There was never a sense that I was personally responsible for the plight of the seals. There were bad rich people who bought or wore seal furs, and they were responsible. There were bad hunters who killed the seals and bad capitalists who marketed their fur, and they were responsible. There was a bad government that allowed it to happen, and they were responsible. But I was a good person, because I could write a check to Greenpeace and help save the seals, and then my responsibility would be over.
Older now, and possibly wiser, at least with respect to a deeper understanding of how this interdependent web of existence in which we live really works, I no longer have the luxury of feeling self-righteous about the check I write to an organization that wants to save polar bears by addressing climate change. The chorus in our Bob Dylan prelude today described a dualistic moral world in which you can choose to be either good or evil, serve the Lord or serve the devil, but when it comes to climate change that’s not the world we live in today. We understand that we all make choices every day that make a difference in our global environment, some of them harmful and some of them helpful.
Intellectually, as our understanding of ecosystems has advanced, we have lost any refuge we could once take from being personally accountable for environmental degradation. We know that the way we live our lives contributes to the melting of arctic ice and the threat to polar bears’ habitats. The bears themselves are innocent victims in this. Nothing in the way they have behaved has brought this calamity upon them. But when I turn on a light bulb or drive a car or mow my lawn, these decisions make a difference in the lives of polar bears.
The Unitarian Universalist theological principle that points us towards to this knowledge is “respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part.” It is a favorite principle of among us because it points to a religious life and understanding based in the natural world and not in a metaphysical doctrine. In recent years, however, with expanding recognition of how deeply the interdependent web of life truly does bind us together, we have been challenged to understand this principle not just intellectually, not just poetically, but also morally and spiritually.
What if the interdependent web is a reality not just in natural ecosystems but in our moral decision-making? Critical to moral decision-making is the question of accountability. “Accountable” can mean both “responsible to” and responsible for”. It means ownership of my own behavior and the fact that I can be asked to account for own behavior to others. There is a spiritual leap involved here. When we are accountable for it all, we challenge the most important barrier that makes us believe in “us” and “them”, in “me” and everything else”. In a world that is determined by overlapping cause and effect, in a world in which there is complex interdependence, the moral web of accountability is critical to our understanding of what it means to live a religious life. So let me ask you today to enter into the spirit of self-reflection as we listen to the Choir’s Anthem today. Ask yourself: To what and to whom am I accountable for my actions in the world, for how I live my life, for the choices I make?
If you so inclined, as the anthem ends, take a pen or pencil from your pocket or purse or the pew racks in front of you, and write down two or at most three answers to that question on the back of the index card in the order of service. Later in the service, we’ll take a look at how you responded.
Dr. King’s words about a network of mutuality seemed appropriate to today’s service. They build a bridge between moral abstraction and moral action. They stand as a reminder how much we lost when he died forty years ago this week. King was thirty-nine years old, much of his life work accomplished as a young adult, and as I look around this room at the number of vital and active seventy-nine year olds and older that we have just among us, I find myself even more saddened by the gifts of mature leadership that were taken away form us that day.
I couple years ago during our sabbatical Kathleen and I visited the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis which has been built around the Loraine Motel, the assassination site. It was a deeply moving experience to visit that site and experience the way that the museum connects the civil rights era to the present day. Inside the museum is an elaborate display about the research that has gone into the assassination of Dr. King, the role that James Earl Ray played in the assassination, and whether there was a larger conspiracy responsible for his death. I cannot say that I have formed an opinion about those conspiracy theories, but in the spirit of our exploration today, I can say that it is easier than ever for me to answer the question: who is accountable for the death of Martin Luther King forty years ago? Clearly, all of us who were living then are accountable for it, in a world built on a network of mutuality, on an interdependent web of accountability.
In that spirit then, would you join with me in a spirit of prayer:
O God whom we know in our lives as the power of moral action, we pause this day in prayer to confess and to seek forgiveness.
Each day that goes by in this world of ours, the life that we lead contributes to someone else’s death: to death from poverty, disease, and indifference. Those who die forgotten are as important in the eyes of God as the famous, and these nameless ones are beyond number. If Martin Luther King were alive and preaching to us today, it would be these he would have us remember. It would be these to whom he would have us be accountable.
So as we remember Martin King today, as we remember his legacy and engage with the challenge his life makes to us, let us confess that he died at the hands of millions, and at our hands. In accepting responsibility and asking forgiveness, we pray that we may move beyond moral paralysis and indifference. We pray that we may recognize that our interdependent web of accountability means that each action we take to undo racism, to alleviate poverty, to relieve suffering makes a difference, so matter how small it seems, no matter how much we wish we could do more. In forgiving ourselves and in moving forward, we would honor Dr. King and the network of mutuality in which he believed.
May it be so.
PART 2: The Preacher
We are blessed to have a significant audio and video record of Martin Luther King’s preaching career, but that record is nothing compared to the documentation that goes on around any preacher’s sermons today. Almost every word that Kathleen and I have preached in sermons from this pulpit is available on either tapes, CD’s, or written transcripts, and from 2001 onwards, they are all available for download on our web site.
So when short video clips from sermons by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, minister of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, began appearing on YouTube a few weeks ago, I must admit my first thought was completely selfish. It was: I wonder if anyone who had a political reason to want to discredit us, or discredit West Shore Church could do that to us? I thought I’d go back to our sermons after 9-11 to see if we ever made the point that there is plenty of blame to go around for why terrorist attacks on American soil happened, and that we are deluding ourselves if we are unwilling as a country to be accountable for some of it. Of course we did. Being willing to be personally accountable, as an individual or a country, in an interdependent world doesn’t excuse anybody else’s behavior. Being accountable in an interdependent world doesn’t mean accepting all the blame. Being accountable in an interdependent world simply means recognizing the reality of complex causes and effects, rather than retreating into bad guys and good guys.
Rev. Kathleen and I are, of course, accountable, for every word we say from this pulpit. Most importantly we are accountable to that which we understand as God, to ourselves and our family, and to you for what we say here. It would be my guess that Rev. Jeremiah Wright would say the same thing, and has taken full responsibility for whatever he has said in his sermons. Ministers, like public officials, have to expect to be accountable for every opinion they offer, and if they are part of a church that is serious about changing the world, serious about making a difference, then they will not be surprised to have Fox News or other political opponents coming after them. That’s also part of the web of accountability. It’s a web with spiders and they bite!
I want to tell you briefly about two personal experiences with Jeremiah Wright. Kathleen and I sought out his congregation and went to church there during our sabbatical. We were greeted warmly by his members and inspired mightily by his preaching. We were thrilled to be part of worship in the largest congregation of our kissing cousins’ denomination, the United Church of Christ, and thrilled that it was a black church. It’s a church that didn’t get that way by speaking in white! I’m sure you’ve all heard thoughtful media commentators reflect on how easy it is to take a snippet out of almost any forty minute sermon heard in any black church and find a way to turn it into something that would scare white people. We heard and felt nothing on the day we dropped in to Trinity Church that disturbed us.
Our second experience was with Rev. Wright was last summer at UUA General Assembly when he was the featured presenter and trainer for the annual meeting of the UU Ministers Association, a mostly white organization. My guess is that every minister who was there experienced him as clear, compelling, and insightful about churches and about society. So we know Jeremiah Wright from attending worship and from personal training with him. It was important, therefore, for us to look at the quotes that were being used against him and hold him accountable for them and to form our own opinions about what he said. One of the quotes that have been used against Rev. Wright has him alluding to the conspiracy theories in the black community (some studies say 50% of African American believe this to be true) that the government helped create AIDS as a means of perpetrating genocide against blacks. We’ll, I don’t believe that happened for a minute. But when I hear an idea like that being talked about from the pulpit in a black church, it causes me to ask why. And it causes me to turn to some facts that I do believe:
That government sponsored experiments with syphilis on black men in Tuskegee Alabama did happen; that environmental racism exposes African American communities to toxins that create diseases at a much higher rate than white communities; that the health care system contains institutional racism and discrimination that creates shocking disparities in health care between black and white communities.
The causes for all this are complex, you might say, and I know they are, but the causes of conspiracy theories in the consciousness of African Americans are similarly complex, and most white Americans have no interest in understanding or honoring that complexity. What would it mean for predominantly white communities and institutions, like this church, or like the United States government, to deeply care about the experience of communities of color and the complexity of reasons why they believe the way they do? Could that caring be a form of what we’ve been calling today “accountability?
Being accountable to somebody else – to a spouse, to a child, to an employer, to a church or to a set of values does involve the necessity of stepping beyond your own self-centeredness and acknowledging that someone else’s world and voice in the world is as important, or maybe even more important than your own. This possibility starts as a spiritual movement, not a political one.