A HOUSE DIVIDED

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday November 7th, 2004

There was a small item in the news this past week; you may have missed it, but it really happened. On Friday I learned that one of our F-16 fighter jets had accidentally strafed an elementary school...in New Jersey. Fortunately, no one was hurt; it was an Air National Guard training mission, and the pilot had simply lost his bearings...still, when I first heard the story I couldn't help but wonder whether this might somehow be emblematic of what we can expect in the future, and hopefully not indicative of the Friend or Foe identification and target recognition skills of all Air National Guard pilots in general. There's nothing like a little friendly fire before the Pledge of Allegiance to get the school day off to a rousing start. Let's just hope that when we are teaching our children to duck-and-cover, no child gets left behind.

Let me tell you what I'm NOT going to do this morning. I'm not going to stand up here for twenty minutes and rehash the results of last Tuesday's election, basically just repeating things you've already heard both better and ad infinitum all week long from the secular media. Nor am I going to stand up here and rant and rave and vent my feelings, which frankly aren't nearly so strong as you might think they would be. I do feel, though, that we need to acknowledge that there are still strong feelings in this country about the results of the election, on both the defeated and the prevailing sides, and that these feelings aren't just going to disappear now that we have a "winner."

The President and his supporters of course are confident that he has earned political "capital" from his victory, and like a kid in a candy store, he's apparently very eager to spend it...although the last time I looked he was already about $400 billion overdrawn, and dipping pretty seriously into the Trust Fund we've all been counting on for our retirement. But who's really counting anyway?

Meanwhile, the losers are left to meditate upon which feels worse: the feeling that they were robbed, or the realization that they've been beaten...if not fairly and squarely, at least soundly and thoroughly. There's a certain amount of righteous indignation that comes from the sense of injustice that results from feeling that you've been cheated out of something you thought was rightfully yours. But when you've just been plain out-thought, out-fought, out-hustled and out-played, there's really not much left to do but to hang your head a little and think hard about what you might have done differently. And then to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and go out and get it done better the next time.

For my own part, I'm actually feeling kinda smug about this election -- which went about 97% the way I expected it to go, with the one big exception of a rather profound and unexpected twist at the very end. Obviously, I have my own political opinions like everyone else, and some of them as you know can be quite outspoken, but when all is said and done I really do possess more the soul of an academic historian than that of a political activist. It was over a year ago now that I stood right here and described Karl Rove's strategy for this election: maximize the involvement of Christian Conservatives while doing whatever it takes to suppress the turnout of likely Democratic voters in the key swing states. And you've all heard the statistics: approximately 30 million self-described Evangelical Christians voted last Tuesday, representing about 20% of the total electorate -- and 80% of them voted for Bush. The President's entire three and a half million popular vote margin of victory can be attributed solely to the increased participation of Evangelicals in just six so-called "Bible-Belt" states...all of which voted overwhelmingly for Bush in both 2000 and 2004.

I likewise had a pretty good idea back in January of how the Electoral College was going to shake out, and that this entire election was going to come down to who could win in Ohio (where it was not uncommon Tuesday for people to wait five to six hours in the rain before voting, and some students at Kenyon College stood in line for as long as 10 hours in order to be able to cast a ballot). And of course for the past month you've all had to sit here and listen to me tell you how this contest was really about two different and competing sets of religious and moral values -- one of which believes in gun rights and doesn't like gays, and one of which believes in gay rights and doesn't like guns -- and how our society will only cease to seem so polarized when we stop looking for the ideological "wedge" issues that drive us apart, and start attempting instead to identify and build upon shared values which both recognize our differences but still allow everyone a place at the table.

And about the only thing I would want to add today is that last Tuesday's election didn't change any of this, and it wasn't going to change it, regardless of who won. The work I'm talking about transcends politics -- and it's going to happen first at the water cooler, and around the kitchen table, and here in liberal churches such as ours, before we are likely to see any real changes at the ballot box. But the tide of history is on the side of Progress and the Progressives; and Liberalism, whether of the political or the religious variety, remains the true philosophy of Liberty. Left to itself, genuine Freedom tends to expand; while preventing its expansion generally requires active attempts at suppression. And not even suppression can be effective forever, even when one side has all the guns, and the other possesses nothing but its own dignity and integrity, together with hope, and the commitment to a vision of a more just, inclusive, and equitable society.

Likewise, there are certainly many traditional values that are worthy of conservation. Conservatism and Liberalism are not opposites; in their proper relationship they support and reinforce one another, allowing us to hold on to what is good while still moving forward toward something better. But resistance to change simply for the sake of avoiding the necessity of change is of no value to anyone. Change is obviously not without its price, but the price of not changing when progress demands it is usually higher. And so the conversation continues: what is worthy of preservation, and what do we hope to change? And who is helped, and who is harmed, as a consequence of our decisions?

As a consequence of last Tuesday's election, the President now has a mandate to pursue his own policies...and to clean up his own mess. And it's only fair that it should be this way. And I have to admit, there's a part of me that honestly hopes that he is right and that he succeeds: that he is able to destroy the terrorist insurgency through unilateral military force alone, and that free elections will subsequently lead to a stable and democratic Iraq, and the quick return of our soldiers home to their families. I don't think that it's going to happen that way; personally, I think that his policies are mistaken and his philosophy is wrong, but I'm not going to be too terribly disappointed if he proves me wrong instead.

And the same with education and health care and the economy and the environment: the President gets four more years to try to make his vision of America a reality, and I get four years of easy sermon topics any time I want one, critiquing his vision from the perspective of my own Unitarian Universalist religious and moral values. He gets the freedom to make his own tough decisions, while I (and people like me) get to play the conservatives for a change -- pointing out the price of those policies, and criticizing both the ideas and the ideology that lie behind them. And yet, this critique is going to be most effective when we point to values that are widely respected, and which we share in common with other people of faith, and then demonstrate how the policies in question are not in harmony with what we all profess to believe. So even in opposition there is an element of consensus-building, and not just by those who hold power, but by those who are out of power as well.

Simply being "out of power" does not mean one is completely powerless. It seems to me that one of the problems with the Democrat party these days, especially those who are still serving in the Congress, is that they just don't really seem to understand yet what it means to be a minority, opposition party. They still see themselves as the privileged and entitled, bossy and overbearing older sister to whose wishes and status the younger siblings should always defer; they haven't quite figured out yet that their new role is now that of the pesky younger brother, whose job it is to torment their older sister at every opportunity and to make her life miserable, and basically just embarrass her whenever possible. They haven't recognized that the world has changed; it's like they're still expecting JFK, or even FDR, to return once more from Avalon and deliver unto them the Holy Grail of comfortable Congressional majorities.

And likewise, it seems to me, the Republicans have yet to figure out that now that they are in control of the White House, as well as both Houses of Congress, they are actually responsible for governing the nation responsibly; they can no longer just go along self-righteously spouting their carefully-crafted ideological slogans, and playing "gotcha," and blaming everything that goes wrong on someone else. They've spent forty years now figuring out how to get to this place in history, and yet the only plan they seem to have is to dismantle the New Deal and return to their glory days of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover -- an era best remembered by historians for prohibition, an unregulated stock market, and the Scopes Monkey trial. Meanwhile if you can trust the pundits, it looks like we can all look forward now to yet another Bush/Clinton showdown in 2008 -- only this time we're talking Jeb and Hillary.

Of course, a lot can happen in four years. And of course, in the meantime, life goes on. Here in the tiny town of Carlisle, in the true-blue liberal Commonwealth of Massachusetts, we enjoyed a voter turn-out of over 89% -- not quite the 100% they boast of in those truly tiny little hamlets like Dixeville Notch in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, but pretty impressive none-the-less. It only took me about half-an-hour to cast my ballot, from the time I left my house to the time I returned home again, including the time I spent talking to the Democratic sign-wavers on the way in, and to the Republicans on my way out. There was a brief equipment malfunction when I broke the tip off my pencil, but fortunately there was enough lead left over that I could still mark my ballot without having to ask for a replacement.

And I even went back a little later in the day, not to vote again (as someone who saw me both times jokingly suggested), but to drop off my surplus Halloween candy, so that my fellow citizens of either political persuasion wouldn't have to go away hungry having done their civic duty, and I didn't have to deal with the long-term consequences of eating all four left-over bags myself. It was, as I'd anticipated, about as pleasant an experience of election day as I've experienced anywhere... certainly much better than the Presidential election of four years ago. And that experience of the Democratic process itself made the outcome of the election that much more tolerable as well, even when things didn't quite work out the way I'd hoped they would.

The phrase "a house divided against itself cannot stand" which I reference in the title of this sermon comes originally from the Gospel of Mark, and has parallels in both Matthew and Luke. But here in America, it is most familiar to us from having been quoted by Abraham Lincoln in an 1858 convention speech on the subject of slavery. "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free," Lincoln went on to say. "I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become either all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, North as well as South."

Two years later Lincoln himself was elected President, after failing to win a single southern state; and by the time of his inauguration five months later many of those same southern states had voted to secede from the Union and form their own Confederation rather than submit to what they anticipated would be an assault on their "peculiar institution" by a Republican-controlled Federal government. We all know how that episode of our history turned out, and in many ways we are still dealing today with the lingering legacy of that bitter and bloody sectional conflict.

And yet we, as a nation, have also made great strides forward in the progress of democracy and human freedom in the past century and a half -- so much so that Lincoln himself might have a difficult time recognizing the nation he lead through its most perilous hour. But I think he would be impressed by much of what he saw, especially if he was looking at a town like Carlisle on Election Day. For we remain a nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal...and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, such as Life, and Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. A nation which still believes in government of the people, by the people, and for the people...and where the sons AND daughters of former slaves are now free to vote alongside the sons and daughters of former slaveholders, and are no longer counted as merely 3/5ths of a person for the purpose of congressional representation. Our union still isn't perfect. But we've made a lot of progress. And we'll continue to make more, so long as we are able to keep hope alive, and remain faithful to our vision of a better future.

(November 3, 2004 - Boston, MA ) The democratic process is an act of faith: not faith that any one point of view will prevail, but faith that the will of the people will point us toward the Beloved Community. And in this national election, "we the people" have spoken, millions more of us than ever before. Unitarian Universalists lived out our faith by registering tens of thousands of new voters. We can rightly be proud of our commitment to this democracy. We stood clearly and proudly on the side of love.

Not only is democracy an act of faith, it is an imperfect process. This national election, like the last, showed us how far we have to go to enfranchise all of our people. But I take great hope from the
relationships our congregations developed in this work.

But Unitarian Universalism is liberal religion, not liberal politics.

Today, while so many celebrate and so many grieve, I hope that Unitarian Universalists will hold fast to our calling. Political sound bites cannot contain it. Party designations do not describe it. Few votes were cast yesterday without reservations in the heart. Our congregations need to be religious homes where the reality of both joy and grief, certainty and uncertainty, can be present.

In 1964, Rev. Jack Mendelsohn wrote a book titled "Being Liberal in an Illiberal Age." Today, Jack reminded me that all ages are illiberal. And, thus, in every age, it is the role of liberal religion to offer a Gospel of openness, of healing and of hope. Our profession of faith is that the arc of the universe is long, but, with our commitment, it bends toward justice.

I extend my personal best wishes to President Bush and pray that his leadership will move this nation toward healing. Unitarian Universalists will do our part. We cannot afford to fuel the stridency and divisiveness of this political campaign. Nor can we afford to withdraw. We are an essential part of this body politic. And we will continue our vigilance and our advocacy for the values we hold dear.

There is only one destiny for this nation and its people. May that
destiny be one of growing justice and equity in our policies and growing compassion in our hearts.