I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. (Letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814).

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State. (Letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT, January 1, 1802).

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

Salim Yacoubi bent over to kiss the purple ink stain on his twin brother's right index finger, gone cold with death.

"You can see the finger with which he voted," Shukur Jasim, a friend of the dead man, said as he cast a tearful gaze on the body... "He's a martyr now."

The stain marked the hard-won right to vote that Naim Rahim Yacoubi exercised Sunday...

Mr. Yacoubi, 37, was one of at least 50 Iraqis who died in bomb and mortar attacks as millions of people marched to polling centers in the first free elections in decades… The victims of election day violence are being hailed by many Iraqis as the latest martyrs... They were policemen who tried to stop suicide bombers from entering polling centers, children who walked with elderly parents to cast votes, or - in the case of Mr. Yacoubi - a fishmonger who, after voting, took tea from his house to electoral workers at the school.

At polling centers hit by explosions, survivors refused to go home, steadfastly waiting to cast their votes as policemen swept away bits of flesh…

Two days before the vote, the portly Mr. Yacoubi, a father of nine, drove with his friend Mr. Jasim to Khadimiya, a Shiite neighborhood, to have a new robe made for the occasion, Mr. Jasim said.

On Sunday, he got up at dawn. "He was very proud, and he put perfume on himself and gave out pastries and tea," Mr. Jasim said.

At 8:30, Mr. Yacoubi walked to the local primary school to cast his vote, Mr. Jasim said. He was frisked by policemen as he stood in line…

Then, impressed by the dedication of the election workers, Mr. Yacoubi went home to boil tea for them, Mr. Jasim said. He had dropped off the tea glasses and was walking away when the bomb went off.

"It's not the man who exploded himself who's a martyr," Mr. Jasim said as the body washer wiped away dried blood. "He wasn't a true Muslim. This is the martyr. What religion asks people to blow themselves up? It's not written in the Koran."

"This is the courage of Iraqis," he said of Mr. Yacoubi's decision to vote, "and we will change the face of history."

On Monday, another family arrived at the cemetery with the body of Ali Hussein Kadhum, 40, a farmer from Mahawil. Mr. Kadhum was one of five people killed by a rocket-propelled grenade aimed at their minivan as they drove from a polling center on Sunday, the family said.

"He told his family, 'We shouldn't go to the polls together, we should go one by one, because we may face terrorists,' " said an uncle, Muhammad Kadhum Jabaara. "It turned out he was right. Because of that, we got a chance to live."

In the dusty lot outside the washing rooms, another family strapped a coffin holding the body of a policeman, Adil al-Nassar, onto the roof of a blue minivan. He had just been cleaned. Now it was time to take him to the golden-domed Shrine of Ali for his final blessings. He was not the first policeman to be brought here.

Officer Nassar, 40, died after tackling a man who had leapt into a line of women waiting to vote at Osama bin Zaid Primary School, said Kadhum al-Hashim, the officer's father-in-law.

The victim's brother, Muhammad al-Nassar, wiped away tears with a white scarf.

"He's a martyr now," Mr. Nassar said. "He saved many lives for the greater good."

One man in the funeral gathering showed visitors two palm-size laminated cards with Koranic verses that Adil al-Nassar had carried in his pocket. Each was marred by shrapnel holes. One verse read, "God, I ask you for your mercy, because we come to return to you and we ask you for your help and to meet our needs."

* * * * *

As I was reading Edward Wong’s New York Times article this morning as the second reading, it occurred to me that all of the names of the people who died in Iraq that voting could take place, deserve to have their names read aloud. Theirs is an example worthy to be remembered, as it is worthy to remember all the men and women and children from our country’s history who died that men and women could vote.

My life did not seem at stake to me when I went to vote at Collins Elementary School last November. But, if I forget history, then I will never understand how symbolically my life was at stake, as throughout history and again a week ago, it is always a matter of life and death when human beings vote. And things of the Spirit are always at hand in matters of life and death.

Why is that? Why is voting a matter of life and death? We are reminded that it is. Voting is not like when men and women drink too much, smoke too much, or experiment with drugs, and risk their lives. It’s not like when the teenager is tempted by the carnival barker at the bungee jump, and his parents look on in horror as he dangles and bobs up and down. It’s not like the soldier in the foxhole in Afghanistan, who volunteered months before and tells his buddy in between the mortar fire that he only joined to pay for college and here his life hangs in the balance. Voting is not like the threat a Chinese woman faces walking alone on the streets of Tokyo, the Englishman in Belfast, the Jew in Damascus or Berlin, or the Hutu stepping off the street and into the Hotel Rwanda. Voting is just making a choice. Why is it, then, a matter of life and death?

Because voting is a private choice? Because voting is an act between an individual and conscience? Because voting is an act between an individual and God? Because voting is a revolutionary act in that, in the privacy of the voting booth in a democracy where there are real choices, there is no room for the evil coercion of governments, nationalities, tribes, religions, or the individuals who exercise power through them? In the voting booth everyman and everywoman holds more power and is more threatening to those in power, than in the confessional or the backroom of any city hall, Grand Rapids included. It’s why mayors do what they do despite the Open Meetings Act! Put authority into the hands of everyman and everywoman, and a power is unleashed that judges every political policy and act, and dooms every religious doctrine and fiat.

Voting is a symbol of the modern world that, oddly enough, both came through religious ideas and has come to threaten most of modern religion.

The first use of the written ballot on this continent was in the Unitarian Church in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1629. Voters chose their minister. It was a revolutionary act. Up until that time ministers were assigned by bishops or other ecclesiastical authorities. Earlier, Robert Browne and his congregation in England had experimented with locating such enormous power in a local congregation. On this continent, though, the Salem congregation was far from the overview of English civil authorities and the Church of England from which they dissented. Up to that time, in all of organized Western Christianity, individual congregants were considered not to have the character, the wisdom, the morality, or the faith to decide and choose upon “Christ’s representative on earth,” as clergy were then known. Our Unitarian religious tradition changed all of that. Spiritual pilgrims would be led by a leader to whom they gave their consent. “Christ’s representative on earth” could be discerned and chosen by everyman; and, later, everywoman, too! Authority was derived not from tradition, not from inheritance, and not from those who held over others the mysteries of God and the sacraments of the church, but authority came from ordinary individuals who chose their spiritual leadership, clergy “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

You can see what tradition of thought Thomas Jefferson was standing within when he wrote those words, notwithstanding that Jefferson identified himself as a Unitarian. His chief influences were twofold, as befits our faith forbears: first, the Enlightenment political tradition of individual rights and natural law, and secondly, the Polish Brethren, a Polish Unitarian religious movement of the 16^{th and 17th century.}

From the Enlightenment Jefferson embraced the idea that it is the purpose of government to defend individual liberty. The word “liberty” has the same derivation as the word “liberal,” from the Latin, “liber,” meaning “free.” Individuals are naturally created free. It is a condition of birth, and not something earned or given at a time later than when the first breath is drawn. It is within the capacity of individuals to structure free societies, like this congregation, over against collectivist ideologies like totalitarianism or communism. And it is the purpose of governing structures to protect individual liberty because this is the source of human power and authority; over against conservatism, which in Jefferson’s time supported the maintaining of the power and authority of the social and political status quo. In Jefferson’s time conservatism was politically manifested in feudalism, which advocated maintaining inherited power and authority like monarchies; or mercantilism, which maintained power and authority as derived from economic power. In Jefferson’s time conservatism was religiously manifested in orthodoxy, the inherited power and authority of the church, the papacy, the Church of England, its doctrines, and clericalism, which maintained that power authority as derived from church appointment by church officials, with no regard for the consent of the governed.

In other words, Jefferson saw that government, business, and traditional religion and its organizations harbored power and authority that at best bruised individual freedom, and at worst held the individual and individual rights in an oppressive death grip. It was the way society’s institutions conspired against the individual and God given freedom. “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.” The psychology as to why men and women would willingly allow their own innate power and authority to be stolen by state and church would be left to our time to ponder. But to Thomas Jefferson individual rights were the product of nature’s God. They were natural. Jefferson’s opinion on this was heavily shaped by English philosopher John Locke, whose theory of “natural rights” was the forerunner of modern ideas of human and civil rights.

When the elections took place in South Africa, and black South Africans could vote for the first time, the wait to do so took hours and hours. Men and women had long been denied a basic tenet of natural law and classical liberalism. They were born free, but did not possess liberty. There was no evidence, politically or religiously, that each person’s individuality existed, as it does when freedom is active and liberty is present. Voting, with real choices with a real difference between the two, is that evidence. And I remember clearly one man, interviewed by an American journalist, whose declaration revealed the foundation of natural law, the idea of individuality, and the idea that individuals possess rights given by nature’s God or, at the least, not from humanity’s institutions. He said, “For the first time I feel like a man.”

Individual liberty and individual rights were derived from the Rennaissance and the Christian Reformation, when the individual human being was lifted up as a worthy creation, needing no church organization or power to engage God. Freedom and rights resulted in the centuries that followed. And one of the chief pioneers of those rights were the Polish Brethren.

These were Unitarians in Poland who dissented against the prevailing power of the creedal Christian Church through their declaration that the Trinity – God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – was a fabrication of the church that actually came to denigrate Jesus. It did not take him seriously as a man of God, as one with a powerful religious faith that could radically transform those who followed in his human footsteps. Instead, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity made a religion of him, and then was used to annilhate any who believed differently, who exercised individual choice in seeing and experiencing God differently. In fact, the Greek word for choice was used by the Church to designate those who exercised choice over against the coercive power of ecclesiastical authority. They were called heretics, from heresy, the Greek, hairesis, “choice.”

But the Polish Brethren saw something else at work in addition to the coercive use of Church doctrine, that later came to influence Jefferson and, still to our day, threatens religions, religious organizations, and those who claim culture must always be placed under the tutelage and guidance of religion. The Polish Brethren saw how the machinations of government conspired with the institutions of religion to impose a smothering conformity. They effects of what they saw are at work today in our country, and in Iraq and the Mulsim world as well. The Polish Brethren of the 16th and 17th centuries advocated a separation of the two earthly authorities, church and state. Jefferson later understood that it was only through this separation of these two powers, that individual liberty could fully blossom. Where the state and church conspire together there is no freedom, no individuality, and certainly no individual liberty. And there is no free movement or expression of the Spirit! Men and women dare to fence in God himself!

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State.”

Voting itself won’t make men and women in Iraq free, any more than just voting anywhere insures that men and women are free. Iraq’s majority, the Shiites, and its minorities, the Kurds and the Sunnis, must look beyond the narrow and oppressive parochialisms of religion, to see the other as possessing rights not given by Shiite, Kurd, Sunnis, or Moslem, or Christian, or Jew, or government, be it Iraqi or American. It will become a democracy when it acknowledges that every voter-martyr, like every voter and every man and woman, possesses rights and is free; and, that it is government’s role to protect that individual liberty and religion’s responsibility to uphold and make room for it. I am hopeful, for there are many in the human family who already know that freedom is an expression of the divine.

Officer Nassar, 40, died after tackling a man who had leapt into a line of women waiting to vote at Osama bin Zaid Primary School…

The victim's brother, Muhammad al-Nassar, wiped away tears with a white scarf.

"He's a martyr now," Mr. Nassar said. "He saved many lives for the greater good."

It is not the folly of men and women and nations that governs the Spirit. The Spirit abides, and to abide in the Spirit demands a faith in something more, a pragmatic willingness to seek hope whencesoever it may come.  To abide in the Spirit requires a generous consideration of the human prospect and a willingness to liberate actively the promise of creation.  It requires faith, and acts of faith.  And in seizing upon acts of faith, and standing alongside those who have the courage to do hopeful things, we abide in the Spirit and multiply a faith that will make all souls free.   To abide in that Spirit is to live a life of hope.

AMEN.