This morning is a gift from God, and the dawn’s new light is a summons to be greeted with gratitude and thanksgiving. We give thanks that we can:

See the forms of creation,

Hear the call of creation,

Smell the fragrances of creation,

Taste the sweetness of creation,

And touch the warmth of creation.

We give thanks for the lives we’ve been given; for the love that graces our days; and for the chance to assist in creation’s unfolding.

He came to a town in Samaria called Sychar. It was near the piece of land Jacob had given his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there. Jesus was tired from the journey. So he sat down by the well. It was about noon.

A woman from Samaria came to get some water. Jesus said to her, "Will you give me a drink?" His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.

The Samaritan woman said to him, "You are a Jew. I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?" She said this because Jews don't have anything to do with Samaritans. Jesus answered her, "You do not know what God's gift is. And you do not know who is asking you for a drink. If you did, you would have asked him. He would have given you living water." "Sir," the woman said, "you don't have anything to get water with. The well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Our father Jacob gave us the well. He drank from it himself. So did his sons and his flocks and herds. Are you more important than he is?"

Jesus answered, "All who drink this water will be thirsty again. But anyone who drinks the water I give him will never be thirsty. In fact, the water I give him will become a spring of water in him. It will flow up into eternal life."

The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water. Then I will never be thirsty. And I won't have to keep coming here to get water."

Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln, Saturday, March 4, 1865

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago…

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war... Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon
Where there is doubt, faith,
Where there is despair, hope,
Where there is darkness, light,
Where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much
seek to be consoled as to console,
not so much to be understood as to understand,
not so much to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
it is in dying that we awake to eternal life. --- St. Francis of Assisi

When I was five years old I was traveling to Mississippi to stay with my aunt and uncle for a few months, and on the road we paused at a highway rest stop to refresh. It was summer and I was parched, and as I bent over a drinking fountain I heard a deep, gruff voice bellow, “Boy, don’t drink from that fountain. Y’all drink from this fountain over here,” pointing to the one next to him. I was an obedient little boy and did as I was told. After drinking the water, it had that rusty taste I had come to disdain, the voice bellowed again, “This water’s better than that other. You don’t never want to drink water from that,” the large arm and fat finger pointing back to the drinking fountain I had first stepped up to. I looked up at the large man standing there directing people to this one or the other as if he were the tribal chief of satiation. His white sweaty brow made me think he probably was always thirsty. But, I stood there looking at people drinking from the two fountains until I had to be retrieved by my aunt. I remember trying to figure out why so many drank from one, and so few from the other. My aunt educated me. “One is colored and the other is white,” she said, having lived in the south for enough time to have gotten accustomed to its water ways. “But,” I protested, “the water isn’t any color in either of them. I watched. It’s clear in both.” I didn’t know then what I know now, and don’t figure I will ever forget the taste of that water.

I was at a conference in Illinois during the election at the beginning of this month so I voted an absentee ballot prior to leaving. The night before I left I told my wife that if Proposal Two passed I would return and preach a sermon entitled, “We Now Live in a Racist State.” Proposal Two was the proposal that if passed, would dismantle many of the programs initiated by Affirmative Action. It did pass, by a healthy margin, and curiously enough, people confessing at the exit polls indicated that it might not pass at all! But, you notice that the title of this sermon isn’t what I declared beforehand it would be. The title change is symbolic and relevant to any discussion of what remains now that Proposal Two has passed and Affirmative Action has been rejected by the electorate. Here’s my thinking over the past three weeks.

I preached a sermon series this past August entitled, “The Fundamentals of the Free Church,” a series about the foundations of our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition that I update about every five years or so. Two of the three sermons are titled, “The Free Pulpit” and “The Free Pew.” Both are difficult to understand and maintain, although the Free Pew is easy to describe. This church maintains there is no theological declaration needed to become a member of the church and share in its fellowship; the widest definition of the Free Pew. It is a spiritual discipline to maintain the Free Pew because it is terribly difficult to uphold, not to judge others by their theological beliefs, and even more difficult in a day when religion is almost completely swallowed up by political pronouncements and ideologies; in all communities, even and especially liberal religious ones. The Free Pew is a spiritual practice in conceiving of a new view of human nature. Human beings are created with the freedom the Free Pew acknowledges. Each person is a differentiated and free self, “possesses the self,” is a living instance of individuality. We don’t create the freedom the Free Pew represents, and it is this part that is hardest to understand. Human nature is created free, individuals possess an inherently emancipated individuality, a differentiated self-interest, and this is what the Free Pew symbolizes. Easy to describe, but difficult to maintain and understand.

The Free Pulpit’s aim also concerns freedom, but unlike its compliment, it is as difficult to explain as it is to understand and maintain. It is maintained as a socially created arrangement. It is freedom we create in time. It does not mean the free access of the pulpit by anyone, that the pulpit is the “Open Mike at the Improv,” but that the pulpit is guarded by the social arrangement of the covenanted community. It does not mean that the pulpit is this century’s version of the 19^{th century Lyceum, where individuals “learn” to speak publicly and organize thoughts coherently. The pulpit “becomes free” through the bond established between a spiritual community and an individual called to serve as that community’s spiritual leader; an individual who must endeavor to lead by understanding what the Free Church tradition is and endeavor to have his or her life shaped by its disciplines. The spiritual community itself maintains the Free Pulpit by guarding its access through lending it only to one who through a mutually agreed upon calling, “walks” with that community. And, finally, the Free Pulpit doesn’t mean a person can say anything from it that he wants. That’s the most common misunderstanding of the Free Pulpit. It’s often confused with license, such that someone might mistakenly retort, “If a person can’t say anything from the pulpit it’s not free.”}

A pulpit is free because it is the product of an agreement, a social arrangement between two parties: a spiritual community and a particular individual, in our tradition, a church and a minister. A pulpit isn’t free because anyone can step into it or because it’s the place where anyone can experiment with their public voice. And a pulpit isn’t free because anything can be said from it, because that can be done from any pulpit. I’ve heard it said in contrast that you can’t say anything from pulpits in other churches without severe consequences; meaning, of course, that saying anything doctrinally blasphemous from an orthodox, creedal Christian church’s pulpit will have consequences for the speaker. But, there are consequences in every pulpit when anything is said. Freedom doesn’t mean the absence of consequences. The Free Pulpit is not built on license. Freedom is the yield of a bond of affection. So a Free Pulpit is free because there exists a bond of affection between a spiritual community and a minister; a covenant that includes love and judgment. From this affection freedom can grow from this mutuality and obligation into a possibility larger than our individual beliefs, our narrow self-interests, a Spirit that is liberated when together we aspire to and are called by an affection larger than any one of us.

That’s why I couldn’t title this sermon, “We Now Live in a Racist State.” The Proposal represents a disagreement; and that the Proposal has passed represents only that this disagreement endures. To give this sermon a provocative title would have added to the political posturing and polarity that drowns out deliberation and reason. It would have betrayed the freedom rooted in the bond of affection that comprises our humanity and makes us free, by denying there are good people on both sides. But, the disagreement does endure, make no mistake about that. And we need to understand why it does.

We do not live a color blind existence. Human beings never have. Skin color has always been a noticeable feature distinguishing individuals. We do not live in a color blind culture. Our culture was formed in a cauldron of color, red people marked off from brown people marked off from white people marked off from yellow people marked off from black people. Racism marked our country’s origins and skin color has a peculiar history to us such that it has become a legacy we bear and a history we need actively to redeem.

The advent of America yielded two contradictions, one philosophical and the other practical. It contained these when it was formed in liberty and equality with some in chains and others unable to vote. America is a long experiment in reconciling contradictions through realizing what human nature is, and enlarging freedom as our conceptions of human nature expand.

When French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville traveled through America in 1831 at the age of 25, his observations were enduring about who we are and what we aspire to become. He traveled as far west as our own state, and as far south as New Orleans. He interviewed lawyers, bankers, settlers, Presidents, and even met with the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. His curiosity was that we had pegged ourselves as a New World, and indeed that is what he found. Old World Europe’s assumptions were turned upside down at their most basic level. The American political experiment in ordered liberty wrought a new understanding of human nature itself. We are the result not of the wrenching upheaval of societal revolt as in old Europe, but of something self evident: “they are born equal, instead of becoming so,” de Tocqueville wrote. We are the inherent promise of individual personality over against the power of social monoliths like the church and the state. We are where individual rights are recognized as having an ontological reality. We are where individuals, and not social constructs like governments and churches, are the creations of God.

But we have never quite believed it enough to devote ourselves to it. We did not believe enough that ot all were “born equal,” and history has borne out that some had to “become so.” We didn’t quite believe in it with devotion when our country was founded, otherwise women would have been able to vote and the chains of slaves would have been removed. And because we did not quite believe it when we began, our unbelief was carried throughout the generations. We still do not quite believe it today; that human nature is created equal and in freedom. The self-interest that marks us off as individuals also distorts our understandings of human nature itself. We tend to give our interests and our attention to those we deem like us in look or act or by locale or belief.

You see, the Free Pew is symbolic that all souls are created equal. And it’s easy to describe. It’s even easy to say you believe in it, in the same way that its easy to say you believe in the rights of all. But it is harder to maintain and understand and devote your life to it and to demand that a society conform to this radically new view of free human being.

At our country’s beginning our unbelief created this contradiction, and yielded another. When slavery was throughout the world going out of fashion, our country was conceived in such a way that gradually we became a culture of it. We were transformed from a society with slaves into a slave society. Our social agreement created freedom which we then instituted in such a manner that it was denied to a significant portion of our people. It was an “institutionalized contradiction.” It was curious that skin color did not of itself illustrate this “institutional contradiction,” determine who was a slave and who was free. Some black men were free and others were not; some, human beings and others, not. Lincoln observed the peculiar institutionalizing of the contradiction that transformed us into a slave society, when he asked how a slave could be governed when that individual’s consent was not recognized by a government whose first principle was to protect it as a divinely endowed characteristic of human nature:

“And yet again, there are in the United States and territories, including the District of Columbia, 433,643 free blacks. At $500 per head they are worth over two hundred millions of dollars. How comes this vast amount of property to be running about without owners? We do not see free horses or free cattle running at large. How is this? All these free blacks are the descendants of slaves, or have been slaves themselves, and they would be slaves now, but for SOMETHING which has operated on their white owners, inducing them, at vast pecuniary sacrifices, to liberate them. What is that SOMETHING? Is there any mistaking it? In all these cases it is your sense of justice, and human sympathy, continually telling you, that the poor Negro has some natural right to himself.”

Our institutions were created in a reality where white men designated women as politically inferior and enslaved some black men and women and not others. The covenant, the bond of affection amongst human beings from which freedom gains shape and substance, was not created deep enough or wide enough to encompass all when it first appeared. And it is still not deep or wide enough today, when poverty and want and the lack of opportunity burdens so many. And that diminishment of the bond of affection necessary for freedom to flourish was built into the institutions that carry that freedom forward to succeeding generations. When that bond of affection is liberated then will our institutions be liberated as well, for it is bonds of affection that engender a devotion in the heart of human being such that freedom can fulfill creation. That the White House itself was built using slave labor is symbolic of this deep American unwillingness to believe in the new philosophical revelation we represent. It is the symbol that our unbelief carries with it incomplete affection. Our unbelief will have been redeemed only when there is no longer any one who remembers burly white men pointing out drinking fountains with signs designating colored and white, and which in reality deliver the clear and living waters the Lord created and human love and justice can extend.

The disagreement endures, and we cannot be naïve about either where we have come from or what we ultimately represent; what has been denied in previous generations and what we are called to redeem. And we cannot turn our back on a devotion to increase the bonds of affection that lie beneath human difference. It is these bonds of affection, this covenant we have with Being itself, that will create in human beings the devotion necessary to bring about liberty and justice for all. As it is with our own Free Pulpit, so to is it in our Republic. Standing in Independence Hall over a century ago, when this contradiction at the center of our country and in the heart of human being had exploded into warfare, Abraham Lincoln declared that it was ”that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men.”

The weight has not yet been lifted. But I am a man of faith.

The human impulse is great to declare that equality exists when it does not; liberty and justice are complete when they are partial; the experiment is over and done when it has just begun. The human impulse is great to say that what God has created has been already completed. But the weight has not yet been lifted. The experiment continues because equality of opportunity does not yet exist. Poverty and Want and Hopelessness endure because Liberty and Justice are not yet finished. The Kingdom of God has not yet been built with our hands and in our hearts. Jesus said that The Kingdom of God is at hand. He did not say that it is finished. He offered the woman at the well living water so that she would no longer thirst, but she did not understand what was being offered.

This glorious experiment, begun with the idea that God has created us all equal, is not over and is not done. We have not yet been able to fulfill in America what God has created in us. We still do not yet believe. The weight has not yet been lifted.

But I am a man of faith that what God created we can complete. My faith is not in politics, nor in my politics. My faith is that men and women, conservative and liberal, will one day tire of bringing the rancor and divisiveness of the world into their spiritual communities, politicizing them into ideological entities; and, instead, will devote themselves to the bonds of affection that is religion at its best, and to extending that affection into the world in a unity and freedom of the Spirit. It is not inevitable. But, it is possible. The weight can be lifted. And one day, together, our disagreements will fall away and dissolve into a bond of affection that will satisfy the thirst of all souls.

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

AMEN.