UUSC Justice Weekend: Drumbeat For Darfur

Rev. Mark Stringer

First Unitarian Church of Des Moines

March 24 and 25, 2007

 

“You may never know what results come of your action, but if you do nothing there will be no result.”– Mahatma Gandhi

 

Call to Gather Adaptation of “The Task of the Religious Community”
by Mark Morrison-Reed

 

Welcome to your church.

As we gather today we remind ourselves that the central task of a church like ours is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all. 
There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others. 
Once felt, it inspires us to act for justice.

It is the church that assures us that we are not struggling for justice on our own, but as members of a larger community. 
The religious community is essential,
for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen,
and our strength too limited to do all that must be done. 
Together, our vision widens and our strength is renewed.

It is good to be together this day.

 

Pulpit Editorial by Diane Shelby Churchill

 

I first became involved with the UUSC during this year’s “Guest At Your Table” fundraiser and a few weeks later, I worked at our postcards for justice table during coffee time between services.  The more I heard and read about the UUSC,  the more I became interested in its rich history and the continuing human rights and social justice advocacy and action the USSC has been involved in around the world.

 

 You see, at nearly age 60, I was part of the anti-Viet Nam generation.  I was active in woman’s rights, human rights issues, anti-war protests, animal rights issues, and worked on Bobby Kennedy’s campaign. I really thought we could change the world.

 

 Of course, a long the way life happened, and I became less and less active and more of an arm-chair activist.  At 60 approaching quickly, I still believe we can change the world…one person at a time.  And the UUSC has given me a new opportunity to get involved.

 

I am very excited about my membership and joining Darcie Vandergrift as the new Co-Chair of the local chapter of the UUSC.  My daughter, Alissa Churchill, who is 16, has also become a member.  I am proud of her for taking an interest in the work of the UUSC and encourage all of the high school and college youth and young adults at First Unitarian to get involved.

 

Today, we join with UU congregations nationwide to observe Justice Sunday. 

 

 Each year, the national Unitarian Universalist Service Committee chooses a social justice issue for us to learn about and act on.   The work of the UUSC began over 65 years ago, when our founders went to Europe and rescued victims of Nazi persecution.  Today, as an independent human rights organization, the UUSC works at home and abroad to bring our seven principles alive in the world.

 

The UUSC defends labor rights through supporting living wage movements around the world.  We also work in partnership with organizations to secure the right to water for everyone – here and  abroad.  Through the STOP campaign, the UUSC works to end US sponsored torture; this is one of the many works in the area of defending civil liberty.

 

In disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, the UUSC draws on donations to help those often excluded from relief due to inequalities created by class, race, gender, religion or political beliefs. 

 

 None of this work is done alone, but in partnerships with local organizations around the world.  When we act in our church in solidarity with the UUSC, we join together to build our UU identity, walk together on our own spiritual journeys, and bring the world as it is closer to the world we want to see.  We can change the world through UUSC.

The generous support of individual Unitarian Universalists and congregations make all of this work possible.

 

 Our congregation’s UUSC chapter is active and growing.  In 2006, our congregation was recognized for the first time in many years as being in “right relationship” with the UUSC through our membership and contributions.

 

 We have some dreams that we want you to be a part of:

 

First, to develop our congregation’s voice for justice, we invite you to develop a spiritual practice of participation.  Write a letter each month at our ‘Postcards For Justice’ table or in your home on an urgent issue … today we will write our senators urging them to act against the genocide in Darfur.

 

Second, consider becoming an annual member of the UUSC.  Members and supporters strengthen our influence in the United States and abroad as we advocate for justice and confront oppressive power structures.  Right now, about ten percent of our congregation are members; when we reach the level of 25%, First Unitarian of Des Moines will receive national recognition for this achievement.

 

Third, the UUSC is a great way to meet people interested in justice issues.  Volunteers in this church range in age from nine to 89 – they promote Guest at Your Table in December, staff the Postcards for Justice Table, and help us plan as we expand work within our church. 

 

And finally, we plan a “Justice Works” program at First Unitarian.  The JustWorks program puts human rights tool to work in a hands-on experience.  At UUSC, action and advocacy have been essential tools for advancing human rights and social justice around the world. People know what the problems are, but they sometimes need help with the solutions. Just Works camps are short-term projects that help volunteers examine and understand the causes and damaging effects of injustice.  Participants work directly with people in the communities they serve, experiencing social justice struggles first hand. Volunteers are taught advocacy skills to address issues of poverty, discrimination, and racism. The JustWorks experiential learning program is an important element in UUSC’s mission to advance justice and protect human rights in the U.S. and around the world.  Watch for more information about First Unitarian’s participation in the JustWorks program.

 

We invite you to join us and 40,000 others across the nation to advance human rights and social justice around the world.  Yes we can change the world … one person at a time.  Thank you.

 

Introducing the Theme      Rev. Mark Stringer

The services this weekend are devoted to growing our congregation’s understanding of and interest in the work of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, and specifically this year’s Justice Weekend subject: Drumbeat for Darfur.

 

Darfur is a region in western Sudan about the size of Texas and is home to many different ethnic groups that are both Africans and Arabs, farmers and nomads.

 

At the risk of over-simplifying the ethnic differences of the population of Darfur, the Arab people of the region have been nomadic herders and the African people have been farmers and shepherds.  In the past, even though the Darfur region has historically received minimal resources for education, health and development, the people have found ways to share the resources upon which they depend and have mostly resolved disagreements around land and water.  However, as the desert of the region has grown, swallowing farmland and further limiting resources, conflicts between the different groups have become more frequent and violent.

 

Over the past few years, the Sudanese government, dominated by its President General Omar al-Bashir’s Arab elite party, has helped to fracture whatever balance of power that had existed by arming certain government-loyal militia groups, leaving the militia’s counterparts to feel increasingly at risk.

 

When, in January of 2003, two armed rebel groups went on the attack in a attempt to compel the government of Sudan to address underdevelopment and the political marginalization of the region, the government responded to the rebels’ demands for equality and protection by mobilizing nomadic groups, most notably the Janjaweed militia, and actually having the Sudanese military standing by providing cover as these groups have decimated entire villages of those with the same ethnicity as the rebels.

 

Survivors of these attacks tell similar stories:  The Janjaweed appear in a village, burn houses and fields, slaughter livestock, and brutally murder the men and boys.   Even more appalling have been the ways in which the Janjaweed have been specifically targeting women and girls, using rape as a weapon of war.  Even in camps, the women and girls remain vulnerable because they must seek firewood outside camp boundaries.

 

In 2004 the African Union deployed forces in an attempt to stop the carnage, but these troops are far too few to be effective and have no clear mandate to protect civilians.  The international community has mostly chosen to ignore this massacre, and other than the United States, has failed to provide adequate funding for the survivors now in camps.  A Darfur Peace Agreement was brokered last May between the government and one of the rebel groups; however the components of that agreement have been ignored and the violence has actually increased.  Last August, the UN’s top humanitarian official declared that the situation in Darfur had gone from “real bad to catastrophic.”

 

Indeed, over a three-year period, this conflict has seen more than 400,000 people killed and more than 2 million people forced to flee their homes and live in displaced-persons camps elsewhere in Sudan or in the neighboring country of Chad.  More than 3.5 million men, women and children in this region are now completely reliant on international aid for survival.  To put this number into perspective, consider it is around 500,000 more people than who live in the entire state of Iowa. It is commonly agreed that not since the Rwandan genocide of 1994 has the world seen such a calculated campaign of displacement, starvation, rape and mass slaughter.

 

Food, water, shelter and health care are all in short supply.  Education, understandably, is mostly an afterthought.  Due to the government’s complicity in this genocide, no place is safe.  Even displacement camps are raided.  Near constant fighting and insecurity make the humanitarian work that is so desperately needed difficult, if not impossible.  While this genocidal war has made Darfurians dependent on aid, they continue to hope for a better tomorrow and are waiting for the world to take notice of their suffering and to help.

 

I’ll admit that the pain, suffering and death being experienced by the people of Darfur on a daily basis have mostly escaped my notice.  In preparing for this service, I have been forced to face some harsh realities and to see how my lack of awareness has kept me from taking even the most simple steps of action that, when added with the actions of others around the world, could help improve the lives of literally millions of my fellow human beings.  Today’s service is focused on giving us all the means to learn and think about Darfur so that we might be moved to take action…even the most simple action.  For as Ghandi said, “You may never know what results come of your action, but if you do nothing there will be no result.”

 

I acknowledge that it can be difficult to think of the suffering of those who we do not see…suffering that far exceeds what most of us will ever know…suffering that transcends what our imaginations can even conceive. 

 

But beneath the differences of culture and geography between us and the people of Darfur, there lies the simple fact that each of the people caught up in this conflict are human beings.  When each of us can grow our imaginative capacity to experience the world through their eyes, no matter how foreign that world may seem, we cannot help but feel our hearts stirred to take action on their behalf. 

 

At the heart of any work we might do for justice, I think, is the determination (or grace) to grow our imaginative capacity to realize that all of our sisters and brothers on this planet are far more similar than different…and that what happens to any one of us, in a sense, happens to us all.

 

As a means to grow this kind of imaginative capacity in her students, a middle school teacher at Chicago’s Elm Place School, created a paper doll project. Their goal is to send more than 400,000  decorated paper dolls representing the lives lost due to the genocide in Darfur to their senator Barack Obama in hopes of demonstrating to him their belief that something needs to be done to stop this atrocity. At a service in January, Joan McDonald described this project for us and set out with those who attended the service, and later our children in religious education, to lend our hands (and dolls) to the project. The dolls that were made are hanging on the south wall of the auditorium and will soon be sent to Elm Place School to become part of a larger chain of dolls. 

 

Our meditation time today will include another way to expand our imaginative capacity to think about the people of Darfur and to relate their own suffering to our lives.  First we will begin with a meditation by the international activist, Anwar Fazal, entitled “We Are One”.

 

Following his words we will share a time of silence that will be punctuated by the sound of a drum.  If we were to beat the drum one time for each life lost due to the violence in Darfur since 2003, this service would have to go day and night for more than three weeks.  Therefore, each time a drumbeat is sounded will represent ten thousand lives. 

 

In each sound of the drum, then, I invite you to hear represented the heartbeats of ten thousand men, women and children…heartbeats that are no more.

 

I invite you to join me now in a time of meditation, reflection, or prayer.

 

Meditation

“We all drink from one water

We all breathe from one air

We rise from one ocean

And we live under one sky

 

Remember

We are one

 

The newborn baby cries the same

The laughter of children is universal

Everyone’s blood is red

And our hearts beat the same song

 

Remember

We are one

 

We are all brothers and sisters

Only one family, only one earth

Together we live

And together we die

 

Remember

We are one

 

Peace be on you

Brothers and Sisters

Peace be on you.” 

 

Silence     

 

40 Drumbeats 

 

Reading    “Good People” by W.S. Merwin

 

From the kindness of my parents 

I suppose it was that I held 

that belief about suffering 

 

imagining that if only 

it could come to the attention 

of any person with normal 

feelings certainly anyone 

literate who might have gone 

 

to college they would comprehend 

pain when it went on before them 

and would do something about it 

whenever they saw it happen 

in the time of pain the present 

they would try to stop the bleeding 

for example with their own hands 

 

but it escapes their attention 

or there may be reasons for it 

the victims under the blankets 

the meat counters the maimed children 

the animals the animals 

staring from the end of the world

 

Sermon

I’ve had to face up to something this past week as I have sifted through the descriptions of the atrocities being committed in Darfur and the shameful way the international community has responded by mostly not responding.  I’ve had to acknowledge that I have been complicit in the crime of this non-response because, though I have heard the words genocide and Darfur mentioned together dozens of times over the past few years, I have chosen to turn away.  Turning away is perhaps the wrong way to frame what I have done.  To turn away implies that I turned toward…and again, I have not done so…at least not until I began preparing for this service.

 

But choosing to pay attention can seem to create another problem.  Sometimes turning toward seemingly hopeless situations like the conflict in Darfur, paying attention to the suffering of millions of people thousands of miles away, among a population most of us will never experience beyond a newspaper article or a tv news report, may feel like self-inflicted mental abuse.  We may not believe we have the mental or emotional capacity to hear more stories of suffering.  It’s true, here in one of the world’s most prosperous and privileged nations, we can convince ourselves that bad news fatigue is something to fear…or avoid.  Don’t bother us with another piece of bad news.  We already have enough to go around.

 

But, as playwright and activist Tony Kushner has put it, “our despair is a lie we are telling ourselves.”  The reality is that in most every period of human history, it has been the people, the ordinary folks like you and me, who have set aside time (even, and usually, in the midst of busy lives) to do the work of political action, to stand up for those without a voice, to be present to their own belief that the world does not have to be obliterated by injustice…and that each step that can be taken toward a better way, no matter how small, is a step worth taking.  And the world has been changed because of their steps.[1]

 

Our despair is a lie we are telling ourselves.

 

Why do we despair? Our little actions won’t change things, we say.  There is just too much evil to resist, too much injustice to overcome.  I have definitely spent much of my life in this camp…the camp of “why bother?”

 

But I am learning through my own attempts at justice work, meager though they may be, that to allow my voice of negativity or hopelessness to reign supreme is to place my focus in the wrong place.  The point, I am learning, is not to only do those things that will bring the causes I support to certain victory.  The point is to do the things that I must do to preserve my own integrity…my own soul…regardless of the outcome.  Along these lines, Thomas Merton, the 20^th century Catholic mystic and social activist suggested that the purpose of action should not be dependent on expectation of results.  He wrote, “You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.”  But, he pointed out, when we focus less on results and more on the “truth of the work itself” we end up struggling less for ideas and more for people.  “In the end,” he wrote, “it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”[2]

 

Each of us can get caught up in our own individual challenges and suffering and miss the opportunities we do have to relieve the suffering of those who may be even more desperate than we are, even when those people are halfway across the world. But time and time again, those who have been deepest in the trenches of justice work even amidst their own problems and challenges, report that they have emerged from those trenches not depleted but renewed and energized by the realization that any action taken on behalf of our sisters and brothers, is, in fact, an action we take on behalf of ourselves…on behalf of our own humanity.  Simply put, any action we can take to help promote or preserve the inherent worth and dignity of others is an action that effectively reaffirms our own inherent worth and dignity.  Or, as our fellow church member Mary Ellen Neal used to say about her justice work:  I am doing this for me.

 

Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright and political activist, articulated the importance of action without assurance of success when he wrote, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”

 

I feel safe to say that none of us can look at what is happening in Darfur and claim that genocide makes sense.  So any hope that we can muster for Darfur must be directly tied to what we can do to remind ourselves that we are in fact, by nature of being human, in relationship with the people there…and therefore we are called to do what we can to bring some sanity to an insane situation.

 

As a member of the UUSC, I’m grateful that the Drumbeat for Darfur campaign is responding to the crisis by

•pressuring the White House, Congress and the UN to make Darfur a higher priority

•Advocating that all sides respect the human rights of the civilians in the conflict.

•Demanding an end to the rape of women and girls in Darfur

•Calling for a UN force to provide protection in Darfur

 

At the same time, the UUSC’s on-the-ground programming is supporting work for the protection of displaced women in camps, including improving access to health care and counseling for those who have been raped.

 

What can we do? The UUSC recommends the following steps so that the media and policymakers can’t easily ignore what is happening:

•We can donate to the UUSC’s Darfur Relief Fund which supports the work with displaced women

•We can write letters to the editor and to our elected representatives.  Today, UUSC members in our own congregation will have a postcard writing table so that we can urge Senators Grassely and Harkin to support the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act which, despite being passed last year, has not been implemented.

•And another small step we can take is to wear a green UUSC ribbon like the one I have on.  Take one on your way out the back door of the auditorium today.

 

No matter what steps we take to more fully understand and engage ourselves in the situation in Darfur, I believe we will move that much closer to a more sure sense of ourselves as agents of change…not only change to improve the lives of others…but change in our own lives and understandings of what it means to be human.  And we will move that much closer to the hope that really matters, the hope that is invested in preserving the “most precious of human ethical possibilities: life-affirming and life-giving openness to others”[3] and the relationships we can foster as a result.

 

May it be so.  For the people of Darfur…and for ourselves.

 

Unison Closing Reading #457
(Edward Everett Hale)

I am only one

But still I am one.

I cannot do everything,

But still I can do something.

And because I cannot do everything

I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.