The Other Side of Route Two, Redux
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- Created on Sunday, 13 March 2011 01:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
{player 2011-03-13-9am-sermon.mp3}
“For those of us living at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
“For those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice
For those of us who were imprinted with fear
Like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
Learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
“For by this weapon, this illusion of some safety to be found –
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us.
For all of us
this instant and this triumph – we were never meant to survive.
“And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain
When the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning
And when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed
But when we are silent we are still afraid.
“So it is better to speak
Remembering we were never meant to survive.”
Audre Lorde
In this my final lap, my last year before retirement, I have been lifting up a few of the sermons I’ve preached here over the years, and today is no different. Today I am remembering a sermon I preached here in October of 1999, and it is the sermon, hands down, that has received as much attention as any outside of First Parish; it has been published in more than one collection of sermons. I know that many of you remember it. It is a sermon about class, and it is entitled “The Other Side of Route Two.”
And, as you listen, remember I preached this sermon in 1999, and there was no Jericho Road Project; we had not yet done City Year projects; our ties to the UU Urban Ministry were not as strong. So, I thank you for listening then, and for moving First Parish some big steps along the road to a justice-seeking congregation, nearly twelve years later. But we have not finished. We are not yet there. But these words were heard, if not welcomed.
I want to talk to you about class, about who’s up and who’s down, about who’s got it and who hasn’t, about blue collar and white collar, about Concord and Maynard, about Acton and Chelmsford, about Bedford and Billerica, about who’s in and who’s out.
“And when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed
But when we are silent we are still afraid.
So it is better to speak
Remembering we were never meant to survive.”
My Dad was, in this chronological order, the owner of a grain store, a traveling salesman, a car salesman, a plumber, a teacher at night in a vocational high school, a clerk in a hardware store, unemployed, a worker for the state highway department, negotiating the taking of property by eminent domain. My mother was a registered nurse. My father’s father owned a grocery store and a grain store. My mother’s father worked in a mill, making wood products. Elizabeth’s father was a stone cutter, as was his father before him. I went to a public high school. I went to the state university. I grew up in Maine, and only a tourist could like the slogan that greets us on the Maine Turnpike, “Maine: the Way Life Should Be.” There’s a great deal of poverty somewhere on the other side of Kennebunk.
My roots are blue collar. I want you to know that. That’s why I’ve given you my pedigree. I served a decidedly blue collar congregation in Bangor, Maine, before applying for a job with the Unitarian Universalist Association in Boston where my job title gave me access to the white wine and brie crowd. It’s been a ride since then. I often have to pinch myself. Sometimes I feel like a fraud. If I weren’t the Senior Minister of the First Parish in Concord, Massachusetts, would you talk to me? One of my nastier colleagues, when I was called to this pulpit, told me incorrectly that I was the first non-Harvard educated minister this church has had. Not that I remember. “Return to no person evil for evil.”
I’m earning now what my father would have taken ten years to earn. I live in a house that cost twenty-five times what my parents paid for their home in 1957. When a house would come on the market in Bangor in the early 1980’s for more than $100,000, the natives would drive by it, knowing for sure that someone moving from “out of state” would purchase it. If my children had graduated from Bangor High School instead of Concord Carlisle Regional High School, the chances are slim to none they would have gone on to Colby and Carleton, all their intelligence and talents notwithstanding.
You are thinking I should be down on my knees every night, with tears streaming down my face, giving thanks. Maybe I should. This is where the organ starts playing “I’m in the money.” But, by Concord standards, I’m not even close. When we moved here in 1988, I had some parishioners tell me how sorry they were I had to live on the other side of route two. [Mattison Drive and the old Thoreau Club property hadn’t been developed yet.] When we moved here in 1988 and you paid me a salary I had never dreamed of making, I ended up visiting a parishioner in those first few weeks at Emerson’s Emergency Room. Posted prominently on the wall was a mandated notification that my income level fell within the guidelines under which I was entitled to free care.
“And when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed
But when we are silent we are still afraid.
So it is better to speak
Remembering we were never meant to survive.”
If you are still listening, and you are thinking that you come from the same background, too, and you find it amazing, I am grateful for your company. If you are still listening, and you have inherited or you have earned a kajillion dollars, and you have all the trappings to go with it, and you believe you are entitled to all this, I must tell you it is all a house of cards. Maybe, in your case, a big house of cards. This is a sermon about justice. This is a sermon about class. This is a sermon about who’s in and who’s out. I’m told Concord is in and Maynard is out. Monument Street is in. Bedford Court is out. Newbury Court is in. Everett Gardens is out.
When Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God,” I think he was telling us it’s all a big house of cards. I think he was telling us we’re skating on thin ice. I think he was telling us we don’t get it. Or this letter of James, found toward the end of the Christian Bible, “What good is it if you have faith but do not have works? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks food, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”
“If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day,” Henry David Thoreau wrote, “he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off these woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.” And he goes on. “There is a course and boisterous money-making fellow in the outskirts of our town [and Thoreau is writing in our town in 1863], who is going to build a wall under the hill along the edge of his meadow. The powers have put this into his head to keep him out of mischief… The result will be that he will perhaps get some more money to hoard, and leave for his heirs to spend foolishly… Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many more are no more worthily employed now.”
This is a sermon about class, about who’s in and who’s out. We’re in. And the soul of this town is at stake. And by this town, I mean Acton, too, and Lincoln, and maybe where you live. I think we’re living in fear. And that’s how we’ll lose our souls. That’s where we get stuck in the needle’s eye. We’ve got it, and we don’t want anyone to take it away from us. Have you ever been in a gated community? I took a cab once from the Houston airport to a private home in a gated neighborhood. A private security vehicle followed that cab in and out.
We are not far from this. We’re just piling more and more things on our kids. We buy an expensive car and put an alarm on it. We build bigger houses and put security systems on them, put a guard house at the end of the road, fear the stranger. God forbid if someone looks or acts different. Please don’t say a gay person is your best friend. Please don’t say a person of color is your best friend. I am talking about a whole system in our society that needs our attention, that cries out for our attention.
These boundaries between towns are only lines on a map. If we are not part of a solution to the neglect of housing and education and justice in Roxbury, say, our style of life and our things are going to be a beacon of envy, and we will need a legion of security people to keep the hungry and the naked and the neglected from our doorsteps. And that’s only the self-serving rationale for action.
But remember what we say: “Strengthen the fainthearted. Support the weak. Help the suffering. Honor all beings.” Remember what the writer of James said, “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” Indeed. And the strengthening and the supporting and the helping and the honoring go both ways. The great lie is that there is a helper and the helped. The great lie is that we have it and they don’t. If the “it” is food and shelter and education, we do have it. If the “it” is love and spiritual depth and faith and kindness, who can tell? James says we can’t tell – on the surface.
You know my love for the people of Transylvania, for the congregation of our partner church there in Szekeleykeresztur, for the minister Jozsef and his wife Anna and his children, Jozsef and Zsuzsanna. Zsuzsanna, in the year she lived with us, would marvel at this town, its homes, its schools, its cars. It was seductive. But she did not bend. She did not break. She knew that the home to which she would return had riches she rarely saw here. She never tired of asking me how many families lived in this house or that, and I would always say “one, Zsuzsanna, just one.”
We have much to learn. And you will notice that I have failed to come up with a ten-point list for survival. We were never meant to survive, the poet says. What were we meant to do, you are asking. That is what brings us together, our ongoing search for that answer. We were meant to live, not by things, but by the meaning of things. We were meant to live, not by fear, but with courage. We were meant to live, not to be safe, but to make a difference. We were meant to live, to help others live. Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the living of these days, for the living of these days.
That was my sermon, my plea, my prayer, so many years ago. I am here this morning to thank you, to thank so many of you, who took these words to heart, and helped us all to move forward in these last dozen years, to go out into the world, to make a difference. I thank all those who have made Jericho Road the institution it is. I thank the Social Action Community who have helped us continue to move from strength to strength. And, most of all, I thank Jenny who has helped move social justice forward in this congregation in remarkable ways. You have all been an inspiration to me.