Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Protests That Endure

Dr. Charlie Clements
April 15, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

Thank you, Jean and John, for that warm and personalized introduction. I am grateful for the invitation to be in this pulpit today. It is nice to be here in Palo Alto … not only because it’s snowing in Boston this weekend. In the earlier service Darcy had the “Red Class” share some of their hopes for the future. One of them wished for snow so she or he could have snow ball fight.

It reminded me of when I moved my family from Santa Fe to Boston three years ago to take the job at UUSC. Our first winter when the temperature dropped to minus twenty degrees, my daughter, then six, and my son, then eight, wondered aloud why we had moved to such a hostile environment? I explained that we were helping to fulfill an ancient prophecy, because locals believed that hell had to freeze over before the Red Sox could win the World Series. Fortunately, the Red Sox preserved my credibility!

I attended the first service this morning and afterwards told Dan Lion that following in his footsteps would be hard. I’m sure the minister who followed him in the 1970s felt the same way. What a privilege to meet and hear you Dan and what an honor for me to help celebrate this church’s 60^th anniversary. Given the title of my sermon and the history of this church, there was an incredible range of possible sermon topics today.

The title of my sermon comes from a statement by Wendell Berry. He once wrote that “protest that endures is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.” I am going to repeat that slowly. Protest that endures…is moved by a hope…far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities…in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”

It was very tempting to preach about your standoff with the state of California for refusing to sign the loyalty oath necessary to qualify for a tax-exemption. It is unlikely you would have engaged in violent overthrow of the government in Sacramento…that was the actual essence of the oath…that you would swear to not violently overthrow the state government. Led by Reverend Lion you understood that signing that oath would be the beginning of an acquiescence, which threatened your very heart and spirit. And thus, your protest — begun in 1952 and joined by five other Unitarian churches — endured until 1958, when the California State Supreme Court agreed with you.

As tempting as that was today is the day around the world when Jews remember the Holocaust. Today is Yom Hoshoah. And in 1947 this church like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations grew out of the ashes of the Holocaust.

And so knowing how over the years your protests have endured, understanding you have not acquiesced to that which would destroy your heart and spirit, I have chosen to preach about the genocide in Darfur today. I have wrestled with this topic and how to find the right words. I vowed to myself that I would not preach about it unless I could leave you uplifted…and we will only know if I succeed…by your actions in the days, weeks, and months.

I don’t think there is a more succinct description of what is happening in Sudan today than the words that Elie Wiesel spoke at an emergency summit in NYC almost three years ago.

Sudan has become today’s world capital of human pain, suffering and agony. There, one part of the population has been — and still is — subjected by another part, the dominating part, to humiliation, hunger and death. For a while, the so-called civilized world knew about it and preferred to look away. Now people know. And so they have no excuse for their passivity bordering on indifference…

… Now its horrors are shown on television screens and on front pages of influential publications. Congressional delegations, special envoys and humanitarian agencies send back or bring back horror-filled reports from the scene. A million human beings, young and old, have been uprooted, deported.

How can a citizen of a free country not pay attention? How can anyone, anywhere not feel outraged? How can a person, whether religious or secular, not be moved by compassion? And above all, how can anyone who remembers remain silent?

What has changed since he spoke those powerful words almost three years ago?

The numbers have changed. The number of people who have been ethnically cleansed from their homes and villages has now doubled from one to two million. Another significant change is that we no longer read about what our own State Department labeled genocide, either on the front pages of our newspapers, nor do we any longer see the horror on our television screens.

President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan has learned the lessons of ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ Thus, he has banned journalists. He has banned human rights monitors. Now he has even banned the very humanitarian workers, who used to staff many of the refugee camps in Darfur; Americans are not permitted outside a radius of twenty-five miles from Khartoum. The killing grounds and camps are hundreds of miles to the west.

If it wasn’t for the very determined and courageous reporting by Nicholas Kristof of the NYT, we would have few updates from Darfur. Bill Sinkford, President of the UUA, Atema Eclai, UUSC’s Program Director, and I delivered one from the refugee camps in Chad eighteen months ago. There, just across the border from Darfur, are crowded collections of plastic sheets, tattered cloth shelters, and mud structures in an incredibly inhospitable environment where 30,000 to 60,000 people hang onto life by their finger nails. I give that range of 30,000 because when we visited that was the population of one of the camps. At that time the humanitarian aid workers and visitors like us were on emergency alert — we were told to be prepared to evacuate on short notice… in other words keep your luggage within reach. A few months after we visited, that and other unprotected camps were attacked by the janjaweed and that particular camp has doubled in size to 60,000.

Janjaweed is the name given to the militias who identify as Arabs; they are largely pastoralists and herders. They have been armed by the government of Sudan and encouraged to take whatever they can plunder from other Sudanese, who identify themselves as Africans. They are mostly farmers. The janjaweed plunder land, animals, grains, water, women, and children. Desertification and drought has heightened the competition between the Arabs and the Africans for land and water. The Africans and Arabs are both Black and they are both Muslim. And the Africans have formed their own armed groups to fight for their survival.

Bill Sinkford and I sat with men, while Atema Eclai sat with women as they told us their stories …stories of pillage, rape, murder, and sometimes captivity. It was neither easy for them to tell nor for us to hear their accounts. We cried with them and we told them that we admired their courage. We thanked them for their willingness to relive this pain that was still so raw. We promised that we would bear witness by bringing their stories to America, where we would seek out hearts and spirits that would not acquiesce to genocide. And so I seek you out today.

In the United States there is a widespread and misguided belief that there is little or nothing that we can do about Darfur. I know that leads to a lot of despair and so we turn away from Darfur. We turn away from the suffering, because we don’t know how to fix it. Our lives are all overly full and we ask ourselves, “How can I find time for yet one more cause?” So we answer ourselves by deciding, “I’ll focus on something where I know I can make a difference.”

The way I am going to lift you up today is to insure that you leave church knowing without a doubt that you can do something about Darfur. I want you to believe that if you can give 10 or 15 minutes a week, you can make a difference. I want you to engage in protest that endures, because not to do so would be to acquiesce and that’s all evil needs to triumph. Omar al-Bashir and his janjaweed murderers are counting on us to be overwhelmed. They need us to feel helpless.

No matter how busy we are I believe that our default position the minimum we can do is remain well informed. Why is that? Being informed gives us the possibility of a moral response. You may recall last year that UUSCs founder, Waitstill Sharp, the Unitarian minister, and Martha, his wife, a social worker, were honored in Israel as “Righteous among the Nations.” This is a status awarded only to Gentiles who risked their life to save Jews during the Holocaust. Some 21,000 people have been awarded this title but until last summer only one had been American.

Martha and Waitstill plunged into Europe as WWII was breaking out. As others fled Europe, they rushed in armed only with their faith and determination to set up a relief and rescue operation, which by war’s end had helped 2,000 men, women, and children escape the Nazi terror.

In 1939 the American Unitarian Association approached sixteen ministers before they found one who would say yes to the mission to Czechoslovakia. Martha and Waitstill Sharp were aware of what was happening to Jews and others who opposed the Nazis, because they got first hand reports from another Unitarian couple that conducted fact-finding missions to Europe in 1937 and 1938. They would debrief for hours over dinner and hear reports about Unitaria, the largest Unitarian church in the world at that time in Prague. Being informed gave the Sharps the possibility of a moral choice.

And because Darfur is not on the front pages of our newspapers or on our television screens, we must seek out information on the Internet. Once a week I encourage you to turn to uusc.org, SaveDarfur.org, or other websitesfor to get an update what’s needed in advocacy. It doesn’t have to take long. If you sign up for UUSC’s Drumbeat for Darfur campaign at our website (www.uusc.org), we’ll automatically keep you up to date and alert you about urgent actions.

You can wear a bracelet like this. Let it be a reminder to talk to someone about Darfur or make a telephone call. I encourage people to develop a habit… get up, brush your teeth, and then call (202) 456-1111. You will be connected to a real White House operator, not a recording. You can tell the White House, “We want the world’s only super power to play a leadership role in ending the genocide in Darfur — now. President Bush did in it southern Sudan and now you can do it again in western Sudan.”

Many Americans are unaware that there was a similar civil war raging in the south of Sudan, a conflict that in a decade had taken two million lives, until enough evangelical Christians put pressure on the White House. President Bush helped broker a negotiation, which ended that protracted conflict.

You also need to know that about a year ago at this time President Omar al-Bashir blocked the supplies allowed into the refugee camps, so almost two million people’s already marginal existence was threatened by half rations. It was a test. Rallies were held around the world including Gold Gate Park, where I saw many of you, and we mobilized tens of thousands of calls to world leaders including Bush. We forced al Bashir to back down and humanitarian assistance began to flow again. He was counting on our doing nothing, but orchestrated and focused advocacy made the difference. It does work.

We don’t have the ability yet to force al-Bashir to accept U.N. peace keeping forces, but in September he did agree to allow the African Union monitoring forces to be strengthened with U.N. equipment. He has now reneged on that agreement and we need to help him keep his word.

We need to put economic pressure on the countries that aid and abet genocide. One of them is China and the way we pressure China here in Portland is that we ask individuals to divest from Fidelity, which has a half billion dollars worth of shares in PetroChina. PetroChina is one of two major Chinese oil companies that prop up al-Bashir’s government. Human Rights Watch estimates that 70% of Sudan’s oil revenues are used to purchase arms. If this church’s endowment or your personal retirement fund manager has Fidelity funds, we ask you to seek other investments and let the fund managers know why. Berkshire Hathaway is the other big offender and soon we’ll go after it.

Both Fidelity and say, “While we certainly empathize with your concerns, we have a legal and fiduciary responsibility as an investment company to provide the highest possible returns to our customers…” In other words, if we can profit on genocide, we are obliged to do so. That’s what companies said in the beginning of the anti-apartheid boycott of South Africa. Remember the colleges and universities used the slippery slope argument that they couldn’t possibly respond to this kind of social pressure lest it make them vulnerable to the every whimsical cause that came along? Well guess what, in June 2005 Stanford divested from Sudan, but many other universities have not.

The UUA has recently written to all of the ministers in the UUMA asking them to switch from one genocide-tainted Fidelity fund to a clean one in their retirement portfolios. We can send a signal to China and Sudan with Fidelity Out of Darfur.

Our tax dollars in other states are helping fund genocide. But you’ve taken the lead here in California tax dollars forcing the state to divest the retirement benefits of state employees from Sudan related investments. There are 22 million other Americans who we need to encourage about divestment. I testified week before last in the Massachusetts state legislature and we will soon pass a divestment bill for our own state pension fund.

We can widen the circle of people aware of what’s happening in Darfur by showing this documentary “Heroes of the Spirit.” Two Saturday’s ago I screened it for 150 college and university student leaders at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and then we screened it again here last night. You can buy one for $10 on our website and send it as a gift to a friend or family member. The 24 minute film is directed by Academy Award winning film maker Deborah Shaffer. It links the inspiring story of the Sharps actions in the Holocaust with our response to the situation in Darfur today.

Bill Schulz, the chairman of our board and now a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights at the Kennedy School at Harvard University, and I were recently in a gathering with Samantha Powers, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. In response to a question, Samantha pointed out that there had never been an organized movement to stop genocide… the other ones Biafra, Cambodia, Rwanda happened too quickly. We can all be part of this movement.

If we have no time for anything else, we can order a yard sign from Save Darfur.org and make a statement that every neighbor, every driver passing by will see. In Needham, Massachusetts there is a sign in every four or fifth yard. They, as a community, are making a statement. You can order yard signs from SaveDarfur.org. You can order a large banner that says Not on Our Watch.

And now I come back to the title of my sermon, “Protest that Endures.” Our protest must endure until enough of us find 15 minutes a week to Save Darfur. You have modeled the deepest and most hopeful lesson of our times: that we surely can transform the world around us with our actions and that our actions in turn will transform our own hearts and spirits.

Perhaps Atema Eclai, a Kenyan and UUSC’s Program Director, puts it most simply in “Heroes of the Spirit,” when she says, “Think of those who are suffering in Darfur today as your blood brothers and your blood sisters… and then act.” When enough of us think as she suggests, then we will halt this genocide in Darfur and know that never again has finally meant never again.

Congratulations of your 60th birthday… your protests over the years have endured and collectively you have preserved your hearts and spirits… whether it was civil liberties in the 1950s, civil rights in the 1960s, a woman’s right to choose in the 1970s, sanctuary and the wars in Central America in the 1980s, homelessness in the 1990s, or the war in Iraq at the turn of the millennium, you have not acquiesced. I thank you again for the opportunity to celebrate this anniversary.

I often close my sermon with some words from the Talmud, which were sent to me from the West Bank shortly after I had visited a pediatric hospital in Iraq just before the war began. They were reassuring then and are as appropriate today.

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Walk humbly now. Love mercy now. Do justly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

Amen.

 

Reading: All are Entitled to Live without Fear and Pain by Elie Wiesel
Remarks delivered three years ago at the Darfur Emergency Summit in New York City