Reading The Sower Luke 8:4-15

And when a great crowd came together and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable: "A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell along the path, and was trodden under foot, and the birds devoured it. And some fell on the rock; and as it grew up, it withered away, because had no moisture. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns grew with it and choked it. And some fell into good soil and grew, and yielded a hundredfold." As he said this, he called out, "All they who have ears to hear, let them hear."

And when his disciples asked him what this parable meant, he said, "To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but for others they are in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand. Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. The ones along the path are those who have heard; then the power of deception comes and takes away the word from their hearts that they may not believe and find freedom. And the ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy; but these have no root, they believe for a while and in time of temptation fall away. And as for what fell among the thorns, they are those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by the cares and the riches and the pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature. And as for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bring forth fruit with patience."

SERMON

Many Unitarian Universalists believe our congregations should look like America. We should have all races proportionately represented in a spiritual United Nations. Not only should our congregations look like America, so should every segment of society. We should strive to break down the barriers of race, class and means so all may have the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of the American dream These UUs look around our congregations with dismay seeing mostly tannish pink faces with nary a black or kinky hair to be seen and believe something is wrong with us and it needs to be fixed.

I have a whole lot of feelings about racial and cultural diversity having been a member of an inner city Unitarian church which continues to struggle long and hard with trying to integrate the congregation. I want to make very clear I would be very happy if this congregation looks like Port Charlotte. I am a strong supporter of the goal of increasing not only the diversity in this congregation but the acceptance and support for that diversity. I have seen the good that can come when a widely diverse congregation worships together. And I am painfully aware of the difficulties and possible pathologies involved. For even the most progressive minded person, growing into saying and thinking "we" and including people who are very different in ways we but dimly comprehend is a formidable challenge. Our ignorance, judgment and suspicion run very, very deep.

So rather than try to persuade you that racial and cultural diversity is a good thing, a bad thing, an impossible task, an improbable outcome, or a psychological and sociological conundrum, I thought I would do my best to present what I'm calling this morning, "rainbow thinking"; the thinking of the people who are pushing this agenda forward. I take the name from the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition. Rev. Jackson's thinking has a deep connection to the vision put forward at General Assembly this past June.

At the 1992 General Assembly, that year in Calgary Alberta, a resolution was passed "to affirm and support" a vision of a racially diverse and multicultural Unitarian Universalism, motivated by then president Schulz and Moderator Gulbrandsen's call to respond to "the reality of a racially diverse and multicultural global village." The resolution further directed that a task force be created to develop and implement a process to realize this vision. For the last four years, The Racial and Cultural Diversity Task Force created by this resolution has been working very hard on "developing and implementing". At each subsequent General Assembly the task force has presented a program as a way of sharing their work with us. At the 93 GA in Charlotte, North Carolina, Dr. Bill Jones, a professor here in Florida who did a Cluster meeting for us on the same subject recently, helped us begin to make an accurate analysis of racism. At the 94 GA in Fort Worth, Texas, Barbara Majors from Crossroads Ministries helped us begin to see the systemic nature of institutional racism and ways we participate in the system. Majors challenged us to move from being passively racist to actively anti-racist which became a theme for the Task Force. At the 95 GA in Spokane, Washington, Thandeka, an African American UU theologian, brought the themes of racism closer to us by presented a play portraying three GA attendees and their GA tour guide talking about attending the diversity day presentation, honestly showing their pro and con feelings about racial and cultural diversity.

Last year was the Task Force's final report and recommendations. The Task Force concluded "we need to collectively develop with our membership accurate analyses of racism, a common language and vision, along with resources and tools to create an institutional anti-oppressive, anti-racist, multicultural identity." They also concluded "an institutional desire to change (that's the leadership of the UUA) cannot be effective unless it is authentically embraced by our membership (that's you and me) and intentionally institutionalized (this is what we agree to do together)."

Being against racism has been a prominent theme in our history for a very long time. Back as far as 1784 Universalist Benjamin Rush was one of the founders of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery. In 1833 Unitarian Lydia Maria Child wrote "An Appeal in Favor of That Class of American called African." Many of the supporters of Abolition were drawn from Unitarian and Universalist churches. In 1909, the Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes was a founding member of the NAACP. In the 1960's many were actively involved in the civil rights movement, marching along side Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1965 March on Selma. I would venture to say that all efforts at ending racial discrimination have had Unitarian Universalist representation and participation. Our Principles and Purposes reflect our history. Our first principle honors "the inherent worth and dignity of all people." Our second principle directs us toward "justice, equity and compassion in human relations."

Over the course of all these years, our success has been decidedly mixed. Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed, an African American UU minister put it this way, "Our history in regard to racial justice is brave enough to make you proud, tragic enough to make you cry, and inept enough to make you laugh once the anger passes." To understand better his words and the struggles we have been through, it is helpful to look at the shadowy aspect of rainbow thinking. The highest ideals filtered through the imperfections of our egos sometimes warp the vision and can flip it in an unintended direction.

For some, rainbow thinking arises out of a sense of cultural guilt from being part of the white power establishment. It is very painful to honestly look at the kind of oppression of non-Anglo-Saxon Protestants done to protect the privilege white folks inherit. The men and women who founded Unitarianism were some of the Boston elite who profited handsomely by the slave trade. Today UUs hold many positions of power in our society and make policies which affect many lives. There is a strong urge to avoid feeling the pain of this oppression done in our name by our forefathers and foremothers in which we may still continue to participate and find some way to restore our tarnished self-image through our religious life.

A common knee jerk reaction to the desire for racial and cultural diversity is the urge to redecorate. "Why, if we want people of color in our congregation", so the thinking goes, "what we should do is lure them in singing a few spirituals, invite a gospel choir to perform, encourage members to invite people with the missing color, and mob them when they walk in the door and tell them how welcoming we are of people like you." Being the intelligent problem solvers we UUs are, we come up with clever ways to attract people of different races, sexual orientations, and cultural backgrounds to spruce the place up and keep it from looking too stoggy. These solutions may attempt to solve a visual problem without thinking deeply about how this feels if you are the person to be used as a congregational ornament. I doubt many would be attracted to a congregation that was courting them more for their skin color than their character. Clearly recruiting someone for a congregation based on the most superficial part of their identity, the melanin content of their skin, can have some serious problems associated with it.

After seeing the redecorating approach fail and seeing the error of that approach, some congregations go for the novelty approach. Having a congregation where everybody is similar isn't as stimulating and growth inducing as a congregation full of all different kinds of people. A diverse congregation helps to challenge one's stereotypes and prejudices providing an environment, a social laboratory if you will, to cleanse one's soul of hate. To constantly raise people's consciousness, these congregations celebrate all the diverse religious and cultural holidays which affirm all the minorities in the congregation, and try to adapt the worship format, meeting style, and power sharing arrangements to make sure every voice gets heard and no one is left out. While this can create the United Nations of spirituality and culture which may be fun and stimulating, it wreaks havoc with institutional identity and encourages pathological group processes as they try to include every voice in decision making encouraging factionalization..

The current rainbow thinking that comes out of the Task Force's final report is that we should become strong advocates of anti-racism both in our congregations and in our communities. I certainly agree UU congregations should become forces in their communities to combat insidious systemic racism which works at many levels to keep non-whites down. Because many of us are part of the power structure, we can use that power to try to dismantle systemic racism. We will then be putting our values into action. Upon seeing our values in action, the minorities will then flock into our congregations because we are fighting their battles for them and with them. We still retain our privilege and power of course, but now we are using it paternalistically for the good of others.

The intentions behind these kinds of rainbow thinking are honorable and even laudable. All the ways people oppress other people systemically is evil. There is much opportunity for spiritual gain in our congregations from greater racial and cultural diversity. This thinking, though, can easily flip into its shadowy aspect if our actions arise from self-serving desires and guilt inducing fears. As long as our actions to end systemic racism come from desired outcomes within our congregations, we will fail and fail in humiliating ways.

The deeply rooted and profound racial feelings we inherit unthinkingly from just about every culture in the world are not problems to be solved with just a little creative thinking. Far, far from it. And at the same time, as individuals and as a religious institution we can do a great deal to free ourselves from racism and bring more racial harmony to our communities. The work requires less to be done in our minds and more to be done in the fearful concealed emotions of which we are but dimly aware. I believe this work freeing ourselves and our culture from racism is tremendously good but turns shadowy when done for self-serving institutional purposes such as changing the demographics of our congregations.

One of our greatest teachers in regard to working against racism was one of the original rainbow thinkers, Jesus of Nazareth. He spent time with and held up for healing the lowest and most despised of Palestine mixing with the whores, the tax collectors and the lepers. He brought a message of salvation for all--not just for the privileged and the pure. If Jesus does come again, I can imagine him arguing for racial and cultural diversity at General Assembly but perhaps with a different spin.

I read for you the parable of the sower because I think within it is some important wisdom about how we should be going about racial and cultural diversity. A sower planting in his field reaches into his sack of seed and scatters it across the ground. In the scattering process, the seeds fall everywhere. Some fall on the path and are easily picked off by the birds. Others fall on rock and do not take root. Others are choked by weeds. And some fall on good soil and sprout returning as much as one hundred fold.

In the urban church I attended, the Unitarian Church of Oakland, California, the beautiful stained glass window in the front of the sanctuary depicts the biblical sower scattering his seed. It is a wonderful symbol of the way to envision advancing the work of racial and cultural diversity. As Jesus interprets the parable to his disciples, the seed is a symbol for the word of God, which the non-theists in the congregation can understand as that which is true. The word is scattered into the minds of women and men without discrimination. In some it is snatched away by the forces of deception. In others it brings excitement and joy but doesn't take root. In others it is choked by daily pleasures, cares and concerns which clutter our lives. But in some it takes root in an honest and good heart and grows with patience.

Our Unitarian Universalist message is good seed. But it only sprouts and grows in good soil. The temptation is to just spread that seed where the soil is thought to be good: the suburbs, areas of urban gentrification, university towns, where historically we have seen it will most likely take root. Yet the sower scatters the seed everywhere. Our message of the inherent worth and dignity of every person and the goodness at the center of all of our hearts isn't just for white folks. We must scatter our seed everywhere unrestrained by racial or cultural boundaries. And where it takes root, new congregations will spring up. There are liberal minded Latinos and Chicanos. There are many Humanist Russians. There may be free thinking Eskimos. We already have a congregation in Pakistan and one in the Philippines. The congregations which spring up may not have organ music, sing reworded Protestant hymns or have someone preaching from a pulpit quoting Emerson or Thoreau, but the core of what we believe about the sanctity of the individual will be there. If what we believe is good and true, it will find a home in a good and honest heart, whatever the language in which it is spoken, and return 100 fold. It will find a home on Harlem street corner as well as in Harvard square. We don't know for sure where our good seed, our life affirming truth, will take root, grow and blossom as we cannot see into the hearts of others. All we can do is freely plant and patiently wait and see what sprouts.

Although we are a small congregation, this sower does his best to scatter the seed all over Charlotte County. Our work with diversity here may have a racial component but at this time, I'm most preoccupied with accommodating the increasing age diversity and theological diversity amongst us. Any congregation's ability to handle diversity is limited and at best makes these changes slowly and incrementally building trust and understanding each step along the way.

Rainbow thinking properly used can assist us in moving past our prejudices and stereotypes as we help move our congregations and our world toward a rainbow connection which permits all peoples to live together in mutually affirming peace with justice for all. We will succeed if we live our principles in the world freely giving out our message to all. This probably isn't practical. This certainly isn't efficient. But it is authentic and not self-serving. It worked pretty well for Jesus, the sower of love in all hearts, and I expect it will work for us as well

Copyright (c) 1997 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.