Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth 
Sermon on Nonviolence, Hal Bertilson
January 12, 2003
In February 1930 Mohatma Gandhi retired to his headquarters along the Sabamarti River. For weeks he was alone in his Spartan office giving no hint of his thinking. Knowing that salt would be a significant symbol to the Indian people, he wrote the British viceroy that the civil disobedience would begin by challenging the British tax and monopoly on salt.
Thus began his 240 mile walk to the sea. Thousands joined the procession including police observers and dozens of journalists. Gandhi walked, gave speeches, and slept only four hours a day. He told Indians that we must not hate the British. They have not taken India from us. We have given India to them. He understood the British sense of fair play and was able to successfully use it to remove Indian consent to foreign rule.
In every speech he explained the power of nonviolent resistance. Gandhi said nonviolent refusal to cooperate with injustice—nonviolent refusal to cooperate with injustice--is the way to defeat it. On the march to the sea, Gandhi asked Indians to resign from their jobs in local government. He asked rhetorically why we should serve a foreign government.
On the twenty-fourth day of the walk, the marchers approached the sea. On April 6, Gandhi picked up a lump of salt. Thousands marched to the sea to break the salt law.
Gandhi had not yet been arrested. He visited seaside villages to make speeches. On May 4 Gandhi wrote to the British administrators that he would raid a local salt works. That led to the jailing of Gandhi. Gandhi was delighted.
The well known poet Sarajean Nidu (sp) stepped forward to lead the Indian followers of Gandhi. She instructed her “army” to not resist. She instructed them to not even raise their hands to ward off blows.
On May 15 Gandhi’s followers were attacked by the police with clubs resulting in fractured skulls and broken shoulders. The reports of police brutality by United Press reporter Glenn Miller was published in 2,000 newspapers and read in the United States Senate. By July more than 17,000 civil resisters had been arrested.
It is fitting as we approach Martin Luther King’s birthday, that we reflect on nonviolence.
Congressman John Lewis, in his book Walking with the Wind, describes returning to Nashville in the fall 1958 for his sophomore year at American Baptist College. Nashville felt like a different place. There was a sense of urgency that the civil rights movement demanded their involvement. This wasn’t even just an American movement anymore. Amazing changes were happening in Africa, where Ghana had won its independence and the black African liberation movement would soon sweep away centuries-old colonialism by Britain, Belgium, Portugal, and France. Freedom was stirring in Zaire, Somalia, Nigeria, and the Congo.
Each Sunday Lewis attended services at the First Colored Baptist Church to hear Reverend Kelly Miller Smith. Smith had come to First Baptist in 1951 with a degree from Howard University. In seven years he had established himself as a progressive force in Nashville. He offered his church as the staging area for the waves of student demonstrators who would eventually topple the segregated barriers of downtown Nashville.
A guest that Smith brought to Nashville was field secretary for a group called the Fellowship of Reconciliation—the same group that published a wildly popular comic book-style pamphlet titled Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, which explained the basics of passive resistance and nonviolent action as tools for desegregation. The pamphlet wound up being devoured by black college students across the South.
The idea of nonviolent direct action was at the root of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which actively opposed nuclear weapons testing and war as well as such domestic issues as racial segregation. The group’s field secretaries traveled from city to city, teaching the principles and practices of passive resistance in churches and on college campuses.
This field secretary, was James Lawson, who had been invited to Nashville by Martin Luther King and Kelly Miller Smith to conduct a series of workshops. Jim Lawson was a Methodist Minister from Ohio. He had spent three years teaching in India and studying the work of Gandhi. The workshops in this small church near the Fisk campus attracted the brightest of Nashville’s students. He took the whole group through a wholeistic view of nonviolence, its history, its roots in Christian thought, its methods of nonviolence. He stressed the Gandhian idea of it being an experiment.
As the semester went on, the students began moving beyond theory and philosophy and started asking questions how they could apply these historic and universal principles to the situation faced right in Nashville. Now that they understood a concept like soul force, their question was how could they use soul force.
With Jim Lawson’s guidance, they began talking about the kinds of situations they might be confronted with during an actual protest. Lawson taught them specific tactics to protect their bodies during an attack. He showed them how to curl their bodies so that their internal organs would escape direct blows. He told them how important it was to try to maintain eye contact with their assailant even as the blows were raining down because eye contact could be a viscerally disarming thing. It is not turning the other cheek. Nonviolence means fighting back, but fighting back means with a purpose and with other weapons. It is fighting to win that person over.
He showed them how to help one another, how if one person is taking a beating, others could put their bodies in the way, diluting the force of the attack. They role-played, teaching themselves how to respond to verbal and physical assaults. They staged little sociodramas, taking turns playing demonstrators and antagonists. Several of them would sit in a row of folding chairs, acting out a sit-in, while the others played waitresses or angry bystanders, calling them niggers, cursing in their faces, pushing and shoving them to the floor.
Always Jim Lawson was there hovering over the action, pushing, prodding, cajoling. It was not enough, he would say, simply to endure a beating. It was not enough to resist the urge to strike back at an assailant. “That urge can’t be there,” he would tell them. “You have to do more than just not hit back. You have to have no desire to hit back. You have to love that person who’s hitting you. You’re going to love him.
Last summer at GA in Quebec, Dodie and I heard Rebecca Ann Parker talk about her new book Proverbs of Ashes with Rita Nakashima Brock. Parker is a Methodist minister holding a joint appointment in the Unitarian Universalist Association and is serving as President of Starr King, one of our two seminaries. Proverbs of Ashes is a critical critique of the dominant culture.
One of the reasons Brock and Parker wrote the book is because religion often sanctions violence. They wrote it from within Christianity. Their theme is that Christian theology in some of its dominate traditions sanctions violence.
Parker, in her book, tells the story of Lucia. A quiet knock on Parker’s church office door interrupted her reading. A short, brown-faced woman stood on the threshold, bundled against the chilly Seattle weather.
“Hello, pastor. I’m Lucia. I live down the block and walk by the church on my way to the bus. I saw your name on the church sign. You are a woman priest. Maybe because you are a woman, you can understand my problem and help me.
Lucia was invited in and sat down on the sofa. She said “I haven’t talked to anyone about this for a while, the smile fading, and sadness deepening her eyes. But I’m worried for my kids now.
“Mostly my husband, Lucia said, is a good man. But sometimes he becomes very angry and he hits me. He knocks me down. One time he broke my arm and I had to go to the hospital. . . I went to my priest twenty years ago. I've been trying to follow his advice. The priest said that I should rejoice in my sufferings because they bring me closer to Jesus . . . He said, 'If you love Jesus, accept the beatings and bear them gladly, as Jesus bore the cross. . . .Is what the priest told me true?"
After a long pause, Parker told Lucia that it isn’t true. “God does not want you to accept being beaten by your husband. God wants you to have your life, not to give it up. God wants you to protect your life and your children’s lives.”
It is the theme of Proverbs of Ashes that Christianity, in some of its dominate traditions, has sanctioned violence by teaching that bearing suffering from violence is vitreous and redemptive. The violence of Jesus on the cross was a pay back to god for what humanity owed to god for our sins. This view of Christianity teaches that the highest form of love is to endure violence. This view of Christianity teaches that violence brings about good. What happens when victims of violence hear this message?
Elizabeth, one of Parker’s clergywomen friends, told her that her father had forced sex on her beginning when she was four. He raped her throughout her childhood, and the incest only stopped when she left home for college. Elizabeth shared this with difficulty, but she wanted to break the isolation she lived in . Parker grieved for her pain, and asked whether her religious faith had helped her.
Elizabeth said, "I identified my father with God. Not 'God is like my father,' but 'My father is God.' When I said this, I believed that my father was benevolent, loving, suffering. I did what I could to ease his suffering, to satisfy and please him. I was torn between two equally demanding gods. One was far greater, eternal. But the other was intimate, present, and more immediately important to satisfy.
"I thought I was the sinful one, that I couldn't control my body sexually and couldn't be trusted to keep silent. As I became more aware of Jesus crucified, I connected my 'betrayal" of my father with the disciple's betrayal of Jesus. My father would be crucified if I told our secret.
Elizabeth’s account of her childhood faith helped Parker see further the anguishing poverty of interpreting Jesus' death as a redemptive event. Elizabeth was a vulnerable child being violated by a parent. Her church taught her a good child honors her father as Jesus honored his when he consented to die at his father's request. At the same time it taught her to see herself as a sinner whose internal sense of resistance to abuse threatened the life of her father. By keeping silent she protected her father from "being crucified." Her silence "saved" him and trapped her in ongoing violation" (p. 28)
The point, according to Parker, is that liberal Christian non violent resistance, e.g. Martin Luther King, believed in the virtue of suffering without retaliation and such undeserved suffering would change the world. Liberal Christian theology assumed that suffering, if born without retaliation, will confront perpetrators and the travesty of what they are doing and will change their heart.
In contrast to the liberal Christian non violent resistance perspective, Rebecca Parker theorizes that it will take more than that to stop the violence of perpetrators. She cited William R. Jones Black Power book Is God a White Racist published by Beacon Press who began to question the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance. He asked if perpetrators have such a moral conscience?
Could perpetrators really be converted by seeing the suffering of their victims? If so, wouldn't racism have ended sooner? Jones offered an overall critique of redemptive suffering that suffering love will save the world is an error in thinking.
Rebecca Parker asserted that we need to come to a new understanding of love--not enduring harm for the sake of an other, especially when it is the power of the relationship of the victim to the victimizer. She argued that we need to form new methods of nonviolent resistance. We must dissent from the belief that nonviolence will save us. Rev. Parker suggested a new foundation of practices for nonviolent resistance in three parts:
Part 1. Emerson called for us to "come at life first hand." Make a deep commitment to make decisions from first hand information. Violent systems have power through a cloak of mysticism and confusion.
One way to reduce violence is to uncloak its operations. Break silence and speak the truth--to see, investigate, and tell truth about what violence does to our lives. Rev. Parker spoke of an incident at her Wallingford, Seattle church. "The social concerns committee wanted the church to raise public awareness of the growing stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. Mary Brown suggested that they place posters on the city's fleet of metro buses. The posters would depict the increase in stockpiles of nuclear weapons since the end of world War II. Not everyone thought this was a good idea, especially the older members of the church.
The topic came up at the women's Bible class that week for the third time. The women grumbled about how the church was spending too much of its energy working on political issues, and besides, why should we be raising questions about military strategy? It wasn't our place. Myrtle called a halt to the conversation. 'Just a minute,' she said, 'how can you say we have no place having an opinion about this?' She looked around at the women in the group. "Every one of us here knows that our men came home from World War II broken,' she said quietly. 'We've spent our lives holding together the pieces that war broke. We did our best to take care of them as well as our children. And never speaking of it, always saying it was a good war. We know there is no such thing as a good war.' There was quiet in the room as one by one the women silently nodded, remembering. After that, the women in the class supported Mary Brown's project.
Violence Rebecca Parker was beginning to understand, is assisted by silences. To stop violence, silences have to be broken . . "
We know what violence does to us. We carry it in our lives. The practice of telling experience first-hand, breaking silence, publishing what we know is the practice of nonviolent resistance.
Part 2. The second practice suggested by Rebecca Parker is to hold actual perpetrators of violence to account directly. Violent systems in cloaking, mystifying, and confusing turn the focus away from the violent system. One way violence is mystified is language that divides good from evil. When we conceptualize ourselves in the United States as wholly good and the other as wholly evil that dualism confuses. If the United States wants to stop terrorism it has to stop training terrorists and stop our dependence on marketing armaments around the world. We have to take responsibility.
Part 3. Parker’s third point is for us to Ask the question who benefits from this violence? What is actually served? Elizabeth believed her silence was saving her father. What was Elizabeth's suffering benefiting? War is an immoral business strategy. Each one of us needs to pay attention to how violence has harmed our own souls and our own relations with others. Parker asserts that as a spiritual practice we need to engage in our own healing so our whole sole becomes a witness to something other than violence. Break the silence.
Finally, Rebecca Ann Parker reminded her readers that liberation theology and liberal theology are not the same. Where liberal theology emphasizes self-sacrificing love, liberation theology emphases fighting to end oppression and injustice. This means courageously confronting oppressive systems that dehumanize life—even at the risk of violent opposition. Will the congregation say amen.