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Living the Theology
July 22, 2008

Rev. William Sinkford began his address last night at the memorial held next door to the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church with the words, “We are here to make sense of the senseless.”  What happened in Eastern Tennessee was indeed without sense, and yet, we are left with the need, as Victor Frankl wrote in his book on his experiences in concentration camps, to search for meaning even in the most tragic and traumatic situations. 

There is little training in seminary - - or in my case none – on how to respond to human made disasters like 9/11 or the Madrid or Bali bombings or Columbine or natural disasters like the Chinese earthquake or the tsunami or those that combine both, like Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. We receive training on helping families with catastrophic illnesses and funerals and deaths, but not on shared community tragedies.

In other religious communities, people are often drawn to rote shared words. We could say a Kaddish for Greg McKendry and Linda Kreager; I have a Baptist friend and colleague who told me that after Dr. Martin Luther King was shot, all he could do was repeat over and over again, “The Lord’s Prayer.” Some of you may find those prayers from your past comforting now.

In some ways our seven principles perhaps feel cold, without poetry or comfort. Yet, I think they provide in their own ways challenges and opportunities for us at this time.

Rev. Sarah Gibb, in reflecting on the third principle, writes that in times of crisis we come together “to share together, to honor one another with open hearts and open minds. We uphold the free and responsible search for truth and meaning as we make sense of what we have seen, what we have heard, and what we have felt.”

Our first principle is to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person; our last is to respect the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. It is in our nature to reach out to those who are affected, to grieve with Mr. McKendry’s and Ms. Kreager’s families, to want to send messages to the two churches in Knoxville, to want to do something concrete for these congregations even as they have asked us to let some time go by before they can tell us what they will find helpful. It is oh so much harder to search for understanding for Jim Adkisson, to understand in the words of Thomas Smith from the Starr King School for Ministry, “how he “could shoot people because he believed the liberal agenda was the cause of his own misfortunes. We are even more dumbfounded as to how others could say that we got what we deserved or that we brought this upon ourselves.”  But, we know that Mr. Adkisson had family, neighbors, an ex-wife, and that they too need our compassion. 

We believe in “justice, equity, and compassion” in human relations, and that calls us to a commitment to social justice and to sexual justice. The churches in Knoxville, like the Unitarian Church in Westport, is a welcoming and affirming church, committed to a wide range of social justice programs. I learned from a blog today that Mr. McKendry was the foster parent of a transgender teen. The church had recently become more public about its support of LGBT issues. We can pray that the story of our denomination and what we stand for be told more widely in coming weeks.

The challenge is to fight the temptation to feel a little less safe this week because of our commitments to social justice, to sexual justice. Surely, as Mr. McKendry and Ms. Kreager prepared for church that morning they did not know they would die that day for their beliefs.  But, indeed they did. We by necessity pause and ask ourselves if we are prepared to do so as well.   

And that’s where our sixth principle calls us to courage – to affirm and promote a world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all – FOR ALL. For young and old, for the poor, for the abled and disabled, for people from all races , ethnicities, and economic classes, for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, and intersexual persons and their straight advocates and allies. It is in the everyday acts of living that as Frank reminded us in his letter, there is a heroic quality we should seek to embrace. 

This tragedy calls us to courageously identify ourselves as progressives and liberals who are working together to change the world. We need to say to the world – to each other – and to our own mourning and perhaps scared selves – we will not allow fear or terrorism to stop that commitment. We need, and we will, take steps this fall, to assure that our own policies are in place to make the UCW the safest place we can, and to reach out to our children. We commit tonight that we will not forget the needs of the two Eastern Tennessee churches when the headlines are over. And we will work together not only to assure full inclusion, but economic security, gun control and health care, including mental health care for all. There is so much that we can and must do to understand that we are all truly connected.

In the coming days, may we recommit to our affirmation: to dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love, and to help one another.

And so may it be. 

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