Prophetic Voices

Prophetic Voices

Live Oak, January 14, 2007

Rev. Kathleen Ellis

On this holiday weekend I want to lift up some of the prophetic voices in the UU world—yes, we have many of them! –still working for a just and peaceful planet.

Last Sunday I had the great pleasure of participating in the ordination service for Debra Garfinkel, a colleague in Tulsa. Debra is obviously beloved in All Souls Unitarian Church. She did her internship there while she was a member of Church of the Restoration, also in Tulsa. Now she is ordained as the minister for pastoral care at All Souls.

Marlin Lavanhar is the Senior Minister at All Souls. He and his wife Anitra suffered the sudden death of their 3-year old daughter Sienna last spring. When they needed their own ministry in the wake of that devastating loss, they turned to Debra, who knew them well and already had the gifts of pastoral care. She did the memorial service for them. Marlin’s remarks at the ordination included his public, heart-felt thanks to Debra.

Mark Christian, minister at First UU Church in Oklahoma City, gave the charge to the congregation. Some of his advice is applicable to Live Oak. He said, “Don’t assume that by telling one minister something you have told all of them. . . . and don’t assume you haven’t!”

My part in the ordination was to orchestrate the laying on of hands, in which the entire congregation was linked to Debra and extending hopes, prayers, and good energy toward this new minister while I placed my hands on her head and gave a prayer for her ministry.

All of this was quite wonderful, but it was enhanced ever so much by the inclusion of racially diverse elements. I mentioned early on that Debra did her internship at the Church of the Restoration. It was founded to serve an intentionally integrated membership, black and white, and very much Unitarian Universalist. Members do the hard work of dismantling barriers between the races in the process of building a faith community. Prophetic voices? Yes!

So Debra, a white woman, was very conscious of including elements of white and black culture into her ordination. After the clergy and lay leaders processed in as everyone sang the opening hymn, the predominantly white congregation at All Souls settled in for a long spell. Then the Young Adult Vocal Ensemble took over the chancel to sing an Afro-Cuban folk song with Swahili lyrics and several drums and got the place rocking. People looked much more relaxed after that.

A black vocalist, accompanied by a couple of white guys on keyboard and guitar, sang a gospel song, “Over My Head.” And Gerald Davis, the black pastor from Church of the Restoration delivered the sermon. He’s nearly blind now but still going strong; he’s used to getting a response to his sermons—“Can I get an Amen?!” (said we were a little weak!). He said, “Sister Debra has come from somewhere.”

One place she had come from was his church, where she had been immersed in a culturally rich environment. She absorbed the spirit and the social awareness brought to us by our African American sisters and brothers. Prophetic voices? Yes!

If you go back in history, you don’t have to go very far to find where women in ministry were a rare and not always welcome prospect. They’re still not very popular in many places. I’ve heard it said that the increase in women into ministry and into church leadership in general have transformed the church from the 19th century stereotypical, traditional, stuffy, frozen people into a community with more compassion. Clergywomen who pioneered in the Midwest, like the Iowa Sisterhood, brought an innate understanding of family and the strength that women bring to relationships and healing.

When I first started attending the annual ministers’ retreat, I was still a seminary student and it was the women who welcomed me. Marjorie Montgomery and Laurel Hallman tell stories of the early days when there were only one or two women in these meetings. The men blustered around, bragged on themselves and their churches, and jockeyed for power. The women gradually brought in a more collaborative kind of power, filled with grace. Prophetic voices? Yes!

African Americans and other people of color have entered the ministry and into higher levels of church leadership. They have brought a lively spirit and a return to the heart of faith. We’re proud to say that Bill Sinkford, the President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, is the first African American president of any denomination. But instead of bragging on ourselves for electing him, let’s applaud what Bill has brought to us: for one thing, a wide-ranging conversation about the language of reverence. His initial call for a language of reverence raised a lot of anxiety.

Some people thought Sinkford wanted to push God-talk on our autonomous congregations. After some of the uproar died down, many of us have begun to realize that you can have a language of reverence without assuming a belief in God or Goddess or any other deity you care to name.

Bill Sinkford’s service as president also keeps in front of us the importance of our long journey toward wholeness in the arena of racial justice and multiculturalism. Prophetic voices? Yes!

Two other friends and colleagues of mine and of Bill’s were Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley, who died December 10, and her husband Clyde Grubbs. They had married in 1999, a white man and a black woman—still not terribly common in our world. They served First UU Church in Austin in an interim co-ministry for a year while a search committee worked to find a permanent successor.

I’d like to share Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley’s story, essentially as she wrote it, as an example of transformation. When I started thinking of a UU hero who could be highlighted on this MLK weekend, I knew that her legacy will last far longer than her 57 years of life. I couldn’t think of a better role model for all of us.

So often we go along with whatever life sets before us, but sometimes there is an event that so impresses us we have to reexamine everything we once thought was true and acceptable. The story of sudden insight came from a lecture Marjorie delivered to her colleagues in Birmingham, AL, as part of the UU Ministers Convocation that we have every 7 years. I was very impressed at the time and want to share part of it with you now.

When Marjorie was young, it was common in her community to end a conversation with the words: "Keep the faith, baby." She used to sign her letters with those words as a parting greeting: "Keep the faith." And when people said "keep the faith" everybody understood it as a way of supporting and encouraging each other; a way of suggesting that in spite of the daily struggle for our full humanity to be acknowledged and affirmed, that everything would be all right, if only we keep the faith.

It was a way of saying, Hold on to the knowledge that there is a power greater than your own, and that you can call on that power, even though you may suffer personal indignities, discrimination, or daily social violence. "Keep the faith"—in yourself, in your Creator, and in your relationships with people who are part of faith-ful communities. And in this sense, it was a reference not to ourselves alone as individuals, but a statement of encouragement for the whole community.

It was not always a religious statement which required belief in God, but it was a faith statement—that things would get better if only folks stood tall and didn’t let "the man" (meaning, systemic oppression) overcome them. It was an affirmation of belief that the universe is on the side of justice, and that we would overcome, if only we kept the faith.

In the late 1970’s through the mid-1980’s, Marjorie was living in Washington, D.C. working as a journalist and public television producer. She had chosen a profession in the news media because she wanted people to have the option of a different spin on the news of the corporate monopolies. She wanted to do stories so compelling that people might not only be inspired, but might actually feel compelled to act.

Some of you will recall that the 1980’s was a time when car jackings were a regular occurrence in some urban areas, and Marjorie was out covering such a story. An African American woman about her age (35 or 36 at the time), was filling up her car with gasoline, and in the flash of an eye, a moment when she had turned away to replace the gas nozzle, someone had driven off not only with her car, but with her eight-year old daughter. Because Marjorie also had a daughter, she had a deep identification with this mother.

When Marjorie arrived on the scene, there were at least five radio and television stations that had set up their equipment, and four reporters had microphones set up. She looked around at her cameraman, who was about to join the mob, and she looked back at the woman. The woman was visibly and understandably upset, speaking in a soft voice; but not all of her sentences were complete or coherent. Marjorie made her way closer, all the time monitoring the pace of her crew’s set-up. As other reporters probed her with questions, she took the woman’s hand, thinking to herself, why don’t they leave her alone? And then, there was this sudden awareness that she was one of them. She was part of the mob of reporters.

And yet, she knew that the last thing the mother needed was not a gang of microphones in her face. In a flash, she remembered the words of one of her professors who, emphasizing that television news had to have pictures maintain its dramatic focus, had said to the class "keep the camera rolling until you make them cry."

What this woman needed was someone to talk to about her troubles; someone to console her; someone with whom she could let out all her fears—without fear of exploitation; someone to tell her "it’s gonna be alright." And when she grasped onto Marjorie’s hand for what seemed like dear life, she knew that she couldn’t do the story, that she couldn’t keep the camera rolling.

Marjorie begged her fellow reporters to give her some breathing room, and the woman must have trusted her, because she did not resist when Marjorie gently led her away and into the news van. Eventually, the microphones and the reporters disappeared, audiotape and videotape in-hand for the evening news.

The woman had held back the tears from the cameras, but within moments, she was weeping incessantly. As they sat waiting for a family member to arrive, Marjorie tried to comfort her as she gave bits and pieces of the story between the tears—without camera, without microphone. And when they parted, Marjorie said to her, "Keep the faith. You will see your daughter again.” And indeed, she did.

Marjorie could not get this woman out of her mind for the rest of the day, and when she went home that evening, it became really clear to her why. Her values had gotten confused. She had had a long period of absence from churches, and so at the time, she didn’t have the religious language to name what had happened with the woman at the gas station. She didn’t realize until much later that she was doing pastoral ministry. The person behind the story had become more important than getting the story. And she knew that she could no longer be a reporter, at least not that kind of reporter. She stayed one more year at the television station to finish a documentary, then began her journey into ministry.

On the path to ministry, Marjorie worked for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee as Director of Public Affairs. Then she worked to give away money in a grant-making program from the UU Society of Shelter Rock. For three years she was responsible for recommending grantees to receive about one million dollars each year to work for progressive social transformation. Prophetic voices? Yes!

While doing this work, Marjorie also did an independent study of the theology and ministry of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In doing so, she recognized her own call to ministry and entered Wesley Theological Seminary. She was ordained in 1994 at All Souls Church in Washington, DC.

Marjorie served churches in New York, Texas, and Florida. She worked for the Department of Faith in Action. She worked as Adult Programs Director and developed, among other things, a curriculum called Film as Theological Text, which involved choosing significant films and developing questions for discussion.

She was a founding member of the African American Unitarian Universalist Ministry, co-author of Soul Work, an anthology of antiracist theologies; co-author of studies on membership and congregational governance; contributing author for Weaving the Fabric of Diversity; and writer of numerous articles and essays. The woman never stopped! For the duration of her life, Marjorie continued the work of transformation.

In memory of Marjorie, Bill Sinkford and the Bowens-Wheatley family announced the creation of the Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley Fund. Contributions to the Fund will be used to support Unitarian Universalist congregations and their lay and ordained leaders who are committed to the transformative work of creating inclusive multicultural communities of the spirit. I encourage you to give—you can ask me about it later. Someday maybe we’ll apply for a grant to do a relevant project.

Prophetic voices? Yes! All of the above inspire me, and perhaps you, to continue the hard work of transformation. We do not have to wait for the children to stand up and lead. Let the children who led the way in Birmingham, the members of Church of the Restoration, women in ministry and in politics, Bill Sinkford’s presidency, Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley and countless others, grant us wisdom, grant us courage, and grant us freedom to change the world. Yes!

Can I hear an Amen?