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Unitarian Church of Sharon
4 N. Main St.
Sharon, MA 02067
781-784-3652
E-mail UCS
What’s Wrong with this Picture?
Sermon by Rev. Deborah Cayer
January 20, 2008
There is a historic photograph that I find myself thinking of frequently at odd moments, though not because it’s beautiful or pleasant. It’s a difficult picture, a photograph taken of an African slave woman in Virginia in the mid-1800’s. In the photo her blouse is pulled down so that a potential buyer can see her strong, healthy body. What’s shocking is not so much her nudity, but rather the story that her eyes suggest.
There is sorrow and shock in the woman’s eyes. She was not in charge of her own body, and there was nothing she could do, as someone’s property, to escape being photographed as an object that was for sale. She had very little control over anything. I find myself wondered about her and what her life was like. And I wonder, with astonishment, at who else must have been in the room—perhaps the slave owner, or overseer, and the photographer. And I wonder…was there anyone present besides the subject who knew that there was something terribly wrong with this picture?
I began thinking about this when those first awful photographs of from Abu Ghraib surfaced in the news, photographs of human bodies being hurt and humiliated, tortured and shamed. And recently, there’s been the even more shocking news that high ranking Senate leaders of both political parties have known about and endorsed the use of torture to obtain information from political prisoners at Guantanamo. I am both astonished and infuriated to learn that this issue has not been treated as a problem, but rather is being applauded by policy makers and world leaders as a good solution. What is wrong with this picture?
This weekend as we remember a great man, I find myself longing for the vision and the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King often spoke out about how wrong it is to treat human beings as objects without rights. And I have been wondering, what might he say to the leaders of our nation about these issues? What might he say about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? What might he say about torture? How might his understanding inform our thinking and action on this subject?
In all of his work, Dr. King relied on theology as a basis for his political action. In his book, Where Do We Go From Here? he wrote: “The Negro will only be truly free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive selfhood his own emancipation proclamation. With a spirit straining toward true self-esteem, the Negro must throw off the manacles of self abnegation and say to himself and the world, ‘I am somebody. I am a person. I am a man with dignity and honor.’”
For Dr. King, personhood is a given. Donald Chinula writes, “For King the personhood of a man or a woman is not conferred by any other human person. The “beingness” or “I-amness” of a person does not derive from other human beings or from social institutions…This is the ontological basis of identity that King consistently asserts and emphasizes: I am a person, I am somebody, whether or not someone else thinks so and acknowledges me to be.”
“I am somebody”…you can hear that foundational thought in the political message that Jesse Jackson, one of Dr. King’s most devoted young lieutenants, later brought to devastated communities in the 1980’s and 90’s. “I am…somebody” was the call and response that Jackson chanted with excited African American crowds. It was a message that white listeners often didn’t immediately understand. Part of what it means to be white, we’re learning, is not having to think very much about the right to respect, dignity and equal opportunity, because these rights of being are simply endowed and can be taken as granted when one is white.
Chinula points out the depth at which Dr. King understood that the humanness of black people in America had to be reclaimed and proclaimed. And it wasn’t enough to only make the claim politically, it was a claim that also had to be made theologically. Dr. King had an extensive argument, he says, that “identity is prior to culture; therefore it is immoral for institutions…to abuse the powerless or nonwhite on the grounds that they are nobodies. No human being is a nobody.” Furthermore, as Chinula points out, this theological assertion also “allows King to urge the dispossessed to claim the true selves robbed of them by culture. Third, it allows King to rebuke society and its leaders for presiding over institutions and laws that fracture and disturb the selves of the oppressed. Fourth, it allows King to diagnose the psychological problems of the oppressed as…rooted not in genetic inferiority, but in their dehumanization.”
As important as all these points are, they are limited to the effects of oppression on individuals. One of the most remarkable features of Dr. King’s theology is that it led him far beyond the point of simply arguing for the rights of black individuals, as important as those rights are. But even more than this, Dr. King constantly lifted up the importance of mutuality in all human relationships and the interdependence of all human society. In his book, A Testament of Hope, he wrote, “The universe is so structured that things do not quite work out right if men are not diligent in their concern for others. The self cannot be self without other selves. I cannot reach fulfillment without thou. Social psychologists tell us that we cannot really be persons unless we interact with other persons. All life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
What I find interesting about these two tenets, somebody-ness and interrelatedness, is that they also appear in Unitarian Universalist thinking and belief. Several years ago a small panel was appointed by the UUA General Assembly to examine all the resolutions and actions we had taken as a denomination, and distill from them a set of general underlying principles. When their work was finished the first principle the group presented was “the inherent worth and dignity of all people”—somebody-ness. And the last principle they presented was “the interdependent web of all existence”—interrelatedness.
Dr. King had done his Ph.D. thesis at Boston University in 1955 on the comparative theology of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman; in the 1980’s the UUA panel was most likely drawing on the same sources since these two thinkers are the preeminent liberal theologians of the 20th century; Wieman as it happens was also a Unitarian Universalist. Unless you know this it might seem surprising to hear the argument that Dr. King made 30 years before our principles were proposed. He wrote, “Deeply rooted in our religious heritage is the conviction that every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Our Judeo-Christian tradition refers to inherent dignity of man in the Biblical term ‘the image of God’…Every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the creator….The worth of the individual does not lie in the measure of his intellect, his racial origin, or his social position. Human worth lies in relatedness to God. An individual has value because he has value to God.” (From, Where Do We Go From Here?)
What this meant, Dr. King argued, is that all of western religious heritage stands against the notion that a person can be an object. Rather, all persons can only be a person with ultimate value, which is infinite and unlimited. This is the basis for his moral argument against slavery and the lingering after effects of racism. Slavery is based on the notion that some people can be used by other people as objects for their benefit, and this is morally wrong. Racism, which discounts the inherent dignity of some based on the color of their skin, and denies them human and civil rights, is dehumanizing and is sinful. He wrote, “Man is not a thing. He must be dealt with not as an “animated tool” but as a person sacred within himself…So long as the Negro or any other member of a minority group is treated as a means to an end, the image of God is abused in him and consequently proportionally lost by those who inflict the abuse.”
Here, Dr. King invokes his two great principles of somebody-ness and interrelatedness as he explicitly points out that racism is morally harmful not only to the oppressed person, but also to the one who is the oppressor. When someone inflicts racial abuse on another, the abuser distances him or herself from God, from the ultimate source of their humanity.
What might Dr. King’s theology tell us about what’s morally wrong with the disturbing pictures of our times? I have been pondering the truth told in the photograph of the slave woman—that while her mind and spirit were in her body, her body itself was not her own, not under her control. Her body could be used, even transported by others for their own reasons without consulting her at all. The effect of that reality is suggested by the look on her face in the photograph.
And I wonder, what were the effects on the other people in the room? What had to have happened inside the mind and heart of the photographer in order to see her as an object to be photographed? And if perhaps he saw her as more than an object, if he saw her as a suffering human being, what was the effect within his body?
You can observe great transitions in theology in the last 400 years. Theology was once mainly concerned with the mind and intentions, the will and spirit of a distant God. Gradually, and it took a long time for this to happen, as human political rights increased, the human mind and spirit took on greater importance in liberal theology. In the minds of many, now God has ceased to be understood as an entity or person, and rather exists in the world as a power that is experienced between human beings in a relationship.
What this has meant is that in just the last twenty or thirty years, modern theologians have finally begun to include the human body in their realm of concern. Theologians are just beginning to ask questions about the human body as a source of information about that which is ultimate: what does the body know? How does the body interact with other people and the world around us? What do our bodies tell us about the ultimate sources that hold and support our existence?
And so I wonder…what important truths does the human body offer us about the times in which we’re living? If we were to look at photographs of human bodies in various modern crisis situations—ill and waiting for hours in an overcrowded emergency waiting room; frustrated and confused trying to learn in an under funded public school classroom; defeated and refused at a border check point; in a constant state of readiness while on patrol in Iraq; full of fear and sorrow at the edge of a melting glacier—if we looked at the stories human bodies tell in such photographs, would we be better able to understand what is wrong with these pictures?
No one can know for certain what Dr. King would say about any of this today. But his work on mutuality suggests that what each human body in any situation knows is important, and deserves to be listened to and respected. His work reminds us that in order to inflict harm on another person, and to disregard their suffering requires that we disregard and discard part of our own humanity. In a very real way, to harm another is to harm our own self. This is also the source of authority in deep ecology; whenever we harm the earth we harm our self. When we harm our self repeatedly, we sicken and die.
What saving grace might theology offer us about such terrible things? The saving grace that Martin Luther King, Jr. continually offered the world in all his work is the saving power of agape, the power of love, especially as it is experienced in community. The King Center in Atlanta lifts up and reminds us of Dr. King’s vision of the beloved community. On their website they write, “For Dr. King, the Beloved Community was not a lofty utopian goal…Rather, the Beloved Community was for him a realistic, achievable goal that could be attained by a critical mass of people committed to and trained in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence.
“Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated…Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries….
“Dr. King’s Beloved Community was not devoid of interpersonal, group or international conflict. Instead he recognized that conflict was an inevitable part of human experience. But he believed that conflicts could be resolved peacefully and adversaries could be reconciled through a mutual, determined commitment to non-violence…”
In all his sermons and speeches, Dr. King talked about the innate human capacity of each person to accomplish the sometimes extremely difficult work of love. What this requires, he repeatedly said, is that human beings have to be willing to acknowledge and admit our power to hate and harm and then, consciously set this aside, let this go. When we do this, the power that exists within each of our hearts will assist us in this struggle.
I can only assume that Dr. King would be first among the firmest, clearest voices that speak up to condemn a foreign policy that condones torture, on the grounds that it is morally wrong, not only for the person being abused, but also for the oppressor. He might say, “we’re all in this together.”
Since he can’t say this now, we must. We’re all in this together; what harms one of us in this interdependent world harms us all, and also our beloved planet.
The good news this morning is that when we face the most urgent problems and the most difficult truths in our world, there is a sacred power that exists within every human body that can help us “dim down the light of hate and turn up the light of love.” The roots of the word compassion in many languages come from the body—in Hebrew rachma comes from the word for womb; in Greek the word for compassion comes from splachna, the word for the gut.
The good news is that when we see someone suffering we have a gut reaction and we want to help. When we listen to this sacred truth that our body is telling us, it can help us figure out how to get to a better place in our interconnected, interdependent world. The good news is that whenever we recognize and admit into consciousness the sacred information that comes from our bodies, we move a little farther along the path that leads to life, not only for us, but also for the ones we love, and for all beings on the earth. Amen.
Sources for this sermon include:
Martin Luther King, Jr, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? New York: Harper and Row, 1967.
A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr. Edited by James M. Washington. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986.
Donald Chinula, Building King’s Beloved Community: Foundations for Pastoral Care and Counseling with the Oppressed. Cleveland: United Church Press, 1997.
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