What Would You Give?

Rev. Peter A. Friedrichs

May 27, 2007

The familiar words of this song, written by Pete Seeger and later made popular by Peter, Paul and Mary, have been going through my head lately. While the song became one of the more poignant and powerful protest anthems of the Vietnam War, Seeger composed it in 1961, before the U.S. got involved in Southeast Asia and long before people began to call for our withdrawal. But, as one of Seeger's biographers said, "a song is like a child: once it gets out into the world on its own, it often surprises the parent."^[1] And the song's power in the anti-war movement both surprised and delighted Seeger. For me, it's that refrain, "When will they ever learn?" that haunts me as I read of the daily death toll in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Israel, in Lebanon, in the Sudan. Indeed, when will we ever learn? This song is a lament about the senselessness of war and the loss of beauty and innocence and life itself that war engenders.

Memorial Day is not, however, a time to discuss the merits of Presidential policies or intelligence failures or theories of "just war." It is a time to honor and remember those who have come before us, who have given their lives because their country or their conscience has called them to serve. So let us take a moment now, a moment of silence, to remember the names and the faces of those we have known, who have lost their lives in service to our country. [Silence] May we cherish their memories for all of our days, and be grateful for their sacrifice.

I've been thinking about the notions of commitment, and devotion, and heroism, and nobility of purpose as we've approached this Memorial Day weekend. I don't think that any of the people we deem to be heroes, those who have died while pursuing a cause they believed in, ever intended to be viewed as heroic or, for that matter, ever expected to lose their lives. What makes someone a hero - which I define as one who is worthy of both adoration and emulation -- is not that their lives were lost, but that their lives were spent. Spent with intention and commitment. Spent with a fullness of heart and a clarity of mind. Spent with devotion to a cause or an issue or a purpose. Heroism is, I think, the simple act of responding to a call. So on this Memorial Day weekend, when we remember our heroes, men and women who gave their lives in service to others, I would like to offer you profiles of three individuals, people from different ages and different cultures, who serve as models of heroism for me. None of them are household names, and you may or may not have heard of them before.

Michael Servetus was born around the time that Christopher Columbus was making his voyages across the Atlantic in search of a new route from Spain to Asia. Servetus was a Spaniard himself, son of a wealthy family, and with his privilege he received the best education money could buy. Of course, that meant learning from the local monks, where young Miguel Serveto learned the teachings of the Catholic church. He was later sent to France to further his studies, and it was here that he first encountered the text of the Bible, made available to him due to the recently invented printing press. After having studied under the tutelage of the monks, Servetus was surprised to learn that the sacred text of the Catholic church neither proclaimed nor explained the doctrine of the holy trinity - Father, son and holy ghost. Astounded by this revelation, at the age of 21, the brash young man wrote and published his first theological treatise, called "De Trinitatis Erroribus" or "On the Errors of the Trinity." Now, you may recall from your history lessons that the mid 1500's were just about the time that the Spanish Inquisition was getting into full swing, so you can imagine how young Miguel's book was received. By the time he wrote it, Servetus considered himself more of a Protestant than a Catholic, and he had earnestly hoped that his work would positively influence the fledgling Reformation movement in Europe. Fearing further conflict with the Catholics, however, Lutheran protestants turned their backs on Servetus and his teachings, leaving him without a theological home or a country. He was forced to live underground, as he was sought for trial in Spain by the Catholics and shunned elsewhere by the Protestants. He lived for a time in Paris under the assumed name of "Michel de Villeneuve," where he taught mathematics and obtained his medical degree.

Had he left well enough alone, Servetus would probably have lived out his days quietly in France as a highly-regarded physician. But his commitment to what he called the "true faith" drove him to engage in two acts that were ultimately his downfall. First, he devoted virtually all of his spare time to writing his most comprehensive theological work, entitled "Christianismi Restitutio" or "The Restoration of Christianity." This work, published in 1553, was roundly denounced as heretical by both the Catholics and the Protestants, and our hero was soon discovered to be its author. He was arrested by the French Inquisition, but escaped from prison before he was tried. He fled to northern Italy, but en route made the fatal error of stopping in Geneva, Switzerland. Geneva was the home of John Calvin, perhaps the most powerful proponent of Protestantism in Europe. Servetus's other fateful decision was that, as he was writing his treatise on the Restoration of Christianity, he maintained a heated correspondence with Calvin. The two held widely divergent views on the nature of God, grace and salvation, and Servetus goaded Calvin at every turn. In fact, Servetus included over 30 of Calvin's letters within the manuscript of his Restoration of Christianity, disputing Calvin openly and not very kindly, and he sent a copy of his book to Calvin for good measure. So when Servetus was picked out of a crowd in a church in Geneva, Calvin was quick to have him prosecuted. He was convicted of anti-trinitarianism and sentenced to death. In an act of apparent mercy, Calvin asked that Servetus be simply beheaded, but the Council of Geneva ordered him burned at the stake. On October 27, 1553, Michael Servetus, an early advocate for the unity, rather than the trinity of God, was put to death, with copies of his book providing the fuel for the fire. Only three known copies of the text survived.

We now jump ahead about 400 years, to the civil rights struggle of the 1960's in the American South. It is March of 1965, and Martin Luther King, Jr. is organizing a march from Selma to Birmingham. On March 7, a day now known as "Bloody Sunday," marchers led by Dr. King were attacked by Alabama state troopers. The police used billy clubs, bull whips, and tear gas to break up the peaceful march, leaving many protesters bloodied and beaten. The brutal scene was broadcast on national television, and all around the country people were horrified by what they saw. The Rev. James Reeb was one of those watching from his apartment in Boston, Massachusetts.

Jim Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister, was working in the poorest part of Boston, trying to improve housing conditions for the most economically disadvantaged residents of that city. From his work as a hospital chaplain in Philadelphia and with the YMCA, to his last job working for the American Friends Service Committee, Reeb was single-minded in his pursuit of equal rights for all. For a time he was a minister at All Souls in Washington, DC, but he found the demands of parish ministry to be too great a distraction from his social justice work, so he left the church to work directly in the community. He was so committed to this work that he insisted that his family - his wife Marie and their four young children - live in Dorchester, the most depressed and dangerous part of town. It was the only way, he said, to understand the plight of the urban poor and to build trust.

Reeb listened to the news that March night, and he heard King's call for ministers from across the country to join him in the struggle in Selma, to march with him and the oppressed people of Alabama the following Tuesday. Reeb knew that joining the marchers would be risky, but he also knew this was something he had to do. He called an African American clergy friend, and both decided it was more important in that moment of history to take a stand for justice than to remain in the safety of their homes. So on March 8, Reeb joined King and hundreds of other clergy and lay people who once again began their march to Birmingham. But once again they were turned back by armed state troopers. Fearing further violence and bloodshed, King turned the marchers back before a confrontation could erupt. He sent folks home, and asked organizers, including Reeb, to meet with him later that evening.

Jim Reeb joined two of his colleagues for dinner that evening. As the three clergymen were walking from the diner to the church where they were to meet up with Dr. King, they were brutally attacked by bat-wielding segregationists. Reeb took a direct blow to the head and crumpled on the sidewalk. As Jim Reeb lay dying on that Selma sidewalk, white men and women gathered and did nothing to help the three beaten men. Eventually, an ambulance arrived and took Jim to the hospital, and two days later, at the age of 38, he was dead. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. himself eulogized Jim Reeb in a stirring address. King said that Jim Reeb "symbolized the forces of good will in our nation. He demonstrated the conscience of the nation. He was an attorney for the defense of the innocent in the court of world opinion. He was a witness to the truth that men of different races and classes might live, eat, and work together as brothers." Historians agree that it was the murder of James Reeb that motivated President Lyndon Johnson to finally send a Voting Rights Act to Congress.

Perhaps you've heard of Michael Servetus, and you may know Jim Reeb's story. Both are often claimed as martyrs for our faith. The third person I want to profile for you on this Memorial Day is someone that few, if any of you, have heard of. Her name is Hanley Denning. I was introduced to Hanley several years ago, as she told her story to a group of us gathered at the First Universalist Church in Yarmouth, Maine. Hanley grew up in that picturesque small town on the coast of southern Maine. She attended Bowdoin College and received her masters in education from Wheelock College in Boston. She was interested in teaching disadvantaged children, so after graduation Hanley took a job working for the Head Start program in North Carolina. Many of her students in the program spoke Spanish as their first language, and Hanley felt handicapped by her lack of fluency. So she decided to take a trip to Guatemala for a few months, where she could visit friends and learn the language. She was getting ready to return to the States when a friend told her about what was going on at the Guatemala City Dump, and Hanley asked to see it for herself. With a local priest and a nun acting as "tour guides" and providing her protection, Hanley walked through the 35-acre dump. And what she saw horrified her. Children, teenagers, and adults, including women with infants strapped to their backs, scrounging through piles of garbage, in search of scraps of glass and metal, pieces of string, any small thing that could be salvaged and sold. She saw people whose hair was tinted to the color of rust from the methane gas that emanated from the mountains of trash. But it was the children that affected Hanley most deeply. Countless children, some as young as three or four, picking through piles of used toilet paper, rotting fruit and even medical waste. Shoeless children climbing and digging through huge piles of waste. Children who would never attend school, who had to scour the dump to help their families survive. "I had to make a decision," she told us. "I could go back home, where I was enrolled in a Masters of Social Work program, or I could stay right there, and do something."

The something that Hanley Denning chose to do was to start a program that would get children out of the dump and into school. You see, in Guatemala, the public schools are not free. Parents must pay for uniforms, and school supplies, and meals for their children. So those who cannot afford it can't send their kids to school. Hanley returned to the States briefly, to sell the few possessions she owned -- "A car and a computer were about it," she told us - and to raise some money. Armed with a small grant, she returned to Guatemala and started a program that is now called Camino Seguro, or Safe Passage. At first, she offered a drop-in program to children on the way to the dump, giving them a meal and a place to play before they had to go to work. Then she started to provide uniforms and school supplies to a lucky few children so that they could actually attend school. As more and more of the children of the Guatemala City Dump entered school, Safe Passage began offering after-school care. Hanley recruited a steady stream of volunteers from the United States and other countries to work as teachers and tutors to provide homework assistance, and to provide supervised sports, art, and carpentry classes during their off-school shift. Volunteers also take children to local clinics when they get sick, and other programs offer cooking and health classes to mothers and support groups dealing with drugs, gangs, pregnancy, and life choices for teen girls and boys. Just this year, Hanley opened a new program for early intervention to benefit pre-schoolers, and Safe Passage now offers an adult literacy program for mothers, as well as a fledgling residential program for at-risk children. Today, Camino Seguro serves more than 500 children from the poorest parts of Guatemala City, offering them not just a daily meal and a chance to go to school, but hope and a future.

I wanted to lift up Hanley Denning's story on this Memorial Day because her life came to a tragic end earlier this year. As she made her way from the village outside the city where she had set up the early childhood program, the car she was riding in was hit by a bus. In one of the many memorials for Hanley that followed her death at age 36, a volunteer wrote: "Hanley scared me. She scared me because she showed me the power and potential of what one human being can do. She scared me because she showed me the potential of what each one of us could do. She scared me because she showed me what I could do, if I were brave enough and selfless enough."

Michael Servetus. James Reeb. Hanley Denning. Three very different people living in very different ages. On a day when we remember soldiers for their bravery in battle, let us remember these heroes as well. And let us remember all those who have answered a call. Those who have given their lives, through tireless dedication, through deep devotion, through clear commitment, to the causes and controversies that cried out for their attention. And finally, on this Memorial Day, let us ask ourselves how, when our lives are over, we will want to be remembered. Let each of us ask ourselves: To what will I give my life?

Blessed Be and Amen.

^[1] David Dunaway, How Can I Keep From Singing: Pete Seeger, New York, NY, 1990, pp. 186-187.

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