As individuals, as a church, as a town, as a religious movement, as a country, we have come a long way in these last decades in recognizing and starting to overcome the privilege that comes unjustly to some of us because of such accidents of our birth as our sex, color, ethnic background, sexual orientation, and other physical, mental, familial, and economic factors.

 I would not be among those who despair because so much injustice still exists. And it does, we know it does. Any of us could cite examples from the recent news or our personal experience of discrimination or violence because of prejudice and hatefulness. There is a sickness in the heart of some people, and a stupidity in some minds, that lead to bigotry and harm. There are parts of the world where it can seem like that sickness and that stupidity rule the majority of minds, or at least enough, well-armed enough, to create an utter hell.

 And yes, blessedly in much smaller ways than in Kosovo, that hell lives here in our land, too, visited upon people because some people have some mad need to dominate, some evil interest in causing pain, some selfish hope of maintaining control, power, status, and a certain sick sense of superiority ... or just because the status quo contains injustices, unfair preferences for people more or less like me – white, male, mobile, sighted, hearing, from an educated, loving, middle-class American family – and unfair obstacles for others, and too many acquiesce in the system. We have far to go to be the humankind we ought to be.

But I will not be among those who despair…. Well, now and then, I just can’t help it. But I know that I cannot afford the luxury of giving up hope, and that surrender is a luxury of sorts, a self-indulgent excuse for inaction. But hope can keep us at the effort when despair would have us retire. And truth is, hope has the better argument, not just in the courts of high ideals but in the record of its successes. We have  come so far.

Anyone over a certain age, as I am, has stories to tell of how much worse it was not long ago. Mine are trivial but telling. I went to elementary school with second-generation Poles, Slavs, Irish, lots of Italians, and many other folks. It was New Jersey. But there was not one black or Asian kid in my school.

As a college student, I went to Florida for spring break in 1965. One of the four of us driving down was a very light-skinned African-American man named Hiltie; and there was a long pained silence after our ordering, before a waiter in Delaware decided that Hiltie was probably white so he would serve him. Hiltie didn’t try to get served with us three whites any farther south. We dropped him off in Georgia, near his home, and went on south. That week we went out to a local bar, where a sign on the door said “Whites only.” We tore off the sign and left.

It wasn’t that long ago. Things were that way, and things are still that way somewhat, though in ways more subtle, most of the time. You can’t deny service to people because of their so-called race, as Denny’s found out not long ago, to their financial loss. There was a civil right movement, and so there are laws. They did not bring paradise, but they brought us a far better America than we had before.

As Maya Angelou wrote, “Strictly speaking, one cannot legislate love, but what one can do is legislate fairness and justice. If legislation does not prohibit our living side by side, sooner or later your child will fall on the pavement and I’ll be the one to pick her up. Or one of my children will not be able to get into the house and you’ll have to say, ‘Stay here until your mom comes home.’ Legislation affords us the chance to see if we might love each other.

“It is imperative,” she continued, “that young people be told we have come a long way, otherwise they are likely to become cynical. A cynical young person is almost the saddest sight to see, because it means that he or she has gone from knowing nothing to believing in nothing. Young people must not get to the point of saying, ‘You mean to tell me we had Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers? You mean to tell me we had the Kennedys, we had Fannie Lou Hamer and Mary McLeod Bethune? You mean to tell me we had all these great men and women and we have made no progress? Then what the hell – there is no progress to be made. It can’t be made.’

“So it must be simultaneous – how far we have come and how far we have to go.”

When Beau referred me to that quote, I had already come up with the title of this sermon, and it had been published in the newsletter: “So Far We’ve Come, So Far To Go.” With Maya and I on the same wavelength, it must be true. Despair is uncalled for, counterproductive, and all too easy for those of us who are doing just fine ourselves.

Meanwhile, lots of folks in our society (not to mention our world) are not doing just fine, even if the discrimination is generally less gross. Life is still unfairly hard for people who are different in certain ways.

And yet we’re all different in one way or another. Would that we and all people could remember the pain and exclusion we all have felt when we were judged to be not skilled enough, attractive enough, bright enough, tall enough, short enough, American enough, pious enough, or just normal enough by some group’s standards. Would that that memory might strengthen a resolve to protect everybody’s unhurtful differences from attack or condescension.

Because difference “makes the world such fun. Many kinds of people, not just one.”  Black, brown, red, white, for instance, and every color of “flesh” there could be, no one more entitled, no one more free, everyone equally able to let their own light shine, privilege and oppression gone. Let us preserve our hopes and redouble our efforts to see that blessed day dawn.
 
 
 

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