Beautiful sermon about the Spring Seminar

Almost everyone at Spring Seminar must have seen a man walking around the seminar, crouching behind seated people, perching on the sides of the stage, and popping up in other areas with a giant camera lens, documenting our Spring Seminar with gorgeous photos. Unless you go to his church in Brooklyn, what you don’t know is that Rev. Tom Martinez went home and wrote a sermon on his seminar experience. Please click on the “Read More” link below to find his sermon for all to enjoy.

“I Was There”
Rev. Tom Martinez
All Souls Bethlehem Church
Brooklyn, NY
April 6, 2008

You all know I like movies. I like the way they draw you in and enable you to experience other times and places. Too often movies are primarily an escape, without a much plot or layered meaning. When a film is a true work of art, life’s deeper dimensions are opened up: the mystery of suffering, the joy and fragility of existence.

At the Spring Conference of the UU-UNO we watched a true work of art: Sometimes in April, directed by Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck. Watching that film was what will stay with me I suspect for the rest of my life. It’s of course impossible for anyone to capture or in any way do justice to the enormity of the Rwandan Genocide. Simone Monasebian, the attorney who served on the international criminal court, tried to put it into perspective by saying that it would be like having three 9/11 tragedies every day for a hundred days. Phillip Gourevetch points out that the killing of an estimated 800,000 people in three months is roughly at a rate three times that of the Nazi Holocaust.

While the enormity of the tragedy is incomprehensible, Peck grounds the mind-numbing statistics in the real-life dramas of two brothers, Augustin, who was in the state-sanctioned army and Honore, who was a popular radio DJ later accused of fueling the genocidal fire with hateful diatribes against the Tutsi minority.

In terms of the ethnic and political conflict the brothers, as Hutus, are on the same side. But the brother in the army is married to a Tutsi. As the horror unfolded people with Tutsis in their families were faced with a Sophie’s Choice kind of situation where they either killed their Tutsi relative or turned them over to the bloodthirsty mob.

Augustin loves his Tutsi wife dearly and is willing to risk his life to save hers. But because his name has appeared on lists and it’s known that he’s married to a Tutsi, it would be suicidal for him to try and make it through the roadblocks. So he begs his brother to try and get her out. They load up the car and Honore does his best. They get through a couple of road blocks but then they run into trouble. Tensions mount as you sense something horrible is going to happen….

Peck, the director, does an artful job of suggesting the terror of the situation and then moving on, not allowing us to know how complicit or heroic Honare was. We learn what actually happened over time through the eyes of Honare’s brother, Augustin. So at the critical instant the drama shifts away from the roadblock to other aspects of the story. We know only that Augustin’s wife and children died and that Honare was arrested months later having fled the country.

The film begins with Augustin receiving a letter from his brother, who’s in prison, scheduled to go before the tribunal for his complicity in the genocide. He doesn’t want to go to his brother. He doesn’t want to face the pain of all that happened. And yet he can’t turn his back on his brother either. And deep down he knows that if he runs from his past he’ll be forever cut off from the deepest dimensions of his soul and psyche.

I want to say more about the film itself, but I also want to say a little bit about the experience of watching it, beginning with a confession. The night we watched it we were supposed to break up into small groups and discuss it. But instead of doing that I headed home. I told myself that was because Marian was away writing and I had to get back to Aidan. But the truth is after seeing the film I just wanted to be with Aidan.

Of course God does have a sense of humor. Marian’s brother, Luke, was babysitting Aidan and when I got back home that night they were both on the couch Aidan watching—without Marian’s approval—the Matrix part III. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the Matrix trilogy. They’re actually some profound ideas to be found there but to see it you have to look past the constant shooting of mechanized alien invaders to see it. So after being blown away by the film about the Rwandan genocide I got back to a very relaxing night of machine gun fire.

That is, of course, part of the challenge of peacemaking: figuring out how to work towards a more peaceful world in the midst of the crazy reality we find ourselves in. This was underscored by the fact that the conference coincided with the 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination, so there were continuous references and reminders of that terrible day. More than simply mourning his loss, the nature of the conference required that we take a good hard look at the issues King wrestled with as related to the issues we face today.

He of course battled for Civil Rights, then became an outspoken critic of his era’s unjust war. At the time he was gunned down he was beginning to speak out about economic social justice and the unacceptable working conditions of the sanitation workers in Memphis. His carefully choreographed movements from domestic to international to domestic issues reflected his underlying sense that we are all ultimately part of one human family. He saw the connections between the kids blown up in the south and the kids captured in the famous LIFE photograph running naked as bombs of flaming napalm destroyed their village.

The ongoing unfolding of this vision of one human family is the foundation of any and all peacemaking. This notion gets expressed beautifully in the one of the most powerful scenes in the film about the Rwandan genocide. A bloodthirsty mob comprised of soldiers and henchmen storms the gates of an all-girls private Catholic school and chaos erupts. By this time many thousands off people have been massacred and there’s an awareness that a wave of violence is sweeping across the country. The teachers frantically try to explain to the children that they may have to divide themselves up according to their Hutu or Tutsi ethnicity—knowing as they say this that the Tutsi children face imminent death. With gunshots going off in the background one young girl says to her teacher, “no, we refuse to be divided. We are sisters.”
The teacher, who is to be one of the only survivors of the massacre, asks, “Do you know what you are saying?”

They do know and when the soldiers come crashing into the room they refuse to cooperate and all of them are killed. (The teacher was knocked unconscious and mistaken for dead.)

Surely there is no ultimate justification for this kind of man-made horror. As a species our task is to shine the light on our warring madness, to see and confess and redeem the moral darkness of the soul so that, in the end, the scales of fate might be tipped ever so slightly in the direction of life and love. But as we engage in that process, these profound moral insights that are born from the crucible of such great suffering must be allowed to light the way. We cannot turn away from the horror, for if we do we leave unanswered the questions about the west’s deafening silence in the face of genocide. Even now as we lament the bungling of the international situation through films and tribunals, another genocide is taking place in Sudan.
One of the most powerful comments about the movie, Sometimes in April, came from one of the youth at the seminar who said, “I wonder if someday we’ll watch another movie about how we didn’t do anything about the genocide in Darfur.”

That young person’s comment begs the question: what can we do? What can we do in the face of the enormous injustices of the world?

It’s an important question, possibly the most important question we can ask. And before I add my two cents by way of an answer let me say that there are as many answers to that question as there are people, since we each have something to contribute to the unfolding vision of justice that flows down from the mountaintop like a might river. I also want to say by way of preface that the conference I attended called our attention to all kinds of peacemaking resources on the web that we can all draw from. We can also support the work of the UU-United Nations Office either financially or by volunteering.

Now: my two cents. I don’t know if you noticed the bulletin cover, but if you didn’t you might want to take a look at it now. This is an image that comes from the cartoon exhibit at the United Nations, which, as you can see, pokes fun at our warring madness. The larger message here is to retain your sense of humor, which may sound like a stupid thing to say in the face of overwhelming pain and suffering, but I think upon closer scrutiny the ability to laugh is linked with the ability to heal and it’s when we start taking ourselves too seriously that we stop being of use to anyone.

As an aside I have to recommend the cartoon exhibit (which is free by the way) to everyone and if there’s interest I’ll be happy to lead an outing to the UN. (I have to go back anyway because Aidan didn’t like the color of his t-shirt.) But seriously, the images are not only funny and insightful, downright brilliant, really, but they tap into something we talk a lot about here at ASBC: namely, the power of the arts in the larger battle for social justice.

We participate in that same fine tradition when we host the open mic with a soul here at the church. The power of the arts to sustain us along the way is fresh in my mind in part because of the closing ceremony at the UU seminary yesterday. Two young performers closed us out, one a spoken word poet, and the other a folksinger. The spoken word poet looked like he was about ten but not thirty seconds into his poem I felt myself lifted off the ground and I could tell it was something everyone felt. He swayed with the power of his vision and railed against the war and the fools that led us into it. When he was done the room erupted with applause but he was already outside the room, bowing in thanks but not even basking in it at all. Then this young woman comes out and sings an equally beautiful and moving song—she happens to be in the neighborhood so I’m gonna see if I can get her to come and sing.

But perhaps the best example of the power of the arts comes from the film I’ve been talking about, Sometimes in April. The film ends a vignette drawn from the truth and reconciliation process. Several men accused of killing the children at the private girls school are standing in front of a group of villagers. There crimes are stated and then the person facilitating the process says, “does anyone recognize any of these men?” There’s a deathly silence and then a woman rises and you see she’s the teacher that survived the massacre. “I recognize these men,” she says. “I was there.”

All in all, it was a great conference. I know, because I was there. Amen.