“Freedom through Defiance”

“Freedom through Defiance”     January 20, 2019   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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In the 1970s, Pete Seeger was invited to sing in Barcelona, Spain. Francisco Franco's fascist government, the last of the dictatorships that started World War II, was still in power but declining. A pro-democracy movement was gaining strength and to prove it, they invited America's best-known freedom singer to Spain. More than a hundred thousand people were in the stadium, where rock bands had played all day. But the crowd had come for Seeger. As Pete prepared to go on, government officials handed him a list of songs he was not allowed to sing. Pete studied it mournfully, saying it looked an awful lot like his set list. But they insisted: he must not sing any of these songs.

  

 Pete took the government's list of banned songs and strolled on stage. He held up the paper and said, "I've been told that I'm not allowed to sing these songs." He grinned at the crowd and said, "So I'll just play the chords; maybe you know the words. They didn't say anything about you singing them." He strummed his banjo to one song after another, and they all sang. A hundred thousand defiant freedom singers breaking the law with Pete Seeger, filling the stadium with words their government did not want them to hear, words they all knew and had sung together, in secret circles, for years. What could the government do? Arrest a hundred thousand singers? It had been beaten by a few banjo chords and the fame of a man whose songs were on the lips of the whole world.

excerpted from “Revival: A Folk Music Novel,” by Scott Alarik

There is no more natural fit for our church than to claim Pete Seeger as one of our patron saints. A couple of years ago I bought matching teeshirts for what we can call our “Emerging Band” that featured a picture of Pete’s banjo with the added caption, “The right song at the right moment can change history.”

For both recording reasons and copyright laws, our internet audience rarely gets to hear what our musicians do here but for those of us in the Springfield “seated” congregation, it is not my preaching and theological insights that created this community of faith, at best, I have simply been the partner to a group of amazing musicians who put into passionate words the liberating and compassionate message the church was founded to prophetically proclaim.

In the case described in our wisdom lesson today, we see a solid historical example of how the saying on the tee-shirt is literally true. Pete Seeger had the courage to go and perform in Spain in the 1970’s when Franco’s fascist government still held power. Government censors showed up at the concert and handed Seeger a list of his popular songs that he was not allowed to sing publicly in Spain. 

It would have been one kind of moral victory if Seeger had just decided to ignore the censors and forge ahead and sing his protests songs. If he had, the concert probably would have been stopped and Seeger might have disappeared into a prison from which he would later mysteriously have emerged as a corpse. 

What he decided to do was so much more powerful and it sent such a compelling message to the fascists in Spain that it did change history. He just started to play the chords of his songs on his famous banjo and the stadium full of eager fans started to sing the songs themselves. It wasn’t that a heroic Pete Seeger came to liberate Spain in a single defiant act, it was that the Spanish people had been listening too, singing, memorizing these protest songs for years. The ideas in the songs were in their hearts. The ideas, which may have also come to them from poets, preachers, priests, philosophers, and revolutionaries all found expression and power in the songs. 

One of our former members used to publicly lament during classes and after services, “All you do is talk about these things but why don’t we do anything?” Well, we do some things . . . we feed the homeless, care for domestic violence victims, resource the unsheltered, and provide food for the poor . . . we sometimes march, protest, call our legislators, or humiliate them in the opinion pages of the newspaper, but still, I understand her complaint. Mostly, I just talk. 

My hope is that I talk in something like the way that Pete Seeger sang. I keep planting the ideas in people’s ears, reassuring them that they are not alone, encouraging them to be brave, so that when there are enough believers, when the conviction is strong enough, a fascist like Franco finds himself to be no longer in charge of the people’s hearts and minds. 

Two weeks ago, I told the story of a young slave who ran away from the service of the first president of the United States and spent her life as a fugitive. I talked about slavery as America’s original sin. I had discussed that our musicians at the time, uncertain whether we should call slavery America’s original sin or was the genocide of Native Americans our original sin? Both historical horrors deserve that designation though I think that the sequence of events might slightly favor slavery for that designation but, who wants to win that contest anyway?

But a part of my premise in the sermon about Washington and the fugitive slave, Oney Judge, is that there were people all around Washington who were very articulately advocating for the liberation of the slaves. Washington was not just swept along by the white supremacy of the prevailing culture into being a slave owner. He made the decision to be a slave owner, and a participant in the literal breeding and working of slaves for his personal profit and comfort. 

I’m not saying that he didn’t do great things in his life, I’m just saying that he had a glaring moral flaw that he had ample information and opportunity to have risen above. 

And today I want to say, in a similar vein, that this was also true in the other great American original sin, the genocide of Native Americans. There were about 90 million Native Americans in North America when white Europeans began their push to take control of the continent. There are about 4 million today, only one third of which live on reservations in intentional Native American communities. As bad as the holocaust in Europe was in the 1940’s, as horrible as the images that come to us from movies and museums, the death toll of the Jewish holocaust was dwarfed by what was done to the American Indian. 

You could look at any number of incidents of broken treaties and intentional spreading of disease among Indian populations, but I want to pull out one of the most egregious examples today, a massacre at Sand Creek that took place in the fall of 1864. While the Civil War raged on in the eastern states, gold had been discovered in the Colorado Rockies and though this was Indian land belonging to the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, troops were forcing the Native Americans back to make way for the gold miners. 

There had been numerous skirmishes but in November of that year, Col. John Chivington, a former pastor, led his men to attack a village killing all of the men, women, and children they found there . . . scalping and dismembering the 150 plus Indians they killed that day. 

But there were two officers under the command of Chivington, Captain Soule and Lt. Cramer, who ordered their men to refrain from attacking.

They confronted Chivington the night before the massacre began and pressed their case with such ferocity that Chivington threatened to send them back east in chains but in the end, he relented and agreed not to attack the Indian village. He was, of course, lying. After the massacre, the soldiers returned to Denver, displaying the scalps of men, women, and even of infants, expecting to be greeted as heroes. And, initially they were. But Soule and Cramer reported the real events to congress, sparking a Congressional investigation that turned the Massacre at Sand Creek into a national embarrassment, and so began the loss of appetite among Americans for the Indian Wars. 

These were just two men and they were grossly outnumbered by those who felt, as Chivington was known to frequently say: “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians. Kill and scalp all, big and little;” and when asked why he had killed babies, he explained, “nits make lice.”Chivington was relieved of duty. I don’t know if he returned to preaching at that time, but something tells me he may have. 

Soule and Cramer were a part of a culture that had dehumanized Indians, that thought that killing Indians was patriotic and even a holy endeavor but somehow, they thought their way out of that culture to a better and higher place and they held a mirror up to America to let the whole nation see how ugly we had become. Prejudice doesn’t die overnight. A great society is not birthed in one incident, but it takes the leadership of a few prophets to show us what we can become.

This is Spenser Rapone’s West Point graduation photo. He is a combat veteran and, obviously, a West Point educated officer, but last year he was dishonorably discharged from military service because, after he read about how the military had used the combat death of the famous football player, Pat Tillman, massaging the story into fake propaganda to sell a war to the American people. Rapone was discharged for disparaging the military mission and advocating for a socialist revolution in America. 

Rapone’s reaction to his disappointment in finding out how he had been tricked and lied to in military brainwashing may have been extreme but it was not quite as thorough going as Pat Tillman’s brother, Kevin Tillman’s, response.

Pat and Kevin joined the army together, shortly after 9-11. It was a patriotic decision for them to defend their nation against attack from foreign terrorists. But their education in international affairs didn’t begin in earnest until Pat was killed by friendly fire on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2004. Two years later, in 2006, an awakened Kevin Tillman said this in an essay that was published in honor of his slain brother:

I will read only a few pieces of essay. You can find the whole of it on Truthdig.com under the heading, “After Pats Birthday.”

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/after-pats-birthday-2/

Kevin writes:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military. . .

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes. . .

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

That essay is now 19 years old and we still have troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. I trust that I do not need to point out to you the moral connection between the hundreds of thousands of civilians we have killed in Afghanistan and Iraq and the massacre at Sand Creek a hundred and fifty-five years ago. 

I appreciate that you may have learned a bit of history when I told the story of Oney Judge two weeks ago. You may not have known the story of the massacre at Sand Creek, Colorado before today, but we don’t come here for history lessons. We come here to hear the voices of people like Captain Soule and Lt. Cramer in the music of Pete Seeger and the memorial musings of Kevin Tillman. 

We want to stand in the breach of military propaganda and cleaned up public school history to offer a prophetic and honest voice to train the conscience of the next generation of decision makers. I don’t know where Pat and Kevin Tillman went to church, but I feel like their church let them down, allowing them to be sucked into the military propaganda machine, leaving them to learn the sorry truth on a battle field in Afghanistan. 

We don’t ever want to make that mistake again.

“After the Patriarchy Falls”

“After the Patriarchy Falls”    January 13, 2019    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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Some people need to create a nightmare far worse than the one they came from before they will go back and heal their early wounds. We see this in trauma survivors all the time. They pile hell upon hell, until they have only two choices—die, or heal the wounds they are fleeing. I used to find this confusing, but I no longer do. Sometimes the first hell was so bloody bad that it takes a far worse hell to uncover it. Bows to those who choose to heal their hells, after so many years on the run. Bows to those courageous beings who give reality a try before they have any evidence that it will serve them. If this isn’t courage, I don’t know what is. from Jeff Brown’s “Spiritual Graffiti” 

I know that it irritates a lot of parents, but I loved it when my daughter went through that toddler phase of always asking why. It didn’t last long for her because, I assume, most pre-schoolers don’t really want you to drop everything and sit down and exploit that teachable moment for an hour or so.

But I sincerely think that more of us should get some of that curiosity back. We stop asking “why?” and we start accepting the status quo as if the way things are is just the way that they should be. And, in fact, religious people will insist that the way that things are is the way God wants them to be.

In the past couple of years, we’ve begun to talk a lot about patriarchy, about toxic masculinity, about white male privilege and the assumptions we make about who holds the reins of power in society. Why won’t the Catholic Church ordain women as priests? Why won’t the Assemblies of God, the Baptists, and most evangelical churches allow women to be ministers? Why are most corporate CEO’s men? 

And last year, when we had the largest number of women elected to the legislative branch of our government in our nation’s history, why is it that women still make up less than one fourth of the Senate and no woman has ever been elected president? 

May I ask you to indulge me just a moment to reflect upon this anthropologically? 

We all know that in any crisis, we place much higher value on the lives of women and children than we do on men. This is not just true about loading lifeboats on the Titanic, this has been true for centuries in warfare, or times of scarcity or starvation. This is not simple chivalry.

In the ancient world, when tribes competed for control of resources, it was much more important to protect women than men. If most of your tribe is wiped out in war, natural disaster, or illness, then it takes women and children to rebuild the tribe. A single man can sire many children in a month, but a woman can bear only about one child a year. Therefore, men are expendable, and women are precious to a tribe’s survival. 

This value creeps unconsciously into our cultural assumptions. Anthropologists have looked at how expendable men are in video games. 

Sure, women get portrayed in exaggerated sexualized ways in many video games, but men are typically portrayed as being entirely expendable. Even in games for children, shooting up dozens of men as if your six-year-old was suddenly John Wick is not much of an issue, it doesn’t raise much of an emotional reaction from almost anyone. 

But you don’t see games in which dozens of women are thoughtlessly mowed down in a hail-storm of bullets. Unconsciously, even in fantasy, men are expendable, and women are to be protected. That might sound like a good deal for women and children but what they sacrifice in this life or death exchange is their freedom from domination.

Patriarchy becomes the price that women pay for protection. The role of men as warriors translates into men as rulers, owners, decision makers, and, like it or not, predators. 

To the degree that cinema is a reflection of society, we have to admit that for the first hundred years of movies, women were basically to be either protected or seduced. 

In the early James Bond films, it was not so much that the dashing secret agent was irresistible, it was that he was basically a misogynist and sometimes a rapist. In fifty years of push back from feminists and more equality minded movie consumers, the movies have gotten a little less rape-y but not much less misogynistic. 

The popular genre of superhero movies have, in the past year, finally given us a black superhero and a female superhero but take a look at their respective costumes:

If you were going to war on a snowy battlefield in Germany, wouldn’t you wear something a little warmer?

Gender progress evidently comes slowly.

 Terry Crews, a professional football player turned actor, comedian, and author, has written a book about toxic masculinity, something that he says he has known from the inside. He talks about his own journey to correct those masculine stereotypes and, quite literally, how to be a better man, but what intrigued me was when he talked about some of the high-profile sexual predators who have been fired, criminally charged, or forced out of office. He talked about the enthusiasm around the trial of Bill Cosby, the firing of Harvey Weinstein, Trent Franks, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Louie C. K., Kevin Spacey, Mark Halpern, and now, 

R. Kelly will get his own documentary series to allow all of the women that he has abused to have a chance to speak. 

But I really appreciate Terry Crews saying that all this media bluster about famous figures amounts to “cutting a tree down by the leaves.” Some of these guys have been absolute monsters and their cases make for great TV news drama but Crews is saying that the real problem of toxic masculinity is in the trunk of the tree, it is a part of society. 

And as bad as the whole matter of employers sexually exploiting their employees is, the real meat and potatoes of sexual harassment is peer to peer in nature. It isn’t just politicians, movie producers and musicians, it is the guys working out at the Y who think that just because you are working out at the Y that they can come over and say salacious things about your body. It is the guy working beside you in the insurance office, the manufacturing floor, or in the restaurant who believes that proximity equates to permission to touch, suggest, even demand sexual attention. 

Patriarchalism, white male privilege, toxic masculinity is so prevalent in society that we tend not to see it. And once a virtual crusade against these evils begins by targeting high profile figures, there is bound to be collateral damage. 

I personally believe that the hunt for male predators went overboard when they equated the offenses of people like Garrison Keillor and Senator Al Franken with the likes of Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer. 

And this is just for free, I believe that Senator Kirsten Gillibrand may be announcing her candidacy for president in 2020 this week. It is time for a woman to become president and she is just the sort of person who may have won but I am afraid that her willingness to sacrifice the political career of her peer, supporter, and friend, Al Franken, will mean that a whole lot of us who have supported most of her views will never trust her. 

As you know, this time last year, we invited Dr. Nicole Fisk to this pulpit to publicly applaud the #MeToo movement and we have not changed our laudatory view of the process, but we don’t want to try to cut down the tree of patriarchy by just cutting the leaves. We want to make substantive change, the kind of change in society that will change what going to work will be like for waitresses, flight attendants, assembly line workers, and secretaries; not just actresses and recording artists. 

Hollywood is beginning to evolve. If you have not seen either of J. K. Rowling’s screenplays in which she offers us the male role model we have been dying to see in the magical character of Newt Scamander, played by Eddie Redmayne. Newt is intelligent and sensitive. He heroically rescues endangered, albeit magical, beasts, but he is reserved, sometimes passive, but strong in his respect for women, for life, and for troubled people. He offers us a view of a man who is to be admired and praised who is not a toxic, power hungry, violent man. 

In the same way that having openly gay characters in sit-coms helped Americans to change their view of the gay community, these kinds of cinema evolutions in how we think about leading men can only help us to reimagine what it means to be a good man. 

That, when coupled with offering us some images of strong, self-reliant women who don’t have to be rescued, seduced, or tarted up for the camera, and maybe our daughters have a chance of seeing themselves in a different universe than the one we grew up in.

But by way of conclusion, I will confess that there was a bit of free association involved with my selection of our wisdom lesson today. When I first read this short this text from Jeff Brown’s “Spiritual Graffiti,” it made me think more about the back and forth of society in the past decade. We took a huge step forward in 2008 when we elected a black president. Eight years later a woman won the nomination of the DNC, and, in fact, the popular vote. But then, like society’s “id” demanding another day in the sun, we have the absolute worst of human nature asserting itself in Donald Trump’s presidency. 

Jeff Brown is talking about how individuals will make a situation in their lives ten times worse before they develop the activation energy necessary to start getting out of that situation. I see this among domestic abuse victims all of the time. They will go back and back and back into a dangerously toxic relationship until it comes right up to the point of murder before making the necessary break to end all contact.

I think that America is in a toxic relationship with Donald Trump. On day one of his campaign it was obvious that he was an uneducated, unqualified, racist, and misogynist. Every day it has gotten worse, down to this weekend’s breaking news that the FBI has been investigating him out of substantive fear that he is actually working for the Russian government while holding the highest elected office in the world. The one thing that he has shown us is just how far off the rails a Republican president can go without being impeached. Bill Clinton was impeached for having an in-office dalliance. Trump makes Clinton look like a choir boy, but I am forced to wonder if this is all an unconscious way that our entire culture is just going deeper into a toxic relationship in order to find the collective activation energy to finally make substantive progress. 

I can imagine a 2019 in which Trump is either forced to resign or be impeached. I can imagine a movement in our country that will bring progressive goals into the mainstream, making things like universal healthcare, sane gun laws and immigration laws, access to higher education, and rebuilding of our infrastructure, centrist ideas rather than radical socialist views. 

The last couple of years have been tough for those of us who have spent decades working on progressive ideas. Yes, Trump blew all of the dog whistles of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, classism, and Islamophobia, to get elected but please note that the Women’s march that protested Trump’s election was three times the size of the crowd that came out to his inauguration. Sure, it was a serious loss, brought to us by an unholy alliance between the angry white men voters of America and Russia’s propaganda arm, but that failure is instructive.

The world is changing. In many ways it is changing through attrition, as the angry white vote is marching literally and figuratively towards the graveyard, and the next generation of voters is not simply browner and blacker, but it is less prejudiced, better informed, and more progressive. The current congress has more women, and more people of color than any preceding congress and it is up to us to make certain that this kind of inclusivity increases in the future. 

We may be in the midst of a very cold winter of a fall back into the hands of greedy capitalist, racists, and white nationalists but this winter will not last forever. Have I ever told you that as much as I love spring and summer, my favorite season is 

“America’s Original Sin”

January 6, 2019     “America’s Original Sin”     Roger Ray, pastor

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The Pennsylvania Gazette, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May 24, 1796. "Advertisement. ABSCONDED from the household of the President of the United States, ONEY JUDGE, a light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes and bushy black hair. She is of middle stature, slender, and delicately formed, about 20 years of age. She has many changes of good clothes of all sorts, but they are not sufficiently recollected to be described—As there was no suspicion of her going off, nor no provocation to do so, it is not easy to conjecture whither she has gone, or fully, what her design is;—but as she may attempt to escape by water, all matters of vessels are cautioned against admitting her into them, although it is probable she will attempt to pass as a free woman, and has, it is said, wherewithal to pay her passage. Ten dollars will be paid to any person who will bring her home, if taken in the city, or on board any vessel in the harbour;—and a reasonable additional sum if apprehended at, and brought from a greater distance, and in proportion to the distance. FREDERICK KITT, Steward. 

Religions and nations alike have myths of origins. As children we all learned the story of how our first president, when he was a child, used his little hatchet to chop down a cherry tree on the family plantation and when confronted by his father, Washington is said to have confessed, “I cannot tell a lie, I cut down the tree.”

Today, I’m going to tell you a sad story about how, as it turns out, the historical George Washington could tell a lie. And it isn’t simply that he lied about the young slave in his household, Oney Judge, but I want to talk about the way ethical thinking evolves. 

If you have a kind of “Gone with the Wind” view of American history, you can believe that the institution of slavery in our country was just a normal form of what Stephen Colbert calls, “an uncompensated intern program” that was the labor arrangement in our country before the Civil War. Like, before the Civil War, decent people, especially in the south, owned slaves. After the Civil War, no one owned slaves. The truth is much more complex. 

Ending slavery in our country was more like a century long debate that resulted in a horrible Civil War but, sadly, even the war and the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t snuff out slavery. It started to open some doors to freedom but an institution like slavery doesn’t end all at once. There was share cropping and things like the 

Pullman porters on the growing train travel: the porters were typically freed slaves and they were not paid a salary but were allowed to work for tips. It was this tradition that started tipping in restaurants which continues to be a near slavery wage arrangement even today. 

We should also be aware that in the institution of slavery, slave holders provided housing, food and clothing to their slaves which is not typically possible for minimum wage earners today. I would argue that until the minimum wage is a living wage, that we have not really ended slavery in America. 

But more graphically, we should never forget that the majority of the clothing, shoes, household goods, toys, and food found on the shelves of Walmart were produced by slaves, mostly in Asia and Central America but some by prisoners in America . . . or did you think that we keep 2.5 million Americans in prison because they are the bad guys?

Or didn’t you know that for very many years, and maybe it is not cricket for a gentleman to tell a lady’s secrets, but Victoria’s Secret was that sexy underwear was made by male prisoners for pennies a day. 

And you thought it was their ads that were obscene!

But I digress, let’s get back to George:  George had become wealthy the old-fashioned way; He married a widow who owned an estate that would have been worth about $10 million in today’s economy. Martha’s estate included several slaves. When George Washington was elected president, he and Martha had to move from their Virginia plantation to the president’s residence which was, at that time, in New York. The next year, the capital was moved from New York to Philadelphia where it remained until our seat of government was moved to the newly constructed city of Washington, D.C. when John Adams was president. 

When Washington became president, Martha’s personal assistant, Oney Judge, was 17. In Virginia, Oney slept in the bedroom next to Martha where she spent her days combing Martha’s hair and caring for her wardrobe. But Pennsylvania was not like Virginia. 

Philadelphia had more freed slaves than any other city in America. Oney saw free black men and women walking up and down the streets as if that was normal, normal in a way she had never seen in Virginia. And, as I said, the end of slavery in our nation was not a singular event nor did it even go in a straight line. 

Pennsylvania had passed a law that allowed slave holders to move there with their slaves but after six months of living there, the slaves were automatically emancipated. So, she saw what black liberty looked like and she saw a path towards freedom herself. But Washington was unwilling to give up the lifestyle of having uncompensated personal attendants. 

He wrote to his secretary that when any one of his six or seven household slaves had been in Philadelphia for more than five months, they were to be rotated with other slaves from among the more than 100 living on his plantation in Virginia. When he brought them back to Pennsylvania, the six month clock started all over again. He instructed his secretary that this was to be done in a way that deceived both the slave and the public. What he was doing was legal but it was morally reprehensible to most of the people around him so he wanted to make it look like his slaves wanted to remain a part of his household. 

Washington also had a law passed that allowed a slave holder to use a slave hunter to capture and return a runaway slave, no matter where they might be found. This was the first fugitive slave act. A captured runaway might be flogged or otherwise cruelly treated but the most common practice was to sell them to a Caribbean sugar plantation where they would almost certainly die in a matter of months. 

In spite of these threats, when Oney learned that she was to be given as a wedding present to one of Martha’s granddaughters who lived in the south, a place where Oney never wanted to live again, she decided to try to escape. One warm May evening when the Washington’s were entertaining guests, she slipped away and found passage on a boat called “The Nancy” and three days later, she was in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

The Washingtons wanted her back but they didn’t want to be humiliated both by the fact that a member of their domestic household had become a fugitive and that they had been outsmarted by a 20-year-old black woman whom they had never bothered to teach how to read and write. So they did what Americans of that era often did, they blamed a Frenchman. Washington concocted a lie that Oney had been seduced to run away by some lecherous Frenchman.

It was harder to hide in Portsmouth, there were fewer free blacks there, and, predictably, she was spotted by a friend of the Washington family who let them know where Oney was living. Washington felt that it was within her purview to use employees of the federal government to help him capture and return her. 

Trump was not the first president to believe that he could use his office for personal gain. There was a customs collector in the small town of Portsmouth, Joseph Whipple, and Washington instructed him to find, capture and return Oney to Philadelphia. And here is another issue in the evolution of morality:

Whipple and his wife had recently freed their slaves, being no longer willing to participate in this barbaric practice. So, he was being ordered by the president of the United States to capture and return a slave when he, personally, no longer found slavery to be palpable. This is the trap we all often find ourselves in. We have a principle, like not wanting to support slavery by buying slave produced goods, and the practical, “prices are much lower at Walmart.” Can you feel me?

So, Whipple tried to split the difference. He tricked Oney into coming to his office with the promise of a job. He asked her about the seductive Frenchman and discovered that what had seduced Oney was her desire to be free. 

He then tried to reason with her, telling her that if she returned to the Washington household, he might allow her to be emancipated after a few years of service. She pretended to agree to these terms and Whipple set out to arrange it through correspondence with Washington, but George would have none of it. Oney was property and he would not reward her with favorable treatment in reward for illegal conduct. Whipple caved in to the authority of the president and went to Oney’s home to take her by force, but she had wisely escaped.

Moving to a small community a few miles away, Oney met and married a sailor, named Jack. With him she gave birth to a daughter, Eliza. But, per the laws of slavery, the children of a slave belonged to the slave holder. By this time, Washington was no longer president, but he did not give up on trying to recover Oney. 

He sent his nephew, Burwell Bassett, who found her and again, tried to kindly persuade her to come back to Mt.
Vernon in Virginia. She flatly refused. Burwell left to hire men and to fetch a rope so that he could capture her and force her to leave with him but when he returned, she had disappeared again.

Even though the Washingtons never were able to recover Oney, the story is not especially a happy one. Oney had three children with Jack but, unfortunately, Jack died young and Oney was not able to support her small family. She had to contract her daughters out as indentured servants to neighboring farmers households and her son followed his father and became a sailor, and she never saw him again.

Eventually, George Washington died, and in his will he stipulated that his 120 slaves would be freed when Martha died which was not a terribly clever thing to 

say. 

A 120 people, living in these crowded dormitories at Mt Vernon,  had their freedom hinged on the death of one old white woman whose safety became rather precarious. There were a few mysterious fires and other incidents at Mt. Vernon that persuaded Martha to go ahead and emancipate the slaves prior to her death but she did not include Oney in that gesture and so Oney continued to live as a fugitive for the rest of her life. 

Her daughters eventually worked off their indentured servanthood and they, with their mother tried to survive in the crushing poverty that was the lot of even freed black people in those days. Eventually, Oney sold the only thing she ever owned, her story of slavery and her life as a fugitive from the first president of the United States to an anti-slavery magazine, just before she died when she was about 70 years old. 

It is my job to write eulogies for the deceased and I typically try my best not to dance on the graves of folks when I am delivering their eulogies but, honestly, I cannot tell a lie, not even then. If you see me at a funeral waxing eloquently about mortality and quoting a lot of philosophers and not talking much about the deceased, you may safely assume that I am avoiding something. I can try to be diplomatic but, as Confucius said, “One does not plaster a dung wall.” If any of you are around to speak at my memorial, I expect nothing more than honesty from you.

So, let me ask you, was George Washington a good man? He did a lot of good things. He risked his life in service of his country. He wrote wonderful documents about freedom and liberty. He delivered speeches, most noticeably, his farewell speech when he left office, even while he was trying his best to find and return Oney to slavery. 

No one is perfect. Good people, without exception, do bad things. But Washington was very well informed regarding all of the debates around slavery. There were people all around him who had thought their way through this issue and had freed their slaves at considerable financial sacrifice to themselves . . . Washington didn’t.

I have made the same observation about the prophet, Muhammad, who, late in life married a six-year-old child when he was in his 50’s. There were people in his life who implored him not to do it but it was legal, even though many people knew how wrong it was and begged him not to do it. So, with my apologies to Muslim defenders of the prophet’s reputation, was Muhammad a pedophile?

Ethics is always a moving target and the best people among us make compromises. I felt it was important to tell Oney’s story here today, not for us to sit in judgement of Washington over 200 years later but to remind us that we have to be willing to examine our own lives with the kind of objectivity that we are applying to Washington and Muhammad today.

For me, at least a part of my ongoing relationship with a spiritual community is the simple fact that being in community helps me to consider my own life in ways that may help me to be a better person, to make fewer compromises. I wish that Joseph Whipple had been strong enough in his convictions to just tell George “no.” 

I wish that Burwell Bassett had never gone to get a rope and some strong men to help him capture Oney. But more than that, when the time for moral decision making in the face of fortune or power comes to me, that I will make a choice that will make you proud when you stand up to speak at my memorial. 

When Ted Kennedy spoke at his brother, Bobby’s, memorial, he famously said, “My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it" I am forced 

 to wonder if Marilyn Monroe had lived long enough to be there and speak if she would have said the same.

We live life one moment at a time, making decisions, often without the perspective of history, but we are left to try to live in a way that when the lights are turned on, we can hope that the sum total is that we have been good and decent people, who saw wrong and tried to right it, who saw suffering and tried to heal it, and who try to leave a legacy of ethical decision making that outweighs our mistakes.

Have courage. Avoid compromise. Advocate for freedom, and don’t go buy a rope, not even for the president of the United States.