“Many Colors, One Palette”

A Sermon for the GNOUU Hot Art Service
North Shore Unitarian Universalists
The Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
Sunday, August 7, 2011

Back when I was an art major in undergrad school (that was back when I had this crazy idea that my career path would be “artist”), laying out my palette of oil paints was one of my favorite things. I loved squeezing out shiny squiggles of paint in lustrous colors with evocative names, such as viridian green and alizarin crimson and cerulean blue, and arranging them just the way I wanted on my palette pad. I took enormous pleasure in that process, and took my time doing it, but it was just the first step in creating a painting.

Years before that, I had felt a similar sense of satisfaction with boxes of 64 Crayola crayons. (Believe me, I had no truck with those little useless boxes of 8 colors or even 16 – all I cared about was the 3-tired boxes of 64.) I used to spend hours arranging and rearranging the crayons in what I considered to be the correct color order, since they never arrived in that "perfect" order. But of course the real creative part was taking the colors out of the box and making something with them.

On Friday afternoon, I had the honor of representing the congregations of the Greater New Orleans UU cluster at a demonstration at the Hale Boggs Federal Building in New Orleans. The ostensible purpose was to join a pro-test against the annual meeting in a New Orleans hotel of the American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC for short, that is funded mostly by the Koch Brothers of Texas, with contributions from big tobacco, big oil, and big pharma. The group is notorious for feeding their member state legislators “model” legislation to protect the interests of large corpora-tions against the rights of workers, unions, minorities, and women. (You can find out more about the group online by googling ALEC, or by going to the website of The Nation to read the exposé that was published last month.)

But since the time that had been set for the anti-ALEC demonstration months ago turned out to be only hours after the jury in the Danziger Bridge case had brought in a verdict of guilty on all counts for 5 former NOPD officers for shooting innocent civilians in the days after Katrina, the gathering on Poydras Street took on something of a celebratory air. There was a sense that if there could be justice in the Danziger case – however delayed – that justice was possible in other seemingly hopeless situations.

Strung along the plaza in front of the federal building was a very diverse group. The locals included representatives from groups active since before the Storm in combating police brutality and after-the-fact official cover-ups, white anti-racists, union members black and white and male and female, students and professors from local universities, including a busload from LSU, immigration activists, and community organizers. There were about a dozen people who had come down from Ohio and Wisconsin, two states that have had recent bad experiences with ALEC-inspired state laws. There were Catholics, and Protestant Christians, Jews and Muslims, and not a few atheists. I met two Unitarian Universalists from the Baton Rouge church – a mother and son team, reminding me of all those demonstrations I went to with my son Stephen – and I saw at least one member of Community Church (Rev. Jim was and is on vacation in Colorado; he and I take turns representing us on community events when we can).

A folk singer led the group, numbering around a hundred people, in traditional protest songs, songs written for the Alaska oil spill as well as the BP oil spill, and a few that seemed to have been written for this occasion. Protest signs ranged from the serious to the silly, with LOTS of different ways to spell out ALEC; many signs bore color photos of different state legislators who had succumbed to the blandishments of the lobbying group.

I was glad to be there, and I was glad for the diversity that was present, but being among so many people of different ages, faiths, and ethnicities was not an end in itself. We were there for something, something important – to stand for justice, for democracy, to make a difference.

We Unitarian Universalists can get pretty excited about diversity. Workshops are held at district meetings and at General Assembly on the topic, and articles on diversity are published in the UU World magazine. Ministers and lay leaders question their counterparts from other churches, asking, How big – how many people of color – whether or not there are working class people in their congregations. And these are not invalid questions, because we Unitarian Universalists ought to be concerned about whether our religious message – our “good news” – is reaching as many people, and as many different kinds of people, as possible.

But much more important than diversity is purpose. We have to be gathering different kinds of people for a good reason, just as placing paint on a palette, or arranging crayons in a box, has to be for a purpose. From what I’ve read, I’m convinced that if they had to, the Koch Brothers could pull together a pretty diverse group of people – but I’m also convinced that even they did such a thing, it wouldn’t be for purposes of wider justice.

When I think about our cluster, the Greater New Orleans UU cluster, and I think about us fairly often, I have some of the same concerns. It is a good thing, a very good thing, that these three congregations have come together, and it is only natural that so much of our purpose for doing so in the beginning was for recovery and support. That was what we needed at the start. But now that we are very close to the 6th anniversary of Katrina, it is needful to ask What else is our purpose? It’s a good thing, a very good thing, that we came together, and I brag about us for doing that all the time when I’m around other UUs. But what are we together FOR? WHY are we together? What is the greater goal, the higher purpose, for these 3 disparate different congregations to be together for?

We are like different colors on one palette – impressive and attractive, but useless unless we’re accomplishing something. Ensuring each other’s survival through raising money, while a good thing, is not enough. Sharing worship in common, as we are doing today, also a good thing, is not enough. We must share a higher purpose together – and I hope that purpose is making the Greater New Orleans area a better, more just, more ethical, more equitable, more democratic, place for as many people as possible in every way we can.

Some might say we have to be completely recovered ourselves before we can reach out to help those even worse than ourselves, but they would be wrong. None of the three congregations – not even Community Church – is wholly and completely restored, and yet already we have been able to make large contributions to the city of New Orleans and the surrounding area, both through our own united efforts and through the work of our shared non-profit, the Center for Ethical Living & Social Justice Renewal.

The list of the community organizations, community groups, and individuals that we have partnered with and that we have been to help would take longer than to recite than we’ve allotted for this sermon. The important issues we have addressed include the destruction of housing projects in New Orleans and the subsequent lack of affordable housing, the closure of Charity Hospital and the push to raze a recovering Mid-City neighborhood for an unneeded behemoth hospital for LSU, wage theft, immigration reform and the right to remain, hunger, homelessness, aid for struggling urban public schools, the revitalization of our local culture and tradition such as the Mardi Gras Indians, food justice and the lack of fresh produce in so many neighborhoods, free healthcare clinics in underserved neighborhoods, care for families in the inner city who are dealing with the nitty-gritty of racism, official indifference, crime, and the public-schools-to-prison pipeline, and of course helping individuals, neighborhoods, and churches to rebuild and come back from Katrina’s destruction.

THIS is why we’re together. Because the people of New Orleans and the 5 surrounding parishes need us, need our voice, need our influence, need our hands and hearts, our work and our monetary contributions. Because justice and ethics and equity and democracy are too important to squabble over and much too big for any one congregation to do by themselves alone.

This is who we are, and this is what we are for. The congregations of First Church, North Shore, and Community Church, urban, inner city, suburban, exurban, rural, middle class, well off, working class, achievers, strugglers, retirees, employed, unemployed, old, middle-aged, young adult, and youths, gay, straight, bisexual, transgender, intersexed, and gender queer, black, white, and Latino – many colors, one palette, for the purpose of making the greater New Orleans area a better place for all of the people who live here.

So might this be! AMEN – ASHÉ – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTÉ – BLESSED BE!