Heritage of Martyrdom
Two weeks ago, I mentioned Jan Huss, a Bohemian Catholic martyr who was burned at the stake for, among other critiques, saying the Catholic church of his day got it wrong in restricting the cup of communion wine to priests alone, excluding the laity. I tied Huss’s theology of more broadly inclusive access to the elements of the Eucharist to my understanding of the meaning of our Unitarian Universalist symbol of the flaming chalice. I also said that though I claim Huss as a kindred theological forbear in this regard, he was not a Unitarian, nor a Universalist, and we can’t rightly claim him as one of ours.
Today I turn to a martyr of the Protestant Reformation, nearly one hundred forty years after Huss, Spanish theologian and physician Miguel Servet, more commonly referred to by the Anglicized version of his name, Michael Servetus. Servetus was burned alive in Geneva 470 years ago this past Friday. Among his heresies, set forth in his books On the Errors of the Trinity and The Restoration of Christianity, was the assertion that the concept of the Trinity is not supported by scripture and is rather a corruption of the true essence of Christianity. Servetus was eager to discuss his ideas with the leading theologians of his day, including John Calvin. Calvin was not persuaded by Servetus’ arguments, eventually ended their correspondence, and told a colleague that if Servetus ever went to Geneva he would not leave alive. Servetus, having narrowly escaped the inquisitor general in Lyon (where he was subsequently burned in effigy), did travel to Geneva. He was recognized, arrested, tried, convicted and burned–though Calvin had both begged Servetus to recant and urged the Geneva town council to substitute the more humane execution of beheading.
It is a bit of a stretch to claim Servetus a capital U Unitarian martyr because he neither founded nor participated in any religious community distinguished by unitarian theology or claiming that name. (Indeed “Unitarian” was not claimed as a self-description for those with unitarian theology until William Ellery Channing did so in Baltimore in 1819, 266 years after Servetus’ death.) Servetus’s writings did, however, influence Faustus Socinus, (in Italian, Fausto Paolo Socini, Sozini, or Sozzini) a 16th century convert from Catholicism who served a church in Krakow, Poland and wrote the first unitarian catechism, and whose own works influenced the rise of Unitarianism in England in the 17th century and in New England in the 18th century. So it is not altogether unreasonable that we consider Servetus one of our earliest theological forbears, and that at least a couple UU congregations bear his name. What is not at all a stretch is to acknowledge that Michael Servetus was a martyr to his belief that true Christianity is unitarian, not trinitarian, in nature.
More than four hundred years after Servetus’s death, in the wake of Bloody Sunday, in March of 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. called for the faith leaders of the nation to travel to Selma for another attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge en route to Montgomery, Alabama. Among those who heeded the call were three Unitarian Universalist ministers James Reeb, Clark Olson and Orloff Miller. On the evening of March 9, after Dr. King had led the group across the bridge, stopped them for prayer and then turned them back rather than violate a court order, Reeb, Olson and Orloff dined together at an integrated restaurant. Upon leaving the restaurant they were recognized as Civil Rights marchers, and attacked by angry men with clubs. All three were severely injured. Reeb died from his injuries two days later. A Unitarian Universalist martyr to the cause of civil rights, and in a real sense, to the Unitarian Universalist values that sent him to Selma, though of course he wasn’t beaten because he was a Unitarian Universalist as such.
Lay folks also traveled to Selma after Bloody Sunday to join subsequent attempts and the final successful march from Selma to Montgomery. One of them was Unitarian Universalist Viola Liuzzo, a mother of five from Detroit. During the last march Ms. Liuzzo was one of a group of volunteer drivers who drove some of the marchers when the highway was too narrow to accommodate them all. On the final night of the five day, four night march she was transporting an African American volunteer when a car full of Ku Klux Klan members began following her and eventually pulled up beside and shot her through the window, killing her. She, too, was a Unitarian Universalist martyr to the cause of civil rights, and to the values of the faith that sent her to Alabama. A double martyr, in fact, because the FBI, on orders of J. Edgar Hoover, immediately mounted a smear campaign against Viola Liuzzo’s reputation, attempting to conceal and draw attention away from the fact that an FBI informant was in the car with KKK members.
Unitarian Universalism does not have scores of martyrs to our faith or other just causes, stretching in a line over the centuries. Still, we have these three–Servetus, Reeb and Liuzzo–and probably others, names and stories unknown outside their families and closest intimates, who convicted by their values took stands that cost them their lives. Martyrdom is one strand of our faith heritage.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and just say, while we do have some pretty fine theological minds in our congregation, it’s a pretty safe bet that none of us is ever going to publish a book that will lead to our conviction and execution for heresy. But as the stories of James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo teach us, martyrs in the last century and undoubtedly this one, too, aren’t often folks who are put to death for the things they think and write and teach—though every day, around the world and here in the US, people do receive credible death threats for things they say and write. Still, contemporary martyrs more often have been, and are, and will be, ordinary people who step into moments that become history because they answer an invitation to come alongside oppressed or marginalized people. They are parents who travel to places of danger and possibility, leaving families at home, because their faith demands it of them. They weren’t like Servetus, knowingly going to a city where his life had been threatened, but they weren’t unlike him, either. The Civil Rights movement had already been marked by violence. Reeb and Liuzzo knew their bodies would be at risk when they went to Selma–though perhaps not that their lives were at risk. They went anyway.
How are we as twenty-first century Unitarian Universalists, called to live out of and into a heritage that includes martyrs to and in service of the values of our faith? Cognizant of these Unitarian Universalists who gave their lives upholding the values of our faith, living in the same broken and hurting world, must we seek to put our bodies and our lives at danger for the values we hold dear, the truths we believe in? Of course not. At least that’s not the only way of honoring Reeb, Liuzzo, the nameless others. After all, they weren’t courting death or even danger. They were seeking life, abundant, safe, unremarkable life for people routinely denied it.
And that we can do a thousand different ways. We start by asking ourselves at least daily, “what does my faith, what do my values demand of me today?” We continue in all the little ways that may seem unnecessary or performative, or politically correct, such as normalizing announcing our pronouns, even if we think they’re obvious, because doing so makes it safer for people to live their authentic selves fully, publicly. We do it by marching when there are marches to go on. By writing letters to the editor when there are issues that need progressive representation. We do it by being curious and informing ourselves, rather than expecting BIPOC or queer or trans folks to expend their precious lives teaching us. We do it believe people know their own experience, their own pain, their own joy, their own needs and desires better than we ever will.
We honor our martyrs when we live active and engaged lives in the face of climate change, partisan politics, and world events so complex and heartbreaking we can scarcely keep ourselves from closing our eyes and ears. Because climate change is life and death. Because politics are life and death. Because armed conflict anywhere diminishes all humanity.
"What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it
whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire."
Mary Oliver reminds us that people have died for ideas and challenges us with the assertion that allowing ourselves happiness is another way to enter the fire. Part of me resists that idea. How can happiness, my happiness, equal the sacrifice of those who have died for truth, for justice, for the lives of others? But of course it is, because happiness we permit ourselves, happiness as a deep breath we would take for all of us, spurs us to pursue it for all others. Happiness we’re not ashamed of calls us into the fray of growing love and building justice in ways just as glorious and infinitely more life-giving than martyrdom, intentional or unintentional.
"It is all so mysterious
the way they remain
above us
beside us
within us;
how they beam
a human sunrise
and are so proud."
Mary Oliver’s poem is titled Sunrise and speaks of martyrs. Alice Walker’s is titled Martyrs and speaks of sunrise. I love her image of a human sunrise, the proud beaming of those who “who sacrificed/themselves/to bring to life/something unknown/though nonetheless more precious/than their blood”. I love even more the idea that those martyrs are within us. However Walker intended that phrase, to me it says, what they had in them, we have in us. The will to give our lives–better still, live our lives for something more precious than blood: truth, justice, love, life for the forgotten, the abandoned, the oppressed, the vilified, and the marginalized. Life for all. Life
Amen.