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Rev. Kendyl Gibbons All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church November 16, 2014

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Rev. Kendyl Gibbons All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church November 16, 2014 Rev. Kendyl Gibbons All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church November 16, 2014 “Nothing Will Halt the March of Truth” “Nothing Will Halt the March of Truth” Once before in my life, I have had this feeling. Eight years ago, I traveled to Israel and Palestine with a group of interfaith clergy colleagues. It was educational. It deepened our friendship. I was fully accepted by everyone as a member of the group, but it was not my story we were encountering – the garden where Jesus once wept, the walls of the ancient Hebrew temple. It was moving to see what it meant to the others, but it wasn’t mine. Until we came to Yad Vashem, the museum and memorial to six million Jews who perished in Hitler’s genocidal nightmare. There, alone, I found the garden of the righteous, dedicated to those gentiles who had risked their own lives to save Jewish lives, and in that garden, the names of only three Americans so honored, two of them Waitstill and Martha Sharp, the founders of the Unitarian Service Committee. A Unitarian minister, and his Unitarian wife. My people. My place. My story. Now I know about being a global citizen, the heir of all human history – that’s right; I’m down with that. But something in us also craves unique identity, the possession of particular heroes who belong to us, and who we belong to. Those whose legacies will be fulfilled, or not, by what we do or leave undone. The story that stands unfinished, to be continued in my life, by my fidelity to what they sacrificed to start. The tribal impulse that is part of our evolutionary makeup certainly has its troubling dimension, subtly urging us to divide the world into in group and out group; those who matter, and those who are dispensable, dangerous, other. This we need to recognize, and resist. But that same tendency has its nobler manifestation, which is this longing to be part of a team, to be the heir of something worth preserving and passing on, to know ourselves by a lineage and a story, that both sets us apart, and demands something of us. Owning Waitstill and Martha Sharp is a responsibility; being part of their continuing story asks me to pay attention, to wonder what they would be doing in the face of the challenges that confront our world today. It makes me better than I would otherwise be. So, I had that same experience last month, in Romania; specifically, at the tomb of Isabella Jagiellon, princess of Poland, queen of Transylvania, and her son, John Sigismund, the only Unitarian monarch in history – so far, at least. They lie in the cathedral of St. Michael, now a Catholic church in Alba Iulia, once the capital city of the independent Transylvanian kingdom. Based on what I could tell from the schematic map of the church, a transept was added in the 16th century, apparently specifically for the placement of their remains. Other dignitaries are interred beneath the floor nearby, with carved stones laid over them, so the whole area has been roped off with velvet barriers. It was unendurably frustrating to have come so far, only to be forbidden the final few feet, so with the encouragement of our host and guide, the minister of our partner church, I slipped under the cordon, and laid my hands on Isabella’s tomb. The elegant marble effigies had been long ago vandalized; the crown beside her arm chiseled away, his face obliterated. I wished suddenly that I had thought to bring flowers; I did not know before we got there how powerful this sense of connection to the past – my past – would feel. I could have stayed there a long time – much longer than anyone else in our group would have been comfortable – but after all, what difference do the bones make? It is the story that matters, that lives on. Yet all the rest of that day, through the long drive back to the Nyarad valley, I was aware that the white dust of Isabella’s tomb was on my tee shirt. You have heard the legend that came to me, standing on the top of Deva mountain, fifty yards from the cell in which it is said that Francis David spent the last months of his life, scratching his final testament onto the cold stone of his prison wall. So let me tell you now how it came to that, what Isabella and John Sigismund had to do with it, and why this story belongs peculiarly to us, and we to it. Princess Isabella was the eldest daughter of King Sigismund the Old of Poland, and his third wife, Bona Svorza, who was said to have single handedly brought the Italian renaissance to Poland. Isabella was raised to read, write, and speak several languages; to understand the complicated political, military, and dynastic landscape of eastern Europe in the 16th century; to be diplomatically astute, and tenacious of her title and power. After several negotiations for more strategically advantageous marriages fell through, at the age of 20 she married John Zapolya, king of Transylvania, who was then 52. A year later, she gave birth to a son, and two weeks after that, John Zapolya died of infected wounds received while subduing a minor rebellion. The infant, John Sigismund, was crowned king of Transylvania at the age of six weeks, in order to frustrate the claim of the Austrian Hapsburg dynasty that Ferdinand, the brother of Emperor Charles the V, was to have inherited the rule of Transylvania upon John Zapolya’s death. During his final days, Zapolya had sought to secure his son’s future by appointing a regency council to hold the throne until the child should grow old enough to assume it in his own right. The three members of this council were Isabella, the widowed mother; George Martinuzzi, a Catholic monk who was John Zapolya’s treasurer, and Peter Petrovics, a Calvinist cousin of Zapolya’s, and a general in his army. King John Zapolya also asked for, and received, the assurance of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, ruler of the Ottoman empire on the eastern edge of Transylvania, that he would both recognize the young prince and his regency council as the legitimate rulers of Transylvania, and also defend that right if Ferdinand and the Hapsburgs should ever attack them. As if this mix of political ambition and opposition to the Muslim Turks were not volatile enough, at the same time, many of the leading families of the Transylvanian nobility adopted the reformation ideas of Luther, or even John Calvin. During his reign, John Zapolya had made only sporadic, half hearted attempts to quench the spread of the reformation in his country, and these efforts had been unsuccessful. Throughout the regency period, the reformation continued to spread into Transylvania. The situation was, as I said, volatile. Transylvania lay in its cradle between the mountains, a buffer zone with two mighty empires on either side. To the west, the European Hapsburgs, including the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles the V – Catholics. To the east, the Turkish Ottoman empire, governed by Sultan Suleyman, who longed to conquer Vienna and spread his territory westward – Muslims. The ethnic Magyar and Szekler tribes of medieval Transylvania had no power to enforce their own independence; the only thing their leaders could do was to play the two surrounding empires against each other. The Sultan Suleyman had promised to protect Isabella and her son because it suited his purpose to do so; he did not want the Hapsburg forces with a military position right on his borders. For their part, the Hapsburgs, led by Ferdinand, saw the infant king and widowed queen as easy pickings. Soon after John Zapolya’s death, they marched into the western edge of the country, and after a quick early victory, Ferdinand managed to have himself crowned king with the same crown used for the baby’s coronation earlier that year. This crown will show up again in the story; keep an eye on it. The three members of the baby John Sigismund’s regency council had been chosen with the awareness that they would each have to work hard if there was going to be any throne left for him to take by the time he came of age. Isabella’s job was to raise a king. Petrovic’s job was to be their ambassador, a diplomatic negotiator who would travel constantly to the royal courts of Poland, Austria, France, and Germany, as well as to Rome, and to Constantinople, Suleyman’s capitol, juggling treaties, private assurances, marriage negotiations, tributes of money, and threats, to keep the powerful neighbors balanced against each other, so that Transylvania could maintain its independence. The monk Martinuzzi’s job was to make sure that there was money for all this, and to organize military strategy whenever the diplomacy failed. When Ferdinand and the Hapsburg army showed up that first year, it was Martinuzzi who called upon the Sultan to fulfill his promise of protection. Suleyman did as he had agreed, came with his own military forces, threw the Hapsburgs out, and restored the nation and the crown to Isabella and the regency council. As always, he cast covetous eyes westward toward Vienna while he was about it, but nothing came of it that time, and Suleyman returned to Constantinople, after being formally presented to the baby king. There is a painting which records this event in the Ottoman archives. Well, it would have been a difficult 18 years if everything had gone well, but of course that rarely happens.
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