Service: Compassionate Father: Reclaiming the Mystical Divine Masculine (no audio or text)
Sermon: Love’s Hands and Feet (audio only)
Service: What I Set My Heart to: Coming of Age Credo Ceremony
Sermon: Flesh, Blood, Breath, Bones, and Stories (text & audio)
Flesh, Blood, Breath, Bones and Stories
“Messenger,” by Mary Oliver
My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird——
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over; how it is
that we live forever.
The Gospel of John 1:1-5, 14
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, . . . full of grace and truth.
We meet and know each other as bodies: tall, lanky, short, squat, round, lean, and average (whatever average is) bodies; bodies with tattoos and piercings, with scars or sciatica, and with acne or arthritis; stooped and aging bodies, svelte and athletic bodies, sick and dying bodies; bodies in remission and recovery; worn and weary bodies; and—a few—rested and energized bodies.
We don’t just have bodies; we are bodies—more than bodies, of course, but never less. We are bodies and spirits—not either, but both. Marcus Aurelius said too little for the body when he wrote: “You are a soul carrying around a corpse.” We’re not pearls waiting to be freed from our uncomfortable oysters or ghosts trapped in irrelevant machines or souls imprisoned in oppressive bodies.
We can’t neatly separate our bodies and spirits; they are not divisible without remainder. They are seamlessly woven together, which is why it’s difficult to do so-called “spiritual” things—like being patient, compassionate and centered—when our stomachs growl, our feet hurt, our heads throb, we haven’t slept enough, haven’t eaten well, or haven’t had our morning coffee. When we’re weary, hungry and thirsty, it’s harder to love well, to think clearly, and to feel truly.
Humans are body and spirit, brains and minds, hearts and love. We need respiration and crave inspiration. We can’t exist without the circulation of blood, and we can’t live without the connection of relationships. We are biology and biography; what people see is our skin and what we want them to know are our stories.
We’re embodied spirits. Emotional or spiritual experiences are somehow and always physical: they fire across the synapses of our brains and register somewhere in our bodies. Anxiety shallows our breathing and speeds up our hearts. Fear churns in our stomachs. Loss sends tears running down our cheeks. Wonder widens our eyes. Desire burns and twitches in our loins. Joy lightens our steps. Confidence straightens our spines. Hope lifts our heads.
The great gifts of laughter and song are magic conjured from body and spirit. We giggle, snicker, chuckle, and guffaw; and, when we do, our shoulders dance and our faces open up. Sometimes the laughter erupts from the middle of who we are—a “belly laugh,” we call it—and the delight can be so great and uncontrollable that we find ourselves down on the floor, slapping the ground. Norman Cousins called laughter “internal jogging,” and it surely is one of the healthiest things we do.
Singing blends poetry and breath, doxology and diaphragm, thanks and throat, praise and vocal chords, lament and lungs, longing and larynx. Singing embraces and involves the whole person: thinking and feeling, the brain and the body. Literary critic George Steiner considered music to be evidence for God, a sign of the divine among us. It gives voice—physical and psychic voice—to life’s deepest, highest, darkest, brightest, and holiest dimensions.
One of today’s readings is from the majestic prologue to the Gospel of John. It’s a song, a hymn, about Jesus which offers us a powerful metaphor for perceiving the extraordinary in the ordinary, the mysterious in the mundane, and the divine in the daily: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, a glory filled with grace and truth.”
Sometimes this metaphor is called “the incarnation,” which is what my grandfather called a “high-dollar word” for a startling claim. Incarnation comes from the Latin words in carne and means “in meat.” The claim is that in the meat and the muscle, the blood and the bones, of a human body, the body of Jesus of Nazareth, we may perceive the grace and truth of God.
I don’t think of the incarnation as something which happened once and exclusively in Jesus; instead, I am sure that incarnation keeps happening to everyone, everywhere, and “every-when.” Feminist theologian Wendy Farley wrote, in The Wounding and Healing of Desire, “The incarnation manifests the power of the human body to bear the divine” (106).
Like all the other great teachers to whom we look for guidance and hope, Jesus lived within the limits and possibilities of a fully human—that is, an irreducibly physical—life. Mary cuddled away the night-chill by holding him in her tender embrace. When Joseph held him close to his cheek, Jesus felt the comfort of a father’s rough, soft beard. Jesus cried when he was hungry or thirsty or wet. He laughed when Mary tickled his feet and shouted with glee when Joseph tossed him in the air. He fell and skinned his knees when he was learning to walk. He hit his thumb with a hammer in Joseph’s carpenter shop, and it really hurt. When he became a teenager, he felt stabs of desire. He had headaches and stomachaches, caught colds, and sweated through the heat of fevers; and in his death, he knew excruciating, torturing pain.
One truth among many that the incarnation offers us is this: what happens to us, to our bodies, matters—matters to us and, I believe, to God.
In many ways, ethics is about how we treat bodies, our own and the bodies of others. Catholic priest and controversial activist Daniel Berrigan was exactly right when he said, at the height of the Vietnam war: “It all comes down to this: Whose flesh are you touching and why? Whose flesh are you recoiling from and why? Whose flesh are you burning and why?” (in Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, 45)
Food matters: Who has enough to eat and who doesn’t? Why are there food deserts in poor urban areas—places where there are more liquor stores, payday loan centers, and fast food restaurants than there are grocery stores?
The condition of the soil from which food grows matters, as do the welfare of the farmers who grow it and of the migrant workers who harvest it.
It matters that people struggle with food: some substitute it for love and can’t get enough of it, even when they’ve had far-too-much, and others obsessively control how much food they consume because they feel consumed by emotions which they cannot control.
It matters when our bodies become broken and we struggle with disease and injury, and it matters that everyone has good and affordable healthcare (By the way, we all have a preexisting condition; it is called mortality.
It matters how the homeless are sheltered and that we work for decent and affordable permanent housing.
It matters that we create jobs which don’t demean human dignity and don’t treat the bodies of laborers as disposable cogs in a sweatshop machine.
It matters how police and prison officials treat all bodies, including black and brown bodies.
It also matters, and these are signs of grace: when we relax beside a warm fire on a cold night, when strong and tender hands massage away the knotted tension of stress from our shoulders, and when a welcoming embrace assures that we belong.
It matters that we find joy in a dancer’s flowing beauty, in a painter’s luminous canvas, in the three-point shot that ties a game at the buzzer and sends it into overtime, in the perfect spiral pass to a sprinting split-end, in the powerful strokes and swiftly gliding body of a swimmer, and in the bursting speed of a runner. I often think of the well-known words of Olympic runner Eric Liddell, “God made me fast and, when I run, I feel [God’s] pleasure.”
Bodies matter; they are where we meet glory, feel grace, and encounter truth. And, our bodies tell stories: lines and furrows of worry in our faces, downcast gazes, slumped shoulders, springing steps, shuffling feet, clenched fists, and out-stretched arms. Journalist Dana Jennings (New York Times) wrote:
“Our scars tell stories . . . [I]n their railroad-track-like appearance, my scars remind me of the startling journeys that my body has taken — often enough to the hospital or the emergency room.
Jennings said that he’s most intrigued by childhood scars that he can’t remember how he got:
The one on my right eyebrow, for example, and a couple of ancient pockmarks and starbursts on my knees. I’m not shocked by them. To be honest, I wonder why there aren’t more. I had a full and active boyhood, one that raged with scabs and scrapes, mashed and bloody knees, bumps and lumps, gashes and slashes, cats’ claws and dogs’ teeth, jagged glass, ragged steel, knots, knobs and shiners. Which raises this question: How do any of us get out of childhood alive?
There are acne scars from his teenage years and surgical scars, too: to repair a blown-out knee, to remove most of his colon, and to treat prostate cancer. “. . . [M]y scars. . . are what they are, born of accident and necessity. . . . More than anything, I relish the stories they tell (“Cases: Our Scars Tell the Stories of our Lives” July 20, 2009, NY Times).
Your body is holy and a gift of the divine. Cherish it and care for it. And let your scars tell their stories.
Though its wounds are mostly invisible, for the last three years, I’ve been dealing with Multiple Myeloma, a treatable but incurable cancer of the blood and bone marrow.
I’ve sustained many losses. I’ve had to surrender my illusions of independence and to relinquish a vocation which had been central to my identity for more than three decades.
I’ve experienced “chemo-brain” which caused me to be occasionally disoriented and confused, to have difficulty remembering the names of people whom I know well, and to put dirty socks in the recycle bin instead of the clothes hamper. From time to time, I’ve dealt with searing pain, endured fearfully sleepless nights, had a severely compromised immune system, and, twice, have come to the edge of death.
I’ve never been good at accepting limits, but now it has become necessary for me to learn. There are things I’ve always done which I can no longer reliably do. I know what it means to feel that “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” In ways I have not experienced since I was a child, I have had to learn to accept help—and not just to accept it, but to ask for it.
Until lately, I’ve known next to nothing about how to care for myself—or to let myself be cared for—when my strength wanes. I haven’t known much about compassion for my own weaknesses. When I say, “I can’t,” I feel embarrassed and ashamed.
Illness is revising the story my life tells; it is teaching me what I’ve been clever enough, resourceful enough, and prideful enough to ignore before now: I am not God. I’m not even an exceptional human being, since there are no exceptions to, or exemptions from, limitation, including the final limit of death.
Barbara Brown Taylor wrote that
Whether you are sick or well, lovely or irregular, there comes a time when it is vitally important for your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, “Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul’s address.” After you have taken a good look around, you may decide that there is a lot to be thankful for, all things considered. Bodies take real beatings. That they heal from most things is an underrated miracle. That they give birth is beyond reckoning (An Altar in the World, 38)
Our bodies are always giving birth; my body’s story has conceived and delivered unexpected wonder. Wonder shares a common root with wound. A wound is an opening in the body: to be wounded is to be cut, pierced, or torn open. Wonder is an opening in perception: something cuts away our customary assumptions, pierces our illusions, and tears open our minds and hearts.
To call something wonderful—full of wonder—is to say that it has opened us in ways we’ve not been open before and given us the opportunity to be filled with unexpected awareness and unimagined grace. This is, as Mary Oliver said, gratitude,
to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
Sermon: What is Required ll (audio and text)
READING
IT is the first mild day of March:
Each minute sweeter than before
The redbreast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our door.
There is a blessing in the air,
Which seems a sense of joy to yield
To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field.
My sister! (‘tis a wish of mine)
Now that our morning meal is done, 10
Make haste, your morning task resign;
Come forth and feel the sun.
Edward will come with you;–and, pray,
Put on with speed your woodland dress;
And bring no book: for this one day
We’ll give to idleness.
No joyless forms shall regulate
Our living calendar:
We from to-day, my Friend, will date
The opening of the year. 20
Love, now a universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
From earth to man, from man to earth:
–It is the hour of feeling.
One moment now may give us more
Than years of toiling reason:
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.
Some silent laws our hearts will make,
Which they shall long obey: 30
We for the year to come may take
Our temper from to-day.
And from the blessed power that rolls
About, below, above,
We’ll frame the measure of our souls:
They shall be tuned to love.
Then come, my Sister! come, I pray,
With speed put on your woodland dress;
And bring no book: for this one day
We’ll give to idleness.
SERMON
Oh, I will be the gladdest thing under the sun! Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem (text of the choir’s anthem) captures that moment of rising joy when we feel so deeply connected to the world around us, to the very pulse of life moving within us.
It’s a moment when we are not observers to the beauty before us: we are of it. We can touch a hundred flowers and have no need to pick a one, for they are, as it were, extensions of ourselves – the cliffs, the clouds, the wind, the grass, all of it. In that moment, we are unutterably home.
We hear it there in Wordsworth’s poem, too. His evoking of a fine day in March, in his words, “each minute sweeter than before.” The birds, the fields, the mountains all contribute to what he calls “a blessing in the air.”
And then he carries it to another level, writing,
“and from the blessed power that rolls
about, below, above,
we’ll frame the measure of our souls:
they shall be turned to love.”
Love, he says earlier, “now a universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
From earth to man, from man to earth:
It is the hour of feeling.”
It is the kind of passage that has gotten poets like Wordsworth dismissed as romantics who are distracted with idylls in a world beset with serious problems. But Wordsworth anticipates his critics: “one moment now,” he says, “may give us more than years of toiling reason; our minds shall drink at every pore the spirit of the season.”
Instead of distraction, he says, the blessing we get from the blithe air offers the very sustenance we most need: not just pleasure in the day but a spur to a morally centered and spiritually fulfilling life.
What does the Unitarian heritage of our tradition call us to do and to be? What does it say is required of us if we would live well, if we would live rightly, if we would live wholeheartedly and at peace?
I want to take this Easter Sunday to explore these questions, completing a conversation that I began last fall, asking the same question from the perspective of our Universalist heritage: In this tumultuous time, how do these rich heritages speak to us now?
What I want to avoid in this conversation is archaic theological debates, many of them so hot as to be subjects of front-page stories in New England newspapers 200 years ago, that now count as little more than historical curiosities. Rather, it seems to me the place to go is to explore some of what those who guided our movement were struggling with and how it speaks to us now.
So, I start with one of the most fascinating of our Unitarian forebears: William Ellery Channing. Slight and sickly as a boy, he was raised from early in his life with an eye to ministry. But Channing had an experience early in his life that turned him against the harsh Calvinism of his family. He told of traveling with his father to hear a fiery sermon on how all people were cursed by their sins to an eternity in hell. Leaving the hall, his father pronounced the words, “Sound doctrine.”
Hearing that, Channing expected that soon they would fall to their and beg repentance. Instead, on the way home his father whistled a happy tune and, when they’d arrived, had their usual family dinner, after which his father repaired to the living room where he propped up his feet and picked up the evening newspaper. It was plain to him, Channing said, that however his father praised the preacher’s doctrine, he didn’t believe it. It was for him the first of many reminders always to test with his mind and heart what the preacher proclaimed.
It was to be a hallmark of Channing later as a leading Unitarian preacher, when he argued for applying reason to religious inquiry and for centering the work of religion in cultivating what he called “character.” And it’s here that Wordsworth enters the picture.
Channing was devoted to Wordsworth’s poetry and made it one of the chief goals of a sabbatical visit to Britain early in his ministry to visit the poet. The two are said to have enjoyed each other’s company wandering along Lake Windermere, but even more they discovered that they shared a similar perspective on the source of religious awakening. At the heart of it was the conviction that the natural world, rather than depraved as the preachers said, was a premier source of insight into the nature of the good. Channing was especially taken with Wordsworth’s poem that we heard, “To My Sister,” often reading it out loud to friends, for it sums up that perspective so nicely. The wondrous beauty of the world, Wordsworth says, turns us from our contemplation of our narrow selves to an expansive sense of love – love within and love beyond – connecting us with all people and all things.
Channing envisioned this inner sense of love as bit of divinity within each of us, a spark of truth and goodness that it is our work to cultivate. Less effusive than Wordsworth, he called it our “disinterested benevolence,” something similar to what Martin Luther King Jr later called “agape.”
That is why freedom and independence of mind are so crucial in religious life, he felt. We need room to act on that sense of benevolence, to attune our lives to its call. Channing felt that we exert our true nature, what he called “our majestic sway,” when we act on behalf of this sense of benevolence. So, he said, our work is to learn the disciplines of “Self-Culture” that help us do that. And from his perspective, the “self” we should culture was not the seat of our pedestrian wants and needs but this deeper self where we were to find our true guide.
It was a philosophy that influenced many reform movements of the early 19th Century that were led by Unitarians, including universal public education, temperance laws, ministry to the poor and ultimately support for the abolition of slavery.
It is also a big part of what informs a fundamental optimism that has characterized our movement from its earliest days, a faith and trust in people to find their way and meet their needs with their own gifts.
With Wordsworth, he felt that following this call, “may give us more than years of toiling reason,” as long as it fuels a sense of duty that causes us act.
So, what does our Unitarian tradition call us to be and do? Well, a strong thread that stretches to our beginnings as a movement urges us to treasure the beauty and wonder of the world, to find what is holy in it and in us and each other, to see ourselves as empowered to act for our own, our fellows’ and the world’s benefit, for freedom and equality.
It is an inspiring ethic that in time has helped accomplish much good. But we also have to acknowledge that this approach also can lead us to omit or at least downplay another kind of experience. You might call it the Easter experience: coping with failure, pain, loss, defeat, death.
It’s something that I can tell you I experienced in a small way the past couple of nights as I’ve been tossing in bed, popping Ibuprofens and attempting exercises, neither of which seem to be making much impact on pain shooting down my leg.
Beside the pain itself I wrestled with a sense of disappointment with myself and my body, a sense of isolation that has kept me out of family plans when our youngest daughter is visiting from out of town, and embarrassment at the prospect of standing before you on Easter Sunday before I leave on sabbatical clutching a cane. It’s not what I want, and, I have to admit, it put me in a pretty sour mood.
Here’s where I have to acknowledge that these are the kinds of things that historically Unitarians haven’t always given a lot of attention to. In this beautiful world, we empowered, cultured, actualized folks sometimes run out of options, bad things happen, and we’re running on empty. What then?
This brings to mind another of our forebears: Norbert Fabian Capek. Capek was born in the late 19th Century in Bohemia, trained to become a Baptist minister and converted to Unitarianism on a trip to the U.S. In the 1920s he returned to Eastern Europe, where he settled in Prague and started a Unitarian church that grew quickly, eventually becoming the largest Unitarian congregation in the world with a membership of some 3,000.
Capek was one of those sunny, indefatigable people, full of energy and optimism. His preaching drew a diverse crowd to his church – former Catholics, Protestants and Jews – which was exciting but also a potential source of conflict. Capek felt he needed to create a ritual that might help bring the worshipping community together.
So, he came up with a simple idea: one Sunday he would invite each congregant to bring a flower to the service – it could be from someone’s garden or just from the roadside – and all those flowers would be gathered in a common bouquet, each representing that person’s decision of her or his own free will to be a part of the group.
The bouquet of all those flowers would represent the gathered community and would be celebrated as such. Then, at the close of the service, each person present would take a flower home, symbolizing that those present accepted each other as belonging to the community and recognizing that for the community to endure, each must give and receive.
The ceremony was a hit and spread widely among Unitarian churches in Eastern Europe. But before long the rise of Nazi Germany put a chill on the Unitarians’ organizing. And shortly after Czechoslovakia was invaded, the Gestapo broke into Capek’s home, confiscated his books and arrested him and his daughter for treason.
In the end, it went for him as it did for so many in that time. He filed court appeals, and even won them, but it made no difference. Eventually the Gestapo sent him and his daughter to the Dachau concentration camp, where in October 1942 they were gassed to death.
It’s hard to imagine what a crushing moment that must have been for the Czechoslovak church, not to mention the wave of fear it must have sent through its members.
But here’s the interesting thing: throughout Capek’s imprisonment and death, the Unitarians kept meeting, and the flower ceremony remained a central touchstone for their communities, even when liberal churches were dangerous place to be seen. Later, Capek’s wife, Maya, who had escaped to the U.S., became a Unitarian minister here and spread the practice of the Flower Ceremony among U.S. congregations.
Capek had told his congregation that he felt that each person was born with an inner yearning for harmony, for connection. In the flower ceremony, with all the blooms gathered in a common bouquet there was a bold affirmation that each was fully accepted, whatever their flaws, their failures.
So, we have drawn an interesting circle of sorts here from Wordsworth’s fields of flowers to Capek’s bouquet, and the imagery speaks to a unified truth beneath them both – if we look, we can find a fundamental value, beauty, integrity in every living thing, in every one of us – sometimes ailing, sometimes well, sometimes grieving, sometimes bathed in gladness.
We know that there is a goodness within us that is capable of flowering, of realizing and expressing the beauty that is at its core, while we can also foresee a time when that flower will fade and die. And that’s OK: that is the way of things.
What the Flower Ceremony reminds us of is that those blossoms are not the end of the story, that it is not as individual blossoms that our beauty is best realized, but in a bouquet. And the bouquet carries us back to Wordsworth’s imagery in the fields around Grasmere, for our blossoms depend on soil and rain and pollinators and all of it, a grand interdependent web.
Capek was right to point to harmony – interdependence tuned in a way that all are served – as a goal that all living things seek. For it is not in individuals, but by being woven into a web that life has its best hope of enduring. It is in a sense the locus of the Easter miracle, how we awaken to the truth that our disappointments, our losses, our failures, even death itself is not the end of things.
We arise from and contribute to the proliferation of a vast fabric of life that carries us with it, even as we go. What is required of us is if we would live well, if we would live rightly, if we would live wholeheartedly and at peace is that we honor and acknowledge it.
It is a source of hope in trying times, a prompt to remind us of our larger connections and larger duty, reborn again and again when we roll away the stone of sorry and self-pity, of grief and disappointment and open our eyes to the grace of living and of life.
Sermon: Catching Fire
READING
From Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard
Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.”
SERMON
Annie Dillard offers a good reminder of what is at stake in worship, if we take what we are doing here seriously. If we take it as our task to name and shape that which is of worth, then we should be prepared to be challenged. Our purpose in gathering, after all, is not to hear a pleasant talk and edifying music. We come to wrestle with the deepest and gnarliest concerns that are pressing on our hearts and minds.
So, I guess I should have expected when we chose the theme of Transformation for worship and small group ministry for the month of April that I would be invited into transformation myself. I offer that by way of explaining why I have decided to abandon the focus I intended for this sermon and instead turn my attention to a troubling concern that has arisen in our movement just in the past few days.
It centers on one of the most frustrating, befuddling concerns that lie before us as Unitarian Universalists – race. And this time it’s not an incident somewhere out there, but right in our own backyard. Let me set the stage.
It began as a concern raised about a hiring decision. Unitarian Universalist congregations across the United States are organized into five regions, each staffed with people who work with congregations when they need help or are in transition. We are part of the Southern Region, which stretches from Texas to Virginia. Some months ago, the person serving in the lead position in the Southern Region, our region, announced that he would be retiring at the end of June. So, a search was announced for his replacement.
About a week ago the UUA announced that a new regional lead had been hired for our district. He is a minister with some 16 years experience and a member of the UUA Board of Trustees. But the same day the hire was announced a group of 121 ministers and other religious professionals issued a letter saying that they were troubled by one important attribute of this person: he is white. (I was not one of the signers. At the time, I wasn’t aware of the controversy or the letter.)
Why should that be a concern? Well, the signers noted, every other regional lead is also white, as is every person who has ever held that job. Not only that, but so are 10 of the UUA’s 11 department heads. They urged that the UUA to examine its hiring practices, warning that as loudly as we Unitarian Universalists criticize white supremacy, we risk perpetuating it in its hiring practices.
As it happened, the news of this hiring also made its way to an annual conference of UU religious professionals of color called Finding Our Way Home. This group has been exploring ways of supporting ethnic minority UU professionals. There, one of the attendees, a woman who is Chicana Latina and is also a member of the UUA Board, announced that she was a finalist for the regional lead job, but had been told that she was not hired because she was not “the right fit for the team.”
An organizing collective calling itself Black Lives of UU also urged examination of the UUA’s hiring practices. It noted that at the Finding Our Way conference, when UUA President Peter Morales was asked why so many high-level positions were white replied that the UUA needs more qualified minority candidates “in the pipeline.”
What exactly counts as “the right fit,” they asked, and why is it that so often that those deemed “qualified” for higher levels positions are so often white, male, heterosexual clergy? Soon the controversy began to spread across social media. All three candidates for UUA president issued statements calling the controversy “a crisis.”
Morales responded with a letter acknowledging that, as he put it, “we are not where we ought to be in the diversity of staff” but also arguing that the complaints failed to note how much progress had been made in improving the diversity of UUA staff. He also argued that the controversy was a distraction from, in his words, “the larger issue,” which is the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in our congregations.
Morales said he was disturbed to see UUA staff treated as, in his words, “the other.” He accepted that staff should be held accountable, but, in his words, “I wish I were seeing more humility and less self-righteousness, more thoughtfulness and less hysteria.” He added in an interview that he was bothered that critics described the UUA as a “white supremacist organization.” “If you call us that,” he said, “what do you call the Aryan nation?”
Among the flood of replies on social media were letters from two groups of clergy, one white and the other those of color. The white group repeated their concern with the hiring process and criticizing Morales for seeking to discredit and shame his critics with words like “hysterical” and “self-righteous” while seeking to deflect and diminish their critique.
The ministers of color, who included senior ministers and a former UUA president, said the controversy points to pervasive patterns of behavior at the UUA that, in their words, “favor those who look and act like the majority white culture within Unitarian Universalism while creating disadvantages for those who do not.” This pattern, they said, particularly affects high level positions and is “endemic and fundamentally systemic. It is also heart-breaking.”
The next day, this past Friday, Morales submitted his resignation as UUA President effective the next day, Saturday. He apologized for responding to the criticism in a way that made a bad situation worse, saying, “It is clear to me that I am not the right person to lead our Association as we work together to create the processes and structures that will address our shortcomings and build the diverse staff we all want.”
To place this event in context, this is the first time in the 56 years that the UUA has existed that its president has resigned. That alone could argue for my breaking in and making it a subject of worship. But what makes it worthy of a service centered on transformation is the tough knot at the center of it: white supremacy.
It’s a disease that sits at the center of American society, and, we might as well confess it here, remains deeply entrenched in our faith tradition. And, yes, heart-breaking is the word for it. How can it be after all this time, after all the proud social justice work we’ve accomplished we are still caught up in this? The fact is we are.
And it’s something that at some level I think we all know. We’re quick to deny it when the charge is made because we’re ashamed to acknowledge it. I hear that shame in Peter’s Morales dismissal of the charge that it applies to us. The Aryan Nation, maybe, but us? Well, white supremacy isn’t just Klan sheets and burning crosses. It’s all the ways that white people like me and many of us seek to control the narrative and retain the privileges that keep whites in charge.
Confronted we’ll dismiss, deny and change the subject, or we’ll just pick up our marbles and go home. It’s easy. We have the power and privilege to decide whether to play. We’re the ones in charge. As much as I sympathize with the heart-break that Peter feels, I wish he’d had the courage to stay in the game through just the last three months of his term to help us work through this and prepare for where we go next.
I was talking last week in preparation for the sermon I thought I would give today with our member Eleanor Lane. I was interested to know a little bit about the experience of transformation that she had with UUCA members Susan Steffe and Beth Weegar in the “Mother Read” program they were participating in at Hillcrest Apartments.
You heard them tell their stories last year about the challenge of that work, how hard it was at first to be accepted. The women they worked with were suspicious at first of their motives. It would have been easy to walk away. But they stuck it out and showed up until they were not just accepted but treated as friends. Success story. Yay!
But here’s the thing, Eleanor told me: even after they made the connections, the work continued: mistaken assumptions, cultural misunderstandings, on and on.
But still Eleanor, Susan and Beth have kept at it, and what’s made it possible, in fact not just possible but joyful is the relationships they’ve made. These are not just connections of convenience: these are people, mothers and their families, who they care about. And it’s changed our members’ lives. Now, the experience is giving them the confidence to do more, to bring in other groups to help and try different projects. In all of it, Eleanor said, “the relationship is primary.”
This is the work that our association of congregations is just beginning: the building of significant relationships of trust with people of color. The Black Lives of UU organization I mentioned earlier is structured to provide networking and connections for people of color who are drawn to our faith tradition. A program track at our General Assembly will support their work.
Meanwhile, organizational leadership at the UUA is moving forward. My hope is that breaking open this dynamic will spur some creative thinking, remembering, as UUA presidential candidate Jean Pupke put it in a video she posted online, “The systems of white supremacy and oppression are persistent.” It will take time to sort out all the threads and learn how to listen with open hearts when concerns are raised.
And let us not miss the chance to appraise our own performance as individuals and as a congregation. In the last year here, we at UUCA have tightened our own hiring policies to require that racial and ethnic diversity be a consideration in every hiring decision we make. And we are continually reviewing how we invite and welcome a broad diversity of people into this congregation. I welcome your thoughts on how to improve what we do.
But I think that more than anything what persuaded me to bring this topic before you today was reflecting on my own response to this controversy. I need to acknowledge that my first response was not exactly sympathetic. When I got the first inklings on social media, the response I felt in my gut was that it was a lot of to-do about something of little consequence. Oh, sure, it looks bad, but how bad is it?
The more I listened, though, I shifted. Sure, this hiring decision wasn’t an egregious abuse. I don’t know the person chosen for the Southern Region lead, but he seems a decent sort and probably would perform well in the position. But can we really be so blind to the outrageous history of oppression in this country, a history that we as a movement despair of and pledge to change, not to at least consider for a moment the ways in which we are complicit in it?
Perhaps circumstances are such that for this particular position there are no minority candidates who possess the requisite skills, and once again we white people must tell people of color, “You’re close, but just not quite there yet,” though I doubt it and my colleagues of color say it is not so.
But the outsize response of Peter Morales to the critique he received turned the tide for me. For in it – in the fear, the outrage, the dismissal – I saw the trademark tenacity of white supremacy hard at work: ironic in this case in a man of Latino heritage. And I saw my own complicity as well.
For all the anti-racism trainings I’ve taken, for all the ways I’ve sought to reach out to people of color, for all the ways I am trying to organize my life to be anti-racist, I didn’t see it – at least not at first. I had to await my own little moment of transformation, that “Oh . . . right!” moment, you know?
The song the choir sang earlier, “Down to the River to Pray,” is not exactly resonant with our tradition. It imagines a baptism that doesn’t fit our theology at all, but the spirit it conveys speaks to what I believe is a universal need: to find a way when we fall short to confess our own fallibility, vulnerability, and transgression.
I am taken with the way Les positioned the choir to sing it: first members standing individually facing forward, then facing each other and turning to face us all. Let’s be honest, the prospect of confession doesn’t thrill any of us, but if we support each other in the work it makes it a little easier. We must first come to terms with the truth that we haven’t measured up. Then, we turn to those in our acquaintance who we feel can hear our confession without judgment. Having been assured, we are then ready to confess it to the world.
Friends, let me acknowledge to you that I have fallen short in this work, fallen short of my own expectations, fallen short of what you might rightly expect of me. But I am open to being changed. I am open to learning, and to recognizing that this learning does not happen once. It is something that I will be repeating, that I will be working at as long as I go on.
Like the king in our story I can pay attention. I can learn to be available to the present moment, to the fellows who are with me and to act for the good.
I am grateful to have your companionship in this work in this community of memory and hope, where we hold each other accountable while we hold each other in love. We have a lot to do, and we can only do it if we can create the space to tell the truth, to hear the truth and accept each other when we have missed the mark. Let us be about it.
Sermon: Recovering We (audio and text)
READINGS
From Healing the Heart of Democracy by Parker Palmer
“If American democracy fails, the ultimate cause will not be a foreign invasion or the power of big money or the greed and dishonesty of some elected officials or a military coup or the internal communist/socialist/fascist takeover that keeps some Americans awake at night. It will happen because we – you and I – became so fearful of each other, of our differences and of the future, that we unraveled the civic community on which democracy depends, losing our power to resist all that threatens it and call it back to its highest form.”
From “A Model of Christian charity” by John Winthrop
“We must be knit together in this work as one . . . . We must entertain each other in . . . affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.”
SERMON
I’ve been struggling to name what is eating at me these days, what is gnawing in the pit of my stomach, disturbing my sleep, lying beneath my perplexity and confusion, beneath occasional fits of anger and bouts of depression that leave me feeling frustrated, isolated, alone.
It’s not just the political turmoil we’re living with. It feels like something deeper, something I am missing, even mourning, yet without being able to put a finger on it. It has been painful enough that, to be honest, I usually pushed it out of my consciousness. But in those moments when I felt my spirits lift and open a bit, I cast about, wondering, and in time I settled on what seems to be the absence of one small word in our lives these days: We.
We, the first person plural pronoun: simple word, right? But such a powerful one, too. In a world where first person singular I goes about distinguishing, separating, first person plural We wraps us up in a blanket, tosses a lasso around us, bunches us together heedlessly, like it or not.
But these days when it seems so many are working overtime to claim distinction, privilege, prerogative, superiority of some, inferiority of others, the voice of We is being pushed aside, lost in the cacophony. Or, what is worse, it is being conscripted in the fight as a tool to make invidious comparisons among peoples, with certain We’s held to be superior in all kinds of imagined ways to other ones. Such madness!
And here, I believe, is why: It is a fundamental truth that every I, no matter what its qualities, has a basic integrity to it. It is itself and that is enough. Similarly, every We is grounded in an ultimate We that encompasses its kind and all kinds. I and We are, in a sense, two peas in a pod, two ways of looking at the world, neither superior to the other – I am myself and I am part of something larger to which I am intimately connected. It is this perspective that I feel is increasingly absent from our lives together and that we are badly in need of recovering.
Earlier you heard the words of John Winthrop, now nearly five centuries old, that helped set the stage for how the early Puritan colonies would gather in those first New England colonies. There are many ways in which Winthrop’s vision was flawed: he laid out a heavily patriarchal government by wealthy landowners dominating subservient poor.
And yet, underlying it all is a powerful We. All members, of both high and low station, must resolve to be, in his words, “knit together . . . in affection.” They must be willing to share – “to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities” – and treat each other with “meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality.” And, he says:
“We must delight in each other,
make others’ conditions our own,
rejoice together,
mourn together,
labor, and suffer together”
always having before us a vision of being
“members of the same body.”
It is language that is both archaic and breathtakingly relevant. When was the last time you were present with someone outside your family who you considered you might “delight in,” whose conditions you made your own, people with whom you rejoiced, mourned, labored and suffered? Winthrop is not arguing for some exclusive community sheltered from the world. Instead, he proposes, a model for the world, a “city on a hill” that accepts the judgment of all people, of the most high on how faithfully it lives its mission.
Now, we know from history that the reality of Puritan life rarely reflected such ideals, but their presence and prominence in the community served as a reminder of its larger goals, of the mission to which it saw itself called. These ideals also underlay an ethos that pervaded our emerging nation, even with its disparities and inequalities.
Yes, the founders of our nation were elitist in many ways, and yet the frame they offered for the nation was one whose authority was grounded in, as they named it, “We, the people”: a broad and glorious We that recognized no distinctions.
Even though, yes, many distinctions were made, are made in how our nation allocates its resources, the principle that We the people – that means everyone – have a claim on them echoes in the halls of government even in the turmoil of today.
Yet, as Parker Palmer reminds us, those words have come to ring hollow, like a tired slogan, leaving us in danger of coming to a place where, he says, “we – you and I – become so fearful of one another, of our differences and of the future that we unravel the civic community on which democracy depends.”
What I find most helpful about Palmer’s perspective is how he diagnoses the cause of the disruption that we’ve experienced and how we might go about repairing it. Where he suggests we begin this inquiry is in the heart, and it’s important to distinguish how he uses that word. Let go, he says, of the idea of the heart being the seat of our feelings, and instead imagine it as the place where, in his words, “we learn to think the world together” and find the courage to act.
Think of it as the center of our integrity, where we pull together our images of self and the world and make some sense of who we are and how we fit. Sad to say, given the state of the world, it’s a place that experiences some significant disruptions that come in the form of such things as loss, failure, defeat, betrayal and death. When those things happen, we experience something that we call “heartbreak.”
This is something worth attending to, Parker Palmer says, because, in his words, “nothing that happens in the human heart has more power, for better or worse, than heartbreak.” We can see how this could be. If we take what we call our heart to be the center of our integrity, then any injury done to it affects us deeply. Something in us is shattered. There’s no avoiding it: It happens to all of us. What is left is for us to decide how to respond.
Some come to dwell on an injury as something that disfigures them irreparably – “Look at this wound! Poor me!” This pity-seeking, though, takes us only so far. We can get stuck in it and so become unavailable to ourselves and others or unable to appreciate their suffering as on a par with our own, breeding in us anger, resentment and isolation.
Others seek to shrug off the impact of any injury. And, yeah, I’m pretty much talking about men here. We’re socialized to take the blows and keep on fighting. “Didn’t touch me,” right? Now, it’s true that in the midst of a fight we do need to keep our wits about us and not get distracted by the blows we receive. But really, guys, there is little in our lives that needs to be elevated to a fight. And what’s worse, the fight culture, militarism, does terrible damage over time to our lives, our relationships, our community.
Another possibility, Parker Palmer says, is that we consider that when we experience loss of some kind we find that our hearts are not broken apart but broken open. That can be hard to hear. It almost seems to diminish what we feel – “Can’t you see I’m in pain? How can this be anything but a total shattering!”
OK, I get that. But look at you. You’re still here, the same loveable, awesome you, and you’ve learned a few things. You’ve learned perhaps that you imbued a relationship with more faith than it deserved, or the sad truth that everyone we love we will lose eventually. That’s hard stuff, and the pain you feel is real, and important. I’m so sorry.
And once we sit with that for a while, breathe a bit, we do notice that despite our pain one day still follows another. We are able to go on, not forgetting our injury, but finding a context for it, adjusting our lives to accommodate it.
That experience, Parker says, teaches us the practice of learning “to hold our own and the world’s pain.” We come to recognize suffering in others, which in turn opens us to greater compassion and deeper empathy.
This is, in essence, the central We of our lives. Suffering, as the Buddhists say, is universal, but it is also the source of some of our deepest bonds. When we are lonely, weary, and fed up, We offers the counsel we need: none of us is bullet-proof, but all of us are fundamentally redeemable and whole.
It’s the message that I know I need to hear these days as I struggle with my own broken-heartedness, my feelings that all the ways that it seemed that we in this country were bridging divides, letting go of ancient hatreds, affirming our intimate link to the Earth are crumbling around me. And I’ve had enough experience of heartbreak to recognize it in the world around me, including those with whom I most strongly disagree. I’m compelled now to see that if I am going to make peace with this I need to find a way to extend my compassion to them, to look for the kind of We that might make room for both of us.
This is not Pollyannaish happy talk. I don’t intend to compromise my principles. But I accept that, as Parker Palmer puts it, our heart demands that we find a way to live appreciating what he calls “the tragic gap” between the world as it is and the world as we wish it to be. And that requires that we find ways to act creatively in that gap, that we each enter with a clear sense of and appreciation for our own voice and agency while working to build community that can support us and help us enact the change we seek.
Because I do believe in the power, the ultimate truth, the bald fact of We. Every way that we seek to separate people into sheep and goats or raise ourselves above others only diminishes us all. Because we are each other’s back scratchers, knit together as one.
Perhaps it’s nostalgia in this conflictual time that led me recently to click on a file I’d stored away on my computer a couple of months ago: Barak Obama’s farewell address. We can debate the pluses and minuses of his eight-year presidency, but perhaps the greatest gift that he has given us in his public life is the affirmation of We.
In the speech, he told of how he learned from his earliest days as a community organizer that, in his words, “change only happens when ordinary people get involved, and they get engaged, and they come together to demand it.” We may believe that the rights proclaimed by the founders are self-evident, he said, but they “have never been self-executing. We the People, through the instrument of our democracy, (are charged to) form a more perfect union,” given “the imperative to strive together to achieve a common, a greater good.”
There is much in our laws that much change if we are to live into that charge, he said, “but laws alone won’t be enough. Hearts must change.” Each of us has her or his blind spots, those sensitive wounds where our hearts don’t feel quite ready to go. Still, he said, “we have to pay attention and listen.”
I hear in those words the echo of John Winthrop – whatever you may think of your neighbor, I charge you to delight in her and in him. See them as the precious beings they are, and you are as well. Know that we can only succeed in this perilous adventure of life together, no less fraught today than it was in 1630, if we will make other’s conditions our own, if we will share our hearts – mourn together, rejoice together, suffer together as members of the same body.
Obama closed his speech with his signature line dating from his earliest campaign speeches, the one he borrowed from the United Farm Workers, “Si, se puede”: “Yes, we can.” But I read it a little differently than I had in the past. This time I focused on the second word.
Yes, We can. As endangered as it feels, We holds our strength and our hope as a people, as a species. It remains an undeniable fact that as crazy as we make each other, with all the wrong of which, sadly, we are capable, the first person plural binds us up, one with the other. Our challenge is to live into that truth.
Sermon: On Kindness
READINGS
ON KINDNESS by Naomi Shihab Nye https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/kindness
Luke 10:25-37
Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus.[a] “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” 27 He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” 28 And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”
29 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii,[b] gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ 36 Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
SERMON
Not many poems have a story behind them, but the one by Naomi Shihab Nye that you just heard does. In an interview with the radio host Krista Tippet, Nye recalled that the poem came to her years ago as the result of an incident in Colombia while she and her husband were on their honeymoon.
The two had planned to take three months to travel across South America, when at the end of their first week they were on a bus at the beginning of their journey and they were robbed of everything they had. Someone else who was on the bus with them, but who they didn’t know, was killed. He’s the Indian in the poem.
It was, as you can imagine, a terribly traumatizing event. The two, being young adults just starting to make their way in the world in a foreign country where they knew no one, were stunned, not knowing where to turn. As Nye puts it, “we didn’t have passports. We didn’t have money. We didn’t have anything.” What should they do? Where should they go? Who should they talk to?
As Nye tells it they were just standing along the side of a road, when a man approached them. “I guess he could see the disarray in our faces,” she said. “He was simply kind and just looked at us. ‘What happened to you?’” he asked in Spanish. And they recounted their story.
“He looked so sad,” Nye recalled. And after listening for a while he said, “I’m very sorry. I’m very, very sorry that happened.” And then he went on his way.
After a few minutes, Nye and her husband came up with a plan: he would hitch-hike back to a larger city and see if they could get their traveler’s checks reinstated – remember travel’s checks? Nye would stay somewhere and await his return.
So, off her husband headed, and Nye, feeling in a bit of a panic, sat down in a plaza, where, as she tells it, this poem came to her: “before you know what kindness really is you must lose things . . . .”
Does this resonate with you? Who of us hasn’t had the experience where the simple gesture of a stranger made a difference in our lives?
It’s a story that echoes much of what we hear in the Good Samaritan story from the Gospel of Luke that James read earlier. It’s interesting, though, to reflect on some of the ways that Nye’s experience differs from the Lukan story.
For example, we have in Nye’s story no parade of functionaries of high station passing by, though it’s a good bet that the man who stopped and talked with the couple was not the first who passed them. His stopping was certainly notable to Nye and her husband.
But also in the Good Samaritan story Jesus takes note of all these wonderful things that the passing Samaritan did for the poor beleaguered robbery victim that he found by the side of the road: he bandaged the man’s wounds and poured oil and wine on them. Then he placed the man on his own animal, likely a donkey or some such, brought him to an inn and cared for him for a day, and then the next day went to the innkeeper and gave him money and said, “Take care of him, and when I come back I will repay you whatever more you spend.”
Wow! What a guy, right? I mean, talk about hospitality. I don’t think there’s a soul who doesn’t come away from that story with a sense of deep admiration. And . . . perhaps also a twinge of guilt. Because, after all, most of us have had occasion to do another person a good turn in one way or another, but there are few whose “neighborliness,” which is what this parable addresses, has been quite so bounteous. Yeah, we did well, but did we do all we could have? Do we measure up to this kind of standard?
I was surprised to discover a narrative something like that in myself in hearing Nye’s story of her encounter with the helpful man. I even printed out a transcript of her interview with Krista Tippet to double-check: OK, he said how sorry he was, uh-huh, and then he did what? Surely he must have done something more. Maybe he led them to a café and bought them a drink? Or directed them to a government office to get a new passport? Or . . .
No. After looking sad and saying how sorry he was, Nye says, he went on. That’s it. He left the picture. Huh!
And here’s the other interesting side of that interchange: at that moment, the man’s simple acknowledgement, Nye said, was all that she and her husband needed. And she remembered it as a moment of kindness.
She didn’t need him turning himself inside out to make everything right for them, because nobody could do that. It was going to take some work to set things right. But meanwhile to know that someone recognized their humanity and offered his sympathies made all the difference.
In hearing the Good Samaritan story it’s easy to get caught up in all that the Samaritan did to help the man – to be honest, I suspect that Jesus laid it on a bit thick so no one would mistake his message. But the truly revolutionary part was this brief passage: “and when he saw the man he was moved with pity.” Confronted with a stranger, a foreigner no less, the man didn’t avert his eyes or shrink from him. He listened to his heart and had pity.
In the rest of that interview with Krista Tippet, I learned something interesting about Nye. The daughter of a Palestinian man and an American woman of German heritage, she had grown up in, of all places, Ferguson, Missouri. In the time of her childhood, Nye said, Ferguson was a sleepy little bedroom community for St. Louis, a place of big trees where kids rode their bikes all over the place and everyone felt safe. To think of it now as a place, in her words, “representing injustice” in the imaginations of many Americans is shocking, she said.
It was also a place, she wrote elsewhere, where her father, an Arab, ran for the school board and won, and she got a summer job picking berries alongside black boys. But with the school desegregation battles of the late 1960s blacks were marginalized and separated from whites.
And in time tensions in that community led to an incident in August 2014 when a white police officer, Darren Wilson, shot to death an 18-year-old black man, Michael Brown Jr., accused of stealing a box of cigars from a convenience store. So much of what surrounded that incident was terrible and tragic, but perhaps nothing speaks more powerfully to how Michael Brown’s humanity was dismissed than the fact that his dead body lay on the pavement of Canfield Drive for four hours before it was retrieved.
It sounds almost like a mockery to call such an act “unkind.” But perhaps less so if we understand kindness in the context of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem and the parable of the Good Samaritan as the first and most basic act of recognizing another’s humanity.
Kindness is not fixing everything and making it right. It is looking directly into the eyes of another and seeing their worth and value as a sibling on this earth, seeing another as akin to oneself. It is, heaven help us, looking at the terribly brutalized body of another and showing respect, at the very least saying, “I am very sorry. I am very, very sorry that this happened.”
Back over this past Valentine’s Day, Debbie and I took a trip to Atlanta. We used it as a time to do the tourist kind of things, trips to museums, historical sites and the like. Among the sights we saw in the complex of museums celebrating the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church. It was the church where King’s father and then King himself were pastors. The building has long since been converted to a museum and the congregation now worships at an immense new building across the street.
In the sanctuary, the museum was playing a recording of King speaking. On entering I sat and listened for a while, wondering if I’d recognize which sermon it was. Before long I did. It was the last sermon that Martin Luther King ever gave, the day before he was shot to death.
It was a tempestuous night in Memphis, kind of like the crazy weather we’ve had here this week, when King delivered the sermon in April 1968. He had come to march in support of striking sanitation workers, but had planned to have his lieutenants handle the rally planned that night at a local church. Word came, though, that the crowd begged form him to come. So, he went and, off the top of his head, preached on one of the most powerful sermons of his life, based some of his favorite personal stories and Bible verses – among them that of the Good Samaritan.
In the sermon, King recalled a trip that he and his wife, Coretta, took to Israel years before, when they rented a car that took them on the road from Jerico to Jerusalem, where the Good Samaritan story is set.
It is, he said, “a wild meandering road . . . really conducive to ambushing.” So, he could understand how the priest and the Levite in the story could have been wary of stopping to help the man beset by thieves. As they considered, King said, the first question in their minds likely was “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But, he said, “then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question, ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’” It certainly could put him at risk, he said, but it was part of what he called “a dangerous unselfishness” to which the Samaritan was called.
King offered this parable as reason to stand with the striking sanitation workers, but later he expanded his theme in the kinds of words he’d never used before, saying he was unsure how long he would live, that he’d been told of threats from, in his words, “some of our sick white brothers.”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said, “but it really doesn’t matter now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.”
How do you know if you’ve been to the mountaintop? I don’t believe that King is referring to some kind of moment of ecstasy here. Instead, I think he meant an experience of affinity with another so deep, so thorough that it washes over you and makes you forget your own mean ego.
It is a moment something like what Naomi Shihbab Nye describes when she says you must look upon others who are suffering and know it could be you.
And so, she says, “before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you can see the size of the cloth. Then, it is only kindness that makes sense anymore.”
I often think that what keeps us from the acts of kindness to which our hearts call us is not just the risk they can entail but also a fear of embracing the sorrow that is woven with them. In extending kindness to another we make ourselves vulnerable to sorrow and loss and disappointment.
It can be scary, it’s true, but that’s part of what communities like ours exist to do, to encourage each other to take a risk, to experience “a dangerous unselfishness,” and see that, as King put it, our fears, our misgivings really don’t matter because we’ve had a glimpse of living where our hearts are undivided from our deeds, and it is good. It may not be life eternal, as the Biblical parable promises, but it surely is the experience of life abundant: life fulfilling and undivided, centered in courage and compassion.
Still, though, we demur: that’s fine for others, but not me. I’m not up to that. And yet, reflect: if taking a few minutes to walk down the street and write a few words in chalk on a sidewalk can do this, what more are we capable of achieving? How else might we reach out so as to give others hope and assurance?
Behind that fearful demeanor that we adopt is a rich abundance of wisdom, hope, compassion that are ready to be mined. And kindness, I want to argue, is the shovel or maybe sometimes the jack hammer that we need to open it up. And it is worth it. It is worth taking the chance of encountering sorrow and pain because with even the smallest gesture of compassion sometimes we can make a difference in the lives of others and our own, that we may be filled with loving kindness and be peaceful, whole, and at ease.
Sermon: Living With Integrity on a ‘Post-Truth’ Time
READINGS
From “1984” by George Orwell
“Doublethink lies at the very heart of (the state), since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.”
If Love Be There by Robert T. Weston
This day,
Setting aside all that divides me from others;
This day,
Remembering that the world is beautiful
To him or her who is willing that it be so
And that into the open, eager heart
The beauty enters in
If love be there;
This day
I will make a part of the song of life
There may be grief, but if there be love it will be overcome.
There may be pain, but it can be borne with dignity and courage;
There may be difficulty, but it can be turned to strength.
Remembering that the word is beautiful
If I will let it be so for others who I meet,
This day
I will make a part of the song of life.
SERMON
All this talk these days of “alternative facts” carries me back to a previous life when for 25 years I worked for daily newspapers. The press, I can assure you, was no more popular among political leaders than it is now. The difference was that back then when you caught some politician in a lie it generally elicited some measure of shame along with the predictable ranting and raving. And I must admit that it’s true: for many reporters there was nothing sweeter than a front-page story of yours catching a politician literally or metaphorically with his or her pants down.
But of course the standard went both ways. There was no wiggle room on even the smallest details of your writing. Every reporter can recount interchanges with tyrannical editors who insisted on checking and double-checking every detail of a story. The poet David Tucker, a former city editor in Newark, New Jersey, sums it up in his poem, “City Editor Looking for News,” which begins:
“What did Nick the Crumb say before he died?
What noise did his fist make when he begged Little Pete not to whack him with a power saw?
Did it go thub like a biscuit against a wall or sklack like a seashell cracking open?
Did he say his mother’s name?
Has anybody even talked to his friggin’ mother?
Is she broke or sick or abandoned?
Is she dying of a broken heart?
Do I have to think of these things all by myself?”
You get the picture. The gold standard in the business was the City News Bureau of Chicago, a cooperative news service that served all of Chicago’s dailies. Its motto was: “Your mother says she loves you? Check it out!”
But the City News Bureau closed in 1999 and with it went much reporting at that kind of granular level of detail. There remain a few newspapers with high standards. (Full disclosure, I am a daily subscriber to the New York time, and I consider it one of them.) But on balance many newspapers, with ad revenue tanking, couldn’t staff it, and much that has replaced it and them is an echo chamber of blogs, partisan politicking, and entertainment chatter.
Our new president is one of the most successful purveyors of that medium. From early in his career as a real estate developer he was charmed by the celebrity culture and insinuated himself into it.
In that culture, he learned that facts can be convenient things to use when they are to your advantage, but also convenient to ignore, deny, or repackage when they don’t. And, as far as he was concerned, exaggeration hurt nobody: biggest, best, greatest, whatever. Who was going to disprove you, or for that matter take the time to? Meanwhile, the dollars rolled in. Tony Schwartz, the co-author of his best-seller, “The Art of the Deal,” recalls Donald Trump coining the notion of “truthful hyperbole,” to describe his approach, calling it “an innocent form of exaggeration” and “a very effective form of promotion.”
So, is it any wonder that Susan Glasser, a former editor of “Politico,” reports that when she assigned a team of reporters to listen to every single word from Trump’s mouth during last year’s primary season, in her words, “he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes for an entire week.” By the general election season, she said, “Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes.”
Given all that, it’s hardly surprising that days after the November election, the Oxford Dictionaries announced that it had chosen “post-truth” as the word of the year, offering as a definition: “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
Of course, lying in politics is nothing new, and rightful accusations can be made on both sides of the aisle. Yet, from my vantage we are experiencing something new in Mr. Trump’s practices. The fact is that there is something qualitatively different between bloviating about the Miss Universe contest and misrepresenting the influence of Russia hackers on the US election. Once elevated to the level of national policy lying becomes something more like propaganda.
It can seem extreme to compare the Trump administration’s practices to those of dictators across history and around the world, even to those that George Orwell describes in “1984.” And yet, the echoes here are eerie.
Orwell invented the notion of what he called “doublethink” to describe the practice of knowingly deceiving others while maintaining a pose of “complete honesty,” denying reality while also secretly taking account of the reality that you’re denying. His protagonist, Winston Smith, worked in the Ministry of Truth (the state’s propaganda office), where he recomposed the record of history, creating, you might say, “alternative facts,” to fit the regime’s ideology.
OK, I really don’t want to carry this too far, but it is at least worth taking a moment for us to affirm that real facts matter. You know: truth, veracity, the real deal, the whole story. And that lying, falsifying, misrepresenting, dissembling is bad for us, a poison, really, that eats away at everything we care about.
There’s a reason why we as a religious people covenant to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. It’s because we believe that our spiritual wholeness depends on confronting the real facts of our lives and the world we live in. We believe we can live free, awakened, and aware; we can be loving, compassionate, and kind; we can live into who we are and use our gifts to help save the world only in the presence of the truth. And from that truth we derive meaning.
This brings me back to the Oxford Dictionaries’ definition of “post truth.” The term describes circumstances where appeals are made, not to facts, but “to emotion and personal belief.” For an ex-journalist like me, the most puzzling thing about Trump’s dissembling is that it doesn’t seem to matter to many people. And that makes me scratch my head: how could that be? How can it not matter that the president isn’t telling the truth?
What appears to be going on becomes clearer on listening to Trump’s speeches, which are offered not as arguments based on facts but as sales pitches centered on emotion. What he likes is “great, the best” and what he doesn’t is “bad, nasty, the worst.” He offers no evidence for those judgments because there is no apparent thought behind them. They are merely impulsive eruptions. All that he offers in support of them is his brand: “I’ve made lots of money, I own golf resorts, office towers and gaudy hotels – Believe me!”
It’s not the first time anyone has made such a pitch, but at a time when our culture measures success by the accumulation of goods it has powerful effect. “This guy’s hauling it in. He must know what he’s talking about.” Right? There’s no question he’s an accomplished salesman, but in just the first month or so of his administration the growing list of his blunders and misadventures make clear how troublesome that judgment can be. Governing, it turns out, is a radically different business than real estate development.
So, here we are at this precarious time. How are we to respond in a way that is centered in integrity, in a way of living that is grounded in what is true and what is right? Several years ago I heard a presentation at a minister’s conference that stuck with me. The speaker argued that over the last century different memes embodying cultural ideas or practices have tended to prevail at the time.
For example, she said, in the 1960s the predominant mode of thinking centered on the notion of rights – who had them and how they would be protected. It was a powerful driver of all kinds of things, she said, but in time its importance faded to be replaced in the 1980s by a different idea, the rising notion that people shouldn’t look to others to make their way in the world, that we are responsible for our own destiny. She identified this with an acronym she gave as “Y-O-Y-O, YOYO” or “you’re on your own.”
She argued, however, that in this new century that old notion is beginning to fade and a new meme is rising that acknowledges more directly our interdependence on each other. It’s the recognition that while we are responsible for our individual lives, we can’t get by on our own. She described this with the acronym, “W-I-T-T, WITT” or “we’re in this together.”
I think that Donald Trump notwithstanding, WITT is the acronym of our age. It embodies the recognition that we are fundamentally bound to each other and the Earth across races, ethnicities, gender identities, economic status and nationality. Every person matters.
Our work, then, involves building ties to know each other better and exploring how to empower all people to live with purpose and meaning. It means widening our circles of concern to embrace all people, including those who today are marginalized. It is a powerful center of meaning grounded in the truth of the unity of humankind.
But it is challenging, too. It requires adapting ourselves to difference, stepping outside the echo chambers of the narrow silos of our lives. We do this through the choices we make in how we conduct our lives, about how we spend our time, who we associate with. Giving ourselves to this work is not easy, let’s be honest.
Easy is living our quiet lives in our quiet circles. Hard is putting ourselves in places we’ve never been in the company of people different from us. It isn’t comfortable, and yet it puts us in touch with something so remarkable and compelling that it can astonish us when we first experience it. Annie Dillard describes it as the substrate that underlies everything else in our lives: “our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here.” The simplest word for it is love: an elemental truth so basic, so vital that it eludes our conscious minds, as Rumi puts it, like the water that fish swim in.
But it’s not enough just to name it: it must be summoned, it must be activated if we would know it. As the writer Scott Peck put it years ago, “love is as love does.” It is an act of will. “We do not have to love. We choose to love.” Choosing to love is speaking out when we see others demeaned, reaching out to neighbors when they are threatened, listening when another is in pain.
I’m afraid it’s a long slog ahead for us, folks. What’s going on in Washington stands to disrupt all of our lives for years to come and in many ways we can’t yet fathom.
That means we must learn to pace ourselves: attend to the good that’s in our power to affect and pay attention. Read your newspapers, stay informed, and look for ways to widen your circles.
And let us say a blessing for the complexities of this world, all the imponderables that unhorse our prejudices and preconceptions, that force us to shake our heads and look again. Our human brains evolved to locate patterns and construct scenarios that distill complicated circumstances to a few simple elements. It’s a great boon to us, but it also gets us into trouble time and again when the messy world with all of its inconvenient truths trips us up.
And so, thankfully, it forces us amid all our hubris to admit to a little humility. Ah, humility, that not-so-gentle reminder that to be human is to be fallible, requiring us to be open to correction, to learn tolerance, forbearance, and so be open to grace.
We are reminded, as Robert Weston put it, that there will be grief and pain in our lives and those of our fellows, but they can be endured and even overcome if love be there. And in bringing that love, we, too, might make a part of the song of life.
Risk
March-2017-RiskGrowing in Faith: Religious Education Celebration Sunday
Joy Berry, Director of Lifespan Religious Education
Growing in Faith: Religious Education Celebration Sunday
Sermon: Walt Whitman-A Cosmos (audio only)
Sermon: A Seeger Odyssey (audio only)
Sermon: Back to Work (Audio and Text)
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
READINGS
From “If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress” by Frederic Douglass
“The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
From “Across That Bridge” by John Lewis
“During the Civil Rights movement, our struggle was not about politics. It was about seeing a philosophy made manifest in our society that recognized the inextricable connection we have to each other. Those ideals represent what is eternally real, and they are still true today, though they have receded from the forefront of the American imagination.
“Yes, the election of Obama represents a significant step, but it is not an ending. It is not even a beginning; it is one important act on a continuum of change. It is a major down payment on the fulfillment of a dream. It is another milestone on one nation’s road to freedom.
“But we must accept one central truth and responsibility as participants in a democracy: Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched him on a distant plateau where we finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society.”
SERMON
You know how it is over the Christmas season – there you are in some store or other, moving down your shopping list when your eyes light on something that isn’t on anybody’s list, not even yours, but you know suddenly that you need it. That’s how John Lewis’ magnificent new graphic novel trilogy, “March,” ended up in my hands at the check-out counter at Malaprops. It didn’t hurt that this copy had been signed by the author.
Lewis is a fascinating member of the roll of Civil Rights leaders from the 50s and 60s. He was never one of the stirring orators, never drew much attention to himself.
After serving as a key player in the battles that won the most significant Civil Rights legislation, he found his niche in Congress representing Georgia’s 5th district, essentially comprising Atlanta, which he’s served for the past 30 years. In that time, though, he’s won a reputation as one of the most consistent and insistent voices for justice and healing in this nation’s struggles over race.
Each year I make a point of using this moment when the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life is celebrated to invite us to reflect on the work of building racial justice to which we too are called. This year, though, I want to take a little different tack. Instead of dwelling on King’s inspiring words, I want to use this opportunity to direct us to what John Lewis has to teach us about the power of deeds.
And the reason for that is plain: in recent years as we’ve been celebrating a half century of Civil Rights victories – the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and more – we’ve also watched as piece by piece the laws enacting these achievements are being dismantled. What had seemed towering ramparts against injustice are being revealed as fragile waystations that need shoring up and in some cases even reenvisioning to fully serve the cause of justice.
In other words, we need to get back to work. We can no longer rest on the laurels of our predecessors. It’s not enough to celebrate King’s “dream.” We need to reflect on and rededicate ourselves to the work of this generation. And John Lewis, I want to suggest, offers us a bridge, with a foot in the Civil Rights generation and an eye to a future that might someday serve us all.
What is so powerful about Lewis’ trilogy is that it carries us in the most dramatic way back to the great moments of the Civil Rights campaigns, not as iconic events in an inevitable march toward victory but as chancy gambles full of risk and uncertainty. The graphic format cuts through the mass of words that surround this story and centers on the action. That makes his work more the blueprint of a movement than a standard history centered on its soaring rhetoric. He walks us through one decision point after another, and doesn’t hesitate to air the dirty laundry of conflict and division along the way.
Lewis doesn’t spare himself either. He introduces himself as the boy who had a soft spot for the chickens on his parent’s tenant farm: giving each a name, preaching to them as they settled down at night, then pouting as one by one they were hauled off for the family dinner.
But he says it was a trip to integrated Buffalo, New York with an uncle who was a teacher that opened his eyes to a different side of the world. Returning to the dilapidated segregated school he attended back home left him sad until he got word in high school that the Supreme Court had outlawed segregation in public schools. Surely, things would change! Not so fast, his family cautioned. But the Montgomery bus boycott the next year suggested something different.
The trilogy then guides us over the next 10 years through advance and retreat, victories and losses from the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins to the integrated buses of Freedom Riders headed into Alabama and Mississippi to the tumult of the 1964 election and ultimately the Selma voting rights campaign.
And at each step of the way, we see, come new twists that add new challenges. Lewis’ own turn from the ministry to the movement alienates family members back home. Back at Nashville, sit-ins that were first ignored later provoke beatings, abuse and eventually jail time.
In one chilling series of panels, he tells of sitting-in at a restaurant where staff turned off the lights, locked the doors, and turned on a fumigator with Lewis and another man still inside. In others, he recalls the bombing of a freedom rider bus the day after he had left it and many other beatings and bombings of that campaign.
In the end, though, violence is not at the center of these books; it is on the periphery. The through line of this tale is how a deeply interlinked and growing cadre of people negotiated one obstacle after another, enlisting the aid of authorities where they could, challenging them where they couldn’t.
It doesn’t diminish the tragedies along the way, and Lewis faithfully recounts many of them, from Emmett Till and Medger Evers to Jimmy Lee Jackson, James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo, and the four girls at the 16th Street Church in Birmingham – Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair. But he gives equal place to achievements gained and the hearts that were won, including among them Bobby Kennedy, who Lewis later was to work for, and Lyndon Johnson.
“March” draws attention to the often grinding dailyness of the campaign and the patience, forbearance and determination required of its participants. It’s easy to forget, for example, that a year and half of meeting and organizing preceded the Nashville student sit-ins of 1959, or that the Selma voting rights campaign had been underway for two years before Bloody Sunday in March 1965.
Lewis’ experience being savagely beaten by police while leading 525 marchers across the Edmund Pettis Bridge on that spring day bookends his trilogy. It was, he said, when he came closer than ever to dying in the service of the movement. And he writes that “there was something in that day that touched a nerve deeper than anything that had come before.”
Still, it brought about perhaps the movement’s greatest victory, The Voting Rights Act. And to make the point of how significant that achievement was, throughout “March” he interjects scenes from the inauguration of Barak Obama, where Lewis himself was giving a place of honor.
Of course, we live at a different time today. We in North Carolina are among several mostly Southern states that have seen the protections of the Voting Rights Act chipped away so that many minority voters are losing their voice, and gerrymandered voting districts are preventing them from gaining it back. And this is only the opening wedge of attacks on a host of legal protections that are looming in the months ahead. How ironic that amid all of this yesterday John Lewis found himself the latest target of the incoming president’s Twitter feed
This makes the words that John Lewis has to offer us all the more important to heed. As you heard earlier, he tells us in a book reflecting on the lessons of his historic march, in his words, “Across that Bridge”: “We must accept one central truth and responsibility in a democracy: Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched on a distant plateau where we finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must to its part to create an even more fair, more just society.”
So, what might our part be? Mulling over this, I reflected on an address I heard a couple of years ago at an annual minister’s meeting. The speaker was Marshall Ganz, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard who got his start in the Civil Rights campaign and later worked for the United Farm Workers in California.
The subject we asked him to address was: How can we be leaders amid change? Ganz answered that question by inviting us to consider the famous questions of Rabbi Hillel, the Jewish leader from the 1st century BCE: If I am not for myself, who is for me? If I am for myself alone, what am I? If not now, when?
Here’s how he teased out learnings from these questions. First, if I am not for myself, who is for me? To achieve social change, we need to be clear on who we are and what our own values are and be able to communicate them. The Civil Rights movement established this early with its commitment to non-violence and the worth, the equality of all and our inextricable interconnection. Even amid setbacks and division there was no doubt what they stood for.
Second, if I am for myself alone, what am I? We need to recognize that we live not as atoms, but in relationship. As Ganz put it, the first principle in organizing is not, what is my issue, but who are my people? With whom are we in relationship? In building relationships, people find a reason to work together. It’s how we make the whole greater than the parts. Through relationships, he said, we transform communities into constituencies, into people who stand together.
In Across That Bridge, John Lewis shows how this principle emerged in the 60s. “The Civil Rights Movement was more than a struggle over legal rights,” he said. “It was a spiritual movement . . . to confront the erroneous belief that some of us are more valuable and important than others. They did not fight or debate about this. They did not threaten or mock. They did not malign or degrade their opponents. They simply took action based on the transcendent unity” of all.
And, finally: If not now, when? This implies, he said, that learning proceeds from action. It sounds contradictory, almost like saying leap before you look. Yet, Ganz said, the fact is that it is in acting that we learn what is effective. In the 1950s before they began regular sit-ins the Nashville student group tested what the response of luncheon counters would be. Once they observed it, they knew how to craft their campaign.
Creating change, he said, requires that we convey a sense of urgency, a feeling that the problem that faces us cannot wait. It must be addressed by action, and now.
People need to be motivated to move out of the inertia of the day-to-day rhythms of our lives and act. And when we act, we can’t expect it to be on the basis of certainty, but on the basis of hope. And by hope, he said, he didn’t mean vague good feelings, but how the philosopher Maimonides framed it: as belief in the plausibility of the possible as opposed to the necessity of the probable. Let me repeat that: hope is belief in the plausibility of the possible as opposed to the necessity of the probable.
John Lewis and the other Nashville students could not be sure that their sit-ins would persuade city leaders to end the segregation of lunch counters. It was probable that they would fail, and they did, at least at first. The tipping point came from the dissonance they created, their own humble presence and outsize response of their abusers.
Ganz noted what he considered a troubling trend in our culture. We are, he said, “imbibing a steady diet of exit,” a response to the dissonance we find in the world not by taking action but by checking out. We experience it in the choices we make about where we live, who we socialize with, how we structure our Facebook feeds.
We constrict ourselves to echo chambers with narrower and narrower amplitudes. And in these happy little silos we grow increasingly disconnected from others outside of them and with it oblivious to the deterioration of the social capital that joins us as communities, as states, as a nation.
A couple of years ago many of us in this congregation took time to read together and discuss Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow. She made the point that the phenomenon of mass incarceration was devastating a generation of young, black men. But she also argued that it was also a symptom of a larger and more frightening trend: giving up on, dismissing anyone unlucky enough to be marginalized in America – low-income whites and blacks, as well as those struggling with mental illness, disability and chronic health problems.
At a time when the ties between and among us are fraying, the topic of the conversation, she said, “should be how us can come to include all of us,” how we reimagine the Civil Rights movement’s goal of “a society that is capable of seeing each of us, as we are, with love.” As James Taylor put it, ties between us, all men and woman, living on the Earth.
But we fool ourselves if we think this will come about through hope as happy feelings. Frederick Douglass understood this better than any of us ever will: human liberty and justice are won as the result of earnest struggle – exacting, enduring, determined and resolute – for without struggle there can be no progress.
This is the work to which we are called, we who proclaim the truth and supremacy of justice, compassion and love, we who insist we will widen our circle til it includes, embraces all the living, we committed to acting for hope, for that seeming improbable possibility that lies on the edge of our consciousness, of the world as one and its people free.
If not now, friends, when?
CLOSING WORDS
I close with the chorus from a song written by Bernice Johnson Reagon that was based on the words of Ella Baker, who with John Lewis was one of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a towering figure in the Civil Rights movement.
“We who believe in freedom cannot rest.
“We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.”
Buddha Belly-A Theology of Joy (audio only)
December 12, 2016
Rev. Rebekah Montgomery Guest Minister
In this sermon, we welcome the infectious joy that comes from deep within. In the
midst of challenges and despair, we find hope. In the midst of strife, we find ways to harness and radiate joy. Come and get your Buddha Belly on!
Rev. Rebekah Montgomery is Assistant Minister of the UU Congregation of Rockville, Md. As well as a commissioned chaplain of the U.S. Army. She grew up a Unitarian Universalist, at the Rockville congregation focuses her work on Adult Faith Formation, Small Group Ministry and Membership and has done a tour of duty with the Army in Afghanistan.
Sermon: Wading In Mystery (audio and text)
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
Certainty is a good thing, but it can also bedevil us, since in the end there is so much in the world and in our lives that we can’t be certain about. We explore what it might mean – at least now and then – to allow ourselves to wade in the mystery.
READINGS
From The Sacred Depths of Nature by Ursula Goodenough
I’ve had a lot of trouble with the universe. It began soon after I was told about it in physics class. I was perhaps 20, and I went on a camping trip, where I found myself in a sleeping bag looking up into the crisp Colorado night. Before I could look around for Orion and the Big Dipper, I was overwhelmed with terror. The panic became so acute that I had to roll over and bury my face in my pillow.
- All the stars that I see are part of but one galaxy.
- There are some 100 billion galaxies in the universe, with perhaps 100 billion stars in each one.
- Each star is dying, exploding, accreting, exploding again.
- Our Sun, too, will die, frying the Earth to a crisp during its own heat-death.
The night sky was ruined. I would never be able to look at it again. I wept into my pillow, the long, slow tears of adolescent despair. . . A bleak emptiness overtook me whenever I thought about what was really going on out in the cosmos. So, I did my best not to think about it.
But, since then, I have found a way to defeat the nihilism that lurks in the infinite and the infinitesimal. I have come to understand that I can deflect the apparent pointlessness of it all by realizing that I don’t have to seek a point; in any of it. Instead, I can see it as the locus of Mystery:
The Mystery of why there is anything at all, rather than nothing, of where the laws of physics came from, of why the universe seems so strange. Mystery. Inherently pointless, inherently shrouded in its own absence of category. . . .
(I’ve come to see that) mystery can take its place as a strange but wondrous given.
Shoveling Snow With Buddha – by Billy Collins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u59Fnw6HRUQ
SERMON
Last October my wife, Debbie, and I set off on a hiking vacation out West. We spent four days in Zion National Park, a stretch of spectacular canyons in southern Utah. On our first day, we took on one of its most famous hikes, an area called The Narrows. It is essentially a long slot canyon – stretching some four to five miles – that follows a sinuous path that is anywhere from 20 yards to 20 feet wide, bordered by sheer canyon walls on each side that tower to around 1,000 feet.
It is so narrow that some points never receive direct sun, and so twisty that you never get a clear vantage of where the trail is going. But what makes the trail especially challenging is that there is at all times a river running through it, which means that if you are going to hike it, you have to wade.
And this is no small feat, because the water is moving at a fairly fast clip, which makes it challenging to keep your footing, and the stream bed is covered with stones and boulders of various shapes and sizes – our guide called it “like walking on bowling balls.” Oh, and did I mention the temperature of the water? 45 degrees Fahrenheit.
The folks at Zion, though, have figured out how to help intrepid hikers make their way up this channel. You can rent waders that pull up to your waist with neoprene socks and sturdy hiking shoes plus hiking poles. Altogether it keeps you pretty comfortable, provided you can stay upright: thankfully we did.
The first few steps into the stream were a little disorienting. I’ve done enough canoeing to be comfortable wading into a stream, but I found something inside me rebelling as I plodded upstream. Because, of course, you can’t really get a firm sense of your footing or any clear idea of what’s ahead, and the coldness of the water is unsettling. I heard an inner voice asking, “What am I doing here?”
But in time I let that go. We found a rhythm in our slow stride, using the poles to steady ourselves and learning to avoid especially rapid or deep parts of the stream. And even though the riffling of the water obscured our view of the bottom, we gained a sense of how to negotiate our steps. In time we even gained the confidence on occasion to turn our gaze up to the amazing rock formations above us. Weird, alien, and yet so compelling.
Later I wondered about that fearful inner voice that I heard at the start of the hike, and I recognized it as that part of me that wants always to be fully oriented and in charge. We’re wary to enter situations that we don’t understand, and, of course, that can be sensible and wise. But it’s also true that we often have a mistaken notion about just how much we do understand or how much control we actually have.
I’ve never had a spiritual crisis quite like the one that Ursula Goodenough speaks of, though I remember a similar unsettled feeling looking up at the stars on learning something about the age of the universe, the distance of those points of light, and our place on the third rock of a middling star out toward the edge of a fairly average-size galaxy, itself one of uncountable millions dotting the sky.
Part of it is the old story of coming to terms with the ordinary insignificance of our own identities, our own lives in the grand scheme of things, and also the fact of our own deaths that await us on some unknowable day far too soon in the future, no matter how distant that day may be.
I think Ursula Goodenough would acknowledge that wrapped up within that feeling of terror that she described was also a hefty helping of self-pity and with it the fear that not only the universe, with its exploding stars and accelerating galaxies that in time will zip out of our sight, is pointless, but that perhaps our lives may be as well.
It is one of those sobering moments that many of us confront at some point in one of those dark nights of the soul, whether we’re looking at a sky full of stars or just wrapped up in the covers of our beds. Is there any “cosmic” meaning to any of this? We can fret about this for some time, circling back to the question time and again before at some point our mind turns on the question itself: why am I asking this anyway? What exactly do I gain from this inquiry?
Well, meaning, purpose . . . That’s important, right?
Sure, but how would it change things if you had an answer?
Well, I guess everything would just seem more . . . meaningful.
Um-hum.
And, I don’t know, then I could feel more confident that I’m organizing my life the right way.
OK, perhaps that’s so. But here’s the thing: we humans have been at this for some time. We’ve come up with all sorts of inventive notions of what this cosmic purpose may be, and each of them eventually turns up a chink somewhere where we find ourselves wandering into wishful thinking or logical inconsistencies.
Now, we can have at it again, or work at solving the problems of some particular system, or stay on the search for the one who we think might have solved all the complexities. Or, Ursula Goodenough suggests, we can choose to step away and stop asking the question.
The more we learn about the world, she says – and as an accomplished scientist she knows a fair amount about what we know of the world – nature comes to “take its place as a strange and wonderful given.”
That is to say, we come to see it as something that requires no particular explanation for its existence: it just is, and that’s enough. For her, she says, this realization was an epiphany. She didn’t need to answer the big questions that were bedeviling her. Instead, she says “I lie on my back, under the stars and the unseen galaxies and I let their enormity wash over me.”
And instead of being gripped by anxiety, she says, she is filled with wonder and awe. As she puts it, “the gasp can terrify, or the gasp can emancipate.”
In her case, Goodenough says, it freed her. She came to realize that she doesn’t need a sense of some cosmic purpose to feel awe. It is simply the product of her experience. That doesn’t mean that her busy mind stops processing all that she sees, but she views it through a different filter: not as something that has an ultimate point, but as, in her words, “the locus of mystery.”
Mystery is a word that can seem unsettling, but for her it simply meant letting go of the need to seek out an ultimate reason behind all things. Instead of working to find transcendent forces at work, she marvels at the enormous subtlety and complexity of the world as it is. And it is a source of wonder at every turn. Each thread we pull takes us deeper into it.
Instead of limiting our imagination or understanding, mystery invites us into more expansive awareness. It’s an awareness that to my mind leads us not away from religion but into it, religion that accepts the givenness of the world, a source of wonder and awe, religion that calls us to celebrate and to live attuned to the world’s rhythms, that invites us to appreciate each other and all life as an interdependent whole.
It’s a perspective that we see in this famous passage from Walt Whitman: I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars, and the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, . . . and the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven and the narrowest hinge in my mad puts to scorn all machinery, and the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses any status, and a mouse is a miracle to stagger sextillions of infidels.
Each of us sorts out how to make our way in our lives in how we interface with the world of our experience and the circumstances of our upbringing. The result is a faith that orients us in our lives.
For her purposes, Goodenough says, she finds her faith in “the existence of all this complexity and awareness and intent and beauty and my ability to apprehend it.”
“The continuation of life,” she says, “reaches around , grabs its own tail, and forms a sacred circle that requires no further justification, no superordinate meaning of meaning, no purpose” other than continuation itself.
Each of us comes to frame our own sense of where our heart rests in our astonishing encounters with the world around us.
But there is something to be said for stepping away from the purpose puzzles, for ceasing to worry about the firmness of our footing and turning our gaze to the weird and wonderful world around us as we wade with uncertain steps into the mystery that is riffling around us and tugging at our knees.
Billy Collins’ imagined interchange with the Buddha offers one perspective on the question. There’s Collins with his non-stop commentary on the wonder of snow shoveling, the stark beauty of that winter day, all the lessons it teaches on the brilliance of sunlight interrupted by the barking of snow geese high overhead.
And there’s the Buddha, silently with single-minded energy throwing himself into the work, “as if it were the purpose of existence.”
And, perhaps at that moment it is: his presence, his attention to that moment, opening a window to life lived drinking in each sensation, each action, each awareness, needing no purpose other than its own completeness, as if a gesture in the dance of all things.
Sermon: The Act of Being (audio only)
Meg and Todd Hoke, Guest Speakers
As we enter a hectic holiday season, Todd & Meg Hoke offer us a service of words and music centered on the wisdom of paying attention.
Sermon: To Be Thankful (audio only)
Mark Ward, Lead Minister
We think we know the Thanksgiving story, but there are actually many stories woven into this popular holiday that emerge out of the history and heritage that we each bring to it. We’ll explore how these stories interlink and invite us all into a new understanding.
Sermon: Waking to the Work
Mark Ward, Lead Minister
With Election Day now in the rearview mirror, we are left with the truth that life goes on. What story shall we tell to guide us?
READINGS
Matthew 13:1-9
That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears[a] listen!”
Throw Yourself Like Seed by Miguel de Unamuno
Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit;
Sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
That brushes your heel as it turns going by,
The man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant.
Now you are only giving food to that final pain
Which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
But to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
Is the work; start there, turn to the work.
Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,
Don’t turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,
And do not let the past weigh down your motion.
Leave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead in yourself,
For life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;
From your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.
SERMON
My colleague Victoria Safford tells of a tense meeting at a congregation she was serving held about six months after the 9-11 attacks. The struggling Social Action Committee had called it simply as an occasion for people to share how they feeling in the aftermath of tragic event. But Safford said she was worried that that tender, risky work would quickly be overwhelmed by, in her words, “all those noisy Unitarian Universalist opinions”: all the articles they’d read, the Web sites they’d found, the NPR commentaries they’d heard.
Thankfully, though, she says, the circle held. Instead of getting lost in the dry sands of rhetoric, they found a way to connect with each other and with something deep in themselves.
Sorrow flowed into the room. Rage decades old made its appearance, and silence, as she puts it, “made its holy way.” The group was edging up to the shores of cynicism and despondency, when someone made an observation.
“You know we cannot do this all at once. But every day offers every one of us little invitations for resistance, and you make your own responses.”
He told of a story he’d read recently in Ian Frazier’s book On the Rez. It tells of a time when the girl’s basketball team on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota traveled for an away game. When they stepped out to be announced, the team members were greeted with anti-Indian hostility: fans waved food stamps, yelled fake Indian war cries and called out epithets like “squaw” and “gut-eater.”
The girls hesitated, uncertain what to do, until one of the team members, a 14-year-old freshman, surprised her teammates and silenced the crowd by stepping out and singing and dancing the Lakota shawl dance. Not only did she reverse the crowd’s hostility, but they even cheered and applauded. And of course, Frazier goes on to say, they won the game.
We convened a gathering not unlike the one that Victoria Safford describes here this past Wednesday. We ate a potluck meal together, gathered for a brief vespers service, and took time to talk. Our purpose was not to debate or analyze the results of the 2016 election but to acknowledge the pain, confusion and surprise that many of us were feeling afterward, and to affirm that we are a loving community that remains centered in a hopeful vision for the world.
Now, nearly a week later, the shock has at least numbed a bit and we are being urged to move on. After all, elections come and go; some candidates win, some lose. We’re grown-ups. We know that. We have seen Hillary Clinton graciously acknowledge her loss and wish Donald Trump, well. We’ve seen President Obama welcome a man with whom he traded some bitter words during the campaign to the White House and promise a smooth transition to the next administration. The gears of democracy appear to be working.
So, can’t we move on? Well, on one level, of course, we will. Life goes on, the government transition is already moving, and people will be attending to what the pending changes mean for what they care about. There’s work to do.
But on another level: no. As people of faith, before we go on we need to attend to what this election season has showed us about some of the deeper and more disturbing strains moving through our politics right now and how we are called to respond to them.
To begin with, what this election reveals about the level of misogyny that is not only present but viewed by many as acceptable in this country is horrifying. And here Donald Trump revealed himself to be a chief offender. It’s not just a matter of his frat boy antics at the beauty contests he sponsored, but his own history of sexually assault that he even brags about on TV. Add to it his repeated demeaning of women throughout the campaign, and is it any wonder women worry for their safety?
Nor does it end there, Hillary Clinton’s bid to break what she called “the highest and hardest glass ceiling” by seeking the presidency made plain the double standard that prevails for all women who attempt such feats: hated for their competency, demeaned for their ambition, held suspect for their success. Never before has this disparity in our national life been thrown into such sharp relief, and never was it more critical that all people, but especially men, denounce it and demand redress.
We are also left with raft of racism, homophobia and xenophobia from Trump or his supporters in either explicit language or code phrases that have fueled attacks and acts of discrimination during the campaign and since the election.
They leave millions afraid – immigrants fearful of expulsion, Muslims fearful of discrimination, GLBTQ people fearful of a loss of rights. So, sure, the government transition will go on. But we won’t forget to call out the oppression we plainly see or turn from the work to combat it.
We also but note an interesting dynamic that ran through the election from early on in both parties, a deep sense of frustration that many people feel about the state of their own lives and their inability to control their future. They struggle with economic stagnation, growing debt, social dislocations, and in this election their fury amounted to a kind of tsunami of grief, disappointment and complaint that washed out the structure of politics as we’ve known it in this country.
These were people who looked to the leadership in Washington of both parties and saw an entrenched, entitled class feathering its own nest, but doing little to change their lives. So, in walked brash and boisterous Donald Trump, promising to upset that cozy applecart and “make America great.”
This story is, of course, a trope as old as our republic – the outsider who pledges to turn things around as “a man of the people.” Anyone with a nodding acquaintance with history knows to be wary of such assurances, and what we see of the actions of Trump and his lieutenants so far shows us why. Still, that’s the work of politics, and as citizens it is our charge to attend to it, raise our voices and make our case for the nation’s future.
But how about us as a religious body? Where do we fit in? It’s here that I invite us to return to the parable of the sower that you heard earlier. The metaphor in this parable is pretty clear: if we want to be fed, we’re going to have to plant seed that will give us a crop. And we better be careful where we plant it: Scatter it on the path and birds will eat it up, toss it into poor soil and it won’t grow well, plant it near thorns and they’ll crowd it out, but scatter it in good soil and you’ll get a harvest.
Simple, right? As agricultural wisdom it’s kind of a no-brainer. But there’s something more here, a learning that isn’t as obvious. So, in a month when our worship theme is “Story,” let’s see what this simple story might offer us.
I think that one experience we have had of this election is that it leaves us hungry – hungry for connection, for integrity, for a life-giving way to be that serves us, each other and the world. Feeding that hunger is likely to take more than just scavenging in the landscape. We’re going to have to do something intentional to give us nourishment.
The parable suggests we’ll find it in seed, gathered from a good and trusted place. Then, we must find a fertile place in the world to plant it, then tend it, cultivate it and bring it to harvest. The story doesn’t indicate where we might find the seed, though I have an idea. Our UU tradition suggests that we don’t need to go searching for it. There is ample seed for this life-giving crop among us, and we locate it in our own experiences, in those moments of clarity that we each have had that tell us who we are.
These are moments that glow in our memory, but we don’t often grasp that within them are seeds of ever-renewing hope and possibility that can center and ground us.
And as it happens, we in this congregation are currently involved in a process of gathering that seed. Our Board of Trustees is inviting us to meet in groups where we share experiences of clarity that illuminate those values that are most important to us. We call them “Experiences of the Holy.”
We’ve had several of these hour-long gatherings so far, and there’s another one coming just after our 11:15 service today. I’ve attended a couple of these, and I have to say I find the experience amazing. To center down on our moments of clarity opens us. We clear away the clutter and can find the clearest, most hopeful part of ourselves.
In this process I have heard experiences of gratefulness, vulnerability, awe-inspiring beauty, compassion, and much more. Once done gathering these seeds, your board will sort through them to identify those that seem to hold the key values of the congregation and share them with you.
It will then be our work to give them good soil, plant them and see them flourish. Because the point of this process is not just to gather nice words; it is to help us nourish a life-giving way of being in the world. What we gather won’t be wholly original with us, but it will embody that which fuels the fires, which feeds the hunger in our own lives, and, we hope, take us deeper and root us more firmly in the soil of our being.
All the disruption surrounding this election is a reminder of how hard it is to stay grounded, of all the ways that despair and confusion can distract us from how we need to be. Let us take the time, then, to get clear on our center. Let us winnow and gather our strength and then, as Miguel de Unamuno urges, begin the work of bringing the values we proclaim into being and then throw ourselves into the fields of our endeavor.
Let us, like that Lakota girl on the Pine Ridge Reservation’s girls basketball team, employ the genius of our grounding and offer our shawl dance to the world.
I don’t know what shape this will take, but I know it won’t all come to fruition at once. It will take time and tending to accomplish with each of us dedicating ourselves to what Matthew Fox called “the small work in the Great Work.”
That means living by little acts love and giving ourselves to the challenging task of truth telling, being clear about who we are at our center, resisting and defying that which diminishes us, and beckoning each other to do the same.
We must be ready for disappointment, occasional failure and indignities, but if we are well rooted, if we have planted and tended well we will hold fast.
(And here I introduced and sang Holly Near’s song “I Am Willing”)
As we close, I turn once again to Marge Piercy’s words: Connections are made slowly, sometimes where we can’t see where they go. So we need to keep at it while living a life we can endure, a life that is loving and resilient and strong.
Then, after a long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
Sermon: The Mightiest Word
Rev. Mark Ward
As we look ahead to the coming Election Day, our topic today builds on a line from the poem that Elizabeth Stevens wrote for Barak Obama’s inaugural seven years ago. Speaking to our General Assembly in June, interviewer Krista Tippet seized on that line as pointing to a central question that our nation faces. What could that word be and what story does it call us to?
READINGS
“Praise Song for the Day,” by Elizabeth Alexander
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/praise-song-day
From The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“A true act of love, unlike imaginary love, is hard and forbidding. . . . It requires hard work and patience, and for some, it is a whole way of life. But I predict that at the very moment when you see despairingly that, despite all your efforts, you have not only failed to come closer to your goal, but, indeed, seem even farther from it than ever – at that very moment you will have achieved it.”
SERMON
It was a blustery, sunshiny day with temperatures hovering around the freezing mark when Elizabeth Alexander walked up to the microphones on a podium constructed on the west side of the U.S. Capitol. Hatless and dressed in a warm, red coat, looking out on what may have been the largest audience ever to attend a presidential inauguration, she set about telling a story of our nation.
It was a story that unreeled far from the TV cameras and dignitaries present on that historic day in Washington, D.C., a story of ordinary people who, she said, “go about our business,” business that had those people “walking past each other, catching each other’s eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.”
Her words echoed those of Walt Whitman, the poet of democracy, a century before, when she spoke of people “stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a hole in a tire.” A woman and her son, she said, “wait for the bus, a farmer considers the changing sky. A teacher says, take out your pencils. Begin.”
But there was a different tone here: a wariness or perhaps just watchfulness that she perceives moving through the scene that Whitman never really picked up. “All about us is noise,” she said. “All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues.”
In this nation of immigrants, there are stories, she suggested, that each of us carries a part of, but that for some is a greater burden than others.
It’s not just the cacophony of busy people, but also thorns and brambles that catch at clothes and tear flesh, all of which speak of some stories told not in the light of day but whispered from one generation to the next, the legacy of hard loss and unrealized hope.
As an African American poet speaking at the inauguration of America’s first African American president, Alexander took hold of the opportunity to lay before the nation the historic achievement before them: “Say it plain: that many have died for this day.” Military heroes, yes, but also, once again, ordinary people who perished in unmarked graves or were traded as chattel, yet who “laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices,” including among them the Capital building before which she stood.
But, the business of the day, Alexander told the crowd, was not recrimination, but praise. Praise “for the struggle” that it took to get there – for each hand-lettered sign of protest brought to a freedom march, for people determined to find “something better down the road,” for people who had the courage to “walk into that which we cannot see.”
What her poem offered in the end was a story of redemption – not individual redemption but the possibility of our nation’s redemption from a troubled past into a more hopeful future, where, she said, “anything can be made, any sentence begun.”
I have to say that as powerful as Alexander’s 2009 poem was, it had pretty much faded from my awareness until this last summer when I heard the radio interviewer Krista Tippett bring it up when she spoke at our Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Columbus, Ohio. Tippett had just published a new book, Becoming Wise – An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, and she told us she was struggling to come to grips with what she found to be disturbing trends in what she called “our common life” in this country.
Coping with a diversity of interests and identities has always been a challenge for us, but she says in her book that in our current struggles with divisions over race and class she sees something new, what she calls “a surfacing of grief.”
And that grief, she suggests, has come about as a result of the breakdown of cultural coping strategies. Tippett told us in Columbus that she remembered growing up in the 60s, when diversities of all kinds were stretching the social fabric, being taught the virtue of tolerance. It sounded good. Live and let live, right? But in fact, she said, tolerance was too small a word for what was needed at the time.
Tolerance, after all, connotes a kind of cerebral assent of allowing or enduring, putting up with each other. Fine, but in the end the problem with tolerance, she said, is that “it doesn’t invite us to understand, to be curious, to be open, to be moved, or surprised by another.”
Nowadays, in our public dialog not only does the notion of tolerance seem a sham, she says, but “we’ve begun to hold the question of hate in public life, creating a new legal category of crimes (hate crimes) to name the breakdown when tolerances gives out and the human condition at its worst rushes in.”
For those caught in the midst of this, it can be a source of despair, but for the rest of us simple bewilderment. As Tippett says, “we don’t know where to begin to change our relationship with the strangers who are our neighbors.” If tolerance guides our interactions, there is always a distance between ourselves and the other. Now, now, leave them alone. That’s not our business.
Live and let live teaches us hands off. Rather than empathize with or extend our moral imagination to another, the operative guidance is, “Let it be.” And so, the crises that rip apart other people’s lives are starved of the living oxygen of real human drama and devolve into issues that become subject to debate and policy solutions.
And yet, Krista Tippett says, “we know in our hearts and minds that we are bigger and wilder and more precious than numbers, more complex than any economic outcome or political prescription can describe.”
And so, she says, it comes as a surprise that “at every turn, I hear the word love surfacing as a longing for common life, quietly but persistently and in unexpected places.”
Love? Really? In families, sure. In romantic partnerships, of course. But in our common life?
But here comes Elizabeth Alexander proclaiming from the steps of the U.S. Capital. It’s not really so strange, she says. “Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself, others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.” Can you not see a thread through all this?
Beyond marital, filial, national love, a deeper chord sounds of a love, that, she says, has no need to pre-empt grievance, that doesn’t rank one person’s claim as higher than another’s, that instead casts a widening pool of light.
“What if the mightiest word is love?” she says. Not the sweetest word or the happiest word, full of hearts and flowers. What if the word “love” names something elemental, akin to a force of nature, something that, in an interview with Tippett, Alexander called “sober” and “grave”? Such love, Alexander said, “can do more than tolerate dissent in difference. (It) can sit with it, take it in, listen to it, let it stand.” It is guided by a need not to conquer or subdue but to know and connect.
Even more, Tippett says, Alexander’s question “invites each of us out of our aloneness.” Tolerant, tolerable folks are like atoms, bouncing off each other but never engaging. Aspiration for love, she says, “sends us inside” to know and honor who we are, then “coaxes us out again to an encounter with the vastness of human identity.”
In a sense, none of this is new. As Krista Tippett points out, “spiritual geniuses have always called humanity to love.” And still we shy away. There are many reasons for it, but mostly it’s because we don’t get into the habit. And it’s scary, since to use our tender hearts we must come to know them. That means that we must open them, examine them, share them. We’re more inclined to protect them – they are so easily wounded, so easily hurt. Aggression, anger, control – they look so much stronger, even if in the end they only bring us to grief.
There is probably no person who understands this better than the Civil Rights leader John Lewis. Time and again he stood up to violent abuse while remaining nonviolent himself. People examining the movement, he says, puzzled over how he could endure all that, but his answer was simple.
Writing in his book, Across that Bridge, Lewis said that “if you boiled down our intent into one all-encompassing residual word the remaining essence would be love.” Lewis said he would read observers writings about how for this or that reason the campaign of non-violence was an effective tactic. But those observers, he said, missed the point. “It was for us a way of authentically living our lives,” he said.
It’s a way of being in the world that judges our effectiveness not by the results we achieve but by how true we are to our center. And that’s important because on that path achievements can sometimes be hard to come by.
I came upon a story by the writer Mark Yaconelli about his experience helping out at a small church across the street from a college in Oregon. The church had received a grant to start a new prayer service. He had written books on prayer and worked with youth and felt certain he could to it. He persuaded the minister to give him the job. Over the next month he made sure the service was publicized widely, he recruited musicians to play and women from the church to prepare a meal.
Three hours before the first service he came to set up the chapel. He lit up candles, arranged flowers, prepared the bulletins. Fifteen minutes before it started he positioned himself at the door with a broad smile, watching as groups of students walked up toward the church – and then kept walking. Not a soul showed up for the service.
What do you do if you throw a party and nobody comes? Worse, what if you had put your very heart into it, something you felt was a great gift to the world?
Yaconelli went through the service with the half dozen people from the church who were there. As per his agreement with the church he went on with the weekly service for the next nine months. Not a single student ever appeared, though eventually a few more church members began to show. And in time among these a deepening closeness grew. When his contract finally ended, several of those participants shared with him how that simple weekly service had changed their lives.
It was on reflecting on this experience that Yaconelli brought to mind those challenging words from Dostoyevsky that I shared with you earlier: A true act of love is tough and forbidding, requiring hard work and patience. And yet, as Dostoyevsky’s character, Father Zossima, puts it, it may be that at that point when you are most certain you have failed utterly you will find you have achieved it.
There’s no denying it: Love is a hard road. I think this especially as we look ahead to this coming Tuesday. It has been an election campaign full of the filthiest superlatives, and whatever its resolution – and I do have a rather strong preference – we have some serious repair work to do to rebuild our common life.
I think back to the day that Elizabeth Alexander delivered her poem and shake my head. Remember? Commentators speculated that, just maybe, the election of our first black president had turned the tide to a post-racial America. Sure there were issues among us, but perhaps we were ready to reach across the aisle, across the cross the color line, across all that divided us and find solutions. No, not really. Not yet.
Instead, it’s time to get back to work. We can mistake what love is about on a sunshiny day when hope is buoyant. We can wrongly assume that it’s about smiles and good feelings. Sure, it’s nice when we get them. But if love is to prevail it must be more than that. It must be a discipline. It must be, as John Lewis put it, “a way of authentically living our lives.”
It must be a way that we hold to even when nobody shows up, even on cloudy, rainy, stormy days. There will be moments when its demands on us are sober and grave, and yet we stick to it anyway because our hearts will allow no less, because it is the only way we are each invited out of our aloneness.
Once again we stand, as Elizabeth Alexander imagined us, “on the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,” called to “walk into that which we cannot see.”
Praise to the brave souls with open hearts who still see that anything can be made, any sentence begun as we walk forward together into that light.
Sermon: Ghost Wings-Day of the Dead (audio only)
Joy Berry, Director of Lifespan Religious Education and Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
A beautiful story of a girl and her grandmother forms the center of our annual intergenerational Day of the Dead service. Please plan to bring pictures or memorabilia to place on our altar to celebrate our honored dead.
Sermon: Who’s White Trash (text only)
SERMON
J.D. Vance says he knew when he was growing up in the coal country of Kentucky and a city in southern Ohio that life was a struggle for the people he was raised among. In his recent book, Hillbilly Elegy, he tells of how his grandparents, the island of stability in his upbringing, scrambled to get by, while he saw little of his drug-addicted mother, and other family members careened through episodes of violence, joblessness, and abusive relationships.
These were people he loved – and still does – but he says they were also people uninclined to foster big dreams, knowing full well they were not likely to be realized.
Vance writes, though, from the perspective of one who escaped that orbit, who found his way into college, then Yale Law School, and now to a position at a Silicon Valley investment firm. But his tale is not a riff on self-congratulation or some up-by-the-bootstraps Horatio Alger myth. It is really a kind of lament for the sad straits in which a huge stratum of American culture finds itself.
He identifies this group, what he describes as his people, as millions of poor and working-class, white Americans of Scots-Irish descent, people scraping by who dispute the notion that many of us are learning to wrap our heads around, that white skin is a ticket to privileges that people of color in this country have no hope of achieving, because they have yet to experience anything like privilege in their own lives.
“To these folks,” Vance writes, “poverty is the family tradition – their ancestors were laborers in the Southern slave economy, share croppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers in more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash.”
They are people, he says, with “an intense sense of loyalty” and “a fierce dedication to family and country” but who also remain innately suspicious of outsiders and people different from themselves.
There are historic reasons we can cite for why all that J.D Vance describes should be so – and I want to explore some of them today – but in this chaotic election year when political candidates seem intent to double-down on all that divides us, I also want to take a moment to step away from the fray.
I want to invite us as people who covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person to open ourselves to complicated truths and reexamine some of our own preconceptions so that by careful, compassionate reflection we might in time help blaze a path to fully realizing a beloved community.
All ideas, it seems, have their zeitgeist, and this appears to be a year for “white trash.” In addition to J.D. Vance’s best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy, we have Nancy Isenberg’s comprehensive study, White Trash – The 400-Year-Old Untold History of Class in America. The title clues you in to the theme.
As you heard in the reading earlier, Isenberg argues that this habit of categorizing some human beings as “waste people” is a direct result of what she calls a “relentless class system” operating across this nation’s history. What confuses this understanding, though, is a national myth from our founding days that, unlike the Europe that our forebears left behind, ours is a classless society.
It’s a free country. Anyone can get ahead, right? All it takes is grit and gusto. And yet, we live in a society with clear evidence of vast economic inequalities. That means, Isenberg tells us, that “rationalizing economic inequality has been an unconscious part of the national credo; poverty has been naturalized, often seen as something beyond human control.”
That’s complicated, but it’s important. So, let me tease out what I hear her saying. If we claim that there are no real class divisions in America, then when we see signs of them anyway – like poverty – we must look for other reasons to explain them. And across our history, those explanations pretty much come down to two factors: sloth and breeding. That is to say, the poor are simply lazy – “shiftless” was the term that was widely applied – or they are genetically deficient.
So, let’s join Isenberg on some of the history behind all this. In her book, she carries us back to the time when the first settlements in America were planned. Leading planters in colonies like Jamestown, she notes, “had no illusion that they were creating a classless society.” Rather, they recruited the poor as indentured servants to work the land, an arrangement that essentially reduced them to “debt slaves.”
Indentured servants were also recruited to serve the Puritan colonies in New England. In both places, there was little economic mobility, and so even for those who completed their indenture, the only way up, often, was out, fleeing their bondage to make their own way, roaming and eventually settling in the countryside.
In much the South, Isenberg says, we see that trend most dramatically. A ruling planter class captured much of the land and took hold of the economy. Where land wasn’t as productive, though, a different ethos evolved. Eastern North Carolina, with its sandy forests and swamps, was one of those. It became a harbor for some of the refugees, making it, in her words, “what we might call the first white trash colony.”
Indeed, one official of the crown who toured the region dismissed it as what he called “Lubberland,” a place of “lazy, bog-trotting vagrants” resistant to any form of government. Why they resisted is plain: government as they saw it largely served the interests of the wealthy, not their own.
As the frontier opened up and settlers encountered these country people, lore grew around them as either folksy sorts who welcomed weary travelers into their humble cabins, or as drunkards, brawlers and highwaymen.
As the Civil War approached, poor whites entered the debates over slavery, with northern abolitionists arguing that they were the victims of a slave economy that closed off the chance for them to advance.
Southern apologists, though, insisted that slavery elevated the status of poor whites by putting them over blacks, even if those whites complained that they had been drafted into a rich man’s war that the poor were called to fight.
After the war, the anger of poor whites at policies that they felt helped blacks but left them languishing built a deep resentment that fueled the growth of the Klan and support for Jim Crow laws that marginalized and disenfranchised blacks.
Meanwhile, the economic shackles that left many poor whites scraping by as tenant farmers remained essentially unchanged well into the 20th Century.
For some time, the rag on the poor had been that they were simply deficient human beings, but after World War with the rise of the eugenics movement it took on a new edge.
As the notion gained currency that what were considered “unfit human traits” could be reduced with controlled breeding, reformers turned their eyes to the South, where lack of education funding and medical care left many illiterate and in poor health. Poor white women became the major target of a campaign to isolate, quarantine and sterilize people declared to “feebleminded” and “unfit for breeding.” In North Carolina alone, for example, from 1929 to 1974 some 7,600 people – men and women, white and black – were medically sterilized.
It wasn’t until Roosevelt’s New Deal, Isenberg says, that class divisions were recognized not as preordained or somehow the fault of the poor, but the result of concrete, mutable conditions that government could alter.
She points to James Agee’s famous Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as making a similar case. The poor, Agee insisted, “are not dull or slow-witted; they have merely internalized a kind of ‘anesthesia’ that numbs them the shame and insult of discomforts, insecurities, and inferiorities.”
This takes our little tour of history takes us roughly to the 1950s and 1960s and the economic boom that did in many ways raise all boats. And along the way as conditions improved the label of red neck, white trash shifted from badge of shame to a cultural trope, with everything from the rise of Elvis Presley to the “Beverly Hillbillies” and “Gomer Pyle.”
Around here, the trope for mountain people is different – the hillbilly with his coon dog, rifle and still. But the pressures are no less real. Ours is a region that has never known much wealth, where land-poor people hold tight to steep mountain acres that bring them no income, and employment is hard to find.
In an interview from 1988, Jim Wayne Miller, author of the poem you heard earlier, said he worries about the effect that this economic instability is having on people in this area.
“Poverty, or the perception of poverty, is often a matter of discrepancy. It’s not a matter, inherently of what you have or don’t have, but what you have compared to someone else. . . . If I had a nightmare, it would be that we will never be able to talk about the last taboo in this country, which isn’t sex or death, but class. Class is the one thing we will not admit.”
And yet its influence continues to intensify. As J.D. Vance notes, recent years have been less kind than previous decades, resulting in increasing numbers of people being pulled into economic instability. As income equality grows, many are losing ground, and once again pundits are putting the onus on struggling people to get themselves out of their messes without any hope of a hand up. Some make it anyway, like Vance cobbling together a series of fortunate circumstances; many others crash and burn into long-term unemployment, broken families, addictions and suicides.
At the same time, Vance says, he sees growing cynicism that nothing anyone can do will make a difference. The feeling is, he says, “We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs.”
Vance identifies himself as a conservative, but says the political right has done his people no favors by “fomenting the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers.”
“What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives,” he says, “yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.”
And it’s plain how that old bait and switch strategy is affecting our politics. Simmering feelings of disillusion, disappointment and shame are being fanned into blind and feral hatred and rage. All that energy not only does terrible damage to our public life, but it conveniently distracts people from that apparent unmentionable in our politics: class.
Yet, there it is. As Nancy Isenberg puts it, “Class defines how real people live. They don’t live the myth. They don’t live the dream. Politics is always about more than what is stated . . . . Even when it’s denied, politicians engage in class issues.”
So, friends, let’s stop fooling ourselves and name what we see, not as political partisans but as people committed to healing the brokenness of humankind, as people who find beauty and wonder, hope and possibility in every living soul.
Let us abandon the scorched earth of fearful speech and fevered imaginings, the sad hubris of wounded ego, of desperate, predatory disrespect.
A generation ago the New Dealers opened the door with the then-radical notion that class divisions were not preordained or somehow the fault of the poor, but the result of concrete, mutable conditions that people working together could alter. It remains no less true today.
Growing up in his “hillbilly” surroundings, Vance says, there were any number of occasions when because of his own poor decisions he skirted disaster. But he says he was blessed to have family and friends who stuck by him and saw him through.
It’s another reminder that none of us is self-made. Each of us struggles and stumbles and sometimes needs to be called back to the original wholeness that is our birthright.
As in the story that Joy told us earlier, even in bleak and scary times, we are called to see the beauty, the vital energy and aliveness that is present in the world. Even when our lives seem “weathered and old-fashioned,” in Jim Wayne Miller’s words, we have the capacity to leave the heaviness that dogs us behind, let it perish, let it topple like a stone chimney and instead let us live into the lightness that dwells within us like a song.
Sermon: The Hubris of Discovery (audio & text)
Rev. Mark Ward
There are scripts that run unquestioned through our cultural memory, and one of those is discovery: the idea that Europeans had dispensation to murder, oppress and uproot peoples in North America and elsewhere for their own benefit. What might be the consequences today of naming and relinquishing that mindset?
READINGS
“next to of course god america i” By: e.e. cummings
next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?
He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water
“The Magic Lake” A Cherokee Story
There was a young Cherokee boy walking in the woods one day, and he saw droplets of blood upon the leaves. So, he began to follow the trail because he was concerned that somebody had been hurt. He followed the drops up the hillside and eventually came upon a small bear cub who had been wounded and was bleeding. The cub was climbing up the hill, so he followed it. As he watched, the cub would stumble and fall, but then get up again. He watched the bear make its way up the great mountain that the Cherokees call Shakonige, which is the Blue Mountain, also known as Clingman’s Dome.
Slowly the bear climbed ahead, and the boy followed him until they got to the top. It was hard to tell exactly where he was, though, because fog covered almost everything. Then, as the boy watched, he saw the bear cub jump into the fog. The boy couldn’t believe his eyes, and so he ran up to the spot, figuring the bear was gone. But then suddenly he saw the fog turn to water, and the cub began to swim.
When he came back to the shore, the bear got out of the water, and his injured leg was completely healed. The boy was very confused. But then he saw a duck swim into the water with a broken wing, and it made his wing well, Animals were coming from all directions, swimming in the water and being healed. The boy looked up to the Great Spirit and said, “I don’t understand.”
The Great Spirit said, “Go back and tell your sisters and brothers, the Cherokee, that if they love me, if they love all their brothers and sisters, and if they love the animals of the earth, when they grow old and sick, they too can come to the magic lake and be made well again.”
SERMON
“By gorry by jingo by gee by gosh by gum. . .”
The language of ee cumming’s poem is a little dated – not surprising, as it was composed almost 100 years ago, in the 1920s. But we can still recognize the figure that he archly lampoons here: the blowhard politician whose speech is a kind of scrambled eggs of worn pieties and pseudo-patriotic gobbledygook. Indeed, in this tumultuous election year we don’t have to look far to find them. So, his poem is good for a chuckle and a weary shake of our heads.
But if we linger just a little longer we can see that cummings is also making a deeper and more penetrating point here. His object is to draw attention not just to the politicians spouting the pieties but to the pieties themselves: pieties, the poem suggests, that are in many ways no less foolish than the speaker himself.
We recognize these pieties, for they are not radically different today from what they were in cummings’ time. They celebrate a triumphalist view of American history that we all know from our high school textbooks. As he says: “land of pilgrims . . . in every language, even deaf and dumb” where the voice of liberty rings clear.
There it is in Katherine Lee Bates’s great civil hymn:
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America! God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern impassion’d stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America! God mend thine ev’ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
I must confess that I was taught well. My patriotic heart still beats a little faster when I hear those words – such lovely images, such soul-stirring sentiment. There is, it is true, historic truth embedded in those verses, and yet . . . and yet so much else that remains unspoken or even acknowledged that is cause, not for celebration, but for mourning and atonement.
This month in our worship and small group ministry we turn to the discipline of healing. Healing is the process of recovery from a wound – physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual. It is not something we can impose or thrust on another; it is something we can only offer with humility and care. When we speak of healing, we begin with the presumption that the one in need of healing has the natural capacity to recover from injury, but is also likely to need time and some assistance to do so.
Today I invite us to consider what it would mean to be agents of healing of one of the oldest and deepest wounds of this nation, one that centuries after it was first inflicted continues to be aggravated even today, a wound summed up in the word, “discovery.”
We grew up being told of the “Age of Discovery,” a time roughly from the 15th to the 18th centuries when “courageous” Europeans set sail to establish routes to trade with other people in Africa, Asia and the Americas. But truth to tell, those sailors were interested in more than trading. Where they found valuable resources – precious metals, gems and so on – they also sought to seize foreign lands for their own.
In this enterprise, they received the blessing of the church. In 1454, Pope Nicholas V issued a proclamation, or papal bull, that authorized the king of Portugal, whose soldiers were colonizing West Africa, to “invade, capture, vanquish and subdue all . . . pagans and other enemies of Christ . . . (and) to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery. . . (and) to take away their possessions and property.”
After Columbus’s trip to Hispaniola in 1492, the Spanish court sought and received a similar papal bull that extended them the same privileges. Other European courts adopted this “Doctrine of Discovery” to support their own colonizing.
“Discovery”: What an exciting word! Isn’t that what goads so many of us in our work? To discover new things – “To boldly go where no one has gone before,” right? Who would ever have thought that it could become a shield for oppression, murder, enslavement, and even genocide? And yet it did.
Those plucky Pilgrims, among our religious forebears, paid little mind to the indigenous peoples who occupied the land they traveled to. To their eyes, they were looking upon pristine, virginal wilderness.
Remember from “America the Beautiful”?
O beautiful for pilgrim feet, whose stern impassion’d stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness!
Nope. Sorry. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz points out in An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, that untamed wilderness was actually occupied by some 15 million people, the majority of whom were farmers who lived in towns. Also, by their actions it’s plain that it was not freedom that the settlers sought to spread across the country but dominion.
And Thomas Jefferson, he who proclaimed that it was self-evident that all are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, was quick as secretary of state to claim the European Doctrine of Discovery as a way of denying Indian claims to their own lands and opening it up to settlers.
And later Chief Justice John Marshall declared in a Supreme Court decision that due to the European Doctrine of Discovery, Indians had lost “their rights to complete sovereignty as independent nations,” and would only be recognized as occupying their lands. Subsequent decisions designated Indian peoples as “domestic dependent nations” forever subject to the control of the federal government.
Those precedents not only remain in the law but in years since have been used repeatedly to appropriate Indian lands previously given by treaty and to remove Indians from their ancient homelands, as our neighbors, the Cherokee, experienced. They also were the basis of campaigns of violence against them, including moments that were nothing short of slaughter.
We can even see it in the current presidential campaign. When Donald Trump asserts that the US should have seized Iraqis oil wells when it drove out Saddam Hussein, he is making essentially an extended argument based on the Doctrine of Discovery. It’s the kind of “to the victor belong the spoils” philosophy often asserted by conquering nations but which in fact amounts to nothing short of a war crime.
In America, it is part of a legacy that has crippled and marginalized native peoples for generations. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s book walks us through much of it. I recommend it to you if you’d like to pursue this further: An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. It’s published by our own publishing house, Beacon Press.
And so we are left to wonder how to deal with all this now. As Dunbar-Ortiz points out, this notion that we as a nation or even we as individuals are privileged do to what we want, grab what we like and throw our weight around heedless of the consequences or of the impact on other people is collateral damage from the wound that the Doctrine of Discovery has inflicted.
Back in 1993 at the 500th anniversary of Columbus arriving in the Americas indigenous peoples argued that to recognize this history, the day now designated as Columbus Day, which comes tomorrow in our calendar, should instead be designated Indigenous Peoples Day.
Since then, there has been a growing movement seeking to bring attention to the experience of indigenous peoples. This year for the first time, the city of Phoenix will join Seattle and Minneapolis – all places with strong indigenous communities – in recognizing Indigenous Peoples Day. So far, South Dakota is the only state to do so.
Back in 2014 Lakota activist Bill Means had this to say about why the celebration should be changed from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day: “We discovered Columbus, lost on our shores, sick, destitute, and wrapped in rags. We nourished him to health, and the rest is history. He represents the mascot of American colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. And so it is time that we change a myth of history.”
That’s not a bad idea: It’s time that we discard the myth of discovery, that we acknowledge the damage that our forebears inflicted on native peoples by the ravages of colonialism. And maybe it’s time that we open a conversation about who indigenous people really are – not exotic figures out of a mythic past, but people with a unique story and a unique place in this country.
In 2012 at our General Assembly the Unitarian Universalist Association adopted a resolution repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery, a move that put us in the company with the Episcopal Church and the World Council of Churches. We also resolved to “expose the historical reality and impact” of the doctrine and eliminate it, wherever we might find it, even in our own policies and practices.
What that might look like is an interesting challenge for us each to consider. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz talks of how frustrated native peoples are that in recent years even as their history has been acknowledged, they find themselves lumped in as just one of many racial minorities who have suffered historic discrimination. All that, she says, ignores the many very real ways that they continue to be marginalized today.
She quotes Ojibwe historian Jean O’Brien who talks of how Indians are written out of existence by what she calls “firsting and lasting.” Towns, she says, create monuments to what they call the “first settlement” or “first dwelling,” as if there had never been occupants in those places before Euro-Americans. Meanwhile, she says, a national narrative tells of “last Indians” or “last tribes”: the last of the Mohicans or the famous sculpture by James Earl Fraser of a mounted Indian slumped over his horse entitled “End of the Trail.”
Among the initiatives our own UUA resolution urges is that congregations make efforts to learn about native peoples in their local context, to develop relationships with them and awareness of their culture.
Several years ago as part of a class here on developing a “Sense of Place” I arranged a visit for our group to the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, where Education Director Barbara Duncan told us something of the struggles the Cherokee have faced and still face to claim their identity and sustain their culture.
The Qualla Boundary, the 56,000-acre reservation at Cherokee, North Carolina, provides a place where many in the Eastern Band of Cherokee make their home. But their heritage in this part of the world extends far beyond this narrow space. You can still see it in dozens of burial mounds scattered across this region as well as town sites, and sacred centers of years gone by. You get a sense of it from Cherokee tales that feature places that remain popular today, including what we know as Mount Mitchell, the Devil’s Courthouse, and, as you heard in our story, Clingman’s Dome.
Here, too, though, the Cherokee struggle with being perceived as a relic, rather than an active, evolving culture. To avoid that fate, they rely on the hope that some of the descendants of Europeans who colonized this land will relinquish the hubris of their heritage.
As Charlie indicated, hubris is the pride that blinds us, an overweening arrogance that insists on its way and will not be bothered with the facts or other people’s perspectives. What might it look like to discard outworn pieties and remove the blinders that the “discoverers” of this land left us and look with new eyes on this land and its people?
It could be a path toward healing, a path perhaps something like the one the Cherokee boy found when he followed the wounded cub up the mountainside, leading us to a place where, as the Great Spirit puts it, if we love all our brothers and sisters and if we love the animals of the earth we might just be made well again.
Sermon:Forgiveness: That Lonesome Road (audio & text )
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
Again and again, we return to the hard work of forgiveness that forces us to confront our errors and inadequacies: no fun, but what relief to be freed of that burden, as the hymn reminds us, to be born and reborn again.
SERMON
Is there a soul, I wonder, who hasn’t walked that lonesome road? You know what I mean. James Taylor is very clear. Standing in the wreckage of some intense argument that went a step or two too far, or having confronted or been confronted with some thoughtless act more egregious than just everyday cluelessness, we find ourselves suddenly facing a yawning gulf in what we had felt was a pretty sturdy relationship.
We probably feel this most intensely in romantic relationships, but hiccups like this happen in any significant relationship in our lives. Distracted, sad, our stomachs tied in what seems an undoable knot, we replay the event over and over in our minds: Did I have to say that? Did she have to say that? Did he have to do that? Did I have to respond that way?
We swing from self-righteous to sad and back: That wasn’t fair. I guess I wasn’t fair. Maybe this is the end. It can’t be the end. What am I going to do?
“If I had stopped to listen once or twice,
If I had closed my mouth and opened my eyes,
If I had cooled my head and warmed my heart
I’d not be on this road tonight.”
What we’re talking about here, Brene Brown says, is heartbreak – again the relationship need not be romantic, but it is one in which we feel invested, where we truly love another person. And when the break happens, we tumble inevitably into grief, which we feel as a sense of longing and loss.
Of course, we may not process our feelings that way at first. Singed with the pain of that break, we may turn instead to anger or dismissiveness. Fine: if X is going to be that way, to heck with him or her. It’s no skin off my nose.
Uh-huh.
As satisfying as such bluster may feel – for a moment – it gets us nowhere because it is frankly a denial of how we really feel – which is lousy. As Brene Brown puts it, “There are too many people today who instead of feeling hurt are acting out of their hurt; instead of acknowledging pain, they’re inflicting pain on others. Rather than risking feeling disappointed, they’re choosing to live disappointed.”
There’s an odd narrative in our culture that paints the image of strength as person who presents themselves as essentially bullet proof, who takes a hit and keeps on going, who acknowledges no hurt, no pain. Brene Brown argues that the opposite is true, that someone who acknowledges no pain is not someone to look up to but someone to look out for. Because it means that that person has no clear sense of his or her feelings.
We celebrate these stories of people who fight back from adversity, but don’t acknowledge the emotional struggle it took to do that. And in doing that we misperceive what the process truly involves. “Heartbreak knocks the wind out of you,” she says, “and the feelings of loss and longing can make getting out of bed a monumental task.”
Rather than celebrate impervious resilience, Brown says, she holds up what she calls “bad-assery” in relationships. Come again? That’s right, bad-assery, she says, as in: “When I see people stand fully in their truth, or when I see someone fall down, get up and say, ‘Damn. That really hurt, but this is important to me and I’m going in again’ my gut reaction is, ‘What a badass!” Bad-ass, as in showing true courage and resilience, not slinking away into silence or self-pity.
People who wade into discomfort and vulnerability and tell the truth of their lives, she says, “are the real badasses.” They are the people, she adds, “who say ‘our family is really hurting. We could use your support.’ And the man who tells his son, ‘It’s OK to be sad. We all get sad. We just need to talk about it.’ And it’s the woman who says, ‘Our team dropped the ball. We need to stop blaming each other and talk about what happened so we can fix it and more forward.’”
It’s good, Brene Brown says, that there are people daring enough to take on the tough tasks of justice making and community building that we need. But among them, she adds: “We also need a critical mass of badasses.” These are people who when confronted with difficulty don’t put up false poses of invulnerability, but who instead “are willing to dare, fail, feel their way through tough emotions and try again.”
Of course, this is demanding stuff. And, as Brene Brown suggests, there aren’t a lot of models for this kind of work.
Where might we today find someone who could show us an example of courage and commitment, who acknowledges emotional pain and damage, but also shows strength in coming to terms with who they are and what matters, someone we might call a brave “badass” of forgiveness?
I’d like to offer one example you may find surprising: Beyonce. That’s right, Beyonce, the singer-songwriter, mega-millionaire, pop diva. The image we have of Beyonce is the superstar who serenaded Barak and Michelle Obama on the night of his election as president and who sells out arenas with her provocative, high-energy performances.
Earlier this year, though, she released an album with a very different vibe. The combined CD and hour-long DVD entitled “Lemonade” is a thinly veiled rendition of the stages of anger, grief and reconciliation that she endured after learning of the infidelities of her husband, the rapper Jay-Z. Beyonce has refused to discuss the situation publicly, but instead in this album she let her art tell her story, and it does.
It’s a surprisingly raw and vulnerable statement for an artist who projects an image of indomitable fierceness. Yet she does even more than that: she conjures up the weight that African-American women have had to carry for centuries, not only from disappointments in relationships but also from a society that diminishes and belittles them. She even gives a place of honor to images of mothers of African-American men who died in recent police shootings.
In one song, “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” she intersperses clips from Malcolm X saying, “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman, The most unprotected person in America is the black woman, The most neglected person in America is the black woman.”
And yet, as if in response, she weaves in a clip from a video of the 90th birthday of Jay Z’s grandmother saying, “I’ve had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up. I was given lemons and I made lemonade.”
She also quotes a recipe for lemonade from her own grandmother, telling her, “You spun gold out of this hard life. Conjured beauty from the things left behind. Found healing where it did not live.”
As for Jay Z, well, the message is pretty clear: in tough language she tells him in no uncertain terms that he’s close to losing the best thing he ever had. “Who the … do you think you are? You ain’t married to no average …, boy.” And if the extent of her anger isn’t clear, in one song she walks down a street with a baseball bat, smashing shop windows and car windows, then hops into a monster truck that crushes them all.
But the stunning parts of the video come in the sections of “Redemption” and “Reconciliation” that close the piece. If there’s any question whether Beyonce is one of Brene Brown’s badasses willing to dare and fall and find her way through tough emotions, those doubts are removed here:
“Ten times out of nine, I know you’re lying
But nine times outta ten, I know you’re trying
So I’m trying to be fair
And you’re trying to be there and to care . . .
All the loving I’ve been giving goes unnoticed
It’s just floating in the air, lookie there
Are you aware you’re my lifeline, are you tryna kill me
If I wasn’t me, would you still feel me?
Cause you, you, you, you and me could move a mountain
You, you, you, you and me could calm a war down
You, you, you, you and me could make it rain now
You, you, you, you and me would stop this love drought
“Sandcastles,” which you heard earlier is the turning point. It is the moment in the video when Jay Z joins Beyonce, and in beautifully intimate images that strip away all the glitz of their show business lives we see simply two people finding peace and reconciliation in each other’s company.
And it’s not just syrupy sweet stuff. The lyrics cleverly point to the kinds of things we must relinquish if we are to find healing – pride, indignation, self-righteousness – and reestablish damaged relationships.
The title tells how crushing this process was. All that they had before, she said – their promises, their vows to each other – felt like sand castles washed away by the surf. She paints a dramatic scene of their initial break-up – “I made you cry when I walked away,” dishes smashed, photos torn from frames, his name and image scratched out and her final promise that, as she puts it, “I couldn’t stay.”
But in the end, she says, she realized that that was one promise she couldn’t keep. “Every promise don’t work out that way.”
So, as the next song proclaims,
“Forward, best foot just in case. . . .
We’re going to hold doors open for a while,
now we can be open for a while,
go sleep in your favorite spot just next to me.
The next two songs – “Freedom” and “All Night Long” – telegraph the relief and renewal that recommitment brought, freed from the chains of grief, and her decision that, “I found the truth beneath your lies.” The closing song shows us once again the sassy Beyonce, “I’m back by popular demand.”
It fascinates me to find a strong resonance of Mark Belletini’s “A Kol Nidrei” in Beyonce’s words. The Kol Nidrei is a verse spoken at Yom Kippur services whose purpose essentially is to annul all the vows that followers made in haste against each other in the preceding year. It invites its listeners into the work of clearing the decks so that we are ready to enter the new year freed of the baggage of the past year’s errors.
OK, Mark says, “let’s set it all down” without hesitation or resentment. All of it: “the disappointments, little and large, the frustrations.” And once we’ve named it all, let us relinquish it, let us open our closed fists filled with self-righteous anger and drop it, all of it, without regret, without reservation.
This is not something we do in the abstract, mouthing words given to us by others that we feel will somehow grant us absolution. This is the tough work of digging in and pulling out all that gnarly stuff, our stuff, stuff we’d rather not face yet which we know is dogging us, keeping us from giving ourselves fully to those we love, to that which fills our hearts. We’re stuck in it, so rather than nurse our griefs and grudges, we are called to release them.
We each know what that is for us. Mark Belletini names part of what’s haunting him:
The useless waiting – for what, what am I waiting for?
The obsession with things we cannot have
Comparing ourselves, to our detriment, with others
Cynical assumptions, unspoken anger, self-doubt, self-pity
Go ahead, add your own. They’re at the tip of your tongue.
Why on earth am I holding on to all that? Can’t we just let it all go? Let’s sink them like stones, let’s drop them like hot rocks into the cool silence. Can’t you just hear them? Ssss.
Never mind feeling sorry for yourself, as JT tells us. It doesn’t save you from your troubled mind. No, let it go. And when it’s gone, as Mark Belletini says, let’s lay back gently, and just float on the calm surface of our lives, these blessed lives that are such a gift. “And (then) let us open our eyes to this new-born world, ready for anything.”
That new awareness is the payoff, the release, the return, the freedom that our bad-ass journey of courage and resilience gives us: where I forgive myself, I forgive you, and we begin again in love.
mp3=”http://uuashevillecom.revaudettefulbright.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/161002-Forgiveness-That-Lonesome-Road.mp3″][/audio]
Sermon:What is Required-Part 1 (audio & text)
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
What is required of our religious movement to make it the change agent it hopes to be? Today, at the anniversary of the Universalist John Murray’s landing in the U.S. I will address how we might respond to this question in the context of our Universalist identity. Next spring I’ll focus on our Unitarian side.
READINGS
Song by Adrienne Rich https://readalittlepoetry.wordpress.com/2006/01/06/song-by-adrienne-rich/
From “The Persistence of Universalism,” an address by the Rev. Gordon McKeeman to the New York State Convention of Universalists on Oct. 4, 1980
“We live in a time when there are a great many scared people who do not want to hear that they have to enlarge their selves. They do not want to hear that they need to widen their sense of concern and consciousness to embrace the whole of the world. They would like very much into fortress America, or fortress Christianity or to some other narrowed loyalties to which they can give themselves. . . .
“We ought to be pointing in people’s lives to the urgency within those lives to wholeness and that no person can ignore that inner urgency to his or her own wholeness, save at her or his peril.”
SERMON
The week before last I spent a couple of days in the Habitat for Humanity building down near Biltmore Village in the company of about 45 people. It was a fascinating mix, ranging from people with high public profiles – Asheville’s Superintendent of Schools & members of the School Board, a state senator, a city councilwoman – and positions of responsibility – with Mission Hospital, the Asheville Housing Authority, the Asheville Police Department and the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Department – but also high school students, community activists, social service providers, and others. Even more, it was unusually diverse for most gatherings in this town – young & old, black, white, Hispanic, and different gender identities.
And the topic before us was something that usually isn’t discussed in mixed gatherings like this one: Race. Not race in the abstract, but how notions about race had evolved over time and shaped our culture, our upbringings and our lives.
We were guided in this work by facilitators from a group called the Racial Equity Institute, based in Greensboro. The story they had to tell was hard to hear – how race emerged as a wedge to divide people in this country from the time of its first settlements, how it acted not only to discriminate against black people but also to confer advantages to white people. Affirmative action, we learned, is a practice that goes back to the founding of our Republic, but it was white people, not blacks, that it was designed to benefit.
We can see it as early as 18th century immigration laws, into Jim Crow legislation after the Civil War, even up to the Social Security Act, the G.I. Bill and federal housing legislation. So, is it any wonder that today we find an enormous disparity in wealth between blacks and whites in America? Yet, even now an invidious racism whispers that the gap is simply evidence is some inherent lack on the part of blacks, some inability to compete on a level playing field.
A point of the training was to demonstrate how the playing field for blacks in America is and has been anything but level – like starting a race well behind your competitors or walking in late to a Monopoly game where nearly every property has been purchased and every move you make diminishes your wealth.
Of course, for the participants this was no game. White people like me were invited to tally the advantages that they and their ancestors had unknowingly accrued, while black participants were left stunned – some, with tears in their eyes, unable to speak – to consider how much loss they and their ancestors had endured: loss measured not just in wealth but in wellbeing, in lives demeaned or cut short, even in their hopes for their own lives and those of their loved ones.
Organizers have invited participants to a potluck supper this coming week, which will be held here, at this church, to talk over what we learned in the training and where we will go with it. I am glad of the opportunity to continue the conversation, but I also worry.
Just this week in Tulsa and Charlotte we got another reminder of how close black people are to the boiling point in frustration over centuries of oppression that they see no signs of abating. We can debate the circumstances of this or that shooting and whether police officers were justified here or there in their actions. But the larger point is that by its actions, by its policies our society, our government shows over and over again that it counts black lives as cheap, and that is simply unendurable.
We in Asheville are not far from our own accounting, with the State Bureau of Investigation report on the police shooting this summer of Jai “Jerry” Williams due to arrive soon to the office of District Attorney Todd Williams. Whatever action the district attorney chooses, we in this town will have work to do.
Much concern has been expressed about whether there will be violence. Of course, no one wants injury and destruction, but it needs to be said that the work before us will need to be more than just keeping the peace. My colleague the Rev. Jay Leach found himself in the midst of chaos in Charlotte last week, and he summed up the state of affairs this way in a post on Facebook. He gave me permission to use this quote:
“As disturbing as some of the images from last night are, I am more and more convinced that sending the message that we all need to be calm is the wrong thing to do. In fact, more of us need to stop being so calm, so accepting, so willing to ignore, so supportive of an unjust and unsustainable status quo. Things should change. Things must change. Until they do, until there is justice, there will be no peace.”
So, I wonder: Do you hear an echo of the quote from Gordon McKeeman that we heard earlier in Jay’s words? Listen again: “We live in a time,” McKeeman wrote, “when there are a great many scared people who do not want to hear that they have to enlarge their selves. They do not want to hear that they need to widen their sense of concern and consciousness to embrace the whole of the world. . . . We ought to be pointing in people’s lives to the urgency within those lives to wholeness and that no person can ignore that inner urgency to his or her own wholeness, save at her or his own peril.”
It’s interesting that, like today, McKeeman was speaking in the time of a contentious national election – October 1980 – a moment when, again like today, fear was driving some people’s political agendas.
But he framed his thoughts a little differently. People, he said, “do not want to hear that they have to enlarge their selves. . . . They do not want to hear that they need to widen their sense of concern and consciousness to embrace the whole of the world.”
What he is pointing to here is the heart of Universalism. Remember that historically Universalism arose in the Christian tradition with the notion that all are saved. It is centered in a fairly simple theological proposition: A God whose nature is love would not consign his creatures to eternal damnation. Such an act it is contrary to the nature of love. And if we understand God as love, then it is contrary to God’s nature. And so, there must be no hell.
Even more, the old Universalists declared, it was God’s intent to bring every person to a happy end. And so, McKeeman says, Universalism became known as “The Gospel of God’s Success,” conveying the image that, as he put it, “the last unrepentant sinner would be dragged screaming and kicking into heaven, unable, at least, to resist the power and love of the Almighty.”
In time, though, the debate over heaven or hell faded and the focus shifted instead to the duty of the living and the nature of the world in which we find ourselves. In that context, it became less urgent that we consider how or even if we image the nature of God – something that lies beyond proof whatever side you argue – and turn to what we might consider to be the nature and consequences of love. What does love call us to in our lives? What does love require of us?
Universalists argued that theirs was not just a theological proposition, but a description of the world. As Gordon McKeeman put it, “running through life is the urgency to wholeness, to integration, to the putting together of scattered pieces of life. There is a universality of natural laws and there is, in parallel with it, a universality of the religious impulse, the desire for holiness or wholeness.”
We can find evidence for this, McKeeman says, when we look at the other side of the coin: “When we see people seeking to live out parochial, partial and insular assumptions, we discover people who create or perpetuate the tragic divisions of life, the costs of which in human misery, pain and suffering we continue to pay.”
There’s another word, an old word that sums up the agony that we experience in this condition, one that we might use to describe this state of affairs: Hell. So, maybe Hell does exist, but it isn’t something that was created for us; it’s something that we create for each other.
Why would we do that? Well, we get confused and distracted, selfish and afraid. We learned at the Racial Equity Institute training that in this country it was fear and greed that tended to drive white people each time they turned up the heat in the Hell they had created for black people, whether it be new restrictions on voting, or housing, or job opportunities.
The thing is that we live with the bizarre notion that while these people are enduring hell, we white people can go about our lives building our own little heavens. We tell ourselves that we live in the American dream, that anyone can accomplish anything with a little grit and determination. Of course, we’ve come to learn that this isn’t even true for most white people, that many people suffer and struggle against forces far stronger than they are.
But rather than question the myth, they bury themselves in shame, check out of the rat race and dive into addiction or despair. It’s a pretty desperate hell of its own.
Universalists warned us against this long ago. As Gordon McKeeman puts it, hell is about separation. We “set up little islands in the human experience” thinking we can make our own way independent of what’s going on with the rest of humankind. “And Universalism,” he points out, “says unequivocally, it cannot be done. You cannot have Hell for some people and Heaven for others.”
So, let’s be clear. The hells we create and the hells we occupy are not just the way of things. They come about by choices we and others make over time that create false divisions and that unfairly advantage some people over others, and until we stop privileging those policies and practices we will be powerless to alter them.
The solution is not to narrow our loyalties, to build walls and gates and find new and different ways to separate ourselves from others onto little islands of our own. The solution is to widen our loyalties, to enlarge our sense of who we are, remembering Edwin Markham’s old Universalist rhyme:
He drew a circle to shut me out – heretic, rebel, a thing to flout, but love and I had the wit to win. We drew a circle and took him in.
How we do that is a big part of what about 70 members of this congregation were struggling with yesterday. We got together and invited each other to name those concerns and injustices that rankled us most. Then, we broke into groups to talk them over. It was big stuff – racism, climate change, immigrant rights, mental health and prison reform. Whew!
But this was no gripe session. It was gathering with an eye to action. So, this afternoon we’ll be meeting further to talk about what that action might look like. And you’re invited to attend. Whether or not you were part of the discussion on Saturday, your voice is welcome as we sort out how we as a congregation can be about widening that circle.
It is serendipitous that PBS chose this past week to air Ken Burns’ powerful documentary “Defying the Nazis” about the role of Unitarians Waitstill and Martha Sharp in helping hundreds of Jewish and other refugees marked for death escape from occupied Europe. (And if you missed it you can still see it online at PBS.org. But it’s live only until October 6, so make a point of looking soon.)
The story I told earlier of Martha Sharp initiating a child refugee program is one of the most compelling examples of their work, but there was much more – escorting refugees on hazardous railway journeys, sheltering refugees in safe houses, fabricating travel documents. It was work that put their lives in danger repeatedly, but they kept at it, even though it meant long absences from their children and strains that eventually broke apart their marriage.
Little wonder that Waitstill Sharp reported that when the UUA president first approached him about the job, he was told that 17 ministers before him had rejected it.
So what is required of us? As Lisa Forehand said, it’s something we all struggle with. Because we know, or at least intuit, that answering that question will open an avenue to help us get a sense of the meaning of our lives.
Our tradition through both of its strains – Unitarian and Universalist – declares that the answer to this question is not something we can expect to be given; it is something we must find. And we begin that journey in our own hearts. As Lisa said, we “try to hear our calling and have the courage and audacity to answer.”
It is not required that we all be activists in the model of Waitstill and Martha Sharp, but it is also not sufficient that we coast on by either insulated in privilege or paralyzed by fear.
Like Adrienne Rich, we might take some time to examine our own loneliness, an existential truth that we each come to terms with at some point in our lives. What’s the use? What am I? How could I possibly matter?
But she won’t leave us there. “If I’m lonely,” she says, “it must be the loneliness of waking first, of breathing dawns’ first cold breath on the city, of being the one awake in a house wrapped in sleep.” Not isolated, not defeated, but awake, aware.
“If I’m lonely,” she says, “it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore in the last red light of the year that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither ice nor mud nor winter light, but wood, with a gift for burning.”
The Universalists had a word for that burning. They called it love. Love calls to us, they said. It nags at us, pleads with us – heck, drags us kicking and screaming, and says, “Get out here. Your presence is required – your time, your talent, your treasure, your genius, your compassion are needed if we are ever going to end the despair and depravity of separation, if we are ever going to live into the wholeness of this world.”
Let us head love’s call.
Sermon: I See You (audio & text)
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
The Way of Covenant is ultimately a different way of seeing, of envisioning the people and the world around us. We begin our fall worship season by inviting each other into this wider view of our faith tradition.
READINGS
From ”Antiphonal Readings for Free Worship” arranged by L. Griswold Williams
Love is the doctrine of this church. The quest for truth is its sacrament, and service is its prayer. To dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom, to serve human need to the end that all souls shall grow in harmony with the divine – Thus do we covenant with each other and with God.
From No Future Without Forgiveness by Desmond Tutu
The concept of “Ubuntu” is very difficult to render into a Western language. It speaks of the very essence of being human. When we want to give high praise to someone we say, “Yu, u nobuntu;” “Hey, so-and-so has Ubuntu.” Then you are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, “My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.”
We belong in a bundle of life. We say, “A person is a person through other persons.” It is not, “I think therefore I am.” It says rather: “I am human because I belong. I participate, I share.” A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are.
SERMON
We begin our fall worship season by raising up and celebrating one of the foundation stones for us as a congregation and for our religious movement. What is it that gathers as people of hope and faith? Covenant.
Now, there is a document that we call the covenant of this congregation, a document that lays out in some detail how we agree to be with each other here, the disciplines we agree to bring to our lives together: sharing, caring, welcoming the diversity of both people and perspectives that we find here, and offering healing and support where we differ.
It’s a good document and it serves us well. But today I want to explore a different dimension of that word: covenant, not as a noun but as a verb; covenant as practice. To do this, I want to begin by taking us way back to the Puritans, who founded some of the earliest churches in New England, a number of which later became and remain Unitarian.
The Puritans had a stern and forbidding reputation, and for good reason. Their Calvinist theology held that only a select elite preordained by God before the creation of the Universe were truly saved.
But as the writer, Sarah Vowell points out, beneath their harsh theology, these “wordy shipmates,” in her phrasing, perceived that something else must prevail if this community of their making was to endure. She quotes the founding governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, to that end:
We must delight in each other, he says,
and make each other’s conditions our own,
rejoice together, mourn together,
labor and suffer together,
always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work,
our community as members of the same body.”
It was not enough that they shared similar beliefs: the only way that this small band of settlers was going endure was if they made each other’s conditions their own. And not just that either: they needed to “delight in each other,” to find joy, each in the others. It’s not our conventional image of the staid Puritans, but it gives us a window into our topic today
Sarah Vowell says it was Winthrop’s words that gave her comfort in the days after the 9-11 attacks. She was living in New York at the time, she says. “When we were mourning together, when we were suffering together, I often thought of what (Winthrop) said and finally understood what he meant.”
She says, “I watched citizens happily, patiently standing in a very long line,” and she marveled, having already experienced New Yorkers’ impatience at being kept waiting for anything. But in this line, she says, “they were giving blood.”
“We were breathing sooty air,” Vowell recalls. “The soot was composed of incinerated glass and steel, but also, we, knew, incinerated human flesh.” So, all the people there truly were, she says, “members of the same body.”
She and her friends were aching for some way to contribute, so when the TV news announced that rescuers needed toothpaste, they took off for the neighborhood deli. By the time she got there, Vowell said, most of the popular brands had been cleared out, so “at the rescue workers’ headquarters I sheepishly dropped off 14 tubes of Sensodyne, the tooth paste for sensitive teeth. “We were members of the same body, breathing the cremated lungs of the dead and hoping to clean the teeth of the living.”
Vowell was right: In important ways, those volunteers and first responders and everyone engaged in the rescue and recovery from that shattering loss were reliving a vision of mutual care and concern that first arrived on our shores nearly 400 years ago: they were engaged in the practice of covenant.
And the covenant the 9-11 rescuers were practicing was not an agreement that was enshrined anywhere. It was instead covenant of being that those people discerned in the moment before them. It was nothing that they needed to invent because they were already a part of it in the fullness of the world. They simply needed to recognize what called to them from the center of their own natures.
A similar point is made in the covenant I read earlier: Love is the doctrine of this church; the quest of truth is its sacrament, and service is its prayer. This was offered up by people not as a theological proposal but as a confession of how they understood the world and their relation to it. Love is the response that the world calls from us; the quest of truth is how we advance it; and service is how it is realized.
Desmond Tutu wrote the book you heard quoted earlier after serving on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Commission provided a forum for leaders of the deposed Apartheid state to confess the wrongs they had done and seek reconciliation. Its work was centered on the premise declared in the title of Tutu’s book: No Future Without Forgiveness.
The process, he writes, was seen as a “third way” between the prospects of trials for war crimes and blanket amnesty. It was a way, he wrote, that sought “to rehabilitate and affirm the dignity and personhood of those who had so long been silenced.”
And what made it possible, Tutu says, was the African practice of Ubuntu. Earlier, you heard his description of Ubuntu: Not simply being caring, or generous, or compassionate but living in a way, he says, that sees “my humanity caught up, is inextricably bound up in yours. We belong in a bundle of life.” It is, he said, “the very essence of being human.”
A couple of decades ago when South Africa’s transition was in the news and Ubuntu was trending in news reports there was much speculation about whether there was an equivalent term in the West to describe this deep connection among peoples. Some suggested that perhaps “community spirit” would do. But really “covenant” is a closer match.
Like Ubuntu the practice of covenant draws us to one another in a way that points to our nature and our destiny: we are meant for each other, and we are completed through each other. This state of affairs is not something we choose; it is something we affirm and that the world invites us to give ourselves to.
There is something painfully ironic about observing such a close parallel at the heart of these two cultures – African & American – given our sad histories. But what we share, and that we share reinforces the notion that something universal is at play here.
At the same time, in our separate perspectives we each are in a position to offer wisdom to the other. The African offers an American culture riven with divisions of race and class a notion that kinship is a rock-bottom truth. Social harmony, Tutu says, is the heart of it all. “We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another,” he says, whereas the truth is that “you are connected and what you do affects the whole world.” Anger, lust for revenge, resentment are corrosive to both social and individual happiness, since whatever I do to dehumanize another inexorably dehumanizes me.
Covenant, on the other hand, calls us to remember that our lives together are centered in promises. We are, as Martin Buber put it, the promise-making, promise-keeping, promise-breaking, promise-renewing creature, and it is woven throughout our interactions with each other.
It can be as simple as when you and I make appointment – promise-making, I put it on my calendar – promise keeping, but then I space out and miss the appointment – promise-breaking. But I don’t blow it off. Our relationship calls me to get back in touch with you, offer my apology, seek to make amends and perhaps set a new date – promise-renewing.
The ways in which we fall out of covenant with each other, though, are not always as obvious. We affirm that every person has inherent worth and dignity and feel called to treat them with respect and care. It is a promise, of sorts, that undergirds our lives.
Yet, we come to learn that the privilege we have gained simply by virtue of an accident of birth serves to keep other people oppressed, feeling little sense of worth and dignity, of respect and care. It is a state of affairs that we had no hand in, and yet it is plain that our advantage comes at the expense of another.
Now, we can say that that’s just the way the world works: Some get and some don’t. And while that may be so, this situation also puts us deeply and irrevocably out of covenant with one another.
And that’s not a small thing. If it is true that we are meant for each other, that each of us is a person through other people, this imbalance, this broken promise will weigh on us until it is repaired.
There is no saying what that repair might look like, but for the sake of peace, our own and the world’s, we had best be about it. That is how it is in our lives together. We struggle, we stumble, we err, and still, we return. Covenant continually calls us back again and again to the day-to-day work that reminds us of and calls us to dedicate ourselves to the small disciplines that enact the truth of our wholeness and unity.
I read recently that 15 years after the 9-11 attacks a whole raft of books on the subject are coming out for young readers. Many authors apparently were reluctant at first to treat such a difficult subject, but now many of their readers have no personal memory of the event since they weren’t born yet.
So, what do they say? For those of us whose memories of that day are still quite sharp, there is a similar quandary. What learning can we take from that event, what wisdom can we offer from our experience? Mulling over this, it occurred to me that covenant might offer a lens to organize our thoughts.
As Sarah Vowell noted, for all the horrific images that were broadcast during that time, there were also heartening ones: blood donors, sandwich makers, clean-up crews. They couldn’t erase the damage done to our society or to our psyches by those assaults.
But each in her and his own way was living into the practice of covenant, the affirmation of a common bond into which each of us is born and which all of us are called to serve. Confronted with suffering, they looked into another’s eyes and said, “I see you.” “Sawubona.”
You matter. You are part of me, and I am part of you. You are important to me. I need you to survive.
Sermon: Walking the Path of Fear (audio and text)
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
Maybe it’s because of this trying election year, but it seems that fear pervades our lives these days. So, how do we take stock of this state of affairs without getting stuck in it? We’ll explore that as we enter this month of Covenant.
READINGS
Lost by David Wagoner http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/09/lost-by-david-wagoner.html
From The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
“I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portuguese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there, but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that.”
SERMON
I had the oddest experience about a month or so ago. I woke in the middle of the night out of a dead sleep, sat up on the side of the bed and had no idea where I was. The dark was so deep that my eyes were useless to me and nothing seemed familiar. I rose cautiously and began to feel my way around.
In my confused mind, still partly wrapped in sleep, a kind of fear verging on panic began to arise. What place is this? How am I going to get out of here? Gradually, though, I seized onto something – it might have been a chair, a dresser, I don’t remember exactly what – but I was able to make a connection – Oh, this is our bedroom! The panic subsided and wearily I made my way back under the covers.
Fear is funny that way, isn’t it? How we can get so easily frightened sometimes by the silliest thing. We even like to play with each other that way: waiting around a corner and jumping out when a friend happens by: BOO!
Psychologists remind us that at its root the fear response is actually a good thing. It’s what we rely on to get out of physical danger. Our muscles need to be primed for action, so the blood quickly gets pumping. The thinking part of our brain essentially shuts down, since we may not have time to weigh the proper response, and instead the body’s old fight, flight, or freeze response kicks in. I’ll bet we’ve all had moments where we’ve been grateful for such a response that saved us from some minor peril.
Of course, there are times when some of us like to have fun with that fear response. There is, after all, a kind of exhilaration that we feel in the moment when fear strikes. To me, that helps explain the popularity of the horror film genre. The first time the zombie pops out, it scares the bejesus out of us. But with each subsequent scare the intensity of the fright diminishes, but we still feel the rush of the quick hit of adrenaline. I have to say that such films are not my taste, but I get how they can be a draw.
But as a rule, fear is not a state in which we want to spend much time. It’s exhausting and disorienting. We don’t think clearly or respond compassionately when we’re afraid. We just want to find safety, whatever in the moment we might take that to be.
The truth is many of us don’t even really like to admit to scary experiences. We’d rather dismiss or deny them. In fact, we feel a little embarrassed by them. Even then, though, we don’t forget the emotional intensity around what happened.
Depending on the circumstances, that intensity can become the source of an internal narrative, a story that we tell ourselves that justifies our response, and the idea – “I was right to be scared” – somehow gets attached to the memory of that event. Even if overblown, exaggerated, or flat out fabricated, the memory is retained, and its intensity gives it the feeling of truth, whether it is in fact true or not.
In time, that memory can become one of the building blocks that we use in creating our world view. The problem is that the learning that we take from our experiences of fear is notoriously unreliable. That’s because, again, it comes from a time when we weren’t thinking straight, when our judgment was skewed, and yet at the same time we experienced intense emotion.
It can take a real effort of will to seek out and find the actual truth in the situation, like waking up from a nightmare with our pulse racing and needing to calm ourselves back down again: “It’s OK. It was just a dream.”
In our day to day lives, though, we may not immediately recognize when fear experiences are triggering us. In the moment, we may not be able to surface that fear, examine it and challenge it. After all, through most of our lives we come to rely on our emotional responses. If something doesn’t feel right, there must be a good reason for it, even if we can’t specifically say what that reason is.
It becomes even harder if we’re challenged. A fear-based experience is not something we can really cite in an argument with someone. It may even be something we don’t especially want to fess up to, but that doesn’t mean that in some way we still don’t cling to it as truth.
There is probably no better example of this than all the forms of prejudice – race, ethnicity, gender expression – that float through our culture. I think of that song, “You’ve Got to be Taught” from the musical “South Pacific.” The Unitarian lyricist Oscar Hammerstein suspected that his song written in 1949 on the source of racial prejudice would be controversial, and he was right.
“You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year.
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.”
Because Hammerstein was pointing to one of the most intensely felt, fear-based fabrications that we live with. Racism, the song says, is not grounded in anything real. It is merely the accumulation of slights and hurts that we experience, together with misapprehensions and lies that we’re told about other people. I’m tempted, though to tweak Hammerstein’s lyrics just a little and argue that we are taught by our communities and loved ones not so much to fear as through fear.
Often, the fears that drive our prejudice are grounded not so much in our experience as in the experience of those who surround us. We take on the fears that are, in a sense, in the water of our upbringing. We experience their fears, then learn to adopt them, fit them into our world view, and justify them to ourselves. I don’t believe it’s a conscious process, but it can be powerful all the same.
And it is this brings me to reflect on the state of our politics and our nation today. I cannot remember a time in my own lifetime when so much in our public dialog was so driven by fear. The polls all confirm it: there isn’t any particular issue that’s roiling the electorate. It’s just broad suspicion that settles on random targets – immigrants one day, transgender people the next, and so on – but mostly, under it all, is a yearning for safety.
So, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that this should be the year where the most obvious signals of fearful thinking are not only lighting up but being celebrated wherever we look – name-calling, belittling, narcissism. It is tempting to tag Donald Trump as the cause of all this, and he certainly is its poster boy, but he succeeds really by poking this miasma of anxiety, rather than by inventing it.
There is much cause for concern in this toxic electoral season. But in a sense, the greatest danger is that we might somehow forget what politics actually can make possible. It is something that our nation was invited to see some 83 years ago when an incoming president of the United States remarked, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
“In every dark hour of our national life,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt told his people, “a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.”
In that terrible time, Roosevelt pointed to what was not only a political truth but also a spiritual fact: that people of inherent worth have the capacity to act together in a way that sacrifices none and benefits all, that our strength as a nation will be found in affirming common dignity as a common cause.
Not long ago, the Quaker writer Parker Palmer told of his own experience getting lost while on a 10-day solitary retreat. He had been out hiking on a poorly marked mountain trail when he suddenly realized he had missed a turn-off. He started back down hill, but couldn’t see it. As the sky started to darken, he panicked and began to run. “Just the right thing to do when you have no idea where you’re going, don’t you think?” he said, with some irony.
After a bit, thankfully, he stopped for a moment, settled down and let the fear subside. Palmer said he sat for a moment and remembered a few lines from the poem by David Wagoner that you heard earlier:
Stand still.
The trees ahead and bushes behind you are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here.
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger.
Stand still,
The forest knows where you are.
You must let it find you.
And so he stood still, and listened. “I could not tell you what I was listening to,” he said, “except that it was something both in me and around me.”
After a few minutes he turned and walked slowly up hill, and began looking to his left. Before long, there it was, the trail that he’d missed.
Stand still. In the jumble of conflicting forces and feelings erupting in our lives, scrambling, scurrying, ducking and dodging, it is where we must begin if we are to come to terms with what drives our fear.
Fear, after all, narrows our view, and from such a perspective, there is so much we cannot see. When we broaden our view, so much more comes into focus. It is just such wisdom that I think Nancy discovered in that dark time during her first marriage.
The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodrun speaks of the opening that comes from confronting the fears that we carry. “Finding the courage to go to places that scare us cannot happen without compassionate inquiry into the workings of the ego,” she says. “So we ask ourselves, ‘What do I do when I feel I can’t handle what’s going on? Where do I look for strength and in what do I place my trust.’”
It’s a scary place to be, she says, so we treat it gently. Rather than go after the walls and barriers that hold us back with a sledgehammer, she says, “we pay attention to them. With gentleness and honesty, we move closer to those walls. We touch them and smell them and get to know them well.”
The way out, then, is merely taking the first step, befriending ourselves and looking for the path that will lead us back to wholeness.
The poet William Stafford offers similar advice in his poem, “For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid.” Fear, he counsels, is a country to be crossed. “What you fear will not go away: it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you. That’s the world, and we all live there.”
Joan Didion discovered that in the year following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. It was a time when she says her grief led her to what she calls “magical thinking,” when we somehow persuade ourselves that if we just hope hard enough or do things in just the right way we can remake the world the way we want it to be.
It is a road that fear can take us on, too. When things seem too painful to confront directly, we find a way of persuading ourselves that they’re not really a problem. What such thinking really does, of course, is dig us in deeper and make it that much harder to free ourselves.
Fear looms up like that swift and powerful current in the tidal pool that Didion describes – something that can either dash us against the rocks or propel us into our future.
Each time she and her husband swam in the pool, she says, “I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong.”
John, she says, never was. Well, whether he never was or never let his own fear hold him back, he showed her the way. And, at the close of a year of magical thinking, memory of that experience invited Didion into a more clear-thinking path to her future.
“You had to feel the swell change,” that impulse toward health and wholeness rising in her heart.
“You had to go with the change.”
Sermon: Drop by Drop (audio only)
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister and Joy Berry, Director of Lifespan Religious Education
(Water Service – a multi-generational service we do annually at this time of year that celebrates all the gifts we get from water.
From such a humble beginning one clear droplet falling from a leaf in the forest or the hood of a raincoat touches and changes so much on this Earth, linking us with all life. Our annual multigenerational Water Service will celebrate all the water gives to our lives. Please bring water from your travels or from a special place for you to contribute to our common bowl.
Sermon: Moving Beyond Belief and Unbelief (audio only)
Rev. Dr. Mark Belletini
After almost 40 years serving Unitarian Universalist congregations, I have witnessed many changes among us. Former hymnbooks and styles of music no longer in use, while new sources of music and culture rise up. New symbols in worship…the chalice of flame, and in many of our congregations, more ceremonial. Far deeper and varied understandings about what ministers “look like,” or whom they love. What is going on? My first year of retirement from my life’s work has offered me new perspectives on this.