The Heart of Sanctuary (text only)

Oct 23, 2018 | Sermons

This weekend we mark the half-year point in our journey of sanctuary with our beloved guest, La Mariposa. With temperatures turning downward and the leaves changing color, we remember another hinge in the year last April when she arrived one evening frightened and disoriented, abandoning her home and livelihood of many years leaving the embrace of her family for a single room in the company of strangers.

Not a one of us knew what to expect. Would federal agents appear on our doorstep? Would protesters or news media gather round? Would this complex and chancy structure of volunteers that we had cobbled together to protect and support her hold up? That it has held up, and not only held up but, with the exception of a bump or two, flourished beautifully is evidence of something that was not immediately clear at the time, that sanctuary is more than the work of justice, it is work of the heart.

We could hardly be blamed for missing that when we began last spring, living as we are at a time when our national conversation around immigrants and immigration is more divisive than at any time since the turn of the 20th century. And we should note that this state of affairs has little to do with immigrants themselves,  but instead is a result of the divisive state of our politics.

Despite the fact that the pace of immigrants entering this country has actually slowed in recent years, that the vast majority of immigrants – documented or not –  are working, abide by our laws and pay our taxes, certain noted politicians have declared that their presence here is a crisis. And so, they ratchet up the penalties for them being here, criminalizing their very presence, unceremoniously grabbing them when they enter stores or government buildings, and warehousing those they seize in private prisons. The result has been to terrorize and disrupt immigrant communities.

When we consider who in the U.S. doesn’t have official status,  we’re talking about around 11 million people, a number that has remained steady for the past 10 years, and about 350,000 in North Carolina, where they make up 5% of our labor force. And that share is significant, especially in key industries like agriculture, construction, and hospitality. In particular, North Carolina farmers, construction firms and restaurants have warned they would suffer without the undocumented workers they employ.

And for all the noise surrounding “illegal” immigrants, polls in North Carolina show that roughly three-quarters of respondents are fine with them being here and have no interest in local police assisting the federal government in arresting them, as long as they have committed no crimes.

Clearly, immigration is a problem. Our laws are a rat’s nest of confusion, and those seeking to navigate them, who already are struggling with the language, find little guidance to make their way through. But the immigrants are not the problem. They are people much like the forebears of every person in this room who sought peace, freedom and a better life in this country. Most of those people were blessed to find a country, a community that would make room for them. How is it that we have become so frightened, so divided, so deluded that we have turned away from the impulse to hospitality that is our true nature, that call from our hearts to know and be known?

We shouldn’t belittle the extraordinary leap of hope and faith that immigrating to another country involves, no less traveling to a place where your language, skin color,  or ethnicity makes you a minority. And yet, how amazing it is how many people thrive, and how rich they make life for the rest of us. This is a learning that the so-called “immigration debate” loses sight of, but that we in the harbor of sanctuary have been blessed to relearn. By taking the risk to open our doors and open our hearts we have reminded ourselves of what true hospitality calls for from us.

Last July I told you that if anyone should ask you why our congregation is inserting itself into the immigration controversy with our decision to offer sanctuary, you can tell them that this is about far more than quibbling over the fine points of government policy.

 It is about our unerring commitment to the inherent worth and dignity of every person. It is about our determination to offer compassion and to be advocates and allies to people suffering oppression. It is about our commitment to uproot and dismantle the structures of white supremacy and build the foundations of a beloved community centered in justice and love.

That is to say, it is work of the heart. The question before us is where that work takes us now. We and the 17 other congregations who are our partners will continue to support our guest as her case wends through the court system, hoping that those authorities will see the justice of her bid for citizenship.

But meanwhile, the immigrant community here suffers. Federal immigration agents continue their sweep of the area, indiscriminately snatching up people and holding them at a private prison in rural Georgia, where around 1,700 men are now housed.

Federal officials acknowledge that they can’t hope to arrest and imprison all undocumented immigrants. Instead, they have instituted a policy to encourage what they call “self-deportation,” that intends to make undocumented people so frightened that they will choose to return to the countries of their origin. From all signs, few people are “self-deporting” – there are, after all, powerful reasons that brought them here in the first place – but many have changed how they live. They avoid going out for shopping, even doctor appointments, and they steer clear of any contact with government, whether it be vaccinations for their children or choosing not to report incidents of domestic violence or abuse. How might we be neighbors to these people? How might our commitment to sanctuary lead us into deeper engagement with this community in our midst?

The Mexican-American poet Luis Alberto Urrea paints a picture of the immigrant’s journey  in his poem “Codex Luna.” Here is an excerpt:

“My moon pulled a different darkness across the sky.

My unknown sisters tucked in the barbed embrace of the border fence saw a different face in the moon.

Theirs was a Luna Tochtli, a Rabbit moon – moon of running, fear, hiding.

My moon was origami floating in a water cup. Their moon was a panicked eye.

Headlights froze them, twin moonbeams ran them down, tufts of their dreams tangled in thickets of border tumbleweeds.

My sisters brought undocumented scents to sweeten the valleys. Their perfume settled on roadsides, misted over bloodstain, rattlesnake, boot print, guard dog, flashlight: illegal exhalations. Behind them, hunger. Before them, night.

I did not need to run. I had a paper moon. Stamped and certified. Gave us the all clear to walk, work, die on the ground our ancestors had forgotten. My moon rose over tidy houses.

She ran all her life. She ran to stay ahead of charging darkness, galloping hunger. She worked the light of the moon in her small hands the color of earth, she molded moonglow into trinkets traded for coins the color of sun.

Somehow, she came to rest in my house. She slept, her hair black across my pillow, spilling toward the earth, her fingers curled, her breath making small melodies of breezes and tides.

Then they woke her. They tucked her in the back seat of a car, smuggled her under blankets through trucks up freeways.

I sank my face into the imprint she left.

I smelled her mother in a kitchen of clay pots, and cilantro on her hands.

It was all there: hibiscus tea, a river. First grade, the chalk dust sneezes. Village church, incense. Laundry day. Tamale day, and the aunts with their crow voice laughter.

The meat, the masa, the raisins, the cinnamon.

Just an illegal drudge in crepuscular rain. If you see her, protect her, revere her, my unknown sister, light candles in her honor, you travelers. She is the mother of my race. “

The work of the heart is not always easy or clear, yet it calls for us to be honest and brave, to be compassionate and clear thinking. And it carries us beyond the slogans, the memes, the talking points. It invites to see the holy in each other, the possibility we each hold in this fragile time and space together.

 

 

What Hope Looks LIke (audio & text)

Sep 24, 2018 | Sermons

SERMON
So, what might hope look like for you? Maybe something fragile and insubstantial, like a big
soap bubble reflecting rainbow colors. Or maybe a comfy blanket you turn to when you’re cold,
or perhaps a finely tooled steel brace that helps you stand you’re feeling weak or uncertain.
I chose this occasion, when I want to introduce you to the esteemed Universalist preacher,
teacher, and prophet Clarence Russell Skinner, to play with the idea of hope because I think
that of all our forebears he offers us a singular challenge to come to terms with it.
Even though it’s been barely 70 years since his death, Skinner is not widely known among us.
Largely, I think that is because he died a good decade before the 1961 union of our two
movements – Unitarianism and Universalism. And with that union came a kind of reset in the
minds of many. History, in a sense, began in 1961.
    Also, it’s true that at the time of the union the Universalists were by far the smaller
denomination and in many ways the Unitarians took charge. So, at least at first, Universalists
took a back seat and so did much of their narrative. In the years since that’s changed and we’re
investigating more and more of our Universalist past.
    As it happens, this is an auspicious time of year to talk about Universalism, since years ago
this was when many Universalist churches used to celebrate the founding of their movement.
They called it John Murray Day, in honor the anniversary of the arrival of this founder
on American shores on September 30, 1770. So, for some years now I have chosen this time of
year to offer a sermon centered on some Universalist figure who I think highlights an important
part of that heritage.
    From the time of his birth in 1881, Clarence Russell Skinner seemed destined for a public life.
His father was editor of the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper, several extended family members were
actors, and all were thoroughly Universalist. In fact, among his forebears going back three
generations, he counted three Universalist ministers.
Skinner himself leaned toward acting in college – St. Lawrence University, a Universalist school.
Instead, on graduating he was hired by a Universalist church, the Church of Divine Paternity in
New York City. Without a day in seminary, he began work as assistant minister. A couple of
years later he was ordained to the ministry and called to his first church in Mt. Vernon, New
York.

The education that made the most difference to Skinner while serving the Mt. Vernon
congregation was not so much what he learned in the parish, but what he learned
in his outreach work in the settlement houses of New York City. While he had grown up in New
York, this was a side of the city that he hadn’t experienced: crowded, filthy tenements rife with
crime, vice, and corruption. And it lit a fire of outrage in him that never went out.
This also happened to be the time and place of the birth of the Social Gospel movement,
mostly Protestant clergy who argued for making improvement of social conditions the work of
the church. Skinner signed on with gusto and organized a meeting of New York ministers to
advance it called the Church Peace Union.
    Skinner’s powerful preaching spurred growth at Mt. Vernon and in 1910 he left for a larger
church, Grace Universalist Church in Lowell, Massachusetts. There he organized the first church
forum in New England, inviting speakers of many disciplines – religion, politics, economics –
to address the topics of the day, and it drew enthusiastic audiences that filled the hall.
This young man, barely six years in the ministry, also helped form the Universalist Service
Commission, predecessor of our UU Service Committee, to identify social need and offer aid.
Then, barely four years later, never having attended seminary, Skinner was appointed to a new
position of Professor of Applied Christianity at Crane Theological School at Tufts University,
the premier training ground for Universalist ministers.
    How to explain this astonishing rise? Well, Skinner was an impressive presence. Though people
found him introverted in person, he caught fire in the pulpit and in his writings. But also, the
Universalist Church was changing, looking outward in a way it hadn’t done in the past,
and for those leaders who promoted that trend, Skinner’s was just the kind of voice they were
looking for.
    But the Universalists may have ended up getting more than they bargained for when at the
start of World War I Skinner announced that he was a pacifist and opposed the war.
It was, as you might imagine, a minority position. In fact, outrage spilled across the
denomination.
     But Skinner’s defenders managed to protect him, even after he gave a speech in Boston’s
Fanueil Hall saying admiring things about socialism. Skinner was never really a socialist, but a
religious activist who had this grand vision of a united world community. And what other religion
is better equipped to hold such a vision, he argued, than Universalism? His own faith had a
mystic bent, a sense of what he called “a creative power” at the center of all things that called
us to universal sympathy.

In 1917 it was Skinner who wrote a Declaration of Social Principles adopted by the
denomination laying out the many ills facing the word and calling for:
– An economic order to give each person an equal share
– A social order assuring equal rights to all
– A moral order in which all law and action shall be “an expression of the moral order of
the universe.”
– And a spiritual order arising from efforts of all people to build a beloved community.
    In 1920 Skinner founded a new institution to help make his vision real, the Community Church
of Boston. It was modeled after a similar church that Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes,
another pacifist, had started in New York City. In fact, he and Holmes collaborated in creating it.
    It was actually more of a speaking forum, with lectures followed by questions, comments and
discussion. But it gained a strong following, with weekly attendance in rented halls eventually
totaling more than 1,200. And no wonder, given that its speakers included such luminaries as
Bertrand Russell, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Margaret Sanger, and it wrestled with topics like Sacco
and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro case and the Republican revolt in Spain.
    Like Holmes’ church, Skinner’s Community Church had no denominational ties. And that wasn’t
especially a surprise, for while Universalists had long been generally progressive
most were not social activists.
    Skinner was well aware this, and it frustrated him. In 1924 in the face of rebuffs for his views
Skinner aired his feelings in a widely circulated poem: “In Times of Disillusion.” In it he
acknowledged all the ways that people’s dreams were disappointed but insisted, “I still
proclaim the Vision Splendid, till it strikes God-fire in old and broken hearts, and urges on the
world to consummate its dream. God’s unsurrendered – so am I! Therefore, I will live and
communicate with hope. I light the candle and – I dream.”
    The truth was, though, that many Universalist congregations at the time were small, country
churches struggling to get by. The population shift to the cities had cleared out many rural
areas, and as the Depression set in many of those Universalist churches were crushed and
closed.
    Skinner, though, persisted. At Crane School, he was named dean in 1933. He was said to be
inspirational and engaging as a teacher and enrollment at the school grew, even as the
denomination shrank. Skinner also devoted more time to write such books as “Liberalism Faces
the Future” and “A Religion for Greatness.”
    World War II was a difficult time for a pacifist like Skinner, but his greater trouble was a bout
with colon cancer. That brought about his retirement from Crane in 1945. He had surgery for
the cancer, but never really recovered, and he died in 1949 at the age of 68.

This returns us now to the question of hope and what Clarence Russell Skinner might have to
teach us. Let’s begin by turning back to the quote from Skinner that I read earlier: “We are so
made that we simply cannot escape the necessity of reaching upward and outward toward
something greater than ourselves,” he said. “Whatever the unseen and distant goals, we have
never lived a dreamless life, content to adjust our whole being to things as they are.”
    No, he said, there is a fire, a hunger within us that brings forth what Skinner called “a radiant
hope.” Religious life of the past failed us, he said, because it demanded of people “submissive
belief” in ordained truths instead of kindling in people what he called “creative faith,” our
innate ability to find in the world, in ourselves the spark that guides us to unity and the source
of our wellbeing.
    He called for cultivating what he called “unsurrendered persons” willing to join the
“adventure” of discovering what is called of us to bring about the world of those great
Universalist visions. The seeds of those visions, he insisted, are present in the people, in the
world around us. What was needed, he said, was the courage to own them and move them
forward.
    It is a heartening perspective, but we also need to acknowledge that Skinner’s “onward and
upward” rhetoric can feel a bit dated today. In the 70 years since his death, we’ve learned more
about what depravity humans are capable of than we would care to know.
    Is “radiant hope” a sensible orientation the world? Well, perhaps not, if that hope is grounded
in unrealistic expectations of ourselves or others to accomplish unprecedented, heroic feats to
change the world. Please! We have enough to beat ourselves up about. Perhaps not, if that
hope arises from a fantastical vision that hovers like that soap bubble I mentioned earlier but
finds no way to connect to the day-to-day world we inhabit.
    No, I think Skinner invites us to a different way, one centered in his confidence in every
person’s capacity to find serenity and courage, to act from a heart held by love aware of and
grateful for the gift of life that each of us has been given.
    Some years ago, in an essay referencing Skinner, the UU theologian Rebecca Parker noted how
many people struggle through disappointment to find some source of trust, of hope. And she
told the story of one terrible moment when she reached that place.
    Much in her life had gone wrong. So, in despair, she decided she just needed to end it. She told
of leaving her apartment with determined steps, her face wet with tears, walking toward a lake
in a park near her home planning to walk into it.
    Entering the park, she was surprised to see a number of dark objects blocking her way. She
didn’t remember them being there before. And as she got closer she noticed something else:
There were people moving among the objects.

Suddenly, she realized what she was seeing: telescopes. It was a meeting of the Seattle
Astronomy Club. Its members just happened to have set up their equipment that night because
the unpredictable skies were clear.
    A little disoriented but still determined, Parker made her way through the group, until one
enthusiast, who assumed she had come to look at the stars, spoke to her. “Here, let me show
you,” he said and began to explain what he had focused his telescope on. Brushing her tears
away she peered in, and “there it was,” she said. “I could see it. A red-orange, spiral galaxy.”
    And that was it. “I could not bring myself to continue my journey,” she said. “In a world where
people get up in the middle of the night to look at the stars I could not end my life.”
    What was it Mary Oliver said? “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely The world offers itself
to your imagination.”
    “Step into the center,” Marta Valentin invites us. “Come in from the margins. I will hold you
there. Don’t look back, or around. Feel my arms. The water is rising. I will hold you as you
tremble. I will warm you.”
    The blessing of radiant hope is that it lives within each of us, and we are each other’s agents of
awakening. “In the tiny space where I end and you begin,” Marta said, “hope lives.”
Hope is that lifeline we each carry the possibility we see in ourselves and each other, the grace
we extend and receive. Let us be keepers and givers of such hope.

Transitions and Possibilities (audio & text)

Aug 13, 2018 | Sermons

Adaptability & Life Transitions

Good morning. It is good to be with you today. I’m starting to recognize some of your faces and remember some of your names. I look forward to getting to know you better as I serve this congregation in partnership with Rev. Mark, our staff, and our lay leadership. I’m thrilled to have a portfolio that emphasizes the importance of faith development for all ages, throughout all the transitions in our lives and when we gather to worship.

I will approach my work with you with this definition of ministry in mind. The author is unknown.

“Ministry is the act of ministering to.

It is the way we are mindful and nurturing of each other.

Ministry is not something only ordained ministers do.

When we care with someone, when we stand with them through struggle, when we help them learn and grow,
we are engaging in ministry.

When we offer programs that engage the heart, the mind or the spirit we are engaging in ministry.”

I eagerly anticipate engaging in ministry with you and watching your ministry to each other and the larger community unfold.

I know you will miss Rev. Lisa and her ministry with you.  Change is challenging and as I begin my work with you I hope to gain your trust and respect. I do not promise you perfection, none of us can do that. But I do promise commitment to supporting faith development at UUCA and providing leadership for the programs in my portfolio: pastoral care, lifespan faith development, and Wednesday Thing. I’m a Zumba fan (Zumba is a dance workout to Latin and Hip Hop tunes that was started by a fellow Colombian) so I see our relationship like a dance.  Sometimes it will flow nicely. Other times we may step on each other’s toes or miss a step. But we will always have a chance to try again and learn together as we transition into a new ministry.

This is new for me, too. I was accepted into UU fellowship in April, graduated from seminary in May, was welcomed into UU ministry at General Assembly in June, moved to Asheville in July and started my work with you August 1. As all that was happening my partner Steve and I prepared to sell our house in Vero Beach, FL and find a home here. I also had to say goodbye to the congregation I served as the religious educator for 17 years, as well as to my friends, my parents who live down the street from our former house and the beach.  But, it isn’t really goodbye. In Spanish, we say “hasta luego” ….until later. I know I will be back to visit. It will be different because Asheville is now my new home and you are the religious community that I am eager and excited to serve. From what I have experienced so far, I sense much possibility for the ministry we will do together.

During time of transition, we will be challenged to grow and learn together.  Struggling through situations, welcomed or not, requires our willingness to question our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.

Can we change the way we think about a situation?

Can we look at evidence, examine facts, and maybe even change our mind about a conviction or belief we have held a long time that is not supported by the evidence? Learning and growth require the willingness to engage new ideas and perspectives. Being open to change is what allows us to adapt to circumstances in our lives and the ever-changing world around us. [1]

My move here has been challenging but I knew what I was in for. And I’m glad to be here! I made a move many years ago when that wasn’t the case.   It was before the internet, so I couldn’t Google everything and really learn about this new place. In 1993, my partner’s job took us to Brazil. Our family moved to Bahia, one of the poorest states in Brazil, with an infant and a toddler. We lived in the town of Cruz das Almas where there was water every third day, limited access to medical care, no air conditioning as well as rampant inflation: food prices increased daily. These are only a few of the many details our young family had to deal with. I was tempted to either feel sorry for myself (which I admit I did for a brief period of time), complain to my partner or even blame him for putting us in this situation …or I could have found a way of making the best of it. I decided to do the latter and by the time the three years were over…I didn’t want to leave.

You may have heard the saying: “You can’t direct the wind, but you can adjust your sails.” Those years in Brazil taught me to adjust my sails.  I learned that we have it within us to transcend many of the hardships and losses we face if we are willing to embrace change rather than fight it; if we are willing to adapt and be transformed.

From the moment of birth, we experience change. We leave the comfort and warmth of the womb to enter a sterile, cold, harshly lit hospital room

We nurse and are weaned.

We start school.

Our parents may divorce.

We move to another neighborhood, state or country.

A parent dies.

A young adult leaves for college.

A spouse is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s

And the list goes on.

Each change requires a transition and maybe even the acknowledgement that there has been a loss.  We often think of loss and grief as responses to death or catastrophic events in our lives. But sometimes it’s unfair situations, big disappointments, life milestones, serious heartaches or the reality of aging- and confronting one’s mortality, that leads to significant transitions in our lives. Acknowledging the sense of loss, they produce can be cathartic.

Furthermore, life transitions often involve a change in how we define ourselves. There is a shedding of a previous identity, a new way of seeing ourselves regardless of whether the situation is happy or sad. What identities have you embraced throughout your life? I know I am making a shift from being an intern and a seminarian to being Rev Claudia: it’s both awesome and intimidating….

In our story today, Pete the Cat just went with the flow, and in the end “it was all good.” It isn’t really always “all good.” However, we can choose how we deal with transitions and the feelings of loss, anger and even despair they may engender. Not all of us are as mellow as Pete the Cat. And that’s OK. We’re all different. We each need practices and friends we can turn to when events in our lives and around us feel overwhelming. And when they occur it is good to know we are part of a caring community.

The earlier reading by Beth Casebolt highlighted the transitions we experience throughout our lives and reminds us of the role our faith community can have in helping us move through them. There are many opportunities of fulfilling that role by ministering to each other as a pastoral visitor, a facilitator for our children or youth program, a Coming of Age mentor, a worship leader, retreat organizer and so on.

Remember, we are doing ministry when ‘When we care with someone, when we stand with them through struggle, when we help them learn and grow….

When we offer programs that engage the heart, the mind or the spirit we are engaging in ministry.”

I hope my ministry with you will support you in deepening your spirituality and commitment to the ministry that your talents and gifts call forth. This is a time of transition and also a time of tremendous possibility.

May we find ways to minister to each other and remain engaged in the task

Of transforming not only ourselves but our community and beyond.

May it be so.

[1] How to Cope with Transitions and Change by Dr. Cheryl McDonald, http://healthpsychology.org/how-to-cope-with-transition-and-change/

Sanctuary Everywhere (audio & text)

Jul 16, 2018 | Sermons

READINGS

Leviticus 19:33-34

  When a foreigner resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress them. You shall treat them as a citizen among you; you shall love them as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

“Let America be America Again” by Langston Hughes https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/let-america-be-america-again

SERMON

There are moments of moral clarity that arrive at times like a ringing bell that resonates deep within us. I had one this past week as I was reading through news reports online about the latest development in the travesty of US immigration agents separating undocumented immigrant parents from children as they are captured crossing our border –  more than 2,000 families, according to the latest count.

This week, though, a federal judge ordered that the families be reunited. Amid all the statistics and quotes from officials was a video of one family’s story.

The reporter followed a Guatemalan woman whose 9-year-old daughter and 17-year son were taken. She told how a uniformed officer at the border entered a room where she, already separated from her son, sat with her daughter and other women.

She said that as the officer approaching her he demanded, “Let go of her, Let go of her” and pulled the girl from her arms. She said she felt sure that she would never see her again. The children were later taken to a shelter in Michigan, but thankfully their father was already in the US. He had come two years before and applied for asylum, and they were released to his custody. The mother said she had come to the US seeking asylum after criminal groups in Guatemala threatened her son.

For 40 days she lived in immigration limbo, but, working with an advocate, she was able to find

her husband and children and be reunited with them. The reporter filmed the reunion at an airport, the family running into each other’s arms, the mother clasping her children:

“My love,” she said, “I missed you. I couldn’t do anything. I felt so cowardly, Forgive me.”

I am grateful that never in my life have I faced something as terrifying as this, but I don’t have to work hard to imagine how I might feel, how devastated I would feel. And I wish I could say to that mother, to all the mothers and fathers whose children were taken:

“You have no cause to seek anyone’s forgiveness. To the contrary: forgive me, forgive us, forgive this country that we have so lost our way, become so deluded and confused  that we permit officers empowered by our laws to rip apart families in the name of something so paltry as a line drawn on a map.”

But, of course, we remember that all of this Is about a lot more than a line on a map, and there lies the rub for us all.

To put it bluntly, it is about a culture of dominance that has prevailed in this country

from the day of its founding, a culture constructed to privilege and protect a select group of people: people whose skin is white and whose assets are ample.

Langston Hughes, writing at the height of the Great Depression, captured the sense of it.

We Americans, he said, grow up with the dream of a country that is, in his words, “a great strong land of love” where no one “is crushed by one above,” where “opportunity is real, and life is free.”

But that America, he said, “never was America to me.” Not he, the African-American man, nor, in his words, “the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, the red man driven from the land, the immigrant clutching hope.” All of them, he wrote, “finding only the same old stupid plan of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.”

Those words had a particular resonance in the 30s, but they still sting today. In this nation of immense wealth and influence, people are still marginalized, stigmatized and oppressed,  the same people who Langston Hughes named, people whose color, whose language, whose ethnicity varies from the predominant white culture.

And, of course, when it comes to immigration we find the same pattern repeated again. For with all the talk of ours being a nation of immigrants the welcome America offers has always been limited. It begins, of course, with slavery, which brought millions of Africans here against their will, but it continued with exclusion and oppression of Asians, mostly Chinese and Japanese, and with our treatment of our neighbors in Mexico, who were sought out for work in mines and fields but never welcome as permanent citizens.

Immigration reform in 1965 changed things dramatically. Old quotas were eliminated and immigration was expanded but one important group was targeted fornew, severe restrictions: Mexicans.

 Before the law changed, the US allowed 450,000 Mexican men into the US each year on guestworker visas. After the law changed, the guestworker program ended, but only 20,000 Mexicans a year could receive resident visas. Those who came without visas were deemed, for the first time, illegal immigrants.

This set up a dynamic that persists today:  hundreds of thousands of people with work histories and family connections here that go back decades  are nonetheless deemed “illegals.”

In time, racism and xenophobia have done their work, painting them as dangerous, or in our president’s words “animals.” driving public policy to “get tough,” with harsh penalties and even imprisonment not just for those who violate the law but now also for those who merely lack citizenship papers.

All of this offers a frightening parallel to a trend that Michelle Alexander described a decade ago as “The New Jim Crow.” Despite the gains of the rise of the Civil Rights movement, she said, staggering numbers of African-American men were targeted in the war on drugs, many of them apprehended and sentenced to lengthy prison terms, after which their criminal records made them largely ineligible to participate in civil society.   Alexander argued that these trends had led to the emergence of a caste system that still devastates the lives of African-Americans and communities around the country.

With the criminalizing of so much of the immigration system, we stand at the brink of a new emerging caste system that could equally devastate immigrant communities. And, once again, it is not all immigrants, but non-white immigrants who feel the brunt of this. We fool ourselves if we fail to discern the blatant racial dimension to this state of affairs.

So, if anyone should ask you why congregations like ours are inserting ourselves into the immigration debate with our decision to offer sanctuary, you can tell them that this is about far more than debating the fine points of government policy. It is about our unerring commitment to the inherent worth and dignity of every person. It is about our determination to offer compassion and be advocates and allies to people suffering oppression. It is about our commitment to uproot and dismantle the structures of white supremacy and build the foundations of a beloved community centered in justice and love.

The passage you heard earlier from Leviticus is one of the most powerful injunctions in the Bible on how people new to a community are to be treated. It comes from a section in the Hebrew scriptures known as the holiness code, which gives many instructions on living a righteous life, on what it is to be just and humane.

“When a foreigner resides with you in your land,

You shall not oppress them.

You shall treat them as a citizen among you;

You shall love them as yourself.”

The right path, it suggests, is not something we walk alone. We encounter others, not just family but people strange to us. And when we meet them, the holy center within us, the way to wholeness and integrity, urges us to attend to them, to treat them as part of our tribe, our circle, and even more, to love them, to love them even as we love ourselves.

To love them.

This is no small task. For in loving another we are always stepping outside of our comfort zones. We make ourselves vulnerable to them. We open our hearts, our dearest, tenderest selves, and prepare to be changed.

Why do such a thing? We do it, not because it is a nice thing to do. We do it because it is what we need to do, all of us, because people of all communities belong together, involved in each other’s lives because this is the only way to wholeness, the only way to live our ethical duty, to be fully present, awake, and alive.

We’ve had a chance to rehearse this in the last several months as we’ve welcomed our guest, La Mariposa, into this community. It’s been hard, I know. While her case grinds through the system, we’ve had to be careful about what we share and who she interacts with.

Sanctuary is a challenging commitment, and it follows no clear path. It’s been immensely rewarding, though, in ways I never anticipated. We have come to learn about the struggles she faces and the quandaries of this byzantine system.  But all of us involved have also come to experience the joy of getting to know and, dare I say, love her.

We’re learning the amazing truth that when you create space to hold the integrity of another person, it opens both of you. It is space that is hard to find in these conflicted times, but it can be made.

And so it’s been intriguing as I’ve been following the sanctuary movement to learn of a new concept that’s emerging within it called “sanctuary everywhere.” How would it be if we applied the principles of sanctuary – collaborating to create safe space for people and communities that are threatened – more widely?

There are other places where this is happening. Wherever we come to know others and make common cause to accompany them in their journey to liberation we are creating sanctuary.

Friends, I invite you to make this our work. to make it central to the ministry of this congregation. Let us be agents of this sanctuary, sanctuary for our immigrant siblings seeking dignity and a place in this country, sanctuary for our African-American siblings seeking justice and peace in a culture centered in whiteness, sanctuary for so many people marginalized for their identities in so many ways.

And in doing this let us remember that sanctuary is not always making physical space. It is also about making space in our hearts, our minds, our consciousness.

At our last General Assembly, I was introduced to a way of framing this work that crystalized it for me.  They are words attributed to Lilla Watson, an aboriginal activist from Australia, “If you have come here to help me,” she said, “you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

 I affirm that my liberation, my own awakening is not something I can achieve on my own.  It is bound up with that of all people, my siblings of all colors, all ethnicities, all identities. From this perspective, we see that all that divides us now is just froth and foolishness, fabricated fear and delusion.

 This year I will be inviting you to join me as we center our work, our thoughts, our love in how to make ourselves agents of this new way. It will challenge us to reframe our thinking, to open ourselves to new learning, to listen with humility and compassion, to act when we are called to act and to organize ourselves in a way that will put our gifts in the service of transformation.

In coming weeks, you will hear more about how our congregation is engaged in this work and how you can participate. But don’t let this inhibit your imagination. What are we missing? What vision, what inspiration can you bring to this that will open all of us?

We Unitarian Universalists have long been good helpers to the work of the liberation of others. Let us now take the next step that helps us see that it is our liberation that is at stake as well.

How might we be agents for the beloved community writ large, for an America that never was, that yet will be?

To Bless and Be Blessed (audio & text)

Jun 20, 2018 | Sermons

SERMON

Early in her novel Gilead Marilynne Robinson imagines her protagonist, the Rev. John Ames, an elderly minister writing a letter to his 7-year-old son, recalling an episode from early in his youth. Ames tells of how he and some friends came upon one of their cats with a litter of kittens and decided that they needed to be baptized.

It was a unique experience, he says, to feel the warm little brows beneath the palm of his hand. “Everyone has petted a cat,” Robinson writes,”  but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing.”

For years, Ames reflects, “we would wonder what, from a cosmic perspective, we had done to them.” “It seems to me a real question,” he says. “There is a reality in blessing.“ It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but acknowledges it,  And there is power in that.”

I’m aware that among us there are different ideas about the nature and power of blessing. Some of us came of age in religious traditions where a blessing is viewed as something given by a person of some authority that, as Robinson’s John Ames suggests, has some “cosmic effect,” that through that act changes us in some way.

As we enter into this discussion, then, it is important for me to be clear on how I’d like us to understand what it is to bless and be blessed. And this passage from Gilead points to it. As Robinson’s now-mature Ames observes, looking back on that childhood episode with the kittens, “there is a reality in blessing. . . . It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but acknowledges it.”

What is important about a blessing is not who confers it or whatever status that person may have but the intention of the one conferring it and the openness of the other to receive it. As Rachel Naomi Remen puts it in her book, “My Grandfather’s Blessings,”  “A blessing is not something that one person gives another. A blessing is a moment of meeting, a certain kind of relationship in which both people involved remember and acknowledge their true nature and worth and strengthen what is whole in each other.”

 In that sense I want to argue that the act of blessing connects with our Unitarian Universalist values, as one of the most effective ways I can think of to practice our First Principle, where we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person. When we confer a blessing on another person, we give that person nothing more than she or he already has. But in doing so, we, the givers, can call attention to something that we, the receivers, may lose sight of: that there is a beauty, a wonder, a sacredness to each of us that is ours: no greater or less than anyone else, but ours, and yet not ours alone but something that we find in the web of relationship.

Remen puts it this way: “Those who bless and serve life find a place of belonging and strength, a refuge from living in ways that are meaningless and empty and lonely. Blessing life moves us closer to each other and our authentic selves.”

Remen, a cancer doctor, was acquainted with the language of blessing through her experience with her grandfather, an Orthodox rabbi. He was someone who she knew as a wise and gentle man, generous with words of care. But she says she learned from relatives that as a young rabbi in Europe he was a proud and demanding scholar who brooked no challenge or contradiction. His tradition was full of blessings but his ministry was focused on teachings with strict interpretations. His softening came later in life when, as she puts it, “the letter of the law” became “far less precious than the spirit,” and the spirit was something that resided in each of us.

On this Father’s Day, it occurs to me that many of us have had similar experiences with important men in our lives. We may even in one way or another have been those men: proud, demanding, stingy with praise, cards close to the vest when it came to our feelings. The models are many in our culture for that sort of behavior. And men are instructed in it from early in life. It is often only later as a parent or mentor we learn that the greatest gift we have to give is not our teaching but our blessing.

As an example, I think of a supervisor I once had in the middle of my newspaper career when I was an editorial writer. The shift from being a reporter was challenging, since reporting demanded that I take no side while editorial writing required that I write to persuade. It was work that required not just good research and capable writing but a strong ethical center: to call it fairly without fear or favor.

It was the guidance of my editor that showed me the way. The integrity that he modeled for me –  day in, day out – despite pressure from some heavy hitters was a blessing that stays with me still.

Leo Dangel’s poem “Passing the Orange,” which we heard earlier, seems to me to embody a blessing of sorts, too.  The men, those farmers in their overalls, are communicating something in that awkward game at a school Halloween night party. It was not some special skill –  Who trains to pass an orange neck to neck? –  but their capacity to make of themselves a team that confers the blessing. In this moment of meeting, these men affirm not only that they’re good sports but what it is to work together.

It’s a curious thing that often we are not even aware of our impact on others and the blessings that result. My editor was not seeking to make an impression on me or anyone else. He was simply living out what his own center taught him. He was, as Remen puts it, serving life by his actions. “The way we live day to day,” she said, “simply may not reflect back to us our power to influence life or the web of relations that connects us. Life responds to us anyway.”

Every one of us in this room affects each other in ways we can’t begin to fathom. What effect that is – whether it enlivens or discourages – depends on the intention we bring. The key, she says, is “taking life personally, letting the lives that touch yours touch you.”I know this isn’t as easy as it sounds. We’re not always sure what will happen if we let others touch us. We’re not sure if they’ll accept us, or how we feel about accepting them. Some even regard being touched as a form of weakness.

So, perhaps we begin with a blessing. Barbara Brown Taylor is a capable guide. Begin with something simple. She chooses a stick. What will you choose? The key is paying attention. What can you say about this thing? What do you notice? What makes it unique? How does it fit in this grand world of ours? What might it teach you? A little silly? Maybe. Give it a try.

Then cast your eyes around this room. Focus your thoughts on some other person. It could be someone you know or someone you don’t Bring that person to mind. What would you like that person to know? How might you send hope his or her way? What blessing do you have to give? How might you strengthen the life around and within them?

Does any of this make any difference? Well, it’s up to you.  The next time you meet the person you blessed it’s a good bet you’ll think a little differently about them. You might even share your blessing. And who knows what might come of that? Meanwhile, the connections you have made will deepen and a new flower of compassion will bloom within you.

This talk of blessing reminds me of an episode at the end of my father’s life. Years before, when his father died, he sent letters to me and my four siblings telling us a little bit about the difficulties that he had had with his father. It had long been plain to us that the two of them had a strained relationship. And he confirmed that, adding that in the days before his father died he had tried to draw him out a little, to have the kinds of conversations they hadn’t had before. But as you might imagine he found it no easier than it had been in the years before. He wrote us that he was sad about that and he hoped that things would go better with us.

i’d like to say that they did and that he and we did undertake to improve our relationships, but in truth that not much changed. Throughout our childhood years he’d been a psychiatrist in private practice, working 60 hours or more a week. So, he wasn’t around much for us to know him, and in our adult years we’d gotten busy ourselves and had scattered across the country. He wasn’t much of a phone talker and visits were brief and full of interactions with grandchildren. His death in a hospice in Naples, Florida, in the middle of a roaring hurricane in 2005 certainly made for a dramatic ending, though.

After the memorial service, I was surprised when my sister handed out envelopes to each of the siblings that our father had left behind, one for each us, with our names written in our father’s hand. What on earth could this be, I wondered?I looked for a quiet place and opened my envelope. Inside was one sheet of paper with three words that my father had written on it:I love you, it said; that was it.

In that earlier letter about his own father, my father had written that while he knew we didn’t talk much he felt sure we knew that he loved us. It was nice to say that, but in fact, it wasn’t necessarily true. It’s not enough to assume that another knows how you feel. You have to tell them. I am grateful to have  as the last communication I ever received from him words that banished any doubt about that. In doing that I now see that he left me a blessing, one that only he could give, one that changed me and still leaves me smiling.

So, don’t hesitate, my friends. Cast your blessings widely. And don’t doubt the power that they can have. For each person you meet –   it could for the first or four thousandth time –  magine the blessing you might give. It doesn’t have to be some grand declaration, but just some word or gesture  that connects directly with who they are.

Don’t fret about whether you’ll get it right. A blessing is a no-lose proposition. Try it once, then do it again and again and again. In this way, we have the capacity  to make our very lives blessings to each other, not by being extraordinary but by being fully ourselves and by being fully present to every person we meet. Truly, as Barbara Brown Taylor put it, a miracle enough to stagger the stars.

 

Getting Unstuck (audio & text)

May 21, 2018 | Sermons

READINGS

From The Places That Scare You by Pema Chodron

“When I was about six years old I received a teaching from an old woman sitting in the sun. I was walking by her house one day feeling lonely, unloved, and mad, kicking anything I could find. Laughing, she said to me, “Little girl, don’t you go letting life harden your heart.”

Right there, I received this pithy instruction: we can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.”

West Wind #2 by Mary Oliver

You are young.  So you know everything.  You leap
into the boat and begin rowing.  But listen to me.
Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without
any doubt, I talk directly to your soul.  Listen to me.
Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and
your heart and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to
me.  There is life without love.  It is not worth a bent
penny, or a scuffed shoe.  It is not worth the body of a
dead dog nine days unburied.  When you hear, a mile
away and still out of sight, the churn of the water
as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the
sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable
pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth
and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls
plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life
toward it.

SERMON

Each time Bill Murray’s Phil Connors wakes to Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” blaring on his clock radio in the 1993 comedy “Groundhog Day” we viewers feel the tension tighten. How will Murray’s character respond this time as he wakes in the time loop he seems caught in,  doomed to relive over and over one of the silliest days on the calendar?

Given what we know of him as the film begins, his evolution follows a predictable arc.  A self-important prima donna, he moves with each awakening from befuddlement to outrage to full-throated hedonism: gorging himself with food, swiping money from an armored truck, honing pick-up lines for the women who suit his fancy. But no matter how he satisfies his pleasure in these one-day sprees, everything is wiped away the next morning.

And so the film takes a darker turn, as he makes his way through creative ways to do himself in. But each time he wakes again until he declares to his co-worker that he must be a god. Of course, he’s not a god.  What he is, is stuck:  stuck in self-absorption, in self-pity, in this narrative that tells him that he must be a victim of the universe.

The Jungian analyst James Hollis says that he often begins workshops he leads around the world with the question, “Where are you stuck?” It’s interesting, he says, that never in those workshops does anyone ask him to define what he means by “stuck.” Even translated to other languages, everyone jumps in and starts writing in their journals, suggesting, he says, “that the concept of stuckness is quite close to the surface in our lives.”

How about you? Where are you stuck? What is holding you back from the life you would like to live? The answer is not always as simple as it may seem. That’s because often what’s bedeviling us is not the stuckness that presents itself. For example, all the ways we get stuck around food usually speak to deeper hungers in our lives – longing for love, for attention, for reliable presence.

So, when we try to deal, say, with cravings or binge eating we stumble again and again because we haven’t addressed our deeper anxiety. As Hollis puts it, “under each stuck place there is a wire, so to speak, that reaches down into the archaic field and activates a field of energy of which we are largely unaware, but has the power to reinforce whatever is holding the line against change.”

The result can be something like the experience that Pema Chodron described, where we are marching around with our fists balled up kicking at anything we find, furious at a world that will not treat us as we feel we deserve.

It reminds me of one of the early Star Trek movies. Do you remember? In it, Earth is threatened by  an alien force inside a massive energy cloud. But that force, which calls itself “V-ger”, turns out to be the remnant of a Voyager probe sent centuries before that had been upgraded by aliens who sought to help the probe complete its mission by returning to Earth. Once the Star Trek crew figures out how to complete the code so “V-ger” can send its information, it is appeased.

How often do we turn ourselves into V-gers raging or withdrawing over perceived slights and inattention that activate our deep anxieties? It’s hard, Hollis says, because these anxieties can be grounded in what he calls perceived existential threats, such as fear of being overwhelmed and being abandoned.

Early in life, he said, we experience what he calls “our relative powerlessness  in a large and potentially invasive world.” So, it’s little wonder that in time we develop strategies to assert some control in our closest relationships.  Likewise, he says, to avoid abandonment, we may focus our energy on achievement to assure ourselves that we are needed, or at least that we receive ample praise.

We concoct strategies to protect ourselves, and they serve us for a time. But they’re rickety, fragile, and reactive. As Pema Chodron puts it, “we let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid.” And in time our defenses suffer damage. So, we get out the paper and twine and patch them up. The result isn’t pretty, but we stick with them because we figure that’s all we’ve got. But it’s not. We have another capacity – deeper, wiser, kinder – that only needs to be activated.

It shows us that many of the scripts that guided us in times of stress are remnants, rear guard actions from our youth or childhood. We can honor them: they offered what service they could at a times of difficulty. But as we’ve grown we’ve become more resilient, and we see that the emotional hazards that we feared are not quite so fearful. They are, in fact, invitations to grow,  to be kinder, more open.

“Sometimes,” Pema Chodron teaches, “this broken heart gives birth to anxiety and panic, sometimes to anger, resentment, and blame. “But under the hardness of that armor there is a tenderness of genuine sadness. This is our link with all those who have ever loved.”

James Hollis makes a similar point. “Sometimes we have to go there, the place of fear, in order to grow up, to recover our lives from all the assembled defenses, of which denial, repetition and rationalization are the accomplices. “Only in those moments when we take life on, when we move through the archaic field of anxiety, when we drive through the blockage, do we get a larger life and get unstuck.”

Phil Connors seems to get that, too. When he’s had enough of self-indulgence, he turns his attention to his fellow travelers in Punxsutawney: saving a boy falling out of a tree, a diner choking on his meal. He learns to play the piano and becomes the life of Groundhog Day parties. He uses what he learns about the residents to counsel and console them.

Along with Murray’s love interest in the film, played by Andie McDowell, we are astonished at the person that Phil Connors has become. In the space of a day, this first-class jerk has become one heck of a decent human being –  except, as we know, it took more than a day, maybe 10,000 days or more.

And it’s true that it can feel like we need a lifetime to climb over all the detritus in our past, the old scripts that haunt us and still carry enough energy to divert us from living in tune with our true selves.

It seems to me that this is the challenge that Mary Oliver’s poem “West Wind #2” addresses. She speaks as one tempered by experience, one who at some point in her life did, as she puts it, leap into a boat and begin rowing. And it is plain from the context  that she was not rowing with a destination in mind: she was rowing away, and not away from a clear threat but from some threat she anticipated, an imagined pain or fear she hoped to escape.

It’s the context that breaks our heart, for it’s plain that what she was running from was something that in fact could save her, something whose power, thankfully, was strong enough to interrupt her impulse to escape, that gave her the insight to write this compelling poem. And that power, she is clear, is something that opened her eyes to a larger life, something she can only think to call love.

“There is life without love,” she says, and you don’t want to go there. Whatever your fear, your insecurity, your self-doubts, you will regret running from it, hardening your heart against its call. Stuck as you may be in the armor you thought would protect you, you must give it up. Lift the oars from the water and rest.  Take a moment to heed what she calls your heart’s “little intelligence,”that inner wisdom that awaits us. And then go . . . go.

Not toward some comforting, warm embrace but right back at what you sought to flee, that tumult of uncertainty and risk. Such is life lived with love, full of bumps and bruises and no guarantees, where we learn what Pema Chordon calls “the tenderness of genuine sadness.” Something that, she says, “can humble us when we are indifferent and soften us when we are unkind. It awakes us when we prefer to sleep and pierces through our indifference.”

Our heart’s awakening, and our own true home.

 

 

 

Delight in Difference (audio & text)

May 7, 2018 | Sermons

READINGS

Genesis 11

  Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.

And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.

 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”

So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.

Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

 “Gate 4-A” by Naomi Shihab Nye       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwDXJ50U22o

SERMON

Years ago, our family flew to France to spend some time with Debbie’s mother, who was fulfilling a life-long dream by living a few years in Paris. While there we also traveled to visit with an exchange student who had stayed with us the previous summer. This young woman spoke English well, and we had enjoyed getting to know her. She was delighted to welcome us to her home but said her parents didn’t speak quite as well.

So, we boned up a bit on French before leaving. Also, it helped that our daughter Anna, who had been attending a French immersion school in Milwaukee, was with us. With her help and our halting phrases and pantomime, we got by reasonably well with them.

One evening, though, they invited us to a great treat – a dinner party with a number of their neighbors and friends. Not being familiar with European customs, we were a little daunted that the party didn’t start until around 9 p.m., but the food was delightful, and the neighbors were friendly.

Friendly, but not especially fluent in English. I remember smiling and stumbling along on my phrases – Anna had gone to bed, so we didn’t have her to rely on. But it wasn’t long after those initial, polite inquiries that friends turned to each other, and the pace of speaking sped up. I have this vivid recollection of suddenly feeling lost. We are verbal beings, and language is what we use to navigate the world in the presence of others.

To have that capacity suddenly pulled away is disorienting, even frightening. So, how interesting that the writers of the Bible should center this story we’re examining today,  one more story where early humans are slapped down for getting too big for their britches, on language. It can’t help but raise the question, what is this story really about anyway?

The story comes in the Bible after God makes his covenant with Noah, promising never again to make a flood to destroy every living creature, and urging his sons to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth.”

Following comes one of those passages of genealogy, listing several generations of children born to Noah’s sons, who are said to be spreading out across the earth. But then comes the Babel story, and suddenly they are no longer spreading out: they have come together, gathered on a plain where they intend to build a great city topped by a massive tower “with its top in the heavens.”

The purpose of this city and its tower? To “make a name for ourselves.” Curious, especially given that in the entire Babel story none of the human actors is named. Who is building this tower? We’re not told. We only know that they fear that without it, “we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the Earth.” And where would they get that idea? Well, didn’t God just charge them all to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth”?  And why would that be such a fearful thing? So many interesting questions.

I have to admit that I had never before been inclined to spend much time with this story. I think that like a lot of readers I saw it as one of those “just-so” stories about the origin of languages. But I was intrigued recently to read a different treatment of the story by a contemporary writer, Rabbi Shai Held. Held argued that the story holds within it, not an act of punishment by a jealous God, but a blessing.

To understand that perspective we need to go back to how the story begins. Remember the opening passage? “Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.”  So, language is central from the start.

OK, and they’re all together, so everything’s good, kumbaya, right? Not exactly. What does this unity give them? Does everyone get to plant his own vine and fig tree? No. Their first decision is, “Come let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” Tough building materials for a big job: a huge city with a massive tower that soars into the heavens.

But why? To what end? We’re not told, but the text gives us a hint. The phrase “make a name for ourselves” has a strong scent of hubris to it.  These folks think they’re pretty darned important, and if they’re scattered across the Earth their power will be diluted and dissolved. You get the sense that the point of building the city is to concentrate that power, and the purpose of the tower, rather than contending with God, is to keep an eye on the populace. Instead of city of peace, it sounds more like something out of 1984.

When we get to God’s response in the story, we see a sense of exasperation: What kind of mess are they into now? If this is their attitude, there’s going to be no end to the misery they make. It’s not as if this building project is going to endanger him. I mean, really? He’s more concerned about the terrible trajectory that this holds for humankind, more specifically a turn toward totalitarian control.

And the uniformity of language is part of this picture. Just as in 1984, language can be an effective tool of oppression. It can shape people’s perceptions and be used to control or even erase individual expression.

Add to this the unprecedented anonymity of all the human actors. No other Biblical story fails to name a single actor. Even the quotes are anonymous. Clearly, there is a message here.

Anonymity, of course, feeds control. If individual identity is not recognized, the only identity that matters is of those in power and the name that they make for themselves. It’s a pattern as old as humankind and one we recognize from the rise of one totalitarian state after another in the last couple hundred years. We arguably even see it in some contemporaries who seem to care little about anything but building moments to themselves and seeing their name plastered across everything they own.

So, what is God to do about this? He’s pretty fed up, but he already promised no more divine catastrophes. But language – hmm, there’s an idea. The text doesn’t give much of a clue about what God may have done to the language, except to say that he “confused it.”

We could play with this a little and imagine all the incomprehensible sounds that might emerge from the mouths of these speakers. As with my experience in France, it surely would be disorienting.

And also, as God intended, it would have disrupted the building project. You can’t direct a massive building project without a common language. It’s likely that it would have prompted people as they scattered to the four corners of the Earth to tend to each other and create communities to survive.

And here is where Rabbi Held sees the story’s message. “Our story,” he writes, “is not about some primordial human unity being lost in the mists of time, but, on the contrary, about an active attempt to undo the divine plan for diversity that has already begun to come to fruition.” The Babel story, he says, “ends with God’s reversing an unhealthy, monolithic movement toward homogeneity with a reaffirmation of the blessings of cultural linguistic, and geographical diversity.”

As troublesome as we human beings can be, our diversity, our uniqueness, and individual genius is part of what makes each one of us blessings to the world. Indeed, Held argues, this is “a large part of what God treasures about each of us.”

We live today at a time when it is becoming harder and harder for that learning to surface. The totalitarian impulse is at work in this country and around the world, crushing countless numbers of people made anonymous in their suffering and their deaths.

Scenes like the one that Naomi Shihab Nye painted rarely receive a response as compassionate as hers was. People marginalized by language, race, ethnicity or gender identity find themselves dismissed, threatened and even assaulted.

And the result is pretty darn brutal, as we’ve discovered where people with black and brown bodies are subject to unending violence and oppression. A good example is the sweep of the immigrant community in western North Carolina, as officers with US immigration authorities, ICE, grabbed people on the street and detained them for deportation.

From any public policy perspective, these practices are pointless, ineffective and damaging to our country. But even worse they tear apart families, disrupt communities and visit on people terrible pain and grief. We can be agents of another way, a way of compassion, appreciation, and care But it’s not always easy and there can be a risk.

We begin by giving up the anonymity that our culture offers up as the default mode in interacting with others. You’ve been in airports, right? Part of the flood of humanity that pours through huge corridors on the way to our distant gates. We may we observe physical differences among our fellow passengers, but we keep our eyes focused forward, our ears buds playing the songs of our choice.

When I read Nye’s poem, I wonder how many of us quietly cringed at Nye’s decision to reply to the gate announcement? As she says, finding ourselves in such a situation “one pauses these days.” And for good reason. There are some crazy things going on, and, hey, I’m just trying to get from here to there.

But, she is in the gate already, and as the daughter of a Palestinian father and American mother she is sensitized to the troubles that people like this distraught woman can face. And, yes, she knows a few halting phrases of Arabic, so sure.

The connection is immediate and, as it turns out, the woman’s problems are really no big deal. But Nye, relieved and a bit charmed doesn’t stop there. She calls the woman’s son to reassure him that his mom is OK, and then, why not call her own dad, and let’s toss in a few Palestinian poet friends as well.

With each step as the circle widens something incredible happens at that airline gate. Others get drawn in, share stories, pass around cookies and juice. An aura begins to grow. People who were strangers a few minutes before are holding hands. Looking around, Nye observes, “this is the world that I want to live in. The shared world.”

Me, too. I want to find that place where the cone of anonymity and separation that we use to shelter ourselves from each other is discarded and an aura of compassion prevails, where we understand without question that we are all worthy beings deserving of care and concern, bound together in a common journey.

Because, let’s face it, each of us has had our moment at the airline gate when things fell apart and we’ve run out of resources, struggling to make our place, to find our way. As Meg Barnhouse puts it, nobody does not know about sorrow, about loneliness, about cruelty, and it’s brought us to our knees.

It’s at that moment that we put aside the walls or towers we’ve built for protection and look for mercy in the arms of those willing to offer their hands, where the differences that once divided us become the powdered sugar that we wear as a badge of compassion, of hope.

Such a thing, Naomi Shihab Nye tells us, “can still happen anywhere” and give us confidence, in the words of the 14th-century anchorite Julian of Norwich, that all will be well.

Body Work (Audio & text)

Apr 16, 2018 | Sermons

READINGS

From “Cages” by Jane Kenyon

And the body, what about the body?

Sometimes it is my favorite child,

uncivilized as those spider monkeys loose in the trees overhead.

They leap, and cling with their strong

tails, they steal food from the cages—little bandits.

If Chaucer could see them,

he would change “lecherous as a sparrow”

to “lecherous as a monkey.”

And sometimes my body disgusts me.

filling and emptying it disgusts me.

And when I feel that way

I treat it like a goose with its

legs tied together, stuffing it

until the liver is fat enough

to make a tin of pate.

Then I have to agree that the body

is a cloud before the soul’s eye.

This long struggle to be at home

in the body, this difficult friendship.

 

GITANJALI 69 by Rabindranath Tagore

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day

runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

 

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth

in numberless blades of grass

and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

 

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean cradle of birth and death,

in ebb and in flow.
I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.

and my pride is from the life-throb of ages

dancing in my blood this moment.

REFLECTIONS

BODY WORK – I

I had just started work as a ministerial intern at the First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wisconsin, and my supervisor, the lead minister, the Rev. Michael Schuler announced that he intended to lead a class in the ancient Chinese practice of Qi Gong.

I had some experience with moves of Tai Chi from a UU summer camp our family attended, but I had never taken a class. And in the context of internship, where I expected I would be putting my seminary book learning, head stuff into practice, it seemed like a good focus for me.

Now, I’ve always had the sense of myself as a big guy. I shot up to nearly my current height in my early teens. And while I never participated much in athletics I had an image of myself as a strong person, capable. You know, the guy you ask to open the tight jar lid or to reach that box on the top shelf. I always liked that. It gave me a sense of confidence.

But let me tell you, there’s nothing like advancing years to chip away at that confidence. It began with a hip resurfacing six years ago, and now odd aches and pains, some so intense as to be disabling for a brief time. Suddenly, I’m not exactly sure what I can expect of this body.

It makes me think of the “difficult friendship” Jane Kenyon speaks of  And from what I learn of other baby boomers in my age cohort I’m not alone in that kind of experience. The impact of all this, I’m coming to see, is not just physical, or emotional, but spiritual, too.

I’ve come to experience how the sense of my body contributes to my overall feeling of well being and the possibility of peace and contentment. It’s something that comes not of physical achievement – winning the tennis match, hiking at breakneck speed –  but from learning to be in touch with and compassionate to this body.

The form of Qi Gong that Michael taught us in Madison is called the Japanese crane. It’s a beautiful form whose graceful gestures do evoke the sense of the crane with its poise and broad wings. But as with all Qi Gong forms its purpose is to point us not to the bird, but to ourselves.

  Qi Gong literally translates from the Chinese as “cultivating life energy.” The exercises are intended to acquaint us with that energy,  the Qi, and to move in such a way that we can access it. The Taoist notion is that this energy fuels our thoughts, our emotions, and our spiritual energy, too: that which helps us find understanding, enlightenment, a place of peace and of balance.

After coming to Asheville, I was grateful that Michael agreed to give the charge to the minister at my ordination. And I was delighted that in his remarks he couched his advice in the context of Qi Gong and Tai Chi. He argued that the subtle wisdom of these practices offers four lessons for our spiritual life:

First, never make a move without locating your center of gravity. In Qi Gong, if you move too quickly you can put yourself off balance. Similarly, when we are confronted with a need to change instead of rushing to reduce our sense of anxiety we need to get clear on our rootedness, where we find our health and grounding, and move from that.

Second, in Qi Gong moving from pose to pose is seamless, just as energy flows through our bodies. Similarly, our lives are most satisfying and effective when the different parts are connected and serve each other. This is what integrity looks like, and it feeds a sense of joy and purpose.

Third, while learning the basic forms may be easy, it takes time and practice to master them. This reminds us of the value of patience in our lives. We are all of us in this, these lives, for the long haul. No matter where we are on our journeys, there is so much more to learn, so much more to do. We simply need to open ourselves to them.

And fourth, don’t be grim about it. There is a basic ease in all of these forms that is essential to mastering them, room for the darkness of the yin, and lightness of the yang. Similarly, as our bodies, our lives evolve we move through changes, changes that invite us to take stock, but also to open new doors, learn new ways, and give ourselves more deeply to who we are.

BODY WORK – II

A little experience with practices like Qi Gong, Tai Chi, or Yoga serves as a reminder of how profoundly most Western religions are separated from the body. It begins with the way we frame religion as a set of beliefs and how we distinguish among them as competing intellectual propositions. Are we theists, atheists, agnostics, polytheists, mystics, pantheists, panentheists, and so on? And what is “right thinking,” or orthodoxy, about such things as scriptures and theology?

All this is the heritage of our Western culture that treats our brains as the pinnacle of our evolution and our bodies as these messy, unreliable vehicles that exist to haul them around. The more we learn about our bodies, though, the more we see how much that perspective misses.

When we say we have a “gut feeling” about something, it’s no metaphor. There is a network of neurons associated with our gastrointestinal system that is so extensive that some researchers refer to it as our “second brain.” We have no conscious awareness of what it communicates, but our central nervous system is paying attention. And we attend to it also, but not as thought: as feelings.

Our feelings embody all the ways that our bodies perceive and process things outside of what we take to be our primary senses, like sight and hearing. And not only that, there is evidence of a constant dialog between our mind and body,  each informing and shaping the other. So that what we think of as consciousness is centered not just in the brain.It is an amalgamation of thoughts and feelings.

Our brains may be our pilots. But our bodies are navigating its path and guiding its decisions. And it may have a direct bearing on religion. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues that we can see the influence of feelings in the core principles of some major religions. Look at the Buddha’s concern for the impact of suffering or Jesus’ emphasis on compassion and love.

Each are ways of being in the world that are centered not in our minds, but in our bodies. Suffering and love are not concepts of the mind. They are experiences of the body.

Several years ago religion professor S. Brent Plate wrote about all the ways that our spiritual lives are linked to our sensual ones. He explored how experience with physical objects like stones, drums, incense, crosses and bread shapes spiritual understanding in most of the world’s religions. What all this shows us, he said, is that “religion is rooted in the body.”

“There is no thinking without first sensing,” he said, “no minds without their entanglement in bodies, no intellectual religion without felt religion as it is lived in streets and homes, temples and theaters.”

At different times various folks have speculated about whether in time religion will fade away as a phenomenon of human culture. In our time, we certainly find many faiths losing ground. Yet, at the same time, we hear of people who call themselves “spiritual but not religious” as well as the emergence of informal house churches and other groups. Clearly, something in us yearns for deeper connection. Perhaps the challenge is to find meaningful ways to explore that with our bodies as well as our minds.

BODY WORK III

Let’s enter the closing portion of this service with a confession: we are a pretty darned heady faith. That’s not altogether a bad thing. We need our capable brains to help us investigate the world and sort out true and false. But the insights of our bodies deserve affirmation as well. How we do we do that, though? What would it look like?

I decided to play with the idea of how it would be if we took the 7 principles that join us as Unitarian Universalists – beautiful words that nonetheless center us in the mind – and considered how we might apply them to the body as well.

What if in saying that we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person we explicitly included each body as well: large and small, able and not, every color, every gender, every manifestation of the human being, beautiful in itself, worthy in itself, needing no excuse, no explanation. How would it change us as a faith to say that?

Each body deserving justice, equity and compassion, equal treatment and equal consideration.

Acceptance of one another as we are and encouragement to come to terms with all the ways we may struggle with our physical beings and to invite each other into wholeness and health.

A free and responsible investigation of all the ways that we touch the world and the world touches us, and how it informs our lives.

The right to have our bodies treated with respect, where abuse of all kinds is anathema, so that never again will anyone have to say, “Me, too.”

The goal of world community that affirms, values and nurtures the broad diversity of humankind and upholds physical protection as a right.

Respect for all the ways that we are linked to life on this planet, human and otherwise, to which we owe the duty of care.

This is, I’ll grant you, a mere thought experiment – There I go again!

But I think it brings us little closer to the spirit that Rabindranath Tagore invites us to experience, the movement of our bodies “dancing in rhythmic measure” with all life,

all of us rocked in the ocean cradle of birth and death, of ebb and flow, such that we might come to know the life-throb of ages, the flow of life energy that moves through these bodies this and every moment.