Liberation Theology

This is the text of the sermon I preached at the congregation I serve -- Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist.  As always, you can listen if you prefer.

I want to tell you a story about a guy named Frankie.  That’s not his real name, actually.  He came from a pretty wealthy family and had one of those long, aristocratic sounding names, but all of his friends called him Frankie.  And Frankie had a lot of friends.  He had an outgoing personality, and an extremely charismatic spirit; he told great stories, and even better jokes; he could sing all of the popular music of his day; and, as I said, he came from a pretty wealthy family so he could throw some really awesome parties.   Which he did.  All the time.

On a Friday or Saturday night Frankie would get in his Bugatti Chiron and cruise around town, calling out invitations to everybody he saw.  Well, almost everybody.  There was a pretty large homeless population where Frankie lived, probably because of the encampment they’d made just outside of town, and Frankie just couldn’t stand the sight of them.  He probably never really thought about it this way, but for him they represented the complete opposite of everything he saw himself as.  He wouldn’t even, couldn’t even, look at the ones standing on the median strips asking for help as he drove by.  He tried to not even think of them at all.

When the time came, Frankie volunteered to join the army and go off to fight.  He expected to be as successful in this realm as he was in everything else, and had visions of honor and glory.  But that’s not the way things turned out, and he came home different.  He was quieter, more serious.  His parties weren’t quite as much fun, and he didn’t throw them as often.  He spent more time driving his Bugatti in the hills and woods that surrounded his town … thinking.  He always seemed to be thinking deeply.

He’d seen such horrible things in the war, experienced such horrible things, and he was having a hard time reconciling these with the privileged life he’d been leading.  He’d seen people who were so very unlike the friends he’d gathered together on Friday and Saturday nights, and he’d seen how many people had problems and challenges he could never have even imagined.  And as he thought about what he’d seen he felt a growing need to do something about it, to do something about the unfairness he now saw everywhere he looked.

What he thought most about was how far to take this new sense of urgency.  He made sure that he always had bottled water in his car to hand out of the window to the people on the medians.  And he began to take some of the money he used to spend on parties and give it to various charities.  He volunteered a bit of his time rebuilding some of the dilapidated buildings around town, even using some of his own money to pay for supplies.  He started going to church … and not just on Christmas and Easter!  But always the question echoing, how far to take this.

It had been a couple of months since Frankie had stopped driving his Bugatti around town and had begun walking or taking public transportation.  Better for the environment, and he could give his gas money to people who needed food.  He was walking down the main street in town and saw a homeless man on the median.  The man was everything Frankie had despised – he was dirty, his clothes were dirty, his hair was unkempt, his teeth were bad.  And yet … and yet on this day Frankie found himself looking beneath or through all of that and seeing the human being within.  And that person he was now looking at was what we all are when we’re really seen – beautiful.  And without even thinking about it, Frankie walked up to the man who just a few years ago he wouldn’t have even looked at, and hugged him.  And at that moment he realized he that knew the answer to his question of how far to take things – he moved out of his house and moved into the encampment, and he lived there for years.

How far to take it?  This feeling, this urge, to do something, to do something to address the inequities we see all around us, to make the world a better place – how far should we take it?

I know that this is a question I wrestle with a lot.  Maybe some of you do, too.  After I change out all of the halogen bulbs in the house for LEDs (which, I’ll confess, I haven’t quite done yet), and I make sure I diligently turn off all the power strips when I’m not using the things that are plugged into them (which I don’t), and I buy only sustainably raised foods, and wear only organic cotton clothing (washing them with non-toxic biodegradable soaps, of course), and … well … how far should I take it?  How far can I take it?  And, honestly, how far do I want to take it? 

Do you ever wonder about things like this?  Maybe you do only after a Sunday morning when you’ve felt guilted from the pulpit about all there is to do to heal this all-too broken world, or after you’ve read a book about racism like Ta-Nehesi Coates’s Between the World and Me, or listened to people talking about income inequality, or … or maybe you’ve woken up some night, in the middle of the night, and thought about the world your children, or your grandchildren, are going to inherit from us and you wonder – shouldn’t I be doing something more?  Couldn’t I be doing something more?  And then there’s the real question – how far am I supposed to go?  How much sacrifice?  How much am I supposed to give up – of my things, the way I live?  How much?

After all, we’re learning – we as individuals and we as a religious movement – that it’s not enough to show up and offer our help to those people who are in need.  That’s pretty easy, actually, but it really does nothing to address the underlying systems that perpetuate the problems we see around us and feel called to address.  When we stay up here and reach down to help, no matter our intention we reinforce those relative positions.  So we know that we can’t stay in our safe spaces and reach out our hands to give someone some assistance without having to be really touched by their problems.  We know that that’s not enough.  But what is enough?  How far out of our comfort zones do we need to go? 

As I say to my kids all the time – I have good news and I have bad news.  The bad news is that that story about Frankie?  It’s a true story.  It’s an updated telling of the story of a young man named Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, who lived in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries in Italy, the true story of a rich kid who had it all and then gave it all away to move from the center of society to its outermost margins and throw in his lot with those who had almost nothing at all.  The good news is that today we know that young man by a different name:  Saint Francis of Assissi.  So the bad news is that the story tells us just how far some people have been willing to go to answer that deep soul urging to make a difference; the good news is that the guy was literally a saint.  Both will be important to keep in mind through the rest of the sermon.

Liberation theology, the ostensible topic for the morning, is a theological framework that appeared in modern Christianity in the Catholic Church of Latin America in 1950s, although that name wasn’t used until the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez wrote one of the movement's defining books, A Theology of Liberation in 1971.  (It should be noted that the concept of “liberation theology,” or “a theology of liberation,” has spread far from its Latin American Catholic roots and can be seen as the foundation of Asian, Black, Womanist, and Palestinian liberation movements, to name just a few.)  The simplest summation of this theology is that the God of the Gospels and the early Christian church has a “preference” for those people who are “insignificant," "marginalized," “unimportant," "needy," "despised," and "defenseless."  Gutiérrez called this “a preferential option for the poor.” 

Of course, liberation theologians would argue that this theological framework didn’t begin in Latin America in the 1950s but, rather, in Palestine in the 1^st century, and that it was already really well established by Hebrew Prophets like Isaiah and Amos, Micha and Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Nehemiah.  These theologies don’t say that God’s love is limited to the poor and the oppressed, just that God has a soft spot for those who have been marginalized and mistreated.  “Blessed are the poor,” not because all people aren’t blessed but because the poor are so often treated as though they’re not that it bears highlighting.

St. Francis wasn’t part of the movement known as liberation theology, but he definitely saw that the place of the church was with the disenfranchised.  The current Pope, not coincidentally named for the earlier saint, has said as much today.  “Poverty is the flesh of the poor Jesus,” he has said, “in that child who is hungry, in the one who is sick, in those unjust social structures.”  He also said, “A way has to be found to enable everyone to benefit from the fruits of the earth, and not simply to close the gap between the affluent and those who must be satisfied with the crumbs falling from the table, but above all to satisfy the demands of justice, fairness and respect for every human being.”

And good social justice minded Unitarian Universalists that we are we say, “Yes!”  “Right!”  “Absolutely!”  Yet if you’re anything like me, while you’re affirming that ideal you’re also asking yourself, “How far do I have to take this?  If I go down this road, how far will I need to go?  Where will be the end of it?  Will there ever be an end of it?”  I ask these questions, and you may too, because I know how insatiable the needs of the world are, and I am afraid … afraid that if I set out on this path it’ll soon be one of those “slippery slopes” and I sure don’t want to end up at the bottom on … well … my bottom, all muddy and bruised and unable to get back up to where I’d been.

Remember, Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, and hundreds … thousands of people like him, prove that it is possible to go all the way, to so care for the poor and the oppressed as to become poor and oppressed oneself in solidarity.  That is the answer he ultimately came to after wandering the hills of Assissi wondering how far to go.  All the way; no holding back.  And if his, and their, testimony is to be believed, rather than some kind of regrettable burden this going all the way opened the way for a joy that had been previously unimaginable to him.  Giving up his wealth, he asserted, brought him to a richness incomparable.

Remember too, though, that young Francesco was a saint and that we – again, if you are anything like me – are not.  So how far should we go?  How far can we go?  And, let’s be honest, how far do we want to and are we willing to go?  I don’t know.  I don’t know the right answer to that for you; I can’t say that I’ve yet figured out the answer for myself.  I can say, though, that I don’t believe the answer is, for me or for most of you either, as far as St. Francis went, but I do believe it’s farther than I have gone so far.  I do believe, I know as a certainty, that I need to go farther than I have so far, and I know that it’s not going to be easy.  I know that I’ll take most of the steps kicking and screaming.  But maybe, just maybe, if we help one another, it’ll be easier.  And maybe that’s part of what it means that we Unitarian Universalists are a people of liberation.  It means that none of us have to be about this work on our own.  We can walk this path together.  In fact, it's really the only way we can.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Liberating Yourself; Liberating Others

This is the sermon I offered to the congregation I serve on March 6, 2016.  As always you can listen if you prefer.

Reading:  “Our deepest fear ..." by Marianne Williamson

I want you to look with me in your mind’s eye at a pastel drawing.  There is a figure, sitting on a bench.  The drawing is simple; there are no details; the face is an oval and the body a barely disguised rectangle.  But the edges are soft, and the colors are a swirl of indigo, red, and orange.  The grey bench on which the figure is sitting is in a cage, a cell, and on the floor there are what appear to be open arm and leg shackles.  The door of the cell is open, too.  And the whole thing is encircled by rough curves of blacks and deep blues and purples.

So there’s a figure, sitting in a cage, but the door is open and there are shackles that have been removed.  There’s a sadness, a loneliness to the image.  Can you see it?

Beneath the drawing there’s a scriptural reference:  Isaiah 43: 1-2.  In this passage from the Hebrew Scriptures the figure of God is speaking to the prophet Isaiah (and really, of course, to the nation of Israel as a whole),

But now, this is what the LORD says—[the one] who created you, Jacob, [the one] who formed you, Israel: "Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.  When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.”

I drew that picture several years ago, and I chose that text.  Or, rather, it was the other way around.  I was on retreat, and we’d been sent to our rooms to meditate on a piece of scripture.  We were given a couple of pages of options to choose from – there were passages from the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian New Testament, as well as some pieces of secular poetry.  That passage from Isaiah was the one that called out to me.

I sat with it for about half an hour … maybe forty-five minutes.  And as I let the words seep into and through me, the image I’ve described came to me unbidden:  a person sadly sitting in a jail cell even though the door was open and the chains were removed.  He – I – was imprisoned not because of any externally imposed judgement, but rather because of a sentence I had given myself.

I remembered all of this as I was thinking this week about the theme for this month – “What does it mean to be a people of liberation?”  What does it mean to say that our Unitarian Universalist faith calls on us to be about the work of liberation (in the world and in our own lives)? 

Maybe you can relate to some of the feelings that led me to meditate on that passage and to draw that picture of the person and the jail cell.  Maybe you can relate to feeling trapped, imprisoned even, in a job you don’t like but need in order to pay the bills.  Or the worry that even with this job you don’t know how you’ll make it through the month.  Or the blinding fear that if you don’t find a job soon you have no idea what you’ll do.

Or maybe you’re locked in a relationship that isn’t really a relationship anymore because the other person has withdrawn – from the marriage, or the family.  Maybe it’s in that absence that you find yourself imprisoned.  Locked out can be as bad as being locked in.  Either way you’ve got the feeling that you’re stuck over here, while everything else is happening over here, and no matter how hard you try you just can’t get out of where you are to get into where you want to be.

For me it was a spiritual isolation, a spiritual imprisonment, that I was dealing with on that retreat.  And as I meditated on that passage from the book of Isaiah I was struck by its beginning, “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you.”  Later the point is made even more clearly, “Your ransom has been paid.”  What struck me, from that frame of reference, was that it wasn’t God who’d condemned me, judged me and found me guilty; it was me.  My ransom had been paid; I’d been redeemed; the door was open and the chains were on the floor.  But there I was nonetheless – imprisoned and in need of liberation … from myself.

Hold that thought for a minute.  I want to take this in a slightly different direction now, because there’s another kind of imprisonment I’d wager that all of us know.  A moment ago Arthur read a passage by New Age guru Marianne Williamson, a passage you’ll still sometimes see erroneously attributed to one or the other of Nelson Mandela’s 1994 Inaugural Addresses.  In it she asks, on our behalf, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?”  (That’s how I first knew it wasn’t really by Mandela.  I couldn’t imagine that he’d have thrown around words like, “gorgeous” or “fabulous.”)

Who am I to be … ?  What?  What is it that you don’t think you have the right to be?  Happy?  Content with your life?  Creative?  Assertive?  Generous?  Brave?  Emotionally available?  A leader?

Maybe you secretly love music but were told you couldn’t carry a tune.  (Or, as I’ve said about my father, “couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket if it were stapled to his forehead.”)  Or you’ve wanted to paint, or write, or dance but hold yourself back because you ask yourself, over and over again, whenever you’re on the verge of giving it a go, “Who am I to be …?” whatever it is you’re wanting to be.

Or maybe it’s more serious.  Maybe society has been telling you who and what you can and can’t be.  Maybe you’ve heard it so often that you find yourself at some level believing it and, so, asking yourself:  Who am I to be happily out as gay, lesbian, or bisexual?  Who am I to be free to express my gender as I know myself and not how I might look to others?  Who am I to be …?

Now … here’s where things come together.  At least, here’s where things come together for me.  I hope they do for you, too.  One of the things it means to say that we Unitarian Universalists are a people of liberation is that we Unitarian Universalists keep doing what we’ve been doing, and keep trying to do, here – to create a community where “whoever you are, whomever you love, and however you express your identity” you are welcome and have a place.   We don’t always live up to that vision, but we do try.  We do try.

I don’t want to at all deny the very real dangers there are for some of us to truly, and publicly, claim and be who we know ourselves to be.  There can be real consequences, serious consequences, even life and death consequences to being our full selves in places where that kind of self isn’t welcomed.  But part of what it means for us to claim to be a people of liberation is recognizing that our people, all those heretical Unitarians and Universalists who came before us, have paid our ransom, opened the doors and taken off the shackles others have put on us (or that we’ve put on ourselves).   It means that we are compelled –  by our faith, by our identity as Unitarian Universalists, as a people of liberation – to create communities in which it is safe to come out into the freedom to be who we are, liberated from the images to which others would have us conform.

And that brings us to the Marianne Williamson quote again, and the full title of the sermon, because she says, at the end, “[A]s we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”  Liberating ourselves; liberating others.  It’s one of the things being a people of liberation means, and it’s one of the things that happens here in this beloved community.

Each year at our Coming of Age service at least one of our young people says, in one way or another, that this has been a place – and sometimes the only place – where they could really be themselves.  The only place they felt free, the only place they felt safe, to be who they really are without feeling caged, imprisoned, in society’s judgments of who they should be.  This place, and sometimes only this place.

And this happens in Unitarian Universalist congregations around the country.  There are so many testimonies to this:  Unitarian Universalism, our liberating faith, not only touches lives … not only changes lives … it saves lives.  With no hyperbole I can say that there are people alive today because a Unitarian Universalist congregation provided for them a community that was liberating.

Our pledge drive is under way, and this really isn’t a commercial for it, yet I can’t help but mention it in the context of this sermon because when being asked what this community means to you, to me, to any of us we most often think about what it has done for us.  Maybe it’s provided some intellectual stimulation over the years, or developed and nurtured some good friendships, or given us a place to hear some awesome music.  What we don’t often think about is what it has done for others, and what it can do for others if it’s supported not just enough to survive from year to year but to grow and thrive.

We Unitarian Universalists are a people of liberation, and this congregation, this community, can be a place of liberation – for ourselves, for one another, and for those who may yet be inspired and encouraged by our examples.