From Not Again to Never Again: a sermon in three parts

This is the (rather extended) sermon I offered to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, Virginia on Sunday, June 21st, 2015.  (You can listen to a podcast if you'd prefer.)  This sermon was spread out through the Opening Words, the normal slot for our "Exloration," and the time normally set aside for sharing Joys & Sorrows.  Before beginning I noted that there are those in the congregation who have been wanting to hear more from their preacher.  I said that, perhaps, after today's service they will be more careful about what they wish for.

PART I

I’d like to begin by sharing a quotation:

"Is something missing from your life?  Are you doing all you can to have a closer relationship with God?  If you have a desire to learn more about God, then join us on Wednesdays at 6:00 pm in the lower level of the church. We look forward to seeing you."

That is the invitation to the weekly Bible Study that you'll find on the website of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. "Mother Emanuel," as it is often called, has had what President Obama called, "a sacred place in the history of Charleston and in the history of America."  CBS News This Morning, on Friday, said that the church has "played a part in nearly every political and social movement since it opened in 1816."

And on Wednesday night, June 17^th, they were having their weekly Bible Study in the lower hall just as they'd been doing for quite some time.  But this would not be an ordinary evening.

 In 1813, Morris Brown, a free black, a shoemaker by trade, wanted to find a church where African Americans were more welcomed than in the Methodist Church of his time, a segregated church that not only kept blacks and whites from worshiping together, but kept them separate in their cemetery as well.  Not seeing anywhere what he was looking for Brown founded the community that would come to be Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

One of its more prominent members – a formerly enslaved man who'd purchased his own freedom from, of all things, having won the lottery – was accused of planning a slave rebellion. Scholars today are apparently divided on whether there ever really was such a plot, yet no matter the truth of the accusation, Denmark Vesey and 34 other men were hanged.  Only nine years after its birth, some of the earliest members of “Mother Emanuel" were lynched.  The violence they’ve known started early.

Now, I have to tell you that when members of an African Methodist Episcopal Church get to studying their Bible, they really get to it.  I know that this might be a little hard for a lot of us Unitarian Universalists to grasp, but these folks had been engaged in Bible study for just about two hours before Dylan Roof entered the building, and they weren’t anywhere near done yet. By most accounts Roof sat with the group for as much as an hour before he pulled out the .45 caliber automatic pistol he’d brought with him. Survivors say that he was clear about his intentions and his motivations.  "I have to do it," he reportedly said, "you rape our women and you’re taking over our country.  You have to go."  Some who know him say that he spoke of wanting to incite a race war.  The car he drove from the scene had a vanity plate on the front:  "The Confederate States of America."

There are those who have been suggesting that he is simply a sick young man; that he's used too many drugs or that he has a mental illness. (They always bring up mental illness, don’t they?  Especially when the gunman is white, right?) There have even been those who've said that rather than being racially motivated this was more likely -- or, perhaps, at least as likely,  -- another example of the ever-increasing war on Christianity in our culture. “… we won't know until we have all the facts”

Well … I don't have all the facts, yet the facts I do have seem pretty clear to me -- this was a self-described racist who said in his own words from his own lips that his goal was not only to kill black people but to incite a race war. One survivor said that he told her he was letting her live so that she could go on and tell others about what had happened. This wasn’t the action of a deranged loner; it was an intentional act of terrorism.

And this is supposed to be a post-racial America!  It's absolutely astonishing to me how hard people who have some measure of power will work to justify their excessively destructive and dehumanizing abuses of that power.  Ask them about slavery and they’ll answer,  “Well, our slaves are happy, you know,and well cared for; they couldn't survive without our beneficence.”  Bring up the subject of Jim Crow and they’ll say,  “It's better this way -- each to their own.  That’s the natural way of things.” And what about the modern practice of the mass incarceration overwhelmingly of African Americans?  “Well ... we can't help it if they commit more crimes.”  (Which, according to law enforcement’s own statistics is, if you’ll pardon my French, foutaise.). But with an act like this that façade begins to break and, so, today the voices plead:  “Please! Let's please call this anything but what it is.”  But here’s what it is:  a terrorist attack on American soil aimed at defending the system of white supremacy that is so engrained in our country that there are people who quite honestly don't believe it exists, and others who believe it but don’t see anything really wrong in it.  Of course, there are those who know it exists all too well, because they are its victims.  Let’s not forget them.

Those who have ears, can hear the incessant drumbeat of death, after death, after death of young black men.  Those who have eyes can see the mounting evidence that apparently black lives do not matter as much as others’ do.  Those who have been paying attention are aware of the ever-increasing rumbling that portends the coming of a massive storm, a storm of, as we might say, a storm of Biblical proportions.  I fear – and in some ways I guess I hope, too – that that storm’s coming soon.  Really big storms are scary, often dangerous things, yet sometimes they’re the only thing that can end the oppressive heat and make everything seem new again.

Back in January I preached on the subject of race in America, and then again in March, but I must confess that in the context of the all that is happening, and all that has been happening, and all that is most surely going to keep happening, I really have been silent.  Too silent.  And in that silence, yes, there is some fear, some cowardice.  And, yes, in that silence there is complicity.  And, yes, that silence is an example of the white privilege that grants me the freedom to be silent, to hope that somebody else is going to do something, or to cynically and conveniently believe that nothing can be done.

I recently saw a Tweet which expressed the hope that we would, in this time, come together for healing.  In response I wrote, “With respect – this is NOT the time for coming together for healing; this is the time for coming together to really work for real change.”  Actually, I think the demand of this time is even more fierce that that – this is the time when we must change things.  And that “we” means largely white America, because only those who are privileged by a system have the power to change that system.

I know that I’m preaching to the choir here, but as a colleague of mine says, “I know I’m preaching to the choir, and what I’m preaching is – get off your buts and sing!”  Our opening hymn is #149, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

INTRODUCTION TO THE OPENING HYMN, “LIFT EVERY VOICE AND SING”

Every time we lift our voices to sing our opening hymn, Lift Every Voice and Sing, I make note that this hymn has such a prominent place in this history of African Americans in this country that it is often been called “the African American National Anthem.”  I’ve usually mentioned, also, that it was the Rev. Dr. King’s favorite hymn. 

The lyrics originated in a poem written in 1899 by James Weldon Johnson, who was the principal of the Stanton School in Jacksonville, Florida.  The occasion of its first public performance, in 1900, was a celebration of the birth of President Abraham Lincoln.  The poem was part of Johnson’s introduction of the day’s guest speaker, Booker T. Washington.  (As an aside, 9 years later Washington would preach at the very same Emanuel AME Church that’s in the news today.)  Johnson’s brother John set the poem to music that same year, and it had gained such celebrated importance in less than a decade that the NAACP dubbed it, “The Negro National Anthem.”  

Ninety years later, the Rev. Joseph Lowery used the third verse nearly word-for-word to begin his benediction at the inauguration of the first African American President, Barack Obama. 

Let’s sing together ...

PART II

Nine people are dead in Charleston, South Carolina. The youngest was 26; the oldest was 87.  I was watching the news with my older son the other night. Both of my children are adopted, and both are what is called, “multiracial.”  The younger one, the 10-year old, Les, has African and Cherokee ancestry from his birth father’s side of the family, but he really takes after his Irish and Scottish birth mother. His brown skin, as he used to say when he was little, is on the inside.

The older one, the 13-year old, Theo, absolutely favors his East Indian birth mom, with hints of his birth father’s Haitian and African roots.   His brown skin is most definitely (and, I have to add, so beautifully) on the outside. 

Over the years I have tried to help Theo, especially, to understand that the world he’s living in now – the world my wife and I have lived in all of our lives; the world, simply put, of white privilege – is not where he’s going to live out most of his life. 

In the past year or so, especially, I’ve tried to have “the talk” with him.  Not the talk about sex, or the talk about drugs, but the talk about how to stay safe in a racist world.  I’ve told him, as so many others have had to tell their children, that he’s now on the pivot point at which people are going to stop seeing him as an adorably cute brown-skinned boy and begin seeing him as a scary black-skinned man.  That day is no doubt  coming sooner than either of us can imagine, if it hasn’t come already.

Theo and I talked some after the murder of Trayvon Martin, and that takes us back three years ago now.  More recently we talked more after the murders of Jordan Davis, John Crawford III, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Michael Brown – and unfortunately I could all too easily go on for quite some time with that list.  And when I’ve talked with my son about this terrible and terrifying dimension of black life he’s responded with the kind of bravado only really possible during your teen years, and the kind of dismissiveness only really possible if you live in the world of white privilege.  “Oh, that won’t happen to me, dad,” he says.  “You don’t have to worry.”  “I’m not like that,” he adds, and by “that” I think he means that he doesn’t listen to rap, doesn’t low ride, doesn’t do drugs, doesn’t hang out in the wrong part of town (wherever that is), doesn’t sprinkle the “f word” into every single sentence or use the “n word” as if it means nothing.  He seems to think that because he speaks standard English, goes to a good school, and has never gotten into any real trouble  he seems to think that these things will keep him safe in this world.

So the other night when the news was on, reporting on the shooting in Charleston, I turned to Theo and told him pointedly that that’s what I’ve been trying to tell him.  These people weren’t dealing drugs or smoking crack.  They weren’t being threatening or even ever so slightly disrespectful.  They weren’t listening to rap music.  Hell, they weren’t even wearing hoodies and eating skittles while walking in their own neighborhoods; they weren’t even driving!

Not that any of those things should make any real difference, but these folks were sitting in their church, studying the Bible, for God’s sake.  They’d been into it for a couple of hours when Dylan Roof joined them.  One of the survivors told him during his initial bond hearing the other day that they had welcomed him into their Bible study “with open arms, she said”  Another said, “we enjoyed you.”  Roof sat with them for as much as an hour … an hour … so there can’t be any possible doubt that he knew what kind of people he was about to shoot and try to kill; he knew that they weren’t “like that,” either.  I told Theo that the awful truth is that in this world, as it is now, it doesn’t matter who or how he is – who he knows himself to be, who his friends and family know him to be.  It doesn’t matter what kind of grades he gets at school, what kind of work ethic he has, or how much time he spends playing Minecraft on a PC he that he built himself.  All that matters, I told him, all that matters in some people’s eyes, is that he is black.  He’s black and, as Roof allegedly said, “taking over his country.”  His country. 

René Marie is a hardworking jazz singer who began her professional career at the age of 42.  She’s 59 now.  Back in 2008 she attracted both notoriety and acclaim when she was invited to sing the National Anthem at a civic event in Denver.  What made her rendition stand out wasn’t only her musicality.  It was her chutzpah.  She didn’t sing “Oh say can you see …” as everyone was expecting.  Oh, she sang the right tune, but she sang these words instead, “Lift every voice and sing / till earth and heaven ring. / Ring with the harmony /of liberty”  See what she did?  She’d combined the melody of United States’ National Anthem with the words of African American National Anthem.  And in that creative juxtaposition, and that creative tension, she created something truly magical.

I was listening to a recording of it in the car yesterday, while I was driving with Theo somewhere, and he looked over at me and said, “Dad, are you crying?”  And I was.  Barely controllably.  When the dynamic last lines of the music blends with the powerful last lines of the hymn’s first verse, it’s almost too much. “Facing the rising sun / of a new day begun / let us march on / till victory is won.”

Theo asked me why I was crying, and I really wasn’t sure what to say to him, so I said something lame like, “Racism sucks.”  But I was thinking about that so long sought, that so long hoped-for “victory” which we’ll know has be won when no one will any more be able to talk about the United States of America as “their country,” while excluding anyone from that collective pride of ownership.  The victory will be won when nobody – nobody – has to fear for their lives, or worry for their loved ones’, just because they’re out driving, or walking, or talking, or studying the Bible, or simply breathing … while black.  I cried because I was listening to an African American woman appropriating the tune of “The Star Spangled Banner” and using it so that the honor, the dignity, the pride that go with it might be claimed by those for whom such things have for so long been denied.  I cried because I could see a  vision of what might have been.  What should have been.

Let us march on ‘till victory is won.  It’s been such a long march already.  Starting with the landing of that first ship at Jamestown in 1619, carrying those “twenty and odd” kidnapped Africans, millions of African women, children, and men marched off those slave ships to be used, to be treated, to be seen as no more animals.   Sometimes not even that well.

It was a long march for the 100,000 or so who escaped enslavement and traveled north on the Underground Railroad, and for the 6 million who marched north and west in the two Great Migrations.  Then there’ve been the marches most of us think of, and many of us lived through – Selma to Montgomery, the March on Washington, the march for worker’s rights in Charleston, and so many others both large and small.  And today we’re we’re marching still – protest marches and funeral processions.  Always, it seems, the marching continues.

So many miles marched; so many miles to go.  On Friday, at that prayer service at the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church here, one of the preachers said in his prayer (and I’m paraphrasing), “How long must we continue to gather in response to events like the shooting in Charleston?  How long?  As long as it takes.”  Till victory is won.

PART III

There are debates among preachers.  Some say that you need to end every sermon on a note of hope and optimism; others say that there are times to leave people discomforted.  Some say that it is perfectly permissible to leave things unsettled, encouraging people to seek the answers for themselves. Others say that one needs to give concrete “next steps” for people to act on.  Well … today it’s my plan to try to do all of that.

So here’s some hope.  In response to the report that Roof had said he wanted to start a race war with his actions, Charleston residents – both direct and more indirect survivors,  both black and white and all of the shades in between – essentially said to him, and to all others who share his goals, that it isn’t going to happen.  It’s just not going to happen.  And not only that, but even while expressing the devastating consequences of his action in their own lives, many prayed that God would be merciful and that God might forgive him.  Some even said that they forgive him themselves.

Reminds me of the Amish community in Nickles Mine, Pennsylvania in 2006 who expressed forgiveness toward the gunman who’d entered their small schoolhouse and shot six little girls, killing five, before shooting himself.  Forgiveness.  And that even just some of those whose lives have been shattered by acts of unmitigated … well, “evil” is really the only word that makes sense to me … the fact that even just some of them have the ability to own both the fullness of their grief and stay true to their values is for me a powerful source of hope.  And those values are our values too, you know.  In her benediction last week the Rev. Alex McGee spoke these words:  return to no person evil for evil.  When  even for only a moment any of us are able to do that -- I have hope.

And yet … I really wasn’t kidding when I said that there are those who have become so twisted in their minds that they would really want to argue that this was not an act of racial hatred but an attack on Christianity.  Really?  Even if they don’t really believe it themselves, they believe that there are enough people out here who would believe it that they spew such spurious speculations as if they were facts.  If that doesn’t leave you unsettled, I don’t know what will.  There is so much denial.

Now, this whole sermon may well have made some of you uncomfortable all the way through it, so I can check that off my list.  And that leaves only my sending you forth with concrete steps you can take to resolve the issue we’ve been exploring.  A classic preacher’s ploy.  Except that we all know that there’s nothing we can do – certainly not individually, and not even collectively – that will end racism.  Write the word in the Sands of Forgiveness and Atonement and then wipe those sands clean and it’ll still be out there, and in here … part of the air we breathe as Americans.

But there are things you can do … that we can do.

Read.  Watch.  Listen.  And now I’m particularly talking to other white folk here.  There is no way for us to fully and truly know what it feels like to live a lifetime in the oppressive heat racism.  But we can learn from those who have no choice about it.  We can listen – and try to really hear – the experiences of those who’ve experienced things very different than what we have.  The world will look different through their eyes, and we – again, we white folk – must learn to expand our vision or all we will do is continue to perpetrate the system in which we live.  But we have to be willing to do the work for ourselves; it’s not fair, and it’s just not cool, to ask people of color to be our mentors in all of this.

So go to the Jefferson Legacies Library in the church parlor (and the big plaster bust of TJ) and borrow a book or three.  Read them; return them when you’re done, of course; and invite others to read them too and then discuss together what you’ve read.  Attend the films we offer here, or make a plan to watch them on your own via Netflix or just old-fashioned borrowing them.

Your Director of Faith Development and I are working to bring to TJMC in the fall a remarkable program out of Meadville Lombard Theological School, our seminary in Chicago.  The program is called “Beloved Conversations,” and it’s described as, “an experiential and evocative curriculum that provides a container for exploring the spiritual and intellectual dimensions of racism in our lives.”  It’s good.  It has been transformative elsewhere.  Let’s really engage it here.

For those who are looking for something immediately practical, on July 12^th, immediately following the Sunday service, there will be a gathering of some of us who are somewhere on the spectrum between “interested in” and “passionate about” seeing TJMC become more focusedly, more intentionally, more explicitly anti-racist and anti-oppression in our words and deeds, and more truly multicultural in our identity.  Not all who might want to will be able to attend this meeting, of course, but it is to be only the first of what should prove to be a very exciting year here next year.

There is energy behind initiating our Public Witness Process so that we might, as a congregation, get clear about what kind of public witness we are willing to make.  Could we hang a #BlackLivesMatter banner on the front of the building like our Marriage Equality banner?  Many of us think that we not only could, but that we should.  The process that was developed for making a public witness is intentionally slower than many think such things should be; it is intended to ensure that a truly congregation-wide and truly deliberative conversation takes place so that before we go out to speak with one voice we find out what we want to say.  In the meantime, I am going to take the prerogative you’ve given me to exercise responsibility for our common worship as the Lead Minister, to put a smaller one here in our sanctuary.  All lives matter, yes, of course.  Yet right now our nation needs and explicit and specific reminder that black lives matter.  I want all who enter this sacred space to know that we know.

And, of course, there’s an elephant in the room, isn’t there?  For years, now, we’ve wrestled in both formal and informal ways with the question of what it means for a liberal religious community in the city of Charlottesville, in the 21^st century, to be named after a man who thought it acceptable to own other people.  Jefferson said and did a great many things for which he should be deservedly praised, and of course no individual can be expected to live up to their ideals in all things, but we’re not talking about an indiscretion here or there.  So … what would it say to the surrounding community, what would it say to us who call this place home, what would it say about our reverence for the values of freedom and tolerance, what would it say about our abhorrence of slavery and modern-day racism, were we to change our congregation’s name?  What would it say if we were to intentionally choose to retain it?  This is a conversation we must take out of the parking lots, and the coffee shops – and our FaceBook page – so that we might all and fully participate.  It is that important – how we choose to identify ourselves and with whom and with what we choose to identify ourselves is that important.  One of the things we’ll be talking about at the July 12^th meeting will be how to structure a process that will help this conversation move forward.

One more thing – individually and as a congregation we need to get out there more.  Oh, some of us seem to be everywhere – Pete Armetta, Elizabeth Breeden, Edith Good, Jen Larimer, Frank and Linda Dukes, Bob Gross and Jean Shepherd, Greta Dershimer, and a host of others I’m no doubt forgetting in the moment.  We currently have a relationship with the Ebenezer Baptist Church, but there are other churches and organizations we could, and I’d say should, get to know better.  And we can collectively get better at practicing the four Ss of the work of being an ally – show up, sit down, shut up, and, when invited, stand up and be both counted and counted on.

My friends, I have talked now for far too long.  But these are things I’ve been needing to share; I hope they’ve been worth your hearing.  When I began to write I was definitely unsettled, despairing, even.  But as I thought about all the things we can do, all the things we’re planning to do, and all the things we’ve been doing for some time now, I began to feel hope.  Perhaps – well, definitely we won’t see an end to this in our lifetimes, but we can certainly be a part of its ending. To paraphrase Edward Everett Hale,

 We cannot do everything, but we can do something.  And because we cannot do everything we must not hesitate to do the something that we can. 

Let’s keep hoping, let’s keep praying, let’s keep working, let’s keep marching … till victory is won.

Amen, and amen.

Closing Words:  “If You Had Lived,” by Bernice Johnson Reagon  (annotated)

If you had lived with Denmark Vesey    

Would you take his stand?

If you had lived during the days of Nat Turner    

Would you fight his battles?

If you had lived during the days of John Brown     

Would you walk his path?                                     

If you had lived with Harriet Tubman    

Would you wade in the water?

If you had lived with Marcus Garvey    

Could you see his vision?

If you had lived during the days of Joe Hill    

Would you sing his song?

If you had lived during the days of Paul Robeson    

Would you live his life?

If you had lived with Sacco & Vanzetti    

Would you know their names?

If you had lived during the days of Scottsboro

Would you stand till the end?

If you had lived with the Rosenbergs    

Would you hold up your hands?

If you had lived with Fannie Lou Hamer    

Would you shine here light?

Where were you when they killed Malcolm?    

Do you hear?

Where were you when they killed Martin?    

Do you hear?

Where were you when they killed George Jackson?     

Do you hear them calling?                                            

Are you living today?

Are you fighting today?

Do you know our names?

Do you hear our cries?

"If You Had Lived" begins at about the 2 minute mark;
as an extra bonus this recording begins with "Biko"

The Wisdom of Our Elders

This is the sermon I preached on June 14th, 2015 at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, Virginia.  You can listen to the podcast.

Thinking about Alex’s ordination this afternoon has had me in something of a nostalgic mood for my own.  I watched the video of it the other night and was reminded of the charge given to me by my friend, mentor, and minister, the Rev. Ed Lane.  Now … Ed could easily have looked and sounded at home in a colonial Unitarian or Universalist church, and would be an easy casting choice for a movie company looking for a Captain Ahab.  Wonderful man.  Great minister.  And O what a voice!  On that afternoon twenty years ago, he ascended to the pulpit and said that he had been in the parish ministry for forty-eight years – with a twinkle in his eye he noted that that was a year longer than the preacher of the day had been alive.  Then looked directly at me to say:

“My first bit of advice to you, Erik, is this:  don’t try to be an old curmudgeon until you are one.”

I have tried to live my life by that advice.

I’ll admit that in general sermons are kind of difficult for me to write and to preach.  I often step up here and look out at a room of people whose collective wisdom astonishes me, and I think of the hubris it takes to say a word.  So many know so much more than me.  And none have lived any less; learned any less about what it means to be alive.  And as I sit before my blank piece of digital paper my mind often goes blank as well, thinking how challenging a task it is to try to mine my little life for a glimpse of wisdom when what I really want to do is sit down and listen to you.  Many of you do not realize this, of course, and will probably even want to disagree with me, but you have lived such lives!

This sermon, in particular, has been difficult knwoing that this is a topic that Arthur has thought about for a long, long time.  He has a real passion for it – elders and wisdom.  In fact, he even wrote a draft of a sermon for this morning, something I hope you’ll all stop by the church’s blog to read.  It’s worth it.  Go to thetalkoftjmc (all one word) at blogspot.com.  Look for it on Tuesday.

I think if I had to boil Arthur’s sermon down to one sentence it would be this –  “We treat elders as objects when they are our greatest untapped resource.”  This is key to understanding not only his sermon, but, I think, perhaps Arthur himself.  So let me say that again, “We treat elders as objects when they are our greatest untapped resource.”

Think about that.  Really think about that.  In the dominant culture of the United States it is thought that once you have reached your euphemistically called “golden years” you’ve really done just about all that you’re going to do.  We measure meaning by how productive one is, and one’s productive years are assumed to be long gone as our hair color, or the hair itself, begins to go.  So we treat elders, as Arthur says, as objects because the culture’s focus has turned to trying to satisfy the physical needs of old age.  Geezerhood, as several of you call it, is a time for you to settle back from all the hard work of your earlier years and to now receive – by which we mean receive help with a seemingly ever-increasing list of ailments and afflictions.  (You know, they say that the short term memory is the first thing to go … and so is the short term memory.)

That may be what the prevailing culture says, but I meet every other week or so with our incredible Active Minds group – the group of “over 65” folk who meet in the church parlor on Thursdays at 1:00 to talk about … well … to talk about all sorts of things.  Let me tell you, there absolutely are some active minds in that crowd and our conversations can become quite … wide-ranging in scope.  No mere objects in that room.  Or in this.

Would those of you who are over 65, and willing to do this sort of thing, please rise in body or spirit?  (This is something Arthur thought we should do today, and I agree.)  Now, will those of you still sitting look at those who are standing and ask yourself what you see … who you see.  And now will those of you who are standing look at those who are sitting … who do you see, and how do you think you’re seen?  (Thanks.  Y’all can sit.)

Arthur told me that he experiences our community as counter-cultural.  Most of us younger folks (and even those who see people like me as old) actually recognize the importance of the elders in our midst; recognize the gifts they have to offer; recognize the lessons one learns over the course of a lifetime and the perspective the long view offers.  (And perhaps that’s a pretty good definition of wisdom – lessons learned over a lifetime seen through a long-view perspective.)

Yet even here the ageist bias can rear its ugly head.  I remember meeting with the Active Minds group early on in my ministry because a group of church leaders was worried that perhaps we weren’t doing enough to support the church’s elders and that we were not providing real opportunities for their meaningful involvement in church life.  I was sent to ask the group what it thought – always a good idea when you’re thinking of doing something for someone – and the almost universal response was:  we’re okay.  They said, essentially, we were “meaningfully involved” for years and now we’re happy to leave all that hectic activity to the younger folks.  Yet with all the passion of someone who’s not really listening I kept trying, “but … but … but … you have so much to offer!”  Their response was, pretty much, to gently pat my hand and say, “that’s nice dear.”

I still wonder if we could be doing something differently.  I do wonder if there’s some way to tap what Arthur calls, “our greatest untapped resource.”  He’s thinking nationally, perhaps, but it’s certainly true at the local level to.  And yet within the last couple of weeks at an Active Minds meeting part of the conversation is how hard it is to even try to keep up with the announcements of all that’s going on here, much less overcome the myriad of obstacles to getting “meaningfully” involved.  It’s something to keep thinking about.

And part of what makes me want to keep thinking about it is an international project that always inspires me when I think of it.  It’s called, quite simply and quite appropriately for this morning’s sermon: “The Elders.”  Let me quote from their website:

The concept originates from a conversation between the entrepreneur Richard Branson and the musician Peter Gabriel. The idea they discussed was simple: many communities look to their elders for guidance, or to help resolve disputes. In an increasingly interdependent world - a ‘global village’ - could a small, dedicated group of individuals use their collective experience and influence to help tackle some of the most pressing problems facing the world today?

Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel took their idea of a group of ‘global elders’ to Nelson Mandela, who agreed to support it. With the help of Graça Machel [former Minister of Education and Culture in Mozambique] and Desmond Tutu [who needs no introduction], Mandela set about bringing The Elders together and formally launched the group in Johannesburg, July 2007.

And what a group they are.  In addition to the aforementioned Mandela, Machel, and Tutu, the Elders consists of:

• Former President of Finland and Nobel Peace Laureate  Martti Ahtisaari;
• Former member of the Indian Parliament and founder of India’s first women’s bank (sometimes called the “gentle revolutionary”), Ela Bhatt;
• Former UN Secretary-General, Nobel Peace Laureate and current Chair of The Elders, Kofi Annan;
• Former Algerian freedom fighter, Foreign Minister, conflict mediator and UN diploma, Lahkdar Brahimi;
• First woman Prime Minister of Norway and current Deputy Chair of The Elders, Gro Harlem Brundtland;
• Former President of Brazil, Fernando Cardoso;
• Former President of Mexico, Ernesto Zedillo
• Former President of the United States, Jimmy Carter;
• Pioneering lawyer, pro-democracy campaigner, and a leading activist in Pakistan's women's movement, Hina Jilani; and
• First woman President of Ireland and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson.

 Hardly a group of mere objects.  Hardly people put out to pasture.  Most definitely a powerful, global resource.  We don’t hear about their work much, but they are out there, all over the place, doing all sorts of great things.  (Google them.  You’ll be amazed.)  None hold political office now, yet they each have the experience, the connections, and the earned respect that lets them be in those places where we need … well … where we need the wisdom of an elder.  We don’t hear much about their work, which is a shame and probably a result of the prevailing culture of dismissiveness toward elders … even elders such as these.

Given the history of so many societies having councils of elders as an important and integrated part of their culture and practices, one can only wonder why this one group hasn’t spawned offspring everywhere.  Ageism is a prevalent aspect of modern societies through the globe; it’s not just here. 

And that may bring us right back around to the point that I think both Arthur and I want to make today, a point that perhaps can go without saying and which therefore may all the more need to be said:

Our inherent worth and dignity is not limited to the time of life when our hearing was good; usefulness and productivity are not synonyms; just because someone has lived a long life doesn’t mean that there isn’t life left to live.  The wisdom I see when I look around this room – and I would dare say especially looking at the white and greying hair in this room – is astounding to me. When I walked around schmoozing during our recent Elder’s Dinner I was truly in awe.  And you who were there, being looked at in awe by me and by the others who were serving, probably had no idea that you could engender such feelings.  But you did.  You do.

So … non-elders … when you look at those who are, wherever and whenever you encounter them, remember to open your eyes, your ears, your heart to their wisdom and the contributions they are still making and have still to make.  And you … elders … I encourage you to take the chance and the opportunity to share who you are and what you are.  The rest of us need what only you can offer.

Pas tecum,

RevWik

They Shall Beat Their Swords Into Plowshares

This is the text of the sermon delivered at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist.  You can listen to the podcast if you prefer to hear a sermon rather than read it.

Opening Words:

On this Memorial Day, as even those who abhor war pause to recognize those who’ve died in service to their country, we offer these as opening words.  They are adapted from Stephen Mitchell’s translation of chapter 31 of the Tao te Ching.

Exploration:

In a relatively recent movie that explores the potential dangers involved in too single-minded a pursuit of security no matter the cost, there’s a scene in which two battle-weary soldiers are talking.  They’ve both seen too much … been through too much.  They’re both questioning it all.  And one says to the other, “Isn’t that the mission?  Isn’t that the ‘why we fight’?  So we get to go home?”

Okay, so this was Iron Man talking to Captain America in the newest Avengers movie, but it sounds about right, doesn’t it?  My dad didn’t talk much about his service in World War II – he was a radar technician in the Navy – but he did say that the guys on the ships, and in the air, and on the ground weren’t thinking all that much about the big picture of the war.  It wasn’t geopolitics that had their attention, it was trying to survive … trying to survive this firefight or that long bout of boredom. 

Yes.  Absolutely.  No question.  The men and women who served in World War II wanted to defeat the Axis powers – they believed that they were the good guys and that they were trying to stop the bad guys – but mostly they just wanted to be able to go home.  They wanted everyone to be able to go home.  Not everyone could, of course.  Not everyone did.  That’s why we have Memorial Day.

“The War to End All Wars,” that’s what World War I was called.  President Woodrow Wilson is often credited with the phrase but it’s really H.G. Wells we have to thank.  A collection of articles he’d written in the Times of London was titled, The War That Will End War, and later he used a shortened version, calling the campaign “the war to end war.”    British Prime Minister David Lloyd George is reputed to have been a little more pessimistic, saying, “This war, like the next war, is the war to end war.” 

Sounds a little oxymoronic when you say it that way, doesn’t it?  But don’t you think that that’s somewhere in the minds of most of the people who are doing the fighting?  (And the dying?)  This war will bring peace in our time.  This war will put a stop to all those unconscionable atrocities.  This war will ensure that our nation is safe.  (And maybe all nations?)  This war … and then I can go home.  Then I can go home and we all can go home.  And we’ll never have to do this again.

Maybe that’s one of the ways faith, our theme for the month, gets into our conversation this morning.  The soldiers’ faith that the war they’re fighting has meaning.  That the danger they are putting themselves into is worth it.  The faith that if they were to die in this battle, in this war, they would not be dying in vain.

And there’s the faith too, I suppose, that those around them have their back.  Faith in their comrades, faith in their training, faith in the skill of their leaders, faith that they will somehow get out of it all alive.  Faith that they’ll ultimately get to go home.

Which is certainly the faith on the home front.  Anyone who has seen a loved one go into war knows that they can’t let themselves think too much about the dangers she or he will be facing.  It would be too much, unbearable.  So they hold on to the faith that they will see their daughter, mother, sister, son, brother, father, friend again.  Faith in the face of war.

I think we can agree that at least among the people who are actually called on to fight our wars, nobody – or, at least, next to nobody – really likes war, really wants war.  Even those who concede a need for war are, in the final analysis, hoping for peace. 

You’ve no doubt heard the phrase, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares.”  It’s found in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Book of Isaiah, in a passage where the prophet is describing a future in which the people of the world all come to God’s holy mountain to seek out the guidance and leadership of the God of Jacob: 

“And [God] will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.”

Let’s “unpack” that a bit.  First, notice that a reason for the change that’s being described here is that God is now in the driver’s seat.  God, a higher authority, will be settling disputes among peoples.  No more petty squabbling and limited self-interest.  Nations won’t any longer be trying to save face, or protect strategic oil reserves, or show the world how tough they are.  Instead, God will be judging between nations and will be settling disputes among peoples. 

Now, for those of us who don’t find the word “God” all that relevant or meaningful, remember that our Universalist ancestors would remind us that God is Love – “God” is just another word for “Love.”  So Isaiah could have been saying that it’ll be Love that is judging between the nations, and Love that will be settling disputes.  Love will be in the driver’s seat.  And as Jimi Hendrix told us, “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”

But there’s something else going on here, too.  As Adam and I were bouncing ideas around we noticed what seemed to us to be an important word – they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.  It doesn’t say that their swords and spears will magically disappear or somehow be transmogrified into plows and pruning hooks.  No, the passage says that the people will beat them into their new form.  I looked at nearly twenty different translations, and the verb to beat is used in all but six of them.  Two use hammer – they shall hammer their swords into plowshares – which is much the same thing; one says that they will forge their swords into plowshares; and two simply say that the people will turn the one into the other. 

Yet whether the people hammer, forge, or beat their swords to turn them into plowshares it is clear that it is not going to be an easy process.  It’s going to be work.  Hard work.  Call up in your mind the image of a blacksmith – the forge hot and smoky, the hammer heavy, and the metal hardly malleable.   Listen to the clanging of the hammer and anvil, the sound of the bellows as they blow air into the fire, the crackle as the coals are heated, and the shhhhhhhh as the hot metal is put into the cold water to harden it.  Feel the heat and the ache in your arms and back; smell the smoke and the sweat.  They shall beat their swords into plowshares.  It’s not going to be easy.

Adam caught still one more nuance – they shall beat their swords into plowshares.  This vision isn’t of a world in which people have put down their swords and taken up their plows.  They haven’t created a cache of weapons “just in case” even though they’re now focused on their farming tools.  This is the end of all wars because the people will have beaten their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.  There are no more weapons.  They’re gone.  No longer needed.

Adam shared with me a lyric from a song in the musical Rent: "The opposite of 'war' isn't 'peace', it's 'creation'."  Listen to that again:  The opposite of war isn’t peace … it’s creation.  The absence of war isn't enough in itself. It's simply a foundation upon which to build other things.  New things.  Life-giving things in the place of life-taking things.  Creation in place of destruction.  The swords have been re-forged, beaten, into new forms, and these new forms are tools of creation.

But that’s not what we see happening around us, is it?  It seems, instead, that we are turning our plowshares into swords.  And we’ve been doing so for more than a while.  It was over 60 years ago that Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a speech, only three months into his Presidency, that has come to be known by the name “A Chance for Peace.”  It includes these now nearly immortal words:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this [and remember that this was in 1953]: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

And yet we continue to turn our plowshares into swords.  And we keep on studying war.

There’s one cost, though, that Eisenhower left out.  The most important, really.  Humanity’s hunger for the tools of destruction costs not just the sweat of laborers, the genius of scientists, the hopes of children – it costs the lives of the women and men who are called on to use those tools as they fight our wars.  Young women and young men, mostly, who should have had long lives ahead of them.  “Virgins with rifles,” Sting calls them in his song Children’s Crusade.  And far, far too many never come home.

Even many of those who do come home do so with such devastating physical and mental wounds that the person they were when they left is not the person who comes home.  And you know that you only have to turn on your TV, radio, or computer for just a little while to learn about some new study revealing ever more inexcusable treatment – or, maybe better, non-treatment – of the women and men who have given so much – and had so much taken – in the service of our country.

However much you or I want to live in a world at peace, we live in a world at war.  There’s a factoid that’s been making the rounds saying that the United States has been involved in war for 222 out of the 239 years since 1776.  That means we’re at war 93% of the time, or that we’ve only been at peace for a total of 21 years since our founding. However much you or I want to live in a world at peace, we live in a world at war. 

Yet we needn’t give up hope.  We can choose to renew our faith; renew our efforts.  In the 8^th century BCE a Jewish prophet gave us a vision the fulfillment of which can fuel our aspirations:

“The people will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.”

On this Memorial Day let us remember those who were never able to get back home, and pray for the day when no one will evermore have to.  And let us fire up the forge – we’ve got some beating to do.

Closing Words:  The Young DeadSoldiers, by Archibald MacLeash

We Never Know

The supervisor of my chaplaincy training advised us to never assume that we know, as we enter a patient's room, how that person is feeling about their situation.  I learned this most memorably from a woman who was in the unit of the hospital for women facing some kind of serious complication in their pregnancy.  I entered her room expressing empathetic concern for her situation, asking how she was doing.  "Me?" she said with a genuine sense of happy contentment.  "I'm fine!"  She went on to say that she had three other kids at home, and that this opportunity to put her feet up for a length of time with no one making any demands on her ... well ... let's just say she wasn't complaining any.  She told me that she figured the health issues would work themselves out one way or the other, so she really wasn't too worried about that.  In the meantime, she was going to enjoy the peace and quiet.

Not what I was expecting, and a great reminder that you never know.

As marriage equality becomes ever more the law of the land, many gay and lesbians couples are choosing to get legally married.  And these weddings, as is true of most heterosexual weddings, have been a source of joy for them, their family and friends.  They even bring joy to the hearts of all those who have long advocated for equal marriage rights for all, whether they know the couple or not.  I recently realized, though, that even here I shouldn't assume a simply celebratory attitude about these weddings.  Things are almost always more complicated than that.

Some of my friends have been in committed partnerships for decades.  Some have had their unions blessed by a religious tradition, and for some the blessing has come through their own love and the love of those in their close communities.  These couples are no less "bound together" than any heterosexual who has had their "marriage" recognized by church and state.

So along with the joy, and in some cases disbelief, that these couples feel at the reality that they can now get "officially" married may well be the pain that they have to now get officially married.  And by this I don't mean that they feel compelled to get married in a legally sanctioned way but, instead, that if they want to have their union legally recognized they have to get married again.

The (still new) opportunity to "get married" is also a reminder that in the eyes of many, and of the state, they haven't been.  It was one more reminder, one more example, of the way(s) their relationships have been devalued and dismissed.  I honestly can't imagine what that has felt, and still feels, like, but I do imagine that it is a lot more complicated than a simple, "Wee!  Now we can get married!"

I want to be clear -- the right to be married has always belonged to both homosexual and heterosexual couples.  It's just that that right has long been denied to couples of the same sex.  These couples who have made formal commitment to one another have always been married.  It's just that their marriages have not been recognized by the majority culture.  It's not that same-gender couples are now suddenly free to do something they've never been able to do before, it's that the heterosexual majority has finally caught up with reality.  We -- heterosexual allies -- can be forgiven for merely celebrating this "victory."  But how can we imagine that this is not more complex for our gay and lesbian friends and family?

Those of us who are part of the majority culture, the dominant culture, the culture that sets the rules -- whether by being straight, or white, or cis-gender (and, especially, cis-gender male), or all of the above -- have the privilege of seeing only what we expect to see.  It's important for us to remember that we truly never know what it's like for someone else when we enter their room.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Can UUs Believe Anything We Want?

This is the text of a sermon (and preparatory remarks) delivered at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, Virginia on Sunday, May 3rd, 2015.  If you'd like, you can listen to the podcast.



Arthur Rashap's Preparatory Thoughts

“You are out of your mind!” “You are out of your mind!” Think of the times you have said that to others – or someone has said that to you. What did they mean? What did you mean? Probably, that what was said was not rationale. It didn’t make “sense” intellectually to your mind or to the mind of the person who said that to you.

The instructions for doing proper meditation practices these days involve being ‘mindful.’ And, if truly the goal is to let go, to release the involvement with getting lost in what was, with planning for the future – to ‘be here and now’ then wouldn’t a better instruction, a better practice be to be mindless?

Our topic for exploration today is ‘faith.’ In the Worship Weaver discussions with Rev. Erik, it was pretty hard to get our minds, our thoughts, around defining what faith is. When you walk into this Church, the pamphlet rack is full of brochures relating to the faith of a variety of religions and topics. As Erik will discuss, there is a big difference between what you believe and what you end up taking on faith.

About 11 years ago, I took a year-long course to become an Empowerment Trainer, with the goal to understand how to help guide participants in identifying goals in their lives and processes to achieve such goals – basically looking at the question: “if you could have your life exactly as you want it, what would it look like?” The basic process mirrored nature’s processes in producing a flower or a vegetable – clearing the ground, preparing it, planting the appropriate seed, nurturing it as it grows, removing the weeds, reacting to all those things that come up in the growing process, etc.

Looking back at my notes and to the page that fell open, here are some of the things I wrote:

“The less you do, the more you can accomplish. You need to bring in more of the right brain acknowledging that you still need your left brain to have the information for day-to-day living. The ‘knowing’ we are talking about here is having less of ego/personalization, and allowing other elements to enter and be present. The process is called: ‘getting out of the way.’ To really be empowered or empower another, you come from an implicit faith that the person herself knows the answers – that every human being knows what they need and want.

It is not for the leader, the teacher, the facilitor, the minister to ‘fix’ them. That is the saboteur, the devil in processing. Their function is one of midwifery – to bring into being the answers, the true life that lies within. The facilitator needs to be as empty as possible, while being actively engaged. Meeting the person exactly where they are, showing up to challenge them, to fix them, doesn’t work.

So how to work on our egos? To empty ourselves? To become mindless and take the leap into faith? To begin with, have a spiritual practice, whatever that may be. For a muscle to get strong, it needs exercise and the same goes for spirituality. The goal is to arrive at detached compassion, without this, life you grab you in any way. To become empty requires a lot, to have great courage and dedication.

Rumi wrote: Live at the empty heart of paradox. I will dance cheek to cheek with you there. Reality is a constant juxtaposition. Every system is so fraught with paradox, that you can easily lose your way.

Erik will be exploring this subject in his special way in a minute. Both he and I recently found we have been reading and enjoying the words and approach of a Franciscan Monk named Richard Rohr. He sends out daily meditations that I do recommend to you.

I have edited somewhat the meditation from this past Wednesday which he adopted from two of his books: Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer, and Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality:

"Spiritual Knowing Must Be Balanced by Not-Knowing"  As the Christian church moved from bottom to top, protected and pampered by the Roman Empire, a number of followers of Jesus and some early monks went off to the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria to keep their freedom and to keep growing in the Spirit. They found the Church's newfound privilege--and the loss of Jesus' core values--unacceptable.  It was in these deserts that a different mind called contemplation was first perfected and taught. They came to see that they could understand spiritual things properly through contemplation alone. The Desert Fathers and Mothers gave birth to what we call the apophatic tradition, knowing by silence, symbols, and not even needing to know with words. It amounted to a deep insight into the nature of faith that was eventually called the "cloud of unknowing" or the balancing of knowing with not needing to know.  Deep acceptance of what has been call “ultimate mystery” is ironically the best way to keep the mind and heart spaces always open and always growing. It really does "work"! Today scientists might call it moving forward by theory and hypothesis. This enables you to be always ready for the next new discovery.  Admittedly, we do need enough knowing to be able to hold our ground. And the offerings at this Church and in other involvements you have - do provide a container and structure in which you can safely acknowledge that you do know a bit, and in fact just enough to hold you until you are ready for a further knowing. In the meantime you happily exist in what some have called docta ignorantia or "learned ignorance." People in this state tend to be very happy and they also make a lot of other people happy. And we are all burdened by "know-it-alls." It is amazing how religion has turned this biblical idea of faith around to mean the exact opposite: into a need and even a right to certain knowing, complete predictability, and perfect assurance about whom God likes and whom God does not like. It seems we think we can have the Infinite Mystery of God in our quite finite pocket.  We know what God is going to say or do next, because we think our particular denomination has it all figured out. In this schema, God is no longer free but must follow our rules and our theology. If God is not infinitely free, we are in trouble, because every time God forgives or shows mercy, God is breaking God's own rules and showing shocking (but merciful) freedom and inconsistency! Perhaps Brother Rohr is suggesting that when it comes to faith, being ‘out of our mind’ is not such a bad thing.

RevWik's Reflections:
I’m sure that some of what Arthur just said would be very difficult for the average – or, at least, the stereotypical – Unitarian Universalist.  And I’m not talking about the explicit “God talk.”  “Cloud of Unknowing?”  “Balancing knowing with not needing to know?”  “Learned ignorance?”  Oh, we Unitarian Universalists – again, at least the stereotype of us Unitarian Universalist – really don’t do all that well with not knowing, not understanding, not at least trying to know and understand.  The search for truth and meaning and all that.

We are – historically, generally speaking – rationalists.  Many of us, if not most of us, believe most firmly, most strongly, in what we can see, hear, taste, and touch.  We like facts.  Hard facts.  [Like this pulpit here – solid.  Real.]  In this year’s Wednesday Wonderings group we’ve been reading our way through a book written in the late 1940s by the Universalist preacher Clinton Lee Scott, which he adapted from radio addresses he’d given.  The book’s title is Religion Can Make Sense – and his fundamental stance is that Universalism is a religion that “makes sense,” that is attuned to the world as it is, and by this he means the world as it is revealed to us by science and not as described in myth.

Yet today, because of science, we know that the “hard fact” of this real and solid pulpit is, in fact, not so hard at all.  What we perceive – see, hear, touch – to be solid is actually a swirling mass of energy with far more empty space in it than matter.  And the same is true of us.  We, too, are a concentration of energy, given solid form by perception, nothing more.  Science tells us that we live in a universe in which particles pop into and out of existence on a quantum foam, and where Schrödinger’s cat can be both alive and dead simultaneously.  What we perceive as empty space all around us is filled with molecules of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and carbon dioxide.  And there are light waves, infrared waves, radio waves, and as Richard Feynman said, all of these are really real.

So what do you believe – that this pulpit is solid and that this hand is solid and that each is distinct from the other, or that when I put this constellation of energy (my hand) on this swirling pool of energy (the pulpit) the distinctions between the two blur?  Do you believe that you are distinct, individuated, independent, or that you and I and all that is are dynamically and fundamentally interdependent, made of the very same stuff?

A Buddhist teacher once told me that the waves of the ocean each think themselves separate and unique, yet the ocean knows that there is nothing but ocean. What do you believe?

And I ask that both as something for you to ponder, and as a rhetorical device to lead us into the question I want us to explore this morning:  “Can a Unitarian Universalist believe anything she or he wants to?”  This is something that’s often said of us, you know.  “Unitarian Universalists … well … they can believe anything they want.”  We even say it of ourselves sometimes.  “One of the great things about being a UU is that you can believe anything you want!”  And it’s true to the extent that there is no Higher Authority dictating what we must believe in order to be a UU.  There is no creed or dogma to which we must assent to belong.

This, then, hardly seems like a topic worthy of our examination.  The answer is obvious!  Of course!  Of course a UU is free to believe whatever she or he wants to believe!

And yet …

And yet someone will usually come up with the retort, “But what about a member of the modern Nazi party, or a member of the Klu Klux Klan, or the Westboro Baptist Church?  Could they believe what they believe and still be welcome here?” 

Now that is precisely the kind of conundrum that, as the Oracle said to Neo, will really “bake your noodle.”  On the one hand, people in our faith tradition are freed from the necessity of believing any particular thing, yet it does seem as though we’re not open to just any thing a person might believe.  Where do we draw that line?  How do we draw that line?

How about someone who believes in shamanic journeying?  Of life after death?  Or multiple lives?  Or channeled teaching?  Would people with these beliefs be welcomed here?

How about that Jesus is not just a great guy who had some good ideas but was, in fact, a manifestation of God and that he not just was but still is?  Or that God is real?  Or that there is no such thing as that to which the word “God” is meant to point?

I can tell you from my direct experience that there are UUs, there are members of TJMC, who hold each one of these beliefs.  And I know of folks who think them extremely odd for doing so.  Can you believe anything you want to here?

Let’s step back for a moment and try to clear something up.  A lot of people conflate the ideas of belief, on the one hand, and faith, on the other.  A lot of people use the words interchangeably, as if they were synonyms.  “What is your faith?”  “I believe in God.”  “How strong is your faith?”  “I believe, I believe, I believe …”

The trouble is … they’re not the same thing.  Look at it this way: belief is an intellectual proposition, it’s something that you think; faith, on the other hand, is something that you do.  Faith is living in the world as if you believed what you say you believe.  Let me say that again:  faith is living in the world as if you believed what you say you believe.

There are people who say that they believe in God and that God will never give you more than you can handle, yet when things get rough they act as though there’s no way they could ever possibly handle all that’s come their way.  There are people who say that they believe people are fundamentally good, yet who feel more than a little anxious and, so, cross the street when the see a stranger coming toward them.  Belief is easy.  Faith is hard.

And it’s hard, at least in part, because our minds are smart enough to know that accidents can happen.  We know that we could be wrong about that thing we believe, whatever it is.  I had a philosophy professor who said that a philosopher can only say that she knows something when she is absolutely certain.  How often does that happen?  I mean not a doubt in the world, absolutely no possibility that you’re wrong, 100% solid? How often does that happen?    As a friend of mine used to say a lot, “you could always get hit by a bus on the way home.”

And so our protective little egos – which think that it’s their job to protect us from, I don’t know, death or, maybe even worse, looking foolish – our protective little egos throw up a dust storm of doubt just as we’re about to take that leap of faith.  And so we come to a screeching halt and find ourselves poised precariously at the peak of a precipice, and our sneaky little ego says, “I told you so.”  “You may not have faith,” it says to us a little later, “but at least you can content yourself with all the good things you believe.”

Putting your beliefs into practice.  Trusting your beliefs.  Living in the world as if you believed what you say you believe.  That, my friends, is faith.  And we’ve been told time and time again that faith can move mountains.

So how do we bypass our all-too rational egos so that we might take that leap?  Richard Rohr, in that passage Arthur read earlier, spoke of a kind of knowing that makes use of “silence, symbols, and not even needing to know with words.”  That’s a start.  Going even further, Arthur himself talked about how our being “out of our mind” might not be such a bad thing.  When I was writing my first book – Teacher, Guide, Companion – Mary Benard, the incredible editor I was blessed to have been working with, had a whole lot of suggestions for me of things I really ought to change.  She was usually right.  But I held my ground on one sentence, because I thought that poetry should trump grammar:

“… you must be willing to loose your mind [she’d wanted me to change that to “lose”], to loosen the vice grip of the sensible and rational in order to allow the imaginative and intuitive ways of knowing to come to bear.”

That “vice grip of the sensible and the rational” is what gets in the way for so many of us when we try to live into our faith.  Yet that’s exactly what we need to do.  Because faith trumps belief every time – it’s not our beliefs that matter, it’s the way we live our lives; it’s not what we think that counts most, it’s what we do.

During our newcomer orientations I often say that one of the things that makes Unitarian Universalism unique is that our first question isn’t, “what do you believe?”  Instead, we ask “what kind of world do you want to live in?”  We ask, “how do you – or how do you want to – live your life?”  In other words, we ask about your faith.

And it is our faith that brings us together – our faith that this is a beautiful world, and that all things that live on or in it are deserving of respect; our faith that love is strong and that we should reach out to others, ever widening the circle of inclusion; our faith in hope, that no matter how much to the contrary things might seem, there is always a way.

Can a UU believe anything she wants?  Of course, because to us the question of belief is merely interesting – a chance to get to know one another better and, perhaps, see the world through a different lens.  The real question, what matters to us most, the “so what” of all this is the vision of the world all these differing beliefs point us toward, and the ways we put our oh so lovely beliefs into action. 

None of us will do this perfectly.  I know I sure can’t.  Yet if none of us can then we each don’t have to worry so much whenever we, ourselves, get stuck on the edge, unable to leap.  And that’s why places like TJMC exist – so that we can help each other; and remind each other; and reach out to one another; and support, and celebrate, and encourage one another.  Be there for one another.

So please, own and honor your beliefs – whatever they are and however … odd … they might seem to me or to anyone else.  And then, with me, with us, try to put them into practice.  The world doesn’t need more believers but, rather, more people of faith.  May we, at least some of the time, be those people.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Riots or Uprisings ...

In 1784 Thomas Jefferson published his Notes on the Sate of Virginia.  In his chapter on slavery he proposes that slaves should be emancipated and then put on boats and sent back to Africa.  He rhetorically asks himself "Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave?"  He then answers himself with these words:

"Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."

Take a moment to read that again.  Isn't this what we're seeing in Baltimore, and Seattle, and Chicago, and Ferguson?  "Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites" coming up against "the thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained," along with "new provocations"?

Malcolm X said:

"If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, that's not progress.  If you pull it all the way, that's not progress.  The progress comes from healing the wound that the blow made.  They haven't begun to pull the knife out, much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there."

Some are beginning to say that we should really think of these "riots" as "uprisings."  Angry people, with "the thousand recollections of the injuries they have sustained [along with] new provocation," are responding not just to any particular specific instance of injustice, but to all they have endured and continue to endure.  Some are responding with control and strategy; others with unbridled rage run rampant.

I've also seen on the Internet this summation of the situation:  Black people are literally saying "Stop killing us!"  And there are people saying "But ..."  I can't imagine -- as a white person I really can't imagine -- how that feels.  But I can't imagine that it doesn't count as a "new provocation."

So what are we to do?  I guess that depends on who we mean by "we."  On April 29th, Salon.com published Julia Blount's article (originally posted on her FaceBook page) "Dear white FaceBook friends:  I need you to respect what Black America is feeling right now."  We -- and by this I mean white Americans -- could begin by reading things like this.  The Unitarian Universalist blogger Kenny Wiley has written some wonderful things on his blog "A Full Day."  (His perspective, by the way, is that of an African American Unitarian Universalist millennial male.)  For a brutally honest big picture view of the background to what's happening pick up Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow:  mass incarceration in the age of color blindness.

Better than -- or, perhaps, in addition to -- reading is talking with people.  Again, to the primarily white folk who read this blog, talk with people of color you know.  And maybe better than "talk to" would be "listen to."  Listen to what they are thinking and feeling about all of this.  (And by "this" I don't mean just Baltimore, nor even just issues of police violence and the inequities of our justice system.  I mean anything having to do with the ways people of color and whites are treated differently from one another -- that thing called "systemic racism.")

If you don't know any people of color, you could talk with other white people.  But don't allow the conversation to fall into easy assumptions.  Question and, then, question again.  Challenge -- both the person with whom you're talking and yourself -- to see things from outside of your experiences of "normal."  Try to imagine the issues from as many different perspectives as you can.  Push yourselves to try to make sense of the things you can't understand and defend things you disagree with.  Broaden your perspective.

If you don't have people of color in your life with whom you can talk about these things ... ask yourself, "Why?"  See if there are things in the way you're living your life that are keeping you from making connections with African Americans, Latino & Latina Americans, Asian Americans (which, of course, encompasses a widely dispirit group of folks!).  Look for ways to begin putting yourself into situations where you can meet folks who don't look like, think like, you.  Tread lightly here, naturally.  You certainly don't want to create a single, token, "Black Friend."  Nor do you want to too soon assume the intimacy and trust that talking about race-related issues with someone of a different race requires.

For a moment I'm going to directly address Unitarian Universalists;  If you're a FaceBook user you might want to check out UUs Resisting New Jim Crow & Mass Incarceration, and Allies for Racial Equity.  (Consider joining that later one!)  For all of us: are you yet a member of the NAACP or the National Urban League?  Things to think about ...

Is what we're seeing in Baltimore and elsewhere a case of "riots" or is it an "uprising"?  I think the answer to that will rest mostly on our -- white -- shoulders.  Our brothers and sisters of color are giving voice to their outrage, their grief, their anger, and their exhaustion.  If it is to be more than that -- if it is to be a full-bodied, long-lasting assault on "the way things are," then it's going to take the involvement of those who most benefit from "the way things are."  As this blog puts it so well:  racism is a white problem.  But maybe, just maybe, we can come together not just to calm this violence but to eradicate its root cause and, so, avoid Jefferson's predicted, "convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."

RevWik