I recently had the privilege (and good fortune) of being asked to read and review the Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd's new book, After the Good News: progressive faith beyond optimism (Skinner House Books). I was going to read it anyway -- Nancy is one of my favorite Unitarian Universalist writers -- so I was excited to know even before I'd even started I had already been asked for my opinion!
After the Good News is easily one of the most important books I’ve read in a long time – it should be required reading for every religious professional (ordained or otherwise) who is serving a faith community that considers itself liberal or progressive, as well as each and every member. In fact, after reading just her Introduction I found myself seeing the liberal tradition I serve with new eyes, and challenged to change because of it.
With her usual self-depreciating humor, solid scholarship, and a willingness to prophetically challenge people she so clearly loves (among whom she explicitly includes herself), Nancy lays out the roots and present ramifications of the,
“oft-unacknowledged arc of history that doesn’t seem quite so triumphant; a narrative of the liberal church that stands counter to the rampart-holding optimism we proclaim in our most stirring hymns.”
In cogent and lucid prose she makes sense of the confounding resistance to efforts for real change experienced even among congregations that are calling for it. She makes clear why it is so difficult for so many people in liberal and progressive faith communities to recognize and acknowledge ourselves (particularly those of us who identify or are identified as white) as participating in and perpetuating the very systems and structures of white supremacy we are so committed to ending (even if unconsciously and unwittingly). In fact, she explains that it is our very enthusiastic optimism and faith in the vision of "Beloved Community," important as it is, that can make us oblivious to the luxury, the privilege we have to keep ourselves at a distance from the reality of the suffering oppression has caused historically and causes still.
Yet After the Good News does not simply convict liberal and progressive religious traditions for their inability to recognize their own complicity in maintaining the injustices we would end. It also provides a pathway by which these traditions can evolve beyond their past in order to live more fully into the vision of Beloved Community we espouse.
“If liberal religion is to step into a future of engaged, anti-oppressive work,” she writes, “we will be called to serve not only because others are broken or the system is broken, but because, as Bryan Stevenson says, ‘I am broken too.’”
The empowering and inspiring vision is important, yet Nancy calls us to move beyond our ingrained optimism and to recognize the work of liberation as not just for those who have been marginalized by society, but for us all. As the Indigenous Australian academic, artist, and activist Lilla Watson has written,
"If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is tied up with mine, then let us work together."
To do this will be hard, painful, and disorienting, and Nancy is clear about how challenging this transformation will be. Ultimately, though, she is hopeful because of her faith in, and very obvious love of, the people who make up these liberal/progressive traditions. After the Good New delivers a prophetic message that will be extremely difficult for some to receive, yet which is fundamentally a message of hope. After reading it, my hope is renewed and deepened as well.
"The question is not whether we believe in resurrection
but whether we have known it --
known it in our own lived experience,
seen it in the lives of others,
felt it in the world around us."
For the last two decades or so, on the Sunday the majority of Christians celebrate Easter, every congregation I have served has held a service titled, "A Rite of Spring: An Eastertide Celebration in Two Acts." It is a visually rich service of readings and hymns, much like many Christmas Eve services, an it is one of the things from my time as a parish minister of which I am most proud. I think it is an authentic expression of Unitarian Universalism -- both our message and our method.
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Back in 2016 I posted the text of "A Rite of Spring." It is a very different thing to read the text without being able to see the roughly 100 images that are projected throughout or to experience the beauty of the hymns. Still, even by themselves I think the words are worth considering. If you're interested, here is the link:
This is the text of the reflection I offered on Sunday, April 7, 2019 at the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia.
It was just after 6:00 in the evening on Thursday, April 4th.*The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had arrived in Memphis just the day before.His plane out of Atlanta had been delayed because of a bomb threat, but he’d made it there in time to speak as scheduled at Bishop Charles Mason Temple.The address he gave that night has come to be known by the name “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” because of what he said at its end:
“I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”
The next day, and at the age of only 39, he was dead.
On April 4th, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stepped out onto the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Hotel.He’d not only stayed in this hotel before, but he and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy had stayed in that exact same room so many times that it was colloquially known as “the King-Abernathy suite.”It was a chilly evening.Jesse Jackson had just told Dr. King that he really should take a coat with him, and King had teased Jackson about how casually the later was dressed.As he walked out room 306, Dr. King asked one of the musicians who’d be playing that night to “make sure [to] play ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’ … [and to] play it real pretty.”
The day had been tense.A federal judge had issued a restraining order against the march that had been scheduled for that coming Monday in support of striking sanitation workers, the reason King was in Memphis.Throughout that Thursday, leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been in court, arguing to have the injunction lifted.The city said it was worried about violence; SCLC reiterated its commitment to non-violence.Right around 4:30 Judge Bailey Brown issued his ruling lifting the ban and allowing the march to go forward.By about 5:00, Andrew Young had returned to the Lorraine to deliver the good news.Yet perhaps because of all the tension that had been building up a fight broke out – a pillow fight!That’s right.Just before he was murdered by a bigot’s bullet, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his companions had been giddy, having a pillow fight and worrying about whether or not to take a coat against the evening chill.
And then a single bullet fired from a bathroom window in a boarding house across the street brought an end to the levity. Dr. King lay in a pool of his own blood.An hour later he would be dead.
One year, as I prepared to lead this service, I was feeling a bit of despair.A lot of despair, actually.Maybe you’ve felt this kind of despair, too:despair that so many people have been killed, are being murdered, simply because they were trying to make the world a better place.So many, oh so many who, like anybody, would have liked to have lived a long life. (“Longevity has its place.”)So many people who knew full well the dangers that you face, and that face you, when you are working for real change, yet who refused to be “concerned about that.”At least not so concerned that they let it stop them.I was despairing – and I expect at times you have too – because of just how often, despite their courageous commitment, they were stopped by a gun, or a knife, or a fist.
I’m honest, I wasn’t just feeling despair; I was also feeling hopeless.Who here this morning hasn’t felt that sometimes, too?That night the future looked to me bleak, and my hope for change was weak.The promise of justice rolling down like an ever-flowing stream felt like an empty promise, because those who want things to stay just like they are seem to always be able to build a bigger damnable dam.(Or, if you would prefer, a “wall.”)If preachers are supposed to inspire hope, to provide uplifit, I surely didn’t know how I was going to do it that night.As the choir just sang,** I was asking myself:
Will justice ever roll down?
Will justice ever roll down?
Hope that calls in vain,
So much hurt and pain,
Sorrow all around...
Have you ever asked that?Have you ever felt a sense of futility in all this work for change?
That evening my wife – wise woman that she is (except for that one time when she for some unfathomable reason said, “yes”) – suggested to me that I was looking at the wrong thing.Yes, the list of people who have been martyred in the name of justice is agonizingly long.And yes, their example of sacrifice – their willing sacrifice – should never be forgotten.Yet, she reminded me, the list of people who those sacrifices have inspired, who are working right now, or who lived out their lives in service to that vision of a better world … well that list is really, really long.
I believe it was that same year that I came across this cartoon.“The odd thing about assassins, Dr. King,” a seated Mahatma Gandhi is saying to a standing Dr. King, “is that they think they’ve killed you.”I truly do not mean to be flip, but I can’t help thinking of Obi-Wan saying to Vadar, “If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.” “The odd thing about assassins, Dr. King, is that they think they’ve killed you.”A verse in Peter Gabriel’s song Biko puts it like this: “You can blow out a candle, but you can’t put out a fire.Once the flames begin to catch, the wind will blow it higher.”The guns, the knives, the fists are strong enough to stop a person, yet not so strong as to stop a vision.In fact, they seem to always end up amplifying it.
In the fantastic film Gandhi – which if you haven’t seen you should go home and watch it this afternoon … this evening at the latest – there is a scene in which Gandhi is speaking to people who will be participating in a demonstration of satyagraha (the “insistent holding on to truth” which is the power of non-violent action).He acknowledges that there will be risks, saying:
“They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me – then they will have my dead body, not my obedience.”
And when the assassin’s bullets took his life, they did not take his commitment, his passion, his spirit of justice-seeking.And neither was Dr. King’s faith in that “moral arc of the universe,” bending “toward justice,” his belief in the inevitability of victory, his unshakable certainty of the arrival of all people in the “promised land” he saw from “the mountaintop” – that was not silenced on April 4, 1968.It lived on.It has lived on.And the good news is that with the spirit of all who have died in the name of a better world, it continues to feed and nurtures today’s seekers of justice.
If I am to tell the truth as I deliver this Good News of the inevitability of victory this morning, I must offer a word of caution.
A few weeks ago I talked a lot about the new book by my colleague the Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd, After The Good News: progressive religion beyond optimism.She notes that there is a danger faced particularly by large-hearted, well-meaning liberal folks like us (and even more particularly by large-hearted, well-meaning, liberal middle-class, well-educated white folks like most of us here).So few of us have our own direct, lived experience of the injustices we are committed to ending.So few of us have personally suffered under the oppressions we strive to dismantle.And because of that distance, it is actually pretty easy to find hope.It’s actually pretty easy for us to believe in a better world, because to a greater or lesser extent most of us have been living in a better world than most of those who experience injustice first hand.
For many of us, maybe even most of us, our vision of the future is derived from our experience of comfort and privilege.It is, even if we don’t say it this way, the hope that one day everyone will be free to live “the American Dream,” not as it now so perverted, but as we believe it was meant to be. Yet such a hope, such a vision, is ultimately doomed to failure because “the American Dream,” in any form, is, itself, the source ofoppression, the reality in which all oppressions are rooted.So the caution is this truth:the Beloved Community will not be a better version of what we have today.That toward which we strive will be a way of life that that has been transformed into something radically, disorientingly, discomfortingly new – un-imaginably different from anything we, especially those of us who identify or are identified as white, have ever seen.
To work for that vision takes a kind of commitment, a kind of courage, a kind of faith, a kind of hope that is nearly impossible for those of us who have known more comfort than suffering, more opportunity than struggle.Such unshakable certainty in the inevitability of victory can only – only – take root and grow in the lives of those how do not stand apart from, but are, instead, intimately connected to suffering and struggling.That’s because only a hope that is rooted in the struggle and the suffering, can transcend it; only a faith that is born in pain can survive the pain that is inevitable as we create, together, the true, and new, Beloved Community we all need so desperately.And that means you, I, we (most definitely I) must find ways to step out of our zones of comfort and into the places of suffering, to not simply name it but to know it, directly, immediately, in our bones.
I know, most of you know, that despair is easy to fall into.Hopelessness is always just outside our door, waiting for an invitation to come in to our lives.Yet those who have known the suffering, the anguish, the pain of oppression declare unequivocally that the promised land is our final destination, and that we are destined get there.No matter how stony the road, no matter how many are martyred on the journey, victory is inevitable.And one day “We shall overcome,” will be truly transformed and become “We have overcome.”
** The details about Dr. King’s last days and hours come from both the Wikipedia article about Dr. King’s assassination, and also from a project of the Atlanta Constitution and Chanel 2 Action News in which, for the 50th anniversary of the assassination they covered the events as if they were live tweeted.
This is the text of the reflections I offered at the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Sunday, March 24, 2019.
There is a story in the Hebrew Scriptures about a man named Nehemiah.You might be expecting me to tell the story of Queen Esther and how she outed herself as Jewish just after the King declared his intention to exterminate all of the Jews in his kingdom, saving her people.That’s the story that’s the basis of Purim, which was celebrated this past Thursday evening through Friday, and which the Gill family will celebrate here after each service.
You might expect me to tell that story – and it is a great story, really – yet I’m going to tell a story from the book of Nehemiah (and if you haven’t yet guessed why, I’ll be telling you shortly).
In chapter 5 of Nehemiah, which most scholars think is historically reliable, Nehemiah says that “a great cry” rose up from the people in Jerusalem.The 1% were really sticking it to the lower 99% .There was a famine going on, and the people cried out that the rich were taking advantage of the situation, and they the average person was having to take out mortgages on their homes and farms just to buy food.(Price gouging in the 5th century BCE!)And the bankers and other power brokers were charging usurious interest on these loans, leading to bankruptcies and foreclosures.(Sound familiar?“The more things change, the more they remain the same,” right?)
One translation says that the people cried out, “Now our flesh is the same as that of our kindred; our children are the same as their children.”It makes me think of that famous extemporaneous speech Sojourner Truth gave on May 29, 1851 in Akron, Ohio in which she asked, “ if a woman have a pint, and a man a quart – why can't she have her little pint full?” and it’s powerful refrain, “Ain’t I a woman?” We’re no different from you, the 99% cry out to the rich. How can you treat us so badly?
The story tells us that Nehemiah heard the outcry of the people and he was incensed.Maybe it was the inescapable awareness of the injustice of it all.So he called “a great assembly” of the people and confronted the rich and powerful.Remember, most scholars believe that at least this section of the book of Nehemiah actually happened.Nehemiah called out the people of power, the people who had the power to make a difference, and he did so in the presence of “a great assembly” … in front of everyone.
One of the things that I find so fascinating in this story is that Nehemiah was one of the movers and shakers in Jerusalem at the time.In fact, he was governor!Installed by the King, with letters from the King declaring the King’s support of him and telling people to listen to him.Even so, Nehemiah knew that his one, lone, voice was not enough.He knew that, by himself, even he didn’t have enough power to make a real change in the status quo.And he wanted change.He wanted an end to the inequities, the injustices he could so plainly see all around him.So he gathered together a “great assembly” of the people so that, in addition to his political and economic power, he had with him “people power.”
In front of that crowd, with the obvious, undoubtable power of the people behind him, Nehemiah confronted those people who had the power to make changes, and they did:properties that had been foreclosed on were returned, interest was eliminated on all loans from that time on, and the interest that had already been paid on those loans was reimbursed in full.
Around this time of year there is an intense, well-nigh inescapable inescapable push by a few members of our congregation to get a whole lot of the members of our congregation to attend something called “the Nehemiah Action.”The Nehemiah Action is the largest public gathering in the Charlottesville/Albemarle area, and is one of the, if not the, biggest interfaith gatherings in the entire commonwealth.It is, you might say, “a great assembly.”(See why I told Nehemiah’s story?)
The Nehemiah Action is the culmination of a year’s – and sometimes more than one year’s – work done by IMPACT – Interfaith Movement Promoting Action by Congregations Together.IMPACT is an example of congregation-based community organizing, a form of coalition building that leverages the fact that a large number of people are already gathered together in faith communities.27 different faithcommunities from within the Charlottesville/Albemarle area make up IMPACT -- Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Seventh Day Adventists, Methodists, Quakers, Muslims, Presbyterians, non-denominational Christians, Pentecostals, Episcopalians, Lutherans, … and us Unitarian Universalists. In fact, we’ve been part of IMPACT, and IMPACT has been a part of our social justice ministries, since the organization’s beginning – thanks especially to the work of one of my predecessors in this pulpit, the Rev. Leslie Takahashi, we were one of IMPACT’s founding congregations!
Each year, through an extraordinarily democratic process, the congregations that make up IMPACT select one concrete example of a real injustice experienced by real people in our community.It’s an issue that can be clearly articulated and for which a practical solution is possible.People spend the year researching the issue, learning how other communities elsewhere have tried to deal with it, and working with stakeholders and the people with the power to make a difference to come up with a solution that will work here in our community.If you want to talk about problems, if you want to create a committee to set up a task force to write up a report that then joins all of those other reports gathering dust wherever such reports end up, then IMPACT is not for you.If, on the other hand, you want to help develop real solutions to real problems experienced by real people, IMPACT is one way to actually have … well .. an impact.
In past years, through the work of IMPACT, and the “people power” behind it that’s on full display at the “great assembly” of the Nehemiah Action, there is now extended service on area bus routes, and an entirely new route to serve the needs of underserved neighborhoods.There is now a free dental clinic, with a full-time dental assistant, resulting in the first year a 1,165% increase in the number of people who previously had to go to an emergency room for their dental care because they couldn’t afford anything else.(That wasn’t a typo. An 1,165% increase in the number of people able to receive dental care.That’s real change; that’s having an impact.)
Even a behemoth like the UVA Health Service was moved by the “people power” of IMPACT, and they now have a program through which otherwise unemployed youth can get free training to become Certified Nursing Assistants, and get on the medical career ladder. During the first two-year pilot program, UVA planned to train 40 people. In January of 2017 they expanded the program, so that it now trains 80 people per year! And 76% of students from the pilot program are now working full time as CNSs.
Not a report.Not a wish list.Not an ephemeral hope.Real change for real people facing real injustices.
While I continue, folks who’ve been involved with IMPACT are going to walk down the aisle, distributing tickets for this year’s Nehemiah Action (which is on April 11th at 6:30 pm at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Performing Arts Center).If you would like to show up and be counted, if you would like to join the “great assembly” and show community leaders – the people with the power to effect change – the “people power” behind making real changes, please take one of these tickets.(Or take more than one and invite a friend to come with you!You don’t have to be affiliated with this congregation – or any faith community – to make a difference.)
Two years ago IMPACT saw the need for a women’s residential treatment center here in Charlottesville.In 2015 we learned that each year there were 3,150 people in our regional jail who struggle with addiction to drugs or alcohol in our regional jail. A majority of these inmates who are women are also survivors of sexual abuse or domestic violence.Residential treatment centers are considered the best way to provide real help, yet women had to go at least as far Richmond to find such a program, leaving their friends, family, and support networks behind.They had to leave their kids behind, too.Working with Region Ten and both City and County leaders, spurred on by the “people power” evidenced by the Nehemiah Action, the Women’s Center at Moores Creek opened on June 1, 2018.Now women, with their children under 5, can receive the care they need in ways that just weren’t possible before.
This year, IMPACT turned its attention to the issue of affordable housing for seniors. Did you know that 900 senior households in Albemarle County are having to choose between paying for medical care and making their rent payments? In the city there are generations of families that can't keep the roof over their heads thanks to Jim Crow-era zoning and land use policies that are still in place. Over 4000 people in the Charlottesville urban ring pay half of their income toward housing!
IMPACT is seeking ways to increase land availability, consistent long-term funding of local housing funds, and rezoning of space, as a way of addressing the need for increased availability of affordable housing for low-income seniors in Albemarle County and low-income renters/families in Charlottesville.On April 11th – 6:30 – 8:00 at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Performing Arts Center – a “great assembly” will be gathered to speak to those with the power to make change, calling on them to commit to doing so.I’ll be there, and I hope many, many, many of you will, too.
If you’ve been involved with IMPACT in any way this year, would you please stand or make yourself known?(And keep standing or holding your hand in their air.)If you have been actively involved with IMPACT in the past, would you join them?If you have ever attended a Nehemiah Action, would you please stand or raise your hand?And if you plan to attend the “great assembly” we call the Nehemiah Action this year, will you join this holy host.
Thanks.
Folks, this isn’t just “power to the people,” or “power for the people,” it’s “people power,” one of the most powerful things there is!
pax tecum,
RevWik
P.S. -- I feel that I should note that the story of Nehemiah's time as governor is problematic in some respects from today's perspective. In addition to the justice-minded reforms noted here, and his successful efforts to rebuild Jerusalem. he also sought to "purify" the city, leading him to ban marriages between Jews and non-Jews, and prohibiting non-Jews from working within the city.
This week both Charlottesville and Albemarle High Schools were the target of online threats. Parents were notified that the schools were taking precautions to keep our kids safe. A spokeswoman for the city schools, "acknowledge[d] and condemn[ed] the fact that this threat was racially charged." "Racially charged" does not begin to capture the truly heinous nature of the threat.
I submitted the following letter to the editor's of our local paper, The Daily Progress:
Whenever someone says, “Black Lives Matter!” you hear, “shouldn’t that be ‘all lives matter’?” Yes … void of any context. Yet we do not live in a world that is void of context. This is a world where black and brown lives have regularly been, and are still, treated as mattering far less than the lives of those who identify as white. “Race-neutral” and “color blind” ideals obscure the very real inequities still present in our so-called “post-racial” nation. Yet simply choosing to pretend there is no monster under the bed doesn’t mean there is no monster. It just allows me to feel safe beneath my covers, while allowing the monster unfettered freedom to do as it likes.
Parents were recently alerted to an online threat made against Charlottesville High School. School officials wanted to assure all of us that they and the police took seriously their responsibility to keep all of our children safe. What they did not want us all to know was that this wasn’t a threat of random violence, but violence directed specifically at children of color. The anonymous poster was very specific, describing their intent as “ethnic cleansing,” using ugly racial slurs to describe the African American and Latinx students who would be their targets. “If you white … you better stay home,” the post said.
What was gained by the “whitewashing” of this pointedly racial threat? Only the comfort of white folk in Charlottesville who want to keep saying that “all children matter,” so we can continue refusing to recognize the ugly reality that some of our children are treated as if they matter more. Meanwhile, those African American and Latinx students and their families are left wondering if anyone really cares that they were the ones being threated, and only because of the color of their skin. When those of us who are white refuse to affirm the racist nature of such a threat, we also refuse to affirm the importance of those who were being threatened. That’s why we need to keep saying, “black lives matter” … until they do.
Rev. Erik Walker Wikstrom
The signs outside and inside the congregation I serve have been up for years, and I hope will remain up until they are no longer needed reminders.
P.S. -- I am pleased to report that The Daily Progress is now reporting that arrests have been made in both cases, and are noting that the threat in the Charlottesville High case described "ethnic cleansing." I believe that the point of my letter remains valid and worth saying.
This is the text of the reflection I offered on Sunday, March 18th, 2019 at the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia.
What makes you feel at home?What makes you feel welcome? That's not a rhetorical question. Really ... what makes you feel welcome and at home?
I read an article this week in which the author pondered this question.She came to the conclusion that she felt most at home, most welcome, when the place looked like someone lived there.
“The homes in which I’ve felt the most at ease have been the homes that feel lived in. They are the ones that are not perfectly clean or perfectly decorated. Now don’t get me wrong; they aren’t filthy either, but a little dust on the furniture and a few stray items cluttering up the counter top almost make me breathe a sigh of relief. The house is inhabited by real people! On the other hand, when I enter a house that looks like a show piece, I spend most of my time holding my breath, worrying about ruining something, especially if the kids are with me! It’s stressful enough to bring your children to someone else’s home without having the added stress of perfection to deal with.”
Then she asked herself what she did to try to make people feel welcome.You might have guessed that she cleans the place top to bottom, making sure that there is no dust anywhere.She puts away everything and sets the pillows on the couch “just so.”(I added that last part, but I feel certain that she does.)My paternal grandmother, Maria Quanstrum, put those plastic covers on all of the fabric covered furniture, and kept them on even when company came.My dad said that that’s one of the reasons he never brought any of his friends over to the house – he knew they wouldn’t feel comfortable, wouldn’t feel welcome.
What makes a person feel welcome?How can we make a person feel welcome?How can we actually be welcoming, as we say we strive to be?
It had been my intention to dance with those questions as they relate to our lives as individuals, and as a community.Yet recent events have led me down a different path.
The other day my son said to me something I never said to my father, “Did you hear that there was another shooting?”Mass shootings happen so frequently today that they’re in some ways becoming part of the background noise of his life.“Did you hear that there was another shooting today, dad?”
It wasn’t like this when I was growing up.Oh I am sure that it was more like this than I knew.There wasn’t the same kind of from-every-direction-at-once 24/7 coverage, and in those days (“the Before Times” as my kids call it), parents tended to shield their kids from the ugliness in the world in a way that not all parents do today.Nonetheless, I do think that there’s been a real change.
We’re 11 weeks into 2019, and already there have been 58 mass shootings (defined as more than 3 people being shot in the same place at generally the same time).58.And there have been 11 times when there was more than one mass shooting on the same day! On January 26, on that one day, there were 4 separate mass shootings – in Georgia, New Jersey, Indiana, and Louisiana – that left 12 people dead.On one day.
Shopping malls, movie theatres, outdoor concert venues, schools, churches, synagogues, mosques – these were places of relative safety when I was a kid.I say “relative” because the places I, as a white person, felt safe were not always safe for women, people of color, homosexuals, trans people …Yet even taking that into consideration, I do believe that there has been a quantitative shift, and a qualitative shift in life in the U.S.
I’ve talked with a number of you over the past few years, and you’ve told me – not exactly in these words – that you just don’t know, just don’t understand, what’s going on in the world anymore.That the world as it is today doesn’t make sense to you, and that it doesn’t feel like “home” anymore.
Just a few months ago a gunman opened fire in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people and wounding another 7.This past Friday a gunman shot and killed 50 people in two mosques this past week, shouting words of hatred as he released destruction and death.He filmed the whole thing, streaming it on Facebook live as it happened.
Two summers ago there were actual tiki torch carrying, robe wearing, klu klux klan members and other white supremacist marching in our streets, rallying in our parks.There is a man in the White House who will not come out and directly, explicitly, and unequivocally condemn white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, trans-fobia, anti-Semetism, Islamo-phobia … And not only doesn’t he outright condemn these hateful ideologies, he seems to actually embrace and encourage them with winks and inuendoes.Deniable, of course, yet all too disgustingly visible.
Hard won protections for the environment; equal rights for women, people of color, trans people, gays and lesbians, people with physical or mental disabilities, immigrants (just about anyone who isn’t white and well-off); peace on the planet; religious freedom; our country’s relationship with other nations and place in the world; worker’s rights; income inequality … in all of these areas where progress has been made over the past decades (however slowly and incompletely), there is currently regression to former, less fair, less safe, less “welcoming” times.
Mr. Rogers, spiritual father and grandfather to several generations, famously said this:
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers.You will always find people who are helping.’To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.”
It is so easy to become focused on the shooters in public, private, and sacred spaces; focused on the Islamo-phobes, and the people who desecrate Jewish cemeteries and synagogues with swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti; and those servants of the people who leave unarmed black youth lying dead in the street; and those venomous politicians (and preachers) who spew hate; and those men who prey with impunity on women and children …I could go on.It’s so easy to become focused on them.Yet they do not represent humanity.And while I need to stay aware of them, recognize their reality, and actively work against their agendas, I do not have to let them to define the world in which I live.Neither do you.We can follow Mr. Roger’s mother’s advice and “look for the helpers.”
This summer a man name Mamoudou Gassama came across a small crowd of people in the streets of Paris, looking up at an apartment building.When he looked, and saw what they were looking at, he didn’t just stand there.He started running toward the building, because what everyone was looking at was a baby dangling precariously from a balcony.Gassama ran to the building and started to scale it.You can find videos of it, and what he does is really amazing.In almost no time he was at the balcony, and he brought the baby to safety.
Mamoudou Gassama could have stood with the others, staring at the infant’s precarious predicament.Instead, he instinctively ran toward the danger.Especially as an undocumented immigrant from Mali, in France for only six months at the time, he might have wanted to maintain a low profile.But he couldn’t.He was a helper.
The National Public radio program “Radio Lab” devoted an episode to the topic of “heroism,” and there was a story that I haven’t been able to get out of my head.I guess I really don’t want to, because it’s a reminder of the helpers in the world.A man was standing on a subway platform, when another person nearby began having a seizure and fell onto the tracks.The first man, without hesitating, jumped down to help the other one up.When he couldn’t, and when it was clear that a subway was coming, he laid down on top of the other man, holding him down on the track.The subway cars passed over the two men, just grazing the top man’s back.The two men were strangers, yet one risked his life for the other without a moment’s thought.
In the early days of my ministry I was officiating the memorial service of an elderly member of the congregation.During the eulogy his son mentioned that his dad had gotten a purple heart because during a battle he had run out to pull back a wounded comrade.“That’s not what happened!” a voice shouted from the congregation.A little while later, during the open sharing of memories, this man took the microphone.“I’m sorry I caused a commotion,” he said.“But that’s not what happened.He didn’t go out under fire to bring back a wounded member of our unit.He brought the first boy back, and then went out again!”
And on Friday Abdul Aziz ran outside and toward the gunman, shouting “Come here!”He threw the only weapon he could, a credit card machine he’d picked up on the way out.After the shooter had gone back to his car to get another gun, Aziz ducked and weaved among the cars in the parking lot as bullets whizzed by him.He saw a gun that the gunman had dropped, but it was out of bullets, so Aziz threw it like a spear at the shooter’s car, shattering the windshield and scaring the killer away.But Aziz wasn’t done.He ran after the speeding car, stopping only when he couldn’t keep up.Because of him the shooter never got inside the second mosque, which is why the carnage was so much less there.
“When I […] would see scary things [going on in the world around me] my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers.You will always find people who are helping.’To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.”
The haters, the demagogues, the killers, the oppressors, the ones who deny another person’s humanity, the ones who push people to the margins so that they can have the center for themselves, the ones who seem determined to make this world a living hell … they’re real.They exist.And we must do all that we can to see to it that they don’t win the day
The helpers are real too, though.They are just as real.And we must never lose sight of that.We must keep them in their minds and hearts, drawing strength, and courage, and hope from their examples.
One last thought:while reading for this reflection I came across an article in which the author said that Mr. Roger’s mother’s advice is not good advice for us today.He had several reasons, a couple of which I found neither compelling nor convincing, yet there was one that struck me as both true and important enough to share it with you this morning.He noted that simply looking for the helpers is not enough.We need to be those helpers to the extent we can, wherever and whenever we can.
Friends, we can work to make this a world in which all people are truly welcome, a world which all of us can truly call “home.”And not only can we … we must.
This past Sunday, during the first service, I realized that I needed to trim my reflections before going in to the second. The proverbial "cutting room floor" is often home to passages that, for one reason or another, were important or intriguing enough to include yet, ultimately, are not enough of either of those things to remain in the final draft. Thus it always is for writers. I remember once, early in my preaching career, emailing a sermon to a friend for her opinion. Something just wasn't right about it, but I really couldn't tell what. After reading through it she wrote back, "Erik, that's two of the best sermons I've ever read." One of them ended up on that floor. Still, that second sermon found its way off the floor and into the pulpit at some point, and today I want to expand on one of the things I didn't get too on Sunday.
This summer I read a fascinating book – Octavia’s Brood: science fiction stories from social justice movements. Octavia E. Butler was a science fiction author -- the first science fiction author to be awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. She was also something of a rarity in the world of science fiction literature for another reason: there haven't been a lot of African American science fiction writers. Her Wikipedia article notes that,
"Butler began reading science fiction at a young age, but quickly became disenchanted by the genre's unimaginative portrayal of ethnicity and class as well as by its lack of noteworthy female protagonists.She then set to correct those gaps by, as De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai point out, "choosing to write self-consciously as an African-American woman marked by a particular history"—what Butler termed as "writing myself in". Butler's stories, therefore, are usually written from the perspective of a marginalized black woman whose difference from the dominant agents increases her potential for reconfiguring the future of her society."
"To Octavia E. Butler, who serves as a north star for so many of us. She told us what would happen -- "all that you touch you change"--and then she touched us, fearlessly, brave enough to change us. We dedicate this collection to her, coming out with our own fierce longing to have our writing change everyone and everything we touch."
The 23 contributors are, as Thomas describes them in her Introduction, “artists who in their other lives work tirelessly as community activists, educators, and organizers.” Imarisha notes in her Introduction that one of the things that makes this project so fascinating and exciting is that, "many of the contributors [...] had never written fiction before, much less science fiction." She writes,
"When we approached folks, most were hesitant to commit, feeling like they weren't qualified. But overwhelmingly, they all came back a few weeks later, enthusiastically, with incredible ideas and some with dozens of pages already written. Because all organizing is science fiction, we are dreaming new worlds every time we think about the changes we want to make in the world."
That idea is what intrigued me and led me to include a reference to this in my last reflections. I realized, though, that I could make the point I was trying to make without this reference and that, actually, this deserved more room than I could have given it there. "All organizing is science fiction." Think about that for a minute; let it sink in. Whenever anyone works for justice, whenever anyone strives to help transform the world from what it is now into what we know it can be, we're essentially painting a picture of a world that does not (yet) exist. That's the work of science fiction -- to show us alternatives to the reality we know. Imarisha says,
“Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction.All organizing is science fiction.Organizers and activists dedicate themselves to creating and envision another world. […]”
J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a great deal more about Middle Earth than showed up in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. One of the reasons the world he created feels so rich, so full, so real, is because he knew more about it than what he needed to tell us for his stories. And you can sense it. You can feel it. He even wrote his own creation story for this world. The Ainulindalëis a really beautiful and profound myth; it's actually my own favorite of all the creation myths I've ever encountered. It is the one that feels most "true." Simply put, Eru Ilúvatar, the One, creates the universe and all that's in it through music.
"The story begins with a description of the Ainur as "children of Ilúvatar's thought". They are taught the art of music, which becomes the subject of their immortal lives. The Ainur sing alone or in small groups about themes given to each of them by Ilúvatar, who proposes a "great" plan for them all: a collaborative symphony where they would sing together in harmony." (Wikipedia)
There are a number of important details, meaningful nuances, that I would hate to rush past. I encourage you to get a copy of The Silmarillion, which collects much of this "backstory," or Google around until you find a copy of the text online somewhere. The reason I bring all of this up is the way the story ends. After the "collaborative symphony" is complete, Ilúvatar invites the Ainur to look at what they'd created together. They do, and it is beautiful. It is good. And then everything vanishes. Void. Emptiness. And then Ilúvatar tells the Ainur to go into that emptiness and bring into being all that they saw. I get shivers -- The Ainur are shown not just the blueprint, but the total, finished reality of all creation, and then they're tasked with actually making it real. When I read Thomas' and Imarisha's words about organizers and activists being engaged in science fiction I immediately thought of Tolkien's myth. Those who work for justice are those Ainur who have seen this not-yet world right here in the midst of the world as-it-is, and they have set upon the work of bringing into being what they've seen. In another way they are Ilúvatar, showing their vision to anyone "with eyes to see" (as Jesus is remembered as putting it), and engaging them in the work of world building. Perhaps all this talk about myths and science fiction seems trivializing of the real life-and-death struggle that is this world for far, far too many. We don't need pretty stories. We need action! That later part is right, but the former misses an important truth. Walidah Imarisha explains in her Introduction the importance of engaging the imagination in the work for societal transformation:
“[T[he decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is:for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born.Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless.”
"[T]hose of us from communities with historic collective trauma, we must understand that each of us is already science fiction walking around on two legs. Our ancestors dreamed us up and then bent reality to create us."
As someone from a historically centralized position, this reminds me that I have to listen not so much to the dreams of my ancestors, to the science fiction that comes out of my history. Why? Because that's the world we're living in. The world that was imagined, the vision that was dreamed and worked for by straight, white, cis-male folks with good educations and incomes has already been brought into being. It's the world that's so in need of transformation into something new.
This doesn't mean that my ancestors have nothing of value to offer, that their vision offers no beauty or strength. It does mean, though, that if we're serious about bringing a new world into being then the movers and shakers of this world need to start listening to new stories, new dreams. Or, rather, new to me. These stories, these dreams, this visions have always been here; they've just been largely displaced by those that brought us to where we are. Reading the stories collected in Octavia's Brook opened for me a library the existence of which, I confess, I was only faintly aware. There is so much more to read, and it pains me that I'm only discovering it at 56. (At least I'm not first discovering it at 57!)
