Deconstructing Bondage & Freedom

This is the text of the sermon I preached on Sunday, March 8th, 2015 at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, VA.  If you'd like, you can also listen to a podcast.

Opening Words:  The Road fromSelma by June Brindel

 Sermon:

“When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom. Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won't do to get it, or what he doesn't believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn't believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire... or preserve his freedom.”

That’s Malcolm X talking (and I kept his gender specific language in place for historicity’s sake).  “A person who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire... or preserve that freedom.”  “Whenever you hear someone saying they want freedom, but in the next breath tells you what they won't do to get it, or what they don’t believe in doing in order to get it, that person doesn't believe in freedom.”

It doesn’t take a lot to see that in this Malcolm is taking a crack at the Rev. Dr. King, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council, and the hundreds of people who fifty years ago today were in Selma nursing the wounds of “Bloody Sunday,” and the thousands of people – white and black – who were on their way there to stand in solidarity and to march, eventually, all the way to Montgomery.  The folks President Obama was talking about yesterday, the ones he described as, “ordinary Americans willing to endure billy clubs and the chastening rod; tear gas and the trampling hoof; men and women who despite the gush of blood and splintered bone would stay true to their North Star and keep marching toward justice.”  These are the people Malcolm X is dismissing as not really believing in, not really understanding, freedom.

What we have here is a clash of ideologies or, perhaps even more accurately, of strategies.  Malcolm X said, "We declare our right on this earth...to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary."  If Dr. King said that “We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means,” then Malcolm X was essentially saying that those seeking freedom must have the freedom to choose how they’re going to do it.

“I don't favor violence,” he said. “If we could bring about recognition and respect of our people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to reach his objectives peacefully. But I'm also a realist. The only people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black people."  He also said, “"I don't mean go out and get violent; but at the same time you should never be nonviolent unless you run into some nonviolence. I'm nonviolent with those who are nonviolent with me. But when you drop that violence on me, then you've made me go insane, and I'm not responsible for what I do."

Martin Luther King, on the other hand, believed that “hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that [and that] we must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation.”  He said, “Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. which cuts without wounding and ennobles the [one] who wields it. It is a sword that heals.”

Malcolm X said, “Concerning nonviolence: It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself, when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks. It is legal and lawful to own a shotgun or a rifle. We believe in obeying the law.” 

What we have here is a clash of ideologies or, perhaps even more accurately, a clash of strategies.  And this clash reveals a paradox – can violence ever achieve peace?  Can limits ever lead to freedom?  It’s this later one that I really want to dig into this morning.

Miriam Webster’s Dictionary defines “freedom” as, “the quality or state of being free,” which it further defines as “liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another (in other words, independence),” and, “the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action.”  And by this definition it seems as though Malcolm X was on to something – if freedom is “the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action,” then how can you achieve freedom if the road you’re going to take to get there is, of necessity, constrained in advance by a principle like nonviolence?

And I’ve got to tell you, the more I read about what went on in Selma 50 years ago the more respect for I have for the discipline, the restraint, the limits that those peaceful freedom fighters placed on themselves, and the strength and courage it took to remain true to them.

Last week I talked about Mark Morrison-Reed’s book, TheSelma Awakening.  This week it’s Richard Leonard’s Call to Selma:  eighteen days of witness.  Richard Leonard was the Minister of Religious Education at the Community Church of New York 50 years ago, and he was one of the hundreds of clergy and lay people who responded to Dr. King’s call and headed down to Selma to stand in solidarity.  He went expecting to be gone just a couple of days.  He stayed for eighteen.  (But don’t worry, by the seventh day he finally managed to call home and tell his wife and kids that he’d gone.)  This book, published back in 2002, is the story of his experiences during those days, as reconstructed from the notes and journal he kept at that time.  What makes Call to Selma so moving is that it is the story told from eye level.  It’s doesn’t depict the perspective of the leadership, but the rank and file.  It’s not the story of the people making the decisions, but of the ones who, in faith, acted on them.

And what a story it is.  

We know, I hope, about that first march, the one that happened 50 years ago yesterday, the one where the marchers hadn’t even gotten all the way over the Edmund Pettus bridge when they were set upon by police with billy clubs and tear gas – Bloody Sunday.  And we may know about the march two days later, on March 9^th, that came to be called Turnaround Tuesday, because the marchers voluntarily turned around in order not to violate the federal court order prohibiting a march (to show their respect for the law), yet also having gotten just a little bit further than they had two days before (to demonstrate their resolve).  And then there was that third march, which started on March 21 and ended with 25,000 people marching up to the state house in Montgomery on March 25^th.

In between there was the lesser known stalemate at the so-called “Berlin Wall.”  With the road to Montgomery blocked by a federal injunction, and hundreds of people wanting and needing to do something, organizers decided on March 10^th, the day after Reverends Reeb, Miller, and Olsen were attacked, the organizers decided to march to the Dallas County Courthouse.  Almost immediately they were met by Mayor Smitherman and Chief Baker, and rows and rows of police officers stretching across Sylvan Street, blocking their way.  This faceoff would continue for six days – night and day, good weather or rain (and there was apparently a lot of hard rain that week).  At one point Chief Baker strung a clothesline across the street to physically demarcate what we might call now “a line in the sand.”  The story of the hours and days on that line is powerful stuff, no less powerful than the stories of the meetings between King and Johnson, for instance.

But to bring us back to that paradox, here were hundreds of women, children, and men who were fighting for their freedom, yet who were incredibly disciplined about it.  They knew that an “anything goes” kind of anarchic freedom could get them all killed and, maybe worse, hurt their cause.  Leonard tells of seeing at one point a hand, coming out of the rows further back, with a pair of scissors poised to cut Chief Baker’s “Berlin Wall,” and then, almost immediately, another hand reached out and pulled the first hand back.  There were times when folks wanted to push through that line, to break through those “stiff ranked troopers / white as a shroud / rimming the road from Selma” the way our Opening Words imagined the ghosts of Reeb and Jackson, Evers and Till, and those four little girls from Birmingham doing.  Oh they wanted to, but they didn’t.  Their actions were dictated by necessity; seriously constrained and restricted.  There were things many of them wanted to do but that they would not do.  They gave up freedom to gain freedom.

And that may be an important point to highlight.  These weren’t constraints placed upon them from the outside; these were limits voluntarily imposed on themselves.  If you choose to limit your own freedom, is your freedom truly limited? 

That’s something I think Malcolm X may have missed.  And you’d think he would have understood this.  After all, members of the Nation of Islam denied themselves the pleasures of the use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs … eating meat.  Members adhered to a strict dress code and what’s been described as a military discipline.  Yet they accepted, even embraced, these limitations to their freedom because of the sense of greater freedom such discipline made possible.  (The word “Islam” itself, the Arabic word, means “submission” as in “submission to the will of Allah.”)  All of this Malcolm understood and it didn’t bother him at all.  Here he understood that an unbridled, no-limits freedom was potentially dangerous and damaging.

King understood the power of self-control, of discipline, of making the choice to limit one’s choices on behalf of a greater freedom.  His belief in the power of nonviolence came from two very different sources.  One, the Hindu Mohandas Gandhi, whom King once called “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.”  Gandhi is remembered as saying about meeting violence with nonviolence, “They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then they will have my dead body, but not my obedience.”   The other inspiration, of course, would have been Jesus who exemplified devotion to love and truth even if that meant his own execution.  Jesus who was remembered as, even from the cross, asking for mercy for those who tortured him.

So why talk about all this this morning?  In part because this is the 50^th anniversary of those events in Selma and we need to remember because, despite how far we’ve come as a nation there is still so much farther we have to go.

But there’s another reason as well.  The dominant culture in which we swim tells us in ways both subtle and overt that we should let nothing stand in the way of our “pursuit of happiness.”  The culture of conspicuous consumption and on-demand … everything … is presented as the highest ideal, and we are inculcated with the notion that our highest goal should be the freedom to do what we want when we want.  We’re told, in short, that bondage is bad and freedom is good.

Yet without its banks a flowing river becomes a swamp.  “Make channels for the streams of love where they may broadly run,” goes the hymn.  Without those channels forward movement is dissipated.  This is true of a fight for civil rights; this is true for the living of our own lives.

When I hear somebody talking about freedom – or anything of value that they seek – and then, in the same breath, hear them say what they’re not going to do to get it, or what they don’t believe in doing to get it, then I feel certain that they eventually will.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Bound

This is the sermon delivered at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church -- Unitarian Universalist, on Sunday March, 1, 2015.  If you'd like, you can listen to a podcast.

This coming Saturday, March 7^th, is the 50^th anniversary of the first of three marches from Selma, Alabama to the state capital in Montgomery.  This first one didn’t even make it fully over the Edmund Pettuss bridge because State troopers attacked the peaceful marchers so viciously that the event came to be called “Bloody Sunday.”  Two days later, on March 9^th, a larger crowd marched again, this time turned back without violence.  And on March 21^st the third and final march took place – this time with the protection ­of law enforcement, and this time making it all the way to Montgomery.  This history is the basis of the movie Selma, which didn’t win the Oscar for “best picture.”

It’s also the focus of Mark Morrison-Reed’s newest book, The Selma Awakening: how the civil rights movement tested and changed Unitarian Universalism.  For those who are unfamiliar with the Rev. Dr. Morrison-Reed’s work, he is a historian and a prophet, speaking truth to power.  He tells our Unitarian Universalist story as it is – the good, the bad, and the ugly.  His focus has largely been on our history with regards race and, as the subtitle of one of his books puts it, “black trailblazers and missed opportunities.”  His work is both profound and powerful – profoundly inspiring and powerfully depressing.

In The Selma Awakening, he takes up one of Unitarian Universalism’s proudest moments.  After “bloody Sunday” Dr. King sent telegrams to religious leaders around the country, calling on them to come to Selma and stand in solidarity.  And people did.  That first march consisted of about 600 women, children, and men.  Two days later, when the second march took place, there were 2,500 people walking together.  This number included approximately 500 Unitarian Universalists – nearly one-fifth of all UU clergy were there, as well as a large number of lay people.  The UUA Board, which was meeting in Boston at the time, suspended their meeting and reconvened in Selma.  We showed up.

That wasn’t easy.  It was a frightening, dangerous time.  One of the clergy who went – the day after his ordination, actually – remembers being advised, “Don’t go to Selma unless it is more important that you go than that you come back.”  And not everyone did come back.  After that second march three Unitarian Universalist Ministers were beaten savagely.  One, the Rev. James Reeb, died from his injuries.  His death sent shockwaves not only around the country, but around the world as well. 

Hundreds upon hundreds of African American women and men had been murdered in the south, of course.  In fact, the Selma marches were a response to the beating and shooting, on February 25^th, of an unarmed man named JimmyLee Jackson – a beating and shooting at the hands of Alabama State troopers I should add.

But – as awful as it is to say this out loud – James Reeb was white, so the reaction to his death was outrage instead of indifference.  The reaction, I should hasten to clarify, of white America.  It was one of our own, if you will; his death had a galvanizing effect.  There were 25,000 people in that final march to Montgomery.

There were actually three martyrs from those marches – Jimmy Lee Jackson, James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo, a Unitarian Universalist lay woman who was also murdered in Selma 50 years ago this month.  Often only Reeb is remembered, but there is a memorial plaque with all three of their faces on it in our headquarters in Boston.

I won’t go into all of the ways that we UUs are interwoven with those events in Selma, but I will say that reading about it makes me proud.  It would make you proud.  When the call went out, we responded.

Yet reading The Selma Awakening is not entirely an uplifting experience.  For us to have “awakened” at Selma suggests that before that we’d been asleep.  And in some very disappointing and discouraging ways, we had been.  If the story of our actions in Selma would make you proud, then the stories of our inaction beforehand will make you angry. Mark does a very good job of putting our courageous involvement in Selma into the context of our much more convoluted history regarding race. 

I won’t go into all of the details here either, but there’s a passage that particularly struck me.  Mark is making a kind of summary statement of our movement and its predecessors.  He says:

“Unitarians and Universalists celebrated an exclusively Euro-American worldview that was implicitly racist, while convinced that their congregations were open and accepting.  Unable to imagine anything else, they championed assimilation while calling it integration. […]

Unitarian Universalist behavior was shaped by white discomfort:  ignorance and anxiety about people and cultures that seemed different from their own; an inability to step too far outside cultural norms; and a fear of ceding control which venturing into unfamiliar situations would have required.  In their complacence, Unitarians and Universalists unwittingly continued to support American apartheid.  The liberal’s version was just white supremacy-lite.”

What got me as I read that is the strong certainty that if you change the verbs from past to present tense, it’s still largely true:

“Unitarian Universalism celebrates an [almost] exclusively Euro-American worldview that is implicitly racist, while convinced that our congregations are open and accepting.  Unable to imagine anything else, we champion assimilation while calling it integration.”

Some of you are no doubt beginning to feel a little defensive.  (If not a lot and for a while now.)  But let me ask this:  why is it that we can’t seem to attract African Americans, Latinos and Latinas, and other people of color?  Even more importantly, I think, why is it that we can’t create an environment that is so truly welcoming that those who do come feel like staying, and inviting their friends?

Well … let’s begin to answer that question by looking at the question itself.  Put another way, what I’m asking is:  what is it about Unitarian Universalism, or the way it’s embodied in UU congregations, that gets in the way of being truly multicultural?  It’s a good question; an important question.  One well worth asking.  Yet when I ask it the way I chose to originally, the way I’ve heard it asked so many, many times before – not only here but around the country – I’m doing something besides asking the question.  

When I use the personal pronoun “we” – instead of the more impersonal noun “Unitarian Universalism” –  I’m making an implicit, if not entirely consciously intended, statement about our faith.  I’m using “we” to represent Unitarian Universalism; asserting that “we” and “Unitarian Universalism” are synonymous.  Right?  That’s what pronouns do – they stand in place of a noun. 

Okay.  So … who is this “we”?  Well … among other things, we’re overwhelmingly white.  And whether we are conscious of it or not – and by “we” here I do intentionally mean us white folk – whether we’re conscious of it or not, when we ask why we can’t attract more people of color we’re really saying that Unitarian Universalism is a white religion and we want them to join us to make it less white.  See how that works?  And see the “us and them” in there?  The very “us and them” that’s been condemned from this pulpit time and time again.  Yet there we are, perpetuating it even as we want to transform it.

So let’s be clear here – Unitarian Universalism has been, and largely still is, a majority white religious tradition.  Often our hearts have been in the right place – Mark lifts up some powerful declarations, especially from our Universalist ancestors, that if we stand for what we say we stand for then we must stand against racial discrimination.  This passage from a letter written to the Universalist Leader in 1942 will give you the flavor.  [You’ll see that I’ve chosen to retain the original language.]

“As applied to our brothers of Negro blood, this ostracism is political, economic, and social – and most deplorable.  We Universalists might well take a leading part in this reform; in fact, as exponents of brotherhood, we must take this stand or else be guilty of rank duplicity and hypocrisy.  In that case, our Church will rot and die, and it will well deserve its fate.”

After this quotation Mark comments simply, “His words were prophetic.”

We – we Unitarian Universalists – we predominantly white Unitarian Universalists – have been struggling for decades – for more than half a century – with how to bring to fruition our vision of “one human family, on one fragile planet, in one miraculous universe, bound by love.”  Yet with virtually every effort we make we undercut ourselves by consciously or unconsciously framing it as trying to bring “them” to join “us.”  And that simply doesn’t work.

So what’s the solution?  Is there a solution? 

First, let’s be honest with ourselves … our Unitarian Universalist faith is as infected by systemic racism as is any other predominantly white institution.  We are, to bring us to our theme for the month and this sermon’s title, we are bound by it and in bondage to it.  That’s a hard thing to admit.  Especially for folks so proud of their liberal identity, it’s a hard thing to admit.  First step though, no matter how hard it is – we need to acknowledge that when we are comfortably complacent we align ourselves with those systems that oppress and marginalize. 

We can’t help it.  It’s like it’s in the air we breathe and the water we drink.  We can’t help it, but we can become aware of it.  We can acknowledge it.  And the more we keep it in our consciousness the more we move out of our comfortable complacency and away from the cultural norms that support racism.  The more we tell the truth to ourselves, the more choice we can have about where and how we want to live in this world.

Next, we need to recognize the limitations of our “openness.”  Despite our assertions to the contrary our actions show that what we’re really after is more of a homogenized soup than a hearty gumbo.  We – again, majority we, white we – want to bring people of different racial, ethnic, and economic groups into our circles, yet it’s obvious to those folks that we also want to keep those circles ours.  As Mark put it, “we champion assimilation while calling it integration.”  People of color have enough places that demand that they assimilate; why would they want to do it at church, too?

So we need to reconsider what it means to invite to the table those who are not there now.  I can tell you some of what it means:  It means that our carefully planned seating chart will be all messed up, and the silverware and plates won’t match anymore, and there’ll be food there that we’ve never seen and aren’t all that sure that we like … and it’ll be this way not as an experiment or as an interesting experience but because this is the way it is now.  We won’t be going back to how it was.  Put simply: we are not a multicultural community right now.  If we become one we will have changed from what we are right now.  To become one we will have to change.

Do we want that?  Do we really want that? 

Sometimes I despair.  Newsweek magazine once described Unitarian Universalism as “the quintessential baby boomer church.”  (I don’t think it was meant entirely a compliment.)  In my time I’ve seen more than a bit of “I want us to do more of what I want and wish we’d do less of the things I don’t” even if we know that there are other people who want to do those other things. We can be a little self-centered.  We’ll have to give that up.

And that feeling we have of walking into the sanctuary and feeling at home?  Yeah … we’ll have to give that up, too.  At least for a while.  Because the homes most of us live in are in neighborhoods that are largely homogenous racially and economically.  If we’re going to make other people comfortable we’re going to have to be at least a little uncomfortable … at least for a while … until we come to experience for ourselves how the Beloved Community is so much more awesome than a gated one.

Freedom from bondage does not come cheap.  On the contrary, it’s costly.  Are we – and let’s say what we mean – are we predominantly white folk who are used to having things the way we have always had them – are we willing to pay those costs?  Are we willing to face the even greater costs if we don’t?  It was true in '42 and it's still true now -- " In that case, our Church will rot and die, and it will well deserve its fate."

I’m going to conclude this sermon with the words the Rev. Phillip Hewett used to conclude a sermon he preached a couple of months after the marches in Selma.  When he speaks of “this tragedy of our time” he was talking about Selma.  We might be think, instead, of Fergusson, or Staten Island, but his challenge is the same.

“Intellectually, we may be ready for the new age into which we are called upon to enter.  But at heart we still have some fundamental adjustments to make.  Some Unitarians made that adjustment overnight in Selma.  All of them came away saying they would never be the same persons again. And somehow or other we have to let this tragedy of our time enter into our hearts until we can say that too.”

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Unitarian Universalism Saves Lives

This sermon was offered at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalism in Charlottesville, Virginia on Sunday, February 15th, 2015.  If you'd to hear it, a recording will be posted here.

This is the morning we’re really giving our pledge drive a real push.  Oh, I know that Alex gave a stirring sermon last week, and that we’ve had announcements, testimonials, dinners, and brunches since the beginning of the month.  But this is “Generosity Sunday.”  And as such you’re probably expecting from me a traditional pledge drive sermon – the sermon we UU preachers call amongst ourselves, “The Sermon on the Amount.”  You probably expect me to have a prop that looks something like this:  an actual approved reproduction of Andy Warhol’s 1981 piece “dollar sign” … on a tote bag.  (I got this at the staff’s annual holiday party this year, and that’s all I’m going to say about it, so don’t ask.)

And that’s actually all I’m going to say about the pledge drive, and money, and why you should give generously to the church.

I've been thinking about someone I knew in Divinity School.  She'd come to Boston from Texas, and one day early on she decided to get the lay of the land by driving around a bit.  She told me that as she drove she kept crying.  She cried because her UU church in Texas -- the only one anywhere around -- met in the basement of a store in a strip mall.  Around Boston, though, every town had a UU church, and they were often in a place of honor -- at the end of the town green, or at the top of the highest hill.  She couldn't keep from crying to see this.

Some stories:

When the news spread about Leela Alcorn’s death by suicide on December 28^th of last year, one of my colleagues got to thinking.  Miss Alcorn is the 17 year old transgender girl whose death – she walked out into oncoming highway traffic – gained international attention.  Her death, and the suicide note she left on her Tumblr blog.  In that suicide note she talked about the challenges – the impossibilities – of being a trans kid in our country, with the biases and bigotry that exists.  Miss Alcorn had no support – not at home, not in the community around her.  She got no support, but also no end of grief simply because of who she was.  In the end, it was too much … or, maybe, too little.

So, as I said, when news about Leela Alcorn’s death by suicide spread, the Rev. Sarah Gibbs Milspaugh found herself thinking about a Christmas pageant she’d attended at the Boulder Valley UU fellowship just a few weeks before.  One of the co-narrators, whose role included not just reading a narration but acting and singing as well, one of the co-narrators was a strong, proud, self-confident teenage girl. A transgender teenage girl.  A teenage girl who could have been Leela Alcorn, accept that she was surrounded by love and acceptance.  No, let me correct that.  She is embraced as who she is, and because of who she is – another person of inherent worth and dignity, as are we all.

Friends, Unitarian Universalism saves lives and changes communities.

Let me say that again:  Unitarian Universalism saves lives and changes communities. 

This week I asked colleagues to send me stories.  So I heard about the lesbian teen who was suicidal when she began attending a UU church.  She is now thriving.  And I heard about a couple of Mormon parents who are eternally grateful to Unitarian Universalism because their gay son has found a place that loves and supports him in a way that their own faith communities could not.  I heard about the clergy person who called the pastor of the local black Baptist church in the days following the incidents in Ferguson to ask if there were any local responses planned who then heard a thankful sigh of relief because that Baptist pastor had thought no one else would care.

Unitarian Universalism saves lives and changes communities.

That last story reminded me of one I experienced during my first pastorate up in Yarmouth, Maine.  This was back in the day when the only option for gay couples was civil unions, and one day I got a call from a couple who very tentatively, fearfully, asked if I’d be willing to perform their union service.  When I responded with enthusiasm the woman on the phone began to cry.  More than one of the other churches in town had actually hung up on her; the pastor of her own church had actually laughed at her when she’d asked.  Unitarian Universalism saves lives and changes communities.

I’d like a show of hands – how many of you are what we call “birthright Unitarian Universalists?”  (That is, you were born into the Unitarian Universalist, Unitarian, or Universalist church.)  And how many are “come outers”?  (That’d be folks who’ve come out of some other tradition or, perhaps, no religious tradition, in your past.)  Of that number, how many have said that you’d wished you’d known that a faith like this existed long before you’d ever found it?  That you’d been looking for something like this?

In the days and weeks after the tragic slaughter at Columbine High School back in 1999, the Unitarian Universalist church there became a haven for the area’s teens – not just the members of the church, but for other hurting young people who didn’t want their grief answered by dogmas and creeds.  Unitarian Universalism at work saving lives and changing communities.

Our own young people, year after year, tell us in their Coming of Age service that this – this – is the place where they feel fully free to be their true and authentic selves.  High school is, well, high school, and families are families.  We all remember what it was like to be a teenager.  But here, in this Unitarian Universalist community, our youth find unconditional acceptance, support, and love.  Can you imagine the difference that makes?

I want to quote at length the email I received from one of my colleagues.  Shortly after he began a new ministry in one of our congregations one of his children, about to start her junior year at Yale, was killed in a car accident precipitated by a drunk drive.  This is what he wrote:

In the next days, weeks, months, I came to know that Unitarian Universalism was not just a good-time religion. My liberal religious, non-creedal faith sustained and saved.  Whether it was the presence at her Memorial Service of many area Unitarian Universalist colleagues I had not yet met, or the theological reassurance of the prevailing goodness of existence despite momentary times of suffering, or the abiding emphasis on the fact that there can be meaning on the other side of anything (and we are the agents of finding it), or the awareness that all of this was not either a judgment nor a infliction on us personally, or the quiet embracing community who offered no magic words others but rather their comforting care, we moved through the passage of deep loss.  Nothing was denied, nothing was explained away, nothing was converted into vengeance, nothing was made supernatural, nothing was done or said that would later linger as a vestigial remnant of either fear or doubt.

This all became all the more evident as the larger world, the world of the families of the fellow victims and the world of the larger community, tried to salve the wounds and bind up lives with pronouncements, prayers, judgments, and calls for retribution, all of which would have denied us our identities.  Yes, we had suffered a loss, a profound loss, a gut-wrenching loss, but our Unitarian Universalism helped us see that we did not have to also lose ourselves in the process.  We, life, existence, meaning, were all affirmed because our values and our community helped us walk the grief journey.

How many of us have walked our own grief journey with the help of this congregation?  (No hands needed.)  Unitarian Universalism saves lives and changes communities

I’ve been saving this one for last because, well, it’s perhaps the hardest to believe.

One of our congregations began, more recently, as a fairly typical UU church comfortably ensconced in the suburbs.  But they realized that that really wasn’t who they were being called on to be, so they closed up shop and moved to an abandoned, derelict church building in, as they say, the zip code with the lowest life expectancy in the area.  Rather than put energy into fixing up their building – not even pausing to clean up the graffiti in the sanctuary – they began trying to make a difference.  In that same derelict building they established a free food store that serves over 1,000 people each month, a free bookstore, computer center, and laundry.  Until the Health Department set up shop they hosted a health clinic in their space.  They’ve also managed to buy a block of abandoned buildings and a trash dump and turned it into garden space and an orchard.  They’ve done all this in their seven year existence, with an average Sunday worship attendance – the gold standard of church success measures – and average Sunday worship attendance of three to twelve.

Unitarian Universalism saves lives and changes communities.

PACEM, the Soup Kitchen, the Food Bank, IMPACT, the community groups we support with our monthly Social Justice collections, the 12 Step groups we host, our partnerships with other area congregations, the children and youth who are nurtured here, the adults who have found a place that is filled not only with like-minded people but, more importantly I think, with like-hearted people.  I know of people who not only chose to join this congregation but who chose to move to Charlottesville because of that marriage equality banner we so proudly fly.  This Unitarian Universalist church saves lives and changes our community.

I said I wasn’t going to talk about our pledge drive.  I lied.  Here goes:

We’re often told (as we even were earlier in this service) that as we consider our pledge we should think about what the church means to us.  I’m going to suggest that while that is important, perhaps even more important is what the church means to others.  What it can mean to others.  The lives it can save; the ways it can change our community.

So often we think about the things we get out of being a part of TJMC, and we do a kind of cost/benefit analysis – what do we get out of it and what should we, therefore, put into it.  But what does it mean that there is a Unitarian Universalist church here on the highest point in Charlottesville?  What does it mean to our town, and our region, that liberal religion has a champion? 

Please, don’t just think of what TJMC means to you.  And don’t even think about what it takes to support this congregation.  Think about the impact of Unitarian Universalism in other cities and states.  Think about the power of Unitarian Universalism across the country.  Think about how our faith – the faith that informs and infuses our own community here and so many, many more – think about how it truly saves lives and changes communities.  Think about how it can change the world.  Think on that, my friends.  Think about that.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Jesus: What's The Big Deal?

“All of God’s promises find their Yes in him.”

--2 Corinthians 1:20

I recently came across a sermon I delivered back in 2004 that, given the focus of my last few posts, seems worth re-publishing.  My book Teacher, Guide, Companion had recently been published, and Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ had just been released.  This was a sermon I'd take"on the road" when I was asked to guest preach in other congregations.  This particular iteration was preached at the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Augusta, Maine on March 28, 2004.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Unison Affirmation:  “I am mortal, like everyone else, a descendant of the first formed child of earth, and in the womb of a mother was I molded into flesh within a period of ten months.  When I was born I began to breathe the common air, and fell upon the kindred earth.  My first sound was a cry, as is true of all.  I was nursed with care in swaddling clothes; no king has had a different beginning of existence.  There is for all one entrance and one way out.  Therefore, I prayed and the spirit of wisdom came to me.” ~  Wisdom of Solomon 7

Responsive Reading:  “Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought; that the Highest dwells within us, that the sources of nature are in our own minds.  As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul where we, the effect, cease, and God, the cause, begins.  I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.  There is deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is accessible to us.  Every moment when the individual feels invaded by it is memorable.  It comes to the lowly and the simple; it comes to whosoever will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur.  The soul’s health consists in the fullness of its reception.  For ever and ever the influx of this better and more universal self is new and unsearchable.  Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.  When it breaks thought our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affections, it is love.” ~  Ralph Waldo Emerson (SLT #531)

Reading:  “Trying to find the actual Jesus is like trying, in atomic physics, to locate a submicroscopic particle and determine its charge.  The particle cannot be seen directly, but on a photographic place we see the lines left by the trajectories of larger particles it put in motion.  By tracing these trajectories back to their common origin, and by calculating the force necessary to make the particles move as they did, we can locate and describe the invisible cause.  Admittedly, history is more complex than physics; the lines connecting the original figure to the developed legends cannot be traced with mathematical accuracy; the intervention of unknown factors has to be allowed for.  Consequently, results can never claim more than probability; but ‘probability.’ As Bishop Butler said, ‘is the very guide of life.’” ~  Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician

* * *

The tale is told of a preacher whose children’s stories had become a tad bit predictable.  One Sunday he gathered the kids around him and began, “Who can tell me what’s small, grey, and furry; has a big tail; and likes to eat nuts?”  One of the kids wearily raised his hand and, when called on, said with a sigh, “I don’t know, pastor, but I’ll bet you’re going to tell us it’s Jesus.”

That obviously wasn’t a Unitarian Universalist church!

Out there—beyond our walls—and even to a large extent in here among ourselves, there’s a perception that Unitarian Universalism is anti-Christian; that we’d prefer to draw wisdom from any of the other world religions but that the Christian traditions are off limits; that, as the old joke puts it, the only time the words “Jesus Christ” are spoken in a UU church is when the sexton stubs his toe.  I’ve heard this from non-UUs, and quite a number of folks in the congregations I know best have told me the same thing.

Still, I don’t think that most people in our movement dislike Jesus.  In the movie Casablanca there’s a scene in which Peter Lorre’s character says to Humphrey Bogart’s character, “You despise me, don’t you Rick?”  To which Rick replies, “I suppose I would if I gave you any thought.”  I don’t think most people in our movement dislike Jesus, but I don’t think most of us give him too much thought, either.

This may have changed recently, what with the release of Mel Gibson’s movie which Steve Martin has renamed, “Lethal Passion,” and about which, I think, the less said the better.  We may be thinking about him more now, but I’ve been giving Jesus some thought for the last several years while I was working on my book Teacher, Guide, Companion:  rediscovering Jesus in a secular world.  And as I’m now being asked to speak at events around the country on the theme of this “rediscovery,” I’m thinking a lot about what to say about thinking about him.  So you might imagine that I am eager for these opportunities to discuss this topic, and this person, that I love.  

Well, yes and no.  There are safer things for a guest preacher to preach about!  For most of us Jesus has so much baggage that it’s hard to see our way past the boxes, bags, and  bundles to the man buried behind (or beneath!) the pile.  We may not actually know more about him than we do about Moses, or Mohammed, or Siddhartha, but we think we do.  For most of us the image was cast in cement a long time ago.  We think we know all there is to know or, at least, all that is worth our knowing.  

I’d certainly thought so.  Raised in liberal Presbyterian and Methodist churches—or, more precisely, in their church camps—I was pretty sure I knew what Jesus was all about—a good guy; an ethical teacher, who died young and was converted into a God.   I had all but dismissed him when, in my twenties, I turned toward Buddhism and Wicca on my spiritual search.  By the time I was ordained and came to the church in Yarmouth, Jesus had become for me essentially a literary figure—one of the mythic hero’s “thousand faces”—well worth mentioning in sermons from time to time, but little else.

And then my mom died.  In the weeks and months that followed I found that the theology I had “built” for myself was not as strong as I would have liked.  It was far more flimsy and hollow than I’d imagined.  I wanted—honestly, I needed—something more and I found myself reexamining the traditions in which I’d been raised.

I decided to begin by studying the man upon whom the traditions had been built, the man I once described in an Easter sermon as “an old friend I seem intent on forgetting”—Yeshua ben Miriam, Jesus son of Mary.  In my reading I came across Bishop Spong’s book on Jesus, This Hebrew Lord, in which he wrote,

“In [the story of Jesus] I found . . . a center for my being.  Behind the supernatural framework of the first century . . . I discovered a life I wanted to know; a life that possessed a power I wanted to possess; a freedom, a wholeness for which I had yearned for years.”

There are those who say that seeking the historic Jesus is a fool’s errand.  On the one hand, whatever else they may be, the Gospels are not reliable journalism.  I’ve often said to the congregation I serve that all religious language is poetry.  This is as true for the Gospels as it is for the Psalms.  The four Gospel writers—the folks we call Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—are poets, not reporters.  Or to use another metaphor, they are painters; the Gospels can be seen as a portrait of Jesus.  Or, more accurately, are portraits, in the plural; it’s worth noting that each painted a different picture of the man.  They each include different stories, and even the stories they tell in common they tell differently.  The feeling, the flavor of the man is different with each, from Mark’s humble healer to John’s self-assured cosmic Christ.  And then, as anyone who’s read The DaVinci Code knows, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are only the four portraits that were enshrined in the canon of the Bible—there are dozens of other Gospels that paint their own pictures of the man.  How, then, are we to find out who he was if there are so many different pictures and none of their authors were concerned with writing reliable history?

Well, we can look at these various pictures and, as Morton Smith put it, attempt to “trace the trajectories” back to their source.  What kind of man would Jesus have had to have been for the Gospel writers to have told the kinds of stories they did?  What are the elements that are consistent among the various stories, or which seem so incongruous that they almost have to be true?  (There are things in the Gospels that are so unflattering or so just plain weird that no one would have made them up and inserted them into the story if they didn’t have to be there because they were true.)  From clues such as these we can begin to form our own portrait.

Beyond this, we can study what can be known about life in first century Palestine and, in particular, about the lives of holy men in Jesus’ day.  Even more broadly, we can find out what can be known about itinerant preacher/healers in pre-industrial, agrarian societies generally.  Then, we can compare this to the information gleaned from the Gospels and, while not being absolutely certain, we can have reason to believe that our guesses are at least well educated.

So what do we know?  Jesus was born about one hundred years after Rome had spread the Pax Romana into his homeland.  During this time, most of the people in the Roman Empire—some 80 per cent of the population—lived at a subsistence level.  The Roman social system was shaped like a pyramid, with the emperor on top, supported by retainers who were supported by merchants, traders, and others, who were in turn supported by the work of the vast majority of the people.  This lowest strata of the population, from which Jesus came, made the Pax Romana possible, but at tremendous cost.  As Stephen Patterson put it in The God of Jesus, “Rome slowly siphoned the life out of places like Palestine.”

There were more immediate and brutal costs, as well.  Shortly before Jesus’ birth, the Roman General Varus quelled a peasant uprising in Palestine by attacking the cities of Galilee and Samaria, selling their inhabitants into slavery and publicly crucifying two thousand of the uprising’s leaders.  Shortly after Jesus’ death, all the people of the nearby towns of Gophna, Emmaus, Lydda, and Thamma were sold into slavery because they had been slow to pay their share of the Judean tribute to Rome.  This was the world in which Jesus lived, and we can be sure that this environment affected him.  Gibson got that part of the picture right, at least.

It should probably be unnecessary to say it, but just in case it’s not—Jesus was Jewish.  He was never a Christian.  He was not even the founder of a new religion.  He was someone who grew out of and spoke to the religion which raised him; he sought a renewed Judaism, and his teachings are in line with many rabbis before and since.  He sought to help his people re-clarify their image of the sacred, and to re-imagine their relationship with their God.  

Yet it’s also clear that his message was not only religious, but political.  Actually, almost no matter what his message was we’d have to say this because the first century Jewish mind would not have conceived of the sacred/secular split that we twenty-first century people seem to take for granted—everything was the province of God, so everything was religious.  But when you look at what his message was, distilled from two millennia of institutional interpretation, it is easy to see why Prof. John Dominic Crossan says that one of the few things we can know for certain about Jesus was that he was executed by the Romans as a political criminal.

Jesus spoke incessantly of “the kingdom of God.”  The Greek word that is usually translated as “kingdom” is basileia, which in just about every other ancient text is translated as “empire.”  In Jesus’ day there was only one empire—the empire of Rome.  To speak of an empire of God was to make a comparison with the empire of Rome, a comparison that would not have been flattering to the Romans.  In the empire of God, the weighty societal pyramid did not fatally crush the poor; in fact, there was no pyramid.  All were invited to the banquet table.  The Romans who were listening in would have heard this as radical stuff, as would the Jews to whom he was speaking.

But Jesus’ message wasn’t, at heart, about societal shake up.  It was about human relationships.  A story is told, with slight modifications, in the books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke:  A group comes to ask Jesus a question and begin by saying, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with particularity, but teach the way of God in accordance with truth.”  (Mark 12:14.)  Jesus lived a life in which the distinctions between rich and poor, holy and unholy, righteous and sinner, male and female, Jewish and Gentile became increasingly meaningless.  The lines of demarcation and division that we humans draw with ever greater clarity became for him invisible.  Much has been made about Jesus eating with tax collectors and prostitutes; reading, particularly, the Gospel of Luke I was struck by how often he ate with Pharisees!  It doesn’t seem to have mattered to him—left wing aid worker or right wing shock jock; homeless veteran or conservative lobbyist—Jesus saw everyone he met as children of the same “Father” and reached out to them as to a brother or sister.

And that, I think, is the point.  (At least it’s the point for this morning.)  Looking at the world with God’s eyes, Jesus came to see all people as divine and recognized all things as sacred; for him there were no distinctions.  Reflecting on this aspect of Jesus, the apostle Paul wrote, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”  (Galatians 3:28)  This is the source of that “freedom [and] wholeness” that Bishop Spong found, and which I found in my search as well.

What about all the “God” stuff?  When Mohandas Gandhi died, Albert Einstein said of him, “Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this in flesh and blood did walk upon this earth.”  When we meet a person who lives her or his life the way Emerson described in our responsive reading, truly in touch with that “deep power in which we exist,” it makes an impression on us.  I believe that Jesus lived such a life, that those who knew him were able to see the Divine shining through him.  It was as if he provided them with a window through which they could see God, or a doorway through which they found they could access those holy “beatitudes.”  Over time, the door became identified with the room to which it opened; the widow came to be seen as one with the view.  The man named Jesus, in whom and through whom people had seen the Sacred, came to be seen as sacred himself.  Came to be seen as God himself.  But again, we should remember, that all religious language is poetry.

This is not as heretical as some might think.  At the dramatic height of the story of the Transfiguration, told in both Matthew and Luke, the disciples see a vision of Jesus in conversation with Moses and Elijah, and they hear a voice from heaven saying, “This is my Son, my Beloved; listen to him!”  

Note that the voice does not say, “Bow down and worship him,” but, simply, “Listen to him.”  How like Marcus Borg’s definition of being a Christian, “taking seriously what Jesus took seriously.”  Perhaps we should take that advice.  

Still, why should we twenty-first century Unitarian Universalists pay him any mind?  Two thousand years ago a young man—a young, “God-intoxicated” carpenter and itinerant preacher—called people to a vision of a world made fair with all her people one.  He demonstrated with his life that you could look at all people as your sisters and your brothers, recognizing our common heritage as children of one Divine Reality.  This is a lesson our world still desperately needs.  Yet I believe there’s more to it than that.  I believe that Jesus is, or at least for some of us can be, more than merely a teacher or a guide.  I believe he can be a companion, for I believe that in some way far beyond my ability to comprehend it, the spirit of this man lives on and continues to offer us a doorway and an invitation to walk through it or, if you prefer, offers across the millennia a window on the way things really are and encourages us to take a deep look.

He is not the only door or the only window, of course, but for many of us he can be one.  And once we’ve cleaned off the accretion of soot and grime that generations of church teachings have deposited on him, we might discover for ourselves just what Bishop Spong, and I, and countless others have found him to be: “a life [we want] to know; a life that [possess] a power [we want] to possess; a freedom, a wholeness for which [we have] yearned for years.”

And so this morning I commend to you this old friend with whom I’ve recently become reacquainted.  This teacher and preacher, this healer and seer, this passionate lover of life who encourages us to live as one with the source of all things.  Who calls us to see everyone we meet as our brothers and sisters and all things as holy.  Who calls for commitment to a vision of a world of freedom and beauty and who was willing to die for his faith.  Such a person should most certainly be welcome in a Unitarian Universalist church, and maybe, just maybe, even in your own heart.

Closing Words:  Perhaps this young man, this Jewish peasant from so long ago, deserves another hearing.  Perhaps there is more to his message than we were taught in Sunday School.  Perhaps this itinerant healer, and teacher, and prophet—whose life and ministry was so short yet whose influence is still felt two thousand years after his death—has something to say to us.  And perhaps, if we listen closely—if we have ears to hear—we, too, will find in him what countless others have found and what we have been looking for. ~ Erik Walker Wikstrom, Teacher, Guide, Companion

Why I Wear a Cross (the power of the cross, part 2)

In my last post I noted that I wear a cross beneath my shirt every day.  However I also bemoaned the devolution of the cross from powerfully potent symbol of subversive defiance to mere fashion accessory.  Doesn't my wearing of one play into that downward spiral?

A story:  The first church I served after my ordination was the First Universalist Church of Yarmouth, Maine.  It's lovely New England meeting house was built in 1860, shortly after the Unitarians split off from the Congregationalists (whose meeting house is still right across the street!).  (As an aside, the congregation is called First Universalist instead of First Unitarian because the Unitarians and Universalists of Yarmouth merged in the early 1920s, long before the national merger in 1961.  The Unitarians had the better building, but the Universalists had just received a sizable bequest.  Guess whose name went above the door!)

Over time the sanctuary came to have a fairly large chancel area, separated from the pews with a dark wooden wall that extends up to just below the chest of someone standing on the platform.  There is a pulpit on one side, and a lectern on the other, with a set of stairs between.  Beneath the pulpit and the lectern there were beautiful red velvet drapes.

One Sunday, as I was preaching about modern Unitarian Universalism's historic roots in the Christian tradition(s), I had two parishioners come forward and lift up those drapes.  The long-time members were not at all surprised by what was revealed, of course, but many of the more recent members had never even thought to look behind the drapes and, so, an audible gasp arose as people saw the two golden crosses that were built into that wall.

I said in that sermon that no matter how much the congregation wished to distance itself from its Christian "parents," the fact is that it would be impossible to do so. As Unitarian Universalists, our Christian heritage is part of our DNA, and is always with us whether or not we know or acknowledge it.  Similarly, I think, I have chosen to wear a cross as a reminder that Christianity is part of my religious DNA, too.

I was born into the Presbyterian Church, but I like to say that I was raised by the summer camp programs of the New York Conference of the United Methodist Church.  I took religion seriously.  (At 16 I was already feeling a call to the ordained ministry.)  Eventually I was ordained -- an Elder in the Presbyterian Church.  (I was the "youngest Elder" in the history of the Long Island Presbytery!)  I remember quite vividly that moment during the service when the Elders placed their hands on me and Rev. Princh read words from the Gospel of John:

"You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and that your fruit would abide ..."

At that moment I felt as though an electric charge was running through my body.  And, as I said, to this day I can remember it vividly.  So no matter how much I may have tried to distance myself from my religious roots, they are always with me.  Perhaps I have finally decided to stop running from that appointment.  I wear the cross as a reminder.

I don't always were my cross.  There are days that I forget, and days when I don't feel "worthy" (whatever that means).  Most days, though, I put it on as I get dressed in the morning.  And I do not always think about the "powerfully potent symbol of subversive defiance" I am putting around my neck, but I often do.  And it reminds me that each day -- in each moment -- I have a choice of whether or not to settle more deeply into my comfort or to "launch out into the deep" and take the risk that I believe all real religion is.  More often than not, I confess, I make the first choice.  But because I've chosen to wear the cross, though, I have with me always a reminder ... and an encouragement to make a better choice.

So ... a question:  do you have a touchstone, a talisman, something that reminds you of the higher self your faith calls you to?  Perhaps it's something you wear, or carry in your pocket, of have sitting on a private altar at home or in the office.  Maybe it's an image you have on your phone.  Please -- I encourage you to leave a comment telling what serves for you the purpose(s) the wearing of a cross serves for me.

Pax tecum,

RevWik