You can read below or watch the full sermon, “Now What,” Rev. Alison shared last Sunday following the election as she oriented towards our shared calling in the weeks and months and years ahead.
Dear Ones,
I love you. I grieve with you. I am angry with you. I am sad with you. I am scared with you. I am getting ready with you. I will act with you. Will you act with me?
I love you. It warrants saying out loud from time to time, and maybe more often than we do. Throughout this election there have been deep messages of division and hate. All of us have been rubbed raw by them, and it is difficult to stay present to love. So let me be as present as I can be this morning and share that I love you. I love those of you who are Unitarian Universalists. I love those of you who hold a different religious identity but spend time with us. It is certainly good to be together on a day like this one.
I love you who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, nonbinary, queer, or questioning your sexual orientation or gender identity. Ours is a fierce and loyal love in this house of worship. We were with you when many other houses of worship wouldn’t open their doors. In fact, our children started learning about the sexuality continuum in 1971 here so that they could be free to love whoever they loved.
You are interwoven into the fabric of our lives for decades. In fact, you isn’t the right word. All of us here are LGBTQ identified or love someone deeply who is LGBTQ identified. We are one family, and we will not forget it. The story we turn to is when one of the harshest anti-LGBT measures was on the ballot in 1992, and we wrapped our building in red ribbon declaring this a “hate free zone” and worked to defeat the measure. We will not go quietly into a bleak night of regression of rights, including reduced access to gender affirming care or bodily autonomy – not in Oregon and not in our country.
I love you who are Black and Brown and Muslim and Arab and Jewish. I love you who are Immigrants regardless of what papers you hold. I love all of you who have ever been defined as ‘other’ knowing that you are none other than mine. Our country is changing, and white domination and Christian hegemony is threatened. The center of this racist, xenophobic, misogynistic construct will not hold – for it is rooted in fear that manifests a hatred that ultimately excludes no one. I know this as a white person, who enjoys white privilege most of the time, but knows the feeling well in those experiences when I am with someone who considers a Jewish person to be ‘less than,’ ‘other,’ and a threat to a way of life or a vision so narrow it chokes off life.
Our country is changing – immigrants continue to arrive – as they always have – offering new ways of seeing the world and doing things – and creating a foundation of diversity and connection across difference as a bedrock principle of this land. Our country is changing and in two decades black and brown identified people will be the majority and our children will have crisscrossed so many cultures – that they will look back on this time and wonder – what it is we were so afraid of?
We already experience that reality in places. All of the schools in the district I moved here from were integrated over 50 years ago in a landmark civil rights case that intended to balance racial and economic diversity. Every day, my child went to school and experienced what it was like to not be in the majority. While I will not pretend there were no challenges as I served on the Equity and Inclusion Committee for the district, I am here to attest that level of diversity promotes possibilities for social, emotional, and intellectual learning that are unparalleled. I look forward to the fact that my grandchild, if I have one, will likely experience that wherever they live in our country.
Maybe the fear is that the descendants of the slaves we treated with such inhumanity would not only rise up and claim the fullness of their freedom, but use their growing collective power to diminish the rights and dehumanize the descendants of the slave owners? Maybe it is fear that we human beings choose too often to “go low,” when the option to “go high” is always there alongside of it? We must name all our fears out loud. We must face them and learn the true ways to deal with the monsters lurking in the bleakness of our night, our dreams, and our waking moments.
Speaking of the descendants of slaves, no one has worked harder for our democracy than black women… Which brings me back to love…
I love you who are women and trans and nonbinary – you whose bodies have been battlegrounds for not conforming to some made up ideal. You are beautiful in every shape and color and size and ability. You have the right to reveal or withhold whatever you need to in order to feel safe. No one should have ever grabbed any rights away from you as so many have done in the past and are emboldened to do now. A note about the women allowed to make it to the senior office in the White House so far… They are not yet the head of the household, but have been allowed to play their “proper” role of spouse. Let us be mindful of the misogyny that is at the root of our comments about both Kamala and Melania and I’ll add Hillary and Shirley Chisholm. It is possible to lift up a valid point and at the same time to hammer it in with a tool shaped by patriarchy, racism, and mysogyny.
I love you our cis-presenting or identified folks. I recognize not everyone always knows what this means. The word cis refers to people whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. I love you our men, our white people, our people who identify as straight or mostly straight (sexuality is a continuum) and our Christians… I am some of these things and many of us are some of these things. You are not some new ‘other’ to project our anger onto, even if that happens sometimes. You are part of the Beloved Community we are committed to building together – You are part of ‘we’ too.
And, you do have privileges – especially those of you who can claim a number, or all of these privileged identities, and you have access to considerable power. The world we live in has been fashioned to protect and serve you, and sadly sometimes at the cost of other people that I know you love too. Some of you may want to distance yourself from power because of the way you have seen abused, but that would be a mistake. All of us need to claim the power that is ours and practice the art of sharing it and using it wisely to benefit the many to the best of our abilities.
I love you.
I need to address class too, especially as it has been named such an important component of how we got to this day. By the way, not a day where a Republican was elected. That has happened for centuries, and I always think people should vote for the candidate they believe in their conscience to be the best leader for all, regardless of party. I mean how did we get to a day where we have elected a man who demonstrates anger, brute force, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, vengeance, fear and mistrust as the tools of leadership. (And, I’ll add something else I have known since I was a child because I grew up in New York City, someone who is not a good businessman. I mean if we want to elect someone who is a talented businessperson, then fine, but he isn’t that.)
I do not have all the answers to this question – my brain is still integrating the information that he has not only been a major party’s candidate three times and now won twice. But, let me say this – the wealthy, white landowners appealed to European slaves – yes, there were European slaves – by giving them new rights and powers over black slaves. When the masses of poor, disenfranchised peoples grew too large for the wealthy, white citizens to feel secure in all they enjoyed, they promised and delivered a system where whites in poverty could move up from the bottom. For example, European slaves started to be allowed to own possessions and could dispossess black slaves of their possessions. It was illegal for people who were black and enslaved to own things. When I unpack Trumps words, he promises something similar. This diminished understanding of the American Dream is disappointing, divisive, and destructive.
We must learn our history to understand what is happening in the present. Unfortunately, liberation and justice do not unfold in a linear fashion onward and upward forever. We must learn how to see more clearly.
His rhetoric over the last eight years has emboldened the hate speech and actions of bullies which threaten to further weaken the fabric of our democracy and wreak havoc on the lives of people we love – women and trans identified individuals, people of color, immigrants, Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, people with disabilities, people without homes, and the humans and animals threatened by wildfires… those in harms way is a list that grows under his vision.
It is a time that we are reminded of the preciousness of this faith and “our beliefs,” which as Sophia Lyon Fahs puts it, “are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern.” It matters what we believe, for there are others who espouse beliefs, which erect a wall between the saved and the unsaved. Our faith and our beliefs take shape in the hearts and minds of the people who make up our congregations, where we remind one another that responding to the call of compassion, love, and justice is our work in all times and no matter who has been elected president by the American people.
It is just that in uncertain times, we are more present to that eternal call, and the urgent need to act on the demands that love imposes on us. It is when we act collectively on that call that we are most able to bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice. This is something I am often reminded of having the privilege of serving as a minister in congregations during times and in places in the country where it is hard to forget.
In the just over two years, I have been here, we have been called into action by our Caring and Action for Reproductive Dignity network to support our neighboring state of Idaho where people find themselves on the frontlines of the struggle for abortion access and access to gender affirming care. Every time a new family sits in our welcome circle at the end of service and shares they have moved here to support gender affirming care for someone in their family and are looking for a church that will welcome them – I feel that red ribbon that was once wrapped around our sanctuary. Another example, at a time when the anti-houseless people rhetoric has ramped up to include a sense that some of us are disposable, we have opened a shower project – to get proximate to those who are struggling on the streets and to offer a space for hygiene, new clothes and respite from the cold temperatures and frosty reception outside.
When I was serving in Morristown, we had a bully who was elected as mayor who thickened the air with racist rhetoric and vowed to sweep the streets clean of immigrants. We joined with immigrant rights groups and interfaith partners to fight against laws that turned our police force into Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. This is exactly what our team that went to Arizona to knock on doors recently was trying to prevent by speaking with residents about proposition 314, which was about just that – deputizing police officers as immigration officials.
In Tulsa, where I served, the congregation was a leader in claiming their involvement in Race Riots and their commitment to reparations and reconciliation long before they joined with a predominantly African American congregation.
In New York, where I served but also grew up, our congregation helped reshape the landscape of our city from callousness to compassion and from homophobia to a holistic love when it came to the AIDS crisis.
You, my fellow Unitarian Universalists and friends, over the decades, have ignited in my soul an unshakeable faith in our ability to make a healing difference in one another’s lives and in the wider world.
It is good to be reminded that we are not alone and that we have need of one another to be fully engaged in the work of healing in a broken world. If we are to live into the promise of a faith that is relevant, robust and resilient, we cannot afford to simply be a haven from the trouble that surrounds us.
We are called instead to offer a center of renewal and hope that sends us back out into the world with a humility and a readiness to learn how to co-create communities where we live and love across difference.
The next four years of a Trump presidency will be very purposeful for us, once we move past this week of shock and grieving. Pay attention to your grief. Some are saying, we don’t have time for it. But, as your minister, I promise you burying your feelings never helps. Feel everything you do in this moment, and allow it to be a teacher for where you may go next. I am not saying wallow in sadness, but I am saying it makes sense to feel sad, angry, frightened, mistrustful, uncertain. But know you are not alone. I am with you. We are with you.
And, I promise you this as the daughter of a woman, who was part of the LGBTQ family, I am in this fight. As a woman who has survived sexual assault and who has miscarried, I am in this fight. As a person with Jewish heritage, who has been raised with an awareness of when we were marked as less than human and slated for a course of death, I am in this fight. As someone committed to economic justice – rather than pitting less enfranchised groups against one another – as a distraction tactic by the wealthy, white segment of the patriarchy, I am in this fight.
As an inhabitant on this precious planet, with wildlife choking on plastic and all of us choking greenhouse gases, I am in this fight. As your minister, I am in this fight with you!
In some ways, what has changed is that now we know 2016 wasn’t simply an aberration. We can see more clearly not only how far we genuinely have come to advance justice, but just how far we still have to go. I am ready, willing, and able to summon the spiritual resources to be in this communion of struggle and commitment to love until we create the changes that all our children and all their children deserve with no exceptions to who is deserving.
Yes, we need to listen to the pain and the struggle that led some to vote for a president seemingly without a conscience, but we must not allow our commitments to black lives, immigrants, non-mainstream religions, LGBTQ identified folks, or people with disabilities to backslide for the sake of going along to get along. We must set our eyes and our actions on higher ground. We must ready ourselves with spiritual practices and with an insightful and incising analysis of what is really happening and with a willingness to act for justice even as we are learning how to act and be more just ourselves.
I love you. I grieve with you. I am angry with you. I am sad with you. I am scared with you. I am getting ready with you. I will act with you. Will you act with me? Let us act and move forward together!
Amen. And, May it be so.