In the midst of a world, wrote Rebecca Parker, marked by [both] tragedy and beauty…
In the midst of that world, “there must be those who bear witness against unnecessary destruction…those who speak honestly and do not avoid seeing what must be seen…of [both] sorrow and outrage…”
Sorrow AND outrage.
I am glad to be back in the pulpit. Glad to be back…even this week…when the presence of violence and suffering in the world has threatened to drown the tenderness and wonder in our spirits…at least in my spirit…
Three more mass shootings…now more than 250 just this year…
The rhetoric of racism from the White House, the most virulent in a century, giving cover to the violence…
More children without their parents after the massive ICE raids in Mississippi…
The fifth anniversary of Michael Brown’s killing was Friday. In this sanctuary that Sunday we chanted “Hands Up. Don’t Shoot.” We hung our Black Lives Matter banner the following week. 5 years ago.
In this church, during that time, we’ve moved forward with significant work on immigration, welcoming Asylum seekers last fall, deepening our relationship with front-line communities and even beginning to look at how the culture of white supremacy lives in us and in the life of this congregation. We name our pronouns now and raise new questions about just how welcoming we are.
The path has been bumpy at times, but we have moved forward.
The world in which we live?…well, an objective evaluation would be hard pressed to point to progress toward Beloved Community.
So, anger…and some fear…have welled up far more easily for me as the week has unfolded… in response to the world.
Hindu philosopher and poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote: “All the …evils in the world have overflowed their banks, yet [rowers] take your places with the blessing of sorrow in your souls.”
We know change needs to come. We know that.
A change of policy. A change of practice. A change of heart.
We know that we need to ready ourselves to take our places…like the rowers described by Tagore…
…with the blessing of sorrow in our souls.
This world needs a conversion. We need a conversion. We need a change of heart.
Recall the story told about Hosea Ballou, the founder of American Universalism. I’ve told it before. Ballou began his ministry, just after 1800, riding on horseback a circuit from one small New England congregation to another.
On the road one day, he encountered a Baptist minister and they fell to talking theology.
Ballou spoke of his Universalist faith…that God was a loving God who would condemn none of his human children to hellfire…that we were all going to heaven…our sins, our shortcomings forgiven…all of us welcomed into God’s embracing love.
The other minister, living out a theology that relied more on punishment…was incredulous. “Why, if I were a Universalist then,” he challenged Ballou, “ I could club you over the head, steal your horse and all of your belongings and not have to worry about punishment in the hereafter.”
Ballou is reported to have replied: “That is true. You could. But if you were a real Universalist, that thought would never have crossed your mind.”
Ballou and the Universalists who followed him, believed that the Good News of Universalism could lead to…would lead to a change of heart…a conversion…
An overcoming…of the greed and violence of which we are all capable…a victory over that evil wolf from our story this morning.
And they believed that that change of heart would lead to a change of practice…a change in the way people lived…a change which would point…inevitably…toward the Beloved Community…here on earth…on earth as it is in heaven.
That’s how the change would happen. It would start with a personal conversion…made possible by God’s love and God’s grace.
We would become the change, embody the change, and the world would change as a result.
“Be the change you seek” was how Gandhi described such a process.
Be the Change.
Is that how you believe change will come. If you live in the world, trusting the Spirit of Life…
If you are converted and convicted…in a good way…convicted to living fully out of that vision of Beloved Community…
Will that lead to the change we need to see?
Is that how you think things work?
The early Universalists were working class…not formally educated. Ballou had no higher education at all…
The early Unitarians…well, they were formally educated… very privileged…and developed a very different understanding.
The Unitarians believed that we could and should perfect ourselves. If the Universalists relied on God’s grace, the Unitarians thought they could rely on themselves. It is called human agency in theological terms. And the Unitarian side of our religious family tree placed far more emphasis on the work we have to do.
William Ellery Channing, the founder of American Unitarianism, for whom our Channing Room is named, preached not about our reliance on God, but on our human likeness to God. “Likeness to God” was the title of one of his most famous sermons.
From that sermon: “I affirm, and would maintain, that true religion consists in proposing, as our great end, a growing likeness to the Supreme Being. Religious instruction should aim chiefly to turn people’s aspirations and efforts to that perfection of the soul, which constitutes a bright image of God.”
The perfection of the soul.
Likeness to God. Do you understand why I speak of the high opinion those Unitarians had of themselves?
“The likeness does not consist in extraordinary or miraculous gifts, in supernatural additions to the soul…but in our essential faculties, unfolded by vigorous and conscientious exertion…”
Exertion. We have to work for it but it is within reach for us.
The Unitarians believed that they were already pretty highly evolved and that they were called to perfect themselves…by study and spiritual practice…improve themselves and then they would direct the transformation, the change in the world.
They would direct it.
Does that approach come closer to the way you live? I mean in practice.
Self-improvement? Learning More? Perfecting yourself? So that you can change the world…improve the world…make a difference?
Two different approaches.
The Unitarian…all about us and our capacity to change and improve things.
The Universalist…all about the Spirit of Love and about a faithfulness born out of the transforming experience of that love.
Human agency…faithfulness and trust.
I should say that neither the Universalists nor the early Unitarians were “woke” about the culture that we are trying to change today.
We love to hold up the abolitionists on the Unitarian side…and they existed…but so did John Calhoun, the segregationist Senator from South Carolina, architect of the Confederacy who was a good Unitarian as well, member of the Church of all Souls in Washington, DC.
And the Universalists… sustained explicit racism in their seminaries and denominational publications right into the 20th century.
So, here we are. Unitarian Universalists. Drawing on both sides of our religious family tree, neither side perfect but both with strengths we can use.
We are Universalists.
Trusting that the Spirit of Life moves in each and every one of us, that we are all lovable and already loved, that no one can be left behind. Love is the doctrine of this church. Though some of us struggle with that original Universalist language of God’s Grace, and prefer to leave the question of divinity open…at least…we are clear that the Beloved Community is not just for some but for all of us. We are Universalists.
And…
We believe that ours are the only hands on earth and that we can learn and grow…not into some likeness of God…few of us would use that language today…but into a human fullness that can bless us and bless the world. We are called to make a difference. The Spirit of Life moves in us and through us, even as we work to improve ourselves.
We are Unitarians too. And their belief that we need to continue learning, continue developing our understanding and our skills…that part of our Unitarian heritage grounds us in our approach to change. It allows us to understand that we have been far from perfect. To acknowledge our mistakes, seek forgiveness and move forward because we can do better.
There is no doubt that we need to deepen our understanding.
To take just one example…sadly appropriate to this week.
As a faith community, we support sensible limits on gun ownership…background checks for certain…but also a return of the ban on assault weapons and expanded magazines…the military tools that allow these mass killings to take place. Many, perhaps most would go further toward licensing and testing requirements…just like we do for driving a car.
We are strong on the policy side. But not enough of us have studied the 2nd Amendment…which has been used to justify our cultural obsession with guns.
Here is the language of that Amendment: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
A well regulated militia. Not individual citizens, despite the Supreme court’s recent interpretation. The people have a right to bear arms in well regulated militias.
We are taught, in our national narrative, to understand this as a response to the authoritarian tyranny of the British King. Citizens need weapons to defend themselves against authoritarianism…well, just bracket that thought for now.
But remember this Amendment was passed in 1791. And all of the voting citizens, empowered to own and use guns in 1791 were white, male property owners.
The 2nd Amendment was a “white” right from the very beginning.
And the militia’s referred to in the Amendment, in 1791, were “irregulars” called into service in what was then “the west”…Ohio, Kentucky…most of them were squatter settlers, hungry for land, who would do what the regular army would not…burn, scalp, massacre… The militia’s executed the on-going genocide of native peoples that was necessary for the Manifest Destiny of white colonization and the theft of the native lands.
The term militias also referred to the slave patrols in Virginia, Georgia and the Carolina’s that hunted the enslaved persons who tried to flee to freedom.
The 2nd Amendment, like every one of our cherished and criticized American institutions, was designed and intended to support a culture of white supremacy.
The 3/5’s rule, the electoral college, the over-representation of “small population states” in the US Senate… Real democracy…for all… was never the intention.
These are all part of a single system, a culture, and we need to understand that system more deeply. Without that inspection, as the choir sang, we’ll be holding onto notions that are better gone. We need to be able to see the racism and the patriarchy built into our system in order to dismantle it.
We need that Unitarian side of our tradition with its affirmation of our agency…our ability to see our world and shape our world toward that vision of Beloved Community.
We need to guard against the Unitarian arrogance, and understand both their and our privilege… but we need to rely on that Unitarian trust of our power.
We also, I believe, and perhaps even more, need to rely on and rest in the Universalist faith in the power of love.
I am not suggesting that love…or God, whatever name you use… will intervene as some faiths claim. The Spirit of Life will not step in to save us in some final cosmic victory of good over evil.
But we will need the capacity for honesty and for forgiveness if we are going to move ahead together. We will need the presence of love and some saving grace in the days ahead or the divisions will tear us apart.
Honesty and the capacity for forgiveness.
Several sources tell this story:
A white South African soldier was testifying before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Referring to a massacre of twenty members of the African National Congress, the soldier said, “We gave the orders to open fire.” The room grew quiet. A long moment passed. And then another. Then the solider spoke again, “Please forgive us.”
Please forgive us.
Silence followed, then applause. Sensing the spirit of forgiveness, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “We are in the presence of something holy.”
The religious world…our religious world…knows at least something about dealing with sin, with human fallibility and with human violence.
We may not know much, but we know that simple punishment drives further wedges between us. We know that for redemption and hope to flourish…
The process must begin with confession, with honesty, and the begging of forgiveness. It continues through repentence and repair.
But for us to even begin the process, we need to hold and be held by a love larger than ourselves.
We will need both the Unitarian confidence and the Universalist grace to come through these times together.
Rev. Pamela Lightsey, the VP for Academic Affairs at Meadville Lombard Theological School wrote earlier this week:
“This violence will be eradicated by speaking hard truths, by knowing the history of those truths, and keeping the courage to look within our own selves to wrestle with those truths.”
It is what Rebecca Parker was pointing to: refuse to close our eyes to “what must be seen of sorrow and outrage…of tenderness and wonder.”
We need to strengthen our faith and our practice.
Even when our leaders will not tell us the truth, we must strive to tell ourselves the truth, searching for ways to model…to live…as we believe we should and must live if we are to survive.
To be the change.
May it be so.
Topics: Embodiment