Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
Turn and face the strange…
Thank you, John. Thank you for bringing the gift of David Bowie’s lyrics and…presence… into our worship on this weekend.
On this weekend when, among other things, we celebrate PRIDE.
Happy PRIDE everyone!
Bowie, with his…I suppose I should probably say “with their” androgynous appearance, their challenge to the gender stereotypes…though that song was written long before our current attention to pronouns…
Changes.
” There’s gonna have to be a different man”…a different person.
That call for change was written in 1971, just two years after the Stonewall Rebellion…50 years ago. Many of you can’t remember just how shocking it was to challenge the accepted norms of dress and personal decoration…the rigid gender binary that ruled…
Much has changed for all of us, the queer community included, in those years…
There is more affirmation of real lived experience…but also on-going reaction and resistance to those changes.
Those changes remain far from complete…
Alice Walker’s words ring so true. Creating change and moving toward the Beloved Community is a relay race, not a quick sprint.
There is so much to preach today.
PRIDE has come…virtually, once more.
But this weekend is not just about PRIDE. It is also Father’s Day, a day to recognize all the fathers and father figures in our lives…the father’s we have lost and the father figures we have found, the fathers who never showed up for us and the fathers and father figures who showed up beautifully and helped us find our way.
Father’s Day was created by a daughter, her father raising her and her brothers as a single parent after the death of their mother. In reaction to a Mother’s Day sermon, this daughter petitioned the Spokane Ministerial Association to create a day to honor fathers. “Why should mothers get all the recognition?”
And Mother’s Day, you’ll remember, began as a protest and demand for peace, not a celebration of love and self-sacrifice. Mother’s Day began as a protest…just as PRIDE did.
Mother’s Day has gone through some real changes, too.
Today, shouldn’t we be celebrating all of the parents…all of those who parent…if we have learned nothing else in these last 50 years, it is that rigidity of gender roles does so much violence.
And as we recognize those who father and parent us, it is important to name that there is no one good way, one appropriate way to parent…it is the real, lived experience of parenting that we need to recognize, and celebrate…and in some cases forgive.
So much change. So much change still needed. So much to preach today.
PRIDE and Father’s Day…and Juneteenth. That celebration of the ending of chattel slavery in this nation…156 years ago…finally a national holiday…
Juneteenth…a celebration of liberation…a change that could have been transformative, a watershed moment in the history of this nation when what is called our “original sin” was ended…
We all know that we are still struggling to make that real.
Resistance to that change has a history just as long…the push back manifest not just in police violence but in carefully crafted voter suppression…
Change…a relay race…resistance always present. Is that our sermon for today?
Our faith tradition has very definite things to say about change.
In theology, we say that revelation is not sealed…that there is more truth for us to discover…
“Love is the doctrine of this church. The search for truth is our sacrament…”
We understand ourselves to be seekers. Open to and even welcoming change.
We have a religious commitment to self-improvement that goes back to what William Ellery Channing called “Self Culture.” We love education. We have more degrees than any other religious community in the US.
And our strong focus on justice-making and justice seeking…as we sang “there is power when we call on justice to break every chain.”
As a religious people we are looking to improve ourselves and better our world.
“For the longing that told you it was time for a change,
…
For the courage it took to answer the call,
We give you our blessings.”
You would think that we are all about change. That we would see change as an unalloyed good…a virtue almost…a necessity at least…a blessing.
Almost…
For people who are supposed to want change so much…we are also such creatures of habit…at least I am.
I have a morning routine…I wake early and come downstairs to our kitchen…make a cup of coffee…and in this good weather step onto our deck…I greet my friend the Sweet Gum tree…check in with how the season is progressing and have my time for prayer and reflection…before others wake, when there is a quiet disturbed only by the rustle of the trees in whatever breeze is blowing…
It is my routine.
And I recognize that there is considerable privilege involved in this habit…many people do not have the comfort of my surroundings or the ability to take that morning time as I do….
There is privilege involved.
But it is also true that if I don’t get that private morning time, the rest of my day is more of a challenge…or perhaps it is that I am less centered and able to deal with what the rest of the day brings my way.
Do you have habits, routines that are important to you? Are your days incomplete without performing some ritual or rituals, some acts that repeat most days? That are constant?
Could we be people thoroughly committed to both change and habit? To both change and constancy?
But it isn’t a sin to treasure some habits…is it? Habits are not sins…are they?
Author Brian Doyle tells this story about change….
“Committed a sin yesterday, in the hallway, at noon. I roared at my son, I grabbed him by the shirt collar, I frightened him so badly that he cowered and wept, and when he turned to run I grabbed him by the arm so roughly that he flinched, and it was that flicker of fear and pain across his face, the bright eager holy riveting face I have loved for ten years, that stopped me then and haunts me this morning; for I am the father of his fear, I sent it snarling into his heart, and I can never get it out now, which torments me. …”
Doyle continues: “I do not know how sins can be forgiven. I grasp the concept, I admire the genius of the idea, I suspect it to be the seed of all real peace … but I do not understand how foul can be made fair.
No God can forgive what we do to each other, only the injured can summon that extraordinary grace…
The instant I let go of my son’s sinewy arm, he sprinted away and … slammed the door …and ran down the street and I stood there simmering in my shame. Then I walked down the hill into the laurel thicket as dense and silent as the dawn of the world and found him there huddled and sobbing.
We knelt in the moist green dark for a long time, not saying anything, the branches burly and patient. Finally. I asked quietly for his forgiveness…and he asked for mine…and we walked out of the woods… hand in hand,,,changed men.”
Changed men. Changed human beings.
Our theology of human empowerment, what is called human agency, and our covenant-making, our aspiring and promising to hold ourselves to high standards…our intentionality and our belief that we decide our future and our fate…that we determine our responses to challenges and shocks…
Our religious culture suggests that change can be willed, can be thought through…can be planned for and organized around…
And some change can be like that…I don’t deny it.
But I am struck by how often real change comes after a shock, a jolt that jars us out of our habits…the result even a tragedy…
I believe George Floyd’s murder was that kind of a shock for many white Americans…a shock that called millions out onto the streets…
It takes energy…some force…so often…to shift us off our dimes…to break our habits of heart and mind…to open us to new possibilities and new hope.
In my own life, it took a personal bankruptcy to get me to change my life…to convince me finally to listen to the call to ministry…
I had been working so hard to make a small business thrive…long ago now…but I remember vividly the shock to my system when I finally had to accept that it wasn’t going to work…
There were reasons beyond my control, but I had to accept the truth that I had failed…
It was so hard for me and for my family… It was one of the hardest things I have ever had to deal with…
But it opened me up…to hear the call to ministry…that had been trying to get my attention for so long.. It took that shock to make me realize that the church had become the center of my life…
My life was changed. That shock, that failure became a blessing…
I’ve told that story from the pulpit before.
I tell it again, because we, collectively, have just lived through a huge shock, a devastating shock to our systems…our personal systems and our collective systems. The pandemic, these past 15 months, called so many things into question…
How and where we work. What school looks like. How we shop. How we socialize. How we do church…
Not to mention all of the losses we need to grieve…
We have been jolted out of so many habits…
And as the pandemic recedes…as the risks reduce…
I wonder what change will come? I wonder what change the shock of the pandemic has opened us to.
Because shocks don’t last…at least the impact of shocks don’t necessarily last.
We are, at least I am, negotiating a return to life with less sense of risk. Beginning to shake hands and even hug. We gathered in person in Pioneer Square last Sunday…and the energy felt so positive and good…after all these months. Even the rain held off for a couple of hours…make of that what you will.
After the service, Rev. Tom and I stood in front of that public pulpit to greet those who came forward.
It was a negotiation with each person. We were masked but would we shake hands? Hug? Or just bow and keep some distance.
Each interaction required a negotiation.
We are collectively beginning to negotiate a return after a massive shock.
The question is what kind of change will follow?
Or will our natural desire simply to return to what we knew…will that close down…or close off…whatever openness to change the shock of the pandemic might have made possible?
We are moving into summer. Summer weather is already here. Schools are out…after being in person for just weeks…
Pre-Covid, many of us could look forward to summer as a less hectic time, when the world seems to welcome us with brighter light and warmth…with the bounty of early harvests already available and the promise of more bounty as the season progresses…
But the summer, pre-covid, was also a time to gather ourselves and to gather strength for the coming year….
Our plan, at the church, is to return to the sanctuary in September. It will be a return, but there will be changes to how we gather. We won’t make final decisions until August, but there is no doubt there will be changes.
And there will be changes within us as well. What we are comfortable with. What boundaries will we have learned are important to us. What level of risk is reasonable for us.
What changes will we need to do the spiritual work and the justice-seeking work that we are called to do?
I hope that this summer can prepare us…can ground us…so that we can reclaim the habits and practices that are of real value for us…but also hold ourselves open to the changes in us and the changes in our world, the need for which have been made even clearer by these Covid days.
I hope this summer can ground us in both memory and in hope.
“You must not be frightened,” cautioned the poet Rilke, “…if a restiveness like light and cloudshadows passes over…all that you do.”
Change is going to come. We know that so much change is needed.
And our faith calls for change.
But our faith also asks us to believe that some truth abides…that some habits of heart and mind carry forward…that we bring them with us…that they are there for us to rely on…
“You must think that something is happening with you…
That life has not forgotten you…
That [the Spirit of Life and of Love] will not let you fall.”
Love will not let us go…Love will not let us let each other go.
It is no simple matter to hold onto that faith…that love will not let us go.
There is so much evidence to the contrary…
But if we can hold onto that…bring it forward with us…
Then perhaps, just perhaps…we can find a way to welcome the changes we know are needed…
Perhaps, just perhaps…we can keep our hearts open long enough to get free.
Topics: Blessing