Call to worship
This week marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of poet Walt Whitman. Our call to worship this morning are his words:
“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun
and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every
one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants,
argue not concerning God, have patience and
indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to
nothing known or unknown or to any person or number
of persons, go freely with powerful uneducated persons
and with the young and with the mothers of families,
read these leaves in the open air every season of every
year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at
school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever
insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a
great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its
words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and
between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion
and joint of your body.”[1]
We come together in this community we call beloved.
Generations together, each bringing our hopes, our dreams, our fears, our gifts.
May each of us find what we need here, and in that finding, each do our part to bless the world.
Come, now, and let us worship.
Sermon
Commitment is our spiritual theme this month. Commitment is a serious word. It asks for, well, commitment.
So what are the commitments that guide your life?
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/756-this-is-what-you-shall-do-love-the-earth-andYour children? Your family? Your work? Your community? Or they may take more personal forms. A commitment to daily exercise, or a spiritual practice. Or maybe they would come in how you express your values—protecting Mother Earth or the freedom of choice. I expect we’d each have a list we make. And as I’d expect in this or any community there would be plenty of similarities. And I expect there would be plenty of differences.
And perhaps inherent in that question about commitment is to look at not just the things we would put on our list but also to look at the choices we make in our lives and what they would say about our commitments. Is there congruence or not? I think that our list of commitments can often run up against the factors of time and energy. They can run up against the realities of a world that asks much of us and that can all too often have us feeling pressure to attend to all the commitments that are pulling us.
Commitment is certainly an appropriate theme on this Sunday when we honor those who have taught our children and youth this year. It really is a commitment these good folks do all through the year.
When I think about some of the teachers I have been fortunate to have in my life, I can see in hindsight how they have been models for me of just how our commitments can guide our lives.
I think of a professor I had in college named Genie Zerbinos. She taught the basic reporting class in the Journalism school and she took me under her wing. In college I was a shy kid from a small town. I was still very much in the process of finding myself. But she, apparently, saw something in me. It was Professor Zerbinos who more or less dragged me down to the office of the college newspaper to get me involved. And I did that. I first became a reporter, then an editor of the arts section and then the Editor in Chief managing a staff of 30 people. That was one of my first experiences of myself as leader and it came to be a defining time for me. I’m not sure my life would have unfolded as it as were it not for that experience. She saw something that I hadn’t quite seen in myself at the time and I’m thankful for her not-so gentle push into the newsroom that day.
That’s the kind of thing that I think about when I hear the word commitment. In the case of teachers it is that sense of looking out for and making students a priority and living out of that priority. And I know enough of your stories to know that our commitments get lived out in all kinds of ways.
Commitments are certainly things that we each make, but there is also something inherent in commitments that are larger than us—that maybe we don’t completely choose. Who were the models for some of those teachers who were important in my life? How was it that they got to where they were? And how did those commitments get passed on to me?
I have been thinking about ancestors these days. This spring has marked a time with lots of memorial services and there is something in those rituals that brings this home. Who are those people in our lives who have guided us on our way? Some of them we know, yes, but others we just know of them.
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York that marked the beginning of the modern gay rights movement. I was six going on seven at the time and don’t have memories of the news coverage but I know that those events that night very much shaped my life and the lives of other LGBTQ people.
Very few establishments welcomed openly gay people in the 1950s and 1960s. Those that did were often bars, although bar owners and managers were rarely gay. At the time, the Stonewall Inn was owned by the Mafia. It catered to an assortment of patrons and was known to be popular among the poorest and most marginalized people in the gay community: drag queens, transgender people, effeminate young men, butch lesbians, male prostitutes, and homeless youth.
The story goes that the police would usually tip off the mafia owners of the bars so that they could hide the liquor and warn the patrons. But for whatever reason on this night that didn’t happen and police showed up unannounced.
Some speculate that the Stonewall was behind on its payments to dirty cops. Others suggest that the Mafia management had become more interested in blackmailing wealthy Stonewall patrons than selling liquor at a dive bar.
The patrons were told to line up against the wall and be ready to produce their identification. Those whose gender didn’t appear to match their driver’s license would be arrested, and those without identification would be taken into another room to have their sex verified.
June 28 1969 was the same day that the funeral for gay icon Judy Garland happened not far away in New York. And the Stonewall was full of people who had every reason not to want to show their IDs. It started with the drag queens. Unwilling to accompany officers into the back room to have their sex checked, they stayed where there were. Other patrons refused to show their identification cards. When it was decided that everyone would be taken to the police station, Marsha Johnson, a black trans woman, proclaimed her rights by throwing a shot glass into the mirror.[2]
Meanwhile outside the Stonewall, a crowd was gathering. Many of those who had managed to escape lingered, waiting for news of their friends. Other members of the gay community joined them.
[2] http://www.outhistory.org/exhibits/show/tgi-bios/marsha-p-johnson
Rumors made their way out to the waiting onlookers: those inside, it was said, were being beaten by cops. The crowd began to perform, taunting police officers with exaggerated salutes as the first of the arrested emerged from the bar in handcuffs.
What ensued were several days of riots that spilled over into surrounding streets. Multiple accounts of the riot assert that there was no pre-existing organization or apparent cause for the demonstration; what ensued was spontaneous.
An activist named Michael Fader, remembers it this way: “We all had a collective feeling like we’d had enough of this (kind of sh–). It wasn’t anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place, and it was not an organized demonstration… Everyone in the crowd felt that we were never going to go back. It was like the last straw. It was time to reclaim something that had always been taken from us…. All kinds of people, all different reasons, but mostly it was total outrage, anger, sorrow, everything combined, and everything just kind of ran its course. It was the police who were doing most of the destruction. We were really trying to get back in and break free. And we felt that we had freedom at last, or freedom to at least show that we demanded freedom. We weren’t going to be walking meekly in the night and letting them shove us around—it’s like standing your ground for the first time and in a really strong way, and that’s what caught the police by surprise. There was something in the air, freedom a long time overdue, and we’re going to fight for it. It took different forms, but the bottom line was, we weren’t going to go away. And we didn’t.”[3]
One of the things that happens when we feel under threat—which it is easy to feel these days—it can help us get to clarity fast about just what our commitments really are. Like that old organizing song asks, “Which side are you on?”
Perhaps the message is that it is important to see the context out of which we live. To not take for granted all that we have and all the responsibility that can come with that. To recognize our privilege which we may or may not even be aware of… to at least strive to be mindful of that. To also see where we may have missed the mark.
Now I should also say that there’s some irony in the story. The heroes were the drag queens who said no most of all. Most of them were people of color. They were more often than not singled out for the worst punishment, the worst discrimination. And while gay and lesbian folk have made tremendous strides in the 50 years since that happened, the case has not necessarily been so for our trans siblings. Their sacrifice has not necessarily been acknowledged as much as it should be and they, in particular, are the subject of much discrimination.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots#cite_note-duberman183-10The spiritual task asks us to take the stuff of our lives and to make meaning. The spiritual task is to see our lives in the context of the whole. We take our fears, our disappointments, we take
our grief and our joy and we bring it all into the mix. And part of the task is to see those moments when we find ourselves saying yes—or in this case, no—and living out of that place. To notice what we may not have noticed before.
The spiritual task to be present with what is around us and to bear witness to what we see. And to see ourselves in relationship with all of life.
This week we have witnessed yet another deadly shooting in our country. Twelve people were killed in Virginia. And the sad thing is that this happens so often it is hard to make any sense of it. It is hard to know what if anything we can do.
A couple years ago when the site of the latest shooting was the Parkland High School in Florida, I took hope when those students said no and organized and were actually able to stand up to the gun lobby in this country. When it happened I found myself responding with what felt like a familiar set of emotions: sadness, anger, frustration. And a kind of resignation that nothing would happen in the aftermath of this shooting either. But then something seemed to be different that time. It was the students who were speaking and they were speaking clearly. They were not just going to accept the status quo when it came to all the guns in our country.
Their leadership at least has pointed me in the direction of hope. Even as so many people have tried to tear them down, with fear mongering online, with so much that would distort their message. Despite so much they have managed to keep their voices out there. Those commitments have been a guide post.
So what are the commitments that guide your life? That’s a big question.
I think that may be part of why we come together here. We want to be part of something larger. We want to have a place where we are called into our best selves and where we are called to know and to live out our commitments. And there is something in the coming together that can help us to do that. It is a place where we bring the grief of our losses, where we can bring our blessings and gifts, too. It is also, hopefully, a place where we bring our questions and our doubts. Something in that coming together that helps us stay on course. Hopefully it means being in a place where our perspectives—our commitments—can grow.
It means approaching life with a degree of humility—to recognize what we know, yes, but also what we don’t know. And to be open to how we might change, how we might call forth change in our world.
Words again of Lynn Ungar:
How can you leave your heart
open to such a vast, pervasive sadness?
How can you close your eyes
to the riot of joy and beauty
that remains?
The solutions, if there are any
to be had, are complex, detailed,
demanding. The answers
are immediate and small.
Wake up. Give thanks. Sing.[4]
Friends, there is much that the world asks of us these days. There is much that asks for our commitment. Through it all may we remember that we are not alone but part of some larger whole that includes those who have gone before us and those who come after us. It includes all those fellow travels with us on this journey. It includes those we may not have noticed before.
It includes the places where we can find our way to yes and the places where the no is clear. Through it all may we find ourselves woke. May we find ourselves whole. May we know ourselves, and all of creation, as beloved. Amen.
Prayer
Spirit of life and of love. God of many names and of no name at all, hear our prayers. Be with us in our struggles, but with us in our discoveries. Be with us as with strive to live with courage, with humility, in such a way as recognized our interdependence with all of life. Most of all be with us as we find our way, as we discern the commitments in our lives. In all our days, may love—may life—call us on. Amen.
Benediction
May your commitments guide us and keep us. May they help us, in all of our days, to Wake up. Give thanks. Sing.
[4] http://www.lynnungar.com/poems/the-last-good-days/Topics: Commitment