In response to the rise in white nationalist violence targeting places of worship across the country…from synagogues and mosques to Sikh temples, sacred Indigenous sites and Black churches…religious leaders and religious communities are raising our voices.

From the hashtag #Many Voices One Prayer

“Listen, America.
Out of many voices,
We rise as one.

We mourn with one voice those lost.
We grieve the white nationalism that threatens us all.
We the people of many faiths shall join together;
With prayer anchored to action and linked to the hope of a country rising out of the many to become ONE.

Let us be healers of the wound that history has formed
Truth tellers of our nation’s sins.

Let us be healers of the wound our present is forming
Truth tellers of the unholy alliance of
Hate and power, married to pain and alienation.

Let us be healers of the wound our future cannot afford
Truth tellers of tragedy, but never prophets of despair.

We pray.

We kneel.
We bow.
We dance.

And, by God we rise
As One.”

Raising our voices, as people of many faiths.

We rise again, to liberate all of us from the unholy alliance of hate and power that imprisons too many and presses down on us all.

We pray, we kneel, we bow, we dance…and we rise as one.

The Muslim celebration of Ramadan begins this evening.

Ramadan Mubarak! That is the common greeting. Happy Ramadan is the convenient short translation. Happy Ramadan.

It fits the way we greet one another on other special days. Happy Easter. Happy New Year. Happy Birthday.

It is not a completely inaccurate translation.

But Mubarak means “blessing” and so a more faithful translation would be: “May the blessings of Ramadan be yours.”

May you find blessings in the practice of Ramadan.

Ramadan Mubarak!

During Ramadan, 1.5 billion Muslims around the world are instructed to fast during the day…for an entire month.

This is one of the 5 Pillars of Islam. Five practices. Five disciplines of the Muslim faith.

Many of us are familiar with the 5 Pillars.

In addition to the Ramadan fast:

Declaration of Faith: there is no god but God (Allah) and Mohammed is his prophet.

Prayer: obligatory, 5 times a day, 365 days a year.

Charity: compulsory giving to the poor of the community.

And, at least once in a lifetime, the Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Islam is being demonized today by the political right as an enemy of western culture…whatever that may be…despite the reality that there is a sizeable and growing community of patriotic Muslim citizens here in the US. Just over 1% of our population. The third largest religious denomination.

And Islam is criticized by many progressives, particularly for some of its gendered practices, the limitations placed on women, and for the violence of some of its political embodiments.

It can be hard to remember that Islam, at the personal and spiritual level, is experienced as a compelling and liberating faith…especially in communities of color here and around the world, whose lived experience is of being oppressed…by colonialism and its inheritance abroad and by racism and white nationalism here at home.

A liberating faith.

Let me say clearly that I am not a Muslim, nor do I consider myself an expert on Islam. For Muslims who are here this morning, or for Muslim and Muslima UU’s, of whom there are now more than a few, I hope my words will ring true to the Islam that you know.

I have studied some and I believe that there is a reason Islam is so compelling for so many…why it is the fastest growing faith on the planet…and why Islam attracts so many persons who have been marginalized:

The practice of Islam is, for so many, an experience of liberation.

And yet, the Pillars of Islam are all about discipline. The word Islam itself means submission. Discipline. Requirements.

Can freedom be found amid requirements? Liberation through discipline? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?

Is this just another of those troubling paradoxes in religious life? Or is there something of importance this is pointing to? Is there something important for liberal religious folks to learn here?

What blessings might open to us if we could only understand…or even embrace…

Well, I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

Liberation is our spiritual theme this month and it is an important theme for religious liberals to consider, especially with our commitments to justice-making, our rejection of creeds and our resistance to any constraint on our belief.

There are two common understandings and definitions of liberation:

Liberation can mean freedom from limits on thought or behavior. This is from the Oxford English Dictionary.

Freedom from limits on thought.

Our Unitarian religious ancestors salute in affirmation here.

“I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers…which refuses to be the slave or tool of the many or of the few…”

That’s William Ellery Channing, for whom our Channing room is named.

Freedom from limits on thought.

That is one definition of liberation.

But that is the second definition.

The first?

Liberation is the action of setting someone free from imprisonment, from slavery or oppression.

This is the liberation of rising. Rising up and out from under those things that press us down. Rising up out of powerlessness and into power.

And, in theological terms, rising up into full human agency.

Women’s Liberation. Black Liberation. Human Liberation.

Do you remember Easter Sunday? What did the choir sing? I’ll rise. I’ll rise again.

Liberation is the breaking of ”these chains holding me” as one of our hymns describes it. Liberation is rising. Liberation is movement toward the fullness of freedom.

You can understand how Channing and that Unitarian understanding of liberation…don’t put any limits on my thought…would just miss the urgency of the embodied need to rise up out of the injustice of slavery, the oppression that bodily holds people down.

Different worlds. Freedom of thought…liberation from chains. They hardly connect.

Of, Channing tried to get there.

“I call that mind free which…sympathizes with suffering…and offers itself up a willing sacrifice to the cause of human kind.”

Sympathizes with suffering.

A willing sacrifice.

You hear, I hope, the platform of privilege from which Channing spoke?

He did try to get there…to that more liberating stance…but most of that work remains for us to do.

I do not, however, want you to hear just one more effort on my part to push or drag Unitarianism and all of us, myself included, our of our privilege and into that deeper affirmation of a justice grounded not in sacrifice but in abundance.

That is a good message. You have heard it from me before. But I don’t want to leave this message there, as just another version of that sermon.

As liberal religious folks, we affirm wisdom in all of the world’s great faith traditions. That includes Islam, of course. But our knowledge of Islam, religiously, tends to focus on the mystical tradition of Sufism…if it goes beyond the troubling images of Islam in the press.

We quote Rumi: “Come, come whoever you are,” and the poems to the Beloved of Hafiz: “Oh Beloved Presence, more beautiful than all the stars together…”

We love that language…though there is a conversation about translation and appropriation that we tend to avoid. We love that language because it affirms us.

The mystical tradition of Islam is easier for many of us to hear because we know, somehow, that mystics of all traditions are pointing in the same general direction…though coming at it from their particular cultural and theological locations.

The oneness and the experience of connection mystics of all faiths describe speak to our common human yearnings.

I believe, though, that makes it easy for us to miss just how deeply Muslim those poets…Rumi and Hafiz…and their messages are.

On this day when Ramadan begins, let me invite you to look a bit more deeply and more toward the center of the Islamic theological tradition.

We read together from Muslim poet and philosopher, Mohammed Iqbal, in our Responsive Reading this morning:

“Where in our hearts is that burning of desire? …Whence comes that drive in us?”

Iqbal was a philosopher whose work focused on the Self.

He found, in the Quran, a language of the Self, a Self centered in and enlivened by that divine spark which is present in every human being…

Does this sound familiar to you at all? The spark of divinity within each of us?

“Rooh” is the word in the Quran, in Arabic. It comes from the same root as the word Ruah…or breath of life…that we know from the Jewish tradition.

We are all people of the same book…in so many ways.

Iqbal argues that one has to make a great journey of transformation to realize that divine spark.

“Search and search again without losing hope. You may find sometime a treasure along the way.”

Good so far? Divine spark in every one of us. Long journey…lifetime journey…to realize it…to liberate it…to liberate ourselves.

Good so far?

So, how do we do it? How do we liberate that spark? How do we liberate our lives?

Iqbal argues that we cannot realize the self, the rooh, outside of the community…

For him, that community was the Islamic community, the Ummah.

Participation in the Ummah ennables the liberation of that divine spark and makes possible the realization of the Self.

For him, it was the Ummah, the Islamic community…for us, is it the Beloved Community?

Sa’adi, the poet I quoted in the Call to Worship, offers this:

“All peoples are members of the same body, created from one essence. If fate brings suffering to one member, the others cannot stay at rest.”

That is in our hymnal, too.

He is drawing from one of the sayings, or hadith, of the Prophet Mohammed:

“The example of the believers (of the Muslims)…the example of those who submit…in their affection, mercy and compassion…the example is that of a body. When any limb aches, the whole body reacts with sleeplessness and fever.”

This is beyond sympathy. This is not the “willing sacrifice” that Channing described. This is connection at the essential level, at the level of the self or the soul.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere…that’s how Dr. King talked about this.

So how does Islam instruct that liberation…for all…within community…can be realized? How can that spark of divinity be freed and fanned?

The answer for them was simple.

Practice. Faithful practice.

Testify. Pray. Give to the Poor. Fast on Ramadan. Make the Haj.

The five Pillars.

Practice them.

Practice can help you move out of oppression and into agency. Practice is the path to liberation…in Islam.

What is the path for us?

If you were asked to describe the practice of our faith, the practice of Unitarian Universalism, what might you say?

We don’t have a creed to recite.

We don’t carry prayer rugs with us…though I do keep one in my office…for visitors. And if you take our Wellspring course you will be asked to commit to following a spiritual discipline…but you get to select what that discipline will be.

We don’t require tithing…though sometimes I wish that we did.

No fasting required. No visit to Mecca.

What is the path to liberation for us?

Rev. Mark Morrison Reed talks about the purpose of religious community…and liberal religious community in particular…as unveiling the bonds that unite each to all. Unveiling the bonds. Lifting the veil.

“Alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen,” …he says…”and our strength too limited to do all that must be done.”

He is speaking to the truth and the strength and the solidarity that can be found only in community…

And our practice…well, perhaps our practice is to find ways to more ourselves beyond our liberal, often privileged individualism…not into sympathy or into sacrifice…but into solidarity…

Into a solidarity made possible by our practice…

And by that aspiration, which will not let us rest, to see and to know every person as lovable and already loved…just as we are.

“It is sunlight
when you practice seeing
Strength and beauty in everyone,
Including yourself…”

That is how our reading put it.

“Just practice,
practice until you get proud.”

To unveil the bonds that unite each to all…

So that we can be found.

So that we can be found and move forward together.

That is our practice. Finding one another…more and more of us each time…and moving forward together.

We have not found a way to welcome everyone in. There is a long journey toward real liberation ahead of us yet.

We name and know that.

But our aspiration and our practice remains to find one another…more and more of us each time…and to move forward together.

“Let us be healers of the wound our future cannot afford
Truth tellers of tragedy, but never prophets of despair.

We pray.
We knell.
We bow.
We dance.
And…we rise
As One

Topics: Liberation