America is a Dream. The dream of Beloved Community. A work in process. A creation that we are all making…always. Nothing is fixed…forever…as James Baldwin wrote. And that constant process of creation means that our participation is always needed and necessary. That is why there is need for lamentation today…and need for prophetic critique.
But there is also great need for celebration of our successes as well. The truth of suffering, which we deny at our peril, only highlights the urgency of joy.

The urgency of joy. We do need joy.

Can I get an Amen to that?

I know I am moving into theology pretty quickly here, but this is church after all.

Just a typical summer Sunday here at First Unitarian Church.

A hundred voice choir…or more? The sound is magnificent.

We are so blessed to have the voices of the Unitarian Universalist Musician’s Network filling the sanctuary this morning. UU musicians from across the US and Canada, perhaps from further abroad as well. A personal welcome to you all. And to have the composers of two of the choral pieces with us as well…

And my heart is so happy that Julie Shaw was able to light our chalice this morning. Julie and I worked together during both of my stints as UUA President. We share a lot of history and a lot of love.

This sanctuary, as you know, is a work in process itself, being renovated this summer to make our chancel accessible to those using a chair or a scooter, those who roll or poll or cane as they move in the world. Some of the cosmetic work is still in process, as you can tell. But Julie is the first person, with those mobility limitations, to be able to take advantage of our improved accessibility and be part of worship leadership.

This is an important move forward for this congregation. It is part of the movement to embody our theology of welcome, to practice what we preach a little bit better. We love that Rumi text…”Come, come, whoever you are”… we love that text and our aspiration is make this community one in which we actually mean it.

Whoever you are…come.

The heart of our theology rests in that welcome.

But until we named accessibility as an issue and made the commitment to address it, and raised the money and lived through the disruption…until we did all of that to make this change, what we were really saying was “Come, come, whoever you are…but don’t come up here unless you can manage the stairs.”

Don’t come up here into leadership. Don’t come up here where everyone can hear your voice.

We may have proclaimed that everyone was welcome…but our practice fell short.

And it is important for us to celebrate this change in our practice, this living out of our commitments…as modest and overdue a change as it may be…

Because in religious life what we believe is important, but how we live out our beliefs…how we put them into practice…that is where the rubber meets the spiritual road.

The word belief in the English Bible is a translation of the Latin word, credo. We understand belief to be, for the most part, something that happens from the neck up. Something we think. But ‘credo’ is not an intellectual belief. Credo means ‘what I set my heart upon.’

Credo is about what we belove, not what we merely believe.

What we believe is important, but oo many religious folks and faith communities have used belief to drive a wedge between people rather than bring them together. Belief has been…and continues to be…more a source of suffering than a source of love.

And so we celebrate this small but important movement toward a religious practice that lives out the hope in our theology.

That does not mean that we have forgotten the other challenges we need to meet. We have had that Black Lives Matter banner on the front of the sanctuary for years now, but our work on the culture of white supremacy within the practice of this faith is current and it is on-going. We proudly present a rainbow flag as a sign of our commitments on the corner of our building, but our work on gender and gender identity is far from complete.

I could go on with other examples…We proudly name our religious aspirations, even though they are yet to be fully realized. This is one way we remind ourselves of our commitments and our accountabilities.

What is true about this community is that the vision of the Beloved Community that we hold calls us out of self-satisfaction and calls us to make the next movements toward justice and inclusion and equity.

And yet, we still take the time to celebrate and raise our voices in thanks and praise.

Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son, is bringing his revival to Portland this summer. Ads for it are all over the internet and cable TV. The ad shows Graham pointing his finger and proclaiming: “I want you to know that God loves you.”

It brings a smile to my face every time a conservative religious leader, when a fundamentalist of any tradition, articulates that central Universalist article of faith…

Mine is not a very mature response…I know… “We told you so.”

We’ve been telling folks so for a long time. But, in my world, the more people who get that message, the better…regardless of the source.

Far too many religious leaders and, indeed, whole faith traditions, still resist that universalist impulse and punish people because of who they are…

I have always been a believer in the message of a bumper sticker I saw years ago… “God don’t make no junk.” To the humanists among us, the god language is problematic, I know. But the message is right from the heart of our Unitarian Universalist faith. Hosea Ballou could not have said it better.

God loves you…however you understand God…I know Franklin Graham will not go that far…but we Unitarian Universalists do.

However you understand God, whatever beliefs you may hold about the way the universe works and who is in charge or not in charge…

There is a presence of love that is always there and always available…

You are lovable and you are loved…already. There is nothing you have to prove…there is nothing you have to do…

You are loved.

It is so hard to believe. It is even harder to live into that belief. I do not claim that it is easy. Being a person of faith is not for the faint of heart. Because the biggest failure of “love thy neighbor as thyself” is that we are so grudging in our love of ourselves.

Oh, we are experts at putting up a good front. But underneath so often we feel inadequate.

We are too much a part of this larger culture which tells us we are never good enough, never successful enough, never smart enough, never…ever…enough. It is hard to trust the love.

You are loved. Because love is what God is and love is what the Spirit of Life does.

Our sweet Universalist religious ancestors got it right. God is love.

And isn’t that reason enough to jump for joy…to sing out praise…to celebrate. Halleluiah!

If we can just believe it…just belove it. Halleluiah!

Northwest author, Kim Stafford, tells this story:

“At midnight on Decatur Street in New Orleans, a sweet Black woman dressed in blue, with [the logo of the Sanitation Dept. and the words] “Public Works” stitched on her shirt above her heart, is crying. Her body bends like a broken tree before the impromptu shrine to Robin Malta, the good man killed when he opened his door to the wrong man in the topsy-turvy days of generosity and danger after Hurricane Katrina. We ask the woman what happened, and through her tears, she begins to tell what Robin [meant to her]:

‘He tell me when your job end,’ she says, ‘you be who you are. You not ‘Public Works.” You not about the trash. You a fine woman with a big heart. You be that!’

You are a fine woman with a big heart. You be that!

Said in our more intellectual words…you have inherent worth and dignity…

You are already lovable and already loved. You are a fine person with a big heart. That is the identity you need to claim. You be that! Each one of you. Each one of us.

Robin Malta was a hairdresser and a fixture at the Mardi Gras celebrations. Stafford writes: “[Malta] championed women’s soul-powers as he worked on their hair. He styled hearts.”

He was not ordained but his ministry touched many. And they created an informal shrine outside his home.

Stafford returned to that shrine the following day and discovered a quote from Robin Malta someone had written down: “If you can dream it, you can do it.”

He was moved to write the lyrics for a song that he left at the shrine. Malta’s sister found those lyrics, put them to her own music, and the family sang them at the Memorial Service:

“You be you, like none other” —Robin said to me.
“If you can dream it, you can do it. This will set you free.”

This will set you free. Amen.

Can I get an Amen for that.

You know, I could end this sermon right there. If you can hear that, really hear it, that is more than enough message for one morning. But let me try to take it one more step.

Because the world we inhabit right now, whether we are American or Canadian, whether we are a citizen or not, whether you are Anglo or not, queer or not, able-bodied or not, affluent or not…

The world we inhabit seems to be tilting so quickly away from freedom and away from inclusion and away from hope. We know how much work we have in front of us. There is so much that will need to be restored. Justice and mercy have taken a big hit in these last two years.

Victoria Safford, in our reading, spoke to this…

Suffering, and even death, she wrote, are both part of a grand and natural cycle…tragic only because we are so aware of mortality and time.

That God is love…is not a guarantee of ease. That the Spirit of Life is always there for us is not a promise of peace.

A theology grounded in love cannot prevent violence or oppression. The promised kingdom is not without suffering…

But in that kingdom…that we call the Beloved Community…suffering is condemned and resisted and alleviated…not condoned and authorized and celebrated.

A theology of love cannot end suffering but it can call us to respond to violence and correct oppression.

A theology of love calls us to resistance to all that would prevent the operation of love.

We hear that call to resist…it resonates in our spirits. When the powerful in our nation strip children from their parents’ arms, when the free press is vilified and truth trampled, when black and brown bodies fill our prisons…

We hear the call to resist.

And we can understand our response religiously and even theologically.

A theology of love does not promise an absence of suffering or injustice.

A theology of love embraces the wisdom of liberation theologies, and Black theologies, and much of feminist theology…that places the oppression of the most marginalized at the center of concern.

The voices of those at the margins must move to the center.

A theology of love will not let us rest in what privilege we may have…and we all have some privilege.

A theology of love is not pie in the sky bye and bye. A theology of love calls us to work for a resurrection for the living…here and now…and for our children and their children.

As feminist theologian Dorothy Soelle writes: “We bring together liberation and resurrection because our deepest need is not personal immortality, but a life before death for all of us.”

Suffering is not a part of happiness at all. That is why we resist suffering. But we would never pretend that it does not exist.

And still we celebrate. Despite the suffering we have experienced and that we experience still. Despite the fear and divisiveness which is deepening around us. Despite the suffering which we commit our lives to reverse.

We celebrate the many blessings of our lives. The chance to come together in gatherings like this…every Sunday…to raise our voices in thanks and praise. To find the strength to make it through the week.

To discover that there is a way out of no way.

And to rest in the love that has never broken faith with us and never will.

Our theology of love calls us into the world.

As the choir sang, “The holt spirit is the harpist and all strings which are touched in love, must sound.”

We must respond, we must “sound,” all of us.

And knowing all this…

And living all this…

How can we keep from singing?

 

Topics: Celebration