Happy New Year!

It’s that most wonderful time of the year again, when we look back fondly the old, at what has passed. We take all those lessons that we learned and together we ring in the new. We examine what we want to accomplish in this New Year ahead of us, and we toast to the good things to come. That’s right, it’s the very first Sunday of the New Year.

No, I did not bring the wrong sermon with me from Honolulu. This is the first Sunday of the New Year, the New Year on the Unitarian Universalist calendar. Wait, don’t tell me that you didn’t know we have our own calendar in Unitarian Universalism? What kind of place are you running here? It’s actually a very creative invention. It begins in September and runs all the way through the end of June—our perfect ten-month calendar.

Yes, we can all be certain that there are things that happen in July and August, but there are many in the Unitarian Universalist world who think of the time between the end of June through the beginning of September as something, shall we say, that draws from our First Shared Source of wisdom—that it is more of a time of transcending mystery and wonder. Something surely happens, but it happens without me.

Now, of course we are having a little bit of fun here. Many of us here are unceasingly dedicated year-round to the work and the worship in which we partake every week, twelve months a year. And for that I know we are all grateful. But like any system, like any place that operates on a schedule, there will always be some times of rest and some times of vital activity. And really there are reasons for our Unitarian Universalist year. As special and as individual as we love to feel, we are not the only churches who are like this.

Whether it’s vacations, whether it’s travel, whether it’s youth sports activities, there are usually good reasons to take a little breather in the summers from the weekly routine. I used to take months off from church in the summers…because it conflicted with softball. I let my Lutheran minister know why I was absent for so long each summer, and I’d tell him that there is a great deal that was holy to me in the crack of the bat, it the fellowship of my friends, and even in the red dirt and fine trimmed grass of the Central Park softball fields. And that kind Lutheran minister, would look at me and think to himself, “When is he gonna realize he’s a Unitarian Universalist?”

But the Lutherans I worshiped with then were no different. Like many churches throughout the world, the church calendar we follow is loosely inherited from the Catholic Church. And the summer months fall right in the middle of one of two stretches of time called Ordinary Time. In many Christian churches around the world, this stretch begins at Pentecost, the time that celebrates the beginning of the apostles’ ministry to the world. And Pentecost often falls between the middle of May and the beginning of June. And it stretches until the beginning of the Christmas season. So really when you inherit a big stretch of time called “ordinary time,” it’s not that surprising that we also would not look at that time with as much excitement as the rest of the year. But we are not all such little church nerds, are we?

There are real, practical reasons why the summers in churches are a little looser. And as usual, one of the great humanist profits of old, Alice Cooper said it best: “School’s Out For Summer!” Yeah, we could get into the church calendar. We could talk about the close association Unitarian Universalist ministers had to the academic calendar of schools. We could talk about farming and the time when summer crops are harvested and fall crops are planted in many parts of the world. But however we look at it, summer is time for a break. It’s time for many to reflect on what was accomplished in the last time of vigorous action and consider what will be next. And around this time, that break is ending, and it’s back to work, it’s back to action, it’s back to learning, and for many it’s back to school.

And it’s not a great time for everyone. Returning to school for some students, for some teachers, means the stresses of work, certainly, but it also means social stress. And I don’t mean chatter between classes about who’s dating whom. No, I mean real stresses for young people returning to school.

There was a piece online this week about a mom in South Carolina and her sixteen year old son. The mom cried everyday because her son Andrew Kirby sat alone at lunch…everyday. She would text him at lunch, “Are you sitting alone?” And he would respond, “Yes.” And she would cry. Then after doing this for a long time, this week she texted him one lunch period…and he didn’t respond. That was a little disconcerting for her. And when her son came home that day, she learned that three members of student council…remember student council?…well, three members of student council came over and invited this mother’s son to sit with them at lunch. And that’s what he’s been doing every lunch period since. He’s even gone to the movies with his new friends since then. His father remarked in an interview, “We’ve been praying for this for a long time. You know, that someone would see him and notice him.”

So am I alone in wondering whether that might be one of the saddest prayers we’ve ever heard?

Now this is a fine story. But it’s a little upsetting. Not because the story was bad news. It’s good news. It’s upsetting because this action made the news. I realize this is part of the well-known kind of soft news called a personal interest piece, but still, it was on a newsfeed. An editor saw fit to write and publish this story. A newsfeed content editor saw fit to include it in the feed this week. And I think we can guess why. I think we can imagine why an editor thought we’d want to know that a story like this is going viral on social media. It might be because news of a group of people elected to serve a public institution, who might seek out ways to welcome, who might imagine ways to invite, who might put a thought to ways of comforting and befriending people, is becoming more rare and more extraordinary, every day. And, well, we all need all we can get of that news these days.

Of course as we heard in the story for all ages today, the experience of starting school is sometimes vastly more traumatic and painful for some in the history of this country. In the story we heard, we learned a little about what Ruby Bridges went through that fall in New Orleans in 1960. Can you begin to imagine? What kind of agonizing experience was that for the Bridges family? Reports tell us that her father really, really did not want to put his little girl through it. But her mother knew that Ruby was special, and that they were living in extraordinary times. How could a child so young hold so close to what she knew to be right?

The story we heard today was beautiful. It told a lot about the ways that bravery, that prayer, that love, helped an entire family to overcome personal fears and challenges and to see their lives as an opportunity to see justice done, to help justice be done. It was a beautiful story. But we heard that a woman threatened to poison Ruby’s food. And that threat led the U.S. Marshals to require that Ruby only eat the food her family prepared at home for her. And then she ate that food alone.

I don’t know whether Mrs. Bridges cried every day, wondering about Ruby eating alone. I know she didn’t have a cell phone to text her daughter. So instead she probably just prayed, like Andrew’s parents, that her child would be OK. And the story we heard was wonderful, but Ruby Bridges wrote her own story in her own words. And she wrote it for young people.

A lot of what she explained was in the story we heard, but in the middle of the story, Bridges shares more detail that doesn’t appear as fully in the story we heard. She explains that for months, months, she was alone in the class with her teacher. Every single other student would not come to class. Spending a lot of time in the mind of those who trade in white supremacist attitudes is not something worth doing too often, so really, there’s not much any one of us knows about what the motivation was for trying to isolate Ruby in that class.

But listen to what happened in Ruby’s own words.

“Parents took their children out of the school. I was alone with my teacher Mrs. Henry. I loved Mrs. Henry. And Mrs. Henry loved me. I was a very good student. I learned math. I learned how to read. But I wished the children would come back. Months and months passed. Then one day, children began to come back to school. At last, I had friends to play with! I was very, very happy!”

At last I had friends to play with. At last I had friends to eat with. At last.

But not all stories end with the embrace of friends. This week of returning to schools held another story. It was the story of a child in Denver, nine years old. Jamel Myles announced to his class of peers at the start of this new year that he identified as gay, about two weeks ago. He confided in his older sister, that after he’d made the announcement to some of his classmates, they suggested that he should kill himself. And as mysterious as the logic or the feelings are in the mind of nine-year-old, the sad fact that came to be is that after the fourth day of the school year, Jamel returned home from school, and ended his short life.

There is nothing, nothing ordinary about the time we are living in. When a child could tell another they ought to die, there is nothing ordinary about the time we are living in. When simple kindness is making the news, there is nothing ordinary about the time we are living in friends. And the time matters, friends. What the author of our story didn’t really mention, what Ruby Bridges doesn’t really mention in her own story, in her own words, is that it really took years for her class to return to a normal size. Ruby knew for years that she was at the center of a controversy that kept other children away. And Ruby was not alone.

The wonderful news story about Andrew and the Student Council glosses over something in that story. Andrew sat alone at lunch for four years before anybody thought to befriend him.

And Jamel Myles and his sister, it is now becoming clear, were bullied at school for an entire year before this final result for Jamel.

Time matters. Time matters when bullying, isolation, and fear become markers of someone’s ordinary time.

The New York Times spoke with Jamel’s grandmother about his passing. And she said that she could not blame the school for her grandson’s death. She went on to say this: “The statement that it takes a village to raise a child is true. And the village is broken.”

When you’re weary
Feelin’ small
When tears are in your eyes
I will dry them all
I’m on your side

Jamel’s school is less then ten miles from First Unitarian Society of Denver. Andrew’s school is less then ten miles from the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg. And my friends, I tell you true, every day I am a Unitarian Universalist, and every day I read stories like this, is another day closer I come to being a full-blown Unitarian Universalist Evangelical.

Because it’s not just schools. It’s not just kids. It’s not just now. Every day, people of all walks of life, at all stages of life, are getting the message loud and clear that they are not worth much, inherently or not. And that dignity should not be afforded them in the least. Yes, the village is broken.

Now, I’m not saying that all of the problems are out there. Every Unitarian Universalist group can benefit from some introspection, followed by real, institutional change. And so many voices in our tradition are begging, are pleading, for the very thing a village needs to survive: that alongside that inward looking gaze, we also ask the hard questions, and listen to the hard answers, of why someone in our own village, whether it be Denver, whether it be Spartanburg, whether it be Portland, Oregon, USA, why someone in our village, in our back yard, didn’t know that there was an entire church that would have their back!

One of my deepest concerns about the future of Unitarian Universalism is that the fear we have of appearing evangelical or of appearing to preach, would keep the message, the good news, we have for the world, from reaching the heart of one more person in our village who is suffering, alone. Eating, alone. Learning, alone.

We do not have it in our power to be sure that there will never be another of nature’s children who feels they must end their precious life. We do not have it in our power to be sure that all who desire the companionship of others will have it. We do not have it in our power, to be sure that no one will ever be treated by others like Ruby Bridges was treated. But we do have the power to try. We have the power in each one of us to be like a bridge between a world that deploys indignity as a punch line and a world that holds sacred the dignity of all; like a bridge between a world that accepts loneliness and isolation as a fact of life and a world whose labors to build the Beloved Community give us new life; like a bridge as precious and as prized as ruby, between a world starving on the meager helpings offered by hate and a world feasting on the bounty of a love surpassing naming. School’s back from summer, friends. Happy New Year! Now let’s get to work.

Topics: Integrity