Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers and father figures and parents of every gender who are here today.
And Happy Pride.
There is a lot to celebrate today, even though we know we have our work cut out for us.
Here at this church, where our mission is to nurture each individual spirit and, together, build the Beloved Community…well, we have to keep at it.
Faithfulness is the religious word. But we keep at it.
We move mountains one stone at a time…[Our] Universalism means no one is outside the circle of love…
We stubbornly seek out the spark of divinity in each other, no matter what.
Interdependence means none of us is truly free until we are all free….
We move mountains one stone at a time.
Elizabeth Nguyen, in our reading, offered about as concise a guide to our liberal religious theology as you are likely to find.
The spark of divinity within each of us and all of us. No one outside the circle of our care. None of us free until all of us are free.
We struggle, Elizabeth goes on, for liberation from everything that presses down on us…(from the violence of the culture of white presses down on us.
And our promise to each other and to ourselves is that we will not stop until love and justice are made real in our world and in our lives.
We promise to keep on keepin’ on ‘till love wins.
Amen.
The theology is clear…crystal clear.
That clarity is such a blessing but it can make our shortcomings even more painful, and even harder to acknowledge.
Dealing with the ways we fall short becomes a central spiritual issue.
Because that clarity about the goal, that crystal clarity helps not one bit when we get it wrong, when we fail to see all that must be seen…when through inattention or inertia or even through decisions that we make…we become part of the problem that needs to be overcome.
It is not often that I promote our denomination magazine. But when I received my copy of UUWORLD magazine last week…here’s what I found:
The feature article was by First Unitarian member Stephanie Kaza…one of our own…“a Buddhist response to climate change.” I encourage you to read the article and buy her book: Green Buddhism. I know, I know…I am going to be shameless this morning.
Stephanie points out…a path to loving kindness in a suffering world…we need those paths.
That was the lead piece, but the first article in the magazine features Rev. Emily Brault and Susan Matranga-Watson, UU chaplains at the Coffee Creek Women’s Correctional Facility. Neither of them are formally members of here, but Emily has preached from this pulpit occasionally and Susan is no stranger either.
These are “our” people.
There is an article by my friend and colleague, Takiya Nur Amin, on embodiment in worship…urging us to dance more…I quoted Takiya in my blog this week.
And the wonderful piece by Elizabeth Nguyen, another friend, hired at the UUA during my time in Boston. That beautiful piece with its hard truths:
“We practice embodying our deepest truths under pressure…[not just on our best days, but] when our backs are against the wall. This is a thorny spiritual truth—that who we are on our worst days is [also who we actually are].”
Moving mountains one stone at a time…requires knowing hard truths.
As I turned page after page in the magazine…I was about to burst my buttons. I was so proud for this church and for this faith. So proud.
And then I came to the section titled “We’re Right Here,” with articles from trans and non-binary UU ministers and lay leaders…and the apology from the magazine’s editor for publishing that story earlier this year by a cis-gender woman about trans experience and identity that had been so hurtful for many trans and non-binary members of our congregations. So disappointing for some of the rest of us. A hard learning opportunity for us all.
That article shone a light on the gap between our theology and our practice.
There it was…right there…that gap…as if Elizabeth Nguyen had been looking for a perfect example: “who you are on your worst days is also who you are.”
Right there…as if Stephanie Kaza wanted to bring it home:
“Sometimes the most important step is to confess our part of the suffering.” Those are Stephanie’s words but that is what the editor of WORLD magazine was doing…in the most public way possible…confessing failure…confessing harm done…vowing to follow a better path.
The vow Stephanie Kaza points to, the bodhisattva vow…to embody loving kindness…requires confession…requires repentence, because none of us lives a pure life. We are all implicated.
Confession. Repentence. Not language most of us associate with Buddhist traditions. Or with this church.
But there you have it. If we need to keep on keepin’ on until love and justice are made real in our world and in our lives…
If we are going to follow the path and stay the course…
Well, one of the most important skills, one of the needed spiritual practices is the ability to get back up when we’ve fallen on our face…again. And again.
I speak as a cis-gender, straight male. And a person of color. I have been trying to understand this stuff all my life. And I am still learning.
Pride. It is a complicated emotion…spiritually.
Portland will march again today. Every year since 1977…the Pride Parade has become a fixture of life in Portland.
(I haven’t been able to track down when First Unitarian began marching…as a church…but it was long before my time, that’s for sure.)
At that first Pride Parade, 42 years ago…about 200 marched from the Park Blocks to the Waterfront. 200.
Now the Parade is so well established that there are limits on the number of marchers this year…not sure how that will be enforced…perhaps there will just be more of us bearing our religious witness on the sidewalks.
The Parade has now even generated a conversation about corporate sponsorship…
Is this the dominant culture (of white supremacy and hetero-sexism) colonizing the “people’s march?”
One way to know you’re making it, I guess, is when your protest march gets corporate funding.
Don’t get me wrong. I am in favor of Pride and this day and of celebrations along the path toward the Beloved Community. We need to be able to celebrate the victories…especially in these days when so much is being rolled back.
But I do want to offer a few thoughts about Pride…not the Parade…but about pride as a spiritual attitude…and a spiritual challenge.
There is a reason pride was considered one the 7 deadly sins…I’m speaking from the Christian tradition of course… Stay with me, on this.
Pride…one of the serious, deadly sins…described as ”inordinate self esteem”…
The Pride Parade is a celebration, an assertion of self-esteem. The origin of the Parade and the liberation movement it symbolizes…are from a time…not that long ago…when self-esteem was about the only esteem available for the queer communities.
But is that kind of self-esteem, that kind of pride, what the Biblical sin was about?
Pride in the Biblical tradition is about inordinate self-esteem. The sin was not appropriate self-esteem…or courageous self-esteem or the proclamation of esteem to preserve the human spirit…
Inordinate self-esteem. That is the problem.
The kind of self-esteem that encourages you …or me…to believe that we are slightly more evolved than those other folks.
That allows us to believe that we are “more woke,” more free of the sins of the past, the misconceptions that kept and keep so many people down.
More woke. Have any of you been in conversations where the message has been that you just don’t get it…that you need to wake up…get woke? Anyone here?
Or conversations where you have felt…proud…or at least relieved…that you weren’t the one who made that most serious mistake…used that problematic language…assumed that you knew more than you knew…
Any of you?
Inordinate self-esteem is the problem.
Pride like that can lead us into that trap where we manage to see ourselves as the “good ones,” the progressive ones, the “woke ones”… who don’t have anything more to learn…
We’re “good to go.”
You get it, I know, that I am building a case for humility.
Humility is one of the seven virtues in the Biblical tradition. Seven deadly sins…seven virtues.
We don’t stress that list of virtues much in this sanctuary…chastity was the first virtue on the list. Just saying.
But the need for humility rings so true. But humility from whom is the question?
Let me push this one step further:
Can we expect humility from people who are only now asserting their worth, only now living into their self-esteem? Is a sermon about humility appropriate for folks who have been pressed down so long?
Isn’t that sermon for the rest of us? Those of us who are privileged in some or in many ways?
Here at the church, we have been working to understand the culture of white supremacy…what it is and how it operates even here…among us…good progressive folks who are at least waking.
Not everyone but a surprising and encouraging number have engaged this conversation…with our Board taking the lead.
The culture of white supremacy is not just about race, of course. There is only one culture in which we live. It is a white supremacy culture and a heterosexist culture and an anglo culture and a cisgender culture and an ableist culture…
One culture.
And we’ve learned some of attributes of that culture…we’re able to recognize some of them.
Individualism rather than a collective understanding. Perfectionism. Sense of Urgency. Right to comfort (for those in the dominant category). Paternalism, Fear of Conflict…
Those categories are starting to be recongizable to more and more of us. We are beginning to be able to see that culture in operation.
I want to add one more category to that list. I want to add another attribute of this culture that we are all of us…in our various ways…trying to change.
It is an a-historical culture. It is a history-less culture.
It does not want to recognize past sins, past culpabilities. It wants no talk of reparations for past harms. Confession? No. Repentence…not even on the table.
“Let’s just go from where we are. We all have the same chance now.”
“I never owned slaves. I never called anyone a…_____ pick your favorite perjorative.
“I’m not a racist…a homophobe…a sexist…an ableist” “I don’t see color. I don’t see gender.”
Really?
That culture assumes that things are not so bad now…we’ve made such progress, don’t you know…
And we’re not responsible for what came before…all those sins of the past…they were terrible…but we (the dominant culture) we’re not responsible for them…we are innocent personally and individually…so there is no need to change the basic way things work…the basic way privilege and power is distributed…the basic way so many people are held down.
We just need to move on from here…from where we are now…don’t you see?
Even though some of us are still advocating to get a bathroom we can comfortably use…still fighting to get equal pay for equal work…still advocating for decent education…still resisting the way the police harm us…still waiting for citizenship.
A-Historical. Without needing to know how things got to be so out of balance. That is part of the privilege…not needing to know.
A-Historical. Without knowing how past violence and past inequality has been passed down to us…so that it is not history…it is not even past…it lives in our bodies.
There are reasons that we don’t all need the same things…have the same priorities…because we haven’t all come along the same path…faced the same obstacles…benefitted from the same head starts…
To say that Pride is a sin is a-historical. Because what some of us need most is Pride…self-esteem and the response from our world that honors our self-esteem.
Self esteem is not a sin for folks who have been pressed down..it is a survival strategy.
All of us need Black Lives to Matter…and Queer Lives to Matter. For some of us that is not an abstract matter at all. Questioning the presence of police in uniforms at the Pride Parade is not unreasonable for trans people of color, given the history of police violence it makes perfect sense.
This church has a proud history…yes proud… out front early in the resistance to hate and homophobia here in Portland and in support of gay marriage…but we still have work to do on understanding how the gender binary lives in us all and impacts our lives…to understand that requires deep work…and we are still at the level of trying to figure out bathrooms. We’re still working on the 101 level.
As religious people we are called to hold that vision of Beloved Community, that vision of a time when the entire human family lives whole and reconciled…
We are called to hold a vision of a hopeful future…while we live in the world as it is and while we need the various things we need to survive in it.
We need to love the world as it could be and navigate the world as it is.
It is no simple task.
It requires self-esteem. It demands strength of person and supportive communities that call us to account and raise us up again and again when we fall.
We move mountains one stone at a time…[Our] Universalism means no one is outside the circle of love, and no one is disposable.
Each of us lovable and already loved. Each of us and all of us.
Sarah Weaver, one of the Trans UU voices in the WORLD magazine article: “I thought it was impossible to be loved for being exactly me…I used to not want to be me, and now I do want to be me.”
What a simple, what an elegant statement of the transformation we hope for in this church and in our world…to want to be who we are and to be welcomed for who we are.
Is that too high a bar?
Each of us and all of us wanting to be exactly who we are, on our worst days…yes, then…but on our best days, too.
Nurturing and affirming the individual spirit and, together, building Beloved Community.
A community of people who see each other as we truly are…beautiful, lovable and loved.
Now that…that would be something to be truly proud of. May we make it so.
Happy Pride.
Amen
Topics: Commitment