Eight minutes and 46 seconds. Hearing that in the abstract doesn’t sound like a whole lot of time. But then imagining that amount of time with a police officer’s knee on your neck, that’s a whole different story. In that context it feels like an eternity. In fact, I have to confess to you this morning that I haven’t been able to watch the whole video of George Floyd being pinned to the ground for that long, crying out for help, calling out the name of those he loves. It is just too excruciating.
Yes, even watching that video for a few seconds seems to last a life time. Seeing the other officers standing there for all that time and not doing anything. There has been something about that video that has seemed to cut through a whole bunch of stuff. It is impossible to not recognize George Floyd’s humanity and the need that rises up and to say no. This is just not acceptable. And that’s how it should be. That shouldn’t be anything close to acceptable or normal.
The optimist in me wants to believe that this time, with protests in so many places and involving so many people that this time there might be a sea change. I want to believe that this time will be different, that life at some point will not just go back to normal until the next black person is killed. I want to believe that this time might be different. Maybe it is some combination of the brutality of this death and of so many deaths. Maybe it is the stark reality of a racist and corrupt president surrounded by so many enablers that has finally revealed just how broken our system is. Maybe it is the disruption of COVID that has made a space for the reality of this to show through for more of us than it has up until this time including the stark reality of how much more COVID has impacted brown and black and indigenous people.
But I also have to note that I, like many of us who identify as white, can essentially make a choice about that. We can choose how far we get out of our bubbles of comfort and when to retreat back in. That is where our privilege comes in. For people of color it isn’t like that I’m told. For people of color you can’t turn that awareness off, you can’t turn that fear off. It is something that you very much live with most or all of the time. It is a reality of life.
I want to hope that all of this is pointing towards something. I want to believe that there is some larger reckoning happening here. That we are in the midst of some kind of sea change. And as I say that I know just how hard actual change can be. Changes in laws and policies. Changes in a culture that too often says yes to such brutality. Are those images of police officers choosing to kneel with protesters a sign? Are those statements from military leaders that the military should not be called out and deployed against their fellow citizens a sign that enough is enough?
I want to believe that maybe there is something that is different this time. And I know that even as individuals change, changing systems, that is even harder. That is going to take something much more sustained, something that is not going to happen easily, something that is going to take all of us being willing to say no. I want to believe that that is possible.
This was a sermon planned pre COVID, pre protests, to mark 25 years of ministry here for me. What an honor it has been to serve and to be here with all of you though these many years. This congregation has a history of shaping new ministers who come here and I have certainly been one of those. No, it hasn’t always been easy, but that’s not the nature of ministry. But overall what I’m feeling is gratitude to have been able to serve this community. I consider myself extremely blessed.
And given the state of our world right now, it actually is a source of hope for me as I try to hold, as I try to make sense of all that is happening. Ministers and congregations at their best learn and grow and make justice in the world together. They call out what’s possible in each other. They make a space for all of us to ask how is it that we choose to live in a world so full of beauty and so full of brokenness? How is it that we make sense of our individual selves and how it is we are in relation to some greater whole? Just what does it mean for us to know ourselves to be part of a Beloved Community and to have a role in making that possible?
The first time that I heard of the First Unitarian Church of Portland was back in the fall of 1992. I was starting my second year of seminary in Berkeley and there was a lot of buzz about this congregation. It was the happening church in our denomination.
The church had just called Marilyn Sewell to be its new senior minister. The fact that a prominent church had called a woman was actually a big deal back then, believe it or not. Just a handful of other larger congregations had done that. And it also happened that at the very same time Ballot measure 9 was going before voters here. It was an effort led by Christian conservatives to disenfranchise lesbian and gay citizens here in Oregon. It was a terrible, divisive initiative.
A friend of mine, Amanda Aikman, had come here to be summer minister that year and when she came back to school she said something that surprised me, that I should keep an eye on the Portland church, that she thought that Marilyn Sewell and I might be a good team. Now at the time I thought I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going into parish ministry, that my call was to be a chaplain. And having been involved only in small churches my whole life, a growing, large church seemed like it was, to tell the truth, a little out of my league. But long story short, that’s what happened. And here we are now, 25 years later.
And when I look back at that time now, that too, proved to be a time of sea change on many levels. It was a time when this congregation and its sense of self would blossom and never be quite the same. It was another time that felt as if the world might just be shifting in some fundamental way towards justice. But it wasn’t easy. It was a time when queer folks were under attack, when it seemed to be permissible not only to discriminate but also to brutalize and kill. And communities of faith, many of them, were either supporting the measure or not saying anything at all about it. Too many people of faith were silent.
But for this community it proved to be a catalyst for change, both from within and in its witness in the larger community. Some of you have heard the story of the wrapping of this church block with a red ribbon and the declaration of a hate free zone. That act was a kind of spark that brought all kinds of people into this community. People wanted to be part of a faith community that said no to hate.
It was a couple years after all of that that I, a not-too-long-out-of-the-closet gay man was called. I didn’t know what it would be like. I didn’t know what it would be like to come to Portland. Looking for an apartment I met a landlord who owned, of all places, an apartment complex called the Stonewall, who said to me, when he learned that I was a minister, that he felt like he could rent to me after hearing what I did for a living. After all, he confided in me, “We have to keep out the homosexuals.”
Truth be told, calling an out gay minister didn’t seem to be that big a deal for the congregation. I think I was probably more anxious about my sexual orientation than most of the folks in the church. I think that’s what can happen when you try to disenfranchise one group or another—they get to the point of saying, “no, we aren’t going to take that anymore… “ and I think that’s what had happened with that ballot measure. A lot of queer folks just said no. And a lot of allies said “yes, we are with you.”
Now it would be easy to want to romanticize all this. One of the things I have learned in these years is that change does take time, and in particular real systemic change. And part of that change is the realizing that we all need to change and maybe sometimes even give things up. It means being open to shifting cultures and noticing who has a seat at the proverbial table and who does not. And it means that we aren’t always kind to each other.
A few months into my ministry here I had a board member, an older straight white male, tell me that I wasn’t welcome here. He even said that with my arrival all the straight men in the congregation had left, which was quite a statement. Clearly my so called gay-dar was not as accurate that I thought it was. What I eventually learned in that situation, which is so often the case in ministry, that it really wasn’t about me. I represented for him some new reality that he wasn’t quite ready to accept. That’s one of the difficult things about ministry is that projection piece. People tend to see the best or the worst in you and it is too easy to get put on a pedestal. And that can be a precarious place to be. But ministers can come to represent some combination of god and parent and first grade teacher all rolled into one. No, that is one part of ministry that I’d be glad to give up.
But I have also learned that for that real change to happen we all play a role. And it means being willing to look at our own stuff and to not put it onto others. It means recognizing the privilege some of us have. It means making a space for those who have been on the margins to be welcomed into the center. It means seeing ourselves as part of the change we want to see.
And I believe that we can make a difference. When Marilyn Sewell had a press conference to announce that ribbon around the block and the declaration of a hate free zone, it happened to be on the same day that the Women’s Alliance—and yes, back then it was the Women’s Alliance, the group that began as the Ladies Sewing Society, the group the founded the church. They were meeting that day and they stood behind the minister as she held the press conference. Some of them, the story goes, still wore white gloves to the monthly luncheon and so the visual was, as the commercial might say, priceless. Here were the matriarchs of the congregation, if you will, witnessing for justice.
And the timing also needed to be right. The church in the years leading up to that pivotal time had been pretty inward looking. The former minister has lost one wife to cancer and then after happily remarrying, six years lost another wife to cancer. It seemed as if the minister and the congregation went through a kind of wilderness. But there is also something in that wilderness, that searching, that was a kind of catalyst for change and a possibility of rebirth. That, too, is part of the story.
We talk about ministers having callings but I have come to learn that institutions, just like people, have callings. They have a mission and live out that mission in the world. And sometimes we find ourselves in certain moments in history that are set apart. The church I was called to was in one of those times. I think the church we are in right now may be in one of those times. And what we do—or don’t do—does make a difference. The Black Lives Matter banner on the side of the church makes that statement and bears witness today.
But part of that call asks us all to look at issues of power and privilege and change, and those usually aren’t easy. It means sometimes those of us who have the power to trust enough to give some of it up. It means adapting to change and growth. When all of that change happened here in the 90s it wasn’t necessarily welcomed by some. There was a great sense of loss for many. In fact, for some it felt as if they were losing their church. People talked about the sense of the church being one big family and all of a sudden all these new people show up for the party and that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. And the years that followed brought the need to figure out things like governance and space needs and staffing. No, those years were not necessarily easy.
Churches I have learned are very human institutions and we don’t always bring our best selves to the effort. Let me be clear that my experience has very much been that more often than not we do bring our best selves, but not always. We want our church to be there for us when we experience change in our lives and we don’t necessarily welcome it when that very change is happening at church.
But there is also possibility. There is a kind of grace as more and more we might be able to see our own lives in the lives of others. In this case it was a lot of straight identified folks seeing that the lives of queer folks mattered and that our destinies were somehow connected. This was a time before I had heard much about intersectionality, but it is really about understanding that oppression, in its many forms, harms all of us. It is about seeing that our individual lives and all of the parts of our identity we bring, are welcomed and valued.
The story of this congregation has been about bearing witness to the times it is in. We talk about the founders of this church, including its ministers, but we know that they, too, were anything but perfect. They were from New England and saw the world ordered in a certain way, and they, of course were at the top of the hierarchy. Equality for them maintained that order and it left a lot of folks out.
Rev. Bill and I have, on occasion, have wondered what Thomas Lamb Eliot, the first minister, or Earl Morse Wilbur, the first associate, would have to say about the church being led by an African American man and an out gay man. Could they even have imagined? I’d like to think they would be proud, but truthfully the image that more often comes to mind is them turning over in their graves.
No, change is hard and it isn’t usually easy. And the thing about change is that once it is happening you don’t know what doors will be opened and stay open. In that wrapping of the block all those years ago was part of some larger change that would, eventually, lead to marriage equality. I could not have imagined that when I came here. I did not believe at the time that I would see that in my lifetime.
There have been many moments of grace. Back in 2004, on a rainy Portland March morning, I got a call from some of our members who had been in line since the night before at the country building. Word had come down that Multnomah Country was going to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples the next day. I will never forget the joy in that line that day. Later that morning the first couples came here to the church and some of the women on the staff happily took on the roles of honorary mothers of the brides. I pulled together a wedding ceremony. In that first week I had the privilege of officiating at 18 weddings. That is something I will never forget.
One of the saddest moments in all these years was seeing those marriages nullified, and the backlash that happened here and all over the country that year when gay marriage was used by the Republicans as a wedge issue. It would take more than 10 years before those couples could legally marry with the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court.
What I think I have learned in these years of ministry is that churches as very human institutions. They are a body of people who come together for mutual support and care but also to help that arc of the universe bend towards justice.
In the story for all ages this morning Cassandra talked about the origins of the flower communion ritual that came out of the Unitarian Church of Prague almost 100 years ago. I noted that that church also had hard wooden chairs—for those of you out there missing being here in the sanctuary, do you remember them? But the minister, Norbert Capek, also needed a way to bring his people together and for them to see the beauty in each other and to remind them that even if they did not all share the same beliefs that there was a power in their coming together and in the recognition that they were more together than their individual selves. In these times this is one of the ways that we are staying together. And what might be some sign of the future, we are drawing people from all of the country and even a few places around the world. What a blessing that has been in these times.
Our times are different in many ways from when Capek offered that first Flower Communion, but that basic statement of theology is still very much alive for us today. The spirit asks us to recognize our interdependence and to recognize how our lives are connected with the lives of others. It seems so simple and we know just how hard it can be. To get past our individual egos, to get past our fears, to get past, or at least to be mindful of our privileges. To get past so many walls that we as individuals and the systems out of which we come. It takes a willingness to be uncomfortable. It takes courage to bear witness. It takes a willingness to trust.
Truth is that faith communities are living bodies and we are constantly working to make that circle we called the Beloved community wider. And truth is that that can be hard work. Unitarian Universalism’s promise—and our challenge—is that honoring of the individual without it all becoming all about any one person. It is about seeing in our own lives the lives of others.
Our spiritual theme this month is Sanctuary. My hope and prayer for this institution is that it might serve as a sanctuary for all of us, a place to take shelter from the storm. But sanctuary is also a place where we go for strength, for courage. It is a place where we might find our grounding, a place where we might also begin on our path to freedom, joining with others as we go. And it means staying true to that call. It means making a commitment for the long haul.
Ultimately, we are all in this together. That means seeing in our lives the lives of the Floyd Georges and the Breonna Taylors. It means seeing in our lives the lives of our transgender siblings when they are assaulted for just being who they are. It means recognizing how the immigrants who are in detention, sometimes without their children, could be us. It is all about bearing witness to those we know and those we don’t know. It is about bearing witness to our own hurts and fears and so many things that would keep us apart. It means committing ourselves for the longer haul because it is in that longer hall that change, that real change, happens.
Is all that possible? I want to believe it is. Let us join together in that dance, that march, that all of us—all of us—might know that community we call beloved.
Prayer
Spirit of life and of love, god of many names and no name at all, hear our prayers. Be with us, spirit, in these times that would trouble—that should trouble—us all. Call us to say no to hatred, to racism, to all that would hold some of us—and ultimately all of us—back. May we see in our coming together a path forward, and may we see ourselves on this journey together. Grant us courage, grant us wisdom, grant us perseverance. And through it all call us to that task divine, that we might build that Beloved Community and that it might help all of us to find our way, together, to freedom. Amen.
Benediction
May each of our lives unfold like the beauty of a flower good people, and may the garden we grow sustain us in these times and in all the days ahead.
Topics: Sanctuary