Thank you, Bethany and Dustin for “A Safe Place to Land.”
“Be the hand of a hopeful stranger…
Be the light in the dark of this danger
Til the sun comes up.”
In the dark of this danger.
I do not need to tell any of you how trying these times are,
…how whatever confidence we might have convinced ourselves to have for a hopeful future has been called into question,
…how the deep and abiding injustices of our system have been forced into the light,
…how we have all been asked to keep our distance when it is the support of community that we most need
I do not need to tell any of you.
“Be the light in the dark of this danger
Til the sun comes up.”
To promise to be that light for one another…
And to try to help shine that light for others in our community through these days…
That would be sermon enough for this morning…wouldn’t it? A good message for these days… to be that light for one another.
Yes it would. Amen? Amen.
I am so glad to be back in the pulpit after some time away. So glad to be here to join with you in listening for what we are called to do…as a liberal religious community…
What we are called to do to support one another…
And what we are called to do to help that arc of the universe bend toward justice.
As liberal religious people we are clear that the premise, the very grounding of our faith calls us to show up for one another and for our community.
Most of you know that First Unitarian is one of the named plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the federal agencies that sent unwanted…what to call them…stormtroopers?…I guess I’ll just leave it at “troops” for now…onto the streets of our city.
There are, I know, a variety of opinions, within this community, about the nature and the techniques of the protests in support of Black Lives.
But I have heard no disagreement about the right of our citizens…of us…to speak our truth and call for change. Policing needs some serious revisiting and more of us have finally realized that that is true.
So, the church joined that suit and we are now…literally tomorrow…amending our filing. Because we are continuing the suit. Although the troops have withdrawn, even if they haven’t left…the issues of the separation of powers and the right to protest remain. And our ability to exercise our right to free speech has been and continues to be “chilled” by the violence of the federal response. It is hard enough to deal with the local police response. And other communities, where federal interventions are threatened, could benefit from legal findings in our case.
So in the last couple of days the lawyer has been working to amend the filing. And one of the additions he wanted to make was to say more about how our liberal religious faith called us to join this suit.
The lawyer needed to explain to the court what kind of religious community would be called to take part in a suit like this?
Who are these Unitarian Universalists?
So, we are adding a declaration, from me…a statement of our faith and how our faith calls us to show up.
In that declaration, I quote our 7 Principles in full: the inherent worth and dignity of each and every person…the call for justice, equity and compassion in human relations…and the interdependent web that binds us together…
And I quote from our Sources as well. How many of you know that we also name the sources of our faith?
“Words and deeds of prophetic people which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.” The Second Source.
“Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves.” That is the Fourth Source.
I quote our Principles and the Sources…the formal language we use to describe our faith…
And then I concluded:
“Justice work and protest recognize the love and common dignity of humanity….We must be present to both the emotional challenge of justice work and the transformative blessing that can be found through witness. …[it is] a crucial path toward the Beloved Community in which each and every person is known as a blessing and the human family, in its beautiful diversity, lives whole and reconciled.”
I wanted you to know how I am presenting our church and our faith in this very public square.
Unitarian Universalism is not grounded in a creed. There is no statement of belief you have to sign onto to be a part of this community.
You don’t have to check any of your intellect at the door…
We describe ourselves…sometimes…as a faith without certainty.
A faith without certainty but not a faith without hope.
Our very First Source speaks of “the direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder that moves us to the renewal of the spirit…
Direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder…
We are content…and I think content is a good word here…content to be present to the mystery and wonder…not to try to control it but simply be present to it…because it offers a source of hope.
If you try to pin things down, make everything concrete and certain and crystal clear…then you need to look at all the evidence…and, if you’ve been paying attention…the evidence for hope is pretty thin.
But despite all the failures of the human community…despite the inequality and the injustice and the violence and the greed…as liberal religious people, we are called to believe that love might just be real and that love might just prevail…despite all of the evidence to the contrary.
Author Bryan Doyle describes what I am talking about this way:
“I still have faith in faith,” he writes, “despite all the evidence that the philosophers are right and religions are merely nutty hobbies, like being a [Chicago] Cubs fan. I keep thinking that under the rituals and rigmarole of religion there is a crucial wriggling possibility for what human beings might someday be.
…Yes, we gather because deep in our mammal hearts we are in awe of whatever it is that sparks life, and yes, we are desperate for definition so we drape explanations on the Unnamable, and yes, we gather in groups because we must, because we are mammals just down from the trees…
…What if our moral evolution ever caught up to our breathtaking physical evolution? What if?”
Doyle, although he was not Unitarian Universalist…he is pointing to the hope at the heart of our faith…
That there is a possibility we can chose. A hope we can embrace. That we are not limited by the shortcomings of the past, by injustices we have allowed to persist, that the Beloved Community is a possible dream, and that we all belong in that community like Angelina, the young girl in our story…we all belong…in all of our diversity…all able to connect…all valuable…all worthy…all lovable and already loved…
There is a promise, a hope we can embrace and a community we can create in which all of our bodies and all our spirits can be fed…a community worthy of being called Beloved.
And the promise of our faith is that if we act as if love were real…by our living we make it so.
We are a blended family…a blended family of faith…do you remember that? The Unitarians and the Universalists came together in 1961…not that long ago.
Those two religious communities had come to very similar theologies…ideas about God or the Spirit of Life…
They had come to consensus that every human being is worthy…or in more theistic language, that we are all children of God…
There were still some differences, especially of language, but the basic theologies were very close.
The two faiths also very similar ideas about the ability of human beings to help shape the world. That’s called human agency in theological speak.
So, after literally a century of approach and avoidance, the two communities came together in 1961.
They came together but…even the modest differences that remained meant that they had to find ways to describe the new, blended faith, that worked for both the slightly more Christian and theistic Universalists and the more privileged and slightly more Humanist Unitarians.
It was not until 1985 that “we”…Unitarian Universalists… could agree on what we call the Purposes and Principles, that I quoted in our legal filing. We’ve known them for decades now and it is easy to forget that they were developed…by committee of course.
Rev. Walter Royal Jones and a small group of Unitarian and Universalist clergy and lay folks…drafted and then revised and then revised again the language we now take for granted. Much of the early energy came from women leaders who did not see themselves in the male-only language that had been adopted at the time of merger.
The approach they took to the differences, was to make the principles very, very general…so general…”the inherent worth and dignity of each person” so general that just about anybody might be able to say yes.
And they shied away from the religious language about which there was still disagreement…including references to religious language in a section on the Sources of our faith.
And they made the Purpose and Principles part of the By-Laws of the Unitarian Universalist Association. We do the same thing here at First Unitarian, btw. They did this in part of make them hard to change, I think…it takes a two year process, with congregational input, two different General Assembly votes… we take changes very seriously.
But also to make sure that those Purposes and Principles could be changed. Because we really do believe that revelation is not sealed and that there is more truth and wisdom to be found as we move ahead.
In fact, they have already been revised at least once.
There were originally only 5 Sources named. But in 1995, a 6th was added as Earth-Centered religions became better known and drawn on more widely. The 6th Source that was added: Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.
And you could almost say that the 7th Principle, the Interdependent Web, was added as well. It was not part of the original committee recommendation. It was added from the floor of the General Assembly.
There is a great virtue in having principles that are general. That helps to keep our doors open…theologically…even while we struggle to make our community welcoming in fact to more people of different backgrounds and identities.
There is a value in a religious community holding to general principles.
But the lack of specificity can also be a problem.
That lack of specificity can make it hard to know what we need to pay attention to…specifically…as we try to build the Beloved Community.
And if there is one thing that the current uprising on the streets has made clear, one thing that the on-going and now more visible violence toward Black bodies makes clear…it is that unless race and racism are specifically addressed, they change and they persist…just as Jim Crow morphed into the New Jim Crow.
So many of you have asked me what we should do to move forward in our work on racism and becoming an anti-racist congregation.
There is a conversation that I want to introduce you to that addresses those questions and points toward answers.
It is in the form of a new Principle, an 8th Principle, that we could add, and that the UUA could add, to help us all develop and claim an anti-racist identity.
Here is the proposed 8th Principle:
“We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote (that is the preamble to all the principles)… [We] covenant to affirm and promote… journeying toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse multicultural Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other
Oppressions in ourselves and our institutions.”
The UUA is beginning the multi-year process to consider this addition…and review all of the foundational identity language in the UUA By-Laws.
But the 8th Principle itself, developed by Paula Cole Jones, a lay leader from All Souls Church in Washington, DC…has specifically been getting more attention as the recent failures of our faith to live up to our fine language have needed to be acknowledged and the need to engage more effectively with issues of race and racism has become so clear.
Twenty five congregations have already adopted the 8th Principle.
We will have the opportunity to consider adding First Unitarian to that list beginning this fall.
Paula, herself, will join us, virtually, for a workshop on the 8th Principle and what it might call us to do and be in September. Saturday, September 26. And she has agreed to journey with us this year…as we consider making more explicit commitments and explore some new ways to live out our faith.
Look for more information in the coming weeks.
Not all of us can or should take to the streets. Not all of us are positioned to be leaders in reshaping our world. There is great wisdom in supporting the leadership of those who have been kept on the margins as we move ahead.
But all of us can have a voice in shaping the identity of this liberal religious community…and shaping our religious witness in the world.
(The language of anti-racism is challenging for some of us, I know. We’ll be sharing resources throughout the year, but consider reading Abram Kendi’s #1 NY Times Best-Seller, How to Be An Anti-Racist. Or his most recent article in the Atlantic.)
There is shift that we need to make, away from individual responsibility or individual innocence…to look at outcomes…not intentions. The question is not whether any of us are good people, whether any of us intended to support racism…we’re Universalists after all. We know that we are all going the heaven.
We need to keep our focus on the truth that as long as the outcome of policies and procedures and attitudes is to keep Black and brown bodies at the bottom…the work of creating Beloved Community…is still to be done.
And, all of us must have a voice in shaping this community into one which we can…
with eyes and minds and hearts,
without a wink or crossing our fingers behind our backs,
recognizing as much as we can the privilege out of which we move…
We all must have a voice in shaping this community into one which we can authentically call Beloved.
We have only begun to imagine justice and mercy, only begun to imagine a future in which love and mercy trump murder.
May we take the broad promise of our faith and discover ways to make it plain…to make it real…so that we can live real lives of love that point toward hope.
May that we so. And Amen.
Topics: Belonging