Justice is what love looks like when it speaks in public.
Justice is what love looks like in public.
It was ten years ago, 2011, and Dr. Cornell West was preaching in the Rankin Chapel on the Howard University campus. His visit had been well publicized and there were more students, by far, on the hill outside the chapel than inside.
He spoke about the power of love and about the Black prophetic tradition…
A tradition of hope even in the face of violence and reverses, when progress seemed impossible…
A tradition grounded in love…but not an anemic love…but a love with enough power to sustain the community even when prospects were bleakest…
A love strong enough to transform a justified anger, a righteous anger…strong enough to channel that anger toward the paths of justice and fairness.
He compared the life force in that tradition to the emptiness of the endless pursuit of pleasure he saw all around him…
He preached for an hour.
Toward the end, when he had condemned the growing oligarchy, the dangerous and increasing concentration of wealth and power in this nation,
Toward the end he told that audience of privileged young leaders…the talented tenth of the Black community…he told them that:
“Justice is what love looks like in public.”
And he told those young leaders, after he had asked them what kind of people they really were and what kind of people they really wanted to be…
He told them that even when things look bleakest…to hold their heads high and work for a justice grounded in love.
Dr. West repeated some of those same themes in 2015 at the UUA General Assembly here in Portland. Some of you were there, as was I.
Justice is what love looks like in public.
That’s the message I want to work with this morning. Because it is not self-evident, is it?… That justice is what love looks like in public.
The connection is not immediately clear, is it?
How do you get from love…embracing and welcoming love…affirming and forgiving love…
How do you get from love…through the anger and often the lies, through the divisiveness and the violence that is our current reality…
How do you get from love to a justice that must include forgiveness, but a justice that also judges…that judges right from wrong…a justice that has a moral compass…a justice that can be hard edged…and a justice with the power, to quote Dr. King, with the power to correct everything that stands against love.
Where do we search to find a love within us that is strong enough to overcome hate and sustain us on the lifelong journey toward Beloved Community…
A love that Audre Lorde described as a “lust for a working tomorrow…”
A lust. A life-force.
Where do we find a love that looks like justice when it moves in public?
Where do we find that love?
Not all of us…not many of us…can rely on the black prophetic tradition directly. That tradition can be an inspiration for the progressive, for the primarily white liberal religious community…but the dangers of
mis-appropriation are real.
And love needs to operate not just by admiring and holding up someone else’s experience but by knowing your own experience…by knowing the truth of your own life, not the stories of other lives…
Stories are important here and our first stop in searching for that love is in the story of the Garden…the Garden of Eden…
That story presents a picture of human life as whole and pure, until knowledge came to us with those first bites of that apple. Until!
Deep in our religious DNA in the West is a story and a theology that equates innocence with wholeness.
That story offers a theology in which innocence…in which lack of awareness…lack of knowing…is held up as God’s desire for us…where innocence…to translate into our liberal religious language…is held up as Love’s instruction for a good and abundant life.
Innocence…ignorance…NOT knowing.
We know what lies down the path of refusal to know and accept the truth. The refusal to know the truth?
We know where that leads. We see where that is leading in this nation today and more broadly in the world.
The work of justice requires “knowing” as broadly and as deeply as we can.
And for Unitarian Universalism, the most well-educated religious community in the nation, the religious community where love of learning is a defining part of our identity…knowing and searching for more accurate and fuller truth should be one of our great strengths.
Racism, sexism, homophobia …the climate crisis and ableism…all of the ways that the structure of our world denies so many of us a full humanity…all of those “isms” …require a segregation of knowledge, a selective refusal to know the truth…
So, first, a love that points toward justice requires the ability and the willingness to see…to know the world with all of its beauty but also all of its violence…
“there must be those who … do not avoid seeing what must be seen…of both sorrow and outrage…but also tenderness and wonder.”
A love that points toward justice must be able to know the truth of our world…Critical Race Theory and all…
But innocence results in more than just a selective refusal to know. It also requires what Rebecca Parker, the author of our reading, describes as the anesthetization of feeling.
The anesthetization of feeling. The shutting off, the closing down of our capacity to feel. Innocence requires a shutting down of too many chambers in our hearts.
Clinging to an innocence none of us really have means we lose our capacity for compassion…the ability to feel for and with others…and we lose the capacity to experience and respond to our own participation in those structures that privilege us in some ways and press down on us in other ways.
We lose our capacity to experience the fullness of life. We lose the capacity to truly live.
So, here is what we have so far:
To discover a justice grounded in love, a justice that is what love looks like in public…we need first to restore our ability to know the world as fully as we can…both the beauty and the brokenness… and develop capacity to respond to the world with full and open hearts, with both compassion and outrage that can then be channeled through love.
Are you with me so far?
Because there is more.
We do a great deal of justice-making in this congregation. I mentioned the summary of our justice efforts that is in the mailing most of you will be receiving this week
Extensive work on police violence and support for the Movement for Black Lives.
Portland became an epicenter of resistance, with national attention, and First Unitarian congregants were there as faithful witnesses, helping to prevent more aggressive federal intervention. Our civil liberties are more secure as a result.
Witness in the streets, yes. But also the adoption of the 8th Principle. Work for electoral justice and systemic change through both legislation and legal action. A commitment to service and use of our facilities for community support. Work for justice in the Middle East and Africa. Significant commitment to climate and environmental justice.
We work with literally dozens of community partners: Portland United Against Hate, ImIRJ, Western States Center, Oregon Just Transition Alliance, Emanuel Displaced Persons Association 2, 350PDX, and more…literally, too ,many to mention.
We give other organizations over $50,000 a year from our plate collections. The First Unitarian Alliance contributes as well. And many of you provide leadership in the organizations with which we partner.
More than 10 justice action groups, plus book groups and study circles to deepen understanding.
It is an impressive amount of activity. Read the full report. I think you will find it inspiring.
But the point I want to make here is not how extensive our justice work is…but how increasingly it is grounded in relationship with those most impacted in this community. The point I want to make is that our justice work is getting deeper, more grounded in relationship and more accountable.
I do not mean to suggest that we have this all figured out. When I spoke with Sue Palmiter, who gave our testimony and is providing leadership for Divest Oregon…the demand that the state pension system…some $120 billion dollars worth…be divested from fossil fuel industries…and directed toward the green energy economy of the future…
When I asked Sue about accountability, she was almost apologetic. She said that she has joined this front line organization and that one…she goes to meetings and makes relationships…but she hasn’t found a deeper level of accountability…yet.
Has not found it…yet. But she is searching for it. She understands its importance and she is laying the groundwork for it.
The justice work at First Unitarian is being grounded more and more firmly in relationships where hope for our collective future can flourish.
Our justice work is also seeing more and more clearly the connections between issues…how environmental justice and racial justice are not siloed and separate…but both part of one effort toward a justice based on love.
The deepening of relationships and the growing accountability in our work is worth noting.
But in addition, there is a growing understanding and a developing practice of seeing and feeling more deeply.
Sue, in her testimony, spoke of being grounded and “tightly tethered”…in relationship with others and…most important…in a deeper relationship with self. She spoke of finding a way out of no way…for herself. She was describing her personal stake in the work of justice.
Rebecca Parker describes the point this way:
“My commitment to… [justice-making] is both on behalf of the other—my neighbor, whose well-being I desire – and for myself, to whom the gift of life has been given but not yet fully claimed.
I struggle neither as a benevolent act of social concern nor as a repentant act of shame and guilt, but as an act of desire for life, of passion for life, of insistence on life—fueled by both love for life and anger in face of the violence that divides human flesh.”
Not charity. And not guilt. Neither charity nor guilt can ground us and sustain us for the long haul.
It is love for the fullness of life, which none of us can realize until all of us are free to realize it.
Even the most privileged of us is being robbed of the fullness of life by the structures and habits of mind and heart that resist and deny love.
Rebecca goes on:
“I step out of an insular shell and come into immediate contact with the full texture of our present reality. I feel the rain on my face and breathe the fresh air. I wade in the waters that spirit has troubled and stirred. The water drenching me baptizes me into a new life.”
A new life in which anesthetization is not necessary. A new life in which we can know the truth of the world and still find hope for the future…hope for the future that makes the present inhabitable.
Love of life means hope for me…born on the new day. We are the new day…the song says.
Perhaps it would be more helpful… and less arrogant… to say that we CAN be the new day. That we have the capacity…all of us…to put away the illusion of innocence and use our skills to know the world as it is…its beauty and its brutality.
And we have the capacity…each of us…to free ourselves to know the depth of feeling…both the outrage and the compassion…compassion even for ourselves…that can be channeled into a love with the power to overcome hate and fear…
We have the capacity…each of us and all of us… to be part of a love with the power to make justice real when that love speaks in public.
May that be so. Amen.
Prayer
Will you pray with me now?
Spirit of Life. Spirit of Love on which we depend in our lives.
Power of love that we search for faith to believe is real.
Be with us on this day and in this community.
These are days when lies pass for wisdom and
When posing passes for courage.
These are days when we are encouraged to fear and to fight…
Gracious spirit, help us know the power of love as a ground
To steady us and as a resource to strengthen our resolve.
We are grateful for the many blessings of our lives
And we have learned at least to question how our comfort
Is purchased with the pain of others.
Help us find more understanding of the way the world works…
And hold a firmer vision of how the world could work, should work,
can work.
And then , Great Spirit, move within us as we answer the call and , together, work for justice
Amen
Topics: Love