Breaking Bad, Breaking Bread

This is a sermon written for Live Oak UU Fellowship for September 18, 2016 service.

Listen to sermon here: http://www.uuliveoak.org/audio/2016/09-18_TetGallardoSermon.mp3

So I’m in my 2^nd week in Starr King, and already I’ve come to a comforting disagreement with all of my teachers.  All of them. After all, I’m Unitarian.  And I am faithful to our sacraments – Doubt, Argument, and Voting.

I am only beginning to be more sophisticated around here. I see a person of midnight black skin, I can’t even assume she’s is Black nor ask her, “Are you black?” I see what looks like a man who has just undressed his stole and robe and revealed a gorgeous rainbow shirt, I can’t even ask him, “Are you a man?”  I see a woman so white her veins are popping blue through her skin organizing the People of Color, I can't even ask what she's doing there.  So many things I cannot ask in this second largest democracy in the world.  

In case you're wondering, India is the largest democracy in the world.  India is in the East.  And when you see Indians talk to each other, you’d think they would go to war all the time, that’s how passionate they are with having real conversations.

Indeed there are many things even large or old democracies have to confront, including in our heretically-rooted so-called democratic churches.

I am constantly drawing inspiration from outside our churches.  I see the complexity in which people are freely who they are and I think it urges us into a level of intimacy where people have to have real conversations before assuming anything.  And that is the future of our churches – real conversations.   

But are we truly welcoming? Are we inviting?  I mean that as adjectives, not verbs.

I am doing some international work, I’ve been to Paris, Prague, in the UK, and spoke in some 9 churches in the US, and now I serve in the nominating committee of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists, and we just had our last international convention in the Netherlands with 36 countries.  Also, I was part of the Summer Intensives in Meadville for the Global Leadership Conference where about 6 countries (Kenya, Mexico, India, Colombia, Japan, and the Philippines) became roommies in a college dorm.   I’ve been in conversation with ministers and lay leaders from all continents except Antarctica.  Last time I spoke with Australia-NewZealand UUA, they are inviting me to be at their GA.

Remember when Christ was in the desert tempted 3 ways with glory, power, and gold?  Well as the story goes, Jesus was fasting and out came the devil tempting him with “all this will be yours” – that’s one. (Glory) And then, “turn the stones to bread and stop fasting” – (Gold) is the second, and lastly, “fall from this building and let the angels come to your aid” (Power)  

How do we become inviting to the people who even turn down these temptations? 

A lot of the enlightened folk who don’t come to our churches don’t like glory, power, and gold.   And those are the folks we also need to be learning from.

“The best minds of my generation are starving, hysterical naked”, said Allen Ginsburg famously. 

The future of churches is Fellowships.  Borrowed spaces, I was one of the champions of that in my church. But I lost to the people who like “legitimacy” and “representation”.    The holy is in the conversation not in the institution. 

The first unit of experience we have  between people is conversation, whether they speak or not, they will be in conversation once they share a space, whether it is as small as an alley or as wide as the world.

Krishnamurti, a guru from India, said, 

“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind.  When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.  So a who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party, or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”

It doesn’t matter anymore whether your friends are black, queer, or Quaker. It doesn’t matter anymore whether there really is a person of color in the room, or if the queer in the room is represented, but so long as you invited all and welcomed all, whether they come or not, it seems to be one’s duty to include their interests in the conversation, if one wants to be inclusive.  That which is holy is that which is concerned about those who are not present. 

It begs the question – Who owns conversation?  It seems conversations have become the ownership of all, not just of the organizer.  It can no longer be hijacked by the organizer’s worldview.  Or by any participant. Instead, keeping to inclusion and fairness has taken hold of it.

People who organize conversations who think they know the outcome of the forum are only pretending not to control it.  There are no real facilitators if the outcome is predetermined. 

As the poet David Whyte would put it, 

“No self survives a real conversation.”

In the Philippines, we used to call them facipulators, those who pretend to facilitate, but really manipulate by controlling the environment, the participants’ profile, the entrance qualifications, and the agenda to develop an outcome that would affirm and confirm their own biases.  This is how NGOs raised more funds. You will read that in a book titled, “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded”.

Now think about worship.  Who really gets to be in it? How are we inviting diversity?

Jay Johnson, author of the book “Peculiar Faith”, who is also my teacher now, says that in the East, theology is studied through worship first; while in the West, it is through knowing first.   This is peculiar indeed.    The East learns from practice, while the West learns from theory as far as studying theology is concerned.  And then with imperialism, we have to comply with a bunch of overthinkers.

Why is worship central to the East?

In 1986, I was 16 years old, and my mom, 36 years old, took me to the 3-day bloodless uprising that ousted a 20-year dictatorship.

And Catholic Masses were central to that change, such that only a matter of minutes after the Catholic Bishop whose name was – I’m not kidding -  Jame Cardinal Sin – said “Go my people”, folks of different sizes, wealth, and walk just poured out the main highway of Manila.

I’ve passed photos so that you could see what happened. In 3 days, we ousted a strongman who was responsible for murders, torture, and missing persons, as he suspended civil rights under Martial Law. And the uprising was bloodless.  It was a pretty simple worship-full street fiesta, where homeless and penniless dined with the rich upper crust eating street foods and giving literally “bread and roses” to soldiers who were sent to quash the uprising, in fact singing to them songs of prayers.  The tanks, the jet fighters, the armies found themselves baffled at how they are going to run over a fiesta.  It’s the Philippines. And we know how to go breaking bad as we go breaking bread.  The dictator Ferdinand Marcos was humiliated by the millions that turned out at EDSA, the highway that spans many central business districts.

30 years now into this new democracy and Filipinos are still feeling their way into its merits, principles, and values.   I think it is the best Western export– democracy.   But the authenticity of conversations in the East between neighbors in rapidly eroded by “development”, where neighbors don’t know each other anymore.

To be Unitarian in a country that is 85% Catholic is daunting, specially when you’re queer, and well democratic.   I grew up Catholic, my family is still Catholic.

In 1960 the Unitarian Universalist churches of the Philippines were founded by Toribio Quimada, then a minister of another religious organization. In his advocacy for farmers to get land titles, he was assasinated and his house burned to the ground, his family barely escaping.   Our churches in the Philippines continue to be moved by the farmers in the countryside heading most of the churches. Many of them are faith healers with indigenous animist and pagan traditions. I am in awe and wonder being with them in conventions.  Our founder’s daughter Rev. Rebecca Sienes has been leading about 20 years now. A succession plan is really one of our crisis points, along with general membership. I, however, need to focus on Manila, 570 miles away North of the headquarters, and I am conscious that the growth in the capital depends on me somehow.  We are about 70 UUs in Manila. But the total is like 1,000 nationwide.  And the population had been declining until we strenghthened our youth activities, and “broke our vows” so to speak – in terms of letting them run the church.

What you know as the board, we call The Council of Deacons – and in the congregation I serve, there are 2 18-year olds, one of them is gay.  And in our church, 70% are kids and youth.

What I’ve learned thus far is that what got us here is not taking us where we need to go.   Our churches need disruption and, maybe a revolution.  

Many of our churches and fellowships are barely existing.

How are we breaking bad and breaking bread as in the old days?  Revolution is now an iffy word when it didn’t used to be.  But if we are not in the conversation of revolution, how can we be in the conversation of change?

My friend Zeus of CitizenZeus.com said, 

“Bread has to be broken in order to be given”.  

In the reading just read earlier, Jesus said, “the blind will see, the prisoners will be freed, the cripple shall walk.” Why, if that’s not defying the very laws of Physics, what is it in defiance of?

The first act of faith is to introduce freedom.  Freedom from limits and bondage, yes. 

But also the freedom to be something else, and in fact, to be something so unrecognizable even to yourself.  It is also the freedom to be broken until someone else comes a long and you form a new pie.  

If in a democratic church there are unspeakables, there are sacred cows, and elephants in the room, then we are not truly free.

Thich Nhat Hanh said,  one buddha is not enough. The next buddha is a sangha – or a loving community.

What got us here is not taking us where we want to go.  It’s time to go breaking bad again as we go breaking bread.  By freeing conversation again, we free ourselves.