Sleeping Through A Revolution

Sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fort Wayne on January 15, 2017. 

Good morning everyone.  I am happy to be here.  To stand with you on Martin Luther King Sunday in exploring what many people feel is a coming period of resistance.  

According one study, white homeless people are at 48%, the highest among all races.  And America is not 48% white people, so we know this is an enormous number. Homeless black people are at 39%.  Whites were also a majority of the unsheltered population at 58%.  This was in an assessment report by The US Department of Housing and Urban Development submitted to the US Congress in 2016.   Yet we don’t see white people in posters of the homeless to normalize the myth of white privilege.

I’ve heard of white privilege.  It is usually told to me by a white person who would like to lead me, like I believe white people have privilege.  I don’t.   If you had privilege, you wouldn’t be invading other countries, you’d have everything you wanted.  You would keep to yourself, like we Filipinos do.

Sure, you can characterize us by the 10% who leave the country to work in menial labor, the “lowest” of us you happen to encounter.  If that’s the case, can we characterize you for the 40 million hungry Americans?

Thomas Jefferson said, “Every generation needs a revolution”. In the Philippines, we’ve had 2 revolutions per generation.  We’ve kicked out the Spanish, the Japanese, the United States, the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and the plunder president Joseph Estrada all within a period within the last century. 

So why don’t we talk about revolution? For me, a revolution is marked by a period of great questioning.  It is a period of welcoming a bit of chaos.  If we keep doing the same things over and over, the results will also repeat themselves, like ignorance, fear-mongering, invasions, racism, and violence. 

In this respect, I am a big fan of Jesus the revolutionary.  Such a brilliant gatherer of people.  Perhaps as a community organizer, he chose a sex worker and a tax collector because they know secrets of society.   Wasn’t Jesus known for knowing things about religious leaders and confronting them about it?  He once said, "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean."

Jesus’s strategy for revolution was ritual – ritualizing communion, sermons, healing, Qand A, self-care, and invoking higher wisdom.   What is ritual?  It is going into actions, repeated in prayerful ways,  conducted in the spirit of enfolding gaze, (gazing is the first act of love) and designed to be instructive in community culture. The repeating part is important. People have short memories and need to re-commit to community as often as they can.

See, community is constantly threatened. Community goes against so many things in America today, where the system forces us into living in alienation, isolated from proper participation in shaping and talking about how common or different our concerns are.  We are kept from realizing how much empathy we have for one another.

This same system has been built to make white people feel they have privilege.  “Privilege” is a whitewash of a scarcity model.  The abundance model, on the other hand, is not about running the gauntlet to be called exceptional or heroic.   In an abundant system, there are no heroes, there are only communities.   A popular Buddhist monk in France who lives in Plum Village is Thich Nhat Hanh.  He says, “One Buddha is not enough.  The next Buddha is a sangha (a community).”

We all know being called superhuman for going through hoops is an illusion.  Look at the two people who have survived primaries to become US presidential candidates.  They don’t reflect the best in all of us, do they?  Competition doesn’t make us better people.  The most enlightened people truly do not compete. Yet, this scarcity mindset persists and many leaders around us perpetuate it.  

Martin Luther King taught me to tell it as it is.  Privilege is not being the beneficiaries of racies.  Privilege is not being not tasered for being unarmed, privilege is not being imprisoned in a police state, privilege is not benefitting from intervenist wars that sustain your status as the biggest debtor nation in the world with 20 trillion dollars of debt.  Privilege is not having to go to war making enemies and not winning.

On March 31, 1968, Martin Luther King delivered a sermon called Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution, and I quote, “ All too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to devvelop the new attitudes, the new mental responses that the new situation demands.  They end up sleeping through a revolution.”

You’ve got racists in the White House.  Huge oil corporations ignoring human rights and civil liberties.   Hate crimes against persons of color have escalated to more than a thousand since Election Day.  Black Lives are bludgeoned in the public square, in broad daylight, our modern day executions.  ISIS has killed more Muslims than non-Muslims, according to a CNN report.  Believers in the Prophet are deprived of the peace they desire and here in the United States they are named and blamed.  Can you imagine if newspapers called out the religions of people for each crime committed? Christian. Christian. Christian. Atheist. Agnostic. No, they only call out Muslims. These united states were built on the shoulders of people who have been enslaved, exploited, dismissed, excluded and obscured. 

The Philippines has accepted 1,200 jewish refugees during the Holocaust, half a million Vietnamese refugees during the Vietnam War, white Russian refugees during the Bolshevik revolution, thousands of Chinese fleeing the Japanese empire, and recently, 6,000 Rohingya muslims fleeing Burmese persecution. We are now arguably the fastest growing country on earth.

If we are looking for change, we must also be prepared to change. No self survives a real conversation, said David Whyte, a great poet, and a real prophetic voice.   No self survives a real conversation.  We cannot continue to be the same while changing the world.  We have a Unitarian principle about the interdependent web of existence because it is self-evident.  Even those who think only Trump should change should be ready to themselves be changed.  Otherwise, we may get rid of Trump but the conditions that gave rise to this racist agenda will persist and will produce the same bigot. 

Now, conversations are such powerful places to wage conflict.  And yet we often come into conversation avoiding conflict.  Then we go to war.   We come into conversation not wanting to feel vulnerable or honest.  Then we go to war.  People would rather lose life than their ego.  

Life is conflict.  We do not live by avoiding conflict but by waging it well.   We need to start being truthful to each other.  Truth-telling is the first act of justice.  Allen Ginsberg was once asked how he has come upon his own prophetic voice, he answered, “Tell your secrets.”  The human struggle needs to be understood wide open in all its frailty indeed, honest, unafraid.  Tell the truth.  How about a ritual shouting our secrets with joys and concerns? (“I forgot to feed the cat!”)  Just a thought.

In the Philippines, we don't have a word for privacy. My view is, it is not what people know about you that makes you vulnerable. It is that they don't know enough about you.  Who wins the popularity contest, but the one who bares their soul. Vulnerability is social capital. It is not what is discovered about you that makes you likeable, but what you bare or reveal about yourself.   A discovered HIV is treated by this society differently from a confessed HIV illness.  God, if only these progressives could be taught to bare their souls to each other and actually like each other, we can outrun intolerance any day.

I believe, we can no longer imagine a common future because we have constantly lied to each other, putting on faces, hiding our feelings, saving our egos.  How then shall we dream together? Robert Bella has said that our crisis is that of the imagination.  Martin Luther King does not just belong to the negro.  He belongs to every revolutionary who has the calling to change the system, to upset the way things are done.

We have learned from this Trump election that emotions hasten change faster than ideas ever will.  All these unconotd emotions, emotions that were let loose without community spirit and ritual, found community and ritual in Trump rallies.  The hate speech, the violence against protesters, the degrading of women, all became ritual in Trump rallies.  And he gained quite a good ground.

We need rituals to help us with our emotions.  Listening to emotion is making room for the irrational bafflement, confusion, anger, or loss.  Some religions dance, some wail, some spin like the whirling dervish, some use intoxicants.  There is that acceptance that the mind cannot grapple with everything and coming fully human with room for emotion helps us tap into what Paul Tillich calls The Ultimate Concern.  These inexplicable expressions that cannot be boxed into words is important and often we can offer to gather these expressions into symbol, like what we have with the chalice, the water, the amber lights, the pews, the cathedral, the cross for some people, the emblems, etc.  But even these erode their meaning with time.  Like the swastika used to a symbol of health and well-being.

New ideas do not win by force, but by emotion.  When our irrational emotions can sit with an idea, then it has won.  The idea that Native Americans could go against giant oil companies and win needed to first sit well with emotions in the room.  This was facilitated by ritual.   And the Native Americans put up a sacred fire just for this resistance.  President Obama sayed the pipeline in December 4.  I was there that day in Standing Rock and celebrated with the chiefs around their sacred fire. But just like all successful resistance, this is incomplete and temporary.

Perhaps to reflect our modern day struggle between nature and greed we can engage in a ritual of oil burning on water.  Another idea.  Our rituals have to reflect which revolution we are in.  How we do ritual is how we do life.

There is no requirement to force an idea on others or to be violent.  A simple but right question can unsettle authority. What would happen if instead of the highly normalized proliferation of photos of black homeless people included white people on the streets?

A revolution is a period of great questioning. It is cheap.  Resisting change, however, remains costly.   Look at all the millions they spend suppressing truths and revising histories.  In fact, there are no poor allies if you truly believe in change.   Again, another thing I learned from Jesus who took in the poor, the sick, the widow, and the hungry.    The unorganized are an open potential.  Because revolution is simply allyship. Period.  Ideas will win by sharing it and by setting it free to be co-owned by others, to be embodied in the heart and human activity. 

Truly there are destructive ideas that continue to persist even if they have been proven time and again to be bad on human beings, like competition versus cooperation, like wars instead of conversation, like isolating the intellect versus community conversations, like objectification versus dignity.   No matter how many generations pass, successes will always be temporary and incomplete.  We need to examine our rituals again and again and again as we examine with new lenses again and again. As revelations continue to unfold again and again. 

Ritual is our rehearsal for revolution.  Let us break each other in our questions,  May the question not be, “Will love win?”   May the question be, “How shall we let love win?”