Sermon delivered at two services of the First Unitarian Church of Oakland on February 12, 2017 in honor of Black History Month with the theme : Possibility.
Good morning. I’m happy to be back here on Black History Month. Our faith owes much of our sensibilities on liberation to the action and rhetoric lent by black people. It is an honor.
Martin Luther King is best known for his speech, “I have a dream.” Also, he was at our General Assembly in Florida in 1966 to deliver the Ware Lecture when he said, “Don’t sleep through the revolution.” We should see his likeness, his photos, in our churches, right? We credit him many things that embolden us in our social justice work.
“One of the great misfortunes of history”, he said, “is that all too many individuals and institutions find themselves in a great period of change and yet fail to achieve the new attitudes and outlooks that the new situation demands.”
Imagine him delivering this to a predominantly white general assembly. Promoting social justice involves the hard task of truth-telling. And much of the work involves research as an act of conscience, uncovering what has been obscured so that we may have a better sense of truth.
Gazing is the first act of love, says Professor Jay Johnson. This involves truly paying attention to what needs to be lifted up. Like telling someone, I notice how your heart jumps when you see me. Even your dog senses it. This is how we shall shape beloved community through intimacy, truth-telling, information and education.
And these conversations may bring uneasiness, discomfort, even sound harsh. For instance: Dear friends, let me tell you, people have made a culture out of racism, they can even call it privilege. But really, it is ignorance --- you know, that thing that happens when you penalize the educational system.
And so the task is upon us to have these difficult conversations involving exposure. The task is upon us to educate each other by revealing the obscure – yes, like telling secrets to each other as lovers do. For instance, did you know that Bayard Rustin, was an adviser to Martin Luther King? He was a civil rights leader jailed repeatedly for social disturbances and his open homosexuality in the 60s. Or, you may know Maya Angelou, but not know that Phyllis Wheatley, then a servant, yet the first published African American author writing her first poem at age 12 in the 1700s. Please correct me if these are alternative facts.
This fascist regime facing us, for instance, is telling of what happens when negative emotions of hurt, fear, and pain overtake us. And this is why we need ritual to model the truth, to rehearse the revolution. Ritual does not begin and end with the chalice and the bell. We are always in ritual. Ritual can look so inconspicuous as routines or habit. So we need to be more mindful of what truth we induce when we conform.
For instance, within a half-mile of my place in Manila are 5 Starbucks shops. And I held this ritual of drinking three cups of coffee every day, getting sold into the idea that this was essential and self-affirming. And this helped me get sold on another idea – that my job was satisfying even as it paid me much lower than my self-worth.
Telling lies and ignoring truths can be the effect of our daily rituals. Lies repeated for instance, like saying Africa had no history before the Europeans defeats all of us. And putting only white people on the walls of our churches and numbing to this fact with every chalice lighting is a ritual and a perpetuation of lies we have been told.
We are still living into many of these lies. Many of our colonizers failed to see the sophistication of our radical hospitality. They just found us despicable. Yet now the West calls on all to engage in radical hospitality to defeat present evils.
Our colonizers saw communal living and thought it better to belittle us saying we had no sense of self, but now as we face a fascist regime, we call on all to consider testing our boundaries in shaping beloved community.
Our colonizers saw our different tribes as separate and thought we were lacking hegemony but empires soon learned as they toppled in every corner of the world that diversity is what makes us ungovernable.
And even now as revolution is fomenting, percolating, heaving, ready to break free, our attention is distracted from each other, as we ritualize our paying attention to what white people have to say. As we clock in every day in a job that hires only white people for bosses, we light the chalice for defeating our allies and ourselves.
Privilege is a word I often hear from someone who wants to establish an ascendancy over me. I tell you this: if you have to peddle the word, you don’t have it. The person who can afford the highly-priced fresh meal is not more privileged than the person who gets a fresh meal for far less. Are you privileged to be in a scarcity model of breaking your back and trampling on others just to gain human rights or would you be privileged if you lived in an abundant society where human rights are for free?
Rituals were once established by religions to help cushion truths we need to face. For instance, sacraments helps us accept changes in our lives through rites of passage in (1) terms of who we are, (2) who are the others are, (3) and what to expect of this new relationship between us and the world--- these are the three things we change in ritual – me, others, and relationship. Ritual is a conversation.
Lighting the chalice is not the same as clocking in. No one is stopping us from blessing the closest body of water and affirming that water is life by adopting a lake and making its purity levels a part of prayer. There are no hindrances to blessing cohorts in ritual so that their imagination is well-aided by a community to help them see the potential of their teamwork.
I believe the despair and restlessness in the air is a crisis of the imagination.
For instance in Standing Rock, we all pray at the Sacred Fire with lots of dreaming together. An elder shares prophetic words about defeating the black snake. Through these, we can imagine together as a community and indeed we have formed beloved community over this.
I know the power of the imagination when my congregation’s vice president, a 21-year old gay man, Alvin Parama, formed a basketball team to help our youth in the summer. He knew nothing about basketball. None of them had ever been in played competitively in our little league. Amazingly, with their rituals of prayer and practices and practicing drills with values of building teams, they won 4 out of their first 5 games.
They credit real conversations that they established early on. This helped them imagine together more possibilities than anyone outside of the team could imagine. David Whyte says, no self survives a real conversation.
How then shall we form allyship when we are always guarded against changing our minds even after being informed of hard truths. How can we evolve when we are still competing on who gets to “shut down” the opposition, to “drop the mic” or to deliver the “word”? If we don’t wage conflict well in conversation, we will wage it in wars.
The revolution needs to be rehearsed in ritual.
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