I wish I could have expounded more and I'm trying to organize a cafe-style workshop during the week of the GA during one of the free time in the schedule to cover this.
Audible sermon here: http://www.uumarin.org/worship/traditional-sunday-services/upcoming-sunday-services/37-ministry/past-services/491-may-21-2017.html
What if I told you there is no moral and immoral. Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist teacher says in a poem,
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that is alive.
I am a mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.
Now that is all too easy for us to swallow until it talks about people. The poem continues,
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin a bamboo sticks.
I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.
What if I told you all there is to know is love. And knowing love and having love makes you less likely to do damage on other people. What if I told you we are not loving enough in our dealings with Trump. What if I told you we are obsessed about power and not enough about love. What if I told you the government is not the enemy. What if I told you there is no you or me. What if I told you we are all in this together.
Allen Ginsberg has received much accolade on having a prophetic voice. One day he was asked by a person from the audience, “How can I be prophetic?” Ginsberg replied, tell your secrets. His poetry was filled with revelation. He himself was a gay man who came out at a time that we were all willing to close our eyes. He expressed new truths for the time he was in, some people might say. But I think he was merely more confrontational and brave with what is and in lifting the veil. He said, “What prophecy actually is is not that you actually know that the bomb will fall in 1942. It’s that you know and feel something that somebody knows and feels in a hundred years. And maybe articulate it in a hint—a concrete way that they can pick up on in a hundred years.” For him, the writing of poetry becomes an art project that is “the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies”, or a mode of self creation.
At this very moment, voices all over our churches are speaking up. Paying attention and attending to one another are the most radical things we can do. Behind every good thing that we built to keep us together as you can see in the chart there, you will find that the very things that we have created to make a strong, progressive community are the very same things that became a vehicle for the toxic things we have at church today. Please take a look at the handout.
White supremacy has crept into the system through the insidious ways with which we reward dishonesty towards one another. For instance, on correctness culture --- one sense of propriety dominating a church bears little difference when compared to a church that has dogma. We have transfixed ourselves on a UU identity, we have a Jesus and we don’t know it. We have some kind of Moses and he is a dead old white guy and he gave us prescriptions instead of commandments from long ago and gave permission for white legacy to be called the enlightenment. During coffee hour, I would invite you to find a partner and discuss this with one another.
We have privileged academic prowess, theological eloquence, or even sheer literacy, and the pristine realm of 20/20 hindsight which belongs to a largely white heritage comfortably building theology while we have disenfranchised the practical, trial-and-error, risk-taking, spontaneous, hardly ideologically coherent yet spiritual revolutions and counter-oppressions which largely belongs to the the global majorities. These are two different cultures of religious leadership. When they inform one another, we call it praxis. Our praxis is broken as our conversations are. And we need to bridge the gap between leaders who are learning as they go and leaders generating theories. Oh I wish to know the ancestors of movements, their longings, their failures. Oh I wish to know the failures that led to the things we enjoy. Oh I wish to know the people who didn’t grab power but remained on the periphery holding hands as the communal guardians of new visions. They teach me idolatry is the enemy. Oh I wish to know the lives of our saints who were frail and human. I wish to know their names. I want to pay attention to them as you are paying attention to me. So during coffee hour, let us think of the question, “How am I doing prophetic work in my church today?”
I came to this church to purge myself of Catholic guilt and find that it is riddled with white guilt. One of the professors at Starr King School for the Ministry is Harvard graduate Reverend Meg Richardson. She says that some white people are very eager to establish that they are on the side of the angels and we have a cultural expectation that in order for someone to do good, first they must be punished with some kind of "postive discipline". She asks, “Why do we need to make people feel bad to do what is good?" which she thinks is parenting and not social justice. I would like to think that punishing people is at least not very Universalist but it seems like it is.” Our sense of accountability is not a loving one, we isolate, name, and call out people who err and flog them on our Facebook walls instead of raising up what pain and harm behaviors are causing others. We have become those legalistic ancestors of Christianity that Jesus is said to have died for in order to save them from a policy statement called the Ten Commandments and teach them love. Love is not telling an erring president you can still be president. It comes from power, we oust an erring president, or at least impeach him, and then provide some good tools for rework and maybe they can run for president again on a different platform. If we cannot picture restoration this way, the kind of love we are peddling must come from a place of victimhood, devoid of a sense of agency, and not from the place of powerful teachers.
Meg taught me that transcendentalists used conversation in a very radical way as a tool for religious/spiritual transformation. An issue is they thought that only like-minded people should participate, although they did bring "outside" voices in but for a group of Harvard grad white male ministers, including at least one who was known to be mentally ill. They did have ground rules: no topic would be off limits. Yet even though no topic is off limits they did expect some kind of behavioral and conversational norm that they were not aware of. And it was inevitable that members and outsiders would find themselves censoring their thoughts and feelings.
Normalizing is insidious. It takes a prophet to see it. Lack of time and resources are the usual reasons to normalize. We can sometimes be dishonest and say that we lack time and resources, and yet we can miraculously manufacture a wrinkle in the time space continuum when we are in love. Suddenly, everything stops and time stretches. When we are in love we find time is abundant especially for our lover. Making time is power and it is revolutionary. Making time invites other resources into the relationship. Lovers often marvel at how miraculously their marriage brings in gifts and blessings form their community. People paying attention to one another become a vortex of power that sucks in people who have nothing to pay attention to. This is why when we are most oppressed and most needy, it is not money that we need but an ally. Two people coming together in friendship becomes the power of three, not two. If this is still a secret to you, I suggest you try it. Allyship is not about showing up at Standing Rock and taking Facebook photos for your congregation to check you out, it is about coming to a place to cross the divide between strangers and adopting one another as friends.
There is so much more to be said today, like how our progressive and advanced RE curriculum is broken because a curriculum cannot exist without community. The explicit curriculum of welcome cannot coexist with an implicit curriculum of conformity. We can no longer teach RE, RE must be learned from children now. They know so much less toxic things than we do. We need to make prophets of our children early on. We need to lift the veil on how we are teaching whiteness through the design on our walls, the design of our worship services, the way our pulpits are still symbolic of authority instead of disruption and mischief. We need to be more confrontational of truths long held by our churches and spoken as principles. Honesty is confrontation. Honesty is prophecy. Reveal your secrets to one another. Confessing may not all be that bad. I also invite you to do this during coffee hour.
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