These were sermons delivered in the First Universalist Church of Denver on June 11, 2017.
This congregation is the partner church of the congregation I serve: Bicutan Congregation of the UU Church of the Philippines (UUCP). The format was such that one exploration came after another separated by a song interlude.
Exploration 1 : The Superfriends – Output Versus Outcome
I just saw Wonder Woman yesterday with Reverend Jeannie and Judah yesterday. Three women watching a film on a strong woman is a great sisterhood experience. And I will not give you spoilers.
Wonder Woman used to be part of a group called Superfriends which included Superman, Aquaman, the Flash, Batman and Robin, and the Wonder Twins, and they used to live together in a place called the Hall of Justice. This was when I was a child watching television. I don’t know if that’s still true.
What I like about Wonder Woman in this movie was that she kept questioning the men around her who thought they knew better where actions were leading, whether these actions made impact in truly stopping the war or not. It didn’t matter to her whether it would mean risking her life, looking foolish, or standing alone. For most of the men, to kill more enemies will bring peace. And she wouldn’t have any of that. That didn’t mean that she didn’t value her friends and allies but that her inner compass of knowing did not get muddled in needing to conform, to seek comfort, or be complicit.
The next UUA president can’t be nothing less than Wonder Woman. She needs to be able to see that education within the religious education we have known for decades did not avert the crisis we have today in our church. The output of more classes, more children, more teach-ins, more attendance did not get us to the desired outcome of more people of color in our pews, on our walls, in our hymnals.
More output on the giving basket did not assure us of our diversity. Clearly something is missing. There is a broken conversation between what we learn and how we do. Because what we learn is designed by people who are not managing what we do. It is not the RE director who decides whether hymnals should contain more songs from Asia and Africa. It is not our RE teacher who manages whether our next church should be built on property closer to downtown. It is not our pulpit masters who decides whether our walls should reflect more heroes of counter-oppression from the global majorities. Our trainings are pointing to fables and parables instead of directing our attention to how our leaders are gaining ground in valiantly rooting out white supremacy on a daily basis. Adult education does not educate us on how to situate the ongoing conversation in a non-partisan way featuring the different positions and their proponents and the implications of having their voices heard while others are not.
In our church in Bicutan, we always always need to speak of the ongoing different adversarial positions. I wish you could hear how sometimes our joys and concerns sound like debate to the Western ear, but the Eastern heart they are parrhesiah, the Greek word for truth-telling or frankness that leads to liberation and church-building. There is such a robust free speech in our midst. It is part of our culture. Back in the day, hundreds of years before the Spanish “discovered” us, the Batangueños, people who live in one of our 7,641 islands, they had a word for war dances, they called them Kumintang. You know what? It is the same word for love songs nowadays. As war dances started to become moot in the light of hundreds of years of peace and unity under the Spanish rule, with no foreign enemies, the Kumintang war dances became sang pieces that evolved into love songs. I wouldn’t be surprised how that happened because true love is an adversarial dance. It is the work of engaging honestly, confronting truths, revealing secrets, and discovering holes that lead us somewhere.
We thank you for helping us, with your aid, to actually enrich our discussions with more people in church these days. Last year, I was part of a select group of people who were in conversation for about one year over the changes needed in the constitution of the 28 UU churches of the Philippines. Can you believe that all of us who worked on that project are still friends even after we sliced in half the powers of the president and redistributed other powers into districts? As a result, our church has never been more vibrant. I was just telling Gene that we have a new problem, we need a bigger church.
As a result of our new church constitution, the congregation I serve, who is your partner church, the Bicutan congregation, has elected a new set of young leaders to form its Council of Deacons. One of them is Elson Balla, a 20-year-old gay man who is a trinitarian. He had been going to our church and showing great leadership since he was 9. Another 20-year-old in the Council of Deacons is Jojo Sulapas, a young student of UU principles who was mentored by the ex-Vice President of Bicutan, Alvin, another gay man, about 4 years his senior, who is now leading our committee on Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expressions. Alvin and Jojo have a great story to tell about how they decided to form a basketball team only to teach teamwork based on our UU principles. They both knew little about basketball. They formed a team of young people aged 14-18 who had never competed in basketball before. Because of how they executed their beliefs and their principles in court, they formed a formidable teamwork just over one summer and won in 4 of the first 5 games they competed in as a team.
That’s the only kind of superfriends one needs to have. Because what is allyship if you just show up without teamwork.
Exploration 2: Radical Hospitality – Breaking Torah, Breaking Bread
People of the Book, People of the Word, People of the Law, are only some of the terms that refer to the devout Jewish people. A few weeks back, I attended a Shevuot with the Jewish community celebrating the day God gave the Torah to the entire nation of Israel assembled at Mount Sinai.
There were 8 to 10 workshops every hour from 8 pm to 6 am. And the first workshop I chose was on heretics. The lecture was being given by a rabbi on how it is sometimes important to break Torah, or the law, to make new Torah. He also mentioned the importance of breaking the Torah to save a life. I was so moved by this. Especially because in the next hour that I had to choose a next workshop, I chose a workshop on meditating to find your own Torah. And I thought wow, this sounds very Unitarian.
The Rabbi in the second workshop led us all to meditate by the bonfire with chants and songs and to share with a stranger in the circle our personal Torah, the thing that makes us tick. Of course, my first reaction was, me tell my secrets to a stranger? Why, I didn’t realize I stumbled into speed dating, but okay. So I chose a man so that I will not have to fall in love with him. And we instantly fell into this intimate space with each other. I learned that he had just moved to Berkeley and that he was apprehensive about his decision even then. I told him I was about to leave Berkeley after one schoolyear as a visiting scholar and that I was also apprehensive about what awaits me back home. I’m sure we broke our Torah on personal boundaries that night. And it was a counter-intuitive thing to do and it worked.
For 4 days last week, I attended a conference on Theology and Disability in Azusa. John Swinton, PhD taught us about inclusion this way. He said, “Inclusion is to make room for different people. Belonging is when they look for you when you're not there. We need to shift our thinking from inclusion to belonging and to reframe our practices from politics to love.”. A few days back, the largest UU congregation in the United States, All Souls Church in Tulsa, decided to move downtown. In this way, they can seek out those who are not there and hopefully make them feel they belong there.
Decades back in the 70s, the First Unitarian Church of Oakland had made that same decision. I hope it doesn’t take decades for other churches to follow suit. We must break Torah to make new Torah. We must break Torah to save a life. How many lives are we going to save if we could change the culture outside of our churches by modeling the right culture within our walls?
The Philippines, not known to many, has been a land for refugees for a long time. During the Holocaust, we took in 1,200 jews who sought asylum. During the Vietnam War we took in more than half a million, put them in the most wonderful island of Palawan, which has received numerous awards for ecological management. Again and again, we took refugees from the Japanese Invasion of China, the Bolshevik Revolution, and recently, 6,000 Rohingya Muslims fleeing “Buddhist” persecution in Burma, for which the British are largely responsible for instigating for their depopulation agenda for mining. Time and again, we who have been ravaged by wars ourselves have broken our boundaries and our vows of self-preservation to make room for those in need. And yet, people do not see our kindness, they only see our open palms, our sad stories, our land as that of tragedies.
In its third week now, Marawi City, is ravaged by bandits who claim to be ISIS. Yet, their masterminds seem to be an international drug ring that has sent foreign terrorists to displace 50,000 people with casualties running more than 100 people now. It is clearly a message to our president to stop the drug war. Bad people are real. They sent terrorists to our land. But the only way we can save ourselves is not to build walls against them but to actually welcome even more people. Exclusion of good people is not going to help.
By the way, about a million Americans are immigrants in the Philippines, that’s about 1% of the population. They don’t want to be called immigrants but expats.
7,641 islands are hard to rule over, that much we know. 110 languages are hard to rule over, it’s been proven. Diversity makes us resilient and ungovernable. Only within a 100-year window between 1898 to 1998, we have kicked out the Spanish, the Americans, the Japanese, a dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and a plunderer president Joseph Estrada. More than Thomas Jefferson can hoped for when he said every generation needs a revolution, for us it’s been two revolutions per generation. Our radical hospitality did not make us doormats. Radical hospitality is the only way to survive and thrive. During the last typhoon that devastated one of the islands killing 3 years ago, the Vietnamese community who were once refugees, gave so much more in donations than we had ever given to them.
Perhaps it’s time to think, when the privileged welcome us, is it because they are kind, or is it because we are? Rabbi Menahem Nahum said, it is time to break our shells of the Torah to reveal the inner Torah. My friend Zeus Yiamouyannis said, “Bread has to be broken in order to be given.”
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