This is the worship service at UU Church of Davis on March 19, 2017.
You can go straight to my sermon at 26:40 on the timeline.
Here's the intended sermon below. I have ad libbed during the sermon though.
Podcast is here
Here's the intended sermon below. I have ad libbed during the sermon though.
Podcast is here
Good morning all!
I am happy to be here today. I just landed back here in California from Baltimore where we had a wonderful and powerful meeting with Unitarian religious professionals of color. And I am happy to announce that DRUUMM or the Diverse, Revolutionary UU Multicultural Ministry is launching a Global Majorities project that wants to confront the question: How would our churches feel, taste, and look if white was not at the center? Please support them via faithify. I am happy that we have come to this point. Truly a heavy and painful load had just been lifted off my shoulders. I have been going around speaking in pulpits. And last Sunday, I was at Olympia, Washington and I bared my soul and my weary heart to tell them that I have had it with our myths of being a welcoming church. That was last Sunday, so I’m happy that this week, I learned for this initiative from DRUUMM which starts this honest conversation. I am in the business of truthful conversations.
Conversations are the currency of organizations. And yet there is very little science on the methods of efficient conversations, or conversations that get to the bottom of things. The challenge is that conversations are not always linear and methodical. Sometimes we have to step back, let go, get a time out, and then discover ideas that we did not even entertain in our meetings. If you look at it, an organization is really just one big long meeting of minds, cultures, beliefs, and actions. You could these meetings are confrontations. Conversations are best ways to wage conflict and yet we come to conversation baring little and bearing little. We come to conversations withholding so much or muddling with too much information. How can we think as a community if we come into it with a competition on who gets to shut down someone first? Don’t we always here about shutting down, drop the mic, and racing to deliver the “word”? There is such a thing in business they call “diversity intelligence” and we don’t have it. “That inability to hear different voices and perspectives (that) is the downfall of intelligent decision making” Garmston would say.
Today our democracy is beleaguered by alternative facts. Maybe some of them are myths that have become stubborn through the test of time, myths like Jesus is white, myths like people of color are a minority, myths like the world is flat, and this I always get: myths like the Philippines is a young civilization.
I come from the Philippines, a land of 7,641 islands, whose first human lived at least 70,000 years ago. We were Hindus as far back as 900 AD, became Muslims at about 1200s, and was “discovered” by a Portuguese in 1521. Why is it that when white people discover something, we mark it as a global awakening? Well, the answer is simple. Because a lack of intelligence in the white community is worse than the plague --- plunder and pillage! The Syrians, the Africans, the Iraqis, and other decimated civilizations can attest. An Englishman named Samuel Shenton in 1956 stubbornly founded the International Flat Earth Society which grew to 3,500 member in 1971 when Charled Johnson from California made it into a religion. For them humanity lives on a disc. Imagine welcoming them in our churches.
I am a person from an old civilization of welcome which has been practicing open sea spirituality. For centuries, we welcomed foreigners in our paradise with only peace as a requirement. And in the 20th century, we have extended this welcome to more than a thousand Jews who fled the Holocaust, more than half a million Vietnamese refugees during the war, and we have been welcoming many refugees of many wars and President Duterte has recently said that we would be welcoming Syrian refugees too. The United Nations High Commission on Refugees also looks to the Philippines as a model for refugee intake. People who have come to our country have not only been kept safe but have prospered. And now the Philippines is arguably the second fastest growing economy in the world, next to China. Our welcome in no way means we are not doormats. We have kicked out the Spanish, the Americans, the Japanese, the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and a plunderer president Joseph Estrada, only in the last century at the rate of two uprisings per generation. Radical welcome is my lineage and revolution is my middle name.
So I come here to our churches with a belief that we are a welcoming church. And now I wonder how much of that is myth. Imagine me coming here to our churches and finding that really what I’ve been told about diversity is not what I see. What I’ve been told about our pilgrim faith is not self-evident. I’ve been to many pulpits now. I’ve been to 25 states. I”ve been to the clergy call at Standing Rock. I’ve been to the women’s march in Chicago last January. I’ve been to our Black Lives Matters rallies. I’ve been to our conversations about sanctuary. I know what provocations we are capable of outside of our churches. We love provoking demons far and out of reach from real confrontation. Which makes me wonder about the confrontations we are capable of within our churches.
Justice does not start with a demand. Justice starts with confrontation.
And we can look around and examine so that we can confront whether our welcome is a reality or a myth. What other myths are staying in our heads and are not grounded in reality anymore? Ann Swidler, a sociologist, found in research that we are capable of “switching frames” when we try to make meaning of the world. People who grapple with the challenges of marriage, for instance, switch frames between what she called mythic view and prosaic view of love. The mythic view of love is made of unconditional, happy ever after, rose gardens, and enduring sentiments. On the other hand, the prosaic view of love, however, is tested by dilemmas and arbitrary decisions and their consequences – who takes the kids to school, who pays for utilities, who gets the remote control. The prosaic view it seems never informs the mythic view. People hard up with trying to make a marriage work can still get misty-eyed with the first time magic that happened between them, or the day she walked down the aisle, or the way he played guitar with his locks over his eyes. These are magical moments we freeze in time and look back on especially in times when the prosaic experience of life is testing our notion of happily ever after. We arbitrarily shift frames and this habit is not limited to romantic love. I would assert that it often happens when we invest in something that has siezed us romatincally, like our love for this church. And our mythic view may never be informed by what’s happening around us. You will never for instance not get very far with a member of the Westboro Church by showing them the enduring love of the LGBT community. No, myth is hardly informed by prose.
But if we look all around us, our churches are whitewashed. White dead male theologians have their footprints everywhere while we pay little homage to the people of color who have lost their lives or risk their lives to liberate us all, oppressor and oppressed. What about women leaders? Our rituals are white. Whiteness is not an ethnicity, or a skin color, but a culture that is supposed to communicate sophistication, privilege, and class in a complex smoke-and-mirrors of behaviors suggesting fragility and comfortable cluelessness, which can be used to exonerate them in court.
We can go misty-eyed when Lady Gaga sings songs that make us hold fast to the American ideals like “home of the brave, land of the free” or when we recite the words in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all [men] are created equal.” Wax poetic all you want, but this is no longer the home of the brave and the land of the free. Is it still self-evident that all are created equal?
Can we not do a reverse evangelism to reach out to people so that they convert us into a more welcoming people? Have we reached the end of our longings? Can we not come into truthful conversations and confront the elephants in the room?
I urge you all to look at our rituals and ask for help. The lighting of the chalice is not like clocking in for work. The ringing of the bell is no longer resonating with the vivaciousness of life needed in this time of urgency.
The mysterious thing about conversations is that there is really never a private one. Conversations have a social dimension to them. Conversations that change the way we look at things can help us be different in many other aspects of our lives. David Whyte says, “No self survives a real conversation.” And when this new self comes out into the world, the world needs to confront this new self.
We need to invite those who think differently to come over, not to make disciples of them, but so they can leave us breathlessly wondering what else we don’t know. May wonders sieze us again and jolt us. May our imaginations be nourished by surprises. If we could start in our breaking together between us in prayer, in trust, in discomfort, in laughter, in irony, in style, in whatever it takes to change us, we can welcome bigger changes like justice.
And may our question not be “Will love win?”
May we confront the question, “How shall we let love win?”
May we light that chalice welcoming the pilgrim.
May we ring the bell welcoming justice.
