Sermon at First Unitarian Unitarian Church of San Diego, 3/26/2017.
"The Global Majorities - Abundance and Scarcity" Rev Tet Gallardo, Mar 26, 2017, Hillcrest from First UU Church of SD on Vimeo.
Good morning to all.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, John Kenneth Galbraith was one of the
most widely read economists in the world.
He said, “Humanity’s
most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the
non-conformists who refuse to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of
things as they are, and insis upon attempting to find new ways of bettering
things, the world would have known little progress, indeed.”
In 2006, Boy Scout leaders knew a lightning storm was
near a Pennsylvania camp when they dismissed 350 Scouts from a dining hall to
their tents, then lied about it after lightning killed a 16-year-old Scout. 350 people trained in leadership but not in
dissent. 350 people trained in taking
the lead but not in taking a different turn.
All complied as told and went ahead into a lightning storm. Previous to this, the year before, 12 scouts
died in a thunderstorm.
We have all heard of herd thinking. We know the dangers
of conformity and obedience. It’s like
having a partner that thinks exactly like you and getting lost exactly as you
would and approaching every problem with the same limits as you have. It’s like having one you with double the
needs. But when you have an opposite,
there two types of strengths and talents.
And because your weaknesses are different, your partner can step in when
you step back.
Why do you think evolution makes us attracted to our
opposites?
I am from an old civilization of welcome with 7,641
islands that has been practicing what I call Open Sea Spirituality. For
centuries, we welcomed foreigners in our
paradise with only peace as a requirement.
We have archeological evidence that Sanskrit came to our shores at about
900 AD, then at about the 1200s Arabic ways came to our shores, and then the
Spanish “discovered” us in the 1500s.
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. But we
still are unable to put our finger on why as our economy grows, it is the
dollar that earns more than the peso.
Our welcome in no way means we are 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.
Genocides, violence, oppression have all been the
pestilence brought to the outside world and to the global majorities by groups
who like to think small, who like to limit the world within arm’s length, and
who need to shrink the universe to the size of their minds.
Colonizers came with their paradigm of scarcity and when
they found us and our abundance, they could not make out what it was.
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 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
diverse and thought we were lacking a sense of order. But empires soon learned
as they toppled in every corner of the world that diversity is what makes us
ungovernable and resilient.
When people exclude, who are really marginalized but
those who have caged themselves. Who becomes the minority but those few who
make themselves scarce. Who becomes the disenfranchised but those who have
closed their palms. A locked ivory tower never gained anything.
A scarcity paradigm plagues groups who like to close
themselves up from the rest of the world.
What we need to discover is an abundant life with abundant practices.
Today, many corporations in an highly competitive
environment are taking advantage of “diversity intelligence” to navigate not
just the ways customers need to be understood but also to mine intelligence
from stakeholders that make up the success of organizations, like stockholders,
suppliers, employees, and overseas governments.
Corporations, unlike churches, cannot sustain itself through endowments
that can last decades on zero income.
Corporations survive by being needed and being relevant. Churches, on the other hand, survive by
attendance. You may have an edowment,
but if no one is attending, you still fall flat. I’ve been to a couple of churches in
Manchester.
At Cross Street Church, less
than 10 people attended the service I attended.
They said it’s because it was summer. This was a church in the middle of
a busy mall district. And I looked at
the roster and it’s mostly people who have retired knowing the church. At Rawtenstall Church, too, there was about
the same situation. The church is more
than a hundred years old and about 10 people attended, all of them are
retirees, except for the minister and me.
They can continue forever on endowments, but these old members will not
last long. Soon there will be nothing
left but money and resources. You come into either of these churches, you will
instantly feel like an outsider. Here’s
a group that has bonded into a family, which is uneasy for the newcomers.
This is what I think was the wisdom of that old Catholic
reading I learned at a young age – Matthew 10:34-35 - where Jesus says, “Do not
assume that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring
peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn ‘A man against his father, a
daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” We need those breaks where others can come in
and enrich our relationships as mediators or those who can introduce new
visions into old friendships. For
instance, my four sisters and I can get so wrapped up in our family history and
drama and our discussion can spiral into toxic ways, but our brother, whom we
adopted when he was 2 weeks old, can just sit there and listen in on us and
boom! We can just look at his innocence
and his faith in this family that adopted him fills us all with his unique perspective
that overrides the mental habits we have formed over the years of indulging in
negativity.
We need those people who understand our problems in ways
that have very little context, less history, and new eyes.
Today, US churches are enjoying an influx of attendees
because of some trouble in this democracy.
And that should be a giveaway.
People are in need of faith in humanity when they come to our
churches. In our churches, we do not
offer a product no one has seen, like heaven.
What we offer is community. We offer conversation. We offer
welcome. But there’s a danger of
proselytizing this church with a singular culture. There is a danger of having a dominant way in
planning resources, in designing our order, in setting a sense of beauty for
our structures, and in using familiar discussion methods. We can use the excuses of tradition,
comfort, understandability, familiary and even “Unitarianism”. These are ways in which we all-too-subtly
shut down innovation, difference, diversity, or even wisdom.
I mean how hard is it to really pump up this party? If we can't model diversity, what are we modelling? We are modeling the global scourge of fragility. We don't have to invite people of color to be members. Let us think about sharing spaces. For instance, we could let them use our space for free for diversity-focused activities. If anyone needed a holi festival space, let them come here.
Last weekend, I was in 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 Collective 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.
