Ritualizing A Brave New World – Making History

Sermon delivered at Starr King UU Church in Hayward, CA on May 14, 2017

This was a particularly special ceremony because I got to do not just the sermon but also the Call to Worship, the Silent Meditation, the Story for All Ages, and the Benediction and, most especially, the Colorful Spice Communion that models how diversity could sit together in the soup.

Good morning, allies! 

I hate studying history.  I only like it when I’m making it.  For instance, my ordination 4 years ago, arguably makes me the first out lesbian minister in the non-Western world.  There have been many lesbian ministers but no one was out.  

This sermon is about you making history.  Right now, or any moment, we can make racism history.

We must constantly make history if were are a progressive church.   The reason why churches are now experiencing the an increase in attendance, or the Trump bump, is because white culture that is out there is not meeting the needs of many liberals.   So white liberals are coming to our churches. This is a good sign. They are longing for an answer, an alterantive.  Their hope is that UU Churches can disrupt white supremacy outside these walls.  However, are we truly taking that opportunity to make history?

When I came to the United States last fall, Barrack Obama was president, Peter Morales was president, Starr King School for the Ministry was perfect, and I was getting married.  Now, none of these are true anymore. And as my sense of truth crumbled before my eyes since last fall, with this as my 19^th pulpit since then , as I made my pilgrimage to many churches and conferences as far as Indiana, Washington, Oregon, and North Carolina, Illinois, with this as my 24^th state to visit in my life, I observed an insidious way that institutions, including our churches, have retained a homogeneity or a uniformity that is alarming and is an indication of how we have been resisting making history.  And if we don’t make history, we are dead.

I come from the Philippines, where you can find the only UU congregations outside the United States, all 28 of them.  We were founded in 1955, that’s 62 years ago. And we are the only UU churches with almost 100% people of color. You could say, yeah, but you’re all Filipinos.  But did you know that Filipinos are a multicultural bunch?  We offer zero resistance to diversity.  The Philippines comes from a long history of fascination with foreign cultures. Long before a Portuguese tried to capture us for the crown of Spain, we had sanskrit in our language, Arabic, Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and Persian too, along with 100 indigenous languages and had a sophisticated stratification of society with evidence that debt notes existed in the year 900 and Muslim hieararchy made for our small packets of governance, scarce and far between the 7,641 islands.  

A Portuguese came in 1521 to “begin our history” to colonize us.  Alas, we killed him on his first attempt.  Our radical welcome was not written on a doormat.  Foreign visitors needed to prove their good intentions.  Civilizations who have come to our country peacefully and in friendship offered their cultural marvels --- a dance, a weaving, jewels, and such gifts.  We had been recipients of cultural gifts without having to appropriate them, when you come to Manila you can have different cultural experiences.  We have welcomed more than a thousand refugees escaping the Holocaust, half a million people fleeing the Vietnam War, thousands from the Bolshevik Revolution, the Japanese Invasion, etc.. and there’s a million Americans there who wouldn’t want to be called immigrants but expats.  And we’re just like, “Sure. We’ll call you by your pronouns too.”

Now how do we make history?  You can’t step in the same river twice said Heraclitus.  People think if we keep doing the same things we are used to, if we kept to tradition, if we just keep stepping into the river at different times, the river changes, and so do we.   And that might be true.  But in that way, we lose our agency, our ability to look at how we might have done more for others, especially those who needed us to not step in the river with our chemical trails or our plastics.

Another argument people make to preserve the status quo is, “Do we throw the baby out with the bathwater?”  The answer lies in our notion of history.  For instance, why can’t we say racism is history?  Does anyone studying history ask that question?  Usually a study of history will lead you to a knowledge of how racism has progressed when your intention was to study UU history. We have been studying history the wrong way. 

There ought to be a difference between the study of history and progression.  According to Hegel, and Marx, history is a study of conflict, of realities that oppose each other or compete against each other such that a dialogue arises that forms a new reality.  There is a thesis, the anti-thesis, and out of their conflict arises a synthesis.   I have still to find an example where that actually works.  For instance, did this global, neoliberal, hegemony arise out of a synthesis of conflicting realities?  Did Uber arise as a conflict between taxis and their customers? The answer for both is no.  Technologies paved for history to be made and to shape our human condition.

History should not be about progression but about obsolescence, how things become obsolete, they become history.  Because if we are still not done with racism, making racism history, how can we truly be objective in analyzing its progression.  Corporations don’t study the history of products in order to innovate.  What they study is how to kill product lines, there is a race of making products history by looking to the future.  If we were run by corporations, we would be looking at how a fringe experience like the Philippine churches could make racism obsolete.

For instance, after 4 years, Google Glass has not truly taken off in the market yet and it is already being overtaken by other technologies with virtual reality and augmented reality. Google has been focused on the history of how users use the net.  Meanwhile, virtual reality and augmented reality technologies are focused on the imagination.

In the Philippines, we have been making history, one after another, like with the 100-year revolutions. Only within the years 1898 to 1998, we have kicked out our Spanish colonizer, the Japanese, the Americans, the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and the corrupt plunderer Joseph Estrada.  Because of our communal ways and our diversity, and with 7,641 islands hard to really govern into one unit with one singular experience, these revolutions have been experienced as like packets of passing gas.  We adapt to the new quite easy.  They have not driven us into the ground. Our poverty levels have been declining.  American jobs have been coming to our shores, and for the last few years we have been lending money to the International Monetary Fund and other global institutions.

Tech companies  plan for the obsolescence of their products, not by constant improvement and development or studying progression but by thinking of disruptive innovation.  For instance, people who made pagers back in the 80s like Motorola were also trying to create ways that the dominance of pagers will be disrupted.  Motorola cellphones disrupted Motorola pagers.   They didn’t care if there will be tons of pagers in their inventory, they were more interested in how people would adapt better to a more user-friendly technology.  They made their own top-of-the-line products obsolete.  Throwing the baby out with the bath water is a regular thing.

And do you know what is a game-changer in the tech world?  The product that creates community wins.  It is not whether you are the most advanced in science or not, it is how your innovation draws in community.  Uber for instance introduces driver to passenger and matches them the way dating apps do.  Social media is now embedded in any product, even in game consoles that we used to play alone.  Now kids can play with anyone all over the world at any time. The difference in time zones ensures that there’s one kid awake in the world willing to play with yours at any time.

The key to making history is imagination.  How are we making racism and white supremacy obsolete?  What technology or new ways of doing does that call for?

The UUA is called to come up with the disruption or the challenge to white supremacy.  We cannot do that when we are still modeling white fragility and white privileging.   Again, let’s take a hard look at our history not by seeing what we think is a progression of liberalism, but by looking at the ways we have become better and better at masking our racism, how along the way we have erased black people’s contributions to our liberal faith, how we refuse to have Martin Luther King on our walls as we say Black Lives Matter, how we sing Come Come Whoever You Are but not acknowledge Sufism, how giving credit stops at the West and goes no further East, how we credit white men for transcendentalism that they learned form Hinduism, how we declare our churches sanctuaries and yet provide zero defense against ICE knocking at church doors.   

Whenever we ignore existing realities, we will not make them history.  White supremacy doesn’t end when we avoid talking about it.  Racism will keep progressing.  And white liberals coming to our churches will only find a liberal theology without a progressive way of life.  We will have become the Christians prior to the reformation, filled with rituals and emptied of hope.

I would like to share this verse that I learned from a Tiwa Chant which I think sings of disruption.  The Tiwa people are indigenous tribes in New Mexico.  They say:

When there is doubt, there is hope
When there is fear, there is love
When there is hate, there is peace
When there is suffering, there is the dance

If we do want to make history, we have to start now mindfully stepping into the river without normalizing the steps we used to take.  We have to learn new ways of being together. We need new rituals. Let’s step into the river with a different foot.  Ritualize everything new.  The chalice must be lighted in a different way.  It is not like clocking in for work.  Be mindful. Every step must be a protest against complacence and being permissive as instruments of injustice.  The new reality must be evoked, provoked, and invoked so that one day we will find ourselves different.