Salvation by Community

There’s an old joke that says Universalists (of the Unitarian Universalists) believe we are all saved because  God is so good. Unitarians believe we are all saved because we are so good.  

These two traditions merged and while not incompatible – both groups believe we are all saved – they are  not the same.  

Universalism was founded in the late 18th century entirely around the idea that there is no hell, that  everyone is saved, that God is Love and Love can only Love. The early Universalist theologian Hosea Ballou said  that Jesus didn’t atone for our sins with his death, but that he released Love into the world so that atonement was  no longer necessary. In other words, Love was released for the sake and in service to everyone, everywhere. What  we have when Jesus was killed isn’t an appeasement for an angry god who needs a blood sacrifice; what we have  is a moment when god refuses to retaliate, refuses to abandon humanity and in that moment sets loose in the world  a power stronger than death. 

Unitarianism stepped back from the question altogether, leaning into reason instead. Rather than creating  a fulsome theology of salvation, the Unitarians shifted the focus to what we can know and what really matters in  the life we are living. While orthodox Christianity debated the nuances of the next life, Unitarians dismissed it all  as distraction imploring people to make this life as good as we can for as many as we can without losing plot  through speculation on the unknowable. 

So, the Unitarians said, “this isn’t something to worry about” and the Universalists said, “and it’s all good  anyway”.  

Martin Luther, the man credited with sparking the Protestant Reformation, was obsessed with the question  of salvation. A whole lot of theological and political energy at the time was spent on who was in and who was out  and what we had to do to be invited to the party. The Roman Catholic Church was convinced that what we DO  will be the determining factor which led to a whole lot of prescriptive behavioral ethics and the first step out was  confession. There were different categories of sins and a variety of responses a person can engage to cut down  the time they’ll have to suffer in hell. Because the process started with confession, Luther would jump from  confessional to confessional constantly naming every unkind thought or worry. As a monk who lived in a  monastery with other Catholic priests, there were jokes about avoiding him in the hall lest he try to confess  something to you.  

But, Luther was just living into the logical conclusion of the theology. It’s almost impossible not to be in  a state of sinfulness, that is until he realized the presupposition for this mania was wrong. We aren’t saved because  of what we do, he decided, but because of what we believe. Jesus said over and over, “Your faith has healed you.”  Salvation by Faith. Not action. Not even redemptive action like saying the 10 Hail Mary’s the priest told you  would be required. It is your faith alone that will get you into Heaven.  

John Calvin took it all one step further. You were saved before you were even born. God has chosen you.  You will live a good, faithful life, and you will be rewarded. It is predetermined. Or, at least it’s true for most of  us, you know, us and our friends. We’re fine.  

So we’re saved by faith and/or many of us are saved in advance and we demonstrate that through faith.  Then the Universalists come forward and say, actually, it’s not just some Christians who are saved. Not just all  Christians who are saved. It’s EveryOne. Every person has been chosen, every person is Loved, is redeemed,  every person will spend an eternity in Heaven. There is nothing we can do to alter that trajectory. Our task is one  of acceptance. Knowing you are loved, living in that Truth. Letting go of the idea that you have to do more, be  more, to win the approval of a distant god, seeking your restoration.  

*The god of the question of who is saved has always been too small for me, too stingy, and not the god I  know through the trees, the oceans or the extravagance of the night sky. That god is not judging our sinfulness,  not presenting a prescription for redemption. And yet, so much of popular American religion teaches us that our  individual behavior is the key to our eternal punishment or reward.

As Universalists, we reject that entire concept. There is no pedestal of perfect purity to stand on and  striving for it is an ego game anyway. That isn’t our spiritual task. That isn’t our work. Our work is that of letting  go of the ego boundaries that allow us to think we’re better or worse than anyone or everyone else. 

Paul Tillich who taught here at Union Theological after being expelled by the Nazis – side note, Nazis  can’t bear the concept of universal love – says this beautifully: 

You are accepted… by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do  not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps  later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything;  simply accept the fact that you are accepted.” 

This is where UUs have landed on the question of salvation. Essentially, we have no real idea about life  after death, but it’s all going to be fine. There is nothing you have to do or confess or repent to be brought into  the circles of Love, and it’s not even that you have to believe the right thing because we know revelation continues  to unfold. We are born into a world where Love has been let loose and there is no power greater. It’s Love in the  beginning, Love in the end, and it’s Love all the way through. The human task is knowing and living into the  reality that we have been claimed by this Love. 

And while that’s no easy task, acceptance isn’t the end of the story. We aren’t worried about life after life,  but life during life still has some tripping points. We might not be at the mercy of an angry god, but we are very  clearly at the mercy of an angry humanity.  

So, what does all this talk of salvation, of Love all the way through, mean for people imprisoned at Delaney  Hall? What does this mean for the woman whose little sister starved to death in Palestine? To the teenager hiding  under his desk as an active shooter looks for people to kill? To the man sitting on the corner of 34th street waiting  for the shelter to open. We might be certain there is no hell after death, but what about the hell we created before  it?  

The real threat is not from a vengeful god, but from us. And the real salvation does not arrive after death  but in the ways we embody the Love always available to us now, here, for each other.  Theologians of the past weren’t wrong when asking questions of salvation; they were wrong in thinking  it was a distant or future necessity. Redemption, Liberation, these are immediate needs with real life consequences  and the God who let Love loose in the world is begging our attention, calling us to save each other from the hell  we ourselves have created.  

Luther feared his personal sinfulness would lead to his damnation, but it is our collective sinfulness, our  shared rupturing of right relationship that is creating the chaos, the hellscape too commonly known in this life.  Redemption is the shared work of embodying that Love that spoke our names before we were born, of making  that Love manifest in the systems that are damning us, setting it free to roam familiar, human-made halls of chaos  and grief. 

The racism that fragments and others, the colonialism that erases history and culture, the economic  systems that destroy mutual dependence, the tech that commodifies attention, the myth of independence that  isolates all of us, forcing us into cocoons of fear telling us lies of loneliness. This is the hell to which we’ve  condemned ourselves and each other.  

Church is the laboratory for our collective restoration. Authentic communities become the body of the  Holy. We are fully human only in relationship and it’s only in relationship that we can untangle the systems that  set this planet on fire with hate and fear.  

The people at Delaney Hall standing in solidarity with the victims inside, witnessing the deplorable  conditions that have sparked a hunger strike, are active participants in our collective salvation.  The people running what has become something of an underground railroad helping trans families escape  southern states where they are under direct threat are active participants in our collective salvation. When you, when we, enter this space and tell each other how beautiful or missed someone is or how happy  we are to see you or donate a little cash to help someone else eat tonight, we are all participating in our collective  salvation. 

God has no hands but ours. And our salvation is found in our cooperation in the healing of the world. We  are obligated to participate because this is the only road leading to mutual liberation. Reconciling the difference  between what is and what should be is the healing work that can only be done together. We are redeemed when 

we are flourishing. All of us. It’s not my work, but our work, not my sin but our sin, and the confessional is ours  to bear together.  

Because Love has been let loose in the world, and we have to accept it for ourselves and for each other,  living into the promise that liberation will be ours if we open ourselves to the unconfined Love running free in  and through us. What we do in response is entirely on us. 

We will either save each other or we will be damned alone.

Who Do We Need to Become?

King Charles came to the US this week. In DC, ground zero for the sitting fascist-leaning regime, he was  greeted with pomp and circumstance, as well as billionaires in the double digits. First in the gilded oval office  and then in a state dinner in white tie formality, the proverbial and literal red carpet was rolled out, offering the  royal treatment to the rich and powerful.  

Next stop was NYC where a different story unfolded. Our Democratic Socialist Mayor, born in Uganda,  a British colony, the child of parents born in post-colonial India, met briefly with the King and Queen in a friendly,  casual exchange in Lower Manhattan. He then went on to other work and left the King to be escorted by former  mayor Michael Bloomberg to visit the 9-11 Memorial. NYC did not, as it happens, roll out a red – or any other  color – carpet.  

Mamdani is resisting the expectation that some people should be treated differently than other people. It’s  an awkward, maybe uncomfortable, but honest reflection of the reality that, king or not, Charles is a human being  just like everyone else. The crowns, the stolen diamonds, the red carpets, the titles, the castles, the books, the  celebrity are all social constructs the entire planet has agreed to abide. The visual of Mamdani greeting the King  and Queen warmly, joyfully, and briefly, felt like a surprising window into a world not yet.  

There’s a line James Baldwin wrote more than 60 years ago that feels both defiant and compelling. He  wrote: “The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.” This exchange  between the mayor and the king felt like a watercolor painting suggesting both the world as it is and the world as  it could be if we don’t “leave it as it was when we came in”. We neither have to accept this world, nor do we have  to leave it unchanged. In fact, I might suggest leaving it unchanged would be a sign of generational failure.  Mamdani demonstrated great courage and an elasticity of thinking in not accepting the parameters given to him  for this visit. He did not fall into the pattern of bowing to this ancient monarchy or believing the social construct  of royalty. One of the most alluring human temptations is to settle for too little. We were offered a master class in  graceful, confident resistance. 

In January, we started on a trajectory here on Sundays that has been attempting to prepare us for this  historical moment. I started by asking what we need so we can resist the oncoming fascist shift of our government,  which I believe has triggered the fall of the American Empire. I started with the question, “What’s happening”,  which opened up the reality that Truth has become difficult to discern. So, first I said we need to say what we  know without capitulating to the gaslighting, the propaganda, the false narrative being offered by the government  and media outlets, parroted by millions of people in every arena. And, I noted that emotional isolation makes that  Truth-telling difficult to do. 

The second question I posed was “What do we need to risk?” After that, we talked about revolution, and  by Earth Day we got specific about the world we dream about, the world we’re suggesting is worth the risk. The  final question, theoretically addressed today is, “Who do we need to become?” Last week we took a step back  and asked if this is really our work, if religious people should be active in the public and political realm. (Spoiler  alert: the answer is yes.) 

The work before us is multi-dimensional. Speaking truth, taking risks, building community – these all  have to be done and often simultaneously. One more thing we have to do, though, is the internal work, the spiritual  work, the deep rooting out of the ways this corrupted world has already taken over our psyches.  

If we are going to find our way to liberation, we have to decolonize our minds. Even more, we have to  make ourselves unavailable to colonization. When I watch Mamdani refuse the King, and turn down the invitation  to the Met Gala, I see a mind that has done or is doing this work, that is making himself unavailable. 

Colonialization is a system, a network of behaviors, habits, fears, accommodations we make all the time, often  without anyone knowing. We limit our imaginations; we settle for too little.  

And societal collapse comes when enough of us have done this, have limited ourselves and our hopes for  what’s possible, that we the people begin to activate and sustain the very systems that are harming us.  Over time, a colonized mind will say what is expected rather than what’s true.  

A colonized mind will avoid questions that might be dangerous.  

A colonized mind will narrow what could be possible.  

A colonized mind will confuse acquiescence with survival.  

A colonized mind will perform roles instead of being a whole or true self.  

A colonized mind will choose denial over reality. 

Eventually, it doesn’t feel like oppression. It feels like the way things are.  

So, how do we decolonize our minds? 

Compassion. Attention. Community. 

The ability to be attentive to suffering is one important pathway toward the reclamation of our True and  Best and Freest Selves, the rewiring of our hearts and minds. Seeing people and feeling their pain. Knowing their  pain is like our pain. Knowing that the way they have responded is the way we would have responded. Knowing  we are connected and dependent on one another.  

Let me see if I can get specific. I was reading a story about a person on her way to work after dropping  her kids at school, who was then captured by ICE and sent into detention. She is here without papers, officially,  but she’s been attending court dates and working toward legalization. The story noted the lack of food or showers  or medicine or beds in the detention center. It noted that no one told her kids who waited at school for hours not  knowing what was happening. The story offered many entry points for compassion, but lots of the people  commenting were unable to find it within themselves to do anything but blame, and even enjoy the suffering of  this woman and her family.  

The ability to remain attentive to suffering is what keeps the mind, the soul, from collapse.  Retaining or reclaiming our compassion is our connection to our deepest selves, is our lifeline toward  decolonization. It is our way to ensure we are not hardened by the suffering, that cultural cruelty doesn’t deny  people the ability to tell their stories, or deny us the ability to feel them. When so much is awful, when the chaos  is constant and the pain is global, turning it off can feel like a kindness. It’s not. It’s a capitulation. It’s the  acquiescence we think we need to survive. It is surrender.  

Compassion is liberation.  

Mamdani was avoiding headlines related to the king, focusing attention on his livability agenda, but when  pushed, he noted that the king should return a diamond stolen many generations ago. This is an example of  interconnected suffering and the accountability compassion leads us toward. He was aware of the ongoing hurt  that theft has created and that was the one thing he brought to the conversation.  

Life in this world can be painful. I’m not going to pretend it’s not. Facing reality, when reality is what we  have now, is heartbreaking.  

But that’s not all there is. In addition to compassion and attention on this path of decolonization, on this  path of liberation, there’s community. And in community, there’s joy. 

Isolation, leading to loneliness, is one of the ways the virus of fascism takes hold in our bodies.  Community is the cure. I’m talking about authentic, covenantal relationships. I’m talking about communities of  care. Communities devoted to truth-telling. Communities where Love is at the center, not in a performative way  but in a messy, committed, loyal, affectionate, honest way.  

This kind of community requires something from us. There’s an obligation. Warmth without commitment  is comfort not covenant. Mutual aid requires mutual demand. This kind of authentic relationship can become a  source of joy which isn’t used as escape, but as fuel. Joy provides a sustained aliveness. It gives us what we need  to endure, to retain compassion, to be in this fight for as long as it takes. Joy is what frees us up to imagine. And  without imagination we’re not going to build the new world. We’re not going to become free of this one.  

Are you in relationships that make bravery possible?  

Are you in relationships that allow you to be your whole and true self?  

Are you in relationships where you can tell stories of your pain?  

Where you can move from your pain into joy? 

Because without that, the calls to resistance are unfair. There is no way we can Resist, there is no way we  can decolonize our minds, there is no way we can sustain compassion, there is no way we can experience authentic  joy, there is no way we can become who we need to be in this moment. Without these things, the call to resistance  is asking something from us that conditions cannot support.  

I’m not sure I have this, but I can imagine it. I am sure we, together, can create this. We’re closer to it than  any community I’ve ever seen. 

And I’m not willing to give in to the temptation to settle for too little.  

I hope you’re not either. I hope you’re feeling as ambitious as I am.  

If we’re going to build something new, we’ll have to be sure not to lose the ability to trust what we know,  to risk what we must, to hold fast to one another in the spirit of love and compassion, to decolonize our minds, and to imagine a life that is not defined by what is already breaking.  

There is no way out of this spiritual work, every one of us is implicated. We are warriors in a revolution  that has begun quietly and without our consent. We are in it, making or not making the world. Let’s live  unambiguously declaring that we have no intention of leaving this world as we found it.

A Pope A Politician and a Fight for the Ages

It’s rare in the 21st century for the words of a religious leader to make headlines, and even less common for a national political leader to argue with them publicly, but that’s exactly what we’ve been seeing. The war of words, both subtle and explicit, between the President and Vice President of the United States and the Pope, leader of the Roman Catholic Church, has triggered an international conversation both on the issues, but also on the bigger question of who gets to talk about what.

Our government waged war on Iran without provocation and without an apparent or accessible goal articulated. It was in clear violation of the Just War Theory, a framework written by St. Augustine in the early 5th century and theoretically followed by the Christian world since.

One of the first acts of this war was to bomb a school killing more than 160 girls, a war crime by both modern and ancient, both legal and moral standards. From there the attacks got worse and the rhetoric threatened mass annihilation. In response, the pope chastised our theoretically Christian leaders and defended the Iranians with lines like, (these are all quotes from the pope over the last few weeks) “whoever is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, never stands on the side of those who yesterday wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” “…our God is Jesus…who rejects war...” “No cause can justify the spilling of innocent blood.” “Enough of idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power!” “The delusion of omnipotence…is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive.” “God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war…your hands are full of blood.”

In response JD Vance, himself a Roman Catholic, said the Pope should be careful when speaking on matters of theology, which has to be the most bizarre statement in this ongoing public quarrel. He said it with a staggering level of arrogance. And, folded into that arrogance was a hint or even just a whisper of a threat. He said exactly, “I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” I think what he meant was he should be careful when speaking on matters of theology that aren’t in alignment with US policy. In other words, don’t get in our way. Know your place.

Lucky for the whole world, this pope does, in fact, know his place.

But sometimes in this country, we get confused about who belongs where and who should be saying what. Part of the liberation people experienced in the founding of this nation was the implied and later codified declaration of the separation of church and state. And while we often assume that choice was a response to centuries of church corruption, it was actually a way of protecting the new church from the stink of politics. As the Puritans were imagining their home in the new world, they wanted to ensure that purity wasn’t tainted by either the Roman Catholic Church they were trying to purify themselves of or the mess that government too often creates.

In the beginning, what was declared in our Constitution was an assurance that no church would ever be Established. This is in contrast to the Establishment of the Church of England which, even today, is enmeshed in governmental systems. While they couldn’t have imagined the pluralism we have, they did want to guarantee that no one in government ever had a say in how religion was to be run or what people were to believe. Remember that they were fleeing England where there was a doctrine of uniformity that legally required conformity of liturgy, government and theology by every citizen.

But separation of church and state is not the same as separation of religion and politics. Separation of church and state, meaning no religion will be established, thereby giving people freedom of belief, - no conformity required - is a legal reality. It means that none of our federal systems will benefit or harm any one group over another. No favorites. No uniformity required. That’s what the 1st Amendment protects. Religion and Politics are different.

Religion is how communities ask big questions together. How we face Mystery, together. How we live deeply, together. How we organize our questions and how we respond to the answers, together. I keep saying “together” because religion is a communal reality. Spirituality is individual. How any particular person asks big questions, faces and responds to mystery, or seeks deeper life is our own spirituality. How we do that with others is religious. We are religious together.

Politics is how we organize ourselves in groups, how we make collective decisions, distribute shared resources, and solve common problems. Each person brings to those public conversations our own individual value systems which are informed by many things including culture, history, and religion. No single person can separate their religious beliefs – the things they discover in community when facing the great mysteries of life – from their politics – how they think we should solve our problems, distribute our resources or make collective decisions.

If we are religious – and if you’re here most Sundays it’s fair to call you religious like it or not – we are going to bring the values we espouse here into the public conversation. Authenticity requires it of us. To be ourselves, we have to ask what it means to Live the Truth as we understand it.

And that Truth is what we discern here, together. That Truth includes supporting each person in their fullness, includes gratitude as a spiritual practice, includes rest as a form of resistance, includes joy as witness to liberation, includes a belief in the beauty of every being with all our varieties, includes a sense of our profound planetary interconnectedness, includes wild equality of being, includes the value of discovery through science, includes truth-telling itself, includes living with Love at the Center of Everything.

And we carry those beliefs into public spaces. We embody them. They are who we are in the world. We want our civic organizing systems to reflect those values. Which means there is no way for religion to be separated from politics. Our politics is incarnational. It is embodied. It is our values taking flesh. Living and breathing in the world.

We don’t really expect our selves or our neighbors not to bring those value systems into the public conversation. And when it comes to clergy we require them to speak out on major ethical issues. We need it as witness. We may not agree with them, but as long as they are respecting our right to disagree, we have collectively determined that we need these voices. People like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. William Barber, the Dali Lama, the Archbishop of Canterbury who’s been turning my head lately, Thich Nhat Hahn, Rev. Mariann Budde (Buddy) who spoke truth to power at the inauguration, even our own Rev. John Haynes Holmes. Each of these people has at some time been the critical voice countering cultural norms. They are calling us to be our best selves. They’re holding up the vision of the new world, the world possible, the world not yet.

As is the pope when drawing attention to abuses of power leading to violence. And, he knows he has a particular responsibility in this scenario because this government has declared Christianity as core to its value system and the Vice President is himself Catholic.

The power struggle between secular and religious leaders is as old as humans. Since we could form language, we’ve been jockeying for position and recognition. Some of these power struggles have been epic leading to massive disruptions like the Inquisition and the Crusades to name only two. The Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, the Protestant Reformation are a few others.

I actually think we’re in a similar fight right now, and one that, like the others, might also lead to a restructuring of the platforms and frameworks for our living.

I know there are people in our country – even in our government – who are trying to bring about the apocalypse. I’m not talking about that, but I’m also not not talking about it. What I mean is that I think there’s a little bit of a feeling both in the country and around the globe, that something big is happening. Maybe it’s AI. Maybe it’s the increase of violence. Maybe it’s the mind-boggling wealth disparity. Maybe it’s the fall of the American Empire. Maybe it’s the climate crisis. Maybe it’s all of these seeming to happen simultaneously and, in important ways, relatedly.

Do you know the entire tech world has a scale they call P(Doom)? It refers to the likelihood that AI will cause a disastrous outcome for humanity like extinction. There are some tech leaders who have a P(Doom) of 95%.

Even without that alarming number, there’s just a feeling so many people – on every side of the political and religious spectrum – have that something is coming or shifting or something. Something is something. Which is why we can’t cede ground to hopelessness. It’s just too easy give up. To look around and say, “We’re doomed. It’s done. Why bother?”

It’s why we need our incarnational politics.

It’s why we need our embodied integrity.

It’s why we need our voices of reason.

It’s why we need our experience of interconnectedness.

It’s why we need our willingness to be curious about difference.

It’s why we need our holy impatience.

It’s why we need our commitment to collective liberation.

It’s why we need our truth-telling in civic discourse.

It’s why we need to be visible as witness to the world we know is possible.

It’s why we need to embody hope in every public square.

It’s why we need our insistence that Love be at the Center in every decision, in every choice, in every vote, and policy, and law.

It might not be common in the 21st century to hear religious voices in public discourse, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to surrender common ground. Not now when our voices are profoundly necessary. So, as we started with words from Pope Leo, let us end with them.

“You are the salt of the Earth. You are the Light of the world. You are the message of hope, and it is on you, on us, to give hope to everyone else… Be not afraid.”

Passover: A Story of Risk Taking

We all know the story. We tell it every year, but we know it.  

• Abraham, Isaac, Jacob 

• Joseph sold/exiled to Egypt 

• His brothers followed 

• Generations passed and they remained refugees/outsiders 

• Forced into slavery 

• Harsh conditions 

• They call to god. God hears them and takes their side. 

• Moses is called by God to liberate them 

• 10 plagues, Red Sea, Desert 

My interest today is in the tiny space between when Pharoah said, “Fine, go.” And when  they actually left. Before the 10th plague, Moses told the Israelites to put lamb blood on the  doorframe so the plague – the killing of the first born son – would pass over them. Until this  point, nothing had been asked of the slaves. And even in this act, there wasn’t great risk. Have  lamb for dinner tonight, share with your neighbors – which scripture actually says – and mark  your door.  

It’s after that when all the Nile River Valley is mourning and the Pharoah relents that the  people have to step up. That’s the moment. 

I can imagine that moment well. Eldest son, super happy he survived the night, says, “Let’s  get out of here.” Teenagers in the household are all for it. Pack up some bread and water and  we’re out. But mom isn’t so sure. I mean, life here sucks and Pharoah is god-awful, but what do  we know about this Moses guy? Isn’t he Pharoah’s grandson? Who are his people? Wasn’t there  a rumor he killed someone? And dad doesn’t want to get up in the morning to hunt for straw and 

labor all day in the dry hot sun, but he has a house with a doorframe and food and they just planted  those fig trees. Maybe we should wait and see what happens.  

It’s human nature to assume the best, even in the face of impossible odds, to want to stick  with what you know, to live within the familiar narrative, even if it’s one of slavery and  oppression. 

Years ago I heard a story from a Polish woman. She was a child and Germany had taken  over. It was the 1940s and her Jewish family had gotten a letter. They were to be on a train heading  for Auschwitz in 2 weeks. She talked about counting the days and waiting up the night before  wishing she could stop the sun from rising. On the train, she and her brother were bickering about  shoes. When they arrived, she and her mother were sent in one direction, her father and brother  in another. She never saw her brother or father again. Her mother was killed shortly after. She  was the sole survivor in her family. 

In hindsight, waiting at home for 2 weeks to catch that train taking you to your own murder  seems deranged, but, it’s what most families did. Leaving, escaping, seeking an alternative meant  confronting the truth about what was happening, and accepting that life isn’t what it used to be,  no matter how normal each day appeared. It was the same for the Israelites. The first and most  difficult step is breaking through the denial to understand this isn’t like anything we’ve  experienced. Everything is different and we have to respond in unusual ways.  

For the last few months – or maybe for 200 years – this pulpit has been a counterforce, a  visible alternative, to the normalcy of American culture, the everydayness of accepting the slow  burn of social, economic, and political oppression. We’ve been providing a counter-narrative,  offering wide-eyed truth telling. I’ve noted the danger in that, the potential for dismissal, that  your desire for comfort – and my desire to provide it – could mean fewer people show up, leaving  our pews literally and figuratively empty. But, that hasn’t happened. You’re still here and more  have been coming. We are willing to speak and hear the Truth, willing to accept the consequences  of knowing, and willing to participate in the resistance we are mounting. 

John Haynes Holmes once said from this pulpit, “When the church identifies itself with the  state, it becomes a chaplain to empire, blessing guns and sanctifying slaughter. In that hour it  ceases to be the church of Christ.” 

The problem for most of us, even as we acknowledge the need to oppose tyranny, is that  we want to be safe. We want to live simple, quiet lives. We want the question of what we’re eating  for dinner or whether it’s warm enough to skip a coat to be all that fills our minds.  

But as we stand on a precipice of history, no one is innocent, no one is irrelevant, and  neutrality is fantasy. Doing nothing is a choice with a consequence.  

Some of the Israelites stayed in Egypt. They decided it was too much to risk and they’d  prefer the devil they knew. There are no stories about them. They have no history. They melted  into irrelevance having sacrificed their lives to the gods of autocracy. 

Because there are no innocent actions. There are no innocent people. When the dragon of  empire breaths fire as ours has been doing, we all get burned. We are complicit either in our  collective destruction or in the building of the new world. Either way, we are all accused and we  are all guilty. 

There is no safety, there is no neutrality, there is no passive democracy. The price of truth  is risk. It could be the risk of inaction like the family that obediently brought themselves to the  train heading to their own deaths. Or it could be the risk of action, of occupying federal space, of  blocking the expulsion of people born on the other side of the border, of speaking unpopular truths  to break through denial and claim your place even in the face of loss.  

To be faithful is not to be safe. The Israelites who stayed behind, faithful to the Egyptian  empire, were no more safe than the ones who left. The family that got on the train, faithful to  governmental orders, was not safe. Safety is as much an illusion as innocence. The implication  of every action and inaction is guilt. The world is broken and we are incriminated by our very  presence in it. We are all participants, one way or another.  

We commit our lives to collective liberation, pushing back on the power of empire, and we  will be found guilty.  

We provide no resistance, obeying the law and accepting the stories we are told, and make  no mistake - we will be found guilty.  

The question before us isn’t how we stay safe, or how we avoid risk. Those are not options.  The question before us is “What does Love require of me? What does Love require of us?” I’m reminded of when John Haynes Holmes stood at this pulpit while patriotism was the  air everyone breathed on the eve of war, and declared, “So long as I’m your minister, this church 

will answer no military summons.” He was risking his job, his career, his livelihood, his  reputation, his standing. He was called disloyal, dangerous, treasonous.  

But the church - our spiritual ancestors – applauded him. He did not stand alone. Because  risk is made possible by our membership, our participation, in community. When we stand alone,  it’s more likely we’ll get crushed. Alone, we are dissenters, non-conformists, trouble-makers.  Together we are a force. A church. A movement.  

What we have here is costly solidarity grounded in an unflinching truth. We are making no  moral surrender to power. To autocracy. To empire. We are linking ourselves each to the other,  knowing Love is the bond, Love is the Truth, Love is the ground on which we stand, together.  

Communities that avoid risk not only become irrelevant, they become soulless. We are here  to save our souls. Salvation isn’t the byproduct of following the rules, the law, living within the  structure of the totalitarian fantasy of a mad king. Salvation is the byproduct of living in Love  with one another, saving each other again and again. Helping each other gather the food and the  water we need for the journey. 

Because we need each other to walk out of the pain that is known into the pain and  possibility that is unknown, that has yet to be imagined, map-less but not without direction,  protecting each other from the dragon’s fire the way they walked out of Egypt, away from  European concentration camps, far from Southern plantations. As Marge Piercy has said, “We are  born of wanderers, with shoes under our pillows and a memory of blood that is ours raining  down.” We will be counted among those who chose the desert over bondage, who revolted, who  fought, who ran. We will one day be the ancestors who let go of everything but freedom (This is a paraphrasing from a piece of Marge Piecy’s poem “Maggid”).

What Women Want (2026)

Every year I dedicate the service closest to March 8th, International Women’s Day, to the question of What  Women Want. Women, of course, aren’t monolithic and what we want isn’t an easy thing to capture.  Women are a lot of things. We’re the people who apply mascara without a mirror on the subway, who  wipe snot from a toddler’s nose, even if the toddler isn’t ours, who wear high heels and short skirts, who drink  pumpkin spiced lattes and text our friends when we get home so they know we’re safe. We’re the people who don’t wear make-up or scarves in our hair, who keep our distance from children,  especially the ones with runny noses, who look fabulous in combat boots and cargo pants, who like Gatorade and  ham sandwiches, whose friends are elderly neighbors or aren’t known much outside of Reddit. Some women are hot all the time, wearing layers they can shed through the day, opening windows to sleep  even in January, and some women are cold, no matter the season. We joke that my sister-in-law could be burning  in hell and she’d still reach for a sweater. 

For a century, public opinion has tried to capture What Women Want, tried to figure out where they’ll  spend money, who they’ll support in an election, how they’ll respond to a news story or policy or if they’ll adapt  to new technologies.  

But women want different things. 

The women in Afghanistan, the women who were born into freedom but were forced into burkas, not  allowed to leave their homes, to see doctors, to go to school, those women want their lives back. The women in Iran whose daughters were killed last week in their school as part of an aggressive show of  force by an insecure American president and incompetent Defense Secretary, want to roll back time so they can  change everything that happened that morning, keeping their daughters home and safe.  The women in Russia whose husbands were forced into the army occupying Ukraine, who have not heard  from their spouses, who do not know if their lovers are alive, want their families intact, want to hold the men they  love in their arms to whisper in their ears, “You’re safe.” 

The women in Ukraine want to stop being so strong, want to collapse into their fear and anger, want to  scream from the bottom of their powerlessness, howling into the black hole of injustice where their neighbors  have died, where their homes were destroyed, where their strength has been sucked from their bodies and  disappeared.  

The women of Congo want an end to sexual violence perpetrated on them as a weapon of war, a war they  did not start and cannot stop, a war that makes their pain a sign of victory, a war that is designed to humiliate and  traumatize girls whose mothers watch powerless, horrified, filled with rage and unsure if survival is worth the  price extracted. 

The immigrant women of Minneapolis want to go to the supermarket without the threat of being captured,  kidnapped, abducted, sent to an American detention center where they will live in a cell so crowded they can’t  even lie down to sleep, where they won’t be able to call home, where they will live hungry and afraid until they  are sent to countries on distant continents surrounded by unfamiliar languages and people with no way back. 

Young women want to walk to their apartments without worrying that the only thing keeping them safe is  the key they slid between two fingers and the performative smile they use to hide their vigilance and fear. Old women want to be seen by society, just to be seen, to know that their opinions, concerns, joys, wisdom,  experience is not ignored, not dismissed as irrelevant because their hands are covered in sun spots, and their  eyelids have fallen over their thinning lashes. 

Black women want to stop having to work twice as hard to get half as far, to stop having to prove  themselves even when they’ve reached the peak of their careers, have accomplished more, achieved more,  succeeded more than the men in their industries.  

And they’d like to stop having to be so resilient, stop having to go high even though the rest of the world  has gone so low, stop having to suck it up, turn the other cheek, be the bigger person, and to, every once in a  while, have the temper tantrum they so fully deserve. 

Women aren’t one thing. 

Some women are proud of their military sons, and some join up themselves, donning uniforms and  machine guns, itching to get to the front lines, and some want their husbands called to war, taking their violence  out of the house, maybe even with a secret hope that they never return. 

Some want to show their bellies, flat or round, and some conceal their whole bodies, neck to ankles. Some cover their heads and others dye their hair to match the rainbow. 

Some write their phone numbers on bar napkins, kissed in red lips, and slipped to the woman drinking a  beer with friends who seem to bore her. 

Some women carry lies on every breath. 

Some speak truth oblivious to consequence. 

Some make music.  

Some run long distances. 

Some own closets filled with shoes. 

Some are wondering how much longer they can go on. 

What do women want?  

We want to be able to balance five cups of coffee in a four cup tray.  

Or hold the phone, and a stack of mail, and a handbag, and the dog’s leash in one hand while trying to get  the keys into the lock with the other. 

We want not to be so weighed down by that tote bag heavy with a wallet, umbrella, a pair of heels for  when we get to the office, half eaten bags of smoked almonds, crumpled receipts that should have been turned in  three weeks ago, and the sadness of each unhoused person we walked by, even as we tried to distract ourselves  with thoughts of anything and everything else. 

White women are not one thing. There are white women enlarging their lips, breasts, butts and whatever  else they think will attract the male gaze, wearing red hats and t-shirts with arrows pointing to their crotches  letting Donald Trump know he can grab them any time, hoping to get onto a billionaire’s government subsidized space-ship while complaining that immigrants shouldn’t have access to services like emergency doctors when  their child is having an asthma attack. 

There are also white women blocking the exits to parking garages preventing ICE from leaving with their  nefarious motives, putting themselves between danger and the vulnerable, filling city streets with bodies and  signs, making visible the resistance of the majority to the degradation of our democracy, of our morality, of the  core of who we have claimed or maybe pretended we were, white women who risk their own lives for the sake  of others, who take the heat, redirect the attention, white women getting pepper-sprayed, getting murdered in front  of their wives in their own cars.  

Women want what people of every gender want. We want love and affection, we want softness, and  security, we want to know those we love are safe, we are safe, we will be safe even as we age, even as our bodies  become less capable, even if we disagree, even if we don’t have a lot of money or no money or no way of getting  money. We all want to live in a world without violence, without fury, without reckless politicians or greedy  billionaires or power hungry tech bros who feel disconnected from responsibility or planetary relationship. 

Women want what everybody wants, we want clean air and fresh water and the freedom to explore our  own humanness without interference.  

We want food that nourishes us and access to healthcare we can afford without worry. We want opportunity and relevance. 

All of us. Every one. Every one in this room, everyone on Madison Avenue, in New York City, and state,  everyone in this country, in every country. Everyone regardless of how they voted or who they think is stopping them from getting what they want or what they think they need to do to get it. 

Women want what men want, what non-binary people want, what trans people want. We want to live our  lives fully, feely, openly. 

We want joy.  

We want rest. 

We want music and dancing and reading and thinking and laughing. We all want laughing. We want survival without required resilience. 

We want recognition without a fight.

We want safety without compromise.  

We want to wear what we want, live like we want, do what we want without threat or fear or complaint or  excuse or criticism. 

We want to belong.  

And we want Love. Unapologetic, unmoored, unbound Love. Love that has been released from its  shackles, love that’s been liberated, love that is liberating, love that sets us free. 

That’s what women – and everyone else – wants. 

There Are Four Lights: Truth Power and the Courage to See

There’s an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the captain is abducted held by an enemy  force. He’s in a dark room with one man who turns on 4 overhead spotlights and asks Captain Picard how many  lights he sees. Picard says there are 4 lights. The captor says, “There are 5 lights.” Picard, again says, “There are  4 lights.” He’s then stripped and hung up by his wrists. He’s denied food and sleep. The captor returns periodically  to ask Picard how many lights there are. They aren’t looking for information about the fleet or anything else. They  just want him to see 5 lights.  

There’s a similar story in Orwell’s 1984, holding up 4 fingers, requiring the protagonist, Winston, to say  there are 5. In that story, after torturing him, Winston says there are 5 fingers to make the pain stop. It doesn’t  stop. Saying there are 5 isn’t the point. He has to actually see 5 fingers when only 4 are shown. 

The captain in the Star Trek story suffers much pain, but he keeps yelling that there are 4 lights. He’s  promised a good life, a gentle life, if only he can acknowledge that there are 5 lights, but in his suffering, he keeps  repeating, “There. Are. Four. Lights.” He’s rescued, and in the final scene he’s with a therapist, who is also a  good friend. To her he says: 

“At the end, he gave me a choice – between a life of comfort or more torture. All I had to do was say that  I could see five lights, when in fact there were only four.”  

The friend says, “You didn’t say it?” 

He responds, “No, but I was going to. I would have said anything at all, but more than that- I believed I  could see five lights.” 

It’s not that he was willing to speak the lie. It’s that he believed it.  

When the same test is administered in the book 1984, Orwell tells us: 

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential  command.” 

The danger is not that the subjects would lie. The danger is that they would believe it. Power is not in the  facts. Power lies with the people who define reality. 

We are living in a moment when reality is beginning to fracture under the weight of so many lies. We are  in danger of losing the truth. 

That statement is so bold, it might sound hyperbolic. After all, my life looks much like it did a year ago.  I’m guessing your lives do too. School is still in session. Movies are playing in theatres. Contracts are still binding.  Things appear to be pretty normal.  

I think Renee Good’s life looked and felt pretty normal too. She was in her neighborhood, doing what she  and her neighbors do. When ICE comes around, they blow whistles as a warning sign. They yell and witness, and  when she had to leave to…I don’t know what – run errands? Get her kids? She got in her car to do that. She didn’t  know that she had crossed into a different world where neither law nor human decency exist. She was shot by an  officer of the state right there in her Honda Pilot.  

No one could come to her aid. She was an enemy of the state, a terrorist, as the Party has confirmed, and  the laws of our Constitutional Republic didn’t apply. 

And when that happened, many people thought the chaos in Minneapolis would stop. Obviously, things  are out of control and the rule of law will kick in. 

It didn’t. 17 days later Alex Pretti, after trying to help a woman to her feet who’d been pushed to the  ground, was tackled and then shot at least 10 times.  

Ernst Fraenkel, the German political sociologist, described his experience in Nazi Germany as a tale of  two nations. It’s what he called The Dual State. In the Normative State, things operate as expected with a  governmental system that abides established laws and norms. In the Prerogative State, which runs parallel to the  Normative State, often on the same streets, there’s a system of arbitrary power that is dictated by the executive  who has unchecked authority to target enemies of the state.

The existence of the Normative State lulls most people into passivity. Everything Is Fine. They don’t have  to care about whatever chaos might be happening elsewhere. In fact, it’s not happening. There are reasons for it  that fit into our shared understanding of the world. There’s nothing to see here, just move it along. 

This concept of two worlds isn’t entirely new here in the US, or in most nations. There are often two sets  of laws – one for the majority, and one for an oppressed minority. Or, one set of laws that stands for most but is  applied randomly for others. 

Every mother of a Black child knows this too well. There have been, from our founding, two nations under  God, quite divisible. 

I’m not going to suggest, though, that something hasn’t changed. Instead of seeing this through the lens  of common experience, we need to be willing to state out loud that we see the fractured nation, we see the work  of The Party. Things are not normal and we know it. There are Four Lights. 

Part of what makes this moment more dangerous is the scale and the institutionalization of the rewriting  of the facts. The President of the United States, the American Cabinet, most of the Executive Branch, and the  majority of both the Congress and the Supreme Court are collaborators in perpetrating the Lie.  

And the Lie is simple. There are enemies in our nation trying to bring us down. We have to do everything  we can to get rid of them so we can be safe and happy again.  

What we have is a massive othering that includes everyone in this country who wasn’t born here, every  transgender person, every non-binary person, every gay, lesbian or bisexual person, every doctor who offers  reproductive health care or vaccines, every lawyer who defends any of these people, every protestor or resistor or  worker for human or civil rights, and now, one year in, every Democrat. Each group has been named an Enemy  of the State, a danger to the nation, people who have to be eliminated. 

You’d think this would be more alarming, but isn’t because even those of labelled “enemies” are living  in the Normative State. We can see the Prerogative State from where we sit, but we haven’t crossed the line yet. While some people are being sent to detention centers where there is very little food and no bathrooms,  where children are existing in a state of heightened trauma, where people are being carted off to countries they’ve  never been to and where they cannot be found, most of us are living in a Normative State where our lives are still  governed by rules, where permits and licenses are processed, where elections occur on schedule and markets and  trains and storms are all still relatively predictable.  

This experience is necessary. It keeps us relatively passive. It creates an experience of continuity and  stabilizes the country, dampening our resistance. The last words Renee Good said were. “Dude, I’m not even mad  at you.”  

She wasn’t. She was living in a Normative State where ICE agents behave badly and good people blow  whistles. It is not unusual or somehow outside the frame of traditional American life. The dual state doesn’t announce itself. It’s a reality that is denied by what Orwell calls – and I will call – The Party. Most people start out in the Normative State and get shifted into the Prerogative State without knowing  it. In both states, the law doesn’t stand on its own. It is coopted by the Party. It’s not that the nation is lawless, but  that the law becomes executive property, applied haphazardly, irresponsibly, and to the benefit of those in power. Truth is also coopted. Federal officials offer different accounts, alter or deny eyewitness testimony, retell  the story to their benefit. They alter images, create AI video, flood the zone with entirely false “proof” designed  for maximum emotional impact. And the people believe them. That was a gun. She was running him over. They  are terrorists. There are 5 lights. 

Some of you have been asking me if we can get out of this without a war? This seems to be an ongoing  wonder. The answer is Yes. It has been done. Spain did it after Franco. Chile did it after Pinochet. South Africa  did it. So did South Korea. Frankly, the US did it too after McCarthy, and each time a country pushes through  authoritarianism, they find themselves more deeply committed to democratic systems than when they started.  

It hasn’t ever happened, though, when the people waited for norms to snap back on their own, or because  some election fixed everything, or because the courts stepped in and saved democracy. It ended because the people  engaged both mass protest, and deep organizing; spoke truth to each other, partnered with each other, refusing the  Big Lie, and avoiding collective amnesia in the quiet times, which I might suggest is what happened between the  two Trump terms. 

So, back we go to Picard and Winston, both tortured and convinced that what they could see and hear was  not true, that the Party, alone, is the arbiter of Truth. How did they recover?

Here I turn to Hannah Arendt who tells us that authoritarianism doesn’t begin by terrorizing the people; it  begins with their loneliness. Before our systems break, before we are willing to believe The Lie, we are isolated  and alone.  

We know this. The epidemic of loneliness we’ve been talking about since the pandemic is real and even  just claiming ourselves victims of it can feel shaming. But, loneliness isn’t just a private sorrow. It’s a political  condition. Media – both mass media and social media – replaces lived experience. We sit alone in our homes,  celebrating nothing, sharing nothing, feeling like there’s something happening somewhere and we aren’t part of  it. 

We turn to online spaces where outrage replaces judgement, where we get lost in torrents of images that  fill our brains and our bodies, leaving us feeling worse – lonelier, angrier, sadder. 

And we connect with others – read their comments, agree with snippets of thought, add our own fury to  the whirlwind. And others agree. And we give in to the rising tornado, letting it blow us into whatever groups  might help us feel connected, less alone, more wanted and seen and safe.  

Belonging replaces truth. We don’t care how many lights there are. If you say there are 5, that’s good with  me. 

When we are isolated, we feel disempowered and unmoored. Propaganda works not because people are  stupid. It works because people are lonely.  

Winston, once he’s released and goes back into the world, continues to suffer. He is profoundly alone.  Memory is no longer shared. He cannot test his perceptions against others. Language doesn’t stabilize meaning.  The common world has dissolved for him, making his reality only what others say it is.  

Picard, on the other hand, recovers. He returns to his friends. He is seen and heard and trusted. He  remembers that there were only 4 lights.  

The greatest acts of resistance are found in the restoration of communities where truth can be spoken and  believed.  

My dear friends, my people, my community, this is what we do. This is who we are. We gather each other  up. I believe your Truth and you believe mine. When you tell me of your experience in the world, I listen, I see  and hear and I remember. Andrea Gibson tells us, “Even when truth isn’t hopeful, the telling of it is.”  

In a time defined by the Big Lie, a time saturated in deceit, when bearing public witness is done at the risk  of death, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. 

Together, fending off the rising waters of loneliness, the pull of social and mass media, and the fear of  crossing into the prerogative state, holding fast to one another, we will howl with our final breath… There. Are. Four. Lights.

Made You Look

In an ideal world, we’d all spend the month of January sleeping. Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, the New  Year – they’d all be behind us with their music and parties and food and drink and shopping and ritual and social  visits and we’d collapse into our beds for a month of quiet. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, Earth provides the  cold and ice, pushing us indoors, attempting to make our worlds smaller, simpler, maybe a little less frantic. Our  bodies enter a state of semi-hibernation naturally it seems, so all we need do is turn everything off, and give in to  rest.  

Our culture, though, this civilization we’re so proud of with its booming economy and free market, really  doesn’t care if our bodies need to slow down. There’s money to be made, and we need to get to it.  If we want time to rest, time to get quiet, we’re on our own. The creation of noise is a necessary part of  21st century capitalism. We are all commodities in the Attention Economy. Pulling the shades or shutting down  our phones are not viable options if this fast paced world is going to keep going around. Because today, nothing can happen without attention. It used to be that if you wanted to build something,  you needed infrastructure, labor, capital. Today, you need those things, and you need attention. You need people  to know what you’re doing, to support it, to love it, publicly. Everything is public. Everything is up for discussion.  And without attention, there is no support, there is no capital, nothing is built or designed or created.  It's true large and small scale. We’re trying to build beloved community right here. We have labor,  infrastructure, and capital. But if we can’t get attention, we can’t get people, we can’t build anything. Last week  I was asked by a visitor who loved the service why this place isn’t filled to the rafters. What’s happening here is  so wonderful; why isn’t it standing room only?  

Because in today’s culture, it’s very hard to get people’s attention.  

~Drop Something on the Floor ~ 

You were listening to me. I had what’s called voluntary attention. You were hearing my words. You had – and have again - chosen, at least if you’re in the room, to give me your nearly undivided attention. You might  have also be tweeting or posting or texting, but for much of the 20 minutes I preach on Sundays, I usually have  the attention of the people in the room.  

But then something fell to the ground and that thing got your attention. That’s involuntary attention. You  had chosen to listen to me. You did not choose to listen to the crash. You just did it. It happens with or without a  choice. 

The people in the attention business want your voluntary attention. Politicians want you to notice their  votes and comments and speeches. Newscasters want you to tune in to their channels and hear their messages and  opinions. Writers want you to sit undisturbed to read their words. Clergy want you to be attentive to their sermons.  Musicians and singers want you to lean in and hear their music. Teachers want you to absorb their lectures. We  are all in the attention business and none of us knows exactly how to get you to pick us over the millions of other  choices you have in a given moment. We don’t know how to get your voluntary attention. This is not a nut any of  us have cracked. 

But we have learned how to get your involuntary attention. We do know how to slam a pile of books on  the floor or how to send a tray of champagne glasses crashing to the ground. We know how to get you to turn  without thinking toward a screaming crisis of our own making.  

I mean, every child knows how to do this. You’re standing with some friends in the middle-school hallway  and one friend widens her eyes and says, “Here comes the principal!” and every kid turns their heads. The kid  then laughs and says, “Made you look.”  

We can all make you look. We can make you shift your attention from where it is to something else for a  moment. 

In the absence of knowing how to get anyone to sink into a juicy idea undisturbed, in other words, to offer  their voluntary attention, we’ve crafted a culture that thrives on the incessant slamming of books on the floor.  I’m guessing that in the time I’ve been talking, which is about 6 minutes, all of our phones have tried to  get our attention at least once. If we haven’t turned off notifications, there has likely been a ding with a text, 

possibly from a friend, but maybe from a politician asking for money or a company telling you that scarf you  were looking at three weeks ago is now on sale. I don’t watch television news, but if you do, you know the  newscaster is competing against their own scroll screaming from beneath their faces telling you there’s breaking  news that requires your attention right now. 

In January, we should all go to sleep. The human body, the human mind, needs time to rest. Planet Earth  provides just that. But we don’t allow it to happen.  

We don’t give each other a break. Society doesn’t give us a break. 

And when we get used to an onslaught of crises, it gets even harder to get our attention, requiring louder  and louder crashes, moving us further from the possibility of silence and stillness and healing. The other response to the constant screaming from every direction is that everything starts to feel the same.  The sale at H&M has the same urgency as the state sponsored shooting of an innocent mother in her car which  has the same urgency as the oncoming winter storm which has the same urgency as the death of an actor which  has the same urgency as a famine in the Sudan. Everything feels flat. Everything feels normal. And our response  time to each crash gets briefer and briefer requiring an increased volume and number of crashes.  We even, at this point, choose the crash over other things. The psychology of scrolling is based on this  phenomenon. You have one thing to pay attention to and in the time in takes for your thumb to scroll down, you  have another thing to pay attention to. One vertical video after another giving you hundreds of different crashes  creating, essentially, a white noise of emergencies.  

With an inability to lean in, to focus on one thing, to offer our full attention, our spirits begin to fragment.  We feel the internal frenzy, the disconnection, the many pieces of our minds rattling around, unable to click  together to form one long, deep thought. 

Silence is the tool that brings us back from fragmentation into wholeness. Silence is the healing balm  soothing the broken edges, bandaging the myriad pieces of ourselves and healing us, so we can live in right  relationship with the world around us, so we can live deeply, attentively, as our most authentic selves, the selves  we can’t usually even hear over all the noise. 

Silence is the place clarity is formed. It is where we are most honest, where we can be sure of what’s real.  It is in the silence we can listen to the wind and the trees and the winter birds call and it’s in the silence we can  listen to our deepest selves.  

Silence is also an act of resistance. In an economy that requires our constant willingness to commodify, to  pay attention, we have the freedom to shut it all down. Non-participation is a choice.  And it’s a choice I’m making with some frequency. I’m not making it so much because I want to but  because I need to. Maybe you need to also. 

Maybe you’re feeling the fraying of your mind the way I am. 

Maybe you’re living a shallow life that can’t penetrate the distractions, the noise, the crashing, the real  and virtual sirens screaming for attention as I do. 

Maybe you’re yearning for long thoughts that lead down unpaved roads with unexpected conclusions. Maybe you’re hoping for a life of depth, of meaning, of rich silences from which emerges beauty.  I know I am.  

I’m not on social media for the month of January, which is a semi-annual fasting for me. It means the  outside voices are silent. There are no crashes to force my attention. No one can make me look. That time is spent sitting with people – sometimes with you – over coffee to talk about everything or  nothing. Or it’s spent writing or reading or, cooking or engaging other activities that need both my body and my  mind.  

Because what I want of my one life is to live out of passion, out of profound commitment to Love. I want  to live boldly. I want to live deeply. I want to connect with people and with the creatures of this planet openly and  authentically. And that only happens when I shut out the noise and enter my life silence.  

Rejecting the all the crashing around me, sitting still and breathing, is the beginning of the Life Well Lived.  So I turn my attention, my voluntary attention, inward. I can’t sleep for a month, but I can get very quiet.  I can heal my mind and my spirit with open spaces and slow movements. We all can. As an act of resistance we  can all take naps and attend 5 hour operas and read epic novels that get lost in language and wind their way into  meaning. 

This sermon wasn’t meant to get you going. Wasn’t even designed to inspire you. This is a sermon of  invitation into a bigger, deeper, maybe even a fiercer life that is born of the quiet. It will only be memorable if  you accept the invitation. If not, it’s just more noise, quickly forgotten when something else comes crashing  down… 

We’ll close with this poem by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called Keeping Quiet 

Now we will count to twelve 

and we will all keep still. 

This one time upon the earth, 

let’s not speak any language, 

let’s stop for one second, 

and not move our arms so much. 

It would be a delicious moment, 

without hurry, without locomotives, 

all of us would be together 

in a sudden uneasiness. 

The fishermen in the cold sea 

would do no harm to the whales 

and the peasant gathering salt 

would look at his torn hands. 

Those who prepare green wars, 

wars of gas, wars of fire, 

victories without survivors, 

would put on clean clothing 

and would walk alongside their siblings 

in the shade, without doing a thing. 

What I want shouldn’t be confused 

with final inactivity: 

life alone is what matters, 

I want nothing to do with death. 

If we weren’t unanimous 

about keeping our lives so much in motion, 

if we could do nothing for once, 

perhaps a great silence would 

interrupt this sadness, 

this never understanding ourselves 

and threatening ourselves with death, 

perhaps the earth is teaching us 

when everything seems to be dead 

and then everything is alive. 

Now I will count to twelve 

and you keep quiet and I’ll go.

Time After Time

After the service two weeks ago – the Winter Solstice – a small group of you came to me with a question  or conversation. Not a complaint. I wasn’t being mistaken for customer service. It was an observation  accompanied by a disappointment by at least one person. That conversation became a source of joy for me these  past two weeks. I have realized that I’ve been feeling very hopeful about 2026, largely because of that interaction. 

The gist of the concern was that the service was intended to lean into pagan wisdom and the ancient  solstice stories, but the closing song was decidedly Christian in the theme of Christmas.  One person noted that that this church tends to be a little more Christian in general than other UU churches,  which is true. Historically, this has been a Christian church with more people who identify as Christian even now  than any other specific non-UU tradition. There are also more Jews here than most other UU churches, and more  Muslims. While other UU congregations made sharp turns into atheism in the mid to late 20th century, a turn  which many are now reversing, this church didn’t follow that path quite so far. So, the general observation that  we lean Christian is fair, as is the recognition that closing with a song about Jesus might have been misplaced. I  have taken the note. 

But that wasn’t the whole conversation. Along with the observation, was a discussion about pluralism.  How do we make room for pagans at Christmas? How do we make room for Muslims during Rosh Hashanna?  How do we celebrate a wide variety of religious holidays without appropriating practices that are not our own?  These are living questions of our faith and we aren’t going to solve them in a single conversation, or maybe ever.  But, those congregants stood before me wrestling with these big ideas. 

And that’s where my joy came from. They were with me.  

This might sound small to some of you. It wasn’t. 

In so many communities, especially ones that are religious, especially ones where people have rejected  one historical religious path because of abuses or even just a lack of proof of life, people don’t talk directly to the  minister. Instead, they’re suspicious of her, assuming some unkind things about her intentions, maybe based on  past experience of others with similar authority. Here’s how that would have gone elsewhere. 

The closing song is over and one person turns to another and rolls her eyes. The friend smiles sarcastically  and says, “I know.” They then head to the diner with a group of other congregants where they start their  complaining about me or the music director or the board chair or all of us. There are all kinds of assumptions, and  even the people who don’t agree are joining in. No one is diving into the complex balance of a pluralistic faith  tradition; they are just bitching and accusing. And, next week, they do it again.  

Instead, 2 weeks ago today, we embodied my greatest hope. Someone disagreed or disliked something,  and engaged me and others in a conversation to tease out the issues. Nothing fancy. Just honest, respectful, mature  conversation. No unnecessary drama. Genuine communal behavior, building and embodying the world we dream  about. I am telling the truth when I say that it has since been a source of tremendous joy. 

Some of you might be aware of something I’ve written about and brought to a few workshops. It’s my list  of Shit We Don’t Have Time For. We are, objectively speaking, in a very dangerous moment. Both our nation and  our planet are on the cusp of treacherous transformations and we will need to be focused if we are going to put  up any kind of effective defense. Because the moment is so charged, people are behaving badly, acting out of fear  and anxiety, but we don’t have time for that. Which is why that conversation brought to me 2 weeks ago was such  a relief. We don’t have time for gossip or finger-pointing. But we do have time for working together to find a road  we want to travel as partners. We do have time for co-creating community. We do have time for wondering how  to embody big ideas in very specific situations.  

I’m not one for resolutions, but the new year is a good time to consider who we want to be, and maybe  who we need to be in the upcoming year. 

It’s easy to look at the new year and hope things change. I know I do. I hope Congress finds a spine, I  hope the Supreme Court confirms the boundaries outlined in the Constitution, I hope the military refuses illegal  orders. But those are all things we have no direct control over.  

In this complicated and fragile moment, our job is to put up a fierce resistance, to set up a safety net for  all the people being neglected and forgotten, and to care for our spirits, personally and collectively. Our job, our work, our task, is to use our time well. 

Time is elusive and unpredictable. We plan for lives we never live. We are taken by surprise, sending us  in unexpected directions. We meet people, learn things, are victims of crimes or accidents or illness, inheritors of  fortunes or beneficiaries of social generosities or any one of an infinite number of things happens to alter the  course we thought we were on.  

I asked my 15 year old son what he expected in 2026. He said, and I quote, “I’ll hit a 1080 before spring.”  Baffled, I asked what that meant and the rest of the words sounded like every adult in Peanuts: whom whom  whom whom whom. I did catch that it has something to do with snowboarding. When I clarified that I was  thinking bigger, he told me he expects the country will go to war. This was on Friday and I told him I didn’t think  so. I woke up Saturday morning to see that we’d launched a large scale attack to illegally capture the Venezuelan  president, and that now we’re saying we’re going to “take over the country”. It happens that fast. For his sake, I  hope he’s also right about the 1080. 

But, time itself is neutral. I mean, if Zack is going to land the 1080, which I now know is three full rotations  in midair (god help me), he’s going to need to practice. He has done two with a clean landing, and he has 2 months  to keep working on it. And that’s the point. We keep working on it. 

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out that time isn’t itself going to solve any problems. Injustice  isn’t resolved in time, broken systems aren’t fixed, in fact wounds don’t even heal in time. You have to clean  them, dress them, partner with the process, take action. Dr. King wrote: 

“And somewhere along the way it is necessary to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of  inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing  to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of  social stagnation. And so we must help time, and we must realize that the time is always ripe to do right.” 

“The time is always ripe to do right.” Doing right comes in the form of a thousand tiny choices, but each  one is grounded in the idea that time is not neutral and what we do and how we act, as tiny as we think we are in  this massive structure of planetary existence, matters. There is no formula for “doing the right thing”. Some days  the right thing is to rest. Some days it’s to protest. Some days it’s to take a friend out for coffee to listen. Some  days it’s to let someone take you.  

What isn’t the right thing is waiting for the arc of the universe to bend toward justice if we aren’t going to  help. What isn’t the right thing is waiting for what we hope is an inevitable justice to happen spontaneously or at  least eventually. We don’t have time for passive shoulder-shrugging and empty hope. We, small as we might feel,  are all we have. And we are enough. We have what we need to bend the arc of this complicated universe.  

Because the right thing is sourced by Love, and we have plenty of that. Plenty of compassion, and empathy.  Plenty of interest in the idea of integrity, the concept of affordability, the movement for equity. We are a people  of faith rooted in Love. Love is, to repeat myself, at the Center. If it’s not, time will not, can not save us. But, it  is. We are doing the work to ensure that it is. I can see it, feel it, I know it to be true about every one of us. 

Toward the end of 1939, WH Auden wrote a poem reflecting on his historical moment, one that looked  sadly like our own. The nations were, again, at war, having learned, it seemed, nothing the first time around. Hate  was on the rise. There had been a Nazi rally that same year a few blocks from where we’re standing at Madison  Square Garden. Antisemitism was common and anti-Black racism was entrenched even in places it wasn’t actually  the law. Immigrants were marginalized, women had very few rights, and a small group of people were hoarding  money, protecting themselves at the cost of everyone else.  

On the eve of a new decade, he starts his poem saying: 

I sit in one of the dives 

On Fifty-second Street 

Uncertain and afraid 

As the clever hopes expire 

Of a low dishonest decade:

He goes on, though, and finds himself at exactly the same conclusion I am drawing. There on 52nd street,  on the eve of a new year, a new decade, disappointed in how things were going, he wrote: All I have is a voice 

To undo the folded lie 

The romantic lie in the brain 

Of the sensual man-in-the-street 

And the lie of Authority 

Whose buildings grope the sky; 

There is no such thing as The State 

And no one exists alone; 

Hunger allows no choice 

To the citizen or the police; 

We must love one another or die 

Time is neutral. We make choices over and over again which create our reality, create the next moment,  create the world in which we exist. We decide to bring our thoughts directly to the minister for an honest  conversation, even if that’s not the most enticing or delicious way to address the issue. We commit to the practice,  the risk taking, to reach a goal even if it’s just spinning around 3 times in the air. We aid in the healing, we chose  the empathetic response, we engage honestly and maturity, even when we are afraid or uncomfortable. We bend  the arc toward justice because it’s not going to bend itself. 

Because no one exists alone; hunger allows no choice…We must love one another or die.

Reflection on the Moment

There’s a Chinese story you’re all likely to have heard. There was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away.  His neighbors expressed sympathy, saying how sorry they were for him. He responded with, “We don’t know  what’s good or bad.” The next day the horse came back with 7 more horses and his neighbors said, “What fortune  for you!” and he responded, “We don’t know what’s good or bad.” The next day his son was riding one of the  new horses, fell and broke his leg to which the neighbors – who seem hang around this guy’s house a lot – expressed their sympathy and he again reminded them that we don’t know what’s good or bad. That’s when the  army showed up looking to take young men from their homes to fight in foreign wars, but the son had a broken  leg, so they left him home. Again the farmer reminded the ever-present neighbors that we don’t know what’s good  or bad. 

Every Sunday we gather for an hour to lean into…something. We feed our souls with music and prayer.  We look into each other’s faces, greet each other, shake hands, call each other by name. And we sink into an idea.  The great American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson said the true preacher (who he assumed was male) deals out to  the people his life – life passed through the fire of thought.  

There’s a reason I’m telling you this.  

I had a plan for today, but when the worship team got together on Wednesday, the mood was hot off the  election, and feeling like it’s hard to focus on much else with everything happening in the country. Fair. And, yes,  we can pivot. It’s why we’re here.  

We’re in a moment and what are we doing here if not reflecting on all the implications of NOW. Passing  life through the fire of thought. But unlike a year ago when we gathered in this same place, also in response to a  consequential election, our experience, our attention, might not be as unified today.  

One year ago, we gathered in grief and fury. It was so intense, we reworked the Sunday after to continue  the conversation, because it felt like the nation as we knew it was collapsing. We weren’t wrong. One year later, and the experience is different. There’s a collective sense of relief from the Left that the  system hasn’t been impossibly rigged, that the protests weren’t for nothing, that there’s still a sign of Progressive  life. 

One year later, and we know, all is not lost. 

Hope seems to have found her way back to New York City. 

What we saw, not just here but around the country, was a clear rebuke of the establishment, of corruption  culture, and certainly here in the city, of the power of money. A younger generation was heard. Mamdani also  showed us a new model for campaigns, one defined by vertical video and on the street accessibility.  

And he named for us what we’ve been needing someone to say. Living here is wonderful, but also horrible,  and it’s become so difficult, so expensive, people are moving further and further out, putting us at risk of losing  the texture created by so many different kinds of people who are being pushed out by the unaffordability of it all.  He mirrored for us what we’ve been saying, and he said he was going to take some risks, push some boundaries,  and throw himself into trying to make life here possible. It felt refreshing and affirming and it brought hope to  city life.  

It feels a little to me like the night Obama was elected insofar as it feels like a vote for new, both in what  he says, but also in who he is. Both men of color, both young when elected to their positions, their very being  feels like the gateway to the pluralistic future we can feel right at the tips of our outstretched fingers.  

Which is why I’m also a little trepidatious, a little like the Chinese farmer who gets the celebration, but  also knows that we don’t know what’s good or bad. Obama’s election was, in some real ways, the culmination of  the American progressive agenda going back 150 years. The ceiling was finally cracked. Generations of  Americans fought in almost countless ways in every arena to make that possible, and after shifting and expanding  and challenging and breaking and repairing American society an infinite number of times, we reached the apex  of all that effort. A Black man was moving into the White House. 

Obama did a lot while there. He created a soft landing to the financial crisis, got nearly every country on  board for an ambitious climate agreement, and he delivered on the age-old promise of creating a more accessible  and affordable health insurance system.  

But the racism we thought was ending only got worse. And our economic system continued to support the  movement of money from the poor to the rich. And we continued to occupy land in the Middle East. And our  immigration system was left to crumble, so that when those 8 years were over, we saw a national dramatic-over reaction in the election of Trump. Progressives were given a chance to show them what we’ve got, and in the end,  even we were a little disappointed.  

I’m not looking to try Obama’s case. I’m simply offering a note of caution. We can’t just celebrate a  progressive win and walk away. We don’t know what’s good or bad.  

Today, there’s hope. 

And hope is an action word. 

We don’t just feel hope or have hope. We plan, we organize, we push through, we live out of Hope.  The blue wave is a sign of Life. But there’s a balance in American society, and certainly in this giant,  multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-national, multi-generational, multi-religious city of 8.3 million residents. That  balance has been carefully honed over 400 years, but sometimes we see cracks in the surface. And, this city is just  a city in the state of NY, but it’s also an international city with eyes on us from all over the planet. And some of  those eyes want to see those cracks deepen and broaden.  

Even without the outside pressure, we have to be vigilant. There are accusations of antisemitism for which  there is no evidence or actual cause for worry, but facts don’t always matter. Accusations can be equally or even  more dangerous. The ADL came right out of the gate with fingers pointing and swords ready to fight. While the  rest of us are hopeful and open, they decided they are the neighbors who know what’s bad. 

Nonetheless, there is reason to celebrate. And, there is work to be done. Rebecca Solnit tells us: “Causes  and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of  soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a  movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they  start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same  ideal and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that  they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the  possibility that an open heart and uncertainty are better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it  is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk. 

“I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling  lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should show  you out the door, because it will take everything [we] have to steer the future .... Hope just means another world  might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope [is a call for action...]”  

What we have right now is the joy, and the luxury, and the instruction of hope.  

We don’t know what will happen, but there is suddenly a spaciousness, suddenly room for us to imagine  a way forward. Resistance was not futile. We organized, we protested, we influenced, we took to social media  and to the streets, and we found a way through.  

I don’t want to be a downer. Celebration is appropriate. There are things we value that a million other  people said they value too. 

I also don’t want us to rest on this win, to see a blue wave and decide to take the year off. I suspect the  ride is going to get bumpier.  

American individualism sometimes conspires with messianic culture to set us up to see a person, a leader,  as the End, the Rescuer, the One Who Will Make All Things Right. We don’t have a savior; we have a mayor.  Hopefully a bold, out of the box thinker who will address the fragile economics of city life in new and effective  ways and who can help the party to welcome a broader coalition, a younger generation, and a more genuinely  progressive platform. 

The task before us, our task as a community of faith, is to gather up all that hope and put it to work. To  use it as an ax to break down doors. To let it propel us into unforged land where we dig out a new path. We aren’t  going to rely on any political leader. We will support, we will cheer, and we will stay true to our values.

Because the song that’s fighting to be sung, the new world that’s pushing to be born, is moving through  us. There is no savior, there is not clarity about good or bad, and time doesn’t stand still long enough for those  judgements to matter anyway. We have a little room to breathe, we have more partners in Resistance, but the  beauty of this world needs us to protect it, even, maybe especially now. There is no apex in history; this story  keeps moving, scuttling, dripping, shifting side to side, forward and back around again. Take a breath. Take a  beat. Then pick up your ax; we’ve got doors to break through.

The Thin Space Between Worlds

Donn, as the ancient Celtic stories go, was a military leader, the oldest of seven sons. He lead his brothers and a fleet of 65 ships to Ireland prepared for invasion and occupation, propelled by revenge for their kinsmen who were killed on site. When they landed, they started heading for Tara, but met three queens along the way. One of the queens – also a goddess in Celtic lore – foretold great success for their invasion, which, apparently, annoyed Donn no end. I suppose he didn’t want a woman taking credit for his victory, so he responded something like, “We owe our success not to her, but to our own power.”

Let’s say that the Queen/Goddess was none too happy with that response, and let him know that, thanks to his arrogance, victory was no longer on the table for him. He would not be celebrating a win any time soon. When they arrived in Tara the forces realized they weren’t actually ready to fight and decided to head back out to sea to regroup. Legend has it they went as far as nine waves breadth from Irish shores. I suppose so as not to look ridiculous, they told the people they were giving them time to mount a defense, and that if they could prevent them from landing again, they’d turn tail and return home.

The people, delighted by this turn of events, sought the help of their goddesses, particularly the one who was already done with Donn, and they raised a great storm, demolishing most of the enemy ships. Four of the brothers died and were buried on the ragged islands known as the Skelligs. The others did return to the mainland, but Donn, the leader and instigator of the massive loss, died at sea, never setting foot on Ireland again.

After his death, Donn used his power in the Otherworld to rise to the position of Lord of the Dead. He made his home in a place now called Tech Duinn on one of those islands, completely visible from the Irish coast. On stormy nights, it was believed he rode on a white horse across the sky and the people would say. “Donn is galloping in the clouds tonight.”

The legend grew. Donn’s story mirrored that of Hades, the Greek god of the underworld. The story of this invasion is mythological and is sort of dated about 3000 years ago, and could have, over time, blended with some of the Greek stories. Like Hades ferrying people across the River Styx, Donn ferries people over the sea to the Otherworld.

Unlike Hades, Donn is said to have a home – or several homes – in Ireland. This is because the Celts didn’t separate worlds the way we do today. There was one world, one eternal soul, that lived here and moved on to another existence once life in this world ended. Donn, the god of death, is present, as seen riding across the sky, and has homes where there are doorways into the Otherworld where souls move through or sometimes hover, as do a host of creatures we rarely see like the fairies and the little people who were sometimes around to offer help and blessings, and sometimes to cause mischief or even great pain.

The boundary between these worlds usually holds firm, but there is a time of year when it gets thin and beings move back and forth between them.

Samhain (SOW-in), the Celtic festival celebrated at this time of year, marks the mid-point between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. It is the most important festival in Celtic tradition, and while Westerners like to say it marks the new year, I haven’t found evidence that the Celts actually understood time in quite that way.

Samhain (SOW-in) is the juncture between two halves of the year, marking a suspension of time. It’s in these hours that the veil between worlds thins and the world of the living becomes entangled with the world of the dead, or more accurately, the Otherworld, where we’ll find those who have passed between worlds, and a host of creatures otherwise unseen here.

To mark these critical hours, all the fires of the land were put out, bringing deep darkness. They could only be relit from the Great Flames of a single ritual fire. In reality this relighting from one fire was more symbolic, but the extinguishing of all flames was real, giving people a lived experience of the dark, and the feeling of the power of that dark, ascending. When the fire was lit, there was a public celebration and feast, and it was understood that the spirits of the dead could be welcomed into your homes safely, posing no threat. The spirits of the ancestors were thought to gather around the fire, bringing health and hope to the family who in turn offered them light and warmth.

The spirits of the ancestors were friendly, but not everyone who made their way through the gates was benign, so it was good to head to bed early to stay out of their way. Food was left out to appease them, even those considered friendly, because, frankly, you don’t want to piss off a ghost, even one who theoretically loves you.

As time stands still, as the land goes dark, people went to bed for another reason. Boundaries everywhere became soft. The line between your land and your neighbor’s was a place to encounter the shenanigans of the little people. Ghosts hovered in the doorways. Bridges were sites of dangerous encounters with entities felt but not seen. Burial places were popular hangouts for the spirits of the dead.

During this time of the thin veil when the dead and other creatures slip between worlds, it’s also possible for humans to slide across the line, or to be tricked into entering a space from which it is not easy to return. And if you do return, you’ll find that time moves differently, so three days there becomes 300 years here, and everyone you know is gone. Leaving out treats and going to bed or finding way to hide on this night, is the safest acknowledgment of the time, and a critical part of Samhain.

When Christianity came to Ireland, some of these traditions lived on in one way or another, and when the Irish arrived in the US, they brought the lore and practices to us in the form of Halloween. This coming Friday night, people will dress in costume to hide themselves from roaming ghosts. Standing in border spaces of front doors and porches, strangers will offer treats to ward away the tricks they are otherwise promised. Teenagers will hover outside cemeteries daring each other to enter, telling haunting stories, and everywhere people will light up pumpkins with fire to bring light back, and frighten off wandering spirits looking to make mischief. Three thousand years later, we continue to talk about the doorway between worlds, as many countries and cultures around the globe also note what they experience as a thinning veil. We talk about all of this as fun, as ancient, as legend, as entertainment. But, last year I told a story of my grandmother’s death and more than half of you later relayed similar experiences.

For those who weren’t here, the abbreviated version is that one night, I woke unable to breath. It was terrifying. No air in or out for maybe 45 seconds. I panicked, but then air came back. I learned a few hours later that my grandmother died, apparently at that same moment.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell that story. I thought many of you would dismiss me as being foolish or dramatic or silly. You didn’t. Or, maybe some of you did, but you didn’t tell me that. Instead, what I heard was how often people have had supernatural experiences at the moment of a loved one’s death or have seen, heard, or smelled someone in undeniable ways. You also told me you don’t talk about those things because you have the same fear I did of dismissal.

In the 16th century, human evolution shifted and reason was introduced in a very different way to our toolbox. The superstitions of the Medieval period were melting away and in their place was a new rational framework for how we understand the world. In the 18th century we experience such a universal change in how we understand everything, we call it the Enlightenment and founded a country – this country – on the principles of reason and human rights. Valuing the human experience above religious law, imagining new ways to organize ourselves starting with what we know to be true, this country was formed outside of the religious structure of past societies.

Unitarianism was birthed very specifically in that context, and so mirrored Enlightenment principles that founding father Thomas Jefferson predicted every American would soon be Unitarian. Reason was the precursor to religious belief, and the filter for every theology. The Universalists weren’t quite so strict in their approach to the world, but that Unitarian spirit of rationalism continues to inform much of who we are.

Which is why I didn’t want to tell you that story. It was not rational.

And we don’t live in a world where we see the god of death riding across the sky during a storm or expect leprechauns to create havoc in October. Or, if you do, you probably don’t tell too many people that. We think our way out of acknowledging things that don’t seem reasonable. We might acknowledge mystery of some kind, but it’s more likely to be things we think we will one day understand like if there’s life on other planets. Experiences we define as supernatural are more likely to break into our lives, but less likely to find their way into polite conversation.

I’m not going to change that, certainly for our culture, and likely not for you. What I can do is tell you that for millennia humans have had these experiences, and even in our hyper rational world, we can sometimes hear the voice of someone who is not there or feel the spirit of the ancestors in the ground beneath us when we lay prostrate on the grass. Feeling spooked in a graveyard is common and seeing a ghost is not uncommon.

So, as October 31 approaches, as the veil between worlds becomes thin, we can put on costumes and hand out candy and light up our jack-o-lanterns all in good fun. But, we can also stand still and feel the spirit world pass through us, listen for the voices of those who have gone before, and allow the mystery of this wild and complicated world to inspire and awe us, setting our minds, on these dark and cold nights, ablaze.

Are You There God, It’s Me Peggy

There’s a coming of age book you may know written by Judy Blume called Are You There God, It’s Me,  Margaret. Margaret, a 12 or 13 year old girl talks to god like you might a good friend, always starting with the  title line, “Are you there, God, it’s me Margaret?”  

“Are you there,” I suspect, is the beginning of many prayers. Maybe not spoken, just thought or hoped  for, almost like pre-game prep. People get on their knees, or stand and bow, or light candles, hoping someone is  there, hoping someone can see and hear us in our need. It’s an articulation, with or without words, of our desire  to be taken care of, to be safe, protected, to feel like there is order in the chaos we experience. Are you there? Is  anyone there? Can anyone hear me? Whether the petition is to heal a sick loved one or to find a parking spot,  people often call into the darkness in some fashion hoping someone is listening. 

I was a college chaplain interviewing student ministers to work in our campus department when we asked  a young man who god was to him. He looked a little confused by the question, although why a person looking to  be a student minister at a Catholic college hadn’t anticipated that question is unclear, but the way he expressed  his confusion was in a baffled facial expression and a finger pointed at the sky. I laughed, which might have been  rude, but I was struck by the clarity of his desire for us to explain which he asked without a word spoken. Pointing  up is somehow a universal symbol for god.  

That moment has stuck in my head because god has never seemed to me to be above, although his gesture  was completely legible. You mean…(point up)?  

So many of us begin the spiritual journey thinking god is elsewhere – up, above, transcendent – and think  the spiritual response is to also transcend this world to find him/her/them. So much of worship, of spiritual seeking  or direction focuses on how to go up. Often in history we declare the most extreme examples as the most spiritual.  Those who transcend physicality, who deny the body and Earth, are closer to god. This leads people to give up  sex in some traditions, to deny themselves food, to limit clothing to one uniform or robe, to accept poverty not as  a way to confront the burdens and inequity of capitalism but as a way to separate from materiality to prioritize  the spiritual, having accepted a divide or incompatibility between them. There have always been contemplatives  in every tradition, people who leave their lives and, ostensibly the world, behind to find or to be worthy of god.  The Jain monks who wander the streets naked. The Hindu ascetics who cover their bodies in human ashes. There  were desert fathers in the ancient church who lived their whole lives in trees hoping the sacrifice and self-denial  would get them ever closer to that god above. Beneath these acts, well-motivated as they might be, is a theology  of the spirit that devalues the body, and sees god as elsewhere. 

And while most of us don’t go to those extremes, it’s still not uncommon to pray with our attention above  or away from us. Are you there? If I pray hard, or right, if I call out loudly, will god hear me? I speak my prayer  and I wait. I hope it’s my turn to be heard. I listen for an answer. One doesn’t come, maybe no one is listening.  Some pray with more gusto or maybe some promises in negotiation; some stop altogether, never to return.  

This process has always struck me as the makings of a dysfunctional relationship. Hello? I’m talking!  Why can’t I hear you? Feel you? Why is nothing happening?  

Most often when people come to me to talk about prayer, it’s in response to this experience. God, as they  understand god, is a many-eyed, many-brained, many-armed parental figure who often seems absent, leaving us  to feel abandoned, or possibly alone by virtue of the non-existence of such an entity.  

Are you there? Hello? 

People often pray with eyes directed upwards, and in the process, we miss the god located directly before  us. It’s the genius of the Christian tradition where god’s big leap in Jesus is to come “down here”, to share in the  human experience, to walk with us. God in the Christian story is forever overcoming the gap, making spiritual  growth less about climbing, denying or performing and more about descending, letting go, grounding. The  invitation the Jesus tradition offers is that of shifting the spiritual life toward authentic humanness, wounds and  all.  

The idea of ascending, of leaving behind our humanity, of not embracing our brokenness, but of self denial as spiritual practice is not mirrored in the story of Jesus, a man who was very much of this world, who 

suffered, and loved, and drank wine and shared meals with friends. The rejection of that world in an attempt to  be closer to god, to be more spiritual, more worthy, is misguided or out of sync with the story, and too often  sponsored by ego. It is, many times, a practice seeking perceived perfection, coddled in arrogance, even as  humility is touted by both practitioner and onlooker.  

Earth-centered pagan traditions are brilliant in their rootedness. The Celtic, Wiccan and Druidic gods are  embedded in the trees, the birds, the wolves, and in each other. God isn’t above, but within and around. Praying  up or otherwise trying to transcend is to bypass the spiritual richness of the world we inhabit.  

When we do that, we miss the god located here, in sight, to be touched and heard. GK Chesterton once  wrote: “Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside of. Once we know that the  entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation …of God, this world  becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look…” 

We keep trying to talk to god, sitting quietly, waiting for a reply, not realizing that we didn’t start this  conversation, and our sitting still or getting small, is limiting our ability to participate in it. This whole world is  Revelation, and our prayer is the response. If it is, in fact, a dysfunctional relationship with communication issues,  we’re the perpetrators. We’re the ones keeping silent while the world, while the god or gods of this world, are  begging for our attention in the extravagance of all that surrounds us. 

Richard Rohr once said: “Our small, scarcity-based worldview is the real aberration here, and I believe it  has largely contributed to… the “practical atheism” that is the actual operative religion of most Western countries  today. The God we’ve been presenting people with is just too small and too stingy for a big-hearted person to  trust or to love back.” 

This is the invitation of Universalism. Maybe even more than an invitation – maybe it’s a charge. A  directive. A demand. The demand of Universalism is to know god to be so big, so generous, so wildly inclusive  as to have saved every single one of us. To love us all so well, so excessively, so generously, as to have brought  us at birth to the Center where Love Lives, to have embraced us from our first breath, never once to let us go.  That is the Love that claims us, the Love to which we belong.  

And that is the Love that surrounds us, enchanting the wind blowing past us, the rain soaking us, the leaves  on the trees captivating us with their reds, yellows and oranges.  

Maybe the question isn’t “are you there”, but “are we here”? Are we here, paying attention, leaning into  the beauty we were born into? And that’s not limited to the natural world in it’s first form, but to what Salle  McFague calls Second Nature. Second Nature like stone houses, like wooden pews, like stained glass. The life of  the spirit isn’t limited. It is all embracing. 

And it’s invitational. It’s a provocation, enticing us to notice. Yes, god is here. No, you don’t have to sit  still or look up or deny your body or your reason or your personhood in any way. You have to lean into those  things, accept your humanness, your earthliness, your body as stardust, sacred and holy.  

This living god comes to us in the form of our lives, in the form of all life. We have only to notice, only  to respond to the gift of this life. We can fall to our knees in gratitude, raise our arms in praise, sing the joy of this  Love, pray with our hands preparing food for someone who is truly hungry, march for justice on any city street,  breathe deeply the air that gives us life, and we can call out, knowing we are heard, knowing the conversation  started long before we arrived and will continue through the end of time. Call out like you just arrived home,  swung open the door, can smell dinner all ready for you, in this world that welcomes you home again and again,  and howl in delight: Are you there god, it’s me!

Religion, Politics, and the Seduction of Empire

Jesus was executed as a criminal after a public trial, nailed to a cross on top of a very visible hill. He was convicted of the crime of sedition. He was a traitor to the Empire.

All Jews were in danger of this crime because the Emperor was considered part-god, a god the Jewish people wouldn’t recognize. To deny the divinity of the Emperor was treason. Jesus was a traitor to his king.

For the next three centuries, Christians joined the Jews as suspicious actors. Pagans held the seats of power. Civic activities started with prayers or rituals in honor of the Emperor-God. Jews and Christians refused to participate in those rituals making them ineligible for positions of authority, government jobs, military service, or any political leadership. The State and their system of belief were inseparable, and those with a different belief had no access.

Worse, they were traitors. They were criminals. They were a danger to the people, the king, the empire. And so, in waves through those centuries, they were arrested, charged, and executed. They were brought to the arenas where they were attacked by lions and tigers to the cheers of the crowds. There are reports of children, and pregnant women being mauled with the sounds of applause surrounding them.

In the year 311, there was an internal power struggle, and Constantine needed an army. Most people were pledged to his rivals, so he made a deal. If the Christians would fight on his behalf and if he won, he’d make Rome a Christian empire. They did. He did. And we entered a new age.

Before that, Christianity was practiced in people’s homes, in catacombs beneath the city, in small, private chapels. It was centered on communal love, on the sharing of resources, on community care. It was literally underground, a secret religion, a subversive, counter-cultural movement committed to egalitarian social structures and radical love. And participation was an act of treason punishable by death.

So, hell yes, Mr. Constantine. Legality sounds really good. You want to institutionalize Love, bring it to the mainstream? God is answering our prayers. We’re in.

They won, and the rest is history. Christianity became the way of the empire.

Those relationships merged so profoundly, there was no way at all to tell the difference between church and state. They were one and the same. Belief was dictated by people in power. Emperors, Royals, political leaders decided what the people believed, and they appointed clergy, theologians, ministers, and other practitioners to be the point people on the ground. Disagreeing even in the smallest ways was a crime with varying degrees of punishment from public humiliation to imprisonment to death.

When the Protestant Reformation broke out, 1200 years after Constantine’s victory, the radical changes sweeping Europe weren’t entirely about personal belief but about national power. There were significant theological underpinnings to everything that happened, but the massive cultural transformation was the result of a new national consciousness. Individual leaders were convinced of a new way and shifted their own nations from the Catholicism of their ancestors to a new Christianity made manifest in their own cultural and political contexts.

Church and State were still one and the same thing. Taxes were levied to support churches. Coronations were religious affairs. There was still very little daylight between the two.

As part of the Reformation, there were a few fits and starts around Europe, attempts to disentangle church and state or to widen the lens through which we understood that relationship, but it’s not until the founding of this nation did this concept get enough room to live into its potential.

When the original colonies were founded, each had a sponsor and reason for being, and each established the religion of the land, in relationship to the land owners in Europe. Roman Catholics started in Florida. Anglicans owned Virginia. Congregationalists took Massachusetts. Rhode Island and Connecticut were founded after theological disputes. Aside from New York, every colony had their theology, and their established church. Taxes were collected to serve owners, the crown, and the clergy. Fun fact - one of the most common means of paying clergy was a tax on tobacco. The more you smoke, the richer we are.

The relationship between church and state was controversial in a land that was trying to promote freedom of thought. With so much space, with the Enlightenment taking hold, surely we can disestablish the church, letting each one stand alone without the support of the government.

And, the Puritans thought, the state is messy. The work of the government is fraught and potentially corrupt. It always involves compromise, a stepping back from its values, and often sucks people in with the allure of power, carrying them further and further from the purity of the church. We don’t want their yuk on our yum.

Thus, the clause in the First Amendment to the Constitution, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Establishment in this case doesn’t simply refer to founding a church, but of allowing any church to become Established, to become intertwined in the State, to be the State Church like, for instance, the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church, both implicated in their names. These new United States will be free of any Established Church, at least as far as the federal government goes. It was actually another four decades before individual states disestablished churches with the Congregationalists in Massachusetts being the last to go in 1833.

In 1954, then Senator Lyndon B. Johnson proposed a soon adopted provision in the tax code that prohibits tax-exempt organizations, like churches, from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office. It doesn’t affect speech regarding social issues, voter information campaigns, or public statements about laws either in effect or debated. But, if John Haynes Holmes had endorsed Roosevelt from the pulpit today as he did way back then, we’d be in trouble. Johnson proposed this change because two non-profits in Texas were collecting tax deductible donations from their members and using that money to actively campaign against him.

Churches were not the target of this provision and were rarely mentioned in any enforcement of it. In fact, until the rise of the religious right in the 80s, it was barely noticed. But in the 80s, Evangelical preachers wanted to tell their congregations which candidate did or didn’t live by what they called “biblical values”, and argued that the Johnson Amendment curtailed their freedom of speech. The IRS would, occasionally, issue warnings, leading to the Right claiming government overreach.

By 2008, the Religious Right was so frustrated by the limitation, they declared Pulpit Freedom Sunday during which they endorsed candidates (remember who was on the ballot?), daring the IRS to challenge them. They were ready for a fight.

I’ll tell you, I wasn’t entirely sure they were wrong. Isn’t it fair for a church to want to know who their minister is voting for and why? And, isn’t it fair for someone like me to tell people about racist dog-whistles like “show us your birth certificate” and why I won’t support it and even how it stands in opposition to our core beliefs? I want to name names! And when we have a candidate who is clearly going to round people up because of their browner than tan skin and deport them to torture prisons or into war zones, can’t I tell people not to vote for that? You have free will. You don’t have to – and almost never – do what I tell you to do. I’m not buying a vote, which, it turns out, is suddenly also acceptable.

But here’s where this gets sticky. How closely associated with the state should the church be? Should we partner with a political campaign to get our person in office? Is that different from the Christian bishops in 325 climbing into Constantine’s cushy carriages, heading to a Council to make religious/state policy?

What’s the benefit of the separation?

Empire is seductive. So much power. So much money. I can hear her whisper in my ear, promising me fame and fortune. My values become everyone’s values, enshrined into law, enforced by the state. Delicious.

And so helpful to our nation. We’re in a massive moral crisis and can use some ethical clarity, some clerical voices, to break through and lead us away from the corruption that has penetrated the entire Executive branch, and much of the Judicial and Legislative as well. We need our clergy to tell us how to untangle this deadly knot; we are desperate for authentic leadership.

And the IRS told us it’s fine. This summer, they changed their rules! No more Johnson Amenment. I can endorse a candidate and it won’t put our non-profit status in jeopardy.

So why not?

In 1917, Former President of the United States Howard Taft was serving as President of the American Unitarian Association. My predecessor, Rev. John Haynes Holmes, an avowed pacifist, had been charged with the creation of a statement that was supposed to articulate our denomination’s support of the war we now call World War I which the nation had just entered. Holmes and Taft had clashed over this issue publicly several times, as did Holmes and President Woodrow Wilson. Holmes’s proposal for our national statement included a resolution affirming both “conscientious support and conscientious objection” to the war, establishing the right of Unitarians to either support or refuse. Taft declared Holmes “unpatriotic” and said the proposal was “treasonable”. The conference upheld Taft’s resolution to support the war whole-heartedly. Homes, and later our beloved church, left the Unitarian Association entirely.

Church vs State. Church And State. Church With State.

Are we instruments of State? Partners with State?

Or are we distinct from State?

Taft went on to become the only person in our history to hold the offices of both the Presidency and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Power was his, as was wealth.

Holmes remained Senior Minister of Community Church of New York leaving him with very little money and a voice that has been largely forgotten.

In a contest for the most toys, Taft won.

In a contest of morality, Holmes beat Taft hands down.

Taft was standing in for the State. Holmes for the Church.

Taft was calling the Church to serve the State.

Holmes was calling his colleague and the entire denomination not to serve the state, but to be its conscience.

The proper role of church in relationship to state, is not partner, but prophet.

We don’t endorse candidates not because it’s manipulative or in violation of some tax code. We don’t endorse candidates because we are called to stand apart, to critique, to become outside voices of justice, to entice the state toward morality.

And if ever the outside voices of conscience were needed, it’s now.

Our nation is fractured, vulnerable, weak with anger and suspicion.

And our government has aligned with one brand of Christianity, creating a dragon born of power and performative piety breathing enough fire to set us all ablaze.

So, I stand before you not in support of the current Republican administration or ethos and not in support of Democrats, but in support of our shared faith. A faith that tells me pluralism, equity, and empathy are worthy of my devotion, of my whole-hearted, full-bodied endorsement. A faith that tells me that any policy, any government action that chooses the rich over the poor, the healthy over the sick, the privileged over the marginalized, or that intentionally withholds life-giving support or encourages or even just allows violence in our streets or in our schools, is immoral and in opposition to all I hold true.

We are not instruments of State, but of Love. We are the voices of a Love that will not be enticed into silence; we are the bodies of a Love that will not cease to act even with promises of power. We will not climb into the carriages of Empire, comfortable as they may be. We are prophets of a new world, a world not yet, but one we will never stop calling into existence.

There are no threats, and there are no promises, that will make this church or our beloved faith, a chaplain to Empire.

Passover and the Path to Liberation

The ancient Israelites were enslaved in the land of Egypt. They’d arrived there after being a nomadic people for centuries. They lived in freedom and partnership along the Nile River for a few generations, but then one particular Pharoah, not knowing the history or context of this co-habitation, decided to enslave the people. The line in the Book of Exodus is something like: There arose a king who knew not Joseph. In other words, he didn’t remember the friendship which was the foundation of these new people living on this fertile land. His primary concern was that there were too many of them. The Egyptians were outnumbered. He was afraid they could be overtaken if the Israelites wanted a fight, or became willing to join an invading army. There was no reason to think they would, but it seems to be part of human nature to think in terms of Us and Them, and to exercise power over whomever you see as the outsider. So, thousands of people were enslaved.

Their lives were intentionally made difficult. Pharoah wanted them to have fewer children so their numbers would stay small, but their numbers grew anyway. He wanted to work them so hard they couldn’t possibly rise up against him, but they seemed more determined to resist with each new cruelty. To break their spirit, he ordered the first born son of every family to be killed, which was a horrific and violent response, but the midwives resisted, lying about the births.

There was still a massacre, but some of the children were saved, including Moses, who was sent down the Nile and retrieved by the Pharoah’s own daughter who raised him in wealth as part of the king’s court. It was Moses, after witnessing his family’s cruelty, who took a stand, killed a soldier, and ran into the desert. It was there that he started a new family and then heard the call to free his people.

In this story, there is a good-guy, Moses, backed by G*d, and a bad-guy, Pharoah, whose behavior is sponsored by greed and fear. Moses wants to get the Israelites out of there, to lead them to a place they can live without persecution or oppression. Pharoah wants free labor. He has plans for development and he needs slaves to do it, and he wants a large population to back him in case of invasion. He wants the Israelites to stay, but on his terms. Moses doesn’t see any way forward if his people remain on this land; they need to find somewhere else to settle.

In order to get the people out safely, Moses and G*d team up. Moses tells Pharoah to let the people go, and G*d sends plagues to make Pharoah’s life difficult as long as he keeps these people enslaved. The final plague is the killing of the first born Egyptian sons.

To ensure none of the Jewish children are killed, they are told to put lamb’s blood on their doors so the angel of death will know and pass over them.

This is an important moment. This is the first time the people participate in their own liberation. This is the moment they make the decision to be counted, to join the group, to declare their intentions. This is when they take an action aligning themselves with others, putting their own lives on the line for the good of their people and future generations.

Pharoah relents and lets the people go. Once they flee and are on the way out of town, he changes his mind and sends his soldiers after them. They are unarmed, carrying whatever food, blankets and water they manage, holding their kids’ hands, helping their elders keep up, and an army is fast on their trail aimed at killing enough of them to convince the rest to return to their enslavement. They go as far as they can, but are stopped by a sea. They don’t have boats. It’s much too far to swim. They are caught between death in front of them and death behind them.

Then, as the story tells us, Moses steps into the Red Sea, raises his staff and the sea parts, letting the people go through. When the soldiers arrive, the sea closes up and drowns them.

They were saved.

And the journey begins.

I wonder what this looks like today. We feel the pressure of change, we see a tidal wave of incompetence, of carelessness, even of cruelty, and if it’s coming for any of us, it’s coming for all of us.

There’s a human psychological process that happens in moments of political crisis. First, we don’t believe these things can happen here. Then we think they can happen here, but only to people who deserve it. Then we think it can happen here to people who deserve it and it’s sad because some good people get caught up. Then we see that it can happen to good people, but it won’t happen to us. Then it happens to us.

The it can be a long list of things. Deportation. Unexpected poverty after benefits are cut. Avoidable sickness after medications are no longer accessible. Hunger after food costs skyrocket. Kids who can’t go to schools because funding was cut from necessary programs or schools shut down or universities shrank incoming classes.

And when we see these things coming, one of our instincts is to shift into survival mode. How can I save myself and my family? People begin to hoard, to lie to protect themselves, to stop speaking out, to comply even when they haven’t been told they have to do that.

And in our computer driven world where so much of our lives happen on a screen, isolation is easy. It’s one of the ways we comply in advance. We stay away from each other. We send messages. We watch things from a distance. And the more distant we are, the more detached we are, and the more likely we aren’t going to identify with people who are different. It’s part of survival mode. We pull back from people who are not like us. We are safe because whatever happened to them isn’t going to happen to me – they are different. They are poorer, sicker, browner, gay-er, they are trans, they were born somewhere else, they live in a red state – they are different so I am safe. We create a disembodied artificiality that has isolated us from each other.

So we turn our attention to the wisdom of our ancestors, to the ancient stories that tell us how we have survived in the past and how we will get through whatever we’re facing now. And when we look at the Exodus story, the foundational story for both the Jewish and Christian traditions, we see that we survive when we work together.

G*d didn’t save Moses. Or Moses and his family. Moses was chosen to be a leader of all the people. All the people who declared themselves ready. All the people who wanted freedom over slavery. All the people who were willing to take a huge risk, to place themselves in the group who were going to run, in the group who had no idea what was before them, but were willing to leave everything behind in the hopes that it was better than what was behind them.

They had a choice. You can put the lamb’s blood on your door or not. You can mark yourself, publicly, visibly. Yes, this means the angel of death will pass over you, but will it? What does that mean? Who says? It’s a risk. It’s a declaration. I’m joining my people.

They weren’t even a people yet the way we think of them. We think they were all Jewish, but that comes later. There’s no such thing as Judaism. We might think of them as the 12 Tribes descended from Abraham, but that story was written later. What they all were was enslaved. They were not of the free-class, they were of the slave-class. That’s what they had. Shared desperation. So, they put the blood on their doors, and the next day, after death caused unbearable grief for the Egyptians, they fled. They followed Moses who led them right to the sea and then, miraculously, through it to the other side.

We can get into the science and history of this, but we’re not going to. There were other bodies of water they might have run into, bodies that decrease dramatically and then fill up quickly. It doesn’t matter. The story is that they made a radical, way outside the box, seriously courageous decision to leave, and off they went, into and through a giant, foreboding sea. And their enemies didn’t make it. They were safe.

And they were together.

This isn’t a story of one person’s salvation. It’s the story of an entire people.

And ours isn’t the story of one person’s salvation. It’s the story of our entire people.

I had a conversation a few weeks ago with a member here who is concerned that, in this hyper-individualistic world, if she gets sick and is unable to make decisions for herself, that there isn’t anyone who can do it for her.

I had a conversation a few days ago with a woman who works full time but who is afraid the church she works for can’t give her a raise and she won’t be able to pay her rent. She’s afraid that she will become one of the working homeless.

I had a conversation recently with a man who has been paying into social security for 50 years, but whose check didn’t arrive on the 1st. Without it, he can’t afford to pay any of his bills.

I had a conversation with a mom recently who has stopped feeding her children breakfast to save the money on groceries.

Our artificially divided lives are becoming deadly.

They are also optional.

We are saved, together.

I want to start a Mutual Aid Society. Instead of just preaching every week about how we’re saved together, I want to create the infrastructure in which this can work. We are not saved alone.

Br. Zachary and I will host a series of meetings. The first one will be online, although I’m hoping most of these will happen in person. Tuesday, April 29th at 3pm, we’re going to gather together to talk broadly about mutual aid, but more specifically about the question of health proxies. What happens if you don’t have someone who can represent you in a hospital? Let’s see if we can do this with and for each other. And, let’s think about what other safety nets we need to create together.

If we’re going to figure out how to get across the Red Sea, we’ll need to do it together. The sea will open if we lock ourselves arm in arm, committed to our shared salvation, unconcerned with who has what, who owes what. Then we’ll go, children and elders, musicians, artists, teachers, the poor, the rich, people of all nations and religions and colors, refugees and profits, bound together, each to the other, ensuring no one is left behind.

The land of milk and honey is somewhere before us, currently unseen, but we know it’s there. We know because we are the ones who are going to create it.

I’m closing with an excerpt from Aurora Morales’s poem The Red Sea.

This time we're tied at the ankles.

We cannot cross until we carry each other,

all of us refugees, all of us prophets.

No more taking turns on history's wheel,

trying to collect old debts no-one can pay.

The sea will not open that way.

This time that country

is what we promise each other,

our rage pressed cheek to cheek

until tears flood the space between,

until there are no enemies left,

because this time no one will be left to drown

and all of us must be chosen.

This time it's all of us or none.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (What Women Want Series)

I’m a Gen Xer which means that the song Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, was something of an anthem for my friends and me when we were kids. Sung by Cindi Lauper, the video made for the new MTV network, features a young woman in Brooklyn explaining to her Baby Boom or maybe Silent Generation parents that times have changed. While her father seeks chastity and her mother is sewing and baking in the kitchen, Cindi is frolicking in the streets, talking on the phone, and packing her bedroom with so many people dancing, they come spilling out. It’s joyful and long after the song was released, girls and young women repeated that line over and over to each other. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.

A few years ago, in honor of International Women’s Day, I started this annual series, What Women Want. Fun may not be the only thing we want, but it’s definitely part of it. But, if we’re going to have fun, we’re going to need some changes in our cultural, political and economic systems.

Young women are both discounted and dismissed, maybe seen as frivolous rather than ferocious. Frankly, old women suffer a similar fate, being not only discounted and dismissed but also made entire invisible.

Have you seen the new Matlock? Kathy Bates, 76 years old, plays a ruthless lawyer hiding in plain sight, someone no one sees coming because of her gray hair. The assumptions made about middle aged women allow her to fade into the walls, to be consistently under-estimated, even by her closest colleagues.

I know I’m talking about young women today, but I have to tell you this story. The UUA Moderator, meaning, the person leading the UUA board and running our business meetings at General Assembly – a power position without question – was doing a little internal growth work. She wanted to set herself up to be rejected, to become practiced in the art of being turned away. She was preparing, actually, for some major fundraising work. So she started knocking on people’s doors, and without explanation, asked them if she could come in, walk through their houses and see their backyards. Obviously, no one would let a stranger do that, so she was sure to get plenty of experience in rejection and would push through and knock on another door. But, that’s not what happened. Also a gray haired woman in her 70s, Rev. Meg was invited in over and over again. Making an unreasonable request to strangers in their homes, she found that at her age, she was deemed irrelevant. Society didn’t see her as a threat. She concluded that they didn’t see her at all, and she could easily walk right into their homes and to their backyards often unaccompanied.

Here's something most women can attest to. The age of invisibility comes almost immediately after the age of immaturity. Society deems women too young to be competent to be taken seriously, too young to be successful, too young to be professional until we’re about 40 years old. At that point we’re seen and heard, but that has a shelf life of about 5 years, because by 45, we have become too old. While men are in their prime in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and often even 60s, women can’t get hired, can’t get published, can’t be heard in the public square, because we’re no longer relevant after peak child-bearing years.

And since we’re dismissed as silly little girls during peak child-bearing years, those of us who identify as female are culturally marginalized most of our lives by all genders. And yet, women, and girls, are ferocious. Dismiss us as your peril.

At the age of 16, Greta Thunberg had already launched a global climate movement powered by teenagers. Furious that the adults were distracted by profit and convenience, or paralyzed by political expediency and dreams of personal wealth, Greta harnessed the anger of young people who took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands in multiple nations repeatedly. Impossible to ignore, she was invited to address the United Nations. Her speech, written and delivered entirely by her, standing not quite 5 feet in the halls of power, Greta admonished the leaders of the international order saying:

“I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act like your house is on fire because it is.”

Time Magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year, winner of the prestigious Right Livelihood Award, and named Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience, at 16 Greta was also listed by Forbes Magazine as one of the most powerful women in the world.

Girls just wanna have fun.

That part is true. We want to relax on the beach or go on a hike or read a good book by a fire and maybe talk with our girlfriends about it over dinner. We don’t want to learn that we’re too young or too old or that what we want or need is dismissed because of our gender.

We can imagine a new world, a better world, an equitable world, and given the right set of circumstances, regardless of how seriously modern society takes us, we are going to do our best to realize our vision, a place where girls and women have what they need, and have time for fun to boot.

We can all imagine a better world, visions that propel us forward, but there’s also a drawback to indulging those daydreams. When humans imagine something better, we can become discontented with what we actually have. It’s the risk of a sermon like this one. If I want you all to feel great, I shouldn’t really talk about what’s not right, because you might start feeling unsatisfied, uncomfortable, or unhappy with the current situation. If I want you to be delighted this afternoon, it’s safer for me to not even talk about the dream of what’s possible. But, we’ll never get to where we want to go if we don’t name the things that aren’t working.

Nietzsche tells us that the primary way humans manage our discontent is to feel guilty about wanting things to be better. We judge ourselves and each other for not loving our current situations or for wanting more. It’s one of the reasons we dismiss young women as being frivolous. We are judging them both for enjoying their lives and for expecting the world to help them create something better.

Possibly as a result of our response to discontent, we judge and attempt control over key parts of the human experience, villainizing sex, our will for power, and our capacity for joy, allowing only a limited number of socially acceptable ways for us to indulge these human experiences. From that judgmental stance, we have created a culture of hall monitors, people watching and determining whether or not we’re playing within bounds. There is a push for conformity in every human culture and how we play, how we enjoy ourselves, how we find fun, is often at the center what we want to control.

Throughout history we see people pushing the boundaries – whatever they are. Speakeasys were very popular when drinking was illegal. Teenagers have been sneaking cigarettes since an age limit was put on them. Every generation finds a way to dance closer to each other than our parents did while sex clubs and prostitution have been with us from the beginning of civilization. We want fun, we want more, we push to see what we can get away with, and we judge and patrol each other in every country in every generation.

Historically, girls have been the most policed. We keep our girls in very small boxes, doing our best to control them, to keep them in line. The consequences of this can be dire, but I actually think this sexist system, reaching across cultures and through time, originated with the consent of women. We understood our power and agreed to what would have started as legitimate protection. This social construct has reached its limits, but some feminist philosophers and sociologists have suggested that women were full partners in the creation of our patriarchal systems, limiting options for girls to ensure the perpetuation of the race. We have always understood the value of the uterus for human survival. Dr. Michael Karson wrote in Psychology Today (December 22, 2022) that “the sensible evolutionary basis for this focus on girls is that sperm is cheap, and uterus access is scarce, so much of what passes for politics involves an argument about who controls the uterus.” The ability to propagate the species is powerful, and politics is often about gaining, managing or limiting power.

I want to say this clearly: While many of us suffer from social limitations, we are also the ones creating them. We are both the prisoners and the guards.

So girls might want to have fun, but society has other priorities. Even over time as population has exploded, we’ve kept girls in small boxes, and now, as population declines, we are again raising alarms about girls and the freedoms they seem to be demanding because if girls are free, we lose control.

When Malala was a child in the mountains of Pakistan, she wanted to dream her future the way her brothers could. Boys could become what they wanted, but girls had far fewer opportunities, and those opportunities all came at the end of a solid education, so she committed herself to going to school. When the Taliban moved into Pakistan and tried to close the schools for girls, locals defiantly kept them open. At 15, Malala was interviewed as a local girl who was still going to school, now 4 years after the ban on education for girls. In this seemingly irrelevant blog, she talked about her hopes for herself as a result of her schooling.

The Taliban, not able to kill this dream of an education and not populous enough to close every school, they decided to make an example of a few girls, creating terror for all the families in the region. Malala was targeted as an activist because of that blog, and was shot in the head while riding home on a school bus.

She survived after massive interventions and has become the voice for girls’ education the world over. Instead of silencing her, they gave her an amplifier and a global stage on which she earned a Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 17.

Police our bodies, judge our behavior, gun us down if you can’t control us. In this country, reproductive rights are under attack, a nearly national attempt at removing the right to self-determination from women and girls. And with that outsized value placed on people of child-bearing age, the Vice President of the United States declared post-menopausal women entirely unnecessary as a group, with one saving grace- they can help care for grandchildren.

It's no wonder Cindi Lauper is skipping in the streets, staying out ‘til dawn, assuring her father she loves him, but she and all her friends really just need to have some fun.

We all do. Because we are the victims and the perpetrators. We have built this system and we are the ones who can break it down – starting by having some fun, and letting others have their fun. We can do it by seeing each other, by respecting people regardless of gender or age. People are snippy right now. I’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. Short tempered, demanding, unreasonable, self-righteous. Maybe for Lent, we let it go. We stop monitoring other people, stop requiring others to serve us, stop speaking when we should be listening. For Lent this year, maybe we bring kindness and a generosity of spirit to our encounters as part of our spiritual practice.

And when we see girls dancing in the streets or skipping through the neighborhood, we can just let them, and ourselves, have a little fun.

Au Chocolate A Celebration of the Delicious

When I was a kid, there was an ad on TV with a woman facing all kinds of life stresses and it ended with her in a bathtub filled with bubbles, her head back, eyes closed, looking blissful, while the narrator said, “Calgon, take me away!” I didn’t know then – nor am I entirely sure now – what Calgon was, and the idea of a bath being something indulgent made no sense to me at all, but the line has been embedded in my head my entire life.

I’d like to think of this service as our Calgon moment. Inside a life of profound stress, maybe even grief, this is our hour of bliss, our moment for indulgence, or at least of rest.

Things are looking bleak. Our city mayor manipulated his way out of accountability by agreeing to support politicized cruelty. The executive branch of the government is dismantling the structure of the nation as laid out in the constitution. The Department of Education is being slashed within an inch of its life endangering millions of children as well as our collective future. Food and medicine created to serve the poorest of the poor has been diverted and left to rot by the richest man in the world while millions of our fellow Americans cheer. Every regulatory agency has been hollowed out to ensure the end of oversight or consequence for the billionaire class. Our phones beep and howl constantly bringing us the latest in bad news, the next step in the dismantling of our democracy, the new face of incompetence being put in charge of some massive agency that does critical work this person knows nothing about. And the mid-February cold doesn’t help. Those with kids at home are also stuck without school this week adding to the stress. People are getting viruses, major and minor, all over the place, coughing and sneezing and adding to the “under the weather” “not up to the task” “I can’t do any more than sit on my couch” feeling that seems to have taken hold.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not willing to just put my head down and hope my loved ones and I survive, watching rom-coms and reading mystery novels. But, with that said, I’m also not willing to devote my life to doing nothing but fight, to resist, to live like a punching bag getting slammed from every angle over and over until I’m bruised and broken.

If these are our only two options, the future we’re building will either be defined by profound disengagement or broken bodies and spirits. But, the future we want to build is bigger than that, more dynamic, more beautiful, more fulfilling. And that future is built on joy.

The method is the message. How we respond to the current crisis will frame how we design the world we’re fighting for. So, we need to bring everything we have – our bravery, our restfulness, our playfulness, our balance and ability to engage all of it. We can’t allow our ongoing state of shock to ossify, turning us into screaming banshees permanently fixed in a state of alarm.

The new world requires moments of soft, of pleasure, of entertaining, of delicious. It requires us to live lives filled with joy, not only because that’s how we recharge, but also because we are dreaming a world that is magnificent and that world is filled with wonderful.

We pray. We dance. We mourn. We protest. We eat chocolate. It is a full life. Complete. Balanced.

I’ve told you the story of Emma Goldman before; she’s been a guide for me for many years, so here it is again, this time with a caveat and a warning.

Emma Goldman was an anarchist, which for her and the left-wing activists of the early part of the 20th century, was about liberation. There were rules, especially for women, that bound them into very small lives. They were fighting for the vote, but also for an end to the conventions that dictated who they were allowed to be. One day, Emma received a letter from a man after her attendance at a party had been noted by some others in the women’s rights movement. The letter told her that in a time of such distress, it was unseemly for her to be seen dancing. He went on to note that her frivolity would hurt the cause and that her behavior was undignified. There were, after all, very serious matters at stake, and if they were going to be successful, they needed to reflect the urgency, especially in public. In her response she said, (I’m quoting from her memoir) “I did not believe that a cause which stood for such a beautiful ideal…for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy.” She then went on with a version of the now famous line, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

The revolution isn’t separate from the joy. The revolution – the dramatic upheaval of the conventions that have brought us to the brink of destruction – the revolution has to include dancing.

But, I have an addendum which has become critical in my understanding of the work of the activist.

Rev. John Haynes Holmes wrote about Emma Goldman in his autobiography. He admired her work and was very excited to meet this larger than life character. She was known to be a bold and charismatic speaker, so he invited her to Community Church. The morning before she was to speak, Rev. Holmes and a friend of his went to Grand Central Station to meet her train. Expecting to be captivated, he described her like this: “Such storms had swept over that face, so weather-beaten was it in every line and feature, so unutterably sad and stern, so weary and forlorn, that one wondered if this countenance had ever been softened by a smile or graced by love... Emma had fought in so many battles, faced such dangers and endured such ills, been so unfairly and cruelly treated…known such suffering in body and mind, that she had no time to give to those gentler and serener aspects of the soul.”

He goes on to say she was exceedingly nervous, timid, and suspicious. She apparently blew the roof off the place anyway, but he was taken aback by her disposition, one that had been permanently altered by the abuse she had taken in the fight she so willingly entered.

I want to go back to the other Emma Goldman! The one who didn’t want to be part of a revolution that didn’t include dancing. And, I think we can. I think the older woman is telling us the same story. If we forget to dance, if we forget indulgence and sparkle, we become nothing more than exhausted soldiers at the end of a battle whose lives are limited to the fight, never again to live with unfettered joy, regardless of whether we win or lose.

That’s not for us. We are going to dance. And sing. And sleep. And eat. Because, without the joy, what’s the point? What are we trying to save if all we have is empty, desolate, gloomy shells of a life? We need delight.

Our lives are full. We pray. We cry. We protest. We organize. And we indulge ourselves in the things our bodies and our minds love.

I want to make sure I’m being clear. This isn’t about doing one thing so we have energy for the other. Our activism and our restfulness, our fight for justice and our drinking hot chocolate, our chanting in the streets and our singing in the shower, are connected. It’s not about needing one to continue the other. What I’m saying is that these things are the same. We are building a new world while engaging all of it. Eating chocolate, taking baths, calling senators, it’s all part of one full life, one engaged and awake life, one balanced, beautiful life. We aren’t betraying one with the other. It’s interconnected, interwoven, one whole cloth that is us in our fullness.

There is no “here” and “there” or “this” and “that”. It’s all one thing, one place, one life - Ours -and we’re living it as whole beings. The method is the message. So, if we want to build a world of radical inclusion, we have to live into that vision now. If we want systems of accountability, and communities that prioritize care for the whole, if we want everyone to be included, and justice to be the law of the land, we have to normalize that with our words and actions. If we want love at the center of everything, we have to put it there now.

Joy is the point. It’s not a by-product. It’s not an aside, a way to rest to go back to fight. The pleasure, the fun, the love that makes our days possible – that’s the point. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re creating a world of THAT. A place everyone has that. A place everyone can safely play and dance and read romance novels.

And that’s why I brought chocolate. And strawberries. Things of indulgence. Life is sweet. It’s smooth and soft and yummy. And, it’s shared.

Chocolate communion may not be considered a holy act in some religious traditions, but it is here. Communion literally means “with together”. Our shared faith is grounded in the idea of community, of god being known within and between us. The sharing of food, of flowers, of water, is how we express in concrete terms the sacred nature of our relationships. We don’t have to know each other to share the objects of joy.

Unlike cornbread communion, you don’t have to wait. Come up. Take chocolate or strawberries or chocolate covered strawberries. There are also dates and the scattered hearts are nut free, the X ones are vegan, as is the chocolate on the strawberries. Come, take. Eat. Indulge. Enjoy. Life is sweet and yummy and altogether delightful. Dig in.

We Can Still Dream

It might seem like a cruel irony that a racist, fascist administration be instituted on the same day we celebrate the life and work of one of our nation’s greatest redeemers, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It might feel like, out of respect for this proud history of liberation that the inauguration should be moved to another day. But, I think it’s exactly as it should be. We are today confronted with the depth and breadth of who we were, who we are, and have before us two distinct visions for who we could be.

When Hitler’s administration set out to design laws excluding Jews from German society, out-casting them, stripping them of the rights of citizens, and later laying out the justification for mass deportation and ultimately genocide, they used the American Jim Crow laws as their blueprint. In fact, there were ways the American laws were even harsher than those of the Third Reich. Here’s an example- Until 1967, white and Black people in the US weren’t allowed to marry. To determine race, we adopted the “Not One Drop” rule, stating that if you had any Black ancestry at all, you were legally Black and could not marry a white person. Germany, on the other hand, had a “3 of 4 grandparent” rule, allowing someone to avoid being classified as Jewish if two of their grandparents were not. The Nazi Party was, it turns out, more inclusive in some ways than the American South.

When Rev. King started his public fight for American liberation, he was facing a profoundly entrenched country of racial politics and violence that started the moment Europeans landed on this continent and persisted over centuries, even in the face of other sweeping and radical social, political and economic changes. His primary constituency was poor, Black, and often uneducated. Segregation ensured they had little access to university, to well-paying jobs, or to people with influence in the nation’s political or social systems. He was trying to organize people who were tired, who had little disposable income, even less time, and were often devoid of hope.

It is to those people who fought and won, those who followed a leader whose love for this nation, his people, and his opponents was unwavering, that we look for our inspiration at the precise moment we truly need it. As this reactionary political party takes their seat on the American throne, filling American halls of power with lawlessness, racism, sexism, and arrogance, we can cower and hide, or we can do as those before us have done and fight with all the love in our hearts.

The MAGA movement betrays it’s own racist fantasies when it claims the slogan Make America Great Again, clearly waxing nostalgic for those days when white power was dominant and ensconced in a calcified patriarchy. Longing for our Leave It To Beaver past when everyone knew their place and a quiet Christian conservatism was a mist that rested over all the land, the people moving into the circles of American social and political power this weekend are hoping to unravel so much of our progress. Rather than buying into the liberal vision of equality and a move toward social and economic equity, they are solidifying an underclass designed to support and serve the wealthy or disappear entirely.

I don’t know about you, but it can make me feel sick. Completely ill, like if I pay too much attention to what’s happening to our beloved nation, I might vomit. One response is to hide. Listen to James Patterson audiobooks. Read Vogue. Eat chocolate. Climb into bed and wait for it to end.

Another response is to be furious. Justifiably angry. To rage at the machine. To take to social media and rant for anyone who’ll listen. To hate that face, that voice, to hate everyone who loves what’s happening, who’s supporting it, who voted for it, or even to hate anyone who didn’t vote against it. We can spew our self-righteous rage for the next 4 years, at the end of which we’ll be right, but alone, and no better for any of it.

We can also play mediator. Consider all sides. Find the middle ground. Learn to make room. Be moderate, temperate, even-handed. Adult? Except that serves to normalize things to which we should not become adjusted, things we should find abhorrent. And letting go of our moral center for the sake of peace doesn’t preserve either our nation or our souls.

In 1966, Rev. King was the Ware Lecturer at our own General Assembly where he told us:

…There are some things in our nation and in our world to which I'm proud to be maladjusted. And I call upon you to be maladjusted and all people of good will to be maladjusted to these things until the good society is realized. I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few, and leave millions of people perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of prosperity.”

Hide, rage, adjust.

Or, we can choose the path of Love.

Love is our Fourth Way. Love is the call of the ancestors, the call from the generations who started this fight, who sustained this fight, who are charging us to continue this fight, firmly on their shoulders, standing steady on the Path of Love.

Having fallen deeply in love and having stayed in love for more than 30 years, I can tell you without doubt that real love isn’t blind. Love sees everything. It sees the quirks and imperfections. It’s not that lovers can’t see, but that they see beauty in it all, they see the flaws and love them. They see the weak spots and love them into strength.

The lesson from the past that we can learn if we are willing, is the lesson of radical, powerful, profoundly awake, and fiercely committed Love. The Love required, the Love that breaks down concrete walls to let justice flow like a river, is not soft or gentle or yielding or in any way in denial about what’s real.

Rev. King told us over and over again that Love is the only path to authentic, societal transformation. He said:

“Now, I’m not talking about a sentimental, shallow kind of love. (Go ahead) I’m not talking about eros, which is a sort of aesthetic, romantic love. I’m not even talking about philia, which is a sort of intimate affection between personal friends. But I'm talking about agape. (Yes sir) I'm talking about the love of God in the hearts of men. (Yes) I’m talking about a type of love which will cause you to love the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does. (Go ahead) We've got to love. (Oh yes)”

We’ve got to Love.

And I can’t think of a more difficult charge. I can’t imagine, in the face of the hate, in the face of the ignorance, in the face of the intentional dismantling of the domestic and international liberal order we’ve fought and died for, that I can enter this next stage with Love in my heart.

But Love is the only legitimate path. Love is the only path of our faith. Love is the only path of our history. Love is the only path that leads to a joyful future.

And if I think this is hard, I need to get my history straight because Americans have been fighting for this vision that all people are created equal, and should have equal access to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, since our inception. Slavery. Christian Nationalism. Irish Need Not Apply. Red Lining. Anti-Semitism. No Right to Vote. No Voice in Court. Rape. Imprisonment. Homelessness. Child Labor. Police Violence. It’s been centuries of oppression and centuries of Love Fighting Back.

And now it’s our turn.

Yes, we can hide. We can rage. We can adjust.

But not if we want to win. Not if we are committed to inclusion. To equity. To justice.

We can get by. We can be self-righteous. We can be gentle and yielding.

Or we can play our part. Resisting. Speaking Truth. Loving in spite of them and in spite of ourselves.

The Path of Love is calling us to speak Truth. To call out bigotry. To call out racism. To defend ourselves and our nation against the autocracy this new administration is trying to install. To protect the marginalized. To take seriously the power of our pocketbooks in claiming our dissatisfaction. To avoid throwing up our hands at the enormity of it all and instead to be careful, intentional, mindful of all the places we have power.

To join and reengage communities of good will, without purity tests, but in the spirit of communion, of shared resistance, of joyful friendship and companionship on what would otherwise be a lonely road. To befriend people and institutions that are also centered in Love, also willing to defend all we can be, in partnership. This is the path of Love that leads us to our Becoming.

Let’s give the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King the last word as our wise guide on this journey:

“Go out with that faith today-that the universe is on our side in the struggle. (Sure is, Yes) Stand up for justice. (Yes) Sometimes it gets hard, but it is always difficult to get out of Egypt, for the Red Sea always stands before you with discouraging dimensions. (Yes) And even after you've crossed the Red Sea, you have to move through a wilderness with prodigious hilltops of evil (Yes) and gigantic mountains of opposition. (Yes) But I say to you this afternoon: Keep moving. (Go on ahead) Let nothing slow you up. (Go on ahead) Move on with dignity and honor and respectability. (Yes) I realize that it will cause restless nights sometimes. It might cause losing a job; it will cause suffering and sacrifice. (That's right) It might even cause physical death for some. But if physical death is the price that some must pay (Yes sir) to free their children from a permanent life of psychological death (Yes, sir), then nothing can be more Christian. (Yes sir) Keep going today. (Yes sir) Keep moving amid every obstacle. (Yes sir) Keep moving amid every mountain of opposition. (Yes, sir, Yeah) If you will do that with dignity (Say it), when the history books are written in the future, the historians will have to look back and say, "There lived a great people. (Yes sir, Yes) … a people which stood up with dignity and honor and saved Western civilization in her darkest hour (Yes); a people that gave new integrity and a new dimension of love to our civilization." (Yeah, Look out) When that happens, "the morning stars will sing together, (Yes, sir) and the [people] will shout for joy."

Hush: A Study of Silence

Today is my first day back from a short vacation. I took this last week off to give myself a break after the holiday. I love the Christmas season from Thanksgiving through New Year’s. The lights, the music, the parties. There’s A Lot, and I’m partial to all of it. Afterwards, my introvert self needs a little time to hibernate.

In the world of spirituality studies, there are two distinct practices that always come to mind when we make this transition from December to January. The Katophatic path, also called the Via Positiva and the Apophatic path, also called the Via Negativa.

The Katophatic path, the path of the Positive, is the one that has much. It begins with descriptions of God, defining and explaining the Divine, talking about all the ways God is good and powerful and present. The Katophatic path might have music and elaborate ritual, incense and readings. There are always a lot of words both sung and spoken often with explanations and exposition and symbols and metaphors packed into sermons that say interesting things, offering insight and ideas and food for brains to chew on. The Via Positiva. It’s what I call the spiritual path of The Stuff.

Apophatic spirituality or the Via Negativa, is the opposite. It’s the spiritual path of emptiness. Nothing. Silence. God is in the void. Indescribable. A whisper. The Quakers share an apophatic spiritual practice when they join together in silence on Sundays. Those who Sit as a Zen practice are also on an apophatic path. Sitting. Being. Listening. It’s a spirituality of desolation, calling us into the barren wilderness where we can rest un-assaulted.

Christmas feels like the ultimate time for kataphatic spirituality. There is So. Much. I don’t even mean Christmas as a day, but as a season, within which we also celebrate Hannukah, Kwanza, Winter Solstice, and which gets kicked off by Thanksgiving. Our shared national story and spiritual culture includes the constant playing of music, gathering of people, the added decorating found in every public and most private spaces. There are concerts and weekend trips and family. It’s a time to see people we haven’t seen, send and receive cards and year-end letters, to bake and visit neighbors. There are often special clothes to wear, traditions to abide, and gifts to dream and purchase and give. It’s a lot of stuff.

Then comes January, the time we shift into an apophatic pattern of quiet. Ice and cold conspire to keep us still, to move us indoors. The world gets smaller as outside space is less welcoming. Our loftiest goals are met with heavy sweaters, hot tea, and a good book.

The apophatic path feels natural in winter. It’s a gift of Earth. It’s the breath we take between the frolic of the holiday season and the new growth of the springtime. It’s an opportunity to renew our spirits through an emptying. The trees lose their leaves, the animals burrow in and go to sleep, and we, too, set ourselves for a time of semi-hibernation.

The silence feels right. It feels like the appropriate response to the world, the natural consequence of the holiday season.

Silence isn’t an absence. It’s not just that there are fewer words. Silence is healing, curative, restorative. It’s the starting point for us to recover our power.

Silence is the tool that brings us back from fragmentation into wholeness. So many of us live lives of division, running from one thing to the next, waiting for moments just to sit down and when we do, it’s often in front of a screen or while waiting for whatever’s next, possibly someone who’s late who’s also living a life of fragmentation. There’s an accepted state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, the generalized noise of what goes on all the time around us or the tidal wave of words that crash on our computer screens with their attachments and links to more words and posts and updates. This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half-diluted: we are not quite “thinking,” not entirely responding. We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn yet not completely available, leading us all into a state of semi-consciousness as we make our way through busy days. Silence is the healing balm that brings us back to ourselves and into right relationship with the world around us.

Silence is the beginning of a conversation, the place from which truth can be formed. Silence is not an absence, not a hole to be filled; it is the necessary medium for clarity. And the truth silence brings is not intellectual; it’s a truth we know in our bodies, one that rests away from our brains wordlessly and ethereally. It’s a truth that comes from a deep place, one that can only be accessed after sinking into the quiet where the boundaries of self soften.

One of the places there are too many words is social media, a venue driven almost entirely by language. Because the national conversation is happening on Facebook, Bluesky, Instagram, and Threads, they can be agenda of social change, terrifically effective places for community organizing and shifting moral norms, so, I try to be an active and visible presence. Most of the year, I engage a potential audience of more than two thousand people who follow me in a variety of conversations and strategies to shape the world in our vision of love. And, every January and July, I sign off. For two months each year, I silence the voices. I shut out those thousands of people to give silence more space in my life. I disconnect, disengage, disentangle myself for a little while from the world so that I can reconnect less with the masses and more with myself.

For those of you very connected on social media, I recommend this pattern. It is restorative. A full month living my life focused only on what’s in front of me and not on an imaginary Greek Chorus who might or might not like the pictures I post or my random thoughts for the day. Quieting the many voices around me gives room to the few voices. My voice. The voice of the trees. The divine voice. The voice of the wind. I need the quiet so I can hear.

My first real step into pastoral ministry happened when I knew, and accepted without judgement, that I had nothing to say. My training took place largely with runaway or what we called throwaway teens here in the city. That training was a lot about what to say, how to help move someone from crisis to a place where they can think clearly. How to help them process trauma enough to make a good next step. My real training happened, though, when I was first confronted by a woman howling in her pain, in her grief, a woman so overcome with loss that all she could do was kneel and beg god to make this nightmare go away. I knew then that words were meaningless. There is nothing to say. Real pastoral care begins with knowing there are no words.

Yet, it’s the reason so many people don’t show up when someone else is in pain. I hear it all the time. Someone didn’t call, didn’t visit, didn’t attend a funeral because they didn’t know what to say.

Speaking isn’t always the way we heal. Words are limiting and can trivialize those experiences that are too deep for language. Being present to someone else’s suffering without having to speak is true companionship. Tolerating the not curing, not knowing, not healing requires some humility, an acceptance that we are small in the face of anguish. But the failure of language is not all we have to offer.

Jewish scripture tells us the story of Job, a man who lost everything, whose grief was unbearable. Chapter 2, verses 11-13 read: When Job’s three friends heard about all the troubles that had come upon him, they set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him; they began to weep aloud and they tore their robes and sprinkled their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for 7 days and 7 nights. No one said a word to him because they saw how great his suffering was.

They sat on the ground for 7 days and no one spoke a word.

Silence itself is the healing balm.

I’m talking about silence as a powerful spiritual tool. I’m also aware that silence can be a powerful tool of oppression. Silencing is not a gift nor is it healing. When you are silenced by political or social moors, when your voice can’t be heard, when your experience isn’t recognized, when you’ve been erased by dominant culture, you’ve been silenced. When our government removes mention of LGBTQ protections from anti-discrimination guidelines, millions of people are silenced. When the talking heads on TV giving their opinions about the day’s events are all white, millions of people are erased. When subways are designed so only people with working legs can use them, millions of people are disappeared. When previously incarcerated people aren’t given a vote, millions of people are muted. When bathrooms are labeled for men or women, millions of people are forgotten. When I list ways people are marginalized in my sermons, but I forget the way you live differently in the world, you are also silenced.

Silence can be a wrench closing the opening where the steam can get out, used by people in power to keep the hissing noise down. It can become a weapon of dominance, wielded to ensure submission and irrelevance. Language is used in courtrooms and welfare offices and at child protection hearings to ensure the silence and continued existence of an underclass.

And silence can become the resistance, a non-participation in the language of oppression. A response to subjugation. A liberation rather than an accommodation. Sometimes we use silence because it’s the only response to a world of too many words, of violent words, of threatening and destructive words. Silence can be self-determination. When systems use language to oppress, our non-participation can utilize silence as an expression of sovereignty.

But, mostly, I’m talking about silence as a spiritual tool, the silence that brings us back to ourselves, back to the Source of our being, the single place where we are most authentically who we are. There’s a voice that has to be heard without language. It’s the healing silence we experience when we first walk in our doors after a busy day, when we take that first deep breath; or that magical silence after a hymn of shared faith is over, when the last word was sung, the final note played; or the meditative silence of standing in a field while it snows.

Wisdom is born in silence, in our ability to be present without ego-consciousness.

Faith is fostered in silence, by the willingness not to explain it all.

Relationships are developed in silence, on our ability to be present without a cure.

Community is encouraged by silence, by sharing the common experience of allowing the boundaries of self to soften.

Learning happens in silence when we accept that there might not be an answer.

Clarity is found in silence, as a gift given in gratitude.

We’ll close as we opened, with the words of the Irish poet: “We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

The Fantastical Life of the Child

It’s a cozy Christmas Eve at the Stahlbaum’s house which is decorated with Christmas ornaments, wreaths, stockings, mistletoe and in the center of it all, a majestic Christmas tree. As the family prepares for their annual Christmas party, their children, Fritz and Clara, wait anxiously. When the guests appear, the party picks up with dancing and celebration. The toymaker arrives with an air of mystery and gives presents to the children.

Fritz is given a beautiful drum, but Clara is given the best gift of all, the Nutcracker. Fritz grows jealous, snatches the Nutcracker from Clara and plays a game of toss with the other boys. It isn't long until the Nutcracker breaks. Clara is upset, but the toy is fixed and a guest makes a small bed under the Christmas tree for her injured Nutcracker.

The party ends. As Clara’s family retires to bed, she checks on her toy one last time and falls asleep under the Christmas tree with the Nutcracker in her arms.

At the stroke of midnight Clara wakes up to a frightening scene. The house, the tree and the toys seem to be getting larger. Out of nowhere large mice dressed in army uniforms, led by the Mouse King, begin to circle the room while the toys and Christmas tree come to life. Clara’s Nutcracker groups the soldier toys into battle formation and fights the mouse army. The Mouse King traps the Nutcracker in the corner, and the Nutcracker can’t overcome the Mouse King’s strength. Clara makes a desperate move to save her Nutcracker by hitting the Mouse King in the head with her shoe. The Nutcracker takes advantage of the stunned Mouse King and claims victory. The mice army carries away their King.

Clara and the Nutcracker fall back into the bed as angels hover over their heads. The bed turns into a magical floating sleigh. The Nutcracker is transformed into a human prince. He gets on and he and Clara sleigh through a snowy forest where the snowflakes turn into dancing maidens.

After their magical journey through the snow forest, they come to the Land of Sweets. Clara can’t believe her eyes; ladyfinger mountains topped with whipped cream, sweetly glazed flowers and buttercream frosting everywhere she looks. Upon their arrival, they are greeted by the Sugar Plum Fairy. As they reenact the night’s events, the Sugar Plum Fairy becomes impressed with Clara’s bravery and the Nutcracker’s heroism. In their honor, the Sugar Plum Fairy takes them inside the Candy Castle and throws a lavish festival. They are treated like royalty and presented with every imaginable dessert. And then, the dancing begins.

Hot coco dances to trumpets and castanets. A giant gingerbread house, opens her skirt and eight little gingerbread children circle around her. Flowers enter to the tune of the harp dancing in mesmerizing patterns as a single Dewdrop floats above them. The Sugar Plum Fairy then enters the room, lighter than air to complete the evening. Everyone bids Clara and the Nutcracker Prince farewell as she wishes the adventure would never end. He tells her it won’t, as long as she has eyes to see it. Clara wakes up the next morning under the Christmas tree with her Nutcracker still in her arms.

The Nutcracker Suite is a fantasy. A famous fantasy. A fantasy depicted as if from the mind of a child, but written by an adult and every year at this time, thousands of us revisit it. Large dance companies report as much as 40% of their income each year is generated from this story alone. Interpreted in hundreds of ways in countless venues, it’s a perfect window into the charm of the Christmas season. It’s about children who enter a fantastical world with dancing and gifts and magic, accompanied by music that removes us from the ordinary and re-places us in the extraordinary, a world people around the globe can and do return to year after year.

Fantasy is why Christmas is so popular as a holiday. The Christmas season has many iconic stories, each pointing to something magical, something outside the ordinary. In It’s a Wonderful Life, a man is allowed to experience an alternative time line in which he was never born, and discovers that he is necessary in the world, that his work has been transformative for an entire town. We’re entranced in A Miracle on 34th Street when a single mother, her utilitarian daughter and a lawyer take in a man who claims to be Santa. The relationship turns into a visitation worthy of Scripture as this stranger enchants them, opening them to the possibility of a truth greater than what we can see. In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by a ghost and three spirits who fly him through time and space giving him a chance to reflect on who he was, who he has become and the direction his life is headed, all of which inspire him to recommit to his earlier values becoming the best version of himself.

And, of course, at the center of the Christmas season is the story of Santa Claus, that jolly old man who delivers gifts to every child on the planet over the course of one night with the aid of flying reindeer, a story told famously in the early 19th century classic ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas and retold again and again in millions of households each December. ‘Tis the season for a little magic.

Even the Birth of Jesus story has a fantastical element to it. A single woman impregnated by god delivers a baby in a barn and three wise men follow the north star to bring gifts for this light brought into the world. An event that happened in the spring is celebrated in the dark of winter because that’s the setting for a dream. I’d like to suggest it’s the magic of this story that has sparked so many other fantastical stories, each one equally delightful and enchanting.

I grew up in an inter-faith home. My Jewish mother got cranky every year when we’d put up the Christmas tree and she stayed in the kitchen or would get in our way with a broom or vacuum trying to keep the living room neat while we’d tear through boxes of ornaments or toss tinsel on the tree and the each other. As a very little kid, I didn’t notice her bad mood because my father’s joy was too bright to be dimmed by her anxiety. As a teenager, though, I really tuned into her dissatisfaction on what was otherwise a joyous family tradition of tree trimming. (I’m sure I greeted her with a few “Come on mom, you’re ruining everything” statements.) But as an adult, I discovered something deeper. My mother loved Christmas. She was annoyed at herself for enjoying it so much, for humming those carols to herself while hiding away in the kitchen. And then I noticed, she wasn’t hiding as much as she was making us snacks to share while we worked and dinner for the family afterwards. In fact, once my sister and I started our own families, my father suggested they don’t need to do a big tree every year and it was my mother who insisted it wasn’t Christmas without it. And after he was too sick to help, she got out that old tree and decorated it herself.

My Jewish mother taught me that Christmas isn’t about being Christian. It’s about embracing a life of fantasy for just a few weeks. Those folks who are imploring us to put Christ back in Christmas might be onto something when it comes to commercialism and the increased materialism being encouraged, but I think they’ve missed what’s really going on here. They’ve missed the magic this season inspires. Rather than focusing on one story, this season is about embracing great hope, about living as if anything is possible. Every year we wish each other a happy season, we sing Joy to the World and we tell stories of a jolly man who will deliver gifts and good cheer the world over. Our generosity buttons are pushed and we buy toys for tots and food for banks and cover trees in mittens. We live as if the world could be a marvelous, safe, magical place where peace on earth is a real possibility just a step or two away. And we revisit this fantasy every year.

I have a son at home. As a younger child, like other children, he didn’t know the difference between fantasy and reality at Christmas or any other time. At 3 or 4, my son told me stories every morning on the way to school, shifting between things that happened and things he’s imagining. He’d begin with the mundane and move into something other-worldly. We have a lot of birthdays in my family in December and I distinctly remember him at about that age talking about the birthday dinner we had for grandma the night before. He described it in detail, but he added a friendly dragon who came to visit. A dragon who, as it happens, could breathe fire, making hot tea an easy choice with our birthday cake. He also loved when he found bugs in the house. Millepedes he named Mille, recounting how they’d become great friends, playing together every evening after bedtime. Ants were Anty, and we talked often of a frog we called Florence. For a time, I was afraid he was becoming a liar, that he’d tell story after story of things that didn’t happen. I insisted he started stories that weren’t true with the disclaimer” Once Upon a Time” until he started annoyingly interrupting my story-telling with the question “Is this a Once Upon a Time story?” But, children that young don’t make those same distinctions between truth and fantasy. Real, they understand fully, is a matter of opinion. Buckingham Palace was no more real to my 3 year old than Santa’s home in the North Pole. My adult desire to classify is an unnecessary intrusion in his creative process and we’re all best off if I leave my left brain out it.

Adults rely on children to bring us into the fantasy world. We can’t help but remember that a toy for a poor or orphaned child doesn’t fix the economic disparities of human life. So we look to the children who stare wide-eyed at Christmas trees and sing carols at the top of their lungs and put cookies and milk out for Santa. We know that if we are going to revisit the Sugar Plum Fairy, we’re going to need them to tell us how to find her, how to get to the Land of Sweets where evil Mouse Kings are defeated by Toy Soldiers and Snow Queens and Nutcracker Princes dance with snowflakes.

This season presents us with the opportunity to live in a fantasy, which we need most years, but this one for sure. On our own streets, with the execution of a wealthy CEO, violence became a source of hope, which isn’t a good sign for what’s to come.

But for now, also here on our own city streets, sidewalks and store windows are dressed up and reminding us of joy and good cheer. Lights twinkle all around us every evening creating a sense of something outside ordinary time, outside the mundane, reminding us of mystery, of the miraculous. And the stories and holiday parties and Christmas music conspire to remove us from the ordinary and re-place us in the extraordinary, a time of magic and fantasy we return to year after year.

There’s Something About Mary

There is likely an inverse relationship between my interest in Mary, Mother of Jesus, and that of the Roman Catholic Church. As a Catholic convert, other people’s interest in Mary was always confounding to me. In my own history as Catholic congregant, chaplain, student, or teacher, I was hard pressed to find a subject I found less interesting. This was a tripping point in my life as professional Catholic, which I was for some time.

Mary, Mother of God, faithful servant. Quiet, somehow continuously in prayer. Oddly always young, also a white, blue-eyed Middle Eastern woman, wearing the colors of royalty – sapphire - over her head, looking up, hands clasped or stretched outward in gentle welcome. Painfully boring on top of being impossible. Adding to my disinterest there’s this doctrine people absolutely love that I always approached with such a theologically critical eye as to not be able to see it at all. Mary was conceived and therefore born without sin, making her ridiculously irrelevant at least in my life.

The doctrine of Mary’s sinlessness is often confused, so let me clarify.

The Catholic Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, celebrated world-wide on December 8th, states that Mary was conceived without sin.

People often confuse this doctrine as having something to do with the conception of Jesus, which it does not. This is all Mary. Or, it doesn’t have to do with Jesus insofar as the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception does not speak to Jesus as born, or have anything to say about him and his life. It speaks to the flawlessness of Mary as a vessel for his birth. She had to be perfect for him to be perfect, so the theory goes. This is her day all the way.

To take a step back, many Christians believe in what’s called Original Sin, the idea that everyone is born in some way broken or guilty, a sin which is washed away at baptism. Some Christians believe baptism has to be done shortly after birth, while others think you have to have at least hit the age of reason. The miracle is that Mary was not victim to Original Sin. She was born pure, sinless. Wholly good. Unlike the rest of us.

The Catholics in particular are serious about this doctrine. It was officially declared in 1854, although for about 400 years before that, it had been discussed and debated. To be clear, though, that’s still only about 25% of the life of the church. I note that because sometimes we get so used to something we forget there was a lot of time before when that thing didn’t exist.

There is another doctrine that says that under certain circumstances the pope is infallible. The doctrine itself is actually quite limited, but declaring the possibility that a human being is absolutely right is quite a leap. It set a whole mood. A vibe, if you will. But, in reality, the doctrine has only been used twice in its 150 years in existence. There are only two doctrines upon which any pope has said they are absolutely sure, without a doubt, that this is true. Twice when they’ve declared themselves Infallible. One is that Mary is in Heaven- the Assumption. The other is that Mary was conceived without sin, the Immaculate Conception.

On the one hand, I don’t care. Doctrines related to Mary have been damaging to women for centuries and I’d prefer to just pretend they don’t exist. They are confusing, misleading, and hold up an image of women as sexless, ageless, limited, suffering servants that most American women are either oppressed by or they dismiss them altogether.

On the other hand, as a UU, I’m very interested in the corners of Truth that the world’s religions offer, and Roman Catholics are telling us there are only two things about which they are absolutely certain, and this is one of them. That makes this worth exploring.

And this is the time. Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, which always happens early in Advent as we talk often about birth and Mary’s role in bringing about the new world.

This is the season of Mary. You can tell us to put Christ back in Christmas all you want; Christmas isn’t Jesus’s holiday. It’s all about Mary. Birth is sort of about the baby, but mostly, it’s about the mother. There’s a woman at the center of this story, a story that is fundamentally about a family.

Mary was a teenager, betrothed to a man. For her time, she was not young, even though many of us balk at the idea of a high school sophomore getting engaged. She was from a good, Jewish family. Sometimes people like to say she was poor, but she wasn’t by local standards. She was likely illiterate, as most women were, but since very little was written down, it didn’t matter much.

The story is that before Mary married Joseph, an angel appeared to her to tell her she’d been chosen by God to bear his son, that he would be born in 9 months. When it was discovered she was pregnant, Joseph was going to quietly leave her, but an angel asked him not to. He stayed, they married, and the child was born that spring, as it happens.

According to ancient doctrine and contemporary lore, Mary and Joseph never had sex, she remained a virgin, and Jesus was an only child, but even a cursory reading of the story refutes that version. Scripture talks often of Jesus’s siblings, and the word we translate today to mean, “never had sex” more accurately translates to “young woman”.

As a student of theology, I’ve gone down plenty of rabbit holes to find the story beneath the story, but that no longer seems interesting to me. I mean, I like facts, but once I have them, I put them aside so I can dive into the myth. Mythology is more powerful than facts, for better or for worse. We are people of the story. We need narratives to give our lives meaning. And Mary, Joseph and Jesus are endlessly fascinating as the primary characters of some critical global, historical myths.

So the doctrine a billion people are celebrating today declares Mary to have been born without sin. No mark of Eve on her. No reason to be baptized. Born perfect. Sinless. Immaculate.

She never snapped at her mother. Never lied to her father. Never coveted her neighbor’s husband. Never pretended she wasn’t home when the local gossip came calling. She never got angry at her two year old for hitting her or bored when her 4 year old wanted, again to know why the sky was blue. Mary never had sex, never had even a lustful thought. She never walked by a beggar and pretended she didn’t see her, never told a leper on the dirt path that she didn’t have any bread to offer. Never.

Mary was conceived without sin, born without sin, lived without sin and died a magnificent death, never having had so much as an impure thought.

Or, maybe we need to rethink what Immaculate means. What does it mean to be Pure? What does it mean to be perfect? What does it meant to be Holy?

Is sex unholy? While the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity goes back to the 6th century, meaning that Mary never had sex, even after the birth of Jesus, Scripture actually talks candidly about Jesus’s 4 brothers and at least 2 sisters. Biblical literacy wasn’t a shared value in the 6th century, so doctrine filled in as the primary teacher for the world’s Christians. It was easy to contradict Scripture. Declaring Mary a Perpetual Virgin was a way of setting her apart and holding her up as better than regular women. But, were they saying something of value about Mary, or about how they felt about women?

The only time I ever got in trouble teaching theology in a Catholic college was when I asked my students what the value of this doctrine is. What do we gain from suggesting that Mary was a sexless mother? What do we lose if we say Mary was not a virgin? What we gain is the ability to find all other women through history, and around the world, inferior. What we lose is the concept that sex can be holy.

With my rational, feminist, sex-positive, 21st century brain, it’s easy to dismiss and ignore the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception as anti-woman, anti-reason, anti-historical, and maybe even the foundation for the hyper control of women’s bodies popular throughout history and again gaining ground at mind-boggling speeds. This doctrine is either entirely irrelevant, or it provides the DNA for so many of our contemporary troubles. This is why I actively ignored it for so long, and maybe why you do too.

But.

What if it’s true? What if Mary was conceived and born without sin. Whole and Holy?

And what if she’s not alone?

The Roman Church might be onto something, but maybe they’re just thinking a little too small.

Mary is an icon of human perfection, flawless and magnificent. She was a wife. A mother. She cooked and cleaned. She wiped dirty faces and butts. She washed filthy clothes in the river, gossiping with her friends. She had secrets and told secrets. She felt angry and sad and frightened. She felt love and hope and joy, too. She was human. And she was perfect. They are right. The fullness of her life, of her character, of her humanness, was gorgeous.

And so are you. And so am I. Conceived and born in beauty. You and I and everyone we’ve ever known, everyone who’s ever lived. Stunning. Impeccable. Immaculate. Mary was born to partner with god, to be the mother of god, to become the embodiment of what is possible. And so were we.

She loved her husband and had sex with him. She loved and laughed and made mistakes. She had at least 7 children who made her nuts, whose diapers she changed, whose questions she answered or didn’t answer because it’s been a long day and she still has laundry and has to make dinner and get wood for a fire even though we live in a damn desert. She was sometimes short tempered, sometimes hormonal, sometimes unimaginative, sometimes neglectful. Mary was human.

And she was complete. Born not covered in Original Sin, but enveloped in Original Blessing. Surrounded by Love. An icon of grace. Deeply human, messy, flawed, and, like us all, she was magnificent.

We Are the Storm

Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a small village in the mountains of Southern France. Located in this Roman Catholic nation, the people of Chambon-sur-Lingon were Protestant and had a long history of resistance to maintain their religious identity. When France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Jews from around the country were rounded up mostly for deportation to death camps, but some for medical experimentation or slavery. Nazis made their way through French villages to capture Jews, but when they arrived in this village, the people didn’t comply, mostly feigning ignorance.

The effort was led by the pastor in the town, André Trocmé (trog-ma) and his wife Magda. Magda explained how it began.

“Those of us who received the first Jews did what we thought had to be done—nothing more complicated. It was not decided from one day to the next what we would have to do. There were many people in the village who needed help. How could we refuse them? A person doesn’t sit down and say I’m going to do this and this and that. We had no time to think. When a problem came, we had to solve it immediately. Sometimes people ask me, “How did you make a decision?” There was no decision to make. The issue was: Do you think we are all brothers or not? Do you think it is unjust to turn in the Jews or not?”

When there was a raid, Jews were often hidden, but most of the time, the strategy was to incorporate these refugees into the village seamlessly so that when Nazis marched through unexpectedly, they couldn’t discern one person from the next. Children went to school, people worked in shops and in the fields. The remarkable thing, the thing that worked, was that everyone participated, no one thought these people should be sent to their deaths.

Pastor Andre had been in that parish a long time and had been preaching a message of Christian love and action long before the Nazis arrived. His standard benediction was, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Go practice it.” This message had been- even without him but explicitly with him- part of the culture of the village.

The remarkable thing about the actions of this village is that no one dissented. Everyone did what they thought they had to do given the situation in front of them. Some didn’t actively participate in hiding people at risk, but they didn’t turn the others in either. It was this unity, this unbroken refusal to participate in evil, that kept the people safe.

Historian Marianne Ruel Robins notes:

“The fact that an entire community participated (or watched and said nothing) is remarkable... The silence observed by the people of the Plateau was an important condition for its success, not simply because it sheltered Jews from external threats, but also because it minimized internal dissent. To refrain from talking meant that one would not shame one’s neighbor for his lack of participation; it also meant that different rationales for behavior would not conflict with another, be they commitment to pacifism, nationalism, or Christian charity... Silence did not necessarily imply that everyone implicitly agreed on the reasons for hiding Jews, but rather that most people came to agree that something ought to be done.”

When Magda, the minister’s wife, reflected on her choices years after the war, she said, “When people read this story, I want them to know that I tried to open my door. I tried to tell people, ‘Come in, come in.’ In the end I would like to say to people, ‘Remember that in your life there will be lots of circumstances where you will need a kind of courage, a kind of decision on your own, not about other people but about yourself.’”

Over the course of four years, this tiny village in the mountains of southern France saved 5,000 people.

Last week, the Sunday after the election, we spent our time together acknowledging our anger, worry, and grief. It was cathartic, and I told you it was only the beginning. We need to feel what we feel, and find others to commiserate with, but that’s not all we need. We also need to understand what’s at risk, and commit to protecting ourselves, each other, and our country. That’s what we’re up to today. We are taking our cue from a tiny village in France who demonstrated for us the power of Resistance.

We may not agree on the level of risk we’re facing. It’s always difficult from a place of safety or near normalcy to look into the future and declare with certainty what’s coming. Acknowledging a wide range of opinions on this – and many other subjects – I have decided to spend these four years speaking Truth as I know it without being afraid of losing congregants or even making people uncomfortable. I don’t know what’s before us, but I know what’s behind us. I know history. And while it’s possible we won’t be repeating it, we have, as a nation, taken a clear step toward a fascist future, and if the worst repercussions are to be avoided, we will need to make some courageous choices. Speaking Truth is one of them, even with the understanding that there could be consequences. (The pastor of that small village was arrested by the Gestapo.) Timothy Snyder, the acclaimed Historian at Yale with a specialty in 20th century fascism wrote this week that the United States is not in a post-electoral moment, but in a post-catastrophic one. He, along with other historians, political scientists, and Constitutional lawyers, is sounding every alarm telling us to do what we can to stop the avalanche barreling toward us- or at least to get out of its way so not everyone is buried in the wake.

Democracies can become autocracies in less time than one might think. This is because democratic systems survive on what’s called legitimacy. The idea is that the government is ruled by a set of laws, that those laws provide the guardrails for ethical behavior, that there is a free press who have access to ensure those laws are being followed, that the people are free to disagree with government and can assemble in a variety of ways to hold them accountable, and that the people elect the government freely. The legitimacy of the government is held up by the many trusted systems in place, but when those systems are no longer trusted or are no longer in place, legitimacy is challenged.

We started to see the beginning of the end of American legitimacy when the result of the 2020 election was challenged. We witnessed an attempted coup, designed to stop the levers of government running. When that failed in the courts, they physically attacked Congress, which also failed. Not being successful with an outside attack, they have now staged an internal one, which is how these things often happen. They came to power with the consent of the majority, and are now getting to the work of dismantling the government. Installing incompetent people in positions of power, removing people with experience, putting the Justice Department in the hands of a criminal, shutting down entire systems like the Department of Education, are all part of history’s autocracy playbook.

The march of tyranny is getting louder, closer, gaining more soldiers jumping into lock-step both thoughtlessly and too often with tremendous pride. We can feel the thumping in the ground beneath us, a ground we aren’t sure will hold when that army of angry, lost, people- our neighbors, family, co-workers- marches by us drunk on hate and the power of being one of many. As tyranny assumes more of our country, as it infiltrates our neighborhoods or even our own minds, it is up to us to be the front line of defense.

I’m not going to outline all the ways we can do that today; we’ll have time to talk over the course of the next few months. But there are a few things for us to keep in mind as this situation unfolds.

Trust your own senses. We’ve seen this strategy at work, in fact, the GOP just swept the nation with a full campaign of gaslighting, telling people that what they are experiencing isn’t real. How many times did we hear that immigrants have taken over entire cities which have fallen into lawlessness? That they are eating pets, or that they are living in luxury at our expense? Trust what you see, not what you are told.

Be careful about your media consumption. Determine now what sources are attempting to bring you facts verses those married to an agenda they will alter the stories to serve. The New York Times, and the Guardian. Have been safe for me. Others trust the BBC, ProPublica, Mother Jones and the Atlantic. The Atlantic, as it happens, was founded by Unitarians and continues with it’s mission of being the organ of no party.

Social Media is not a news source, but it will give you a feeling of the national conversation. Follow people you trust. Twitter has become state media. BlueSky is more trust-worthy at the moment. Facebook is a highly manipulated platform.

But, Facebook has something no one else has created yet. Groups. And at the moment, groups are a very good way to stay connected. Fascist systems need people to be isolated. We are more easily convinced, more easily controlled, when we are alone. One of the most effective things we can do is build and sustain strong communities.

Timothy Snyder tells us that one of the 20 things we need to do is pick an institution and defend it. As I’ve said to you before, I’ve picked this one. This particular church with it’s long, very proud and effective liberal history, but also the idea of Church itself. All the liberal churches which, to be honest, we’re dismantling without anyone’s help. I’m defending Church, places people gather to pray, to care for each other, to get some window into Truth, and where we practice being our best selves. Strong religious communities, grounded in shared values, committed to taking care of each other, are a critical part of the social infrastructure we will need.

In the Guardian last week, Rebecca Solnit wrote: We do not know what will happen. But, we can know who we can commit to be in the face of what happens. That’s a strong beginning. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.” She closes by quoting Julian Aguon, “No offering is too small, no stone unneeded…All of us, without exception, are qualified to participate in the rescue of the world.”

The needs right now are great, and we might feel small or insufficient. And we are. Alone, we are less than what’s needed. A single voice speaking of love won’t be heard over the cacophony of hate coming at us from every direction. A firestorm of anger was unleashed and is being celebrated, supported, funded, institutionalized.

So we change our aloneness. We partner with each other, with other congregants, with the person you’re sitting next to or in front of. We partner with other churches, with religious people called by their faith to embody and bring forth love. We don’t have to be single raindrops trying to put out this fire, we can build alliances, join arm in arm with like-minded people.

And they may not be people with whom we agree on everything. Our motivations might be different. Our theology, philosophy, our politics might even be different, but we aren’t getting picky, aren’t looking for purity. We are looking for allies who, like us, refuse to let hate win.

Like the people in Chambord who leaned into their collective power and unspoken decision to fight a terrifying foe, we can build our own coalition of Love to combat the hate getting hotter around us.

(*SLOW) We are not enough alone, but we are Not Alone.

The devil might whisper in our ears, “You are not strong enough to withstand the storm.” But we, together, will whisper back, “We are the storm.”