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.