Disrupt Church

I am angry this week. So angry! Last week, too. And, maybe the week before. It’s sort of been going on for months. I mean, if I’m honest, it started last October. Someone did me wrong last October. Me and my whole family and I’m still mad. For months, when I passed their home, I’d give them the finger. They didn’t see it, but it felt pretty good. I remember a long time ago when we were still protesting Apartheid, a nun I knew used to drive into Shell stations to give people the finger. I’m taking my cue from Sr. O’Neil. It means nothing outside of registering my dissatisfaction, but sometimes that’s all we have.

When I say I’m angry, I mean it, too. And that anger has been distracting for almost a year. It sneaks into my head when I’m not thinking about anything in particular. It fills empty space. It shows up in my dreams. It slips out during casual conversation. In these last two weeks, I even think it’s blocking joy, preventing me from living my life fully.

Early in the summer, I realized I was still so angry because there’s been no accountability. These are people who treated my family badly – my son in particular – for which they’ve experienced no consequences. This is a trigger for me. I have a hard time when people behave badly and are not accountable. And, as I’ve confessed here before, I behave badly when I’m right. They haven’t been held to account and I’m right. This is a bad combination.

I actually do pretty well when I’m wrong. I don’t mind apologizing for things. I even appreciate the opportunity to grow. I find being wrong sort of liberating. If nothing else, I’m in control. I can apologize and make things better. I welcome learning I was wrong. I’m not so gracious when I’m right. In fact, I’m downright self-righteous. I need people to know I’m right. I have yet to learn the grace of being right and being quiet about it.

And this family- they’re not only wrong but they hurt my kid. I’ve been plotting revenge ever since.

I’m obviously not good at the revenge game, though, because outside of giving them the finger from time to time, an act they know nothing about, I haven’t taken any action at all.

So, a few weeks ago, this family acted-out again. My son was hurt. My husband was annoyed. So, they called a friend and went out for ice cream. They returned laughing having forgotten all about what sent them seeking fun to start with. I, on the other hand, stayed home and stewed.

It was then that I realized that I am, in fact, in the wrong.

Not about the situation. I’m wrong – or more accurately – I’m misaligned with a greater Truth. There isn’t anything I can do about what happened or continues to happen. Br. Zachary and I sometimes say to each other, “It’s people being people.” This family- they’re Peopling. Nothing I can do about it. And I’m not wrong that they’re doing the people thing badly. But, when all is said and done, I’m the one suffering from it. And that’s where I’m wrong.

So much of our suffering is forced on us. Death. Financial insecurity. Illness. The loss of human and civil rights. But this – this silly social stuff that most of us spend our time worrying about – that’s optional. Suffering is inevitable. Misery is optional. In fact, if I’m honest with myself, this year of anger is entirely on me. I’m not at fault in the precipitating event, and the feelings and intense response I had last October were appropriate. But, in the months since, my misery has been on me. If I want accountability, I may never get that for these people, but I can get it for myself. I’m creating my own pain.

It’s not the first time in my life I’ve done this and I know I’m not alone. I won’t ask you to raise your hands, but I’ve been in this business long enough to know that we humans, we do this to ourselves. We get angry and we hold on to it, and we create our own misery.

Rosh Hashanah started a week ago on Friday evening, the 15th. Yom Kippur begins this evening. If we hadn’t gone to the climate march last week, I’d have preached this sermon and invited us all into a week of reflection. Instead, I’m limiting our time to today, into tomorrow.

Self-reflection is an important spiritual practice. It’s how we bring ourselves back into alignment. It’s how we connect with our deepest selves, with the god or gods of our understanding, with the great rhythms of Earth, with the source of Love and Truth, with the Ground of Being. We stop. We look. We sit with what we see. We breathe into the reality of who we are.

It is good. We are good. We are also misguided. Unforgiving. Resentful. Reactive. Judgmental. Sometimes we’re joyless. Humorless. Inflexible. Demanding. Entitled. Self-Centered. Arrogant. Thoughtless. Stingy. Sharp. Critical. Any of this sound familiar?

And, if we’re sitting and looking and breathing, we can also see that we are helpful. Kind. Generous. Forgiving. Unassuming. Grateful. Playful. Creative. We can look at ourselves and see that we are open. Curious. Engaged. Gentle. Thoughtful. Relational.

Once we see our full and true selves, our potential for harm and grace, it’s time to repent. There is no repair, no reparations, no way to move forward in healing unless we repent. This is our moment for accountability. We stop. We look. We see. We breath into what’s real. And we begin the work of repentance. Again, there is no repair, there is no healing, if there is no repentance.

I think about this in anti-racism work too. I know sometimes white people feel like we’re being asked to apologize all the time, and often the people who feel that way point out that their families were very poor or they came from another country where they were persecuted or that they were an underclass even here for generations, all making the point that most white people alive today, especially here in New York, weren’t part of the inhumane history of slavery or segregation, so why should we apologize. The presupposition is that it has nothing to do with us. Often, at least in the circles I run in, the people speaking are liberals who understand the impact of American racial history, and they might even be open to institutional reparations.

It isn’t enough. While I might not personally be perpetuating systemic racism, repair only happens after repentance, and the repentance all white people have to consider is the inherent privilege of whiteness and the generations of opportunity on which our lives are based. If there’s going to be repair, we have to reflect honestly, even fearlessly. Acknowledge where we stand in the system. And repent. Healing comes after we say we’re sorry, even if we aren’t personally to blame. We are, nonetheless, the beneficiaries.

I wonder if it might be helpful for you all to think about something for which you might need to repent. It might be, like me, something I’m doing to myself, largely, although those who live with me aren’t protected. Or, it might be your place in our larger systems. It might be something very specific that you did or said that hurt someone you know. Think for a moment. Get that clearly in your mind.

I can ask you to do that because there’s always something. No one can say, “Nope. Nothing. I’m good.” If we’re honest, we know there’s a place that needs mending.

Think clearly about what it is you did. What part of this did you have? Was it your actions? Was it an inaction? Did you cause someone harm? See if you can name it for yourself.

Holding that in mind, how can you repent? There will be people down at the East River throwing bread into the water. Maybe that’s your way too. Or, you can go directly to the source, the person you’ve hurt and say you’re sorry and ask for forgiveness. Or, you can pray, telling the god or gods of your understanding what you’ve done. Seek accountability for yourself.

Forgiveness may or may not come next, specifically when we’re dealing with other people. Nothing we can do about that. That part is out of our hands. All we can do is acknowledge and repent. Acknowledge and repent. That’s the practice. Others will do or feel however they will. This remains true even if the one who was hurt was ourselves.

The practice is necessary either way. The only chance we can bring ourselves back to ourselves, back into alignment, is to see all we’ve done to knock ourselves off course.

Here’s the one assurance I can offer you. Regardless of what you’ve done or who you think you are, you are loved. You are held, right now, even in your brokenness, in a vast matrix of love and welcome.

I’ve been thinking about the spiritual practices of this church. It might be that I need to deepen my own spiritual life and it might be because I’ve heard similar things from some of you, but I’d love for us to think about how we lean into opportunities like the one offered by Yom Kippur. There is a natural rhythm in the human condition and part of that is a time for spiritual reflection. Because of the timing, we’ve missed much of the opportunity of this holiday, so I’m preparing you now for Lent. I am going to invite us all into a deeper, more intentional and longer time toward the end of winter so we can lean in to this kind of healing for ourselves, for those around us, and for the world.

But that shouldn’t take away from today. If you are able and willing, I’m inviting you – as I’m inviting myself – into a day of reflection. Yom Kippur begins this evening and runs through tomorrow. I’m lucky that tomorrow is my day off, so I’ll have some time. I’m going to begin my day writing my reflection. I’ll spend real

time tomorrow putting language to all the things that are blocking me, that I’ve messed up, that I’m guilty of. I’ll then sit with all of that, breathing deeply what it means to be human, what it means to be me right now. And then I’m going to bring some bread to some water and I’m going to name each of these transgressions as I throw bread into water and with each naming, I’m going to ask the god of my understanding for forgiveness.

This is my cleansing ritual, and it might be for you too. Maybe this is a good time for you to take a similar spiritual and moral inventory. Maybe tonight or tomorrow, you can sit with and breath into some of the less comfortable truths about yourself. And, maybe the ritual of bread and water will work for you. Fire is another option. Write it all down and burn it. Kitchen sinks work if you can turn off the smoke detector for a few minutes.

Whatever the actual practice, this invitation is open.

And whatever you find, whatever you see in yourself, we are Universalists. We know that Love is the ground on which we stand, that we were welcomed into the embrace of Love with our first breath, that we are surrounded by that very love in every moment of every day since then, and that we will be welcomed into Love with our last gasp of air.

With that Truth, with Love always at the Center, we will begin our litany.

Disrupt Church

The question I can’t stop asking myself, the one that inspired me to try this new liturgical style, is “What are we doing here?” “Who are we serving?” I look out at the world and see people in so much pain. Putting aside the events of the last two weeks, and outside of maybe attacks on our soil like 9-11 and Pearl Harbor, when can you remember so many people feeling frightened? And I don’t mean that kind of surprise attack-scared. I mean a low level of fear people seem to be walking around with every day. A private fear. And it seems to be connected to loneliness, ongoing isolation, emotional separation. And it’s connected for some, even many people, with money. Will I have enough? If I don’t, who will help me? Is there anyone I can tell about how frightened I am about being so alone, about growing old, about being responsible for a child, about losing a job, about finding myself unable to keep up with the pace of the world. What if I’m forgotten?

Some of that is tied to climate grief. My children, my grandchildren will never know the beauty of the world I knew. Or climate fear. Flooding, access to food, water, power in times of crisis. And again, back to that underlying fear and the loneliness.

And with all that pain that I see everywhere, these last few weeks have brought us to a place I’d never seen. Those Trump years divided our country along red/blue lines, fracturing a nation that seemed all too ready to break. There was so much anger added to the existential crisis of our diminished democracy, and none of that has been healed. In some ways the passive peace is more a result of not talking to each other at all rather than a capitulation.

But, now, today, these last two weeks, since the attack on Israel and the retaliation against Palestine, that national fragmentation has moved to a new level. There were breaks in families before, but many still remained intact. There was the loss of old friends, but the strongest relationships survived. Most of the fractures were geopolitical- red state against blue state, and the old north-south story. Not any more. This one hit much closer to home, dividing neighborhoods, congregations, families, even households. Many of those last relationships standing have begun to topple.

So, I keep asking myself, “What are we doing here?” “What am I doing?” (Out of respect for this pulpit, I won’t tell you exactly how I word that question to myself, but there’s an extra 4 letter word.) Here I am, the Senior Minister of a well-established, well-connected, well-staffed, well-funded church in the middle of NYC. Who am I serving? Who are we serving?

If I stood right outside that door and asked people “Do you want a spiritual home? Do you want authentic connection? Do you want a progressive, multigenerational, multicultural community? Do you want to live a deeper, more meaningful life? Do you want to work for peace, serve people in need, do you want live music and storytelling, do you want to live in a bigger way?” I think most people would say yes. I mean, not at first. At first they’d be annoyed by the question, and if they thought I was a minister they’d walk quickly pretending not to hear me. But, if they answered honestly, if they weren’t afraid of me and what they think I want from them, if they sat with the questions in stillness for just a few minutes, I’d bet anything half of them would have to say “yes”. (pause)

I love this church so much more than I ever thought I would. Honestly, I moved into this ministry pretty nervous about the history and conflict and significant financial troubles. It never occurred to me that I’d love this church and its members as much as I do. Here in my 5th year, we’ve confronted a lot of really difficult problems head on and we’re so much healthier for it.

But we’re shrinking. Some of that is the move into this space, and some of that is the emptying of NYC since Covid, and some of that is the freefall of institutional religion across the board.

Institutional religion, in my assessment is dying. We’ve lost our place in American society, no longer considered the moral center and no longer an assumed part of people’s social circles. Our buildings are being abandoned, being sold, being repurposed across the country. Ministers are leaving the profession unable to afford working in the parish or unable to sustain their own mental health which is cracking under the weight of congregational criticism and ever-decreasing membership rosters. Religious educators are being pushed out because there’s no money to pay them, and very few children to educate. I offered some numbers last week, but I’ll repeat them here in case they didn’t stick. We lost 18,000 children from our RE programs in the last 10 years. We’ve lost half our members in the last 20. And the people who are left are aging. Our churches have twice as many people over the age of 65 than in the general population.

Gen Z isn’t being raised with religion at all. 45% have no affiliation. In other words, they can’t even say “my family is” UU or Catholic or whatever. A majority will say they believe in god, or have a spiritual life, but they aren’t interested in formal religion and have no connection to any denomination or religious community, even as part of their cultural heritage.

We are shrinking, aging, and increasingly irrelevant.

And, I’m not worried. I’m not worried in part because I know the story of the Great Awakening. I know religion has died before, and it was resurrected when we found new ways to meet people’s needs. The impulse for greater life or meaning doesn’t die. Just the forms we create to respond to that impulse.

Religion is the way communities ask big questions, face into mystery, seek deeper life, together. Spirituality is how we do this on our own, but when we gather with others, we are religious. If we strip it all down, that’s what it is. We then create theologies and we enact those theologies through rituals and rites and they feed us in so many ways. Until they don’t.

When they don’t, we have the choice to hold on to what once worked decreasing our numbers until there’s no one left, or we change to meet new needs for a new generation, expanding and imagining theologies that help people face mystery and live more meaningful lives. The problem is that the people who aren’t being served aren’t in the room. The ones who like what we do are the ones who show up, so they’re the ones with the vote. The people in the room, the people being served, those people define what happens, which is why so often new things start in new places.

That’s why those Awakening churches happened in tents. And barns. And fields. What was happening there wasn’t predetermined. No one could say, “that’s not how we do it.”

I’m a lucky minister and this is an unusual church. For all of our 200 years, we’ve been at least a little experimental. We’ve been willing to try new things. It didn’t start with John Haynes Holmes, but he was the most aggressive in his experimentation. He got rid of paid pews. People used to pay for their seats, creating a class system on display every Sunday morning. He gained freedom of the pulpit, disbanding a sermon committee that approved his message before he could preach it. And he was very intentional about creating a multiracial congregation, a legacy whose rewards we all continue to reap.

So, here we are, with people walking by us desperately needing us who will never walk in here, while we shrink and age, and hold on to who we were, not because we’re afraid of changing, which I don’t think we are, but because of inertia. We do what we’ve always done. It’s easier and familiar and it’s fine. Sometimes it’s really lovely.

But I don’t think we’re even serving the people in the room all that well right now. On any given Sunday, we’ve got people with earbuds watching the livestream because the sounds is better online, or people who are here now, but watch the service later because they couldn’t really hear or see while they were here in the room.

And back to the question. What are we doing here? Who are we serving? This is where Darnell steps in. One day he almost casually said to me, “Peggy, all we need is you preaching, my music and a street corner in Harlem. That’s where the people are. That’s who wants and needs this message. No one’s coming into that church to hear that message of liberation, so we need to bring it to them” That started me thinking about preaching in parks or from stoops. And it got me thinking about what it means to strip it all down.

When we do that, we’ve got a message of salvation. We have a message that tells us everyone is beautiful, everyone is loved, everyone is saved. We know that the Spirit of Love blows through us, lives in us, is the power of heart and spirit that enlivens and connects us. We know that everything is intertwined, interconnected, folded in a wild Love that has saved and is saving us all if we can seize it and pass it on, encircling everyone else with it. Our message is one of liberation in its simplicity, so accessible, so desired, and too easily bypassed if we want to live in rage or fear, but also easily remembered when one of us grabs the other by the hand and says, “We are in this together. I got you.”

When we strip it all down, what we have is what so many people want, whether they are courageous enough to step in our doors or not.

What does any of that mean? I don’t know. I don’t usually preach answers, and you know I love a good question, but today, I’m even further from the end of this thought experiment than usual. Or not. I’m not sure there’s an end. I think this is a process. I’m going to try things and you’re going to tell me what works or doesn’t and I’m going to keep pushing the envelope because there are people walking by us right now, at this very moment, who are afraid or lonely or angry, whose lives are smaller or shallower than they want them to be. Right now walking by us. People whose children have questions they don’t know how to answer and don’t have communities to figure it out with. People who have their own questions, their own longings, their own woundedness who aren’t fed by our current structures but would be fed by our message if we knew how to get it across.

So, what are we doing here?

We’re committing to living into the question, to becoming the balm desperately needed in the world, even if we have yet to figure out how. We’re reminding ourselves that we have what we need to be of service, to helping heal – if not a whole nation, maybe just a neighborhood – of people who are wounded. We are remembering that we have a history of deconstructing and reconstructing for a new age, finding hope in each other.

Religion isn’t dead, but it might need to be resuscitated, so we are breathing new life into it, breathing music into it, breathing a song of love and healing for everyone to hear. This is our time, this is our ministry, we are the ones who are called.

And THAT is what we are doing here.

Power Sunday: Leveraging Our Collective

TikTok says men think about the Roman Empire daily, but it’s the American Empire that has my attention. Mirroring the innocence of the mid and late 20th century, I grew up believing that the United States is the best nation that has ever existed. That opinion came from my white immigrant family grateful largely for opportunity and the freedom of economic prosperity. But, over time, our democracy has begun to fade, and whether or not children are told this is the best nation in the history of nations doesn’t alter our current downward trajectory.

As much as we like to say we’ve been a democracy since 1776, or maybe from the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, we’ve mostly been a democracy in process until the full realization of our potential with the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. With the codification of inclusion at the ballet booth, the United States of America became worthy of the admiration of democracies, both realized and struggling, around the world. Our system of government, standing on a strong foundation of law, had the full support of our nation’s people and our institutions, creating what we thought was an unbreakable network ensuring equal access to our founding promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But as we approach the 60th anniversary of that peak moment, most Americans are aware that our democracy is on a downward slide. There are many key markers that support this suspicion including our decline on the Polity Index that moved us below the threshold of full democracy in recent history. President Joe Biden warned us just a few weeks ago that democracy is at risk, that the threat to our institutions and our Constitution is serious, noting extremism and increasingly disturbing threats of violence on our leaders. Of course, we don’t need scholars or even our President to tell us what we can see and hear for ourselves. The words “chaos” and “dysfunction” and “in-fighting” have become common in our national headlines as our government grinds to a halt over and over again.

Strong, healthy democracies require what we call civil society. Civil society consists of all the voluntary organizations where people gather, autonomous from the State. These groups might have some state support, funding or interaction, but they are independent of state controls and have their own agendas and goals. They are concerned with public ends, but they aren’t seeking state power. They exist for many reasons, but one is to influence law, culture, and the ways we live together. They are part of a larger piece of community living, valuing pluralism, inclusion, and a wide range of life experience and thought.

The organizations that populate civil society include educators who advocate for curriculum development to train the next generation of thinkers and leaders, and climate activists who push against corporate influence, and librarians who ensure access to a diversity of ideas, and workers who leverage their collective power to ensure fair wages and protections. Civil Society includes museums that preserve our history, dance companies that celebrate self-expression, and community theatres where new philosophies are given language and an audience.

Cults aren’t part of civil society because they want to separate people from the mainstream and yoga groups don’t generally qualify because they have no interest in influencing public life. Churches, on the other hand, do. So do all of our UU organizations like Ministry for Earth, state action networks, and UUSJ, our UU voice on the Hill. All of these institutions are part of the fabric of civil society, without which we don’t have an authentic democracy.

Scholars tell us that democracies don’t collapse because of a single, influential person. They collapse because the people who should know better align themselves with stronger, more dangerous, personalities. They, themselves, aren’t fascists, communists or extremists. They’re just too weakly committed to democracy and are ultimately opportunists who say what they think they need to say to get or keep power. Civil society is one of the key levers to keep these people in check. Groups that are themselves run democratically, giving everyone the experience of having a voice and a vote, with deep membership rosters of concerned and engaged citizens, or public forums for open discussion, become a counter-balance to self-serving individuals. These organizations create occasions for influence and can reward opportunists with the popularity or power they seek without requiring them to compromise their commitment to democratic systems. They can also create and engage systems of social accountability that keep some of these people in check.

Totalitarian nations have no civil society. The more civil society in a country, the more democratic it can be. There are very few fully totalitarian nations, but we can see these systems of government increase as civil society decreases. North Korea is completely totalitarian with no visible counter to the current government. China used to be more complete, but civil society has been growing there. When nations like Russia want to increase governmental control, they shut down parts of civil society as does every autocrat seeking to consolidate his or her power. Voluntary organizations are a crucial part of any healthy, transparent, and legitimate democratic system. We can determine the vitality of a democracy by the integration of these groups in the fabric of the nation.

Faith based organizations are historically some of the most difficult to terminate because they are often seen as the moral centers of the community. Shutting them down forces the government to admit a lack of concern with morality, an act most citizens find alarming. Instead, many authoritarian regimes work to befriend religious institutions, seeking to align religious power centers with their own. We can see this happening here in the US with Evangelical churches who have become supporters of some of the more dangerous factions in our current system. This makes our own position as a liberal religious denomination all the more necessary in our current political climate. We continue to have the moral authority to counter the current trajectory and can stand against the wave of conservative religious alignment with the radical right-wing political movement. Our existence, our internal health, and strength, is an essential part of what can turn the tide of American democratic legitimacy. It is our witness to pluralism, an embrace of science as a source of truth, our own democratic structures, our collective voice for choice, for education, for inclusion, and our training of a new leadership class that demonstrates the need for

our witness and the centrality of our voice as part of civil society right now, at this moment in history.

Sadly, this comes at the same time religion is on a steep decline in American culture. Across the country, Unitarian Universalist churches have seen a dramatic reduction in membership. We’ve lost 18,000 children from our RE programs over the last 10 years. We’ve lost 100,000 members over the last 50. In 2020, the average size of a UU congregation was half the size as 20 years earlier. We’re not alone in this freefall, and as liberal religion declines in national influence, so does American democracy.

I don’t think these things are unrelated. Just as people are turning away from institutional religion, the demons of authoritarianism are gaining ground. When the moral centers lose influence and can no longer claim to be our collective conscience, it’s easier for alternatives to take root. Our voices get weaker and are harder to hear.

But lets not pretend we’re inaudible. There are close to 200,000 people in UU churches. We have not given up our space at the table nor our moral authority, even if the tide of totalitarianism hopes to wash over us. This is evidenced, at the very least, by your decision to bring this service to your own congregation today, as so many other UUs congregations are doing. We are interdependent, interconnected, and committed to holding up our shared liberal religious values.

Power Sunday comes from UU’s for Social Justice. UUSJ was founded originally by a circle of UU churches in the Washington, DC area who wanted to leverage their geographic location to influence the federal conversation. About two years ago, UUSJ broke out of that model and opened to UUs around the country to become our collective voice, not just those positioned so closely to DC power centers. UUSJ is a small organization with no full time staff, like so many of our UU groups doing the work of our faith, but with the help of their Executive Director, have had an outsized influence in federal policy conversations. This worship service is designed to get the word out about both our UU potential as a faith community through the work of UUSJ in these national discussions and to hold up one of our own institutions, also part of civil society, in need of support in these fragile days of our democracy. In future years, Power Sunday will include an opportunity for advocacy so we as UUs can leverage our collective power.

Scholars might tell us that American democracy is deconsolidating, but it is far from collapse. Even through significant challenges, the system is holding. With the kick-off of Power Sunday, UU congregations can step into our moral authority in partnership with each other and other liberal religious members of civil society to hold strong against the tide of authoritarianism. Through our connection with UUSJ, the building of our collective power on the Hill, and as a partner with other denominations also holding back the waters of authoritarianism, Unitarian Universalists play a key role in keeping our democracy strong.

Today, in churches around the country, we are raising our shared consciousness, holding up our critical place in the democratic fabric of our nation, tuning our collective voice, and reminding Unitarian Universalists that we are necessary, that we are not alone, and that in this fragile moment of American history, we are powerful.

Yom Kippur: Atonement, Accountability, and Healing

I am angry this week. So angry! Last week, too. And, maybe the week before. It’s sort of been going on for months. I mean, if I’m honest, it started last October. Someone did me wrong last October. Me and my whole family and I’m still mad. For months, when I passed their home, I’d give them the finger. They didn’t see it, but it felt pretty good. I remember a long time ago when we were still protesting Apartheid, a nun I knew used to drive into Shell stations to give people the finger. I’m taking my cue from Sr. O’Neil. It means nothing outside of registering my dissatisfaction, but sometimes that’s all we have.

When I say I’m angry, I mean it, too. And that anger has been distracting for almost a year. It sneaks into my head when I’m not thinking about anything in particular. It fills empty space. It shows up in my dreams. It slips out during casual conversation. In these last two weeks, I even think it’s blocking joy, preventing me from living my life fully.

Early in the summer, I realized I was still so angry because there’s been no accountability. These are people who treated my family badly – my son in particular – for which they’ve experienced no consequences. This is a trigger for me. I have a hard time when people behave badly and are not accountable. And, as I’ve confessed here before, I behave badly when I’m right. They haven’t been held to account and I’m right. This is a bad combination.

I actually do pretty well when I’m wrong. I don’t mind apologizing for things. I even appreciate the opportunity to grow. I find being wrong sort of liberating. If nothing else, I’m in control. I can apologize and make things better. I welcome learning I was wrong. I’m not so gracious when I’m right. In fact, I’m downright self-righteous. I need people to know I’m right. I have yet to learn the grace of being right and being quiet about it.

And this family- they’re not only wrong but they hurt my kid. I’ve been plotting revenge ever since.

I’m obviously not good at the revenge game, though, because outside of giving them the finger from time to time, an act they know nothing about, I haven’t taken any action at all.

So, a few weeks ago, this family acted-out again. My son was hurt. My husband was annoyed. So, they called a friend and went out for ice cream. They returned laughing having forgotten all about what sent them seeking fun to start with. I, on the other hand, stayed home and stewed.

It was then that I realized that I am, in fact, in the wrong.

Not about the situation. I’m wrong – or more accurately – I’m misaligned with a greater Truth. There isn’t anything I can do about what happened or continues to happen. Br. Zachary and I sometimes say to each other, “It’s people being people.” This family- they’re Peopling. Nothing I can do about it. And I’m not wrong that they’re doing the people thing badly. But, when all is said and done, I’m the one suffering from it. And that’s where I’m wrong.

So much of our suffering is forced on us. Death. Financial insecurity. Illness. The loss of human and civil rights. But this – this silly social stuff that most of us spend our time worrying about – that’s optional. Suffering is inevitable. Misery is optional. In fact, if I’m honest with myself, this year of anger is entirely on me. I’m not at fault in the precipitating event, and the feelings and intense response I had last October were appropriate. But, in the months since, my misery has been on me. If I want accountability, I may never get that for these people, but I can get it for myself. I’m creating my own pain.

It’s not the first time in my life I’ve done this and I know I’m not alone. I won’t ask you to raise your hands, but I’ve been in this business long enough to know that we humans, we do this to ourselves. We get angry and we hold on to it, and we create our own misery.

Rosh Hashanah started a week ago on Friday evening, the 15th. Yom Kippur begins this evening. If we hadn’t gone to the climate march last week, I’d have preached this sermon and invited us all into a week of reflection. Instead, I’m limiting our time to today, into tomorrow.

Self-reflection is an important spiritual practice. It’s how we bring ourselves back into alignment. It’s how we connect with our deepest selves, with the god or gods of our understanding, with the great rhythms of Earth, with the source of Love and Truth, with the Ground of Being. We stop. We look. We sit with what we see. We breathe into the reality of who we are.

It is good. We are good. We are also misguided. Unforgiving. Resentful. Reactive. Judgmental. Sometimes we’re joyless. Humorless. Inflexible. Demanding. Entitled. Self-Centered. Arrogant. Thoughtless. Stingy. Sharp. Critical. Any of this sound familiar?

And, if we’re sitting and looking and breathing, we can also see that we are helpful. Kind. Generous. Forgiving. Unassuming. Grateful. Playful. Creative. We can look at ourselves and see that we are open. Curious. Engaged. Gentle. Thoughtful. Relational.

Once we see our full and true selves, our potential for harm and grace, it’s time to repent. There is no repair, no reparations, no way to move forward in healing unless we repent. This is our moment for accountability. We stop. We look. We see. We breath into what’s real. And we begin the work of repentance. Again, there is no repair, there is no healing, if there is no repentance.

I think about this in anti-racism work too. I know sometimes white people feel like we’re being asked to apologize all the time, and often the people who feel that way point out that their families were very poor or they came from another country where they were persecuted or that they were an underclass even here for generations, all making the point that most white people alive today, especially here in New York, weren’t part of the inhumane history of slavery or segregation, so why should we apologize. The presupposition is that it has nothing to do with us. Often, at least in the circles I run in, the people speaking are liberals who understand the impact of American racial history, and they might even be open to institutional reparations.

It isn’t enough. While I might not personally be perpetuating systemic racism, repair only happens after repentance, and the repentance all white people have to consider is the inherent privilege of whiteness and the generations of opportunity on which our lives are based. If there’s going to be repair, we have to reflect honestly, even fearlessly. Acknowledge where we stand in the system. And repent. Healing comes after we say we’re sorry, even if we aren’t personally to blame. We are, nonetheless, the beneficiaries.

I wonder if it might be helpful for you all to think about something for which you might need to repent. It might be, like me, something I’m doing to myself, largely, although those who live with me aren’t protected. Or, it might be your place in our larger systems. It might be something very specific that you did or said that hurt someone you know. Think for a moment. Get that clearly in your mind.

I can ask you to do that because there’s always something. No one can say, “Nope. Nothing. I’m good.” If we’re honest, we know there’s a place that needs mending.

Think clearly about what it is you did. What part of this did you have? Was it your actions? Was it an inaction? Did you cause someone harm? See if you can name it for yourself.

Holding that in mind, how can you repent? There will be people down at the East River throwing bread into the water. Maybe that’s your way too. Or, you can go directly to the source, the person you’ve hurt and say you’re sorry and ask for forgiveness. Or, you can pray, telling the god or gods of your understanding what you’ve done. Seek accountability for yourself.

Forgiveness may or may not come next, specifically when we’re dealing with other people. Nothing we can do about that. That part is out of our hands. All we can do is acknowledge and repent. Acknowledge and repent. That’s the practice. Others will do or feel however they will. This remains true even if the one who was hurt was ourselves.

The practice is necessary either way. The only chance we can bring ourselves back to ourselves, back into alignment, is to see all we’ve done to knock ourselves off course.

Here’s the one assurance I can offer you. Regardless of what you’ve done or who you think you are, you are loved. You are held, right now, even in your brokenness, in a vast matrix of love and welcome.

I’ve been thinking about the spiritual practices of this church. It might be that I need to deepen my own spiritual life and it might be because I’ve heard similar things from some of you, but I’d love for us to think about how we lean into opportunities like the one offered by Yom Kippur. There is a natural rhythm in the human condition and part of that is a time for spiritual reflection. Because of the timing, we’ve missed much of the opportunity of this holiday, so I’m preparing you now for Lent. I am going to invite us all into a deeper, more intentional and longer time toward the end of winter so we can lean in to this kind of healing for ourselves, for those around us, and for the world.

But that shouldn’t take away from today. If you are able and willing, I’m inviting you – as I’m inviting myself – into a day of reflection. Yom Kippur begins this evening and runs through tomorrow. I’m lucky that tomorrow is my day off, so I’ll have some time. I’m going to begin my day writing my reflection. I’ll spend real

time tomorrow putting language to all the things that are blocking me, that I’ve messed up, that I’m guilty of. I’ll then sit with all of that, breathing deeply what it means to be human, what it means to be me right now. And then I’m going to bring some bread to some water and I’m going to name each of these transgressions as I throw bread into water and with each naming, I’m going to ask the god of my understanding for forgiveness.

This is my cleansing ritual, and it might be for you too. Maybe this is a good time for you to take a similar spiritual and moral inventory. Maybe tonight or tomorrow, you can sit with and breath into some of the less comfortable truths about yourself. And, maybe the ritual of bread and water will work for you. Fire is another option. Write it all down and burn it. Kitchen sinks work if you can turn off the smoke detector for a few minutes.

Whatever the actual practice, this invitation is open.

And whatever you find, whatever you see in yourself, we are Universalists. We know that Love is the ground on which we stand, that we were welcomed into the embrace of Love with our first breath, that we are surrounded by that very love in every moment of every day since then, and that we will be welcomed into Love with our last gasp of air.

With that Truth, with Love always at the Center, we will begin our litany.

The Five Stones, Pt. V: Choose Hope

Rev. Jude Geiger, Minister of Community Engagement

September 3, 2023

The prior 4 weeks, I spoke at length about the theology of James Luther Adams and his concept of the five stones. Is this the first time you’re hearing about – real briefly – I’ll try to catch you up. He was one of our Unitarian theologians who was physically active in trying to stave off the rise of Nazism in Germany before he moved back to the States. And his teachings from a century ago, are as relevant today. In short regarding the piece about the five stones, he was looking at the story of David and Goliath and reflecting on what the 5 stones David used would be in modern language to combat oppression. I’ll paraphrase one last time all five stones – it’ll help you memorize them. ;-)

What does our liberal faith say about living? I will paraphrase the much longer piece, which itself is an edit of a sort, using language that might be more familiar to us: 1. Revelation is not sealed — in the unfolding of the human spirit we continuously experience life in new ways and so too does our experience of truth. 2. Relationships between people ought to be free — mutuality and consent are both ethical and theological principles 3. We have an obligation to work toward creating a Beloved Community — our faith inspires us to the work of transformational community that is centered in justice and love. The prophethood of all believers has a corrective effect on systems of oppression 4. Each child that’s born is another redeemer — we are all potential sources of good in the world and each have a role to play. Goodness happens in relationships with one another. 5. We choose hope — Our resources – both sublime and mundane hold all the capacity we need to transform the world.[1]

Again today’s focus is that fifth stone. “We choose hope — Our resources – both sublime and mundane hold all the capacity we need to transform the world.”

Each of these are interdependent with one another, and each is a way to stave off humanity’s totalitarian tendencies.

1) Revelation is not sealed – reminds us that there is no one right way to do all things. Strict adherence to creed is antithetical to the human spirit – and so is following propaganda and groupthink. 

2) Mutuality and Consent are ethical and theological principles. Fascism targets consent first – the show of power over, rather than power with, is the point of Fascism.

3) Building the Beloved Community, and the prophethood of all believers. Community transcends Ego and it transcends charlatans and narcissists. Where the protestant reformation made all of us priests in our own faith, JLA is anointing us all prophets to speak truth to power for the wholeness of Community.

4) Each child that’s born is another redeemer. Fascism wants to segregate, separate and scapegoat whatever “other” they can come up with. If Love is truly at our center, and every child is another redeemer, we remember that we need all of us to survive.

Again today’s focus is that fifth stone. “We choose hope — Our resources – both sublime and mundane hold all the capacity we need to transform the world.” We’ll be talking about a community vision today, and our individual choices to choose hope. Fascism wants us to feel demoralized, to wonder what the point is, or to forget our own power and agency. We began this series talking a little about science and perception, and our faith teaches about the evolution of our ethics and our expressed religious practice. (Evolution in the scientific sense, of adapting to the current reality, rather than in the sense of better and better for ever and ever. Perpetual growth for the sake of growth is a quirk of a bad take on textbook economics; JLA is teaching us about depth, not expansion.) And we’ll end with another discussion about science and ethics.

There’s a notion – I’m not sure where I first encountered it – that makes a distinction about the evolution of science and the evolution of ethics. It suggests that they differ in one notable way. As science unfolds, it progresses on what came before. Each generation is faced with new learnings that are rooted in old learnings, and the body of scientific knowing gets passed on to the next generation to pick up from where prior scientists left off. Barring catastrophes like the Dark Ages, science isn’t lost, it perennially moves forward. It will likely unfold with experts developing into further and further specializations; so that each area of sub specialty gets more and more nuanced and hopefully advanced.

Ethics is a different creature. Although our scholars in the field may function in the same way, building off what came before – as a people – each generation needs to learn and relearn the same lessons. Why is war the worst solution? Why are basic civil rights a thing each generation needs to fight for over and over? Why do we enter and recreate financial crises that we knew would occur – the proverbial market bubbles that we force upon ourselves again and again? It’s because as human creatures, our communal intellect may be willing to build off the lego blocks of past advancements, but our hearts have to start from the beginning with each new generation. And ethics has the additional challenge that there are bad actors who lie to us, or to themselves, or to both – that they are the good actors and not really the bad. For communities, ethics is learned from the ground up, with an ever changing cultural peer review panel whose rules are written and re-written for every generation…  and science starts from the shoulders of past giants; theoretically with a consensus.

Now that statement has a way about it that’s painted in broad strokes. Even if science can give a clear answer – like on the question (or non-question) of climate change – ethics deeply influences our ability to accept it as answer. Likewise, we seem to be able to make the processing power of computers multiple by 1.5 times annually, but ethics seems to stall our improvement of fuel efficiency and our choices to even research renewable resources. But the basic notion is still accurate – we have all the resources to transform the world, but we don’t always choose to do so.

Spiritually, there’s a way in which that feels exhausting. We have all the capacity to affect the changes we need, but we often don’t have the moral courage, or maybe the moral willpower, to pass on the lessons in ways that seem to match. But we can choose to flip that script.

Despair sets in when we think we can’t affect change. That’s either rooted in cynicism, or that’s rooted in facts that paint a bleak picture. Let’s look at both. Staying with the science road, history tells us that the facts of science seem to indicate we have all the capacity we need to affect change in the world. From polio, to penicillin, to the moon landing, to the ozone layer – give us a challenge that we can unite behind, and give us generations to accomplish it, and we can do it. That’s the fact. Cynicism looks at perfect outcomes and pretends that those perfect outcomes are the new benchmark to follow. If we don’t meet the benchmark of perfect, then the solution is flawed and so what’s the point. There’s some interesting blogs out there wrestling with our political situations and the impact of cynicism that I won’t go into here, but there’s a lot of thought out there on this topic of cynicism that you might want to look into on your own.

Our resources, both sublime and mundane, hold all the capacity we need to transform the world. History presents both an onerous and a hopeful record. Each generation must imprint humanity’s moral progress upon the tablets of our hearts anew. We can choose to look at that with despair for the effort, or we can choose to look upon that with awe. We have the capacity to impress humanity’s moral progress anew!!!  It’s a matter of will; it’s a matter of personal and communal choice. That’s our spiritual charge as a religious community.

In a few short weeks, we will be entering the High Holy Days in the Jewish liturgical calendar - how do we begin again in hope after seasons of hardship? As we are come upon these days of awe, can we bear witness to their lessons and apply them to the choice for hope? Do we look upon past choices with despair, or do we choose to look upon them with awe? For the month of September, our sermons and services, we will be imagining what it would mean to be a People of Renewal. How do our choices impact that imagination?

I once heard our regional lead for the Central East Region, the Rev. Megan Foley, was leading worship for 40+ clergy and she had a metaphor that’s really helpful here. She spoke of earlobes and nostrils. I’m going from memory, so I’ll get the gist, rather than quote – but I thank her for getting me to think in this direction. In the body of life, we all have a role. If you’re an earlobe, your role is to be the best earlobe you can be. It’s not to create more earlobes; it’s not to make the nostril over there act more like an earlobe. You may want to put in some effort to help the nostril be the best nostril it can be, but that’s as far as you should go from your role as earlobe – because the world still needs someone to be an earlobe.

That metaphor got me thinking a lot about our mission as a religious community in the face of hardship and hope. We function as a group of individuals; but we also function as a group of groups. There are bodies (committees) that help move forward our social justice work and our anti-racism work; who help to maintain our men’s refugee shelter; who create and curate art, who offer communal pastoral care, and on and on. We don’t need our membership team to take over our shelter, but maybe our membership team can help identify folks who are well suited for direct service work. Our Church Council doesn’t need to figure out the solutions to a better office system, but it can help us all to identify when something isn’t working, or something is working fabulously!  In a community as large as ours, the minutia matters if we want to achieve our common purpose. The earlobes and nostrils of fellowship-work, lead to a common purpose.

In religious community, we nurture our individual spirits through caring for one another and helping to heal the world.  Those are just words, but the impact is larger. We care for our members in times of crisis as best we can, when we know of the challenge; we offer a shelter in the cold weather months and collect and distribute food to those in need. We partner with non-profits the world over, our denomination and other local groups and intake shelters, to offer funds, or organizing, or marching (like on Sept 17), or simply following their lead; and on and on - and that list takes a ton of minutia to happen. We need earlobes and nostrils – as unexciting as that work sometimes sounds – makes the life-saving and life-affirming ministries happen. In these days of renewal, and the coming days of Awe in the Jewish calendar, it’s not just the sublime sunset, or the quiet of the garden that affirm our spirits, it’s the mundane everyday task that takes 30 years to build or rebuild– that also affirms our spirits and blesses our hands to do the work ahead.

In religious community, we nurture our individual spirits through caring for one another and helping to heal the world.  If I were to whittle that down to three words, what would they be? Community, Individual and World? If that were it, it would mean community draws the individual into the world. That’s true – and that’s one of our goals. Maybe, Nurture, Caring and Healing. In a too often broken-feeling world, healing can only come when people choose the path of compassion and support. That’s true too. What I see as central to our religious purpose is the reality that we need to be drawn out of our individual concerns into an accountable community that chooses to heal these corners of the world through care and justice. Sometimes that will be hard; sometimes that will be uncomfortable; sometimes that means that our individual opinions will be in conflict with another’s views, but we do so together.

I’ll close with a matched theological demand to James Luther Adam’s 5th stone. I see the matching demand of progressive faith to be this questions: Does it remind me to live with hope? When we are faced with a belief that challenges us, or leads us to despair, our faith tells us that it’s misleading. If our faith truly teaches us that – Our resources, both sublime and mundane, hold all the capacity we need to transform the world  -(and it does) – then any theology that seeks to cause us to forget hope is a theology that is misleading. Hope doesn’t mean easy; it doesn’t mean perfect; it doesn’t protect us from having to endure through periods of exhaustion or boredom or minutia – but it does make sure we face the world with a healthy sense of awe and possibility. Awe and possibility.

The Five Stones, Pt. IV: When Goodness Happens

Rev. Jude Geiger, Minister of Community Engagement

August 27, 2023

The prior 3 weeks, I spoke at length about the theology of James Luther Adams and his concept of the five stones. Is this the first time you’re hearing about – real briefly – I’ll try to catch you up. He was one of our Unitarian theologians who was physically active in trying to stave off the rise of Nazism in Germany before he moved back to the States. After many requests, I promised I would work through each of the stones in successive weeks. In short regarding the piece about the five stones, he was looking at the story of David and Goliath and reflecting on what the 5 stones David used would be in modern language to combat oppression. After today we have one more to cover, but today, I want to focus on the 4th stone in Adams’ theology. That precept paraphrased is: “Each child that’s born is another redeemer — we are all potential sources of good in the world and each have a role to play. 

Goodness happens in relationships with one another.

Each child that’s born is another redeemer. 

But like the other sermons in the series, I want to start out with a story. When I was a child, one of the worst insults another kid could make toward a boy was to say they acted like a girl; or threw like a girl, or ran or walked like a girl. “Man up”, meant toughen up. Being a guy meant being strong, and loud, and taking up space. And the barbs would come from boys for sure – but those barbs would also come from girls. It would be engrained by implicit actions by adult men, and by adult women. As kids we would voice aloud the stuff that we would quietly live by as adults.

It’s sick. It’s a sickness in our culture that strives to denigrate half our population in order to apparently lift up the other half. But it only does so in appearance. When boys and men are raised to think masculinity has only one form, we box in our boys’ potential as we diminish the worth of our girls. No one wins; everyone loses. The pain is merely felt differently for each of us; but the pain is real. And although we’re all diminished, girls’ and women’s safety is put up as the gamble.

Goodness happens in relationships with one another.

Each child that’s born is another redeemer. 

And it continues well on into adulthood. The worst excesses get normalized as harmless ‘locker room talk’, when what is actually being bantered about - amounts to sexual assault. But we don’t have to go to that extreme to see it in our daily lives. At work, or out and about, take note who takes up room in discussions. Note how we are trained and raised to speak or not to speak. Who gets to repeat the same tired point over and over until folks are beaten into submission, and who struggles to whisper their view even once? Misogyny is a sickness, and we’re swimming in it – we’re swimming in it so - that some of us normalize it, some never notice it, and some are being killed by it.

We’re living in a culture where several women can accuse a public or political figure of sexual assault, and a mainstream media pundits will punish them by tweeting out the women’s home address and phone number. If we wonder why women do not speak aloud in a timely manner after being assaulted, we only have to look to that to know one of the reasons. How is that even legal?! We give the whole public direct access to the potential victim of sexual assault. How traumatic that is for the victim. But there’s also a way in which that punishment for speaking out gets felt by all women, by all victims of sexual assault (not just women.) They’re put in their place – once again. Misogyny is a sickness that demoralizes, victimizes, and sometimes kills.

Goodness happens in relationships with one another.

Each child that’s born is another redeemer. 

Theologically, misogyny is another form of Original Sin. We don’t need to have done anything to be infected by it. Men, women, all people raised in our culture must deal with its imprint on our psyches and on our souls. We’re born into, infected by it, and live lives that replicate the systems of abuse – knowingly or unwittingly – even if we’re also victims of it; because we’re all victims of it. But even if we’ve done nothing to deserve the sin of misogyny, in order for healing, we need to address it. For some of us we’re victims and a whole range of support systems may need to be relied on for healing, for safety, or for justice. If that’s true for you, and you need help, please reach out, and our Church will help in every way we possibly can.

Some of us have internalized it so much, that we contribute without knowing the damage we do – in some ways large, and in some ways small. If I go back to my childhood – being a guy meant being strong, and loud, and taking up space. The flip side meant that being a girl meant being weaker and being a door-mouse. When we find ourselves living by either of those false truths, we need to seek to push ourselves to break free from that bind. Binding lies, break our spirits, harm our world, and risk our lives.

And for the men in the room, we need to do better. We need to be a little more believing of women who say they are in danger. We need to be a little more gracious with the space we dominate. We need to be less permissive of supposed “locker room talk” when we hear it. Women become less safe, and men become less human, when we pretend that language that perpetuates sexual assault is harmless in our personal fantasies. It’s not harmless; it doesn’t further the peace; it doesn’t make space for women (and not only women) to be themselves without fear of harm. We have to do better.

Goodness happens in relationships with one another.

Each child that’s born is another redeemer. 

Theologically, what does that mean for our culture? If every child that’s born is another redeemer, then misogyny is a lie. We’re not better than any other soul because of the happenstance of our birth. Any ethic that lifts one group over another is a spiritual lie that erodes our conscience and diminishes our humanity. Each girl that’s born is another redeemer, and we ought to treat one another appropriately with care and support. Our common humanity is wrapped up in the common redemption of all people. Each of us has the potential to redeem the broken corners of our world.

We are soon coming to the Jewish High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, next month. Throughout the Jewish religious life, these holy days teach us wisely to admit our failings, and atone for the harm we’ve brought into this world – through our actions or due to our inactions. There was a teaching that comes from an 18th century Chasidic proverb. “Keep two truths in your pocket, and take them out according to the need of the moment. Let one be, “For my sake was the world created.” And the other, “I am dust and ashes.”

 This wisdom speaks to us based on where our ego and where our sense of self lie. When we’re allowing the world to step on us, and destroy our sense of worth, we need to remember that for our sake - was the world created. When we’re doing the soul-crushing of another, we need to find more humility and remember that we’re dust and ashes. Misogyny confuses the world into thinking those two proverbs apply distinctly based on gender; as if the world were created only for men, and women were but dust and ashes. If that feels extreme, take a closer look at how men and women are spoken of in the general public, on the schoolyard, and in your work meetings. I don’t think it’s that far off how culture functions at its worst. And it functions at its worst far too much.

But if each child that’s born is another redeemer; if we each have worth and we each having a saving agency to bring to Creation, then that potential for goodness is inherent. That potential for goodness also obligates us in the face of a world full of struggle. If we have agency, goodness obligates us to use that agency for the betterment of one another. To do otherwise is to turn our heads from another’s needs; to become complicit in systems of oppression and indifference that churn through the lives of our children and adults, and through our own lives. The demand this fourth stone places upon us is the perennial question: Do I live into this holy work? At times of hardship, it may be enough to simply try to survive, or to heal. But when we have the capacity to ease the suffering of those around, goodness obligates us to live into this holy work. At those times of strength, living into this holy work means taking seriously when another speaks up about violence or coercion done to them. And to be sure, when we’re going through those times of hardship, living our authentic self is the first movement toward living into this holy work.

The Five Stones, Pt. III: Out of Isolation

Rev. Jude Geiger, Minister of Community Engagement

August 20, 2023

When I was still living in Brooklyn, we had a small garden that wraps around our terrace – think herbs and some wild flowers and grasses. When the weather is nice, I wrote my sermons from there. It’s probably why I have so many nature references in my sermons. My dog would lay down in the shade of one of the flower boxes, and my cat gets the proverbial popcorn and watches the “Nature Channel” in my garden. Everything is extremely fascinating to our cat – Toby. He’ll stare at ants like they are alien creatures, but won’t go too close or engage. Bees on the other hand – bees turn him into a jerk. He’ll stalk them and swipe at them if they linger too long on a flower.

At first I was horrified – without a clue as to what to do about it. I have a mild allergy to bees, so I’m not going to get too close to intervene, but they also don’t deserve that fate before the claws of my cat. In another feat of dog-training magic, I’ve figured out how to train our dog to tackle the cat when he goes for a bee. It was based off an earlier essential lesson in tackling-the-cat when the cat scratches the furniture. Basically, we’ve trained our dog to tackle small cats on command. I think it’s fun for everyone really, but I’m sure the bee appreciates it as much as my couch does – I dare say more so. Enough times being tackled by the dog, the cat is becoming increasingly hesitant to swipe at bees (it doesn’t seem to stop him though from destroying our furniture though. Can’t have everything I guess.)

Bees are interesting creatures. The common wisdom is that they defy all laws of aerodynamics in order to fly with their wings that should be too light for their bodies to get lift; but they still do. They live cloistered away with several thousand of their closest family members. They work tirelessly, so that the next generation which they may not live to see, can be born in another season. How many millions of worker bee hours does it take to produce one jar of honey for our toast and tea? …Then they return, again and again, to the field, to gather more and more food for the honeycombed table.

From the perspective of us humans in the northeast, they are gone for half the year, isolated from the cold and inclement weather. Even raindrops can be a challenge when you’re that small. When I water my garden, they head for the hills. Then as the weather turns to spring and summer, they fly back out of seeming isolation, and live fully in the wider world. Food, and garden hoses, and allergic bystanders, and yes, even psycho-killer felines are here to greet them as they return. It’s a microcosm of the world we live in, and just as true.

We all have our times of quiet, introversion, rest and renewal, in between the periods of work, or study. For the bee, it’s the call of physical nourishment, that brings them out of their quasi-isolation from the world. No matter how much we hunker down, at some point, the reserves run dry and it’s time to go back out for connection.

This year Rev. Peggy will continue to lead us in imagining what it would mean to be a people of covenant. Maybe you know the word covenant mostly from Jewish and Christian and Muslim stories about God and God’s people. That understanding is about the promises we are given, and the promises we are held to, in light of the demands and support given to us by God in those stories. But for today though, I want to focus more on what promise is held in covenant. Community and covenant draws us out of loneliness into a shared humanity that defines our lives.

In UU Congregations, Churches, Societies and Fellowships, one thing is almost universally true - the essence of the covenant centers around our desire to be accountable to one another. In a secular world where consumerism and convenience trumps a sense of a common ethic of mutual support, it’s imperative for religious communities to stretch out to, and within, one another to build the common good. Covenant is about building the common good – or what Martin Luther King Jr commonly referred to as the Beloved Community; a phrase we each recite every Sunday as part of our services.

Last Sunday, I spoke at length about the theology of James Luther Adams and his concept of the five stones. In short, for those that missed it, he was looking at the story of David and Goliath and reflecting on what the 5 stones David used would be in modern language to combat oppression. I’d like to focus on one more of those stones. In the next two weeks I’ll get to the 4th and 5th stone. But today, I want to focus on the 3rd stone in Adams’ theology – and go a bit further with it than I was able to in the first of sermon in the preaching series. That precept paraphrased is: “We have an obligation to work toward creating a Beloved Community — our faith inspires us to the work of transformational community that is centered in justice and love. The prophethood of all believers has a corrective effect on systems of oppression.”

As I paraphrase it, community has a corrective effect on systems of oppressions. Theologically, covenant is the antithesis of oppression. You only build a covenant when folks come to it with equal footing, and when we have equal footing, we can hold one another accountable from an equal place. So when we talk here about someone falling out of covenant, we’re talking about a situation in our Fellowship, where one person is leveraging their power, or their feelings, over and beyond the shared agreement of how we work together collaboratively. It’s referring to a situation where the individual ego is leading over another person’s worth, or another person’s pain. And to be fair, we all fall for the tricks of the ego. Falling short of our covenant doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, it means that you’ve let your ego run before the rest of us, before all of us, and that’s something we all do from time to time. We all do it. It’s human, and it’s our quintessential challenge to overcome as humans. As UU’s we choose to face that challenge together; publicly, and to do that together publicly fosters some awkward moments. So when we fall for it, and someone points it out, try to hear it with love, and begin again and again. It’s being human at our best.

Last week, I also spoke about demands that our faith places upon us in relation to those precepts – those “stones” Adams proverbially spoke about. The matched demand to this third precept would be the theological question, “Does this thing or value before us, seek to bring more harmony and more equity in our relationships (– even if the work is very difficult?)” What does that mean though in every day language? When we’re trying to decide on an action, or a belief, or a value, or an angered reply to something someone says or does in our community – the essential question follows: Does our response bring more harmony and equity to our relationship? If the answer is yes, great. If the answer is no, then we are straying from the religious path our faith challenges us to adhere to. When we ask ourselves if our response or actions bring more harmony or equity, and the answer is no, we’re falling prey once more to our lone ego. The domain of the ego is isolation, and community calls us out from that lonely place. I believe that progressive faith calls us out of isolation, to do much in the world, but it also calls us out of isolation to spiritually mature past or through our attachment to ego. And it’s in that maturing through our attachment to ego, that we also begin to do much good in the world.

 See that? We sometimes joke that we can believe anything. I don’t agree with that, and if you think I’m wrong, then next week let’s plan for me to preach about whatever I personally feel like and see what happens. 

 Because we can’t. We can’t believe anything. We’re not about belief, but we have central values that are very specific, even if we don’t always see it. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring together what demands our theology places upon us. Our actions in the world, as UUs, as religious people of faithful purpose – demand that we act so that we nurture harmony and equity in human relations. When we act from anger, or ego, we’re being very human, but we’re falling short of our theological convictions. We’re not evil for doing it necessarily, but we have fallen short, and our faith calls us out, calls us in, and calls us for more.

The Five Stones, Pt. II: Broken Twigs

Rev. Jude Geiger, Minister of Community Engagement

August 13, 2023

We’re at our second sermon in a five week preaching series on the ethics of James Luther Adams – an early to mid 20th century Unitarian Harvard professor who was committed to combating the rise of Nazism both abroad, and at home. We’ll take a circuitous route today through a few stories that all touch upon his second of five stones (it’s a later editors’ reference to the David and Goliath Story where with five stones, an oppressive attacker was beaten back by a kid with a sling.) It goes – “Relationships between people ought to be free — mutuality and consent are both ethical and theological principles.”

First Story:

A few years back – prep-pandemic – I  attended ten days of working conferences for religious professionals. One part of those conferences was primarily about having difficult conversations. How do we as leaders, how do we as religious people, have the difficult conversations around the big topics: money, race, death and sexuality. I was also asked to lead part of the workshops around race, identity and racism. Not surprisingly, the week started with the comparatively easy (I kid) topic of money, and (not surprisingly) saved sexuality for the last day.

One of the premises of the conference was that we needed to understand our frameworks around each of these topics if we’re to have the difficult conversations within our communities of faith. Where we start from, when we’re thinking about race or death, has as big (or even bigger) an impact than any set of facts or subset of knowledge on the topics. What’s our story about money or sexuality, and how do we tell it? One of the odd stand-outs for a very unusual conference for religious professionals, was realizing that if something happened to me, my husband would have a hard time figuring out where all of my investments, or retirement portfolios are, where my bank accounts are and so on. That’s something we’re still working on fixing, but it taught me something about myself that I hadn’t quite realized: Part of me is still living, in some ways, a story of individuality.

“Relationships between people ought to be free — mutuality and consent are both ethical and theological principles.”

Don’t get me wrong; almost everything that impacts our household goes through a rigorous schedule of fretting, and arguing – like any very happily married couple. But there are some habits of the single years, that I haven’t quite put to rest – even now 8 years into married life: shared documentation, shared calendars, and negotiating where we go for Thanksgiving and Christmas – all still trip us up – even after 8 years married and 13 years together. How do we start a shared google calendar – has become a seasonal refrain that despite all my tech savvy, I find extremely onerous. Individuality runs deep in our culture, and it’s a hard practice to unlearn – and I don’t think I’m alone here on this.

Another side of individuality is isolation. We all live in isolation at some time in our lives, even if we’re surrounded by people all the time. (And we don’t have to be alone to be in isolation.) It’s another story we tell ourselves: how alone are we…We can become most aware of it when we’re going through times of crisis – whether or not we have all the communal support we can ever dream of – how we relate to crisis can determine if we tell our story as individuals, or tell our story as part of something larger. Do we fight that struggle with cancer as lone warriors, or do we let ourselves lean on our friends and neighbors for moral support, even knowing still that we are the ones that have to go in for chemo? When our relationships wither, do we reach out, or do we hunker down? Having good friends and family – even when we have many of them – doesn’t necessarily mean we let them in when the road gets rough. Sometimes that might be the right choice – only you know that answer for yourself – but sometimes we think isolation is the best choice – even when it’s not.

Second Story:

I was listening to an interview with a comedian some of you may know, Patton Oswalt. He was being interviewed on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. At the time - He’s a man in his mid to late forties with a 7 year old daughter. His wife suddenly died in her sleep – there was no warning. She had been working very long hours and he finally convinced her to stay home and get some sleep; there was an accidental and very tragic dose of sleeping medication…. He’s been very public with his grief, and he took a long break from his work in comedy. Something he said about grief in the interview really struck me as true. “If you don’t talk about it, then grief really gets to setup and fortify its positions inside of you and begin to immobilize you. But the more you talk, the more you expose it to the air and to the light, then grief doesn’t get the chance to organize itself, and maybe you can move on better and easier…

…[grief] can’t be remedied, it must be endured – and it’s the endurance, oddly enough, that becomes the remedy.”

He goes on to talk about how he’s found that not only has talking about his grief with others helped him to move forward with his life as an individual and then as a widowed dad of a young child, but he’s learned that his sharing has helped others in extreme grief find avenues for healing. Speaking our stories has a healing power that can help us get back to living more fully after times of great loss.

“Relationships between people ought to be free — mutuality and consent are both ethical and theological principles.”

Third Story:

This reminds me of the old folk saying about twigs. Take any twig you find and try to snap it. It’ll break pretty easily. Put that same twig into a bundle with other twigs, and it gets harder and harder to break. I think when we separate ourselves too long from one another, from community or friends, we can become like that singular twig. Life’s pressures can become too much; grief or loss can become too much – and we don’t have to do it alone.

Alone or together – the story we tell about our life changes us. British fiction author Terry Pratchett said, “People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.” Well, we are a people of story. Most of my sermons start by telling another type of story – basically parables of daily living. For us, we don’t have to imagine being a people of story as much as consciously realize how deeply stories impact our lives and our living.

What are the stories you come back to year after year? What stories do we raise our kids on, and why? Which stories defined your character, or pull on your heart strings, or get you in the gut when they resonate with what’s happening in your life? As Pratchett writes, people are shaped by stories – we should choose our stories wisely. And we should choose the stories we tell about our lives just as wisely. What negative story do you choose to try to convince yourself is true about you? I spoke about separation and isolation before, but there are many other stories we tell about ourselves that harm more than help.

Fourth Story:

Some time ago, a colleague of mine was sharing a story about their congregation on Facebook. (I have permission to share this here.) He wrote, “One thing that I never expected to be quite so good at – helping calm really little kids down who are missing their parents. I wonder if this sort of inherent knowledge came when I was hired as a DRE, or if it was there all along.” On one level, there’s a story we all tell about our capacity to be in the world; what we’re good at, what we’re bad at, and what our roles are in our lives. But on the spiritual level, his story reminded me about the central purpose of communities of faith – and I don’t say this flippantly. All religious life is essentially helping one another struggle through our separation anxiety: our sense of separation from the Holy, from God, from one another. In times of grief, we remember those who have died in our lives. In times of change, we hold one another’s hands to remember we’re not alone. In the every day, or maybe for you only a few times in your life, we struggle with whether there is meaning and depth to this world; whether we’re part of something greater. For some the answer is community, or compassion, or justice-building. For the more mystical among us, I believe we’re never truly alone – but despair sets in when we forget that truth. Religious life is helping one another through our struggle with separation and isolation, through grief and loss. And the other side of that struggle is a question of the spirit – and an answer that draws us back out – again and again.

“Relationships between people ought to be free — mutuality and consent are both ethical and theological principles.”

Fifth Story:

Let me try out today a new metaphor: The parable of the Chili Bake. I hope this will explain all things. Social media is sometimes an odd place to be in my friendship circle. One mid-western colleague was talking about the sounds and looks of horror in a NYC deli when she asked to put Lox on a Cinnamon Raisin Bagel, and further out west,  a bunch of my Texas friends and colleagues were talking half-seriously (but very half-seriously) about Texas state politics and a recent accusation that a certain candidate (who will remain nameless here) puts beans in his Chili. There were gasps, and comments of, ‘well this is getting dirty now isn’t it.’ Then enters the Jersey-boy/New Yorker and I slowly raise my proverbial hand and ask, “If you don’t put beans in your chili, what do you put in your chili.” Insert more gasps.

Two Texas colleagues came to my rescue and explained what their bean-less chili is – how to my Italian ear what they were describing was actually just spiced sauce – no, no, no, there’s too much meat in there for it to be sauce. Which then sounded like they were talking about hamburger helper, which produced more gasps and not a few sighs. No, no, no, it’s straight beef, not ground meat. And on, and on. I recall saying that, “Wow, it’s like we use the same words but they have different meanings.”

Then one saint stepped in and performed what I will call “Chili exegesis.” Rev. Joanne Fontaine Crawford.

She explained: “The Authenticity answer: chili is cowboy food. On long cattle drives, you didn’t have room to carry a lot of supplies. Certainly not beans. 

Texan Foodie answer: a properly made chili has no need of beans. It is not like what passes for chili in other places just minus the beans. It is usually slow cooked for hours and is full of chiles, spices, and good meat (not ground beef, shudder) and you want to taste that without the “filler” of beans. In a proper bowl of Texas red, you can stick your wooden spoon in the middle of the pot, and it will stand up straight with no help, because it’s that thick. 

Practical answer: in Texas, chili isn’t just one dish. Chili is an ingredient. It’s thinned and poured over enchiladas, thick and added to hot dogs, used to make frito pie, etc. You eat beans on the side.””[1]

It’s almost as if we are using the same words but they mean different things. And they’re both still chili; just a chili that addresses the answers for the people in the place where they are (whether that answer be cowboy food, an ingredient in another more elaborate dish, or a entrée of its own.) As my theology professor, Dr. James Cone, would often repeat, “Theology is how we make and understand meaning in the world.” Each community, each people, is going to wrestle with the answers and questions before them in their own way. (And yes, it’s still wrong to put Lox on a Cinnamon Raisin Bagel.)

“Relationships between people ought to be free — mutuality and consent are both ethical and theological principles.”

I made a choice in this sermon to focus on the everyday side of this second stone of James Luther Adams. A bunch of stories about everyday togetherness, mutuality and daily free exchange of ideas, stories and life. Consent would be a series of sermons all on its own. And we’ll get there over the years together. But I made the choice to focus on the everyday – right-relationship side – of this message because we all could benefit from honing in on how to rebuild that when we don’t all see the world the same way. Here in Metro NY, that is our next goal. Rebuilding relationships that understand what mutuality means when we don’t all understand the world in the same way; because we simply don’t – as the news daily reminds us.

The Five Stones, Pt. I: Unitarian Ethics and Theology

Rev. Jude Geiger, Minister of Community Engagement

August 6, 2023

I’ve told this story about how I found UU before, so I’ll be brief, but it’s important for today’s wider message. I was 19 when I found Unitarian Universalism. In some ways, I share the usual story for converts to our faith. In my case, I was a devout Catholic who had come to accept that there was no Hell, that God was loving, and that homosexuality was not a sin – but an expression of love. In other ways, my story was unusual. I found a UU Fellowship in northern NJ through a job. For a host of reasons, I dropped out of college in my first year studying environmental science. After getting laid off from a part-time job at a chain bookstore right after Christmas, I got word that a church was looking for a custodian. Over the next three years, that job expanded into their events coordinator (think weddings and art shows.) I was still pushing the mop, I was coordinating weddings, and I was back in college – this time studying religion and anthropology. For those of you going through a tough time with school or work, try to remember that you never know how things will turn out. Some of the worst times of our lives, still find a way to end eventually, and there can be something new in store for any of us.

In many ways, the Morristown UU Fellowship was the last place I would have imagined myself joining. They were a staunch atheist fellowship that had severe allergies to theological language – and I very much believe in God. H forbid anyone use the G word. And the J word was right out! Buddhist influence wasn’t wide-spread enough yet in the mid-nineties to inform the spirituality of the services overtly. And yet there was a lot of heart in their meeting space on Sunday morning. There was a there – there – that I couldn’t exactly place at the time. If I’m honest with myself, my younger self appreciated the stark contrast to conservative Christian teachings that I hadn’t yet worked through. It was a community that was wrestling with the nature of being. And that was enough for me. I didn’t need an answer, I needed a space to find myself, and live into community.

The next congregation I was a member of, couldn’t have been further afield in style or expressed theology: All Souls in Manhattan. Largely toted as NYC’s only New England Style white-steeple church. A 1500 member churchy-church, with an organ, actual pews, multiple pulpits, and monthly communion services. I joined there while I was in graduate school.

Both settings are Unitarian Universalist. Both hold the same values. Both are seeking a faith path that is open to hope, possibility and joy. Openness, mindfulness, reverence – have become central in most of our congregations. All of our communities have religious humanists and religious theists among us. Trappings are the difference, not content. All of our congregations have a central UU theology – in some locations it’s more clear and others it’s simply felt beneath the skin.

I’ve long identified as a sort of hybrid UU. Denominationally speaking, most of us are converts and some of us are life-long UU’s. I have converted to this faith, but I did so right at adulthood – so in many ways this feels like my life-long choice. By a show of hands, how many of you have been attending our Fellowship for 2 years or less? How many of you have been a UU since childhood (prior to turning 18?) How many for 30 years or more? (I love watching the changing demographics!)

Now I’m guessing that the folks that have been attending for 2 years or less are thinking – “Oh good! We’re finally going to hear someone tell us what the central UU theology is.” I think it would be safe to guess that the folks who have been UU for 30 years or more are thinking, “Oh good! We’re finally going to hear someone tell us what the central UU theology is.”

Being a non-creedal faith is both a strength and a challenge. Folks are reticent to assert theological claims when we have no test of belief. We don’t want to make any theological truth statement because we appreciate that we all see the world differently and that’s not what we’re about. Some years ago, I was attending an annual conference of religious professionals in Williamsburg, Virginia. One Sunday evening I attended worship at their local Episcopal church – which was led by a former professor of mine when I was studying in England, and who became a dear friend of mine over the years when he moved to the States. They got to the point in the service where the community recited the Nicene Creed. For those who are unfamiliar, this is a minute or two long creed with some very specific theological details in it (just about none of which I actually agree with.) My UU colleagues next to me were visibly shocked (one actually jumped – and he’s not a jumper by nature) when I began reciting it from memory. For context – it had been over 20 years since I had attended a Catholic Mass, and left the Catholic church in my high school years. …We have nothing like that. Although I imagine we could begin the practice of reciting our 8 principles as a covenant and it would fit that role. Our principles are promises we struggle to keep with each other. But they’re action statements – not creedal assertions.

Our UU theology is rooted in our six sources. But our sources themselves are not strictly a theology. Our sources are not an interfaith smorgasbord, although we sometimes treat them as such. “I prefer the course of cultural Christianity and a heavy dose of agnosticism please.” They ground us in our religious meaning. Any theology would need to reckon with them to be true to our core. Here they are more simply put: Transcendent mystery and wonder moves us to a renewal of spirit. Prophetic deeds challenge us to confront systems of oppression with compassion. All world religions hold wisdom to inspire our ethical and spiritual lives. Love our neighbors as ourselves. Reason and science warn us against idolatries of mind and spirit. We are part of this world and ought to live in harmony with it. (Ok, maybe that could work as our Nicene Creed.) None of these sources answer whether we ought to believe in God or not, but frankly – that’s not what our theology could ever look like again. But our Six Sources are rich in very different ways. They give us space to be true to ourselves, to learn how to live into community, and hold a rich depth in themselves. And we’d be hard-pressed to come up with a reason to disagree with any individual source – except for maybe how we apply them.

That’s a framework though, and not a theology. One friend once asked me, “but isn’t the central theology of Universal Unitarianism that there isn’t a central theology of universal unitarianism? Theological Switzerland, so to speak?” I won’t fault him on his placement of U’s in that sentence. And he’s right in a way. We tend to live with an explicit theological message that this is so: All are welcome. All can see the world the way they see it. (The only really important theological question is the nature of God so let’s just say we don’t have a theology because we’re not going to touch that one!) But that’s not the case.

I’ve been heavily inspired by the writings of James Luther Adams. He’s a mid-20th century theologian, minister and academic from the US who lived in Germany in the 1930s and was active in the clandestine resistance to the rise of Nazism. We often take our theologians out of context. And as I talk about his thoughts, keep his experience in Germany in mind.

After the breadth of his 40+ years of writing were complete, folks started pulling together bits and pieces of his thinking, jumbled them together, and came up with some pretty helpful combinations. One such is an essay on “The Five Stones.” It’s a metaphor back to David and Goliath. In the Jewish story, a teenager “David” manages to defeat the Giant named Goliath on the field of battle with a sling and five stones. It’s a violent story, but a course of action that prevented two armies from colliding. There was one death instead of thousands. For JLA, the five stones become a metaphor for how we can combat systems of oppression in the world. What are the five things we can do that will unbind the oppressed? In modern language – how do we end Racism, Homophobia, Classism and Misogyny – to name a few.

What does our liberal faith say about living? I will paraphrase the much longer piece, which itself is an edit of a sort, using language that might be more familiar to us: 1. Revelation is not sealed — in the unfolding of the human spirit we continuously experience life in new ways and so too does our experience of truth. 2. Relationships between people ought to be free — mutuality and consent are both ethical and theological principles 3. We have an obligation to work toward creating a Beloved Community — our faith inspires us to the work of transformational community that is centered in justice and love. The prophethood of all believers has a corrective effect on systems of oppression 4. Each child that’s born is another redeemer — we are all potential sources of good in the world and each have a role to play. Goodness happens in relationships with one another. 5. We choose hope — Our resources – both sublime and mundane hold all the capacity we need to transform the world.[1]

This faith statement is central to our UU theology. If you are craving an affirmation or a negation of the nature or existence of God, I can only say again – that’s not how we do theology. Our kind of theology is like the scientific method. When we learn that Newtonian Physics is only correct at certain speeds and certain proximities to really big gravitational objects (like the Earth going at about the speed we happen to be going) we don’t throw out physics and say Science (I hope you can hear the capital S) is wrong. We say that there’s a process of testing and observation to follow. Likewise, our theology is one of testing and observation. When you have questions of purpose, belief, or values ask yourself – Does this thing or view leave room for the ongoing evolution of the human spirit? Does it draw me closer into a community that is mutually supportive? Does it seek to bring more harmony and more equity in those relationships – even if the work is very difficult? Does it falsely make me forget that I have the capacity to live into this holy work? Does it remind me to live with hope?

Our theology is both a faith statement and a process of reflection. Our faith teaches us that we can expect to continue to be inspired, to learn from one another, and to seek out that spiritual growth. Wheresoever we freely choose to enter into communities with one another we are doing sacred work – not easy work – not convenient work but holy work. In this we are obligated to vigilantly transform systems of oppression with acts of love and compassion. We all have the capacity to make this happen, and everything that we need to do so already exists. There is a reason to hope in this world.

[1] This is a paraphrase of James Luther Adams. Various sources include “On Being Human Religiously”, The Tapestry of Faith Online Curricula, The GOLDMINE Youth Leadership School and the 2012 Keynote address at the LREDA Fall Conference by Dr. Raser.

God Isn’t, Can’t or Won’t: The Question of Suffering

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister
May 7th, 2023

I stood in my kitchen on Friday with a friend of mine. Aracelly is a good woman who left Guatemala more than 30 years ago with nothing but her 3 year old son. She worked in a factory, learned how to speak English, became a US citizen, got married and today lives quite comfortably with her husband having had 4 more children and now some grandchildren. And on Friday, she was telling me how grateful she is for everything she has.

Then she reminded me that none of it mattered, that she’d willingly give it all up if only she could have her son back. That little 3 year old, some years later, died in a car accident. There in my kitchen she cried, as she’s done in my kitchen so many times. And she posed the question that she poses again and again, especially in the springtime, around the anniversary of his death.

Every time she says “Why, Peggy? What have I done? Why did I deserve this?” Her friends and her priest have given her answers like “God tests those he loves most” and “This is how God proves to others who really loves him.” Somehow it’s her job now to bear witness to her unwavering faith. Many spiritual traditions advise the benefits of suffering. It forms character, it opens us to intimacy with God, it sets “good” in clear relief, all the more appreciated for the contrast.

If those answers worked for her, she wouldn’t spend so much time asking those questions year after year, nor would the millions of other people when drowning in their own pain. “Why? Why did this happen?” We grasp for meaning when the world feels most cruel. We search for the only ground we think we might find. “Why?”

Suffering is religion’s Achilles Heel. This is particularly true for monotheistic traditions that posit a single powerful, knowing and even controlling god. God with a capital G. God as Designer. Director. It’s lovely and safe and is a very popular understanding for billions of people. But, that vision and image of God has trouble holding up to the realities of human pain.

Suffering is inescapable. No one lives without grief. In the course of a week, most people don’t talk about it, but there is no person you have met, no one any of us encounters who hasn’t experienced real pain. We’ve lost children and parents and siblings and friends and lovers to death, to addiction, to dementia, and possibly to violence. Grief is an ongoing part of the human experience.

While much of that is common, there’s also uncommon suffering. Children in Ukraine are being taken from their families to be brought to Russia for adoption. Uyghurs in China have been pushed into forced labor camps to punish them for being Muslim. The list goes on and on. Sudan. Ethiopia. Palestine. Iran. These are the modern hot-spots, but there will be a different list in a year because life on this planet is difficult.

I took a course in graduate school on the Holocaust, the uncommon suffering that is most present in my own family. That course was my first introduction to the depths of human depravity and a serious challenge to my faith. It was also the beginning of my quest to understand, to answer the “Why” that inevitably is asked when grief is unexpected. The question that haunted me then and still lives with me, especially as we see similar patterns here to those 15 years in Europe, the question I asked was: Is God all powerful and therefore evil, or is God powerless and therefore useless?

John Roth in his reflection on the Holocaust wrote, “Where was God? Off trimming the divine nails? We want to know the source of this evil, and if God was on-duty when it happened. We want to know who has hell to pay for the evil we see around us. After all, does not Hell seem superfluous?”

How can we believe in a powerful god? If god is good and powerful, why is there suffering? That is, if god could prevent suffering but doesn’t, can god be said to be good? On the other hand, if god is good, but cannot prevent suffering, can it be said that god is powerful?

The religions of the world, humans through history have been asking these things in their own contexts and they’ve left us breadcrumbs to follow, hoping one day we’ll find answers that can hold up in times of trouble.

Distilling all that wisdom down, we can see a few patterns. For instance, a very common response the world-round is the “consolation of a promise”, the notion that there’s something better coming, either in this life, or in another life, or in the after-life. We suffer now, but it’ll be OK in the end with “end” being a flexible term. In Hebrew scripture we are promised a future peace and told that “one day the wolf will dwell with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion will lie down together, and the child will lead them all.” Hindus believe in Karma, in an ultimate system of justice where balance will be found, where we all get what we deserve, but this promise will be made real in our next life. The Qur’an tells us that Allah will give good provision,

that God is indulgent in the after-life. So, in the future, in another life, or after death- at some time we will find peace and/or justice, even as it seems elusive now.

This consolation of a promise is the carrot held out in front of us. Karl Marx called it an opiate, a drug that lulls and distracts us. He suggested that we awaken and claim a more immediate response. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, when confronted with similar promises of a world not-yet, told us that justice delayed is justice denied.

This same promise of consolation comes in sayings like “God has a plan” or “everything happens for a reason”. It sooths us into feeling like things aren’t random, that there’s a purpose and that ultimately, we’re being taken care of, that all will be made right. It feels good to believe the suffering will be justified, although I suspect the good-feelings are often for those who have not been violated. It’s more a remedy for onlookers. I don’t know anyone whose suffering was alleviated by such platitudes.

This consolation of a promise feels like a denial of authentic suffering. A pat on the head and a “don’t worry, it’ll be alright”. That’s not who we are.

This sermon is part of a series called This We Believe. For the last two years, I’ve been teasing out UU theology. The challenge for today isn’t to tell you what all the other religious traditions believe about suffering, but about what we believe. What does Unitarian Universalism have to offer to people in times of tremendous pain?

We don’t deny the depths and reality of suffering. Those promises, those carrots, are necessary only after creating a worldview in which there is external force in charge. In other words, I was asking the wrong question. I was asking about power. Who’s responsible? What solid, stable worldview can give suffering meaning?

But, the precarious pathway of human life challenges the idea that god is both good and powerful, leading many believers to doubt or even to see faith disintegrate when that worldview cannot hold up under the weight of real pain. As UUs, we do not have a mythology to which we have committed ourselves so strongly that we have to continually alter reality in order for it to make sense. We have not indoctrinated a belief in an all-knowing, all-powerful god, so we do not have to struggle with that image while confronting, for instance, the massacre of children in their classroom. We don’t have to ask if god knew in advance or if god chose not to stop it and we do not have to justify god’s actions in the face of it with empty platitudes like “everything happens for a reason”. No grieving mother will ever have to hear that here.

After struggling for 2 years with writing that paper for that graduate class, (yes, 2 years – it was late) I realized I was asking the wrong question. Power isn’t at the Center. Love is. Love is the highest attribute. I was wrestling with questions of power, as is everyone asking “Why?” and wondering who’s in charge, wondering what we could have done – what prayers we were missing, what actions we didn’t take.

Immediately after the massacre at Sandy Hook, conservative talking heads claimed it happened because Connecticut had fought so hard for marriage equality. The slaughtering of their children was their punishment.

Our theology doesn’t require that we appease an angry god. We don’t think humans are sinners or that god has put us in slippery places and awaits our fall, who keeps us from the pit of hell only by his good grace. We never look into the face of pain and wonder what they did to deserve it.

Unitarian Universalists are free to be shocked when confronted with true suffering. Without an omnificent deity controlling our every breath, we don’t have to be afraid of our own horror and we don’t have to alter our faith in order to make room for reality. Our search for truth includes an embrace of unanswered questions and a confrontation with the depths of human suffering.

For most Unitarian Universalists, hope is not external. Hope does not come from the ancient god of Moses or Jesus or Muhammad. Hope comes from us, from the reality we are creating, the world we are dreaming and building together. Hope comes from this room, from this community. Hope comes from Now and Here. Hope comes from We Who Put Love At The Center of Everything.

Congregational membership, covenanted relationships, are rooted in love. This love sees the Other clearly and entirely. Love isn’t blind; it sees EVERYTHING. Love means we can see each other as whole people, with our potential for kindness and cruelty. It’s a full acceptance of who someone is now, coupled with a profound willingness to help them become more, to help us all become more- to live like we are more.

We are here in the name and in the service of Love.

The question isn’t about whether or not god is powerful. The question is about whether or not we can summon Love, live into Love, act with the open heart of Love so well that we become powerful.

There is no cure to grief. When Aracelly cries, I hold her hand. When George Floyd died, we took to the streets. We are not the source of Love, but we are her magnifiers.

I’m not going to reduce our woes to a need for more love. I know it’s not that simple. And I’m certainly

not going to suggest that if there were more UU congregations we’d be free from violence. But I am going to suggest that when we face into human suffering, it’s the strength of our shared faith, grounded in our covenanted relationships, held by Love, that will bind us when everything else feels like it might fall apart. If there’s hope, I believe it will be found in the radical, counter-cultural, witness of congregations like ours, of people who are willing to name the suffering without dismissing it with platitudes or over-simplifying it because the rabbit hole is too deep or justifying it with an absentee god. If there’s hope, it’s because we are willing to participate in the experiment of being human, moving us forward into the unknown. Awake and afraid, but not alone.

The Pleasure is the Point

The world has become a frightening place. I suppose, it’s always been that way to some degree, and I’m sure every generation is convinced they are living in the end times in one fashion or another. Change does that. Becoming awake does that. With that said, the planet is in a particularly precarious position with about 7 years left before the damage we’ve done to our climate becomes irreversible. Equally frightening is knowing that our democracy is losing the guardrails that have held it together for 250 years, making the foundation for our lives - both the platform for all life and the ground for our particular American context - unstable and dangerously close to collapse. I would argue that we are in a more fragile place than at any other time in human history, both because of the imminent collapse of our planetary systems and because of our access to global communications that force momentum at lightening speeds. While in the past, people might have had time to adjust to advancements, today we live at high velocity. While our direction is destruction, we hardly have time to catch our collective breath before another horrific thing happens, propelling us toward the disintegration of our free society faster than our minds can fully understand all that’s going on. And, even if we weren’t bringing ourselves to the edge of national disaster, climate change is bringing the whole planet there, a problem we can’t seem to summon the will to address in any meaningful way, guaranteeing global catastrophe.

There seem to be two responses to these dual realities. One is an urgent, angry activism propelling people on both the right and the left toward intense, self-righteous politicking. The other is hedonism sponsored by denial. We are either shaking people to wake them up and get them to fight or we’re keeping our heads down, reading romance novels and watching reality TV. Sometimes, we do the activist thing, signing letters, posting frightening facts, showing up for rallies, reading the news daily, and then we burn out, overwhelmed by the distance between where we are and where we need to be, so we spend the next few months keeping our heads down, reading romance novels and watching reality TV.

Neither of these is a perfect solution. I’m not sure either of them will get us anywhere close to where we want to go. It’s possible hedonism will serve those who live into it, focusing on themselves and those in their immediate circles, indulging their physical desires, and even their spiritual desires in the form of churches who preach personal success, hyper individualism through personal relationships with god, and feel-good theologies. And, it’s possible the activists who never let up, who won’t stop until every system reflects their understanding of peace, who shame us into constant participation will eventually create a world where justice rolls down like water. I’m guessing, though, that neither will create a future of balance and joy. There isn’t anything wrong with taking care of yourself nor is there anything wrong with the fire of activism. I’m just not sure that either road is leading to a utopian future.

I am imagining a new world. It’s what the novelist Octavia Butler calls writing Science Fiction. We have to imagine it to achieve it. And when I imagine this utopian future, we’re living in communities of intentionality, with people caring for each other in real and tangible ways. We’re growing food together, we’re sharing resources and skills and training, we’re living slower lives in partnership with each other. We are living with Love at the center of Everything. We don’t get to that new world or whatever science fiction you’re imagining following either the path of self-righteous activism or hedonism.

How we get there matters. We are building the plane while flying it, and the tools we use will determine what kind of plane it is. So, I’m hoping we build with joy, and love, and tenderness and pleasure.

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 suffrage, 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. And singing. And art. And even though we don’t usually say these things from the pulpit, it has to include sex. One day we should talk about why we think sex isn’t something you should talk about in church, but that’s for another day. For today, I’m just noting that if we’re talking about pleasure and joy and art and dance, we shouldn’t forget sex.

In so many ways, we’re all feeling frightened. On Friday evening in a residential neighborhood, a man was firing his AK-15 in his backyard. A neighbor asked him to stop because his infant was having trouble sleeping. In response, he shot and killed him, 3 women and an 8 year old child. This is the world we live in. We are armed to the teeth, shooting children who accidentally knock on our door or drive into our driveway or neighbors who ask for quiet so the baby can sleep. Urgency is not unwarranted. The crisis is real.

The work is necessary, but that doesn’t mean it also has to be unpleasant. The world might feel sharp and hard, but we can greet that with softness, with kindness, with authentic care and whispers to counter the screaming. The revolution is communal, it’s deeply relational. Hyper independence brings us to a place of buying guns to protect our homes and shooting our neighbors for wanting quiet. Instead, we lean into community, into flexibility. We yield to each other. Our softness is our resistance.

Yesterday, I wasn’t feeling well. It’s been happening all week and is related to migraines which I used to get often but haven’t in years. This week was different and Saturday morning I was dragging. I had to write this sermon, take my son to get his haircut, my brother-in-law is in town and we were having dinner with him and my mother-in-law. So, early in the morning I was in my office in front of my laptop pushing through when my husband quietly handed me a banana he’d started to peel. Bananas have been my salvation all week, for reasons I don’t really understand. I feel better after eating one. My husband saw we were out, so without saying a word, he went to the grocery store to get more, then handed me one with some Excedrin and a glass of cold water. It was kind. And generous. And as I was writing about the harshness of the world, it was a reminder of gentleness.

Our activism and our restfulness, our fight for justice and our joy, our chanting in the streets and our singing in the shower, are connected. And, it’s not about needing one to continue the other. It’s that these things are the same. We are building a new world while engaging all of it. This is the revolution.

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 I want to build a world of radical inclusion, I have to live into that vision now. If I want a world where communities are the central sources of goods and services, where we partner with each other, caring for our families and the details of our lives with a larger circle of people, I have to build those communities now. If I want love at the center of everything, I have to put it there now.

The pleasure 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 joy, the sweet 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.

Rest, and the centrality of love, and a shared practice of joy, and the commitment of communities of care are part of my vision for the future. Which means they need to be part of my life right now. Without apology. Without feeling badly that we’re getting ready for our climate action by painting fabric and learning paper mâché, or even though we’re furious about yet another black man being killed, we can bring singing to the streets to help heal our heartbreak. And when we’re back home, it’s OK to take a hot bath, to let a new soundtrack take you away, to eat a favorite meal or get a full body massage. More than OK. These things are all part of the creation of the new world. These are the tools because these are what the plane, is made from. The pleasure is the point. It is the vision of the new world. Communities working together, building something new, sourced by joy and a vision for something better.

I brought chocolate with me. We’re going to eat it, together. I’m calling it communion. In my theology, communion is the action we take to connect. The word comes from Latin literally meaning With Together. It’s an act of Being With. It might mean being with god or gods or connecting with others or the ground of our being. In November, I learned that there was a tradition of cornbread communion and you all introduced that to me. I’m now introducing you to chocolate communion.

Chocolate is sensual. It’s sweet and soft. The chocolate I brought will melt in your mouth, extending the pleasure. When eaten slowly, it can be joyful. And when eaten together, it can also be communal.

It feels like a window into the world I’m dreaming about. A place we rest together, enjoy life a little, experience something indulgent, in community. Not only part of the future I hope to imagine into existence, it’s part of the present I want to live into. I want us to offer each other things that are beautiful and delicious. Without

guilt or shame, without anyone telling us to do better or be more or work harder, I want to share chocolate. Chocolate, With Together. Communion.

A few notes- please don’t leave the wrappers for someone else to pick up. There’s a garbage on your way out. If you are allergic to nuts, it might be safer not to eat it. You know your own body, but Lindt says that their chocolate might have come in contact with nuts.

While the chocolate is going around, we’re going to sing. Indulge. Listen to the music. Taste the chocolate. The pleasure is the point.

Love is the Enduring Force

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

February 26, 2023

What would it look like if Love was at the center of everything?

What if Love was the organizing principle of your condo or coop board? What if Love was the organizing principle of your kid’s school? What if Love was the organizing principle of our city or state government? What would it look like if, when making decisions, Congress asked themselves what the most loving choice would be? What if corporations prioritized Love over profit? What if Love was the driving force, the central principle of every institution, every organization, of our lives? What if we recognized Love as the one constant, the critical reality that never loses value, over time? Millennia? The universal force for good, recognizable in every cultural context. What would happen if we put Love at the center of Everything?

I suppose, if that was a revolution we’d want to spark, the place to start would be religious institutions. And if we were starting with a religious institution, it may as well be our own. And if it was going to start with us, we may as well start now. But first, let’s look at how we got here.

It was the year 2009 and General Assembly, the annual gathering of UU delegates, was taking place in Salt Lake City. A lot of business is covered at these gatherings and thousands of people representing their congregations are there to learn and debate and embody the critical relationship between governance and theology. My husband, Graham, was there on behalf of our home church in Mt. Kisco, and there was an item on the agenda that had his attention. The language for our Seven Principles and Six Sources was potentially going to be altered and the new version, in his opinion, downgraded atheism. Graham wasn’t happy. My 15 hour days were over and I was done with GA, very much looking forward to catching a plane home, but Graham insisted we stay for this vote. He even went to the mike to speak against the proposed change. The debate was heated. Usually debate gets cut when one microphone- the pro or the con- has a long line and the other has no one, indicating that the gathered group was coming around to a conclusion, but this debate had long lines at both. When time ran out, people voted for more time, and the discussion was extended. There was no clear winner here, so Graham insisted we stay to make sure our votes are counted. Cutting our travel time very close, we remained in our seats with our pink voting cards in the air to ensure our opposition to the change was noted. With more than 4,000 people in the room, it came down to 13 votes, and two of them were ours. The motion to change the language failed. We ran for our plane.

I wasn’t as committed to keeping the language as my husband was, but I did find the whole process fascinating. The Seven Principles and Six Sources are written into the bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association which is a collection of congregations who have committed to a loose relationship with one another, largely bound by covenant as expressed in these bylaws, while remaining entirely independent. When the text was first written and codified, it was 1961 and was done as part of the merger between two separate denominations, the Unitarians and Universalists. Because both groups were non-creedal, they were concerned about putting anything in such a document that might, over time, ossify. They were afraid if we outline our theology even in the barest of terms, people might grow too attached, ultimately not allowing the language or the theology to change over time. We do, after all, believe that Revelation continues to unfold. So, in addition to writing a brief statement of faith intended to hold these two historic groups together, they also built in an automatic deliberation of that statement every 15 years, forcing us to at least consider changing the language periodically.

In 1961, there were 6 principles which included “to cherish and spread the universal truths taught by the great prophets and teachers…immemorially summarized in the Judeo-Christian heritage as love of God and love to man” and another that said “to encourage cooperation with men of good will in every land”. I’m grateful we assumed regular revisions. Those statements remind me of the language you’d have found in many Unitarain churches in the first half of the 20th century that said, “We believe in the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, the Leadership of Jesus, Salvation through Character and the Steady Progress of Mankind Onward and Upward Forever.”  Over time we’ve become more expansive, more inclusive, and generally more open to a larger variety of ways people connect to the world spiritually. We extended to 7 Principles and 6 Sources. We altered language first to include women, and more recently to let go of the binary altogether. We’ve also tried to do a lot of wordsmithing; the vote in 2009 was one example, but there have been others. I was part of a group hoping to alter the words “every person” to “all beings”, and we’ve all been part of a move to add the 8th Principle to encourage and support our commitment to anti-racism, anti-oppression work.  

Honestly, this is why I hate bylaws. I think every set of bylaws should say as little as possible. You’ve all seen it here when we try to change a bylaw, a task I think we’ll take on at the next congregational meeting in a few weeks. Now imagine there are thousands of people in the room. Yes, it’s as bad as you think it is. With an equal level of frustration, someone proposed something new. What if, instead of having hundreds of congregations wordsmithing our Principles and Purposes and Sources, all part of Article II in our bylaws, what if we change it completely? What if we consider broad values we all share instead of trying to get so specific?

A covenant, which is the language used to introduce these Principles, is not a creed or an unchanging declaration or the final word on anything. It’s a framework, a way of relating, an understanding between people that we are in this together, that we are partners in the work. It’s an acknowledgment of a relationship that exists regardless of how we behave. A covenant calls us to presence, to trust, and sometimes to sacrifice. It is humble, knowing change is required in response to an unfolding and unpredictable future. It is in movement, always being renewed, always seeking a new harmony with new voices. A covenant is also stable and stabilizing. It is the container within which we exist together, providing walls to lean on, keeping us within boundaries as we engage all the complexities of human relationships.

As members of this Association, we are all, technically and maybe just theoretically, in covenant with one another. One of the few ways we’ve articulated that covenant is when we say, “we covenant to affirm and promote” and then we list the Principles. And, we agree, the Principles aren’t a creed, aren’t perfectly reflective of our faith or our shared values, although they come close. And we agree that they should be reviewed and altered periodically.

To that end, the UUA Board appointed a team which was, at it happens, led by our own Rev. Cheryl Walker. There were, as you can imagine, focus groups and forums, both open and closed. There were rough drafts and first drafts and rewritings of all kinds. And what we have now isn’t done. It’s a proposal. They’ve created something they believe reflects who we are, across all kinds of boundaries and borders, mirroring what we believe.

It’s not linear. It’s not a list. It’s a dynamic image revealing so much of what we value, and at the center is Love. There’s a diagram on those handouts. I’m not sure if you have those and I’m pretty clear about the difference between a sermon and a lecture, so not having those is fine. When you get a chance, though, take a look. It’s almost a flower, or waves, or arms stretching out from the center which is the word Love and a chalice. Surrounding Love are the words that the writing team heard consistently during all the focus groups they’ve been holding. Our shared values include Interdependence, Equity, Transformation, Pluralism, Generosity and Justice.

At the center, though, is Love. Love is the heartbeat, the life-giving force that animates all these other values. In this new articulation of who we are, we are saying that Love is our organizing principle and from Love, or because of Love, we live big, hopeful, beautiful lives, and we promote choices that hold people up, that heal our planet, that support expansiveness, inclusion, and life in all its full and rich dimensions.

It’s often said that no one is going to recite the 7 Principles on their death beds. As a Catholic, I would recite the prayer often called the Our Father to myself whenever I was in need of strength or grounding. In times of grief or trauma or in times of joy, I would almost mindlessly repeat those words to myself because I found them comforting. As a UU, I don’t have something similar. I wonder, though, if the authors here have given us something, or at least a place to start.

I wonder if this might be our new mantra. “Love is at the center. I know Love is at the center. When I am afraid, when I am angry, when I am grieving, I remember Love, at the Center.” I think there’s something there. I’m even wondering if it might become our congregational covenant. “We know love to be at the center. When we are afraid, when we are angry, when we are grieving, we remember love at the center.”

Adrienne Maree Brown, in her book Emergent Strategy, wrote, “When we are engaged in acts of love, we humans are at our best and most resilient…If love were the central practice of a new generation of organizers and spiritual leaders, it would have a massive impact…If the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning or dominating a constant opponent, I think we could actually imagine liberation from constant oppression. We would suddenly be seeing everything we do, everyone we meet, not through the tactical eyes of war, but through the eyes of love…We would understand that the strength of our movement is in the strength of relationships, which can only be measured by their depth.”

This brings us back to the beginning. What if Love was at the Center? What if Love was the organizing principle for our lives? What if we knew that our strength is in our relationships, that our power comes from the depth of our empathy, that our task is not to win but to commit to the transformative power of Love. What if we let go of the lists of things we are sure we believe in and instead leaned into a more dynamic possibility, centering Love and moving from there into the world. What would that do to our church? How are we different if we center love? What does that do to the covenant we have with all the other UU churches? Does that change the way we relate to them? Should it?

Imagine the witness we could become in the world if Love was at our center. As I was writing this, I couldn’t stop thinking about the shelter. With Lisa and Austin remaining committed even though they moved to Delaware. With the committee, with the staff pouring themselves out to ensure we can provide beds for people we don’t know, but who need to be safe and warm. Br. Zachary was here only a few weeks before he grabbed the directive with his whole being, fully engaged in doing whatever it took to get us open again. Love was at the Center. So, maybe this is who we are. At the very least, this is a peek into who we can be.

What will happen to this new language is unclear. The delegates at June’s General Assembly will vote on whether they want to move the process forward. If they do, we’ll spend another year tweaking and wordsmithing I’m sure. Then we’ll vote again next year. Regardless of whether anything comes of it, though, I think the challenge has been issued and we can’t pretend we haven’t heard it.

Can you let go of everything else and live into the grand question… What would it look like if Love was at the Center of Everything?

Find a Stillness

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

February 19, 2023

 It’s been such a warm winter, it’s nearly been spring with the exception of maybe 4 days- Christmas, of course, when we were all standing outside wrapped in every winter item we could find, and one brutal weekend two weeks ago – and even then, there’s been no snow or ice to speak of. This week, it hit 70. The problem is, at least for me, that winter is the time I slow down. As a working mother with big obligations in many areas of my life, I’m busy all the time. I need winter to force a slow-down, and this year, I’ve been short-changed. Instead of the natural stay-inside response to freezing weather that slows things down after the holiday season, we went from the hustle and bustle of December singing Busy Sidewalks to actual busy sidewalks, and all the growth and productivity of springtime.

In the absence of that necessary and common winter slowdown, I’m offering instead this sermon. It’s meant to be a meditation on winter and stillness with the explicit invitation to just breathe through it, letting your body relax, letting your mind go. I promise not to say anything important. I won’t talk about trauma, I won’t call you to action, I won’t give you anything deep to think or worry about. There will be no facts or figures, nothing you’ll want to remember later. Not today. Today is meant to be a gift, a kindness, a way for your brain to slow down, for your body to be still, for you to rest. So, listen to the meditative sermon. Or let your mind wander. Notice how beautiful the stained glass here is. Then come back to my words which are nothing more than an invitation to lean in to the stillness of winter.

Make yourselves comfortable. Take a deep breath.

Annie Dillard says, “I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting. Outside, everything has opened up. Winter clear-cuts and re-seeds the easy way. Everywhere paths unclog…The woods are acres of sticks; I could walk to the Gulf of Mexico in a straight line. When the leaves fall, things stand mute and revealed. Everywhere skies extend, vistas deepen, walls become windows, doors open. All that summer conceals, winter reveals.”

I live in the woods, which might seem odd since I only ever see any of you here in Midtown, but I do. My house is surrounded by trees and for much of the year, we can’t see the other houses on our street through all the leaves. But in the winter, the woods empty and I can see everything. The spring is a virtual cabaret of flowers and budding trees and the summer is a carnival of life and autumn a festival of color.  But the winter is more like a memorial, a time for reflection and revelation. The trees and shrubs end the autumn in a dramatic striptease exposing a bare Earth and the humans make our way inside where we are less vulnerable, less exposed than the planet appears to be.

And then things get quiet. When there’s snow, sound seems to be absorbed and we enter the quiet time. Even when the snow melts and turns that awful gray, the chill keeps us indoors where we can think. Humans don’t talk about hibernation, but I think we do, in fact, enter a semi-hibernation state where we eat heavy food and sleep longer hours, and move more slowly. It’s natural for us to hole-up, to make our homes into little caves, to be lazy. And, to be clear, I’m not using the word lazy as a judgment, just an observance. Doing less isn’t bad. It’s counter-cultural, so it’s unusual, but it’s not bad. Sometimes, it’s even good. It’s time to recharge and it’s wholly necessary.

This is what sabbath could be for us. One day a week for rest. To be honest, I’m not a leader in this field. I have one day off each week and I still read email or do other work things. So, I preach these words for me to hear as much as anyone else. In a world that measures success by market growth, that understands the rhythm of the planet only insofar as it pertains to economic advancement, requiring everyone to do and spend more each quarter than we did the last, observing the sabbath is a wholesale rejection of a culture that cares nothing for our collective spiritual well-being. Taking one day as a break from the system that sees us all as commodities, instead focusing on healing and breathing, and being in relationship, could be a balm for ourselves and this perpetually moving culture of ours.

My aunt is dying. I spent a lot of time in her home recently with my uncle and cousins, who are some of my favorite people. Carolyn is dying at home. She’s too young, but she’s in bed surrounded by her family. There’s nothing like the stillness of a home waiting for death. I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about. We’ve spent a lot of time being still. Waiting. We make small talk. We make big talk. People move in and out- old friends, nurses, neighbors, caretakers of many kinds – and we sit. We hold her hand. We tell her stories, although she’s been asleep for a week. We eat when we’re hungry, never really clear about what time it is or what meal it’s supposed to be. Time has little meaning when everything is just what we understand to be Before. There is great sadness in our stillness, in the stillness of that house. And there’s connection. And tenderness. And love. Even as we do little more than breath together, and wait.

So many of us – the entire planet, really – had the experience of collective stillness for at least 3 months, and really more like 2 years, didn’t we? We were ordered into our homes. We were told that moving around was hurting us, was spreading a deadly virus. We need to stay still. Keep ourselves contained. And as sure as we were that we could never do that on any large scale for any period of time, it was stunning how quickly we did just that. We all stayed still. We moved indoors and waited.

Quarantine felt like a multi-national spiritual practice. Everyone inside. Everyone stay still. Everyone breathe deeply and lean into your powerlessness. Everyone. Shhh…Don’t move.

Let’s all try it. Let’s try for a moment to not move. Let your hands rest, maybe drop your eyes to a fixed place on the floor. Breathe in. Feel your breath move through you. We’re going to breathe a little together. We’ll breath in to the count of 4, then hold for 7 and breath out for 8. Doctors tell us this is good for our bodies.

Breath in 1-2-3-4. Hold 1-2-3-4-5-6-7. Out. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8. Again.

And sit. Feel the seat. Maybe it’s uncomfortable. Feel the air on your skin. The floor beneath your feet. Your clothes on your body. Breathe.

And let your mind rest. Watch the thoughts melt away. Lean into the nothing. Let your body be still, but not so still you feel afraid to move. I was once joining a Roshi for the Zen practice of sitting and when I realized I wasn’t allowed to move I nearly had a panic attack. Don’t be that still. There are no rules. This is just about being. You and I are just being. We aren’t doing. We are still and we are breathing, and we are alive, and it is enough. It is good. It is very good.

I will keep talking, and you can tune back in or you can keep feeling your breath moving through you.

W.B. Yeats, the Irish poet wrote: “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.”

We can make our minds so like still water. Stillness 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 volcano of words that crash on our computer screens with their attachments and links to more words and tweets 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. Stillness is the healing balm that brings us back to ourselves and into right relationship with the world around us.

So, let us sit. Still. Let us sit still. Just for this moment, with Madison Avenue busy behind you, let us sit still. Let’s breath into the stillness of our bodies, long deep breaths. Let the world progress around as it does, let the day move and the buses pass, and the sirens blare, but let us sit still. There’s healing in the stillness. If we do it long enough, we’ll hear our own voices quietly telling us where to go next. We’ll see our ancestors smiling. We’ll feel ourselves rooted in Earth and nourished from our common Source.

These winter days, with or without the cold and ice, are an invitation to move inward, to rest. To be still. This is our season to appreciate the Sabbath, the sabbatical of the winter, now is our chance to reclaim our lives from the busyness, to move indoors and discover what the stillness of winter will reveal.

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.

Healing the Wounds that Bind Us

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

February 12, 2023

Google “religious scandals” and you will be as overwhelmed as I was with the dizzying array of salacious events to choose from. Faced with an astounding list of options, I first clicked Jim Bakker, since that was a familiar name. A televangelist with his own Christian theme park, he and his wife founded the Praise the Lord Club, a televised program netting over $200 million a year. Bakker resigned from his ministry after paying his secretary to be quiet about raping her and then he went to prison for felony related to accounting fraud.

In 1990, Covenant House, an organization designed to help runaway kids, was slammed with accusations that Fr. Bruce Ritter, their larger than life founder, sexually abused some of the kids in his care. That revelation opened the gate for a tidal wave of stories from people across generations all over the country not just accusing priests of molesting them but of a massive system of cover-ups aided and abetted by the most powerful men in the American Catholic Church.

Just a few months ago we learned that a Hasidic school in Brooklyn has been failing to educate their students essentially neglecting to teach them math, English, science or social studies, choosing instead to spend huge sums of money on religious indoctrination and Yiddish. Orthodox schools have also gotten city and state money for children with disabilities, but the schools have provided little or no accommodations for those children. Making these scandals even worse, lawmakers in the area have known for years but haven’t wanted to appear antisemitic or to challenge the voting block which they need to maintain their power in the neighborhood.

People calling themselves Christian have been trying for-ever to convert people who don’t conform to sexual or gender norms. LGBTQ people have been subjected to electroshock treatments, conversion camps, and full communal exclusion when they display behaviors considered outside the acceptable societal expectations. Christian preachers croon about hell and cite narrow interpretations of scripture to marginalize people, leading to unbearable pain.

A woman I know was raised a Jehovah’s Witness. She met her husband in her church, but soon after marrying they decided they wanted to take a break from Sunday mornings and stopped going to church. The minister told the community to shun them, which meant to completely shut them out of their lives. The community included their parents, grandparents, brothers, and sisters. They were excluded from gatherings of all kinds; not even phone calls were allowed. Under pressure, the couple agreed to return to church where the shunning continued for 6 months until they proved their faithfulness.  

I was raised without religion, a fact many people tell me they wish was true of them. Both of my parents had been treated badly by their religions of origin. They’d both experienced trauma as children and neither of their respective religious traditions or communities were able to speak to their needs in any meaningful way. To make it more complicated, after they fell in love, the fact that he was Catholic and she was Jewish meant that neither family was supportive of their relationship. My mother’s mother forced a break-up. My father’s cousins looked for my mother’s horns. The whole thing was destructive and when I was born, they agreed to keep me away from organized religion. (We can see how well that turned out.)

Religious institutions have been the source of tremendous pain in the lives of millions of people.

Raise your hand if you have been hurt by a religious community or particular theology. Keep your hands up. Raise your hand if you rejected religion because it was harmful to you. Keep your hands up. Raise your hand if, before coming here, you were sure you’d never step foot in another church/synagogue or other house of worship again.

You can put your hands down. That’s a lot of us. A lot of people right here in this room have experienced religious trauma or have barely escaped it, and we aren’t alone. Our streets are filled with people who have been hurt, rejected, or otherwise harmed in one of a thousand ways by the very institutions they were taught to trust.

I read a sermon written by a colleague of mine down in Georgia. Her name is Charlotte Arsenault and in her sermon she references a writer named Jim Palmer. He’s done a lot of work on this subject, but what I found most interesting is a list of messages people get from religion that create trauma. Here’s his list:

I am inherently bad.

I can't trust myself.

My heart is wicked.

I deserve punishment.

I don't measure up.

I am powerless.

Self-denial is holiness.

I need forgiveness for who I am.

I need to be saved from myself.

I am worthless on my own.

Being devoted to God means staying in an abusive relationship.

Therapy or medication is a lack of faith.

Self-care is selfish.

The world is evil.

If I mess up I will lose my salvation and go to hell.

People I deeply love are in hell or will go there.

Everything outside my church culture is a threat.

I can never be good enough.

Feelings are dangerous and not trustworthy.

I am not capable of thinking for myself.

Obedience is true discipleship.

Questioning is a spirit of rebellion.

I must be perfect.

My struggles mean I am not trusting God.

I am nothing.

I am weak.

And lastly, God will fix it for me.

To Mr. Palmer’s list I’d like to add:

You don’t need science if you have faith.

You might be in pain, grieving, terrified, but it’s all God’s will.

This is God’s plan.

Your beloved died because God wanted them with Him.

Sex is sinful and separates you from God.

Clergy are closer to God than you are.

Clergy are rarely wrong, sad, angry or in need.

This is because they have real faith.

When you are wrong, sad, angry or in need, it’s your lack of faith.

Women are subservient to men.

Women should not lead.

Women should be quiet.

These might be messages you’ve heard before. If so, I’m sorry. I’m sorry anyone said these things to you or implied them or build a world or system around them. I’m sorry anyone has had to hear them, or that anyone believes them enough they’d repeat them. Those messages saturate our culture, sink into our minds, and effect self-worth in powerful, often lasting ways.

People are running from organized religion, and it’s no wonder. The hurt perpetrated, over and over, generation to generation is finally repelling people, something I hope is a sign of health. I hope there’s a wholesale rejection of messages that don’t align with other shared cultural values.

If I were to make a list of what messages I hope people are hearing or assuming here, here are some things that would be on it:

I am beautiful

I am made in the image of all that’s Holy

I am loved

When I feel broken, there’s somewhere I can go to be reminded that I am whole

Everyone behaves badly sometimes

Everyone gets angry

Everyone feels sad

Everyone knows how it feels to be lonely

None of these feelings are a lack of faith

Everyone is loved

Everyone is saved

My gender, my sexuality, the color of my skin, are reflections of God

I am part of the divine spirit that lives and loves in all of us

My voice matters, even if I don’t have a job or a home or don’t speak English

It’s OK that I don’t have answers

Questions are faithful

One of the ways I see religious trauma play out is in inherent distrust of clergy, and sometimes other church leadership. It’s always interesting to me when I see people start to question the motives of their friends once their friends are sitting on the board. I tell board members when that happens that it’s not about them, the same way I know the similarly suspicious energy I receive isn’t about me. It’s one of the ways we play out years of pain or childhood religious trauma. It’s safer to assume malintent of people with any kind of religious authority. I mean- it’s annoying for us, but in some ways it’s also understandable. I don’t want to downplay the trauma it perpetuates, though. At least two past board chairs here have been honest about how that experience has eaten at their souls. One recently spoke publicly in a congregational meeting that she has some PTSD as a result of how badly she was treated by other members of this congregation when she was in a position of authority. Often in UU churches, once a board chair steps off the board, they leave the church, sometimes just for a while, but often for good. We’re seeing ministers fleeing under similar circumstances. With a national shift toward self-care, clergy across denominations are deciding they can’t be lightning rods any more. We’ve all heard the old adage: Hurt people, hurt people and whether they are aware of it or not, that anger plays out in houses of worship over and over again, continuing the cycle of victimization.

As we make our way toward a congregational covenant, acknowledging the religious trauma we might be carrying will be necessary. We don’t want to keep rehearsing pain, building our defensiveness into new relationships, designing new systems on foundations of unprocessed suffering. We don’t want to perpetuate the same trauma on others because we haven’t come to terms with it within ourselves.

One sermon isn’t going to heal anyone. That’s a magic touch I just don’t have. Today is one step in a process of mending those fragments of our spirits that are still torn, or frayed from having been pulled out from under some heavy guilt and rejection and familial or cultural weights. The steps toward healing aren’t linear. I can’t tell you what’s first, and the fact that you’re here says you’ve already begun. This is more of a spiral where you know the pain and feel it and consider it and deconstruct it and then know it and feel it again. It’s a movement, like all healing is, a dance deeper in and back out again in a process of discernment and letting go and finding replacements for the messages that cause so much hurt.

Those healing messages are spoken here every week, and even as you hear them, they won’t push out the more damaging messages until they are lived and demonstrate themselves to be real. One of the things that helps us to live them is to be honest about them. To talk about where and when and how the damage was done. And let me acknowledge something some of you might need to hear. I know some of the damage was done here at Community Church. I know that this church hasn’t always been the safest place for everyone. We haven’t experienced sexual misconduct from leadership – as far as I know – but there are other ways for clergy to behave badly, ways for leadership to damage a church in a slow-burning, the effects of which are seen over time rather than in the in-your-face-ness of a mega-church guilty of tax evasion or paying off rape victims. We don’t talk about it much here, which I wonder about sometimes. Does it seem disrespectful to name openly what’s been happening here over the last 40 years? Is it that the people still here aren’t the ones most hurt, so there isn’t much to say? Is it that the people causing the hurt or dysfunction might still be in earshot? Or is it that we’ve all been taught not to speak these things out loud, that millennia of listening to religious in power conditioned us to keep quiet?

Just before the Me Too movement hit nationally, the female clergy within the UU Ministers Association started telling some difficult truths. At the beginning of that reckoning, one of our luminaries who has worked with congregations in the aftermath of clergy misconduct gave a critical lecture to our entire membership. She started by invoking the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Arc where the lead character played by Harrison Ford told his friends not to look as the Arc of the Covenant was opened and the demons were released killing anyone with their eyes open. Instead, she said, Look. We might be afraid, but we have to look and see what’s in the box we’ve been keeping closed or we will never heal. 

A few months ago I apologized from this pulpit for something I’d said the year before. It was a very deliberate act and I did it for several reasons. One was that I regretted what I’d said. It was also because I suspected very few people in this room had ever heard a member of the clergy apologize from the pulpit. It happens very rarely. In fact, I was trying to remember a time I knew of where it had happened without the person resigning and couldn’t come up with one example. This isn’t to say there aren’t plenty, but none come to mind. What does come to mind is people recognizing something they did and then walking away. That might be appropriate sometimes, but I’d like to think there are ways to acknowledge mistakes that allow for a continuation of covenantal relationship. In fact, that’s what I think covenantal relationships are. Some of you have asked me to forgive you for things you’ve done or said and my response is always, “Of course”. That’s covenant lived in real time.

And that’s authentic religious community. No shunning. No converting. No hushing or denying. We speak truth in love. And when we can’t, when we can’t find truth or love is distant, we say that too. We say it in faith, knowing that we will make our way back to ourselves and to each other, that we are together, walking each other home. As Alice Walker tells us, “There is no god but love and so rising is inherent in our heart beat as we move carried or knocked about by life. This we know: We were not meant to suffer so much and to learn nothing.”

So we are here with our broken hearts, our healing spirits, and our wisdom being born.  

Reclaiming History: The Rise and Fall of Black Wall Street

February 5, 2023

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

After the Civil War, the 5 Indigenous Nations living in what is now Oklahoma gave a group of freed people land on which to start new lives. Word got out that the Territory was a safe place for newly liberated people, creating a land rush that only got more intense through the rest of the century.

In 1889, OW Gurley, born to freed people in Alabama, moved to Oklahoma where he purchased 40 acres with the idea of supporting other Black people to buy land and build homes and businesses. Often called the Architect of Greenwood, the neighborhood in Tulsa sometimes referred to as Black Wall Street, Gurley provided loans and other support to encourage the creation of a new community for Black people. 10 years later, he was joined by JB Stradford, a Black lawyer from Kentucky, who built homes and businesses including a luxury hotel. In that intervening decade, restaurants, doctor, dentist and lawyer offices, schools, grocery and candy stores, banks, churches, pool halls, hair salons, and theatres had opened up and by the turn of the century Greenwood was a destination for Black people to settle or vacation. They even had their own hospital and newspaper, the Tulsa Star, founded and run by an activist committed to telling the story of this thriving Black enclave. You could live in Greenwood and never leave. Covering about 35 square blocks – from Lex to 7th, from 35th to 42nd st., everything a family needed could be found in walking distance. Families were accumulating wealth and were spending it in their own community, keeping the neighborhood self-sufficient, while the people were interdependent.

There are some lovely stories of the Greenwood neighborhood. Ellis Walker Woods walked from Memphis to Oklahoma after seeing a flyer advertising for Black teachers. As a college-educated man, he soon became the principle of the Booker T. Washington High School. Simon Berry, a pilot, learned that the taxi service in Tulsa only served white people, so he borrowed the money for a Model-T Ford to drive Black people where they needed to go. He then expanded creating a bus line and then a charter plane service for wealthy Black oilmen. Mable Little arrived in Greenwood with $1.24 and was able to open a hair salon with the help of other female entrepreneurs who were committed to supporting each other in this new world they were building.

On May 30th, 1921, 19 year old Dick Rowland, a Greenwood resident working in greater Tulsa, got on an elevator run by a 17 year old white female elevator operator named Sarah Page. When the elevator opened, Ms. Page accused Mr. Rowland of attempted rape. In subsequent investigations, it seems clear that nothing actually happened on that elevator, but the accusation was all that was needed. Rowland was arrested the next morning and brought to a Tulsa jail. By then, rumors were circulating about an assault, fed by a front page story in the primary Tulsa paper accusing Rowland of raping a white teenager.

As evening fell, a group of white men gathered outside the courthouse demanding the Sheriff release the teen to them. He and his deputies refused and barricaded themselves into the top floor. About 25 armed Black men showed up offering to help the Sheriff protect Rowland, but he turned them away, telling them to stay outside or go home. As the evening progressed, as many as 1500 white men were at the courthouse where the 25 Black men, now joined by their neighbors and totaling 75, stood guard. Shots were fired and the Black men retreated, heading back into the Greenwood neighborhood. Assuming the shots were from the Black men, the Sheriff deputized some of the white mob and asked for help catching them.

That white mob, now acting on behalf of the law, and soon joined by even more people coming in from all over Tulsa, descended on Greenwood and started to burn it down. Firefighters came to the scene but later reported that they were threatened at gunpoint when they tried to put out the fires. The rioting went all night and into the morning. In the end, more than 300 people were dead, almost entirely Black, more than 6,000 of the 10,000 Greenwood residents, including children, were arrested and put in holding cells, and every home and business had been looted or burned to the ground. Almost 1300 private homes were flattened along with schools, theatres, their media outlets, and even their hospital. All gone. No white people were ever charged with anything related to the violence in Greenwood.

A few days later, Rowland was released from jail without charges. It seems he’d accidentally banged into Ms. Page during the ride. He never returned to Tulsa.

Newspapers called it a race riot. In Tulsa it was called a Race War. No one called it a massacre, which is, of course, what it was. The Boston Massacre saw 5 killed. The worst riot in American history until then saw 119 dead, and they were on both sides as were death tolls of most other American riots.

Not only did they not call this a massacre, within weeks, no one talked about it at all. It was a big story with major newspapers covering it in the immediate aftermath. There were even white people taking pictures, creating postcards, and selling them as souvenirs. But by August, no one was talking about it at all. It seemed to have been largely erased from American history, until recently.

At the 75th anniversary in 1996, the City of Tulsa created a Commission to investigate. It’s from them that we have most of our statistics. Even with that acknowledgement, we were looking at the 100th anniversary with most Americans having never heard of the Tulsa Massacre.

The decision not to tell the story was the result of a cultural conspiracy from both white and Black people. On the one hand, the people of Greenwood were traumatized. Everything they knew was gone. Their homes. Their clothes. Their neighborhood. Their neighbors. They were terrified it could happen again, which was a legitimate fear since the Ku Klux Klan increased in both size and visibility right after the massacre. Their numbers swelled to over 10,000 in the city, ensuring that Black people remained silent. And white people didn’t want to keep talking about it either. The city officials were afraid of scaring off oil tycoons with talk of riots and other residents were just happy it was all behind them. So as not to embarrass the city, people in charge agreed not to include the incident in history books and many newspaper accounts were removed and archived to microfilm. Black residents didn’t want to pass on the pain to their children, or to dampen their ambitions and white residents didn’t want to admit any of this had happened at all. Together, they ensured that the story was never told.

It became part of the American conversation in 2019 when HBO aired the first episode of The Watchmen which opens with a depiction of that horrible night. Like so many Americans, I watched and assumed it must be fiction, as the rest of the show is. But curiosity was piqued and some vocal historians injected the conversation with facts, which are now making their way back into American culture, adding depth and texture to our understanding of who we are, where we come from, and how much work there is still to do.

We have entered Black History Month and I have to ask myself, “How can we celebrate Black History when we don’t even know it?” And I’m asking that question during a spasm of intentional, institutional mis-educating, history-erasing, fact-denying activity. Right now – Even Now – Still Now - the governor of Florida is doing everything he can to make sure people don’t know and can never learn American history. An Advanced Placement course was recently updated to include Black Lives Matter, mass incarceration, the relationship between varying oppressions, and explanations of Critical Race Theory. Specifically rejected from the course outline is an article on intersectionality and violence against women of color, as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s groundbreaking article on reparations, and a book by James Baldwin.

AP classes are designed by a national board with the intention of helping high school students gain college credit; they are open only to the most accomplished students in the school and are completely optional. Rejecting the curriculum in one state means that no student in any state will have access since AP classes are created for national standardization. This particular course was designed in partnership with the Smithsonian Institute. They have now gone back to rework this Black History course so as to eliminate – or what I’d call WhiteWash - much of Black history.

They’re also eliminating queer history, and gender history, and the very concept of intersectionality in this course. It is not to the benefit of those in power to allow a framework to be taught that recognizes the relationship between oppressions. They would prefer to target individual people or singular groups with accusations of resentment or entitlement, rather than acknowledge a massive system of oppression undergirding the entire American narrative.

Greenwood was not unique in its destruction. Have you heard of Bronzeville in Chicago? In the summer of 1919 they suffered a series of massacres and mass burnings of homes. Or West 9th street in Little Rock, or the 1906 riots in Sweet Auburn, Atlanta where white people randomly killed Black people en masse. I can’t find a death toll for that one either. The stories of so many of these places isn’t told, wasn’t investigated, and has moved into the dark underbelly of our country.

And that’s where conservatives would like it to remain. Unseen. They would like to retain power by keeping We the People uneducated lest we learn from our past or embarrass or make anyone uncomfortable in talking about it.

Timothy Snyder is one of our most respected writers and thinkers on political repression. He has a tiny, critically acclaimed and powerfully necessary book called On Tyranny in which he lays out the steps to resisting the shift away from democracy. The very first thing he tells us in this book is, “Do not obey in advance”. Very often, especially in the early stages of the shift into authoritarianism, power is given freely to autocrats. We see what they want, and we let them have it. Sometimes, like the case of Ron DeSantis wanting the college board to change the curriculum, they ask for it or even demand it, even though they have no moral or legal standing for such a thing. In response – maybe because we want to avoid a fight or maybe because we want to seem flexible or maybe because we’re intimidated by the power being wielded – we acquiesce. We obey. We figure there are ways around whatever they want. Or, we decide it’s not that big a deal. How many students are even taking this course?

And that’s how we end up, 100 years later, not knowing about a night of penetrating violence that killed hundreds, traumatized thousands, and burned a thriving neighborhood to the ground. We obeyed. We didn’t want to embarrass anyone. Make people uncomfortable. We stopped talking about it and thought it went away.

One month a year – and the shortest month at that – to talk about Black history seems a little absurd. But, that’s only if we forget that Black history is American history. We take one month to make sure the past is in sharp relief. We look carefully, thoughtfully, meticulously investigating, pulling at all the threads we have yet to consider. Then we weave those threads into the rest of our larger story.

The story of Greenwood is part of the story. The story of the GOP trying to erase that history is also part of the story. We reclaim our history by telling these stories, and by reclaiming the narrative, pushing back when someone tries to stop us.

There is hope in the struggle. There’s hope in the fact that people are struggling, that we haven’t just acquiesced, that we are raising our voices and using our pulpits. And, I’d like to encourage you toward a little curiosity. Investigate what you don’t know. See if there are stories no one is telling, and start telling them. Maybe post them in our Facebook group. Send them to me or to each other. Tell them over coffee or at the diner. The trauma inflicted on the Greenwood community wasn’t unique and isn’t over. The people of Memphis can assure us of that. Let’s commit to keeping those stories alive.

And when we do that, we keep our communities alive. We keep our history alive. We keep ourselves alive. Each of us. Nurtured by Truth so we can Embody Justice.

The Madness of Love

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

January 29, 2023

In 1963, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist have a summer job herding sheep in the mountains of Wyoming. They fall in love but pursuing a same sex relationship is dangerous, so both men leave that summer and marry women. Over the course of the next 25 years, these men struggle with their tremendous passion for each other grounded in an intense, lasting love but tempered by the reality of the time and location of their lives. Not being willing or able to risk the loss of family or safety, they settle on loveless marriages and periodic fishing trips on Brokeback Mountain where they can be alone. It’s during those trips they are each most alive and most authentically themselves. The months and years between are empty, often lifeless periods of waiting for the next time they can be together. Ultimately, Jack is killed although Ennis never really knows what happened and is left to live his life profoundly alone. In the final scene of the movie, Ennis is in a room holding two t-shirts covered in his and his lover’s blood.

On this bleak mid-winter afternoon, I’m hoping to bring a little warmth, maybe some joy, hopefully a brief respite, by talking about love and desire. We’re taking a break from our usually scheduled Love As Justice, and instead, we’re talking about romance.

Romantic love is one of humanities primary relationships. I talk often from the pulpit about the power of love in changing the world, the necessity of love as a tool for social justice, and I’m sure I’ve nearly worn out the word love, speaking it so many times it’s gotten thin, smudged, faded and so soft it might disintegrate. But today I’m talking about romance, about falling in love and living in love and being so defined by love we can no longer even tell it’s there.

Love is all- encompassing, life-altering, world-changing, mind-blowing, family-creating… and family-destroying. It might be the most powerful experience a human can have. The loss of love or the loss of a loved one is equally explosive and life-defining.

The Madness of Love. Or, in the case of Jack and Ennis, the Madness of a Society that Blocks Love. But, that’s so often the case. Regulating love and sex is as ancient as civilization. But desire cannot be regulated.

Romeo was a Montague. Juliet, a Capulet. Their families were sworn enemies, but they met at a ball and fell madly in love. After the party, in what is now famously called the "balcony scene", Romeo sneaks into the Capulet orchard and overhears Juliet at her window vowing her love to him in spite of her family's hatred of his family. Romeo makes himself known to her and they agree to be married, a promise that comes to pass the next day. After their secret wedding and one night together, Juliet’s father agrees to offer her hand in marriage to a suitor named Paris. In an attempt to get away from her fate, Juliet drinks a potion that will make her appear dead. Romeo, thinking his lover is gone, kills himself. When she awakens, Juliet sees her husband dead and follows him to her death.

That story always strikes me as being both an epic love story and a little bit ridiculous. They met, married and died for each other in the course of 3 days. Of course, they were teenagers, so it might not be completely unrealistic.

Regardless of the timeline, this is a classic love story, an ancient story rewritten and timelessly memorialized by Shakespeare and reimagined over and over again for each new contemporary context. We can’t stop telling the story, hearing the story, because love captivates us, because we have all known love – or wished to know love – so powerful we weren’t willing to live without it. It becomes the life of every cell in our bodies, the breath we need to continue minute to minute.

The experience of falling in love doesn’t last a lifetime, but it can set the stage for a lifetime. Real lives are filled with the mundane, with doing dishes and running errands and answering phones and feeding children and going to meetings and living on a budget. Doing those things as you build and sustain a life with someone you love alters the nature of daily life.

We often speak of "falling in love," as if love is stumbled into or we talk of "being in love" as if love is a permanent condition. Both phrases imply that nothing is easier or more natural than love. Yet there’s hardly any human enterprise which begins with such hope and expectation and fails so regularly. Love takes time, effort, even training. It’s not for beginners, a fact Romeo and Juliet found out the hard way.

When we talk about finding a mate, we often talk about becoming desired. Stand in front of any collection of popular magazines and it’s all quite apparent. The problem most people think they have is not  loving better, but becoming more lovable. For men, that often translates to money and power. For women, all too often, we focus on physical beauty. Second to those things for all genders is the ability to maintain interesting conversations, to be funny, and to be well mannered. Being lovable becomes a mixture of being popular and having sex appeal as any high school sophomore can tell you.

It’s as if there’s nothing to be learned about love, that the problem is one of the object, not the faculty. In other words, we think loving is easy, the difficulty is finding the right person to love- the object of my affection. The difficulty is being attractive enough to someone I desire. Love becomes an extension of our consumer culture. We spend our courtship years- which happen between the ages of 10 and 100 – window shopping. We marry when we have found the best item on the market, given our own spending limitations.

But real love requires much more than making the right purchase, more than being desired by one you desire. That might make for a really fun weekend, but then you’re done. Love is what happens after, what happens when the falling is over and you’ve landed in a home with a partner. It’s good to remember that real love isn’t a feeling. Feelings come and go. Scott Peck taught us so long ago- Love is a Decision. Love is a difficult and lasting decision, a decision to be present and honest and fully yourself while encouraging growth and offering support for an other. And while that decision can be changed, that it’s been made creates a container for the rest of our lives. We can feel angry, but that anger is held in the framework of love. We can feel disappointed, or bored, but the decision to love still encircles us. It’s why we can disagree, and decide to talk about it later. We know we’re together, that most things aren’t urgent, that the container we’ve wrapped ourselves in will hold.

Authentic love is also, by its very nature, self-generating.  It multiplies, it expands. It rehearses it's abundance in generosity. Many years ago I was presiding at a wedding for two people entering their second marriage. They had a mature love, one that drew people in and sent them back out with a great experience of joy. I had told them not to pay me for the wedding, so instead, they pulled up to my new house with a car filled with flowers to be planted in my empty garden. When they opened the back of the car, I gasped. There was so much color and life filling this car. It seemed like a perfect reflection of their relationship- filled with a love that multiplies generously.

Real love extends beyond ourselves and into the world. It’s not about desiring one other person, but about loving one person so much it spills onto the streets. One of my favorite moments in the Romeo and Juliet tale is when Romeo refuses to fight. Romeo is confronted by one of Juliet’s kinsmen and challenges him to a duel. But Romeo sees his former enemies as his future family and can’t bring himself to participate. Love has expanded to include even this man he hardly knows. True love is inclusive, opening the lovers to union with all of life. Love awakens us to existence outside ourselves. We can suddenly see the other no longer as enemy but as family.

         Living with someone for a long time, growing older with someone, living in the averageness of daily life doesn’t preclude the need for passion. This is why I loved our opening reading. It’s a regular moment. She’s in a café with her husband. Something they’ve done a thousand times together. But a young woman leans over and asks about his dessert and the author yearns for a life in that moment in which people are reaching for so much more than what’s in front of them, where people are accepting their own lust and giving in to it if only just a little bit. She enjoys that her husband feels something, wants something. He’s still alive. And so is she.

         She can only get to that place because they’ve been together a long time, because she trusts her husband and isn’t living in constant insecurity. She’s learned something about love. She’s learned how to find and offer room within the container of marriage. She’s learned not to be afraid of hungers, not to be afraid to want something or to allow her husband to desire something more. It’s how we grow, how we stay alive. We accept and love the life we are living and we reach for more. Within the container of joy and commitment with a partner, we stay alive by reaching for more.

Falling in love, agreeing to share your life with someone is a risk. You could get your heart broken. It happens all the time, which, if it’s ever happened to you, is difficult to believe. How can people function once that’s happened? How do you get up in the morning, get kids off to school, go to work, have conversations, how do you gather the energy just to take a shower once your beloved has cheated on you, left you for someone else, told you you are no longer loved? How do you move forward when your lover has been diagnosed with a terminal illness or died in a car accident? How can you continue when your heart has been broken? Maybe it’s better not to take the risk, better to let love move by you, remain unnoticed, safe, alone. Love is so likely to end badly, it might be best to stay away. And yet, even with millions of books and movies and songs going back through the ages, warning us, it’s a risk most of us take at some time. We want more from life than what we have, we want to live bolder and sing louder and feel stronger than we do. We want the feeling of falling and of standing and living in love, of creating a life with someone.

UU Minister Rev. Bob Janis wrote a poem I’ve been loving. It’s called “The Hunter”.

Love, the Hunter

Love roams the earth

Looking for victims

Sacrifices to the high God

She is not inescapable

Some days we are too fast

too wary

Once I was able to disguise myself

as a man looking at a train timetable

She went right on by

until I started looking at the numbers too closely

and I enjoyed the way the four looked next to the eight

And I was flattened

If love catches you

then that's it for you

I'm afraid

O you may find a moment or two out of her clutches

A time to reminisce about when the days were your own

and you were the one

trying to capture the world

and bring it home

But in the end

there is only one pit

and we all fall in

And though it's not the fire that consumes us

everything that brought us to this point

down to our very flesh

will be destroyed

But at that point you won't care much

For you will become a part of love itself

Maybe love is after all more of a gatherer.

Ultimately, we want to be caught, want to burn in a fire, be destroyed in a pit, melt into love. We might even want to love so ferociously we’re willing to die or even kill to protect it. Like Ennis and Jack, we’re willing to risk everything we have because when love is real, nothing is more powerful or beautiful or more necessary. We are not here to live numb, cold lives, to play it safe. No one gets out alive. We’re here to live boldly, to risk mightily. We’re here to love what our bodies love, to be with the people we can’t live without, to climb balconies in the middle of the night and profess love unto death. This is what it means to be a people of desire. This is the joy and the madness of love.

By Thy Light Glowing: Winter Solstice

December 18, 2022

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

We’re in a cave, a dark temple, with a fire and some candles to keep us from complete darkness. The light is low, the sounds hushed. We hum, we sway, we huddle together, smiling at each other across the warm light. We see the night through until day, resting, leaning on each other, holding sleeping children in our arms and across our laps. Blankets draped over us, we tell stories about the dark, and the light-returning. We watch for signs of sun as a symbol of the turning Earth, the days yet to come. For tonight, the sun rests having been wrapped by the night and when he returns, we all awaken to greet the dawn, the new day.

The ancient peoples gathered on the winter solstice around fires, inside caves and temples in just that way. They brought comfort to each other, leaned on each other, sang and danced, and created hope and joy with each other. Into the darkest, longest nights, they brought themselves and their families, they prayed to the gods and goddesses who controlled the turning, or whose stories helped make sense of the cycles of Earth that still define our lives.

During these late December, early January days, hovering around the winter solstice, we have about 9 hours of light. That’s it. Just about enough to last the work day. My alarm goes off at 6:00 every morning and it’s dark as night. Within 2 minutes of opening my eyes, I’m outside in the cold, walking my dogs, looking at the moon. Back indoors, I turn lights on and heat up, trying to trick myself into believing daytime has begun. At 7:00, we start the trek toward school. The sun is beginning to wake, but won’t really be up until 7:30. The morning feels soft. Everything is draped in gray, as if the filter from an old black and white tv show has been laid over it all. Red and green traffic lights seem out of place in the muted colors of the morning. When school is over, the sun is already descending, and dark returns at 4:30, hours before the busyness of the day comes to an end.

We live in the dark. We tend to think of daytime as the hours when the sun is up, but for a portion of the year, we move through our lives in an almost perpetual night-scape, waking and working without the sun to beckon or support us. Plenty of people find this lack of daylight depressing, but I find it comforting. Cold and dark conspire to slow us down, to shift us into a state of semi-hibernation, a natural time for winter sleep, and I welcome it. In the story Rev. Jude told us earlier, the sun is tired, so the night wraps around the sun, allowing the sun to rest while the people wait.

There are many stories told all over the northern hemisphere, handed down over millennia, to put this time in context. In Judaism, Hannukah might not be a holiday of major importance, but it is, nonetheless, a story told every year, partnered with music and games, to explain and help us live into this time of dark. The story itself is problematic since we’re technically celebrating the victory of a ruling family opposed to religious and cultural pluralism, but there’s no reason to get stuck on the details. The Jewish story speaks to our shared lived reality. It was dark, very dark, and with the dark came the cold and in the dark and cold there was fear. The people took a chance on hope, used the oil they had and did the best they could to survive. The fire burned for 8 days, long enough to get them through. They celebrated, and we remember every year that faith can sustain us even when it seems all is lost.

Both the Menorah and Christmas Lights are modern echoes of the ancient impulse to cast off the dark, a collective act of defiance. In the very recent past, from the 2016 election through the pandemic, people have been more likely to leave lights on well into March reportedly because days felt sad and frightening and they needed the reminder of joy the light could bring. I understand that, but instead of seeking the light this year, I’m enjoying the dark. It might be a Covid thing. For a good long while, the world slowed down. Recently, it sped up again, and while I’m not romanticizing anything about Covid, the experience of modern life in slow-motion was healing. I’m sorry we seem to have forgotten. As a society, we’ve kicked into high gear again. Before the light returns, I’m hoping for a little more time being comforted by the dark.

In the dark, edges become blurry. In the light, we can see each finger on our own hands, and where our wrist extends outside the sleeve sitting on it. In the dark, it all melts together. My sleeve and wrist and fingers and hands. And when someone puts their hand in mine, I can feel them as distinct, but I see them as part of my own body. We begin to blend, as people will if they are walking arm in arm or a group is huddling together in the dark and the cold, keeping warm. In the dark, we bend and breathe and feel the energy of each other, but the hard edges of our bodies aren’t discernable like they are in the light when we stand apart, hands in pockets.

There is mystery in the dark. There’s growth in the dark. Plant a seed beneath the soil, and the seed will blossom. If you have an idea, a thought, something dangerously brilliant, plant that beneath the soil too so it can take root. It’s in the wet Earth, away from the people and the eyes and busyness of our lives that genius has the space it needs. Babies also need dark, deep in a womb where eyes are closed, but experience profound dependence, and a love not yet quantifiable.

And it’s from the dark that our new world will be born, too. Winter is a time for reflection. A time to sit, to think, to wonder and consider. A time, also, to sleep, to curl up under a pile of blankets, letting imagination run wild.

One of the reasons we moved this service a little earlier – as early as we could possibly get, really, given the availability – was that we didn’t want people walking home in the dark. But, maybe we should have rethought that. Walking home as the sun is going down on a late Sunday afternoon is a perfect time to dream the new world.

We need that time. The world is turning. Turning toward or turning into or turning away from what? What is being born? Who are we in this new time? The dark gives us that space. If we can’t see everything in stark relief, we can pay attention to the interior landscape, to the meadows and shorelines and breathing trees of our own bodies. The world gets larger, we get larger, when we have time to dream in the dark.

David Whyte writes:

When your eyes are tired

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone

no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark

where the night has eyes

to recognize its own.

There you can be sure

you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.

The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and

the sweet confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

Here in the dark this winter solstice, I plan to wonder about what should be cast off, and what should be reclaimed. I am going to think about who I belong to, who my people are, which bodies should melt into mine and which should be held at arm’s distance. And I’m going to dream the new world, one where everyone has been claimed, everyone has people and dreams that have room to take root.

This sermon wanted to be written in poetry, and music and dance. As I was writing, I kept complaining to myself that my sermon doesn’t have a point. But, that is the point. It’s not time to know or be right or clear. It’s time to grapple, to wander, to lie back and dream big. That’s the invitation of the solstice, of the deep dark that envelopes us. I know how important words are in this congregation and that I’ve already cut sermons nearly in half, but today, seven days from Christmas Eve, three from Winter Solstice, and just two hours from the first night of Hanukkah, what’s beckoning me isn’t the hard line of prose, but the soft body of poetry. Instead of explaining through well researched argument or posing life-defining questions, let’s bury ideas in the soil and dance over them, summoning the sun to birth a fresh year. During this Winter Solstice, let’s hum, and sway, and lock arms and huddle under blankets around a fire together while we dream the new world.

Incarnation: Embodied God

Advent, 2022

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister 

Advent. The season of dark, of quiet, of waiting. The story most often told during these weeks in December is that of Mary, a pregnant woman, travelling home with her love, waiting for her baby, anticipating a whole new stage of life as a wife and mother. For millennia, Christians have been living into this story as we inch through the month toward Christmas. It’s part of the Christian paradigm, defining these December weeks, beckoning us deeper into the dark of the season, promising joy and good cheer when Christmas comes, when we celebrate the birth of Jesus, the birth of God into the world.

The entire story- pregnancy, travel, birth, visitors, a baby – the whole thing is so human, so, familiar in its normalcy, so embodied as we all are. Some of us get pregnant, some give birth. We all travel to some extent, all get tired, get sick, experience our bodies injured and aging. In its simplest form, this is a story of bodies.

Mary was pregnant. Nine months. Her feet are swollen, her back is aching. Simple things like getting up from a sitting position were painful and complicated. She and her husband were back in their hometown when she went into labor. Cramps turned to contractions to cries of pain and pushing, blood and tearing, sweat, tears, breathing, squeezing people’s hands while letting out primal screams. It’s hard to imagine a more embodied experience than birth. And then a child. A baby boy. Slimy, crying, getting air into his lungs, cold, bright, eyes closed, screaming. He’s handed to his mother, also crying- a mix of joy and pain and relief.

They were in a manger, meaning they were on the bottom floor of a home where the animals lived. People usually went upstairs to sleep in the lofts, but there was no more room there, so Mary and her betrothed, Joseph, stayed downstairs. When we were in Jordan, we got to see a village more than two thousand years old. The doorways and stone frames and sometimes staircases still stood, letting us stand on the same ground, in the same rooms as people did millennia ago. Our guide casually noted as we visited one of the houses that the alcoves on the ground floor where we stood were the manger, the part of the house where the animals fed and slept. The stairs or ladders led to the second floor, the upper room, where the people stayed. Mary and Joseph would have been downstairs when their baby was born, down in the manger because so many travelers had come to town, there was no more room upstairs.

Advent isn’t the time to talk about Jesus’s birth. I’m ruining the entire spirit of waiting! But every year we talk about anticipation, and then we skip a few weeks focusing on the Jewish and Pagan traditions and land on Christmas when we sing and celebrate, but don’t dig into the theology of the story, so this year I’m exercising a little preacher-privilege to use this Advent sermon to talk about incarnation. What exactly are we waiting for? Why are we on the edge of our seats?

I’ve spoken before about the corners of truth, those particular insights that each religion of the world offers the rest of us. Religion, by definition, is how communities face mystery together, how we live into the big questions of the world. Having done that for centuries, or millennia, those communities have stumbled into wisdom they can offer the rest of us, even if we don’t adhere to all the tenets of the entire faith. Christians offer the world a profound truth related to the nature of humanity, and of what it means to be both human and divine. To demonstrate, or maybe to balance, that for all of us, they tell the story of Jesus’s birth. Stories about gods abound, but stories about children, about tiny, vulnerable babies who are also divine, are a gift offering us an unusual insight.

The image of Jesus as a baby is one of the most profound spiritual images offered by any of the world’s religions. That’s a big statement, so let me explain. Ignoring the infinite ways Jesus has been painted or drawn or sculpted as a child-king, as an infant-idol, with an adult gaze and halo, I’m talking about the actual image of a baby. A real infant. Tiny. No language. Very little sight at first. Sounds are too loud. Crying is the primary mode of communication. Eating, pooping, sleeping. No way to move around. Rolling over from back to front is a big deal. Then crawling. Walking, holding on to a table. A few independent steps. It’s some time before that child can successfully get food into his mouth on his own. This is God.

I’ll say it again because it’s mind-blowing- This is God.

What a profound Truth, what a theological offering, given to us through this Christian story. This is God. The baby. The one whose diapers his grandmother changed, the one who used his tiny hand to grab his grandfather’s finger for balance, the one who is washed and fed and rocked and scolded. This is God.

The idea that Jesus, a human being, was god, was dismissed as part of our original Unitarian founding. I’ve preached on this history before and if you’re interested, I will again, but for now just a quick reminder – There was a debate after Jesus died about whether he was god and because of a variety of political forces, it was decided that the doctrine would include this god-man, fully human and fully divine. Plenty of people believed it and even those that weren’t so sure understood that in a Greco-Roman world with plenty of other god-men in the mythology, this was likely the path of least resistance. The Council of Nicaea declared it doctrine in 325, but the controversy lived on and it was again determined at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Jesus is one being with 2 natures.

As final as church leaders thought they were being, the question remained. Having added the Holy Spirit, the official doctrine was of a Trinitarian God. One God, Three Faces. It was complicated and debated and embraced and dismissed through history, including by our Unitarian forebears in Europe. In the early part of the 19th century, our own Rev. William Ellery Channing formally preached on Unitarian theology, recognizing that Trinitarianism didn’t prioritize reason which would clearly recognize Jesus as human, a truly great human and model for other humans, no more god than anyone else. Letting go of all supernatural implications, Channing and the Unitarians who went after him, removed Jesus from the realm of a deity.

Which makes sense. Totally reasonable. But with that declaration, we lost the brilliance, the genius, the earth-shattering insight that is the core of the Christian offering. Jesus was god. Jesus, that tiny newborn, fragile, vulnerable, dependent baby born to a young woman on the ground floor of an ancient home surrounded by sheep and camels, was god.

I’d like to suggest that we got sidetracked with that original Unitarian declaration and forgot that the theology of Jesus’s divinity didn’t elevate one man as much as it elevated all of us. We got distracted by one story – his story – and forgot that it’s all our stories. We are all born, we are all dependent, we are all human. Christianity became a cult of One instead of a cult of All. While theologians throughout history were trying to capture Jesus, to enlarge him, they forgot that we are all equally human, all equally divine.

Jesus wasn’t the only one. He was one of the people who became awake to the magnificence of what it means to be alive. He lived communally, he loved unconditionally, he valued life over material things, valued health over money, believed we are all here to break ourselves open and pour ourselves out in service to each other.

Those early Unitarians rejected the idea that Jesus was god, claiming that there is only one God. They upheld Jesus as a role model, a good person who had a strong and necessary message about how we treat each other.  They declared a humanist Christianity that focused on serving the poor and feeding the hungry and healing the sick and visiting the imprisoned and generally caring for and being responsible to each other. There was no reason to get involved with complicated trinitarian theologies or questions about salvation after life; there’s certainly enough to keep us busy here and now without ever asking questions for which we’ll never have the answers. This made sense to thousands of people, and here we are to prove it.

But rejecting that insight, removing Jesus from the realm of incarnate god, of embodied god, separated divinity from humanity for all of us. We’ve done it in the rest of the natural world, too. Removing god from the body of Earth and sending god into the world of the stars separated from our embodied-ness, all of Earth became a collection of objects rather than a communion of subjects. We have made it our habit to remove or deny divinity, separating it from the bodies of our lives.

Russian soldiers have been executing Ukrainian civilians and dropping their bodies into mass graves. Iranian women are being imprisoned for as little as letting a lock of hair show. Unhoused Americans are sleeping and starving on city streets across the country. China is enslaving Uyghurs in an attempt to convert them from their Muslim faith.

We don’t do this when we see the face of god in each other’s eyes.

When I know you are god, that you are part of the great divine mystery, I do not let you starve. I do not let you suffer at my hand. I do not forget you, neglect you, abandon you.

And when I know god is tiny, fragile, embodied and becoming like the rest of us, I know I’m responsible for being god’s hand, god’s eyes, god’s feet. I know I am called to living a life of partnership with Love.

The divine spirit is embodied in each of us. Each of us born. Each of us as children, as teenagers, as young adults, as reproductive parents, as working people, as aging people. We are divine in our wrinkled skin and graying or thinning hair, in our aching knees and failing sight.

Waiting for the birth of god is waiting for us to know that god is here, in each of us, that hope is here because we are here. There is joy already alive. Advent is the time for waiting- but maybe it’s time for us to stop waiting and wake up to the magnificence of who we are, so fully human, so fully divine.

We are waiting for each of us to become awake. We tell the story year after year, and we keep thinking it’s a story of someone else. Mary and her baby 2000 years ago. But it’s our story. It’s the story of humans who are born, who are vulnerable, who are dependent. It’s the story of god who is born, vulnerable and dependent. It’s the story of loving so well and so much people celebrate your birth every year for ever. It’s the story of learning how to love that well, of being that love for each other. Advent is our time to be born into our own magnificence, and to see that same divine spirit in the eyes of everyone around us, no matter how broken or frightened or angry or lost they are.

Because they are god. And we are god. And until we all know that, we wait.

State of the Union

November 13, 2022

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

No one felt as good or as bad as they thought they would on Wednesday morning. After a rollercoaster of an election season, we neither saw the blue sweep in response to the end of reproductive freedom, nor did we see the red wave rebuke of the President’s economic policies. It was an unusual year after a whole lot of unusual years. Some purple states went blue. Some went red. Democracy was on the ballot and people voted to save it. Ish. Some extremists won, and some lost.

Last week I brought you 6 candidates, all GOP extremists, all, as far as I can tell, a threat to our values of truth-telling, peace-making, unity and equity. Of them, 5 lost. This includes the man calling for civil war, the one who said our astrological signs can help us make decisions about our health, the one who doesn’t believe women have a place in public life, the one who rejects evolution, and the white supremacist. On the other hand, Lauren Boebert, the one wondering how many AK-47s Jesus would have owned, won re-election to her seat in Congress, even though she has either never read or completely misunderstands the Bill of Rights, and is calling for an end to the separation of church and state. But, she stands alone in that particular random grouping of candidates I mentioned last week.

The good news is that voter turnout was high, a sign of a healthy democracy and of a continued trust in the system. Without faith in the process, democracy is dead and this week we learned that most people still believe that showing up matters. Our faith in the system hasn’t been degraded such that we no longer see a value in active participation, which would have been a sign that democracy is fading. We also learned that Americans aren’t as divided as we might have thought, evidenced by the number of people who split their ballots, voting both red and blue depending on the particular candidate, rather than blind party allegiance. During interviews outside polling places, people said they were voting for balance, voting against conspiracy theories, looking for stability, maturity, and honest leadership. And whether they were thinking the democrats were rigging the ballots or the republicans were suppressing the vote, people voted for whatever free and fair election initiatives were available to them. They voted to save democracy.

I Know This Rose Will Open

There are reasons, though, for our continued diligence. While a majority of Americans want to defend democracy, there are signs of something more sinister entering the mainstream. More than half of the election denying candidates won. There were 370 running for a variety of offices across the board, and 220 won. Of the 370 running, 100 of them were extremists, claiming intentional voter fraud in the 2020 election and seeking to remove President Biden and restore former President Trump. Of that 100, 40 won.

The others were more moderate in their denial, saying things like, “we need further investigation”, suggesting that this is an open question, when, in fact, it is not. About one third of the incoming House of Representatives includes people who question or deny the previous election. Of them, about 25 are extremists. Most states have at least one Representative who casts doubt on the election. In five states, 100% of the election deniers running won. In another 10 states at least 75% of them won. Of 100 Senators, 17 will be election deniers. Some of the newly elected positions will be populated by people who were at the capitol on January 6th, people who actively sought to overturn the 2020 election. The Governor of Alabama, reelected on Tuesday, said clearly that, “fake news, big tech, and blue state liberals stole the election from Trump”, and the incoming Secretary of State in Indiana said 2020 was a scam.

The problem we’re facing is that fringe conspiracy theories are no longer fringe, finding themselves in seats of power throughout the nation where they are far more difficult to ignore or dismiss and where their extremists views are becoming normalized.

I Know This Rose Will Open

At the same time, misinformation didn’t spread at the speed it did two years ago. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube reportedly removed thousands of posts with misinformation during this election cycle, usually before those posts got any traction. YouTube added $15 million to their budget to hire content moderators for both the US and Brazilian elections, establishing what they called a war room on election day to take things down in real time. Even things that got through temporarily failed to garner the attention the 2016 and 2020 elections taught us to expect. A conservative talk show host in Arizona shared a video on Twitter Tuesday about what he called intentionally broken voting machines. The video was shared 20,000 times, often by people with hundreds of thousands of followers themselves. But, in an unusual turn, people stopped sharing it almost as quickly as they’d started and within a few hours, it had lost its audience.

Free Press, an advocacy group for digital rights said that demand for misinformation was lower this year than in the last election cycle. We saw candidates who traded in blatant misinformation lose, like Senate nominee Bolduc from New Hampshire who said that schools were providing kitty litter to students who identified as cats, playing on fears around transgender people. There was ample evidence that Russia reactivated its massive system of trolls and bots to feed our hunger for conflict and reinforce our confirmation biases, but this year, if they punched through the nets placed on social media, we largely ignored them.

I Know This Rose Will Open

One of the more alarming things we heard from candidates, and from citizens all over this country is a call for, or an expectation of, civil war. Here in NY, those voices are muted, but we can’t deny the January 6th attempt to take down Congress and install an unelected government through force, nor can we ignore the reality that while the red wave didn’t take the country, it did crash on our state, with some of the most extreme now representing us.

Some experts who study the onset of civil wars, the loss of democracies and the rise of authoritarianism have been working hard since 2016 to get our attention. We have trusted – and maybe the whole world has trusted – that the American Constitution is strong, that our democracy is deeply ingrained in our law and culture, and that we are nearly invulnerable to any serious threat. These experts are trying to warn us that while many of us are confident that our institutions are secure, there’s a far-right movement gaining significant traction and while they started small, we are no longer able to ignore them. The presence of armed men at rallies, the visibility of paramilitary groups on American streets, and the waving of alternative symbols like confederate flags or American flags with a thin blue line have become commonplace.

We know, if we watch how this happens through history, that when governments topple, when civil war erupts, when authoritarianism takes over, many people are surprised. This is partially because we get used to the symbols of war, the symbols of democratic breakdown. We dismiss people as fringe, we see them as outsiders in some way, and we rest in the strength of our systems. But, here in NY, a far right candidate for governor got 2.7 million people to vote for him, just a few hundred thousand votes away from the winner, and four House seats flipped, all with far right, Trump aligned, candidates. We might see this shift as something happening to our south or west, but that isn’t in congruent with the facts.

I’m not saying this to frighten you, and I hope I’m not doing that. I’m saying this because I know we are ready to look at what’s real. It’s something I love about our faith. We don’t pretend. We face things directly, honestly, and we aren’t afraid to break through convention to speak truth. Today, this is our truth.

I Know This Rose Will Open

Last week when worship was over, a few of you encircled me because you were worried and you asked me what to do if a country that feels combustible actually ignites. I told you I’d have a better idea today. And I do. I’ve read key books on this subject, listened to advice from our top leaders, and have reviewed what I know from my years of study and here’s what I have. What will save us? Faith, Hope, and Love. Don’t roll your eyes at me.

One of the most dangerous things about this moment in history is our isolation. After years of pandemic lockdowns and quarantines, the rise of video as the primary way people meet, and the dramatic reduction of people working in the same physical spaces, our communities are smaller if they exist any more at all. When we add to that the disintegration we experience in families both because of real distance and because of political divisions, we are living in a nearly unprecedented time of social fragmentation.

This makes us vulnerable in a variety of ways. A good friend, living in a very conservative town, is single and has rainbow and a black lives matter flags on her home. She wondered recently if she should remove them given the political climate. Understanding how mob mentality works, she knows if people take to the streets, she will be quickly targeted. Some of you have expressed similar worries.

While history tells us that these things happen and no one is immune, we also know that people are less likely to harm someone they know. My friend will spend some time knocking on her neighbor’s doors to introduce herself. She’ll pay specific attention to those she thinks are more liberal or moderate, hoping to build a network. In that same town, she and other progressives are scheduling gatherings in each other’s homes. They’re also organizing to support more progressive policies in the school system, hoping to stave off a sharp right turn parent-activists have taken. In other words, they are building community. They are building systems of relationships, with the intention of creating safety nets for each other.

Last week, I told you that hope is active, that hope isn’t the idea that things will be fine, but they might be fine if we work to make it so. As a people of hope, we are called to active engagement. Timothy Snyder, the author of the book On Tyranny, tells us to pick an institution and commit to defending it. An institution can be as small as a local library or as large as the Department of Education. Using your own interests and skills, ask yourself what institution is necessary for a free society and protect it. I’m committed to this one, the Community Church of New York, and with it, to freedom of religion and the separation of church and state.

As Unitarian Universalists, we have a long history of fighting for justice, for centering the marginalized, for seeking equity. We pray in traditional ways, gathering our strength and expressing our gratitude, but we know if we aren’t also praying with our hands and our feet, our prayer is almost meaningless. We are a people of faith, which means we are a people of action, grounded in the shared and deep values of human worth and dignity, democratic principles, and radical interconnectedness.

Faith, Hope and Love. These are our salvation, the response to the eschatological anxiety of our time. We are not ungrounded. We are not helpless. We are not alone. 

This We Believe: On God and Prayer

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

September 18, 2022 

Long before becoming UU, the question “Do you believe in God” was the worst anyone could ever ask me. You might feel similarly. It’s a binary question and I’m not a fan of binary. It’s a yes or no question to the nature of the universe. It’s like asking, “What is the meaning of life: yes or no?”

I have no intention of asking or answering that question today – not for you and not for me. It’s a bad question. It’s particularly bad when people are sure they know the answer and then judge other people if their answer is different. I won’t ask the question and I don’t have an answer. And I’m sure if ever anyone ever comes close to an answer to that question, it won’t be “yes” or “no”.

The universe as I understand it is far, far more complicated than that. It’s profound with mystery- complex, unknown, unknowable. It’s wild, and chaotic with life teeming in the minute and in the magnificent. It’s loving. It’s violent. It’s unpredictable, and I’m not willing to even consider that there’s a “yes” or “no” question that comes close to apprehending the depth or breadth of what it means to be alive or in what ways we are alone and in what ways we are not.

There are times, though, when I seek people who wrestle with these big questions. Not people who answer them, but who live into them. Some are scientists, poets, philosophers. A few of my favorites are mystics. Mysticism, in its formal and academic context, is the radical experience of the divine. My master’s degree is in Medieval Mysticism, a subject I found tremendous comfort in in graduate school where we otherwise spent our time diagnosing and dissecting god. Courses on reason and doctrine were tempered by poetry written a thousand years ago by women and men overcome by Love.

We have mystics closer to our time period who have had similar experiences. The 20th century writer and spiritual leader Thomas Merton wrote of a conversion experience in Kentucky. He said:  “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness. . .

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Merton’s conversion on 4th and Walnut, - now so famous an experience it’s memorialized on that very corner in that city with a big sign marking the spot – that kind of experience isn’t common, but it’s also not entirely unusual. Caryll Houselander, a lesser-known 20th century English mystic had a similar experience. She was riding in an underground train. She writes:

“Quite suddenly, I saw with my mind, but as vividly as a wonderful picture, Christ in them all. But I saw more than that; not only was Christ in every one of them, living in them, dying in them, rejoicing in them, sorrowing in them – but because he was in them, and because they were here, the whole world was here in this underground train, not only the world as it was at that moment, not only in the people in the countries of the world, but all those yet to come. I came out into the street and walked for a long time in the crowds. It was the same here, on every side, in every passerby – Christ.”

Language isn’t our friend today. The word “god” – with or without a capital “G” – can be cumbersome, depending on your own personal history. “Christ” maybe even more so. These words have history. They have politics. They might be connected with very specific images and understandings. They might be connected to personal trauma. To religious trauma. To deep, unnecessary rejection, pain, longing and loneliness. Unitarians in particular have been trying to break open our assumptions and connections around the word “god” from an individual male, white, conscious, all-powerful and present being since the 19th century, but somehow we still default to that, even unconsciously, probably because that image has so saturated our culture and language it requires more discipline than most of us have time for to break free of it. In response, so many of us say we don’t believe in god. We answer “no” to the binary question. What I think we mean is we don’t believe in that, particular god and we haven’t had time to give much thought to the other ones.

Sometimes we find it liberating to hold the same kind of image, but this time god is female. And Black. That gets easier. Warmer. Maybe equally ferocious but on our side. That god might even be sexual. And lesbian. Now She’s starting to get interesting.

Richard Rohr, the director of the Center for Contemplation and Action, poses the idea that God isn’t an individual being, but another name for Everything. Everything is connected to Everything. We aren’t saved alone, but in participation with everyone else, in community with people and with the planet. God is in all things, is all things. The world is both the hiding place and the revelation of God. There is no difference between the profane and the sacred. All life is communion, all life is coherent. Limiting God to a person, a single revelation, makes the world fragmented and small. But, the world, the universe is massive – and expanding. The Holy, the connection, the foundation for life, the platform for our living, is moving, stretching, expanding. And it is the body of God, another name for Everything.

A man who calls himself Wild Bill Balding goes even further. Breaking open the idea that God is the expanding universe, Balding tells us God is a Verb, not a noun. He writes:  

'I am who I am,

I will be who I will be.'

dynamic, seething, active

web of love poured out,

given, received, exchanged,

one God in vibrant community

always on the move,

slipping through our fingers,

blowing through the nets we cast

to hold and name,

confine to nouns, to labels,

freezeframe stasis,

pinned like a butterfly,

solid, cold, controlled, lifeless.

'I am who I am,

I will be who I will be' -

not pinned down by names, labels,

buildings, traditions,

or even by nails to wood:

I am: a verb, not a noun,

living, free, exuberant,

always on the move.

“I am who I am”. That’s what Moses was told. He saw a bush, engulfed in flame, but not burning and he tried to find out what was going on. Yahweh spoke to him and told him he was being called to liberate those who were enslaved by the Pharoah in Egypt. Moses, unsure about what was really happening here, asked who is sending him and the answer was “I am who I am”, sometimes translated as “I am who Is”.

I Am Who Is. An act of Being. And the conversation is an experience, not a belief. That conversation, often called prayer, comes up from our center, not always as words, but as laughter or kisses or sobbing. Prayer is primeval, it’s primordial, it’s our most ancient language, spoken long before we had words. We dance in joy and sorrow and fear. We make wishes, often secret, and howl, sometimes in pairs and every time we do, we are expressing our deepest desires, our longing for a world we once knew or never knew and can’t live without. Prayer is our most authentic expression when we allow it, especially if we don’t try to temper it with those pesky binary questions that end with “yes” or “no”. Once we move into our minds, seeking images or specifics, wondering to what or whom we are praying, we have moved from our hearts to our heads where Mystery is uncomfortable and usually unwelcome.

I remember long ago being told to kneel and pray daily, to say thank you and to ask for things like help and wisdom. I was told if there were specific things I wanted, I could mention those too, but to be aware that sometimes the answer is “no”. So, I did that. I got on my knees and talked. It was fine, and sometimes helped me get clear about things, or made me feel better about something. Sometimes I waited for answers – and I could wait a long time. Then I started feeling like this was a dysfunctional relationship with me doing all the talking and some guy out in the clouds with all the power. When I started studying religion, I asked a teacher how to pray and she genuinely didn’t understand my question. I wanted her to hand me a stack of papers with the right words on them so I’d be sure I was doing it right. Instead, she asked if I sing. Or walk in the woods. Or chant. She asked if I danced, which I did often. She asked if I loved people, which was also a big “yes”. So, she said, she doesn’t understand why I’m asking. It seems I know how to pray.

I thought I’d find the appropriate and accepted posture and start a conversation with the magic words and then I’d wait for an answer. What I didn’t know is that I didn’t need words and the conversation was going on all around me. All I needed to do was notice. I needed to breath. To see. To feel. To listen.

I don’t know the nature of the universe. I don’t know the meaning of life. I do know how it feels to stand in a summer rainstorm, drenched and laughing. I know how to take off my shoes and feel the grass beneath my feet. I know how to hold a door open for someone or how to thank them when they do that for me, how to live into each gift, how to offer gratitude.

Look around for yourself. Just outside this door, you will see giggling children and plumes of exhaust, regal buildings and people scrounging for food, warm winds and tropical storms – in awe and delight you will see all the things, dreadful and beautiful, more wonderful and terrible than is necessary. Let it strike you speechless with worship and fear. It is Everything.

And every once in a while, look around and see that everyone – no matter who they are or what they think or why they’re here,- everyone is walking around shining like the sun.