preached at First Parish in Lexington, July 20, 2014

The image of an elderly Emerson, perhaps resting in dusty sunlight on an overstuffed armchair, asking his wife, “What was the name of my best friend?” is moving. It suggests that Thoreau’s name faded long before the feelings his memory evoked. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are not exactly the type of people I usually think of when I think of friends. Thoreau, the archetypical non-conformist, sought to live in the woods by Walden Pond to prove his independence. His classic text opens, “I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself… and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.” For Thoreau solitary life was permanent while life amongst his human fellows was but a sojourn, a temporary condition.

Emerson was equally skeptical about the social dimensions of human nature. In his essay “Self-Reliance” he claimed, “Society everywhere is a conspiracy against… every one of its members.” He believed that self-discovery, awakening knowledge of the self, was primarily a task for the individual, not the community. When he was invited to join the utopian experiment Brook Farm, Emerson responded that he was unwilling to give the community ‘the task of my emancipation which I ought to take on myself.’”

Yet both of these men sought out the company of others. Emerson gathered around him a circle of poets, preachers, writers, and intellectuals whose friendships have become legendary. That circle contains many of our Unitarian Universalist saints. I speak of the Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau, of course, but also the pioneering feminists Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody, the fiery abolitionist Theodore Parker, and the utopian visionary George Ripely. What we see when look closely at Emerson and Thoreau is not two staunch individualists but rather two men caught in the tension between community and individuality, very conscious that one cannot exist without the other.

Emerson wrote on friendship and in an essay declared, “I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know.” Margaret Fuller’s tragic death, she was forty when she drowned at sea, prompted him to write, “I have lost my audience.” Emerson thought that Fuller was the one person who understood his philosophy most completely, even if they sometimes violently disagreed. Of her he wrote, “more variously gifted, wise, sportive, eloquent… magnificent, prophetic, reading my life at her will, and puzzling me with riddles…” Of him she wrote, “that from him I first learned what is meant by the inward life… That the mind is its own place was a dead phrase to me till he cast light upon my mind.” Perhaps Fuller’s early death is why Emerson recalled Thoreau, and not her, in the fading moments of his life. But, no matter, a close study of their circle reveals an essential truth: we require others to become ourselves.

The tension between the individual and the community apparent in the writings of our Transcendentalists leads to contradictory statements. Emerson himself placed little stock in consistency, penning words that I sometimes take as my own slogan, “…a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Let us consider Emerson the friend, rather than Emerson the individualist, this morning. If for no reason than when Emerson was falling into his final solitude he tried to steady himself with the memory of his great friend Thoreau. Emerson himself wrote, “Friendship demands a religious treatment.”

Have you ever had a good friend? A great friend? Can you recall what it felt like to be in that person’s presence? Perhaps your friend is in this sanctuary with you this morning. Maybe you are sitting next to them, aware of the warmth of their body. Maybe they are distant: hacking corn stalks with a machete, sipping coffee in a Paris cafe, caking paint on fresh stretched canvas, or driving a taxi through the mazing Portland streets. I invite you to invoke the presence of your friend. Give yourself to the quiet joy you feel when you are together.

Friendship is an experience of connection. Friends remind us that we are not alone in the universe. We may be alone in the moment, seeking solitude or even isolated in pain, but we are always members of what William Ellery Channing called “the great family of all souls.” If we are wise we learn that lesson through our friends.

Again, Emerson, “We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables.” Such dreams and fables can become real, they can become, “the solidest thing we know.” Seeking such relationships is one of the reasons why people join religious communities like this one.

When I started in the parish ministry it took me awhile to realize this. In my old congregation in Cleveland we had testimonials every Sunday. After the chalice was lit a member would get up and share why they had joined. Their stories were almost always similar and, for years, I was slightly disappointed with them. The service would start, the flame would rise up and someone would begin, “I come to this congregation because I love the community.”

“That’s it?,” my internal dialogue would run. “You come here because of the community? You don’t come seeking spiritual depth or because of all of the wonderful justice work we do in the world? Can’t you get community someplace else? If all you are looking for is community why don’t you join a book club or find a sewing circle? We are a church! People are supposed to come here for more than just community! Uh! I must be a failure a minister if all that these people get out of this congregation is a sense of community!”

Eventually, I realized that community is an essential part of the religious experience. The philosopher William James may have believed, “Religion… [is] the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude,” but he was wrong. Religion is found in the moments of connection when we discover that we are part of something larger than ourselves. Life together, life in community, is a reminder of that reality. People seek out that experience in a congregation because of the isolating nature of modern life. In this country we are more alone than ever before. Just a few years ago, Newsweek reported that in the previous twenty years the number of people who have no close friends had tripled. Today at least one out of every four people report having no one with whom they feel comfortable discussing an important matter.

Congregations like this one offer the possibility of overcoming such a sense of isolation. We offer a place for people to celebrate life’s passages and make meaning from those passages. Friendship requires a common center to blossom and meaning making is a pretty powerful common center.

Aristotle understood that friendship was rooted in mutual love. That love was not necessarily the love of the friends for each other. It was love for a common object. This understanding led him to describe three kinds of friendship: those of utility, those of pleasure and those of virtue, which he also called complete friendship. Friendships of utility were the lowest, least valuable kind and friendships of virtue were the highest kind. Erotic friendship fell somewhere in between. Friendships of utility were easily dissolved. As soon as one friend stopped being useful to the other then the friendship dissipated.

It took me until I was in my twenties to really understand the transitory nature of friendships of utility. I spent a handful of years between college and seminary working as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. I worked for about a year at on-line bookstore. When a recession hit there were a round of lay-offs and, as the junior member of my department, I lost my job.

Up until that point I spent a fair amount of social time with several of my colleagues. We would have lunch and go out for drinks after work. I enjoyed the company of one colleague in particular. I made the mistake of thinking that he was really my friend. He had a masters degree in classical literature. Our water cooler conversations sometimes revolved around favorite authors from antiquity, Homer and Sappho. “From his tongue flowed speech sweeter than honey,” said one. “Like a mountain whirlwind / punishing the oak trees, / love shattered my heart,” said the other. Alas, when I lost my job a common love of literature was not enough to sustain our relationship. My colleague was always busy whenever I suggested we get together. Have you ever had a similar experience? Such friends come and go throughout our working lives. Far rarer are what Aristotle calls friendships of virtue. These are the enduring friendships, they help us to become better people. Congregational life provides us with opportunities to build such friendships.

The virtues might be understood as those qualities that shape a good and whole life. A partial list of Aristotle’s virtues runs bravery, temperance, generosity, justice, prudence… Friendship offers us the opportunity to practice these virtues and, in doing so, helps us to become better, more religious, people. The virtues require a community in which to practice them.

Let us think about bravery for a moment. The brave, Aristotle believed, stand firm in front of what is frightening not with a foolhardy arrogance but, instead, knowing full well the consequences of their decisions. They face their fears because they know that by doing so they may achieve some greater good.

Seeking a friend is an act of bravery. It always contains within it the possibility of rejection. Emerson observed, “The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.” I have often found, when I hoped for friends, that I need to initiate the relationship. I need to start the friendship. I am not naturally the most extroverted and outgoing person. Many days I am most content alone with the company of my books or wandering unescorted along the urban edges–scanning river banks for blue herons and scouring wrinkled aged tree trunks for traces of mushrooms.

But other people contain within them possible universes that I cannot imagine. My human fellows pull me into a better self. And so, I find that I must be brave and initiate friendships, even when I find the act of reaching out uncomfortable or frightening. Rejection is always a possibility. I was rejected by my former colleague. Rejection often makes me question my own self-worth. When it comes I wonder perhaps if I am unworthy of friendship or of love. But by being brave, and trying again, I discover that I am.

Bravery is not the only virtue that we find in friendship. Generosity is there too, for friendship is a giving of the self to another. Through that giving of the self we come to know ourselves a little better. We say, “I value this part of myself enough to want to share it with someone else.”

We could create a list of virtues and then explore how friendship offers an opportunity to practice each of them. Such an exercise, I fear, would soon become tedious. So, instead, let me underscore that our friends provide us with the possibility of becoming better people. This can be true even on a trivial level. Just the other day, a friend visited from Cleveland. I took the opportunity to make a vanilla soufflé, something I had never done before but will certainly do again. We delighted in its silky sweet eggey texture. It can also be true on a substantive level. Just the other day, a friend called me and reminded I should try to make the world a better place. Next week I am going to El Salvador to gather testimony from undocumented immigrants who have been deported back there.

How have your friends changed your life? Emerson and Thoreau certainly changed each other’s lives. And I know that the two men, whatever their preferences for individualism, needed each other. I half suspect that Emerson’s tattered memory of his friend, “What was the name of my best friend?” was actually an urgent cry. As Emerson disappeared into the dimming hollows of his mind Thoreau’s light was a signal that could call him back into himself.

I detect a similar urgency in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem to Marianne Moore: “We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping, / or play at a game of constantly being wrong / with a priceless set of vocabularies, / or we can bravely deplore, but please / please come flying.” Whatever was going on in Bishop’s life when she wrote her friend the most pressing matter, the strongest tug of reality, was that she see her friend. Surely it is an act of bravery to admit to such a need. Truly it is an act of generosity to wish to give one’s self so fully.

Let us then, be brave, and seek out friends. Such bravery can be a simple as saying, “Hello, I would like to get to know you.” Let us be generous, then, and give ourselves to our friends, saying, “I have my greatest gift to give you, my self.” Doing so will help us to lead better, more virtuous, lives and may draw us to unexpected places and into unexpected heights.

Amen.

preached at the First Parish in Lexington, July 6, 2014

Have you ever played the “Race Game?” Unitarian Universalist theologian Thandeka describes it in her well known work “Learning to be White.” The game is straightforward. It has only one rule. For a whole week you use the ascriptive word white every time you refer to a European American. For example, when you go home today you tell a friend: “I went to church this morning. The guest preacher was an articulate young white man. He brought with him his seven-year old son. That little white boy sure is cute!”

I imagine that I just made some of you uncomfortable. Race is an emotionally charged subject. An honest discussion of the subject brings up shame, fear, and anger. Talking about race can also be revalatory, it can bring the hidden into sight. What the “Race Game” reveals is the extent to which most white people assume white culture to be normative. Thandeka writes, “Euro-Americans… have learned a pervasive racial language… in their racial lexicon, their own racial group becomes the great unsaid.” In her book, she reports that no white person she has ever challenged to play the game has managed to successfully complete it. In the late 1990s, when she was finishing her text, she repeatedly challenged her primarily white lecture and workshop audiences to play the game for a day and write her a letter or e-mail describing their experiences. She only ever received one letter. According to Thandeka, the white women who authored it, “wrote apologetically,” she could not complete the game, “though she hoped someday to have the courage to do so.”

Revelation can be frightening. The things that we have hidden from ourselves are often ugly. In the Christian New Testament, the book of Revelation is a book filled with horrors. The advent of God’s reign on earth is proceeded by bringing the work of Satan into plain light. It is only once the invisible has been made visible that it can be confronted. Thandeka’s work reveals how white people are racialized. It shows that whiteness is not natural, it is an artificial creation. Whiteness is something that white people learn, it is not something that we are born with. Race is a social construct, not a biological one. It is taught to children.

Thandeka recounts the stories of how many white people learned about race. Most of the stories follow the narrative of Nina Simone’s powerful 1967 song “Turning Point.” I do not have Nina’s voice so I cannot do the song justice. But the words are poetry:

See the little brown girl
She’s as old as me
She looks just like chocolate
Oh mummy can’t you see

We are both in first grade
She sits next to me
I took care of her mum
When she skinned her knee

She sang a song so pretty
On the Jungle Gym
When Jimmy tried to hurt her
I punched him in the chin

Mom, can she come over
To play dolls with me?
We could have such fun mum
Oh mum what’d you say

Why not? oh why not?
Oh… I… see…

It is chilling, when Nina sings that last line. She sings it as if it was a revelation. The “Why not? oh why not?” are offered in low confused tones. The “Oh… I… see…” are loud and clear. They suggest a transformation, and not one to be proud of.

I do not have particularly clear memories of learning to be white. Many people Thandeka describes in her book belong to my parents’ generation, the Baby Boomers. I grew up in a somewhat integrated neighborhood. One of my neighbors, I used to mow his lawn when I was in high school, was the Freedom Rider Rev. John Washington. My elementary school had children and faculty of many races.

I do not remember thinking about race until I was in my early teens. I was with my white parents. We were driving through Chicago, the city where my white father was born, when our car broke down across from Cabrini Green. Do you remember Cabrini Green? It was Chicago’s most notorious public housing project, with terrible living conditions and a horrible reputation for violence. My parents told us, their white children, not to get out of the car. I have a clear memory of my white father telling us, “this is a very dangerous neighborhood.” When I asked him what he meant by that he responded by saying he would tell me later. I do not think that he ever did. It was only once I reached adulthood that I realized phrases like “dangerous neighborhood” and “nice neighborhood” or “unsafe failing school” and “good school” contained a racial code.

This morning I do not wish to only stir up whatever feelings of shame, anger, and fear come up when we talk about race. I want to give you a note of hope. I want to talk about reparations for slavery, for Jim Crow, and for the continuing racial injustice in our society. Racism has been called America’s original sin. Like many Unitarian Universalists, I do not believe in original sin. I do not believe that we born racists or racialized. I believe racism and racialization is learned behavior. And just as the behavior has been learned, it can be unlearned. Those of us who are white can teach our white children differently than we have been taught. We can work to make things right.

I took Frederick Douglass’s “What to Slave is the Fourth of July?” as my text this morning because I knew that on this Sunday after July fourth I was occupy one of the great pulpits of the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence was read here, as it is every year, on Friday. Let us invoke Douglass, one of the greatest abolitionists, the escaped slave who declaimed, “I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view.” Observed from thusly the holiday showed, in his words, “America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.”

Douglass believed America was false to its past because European Americans pretended that the American Revolution was about freedom. The truth differed. The Revolution was about freedom for whites. For African Americans it heralded another ninety years of enslavement. For Native Americans, the indigenous people of this continent, it signaled the continuation and amplification of generations of land theft and genocide. Slavery was outlawed in England, but not the English colonies, in 1772. The English crown was more respectful of Native America nations than most European colonists wished. What to the Slave was the Fourth of July? A celebration of white freedom; a gala for African American slavery. Liberty and slavery were the conjoined twins of the American Revolution. High freedom for some, mostly white, and base oppression for others, mostly people of color, continues to be its legacy.

Do not let fact that the President of this country is black fool you; we continue to live in a society designed to benefit whites over others. Freedom and oppression continue to be conjoined. If you doubt this consider that the average wealth of a white family in this country is twenty times that of an African American family; consider that the unemployment and poverty rates for African Americans are twice those of whites; consider that African Americans are incarcerated at six times the rates of whites; consider that African Americans, on average, live four years less than whites; consider how hard it is to play Thandeka’s “Race Game.” The statistics for Native Americans are similarly depressing. The conclusion is inevitable: our society is structured to benefit white people at the expense of African Americans and most other people of color.

On this Sunday after July fourth it is appropriate to ask not “What to Slave is the Fourth of July?”–for legalized slavery has been largely ended–but: “What to anyone who cares about racial justice is the Fourth of July?”

Now, I suspect that at this point some of you are beginning to wonder what you have gotten yourself into. Peter has gone away for the summer and left your storied pulpit in hands of a lunatic radical. You might be thinking: we are ten minutes into the sermon and all we have from this maladjusted savant is a cringe worthy political oration. I might reply, in the words of Martin King, “There are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted.” We ought to be maladjusted to white supremacy. It is a grave threat, perhaps the gravest, to our souls.

By soul I mean, our essential essence, the core of our personality, that part of each us that animates us and makes us uniquely who we are. Our souls are social products. They are born from our interactions with ours. White supremacy lessens our souls. White, black, brown, white supremacy spreads the lie that some of us are more innately gifted, better than, others. For many European Americans, it creates illusion that we have earned what have not. For many people of color, it suggests that undeserved suffering is somehow a predestined punishment. It circumscribes the circles that we interact with, separates people and communities.

For those of you who are comfortable with traditional religious language, let me suggest that white supremacy is a sin. Paul Tillich, one of the great white Christian theologians of the twentieth century, helpfully described sin as “estrangement.” It can be cast as separation, and alienation, from the bulk of humanity, the natural world, and, if you identify as a theist, God. James Luther Adams, one of Tillich’s students and the greatest white Unitarian Universalist theologian of the second half of the twentieth century, believed that the cure for the estrangement of sin was intentional, voluntary association. We can create communities that overcome human separation. He wrote, “Human sinfulness expresses itself… in the indifference of the average citizen who is so impotent… [so] privatized… as not to exercise freedom of association for the sake of the general welfare and for the sake of becoming a responsible self.”

The Christian tradition offers a religious prescription for dealing with sin. First, confess than you have sinned. Second, do penance for your sin. First, admit that you are estranged. Second, try to overcome that estrangement. We might recast the prescription in terms of addiction. First, if you are white, admit that you are addicted to whiteness. Second, you try to overcome your addiction, step by small step. First, you admit that we, as a society, have a problem. Second, we try to address it.

Race is a social construct, a collective sin. It requires institutions to maintain. Frederick Douglass, and other abolitionists, accused the churches of their day of siding with the slave masters against the enslaved. Douglass proclaimed, “the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually sides with the oppressors.” Today most religious institutions, particularly most predominantly white religious institutions, maintain racial norms not out of malice but out of ignorance. Silence is the standard. But, as Audre Lorde said, “Your silence will not protect you.” If we are to overcome the sin of separation and save our souls then we must speak out. We must admit that our own Unitarian Universalist Association tends to continue to do social justice and theological work from primarily the perspective of the white middle class. We must call for, work towards, reparations.

You might know that this year at General Assembly we adopted a study action issue focusing on “Escalating Inequality.” It is a telling, and well intentioned, document. It document acknowledges the increasing inequality in our society but it makes no mention of race or racism. It makes no reference to the gross disparities in wealth between most people of color and most whites.

Racism and economic inequality are hopelessly intertwined. One is almost certainly the product of the other. The skin caste system in this country dates from the colonial period when it was intentional constructed to turn the African and European servants of the great plantation owners against each other. Whites were promised a modicum of privilege if they sided with the great landowners against African slaves. Poor whites gained a measure of freedom in exchange for enforcing the slavery of blacks. Whites who strayed, who sided with the African slaves, were ostracized, or worse.

If we are going to address inequality then we must seek reparations. And here’s where the hope comes in. Reparations may seem like an impossibility but they are a real possibility. There is a precedent. During World War II Japanese Americans were viewed as a threat to national security and forcibly relocated to internment camps. In 1988 the United States Congress passed a bill giving each living survivor of the camps redress. On the international level, Germany and German firms have paid various forms of reparations to both Israel and individual survivors of the Nazi concentration camps.

I do not know what form reparations will take but there are four concrete things that can be to move us towards them. First, those of us who are white can examine what it feels like to be white. We can play the “Race Game.” We can examine the ways in which we have learned to be white, and how we have benefited from and suffered under the racial caste system. We can end the denial that we live in a white supremacist society. Second, your congregation can pass a resolution making a public statement in favor of reparations. You celebrate your connection to the great abolitionist Theodore Parker. Honor his legacy. My home congregation, First Parish in Cambridge, has a banner on the front proclaiming its divestment from fossil fuels and challenging Harvard to do the same. How powerful would it be for the church on Lexington Common to hoist a banner each July fourth calling for reparations? Third, you can write the Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association and challenge them to include language about reparations in the final version of the study action issue on inequality. Finally, call your white Congresswoman, Katherine Clark, and ask her to support Congressman John Conyers’s bill calling for the creation of a commission to study reparations. He has introduced it repeatedly. It does not commit the government to do anything beyond creating a commission to study reparations. That would be a first, necessary, step.

In “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglass compares the country to a river. I find his description hopeful. Let me leave you with his words. “Great streams are not easily turned from channels… They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel… But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch…” Which is the river’s true channel? The legacy of liberty or slavery? Will your soul, or mine, be a withered branch or will it rise in stately majesty?

Amen, Ashe, and Blessed Be.

This coming Sunday I am preaching at the First Parish in Lexington. The fact that I am preaching in that particular historic pulpit has prompted me to reflect on Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” My sermon, “The River May Not Be Turned Aside,” responds to Douglass and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent piece in the Atlantic Monthly calling for reparations. In doing so, I take up the call for reparations and challenge Unitarian Universalists, and European Americans, to commit to them. In preparing for preaching I dug up a sermon I preached in 2006 “The Case for Reparations.” Reading, I can really see how far I have come as preacher. My sermon on Sunday will have quite a different structure and sensibility. The message, however, will be more-or-less the same.

The Case for Reparations
preached at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Long, January 15, 2006

I was born eight years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Despite this he has been a powerful presence in my life. My parents are both veterans of the sixties civil rights movement and I grew up hearing stories about King, Stokely Carmichael, Rosa Parks and numerous others. Dr. King and his philosophy of non-violence were held as an example of the best that the human race could achieve by not only my mother and father but by my schoolteachers and church community.

I have an early memory of hearing Rosa Parks speak at my church. I was probably about ten or twelve and the details are a bit fuzzy. What I remember of her speech is this: She was very small. She emphasized her ordinariness. And everyone in the church thought she was very important.

Rosa Parks died last year. Her passing received the sort of national attention normally reserved for presidents. Her casket was placed in the capital rotunda, a first for a woman, and the nation’s flags were ordered at half-mast. Her death was an opportunity for many, especially those in the establishment, to celebrate how far the country has come since the days when Parks and King fought Jim Crow and led the Montgomery bus boycott.

Today is King’s birthday and tomorrow people will celebrate a federal holiday in his honor. Right now churches around the country are remembering King and Parks. In the twenty years since King’s birthday became an official holiday I have been to many services that have lionized him. Most of these have focused on his non-violent philosophy and position as the leader of the civil rights movement. In much of popular culture he has become such a symbol of the civil rights movement that he has acquired an almost god-like status. As a result the broader civil rights movement and the work of many of his predecessors and contemporaries has been obscured.

King’s birthday is one of the few times of the year that people in America are willing to talk openly about racism as a problem. Usually, though not always, racism is described in the past tense and King’s work is presented as either mostly done or complete. I am afraid that many people have replaced celebrating King with his continuing his work. In fact for some, the fact that King can be the subject of a national holiday is in of itself enough to demonstrate that racism no longer exists. In this way the celebration of King’s birthday risks becoming a type of tokenism.

There’s a cartoon from an eighties labor journal that captures this problem. In the first panel two people ask President Ronald Reagan: “What do you say to charges that your policies encourage racism?” He replies in the next two panels: “Happy Birthday to You! Happy Birthday to You! Happy Birthday Dear Martin! Happy Birthday to You!” The final panel has Reagan scratching his head and thinking to himself: “How could I ever have opposed this holiday?”

King’s birthday has become both an opportunity to celebrate the heroes and veterans of the Civil Rights movement and, for some, a chance to pretend the oppressive systems that Dr. King fought to change no longer exist. After all today both the Republican and Democratic parties have prominent members who are African American. Condoleeza Rice claims that if was not for Rosa Parks she never would have been able to become Secretary of State. The implication is that the appointment of an extreme right-wing African American woman to the third highest position in the executive branch is the culmination of the civil rights movement. The accomplishments of a few African Americans like Rice leads to the claim that racism is largely defeated and obscures the continual oppression of the majority.

As the recent events in New Orleans demonstrate racism is alive and well. The fact that a majority of those left behind in Katrina’s path were African Americans was no accident. Forty years after the high water mark of the civil rights movement—the passage of the 1964 civil rights and the 1965 voting rights acts—the majority of African Americans still live in poverty. During Katrina they were primarily the ones who lacked the resources to flee the hurricane. The federal, state and city governments did little to compensate for this and offer them help. Neither adequate shelter from the storm nor buses to leave the city were provided.

The majority of European Americans have chosen to ignore or forgotten the conditions that many African American poor live. Katrina uncovered the desperate multigenerational poverty that many African Americans continue to live in and forced them into the public eye again. This type of poverty is not limited to New Orleans and can be seen many places if one chooses to look for it. A trip to parts of Long Beach or nearby South Central Los Angles will reveal the poverty that is an ever-present reality for many African Americans.

This poverty is often the result of the structural changes in the economy that have made high paying blue-collar jobs harder and harder to find. The nation’s inner cities have been intentionally starved of the material resources necessary to provide good education and opportunities for economic development. It is not a coincidence that the most resource starved urban areas are populated largely by people of color. Without access to higher education many African Americans are unable to obtain more than low-wage jobs in the service sector and provide adequate resources for their children to escape the cycle of poverty.

African Americans continue to suffer from structural racism in other ways. They make up a disproportionate number of the prison population and are often targeted by police for crimes they did not commit. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that African Americans are more likely to receive harsher sentences than European Americans who commit similar crimes. The phrase driving while black is not just a colloquialism. It is an adequate description of the racial profiling and discrimination that many African Americans face from police.

The civil rights era won an end to the legal discrimination of individuals based on the color of their skin. It is now illegal to refuse to hire someone or admit them to a university because they are African American. What the civil rights movement did not eliminate was the structural, economic and civic, forms of oppression that are directed at whole populations but that individuals can escape. It is still legal to discriminate against whole populations by not providing adequate resources for education, housing and economic development. A comparison of the conditions many of the nation’s inner cities and suburbs demonstrates this. And, as the 2000 election in Florida and the 2004 election in Ohio prove, legal or not it is still acceptable to create obstacles for large groups of African Americans to vote. Today the forces of racism are subtler than those King and Parks fought but they are just as damaging and pervasive.

It is my contention that the best way to erase this structural racism is through a re-configuration of society’s institutions. The United States was founded by slaveholders and much of its economic wealth was generated by enslaved Africans. While the institution of slavery was abolished in 1865 much of the country’s economic and social structure continues to reflect its legacy. Today the majority of African Americans live at or near the poverty level and continue to work undesirable and low-paying jobs. Working people without unions, whether African, European or Mexican American, are paid subsistence wages while an extremely small number of people control the majority of the country’s resources. The vast majority of those who are lucky enough to find themselves in the 1% of the populace that control 90% of the nation’s resources are European Americans.

Reparations for slavery are a necessary step to transform this system. After the Civil War few, if any, freedmen and freedwomen received redress for their enslavement. While there was talk of giving every liberated man forty acres and a mule little redistribution of wealth actually occurred. The European Americans who built their fortunes exploiting others were able to keep them and many African Americans, lacking material resources, were forced to go back and work for their former masters as sharecroppers. This system remained in place until the 1960s. Until that time many African American families were unable to accumulate the material resources necessary to escape the cycle of poverty.

Congressman John Conyers has repeatedly introduced a bill into the House of Representatives calling for the creation of a commission to study reparations. The passage of his bill would do four things:

1. It would acknowledge the fundamental injustice and inhumanity of slavery,
2. It would establish a commission to study slavery, its subsequent racial and economic discrimination against freed slaves;
3. It would study the impact of those forces on today’s living African Americans; and
4. The commission would then make recommendations to Congress on appropriate remedies for the study of issue of reparations. We might all engage in a similar study.

We should encourage the Unitarian Universalist Association, our churches and elected officials to engage in a similar course of study. The city councils of Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and Atlanta have passed resolutions calling for the study of reparations. I believe the city of Long Beach and the state of California should take a similar course.

My call for reparations may sound radical but a precedent for them already exists. During World War II Japanese Americans were viewed as a threat to national security and forced to relocate to internment camps. Many suffered and lost their property as a result. After the war there were a series of bills passed to compensate former detainees and in 1988 the United States Congress passed a bill giving each living survivor of the camps $20,000 in redress. In addition Presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush senior have all issued formal government apologies for the camps.

There is also a precedent on the international level. In the last few decades Germany and German firms has had to pay various forms of reparations to both Israel and individual survivors of the Nazi concentration camps.

The movement for reparations is international in scope. Slavery was part of a larger pattern of colonialism that has created the world we live in today. The sad state of countries in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere in the world is a direct result the colonial period. As the anti-colonialist and psychotherapist Frantz Fanon wrote in his masterpiece The Wretched of the Earth:

“Europe is literarily the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the under-developed peoples. The ports of Holland, the docks of Bordeaux and Liverpool were specialized in the Negro slave-trade, and owe their renown to millions of deported slaves.”

Today many of these countries are demanding some form of reparations from their former colonial masters.

It is wrong to think colonialism is entirely in the past. Colonialism is essentially the transfer of wealth from the colonial country to the colonizers country. Today many former colonies are saddled with huge debts to the developed world that they must pay before they provide services for their own people. The outsourcing of manufacturing jobs from communities in the developed world with strong unions to countries in the developing world where unions are illegal or impossible to form is another example of how colonialism continues. The conditions under which people have to work coupled with the few economic and political freedoms they enjoy is a continuation of the pattern exploitation of the local populace by the colonists. The people who make many of the goods we enjoy lack the resources to use them themselves. They spend their energies creating goods for the developed world to consume. Instead they would be better off manufacturing goods that would better their countries. And so the overall pattern of the transfer of resources from the developing world to the developed one continues unabated.

Colonialism continues in another, more violent, form as well. During the Cold War former colonies served as places where the proxy wars of the two superpowers were fought out. The countries where these proxy wars have taken place have been devastated and left politically and socially unstable.

One example of a country where a proxy war was fought is Afghanistan. In this country the United States helped organize an insurgency, primarily composed of Islamic fundamentalists, against a secular Soviet backed state. Our government gave these insurgents military training and resources. In exchange the insurgents fought what was purported to be a common enemy, a communist government. After of the Soviet backed government was toppled the United States abandoned Afghanistan to feuding warlords. Eventually the Taliban took power and began to support a movement against what its members viewed as imperialism. The name of this movement was, of course, al-Qaida and many of its members, including its infamous leader Osama bin Laden, received training from the Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S. governmental agencies.

In 2001, days before September 11th, the United Nations sponsored the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa. As the name suggests the focus of this conference was how to end the global and local systems of oppression and racism that continue to ruin the lives of some many people across the planet. At this conference almost all of those present, including many European countries, agreed that the developed world owed the former colonies reparations. The delegation from the United States walked out in response.

While I believe that reparations are necessary to correct past wrongs I also believe that they will, indirectly, benefit those who gain from structural racism. In order for colonialism and racism to continue those of us who benefit from them must dehumanize the people that we exploit. By treating other human beings as less than human we too fall short of realizing our own full human potential. A part of ourselves becomes numb and dies by ignoring the suffering that we have caused. Enacting reparations will allow us remove the emotional blinders that we wear to ignore the suffering around us and the suffering that we cause.

Parks, King and the civil rights movement managed to end legal discrimination and segregation. It is now time for us to continue their work and struggle to end structural racism by demanding reparations for African Americans. In doing so we will be building the sort of world that they dreamed of. One in which all women and men can meet together as sisters and brothers.

as preached at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, February 16, 2014

This is my last Sunday with you. It has been a pleasure serving as your sabbatical minister for the last two months. Asa and I have enjoyed getting to know you. I have found my time with you to be something of a grounding break from graduate school. It is easy as an academic to get completely absorbed in the scholarly life. My time with you has provided me something of a ballast while I have been studying for my general exams. You have helped me to keep things in perspective and remember that there is a life beyond graduate school. I hope that you have found service as sabbatical minister to be useful.

The sermon I offer you this morning is a mediation on the question: What does it mean to be present to the holy? This question could be recast: where do we find God? God is, of course, one of the most difficult words to define. I was reminded of this difficultly while talking with friends a few months ago. They have a four year old who is just at the point of asking big questions. Recently, she was asking about God. My friends do not believe in a God that sits outside of the universe and human history judging us. They believe in what a theologian might call an immanent God, a God who is part of, who makes up, the universe itself. So when their daughter asked about God they told her that God lived inside of her. A horrified look came over her face. “No,” she replied. “There’s nothing inside of me. It’s just me.”

This story suggests the challenge we face when communicating about the holy. Language frequently fails us. It is difficult to talk about the holy because often people cannot even agree on what they are talking about. Words are gestures towards a larger reality. They frame how we understand the world but they are not the world.

A few years ago the physicist Stephen Hawking generated significant interest by claiming that the findings of modern science demonstrated that God was no longer necessary. Since we now have a fairly complete picture of how the universe came into being, how life evolves and how the physical laws of nature work, he reasoned there is no longer room for God in the rational mind.

Liberal theologians have long argued the opposite. God, they claim, is not a rational construct. God is a feeling. Friedrich Schleiermacher, described as the father of liberal theology, believed that “the feeling of absolute dependence” is the experience of “consciousness of God.” It is the moments that I am most aware of my dependence that I feel the presence of the holy.

I close my eyes and it fills my senses. The room dark, pitch even, illuminated only by the haze of medical machines and a blue string of Christmas lights. Hysteria, desperation, the sounds of panic and despair contrast the dimness of the room. On the bed, the thin, wan, retreating figure of a sixteen year old girl. Her Haitian mother wails, alternating between Creole and accented English, over her fading body. The words come back, a terrible litany of loss, “There will be no graduation for you. There will be no wedding for you. There will be no babies for you. There will be nothing for you, nothing.”

For the last five months the daughter has struggled with cancer. Tonight she has lost that struggle. The doctors and the nurses have told her parents it is over. Everything but the morphine drip and the monitors have been disconnected. This is it. The daughter is about to die, is dying, is dead.

Over the decade I have spent as a member of the clergy, I have witnessed many deaths and conducted many funerals. This one, the death of a young immigrant to cancer, remains one of the most memorable. Perhaps, because the mother’s wails echoed the famous line from the 22nd Psalm, words repeated by Jesus as he died on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” Or maybe it because at that moment I felt an intense connection to life itself. The waning breaths of the young woman, the mother’s love, the prayers we said together combined and I knew that I was in the presence of something greater than myself. To be witness to death is to be witness to our absolute dependence.

Despite this it is at death, and in moments of pain, that the absence of the holy can be felt most profoundly. William Schulz, past President of the Unitarian Universalist Association and former Executive Director of Amnesty International, once gave a lecture entitled “What Torture Has Taught Me.” In it he challenged the concept of an immanent God, a God that is present in all things, by claiming “that no God worthy of the name is present in a torture chamber.”

Rabbi Irving Greenberg offered a counter perspective when trying to make theological sense of the Holocaust: “To the question, ‘Where was God at Auschwitz?’ the answer is: God was there — starving, broken, humiliated, gassed and burned alive, sharing the infinite pain as only an infinite capacity for pain can share it.”

African American liberation theologians like Kelly Brown Douglas make a similar point when they argue for the necessity of a Black Christ. In this view, Christ needs to be black so that he can accompany, in Brown’s words, “the Black struggle to ‘make do and do better’ in face of racist, sexist, classist, and heterosexist oppression.” As Brown puts it, “Christ is inside of my grandmother and other Black women and men as they fight for life and wholeness.”

I do not pretend to know whether Schulz or Greenberg and Douglas is right. What I do know is that one of the most political decisions that each of us makes, that each culture makes, is in how we define the holy. Rebecca Parker makes precisely this point when talking about the crucifixion of Jesus. She writes, “To say that Jesus’ executioners did what was historically necessary for salvation is to say that state terrorism is a good thing, that torture and murder are the will of God.” To choose between locating the holy in Jesus’ life or in his death is to choose between two radically different theologies. The option of finding it in both, or in all things, is yet another.

When we start to think about the holy we are confronted with questions beyond just the choice to find it in life or death. We also must ask: Does the holy only belong to some people? Is it only found in some places? Is it everywhere and everything? Is it a metaphor? Is it separate from the visible world? Does it act upon us? Do we act upon it? How do we know when we experience its presence?

These are not questions with rational answers. They are tied to feelings. I do not know how I know. I only know when I feel. I was fourteen. It was my first time away from my parents for an extended period. I was at a week long Unitarian Universalist youth camp in the Pacific Northwest. The grounds, abutting the ocean, were rich with immense trees. The camp was isolated and powered by its own generators. Each night after dinner and evening worship there was a hymn sing around a camp fire.

The last night of the camp we had a dance. It was a wonderfully goofy affair. People dressed in ridiculous costumes, painted their faces and flailed around to punk rock anthems by the Clash and disco jams like the Village People’s “YMCA.” After an hour, maybe two, the power suddenly went out.

The dance’s abrupt end found a number of us back at the fire pit, singing. It was the only place on the campground with any light and, besides, we enjoyed making music together. I don’t know how long we sang, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, an hour… It was a consuming experience. Eventually we reached the hymn, “Over My Head.” You might know it, “Over my head I hear music in the air. / Over my head I hear music in the air. / Over my head I hear music in the air. / There must be a God somewhere.” We sang that song for awhile, substituting new phrases for what was over our heads as we went. Laughter, joy, singing… Someone, a little snidely, finally suggested light. And when we reached the end of the, “There must be a God somewhere,” the power at the camp went back on.

It seemed like a minor miracle. It might have been someone from the camp’s idea of a prank. Whatever the explanation, the experience left an impression. Up until that moment I described myself as an atheist. Now I am not so sure. I am more open to the mystery of our lives and cognizant of the limitations of language. I understand that words like holy, divine and God are metaphors for the experience of connection to something greater than ourselves. The human mind, marvelous as it is, is quite small and in the end each of us can grasp but an infinitesimal fraction of the universe’s complexity. To speak of the holy is, I believe, to acknowledge this.

There is a certain timelessness to my memories of the holy. They fade far less than others. They come forward in vivid color rather than tattered grey, occasionally so strong that they blot out the present. There is a difference between ordinary time and holy time. The experience of the holy is more defined, placed in sharper relief. It marks me, changes me, even if the change is ever so slight.

James Wright’s poem “A Blessing” speaks to this. In his poem, Wright finds himself in a perfectly ordinary place “Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota” observing the ordinary. For what is more ordinary in rural Minnesota than two ponies “munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness”? And yet, it is here that Wright finds a blessing. Simply observing these ordinary ponies, the affection they have for each other and the peace they seem to feel while grazing alone, together, makes him realize that “if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.”

Wright’s poem suggests that the transformative experience, being in the presence of the holy, can be found in even the most unremarkable of activities. It is not what surrounds us that matters. We do not need to seek out the extraordinary to find the holy.

The poem is instructive on several levels. It reminds us that the holy can be found everywhere. James Wright discovered it in two ponies. Kelly Brown Douglas sees it inside her grandmother. I have felt its presence in the room of a dying child and at a youth camp. When we find the holy we must somehow engage it. It must be wrestled with. Wright did not look away from the ponies. Rabbi Irving Greenberg and William Schulz struggled to make sense of a world filled with pain, torture and the Holocaust. To be in the presence of the holy is to be open to change. Wright wanted to burst from his body. The music at youth camp shifted my atheism. This change can come at a cost–pain, the presence of death–but it does not have to. One suspects that the only thing Wright’s experience of the ponies like “wet swans” cost him was reflection.

The feeling of being present to the holy is helpful on another level, a moral level. It reminds us that the experience of the holy frequently requires an other. Each of the experiences that I have described is an experience of connection, not the experience of an autonomous and isolated individual. We each construct our theologies out of our personal experiences. Since each of our experiences are different our theologies are different as well. This might lead to moral relativism but it does not have to. If being present to the holy means being present to our feelings of dependence and connection then we know we have strayed when we disavow those feelings.

Moral clarity comes from understanding our dependence on the universe not on claiming a sense of independence from it. For me there is only one heresy worth interrogating, the myth of the autonomous individual. None of the experiences of the holy that I have described have taken placed in a vacuum. All of them are interactions between people or between people and the larger world. We need each other, or at least an other, to experience the holy.

It is like the hymn we sang that night at youth camp, “Over my head there is singing in the air.” Over our heads there is something in the air. It is through that something, because of that something, with that something that we know that we are present to the holy.

Amen and Blessed Be.

as preached at the First Religious Society Carlisle, February 9, 2014

Haiku was the first form of poetry I learned. I encountered it in elementary school. I think I was in fourth grade. One of my teachers taught us to write the simple form. It was an exercise to help us learn about syllables. Three lines: first line five syllables; second line seven syllables; third line five syllables. No rhyming necessary. 

I have no memory of my first haiku. I doubt it was sophisticated. Most likely it was a concrete pile of images, sparked by something simple I observed on my daily walk to and from school. 

Blue jays fly over
my head. Green tree leaves are
everywhere I go.

It was not until college that I realized that haiku was a serious literary form. I engaged with it through the Beat poets Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder. A lot of their haikus were not proper haikus. They captured the essence of the form, instead of following it precisely. What I noticed reading them is that haiku could be more than just a series of images. Instead, they could contain a compressed narrative like this selection from Gary Snyder’s “Hitch Haiku:” 

They didn’t hire him
so he ate his lunch alone:
the noon whistle. 

There is more packed into that little poem than there is in a lot of sermons. It offers many questions and few answers: Why didn’t they hire him? Who was he? Where did he eat his lunch? Reading the poem I picture a grizzled itinerant worker, in dungarees, sitting on a flat large stone, sun shining over head, in a small woodland clearing behind a factory. I imagine the kind of factories I used to discover rambling through Detroit and Chicago. Brick, half-crumbled and pressed up against a spot of vacant industrial land slowly being reclaimed as wilderness. 

It was from the Beats that I eventually made my way to the Japanese haiku masters. I loved Kerouac’s On the Road. Someone told me that Kerouac was inspired partially by the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Interior.  

Basho was one of the greatest writers of haiku. He composed what is the most famous work in the form: 

Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond,
A frog jumped into water
A deep resonance. 

Numerous commentaries exist on this text. Most observe that Basho was a Zen Buddhist. For him the pond was a metaphor for the mind. When water is clear and still it is like the mind when it is enlightened. Undisturbed, the reflections on its surface are the images of objects, not the objects themselves. The actual objects exist outside the pond, just as everything we perceive exists outside of our minds. 

Any motion of the water in the pond is produced by external factors. Waves come when wind riles up the surface. They disappear when the wind dies. Ripples emerge when an object pierces the water’s calm top. They too quickly fade. 

In the poem, the frog can be understood as a thought. It appears from nowhere. Troubles the water with its splash, leaves behind a dissipating sound and then is gone under the surface. Perhaps it will reappear again, frog eyes sticking through duck weed and scheming their next step. 

The poem’s popularity and such interpretations have led to parodies. There is this by Gibon Sengai: 

The old pond!
Basho jumps in,
The sound of the water! 

Haikus like these were presented either alone or as part of a series of interlinked poems called renga. Renga can contain somewhere between two and a few hundred haiku. Some of them are authored by a single poet. Others are written by many working collaboratively. One of my favorite pieces attributed to Basho is perhaps not even original to him. It appears in one of his texts as composed by a priest who traveled with him: 

Regardless of weather,
The moon shines the same;
It is the drifting clouds
That make it seem different
On different nights. 

This piece, like many other of Basho’s haikus, appears in one of his travel sketches. This series of texts, which include The Narrow Road to the Interior, narrate some of Basho’s travels around Japan in the late 17th century. They alternate, as I have been doing in this sermon, between narrative descriptions, philosophical reflection and poetry. 

They describe Basho’s journeys as pilgrimages. Pilgrimages are a kind of intentional journey, undertaken with some sort of spiritual or religious purpose in mind. 

Usually when we think of pilgrimages we think of traveling to a specific destination. In the Christian tradition, people have long made pilgrimages to Jerusalem, to the sites of miracles and to the tombs of various saints. On such pilgrimages, the journey is completed when the destination is reached. Sometimes the object being travelled to is thought to have supernatural powers that grant  a blessing on the pilgrim. This blessing may be a healing that comes in this life or a cleansing of sins that leads to a better afterlife. 

Basho’s pilgrimage was of a different sort. Instead of seeking a particular destination, he sought to travel for self-discovery. Within this kind of pilgrimage there is usually a recognition that life itself is a journey. As Basho himself writes:

“Days and months are travelers of eternity. So are the years that pass by. Those who steer a boat across the sea, or drive a horse over the earth till they succumb to the weight of years, spend every minute of their lives traveling.” 

Within these sentences is the acknowledgement that to be human and alive is to be in motion. Think about it. We spend much of our lives traveling. Whether it is from home to work and back again or to some distant city to visit friends and relatives, our lives are filled with travel. Some days, it seems like all I do is move. Just Friday I went to school, rode the bus home, dug the car out of the snow in a blur of motion, rushed Asa to piano, and went to two different groceries and the pharmacy. Sound familiar? I imagine it does. 

Even when we are not navigating the way through our lives we are still in motion. The Earth spins on its axis and orbits the sun. The sun, in turn, circles the center of the Milky Way. The Milky Way rushes out from the origin of the Big Bang as the universe expands. On a smaller scale, the atoms of which we are comprised are moving too. Each of these trillions of particles that compose our bodies consist of tightly packed bundles of neutrons and protons surrounded by rapidly moving clouds of electrons. Existence itself is motion. 

The wisdom of Basho’s practice of pilgrimage is to seize this moving reality and then use it seek enlightenment. For the Buddhist this means something particular, an understanding of the transitory and illusory nature of existence. For us Unitarian Universalists it may mean something else. Either way, a helpful tactic within Basho’s practice of pilgrimage is to seek inspiration, what we might call the divine, in the ordinary. This leads to sometimes humorous results as in this haiku: 

Bitten by fleas and lice,
I slept in bed, 
A horse urinating all the time
Close to my pillow. 

Such a poem suggests that when life is viewed as pilgrimage every experience has religious potential. For most of us, it is probably difficult to imagine every experience as a potential religious experience. We can learn from every interaction we have and everything we encounter. Pain or joy, success or failure, extraordinary or banal, each moment and experience in our lives contains within it a kernel to reflect upon. It all depends upon what approach you take and how open you are to exploring your life. 

Take something ordinary like cooking. Within the act of preparing a meal there is the opportunity to learn about the ingredients themselves, the chemical processes which we use to prepare foods and the social dynamics around eating. You might remember a couple of weeks ago I brought a clementine for us to look at during the time for all ages. Gazing at the clementine was a way to reflect upon the chains of dependency which comprise our lives. The fruit came from someplace other than Massachusetts. It was picked by hands besides mine and transported to the store by many people. It derived from countless generations of cultivation. The clementine allows us to think about the whole structure of civilization and the dependent reality of human existence. Without food we cease to be. 

Such reflective wisdom might run counter to Basho’s own spiritual tendency. He wrote, “Whatever such a mind sees is a flower, and whatever such a mind dreams of is the moon. It is only a barbarous mind that sees other than the flower, merely an animal mind that dreams of other than the moon.” But then again, perhaps not. The contemporary Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh has written an elegant meditation entitled “Interbeing.” In it he claims: 

“we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. We cannot point to one thing that is not here–time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper… 

Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper will be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be… The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of ‘non-paper’ elements. And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. Without non-paper elements, like mind, …sunshine and so on, there will be no paper. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.” 

The religious quest is partially about reaching this state of awareness of interconnection. It certainly speaks to the seventh principle of our Unitarian Universalist Association, “respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” The question is not if such an understanding is one of our goals as religious people. We can find such a goal attested throughout many of the world’s traditions. Rather, the question is how do begin to reach such a goal. 

One consistent answer has been to practice asceticism and shed attachments to individual material things. At the beginning of The Narrow Road to the Interior Basho notes that before beginning his journey he sold his house. With this action then everyplace and no place potentially becomes his home. Rather than fixing his home as some place in particular it becomes wherever he his. As he writes, 

I felt quite at home,
As if it were mine,
Sleeping lazily
In this house of fresh air.

Similar advice for seeking the religious experience can be found elsewhere. In Luke, Mark and Matthew, there is a story about Jesus giving advice to a young rich man. Many of you, I imagine, remember some version of the text. In Matthew it reads: “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and youwill have treasure in heaven; then come follow me.” 

In our tradition, the life of Henry David Thoreau offers a slightly different example. Thoreau was a kind of ascetic. A resident of nearby Concord, he went to Walden Pond to try to live, as he wrote, “alone in the woods… in a house which I had built myself… living by the labor of my hands only.” His famous book reflecting on his experiences is filled with his scorn for the material conveniences of civilization. The clear implication throughout is that such goods inhibit a life of reflection. 

I have thought about such advice the last year and a half since Sara and I sold our house in Ohio and moved to Massachusetts. Our living space is much smaller than it used to be. We have had to get rid of a lot of things we accumulated over the years. In the process I have reflected upon my relationship to my materials goods. How much do they really matter? How many provide nothing more than brief distraction and then sit on a shelf collecting dust? What do I really need in life? 

Again, turning Basho, I find some useful advice. At the start of his journey he dispossess of some but not all of his material goods. He writes, “the load I… carried… consisted of a paper coat to keep me warm at night, a light cotton gown to wear after the bath, scanty protection against the rain, writing equipment, and gifts from certain friends of mine.” Even if we take the route of a spiritual ascetic some things remain essential. 

Any pilgrimage requires a certain level of material comfort to succeed. Even with his ascetic tendencies Basho did not wander the countryside naked. To journey through life material goods are to some extent necessary. As Thich Nhat Hanh would say we inter-are with them. That is not say we are dependent upon fancy sports cars for our existence. But we all need food, shelter and clothing. 

And it is worth remembering that even if try to walk life’s paths alone we are never really completely independent. Reading “The Narrow Road to the Interior” one finds that Basho traveled in the company of others. Some of the haikus he records do not even originate with him. This one, for instance, comes from his companion Sora: 

Rid of my hair,
I came to Mount Kurokami,
On the day we put on
Clean summer clothes.  

With that observation, I think of my own path to Basho. It began with an elementary school teacher, wound its way through my college years and helped deliver me here. Along the way I have had companions. Not the least of whom has been my wife who, I discovered when I picked it up, peppered my copy of Basho with commentary. Another reminder that the journey we take may be our own but we do take in the company of others. 

We all receive help on our individuals journeys, whether we are cognizant of it or not. If we look at the practice of pilgrimage closely we will discover buried within it are justice questions. What is necessary for each of us on our journey? How much do we all need it? Can we have too much, so much that it prevents us from ever seeing what is really there? What obligations do we have to those who travel with us? Such questions are their own reminder that when we see things as they are a certain richness opens up. It is like the form of haiku itself, the poems appear simple but hide a wealth just below the surface. As another translation of Basho’s frog poem reads: 

pond
frog
plop! 

May we, like Basho, travel through life blessed with companions, and a religious community, that helps us to see things as they are. 

Amen and Blessed Be. 

as preached at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, February 2, 2014

Have you ever had an experience that caused a fundamental shift in the way you see the world? One that forced you to re-examine all of your previously held beliefs and develop new ones? I suspect that some of you have. Unitarian Universalism is, by in large, a religion of converts. Only about 1 in 10 of the adult members of our congregations were raised Unitarian Universalist. The majority of us were either brought up in another religious tradition or in no religious tradition.

As someone raised Unitarian Universalist I am naturally curious about the people who join our congregations. I never had the experience of leaving my faith community in disbelief or disgust. I find it helpful for my ministry to learn about why and how people come to our tradition. Broadly speaking, I have found that, people join a Unitarian Universalist congregation for two reasons. The first is that they become disaffected with the belief system of the religious community they were born into. They examine it under the cold light of reason and under that light it fails some fundamental test. Either they cease to believe in God or they cease to believe in that community’s God.

The second reason people come to Unitarian Universalism is that they have a conversion experience. James Luther Adams defines conversion as “a fundamental change of the heart and will.” We do not talk about conversion experiences very often. Perhaps this is because so many among us left our previous religious homes for rational reasons. The rational group find it difficult to understand how someone could have a conversion experience. Some think that such experiences, because they sometimes falter under reason’s light, have little to teach.

Conversion experiences, disconcerting as they may occasionally be, do have something to offer. I find that they cause me to reexamine my faith and cast my understanding of Unitarian Universalism in a different light.

One powerful conversion story comes from the Unitarian Universalist minister Bill Breeden. As I remember, Bill started life as a fundamentalist Christian. His tradition did not require, or even value, clerical education and as a teenager he began preaching at a small Pentecostal church. At the same time, to make ends meet, he was working at a local grocery store as a stock boy.

It was there that Bill had his conversion experience. One of his duties was to dispose of unsalable or expired food. This was the 1960s and the food was destroyed in a burn pit behind the store. Once a day Bill would gather up the food, take it out back, douse it with gasoline and make a sort of bonfire. Often times the food that he destroyed was still perfectly edible.

One evening as he prepared to pour gasoline over the assembled pile and light it aflame he heard a voice. “Please, sir, could I have that cheese? I am hungry and I would like something to eat. I would like some food for my family.” Bill turned and found himself facing a middle aged Black woman. He let her have the cheese and she went on her way.

Put before she did Bill saw Christ in her. Something about her, some manner in which he connected to her, caused him to see the world in an entirely different way. In that moment Christ was transformed from a blond haired, blue eyed, white skinned male to a poor Black woman standing in front of him. His universe, his understanding of the sacred was forever altered.

Over the next years Bill left his fundamentalist community and developed a theology of Universalist Christianity. He saw the divine in all people and upheld the human family as one. Eventually Bill found Unitarian Universalism.

I doubt most people have conversion stories that are quite as dramatic. Few, if any, Unitarian Universalists I know claim to have seen Christ. Many of us are not Christian and grow squeamish when the word is mentioned. Others, such as myself, would argue that the word Christ is a metaphor for the human potential and the possibility of perfection that lies within all of us. In this theological strain seeing Christ in someone else means sharing a moment of absolute connection and recognition; witnessing the impossible glorious mystery of the universe in the face of another. It is such a moment, I suspect, that Bill had when he encountered the woman behind the grocery store. In her he saw himself and all of the human family. He realized that the two them shared some sort of deep connection, some type of kinship, on an ineffable level.

A feeling of the kinship all humanity is lies at the heart of our religious tradition. The great Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing once wrote, “I am a living member the great Family of All Souls.” In doing so he purported to claim kinship and connection with all of humanity. His tract continues “I cannot improve or suffer myself, without diffusing good or evil around me through an ever-enlarging sphere.” The knowledge that all humanity is, on some deep level, one family and that we are all connected means that the actions of an individual can and do effect the many.

Drop a pebble in water and it ripples outward. Act, speak or simply live your life and you cannot know ultimately what effect you will have. The choices that we make effect not only ourselves and our families but future generations.

For Channing one of the purposes of religion was to help people gain insight into their impact on and connection with others. Religion could nurture the conscience and help individuals tune themselves to the “Infinite God…around and within each.” The more developed the conscience, the greater the understanding of how each and every action effects those around us. The truly wise, he wrote, “will become a universal blessing.” They understand how “an individual cannot but spread good or evil indefinitely…and through succeeding generations.” Understanding this they weigh their choices carefully.

Channing’s theology caused him to affirm that humanity’s spiritual nature included “the likeness of God.” Within each person was “the image of God” and by the choices one made that image would either be “extended and brightened” or “seem to be wholly destroyed.”

Casting Bill’s experience into Channing’s theology it would appear that at the moment of his encounter, Bill was made aware of the image of God within both himself and the woman. Their differences were blotted out. Bill realized that, in the language of Channing, they were both members of “the great Family of All Souls.”

The images we have of God can obscure the divine from our view. Each image is, by necessity, only partial. Yet often people mistake them for the whole.

Even the very word God is misleading. As Forrest Church writes, “God is not even God’s name, but our name for that which is greater than all and present in each. God is a symbol expressive of ultimate mystery, meaning and power…” In trying to describe the ultimate mystery of the universe we naturally run across the limits of our human language and human imagination. God is a useful metaphor for those limits. Using the word allows a humanist like me ways to communicate with my friends who resonate with more traditional understandings of the divine. We are all trying to understand the same ultimate mystery, the unfathomable vastness and complicated beauty of universe, just as we are seeking to comprehend our part in that mystery. As Pete Seeger said, “I am no longer leery of using the word ‘God,’ though I have my own definition… ‘The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.’”

Orthodox forms of Christianity try to make the mystery more fathomable by claiming that Jesus Christ was God. A human God is a God that we can relate to and, perhaps, understand.

But by making God human the orthodox imprison her within all of the various complexities of humanity. There is a paradox here. For if God is only fully present in one person then that one person somehow reflects what is of ultimate value differently than anyone else. Jesus is male so God must be male. God is male so males must have the highest worth. This theology of incarnation has led to a place where God is no longer ultimate and universal. Instead, God is partial and trapped in human images. God, the symbol, reinforces human hierarchies.

Here I find the recent controversy brought on by Fox News personality Megyn Kelly to be instructive. You might remember how, in December, she said during an on air segment, in response to calls for diverse images of Santa Claus, “…for the kids at at home, Santa just is white…” Later in the same segment she went on to claim, “Jesus was a white man, too. He was a historical figure. That’s a verifiable fact — as is Santa.”

In my house, this prompted, amongst other things, playing Teddy Vann’s soul classic “Santa Claus is a Black Man” on high rotation. The fantastic chorus, sung by Vann’s then five year old daughter, runs:

Santa Claus is a black man, Santa Claus is a black man
And he’s handsome like my daddy too
Santa Claus is a black man, Santa Claus is a black man
And I found out, that’s why I’m telling you.

There are significant stakes in how the divine is portrayed. The image of Christ, or for that matter Santa, as White suggests that because God choose to be embodied in as a white person whites are somehow closer to God than others. For some a white Jesus is the foundation of that most pernicious form of partialism, white supremacy.

The Black Christ is presented by black theologians such as James Cone, J. Deotis Roberts, Albert Cleage and Kelly Brown Douglas as a counter to the White Christ. In various ways these theologians argue that if Christ must be a color that color must be black. As Brown Douglas points out, historically, “in the United States Blackness is synonymous with inferiority.” By recasting Christ as Black the “bond between Blackness and inferiority” can be severed. This move also “fosters Black people’s self-esteem by allowing them to worship a God in their own image, and by signifying that Blackness is nothing to be detested. On the contrary, it is a color and condition that even the divine takes on…”

For most of these black theologians the White Christ was a Christ of slaveholders. Brown Douglas explores the history and significance of the skin color of Christ in her book “The Black Christ.” She identifies the Black and White Christs as having different theological significance.

“The White Christ,” Brown Douglas writes, “is grounded in an understanding of Christianity suggesting that Jesus of Nazareth was Christ…because God made flesh in him. The incarnation itself is considered the decisive feature of Christianity.” Through this Christ Christians view themselves as saved from original sin because of something called atonement theology. This system argues that we humans were born wicked and sinful but God, in his infinite love, choose to accept Christ’s sacrifice on the cross as a substitution for the punishment that all humanity deserved.

Brown Douglas argues that this system has at least two major problems. “First, little is required of humans in order to receive salvation.” One either accepts Christ as Lord and savior and is saved or one does not and is not. If one accepts Christ then no further action is required. There is no call to ethical living. Jesus’s ministry to the poor and oppressed is of secondary importance. Right belief, and not right behavior, is the focus of the system.

This first observation lead Brown Douglas to a second: “in order for humans to benefit from God’s saving act, they must have knowledge of Jesus as the divine/human encounter.” Without that knowledge salvation was not possible.

The logic of this White Christ served as a justification for slavery. Enslaving Africans and introducing them to Christianity saved them from the eternal damnation they would have faced otherwise. As one pro-slavery advocate argued: “The condition of the slaves is far better than that of the Africans from among whom they have been brought. Instead of debased savages, they are, to a considerable extent, civilized, enlightened and christianized.”

In contrast, the Black Christ, in Brown Douglas’s analysis, “empowered the Black slaves to fight for their emancipation from the chains of White slavery.” The important feature of this Christ is that not he somehow saved humanity. It is “that Jesus helped the oppressed in his own time.” Importantly, for many, “Jesus was a living a being with whom the slaves had an intimate relationship.” That Jesus, because of his own suffering, could offer succor and understanding in times of crises.

Starting in the 1960s, with the rise of the Black Power and Civil Rights movements, black theologians such as James Cone, J. Deotis Roberts and Albert Cleage further developed articulations of the Black Christ. These theologians, each in their own way, recast the Black Christ in terms that some Unitarian Universalists might find familiar.

Cleage, a minister in Detroit, argued that the historical Jesus was a black man. Further, he suggested that the bodily resurrection of Jesus had not occurred. It was a lie perpetrated by those who used Christianity as a tool for subjugation. The good life was not to be had in heaven after death but here on Earth. The myth of heaven was something that was used to oppress people. Jesus’s resurrection after his death came through the continuation of his ministry by his disciples. This ministry had freedom from oppression as its central goal.

Cone, the founder of the academic school of black liberation theology, understood the Black Christ to be an ontological symbol. Ontological symbols allow humans to communicate imperfect knowledge of the divine. They are important because they point beyond themselves and suggest some fundamental truth about reality. God, for Cone, stands on the side of the oppressed. Therefore, he argued, God must have a black aspect.

Roberts, a professor at Howard University, used the Black Christ as a symbol for what he thought of as “Christ’s universality.” For him there was not just a Black Christ but a Red Christ and a Yellow Christ. Christ could be seen in all the colors of humanity. Re-imagining Christ in this way allowed for Roberts to try to free, in his words, Jesus from “the cultural captivity of… Euro-Americans.”

There is significant overlap between these understanding of the Black Christ and much of Unitarian Universalist theology. Like Cleage traditional Unitarians affirm a human Jesus and emphasize his ethical teachings. Like Cone most Unitarian Universalists understand Christ as a symbol–one of many in the world–that offers to teach us something about the mystery of life. With Roberts, Unitarian Universalists affirm that God, or the divine, is present in all of the human races.

Unitarian Universalists might also agree with a criticism that later generations of black theologians have of their predecessors. For black women theologians such as Brown Douglas it is not enough to make Christ Black. Christ also has to become a woman so that the full spectrum of humanity can be represented in the divine.

These understandings of the Black Christ remind me of Channing’s dictum that we are members “of the great Family of All Souls.” While Unitarian Universalists hold to this ideal we often fail to make it a reality. Our congregations are largely white and our message reaches but a portion of the human family. For us, Sunday morning often remains the most segregated time of the week.

I suspect that the image of the Black Christ has something to teach us, regardless of the hue of our skin. This symbol is a reminder that the divine can be found in all. If we, like Bill Breeden, can learn to recognize that divine spark in others no matter how unlike we are we can take a step towards truly building a community that embodies “the great Family of All Souls.” We do not know where such steps might lead us or how such recognitions might change us.

Alice Walker, in her novel, the Color Purple wrote: “Here’s the thing…the thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else.” With this in mind, in the coming weeks try the following spiritual exercise. Take five minutes each day as you walk down the street or drive in your car and try to see God in the people around you. Acknowledge that God, the metaphor for the mystery of creation and destruction, death and birth, that binds us together, is part of and beyond us, can be seen in each and every person that surrounds us. Apply this practice to those least like you and see if you notice a change or a transformation.

Perhaps you will. And who knows where that small change may lead. That it may be so, I say Amen and Blessed Be.

as preached Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday at the First Religious Society Carlisle, January 19, 2014

When she remembers the 1960s, the civil rights activist Zoharah Simmons tells a powerful story about organizing in rural Mississippi. She was part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, the major African American student civil rights organization. Fifty years ago, during what was called Freedom Summer, she travelled to Laurel, Mississippi to organize African Americans to vote. Zoharah had never been to Laurel before and she knew no one there. When she and her two colleagues had been assigned the task of organizing in Laurel they were told, “Now you are going to have to drive up to Laurel and be as clandestine as possible and try to open up… the town… Try to find people who might want to be involved in this and who will give you shelter.” They were given a list of names to contact and little else.

When they got to Laurel they went to the home of one of the people on the list. She gave them more names. Zoharah picked Mrs. Euberta Sphinks’s name from that list and went to knock on her door. I can imagine the scene, Zoharah nervously approaching the house, pausing, drawing breath, and then knocking, tentatively, half hoping that no would answer. Someone did. Mrs. Euberta Sphinks’s came to the door. Zoharah introduced herself, afraid of being rebuffed, told that her efforts were futile, that Mississippi was never going to change, that she should go home. But Mrs. Sphinks did not tell her that. Instead, she looked Simmons up and down and said, “Girl, I’ve been waiting on you all my life. Come on in.”

Now, I love this story. It has so many rich strands to it that we could spend the next twenty minutes just pulling it apart. There’s Zoharah Simmons and there’s Mrs. Euberta Sphinks. They both have so much to teach us about what it means to change the world. I want to ask questions: what would have happened to Mrs. Sphinks if Zoharah had never come to her door? Would she have kept on waiting forever? What about Zoharah? Would she have stayed in Laurel, Mississippi and kept trying? Or would she have packed her bags and left? I also want to know, is there someone out there waiting for me? I am I waiting for someone? Maybe we all are…

Patience is something that is crucial for any form of social transformation. The world changes slowly, especially when it comes to moral issues. And yet we have to be ready for that change, for the opportunity for change, at any time. I had a professor in seminary who liked to underscore this point. He was a very devote Jew. He refused to close doors completely. He said, the messiah might come at any time. He didn’t want the door to be closed, and miss the announcement, when she arrived.

This Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday I want to ask all of you two questions: What are you waiting for? How are you preparing? Hold onto those two questions as I proceed with the sermon.

Almost precisely a year before he died Martin King challenged this country with his sermon at Riverside Church “Beyond Vietnam–A Time to Break the Silence.” It was a sermon that changed the way he related to the domestic power structure and how he placed himself in relation to global struggles for freedom. In it he made a direct connection between the struggle for freedom, equality and economic dignity in this country and the struggle against American capitalist imperialism in Vietnam and other countries. In it he told us that we were “a society gone mad on war” and warned that this country “would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.” Not long after that, in a different speech, he made his point even more graphically: “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home.”

In that last year of his life Martin King warned us that the struggle for freedom, equality and economic dignity faced three triple giants: racism, militarism, and materialism. Unless we underwent a true moral revolution we risked being squashed by those giants.

Now, I am from Michigan and I spent five years as a parish minister in Cleveland, Ohio. I can tell you that in the last four decades bombs meant for all countries that the United States military has attacked have dropped on the cities that I love. The bombs meant for Vietnam have hit Detroit. Bombs sent to Cambodia landed in Cleveland. Those destined for El Salvador hit Roxbury instead. Bombs dropped on Iraq found their targets in Washington, DC. Missiles launched in Afghanistan brought death to Oakland. And rockets sent to Bosnia ended up on the South Side of Chicago. The list of countries that the United State military has bombed since 1968, the year Martin King was assassinated, is more than twenty names long. As a society we continue to spend the vastly more on war than on ending poverty.

The city of Detroit declared bankruptcy this past year. Its infrastructure is crumbling. In places the roads are little more than gravel, the street lights are broken, and the abandoned buildings stretch on for blocks. There are neighborhoods that are returning to prairie. I have seen poverty there, men in the street with open sores on their faces, that should not exist in the twenty first century, in the richest society in human history. There’s a skyscraper in downtown Detroit, a forty story building, that has been abandoned for so long that standing on the street you can see mature trees growing on its crown.

When the poet Amiri Baraka wrote about the African American freedom struggle he said, “we / vote among roaches.” Wherever we are in the struggle to build a just society, we still have a long way to go. The federal government has essentially abandoned Detroit. The city’s bankruptcy debt is about $18 billion. This country’s military budget in 2013 was more than $700 billion. For the cost of funding the military for about a week the federal government could have saved Detroit from bankruptcy. Not only did this not happen, there was no national conversation about it. Martin King would have been ashamed of this country. If he was alive today, on this day we celebrate his birth, he would say to us now what he said back in 1968 to his congregation, “The judgement of God is on America now.” And he would ask you, and he would ask me, “what are you waiting for?” He would remind us that he was willing to give his life for what he believed in. And he didn’t just believe in racial justice. He believed in economic justice–that everyone should have a safe place to live and job that gave them dignity. He would have cried with gentle rage about the chemical spill in West Virginia that rendered water undrinkable for 300,000 people. He would have been indignant that we bailed banks but left home owners in cities like Cleveland and Detroit to rot. He would have reminded us that he believed not only in racial and economic justice but in peace. He believed that men and women from this country should not go and kill men, women and children in other countries. It is hard to say these things in polite conversation anymore. But the question remains, why are we still waiting to build a world with peace and justice? What are you waiting for? What I am waiting for? Who are we waiting for?

Poet and civil rights veteran June Jordan famously said, “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” She is right, there really is no one else. It is just us. If we do not figure out what needs to be done then no one will. What needs to be done? Martin King knew. He said, “we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society.” What might that revolution look like? Let me tell you a couple of stories. They come from my mentor Staughton Lynd, the historian and civil rights activist who served as coordinator of the Freedom Schools during Mississipi Freedom Summer. That was the same project that brought Zoharah Simmons and Euberta Sphinks together.

Staughton likes to share a story about James Farmer, who at that time served as SNCC’s Executive Secretary. One day Staughton and his wife Alice went to the SNCC office early in the morning for some reason. The only person they found there was James Farmer. He was sweeping the office floor. When Staughton tells the story he often remarks, “He is the only person in a similar position of authority whom I have ever encountered performing such a task. Alice and I attempt to act likewise.”

This might seem like a discordant note when placed alongside Martin King’s call for a revolution in values. It is not. Stay with me for a minute. I am going to go a bit further afield with another of Staughton’s stories before bringing my point home. This story comes from the Spanish Civil War, which was a struggle against fascism right before World War II. The anti-fascist forces included a lot of different groups. One of the largest were the anarchists who sought not just to defeat fascism but to build a new world, a world without poverty and war, as well. As Staughton tells the story:

“It seems that one day during the Spanish Civil War there was a long line waiting for lunch. Far back in the line was a well-known anarchist. A colleague urged him: ‘Comrade, come to the front of the line and get your lunch. Your time is too valuable to be wasted this way. Your work is too important for you to stand at the back of the line. Think of the Revolution!’ Remaining where he was in line, the anarchist leader replied: ‘This is the Revolution.’”

I want to suggest that there are three lessons that can be drawn from these stories. And that these lessons point to the kind of revolution of values that our society needs to undergo and what we as individuals can do to bring about such a revolution. First, and most important, a revolution in values begins in this moment, in the here and now. Yes, it has to be a focus on changing the structure of society. But we will only be able to make that change if we change the way we treat each other. If we want a more egalitarian society, we have to treat each other as equals. If we want a society without racism, we have to strive eliminate racism from our own lives. As the great peace activist A. J. Muste said, “There is no way to peace–peace is the way.”

Second, if we want a new society, a just society, then we have to create institutions that can serve as seeds for that society. We have to develop spaces where we can challenge each other to undergo a revolution of values and question how the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism operate in our lives.

The great Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams, thought that this was the purpose of our religious communities. He taught that voluntary associations, groups of people that came together united by common interests and bonds of commitment, were the most powerful force in human society. The revitalization of society stands or falls with such voluntary associations. We tend to fixate upon prophetic individuals but, the truth is, truly powerful prophets are parts of organizations. We know who Martin King was because of the organizations he participated in and led. The civil rights movement is much more the story of heroic organizations than heroic individuals. Without the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference a prophet like King would have found himself alone in the wilderness.

Most prophets have recognized this. Jesus, after he received his call, gathered up his disciples and created a religious community. Mohandas Gandhi built ashrams in both South Africa and India to serve as spiritual bases for his activism. The characters in Lynd’s stories are both involved in organizations. Zorah Simmons did not end up in Laurel, Mississippi on her own.

This brings me to my third point. Organizations need leaders. However we conceptualize them, organizations need people who can inspire others to act. A revolution in values requires a new kind of leadership. And I do not think that Martin King, as great as he was, necessarily exemplifies that kind of leadership. Instead, I think it is to be found in people like James Farmer, or the anarchist from Staughton’s story. Such leaders remain in direct relationship with others from the movement of which they are a part. They do not try to assert dominance over others. Instead, they try to build capacity in others. They are driven by the belief that anyone can acquire the skills to be a leader.

This is a lesson we can learn well if we look around on Sunday morning. It takes a lot more than a minister to make a powerful worship service. We have musicians. We have to people who tend to the administrative functions. We have to keep our space clean and inviting to guests. All of these people take us a little further down the road than we would be able to go without them. Elsewhere, I have observed that some of the most unappreciated leaders in the congregation are the people who get everyone else clapping to the hymns on Sunday morning. I always notice when such people are absent. The service is less lively, less renewing, without them.

Let me summarize my three points. A revolution in values requires us to build organizations that challenge us to develop a new kind leadership. This is a leadership that sees everyone as a potential leader and brings out the best in them so that they can bring the best in the community, and ultimately the world. Such an organization will challenge us to confront the triple giants of racism, materialism, and militarism both in the wider world and in those places where they are operative within our own lives.

Let me suggest that this congregation can be a starting point for such a revolution in values. To return explicitly to our Unitarian Universalist tradition, James Luther Adams, the theologian I mentioned earlier, liked to remind us that our congregational polity was one of the sources of democracy in this culture. He even joking referred to our religious tradition as “Spiritual Bolshevism” to signify the revolutionary potential within it.

I think that there is one thing, only one thing, that we need to do to start to realize that potential. And here I return to the story of Zoharah Simmons and Euberta Sphinks. There is a part of it I forgot to tell you. Euberta Sphinks had already organized her neighbors. When Zoharah showed up at her door Euberta went across the street and knocked on the door of her friend, Mrs. Carrie Clayton. I am telling you these names because today we should celebrate not just Martin King but all of the leaders, known and unknown, who made built the civil rights movement. Anyways, Euberta Sphinks went across the street to tell her friend, in effect, we are not alone. There other people out there struggling for the same things we are struggling for. And now one of them has found us. We are stronger than before and we can take our struggle, here in Laurel, Mississippi, to a new level.

And that is exactly what they did. People in those little towns in Mississippi had been struggling for African American freedom for hundreds of years. In the 1920s and 1930s they had organized sharecroppers unions. Their grandparents had fought with the union army to end slavery. Their great grandparents had resisted the slave masters in endless, untold, creative quiet ways. Each generation built on the struggles of the previous ones. When Zoharh and Euberta found each other they were able to take that struggle to a new level.

Let me close with a brief autobiographical note. I have spent much of my adult life as an organizer. In doing so, I have been part of groups working to bring about a revolution in values. Wherever I have gone to organize I have discovered that the people there were already organized. What they were waiting for, whether they knew it or not, was someone from another group to tell them, “Hey you are not alone. Together we can take this struggle to a new level.” This has been true whether I have been organizing truckers in the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, bike messengers in Chicago or taxi drivers in Cleveland. It has been true in every congregation I have ever served. It was true when I committed civil disobedience alongside other Unitarian Universalist clergy in Phoenix, Arizona and went to jail. If we, Unitarian Universalists, are going to help bring about a revolution in values then we need to get outside of our comfortable communities and find others struggling against the triple giants of racism, militarism, and materialism. When we do we will discover we are not alone.

We already have everything we need to change the world. We truly are the ones we have been waiting for. But first we need to find each other. Who are you waiting for? Who am I waiting for? Who is waiting for us?

As I leave you to contemplate those questions I say Amen and Blessed Be.

as preached at the First Religious Society of Carlisle, January 12, 2014

This morning I want to begin with a story. It comes from Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables.” The book, as you might remember, centers around the former convict Jean Valjean and his struggle to lead both a good life and remain free from prison. One of the major themes of the book is redemption and transformation. Towards the beginning of the novel Jean Valjean has an experience that allows him to transform his life from that of an outcast, a former convict, to a man of wealth.

Shortly after he is released from prison Jean Valjean travels to a small town looking for lodging. He has a passport with him that declares him to be a former convict. As a result, no one will give him food or a place to sleep. No one, that is, except for the local Bishop. The Bishop takes him in, gives him food and a bed to sleep in. In the middle of the night Valjean repays the Bishop by stealing his family silver.

Early the next morning the police catch Valjean as he slinks out of town. They ask him about the silver he is carrying. He claims that the Bishop gave it to him as a gift. The police take Valjean to the Bishop for questioning. When the Bishop sees Valjean, he confirms his story. The Bishop even goes so far to tell Valjean that he forgot to take a pair of silver candlesticks with him. These were the only items of value that Valjean had not stolen from the Bishop’s household. Before Valjean leaves, the Bishop takes him aside. I will let Hugo describe their final exchange:

“The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:–

“Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money in becoming an honest man.”

Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything, remained speechless. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he uttered them.

He resumed with solemnity:–

“Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”

The Bishop’s gift of silver to Jean Valjean was a form of grace. Grace is an unexpected and undeserved gift that transforms us, even if only for a moment. Grace is not something that we earn or create for ourselves. We can only receive it and try to give it to others.

The story of a thief who steals something from a holy man is an archetypal one. It occurs in many cultures. This morning I want to use it to explore different aspects and kinds of grace. In the version of the story found in “Les Miserables,” grace is something that one human being gives to another. It is not supernatural but natural.

After the gift of the Bishop’s silver, Valjean becomes a sort of holy man himself. He saves lives, brings up an orphan and ultimately tries to redeem his own great adversary, the policeman, Javert, who spends decades hunting him.

The profoundly transformative grace that Hugo describes at the beginning of his novel is rare. It is not an every day grace. It is something extraordinary, the stuff of fables, the sort of experience that we are lucky to have once or twice in our lives.

While the Bishop’s grace might be extraordinary, its essence was not. The core of the Bishop’s gift to Valjean was that of the kindness of strangers. This should not be a foreign experience to any of us. Who has not felt the warm smile of a stranger as they walked down the street? Such moments can sometimes stick with us. They can bring a heightened awareness to us and cause subtle shifts in our perception, sometimes allowing us to see the world around us as beautiful, which is its own form of grace. Ezra Pound tried to capture the sense of such a moment of grace in his two line poem “In a Station of the Metro”:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Pounds’ poem shows how, for him, the faces of a subway crowd were momentarily infused with deep beauty. This is a much more mundane kind of grace than Hugo describes in “Les Miserables,” but it is grace nonetheless.

These moments of mundane grace, small kindnesses, gentle looks and unexpected beauty can be fleeting. On occasion they remain with us for a while, but most of the time they are forgotten almost as they occur. Such mundane grace can come from almost anyone, be they strangers or our most intimate friends and family, and at any time.

We can give grace just as easily as we can receive it. Another version of our story, this one from the Hasidic Jewish tradition, illustrates how.

It seems that once there was a Rabbi who encountered two thieves in the process of robbing his home. He was not a rich man and they were about to take everything he owned. When he saw them he did not grow angry or try to stop them. Instead he told them, “take these things as a gift from me.” The thieves fled in confusion. Being a Rabbi, he was concerned about the souls of the potential thieves. So, from that night forth before going to be bed he would say “All my possessions are held in common. They belong to everyone.” He wanted to make certain that if other thieves came they would not be guilty of theft.

In this version of the story the Rabbi gives grace to others indiscriminatingly. They may be coming to steal his possessions but instead of committing a crime, they end up receiving a gift. The Rabbi denies himself ownership over his possessions so that if someone steals them they won’t be guilty of a sin.

For the Rabbi the giving of grace is a spiritual practice. Every day he reminds himself that what belongs to him does not really belong to him, but belongs to everyone. He is indiscriminate in his well wishing. He gives it to the stranger as easily as he does to members of his community.

Each of us is capable of giving grace in the same way that the Rabbi does. We can do it by being kind to those around us. You never know when simply smiling at someone might change their mood, or even save their life.

A few years ago I read about a young man who survived a suicide attempt. He threw himself off of the Golden Gate Bridge and into the San Francisco Bay. Before he jumped he sat on the bridge for a while. He felt alone in the world and told himself that all it would take to stop his suicide was someone simply talking to him while he sat on the bridge. Many people passed him. No one so much as said hello to him. After an hour or so he leapt off the bridge. Someone could have stopped him if they had given a stranger the simple gift of a hello. But no one did. All he needed was a simple act of grace. No one gave it to him. Yet anyone could have.

This reminds me of how easy and how challenging it can be to give grace. It easy: sometimes all it takes is a smile. It is hard: it requires us to move out of our comfort zones; to reach out to those who surround us; to be aware of those who surround us. And that can be a great challenge. It is one I fail to meet almost everyday. When was the last time you smiled, and I mean truly smiled not just nodded in recognition, at a stranger?

This brings me to the third version of our story. It comes from the Zen Buddhist tradition.

Many years ago there was a Zen Master whose life was very simple. He lived by himself in a small hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening, while he was away, a thief snuck into the hut only to find that there was nothing to steal.

After a little while, the Zen Master returned and found the thief. “You have come a long way to visit me,” he told the burglar, “and you should not return empty handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.” The Zen Master stripped off his humble garments. The thief was bewildered, but he took the clothes and ran away.

As the thief fled into the distance the Zen Master sat naked, watching the moon. “Poor fellow,” he thought, “I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”

Of the three versions of the story, this is the one that I like the best. It raises questions about what grace is and who is capable of giving it. It suggests that the reception of grace is facilitated by a person’s attitude. To look up at the moon and think that it is a gift to give might seem ridiculous. On the other hand, being able to look at the moon and realize that it is beautiful is a gift. Not everyone has that capacity at all times.

I imagine that most of you have had the experience of seeing a breathtaking moon rise. You are driving down the highway and then, over the next ridge, it catches you unaware, seemingly out of nowhere, a brilliant yellow moon. The craters stand out and the orb of the moon appears larger than it should. A cloud drifts by, the stars shine brighter, and everything in the world suddenly seems impossibly beautiful. On occasions like that, the moon itself is a sort of grace. You did not do anything to deserve it. It came unbidden and on its own, but there it is. To cultivate an awareness of the grace of the moon is to become more aware of the profound grace that surrounds us at all times.

Maybe we have to strip ourselves naked like the Zen Master to truly experience the grace that surrounds us. Perhaps it is only once we have shorn our minds all of the distractions of materialism that we are able to truly experience the world around us as a kind of grace. Life itself is its own unasked for gift. This is something that I think most people forget from time to time. Especially in the chaotic hustle and bustle of our consumer culture. Who has time to appreciate, or even pay attention to, the moon amidst cell phones, computers and televisions? When was the last time you looked at the moon?

When the Zen Master gave away his last clothes to the thief, he might have been thinking that he was removing the last of his material distractions. In that moment, as he stared up at the moon, maybe his absolute lack of material possessions made him acutely aware of the simple gift of life. Did he understand that each breath, each moment, is a form a grace? Did his own nakedness make him even more conscious of the beauty that surrounds us all?

And what about the thief? What was the thief thinking as he fled the Zen Master’s hut? Did the gift of clothes transform him somehow? With his material needs met, was he able to see the moon? or did he remain the same old vagabond after the encounter?

Between the Zen Master and the thief the question must also be asked: who is giving and who is receiving grace? Perhaps both give and receive in their own way. Perhaps the theft of the clothes is as much a gift to the Zen Master as the clothes themselves are to the thief. Each brings the other a new sort of awareness.

The Zen story also suggests that we are most aware of grace when we cultivate the right attitude towards it. This is a spiritual practice. The Zen Master was able to do without his clothes and appreciate the beauty of the moon precisely because he was a Zen Master. Not everyone would have the same experience in a similar situation.

Not all of us, and probably none of us, will ever become Zen Masters and be able to both give and receive grace in the way that Zen Master in the story does. But we can cultivate the right attitude for giving and receiving grace. This is the attitude of gratitude.

Our lives are their own forms of grace. It is proper that we respond to the unexpected gifts in the world with gratitude. As Elizabeth Tarbox said in our reading this morning: “The world is full of blessings.” When we express gratitude we become aware of the grace that exists in our lives. Tarbox suggests this when she expresses gratitude for having a heart that can break while at the same time remembering “the sunrise over the ocean.” For the complicated world we live in–with all of its blemishes–even gratitude is not enough. But cultivating gratitude can make us more receptive to the grace around us. It can cause us to be thankful for even the pain in our lives. Such pain makes us human. A spiritual practice of gratitude can cause us to expand our definition of grace to encompass all of life itself.

Grace is something we receive and it is something we give. Each version of the story tells us something about grace from a slightly different perspective. The story from “Les Miserables” reminds us of just how transformative grace can be. The Hasidic tale teaches us that grace is something that we can easily give each other. And the Zen Story complicates the picture and tries to remind us that grace can be found in nature and when we cultivate the right attitude.

Let us then be aware of the grace that exists in our lives. Let us be grateful for the sun, the moon and the stars. Let us appreciate the cracks in the sidewalk, the weed flowers that come up through concrete and the shine of broken glass. Let us remember the miracles found in an orange. Let us be thankful for the kindness of strangers and of our friends. Let us be ever open to the unexpected and the grace that we may receive at any moment.

Thank you for listening to me. I am grateful for that.

Amen and Blessed Be.

The video for my sermon “Encountering the Kingdom” is now available. You can view it here. 

preached at the First Parish in Milton, Unitarian Universalist, July 28, 2013

It has been a pleasure worshiping with you this month. Since I left my parish in Ohio at the end of last summer I have been doing pulpit supply. There is a real difference between preaching somewhere once and regularly. Worshiping with the same congregation week after week allows for a dialogue between pulpit and pew to emerge. Last week someone came up to me after the service and let me know they disagreed with a portion of what I had to say. The knowledge that I would be coming back here this week made me think about that person’s critique differently than I would have if I had preached here once.

The opportunity to preach here four times has let me offer you a sermon series on Unitarian Universalist as religion of presence. Each week have we have asked a different question. We began three Sunday’s ago by asking: What does it mean to be present? Then we asked: What does it mean to be present to each other? Last week: What does it mean to be present to justice? This week we conclude by asking: What does it mean to be present to the holy?

This question could be recast: where do we find God? God is, of course, one of the most difficult words to define. I was reminded this difficultly the other day while talking with friends. They have a four year old who is just at the point of asking big questions. Recently, she was asking about God. My friends do not believe in a God that sits outside of the universe and human history judging us. They believe in what a theologian might call an immanent God, a God who is part of, who makes up, the universe itself. So when their daughter asked about God they told her that God lived inside of her. A horrified look came over her face. “No,” she replied. “There’s nothing inside of me. It’s just me.”

This story suggests the challenge we face when communicating about the holy. Language frequently fails us. The critique one of you had of last week’s sermon revolved around a single word choice. This is similar to the problem of talking about the holy, it is difficult because often people cannot even agree on what they are talking about. Words are gestures towards a larger reality. They frame how we understand the world but they are not the world.

A few years ago the physicist Stephen Hawking generated significant interest by claiming that the findings of modern science demonstrated that God was no longer necessary. Since we now have a fairly complete picture of how the universe came into being, how life evolves and how the physical laws of nature work, he reasoned there is no longer room for God in the rational mind.

Liberal theologians have long argued the opposite. God, they claim, is not a rational construct. God is a feeling. Friedrich Schleiermacher, described as the father of liberal theology, believed that “the feeling of absolute dependence” is the experience of “consciousness of God.” It is the moments that I am most aware of my dependence that I feel the presence of the holy.

I close my eyes and it fills my senses. The room dark, pitch even, illuminated only by the hazy light of medical machines and a blue string of Christmas lights. Hysteria, desperation, the sounds of panic and despair contrast the dimness of the room. On the bed, the thin, wan, retreating figure of a sixteen year old girl. Her Haitian mother wails, alternating between Creole and accented English, over her fading body. The words come back, a terrible litany of loss, “There will be no graduation for you. There will be no wedding for you. There will be no babies for you. There will be nothing for you, nothing.”

For the last five months the daughter has struggled with cancer. Tonight she has lost that struggle. The doctors and the nurses have told her parents it is over. Everything but the morphine drip and the monitors have been disconnected. This is it. The daughter is about to die, is dying, is dead.

Over the decade I have spent as a member of the clergy, I have witnessed many deaths and conducted many funerals. This one, the death of a young immigrant to cancer, remains one of the most memorable. Perhaps, because the mother’s wails echoed the famous line from the 22nd Psalm, words repeated by Jesus as he died on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” Or maybe it because at that moment I felt an intense connection to life itself. The waning breaths of the young woman, the mother’s love, the prayers we said together combined and I knew that I was in the presence of something greater than myself. To be witness to death is to be witness to our absolute dependence.

Despite this it is at death, and in moments of pain, that the absence of the holy can be felt most profoundly. William Schulz, past President of the Unitarian Universalist Association and former Executive Director of Amnesty International, once gave a lecture entitled “What Torture Has Taught Me.” In it he challenged the concept of an immanent God, a God that is present in all things, by claiming “that no God worthy of the name is present in a torture chamber.”

Rabbi Irving Greenberg offered a counter perspective when trying to make theological sense of the Holocaust: “To the question, ‘Where was God at Auschwitz?’ the answer is: God was there — starving, broken, humiliated, gassed and burned alive, sharing the infinite pain as only an infinite capacity for pain can share it.”

African American liberation theologians like Kelly Brown Douglas make a similar point when they argue for the necessity of a Black Christ. In this view, Christ needs to be black so that he can accompany, in Brown’s words, “the Black struggle to ‘make do and do better’ in face of racist, sexist, classist, and heterosexist oppression.” As Brown puts it, “Christ is inside of my grandmother and other Black women and men as they fight for life and wholeness.”

I do not pretend to know whether Schulz or Greenberg and Douglas is right. What I do know is that one of the most political decisions that each of us makes, that each culture makes, is in how we define the holy. Rebecca Parker makes precisely this point when talking about the crucifixion of Jesus. She writes, “To say that Jesus’ executioners did what was historically necessary for salvation is to say that state terrorism is a good thing, that torture and murder are the will of God.” To choose between locating the holy in Jesus’ life or in his death is to choose between two radically different theologies. The option of finding it in both, or in all things, is yet another.

When we start to think about the holy we are confronted with questions beyond just the choice to find it in life or death. We also must ask: Does the holy only belong to some people? Is it only found in some places? Is it everywhere and everything? Is it a metaphor? Is it separate from the visible world? Does it act upon us? Do we act upon it? How do we know when we experience its presence?

These are not questions with rational answers. They are tied to feelings. I do not know how I know. I only know when I feel. I was fourteen. It was my first time away from my parents for an extended period. I was at a week long Unitarian Universalist youth camp in the Pacific Northwest. The grounds, abutting the ocean, were rich with immense trees. The camp was isolated and powered by its own generators. Each night after dinner and evening worship there was a hymn sing around a camp fire.

The last night of the camp we had a dance. It was a wonderfully goofy affair. People dressed in ridiculous costumes, painted their faces and flailed around to punk rock anthems by the Clash and disco jams like the Village People’s “YMCA.” After an hour, maybe two, the power suddenly went out.

The dance’s abrupt end found a number of us back at the fire pit, singing. It was the only place on the campground with any light and, besides, we enjoyed making music together. I don’t know how long we sang, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, an hour… It was a consuming experience. Eventually we reached the hymn, “Over My Head.” Maybe you remember the words. We sang them a couple of weeks ago. The first verse runs, “Over my head I hear music in the air. / Over my head I hear music in the air. / Over my head I hear music in the air. / There must be a God somewhere.” We sang that song for awhile, substituting new phrases for what was over our heads as we went. Laughter, joy, singing… Someone, a little snidely, finally suggested light. And when we reached the end of the, “There must be a God someone,” the power at the camp went back on.

It seemed like a minor miracle. It might have been someone from the camp’s idea of a prank. Whatever the explanation, the experience left an impression. Up until that moment I described myself as an atheist. Now I am not so sure. I am more open to the mystery of our lives and cognizant of the limitations of language. I understand that words like holy, divine and God are metaphors for the experience of connection to something greater than ourselves. The human mind, marvelous as it is, is quite small and in the end each of us can grasp but an infinitesimal fraction of the universe’s complexity. To speak of the holy is, I believe, to acknowledge this.

There is a certain timelessness to my memories of the holy. They fade far less than others. They come forward in vivid color rather than tattered grey, occasionally so strong that they blot out the present. There is a difference between ordinary time and holy time. The experience of the holy is more defined, placed in sharper relief. It marks me, changes me, even if the change is ever so slight.

James Wright’s poem “A Blessing” speaks to this. In his poem, Wright finds himself in a perfectly ordinary place “Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota” observing the ordinary. For what is more ordinary in rural Minnesota than two ponies “munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness”? And yet, it is here that Wright finds a blessing. Simply observing these ordinary ponies, the affection they have for each other and the peace they seem to feel while grazing alone, together, makes him realize that “if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.”

Wright’s poem suggests that the transformative experience, being in the presence of the holy, can be found in even the most unremarkable of activities. It is not what surrounds us that matters. We do not need to seek out the extraordinary to find the holy.

There are many stories from the Bible that are instructive on this dynamic. One found in Genesis is the story of Jacob wrestling what the text refers to as “a divine being.” In the story Jacob, the patriarch whose children eventually founded the tribes of Israel, stops, alone, by the side of a river to spend the night. There he finds a man. They wrestle all night, the man trying to escape Jacob, Jacob refusing to let him go. Finally, the dawn comes. The man wrenches Jacob’s hip from his socket and says to him, “Let me go, for dawn is breaking.” Jacob replies, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” And so, the divine being blesses Jacob. In doing so, he changes Jacob’s name to Israel.

The story instructively suggests several things. The holy can be found anywhere. Jacob encountered it on the river bank. James Wright discovered it in two ponies. I have felt its presence in the room of dying child and at a youth camp. When we find it we must somehow engage it. It must be wrestled with. Wright looked at the ponies. Jacob struggled against the divine being. I heard music, saw light, and rethought the way I see the world. To be in the presence of the holy is to be open to change. Jacob received a blessing and a new name. Wright wanted to burst from his body. This change can come at a cost–a limp, pain, the presence of death–but it does not have to. One suspects that the only thing Wright’s experience of the ponies like “wet swans” cost him was reflection.

The story of Jacob and the feeling of being present to the holy is helpful on another level, a moral level. It reminds us that the experience of the holy frequently requires an other. Each of the experiences that I have described is an experience of connection, not the experience of an autonomous and isolated individual. At the start of this sermon series I suggested that we each construct our theologies out of our personal experiences. Since each of our experiences are different our theologies are be different as well. This might lead to moral relativism but it does not have to. If being present to the holy means being present to our feelings of dependence and connection then we know we have strayed when disavow those feelings.

Moral clarity comes from understanding our dependence on the universe not on claiming a sense of independence from it. For me there is only one heresy worth interrogating, the myth of the autonomous individual. None of the experiences of the holy that I have described have taken placed in a vacuum. All of them are interactions between people or between people and the larger world. We need each other, or at least an other, to experience the holy.

It is like the hymn we sang that night at youth camp, “Over my head there is singing in the air.” Over our heads there is something in the air. It is through that something, because of that something, with that something that we know that we are present to the holy. And so, in that spirit, I invite you now to sing with me hymn #30 “Over My Head.”

Blessed Be and Amen.