September 2016 – bodily integrity

I Love Supergirl

September 27, 2016December 6, 2016Meghann Robern

I have confession to make.

I watched it last year as it aired, and recently my seven-year-old daughter asked to watch it. So I’ve been watching it again, knowing what’s coming, and experiencing it through her eyes for the first time.

Like most freshman shows, it takes an episode or few to get its bearings, to figure out what it is and what kind of stories it’s going to tell. So if you passed on it last year, I’m here to tell you to try it again, as the full first season was just added to Netflix streaming in anticipation of season two beginning on The CW this month.

You may be asking yourself, “But why on earth (or on Krypton, for that matter) is this worth a mention in our congregational newsletter?”

Without going too far into spoiler territory, the narrative arc of season one is about how unregulated, thoughtless consumption of resources destroyed one planet, and asks how far one is willing to go to prevent that from happening to another. It tells a story about love of a planet not just for what it can give us, but how we can exist on it and with it. Supergirl asks us to look at how the interdependent webs of our lives are inextricable from the physical water, earth, and air around us.

Like all the best stories, the external conflicts are directly related to the internal ones. Kara Zor-El was old enough when Krypton was destroyed that she has a young girl’s memories of its culture, its ethics, and her own family members. Now that she has grown up, she is discovering the nuance required to navigate worlds full of multi-faceted, multi-layered beings, who often have as much conflict within themselves as they do with others. Loss, grief, and isolation exist alongside joy, satisfaction, and belonging. And as she’s learning about what it means to be a human, she is also passing on the lessons she learned from Krypton about working together, sharing burdens, and bonds of love that go beyond family ties.

Ultimately, for me, the show asks us about our choices. How much will we sacrifice for the greater good? How will we find ways to work together when we are afraid? When we are angry? Supergirl, like all good stories, helps us to think about our own lives and the choices we make every day to live into our covenants with each other.

Jeanne D’Arc

September 25, 2016March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Listen to the sermon here:

Jeanne D’Arc

Or, watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook

Joan of Arc. The name has passed into legend around the world, the Maid lifted up into sainthood. Her story has been re-imagined, retold, and adapted over and over again, from Mark Twain’s novelization of the historical records in France to the modern day setting of the show Joan of Arcadia. Surely, the life of Joan of Arc qualifies as words and deeds of prophetic people which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love — one of the adopted sources of our Unitarian Universalist faith.

What does hearing her name bring into your mind? Was she an illuminata commanded by God to save France from annihilation? Was she mentally ill, suffering from hallucinations and caught up in the superstitions of her time?

These are the kinds of questions that follow her legacy around in these modern times, and I believe they detract from it. It does not matter whether or not her voices were from God. What matters is her choices, her actions, and what she inspired in the people around her. For a girl whose name calls up so many questions about the truth of vision and the nature of religious devotion, the details of her life are known in unquestionable detail through records of the Hundred Years War and court transcripts of her multiple trials.

Visions or hallucinations, she first saw her angels while working in a field. Though she had no contacts, no training, no resources, she defied her father —who testified that he would have drowned her himself rather than see her go to war — and made her way through the wrecked countryside to the seat of the local nobility, where she petitioned again and again to be sent to the Dauphin — the French prince who had been driven away by English aggression. When Joan came into his life, he was about to flee France altogether.

Each step on Joan’s path is the same as the first, with only the names and places changing, and the threat to her life increasing. At each fork in the road, from her village, to Vaucouleurs, to the Dauphin’s castle, to her first trial at Poitiers, to the siege of Orleans, all the way to the king’s coronation at Rhiems, she faced the crushing doubt of powerful men, the mocking laughter of her fellow citizens, and grueling examinations, both verbal and physical, of her worthiness to just to speak, much less act. And each time, without fail, through the perseverance of her words and deeds and her unyielding faith, she turned every single one of them to her cause.

At first she held power just as a mascot for the people of France to rally around. After the Victory at Orleans she was placed in charge of tactical decisions. She was given special dispensation by the Church to wear men’s clothing, equipped with personalized armor and her own war banner. In the span of just a few short weeks, she rose from being perceived as a delusional peasant girl to a general-in-chief on the fields of battle.

To quote 19th century Hungarian President Lajos Kossuth, “Since the writing of human history began, Joan of Arc is the only person, of either sex, who has ever held supreme command of the military forces of a nation at the age of seventeen.” And she did not just send her army into battle — she joined them. One story is told of how Joan took an arrow in her neck and kept fighting until they had won.

What is even more significant is the actions she inspired in the soldiers and farmers who fought those battles. In real war there is the march, the nightly camps, the councils of war. It was during this downtime that she taught the peasant army a better way of life, of the orthopraxis that must follow any orthodoxy. She sent the whores away, outlawed gambling, and made each of them promise to stop swearing. She told them not that God would win them the battle if they raised their swords, but that battles would be won only when they gave their life to God’s commandments.

Right action had to be performed in the world before the world would return any semblance of righteous victory. She did not just reclaim the land of France; she reclaimed its souls as well.

Her life was one of relentless, hyperfocused vigilance on her mission. Regardless of whether or not she had hallucinations or true visions of the saints and angels of heaven, it was the faith imparted to her by her community that enabled her to leave her home and find her way through one barrier after another until she could crown the rightful king of France.

When Chelsea, today’s worship associate, and I were discussing this service, and where we wanted to go with all the many possibilities that come out of Joan’s life, she lifted up the unification of tribes at Standing Rock to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. What we learn from Joan, she said, is that it doesn’t matter how things have been done in the past. It doesn’t matter what entrenched systems of power or oppression or warfare have been at work, nor for how long.

When the heart of our vision calls for us to rise up and claim a better world, we must do so. For Joan, it was freeing her people from the ravages of a hundred year war, a war that existed longer than the memories of everyone alive at the time. Just think — no one could remember a time when they were not at war, and this young girl said surely, we can know such a time again.

But Joan’s story does not end with the coronation. It continues on into tragedy. This is the part everyone knows. She’s burned at the stake, nineteen years old. What doesn’t always make it into the retelling is that she was captured by the English, and the King of France — the man who owed this girl his crown — refused to pay her ransom.

He abandoned her in most dire hour of need, and she was sold to a kangaroo court bent on destroying her just to send a message. From this point on, in the hands of the enemy, everything was rigged against her. In the end, the English had to resort to lying to convict her. Because she couldn’t read, they convinced her to sign a document relinquishing her right to wear men’s clothing, telling her it said something else. And so, the next time she put on men’s clothing, they set her on fire.

The worst part is that, at the end, when she saw that she was truly, actually going to die, that she had been abandoned by the country she had saved and that there was no one else willing to help her, she recanted. She broke. The community that had given her strength was nowhere to be found, and so of course one human being cannot carry so much herself without being destroyed. This is the blessing of the gathering community. This is the power of our covenants — our promises of how we will be with each other. It’s not about being nice.

It’s about support, and love, and hope that we will care for each other through the best of times and the worst of times.

I turn to the words of Iyuskin American Horse and his people. The words of the hundreds of First Nations tribes that are gathering, right now, at Standing Rock, putting aside centuries of conflict among each other to fight for a common purpose. It does not matter what has been for the last hundred years or more, of the iron grip that white colonization and white corporations have had on the land and the people for so long. The protectors of land are rising up together to say no more. We will not do things this way anymore. And what they are protecting is not only sacred tribal land, but also access to clean water. Water is life, for them and for you and for me. Water is life for our children, and our children’s children. Water is the future.

Like the Unitarian Universalists who answered the call to Selma in the 1960s, UUs, both laypeople and ministers are also travelling to Standing Rock and asking the local protectors how they can help.

But, of course, not all of us can go to Standing Rock. And that’s OK. Each of us is capable of contributing to the greater vision in our own way. Joan may have left home to go lead an army and stop a hundred year war, but we might not know anything of her story if not for her mother. Remember, she’d been thrown away by the French and convicted by the English. Joan the hero entered our cultural consciousness because of her mother, an uneducated peasant woman, with no power. She petitioned, again and again, for her daughter to be retried posthumously, so that history would not remember her as evil. And eventually she succeeded.

Each of us has different gifts to bend the moral arc of the universe, different ways we can choose to live out the vision of a better world. Joan took on war. Iyuskin American Horse is taking on big oil. Joan’s mother took on bureaucracy. The Reverend Robin Tanner, UU minister, goes out on the streets of Charlotte every night and puts the peaceful protesters up on Facebook live, showing the world their singing in their grief. All of these people, working against huge, entrenched systems of oppression, and doing so in the best ways they know how. Each of them adds to the effort. Joan could not have taken back France without earning the support of her army. Joan’s mother could not have vindicated her daughter without someone finally supporting her bid for a retrial. Rev. Tanner is supporting the protestors, and we in turn support her and the protestors by witnessing what is happening.

Words and deeds of prophetic people, as a source of our faith, calls us not just to learn about the prophets of our history, but to remember those lessons so we do not repeat our mistakes. Joan of Arc teaches us that we must rise up with the prophets of today, and stay with them, in whatever ways we are able, in order to change the world for the better.

May it be so.

The Revelator

September 18, 2016March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook

The Book of Revelation. It’s a letter written by a person who called themselves John, meant for seven communities in Asia that had gathered around a belief in Jesus Christ. Unlike today, when Christian identity is linked with power and empire, Christian communities (even before they were calling themselves Christians) were subversive, anti-establishment groups fighting just to survive, much less thrive. Living in the shadow of the Roman Empire, which required imperial religious devotion in all aspects of life, including commerce and livelihood, many resorted to hiding in plain sight. They kept their beliefs about Jesus internal, while their actions supported the divinity of the Roman emperor and his authority over all because it kept them alive.

Enter John, the Revelator. Not the same John to whom the fourth Gospel is attributed, or the Johannine letters. A different John. He’s a Palestinian Jew, living among the Jesus communities in Asia, and he is so angry at his people for their collaboration with the empire that persecutes them, and so afraid that the message of Jesus, his messiah, will be erased, that he cannot truly express how he feels in everyday, conversational language. He is so overwhelmed he cannot even rely on traditional rhetoric like what Paul used in his letters. John can only communicate the depth and agony of his truth through manifesting visceral gut reactions to his fantastical and often grotesque imagery. The four horsemen of the apocalypse. The beast rising from the sea. The dragon sweeping stars from the sky with a flick of its tail. The woman clothed in the sun, with the moon at her feet.

The imagery of John’s epistle is so powerful it has moved past Christian culture and entered the consciousness of the American secular experience. It’s the basis of numerous pop culture endeavors, like television shows, and referenced in many more. I would argue that it’s used as a founding cosmology in the creation of our art more than it’s used as a Christian sacred texts in modern churches. Many mainline Christian pastors are afraid of trying to exegete it, like English majors tiptoeing around James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s powerful at an emotional, reactive level. And one of the hardest things to deal with about Revelation is its violence.

Miroslav Wolf, a Bible scholar and survivor of the genocide in the Balkan peninsula claims that: “In the worldview of Revelation, there is no power great enough to stop the beasts from wanting to be beasts.” There is no power great enough to stop the beasts from wanting to be beasts. What do we do with that as Unitarian Universalists?

I think we have to go back to King, the authentic King, the one who understood that non-violent action does not mean it is not disruptive. Non-violent action, civil disobedience, must be disruptive, must make Rome agitate, for it have any effect. But King’s call to non-violence is also deeply rooted in Universalism, in demonstrating that those who hold the power in an oppressive system are just as much victims of that toxic environment as those who are oppressed. That we are called to love even the beasts who want to be beasts. That love is how we show beasts that they do not have to be beasts to belong. As UU Rev. Anita Farber-Robertson says: “My Universalism is fierce. It has no patience with a theology of scarcity.”

King also lays out for us a historical record of what he calls “creative extremists”. And it’s important to note that these leaders of change were not themselves perfect, nor were their messages always perfect. John’s resistance to religious imperialism did not intersect with resistance to patriarchy — his fantastical visions rely on caricatures of the historically oppressive roles of women — mother or whore. Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal” but left out the white women, the black lives that kept his household, and the economy of the Southern United States, running on slavery of human beings. That historical erasure of the humanity of black lives affected all people of colour as this nation formed its identity. It’s a legacy with which we are all still struggling today. Revelation is resistance.

To resist, we must acknowledge that our pasts are imperfect, and we are imperfect, and that’s okay as long as we are willing to keep learning. It is incumbent on us to learn from the mistakes and misunderstandings of our histories so that we can always be evolving into the people the visionary future needs to create itself. We will always be imperfect, because we will always be creating something new. We make each other better by learning from each other and the diversity of our experiences and our belief. We covenant together to more than the sum of our parts in building the future.

Revelation is resistance to the status quo. Revelation asks us to consider how we navigate questions of fidelity to covenanted communities of mutual love and support, leading to action on justice issues, when we live in a culture that demands unquestioning fidelity to imperial projects. In modern times, that becomes how do we navigate a covenanted agreement to make our seven principles, statements of hope and vision, the reality in this world that demands we agree to private prison industrial complex, the oppression of black lives, Muslim lives, Latinx lives, queer lives, and so many more. There are, right now, thousands of people supporting the First Nations protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, protesting for the sake of the future of clean water for our children and grandchildren. Those thousands of people are being ignored by the mainstream media while they report about a gas panic due to — wait for it — a broken gas pipeline polluting everything around it. The cognitive dissonance is staggering. Revelation 13:4: “They worshipped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the beast, and they worshipped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?”

We are, all of us, under the thumb of New Rome, my beloveds. And Revelation is resistance. Our seven principles are resistance.

I’m a huge fan of Nadia Bolz-Weber. She’s a Lutheran pastor who also happens to write some really good books. And it turns out that once upon a time, she tried to be a Unitarian Universalist. She decided it wasn’t for her because, for her, we UUs “have a higher opinion of human beings than I have ever felt comfortable claiming, as someone who both reads the paper and knows the condition of my own heart.” She claims that we rely too much on “hopefulness and positive thinking.” And this not a claim unique to her.

I offer to you today that we should not ignore or dismiss such judgements about us, but rather use them to fuel our drive to make our vision reality. I am willing to claim that hopefulness and positive thinking are central to our Unitarian Universalist identities, but they are not how we get things done. The hope is why we work for a better world. Love is why we work for a better world. The how is always changing. Revelation is resistance.

Our seven principles are not belief statements. They are statements of vision and mission around which we, as members and congregations, covenant to preserve where they exist and to make a reality where they are not. It is often very, very hard work, and more about confronting our own flaws of perception than is it about our own “awesomeness”.

Take, for example, our first principle: we covenant together to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. From a belief standpoint, we can recognize all around us, every day, how people are not shown, nor demonstrate, inherent worth and dignity. The difference, however, is that as UUs we are also willing to learn about, and then recognize, the systems of oppression that teach people to fear and hate each other. And, as we learned from the trolls in Frozen, “people make bad choices when they’re mad or scared or stressed.” When the systems keep people from having access to food, to shelter, to health care, they live in fear, and they make choices based on fear. I’m not sure those decisions can be called choices at all.

The covenant of our seven principles is about recognizing the divinity of others. And only when we have done that can we truly recognize the divinity in ourselves. That we are worthy of love simply because we exist. That each of us is enough, just as we are. That living into the worth and dignity of every person includes living into the fullness of our own individual potential as we help others live into theirs. Revelation is resistance, resistance to the old order, resistance to the empire, resistance to systems of oppression that harm all of us with their poisonous ways.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous image of the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice is, in fact, paraphrased from the writings of Unitarian Theodore Parker. King understood that that moral arc bends towards justice because people bend it. That moral arc requires our thoughts and prayers and our actions. And this community is a perfect example of how necessary a faith in hopefulness and positive thinking is to how we hold together as a congregation, as a larger denomination, despite our multitude of differences. Our sources of faith are numerous, but we share a vision that we can make people’s lives better, including our own; that we can ease suffering, including our own. That vision relies on our covenant to work, to love, together. Our differences make us stronger because they encourage us to learn from each other.

The Book of Revelation shows us a world of anger and fear, where violence is inevitable and divine retribution is the only escape into New Jerusalem, into the new world order. And if all we do is wait for someone better than us to change it, that’s what the world is and will continue to be. Because there is no one better than you, right here, right now, as part of this community. There is no one better to change the world.

In the words of Black Elk, sung by our choir today, “I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all children.”

We are the revelators. We are the creative extremists that King said the world needs.

Throw off the fear. Throw off the hate. Bring on the New Jerusalem.

Revelation is resistance.

May it be so.

We Ask the Church

September 4, 2016March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Listen to the sermon here:

We Ask the Church

Or, watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook

I used to be a screenwriter. Almost ten years ago, the Writers Guild of America went on strike, right when my career was about to take off. I’d sold a project to a big studio AND it was being made, which doesn’t always happen. You’d be surprised how many successful screenwriters there are who’ve never seen something they wrote made into a movie. But they get paid for their work, thanks to the guild.

But because it was my first project, and it had been optioned but not purchased, and production hadn’t started, when the strike began, I was in this sweet spot area of having a lot of industry buzz around my name, but not yet enough “units” to be eligible for guild membership.

And before any of you ask, I’ll only tell the name of my movie to whoever takes the Program Council Chair position.

So one day, while my day job boss was down on the picket line, I get a call from my agent, Howie. Now, I’m sure that many of you have a very particular personality in mind when you think of a Hollywood agent. Howie is an exception. I’m pretty sure if I called him today he’d still talk to me.

So Howie calls me up, and after some checking-in small talk, he gets real quiet. “Meghann,” he says, “are you a member of the guild yet?” I said “No, I’m not eligible until they start production.” Silence. Then he says, “As your agent, you need to know that I can get you work right now.”

And what he’s not saying, what he and I both understand without having to say it, is that not only could I get work, but I could get a lot of work. More than any other fledgling writer could reasonably hope for at this point in their career.

And I had one of those moments that technically only lasts a second or two, but encompasses what feels like decades of thought. I remembered that I grew up with food in my belly and consistent health care because of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the American Federation of Musicians. In that one second I recalled all the conversations I’d overheard in recording sessions about scale pay, and how my parents never questioned that someone should be paid fairly.

I thought about my boss, the man who had taken me under his wing, treated me fairly, and given me every opportunity to move into my own career. I remembered that the money I’d already made from this movie was only in my bank account because of this guild that was on strike.

I knew, in that one second, that while I may not be a member on paper, I was a member in spirit.

“I’m sorry, Howie. I can’t cross the picket line. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”

“Good girl,” he said. Then he hung up.

And I never worked in Hollywood again.

I tell you this story today because it’s my example of what “labour union” means at a personal, spiritual level and not just politics. UU minister Rev. Aaron McEmrys, who was an organizer before following his call to ministry, describes it perfectly for me. He says,

I choose to use the word, “union”, because it best describes what happens when groups of individuals come together in a spirit of mutual support, respect and love. In this sense, the concept of union is one of the most beautiful and important “spiritual” words in my vocabulary. Whether people are organizing through the “official” mechanisms of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) or through “unsanctioned” means – they are nonetheless organizing themselves into a relationship of “union” with one another, where “an injury to one, is an injury to all.”

Rev. Aaron also teaches UUs about our long history of supporting labour movements in this country. William Ellery Channing, in the 1830s, said that all people had the same “tremendous potential” regardless of economic class, and that the exploitation of workers was denying them their ability to fully manifest that potential. Theodore Parker preached on poverty and its direct ties to abuse of workers. Over a hundred years ago, John Henry Holmes wrote a description of that same link between systemic poverty and worker injustice that could have been written today:

Poverty, in this age as in every age, in our country as in every country, is primarily due to the fact of social injustice – that employment cannot be had by those who are ready to work; that employment even when regular is not paid enough to enable the faithful and efficient workman to guard against illness, to protect his widow from dependence, or to provide for his own old age; that insufficient wages force thousands of families to crowd into unhealthy tenements, to eat insufficient food, and to wear insufficient clothing, thus paving the way for physical weakness and disability; that accidents rob the wage earners without compensation from society; that taxes are inequitable, throwing the chief burden upon the poor instead of upon the rich; that natural resources, which are the basis of all wealth, are in the hands of a few instead of under the control of society at large, and are thus exploited for the benefit of the few and not for the sake of the common welfare; that the distribution of wealth is grossly unfair and disproportionate – in the final analysis, that society is organized upon a basis of injustice and not of justice, and is permeated by the spirit of selfishness and not of love. (The Revolutionary Function of the Modern Church (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1912) pp. 100-101)

Heartbreaking words, because they still ring so true. And yet. Hearing it so perfectly summed up, it becomes so thick and dense that I am overwhelmed by the magnitude of it. How am I, one person, supposed to help, especially when I’m as tied up in it as everyone else?

After the writers guild strike came the economic crash. My boss had to let me go. I had a new baby, a house I couldn’t sell, and I couldn’t find a job to save my life. Eventually my unemployment insurance ran out. And I know, without a doubt, that we would have ended up homeless, with Prudence in foster care, if it weren’t for our family’s economic privilege.

We had people not only willing, but also ABLE to support us in a time of great need. My family of musicians union members now included Josh’s family of teacher unions. Once again, my life, and the life of my child, was sustained by the ongoing work of the labour movement.

Even finally following my lifelong call to ministry — the years of seminary, moving here to serve as your intern minister last year– was only possible because of the economic privilege given to me — GIVEN to me, not earned by me — by union workers.

The quote I chose for the order of service today is also from Cesar Chavez, one of the co-founders of National Farm Workers Association. A devoted Catholic, he specifically reached out to religious communities for support, asking them “to sacrifice with the people for social change, for justice, and for love of [sibling]. We don’t ask for words. We ask for deeds. We don’t ask for paternalism. We ask for servanthood.”

And yet, I know that fear that tells us to cross picket lines — fear of hunger, fear of losing our children, fear of homelessness. I know some of you here in this sanctuary are not just living with these fears as a possible future but are also living the reality of not knowing where next week’s food will come from, or where you’ll be sleeping.

I also know the fear of activism. I’ve thought about what I want displayed on the back of my car, and whether it will bring violence to me and my family. I’ve stayed out of protest situations wherein I felt the risk to my safety was too high. And I reconsider those decisions every day. I carry guilt for those decisions every day. I know that the fact I even have a choice is deeply rooted in my privilege. I’m not sure I’m as brave as Shaie’s mom, or as many of you here today.

But what I do know is that the more of people’s stories I hear, the more I know about people’s lived experience, the braver I become. Bravery doesn’t mean the fear goes away — it means going ahead even when we’re afraid. So let’s continue to listen to people’s stories, and to make safe space for those stories yet untold.

I also know that when I’m faced with a task that feels overwhelming, insurmountable, I have to find a way to make it smaller. I break it down, into little pieces, that I can conquer one at a time. And this is where our choices come in.

This is where solidarity, where Cesar Chavez’s call to servanthood and deeds looks like joining a boycott instead of joining the front lines of the protest itself. Where Shaie’s mom did as much to support the farm workers by telling their story to her daughter as she did by putting that bumper sticker on her car.

We cannot live into affirming the worth and dignity of every person and the interdependent web, two of our seven Unitarian Universalist principles, if we cannot stomach the reality of where our fruit comes from.

We cannot claim that we believe Black Lives Matter if we don’t see how Black Lives are forced into poverty through unfair labour practices.

We cannot venerate the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a civil rights leader if we ignore his call that workers’ rights are civil rights.

So how is each of us willing to live up to this call?

What choices do we make, every day, no matter how small, that bend the arc of the universe towards justice?

How can we deepen our relationships with those around us, to strengthen the web that holds us in love?