fuun – bodily integrity

With a Lion at Her Feet

January 29, 2017March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Listen to the sermon here:

or watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook.

Thekla. A young woman, caught up in a culture wherein she is denied all control over her life. Her mother makes her decisions for her, and she is engaged to a man who believes he is entitled to her submission — something which is validated by all those around them. Thekla has been denied affirmation of her inherent worth and dignity.

But then, she is given the chance to hear the teachings of Paul. She hears someone speak of love that rises above all injustice, of equality that knows no sex or gender. She hears a voice telling her that she is a person and not a thing. For teaching her this, Paul is thrown in jail. Think about that. Think about how powerful words can be, and how dangerous they are to people who hoard and abuse their power.

Regardless, Thekla has tasted freedom, freedom of her heart and freedom from her chains. Neither her mother nor her betrothed find that they can control her anymore, and while Paul is merely imprisoned, Thekla’s own mother asks for her to be burned. People oppressed by a system are most often taught that they must collaborate willingly in the system in order to survive.

Now, I know this story has some miracles in it. I’m not asking you to take them literally. What I want to do is invite you to consider them as metaphor for the immense power of the religious community to love, and protect, and change the fabric of the world around us. Thekla is saved from the pyre by an outpouring of rain; we learn that Paul and his people were actively praying for her deliverance.

What would it take for us to become the rain — single drops, each of us, overwhelmed by the magnitude of putting out a raging fire. And yet, when joined together, we become a downpour, extinguishing fires of hate and injustice. Rabbi Shana Mackler, of the Temple, taught me a saying that has become essential to my spiritual life this last week. “Pray as if everything is up to God. Act as if everything is up to you.”

Prayer, of course, means different things to different people. And maybe you’re not the kind of person who finds prayer to be very useful in your life. But I would offer up that because prayer can take so many different forms, and that one of those forms is to act as a direct conduit to our conscience, that maybe it’s not so irrelevant to all of us in these times. The Sikhs go to daily prayers because they believe that hearing and chanting the words of the Guru Granth attunes them to the needs of the universe each day. Prayer can be engaging with our personal gods, or with our still, small voice. However your personal spiritual journey has, and continues to unfold, prayer is not about quieting and soothing the mind, like meditation, but rather is about actively engaging your inner self to help choose the course of your outer life. This religious community offers up a mission, and shared values, to help guide us in this constant discernment.

Pray as if you are part of something bigger than yourself — a world that encompasses far more than one person’s experience. Act as if loving that world, and all the people in it, begins with you.

Let us return now to Thekla. Reunited with Paul, they travel to Antioch, where a powerful government man first tries to buy Thekla from Paul, and then, finding that she is not owned, immediately forces himself upon her in a public street and in broad daylight. He just grabs her and starts kissing her. Apparently he can’t help himself. She fights back, in the process ripping his clothes and knocking his crown off his head. Once again the world in which she lives is trying to make her into an object, and she finds the courage to resist from the love and empowering message taught to her by her religious community. Even though, once again, she finds herself under arrest and sentenced to death, while the power figure trying to control and objectify her, trying to make her less than human, is allowed to continue as a public figure and government leader.

But Thekla will not be silenced. She will not be contained. She not only believes that she has inherent worth and dignity, but she has also been told this, and shown this, by her religious community. She preaches about it to all who will listen, including the people of the house where she is kept locked up until it is her time to be thrown to the beasts.

And here we have another miracle. The lioness, the fierce beast meant to kill Thekla, most likely starved and abused by keepers in order to increase the violence of the demonstration, walks up and lays at her feet. Another creature, trapped in the system, decides to say, “Not this time.” They try again the next day, and not only does another lioness refuse to attack, but it protects her from the other beasts released into the theatre.

“Not this time.”

In this story, the beasts are not less than humans, but merely a different aspect of creation. They represent the diversity of this world, and the fundamental, interdependent web of which we are all a part. The lions have not necessarily heard Thekla preach, nor have they been converted. They simply see an injustice being perpetuated, one tied to their own captivity and oppression — because we are all tied to each other — and they rise up in solidarity.

“Not this time. And never again.”

Now, here’s the part that I love, and that has led to institutional western Christianity to run away screaming from this text.

In the midst of all this — a theatre of execution games, wild beasts running around, crowds of people, half of whom are screaming for her death while the other half are so moved they shower her with gifts thrown from the stands — in the midst of all this, she sees a tank of water, and says, “Oh look! This is a perfect time to baptise myself!” And throws herself in. She baptises herself. She doesn’t need Paul, or anyone else to declare her fit for it. She doesn’t need someone to bless the water. She doesn’t need someone else’s hand to be involved at all.

When this story began, she was a person trapped, with no autonomy over her life except to sit at her window, waiting for her mother or her future husband to make decisions for her. It is through hearing a message of love and acceptance, for everyone, not just some, that led her to make her first escape. It is through experiencing how that religious community lived their message, in deed as well as in word, that empowered her to claim her personhood, even when it was threatened. It was knowing that she was not alone, even if they were not physically by her side, that allowed her to know she could create herself however she wished, as long as it could be held over and against the values of love and justice she had been taught by her religious community.

Freshly baptised, and with the beasts dead around her, and half the crowd cheering for her, the powers that be are forced to let her go. She returns to Paul, and he tells her to go forth into the world and to preach of what she knows. She spends the rest of her long life doing that, and becoming a healer. She brings the religious community with her wherever she goes, working to heal those around her of their fear, anger, loneliness. She lives a life of compassion and strength, offering comfort and love to those who need it the most. She prays as if everything is up to God, and she acts as if everything is up to her.

So here we are, now, almost two thousand years later. While we may not cleave to Thekla’s Christianity, we can absolutely relate to her experience of how a community built on love and justice can heal us and empower us to live in the world. The Acts of Paul and Thekla was a text written to justify women as religious leaders and preachers, but it is ultimately, for me, about personhood. Replace her identity as a woman with any other oppressed identity — being black, being Muslim, etc. — and little about the story changes. How do we, as Unitarian Universalists, live into our legacy of a religious community built on love and justice?

Today we are welcoming new members. They have decided not only to participate in the shared ownership of and responsibility for this congregation and its ministries They also are promising to uphold and live into this congregation’s mission. Being a part of this religious community, in addition to our seven UU principles, means answering a call to create community, nurture spiritual growth, and act on our values in the larger world. We are not, as many claim,a community in which you can believe or do anything you want. We are a community in which we celebrate the diversity of our lives, and the diversity of our spiritual journeys, and we are called to believe only that which our conscience allows us. What we claim in this space, when we are gathered in safety, means nothing if we do not also live into it when we are separated, and the beasts are coming for us and those around us.

This congregation is a sanctuary. That means it is a place where those who need safety are met with protection. That those who have been hurt and battered outside our walls will find healing. That those who are tired and weary will find rest. That those whose voices have been silenced will be encouraged to share their stories. That those who are lonely will find companionship. That those of us who, like Thekla, have learned that they are worthy of love just because they exist, will in turn teach it, show it, to those of us still struggling to love ourselves.

May it be so.

Big Magic

January 22, 2017March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Listen to the sermon here:

Big Magic

or watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook.

You may have figured out by now that my usual preaching style is to start with an opening — a story, a quote, a news story. Build it up into larger context, link it to one or more of our seven principles. Lift up the power of community to heal and restore, and then send you out with a call for living into our mission and values outside of this sanctuary.

Yes, I am that predictable.

Today, I am starting at the end. Because I believe we are at a crossroads in our human history, and I need you to hear this. If you take nothing else home with you today, please take this:

You have within you, right now, just as you are, everything you need to meet your muse, to engage with your genius, to raise your dead, to reclaim your creativity from where our culture told you to toss it in the gutter.

You have within in you the power to reconnect with that mysterious thing that calls to us from an early age. That force which led human beings to draw pictures on cave walls well before they developed agriculture. The need to create poured out of us thirty thousand years before we thought to cultivate reliable sources of food.

And creativity is not about making a product. That’s just something else to be sold. And, once again, our culture tells us that’s the only way creativity is valid — is if its value is about money.

The most important thing you can create is yourself, in relationship with the world around you.

Our reading today was an excerpt from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic, in which she tells us her thoughts on why it is so important to extricate artistry and creativity from the concepts of suffering and torture. Valerie and I chose this story because it focuses on something a person, Susan does entirely for themselves. It’s not about winning medals, or performing in shows. There is no audience, no sponsorships, no livelihood waiting at the end of each ice skating session. This person has resurrected something from their childhood that gave them joy, that helped them live into their entire being.

And recognizing that as an adult — raising that feeling from the dead — and putting it back into her life, helped her become a better person overall. A better co-worker, a better friend, a better daughter. Putting it back in her life made her better, and that made her better to others.

Living into yourself, into your truth, can take so many different forms and expressions. Ruth chases her poems around her yard. Susan ice skates three times a week. I went back to school after ten years and became a minister. President George W. Bush became a painter. Every day, someone either learns something new about themselves, or rediscovers something left behind. Every day.

The question is, do we keep it, even if we have to chase it down and catch it by the tail, or do we allow it to slip through our fingers?

This brings me to our meditation, and confronting our fears. Fear of failure, fear of ineptitude, fear of putting time and effort into something that doesn’t bring us more stuff or money to buy more stuff. Fear of mediocrity, as if being average is a bad thing.

Well, if you were here on New Year’s Day, you know that I’m less than mediocre at running. I’m pretty bad at it. But in doing it, I’ve found something that goes deeper in me than running to win. And, if you were here on New Year’s Day, you also heard me attempt to make up a song verse and sing it with no rehearsal. Twice. To make the point I had to make up something totally different for the second service. We didn’t plan that to embarrass me, or anyone else who bravely came down to make up their own verses. We did it to lift up creativity as something that can, and often should be, fun and delightful and messy. That by sharing our experiments, and our bravery in taking these risks when we do so, there is nothing to fear.

And our meditation today reminds us that stories to embolden and inspire us to live into our own wonder and joy are not just coming from those around us, but from our own past. We can look not just to what we may have overlooked or tossed aside in our childhood, but also in our histories. Systems, especially family systems, carry long memories even when the details are forgotten. The homes in which we grow up, either by birth or by adoption, imprint their ghosts upon us. Sometimes they are malevolent, yes. But just as often, they are benevolent. They are our permission slip to chase the fullness of our being and co-create ourselves with the multiverse.

And, this is just when we’re working at the individual level.

There’s that saying that charity begins at home, which is often thrown around as an argument to be less charitable, actually. But in reality the original meaning of the phrase was about growth outward being a natural result of tending to the needs inward. That by starting with generosity in the home, one would naturally become more generous outside the home, because it would be an everyday practice well-integrated into one’s life.

So what I want to ask you today, is what would it feel like for you to be generous to yourself? What would it feel like to begin living into the affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, by affirm that about yourself?

So much of the fear we have around claiming our creativity is that we are taught to hate ourselves, and then to turn that self-hate out onto others around us who have less power. We witness it when the poor white worker, who is made that way by the policies of the rich, is convinced that their poverty is the fault of the black worker or the immigrant instead of the executive maintaining low wages and breaking unions. We are taught it when we are told that if something we love to do won’t pay us money, that we need to find an alternative to do with our lives, and we are a disappointment if we don’t succeed in filling our bank accounts.

Charity, generosity begins at home. What happens if we recognize that because we are worthy of health care, that has to mean everyone is, too? If creative expression is fundamental to our creation as humans — however you believe that creation to have come about — that has to mean that we should support learning how to empower it and express it in our homes and in our schools.

But most of all, in communities like this congregation, that exist to provide safe, loving, supportive environments for people to learn and grow — we have to support each other in being brave, in running toward the thing that inspires us instead of watching it disappear because we are afraid.

Fear is how we allow people to control and manipulate us. Fear is how we get convinced to back down when there’s a fight that needs to be had — a fight for our own sake as often s a fight for the sake of others. And when the fear becomes constant enough, when the anxiety is chronic, we become reactive, and apathetic. We dismiss it when people in power blatantly lie to our faces and get away with it. We insulate ourselves, and try to avoid drawing attention. We become collaborators with our own slow destruction instead of collaborating with our creative potential.

And nowhere was that creative potential more apparent than in the marches across the world yesterday. This was not an exercise put forward by “coastal elites”. It wasn’t even limited to big cities. Mentone, Alabama, population 360, had fifty people come together for their Women’s March. That’s 14% percent of the town’s entire population. In Alabama. Talk about creative expression. The smaller cities and towns, in the nation’s heartland, the turnout was just as astonishing, and this is where the oppression is the greatest, where their presence was needed the most.

In some of the bigger cities, so many people showed up that the entire route was filled from beginning to end, and they couldn’t actually march anywhere. So they shared food, shared stories. They played, and danced, and they sang.

But whether these gatherings had marching or not, they were an unstoppable outpouring of energy, just like those cave paintings on the wall from the infancy of our beginnings. They began from a single idea, tied to our country history of resistance to tyranny and oppression, and inextricable from thousands of years of patriarchy that has made white women second class citizens, and racism that has debased women of colour even more. The Women’s Marches were not only the largest protest in our nation’s history, they were a celebration of expression without fear. Of solidarity, and community, and of what it means to support each other in the diversity of our journeys into self-discovery and wonder.

They showed us what it looks, and sounds, and feels like to hold hands and stick together, like we’ve supposed to have been doing since kindergarten.

And so, I’ve come back around again to where I began. The most important thing you can create in this lifetime is yourself in relationship with the world around you. This is not a luxury. This is not a waste. This is not an irresponsible choice.

It is necessary. It is essential. It is vital.

Generosity begins at home, with you loving yourself so that you may pour that love out into others. Love yourself so that you can learn what the fullness of your being can be. Love yourself so that you are strong enough to learn from the wonder and joy of the diversity in our world, and not run away from it.

Love yourself, so that you may trust yourself, and chase your muse until you can grab it and hold it close.

May it be so.

Distributed Denial of Service

January 8, 2017March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Listen to the sermon here:

Distributed Denial of Service

or watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook

In his reflection, Steve spoke of experiences in which he witnessed the immense gulf between different populations in our world, a gulf that is only growing as our ability to innovate technology increases and the very valid attention being paid to STEM education — to science, technology, engineering, and math — is redirected at the expense of the humanities, philosophy, and religious studies?

One area is not inherently better than the other — they inform and shape each other. Steve’s identity as a Unitarian Universalist, his commitment to living into our principles, gave him the insight to both appreciate the technology in his hand as a positive tool for fostering connections and joy of community, while at the same time recognizing how it was preventing him from helping someone experiencing great distress.

The hymn that was chosen to follow Steve’s reflection this morning was chosen deliberately because of its particular message that is far from the truth for millions of people in our national communities, and billions of people around the world. It takes the time to mention creatures of “high and lowly birth”, but fails to acknowledge that such categories are more often than not human constructions of systems that keep the power with the already-privileged and disenfranchise those who are born into such a hierarchy. It totally ignores that life, and the struggles within for so many, are not a precious gift, but are in fact an endless stream of disappointments and suffering. And telling people living those lives that they should be grateful just to be alive is making the choice to diminish their narrative, to erase their story.

If we, as UUs, are going to sing about Life Being the Greatest Gift, then we need to commit ourselves to working to make that true for everyone. The moral arc of the universe only bends towards justice when we make it so.

So what does the story of the Tower of Babel teach us about how we can accomplish this? The conventional western Christian take on this story is that it’s about a community driven by “arrogance”. They realize they can build a very tall tower, a tower that can reach so high it can touch God, and they want to do so in order to make a name for themselves. And remember, historically, temples for gods were built to acknowledge their space in the sky, not the area on the ground. They were symbolic of something that could not be reached by those born of earth.

So this attempt to build a tower offends God, because, God claims, if they can do this, then there’s nothing they can’t achieve. So God decides to scramble everyone;s languages, so they can no longer communicate. They become separate communities, and the gulf between them grows.

That’s a pretty crappy thing for God to do, eh?

Yeah, that’s not my God.

Here’s my take on this story for your consideration — the people in the community lost touch with each other, and became so distant from each other in communication and experience, because they were using their innovation and gifts as a community for the wrong thing.

This community set about to build a tower as high as they could, just because they could. Imagine the resources that must have been put into it. Yeah, there were job for a while, but once it’s built… what does it do? What does it symbolize? An accomplishment that will stand there and mean nothing as the government is bankrupt from paying for it and the citizens experience massive unemployment. It is not God who breaks this community aparts and creates the dissonance between its citizens — it is the people themselves.

Imagine, instead, if the community has thought about what they would build before they did it. Instead of building it just to make a name for themselves, what if, knowing that they were capable of great things that would lead them to innovate and explore, they chose instead to build a thing that would keep them connected when they spread out into the world? What if they invested all those resources and all that time in a structure that would allow them to continue to communicate with each other, and hear each other’s stories of both joys and sorrows, across time and space?

Imagine how strong they would be. Imagine what they could accomplish, and what they could overcome. Imagine the larger world they could create. Sounds a lot like the shared values we strive for when we covenant to affirm and promote our seven principles.

It also sounds really threatening to those who hold and hoard power, like that really crappy God that wants to keep them from knowing what they can achieve.

What God does in this story is the Biblical version of a distributed denial of service attack. Now, for those of you in the room who use the internet, you may have experienced one of these attacks and not known it. What happens is that someone decides they want to stop you from accessing Amazon,com, or another website, for whatever reason. So they create a program that sends so many requests to that site, that it can’t handle all the requests and overloads. When people who want to use the site try to access, they can’t. It’s like someone intentionally keeping all phone lines busy so people can’t use them, or a group of people intentionally crowding into the doorway of a store so others can’t get in.

It’s frustrating, and oftentimes the average person doesn’t know what’s actually happening, so they take it their negative feelings on the victim of the attack. The website has not only lost its presence, but without awareness, its reputation and ability to recover are also affected.

What that God does in the story of the Tower of Babel is a distributed denial of service. He shuts down the people’s access to each other, and makes them think it’s their own fault. And he does it because they were going to know their own power to shape the future of the world.

We are currently living in an era such as this, where the people in power are using our own innovations to attack our ability to live into our seven principles and make them a reality. Technology is a tool, and all tools are only and good or an evil as the choices people make when using them. Twitter, Facebook, the internet, have allowed people to lead revolutions across the world. They’ve also allowed white supremacists to organize and consolidate their power without us noticing. And, this use of technology and innovation is nothing new in human history.

While we were planning this service together, Steve showed me the Never Again Tech pledge statement. This is an excerpt:

We, the undersigned, are employees of tech organizations and companies based in the United States. We are engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing data about people. We are choosing to stand in solidarity with Muslim Americans, immigrants, and all people whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the incoming administration’s proposed data collection policies. We refuse to build a database of people based on their Constitutionally-protected religious beliefs. We refuse to facilitate mass deportations of people the government believes to be undesirable.

We have educated ourselves on the history of threats like these, and on the roles that technology and technologists played in carrying them out. We see how IBM collaborated to digitize and streamline the Holocaust, contributing to the deaths of six million Jews and millions of others. We recall the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. We recognize that mass deportations precipitated the very atrocity the word genocide was created to describe: the murder of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey. We acknowledge that genocides are not merely a relic of the distant past—among others, Tutsi Rwandans and Bosnian Muslims have been victims in our lifetimes.

Today we stand together to say: not on our watch, and never again.

The story of the Tower of Babel is a warning to us about where and when we are, right here, right now. As we celebrate the life-affirming, community-building aspects of the technology we build, we are also witnessing an increasing chasm between communities, a separation based on class and resources. This separation is perpetuated and enhanced by people with an agenda to attack the nature of objective reality. Spin masters and fake news combined with the soundbite attention span have created a world in which public leaders can blatantly lie, and there are no consequences. This is only made worse by the idea that these technological platforms are somehow inherently neutral or apolitical.

The Tower of Babel failed, and divided the people who built it, because they were focusing on the wrong thing. They were building something just for the sake of building it. Instead of looking up to an empty sky, I would offer today that we should look at the whole setting — earth, sea, and sky. That we intentionally takes these amazing creations of humanity and take that innovation one step further — to combine our science with our morality and use both to build a world in which we empower communication and community. We already have the capability to do so much — we must keep building to manifest our sixth principle: our goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.

May it be so.

The Courage of Creativity

January 1, 2017March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Listen to the sermon here:

The Courage of Creativity

or watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook

Y’all would not believe the time I have had writing this sermon for today. Oh, the irony of getting writers’ block on a piece about creativity! But there you go. Stuck on that blank, white page. Kids home from school for a second full week, that definitely didn’t help. But I had to pull it together somehow, because this is the first worship service of 2017, new beginnings, new goals, new inspirations for my beloved congregation!

And that, I realized, was my problem. My creativity was blocked because I was afraid of failing, of letting down the people who need me to be creative and inspiring and… courageous.

The origin of “courage” is the French word for heart: “coeur”. To have courage is to live with your heart. Bravery comes into it because a lot of the time living with your heart is really scary. If we’re lucky, it’s not. But living with your heart means putting your heart out in front, to take the lead. It leaves our heart exposed, vulnerable.

A heart in that position takes enough beatings, and it might not have the resilience to recover. That makes me hesitate, every single time.

Brene Brown once asked herself, when she was examining her own vulnerability, “does this mean that our capacity for wholeheartedness can never be greater than our willingness to be broken-hearted?”

I spent many years afraid of a broken, irreparable heart. I saw it as a fragile thing, made of glass, easily shattered, unless every movement was known ahead of time and carefully planned. It was a safe life. And it was devoid of true creativity — the creating of me.

When I finally started down this path to professional ministry, after years of not leading with my heart, it became clear that I had to learn how to take risks, how to be courageous in my creativity. Because how can I serve a congregation if I can’t show them who I really am?

Last year, when I first told you the story about why I started running, it was about proving something, about proving someone else wrong in their assumptions about me. It was, in a way, a creation narrative, and it happened to succeed.

What I talk less about, at least from the pulpit, is how I fail every single time I put on those running shoes.

I’m really bad at it. I’m slow. I always look ridiculous, even in my snazzy outfits. I sweat buckets, and I smell no matter how much deodorant I put on, and I’ve never, ever, ever had a runner’s high. I fail at running on a regular basis.

And then, I do it all over again. Sometimes, over thirteen miles worth.

And yeah, someone hands me a shiny medal and I get to eat a lot of really terrible but delicious food for one day. But what I come away with, and what leads me to always sign up for another race so I have to keep training, is that I did something that I am not good at, that I will never be good at. I did something just for the experience of doing it… and I didn’t die. I survived, and it hurt a lot, and my heart is a little stronger each time because of it. What was once made of glass, that I was afraid would turn to stone if I let it be hurt too much, turns out to be a living muscle, warm and flexible and willing to lead me into amazing new realities of my own making.

I may have started running with a purpose, with an expected result. But it soon became something I did for its own sake, because of the experience itself. When Marie Curie wrote about her life’s work, she said:

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.

While scientists sometimes describe the things they encounter in their work as beautiful, it’s not often that we as a culture consider the act of science itself as an art, as a creative act of beauty. And yet, it is. Science, in the way the Marie Curie approached it, was worthy of doing for its own sake, and by equating it with music, and painting, and language, it then also must be held over and against the demands of the humanities — our morality and ethics.

One cannot tell the story of Marie Curie’s discovery of radium, and the good it did for many lives as a cancer treatment, without also telling the story of how unchecked consumerism took this scientific, artistic discovery, and proceeded to market it without further experimentation. These people were all absolutely convinced that there was nothing else to be learned, no more creativity to be found, except what could line their pockets.

Instead of doing what Marie did — continuing in the science, in the creative act of loving the world by learning about it — they assumed a false state of static, complete knowledge. Radium began to be used in cosmetics, as store-bought health aids, and in the most well-known case, in paint used on watches. The women who did this work, who were told to lick their paintbrushes to make points for detailed work, are known to history as the Radium Girls, whose lawsuits barely covered their living and medical expenses as the cancer caused from the radium exposure slowly killed them.

Even Marie Curie herself died from near-constant exposure to radioactive elements throughout her career, although she lived much longer than the people who consumed radium products.

The Radium Girls were not given the full breadth of knowledge, and even when they began to investigate, the company outright lied to them to protect their assets.

And yet, Marie Curie, who was forced to flee her home and her country to a strange place where she had no connections, no safety net, changed the world not because she could, but because she felt compelled to try new things and see what would happen. The results of these experiments, as we have also learned, cannot be put to use without ethical and moral examination. But Marie Curie was willing to risk her own life in order to live it to what she felt was the fullest extent.

Last year, one of Rev Gail’s sermons talked about how, when seeking to innovate, if you can aim, then it’s not really innovation. Because if you can aim at it, it’s known territory. True creativity, true experimentation, requires a willingness to shoot without a target. It requires shooting just to see where it lands.

What that reminds me of is how people talk about desperation. “Any port in a storm.” “Settling for what you can get.” So often that’s framed as a bad thing. And yeah, if you’re only going to shoot once, and commit yourself to wherever it is that you end up, probably not the best idea. Leading with the heart, having courage, truly embracing creativity, is being willing to shoot without a target, and then do it again if the result doesn’t work.

Innovation is scary. Creativity is scary. Because they are unknown, and our lizard brains hate the unknown. Unknown means danger.

But the unknown is also where we find freedom from our chains. The unknown is where we catch the glimmer of our vision, the tiniest seed of possibility. The unknown is where we must go to build something that works better than what we already have.

And that, my friends, is ultimately why creativity is so very very scary — because, by its nature, it seeks to undo the status quo. It seeks to undermine stability, to make you examine everything that you’ve been told is how it ought to be. It’s why artists are the first prophets of a revolution, it’s why tyrannical regimes seek to keep people so desperate and anxious that they cannot feel the pull of their hearts, and it’s why the rich and powerful always seek to own and control scientific innovation.

And I’m going to let you in on a secret.

That courageous, creative prophet who will change the world?

It’s you.

Whether it’s writing, or a science experiment, or designing a new education curriculum, or painting, or engineering, or any number of other things… something as yet unknown in the world, is calling from your heart.

In this new year, let us in this community help each other find our courage. Let us help each other explore the beauty in this world just because it exists. Let us find freedom in celebrating our creativity, no matter how scary, and no matter how many times we fail.

May it be so.

Amaterasu

December 18, 2016March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Story for All Ages — Amaterasu and her little brother, Susanoo (photo by Rev. Jason Shelton)

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Watch and listen to the homily on Facebook

So Amaterasu has run away to hide in her cave. Chelsea has taken us through how she might be feeling, and how those feelings are felt in her entire body — just like we feeling our feelings not just with our minds, or our hearts, but also with our bodies.

There’s a few things about this part of the story, when Amaterasu in is the cave, that I want to lift up for you today. The first is that even Amaterasu, the primary goddess of this tradition, has folks in her life that she can’t control and who do things to upset her. In this case, it’s her brother — but even if we don’t have a sibling, each of us has people in our lives that annoy us, that test our patience, that sometimes do things that upset us so much we feel that we need to separate ourselves for a little bit.

And that’s okay. Amaterasu goes into a cave. I go to bed and under the covers. Some folks go for a walk. Each of us is different — the important part is to spend time figuring out what works for you. What in your life will be your cave, where you can retreat to think about your feelings?

Taking the time to be in the cave is important, because it helps us be smarter about when we’re outside of the cave. This is the one of the most important lessons that we have been given from our Earth-centered traditions — the understanding that the world around us exists in cycles. We cannot have spring and summer without fall and winter. The ecosystem needs the period of rest before it can create something again. We have been in the season of fall, feeling the nights get longer and the days get shorter– Amaterasu is fleeing into her cave

But even though this week marks the Winter Solstice, and those of us in the northern half of the world transitioning from fall to winter, it also marks the return of the sun — Amaterasu emerging from her cave to bring sunlight back to the world so it will become spring again. This is a holiday about knowing we are in darkness, that it is necessary, and that we have hope for the future nevertheless.

This story is also about community. Amaterasu has a gift for the world — her light, a gift that world needs in order to survive. Each of us has something to offer that is equally necessary to our community.

And in the end, it is her community, and the power of laughter, that brings her back out again. Retreat time is important, yes. But sometimes, we try to think our way out of difficult situations are experiences. We get trapped inside our own heads. When Chelsea and I were discussing this service, she said — “Some things you can’t think your way out, But you can laugh your way out.”

It is through the power of laughter, offered by community, that Amaterasu is drawn out of her cave, out of her isolation. The story is not complete without both the willingness to go into the cave, and the understanding that something wonderful is waiting for you outside. And sometimes, we’re the ones in the cave, and sometimes we’re the ones drawing them out.

The Gift of Sweetness

November 27, 2016March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Watch and listen to the homily on Facebook

I have a question. How many of you currently go to school? What do you do at school? You learn new things, right? Things you didn’t know before.

Now, in order for me to be one of your ministers here, at this church, I had to go to a special school called a seminary. And I was very lucky, because I lived close to a seminary that dedicated itself to lots of different religions in addition to the Methodists that had started it. They partnered with the school that trains Jewish rabbis and cantors, and the school that trains Buddhist leaders. They even helped create a school to train Muslim leaders! Even better, these relationships between the schools meant that there was diversity among the students in all the classes. But, they didn’t stop there. Learning new things is so important to my seminary, that they require every single person who is training to be a minister, like me, to take classes in religions that aren’t ours. I couldn’t finish my program unless I learned about something totally new to me.

Now, because of my great seminary, I had a lot of options to choose from. Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and more… and I chose Sikhism. Does anyone here already know something about Sikhs?

One of the reasons I wanted to study Sikhism is because I believed they truly practice radical hospitality, something which we UUs try really hard to do. Did you know that every Sikh temple has rooms that anyone can stay in, at no charge, for up to three nights? It doesn’t matter why you need a place to stay — they will give you a bed to sleep in and a roof over your head. They also feed everyone after every prayer service. Even the Golden Temple, the holiest gurdwara of Sikhs all over the world, in India, serves thousands after prayer three times a day, entirely on volunteer effort. They form their religious community around radical hospitality of food and shelter for all.

And what about the story of Ukko and the woman who didn’t want to share her bread? The more she kept for herself over what she needed, the smaller she got. Now, we all know here that being small in body isn’t necessarily bad — small people can have great big hearts. But the smaller the loaf she made for Ukko… the smaller her heart was. And even when she began frantically giving more and more of the bread away so she could be herself again — it was important that she not give everything away. She still kept what she needed to feed herself and her family. Community doesn’t mean giving until you have nothing for yourself. Community is about giving and sharing to sustain everyone, including yourself.

Then Marguerite told us the story of the people seeking a new home. They asked to share space, and they were initially told they would take up too much room, that they would overflow the bowl and cause resources to be lost. But their leader decided to offer a different way of looking at joining this community. Instead of being a burden, instead of causing trouble… what if their presence instead made something new? Instead of draining the community of its abundance, they would add to it, and change it for the better. And so they were welcomed, and the community was made better by its hospitality to people who were different, but were still in need.

Like the sugar in the milk, life is better with a little sweetness. This community, this congregation, strives to be something sweet in your life. Something else the Sikhs taught me is that the sweetness of your religious community should be matched with a sweetness on your tongue — they hand out little balls of sweet dough after prayers, before they head to the meal. It’s to remind that connection between your mind, body, and heart, that the sweetness of community comes from nourishing all parts of yourself. For there to be peace in the world, it must begin with peace in the heart.

So today, for our Bread Communion, we are offering you something sweet for your tongue to symbolize the sweetness of this community.

May it be so.

We Were Made For This

November 13, 2016March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Listen to the sermon here:

We Were Made For This

or watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook

I’ve gotten lots of questions about what today’s sermon will be about. I’ve deflected all of them — partly because, well, I wanted people to show up. And partly because, I think, I wasn’t sure where on the spectrum between pastoral and prophetic I was going to land. But here’s the thing: from this pulpit, I cannot endorse candidates. But I can absolutely speak to issues, especially ones directly relevant to our religious tradition, and I can talk freely about already elected officials. I want to be clear right now, at the beginning of this: I love you. I love all of you, with your depth and your nuance and your glorious divinity, and the parts of you you wish you could forget about, or hide. I love you. And as a human being, naturally, I like it when you like me. But I’m also one of your ministers. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I were trying to please everyone in the room. So buckle up.

In Unitarian Universalism, we also have something called the freedom of the pulpit — the right of the minister to speak what they believe to be truth to power. What often gets forgotten is that this freedom of the pulpit goes hand in hand with the freedom of the pew — the sovereign right of those listening to agree or disagree.

And here I come to the crux of the issue at hand in our culture this week: it is assumed, in our tradition, that we will have a diversity of beliefs. It is HOW we communicate about and through these differences, how we treat those who are not exactly like us, that binds us together as Unitarian Universalists. This is a legacy we UUs have not always lived up to — but that doesn’t mean that we should give up trying. One of our most popular hymns is Rumi’s come, come, whoever you are, but one of his most important lines of the poem has been cut from the version we sing: “Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times, come.”

Now is the time for us to renew our vows, to our covenants of behavior and to our principles of action, because it became pointedly clear Tuesday night that much of the rest of our country has forgotten, or never learned, how to be together.

A few weeks ago, one of our members preached a controversial sermon on the inherent worth and dignity of every person in the face of great evil — the freedom of the pulpit. While she was preaching, someone was overheard to say, out loud, “She should throw herself away.” That is not the freedom of the pew. That is the kind of divisive response that has led us to this awful moment in our history, where a man who has incited violence, hatred, bigotry, racism, and openly admitted to sexual assault has been elected to the highest office we have. Say whatever you will about the electoral college, the fact that the popular vote was even close enough to allow the electoral college to override it makes me ill. The fact that almost half of eligible voters didn’t vote, by choice or by voter suppression, makes me ill.

I have friends, people whom I trust with the lives of my children, who voted for Donald Trump. I know there are people in this room who voted for Donald Trump. I’m both capable and willing to to discuss with civility and genuine interest the reasons those votes were cast. But make no mistake — the inherent worth and dignity of every person is not the equivalent to the inherent worth and dignity of every opinion. People are going to die because of this. In the last five days, there have been over 200 incidents reported of hate crimes directly linked to people feeling empowered by Trump’s election and the validation of his horrific rhetoric. Those are just the ones we know about.

People’s lives are at stake now. I am all for rooting out corruption in government, but not with an administration that believes climate change is a hoax perpetuated by China, that women should be punished for having an abortion, and that being gay can be cured with electroshock therapy. That’s only the beginning of the list.

It is not enough to look at policy platforms or party affiliation and ignore the person who will be taking the office. It is not a responsible choice to ignore the impact of electing a man who calls himself the “law and order” candidate while we display a Black Lives Matter sign on our lawn. “Law and order” is the spin white people put on the New Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and the epidemic of systemic racism in our criminal justice system. If you missed our Palmer lecture about this, it’s posted on our website. Want more? The documentary “13th” is streaming on Netflix, right now. Lives, families, of people of colour have been destroyed in this country for decades, and it became clear on Tuesday night that the system is going to continue.

I know this is a dismal picture I’m painting for you. For some of you — our members and friends who are people of colour, queer, women, and so on and so forth — this is more of the same. The fear that you have already lived with every day. For some of you, this reality is new, and it’s weird and really really uncomfortable, and it is so tempting to retreat back into locations of privilege to avoid that feeling. Even those of us who are part of one group under constant attack — for instance, me, as a cisgender queer woman — may find it easier to conserve my resources to protect myself. I can retreat into my whiteness, my education, my class status, as insulation.

But my resistance will be intersectional or it will be worthless.

I am part of the interdependent web of all existence, and that means I am in relationships. That web means those relationships are with strangers as well as with family and friends. My resistance to the status quo, to the patriarchal idea that any man can just grab me by the… well, you know. It’s a word we reject in our UU sex ed classes. My resistance to being grabbed by any part of my body, as a woman, must be intersectional with resistance to racism, transphobia, bigotry, Islamophobia, and all the other dis-eases burning through our communities.

So where do we go from here?

These words from Clarissa Pinkola Estes are a start, for me:

Ours is a time of daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to caring, visionary, civilized people. You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris, the bald faced audacity that some are engaged in while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, this mother earth, is breathtaking. Yet I urge you, ask you, gentle you . . . to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is, we were made for these times. Yes. For years we have been learning, practicing, been in training for, and just waiting to meet, on this exact plain of engagement . . .

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts, or by whom,will cause the critical mass to tip towards an enduring good and transformative shift. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts great and small, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on earth to bring justice and peace, but small determined groups and individuals who will not give upduring the first, second, or hundreth gale.

The good words we say and the good deeds we do, are not ours. They are the words and deeds of the love and life that brought us here. In that spirit, I hope you may write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and tied to the pier, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not, what great ships are built for.

Each of us is a great ship. I truly believe that. But some of us, at this moment in time, have taken more damage than others, and we see no end in sight. It will require a fleet of great ships, working together, to bring about an end to the storm. It will require this sanctuary, this community, to commit to being a safe harbour when any of us need to resupply, to repair. It will require us, all of us, to keep each other safe, and to build the next generation of great ships in our children and youth.

I believe this can be done. I believe you, every single one of you, can contribute to make it happen. I believe that our world needs us, Unitarian Universalists, more than ever. I believe if we are willing to live into our seven principles — not as beliefs, but as calls to action — and to fully commit to our covenants of how we will be with each other and in our greater communities — that we can hold our government to account for the lives of the people. The moral arc of the universe only bends towards justice when we bend it.

You may have seen the safety pin meme going around. The idea is that, if one is wearing a safety pin, one is identifying as a “safe” person, someone who can be trusted by those who are in a vulnerable position. There is a lot of controversy around this idea. White pride people are telling their followers to wear safety pins to lure people of colour into trusting them. Leaders of colour are calling it out as yet another way that white people soothe their conscience without taking direct action to change the systems that lead to harm and violence.

You may have also noticed that I’m wearing one. And so is Rev. Jason. We’re offering them here today to anyone who wishes to take one. But I’m asking you, if you put one on, to remember it not as a symbol for others but as a symbol for yourself. That every day you wear that pin you have pledged to rise up, to speak out, to literally put your body in the way of harm. This is not something to take lightly. This is something that requires thought, training, and planning. This requires you to be willing to protect a black man, a trans person, and a Muslim woman with equal commitment. Wearing this pin means you are willing to get involved with organizations like Showing Up for Racial Justice, with Black Lives Matter. It means you are willing not only to come to the aid of a stranger, but to also risk your existing relationships when people you know make jokes at the expense of others, jokes that perpetuate the hate against people we claim we want to liberate.

The safety pin also represents something else, as explained beautifully by the Rev. Kendyll Gibbons: “A safety pin is also about holding things together, maybe just barely, as best we are able – about improvising in the presence of brokenness and failure, and trying to keep the fabric of our connections from being completely torn apart. It’s about doing what we can with the resources we have, even when they are far from ideal.”

I don’t expect anyone here today to take a pin, nor do I expect to see you wearing it if you do take one. Perhaps you want to take one and keep it with you, to reflect or meditate upon its meaning, as you discern your role moving into the future. Whatever you decide — you are still part of this community. You are loved. You are wanted. You have something to contribute. And we will figure out what that is, together.

The other item we have to offer today is a piece of sidewalk chalk. UU minister Ashley Horan, of the Minnesota UU Social Justice Alliance, has started the movement of Neighborhood Love Notes. She is asking people all over the world to take chalk, and to leave messages of love and support all over their communities, and in particular in front of places where people are particularly vulnerable, like Islamic mosques. So we invite you, as you leave this sanctuary today, to take a piece of chalk with you and spread our message of love.

Our closing hymn today is “America the Beautiful”. Jason and I chose this intentionally, because it contains within it hope, and the promise of grace, at the same time it speaks to our history of patriarchy, theft, and genocide. We cannot learn from our terrible mistakes if we pretend they never happened. In this sacred space, this sanctuary, we have descendants of these pilgrims, and those indigenous people whom the pilgrims decimated. In this sanctuary, we have those for whom brotherhood has always been a welcoming word, and those for whom it has oppressed and excluded them from the most basic of human rights. In this sanctuary, we have people who believe in God, people who believe God is a he, and people who believe neither of those things. For some, God is irrelevant. For others, divinity is many gods, of many genders.

This is the work we have to do, and the promise held within this song, including its devastating flaws. We are a multitude, and we are always seeking to grow, to listen, to learn, to be better, and to make amends. We invite you to sing this song, in its entirety, and to recognize when the words make you angry or uncomfortable. Our history as a country is bloody, and cruel, and oppressive. But just as we adapt our language to answer the call of love, so too can we change our vision to be more worthy of its promise.

May it be so.

We Are Groot

October 16, 2016March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Listen to the sermon here:

We Are Groot

Or, watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook

Groot Hat

When I was initially working on this sermon, as evidenced by the description of the worship service from January, I thought the focus should be more on our first principle, the inherent worth and dignity of every person. But the more I’ve worked through it, the more I’ve found this story to be about the seventh principle — the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

That’s quite a mouthful. You’d think it could be shorter, you know, maybe just “the interdependent web”. But humans sometimes aren’t that good at recognizing the bigger story, especially when we’re in pain, or mad, or afraid. And us Unitarian Universalists in particular, sometimes we like to believe that we’re exceptional to the point of being set apart from others, removed from the things that we think we’ve rejected or left behind as our tradition has progressed. So we need this big mouthful of a reminder that we are deeply, deeply set into this web of existence, whether it’s moving us to joy or to sorrow.

The interdependent web of all existence. Even the pieces we don’t like.

The interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. We are intimately, inextricably connected to the people we dislike. Dare I say it, we are inextricable from those we hate.

We are a part of those who we try to shut out and disown as not being us.

This brings me to the reading, often titled “The Faith of the Canaanite woman”. I think it should have a subtitle: “In Which Jesus Is Wrong.”

I love this story. It’s one of the best stories for a perfectionist, overfunctioning person like me who’s spent years learning that mistakes are inevitable, that we are flawed beings always learning how to be better to each other.

And there’s lots of different interpretations of this story in Christian exegesis, and lots of different ways of working the text so that Jesus is still perfect. Perhaps those versions of the story speak to you, and that’s perfectly ok. One of the things I love most about Unitarian Universalism is that not only do we embrace different stories, we embrace different sides of the same story. We say, “Yes, and.”

So this morning, we’re focusing on the idea that Jesus was wrong. He gets called out on it, and instead of doubling down in his wrongness, throwing a tantrum, or any other deflecting behavior, he says, “Oh my gosh, you’re right.” And then he makes amends.

Think about the power dynamics here. A desperate women from an oppressed, systematically maligned population shows up asking for help for her child from a healer. This healer, who knows he could ease this child’s suffering, says, “No, I don’t think so. You’re not the right kind of people. In fact, I’m not sure you’re even a person. You’re like a dog.” (Which, I just want to point out, I know for many in this congregation, is not an insult. But apparently it was for Jesus. That’s another sermon).

And this woman, who has already made herself vulnerable just by showing up and begging for help, doesn’t back down. She says, “Even dogs get scraps from the table.” Even dogs are part of the household.

Even if I’m willing to debase myself to agree with your assessment of me as less than you, I’m still a part of the interdependent web and you should respect that.

I am willing to believe in you and your power to save my child. Why won’t you believe in me?

And there it is. Jesus realizes that he actually knows nothing about her life, or what difficult choices she had to make to survive. He has judged her worth solely on her identity as a Canaanite. He reacts like a bigot.

Now, this is not to say that the Canaanite woman is perfect. We don’t know anything about her, or her past behavior. She could be toxic in any number of ways– but not just because she’s a Canaanite.

And that’s the point of the story — that in this moment, it doesn’t matter. In this moment, right here, she is asking for help for someone she loves from someone she knows can help at no risk or loss to himself. Whatever she may have said or done in her past is irrelevant.

So how does this tie in to Guardians of the Galaxy?

I love genre stories, because they help us get understanding about our own lives by removing us from it. When Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura on the original Star Trek series, was considering leaving the show, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. asked her to stay on. He told her how important it was for black people, especially young black children, to see themselves on television as something other than a servant. Star Wars tells us a story about the search for identity and resisting imperialism. Superheroes awe us with their powers while teaching us how to process the power of our emotions and actions in the world.

And sometimes, those heroes are anti-heros. The Guardians of the Galaxy are our Canaanites, and unlike the Canaanite woman from our others story, we know all about the history of this motley crew of criminals.

Peter Quill, con man and thief. He was kidnapped from earth as a young boy, after the death of his mother, and maintains emotional distance from those around him as a protection.

Gamora, thief, assassin for hire. Her family was killed in front of her when she was a child, and she was “adopted” by the man who did it. He turned her into a living weapon. She is fighting to both survive and find a way out.

Drax, a man consumed by a need for violent revenge after the slaughter of his family. He solves problems with brute force.

Rocket. He’s a freak, a mistake made from the progress of science without the temper of ethics. He is, more than any of the rest of them, alone in the universe, carrying memories of torture and abuse and living with the constant ridicule and mocking of those around him every day. He is cruel, and angry.

All created by the systems in which they existed. All have had to live for most of their lives with no one validating their inherent worth and dignity, so they are forced to carve it out for themselves, often resorting to brutality, fear, and avoidance rather than right relationship.

And yet, when push comes to shove, when they realize that they can contribute in a meaningful way to the larger community, to the survival of the very people who malign and oppress them, they rise to the occasion.

And then there’s Groot, the giant tree-being. Groot enters this story as Rocket’s muscle, giving him physical and emotional support in a world that created him and then abandoned him. While Groot can only vocalize the words “I am Groot,” he understands everything said to him. Groot becomes the force binding them together, the one among them who can create beauty amongst ugliness.

All of this is important for the moment that made this movie worth a sermon. You have to know how awfully these people have been treated to understand how huge it was for them to join the fight to save the world that had abused them. You have to know how criminal their choices have been to understand the risk they took by contacting the NovaCorps, the military and police forces of the first planet to be attacked.

You have to know how little they think of themselves, how little expect from their lives to understand how shocking it was that Groot sacrificed himself to save them. In that moment, when Groot uses “we” for the first time, he is using his power to heal those he cares about. He is telling them, you showed up, and so you are worth saving.

So where do you find yourself in this story?

Maybe you’re one of this mercenary crew, asking for someone to believe in you, to believe that you can change the world even as it’s trying to tear you down. Maybe you’re one of the NovaCorps, having to decide whether or not to give these people a chance despite their history.

And yes, I know that there are people, that there are relationships, that are so toxic we must, one-on-one, break those ties, for our safety and for the safety of others in our care. I’ve had to do this myself. There are people I will never let back into my life. One person cannot take down a Ronan, bent on destroying everything them just because they can. And people like this do exist.

But these toxic, destructive people remain part of our interdependent web. Even if we can’t be in direct relationship with them, we will always be in indirect relationship with them, and so by pouring love and and kindness out into that interdependent web of all existence, we can support them from a distance. Intimacy is not always required to provide care.

A large, healthy system, like the one this congregation has worked so hard to become, is strong enough to take a risk as a community when the risk is too great for one single person to bear. Like the criminal protagonists and the NovaCorps, we are stronger when we work together to fight a common enemy for the good of all. Like Jesus, we have the power to heal those who come to us, who willingly join with us.

And here’s the really difficult part of the story for us to bring into our daily lives. After the Guardians defeat Ronan, after they save the planet, and stop the spread of destruction to the rest of the universe, NovaCorps erases their criminal records. Builds them a ship to replace the one they lost in the battle. And then lets them go free.

They are given a clean slate, and the chance for a new beginning. The past is forgiven, but not forgotten — there is an understanding that if they break this new covenant, there will be repercussions. But until that happens, they will be treated like any other member of the community. I love this, because it’s not a magical panacea that erases everything about their lives and personalities.

Your past is always a part of who you are. Their personalities have not changed, but now? Now they have a vision of the future in which they are empowered to make better choices, despite the systems of oppression that have formed them. The sequel hasn’t come out yet, so I’m sure we’re going to see some bad choices yet to come. They’re flawed. We’re flawed.

But as the story of the Canaanite woman tells us, even Jesus was flawed. Groot was flawed. We can be flawed and still be powerful beings co-creating the universe, one choice at a time. We can still recognize the respect the ways in which we are connected to one another, from our closest friends and family to strangers on the other side of the globe.

We are Groot.

Ten Days of Returning

October 2, 2016March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Listen to the homily here:

Ten Days of Returning

Or, watch and listen to the homily on Facebook

I spent this summer working as a chaplain at Vanderbilt. And one of the most heartbreaking encounters I had was with a person I’ll call Alex.

Alex had been admitted for observation, as they had a lot of medical problems with as yet no concrete source. And without knowing why Alex was suffering so much, the doctors couldn’t treat them. And over the course of my many conversations with Alex, they confided in me, through uncontrollable tears, that they believed their physical suffering was a punishment from God.

I’m sure you can imagine what my gut reaction to that was. But my job as a chaplain was to listen, to help a person through their own theology, not to convert them to mine. So I asked Alex to tell me why they believe that.

“I’ve done awful things in my past,” they said. “I used to sell my body, as a prostitute. I did drugs. I was so sinful. And then one day, one of my clients, told me they loved me and wanted to marry me. They brought me to Jesus. They saved my life.”

Knowing that they would be admitted to the hospital for several days, Alex had brought comforting mementos. Their partner had died, but Alex showed me their love letters and wedding photographs. They played me voicemails from church members that they’d saved, messages of love and support. And the tears just kept flowing, because of that unspeakable thought that God is punishing them for past transgressions.

By all accounts, Alex’s conversion was genuine. Their participation in church life after the death of their partner was very clear, and that community knew their life story and welcomed them wholeheartedly. This sense of punishment was not coming from the people who had taught them religion.

So I nudged a little bit, asking them to think about the contradiction between how they describe the forgiveness freely given to them by their partner and their church, the forgiveness they clearly believed Jesus had given them, and this plague on their body they also feel was sent by God.

“I know Jesus loves me, and has forgiven me,” Alex said. “I know my love and my church has forgiven me, truly. <beat> I just can’t forgive myself.”

And there it is. That immense power that each of us has within us to define our reality. For better or for worse.

Tonight at sundown is the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and the entrance to the Ten Days of Teshuvah. Now, in our Western culture, teshuvah is often translated as “repentance”.

Using repentance, on its own, is not a bad thing — it’s about recognizing one’s faults and committing to improving our behavior when we’ve done wrong. In our faith that is built on covenants, on making promises to one another about how we will be with each other in community, it’s important to be able to change for the better.

But repentance has a lot of emotional baggage that comes with it as a word in our culture. Sadness. Remorse. Even shame. There is the implication that when one repents, those parts of one’s life are erased, forgotten, or at least that they should be. That is where Alex was living. The other people in their life, the ones who taught them about love and forgiveness, were recognizing their whole self. They saw Alex’s past as an integral part of who they are, as part of the entire life that led them to be a loving partner and devoted member of a community spreading love and generosity in the world.

But Alex can’t escape the thought that they needed to be perfect all along. That to be worthy of that love and acceptance, that they need to somehow purge these experiences that have helped to make them who they are today. Alex is fighting being made whole in love.

According to many Jewish linguists, a more accurate translation of teshuvah for Western culture is “returning”. Not only does it carry less baggage than “repentance”, but it implies a cyclical, ongoing process around a centering point. Instead of a cutting off from the the past, teshuvah becomes about integration, and wholeness. In order to truly live out our full potential as human beings, we must be willing to recognize all of our past as part of our selves.

I talk a lot about how our Universalist heritage calls us to radical hospitality and loving those who we want to hate, usually in the context of others. Today, that radical hospitality and reaching out in love is for ourselves. These ten days of teshuvah, of returning, are an opportunity for us to say “I am loved. All of me.” All the forgiveness in the world from others means nothing if we’re not willing to forgive ourselves.

I Love Supergirl

September 27, 2016December 6, 2016Meghann Robern

I have confession to make.

I love Supergirl.

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.