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Viola Desmond Goes to the Movies

Meghann Robern

Watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook:

 

I cannot, in good conscience, offer you this sermon today without pointing out that I am a white woman in 2017 speaking to you about the lived experience of a Black woman in 1946. I am claiming her story in the fulfillment of my work, using it for my own ends. No matter how well-researched, or how well-intentioned, my sermon is, I am still a white woman interpreting and retelling the personal experience of a Black woman. That fact will be hurtful to some, possibly many. Possibly even in this room right now. Impact always outweighs intent.

And, at the same time, it is the very least I can do as an ally to indigenous peoples and people of colour (two identities between which there is much overlap), it is the very least I can do to use my power and privilege as minister of this congregation to share this story. To be intentional with our full worship team about lifting up the voices of those who have been marginalized and oppressed.

In preaching about Viola Desmond this morning I am trying to dismantle systemic racism while at the same time continuing to participate in it. It is a complicated question that does not have a one-size-fits-all answer, and it relies on both things being true in order to be authentic.

I’ve been a runner for a few years now, and one of the things that happens is you find yourself part of the online running community. Groups where people share stories, tips, and generally support each other. One of the things that was given to me by a member of the online running community was when a Black man shared with us what he has to do to stay alive as a Black man running in the streets of his home.

He always, always, without fail, wears the brightest, most neon clothing he can find — from the sweatband on his head all the way down to his toes. He puts on reflective gear, so that headlights will make him known in the dark and the attempt to be visible can be recognized even in the daytime. He wants to be seen, so that no one can argue he was trying to hide or look inconspicuous. He always wears a shirt from a race he’s done in the past, so that on first look people can get that extra piece of information before judging him. He does all of this, because in his experience when people in our dominant culture see a Black man running, they assume he’s running away from the scene of a crime, and to protect his life he has to make them think something different.

That is not my experience as a runner. It never has been, and it never will be. And I think that everyone here, regardless of how you have been racialized in your identity, can agree that it would be preposterous to argue that because my experience was different, that therefore his isn’t true. And yet, this is what happens every single day to people of colour, both inside and outside this congregation. The pervasive abuses of systemic racism that continue in our modern, dominant culture are not hearsay to be debated. They are documented fact. Here is just one: in Policing Black Lives, Robin Maynard says:

“Black communities live in a state of heightened anxiety surrounding the possibility of bodily harm in the name of law enforcement. A genuine fear of law enforcement officers exists among many in the Black community, a response that is rational given the circumstances. In a society where many white Canadians think of the police as those who protect their security, Black people, quite legitimately, largely fear for their for their security in any situation that could involve the police. Parents, in particular, have expressed a genuine concern for the physical safety of their loved ones.” (Maynard 102)

“Though police killings, like other forms of systemic racism, are frequently justified by invoking Black criminality and “dangerousness,” this does not stand up to scrutiny. Criminal involvement does not, by any means, provide moral justification for police killings. However, police use of force also does not correlate to rates of Black criminality: while most white persons involved in incidents of police use of force have criminal records, this is not the case for Black Canadians. Instead, it is race that impacts police treatment: in one study, it was discovered that when responding to “minor offences,” police drew their weapons during arrest four times more often when arresting Blacks than any other group. Black people continue to be killed by police in situations that could have been de-escalated by other means and often due to police interventions that would not have even occurred had they been white. (Maynard 107)

We have covenanted together to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. That is not the same as the inherent worth and dignity of every opinion. Anyone, and I do mean anyone, is welcome to join us in this community, but to stay they must be willing to do the work of examining their sustaining beliefs, and their choices in the world. When we fail to hold people accountable for their beliefs that lead to the destruction of those that are not like them, we are failing our core Unitarian Universalist principles. White supremacists will not find a home here. Neo-Nazis will not find a home here.

Making room for everyone does not mean that we ignore those who are using that room to hurt others. Being freethinkers doesn’t mean that we are free to use oppressive language and to choose oppressive actions. Freedom from dogma and creeds does not mean freedom from ethical accountability. None of us can claim to be living into our full potential, or claim to be nourishing our spirit, when we are at the same time ignoring We can and should be better than this — not only to truly honour the diversity we have among us today, but to ensure a better future for those who will come after us.

Our choir today, singing the words of Unitarian Universalist Dr. Ysaye Barwell, asks if any of us would harbour, or maybe even become, a Harriett Tubman or Sojourner Truth, those fierce women of colour in the fight against slavery in North America. Would any of us harbour, or maybe even become, a Thomas Garrett, a white Quaker who helped innumerable Black people escape slavery on the Underground Railroad. This is a question for everyone here, because systemic racism poisons all of us. Viola’s sister, Wanda, describes how many people of colour expend great effort to stay out of trouble, to stay under the radar, because of the danger of being noticed.

She herself describes how she was aware of her Blackness by the time she was in junior high, and that she was ashamed of her sister for getting arrested. Viola, who only wanted to be able to see a movie in focus, and tried to pay for the proper ticket, and was forcibly dragged out of the theatre by two men as she clawed at her surroundings. Her own sister was cultured to be ashamed of rising up to defend oneself against racism. Even now, when people of colour protest peacefully, pay attention to how they are described by the dominant media — uppity. “Doing it wrong” “An inconvenience.” That is a legacy of a culture in which slaves ought to know their place.

And I know, I know, some of you are right now squirming in your seats and figuring out how to tell me after the service that sermons should be about the spiritual, that this is too political. Well, this is spiritual work. Viola Desmond is going to be the face of our new $10 bill. And yet, still, in 2017 people are dying because of the colour of their skin, and they are crying out for help, and they are being ignored because the majority of our culture can’t handle multiple experiences of the same thing. Because it is, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, incredibly hard to do so.

Why? Because the story we tell of our individual life, the narrative sum of our experiences, is the definition of who we are. Being able to form a coherent self-narrative is one of the ways we heal from traumatic events. So when we are asked to validate a different narrative, one that often contradicts our own, it feels threatening. It feels like an attempt to erase us. So we get defensive. This is spiritual work, because it affects our spirit, the stuff that makes each of us, us.

And when we feel threatened, when we feel defensive, we often forget to take into account the bigger picture — which includes a power analysis. When two individual accounts of reality conflict, and those involved will only allow one to be “The Truth,” then the one that has more power will win. Remember the saying, history is written by the winners? And one wins in a conflict by having more power — more money, more resources, the “right” assigned sex, the “right” size body, the “normal” skin colour. And here’s the other thing that’s so hard for us to understand, because it cuts right to how we define ourselves — it’s possible to have privilege and not have privilege at the same time.

I have immense privilege as a white person. I am marginalized as a woman. I have privilege of class, due to the pure luck of my birth. I am marginalized as a queer person. I have privilege due to my level of education — which is also linked to my whiteness and my class status — and I am marginalized due to my size. Holding different experiences of the same thing in tension with each other means that someone else having life struggles doesn’t diminish my own — but if I am going to be a true partner, if I am going to truly live into our shared UU principles and shared values, I have to acknowledge multiple realities as true. I have suffered immense pain in my life due to my size.

When I go running, I have to keep eye out for people throwing things at me because they think it’s funny to see a fat woman running. I’ve had horrible things shouted at me, been called awful names. But never, not once, have I been afraid for my life. My suffering is not negated by my fellow runner’s suffering as a Black man, and I can hold my painful experience as valid while also naming that his has been much worse. The real question is — how can we help each other find freedom in this world by changing it for the better? This is what it means to be intersectional.

Each situation, each choice, must be examined, must be held accountable to the larger work of dismantling systemic racism (and classism, and sexism, and ableism, and, and, and). And, I firmly believe that if there is a religion in the human experience that is capable of living into that tension, of holding multiple truths in a loving embrace and asking what’s next — it is Unitarian Universalism. We have failed at this many many times. But the promise, the potential of world-changing healing is there… if we are willing to take certain risks. But the how and when of those risks will be distinctly different depending on our racial and other social identities.

Those of us who are white will be asked to do very different things than those of us who are indigenous people and people of colour. Those of us who are white will need to always remember that we can go places, do things, say things that people of colour cannot without risking life and limb, much less freedom. White people are less likely to die in jail, or even die during arrest. And for those of us who are people of colour — the white people, myself included, are going to mess up. White people are going to continue to say awful things and make bad assumptions and forget to decenter themselves and their whiteness as they do this work of breaking down these systems and I’m so very sorry it won’t change overnight. But as I said to you a couple of weeks ago…. Perfect is the enemy of good. Perfect is the enemy of better. We can’t wait until we’re perfect to do the work. None of us will survive that long.

We Unitarian Universalists are a covenantal people, no matter what our colour. We are bound together by the promises we make to each other about how we are going to build and sustain this community, about how we are going to teach the larger world what it means to believe different things but to still care about each other. The seeds are already within us, within this community. This is spiritual work, for the betterment of all. As we go forth today, remember — there is more love somewhere. There is always more love somewhere. And we’re gonna find it. Together.

May it be so.

With a Lion at Her Feet

Meghann Robern

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Listen to the sermon here:

With a Lion at Her Feet

or watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook.

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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.

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Distributed Denial of Service

Meghann Robern

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Listen to the sermon here:

Distributed Denial of Service

or watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook

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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.

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The Courage of Creativity

Meghann Robern

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Listen to the sermon here:

The Courage of Creativity

or watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook

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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.

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The Revelator

Meghann Robern

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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.

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Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain

Meghann Robern

This is the text of a sermon given at First UU Nashville on May 8th, 2016.

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Listen to the sermon:

Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain

The Wizard of Oz started out as a harmless showman in our world, one who entertained people with tricks and illusions. Then he crashed, literally and figuratively, into a whole new persona. To the people of Oz, he appeared out of the sky, in a vehicle none of them had ever seen before, and so they ascribed to him power equivalent to the only other sources of great power they knew — the Witches of the four directions.

His story is still important for us today because he shows us the nuances of the human condition, and how a good person can still make bad decisions out of fear. On one hand, the Wizard embraces the leadership thrust upon him, and uses his showman skills to genuinely care for those in his new community — building them a safe, sustainable city in which they thrive.

On the other hand, when he believes that these witches who have “real” magic will eventually discover his tricks and destroy him, he also uses that power out of fear. He sends Dorothy, a young girl, and other beings of Oz — the scarecrow, the tin man, the lion, into imminent mortal danger in order to save himself. He deems their lives to matter less than his, in the guise of protecting his legacy, when deep down he knows the citizens of the Emerald City would do just fine without him now.

The Wizard of Oz captured the attention, and the fear, of the citizens of Oz when he crashed his balloon — something they’d never seen before, a catastrophic event in their midst. They witnessed this man not only survive, but walk away unscathed. They projected power and authority on to him, and made him their leader. In the same way, the conflict and fear from the War of 1812 led Andrew Jackson to become a national hero, and he also had power and authority projected on to him. The first time he ran for president, he won the popular AND electoral vote, but with more than two candidates running, there was no clear majority. The other candidates colluded together to give John Quincy Adams the majority.

This gave Jackson more than enough ammunition to claim that the election had been tainted through government corruption and conspiracy. His political persona shifted from national hero to a man of the people, fighting a war against the establishment that had stolen the presidency. Four years later, campaigning on this narrative, on this “spin”, he won by a landslide.

When I was in school, here in Tennessee, we were taught that Jackson was a populist President — about how his election was a victory for democracy, how commoners were invited to the White House for his inauguration, how he took on the elite who were stealing power from the people. We were taught that he and followers founded the Democratic party, that he fought against the earliest attempts by states like South Carolina to secede from the Union. It wasn’t until I reached AP US History in high school, and I had a teacher who brought in The People’s History of the United States as a counter-narrative to the state sanctioned textbook, that I learned about Jackson’s pro-slavery platform, or how he was instrumental in the passage of the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears.

And the latter was not some kind of regretful political compromise, like we see our heroes do in the gritty reboots of our modern stories. Jackson went before Congress and used his showmanship, his charisma, to spin a tale to white colonial America of an oppressed population who should be grateful for their oppression. He said, “Rightly considered, the policy of the General Government toward the red man is not only liberal, but generous. He is unwilling to submit to the laws of the States and mingle with their population. To save him from this alternative, or perhaps utter annihilation, the General Government kindly offers him a new home, and proposes to pay the whole expense of his removal and settlement.” This from a man whom whole generations were taught was an unequivocal hero. He may have been heroic, in certain times and places. But he was handed power and he used it, along with his powers of persuasion, to ruin lives instead of protect them.

A different kind of Wizard from our history is P.T. Barnum, who was a lifelong Universalist. Contrary to popular belief, he did NOT say “There’s a sucker born every minute” — that was one of his competitors. Rather, Barnum’s principles are better summed up in his treatise on Universalism: “We believe that holiness and true happiness are inseparably connected, and that believers ought to be careful to maintain order and practice good works; for these things are good and profitable unto men.”

He was unapologetic about his desire to make money, but always tried to align his ventures with providing services to his local community and to the country at large, because he believed it was the right way, the only way, to do business. And yes, in his mind, in his religious faith, all the museums and shows he created were community services equal to his contributions to education and to Universalism. His museums and sideshows were created to offer humanity the experience of wonder, to inspire dreams of what might be possible. He wrote, “I base my hope on the Word of God speaking in the best heart and conscience of the race -the Word heard in the best poems and songs, the best prayers and hopes of humanity. The ages have been darkest when this hope was lowest.”

None of this is to claim that he was a perfect human being. Like all of us, he was a product of his time. This same man who was an adamant abolitionist also fought to keep people from having access to birth control. Ralph Waldo Emerson hated him, going so far as to claim that one of Barnum’s bankruptcies was proof of gods. But we as human beings are not all or nothing packages. Like the Wizard, like Jackson, like Barnum, we are neither black, nor white, not even grey, but rather a constantly shifting, living mix of all the colours of our human experience. Whether you call it the Word of God, or choose what our UU humanist origins describe as “the belief and trust in human effort,” the thought that we can make a difference even when we are not perfect all of the time binds us together in faith. We just have to find a way to make decisions out of love instead of fear.

Ultimately, the Wizard realizes what a horrible mistake he’s made in sending Dorothy to kill the Wicked Witch of the West. When she discovers his secret — that he has no “real” magic at all, they still insist that he honour his promises anyway. And so, the Wizard returns to the only skillset he’s ever had — showmanship — and uses his wordsmithing and clever props to draw out the qualities that the scarecrow, the tin man, and the lion had actually had all along. Up to now, they have lived in fear — fear of not being smart enough, not being brave enough, not being emotional enough to survive. The Wizard takes away that fear by enabling them to see a different truth about themselves, one that leads to authentic wholeness, even as that truth is born out of deception.

I was so moved by Andy’s words, because of their honesty. He’s afraid. I’m afraid. I know some of you are afraid, too. I’m also angry, angry at how I see people’s fear being used to create more fear, to manipulate, to scapegoat, in all aspects of our culture right now. The news cycle, our modern narrative, moves so fast that we can barely fact-check something that comes across our Facebook feeds before we’re hit with another inflammatory meme.

People with agendas of control are hijacking larger movements that offer people hope: hope of jobs, health care, access to education. And before you assume that you know which “side” I’m talking about, let me be clear — I’m talking about all sides. The people you think are on the “other” side are just as afraid as you are. They’re afraid they’ll never work again. That they’ll lose, or never have, a home. That they’ll lose their children, or never be able to afford having them in the first place.

It is thousands of years of genetic memories that teach us to demonize, de-humanize those with whom we find ourselves in conflict, because when they are not-us, we can safely categorize them as a threat. That is how humans survived the millennia — with categories. This plant is safe, that plant is not. This tribe is an ally; that tribe is a threat. And yet humans are also hard-wired for compassion — we can see this in our babies and young children. It’s the most profound act of love, of our Universalist tradition, to witness something beyond that instinctual categorical thinking. When all of our human history works to convince us that putting people into boxes keeps us safe, it’s dangerously radical to live into the idea that love wins.

The modern populist revolt is happening on both sides of the political chasm, and we are called to reach out across this great divide and say, “You matter to me.” All the fact-checking and debunking in the world will not ease our suffering until we give witness to these people, our Samaritan neighbors, who are afraid. And yes, that includes the ones who are spewing racist hate speech, or deeply sexist rhetoric. This is the hardest task of our Universalist heritage — living into our covenant that every person has inherent worth and dignity — even those who are trying to take that worth and dignity away from others. And yet our world need this from us, desperately.

The life of Andrew Jackson is a warning of how easily the one claiming to be the saviour of the people can turn into an enemy of true freedom and justice. And seeing how the story of his life has been handed down in different ways, depending on one’s context, shows us how hard it is to ever find truth with a capital T. We must take the narratives we’re given, and instead of believing them at face value, test them against the rubric of our Unitarian Universalist call to build beloved, sustainable, welcoming communities in which people care for each other and thrive. This is how we find authenticity. This is how we embrace a multitude of truths that celebrate our diversity as a strength, not a weakness.

Even as I say that, I’m still afraid. But here, with you, I know I’m not alone. Even when I doubt myself, I believe in YOU. I hold tightly to that, knowing that even when we are afraid, when we are tempted to make terrible choices in the midst of our fear, together we will keeping calling each other back to covenant. This is how we ensure that love wins.

May it be so.

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