humanism – bodily integrity

Shaking Out Your Gear

September 3, 2017October 10, 2017Meghann Robern

Watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook:

One of the things you’re taught when you’re training to be a religious leader, no matter which faith tradition you call your own, is to figure out what spiritual practices nourish you so you can serve others, and to try to always find inspiration and connection in your daily life, not just on Sundays. As Unitarian Universalists, I think these are important things for all people to develop in their lives, not just the clergy. It’s part of my work here with you to help you on your individual spiritual paths, and to help you build a covenanted, beloved community.

We do this by expressing our shared values through our seven principles, and exploring the six sources of our faith. Today in particular, I’d like to share an example from a source that we Unitarian Universalists describe as “direct experience of the transcending mystery and wonder”. It comes from a friend of mine, an Episcopal priest named Jana, who serves the communities of Southern California in the United States. We went to seminary together, and soon became good friends. We were both women in traditions historically dominated by men in the clergy–this congregation being an exception, of course. We both were finding our way through graduate school and credentialling requirements while being married and co-parenting. We both had sardonic, sarcastic senses of humour that sometimes got us in trouble.

One thing we didn’t have in common, however, is a love of hiking. As many of you found out last weekend on the church camping trip, while my partner, Josh, made the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America, I am Troop Beverly Hills. I enjoy camping, but I have my limits. For Jana, however, deep trail hiking and camping is not just time she devotes to her self-care and bonding time with her family, but it is also a spiritual practice in the same way that running — or in my case, wogging — is for me.

For a class project, Jana shared with us one of the most important spiritual lessons that she had learned from these endeavours, while preparing to hike the John Muir Trail. This trail is famous, even outside of hiking and camping communities. It runs 338 kilometres from the Yosemite Valley to the peak of Mount Whitney, and then you have to do another 17 kilometres to get from the official end of the trail down the mountain. The elevation gain is 14,000 kilometres. It’s called the backbone of the High Sierra. While parts of it are accessible even to the likes of me, hiking its length takes multiple days, ventures through deep wilderness, and is not for the unprepared.

What Jana taught us for this class project, and I’ve carried with me as an essential tool in the spiritual kit since then, is the concept of shaking out your gear. Before you actually go up on the trail, committing to hundreds of kilometres and several days in the wilderness, you do test runs. You pack up with the stuff you *think* you will need, and go out for a test hike somewhere less dangerous, for a shorter amount of time. And you *pay attention*.

A pack that feels fine at the beginning on day one can be dead weight by lunchtime. By the end of the day, you could have slowed down so much that had you been on the real hike, you might have run out of supplies halfway through the trail. So — you go through all the things you brought with you. Be ruthless. What do you *really* need, and what can you leave at home? What might useful for another situation, but not this one? What can you get rid of entirely? What can be shared among the group instead of each person carrying their own?

What I’d like you to consider is how what we did this morning, cleaning out my bag, might be helpful in our internal work. So much of our culture is about perfection, and about getting rid of the parts of us we don’t like. Pretending they don’t exist and never did. The problem with that is it causes erasure. It prevents wholeness, it prevents integration between our minds, bodies, and spirits, and it keeps us from living into our full potential.

One of the key components in the definition of trauma and its side effects is the inability to create a narrative out of one’s experiences. Things that we have experienced are kept in our memory banks isolated from everything else, with no connection to things before or after. In extreme trauma, the memories are imprinted on the brain without even a stamp or time or place for filing, which is what leads to flashback experiences for those living with post-traumatic stress disorder. With PTSD, our brains have no system to file these memories of trauma in the archive, so they keep coming back as a present-day experience. Therapy and other treatments help the brain assign traumatic memories a place in the past, so they can be examined with some distance, and integrated in a personal psychological narrative.

That’s a lots of psychological terminology to say that we as human beings are hard-wired to tell stories. We tell our own story to define who we are. We tell stories in groups to teach each other what it means to human, and to be in a particularly community. Multicultural understanding comes when we learn stories not our own. For Unitarian Universalists, stories are the bedrock of our tradition — our stories help us journey on our personal spiritual paths, and our stories guide us in how to be together and live into the covenants of community we make with each other. Stories allow us to be flexible and responsive, and to always be learning and evolving and adapting, instead of being tied to creeds or doctrines.

Some stuff that comes out of our bag is stuff we need to get rid of. The ways we’ve been cultured to allow -isms into our culture, to become entrenched in our systems. It’s the protein bar that fell to the bottom of the bag, broke open, and melted over everything else, including the inside of your bag. It’s permeated, and gonna take a lot of time and effort to get it out. Might even take more than a few attempts. But knowing it’s there is so much better than ignoring it and letting it mess up everything else in your bag. Pretending it was never in the bag prevents you from actually being able to use the bag.

And so it is with all the stuff that makes us who we are — our flaws and faults as well as our talents and shining abilities.

I’m someone who likes being prepared. I have multiple backup plans for any given situation. My lists have lists, and sometimes all my lists are catalogued in a spreadsheet. Organizing my resources into easily accessible forms is soothing for me. It helps me work through anxiety and fear about the unknown. And these are skills that someone in my position should have, as a sole minister of a mid-size congregation. But what this also tells me about myself is that I like to be in control. I like consistency, reliability. Many years ago, before a lot of therapy and spiritual direction, I would allow my need for control and planning as a comfort mechanism to interfere with my ability to be person in relationship with others.

What I’ve learned from my spiritual work with shaking out my gear is that while making all these lists and plans are helpful for me, to help me assess and process what happening in my life — sometimes to actually live I need to throw out the lists. To truly be in community I need to be disrupted by the needs of those around me. To acknowledge that it’s not all about me, to check my own selfishness and self-absorption, I need to be willing to ask — what would be helpful for you right now?

Even more importantly, I know that this tendency of mine is part of who I am. It is not something I can simply pretend doesn’t exist. What I *can* do is recognize it for what it is, and spend intentional time figuring out how it is helpful, and how does it hinder? When I “shake out my gear”, is it something I need to leave behind for this excursion in the wilderness? Or is it something I can use to help all of us get to the end of this particular adventure?

And shaking out our gear is not a one time operation. Especially as Unitarian Universalists, who have built adaptation, growth, and learning into the fundamental values of our tradition, we should always be willing to examine our ways of being — on both the personal and communal level — to see what work needs to be done. What has had its time, and can be shifted into fertilizing our roots? What new innovations are before us, to give us wings? How can we take all of who we are, as whole yet imperfect people, and love each other so profoundly that we find ways to thrive even in the midst of maelstrom. That we find ways to share that love even in the deepest cracks where rot seeks to take root.

I leave you once again with this blessing that survived the shakeout from my ministry in Nashville to here: May our minds be open to new learning; may our lips bring truth into the world; may our hearts know love; and our hands do the work of justice; as we go our way in peace.

May it be so.

With a Lion at Her Feet

January 29, 2017March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Listen to the sermon here:

With a Lion at Her Feet

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.

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.

Jeanne D’Arc

September 25, 2016March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Listen to the sermon here:

Jeanne D’Arc

Or, watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May it be so.

The Revelator

September 18, 2016March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revelation is resistance.

May it be so.

We Ask the Church

September 4, 2016March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

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We Ask the Church

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I never worked in Hollywood again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain

May 8, 2016March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

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

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.