Sermon Jan 22, 2017
Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
Yesterday I saw many of you just down the street.
We gathered on the sidewalk along Midkiff next to the Mall. Right next to the busy traffic. With some signs. We gathered for a Demonstration of Solidarity with the Women’s March on Washington.
You probably heard about the Women’s March.
In addition to gathering in D.C., women and people of all genders gathered in hundreds of cities across the country and across the globe – on every continent, even Antarctica!
People estimate that over four million people gathered in the U.S. alone. It is being called the largest one-day protest in U.S. history.
I, along with a couple members here, were going to go to a march in Alpine yesterday. But then we saw that it wasn’t a march but a hike through the hills, and that there was a 90% chance of rain there.
So I entertained again the crazy idea I had had a few weeks ago but had pushed away out of fear and fatigue: could we do something here in Midland? I asked a few people, is this a crazy idea? They said: do it. This was on Thursday. Yes, this past Thursday.
I didn’t think we as a Church had the time to decide whether we wanted to sponsor it, but I did ask permission to post it on our church facebook page. And I made a facebook page for the event; I emailed the info to some local connections; I informed the press…and I worried and I fretted.
I worried that I would mess it up.
One reason I had pushed away the thought those several weeks ago is that I knew I didn’t have the energy or time to plan it the way it really needed to be done. Ideally, I would find some additional organizers so I wouldn’t be doing it all by myself. It would be a better event if I – yes, a woman, but a white, cisgender, privileged woman – weren’t the only one at the helm. Last year, when we as a church organized our vigil for the shooting in Orlando, we partnered with gay, lesbian, transgender activists in the community. That’s what made that such a successful event. I knew that a successful women’s march would need women of color in leadership; women with disabilities, transgender people… But I knew that unfortunately I didn’t yet have enough of those connections here in Midland. So I fretted about the ways I was inevitably overlooking something. …Whether I should do it at all?
I fretted about the strategy.
Was it the right time and place? Had I overlooked some detail? Would anyone show up? Would the numbers be so small it would be demoralizing?
I fretted about safety.
The night before the demonstration, I got a facebook friend request from someone I didn’t know. I knew it was because they found me through the demonstration page. He had the confederate flag as his profile photo, and his page was filled with hate. I said no to the friend request, but I started picturing our demonstration overtaken by huge trucks – nothing against trucks, except that they are big – trucks pulling up next to us in the parking lot, or driving up over the curb, people yelling at us, perhaps even assaulting us. I could feel the fear in my body. That night, I looked at my sleeping two-year-old and the fearful voices got stronger – were we taking too big of a risk?
I fretted about all of these things.
But I went to sleep holding on to the reminder that I would not be alone, that even if only one other person showed up, we would be together.
And I went to sleep remembering all the people throughout history – known and unknown – who had taken much bigger risks.
I went to sleep remembering the values – the Unitarian Universalist values – that compel me to show up: My belief in inherent worth and dignity of every person, my belief that no one is free when some are oppressed, my belief that the universe does bend toward justice. My belief that there IS a LOVE that holds us.
And then I woke up the next morning ready, hopeful.
And then…not just one person showed up, not just ten people showed up, but over 75 people showed up: women, men, white, black, brown, couples, friends, children, an Episcopal priest, a Muslim man, grandmothers…and then, we received more joyful honks and cheers than heckles and jeers.
I often hear people bemoan what it’s like living in Midland. But this is Midland, too.
And, with more planning, we could have been many more in number.
Yes, it was “just” a demonstration. We were just standing with signs.
But here are five reasons why taking to the streets is important. Credit for these goes to columnist and activist Courtney Martin:
“1. It’s visceral.
For many of us, so much of our lives is spent staring into screens, tapping away at keyboards, sending signals into an intangible universe of bits and bytes. It all adds up to something, surely, but sometimes that something can feel wildly disconnected from the someone. Us! Who we really are. What we really care about. Our bodies. Marching is a chance to reclaim all of that — the corporeal, the relational, the sensorial.”
“2. It’s visual.
…Where there’s a photo-op, there’s a story. Where there’s a story, there’s power…”
“3. It’s restorative.
There’s little else that can make the hardened heart supple again like pounding your feet into the streets beside perfect strangers joined in common cause. …Marching side by side, smiling at one another, singing spontaneous chants in unison — this is the stuff that re-aligns your backbone and gets you feeling courageous and in cahoots again.”
“4. It’s playful.
It’s so simple. It’s so unapologetic. It’s almost childlike in its own strange way. And where there is play and joy, there is sustainability. This is going to be a long haul fight, not a one-weekend affair. If we’re going to keep going, we’re going to need to laugh and dance and move.”
“5. It’s effective.
You know who else took to the streets? The Velvet Revolution. And the Civil Rights marchers. And the second-wave feminists. And so many other movements that won — if not reaching all of their aims, at least having transformed cultures, systems, and hearts and minds so dramatically as to be considered hugely effective.”
And the work will continue.
Again, it’s one thing we can do. You could call it the beginning but it wasn’t. It was one moment in a long, long line of people working for progress in many ways. Because marching and demonstrating is not for everyone. And because we need a multi-pronged and ongoing approach to change. By protesting, by organizing, by making donations, by making art, by dialoguing, by calling our representatives, by running for office, by volunteering…
These are all important.
I know many of you do so much already. So let this be an affirmation of your work, and an encouragement.
Let’s keep pushing through our fear and resistance.
Let’s keep doing the things that aren’t only difficult but bring us joy and community and solidarity. Because the journey is long, and as my Black and Latino friends say, we can’t just act when it’s trendy and rewarding.
Some have been saying with sadness and frustration: “Where were you before?”
The black activist Ijeoma Oluo lamented,
For all my black and brown women who can’t help but look at crowds of millions of women and wonder, ‘where were you when our babies were being shot in the streets, locked away in prison, deported away from the only home they’ve known?’ For all my black and brown women who can’t help but imagine how many of their brothers and sisters and sons and daughters and husbands and partners could have been saved if our oppression and our murder could have inspired 1/10th this level of action and care. For all of my black and brown women who cried today for all the opportunity lost, for all the people we lost waiting, fighting, crying, screaming, begging for somebody to help.
On the other hand, Alicia Garza, one of the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, suggested that we cannot attract the people who need to learn and need to join us if we shame them.
I suspect both of these voices are both true.
I have to ask myself to listen to these statements, to not fall into guilt, or defensiveness, but self-reflection. For the truth is that when I am not as affected, when my visible identities do not make me as vulnerable, it is easy for me to fall into complacency, even complicity.
As one woman said, here in Midland:
Being brown has always been my sign. We don’t ever get to put ours down.
That threat that I felt before the demonstration is a taste of the threat that some people in our country live with constantly at some level.
And, as the black poet Audre Lorde said, and as applies to all of us humans:
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
So I pledge to keep working, to keep learning, to keep pushing myself out of my comfort zone.
THE RELIGIOUS/SPIRITUAL AND THE POLITICAL
Now, I know I’ve been preaching a lot of sermons lately on activism, on the political, as you could call it, under one definition. And I assure you, I will start to balance out all of this talk of activism with some other topics.
But I won’t ever divorce the spiritual or the religious from the social or the political. I won’t get partisan; I will never tell you who to vote for; but I deeply believe that the religious, the spiritual, is intimately tied up with and inextricable from the ethical, the social, the political.
And if anyone ever tells you that religion and politics should not mix, ask them:
Was Jesus not concerned with the political as he overturned the tables of the money changers, as he was called Lord, a title reserved for Caesar, as he sought to establish a new kingdom in which enemies are loved and the marginalized are prioritized?
Was Muhammad not concerned with the political as he overthrew the Arab tribal bonds and instead insisted that humans stood radically equal, “as the teeth in a comb?”
Was Rabbi Heschel not concerned with politics when he said that he was praying with his feet in marching for civil rights next to Martin Luther King, and when he said that he could not read his prayer book when every time he opened it he “saw images of the children of Vietnam burning in napalm?”
Was the Buddha not political when he personally went to the battlefield to prevent the outbreak of a war, and encouraged the use of the democratic process in the sangha (the community)?
Pagans… I’ve been seeing many pagans recently posting their explanations of why their spiritual path is inevitably intertwined with the sociopolitical – with how to create a better world.
Spirituality cannot be divorced from what it means to live in this world.
The personal is always political, even if the connections remain hidden from us.
We as Unitarian Universalists root out those connections, we see how the “search for truth and meaning” is intimately connected with the principle of “justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.”
We cannot pretend that our human systems of government will ever completely solve our human problems. But we can work to make them better embody our values; we can work to help each other better embody our values.
The truth is, even if Hillary Clinton had won the election, or some independent, I would love it if we had still had all of these marches. Because these marches were ultimately not about Trump. They were about the fact that this nation was supposedly founded as a country “Indivisible with liberty and justice for all” – but in reality that was only for white (whatever white meant back then), land-owning men.
This foundational belief that some lives don’t matter is not distant history; it does not die so quickly; and the progress won so far has not come easy.
There’s an unfinished revolution waiting to be won – in our laws, in our systems, in our beliefs, in our hearts.
May it be so.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
Responsive Reading
We Will Be Heard
By Alden Solovy, from his Liturgy for Inauguration Day
Today
I am an immigrant,
A drag queen,
A rape survivor.
An African Methodist Church set on fire,
A mosque pelted with rocks,
A synagogue painted with hate.
I am disabled.
A woman paid half of a salary.
A Black man encircled by police.
I am Asian, Latino, Hispanic,
Native American, and Multi-Racial.
Yes,
We pray for wisdom and grace
To land like a miracle
[on our country]((I adapted this poem for our service, changing “on our President” to “on our country”))
Transforming [the] rhetoric of hostility and violence
Into deeds of compassion and love.
And still we stand in shock and fear
That our rights will be trampled in public
And repealed in law.
Don’t say get over it.
We haven’t forgotten the lynching,
The darkness of the closet,
The death by back-alley abortion.
Today
I am Roe v. Wade,
Obergefell v. Hodges,
Brown v. Board of Education,
The child of slaves,
The child of illegals,
The child of gay parents,
The child of a vision for freedom
And the yearning for inclusion
Rejected by those in power.
Today I am an American,
A citizen of the United States,
A child of democracy,
A patriot,
Dedicated to justice,
Dedicated to liberty,
Dedicated to action,
Demanding to be heard.
Images like the above from Shepard Fairey. Photos from the Midland TX demonstration by Carol Ramirez photography.