Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
October 23, 2016
OPENING WORDS
By Mormon writer, naturalist, and activist Terry Tempest Williams:
The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions. Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up—ever—trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living democracy?
SERMON
Today’s sermon is the final installment in our series on Healing the Heart of Democracy.
And I come to you consumed by this election. I don’t know about you, but I have been glued to the news, glued to social media, craning my neck to see that car wreck, unable to pull myself away. Some of it, I’m sure, is the drama of it – the “What will happen next?!” But I also sense the importance and the stakes. This election has thrown back the curtain to expose raw wounds and deep burning questions in our country and in our human experience.
A TIME OF GREAT CHANGE
Hear again the words you just read from Thomas Merton:
We are living in the greatest revolution in history—a huge spontaneous upheaval of the entire human race; not the revolution planned and carried out by any particular party, race or nation, but a deep elemental boiling over of all the inner contradictions that have ever been in humanity, a revelation of the chaotic forces inside everybody. This is not something we have chosen, nor is it something we are free to avoid.
We are certainly in a time of massive social change.
Non-whites now make up a majority of kindergartners; by the next presidential election, the Census Bureau predicts non-whites will be a majority of all children; and by 2044, no one racial group will be a majority of the country((http://www.npr.org/2016/10/12/497529936/how-the-browning-of-america-is-upending-both-political-parties)). In 1960, our foreign-born population was 10 million, and today it is 40 million((http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/09/28/chapter-5-u-s-foreign-born-population-trends/)). On the phone, we are often asked to Press 1 for English. We have a black president. We have stay at home dads. Same sex couples have the right to marry. Transgender people are feeling a bit more safe to come out and transition.
We could have a female President ((Please note this is not an endorsement of or opposition to Hillary Clinton as President, but a commentary on the level of societal change represented by the possibility of a female President)), and the other day I found myself in deep wonder about how a female president would change the presidency… What would we call her husband (if he weren’t a former president) not the First Lady, but the First Gentleman? Would the restrooms off of the Oval Office need to be changed? Would we say Madam President?
For me, all these changes inspire curiosity, excitement, celebration…!
But to some, these changes are a source of great fear and anxiety.
Change can be hard. And these are not mere shifts but revolutions.
No wonder some people are hoping for a return to a previous time when America was supposedly “Great.”
No wonder some are asking for walls to be built on our borders, a total lock-down on Muslims entering our country, a mass deportation of all immigrants (or at least immigrants of color).
US, TOO
We can – and should – call this xenophobia, racism, even hatred. But what we should not do is pretend that we enlightened Unitarian Universalists are separate and superior. Again, YES – we can and should condemn hatred when we see it. But We should not pretend that we are completely invulnerable to this same fear of change. Every one of us has much to unlearn in fearing the other, in holding onto the status quo.
Last week, at a gathering of Presbyterian ministers, Melissa Harris-Perry, a Unitarian Universalist, spoke from within the context of our current election, saying, “Liberal rhetoric suggests that your Beloved Community stops at the rim of the basket of ‘deplorables.’”((reference to Hillary Clinton’s remark referring to half of Donald Trump supporters as in a basket of deplorables: racist, homophobic, xenophobic etc.))
But she continued, “We can never call other people monsters. Anything a human can do, you can do…They’re not monsters — they’re human. And if we distance ourselves from the reality of that, we can’t confront it.”
The “Us and Them” mentality in our culture is rampant. At last year’s democratic debate, Anderson Cooper quoted FDR who said: “judge me by the enemies I have made,” and then asked the candidates: “You’ve all made a few people upset over your political careers, which enemy are you most proud of?” Without batting an eye, each of them listed off enemies they were proud of, to much applause and laughter.
Bad things happen when we imagine each other as enemies.
We Unitarian Universalists believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all people. We know humans can do things that are awful, even evil. We know that awful, even evil systems can take people far from their worth and dignity. But we are called to invite people back to that understanding of worth and dignity. This requires respect, empathy, imagination.
Wendell Berry said,
Respect… always implies imagination – the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls…If what we see and experience…does not become real in imagination, then it never can become real to us, and we are forever divided from it.
I do not want to be “forever divided” from half of the country.
I do not want to be forever divided from my extended family members whose political, social, and religious beliefs are very, very different from mine. I do not want to be divided even from people in this congregation who have beliefs different from my own.
A BIGGER, WIDER BELOVED COMMUNITY
So the question is, as Melissa Harris Perry put it: “How Big is Your Beloved Community?”
I’ve used the phrase “Beloved Community” many times in our services, and when I arrived at this church, I found it already to be part of our Vision statement. Right there on the website we say, “Our vision is to build the Beloved Community,” and then we quote Rev. Dr. King’s definition of the Beloved Community: “a completely integrated society, a community of love and justice.”
The term “Beloved Community” was coined by the early twentieth-century American philosopher Josiah Royce. But most of us learned it from Rev. Dr. King, who said:
the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opponents into friends….It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.
But as my colleague Carl Gregg points out:
Notice as well what King is not saying. He is not saying what we are often accustomed to hearing in our highly competitive society: that the end goal is a…crushing victory over our opponents. For King, building Beloved Community requires the even harder work of reconciliation…[like Jesus embodied:] a love that dares to transgress cultural and tribal divisions. From that perspective, I think G.K. Chesterton’s view on Christianity applies equally to Dr. King’s vision of the Beloved Community: “[it] has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”
Creating a true beloved community is difficult. Just as Unitarian Universalism is difficult!
WADING INTO THE RUCKUS
We come together here with various beliefs – Some of you hear me pray each week and have to translate it into your own type of meditation, for others I don’t use enough theological language. Yet we believe, “We need not think alike to love alike.” We know that at times it is easier said than done.
Likewise democracy is difficult. In democracy we come together with our different ideas and different experiences, and we push and pull, argue and listen, compromise and stand firm, wrestling with different visions of the world and different strategies for how to make real those visions.
It’s always a mess because we humans are a mess.
That’s why I love that very messy book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, shared by Jews and Christians. It’s full of stories of deceit, adultery, murder. To me, the book of Genesis is a timeless record of people struggling to make sense of what it is to be human, what it is to be in relationship with each other, who God is and what our relationship with God – or Peace, or Justice – might require of us. There are no easy answers in the text, no fairytales, instead many silences into which we can imagine ourselves: our own questions and doubts and messy human lives. Literature scholars have shown how the stories are told in such a way as to invite moral reflection.
When we wrestle with the text, we can wrestle with our own lives.
But we must read in community because we need to hear the ways others hear the text – others lift up questions and life experiences unavailable to us. We grow in empathy, we grow in our understandings of moral complexity, we grow in our discernment of our own spiritual questions and beliefs, we find pathways forward.
Democracy is the same process.
We wade into the ruckus and there, in what Merton calls that “deep elemental boiling over of all the inner contradictions” of humanity we practice the habits of the heart that I have talked about in this sermon series. Each of them is related to the fifth habit of the heart: community.
Let’s review: There is #1 remembering we are all, ultimately, in this together, #2 appreciating the value of otherness, #3 holding tensions in life-giving ways; even #4: personal voice and agency is related to community – I could not speak of personal voice without talking about the ways communities shape our voices, amplify our voices.
INNER WORK IN COMMUNITY
Parker Palmer, the Quaker who spoke of these five habits of the heart, said that each of them require inner work: “the powers that open the heart, that open the mind, that invite the soul into being…”
And he stressed that this inner work must be done in community because we are “so gifted at self-delusion, of hearing only certain voices within ourselves.”
In many religious traditions, community is essential to spiritual and social change, both the personal and the collective.
The term “Beloved Community” is often the secularized version of the Christian concept of the Kingdom of God – or the Kin-dom of God, as feminist Christians say: the creation of peace and justice in our communities here on earth. In Islam, Muhammad’s mission was about revolutionizing society and building a “mother community” (ummah) based on the bonds of faith. In Buddhism the sangha, the community of practice, is essential to one’s ability to practice the dharma teachings.
Even though this election pits us against each other, and we must take clear actions for the causes we believe in, we also must not forget that our faith also calls us to build a wider Beloved Community where all are reconciled, where the whole human community can thrive.
I’d like to close this sermon and this series with a performance of the poem “Let America be America Again” by Langston Hughes, written in the 30s but still real today. This is Abena Koomson performing the poem in Union Square, New York City.
Let it remind us to stay engaged with this democracy, with “We the People.”