Sermons

Martin and Malcolm in America

Rev. Douglas Taylor

1-19-25

Sermon Video: https://youtu.be/pjYecyTMKL4

James Baldwin wrote an incisive article for Esquire magazine in 1972 about his relationships with both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Baldwin had the unique position of being a contemporary colleague of both men. Four years after Martin’s assassination and seven years after Malcom’s, Balwin wrote,

“Malcolm and Martin, beginning at what seemed to be very different points … and espousing, or expressing, very different philosophies, found that their common situation so thoroughly devastated what had seemed to be mutually exclusive points of view that by the time each met his death there was practically no difference between them.”

It is commonly accepted in many circles even to this day, the romantic cliche that Martin was the peaceful, inspiring one working tirelessly for integration while Malcolm was the scary, dangerous one fighting for black empowerment. They are held up as dissonant icons of the ‘60’s; two paths, two opposing options people could choose between. Peniel Joseph’s book title The Sword and the Shield acknowledges this mythic perception of these two historic men. “Self-defense vs. nonviolence,” we can read on the jacket cover, “black power vs. civil rights, the sword vs. the shield”

The truth, I hope you are not surprised, is more nuanced and complimentary. Indeed, over the years I have found myself draw more to the radical work of King in his later years. And if Baldwin’s analysis is on target, we who love the radical aspects of King, have much to appreciate in the later years of Malcolm X as well.

The Soul Matters theme of the month for January is ‘story.’ I think it is fitting for us to grapple with the stories we have been fed about these two men, and the impact of these stories on how we respond to situations of racism and economic injustice today.

Part of the story is simply historical record.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta into a preacher’s family. He experienced southern segregation and racism growing up, but also the protective strength of the black church. He attended Morehouse college, Crozier Theological Seminary, and Boston University for his doctorate. At the age of 25 he was called to serve the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery Alabama. From there, he became more and more involved and central to the Civil Rights Movement.

Malcolm X, was born in Omaha Nebraska to the Little family, admirers of Marcus Garvey. His father died in a streetcar accident although many suspected it was not an accident. His mother was later committed to a state hospital after a nervous breakdown. Malcolm’s adolescent years were spent in foster homes or with other relations. Malcolm was a street hustler and thief. He was arrested for burglary when he was 20. While in prison, he converted to Nation of Islam, changed his last name from “Little” to “X” as was the custom in the Nation of Islam, and once paroled, began climbing the ranks in the religious institution. From there, he became more and more involved and a central spokesman for the Black Power movement.

Both Martin and Malcolm rose to such levels of power and persuasion among people that our government had agents and surveillance on each of them throughout their public careers. Both Martin and Malcolm’s assassinations spurred questions and conspiracies around the official stories offered about the shooters. All of that is about circumstance more than either of their character.

What brought them together is that both Martin and Malcolm had the goal of eradicating racial discrimination and advancing the conditions of Black people in our country and world-wide. They certainly disagreed on the role of violence in the movement – King advocating for Non-Violent Direct Action and Malcolm X strongly supporting armed self-defense. And they did not agree on the ultimate goal of what racial advancement looked like. King was an integrationist, envisioning a multi-racial Beloved Community. Malcolm X was a black nationalist, promoting the superiority of the Black race.

If you were alive back then and remember how things were, you may recall how vilified Malcolm X was. Martin Luther King Jr. was also vilified in certain circles, but the lion’s share of the fearmongering was heaped onto Malcolm X.

It was easier to demonize Malcolm X for two reasons – he was saying some fairly radical and scary things. For example, one talk King gave on Civil Rights was titled “Give Us the Ballot.” Later, when Malcolm X did something similar the title he used was “The Ballot or the Bullet.” Malcom X was provocative, and thus, easier to demonize. The second reason is that King’s impact was built across the racial lines, among white and black people. Malcolm’s impact was among black people who were poor and marginalized. And really, the demonizing I’m talking about is defined by the espeices of the white people at the time, not the black people. Both Martin and Malcolm were considered dangerous by those in power who benefited from the status quo.

There is a lesson here. When we are offered narratives about people that they are scary and dangerous – maybe look a little deeper to uncover the motives feeding those narratives. Fear and division are tools used by oppressive systems to maintain control. It was Malcolm X who said, “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

Malcolm X’s primary goal was to advance Black dignity. He wanted Black people to be proud of themselves because they were Black. He wanted Black people to walk tall, proud to be Black. James Baldwin once wrote: “It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.” Malcolm wanted to give Black people a world in which they knew they had a right to belong, in which they did not need to shield themselves from the hatred and self-hatred fed to them every day. Malcolm’s fierce critique of white supremacy, his rhetorical sword, was a tool in the service of his passion for Black dignity.

King’s focus was on Black citizenship. He insisted that we must join together in solidarity and make our democracy work for all the people. King wanted Black people to demand their rights, to insist on being granted their due as citizens of the nation. And more, he wanted all people, white and Black, to participate in making our nation realize its promise. I think many of us are more familiar with Dr. King’s motives and his articulation of his goals. 

We are certainly more familiar with Martin’s quotes, like, “We are inextricable caught in a network of mutuality;” and, “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.” But Malcolm had the gift of eloquence as well. “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us,” he said; and, “You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.” Many people will quote Dr. King out of context and turn his words of power into pablum – we don’t get to have that poetry without also taking the pain.

The contemporary Black Lives Matter movement feels like the heir of both the Black Power movement and the Civil Rights Movement blended. The call to say their names, for example, to lift up the individuals who have been killed was a key part of the movement. It is a mark of Black dignity. And the call to assemble and insist on civic change was the main thrust. It is a mark of Black citizenship to declare – these are our streets. We keep us safe.

But it is Malcolm X who is quoted more often by young activists today. The call for Black citizenship is certainly still important to people, but the call for Black dignity is the starting point, without which there is no other work. In his new book Starting Somewhere, local activist and organizer, Roderick Douglass offers a Malcolm X quote in the forward of the book. “There is no better teacher than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.” Appreciation of Malcolm’s contribution and impact is rising.

As our days unfold before us, it is worth noting that the anger and pain Malcolm spoke to is the same anger and pain many vulnerable people feel today. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of Beloved Community with a place for everyone is still our central guide. But there is much we can learn from Malcolm X’s perspective as well. When we make the commitment to live out of Unitarian Universalist values of Justice and Equity and love – then we do well to lean in to that discomfort of other people’s pain and anger. Learning more about Malcolm X, his life, his words and teachings, will help me be more present and a better ally.

Recognizing the blend of Martin and Malcolm in their later years, we can attend not just to the call for peace and justice, but for dignity as well. Recognizing and encouraging the dignity of the poor, the disenfranchised, and the vulnerable is what opens up the possibility of a Beloved Community where we can meet as equals. Martin once said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” With all that is going on in the world, the suffering and the injustice, we who would be part of the solution must keep our ears and hearts open to what is going on. And we can treat all people with dignity, for that is the starting point for the Beloved Community to become realized in our midst.

In a world without end,

May it be so

Spirit Ablaze

Rev. Douglas Taylor

12-15-24

Sermon Video: https://youtu.be/tWcWKxFP1ZQ

I recall reading somewhere years ago, but could not put my finger on the quote this week, a small story of a rabbi kissing his spouse and children goodbye earnestly each sabbath before going to lead prayers for the congregation; for who could know what might happen between the moment we invoke the name of the holy and moment immediately following when we offer suitable supplication.

I step into this topic knowing full well I preach unto a community that consists largely of atheists and agnostics; and of those remaining who do believe in God, most do not believe in a God like that. A god of arbitrary smiting and wrath. I know this. Truth be told (and I trust this is not surprising), I don’t believe in a God like that either. And yet I bring this topic before us all the same and will make suitable effort to translate in such a way as I hope will still be edifying to the full range of belief among us.

Here we are, each Sunday. And like that hapless rabbi kissing his family goodbye, I invite the holy each week to abide among us as we worship together.

In her book about prayer, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard frames the question this way:

“Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” (Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk.)

Do we? Do know what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Annie Dillard is a poet and author; her writing is a blend of naturalism, mysticism, and self-reflection. I discovered her work while in seminary and it had a profound impact on my view of the world. Her theology does not line up perfectly with mine, but there is enough overlap for me to find resonance.

When she cites our audacity to blithely invoke the holy, for example, I don’t quite resonate with the suggestion that an angry father God might strike us all down. But I do find it compelling to read her passionate plea as if to declare – this is real, you know, all this ritual and gathering we do! It’s not just a bit of pomp or fluff. It’s real. I like that part.

I am reminded of a description from Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd’s book After the Good News that came out just before the pandemic. It is a book about the future of Unitarian Universalism. In it, she writes:

A universalist God for a tragic era is not a gauzy, hymn-singing force of personal devotion that draws us endlessly toward itself, but a fierce and compelling power that grips us by the collar amid our rebellious descent and calls us to choose the will to mutuality all over again, even when that choice is so risky that it could utterly remake us.

And that, my friends, is the risk Dillard is referring to when she suggests we wear crash helmets and issue life jackets in place of orders of service each week. The risk is that the holy we are invoking each week may remake us. We risk actually becoming compassionate toward the vulnerable; we risk acting on those ideals we mention each Sunday.

There is a joke bouncing around social media lately about how some conservative Christian pastors are warning their people against watching the new Wicked movie lest it lure them into evil ways. The tongue-in-cheek response is, “you’re worried about the influence of a 2-hour movie on your parishioner’s morals, yet weekly worship has not made your people more compassionate and Christ-like.”

The risk is we might invoke the holy together and be changed by the encounter. Or I can say – we risk invoking our deepest values and find ourselves compelled to realign our behavior to match our values. Or I can say – we risk inviting God to be with us and discover God accepted the request.

This thing we are doing every Sunday morning, there is some contradiction built into it. As Unitarian Universalists in particular, we are several steps off the beaten path in terms of religion and belief; and yet our Sunday morning practice looks a lot like the usual beaten path! We attract people who are seeking an alternative to organized religion and we jokingly say we are very disorganized – and yet, we are an organized religion. It’s just we have organized around something radically different than what most other religious communities gather around. We gather around values and a promise to be with each other across our differences.

We Unitarian Universalists live in the religious realm of individualism and freedom of conscience; and we carry an abiding distrust of authority. One result of that is the way we compensate and push ourselves to be community-focused, to lean into the concepts of covenant and accountability and liberation. Another result is an undercurrent in which we keep faith at arm’s length. We intellectualize our experiences; we talk about things and learn about things. That is in important aspect of how we create community together.

The trick here is not to stop doing that, but to balance it with more trust. We need to allow ourselves to be impacted and changed by the experiences we create together, by experiences of the holy. Our shared experiences on Sunday morning can be transformative; they can impact our living and our behaviors. We can risk growing and changing, risk being transformed, healed, or as Rev. McDonald Ladd put it – remade.

I am not suggesting we swing wildly into the over-trusting end of this conversation. Dillard offers a deep warning against that as well. She warns us not only against faking it, against being tourists in religion. And she offers a warning for when we take it seriously and we do experience the transformative power of love; that we not lose ourselves in the light we seek. Let me spend a minute in this extreme with you.

Her 1977 book, Holy the Firm, is a thin little text exploring a three-day time span of events on an island in the Puget Sound where she was writing. The crash of a small plane and a seven-year-old girl burned in the accident become a focus for Dillard to talk about beauty and cruelty, faith and suffering, and a moth caught in a candle flame.

It is that last bit that so captivated me when I read the book as part of theology class in seminary. Dillard describes how she would often read by candle light every night. Moths were constantly fluttering around her flame, many suffering the clichéd result.

“One night,” she writes early in the book, “a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled, and fried in a second.” (p16)

Dillard goes on to describe the event in vivid detail for several more sentences. Quite poetic, quite horrifying.

After, she writes,

“And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax roses in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side.” (p17)

I don’t bring this story to say – don’t succumb to burn-out friends. We can have that message in the workshop immediately after the service today. Instead, the message her is a spiritual warning. When you find the light, when you find your calling, when you are alive and afire with a passion for something life-giving – be mindful of what ese is happening in your life around you as you burn with your passion.

This is a bit like the proverbial question for the dog always chasing cars. What would they do with it if they ever caught one? What would you do if you ever did set your spirit ablaze?

There is a lot going on around us these days, my friends. There are calls for us to step up and live our values out loud, to be visible allies for the vulnerable and the marginalized. And this is not just a call to do justice – it is a call to live our spiritual values together in community.

Much of it will come out as a call to do justice – Who is taking care of our trans siblings? How are the undocumented in our community? Where are unhoused people sleeping tonight? When can we feed the hungry again? A lot of this will sound like a call for justice. But deeper down it is a call to faith, a call to trust that the holy to go with you on the call.

If we gather on Sunday mornings like this, invite the holy to show up, and experience growth and change in ourselves – the spirit will call us into places where we will need our communities around us and … and we will need faith to trust that God is with us in the work. Or, to trust that our values are true.

If we invoke the holy here and feel Love grab us by the collar and utterly remake us – we do well to trust that Love and not try to be our own wick and flame. We must trust Love to travel with us where we are called. To trust God, to trust our values as true, to trust the holy. If you feel a change, a growth, a call – don’t fall for the idea that you must be the moth and burn yourself up in response.

Instead, grab you crash helmet and heed to spirit. Let love be your guide in the days to come. Dare to respond, take a risk to reach out and live your values more boldly, trusting that Love will travel with you as you go. Let love be the burning wick. Your work is show up with that love, and to trust that love will travel with you as you go.

In a world without end

May it be so.

It Was Always about the Kindness

Rev. Douglas Taylor

December 8, 2024

Sermon Video: https://youtu.be/ySn_S_5Qjuk

I don’t know if any of you have responded to the current political troubles and social anxiety by hunting out bits of uplifting news. That’s one of my techniques. I have been digging up feel-good news stories and anecdotes of humanity at its hopeful-est. It helps me digest the rest of the news. Earlier this week on social media someone from Iceland posted their concern for a baby swan frozen on the ice and dying. People started chiming in, worrying until … naturalist Kerstin Langerberger replied to the post, saying: “I am on my way with the necessary equipment.”

It turns out ‘necessary equipment” for this situation meant: a friend, some thermoses of warm water, and a surfboard in case the ice failed. Langerberger went out on the ice, found the baby swan, thawed and freed it. The bird recovered quickly and flew off. A happy ending.

I love that ‘a friend’ was included in the list of ‘necessary equipment.’ It makes me wonder about the experience of the friend who accompanied the naturalist. “You are going to do what? And you want my help? What exactly do you need me to do?” Sometimes what’s needed is some expertise, some particular skill. Sometimes what’s needed is a companion to ride alongside. We help each other in a variety of ways. We make the world a better place. Some days we save a baby swan.

I remember a conversation with someone back when we were both in our 20’s. We were on staff at a youth camp and were helping one of the high-needs youth process some social interactions that had not gone well earlier in the day. Later, this other young adult and I were talking, and he reflected to me a challenge he was wrestling with. He had expressed before that he was a survivalist, could live off the land, loved hiking and all that. But this outdoors athleticism was all framed for him in his deep belief in what he saw as Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest. “The problem,” he confessed, “is how the kid we just helped would not survive without a lot of support – and that’s not how survival-of-the-fittest works.”

But what if my friend had it wrong? Darwin’s idea of natural selection and ‘survival of the fittest’ is often – I have more recently discovered – misunderstood. At its base, the concept is simply saying that to pass on your genetic material to the next generation, you need to survive. To survive, you need to fit the demands of the world you live in. Darwin was not saying only the strong are fit or only the intelligent are fit. He was saying only the fit survive. So what does it mean to be ‘fit?’

In some ways this reminds me of theological arguments about what, exactly, is the ‘image of god’ in humanity. Is it our physical form? Our intelligence? Our goodness? Our capacity to love? I recently bumped into the idea that perhaps the image of God we carry is not found in our individuality, but in our collective. What if the image of God is experienced in community? Because that’s certainly the answer to Darwin’s concept of survival of the fittest. He was not talking about individuals surviving. He was talking about species.

The key to our human survival as a species is found in how we support each other in communities. Other creatures have other traits, sharks and finches evolve to fit differently in the world. So did we. What defines ‘fit’ is different for different species. But somehow, we humans have taken the phrase to mean – only the strong survive. In the introduction to their 2021 book, Survival of the Friendliest, Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods write this:

“The idea of “survival of the fittest” as it exists in the popular imagination can make for a terrible survival strategy. Research shows that being the biggest, strongest, and meanest animal can set you up for a lifetime of stress. Social stress saps your body’s energy budget, leaving a weakened immune system and fewer offspring. Aggression is also costly because fighting increases the chance that you will be hurt or even killed. This kind of fitness can lead to alpha status, but it can also make your life “nasty, brutish, and short.” Friendliness, roughly defined as some kind of intentional or unintentional cooperation, or positive behavior toward others, is so common in nature because it is so powerful. In people, it can be as simple as approaching someone and wanting to socially interact or as complicated as reading someone else’s mind in order to cooperatively accomplish a mutual goal.” (p xvii)

So we join together to support each other. We save the baby swan from freezing on the ice. We help a kid struggling with disadvantages. We don’t just leave people to suffer and die. That’s not how our species evolved. The ‘fittest’ among us are not the strongest or the smartest or the ones who create the best tools. Instead, natural selection has amplified those who are kind and help build the community.

There is an anecdote about Margaret Mead that illustrates my point here. The story is found in Dr. Ira Byock’s book about palliative care and may be apocryphal but even if it is not something she really said, it is in keeping with the sentiment of Margaret Mead’s style.

“A student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” The student expected her to say a clay pot, a grinding stone, or maybe a weapon.
Margaret Mead thought for a moment, then she said, “A healed femur.”
A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend.
Mead explained that where the law of the jungle—the survival of the fittest—rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur.”            (Ira Byock, 2012, The Best Care Possible)

I would counter that ‘healed femurs’ is humanity’s version of survival of the fittest. Mead, in this story, names compassion. I’ve been talking about kindness. In the book I quoted from earlier, Survival of the Friendliest, they propose that friendliness is a key trait that opened our evolving species to surviving when others like Neanderthals went extinct. By evolutionary perspective or by religious sentiment, we are talking about how it is not brute strength or clever resourcefulness that is our greatest trait as humanity. How we support each other is what makes us human.  

Unfortunately, here is the spot where it all gets muddy. Friendliness, or kindness or compassion, is a trait that has been naturally selected to make us a strong species. And there is a shadow side in this evolutionary theory. Despite the benefits of kindness, there remains ample evidence that our species is not always kind. We still have violence and territorialism and gangs. We still have war and pogroms and death marches and genocide. And according to the research in the book, it is linked to the key trait of friendliness.

“We have a tremendous potential for compassion [the authors write] and we evolved uniquely to show friendliness to intragroup strangers. But our cruelty to one another is connected to this kindness. The same part of our brain that tamed our nature and facilitated cooperative communication sowed the seed for the worst in us.” (p121)

The shadow of kindness is cruelty, and the record shows we have ample capacity for both. The social scientists have studied cruelty with experiments around prejudice, conformity, and compliance with authority (p132) to try to explain how the holocaust could occur. But the big reveal I found in this book about friendliness is the impact of dehumanization.

In proclaiming that kindness is the mark of our fitness for natural selection, it is a statement about how we interact with others. But which ‘others’ are we talking about? We are supportive and friendly with those who are in our group.

In evolution, this played out as Homo sapiens shared the world with Denisovans and Neanderthals and possibly Homo erectus. It was important for us to distinguish the ‘other’ so our species could survive and thrive. Our friendliness and kindness extended to Homo sapiens only. Fast forward a few hundred thousand years and we still have this part of our brain fully functioning to protect us from ‘the other’ while we support and care for ‘our own kind.’

It plays out in the way we dehumanize some groups of people so it is easier for us to harm them and kill them, or more likely to simply stay home and ignore the atrocities become it is happening to those we do not think of as human. Religiously, we are challenged to expand our concept of who belongs and who is excluded. I would argue that Jesus’ central parable – the Good Samaritan – is a direct challenge against our predisposition toward dehumanizing some people.

And there is a lot of dehumanizing rhetoric in our political and social situation today. The impact of these ideas is not academic. There are people with power now who are playing up the cruelty side of our best quality as humanity. I caution us against the urge to dehumanize them in return.

The solution is to expand who we mean when we say we until it includes all humanity, all the world as kin. The word ‘Kind’ has its etymological roots in the word ‘Kin.’ I say it is crucial for us to resist that evolutionary urge to dehumanize the ‘other’ and to instead expand our sense of who belongs. Kindness, I believe, is the key distinction of our humanity; and it is also the solution to the cruelty living the shadow of our best quality as humanity.

Over the coming weeks, as we move through both Christmas and then the inauguration, listen for the messages about kindness, cruelty, belonging, and dehumanization. Listen and choose the path that brings out our humanity. Listen, and choose life.

In a world without end,

May it be so

To Show and Affirming Flame

Rev. Douglas Taylor

11-10-24

sermon video: https://youtu.be/TotbAzq7Nh8

This week has been fraught with emotions and reactions and dawning realizations from this past Tuesday’s election. Many among us are lamenting. Many people are angry and frightened by what is presenting as a march toward fascism in our country.

In my description for today’s service I stated that W.H. Auden wrote a poem entitled “September 1, 1939.” I mention it because the last line of that poem is the title for this sermon: “To show an affirming flame.” The title of the poem, “September 1, 1939,” refers to the beginning of World War II. The poem itself is a denouncement of fascism and a call toward solidarity.

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Auden goes on to decry the madness and cruelty of the era leading to Adolf Hitler’s ascendency to power, the lies and apathy that allowed evil to gain control. Some literary critics have suggested this is Auden’s best poem, indeed called it the best poem of the 20^th century. It is laced with references to the history of Democracy as a concept and the steady erosion we suffer again and again. It calls us to both rise with our individual responsibility and stay firm in our communal solidarity. The second-to-final stanza reads:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

“We must love one another or die,” he wrote. True then, and true still today. “All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie.” This past election season will perhaps be best remembered for all the incredible lies.

Democracy is embedded with certain values. And there is a certain amount of overlap between those values and our Unitarian Universalist religious values. Chief among them liberty, freedom, and justice. A democracy assumes an informed citizenry, so there is an implied value of education and critical thinking. Equality and forbearance – or at least tolerance – round out the necessary values for democracy to thrive. I am hard pressed to find examples of these values in our incoming president-elect Donald Trump or in the policies and promises he has made. Instead I see crass vulgarity, posturing and bullying, deceit and lies, and divisiveness. Divisiveness is a common tool for authoritarian politics, not for democracies.

I saw a list of the early warning signs of fascism as displayed at a Holocaust Museum. I posted it on social media if you are looking for it. The list of warning signs induced: “Powerful and continuing nationalism; Disdain for human rights; Identification of enemies as a unifying cause; Supremacy of the military; Rampant sexism; Controlled mass media; Obsession with national security; Religion and government intertwined; Corporate power protected; Labor power suppressed; Disdain for intellectuals and the arts; Obsession with crime and punishment; Rampant cronyism and corruption.”

And to be clear, some of what is likely to happen over the next four years is basic policy changes that happen every time there is a change in the political party. It is stuff that I will argue against, plans that will go against my values, actions that I find objectionable but ultimately match what previous administrations have done. But then there will be things that tear apart the structures of our democracy in favor of constructing a fascist oligarchy.

There is still harm committed in the first set of policies and actions. A tragic example is Ronald Reagan’s refusal to recognize AIDS which led to a great deal of death and suffering. In making the distinction between basic party changes and fascist plans, I don’t want to minimize the harm that results from the former. I am merely lifting up the truth that as long as our democracy remains intact, there is recourse.

In her 2018 book Fascism, A Warning, Madeleine Albright had written, a Fascist “is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have.”

We’ve already seen four years of a Donald Trump presidency; we don’t need to guess at what a second term might contain. The rights of queer and trans people are under threat. Immigrants and people of color are at risk. Women’s access to reproductive health care is under attack. Trump will quite likely pull all support from Ukraine and NATO, allowing Putin free reign for Russian military expansion. I can’t imagine he will do much to support the Palestinians either. He will certainly pull us out of the Paris Accords again, so our efforts to respond to the climate crisis will be stalled. And he has promised again to destroy the Affordable Care Act – an unattained goal he had last time he was in office. And his whole campaign was centered around an untenable promise of mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. 

Honestly, I don’t think fascism in the United States will show up as Concentration Camps in the near future. We already have a robust prison system that will serve the same purpose. Where else would we get the labor to cover the work of undocumented immigrants once we’ve deported them. If we bother deporting them when we could just pump them into the prison system. Stock prices for private prisons jumped this past week.

But in all of that, I am well convinced that the signature play of the Trump re-election campaign has been the rampant use of misinformation, disinformation, and lies. People talk about how fascists go after the journalists, but I believe the current MAGA political right-wing has circumvented the need to silence journalists by blasting media with lies and sensational nonsense so no signal can make it through the noise.

Everyone is so numb to the lies, countless stories are emerging of people saying they voted for him but they don’t believe he will really dismantle the Affordable Care Act because they need it, or deport all the immigrants because they’re married to one, or make abortions illegal at the federal level because their mistress’s still need that access. There is a subset of the people who voted for him who know he is a liar and don’t believe him.

And I hear progressives saying “Believe him, he’s telling you the harm he is planning to cause. Believe him.” But there are so many lies. Which ones matter? Which ones should I trust. All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie. In Auden’s poem, the lie was about believing a dictator was better equipped to make decisions for you. In Auden’s poem, the lie was that an individual exists alone and would not experience the consequences of a semi-distant evil about to land on someone else. In Auden’s poem, the lie was all those people who went along with the Nazis because they thought the economic policy sounded better.

There are guardrails still in place protecting our democracy today. If we are tempting fascism, it will not drop upon us overnight. We can still pay attention; we can still resist. Part of the work is to continue to do what we’ve been doing – building relationships with people and communities doing good work in the world around us. We can keep working to support change for unhoused people in Broome County. We can keep working to feed people with Beloved Community. We can keep educating ourselves on racism and White Supremacy. We can keep supporting Planned Parenthood and other local abortion providers. We can keep advocating for queer youth and creating spaces for trans and queer people to be welcome and to be safe. And my list goes on. We are already doing a lot of what we need to be doing together, locally where it matters most, and beyond.

The final stanza of Auden’s September 1, 1939 poem says this:

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

We are not yet defenseless as he saw Europe and America to be at that moment in time. We may not be far off, but we are not defenseless yet. The harm people are worried about is real and so our response must be equally real.

I am called to take the side of the poor, the marginalized, the vulnerable and disempowered, and all those treated with injustice and cruelty. We are called to get in the way of systemic injustice, to stand up against tyranny, to agitate the establishment for change so that all people can heal from the wounds of our days and we can all experience more peace.

Our work remains: to build solidarity, to uphold justice, to shine our light, and love bravely in a world too full of desperate loneliness and alienation. 

I’ll close with a James Baldwin quote I was reminded of earlier this week. In his novel If Beale Street Could Talk, Baldwin wrote: “…love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.”

In a world without end

May it be so

All I Know So Far

Rev. Douglas Taylor

10-27-2024

Sermon video: https://youtu.be/n1zNy_MKmpI

Several years back I started collecting a playlist of positive songs that were written as advice from a parent to a child. When I was a teenager, Rod Stewart did a cover of “Forever Young.” This song was all over MTV during my senior year in high school; and later when I was a new minister, someone used it during a private Child Dedication ceremony. I think that’s what cemented it for me. I had played “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin and “Father and Son” by Cat Stevens, but they were less examples of what I longed for and more cautionary tales. This old Bob Dylan song offered a message I wanted to embody as I entered adulthood.

Then, in the ‘90’s, as a young father, the radio was playing “You Gotta Be” by Des’ree.

You gotta be bad, you gotta be bold, you gotta be wiser

I love this song.

Listen as your day unfolds
Challenge what the future holds
Try and keep your head up to the sky

This was peak wisdom for me as a young parent. I loved it. This is what I wanted to instill in my children. I particularly resonated with the message that you gotta persist – you have to keep at it. You don’t have to be perfect, but you do have to be bold.

Over the years I added more songs to my playlist. 93 Million Miles by Jason Mraz; Growing Up by Macklemore, I Hope You Dance by Lee Ann Womack, and Dear Winter by AJR; I’m sure you have your own playlist, your own songs that carry wisdom down through the generations.

All I Know So Far is the most recent addition to my playlist. It is a song written by Pink just a few years ago (2021). Pink says the song was envisioned as an advice-filled love letter to her daughter. The lyrics talk about finding strength in the face of adversity and fear.

And when the storm’s out, you run in the rain
Put your sword down, dive right into the pain
Stay unfiltered and loud, you’ll be proud of that skin full of scars
That’s all I know so far

It is a call to be open to the hard parts of life, to be vulnerable. That’s all I know so far. Pick reveals some hard-won wisdom in this song. If you have some time, listen to the full song by Pink. It’s worth it.

This morning, my focus is to offer something akin to these songs on my playlist – a sermon highlighting my message; not to my children but to the world. They say every preacher has only one sermon they keep repeating and reframing and revising over and over. Which makes me wonder: what is my one sermon?

I toyed with the idea of asking all of you to answer for me; to set aside some time for any of you to share what you see my one message to be. What is the overarching message you’ve heard from this pulpit over these past 20-plus years? But then I figured that was a tricky question to put you all on the spot with. And honestly, if I’m doing my job right, your answers would be more about you and what you’ve needed to hear than they would be about me and what I’ve been trying to say.

I’ll give you a preview – a small hint of what is to come. It’s going to be about love. And I don’t mean the soft, commercialized stuff we are sold in ads. I mean the transformative power of love. I mean it the way James Balwin was talking about when he said:

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love—whether we call it friendship or family or romance— is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. … In our best moments, we are that person for another.

                                    (From Nothing Personal)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I only meant to give you a hint, a small clue for what I think I’ve been saying from this pulpit these past 20 years. Because let’s be honest – I don’t only preach about love.

I feel like I have a fairly wide range of sermons week by week. I preach on social issues and theological questions, UU history and various holiday themes. I preach about grief and anti-racism, forgiveness and covenants.

On Sundays, I share my own collection of influences such as the various Bible stories and key passages from the Tao Te Ching, and a myriad of poems and song lyrics. I share with you my fascination with Process Theology, Annie Dillard’s poetic naturalism, and Winnie the Pooh’s simple way. I have an eclectic taste. 

Consider the recent few sermons from September and October so far. I preached about political divisiveness one Sunday, war and peace the next, followed by a climate revival and then a homily on forgiveness, before rounding it all out with a collaboration Sunday message about the ethical harvesting of sweetgrass as it applies to your own living.

What is the common thread through all of these different topics, nestled in each of those sermons? Maybe it is something about how to be human together. Or, as I’ve already hinted, maybe it’s all about loving and being loved.

Let’s sit with that first idea for a few minutes; maybe every sermon I preach is something about ‘how to be human together.’

I have not done a comprehensive review, but a recent perusal of my sermon catalogue revealed to me three prominent themes that I keep circling back to – each of which does feed into the idea that every sermon might be about ‘how to be human together;’ or more broadly about love.

The first theme I hear myself bringing up a lot is brokenness. The Ingathering Sunday story about Celia and the Sweet Sweet Water in which she almost made it home with the saving water but she tripped and broke the glass.

I talked about how we are all broken, we all have broken places in our lives and in our hearts. And how many times have I quoted that Leonard Cohen song in which he claims there is a crack in everything, that’s where the light gets in. Our brokenness hurts, but it also opens us. And our brokenness is a path into empathy as we see the brokenness in others.

From this root idea I talk a lot about vulnerability and courage, trust and compassion. From this root idea of brokenness I challenge ideas such as perfection and shame and Original Sin and the illusion of self-sufficiency. In short – I talk about love. I talk about ‘how to be human together.’

A second theme I hear myself bring up a lot is resilience. If we are broken, it is because we fail and we fall and get hurt. It happens. And after we fall, after we break – we rise. Helen Keller is remembered for saying; “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” Yes, there is trouble in the world, and so we will rise to meet it.

From this root idea I often speak about the resiliency of nature after disasters and devastation. Healing and resilience are natural qualities – it is what nature does with even the slightest bit of life remaining. And from there I talk about how we are part of nature and we, too, are resilient. And from there I talk about how we can create communities of resilience. In short – I talk about love. I talk about ‘how to be human together.’

A third theme I hear myself bring up a lot after brokenness and resiliency is something about community. I learning I’ve more recently come to articulate is that healing doesn’t happen in isolation, real healing is a communal experience. I often frame this as something this congregation can be – a healing community.

From this root idea I talk about the theological concept of Beloved Community, about liberation theology and liberative justice. From this root idea I talk about covenant and the bonds that set us free, that hold us accountable, and compel us to grow. In short – I talk about love. I talk about ‘how to be human together.’

So that is how I see myself able to have such a variety of topics and themes on any given Sunday but the one sermon I am preaching over and over is about how to be human together – about loving and being loved.

There is a book by Prentis Hemphill called What It Takes To Heal. A colleague put out a call over the summer saying she wanted to read this book and to have a group of colleagues who would read it with her and process it with her. It’s a good book. Near the end of the book, Hemphill talks about a transformative experience they had centered around love.

Kasha was my friend for many years before anything romantic happened. It wasn’t until the passing of my grandmother, not too long after her grandfather had died, that we fell in love. It surprised us both, that our grief opened up the door for love.

On a visit to see her in Hawai’i, she built an altar for my grandmother and her grandfather. They sat next to each other up there, framed and smiling, encircled in leis. She sat just below, and asked me to tell her stories about my grandmother. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of this invitation. Did I deserve to be loved like this?

I shared and she listened with a steady presence. She gave me room to feel, and instead of being repelled by my vulnerability, she moved closer. The tears poured and she didn’t rush to wipe them, just put a hand on my back, asked another question, or let the silence wash over us.

[Later]… At the airport as I was leaving, I said to her, “I wish a love like this for everybody. Imagine what it could do.” (p194-5)

Imagine what that could do. James Baldwin wrote:

“Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.”

            ― James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone  

Imagine what it could do if everyone could experience the love Prentis Hemphill received at that ancestor ritual in Hawai’i. Imagine being loved yourself. Imagine others being loved – maybe even people you can stand, people you hate. What if someone loved them? Imagine what that could do.

Listen as your day unfolds
Challenge what the future holds
Try and keep your head up to the sky
Lovers, they may cause you tears
Go ahead, release your fears
Stand up and be counted
Don’t be ashamed to cry

It’s okay to be a little broken, indeed it will help to be broken open. Your humanity will grow as you are open to the light that shines through the brokenness of others around you. Don’t be ashamed, go ahead and release your fears. We have each other to help heal each other. This is how we are human together.

All I know, all I know, love will save the day

In a world without end,

May it be so.

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