Excuse an abrupt turn. Most of you know how I start many sermons (with a few bad jokes).
What do you call a duck that likes to celebrate Independence Day? A fire quacker.
The colors red, white, and blue stand for freedom until they are flashing behind you.
Why did the freedom-seeking chicken cross the road? To assert its right to choose its own path.
I planned this service and wrote 2/3 of this sermon by Thursday night without realizing what was coming. Now our hill country communities are reeling, grieving, anxious and heart broken. The storm was preceded by news of war and the passing of a bill that will bring great harm and hardship to our most vulnerable. However you are feeling about these events, we offer and share this sanctuary as a safe, warm and welcoming place.
We are a learning community with a spirituality that encourages deep reflection and action re personal and social concerns. And it’s sermon time. I have some hefty ideas to share that will be groundwork for a big ask. I hope by the end we will be solidly on a liberation path. To hike on that liberation path, will require decisive action and resolve on your part. Let’s roll.
This weekend we celebrate the country’s birthday. We commemorate July 4th, 1776 when the 2nd Continental Congress voted to approve the Declaration of Independence that founded this nation upon the principles of freedom, democracy, self-governance and the pursuit of happiness. The nation was born from a zeal for freedom.
That zeal for freedom, that holding of freedom as sacred, as the primary right, has shaped our nation. It was the same spirit that led to the founding of the Unitarian and the Universalist Churches. It is the spirit that has guided and been at the center of our UU religious tradition.
When I first encountered UU tradition in 1984, I heard “Freedom, Reason and Tolerance” as the watchword of this faith. These values had been present further back in 1568 when a Unitarian preacher and Unitarian King pursuaded the Transylvanian Parliament (Diet) of Torda to issue an Edict giving each citizen the right to choose their religion. It asserted that faith could not be achieved by force, and was between an individual and God.
The Unitarian and Universalist Churches rejected creedal tests for membership. Throughout our history we have advocated a generous approach to religion. We have recognized that truth cannot be expressed in an inexhaustible way, and that divinity can’t be contained in a box. These remain central to our religious liberalism.
We are also liberal because we hold liberation as holy, something worthy of our trust and effort. We have been united in our passion to promote and pursue liberation and freedom. The Universalist proclaimed that all souls would come to know the limitless love of our maker. UU tradition has directed us to support that which encourages souls to embrace our free will, to know freedom as our inherent nature and to know goodness as the nature of the force that created us.
Our reverence for nature, our appreciation of the potential for good in humanity has led us to invite many voices into religious discussion. By contrast autocrats, dictators and tyrants squelch public discourse for two reasons. 1-They believe that people can’t be trusted to participate in governance. 2-They seek to keep power and maximum wealth in their possession or control. Liberal religion and liberating efforts seek to build and earn trust by enabling wealth and wellbeing for all.
Liberal religion asks us to practice love and generosity. Religious liberals eschew claims of absolute truth, and so we promote plurality and multicultural exchange. We also trust nature and see goodness in creation, including our bodies and our inherent nature.
Liberal religion renounces coercion and domination. UU tradition has been a prophetic voice opposing anything and everything that keeps humans from experiencing the divine and the splendor of one’s humanity.
Unjust and oppressive traditions divide us and keep us from knowing our worth and our power. They hinder our ability to see, enjoy, share and appreciate our common wealth and welfare. Our UU tradition asks us to work to establish the beloved community by dismantling systems of oppression by removing our support of and participation in them. It asks us to educate ourselves about systems of oppression as what causes human degradation and dis-empowerment. It asks us to find where oppression exists in us and how we continue it.
Tyrants seek to divide the population because it enables them to dominate and exploit us more easily. The dis-empowerment or oppression is both physical and psychological. South African leader Steven Biko said “the greatest tool in the hands of an oppressor is the minds of the oppressed.” In other words, along with the physical structures that favor some and discriminate against others, there are messages, pedagogy and inculcation of ideas that allege inferiority of people from groups (almost always minorities). The purpose of putting down minorities is to keep them from gaining power.
Oppression alleges the superiority of groups which dominate and the inferiority of the dominated. It promotes the hatred of people deemed as others. It asserts that members of the outgroup are bad. It justifies and blames them for their mistreatment. Intimidation and repetition of hateful and harmful messages coerce people to conform, participate and enforce discrimination of the out group. The hurtful messages come overtly in words and covertly through mistreatment in systems of education, housing, and economic opportunity.
We internalize these harmful messages about others and about ourselves. With tremendous will, mindful action and great persistence we can overcome established societal patterns of domination, and replace the harmful messages with ones that liberate. Without great persistence in counterculture liberatory efforts, we will likely default to participation in established systems of oppression.
Liberalism seeks to encourage liberation. Contempt, blame, mistreatment, and hatred of liberals serves to enforce the status quo, by keeping those who advocate for an egalitarian society from gaining influence and power.
Liberalism requires the study of oppression and liberation. It seeks to learn means that support cooperation and advance the welfare of all. Liberal education undermines systems of oppression by illuminating the needs and perspectives of underrepresented minorities and marginalized groups.
Those who would maintain the status quo of privilege for dominant groups foment hatred of minority groups and of liberals. Promotion of hatred of liberals has grown steadily for decades and has become virulent. Incidents of violence against liberals have grown steadily. After the sermon, I’d like to hear which events and messages you have seen and heard as most problematic and alarming.
With the rise of violence, it’s predictable and understandable that we might become afraid and wish to hide. However, silence is dangerous complicity. Although discernment is necessary, unless people speak up and resist, the rise in violence will increase. Humanity needs us to speak out and name the accelerants of violence.
Speaking out usually begins with supportive peers. Preaching to the choir is a good and necessary step. We just can’t stop there. To gain skill in interrupting oppression we must practice, take some risks and develop effective strategies. We need to choose when and how to respond. Then if we will celebrate every step, we will build momentum. Empowerment and healing will be our reward.
Humor is also crucial. Bullies like to inflate their power and importance. Making fun of those who try to dominate us is way to cut them down to size. Humor burns away our fear. It liberates our imagination and creative power!
Laughing at ourselves is good medicine too. Humility grounds us in a power that is greater than ego. Laughter dispels fear. We will grow in power when we are not attached to getting fame, recognition or credit. When we begin to identify with Mother Earth and with life force, we will laugh at human hubris.
Oppression inflates the worth and importance of the super rich, and deceives us into thinking they have all the power. To grow awareness of the power and beauty of liberalism, we can celebrate working class people and learn to appreciate women’s power, the power of the collective, the power and worth of children and cooperation. This will help us feel the joy of being liberal, and being part of liberation.
Angela Davis said that when America elected Obama it immediately forgot what put him there. She said it was a mistake to think that he could transform the establishment without continued clamor for progressive change from masses and grass roots groups. To get our nation’s government to value poor people would take a great force of nonviolence and love. It would require getting big money out of politics. We can’t expect the man at the top to change the system so that everyone would matter. For that we need an educated, united and empowered grass roots force. If the masses continue to sit quietly with one man in charge at the front of the room, we have “a new boss but he will be the same as the old boss,” and will get fooled again. (*Pete Townsend)
Can you see why UUism requires a living tradition? Our religion has changed a lot and is not done changing yet! Liberalism requires progressive change! So does democracy. Democracy has played a powerful role in our religious tradition. Liberals recognize that those in power often don’t want the people to have voice. When the people have a voice, we demand things that make society better for everyone. Those who don’t want progressive change promote repression and ignorance.
Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the declaration of independence said “”If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
Okay well I’m going to run out of time, and I’ve probably gotten too political for some people’s tastes. I promised to distinguish between religious and political liberalism. Being UU doesn’t mean we all subscribe to one party or worse one small wing of one party. We no more demand conformity to a political agenda than we demand conformity to a theological belief system. You’re free to disagree with anything I’ve said.
I’ve argued today that the core of our religious tradition is a commitment to work for the freedom and liberation of all of humanity. Our UU living tradition began with followers of Jesus who recognized that the synoptic gospels and specifically the sayings of Jesus indicate that he did not ask to be worshipped. Jesus life was consistently oriented toward the marginalized outcast. He called for faith in an emerging divine order, a kingdom of heaven -on Earth. Today we call it “the Beloved Community.” It’s a vision of a society where people’s need matter. We seek a world where public health, food, clean water and air become more important than the desire of the richest men to achieve more wealth than is possessed by most nations.
To make these our priorities, we need to put love at the center of our religion. We need to learn together how to escape the illusion of separateness to come to fully appreciate ourselves as part of an interdependent web of existence. Perhaps we would need to love that web, that oneness and wish to get to know it the same way devotees have always longed to know their Lord.
Perhaps we could come to know this awesomeness, this sacredness, this holiness in every soul without requiring them to use the same nomenclature or belong to our political party. Perhaps we as religious liberals in the same tradition as our ancestors would seek “to love the hell out of this world.”
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