bring on the lovingoverthrow

I was very pleased that so many people said they appreciated my Memorial Day sermon.  Several people asked for copies so I am posting here a very cleaned up and fleshed out product from my notes.

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“Truth is Love’s Doorway” 

Recently, I’ve been studying up on relationship skills both for my own good and because I am looking for better ways to teach and talk about the practices that help us be with one another in powerful, healing, creative, even transformative ways. As human beings, we can choose how we want to be with one another. And, the religious life is about learning and practicing ways of being with and relating to one another that produce these greater goods.

So, in my study recently, I came across what feels like a very valuable teaching which is captured in the title of today’s sermon. Truth is love’s doorway. I can’t tell if they coined the phrase or not but the teachers who brought it to my attention are Paul and Layne Cutright. If you are interested in relationship skills, I recommend their work which is readily available on the internet.

Truth is love’s doorway. Truth is the means by which love enters in. So, if it feels like love is missing in some situation or that an infusion of love is needed to bring things to another level, this teaching suggests that some truth-telling is in order.

Check this out for yourself. Think of a place in one of your relationships where you have thoughts or feelings that you are holding on to – keeping to yourself. It could be with your partner, your parent, your child, with your friend or with a colleague. Maybe you are waiting for the right moment, or looking for a good way, or maybe you’ve decided that there will never be a right moment or good way and so you’ve just sort of accepted the situation. How many of you can see a place in your life where you are keeping the truth about what you think or how you feel about something to yourself?

What’s it like in that place? What’s a word that describes it? Sad? Lonely? Angry? Frustrated? Disappointed? There is a disconnect – an interruption in the flow of love and good feelings. Like a wall has gone up or a door has been closed. Truth is love’s doorway and when we keep our truth closed inside us, love can not come or go. Our ability to give and to receive is shut.

One thing I really like about Paul and Layne’s way of teaching in this area is that they don’t pretend that the solution to this problem is as simple as, well, just speaking your truth. For one thing, they acknowledge that we all have a lot of good reasons for not speaking the truth of our thoughts and feelings. It can be dangerous to tell the truth and it is important that we be compassionate with ourselves about the fears and difficulties we have.

Another problem is that we often don't know the truth of our thoughts and feelings.  Sometimes we have been working so hard to please or take care of others that we have lost touch with what our own thoughts and feelings actually are.

Finally, there is nothing magic about speaking the truth. Truth is love’s doorway and speaking the truth makes it possible for love to enter a situation but it doesn’t guarantee any particular results. Good results require good intention and come most consistently with practice.

The issue of our good intentions in speaking the truth is particularly important.  How many times have you experienced someone telling the truth about what they think or feel in a way that is not helpful to relationship? They just drop their thoughts and feelings like a bomb in the middle of the room and act as if just because it is the truth it is okay. How many times have you maybe held on to your truth for so long that suddenly it explodes out of you and all your pent up anger, guilt, frustration, whatever comes with it? Truth is love’s doorway but for love to enter and have the best chance of being received, there has to be an intention to help the relationship and it works best when that intention is firmly held and clearly communicated. So, we don’t speak our truth unless we are clearly in touch with our purpose to honor and strengthen the relationship and we let the other person know that this is our purpose.

Now, I think this is very good and useful teaching with regards to developing healthier and more loving relationships in our lives. I hope you will all think on it, look it up on the internet, and talk to one another and to me about it. But I offer it today not only in regards to our personal relationships but also and even more so in regards to our broad social and economic relationships as citizens of a nation at war and a planet in peril.

What is the truth-telling that needs to be done such that love sufficient to all our current crises can enter into our political relationships and become the basis for our common lives? This is truth I want to speak and to hear. 

. . . .

How many of you know that theologically speaking, we UU’s are very close cousins the UCC? There is a joke that UCC stands for Unitarians Considering Christianity.

Some of you might also know that the church to which Barak Obama belongs is a UCC. Which of course means that its pastor, Jeremiah Wright is a UCC pastor.

In response to the controversy stirred up by some things that Rev. Wright has said both in the pulpit and on national news and most of all by the media’s irresponsible reporting on things he has said, the UCC has called on ministers of all denomination to participate in a national preach-in on race. My sermon today is in response to that call.

The truth can be hard to speak. And the truth can be hard to hear. It is important that our truth-telling be with the intention to heal, to strengthen, to create new possibilities for love to enter and be experienced and expressed. Otherwise it is just useless and possibly even harmful venting.

I have had the opportunity to hear Rev. Wright speak as he was the keynote speaker last year at our annual UU ministers pre-GA conference. I have also listened to and read excerpts of his some of his sermons. I believe that Rev. Wright has the intention to heal and that he is a human being struggling to tell the truth about some of the very most difficult subjects in human history, racial oppression, the legacy of slavery, our complicity in  empire. I believe that, when we understand that truth is love’s doorway, we want to hear another person's truth and so we listen deeply and generously even gratefully without taking offense – even when they are less than skillful, less than firmly planted in their highest commitments, even when what they have to say is painful for us to hear.

One of the challenges we face as liberal religious people is that the truth about the continuing reality of racism is hard for us to hear. We are deeply committed to the inherent worth and dignity of every person and to justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. We believe that racism should not exist and yet it does.

One of the major anti-racism initiatives of our denomination called a Journey Toward Wholeness has encountered resistance because it not only requires us to accept the fact of continuing racism, it asks us to personally accept responsibility for our racist culture and to admit that we, ourselves, are racists.

In her book, Learning to be White, UU minister and scholar Thandeka takes a very thorough and compassionate look at the ways in which white people are socialized into racist culture. I know. I know. Many of you are barely able to contain your protests right now. You are not racists. And I accept that. It is a reasonable and sincere position to take and I am not going to try to convince you that you are racist. I myself don’t find it particularly helpful as a strategy for getting people to open up and examine more deeply the truth of their own experience about white racial privilege.  It helps me to think of it this way. We were born into a racist culture. We have been racially programmed since our birth in ways that are completely unconscious to us. When a racist thought or behavior appears, we are horrified. That is not us! And that’s true. It is not us. It is appropriate and even helpful to recognize that these are not the thoughts and behaviors of our true selves. These come from our cultural conditioning which operates in us but far to often outside of our awareness. It is not helpful to repress and deny the contents of cultural conditioning. For only by admitting it and appreciating our ability to see it for the distortion that it is, can we gain the wisdom to speak the truth that will let love enter sufficient to heal the situation not just for us personally but for our larger culture.

So, I don’t go around claiming to be a racist but if I am in a conversation with a person of color who needs me to own a part of the racist culture that we share, I will do that and I will admit to being a racist if that will help the conversation.  Many times, I have witnessed people of color trying to carry on a conversation about racism with white people who take the position that while racism undoubtedly exists somewhere, it's nowhere near them and certainly not in the room at all unless the person of color happened to bring it in.  What's more helpful, I think, is to own our experience of being white in a racist culture and lay the truth of the way racism has infected our lives out on the table in front of us. In my life, I've been given glimpses of my unconscious often enough to know that there can be things in there that I don’t know about and that I have little or no responsibility for how they got there there.  I was in my early 20’s when I first became aware of this with regards to unconscious racism.  I  was walking down the street in downtown Lincoln, Nebraska.  As I approached an intersection the light changed and I had to stop and wait.  As I stood on the corner, I looked at the car that had been waiting at the light and was now beginning to move forward.  It was a very expensive car.  A sports car.  A Jaguar or something.  As I looked, I saw the driver and noticed that he was a very nicely dressed black man - older than me but not a lot older.  At the moment of noticing him, I also noticed something happening in me.  An voice came out of nowhere and started expressing outrage.  How dare he, a black man, be rich?  Black men were not supposed to be rich.  They were all supposed to be poor and ready to march with me on Washington to demand equality and justice for all!  Fortunately for me, I had encountered eruptions from my unconscious before so I was able to recognize this as the product of cultural conditioning.  On the other hand, I was deeply humbled and saddened to find that, despite the fact that my waking experience for as long as I could remember was of being a lover of all people and even a fighter for racial justice, I still had this in me.  Against my will, it was in me.

I know that everyone in this room is genuinely committed to racial justice, that you are committed to the principle of the inherent worth and dignity of every person and that you have putting that commitment into practice for most if not all of your lives. But the thing about racism that is most destructive face is not its personal face of behavior between individuals.  The most destructive face of racism is thecultural face that is hidden in the behavior of institutions.  And we are, in part, living embodiments of that culture. We carry it and help keep it in existence whether we like it or not. And the most powerful thing that we can do to help our nation and world overcome racism is to speak our truth and most importantly be willing to hear the truth even when it is painful, even when it is offered unskillfully, even when the intention of mutual healing is not clearly present. We might not like what Rev. Wright has to say or how he chooses to say it but if we are committed to overcoming racial injustice, we will listen. And, especially we will resist all attempts to demonize him and the black liberation movement for the fact that human beings sometimes fail to present their truth with careful consideration for our feelings and sometimes it lands like a bomb in our living room.

Now, there is just one more thing before I close. And this is the reason I felt it was perfect to bring this message to you for Memorial Day. Because it is not possible to responsibly preach about racism today without reflecting the understanding that racism is inextricably linked to militarism. The Iraq war is, among other things, a racist war. Its costs both in Iraq and here at home are disproportionately borne by people of color.

MLK, JR. was an expert at using truth-telling as a means of letting love enter our national culture and dialogue and psyche. Here is something he said about all this just one year to the day before he was killed.

"Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

This was just over 41 years ago. And I’ll tell you this. We did not hear the man then and we don’t seem to be hearing him now - or to be hearing those who have since taken up the call. We have, in fact, entered into a whole new era of empire – pre-emptive empire. One motto of the Trinity UCC is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian. Our current culture could have the motto, unashamedly making profit more important than people and unapologetically using raw power to punish whoever gets in our way.

James Cone, Charles Augustus Briggs Distinguished Professor of Theology at Union Theological Seminary in NYC, has said that it is time for white America to be quiet.  Here’s what I know and what I want to leave you with. Our American culture is in dire need of a massive infusion of love.  We must rapidly begin to teach and talk about those ways that we can be with one another that are most powerfully healing, creative, and transformative. And when it comes to hearing from our brothers and sisters of color both at home and abroad, their truths about who we are and what we have done as a nation, it would be a great gift if we would be just be quiet and listen.

May it be so, Amen.