Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church-Unitarian Universalist

Chalice Bearers

March 4, 2007

Rev. Leslie Takahashi Morris

This weekend, a number of us spent time reflecting on the complexities of our identities—our racial identities, our family identities—all in our Unitarian Universalist frame. For me personally, it brought together many of my circles of association. In February 2005, the morning after David and I had the amazing experience of being called in co-ministry here, I received a phone call from Skinner House Books informing me that a proposal I was part of submitting had been accepted. We had, foolishly, agreed to write a history of recent anti-racism efforts in the UUA. In the space of 48 hours I had made the journey from unemployment to over-employment. What this has meant is that in my off hours, I have spent time with the difficult, inspiring story of how we have traveled together as an Association on this part of our religious journey. So just a warning, for those of you who think I pack too many ideas in one sermon, hold onto your hats because my text this morning is a 500-page single-spaced unfinished manuscript!

In those pages is the range we saw here this weekend: a woman struggling with what it means to be white and to play out in systems that call us all into roles we don’t want to play; an older African-American man a bit tired of telling his story again and again; a young boy celebrating his complex heritage in pictures and words; middle and high school students, many of them multiracial, talking about how privilege and power play out in their daily lives; a Latino woman whose family rejects her children and her strange liberal religion; bi-racial couples whose know many are still affronted by their existence who find a haven in our walls ; a young adult of color raised a UU grieving that she is no longer comfortable in any UU church. All of them have a story and are linked stories that came before.

For these are not new stories among us. My sifting through countless words and pictures suggest that struggling against that which denied human dignity and which thwarts our dreams of embracing community has been and is part of our religious impulse. The story of how we have moved together can be told as a series of events, punctuated most recently by three resolutions passed at the General Assembly. Our delegates voted in 1992 to call on our Association and its congregations to wrestle with issues of race and with dominant, culturally produced attitudes. It can be told after that through countless meetings, writing and conversations about why the work was divisive and not part of a religious charge.

The “facts” do not lead to any logical clear conclusion, except that our failure to discuss our history left us stuck in it for decades. You can tell it in heroes or in embarrassments. You can count how much money has been spent, how many people have left because of frustration with the pace of progress-their contributions forgotten, how many have gained understanding, the unprecedented number of seminarians of color are in our pipeline today, and how much facial diversity is found in our associational leadership and among our youth —or in our congregations on Sundays.

Yet the largest story is about things you can’t count: identity, relationship and faith. This story has shadows of slavery, and of the 1960s when a young Unitarian Universalist Association was rocked by a series of controversies about race when it was still in its elementary school years. At a time when its members were still trying to sort out what it meant to be a Unitarian Universalists, they played hero and villain in a difficult twisting set of dramatic events. Without a clear religious mandate, the debate had no mooring and was so painful that for more than a generation, we dealt with this mostly by not talking about it, trying to get by. Then, in the 1980s when these issues surfaced once more, we were wary and tenuous—and still unresolved about our history, still surprised when we touched unhealed and festering wounds.

In our collective story, each voice brings a particular view. Standing out are those who have led the way—through their willingness to talk about hard issues and to speak their truths. Janice Marie Johnson, a religious professional of African and Caribbean descent, calls those who take the flame of our faith into places it hasn’t been before “chalice bearers.” This weekend this space was hallowed by the physical presence of many leaders who have sacrificed much to light the way. And as a movement, we have learned to listen, some, to other voices. In this way, we created Sanctuary. Others call for our ear, ghosts from the past and our children among them.

For this work is at the core of our identity as a religious people–and it challenges our core identity—as UU’s because it is tied to our deepest held beliefs about ourselves and about the world we want to create. It suggests that freedom of the individual needs to be held in tension with a community of seekers. It suggests that some things are so complex they demand our best thinking—and cannot be approached by thinking alone. And it requires that we understand the paradox that our being ahead of the curve on these issues doesn’t make us gods of righteousness—revelation is not sealed and we still have a few things we need to learn at the same time that we lead the way for others. We have, over this last decade or so, learned to tell a more complex story about our identity. We see this most clearly in the way our youth and young people have often served as chalice bearers for us on issues on identity. The key will be to continue to see ourselves as travelers.

To sit with the words of some of those chalice bearers has been sacred, hard work. Here a white associational leader talks about why addressing issues of race is religious work: “It matters because it’s at the core of what we are about. We can’t be what we want to be, or what we think we are, or what we think we want to be without seriously addressing the fact that racism exists in our society. It’s a major, major issue and because we have tried to get our hands around it, albeit not quite knowing what we’re doing and not being sure how to be effective, and not being sure what works and what doesn’t but because we keep trying to work, if we gave up on that and said well, actually either ‘That’s too hard, there’s nothing we can do that will change it’ or ‘It’s not important, we have other things we need to do,’ it would absolutely betray the integrity of what we see as our religious mission, in my opinion. And I would not be interested in that. It’s a religious imperative. It’s what makes us more than a community of like-minded folks.”

Relationship is important to us. Many of us are “come-in-ers” and as such fear anything that might divide us and, as a result, are somewhat conflict averse. We get fearful when our relationships falter because this faith is our sanctuary. Yet one experience people of color who have been with us for years have in our congregations is a feeling of always being “guests”, held a little outside relationship, repeatedly greeted with surprise that that someone who looks like them would be a UU.

A former member of the Black Concerns Working Group in the early 1990s said: “When asked ‘Why are you a Unitarian Universalist?’ I explain. And if the questioner continues to question, I tell them that Unitarian Universalism is the only religion I can stand. That really seems to confuse them.”

In our collective story, this is best illustrated by the ways we have built infrastructure of relationship and accountability and formed new groups who provide people a sanctuary around their experiences. For me, and this is the hardest part to tell, it is about people, people who have fought with, people who we have fought with and people who have literally died without knowing whether the blood and tears they have shed over these issues have been for naught. Many of the stories about how we as Unitarian Universalists have struggled with race, perhaps most, find many where you may be now, thinking this has nothing to do with religion and is merely an annoying social justice insect buzzing around some beloved sacred cows. Sometimes you can understand a movement best by its negative. At one point in our journey as an association, a catch phrase was that our issue wasn’t about race, it was about class. A false dichotomy—for we have obvious problems with both. And yet, I say today that the problem is not race, it is faith. For this journey, I believe, is best seen as a journey of faith.

Seen as a matter of faith, we are each called into deep dialogue with matters of belief, matters, for example, of good and evil, something our progress-oriented, human-good-centered beliefs give us little vocabulary around. Theologian Paul Razor writes: "Whether the structure we're dealing with is racism, or sexism, or heterosexism, or violence, or materialism, the evil is in the ability of the dominant worldview to make itself seem logical, even necessary. To fight them, we need an inner transformation…. It is not simply a matter of purifying our hearts. It is also a matter of coming to have a different sort of perception. What we need in these cases is the kind of transformation that will allow us to perceive things in a new way. We need a shift in our worldview, a new gestalt that allows us to move forward together and to resist. Social analysis by itself can't give us this. In fact, much of our social analysis is done from the perspective of the dominant worldview. Much of our social justice work makes only a political statement, not a faith statement. It can speak only to the intellect, and seeks a political response. But when we deal with the spiritual aspect, we are making a faith claim, and what we seek is a spiritual response." In other words, there is no turning back or being turned around.

We have yet, I believe, to fully claim the power of our heritage, a heritage that includes powerful concepts such as the idea that all are capable of redemption. Rev. Bill Sinkford, the first African American president of our Association asked ten years ago, “Why would anyone doubt that our faith, our radical belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, our trust in the spark of divinity which each of us carries…how could anyone doubt the appeal of such a faith and the need for such a faith in this very broken world. We HAVE good news to share. We have an abundance of good news…that sometimes we can’t even recognize it.”

If addressing issues of race in our congregations is social justice work, it doesn’t matter as much how we get there. If it is a matter of faith, how we get there is more important than when. The story that Martha Niebanck tells speaks of all the complexities of these journeys to better understand one another’s perspectives. Being open to new revelations is part of our religious identity and our faith, our way of bringing what we believe to life. If you are committed to ending oppression, do you do it as a Unitarian Universalist, with respect for the inherent worth and dignity of all those oppressed and all those oppressing.

So how does this matter to each of us? I believe knowing where we have been gives us we a truer sense of the power of our faith. To know who we are, who we are in relationship with, and what we believe is essential. Today’s racism is not usually the dramatic kind that demanded a march on Selma, a step out of everyday life to answer a call. It is more likely to be what one Asian Pacific Islander UU called recently, “death by a thousand paper cuts.” It is subtle and pervasive and exhausting.

Faith is a forest and we need to know the soil in which we are planted. We need to understand its roots and its history, our resources and our vulnerabilities. The story has a place for each of us. Janice Marie Johnson pointed out to me that when she offered the term “chalice bearer,” in a truly Universalist sense. She sees us all as chalice bearers—called upon to take our faith to places where it has never been. Into the world, into difficult dialogues with people we love, into places deeper in our own hearts than it has penetrated before. As this spring comes round again, may we all seek ourselves as growing towards justice. We are all chalice bearers It is about race. It is about class. Most of all, it is about faith. May we keep on walking. May we keep on talking.

Sermon Response: “Crocus Prayer” kim crawford harvie

adapted from an anonymous source]

It takes courage to be crocus-minded.

. . . I’d rather wait until June,

Like wild roses,

When the hazards of winter are

Safely behind and I’m expected,

And everything’s ready for

Roses.

But crocuses?

Highly irregular.

Knifing up through hard-frozen

Ground and snow,

Sticking their necks out

Because they believe in spring

And have something personal

And emphatic

To say about it,

. . . I am not by nature crocus-minded.

Even when I have studied the

Situation here, and know there

Are wrongs that need righting,

Affirmations that need stating,

And know also that my speaking

Out may offend,

For it rocks the boat—

Well, I’d rather wait until

June.

Maybe later things will work

Themselves out,

And we won’t have to make an

Issue of it.

. . . Forgive (me).

Wrongs won’t work themselves

Out.

Injustices and inequities and

Hurt don’t just dissolve.

Somebody has to stick (their) neck out,

Somebody who

Cares enough to think through

And work through

Hard ground,

Because (they) believe

And (they have) something personal

And emphatic

To say about it.

Me . . . : Crocus-minded?

Could it be that there are

Things that need to be said,

And (I need) to say them?

I pray for courage. Amen.

Closing Words Words of Amaretta Callaway

May we step forth from here in love—

love that empowers us;

love that spills forth from us;

love that recognizes our neighbor in the nameless

stranger on the street.