Acceptance and encouragement

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 13, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Our third UU principle says we will affirm and promote acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations. Are there some ways to encourage one another that don’t sound like judgment or advice?

Sermon

There was a big election upset. “Upset” is how many of us feel. Sad, sick, shaken. Angry. Blaming people who didn’t vote, regretting not working harder, for believing pollsters and pundits. Many of us broke up with the news for a while, broke up with social media, cynical about anyone’s explanations of why and how this happened. They didn’t know squat before the election. Why listen to them now. Upset.

And here come the holidays, family time. Some stay with chosen family during those times (we’re having Thanksgiving dinner here at 2:30 on the day, but others go to the family they were born or adopted into. For most of us, there are people we will see who would say they love us, but who voted for someone whose policies and promises threaten us and our beloveds.

Do we beg off this season? Do we say we just have too much going on or do we tell the truth, that we have not yet figured out how to sit at a table and eat with people who actively participated in bringing about a situation in which we or our beloveds are suddenly endangered, vulnerable? Did they just want change so badly that they were willing to shrug off our fears as unfounded? Would they shrug off stories of bullying’s escalation, of hate crimes increasing? Would they shake their heads and say “not all Trump supporters?” They would never beat up someone. If they saw a person of color thrown to the ground by a white man, would they interfere? If it were a police officer would they start filming? If they went into their kids’ school and saw a kid with brown skin crying because someone just told her to go back to Mexico, or because her best uncle just got deported, would they shrug and say well, you don’t have a country if you don’t have borders? They have shrugged off a cascade of racist statements and stances, the discovery of a confession of sexual assault (yes, grabbing a woman’s private places is a sexual assault,) they have shrugged off or explained away mysterious finances, possible ties to an enemy power, made it clear that we queer folks, brown and black folks, women and children don’t deserve protection as much as they deserve— what? Survival is how some Trump voters see it. They need jobs and they feel forgotten (because they have been) and they feel endangered. In most rural parts of the country, there is no liberal news channel. Maybe they’ll get CNN, but mostly they get Fox. Fox facts are the only facts they hear. They want to feel safer, and they made a choice to dismiss and shrug away the dangers staring the rest of us in the face. That’s hard to understand and forgive. Also, I could be wrong. They may not want to feel safer. They may also not want to change their picture of what an American looks like. Or they may just want someone in charge who is a Big Daddy, and will tell them he’s got this, don’t worry any more.

Some white folks are claiming to be so surprised, shocked at the glimpse of the America they’ve just seen. They had NO IDEA it was this bad. No person of color is shocked or stunned. It was part of a sleepy and thoughtless privilege to remain unaware of the racism and the deep-rooted sexism in our culture. Now they’ll say “Oh, it’s not that bad.” And it won’t be bad for a lot of us. It will continue to be bad and worse for women, who are already hearing coarse men “joking” about grabbing their private places. What we have learned is that people who say they love us are willing to shrug, to excuse, to blame it on God or their preacher, to minimize our fear and wave away our concerns. The Mike Pence headshake with downcast eyes and dismissive chuckle is going to become the gesture of art in conversation.

How do we talk to those we love, those who claim to love us, when they have chosen to vote for “change,” (the kindest word I can find for this conflagration of American Constitutional values)

What we know is that it’s going to be really difficult. Awkward at its very best. I’ll tell you what I know today, and that’s the best I can do.

We go BACK TO BASICS when things get bad. That’s what we do. Our UU basics are our principles. The third one, the one I was scheduled to talk about today, turns out to be perfect for this problem. We covenant together to affirm and promote acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations. You all know that I like to say “in our homes and congregations,” so here we go.

Acceptance of one another means acceptance of the people who have different ideas from ours. Acceptance of the people does not mean or even imply acceptance of all of their ideas, because some ideas are destructive, and lead to injustice. We accept the people, though. I accept that you are who you are, and I trust that you will be you. I may need to protect myself or others from you. I may need to limit what I talk to you about, but I accept that you are who you are. That’s being a Unitarian Universalist. What is this “encouragement to spiritual growth” part, though? Well, spiritual growth is where you get clear about your values, and you live those values, so your spirit’s water runs clear and doesn’t hurt anyone downstream. Do we encourage spiritual growth through argument? I imagine there are some people who have grown through being harangued or shamed, but not many. People grow spiritually when we feel a dissonance between our values and our actions, and when we can deal with that dissonance in an atmosphere of curiosity and respect. Not safety, necessarily. Change is hard. No comfort, but curiosity and respect.

1. Figure out what you want for you, what you want for them, and what you want for the relationship. That’s what the Crucial Conversations people suggest. 2. Listen deeply. Listen with focus, suffused with curiosity, until you can almost see how they got there. That’s what the FBI hostage negotiators suggest when you’re trying to get someone rigid with certainty and grievance to put down their weapon and come out peacefully.

3. Give your own internal “weather report.” No one can argue with you saying “I feel afraid for my people who are black, brown, undocumented, queer, differently abled. I am sick and sad, and watchful for signs of autocracy. I love this country whether it’s right or wrong, and that means that sometimes it’s wrong. I believe it’s wrong now. And I love you, even though I’m hurt by your actions right now.”

4. Don’t despair. This may sound harsh, but that is a privileged response. Folks in marginalized communities and populations have been struggling forever. There is life and joy in the midst of struggle. Just because there is a struggle doesn’t mean you did something wrong. Not everything can be fixed. Life is struggle, and we can’t afford to give up.

5. Resist at every turn. The time to be nice and silent is not now. We don’t argue and shame individuals, but public policies, actions of the government, contempt for the press or the judiciary? We lobby. We write letters, we make noise. Those of us who are disruptors disrupt, and those who want the power of respectability, use that power for good.

6. One thing people are doing to indicate that they are protectors, safe spaces, is to wear safety pins on their clothing. We have boxes of them in the Gallery at the Social Action table. BUT. Here’s what it means when you put it on. You are willing to get next to a brown or black or Muslim person at a bus stop if you see them being harassed. It means you have looked online to see how to deescalate a potentially violent situation. We don’t want to make things worse. It means you will take the time to find out how to get that person to safety. If you have your kids with you you may want to take it off, if you don’t want them involved in such a situation. If you are feeling rushed and committed or weak and weird that day, you can take it off. People are wearing them, not to signify that they are a perfect ally, but to signify that they want to get there, and that they are actively seeking out training in order to be a good ally. We don’t wear them because all the cool kids are doing it, or because we feel guilty about the racist comments we didn’t challenge in order to keep things sweet on the surface.

7. Challenge. A good long stare is sometimes enough. A full minute of silence, count it off in your head. You haven’t said anything, you can’t be kicked out of the family or friend group, but the Dowager Countess face with a full minute of silence will go far. Let’s practice that now.

8. Engage by asking questions. Questions are powerful. Most of your ministers have preached sermons about asking good questions. “Help me understand this.” “How did you come to this view?” “What is your favorite thing about this?” “Do you have any concerns about this?” I wrote a whole sermon about asking questions that should be on our podcast somewhere. Watch Van Jones’ The Messy Truth videos. He is a Black man, a commentator on CNN, he spoke at General Assembly a few years ago. He gets in a room with a politically and racially mixed group and engages with such strength and kindness until he gets to the common values people can agree on. So we can build on strengths instead of clawing at differences.

9. We cannot afford to be squeamish here. We cannot be separatists. If you don’t have the spiritual strength to get in there and find common ground with people, that’s how it is, but if you do, you can build on people’s strengths, on their values. Van Jones as filmed some conversations of himself doing this in mixed political groups. He searches underneath the facts and talking points for someone’s vision of how things should be. Maybe we can ask people about the world they think should be. Maybe we can say “what is your vision of a fair country?”

There are loud and scary people in this country with varying points of view. Some of the loudest, scariest people who used to be dismissed as being fringe elements have just won the right to occupy the White House. If we talk to our friends and relatives who were Trump voters, if we find shared values with those regular people, we strengthen them and ourselves for times of trouble. Most of them don’t want to see hate crimes. They don’t want to see school children bullied. If we can all agree on that, that’s something. Most of us, after eighteen months of the most astonishingly vulgar and shocking campaign rhetoric, feel battered, wounded. Many of us are triggered and traumatized by having a loud verbally and sexually aggressive insecure narcissist in our peripheral vision for a long time, representing the loud aggressive bullying man in our past experience. Many among us do not have the strength yet to do anything like have a curious conversation with Trump supporters. Those among us who do, though, need to strengthen alliances. Things will go badly for the asylum seekers first, and those are our people. Then they will go badly for the undocumented men and women, boys and girls. People of color, poor people, women, gay women, gay men, then men who disagree with those in power. I hope none of that happens, but we are watching. We are watching for how the press is being treated, and it’s not starting in any kind of a reassuring way. This is not up to anyone else, my people. We must train ourselves to be the safe ones. You can wear safety pins to designate yourself as a safe person for Muslims, people of color and the undocumented. If you wear them, though, be sure to know that it means you have some knowledge of what to do in a situation where you’re needed. Whom to call, where to drive someone to, which agencies can be of help. We don’t wear safety pins because we would like to be competent allies, but because we are becoming competent allies. May that be so, more and more.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

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