Bravely ourselves

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
May 27, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

In her newest book, Brene Brown examines the supposed duality between becoming fully ourselves as individuals and finding true belonging and community. She finds it to be a false duality. She raises the question of how we find sacredness both in being a part of something and in standing alone when necessary.

Call to Worship

Exerpt from Dr Brene Brown’s book, “Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone”.

True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness.

True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are. It requires you to be who you are.

Reading

Exerpt from Dr Brene Brown’s book, “Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone”.

Theologians, writers, poets, and musicians have always used the wilderness as a metaphor, to represent everything from a vast and dangerous environment where we are forced to difficult trials to a refuge of nature and beauty where we seek space for contemplation. What all wilderness have in common are the notions of solitude, vulnerability, and emotional, spiritual, or physical quest.

Belonging fully to that you’re willing to stand alone is a wilderness — an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, as sought after as it is feared. The wilderness can often feel unholy because we can’t control it, or what people think about our choice of whether to venture into that vastness or not. But turns our to be the place of true belonging, and it’s the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand.

The special courage it takes to experience true belonging is not about braving the wilderness, it’s about becoming the wilderness. It’s about breaking down the walls, abandoning our ideological bunkers, and living our wild heart rather than our weary hurt.

Sermon

I’d like to begin today with a confession.

I am still struggling myself with what I am going to talk with you about today. I still mess up. I still get angry or hurt and make mistakes.

The last time I preached, I talked about human rights activist, Valarie Kour, and how she says that to build the Beloved Community, we must practice revolutionary love – love that is an intentional act both brutally difficult at times and ultimately beautiful and life-giving.

She says that are three aspects of revolutionary love. We must love ourselves; we must love others who do not look like us; and we must love our opponents, even those who would harm us.

It’s that last one I am struggling with this morning.

Anyone else struggle with that one? Valarie Kour confesses that she struggles with it too.

She tells the story of the first person killed in a hate crime in response to the attacks of 911, a close family friend named Balbir Singh Sohdi who like her, was a Sikh. Frank Roak, the killer, mistook him for a Muslim, because of Balbir’s turban and beard.

Roak had bragged, “I am going to go out and shoot some towel heads. We should kill their children too.”

Flash forward 15 years, she returned to site of the shooting and was joined by Balbir’s brother, Ranna. They lit a candle, mourning how little had changed.”

Kour asked, “Who have we not tried to love yet?”

And so, 15 years later, they called Frank Roak, who was still in prison.

They asked him why he agreed to take their call.

Roak replied, “I am sorry for what I did to your brother, but I am also sorry for all the people killed on 911”.

Ranna somehow found the compassion to not react to the second part of that and say, “That is the first time I have heard you say that you feel sorry.”

Roak answered, “Yes, I am sorry for what I did to your brother. One day, when I go to be judged by God, I will ask to see your brother, and I will hug him, and I will ask him for forgiveness.”

Ranna replied, “We already forgave you”.

Here is how Kour explains what she learned from that story.

VIDEO

So forgiveness, finding a way to be in conversation even with our opponents, is not releasing them from accountability. It is not giving up on struggling, fighting, resisting, rebelling against an ideology we oppose.

It is living our own values to their fullest.

It is, as Kour puts it, tending the wounds, both theirs and ours – the wounds that are so greatly and dangerously dividing us.

Dr Brene Brown, social worker, researcher, author and our second Ted Talk divinity for this morning, approaches much this same challenge in her book, “Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone”.

I can only scratch the surface of this book full of great information this morning, so I’ll start by simply highly recommending it to you.

Part of what she reveals though is how we as a society have been moving more and more into silos.

We are segregating ourselves not just by race and ethnicity anymore, but also by societal and political ideology.

We move geographically to live around people whose ideology largely matches our own.

We interact on the web and social media with people of like mind.

We attend churches or other communal institutions with folks who think and believe much like us.

Conservatives watch the “Fox Propaganda Network” and progressives watch the Rachel Maddow Ultimate Truth and Journalistic Integrity Hour”.

OK, I am joking. The truth is we all are getting a lot of editorializing.

And yet the data shows that we are lonelier than ever before. We have LESS of a sense of belonging, the more we segregate ourselves with only the likeminded.

Perhaps it is because we never have to be challenged by a different perspective. Perhaps we never have to go out into the wilderness and truly determine who we are, what we believe, what values we hold dearest, because all we have to do is go along with what the people with whom we already agree are saying.

And if we haven’t done the work of knowing who we truly are, we get triggered far too easily. We lose civility. We get on Facebook and spout simple slogans or share dehumanizing posts about our political opponents, which Brown notes diminishes our own humanity and drives us to feel even more isolated.

We avoid having the substantive and much needed conversations that might allow us to find reconnection. Hells Bells, as my grandmother used to say, we avoid even being around those with whom we disagree.

The problem is these are our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens and, far to often, our friends and family members.

The problem is, if we never have those difficult but civil conversations, we will never move forward. We will retreat more and more into our ideological bunkers until the fabric of society itself comes unraveled.

I know I sometimes avoid such conversations because they can be so very, very hard. I’m afraid I will make mistakes. I’m afraid I’ll get hurt.

That’s why it made me feel so much better to hear my Guru Brene Brown say much the same thing.

VIDEO

Good advice – especially for social media.

Another of my personal gurus, Van Jones, human rights activist, attorney, CNN commentator, and author of another recommended book, “Beyond the Messy Truth: How We Came Apart; How We Come Together” also offers much that is very, very helpful on this subject.

Today, I want to share a story he told at a recent conference I attended.

Jones tells of visiting communities in West Virginia where they were having to bring in freezer trucks on Friday nights because too many bodies of people who had died of opium overdoses were coming in over the weekend to hold them all in the local morgues.

Babies were being born already addicted and then losing both their parents.

Jones brought five leaders who had emerged from the 1980s crack epidemic in his community in Los Angeles with him West Virginia to work with five leaders there.

He says that was hard, because when drugs were ravaging his community, it was not treated as a public health issue. It was treated as a criminal issue – with brutality and imprisonment.

They began by sharing pictures of people each of them had lost. Out of that common pain, came a common purpose. They forged relations across their differences and divides.

I want to let you hear him tell about something that happened while they were there.

VIDEO

“The biggest danger we face is becoming what we are fighting”

But how do we avoid that? How do we engage with civility, even when those whom we disagree, are not always so civil toward us?

Well, there are no easy answers. It’s difficult even for these folks with far more expertise on this than me. All three say it is hard. And yet all three also say it is absolutely necessary.

Here are some thoughts.

Brene Brown says that people are hard to hate close up, so move in. Get to know them. Engage with them.

In the best book chapter title of all time, she also writes, “Speak Truth to Bullshit. Be civil”.

We can hold people accountable without using personal attacks. We can hold fast to our values without dehumanizing others.

No shaming, no name calling, no putting other people down.

We can listen and reflect back to people what they say. We can ask, “can I tell you how that makes me feel or what I understand about this?”

Valarie Kour talks about approaching other people with curiosity and wonder. She talks about the importance of sharing our stories and listening to theirs. “Stories,” she says, “can create the wonder that turns strangers into sisters and brothers.”

Van Jones speaks of searching for common ground – not mushy middle ground – but true shared interests. He talks about how he is working with conservatives such as Newt Gingrich on issues such as our criminal justice system, the addiction crisis and creating high tech and clean tech jobs.

It is difficult. Finding compassion, much less love, for those who might harm us is gut-wrenchingly hard. I know. 1’m one of the targets. Certainly none of should try to engage in a situation where we are at threat for physical harm.

I don’t have all the answers. None of us do.

I do know this. I know we have to try. I know we will never build the beloved community if we disconnect from, leave out, 30 to 40% of the population. We have to build a new way.

After the last Presidential election I found myself needing to have this kind of conversation with my mom. She gave me permission to share this story with you.

She had voted for Donald Trump.

I had posted some things on social media that were … strongly worded.

Our relationship had become strained. We avoided the topic. It is hard for love to flourish when pain has been left unspoken.

We agreed to talk. We set ground rules – each of us in turn would talk about our perspectives on the election and its aftermath – no interrupting, no arguing, no trying to convince the other of anything.

And it was difficult. And it was holy. And the ground beneath us and between us shifted, as if God had entered the room and held us both as we moved through that difficult but ultimately loving conversation. My beloveds, we can do this. It will not be easy, but we can build that new way.

We can build the be-(revolutionary)-loved community.

Amen.

Benediction

“We are bound together in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny”.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s words still ring true and powerful today.

And that means that even as we leave this sanctuary today, our work together to help build the beloved community goes on, as we work for justice that can transform both the lives of others and our own.

Likewise, the courage, community and compassion we experience here go with us also.

May the congregation say, “Amen”, and “blessed be”.

Go in peace. Go in love.

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