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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
February 11, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
In our mission, we say that we “do justice”. What if truly doing justice requires not just new ways of thinking but new ways of being? Equity instead of equality? Liberation versus liberalism? Proximity rather than paternalism? What if we moved beyond charitable compassion to a love that is revolutionary?
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most! – and listens to their testimony. – James Baldwin
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places – and there are so many – where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
– Howard Zinn
Sermon
I want to share something with you.
VIDEO
That’s Danez Smith, award winning poet, writer, and performer who identifies as queer, non-binary, and HIV positive.
It is part of their poem “Principles”.
If you get the chance, it is well worth watching the rest of their performance, which you can find on YouTube. Their words demand to be heard.
Because Danez Smith isn’t calling for incremental fixes to a country filled with so many systems of oppression and denial that we can no longer believe that those systems are “broken”.
When year after year, we witness the continued killing of unarmed BIPoe folks by law enforcement – When one out of every seven police interventions results in bodily injury – When we know that one out of every eight black person in the U.S. will be sent to prison –
When year after year after year, despite both so called liberal and so called conservative interventions, inequities by race, gender and gender identity, sexual orientation and more continue to persist in employment, income, wealth, housing, healthcare, education, food and nutrition, well just about every facet of life in the U.S., every system and sector of our society, we have to face the reality that these systems are not broken.
They are functioning exactly as they are intended.
They are concentrating more and more wealth and power within the control of fewer and fewer folks.
And still, most of them white. Most of them male. Most of them heterosexual. Most of them Cis. Most of them already born into power and wealth to begin with.
That’s the system.
So, Danez Smith is crying out not to repair America around the edges, but to replace our fundamental societal structures with something entirely new that lives up to the values of justice, liberty, and the potential for human dignity and fulfillment we claim to hold.
Here is more of what they have to say:
i want to be a citizen of something new.
i want a country for the immigrant hero.
i want a country where joy is indigenous as the people.
i want a country that keeps its word.
i want to not be scared to drink the water …
i want a country not trying to cure itself of me …
I want a nation under a kinder god.
I want justice the verb not justice the dream.”
Danez Smith is “talkin bout a revolution”. My words, not theirs.
Well, those of Traci Chapman in the lyrics of her song we heard earlier.
And so, if are to make justice a verb, to do justice as we say in our mission, if we are to tear down the systems of injustice we have now and build new ones – build The Beloved community – we need a revolution in our ways of thinking and being in our world.
Folks as diverse as Bryan Stevenson, social justice activist and law professor to faith activist Rev. William Barber, provide what I think are at least fours ways in which we can create that revolution.
The first is to root our work for justice in a theology that moves and sustains us.
Now that word theology can sometimes freak out some Unitarian Universalists (UUs for short) because it can imply a creedal belief system involving a God or Gods.
But it does not have to involve these things.
Rev. Dr. Elias Ortega, of our UU Meadville Lombard Theological School describes how theology can be “practices of being, thinking, and acting in the world” that move us toward that which we hold most vital.
For Unitarian Universalism, our theology grows out of traditions embracing the unity of all life and creation and a universal love that flows through our universe and our lives.
Our is a living, ever evolving theology of collective liberation, that values all people and beings, especially lifting up those of us who experience marginalization and inequity.
It is a relational theology that recognizes that each of us can only reach for our fullest creative potential when all of us are able to do so.
In the famous words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
We need one another.
The revolution, the Beloved community, can only become when it is co-created by us all.
And such a theology moves us to the second way we might build a justice revolution.
In the late 80s and early 90s, I was involved in non-profit HIV / AIDS research, education, treatment and humans services.
All greatly needed because so many people were suffering and dying from the disease.
And even though I could see every day how much this charitable work was necessary, I started to grow more and more depressed and disillusioned, as more and more people I had come to know and love died, one after the other.
I remember at one point looking through my contact list and realizing that at least a third of the people in it had died of the disease.
And so I began to realize that only providing charitable support, as much as it was needed, was doing nothing to address the systemic racism and anti-LGBTQ bigotry that were blocking people from learning how to keep from getting the disease in the first place and accessing treatment once exposed.
I began to see the complete lack of humanity in a healthcare system and drug development process that exist to worship the Gods of profit at the expense human life and wellbeing.
And so I knew I had to also get involved in activism and building new systems to replace those that were quite literally killing people.
Research from Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation reveals that the vast majority of charity in the U.S. actually goes from the wealthy to the wealthy – to healthcare facilities, institutions of higher education and the like that serve mainly the very rich.
And as I had discovered with HIV/AIDS, charity, wherein most often the powerful determine what and how to give to the less powerful, can frequently serve to uphold systems of inequity by alleviating just enough pressure to prevent the rebellion against them that might otherwise arise.
As educator and philanthropic innovation researcher Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen says, “Charity is about helping people survive. Justice is about helping people thrive.”
A theology of collective liberation moves us beyond charitable compassion toward a revolutionary love that dismantles the unjust systems creating the need for charity in the first place.
And this leads us to a third and corresponding way we can revolutionize how we do justice.
A relational theology requires us to be in proximity to those with whom we are trying to be in solidarity.
Mother Teresa once said, ” … it is fashionable to talk about the poor, it is not so fashionable to talk with them.”
We call for justice, yet we don’t want the multi-family, low cost housing project in our neighborhood.
We prefer to drive across town to volunteer for the charity health clinic.
And don’t put that homeless shelter in the old hotel down the street.
And lest we think this is a conservative versus liberal issue, research indicates that liberal enclaves are some of the most segregated in the country.
As our call to worship pointed out earlier though, to change systems, we have to be in conversation with those who are most affected by those systems.
And, further, collective liberation theology calls us to follow their lead.
In 2015, I joined a group ofUU’s from across the country in Selma, Alabama at the 50th anniversary commemoration of the march for voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Several of the mostly white UU s there had to be told that, no, they would not be at the front of the commemorative march across that bridge.
The black folks who had organized the event and whose lives had after all been most affected by the history being remembered were perfectly capable of leading their own march.
Here’s an example of when we’ve done better.
First UU helped to form the Austin Sanctuary Network, and from the beginning the sanctuary network has centered in its leadership folks most affected by our inhumane immigration system.
Collective liberation theology moves us from paternalism to proximity.
Finally, I believe that our faith is strong enough, our underlying theology powerful enough, that it can sustain us through the discomfort in which we will have to dwell at times in our journey toward transformation.
Discomfort?
What in the world is Rev. Chris on about now?
Go with me for just a moment into some discomfort that exists right here within this here very church.
We have had a lot of surveys, listening sessions, and the like in the church over the last couple of years, haven’t we?
Well, some themes around where we feel discomfort have occasionally emerged.
For instance, we want First UU to be a strong force for justice in our world.
And there is some discomfort talking about politics in church.
But you know, a lot of what happens regarding justice or injustice, is enacted through legislation or through court rulings, both of which are driven by politics.
So, while we are prohibited from supporting political candidates or parties, we must move through any discomfort around justice-related political issues, whether in church or in the public arena.
I can assure you our fundamentalist faith counterparts have no such discomfort.
And further, given the need for revolutionary change that Danez Smith proclaims in their poem …
And given that far too often our political choices these days seem to be between regressivism at worst and painfully slow incrementalism at best, we will need even more than political engagement.
We will need more than protests and marches.
We will be required to dream of new societal systems and structures and to begin living out them out, sometimes in rebellious ways, within our daily lives.
And that can be extremely uncomfortable for those of us for whom the current systems provide privilege.
As author and activist Arundhati Roy says of war, “Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe.”
UU theologian (and one of my favorite people), Sharon Welch, applies this to the many aspects of our lives in her book, “After the Protests are Heard“.
She writes that we must notice “the ways ways our everyday decisions already create more justice.”
And though that awareness may sometimes bring discomfort, changing even small acts in our daily lives, as our reading earlier described, germinates seeds of hope and transformation.
Here are some of Danez Smith’s thoughts on that hope.
VIDEO
My beloveds, rooted in faith, we can move the mountain. Sustained by a theology of liberation for all of us, every single one of us, now, now, we’re talkin’ bout a revolution.
Benediction
As we go out into our world now, may you carry with you a sense of the great river of love that flows through our universe and through each of us.
A revolutionary love that moves us toward equity, justice, and the realization of the Beloved Community.
May you also carry with you the love of this religious community, until next we are gathered again.
May the congregation say, “Amen”, and “blessed be”.
Go in peace.
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