The Only Lasting Truth

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Rev. Jonalu Johnstone
November 13, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Octavia Butler writes in “The Parable of the Sower” that the only lasting truth is change. In this week after the election, we’ll consider change and its impact in our political system and in our lives. “All that you touch, you Change. All that you Change Changes you.

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

By Katie Kardarian-Morris

Here we have come into this sacred space –
quieter now with our readiness
Hushed voices, hoping, trusting for so many things:
For connection, for communion
For inspiration, for information
For healing, for wholeness,
For words, for music,
For celebration and consolation,
Here we have come into this space bringing all of who we are,
Let us be willing … however we are changed.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Moment for Beloved Community

In this post-election moment, it seems a good time to remember why we, as religious people in religious community, care about elections. There are some easy answers – that as Unitarian Universalists, we value democracy; that we want to make real our values in the world.

I also want to remind us why we don’t care about elections. In his blog this week, Rev. Chris told us something about the specific legal limits. I want to remind us of the larger limits, the limits that Divinity sets. We as a religious community are not concerned with power for the sake of power, for obtaining or maintaining our own privileges. It’s easy to be tempted by power, to get drawn into winning and losing and strategic choices. As religious people, though, we are called to a higher standard – to examine carefully, to not deal so much in strategy, or our personal bottom line, as to deal in the moral bottom line. The Rev. Dr. William Barbour of the Poor People’s Campaign has written:

[A] moral movement claims higher ground in partisan debate by returning public discourse to our deepest moral and constitutional values …. We cannot allow so-called conservatives to hijack the powerful language of faith; neither can we let so-called liberals pretend that moral convictions are not at play in public policy debates. Every budget is a moral document or it is an immoral one.

[The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics and the Rise of a New Justice Movement, p. 128]

A political group focuses on what can be achieved, the art of the possible. As a religious people, we are focused on bigger issues of values and principles, the broader questions of how we ought to live in the world and what the world ought to be like. Part of our obligation as a religious community, as a prophetic community, is to notice and name right and wrong. We’re at a place in history where those qualities are shining in bolder relief.

So, the work is not ended because the election is over. We are called to remind our elected leaders whoever they are – of the moral imperatives that motivate us, whether we mostly agree with those leaders, or mostly disagree with them. We speak with moral authority because the Beloved Community we build is not just this church, but our whole world.

Unlike candidates and parties, we are not about political strategies and tactics. I’ve been involved in politics enough to know the angling and alliances that politics require. In politics, compromise is messy, and morality often obscured. We cannot be obsessed by strategy and tactics. We never want to become centered on having power alone – always on the moral ends, not the political ends. I’m not naive enough to believe that the strategies are completely avoidable. We will be involved in some of those conversations.

Sometimes, though, we may need to do things that may not be the most strategic. We may meet with elected representatives who we feel it’s a waste of time because of our radical disagreement. We may speak either more strongly, or more diplomatically than some of our allies. We may not value strategy as much as truth. Because sometimes something just needs to be said. And we never know what seeds we may have planted. And we keep at it.

May we always side with love – for everyone. In so doing, may we build Beloved Community now and always.

One way that we challenge the status quo and keep our sights on the future is to support organizations that help us in the building Beloved Community.

Meditation Reading

In 1993, the prescient Black sci-fi writer Octavia Butler published the first part of her Earthseed series, Parable of the Sower. In it, she depicts a dystopian future fueled by climate change, hordes of refugees, and increased social inequality. Her protagonist Lauren Olamina develops a religion out of her observations. Among them are these:

All struggles
Are essentially power struggles.
Who will rule,
Who will lead,
Who will define,
refine,
confine,
design,
Who will dominate.

All struggles
Are essentially power struggles,
And most are no more intellectual than two rams
knocking their heads together ….

When apparent stability disintegrates,
As it must-
God is Change –
People tend to give in
To fear and depression,
To need and greed.

When no influence is strong enough
To unify people
They divide.
They struggle,
One against one,
Group against group,
For survival, position, power.
They remember old hates and generate new ones,
They create chaos and nurture it.
They kill and kill and kill,
Until they are exhausted and destroyed,
Until they are conquered by outside forces,
Or until one of them becomes
A leader
Most will follow,
Or a tyrant
Most fear. …

Any Change may bear seeds of benefit.
Seek them out.

Any Change may bear seeds of harm.
Beware.

God is infinitely malleable.
God is Change ….
As wind,
As water,
As fire,
As life,

God
Is both creative and destructive,
Demanding and yielding,
Sculptor and clay.
God is Infinite Potential:
God is Change ….

Create no images of God.
Accept the images
that God has provided.
They are everywhere,
In everything.

God is Change –
Seed to tree,
tree to forest;
Rain to river,
river to sea;
Grubs to bees,
bees to swarm.
From one, many;
from many, one;
Forever uniting, growing, dissolving –
forever Changing.

The universe
is God’s self-portrait.

Sermon

I take some comfort in reading dystopian novels like Octavia Butler’s because at least our situation is not THAT bad …. Yet. The novels reassure me, too, because they show people coping with those situations that are far worse than our own. And that helps me believe that, even if it does keep getting worse, we will go on living, struggling, coping, loving, and being. We will keep dedicating children and holding the hand of the dying.

At one point in Parable of the Talents, the narrator expresses understanding for people who want a strong leader who wants to make America great again remember this was written back in the 1990’s:

” … they’re afraid and ashamed of their fear, ashamed of their powerlessness. And they’re tired. There are millions of people like them – people who are frightened and just plain tired of all the chaos. They want someone to do something. Fix things. Now!” [p. 607]

I’m in awe of how Butler foresaw the politics we struggle with today. The election this week did not go as badly as it could have in most of the country. But I didn’t vote for anyone who got elected. The nation is still deeply divided. The government is deeply divided. And, yes, there is so much fear and shame and tiredness and chaos and impatience – desire for things to just get fixed. Or to go back to some mythic good ole days.

Of all the emotions that characterize our times, impatience may be the most dangerous. Yes, hate is horrible, chilling. Anger is scary in ourselves and in others. Fear is difficult to endure and leaves us unable to think well. Shame freezes us. Tiredness wears us down. Impatience, though, has its own subtle danger – it keeps us from the excruciatingly slow untangling of complex social, economic, racial, and political issues, and reduces us to bumper sticker slogans and “easy” solutions that aren’t really solutions at all. It convinces us we are doing something – because we are doing something even when what we are doing is counter-productive, or worse yet, counter to our values.

So we need religious community to remind us of those values, of what is of worth, so we act more and more according to our values rather than according to our instincts or fears or impatience.

We will go on. Somehow. And religious community is one of the places where we find both the means and the inspiration to go on. The lessons for a time of dystopia may lend themselves to our own time.

Butler’s novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents tell about the people of Earthseed, a religion discovered by the central character, a Black teenaged woman. She and the people she lead finds comfort and solace in the fact of change, even saying God is Change, despite the horrors and violence they live in. If change really is the only lasting truth, what spiritual lessons can help us with change? After all, people have offered that idea of the eternity of change through the millenia. Around 500 years before the Common Era, Heraclitus of Ephesus is quoted as saying, “Everything changes and nothing remains still; and you cannot step twice into the same stream.”

Buddhism is known for its teachings that all is impermanent – which is much the same as saying that only change is unchanging. Whatever is happening now will not continue. So, when it is something pleasant seize the moment because it will not endure. And when it is unpleasant, know that it is impermanent so you will not always suffer. There are Five Buddhist remembrances, all related to the pervasiveness of change. They come from the Upajjhatthana (You-paja-hana) Sutta:

- I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.

- I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.

- I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.

- All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.

My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

Upajjhatthana Sutta (“Subjects for Contemplation”) –

Some commentators have called these “Buddhism at its very best.” Kuon Franz a Soto Zen priest from Nova Scotia sums them up this way:

Everything is going to change; nothing is ever going to be as I want it to be, as I need it to be, as I think it should be. I can’t keep the perfect thing. I can’t keep anything.

There is plenty to say about these precepts. “I am of the nature to grow old,” is one I certainly find more and more true every day. Much could be said about our culture’s resistance to the truth of growing old. That’s for another day, though.

“I am of the nature to have ill health.” We have become so much more aware of this during COVID times, when we can’t count on so much because of periodic outbreaks. And as winter approaches, flu and RSV and colds are increasing. Our culture also seems to bring the expectation that we can cure or prevent anything, and it’s not true. That sermon, too, is for another day.

“I am of the nature to die.” The late Rev. Forrest Church, an esteemed and controversial figure, said that “religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.” Multiple sermons could be preached on that one. But not today.

“All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change.” Ah! Here’s where are today. All of us need a certain amount of predictability and stability. We each have a difference tolerance for change, though. Some people thrive with stability – knowing from day to day what will happen and how. Living in the same place for a long time. Staying in the same job.

Others of us have a little problem with boredom, wanting to change it up a bit more often. My mother taught every grade from first through middle school during her career. She said recently that many of the teachers liked to keep the same grade every year. She thought that was boring – she liked to teach different grades. Kept her on her toes.

I have to remind myself that many people have less tolerance for change than I do. We all have to recognize, though, that if we do not make changes, it doesn’t prevent change from coming. Change will come. It does. Summer turns to fall to winter. Babies turn to toddlers to tweens to young adults. People grow ill and die. And we’re living in a time of hastened change. Elections turn some people out of office, while others gain power. Technology morphs almost daily. Climate change increases fires and droughts and floods and hurricanes. Diseases appear and spread. New music and art and fashion emerge and gain popularity, only to be quickly replaced by the next new trend.

And with that accelerating rate of change, more people are thrown off, longing for something firm and steadfast, dependable. Sometimes, because so much is changing around them so quickly, they can become fixated on holding on tightly to something that, in the scheme of things may not seem all that important. And yet …

Also, we might see any change as good or bad. Those are not inherent characteristics, though. Change isn’t good or bad – it simply is. “All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change.”

The single most important way to deal with that is to accept it. Not to cling to what has moved on. Sure, we mourn it, we feel our feelings – knowing that those feelings, too, are impermanent. And then we let it go. Easier said than done, I know.

Finally, the fifth remembrance:

My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

Things and even people will change and eventually disappear. Our actions, in some strange way, cast a longer shadow, are more persistent. What we do matters. That’s why it’s so important that we make deliberate choices about how we will act — in our everyday lives, in our connections with people we love and with people we do not know, in our activism. Zen priest Franz has something to say about it:

“And while you get to choose which actions you take, you don’t get to choose what those consequences will be. It’s like aiming a bow and arrow while you’re running: you know what you want to hit. Maybe you’ll get it. Maybe you won’t. You just do your best, but you have to accept the consequences for what happens because what other option is there? So Remembrance #5 is saying that what you do matters-so live like it does.” – Kuon Franz

There’s the tough part, eh? We get to choose how we act, we do not get to choose what the result of those actions are. That means we have to – oh, here it is again – let go. Let go of the outcomes. We can vote; we can even work to turn out the vote. We cannot control who will win. We can voice our opinion. We cannot choose the results. Winning and losing are not spiritually grounded concepts. They are temporary and illusory. They are bound to ego.

Now, that doesn’t mean, don’t do anything.

Remember? Your actions matter. And, it doesn’t mean that your work was wasted, even when you appear to have lost. Because we are imagining a better future as we work for it. And we cannot know what seeds we have scattered that may later bloom.

We’re called as religious people to weigh in on the side of the vulnerable and to name persecution of others as wrong – whether transgender people whose lives are threatened or women whose control of their bodies is at risk or Indigenous people losing their tribal protections or Black people dying younger and owning less or children under threat of gun violence and the mental health emergency. Such oppression is wrong. Not only inadvisable or unfair or even unconstitutional. Just plain wrong. Moral terms.

I saw a cartoon on Facebook. You may have seen it.

An adult and child. The child asks, “But what if they lose?” The adult replies, “Then we keep fighting for the rights of all people.” “And if they win?”

“Oh, dear girl, it’s the same answer.”

It’s the same answer. Win, lose, or draw – we embrace our values, living them out in our lives and in the larger world. Yes, change will come – some days the wind will blow towards us and other days away. We feel the winds and still, ground ourselves in our ideals, our vision, our mission.

If they lose. If they win. Oh, dear girl, dear friends, it’s the same answer. We keep striving for the rights of all people. We can be the change we want to see in the world.

Benediction

I leave you with the words of the Rev. Dr. Sofia Betancourt, professor at Starr King School for the Ministry:

The good news is that we are in control of what we do with our daily living. If we, each one of us, represent a missing remnant in the fabric of our collective future – then together we can lean into a possibility that we have yet to fully experience in human history. A collective wholeness. An unassailable good. That is the kind of salvation I am here to fight for in the small moments of every single day. So may it be for us. May we achieve that collective wholeness, that unassailable good, that Beloved Community.

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