The following two-part sermon was delivered as part of the Unitarian Universalist Student Chapel held at Union Theological Seminary on November 12, 2014. The chapel name was "Binding Together," and included a choral version of Ysaye Barnwell's "
Wanting Memories."
First Reading
A Litany of Restoration
by Rev. Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley
"If, recognizing the interdependence of all life, we strive to build community, the strength we gather will be our salvation.
If you are black and I am white,
It will not matter.
If you are female and I am male,
It will not matter.
If you are older and I am younger,
It will not matter.
If you are progressive and I am conservative,
It will not matter.
If you are straight and I am gay,
It will not matter.
If you are Christian and I am Jewish,
It will not matter.
If we join spirits as brothers and sisters, the pain of our aloneness will be lessened,
and that does matter.
In this spirit, we build community and move toward restoration."
First Sermon: Wanting Inclusivity
I really want to love this reading. It starts off so
powerfully. Salvation is a community affair. It’s not “my salvation,” or “your
salvation,” but “our salvation.” It is an active and universally inclusive
process, driven by an understanding that our individual journeys are
necessarily woven together, shape each other, and give us strength.
And the ending. “The pain of our aloneness will be
lessened,” and we will “move toward restoration.” It’s recognizing the
brokenness that exists in our world. It’s recognizing the suffering that can
come from feeling abandoned or dehumanized by our society because of who we
are, what we think, who we love. And it’s recognizing the possibility of
healing.
But it’s not recognizing me. It’s not recognizing a lot of
people.
This past summer, I served as a facilitator for the UUA’s
Multicultural Leadership School. I was responsible for re-centering the group
for one of its sessions, and on a whim, I decided that I would use this Litany
of Restoration. I thought it was perfect for this group of youth and young
adults of color to hear the words of one of their Unitarian Universalist predecessors. I wanted
them to see that the work we were doing that weekend, the experiences we were
sharing, they were all part of a tradition that included and celebrated them.
And a part of me wanted to lift up the legacy of the litany’s author, Rev. Marjorie
Bowens-Wheatley, a woman whose ministry transformed the anti-racism efforts of
our denomination, and whose example so many of us strive to follow.
But as I started the reading, my heart began to sink. Not
everyone in the room was black or white, not everybody there was female or
male, gay or straight, Jewish or Christian. I looked around the room, and I
realized that I was leaving more people out than I was inviting in. And the
problem wasn’t the words. The problem was my decision to bring them out of
their context and into a world that was so different from the one that Rev. Marjorie
had written in. I had been so eager to lift up the struggles and beautiful memories
of our past, that I ended up forgetting to see the beauty and struggles of the
present. I wanted so badly to show the power of the work that had been done
yesterday, that I failed to see who was in the room doing the work today. I was
among young leaders whose stories were so often forgotten, who struggle
virtually every day to have their voices heard through that barrier of the
binary...and I ended up reinforcing it.
I want to love this reading, but seeing the world as it is
today, I know that I also need to critique its present use. When we look to the
successes of our past, we can find the strength and inspiration to continue the
work of those who struggled before us. We can follow the spirit of their
efforts, and take it on in new and more-informed ways. But when we rest in the
successes of the past? What are we doing except nothing? When I don’t make an
effort to move beyond what I already know, how is that any different from
giving up? For the people who find themselves comfortable and unwilling to
challenge today’s world, how is that any different from saying “I got what I
need, sucks to be you.”?
So what do I do with this reading?
How do I keep the
memories alive without letting them be all that I see? How do we
honor but challenge our outdated successes?
Second Reading
A Litany of Diversity
by Michael Sallwasser
If the colors of our skin or the lands of our ancestors are different,
It need not divide us.
If the genders we claim are different,
It need not divide us.
If the stages in our lives are different,
It need not divide us.
If our means of achieving the common good are different,
It need not divide us.
If who we love and how we love are different,
It need not divide us.
If the spiritual paths we follow are different,
It need not divide us.
If our abilities to think and do are different,
It need not divide us.
If our resources are different,
It need not divide us.
If we join spirits and hearts,
Our differences will not divide us, but deeply bind us together.
Second Sermon: Needing Particularity
This Litany of Diversity may offer an answer to my litany of questions. Nearly twenty years after the Litany of Restoration was written,
Michael Sallwasser and others committed to work that Rev. Marjorie had started read her words in a meeting, and experienced the same tension that I felt
over the summer. And with her permission, they updated Marjorie’s words. They
preserved the spirit of her efforts by doing exactly what she had done in her
time - they took a critical look at their traditions. Like Marjorie had
advised and modeled, they chose to "witness to and actively participate in the
transformation of their faith community and society." They took to heart her
distinction between liberal religion, which conforms to the world and rests in
our past successes, and liberationist religion, which transforms the world and
critiques what lies beneath our inherited practices. Like Marjorie, they
refused to settle for something that they knew they had the ability and
responsibility to evolve.
And the litany itself does move us past the inherited
practice of binary thinking. It no longer limits the conversation to two
voices, and it allows for the constant inclusion of new identities in
communities. With this looser and open language, anybody and everybody is
welcome to join spirits and hearts together. But is it too loose? Is it so
focused on including anyone that it actually excludes everyone? Does it do such
a good job of making sure that no voices have a monopoly on the conversation,
that it actually further silences those that have yet to be heard? This litany,
this version of open thinking, it lifts up that our differences need not divide us,
but it neglects the importance of our particularities. It tries so hard to ensure that nobody is offended, that it chooses to remain in the
safety of ambiguity, conforming to the warm and fuzzy resting place of liberal
religion.
See, Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley also criticized the tendency
for liberalism to view “freedom in the abstract,” and this litany unfortunately
seems to do that. Her original words, as binary as they were, they
recognized that for us to move forward in community, our differences must be
explicitly named. In order for us to be the liberationist transformers of our
world, we have to give weight to the specifics. We have to be grounded not in
the abstract principles that sound good, but in concrete experiences that push
us out of our comfort zone. The ability to ignore our particularities and their
lived realities, it comes not from a place of wanting to find universal truths,
but from the privilege of never having to consider that there are experiences
in the world that are different from one’s own. Removing the specifics is no
better than limiting them to two options, because it brings none of our stories
to the table, and lets those who have set that abstract liberal agenda in the
past keep it in its conforming place.
These litanies may be Unitarian Universalist readings, but they’re not the only
example of these differences in thinking. Here at Union, we have the option to
create a faculty position that comes to the table with a specific voice; we
have the opportunity to recognize the particularities that come from a womanist
perspective, and the liberationist transformation that this view brings. But
something is keeping us from explicitly naming it as such. We are stuck in our
liberal, abstract freedom, preferring the warm and fuzzy resting place of
ambiguity over the difficult work of concrete liberation. Like the latter
Litany of Diversity, our vague approach is so inclusive, that it is actually
excluding the specific voices we need to hear. Our looser language is not
living up to our responsibility to change our community and evolve.
With the spirit of these two litanies in mind, it is our
responsibility to balance the desire for inclusivity with the need for
particularity. It is our responsibility to keep the memories of our predecessors
alive, to honor the spirit of their work, by being true to what we know about
our world today. And that requires us to create that open and inclusive community by being specific and concrete with our
liberationist goals. The communal process of salvation that Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley
wrote about in her original litany invites us to be critical of tradition, but
it does not mean that we must abandon it entirely. It means that our past successes
help us to see that there is something better ahead. It means that the transformation
we seek will come, but we must first be willing to name the particularities
that will bind us together.
