“Love and Justice”
Rev. Dan Schatz
Unitarian Congregation of West Chester
April 28, 2024

In the early 2000s, this country began turning toward justice for same sex couples. Vermont had legalized civil unions not long before. Unitarian Universalist ministers across the country preached sermons in support of marriage equality. Mine was called “Freedom to Love.”

The sentiment was not universally accepted, even among Unitarian Universalists. There were members of my congregation at the time who heard the message with a degree of skepticism about this issue and its importance. But they stayed with it. They stayed with it because they cared about people. They listened to gay and lesbian and bisexual members of the congregation, they listened to their children, and I watched in real time as love became the servant of justice, and hearts began changing. Some of those same people ended up marching in the streets together for marriage equality.

And when the Massachusetts Supreme Court made that state the first in the country to legalize same sex marriage, the plaintiffs in that case celebrated their wedding in the chapel of the Unitarian Universalist Association in Boston, with our then President, Rev. Bill Sinkford, officiating.

With greater justice came greater backlash. State after state, including our own, passed so called “Defense of Marriage” ballot measures, and before long the US House of Representatives passed legislation in favor of a Constitutional amendment outlawing same sex marriage forever. That was the backdrop in 2004, when Rev. Sinkford received a call in his office at the UUA. It was a reporter. “The President of the United States has just announced his support for a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage. I’m calling to find out where Unitarian Universalists stand.”

Here’s a pro tip about dealing with the press. Normally, in these kinds of situations, a leader will either respond with a prepared talking point, or maybe ask for a little time, so they can get their thoughts in order, and then call the reporter back with something print ready. But the question took Rev. Sinkford off guard. He hadn’t known President Bush was going to do that – so he just said the first thing that popped into his head. “Well,” he said, “we stand on the side of love.”

As far as I know, his statement to the reporter never made it into print; if it did, I haven’t been able to find it. Most likely it would have been lost to time had it not been for a UU songwriter, Jason Shelton, who turned Rev. Sinkford’s off the cuff remark into a song. That inspired what is now the “Side with Love” campaign – a Unitarian Universalist approach to social justice. Most of you know the yellow t-shirts and banners which we have proudly worn and carried to demonstrations and actions from the Mexican border to the Chester County Courthouse. We side with love.

The campaign began with a question – whatever the injustice, whether it’s homophobia, or climate change, or racism, or anti-trans hatred, or ageism, or sexism, or ableism, or reproductive justice issues, or threats to democracy itself, whatever it is, how can Unitarian Universalists side with love? What does it mean for us and to us to side with love? And for twenty years, since that phone call, we’ve been asking that question.

We sided with love when police in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed a young unarmed Black man named Michael Brown. The phrase “Black Lives Matter” already existed, coined after the killing of another teenager, Trayvon Martin. The idea was simple – racial bias, whether conscious, or unconscious, or baked into the system, had led to the deaths of too many Black people, with too little accountability, and too little action.

In Kirkwood, Missouri, just outside Ferguson, my colleague and good friend Barbara Gadon began holding weekly vigils for Black Lives Matter. They did it for years, standing outside their congregation with signs, sometimes with singing, sometimes in silence. They stood through hot Summers and through Missouri winters. Other people from the community joined with them. Soon, UU congregations across the country began holding similar vigils once a week or once a month, for Black Lives Matter.

I remember how many people asked me, at the time, “Shouldn’t we say ‘All Lives Matter?” When my congregation put a temporary message on our sign by the road in Bucks County, I received a letter from someone in the wider community asking me that exact question and demanding to know why I thought God judged people by the color of their skin. I wrote back: “Of course all lives matter. Sadly our society has a long history of treating some people as less valuable than others…. To say that Black lives matter is not to say that other lives do not; indeed, it is quite the reverse – it is to recognize that all lives do matter, and to acknowledge that African Americans are often targeted unfairly. This means that many people of goodwill face the hard task of recognizing that these social ills continue to exist, and that White privilege continues to exist, even though we wish it didn’t and would not have asked for it…. If nothing else is clear from the past few weeks, it is painfully evident that a great many people do not believe that they are treated fairly. Healing begins by listening to those voices and stories.” It went on.

I shared that letter with some colleagues who encouraged me to publish it, so I put it up on my blog, and within days it had gotten thousands of hits, and been republished in a few different places. I ended up talking to NPR reporters in St. Louis about it. It even got used in a couple college curriculums – my little letter.

I say this not to brag; it was pure luck that anyone happened to pick it up, but because of something that happened the following Christmas. I’ve probably told the story before; it’s one of the most significant moments in ministry I’ve ever known. A teenager in our congregation, who had drifted away from interest or involvement, came up to me and said that she had made Black Lives Matter t-shirts to pass out in her school, and her principle had told her that they should say “All Lives Matter.” When she told this to one of her teachers, they shared an article from the Huffington Post – “On Being Asked to Change ‘Black Lives Matter’ to ‘All Lives Matter.” It was my little letter, and as she started reading it, and she saw the picture of our temporary sign, by then long since changed to something else, she said, “Wait a minute. That’s my church. That’s my minister.”

And this amazing young Black woman, who had given up on finding a home in Unitarian Universalism, realized, maybe for the first time since she was toddler, that there was a place for her in her own congregation, where she would be supported and she could thrive. For the first time, she knew the congregation had her back as a person of color. She didn’t have to ask for it or make space for herself; it was just there.

I’ve had some powerful experiences in ministry over the past twenty some years, but that’s one I will never forget. That’s love and justice coming together. That’s one realization of words which at that time hadn’t even been written yet – “We work to be diverse multicultural Beloved Communities where all can thrive. We covenant to dismantle racism and all forms of systemic oppression.”

Justice is one of the proposed values in a list of six, in the proposed changes to the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Article II – just one of six values centering on love. I know that there is controversy about whether racism should be singled out. But for me, I think of that young woman, and I have to admit, I don’t begrudge the attention. It takes nothing away from anything else, but in a faith which despite good intentions, has often done poorly by our members of color, it sends a powerful message.

It’s the message this congregation embraced before I ever got here, when you voted to put a Black Lives Matter banner on the side of this building, in Side with Love yellow, and to publish these words, which are still on our website. You said: “On a continuing basis, our membership is exploring how we can better understand the black experience in our community, and how we can best speak out against injustice and discrimination. We regard the tendency to devalue black lives as an issue that permeates all areas of society at different times and in different ways. Our exploration of the issue will reflect that.”

When you did that, as a congregation, you embraced love and justice. When you did that, you sent a message, and you made a commitment, and again, I hear your words echoed in that new language: “We work to be diverse multicultural Beloved Communities where all can thrive. We covenant to dismantle racism and all forms of systemic oppression.”

Being a community where all can thrive is justice, lived, but not in the sense of a laundry list of issues. It can’t be a laundry list of issues, because sometimes we may legitimately have very different views, within our one community. So it has to be deeper than that. It has to spring from our hearts, a promise of love, self-consciously echoing the teachings of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote again and again about the importance of the Beloved Community. Incidentally, I believe that’s why it’s capitalized in the text; it’s a reference to Dr. King. He talked about it over and over, often building on the teachings of his mentor Bayard Rustin. Dr. King knew the temptation of people who had been treated poorly to respond to hatred with hatred, or to replace one oppression with another, and he also knew the tendency of some who were accustomed to privilege to react to a movement toward justice with fear. So he made it very clear that punishment would not, should, and could not be the goal. “The end,” he said, “is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community.”

For King, love had to be at the center of justice making, because without love, justice cannot exist. “Power at its best,” he said, “is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” The goal of justice is not retribution, but reconciliation. That’s what love teaches. The goal of accountability is not punishment, but coming together. That’s what love teaches.

Dr. King was hardly the first to make this connection. Paul Tillich, the great theologian, wrote an entire book on Love, Power, and Justice, saying, “This principle is the demand to treat every person as a person. Justice is always violated if men are dealt with as if they are things.” (Sorry about the dated language; he was writing a long time ago.) He also said “Justice is just because of the love which is implicit in it.” “Love is… the moving power of life…. Love is the drive towards unity of the separated…. the reunion of the estranged.”

The goal of justice is healing and relationship. “We work to be diverse multicultural Beloved Communities where all thrive. We covenant to dismantle racism and all forms of systemic oppression. We support the use of inclusive democratic processes to make decisions within our congregations, our Association, and society at large.”

That last part strikes a chord, maybe because we just voted on Tuesday, but mostly because in our country right now democracy itself is under threat – and honestly has been deeply flawed for a long time. Our support for democracy that is inclusive is also about love, not in the sentimental, emotional sense, but in the larger sense that King and Tillich and so many others meant.

Because the truth is that democracy is not always inclusive. We need to be honest and recognize that. In this country, and in this region, if you are a person of color, statistically, it’s harder to vote. There are fewer polling places per person in mostly Black and Brown cities. If you are in the political minority, in many states, including ours, your vote likely means less, because our state house districts are badly gerrymandered. These kinds of systems – right down the way we elect the United States Senate and the United States President – were created to make it that way. It’s a democracy-like system that keeps people from power. In that kind of system, the voters become tools, a means to an end – things, instead of people. Remember justice and love is treating people as people. But instead we get power standing against justice.

Love teaches differently. Love teaches better.

So it means something when Unitarian Universalists support inclusive democracy. It means that we remove barriers to participation, we don’t erect them. It means that we make participation in our own UU democracy more representative and more accessible. It means we make a conscious effort to include those whose voices have been excluded, whether, in the end, we agree with what they have to say or not. It also means that even as we govern by the majority, we make sure not to trample on the rights of those who are not in the majority. That’s what love teaches. That’s what justice teaches. That’s what it means to build the beloved community.

Because in the end, justice isn’t something you demand or you get; it’s not something we do for our own interests, or at least not for own interests alone. It’s not about retribution for past wrongs. Justice is a way of living that goes all the way back to Biblical times and before: “Do justice and righteousness, and deliver the one who has been robbed from the power of the oppressor. Do not mistreat or do violence to the stranger, the orphan, or the widow.”

Justice is nothing more or less than love made real in society.

And when you think about it, Unitarian Universalism at its best is love made real in free religious community. This is the faith that treats people not as sinners to be pulled from wickedness, or converts in need of dogma, but as human beings, freely joining together. This is the faith that honors human dignity, as we are. This is the faith that asks us to be who we are in the best possible way. This is the faith of the open mind and the open door. How could we not do justice? How could we not seek to create a community and a society in which every human being can thrive, no matter their background or gender, or orientation, or identity, or ethnicity, or ability?

Our goal is nothing less than the beloved community on Earth. Our goal is love made real. We work toward our goal by living it, right here, in this place, and whenever we gather in person or online, and wherever we take our message of dignity and community and freedom, and however we work to improve society and ourselves, so that we truly live the values we proclaim. This is a faith of love, and I am proud to share it with you.

Go out into the highways and by-ways.
Give the people something of your new vision.

You may possess a small light,
but uncover it,
let it shine,
use it in order to bring more light and understanding
to the hearts and minds of the people.

Give them not Hell, but hope and courage;
preach kindness and everlasting love. 

– adapted from John Murray