Readings:

I Too, Sing America by Langston Hughes (click to read)

Poem for July 4 1994 by Sonia Sanchez (click to read)

“Elegy,” by Kiran Schatz

An Elegy

For the long-forgotten past
And the days that we may never live to see;
Our sacrifice will give the hopeless, freezing mass
A chance to build a future that is free.

A song of love
For the comrades we have found
And for those who we have lost along the way;
With strings of fate, we are forever tightly bound
They’ll warm our hearts throughout the cold and rain.

A song of pain
For all the wounds that hurt us still
And the bandages that wrap our bleeding hands;
The scars will fade, and soon the blood that we have spilled
Will dry upon the frigid ground and stain the land.

A song of strength
For the blood within our veins
And the movement that is greater than us all;
We’ll find the might to break our rusted iron chains
Then finally, we’ll make the giants fall.

A song of hope
For this cold midwinter night
And the heat of blazing fire that we bring;
Through dark despair, we find the will to stand and fight
Unburdened by the future, we will sing:

Song: “The Power and the Glory,” by Phil Ochs

Come and take a walk with me thru this green and growing land
Walk thru the meadows and the mountains and the sand
Walk thru the valleys and the rivers and the plains
Walk thru the sun and walk thru the rain

  Here is a land full of power and glory
  Beauty that words cannot recall
  Oh her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom
  Her glory shall rest on us all  (on us all)

From Colorado, Kansas, and the Carolinas too
Virginia and Alaska, from the old to the new
Texas and Ohio and the California shore
Tell me, who could ask for more?

Yet she’s only as rich as the poorest of her poor
Only as free as the padlocked prison door
Only as strong as our love for this land
Only as tall as we stand

But our land is still troubled by men who have to hate
They twist away our freedom & they twist away our fate
Fear is their weapon and treason is their cry
We can stop them if we try

 

Sermon: “The Next 250 Years”

I love the song “The Power and the Glory;” it means so much to me. I remember hearing it for the first time when I was a high school student and bought my first Phil Ochs album. That song, “the Power and the Glory,” coming from a radical leftist pacifist scathing critic – taught me how to be a patriot.

That song taught me for the first time that it is possible to love my country not for its mythology, or its military capacity, or because of its past accomplishments, or even for its present heroes. That song taught me to love my country as a set of ideals. Some of those ideals have been realized only imperfectly, some of have never been realized at all, and some we are only just learning to embrace.

That song – along with poets like Langston Hughes and later Sonia Sanchez, taught me to be a demanding patriot. They taught me to insist that my country live up to itself, acknowledging the realities of our failings. They taught me to hold myself, my community, and my elected leaders accountable for making it better.

“She’s only as rich as the poorest of the poor,
only as free as a padlocked prison door.”

Today the national conversation centers around a different idea of patriotism – one that looks to an idealized, fictional past, stifles voices of dissent, erases – literally erases – and falsifies the history of those who have been victimized by our country’s moral failures, one that not only repeats the great injustices of the past, but doubles down on them. We are seeing this in so many ways.

But patriotism that ignores truth is not patriotism at all. Patriotism that embraces hatred and enacts policies that punish brown and black people, and poor people, disabled people, immigrants, women, and LGBTQ folks, is not love of country, but love of privilege. Such policies are the greatest threat this country has seen in decades, if not a century and a half.

“Our land is still threatened by men who have to hate
They twist away our freedom, and they twist away our fate.”

It’s up to us to speak louder and act stronger. We can never allow the voices of White nationalism to define our patriotism.

This country belongs to us. It belongs to all of us. It belongs to the liberals and the radicals just as it belongs to conservatives and reactionaries. It belongs to the Brown and the Black just as it belongs to the White. It belongs to the lesbian, the gay, the bisexual, the pansexual, and the asexual just as it belongs to the hetero. It belongs to women, and transgender people and non-binary people. It belongs to immigrants and indigenous Americans. It belongs to children and it belongs to the aged. It belongs to Muslims and Jews and Pagans and atheists, and Hindus and Buddhists and every other faith just as it belongs to any Christian. And yes, it belongs to Unitarian Universalists as well, no matter what the Department of Defense might think. This is your country and it is my country. And yes I know now I’m starting to sound like a Woody Guthrie song, but he got some things right, too. Phil Ochs had to learn it from somewhere.

A nation is more than a group of people in a geographical area. It’s also a community, a set of values, and a promise. It’s definitely not a flag, an anthem, a leader, or even a mythology if that mythology is false. In stark biblical terms, it is idolatry to replace an ideal with a symbol and then worship the symbol at the expense of the ideal.

Part of our calling as a religious people whose faith centers in love and places the highest value on truth, is to counter this kind of idolatry. It’s not easy, because this ideology is deeply embedded in American culture, and it feeds on the very injustices it perpetuates. But if we truly love our country and its highest ideals, if we believe those ideals should apply to everyone, and not just a few privileged people, then we cannot acquiesce. This country belongs to you – and if that hasn’t always been true – as, historically it hasn’t for most people – it’s our job as patriots, and as Unitarian Universalists to make it true.

This weekend our nation celebrates a quarter of a millennium, two hundred and fifty years of The United States of America. As we hold this celebration, we face an existential threat from Fascism, racism, transphobia, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, Christian nationalism, and a whole mess of other of phobias and isms. It’s all of a piece. I know how frightening a time this is. I am frightened. The country I love is under threat.

But I also know that this country was born under threat. And that moment in history gave birth to a vision that really was great, even as it was flawed. Despite all the ways the founders tried to walk their ideals back, despite the sexism, the racism, the acceptance and encouragement of slavery, the denial of voting rights, and all the rest of it – despite all these things the underlying ideals survived, and they were far better than the people who espoused them. As broken as the country was in so many ways, as racist and sexist as it was, those ideals, underneath their flawed expression, gave us a vision of progress and a better society.

Over the centuries, we have followed that path sometimes, and blundered off at others. But our progress is real and enduring, and as regressive as things feel and are right now, they’re still a lot better than they were two hundred or one hundred years ago.

Those changes didn’t happen automatically, they happened because we organized for them. We labored for them. We, the people, made them happen. And we will not let our work be undermined. We will continue the struggle.

That includes resistance, but the truth is, resistance isn’t enough. Sure, there are crimes being committed against our country, our people, humanity, morality, and human decency. We absolutely need to resist those crimes. But resistance by itself doesn’t work for the long haul. All resistance hopes to do is move us back to a status quo. Resistance is not what gave us a forty hour work week, or the civil rights act, or women’s suffrage, or marriage equality. Those things took vision. They took people who imagined the world as it should be, if the values we claim are ever to be the values we live.

Without that kind of vision, it’s too easy to lose sight of our ideals and become what we abhor. We get caught up in which team we’re playing for rather than the collective value of bettering the whole. This doesn’t mean that those who commit acts of evil shouldn’t be held accountable. They should. It does mean that we need to dedicate at least some of our efforts to envisioning a future beyond the evils of our day. We need that sense of vision. Without, we lose sight of what we’re struggling for.

As Unitarian Universalists, we hold a unique position in American history. The ideals of our faith – freedom, equity, justice, the right of conscience, democracy, were pivotal in shaping the thought of so many of this nation’s founders. And generation after generation, we have returned to those ideals, making them bigger, and demanding that we as a religious people and a society live up to our promise.

Our ideals, as Unitarian Universalists and as Americans, will shape our work for the next 250 years. Our vision and our efforts will help to create what this country becomes. For me, it’s a vision of diversity, of community, of compassion, of justice, of equity, of belonging. It’s a vision that recognizes our interdependence with each other, with all people, and with the earth itself. It’s a vision born of love, even though the term probably won’t get used much in the public sphere. But sacred love, divine love if that is your theology, or simply human love made manifest in society, fuels the vision and the moral progress of humanity.

You have your own vision – in your heart, your mind, your way of being –  and that’s what we need. We need every one of us to imagine the best of what we can be together, and dedicate some part of ourselves to making it happen. That’s patriotism. That’s what has shaped the best of American history. That’s what Unitarian Universalism, this free, yet demanding, faith that asks us to actually live our values, calls us to do.

Sometimes I imagine the people of 2276, celebrating 500 years of the United States of America, and I wonder what they will see when they look back to this day. I’m sure they’ll see the troubles, but I hope they will also see the movement that lifted us from these times. I hope they will see the progress we inspired with our vision and our dream. I believe they will see the gestation and birth of the America that is to come.

That future lies within each of us. It is our hope, our task, and our calling. Now is the time to rise and answer.

This day is a call,
a beginning,
a possibility.
Open yourself to the promise of this moment
and the days we create
as one people.