by Leela Sinha, Assistant Minister

A sermon given September 17, 2006

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

I’m new in town.

In the weeks since I arrived, I’ve been finding gas stations and grocery stores,

learning east from west and north from south,

learning the lay of this new land I’ve adopted. 

…and at one new store two things happened

and I thought, “Toto, we’re not in Kansas

anymore.” 

I was shopping

I had just found the eggs.

I had been looking for ten minutes. 

So I stood, dazed until the eggs

stared back at me and just as I remembered

that I wanted to get some eggs,

and go hunting for pickles,

or possibly cereal,

a person came up to me and said,

um, does, that, does is--does your necklace mean

that you’re Unitarian Universalist? 

And I forgot all about the eggs. 

In all my life I’d never heard that question before. 

Someone had heard of us!  It was a good welcome. 

A few days or maybe weeks later

I had a different experience.

I just wanted some bread, some milk.

of course the quick trip to the store filled

a cart full

and so my partner Janine and I stood

tired, covered in cardboard-box-dust,

waiting to pay for our food.

The woman at the register was South Asian,

and when she took my credit card

she read my name aloud.

Then she looked at me skeptically,

taking in the grit,

the grey and torn t-shirt,

the baggy shorts,

the short hair,

Janine standing behind me.

Her mouth twisted and she lifted her chin,

“Your daddy Indian?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Hmph” she said. 

She did not make eye contact

or respond to my have-a-nice-day.

The next trip she turned away immediately.

The time after that I chose a different line. 

Clearly, she saw something she didn’t like.

If it was grime or sexual orientation or

gender presentation or fatigue,

I don’t know. 

Usually  
When I meet a South Asian of my father’s generation, 
they ask me two questions: 
what is your last name, 
and where was your father born? 
They want details-city and state, village, neighborhood, 
they want the whole story. 
 
See, someone with my story 
someone from someone from my father’s city 
should not be here, should not be a good student, 
in graduate school, in professional work. 
Bihar was the seat of successes millennia ago, but 
now it’s mostly the seat of corruption, 
terror, 
purchased votes. 
 
My presence, my accent, 
my address 
do 
not 
compute. 
 
(Oh well.) 
 
I’d bet that you’ve had the same experience a time or two. 
Same...but likely different. 
Probably no random guy in a video store is trying to hook you up with his son, 
no, you’re probably at a potluck 
for something you volunteer for, 
on the nights when you’re not here. 
You’re standing in line, paper plate folding under the weight 
of pasta and beans and 
oil-drenched lettuce and someone asks you to another potluck 
a week from Tuesday. 
You’re busy, you say. 
Oh, doing what? they say. 
Volunteering, you say, 
oh at what? they say, is it that one, that new group 
downtown? 
You take a deep breath. 
You find a seat. 
You pick up your fork. 
At church, 
you say, 
and dig into the potato salad, 
fast, before anyone can ask again. 

I was talking with Dana, our Director of Religious Education for Youth, and she was telling me how people feel freer when they have more rules, because if the boundaries are clear then they have a safe space to play in, clearly defined.  I think that’s true, and I think what’s scary about Unitarian Universalism is that we don’t have a lot of rules, and so sometimes we act like we have less room to improvise.   

Imagine a cliff with a fence at the edge.  Imagine playing kickball on that cliff.  You can run pretty fast and pretty hard toward the fence, because you know where the fence is, and you know that it marks safe from unsafe, and you know that it will stop you before you fall.   

Now imagine a tall, sandy bluff that slopes away into a sheer drop.  Imagine playing kickball at the top of the bluff—no fence, just an awareness that somewhere over there the slope becomes too steep for standing. 

You’d kick the ball more gently.  You might even move your whole game someplace where there were no drop-offs. 

That’s us, on the sandy bluff.  By our nature we have very few clear boundaries and sharp definitions.  It makes our lives challenging, especially when we believe that the drop-off is steep; that the ocean crashes death at the bottom.  It makes even going for a walk feel risky. 

Often we find ourselves divided sharply within our faith: by theology, by ideology…by fear—fear of not having a definition or an identity; fear of no longer being ourselves. 

What if there is no cliff? 

What if the slippery sandy dune slides down a little and up a little and becomes another slippery, sandy dune?  What if we’re standing in the middle of a vast expanse of sandy hills, tall and short?  What if sliding down the edge means meeting in the middle?  What if we can be courageous and play wild games of tackle kickball right to the edge of the dune, because we know that we don’t need a fence? 

Our very identity as Unitarian Universalists makes that possible, but in order for anyone else to understand that they need to know who we are, and that we are.   

Where are you going to be on Tuesday?  What’s that? 

I am a Unitarian Universalist.  Here is what I believe.  If you’re curious you’re welcome to join me.  I would love for you to get to know our faith better.  Yes, I am religious.  Yes, I am faithful.  Yes, I love my church.  Yes, we believe that new connections are a blessing.  Yes, it’s scary.  Yes, it’s exhilarating.  Yes, yes, yes.   

Yes, we are a living tradition and we can live out loud. 

I had a lovely experience last week.  In an online chat room connected to the website of a liberal minister, I met two other people, and by this and by that we discovered that we were all working for churches and we were all queer.  One of us worked for a foursquare church as an IT administrator, and the other one was a minister in a liberal congregation in a conservative tradition.  They had both heard of Unitarian Universalists.  I was the only one who was “out,” because their traditions did not permit it.  But we were, for those fifteen minutes, all religious people together, more united by our faiths than divided by them. 

I love my religion. 

People expect to hear that from me, but only if they know I’m a minister.  If they meet me somewhere else-anywhere else-they’re usually surprised.  Heck, they’re surprised I even have a religion.  Well I don’t look religious, they say, a little bashful, a little baffled. 

I don’t look religious. 
 
Have you ever seen the buttons out there that say, “This is what a feminist looks like”? 
 
Maybe this is what religious looks like. 
 
What people really mean is, “you don’t look the way I expect religious people to look.  You don’t match the picture in my head, and that’s confusing.” 
 What’s neat is what happens next.  The person across the table or standing in the park or sitting on the MAX says, “Unitarian?  I’ve never heard of that before.  What do you believe?” 
 
What do I believe?  Or what do Unitarian Universalists believe? ...and the conversation begins. 
 
I think of myself as a kind of perpetual educator, answering questions about my clothes, my heritage, the way I live my life, my religion.  I choose to help make that information available in the world.  In exchange, the world makes itself a more receptive place for me to live. 
 
As Unitarian Universalists, we have an advantage: not only are people curious about us, they are hungry for religion.  This is what religious can look like.  We are a participatory religion based in love, and we strive to embrace diversity.  We offer a challenging, intellectual, heartfelt faith tradition that emphasizes social justice, community, examined theology, and lifelong spiritual growth. 
 
We are strong in diversity.  We have identities about theology, about sin, about growth, about evil, about joy, about every single thing we can think.  We have so many different ways of being, and we somehow find our strength in our conversations—in our dialogues. We find strength in the spaces-between.  We specialize in holding the tension, cupping it, nurturing it, loving the both/and of our impossible lives together.  Within us we hold dissimilar, even conflicting beliefs, among us we hold wholeness in all its inconceivable dimensions.  We function as a community in flux; motion; in discussion, held together and apart.  It is the motion and adhesion that allows us to exist.  We vibrate in conversation with each other and with ourselves.  Our diversity, our difference is how we are...at all. 
 
So why are we so scared of difference? 
 
We are scared because those vibrations are how we are but they are also how we can be ripped apart.  We need to find the way to walk the line, to live in the space of tension that allows us to be, allows us to grow and change and learn, without tearing us asunder.  We are many and one, and we do not choose civil war.  Unfortunately, without deliberate attention, we can arrive in conflict without ever knowing how we got there.  We must know the tensions as our allies so that we can learn to dance with them. 
 
In these dark days we are watching our world rip itself apart.  What would you do if you lived in Israel?  In Lebanon?  In India?  In Pakistan?  In Darfur? 
 
You probably cannot know.  There are places where difference has been so deeply embedded in the consciousness of the people that it supercedes everything else.

 
But what would you do if you saw someone who looked different from you here, on the street, at your door?  Someone who looked richer, or poorer, or darker, or lighter; someone with different transportation or different language?  Someone older; someone younger?  Someone better fed or someone hungrier? 
 
You would almost certainly begin to shape a belief about that person.  If you are well-practiced you might catch yourself and realize that you were making up a story about the person based on what you thought you knew.  You might still choose your behavior based on the possibility that your fiction was fact. 
 
You would be very human…and very likely be wrong.  We must find the place where our differences converge enough to have discussion. 
 
We can, and we must. 
 
We must stand tall and say yes, we do have the skills for these conversations.  We have been working for years on holding the tension and we can model it...first for ourselves, and then for the world. 
 
Yes, I am. 
 
Yes, we are. 
 
We are a religious people.  There are lots of religious people in the world.  There are people with all kinds of different beliefs about how religion works and what it is and what it means.  We stand on common land with all of those people.  We are all religious people together. 

The picture on my computer desktop right now is of a Muslim man singing a Muslim call to prayer in a synagogue.  The same photographer took another picture of two cantors giving Jewish prayers on the steps of a mosque.   

We are all religious people together.   

And this this (THIS) is what religious looks like.   

You take a deep breath. 
You find a seat. 
You pick up your fork. 
At church, 
you say, 
and dig into the potato salad, 
fast, before anyone can ask again. 

Why so quick to fill your mouth? 
Because when we hear “church,” we often think we know what we think. 
Just like we think we know about “prayer” 
about “conservative” 
about “Catholic”
about “faithful.” 

We have worked out what we could know and what we think is knowable about those things, and we use that information to simplify our lives.  Simplify, because we often stop listening right there.

Here’s the piece that matters:

when it happens—

when a piece of your living slips

out of alignment

with a piece of your soul,

you have to get very quiet.

Or go for a walk, start

making music

you have to dance or cook—

do what you do to find the spirit

within you and

when you find it,

you have to listen.

That wisdom,

that inspiration

the salvation that comes from within

is where you will find the answer to the hard question: 

what do I do? 

What do I do when I face assumptions,

discrimination,

harassment;

what do I do when I face ignorance,

unfairness,

injustice;

what do I do in the face of a broken world?

What do I do when I am the one who’s broken? 

You listen.

You listen and then you assume that the person across from you is as holy as you know everyone is. 

You listen and then you act out of justice and compassion together. 

You listen, and then  

you stand up for your faith.  Stand up for who you are.  In standing up we invite the community at large to call us to account for our beliefs.  We might scare people.  We might scare ourselves.  It is difficult to hold one’s life up for public examination, but that is how our faith works.  We challenge each other to growth; our community and our world can challenge us as a group to live up to our ideals—not to change who we strive to be, but to move closer to our own goals.  Let us take advantage of that possibility.  We can do it.  We must continue to reach for our deeper selves.  If the community knows who we are, they will have expectations for us.  We can trust them to be honest, because it is in all of our interests for them to do so.  Those expectations can be one of our mirrors; a way of knowing who we could be in the world.   

We are Unitarian Universalist.   

We are challenged, and we are blessed.

PRAYER 

Please pray with me: 

We reach this morning as every morning for the spirit of life which runs in the bones and blood of us all.  May we be strong enough and humble enough to do this work of love and interconnection; may we offer ourselves fully to to the world in which we live, and may we receive deeply the gifts our neighbors choose to offer. 

Amen.

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Copyright 2006, Leela Sinha.  All rights reserved.