The storm is passing over. There is a sense of relief…a new lightness many of us are feeling. First, new national leadership is on the way in just a couple of months. And then the announcement that a vaccine…or several could be just around the corner.
The storm is passing over. Can I get an “amen” to that?
And yet, we know that we are not past these difficult days…hardly. Even when our politics have new leadership and vaccines begin to be available…even then we know that challenges aplenty will remain.
There is so much harm to be undone…where it can be undone…we know this.
But there is also hope to recover and sustain. There is joy to reclaim and love to unleash.
We have our work cut out for us. Of, yes. There is hard work ahead.
“The prayer of our souls is a petition for persistence.”
A petition for persistence.
“…not for the one good deed, or single thought, but deed on deed, and thought on thought, until day calling unto day shall make a life worth living.”
W.E.B. DuBois, who wrote those words, knew of the need for persistence.
When the task is righting wrongs…persistent wrongs…
When the task is liberation…
When the task is fundamental change…persistence is necessary…right?
Because you know the pattern…two steps forward and one step back…whether we are talking about our individual lives or our world…change is a challenge. And progress…even our victories…seem so fragile…and some, so easily rolled back.
DuBois is probably to be credited for that phrase, “two steps forward and one step back,” by the way, or at least for its genesis. He often described the movement toward freedom as two steps forward…one and a half steps back. He saw clearly that real change came slowly…and could be reversed.
DuBois was born in Massachusetts just after the Civil War, he lived until 1963…well into my lifetime…but never saw the dismantling of legal apartheid in this country for which he worked so long. Disheartened, he left the US before his death, to live in Ghana. He was not only a founder of the NAACP, with several Unitarians that we revere…but he was also a Pan-Africanist, with a socialist vision. He knew capitalism and racism were tightly bound.
I think he would understand AOC and the Squad as his spiritual descendants.
Did DuBois pray for persistence because progress toward his vision was so slow, that it came in such small hard-won increments?
Is that how you see change taking place? In small steps? Inch by inch?
Is that how change has come to you and for you? In your personal life?
Is that how you see change taking place in the world around you?
For what should we pray? Is it persistence…to keep on doing what we have been doing?
Is ours a prayer simply for stamina?
Or is there some truth in the famous Einstein definition of insanity…doing the same thing over and over…and expecting different results.
Is ours a prayer for grim determination?
Or should we be praying to break through…to break out…for liberation…some final freedom…some ultimate hope?
Or should we be praying for both…for stamina and for breakthrough?
For what should we pray…today?
There is much to be learned from our national failure to respond to the pandemic…much to be learned about the importance of political leadership, about listening to the science, about loss, about sacrifice even…Thanksgiving will be a very different holiday in most homes this year…
But there are also things to be learned…or at least to think about…in terms of change and growth. Things to be learned about how real change happens and how fast.
Malcolm Gladwell is a popularizer of scientific information. Many of you are probably familiar with his work…Outliers, Blink, The Tipping Point…
Like most popularizers, he gets criticized for shallow understanding of science…But as we look for metaphors for help explain our lives…well, there is a reason that his books sell millions of copies.
I opened The Tipping Point again this week, because that book is build around the metaphor and the mathematics of epidemics.
I am not going to go deep into the math…relax…but epidemics, whether we’re talking about the current virus… or the rapid adoption of cell phones in the 1990’s…epidemic change grows not in a slow, linear fashion…it grows exponentially.
We know this? Right? We see it in the spiking Covid-infection rates and we’ve heard that the growth rates will just continue if it is not contained…and the sooner the better.
But that kind of growth violates what Gladwell calls proportionality.
Effects should be proportional to the cause. And our brains have a hard time remembering…or believing…that just a few cases of infection can so quickly become a pandemic.
Here is the example Gladwell uses:
“I give you a large piece of paper, and I ask you to fold it over once, and then take the folder paper and fold it over again, and then again, and again, until you have refolded the original paper 50 times. How tall do you think the final stack [of folded paper] is going to be? In answer to that question, most people will fold the sheet in their mind’s eye, and guess that the pile would be as thick as a phonebook…(you do remember phone books)…or, if they are really courageous, they’ll say that it would be as tall as a refrigerator. But the real answer is that the height of that stack [of paper] would approximate the distance to the sun.”
Geometric progression.
It is hard for us to imagine, though. We have learned to expect results to be closely tied to the size of the cause.
Gladwell argues that we need to “prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big…huge…changes follow from small events, and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly.
That last…the speed of the change and the dramatic shifts…that is the center of the idea of the Tipping Point.
The term originated in the flight of white families to the suburbs. When a certain percentage of black families managed to move into a neighborhood…10% or a bit more…which could take years…but when that tipping point was reached…the vast majority of the remaining white families would leave almost immediately.
The tipping point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the point of no return…
From Gladwell again:
“We are all, at heart, gradualists, our expectations set by the steady passage of time. But the world of the Tipping Point is a place … where radical change is more than a possibility. It is…contrary to all our expectations…a certainty.”
Exponential change is not a moral phenomenon. It is a mathematical description of how rapid change works. Change for good. Or change for what we would call evil. Remember…white flight is where the term tipping point was first used.
One of the great challenges for liberal theology has been accepting that history is not moving toward some guaranteed city on the hill. God, or the Spirit…whatever name you use or reject using…the universe just doesn’t work that way…there is no deus ex machina that will deliver salvation…the coming of the kingdom is not necessarily the final chapter in our drama. Not necessarily.
The universe turns out to be a-moral. That was such a hard lesson to take in.
The Spirit of Life and of Love that you hear me name in prayer…that spirit, that presence…I have felt in my life and so have many of you…but we’ve not felt it as a guarantor of ease or happiness or success.
That spirit has been a comfort…a “force” that has held me…holds me…holds us all…but without guarantees of outcome.
Rebecca Parker, former President of Starr King School for the Ministry, was one of my primary guides into the lessons of theology.
The hardest lesson she taught was this…Rebecca’s words: “There is a love that has never broken faith with us and never will.” You’ve heard me say that more than once from this pulpit.
“There is a love that has never broken faith with us and never will.”
How can that be true when there is such violence in the world, such injustice…such mean and evil-spiritedness? How can that love be real?
How do we explain these last four years? Spiritually…religiously…how do we explain them…without simply writing off any notion of the power of love…and almost half the American population as well?
Process theology, which is what almost all modern liberal theology draws from, …process theology dealt with that dilemma by saying: The power of the spirit is always personal and contextual….not external and ultimate. Fancy terms, I know.
Let me try to break it down. The power of love meets us where we are and asks us not to make the ultimate and absolute best choice…but the best choice for us…in that particular situation.
We are not called by love to embrace the Proud Boys. Though love does call us to limit their impact.
Even anger and confrontation can be loving responses for those who have been abused…anger can be a first step toward self-affirmation that can ultimately open pathways to love.
I finally learned…though I have had to re-learn it so many times…that if I understand love that way…as personal and born in the context of my life…
If we lean into that love…I’m revealing my mystical side now…
If we lean into love…that love will lean back. And love will begin to multiply…love will lean back.
If I understand love that way, I can get to hope. I too can say that there is a love that has never broken faith with us and never will. Because that love depends on our leaning into it.
For what should we pray…today?
Right now…I am not ready to reach all the way across the aisle…I do not have the capacity for compassion at that level. I will get there. Soon I hope. Some of those across the aisle…we love. Some of them would have been at our Thanksgiving table…if we were going to have a Thanksgiving table this year.
We will get there. And perhaps those across the aisle…perhaps…they too will begin to shift…or soon a new generation of leaders will allow a different and more honest seeking of common ground…we can hope and we can pray for that.
But right now, I am focused much more on those on the progressive side of the aisle. I am much more focused on you and on what we can do together.
Part of whatever spiritual maturity…that sounds so grandiose…part of whatever I have learned is that the world operates as the world operates…
Exponential change can multiply evil just as easily as good. In the last four years over 100 environmental regulations have been rolled back…and enforcement virtually ended. Progress turned out to be so fragile…tentative. Two steps forward and 1 ½ steps back. And it leaves us with so much repair work to do.
The universe may be a-moral. But morality is what we focus on here. We speak of First Unitarian as a moral beacon…for us and for our community.
Morality…the common good…answering the call of love is a choice…
But it is a choice we are called to make.
Process theology…liberal theology as it has developed…asks us to believe that love is real, that love can be real if we are willing to be the bearers of love…
Liberal theology speaks of our choice…
Liberation theology speaks not only of choice but of need…liberation theology addresses a world of imbalance and injustice, of haves and have nots…of those pushed down and those…however unintentionally… doing the pushing…
Liberation theology demands preference for the poor and the oppressed…for the marginalized and the left behind…
And liberation theology also offers a promise… liberation from the effects of living in a world of the saved and the damned…the sheep and the goats…
Liberation theology promises that we can all be liberated…that we can all get free.
There was another theme in process theology that was hard for me to learn…that I am still learning in many ways…
Process theology understands God or the spirit to be a creative force…God is a lover of novelty…the spirit is a lover of beauty…
The spirit is a spirit of abundance…of plenty…and of play…of possibility and of joy.
I saw the work of justice as so grim…requiring such determination…such persistence…such doggedness…
The joy in liberation was a hard lesson for me to learn. Perhaps it has been hard for you to trust that lesson as well.
For what should we pray…today?
Persistence…yes.
But not persistence alone.
What would happen if we gave ourselves to love…
Truly gave ourselves to love…leaned into love and liberation and joy…
And allowed love to lean back?
There is much repair to do. Our system was failing long before 2016. The repair needed goes deep. And that involves serious work.
But we cannot allow the harm that has been done to define us or to limit our vision or to set boundaries around the hope we can hold.
Our vision cannot be just a collection of corrections.
Starting from where we are…not pretending to have more compassion that we can honestly claim…
Can we lean into love and creativity and joy and discover that hope and history can rhyme…
Discover that wholeness can go viral…not just viruses.
Discover that liberation is not too grand a dream for us to dream.
And that love is not too outrageous a choice for us to embrace.
And discover what it might be like if the pandemic we were living through were a pandemic of love.
I am not sure that persistence…that linear effort of one small victory after another, with resistance mounting at every turn…
I’m not sure that persistence alone will ever open the flood gates so that justice can roll down like waters…
But a pandemic of love…we could be looking at a waterfall.
I know, to paraphrase Caroline Randall Williams, this is like asking us and asking America to turn toward a light we’ve never seen.
But it could be. We could choose it. Why not live as if a tipping point were possible.
No guarantee of course. But as I’ve heard someone say in the not-too-distant past… What…what have we got to lose?
Amen.
Prayer
Will you pray with me now?
Spirit of Life and of Love. Mystery somehow at the heart of things. Spirit of persistence. Source of joy.
As we feel ourselves moving out from a time of fear
When our world seemed to shrink
And the voice of chaos threatened to drown out
Even the call of love…
As we emerge, may our choices point us
And our world toward opening the floodgates
of justice by harnessing the power of hope
that we hold within.
And may we discover that there is a way
Even out of no way, for us…
That the voice of chaos need not have the last word
And that we have not only the persistence to go on
But the capacity…and the will…
to lean into liberation
to reclaim joy
and unleash love.
May that be so.
Amen.
Topics: Prayer