Transforming the Story, by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz March 28, 2010

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Transforming the Story

        Last Sunday was an amazing day, wasn’t it? Health care reform, however imperfect, passed – and some members of this congregation were on hand to greet the lawmakers when they emerged, tired and happy, from the Capitol late Sunday night. Earlier in the day, a couple hundred thousand people of all hues and national origins gathered on the National Mall to demand dignity and compassion for people who have come to this country for honest work that is needed not just by the US but in the global economic system. Were you among them?

        What else, last Sunday? The story of this church opened a new chapter, with modernizing constitutional revisions put forward by committed leadership. It was a big day, a day that will go down in history -- in the national narrative, in the narrative of this Beloved Community, and in the places where those two narratives intersect.

        It is, of course, in our work for social justice that the narrative of this church connects most vividly with the story of our country. This church was there working to desegregate the schools in Arlington. We were there in the 1970s, beginning a conversation about low-income housing for seniors, which eventually took form in Culpepper Garden. We were there in the 1980s, providing sanctuary for a family from El Salvador. We were there in 2006, standing strong on the side of love against the Marshall-Newman amendment which defined LGBT citizens outside of equality under the law. Today our church remains a sanctuary for LGBT people and a source of organizing strength against such discrimination, and believe me, friends, the final chapter on this struggle has not yet been written.

        And then, last Sunday, our church and our partners in VOICE were invited to ride buses to the mall with members of the largely immigrant Buckingham community. That invitation made me proud. We were invited because members of this church have repeatedly shown up as friends and as allies to our neighbors, to people right here, just a few blocks away from this place. About two dozen of us from this church stepped forward to accompany several hundred Buckingham neighbors to the march.

        These are our stories.

        It’s a great time of year for stories. Today is Palm Sunday, and all over the world Christians are re-enacting the triumphal entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey colt. The people laid palm branches on his path, and shouted “hosanna,” for they believed this man whose message was love and forgiveness, this simple son of a carpenter, was the answer to their prayers.

        That’s not the only tale told this time of year. Earlier we sang, “Go Down, Moses,” in memory of one of the other most powerful religious stories we know. At sundown tomorrow, Jews will be sitting down to the Seder to tell this magnificent story -- how God’s compassionate heart heard the cries of a people; how God sent Moses to lead them out of slavery in Egypt. This story makes liberation into God’s business, and it still inspires chills.

        What happens, though, when the people get to the Promised Land? They are instructed to be kind to the people living there, but if necessary to defend the trueness of God as God, they should kill them.

        This is where the story gets more complex, and less satisfying. We live in a postmodern world, a world of many peoples and many stories, and we are well aware how one people’s triumph too often turns into another people’s oppression. As UUs, we love to sing, “We’ll build a land,” but how, I wonder, do Native Americans hear those lyrics? If you went to General Assembly last year in Salt Lake City, you might have heard a presentation that unpacked the way these words are heard by people from different cultures – and not hypothetical members of “other” cultures either, but people who are leaders in our movement, people who are sitting in our pews.

        Back to the Exodus event: a whole theology of liberation has grown up with that story as its centerpiece, as it seems to show God acting in history to free the oppressed. That “acting in history” is important; most liberation theologians look at religious reality through the lens of a story that progresses through time.

        Well, duh, you might be saying. What other way could there be to look at it?

        According to the late Native American theologian Vine Deloria, the other way to look at religious reality – the Native way – is through the lens of place.

        I grew up steeped in narrative, in stories with identifiable beginnings, middles and ends, stories with a predictable narrative arc. The “story” way of thinking permeates my consciousness, and – reading Deloria, I now see that this way of thinking limits my world-view. Because our western minds are so caught up in history and progression, the Native way may seem static, with stories and ritual that grow from intimate contact over generations with a particular landscape. Perhaps I’m even tempted to call it “primitive,” which – in our linear, temporal way of thinking, places it earlier in time and therefore less developed.

        And yet – there is something there, isn’t there, that we yearn for. Don’t you feel it when you hear the flute?

        Deloria, writing in the 1970s, noticed the obsession of western culture with all things Native. White people, he said, were desperate to find some sense of authenticity in their lives, and this is why they were reaching out to embrace both Eastern religions and Native American rites.

        In the 1970s, following the civil rights movement and the rise of Black Power, white people were embracing Indian culture as a part of history that was colorful, American, yet seemingly divorced from the problems of the day. Indian culture, as depicted in books like Carlos Castaneda’s stories of Don Juan, offered young and drifting whites a chance at some power to deal with what Deloria called the “tragic breakdown of vision and values” in western culture.

        “The escape to drugs, the rise of power movements, and the return to Mother Earth can all be seen as desperate efforts of groups of people to flee abstract articulations of belief and superficial values and find authenticity wherever it could be found.” Deloria wrote. “It was at this point that Indians became popular.”

        What white people were reaching out for, Deloria tells us, was a deep authenticity that comes from religious reality based on a sense of place – spatial rather than temporal. Progress is not an important product of such religion. Ethics flow from the ongoing life of a community whose religious rituals are rooted in a particular landscape.

        Many of us in this congregation are the sons and daughters of the colonial power, and such is not our way. We are the ones who believe, with Theodore Parker, Martin Luther King and Barack Obama, that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. We are as firmly rooted in time as tribal communities were rooted in place, and the longing we feel may stem from a sense that our roots need to move to be real.

        It puts us in a quandary. We need to know our own stories, know them well, since when we know where we have come from, we know something more of the shape of the arc -- where we are and where we are going. For us, the “where” is a location of time, not of place.

        So we need to hold our stories lightly, as befits a moving landscape, yet know that they are rooted in our theology. Rooted in love. How can we know our work for justice is rooted in Love, as Jaakko said in his “I believe” statement? What does that mean, to be rooted in Love? I think this is one of the most important questions facing this church, and our UU movement generally. That is why I hope every one of you will join your ministers and leaders at the all-church workshop happening here April 9th and 10th. In that workshop facilitators from our Unitarian Universalist Association will help us give birth to a UUCA theology of social justice, and will help us discover that theology in our own stories of justice making.

        Unless of course you believe Glenn Beck. He says churches should not be involved in work for social justice. What do you think? Glenn Beck would have churches be nothing but collections of individuals each focused on his or her personal salvation. If you put all your energy into thinking about your own possibility of life after death, you won’t have time in this life to open your heart in compassion to those who are being squeezed by our economic system, our health care system, or our immigration system. You wouldn’t have been there for our neighbors last Sunday.

        This doesn’t work for most of us.

        We are, most of us, creatures of a temporal narrative, and that leads naturally to a certain restlessness, a restlessness that can be soothed by engagement in acts of kindness and compassion. Our authenticity comes from knowing our history, the good and the bad of it, and at the same time knowing our history is not the only history.

        Knowing our history, we become more available to show up as who we are when our neighbors at Buckingham ask us to accompany them on buses downtown to join a march where they feel they might be threatened with attack. Knowing our history and why we act for justice, we open our hearts to the struggles of those whose jobs are being squeezed out and whose incomes squeezed dry. (If you are interested in learning more about this “Big Squeeze,” you can join a conference call this afternoon at 4 pm with the UU Service Committee, based on this book, “The Big Squeeze,” by Steven Greenhouse).

        Knowing our history and our theology – our highest and deepest values – we can sing, “We’ll Build a Land” and feel joy at the possibility we are singing, without denying the pain inflicted by those whose triumphal narrative held no room for the stories of others. From this place of many perspectives, we can see there is nothing wrong with celebrating Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem, the palm branches, and the whole nine yards. Where it goes wrong is when we have to have him come again; when we get addicted to triumphalism, when we think that the progress of history has to be in only one direction, our direction, and that we can know, or dictate, what the final chapter will be.

        We can know that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, but only if we put our energy into hearing all the voices – with nobody left out -- so we can understand together what that direction is.

        This church is a place to come together to explore uncomfortable truths. A place to put down our certainties, to open our minds and hearts to the possibilities that arise when we don’t know, to open our hearts to the wisdom each of us shares and discover what it is this community cares about.

         “There is no power greater. There s no power greater than a community discovering what it cares about,” wrote Margaret Wheatley. I read these words to this congregation in the first or second sermon I ever delivered here, four years ago. When we know each other deeply, when all of our individual stories are included to become one community’s story, love grows, and our work to bend the arc of history takes root there. When this happens, we are real; we act from our own authenticity. Our work for justice as a community, together, transforms us as individuals, even as we transform the story of our community.

        On this Palm Sunday, let us shout hosanna and let us also await the liberation of Passover. Let us open our hearts to new ways of hearing stories – ways we’d never thought of before. And let us know one another. Let us know this church as a community, rooted in love, that acts to bend the arc of history toward justice.

        Blessed be. Hosanna!

I Believe Statement

• Jaakko Helleranta

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