So, it probably won’t surprise you that this isn’t exactly the sermon I planned to give at the beginning of this week. That’s one thing about being a minister or even just a preacher: you plan and craft and write and tweak and sometimes... life happens. Sometimes... the world changes right in the middle of your plans... and you’re called by forces far greater than yourself... to meet that moment...
[ask me sometime about the worship training I got in seminary for just such occasions]
Now. One of my favorite books of all time is the classic Stephen King novel, IT. IT is the story of a group of children who take it upon themselves to go toe-to-toe with an ancient and unimaginable evil. This evil doesn't just take the form of scary monsters or a creepy clown but it's actually infused with the town itself--and its people--often manifesting in violent racism, misogyny, and homophobia. And the more I (red) read of IT, the more I felt this sense that our world has its own IT lurking beneath the surface, born of the original sins of colonization, enslavement, genocide, and oppression; absorbed into the very air we breathe, the water we drink, and the ground we live off of.
And I think it’s important to use that language for a couple reasons. I know “original sin” is one concept that our faith was actually built in opposition to. As an alternative to. But I think we can reclaim this theological doctrine for just such situations as this. Not only is this language familiar and evocative for many, including those who may be challenged by these assertions, but for me there really is no language that more fully and truthfully crystallizes what it is we’re talking about here. It’s impossible to overstate the degree to which our original sins are encoded into the DNA of this country. A country built from its very foundation on stolen land, conquered through the brutal genocide and displacement of its indigenous population. A country LITERALLY BUILT by enslaved African hands and feet stolen from their homelands and trafficked into America, whipped into submission, subjected to rape, torture, and yes, genocide.
That’s something we don’t acknowledge enough--we associate genocide with Native Americans and slavery with Africans but enslaved peoples were absolutely also, by definition, victims of genocide. This legacy has been baked into our laws, into our cultural attitudes, into our minds and hearts... it’s even been emblazoned into the cellulite of our films for far too long.
And yet every effort to reckon with this abhorrent heritage and every step taken to dismantle it is met with resistance, if not outright accusations of reverse racism and unfair treatment of white people. Affirmative action and even non-discrimination practices are decried, ridiculed, and often eliminated. Positive representation in media is characterized as “white genocide.” And over the past decade, even teaching children about things like Native genocide and the African slave trade in schools has been not only vilified as anti-American, but actually made illegal. This is the absolute last thing we need. Quite the opposite, it is essential that we learn about and teach about the darkest, ugliest, most unconscionable pieces of our history. We must reckon with who we’ve been... to become who we want to be.
Why? Because we’ve seen what happens when we don’t. Because l’est we believe that American empire is a relic consigned to a distant and unrecognizable history of genocide and slavery, the truth is a very different story altogether. A story of Jim Crow racism enshrined in our laws until the middle of the 20th century--and revived in the 21st with the death of much of what the civil rights movement fought for. A story of imperialist foreign policy and American hegemony in the decades that followed World War II, including support for an apartheid state slaughtering Palestinians and turning their home into an open-air prison. A story of crony capitalism colonizing the world and monopolizing our own country, consolidating immense power in the hands of the few. A story of endless 21st century wars in the Middle East and a draconian, ruthlessly inhumane immigration policy in the years since 9/11, all in the name of “security.”
For all these reasons, one of the central foundational projects of American imperialism has always been an all-out assault on education. For decades they have been dismantling public education, slashing funding at every level, especially for the arts in education, and doing everything they can to dictate what teachers are allowed to teach and what their children are allowed to learn.
This is a direct assault on a core foundation of our faith: the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. If I may borrow a few words from one of the great luminary leaders and living prophets of our faith, the Rev. Dr. Rebecca Ann Parker: “The purpose of education, Channing says, is "to unfold and direct aright" all the powers of the soul. The educational task is to wake up, unfold, and direct aright our capacity to feel, to think, to create, to judge right and wrong, to sense the presence of God, to respond to beauty. As each human being finds, claims and develops their array of capacities, they grow in likeness to God, they embody their divinity. The growth of our souls, the growth of our capacities, the unfolding of our capacities directed to what is right and good, is the rising of the presence of God, the incarnation of the presence of God, in the world.
“This means that in our theological perspective, education is the fundamental spiritual practice. It's more fundamental than prayer. It's more fundamental than going to church on Sunday. It's more fundamental than the sacraments. It is the core spiritual practice by which the human soul grows in likeness to God and becomes a manifestation of divinity.”
This is the task we are called to in this moment. One of them, at least. I did a service early last year on the relationship between liberal religion and anarchism and one of the central focuses was the necessity of mutual aid in Times Like These. There are many ways we can and do provide mutual aid but I truly feel that the greatest way we can do it is by practicing the fundamental spiritual practice of our faith: education. In some ways we’re already doing this--some of you may know that the Our Whole Lives sex education curriculum developed by the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ, is considered by many in religious and non-religious circles to be one of the gold standards of sex education for children and adolescents. And. There is so much more we can be doing to "to unfold and direct aright" all the powers of the soul and become manifestations of divinity.
And by the way, this is one of my favorite pieces of Channing’s theology that I feel has sort of been lost in modern Unitarian Universalism. His steadfast belief that human beings are created in the image of God, inherently good, possessing what he calls “godlike powers” of the soul that he truly believed hold the potential to be, in a very literal, practical sense, a manifestation of divinity. This is a huge part of my own personal theology: my belief that our minds, our bodies, our souls, our imaginations have infinite untapped potential to shape our world in ways we’ve only just begun to understand.
In Stephen King's novel, IT prays on the imagination. The most terrible imagination of all: fear. It takes the form of the thing you fear the most and terrorizes you into submission in order to destroy you. Not only that but IT uses that fear to control people into doing terrible things to one another--or even just looking the other way when someone else does. American empire does just the same. It weaponizes our fears against us because it wants us so afraid that we lose hope and obey in advance. It uses fear to turn us against each other because the more we fear and hate each other, the more distracted we are from the proverbial “man behind the curtain,” the corporate and fascist overlords pulling the strings, making all our lives worse to enrich themselves. But as we have seen this very week: THEY. ARE. FAILING. We are TIRED of fear and hate. We are TIRED of fighting each other. In the words of James Talarico, Senator-elect from the state of Texas, “the real divide in this country is NOT Left vs. Right; it’s Top vs. Bottom.”
The foundation of American empire is cracking. Because as hard as they try to weaponize the fear in our imaginations, it also makes them vulnerable to those very same imaginations. In King’s novel, this is the catch: because IT feeds on imagination, that also makes IT especially vulnerable to imagination. And I believe the “IT” in our world is the same. When we imagine our world as it could be, we can do real, lasting damage to the structures of violence and dehumanization that our world has been built on.
In seminary, we had to read a book that honestly should probably be required reading for all Unitarian Universalists, religious liberals, anyone who wants to transform this world for the better. It’s called “Collective Visioning: How Groups Can Work Together for a Just and Sustainable Future” by Linda Stout. The main thrust of it is this: all too often justice movements try to build their power in opposition to the things they’re fighting against. But we are so much more effective when we build movements on a positive vision of the future we want and the world we dream of. We’re seeing this happen in real time all over this country--a positive vision inspires people and motivates people and gives them reasons to hope.
Hope... is the fuel that powers our imaginations... and also powers the work we do to transform this world. The work is the essential piece but it all starts with our imaginations. When we imagine a better world, it gives us the power to transform it, to manifest that vision. This is the power of possibility that Rev. Harold is always telling us about. The God of possibility. We are that God of possibility. Let’s go show the world what’s possible. May it be so.
