First Parish Bedford UU

“What Do We Do to Deserve
the Diversity Award We Just Got?”

A sermon by Rev. John E. Gibbons

delivered on Sunday, May 16, 2010

at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

Preface

Reflections on Meeting with UU’s in Africa

by Cathy Cordes

There are times when I really love my job. Finding myself on a plane to Africa is definitely one of those times. I traveled as part of a team, to visit the Unitarian Universalist congregations in Burundi and Uganda.

“But are they really UUs?” people ask me. Well, obviously they don’t look like this congregation. They were mostly so YOUNG and mostly male. Jill McAllister and I brought the number of women in the group of 50 in Burundi to 5. AND - my traveling companions and I were the only white people around.

In Bujumbura, after two full days of meetings with the congregation, we ended on Sunday afternoon with a worship service. The chairs were moved to form one large circle. The meetings had been conducted in French, the official language in Burundi, but the worship was conducted in English for our benefit. We sang Spirit of Life, in English. Fulgence nDa-gi-ji-mana, read a bible selection and gave a short sermon. Jill, who is the minister of Bujumbura’s partner church in Ann Arbor MI, spoke about partnership and friendship. There was a closing prayer and another song. The service reflected the community and the culture of the congregation.

Here’s the story of how they started. In 1998 Fulgence Ndagijimana joined the Dominican order of Catholic priests. In 2001, Fulgence was finishing a Philosophy degree at the seminary in Bujumbura, Burundi. He had already started to question many Roman Catholic teachings. While taking several online courses he became acquainted with a Dominican priest in Canada. The two became friends and often exchanged email. One day, Fulgence read a notice on the community board that this man had left the Roman Catholic Church to join the Unitarian Universalist Church. Fulgence went online and searched for Unitarian Universalism.

In his own words Fulgence says “After the search, I was not converted; I just discovered that I was a Unitarian.” He left the seminary. He connected with The International Council of Unitarians and Universalists (ICUU). He started corresponding with several UU ministers in several countries. Rev. Ray, from the U.K. said, “I have some advice for you, start your own community.” Fulgence started talking to his friends and very quickly a group of people were meeting in people’s homes. They soon started L’Association Chrétienne Unitarienne du Burundi.

They now number about 40 people. Most of them are young professionals, working for NGOs or the government. The congregation meets once a week. Social justice work is important to them. As they build their own congregation, they are also working with an indigenous people - the Batwa pigmies, a pre-agricultural hunting and gathering society that has survived for thousands of years in the forests of Eastern Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. The congregation is working to help them gain their rights as citizens of Burundi.

Uganda has a similar story. I was not in Uganda on a Sunday, but attended a Wednesday afternoon fellowship at the New Life Elementary School, connected to the UU church in Uganda. A debate topic had been chosen for the day “Christianity is the one true faith. True or False.” Teachers, guests, and the older students were invited to attend, but it was not required. The afternoon began with drumming by some of the boys to accompany the singing in Luganda, the local language. After the singing the topic of the day was introduced by one of the teachers. One by one, teachers and students rose to speak to the topic, defending their choice of true or false. The students had been given the topic ahead of time and many had written their arguments on paper and read them. They all learn English in school – it is the official language of the classroom. The guests were also asked to give an opinion. When there were no more speakers, no winner was declared. The fellowship ended with tea and cakes for all.

In Kampala, a nearby large city, the small congregation was preparing for a large worship service the Sunday after we left. That service was not going to look familiar to us. It would be 4 hours long. Elements include dancing and drumming, preaching and faith healing. The message they preach is the dignity and worth of each person and individual choice of religion.

They are the New Life Church of Kampala and they are UUs. Mark Kiyimba, their founder, was trained as an Apostolic minister. He says he was bothered by the hypocrisy of his own ministry. He would preach about not drinking and then would go home and have a beer. He would preach about accepting our neighbor as our self and then would be told to preach that homosexuality was a sin and homosexuals were bad people. He disagreed with the leaders of his church of gender issues, spiritual liberty and scriptural interpretation.

He also researched religions online and found Unitarian Universalism. In 2004 he started his own church – a free and welcoming congregation. He connected with the ICUU and found a religious home. His ministry is now one of possibilities, of social justice for all and care for those less fortunate. Their congregation is working with the New Life elementary school and an orphanage. They are also addressing the rights of gays and lesbians in Uganda.

The Uganda government is debating a bill that will make it a crime to be a homosexual, punishable by life imprisonment. In a very courageous move. the Ugandan Unitarians joined with several other groups to organize a conference in Uganda to be a counter balance to the religious right and to support the dignity and rights of all people. Mark asked the minister of their partner church in Tulsa OK church, Marlin Lavenhar to come. On February 14, 2010 the Reverend Lavanhar, stood on the side of love along with Mark Kiyimba. The Tulsa church has vowed to stand by their partner as they navigate the politics of Uganda.

Both Uganda and Burundi have applied to the ICUU as emerging groups.

Like the Unitarian Universalist Association in the U.S., ICUU is a voluntary association of churches around the world. The UUA is a member of the council. Their constitution outlines common beliefs. it reads in part:

We, the member groups of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists, affirming our belief in religious community based on:

• liberty of conscience and individual thought in matters of faith,

• the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

• justice and compassion in human relations,

• Responsible stewardship of earth's living system,

• and our commitment to democratic principles,

declare our purposes to be:

• to serve the Infinite Spirit of Life and the human community, by strengthening the worldwide Unitarian and Universalist faith,

• to affirm the variety and richness of our living traditions,

• to facilitate mutual support among member organizations,

• to promote our ideals and principles around the world,

• to provide models of liberal religious response, to the human condition which upholds our common values.

What is really wonderful about this faith of ours is that it has a unique flavor that always reflects the culture in which it exists, be it faith healing in the Philippines and Uganda, large flaming chalices in India or communion in Transylvania. And yet, at the core of every Unitarian and Unitarian Universalist church I have visited is a commonly held belief in religious freedom, reason and tolerance. So I leave you with this thought: If a visitor from Uganda were to come here, what, I wonder, would our way of being a congregation tell them about our faith, our values and our culture?

Sermon

“What Do We Do to Deserve the Diversity Award We Just Got?”

Rev. John E. Gibbons

Earlier this month, the Bedford Chamber of Commerce (of which we are a member) gave us its annual Diversity Award.

“To John Gibbons and First Parish in recognition to a business that has done the most to promote respect for all people who live and visit our community, equality in public interactions, and employee education towards enhancing individual dignity and civil rights.”

My first reaction to this was surprise: We do so little, can it be that others are doing even less? And yet the Chamber did point to some significant things we are a part of:

We were recognized for our leadership in Business Diversity Training – Carlton SooHoo, Naomi Dogan-West, Lois Pulliam and Sue Baldauf were also part of that. They took note of our engagement with partner churches globally. Cathy has previously reported to us when she and others of us have been to Transylvania, the Philippines, India and now Africa. The Chamber noticed our Welcoming Congregation work to include the GLBTQ community and our advocacy for all human rights; our outreach to Iraqi refugees; and our response to racism and hate incidents; and our affirmation of Bedford as a community committed to respect, cooperation, and the non-violent resolution of conflict.

It does feel good to be recognized, as I said in our newsletter, and I am also reminded of Howard Thurman’s admonition that “a crown is placed over our heads that we are trying to grow tall enough to wear.”

This morning I want to reflect on why we do these things. Today I won’t try to rally us to storm the barricades and do more (though we should do that also). Rather I want to reflect more spiritually, theologically, about who we are as Unitarian Universalists and how we understand our lives and purpose.

Much as our experiences with partner churches have taught us that there is more than one North American way to be a Unitarian Universalist, a commitment to diversity arises from a deeply spiritual awareness that there is more than one way to be a human being. I’ll come back to this.

As usual, I’m going to go at this in an odd way. I’m going to read you a poem by Billy Collins. It’s titled “The Afterlife” and its stanzas each describe alternate conceptions of what happens when we die. Basically, the poem says we will each end up where we imagine we will go.

Billy Collins says,

They're moving off in all imaginable directions,

each according to his own private belief,

and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:

that everyone is right, as it turns out.

you go to the place you always thought you would go,

the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors

into a zone of light, white as a January sun.

Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,

while the less inventive find themselves stuck

in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,

a woman in her forties with short wiry hair and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.

With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.

There are those who are squeezing into the bodies

of animals--eagles and leopards--and one trying on

the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,

ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

while others float off into some benign vagueness,

little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.

He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave

guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins

wishing they could return so they could learn Italian

or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.

They wish they could wake in the morning like you

and stand at a window examining the winter trees,

every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.

Billy Collins says that in the afterlife you go to the place you thought you would go, the place you saw in your head, in your imagination. Raise your hands, when you die how many of you figure you’ll get shot into a funnel of flying colors? Who’s joining the celestial choir? Air-conditioned room and chorus girls? Who expects to be greeted by a goddess? Who among you are the reincarnationists? Who will float off into benign vagueness? Any classicists here ready to meet up with Edith Hamilton (remember she’s the one who wrote the standard textbook of classic mythology.) And will the rest of you just lie on your backs, wishing to return to learn Italian or see the pyramids or play a little golf or just wake up to an ordinary day?

Well, the truth is that I don’t think much about the afterlife (so maybe I’ll just float off to some absent-minded hum). But I do think about this life and my life, and here’s what I think:

Now for ordinary everyday purposes, I am generally aware of who John Gibbons is and what language I speak and what I can and cannot do. I won’t barge into a surgical operating room and announce that “I’ll take over that heart transplant!” I won’t offer myself up as a body double for George Clooney or Eminem or Lady Gaga. I won’t go to the police who are holding Faisal Shahzad and say, “Wait you’ve got the wrong man! I’m Faisal Shahzad!”

Actually, last Saturday after officiating at a wedding I was leaving down the aisle when an old bent-over wrinkled man pulled me aside, grabbed my hand and said, “Hey, I’m John Gibbons!” and well, he was.

In my day to day life, I’m not too unsure of who I am. I don’t mistake myself for some stranger on the street, or some jerk behind the wheel, or some dorky kid, or some bald guy, or a Tea Party fanatic. I’m not a murderer or someone murdered. I’m not a nervous peace-loving law-abiding Pakistani nor am I one of the immigrant (documented? undocumented?) housekeepers at the Doubletree over on Middlesex Turnpike, or one of the Iraqi refugees now in Lowell. I’m not the heroic Chesley Sullenberger or the disgraced Bernie Madoff, nor am I the unemployed single mother who comes to the church looking for some help. I don’t think I mistake myself for that little boy in the Libyan hospital bed, now back in Holland, the sole survivor of that plane crash that killed his parents, brother and 100 others.

Or…wait, maybe it did it cross my mind to wonder what might it be like to be that scared, hurting, maybe thankful, maybe not disoriented little boy.

And in that instant that one wonders we become aware of a different, not everyday but nonetheless as real reality that we are the terrorist and the peacemaker, we are the accused and the accuser, the vengeful and the avenger, the hero and the schlub, the stranger and the familiar one, the exceptional, the common, the dork, the jerk, the bald one, the bold one, the shy one, the parent, the brother, the little boy in the hospital bed. We may have our inner demons or inner George Clooney, or Eminem, or – just speaking for myself – Lady Gaga.

James Thurber recalled the mother showing her young son a photo from her wedding. Pointing to the groom, she says, “And that handsome man is your father.” “If that’s my father,” the boy replies, “then who is the old bald guy who lives with us?”

“Do I contradict myself?” asked Walt Whitman. “Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

Some of you will remember the late Bill Hammond, UU minister and reverential naturalist, who was influenced by his teacher Alfred Korzybski, “the father of modern semantics.” It was Korzybski who believed people do what they do because of the way they see the world.

Any of you who have used personality inventories like Myers-Briggs or the enneagram or probably some kinds of astrology, too (science and pseudo-science) know that we differ in the ways we see and experience and imagine reality and, thus, we can only hope to understand one another if and when we see, experience and imagine reality as others see it…when we are large, when we contain multitudes.

When I accepted for us the Diversity Award, I recalled that I grew up in a small suburb of Chicago, not in some ways much different demographically from Bedford. At a public meeting somewhere my mother Mary Lou advocated for more affordable housing, more racial diversity, less discrimination – and at that meeting she was shouted down by a local businessman who said, “Lady, if that’s what you want, why don’t you move back to Chicago?”

Bedford today has two Korean churches; an Asian monastery; a couple of Brazilian immigrant churches. Kids entering our schools speak an amazing 21 native languages! Ten percent of the elementary school population is Asian; 25% of the entire school population is non-white.

I don’t want Bedford to be any less beautiful than it is, any less clean, the streets any less safe; I don’t want its population to be any less charming than you already are. But you know, I do want the people of Bedford (and all the places we live) to look more like America – heck, more like Bedford - actually is! …More diverse in age, race, religion, ability, disability, sexual orientation, political affiliation (we still need more Republicans in this church; more socialists too). We need still more people who haven’t got it all figured out, more disfigured and differently configured people, more Christians and Jews and Pagans and Buddhists, more shy people, more transgender and funny and sad and I-haven’t-got-a name-for you people; and, as for the loud and confident and cock-sure people, well, we’re still one or two short of quota. You get the idea.

But – none of this is not about politics or about political correctness. It has more to do with theology and spirituality and who we are as Unitarian Universalists (though this is a wide consciousness we share with many other people across every boundary of belief and unbelief). It is about understanding our self, not as what is contained by this ever more wrinkled and scarred and sagging sack of skin but rather knowing our self as inclusive of the myriad human realities that we can breathe in, and see and experience and imagine. And I’m pretty sure that it’s not just human realities but the realities of all that lives. And I don’t want to go too wacky on you here but I’m pretty sure as well that all that lives is inclusive of a lot of life that, has after death, assumed new reality.

Our self is large; we contain multitudes.

I was in a ministers meeting last week and we too share joys and sorrows. And there were the usual births and deaths and haircuts and new puppies but then someone said she mourned “the bleeding of our mother earth in the Louisiana Gulf.” And well, my first reaction was to mildly roll my eyes at the anthropomorphizing of an oil spill but, on further reflection, she had it about right.

Remember the character Shug in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple talking about what some people call God: “my first step from the old white man was trees. then air. then birds. then other people. but one day when i was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which i was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. i knew that if i cut a tree, my arm would bleed.”

We are bleeding down there in the Gulf; you and I are bleeding.

I think of Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” “Everything about him was old except his eyes, and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.”

You and I are in the sea of existence. You and I are one with the earth and sea.. the people, the animals, the air.

Aspiring to diversity is most about disabusing ourselves of all the prejudices and misconceptions and idolatries and barriers and cuckoo ideas that deceive us into thinking that we’re much different than anyone else. Here we aspire to do all we can to replace such barriers and cuckoo conceptions with ever-widening circles of solidarity and mutual respect .

Gandhi said, “We must be the change we want to see in the world.” Maybe that’s true of what we envision for an afterlife. Surely it is true of what we live in this life.

In the gospels it is said that we are to treat our neighbor as our self because our neighbor is our self.

That’s it. Amen.

Closing Words:

It is told of a Zen Master who had done a painting for the King’s palace that when the King wanted to see it, he would say, “Wait a little longer.” Years passed and the King repeatedly asked, “Isn’t the painting ready yet?” The Master said, “The painting is ready, but you are not. Existence is always ready.” But the King insisted. They entered the room and the painting was breathtaking! – three dimensional – the hills, the valleys and a small path going somewhere inside. “Where does the road lead?” asked the King. The painter said, “I will go and see.” And he entered the path and disappeared beyond the hills. That is what it means to be diverse, to be large, to contain multitudes. We move into life. We don’t stand outside it and ask where it goes.