Prayers of the People

“Prayers of the People”        Rev. Laura Bogle

A sermon delivered on November 6, 2016

A song by the band Old Crow Medicine Show says “We’re all in this thing together, walking the line, between faith and fear.  This life don’t last forever, when you cry I taste the salt in your tears.”

Our country is walking that line, that tightrope right now – between faith in the foundations of our democracy, as imperfect as it has been – and fear that it is all coming apart.  That the center will not hold, that the extremes are pulling us so far apart that there cannot be repair.

The last months I’ve found myself falling to that side of fear at times. Usually this takes the form of reading doom-and-gloom political predictions, checking the polls, seeing ranting Facebook posts and getting sucked in to thinking that the world is about to end. 

Sometimes it involves talking to someone else who shares my political views and getting each other all worked up in a frenzy of self-righteousness.  Sometimes it has meant looking upon fellow citizens with suspicion and anxiety, seeing caricatures rather than people.  Often it has felt like a generalized anxiety and tiredness.  That last few weeks, I’ve heard from many, many of you about similar feelings, similar stories.  Some of us, because of particular identities we hold – for example, being a woman, being a person of color, being an immigrant, being LGBTQ, being a decent human being – have had real trauma re-triggered by headlines and campaign language.  I don’t know anyone who isn’t ready for this election to be over.

But here’s the thing:  No matter who wins the election on Tuesday, our country is in a challenging mess and I think is going to be for quite some time.  Let’s be clear, as I have preached before this year, the zenophobia and misogyny and out-loud racism and power-grabbing we have seen in this election is nothing new; but it has been unleashed and emboldened.  

In these times, how do we move on the tightrope we are walking more often towards faith, instead of fear?

NY Times columnist David Brooks recently said in an interview with Krista Tippet that “we are now in a culture that’s over-politicized and under-moralized.”  “It’s not that we’re bad” he says, but that “we are morally inarticulate.” (OnBeing interview)  For him, it is the language of religion and faith, struggling with ethical and moral principles, that will pull us out of this over-polarized and over-politicized place we find ourselves.

Others, including Rev. William Barber of the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina, have also been working on a conversation centered on morals – what is good and just – as a way to bridge the polarization in this country.  Barber and others have proposed the Higher Ground Moral Declaration – and it is not a right vs. left or democratic vs. republican thing. It is an articulation of deep yearnings for health and wholeness and peace.  Much like our prayers in our web here this morning.  (By the way, pick up a copy of Rev. Barber’s book ‘The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear” and join with others to discuss on January 8^th.)

The tradition of Unitarian Universalism is a story which shows how our inner spiritual lives and our outer political and ethical lives are intertwined.  One without the other is powerless.

James Luther Adams, the 20^th Century Unitarian minister and ethicist helped us to understand our tradition as the priesthood and the prophethood of all believers. 

The priesthood of all believers – The protestant reformation idea that we all must take some responsibility for cultivating our own inner spiritual grounding.  That professional clergy can walk with us in that, and offer guidance and support and challenge, but cannot do it for us.  In covenanted community, with one another, and in relationship to that which is bigger than anyone of us, we practice loving ourselves and each other into wholeness.

Our tradition though, also says that liberal religion cannot stop with the purely personal.  That there is a relationship between that inner growth, that search for truth and meaning and what we must do together  in this world, in the realm of politics and society.  We must also practice loving the world, bringing our inner spirituality out into the realm of history.  Adams called this the prophethood of all believers.

He wrote:  “A church that does not concern itself with the struggle in history for human decency and 

justice, a church that does not show concern for the shape of things to come, a church that does not attempt to interpret the signs of the times, is not a prophetic church. … The prophetic liberal church is the church in which persons think and work together to interpret the signs of the times in the light of their faith….  The prophetic liberal church is the church in which all members share the common responsibility to attempt to foresee the consequences of human behavior (both individual and institutional), with the intention of making history in place of merely being pushed around by it.”

As a community of faith attempting to be the priesthood and prophethood of all believers we bring a spiritual lens to our political commitments, and we bring our political commitments to our spiritual lives.  In this way we attempt to make history, to be a participant in what occurs here in this world—not simply a passive observer or commentator.

On some Mondays this fall I’ve been volunteering my personal time as a citizen to spend a few hours supporting a particular candidate for state office.  And I don’t want you to think I’ve done a lot, because I haven’t.  I’ve done a tiny bit—a few hours of data entry and fewer hours of phone banking.  But it has been my very small attempt to feel like I am connected in some way to what we call the political process, because my faith calls me to do this.

I have been remembering the words of Toni Morrison – “When I vote, it’s like a small prayer by the road because I remember Rosa. I remember Fannie Lou. I remember all those people who were hosed down in order to get the vote.”

And so, even though data entry and phone banking can be kind of tedious, I tried to make it a kind of prayer.  There can be a sacredness to scrolling through the names of voters, citizens of this country, my neighbors.  Knowing that in that list are the elderly and first time voters, parents and grandparents, more recent immigrants with names I didn’t know how to pronounce and those with generations of roots in Tennessee.  Reading their names was a meditation, a reminder of all these real people, with real addresses, and real experiences, living right here; people who may be voting, and part of deciding who will lead us in the next years.  If I actually got to talk with one, I was reminded:  here is a person who in all their complicated life experiences has landed in a certain place in relationship to what we call politics, just like I have, and who might agree with me in some places and not in others.  I found that approaching this work with a prayer-like sensibility has helped me to stay calm and not fearful, to keep my faith that in the end all will be well.

No matter what the results of the election are – who wins and who loses – we all have work to do my friends to keep holding the tension between faith and fear, not letting it overwhelm us.   

May we keep breathing in peace, and breathing out love; may we make our political engagements more like prayer, and our prayers more like listening.

I joked this week that my sermon might just be a poem because I was finding it so hard to put down words in prose that could capture what I wanted to say to you this morning.  And so I did write a poem, and I want to end by giving that to you now.

Outside

The flags fly

Down the highway, hanging on to the back of large trucks or the chest of a man.

Outside

There is grabbing and taking

A staking and restaking

Of territory claimed

The roads cut, the oil burned, blockades erected, and walls built

Outside

The borders between us are made visible in noise, colors, ballots, batons.

Signs and signals.

Inside resides

The breath of common ancestors

The child who plays with no thought of malice

The heart tuned toward suffering

The taste of figs ripening in the lingering autumn heat

The sliver of an orange moon low in the evening November sky.

Inside, begins something you might call a prayer

Let us kneel down.

Not to God or nation or ideology

But to what is inside.  A feeling, a connection

A welling like the waters at the very beginning of time

Unpolluted and gently flowing. 

Sweet and dark and healing.

Let us kneel down to the persistent possibility that life and love prevail.

Let us release what is inside

outward in beauty, spilling towards each other, until all merges.

An unstoppable well of knowing that we will only ever be saved by one another.

Amen.

Closing Words

We are all in this thing together—this election, nation, this earth, this universe.

Take care of yourselves and your spirits this week.

Will you turn toward one another, let us lift up our hearts, our best selves, towards the Great Good we know is possible,

Carry peace and love with you as you greet your neighbor.