2018.1.14 There is No One But Us

2018.1.14        “There is No One But Us”    

Time for All Ages: Litany of the Generations

Reading from Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard

“There is no one but us. There is no one to send, not a clean hand or a pure heart on the face of the earth or in the earth—only us… unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and uninvolved. But there is no one but us. There has never been.”

Reading from Stride Toward Freedom by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable.  Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on the wheels inevitability….Without persistent effort, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of … social destruction.  This is no time for apathy or complacency.  This is a time for vigorous and positive action.”

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Some of you know that last November I was unexpectedly able to take a brief trip with my partner to Europe.  I mostly was in Germany, but also took the train to Amsterdam for a couple of days, where I stayed with a dear old friend who has lived there now for 8 years or so.  So good to get historical perspective – we (and by that I really mean white folks in the US) tend to live with such a short vantage point on history.  As if everything is now, 50 years ago is the distant past, to say nothing of 150 years ago, or 17 generations ago, and nothing that happened that long ago could possibly have any bearing on our own moral life, or the state of our souls.

So, when I was in Amsterdam I spent one whole day alone, wandering around the old Jewish section of town.  I went to the Jewish historical museum, literally built on top of what used to be 4 different synagogues.  I then went to the Esnoga, the synagogue that was built between 1670 - 1675 by Portuguese Jews who had moved to more cosmopolitan Amsterdam, fleeing persecution during the Inquisition. 

It is an enormous, beautiful place of worship, still an active worshipping community and also serving as a museum.  It was built at the same time as the grandchildren of the first enslaved people in the United States were being born.  The rows of wooden benches in the synagogue have compartments under the seats—little cubbies—where men could store their items for worship.  Each had their own designated seat.  During WWII when more and more men were disappearing, the community kept their things locked up in their compartments, to remember them.  Some of those items are still on display, a reminder of the people who lived, not that long ago; and who did not survive. 

I was left with a sense of amazement that the synagogue itself was still standing, through the centuries, including and especially through WWII.  The past was present.

And then I went to the final stop of the day—the Dutch Resistance museum—which takes you through the years of WWII and explores the ways that Dutch people did – and did not—resist Nazism.  It was the very first section of the museum that continues to haunt me—

the section which covered the time period when Hitler first invaded and occupied Holland, and the year or two right after.  Through personal stories of regular people the exhibition focused on the dilemmas that people were confronted with during the occupation.  To what extent should one adapt to the new situation and did one dare to resist?  For those in positions of power, especially governmental power, should they stay in those positions and try to use that power to resist from the inside?  Or should they resign and work from outside the system?  Then there was the problem of the initial strategy that the occupying Germans pursued:  to be gentle on the Dutch at first; to try to win them over to their Aryan nationalism.  For a great many people, after the initial invasion and occupation, life went back to normal for a while.

That evening, back at my friend’s house, I was reviewing the day with her and her partner, who is Dutch.  I shared with them how powerful I thought the Resistance museum was, the examples of great bravery and sacrifice, the examples of complicated ethical calculations. 

And then her partner, interrupted me to say—“We did not resist.  The Dutch people hardly did anything.  We like to think we did, we have a whole museum dedicated to that story – but really, the vast majority of people did nothing. We were all complicit.”  There are many ways to tell the same story.

…

Did you know that Dictionary.com named “complicit” as the 2017 word of the year?  I’m not sure exactly why they chose it, but here’s why I want to talk about it today:  I can imagine the thousands of people in this last year, especially people of racial or gender privilege asking themselves, “Am I part of the problem?  Have I been enabling/propping up/complicit with white supremacy, with toxic male supremacy, with fascism, with xenophobia, etc?”  Some of us are asking those questions for the very first time, and it’s good to be asking it.  Others of us ask it several times a day, and worry about it, as if we could somehow distance ourselves from what is happening in our country, as if we could ever give a definitive “no” to the answer “Am I complicit?”  Of course we are.

The root of the word is the same as the root of the word complicate.  Comes from the Latin complicare = to fold together.  One thing is connected to another is connected to another is connected to another.  Stories exist on top of stories, our lives are multi-dimensional, actual history cannot be told in one voice.  As Dr. King said, “In a real sense, all life is inter-related.  We are tied in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapably network of mutuality.  And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

I want you to imagine a kind of garment with me --- you know what smocking is? You most often see it on little girls’ handmade dresses.  It’s a method of embroidery that gathers up a huge amount of cloth, folds it up into tiny little creases so it becomes much smaller. There’s this nice orderly pattern embroidered on top of it, tightly holding and folding together so much of the fabric. So much is hidden underneath, in the complicated folds and creases.  You wouldn’t be able to tell just how much fabric is there unless you unraveled that embroidery, picked out the stitches and let the fabric open up.

This is my image today for history, how the powerful tell history, and how we can re-tell history towards our freedom and our opening up.

We, all of us, are born into structures and systems and a history that make us complicit, whether we choose to be or not.  We are born into certain dominant stories about history, practically written on us like the embroidery on a smocked dress.  Often neat and tidy stories, that appear beautiful on the surface, but hide so much underneath. 

As Dr. King said in one of his sermons collected in the book Strength to Love, “We are made by history.”  He went on to say in that same passage:  “Who doubts that today most [people] today are… shaped by the patterns of the majority? Or to change the figure, most people, and Christians in particular, are thermometers that record or register the temperature of majority opinion, not thermostats that transform and regulate the temperature of society.”

Dr. King, like the Hebrew prophets, like Jesus, like all great prophets and resistors of Empire, was someone who asked us to wake up to a wider, more inclusive history; to wake up to how we are shaped by that wider history in ways we often don’t realize, ways we don’t see. 

He asked us to tease apart the nice orderly story we were telling about the history of the United States, to open up the folds and creases and expose the hidden stories, so that we might be more honest about who we are.  But not just to re-tell history to somehow get it more correct—we do this to also shape history and to shape the future, so that we might be more just, so that we might be more loving, so that there might be more freedom in this land.

“Human progress is neither automatic or inevitable” he said.  It is up to us to take the history we have been born into, to tell the truth about it as much as we can, and shape it towards a different future.  This is how we resist simply being acted upon by the forces of the powerful who usually tell history, and so shape it to their own ends.

The poet W.H. Auden wrote in 1939, just a few weeks after the beginning of WWII “All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie.”

Last weekend the Blount County United Faith Committee sponsored a forum entitled “Jesus and Race” and focused on prompting reflection on what followers of Jesus are called to do and to be in response to on-going systemic racism in the US.

It began with a telling of history from two perspectives.  Two people using their voices to undo the folded lie.  A white woman, SM Atchley who was a student at MHS in 1963 when schools were desegregated here, and an African American man Ron Coffin who was one of the first 4 to enter MHS that year.

SM recalled the first day the new students entered the school building.  How they were surrounded by police, and by people, students watching as they walked towards the school.  How they entered the school and then disappeared, how they were not at the school assembly that morning.  How they were not allowed to be in the same classrooms together.  How they had to enter the classrooms after the bell rang and all the other students were seated.  How they were separated and alone.  And she remembered for us, emotionally, how when they walked up to that school building, there was no one walking with them. 

How she didn’t walk with them, didn’t speak with them. How ever since that day, when she was just 16 years old, she wonders, Could she have walked with them?  What else could she have done? Most importantly, what can she do now?

And Ron, in telling his own history of that time, reminded us of what a brutal year 1963 was.  When those 4 students walked into Maryville High School in September they were walking surrounded not just by police, but by a context of national movement and change, violence and assassinations.  The March on Washington had just happened.  And just a week later the 16^th Street church in Birmingham was bombed, killing 4 young girls.  Ron reminded us that as we remember and tell history, it’s important to be specific with our words, lest we tell another a folded lie – He said, it was desegregation that happened in 1963, not integration. Integration would have meant an inclusion not just of those four students, but some of the African American teachers and administrators from their school, and a recognition of their full humanity, and a recognition of their right to bring all of who they are into that school.

Right here there is a deeper, more complicated history to be unfolded. 

And when we do that, when we listen to that history, as we did during our Time for All Ages this morning, we are reminded of what Annie Dillard wrote--

“There is not a clean hand or a pure heart.”  There is not someone somewhere else with the moral innocence to save us or tell us what to do.

Through history we are all folded together, we each are always, already complicit, in each other’s complicated lives.  “There is no one but us.”

Perhaps the question to be asking, especially today, is not “Are we complicit?”  But how?  How did we get here? Whose stories am I listening to? And what will I do to shape this history towards something different, to bend the arc a little further towards justice in my time? 

The final words written on the walls of the Dutch Resistance museum, as you exit the exhibit are a quote from the Dutch writer Remco Campert, whose father died in a Nazi concentration camp: “Asking yourself a question, that’s how resistance begins.  And then ask that very question to someone else.”

To what extent do we adapt? How much are we willing to question? And how much are we willing to do to resist?

We are made by history, AND we are called to be questioners and shapers of history.  We are called not just by Dr. King but by the spirits of all the ancestors—those who walked with King, those who stood silently by; those who died in enslavement, those who did the enslaving; those who died in the concentration camps, those who resisted, those who went along to get along; those whose stories we tell and those whose stories we have forgotten.  May we listen to that call just as much, if not more than we listen to the loud voices in their places of power today.

May we keep asking our questions—

            Questions about our own lives, and how it is intertwined with the histories we learn, and the histories we don’t learn;

            Questions about our elected leaders, about the way things are today, and the way things could be.

We are the ones living in this time, in this history-in-the-making.

Let us continue to claim our power, and our responsibility

So that in the next generation, or 17 generations from now, a different history will be remembered.

May it be so.  Amen.

2018.1.7 How Shall Our Garden Grow?

2018.1.7 “How Shall Our Garden Grow?”    Rev. Laura Bogle        Foothills UU Fellowship

Readings:

Connections are Made Slowly by Marge Piercy (#568 in Singing the Living Tradition)

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

__You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.

More than half a tree is spread out in the soil

under your feet.

__Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.

Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.

__Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.

Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

__Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.

Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.

__Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in, a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen:

 __Reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.

This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,

__For every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

Mark 4:3-8

“Listen. What do you make of this? A farmer planted seed. As he scattered the seed, some of it fell on the road and birds ate it. Some fell in the gravel; it sprouted quickly but didn’t put down roots, so when the sun came up it withered just as quickly. Some fell in the weeds; as it came up, it was strangled among the weeds and nothing came of it. Some fell on good earth and came up with a flourish, producing a harvest exceeding his wildest dreams.

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Context for those who are new: the congregation voted last month to enter into call exploration process, to consider whether to call me as your settled minister.  This sermon is a response to that vote.

It was perhaps dangerous to agree to preach this sermon, on my vision of ministry with you all, during the month when our worship theme is “resistance!”  Hopefully you all are not here to resist what I have to say today.

While I’m not preaching directly on the theme of resistance today – here’s one connection I will make—I see the purpose of our congregational life in these times is to resist cultural and social pressures that separate us, that keep us lonely, that keep us hopeless and despairing, that keep us only talking to people in the same income bracket or the same educational status or the same race or the same age as ourselves, and to resist pressures that keep us disconnected from what is most important and precious in our hearts and souls.  We resist those cultural pressures is by practicing living a different way of Love and connection in this community.

As your part-time, consulting, minister the last 5 years I have been privileged to be with you as we seek to deepen and expand the ways we practice that kind of Love.  Back in October I preached a sermon that was really a Love Letter to all of you as this congregation enters its 10^th year as a chartered congregation of the UUA.  I reflected on where this congregation has been, and where we have been together. That sermon is posted on my blog if you want to go check it out.

One of the things that I’ve experienced in the last 5 years with you is a back-and-forth spiraling deepening of investment and trust.  As you have welcomed me and invested in me and trusted me, I have been able to deepen my own investment and trust; and vice versa.  I have learned from this process so far that the relationship between a minister and the congregation they serve is a dynamic one;  it is never only one thing for very long.  It is core to my theological perspective that I am only who I am because of the relationships I am embedded in.  And so in a very real way, I am not the same minister who joined you 5 years ago.  For one thing, I have more kids!  But I am the kind of minister I am today in large part because of you. 

And so, what I have to share with you today is out of the best that I have to offer, today, knowing that it is just part of an ongoing conversation among us. 

I want to thank and acknowledge the folks who have sent in specific questions for me.  It is interesting and notable to me that most of the questions submitted have in some way to do with organizational structure, authority, tradition, power, decision-making, and growth.  I will begin I hope to answer some of these questions today, though because I am a preacher it will be through metaphor.  And I want to note, that there’s much more that could and probably should be said – and I want to set aside additional time for those conversations.

We, together, are considering entering into a more permanent and longer-term relationship—one that is open-ended and based in a covenant with one another. 

Very often marriage is the metaphor used for this kind of relationship between minister and congregation.  You might have heard that if you were here for my colleague Jake Morrill’s sermon on called ministry last month. 

That’s a rich metaphor and there’s lots that is helpful there;  the spiritual practice of growing in love and intimacy through committed and equitable partnership, through the good times and the bad times.

But it’s not the first one I depend on—perhaps because as someone who for a long time didn’t have the right to marry the woman I love, the word marriage has been a bit fraught for me.

Another colleague of mine, who spent years as a labor and delivery nurse before becoming a minister, says the minister is like a midwife—doing hard work supporting and coaching the congregation to give birth, but not doing the actual labor of giving birth.  I like this metaphor, too, because it reminds us that the work of the congregation is not in the end the minister’s work; that indeed, the congregation does not belong to the minister.  In our tradition the congregation belongs to itself, and it is only the congregation that can decide to enter into special relationships with a minister.  It is the congregation which must decide where and how it will bring new life into this world.  The minister is there as guide, as supporter, as inspirer, as knowledge-bringer.

But, this metaphor is also not the first one I lean on.

The metaphor I want to open up today is that of ministry as organic gardening.  Perhaps this works for me because I grew up in a family with a big garden.  And, while I am no master gardener, I try to continue that practice of growing some food every year.

To be in ministry—whether ordained or lay ministry-- is to be cultivating earth, planting seeds, nurturing life, harvesting and feeding others, following the seasons, recognizing the fallow seasons as crucial for the next year’s crop.  It requires being attuned to the ecology of the whole.  It is about organic growing.

I often get asked “Is your church growing?”  By which people usually mean, do you have more members than you had last year?  And sometimes, I have asked you all, do you really want to grow, and how?  Congregational consultant Loren Meade, in his book More than Numbers: the Ways Churches Grow  outlines 3 other ways that church grow besides simply growing in the number of attendees or members. 

He talks about maturational growth, incarnational growth, and organic growth--All different kinds of growth that aren’t directly about how many people are on the membership roll.

To be only focused on numerical growth to the exclusion of these other kinds of growth would lead, I think, to seeds being planted in shallow or rocky soil; and an inability to take hold and really produce a harvest.

            Maturational growth—which is maturing in spirit and wisdom; becoming more of who you 

and we are meant to be; growing in faith across the lifespan spectrum from children through elders.

Using the metaphor of ministry as gardening, we might think about maturational growth as the practice of tilling and feeding the soil; preparing our souls to receive seed, so that when some are scattered they don’t sprout too quickly and die, they don’t get eaten by the birds, they don’t get strangled in the weeds—but we can receive them and allow them to take strong root.

            Incarnational growth—which is growing outward—putting our faith into practice in the world; embodying our values more effectively and living our mission. 

Using the metaphor of ministry as gardening, we might ask the question “Who does our crop feed?”  How are we using our plot of ground and our resources to feed others—not just ourselves?  That is, how are we sharing our harvest?

            Finally, he talks about organic growth—or, organizational growth,  and that’s what I want to spend a little bit more time on today.

Marge Piercy reminds us that ecological connections are made slowly – that we don’t always see what is happening underneath our feet, or see the effects of our actions in one season.  Healthy organizational development is a lot like this.  A few lessons I learn for our congregation, reflecting on organic gardening practices:

#1 Any organic gardener or farmer I know has to take a long view – thinking about the long-term health of the soil, for instance, so doing things like planting cover crops to replenish nutrients, and sometimes letting the ground lie fallow to rest. 

àIn congregational life and leadership, we could do the same.  Remembering that we each will have seasons of growth and activity, and seasons of rest and replenishment.  I want to see us build that into the organizational culture of our congregation, so that we are not burning out our volunteers or our leaders.  That means building strong functioning teams where the work can be shared among us. 

#2 Taking the long view also means not using toxic tools even it might get you a better harvest this season, because you know in the long run pesticides are going to wreak havoc on the larger ecosystem.

            àIn congregational life and ministry, for me this means that process and relationship matters just as much if not more than the product or harvest in one season.  It may take longer, but if I want to grow sustainably I have to take into account the long term effects of my actions.  For us, this highlights the importance of taking the time to have real conversation and build real connections.  To really listen to each other, even when we disagree.  This is where our congregational covenant is so important and guides our work with one another.  As your minister, I see one of my primary jobs is to help us hold that covenant together; to help us make that covenant real.  As a human being, just like you, I know that I myself don’t always live up to everything that covenant says.  In a longer term relationship with one another we are going to have lots of opportunity to call each other, with love, back into covenant and right relationship.  We do this for the health of the whole ecosystem, and our own spiritual integrity.

#3 Organic gardeners are not monoculture planters—only growing one thing.  In organic gardening there is a concept of complementary or companion planting. It’s the idea that one kind of plant next to another actually helps the other to grow.  Having a diversity of plants helps them all to thrive together.  Think about the old Native practice of planting squash, beans, and corn together—the Three Sisters.  The corn emerges first, and provides a stalk for the bean vine to reach up when it comes up next.  Later the wide leaves of the squash provides some shelter and shade at the roots, holding in moisture and keeping the weeds at bay.

àWe are also not a monoculture here, thank God.   How boring would that be?  We can all thrive better when we welcome the unique gifts we each have to bring.

Native American ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “The way of the Three Sisters reminds me of one of the basic teachings of our people.  The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world.  Individuality is cherished, and nurtured, because, in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to be strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction, so they can be shared with others.  Being among the sisters provides a visible manifestation of what a community can become when its members understand and share their gifts.  …The gifts of each are more fully expressed when they are nurtured together than alone.  In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship.  This is how the world keeps going.”

è From an organizational structure perspective, this means we make room for each of us to give the gift we have to give, and to make that easier and more transparent.  This is a growing edge for any small congregation—to fully welcome and integrate newcomers and to communicate well how to get more deeply involved. This is something that we have to continue to work at, together. 

è The metaphor of companion planting in a garden also helps me think about roles and boundaries in a congregation in a non-hierarchical way.  The more clear we are about whose job is whose, the more beautiful our garden can be.  The more clear we are about whose job is whose, the more fruitful we can be, together.  As your called minister I will be invested by the congregation with a particular sphere of authority, to lead the spiritual and worship life of this congregation, and to lead us in ministry to one another and the world. In the same way the congregation invests the Board with the power to play a particular role of governance, to do a particular job in the garden.  Its not the same job as the minister, but we must be in collaborative complementary relationship in order to grow well.   

All of that authority is given by and is accountable ultimately to the power of the congregation.   The process of deciding whether to call me as your minister provides a good opportunity to get deeper clarity about our roles.

#5 Organic gardeners have to practice a certain kind of discernment.  This time of year I love looking through this beautiful seed catalog I get, and making big long lists of things I want to plant in the spring.  The dream is so beautiful!  And then I remember: oh yes, I only have these 4 little raised beds in the back yard, I’m going to have to make some choices here!  I have to ask, what might actually grow here?  What do I most want to grow this year?  Can I add another garden bed and adequately take care of it?  My hope in my ministry with you, is that we will grow in our ability to practice this kind of discernment, together, so that as a community we make good decisions and feel we are moving together in a mission-focused way. 

For instance, I get asked often these days whether I want us to have our own building.  I can tell you that I am excited that we feel full here on Sunday mornings and that I think we need to be thinking creatively about how we make more room for all of us and what we want to do.  I can tell you that I personally am excited about the visions that were cast at our leadership gathering back in September when so many people individually shared variations on a theme—the idea of a space in the future that we share with other good work and organizations in our community, consistent with our mission.  Again, I go back to the metaphor of organic growth, and thinking about long-term sustainability.  What do we really need, and when, and why?  How do our values guide us in the use of our resources?  As your minister I am here to both cast my own vision, but also to listen and to companion us all in a process together.  The two are not mutually exclusive.

Gardening or farming is a risky business.  You must invest a huge amount early in the season, not knowing whether the harvest will be good.  You never control all the variables – there might be a drought or a disease.  There might be seasons when the whole crop is lost.  Or you might end up with way more tomatoes than you know what to do with.  But does that mean not planting at all in the next season?  No.  We rely on each other and the Spirit of Life that is greater than anyone of us, to have the faith to keep planting.  Each attempt at sowing seed is an act of faith, and an opportunity to pay attention and to learn.

May we together, in the words of Marge Piercy,

“Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.

Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.

…Reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.

This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,

For every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.”

May we live our short lives on this Earth growing more Love, serving Justice, and creating Beauty.

May it be so, and Amen.

2017.12.3 The Gift Economy

2017.12.3        “The Gift Economy”   Rev. Laura Bogle

Time for All Ages Sophia’s Guest by Becky Brooks

Reading          by Alison Luterman

Consider the Generosity of the One-Year-Old

who has no words to exchange with you yet,

and instead offers up her favorite drooled-on blanket,

her green rhinoceros as big as she is,

her cloth doll with the long blonde pigtails,

her battered cardboard books, swung open on their soggy pages,

her limitless heart.

If you were outdoors she would hand you a dead beetle,

a fistful of grass, a pebble,

by way of introduction or just because.

And if, a moment later, she wants it back,

it would be for the joy of passing

these simple symbols back and forth,

freely offered, freely relinquished,

This is me.  Here is who I am.  Oh.

In the same way, sun

drapes a buttered scarf across your face,

rose opens herself to your glance,

and rain shares its divine melancholy.

The whole world keeps whispering or shouting to you,

nibbling your ear like a neglected lover,

while you worry over matters of finance,

of "relationship,"

important issues related to getting and spending,

having and hoarding,

though you were once that baby,

though you are still that world.  

                    

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Robin Wall Kimmerer is a scientist, a professor of botany and ecology, and a person of Native American Heritage.  In her recent book, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” she tells of how the early summers of her childhood she would spend hours out picking wild strawberries.

“I’d lie on my stomach in my favorite patches, watching the berries grow sweeter and bigger under the leaves. …

Even now, after more than fifty Strawberry Moons, finding a patch of wild strawberries still touches me with a sensation of surprise, a feeling of unworthiness and gratitude for the generosity and kindness that comes with an unexpected gift all wrapped in red and green.  ‘Really? For me? Oh you shouldn’t have.’ After fifty years they still raise the question of how to respond to their generosity.”

One way, she says, to respond to generosity is to pass on the gift.  She and her siblings would always pick enough berries for their Father’s special shortcake on father’s day.  His favorite.  “it was a gift that could never be bought.”

She remembers an early lesson in economics when one summer she was hired to pick cultivated strawberries on a neighboring farm.  Earning a dime for every quart.  And the owner of the farm saying to her, “These berries belong to me, not to you.  I don’t want to see you eating my berries.” The cultivated berries had become an owned commodity, and if Robin wanted to bring any home, she had to spend most of what she had earned picking the berries, to buy the berries, which sold at 60 cents a quart. 

In contrast, the wild berries were there as a gift—they belonged to themselves, not to anyone else or to the marketplace.

She writes, “Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.  The field gave to us, we gave to my dad, and we tried to give back to the strawberries.” (25)

You could say Robin’s whole book is a meditation on the moral disconnection that happens in the great so-called Free Marketplace, where we are removed from the relationships and reciprocity that occurs when we look on the world and each other as gift.

Think about a time you received a gift – what was your response?  One of gratitude?  Did it make you want to give something back in return?  How did it make you feel? 

Now think about the last time you bought something – put gas in your car, went to the grocery store, went to the department store, exchanged money or more likely, you didn’t even exchange money with a person, you simply put a card in a slot and mysteriously paid.  What were you thinking?  What was your response?  Very often, for me, anyway, it’s simply completing a task. There’s not a feeling of connection.  There’s an emptiness in the transaction.  Or perhaps a sense of despair--  Maybe we think… wow I just spent the equivalent of hours of labor to put gas in my car just so I can work more.  Or maybe… I have no idea where any of this food was grown or who grew it.  Or maybe… I wish I could buy that sweater I saw, that would just complete my life, but it’s too expensive.  Or maybe I buy it anyway and just put it on the credit card, only to find out that another sweater produced in Honduras, or wherever, does not in fact make my life better.

That feeling of emptiness and disconnection might be why, according to a Harvard study released last year, just over half of millennials aged 18-29 say they don’t support capitalism. They aren’t sure about what the alternative is, but they realize the current state of affairs isn’t serving them, or their future and the future of our planet.

As Martin Kirk and Jason Hickel write in a recent article for FastCompany, entitled, Are You Ready to Consider that Capitalism is the Real Problem?, “It’s because they realize—either consciously or at some gut level—that there’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into capital, and do it more and more each year, regardless of the costs to human well-being and to the environment we depend on. …

As Robert Kennedy famously said, Gross Domestic Product “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play . . . it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.””

One of our neighbors is kind of a crotchety old guy.  In a neighborhood that is gentrifying he holds out in his house, living on a very limited income, partly surviving on food pantries and scavenged items.  And yet, he occasionally will bring us things – most recently it was a bouquet of flowers he got at a local ministry, clearly donated by Trader Joe’s because they were a bit droopy and on the verge of their demise, and no longer could be sold.  “For the girls” he said, “make sure you let them put it in a vase!”  And so we did.  And they loved it, of course.

Now, I would never think to write a thank you note to Trader Joe’s after I spent money buying a bouquet of flowers there, but I feel gratitude to my neighbor, and I even feel some gratitude to Trader Joe’s for giving away some flowers.  Our neighbor received a gift and passed it on, and it made me more mindful—what gifts do I receive to pass on to him?

Charles Eisenstein writes in his article, “To Build Community, An Economy of Gifts,” :

“Community is woven from gifts. Unlike today's market system, whose built-in scarcity compels competition in which more for me is less for you, in a gift economy the opposite holds. Because people in gift culture pass on their surplus rather than accumulating it, your good fortune is my good fortune: more for you is more for me. Wealth circulates, gravitating toward the greatest need. In a gift community, people know that their gifts will eventually come back to them, albeit often in a new form. Such a community might be called a "circle of the gift."” 

There are increasingly all kinds of organized and informal ways people are trying to resist the commodification and upwards concentration of wealth in the marketplace and turn towards alternative gift economies, circles of the gift, structures that help meet people’s needs and build community at the same time.  “Think mutual aid, community organizing, self-help, and cooperatives of all kinds.”  http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/solidarity/capitalism-is-not-the-only-choice-20171114

In one model a small group of people meets on a regular basis, they each share one thing they need – say, help building a fence-- and they each share one thing they have to give—say, extra produce from the garden—and they figure out how to share and meet each other’s needs without buying anything or exchanging money.

There are lots of other examples too, including large cooperative, worker-owned businesses whose mission is not to make the most money but to meet a community need and sustain family-friendly, family-supporting jobs in the process.

These are not new and innovative ideas—in some ways it is simply returning to and expanding a well-known way of life. 

We ourselves as a congregation are our own gift economy.  We pool our resources—money, talents, food, care—we share them with each other and with those outside our walls with no expectation of equal exchange or “profit”.  When you give to this congregation, it is not a market transaction, but a gift of trust in community and reciprocity.  When you allow yourself to receive gifts through this congregation the circle is completed. 

Giving and receiving is both a reflection of the relationship that already exists, and a way to deepen that relationship. 

In the same way, when I give out of our Ministers Discretionary Fund, it is not a gift with strings attached, I do not ask for a detailed accounting of how the gift was used, nor a particular return on investment.  It is simply moving what has already been given as a gift along again, circulating the wealth towards the greatest need.

It is hard spiritual practice to be like the generous one-year-old in the poem that Autumn read—simply experiencing the joy of passing gifts back and forth, freely offered, freely relinquished, without grasping for self or security, without feeling owed to or in debt.

If only I could be so generous in my heart. 

If only we could be so generous in our nation.

We often hear talk about our country as a Christian nation, but we have long since replaced the God of Abraham with the God of the Marketplace. 

One only need to look at the last month in Congress to understand that.

The tax reform bills passed by the Senate this week and in the House previously do not follow Jesus’ admonition to “Love thy Neighbor as thyself” or any of the other hundreds of places in scripture that instructs believers to care for the vulnerable and poor.  Instead, they cater to the wealthy, Wall Street and large corporations, leaving the rest of us to carry the debt and figure out our own survival.

And here’s another thing that happened this week, getting less attention --  legislation was introduced in the House this week to repeal some of the already pretty weak consumer protections around a practice known as pay-day lending. Imagine: you have a job but not enough to have much of a buffer in your bank account.  You have an unexpected expense – a car repair, for instance, and you need that car to get to your job, to keep your job.  So, what do you do?  Often the only line of credit available to you, especially if you aren’t from a family with resources, which is so often the case for low wage workers, is to go down to the pay day lender.  To get a loan against your future paycheck.  And then to find yourself, when all is said and done, paying upwards of 300% interest on that loan, for years.

The regulations that this legislation want to roll back simply say, you can’t do this too often with the same person.  There’s not a cap on interest.

The reason I’m raising this today is because there’s a group right here, through the Blount County Ecumenical Action Council, that is considering what alternatives we might set up.  How might we create a pool of money that could be loaned at very low or no interest to people who need it?  What if instead of going down to the pay day lender, people had an option to talk with a person in their community whose highest regard was for their health and dignity and not the bottom line of shareholders or banking regulations?  What if we based a system on trust and reciprocity and compassion instead?  What if instead of telling ourselves a story of scarcity and competition, we told ourselves a story of abundant gifts, that we already have what we need to meet every need, if we would share?  What if?

Robin Wall Kammerer writes,

“We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep.  Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath.  Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.” (p.104)

We need each other, and in the years ahead that may become more and more clear to more and more of us as social safety nets get sacrificed.

May we, even in these days when we might despair that the decisions people are making in Washington are all too big and too mean for us to do anything about – may we remember that we still yet have the ability to ask “What if?” What if we just did it differently?

In this season of gift-giving and gift-receiving, may we be mindful of the gifts of earth and each other which we already have received.  May we look for ways in the coming year to more often share and pass those gifts along, so that we might all live more abundantly and free.

Amen.

2017.11.29 Finding Blessings on the Gender Spectrum

2017.11.19      “Finding Blessings on the Gender Spectrum”

Rev. Laura Bogle

Time for All Ages:  “Red: A Crayon’s Story”  https://youtu.be/ytZ2fhuj6kA

Earlier this year I was at a family gathering at the beach. 

Picture this:  6 kids under the age of 8!  Three were mine, two were my sisters kids, one a family friend.

Picture this: in the warm weather they are splashing in the water, running on the sand. 

Picture this:  they are so full of themselves, un-self-conscious.  Free.  Happy. Strong.  Comfortable in their bodies.  Curious about everything.  Totally fine getting *very* dirty.  Most of them still fine to run around shirtless without a care.

They are all girls – at least so far as we know at this time in their lives.

And I worry and think about:

When and how will they lose that kind of abandon? 

What can I do to help them hold on to that kind of freedom?  To move how they want to move?  To play however they want to play?

Of course, I know that by age 5, when most kids in the US enter the public school system, the policing of gender norms has already started—what girls are supposed to do and be, what boys are supposed to do and be.  It probably started the moment their parents announced their birth, and the first question is so often – a boy? Or a girl?

Part of the answer, for me, is to talk about gender with our children, and affirm gender as a wide spectrum—one which has lots of options and possible expressions, so far beyond the segregated aisles at Toys R Us.

And Part of the answer, for me, for all of us who want to raise healthy and free children who grow up into healthy and free adults, is for all of us to learn about, talk about, and practice getting comfortable with a gender spectrum.  To look for ways ourselves to move around a bit more on that spectrum, and to make sure our kids get to experience adults in their lives who don’t fit neatly into our cultural gender roles.

My hunch is that the more we can expand our imagination around gender, the more healthy and free we might *all* be. 

In our culture lately there’s been increased attention to transgender people and their lives and concerns—in part due to high profile celebrities transitioning from one gender to another, as well as more transgender children and their parents fighting for equal and safe treatment at school.

While our congregation held workshops back in 2013 for us to learn together about gender as part of our Welcoming Congregation process, it is always useful to go back to the basics—even in 4 years things change and develop.

So: I want you to picture a gingerbread person—except this will be our Gender Bread person.

http://itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2015/03/the-genderbread-person-v3/#sthash.G7sUljh4.dpbs

Holding this image in your mind will help us disentangle a few terms.

We’ll start up at the head, the brain—where Gender Identity resides.  Gender identity is the internal feeling you have about your gender.  Do you identify internally as a Man?  As a Woman?  As neither?  As both? 

One term that is increasingly used is “genderqueer” or “gender fluid.”  Terms used by people who identify as being between and/or other than man or woman. They may feel they are neither, a little bit of both, or they may simply feel restricted by gender labels.  Some people choose to use pronouns that are not gendered.  For instance, the use of the term “they” as a gender neutral pronoun is more and more in accepted use.  Or some folks may use terms like ze and hir instead of he or her.

Remember: Gender Identity itself can exist on a spectrum and change over time. 

Gender Identity is separate from Gender Expression. Think about the outline of our genderbread person– the ways a person acts, dresses, and presents their gender on the outside.  Is it more masculine or butch?  Is it more feminine or femme?  Do you present more androgynous? Or gender neutral?  Does it change depending on the day and where you are, who you are with?  How many of us feel like we have to dress in drag to go to work or to our family’s Thanksgiving table? 

Gender expression is the place where very early policing and control of gender norms happens with kids.  

Sometimes this happens overtly. 

Tony Porter is the author of “Breaking Out of the Man Box” and co-founder of the organization “A Call to Men.”  He talks about the moment he realized how deeply differently he was treating his son and daughter, who were very close in age. At the time they were 4 and 5. His daughter would come crying to him and he immediately would cuddle and console her; call her sweet names and let her cry it out.

His son would come crying to him and he’d give him a few seconds before he told him to shape up and stop crying.  No hug.  No consolation.

This is a kind of enforcement of gender expression – what’s OK and not OK.

Many times this enforcement happens subconsciously or implicitly—like what kinds of toys or activities or clothes are offered or available for boys vs. girls; men vs. women. 

Did you know that it’s kind of hard to find women’s dress pants that have deep pockets and enough room to carry a wallet?  I’m just saying.  Sometimes, it’s the little things.

So, we’ve been to the brain and to the outside expression. Let’s move down a little further on our genderbread person and talk about Biological Sex. 

Biological sex is the physical characteristics you are born with and develop that may include anatomy, hormones, chromosomes, body shape.  While we don’t acknowledge it much, even biological sex exists on a spectrum.  There are some people who are born with a combination of male and female biological markers—the generally accepted term for this is Intersex.  There are some people who are born with generally male biological markers, and who later decide to make changes—through surgery and hormones—to shift their biology towards femaleness.  Or vice versa. 

What gender non-conforming people of all kinds have helped us to do is to de-link biology from culture, identity, and expression.

So, when we think about Gender Identity, separate from Gender Expression, separate from Biological Sex—and recognize that all of these exist on a spectrum – the permutations are endless!

You could have a Genderbread person who Identifies as a Woman, who expresses a more masculine gender, and who has female biology.  A butch woman.

You could have a Genderbread person who Identifies as a Woman, who expresses a Feminine gender, and who has or had mostly male biology.  A Male to Female transgender person.

You could have a Genderbread person who Identifies as Gender queer, who some days expresses a more masculine gender and some days expresses a more feminine gender and has male biology.

And on and on….

Then there are those of us who are Cisgender.  Cisgender is the term used to describe someone whose gender identity, gender expression, and biological sex generally match up based on the cultural gender binary. 

I am Cisgender.  I feel myself to be a woman, I generally express myself in more feminine ways (though to be sure, I don’t fall to the extreme of that spectrum), and I was born biologically female.  Cis means “on the same side” and is used in contrast to “trans” which means crossing over.

What very often gets tangled up in this conversation about gender is sexual and romantic orientation—who you are attracted to.  I almost didn’t even want to talk about it today, but I think it’s important because there is often so much confusion about it.  And I invite you now to envision the heart of our Genderbread person.  Imagine that sexual orientation and romantic orientation – who you are attracted to—resides in the heart.  It can be separate from what gender you feel yourself to be, how you express your gender, and what your biological sex is.

For so long in our culture the options have been two boxes:

The Man Box:  Male = Masculine = Man = attracted to women

OR

The Woman Box: Female = Feminine = Woman = attracted to men

And there’s a host of qualities, and characteristics, and behaviors associated which each of the boxes.

What we know is that while that equation might work for some people, there are very many of us for whom that equation doesn’t equal our own experience.  We change the variables into so many different kinds of patterns, creating all kinds of beautiful expressions of being human.

We also know that it is dangerous—emotionally and sometimes physically—to transgress these two boxes, or to dare to make different combinations.

Kids get punished.

People get told they are in the wrong bathroom, or refused service at a restaurant, or turned away at a church door, or from a family gathering.

Some people are assaulted and killed. 

Later today we can show up for the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance vigil, and help memorialize all the transgender and gender non-conforming people who have lost their very lives in the last year, because of who they are, who they dare to be.  We can hear the names of the ones we know about, and remember that they represent even more loss and names we don’t know.  We can understand that most trans people who are assaulted or killed are Transwomen of Color.  We can reflect on how that represents a deep, deep fear of gender transgression in our culture; and a deeply ingrained toxic kind of masculinity that teaches boys and men to fear and suppress and exorcise their femininity. 

And I have to name here—if we didn’t enforce this kind of masculinity on men and boys, we wouldn’t be seeing the endless revelations of sexual harassment and assault on women, the stream of #MeToo stories that is filling our social media and news stories.  As we memorialize lives lost to violence against trans people, we can also memorialize the lives damaged by a kind of masculinity that equates being male with being dominating, aggressive.

But I want us to do more than show up to memorialize.  I want us to think about what further steps we can take to support resilience and health for all of us on the gender spectrum.

Our congregation states that part of our mission is to celebrate diversity.  It is central to our faith to recognize that beauty and worth and dignity and goodness shows up in many ways and forms.  It is central to our faith to remember that when some are not free, none of us are free.

How might we all, especially those of us who are cisgender, work towards making gender diversity visible, accepted, celebrated—not just tolerated?  So that we might all find more freedom?

One small option that can make a difference is for all of us to take on some of the risk and the burden of communicating about our gender identity. 

Some of you might have noticed that on my e-mail signature under my name it now says “Preferred pronouns: she/her”  This is my way of making explicit what is often just an assumption other people make about me. 

People look at me and put me in a particular gender box: woman.  There was a time when I was around 10 or 11 and had very short hair, when people repeatedly assumed I was a boy.

So rather than make assumptions about someone’s gender when they walk through the door here, let’s try to practice  not gendering people until they let us know what gender, pronouns, name they want to be called.  And we can signal a welcome by communicating our own preferences.  At the greeters table there are stickers available for you to indicate on your name tag what your preferred gender pronouns are.  And there are blank ones – so you can really decide what works for you.  An invitation, not a requirement.

We are not always going to get it right.  We are going to mess up sometimes,  We are going to misgender or misname each other sometimes.  When that happens, may we be strong enough to acknowledge it, to apologize, to try again, to extend grace to one another.

Transgender activist Patrick Califia asks:  “Who would you be if you had never been punished for gender inappropriate behavior?  …. What would happen if we all helped each other to manifest our most beautiful, sexy, intelligent, creative, and adventurous inner selves, instead of cooperating to suppress them?”

I want to invite us to all, especially those of us who are cisgender, and especially the cisgender men among us, to think about ways, comfortable to you, that you might transgress the Man Box.  I know a father, for instance.  You could say looking at him that he usually presents very butch.  He is married to a woman.  He works on a construction crew.  He has two daughters, one of whom is transgender.  Recently I saw him and noticed his fingernails were painted.  A small thing; and yet, a hugely rare thing. Imagine the message that sends to his children.  Imagine the conversations it opens up with other men.  Imagine the level of internal security of self it takes to transgress that gender norm.  Imagine the ripples of possibility and freedom it creates.

Tony Porter says he remembers asking a 9-year-old boy “What would life be like for you if you didn’t have to adhere to the man box?”  And all he said was, “I would be free.”

May we create ever more ways to find that kind of freedom from boxes, for ourselves, for our children, for us all.

Amen.