“Learning to Bear the Beams of Love” – November 19th, 2023

Rev. Sophia preaching, with Jean Gauthier, Elisabeth Strekalovsky, Charlyn Bethell, Guy Urban and the FPW Choir.

How might we be more generous in spirit? What does building, and belonging to, a community of love really look and feel like? We will consider these questions as we honor our trans siblings whose lives have been cut short this year for our Transgender Remembrance Day worship service. We will also listen to the powerful voices of our choir who will ask us why we build walls and teach us about taking them down.

TRANSGENDER DAY OF REMEMBRANCE SERMON:

“Learning to Bear the Beams of Love”

“Love is the Spirit of this Church!”
“In this church, you are welcome just as you are!”
“We affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person!”
“Side with Love!”
“We are building Beloved Community!”

If you’ve hung around this church or Unitarian Universalism long enough, these are the words that get printed on our banners–that are staked to our front lawns, or hung on the walls or held up at marches or vigils. They are in our spoken-in-unison faith affirmations; many of our hymns and favorite UU readings; stories for young people along with mountains of curriculum for all ages–all about these hopes for care and love and acceptance and welcome.

For many of us, they are why we are here. They align with our beliefs and values. They are our moral compass. For others, they offer an invitation to a potential safe space–those of you who have to be careful about the thresholds you cross–or the thresholds you bring your children or grandchildren across–particularly religious thresholds. You look for words like these so that you don’t just feel welcomed, but literally, safe.

And all of these words, banners and flags, all of these are wonderful and treasured mantras of our Unitarian Universalist faith. But do we really get what they are asking of us? Do we?

The hard truth is this: they don’t mean a thing if we aren’t living them. Doing welcome is not the same as being welcome.

I’m much better at doing welcome than being welcome. I’m better at it because it takes very little effort for me to look out at you and say, “you are welcome here,”–and trust me, I mean it– but it’s a lot easier to say it, than it is to live it.

Living it is an inside job. And that’s what makes it exponentially harder. Because the first required step is getting how people feel unwelcome, and the part I play in that; how I unintentionally perpetuate it or just don’t notice it.

This is an un-earned, inherited privilege I live with: the privilege of not noticing. I have to pointedly focus with intention and attention on what it might, because I’ll never fully understand, what it MIGHT feel like to NOT be fully welcomed somewhere. Or what life would feel like in a world that tells you, everywhere you go, that you don’t fit. The fact that I have to actively try that on…is privilege.

It’s not that I have never been excluded, or harmed, or ill at ease in my body; under-represented or unrepresented completely, or even discriminated against. I am a woman after all. AND, again by no choice or fault of my own, I also hold a variety of identities that offer me easy breezy access to most places and groupings. It is not difficult for me to cultivate a feeling of belonging most anywhere–and this isn’t just because I have a good personality. Or am nice.

It comes with the package that our culture calls: ‘the norm’ or ‘socially acceptable and desirable.’ Apart from being a woman, practically every other identity of mine fits into culturally desirable social qualifiers: I am of able-mind and body; I am white; I am of “average” weight; I am highly educated; I am financially stable, as is my family; I don’t speak with any discernable dialects or accents; I am straight; and I am cis-gendered: meaning the gender I was assigned at birth (FEMALE) matches how I identify and who I am perceived to be. My pronouns she/her/hers don’t ruffle any feathers nor does my gender identity make it hard, if not impossible, to use the bathroom when I need to.

All of this, and more, makes access and belonging easy. Or at least something I don’t have to think much about. And I invite you to take part in this exercise: make a list of all the things about your identity that makes life, and belonging, that much easier.

For a long time, I didn’t get this. And I definitely didn’t get that this made me someone who said welcome, but who didn’t know how to fully live it. Alex Kapitan was one of many who have taught me about this, and who opened my mind and heart.

Alex is one of our faiths’ most celebrated young, transgender, queer activists and spiritual teachers, and has companioned countless congregations through the process of becoming Welcoming Congregations, and upholding those certifications. This is what we are. Your certification through our larger association, the UUA, came in 2002 and it’s neither easy to receive, nor uphold. You’ve got to do some things. And you’ve got a passionate group of leaders who help us with ‘these things’ every year. Thank you Welcoming Congregation Committee. If this ministry speaks to you in any way, I hope you will reach out to them.

These are Alex’s words: “I want to let you in on a little secret. When congregations first go through a Welcoming Congregation Program, they often focus on ‘those people out there.’ They talk about welcome as it if it’s something ‘we’ need to do for ‘them.’ But here’s the secret: being a Welcoming Congregation isn’t about ‘them.’ It’s about ‘us.’ It’s about what our definition of ‘us’ is. AND. It’s about what we are willing to do to expand that definition.”

Alex goes on to say that “Every community has unspoken answers to questions like ‘how old are we?’ ‘where did we grow up?’ ‘how much education have we had?’ ‘what sort of jobs do we work?’ ‘what race are we?’ ‘how much money do we have?’ ‘how able are our bodies and minds?’ ‘how did we vote?’ ‘what do we think about God?’ and hundreds more.” Alex says that “every community has a definition of ‘us’ and ‘we’ that dictates the boundaries of the circle of belonging. Somewhere there’s a line that gets drawn and ‘we’ are inside of it. ‘They’ are not. And what happens, Alex so beautifully articulates, is that “we communicate our definition of ‘us’ in a thousand conscious and unconscious ways.”

This is what happens: we just assume everyone has, more or less, the same lived experience as ‘us.’ And this informs how we structure ourselves–whose at the table and who isn’t–how we run meetings and make decisions about what’s most important; what our building looks and feels like–oh this has been a hot topic around here; how we present the history–another hot one; how we do fellowship together; how we do and define justice work together; how we worship together, and on and on.

Unintentionally, this assumption of most everyone having more or less the same lived experience as us, serves as a wall that keeps us in, and them out. Unintentionally. We don’t intend for this to happen. But I can guarantee you it’s why our UU churches from coast to coast…look a certain way.

Belonging for many of us can often get misconstrued as a place where everyone thinks alike. We have even proclaimed “like-mindedness” to be one of our precursors for joining a UU church. I found my people, I used to say! People like….me?

In most communities around the world: from faith organizations to academia to non-profits to massive corporations–these conscious and unconscious definitions of ourselves, dictate the boundaries of belonging. If you like what we do, and how we think, then you probably belong.

What we are willing to do to expand these definitions? Alex asks us.

Today, on Transgender Remembrance Day, where our month’s theme is Generosity, is simply an invitation to consider the walls that aren’t just out there in some nebulous, scary place in the world–that THOSE people build. But here. In us. Not so that we hang our heads in shame, but so that we become more fully whole and healed.

I do my best to be awake to this as deeply as I can, it’s all I can do–my best. And part of this MY BEST is a commitment to keeping my spiritual muscles strong–this is key here. Learning to “bear the beams of love,” for that is what this is–those are William Blake’s words–being and living welcome, taking down the walls inside us with all our heart and soul so that we might be whole, as our choir just sang to us, it means failure. And messiness. And hard truths. And heart break. And change. Which, as you know, always comes with heartbreak. We need strong spiritual muscles to keep us resilient and open and loving, less we become defensive and complacent and brittle in spirit.

But this isn’t a gloomy affair. NO! We call this liberation work for a reason! When we try for taking down, breaking down the walls that keep people outside of our circle of belonging, opening our minds and doors to a variety of lived human experience, the things we want most for ourselves and this community and faith: Love, Care, Welcome, Belonging, Joy, Connection–they aren’t going to fall away, they are going to fall into place.

When we courageously say YES to the breaking down, we break through! We aren’t losing anything–we are gaining everything.

Alex Kapitan says that all of this is “a tall order.” Yes. And it’s not easy or comfortable. But if we are about trying to “heal our world,” then it is necessary.

As we prayed earlier, this coming week is going to hold a lot for a lot of different people. There is a multiplicity of experience, need and expression in our midst. Be open to it. Welcome it in. Inch out your circle of perspective a bit wider. Consider your boundaries of belonging. And the assumptions you make by virtue of them. How did you come by them? How can you expand them?

In each of your orders of service is one of the names that Jean read earlier. Look them up, come to know a bit about them, place them on your dinner tables this week–maybe on Thanksgiving for those of you who plan to celebrate it. Call them in from the margins and put them at the center of your table. Do this as an embodied expression of boundary stretching and living welcome. These are people who you will never truly know, never fully understand, but whose experience and life; pain and hope; have so much to teach us; their lives and deaths, offer the possibility of transforming and stretching your boundaries of belonging. If you can be open to this, you will do them the greatest of honor. I sense that you will also heal something deep inside that needs healing.

Building a Beloved Community of Wondrous Love saves lives. Not just theirs, yours.

Let’s return to the words that our choir just sang to us:

Can you hear us saying,
Shouting, praying,
Rise up together when the heart calls,
Take down,
Break down,
Take down these walls.
We will never stand to be divided
We will never spread the word of hate and fear
Always taking care of one another,
Wond’rous love is here.
Take down these walls that divide us
Take down these walls so deep inside us
With all your heart and soul
Reach out and make us whole.

May it be so and amen.

WHAT WONDROUS LOVE IS THIS? Oh my soul, oh my soul… sing with me #18