Reading: “No-Questions-Asked Love,” by Kate Landis – Read by Johanna Fitt

“In my life, I have received this big, engulfing, no-questions-asked love. From old church ladies who winced at my blue hair but loved me anyway; from my “Do we have to talk about feelings?” little brother when I was shattered into depressed, weeping shards on the kitchen floor and he sat beside me. From seminary friends after I told them, terrified, that I wondered if a person with my mental health history could be—should be—a minister, and they said, “Hell yes!” From church board members after I shoved my foot halfway down my throat, from nurses in the psych ward—I am broken yet beloved. In all the moments when I needed love but didn’t deserve it, hadn’t earned it, couldn’t appreciate it—love enveloped me, a bounty without end.

I saw this bounty in my congregation. Fearless, unshakeable love for each of this world’s broken souls. It’s why I fell in love with them. Every Sunday we say, “Whoever you are, wherever you came from, whoever you love, wherever you are on life’s journey—you are welcome here.” It knocks the wind right out of me. I didn’t know the human heart could hold so much love before I met this congregation.”

Sermon: There Is a Love – Rev. Eric Banner

I woke up Wednesday to snow on the ground and children who needed to get to school. It was as if the world had changed not at all, except, of course, that it had. I woke up to what I had always known was possible, and about which I had not a word to say. Or at least not one I can use in this pulpit. Lacking words is something of an occupational hazard in this line of work…

And then, that evening, we gathered just across the way in the Hospitality Center. Sarah played music. I read another minister’s words. And we lit candles. These candles, in fact. These very ones. And we listened to each other. To the stories of our families. To the stories of our hearts. To the stories of our questions. We listened.

I hoped. I prayed. I longed for words then that would make this go away. To bring back the possibilities long hoped for that my daughters would see a person whose body was like their bodies, experienced the world as they did, in the highest seats of power in our nation. But the truth is, there aren’t words that will make it go away. It is what it is.

For days I have sat with the hurt in my heart, and the clarity in the world, and thought about this morning. Perhaps you have come angry, and long to hear me tell you how we will fight, and win the battle before us. Perhaps you have come wondering how you will talk to your family at Thanksgiving, and want some guidance on how to reach across the divide that runs through our nation and our families. Perhaps you came scared for yourself, or your loved ones, and came longing for a word of comfort, a promise that things will be okay. Perhaps you came wondering if there is a place for you in this congregation, concerned that we might say things that escalate conflict and sow division and mistrust for the sake of power or influence.

As for me, I confess I sit with some measure of fear. A member here not long ago, in a conversation entirely unrelated to the election, mentioned an old teaching about fear standing for false expectations appearing real. But I don’t know what expectations are false, what is bluster and what are real plans. I have talked to people this week with undocumented family members who wonder if the pledges to deploy the army, trained for fighting and winning wars, in the cities near and far to round up and deport long-standing members of our community. I have spoken to Jewish people who are working to determine eligibility to move to other countries. “We never thought we wouldn’t be safe in Germany,” one said. I’ve talked to women who wonder if their private medical records will suddenly be accessible to prosecutors in other states, bent on enforcing abortion bans not only in the states where they are the law, but on anyone who seeks that health care in another state. And I have thought back to that fateful day in Charlottesville in 2017, with torches and chants of, “You will not replace us.”

What expectations are false, and what are real? What guardrails of democracy are still intact enough to ensure that our values preserve the rule of law, a non-partisan military, a civil service core hired for their expertise rather than their political connections? How can we know? Should we be afraid, or is a healthy measure of danger awareness enough? I wish I had the answers.

I know enough to know that the dangers are not the same for everyone, and it would be irresponsible to pretend otherwise.

But I also know that in a few weeks’ time a new president will take office with the backing of a majority, however slim, of the popular vote. It is not that some small fringe, acting through subterfuge and machinations has somehow stolen the vote. This is the future that the American people, tens of millions of them, has voted for. And the question before us is what we shall do with it? What does it mean to be a Universalist in an age when division seems to be the preferred national pastime? Is there still reason to believe in a love that holds us all, when we look out at the world baffled by people who seem to live in an entirely different world than we do? And yet, we gather, in this place, to be strengthened by each other, by the spirit, by song, that we might be prepared for whatever is coming.

(There is a love holding us…)

I remember back in 2020 hearing people talk about how they wished they were living in precedented times. How living through a global pandemic unlike anything seen in 100 years left them feeling like they didn’t know what the right answers were, and wished to look to the pages of history to find them. But now, now we face a future that is, for all that we might wish otherwise, filled with precedent. Whatever comes in the weeks, months, and years ahead, all that has been proposed has been part of our history before. Deportation and detention of not only immigrants, but American citizens? Ask your Japanese American friends and neighbors about World War II. Ask your Chicano friends and neighbors about the “Mexican Repatriation” program in the 1930s. What about the threats to the civil service program that ensures that federal employees are hired based on competence? Those expectations only came into being after President Garfield was assassinated in 1881 by someone who thought he deserved a job he didn’t get for having supported the president’s electoral campaign, and generations of incompetence as a consequence of patronage based hiring. Women’s rights? Most of you in this room were alive when women couldn’t get a loan on their own, and plenty of you were alive when abortion was outlawed in most of the country. Marriage equality? The Obergefell decision was less than a decade ago. The list goes on. Perhaps that’s why I saw a piece by Venice Williams, not the tennis star, the minister and director of the urban farm project Alice’s Garden in Milwaukee, shared around this past Wednesday. She wrote:

“You are awakening to the
same country you fell asleep to.
The very same country.
Pull yourself together.
And,
when you see me,
do not ask me
“What do we do now?
How do we get through the next four years?”
Some of my Ancestors dealt with
at least 400 years of this
under worse conditions.”

These times are precedented, and in that there is power. In that there is meaning. In that is part of something I didn’t say last week, but feels so deeply relevant just now.

You might recall, last week I shared with you a portion of the words of James Luther Adams. About the power of organization, and the organization of power. It was part of his essay on the five smooth stones of religious liberalism, and his point was that for there to be the things that we hope for, we must organize ourselves to create them. That nothing good happens just because, it happens because people get together and work to address the things that outrage us, that break our hearts, that fall short of the kinship of all people that lies at the root of this faith.

You’ve heard before the words of the Universalist, and then Unitarian Universalist, minister David Bumbaugh, who said that part of what we believe is that:

“Beneath all our diversity, behind all our differences,
there is a unity of the spirit that makes us one,
and binds us forever together in spite of time,
and death, and the space between the stars.”

That is the kinship of all people that we strive to build, here, in our families, in our communities, in our nation, and in this world. And yet, we know that things don’t always turn out the way we would hope. We wake up and discover that, in the words of Venice Williams, we have woken up to the same country we were part of when we fell asleep. And we can feel discouraged. Wonder how it is that we are still having this conversation about the things we value, and the liberty we thought we had secured for our posterity.

But Adams had something to say about that, too. He closed his essay with what he called the fifth smooth stone of religious liberalism.

“Finally,” he wrote, “liberalism holds that the resources (divine and human) that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism. This view does not necessarily involve immediate optimism. In our century we have seen the rebarbarization of the masses, we have witnessed a widespread dissolution of values, and we have seen the appearance of great collective demonries. Progress is now seen not to take place through inheritance; each generation must anew win insight into the ambiguous nature of human existence and must give new relevance to moral and spiritual values.”

It can be hard to feel optimistic in the face of a future filled with fearful possibilities. It can be hard to be in the presence of another whose assessment of the situation, rooted in different life experiences, different risks, and different identities, does not match our own. But this faith, this church, doesn’t ask that we all feel alike to love alike. It only asks that we make space for the fullness of what is true, for ourselves, and for each other.

If you aren’t worried right now, you don’t need to convince other’s that they shouldn’t be. If you are worried right now, you don’t have to be responsible for helping anyone, yourself, your family, your neighbors, that those feelings aren’t real. Ultimate optimism isn’t immediate optimism, and if we are to face the facts of life face to face, we must know the true meaning of the old community organizing distinction between the world as it is and the world as we wish it would be. “Each generation must win anew,” said Adams, and that has always been true, for 400 years, for 4,000 years.

(Loosen?)

But how do we loosen? How do we not carry the weight of the world in our muscles and bones? We make room for how we are feeling, naming it all, so that it does not wear down upon us behind words like “fine” and “doing good” when asked how we are. And we take care of ourselves.

A few days ago, the ministers JJ Flag and Victoria Safford offered words that are as important today as they were before the election:

“Friend, go to the window. Open the door. Move away from the screen, pocket your phone.

For just a moment, sometime today, let this November air mess with your hair, caress your crumpled, tear-streaked face, kiss your bare hands, as it has since you were small, as it will as you grow old.

All is not lost.

Go to the window. Open the door. If you can’t, if you’re sick, or in jail, or at work with no break, if you’re stuck in an airport or riding a train, or in labor right now, if your body can’t move to the window or door, just imagine you can smell the rain, taste the wind, the body and breath of the beautiful world. Close your eyes. Breathe deep, drink deep, the nourishing, life-giving air and let it be Spirit inside you. Breathe in life, and breathe out again, life. Breathe more.

This is your life, and our life together, you and I, and all the beloveds at risk now as never before, humans and trees, rivers and land, animals, children and birds. Breathe in love for them, breathe in love for us all. Protection. Resolve. And when you’re able, when you’re ready, whenever you can, breathe out a prayer of hope.

This may take a while.”

This may take a while. But we hold in our hearts a kind of ultimate optimism, one tempered by the facts of history, and the facts of the present day. As presidential historian Jon Meacham put it not long ago, “America has always been shaped by the tension between hope and fear, justice and injustice, grace and rage. Whether the good prevails over the bad – whether we moved closer to the promises of the Declaration or farther away from them – is contingent on the habits of the heart and mind of a sufficient number of Americans, in power and far from it.”

So may we build the habits of the heart that build sanctuaries in our lives, and in our hearts. May we give and receive the “big, engulfing, no-questions-asked love” and offer a “Fearless, unshakeable love for each of this world’s broken souls.” Even our own. Remembering that, “Whoever you are, wherever you came from, whoever you love, wherever you are on life’s journey—you are welcome here.”

And then, when our hearts are ready for the work that each of us is called to, may we go back out into the places we live, and work, and love, giving to each and all not hell but hope, and courage, and remembering the everlasting love that holds us all.

So may it be.