I want to say something about slavery in the 21st century in my April 20 sermon on Passover, but I am overwhelmed by the subject. Does anyone have a resource you would particularly recommend (especially on-line) that might help me craft a few paragraphs or pages to integrate into the story of Exodus?

Any books you found especially helpful?

Thanks in advance,
PB

When I think of this occupation, though, I think not of my own generation but of my nephews’ grandchildren, who will stay be paying for it, and theirs after them. I am convinced that two hundred years hence, if we still have a planet Earth and a history of it, this episode will be remembered as one of the greatest disgraces committed by an empire at the height of its power. It will be remembered as a tale of stupidity and hubris and cultural ignorance over which historians and lay people will shake their heads wondering, “How could that one superpower in that era do something so incredibly, obviously motivated by bloodlust and greed? How did their great government allow it? How could the people not take to the streets in droves, screaming and protesting, boycotting and barraging their elected representatives until they got out? What in the world was it really supposed to accomplish? How long did it take Iraq and surrounding nations to regain anything resembling equilibrium?”

I did sign on to the Call to Lament and Repent, but really, what other sacrifices have I been asked to make? Sending an e-mail petition is a pitifully empty action made through zero effort by a fat, comfortable civilian whose exterior life has been entirely uninterrupted or disturbed by this war while thousands of my countrymen and women are dead, are currently in harm’s way, and whose families daily bear the burden of their being in a hostile, dangerous environment fighting a war with no end in sight. My only sigh of regret comes at the gas pump, where I shell out (pun intended) over $3 a gallon for gas so I can go and drive wherever I please, while how many tens of thousands of Iraqi lives are shattered and their land drenched in blood? My biggest family concerns in the past five years amount to a mother with a broken shoulder and a brother with knee problems. My nephews are alive and well and growing up with all comforts and luxuries on a safe little suburban street, my sister and I work our jobs and have full and free social lives, travel, shop, entertain ourselves as we so choose — there is no interruption of services, no end to the diversions we might purchase for ourselves, no cessation of the round of social outings, learning opportunities, cultural life and beautiful countryside to which we might avail ourselves. Our sleep is undisturbed. Our grocery stores are full to bursting, we never go hungry unless we choose to, and all manner of services are widely available to us with no delay.

I saw a movie this past week that was ostensibly a sweet piece of madcap costume fun starring the extraordinary Frances McDormand, the delightful Amy Adams and my personal favorite, the wickedly talented Shirley Henderson. It was set in England at the start of WWII, and while the younger characters involved themselves in a whirl of sex, champagne and romantic intrigue, the middle-aged leads (McDormand and her lovely, sexy suitor Joe played by Ciaran Hinds) were dreadfully aware of the signs of coming war, and knew just what that would mean. They had lived through the first world war, you see, and while the youngsters danced and carried on obliviously, these two drew closer together in deep generational understanding and sympathy, having no idea what was to come but knowing in their hearts that it would be terrible, and require much of them, taking away their peace of mind and their comforts, which is what any war should do. Any war should take away the peace of mind and the comforts of the nations that fight it, else it is too distant, too hypothetical, too much a spectacle on the nightly news and not real enough for us to hate it enough to end it.

Helpless, helpless, helpless. We inflicted this horror upon another sovereign nation and our own military forces and kept ourselves largely untroubled at home, thinking that yellow “Support Our Troops” stickers on our cars was gesture enough, that circling around in peaceful protest was enough. We should have had our gas rationed, our sugar, silk stockings, and other luxuries taken away, our electricity and heat rationed — not only to pay for some of this disastrous experiment in “nation building” but to have it brought to our attention on a daily basis that we are a nation at war, hemorrhaging billions of dollars a day while many of our own citizens lack housing, food and health insurance, and that this is untenable, disastrous, and must be repented of and ENDED.

“Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day” — which of these women has lived through a world war??

“THEY DON’T EVEN BELIEVE IN CHRIST AND THEY’RE GETTING THEIR OWN CHRISTMAS STAMP,” sez the genius who composed the nationalistic screed. Um,excuse me, Mr. or Ms. “Peace On Earth, Good Will Toward Men,” Eid isn’t Christmas. Look it up. It’s a Muslim holiday. “Eid” is not Arabic for “Merry Christmas.”

REMEMBER THE AMERICANS WHO HAVE DIED IN TERRORIST ATTACKS! BOYCOTT THIS STAMP!

Because, of course, the 5-8 million Muslims in America are all terrorists. That’s what it’s all about. Right on, and welcome to the holiday season!

(P.S. I actually love the design of the stamp and plan to use it to send all my holiday cards if it’s still available. Thanks, Miguelito!)

Update: It’s much older than I thought. You can read about its release, and about Eid, here. And you can read about the boycott of the stamp here.

They had names like Brass Liberation Orchestra and Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble and Hungry March Band and they came from as close by as Providence, Rhode Island and from as far away as New Orleans,Lousiana and Rome, Italy. My favorite group was the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, which had the best choreography and oom-papa kick-butt music and message.

It was one of those “Hush, Little Baby — Mama’s Gone Hunting a Sermon” outings — I already wrote 90% of my sermon on “Can These Dry Bones Live: Singing, Dancing and Laughing-In The Revolution” on Thursday and knew I’d get my first page or so from attending the festival. We’re hearing “Stories From the Cha Cha Cha” by Vern Huffman (in Paul Rogat Loeb’s marvelous book of essays, The Impossible Will Take a Little While) as our contemporary reading and Ezekiel 37:1-9 as our ancient reading. I’m referencing “Hairspray” and Baby Suggs’ Sermon in the Clearing from Beloved in mysermon:

“Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. … This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. … hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.” Saying no more, she stood up then and danced with her twisted hip the rest of what her heart had to say while the others opened their mouths and gave her the music. Long notes held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh.”

I’m singing “Our Father (The New, Revised Edition)” by Susan Werner as the Prelude and the choir is doing “The Fire Of Commitment” by Jason Shelton. The music will all be fun, irreverent and contemporary. My Music Director is going to play “You Can’t Stop The Beat” from “Hairspray” as the postlude!

I used Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy as research reading.

My message is basically this: one of the most tried-and-true ways to oppress a people is to control their laughter, dancing and singing. The work of social change must reclaim these things. There’s a lot my sermon about colonialism and Western attitudes about the place of the body in spiritual practice (ie, none! ’til very recently!). We will remember the African slaves who sat in the choir loft of our own church building with their hands properly folded, having been taught that their own embodied forms of worship were demonic. The sermon concludes with the (somewhat inaccurate but by now legendary) words of Emma Goldman, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

Take and use as you like. I believe in sharing liturgical materials.

I’m really excited about this service. It has the potential to be a failure, and I think it’s important to take those risks now and then.

I’ll take contributions through the end of this week and then we’ll cut a check for St. Greg’s, which is celebrating the 7th anniversary of the food pantry in early November. Wish I could be there!

On another subject entirely, have any of you ever offered a special evening healing service for your congregations? I am feeling that I would like to plan one this winter and would like to see people’s liturgies — especially Unitarian Universalists’.

Another liturgical inquiry: I would like to do a Tenebrae or Good Friday service this year for the first time. I attended one at All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, DC about ten years ago that was very powerful, as it interwove stories of martyrdoms from around the world with the story of Christ’s passion. I am under the impression that other congregations have offered this sort of service, and was again wondering if you’d like to share either liturgies or stories of similar services.

Thanks for your help. Time for bed.

I won’t double any more contributions but wouldn’t it be kewl to get it up to $500!?

Many thanks to those of you who already make generous donations. If you feel so moved, please use our handy-dandy PayPal link at the “Support PeaceBang” button at the top of the blog.

Go to www.saramiles.net to read more about this ministry in San Francisco, and to order a copy of Sara’s wonderful book, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion.

This isn’t a Michael Moore-ish production with lots of manipulative editing and sexy music — it’s mostly talking heads and footage from Iraq asking the question of how the U.S.’s mistakes led to the now out-of-control insurgency.

There is much to appreciate in this movie: its calm, chronological manner of presenting information from Bush administration insiders, its judicious usage of extremely upsetting footage, its intelligence and conscience. I think what I most appreciated, however, was that it showed the military in a very sympathetic light and put to rest once and for all that supporting the Bush administration is somehow “supporting the troops.”

Please see this film. Bring your friends. You will want to talk about it afterwards.

I really, really hope you’ll see this film, in case I didn’t make that clear enough.

It was a serious question, although it got lost in the larger controversy about race and brown bag lunches.

This is my most serious and pressing question about current UUism, which seems to have utterly jettisoned theology in favor of ideology. Theology is apparently too hard to deal with any more — especially in a RELIGIOUS movement that has so many vehemently anti-religious members in it (gee, remember when we were the supposedly rationalist faith tradition?), and so we have collectively decided that our serious work shall focus not on theology but on sociological concepts and models.

In her book Living Well By Doing Good, UCC pastor and activist Donna Schaper says that activists must fear grandiosity above all. She writes that we must cultivate “a serious detachment from totalitarian attitudes toward social change by which we force our self-righteous will on the world: ‘We know what’s good for you! That’s why our lives are so miserable!’” This message, she writes, is too ofen both the surface and the subliminal message of activism. I believe it is also the surface and the subliminal message of contemporary UUism.

We seem miserable to me. We certainly look miserable. Why shouldn’t we? Without any grace in the world without our help, we are literally carrying the world on our shoulders, and it shows.

It shows in our obese bodies (including mine, folks, including mine) and in the comical conformity of our slovenly appearance. It shows in our bizarre, vampiric fetishization of youth. It shows in our confused worship: because we no longer grant ourselves permission to unabashedly worship God or to pray for God’s guidance and mercy, we have taken to worshiping ourselves. Think I’m exaggerating? One of the liturgical elements listed as a prayer at our Ministry Days worship services began in this way,

“We, the creators.
We, the messengers…”

In 2006, also at Ministry Days, the prayer began,

“Here’s to us.”

Even the two well-loved and respected preachers at our Service of the Living Tradition preached about how they couldn’t manage to write their sermon, and took us through a lengthy, poetic description of their own confusion.

Friends, I am simply reporting facts here. You decide what it means.

Did you attend our Opening Celebration? What I saw was a history of Our Prophetic Greatness, presented unironically by our president and moderator. What I got was this message: “Thanks to nothing but our own enlightened wonderfulness, we achieved these groundbreaking justice commitments.”

And yet my own understanding of Unitarianism and Universalism informs me that it is because God is a God of justice and because we are created in the image of that God that we achieve any justice at all. According to our Unitarian and Universalist heritage, it is because God loves us and because we are created both to do good and to seek for personal and societal improvement, that we manage to do any of those things.

What I see in the larger UU movement is a very special, self-selected group of intelligent and well-meaning religious liberals who insistently define religion in such a way as to be unrecognizable to most of the planet, and then find tremendous disappointment in the fact that so few people know who we are, or care. Look at us, six thousand strong, gathering in plenaries with grim determination and harsh condemnation of those who think the wrong thoughts or believe the wrong things.

But of course we are in a particularly shrill and hysterical era of rage and condemnation in UUism: the evidence is indubitably IN that our first principle just might be theologically unsound, and since we have neither a doctrine of sin or of grace, we’re stuck in a world of genocide, environmental degradation, racism, greed, insane militarism and relentless moral UNimprovement with no explanation for it.

Instead of turning to the study of theology, we turn to the study of ideology: perhaps if we can find the right model, the right lingo, the right training, the right mission statement, we can cure this problem? If we can all just think the Right Thoughts, it will all make sense and we can take away the sins of the world. Just call me Agnes Dei.

I attend church services at the Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, OR one Sunday, and at the Queen Anne’s United Methodist Church the next (the first Sunday was during GA, when our leaders thought it best to schedule a plenary, rather than worship, at the customary hour of worship). Both congregations are anti-war, heavily critical of the Bush administration, openly skeptical about certain articles of Christian doctrine (the Episcopal priest says that he gets a little “integrity cringe” every time he recites the Nicene Creed), racially and economially diverse (not very, but neither are most UU congregations), gay accepting and feminist-affirming. They are both sending mission teams to work in places like New Orleans and Honduras. And they are obviously respectful of inter-faith relationships: the Episcopal bulletin announces an Adult Education item that reads, “Today Jewish Educator Jan Rabinowitch will be our guest with a discussion of one of the tougher Biblical texts, Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac.”

Spending time with both of these faith communities, I grieve yet again that we have reached a day when most UUs assiduously avoid the ecunemical spirit and commitment that was the dream of great Unitarian leaders like William Ellery Channing and Frederick Henry Hedge. Having so recently attended a conference (May’s Festival of Homiletics) with five thousand mostly-progressive Christian CLERGY, I am amazed to see nothing about partnering with the liberal Christianity community in our GA programs.

At the Episocpal church that Sunday, I sit next to a UU minister friend who is leaving us and joining the Episcopalians. She tells me of another mutual friend who is doing the same. I do a mental calculation: how many UU colleagues have left our movement in the ten years I’ve been serving in our ministry? I count eleven. At coffee hour, I meet a friendly couple who tell me that until very recently, they worshiped with the UUs. “But we really missed the sacred,” they say.

I think about the previous day — a Saturday afternoon in Portland when I was walking to the light rail that would take me back to the convention center. An earnest evangelical Christian was passing out pamphlets of some sort on the street corner, and a UU man still wearing his GA nametag took one and crowed “Jesus Saaaaaves” in the mocking tones before tossing his pamphlet into the trash.

Yes, we the tolerant. We the accepting. We the rational.

The invitation to Communion at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral simply reads: “All who hunger for God are cordially invited to the table, including children.”

What do we offer to those who hunger for God?

Thanks to Hafidha Sofia for the link to Class Matters.

Me, the dumb do-gooder and peacemaker, goes, “Hey Buddy. Whoa!” I figure if I can interrupt his invective maybe he won’t keep escalating into a more dangerous fury.

“Whoa WHAT?? Mind your own f-ing business!” he shouts at me.

“Whoa, watch your mouth and calm down!” I say, fool that I am.

“Shut the F up! It’s none of your f-ing business!” he says. And I say, “Yes it is my business! Keep your foul mouth off my streets!”

So then SHE gets in on it!! “You don’t know what’s going on! Mind your own business!”

Me: “Honey, this is what we call an ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP, okay? And when you bring it onto the streets, it’s definitely everybody’s business!”

Her: (starting to cry) “You don’t know what’s even happening! You have no right!”
Me: I DO know what’s happening — and let me tell you this — this man is a violent nightmare and it doesn’t matter WHAT’s going on — you never, ever deserve to be talked to like this.
Her: (screaming) SHUT UP! SHUT UP!

Him: You think I give a F about that cloth around your neck? I don’t give a S—!

Me: (forgetting that I’m even wearing a clerical collar) Well, obviously!
(yelling after the woman) Get help! You’re going to need it!

So hey, that was effective, huh? Because what I managed to do was (1) enflame the violent dude even more (2) put myself in harm’s way and (3) make her feel protective of her may-an. Oh, great.

But then I remember one time eleven years ago when I was eating a sushi dinner in Rochester, NY and reading a book while eavesdropping on the (hetero) couple next to me. I couldn’t help it: they were like 7″ from my table. The man was tearing the young woman apart in the softest, most malevolent of tones, ripping to shreds her every idea and attempt to assert herself. He insulted her family in hypnotic tones, and when she feebly protested, he would lean forward and stare at her as though he was moments from plunging his chopsticks into her throat.

I was so terrified by what I saw that when I got to the theatre I called the restaurant and asked to be put through to Jennifer (I knew that was her name). They brought the phone to her.

This is what I said to her:

“Jennifer? This is the woman who was sitting next to you a few minutes ago reading. Just pretend I’m your uncle calling to let you know of a change in the party for your mom, okay? (she made frightened little sounds, but stayed on the phone) But listen to me: you are in a very abusive relationship and your boyfriend is a very dangerous person. I know you know this: I can see it in your eyes. He is trying to isolate you from your family so that he can tear you down and destroy you, and if you don’t get help, he will. I am really worried about you, and I want you to tell someone exactly how he treats you and talks to you, because I think he’s a master manipulator and no one has any idea how vicious he is to you. But I heard it and I saw it, and I really hope you get away from him. I’m going to let you go now, but I want to tell you that I really care about you.”

“Yes.” she said.
And then,
“Thank you so much, Uncle Barry.”
Me: “Be strong.”
Her: “Okay. (quavering voice) Love you, Uncle Barry.”

I think of her even today.