“What have we learned?”

“What have we learned?”

April 25, 2021     Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

 

Click here to see the video

Adding an existential element to the old movie title, “Waiting to Exhale” we all breathed a sigh of relief on Tuesday afternoon when the verdict was read in the Derek Chauvin trial. After a two weeklong trial, during which those of us who are a little too addicted to the news, witnessed over and over, bits of the video of Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of the already dead George Floyd in Minneapolis last May, the verdict came as a relief. It was a case of police brutality that turned into murder that was witnessed by children and professionals who pled with Chauvin to get off of George Floyd’s neck, to start CPR, to check for pulse. Expert witnesses explained what was obvious to all of us, that Floyd died, not from his own pre-existing health problems, drug use, or anything else. He was deprived of air. He was choaked to death by members of the police force, led by Derek Chauvin. 

 

We were waiting to exhale because, as many black community leaders have said, “We’ve seen the movie before.” Lots of evidence, videos, witnesses, and still, the police usually are found to be not guilty, or, in many cases, not even to be charged. I kept assuring my more cynical friends, “There is no way that Chauvin is going to walk away from this. There is just too much evidence.” But every time I said that, I prayed silently that I would be right because, well, we’ve seen this movie before. 

 

No one celebrates in a case like this. George Floyd is still dead. The court system can only do so much to give justice to his memory but, at least they did what they could. We are not guaranteed that they will do the same the next time. 

In fact, we cannot say much more than that in this case, the dark wall of injustice has been cracked, but it will take many more hammer blows for that wall to be broken. 

 

I am relatively certain that all of you who listen to my sermons will have spent some time listening to some of the evidence in this trial. You saw a large black man, with his hands handcuffed behind his back, lying still on the pavement with Chauvin’s knee on his neck as he pleaded for his life, saying, “I can’t breathe,” and even calling for is dead mother to help him. 

 

But I want to take you back 11 months ago, to May 25^th of last year, before the video went viral. Before the police officers involved were fired under public pressure and before Derek Chauvin was charged. The day after Chauvin had murdered George Floyd in the street, the Minneapolis Police Department released this statement, please allow me two minutes to read their entire press release: 

 

Man Dies After Medical Incident During Minneapolis Police Interaction

Press release from the Minneapolis Police Department:

May 26, 2020 

May 25, 2020 (MINNEAPOLIS) On Monday evening, shortly after 8:00 pm, officers from the Minneapolis Police Department responded to the 3700 block of Chicago Avenue South on a report of a forgery in progress. Officers were advised that the suspect was sitting on top of a blue car and appeared to be under the influence.

Two officers arrived and located the suspect, a male believed to be in his 40s, in his car. He was ordered to step from his car. After he got out, he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress. Officers called for an ambulance. He was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center by ambulance where he died a short time later.

At no time were weapons of any type used by anyone involved in this incident.

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension has been called in to investigate this incident at the request of the Minneapolis Police Department.

No officers were injured in the incident.

Body worn cameras were on and activated during this incident.

 

They gave themselves several hours to concoct an account of the murder of George Floyd that made it sound like, “nothing to see here,” they made it sound like they were almost sympathetic, that it was just so unfortunate, that he just happened to have a medical incident while we were questioning him. We know that George Floyd had been dead for the last five minutes that Chauvin was kneeling on his neck, but the police, in their official press release, said that he was taken to the Hennepin County Hospital and that he had died there. 

Chauvin was found guilty of murder. But there were four officers involved in the incident. There was a dispatcher watching on video. There were other members of the police force who were aware of this while it happened and when it was all over, their official offices wrote this piece of fiction to try to convince the public that these helpful officers had just noticed that something was medically wrong with George Floyd and they acted to save his life, but sadly, he died later at the hospital. 

 

What have we learned from this incident? I don’t like this, but I need to ask you to think about it. What have we learned?

 

I will tell you very honestly, in the summer of 1995, when the trial of O. J. Simpson was being televised, when I heard that L A Detective, Mark Fuhrman, was accused of planting evidence intended to frame O. J. Simpson with the murder of his ex-wife and her friend, I just thought that was the silliest thing I had ever heard. A detective tries to find out who committed the crime, they don’t manufacture evidence to frame someone.

 

Now, I do believe that O. J. Simpson did commit the double murder, but I also think that Mark Fuhrman was a racist who was determined to smear blood from the scene on Simpson’s clothes, gloves, and in his car, to make it impossible not to convict him. I don’t know if you are old enough to remember the trial or if it occupied much of your attention at the time, but it took me a couple of years to accept the fact that I had been made to believe in a fiction of police nobility. And this was three years after the four police who had beaten Rodney King nearly to death had been captured by a video camera and those four were acquitted of all wrongdoing; when we had all seen them do it.

 

I was one of the people who, initially, was prepared to believe that they must have had some compelling reason to use that kind of force, something that didn’t show up in the video recording. I was programmed, from the earliest days of elementary school, to see the police as being friendly helpers. They protected us from crime. 

They were the ones we were to run towards when we are scared. Of course, my early elementary school years were spent in an all-white segregated school but, still. 

 

Mind you, I was a war protester in high school. I already knew that our president, Richard Nixon, was lying to us about Vietnam. But the police? And, let’s be clear, they don’t always lie. They are not always evil. You might even want to argue that most are good public servants . . . it might take some work and some evidence to convince me right now, but I’ll even grant you that many do good work and that I don’t want to be without them entirely. But will they lie to cover up their own crimes? You bet they will. When I ask you, “what have we learned?” I hope that I can hear your hearts whispering, “question authority.” I hope that I can see you set your jaw and refuse to believe propaganda without serious evidence.

 

As the famous actor, Will Smith, said five years ago, "Racism Is Not Getting Worse, It's Getting Filmed." In 1991, video cameras were becoming more common. We got the video of the beating of Rodney King from one of those cameras as a witness recorded the event from his balcony. But it was the advent of smart phones 25 years later that has put a much better video recorder in our pockets that makes it possible for us to keep real evidence of these events.

 

There was a 17 year old girl there who recorded the cellphone video of Floyd’s death. Chauvin threatened to pepper spray her if she didn’t stop, but the young woman would not lower her phone. Say what you will about Face Book, but she recorded Floyd’s murder and posted it on social media and the police lies about what happened started to fall apart because this young woman had the courage to document the truth. 

Without her courageous action, I am afraid that we might never have heard of George Floyd. None of the police on the scene had the courage to tell the truth about what had happened. Everyone standing on the sidewalk, undoubtably had a cell phone in their pockets and they could have recorded it. She did it, and she saved George Floyd’s memory. She led the world to justice.

 

Now, when I say that she had courage, it should be said that she had to have courage in the face of a police officer who was murdering one large black man who was telling her to stop recording. But she also testified in the trial and you must understand, her life is now at risk, which is why I am not going to repeat her name or show her image and I wish that other sources would do the same. She has had the courage to put her life on the line to speak truth to power and we should all try to protect her from the many white supremacists who will now look for an opportunity to kill her. 

Harvard professor, Cornel West, regularly reminds us that “Justice is what love looks like in public.” Love is a verb. It is something you do, not something that you feel. Love involves risk. Love requires courage. 

 

When we started this church in 2008, we took as our motto that famous quote from the holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, “Thou shalt not stand idly by.” We cannot hope for justice if we remain neutral in the presence of injustice. Silence never creates justice. Silence is tacit support for oppressors. The powerful never give justice to the weak out of the goodness of their hearts. Presidents will lie. The police will lie. And though I hate it, denominations, Bishops, Popes, and pastors will lie to make their worst sins seem benign. 

It is several years old now, but I recommend this book to you, though the title tells you a lot of what you learn from reading it or listening to the audio version, “Mistakes were made, but not by me." We are all the hero of our own novels and we have ways of telling our life story that makes us appear to be innocent of wrongdoing, no matter how close we were to the horrible events we have witnessed. Even if you were not the one making the mistake, if you stand idly by, you are a part of the propaganda that insists that no one is responsible . . . the police were just questioning him about a counterfeit bill when they noticed that he was having a medical problem. 

 

What have we learned when we compare what we know now about how George Floyd died with what the police told us last May? It seems unavoidable to me that we have to learn to question authority. I am not encouraging you to be paranoid or to reach a new height of cynicism, that can be deadly on its own. But we must all accept that we know, with lots of evidence, that governments will lie to cover their own tracks. The police will lie. Wall Street Bankers will lie. The media will lie. The church will lie. Sometimes your most trusted friends will lie, when they need to assure you that they are innocent. 

 

The sacrament of the progressive church needs to be something other than rituals and religious texts; it really has to be critical thinking. 

 

There is a Buddhist tradition that says that when the Buddha was enlightened and he began to wander around India teaching, he was asked; "Are you a god?" "No," he replied. "Are you a reincarnation of god?" "No," he replied. "Are you a wizard, then?" "No." "Well, are you a man?" "No." "So, what are you?" Buddha simply replied: "I am awake."

 

Religion really can be the scales over our eyes that keep us from seeing the truth. Patriotism can blind us. Indifference can make us look away from injustice. Comfort with the status quo can make us wrap ourselves in white privilege, middle class insulation, the comfort of knowing that the police don’t beat people like us. 

We need to wake up to the fact that we cannot allow ourselves to be programed by the propaganda of the media, the marketplace, the government, the police, or the church. 

 

Love is our religion, and we make our religion visible by working for justice. People, please, know how to make a video recording with your phone and if you are a witness to police abuse, record it, post it, because without it, justice is hard to find. 

Black, White, and Blue

Black, White, and Blue          April 18, 2021     Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

Click here to see the video

 

We’ve talked a lot about racism in America over the past several years. It is a huge and complex issue that defies simple explanations or easy solutions. In the past few years, a lot of the conversation has revolved around race as an issue in police violence and the way that this problem gets ignored in our judicial system. The #Black Lives Matter movement came into existence in 2013 following the acquittal of George Zimmerman for killing Travon Martin in Florida. 

 

The Travon Martin story was well documented, and the media gave the case a lot of attention. A teenaged boy walking through a predominantly white neighborhood after buying a bottle of iced tea and a bag of skittles, was cornered and gunned down by a wannabe cop while he was walking back to his home. It seemed like a clear case of racial profiling and overly zealous neighborhood patrolling turned to murder but George Zimmerman was acquitted of charges and America woke up to a dimension of tragic judicial protection for those who kill black people in the name of law enforcement.

 

It was the very next summer when things took an even more ugly turn in the police killing of Michael Brown, a black teenager in Ferguson, MO, a suburb of St. Louis. Riots broke out with looting, burning buildings, and a summer of violence demanding action this time. It took six full years of judicial procedures to end up with the decision that officer Darren Wilson would not be charged with any crime. 

 

We have two issues to think about here. Over the past five years, police have shot and killed at least 135 unarmed black men. Police shoot and kill black people at twice the rate they shoot and kill white people. Last year, nearly a thousand people died in police action. But the second issue has to do with the judicial system, which seems always willing to give a police officer the benefit of the doubt, even when there is video evidence of the unnecessary and sometimes absolutely outrageous nature of the killing.

 

There is progress on some fronts. Many of us were very encouraged when Cory Bush, a black single mother from St. Louis, was elected to congress in November. She is the first black woman elected to congress from Missouri and she brings with her, not only her background as a Registered Nurse and a UCC minister, but she has also experienced homelessness and the racism that has been so much a part of this region of the country.

A couple of weeks ago, St. Louis broke another glass ceiling in the election of Tishaura Jones as mayor, promising that race would no longer be an afterthought in St Louis government and policing. But as an almost throwaway line in a press coverage of Jones’ election, there was a comment about the fact that the 1500 member St Louis police force still has two labor unions, one for white officers and one for black officers. 

This is so implausible that you may not have heard me the first time, so I am going to say it again: in 2021, in the city of St Louis, there are two police unions, one for white officers and another one for black officers.

This is not the 1960’s when I started school in a segregated, all white school in rural Kentucky. This is not a museum shot of a coloreds’ only and whites’ only rest room or water fountain signs, this is right now in St. Louis, Missouri. 

 

Of course, it would be impossible to maintain this segregation if black members of the St Louis police force wanted to join the white police union but there is a well-founded matter of a lack of trust here. Black police are painfully aware of deep racism among the white members of the police force. 

A perfect illustration of this distrust can be seen in the case of Detective Luther Hall, seen here working undercover during a demonstration in 2017. Three white officers, mistaking Detective Hall for a demonstrator, beat him and beat him so severely that he was hospitalized and underwent several surgeries to recover from the incident. Last month, the three officers who beat him were acquitted of all charges by an all-white jury.

 

Folks, this is no longer something that we can wave off as being media hype or exaggerated claims of police abusing their authority. Black people don’t fare well in encounters with the police, whether they are guilty or innocent. Whether they fully cooperate or if they resist arrest. Even not when they are asleep in their own bed in their own home, and, as in Detective Hall’s case, not even when you are a member of the police force, at work. Thursday, the police in Chicago shot and killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo as he surrendered to police with his empty hands raised above his head. And after these egregious events, the judicial system makes it all that much worse by seeming to somehow make it seem like it was legitimate police work. 

 

Allegations of racism in the Minneapolis Police department where some estimates indicate that a black man is seven times more likely to be shot by the police than a white person is, have been in the news a lot in recent years. From the shooting of Philando Castile in 2016, to the choaking death of George Floyd, and now, this week, the shooting of Daunte Wright in another traffic stop gone bad. 

 

At this writing, we are still awaiting the verdict in the trial of former Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin in the choaking death of George Floyd. But while demonstrations have been going on every night of the two-week trial, demanding justice for George Floyd, now we add to the tension the shooting death of Daunte Wright by Kim Potter, who has been on the police force longer that Daunte Wright had been alive. Potter has resigned and has now been charged with involuntary manslaughter because, she claims, she thought that she was holding her taser when, in fact, she was holding her revolver. She insists that the fatal shooting of Daunte Wright was an accident. 

Something which, and I can’t believe I 

am even saying this, Televangelist, Pat Robertson, finds to be an unbelievable claim . . . and folks, Pat Robertson has shown us for 40 years that he will believe and say almost anything, but not being able to tell a yellow plastic taser from a heavy metal handgun is just too much for ol Pat to buy!

 

I don’t know much about Kim Potter. I don’t know if she is a racist. And, for our purposes today, I don’t want to get mired down in the particulars of any one case in any one city. I want to draw back the wide-angle lens and consider the presence of racism in our police forces in the United States, and for that matter, racism in our military because an awful lot of former military service people come home to become police. And I want to think about why our judicial system seems to so blatantly favor the police, even when there is video evidence and multiple witnesses to lethal crimes. 

 

As arrests mount of those involved in the January 6^th insurrection, we are discovering that very many  are deeply racist, Nazi-sympathizers, who were members of the military and police forces. There were thousands of people involved in the insurrection and only about 500 have been arrested, but 20% of them have military or police backgrounds, which, on the face of it, would seem to be impossible, except for the fact that racism is a disease that runs deep in law enforcement and in the military. I don’t mean to tar the whole of our armed forces and all of our local police forces with a single brush. It obviously is not all of them and it is obviously not a majority, but there are too many and we all know it. We just can’t ignore it any longer.

 

The nomenclature is not new, marginalized communities have been talking about either defunding or dismantling the police for a long time. It is a new term for a lot of us and a lot of Democratic leaders don’t like it, and those of us who do like it don’t always mean the same thing when we say it. Speaking only for myself, what I mean when I say it is dramatic police reform. 

 

I am going to pretend that someone asked me how I would go about rooting out racism from the police and the military, as well as white favoritism and white police favoritism in the judicial system. 

 

1)   Why are there a thousand police killings in the United States every year when there are none or always fewer than 7 in Great Britain when Britain has all of the racism and racial diversity that we have, but without so much violent policing? There are a number of reasons:  The streets of Great Britain are not awash with guns. Guns are closely regulated in the UK and so the police don’t have to be afraid of being shot every time they try to apprehend a suspect. We have allowed our streets to become militarized which has led our police to become militarized and, frankly, scared. 

 

As we saw Thursday night, there are military styled weapons readily available on our streets, such that an inexperienced, untrained, 19-year-old kid in Indianapolis could jump out of his car and kill 8 people and wound 4 others in one minute! Police are always pulling out their handguns because, they say, they are afraid. 

 

I’m not saying that being a policeman or woman is not dangerous, I’m just saying that it is not the most dangerous job in America . . . it is, just for example, much less dangerous than being a logger, an aircraft pilot or engineer, a oil derrick worker, a road maintenance worker, and agricultural worker, a roofer, a garbage collector, a fire fighter, a delivery driver, a utility lineman, a crane operator, a landscape supervisor, a farmer, a construction worker, a vehicle mechanic, or a grounds keeper. 

 

I’m not saying that the police do not face danger, but it is statistically true that the police kill ten times as many people as people kill police and that is just a fact. So, if people like Kim Potter have been on the police force for over 20 years and still get scared enough to not be able to tell a gun from a taser, maybe this is just not the job for her.  

 

Another reason there are almost no police killings in Great Britain is that there are almost no traffic stops, which appears to be where most of our police get into trouble. In Great Britain, they use cameras on major highways and if you are speeding or driving badly, you will get a ticket in the mail for which fines are only one possible consequence. 

 

Our police use broken taillights and expired tags as a pretense to go looking for more serious crimes which is, in two words, over policing. In sum, we must demilitarize our streets, and demilitarize our police, and not send armed police out to do traffic stops when a camera can accomplish what needs to be done. 

2)   Secondly, there should be much better screening of candidates for both police and military service and their training must include regular sensitivity training to make sure that they do not become radicalized.

I have to regularly take boundary training classes to teach adjunct classes at my university and as elaborate as they try to make it sound, it boils down to this:

Don’t have sex with any of your students. How often should I have to take that class? Doesn’t that seem pretty obvious? My counseling professor at Vanderbilt had a much more graphic, and therefore, more memorable way of saying it, but that cannot be repeated here. Back in the 70’s, professors having sex with students was almost considered an employment benefit, but it became frowned on in the 80’s, and since the Clarence Thomas hearings, it has been cause for dismissal. 

 

Learning how to not be racist is much more complicated than being taught not to have sex with your students, so, yeah, regular continuing training really has to be a part of the solution. 

 

3)   Thirdly, a great deal of police work has to do with addiction, mental health, and domestic violence. These are things which, when you add an armed policeman to the mix, often get much worse. We need to dramatically reduce armed police in traffic management, and we need to cut back on armed police and staff up with trained social workers who know how to deal with mental health emergencies, addiction, and domestic disputes. I’ve never owned a gun and I have gone into homes dealing with addiction, mental health crises, and domestic disputes for more than 40 years. I’ve taken a couple of punches in my day, one that was quite memorable, but I have never wished that I could have shot anyone. 

 

Once I was held at gunpoint by an alcoholic in a domestic violence call for five hours. If the police had shown up, I am confident that the alcoholic, me, the alcoholic’s wife and mother would all be dead. It was a traumatic event, but I’ve been around to talk about it for 35 years because no Barney Fief with a loaded gun showed up to “nip it in the bud.”

 

I get that there are circumstances that call for an armed officer and I want to know that they are available when needed. I’m just saying, we probably need about a fourth as many as we have, and we need a lot more social workers and people with mental health training to do what they are equipped to do. 

 

Our police have a bad habit of turning a minor traffic infraction into a fatal shooting. Their defense is almost always that they were following standard police procedures and that, I submit, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is the whole damn problem. Standard police procedures in the USA are militarized to the point of the police acting like an occupying force in a foreign country. They work for us. They are supposed to protect us. Our problem is that we have no one to protect us from them!

 

If the British can manage their population with 2 or 3 gun deaths per year, anytime we have more than 10, we should stop and re-evaluate what we are doing. By the way, we had more than 200 by the end of March this year, about 80% of them were non-white. So, you see, that is about 100 years of British police work done in less that 3 months in America. Do you see how serious this problem is for us?

 

The federal government can help with this reform in two ways. Stop giving military equipment to local law enforcement agencies and shift your federal grant money away from armed policing and towards mental health, addiction, and social workers. Local law enforcement will hire what they can pay for. This is not complicated. 

4)   Finally, the Attorney General should have an office of review in every legal case where there has been a police killing with special attention to be given to cases in which the race of the police and the victim differ. Every judge and prosecutor should know that their work is being professionally scrutinized in a way where consequences for racist decisions are severe. 

Judges and prosecuting attorneys are not that much different from the rest of us. They are much more likely to do the right thing, when there are serious consequences for doing the wrong thing. Judges are not demigods; they are just surgeons who couldn’t get into medical school. I can’t prove that last statement, I just know that I’m right. 

 

I want to thank you for asking me how I thought we should approach police reform. This is not a comprehensive list but, I believe that it is a vital starting place. Clearly, what we cannot do is to accept the status quo and, I beg of you, my white sisters and brothers, do not think of this as a black problem. Sure, most of the victims are black but most of the shooters are white. This is mostly a white problem. We need to change. Black people have tried everything from absolutely compliance to running for their lives. They have knelt, slept, demonstrated peacefully and rioted. They have tried everything to avoid being victims. Now, we need to try something, like changing, not being so racist, and not burying our heads in the sand.

 

That’s just my opinion, of course, but you know in your hearts that I just happen to be right.

“I got vaccinated but I still want some of you to stay away from me”

“I got vaccinated but I still want some of you to stay away from me”

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

April 11, 2021

 

Click here to see the video

 

 

Now that about 20% of us have been vaccinated and nearly twice as many people are still sporting antibodies from having been infected with covid-19, we are finally reaching a point where some of us are cautiously re-entering the world of social contact. We are going to try to start having in-person Sunday morning services in May, inviting only vaccinated people to attend, to see if we can safely try to have a seated dimension of our church once again, after more than a year in pandemic lockdown.

 

A small group of my vaccinated friends and I decided that we would attend a small venue, carefully spaced concert at which we had to buy tables of 4 to acquire tickets. There are 7 of us. So, we needed to agree on an 8^th person to invite, which, you wouldn’t think would be so hard. But, as we began to discuss it, we realized that a couple of my close friends have some bad history with one or two of the others and so it wouldn’t be universally comfortable in the group for me to invite them.

 

Of course, the next person suggested was someone with whom I have had an unfortunate conflict. I don’t hate her. I don’t wish her ill. But I also don’t want to spend an expensive Saturday night sitting next to her. And so it went, with each suggestion being vetoed, vore dire, style, by someone else in the group. And, in almost every case, some one of us have said to another, in regard to this bad blood, “I really think that you should just get over it.” Which is to say, “They don’t bother me and your issue seems to me to be unimportant.” Which is, if I may point it out, a really good way to tell a friend that they and their feelings are irrelevant, which just isn’t a good way to try to successfully emerge from our year-long pandemic isolation. 

 

It has been a rough year. A half a million people have died, which means that millions of people are in grief. Tens of millions have lost their jobs, some have lost their homes. Marriages have failed under the stress. The suicide rate is way up. Alcohol and drug abuse has spiked. Even those of us who have been blissfully free of panic attacks and serious depression prior to 2020, have realized that we just might not be as strong as we have been in previous years. Human beings are hard wired for social interaction and without it, our species does not do well. 

 

Even those of us who have remained employed, housed, and healthy, have experienced real, palpable anxiety, about having to go to the grocery store, the pharmacy, or the auto mechanics shop and encountering people who refused to keep their distance, wear a mask, or show any signs of civil awareness of how dangerous their careless behaviors have been. The stock value of the human race has gone way down in my estimation over the past year as I have heard former friends declare that they absolutely don’t care if their personal conduct spreads the virus because, “If people are afraid of getting sick, they should just stay home.” Or those who refuse to be vaccinated because they want to wait until a few hundred million other people have had it first, or they are afraid that it is the “mark of the beast,” or it is all just a hoax. 

 

Over the past year we have been irrefutably presented with the fact that an awful lot of people simply are not very smart and that even more, who must certainly understand the issues, just don’t care about anyone but themselves. 

 

The pandemic came in the final year of the tragically polarizing presidency of Donald Trump, who did everything he could to stoke the flames of partisan hatred, racial prejudice, class warfare, and fascism. We were pretty engaged in being at one another’s throats before the pandemic and those polarized groups turned a global health crisis into just another aspect of the political and class divides of our nation. I simply cannot believe how close we came to actual civil war. American culture has been really sick, and we are not well yet. A lot is riding on how we come out of the pandemic.  

 

I want to talk about two things today: forgiveness and boundaries. If you wanted to judge your way through life, it really wouldn’t be hard to do. People give us lots of reasons. In fact, if you are not going to judge your way through life, and this is no exaggeration, you have to make a conscious and powerful decision to suspend 

judgement. No kidding. As the popular 19^th century Scottish pastor, Rev. John Watson, advised:  Be kind, for everyone you meet is carrying a heavy burden.

 

People often behave very badly but if we can assume that everyone we encounter is carrying a burden we cannot see . . . we don’t know who in their life has died. We don’t know what their financial situation might be, their addiction status, their health, their trauma. Sure, maybe some people are not dealing with trauma or cancer or grief, but it is a fairly safe bet that almost every short tempered, confrontational, inconsiderate person you encounter is reacting to something in their lives that, while it may not be a good excuse, or even a cause, of their conduct, but it is, at the very least, a reason. 

 

My audience is, almost universally, a self-selected group of progressive people who have very passionate feelings on an array of social justice issues. The laundry list of things we are passionate about, if we allow it to happen, can make us virtually incompatible with all but a few people in the world. Almost half of the people in this country were and possible still are Trump supporters. Many would be willing to seal our borders against all immigrants, and I shudder to think how far many of them might honestly be willing to go in permanently imprisoning or even stoning homosexuals, addicts, or even most minorities. 

 

But even among liberals, there are those who cannot abide people who still eat meat, or drive a gas guzzling car, WalMart shoppers, or who live in a gated community. Honestly, liberals seem always to be on the verge of cannibalism, more ready to devour one another in harsh judgment, than to enjoy and celebrate the myriad things they have in common.

The fourth century Roman historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, wrote about the last non-Christian Roman Caesar, Emperor Julian, the Apostate, that he brought together all of the local priests and bishops to meet in the palace to politely discuss their beliefs. Marcellinus recorded, “The Emperor thought that freedom to argue their beliefs would simply deepen their differences, so that he would never be faced by a united common people. He found from experience that no wild beasts are as hostile to men as Christians are to each other.”

 

What Julian observed about 4^th century Christians is, I’m afraid, even more true among liberal religious people in the 21^st century. I recognize that calling out people for being easily offended will probably offend the whole lot of them, but over these past years when I have been invited to travel and speak in other churches, at least in the USA, the invitation is almost always from a Unitarian Church and, the Unitarian Universalist approach to faith is the most agreeable to me of all of the choices on the menu, but without exception, I have experienced these small congregations to be divided against one another in shockingly toxic ways.  

 

Thomas Jefferson once said that he believed that before the current generation ended, that everyone in the United States would be a Unitarian. And, for a faith that fits in a modern scientific age, they really should be the vessel of thinking, compassionate, religious people . . . but their congregations are almost always very small, and most are ready to collapse because they just don’t get along with each other. I could cite a fair list of reasons why that is so, but I believe that I may have already said a bit too much. 

 

I would be among the last to suggest to a progressive audience that you should lighten up on your convictions, dilute your passion, and get along at all costs. We need more prophets and less apathy in this world, but I’m just saying, if you expect purity of convictions in others, when we all have so much impurity in ourselves, then we are not divided by principles, we are divided by inflated egos and that needs to stop. 

If our goal is to educate others, to heighten awareness of moral issues, to encourage others to share your passions about social justice causes, well, that can happen, but it never happens when people feel unsafe, judged, put down, or belittled. Change of that sort happens when we feel safe. When we can feel loved and accepted as we are so that we are allowed to open our minds to new ways of seeing. Trust me, if people could be judged into changing, I would have had this city cleaned up 25 years ago!

 

Let’s face it, we are evangelists, not evangelists who want to convert people from one set of magical beliefs to another set of equally absurd magical beliefs, we want to convert people into believing that we really can have universal healthcare that costs less than what we are paying now. We want to convert people into believing that we really can pay women the same amount we pay men for the same work, that the minimum wage should be a living wage, and that the sexual orientation of other people is none of our business. And it can be done, most of us were not born into liberal progressive views. We changed, other people can change too, but love always works better than hate and if we cut off contact with people whose current beliefs and behaviors are deplorable to us, then what real chance is there that they are ever going to change? 

 

Remember, you changed because you were in a social, educational, spiritual community, that allowed you the freedom to grow, so don’t close the door behind you when you outgrow old belief systems. 

 

But I said that I wanted to talk about two things as we emerge from our pandemic hiding places. 

One crucial spiritual value is forgiveness and all of its cousins: compassion, tolerance, sincere love, and even reconciliation, but I also want to talk about boundaries, because, seriously people, you cannot be reconciled with everyone. 

 

Yes, try to suspend judgement. Focus on changing yourself rather than being critical of others. Extend yourself to show undeserved, unearned compassion. Try to find common ground with people. Try to stay in conversation with family members, neighbors, co-workers, and friends with whom you have vital disagreements. 

 

Look people, I was an election judge in Tuesday’s election, which means that I was paired up with a Republican for 13 consecutive hours at the polling place, an uneducated, opinionated, Fox News watching, unvaccinated, Republican who thinks that wearing a mask has absolutely no benefit in slowing the spread of a virus. And look at me, I am not incarcerated for homicide, assault, or anything. I’m just saying, it can be done. 

 

But forgiveness doesn’t mean that you have amnesia. Suspending judgement doesn’t mean that you also abandon your values, your beliefs, your ethics. Trying to stay in community with people does not have to mean that you sacrifice yourself in the process.

 

Look, if we say that you wake up every day with a hundred units of emotional energy, that’s your daily strength; what are you going to spend it on? Navigating life, staying informed about the news, dealing with work, home maintenance, traffic, bills, the family in your house, they all take some of it and at certain stages of life, they may take almost all of it. 

So how much can you afford to spend of those who only take energy from you . . . who won’t stop sending you authoritative videos about how the vaccine is just Bill Gates way of getting a gps implanted in your body, or RNA based vaccines will change your DNA and make you buy a Subaru, listen to NPR, and vote for Democratic Socialists? Or the persistent friend who constantly tries to use friendship as access to manipulate you into a romantic relationship. . . how much energy, leeway, access do you give to people who just don’t want what you have to offer; but they do want to control you, change you, or own you in some way. Even if it is your oldest high school friend, your brother or your mother, you may have to put up solid boundaries that allow you to decide how you are going to spend your emotional energy.

 

As I have told you before, you are not the “asshole whisperer.” Or, if you 

prefer, as Jesus said, “Don’t cast your pearls before swine.” (Matthew 7:6)  I am a big believer in forgiveness and reconciliation if it can be accomplished in a healthy way. But as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, forgiveness without confession is cheap grace. When a real offense has taken place, the mere passage of time, especially time passed in silence, does not have to make any real difference. Everybody makes mistakes but don’t let the mistake turn into a character flaw by failing to apologize. People of conscience should always strive to make a mistake right. Forgiveness without confession, without acknowledgement of the fault, is a demand that you either have amnesia or that you devalue yourself to the point that you too come to believe that you deserve to be abused. 

 

There mere existence of social media makes it almost certain that there is not a person within the sound of my voice who has not said something that you shouldn’t have said during these months of pandemic. Sure, we have been under a lot of stress, we’ve been fed propaganda, and we have all come to imagine ourselves to be virologists, dispensing judgement and instructions on how everyone else should live.

 

To end the pandemic, we may need more than a vaccine and a haircut. We may also need some humility, to own our mistakes and hold out an olive branch whenever possible. This church has often sung a song declaring that love is our religion. Between the Trump administration and the pandemic, it looks like a lot of us have been in danger of losing our religion. 

 

I implore you to remember the kind of person you know in your heart that you want to be. You know what is really important. Sure, respect yourself, guard your emotional health, but, to quote St. John, “Let us love one another, for love is of God.” In fact, all we can really know of God, is in the act of loving.