Please click the link to watch Rev. Cynthia Snavely’s video recording of this sermon.

This has been a dark year. Many of the values we hold dear have been ignored—or worse, turned upside down—by the leadership of our own country. People around the world have not received medical treatment. Poor people around the world have lost their food aid. Why? Because American aid that helped pay for the medicine, the medical staff, and the food was abruptly stopped.

The work toward the mitigation of climate change has been reversed. Offshore wind projects have been halted. Fragile land and ocean areas have been opened to fossil fuel extraction. Agencies doing climate research have seen their staff and funds reduced. A nation we want to see as a refuge for immigrants, a land in which one harbor of entry displaying the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” is rounding people up and deporting them, threatening to kick out even naturalized citizens and not even letting in those who are at risk because they helped us in Afghanistan.

News outlets have had access to sources restricted and public television and radio have had funding cut. People who identify as transgender have been thrown out of the Armed Services despite years of exemplary service, been barred from sports, had their identity erased and healthcare threatened. Unfortunately, I could go on. It is all too easy to become hopeless.

But. There is always a but. People are pushing back. Despite the funding cuts, people around the world are doing what they can to keep lifesaving work going. Many of you are part of the Citizens Climate Lobby, which has not given up on pressing our government to take actions that mitigate climate change. People are out on the street watching for ICE and warning their neighbors when it is present in the neighborhood. Larger public media stations are helping small rural public stations stay afloat. Pink Haven declares that they “are a coalition of trans organizers, mutual-aid groups, progressive faith organizations, queer associations, and individual justice-lovers (who) know that liberation is a group project and that no one is free until everyone is free.”

What has been happening in our country seems senseless to many of us. Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, says, “We could bear nearly any pain or disappointment if we thought there was a reason behind it, a purpose, to it. But even a lesser burden becomes too much for us if we feel it makes no sense….”

This, all of this, makes no sense. But Rabbi Kushner suggests that we move beyond asking why to a different question. He says, “The question we should be asking is not, ‘Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?’… A better question would be ‘Now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?’” (from http://www.myjewishlearning.com/beliefs/Theology/Suffering_and_Evil/Responses/Modern_Solutions/When_Bad_Things_Happen.shtml).

Sure. This is not some personal or natural catastrophe. It is not cancer or a flood. It is a catastrophe created by our own elected leaders. It may be good to ask how we got here and how we allowed this to happen, but the even better question is still “Now that this has happened, what am I, what are we, going to do about it?”

I suggest the answer is not to just accept all this and go with the flow, not to just adjust ourselves to some new normal. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said decades ago, “… I say to you, my friends… there are certain things in our nation and in the world (about) which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all (people) of good‐will will be maladjusted until the good society is realized. I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self‐defeating effects of physical violence….”

In our reading by Hannah Roberts Villnave, she says, “Hope seeks out the forgotten places—the longest night, the damaged temple, the overcrowded stable, and every corner where tomorrow seems impossible.” But hope uses people to do that; ancient astronomers who built temples marking the solstices, the Maccabees fighting Antiochus IV Epiphanes and restoring the temple, Mary singing out the Magnificat: “(The Almighty) has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. … has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich (are) ….. sent away empty.”

For some reason as I prepared to write this sermon, the lyrics from a song by Lionel Bart, from the musical “Oliver” kept coming to my mind.

“Where is love?
Does it fall from skies above?
Is it underneath the willow tree
That I’ve been dreaming of?
Where is she?
Who I close my eyes to see?
Will I ever know the sweet ‘hello’
That’s meant for only me?
Who can say where she may hide?
Must I travel far and wide?
‘Til I am beside the someone who
I can mean something to …
Where…?
Where is love?”

Despite his wretched life conditions, Oliver has not given up hope in love. He is still looking for it. Somewhere out there someone is going to care about him, someone is going to love him. And as long as our children who must live with climate change, the sick and hungry of the world, the immigrant and refugee in our own country, the people who identify as LGBTQIA+ still believe that somewhere there are people who care, who love them, they can still have some hope. And maybe, just maybe we can be the people who care, who love.

Charles Dickens did not write Oliver Twist’s song, but he did write his story. And though Dickens began and ended his life with the Church of England, he has a place on our Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography webpage.

There, Wesley Hromatko writes, “Dickens had hoped to find in the United States progressive religious bodies, free from state control. Although disappointed with most American churches, he returned home full of enthusiasm for New England Unitarians in general, and William Ellery Channing in particular. He first attended Unitarian services at Essex Street chapel, London, and later took a pew at the Little Portland Street chapel. He liked the chapel’s minister, Edward Tagart, and they remained friends until the minister’s death sixteen years later. According to Dickens, Tagart had ‘that religion which has sympathy for men of every creed and ventures to pass judgment on none.’ Dickens wrote to Unitarian Harvard professor Cornelius Felton, ‘I have carried into effect an old idea of mine and joined the Unitarians, who would do something for human improvement if they could; and practice charity and toleration.’”

Since I have mentioned Dickens and his story Oliver Twist, I need also address that story’s Jewish caricature, Fagin. Hromatko notes, “In 1863 a Jewish acquaintance, Eliza Davis, wrote Dickens a letter complaining of the Oliver Twist character, Fagin, as ‘a great wrong’ to the Jewish people…. He made amends in Our Mutual Friend when he turned the stereotype upside down. The sympathetically drawn Mr. Riah is forced to front for a Christian moneylender, and a generous community of Jews shelters the heroine, Lizzie Hexam…. Mrs. Davis gave Dickens a Hebrew and English Bible inscribed, ‘Presented to Charles Dickens, in grateful and admiring recognition of his having exercised the noblest quality men can possess-that of atoning for an injury as soon as conscious of having inflicted it,’” (from Dickens, Charles – Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography). We may debate whether or not that atonement was sufficient, but apparently, he tried.

That is why we need one another. Eliza Davis was there to confront Dickens. We need people who are brave enough to tell us when, even as we seek to do something to improve the world, we end up causing hurt and harm. We can’t always see our own biases.

Way back in February of 2016 someone sent me a link to an article by Tom Jacobs in Pacific Standard magazine. It said, “In a series of studies, a University of Iowa research team led by Andrew Todd finds images of the faces of five-year-old black boys are sufficient to trigger whites into heightened-threat mode. ‘Implicit biases commonly observed for black men appear to generalize even to young black boys,’ the researchers write in the journal Psychological Science.

“The first of their experiments featured 63 college undergraduates, who ‘completed a categorization task in which two images flashed on the monitor in quick succession. Participants were instructed to ignore the first time, which was always a face; it merely signaled that the second image was about to appear. Their task was to quickly and accurately categorize the second image (the target object) as a gun or a toy, by pressing one of two response keys.’

“In fact, the faces — all of five-year-old boys with neutral facial expressions — were a key component of the experiment. Six of them featured black children, and six white. Researchers wanted to know whether the race of the child would affect the speed and accuracy of the white participants’ responses.

“It did. ‘Participants identified guns more quickly after black-child primes than after white-child primes,’ the researchers report, ‘whereas they identified toys more quickly after the white-child primes than after black-child primes.’

“Subsequent experiments found black five-year-old faces produced just as strong an effect as photographs of adult black males. This held true when white participants were labeling images as guns or tools, and when they were shown a list of words (including ‘criminal’ and ‘peaceful’) and asked to categorize each as ‘safe’ or ‘threatening.’

“In that last experiment, participants misidentified safe words as threatening more often after seeing a black face, and misidentified threatening words as safe more often after seeing a white one — child or adult.

“’These racial biases were driven entirely by differences in automatic processing,’ Todd and his colleagues write. In other words, no conscious thought was involved; whites simply saw a black male face and reacted in ways that indicated a heightened level of perceived threat.

“Even when the face was that of a five-year-old,” (from https://psmag.com/racism-in-the-kindergarten-classroom-6d6ab68ebc9c#.9ldvqx9ji).

Where is hope when even those of us who would, as Dickens wrote of us, “do something for human improvement… and practice charity and toleration,” don’t know our own biases? Our hope is in the Eliza Davises and Andrew Todds of our world. It is in being in communities of care whose caring includes critique. The covenant statement under our value of transformation in our statement of shared values states, “We covenant to collectively transform and grow spiritually and ethically. Openness to change is fundamental to our Unitarian and Universalist heritages, never complete and never perfect.”

Unlike our current national administration, we believe in looking at all the parts of those heritages, even those of which we are rightfully ashamed and learning from that history.

The American author Jodi Picoult wrote, “Heroes didn’t leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn’t wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or loving. Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else’s. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back.”

To be in a community of care is to contribute to hope, for ourselves, for others, for our world.

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