BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH
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  • BUUC Home
  • Events
  • About the BUUC
    • Our History
    • BUUC Committees >
      • Executive Committee
      • Worship Committee
      • Membership Committee
      • The Women's Alliance
      • Flower Committee
  • Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
  • Stewardship and Gift Policy
    • Saints We've Known
    • Charitable Giving and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
  • Sermons 2022-23
    • The Seventh Principle
    • Make Light of It
    • A Turn of the Screw
    • America: Part II
    • What Do You Expect?
    • Good Mourning
    • Beyone Repair?
    • No Signal
    • Absolutely, Maybe, Definitely Not
    • Do Guardian Angels Exist?
    • Right Here
  • Our Covenant
  • Minister's Welcome
  • Religious Exploration
  • Music & Choir
  • We Rise: Social Justice Resources
  • Newsletters
  • Church Calendar
  • Unitarian Universalism
  • Driving Directions
  • Photos of Us
  • Making the BUUC Accessible
  • LOVEUU
  • Community Resources
    • Mental Health Providers, Worcester MA
    • Southern Worcester County Parent Guide
  • Contact Us
    • Sermons 2021-22
  • Sermon Archives
    • Finding Joy in Uncertain Times
    • The Arithmetic of Joy
    • Of Muck and Martyrs
    • Doing Dishes
    • Idle Worship
    • The Fear of the Refugee
    • It's Not Just You
    • If We Choose
    • Lazy Busy
    • A Most Human Season
    • Running on Empty
    • Alone Together
    • Come Home
    • Winter Warmth
    • How Big Is Your Circle?
    • Thanksgiving Life
    • Kurt Vonnegut: Humanist Hero
    • In Costume
    • Again
    • Borderland
    • The Geometry of Life
    • Transformation and Growth
    • Come Build a Land
    • Our Brains, Our Minds and Our Hearts
    • Gifts
    • Repairers of the Breach
    • The Times They Are A-Changin'
    • Mission Possible
    • It Matters
    • Thanksgiving Reflection
    • Shoes That Fit
    • Winter
    • Ignorance, Answers, and Bliss
    • Questions, Questions
    • Living to the Point of Tears
    • Lost in the Shuffle: UU's Less Popular Principle
    • On the Turning Away
    • A Matter of Degree
    • A Collection of Near Death Experiences
    • I Know Her So Well, I Think. I Thought.
    • Faith-based Resilience
    • To Abet Creation
    • Who Cares?
    • A Matter of Life and Depth
    • Pass/Fail
    • Enough
    • O Holy Light
    • With New Eyes
    • Coming Alive
    • Beyond Words
    • Becoming
    • A Miracle Even Thomas Jefferson Could Embrace
    • Fear Not!
    • The Miracle of Change
    • Meeting Grace
    • R-E-S-P-E-C-T
    • Serving with Grace
    • The Pursuit of Happiness
    • When Heresy Met Sally
    • The Souls of All Living Creatures
    • What Are You Looking For?
    • Beloved
    • Let Me Count The Ways
    • Happiness
    • Chosen
    • Faith and Belief
    • Room To Grow
    • Blessed Fools
    • Don't Be a Superhero
    • Getting There from Here
    • Unfinished Business
    • Universalism's Origen
    • Yearn to Learn
    • Beauty Saves
    • Commentary on Freedom
    • Being Human: Religious Community in a Plastic Age
    • Questionable Certainties and Faithful Doubts
    • Commentaries on Murphy's Law
    • Children of a Lesser God
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Life Incarnate
    • So You Want to Be Happy
    • A Year's End Resolution
    • Where Stars Are Born
    • Thanking Eve
    • Anger, Our Teacher
    • Everlasting Punishment
    • Comprehending Moral Imperatives in a Me-centered World
    • Promises Kept
    • Dancing With The Stars: Science and Religion
    • Two Steps and Missteps: Church Membership for Human Beings
    • Light of the World
    • Dear God
    • Imago Hominis
    • CESA: Reflections on Drug Addiction
    • Falling in Love Again
    • How Does Your Garden Grow
    • Repent! No Guilt Trip Required
    • Go Out into the World
    • Thanks-living
    • Life and Not Life
    • Guilty As Charged
    • Dare To Hope
    • Don't Forget To Chew
    • Break the Silence - Stop the Violence
    • Living Among Strangers
    • What Is Religion Anyway?
    • East of Eden
    • Praying Attention
    • Wholly Human
    • The Healing Power of Forgiveness
    • All I Want for Christmas
    • Let It Be...Let It Go
    • Why Not?
    • People Like You
    • Vulnerable Trust
    • Thin Places
    • Now What?
    • Courageously Humble
    • The Last Butterfly
    • The Good, The Bad, and The Whole
    • Sacred Souvenirs
    • Made Whole
    • This Wild and Precious Life
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Where Our Future Can Begin
    • Taking Stock: Managing Our Spiritual Inventory
    • To Convert Life into Truth
    • Are We There Yet?
    • Family Matters
    • Ordinary Saints
    • All I Wanted Was Everything
    • Giving Thanks
    • To Be or Not To Be
    • Entering the Christmas Story
    • A Great Light
    • What's Real?
    • Troubling the Water
    • The Amazing Mr. Wedgewood
    • Lend Me Your Ears
    • Work That Is Real
    • Happy Melba Toast Day
    • The Great Pacific Garbage Dump
    • Plastics, Benjamin!
    • Surprise Beginnings
    • A Place at the Table
    • Norbert Capek’s Flower Communion: A Call To Honor Life
    • Voices of God
    • Hold On To What Is Good
    • The Little Stone Church That Rocks
    • What Would Jean-Luc Do?: A Tribute to Humanist Hero Gene Roddenberry
    • From Who am I? to Whose are We?
    • Turning
    • Spirituality
    • R & R
    • Spritual F-Words
    • Does Anyone Really Like Herding Cats?
    • Prepare to Be Amazed
    • The Greatest Gift
    • The Impossible Will Take A Little While
    • Taking Sides: Journey to the Center of the Universe
    • Help Wanted, Apply Within
    • Two Truths & Plastics and Water Don't Mix
    • The Third Conversation
    • Good People >
      • UU You >
        • Twitter and Covid and Wall Street, Oh, my!
        • I Do Believe in Spooks >
          • Holy Homophones >
            • What's in a Name?
            • So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye!
            • Open-Mindedness, As Assigned
            • Going on a Journey
            • Cheap Love
            • Nonproductive Delight
            • The Persistence of Memory
            • Thoughts about the Historical Jesus
            • Lindens and Tiarella and Bearberry, Oh My!
            • Season's Greetings
            • I Still Have A Dream
            • Peace Corps - A Lesson in Caring
            • Spiritual Engineering
            • Thanks for the Memories
            • Our Stories, Ourselves
            • Anxious Gardeners
            • The Best Sermon Ever!
            • UUnited
            • We Are Courageous
            • A Right Way to Be Wrong
            • Sacred Ideals
            • This Wild and Precious Life Revisited
            • 20/20
            • Home
            • What About Now?
        • Fragile
        • Time Ravel
        • Now Is Not the Time for Hope
        • The G Word (It's Probably Not what You Think)
    • No Thanks, I'll Walk
    • Be the Change
    • I Don't Know
    • What Lies Within
    • Guest Perspective
    • Growing Panes
    • De Colores
    • Roots and Wings
BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH

Again
 
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
October 17, 2021
Rev. Craig M. Nowak

 
I don’t know about you, but I’ve come to realize something that’s kind of unsettling…
 
The world is crazy.
 
Now, maybe it always has been, but, I’ll tell you, the more I see, read, or listen about what is going on in the world beyond the walls of my home, the convinced I become that we are living in a time of unprecedented madness.
 
Then again, maybe I’m just getting old.
 
I turn 52 in a few weeks- I know, still a kid to some of you- and in the last at few years I’ve found myself increasingly engaged in conversations with others reminiscing about something called, “the good old days.” Truth be told, as the spouse of antiques dealer I’ve spent the last 25 years among people reminiscing about “the good old days”. What’s different now is I’m not just listening, but reminiscing myself.
 
One of the things I’ve noticed over the years of listening to people reminisce about the past is that almost without exception, the past is remembered not only as better than the present, but hallowed as some unique golden age, the full glory of which we shall never see again. A time gone by we must be content to release and relive in our memories alone. I say almost without exception, because there are of course, exceptions. Every so often one meets a person who not only thinks the past really was some golden age, but thinks that past can…and should… be recreated.  A sentiment politicians and pastors of a certain ilk seem to share.
 
Indeed, one the hazards of being a clergyman in a country that equates religion with the religious right is that when people learn that I’m a minister they sometimes assume I’m an arch conservative socially, politically and so on.
 
And so it was with a woman I met a few years ago.
 
The conversation started innocently enough. The woman, a stranger to me, had somehow managed to strike up a conversation with me about the challenges children face today that she and I didn’t have to deal with growing up…things like the pressures of social media and active shooter drills.
Soon we were sharing stories of playing outside, being allowed to ride our bikes what seemed like long distances from home so long as we were home before the street lights came on. Touched with a tinge of melancholy, our similar memories carried the nostalgic warmth that often characterizes longtime friendships.
 
Then things got weird.
 
I don’t know which one of us said the first thing that caused the hair on the back of the other’s neck to rise, but before too long pointed comments about race, welfare, shooting, and her speculations as to the reason her old neighborhood had gone “downhill” became intertwined with talk of the need to bring prayer back to public schools.
 
Soon it was apparent that while she and I shared some similar memories of childhood decades past, only one of us pined for a return to the way things were, an America, in the words of the poet Richard Blanco, “as great as it never really was.”
 
In retrospect, I could have asked the woman with whom I seemed to share so many similar memories with if she grew up in well-kept houses with yards outlined by neatly trimmed hedges and an old stone wall like I did.  Or if her mother was blonde, a stay at home mom, and if her father went to the office every day, like mine. And if she, like my sister, had a brother who knew he liked boys instead of girls, but stayed silent and let it eat away at him from the inside rather than disturb the greatness of our picture postcard life for everyone else.
 
That she was a stranger, I didn’t get into it too deeply and instead offered a few edited thoughts, which to her seeming surprise, were quite counter to hers, and left it at that.
 
Now, I admit there’s a part of me that felt for her and others who would turn to and even follow a political or religious Pied Piper back to a known past rather than face an unknowable future. I get and indeed share the anxieties of this age in which we live. In fact, it is something never very far from me these days.
 
But there’s another part of me that wants to know what right she or anyone else has to assign and expect me to go back and play the part I was given so she and others can relive those alleged good old days for which she pined?
 
The unwillingness of many for whom the good old days weren’t so great to get back in line in order to restore that fictional greatness is an inconvenience many have a hard time accepting.
 
Sometime after football player turned civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick started “taking a knee” during the national anthem to protest racial injustice, mugs, tee-shirts, and bumperstickers began to appear emblazoned with the words, “Stand Up or Get Out.”  Alongside these overtly commercialized expressions of outrage was another somewhat more subtle call for him to mind his place…some variation of, “I don’t mind him protesting, but he shouldn’t mix politics with sports.”
 
But justice is not politics.
 
Calling it such in a culture where politics, along with religion, are things to be avoided in polite company means advocating for justice becomes not only an inconvenience but inappropriate to those who are not interested or intentionally engaged in it. An echo from an America “as great as it never really was.” sounding in the present.
 
Wouldn’t it be nice instead to live in a country where the justification and toleration of injustice was considered inconvenient and inappropriate?
 
And wouldn’t be nice to live in country where the good life didn’t come in one size, one color, and from one or two corporate suppliers?
 
And wouldn’t it be nice if in this country women, all women, were recognized and fairly compensated for their work whether inside or outside the home? And that charges of abuse and violence toward them were taken as seriously as the excuses and denials of male perpetrators of abuse and violence.
 
And wouldn’t it be nice if the jobs Americans won’t do could be done by Americans, new Americans, those migrants and immigrants doing the work “illegally” today and paying into a system that threatens them with ruin rather than reward each new day.
 
And wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a country where men were as valued for their effort as their achievements and a boy awakening to a different gender identity doesn’t get their head bashed in for trying on a dress.
 
Wound’t it be nice, indeed.
 
At a debate in 1965 at Cambridge University between the writer James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr., then editor of the “National Review” Baldwin, who was black and gay, famously said, “It comes as a great shock around the age of five, or six, or seven, to discover that the flag to which  you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you.”
Oh how those words resonate with me.
 
I was unaware of Baldwin’s words and his debate with Buckley when I came out in 1996. Indeed, I wasn’t five, or six, or seven, but twenty-six when I discovered the flag to which I had pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, had not pledged allegiance to me. With two words, “I’m gay” I was instantly assigned second class status with different rights, like the right to be arrested for acting on being gay, the right to be fired or denied public accommodation for being gay, and the right to be beat up then accused of inciting gay panic by the perpetrator’s defense lawyer. By the way, LGBTQ folk still face those last two rights in many states, even some considered “blue”.
 
“But it’s better today,” I’m often reminded in the form of a question.
 
The long and short of it is, I’m not interested in returning to an America “as great as it never was.” even though some of it was good and carries some fond memories. Instead, I want to live into an America that’s again committed not just to the broader ideals as great as those written on the parchment of its founding documents but to their fulfillment, a nation where the flag anyone here pledges allegiance to pledges its allegiance to them in return.
 
And I’m not talking about politics. I’m talking about justice…the kind of faithful work Jonipher Kwong speaks of in our second reading.  The spiritual work and practice of acknowledging and remedying an imperfect past and present and readying ourselves that a still imperfect but decidedly better tomorrow may yet emerge and flourish in each and for all.
 
And wouldn’t that be nice? Indeed, it might even be…great.
May it be so.
 
Amen and Blessed Be
 
 
 
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