“The Times They Are A-Changin’
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
October 14, 2018
by Rev. Dr. Michelle A. Walsh
I was born in 1961. My first adolescent political consciousness began with Watergate, followed by the resignation of Nixon as president in 1974. I was just 12 and then 13 years old and there already was a lot happening for me and my family during that time, including family economic turbulence and substance abuse and an abrupt move from Ohio to New Jersey alongside the discovery that I soon would need spinal surgery for scoliosis. For me, the loss of trust, security, and idealism amidst these changes within my micro family system were paralleled and crystallized together with the macro political system at a pivotal moment in my early adolescent development in the early 1970’s. A decade earlier in 1963, Bob Dylan wrote of his own sense of the impact of such changing times for the different generations, expressing both urgency and caution for what he prophesized and witnessed in what was to come.
How many of you were old enough in the 1960’s to have some type of political consciousness or awareness of what was happening? Did it creep up on you with a shocking suddenness – like you could see the seeds of the gradual beginnings of change, and then it was full-blown before you even knew it? Suddenly cries and actions for justice were pouring out upon the country on so many fronts – African American civil rights, Vietnam War resistors, the American Indian Movement, the women’s movement, Stonewall and gay rights, etc. If you carried an identity from one of those groups, perhaps it was not so sudden – you already were part of the movement – but I do suspect the fullness of all of these oppressed groups breaking into the public square at the same time might have been a bit surprising in its intensity for most people. If you were an adult then, did you rise up and pitch in and take action? Or did you watch it, by choice or ability, from the distance and over the television?
Do today’s public events – from first the Occupy movement, to the Arab Spring to the People’s Climate March in NYC, to the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement across the country to the Standing Rock Water Protectors to the New Sanctuary and Families Belong Together movements for undocumented immigrants to the Women’s March and ongoing national impact of the #MeToo movement, and now the March for Our Lives and Never Again student movement alongside the Poor Peoples Campaign, both focused on voter registration – [take a breath] do these waves of movements seem at all similar to the 1960’s? What should our stance as Unitarian Universalists be when “the times they are a-changin’”? How do we side with love and movement building during these times, particularly when we – as my family was in the 1970’s – already may be struggling to save ourselves and to move at all, when we have more than enough on our plate for just our own survival? How do we lovingly care for ourselves, family, and friends as well as for our larger world during the storms that currently are raging, with even more powerful storms yet to come?
This question goes to the root of our call during these times as a people of faith – and the times are changing not only for our larger world but also for you here in Brookfield as you consider your own vision. Back in 1966, at his UUA General Assembly Ware Lecture, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to us then with words that still ring prophetically true today. He warned: “One of the great misfortunes of history is that all too many individuals and institutions find themselves in a great period of change and yet fail to achieve the new attitudes and outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution. And there can be no gainsaying of the fact that a social revolution is taking place in our world today.”
Indeed, “a social revolution” once again is taking place in our world today – with life and death at stake for so many. You too here in Brookfield have a role to play in these changing times, in forging a new, shared vision for the ongoing work of your congregational life with and within our larger association of Unitarian Universalist congregations. We have recently emerged from a conflicted and transformative period in our Unitarian Universalist Association structures, with a presidential and more resignations, an embrace of the Black Lives of Unitarian Universalists’ call for teach-ins on white supremacy, and the election of our first female president. Earlier this year, our UUA Board of Trustees held their board meeting at the historic Highlander Center in Tennessee. How many of you have heard of the Highlander Center? It’s a grassroots organization that has been engaged in collective movement training and building over the past 85 years. That’s amazing, folks, and historic for UUA Board of Trustees as well.
Our UUA leadership fully intends not to sleep through this particular revolution as they engage in their visioning processes for our association of congregations. The times they are a-changin’. How large and how rooted will your vision be here in Brookfield? How well prepared are you to rise up and share in the creation and implementation of that vision with your fellow Unitarian Universalists in your region as well as across the country and our shared world – for we are indeed an international movement? One thing I do know from experience is that cultivating a vision and sustaining ourselves through the messy implementation of that vision is never easy, and it also is never an individual project – it must be a collective one, all rising up together, each to their own ability and with loving support and recognition of each other’s personal story and abilities – a vision rooted in a sense of the abundance of our collective engaged gifts.
Part of this learning happened first for me through unique historical and experiential factors and continues through my direct encounters today. I have been involved with racial and economic justice education and action since my young adulthood, primarily in urban ministry and social work, including nearly 18 years directing an urban youth ministry with the Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry. Currently my community ministry is focused within higher education.
At the end of 2014, I taught a very challenging Racial Justice course at Boston University’s School of Social Work – one third students of color and two thirds white students. Surrounding us in the outer world, and leading in public news headlines, were all the murders of young black men – previously Trayvon Martin (the beginnings of Black Lives Matter) and now Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and young 12-year-old Tamir Rice. Pitched cries for justice were pouring onto the streets, and the Black Lives Matter movement began to take to the larger public stage for the first time.
It is not atypical in any class for some to feel more comfortable speaking up and for some to sit listening, often my white students prefer to “just listen”. A tactic I use to disrupt these tendencies is to have the students agree at the beginning to a practice of stepping up and stepping back, though today I strive for alternative metaphors such as rise up and move back. However, at that time, I used the language of step up and step back – in other words, students who are more comfortable speaking out, are asked to practice stepping back and listening to create the space for others who need time to practice stepping up to talk to do so.
Well, that didn’t exactly work for this particular class. A young, highly engaged African American man expressed his profound frustration that it compounded his frustration to be asked to step back. “No”, [slam hand], he said, “No, everyone needs to step up. The practice should be step up, step up – not step back” – particularly for these young white students for whom it was easier and more comfortable to sit and listen than to do the hard and less familiar work of emotional risk and engagement. With challenge and support, gradually everyone began to risk entering “brave space” and to communicate with each other at more vulnerable depths.
The times they are a-changin’. What worked before may not work now. New paths and practices are called for – on the macro level of our nation and here on the micro level of your own congregational practices. So how will you here in Brookfield rise up in this process? For the times are calling us to attend together to the most serious concerns of our shared lives. [Read Sharon Delgado quote on climate change impact, recent 7 degree rise Washington Post mention; and most recently U.N. climate change report of 10-12 years left.]
The times they are a-changin’. This is the heavy new reality, and it cannot be faced as individuals because that is where we fall most easily into depression or despair. It must be faced as a collective, and in that there is the hope and energy. With all the possibilities of new vision come all the challenges of specific tasks to accomplish and new relationships and partnerships to forge. It is in the nitty gritty of change that we often find and need to face our deepest fears and anxieties together. Again, it is one thing to have a vision or a dream – as John Lennon did, as Martin Luther King did, as did many whose stories have yet to be told in our public square legacy do. It is quite another thing to be able to implement that vision or dream for the long haul, through the thick and thin of whatever new or unanticipated problems you might face and caring for each other in the process. We can only do this together – it is not and cannot be an individual project, or even a project of two or three together, this will take the full multitude of our congregations in partnerships with local and global communities.
The various movement leaders in the 1960’s knew this, and many trained through the Highlander Center. The fruition that the world witnessed as the civil rights movement only came after many, many, many years of different groups working together, or side by side, and carefully and strategically laying the groundwork – groups that included the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress on Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, among many others. As a couple of examples, the NAACP spent decades – decades – building case law to overturn portions of the Jim Crow laws of segregation. You have all heard the stock story that Rosa Parks just suddenly got tired and resisted giving up her seat on a bus to a white man, thus getting herself arrested. Hopefully you do know that that is a stock story, and the concealed story is that Rosa Parks was a long time fierce social justice activist who also was the branch secretary for the NAACP in Montgomery, AL and that she had trained at the Highlander Center. Hers was a planned action as part of a collective movement, not just a solitary act of resistance.
You probably also have never heard the story of Irene Morgan, who refused to give up her seat on an interstate bus in 1944. The NAACP took her case all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1946 used the Interstate Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution to strike down segregation laws on interstate buses. The Freedom Riders of 1961 – many black and white young adults, organized by the Congress on Racial Equality with some trained by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – would never have been able to ride those Greyhound and Trailways buses together from the North through the South if not for Irene Morgan’s breakthrough, case sponsored by the NAACP back in the 1940’s.
And lest you think that from my own decades of being immersed in re-learning U.S. history I have now arrived at a perfect point of knowledge – no, only a couple months ago I learned the story of 17 year old Mimi Ford Jones, who risked integrating a swimming pool and was nearly scalded with acid being poured into the pool by the manager. Images from this story were also shown in the recent film about Mr. Rogers. We all have much to learn and relearn – there are so many concealed stories in what is recorded as “history”. Finding the stories of resistance and lessons in collective movement building is where the hope that sustains us will be found.
It takes a lot to embrace the unknown with humility – it takes spiritual courage and what often is called “a leap of faith.” Though while we intellectually know our interdependence, we also need our knowing to be engaged by rising up and speaking our truth and building our individual courage – yes in community, and in our selves, by cultivating practices that lead to creating brave space and connected relational space. This happens by getting to know each other in our depths and taking risks in sharing our personal stories and building our relational capacity for shared vulnerability and intimacy – and then to not rest easy in the comfortableness but to share the abundance in reaching out to your fellow regional congregations and local community organizations.
So I return now where I started – what will be the vision here in Brookfield, how large and how rooted? And how will you as an individual within this community, and with each other, rise up with your fullest open hearts, your compassionate hearts, and your forgiving hearts, to shape and support the implementation of that vision? The vision of our faith as Unitarian Universalists is shaped by an ancestral community that is very large – international in scope and history – we are just one small, though important part, of that long ancestral chain. Our ancestors are with us no matter where we go and how we struggle in this particular moment in time – and we one day will be with them in the legacy we choose to leave through the spiritual authenticity of the rising up that we do locally and globally. The times they are a changin’ and we CAN change with them, just “don't stand at the doorway, don’t block up the hall, your old road is rapidly agin’….”
Amen, Amen, Blessed Be.
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
October 14, 2018
by Rev. Dr. Michelle A. Walsh
I was born in 1961. My first adolescent political consciousness began with Watergate, followed by the resignation of Nixon as president in 1974. I was just 12 and then 13 years old and there already was a lot happening for me and my family during that time, including family economic turbulence and substance abuse and an abrupt move from Ohio to New Jersey alongside the discovery that I soon would need spinal surgery for scoliosis. For me, the loss of trust, security, and idealism amidst these changes within my micro family system were paralleled and crystallized together with the macro political system at a pivotal moment in my early adolescent development in the early 1970’s. A decade earlier in 1963, Bob Dylan wrote of his own sense of the impact of such changing times for the different generations, expressing both urgency and caution for what he prophesized and witnessed in what was to come.
How many of you were old enough in the 1960’s to have some type of political consciousness or awareness of what was happening? Did it creep up on you with a shocking suddenness – like you could see the seeds of the gradual beginnings of change, and then it was full-blown before you even knew it? Suddenly cries and actions for justice were pouring out upon the country on so many fronts – African American civil rights, Vietnam War resistors, the American Indian Movement, the women’s movement, Stonewall and gay rights, etc. If you carried an identity from one of those groups, perhaps it was not so sudden – you already were part of the movement – but I do suspect the fullness of all of these oppressed groups breaking into the public square at the same time might have been a bit surprising in its intensity for most people. If you were an adult then, did you rise up and pitch in and take action? Or did you watch it, by choice or ability, from the distance and over the television?
Do today’s public events – from first the Occupy movement, to the Arab Spring to the People’s Climate March in NYC, to the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement across the country to the Standing Rock Water Protectors to the New Sanctuary and Families Belong Together movements for undocumented immigrants to the Women’s March and ongoing national impact of the #MeToo movement, and now the March for Our Lives and Never Again student movement alongside the Poor Peoples Campaign, both focused on voter registration – [take a breath] do these waves of movements seem at all similar to the 1960’s? What should our stance as Unitarian Universalists be when “the times they are a-changin’”? How do we side with love and movement building during these times, particularly when we – as my family was in the 1970’s – already may be struggling to save ourselves and to move at all, when we have more than enough on our plate for just our own survival? How do we lovingly care for ourselves, family, and friends as well as for our larger world during the storms that currently are raging, with even more powerful storms yet to come?
This question goes to the root of our call during these times as a people of faith – and the times are changing not only for our larger world but also for you here in Brookfield as you consider your own vision. Back in 1966, at his UUA General Assembly Ware Lecture, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to us then with words that still ring prophetically true today. He warned: “One of the great misfortunes of history is that all too many individuals and institutions find themselves in a great period of change and yet fail to achieve the new attitudes and outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution. And there can be no gainsaying of the fact that a social revolution is taking place in our world today.”
Indeed, “a social revolution” once again is taking place in our world today – with life and death at stake for so many. You too here in Brookfield have a role to play in these changing times, in forging a new, shared vision for the ongoing work of your congregational life with and within our larger association of Unitarian Universalist congregations. We have recently emerged from a conflicted and transformative period in our Unitarian Universalist Association structures, with a presidential and more resignations, an embrace of the Black Lives of Unitarian Universalists’ call for teach-ins on white supremacy, and the election of our first female president. Earlier this year, our UUA Board of Trustees held their board meeting at the historic Highlander Center in Tennessee. How many of you have heard of the Highlander Center? It’s a grassroots organization that has been engaged in collective movement training and building over the past 85 years. That’s amazing, folks, and historic for UUA Board of Trustees as well.
Our UUA leadership fully intends not to sleep through this particular revolution as they engage in their visioning processes for our association of congregations. The times they are a-changin’. How large and how rooted will your vision be here in Brookfield? How well prepared are you to rise up and share in the creation and implementation of that vision with your fellow Unitarian Universalists in your region as well as across the country and our shared world – for we are indeed an international movement? One thing I do know from experience is that cultivating a vision and sustaining ourselves through the messy implementation of that vision is never easy, and it also is never an individual project – it must be a collective one, all rising up together, each to their own ability and with loving support and recognition of each other’s personal story and abilities – a vision rooted in a sense of the abundance of our collective engaged gifts.
Part of this learning happened first for me through unique historical and experiential factors and continues through my direct encounters today. I have been involved with racial and economic justice education and action since my young adulthood, primarily in urban ministry and social work, including nearly 18 years directing an urban youth ministry with the Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry. Currently my community ministry is focused within higher education.
At the end of 2014, I taught a very challenging Racial Justice course at Boston University’s School of Social Work – one third students of color and two thirds white students. Surrounding us in the outer world, and leading in public news headlines, were all the murders of young black men – previously Trayvon Martin (the beginnings of Black Lives Matter) and now Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and young 12-year-old Tamir Rice. Pitched cries for justice were pouring onto the streets, and the Black Lives Matter movement began to take to the larger public stage for the first time.
It is not atypical in any class for some to feel more comfortable speaking up and for some to sit listening, often my white students prefer to “just listen”. A tactic I use to disrupt these tendencies is to have the students agree at the beginning to a practice of stepping up and stepping back, though today I strive for alternative metaphors such as rise up and move back. However, at that time, I used the language of step up and step back – in other words, students who are more comfortable speaking out, are asked to practice stepping back and listening to create the space for others who need time to practice stepping up to talk to do so.
Well, that didn’t exactly work for this particular class. A young, highly engaged African American man expressed his profound frustration that it compounded his frustration to be asked to step back. “No”, [slam hand], he said, “No, everyone needs to step up. The practice should be step up, step up – not step back” – particularly for these young white students for whom it was easier and more comfortable to sit and listen than to do the hard and less familiar work of emotional risk and engagement. With challenge and support, gradually everyone began to risk entering “brave space” and to communicate with each other at more vulnerable depths.
The times they are a-changin’. What worked before may not work now. New paths and practices are called for – on the macro level of our nation and here on the micro level of your own congregational practices. So how will you here in Brookfield rise up in this process? For the times are calling us to attend together to the most serious concerns of our shared lives. [Read Sharon Delgado quote on climate change impact, recent 7 degree rise Washington Post mention; and most recently U.N. climate change report of 10-12 years left.]
The times they are a-changin’. This is the heavy new reality, and it cannot be faced as individuals because that is where we fall most easily into depression or despair. It must be faced as a collective, and in that there is the hope and energy. With all the possibilities of new vision come all the challenges of specific tasks to accomplish and new relationships and partnerships to forge. It is in the nitty gritty of change that we often find and need to face our deepest fears and anxieties together. Again, it is one thing to have a vision or a dream – as John Lennon did, as Martin Luther King did, as did many whose stories have yet to be told in our public square legacy do. It is quite another thing to be able to implement that vision or dream for the long haul, through the thick and thin of whatever new or unanticipated problems you might face and caring for each other in the process. We can only do this together – it is not and cannot be an individual project, or even a project of two or three together, this will take the full multitude of our congregations in partnerships with local and global communities.
The various movement leaders in the 1960’s knew this, and many trained through the Highlander Center. The fruition that the world witnessed as the civil rights movement only came after many, many, many years of different groups working together, or side by side, and carefully and strategically laying the groundwork – groups that included the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress on Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, among many others. As a couple of examples, the NAACP spent decades – decades – building case law to overturn portions of the Jim Crow laws of segregation. You have all heard the stock story that Rosa Parks just suddenly got tired and resisted giving up her seat on a bus to a white man, thus getting herself arrested. Hopefully you do know that that is a stock story, and the concealed story is that Rosa Parks was a long time fierce social justice activist who also was the branch secretary for the NAACP in Montgomery, AL and that she had trained at the Highlander Center. Hers was a planned action as part of a collective movement, not just a solitary act of resistance.
You probably also have never heard the story of Irene Morgan, who refused to give up her seat on an interstate bus in 1944. The NAACP took her case all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1946 used the Interstate Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution to strike down segregation laws on interstate buses. The Freedom Riders of 1961 – many black and white young adults, organized by the Congress on Racial Equality with some trained by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – would never have been able to ride those Greyhound and Trailways buses together from the North through the South if not for Irene Morgan’s breakthrough, case sponsored by the NAACP back in the 1940’s.
And lest you think that from my own decades of being immersed in re-learning U.S. history I have now arrived at a perfect point of knowledge – no, only a couple months ago I learned the story of 17 year old Mimi Ford Jones, who risked integrating a swimming pool and was nearly scalded with acid being poured into the pool by the manager. Images from this story were also shown in the recent film about Mr. Rogers. We all have much to learn and relearn – there are so many concealed stories in what is recorded as “history”. Finding the stories of resistance and lessons in collective movement building is where the hope that sustains us will be found.
It takes a lot to embrace the unknown with humility – it takes spiritual courage and what often is called “a leap of faith.” Though while we intellectually know our interdependence, we also need our knowing to be engaged by rising up and speaking our truth and building our individual courage – yes in community, and in our selves, by cultivating practices that lead to creating brave space and connected relational space. This happens by getting to know each other in our depths and taking risks in sharing our personal stories and building our relational capacity for shared vulnerability and intimacy – and then to not rest easy in the comfortableness but to share the abundance in reaching out to your fellow regional congregations and local community organizations.
So I return now where I started – what will be the vision here in Brookfield, how large and how rooted? And how will you as an individual within this community, and with each other, rise up with your fullest open hearts, your compassionate hearts, and your forgiving hearts, to shape and support the implementation of that vision? The vision of our faith as Unitarian Universalists is shaped by an ancestral community that is very large – international in scope and history – we are just one small, though important part, of that long ancestral chain. Our ancestors are with us no matter where we go and how we struggle in this particular moment in time – and we one day will be with them in the legacy we choose to leave through the spiritual authenticity of the rising up that we do locally and globally. The times they are a changin’ and we CAN change with them, just “don't stand at the doorway, don’t block up the hall, your old road is rapidly agin’….”
Amen, Amen, Blessed Be.