Rivers and Resistance

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A sermon by Polly Peterson during our Earth Day service

When the poet Robert Francis, wrote the poem “Like Ghosts of Eagles,” he was living here in Amherst. He spent nearly all of his life in a little house near Cushman Village that he built for himself in 1940—right here in the Connecticut River Valley. He didn’t include the Connecticut in his poem, but I wonder if he felt its spirit as he wrote—if he thought about what its name may have sounded like when spoken by indigenous peoples—the Abenaki and Nipmuc and other Algonquian-speaking peoples who defined themselves by its proximity.

Kwenitekw (KWEN- ee – took – uh) is what the Abenaki call it. The name’s meaning is generally translated as “long tidal river,” but it is much more than that. To these river-centric people, the river is a vital spirit power, a continuous, flowing, connecting force, never static, ever changing. It is sacred. To say the name is to evoke an entire worldview, not an object or a single physical entity.

The logo that Lea recently created for our congregation prominently features the Connecticut River, honoring the importance of that vital source of our valley’s identity.

Rivers are the lifeblood of our planet. We all live in watersheds. No place thrives without sources of fresh water, and if we pollute the waters, we hurt not only the rivers and streams and brooks and lakes, but also ourselves. One of the activities of our UUSA Environmental Action Circle, has been the annual Connecticut River Clean-up. It gives us a chance each year to connect with our watershed and to do our best to keep its waters and riverbanks clear of pollution and litter.

We’re fortunate that our task is not as daunting as the task that faceMarion Stoddart in Groton as she promoted the clean-up of the Nashua River*, but her success can serve as an inspiration when we think that our own small contributions will never amount to much. Environmental activism is a profound calling. It connects us with the people who came before and the people who are yet to come, and it connects us to the web of life. It is a reminder that we all depend on the Earth, and that in the face of human threats and degradation, the Earth also depends upon us.

Henry Thoreau, one of our Transcendentalist forebears, spent a good deal of time pondering the interface between humans and nature. In 1839, when he was in his early twenties, he and his brother John took a trip on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in a boat they had built themselves. Henry, who had always been a keen observer of wild creatures, was struck by the effects of human activity along the river. He watched the migratory fishes that swim upriver from the sea to spawn, and he saw that the fish were being stymied by dams. “Poor shad!” he lamented. “Where is thy redress?” His concern led him to ask the haunting question: “Who hears the fishes when they cry?”

An encouraging feature of our time is that more and more people are hearing them. Dams affect not only migratory fishes, but whole ecosystems. Dam removal has become an environmental success story. The nonprofit organization American Rivers reported that in 2025, the efforts of environmental and safety advocates resulted in the removal of 100 outdated and unsafe dams in 30 states, reconnecting 4,893 miles of rivers, the most miles ever restored in a single year. Eleven of those dam removals were here in Massachusetts. Dam removals restore wildlife habitat, develop greenways in cities, and increase climate resilience.

Dams, of course, are built to serve humans, and they have much to offer. But their impact can be devastating. I remember going to a museum of Native American history in Tucson, Arizona some years ago, and being stunned to learn that the indigenous peoples living at the mouth of the Colorado River, whose lifeways had for centuries depended on the ecosystem of its lush and massive river delta, no longer get any water at all from the river. None. Less than a century ago, the mighty Colorado River flowed unhindered from northern Colorado to the Gulf of California in Mexico. Now eight western states divert nearly all of the water for agriculture, urban water supplies, and hydropower. One out of every 10 people living in the United States relies on the Colorado River for drinking water. We ourselves, when we eat fruits, nuts, and vegetables from California’s Central Valley, are consuming Colorado River water. Of the small fraction of the river’s flow that eventually reaches Mexico, most is used for agriculture. Satellite imagery shows us that the final trickle of that once mighty river simply disappears into desert sand before reaching the sea.

It’s easy for us to see this as a human tragedy, a violation of the rights of the downstream people who have lost the rich and complex wetlands of the Delta that had always been at the center of their lives. From our human-centric worldview, the injustice is clear. But can you as easily think of the river itself as having lost its right to flow unimpeded to the sea? Does a river have rights?

Remarkably, some now explicitly do. A few of the world’s rivers have been granted legal personhood. I was brought up with common assumptions that rivers are nonliving natural resources that provide water and power, transportation, recreation, and a place to dump waste.

But indigenous peoples throughout the world regard the life of a river as vital and sacred. People who have long regarded rivers as sacred ancestors have no difficulty accepting the concept of a river’s personhood. To them it is obvious that a river has rights.

In 2017, New Zealand’s Whanganui River became the first river to be granted legal personhood. New Zealand’s indigenous Maori people have long believed in a deep connection between humans and water. A traditional saying is, “I am the river, the river is me.” For more than 160 years, they fought for the rights of the Whanganui River in the courts of the colonial government. They finally succeeded in getting, not just legal protection for the river, but recognition of the river as a legal entity in its own right.

That recognition encouraged activists in other countries to work for the legal rights of their rivers. The success story that is closest to us is in northern Quebec. As wild rivers in Canada were being dammed and harnessed for hydropower, their loss was keenly felt by lovers of wild places and, in particular, by the indigenous Innu people. Massive dams built by Hydro-Quebec had resulted in the devastation of vast ecosystems. Activists were determined to save the Magpie River watershed from that fate, and in February 2021, the Magpie, or Muteshekau-shipu (Moo-teh-sheh-gow-shee-poo) became the first river in Canada to be granted legal personhood. It has nine specific rights, including the right to maintain its natural biodiversity, the right to maintain its integrity, and the right to be free from pollution.

Thinking of a river as a legal person is a new concept for many of us, and predictably there is lots of pushback. Unconscious cultural assumptions make it difficult for us to move outside the patterns of thought instilled in us by our language and culture—difficult for us to rethink assumptions about what entities are living and nonliving, sacred and profane, which are deserving of legal protection, and which can be bought and sold.

How different would our world be if we cared deeply about the rights of rivers and streams to flow freely, clear and unobstructed? There is so much money to be made from damming and harnessing them, there are so many ways that corporations might benefit from polluting them. And yet, as more and more people recognize our place in the interdependent web of life of which we are a part, the Rights of Nature movement is gaining ground. Altering our fundamental relationship to nature may be our best—or only—path to a sustainable future. Granting legal rights to rivers will no doubt be relentlessly opposed and ridiculed. That has been the fate of every movement that seeks to expand the definition of who has rights.

Today, in the face of governments that are causing so much hurt in the world, we often speak of ourselves as the resistance–and of course it is important to resist corrupt politicians and unjust policies. But what if we turn that paradigm on its head? Our nation was founded for the purpose of giving people in the American colonies the right to rule themselves, and throughout the history of our nation, we have seen effort after effort to expand that right to more people. Activists have dedicated their lives to ending slavery, ending child labor, advocating for women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, immigrant rights, and, yes, now even for the rights of rivers. Every advance has been met with resistance. It is the instinct of those who are privileged to resist any expansion of rights for others. But the courage and persistence of people who are dedicated to freedom and justice continues to push forward against that resistance.

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation’s Declaration of Independence, we can look with pride and gladness on the ever-widening definition of who deserves to have full and equal rights. But in today’s political climate, we can also see that many of those rights are threatened. Battles once won may need to be refought. We may feel overwhelmed by the outrages that seem to come at us like water from a fire hose.

But take heart. When we look at the world from the perspective of expanding rights, we can see that we are not the resistance. We are the flow. We are the Revolutionary River, declaring that rights are for everyone, not just for the privileged few. It is those who want to block or reverse the expansion of rights who are damming the flow.

Water is soft and yielding, yet very powerful. A river can carve a canyon through solid rock. It can find its way through an obstacle or carve a new channel that flows around it.

So too, the quest for justice and equitable rights is powerful. It can break through resistance and find a way around the obstacles that people erect to stop it.

As we celebrate the Declaration of Independence, listen to what it has to say: tyranny must not stand in freedom’s way. Let us flow on in the spirit of our forebears, expanding their vision to an ever-widening embrace of all humankind—and perhaps we are ready to expand to an even wider embrace that acknowledges the rights of rivers and mountains, plants and animals, and all sacred beings in our more than human world.

May it be so.

 

*  The Time for All Ages story, “A River Ran Wild” by Lynne Cherry, tells the story of how Marion Stoddart led the way in the clean-up of the Nashua River, beginning in 1962. Because of her efforts, people rallied to transform the Nashua River from an industrial dumping ground (56 miles of stinking toxic sludge) to the beautiful clean recreational river it is today.

 

Easter: Wild Uncertainty

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The resurrection of Jesus from the Gospel of Mark

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb.

They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back.

As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

So, they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Wild Uncertainty

Jesus is offstage for his own resurrection. And we experience this moment with the women who have come to tend the dead body of their loved one.

First, they are worried about the stone. It’s a large stone, large enough to keep wild animals and casual bandits away from the body. They saw it put in place, and they don’t think that the three of them will be able to move it. But they go anyway. The task they anticipate is emotional, anointing the body of their friend and leader, and likely unpleasant, since he died violently and was put away over a day ago. It’s also dangerous. Would caring for Jesus’ body mark them as rebels too? Would someone else be anointing their bodies tomorrow? They don’t wait to collect more people to help them move the stone–they just go as soon as they can. Maybe following Jesus has taught them to expect miracles.

But they didn’t expect this one. The stone was already rolled away. I can imagine that for the last 36 hours they’ve been trying to figure out how to move the stone, when they weren’t simply grieving. They were trying to figure out how they might move the stone without getting anyone else in trouble. And the obstacle they showed up dreading was already taken care of.

But then, another surprise. The tomb is empty. Not totally empty–there’s this guy in a white robe who narrates what they’re seeing, or not seeing in this case. How many of us are feeling burnt out, running on fumes, or just plain empty? What is the empty tomb to us, when we are so energetically empty?

Well, what was it to Mary, Mary, and Salome? I imagine they’re empty, too. In the last few days, they’ve seen their loved one and leader arrested, tortured, and executed. The other members of their group have scattered in fear–the same could happen to them. This is terrible trauma. And the three of them are the only ones who are daring enough, or heartbroken enough, to stay, watch the whole ordeal, and risk their lives caring for Jesus’ dead body.

Suddenly, they’ve put everything on the line for a body that’s not even there. They’ve given everything they have, they’re empty, the tomb is empty.

This stranger tells them not to be alarmed, but they are. They didn’t know what would happen before, but now they don’t even know what is happening. The text describes their terror, dread, and fear.

They leave the tomb. What they came to do is not possible–they can’t anoint a body that isn’t there–so they leave not knowing what to say.

And there it ends. Not just our reading, but the earliest gospel, the first narrative account of the ministry and miracles of Jesus of Nazareth just stops when Mary, Mary, and Salome leave the tomb. Later editors tacked on endings to make more sense of the moment. Later gospel authors give us time with post-resurrection Jesus. But the gospel of Mark originally ended when the women, Jesus’ would-be mourners, leave the tomb.

I hear a message in that moment for now. We’re on empty, coming from empty, shaped by trauma, and heading out into a future we don’t understand yet.

We don’t know what’s outside the tomb, any more than we could have predicted what was inside. When we don’t know, we can go back to what we do know.

What’s your stone? What obstacles are you dreading right now? What’s the thing that is in your way, preventing you from doing the thing you most need to do?

I can’t speak to your personal answer, but collectively we’re living in a time that might look shockingly familiar to the author of the gospel of Mark, which was written in the Roman empire around the year 70. The Roman empire depended on religious nationalism, on the cult of devotion to the emperor, to stabilize its expanding borders. And here we are watching our government lean into imperialism, Christian nationalism, and senseless authoritarianism. We’re at war in the Middle East, and we remember that for some of us it’s not so remote people in this congregation have loved ones in Israel, in Palestine, in Lebanon, in Iran. We remember that governments go to war but it’s the people who live with the violence and loss.

Mary, Mary, and Salome faced the terror of having to undermine the most powerful empire, which occupied their land, to grieve and tend their dead. We live within the American empire, founded on colonialism, occupation, and exploitation, and it underscores every act of care we try to offer the world. For some reason, call it stubbornness or integrity or even faith, we haven’t given up. We still care for one another. We still try to make the world a better place, even when people in power try to claim the world for themselves.

Being willing to face the obstacle makes it moveable.

So, we arrive already depleted at this tomb, find out that the problem was not what we expected, and now must go back out and figure out how to live in a world turned upside-down. Like Mary, Mary, and Salome, we have each other. We don’t have to do it alone. You have people who will help you through the strangest and most confusing situations. Maybe in other parts of your life, but certainly right here, in this congregation.

We need one another, so we’re there for one another. Universalism comes from the idea that we are all children of God, that God loves everyone so much that of course we’re all saved. So, what are we going to do if we’re not busy trying to get into heaven? We take care of each other. We look for suffering and find ways to help. We cry out for justice in the face of oppression. We try over and over again to learn that us means all of us, not just people like us. We try to put children and disabled people and outcasts at the center of our community, just like Jesus. We fight for the rights of those who suffer and die at the hands of the state, like Jesus did. And we pray. We open to what is larger than ourselves and let it change us.

Oh beloveds, we’re coming out of the tomb, just like Mary, Mary, and Salome did. We’re coming out of the tomb, and there’s so much to do.

Please join me in prayer.

Spirit of life and death, love and belonging, who has spoken to us in many traditions and speaks to us still, we are empty. We are empty and coming from more emptiness. Help us to remember that emptiness is a state of possibility, not just lack. Sound an echo through our empty soul that the vessel itself might sing an alleluia.

In the holiest of names and the sweetest of silences, we pray.

Amen. Alleluia.

Twilight and Tide Pools: Beyond the Binary

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A sermon by Sarah Prager — Writer, Speaker, and UUSA Member

I want to start off talking a bit about history.

I came out as queer 25 years ago when I was 14.

If you do the math, you’ll see I still have 5 months left where I can say I’m in my 30s, but the kids already say being “born in the 1900s” means that 2004 is ancient history. I hope you’ll agree it was recent history… but in terms of queer history it was actually a very different time.

In 2004, marriage equality wasn’t legal in any U.S. state until Massachusetts became the first in May right before my high school graduation. Two thirds of Americans opposed that right becoming law.

Sodomy had been decriminalized nationally just one year earlier. Hardly any celebrities were out besides Ellen DeGeneres. Facebook hadn’t even been invented, let alone Instagram or TikTok for finding other representation—just seeing another queer person was something exciting and relatively rare in my life.

Because of what I couldn’t see reflected in the world around me, I didn’t want to come out to myself as queer because I thought it would mean I couldn’t get married and have kids, never be normal. Now I know families are not made by laws and blood but a shared commitment to each other. But at the time I believed those messages I was getting from the world around me. I couldn’t see representation of what was possible.

When I started to seek out my community’s history, I started to find that representation. I could see myself reflected in the stories of other women who loved like I did. I could see a piece of them living on in me.

When I read love letters between two women from 100 years ago, 200 years ago, Sappho’s poetry about loving other women from over 2,000 years ago, it gives me a sense of belonging, of ancestry, of rootedness. When I read that as a teenager, it blew my mind open to realize that I wasn’t the first one to ever feel this way, that I wasn’t alone, that other women had had these feelings through all of time and that I had an infinite network of women across history with me. We existed. We always have. We always will.

Our community here at UUSA is sacred as well, and has a place in history. Our congregation has existed for over 100 years, in different buildings and of course with different people—people with shared traditions that we carry on today. You have a bond with those worshippers of First Universalist Parish 139 years ago who we never met, like I have queer people from 139 years ago I never met. To know those people had something intimate in common with us is a hauntingly beautiful thing to ponder.

The history of organized religion and queerness is often not a harmonious one—but religion and God have their own distinct relationships with queer people. Though the Church was a negative force in queer people’s lives for centuries before a relatively recent turn in which millions of people of faith like our congregation are now welcoming and affirming, God never hated queer people. Whether you believe in God, or not, or another spirit or force or energy that comes from us or nature or somewhere unknown, that divine is what I mean when I say God here.

Our reading from Genesis describes God’s creation of the world in categories and binaries—earth and heavens, day and night, sky and land and seas, fish and birds and livestock… man and woman—according to the Torah, the Bible.

But God’s creations are not so simple. There is not only day and night—there is dawn and dusk and light in the night from the stars and the moon, and darkness in the day from shade, and fireflies at twilight, and sunrise and eclipses. There are fish that fly and birds that swim. There is not only land and sea but marshes and swamps and bogs and islands and beaches and shallows. So, while the holy books may describe God’s creations in binaries, God did not create us that way. The text leaves out the twilight and the tide pools, but the reality exists anyway.

Nature knows no binary. We are transitioning to spring right now, however bumpily. Animals can change sexes or have more than one sex. Animals can show bisexual or homosexual behaviors. They can engage in sexual acts for pleasure instead of procreation. Males can carry pregnancy and be caretakers, females can be leaders and hunters. There is an infinite spectrum of color and size, combinations of feathers, scales, and fur.

And humans’ natural state is nonbinary, too. Before European Christians exported their ideal of the gender binary around the world, many indigenous communities had three, four, five, or more genders in their cultures as the societal norm. In North America, the umbrella term Two-Spirit holds hundreds of nonbinary genders of Native peoples under it. Two-Spirit people and other nonbinary genders around the globe were and are seen as holy and treasured. As having a special gift to transcend which makes them natural spiritual leaders. The gender binary was created in part to keep women in their roles, in part to further destroy and villainize indigenous peoples, in part as a misinterpretation of the story from Genesis.

In our story this morning, Not Quite Narhal, Kelp learned he could honor both sides of himself—the sea unicorn and the land narwhal—instead of having to choose one or the other. Kelp figured out there was not a binary choice of staying in the ocean or leaving the ocean and chose to live fluidly.

We can all learn from Kelp’s realization that the binary is a false choice. Think about a balance you’re trying to strike in your life right now, maybe about work, or parenting, or rest, or identity. How are you seeing it as a binary choice and how can you expand your thinking to be more fluid, more expansive, recognizing that binary choices are untrue.

No one is winning or losing as you try to flow between the beach and the sea—you are a sea unicorn. You are doing both. And you can do more than two things, too. Be a baker and a sibling and a knitter and a spouse and autistic and UU and an activist and an immigrant and a runner and a friend. Don’t judge yourself for trying to “have it all.” Celebrate that you’re an expansive, fluid being who is doing all that you can, no matter how imperfect by your or others’ judgements. You are not right or wrong, or good or bad—you just are.

I can think of few things more holy than my trans family. They mirror the transition of trees’ leaves from bud to bloom to a colorful death, the sun’s masterpieces across the setting sky transitioning from day to night. They embody nature and art. I am in awe and reverence of their ability to mirror the natural state of the world and constantly change like the water at a point in a stream.

Author Julian K. Jarboe wrote:

“God blessed me by making me trans for the same reason he made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine: so that humanity might share in the act of creation.”

What a gift. Injections, pills, and scars can be tools of the divine—Creation in action.

My spouse and my child are nonbinary. They would be blessings in my life without being trans, but that part of who they are only enriches my life.

I deeply respect their ability to help me see outside of binaries in all parts of life, always finding a third option when I might see two. Not only do they show me how to see another way, but they also show me how they share in continuing the Goddess’s acts of creation, as Jarboe wrote.

LGBTQIA+ people have been part of that for all time as creators.

A gay man created the computer. A trans woman created the microprocessors inside our phones. A gay man created the high five. A trans woman created satellite radio. The children’s books Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are and Frog and Toad were created by queer people.

Queer people’s contributions to the world are in everyone’s everyday lives, not just queer people’s.

We can thank queer people for Swan Lake, the Nutcracker, West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, A Streetcar Named Desire, A Raisin in the Sun, the Mona Lisa, the David, the lyrics of America the Beautiful, and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

LGBTQIA+ people of faith have been part of that history, too.

Christina ruled Sweden in the 1600s as a Lutheran-turned-Catholic. They were raised as a girl but tended towards hunting instead of painting, the equivalent of trucks instead of dolls. They were fluid with their clothing, and dating, and relationship to gender, but being queen required them to marry—a man, of course. In Christina’s words, they would rather choose death than a man.

But it was required. What could they do? Christina thought outside the box and didn’t accept what felt like the only choice in front of them. At the age of 26, they abdicated the throne, negotiated a salary for life, moved to Rome, and lived out their life expressing their gender fluidly. They died happy, free, and old, and are buried in the Vatican.

They found another way.

Juana Ines de la Cruz lived at the same time as Christina but without Christina’s power, privilege, or money. In 17th century Mexico, called New Spain then, women weren’t allowed to get an education or to work, so they needed a husband to provide for them. Getting married was the ticket to food and shelter. But Juana, like Christina, didn’t want to marry a man… and she was far from a wealthy queen.

But Juana also found another way. She became a nun, and the convent provided her food and shelter. She spent her time there studying and became the most educated woman in the country.

She also became one of the most prolific poets of the Spanish language and some of her poems were romantically directed towards Maria Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga, the queen of New Spain. Today, Juana is an icon of Mexican history and appears on the 20-peso note and Mexican stamps.

She found another way.

So, even as the Church was undoubtedly a negative force in the lives of LGBTQIA+ people for centuries—often a deadly force—there is no binary here either. Queer people of faith are part of the story, too.

Our UU history is one to be proud of. We were among the first religions to begin performing same-sex unions… in the 1970s… ancient history, right? In 1984, before I was born, the UU General Assembly passed a resolution formally affirming this practice.

UUs made up half of the plaintiff couples in the Goodridge v. Department of Public Health decision that legalized same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. The first same-sex couple to receive a marriage license in Massachusetts was a UU couple and married in the offices of the UUA.

We have been—and still are—part of every community. A final example of our presence within communities of faith comes from the Jewish tradition. Kalonymus ben Kalonymus lived from 1286 to 1328 in France. They studied philosophy and rabbinical literature and became a prominent writer, translator, and poet. In one poem, they curse being born a man and wish they had been born a woman. I’ll read an excerpt:

Father in Heaven who did miracles for our ancestors with fire and water.

You transformed the fire of Chaldees so it would not burn hot.

You transformed Dinah in the womb of her mother to a girl.

You transformed the staff to a snake before a million eyes.

You transformed Moses’s hand to a leprous white, and the sea to dry land.

You transformed rock to water, hard flint to a fountain.

Who would then transform me from a man to a woman?

Kalonymus ben Kalonymus, Philosopher (1286-1328)

 

However you might believe in the Divine, I have no doubt that Spirit smiles on this transformation and any time we are our true selves. No matter your gender identity, you can learn from the lessons of our nonbinary siblings.

Live in that spirit—questioning yourself, complicating your thinking, continuing to transform yourself over your whole lifespan. Refuse to get stuck in either/or thinking and stay in the “both/and.” Both, and, and more. Find a third, fourth, fifth way. Be a sea unicorn. Look for the twilight and the tidepools.

Your own metamorphosis from child to teen to adult to senior, from single to married to divorced, remarried to widowed, from unemployed to working to retired, from walking unassisted to walking with a cane, from pregnant to postpartum to menopausal… we all have transitions in our lives.

Handle them with openness, fluidity, expansiveness… and beyond the binary.

 

“I believed, and still do, that our bodies are ourselves, that my soul is the voltage conducted through neurons and nerves, and that my spirit is my flesh.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, American author, journalist, and activist

 

Photo by Brice Cooper on Unsplash

The following is a video of this sermon.

The Young and Fearless Prophet

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In case you missed it, amid the firehose of news, Liam Conejo Ramos is back home in Minnesota with his family. If you’re struggling to place the name, Liam was the five-year-old in the blue bunny hat and Spiderman backpack detained by ICE on January 20th. You may remember the picture. Liam and his father Adrian have active asylum claims and no deportation orders, but ICE arrested them in their driveway and transported them to the Immigration Center in Dilley, Texas.

On January 27th, Federal Judge Fred Biery ordered the federal government not to deport Liam and Adrian; on January 31st, he ordered their release. The judge wrote scathingly in his order, calling out the government for its policies of cruelty. And, in an unusual move, he ended the statement with the viral picture of Liam and two Bible verses: Matthew 19:14 and John 11:35.

“Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these'” and “Jesus wept.”

We usually talk about Jesus twice a year on the two big Christian holidays, Christmas and Easter, and I worry sometimes that I’ve done you a disservice by not mentioning him more often. Not because I think you need to believe a particular thing about Jesus, but because even though he lived and died two thousand years ago, his ministry remains relevant in so many ways.

There are reasons why Judge Biery quoted the gospels. When so much of our country is run on a platform of Christian nationalism, Jesus counts for a lot. Jesus counts for a lot, if we can go back to the source texts and stop waving him like a flag, that is.

‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these’. These are the words of Jesus, printed in red letters in some editions of the Bible. The kingdom of heaven belongs to the little children you would push away.

Judge Biery is appealing to the authority most commonly recognized as higher than the President of the United States, and that authority is siding with compassion and the innocence of children, not might and power.

Of course, many of us are looking for the Jesus who flips the tables, who overthrows corruption. The story of Jesus cleansing the temple, where he runs the money changers and sacrificial animal vendors out of the temple, overturning their tables and brandishing a whip of cords, you can find a version of it in each of the four gospels.

And then there’s the story I told the kids, the feeding of the five thousand, the loaves and fishes. This story is the only miracle other than the resurrection that is in all four gospels.

If I can switch away from the six-hundred-year-old Armenian gospel illustration of the loaves and fishes miracle I have on the screen to another image about ten years old.

Bear with me a minute, as we look at these very Western European-looking Jesuses. About ten years ago, the internet was full of “he protec, he attac” memes, where the same character has a defensive posture and an offensive posture. The meme grew to have a third pane “but most importantly…” and something that rhymes. So, we get “he protec”–Jesus welcoming and blessing the children– ”he attac”–Jesus cleansing the temple– and “but most importantly he multiply snac”.

The Bible is an excellent collection of memes that are thousands of years old, after all. And I don’t mean memes as visual internet jokes, or not just that. I’m going back to the older sense of the word as a dense nugget of cultural information that is replicated and circulated through the culture and evolves through transmission.

It’s not the only thing that has created our culture, but Christianity of one sort or another is the normative religion in our country. Think of how elegantly Judge Biery dropped two Bible citations into his order, and with two words and four numerals millions of people understood that he was appealing to a higher authority than the government of our land, an authority that government claims to be serving. People also understood it as an appeal to compassion. People understood it as a defense of the rights of children. It was all of those. It was powerful, especially when paired with his text and the picture of Liam.

When the alternative is Christian nationalism, going back to the Jesus of the Bible–the strange teacher who railed against injustice and corruption, the healer who touched unclean people and restored them to community, the holy man who hung out with sinners–that Jesus is somebody I don’t want to lose track of. I don’t want to give him up for the Jesus who vanquishes enemies and judges the outcast instead of the powerful, the triumphant Christ of Christian nationalism. I like the original version better.

The Jesus who welcomes and defends the children, when children are under attack. As schools lose funding. As our government finds new ways to persecute trans kids. As we hear stories of the abuse and exploitation of children.

The Jesus who removes corruption from sacred places. As Pete Hegseth hosts Christian nationalist prayer services in the Pentagon auditorium. As the President of this country claims a mandate to remove our rights and the rights of those we love. As supposed ministers of the gospel get rich promoting the persecution of the vulnerable.

The Jesus who feeds everyone. As the gap between billionaires and the rest of us grows. As one in seven households in the US experience food insecurity.  As we watch as children starve.

The good news is that the gospel is good news. The Jesus in the gospel’s sides with the poor, vulnerable, and oppressed. The harder part, but the realistic part, is that after two thousand years I don’t think he’s going to pop in and set everything right. So it’s up to us, all of us living now. It’s up to us to end oppression, corruption, and poverty. And even if he did show up, wouldn’t we rather be working on building the kingdom of heaven? Wouldn’t we rather be building the world that belongs to the children, the one we want them to inherit? Wouldn’t we rather be building the Beloved Community than waiting for it to appear?

Because every life saved, every burden eased, every heart opened, it’s worth it, even if we don’t know the full realization of Beloved Community in our lives. Even if it doesn’t fix everything, doing the part that we can is better than doing nothing. Because the kingdom of heaven, the Beloved Community, is real, even if it doesn’t exist yet, so long as we keep building it.

And so many of the people in this country who want to build the Beloved Community, the kingdom of heaven in our midst, they talk in this language of Jesus, of miracles that some understand as fact and some understand of metaphor, of radical teachings of love, of challenging the status quo of greed.

We’re going to continue, in our public moral discourse, to hear demands made in the name of Jesus, and a lot of people making diverse arguments will invoke him as a higher authority. I challenge you to listen to what they have to say. Because the people who speak of a Jesus who divide the worthy and unworthy, we’re not ready to build together. But the people who speak of a Jesus who lifts up the oppressed, who challenges the powerful, who loves above all, those are our collaborators in building the Beloved Community, the kingdom of heaven.

We see them washing dishes at Wednesday breakfast, packing the 400-person sanctuary at First Church for the most recent LUCE bystander training, reaching out in love across borders, going into prisons, or standing outside them, to comfort and release the prisoners. These are the kind of Jesus people who are realizing the kingdom of heaven, one step at a time, and they are our co-conspirators in the Beloved Community to come.

May we build the kind of world that Jesus preached.

The Beloved Community Means Everybody

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Beloved Community means everybody. This is one of the most important things to remember as we use this powerful phrase. It’s not a community defined around beloved people or for a special group. It’s a way of building community defined by the way love operates. Most of all, if anyone is excluded, it’s not a beloved community.

Beloved community means everybody. It means that we’re building a world where everyone can thrive.

This means eliminating poverty. And the cycles of greed and economic exploitation that keep us trapped in debt. It means everyone has food, housing, healthcare and all their basic needs. It means that everyone gets quality education.

This means dismantling racism and other oppressions. Racism, yes, and antisemitism and xenophobia. But also, sexism, heterosexism, and transphobia. Also, ableism, ageism, and adultism. Every system that tries to make one person more important or valuable than another.

This means ending militarization. Stopping wars and the posturing of war, stopping the control of people by threat of force, whether we’re talking about individuals or ethnic groups or countries.

Beloved community is the antithesis of what our country’s government has done in the last year. In the last year, our country has withheld food from people living in poverty, cut funding to schools, made healthcare inaccessible to millions of people, discriminated openly against transgender people, immigrants, and people of color, abducted and detained immigrants, terrorized communities, kidnapped the ruler and first lady of Venezuela, and threatened to conquer Greenland, just as a sampling.

Though we’re all in this moment, we don’t necessarily all feel or navigate it the same way. Those of us who are immigrants or transgender are facing direct attacks from our government. Black and brown people have long known this danger. Those of us who are poor, disabled, queer, women, the list is long and our time together is not, will all have our particular experiences of harm here. We’re coming from so many places. Our resistance will not all look the same.

As Rev. Ranwa Hammamy articulated in our reading, we have many ways of resisting. Some of us will be out in the streets, of course, but all of us are called to do what we can to align our lives and our values. How do we enact Beloved Community as our resistance, not just our end goal?

We watch each other’s kids. We bring food to the movement. We use the power we have for the good of our neighbors. We build community that’s worth saving.

I invite you to see this as the same movement Dr. King was part of, 60 years ago. The racial, labor, and anti-war organizing that he and his contemporaries undertook is directly connected to the struggles we face now. These evils of poverty, racism, and militarization are not new, though sometimes they feel newly distilled.

Historian and content creator Ashley the Baroness challenges us to see the tactics of ICE agents as repeating those of slave patrols, targeting people based on race, based on assumptions not evidence, terrorizing communities, brutalizing and abducting people. This isn’t new, and it isn’t un-American. It isn’t helpful to look further than our own history to understand this dynamic.

Beloved Community means everybody. Everybody has what they need to thrive. But Beloved Community means everybody, and we all have a part to play in building this world of love, justice, and peace.

This means dismantling our own assumptions, yes, of course, but I’m specifically thinking of how we actively resist the harm that our government is doing right now. And there’s a tool that was also in the civil rights movement’s toolbox: the boycott. When so much of what is killing us in this moment is greed, we fight back with our wallets. Every time you make a purchase, you make a choice, after all.

70 years ago, when Martin Luther King, Jr., was the new pastor in Montgomery, local organizers selected him to be the visible leader of a bus boycott. Remember Rosa Parks, and Claudette Colvin, and their coordinated refusal to give up their seats to white bus riders in protest of segregation and grave abuses by the bus system in Montgomery? The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 381 days, more than a year, of coordinating people to not ride the bus. That’s a lot of walking and bicycling, a lot of ridesharing, a lot of time that people weren’t home with their families to make that happen. People collected and distributed shoes to replace the shoes that the boycotters wore out. This coordinated action took the commitment of the whole community to support it.

It wasn’t a foregone or riskless victory. King’s house was firebombed, and he spent two weeks in jail. The same for Ralph Abernathy. Rosa Parks had to leave Montgomery–she couldn’t get work afterwards. Boycotters were attacked while walking. It took profound courage and stamina to participate in this boycott.

Side With Love’s Nicole Pressley put it this way: economic noncooperation raises the cost of repression. ICE needs the economy to function to do what they do. They need food, hotel rooms. There are ways to hit ICE and their allies in their wallets. When the executive branch won’t listen to judges, when congress won’t stop illegal action, we all need to own our economic power.

  • Avelo Air travel: Avelo Airlines had a $150 million contract with the federal government to operate deportation flights. The government was deporting these individuals without a fair hearing or due process. Consumers boycotted Avelo during the busy travel season of Thanksgiving and Christmas, and they also organized actions and divestment. On January 9, Avelo announced that they were discontinuing deportation flights. This is a win. Let’s celebrate it and allow it to inspire us to further economic action.

Here are some of the boycott and divestment actions that I’m hearing about. This list is hastily assembled and non-comprehensive, but see links at the end of this post for more ideas.

  • Hilton Hotels: a Hampton Inn in Lakeville, Minnesota, canceled ICE’s reservations, and Hilton, the brand owner, canceled that location’s brand status. Hilton has also hosted ICE recruitment events. Organizers are calling for those who can cancel their reservations with Hilton brand hotels. Some organizers are even calling for people to make and cancel reservations, to flood the system and cost Hilton money as they process the reservations and cancellations.
  • AT&T Telephones: AT&T has had multimillion-dollar contracts with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Organizers call for consumers to refuse to buy, upgrade, or renew phones or plans until AT&T stops contracting with ICE.
  • Amazon surveillance technology and data processing: Amazon isn’t the only one, but it’s one we might use on a daily basis. Amazon doesn’t just sell us objects–Amazon makes millions of dollars each year selling cloud computing services to ICE. In fact, ICE depends on Amazon to carry out its work. I know that Amazon is deeply embedded in many of our lives. To the extent that you are able, stop shopping with Amazon. This means Amazon.com, but also Audible, Ring cameras, Whole Foods, and even the Washington Post. This one is a double whammy. Getting our money out of Amazon’s economy is perhaps a drop in the bucket when Amazon has a hand in everything, but we can reinvest in smaller businesses and local economies when we stop and think about the paths that our money takes. We can build the economies we want to support by shopping with companies that more closely align with our values.
  • Prisons and weapons manufacturers. You probably don’t go out of your way to support private prisons or weapons manufacturers. Individual consumers usually don’t. But have you checked your investments recently? Do you have money invested in funds that include private prisons or weapons in their portfolio? Do you know, generally, what your money is doing in the world? Is your money being used in ways that don’t align with your values? It might be time to change that.

We have seen injustice before. But as our first hymn says, we’ve got our minds stayed on freedom. We lift up the songs of the civil rights movement today, many of which come out of the Black spirituals and gospel traditions, which reach back to Black people’s struggle for freedom from slavery. With respect for this deep tradition, we sing these words to remember that the struggle is centuries-long and rooted in the ordering of our society. So is the will to overcome.

Over 100 years ago, a mixed-race mine workers’ union sang a gospel song “We Will Overcome” at its meetings. Along the way, parts of the tune were swapped out with a spiritual you may know, “No More Auction Block for Me.” In the 1940s, striking tobacco industry workers, mostly Black women, began singing “We Will Overcome” at their meetings. The organizers at Highlander School, which has trained generations of civil rights activists, learned it from them. Pete Seeger changed it from We Will to We Shall Overcome. Dr. King heard Seeger sing the song in 1957. The song, as we know it, is deeply associated with the Highlander Center, which still trains civil rights activists, and with the labor and civil rights movements, holding and passing the hope through the generations.

We sing it as a prayer, for endurance, for justice, for kinship, for peace, for freedom

_____________________________

Resources for economic resistance:

Side With Love: https://sidewithlove.org/ourstories/2026/1/13/recording-from-january-gathering

Cut Off the Spigot: https://cutoffthespigot.substack.com/

Photo by Zacqueline Baldwin on Unsplash

Who Has Time for Collective Liberation?

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When I preached the glossary service three weeks ago, I encountered a question that was too big to fit into the time we had for that service. It was about the term “liberal religion.” We have a tagline on our letterhead and now on our website that reads “A liberal religious light since 1893.”

Since we just had the November election, I want to be clear that liberal in the sense of liberal religion does not necessarily describe the electoral politics of our congregation or the Unitarian Universalist religious movement. We don’t endorse any candidates or parties. I do speak about how our values translate into public and collective power. Liberal religion is a term that describes not what a religion believes, or how its people vote, but how its beliefs work, though those things frequently do go hand in hand.

Liberal religion means, broadly, religion that is not limited by fixed doctrine but instead contains a framework for further evolution. Many religions have a liberal tradition–we’re not the only ones. In my seminary education alone, I read and studied with scholars from liberal Protestant Christian, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist traditions. If this is new to you, just because you haven’t experienced it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Let me know if you want a bibliography.

In the Unitarian Universalist context, we have made a tradition of outgrowing our own previously held doctrine. We don’t have a creed here. We do have shared values that guide our ethical decision-making. Those shared values are Justice, Equity, Transformation, Pluralism, Interdependence, and Generosity, grounded in a foundation of Love. Conscience, reason, and inspiration are our tools in making ethical decisions.

To go back to 19th century Unitarianism, older than our congregation, Theodore Parker preached about the Transient and Permanent aspects of Christianity. Doctrine on the nature of Christ, the miracles, the things Jesus did two thousand years ago, all of that was transient; the teachings of love are permanent, and that is what we carry with us. And you know what, a lot of what Theodore Parker wrote turned out to be transient too.

Liberal religion expects to grow and change. I really hope that one hundred years from now, all of my ethical commitments like:

  • All genders are sacred and trans people are free to live as their truest selves
  • Migration is a human right in an unstable world. People need the freedom to migrate and the safety to not migrate.
  • All people deserve freedom and a say in their government
  • All people have the right to food, housing, healthcare, education, and support throughout their lives

I hope all of those ethical statements sound ridiculously outdated someday, and the sooner the better, because then we will have built a world where those things are taken for granted.

But the real question here, from the person who submitted this term for the glossary service was, ‘Is there such a thing as radical religion?’ I don’t frequently hear those words together, though Unitarian Universalists and others do talk about radical meaning grasping something at the root, getting the whole metaphorical carrot, I guess, and not just the leaves.

I more frequently hear us talk about the difference between liberal theologies and liberation theologies. Liberal religion, with its liberal theologies, is concerned with the growth and freedom of the individuals who practice and believe them. Liberation theologies are concerned with generating freedom where it’s missing. In seminary, I studied Latin American liberation theology, Black liberation theology, Indigenous and Asian and African liberation theologies, women’s and queer liberation theologies. My friend Rebecca Stevens-Walter is a children’s liberation theologian. Liberation theologies ask what does salvation mean for someone who is oppressed?

I find this question fascinating when we hold it in the context of Universalism, which is to say that all people are loved without reservation and deserve what they need to thrive; liberation theology reminds us that those of us who face particular oppressions might need more than one-size-fits-all salvation. It’s why we have Black Lives Matter and a Pride flag on the outside of our building. Sometimes loving everybody means being on the side of people particularly. Love makes demands of our consciences, and loving everybody means dismantling oppression, for the freedom and healing of both the oppressed and the oppressor.

Liberation theology in a theistic frame says that God is on the side of the oppressed. God never stops loving everyone, but sometimes love means stopping harm, righting wrongs, making sure the people who don’t have enough get what they need. You can see this idea in the ministry of Bishop William Barber, Rev. Liz Theoharis, and the multi-faith coalition at the heart of the Poor People’s Campaign. It says in the Bible and the religious texts of many traditions that how we treat those who are poor, those who have less power, matters more than who can offer the best sacrifice.

The world has so many needs right now, and always, and none of them is more important, even if they seem to take turns as most dire and urgent. Food insecurity matters, and healthcare, and safety for immigrants and trans and queer people. And disaster response. And really everything. In the Beloved Community, it all matters, from ending genocide down to the tiniest animal shelter.

I often ask you to imagine the Beloved Community, where everyone has what they need to thrive, where we no longer experience racism, poverty, militarism, where we build positive peace and settle conflict constructively, without violence. I have never lived in the Beloved Community. It has not yet existed, at least in the sense of everyone in the whole world having what we need.

But I have experienced it in tiny glimmers. A holiday dinner where everyone, including diabetics and vegans and omnivores and food-allergics sat down hungry and got up satisfied. A meeting where people came together broken and in conflict and decided to meet the humanity in one another, not to compromise or even agree to disagree but simply to hear one another. Maybe even an election like this past Tuesday, in which voters all across the country repudiated the ongoing persecution of poor people, disabled people, immigrants, and trans and queer people by voting for change.

Like with most things, collective liberation, I don’t know how to get to the end goal from these tiny glimmers. I don’t have a plan. But like any kid who grew up with the Ghostbusters, the X-Men, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I believe that having a plan is not nearly as important as having a team. Having a team means that we don’t all need to have the same gifts, and it’s better if we don’t.

Deepa Iyer’s children’s book We Are the Builders, as well as her helpful workbook Social Change Now: A Guide for Reflection and Connection propose ten roles for social change.

  • Frontline responders: These are the folks who mobilize quickly, who always seem ready to help and calm in the storm. The first example I can think of here is LUCE, responding to ICE detentions. LUCE was part of the ICE bystander training we hosted last month, and I am so grateful that they’re running the hotline for ICE sightings, verifying them, and helping those who have been detained and their families.
  • Visionaries: These are the people who know where we’re going, the ones who ask if the direction we are heading will get us to our ultimate goal. Sometimes these are the ones who wind up at the microphone at a protest, the ones who reconnect us to our hope.
  • Builders: These folks do details, solve the problems, and get it done. We have a lot of builders in this congregation, and I appreciate you all so much.
  • Disrupters: These are the people who take risks to call out injustice. Think of whistleblowers. Think of people in inflatable frog costumes pointing out the cruelty of our government.
  • Caregivers: These are the folks who make it safe for others to get what they need and feel their feelings. We don’t always name the caregivers as an important part of movements, but they are the ones who remind us to rest, make sure we eat, ask us how we’re taking care of ourselves. We would fall apart without them.
  • Experimenters: These are the out-of-the-box thinkers, the ones who are willing to try new things and see what works, what doesn’t, and what we learn along the way. They call us beyond our comfort zones and have faith that we can survive and learn from things that don’t go according to plan.
  • Weavers: These are coalition-builders, the ones who find what we have in common across perceived differences. They keep the larger ecosystem in mind and can look beyond self-interest. They build bridges between communities.
  • Storytellers: These are the poets, the documentary filmmakers, the photographers, the ones who make a narrative out of the moments and complex characters out of headlines. They connect the movement to its humanity.
  • Healers: These are the people who move our society and movements, as well as our congregation, into healthier ways of being and interacting. This looks like practicing moving through emotions together, repairing relationships, sitting with grief.
  • Guides: These are the wise elders, regardless of age, who translate their own experience for others to use, who know that some things may be different this time around, but their thoughtfulness can be a resource.

The disrupters and weavers, for example, don’t understand things the same way, or work the same way, but both roles, or really all ten, are necessary for creating a future that is actually for all of us. And infighting between people whose ultimate goals are aligned is a huge distraction from our collective liberation. Which is not to say that we need to play nice with those who dehumanize us and those we love, but the work we do to come together across difference is part of the work of building Beloved Community.

Nobody is all of these social change roles. I tell myself that, over and over, and sometimes it sinks in that I, or you, don’t have to be good at all of them. Because together, we have one another. Collective liberation needs all of us working in our different ways, not all doing the same thing. Once again, we’re called to connection not perfection.

If you feel guilty that protests make you anxious, if you don’t know the right thing to say when times are hard, if you hate phone-banking, that’s okay. It’s just not your role. Do you believe me when I say that there are people who feel the joy of their community at a protest, who actually enjoy knocking on strangers’ doors to canvass for an issue, who get a thrill from asking for donations? They really exist. I encourage you to find your role in making the world a better place, the place that makes you feel alive and connected to your purpose. If you have time or money to give, and you can do so with joy, then you’ve found your place just right.

And you know what, maybe what you can do right now is survive, and that is enough. The world is a better place with you in it. As Julian Jamaica Soto says, “All of us need all of us to make it.”

So maybe sometimes it feels like we don’t have time to get everybody free, but it won’t be Beloved Community until everyone belongs. We’re not piecemeal struggling people up into privilege. We’re called to build something so much better, joyfully interdependent, for a better world than we have ever known. So, it’s not so much who has time for collective liberation as who has time to wait?

None of us can do everything, and all of us can do something. All of us need all of us to make it. May we each find the gifts we can offer with delight. Amen.

To view the sermon, click the link below.

 

Featured photo by Kelly Cristine on Unsplash