Change and Liberation

A Sermon by

Rev. Robert M. Hardies

All Souls Church, Unitarian

Washington, D.C.

Sunday, 31 January 2010

Our first reading we will share responsively.  You can find it in the back of your hymnal.  It is number 558, a reading from the third chapter of the book of Ecclesiastes which can begin our reflection on this theme of change.  Number 558.  I’ll read the plain text and invite you to join with me in the italicized text.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die;

                A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal;

                A time to breakdown, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh;

                A time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

                A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to seek, and a time to lose;

                A time to keep, and a time to throw away;

A time to tear, and a time to sew;

                A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate;

                A time for war,

And a time for peace.

Amen.

I have a second reading I want to share with you as well and it’s a reading from one of my favorite authors, James Baldwin.  Incidentally, I’m teaching a class starting next week on James Baldwin.  James Baldwin as theologian and social critic and it’s exploring the intersection of race and sexual orientation and religion.  The deadline for signing up for that class is today.  There’s a little information about it in your bulletin.  If you’re interested, send me an e-mail.

This passage from Baldwin is from the opening paragraph of his essay called “Faulkner and Desegregation,” which was written in 1956.  The essay itself is really a stinging critique of segregation and of the novelist William Faulkner’s defense of it.  Yet Baldwin begins the essay in a very interesting way.  So let us hear these words.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one identity, the end of safety.  And in such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew, to what one possessed or dreamed one possessed.  Yet it is only when a person is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is free for higher dreams, for greater privileges.  All people have gone through this, go through it, throughout their lives.  It is one of the irreducible facts of life and remembering this, especially since I am a Negro, affords me almost my only means of understanding what is happening in the minds and hearts of white Southerners today.

Now, just think about it for a moment.  What a remarkable way for an African-American author, writing in 1956, to begin a scathing critique of segregation.  Not with a lash of his acerbic pen, which Baldwin was more than capable of, but with a gesture of empathy, a gesture of human solidarity.  He says, you know, I think a part of me can actually begin to understand what a white Southerner facing desegregation might be going through because I’m a human being too and I know what it’s like to fear change.  And herein lies Baldwin’s genius and grace as a social critic; his genius and grace lie in his ability to simultaneously expose the injustice and the divisions that separate the human family and affirm our common humanity. 

This approach is both rhetorically savvy and theologically significant.  And part of why I share it with you this morning is I want to offer it up to all of us as people of faith as a model for how we can simultaneously critique and repair the world.  So often, critique just serves to tear things down.  Baldwin shows us a way to tear things down but simultaneously build things back up again.  And in this passage he does so by drawing our attention to an irony that lies at the heart of human experience.  And that irony, simply stated, is this:  We are afraid of change, yet only change can set us free.

Let me repeat that:  We are afraid of change, yet only change can set up free.  It is that irony that I wish to explore with you this morning.  So, let’s just for a moment take a look at this resistance to change.  What’s that all about?  How many of us have known people – not us, other people [Laughter] – who stayed in a job long after they knew it was time to go, after they knew it wasn’t right for them.  Or how many of us have known people who stayed in a relationship long after it’s clear to everyone else that that relationship is broken.  In each case, change seems to be the obvious path, yet it is met so often with resistance, with fear even.  What’s behind that?

Sometimes when I invite people into my office and we’re talking about change and I ask them about their resistance, they’ll attribute it to inertia.  You know the old saying, “A body at rest stays at rest.”  And that’s when I usually have to gently remind them that a human being with will is not bound in the same way to the laws of physics as an inanimate object and that usually there’s something behind that inertia, something more profound.  Once we get below the surface, then we usually discover what’s behind the resistance which is that all change, even minor change, even change for the better, represents loss.  By definition, change means we’re going to lose something.  And loss, by definition, begets pain.  And pain begets grief.  I don’t think we can get around our resistance to change unless we really acknowledge and confront the pain and the loss that it brings us.

Take the woman stuck in a bad marriage.  One part of her knows deep down in her bones that this is not going to work.  We tried, but it’s just not going to work.  Yet there is another part of her, isn’t there, that is saying, “But this is everything I know.  What about our kids?  What about our home?  What about our friends?  What about our life?”

James Baldwin says, “Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave us identity, the end of safety.”  That’s why we resist change.  I hear people say, “Yes, I can’t stand my job, but I can’t imagine who I would be if I weren’t a . . . “  fill in the blank – a writer, a nurse, a lawyer.  Or, to use the situation that Baldwin was writing about, you can imagine someone saying, “Deep down, I know that oppression is wrong, but I wouldn’t know where I stood in the pecking order if suddenly someone wasn’t below me.” 

In order for us to really embrace change, we need to attend to the loss.  Pretending the loss doesn’t really exist doesn’t get us anywhere.  In the middle of his life, the great Southern novelist, Reynolds Price, contracted a virulent form of spinal cancer.  He survived, but he lives now in a wheelchair.  When he looks back on that experience he expresses frustration that no one wanted to acknowledge the loss that he had experienced.  Listen to what he writes.  He says, “When you undergo a trauma, everybody is in league with you to deny that your old life has ended.”  Everybody’s trying to patch you up and get you back to where you were when in fact, he says, what you need to be told is “You have died.  Who are you going to be tomorrow?”  To greater and lesser degrees, all change involves the death of some part of us.  The death and then the rebirth.  But there can’t be a resurrection until the death has been acknowledged.

So I invite you to take a moment and to consider the changes in your own life, the recent changes or the changes that you’re contemplating right now.  And to be honest with yourself:  What losses will you suffer because of that change?  There’s usually more than one.  Once we acknowledge and grieve these losses, then we may find that our resistance to change softens a little and we may be able to embrace the liberating possibilities of change.  Because that’s the other half of the irony that Baldwin has laid out for us.  He says, we resist change, but only change can set up free.  It is only when a person is able to surrender a dream he has long cherished that he is freed up to embrace a new dream.

I wonder if you really believe that.  Do you believe that?  Because there’s really an article of faith hidden in that statement.  There’s an article of faith in that passage that out of the flux and the change of our lives, we can indeed discern a new calling, a new direction for our lives.  I’m not sure we all trust that.  There’s a belief that God can work with us in the flux and the change of history, not as the author of every event, but as the one who works with us in each moment, through each change, to lure us to the most loving, the most just, the most true outcome.  It’s a faith that Baldwin shares with our Unitarian ancestors, a faith that’s summed up in our opening hymn this morning, penned by that old warhorse of a Unitarian poet, Samuel Longfellow.  “Oh life that maketh all things new . .  . .”  It’s a prayer to a God who is not only a creator, but a re-creator, a spirit, a higher power who brings the new out of the old, who accompanies us through change, helping us recreate our lives along the way. 

I wonder if you share that faith?  Maybe God’s not a part of it for you.  Maybe for you it’s just the trust, the trust that things will work out well, the trust that Julian of Norwich had when she said “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

A good friend of mine who’s a Baptist minister was going through a crisis recently in her own life and in the life of her church and she kept saying that line from Julian of Norwich over and over again.  She thought some of the people in her congregation thought she was going crazy she had to say it so often.  Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that all shall be well, that all manner of things shall be well.  It reminds me of one of my favorite spirituals that says, “I don’t feel no ways tired; I’ve come too far from where I’ve started from.  Nobody told me that the road would be easy, but I know You haven’t brought me this far to leave me.”  The faith that we are accompanied through the changes of our lives, the faith that is central to my own belief, is central to our faith as Unitarians. 

I want to close with a story that the old Sufis tell.  It’s a story about change and about trust and about transformation.  It’s a story about a stream that was born high up in a mountaintop in the time of the melting snow.  That stream spent her youth sliding down the mountainside, splashing over rocks, plunging through gorges.  Every once in awhile, from her vantage high in the mountains, she could see in the distance the ocean.  She knew, deep within her, that somehow she belonged with that ocean, that somehow she was destined to arrive there.  But one day, after she had come down to the bottom of the hill, the stream had encountered something that she’d never experienced before.  She had entered the great desert plain, and as she threw her body against the desert, she found that she was turning into mud and into muck.  And just as she was about to panic, just as she didn’t know what she was going to do, the wind came to her and whispered to her and said, “If you will allow yourself to become a vapor, I will carry you across the desert and deposit you on the far side, safely.”  I can’t, protested the stream; I’m not vapor, I’m a stream.  That’s not who I am.  But the stream soon realized that she had no choice but to trust the wind and so she just let go.  She released herself into the welcoming arms of the wind who bore her across the desert and laid her gently down on the other side and allowed her to continue her journey to the ocean.

I think that story captures both our resistance to chance and its liberating potential.  Sometimes we need to trust.  Sometimes we need to give ourselves over in order to be carried to the other side.  My prayer for each and every one of us is that we might find that courage and that faith in our lives.

Amen.  [Applause]