Call to Worship:
Friends, I call us to worship this morning with these words which have been on my heart this week. They come from WH Auden’s poem September 1, 1939:

”All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie…”

First Reading:
Proverbs 12: 17-22
Amos 5, 10-15; 24

Pastoral Prayer:
Dear ones, this has been a heavy week in our country, and I know many of you bring your own personal worries, losses, and fears. Let us take a moment to just be together in silence. To hold space for the memory of Renee Good who was killed by an ICE officer in Minneapolis this week and to feel the presence of the sacred and this gathered community holding us in love.

Will you pray with me?

Spirit of life, God we know by many names, hear our prayers this hour

Some days we come before you with prayers composed of nothing but calm, clear silence, content to listen for your voice and to the wisdom that comes in the quiet

Some days we come with prayers of joyful song, like the prophetess Miriam, lifting up our praise with tambourines and ecstatic dance

Some days we come with prayers like poetry, words carefully chosen, flowery and intricate, crafted for the pleasure of hearing them roll off the tongue

Some days we come requesting detailed intercessions, feeling attuned most clearly to our individual wants and needs

And some days, like today, we come with simple words and deep longings

We pray for an end to violence

We pray for mercy

We pray for justice

We pray for answers

We pray for healing

We pray for peace

We pray for courage

We pray for love to prevail.

Dear God, we pray.

Amen.

Will you join me in reciting the Lord’s prayer, this week using a Latin-American paraphrase. The prayer is associated with communities committed to Latin American liberation theology although I have not been able to find a single author.

Our Father, Mother, Creator,
     who is in us here on earth
     and in heaven,
Holy is your name
     in the hungry
     who share their bread and their song.
Your Kingdom come,
     which is a generous land
     flowing with milk and honey.
Let us do your will,
     standing up when the rest are sitting down,
     and raising our voices
     when the rest are silent.
You give us our daily bread
     in the song of the bird and the miracle of the corn.
Forgive us
     for keeping silent in the face of injustice,
     and for burying our dreams;
     for not sharing bread and wine,
     love and the land
     among us now.
Do not let us fall into the temptation
     of not loving our neighbors,
     of shutting the door through fear,
     of resigning ourselves to hunger and injustice,
     of taking up the same arms as the enemy.
But deliver us from evil.
Give us the perseverance and the solidarity
     to look for love,
     even if the path has not yet been trodden,
     even if we fail,
So we shall know your Kingdom,
which is being built forever and ever.

Amen.

Second Reading:
Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars) by Muriel Rukeyser

Sermon:

Friends, I will be preaching today about the events this week in Minneapolis, striving to tell the truth about what happened there. I think it’s important for us to hear, even when it’s hard. But if you have little ones who have stayed in the sanctuary today or you aren’t in a safe space, mentally or emotionally to hear about violence, know that it’s okay if you need to step out.

I’ve talked before about the moment I first felt called to ministry, but in reality, my journey to ministry began in earnest the day after the 2016 election, when I didn’t know what to do, so I got some friends to meet me at a bar and then convinced them to go to church. My home congregation in DC was having an evening vespers prayer service. There were no calls to action and no fiery sermon, just prayer, music, simple chants, candles, and silence. That was the first time I sought religious community as the answer, when I didn’t know what else to do. And it unlocked something inside me that eventually led me here, to this pulpit with all of you.

And now I find myself again at a loss—for words, for understanding, for the clear next steps, and for any idea of what the future might hold for our nation. This Wednesday, an agent from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement shot and killed 37 year old mother of three Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis and then denied her immediate medical care. The agent involved was one of 2,000 agents deployed to Minnesota in what the agency called the “largest immigration operation” ever, focused mainly on the state’s large Somali community. While the full details of what happened are still emerging, and might never be fully known given the FBI takeover of the investigation and the refusal to include state and local officials, it appears Renee Good and her wife were joining with other community members to warn their immigrant neighbors of ICE’s presence and document their conduct.

Almost immediately, white house officials began painting a picture of the incident that is directly contradicted by video evidence and analysis by a variety of legal and law enforcement experts, labeling Good a domestic terrorist, claiming she “violently ran over” the officer, and attacking her character, with Vice President JD Vance calling her deranged and labeling her death as “a tragedy of her own making.”

A decade later, heartbroken, full of grief and righteous anger, and once again unsure of what to do with it and my response is the same. Go to church. Go be with my people. This time around, try to preach a good word, yes, but mostly just go be with you all. Sit. Pray. Lament. Worship together.

A decade ago, I worried that my response was akin to retreat—that I was seeking the safety of a candle lit sanctuary as a way of avoiding what was happening outside.

I am not worried about that today. Our work doesn’t end in these pews, but it’s got to start here. Especially right now. Because the power of this place in this upside down world we’re living in is that it gives us a space, away from all the noise, to remember our humanity, to recalibrate our moral compass, to stay in relationships with the holy and with one another, and to stay tethered to deep, eternal truths that temporal powers would rather us forget.

This place is a sanctuary, yes, but that doesn’t mean a site of escape or avoidance. It doesn’t exist to protect us from hearing about and confronting difficult things. It exists to protect our souls and spirits from being degraded, from being worn down by a constant stream of lies, dehumanization, and fear-mongering that makes us distrust our neighbors and distrust ourselves. It exists to ensure our souls have space to hear the call of the sacred, so we can respond with discernment, moral clarity and courage.

In this space, together, we can resist efforts to disconnect us from our humanity. I’ve been thinking about how the language coming from Trump, Vance, and Kristi Noem immediately after the shooting was so blatantly false and upsettingly dehumanizing. There was no show of thoughts and prayers, no hedging, no “let’s wait and see what the facts reveal.” The falsehoods were extreme and immediate. It was hard not to think about Geroge Orwell’s famous quote from 1984,“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

They know they’re lying and they know we know they’re lying. But in an effort to disprove their lies, we immediately start analyzing the evidence. We get drawn into a political debate before we’ve had time to process the full moral and spiritual weight of what happened—before we’ve had time to grieve and mourn the loss of life. As we watch experts and talking heads zoom in on the video, slow it down, freeze the frame and circle key areas in red, it becomes easy to forget what the videos actually show. They show the death of Renee Good, a person with a name and a family and friends and a whole life ahead of her cut violently short. Whatever angle you look at it from, whatever other conclusions you draw, the basic fact is that the videos show a human being shot by a US agent at point blank range. And most of us have watched it multiple times at this point. That is not normal. It shouldn’t feel normal. So even if we don’t believe their lies, engaging with them is still doing damage to our souls. They are serving to desensitize us to violence and disconnect us from fully feeling and comprehending the tragic loss of life.

Here we can resist that. We let ourselves take a break from frame by frame analysis and lean into the human response: grief and lament. We can make space to mourn and honor the dead. We can remember that as Unitarian Universalists, one of our core beliefs is that each and every person has inherent worth and dignity and anytime a life, any life, is cut short by violence, that is a tragedy that leaves a tear in the moral fabric of the universe. We don’t need a forensics expert to tell us that.

Here we resist efforts to disconnect us from our humanity and, we resist efforts to disconnect us from our ethical commitments and our moral centers. One thing that has been so alarming to me this week are the moments I’ve found myself doubting my own moral compass—my own capacity to differentiate right from wrong, justice from injustice. As I read the news, listen to various pundits and try to understand different perspectives, I’ve found myself starting to ask things like “Was she actually interfering with operations?” rather than the question I should be asking: “are those operations worthy of interference?"I find myself beginning to wonder “why didn’t she just comply with orders,” without asking whether those orders were morally legitimate, rather than asking “should the price of non-compliance with an unjust system really be death?” I see the ways those in power are shifting the terms of the moral debate to make me question my own sense of right and wrong, to make me forget my commitments to my immigrant neighbors, to democratic principles, and to non-violent resistance.

So I need to come here to recalibrate my moral compass, to this place where we don’t have to accept their terms of debate. Where we can draw on deeper sources, and try to access more lasting truths about the nature of goodness, and justice, and respect for human life. Where we can ask different questions, like the one inspired by journalist Peter Birkenhead, not “did this officer have cause to fire his gun,” but rather “did he have moral authority to carry one and be on that street in the first place?”

And we have generations of ancestors—activists and prophets and theologians—to help us answer those questions and find our moral center again. From biblical teachings that implore us to welcome the stranger to the example of abolitionist Unitarian ministers like Theodore Parker who funded John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. One I’ve been returning to this week is Henry David Thoreau who wrote:

“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil…Why does it not cherish its wise minority?...Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults…? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?” Thoreau says if the law “is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.”

Here, when we worship together we can reconnect with the sacred, drawing on our own direct experience of transcendence and wonder to guide us in knowing what is right. We can enter into a centuries-long conversation about our moral obligations in the face of unjust powers. We can ask ethical questions together that feel too big to confront on our own. And when we find that our sacred values compel us to transgress civic orders, we can take courage in knowing we aren’t alone.

When we come here to worship together, we resist efforts to disconnect us from our humanity, we resist efforts to disconnect us from our moral compass, and we resist efforts to disconnect us from one another. These violent tactics, and the government’s endorsement of them are meant to force us back inside, to stop us from showing up for our communities, from acting in solidarity with our neighbors. And the dehumanizing language, against Renee Good and immigrant communities, is meant to further divide us, to make us distrust and fear one another. This is why, several months ago, I reminded you all of Hannah Arendt’s assertion that totalitarianism is “organized loneliness.” In the face of these isolationist tactics, communal worship is a direct expression of the power of gathered community. The word liturgy means “the work of the people.” Jesus told his disciples, “where two or more or gathered, there I am.” To continue to gather voluntarily, collectively in the name of love and justice is a powerful thing. As long as we keep coming together, we can keep the presence of righteousness and the light of truth alive among us. When we sit next to each other on Sundays and share in our joys and our pain, we are reminded we are each others keeper.

And in doing all of this, in resisting their efforts to disconnect us from our own humanity, from our moral compass, from one another, we resist efforts to disconnect us from God—from the sacred power of love and justice that is the very ground of our being, guiding our feet and lighting our way.

This is why, when we don’t know what else to do, we show up to worship. And this is why showing up here is never a waste of time. It keeps us connected with what is most holy and maintaining the connection is an urgent and radical act right now. Every hymn we sing, every word we pray, every moment of silence we hold, everything we do here in this sanctuary should be done with the intention of tethering us to truth and goodness and to our shared human obligations.

I was talking to a friend and teacher about these events and one thing she noted that deeply moved me was the fact that Renee Good was in her neighborhood when she was killed. A neighborhood she had recently moved to in order to find home and welcoming community. ICE was disrupting the home life of her and her neighbors. Blocking the roads they used to go about their daily tasks, targeting schools where their children were learning, enacting violence in their streets and front yards. Following these events, JD Vance promised that ICE would begin extensive door-to-door operations, violating the sanctity of people’s homes with tactics terrifyingly reminiscent of 1930s Germany.

It served as a reminder that there are fewer and fewer places left that lie beyond the control of this administration’s lies, violence, and fear-mongering. But, so help me God, this church, this sanctuary will remain one of them.

Here we will tell the truth and we will speak truth to power. We will confront reality and bear witness to all the beauty and brokenness of the world. We will not become desensitized to violence. We will keep our hearts open and tender. We will not fear our neighbor. Here we will revere life as sacred and recognize love as our highest law. And it is from that place that we will move out into the world and work for peace and justice.

May it be so.
May we make it so through our living.

Amen.

Now let us rise in body or in spirit and sing Hymn #318: We would be one.