Sermon given by Intern Minister Tori Rosati on January 16, 2022.
A number of years ago I attended a conference on ecological justice that was co-hosted by the Religion and Conflict Transformation and Faith and Ecological Justice programs at Boston University. While I had spent much of my professional life working in the environmental non-profit field, I have to confess that in all my years working on causes related to environmental education and conservation, I had never thought about them from a justice framework. We need to protect land - yes, we needed to educate our youth to be good stewards of the natural world - yes, but how all this related to social inequity, racism, and injustice did not factor into my thinking.
The presenters talked about our current climate crisis alongside familiar conversation on racial oppression and economic inequality. By the end of the conference – the pathways through each of these individual and global challenges thread through each other to the point where they couldn’t be separated. The environment was more than the nature preserve, it was the landfills and industrial waste sites disproportionally built in communities of color – it was the poor countries without the economic means to mitigate rising sea levels that would one day fall into the ocean. These other realities were compounding and being compounded by each other.
Climate change and ecological degradation and destruction was and is a justice issue – like all of these issues – they are rooted in systemic, pervasive oppression that not only inequitably impacts those on the margins but impacts all on some level.
As we have explored these last few weeks – this notion of interdependence, of mutuality and integration has never been more felt then in these last two years. Our individual choices are certainly bound up with others – we can’t escape the mutualities enshrined in public health – public policy – public good. Notions of independence are now paired with deep and sometimes uncomfortable conversations on accountability, and responsibility – the tangles of which can seem overwhelming – where and how do we find the way?
In this climate, the image of an interconnected web, that our 7th principle lifts up – with those impossibly perfect concentric cross sections of thread – seems too neat. Sometimes this web is more of an entanglement – things cross over, get dropped, moved around – harm is done.
On this Martin Luther King Weekend Sunday – the theme of interdependence still feels fitting though. It was something that King explored throughout his life. In his 1964 Christmas Sermon on Peace King says, “It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.”
King shared these sentiments a year earlier in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail where he called out white moderate clergy for their critique that he and his movement were outsiders and had no place coming into town and demanding justice. Here he wrote:
“I am in Birmingham because there is injustice here…
I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
I am moved by the wording King uses in these pronouncements. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. The very structure of reality is interrelated. It is as if we can’t get out of this. It is the nature of this life. If, then, this is the way it is, then, again what is the way through?
Our conversations on race and other oppressions over the last years have been focused on systems. Individual actions, while still a critical part of our liberation work, will only get us so far. We must also address the larger institutional manifestations of oppression that grow out of systems. Systems of white supremacy that permeate our educational, criminal justice, and economic institutions. These systems impact our individual actions and in turn our individual actions impact and affirm the oppressions embedded in these institutions.
But…just as a system can oppress – can it too liberate? Our interdependence exists in a system – an eco-system – a system of mutuality, relationship and common cause. We are bound in a larger, cosmic system of inter-relatedness whether we are aware of it or not.
Are we destined to get tangled and overwhelmed within the challenges that this interdependence, interrelatedness creates? Or is there way to use this – to lean on this – to live into this nature of reality toward action and social transformation?
Rev. William Barber, in his book, “The Third Reconstruction,” explores our current moment alongside the Reconstruction of the past. From the first Reconstruction directly after the Civil War that saw advances in public education and voting rights and yet would eventually cement segregation into the fabric of our nation and usher in the era of Jim Crow - to the second Reconstruction – the civil rights movement - that integrated public schools and saw passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 - and yet would see the more abstract but just as harmful disintegration to social advances through gutting voting laws and social programs in communities of color that are still felt today. America, Rev. Barber argues – is in need of a Third Reconstruction – one founded on moral principles and built through a fusion organizing model – bringing together movements that tackle a variety of social oppressions – interwoven and interdependent - to move forward together.
Picking up the early beginnings of King’s Poor People’s Campaign that he had begun before his death, Barber and others have been organizing in North Carolina since 2008 (in fact there is a MA chapter of the Poor People’s Campaign right here in our state). Their efforts, known as “Moral Mondays” brought together groups addressing issues of criminal justice reform, immigrant rights, healthcare access, LGBTQ rights, climate change, and on and on to engage in direct action in service to a moral movement. Organizers hailed from a variety of faith traditions – Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu…Organizing their movements around specific moral issues of our time allows this diverse group of individual causes to advance a social transformation agenda together. To realize their dependence on each other. To realize that what affected one, affected all.
Barber, in his work, points out that fusion coalitions are not about “simple transactions where I support your issue if you support mine. We must learn how our issues intersect in a comprehensive moral agenda that demands transformation of everyone.” Furthermore, this fusion organizing must resist the notion of what Barber calls a “one moment mentality.” “We are building a movement!” he says, “No one victory will usher in beloved community; no single setback can stop us. We are building up a new world, moving forward together toward freedom and justice for all.”
I love this…let us resist the notion of one moment, one person, one agenda – and turn our attention instead to movement. Not moment, but movement. The thing about interdependence, that for me as a faith touchstone, is that it is contained in movement. In relationships.
And it echoes much of what King called for so many decades ago. Again, in his letter from the Birmingham Jail, King called out the white moderate as a greater threat to freedom than the KKK, for among other things, their admonishment of direct action and constant urging to wait for a more convenient season to act. King wrote:
“For years now I have heard the word, “wait…”
This “wait” has almost always meant “never…”
We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that “justice too long delayed is justice denied…”
Waiting blocks movement and the movements that abound in our midst – each in its own way attempting to usher in a transformed world. As Barber reminds us, we must be part of not only a moment, but of the greater movement and action of this world toward justice. Like UU theologian Theodore Parker proclaimed and that King would affirm throughout his life – this movement that bends the moral arc of the universe toward justice.
I know that in this moment – talk of moving can feel wearisome, if not impossible. This pandemic has literally impacted our ability to move with lockdowns, quarantine, and isolation. It has made our social challenges more entrenched, more oppressive, and more deeply felt.
But here is where I lean on this notion of interdependence.
Back at Boston University, as the ecological justice conference I attended was wrapping up, one of the speakers began to pull together all these threads for us – how the forces of racism, classism, and entwined injustices intersected and interwove together – but then they finished by saying, “But that’s the good news …”
The “good news?” How could that possibly be the good news?
He went on… the good news was that because of this entanglement when you addressed any one of these realities you impacted them all – you alleviated some of the conditions of the others. Like when you're working on a knot that seems impossible to untangle and all of a sudden you move one piece of thread or another and they all fall into place, release and open in your fingers, like magic. These networks of causations created tangles, yes, but they also created opportunities through which we could work to keep moving toward a more just and equitable world.
When the intersections, the snarls and ravels, of our world’s deep deep wounds seem insurmountable – interdependence becomes, for me at least, a way through. It brings me energy and resolve to know that I am not alone, our work in this world is not done alone. And that is a comfort. We are part of this complex network of mutuality and dependence—something much greater than ourselves. When we tire of moving, when a cause fails, when resolutions end in stalemate—there are others in our midst whose tailwinds we can draw on to keep us moving.
Dawna Markova in our reading pronounced: “I choose to risk my significance;/to live so that which came to me as seed/ goes to the next as blossom/ and that which came to me as blossom, / goes on as fruit.” Our singular significance is tied to the ways that we are connected to the movement and movements around us. We don’t need to create the seed, blossoms or fruit – we are called instead to keep them moving.
We contribute our individual movement through this world, in our actions, our presence, all the ways big and small that we show up in the name of justice and fellowship…we weave those movements into the larger social movements around us – imbuing these systems with our love, compassion and action. And…and…we draw sustenance, energy, and vision from the greater movement of the Divine in our midst. Like the river we sang about in our meditation – peace runs through us. When we go with this – swim with that Great current – lean into that Holy tailwind – our movements are compounded, magnified, interwoven with the streams and rivulets around us to create an unstoppable force.
So let us not wait. Let us turn this moment into movement in whatever ways we can in these challenging days. Know that we are part of an inescapable network of care and commitment. A network, sometimes a web, sometimes an entanglement, that catches us when we stumble, lets us rest when we are weary, and gives us tailwinds to keep going when the storm is raging on. May we risk our significance to this larger call to live interdependently and remember that we are the movement of love through the threads of reality’s interrelatedness, we are the threads, the conduits through which the moral essence of life unfolds and hopefully and ultimately bends toward justice.