Day 14: Love is My Higher Power
The message below went out on Sunday, January 29, 2012 to those Standing on the Side of Love supporters who signed up for daily Thirty Days of Love emails. You can sign-up for the 30 Days of Love emails here.
In a moment of candor between a professor and myself several years ago, he said to me, “I love the Unitarians. You are a bright light in the world, but you do not understand evil.” I knew he was right. I had struggled with my own relativist notions of the concept… indeed I thought of it as a concept. I had rejected sin preferring the idea of original blessing, preferring the leap of faith made by stating that all beings have an inherent worth and dignity. My people, I thought, were a thoroughly modern people.
Until the 20th Century, both philosophy and theology were obsessed with the work of theodicy: a systematic understanding and justification of suffering and evil all the while defending God’s goodness. Great thinkers spent their lives trying to explain how evil could exist if God was omniscient (all knowing), omnipotent (all powerful) and omnipresent (everywhere). The problem of theodicy, of understanding evil while believing that goodness and love is a greater power, is perhaps a struggle Unitarian Universalists would do well to pick up again. It is not enough to simply ask why do bad things happen to good people? We must ask what is the vision of the people who would seek justice and equality and redemption and forgiveness in our world? We must ask, if love is a greater power, a higher power, what is our relationship to that? Are we merely individuals at play in a larger system that makes good people create bad consequences wishing it were otherwise?
Today’s action for 30 Days of Love is to hold a theological reflection discussion to think about this moment in time as a community and how our faith impacts our response to this moment.
Schedule a time to gather during or after services, or a time on another day, and use our 30 Days of Love Theological Reflection Guide to help your discussion. Download the PDF here:
Two summers ago, I travelled to Phoenix, AZ to participate in a mass rally against the racial profiling of American citizens and the arrests and deportations of people who had crossed the border without permission. I purchased a clerical collar for the event because I wanted to be recognized as minister when I was arrested. After our action, illegal in the eyes of the system, I sat in the basement of the 4th St. Jail along with five or six Latino activists; all of us in zip tie handcuffs. My collar attracted the attention of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the man behind the raids being carried out with the passage of SB 1070. There is no shortage of people who call this man evil. Just as there is no shortage of people who call this man a hero. As he stood over me, he asked, “Why are you here?”
Unfortunately, I answered him in a most juvenile and disingenuous way. I looked up in defiance and said “Jesus sent me.” This wasn’t true and I regret saying it. Sure, I might be able to spin some story about how Jesus stood up for the disinherited and I was trying to follow that mandate. But the truth is, I knew that Sheriff Arpio is a devout Christian and I was trying to insult him. I got the desired effect. He screwed up his face and walked away. Instead of being honest about my desire to be in relationship with that higher power of goodness and love I made a joke, and not a very good one.
The truth is, I am scared of taking on the mandate of living in the world guided by the idea that there is a love and goodness that will care for me and help me care for others. It is much easier, much safer to sit behind my intellectual analyses of a cold, systematic world where the banality of evil rules, where the micro-offenses of human beings slowly destroy us, where the source of our creation, God if you will, is indifferent at best. This is a fear of intimacy: intimacy with fellow humans as well as intimacy with God.
But if we are to be a part of the vision that brings healing and health to our nation we must step into the holy and prayerful practice of exploring intimacy. There is no better place for this type of study and reflection than our congregations.
Please take a moment to download the 30 Days of Love Theological Reflection Guide and to discuss this with your congregation. Download the PDF document:
There is a lot of healing left to do in this country and in the world. There is a lot of injustice and we are called as a people to do what we can to counter it. We can fight for justice as individuals, but I would rather do it as a community guided by a vision. So when someone asks us “Why are you here?” We can answer, “Because there is evil in the world. It comes in many forms ranging from brutal and immediate to the complex and bureaucratic. But evil is not the highest power. We are here because love and goodness is the highest power. We are here because love asked us to come, to sit before you and say this cannot happen any longer.”
