1 A Theology of Relinquishment and Solidarity The Rev. Dr. Lucy Hitchcock Seck Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Miami June 1, 2008 At the movie on Friday night, which depicted the Biblical excuses some churches use to oppress gays, David Traupman reminded me that gay pride month starts today. I remembered I had a lavender robe so I am wearing it in solidarity with Gay Pride Month. The web site of the Bay Area Unitarian Universalist Church tells the following stories about the origins of the pink triangle and an example of solidarity with those forced to wear the Yellow Star of David. The Holocaust, during World War II, took more than six million Jewish lives. Many people do not realize that other groups also were targeted for extinction, including the mentally retarded, Gypsies, and homosexual men and women. Nearly a quarter-million gay men and lesbians perished in Hitlers death camps. Prisoners were forced to wear identifying symbols on their sleeves. People of Jewish descent were identified by a yellow Star of David. Homosexual men were branded by an upside-down pink triangle, while lesbians were branded by a black one. Today, the pink triangle is a symbol of liberation and pride worn on buttons, lapel pins, tee-shirts, and even car bumper stickers to remind gay, lesbian, and bisexual people of the oppression they have suffered historically and to signal their refusal to be silent again. There is a story that relates how people have defied oppression. When Denmark fell to the Nazi armies in 1940, the German occupation authorities immediately decreed that all Jews wear the yellow Star of David on their sleeves at all times, to facilitate their identification for transit to the concentration camps. Legend has it that the very next morning King Christian X, the aging Danish monarch, came out of the palace 1for his morning walk wearing a yellow Star of David on his coat, thus expressing his solidarity with the persecuted minority. Word quickly spread about this silent and non-violent act of defiance and soon many other Danes were wearing the symbol on their sleeves. The populations compassion and resistance may have contributed to the fact that almost all of Denmarks Jews survived the barbarism of the holocaust that took the lives of most European Jews. Despite many advances in recent years, bisexual, gay, lesbian and/or transgender people continue to face oppression and persecution in the United States. Many heterosexuals wear or display the inverted pink triangle or stickers to express their solidarity with bisexual, gay, lesbian and transgender people.

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http://home.earthlink.net/~bauuccwcc/id30.html (Bay Area UU Church)

2 I suspect you have heard both these stories before, but they bear repeating. If we think about it, we can identify the symbols that identify those groups who remain oppressed in current society although they may not be worn on the sleeve. And, if we think about it, we could discover ways to be in solidarity with any of the oppressed groups on our accountability chart. My intent in this sermon entitled, a Theology of Relinquishment and Solidarity is to give a religious response to the social stratification and oppression depicted in the Circles of Accountability we created a few weeks ago. It is easy to slip into the impression that the intent of gathering a congregation is primarily to bring like-minded people together. Like-minded Unitarian Universalists are intelligent, curious, iconoclastic, well-read, and eager to be part of a nurturing, mutually affirming, trustworthy and affable community. We like to talk, sometimes also to listen; and we like to cook and eat together. That is our version of communion. We also like to think of ourselves as a justice-seeking community. We can celebrate two justice projects we participated in that have recently achieved victories. Burger King finally succumbed to activist pressure and granted a penny a pound increase in compensation to tomato workers. I am sure the Giant Red Tomato with many of your signatures was the turning point in their resistance! Also, the Fisher Island employers agreed to allow certain segments of their employees to join the SEIU union and they agreed to enforce better treatment of their employees. Fisher Island is the most affluent zip code in the United States. It is home to people in the upper 1% of income in the world, sometimes called the capitalist class which sets the standards, the rules for how society currently works. At least now, there is a possibility for the labor that serves them to be organized to be in dialogue about the conditions and benefits they work under. Historically, solidarity among workers has achieved such things as the forty-hour work week, pension funds, social security, and safety on the job. In recent years, unions have been decimated by government and court decree, as well as corporate power including the power to move to places where the rules are fewer and workers and the environment may be abused for profit. We can be proud that members of our congregation were part of these efforts for justice. Religions and their scriptures have had economic justice at the center of the faith work they describe. The central story of Judaism is the rebellion against the Pharaoh in Egypt and the exodus across the Red Sea toward the Promised Land. The message of the prophets was to question the power, authority and wealth of kings and sometimes priests. The central messages of Jesus ministry were about helping those who were marginalized, and overturning the power of the money-changers and the empire. The early Christian communities, inspired by Paul, were places where goods and services were shared communally. One of the five pillars of Islam is the giving of alms to the poor. So, while all these religions seek to build like-minded communities, the centering raison dtre was to restore welfare to people who were marginalized, who were powerless and who were poor and to restore peace to the worlds in which they lived.

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We have observed through the ages, that this intent and the scriptures which support it have been adulterated and ignored even by people who say they are Jews, Christians and Muslim. Many today might even say that it is silly to ask the affluent to pass through the eye of the needle, to give away their possessions in order to enter the Kingdom of Shalom. As we saw on the Accountability Circles, the direction of most people is to achieve more and more of what the center of the diagram offers: Power and Privilege. In this country we even call it the American Dream. The problem with this direction and this dream is that it is billed as an individual journey and, to achieve it, it is necessary to compete, to have winners and losers. The current reality TV series show this explicitly. We get to watch the competition, the eliminations, the responses of the losers and the winners. We are taught to use and abuse each other to get ahead. We are seeing it in politics as well. It is necessary to show what is wrong with the other guy so that we can beat them out by beating them up. Another problem with this phenomenon of getting ahead is that we also use up and abuse the earth and dont count the cost. Now, with the industrialization of places like Asia we, Americans, are competing for those resources with other players who werent in the game before. One of the reasons, we are told for the rise in the cost of oil, is that China now also wants automobiles to replace bicycles and horse-drawn carts. More cars, more factories: more pollution of the atmosphere. We have no right to complain. Another reason for the rise in the cost of oil is that the wealthy can buy and stockpile quantities when the price is low, hold it off the market, and make a killing with slow release as the supply decreases. We will soon see the same with real estate. The wealthy are able now to buy up homes at bargain prices as the banks seek to get rid of the foreclosed properties. People will always need lodging and will have to buy once again. The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. I dont mean to be reciting doom and gloom. I mean to point to the way out, a way out that can come through religion, that is by people of faith binding together. The faith is in a path of justice, equity and compassion; the faith is affirming the worth and dignity of every person, including those who do not wear the symbols of wealth; the faith is ultimately in a world community, an interconnected web of all existence of which we are a part. Our UU Principles. The theology of our liberation from a social structure designed to create winners and losers is necessarily a theology of relinquishment and solidarity. Relinquishment is not only a relinquishment of too many goods, a relinquishment of monetary surplus beyond what we need for Thoreaus spartan essentials of a good life. It is not only a relinquishment of the obsession with consumption whether of food, electronic devices or books. It is not only a relinquishment of the overuse of carbon, for transportation (cars and air travel), for air conditioning and heat. It is the relinquishment of a worldview we have been sold since we were small. It is relinquishing competition for cooperation. It is relinquishing the dream of individual power and prosperity for communitarian sharing of power and advantage. It is turning from using the earth and

4 her resources to loving the earth and getting our heart satisfaction from preserving the goodness of the plants and animals, the air and the water. Theology is typically a word that somehow describes God or the holy. A theology of relinquishment calls the earth sacred and values community and relationships over privatization and individualism. A theology of solidarity calls us to stand with those who are the allies of any of the groups we have described as marginalized. It means that when we see a worker abused, we will stand beside them. We will interrupt our personal journey to speak up and say aloud what is wrong. If at work, we get a raise and notice that a co-worker of color does not, we will take the chance of annoying our boss or diminishing our gain and speak up, not just let it pass. If driving to church, we could relinquish the freedom to decide where we want to go next and instead carpool with those closest to us and arrange our destinations with others we would be in solidarity with the earth. If we wear a pink triangle or a star of David, we relinquish the ability to pass as straight or Christian or whatever is the more acceptable category. Sharon Welch writes, Liberation faith is conversion to the other, resistance to oppression, the attempt to live as if the lives of others matter. And not just any other, like our kids and our friends, but others who have fewer advantages than we do. This is not an easy message. It is a message that says we are called, if we are a religion, to move beyond the satisfaction of our own selves. Our religion has made a good beginning on addressing issues of gender and sexual preference, but we have barely touched economic injustice, class and the intersection of race, disability, national origin and economic disadvantage . Here too, we are not an inner city church. Few people stop by to ask for money. We rarely see homeless people on our land. We have to go out of our usual paths to see people with all their teeth pulled, to see people who are being evicted from their homes, to see children who cannot read and cannot afford to go to college. The next step after the Welcoming Congregation is to take a self-evaluation and a congregational evaluation of any advantages we have that are getting in the way of community, are harming the earth, and are undermining the UU Principles we say we stand for. Maybe we can wear our turquoise wristbands that say Unity to remind us to stand in solidarity and to relinquish the world view of separation and me first. The God we seek is one who calls us to take off our blinders and see the true water in which our culture swims and to ask ourselves whose side are we on.