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9.11.16 Homily “Gathered Here” 1

Journeying Together

Some of you may have noticed a subtle change in the title of this morning’s

sermon from what was announced in a previous Weekly Bits to what is on

the order of service today. Originally, I took the first part of today’s title

from a book written by Unitarian Universalist author Conrad Wright: Walking

Together.

And then, last Sunday, as Aidan and I were driving home and talking about

covenant and inclusion, he said, “Then don’t say ‘walking’.” I have to admit, I

swore in my car at that moment—not because of his reply, but because it

was a reminder I wished I hadn’t needed. You see, all this summer, I’ve been

working on the latest challenge for me in inclusive language: removing

ableist language from my vocabulary. Some of you may know what I mean

by that; please bear with me while I give a brief explanation for those who

do not.

© 2016 Diana K. McLean


Ableist language is language that presumes that a particular kind of body,

with particular abilities, is the norm or the ideal—language that we use

often, especially when we are talking about social justice work: language

about walking together, standing on the side of love, taking one more step,

marching towards justice, and so on. Nothing is inherently wrong with these

words in and of themselves, but when all of our metaphors are about bodies

that work in a particular way, we are putting a barrier up that tells people

with differently-abled bodies that they are not part of what we envision

ourselves to be. This excludes people as surely as our building would if it

had no wheelchair-accessible ramp and no elevator.

Although awareness of ableism is new to many of us, the idea that language

can either include or exclude people is not. Let me illustrate with a story I

told the Social Justice Committee in our meeting after worship last Sunday.



On the first Sunday that my family ever attended a Unitarian Universalist

church in the early 1980s, my parents were discussing it in the car on the

way home, and my mom said how pleased she was with the inclusive

language. My dad asked what she meant, and she said, “the minister said

‘men and women’ instead of just men.” My dad replied, “Well, everyone

knows that when “men” is used that way, it includes women.” Mom said,

“How would you feel if we always said ‘women’ and you would have to just

understand that it included you, as a man?” Once she asked that, he

immediately understood, and he went on to challenge sexist language in his

military workplace.

In 2016, we almost never hear “men” used to mean “all people.” Our

Unitarian forebears talked about the Fatherhood of God and the

Brotherhood of Man; now we would never do so. We heard in the Story for

All Ages last week about how our hymnal changed to have language that

included women.



Similarly, in 2016, we do not hear the widespread use of racial slurs that

were common a generation or two ago, except from people and groups we

now readily identify as racist, including white supremacists.

Those language changes—changes that were uncomfortable for many to

make as they were becoming the new normal—are second nature to us

now, something we do without thinking.

But now, a generation later, we are slowly coming to understand that there

are still people we exclude from our language. For example, we now know

that gender is not the simple binary we once believed it to be. There are

people—some of whom are my dear friends, and some of whom are my

colleagues in Unitarian Universalist ministry—who do not fit that false

binary, whose knowledge of themselves does not fit with man or woman,

with the pronouns he or she, with the language of “brothers and sisters” that



we sing in some of our hymns. For those people, failing to use broader

language—language about our human family, or siblings, for example,

rather than brothers and sisters—is an emotional injury. I have heard it

described as dying from a thousand small cuts—being constantly reminded

that they are outside of some imaginary “normal” that the language upholds.

I spoke last week about church being a home, a refuge. I don’t want our

church to be a place where people are wounded—there is enough wounding

happening in the wider world. And yes, changing language so that we don’t

wound our transgender and genderqueer and gender fluid loved ones may

be hard, may be uncomfortable, for some of us. Our discomfort does not

supersede their right to be treated with dignity and respect. Our first

principle calls us to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of

every person—and when we choose easy habits of language over the

named hurt of real people, we are not living most fully into our first

principle.



Similarly, when we use language about standing and walking and marching

and stepping, we are not honoring the worth and dignity of those who sit,

who roll, who move in different ways or do not move at all.

Yes, this means that between binary gender language and ableist language,

many of the songs in our hymnal are problematic in ways we are just

beginning to recognize. It will take time for changes to happen, just as it

took time to change from an entirely male language for both humanity and

divinity to a language that included women; changing “men” to “men and

women” and “brothers” to “brothers and sisters.” Now that we know that

there are more changes needed to fully welcome all who might find a home

with us, can we fail to make those changes?

I can’t.



Let me tell you another short story. As most of you know, I was ordained in

July. Ordination is perhaps the single biggest event in a minister’s career,

followed by installation in a congregation that has called us to serve it. In

both of those rituals, ordination and installation, the details are important

and often laden with emotional significance for the minister. Many ministers

have been thinking for years, all through our formation process, about what

our ordination day might be like. I know that I had been thinking for years

about which of my favorite hymns we would sing together at my ordination.

One of them was a song traditionally used as the Processional at both

ordinations and installations—sung by the congregation as the gathered

clergy process in to begin the service. The title of that hymn is “Rank by

Rank Again We Stand.”

You hear the problem there, right? Even if before I began this sermon, you

wouldn’t have?



I certainly couldn’t fail to hear it, largely because a colleague who sits more

often than stands and rolls more often than walks brought my attention, and

the attention of hundreds of others, to it at General Assembly this June. This

colleague and others with less visible mobility challenges were struck by the

number of songs in worship at General Assembly that used language about

walking, standing, marching, and stepping, and they wondered where their

place was in all of that language. Where could they see themselves in the

worship, in the messages? Partway through General Assembly, the

colleague made a sign that simply said “ouch” and held it up each time we

sang lyrics that included ableist language.

I said last week that church is more than a home, more than a refuge—it is

a place where we are both challenged and encouraged to be our best

selves. It is a place where we are asked, as my Dad was thirty-some years

ago, to consider whether “the way we have always done it” is the right way

to continue doing it.



There are those who call this “political correctness,” many of whom say that

in a tone that makes it clear they resent being asked to be “politically

correct.” I would urge us to respond that it is not political in the least—it is

compassion. It is covenant. It is how we choose to journey together—in love,

and with a willingness to change when our old habits cause others pain or

act as barriers to their full welcome.

We have a ramp at the back of this building to allow people who roll instead

of walking to enter our space. It’s not perfect, but it’s something. The

question I would ask is, once they are in our space, have we welcomed

them into our liturgy? Into our imagery? Into how we define who is part of

“us”?

Covenant is a crucial piece of our faith tradition, so you’ll hear me talk about

it a lot. Part of covenant is doing exactly what my son did in our car last



Sunday—naming it when one of us falls out of covenant. My language

transgression was small compared to some of the ways we humans violate

our commitments to ourselves and each other, but it can serve as an

illustration of something else I’ve learned from our Unitarian Universalist

youth in recent years.

There’s a simple practice, often referred to as “ouch/oops”, that can call us

back to covenant when we slip. Remember the “ouch” sign I told you about

earlier, the one my colleague held up in General Assembly? The ouch means

covenant was broken. Any of us can use it. Imagine sitting in a meeting, or a

social context, and hearing someone make an offensive joke, or speak to

someone in a disrespectful way. I would imagine all of us have experienced

moments like that—and most likely, we wondered how to speak up, or if to

speak up at all. Well, the youth have offered us an easy way; just one word.

Say “ouch”…and then let the person you’ve said it to ask why you said it.

Most likely, their answer will start with some version of “oops”—in other



words, they didn’t mean to cause the ouch. Now, here’s the tricky part—

there’s a third step. There’s ouch (that hurt), oops (I didn't mean to cause

hurt), and then: own the impact. That means that even if you intended no

pain, you acknowledge that pain was in fact caused.

Putting this back in the context of language, this is what that might look

like. If I say, “My sermon title for Sunday is Walking Together: A People of

Covenant” and someone says “ouch”, I will most likely immediately catch

that I slipped and used ableist language. But imagine that I didn’t. I would

pause, and calmly—not defensively—say something like, “Could you tell me

what prompted that ouch?” Then someone could say to me, “Well, “walking

together” is a metaphor that privileges bodies that can walk over those that

can’t.” At that point—assuming I didn’t swear like I did in my car when Aidan

called me on exactly that language—I would start with “oops” because my

choice of language really was an accident. But if I stop at oops, I’m asking

the other person to take responsibility for the impact of my words. So



instead, I’d say something like this, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t intend to use

exclusionary language, and have been working on that. I can hear, though,

that my choice of words caused pain, and I’m sorry.”

Like any new habit, this can feel awkward at first. I’m willing to feel awkward

if that’s how I can cause other people less pain. A colleague of mine, Lori

Gorga Hlaban, posted on Facebook this week, “Words matter. It is not true

that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."

I learned that as a child - but really: words can break one's spirit.”

My goal is to avoid breaking anyone’s spirit.

That doesn’t mean I’ll be perfect. I slipped in my sermon title choice; I’ve

slipped before and will again. We all make mistakes. In fact, Unitarian

theologian James Luther Adams, reflecting on the work of Jewish theologian

Martin Buber, told us that human beings are “promise making, promise



keeping, promise breaking” creatures. Somewhere along the way, someone

added “promise renewing” to that list: we are promise making, promise

keeping, promise breaking, promise renewing” creatures. The renewal part

of that is just as important as the making and keeping—because, being

human, we will sometimes break our promises, and then our choice is to

walk away from relationship, or to repair it by renewing our covenant with

each other.

Back in Candidating week in June, in my sermon on the day you called me to

be your minister, I shared with you a question that inspires much of what I

do in ministry: “For whom does your heart break?” Covenant calls us to

prevent as many of those heartbreaks as we can, and when possible, to heal

those we cannot prevent. That’s what promise renewing is about.

At its very core, what this is about for me is choosing love. Choosing to offer

love rather than indifference or invisibility or outright denial to another



human being. Choosing to respond to “ouch” with more than a shrugged

“oops” and no change in behavior, or worse yet, not even an oops but a

complaint about being told “ouch.” Our covenant asks that we treat each

other with respect, and from there it is not such a long leap to love.

Our covenant may be literally with each other—as in congregations that

develop a covenant of right relations, a written commitment of how they

aspire to be with each other, a process which the Governing Board and I will

be introducing here this year. However, the covenant we Unitarian

Universalists are called to live is bigger than that. Our roots in Judaism and

Christianity talk about covenants between humans and God; we may talk

instead about a covenant we make with Life with a capital L. If we aspire to

that kind of covenant, no one is outside it. Everyone is within the reach of

our love and our compassion.



Imagine the world if we live into that kind of covenant. Perhaps our mission

—the bigger mission behind all the work we do—is simply this: to journey

together, putting more love into the world as we go.

More love. Less pain. Fewer broken spirits. That is the world I want to live in,

the world I believe we can create, one action at a time, one thoughtful word

at a time.

May it be so.


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