DO THE BEST THINGS IN THE WORST TIMES

 A Sermon given September 21, 2025 

At High Street Unitarian Universalist Church

Macon, Georgia

Guy’s walking down the street not paying attention so he trips on something and he falls in a hole. Sprains his leg good so he can’t stand up, and that wouldn’t do him any good because the hole is deep. The sides are sheer, and he can’t get a handhold. 

So he’s lying there and a priest walks by. Guy shouts, “Hey, Father, can you help me? I’m down in this hole and I can’t get out.”

Priest looks over the side, sees he’s in there deep and says, “I’m on my way somewhere but I’ll pray for you.” He prays over the hole, goes on.

Guy’s getting cold and he’s feeling desperate. Doctor walks by. Guy yells, “Hey, Doc, can you help me? I’ve fallen down this hole and I can’t get out.”

Doctor looks over the edge, says, “This isn’t really my area so I’ll write you a consultation.” So he writes it up, throws it down. He goes on.

Now’s it’s getting darker and the guy’s feeling pretty hopeless. He’s cold and his leg hurts. He starts crying and he’s not sure if he’s ever getting out.

Homeless guy walks by and looks down in the hole, sees the guy crying, and he jumps in and sits in the dirt next to him. 

Guy just about explodes, says, “What are you doing? I need help getting out of here and instead you jump down with me! What’s wrong with you?”

Homeless guy takes off his coat and puts it over the other guy’s shoulders. Says, “You looked like someone who could use a friend, and here I am. Besides, I’ve been down here before and I know how to get out.”

The Parable of the Good Samaritan is so ubiquitous in American culture most of us can probably tell it off the top of our heads. Admittedly, this version owes more to Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing than to the New Testament, but like theologian Karl Barth said, “Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both,” but nobody gets a newspaper anymore, so we’ll go with a TV show

Here's a real life version from theologian Diana Butler Bass. In a sermon from 2022 she writes about riding a steep escalator when an elderly man ahead of her collapsed, tumbling down the steps, bleeding. People came running and they lifted him and found a bench to lay him on. A waiter from a restaurant brought paper towels and someone else had a water bottle. Blood running down his face, the elderly man tried waving them off, saying it was all right, he was fine. Someone called for an ambulance and the crowd waited with him until the ambulance arrived and he was wheeled out by EMTs. She says, “We all shook hands and went on our separate ways.” 

That’s great, isn’t it? A spontaneous act of help, a crowd of people coming together to make themselves useful and remaining with the injured until he’s tended to by professionals. Great story. 

Then she goes on. “About three weeks later, I was crossing a street…and I tripped, landing spread-eagle in the crosswalk. My purse flew one direction, my glasses another. My hands were scuffed and bleeding from my feeble attempt to break the fall. And my knee hurt.” She was goggle-eyed and cried because she knew she was in danger.

Butler Bass was 62 when this happened. “A car stopped, and a woman opened the driver’s side door…[but] instead of helping, she began to yell at me. ‘What’s wrong with you? Get up! You’re blocking traffic!’ When I didn’t answer, she shouted, ‘Are you deaf?’ and she leaned on her car horn. I crawled across the street to the far corner. ‘Idiot!’ she shouted as she drove away. I sat on the curb sobbing. No one asked me how I was; no one helped. Several people walked by without comment, turning their gaze from the rattled, bleeding woman on the sidewalk.”

She concludes, “Occasionally, you get to be the Samaritan. But sometimes you’re in the ditch.” 

Friends, we are in the ditch. 

Fred Rogers’ mother famously told him in an emergency, look to the helpers. But what if there aren’t any helpers around? Butler Bass writes, “sooner or later, we’ll all be in the ditch…Splayed on that road, I didn’t care who helped me. I just needed help.” That’s the real point of the Parable, she points out, citing Amy-Jill Levine, a scholar of parables. Where most of us associate with the Samaritan Levine insists that Jesus’ hearers, Jewish hearers, would have identified as the wretch in the ditch. “’I’d rather die than acknowledge that [a Samaritan] saved me’; ‘I do not want to acknowledge that a rapist has a human face’; or ‘I do not recognize that a murderer will be the one to rescue me.’” Jews of Jesus’ time were certain that the Samaritans weren’t, in the phrase popular today, sending their best people. That Samaritans were the descendants of rapists and murderers and worshipped at a corrupt Temple. Levine writes that “a contemporary version of the parable would turn the Good Samaritan into the ‘Good Hamas Member.’” The real message of the parable is that “Whoever shows up—even your enemy—especially your enemy—is your neighbor.” 

Let me give you a for instance from my own life. My wife and I work with dog rescue groups. We’re currently fostering two blind chihuahua pups and we go to a lot of foster events. One of the most visible members also appearing at these events are this guy I'll call Frank and his wife. Now, there’s no question they’re good fosters or members in good standing. But I’m leery of Frank. Very white, overfed, bluff, he appears at every event wearing an unconcealed gun at his hip. Like the Paiutes will race over the hill to rustle the dogs any minute. I’ve strongly suspected he has a MAGA hat he only wears around the house.

I know where my antipathy toward him comes from. I’m afraid of guns. I was shot at once and I don’t like firearms anywhere near me. I don’t trust the people with them, even cops, even my wife’s family, even my own family, not to suddenly take a potshot at me. 

A couple months ago at one of the adoption events, I drove over a curb and got a flat tire. Jayne went in with the pups and I tried to change the tire. In vain. It turned out my car, having originated in the wintry central Midwest, had acquired an accumulation of rust on the underside that in retrospect I’m surprised I hadn’t put my feet Flintstone style through the floor when braking. 

While I was mismanaging my solo tire changing, I saw Frank out of the corner of my eye. I hoped he’d go on but he came over to the side of the car and said, “I bet you can use some help.” I swallowed what little pride I still had invested in doing this and said, “Thanks.” We tried this and that, none of which worked, but in the process we both worked up a good sweat. That’s when he said, “You’re wearing patchouli, aren’t you?” Yes, I was. I like the smell of patchouli. I even wash our clothes in patchouli-scented detergent. I espected grief from him.

Frank said something like, “Boy, that takes me back to my hippie days. I used to always get the evil eye from the guys I went to school with, and when we moved out of the commune my wife made me stop wearing it in public.”

Shock can’t begin to suggest the look on my face. You could have driven a Toyota in my mouth my jaw dropped so much.

Butler Bass concludes, “Down [in the ditch] we feel helpless, hurt, afraid, and angry. We stare in shock at those who threaten to run us over if we don’t get out of their way. In the ditch, we have the chance to learn the most radical truth of all—even our enemy is our neighbor.” 

Find the helpers. Would Donald Trump or JD Vance be acceptable helpers? That’s stacking the deck because, while they could have a change of heart and offer their hands, the scenario itself is so unlikely as to be a joke. Let’s make it more probable. Do you accept help from the guy wearing a MAGA hat? From the woman in the Marjorie Taylor Green tee-shirt? From the local Republican Party chair? 

It’s a hard question to answer, I know, and it’s their own extreme actions that make it hard. Keeping people accountable to their words and their deeds are an important part of keeping each other honest.

There’s a meme I’m sure you’ve seen, a New Yorker cartoon where one person says to another, “My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.” We might be tempted to subscribe to the solution offered by Rabbi Bob Alper who quipped when he moved his family to Vermont, “We’re too remote for cable so we have a satellite dish. We can pick up some pretty obscure stations, including a Jewish Cable Channel. Every hour a guy meanders on the screen and says, ‘You don’t wanna know.’” 

Okay, so maybe that’s not really a good solution. An apocryphal story about Margaret Mead says the first sign of civilization is a human femur that’s been broken and then healed. In the animal kingdom, you don’t heal from injuries like that. You become lunch. Let me acknowledge the other Bible allusion in my story. I’m talking about the part where the homeless guy takes off his coat and puts it around the guy’s shoulders and says, “You looked like you could use a friend.” I took that little bit from a comment in the Book of Job, specifically the end of chapter 2. 

These are the three friends of Job who, when they hear of the tragedies that befall him and his family, go to comfort him. He’s so changed they don’t even recognize him from a distance, and when they do, they weep, “they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads.” These three get a bad rap in most analyses because in the next chapter they try convincing Job that he’s somehow brought all his problems on himself. 

But let’s stay with the end of chapter 2. There, they do what a lot of people won’t do. “They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw his suffering was great.” They get down in the dirt and the dust and ashes with my man for a week—a week!—imagine that. And they keep their yaps shut because they know the only thing that will come out will be recriminations and poppycock about how you, my good friend Job, brought this all on yourself even if you don’t know how, but in my heart of hearts I know that isn’t going to give anyone anything but agita for Job and a smug feeling for me. 

There is a reason they would have done. Per psychology researcher Steve Taylor, for most of human history we’ve lived as tribes, and certainly the Bible qualifies as a tribal testament. Taylor writes, “There’s no reason why early human beings should be competative or individualistic. That would not have helped our survival at all. It would have actually endangered our survival.” He concludes, “There’s such a strong association between well-being and altruism that it would be foolish not to live altruistically.

This jibes with something I’ve observed, which is there are more “good” people than ones who take advantage of someone. In seminary I was taught Rabbi Edwin Friedman’s practice of the non-anxious presence, the guy just there in the house where tragedy has happened to provide support. Visit the lonely. Do the dishes or the laundry. Mow the lawn. Hold the baby. Stand quietly by, available.

In my title I call these The Worst Times, but make no mistake, these aren’t the worst times in world or even American history. To the contrary, everything considered, these are good times. Many of us have enough money to see to our needs if not our wants. Here. People aren’t being shot in the streets. Here. People aren’t dropping dead from preventable diseases. Here. Yet.

Some of us have seen some really bad times, some of our parents and grandparents lived through them. Maybe that’s what stings the most about these times. We’ve seen things get better. In my lifetime little black girls had to be escorted to school by US Marshalls. Black churches were bombed. The National Guard fired live ammunition into students protesting at Kent and Jackson State Universities. It was a long slog getting past a lot of that and some of us are in danger or have already lost the rights others worked and died for. In the annals of the 300,000 years homo sapiens have existed, these troubled times don’t even merit a footnote, let alone being called the worst. But these may qualify as the worst times many of us will live through.

The saddest part of all this that’s happening, the chaos, the pulling back of the smiling mask of bigotry and repression that many of us are seeing for the first time, but that has lain dormant underneath, is that there is no Samaritan coming to save us. We’re lying in the ditch or in the hole or creeping across the street. We’re on our backs like turtles. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, in the words of poet June Jordan, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” We are the homeless guy, the woman on the escalator, the gun-guy ex-hippie in the rain, the non-anxious presence. This is what we must do. Hold up the hurt and disillusioned. Feed the hungry. Shelter the unsheltered. Raise your voice for the voiceless and afraid. Don’t expect anything in return except the feeling of having done right. Do the best things in these worst times. 

Just Another Bad Joke

 I used to live on the rim of suburbs and small towns circling the Twin Cities. I attended seminary just north of Minneapolis and did much of my teaching and interning in that city. It's a beautiful city full of beautiful people. That there are two fewer of them today, both children, is much on my mind.

That people, including children, die in that city and too many others everyday sits heavily on my conscience. That they die from a disease to which we have a cure is ironic. That these children died in church during Mass is just another bad joke that doubles as irony. That their killer was someone who attended classes there as a boy and then killed as a girl is another.

Many of us see ourselves in the mother pictured above, running Pell Mell through the streets, not even taking the time to put on her shoes in the rush to answer the question, "Is my child safe?" There is always conflict when we consider murderers who may have been victims and I wish I could but I can't provide an answer to that. I hate Robin Westman for what she did but I would have loved Robert Westman for what he was going through. My friends in the trans~ communities are more conflicted than most and I don't envy them. All I can do that has any value is to be with them as they grieve. That is how the Beloved Community responds. Those of us who will, like Job's friends, sit wailing with them must also be ready to shield them from the assholes who frame this as confirmation of their bigotry. It is long past time to lay down the automatic weapons and other killing machines and, in the words of Minneapolis mayor Jacob Fry, wrap "our arms around these families with every bit of love that we can possibly show."

Capitalism will not survive trump

 

Mancur Olson showed that kleptocracy at the top stunts the growth of...countries. Having a thief for president doesn't necessarily spell doom; the president might prefer to boost the economy and then take a slice of a bigger pie. But in general, looting will be widespread either because the dictator is not confidant of his tenure, or because he needs to allow others to steal in order to keep their support.

Then further down the pyramid of wealth, development is thwarted because the rules and laws of the society do not encourage projects or businesses, which would be to the common good. Entrepreneurs don't establish official businesses (too difficult) and so don't pay taxes; officials demand ridiculous projects for their prestige or personal enrichment; schoolchildren don't bother to acquire irrelevant qualifications...

The rot starts with government but it afflicts the entire society There's no point in investing in a business because the government will not protect you against thieves. (So, you might as well become a thief.) There's no point in paying your phone bill because nobody can successfully take you to court (so there's no point being a phone company). There's no point getting an education because jobs are not handed out on merit (and in any case, you can't borrow money for school fees because the bank cannot collect on the loan, and the government doesn't provide good schools.) There's no point setting up an import business because the customs officials will be the ones to benefit (and so there is little trade, and so the customs office is underfunded and looks even harder for bribes.)...

[China's 'Great Leap Forward'] seemed to make sense, but it was the greatest economic failure the world has ever seen. Mao conducted economic policy based on the hidden premise that if people tried hard, the impossible would happen. Zeal alone was sufficient. Villagers were ordered to build steel furnaces in their backyards but had no iron ore to put into them. Some villagers melted down good iron and steel--tools, even doorknobs--in order to meet the quotas demanded by the state...

If industrial policy was a farce, agricultural policy was a tragedy...Mao ordered the people to kill grain-eating birds, and the population of insect pests exploded as a result. Mao personally redesigned China's agricultural techniques, specifying closer planting and deeper sowing to increase yields. Rice planted so closely together could not grow, but party officials, anxious to please Mao, staged shows of agricultural and industrial success. When Mao traveled by train to admire the fruits of his policy, local officials built furnaces along the railroad and brought rice from miles away to replant, at the officially specified density, in adjacent fields. Even this charade could not be maintained without the use of electric fans, which were used to circulate air and prevent the rice from rotting.

--From The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford, 2007 edition 

We Don't Go Golfing

 By now it's probable you have heard about the loss of over a hundred lives in the July 4th flooding of Texas' Guadalupe River. I'm not interested here in who's responsible for the lack of information or timely warnings. Those people will be identified and I hope they will face consequences.

What I am interested in here is the misinformation you may have heard or seen thanking Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum for having immediately dispatching rescue teams from her country to Texas to help in efforts there. This, in spite of the meanness, cruelty, and racism displayed by the trump administration's ICE efforts. But that is not true. The truth, I think, is better. 

On July 6th at 5 AM the Dirección de Protección Civil y Bomberos de Acuña, Coahuila (I could not hope to accurately write that out so it is also a link to their Facebook page), along with members of Fundacion 911, left for Kerrville to assist. This was in response to a request from Texas Equusearch, a search and rescue based in Houston. 

Direccion de Proteccion is located in Cuidad Acuna, near the Texas border and Kerrville and the Guadalupe River are 275 kilometers northeast.  Their response was not based on permission or arrangements. Both organizations are volunteer. While President Sheinbaum acknowledged them for their swift response, she did not claim to have contacted or facilitated them. 

The volunteers of Ciudad Acuna responded on their own. They did this because a call went out to a neighbor for help. As President Sheinbaum later said, "That is the people of Mexico. That is our culture." It is what we do in the Beloved Community. We don't go golfing. We put on our big boy and big girl pants and we respond. 

You Know It's Time to Act

 I like post-apocalyptic fiction as much as the next guy, but I've often wondered why there's such an emphasis on dystopia rather than on cooperation as the method for going on. In reality, guns and motorcycles and theft are only going to feed you or keep you safe for so long, and it won't help your contributions to the future, i.e., children. The term I often think describing these kinds of novels or movies or TV shows shouldn't be dystopia but nihilist. 

Recently I read The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson and I'd call it an excellent example of what I think is the proper way we need to think about anything like a post-apocalypse. Published in 2020, it presents a world facing the certainty of climate change with nothing having been done to slow it down or even address it. After a devastating heat wave kills millions of Indians over a course of weeks, the UN recognizes something must be done and empanels a ministry designed to focus on both the future and the development of ways to be certain there is one. Various countries, starting with India, decide to ignore the richer nations and their do-nothing procedures and jury-rig a program meant to help themselves first of all and benefitting all other nations secondarily. 

Not to spoil a 500+ page book, but this jump-starts a series of escalating programs and laws that manage to keep the earth turning for the near future. The reason I applaud this "science fiction nonfiction" (as Jonathon Lethem dubs it) and I suppose a reason it was named one of Barack Obama's favorite books of the year is because the solution doesn't lie in guns and marauding bands and white American individuals making heroic sacrifices but in the subtle use of economics, policy, and science to come to terms with our reckless disregard for responsible use. The world finally discovers it needs a Plan B.

What was it? Big parts of it have been there all along; it's called socialism. Or, for those who freak out at that word, like Americans or international capitalist success stories reacting allergically to that word, call it public utility districts...Public ownership of the necessities, so that these are provided as human rights and as public goods, in a not-for-profit way. The necessities are food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, health care, and education. All these are human rights, all are public goods, all are never to be subjected to appropriation, exploitation, and profit. It's as simple as that.

Democracy is also good, but again, for those who think this word is just a cover for oligarchy and Western imperialism, let's call it real political representation. Do you feel you have real political representation? Probably not, but even if you feel you have some, it's probably feeling pretty compromised at best. So: public ownership of the necessities, and real political representation...

[There] still has to be money, or at least some exchange or allocation system that people trust, which means the already existing central banks have to be a part of it, which means the current nation-state system has to be part of it. Sorry but it's true, and maybe obvious...It is what we've got now, and in the crux, when things fall apart, something from the old system has to be used to hang the new system on, hopefully something big and solid. Without that it's castles in air time, and all will collapse into chaos...It's like being hypnotized; you have to agree for it to work. So we are all hypnotized in a giant dream we hallucinate together, and that's social reality...

 [The] current order is so unequal, so unfair. Old story, of course. Biblical; detailed in Genesis; it's the oldest story, inequality, and never much changed from the start of civilization. So how can we change that? What do we do now?

Now, everyone knows everything. No one on the planet is ignorant of the real condition of our shared social existence. That's one real thing those stupid smartphones have done; you can be illiterate, many are, and still have an excellent idea of how the world works. You know the world is spinning toward catastrophe! You know it's time to act. Everyone knows everything. The invisible hand never picks up the check. The money is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed. Which is to say properly distributed. So now things have broken. We broke them; we broke them on purpose! Riot, occupation, non-compliance, general strike: breakdown. Now it's time for Plan B. Time to act...

Hope and the Courage to Act on It

 

I'm conflicted, I admit. Not a day has gone by since the ignobility of the November vote that there hasn't been an idea floated, an action taken, a decree made, an insult delivered, and thousands upon thousands of lies told, and I have felt the need to talk about it. I've been concerned that, in the wake of the complicity of most media in the pretense all this is normal, there won't be a note for future generations, if there are any, that there were people watching and writing it down and recognizing the wrongness of it all.

So I've felt it's fallen to me. But that's self-aggrandizing, almost worthy of trump himself, that anyone reads these missives, let alone they'll remember that there was someone commenting on it in a way that's worth holding onto. 

Besides, and maybe more importantly, I don't want to be that guy. I don't want what little attention I get to be for a list of lies and laments. That's all such notes would be because frankly just noticing this sort of stuff daily is exhausting. 

I want to be known, if at all, for keeping up a good word, for being the port in the storm, the one who keeps his head when all around them is chaos and dread. I do dread the chaos, of course, because not to do so is to give in to the lie that it's a kind of order, trump uber alles. 

I would be remembered like John Murray to whom is attributed this: 

You may possess only a small light, but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to hearts of men and women. Give them, not hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.

Quite some thought to be remembered by, isn't it? Of course, John Murray never said nor wrote this. It was attributed to a Time-Spirit counseling Murray in a 1951 pamphlet by Alfred Cole, and somehow made it into a Universalist Sunday text in 1962 and from there into The Larger Faith, the history of the Unitarian Universalists written by Charles Howe. 

But the point here is that, even if Murray didn't write it but Cole created it for his pamphlet, it is still a good distillation of what is important, that we leave people with hope and the courage to act on it. As Ken Davis writes in Don't Know Much About the Bible about the sayings of Jesus, "What's important is that someone said these things or wrote them down." Just as Jesus' words, whosever they may really be, remain a touchstone about how to behave with one another, so Cole's words are a prod to those who comment on the darkness and despair now. As Wayne Arneson reminds us, "The way is often hard, the path is never clear, and the stakes are very high." But "Take courage [because] you are not alone."

Let someone else keep the lists. I will uplift hope. 

Turtle mitzvah

It's a small thing, but isn't that what life is composed of? For my birthday I took a short road trip, just a day out and a day back, spending most of both days driving because I miss driving distances. I drove what William Least Heat Moon called Blue Highways, the state and local roads where you have to slow down when you're near a town or church or school. I wasn't in a hurry to get where I was going.

Where I went is Alabama, where I noticed 3 things: even middle aged men in nice cars don't mind losing a hub cap as one I followed for a length of time did so on a corner, and it bounced off a tree and flew back between us, missing my car by a couple feet; there were many houses, both in and out of towns, surrounded by fences, some houses nice but also many that were obviously abandoned, and often those were fenced in by stronger materials, leaving me wondering if the place was a former or current meth house; and near the Georgia border there was a stretch of about 10 miles with fire hydrants spaced every half mile where there were no houses in sight, and even between abandoned and tumbled down buildings.

I love that sort of driving, listening to the radio and watching the trees and trailers and folks in their yards go by slowly enough I could see them in detail. There was a thunderstorm I drove through for hours that closed 3 roads and a bridge I'd intended to take. I'm glad too because on one of those swtched-to roads I was on I crested a hill and made out a turtle crossing ahead of me. Or starting to cross, as he or she was just off the shoulder and aimed at the opposite side. I couldn't see any water on either side but that wasn't any of my business.

I stopped on the shoulder beside the turtle, who turned about and scurried under my car. I found it behind a wheel and picked them up with both hands and carried them across the road and a few feet past the shoulder where they splayed out all 4 feet and head and contentedly continued on their way. 

I'm not a believer in being directed by God or Fate or the Universe into doing something that makes a difference, but as I got back into my car I felt I'd done something that mattered, that left me feeling blessed. Jews say this is what we feel when we have done a mitzvah. It is a good feeling.