THE AUDACITY OF RECOLLECTION

 

A Sermon Delivered to 

High Street Unitarian Universalist Church

March 15, 2026

          I have few fond memories of the George W. Bush era, but I want to share another person’s memory. This is from then-Senator Barack Obama’s memoir The Audacity of Hope describing his 2004 swearing-in at the start of the second Bush administration.

A young Marine at the door politely indicated that the photograph session was over and that the President needed to get to his next appointment. But before I could turn around to go the President himself appeared in the doorway and waved me over.

’Obama!’ the President said, shaking my hand. “Come here and meet Laura. Laura, you remember Obama. We saw him on TV during election night. Beautiful family. And that wife of yours—that’s one impressive lady.’

’We both got better than we deserve, Mr. President,’ I said, shaking the First Lady’s hand and hoping I’d wiped the crumbs off my face. The President turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a bog dollop of hand sanitizer in the President’s hand.

’Want some?’ the President asked. ‘Good stuff. Keeps you from getting colds.’

Not wanting to seem unhygienic, I took a squirt.

’Come over here for a second,’ he said, leading me off to one side of the room. ‘You know,’ he said quietly, ‘I hope you don’t mind me giving you a piece of advice.’

’Not at all, Mr. President.’

He nodded. ‘You’ve got a bright future,’ he said. ‘Very bright. But I’ve been in this town a while and, let me tell you, it can be tough. When you get a lot of attention like you’ve been getting, people start gunnin’ for ya. And it won’t necessarily be coming from my side, you understand. From yours, too. Everybody’ll be waiting for you to slip, know what I mean? So watch yourself.’

…[As] we walked to the door I told him a few stories from the campaign. It wasn’t until he had left the room that I realized I had briefly put my arm over his shoulder as we talked—an unconscious habit of mine, but one that I suspected might have made many of …the Secret Service agents in the room, more than a little uneasy.

          Now that is audacity. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether it’s an example of disrespectful behavior, or the more common meaning of a bold move. You always chance, when you act audaciously, having your brashness be confused with rudeness. That sort of audacity, that willingness to boldly say or act because the stakes are too high not to, that we must present ourselves.

In this climate almost nothing is more audacious than remembering that it was June 16, 2015, 11 years ago, Donald Trump appeared at the top of an escalator with gold gilding in New York’s tower named for him. Who would have predicted at that time we would still be under his sway, let alone talking about him, all these years later?

          It should have been an indication what he was capable of when his first words on taking the stage were, “That is some group of people. Thousands!” According to contemporary news accounts there were, at best, a few dozen people in attendance, certainly no more than a hundred. Any others Trump imagined were on the other ends of cameras, of which there were also only a few, and except for Fox and CNN, those were all local. Any idea that the truth of the situation might temper his tendencies was smashed when, after his inauguration in January 2117, Trump’s factotum, Sean Spicer, reported Trump’s crowd size at “a million and a half” attendees while professional crowd counters came up between 3 and 600,000, well below the first inauguration of Barack Obama conservatively estimated at over 1,000,000 people. It is also instructive that this was the first time we heard the phrase “alternative facts.”

          It’s important to Trump that his White House continues, in the face of multiple facts, to trumpet his guesstimate. [It is also important because memory matters. John Gardner reminds us in Grendel, his novelization of the Beowulf legend, memory is supernal in the way that someone’s lies, deceitful, flattering untruths, as the monster puts it, “changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it…[They] who knew the truth remembered it his way—and so did I.”]

          Here’s one of my memories. January 2009 I was teaching a class at a suburban business that began at about the point Obama would be finishing up. I listened to his speech while I drove from another class. We thought it would never happen, and here it was, the first Black American president. And he was talking about things that were important to me. I recall his humble tone and willingness to reach out to others. Here’s an excerpt from his speech:

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation. But in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

          Now, I will remind you that, among other things, this was still three years before Joe Biden would convince Obama his position on marriage equality was outdated and he publicly supported same sex couples marrying, eventually becoming law. So even with the positives in that speech, there was greater room for better to come.

          I was so enthralled listening to this I sat in my car in the parking lot an extra 15 minutes, soaking up as much of that feeling as possible. Class, of course, began later than usual, but most of the other students walked in when I did. One, a Muslim woman from Africa, had arrived early and sat in another student’s car, and they listened to the entire speech together.

          [It may be worth noting that where I got this excerpt, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, promises a full transcript via a link to the White House. The White House has removed that transcript.]

          Am I remembering the lush sense of potential correctly? To test myself, I read an essay by one of my favorite New York Review writers, Darryl Pinckney, describing an appearance by then-Senator Obama in Indianapolis. “What Obama most projects is intellectual honesty, a sense that he has thought things through or is going to try to.”

          And a year later, writing about Obama’s inauguration: “President Obama’s speech was eloquent enough, starting with the fact that he used the word ‘I’ only three times throughout the course of his recollections on ‘the work of remaking America.’…[What] surprised many of us about Obama’s inaugural address was not the absence of rhetorical finery, but how basic and insistent was his reiteration of the premises on which he said we as a nation had always told ourselves we stood.”

          Further,

President Obama’s chastisement of the nation for the drift and low spirits of recent years exempted no one, including himself—everywhere he cautioned of the labor ahead…No slogans, no self-congratulation, but a definite end to the atmosphere of corruption. [He is pledged to transparency in governmental practice in order to ‘restore the vital trust between a people and their government…’]

In Harlem, they say that he is president of the world, [and the photographs of people watching the swearing-in ceremony from Kabul to Nairobi suggest that President Obama was at times so plainspoken in his speech in an effort to reach people who speak English in other countries, talking in a language the world could understand.] It was only after things were over that I remembered how much of the world had been watching…The dignity of the nation was gathered up into his assertion that ‘our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.’

The pride with which people came away from the Mall was owing in great measure to their profound respect for President Obama. As much as he tried to merge into his message, or to lower expectations of what he’ll be able to accomplish, I was moved by the thought that we hadn’t seen his like before.

         [I don’t have to tell you who looks pretty bad in contrast.]

Am I guilty of looking at the recent past with rose-colored glasses? I may be. But like looking at Washington, Lincoln, FDR, JFK, even Reagan and, now he’s safely dead, Jimmy Carter, it’s hard to take off those glasses when contrasting them with whatever era we might be reading from. A previous administration almost always looks better than the current one.

          But remember the things we’ve lost to a Trump administration. Perhaps calling these policies “lost” is incorrect. We haven’t mislaid them and however we might feel they haven’t been taken from us. The current administration has decided these are somehow out of reach, either because of finances or a strained morality, but we worked long and hard to achieve them, to convince enough people of their rightness that they understood with us that a sane, good society needs them. They are things we believe in.

          We believe in a person's sovereignty over their own body.  While the Dobbs v Jackson decision was reached after Trump was defeated the first time it was after he had appointed 4 conservative justices to the Supreme Court, including at least one who by rights should have been Obama's nominee. The right of a woman to make her own pregnancy decisions is, or should be, inviolate.  Likewise, the right of an individual to determine what body they’re comfortable in is sacrosanct.

We believe in the separation of church and state. As Obama said, Americans have the right to choose in a god or a discipline we believe, or choose not to believe, and the right not to be subordinate to someone else’s belief or nonbelief.  We believe in programs like USAID, that helped develop foreign policy and lessen poverty, enhance healthcare worldwide and make economies stronger. Prior to its dismantling, USAID was credited with preventing 75 million deaths, many of them in underdeveloped nations [in Africa and Asia.]

          We believe in an independent Center for Disease Control. In 2024 there were a total of 284 cases of measles; in 2025, a full year of the Directorship of Robert F. Kennedy Jr brought that number to a staggering 2283 cases. In these first 3 months of 2026 there are already 1281 cases.

          We believe in meaningful work. Just since Donald Trump assumed office again manufacturing lost 88,000 jobs, more than 10,000,000 people have been out of work for at least 6 months, over 4.7 million people are underemployed, unemployment among the young has jumped from 9.3% of job-seekers in 2023 to 13.9%.

What kind of quality can we put on our sense of safety or security in the actions of our government? How do we even measure that? After the disastrous rollout of Covid 19 prevention under Trump during which it was suggested by him we inject ourselves or swallow noxious chemicals, some intended for other species, or shining ultraviolet light up our system, 1,124,000 people have died. Since Trump’s reelection and expanded powers for ICE and the CBP 48 people have been reported dying in detention centers around the country, and another 8 people, famously including two who were videotaped, were also killed by ICE agents in public. For many of us this is shockingly new, but for just as many others it’s dismayingly familiar. A veneer has been pulled back to display the rot beneath.

          We’ve seen the sacrifice of DEI, Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, on the altar of the lies of wasteful government initiatives, preferential treatment, and hurt feelings. These programs helped correct past wrongs and contemporary setbacks. When we say we believe in DEI we echo our Unitarian Universalist values of an individual’s inherent worth and dignity, of justice, equity and compassion.

These are the ideas and policies we believe in. We fought long and hard and some of us died to achieve them, and just because Trump and his followers don’t share our8 belief doesn’t mean they are gone. It’ll take time but we’ll get them back.

          Because when you believe in an ideal like equality or feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless or treating one another with respect and dignity, it’s not something you can cross out of a budget. We bought those things with muscle and blood. It’s not a pet rock or platform shoes. We can’t live up to our best without them.

          It’s a truism among political wonks that a leader is someone who watches which direction the people are going and runs out ahead shouting, “Follow me!” We don’t elect a leader to tell us what to do, we elect one to inspire us to do better.

          Can we do better than Donald Trump? Yes, we can. Can we do better than Barack Obama? Yes, we can. I don’t know what that looks like but they’re out there. We’ll know them when we hear them, the belief, the certainty in their voice and actions that we can and must be better. To quote the title of a James Carville book from the 90s that popped down the memory hole, We’re Right, They’re Wrong. There’s nothing wrong with certainty in helping others. We must hold to that belief if we’re going to return those values to their proper place.

         

“What is Happening to Me?”

 

A Sermon Delivered to 

High Street UU Church, 

February 15, 2026

I used to live about 45 minutes from Minneapolis. My wife says that when I start out with something like that, I should give fair warning that I’m about to tell you an amusing anecdote about myself. But this isn’t amusing and as you’ll see I’m peripheral to the story. Like today, a lot of protests and rallies were happening in the Twin Cities. Most I attended were uneventful, but in September 2008 the Republican National Convention came to town. Joining about 10,000 others on the streets of St Paul, I took with me a young member of my congregation. Keith had been to some protests in his sleepy Wisconsin town but not a large gathering or one with a sizable police presence. I suggested to him before we got out of the car he should leave his backpack of cigarettes and jacket, phone, instruments, and homemade signs in the car. But he was sure he’d need them.

We joined the anarchist contingent, a part of which was the so-called “black bloc,” the masked protesters dumping trash cans, breaking windows, setting small fires. One group eventually set a police cruiser on fire. I didn’t join them. I believe destruction gets you nothing except bad publicity, but I understand also publicity has its place.

Keith and I got separated soon after arrival and later I saw him do a brave thing. There was a large group of protestors at one end of a street and on the other end a large group of police. Now it’s a common sight today to watch videos from Minneapolis and Portland and Seattle and see all these militarized, armed cops in tactical gear and helmets, but in 2008 it was new. I stood with a part of the crowd at one end of the street, observing the standoff, when suddenly Keith emerged from the crowd. He walked to a point about midway between the two groups and sat down on the street. He sat in the lotus position, opening his arms to the cops, miming “Why?” Believe it or not, this had an ameliorating effect on the cops. They were ordered back a few blocks and the protestors marched further.

I saw a lot of things, places being vandalized, tear gas unleashed. Famously, a police car was burned. One protestor who’d thought to bring his own gas mask put it on and was surrounded and pummeled by the police about 20 feet away from where I stood. I stayed upwind avoiding the group collecting on the Wabasha Street bridge. There’s a police tactic called kettling, allowing a group to herd themselves into an area, then cutting off the means to and from that area, effectively boxing the group in. Most of those on the bridge were arrested.

There’s more to this day I’d relate but I’m talking about Keith, so I’ll skip to the end. After his action on the street, I didn’t see Keith again and when I returned to the car at our agreed-on time, he wasn’t there. I waited another hour before I called his cell phone, and it rolled into voicemail. I left a message and then drove the streets looking for him. Many streets were blocked off, however, so I knew there was a chance I wouldn’t find him. About 10 that night I called his mom and reported I hadn’t found him and needed to leave, as I had an 8 AM class next morning. She said she and her wife and her ex-husband, Keith’s father, would drive over and start looking.

Here’s the story as I heard it later. The three of them drove around the now-opened streets of Minneapolis until 3 when they found him wandering one of the streets with a small group of other teens. He’d been arrested a few blocks away from where I’d last seen him while getting a lighter out of his backpack. I knew that backpack was bad business. He’d been pressed down so hard by the cop he had a boot indentation on his back. Somewhere I still have a picture of it. He’d been taken to juvenile and kept in lockup for at least 8 hours. Juveniles don’t receive the fabled one phone call and his cell had long since died.

The cops remained on the streets of Minneapolis for about a week. The image of at least 2 officers armed with semi-automatics and bulletproof vests on every corner became a daily sight.

Here’s why I’m telling you this story. As nasty as the 2008 elections were—you remember the election? Sarah Palin was a Donald trump without either the charisma or the cash. John McCain referred to Barak Obama as “That one” in the second debate but made up for it by interrupting his own supporters’ allegations to describe him as “a decent family man with whom I have some disagreements.” Leading up to the election and after, Obama was described as anything from a secret Muslim, a Kenyan by birth, to the Antichrist. During the crackdown on the protestors that lasted a week, dozens were arrested. Some were hurt. But no one was killed. Other than gas masks when they deployed gas, I never saw a masked cop. Every one of them had his badge on the outside of his gear; Keith’s family eventually sued the officer who’d used excessive force in arresting him and we knew who she was because someone had taken a picture of her and her badge. My court appearance on Keith’s behalf was the first time I’d worn my brand-new clerical collar. People were hurt. No one died. As messy as things got, as adrenalized as everyone was.

Rush forward 18 years and things have changed. We look at one another and at ourselves differently. In under a year we have gone from, well, maybe not a Capraesque Bedford Falls, but it’s hard to deny we’re living in some version of Pottersville. You might remember in Bedford Falls there was a sizable community of hardworking immigrants, but there are no visible immigrants of any kind in Pottersville.

In my instance, I’ve come to see myself differently than before. I’m angry sometimes, at nothing in particular or at nothing I can identify. I avoid the news, and when I don’t I doomscroll. I brood. I don’t brood well. My brooding is less Heathcliff on the moors and more Charlie Brown reflecting on his team’s 156^th consecutive loss. “Rats.” I snipe at people whose only crime is being related to people who continue to support trump. I don’t think of myself as depressed, rather as echoing the poet of the Biblical Book of Lamentations who writes, “My eyes! My eyes! They stream with tears! How far from me is anyone to comfort, anyone to restore my life. My children are desolate; the enemy has prevailed.”

In his “autobiographical sketch” of his childhood, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” Richard Wright’s there was a clear distinction between the Black and white children. Among other things, Black children threw clumps of railway cinders at one another in play, while white boys were allowed to throw broken bottles at them. Young Richard catches one of these projectiles in his neck, requiring three stitches.

When night fell, my mother came from the white folks’ kitchen. I raced down the street to meet her…I grabbed her hand and babbled out the whole story. She examined my wound, then slapped me.

“How come yuh didn’t hide?” she asked me. “How come yuh always fightin’?”

I was outraged, and bawled. Between sobs I told her I didn’t have any trees or hedges to hide behind. There wasn’t a thing I could have used as a trench. And you couldn’t throw very far when you were hiding behind the brick pillars of a house. She grabbed a barrel stave, dragged me home, stripped me naked, and beat me till I had a fever of one hundred and two. She would smack my rump with the stave, and, while the skin was still smarting, impart to me gems of Jim Crow wisdom. I was never to throw cinders any more. I was never to fight in any more wars. I was never, never, under any conditions, to fight white folks again, and they were absolutely right in clouting me with the broken milk bottle. Didn’t I know she was working hard every day in the hot kitchens of the white folks to make money to take care of me? When was I ever going to learn to be a good boy? She couldn’t be bothered with my fights. She finished by telling me that I ought to be thankful to God as long as I lived that they didn’t kill me.

What’s happening to me, at least partly, is my disheartening realization that this self-identification with the authorities like Richard’s mother is something we have already seen. Hispanics, Blacks, and women have all joined the Border Patrol and ICE and are, maybe not unilaterally, but sufficiently content with their orders and their targets. My fantasy solution is suggested by the line of a song by The Devil Said Jump. These MFers are gonna “Make Me Buy a Gun.” So far, it remains fantasy because I’m really too much the coward and pacifist to do that. But I will admit I’ve looked up the price of high-end long-distance slingshots. My rationale around that is to echo that of the pastoral character Shepherd Book of the TV series Firefly. When the ship is attacked by government agents and along with everyone else onboard he picks up a gun to fight back, he is asked, facetiously, whether there isn’t something specific in the Bible about killing, he answers, “Quite specific. It is, however, much fuzzier on the subject of kneecaps.”

My point is it can be done, it has been done, without people dying or being maimed. We can’t support a government that acts out of the barrel of a gun. We will not support such a government, we will not forgive such a government, we will remember the government that did this and the people who cheered it on or who, at best, ignored that it was happening. People point out, rightly, if we, by which I mean the predominantly white liberal community, had refused to allow the government to behave this way with Black citizens, Asian citizens, Native Americans, we would not be dealing with the government treating people this way now. Yes, 20-20 hindsight and all that, but there’s at least a salt lick’s worth of truth to that.

I quoted Lamentations earlier. Now I quote the Psalms: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.” We can surely use some of that certainty, can’t we, the surety of UU minister Wayne Arneson who wrote “Take courage, friends. The way is often hard, the path is never clear, and the stakes are very high. Take courage. For deep down, there is another truth: you are not alone.

It may be time, may be past time, to cut loose MAGA from political thought. Remember the John Birch Society? There’s an argument to be made that Bircherism is echoed by contemporary Trumpism. Long thought dead, it declined in membership from a high in the 1960s of 100,000 to somewhere in the hundreds. It isn’t just numbers. More Americans profess belief in UFOs than voted for Trump—yes, I looked that up—and we don’t take them into political account. They have set themselves outside society. It’s time to metaphorically vote them off the island. I remember during the first trump administration coming across the comment that the only things that would separate most of his supporters from him would be finding a dead woman or a live child in his bed, and there was some question about the dead woman. With each day revealing more evidence, it is obvious the live child makes no difference either.

Am I suggesting we drop those people from our lives? In so many words, I am. It’s possible to love someone and hate his actions. I used to teach in the Minnesota prison system. I liked my students. They were personable. I didn’t ask anyone what his crime was because, a, that’s not something you ask a person, and b, I wasn’t so certain I’d like them after finding out. They looked forward to class days and did all the work because it was a way, as one inmate put it to me, “to remind me my life isn’t just punishment.”

One of my best students and a favorite of mine insisted one evening on telling me why, in his early 20s, he had a life sentence. Without putting too much of a spin on it, he told me he’d raped and killed a young girl in his mid-teens. I had to sort out for myself whether I wanted to keep him in class. I had that kind of power, to drop anyone from class if I felt their contributions ran counter to it. It was a week of some soul searching, and I decided that despite how I felt about his crime, he had earned an opportunity to better himself. It is the same kind of self-questioning anyone with a father, brother, mother, sister, cousin in prison must ask themselves.

I like to think he took some comfort in that, that as bad as he had made his life he could read and talk about good books. I would rewrite the benediction of Reverend Arneson from “Take courage, friends” to “Take comfort.” Where do I take comfort? I take comfort in the love of my family. I take comfort in my animals, the dogs and cats who make up my pack. I take comfort in my work, helping people. I take comfort in my daily walk around my neighborhood, greeting the dogs and cats, and yes, even my neighbors who wear red caps. I take comfort in my activism, in showing up to rallies and protests and marches. I rarely help to organize these and less often speak at them, taking my comfort instead by being a part of the crowd, a quiet body standing in solidarity with like-minded people. It reminds me I am not alone. I take comfort in the words of fellow Unitarian TheodoreParker, that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But if we would see justice come in our lifetimes we must lean on one end.

Speak Boldly

 

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity."

These lines from William Butler Yeats "The Second Coming", written over a century ago and describing a world on the brink after and before world wars, remain relevant to our situation. We aren't talking like we should. We should be howling from the rooftops that we are lost and our leaders are behaving the way we were taught were ways associated with the Soviet Union and its satellites. That is, what we have is not to be shared among a just and wise people but hoarded for the few and their favorites. 

There is a cautiousness to our speech today, as if we aren't sure what we believe is believable or that we want to put ourselves out that far to where we could be swatted down. Some individuals are making themselves heard--folks in Minneapolis angered at the death of Renee Nicole Good and people in other cities reacting to the kidnapping and spiriting away of citizens, documented and not, by a trump-anointed militia given the go-ahead to make things as untenable as possible to unloose that mere anarchy so to avoid justice and accountability--and these are good things. 

But what I'm talking about is individuals talking among themselves at the post office, the market, on the street. It is as if we've all agreed to avoid the discomfort of saying something that will somehow offend our listener. Unless of course we are MAGA, and then we can't shut up.

I am as guilty of this as anyone. I am passionate about the criminality of this administration but don't bring it up in regular conversation. There is a weirdness to my conversations. It's a day-to-day unwillingness to comment on the things happening directly in front of us unless we are already certain we're in a safe space, a church group, a protest, a meeting, where we are all basically agreed that this is a bad place to be. 

It isn't as if we're afraid to speak on these things because someone is listening. That's Orwellian enough. But we're self-censoring because we're not certain we're not imagining the illicitness of it all, that we're the ones who are crazy. 

We aren't crazy. We are awake and we see what's going on. For the sake of our future and our communities, we must say so.