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.
