A Sermon Delivered to High Street Unitarian Universalist Church, Macon, Georgia, June 30, 2024
Last
November I discovered that a woman I hadn’t seen in over three decades was
going into hospice at her family’s home in Arizona. I’d tried to stay in touch,
but what had been a loving relationship had dwindled to occasionally saying
“Happy Birthday” to one another on Facebook. She would have turned 60 this past
Friday. Denise didn’t tell me about her cancer diagnosis and hospice decision
but her younger sister who stayed in touch with me had.
I
drove to Arizona to spend as much time with her as I could. It was a long trip,
27 hours each way. But despite the ensuing years our sitting down and talking
together came easier than I expected. After a few days, she slipped into a coma
from which she wouldn’t waken, and a few days after that Denise died quietly
and peacefully.
But
in the words of the sainted Arlo Guthrie, “that’s not what I came to tell you
about.” I came to talk about radical hospitality.
Among
the audio books to keep me company was Sacred Nature by Karen Armstrong.
A theme she articulates often, how religion tells us to treat one another and
the world around us, reflects a consistent theme to the world’s surviving
practices. We are most familiar with it
as the Christian Golden Rule: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” We
have reached a point, Armstrong writes, at which “Any single world view is
inadequate.” To survive, we must merge. Here in the US, we’re in the midst of a
heat dome; this is the coolest summer of the rest of your life. Georgetown
biologist Colin Carlson has estimated at least 4M people have died since the
turn of the millennium due to malnutrition, floods, diarrhea, and malaria, ills
within our scientific power to control. People
have messed around with the world enough that it’s become incumbent on us to
reach out to other people and things just to maintain the Interdependent Web of
which we’re all a part. If we would live in peace we must do so together. This
requires what Armstrong calls a “profound empathy” and UUs call radical
hospitality.
Some
religions make it a short rule: Hindus say “Don’t do to others what would hurt
you.” Others don’t. Buddha quantified what he called The Four Immeasurables, loving-kindness,
compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. They have very involved
explications in Buddhism so I will put them more simply.
There
is no one and nothing I can meet that is not loved by God or the universe. If I
had the same history and experiences of another person or thing, my outlook
would be the same. Recognizing the other’s outlook as valid as my own, I share
the other person or thing’s successes as my own. In doing so, my existence and
the other’s existence complement one another, and we live in peace.
My
parting with Denise had not been on the best of terms so I asked myself,
driving back from her death, can I look at the Four Immeasurables through the
lens of Denise?
Can
I accept she was loved by God? Absolutely. If I had lived a similar life to
hers, would I have seen life the same as she did? Well, that’s a little harder.
Denise had a rough life that allowed her to be taken advantage of and
experience health problems that I like to think I could avoid, but yes, I can
envision that I would. Can I share her successes as if they were my own? Yes, I
could. She bought a house on her own and filled it with people she considered
family, something we had always said we would do. Finally, do we complement one
another as if we were the same person? Absolutely. Despite the physical and
emotional distances between us for all those years, that final act of talking
felt harmonious.
Well,
maybe it’s easier to do this with someone who’s dead because they aren’t going to
disagree with you. And even though we ended on a bad note that resonated for
three plus decades, it is easy to feel this for someone you loved.
It
may be easy too in the sense that I know little enough about other people’s lives
I can accept them in the larger sense without knowing much about them. But
Donald Trump. Now there’s someone about whose life we seem to know everything,
most of it not very complimentary. [To give an instance, when I sent my title
for this sermon out, it was called “Loving Donald Trump,” but somewhere along
the line, probably for space reasons, it was shortened to “Loving Trump,” and I
don’t think there’s any confusion about which Trump.] I volunteer at Daybreak
here in Macon and among my friends there are two homeless men who support
Donald Trump. One of them is black. Neither will experience any benefit I can see
from his return to the presidency, but both support and pray for his candidacy.
I love these men not despite but because of who they are. Can I love Donald
Trump the same?
Now
before I answer I’m talking about radical love. Radical love and hospitality are
cornerstones of our faith, and we justly pride ourselves on practicing them. I
want to put to the test the love we refer when Jesus articulates the Golden
Rule: to love God with all your heart and soul by loving your neighbor as
yourself. This is the radical love we aspire to in the Beloved Community. Is
Donald Trump my beloved neighbor?
Let’s
apply the Four Immeasurables. Can I accept that God loves Donald Trump? I don’t
really have any skin in that game so sure, I can accept that when God looks at
Trump, as when God looked at Pol Pot and Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler and
Caligula and anyone you want to name, God loves him. Despite what Trump is, God
loves him.
What
about the second, can I accept that if I had lived the experiences he had,
would I act like Donald Trump? Um, okay, I guess. But I like to think I would
act better than he does, I would do more for others with his wealth and
prestige and do better things.
Can I celebrate his successes with
him? Insert record scratch sound. What? Now hold on. Celebrate his Supreme
Court appointments who have taken away a woman’s right to choose abortion, even
in the cases of incest and rape and death? Celebrate his success in separating
his supporters from their money despite his wealth and the unlikelihood he will
do anything to improve their lives? Celebrate the policies he’s provoked that
ban books and education and healthcare to people who need it most? Celebrate
his rolling back more environmental and economic regulations than any previous
president, his attitude toward climate change best represented by his recent
statement that climate change is good because it “means basically [you] have a little more beachfront
property…”? No, no, I can’t celebrate those unholy things! No, finally, Trump
and I cannot be complimentary, we cannot live in harmony. Shall I admit, then,
that I can’t love my neighbor as myself, that I can’t be at peace with this
portion of the world, because we all know someone, someone we love, who thinks
as Trump does, and if I can’t be at peace with him can I be at peace with them?
Moreover, should I echo the worst of them, calling them scum, defilers of the
blood, my enemy? Should I in turn offer them violence and bloodshed because I
don’t like their votes?
Now I’ve read
a lot of holy books in my time but none of them has said treat your enemy the
way he treats you. In fact, they go out of their way to say, as Jesus did, “if
your enemy strikes your right cheek, offer him the other one.” We are, the just
and unjust alike, granted the same sunlight and rain. Determining who gets less
is outside my pay grade.
Religion, if
it’s to have any meaning, demands better from me. If I would accept radical hospitality,
I must accept God loves Donald Trump as much as God loves me, not despite who
he is but because he is. Full stop.
Would I be the
same person Donald Trump is if I had the same experiences, without insisting I would
be better? Yes. I’m not as different as I’d like to think, and his election in
2016 proved at least to me the fallacy I’d accepted, that the US is a special
nation. And for that I ought to thank him; so, I admit, with his same
experiences, I would see the world the same.
Can I
celebrate his successes with him? Now perhaps I have been looking at the wrong
successes. Perhaps, like mine, his successes are on a smaller, more personal
scale. Donald Trump is loved, and I’m not talking about his followers or people
he benefits, but people who love him the way I love my family and friends. The
way you love and are loved. By all evidence, the love Trump’s children have for
him is unfeigned, and we all know how hard it can be to love our parents. To be
a part of someone else’s life for any substantial amount of time and remain loving
them is a success to which we all can relate.
Finally, am I
at peace with Donald Trump as Donald Trump, as Jesus or Buddha would be at
peace with him? We are each allotted the same time on earth, a lifetime. Donald
Trump will die and so will all his followers. So will I and so will everyone
who I love. I would be remembered for my love for other people, and that is
about the best I can hope for.
So that’s it,
right? I accept the misdeeds of my enemy and we live in harmony, yes? No, of
course not. Because here’s where the radical part of hospitality comes in.
Because as Jesus and Buddha and the rest taught, once you’ve become enlightened
or seen the kingdom of heaven or the Beloved Community, it is your
responsibility to bring it about. I learned that as a shaven-headed would-be
monk four decades ago when the abbot at the monastery where I was studying
agreed I had reached a level of enlightenment and said, “I’m so sorry.” Because
recognizing the injustice surrounding you means you can’t ignore what’s wrong
any longer.
My wife has pointed out to me that this is “Sermon Bob,” not
“Bob Who Lives with Me Every Day”, who is sharing these things. And it’s true.
I don’t live my life like this daily, maybe not even weekly. I continue to post
Facebook memes of Wonder Woman punching Donald Trump and I point out the incongruity
of posting the 10 commandments in places children can be shot. But there’s
every reason for me to try to live to be someone better. Pointing out and
correcting the foibles of others doesn’t mean I don’t have them myself.
Flicking the speck out of my neighbor’s eye impels me to be aware of the log in
mine. [We saw an instance of this a week ago when Reverend JeKaren Olaoya, during
a contentious moment of argument, instead of calling out the offending comments
turned to those offended to reaffirm they are loved. This is one way the
Beloved Community operates.]
But, as
parents know, it’s not always enough to love someone. You have to correct misbehavior
and provide proper behavior if the other is to become a good child, father,
mother, brother, sister, parent. In the Beloved Community, we are responsible
for one another. So do not complain that Donald Trump and his followers are
destroying democracy and human rights, show them how they are doing it, and
what the correct response should be.
We face an
alarming future, and by “we” I mean our younger people, their children, and
their children’s children. It is likely the world’s situation will get a lot
worse. It isn’t just Donald Trump and his supporters. They have appeared after
multiple decades of waste and overuse and as the African adage goes, “When the
water hole shrinks, the animals get meaner.” There are things we can do. When
we hear or read of a Trump supporter parroting our need for “a united Reich” or
for separating migrant children from their parents or banning Muslims from
entering the US or that US media is the enemy of the people or any number of offenses,
it is incumbent on us to say, “No. No, that’s not right.” Don’t argue with
them, don’t bring up facts or statistics proving your point because they won’t listen,
and they certainly won’t admit they’re wrong as we won’t admit we’re wrong. As
Canadian wrestler Sami Zayn reminds us, “Everyone is the hero in their own
story.” Correct them as you would a
child. “No. Don’t do that because it hurts other people. We must live with
those other people and if we’re going to live together, we must stop hurting
them.” Our message must be that simple: Don’t hurt them. They’re our neighbors
and our friends and our loved ones. Even the ones like me who love Donald
Trump.