"This only gets you this"

 

I remember when RFK and MLK, Jr were shot. I was 3 at the time so I don't recall JFK's assassination but I do recall the surprise I felt at the realization it had happened in my lifetime. I remember George Wallace being shot, and Jerry Ford, and John Lennon, and later Ronald Reagan. Any time violence mars the political or cultural dialogue, it's a blow against the safety we all take for granted.

Now Donald Trump has been shot at. I say "shot at" because, even after 2 days of reporting, I have yet to discern whether he was hit by a bullet or a shard from the screen behind him. It doesn't ultimately matter because the fact remains he was shot at, and this is something we can't dismiss.

Let me first reiterate, as someone else has, that the notion this was a false flag operation by his own personnel is absolutely ridiculous because there is no way anyone would sign off on putting himself in immediate danger like this. Whether it was a bullet or plastic that struck and bloodied his ear, any nearer and we would be talking about an assassination rather than an attempt. 

Trump's raised-fist response in some photos is legitimate and I'm willing to allow he is braver or at least appears so in the clutch than I would have thought (and maybe even more so than I would be). That wouldn't make him any better a president than he was before and it doesn't change any of the wrongs he's done. It makes for a great picture, is all. Let him have it.

Here is the thing. When we move from rhetoric to violence, as has happened, it diminishes us all. It says we have given up that, in MLK's words, "the arc of the moral universe...bends toward justice." If we would be content, we can't allow anger with one another, distrust in one another, or violence against one another to dictate how we behave toward one another. 

Neither should we forget Corey Comperatore, who was struck by a bullet while shielding his family, and killed, or David Dutch or James Copenhaver, both of whom were struck and hospitalized. And we shouldn't forget Thomas Matthew Crooks, who for reasons we can't begin to guess at decided to join the ranks of Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, Arthur Bremer, Lynette Fromme, Mark David Chapman, and John Hinkley. 

At some point, frustration and rage can flare into the certainty that "I must do something, no matter who it hurts." Before any of us reaches that state, we need to recognize that it's never the right response. The right response is long, arduous, exhausting work that can't take the shortcuts provided by a fist or a knife or a gun or a bomb. President Biden put it well in his address after the shooting: “In America we resolve our differences at the ballot box... Not with bullets." But perhaps Norman Lear's All in the Family put it more succinctly when the actor Gregory Sierra, playing a Jewish vigilante, tells Rob Reiner's Mike that, "One day you're gonna find out this [making Reiner's hand into a fist] is the only answer." Mike tells him he's wrong "because this [making another fist] only gets you this." 

Loving Donald Trump

 

 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.