Dear friends, this was the sermon I was to have offered last Sunday, the day our beloved Rev. Dr. Dorsey Blake died and our world changed. I shared with Dr. Blake that I was preparing this sermon, and that it would include words from Rev. Nelson Johnson who died last month. He broke into a big smile and was glad to hear that I was bringing forth the message on Revolutionary Love from Rev. Nelson, who was one of the honored members of the National Council of Elders along with Dr. Blake and Gus Newport – David Hartsough too, who is still with us. Our world is a better place for these elders.
Psalm 15
Lord, who can be trusted with power,
and who may act in your place?
Those with a passion for justice,
who speak the truth from their hearts;
who have let go of selfish interests
and grown beyond their own lives;
who see the wretched as their family
and the poor as their flesh and blood.
They alone are impartial
and worthy of the people’s trust.
Their compassion lights up the whole earth,
and their kindness endures forever.
-Translation by Stephen Mitchell
The other day my daughter sent me a TikTok post of Kamala Harris. Kamala had gone to see a play and was backstage afterwards. A crowd had gathered around her and people were pulling out their phones and recording it. You could tell that people were hungry to hear what she had to say about what we are facing right now in our country. In that intimate circle of people, she spoke matter-of-factly, simply and clearly. This is what she said:
The progress of our nation has always been about the expansion of rights not the restriction of rights. We’re seeing a U-Turn right now. But we have to keep fighting for those rights to be maintained. Which means we have to be vigilant. And it’s just the nature of it, just the nature of it. Whatever gains we made will not be permanent unless we’re vigilant. And this nation, our democracy, our rights are only going to be as strong as our willingness to fight for it. And it’s the nature of it that we do have to fight for those rights…. And I believe we fight FOR something, not against something. And that’s our optimism.
Kamala is reminding us, encouraging us, to keep fighting for our hard-earned rights. We cannot take them for granted. Now, if you are like me, it can feel exhausting that we have to still fight for what seems like basic, obvious human needs and human dignity. I remember a sign in the Women’s March in DC back in 2017 when Trump first took office. It said, “I can’t believe I’m still fighting this shit” …echoing, as we have said in past Sundays, Fanny Lou Hamer’s “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
How do we keep going forward when we are sick and tired of it? After Trump first took office in 2017, I was living in Oregon and was involved with a climate action group. The activists are primarily older, in what climate leader Bill McKibben would call their “Third Act.” They had spent their lives fighting for environmental protections, fighting to abolish nuclear proliferation, fighting for civil rights and social justice progress, helping immigrants get drivers licenses and citizenship. Like now, they saw their life’s work being swept away with the stroke of a black Sharpie pen. They approached me about starting a support group, and so together we created it, and together we got through those years, got through COVID, got through a wildfire that ripped through our towns, got through climate legislation being defeated and walked out on again and again. We aired and shared our emotions, we celebrated each other’s presence, we sustained our engagement in our actions, together.
Another means of sustaining ourselves is HOW we orient our engagement with the issue at hand. Like Kamala Harris said, we do best to act with an optimistic mindset of fighting FOR our rights, for those who are protected by those rights, rather than with a mindset of being AGAINST certain people or AGAINST an ideology. It brings forth a creative and a steadfast energy to go TOWARDS something of meaning and purpose, rather than get sucked down into a reactionary, draining spiral of hatred and greed. We act from our spirit, from our beliefs, from our love and care for each other.
Rev. Nelson Johnson served as the minister with Beloved Community Center in Greensboro, North Carolina and was known for his community building and commitment to diversity, justice and democracy. He died just last month. Last summer he and his wife Joyce Johnson were part of a webinar put on by the National Council of Elders called Only Revolutionary Love Can Save Us Now. It featured Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, and was a profound conversation into the concept of Revolutionary Love. This is what Rev. Johnson said that Revolutionary Love meant to him:
I think as long as you stay in the struggle to try and change the conditions of the world for the better, the more you have to grow, or … give up. I think that that growth draws the best out of us. As we engage in a nation that is disloyal to its own creeds and documents… that blatantly accumulates riches at the expense of the poor, that casually makes war on other countries in order to enrich itself… living through all that… gives you a different perspective on what it takes to change it. And that’s where I think the term Revolutionary Love comes in….
What does it take to not only confront that, but to change that? …It requires a deep commitment… it requires the growth in us that comes out in the way that affirms life, that affirms the neighbor, that affirms the next nation… And it equips you to say ‘no’ to things. I’m not going to do that. It violates the very core of love that I’ve come to understand…. So, I think the term Revolutionary Love is appropriate for this period where we are confronted with climate change, where we’re confronted with different forms of racism, where poverty grows in our neighborhood. What is the quality of the soul that can stand against that? And to do it with a certain amount of… I’m reluctant to use the word joy – but with a certain amount of contentment and commitment – this is what I was born to do. I think that is Revolutionary Love.
Rev. Johnson points to contentment (joy even!) and commitment… an abiding sense of “this is what I was born to do.” This is who I am, what I value, this is what is life-affirming for me, this is what I love, this is what and who I stand by and for, this is how I choose to be in the world. This is Revolutionary Love, says Rev. Johnson. It requires that, to quote Thich Nhat Hanh, we cultivate a “solid-like-a-mountain” core of our being that can be present to the world… and even just through this presence is causing power and influence “that affirms life, that affirms the neighbor, that affirms the next nation.”
Yes, our world is changing rapidly now, much faster than our nervous systems were designed to handle, it appears. And so, overwhelm and fear are easy tools of the authoritarian. But by rooting ourselves firmly and resolutely in our Revolutionary Love, in our commitment, in our High Resolve, in what we stand FOR, this is how we proceed and respond. And by staying present in our contentment, in our joy, this is how we sustain ourselves. And by working together, collaborating across what has been an intentionally-enflamed polarization, this is how we create and maintain an equitable and meaningful life for all.
I’d like to share what I found to be an inspiring example of a community that worked together across their divides to protect their hard-earned, democratic co-existence. This story is current, it’s local, and it’s cautionary. And it may be familiar to you. This is the story of the county of Solano and the peoples’ resistance to the takeover of their farms by the high tech visionaire-billionaires and their utopian plan for their “California Forever” city, led by CEO Jan Sramek. The extravagant marketing for California Forever slides out glossy green sci-fi visuals of a walkable city – for sure this is a green model of sustainability for municipalities – as well as affordable homes for 400,000 people, and jobs for Solano County … at nearby tech businesses that just happen to be owned by some of the investors of the techtopian vision. [California Forever is financed by tech venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen (Netscape, Mosaic), Reid Hoffman (Linked-In) Laurene Powell Jobs (Apple.)]
But Sramek’s approach was secretive, using a front company to buy up 66,000+ acres of protected farm land. And when a group of farmers and ranchers didn’t want to sell their land and banded together, Sramek sued the local citizens, claiming collusion and anti-trust violations, an act so absurd that it rebounded against him and redoubled efforts to halt his takeover. These tech-billionaires want to build without regulations, and they are working to vote out the County’s “Orderly Growth Initiative” so as to have no constraints. And - they are willing and able to buy political power and the seats of city councilors and county supervisors.
As far as governance goes for these techtopian visionaries, there are darker authoritarian underpinnings about the way California Forever will be run politically, with Sramek simply saying, “It’ll be like nothing you have ever seen before.” Princess Washington, who is Vice Mayor of Suisun City, feels the biggest disadvantage will be to the citizens of the city because they won’t have an elected official to hold accountable and she feels like the fight going on now is historical because it is setting precedent for the country. California Forever is aligned with a broader coalition of tech billionaires to create what is called The Network State, along with Donald Trump’s call to create 10 “Freedom Cities” on federal lands. There is loads more to these issues, but let me simply suggest that you read the fine print on the contract before buying a new home in one of these cities that will not be modeled after a democracy and may be more reminiscent of a fiefdom, albeit a well-branded one.
BUT… AND!… despite a multi-million-dollar public relations campaign with massive marketing and community handouts, the California Forever project lost out – for now anyway – to Solano County residents who joined in a coalition called “Solano Together.” The coalition put up so much resistance to this arrogant riding-roughshod over their lives and over the land that California Forever withdrew its proposal from last November’s ballot, which had aimed to oust the county’s Orderly Growth Ordinance.
Catherine Moy, Mayor of Fairfield featured in a video exposé by the news media group A More Perfect Union, lifts up the power of people of Solano County coming together. She said, “I have never seen a true, real, grassroots fight like this. It’s across the board… Republicans, Democrats - does not matter- Liberal, Conservative …never cared about politics in my life but I care about farming, or, I care about Travis (Air Force Base). They’re up against people who care. And that means a lot. We hope it means more than their billions.”
This is just one example of the power of people coming together to protect our communities, each other, and our rights. I’d like to thank Gil Duran for his ongoing coverage of the Silicon Valley tech authoritarian politics. I also want to lift up our own tech wiz Courtney Brown and hope to have more conversations with him about this topic.
So, to summarize, Kamala says that it is the nature of progress that we have to stay vigilant in fighting for our rights. And Rev. Johnson says that this fight, this commitment to Revolutionary Love, is what grows us, what draws out the best in us. And history has shown that we can accomplish great things – and sustain ourselves in doing so for the long-haul – when we do it together.
But it shall be the words of Howard Thurman with which I’ll close. On that last visit with Dr. Blake, I read various favorite passages from The Inward Journey and from Meditations of the Heart. I found this one that I had marked as one of my own favorites, one that I had read in a gathering of other hospital chaplains when we served during COVID and Donald Trump’s first reign.
During these turbulent times we must remind ourselves repeatedly that life goes on. This we are apt to forget. The wisdom of life transcends our wisdoms; the purpose of life outlasts our purposes.; the process of life cushions our processes. The mass attack of disillusion and despair, distilled out of the collapse of hope, has so invaded our thoughts that what we know to be true and valid seems unreal and ephemeral. There seems to be little energy left for aught but futility.
This is the great deception. By it whole peoples have gone down to oblivion without the will to affirm the great and permanent strength of the clean and the commonplace. Let us not be deceived. It is just as important as ever to attend to the little graces by which the dignity of our lives is maintained and sustained. Birds still sing; the stars continue to cast their gentle gleam over the desolation of the battlefields, and the heart is still inspired by the kind word and the gracious deed.
There is no need to fear evil. There is every need to understand what it does, how it operates in the world, what it draws upon to sustain itself. We must not shrink from the knowledge of the evilness of evil. Over and over we must know that the real target of evil is not destruction of the body, the reduction to rubble of cities; the real target of evil is to corrupt the spirit of man and to give to his soul the contagion of inner disintegration. When this happens, there is nothing left, the very citadel of man is captured and laid waste.
Therefore the evil of the world around us must not be allowed to move from without to within. This would be to be overcome by evil. To drink in the beauty that is within reach, to clothe one’s life with simple deeds of kindness, to keep alive a sensitiveness to the movement of the spirit of God in the quietness of the human heart and in the workings of the human mind – this is as always the ultimate answer to the great deception.
-Howard Thurman, “Life Goes On,” Meditations of the Heart
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