Including Religion

Living Love through the Practice of Inclusion:

Including Religion

There are such egregious examples of doing religion badly, hurtfully, abusively, that even if we participate with a religious community, we can tend to avoid identifying as “religious.” What if we leaned into it instead?

Including Religion

Rev. Joseph Cleveland

February 23, 2025

 

Like a few of you in this room, I grew up attending a Roman Catholic church.  You know how some people follow a sports team religiously?  When I was growing up, we went to church religiously.  Religion, in and out of the church, was something that held a special significance.  It felt like church time wasn’t like regular time.  The meaningfulness of things, of people, seemed to shine brighter, seemed to be richer, seemed to be more tactile.  The meaningfulness was something you could almost feel, like a piece of cloth held in your fingers. Or like water flowing around your hand.  Maybe you’ve been by a creek or a river and actually put your hand in the water and didn’t just see but felt the water go by.  When I experienced things framed by my religion, or in the context of my sense of religion, I could feel their meaningfulness like water flowing around me.

I am a religious person.  But I might not be what comes to mind if I said to you, picture in your mind a religious person.  Living in a culture whose understanding of religion is dominated by Christianity, when I ask you to picture in your mind a religious person, I bet that you are thinking of someone in a collar.  Or someone in robes like a priest or a monk or a nun.  You all have a liberal appreciation of religion, so some of you might also be picturing the Dalai Lama, or some other religious person.  When I ask you to think of someone who is religious, some of you might have friends or family members that come to mind.  

I haven’t always been comfortable with the “religious” label.  It was probably easy for you to think of someone who you think of as religious.  But it is probably also easy for you to think of someone who claims to be religious and who you think of as hypocritical.  It is easy for us to find examples of people claiming that they are religious and using that to justify being hateful, hurtful, and violent to other people.  It’s easy to think of historical examples of this.  It is easy to think of people who are right now acting this way, like the current President of the United States.

I remember it was not quite one year when he started selling Bibles.  “Happy Holy Week! Let’s make America Pray Again,” he posted to social media.  So professes the President and the other power-hungry, selfish, rich white men who are running the country, trying to prove how strong and virile they are by attacking the most vulnerable people in our society.  And now the President and the world’s richest man are heartlessly thrilling in how nasty they can be to people who have been making their careers and livelihood as government employees, people who’ve mostly had as their job helping and caring for and providing services to people. The country elected the man who discovered his power and ability to arrest our attention through a reality show on which his catchphrase was, “You’re fired!”  

Just as an aside, has anyone else been finding being in the car a convenient place to do a bunch of shouting and yelling at the top of your lungs at the current Misadministration?  

I know that the members of this congregation and its Social Justice Team are engaging in all sorts of actions to interrupt the state-sanctioned actions that are proudly fueled by greed, hate and fear.  We are acting as individuals, as members of this congregation, and there are also actions being taken as a larger body.  Tuesday before last, the Unitarian Universalist Association announced that they — we! — are a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed challenging the Executive Order encouraging Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents not to respect churches and other houses of worship as special or sensitive locations as they go about detaining people for deportation.  

The UUA is one of more than two dozen religious groups who have joined together in this lawsuit.  The Associated Press reports that the groups range “from the Episcopal Church and the Union for Reform Judaism to the Mennonites and Unitarian Universalists.” The suit argues that our religious freedom is being infringed upon.  The Most Rev. Sean Howe, the presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church says, “We cannot worship freely if some of us are living in fear. By joining this lawsuit, we’re seeking the ability to gather and fully practice our faith, to follow Jesus’ command to love our neighbors as ourselves.” 

I asked you a moment ago to picture someone who is an example of what being religious looks like.  That lawsuit filed on behalf of millions of people of faith is what being religious looks like.  

I am a religious person, a person of faith. And I believe that it is terrible, the way that the understanding of what it means to be religious has in this country been coopted by conservative Christianity.  I say conservative Christianity, but it doesn’t follow what I understand to be the teachings of Jesus.  Last summer, when Kamala Harris began running for the Presidency, one thing that really excited me was the potential she had to present herself as a person of faith in a way that would directly challenge that conservative domination of the religious voice.  Harris is a Baptist who also honors the Hindu religious traditions of her mother’s native India, and her spouse is Jewish.  I wanted to hear her talking and talking and talking about how she values that plurality of religious belonging and experience. About how this is what being religious looks like: honoring multiple faith traditions and how they teach that we should live lives dedicated to one another’s well-being, especially the well-being of those of us who are disadvantaged and othered and marginalized in our society.  Maybe I didn’t pay enough attention to the news at the time, but I think her campaign didn’t really lean in to that opportunity.  

People need to know that there is a way of being religious that looks like centering yourself and your community on love and living a life that values pluralism, equity, justice, generosity, as well as our interdependence and mutual transformation and growth.

I just described what Unitarian Universalist religion is!  

I want all of you in this room and on this zoom to be comfortable coming out to yourselves and to your friends and neighbors as religious people.  When someone is asked what it means to be religious, I want them to think of you.  I want them to think of us.

There is strength and healing and resilience that being religious opens up for you.  I don’t mean that you have read the Bible more.  Although that wouldn’t be a bad thing.  Bible sales are way up these days, by the way.  Did you know that?  I read the other day that regarding the sale of printed books, “Bible sales increased by 22 percent in the US through the end of October 2024 compared to the year before, while total US print book sales only increased by less than 1 percent in that same time frame.”  People are reading it.  They are looking for something and they are looking to religion.  I don’t think people are looking for answers, necessarily. I think we are looking for inspiration and solace.  I think we are looking for help understanding what we are feeling.  I think we are overflowing with feeling these days, overwhelmed by our feelings.  I think people are looking to scripture for language that will help them feel less overwhelmed.  And from a UU perspective, that scripture can be the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dao De Jing, Mary Oliver, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou.

Don’t be afraid to be religious. It just means opening yourself to wonder.  As the writer Atena O. Danner says:

Because I believe in the power of words,
of intention expressed, of gratitude and creation,
the unfurling of purposeful language
might be a prayer or incantation

Every time I seek out more
than what is already there,
A prayer, a prayer!

Don’t be afraid of religious language. One of the main reasons I love Unitarian Universalism is because it liberates religious language from the straitjacket of dogma and lets it and us run free.  Or as Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt, the President of the Starr King School for the Ministry, says: “Church is the place where we stand with one another, look the world in teh eye, attempt to see clearly, and gather strength to face what we see with courage, and yes, with joy.”  

May you find your language of faith, a language that frees and feeds your spirit.  May you find and liberate what prayer could be for you.  May you discover, explore and help to create places of sanctuary.  

May you find in being religious rest and resolve, energy and inspiration, balm and the wonder of becoming.  May we together be a religious people who are always seeking out more than what is already there.  May our religion be one where meaningfulness shines out all around us and from within.  May love hold and help, inspire and liberate your spirit.  May you attend religiously to love and loving.  May love and loving religiously attend to you. 

You are what religious looks like. 

OOS Feb 23 2025.docx

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