The Art of Resistance

October 24, 2021

First Unitarian Church of St. Louis

Today, as I celebrate the completion of my formal seminary education at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, I want to take a moment to thank all of you. I thank you for being the congregation who birthed me and nurtured me spiritually during my time of formation. It was this community who taught me the power that religion has to take hold of us as individuals and turn us into a community of seekers.

I’m blessed to have lived and worked in covenant with many of you who are sitting here in spirit in these sacred pews today, along with many others of blessed memory. [Pause while camera pans] I will always carry you in my heart and in my new life’s work. Thank you, thank you.

At seminary, I will graduate with a master of Divinity degree with a concentration in Theology and the Arts. The arts, for me, bring ministry alive, fusing humanity, creativity, and divinity. At United, this has given me an additional dimension to explore beyond theology and sacred texts. Ministry is expanded when infused with the creative arts of all kinds, tapping into something deeper than thought and reason. Music, poetry, and visual art aren’t about texts, they’re about the spirit reaching down inside of you and grabbing you in the guts — something that makes you feel, or laugh, or cry, or get angry. Despite the artifice of art, it connects us with real human life, with the ability to create experiences that transform, reawaken, and inspire. For me, there is no spiritual or religious life without art at its core.

At the same time ministry is about much more than seeing, hearing, and feeling something. It’s about doing something. About committing to something. Encouraging people to spiritual growth through engaging in the world, through engaging with that crazy quilt of the stories that is the human experience. In short, ministry, as with the prophets of old, is about leading the resistance — Resistance to the dominant cultural narratives, resistance to toxic individualism, resistance to complacency, resistance to hate, and resistance to the power structure, whether externally imposed or internalized. Ministry is laying a healing hand on the broken places, the blind spots, the injustices in this world, and declaring that these will not stand.

So given my irresistible love of the arts, and my passion for the art of resistance, imagine my joy this past summer in discovering the exhibit Stories of Resistance at St. Louis’ Contemporary Art Museum. Stories of Resistance “is a collection of stories past, present, and future exemplifying the power of acts of resistance from across the world.” The art is about making the struggle for change visible and inspiring us with stories of resilience and courage. Perhaps even more important, for me, it deepens my calling. It reminds me that ministry itself is an act of resistance. It goes against the grain of our me-first culture; it attempts to invert the power structure, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable; it cuts against the easy answers of us-versus-them politics; and it cuts against the human tendency to look away from pain and suffering, preferring to look it squarely in the face and aspiring to say I am not afraid.

But what does resistance really mean in a practical sense? Who’s resisting whom or what? How do regular religious liberals like us participate in resisting the forces that destroy beloved community? And how do we know what to resist, exactly, as we find ourselves in the midst of a multicultural, pluralistic, postmodern world? How do we keep from resisting good things, like progressive change, instead of destructive things, like injustice? This art exhibit, Stories of Resistance, offers three paths of resistance that all of us as a faith community can participate in: Language as resistance, Existence as resistance, and Movement as resistance.

Picture, if you will, a large white room, empty except for a stack of three shelves set at an angle filled with 145 lithographic limestone tablets. These tablets don’t contain the 10 commandments, or official truths handed down by ecclesiastical authorities. No, they contain 145 diary entries of Kurdish journalist and editor, Ms. Gurbetelli Ersöz, who was allied with the Kurdistan Worker’s Party and considered an enemy of the Turkish state. This work, titled Gurbet’s Diaries, was created by artist Banu Cennetoğlu, who celebrates the guerrilla tradition of keeping a diary. The diary is meant to communicate to the world an otherwise unwritten history, refusing to have the story erased by the dominant narrative. As the exhibit curators describe it, “Words,” such as those of Ms. Ersöz, “are used by individuals to make injustices legible and to reframe history. They are calls to collectively organize and take action.”

And thus we enter the first gallery, called Language as resistance, where we are about to discover “how speech and storytelling empower individuals.” Language is critically important in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, and that includes the power of storytelling. But whose stories will we lift up? Whose stories are we leaving out? And most important, what is the story that we tell about ourselves as Unitarian Universalists? UU minister, Rev. Jacqueline Lewis, proclaims that it’s the mission of the next generation of Unitarian Universalists to grow beyond the Emersonian ethic of the dominant culture that celebrates — worships — the theology and philosophy of individualism. Instead, she writes, we must re-story Unitarian Universalism for the 21st century. “Stories shape and transform our identity,” she writes, and so in an increasingly multicultural and interdependent nation, “...we need to re-story what it means to be an individual in community, what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist in these times.” UU minister Rev. Frederic Muir, similarly insists that we need “a renewed and renewing story” about what UUs are about. He says the language of covenant is the passphrase that will take us into the future. We must insist, like Ms. Ersöz, that stories of marginalized people be written into our history, inscribed on stone tablets alongside our more familiar stories.

In addition to the language of storytelling and covenant, language as resistance means the use of prophetic language — and a language of reverence — from the pulpit and in the public square. Not everyone needs to believe in a traditional notion of God, and I certainly don’t. But using the language of reverence transcends and connects, helping to create an idea larger than the individual. The trend in our denomination these days is away from secular humanism and toward a re-embrace of spirituality. I personally welcome that development, while making room for those who draw the line at theism. There is room for all in a language of spirit and connectedness and this transcendent experience blossoms in art. One UU pioneer of arts in worship, Erik Martínez Resly, proclaims that art allows us to create new images of God, making “space for the invention of new pathways that reconnect us to the chaos, to that which is ultimate and primal…”

Now, step with me into the next gallery, where we see a bronze cast of a man’s raised fist. This simple, powerful gesture is the 2019 work of Glenn Kaino, titled Salute (Lineage). It celebrates the defiant act of US gold medal sprinter Tommie Smith, who raised his fist during the national anthem along with bronze medalist John Carlos at the 1968 Olympic Games. Their fists were a message of solidarity with those suffering human rights abuses under the Aparteid regime in South Africa, as well as with Black people in the U.S. who were likewise struggling for their civil rights. The bronze forearm and fist is set in a mirrored case, giving the illusion that an infinity of raised fists have joined the first in solidarity.

This is part two of the exhibit, Existence as resistance. This room is about “making things visible and asserting the presence of lesser known histories.” Here, the artists seek to “make visible histories, stories, and peoples that are often disregarded or forgotten.” How can we UUs live into this tradition of being a witness? Of naming and not forgetting? We can start by redoubling our commitment to stop the erasure. Embracing our multicultural future means refusing to erase people of marginalized identities, and proactively working to reclaim their stories. Like, for starters, naming the indigenous tribes on whose land we’re sitting right at this moment. We acknowledge and reclaim you into our history, Héthy Šakówin, Ogaxpa Mazhon, Myaamia, Osage, Kaskaskia, Kickapoo.

Likewise, we must renew our spiritual commitment to filling the “Black hole” in Unitarian Universalism. This is how UU minister Mark Morrison-Reed characterizes our present duty to reverse the erasure of Black UUs from our history. This is a gift I have received in my seminary education: to get to know amazing Black Unitarians and Universalists, names such as William Jackson, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Barrier Williams, Ethelred Brown, William H. G. Carter, Eugene Sparrow, Joseph Jordan [Jerden], Thomas E. Wise, Mary J. Jordan, Margaret Mosely, William R. Jones, and Anthony Pinn, just to name a few. Most of those names, I’d guess, are unfamiliar to you. I’m excited for you to get to know them.

There are so many other stories that have been written out of the dominant narrative that it feels like a daunting task to reclaim them all. How can we do that without also erasing the stories that all of you hold dear, including your history with this faith tradition and your individual experiences of the sacred. Existence as resistance seeks to bring all our stories into this sacred space, a place where no one is left behind.

Now let us enter our third and final gallery. Here we see two large, blue, handmade slave rebellion banners, created by artist Scott Tyler, known professionally as Dread Scott. The banners are decorated in white geometrics designs and Egyptian crosses on a field of deep indigo. And they’re surrounded by a series of photographs of the Reenactment of the 1811 Slave Rebellion in New Orleans. In 2020, Scott and community collaborators reimagined the largely forgotten rebellion. “Hundreds of Black and Indigenous reenactors dressed in period clothing, rode horses, carried [these] flags, and marched to the beat of African drums. [They sang] in Creole and English for two days across 24 miles...following the same route as the original rebellion.” This portion of the art exhibit celebrates Movement as Resistance, “[focusing] on the mobilization of people—whether through migration or marching in the streets—as a revolutionary form of action and self-determination.”

We UUs continue to speak not only with words but with our assembled bodies, as we demonstrate for Black Lives Matter, march in the annual Pride parade, show up for the homeless and the hungry, and so much more. This form of resistance is about people moving — moving across boundaries, seeking to move others out of complacency, moving into new encounters with the other that expand and recreate the definition of who we are and what we are about religiously. This is what Unitarians and Universalists were made for, my friends. We have not been perfect, we’ve gotten things wrong, we’ve left people out. But we’ve always been a faith that’s moving out into the world and continuously expanding our story. Some religions pride themselves on being eternally the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Our faith in progress and change ultimately draws us to the next chapter, seeking ever new footholds on the unfolding arc of the moral universe. But it’s a messy progression, not a linear one. It’s actually more like concentric circles that ever widen over time, rippling out toward larger and more inclusive truths.

In this country we started by resisting ecclesiastical authority. Instead of bishops, we embraced covenantal theology and congregational polity that placed a priority on walking together, bound to each other by our beliefs, values, and mutual social commitment. One by one we questioned and shed orthodox beliefs, though not without great struggle at each point, ultimately embracing the radical theologies of unitarianism and universalism. Then we struggled to oppose slavery, embraced the role of women as clergy and lay leaders, broadened the very notion of divinity in Transcendentalism, sought to build a divine kingdom on earth through social reforms, embraced world religions, widened the circle to include humanists, very imperfectly struggled to open our faith to people of color, incorporated feminist, LGTBQ, and migrant perspectives, and today are widening our 20th century humanistic approach to be more welcoming of spiritual and theistic language. As a tradition, we have resisted easy answers to life’s most difficult questions. But likewise we must today recommit to resisting the easy escapism of individualism and the isolationism of congregational polity. A purely negative freedom, absence of restraint, is not a sufficient foundation on which to build beloved community.

May we embrace the language of resistance by speaking of covenant and using our prophetic voices.

May we embrace existence for all as another form of resistance.

And may we embrace movement as resistance — seeking to move out into the world and, through loving encounter, to widen the circle of welcome.

This is what we are made for. Go forth now into this world, and be the resistance.

Amen and blessed be