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Our election has brought us a new reality. A man has been elected as our president whose campaign seemingly had nothing in common with Unitarian Universalist values of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, or compassion in human relations, or the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all.
The other candidates were not without their problems. There was no candidate who represented all our shared values, let alone someone who could perfectly unite all our diversity as a nation.
Yet we have elected a man who ran on racial divisions; a man who has said he wants our country to set aside its foundational principle of religious tolerance; a man who has treated women as objects; a man who seems to prize wealth and power over human relationship.
We have also elected a man who said in his victory speech that this was a time to bind the wounds of division, and to come together as a nation. President-elect Trump said he wanted to receive guidance from those who did not support him, and be the president for all of America. Whether this is his true self, or his campaign showed his true self, it is on all of us to accept him as our president in January.
This is not the first time liberal religious people have been in a moment of uncertainty or despair over our nation's politics. I want to go back all the way to 1866, when the 14th amendment to the Constitution was proposed after the Civil War. This amendment is what gave former slaves and other male citizens of color in our nation the right to vote and the protections of the Constitution. Women suffragists had joined their efforts with the abolitionist cause during the Civil War. They saw rights for African-Americans and rights for women as intertwined. They fully expected that the 14th amendment would include the protections of citizenship, including the right to vote, for women as well as men.
But during the proposal of the amendment, the word "male" was added. When the amendment was ratified in 1868, it only provided the rights of citizenship and the vote to men-not to white women or to African American women. The suffragists, many of whom were Unitarians, many active in Worcester, many our direct spiritual forebears, were outraged. They felt left out. They felt abandoned. They took out their anger on their African American brothers and sisters. They let that wedge of division come between them.
This is what we cannot do, here, now. We need to work together. White people must work together with communities of color. Straight people must organize together with queer people. African American people must organize together with Latino people. Women must strategize together with men and with trans people. People of all physical abilities must work together. Rich people must listen to poor people. Working class and middle class must come together. We can't afford division. We can't afford to lose sight of all the hopes we share. We will not agree on everything, but where we agree, we join together. America is counting on us.
We want to live in a country that works toward our highest values. We want to see a country that affords all its citizens equal opportunity and equal protection under the law. We want a country where poverty isn't a life sentence and having dark skin isn't a crime. We want a country where all people can seek the health care they need and have a way to pay for it. We all want a country where America's proud traditions of religious diversity are upheld in peace.
I find hope here in our city, the city of Worcester where our liberal church has made its home for 231 years. Here in Worcester, my white children see a Hindu Indian woman as their pediatrician, and go to a school with Latina and immigrant teachers and leaders, and play with the children of women wearing hijabs in the library. They have friends in the neighborhood with Ecuadoran parents and Vietnamese parents and African American parents and European American parents. They have friends with two moms and classmates with two dads. This is the America I hope for.
Here we welcome refugees and organize to house them-and put pressure on elected officials to improve the integration of refugees in Massachusetts. Here the conservative clergy and the liberal clergy, the clergy of the African churches, the African American churches, the Latino/a churches, the white churches, the synagogues and the mosques-even the Catholic churches!-meet and organize together. We in this city have some practice in living together and working together.
It does not mean we can't mess up. Of course we can get caught in our Facebook feeds with people who agree with us and never disagree; of course we do not see every aspect of our nation's diversity. Of course we can never set aside our own privilege and point of view entirely. Of course we cannot take up another person's point of view completely without being that person.
But we can take the first step-toward communities of color, toward women's communities, toward trans communities, toward religiously diverse communities, toward poor communities-to organize together for the world we want to see. We listen to them and follow their lead. And even those people whose values are completely other than our own, even those groups with whom we cannot organize and strategize and plan-we can seek every opportunity to be in relationship with them and to recognize with compassion their humanity.
We must always remember, too, that there is a larger source of healing and wholeness which holds us in its embrace. It is there on the good days and the bad days, it is there when we triumph and when we fail. Whether we name it as the sum of human potential or as the loving God, it searches us and knows us and loves us and does not let us go. That source is in us and among us. It is in our energy for change and our broken-heartedness. It sees our failings and entrusts us with its pardon, that held in grace we may ever return to the hard, necessary work of being the best people we can be. Amen.
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