sermon: free love

The Unitarian Univeralist Church of Muncie
October 12, 2014
Same Sex Marriage was Legalized in Indiana October 6, 2014

​The following video was the reading. 

With a simple sign and open arms, Juan Mann has started quite a movement. He didn’t set out to change peoples lives so greatly. He didn’t set out to inspire people to follow in his footsteps all over the world. He just had an idea. A simple idea. And the willingness to open himself. The compassion to offer himself because he knew loneliness.
 
As he tells the story, he was returning to his native Australia after a trip when the idea came to him. He was not greeted at the airport and longed for an embrace. We all yearn to be held. To be touched. To hold and touch others in return. It is a deep human need. So, in feeling this need, Juan decided to offer himself to others. One of the beautiful things about hugs is that they are mutual. When one gives, one receives.
 
Juan set out that first day without a plan except to give this thing a try. He had his sign and his open arms, and, well, we saw what happened in the video.
It took some time for folks to open up to him. We have become so conditioned to pass strangers by on the street; I wonder how many people even noticed him. But eventually, someone risked opening themselves to him. Someone risked hugging this perfect stranger. And she had been having one of those terrible days, so this action, she told him was exactly what she needed. It showed her that she was loved. Because we all are loved. We forget it, too easily, but it is true. There is so much love, coursing through this universe, always available to us. Juan Mann must have known this in some deep way. So, he set out to feel and share some of it with others.
 
But when the Australian police told him he would have to stop, things changed. He didn’t plan on this being a thing. He just wanted to give and receive some hugs. But something shifted when he was told that he had to stop. By that point he’d been hugging folks for a few hours and had felt that deep and abiding love that we all yearn to feel. He had heard how much it meant to others that he was offering hugs. He had felt how much the love was transforming him. He couldn’t let that love be constrained. So he fought.
 
The police had stopped him and gotten a court order against his offering hugs under the premise that he was bothering the people. That he was being a public nuisance. His experience had shown that this was not the case.
 
He gathered 10,000 signatures, as we saw, and was given permission to resume offering free hugs. And in this process, he got some media coverage. And he made a video and put it on youtube. And people were interested in this story. Before long, the story was spreading and so, too, was the hugging. People began making their own signs and going out in their own communities, all over the world. People started groups that would go out together and offer free hugs to whoever would take them. A global movement was formed. There is a website where you can find the free huggers in your area so that you can join forces. There are “free hugs” days in many communities where anyone is welcome to offer or receive.
 
Juan began something huge. But he didn’t create that love. He has merely inspired people to make it manifest in the world. The love that is always surrounding us is made tangible by these hugs. The unconditional, universal love that always holds us all is made flesh as it moves through us.
 
As Psycholigist Caryn Markson and Journalist Peggy Gillespie write in their poem Psalm 62, “Not everyone recognizes that the arms of God are holding them. Not everyone remembers that their arms are the arms of God.”
 
In offering free hugs, people have become vessels for a love that cannot be contained. Yet, people have been striving to contain love for far too long. That love should flow freely through and among people has scared too many people for too long. The incredible power of abundant love can be seen as dangerous to those in power, to those who seek to control others, to those who are threatened by it.
 
Yet, slowly, often too slowly, love overcomes. Love proves, time and time again, that it is free and freeing.That it is available to all people at all times. That it will hold us and guide us through the trials of this life. We can see this is the long and arduous battle for love to guide the laws around the institution of marriage. Indeed, it is clear that love has not been the guiding force around these laws if we truly look at its history, but love has been slowly prevailing over time. The law of coverture, for example, which stated that a wife didn’t exist except as an extension of her husband was slowly overturned, state by state in the late 19th century.
 
In 1967, Love triumphed over hate in a historic supreme court decision, Loving v. the state of Virginia. Now, I just think it is too precious that the couples name was Loving.The Lovings had been taken from their home in the middle of the night for breaking the law in Virginia, for getting married when she was black and he was white. The story goes that the police came to their home at night in hopes of also catching them in the act of sex, so that they could up the charges. But the Loving’s prevailed. Their case declared that no state laws could prohibit marriage on the basis of race. Love flowed more freely that day.
 
And now, the battle for marriage to become more and more an institution of love continues. Just last year, the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, recognizing all those unions legal on the state level. We have watched state after state open their laws up to more allow unions of loving people of the same sex.
 
And we have seen a major tide turning here, where in the matter of less than a year we’ve gone from fighting against a hateful constitutional amendment HJR-3, to our community minister performing legal weddings in this very room, to this weeks incredible news that same sex marriages will be recognized and can be legally performed within Indiana.
 
30 out of 50 states now have marriage equality! And the waves of this change are picking up steam, the laws are changing more and more quickly, Love is gaining power and breaking down barriers with more and more speed. As more and more states open their laws to allow this love in, we see another example of love overcoming fear and hatred. Of love refusing to be contained. Of love insisting on flowing, freely through and among all people. It has been said that it is now only a matter of time when it comes to marriage equality. The tide has turned.
 
The best of times so far, when it comes to marriage equality, is now. And yet, there are countless ways in which Hatred and Fear threaten Love in our lives – but especially in the lives of our LGBTQ siblings.
 
While it is something to celebrate that we’ve made such headway on the issue of LGBTQ rights in regards to marriage – and that each of these victories continues to further the cause of LGBTQ rights in general – there is still much to be done in other areas. We cannot simply rest. Not yet. Not when in 33 states you can still be legally fired or discriminated against in the workplace for being LGBTQ. And LGBTQ youth are twice as likely to as their peers to have been physically assaulted, kicked or shoved at school.[1] And in public high schools 97% of students report regularly hearing homophobic comments from their peers.[2] And 58% of LGBT youth have been sexually victimized. [3] 26% of LGTQ teens who come out to their parents are kicked out of their homes.[4]
 
And when we look at the lives of just our transgendered siblings, those who are perhaps the most at risk, the statistics get even more tragic and scary. Transgender individuals are 4 times more likely to live in poverty due to recurring bias based events.[5] And 80% of trans students report feeling unsafe in school due to their gender expression. [6] For us to stand on the side of love, it is not enough for us to celebrate the turning of the tide on marriage equality and not continue to fight for the safety and fulfillment of potential of all LGBTQ people. Love calls us to create a land where all love is celebrated – not just heteronormative love.
For us to live into what the queer rights movement is truly asking of us, we will need to break open and reimagine what we believe love looks like. What we believe the ideal way of sharing love is. Because love doesn’t fit into the boxes that we put it in. Love is more powerful than allowed by our heteronormative culture.
 
We’ve got a long way to go to create the kind of world where all love is celebrated. And where the love between comrades, between communities, between those who are not partners but have a deep connection, where this love is lifted up as transformative as well. Where community is valued as strongly as the ideal of the nuclear family – which was created as a concept to sell more washing machines and refrigerators.
 
Love demands more of us. As we continue in the struggle to allow more and more love to flow freely throughout this world that seems to ridden with fear,
As we stand up and speak out for the rights of each of us to create the kind of loving family that we dream about, as we let loose the power of love into this world, I believe that love will win.
 
The best of times is now, but tomorrow, well, who knows what is possible?
 
In the end, love will flow free, as it is meant to. Love will not be contained. Love will not allow that people be denied the legal right to embrace one another. Love will remind us all what the basis for marriage truly is. Love will bind families of all shapes and sizes together, not tear them apart. Love will move through our human, flawed, judicial system opening more and more hearts and more and more doors. And it will move through our broken, divisive, consumerist culture, leading us ever so gently towards a more whole, united, human based way of being in the world. And love is calling us to this work.
 
Love is calling us to make it more manifest in the world, by sharing a hug or by standing up for those who cannot openly share their love. Love is calling us to break down the barriers that would try to keep it tightly bound. Love is calling us to allow it to flow freely through and among us. To allow it to continue to free us from our own fears of one another so that we can see all as our siblings in the great human family. To allow it to move into us so that we can receive the healing powers it possesses.
 
Love is calling us to share all that we have in our hearts with those around us. But we don’t just try to contain the love of other people. We try to contain one anothers identities. We try to box in our understandings of sexual orientations and gender expressions – and the definitions do not allow for the variety of humans existing within them, so we add more, creating quite an alphabet soup in order to allow all to feel included.
 
Many of you remember, I’m sure, when we only really talked about being gay or lesbian. And of how things have changed. Acknowledging even the existence of bisexual people was harder for many. And transgender people really challenge our narrow cultural understandings of gender.
 
The binary and boxed in notions of identity have sadly only opened to new ideas so much at a time. And soon even LGBT felt too limiting, as many of us began to realize how the term bisexual implies that there are 2 genders – which does not lift up the reality of the lives of not just our transgender siblings but most of humanity who actually have much more nuanced gender expressions. Never mind that there are whole communities of people who do not feel a home within the constructs of either gender on the binary scale and identify as gender queer.
So the term queer has become an umbrella term for those of us who do not identify as straight and still do not fit into the boxes that we’ve so careful crafted around the identities of LGBT. Because we needed something more expansive, something that left people some room to be themselves, because people were struggling to fit into the identities that we had.
 
Over time, as more brave souls share their full, beautiful, unique selves with those around them, and as more of us celebrate what is so special about breaking open the boxes that keep us all confined, Love continues to move and shape this world into ever more of the beloved community.    
 
The temptation to make sense of things by creating clear, yet restrictive containers is great. It helps us to define. To understand. To draw clear demarcations of what is what – But it has also drawn clear demarcations of what is acceptable and what is not. And the reality is that too many people just don’t fit into clear, easy to understand defining identities. And really, I’m glad we don’t, because that would be so boring. People are nuanced, and complex, and beautifully unique. We cannot just understand and define them quickly and easily. We have to take our time, to get to know them, and to let them evolve over time.  Because –we often try to contain people – our loved ones just as much if not more so than strangers – whether queer or straight, and of all gender expressions.
 
Breaking open boxes so that love can be free is not just an issue of equality for LGBTQ people, it is an issue for all people. We capture each other in a moment in time and struggle to allow each other to grow and change – to break the boxes we have put each other in.
 
How many of us have partners or spouses who are exactly the same as they were when we started our relationships? How many of us have siblings or best friends or chosen family who have not changed a bit in the years we have held them dear? Anyone?
 
Seth and I are a relatively new partnership, we celebrate 4 years together tomorrow, and we’ve both changed drastically in the time we’ve been together. All for the better, of course. Yet, even as they’ve changed, we think we know exactly who our loved ones are, right? And we think we know what they will do or say or think in any number of situations?
 
We put our loved ones in boxes. As my treasured colleague in Tulsa, Rev. Tamara Lebak puts it: “It’s inevitable that we will put our partners in boxes. I just want us to keep the lids off.” And I, too, want us to keep the lids off. For otherwise, we do not allow our loves the room to grow, to become their best selves, to be free.
 
The Lebanese poet, Kahlil Grabran calls us to “make not a bond of love”, but to “let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of the heavens dance between you.”
 
And these truths can hold just as strongly in your other loving relationships. The best thing a parent can do for their children is to let them be themselves. As hard as it is to let go of our dreams for who they might be, that may have little to do with who they should become. And when we put any loved one in boxes, we limit them. We make it harder for our loved ones to grow in new and exciting directions. We make it harder for our loved ones to find and nurture new parts of themselves. We make it harder for our loved ones to be free.
 
Has anyone ever experienced something like this? Have you felt the expectations that have confined your dreams? Have you experienced someone confining you into who you used to be and not see who you are becoming? Have you broken free from such boxes? Have you been allowed the freedom of unconditional, free love? Loving each other in this way is truly holy. This kind of free and freeing love helps to build the beloved community of all souls here on this earth, one relationship at a time. And here in this place, we practice that kind of love. So that we can be free and so that all people can be celebrated for exactly who they are – free of the boxes that society dictates are acceptable and free of all boxes that would seek to constain us all from sharing the love that flows from within us.
 
We love each other deeply, get to know each other well, hold each other closely. And we allow each other the space to be whoever we are and love whomever we love. We encourage each other to grow and learn and change however we feel we are meant to. We embrace each other as we are, gently, never holding each other too tightly so that we cannot move in the world the way we need to. Practicing love in this way, we can create such an incredible place. We create a place where all beings know their own wholeness and feel embraced by a love larger than words or deeds. Here, I feel embraced by something larger than the sum of each of you. And I hope you all do, too. Here, I feel truly, unconditionally, freely loved. And it is indeed freeing.
 
More people need to feel this. Love can shine from this place into the dark corners where fear and hatred that continue to rule the day. Let us let Love out. Let the power of Love continue to open the hearts of us all so that we can create a world that celebrates the true diversity of humanity. Let Love – free flowing and freeing Love – continue to move us closer and closer to a world where everyone is safe, affirmed and loved. Let that feeling of being truly loved, truly held in the arms of love, in the arms of God, let that feeling free us all.  And to that I must say, Amen.  


[1] http://www.hrc.org/youth/view-statistics#.VCxwOvldUSM

[2] https://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-gay-rights

[3] http://ckennedyauthor.blogspot.com/2013/05/lost-and-found-anthology-about-omeless.html

[4] https://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-gay-rights

[5] http://lexiecannes.com/stats-on-transgender-discrimination-violence-and-suicide/

[6] https://www.umhs-sk.org/blog/exclusive-interviewpediatrician-dr-aaron-miller-of-the-martin-luther-king-jr-macc-hub-clinic-in-los-angeles-on-lgbt-medicine-for-youth-teens/Caribbean-Medical-Schools