The Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring
Sermon transcript
Standing on the Side of Love
by Rev. Liz Lerner Maclay
Service at UUCSS on February 14, 2010
Standing on the Side of Love
May 28th, 2008 was a beautiful day. Tim and I were away on a scuba diving vacation. We went diving that morning and he seemed especially tender in the boat as we were riding back to shore. I was starting to think he might be gearing up to ask me to marry him, but I’d thought that before and been wrong, so I was wary of going down that path again. By any measure, after 5 years together, we were running out of time to figure out whether our futures would be joined or not. I was on my own in the afternoon and I spent it doing a lot more such more figuring and analysis. I ended up confirming to myself that there was a chance that dinner would be one that might be lifechanging…. Or not.
When he joined me we still had plenty of time before walking over to dinner, so we decided to go down to the little beach and have a drink and enjoy the sunset over the bay. We settled into beach chairs and looked at the white sand and the sky shot with color and the sailboats in the water and I went off on a spiral in my head, thinking about I don’t even remember what. Tim was talking and I was sort of listening, and sort of lost in the beauty, and sort of wondering whether he would ask me later, and what I would do to handle it if it he didn’t. Right about then, I caught a few words of what he was saying and I actually heard them and I realized that they sounded sort of like the preamble to a marriage proposal. So I tuned all the way in fast and looked at him, and listened…. And it was exactly like the preamble to a marriage proposal. And after the preamble…. The proposal. No I didn’t actually say yes right away. Instead I said “I can’t believe you finally asked me.” And he laughed and said “Do you want me to ask you again?” And I said “Yes.” And he did, and then I accepted, laughing and crying. Later that night we went to dinner and the emotion between us was so charged and I was weepy so often that our waitress was clearly worried for us – worried in fact that maybe the exact opposite of our reality was happening – so we explained the situation and she was thrilled and we got desserts from them as our first engagement present.
Fast forward about a year, the wedding is a couple of months away yet, and Tim and I are in the car driving to pick up the kids for the weekend. And I’m pondering the strength of my love for him and I make the mistake of saying what I’m thinking: “You know I honestly think I love you so much that if Obama himself came to me and told me ‘Liz you’re the one for me. I’m done with Michelle, I want you to be my lady, my first lady, everything. I want to hitch our stars and share an amazing life with you from now on forever, etc….. ‘ I really think I would say no. I think I would turn all that down, not because it would be wrong to go with him or diminish him in my eyes if he left Michelle ever – though it would – but because that’s how much I want to stay with you and be with you and our life. That’s how much I love you.’ I considered this a pretty ultimate proof of devotion and love. Tim was not pleased. He considered that even if we weren’t actually wed yet, he’d asked me to marry him and I’d agreed, asked and answered. The commitments were made. So of course I wouldn’t leave him, just like he would already not leave me. It was not a proof of my devotion that I would stay with him, it was if anything kind of insulting that I was still playing out little scenarios like that in my mind.
I share these stories with you because implicit in them are most of the reasons why I am passionate about marriage equality. We could share our story with the waitress and count on her congratulations. We could struggle over whether to get married knowing that the only impediments were our own emotional baggage. Most of all, (though clearly our understanding of ‘engagement’ was different), we could struggle with marriage, knowing that we shared the same understanding of it not only with each other but with much the western world – except for the gender angle. And even with all that going for us, Tim and I lived together for several years before we took the plunge. We shared our lives deeply, made many of our decisions together, shared our families, our friends, our vacations and our work, meshed our priorities and needs over time even some of our finances …. Yet we weren’t married, and we saw getting married as a big change.
It was a big change because we weren’t free spirits to whom marriage was just a word or an empty ritual or a legal expedient. We both actually believe in traditional marriage, which we understood as a sacrament and a blessing, a faithful lifetime commitment between two people, regardless of gender, to hold each other in love and respect and make each other the foundation of family. We believe that this experience is about diving deeply into another person and into life with that one other person and the depth comes from that unique commitment. The difference in our relationship, therefore, between being married and living together was significant in terms of how we understood our commitment and our future.
I want to be clear, in defining marriage, that it is one of the greatest human undertakings because it is a leap of faith in the face of all the imperfections we all possess. It is a commitment to commitment that doesn’t always succeed. As the country singer Brad Paisley tells us, ‘If love was a plane, no one would get on.’ We all know what it feels like to fail in some form of faithfulness, and we also know what it feels like to be betrayed. Some marriages that have been challenged in terms of respect or love or faithfulness can overcome those challenges and live truly into what marriage should be – this can even be part of how it is a great adventure of the soul. And some cannot meet those challenges, or overcome them, and we all know divorce is a shattering experience. Those are not reasons marriage is an illusion, they are reasons marriage deserves great care and respect, the greatest care and respect, nothing less is enough.
The other reason marriage was a big change was that because we were two people who explicitly had not made that commitment, as a single person, my bottom line was supposed to be me. This meant that the risky decisions then were those that prioritized us over me. When I made a decision that put my own future happiness or welfare in jeopardy, a decision that only made sense if we were going to be together forever, that was risky. And if we’d split, no doubt my narrative would’ve changed and the decision would have changed from risky to stupid. But my belief was borne out, and so those risky decisions became leaps of faith that were justified. And now risky decisions are exactly reversed: my bottom line needs to be us. Risky decisions would prioritize me over us.
Standing on the side of love is always about prioritizing us over me. The ‘us,’ the ‘me,’ they change, but the principle applies, to marriage, to all marriage, to a country in its struggle to enlarge its heart regarding marriage to include all its people and learn that difference is not threat, not ugly, not unnatural, no less human, no less sacred.
I work for marriage equality on two levels. I work as a citizen of this country who knows well the risk marriage involves, after 43 years of life as ‘me,’ that ultimate risk of ‘us.’ But it’s nothing compared to the amount of risk involved in loving someone of the same gender and changing ‘me’ to ‘us’ with them. The risks of loving someone whose hand we cannot hold in public, someone we cannot sit too close to in public, someone we certainly cannot kiss laughingly or carelessly – in some places we could be killed for showing that kind of love and happiness in each other. The day I got engaged, the day I got married, everyday of my life in love, all are privileged in terrible, unacceptable ways simply because I don’t have to worry about defending or justifying my love. No one will kill me for loving Tim. No one will hit me or stare at me or curl their lip or swallow their words or spew their words. Instead, starting with the waitress at the restaurant that first night, it’s all been cake.
But this isn’t just a social or a civil issue, which is why I work for marriage equality as a religious person. There is a religious justification, and it goes back to my belief in marriage as a sacred institution, a blessing and a sacrament, full of beauty, possibility, and that adventure of the soul. Love is the most powerful, beautiful, spiritual, human quality there is. All love – between family, between friends, between lovers, it’s all ultimate and precious and spiritual. Because it is with each other that the divine spark can be most fully experienced and expressed. There is inherent worth and dignity in every person, and that there is a divine spark in every person – something of god, something beyond words, something stunning, something of grace, something absolutely alive and grand and infinitely precious, something we overlook or ignore all the time, until something else, frequently love, gives us the vision to see how just how beautiful and precious a person is – which is just how beautiful and precious every person is. This is the point of Rumi’s poem, Love Dogs. Our longing for love is also our capacity for love, and there is a kind of fulfillment in love, all love, that is worth everything. Find those who deserve and return your love, and love them with everything you have. Thus will you become your fullest self, because you are in loving relationship, than any of us can be without people to love and love us.
Stay with me here. We think of personhood as an individual experience, as being fully who we are. But this is a mistake. We are individuals and we do live, and die, alone in many ways – but it is always relationships that grow us, that try us, that teach us, and that sustain us. In that way, our personhood is absolutely dependent on relationship, and none of us is alone, nor alone in who we are. We are who we are and we are the sum of those who have shaped us, especially those who have loved us and whom we have loved. And while my focus is marriage, I include all kinds of relationship – even that between a writer and a reader, or an artist and a viewer, across centuries. All relationships grounded in love offer us opportunities to grow ourselves and each other, to live into the potential of our spirits and our persistent capacity to seek meaning and to honor it, to praise and to seek the divine in all the ways we do, and in all the ways we share with each other. This happens regardless of whether the love is romantic or not, whether lovers wish to marry or not. Love is not all about marriage.
But marriage is all about love. So the issue of marriage equality is fundamentally religious because of the foundational relationship between love and soul. And it is also religious because at the heart of marriage equality are the issues of what is sin, and what is grace. That’s right sin. We don’t use that word a lot, but you can’t talk about marriage equality without it. So here’s my definition. Sin is what works against humanity’s capacity for compassion, commitment and communion. Sin is choosing me over us, even when the us is humanity, or the planet, or the future. And what puts us in sin is never love, but all those things which deny or reject love. Selfishness, jealousy, laziness, prejudice, and of course hate. Grace is what flows from life and the tapestry of all that exists in this world, to uplift us and renew us, beyond our command, overcoming any myopia or self-absorption, reminding us that we are not alone, that we are linked to life in many and beautiful forms, that there is always an us. There’s a reason why that saying persists: Jesus is love. Love is surely the most powerful form of grace that humanity knows. Love is not God, but it is akin to God in that love gives us strength, hope, happiness, belief in ourselves, relief in grief, endurance in despair. For those of us who live without believing in God, love fills many of the same roles. And in this way, we are all Rumi’s love dogs. We all long for it, even pray for it, as fiercely as any mystic longs for God. And if and when we find it, we give ourselves to it, aware that any limits to our loving are our own, ours to discover or set or transcend. Union leads to communion, and communion to union, they are self-perpetuating¬¬¬¬ and will always take us deeper if we let them.
And if love is like God, denying or condemning love are desecrations. Such negation has sinful effects not only on a person but also on the soul. Who is anyone to condemn what gives another strength, hope, happiness, belief in themselves, relief in grief and endurance in despair. Such attempts to reduce or dehumanize people are only successful in that they inevitably redound back onto the haters who wish to dehumanize others. If you cannot see the humanity in a person because of where they find love and hope, then it is your own humanity that is in jeopardy.
I agree with the religious right that faithful, traditional marriage between two believing and committed souls is a social cornerstone and a sacred institution. And I believe that love is sacred, because of its transformative power, because it can work like God in our lives. And sacredness doesn’t belong as an exclusive privilege, bottled up like spring water or reserved on high for members of an exclusive club who get to decide who can join them and who can’t. That kind of elitism has no place in faith, no place in justice, certainly no place sticking its nose into love. I have said before, if the religious right wants to defend marriage, really wants to defend marriage, then work to close down wedding chapels in Vegas where even drunken strangers can marry, require premarital counseling so that people go into it understanding that no marriage is perfect, and that neither of them is perfect, and their marriage will absolutely require commitment and sacrifice if it is to endure and deepen and deepen them as it can, as it should. I will join them in those endeavors – it would be a heck of an alliance.
But in the meantime, Marriage Equality hangs in the balance. We have started a change and the struggle is joined and every single one of us needs to bend our shoulder to this task. We cannot be complacent, we cannot be tired, we certainly cannot be bored, about this issue. We have begun to roll a great stone and there are as many or more trying to roll it back. Put your shoulder to this stone with me, make sure you lend your strength, your hope, your compassion and your humanity to this task. Every one of us is needed, and needed right now. Sign petitions, call your representatives, give money or time, write to your newspapers, talk with your neighbors, plant signs in your lawns and replace them when they are stolen or defaced, teach your children, teach their teachers, if you can think of it, do it. Do it and do not stop. We have never said all there is to say and never done all we can do until the day, the shining day everyone deserves for their wedding, when all people can marry their great love, regardless of gender. That will be the brightest day in our ministry, a blazing day for this church, when this sanctuary is hallowed by the legal marriages of all our lesbian and gay members and friends and family and friends of friends, all the same-sex couples who have already been faithfully in union and communion for years or decades, when I can finally say ‘with the power vested in me by the state of Maryland” and pronounce every devoted same sex couple who wishes, married: fully, honorably, beautifully, not only in the eyes of us all and in accordance with all that is sacred, but also according to all law. Forever and ever. Amen. hymns: no 1014 - Standing on the Side of Love no. 170 - We Are A Gentle Angry People Performance: Someone Like You - Van Morrison, The Power of Two – The Indigo Girls Welcome to the Future - Brad Paisley, Love Train - Big & Rich
OW: 418 Reading: Love Dogs - Rumi One night a man was crying “Allah! Allah!” His lips grew sweet with praising, until a cynic said, “So! I’ve heard you calling out, but have you ever gotten any response?” The man had no answer to that. He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep. He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls, in a thick, green foliage. “Why did you stop praising?” “Because I’ve never heard anything back.” “This longing you express is the return message.” The grief you cry out from draws you toward union. Your pure sadness that wants help is the secret cup. Listen to the moan of a dog for its master. That whining is the connection. There are love dogs no one knows the names of. Give your life to be one of them.
CW: Live with everything you have. Witness to life in all its infinitude, beauty, power and fragility. Be the change you want to see. Seek forgiveness. Renew your spirit. Keep fresh the moments of your high resolve. Be bold. Be thankful. Care for those who need you. Take care from those who love you. Attend the holy. Go in peace.