Children of the Light ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
June 21, 2020

Imagine, for a moment, having nowhere that you could get together with friends, or to meet people, that was legal. Imagine, for a moment, not being welcome anywhere, or even allowed to be yourself anywhere in public.

It’s easy for many of us to forget that until 51 years ago, that was the way of life for our lesbian, gay, transgender and queer siblings. There were clubs and bars in cities where folks could gather, but it was never safe, because it was illegal. The police could always arrive and arrest you.

That was the situation on June 28, 1969, when police raided a bar called the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in New York City. Many patrons fled, others were arrested and loaded into police vans. A crowd gathered, bottles, and rocks began to fly, and the police ended up barricaded from the mob inside the Stonewall Inn. The stories tell of drag queens and people of color, the most marginalized, who led the attack on the police.

Protests went on for days, and eventually focused on the offices of the Village Voice, which had joined the New York Daily News in using homophobic slurs in their reporting of the riots.

One year later, on the anniversary of the riots, a protest march took place, called the Christopher Street Liberation March. A few hundred people started the march, but more and more joined in until it stretched for 15 city blocks. Other cities: Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, followed suit that year, and more and more in the years since, until each June cities and towns all across the world hold Pride events.

As the rights for LGBTQ people have expanded, the protests have given way to celebrations. Church groups march, along with families and businesses. Two years ago my son and daughter in law rode on her company’s float in the Boston parade. Pride goes mainstream.

Mainstream in some ways, but there are still far too many who would deny basic rights and deny the humanity of LGBTQ folx. I don’t want to paint too rosy of a picture, or to make it seem that there is nothing left to fight for. Just this week the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to uphold that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects LBGTQ people from workplace discrimination. As glad as we were about the ruling, we wonder why this would ever be necessary, here in 2020. And the frightening thing was that many of us were surprised.

I began by asking you to imagine not having a legal way to gather and socialize with friends. And now I’ll ask you to imagine not being able to take for granted your right to marry or to not be fired from your job because of who you are. And perhaps you do not have to imagine this because you have lived it. We hold you in our hearts, and we pray that the path becomes easier and more secure.

Americans have such a complicated attitude toward protest. In the moment, in the present, it often scares us and we are most likely to try to shut it down, repress it, stifle it. And then, as events pass into history and we feel safer, we romanticize the protests, even regard them with pride. I think of the Boston Tea Party, and the Boston Massacre. We don’t think of those ancestors as looters, or rabble in the streets. They are our heroes. We squirm today at the footage of the protests in the South in the 1960’s, with the police dogs and the fire hoses. Today, we quote Dr. Martin Luther King over and over. Gay Pride protests have become Pride, with rainbows and floats and costumes, and the Stonewall Inn has been named as a National Monument. It seems that time needs to pass before we can accept that a protest was necessary, that the rights and freedoms demanded and won were deserved. We are proud of our revolutionary past, as long as it is well and safely in the past. And we look like hypocrites.

The Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass had this to say, famously, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will.” He also said that “without a struggle, there can be no progress.” We look at history, and see the demands for justice, for equality. Our nation was born in one of those struggles, and we celebrate it. But those coming along afterward discover that they must also fight, and demand, and wrest power and justice away from those who would try to hold on to it. “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

And so, in this June of 2020, we simultaneously commemorate the struggles of 50 years ago, even as we watch, uncomfortably, as demands for justice, for accountability, for equal treatment under the law, force people to the streets yet again. But this year, something feels different. We watched on Friday as June 19, Juneteenth, a day commemorated among Black people as the day in 1865 when slavery was finally ended throughout the United States, suddenly became noticed and honored by European Americans as well. There is talk about making Juneteenth a national holiday. Celebrations were shown on news programs. What a change this represents, and in the midst of the protests and chaos, not long after everything settles down again. We appear to be slowly evolving from fear and repression toward celebration.

Perhaps, as we learn to expand our vision of who deserves justice, who should be celebrated and honored, we begin to inch forward toward the celebration of more of the jewels in Indra’s Net.

With each demand for justice, for shared power, with each bending of the arc of the universe toward justice, we are able to see more clearly the presence of all the jewels in the Net. And we understand better the existence of the Net itself, or as we UU’s would call it, the interdependent web of all existence, and we understand that we are all connected. More justice for those who are being oppressed means more justice, period. Remember our reading: “whatever you do to one jewel affects the entire net, as well as yourself. You cannot damage one strand of a spider web without injuring the entire web, and you cannot damage one strand of the web that is the universe without injuring all others in it…”

“The web that is the universe.”

My friends, we have been living through some scary and difficult times these past months, and the images broadcast of the protests, with the tear gas, the military and their weaponry appearing on our streets, the looting and the fires, the violence, has been so hard to watch. But a society that is apathetic, that is unwilling to fight for change, will never become what it is meant to be. We will never expand our vision of the universe, and our vision of who is within it.

To recognize the jewels of Indra’s Net is to understand that everyone, all beings, really, are part of the universe, part of the holy. Ultimately, justice work, protest, is holy work, for it enlarges our vision of the Net.

I will end by paraphrasing Reverend Marta Valentin’s prayer, “our ground enlarges with every resolution to speak on God’s behalf, to honor the divinity within ourselves, and to give witness as children of God’s light.”

May it be so,
Amen.