RSVP: On hearing and accepting the invitation to membership

This is my sermon from last Sunday, September 22, 2024 at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Danbury, CT. I reflect on how we hear and respond to the invitation to relationship, covenant, and participation. My focus is on the invitation to be part of a congregation, but I think what I have to say applies to many relationships and involvement in any voluntary association.

Being a member of a congregation is to accept an invitation into a deep relationship. This is what we call covenant.  We’re invited into sacred vows, promises, a marriage, a monk in a monastery, a partnership, comrades in the struggle of human existence.   Here in our congregation that covenant relationship is one that practices diverse, loving community, encourages spiritual growth, works for justice, and celebrates the good in life.

This relationship is  an invitation to comfort and care for others.  An invitation to know and experience the variety of human differences. An invitation to do what you can to create a just and sustainable society. An invitation to pursue a continuous journey of spiritual growth. 

How do you experience this invitation?  Do read a weekly email?  Do you speak with Me and Sierra Marie and Jerry and Sherry and Margaret? Are notifications always popping up on your phone? Are you getting your mail from the mailbox every day checking for a formal envelope?  Are you listening for opportunities to get involved, participate, and attend things as they surface in casual conversation? Do you look for announcements from the order of service and spoken notices on Sunday morning asking for your help?  How do you experience this invitation to Covenant? 

I believe that congregational life and membership mirrors life in general.  Invitations are constant but it’s only when we notice them that they seem to pop up.  I believe that we experience the divine, God, spirit, through the people, places, and events in our lives.  Life is one long, continuous invitation to come along, join the party, hang out, go on a date, be part of the club of humanity.  Please join us, we’d love to have you. Most Sincerely Yours, All THAT IS.

Every moment of every day, the phenomenon of the cosmos swirls around us. But it’s that morning we get up early, maybe with a loved one, and go outside, maybe to the back porch, maybe to a city park bench, maybe to the beach and watch in wonder as the sun rises, devastated by the star moving through the early hour atmosphere. Letting there be light everywhere.   Every moment of every day strangers walk past us, drive past us, flash by us on the internet, but it’s only when someone steps in front of us and holds a door with a huge smile taking up their entire face that we notice our fellow passengers on spaceship earth. 

Being a member of a congregation is going to church. Showing up on Sunday. Attending an event. Joining a committee. The week to week and day to day existence of faith communities look surprisingly similar from the outside.  But when the sermon says something that speaks directly to your heart as if it was written just for you, The song Jerry sings is from own private playlist of life’s most important moments soundtrack and you can’t believe Jerry has read your mind again, when your children return from outside and downstairs smiling and laughing, when someone invites you to their home for dinner, when your committee receives that thank you letter from the community partner you helped with a donation, when you stand outside in the bitter cold advocating for justice and all of a sudden it’s not just the ordinary I went to church today, it’s special. It’s immediate. It’s heartwarming. It’s something that helps you get through and reminds you why you bother to belong to a faith community in the first place.  That’s when you notice it.  Just like everything else in life. When it’s special, we notice. When it grabs our attention, we notice. When it snaps us out of rambling shame out of the past and anxious worry about tomorrow,  and captures us in a moment. That’s when we realize that the invitation was there all along.   You come too. Join us.  This party is for you.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s short poem epitomizes this.  Every common bush afire with God.  But only we who notice take off our shoes.  Taking off our shoes because it’s holy ground.  I have Methodist minister friend in Texas who always preaches her sermons barefoot. I once asked her why. Is it because the church is holy ground.  And she said, “sort of. But more like everywhere is holy ground and so is everyone. So, I take off my shoes.”

The covenantal relationship we are called to at church asks us to pretty much go barefoot.  This is love at the center of everything. 

Even though we proclaim love at the center of everything, we sometimes don’t place it there. We get sidetracked by our own selfishness, our culturally ingrained expectation that we put ourselves at the center instead of love.

The opposite of Love and covenant is consumerism.  The opposite of authentic relationship is transactional relationship.  And unfortunately, all too often, church, synagogue, temple, assembly, faith communities of any kind become merely transactional. 

I went to a conference about thematic preaching many years ago, back before monthly themes had caught on in Unitarian Universalism. And the church that hosted the event had a monthly sermon series going on about the topic of Grace.  I also noticed something in all their advertisements and promotions that surprised me – not one image, poster, or announcement promoted anything other than the month  - it was May – and the theme of Grace. No Sundays were mentioned by date. No preachers were named. No specific topic was described anywhere.  “We’re talking about Grace this month.”    I wonder if we could do that?  If we could say, we’re talking about invitation this month and leave it at that.  We’re so used to a marketing mentality that it seems almost alien to not have a sermon title and description.  But we’re not about titles and descriptions. We’re about relationship. 

We often think about our involvement in church transactionally.  I don’t like this or that. I want a church with youth programs or social justice activism.  I want fewer hymns and more jazz,  We get put off sometimes if something is going on that we personally don’t like or isn’t our favorite or not intended for us.

I heard the retired pastor emeritus of Riverside church in NYC once say that no one should like everything that’s going on in their church.  In a vibrant multi-generational, multicultural church you should only like about 75-80% of what happens at your church.  Because if you like almost everything, If you like 99% of stuff that goes on at your church, you can be fairly certain that only people exactly like you are at your church and will want to be at your church.  In our polarized age, that might sound tempting at first, but it’s not beloved community.  It’s not diverse. It’s not welcoming.

Covenant invites us into deep relationships.  We live in a world of shallow relationships. A world where we call people friends who we acknowledge on social media.  Covenant calls us to make friends.  Not everyone in a congregation will be your friend. But I certainly hope you have and make a lot of friends here. Not just people you like that you see on Sundays, but people you invite more deeply into your life.

Covenant invites us to serve.  Both in the congregation and in the world.  The Baha'i community has a fascinating way of selecting leaders.  Every member of the community is a potential leader. All their communities and each level of their religion is governed by teams, not individuals.  And from the local level to the international level they have a basic way of electing leaders.  There is no campaigning. There is no nominating committee.  There is no debating or even discussing potential leaders.   What happens is that when it’s time to select members of the leadership team, every member of the community writes down names on a piece of paper. If 5 leaders are needed, it’s five names. If 9 are needed, it's nine names.  And then the people, the five most, the nine most, whatever it is, the people who are named the most times on all the ballots serve.  Exceptions can be made for things like illness, or other severe disruption or trauma, but if able, people serve. That’s part of the deal of joining the community. What people don’t know they learn.  And the Baha'i take this very seriously, they only name people they think are ethical, capable, kind, good examples of living lives of Baha'i values and so on. What if our covenant relationship calls us all to be leaders? At some point in our time here. In some way?  What if our covenant relationship calls all of us to share in the work of the community.

We have wonderful greeters who say hello to you on Sunday as you walk in, but we are all invited to greet new people and make them feel welcome? We have amazing volunteers who work with Sierra Marie to create programs and community for children youth and families, but we are all invited to make this place welcoming and supportive of children, childhood, parents and parenthood. We have a great staff and board that is thinking about how to grow and publicize our congregation, but we are all invited to into this work as well.  In fact, as person invited into our covenant relationship the most vital and important thing you can do for the long term health and vitality of our congregation is to invite others into it? In every study and survey that anyone ever does on the topic, when people are asked why they chose a particular church or why they visited a particular synagogue or mosque, the overwhelming number one answer, in some studies up to 85-90% respond Because someone invited me to join them?

If you’re every wondering about why there aren’t more people here or more children or more families or more people of color or more queer people – ask yourself, when it the last time I invited them?  As you have been invited, go and invite others!

I’m hoping that our theme has invited you to deepen your participation.  That deepening might be through attention, taking more notice and more detailed notice of our community life. It might be taking on a role of more responsibility in the community or volunteering more. It might be deepening your study of Unitarian Universalism.    It might be inviting someone you know to join you here. And as I ask you to invite others, I once again invite you.

I await your RSVP.

Lizzo's LIbertating Love

NOTE: This sermon was preached as part of a program that included short readings from two books, What We Don't Talk about When We Talk about Fat by Aubrey Gordon and Why We Get Fat and What We Can Do about It by Gary Taubes. You can read these here. The children's book Bodies are Cool! by Tyler Feder was also read.

LIZZO

Lizzo is the stage name of American rapper, singer, and flautist Melissa Viviane Jefferson.  She’s 35 and has won four Grammys, two Soul Train Music Awards, a Billboard Award, a BET Award, and been nominated for many others.  She performed at the Glastonbury Festival and headlined Pride Festivals in Indianapolis and Sacramento. She was a musical guest on Saturday Night Live.  She is glamorous, loves fashion, make-up, and her costumes live in the same neighborhood as Madonna’s. Lady Gaga’s, and Dua Lipa’s. And….

SHE'S FAT!

Her Instagram handle is @Lizzobeeating.  She has an Amazon Prime reality show called "Lizzo's Watch Out for the Big Grrrls" in which plus size women audition and compete to become her back dancers. I’ve been a fan since she burst onto the scene about five years ago. It says a lot that she’s notable for being a sexy pop star who’s fat. But what it says is that fat people shouldn’t dress to be sexy, shouldn’t dance, and shouldn’t live out loud about who they are.  Her dog died on Christmas Eve. And she’s being sued by former employees for sexual harassment and weight shaming. Lizzo denies the charges.

“I am a proud Black woman. I love my plus-size body and I celebrate every inch of it as sexy and beautiful. I believe in hard work, striving for perfection and constantly pushing myself to do better.”

I hope the accusations are not true, but if they are - it fits the pattern of people who are oppressed for whatever reason internalizing that oppression and inferiority and practicing it against others.   When I learned about these accusations I was bummed out. It’s been wonderful having a bonafide A-list FAT superstar.

I grew up as a fat kid and all there was at the time was Fat Albert and he was a cartoon version of fat that was still easy to make fun of.  As a kid I was called lots of names pudgy, husky, pleasingly plump, stout, portly, roly-poly, tubby, and fatso.  The kids mostly used some variation of fatso, but it was all the verbal contortions that adults went into that bothered me the most.

CHILDHOOD MEMORY

On my tenth birthday in May of 1976 I went to K-Mart with mom. I can’t remember what I bought with the money my grandmother had sent. But I remember vividly what I did next. After K-Mart, we went to Barone’s – our pharmacy – which was next door.  We called Barone’s "the drug store." We got our medicine there, but we also got comic books, hot dogs, and ice cream. That afternoon of my 10th birthday, I remember mom buying me the latest issue of the Amazing Spider-Man and a chocolate milk shake.  Barone’s made the best milk shakes, even better than Friendly’s or Dairy Queen.  On the way back to the car, we passed Mr. Fournier. Mr. Fournier was the coach of a team in my little league.  Mr. Fournier looked at me and said,

“Pudge, that milkshake ain’t doing you any good. You’re chubby enough. You gotta be able to move behind that plate (I was a catcher) and run out ground balls.”

And then he smiled and winked at me. It was bad enough when other kids made fun of you because you’re fat, but it was worse when adults did.  I thought of throwing the damn milkshake at him, but that would have been wasting half a milk shake. I stood paralyzed in what I can now name as shame. My mom tugged my arm, gave Mr. Fournier the same look she gave me when I was in big trouble, and pulled me along to the car. 

LIBERATING LOVE AND LINGERING PREJUDICES

Each month I extend a spiritual challenge based on the monthly theme. This month’s challenge is to do an examination of conscience for lingering, under the radar prejudices, and to get people started I suggest the topics of fatness, being poor, and being uneducated.  Most good hearted people are aware of prejudice and understand that even the best of us have certain biases and prejudices, sometimes unconscious, that inform our attitudes and behavior.  You’ve probably done some work - or even a great deal of work - on unlearning white supremacy culture, engaging and combating racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and other glaring prejudices.  My challenge to you this month is look underneath those prejudices that loom large at the front of consciousness and peek under the psychic bed and into the mental closet for some persistent prejudices and biases that tend to get overlooked, especially by liberals and others with a more open-minded world view. One of those is FAT.

Reflect with me a minute. Look at this list of ten statements related to obesity and fat people. What do you think or feel when you read/see/hear them?

Fatitudes

Here's a short True-False Quiz about fat.

Fat True & False Quiz

You may have noticed a pattern. All the odd number questions are FALSE and all the even numbered questions are TRUE.

Did you learn anything about any bias you might have toward fat people? Did you learn something about the actual causes of obesity? It’s OK to not be righteous. No one is. I’m fat and I know I fall into these modes of thinking sometimes.  If you want to dive deeper into attitudes and bias about and toward fat people, there’s a great little questionnaire published by IDR Labs that gets you thinking about your own ideas about weight, fat, body image and acceptance: https://www.idrlabs.com/fat-shaming/test.php.  

Even while reading this you might you be thinking – "Yes, yes, you’re right that we shouldn’t be cruel to anyone on purpose or make fun of people for being fat, but --- being fat really is unhealthy and I don’t think it’s OK to tell people it’s OK to be fat.

That’s just it. Fat liberation isn’t about telling people to be unhealthy.  I think it’s about what’s called Healthy at Every Size, trademarked by Association for Size Diversity and Health.   They advocate a non-diet approach to promote a gentler to health than weight loss at all costs mindsets. In a May 2022 online essay Registered Dietician Cara Rosenbloom quotes Veronica Garnet and Ani Janzen who say of their approach:

"Our current five principles of HAES are weight inclusivity, health enhancement, respectful care, life-enhancing movement, and eating for wellbeing."

Gary Taubes directs us to the science to get fat straight. We’re learning more and more all the time about what actually causes obesity. He says:

“The science itself makes clear that hormones, enzymes, and growth factors regulate our fat tissue, and that we do not get fat because we overeat; we get fat because the carbohydrates in our diet make us fat. The science tells us that obesity is ultimately the result of a hormonal imbalance, not a caloric one—specifically, the stimulation of insulin secretion caused by eating easily digestible, carbohydrate-rich foods: refined carbohydrates, including flour and cereal grains, starchy vegetables such as potatoes, and sugars, like sucrose (table sugar) and high-fructose corn syrup.”

Why have obesity rates skyrocketed? Because over the last century the American diet has become increasingly full of simple sugars like high fructose corn syrup and scientifically engineered food like products full of refined carbs. They’re everywhere and in everything.  And in urban food deserts, the convenience stores aren’t full of fresh produce, but Doritos, hot dogs, and ice cream. We spent the 1970s telling everyone all fats were bad and filling people full of low-fat – and high sugar – substitutes.

The vast majority of people who lose substantial amounts of weight gain it back. The diet and exercise mantra has not led to a decrease in obesity rates.  We need to re-evaluate the way we approach fat.  When is weight truly causing, and not a symptom of, poor health?  We assume fattness is bad so we don’t yet fully study how people like my wife can be obese but have normal blood sugar and blood pressure and run half marathons and swim a mile and half for exercise four times a week. Our assumptions and prejudices get in the way of using science to figure out the real answers.  And when science finds answers social stigma and stagnant attitude keep even doctors from using them effectively.

 A 2003 study found 50 percent of the primary care physicians they surveyed viewed obese patients as “awkward, unattractive, ugly, and non-compliant,” Cited by Evette Dione in YES!

Not only is being fat not some type of character deficiency and moral flaw, it has a systemic justice component in much the way all other injustices and oppression do.  And just like all people who experience discrimination, scorn, shaming, and shunning, fat people don’t want to t be tolerated.  We want to be included. We want to be able to walk into any store or visit any website and find something in our size. Have you noticed that I only wear two suit coats? I can’t find anything in my size of decent quality in my price range, my waist is big, my shoulders broad, and my arms relatively short.

Sabrina Strings and Lindo Bacon make an argument  in Scientific American in 2020 – that

bias against fat people is actually a larger driver of the so-called obesity epidemic than adiposity itself. A 2015 study in Psychological Science, found that people who reported experiencing weight discrimination had a 60 percent increased risk of dying. Chronic diseases such as diabetes or heart conditions are mislabeled “lifestyle” diseases when behaviors are not the central problem.

RACISM

Fat liberation, like all liberation movements, needs to be approached as intertwined and connected to other struggles such as sexism, racism, and poverty.  The history of fat shaming can be traced directly to racism attitudes toward black bodies.    Sara Baartman was an enslaved woman from the Eastern Cape in South Africa. Her amble bosom and large rear end were said to be examples of primitive African body types. She was put on display around Europe in the early 18th century in freak show as the "Hotentot Venus" and   people paid extra to poke her with a stick or a finger. Eventually she was prostituted. She died at 26 in 1815.  Scientists preserved her voluptuous body parts and her remains were used to support racist theories about Africans and black bodies. In 2002, after a decade of requests, her remain were returned to South Africa.

Evette Dionne’s 2019 essay “Here’s What Fat Acceptance Is and Isn’t” in Yes! magazine reports a number of fascinating studies.

• 2010 University of Michigan “kids who were obese were 65 percent more likely to be bullied than their peers of normal weight;

• A USC study of the top 100 films released in 2016, found only two women larger than a size 14 were cast as a lead or a co-lead. Of the top 50 TV shows that year, only three women leads were larger than a size 14.

• In 2017 Fairygodboss found fat employees earn $1.25 less per hour  on average for doing the same job as nonfat workers.

You can still be fired for being fat in 49 states – yay Michigan. Although there are cities and a few states considering anti fat discrimination laws, existing federal and local anti-discrimination laws consistently don’t hold up when tested by fat people suing employers.

Quite often when people try to lose weight, they are not usually trying to lose weight for its own sake, merit worthy or not, What they are doing is trying to lose the discrimination and mistreatment they suffer because of their size. I was once told by a member of a congregation I served - at coffee hour in front of others - that the congregation would benefit if I were in better shape because fat people weren’t as good at marketing.

How prevalent is fat shaming?

MY WIFE'S SERMON

My wife is a priest in the Episcopal Church.  I share this with her permission. While on vacation this past summer in Portland, OR she preached a guest sermon at an Episcopal church. The prescribed scripture reading for that Sunday was The Gospel of Matthew chapter 15 where Jesus says:

 ‘Listen and understand - it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.’ 

Her sermon was about fat phobia and how fat people are still the butt of jokes, cruelty, and discrimination. She received actual hate mail about the sermon. The worst was from a professor at a local university who sent an angry, hateful, curse laden email calling her just about every fat slur in the book and offering,

“Your taking of the gospel lesson, in which Jesus says that righteousness depends on what comes out of our mouths rather than what goes in, and turning it into a call for gluttony and obesity was bizarre. This may also explain why there are no young people left there. My daughter thankfully has established good eating and exercise habits. But your call to obesity would have most parents of young people scrambling for the exits.”

My wife is a large, fat woman. And her call to kindness, inclusion, and compassion for fat people resulted in hatred directed at a fat woman for being fat. 

BUT THERE IS HOPE

I published a novel in 2017 about a Catholic High School in Boston.    The title Saint Somebody Central Catholic is based on the name of the school in the story which is named after some long forgotten Irish Catholic saint and the idea that everyone – even unknown teachers and their students in a insignificant high school in Boston are all saints – holy people. I’ve always been a Universalist at heart.  Spoiler alert – it wasn’t a best seller.  After about 18 months sales dropped off and it’s a nice thing I’ve done in my life and I can say I have an author page on Amazon. BUT…

Just after the Covid quarantine began in the winter of 2020 I received an email from a woman in Australia named Sophie Henderson-Smart offering to buy the domain name of my web site for the novel.  She needed the domain name for her business. Fashion designer Sophie Henderson-Smart had started a business in Australia in 2018 making top of the line swim wear for plus sized women. She called it Saint Somebody because everyone is beautiful, holy, and special – we’re all saints. Even fat people. Or as she says,

"Inspired by all women and their beautiful, diverse, remarkable bodies we create pieces that feel incredible to wear. Luxury fashion isn't only for one body type, nor should it dictate how we view our bodies. Fashion is about how the clothes make us feel."

The Saint Somebody Swimwear Website

 I absolutely loved that when she told me why she named her business Saint Somebody. I told her she could have the domain name. She didn’t need to buy it from me, and I signed over the rights.   She also told my wife that she should pick out two or three suits from the catalog and she’d have them sent.  So, I traded the domain name for $700 worth of swimwear and the knowledge that I’m not the only person who thinks we’re all valuable, lovable, and acceptable, whatever our size.