Rev. Joseph Boyd
The first time I was introduced to Ohio, I was offered a summer fellowship at a church in Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland. I was asked to deliver six consecutive sermons on six consecutive weeks, and I was given a very generous stipend and a 6-bedroom, 3-bath house all to myself within walking distance to the church gifted by a member of the church who vacationed somewhere else for the summer. A couple weeks before I arrived gay marriage was made legal in all 50 states based on a Supreme Court ruling, a ruling that had been a long time coming and finally succeeded. It was also the same year that Tamir Rice, a 12 year old African American boy was killed by police in Cleveland while playing with a toy gun on the playground. This happened months before I arrived, but I remembered hearing about it, and when I arrived those who lived in Shaker Heights were still trying to process this with a mix of sadness and horror.

I had never preached six sermons in a row before. In fact, by that time, I had probably preached about six sermons in the space of 2 years, spaced out with lots of time in between. When I arrived at the church, the office administrator asked me for the titles of my six sermons, so she could promote them in the newsletter. She could see me turning pale, and then gently said: “You don’t need to give us a description of what you’ll say. Just the titles.” So I wrote titles that I found interesting, having no idea exactly what I would say. I wrote titles like: “The Disinherited,” “Returning Home,” “The Vision on the Ladder.” When I saw the titles, they stirred me and gave me a warm feeling. I learned something helpful during those weeks. I learned that it was easier to do multiple sermons in a row, rather than give one sermon once in a while. I could find my flow with doing this week after week, and my process became much more organic, lived, and visceral. I learned how to listen to myself, and I learned how to pay closer attention to my life, knowing it would impact the quality and depth of the sermon.

On more than one occasion I would get pizza delivery, because I didn’t have a car, and the nearest grocery store was about a quarter mile away, and public transit was not as frequent. One time, a young man who must have been in high school came to deliver pizza to me, and I opened the door, took the box from him, and gave him a tip. Usually at this point in the exchange, they would turn around and leave and go back to their car. That didn’t happen this time. This time the young man stood there and looked at me, and then said something completely surprising to me: “You look like a rich man.” I told him: “I don’t own this house actually. I’m just staying here. I’m a student.” He persisted though. He said “There is something about you. You look rich. Can you tell me your secret?” I have no memory of what I said next, but I remember the feeling I had that became clear in that exchange: I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I felt that I belonged, and this belonging was not bound to a particular geography, it was a belonging to a vocation, a way of being in the world, seeing the world, responding to the world. I’m doubtful I said that to the pizza delivery boy, but I’m grateful for him. Whether he knew it or not, he was holding up a mirror of appreciation, so that I could discover that sense of belonging.

I’ve had many moments like that since then. One of those moments was coming to Youngstown for the first time, and Jennifer noticed while we were driving: “You look so happy.” I’ve had many moments like this since then since coming to this beautiful congregation, full of beautiful, smart, and sincere people. It has been your sincerity that has captured me the most. The way you love and care for each other, the way you show up for our wider community has melted layers of cynicism within myself and showed me what may be possible as a human community. I’ve been treated so kindly, and that in turn has made me pay more attention to my life, and want to be more kind to myself and to others. You have created an incubator for people like myself to find themselves as Beloved, as a person with an inherent mystery, beauty, and calling.

I do believe that life calls us, each of us, to discover in our own language, in our own way, what it feels and looks like to recognize ourselves as beloved. Ministers like myself usually are given the assumption of having a calling, but that’s probably because we happen to be pretty vocal, and won’t quit talking about it. I think it’s true for each of us here though, and I’ve witnessed it myself: a woman in a moment of weakness, finds her strength. A transgender person comes to feel their worth and a sense of sanctuary. A man finds he is not stuck, and actually has many choices and opportunities to respond to his life. For me, all of these moments of strength, all of these moments of comfort, all of these moments of realized possibility are love letters to the nation. The ways we find ourselves in sometimes unexpected ways, the ways that we mirror to each other appreciation and awe: this is a living response to the issues we face today as a nation. And we all have the capacity to respond with gratitude that we are given life on this day. It is a spontaneous response for discovering we belong.

We are a nation of individual persons seeking a deep and abiding sense of belonging. A belonging that is more than just the surface – our education, our history, our accomplishments or lack thereof. But something deeper, something truer. A sense of belonging that leaves room for our inherent mystery, our inherent beauty as an individual person with specific experiences and specific gifts. If I was writing a letter to the nation, I would not start with “Dear America,” I would start with “Dear Beloved, Dear Person of inherent mystery, beauty, worth and dignity,” and I would say to that person: You may have questioned whether you ever truly belonged. You may be questioning that right now. To tell you, you belong would be too easy, and perhaps you would believe me, and perhaps you wouldn’t. But what I’m talking about is not a question of belief or unbelief, it is a question of knowing beyond yes or no thinking, an embodiment of your person as a gift of this earth, a gift of the ancestors, a gift to the present crisis, and a gift that will live on without end tomorrow. I would say something like: I hope the present crisis you are experiencing and that we are experiencing as a nation may cut away what is dead and no longer serves you, so that you and me might truly live. I would probably say something like: we have each other and we are breathing together in this moment, and for me that is enough to know that love is real, perhaps the only real thing. We are in this present crisis together, though yours may feel fundamentally different than mine, but together I think we can find the calm in the center of that storm, and that calm center is the truth of being beloved now and always.

Now and always. Just this week I learned on the news of a trans woman, 24 years old, who was murdered brutally on her front lawn by a man. The police arrived and demanded the man stop beating her, and when he didn’t they shot him. They then took her to the hospital at St. Elizabeth’s, less than a half a mile from this church, where she died of her injuries. I include her and her family into our thoughts this morning. I think we all need to hear the message of beloved community, but that message is more pressing for those who face real life and death on the streets of this nation.

As many of you may know, we’ve recently added a principle at this church to create beloved community, by abolishing racism, dismantling white supremacy and other oppressions in ourselves and institutions. How do we do that? I was recently on a zoom call, and on the call was a 90 year old African American woman who shared with the group that she is dependent on nurses to come to her home to administer care. She said some of them are really friendly but are not as reliable. She said some are punctual and very reliable, but not too friendly. She said she has the practice she now uses with everybody she meets. She says (in her mind) “I love you,” and then she sees how she would talk and treat someone who she loves. She told the group that all the nurses have now become her daughters, part of her family, though she never tells them that. She said: “It’s amazing to watch someone transform when you see them as your beloved child.” I think that’s a wonderful way to practice beloved community, creating first in the mind and the heart, and acting on that transformed view.

I really like the word in the principle: dismantle. It means that perhaps we don’t need to do anything special, we may just need to undo habits of doing and seeing and relating. In my opinion, I think what we’re dismantling is indifference in ourselves and in this nation. I think it is a small minority of people that live their lives motivated by conscious hatred. They are certainly there, and there is great pain there in themselves and in their actions, but they are not the great majority of this nation or of this world. Instead I think the most prevalent thing that keeps this nation stuck in patterns of oppressive thought and action is indifference. To be more to the point, I think the great majority of people have become seduced into thinking they don’t have enough time or energy to devote to this, creating beloved community. Few I think are against the idea, though there may be disagreement about tactics. But many I think feel: I want to accomplish something in my life. I want to attain a position, some material security. I want to protect what I have. In short, if I can find a way to navigate through institutions that dehumanize a great portion of this population and eke out a decent living, and maybe help my children eke out a decent living and have an ok life, that takes all my time. What I think this points out is something very true: creating beloved community is not a weekend project, or something we can do when we have the time. Creating beloved community is a moment by moment awareness of ourselves as inherently beloved, and all persons as inherently beloved, and letting that guide our day to day lives. What I think is very true is that if one lives with the awareness they are inherently beloved, there is a kind of freedom and letting go that happens, that can seem very foreign and scary. If we quit trying to prove our worth through gaining prestige, wealth, reputation, if we let that go, we find a different kind of life emerging. And we probably find we have less tolerance for navigating systems that are inherently violent and dehumanizing, and then before you know it, you’ve become a radical. A radical for love. We really like those radicals, but we see what happens to them, and we really don’t want that. So that’s understandable.

It is true that sadly it is a radical notion that each of us has inherent worth and dignity, and that understanding should guide our politics, our economic life, our healthcare system, our educational system. But in my experience, encouragement comes along sometimes in surprising ways. I have found that sometimes you’re speaking with someone and they say: You seem like a rich person. Can you tell me your secret? And you may have no idea what to say, and in the end the words you say may not matter. But you will know how it feels to know what you want to do with your life. You will know that creating beloved community is not a far off goal, but a lived reality if we can only let go of all that holds us back from realizing we don’t need to prove anything to anyone. We are inherently worthy of love. We are more than the sum of our experiences. We are indeed a great mystery and a container for unspeakable beauty, and in that knowing we can’t help but share the good news with weary persons in a devastating, violent, and beautiful nation: You belong.