Homily: "Different, Unique, Diverse, Inclusive" (Delivered 5-6-12)

I want to begin by mentioning one particular poem by Billy Collins, the former US poet laureate and a favorite poet of many members of this church.  In his exquisite poem Litany, Collins strings together a list, a litany, of increasingly unusual and unlikely metaphors.  [Click here to check out an unlikely recitation of the poem.]  But, Collins begins his poem in more familiar territory, opening with the lines, “You are the bread and the knife, the crystal goblet and the wine.”

Bread and wine.  These are universal archetypal images.  (As are the chalice and the blade, for that matter, but that’s a different sermon for a different time.)  These are objects with deep metaphorical resonance, especially in the Christian tradition:  Take, eat, this is my body; take, drink, this is my blood; loaves multiplied; water into wine.  And, especially in the Jewish tradition: the challah bread and wine on the Shabbat table; the matzo and four glasses of wine during the Passover Seder.  And the deep metaphorical importance of bread and wine is by no means limited to the Jewish and Christian traditions.

I was led to reflect on metaphors that are used to symbolize communion for two different reasons this week.  One of those reasons is obvious.  Today is our Flower Communion and it would be helpful to say something about its meaning.  The other reason – pardon my digression, this will come around eventually – has to do with hearing about the news from the General Conference of the United Methodist Church which was held in Tampa, Florida, this past week.  Delegates from America’s largest mainline denomination come together every four years to debate and vote on changing the official positions of the church.  This past week the Methodist General Conference took up the issue of making the denomination’s stance on homosexuality less discriminatory.  Attempts to make the denomination’s teachings more welcoming and inclusive were soundly rejected.

Over the last decade and a half, we’ve witnessed several American Mainline denominations including the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Lutherans take at least small steps in the direction of inclusion and welcome, but those steps were taken with considerable pain and deep conflict.  There is a great temptation to brag about Unitarian Universalism here.  After all, our UU General Assembly has been passing resolutions of inclusion and acceptance for gays and lesbians since before I was born.  We were decades ahead of our time!  And, unlike seemingly every other denomination, we passed each resolution without divisiveness or hostility, and without people being nasty to each other.

In all honesty I have to tell you that I do not enjoy attending the business meetings of our religious movement.  It requires a type of patience with which I have not been blessed.  But, when I go I thank my lucky stars that this faith tradition is not stuck in deep and hurtful conflict.  My deepest fear is that I will become bored, not that the humanity of my friends will be questioned.  We don’t debate the exclusion of entire classes of people.  This is as it should be.

Unfortunately, it is not how all organizations operate.  Institutions can use their bureaucracies and by-laws to inflict harm.  Institutions can use their policies, procedures, practices, and processes to wound.  Power can be withheld or wielded destructively.  Organizations can become bullies.  Again, I bring up our tradition for comparison not to brag, though perhaps a little bragging is healthy.  No, rather, I find the capacity of institutions and systems to inflict pain and to dehumanize others to be sobering.  It is important to me that we don’t do that.

This past week, I was struck by an image from the United Methodist General Conference.  This is where I bring us back from the digression.  Following the vote at the Methodist General Conference to uphold the church’s discriminatory teaching, a group of activists and protesters occupied and shut down the meeting.  They rose up and marched in.  Their singing filled the assembly hall.  They gathered in the very center of the room.  In the very center of the room, the activists celebrated communion.  A loaf of bread and a chalice of wine.  I can hardly think of a more powerful symbolic act.  The communion table is an open table is a welcome table.  Jesus fed the multitude, and who was turned away?  The water became wine and who was not invited to rejoice?

No matter how different, distinct, or diverse, still welcomed.  No matter how unique or individual, still included.  That what those protesters were saying.  That's what our UU denomination has been saying for more than forty years.

We’re told that the Unitarian Church in Prague in the 1920s and 30s was made up mostly of former Catholics.  We’re told that a good number of these Czech Unitarians, in fleeing from their faith background, sought the opposite in their new religious home.  We’re told that the Unitarian Church in Prague did away with robes and vestments, ornate decorations, the formal liturgy with prescribed prayers, and the practice of communion.  We can imagine that such a rejection of the old ways was partly reactionary.  But, we can also imagine that this was done out of worry that these rites and rituals would become corrupted by abuses of power or by an in-group mentality.  They feared that they would wind up pushing others away.  And then Norbert Capek had the idea of bringing back ritual, of holding a flower festival in which everyone would bring a flower, place them together in a common bouquet, and then receive a different flower than the one they had shared.

As far as metaphorical significance goes, flowers are right up there with bread and wine.  They are potent symbols of life’s passages, from cradle to grave:  the single rose at the child dedication, the corsage, the wedding bouquet, the get-well flowers sent to the hospital room, the flower arrangement at the memorial service.  They can represent joy or grief, heart-pounding sensuality or calming compassion, life or death.

The beauty of the Christian communion service, when it is done right, is its generous, open-handed welcome.  As one hymn that we have in our hymnal puts it, “O come you longing thirsty souls, drink freely from the spring.  And come, you weary famished folk, and end your hungering.  Why spend yourself on empty air?  Why not be satisfied?  For everywhere a feast is spread that’s always at our side.” 

The flower festival, the flower communion, is beautiful in its own right as well.  The bouquet we become together is tremendously rich, spectacular and complex.  The bouquet comes into being because each person is willing to contribute a bit of their beauty, their joy, their sorrow.  The bouquet comes into being because each person has shared freely of themselves, their own shape and style and personality.  The bouquet comes into being because each person is willing to share their gifts, their unique contributions to community.  The bouquet comes into being because of each person’s willingness to come together in community.  And, in such giving we are also invited to receive, to be blessed by the gifts and lives and stories and beauty and generosity of each other.

If we return to that Billy Collins poem, we might become inspired enough to write out lists of metaphors.

You are the peony, friendly and loud and bubbling out into the world.

You are the daisy, shy and quiet and blending into the crowd.

You are the iris, elegant and also a little delicate.

You are the rose, your life full of complex layers and a few thorns.

You are the daffodil and tulip, early and always leading the way.

And on, and on, and on.

Different, unique, diverse.  Absolutely included.  Absolutely welcomed.

Who's Ready for Arizona?

As of late I haven’t been able to open my web-browser without reading a story about people in Arizona acting as nutty as my grandfather’s pecan tree.  Just yesterday, I read an article about AZ Gov. Jan Brewer signing a law to ban Planned Parenthood from receiving Title X funds.  Because, you know, a great way to reduce abortions is to take away people’s access to contraception.  This news barely cracked the lunacy scale for this week, what with a straight-up neo-Nazi, who happened to be all BFF with the State Republican leadership, killing his entire family and then himself.

And, then it hit me.  I’m actually going to Arizona next month.  Who had this great idea again?  Oh, that’s right, we did.  Back in 2010, with white supremacist anti-immigrant legislation set to take effect in Arizona, the UUA General Assembly met in the civilized city of Minneapolis and debated whether to boycott Phoenix, which had been picked as the General Assembly site for 2012 by the GA Planning Committee.  The final decision was not to forfeit the hefty deposit the UUA had given Phoenix and to go to Phoenix with the understanding that it would be a “Justice GA” and not business as usual.

It seems we were not the only ones talking about pulling out of Arizona.  Check out this Forbes Magazine on-line article that might as well be titled, “Business as Usual Says No More Business as Usual in Arizona.”

“If business leaders in the state can’t find a way to rein in the elected officials, the militias prowling the border, and the out-of-control legislature, Arizona will continue its quick decline, transforming from the business-friendly, libertarian-leaning state of Barry Goldwater into a circus where no sensible entrepreneur would ever dream of locating their business.”

Or, consider this story from the Southern Poverty Law Center that tells us Arizona has a “reputation as the epicenter of anti-immigrant hate and as a site of disturbing extremist activity.”

News stories tell us that politics in Arizona ranges from ultra-conservative at best to domestic terrorist at worst.  Besides JT Ready killing his entire family, there is last year’s shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, as well as stories like this one about a militant hate group conspiring to place landmines along the US-Mexico border.

News stories run from the embarrassing to the idiotic to the surreal.  Embarrassing would be Gov. Jan Brewer literally shaking her finger in the face of President Obama on an airport tarmac in Arizona last January, and then, while being interviewed about the uncomfortable exchange, telling reporters that she “felt a little threatened” by the President.  I’m sure she didn’t mean that in a racist way.

Idiotic would include Arizona’s newest wave of anti-abortion legislation that included a legal definition that pregnancy begins two weeks before conception.

And then there is the surreal.  That would be America’s most demented lawman, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, turning the bust of an alleged cockfighting ring into the set of an action movie, complete with paramilitary equipment and martial arts movie star Steven Seagal riding in on a tank while the cameras rolled.  Apparently, Seagal managed to kill a puppy during the raid.

This list is by no means comprehensive.  I could easily write a blog post ten times as long documenting Arizona’s right wing racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-woman legislation and activity in recent weeks and months.

Of course, I live in Missouri so I shouldn’t call the kettle black.  I work in Kansas so I shouldn’t throw stones at glass houses.  Can I make just one little suggestion to Unitarian Universalists out there?  Instead of going someplace where the politics are as crazy as a wolverine on psychedelics, maybe we can choose a place where our values are celebrated.  I hear Vermont is pleasant in June.

Sermon: "Grace for Unitarian Universalists" (Delivered 4-22-12)

For the past week or two, I’ve been asking people to tell me about what grace means to them.  Several of the responses I’ve received are sprinkled throughout this sermon.  But, I begin with just one response.  Earlier this week Lane and I went to a park for our weekly time of theological reflection.  We talked about our understandings of grace.  While we were sitting there, discussing grace, a woman with a dog came by.  We had a brief chat with the woman and I asked her what her dog’s name was.  “Grace,” she answered.  Lane and I glanced at each other.  What a coincidence!  Amazed, I asked the woman why she had chosen that name for her dog.  She replied, “Oh, you know, for the obvious reasons.”

***

Obviously!  Grace is one of those theological words that resist simple and easy definition.  Its meaning crosses boundaries; its nature is hard to define.  One member of the worship committee commented that when she thinks about grace, she thinks about something that seems to float, something with a light and airy quality.  In other words, the opposite of something solid and distinct.  David Blanchard’s words from our reading agree.  “Grace just sneaks up on us and often steals away before we know what happened…  Grace is sometimes beyond our understanding.  But from time to time it pays us each a visit.”

This morning’s sermon is going to first share some ways of thinking about grace.  Then, we’re going to layer on some Unitarian Universalist theology in order to deepen our thinking about grace.  Finally, we’re going to go beyond theology and talk about the ways grace can and does intersect with our lives.

A tentative working definition of grace might say that grace is favor or fortune that comes to us unbidden, that is impossible for us to do anything to merit or deserve.  That I’m aware of, we’ve had three children and two dogs named Grace in this church community.  One member of our church tells me that she named her dog Grace and she literally meant it.  Dogs, she explained, give us love, companionship, and devotion beyond our capacity to earn it.  They look past our shortcomings and blemishes, our foibles and failings, and favor us unconditionally.

Etymologically, grace is related to expressions of thankfulness.  We might mention the Spanish gracias, the Italian grazie, and the Latin gratia.  There is a clear connection between grace and gratitude.  One step removed is the Latin gratus, which means pleasing, and there we find words like gratifying and gratuity.  Or, take the opposite.  Even if we are not sure about the workings of grace, we know what is meant by a disgrace, an ingrate, a persona non-gratis.

The idea of grace conjures up an awareness that many things in our lives can be thought of as accidents.  The poet Jane Kenyon, in her poem “Otherwise,” writes, “I got out of bed / on two strong legs. / It might have been / otherwise.  I ate / cereal, sweet / milk, ripe, flawless / peach.  It might / have been otherwise.”

It might have been otherwise.  If your life ever brings you into contact with people whose suffering seems overwhelming, you might have repeated this phrase to yourself, or perhaps a variation of it, such as the phrase, “There but for the grace of God go I.”  Have you ever uttered a phrase like that to yourself?  In my mind, I rewind the script of my life, back to my young adulthood, back to my adolescence, back to my childhood, or back even to my birth.  In my mind, I replay my life with different choices or different fortunes, different opportunities or different circumstances.  I imagine my own life otherwise.  It might have been otherwise.  There,but for the grace of God go I.

For me, one time when I’ve definitely said this to myself is right after I’ve visited someone in jail.  I have had occasion to make such visits as your minister, but fortunately, not often.  “There but for the grace of God go I” is also a saying that comes to the forefront of my mind when serving at the soup kitchen, or officiating at the difficult and tragic memorial service.  It would apply to the refugee camp, to the city ravaged by the natural disaster, wherever there is wholesale suffering in our world.

For religious liberals, understanding grace in these terms may seem problematic.  After all, the idea that God has a plan that involves some being chosen to have a good life and many being chosen to have miserable lives is repulsive.  And, it is also a copout.  A good portion of human suffering is not due to chance in any meaningful way.  I return to the experience of visiting someone in jail.  I find myself thinking of such visits that I’ve made to visit people in jail because I’ve recently been reading a book about race and our nation’s brutal system of mass incarceration.  The book argues, convincingly, that the criminal justice system is designed to be a form of social control that systematically disenfranchises people of color.  (I may come back to this book in a sermon later this year.)  Seen from this perspective, the larger societal perspective, grace, as it is commonly understood, is not all that relevant to the conversation.   Systems of oppression that have a human design also have a human solution.

But, even if we do reject the idea of a God blessing some with favor, it cannot be denied that fortune or dumb luck or random chance most certainly have played more than a small role in making our lives what they are and not otherwise.  Is grace nothing more than the aspects of our lives that are left entirely to chance?

***

I recently had lunch with my friend Aaron Roberts, a minister in the United Church of Christ, a liberal denomination.  I asked him to tell me about what grace means to him.  Aaron said something very smart.  He explained that our theology of grace is inversely proportional to our theological anthropology.  To translate and unpack that statement, what my friend was saying was that to the extent that we have a positive view of human nature and human potential, to the extent that we have a high estimation of ourselves as human beings, we won’t tend to think of ourselves as in need of grace.  However, if we have a negative view of human nature and low expectations of human potential, we will see grace everywhere.  It will all be grace.

Where do Unitarian Universalists fall on this spectrum of holding human nature in either high or low esteem?  Let me give you a hint.  When we include the hymn “Amazing Grace” in our hymnal, we give our members the option of substituting the word “soul” for the word “wretch.”  It is written right there on the page.  Our tradition, historically, has had about as high a view of human nature as it is possible to have.  We have tended to regard ourselves and one another as capable and competent and good.  And, even more than that, we have historically embraced justice, which to us means the work of refashioning a world in which the random accident of being born one race, or one gender, or one nationality, or one socioeconomic class does not foreclose a life of opportunity or security or happiness. 

According to my friend, such a hopeful theology may not leave a lot of room for grace.  There is a very old episode of The Simpsons in which Bart is asked to say grace before the family dinner.  Bart folds his hands together, bows his head, and says, “Dear God, we paid for all this food ourselves, so thanks for nothing.”  Such a belief in our own radical self-sufficiency can close us off to grace.  Author Marilynne Robinson writes, “It is [Jesus’] consistent teaching that the comfortable, the confident, [and] the pious stand in special need of the intervention of grace… The problem is that we don’t recognize pride or hubris in ourselves, any more than Oedipus did, any more than Job’s so-called comforters.  It can be so innocuous-seeming a thing as confidence that one is right, is competent, is clear-sighted, or confidence that one is pious or pure in one’s motives.”  In the story of John Newton and the composition of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” it is clear that it is the author of the hymn who is most in need of the intervention of a transforming grace.

I wonder.  Is there a way to keep our mostly hopeful view of humanity and still make room for something like grace?

I want to describe two different ways in which human beings are said to embody grace.  The first way is to be graceful.  We are particularly used to using the word “graceful” to describe accomplishments in the fields of art and athletics.  Dancers, gymnasts, figure skaters, second basemen pivoting to complete the double play.  Grace is making something very difficult look smooth and effortless through practice and mastery.  It involves poise and sophistication.  Being graceful is not an exclusively human quality.  Butterflies, soaring birds, and running antelope are thought of and referred to as graceful.  This meaning mostly refers to a quality of motion.

There is another word, though, that is used to describe human beings who are said to embody grace.  That word is “gracious,” and it is almost exclusively used to describe human beings.  Graciousness is an interpersonal quality.  It is the passing of grace between people.  If you are feeling awkward or unsure, a gracious host can set you at ease.  If someone has hurt you, you can graciously accept their apology, just as you can graciously apologize for hurting someone.  It involves having the capacity for compassion, courtesy, kindness, and mercy.

Have you ever done something that made you feel awkward or embarrassed and then someone said something or did something that put you at ease?  Have you ever put your foot in your mouth and then had someone forgive your insensitivity?  Have you ever messed up in such a way that your relationship with someone else became estranged, only to have another person graciously refuse to cut you off entirely?  That’s grace.  We can recognize the grace that comes from graciousness.

How do the workings of grace play out in your life?  I find grace, I experience grace, in the receiving of love.  When it comes right down to it, if I’m completely honest with myself, the love that I receive is not something I can really say that I’ve earned.  And, if I continue to receive it in the future, it won’t be because of merit.

Our positive theological anthropology, our positive view of human nature, does not guarantee that we will never be wretched.  It doesn’t guarantee that our fate in life will be determined by actuarial tables, by an accounting of our credits and debts, our rising up and sinking down.  No, our positive anthropology insists that our own wretchedness isn’t the final word, the end of the story, or our eternal fate.  Grace is many things, and one of the things that it is graciousness, the ability to redeem and bless each other.  As Unitarian Universalists we are the inheritors of twin theological traditions.  The Universalists spoke of an all-loving God, ever bestowing the great gift of grace.  The Unitarians spoke of a humanity worthy of love, still worthy of love despite any evidence that may be produced to the contrary. 

May we be both the givers and receivers of grace.

Sermon: "Open Wide Thy Hand: The Essence of Liberalism" (Delivered 4-29-12)

Opening Words

by Peter Raible

We build on foundations we did not lay.

We warm ourselves by fires we did not light.

We sit in the shade of trees we did not plant.

We drink from wells we did not dig.

We profit from person we did not know.

This is as it should be.

Together we are more than any one person could be.

Together we can build across the generations.

Together we can renew our hope and faith in the life that is yet to unfold.

Together we can heed the call to a ministry of care and justice.

We are ever bound in community.

May it always be so.

Sermon

There hasn’t always been and there may not always be a religious movement known as Unitarian Universalism.  There hasn’t always been and there may not always be an organization known as the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.  If we were really honest with ourselves, we’d also understand that there hasn’t always been and may not always be a church known as the Shawnee Mission Unitarian Universalist Church.  However, as long as there has been religion and as long as there is a human species, there has always been and there will continue to be something called liberal religion and people who are religious liberals.

The signs at our new facility announce that our church is coming in 2012, and the signs prominently display a tag-line that reads, “Liberal Religion for Johnson County.”  I want to ask us, are we all clear on what liberal religion means?  And, even if we all are clear, is the greater Kansas City metropolitan area clear on what liberal religion is?  When it comes time for us to occupy our new building, I’m fairly certain that it will be necessary for us to offer some bold declarations and powerful articulations of what, exactly, this thing called liberal religion is.  My words this morning are in that vein.

I’m reminded of a conversation I once had with a person my own age.  I introduced myself as the minister of a Unitarian Universalist Church.  The person wasn’t familiar with our tradition, which is not surprising.  My first clarification was to say that we are a liberal church.  The response I received was unexpected.  “Oh, so you have a rock band and you wear blue jeans on Sunday.”  This person had associated liberalism with a style, not a theology.  And, is it possible that some of us make assumptions of a similar nature?  If we meet a person who says that she goes to a church with a rock band, do we make assumptions that the theology is conservative?  When I talk about liberal religion, I want to be clear that I am talking about the message not the medium, the content not the container.

So, what is it that is most essential to communicate when we use term liberal religion?  Unitarian historian Earl Morse Wilbur wrote that what sets liberal religion apart is our commitment to freedom, reason, and tolerance.  Freedom, reason, and tolerance.  However, self-critical Unitarian Universalists have critiqued making these three qualities, together or separately, the core of liberal religion.  Doug Muder writes, “None of the three will get you out of bed in the morning.”  Taking them separately, there is no denying that our willingness to embrace reason and science as ways of approaching truth is an incredibly important aspect of our tradition.  Reason we can keep as a core element of the liberal religious project.  Tolerance?  Well, tolerance is certainly better than intolerance.  At least it’s got that going for it.  But, tolerance is also a passive quality.  Tolerating your neighbor is different than loving your neighbor. 

This leaves us with freedom.  Freedom seems important as a core religious principle.  But, freedom can be a bit problematic.  Freedom is a word that you would find prominently in the speeches of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and prominently on the dust jacket of a book by Sarah Palin, and prominently in the platform of the Libertarian Party.  Freedom is the reason for the existence of the NAACP and freedom is the reason for the existence of the NRA.

So, when we say that freedom in religion is at the heart of Unitarian Universalism, what exactly do we mean?  My colleague Rev. Tom Schade puts it like this, “I think the question out there, especially among the younger people, is, ‘how are we not like every other church/religion organized around its self-importance?’…  The most important thing that I think people should know about us is that we have been struggling and even dying for a spirituality organized around freedom and liberation for a long time.  We’re not done yet.”

What my colleague wrote is absolutely right in some respects.  Religious and spiritual freedom and social liberation have always been central to us.  Michael Servetus was burned at the stake for his practice of free religious inquiry.  In Transylvania, a Unitarian king enacted an edict to guarantee religious freedom.  The early American Unitarians and Universalists followed their conscience away from the orthodox creeds.  The last person imprisoned for the crime of blasphemy in the United States was Abner Kneeland, a Universalist minister sentenced in 1838 to sixty days in jail for publishing statements about his own naturalistic theology.  Intellectual freedom led to the embrace of humanism in the early twentieth century.  And, our commitment to human liberty led to support the abolitionist cause, women’s rights, the civil rights movement, and equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, just to name a few of the ways we’ve promoted the cause of freedom.

These efforts and many more, large and small, to promote spiritual and religious freedom and social liberation have been edifying.  However, it cannot be denied that freedom can have a shadow side.  Too often, the understanding of what freedom actually is stays stuck at its most immature, adolescent, and reactionary levels.  Have you ever experienced a child throwing a tantrum in which certain declarations are made about the future?  When I am older, I’m going to eat dessert for dinner every night.  When I am older, I’m not going to have a bedtime.  When I move out, nobody is going to tell me what to do.  A juvenile declaration of independence.  Maybe your children have said something like this.  Maybe you remember saying or thinking something like this.  All of this is naïve and annoying and perfectly developmentally appropriate.  And, all of this is something that we hopefully grow out of through responsibility and maturity.  In time we learn that our actions have an impact on others, that freedom needs to be balanced by responsibility.  We learn that there are all sorts of ways that we are accountable to others, and not just to our own desires and whims.

Liberty, liberation, liberal, liberalism, liberal religion.  What exactly do these words mean?  What is the relationship between religious liberalism and religious freedom?  And, what do we mean by liberal religion?

***

Last month I read a newly published collection of essays by Marilynne Robinson.  Robinson teaches creative writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, and is the author of three novels and four works of non-fiction.  For her novel, Gilead, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.  Robinson is a liberal Christian and is active in the United Church of Christ.  Each of the ten essays in her most recent book could easily inspire its own sermon.  This morning I want to mention just one of those essays from the heart of her collection.  The essay is entitled, “Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism.”

Robinson remarks, “The fact that words have different meanings in different cultures, that ‘liberal’ is itself a word with very different meanings in American and European contexts, for example, never seems to influence discussion as it ought to.”  Robinson explains that in Europe, the word “liberal” changed its meaning between the time of the Renaissance and the end of the Enlightenment.  In the 1800s, liberalism became synonymous with political positions, especially the politics of the French Revolution.  Liberalism’s meaning, which continues to this day, became associated with freedoms having to do with equality and human rights and with resistance to political, religious, or economic authorities that deprived people of their rights and civil liberties.  Liberalism became equated with freedom, reason, and tolerance.

Marilynne Robinson reminds us that liberalism had a somewhat different meaning a couple hundred years earlier, when liberalism was associated with scriptural commandments having to do with generosity.  Consider the following translation of a passage from the Bible from four hundred years ago,

“The nigarde shal no more be called liberal, nor the churl rich.  But the nigarde wil speake of nigardnes, and his heart wil worke iniquitie, and do wickedly, and speake falsely against the Lord, to make emptie the hungrie soule, and to cause the drinke of the thirstie to faile.  For the weapons of the churl are wicked: he deviseth wicked counsels, to undo the poore with lying words: and to speake against the poore in judgement.  But the liberal man wil divise of liberal things, and he wil continue his liberalitie.”

Robinson goes on in her essay to cite several theologians and religious writers in Europe in the 1500s and 1600s, and in America in the 1600s and 1700s.  These theologians wrote at great length about the scriptural commandment to be liberal and they greatly emphasized this point.

Writes one European theologian, “True liberality is not momentary or of short duration.  They who possess that virtue persevere steadily, and do not exhaust themselves in a sudden and feeble flame, of which they quickly afterwards repent…  The Lord exhorts us not to momentary liberality, but to that which shall endure during the whole course of our life.”  And, if that wasn’t enough, this writer made notes in the margin of his scholarship that read, “Thou shalt be liberal!”

On the American side, Robinson writes of a great American preacher from the 1700s who liberally poured the word liberal into his sermons.  In his writings we find, quote, “a recurrent, passionate insistence on bounty or liberality, mercy and liberality, one being kind and liberal, liberal and bountiful...  These phrases are all [his] and there are many more like them.”

***

It may strike you as odd and actually a bit backwards that I should elect to preach on generosity at the end of April, as we’re bringing our annual stewardship campaign to a close, and not, say, at the beginning of March.  To that I say, yes, you’re absolutely right.  It is a bit backwards.  And, I offer two responses.  First, as you’ll notice on the giant thermometer in the foyer, we’re still a good ways off from reaching our goal.  That fact should and will probably engender some conversation and dialogue over the next several weeks and months as we prepare for the coming church year.  [You can still make your pledge.]

But, more importantly, if Marilynne Robinson is right, and if generosity is actually a liberal religious virtue, then there should be no calendar to constrain the discussion of generosity.  And, for that matter, if generosity is actually a divine virtue, then it deserves better than being something that our religion asks us to calculate on a Excel spreadsheet or the back of a napkin once a year.  Generosity belongs with love, justice, compassion, trust, hope, and forgiveness.  It is a virtue for all seasons.

So I want to argue and I want to suggest that what makes liberal religion liberal, at its core, is not just, not only, the Enlightenment concept of liberality, which stands for freedom, reason, and tolerance.  What makes liberal religion liberal, at its core, is also an older Renaissance and Reformation understanding of liberalism that equates liberalism with generosity.

Take, for example, our sources.  We list on the back of the order of service the seven principles, but the document in full is a list of seven principles we affirm and promote and six sources that feed our religious life together.  Those six sources include:  direct experience of the holy, the prophetic witness of women and men, wisdom from the world religions, Jewish and Christian ethical teachings, reason and science, and nature-based wisdom.  I consider the fullness of that list to be a statement of liberal generosity.

Or, take justice work.  Martin Luther King once said, “One of the great tragedies of [our] long trek along the highway of history has been the limiting of neighborly concern to tribe, race, class or nation.”  Our justice work would have to be characterized as generous, broad, expansive, and wide.  Its fullness is liberal.

Or, take our religious forebears, the Universalists who believed in a God whose love was expansive, liberal, and unbelievably generous, and the Unitarians who had a most generous and liberal view of humanity.

When we say that we Unitarian Universalism is a liberal tradition, that we are religious liberals, that the Shawnee Mission Unitarian Universalist Church is a liberal church, what exactly do we mean?  When we say that we are liberal religion for Johnson County, what exactly do we mean?  I would argue that whatever else we mean, we also mean that we are liberal in the older meaning of the word, which is to say radically generous.  Thou shalt be liberal.

Book Review: "When I Was a Child I Read Books" by Marilynne Robinson

Whenever I read a book by Marilynne Robinson, I always think of my visit to Iowa City a number of years ago and having the chance to meet her and attend an afternoon workshop that she presented to around a dozen ministers.  It was striking to me that Robinson talks with and embodies the same measured poise with which she writes.  Robinson, the author of three novels and four works of non-fiction (I’ve read all but two of her books), has a remarkable mind and writes in a controlled, exact, and precise manner.  I was not surprised to learn that there was something like a twenty year gap between her first and second novel.  Her writing was so perfect that I imagined her taking a week to craft a sentence.  According to a favorable review of Robinson’s most recent book in the Wall Street Journal, “The greatest pleasures of this book are its provocations, which are inseparable from its prose.”

When I Was a Child I Read Books contains ten essays, each seemingly better than the one before it.  Robinson writes as a liberal Christian who merges Christian theology with the humanities.  These essays return again and again to a series of themes: the Biblical commandments about generosity, the sinister ideological roots of modern economic theory, the rejection of ideologies that would limit our humanity, and the glory of the human mind.

In her opening essay, Robinson writes, “I realized gradually that my own religion, and religion in general, could and should disrupt these constraints, which amount to a small and narrow definition of what human beings are and how human life is to be understood…  For the educated among us, moldy theories we learned as sophomores, memorized for the test and never consciously thought of again, exert an authority that would embarrass us if we stopped to consider them.”  Immediately, Robinson goes on to critique behaviorist psychology.  Less proximately, she goes on to question the economic ideologies of modern day capitalism, Darwinian attempts to explain human behaviors, and the rejections of religion by the New Atheists.

Her essays are always fascinating, and sometimes go off on puzzling tangents, as when she writes about reclaiming the figure of Moses as an exemplar of liberalism.  She considers four books that seem to hold a negative opinion of Moses and the Old Testament.  Those four books include popular religion treatments by Bishop John Shelby Spong and Jack Miles, along with obscure scholarly titles by Jan Assmann and Regina Schwartz.  I get what she’s doing here.  A lot of the condemnations of Jewish scripture are nothing more than the “moldy theories we learned as sophomores.”  But this essay, unlike the other essays, is so narrow and specialized that it seems inessential when compared to the topics she tackles elsewhere.  How many people are interested in reading a three page refutation of Jan Assmann’s Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism?  (For the record, I read Assmann’s book as part of senior-level college seminar in the history of religions.  It is a wild book.  It freely admits to being a wild book.  And, I think that Robinson could have treated it more generously.)

Robinson is at her best in her essays “Who Was Oberlin?” and “Cosmology.”  In “Cosmology” she thrashes Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and other neo-Darwinians.  It is Robinson’s way of thinking here that I find most liberating and most in line with the theological thinking to which I aspire.  In “Oberlin” she considers the historical importance of nineteenth century evangelical Christians like Johann Friedrich Oberlin and Charles Grandison Finney, who played an important role in the end of slavery, and in forming Midwestern intellectual and cultural institutions, such as Grinnell and Oberlin.  Robinson’s essay provides an alternative history to the history of evangelical religion offered by Jeff Sharlet in his exposé The Family.  Sharlet seems to treat Jonathan Edwards and Finney as the precursors of modern day Christian dominionists.  Robinson shows this not to be the case, but in doing so she inadvertently understates the threat of the right wing.

Part of the joy of Robinson is also part of what makes this amazing book a bit frustrating in retrospect.  She does not suffer fools gladly.   “[A]nother identification I hold passionately is with the academic community, which has its fair share of skeptics and agnostics, some of whom are well enough informed historically to mention Michael Servetus from time to time, to make an occasional offhand remark about the Thirty Years War.”  Robinson holds that the complexity of the human mind and the complexity of the cosmos are deserving of reverence.  Her efforts to praise and defend that larger reverence and wondrous love are sometimes noble and sometimes quixotic.  Not all sins are equal.

Click here to see what other books I've read in 2012.

Sermon: "Liberal Religion, Sex, and Reproductive Justice" (Delivered 4-1-12)

A little over two weeks ago I was honored by the Kansas Choice Alliance with their “Next Generation” award for my service to the causes of reproductive justice, quality sex education, and women’s rights.  The statue I was given is displayed on our candlelighting table this morning.  Some of you may know some of the ways I’ve been involved in these issues, but many of you don’t, so let me describe some of the work I’ve done that led to this award.

From very early on in my ministry here with you I’ve been one of the religious leaders in Kansas most willing to speak up, show up, and advocate for choice and women’s reproductive rights.  That has entailed testifying before legislative committees, county commissioners, and the Kansas Board of Education.  It has meant speaking at rallies and press conferences.  It has meant other forms of involvement as well.

A few years ago, I brokered a meeting between concerned parents and administrators in the Shawnee Mission School District.  The meeting was held in the Saeger House dining room.  The parents were concerned that the school district was using an abstinence only sex-ed curriculum that contained factual errors, intentional omissions, and thinly veiled conservative religious ideology.  The meeting began reasonably with the parents presenting the various problems with the program and asking for the school district to work with them in changing the curriculum.  The administrators hesitated, explaining that they don’t make changes unless they’ve heard from a large group of parents.  I pushed back.  “Tell me, exactly how many parents do you need to hear from before you’ll make changes?  I’d like to know because I spoke with a couple of reporters today and they said they might have an interest in running a story.  I imagine you would hear from more than a few parents.”  The meeting ended with the administrators promising to work with the parents to address concerns with the curriculum.

Or, consider last July.  Last July I spoke at a meeting of the Johnson County Commissioners.  The Johnson County Health Department was asking the county commissioners for permission to accept a grant for more than a half million dollars to do youth sexual health education at no cost to the county.  Anti-abortion activists were trying to get the county commission to turn down the grant.  Fearing the entire grant would be turned down, the health department split the grant.  By a narrow margin the county commissioners accepted funding for a program aimed at middle school students but turned down tens of thousands of dollars for a program targeted at high risk teens, especially teens incarcerated at the juvenile detention center because that program would have included information about contraception.  (That same morning the Johnson County Commission also prohibited the health department from applying for a $300,000 grant from the Centers for Disease Control to do capacity building for public health programs for poor populations.  Who needs public health?  Who needs new jobs?  [You can watch me testify at the meeting of the County Commissioners here at minute 53:40.]

I’ve got many more stories like this one.  But, I want to say that while it is work like this that was recognized in Topeka, the award should be thought of as ours.  Yours and mine together.  Whenever I go to testify or speak or pray I’m either the only minister there, or the only minister who isn’t retired.  I can count on my congregation being rightfully proud of my public ministry.  Outside of Unitarian Universalism, too few progressive religious leaders can count on the support of their people when taking on issues of sexual health and reproductive justice.  They are often too afraid to broach this subject with their congregations.  You expect me to preach my conscience, to speak the truth as I know it and not the truth filtered by the calculations of church politics.

If you’ve been paying attention to politics recently at the national level or the state level, you may find yourself shocked and surprised to learn that in 2012 we are having a debate about contraception.  Where did this come from?  What is it all about?  In 1965 the Supreme Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that the use of contraception is a private medical decision that government cannot deny.  How can we be revisiting this in 2012?  Isn’t this a settled issue?

Sadly, it is not.  And, people who have been paying attention to the political winds have been able to predict for as much as a decade that this issue was going to reappear.  For years now one of my favorite syndicated columnists, a gay man, has had a recurring feature called “Straight Rights Watch.”  The purpose of this feature is to “wake heteros up to the reality that rightwing conservatives […] don’t just want to regulate the private lives of queers… but that they also wish to regulate the private lives of straight people too.”

A few years ago I got to go to dinner with New York Times best-selling author Michelle Goldberg.  She was here on a speaking tour and I lucked into taking her out to dinner.  Over dinner she told me about research she was doing about global women’s health, research that would eventually become her book The Means of Reproduction: Sex Power and the Future of the World.  Her global perspective helps us to better understand what is happening in Topeka or Olathe.

All over the planet, conflicts between tradition and modernity are being fought on the terrain of women’s bodies.  Globalization is challenging traditional social arrangements [and] upsetting economic stability… All this spurs conservative backlashes, as right-wingers promise anxious, disoriented people that the chaos can be contained if only the old sexual order is enforced.  Yet the subjugation of women is just making things worse, creating all manner of demographic, economic, and public health problems.

 Consider the country of Uganda, a country we might do well to consider because the need for the school that we support there was created in large part by our own mixing of conservative religious ideology with international public health policy.  Through the 1990s, Uganda was a leading example of African HIV/AIDS prevention.  Then, under the Bush administration, writes Jeff Sharlet, American politicians like “[Sam] Brownback and Representative Joe Pitts used their [influence] to insert chastity into foreign affairs.” [Sharlet, The Family, p. 327-328]

Under President George W. Bush, Michelle Goldberg writes,

A full two thirds of American aid for the prevention of the sexual spread of HIV went to abstinence and faithfulness programs, often run by religious groups.  American money influenced Uganda to abandon its successful, home-grown approach to curbing HIV in favor of one that fit the preconceptions of the religious right, with deadly results. 

Billboards advertising condoms, for years a common sight throughout the country, were taken down in December 2004…  Radio ads [for condoms] were to be replaced with messages from the cardinal of Uganda and the Anglican archbishop about the importance of abstinence and faithfulness within marriage.

Sharlet adds,

Uganda has been the most tragic victim of this projection of American sexual anxieties…  [The] evangelical revival in Uganda, and a stigmatization of condoms and those who use them [was] so severe that some college campuses held condom bonfires… [and] the Ugandan AIDS rate, once dropping, nearly doubled.

Who are the students at the New Life School in Uganda that we sponsor?  Many of them are the victims of the fundamentalist public health policy our country exported to Africa.  These policies are not just something that we export.  They are policies that are now being proposed domestically. 

Both Missouri and Kansas have so many appalling pieces of legislation in the works right now that it is difficult to keep track of them.  Both legislatures are working on bills that would allow health care professionals to refuse to dispense contraceptives if they have a religious objection to contraception.  This is bad enough in Johnson or Jackson County.  But, it is even worse in rural Kansas where an entire county might have only one doctor or a cluster of counties might share a single pharmacy.

Both the Kansas and Missouri legislatures are working on bills that would allow companies to remove contraceptive coverage from company health plans if the employer is morally opposed to contraception.  I will say more about this later.

This year Kansas is on the verge of passing another enormous piece of legislation that would further restrict access to abortion.  That bill would allow doctors to lie to patients if the lies are intended to prevent the woman from having an abortion.  The bill would also require doctors to make statements to women about the dangers of abortion that are medically and scientifically false.  It requires doctors to lie.  Kansas law forbids private insurers from covering abortion services; women must purchase a separate insurance rider for abortion services.  But the new law would not allow you to deduct the cost of medicalservices related to abortion on your taxes.  This would mean that the state could conceivably pry into women’s private medical records to determine if they’ve properly reported their abortion on their taxes.  All of this is the very definition of unconscionable.  It is sick and disgusting.

Earlier this week, right here in this room, I hosted a breakfast meeting for rabbis and ministers committed to reproductive justice.  At the breakfast we considered a couple of case studies, real life stories, and how those stories would be impacted by Kansas laws.  One true story was told about a family member of one of the attendees.  Her sister and her sister’s husband were expecting a baby.  They were overjoyed.  The whole extended family was overjoyed.  And then the first ultrasound came back irregular.  Genetic testing showed that the fetus had monosomy Turner Syndrome.  Over the next several weeks, additional ultrasounds revealed that the fetal heart rate was slowing down and other complications from Turner Syndrome were taking their toll on the fetus.  Death in utero was a certainty, but whether death would come in days, weeks, or months no one could say.  The woman and her husband decided, after consultation with her doctor and searching their own hearts, to induce labor at twenty weeks thereby terminating the pregnancy.

Not one of us here can tell this woman that she did the wrong thing.  Not one of us here can hold the complexity and the sadness and the pain of this story and tell her that she should have done anything other than what she did.

But, here is how current Kansas law and the laws the legislature is currently working to pass would treat her decision.  Labor induced at twenty weeks would be considered an abortion.  Before she would be allowed to induce she would be forced to have another ultrasound at her own expense, observe a mandatory 24-hour waiting period, and receive state-mandated “counseling.”  A doctor would be forced to lie to her and tell her that her procedure would increase her risk of breast cancer, despite science having proved that it does not.  A doctor would be forced to lie to her and tell her that her procedure would increase her risk of not being able to conceive in the future, despite science having proved that it does not.  If she did not have a rider for abortion on her medical insurance, she would have to pay for this procedure out of pocket, at a cost of $17,000.  And, she might be liable to pay special taxes to the state for these medical procedures.

We can all agree that the state piling restriction upon restriction, condescension upon condescension, insult upon insult upon this woman is gravely immoral and inhumane.

But we know that those who write these laws and vote for this legislation don’t have this woman in mind, this family in mind.  We know that, insofar as any of us can imagine ourselves in a similar circumstance or compelled to make a similar decision, they do not have any of us in mind either.  No, what they have in mind is a stereotype of women that is grossly disfigured and caricatured.

The woman I see:  a hopeful mother faced with heartbreak; a planned pregnancy gone horribly wrong.  The woman they imagine when they propose these laws:  a stereotype; a projection of their own sexual anxieties and fears and issues.

The woman I see:  a bright young lawyer in the making; a student leader at a great law school testifying before congress.  The woman they see:  a slut, to use the term conjured up by Rush Limbaugh’s febrile imagination.

Should employers have the right to deny contraception coverage to women because they have a moral opposition to contraception?  Notice that this is the issue.  An employer may have a moral opposition to alcohol, but no employer is trying to deny coverage for liver transplants.  An employer may have a moral opposition to smoking, but no employer is trying to deny coverage for lung cancer.  An employer may have a moral opposition to red meat, but not a single employer is trying to deny coverage for colon cancer.  Why is this?  It is because those conditions which affect men are seen as a part of health care, but contraception is viewed by the religious right not as health care, but as some threatening voodoo magic that women will do if they are able to control their own bodies.  Jeff Sharlet wrote that, “Uganda… has been the most tragic victim of [the] projection of American sexual anxieties.”  Actually, it is women who have been the most tragic victims of the projection of American sexual anxieties.  Employment law restrains all manner of prejudices and phobias having to do with race, nationality, and ability.  I don’t see why such equality under the law shouldn’t apply here as well.

What we need on this Sunday before Easter is a new understanding of the doctrine of incarnation.  A theology of incarnation involves God taking on a human form.  It tells us that the source of all being is inextricably linked to our physical bodies.  The opposite of such a theology imagines the divine as distant, imagines our bodies as full of some sinfulness that we need to restrain or overcome.  Unitarian Universalist Christian minister Rev. Victoria Weinstein puts it this way,

I believe that the current war on women is a disgrace to God and a dreadful violation of God's law of love... The body knows great pain, and it can know great pleasure.  The giving and receiving of physical pleasure is a spiritual act and experience.  Neither the Church nor the government should be in the business of legislating intimacy or its outcomes, which are a private matter of the body, whose inherent dignity Jesus constantly respected.

The theology of the body, of women’s bodies, of sexuality, of physicality that is put forward by the religious right is hurtful and harmful and ill.  It views sexuality as something to be, to paraphrase a quote on Weinstein’s blog, “degraded, shamed, repressed, sentimentalized, legislated, and played for porny horny giggles.”  It has all the maturity and wisdom of a middle school boys’ locker room, only our middle school boys have taken the Our Whole Lives program and have a more informed, accurate, and nuanced understanding of the subject.

For change to be made, it will take more than me going to testify in Topeka and speak at rallies.  It will take more than writing checks to Planned Parenthood, though those checks are so very important.  It will take a conscious effort to speak out.  We are one of the very few churches in the entire state of Kansas that has its head on straight.  We should be putting the issue before people.  We should have a sign out front, a big bold banner that reads, “We believe in access to contraception.”  We should offer the OWL class to the whole community.  And every time someone puts forward stereotypes and slander about sexuality and the body, we need to share a true story about the reality of women’s lives and the awful consequences of rightwing legislation.

After I went to dinner with Michelle Goldberg, she autographed her book for me.  She wrote, “Thank you for being a beacon of real spirituality in the heart of so much madness.”  It is an affirmation of who we are as a church.  It is a challenge for us to live up to.

Prayer

O holy source of our being and becoming, known throughout history but still unknowable, called by many names but still unnamable, we see you in the spirit of spring.

We see you in sunlight and tulip, in rosebud and robin.  We see you especially in this living, budding, sprouting, birthing spring.  We see you incarnate in creation, and incarnate in our living bodies.  Holiness is present in flesh and sinew, in blood and bone.

Help us to treasure our creatureliness, the holy wrapped within a layer of skin.  Help us to cast aside all fear of our bodies, all anger, all jealousy, all contempt.  Help us with each breath to give thanks, to be less at war with our being.

May we treat no other body, no other being, with disgust or anger, jealousy or contempt.   May we treat no person of any race, no person of any gender, no person of any sexual orientation, no person of any age, no person of any disability or illness with anger or contempt.  For our lives are sacred – complex, and challenging, and confusing, and difficult, and mysterious (yes, all of these, yes) – but also, and certainly, holy.

Amen.

A Larger Imagination for Public Education (Memories of Wayland)

I'm interested in your reaction to these thoughts on Kansas school funding.  Please email me at minister[at]smuuch[dot]org and let me know your reaction.  Do I have it right?  Am I misguided?  Thanks for sharing your opinions and thoughts with me.

Ten days ago I attended a forum on public education and school financing hosted by the MainStream Coalition.  More than sixty of us met in the basement of a UCC church and heard from a school superintendent, a Kansas legislator with a pro-education track record, and the lobbyist of the Kansas NEA.  I was just about the youngest person in the room and, unfortunately, there were only a few families with young children represented.

At the forum we learned about more proposed cuts to education coming out of Topeka as well as several awful pieces of legislation that are being considered this session.  I am convinced that the administration in Topeka doesn’t believe that public education should be appropriately funded.  They cut programs so they can turn around and cut taxes on the wealthy.  They propose legislation that would funnel money away from public education and towards private (religious) education.  When they can’t point out shortcomings in public education (shortcomings caused or magnified by a lack of funding) they manufacture data to show that Kansas schools are failing.  They are interested in creating an atmosphere in which public support for education is so low that scuttling the system is not met with resistance.  They are interested in the wealthier districts taking an “every man for himself” approach that is shortsighted and self-destructive.

Over the past couple of years I’ve attended several public forums on public education and school funding.  I leave each of these meetings troubled by the state of politics in the State of Kansas. But, I also leave these meetings mourning what I see as a failure on all sides to imagine what a truly great public education looks like.

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I grew up attending public schools in Wayland, Massachusetts, one of the best public school systems in the entire country.  Many of my teachers in high school, middle school, and even elementary school had doctorates.  (My second grade teacher had a doctorate!)  My high school English teacher had a Ph.D. in English literature and an undergraduate degree from Stanford.  My high school biology teacher had a Ph.D. in biology.  My high school American History teacher was a published historian.  One of my friends from college, a brilliant woman, went on to earn an advanced degree in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and is now a teacher at Wayland Middle School.

There were 132 students in my graduating class and 130 of them went to four-year colleges or universities.  And, the list of academic institutions that Wayland High School graduates went to was nothing short of amazing.  Whether true or not, it was widely rumored that Harvard capped the number of students it would accept from Wayland High at four per year.  (If true, this meant that it was easier to get into Harvard than to finish at the top of the class at Wayland High.)  Besides sending four students to Harvard, Wayland High graduates from the class of 1995 also went to Yale, Brown, Dartmouth (4), MIT (2), Stanford (2), Amherst, Swarthmore, Johns Hopkins, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, Duke, Vanderbilt, and Georgetown.  That is just the beginning of a list!  As high school students we were even required to attend a set number of individualized college counseling sessions with one of the school’s guidance counselors.

I was one of two students in my graduating class to go to Reed College, a small liberal arts college with a first class reputation in Portland, Oregon.  Even though I was at college 3,000 miles from home, I was around another high-achieving Wayland High student.  One of my high school classmates also majored in religion at Reed.  He was a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship.  Another of my high school classmates is now a speech writer for President Barack Obama.

I don’t mean to imply that gaining admission to elite universities is a prerequisite for a successful education or a successful life.  However, the K-12 public education received by students in Wayland is a launching pad for a life with tremendous opportunities. 

I could go on bragging about such a public education.  Maybe you are reading this and asking how such public education is possible.  The answer is that the residents of the town paid for it.  There is no denying that this education was possible because of the tremendous affluence of the town of Wayland.  However, the town also made a conscious decision to leverage that tax base and invest in education.  The town attracts the best teachers by paying for the best teachers.

In 2009-2010 the average teacher salary in Wayland was $83,872.  That was good for seventh in the state.  Although it is impossible to know how much the salaries of individual teachers increased, we do know that from 2004-2005 until 2009-2010 the average teacher salary in Wayland increased an average of 4.7% per year.)  This article from 2008 details the high end of teacher salaries in Wayland.  The current contract between the Wayland Teacher Association and the town of Wayland includes a provision (section XXII) for annual salary increases for all teachers.

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Members of my community send their children to some of the best public schools in the State of Kansas, even in the whole Midwest.  The Shawnee Mission, Blue Valley, and Olathe school districts are well-regarded.  Shawnee Mission leads the state in teacher salaries with Blue Valley second.

I am well aware that measuring school performance is a challenge.  Among the factors that makes it so challenging is that different communities are vastly different in terms of socio-economic standing.  What do standardized tests prove when opportunity is not standardized?  However, I would be willing to bet that there is a high correlation between teacher compensation and student performance. 

Towns like Wayland are far from perfect.  But, there is no denying the basic argument that it is a town that invests in education, though sometimes it gets it wrong.  In thinking about the recent debates about funding for public education in Topeka and in Kansas, the debate so often seems myopic, small-minded, and lacking in imagination.  The conversation would change entirely if the public schools of my childhood were imagined, if public education was widely regarded as a sound investment, and if taxes were increased with the goal of funding excellence.