 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. talked a lot about beloved community. In her excellent column in this month's FUS newsletter, our communications director Brittany Crawford cited a definition of beloved community that I really like. Beloved community happens when people of diverse racial, ethnic, educational, class, gender and sexual orientation backgrounds and identities enter into an interdependent relationship of love, mutual respect, and care. Love, mutual respect, and care. Importantly, Brittany also quoted Bell Hooks who says that the beloved community does not remove differences, rather it removes privilege. Beloved community does not happen when the differences between individuals and groups of people are erased and replaced by a monochromatic unity. Well, Dr. King was an idealist and he was a realist. He understood that all people, himself included, make mistakes. In the language of his Christian faith, he recognized that all of us are capable and at times exhibit sin. Communities are made up of people. Therefore, no community completely and perfectly embodies the ideal of beloved community. What we can do in actual community is try to embody the principles of beloved community as often and as consistently as we possibly can. To the extent we do so, beloved community comes to be in the here and now of this world. So, there are not specific beloved communities that, like LEED certified buildings, have the stamp of approval on them, but there are communities that figure out how to embody beloved community true mutual love at least some of the time. This understanding of beloved community thinks about my own way of seeing paradise. I don't think a paradise is some state of being we might find after we die, if we've been good people. Paradise, rather, is something that can be embodied here on earth. I actually believe the same thing about hell. That's not somewhere else after life. It is embodied here on earth, unfortunately. So, we don't achieve paradise and get this is paradise, stamp of approval. We can approximate paradise at times. Paradise on earth is always fragile and it is always impermanent. For me, paradise on earth includes those qualities that we talk about in beloved community that Brittany highlighted in her article, love, mutual respect, care for one another. I would expand it to also include relationships, not just with people, but with that wider interdependent web of existence. As Unitarian Universalists in the United States, we've begun to have a reckoning these past four years with the legacy of white supremacy culture that is part of our UU heritage in this country. It's occurred to me that the environmental ethic comes more easily to most of us in our mostly white denomination than the anti-racism ethic. I've come to the conclusion that therefore we need to prioritize the work of racial justice and that this is actually key to making more progress in our environmental justice work. They are inextricably linked. No racial justice, no environmental justice. I think this realization is part of why First Unitarian's Board of Trustees has included anti-racism, anti-opression work in this year's strategic priorities, one of three strategic priorities, and I applaud that decision. Now, it can be tempting to look at these different types of justice as either or propositions as part of a zero-sum game, and this is not the case. Putting a primacy on racial justice for a period of time does not mean that we quit doing environmental work or that we don't believe that this environmental work is urgent and important. Rather, it is saying that as a predominantly white congregation in a predominantly white denomination, we have some long overdue work to do on racial justice. And doing this work will help us do everything better, including environmental justice. So we're putting a primacy on racial justice work this year into next year. I hope we keep it front and center longer than that because it's going to take a while. All of this makes me think of one of my kids. One of my kids responded to being challenged to do something better with, you know, I just stink at that. As in, I'm really bad at that and it's hopeless, so forget about it and leave me alone. Well, none of us are good at everything. There are some things we really struggle with. Sometimes it's okay to let those things go. But sometimes we need to keep on working on them. So to be blunt, in many ways, our American Unitarian Universalist faith has stunk at anti-racism work. We've missed opportunities. We've made wrong decisions. Not always, not all of us, but enough of us, me included. Often enough, me included, that it's been a problem. But anti-racism work simply can't be something that we shrug off with. Well, we stink at that. We have to try. We have to work at it. No doubt, we will keep making mistakes, but I believe in my heart that we can do better. And by we, I mean me, and you, in First Unitarian Society, and our UU Association in the United States. Friends, the world needs us to do better. Our UU kinfolk overseas need us to do better so we can build truly mutual partnerships together. First Unitarian Society and our UU faith in the United States need us to do this work so that our congregation and our faith can survive and thrive as the United States becomes more thoroughly multicultural. Our neighbors of color need us to do better. They need us to be in the trenches working with them, supporting them in many ways following them to make Madison a more just place. We need to do this work so that our beloved congregation can more consistently embody beloved community. And we need to do this work for our own souls, not for some heavenly reward, but so that we're better people and that we leave a better imprint from the way we live our lives. So there's a movement to highlight this anti-racism, anti-oppression work within the Unitarian Universalist Association by adding an eighth principle. The proposed eighth principle reads, we the members of the Unitarian Universalist Association covenant to affirm and promote journey toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse, multicultural, beloved community by our actions that accountability, dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and in our institutions. It's kind of a lot to say, so I'm going to say it again. We covenant to affirm and promote journeying toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse, multicultural, beloved community by our actions that accountability, dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and in our institutions. Well, I support this eighth principle adding this to our seven principles, just as I supported adding an additional source of our Unitarian Universalist faith several years ago, namely that spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature. I supported that that needed to be part of what we cite as our sources of our faith. Well, it's important to understand that the seven principles and the now five or six rather sources are not some sort of creed all statement. They weren't imprinted on stone like the Ten Commandments. They are a snapshot summary of what most Unitarian Universalists believed in the 1980s. And just as our faith is a living entity, so must our understanding of what's most important among us be alive and growing and changing. So the eighth principle recognizes that this anti-racism, anti-oppression work, needs to be front and center for us for a while. Since I first encountered Dr. King's book, where do we go from here? Chaos or community maybe 30 years ago. I keep coming back to it. He wrote that book in 1967. It's my favorite book of his. And every time I read it every few years, I think, wow, it's as if he wrote that book for this precise moment. Listen, for example, to this quote from the book. At the other end of the poll are unregenerate segregationists who have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality. The segregationist goal is the total reversal of all reforms with reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism. Wow. Could that not have been written on January 6th, when an overwhelmingly white mob attacked the United States Capitol, some waving Confederate flags? Now there were lots of motivations for those attackers besides indiscriminate devotion to an authoritarian leader. Certainly some, including the insider in chief, were on regenerate segregationists out to cancel beloved community wherever it has happened and come to be in the United States. Martin Luther King Jr.'s words in 1967 are spot on for 2021. In that question that Dr. King posed in the title of his book, where do we go from here? Chaos or community remains such a potent question. Certainly it's an apt question in the wake of the January 6th insurrection when we had a picture yet again of what chaos looks like. Now we don't know for sure how things will unfold in these coming years, but it's clear to me that there are two sets of paths that we could take. And one leads toward chaos and one leads toward community. Which path will our nation choose? The only way forward in my view is toward community. That was true in 1967 and 77 and 87 and 97 and 2007 and 2017 and 2021. I think Dr. King would have understood this even though he really wasn't sure in 1967 that there'd be a 1977 for us, let alone a 2021. Hear these words from his book. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leads us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words too late. There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. The moving finger rights and having writ moves on. We still have a choice today nonviolent coexistence or violent co annihilation. This may well be met human kinds last chance to choose between chaos or community. Wow, those are powerful words. I think that we need to take a leap of faith every day. Every day when we are encountered with the fierce urgency of now. And that leap of faith is that maybe it's not too late that at least it's not too late to try. The video sharing this morning by tequila beton underscores the fierce urgency of now. The fierce urgency of this work. Her son's well being and maybe even survival depend on our city and our nation finally choosing the path toward beloved community. We are part of a society that funnels to Kayla son toward prison or even an early grave. We can work with tequila. We can support tequila and others to help transform our society to one that funnels her son and all children toward beloved community. We have to feel to Kayla's and her son's story as she asks us to do. We have to love them as if they are our own because they are and we are their own confronted with the fierce urgency of now. Let us choose community and love.