 What is worship, if not a sacred celebration, a moment of shaping worth, of return, of reconnection that punctuates the end of one week and beginning of another? I am grateful to be in this space this holy pause with you. Thanks to my colleague and dear friend, Reverend Roger, for the invitation and to Reverend Kelly and Dan for creating this worshipful space with me. Friends, I am honored to be sharing in worship with you. It is good to be together. It is good to be together on this day, Father's Day, this time set aside for honoring the fathers and father figures in our lives, for remembering the ways they've shaped us, nurtured us, journeyed with us. It is a day that invites us to honor the fathers and father figures who've passed, leaving legacies for us to embrace or make sense of. And it's never that straightforward. For some of us, this is a complicated day, isn't it? One that holds grief, loss, may be a sense of abandonment and neglect. And other very real feelings about fathers and father figures in our lives. All of it, all the complicated, messy, sweet feelings are welcome in this space. To be human is to wrestle with the joys and sorrows that life hands us. And to find the companions who will wrestle in love with us. My wrestling's encompassed the reality that yesterday was Juneteenth or Freedom Day and Congress approved a bill to make it a federal holiday, an important act. And I find myself thinking about the hundreds and thousands of black, brown and indigenous adolescents, adults and elders who are caught in America's carceral system. A system that disproportionately imprisons BIPOC men and women, cis and trans BIPOC men and women. A system that steals lives, souls, from communities and families. And so on this day, I remember the fathers who find themselves locked in prison cells. I remember the fathers who mourn their children, captives of the state. I remember the children who perhaps yearn for and mourn the absence of their fathers who have been savagely consumed by the state. I remember the men, women and communities for whom freedom has not yet been realized. Folks who were never meant to survive. In reflecting on this most unusual 15 plus months during which vulnerable frontline and essential workers, the majority of whom were black, indigenous and people of color were hailed as heroes. While afforded little protection, health benefits, compensation, flexible work schedules, childcare, the basics, in reflecting I keep asking myself, what is it that I want to say to the black, indigenous and people of color, the BIPOC folks in my life? This has been a difficult time. It has held isolation, grief, tremendous losses of loved ones, of relationships, of what was, what might have been. The social and political oppressions and pressures we face have been amplified again and again. Already pushed to the margins, many BIPOC folks have been further marginalized. I watch my dear niece and nephew, young adults yet, babies really. Growing up in this cultural context that deliberately refuses to appreciate who they are and how they are in the world. I witnessed the ways in which they internalize and struggle with the minimal expectations that this world has of them. How my niece works twice as hard for much less affirmation and access. And this is particularly true for my sweet nephew who has yet to find his place in the world. How he, just on the cusp of adulthood, struggles with constantly receiving messages from the world that he will not make it. I witness how often he lapses into believing that his life is not worth much of anything. His life does not matter. So why bother? There is so much despair in that one small question he asks. Why bother? What I want for them. What I long for for my niece, my nephew and other BIPOC folks is the lived experience of taking up space. Remember Julian from our story earlier today and how that beautiful brown mermaid eventually took up space? What I want is the lived experience of celebration, of soul care, of rest, a deep honoring of our exquisite selves made in the image of all that is holy. Just as we are. Just as we are. In his sermon on June 6th, Reverend Roger offered these words. He said, I believe that every soul is sacred. Therefore every soul deserves the opportunity to flourish. Every soul has a basic right to food, healthcare, shelter, equality and love. Deserves to be treated with dignity and to have the soul's inherent beauty recognized, celebrated and loved. Amen to that. Every soul deserves to be treated with dignity and to have the soul's inherent beauty recognized, celebrated and loved. Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed, wrote the poet Lucille Clifton. Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed. And there, there is the rub that every soul deserves the opportunity to flourish. And for some of us black, brown, indigenous people of color every day, a political system anchored in white supremacy threatens our survival in minor and significant ways. I think about my nephew every day, I want to say to him. Every day we have to choose to answer the question. Every day we have to choose the answer to the question. Why bother? And to do so by centering our own needs for care, for tending to our souls, our hearts, our bodies. This is by no means easy. Our soul care itself is an act of defiance for it furthers our survival, our thriving, which we were not meant to do. Our soul care is its own prop protest against a culture more concerned with preserving whitewashed versions of history than it is with making space for pedagogical interventions like critical race theory that illuminates who we are as a nation and offers tools for how we might come to a place of reconciliation and healing. Our soul care is an act of political disruption, redirecting our energies from maintaining what is and putting those energies toward creating communities. As the feminist philosopher, Sarah Ahmed says, creating those communities assembled out of the experiences of being shattered. In our care for ourselves, quoting Sarah Ahmed again, in our care for ourselves, we reassemble ourselves through the ordinary, everyday and often painstaking act, painstaking work of looking after ourselves, looking after each other. We practice returning again and again to our very selves and to each other. So to my nephew, to my dear BIPOC folks, it will not be easy to embrace centering your own souls, to embrace centering those in your communities. It will not be easy to pause and care for yourselves in ways that invites scrutiny under a capitalist gaze. Doing that which is not expected of you, not usually available to you, well, it might just make you tremble with fear. An ordinary Lord ends a litany for survival reminding us, when the sun rises, we are afraid it might not remain. When the sun sets, we are afraid it might not rise in the morning. When our stomachs are full, we are afraid of indigestion. When our stomachs are empty, we are afraid we may never eat again. When we are loved, we are afraid love will vanish. When we are alone, we are afraid love will never return. When we speak, we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive. We were never meant to survive. And James Baldwin tells us in a letter to his nephew, so many decades ago, that if we had not loved each other, if we black folks had not loved each other, none of us would have survived. And now you must survive, dear nephew. You must survive, my Bangkok community, because we love you. And for you to survive and thrive, every day must hold a celebration of your worth, of your soul, of your magnificence. And you must be bothered enough to remember that the very existence of your body is a protest. Your joy is a protest. Your answering yes to life, to love, to truth is an act of political dissent. And you do not do it alone, but always in community, always with the legacies of those who preceded you, holding you and you, the gathered congregation can be a part of that community. You can be a part of ensuring that every day, every day you choose to contribute to the work being done to dismantle a system designed to destroy the freedoms of your BIPOC neighbors. Folks here in your midst and folks you will never meet. Freedom and celebration of that freedom must be grounded in justice. It will take all of us doing our soul work to make it so. So may it be.