Well, good morning everybody, thanks for coming
again.
I appreciate this platform I've got to say.
It is YOUR platform, and I feel honored
and responsible for sharing it.
Let me saythat at the start, in case I offend people.
Because this morning's talk starts with the stuff
of dreams, which are not logical, necessarily;
or necessarily politically correct. So...
Many years ago I took a workshop at Rowe Camp
and Conference Center from a Unitarian minister
who'd written a book about using dreams
in spirituality. Dreams are mysterious; there's
a lot of debate in the academic community
about what dreams are in the brain, what part
they have to do in our development, whether
they mean anything at all? Some of them believe
that your dreams are your  brain breaking false connections;
you know, you can't fly, you can't walk on
water. And there is some support for the traditional
interpretation that our dreams are messages
from our subconscious that our waking minds
would censor, making fresh connections to
teach us lessons.
What I'm going to talk about now is the latter,
so let me describe a dream...I know everyone
hates to hear people talk about their dreams,
but give me a break.
So let me tell you, I'm in this incredible
place, kind of like a campus, sort of like the picture I just showed a minute ago. Each building
has a beautiful abstract sculpture in front
of it. Dreams have these weird things in them
and it's hard to describe, but if you could
make a three-dimensional stained-glass window that was kind of
like a tree, with branches, and they're glowing and instead of lead between the stained glass
there's silver
and they're all lit up, they were like that, and they're all over the place.  They'e scattered around town in front of beautiful
high-tech buildings , and they're all connected by these very neat walkways.
I realize that I've been transported
100 years into the future, and Bernardston
has become a big city or a kind of campus.
I don't recognize anyone, but I do recognize
our church. It's the same traditional building, that's been occupied since 1739, except
except it has one of these sculptures in front of it,
and there are a few cows grazing on the lawn.
And on our announcement board--wait for it--is a big poster
reading "Cow Lives Matter"
Now, this upsets me for a moment, thinking that
if any Black people go by the church they're going to 
be insulted, but I realize that this
is the year 2120 and luckily, we've cured our racism problems and we've moved on.
so instead of antiracism protests a hundred years from now, all the UUs have become vegan and vegetarian activists.
This is a dream...This is when Gwyneth Paltrow walks up to me,
and takes my hand to guide me into the church.
Inside someone explains to me that
she's not really Gwyneth Paltrow, but she's a robot that
looks like her to make me feel comfortable.
They say, "We thought you'd be lonely here, so
we found the robot that looks the most like
your wife.
Here I must digress and say that when I compliment Ellen's looks, she sometimes says,
" I love it when you don't wear your glasses
in the morning."
Anyway, so it's coffee hour in 2120 and people guide
me over to this big punch bowl filled with a
mixture of granola, Fruit Loops, and milk.
I take a ladle of it, but of course, it's
almond milk. It would be politically incorrect
to have dairy products in a UU church
that is preaching that cow lives matter.
I'm trying to avoid the fruit loops and
dig for the granola when other people around
me start having a furious debate. One says,
"All animals matter. We shouldn't be
focusing on just cows."
Another person who in my dream looks a something like
Barack Obama says, "that's not the point.
It's only cows are being ground up into
hamburger for McDonald's."  And at this point I look out
the window and I see there had been
a McDonald's across the street from the church but it has been burned down
and the golden arches are like, in the ashes.
Anti-meat activists have destroyed McDonald's.
So...Gwyneth Paltrow turns to me and says, "did
Unitarians eat at McDonalds in your time?"
And I said, "well, almost none did, and
I stopped when I got older."
I was hoping
that there were no ancient receipts from Burger King
that they had saved through the century.
This is where the dream takes
one of those turns that only happen in dreams.
I realize that I've been brought to the
future to explain my time.
And in this year 2120 or whatever it was,
the UU General Assembly has met in Bernardston,
which is now the capital of Massachusetts
because Boston is under the ocean because of all the Antarctic melting.
All of a sudden I'm in a huge arena full of
22nd century UUs and this is some kind of inquisition
or investigation.
So I'm on stage with robot Gwyneth Paltrow,
and she says, "but you did eat a lot of
meat back then, right?"
and I said, "well, yeah, almost everybody did."
"But there were vegans and vegetarians
then, right?"
I figured they had researched my family and
know that Ellen's kids were vegans. "Sure,
and we did eat vegetarian sometimes." I thought
of the Boyden Dairy Farm at the end of our
road, and wondered if it was still in business,
or whether it had met the same fate as McDonalds.
I poked at my bowl of fruit loops and granola
and wished it were real milk, but thought
I'd better put it down.
Gwyneth smiled at me.  "It says in the records
that you would preach here once a month."
I said, "That's true," grateful that
somebody had remembered.
"How did you get to the church from your
home in Conway 25 miles away?"
At this
point she transforms into Leslie Stahl and
I realize this is kind of a "60 Minutes"
ambush interview, somehow taking place over
space and time.
I said, "Well, I drove," and the crowd gasped.
"But I drove a Prius, and we put solar panels on our house."
Scattered, faint applause.
"Why didn't you drive a Tesla?"
At this point, I notice that Elon Musk is in
the audience.
Of course, he'd figure out a way to live forever.
I was about to ask him how many gallons of fuel did it take to launch
one of your cars into space, you know, you could have given me one,
but thought it
would seem too defensive.
So I just said, "I couldn't afford a Tesla,
they were like a hundred grand, so only rich
people drove them."
So Leslie/Gwyneth says, "You could have ridden your bicycle to
church, couldn't you?"
"I would have had to wake up at five in
the morning and pedal for hours, and I would
have been exhausted by the time I got there.
Too exhausted to preach.
And my bike has a flat tire."
(That last fact, true in my
waking life, has been bugging me for a while.)
So much so that Ellen just fixed it.  Anyway
So groans, groans arose from the angry future Unitarians.
and I know I'm losing the crowd.
Gwyneth Paltrow is now
in the front row, glaring disapprovingly.
And I guess she's not going to take me back to wherever
they're putting me tonight.
And the grilling continues.
"Let's go back to the church for a minute," Leslie Stahl
says.
"How many gallons of fuel oil did
it take to heat the church in those days?"
And here, I'm transforming into All Souls
I said. "About four and a half thousand gallons
a year,"
"But you all knew about carbon emissions
and climate change, right?"
"Yeah, we did, and we were quite vocal about it."
"Still, you didn't insulate the ceiling,
and you didn't put solar panels on the
roof of the bell tower, did you?"
"We couldn't afford it. We could barely
keep the church open as it was. The buildings
were old and hard to insulate, and the roof
leaked.
We couldn't afford a minister.
Besides, with everything else in the society
based on fossil fuel, it wouldn't have
made a difference. We were opposed to systemic
fossil fuel use, but at the time we had to
do what we did."
At this point in the dream, there's a proposal
on the floor of the General Assembly to acknowledge
our church's historic complicity in the
evils of meat eating and fossil fuel use.
I slip offstage and somehow use my phone to
call my wife Ellen and I tell her what's
going on. Ellen is very sympathetic to my
situation, until I tell her about robot Gwyneth
Paltrow when she says, "You get back home right
now!"
And that's when I woke up.
Well,
There are two ways of interpreting
this dream.
One is that there are things that
we know are true, things we know we 
should  be doing with our lives,
things that we don't do because we live
in a society that doesn't yet see things
our way. The other interpretation of the dream
is that we should be cautious about judging
our ancestors without understanding the times that they lived in.
The past few months have
brought America to a new threshold of racial justice.
We are breaking through to a greater
understanding of how white supremacy culture
has held Black people down even after the
legal changes brought about during the civil
rights era, thanks to brave people like the
late John Lewis.
Such societal breakthroughs
don't  happen entirely peacefully. Jefferson
once said the tree of liberty needs to be
refreshed every few decades with the blood
of patriots;
thankfully, it seems that in
modern times it needs to be refreshed with
a few broken store windows and toppled shibboleths.
Statues are being pulled down by angry mobs
who have drawn the connection between Confederate
generals who fought to preserve the institution
of slavery and the extrajudicial executions
of Black people like we saw in Minneapolis
with George Floyd.
The stars and bars
flag has been banned from NASCAR and taken
off the flag of Mississippi; it's no longer a sign
of the nobility and bravery of the South, but of its shame.
And it's about time, too.
In the current revision of
our history, there are contexts though that we might
dismiss too easily. Human affairs are complicated,
and the evils of the past are interwoven with
ours. Hindsight is 20/20; we see the past
through our modern eyes, just as the future
will look at our shortcomings and failures
through their eyes.
Perhaps our great-great grandchildren will
scorn us for our carnivorous ways.
How could you have walked by the meat counter at Big Y
[supermarket] without being disgusted?
How come we didn't blockade the drive-ins at McDonald's?
Now, I'm no vegetarian, far from it. I
eat steak and chicken and dairy foods and
eggs. The reasons why I do are for another time.
But I use this analogy as an example of something that is broadly accepted now that, perhaps in the future,
will be seen as unacceptable, even evil.
Have you heard the word "speciesist"?
A speciesist is a person who believes that
human beings are inherently, inarguably, better
than all other life forms, and we can do with
them what we like.
And this is related, I believe, to the theological term "dominionism".
We might think of this
attitude that most of humanity shares and takes as a
given,
you might call it "human supremacy culture".
Lest you think that I'm trivializing Black
Lives Matter and our denomination's
ongoing battle against white supremacy culture,
I'm not.
I'm trying to illustrate how
deeply it's rooted.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the idea that races
other than your own are basically the same
as you was a fringe idea. It was perfectly
OK to steal land from native people and kidnap
them to work in your fields or on your ships,
it wasn't even seen as stealing.
It was
"manifest destiny"
Now, the vegetarians and vegans among us today
who see all sentient life as inherently valuable,
capable of emotion and pleasure and pain,
right now they are a minority among us. The rest of us, myself
included, have our hamburgers and drumsticks
with only minor qualms about cage-free eggs
and kosher beef, because that's the world
we were born into.
My point is that all centuries have their
context. We can judge the context, but we
should be careful of judging the people.
Which brings me to Thomas Jefferson,
third president of the United States,
author of the Declaration of Independence,
who was also a slaveholder and some say,
slave rapist.
One of his descendants wrote an op-ed in the
New York Times a few weeks ago proposing that
the Jefferson Memorial in Washington should
be modified,
replacing his statue with
someone else
perhaps Sojourner Truth.
He said that Monticello,
built by enslaved people under Jefferson's direction,
was monument enough, with its slave cabins
and small room for Sally Hemings, by whom
evidence says he fathered 6 children.
Jefferson certainly benefitted from white
male privilege; he inherited slaves and land
from his father; his wife gave him even more,
including the Hemings family
which included
Sally, who was his wife's half-sister.
By the end of his life, he had controlled about 600 slaves;
only the Hemings children were set free, as
was Sally.
The rest were sold to pay Jefferson's
debts after his death because he was about
$2 million in today's money in debt .
This
would be a blot on Jefferson's legacy,
in contrast to George Washington, another Virginia
wealthy white male slave holder who freed all his enslaved people in his will.
Now,
Was the man who wrote "all men are created equal" a hypocrite?
Was he a racist?
Yes, by today's standards.
But what about thestandards of the 18th century into which he was born?
By those standards, you might see him as a pragmatic radical.
And there's a lot to think about before
we tear down the Jefferson Memorial in our zeal.
When Jefferson was a young man, just out of law school,
he was elected to the Virginia state house,
the House of Burgesses. He hadn't married
or moved to Monticello yet,
his head was filled
with the Enlightenment ideas taught by his
tutors at William and Mary.
So he proposed
a bill in the legislature to end the importation of Africans
to Virginia.
It did not go well for young Jefferson. He
was rebuffed by his colleagues, and he learned the limits of idealism.
If you don't have power, you can't change things.
If Jefferson
had stuck to his guns, he never would have
been the author of the Declaration of Independence,
And by the way, his first draft of the Declaration included a whole paragraph blaming
King George for the slave trade, and he called it an "execrable commerce"
and an "assemblage of horrors".
Jefferson blamed the deletion of this paragraph on delegates to Congress
from South Carolina, Georgia, and Northern
delegates who profited from the slave trade.
After the Revolution, Jefferson drafted a
law that would prevent slavery from being
extended to the new states, that was defeated by one vote.
When he became president, in 1805,
the first year it would be legal to do so
under the Constitution, he finally was able
to ban the transatlantic slave trade, which
he had been trying to do since his late twenties.
Politics is the art of the possible; and Jefferson
...I think maybe this was the point of my dream...
Jefferson would have been no more able to abolish slavery
in his time than I'm able to ride my bicycle
everywhere instead of driving a car.
You know, equality  is something, is an ideal is  we take
for granted today, partially due to the work
of people like Jefferson.
But in the 18th century,
the equality of all
people was seen as irrational.
The idea that average working men should vote, that was far off
on the fringes.
As for women, forget about
voting or holding public office; they were
legally the property of their husbands; they
had no... they weren't allowed to have bank accounts,property titles,
they had no right to leave or divorce
their partners.
In most of Europe and Ireland
the majority of people were serfs, little
more than slaves. They may have been legally
allowed to move from place to place, but few
had the means to do so.
My Irish ancestors
were tied down to their little stonewalled
enclosures by their English landlords.
That was the world in 1776 when Jefferson
wrote that it was self-evident that all men
are created equal. That was a bombshell that
led to the more complete equality we have
today. THAT's why Jefferson's statue is on the Mall, along with Lincoln's and Martin Luther
King's, not because he was perfect
not because he didn't benefit from the labors of enslaved human beings.
But that's only one lesson from my dream or
nightmare of being prosecuted for my carnivorous,
gas-guzzling ways.
Here's the other lesson of the dream, which is probably more important.
Let me read you something that
a man named Eric Levitz wrote
in New York magazine,
I think about a week ago.
He said, [wrote]
"Americans live in a society that warehouses
more than 2 million people in penitentiaries
rife with
state-ordered torture and
unpunished sexual abuse.
A society that lives off the
"essential" labor of workers who
have no right to vote, and whom the state
reserves the right to deport; a society that
allows hundreds of thousands of its people to
go homeless
millions of its children to go hungry,
[while] dozens of its Fortune 500 companies
go untaxed; a society
that condemned much of its Black population
to enslavement for 246 years,
Jim Crow rule for a century after that,
and underinvestment,
underemployment  and
overincarceration ever since;
a society
that abets the
war crimes of Islamist autocracies
collectively punishes the populations
of adversarial regimes,
[(think Venezuela and Cuba)]
undermines global action on an ever-deepening
climate crisis that threatens the global poor
with mass displacement, if not mass death."
...Paris Accord.
Quite a litany.
None of these things are new to you, or to me.
These are the crimes of our times. We have
lived under the propaganda that aggressive
policing and throwing lots of people into
prison is the way to keep society safe, and
we've accepted this idea despite mountains
of evidence that our criminal justice system
is prejudiced, unfair, ineffective at changing
the lives of inmates and less effective than
available alternatives.
So how shall we judge our ancestors who lived under the plantation propaganda that slavery
was the natural state of affairs, it's essential
to the economy, it's sanctioned by the bible, and
that to free enslaved people would result
in a race war?
All of those were dire predictions of the
pre-Civil War era that turned out to be...
patently false.
I note that none of our right-wing friends
would trade the economy we have now for
the antebellum economy,
" Gone With the Wind" not withstanding.
It's also important to notice that
if all the freed African Americans had been
deported after emancipation as many people thought would have to haqppen,
that our country would be immeasurably weaker, culturally, economically,and spiritually.
It is not a privilege to not to have a cop's knee on your neck.
It is not a privilege not to be shot in the back by a law officer for an insignificant crime
or to be separated from your children;
it is a right, a right that extends to every human being in this country.
Things are turning in the world, thanks to
a pandemic that's made us realize what
fools we've been played for,
thanks to a government that has been captured by a mob
with limited imagination and awareness, and
thanks to video cameras that pull back the
cloak of fascism and show us the ugly face
of racism.
We don't get many chances like this,
and a lot of mistakes are being made,
one of which I think is the meme "all cops are bad",
when no one has the right to say
all anybodys are bad.
but that's another sermon.
Someday, providing we don't completely
screw up the planet with pollution or nuclear
war,
people will look back on us and wonder
why we did what we did, why we didn't change
the world in light of what we knew in our
hearts to be true.
The first verse of one of our hymns says:
"The star of truth but dimly shines behind
the veiling clouds of night,
But every searching eye divines some partial glimmer of its light."
Thomas Jefferson only saw a partial glimmer
of the truth, as do we.
We are disappointed in him;
will the future be disappointed in
us?
Thanks to my crazy dream, I'm thinking
we need to go a little easier on people from
the past, and a little harder on ourselves.
I, for one, don't want to face down that  disapproving
look
from a robot that looks like Gwyneth Paltrow.
And on that note,
Let's sing a hymn here...
