(Sermon only) Claimed By Ash Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley March 22, 2026

On the banks of the Danube in the middle

of Budapest,

there are bronze cast shoes that if you

don't know what they are, might look

like someone had just jumped into the

river there for a moment. So realistic

were they made

I remember feeling that way when I had

the chance to visit some years ago and I

didn't realize exactly what they were

until I stumbled upon them close enough

to see the candles burning in some or

the flowers stuck

between the laces of others.

The shoes are there to remember the

citizens of Budapest, mostly Jewish, who

were killed by the fascist Aerocross

militia men during World War II.

The victims were brought to the edge of

the river

and told to take off their shoes along

with anything else of value

before they were shot into the river.

60 pairs of shoes for thousands of dead.

And standing on the edge of the river

there in front of the memorial, I I felt

the grief of the place, the grief that

memorial honors claim me. Do you know

that that feeling

being claimed by a place being claimed

by a grief?

It's actually one of my sharpest

memories from visiting that city.

So this week I'm thinking about Ramadan

ending. I'm thinking about the people

who are celebrating that beloved

holiday. The families gathering for the

moment that is to be a joyful

celebration. Gathering in bomb shelters,

gathering amidst the rubble and ash in

Iran, in Lebanon.

It will be some time, I imagine, before

we are able to place shoes along the

water for all the civilian casualties of

our casually, impulsively launched

missiles.

The philosopher Frederick Nichu once

observed about our collective cultural

memory. If something is to stay in the

memory, he wrote, it must be burned in.

Only that which never ceases to hurt

stays in the memory. Only that which

never ceases to hurt stays in the

memory.

This was, I think, part of the reason

why each year after

George Moscone and Harvey Mil were

killed here in San Francisco in the late

'7s, each year Cleave Jones and others

gathered, people to have a candlelight

vigil on the anniversary of their death.

And and one year in 1985 when they were

gathering for that vigil, Jones realized

that now more than a thousand people in

the city had died of AIDS.

And he thought, "This has to be marked.

We have to remember. We have to hold

their memory among us as we gather for

this vigil this year." And so he

gathered people to put up placards, over

a thousand placards all along the

federal building with the names of all

of those who died. and looking from up

on the ladder where he had climbed to

hang the placards down at this blanket

of names.

He had a vision of what would become the

largest public art project ever created.

The AIDS memorial quilt is now 54 tons

of stitched fabric.

Each panel 3x 6 ft

the size of a grave.

So we build monuments and light candles

and leave flowers. We quilt

and let ourselves be claimed by ash.

And it can be the AIDS quilt or the

shoes in Budapest or so many other

memorials of of World War II and the

Holocaust of Vietnam or of the 9/11

memorial in New York City. enormous and

unthinkable human tragedy. Distilled

into metal and stone, into carved words,

stitched fabric, a place to bring

candles and flowers.

As the deaths from AIDS soared,

the communities around

struggled to give them dignity. You

know, funeral homes refused to receive

the bodies.

or charged exorbitant extra rates.

Families refused the deaths. The

government refused to look. This is the

context in which the Metropolitan

Community Church of San Francisco grew

and deepened.

There's an incredible uh podcast that

was re released this last fall telling

the story of this uh church community,

the Metropolitan Community Church.

There's there's many of them around the

country. There was a a church created

specifically for gay and lesbians for

the LGBTQ plus community to gather and

have religious community in a time when

religion at large shunned them.

The podcast is called When We All Get to

Heaven after a song because these people

figured out how to live in a kind of

heaven with one another through the

apocalyptic time that was claiming them.

That's the invitation I want to offer us

today. How do we live in a kind of

heaven with one another through

apocalyptic times? Their

story was documented because uh uh

someone who was eventually a member of

their foundation's board found 1,200

cassette tapes, recordings from the 80s

and 90s of the during the AIDS crisis

that were about to be uh thrown away.

They were in a dumpster

and she saved them, listened to them and

did interviews with the contemporary

survivors

listening.

You hear this congregation gathering

week after week, reading the names of

those who had died since the last

Sunday.

They sang, they grieved, they argued

with God, they held each other's hands,

they walked through the valley of the

shadow of death together and found that

there a sweet spirit moved among them.

that even as they died and grieved and

raged,

their spirits grew.

I think this is what the theologian

Walter Bugamman is trying to articulate

when he talks in his book hope without

hope within history

about moving beyond the inward focused

therapeutic understanding of church as a

place of individual healing to turn

outward and transform personal stories

of our faith into a powerful voice in

the public square.

Bugamman finds in the Exodus story and

and throughout the Hebrew prophets a

pattern that repeats whenever a

community passes through the fire of

true transformation, a narrative that

intentionally shatters all the old

descriptions of reality and invites a

community into a new one.

It's the process of taking the brutality

of social circumstances

like those at MCC San Francisco faced in

the 80s and 90s and facing them with

faith. So the first part of this process

is three-fold. He says first is a

critique of ideology.

You have to critique the dominant

worldview, the oppressive theology that

is structured around the community.

says that theology it emerges from life

and shapes behavior that there's a

relationship between our choices and our

religious ideas and therefore when it

becomes oppressive theology must be

critiqued

in order to free ourselves.

We have to undo that which holds us

fast.

MCC. They dismantled the theology that

tried to displace

the ashes of the society onto them and

other communities that said you don't

belong here. You have a disease that is

confined to your people and God has

condemned you. They critiqued that

theology.

We have to dismantle a theology that

claims a human dominion over the earth

that turns a blind eye to the

devastation that we are wreaking

this heat in March. I know it's lovely

but it's one more warning

in all likelihood a harbinger of fires

to come in this corner of the continent.

We have to understand the ideology

that allows these things to happen and

critique it. That's the first part. And

then the second stage and maybe the one

that we want to resist the most is the

public processing of pain.

hear self-disclosure and storytelling

break silence around an unmentionable

issue and point the way forward for

others to do their own work of

truthtelling and healing.

In many societies throughout history,

soldiers returning from war had to

engage in some kind of purification

ritual

before they were permitted

to re-enter

to come back to their families and their

society. These practices of ritual

purification and repentance were

required

even for the sanctioned actions of what

was deemed a just war because the

society would expect the warriors

nevertheless to feel some shame and

guilt.

In some medieval European countries, the

civilians would even share in the

rituals, mourning and acknowledging that

that they shared too in the

responsibility for the actions of the

returning soldiers.

The whole town, if you can imagine this,

the whole town coming out as their

beloveds, their returning soldiers come

wearing ash.

and grieving.

A hero's welcome was not a parade

through town, but a public ritual of

grief at the brutality of what had been

done.

And I wonder what will happen to the

souls of the soldiers who fight a war

from behind a screen, who pilot drones

and direct w missiles and and watch

images of the devastation

as their society condemns the killing as

morally bankrupt. And there is no public

reconciliation of the costs their

actions have wrought upon others and

themselves.

It's that public reconciliation, that

public expression of private pain that

shook so many seeing for the first time

when it was laid out across the National

Mall the AIDS quilt.

You've seen that image, right? Panel

after panel after panel, painstakingly,

lovingly quilted and laid out at the

heart of the nation.

It was the last day of one of the times

that quilt has been displayed in 1992

when activists from ACT UP, like we were

talking about a few weeks ago, took

ashes of their own beloved lovers and

friends and threw them crossing the

police lines on the lawn of the White

House.

if you won't come to the funeral, they

famously said, we'll bring the funeral

to you.

And while many thought this battle must

have been fought and won by now, just

this month, Florida decided to remove

coverage of AIDS drugs assistance

program from at least 10,000, maybe more

of their residents. Experts predict that

in African countries, last year's

removal of the USAD funds to combat the

continued AIDS crisis will likely result

in 3 million deaths in the coming years,

including half a million children.

And so we have to get to that third

stage. The third stage of faith

development where that public outcry and

processing of pain leads to the release

of a new social imagination.

The outcry that takes the lid off of a

hopefilled imagination. And the question

he writes, this is Bugamman, the

question always asked of the ones

liberated in their pain is, "What will

you do with your time?"

Those

living through the AIDS crisis at the

Metropolitan Community Church in San

Francisco, they came to realized there

was an important difference between a

cure, which they didn't know might ever

come.

A difference between a cure and healing.

They said, "We might not ever be cured

of this plague, but we are healing."

They were healing while they were dying.

Healing when families who had been

alienated for years reconciled. Healing

when people were able to have have a

kind of self-acceptance that overcame

shame.

Healing happened when a community

gathered and grieved.

At some point their lead pastor Jim

Matulski began to say, "Our church has

AIDS.

And eventually Jim himself got AIDS.

And it required the whole community

again to confront this idea of how do we

make sense of our moral choices

while living through an apocalypse?

How will we make sense while we live

through unthinkable devastation of our

own capacity for limited but important

choices?

Marita Sturkin wrote a a history of this

time in the late 90s and she talked

about a a sense of belonging

being related to intimacy. She said,

"Ironically, in the in the '9s, this

means that exposure to infection has

also shifted meaning. What was once

considered reckless and selfish behavior

is recorded, recoded as heroic,

an expression of true love.

The only way to live,

to be healed when there is no cure, is

to be claimed by ash and its strange and

miraculous alchemy.

That's the miraculous alchemy that

Cleave Jones and so many others wo in

through making the AIDS quilt. It's

transforming tragedy and injustice into

heartbreaking beauty into a remembrance

that can still bring so many of us to

tears that breaks us open.

The congregation I grew up in made its

own small quilt, a quilt of healing

hands. Members traced their hands and

cut them out and patched them together.

And these healing hand quilts were

passed around from members to members to

show that the love of our community was

with you. When you were sick in the

hospital, when you were grieving at

home, when you had just lost

a parent, a spouse,

you know that experience of being broken

open when something cuts through the

armor you wear, the warmer we all wear

to get through our days. But something,

often something profoundly beautiful or

poignantly painful or often both, cuts

through that armor, pierces your heart,

and floods your system.

Nichi's observation that only that which

never ceases to hurt stays in the

memory. It it was a warning about

cruelty

about how societies use pain to enforce

compliance and create identity.

But there is another way to read it. One

we can read in the kind of memory held

by MCC, by the makers of the quilt, by

the people who laid the shoes along the

Danube. What gets burned in is not only

suffering. What gets burned in is love.

The love that made the loss so

devastating in the first place, the ash

that claims us carries both.

The ash that for many marked the faces

on on Ash Wednesday at the beginning of

this season says remember you are dust

and to dust you shall return not as a

threat as an invitation to be present to

what is real.

So I want to leave you with a poem.

It's a favorite poem of mine from the

collection Atlantis by Mark Dodie.

He wrote it while his partner Wall-E was

dying of AIDS. It was published the year

after Wall-Ally died.

And this poem, Brilliance, is about a

friend of Mark's, a friend of a friend

who was cared for by a nurse named

Maggie.

Brilliance. Maggie's taking care of a

man who's dying.

He's attended to everything.

Said goodbye to his parents.

Paid off his credit card.

She says, "Why don't you just run it up

to the limit,

but he wants everything squared away?

No balance owed.

Though he misses the pets he's already

had found a home for.

He can't be around dogs or cats. Too

much risk.

He says, "I can't have anything."

She says, "A bowl of goldfish."

He says he doesn't want to start with

anything.

And then describes the kind he'd maybe

like,

how their tails would fan to a gold

flaring.

They talk about hot jewel tones, gold

lacquer. Say maybe they'll go pick some

out, though he can't go much of

anywhere. And then abruptly he says, "I

can't love anything I can't finish."

He says it like he's had enough of the

whole scintilent world, though what he

means is he'll never be satisfied and

therefore has established this

discipline, a kind of severe rehearsal.

That's where they leave it. him looking

out the window, her knitting as she does

because she needs to do something.

Later, he leaves a message.

Yes.

To the bowl of goldfish,

meaning let me go if I have to in

brilliance.

In a story I read, a Zen master who'd

perfected his detachment from the things

of the world remembered at the moment of

dying a deer he used to feed in the park

and wondered who might care for it and

at that instant was reborn in the

stunned flesh of a fawn.

So Maggie's friend,

is he going out into the last loved

object of his attention?

Fanning the veained translucence of an

opulent tale, undulant in some

uncapturable curve as he bronze

crosanthemums, copper leaf, hurried

darting, deloon,

icon colored fins, troubling the water.

Say yes to the bowl of goldfish.

Be claimed by beauty and grief all at

once.

Refuse to choose between them. Refuse to

go numb. Refuse the offer of a life that

doesn't hurt because it doesn't feel be

claimed by ash. And let us face the

devastation of our times hand in hand,

holding faith that holding a common

grief will break open our hearts in the

service of our common humanity. May it

be so. And amen.