(Sermon only) Smoke and Memory Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley March 15, 2026

Long after the fire, the smoke remains.

The memory of transformation, of loss,

of destruction, of the impact of what

has come before. It permeates

everything. You might try and sweep it

up like soot into a closet or hold it

like a beach ball under the water,

but it is like smoke. It lingers in

clothes and hairs, seeps into the walls,

hangs in the air.

In in 1991,

there were a construction team breaking

ground on a federal office project in

lower Manhattan.

And they unearthed what turned out to be

a colonial era cemetery for enslaved

Africans.

The largest in North America. Somewhere

between 10 and 20,000 people had been

buried there beneath the streets of

lower Manhattan.

And one coffin there in particular

arrested the attention of the scholars

who began to study the site. Nailed into

the wood lid were 51 iron ts forming

kind of a heart-shaped design that they

identified eventually as a sanca symbol.

Sanca from the Akan language from Ghana

refers to an image of a bird with its

head turned backwards.

It literally means something like go

back and get it.

Go back and get it.

Have the courage to turn around and face

what you are already carrying.

In a rare moment of public reckoning

with our past in this country,

construction was halted at the site.

It was designated a national historic

landmark in 1993 and a decade later

funds were allocated to build a memorial

at the site. And there's still some some

scholarly debate about the symbol on the

coffin, but the the moment itself was a

Sancopa moment as a community of of

activists and scholars insisted

that the remains be retreated with

dignity.

Insisted on years of careful study and a

ceremony of reinterment that traveled

through six cities before returning the

ancestors to the ground.

The grief

still had work to do.

Some 200 years later, this site was from

the late 1700s. Some 200 years later,

the grief still had work to do.

The memory of those who suffered

atrocities and still managed to hold in

collective memory, still managed to

dignify death with the wisdom of their

ancestors.

I once had a chance to sit in a circle

of clergy with for a week with with a

Reverend Dr. Sorry, Dr. is a Barnwell,

the singer of Sweet Honey and the Rock

fame, who led us in singing among other

songs, There is a Balm in Gilead.

And she drew the meaning of the song out

for us, us Unitarian Universalist

ministers who weren't quite sure about

this idea of proclaiming Jesus's love,

that he died for us all.

She said, 'What you need to hear is this

balm and whatever you know that balm to

be. It is the balm that makes the

wounded whole and the balm that heals

the sin sick soul. And she said in the

understanding of those who wo this song

together, of course, the the wounded who

need to be made whole. These were the

enslaved African people.

And that sin sick soul, those who whose

souls needed to be healed of their sin

sickness, of course, were the white

enslavers.

And she said, "The song's precise

psychological genius

is that it is the same balm

to make the wounded whole, to heal the

sin sick soul.

It's the same healing process of

lamentation and reparation that heals

both victims and perpetrators. our

bodies thirst for a balm that it is a

salve for our our bifurcated beings our

culture of oppressor and oppressed. This

is the kind of dichotomy that Ryan

Cougler said his film was about. Ryan

Cougler, the legendary local filmmaker

whose film Sinners is up for 16 Oscar

nominations tonight, the most ever.

uh

he created this film that that begins

with these lines. They they foreshadow

the whole story.

There are legends of people born with

the gift of making music so true it can

pierce the veil between life and death.

Conjuring spirits from the past and the

future. This gift can bring healing to

their communities. But it also attracts

evil.

The film set in the Mississippi Delta in

1932 and twin brothers Smoke and Stack,

played by Michael B. Jordan, have come

home from Chicago with money and

ambition trying to build something new

on the old land.

They open a juke joint and there the

drinks are flowing and the music is

hopping. And then the the the reason I

imagine many of you have not seen this

film, The Vampires Arrive.

And so I hope I don't spoil anything if

you haven't seen it and mean to still,

but it really it tells you the whole

story in those first lines.

The sinners, it's about what happens

when harm is done and something gets in

the way of the grief.

It's about the smoke that lingers and

how much better it feels to seek the

warmth of another's fire than take

honest stock of what we've been through

and what we are already carrying.

The central figure in the movie is

actually Sammy, who's a a gifted

musician whose preacher father condemns

the blues that he loves, demands he give

it up and use his gifts only in the

service of the church.

But Sammy loves the blues and follows

his cousins to the juke joint and plays

his heart out. And in one of the most

compelling scenes of the movie, he plays

and it's indeed a magic that pierces the

veil of life and death into the midst of

the dancing community arrive. ancestors

playing traditional drums from times

before the slave trade, as well as

descendants breakdancing and rapping

alongside Sammy's blues.

In our

liberal tradition,

we like to think of ourselves first as

individuals, primarily autonomous beings

who make our own choices, charter our

own courses, find freedom in our

separateness.

This rather strange way of thinking with

its roots in enlightenment thinkers like

John Lock's tabularasa

and in that Protestant impulse to seek

salvation through an individualistic

progress towards perfection.

This is one of the things we are already

carrying.

But the truth is, we are born into

bodies that carry the memory of what

happened to the bodies before ours.

We're born onto land that bears the

wounds of industry. We're born into

languages and silences and habits of

feeling and not feeling that were handed

to us by people who were handed them by

people who did not choose them either.

You know, the epigenetics research

showing us how this isn't just even

metaphor. This is biology. The trauma of

one generation reshapes the nervous

systems of the next, the smoke

gets into the walls,

gets into all of us.

And so as all of this kaleidoscopes

together in the juke joint, as healing

glows through the communal joy, the

promised evil also arrives in the form

of Remik, the old Irish vampire.

Now, the vampires and sinners, they're

they're kind of a a mythopoetic

depiction of of extraction.

They're drawn to the music the way

colonialism is drawn to indigenous land.

The way the music industry is drawn to

the blues, the way the dominant culture

is always drawn to the beauty that

emerges from communities it has tried to

destroy.

The vampires

recognize depth. They want to possess

it.

And this question that they pose,

it's it's one of those age-old religious

questions. How to make sense of our

suffering?

That why?

Tony Pin, a a black humanist theologian,

first introduced me to the word theodysy

as the study of this question in his his

book, Why Lord? Suffering and evil in

black theology. He explains how the

traditional Christian understanding of

redemptive suffering

that somehow our suffering serves a

higher purpose

that he died for all

is morally bankrupt,

enabling communities to justify or

ignore injustice through a kind of

spiritual bypass.

And he finds actually an alternative

within the spirituals and in gospel and

in blues and hiphop. And I think he'd

say it appears in cinematic form in

Cougler's Sinners.

What he terms a nittygritty hermeneutic

in a word he says nittygritty

hermeneutics is telling it like it is

and taking risks.

Telling it like it is and taking risks.

The blues that course through Cougler's

film don't say your suffering is worth

it.

They don't say God permitted it for a

reason. The blues say this happened. It

was real. I'm still here and I don't

have to lie about any of it.

That's a theological stance. It's not

theodysy in a traditional sense. It

doesn't answer the why we suffer.

In fact, it refuses the question of why

in favor of a harder and more important

question. How do we live with the

enormity of it all? With all that we

have inherited, with all that we have

endured, with all that we carry, how

shall we live?

So Remick the vampire is drawn in coming

to find Sammy,

find in him something that was taken

from Remik long ago.

In the complex dance of empire, the

Irish vampire has traded his own

colonized culture for whiteness and now

declares, "Long ago, the men who stole

my father's land forced these words upon

us.

I hated those men, but the words still

bring me comfort. Those men lied to

themselves and they lied to us. They

told stories of a god above and a devil

below and lies of a dominion of man over

beast and earth.

We are earth and beast and god. We are

connected, you and I, to everything.

And so the vampires begin to inone an

invitation over and over to be family.

Come join us

all one family.

An offer of love. They keep talking

about this love that people will have

with them.

A seduction which our liberal cut off

individualism is most vulnerable to.

the offer of connection and belonging

without the cost of inheritance,

without the weight of history, without

the nittygritty realities of our lives,

the flesh and bone details, the smoke.

Come join us. We're connected to

everything. We're all the same.

Trade the reality of your story for a

vague and universal belonging.

Become a vampire in the metaphoric

language of the movie. You won't hurt

anymore.

You won't hurt anymore, but you also

won't be as alive as you were.

Refuse the grief. Cast off finitude.

Become invincible. become numb.

Sammy survives the night and shows up to

his father's church in the morning,

barely clinging to life,

clutching the broken neck of his guitar.

And instead of embracing his son in all

the mess in the nittygritty reality of

what he has been through, the preacher

doubles down on his call for purity.

demands his son let go of the guitar.

And so Sammy drives off, still clutching

that broken piece of beauty and truth,

determined in the end to save the only

life he could save.

Keep turning back

not to be stymied by shame.

not to endlessly relive the trauma. Not

to dwell with nostalgia on a fantasy of

what has been. Keep turning back to face

honestly that which you already carry,

which has formed who you are, which yet

makes demands on who you are becoming.

Keep turning back

and let yourself be seen even in the

hardest hurts.

especially

in the hardest hurts.

For the balm that will heal us cannot be

administered to any one of us alone.

It is a balm that heals between us as we

let one another witness and tend to the

places we've been burned.

May it be so. And amen.