(Sermon only) JUSTICE IN THE LONG SHADOWS Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley January 18, 2026

Like so many spirituals, the genius of

the song pointing to a depth of

suffering that we here in this room, I

imagine, cannot fathom.

and yet also speaking to something so

profoundly universal.

I think of the children I used to

comfort at an outdoor school. It's the

Mosaic Project. We would gather children

to try and further that dream that King

preached about. We'd gather children

with their classes from schools and an

impoverished

inner city school from Hunter Point or

somewhere in Oakland alongside one of

these Berkeley public schools alongside

one of our private schools come together

and mix them up in cabins for a week

of peace and diversity training.

And for many of those children from

whatever school it was the first time

they were spending a week away from home

and that feeling of homesickness of

being a motherless child

would start deep in their bellies.

A few days in, almost all of them had

forgotten it in the whirl of magic and

wonder of musical curriculum

of a quality of community that we would

create that felt like nothing anywhere

else in their lives.

Now, those of us working it were working

80our weeks to make this happen.

And after a few sessions, we would be

feeling it, this staff team, and

sometimes get a little bit grouchy with

one another. And I remember one such

week when my friend Ammani told us a

story. He'd been studying with a

spiritual teacher who would show as part

of a a week of retreat focused on how to

build spiritual capacity for peace

building a video of the Navy Seals boot

camp.

They'd watch these seals push themselves

to the absolute edge, both physically

and psychologically, performing the most

challenging athletic tasks while

deprived of sleep and food, training

with weapons in extreme temperatures in

every environment. They'd watch this

video of people going through grueling

training and then the teacher would say,

"This

is what people are willing to do for

war.

What are you willing to do for peace?"

Just before I started seminary, I went

and lived in uh Rio Visioniro in Brazil

for several months to study the work of

a friend who uh developed a restorative

justice practice there that be had be

starting to take off as a alternative

track to the justice system for for

juvenile justice especially in several

cities. And then I I wanted also to

study the work of Austo Bal who had

created this body of feeder of the

oppressed.

And

neither one of those quite worked out. I

was on Brazilian summertime and and

things didn't quite

work the way I expected them to.

So instead, I ended up spending quite a

bit of time in a in a shanty town, in a

what they call a favlla there with the

young people playing with theater and

and teaching English.

I was stunned the first time I remember

seeing a 14-year-old riding around on

his motorcycle with a large

semi-automatic gun strapped casually

over his shoulder.

Eventually,

I learned these young men with big guns

were just the most visible layer of a

quasi governmental infrastructure of the

FLLA gang because the government doesn't

provide services in the Favlla. The

gangs provide medicine,

baby formula,

other services that people living there

depend on. And I was trying to make

sense of this new reality to me. And I

picked up um Hana Arent's on violence.

You can tell where I come from.

I remember reading Hana Arent sitting on

the pla the beach trying to untangle

this knotted web of violence and power.

I found myself studying and the light

bulb moment for me when she

provided

a conclusion that violence

contrary to the way I had always seen it

as kind of a brutal exercise of power

a coercion of the less powerful by the

more powerful. that violence is actually

an expression of powerlessness

of desperation.

In fact, she argues power and violence

are opposites.

She says where the one rules absolutely

the other is absent. Violence appears

where power is in jeopardy.

Violence can destroy power.

It is utterly incapable of creating it.

Violence can destroy power, but it is

utterly incapable of creating it. What

creates power is collective will. It's

organized solidarity. It's people

determining to act together in concert,

giving their body and their will to

something larger than themselves. Power,

the ability to achieve purpose, as King

would have preached, it cannot be born

from violence only disrupted by it.

When I investigate this within, I know

those interior states

that no real power

that can rest,

available for the moment, available to

those around me, ready to act in service

of my values.

And I also know those places of

desperation, those clenching, clinging,

those empty hollow, those grasping

places

that would reach for violence instead,

those places of desperation.

The rhetoric

that the regime running our country has

employed to justify bombing at least 35

boats off the coast of Venezuela since

September

has been the urgent need to address a

drug crisis in our country.

And the crisis itself is real. Something

like 200 people die of fentinyl

overdoses

every day.

Since 2016, the cheap opioid is

responsible for more overdose deaths

than heroin and prescription drugs

combined.

But with with just a cursory glance at

the facts, the boats that have been

bombed are transporting cocaine,

most of which would have been destined

for Europe, not the United States.

The cynicism of our government's actions

is laid bare.

As has become explicit, these military

actions were never about solving

America's real problem with drugs, but

about a pretense for seizing power and

access to oil.

If our leaders were serious about

addressing our drug problem, they might

start by picking up a book by Bruce

Alexander, the globalization of

addiction, a study in poverty of the

spirit. We were talking about poverty of

the spirit last week.

Alexander asked, "Why

are there periods in history and

specific places where addiction spikes

throughout a society?

as it is in ours and increasingly around

the planet today.

These spikes occur again and again, he

notes, in the wake of imperial power,

exercised to dislocate a people from

their ancestral place, to disrupt their

social fabric, to supplant the cultural

traditions and rituals that weave a

community together.

Like when European colonists uprooted

indigenous populations and destroyed

cultural traditions resulting in a

massive dislocation

literally and spiritually

suddenly rates of alcoholism and other

forms of addiction in the indigenous

population skyrocketed. Right? or when

the industrial revolution uprooted

families who lived it who had lived in a

in a particular place tending to a

particular plot of land for generations

and are suddenly moving long distances

often overseas to work city jobs again

rates of addiction explode

trying to figure this out. Bruce

Alexander was was worried about this

other idea of where addiction come from.

this the myth of the demon drugs he

would call it. And so he did a study. He

said, "Okay, those rats, right? We've

got the rats that get addicted to

heroin. You know about the rats,

the rats." He said, "Well, they're kept

in cages alone, and that's no way for a

rat to live."

So he said, "I'm going to try something

else. I'm going to I'm going to have

those rats that are alone in the cages,

addicted to their heroin, but I'm going

to also make a rat park.

It's going to be perfect. The perfect

place for a rat to live its ratly life.

It's going to have lots of other rats

and things to play with and stuff to run

around and go. It's It was going to be

an idea, a rattopia.

So, Bruce Alexander makes Rat Park and

brings those same rats who've been

addicted to heroin, who would choose the

heroin over food, isolated in a cage

alone. And when they come and live their

lives in Rat Park, those addiction rates

suddenly drop away.

They found that the rats housed in the

normal cages consumed 20 times more

morphine when it was offered than those

living in rat park.

The point he drives home over and over

again is that counter to the common

sense of understanding that the powerful

drugs are primarily to blame for

widespread addiction, it is in fact a

spiritual impoverishment, a disruption

of the intact relationship between

individual and community and land. The

shaping of a spiritual wholeness, of a

personal and collective identity through

shared music and food and dances and

rituals, of a belonging to a

relationality woven with integrity,

dislocation

driven by the same forces that King

famously named as racism, materialism,

and militarism. A profound spiritual

dislocation leaves an ache in the psyche

that we try to fill with so much more

than drugs.

We

don't know what to do with the chickens.

I don't know about you, but I didn't

grow up learning how to tend chickens,

how to baptize them and preach sermons

to them.

And even without the chickens involved,

just to know these are the foundational

practices of how we make healing and

wholeness real amongst us.

We have lost so much.

The genius of the Fox News MAGA America

First politics has been to offer a

narrative to soothe this ache that

allows white Americans to avoid looking

inward for the source of their wounds.

It's not that your own culture has been

hollowed out and sold off to the highest

bidder. It's the immigrants. It's the

trans people. It's you know the story.

The attack on so-called traditional

values, the disregard for old-fashioned

masculinity. That's the problem.

Genius, I say, because it speaks

directly to the ills at the hearts of

our communities, but coercibly

obfiscates their cause and misdiagnoses

their remedy.

It's so much easier to believe that

others are responsible for your pain and

lash out with violence

than to take honest stock and practice a

nonviolent responsibility for

transforming that which we have

inherited.

This is the spiritual task before us.

This is what we are engaged in here.

taking honest stock and transforming

what we have inherited.

But that honest stock, it can leave us

unsettled, agitated, what King claimed

as a divine discontent.

I talk a great deal about the need for a

kind of divine discontent. He said

and I always mention that there are

certain technical words within every

science which have become stereotypes

and cliches.

Modern psychology he said has a word

that has become common. It is the word

maladjusted.

We read a great deal about it. It is a

ringing cry of modern child psychology

and certainly we all want to live the

welladjusted.

avoid neurotic and schizophrenic

personalities. But I must say to you

this evening he preached, "My friends,

there are some things in our nation and

in our world to which I'm proud to be

maladjusted."

And I call upon you to be maladjusted

and all people of goodwill to be

maladjusted to these things until the

good society is realized. I never intend

to adjust myself. he said, to

segregation and discrimination. I never

intend to become adjusted to religious

bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself

to economic conditions that will take

necessities from the many to give

luxuries to the few and leave millions

of people perishing on a lonely island

of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean

of prosperity.

I must honestly say, however much

criticism it brings, that I never intend

to adjust myself to the madness of

militarism

and the self-defeating effects of

physical violence.

to make to rebuild intact human

community

in the long shadows of all we must

remain maladjusted to. This is the task

before us. To find a holy wholeness

amidst the broken fragments of the

legacy of colonialism and imperialism

that has impoverished our spirits, we

must practice a rigorous discipline of

humanization.

It's the kind of discipline that King

and the other leaders of the civil

rights movement inspired in their

followers.

Did you know that in in Birmingham,

those who fought that critical battle in

the civil rights movement, every person,

every one of them was asked to sign a

card.

It read this. I hereby pledge myself, my

person, and my body to the nonviolent

movement. Therefore, I will keep the

following ten commandments.

One, meditate daily on the teachings and

life of Jesus.

Two, remember always that the nonviolent

movement in Birmingham seeks justice and

reconciliation,

not victory.

Three, walk and talk in the manner of

love, for God is love.

Four, pray daily to be used by God in

order that all men might be free. Five,

sacrifice personal wishes in order that

all men might be free.

Six, observe with both friend and foe

the ordinary rules of courtesy.

Seven, seek to perform regular service

for others and the world.

Eight, refrain from the violence of

fist, tongue, or heart.

Nine, strive to be in good spiritual and

bodily health.

10, follow the directions of the

movement and of the captain on a

demonstration.

I sign this pledge having seriously

considered what I do and with the

determination and will to persevere.

So I ask you, what would it take to

commit yourself? What would it take to

commit ourselves to such a rigorous

discipline?

What would it be worth to belong to such

a countercultural movement?

And the good news, I think, is that

every day offers us opportunities to

practice this kind of nonviolence. This

was not a non-violence reserve for the

moment of protest, the moment of action.

It was a nonviolence to be lived day in

and day out.

Remember once hearing about a mom

describing

the what she learned from her her

child's teacher about a weekly practice

in her teacher's classroom.

Every Friday afternoon, she asked her

students to take out a piece of paper

and write down the names of four

children with whom they'd like to sit

the following week. And the children

knew that these requests may or may not

be honored. She also asked the students

to nominate one student who they

believed to have been an exceptional

classroom citizen that week. And then

all of the ballots are privately

submitted to her. And every single

Friday afternoon after the students went

home, she takes out those slips of

paper, places them in front of her, and

studies them,

looks for patterns.

She asks, "Who's not getting requested

by anyone else?"

She asks, "Who can't think of anyone to

request?

who never gets noticed enough to be

nominated,

who had a million friends last week and

none this week.

And after taking in the profoundity of

this practice, the mom asked her child's

teacher, "How long have you been using

this system?"

"Ever since Coline."

Ever since Coline, the teacher answered.

Every single Friday afternoon since

Coline.

Yes, violence can rip apart lives and

communities like fentinel. It can soothe

the pain for a time, displace it.

But those who would lend their lives to

help heal our world are led by a

different light.

It's a light that's always burned in the

long shadow of violence and empire. The

light that summoned clergy and activists

from across the country to Selma. The

light that once again is calling many

this week to endure the bitter cold of

the Twin Cities and show up to hold

vigil and march for justice in

Minneapolis.

Let us hold close

the uncomfortable glow of divine

discomfort this week.

If you can't go to Minneapolis, consider

joining the local interfaith solidarity

vigil here noon on Thursday in San

Francisco City Hall, kicking off a day

of fasting. Perhaps the spiritual

discipline of a fast is possible for you

this week. Or just join to break the

fast and rally on Friday at noon at ICE

headquarters on Sansom Street in San

Francisco. Or show up right here in our

neighborhood tomorrow to honor the

legacy of Dr. King with a civic parade

and rally in El Certo. or find another

way,

your own way to walk with that holy

maladjusted glow this week

to circle around in the deep dislocated

shadow of empire

and join with fellow travelers in the

discipline of nonviolence

of soul force as Gandhi called it of

repairing and renewing that inescapable

network of mutuality.

that single garment of destiny which is

our source and which we are called to

steward with integrity, joy and service.

May it be so. And amen.

>> Amen.