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YK Morning Sermon, 5779 (September 19, 2018)In late October of 1981, I was in Cliff’s Hardware, in the Castro, standing in line to buy a couple of wood screws. Cliff’s was then all one store, so you bought hardware at the same registers as fabric and sewing supplies. I stood there with a baby on my back in a long line of men buying yards of lamé, sequins, and feathers for Halloween costumes. The party spirit was contagious, and we were all having a great time, knowing the festivities would last for days. …. Many of us had heard about a new illness affecting gay men, some of the men in that line perhaps had friends who were already mysteriously ill, but none of us had any idea what was coming.What was coming was unimaginable. Within a short time, just catching a bus in the Castro was an immersion in not just misery but horror. Skeletal men, some with visible lesions, hobbled along leaning on canes. There were so many funerals, so many sick friends to visit. People you hadn’t seen in a couple of months turned out to be dying. It was dizzying, and it felt impossible to catch your balance. …. I remember thinking, one of those days when I was in the Castro, “Will we ever laugh again?” How would we keep going?At first we didn’t even know how AIDS spread or what precautions to take, yet there wasn’t much time to decide what to do about friends, neighbors, coworkers, relatives who were sick. And slowly people figured out what we could do. Ruth Brinker started making food for a handful of sick neighbors; her efforts grew into Project Open Hand, which now feeds thousands of people every day. Cleve Jones expressed his grief, rage, and fear in fabric, and the The AIDS Quilt started to form. Nurses and doctors at San Francisco General Hospital created ward 5B where people with AIDS were cared for with respect and love. Folks did stuff that seemed to need doing, and then they and all of us built on what worked best. We learned how much we need each other, not just for numbers and strength but because we are different from each other, we have different perspectives, gifts, and capacities.Somehow we did learn to laugh and even rejoice in the midst of mourning and shock. In a way we had to, because without laughter and even joy we have only grimness or despair, which sap our energy and leave us helpless and exhausted, unable to muster the energy for caring for the sick, developing treatments, urging legislators to appropriate more money for research, raising money to make what treatments there were available to everyone.Last spring, Dave and I saw Angels in America at Berkeley Rep. It’s a pair of plays written by Tony Kushner in the midst of the epidemic. They’re funny and moving and political. They rekindled my grief for friends who died, and I grieved outside the theater with the news of thousands of children separated from their parents at the border. I began to realize that what we learned during the worst of the epidemic can help us as we struggle to keep our balance in the face of a rapid sequence of political, social, and environmental crises. What unbalances us now is the urgent need to figure out what to do about the children still separated from their parents, about the people living on our streets, about the courts and the congress, about people around the world and entire ecosystems which are in danger. We need everything we collectively can create. No matter how overwhelmed we may feel, we can encourage each other to follow our best instincts to figure out what we need to do. [pause – shift of attention]You know, I belong to a generation of Americans which, unlike our parents and ancestors, mostly expected to live into adulthood. Vaccines protected us against smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough. New drugs - penicillin, aureomycin, and a growing number of antibiotics - let us survive staph infections, rheumatic fever, pneumonia, and many other diseases which killed children born only a little before we were. The polio vaccine arrived while I was in grade school, and the entire school population lined up for our shots. We felt safe until AIDS arrived and our generation began dying in numbers that astonished us, but would not have astonished previous generations.For me, it was helpful, if not exactly comforting, to realize that the death rate from AIDS in some ways united us with all other humans who had ever lived. It helped to realize we belonged to a long lineage of people who had nursed the sick, buried the dead, helped each other mourn, and still continued with the work of living.In the midst of our current crises, I have been reading our liturgy with fresh attention. Later today we will chant the Unetanah Tokef, as we did on Rosh Hashanah. It’s a powerful text which has lasted for centuries. Listen: On Rosh Hashanah all is written and revealed, and on Yom Kippur, the course of every life is sealed!how many pass on, how many shall thrive,who shall live on, and who shall die, whose death is timely, and whose is not,who dies by fire – in the last year in Greece, in Sonoma County and Mendocino County, who by water – in Puerto Rico, Houston, Laos, the Mediterranean, this week in the Carolinas, the Philippines, Nigeria, and Chinawho by the sword (by violence) – Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Gaza, Somalia, our citieswho by hunger – Yemen, Somalia, Venezuela, South Sudan who by plague – Ebola, AIDS (still), influenzaBut teshuvah, and tefilah, and tzedakah make easier what God may decree. Uteshuvah utefilah utzedakah ma’avarin et ro’a hagezerah.I don’t believe in a literal Book of Life or in an interventionist God who is toting up credits and demerits. I don’t believe that today we have only a few hours left to reverse a harsh decree for the coming year, but we do have reason to expect that 5779 will be a tough year. We’ll be tempted to give up, to turn away from seeing what is happening, to wonder whether our efforts make any difference. We’ll need each other, we’ll need to find ways to laugh and celebrate together so that we can act together to do the things that clearly need to be done. And I believe that Teshuvah, Tefilah, Tzedakah make a different to our fate – and may even reverse or mitigate harsh consequences of our collective past action (and inaction).Teshuvah means changing our ways, seeing our patterns and habits with fresh eyes, returning to source, to balance, to our best selves. It means asking the hard questions about my use of resources, my capacity for action, my willingness to serve those in need and those who are different from me.Tefilah includes directing our attention so that we notice and respond to that in ourselves and that in the world which needs to change, to what needs mending, what needs strengthening, what needs to be released. Tzedakah means charitable giving, but it means more than that. It means righteous action, including voting for higher taxes and for legislators who will fund medical care, climate research, and decent housing for everyone.For many years I said that, if I could choose to have back my friends who died of AIDs, even at the price of all the spiritual and emotional growth we survivors gained, I would give up the growth in a heartbeat. But now I’m grateful for what I learned, because I want to teach my grandchildren how to laugh and love and act no matter what challenges they may face. We won’t get back to “normal” any more than I can bring my dead friends back. We can’t go back, we can only go forward. Times like these change us and change everyone. Let us pray that they change us for the good. We need to take the learnings into our future, teach our collective children what we have learned. We need to act on what we know, we need to mend the world as best we can, so that fewer people die by fire, by flood, by violence, by hunger, by disease. ................
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