Do your hands speak?
Hello.
Come here.
I love you.
Peace!
Live long and prosper.
Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah-Nah.
I don't know about you, but it is very clear to me
that there is a language of hands.
Rather, I should say languages.
Baseball teams, commodities brokers,
orchestra conductors
all have different languages of their own.
What seems like the number two in America
is actually obscene in Britain.
And then there are the two sides of my family.
The waspy, Manhattan side prefers to add adjectives in order
to emphasize a point and hands are
almost always respectfully at the sides.
Whereas my Brooklyn Jewish side
has to emphasize every point by gesticulating as wildly as possible.
You might even say that the hand rivals the tongue in its ability to communicate
We request.
We applaud, summon, dismiss,
pray, bless,
make oaths,
insult, refuse, flatter, welcome,
show surprise, grief, and joy
all with our fingertips.
Hands are bearers of meaning in our lives.
They bear witness to the human urge
for connectedness, whether a handshake
or the embrace of old friends at the beginning of SUUSI.
or a handwritten speech meant to inspire us to tend our earth.
At the same time our hands
mark our individuality.
We recognize the hands of ones we love.
Before there was DNA, there were fingerprints and signatures.
Our hands give us away.
The first time I thought about this was while wandering an exhibit called
"Speaking With Hands" by the photographer Henry Buhl.
I decided at this exhibit to play a little game,
to see if I could guess who the portrait was of
when the portrait was only hands.
The hands loosely holding prayer beads...
The Dali Lama
The hands, clasped, etched with lines, over and over,
representing hard work...
Mother Teresa.
The hands of two fists with "true love" tattooed on the knuckles...
A Union Organizer.
And the hands dripping with rhinestones and rings
can anyone guess?
Yes! Liberace.
Exactly. Our hands reveal so much about us.
Harriet Tubman, when she escaped from slavery,
is quoted as having said,
"I looked at my hands
to see who I was now that I was free."
I began to perceive the following two-fold task
as I looked at this array of portraits of hands
Number one: Who do my hands say that I am? Who am I?
Number two: What will be my handy work? What am I called to do
with this one precious life, with these precious hands?
They have the opportunity to help me to heal or to destroy.
It is my choice, it is your choice, it is our choice.
We may not always want to admit it but we human beings do
have immense power in our hands
as John F Kennedy reminded us,
"The world is very different now for humans hold
in their mortal hands the power to
abolish all forms of human poverty and
all forms of human life."
Many of us recognize this statement as true on an intellectual level
However, in our daily lives we may not see
how our individual actions can have such a profound impact.
If I do or don't choose to recycle the
bottles in my house,
what impact will it make on our environment?
And if I learn about the legacies of
racism and sexism and ableism;
If I strive to use my privileges to open doors,
to those who have had them shut in their face,
can I make a difference?
As I stared at the photograph of Martin Luther King Jr's hands
I glimpsed a part of the answer.
His hands were fittingly surrounded by so many other hands embracing them.
You see, he knew well that old proverb,
that many hands make light work.
And he had faith that if he carved a path,
that others would join in the communion of struggle
and finish his work.
That song, that "He's got the whole world in His hands,"
is only partly true... The truth is
WE have the whole world in OUR hands
and thank goodness,
none of us has this power alone.
None of us as individuals can either create or end world suffering
it is difficult to come to terms with,
but Hitler did not rise to power alone.
And the most chilling image for me
of that fact are hands raised in the air,
thousands of them assenting
and saying, "Heil Hitler."
We hold so much this year.
Right now, even as the Republican Convention
is going on, at this very moment,
but also with the ongoing legacies of violence and oppression
And the life-as-we-know-it altering challenge of climate justice,
many of us are now multitasking all of the time.
We are here at SUUSI
enjoying one another's company
and we are also here with the world in our hands,
We're in Nice. We're in Baton Rouge.
We're in Minnesota. We're in Cleveland.
We are holding the world's hurts
and the world's possibilities in the palm of our hands.
Yes, we hold the world's possibilities, too.
We are living in a time of the tipping point
where danger and opportunity lie side-by-side.
The power to harm and the power to heal
is quite literally in our hands.
I have never felt that more purposefully
than in recent years as I have worked in my community
as an advocate to end gun violence
and to end police brutality and excessive use of force
through the Black Lives Matter movement.
This year I was asked by the Morris County NAACP
and by the local African American Clergy Council
if I would join them in a community dialogue
with local law enforcement,
specifically about the
training in the use of force of officers.
More than that, they asked me,
would I be willing to be one of two volunteers
to be trained in the use of force
and to hold a gun.
This was not an easy request for me
the last time that I had been so close
to the barrel of a gun
it has been pointed towards my head,
in a robbery as a small child.
But sometimes we are called to say "yes!"
to the risks that love demands of us,
even when it makes us uncomfortable,
especially when it is a risk that might bring more healing to our community.
And so I did. I said "yes" and I stepped into
that use of force simulator with so many
scenarios before me and I had to make
very tough decisions.
and at the end, the training officer
gave me high marks on my communication skills,
my ability to deescalate with both my body language and speech
and low marks on my ability to follow through and pull the trigger.
[Laughter] I'm actually okay with that.
I'm very much okay with that.
But through efforts of all of us leaning into the challenges
of our community we are making changes and now
our police officers wear body cameras
to help to hold them accountable.
And we're continuing the dialogue and now working on a project
to deepen the anti-racism and multi-culturalism training
that are offered to our police officers.
But, sometimes our handiwork
doesn't have to be so dramatic.
Sometimes it can simply be writing a letter
and forging a relationship with another human being.
I serve on the board of the UU Church of the Larger Fellowship
which, amongst other populations,
happens to serve a large Church of prisoners.
We now have 740 Unitarian Universalists
Who are incarcerated that we serve.
At one of our meetings, one of the prisoners wrote a
letter to us wanting us to know what a difference
the pen pal ministry had made in their life.
It was an African American man
who had been behind bars many years,
who have been in a long-term relationship
through letter writing with
a white women in one of our conversations.
He said it was the first time in his life
that he had experienced a mutual, caring
relationship with a white woman.
And he was so excited a white person,
he actually said,
and it was so healing in fact that, although he couldn't
literally, physically make it to General Assembly,
he asked if we would carry a photo of him
to the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly
and we did!
A life-size, 6-foot cut out of him,
with which he was placed in the first row during the
Church of the Larger Fellowship's worship.
Or, the experience this year of marching with a
hundred women who are immigrants from
all around the country,
a coalition of us. Immigrant justice workers who were
invited to walk a hundred miles
from York, PA at a detention center,
to Washington, DC, the halls of power.
I was called into so many opportunities of
meaningful service but perhaps the most meaningful,
the final two miles a woman cried out
for the chaplain to come to the front.
Which I did.
It turns out that this woman suffered from a debilitating illness
that made it very difficult, very painful for her to walk.
And she was afraid that she was going to fall to the ground
and she asked me, pastora, will you hold my hand
and pray with me to the end?
And we did, we held hands and prayed unceasingly. And she made it...
for the one hundredth mile!
Holy work is possible with these hands.
And I have seen at times God.
Flashes of the divine imprinted in the movement of our hands.
When I was a teenager I was in-patient quite a bit
in a pediatric cancer ward.
And the best image of God that I have to this day
was a five-year-old
who wanted to learn to ride a bicycle
but hadn't been let outside of the hospital in months,
who asked his mother if she would teach him how to ride a bike.
She managed to get a bicycle into the fifth floor,
the pediatric cancer ward.
No easy task, let me tell you - bureaucratic nightmares in hospital.
And she did it.
He mounted on that bike,
and his mother steadied the back, running after him.
And a nurse helped to detangle the IV lines
to make sure that they didn't break.
And that child...
That child whizzed by on that bike
and threw his hands up in the air and yelled,
"Wheeeeeeeeeeeee!"
And I knew
I knew God was there.
In that very moment.
So, this day, this week of SUUSI, this life of yours,
I ask you,
who do your hands say that you are?
What do they say about you
and what you are creating in this life?
What will be your handiwork?
And as you considered the answer,
you might find helpful this advice
found in Midrash...
and it's obviously very important because it has an accompanying
"lots of bangs." (Acknowledging "banging" noise in auditorium)
This is from Midrash,
the collection of wisdom sayings from the rabbis.
"When a person enters the world,
his hands are clenched as though to say,
'the whole world is mine, I shall inherit it.'
But when he takes leave of it, his hands are open as if to say,
'I have inherited nothing from the earth
and all that matters is what I have given away.' "
So don't sit on your hands
deciding for too long.
For there is food to prepare for the hungry.
mind expanding art to be produced,
hands that need to be held and so much more.
Most of all, have faith in the gift of your hands.
May they be instruments of love,
of life...
of justice.
Amen and may it be so.
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