One day a few of us were at Josh Lewin s house. Joshua s father was there--and I don t think he was someone we saw too often--but there he was

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1 Homily: Wearing Your Heart, by Rev. JD Benson, first delivered at First Parish Brewster-East, August 21, 2011 As a teenager I often wore a ratty old blue denim jean jacket to which I had clipped, sewn or pinned a wide variety of patches, pins and buttons. Oh, we had tee shirts with messages on them to some degree, but buttons and pins they were the thing: stop war; love is the answer; several different peace signs in a rainbow of colors; a Fab Four i.e. a Beatles pin; a Support our Black Brothers/Panther Power button, something disparaging about the corrupt and careless politics and politicians of the day.and, oh yes, a button in big letters simply saying GROOVY! One day a few of us were at Josh Lewin s house. Joshua s father was there--and I don t think he was someone we saw too often--but there he was 1

2 sitting in a big overstuffed chair in the living room. He was a broad shouldered man, tall too, and on the occasions we did see him, he said nothing to us--maybe a hello or a goodbye, that s about it. Josh told us he was an artist. He was a thinker. And he was in our background. But on this one day Mr. Lewin looked over at me, and at my friends who were similarly adorned, and in a quiet but audibly angry voice said Do you have to wear your heart on your shirtsleeves? I m not a big button person these days and I don t put bumper stickers on my car, not ever any more. But the occasional tee shirt that says something I care about, I m good with that. Today of course we can , facebook and tweet our heart s calling, our outrage, our excitement, our music, we can 2

3 even post a little homemade video on you tube in which we can call people to prayer or apostasy or revolution, to seemingly spontaneous dance and song events on the one hand, and, so horrifically, as we have all heard and seen happening in Philadelphia in recent weeks, to a location and time to rob stores and beat up random passersby. Today I m wearing a tee-shirt. It says Standing on the Side of Love. Standing on the Side of Love is, as its website says, a public advocacy campaign that seeks to harness love s power to stop oppression. It is sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Association and all are welcomed to join. Some people take offense at that assertion, as if one were saying My religion is standing on the side of love and yours isn t which isn t what it s about at all, as if somehow we as Unitarian 3

4 Universalists and others aligned in this campaign are sufficiently arrogant to think we are the only ones who love. But that is, I believe, a false reading of the phrase. Instead Standing on the Side of Love is a call to me and to you in the moment of choice and there are many such moments every day---to stand on the side of love and not hatred or abuse of power or mean-spiritedness or violence. We all have the capacity to be on the wrong side of love in any moment, on any issue. That s human nature. We are not perfect. But in each moment we can choose to stand on the side of what we truly believe would be the loving thing to do, to say, to be. These are the shirts we wore as part of our public witness in the streets of Phoenix last summer as we protested Arizona s outrageous immigration 4

5 police tactics and public policy. These are the shirts we will wear next June at General Assembly in Phoenix as we take our public witness into the streets once more. This year I will wear this teeshirt when I go to Georgia to demand the closure of the School of the Americas, where the name has changed but where our military and the CIA continue to train military, paramilitary, intelligence agents and others from around the world how better to torture human beings. I will wear it when we lobby at the State House for access to clean water for all, when we engage in green projects around the Cape, and in other actions as well. Last year, this year, next year: it s my tee shirt, my reminder to myself and my message for all to see. 5