First Unitarian Universalist Society Burlington

August 24, 2025

To start us off: three stories about walls.

Number One: Thirty-eight years ago, I spent a summer living and working in West Berlin. The wall, built before I was born, wouldn’t come down for two more years. I was convinced, in that way only a 20-year-old can be, that the wall would not come down in my lifetime.  

Because the nature of reality is that there is no separation, is that we are all interdependent with and among each other, the delusion that we can be separated has to be enforced. In this case, with bricks, then concrete and barbed wire; with the threat of violence and an extended parcel of land that came to be called “the death strip.” More than one hundred died attempting to flee that Cold War border fortification in the 38 years of its existence.

This past summer, I spent five days in Berlin. I returned to Kreuzberg and took my picture in front of the building I lived in that summer of 1987. I also visited pieces of the transformed wall, placed now throughout the city.

I went to the world’s largest open-air art gallery made of 1.3 kilometers of the wall, painted by artists from around the world. I went to parts of Berlin not previously accessible when I had lived there, walled off from access, walled off from freedom. 

I spent much of my time in a kind of pilgrimage, tending to the places and stories of local resistance during the rise and power of the Nazis.

I learned of the Rosenstraße protest, where hundreds of so-called Aryan wives demonstrated for the release of their Jewish husbands, succeeding in the freeing 2,000 men who had been picked up in a Gestapo raid.

I learned of resistance circles that formed, often out of trade unions, which led to non-Jewish Germans protecting, hiding, and helping Jewish Germans flee.

I visited the Bonhoeffer House, where Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived. He was a Protestant theologian and a member of the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. He  was arrested in that house and a year and a half later, murdered.  

I needed, more than ever, to know that there were Germans inside the heart of that terror who resisted, who subverted, who said no. And yes, who risked and many of whom sacrificed. For my own heart’s sake, living as I do  ~ as we do ~ in these times and in this nation with its own terrors.

~~~

Wall Story Number Two: I earned my master’s degree in divinity from two schools through a cooperative program. I studied the first two-and-a-half years of my formation at what was then called Hartford Seminary; I spent the second half at Andover Newton Theological School. Before fully committing, in January, 2011, I took one class to see if it was right for me.

At the time, Hartford stood out as an interfaith seminary. Around a third of the student body and faculty were  ~ and still are ~ Muslim: many from this continent, many from other nations. It was a powerful experience to not only learn about Islam, but to be in relationship with folks for whom this was their religious tradition.

I remember a group project in that first class. In my small group was Yahya from Syria and Kamal, originally from Turkey, then living in Houston. We created a project on the religious mandate for walls to come down. One focus of the project was the wall that Israel had begun unilaterally erecting on the West Bank less than a decade earlier. This barrier, found to be illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004, was ostensibly built to keep out the very real suicide bombers wreaking havoc and murdering people in Israel. Yet it was not built along the 1967 Green Line, but instead, deep in Palestinian territory, slicing through communities and farmland, emboldening Israeli settlers in their hungry-ghost quest to steal more land.

It was powerful for me to begin my seminary studies at an institution and with fellow students with the interfaith make-up that Hartford Seminary had. I’m not sure that in any other seminary, the topic of the Israeli wall in the West Bank would not have come up as a focus for theological reflection. Maybe. Maybe not. I am thankful for that Muslim influence on my interfaith sensibilities.

~~~

Number Three: In 2018, as part of a cohort of Unitarian Universalist ministers deepening our prophetic ministry, I went to Arizona to visit the wall along the U.S. / Mexico border. This group of ministers enacted a witness ritual where that wall divides Nogales, Arizona from Nogales, Mexico.  We visited the UU congregation in Amado, 30 miles from the border. Now called Borderlands UU Congregation, we learned of their powerful ministry to those seeking safety from the treacherous desert and heard their stories of the increasing militarization of local communities. We visited with activists involved in No Mas Muertas/No More Deaths in Tucson, a UU sponsored humanitarian organization. We did house-to-house canvassing, trying to grow support for their efforts to reduce deaths of those crossing the fortified border by leaving jugs of water at key locations in the desert.

That second most famous poem by Robert Frost, “Mending Fences,” is often interpreted against its actual intended message. Folks will quote “Good fences make good neighbors” as if that is the message of the poem. In fact, its opposite is true. In response to the neighbor praising the stone wall dividing the properties, the poet says

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.

Then the poet notes, observing the stones that regularly fall out of field walls and must be replaced:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.

How good it is to ask the question – why fences? Why walls? What are we walling in? What are we walling out?

In this morning’s reading about the wisdom of our bodies, and the peculiar ways in which cellular membranes can act both to protect and grow, but not at the same time, I have been keeping company with the idea that while sometimes, walls (and fences, perhaps borders) can protect us, that too often, at the national and international level, they convulse away from health into a form of sickness, into a deep form of corruption that at least mimics evil, if not generates it and amplifies it.

From the beginning, when that first singular cell bumbled its way to life in the warm ocean soup, protection has been designed to be temporary. Something you do in a moment, until the threat passes. It is not a state that is supposed to continue, a permanent way of being. There is no space for wisdom here if protection never ends. Growth is the forever part; it’s what we call life. We cannot protect and grow at the same time. (Susan Raffo, Liberated to the Bone)

Let me be clear – I am not talking about all boundaries, especially interpersonal ones. I am a firm believer in those. I am in full agreement with this bit of wisdom, a sermon in and of itself, from Prentis Hempill, the founder of The Embodiment Institute:

Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.

So boundaries: yes! Just like healthy cellular membranes: yes!

Walls, not so much. 

And in that same spirit: open windows – yes!  Closed windows, not so much.  Let me explain.

Over the past year, I have incorporated the work and wisdom of the community activist, Daniel Hunter, into some of my sermons and throughout my ministry. We’ve used his freely-shared frameworks for some of our classes at First UU. Daniel’s visibility and influence have only grown in this past year.

Recently, as part of the No Kings: One Million Rising campaign organized by dozens of progressive organizations, including our own UUA, Daniel, along with several other leaders, reached tens of thousands of people through three webinars (which were recorded, and you can watch on YouTube). In these organizing sessions, Daniel spoke of the developmental path of authoritarianism. He named the historical pattern of a “window” during which, the forces of fascism work to consolidate power.

A window. This is, of course, a simile. Yet the concept and the actual concrete window have at least one thing in common: they close. Dr. King once said, when speaking of the “fierce urgency of now” that “in this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.” Students of authoritarian movements tell us: that window will close. Once closed, resistance will be harder, entailing more risk, more sacrifice.

Some barriers – rigid walls, closed windows – might have seemed reasonable at some starting point. Israel had a right to protect itself from suicide bombers. Yet, the curtain of Future Time obscures how easily they transform into tools and weapons of tyrants, stifling growth, smothering life, undermining integrity. How too easy what is pawned off as defense transforms into a tool of violence, which its razor wire always promised, despite what leaders and apologists said! (And perhaps was always nefariously meant to be so, especially when people like Stephen Miller and Benjamin Netanyahu are in charge.)

Walls make us sick.

Open windows, healthy cellular membranes, permeable walls: these are for us to envision, embody, build. In these times, we do so by showing up in ever new, creative responsive ways, attending public actions, as our lives allow us to – and sometimes, even when, we must reshape our lives to make room. Showing up at small and growing public actions that some call demonstrations, other protests, doing so to exercise that particular human muscle, one built of conscience, built from ethics or faith (or both), and a commitment to community. Muscles that will require heavy and heavier lifts, and more risk.

There is no exact template for the formula of authoritarianism now, yet historical lessons tell us that we must prepare for deeper and wider forms of non-cooperation – not just demonstrations where we get to admire the cleverness of posters that our friends and neighbors bring (and there are some clever ones!), but growing our comfort zone (a kind of wall) beyond our fear zone (a kind of rigid wall) into our learning zone (a porous boundary) that leads to our growth zone, so that we might risk being part of deeper and wider forms of non-cooperation – work slowdowns, general strikes, interrupting ICE raids in real time, and so much more.

As I said before, I spent time in Berlin this summer. While there, I visited the concentration camp called Sachsenhausen. Friends: what were trains then, are, in these times, in OUR times, airplanes.

This is why the efforts of local community members are so important when it comes to confronting airlines and shaming airports for their complicity with the kidnapping of our neighbors and the decimation of due process. Thank you to those in this congregation who have taken this up. This is the possibility of health, of growth, of justice, of freedom.

If you found yourself riding your bike over at Airport Park on your way to the Causeway this past spring, you probably noticed that the fine workers of the Town of Colchester were re-setting the pathways with peastone and reseeding the adjacent grass. You might have noticed, like I did, that they seeded over one of the well-worn paths, the one not so much at perpendicular angles (which they reinforced) but the one at a gentle curve to get from here to there.

Their efforts were in vain. If you ride there now, you will see how the collective human impulse is stronger than any willful urban planner who thinks they can create a barrier where the people do not want one.

Just as true, and even truer, when it comes to the migration of humans across national borders, especially when the climate crisis drives humans, with our inherent worth and dignity, to seek a better life and more safety. Just as true, and even truer, when it comes to the migration of humans seeking shelter and care, especially as the social safety nets fray in the harsh winds of late-stage capitalism.

In that Frost poem, the poet observes that there is something that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down. I wonder how we might find ourselves embodying that drive deep from within Nature and the laws of the cosmos which give us gravity?

Surely when we show up for our immigrant neighbors when there are hearings at the federal building across the street and when they must attend those fraught appointments online with immigration court as they seek asylum or at the ICE office in St. Albans. When we do these things, we are part and particle of that process that brings down the walls that are sickly stuck in protection mode, freeing that barrier to be a living membrane that allows growth.

We close with a stanza from my favorite German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote at the turn of the 20^th century, the industrial revolution promising great things with an undercurrent of threat that Rilke sensed. May this plea traveling across the centuries become part of our truth here and now, in these times:

All will come again into its strength:
the fields undivided, the waters undammed,
the trees towering and the walls built low.
And in the valleys, people as strong and varied as the land.

So be it. See to it. Amen.