When I was in fourth grade, I stood on a chair in my elementary school cafeteria and gave my first protest speech. We were having a dish called Johnny Marzetti for lunch for the sixth time in a month, and I was NOT happy about it. Did we enjoy having runny-mystery meat -tomato sauce-noodle glop over and over? No we did not! So 8 year old me led a gaggle of frustrated small children in a chanting chorus of “WE WANT DIFFERENT LUNCH!” for about two minutes until a teacher finally noticed and made me get down…and then she said the magic words. You’ve just earned yourself a trip to the principal’s office.

SCORE! She thought it was a punishment. I thought it was a one way ticket to an audience with the big boss, the guy who could make things like menu changes happen!

I got to tell him why we were upset, and learned about great things like petitions and the student council. And you know what? Three months later, after collecting signatures from almost every kid in the school who knew how to write, he put me on the student council, and we didn’t have Johnny Marzetti for lunch any more.

I certainly learned my lesson. I learned that sometimes, to make change, you have to start by breaking some rules and making a little bit of trouble. Ya know, just to shake things up and get people listening. I learned that, if you want change, you’ve got to be willing to make it happen on your own.

The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized this is true, in my personal life, and in society in general. So imagine my glee when I stumbled across UUCV, where protesting is practically a sacrament, and our minister regularly reminds us during the benediction to ‘go out and make a little trouble, then come back and tell each other about it’.

When I first signed up to preach on this topic, the words social distancing, quarantine, and Covid-19 hadn’t yet entered my vocabulary. When I signed up to preach, a group of us was sitting around Gisela’s kitchen table, sharing soup and good, crusty bread, sitting close to one another, sharing hugs and laughter. All of those things seem more than a little bit scary and reckless right now….and I thought to myself — what right do I have right now to talk about rule breaking when following rules and guidelines will very literally keep us alive and safe?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this idea of making change is less about the naughtiness of it, less about kicking up a fuss, than it is about un-stucking yourself or others from the circumstances you find yourself in. Yes, I said un-stucking. Yes, I did make that word up.

Thinking back on all the times we’ve protested as a congregation, all the marches I’ve attended, all the times I’ve challenged a rule or an authority, it wasn’t for the pleasure of a good protest, it was because something was wrong. Something about the situation wasn’t right, and that dissatisfaction led to action, which, hopefully, eventually, brought about change.

This past month, we’ve all found ourselves stuck in circumstances we didn’t ask for, didn’t ask to be in, don’t want, and wouldn’t choose for ourselves. We’re stuck in the middle of this pandemic, and, to be really blunt, it sucks. 8 year old me wants to jump up on the piano and lead y’all in a chant of “I want a hug! I want a hug!”….but the reality is that a hug, and a lot of other stuff that I desperately want is a really, really bad idea right now. No amount of protesting or mischief is going to change that fact. And so, we feel stuck in our circumstances.

As a favorite musical character of mine would say — right now, we’re all innocent victims of our stories.

I’ve always been a fan of the musical Matilda, and over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve found myself listening more and more to a song from it called Naughty. In it, Matilda is ruminating on her life as a kindergartener in a dysfunctional family that doesn’t want her. She’s only 5, and there isn’t a lot she can do to change the situation she’s in. The adults won’t listen to her, she can’t move out because she’s 5, she can’t trade her parents in for better models. So what can she do? Like many children, she turns to books. The stories she reads -jack and Jill, Romeo and Juliet, start her thinking — is she predestined to live the life she was born into? Does she have to settle for the story she has been handed?

Sounds a lot like some of the same questions I’ve been asking myself lately. Stuff has been weird in my world for three weeks now. The first couple days of working from home were torture. I may have returned a cheerful greeting on the church zoom channel with an exclamation that “this is extrovert hell!”

I was feeling all kinds of stuck.

Stuck inside.

Stuck alone.

Stuck in a bad remake of the movie Groundhog Day.

I’m sure you can relate. It’s been hard on all of us.

But again, what choice do we have?

I was feeling really sorry for myself, asking myself the same question – what choice do I have, When our fictional five year old sang me the answer over my Alexa while I was washing dishes. You want to know what she said?

Every day starts with the tick of a clock

All escapes start with the click of a lock

If you’re stuck and your story and want to get out

You don’t have to cry, you don’t have to shout

Because nobody else is gonna put it right for me

Nobody but me is gonna change my story

And a lightbulb went off.

We can’t protest ourselves out of this one. The situation is what it is. But what we CAN do is change , or un-stuck our own story with how we respond and counter it. It’s true, we can’t be together in the sanctuary, but you know what we CAN do? Exactly what we are doing now. The circumstances suck, but we don’t have to sit in isolation from one another. Doing church via zoom, looking at screens and cameras and chat boxes, sitting in our pajamas, drinking our coffee, feels almost delightfully subversive when we think about how we normally do church. We have upended what worship, and what quarantine, looks like, and in some small way, we’re putting things right, when the world feels so very wrong. There are a thousand little ways we can take back ownership of this story we’re living in right now. The thing is, we have to be intentional about how we respond to the situation we find ourselves stuck in.

We can still put our ‘rebellion as a sacrament’ theology into action, even while we’re stuck in a situation we know we can’t do much about.

We can revolt against things like loneliness by connecting in new ways with one another.

We can protest hopelessness with intentional gratitude.

We can stubbornly resist the urge to beat ourselves up for not being pinterest perfect at working from home, home schooling our kids, getting all those quarantine projects done that we think we should be doing because we see other people doing them on the internet.

I don’t know about anyone else, but for me, it feels delightfully rebellious, and really freeing, to give myself permission to be ‘just good enough’ right now.

It seems counterintuitive, that letting go of control is the way to un-stuck ourselves from this current story, but in a way, it’s the ultimate rebellion. We live in a society that values productivity and routines and concrete outcomes. Maybe, just maybe, this is our chance, individually and collectively, to start to dismantle those old ways of thinking about ourselves and our families, and discover new measures of what success or ‘a good life’ looks like. We keep saying that we’re trying to navigate our new worship experience with humor and grace. What if we consciously choose to navigate this new season of our lives centering ideas like those? What if we, all of us, choose to wage a tiny revolt against the feelings that threaten to make us the most stuck?

Because that’s the reality, isn’t it? It isn’t the virus, the quarantine, that has us feeling stuck.

It’s the loneliness. The frustration. The helplessness. We can rebel against those things. We can fight back and un-stuck ourselves, both now and going forward.

I’d like us to try something together. If we were all here in the sanctuary together, I’d have you stand up and talk to me, but since we’re on zoom, I’m going to ask everybody to open up their chat box. And I want you to join the resistance with me this morning. We can all start our own tiny revolts, in our own little corners of the world, right now.

I want you to tell me what you’re going to rebel against this week, and how you’re going to do it. I’ll start.

This week, I’m going to rebel against feeling isolated by video calling people I love.

Tell me how you’re going to un-stuck your story this week, and I’ll share it out loud. It’ll be like our own little joyful, virtual protest against all the yuck that is happening!

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We can all hold each other in love. We can all be part of changing the outcome of this story. May the rebellion be so, in and for each of us. Amen.