Adapted from a sermon preached at UUCV on 3/9/2025

Sometimes, I sort of wish ministry came with a crash helmet. 

It would be so practical for new ministers to stand up at our ordination and  get our stole, and our ordination certificate….and a crash helmet. But not one for our heads. A crash helmet for our hearts. For our souls. 

Ministry is full of moments and situations that will break your heart, realizations that will hit you like a ton of bricks, and theology that will knock you over and take your breath away because the truth truths so hard when it hits. 

But it’s not just like that for ministers. 

It sounds wrong, saying that we need crash helmets at church. We come to church and think it’s going to be a safe place to rest and reset – and it is. The church should always be a place of sanctuary where we can bring our full selves. 

It should also always be a place that challenges us, stretches us, and helps us grow. 

 I call those challenge/stretch/grow days Crash Helmet Sundays. 

This past Sunday was one of those Crash Helmet Sundays. I took a REALLY old blog post [one of the first I ever put up on this platform] and used a portion of it, and the title, to frame my sermon.

It seemed timely.

Back when I was doing ministry with the Salvation Army in Scranton, we had this janitor, Bobby. He wasn’t a particularly good janitor. He broke more than he fixed, and made more messes than he cleaned. He was a very simple man, didn’t have good hygiene, never wore clean clothes…… and, to this day, he is still one of my very favorite people.

Bobby was THERE.

He was the very embodiment of a person being 100% engaged with whatever, wherever, whoever he was with. He believed, with all his heart, that he was doing his part to make the world a better place by being the best church janitor he could be. 

And he DID change his corner of the world. Bobby’s heart was absolutely made of gold. Even when he broke things, he would remind me [as he presented me with a cup of ‘peace offering coffee’] that God loved broken, and could fix anything.

He believed that with all his might.

And there wasn’t a person on the planet that Bobby thought was too far gone to be loved by God, AND the church.

NO ONE.

Bobby knew in his bones what that meant. It meant all the people that were hard to love. People that no one wanted to be around. People that made society feel fundamentally unsafe, and disgusted,  because of their actions. 

People like his family members. 

He knew what they had done. 

He knew who they had hurt.

 And he believed that his far less than savory family members deserved God’s love and grace as much as anyone else who sat in our pews.

And I agreed with him. 

Bobby would have made a fantastic old school unitarian. 

He ALSO believed that we needed to keep our congregation safe. He understood that there were consequences for their unacceptable behavior. He understood that in his bones. 

Bobby believed both of those things, AND he also believed, down to the marrow of his bones, in an unconditional love, in an overarching of humanity that reached even those who did  unspeakable things to others. 

Unfortunately for Bobby, there were folks in that congregation who did NOT feel those things in their bones.

Not only did they believe that his family members shouldn’t ever be welcome in the church because of their past actions, they thought that, because Bobby shared the same last name as them, HE shouldn’t be welcomed either, because “he might have the same tendencies.”

That’s some seriously assumptive bullshit. [I didn’t say that part in church]

So one Sunday in early March that year, I preached about love.

Seems like an innocuous, easy topic, right?

Until it isn’t.

It seems easy until you start talking about what it looks like to love people who aren’t easy to love. Loving people who aren’t like you. Who do things that you find abhorrent. 

Bobby would have made a great UU.

He sat in the front pew that Sunday, nodding along, as I spoke about the radical love Jesus modeled. 

Jesus would have made a great UU. 

 It’s easy to turn away, to build walls, to justify our distance when folks do or believe things we find abhorrent. But Jesus didn’t.

Jesus was a badass. [I didn’t say that part out loud either]

He didn’t reserve his love for the righteous or the agreeable.

He had dinner with tax collectors, hugged lepers, and forgave people who literally wanted him dead.

He saw through their behavior to the human being.

I reminded folks that day that Jesus once said to, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” And he didn’t say it as a suggestion; it was a radical call to action.

It’s a reminder that everyone, regardless of their behavior, is worthy of our compassion.

I reminded them that he modeled this through unwavering forgiveness, through relentless service, and through a deep understanding that everyone has inherent worthiness, just by virtue of being human.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

I reminded them that loving the difficult does not mean condoning their actions; it means recognizing their humanity.

And by this point in the sermon I’m pretty sure the congregation realized that it was time to put on their crash helmets.

There’s a video going around on tiktok right now asking “what are you going to do when it happens?” and the IT they’re referring to is when the current president is….. no longer alive. 

And while the petty, dramatic part of me wants to answer with “I’m going to dance in the streets and blast “No One Mourns the Wicked” as loud as I can………..there’s another part of me that is deeply uncomfortable with the idea of wishing death on someone – anyone. 

Even him. 

 It’s tempting, for sure. 

 But then I think about it within the framework of my own ethics and theology, and I realize that celebrating the death, wishing for the death of this man, means that there’s at least one person on this planet we believe doesn’t have inherent dignity and worthiness as a human being. One person we get to “exempt” from our first principle. 

And it would be easy to say he, and possibly several others, deserve that exemption from our beloved first principle…

But the problem is that once we start issuing exemptions, it becomes easy to keep going, until we’re some kind of moral Oprah – “you get an exemption, and you get an exemption!”

And once we start exempting folks from that inherent worthiness and dignity, no matter how heinous they are, what  we are saying with our actions is that we are people who get to decide.

When we start exempting folks, we are taking a really scary position, saying through our actions that we are the type of people who get to judge whether other people have inherent worthiness and dignity, which is a problem when we say we’re ascribed to a faith that affirms that every person has inherent worthiness and dignity!

Crash helmet?

Crash helmet.

I’ve heard a lot of folks say, in very condescending tones, that our Principles, now our petals, are “easy” theology. That they’re too broad and too shallow to have any real impact. That they’re things we can call sort of agree to. And in their abstract, I guess they are.

But in their specifics, they have an impact that can make us wish we were wearing a spiritual crash helmet.

They are hard.

Our principles are incredibly challenging.

They ask us to accept the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. Even the one you’re thinking of now. Which means we have to find a way to accept the worthiness of the people who do things we find abhorrent, that make us cringe, whose actions and motivations we cannot imagine or accept. 

It’s not easy to love people who do things we find abhorrent.

 It requires a radical kind of empathy. It means choosing kindness when we are also justified in our anger. It means offering grace when we feel entitled to our judgment.

But in that act of loving the difficult, we can also find something profound. We start to break down the barriers that divide us. We can create space for healing and reconciliation. And, whether we’re a Christian or not [remember, Jesus wasn’t!] we can reflect the teachings of Jesus, who acknowledged the inherent worthiness and dignity of all, even when they were difficult to stomach.

Acknowledging the inherent worthiness and dignity of every person doesn’t mean we suddenly condone abhorrent actions or invite oligarchs and dictators over for tea, but as we go through our days, as we try to live into a theology that says people are not only welcome in the church, but wanted there and needed there, we need to think about what happens on the day someone walks through the church doors who challenges us to live up to our own principles in a very real way.

I believe we can do it.

And I believe Bobby the Janitor from the Scranton Salvation Army, if he was still alive, would be nodding along in the front row, cheering us on, telling us that we are making it so even as we tighten our crash helmets.