Love wins. Believe it. Not as hope. As a fact. In fact. Love wins. If you have a rough time believing, when you wait for the “arc of the moral universe to bend toward justice” (MLK) but the wait is too long, find the places with the people who will take your face between their palms and look into your eyes until you believe. Love wins. Believe it. Not as a hope. As fact. As now. In fact. Love wins.

As you know, Debbie and I, Erin and Amy, Laura, Joel and Jackson have been showing up at rallies and protests.  People we’ve known for ages and folks we’ve just met are showing up.  We have a newborn community.  Our sisters and brothers show up. They share their photos and tell their story.  We do it to keep believing. Sometimes we go with our whole selves. Sometimes we go distracted, not wholly present, but we show up.  Sometimes for obligation.  Sometimes for guilt or fear.  Sometimes for beauty.  It doesn’t matter.  We are there. We are here.  And no matter our particular reason for being present, we find joy. Yes. Real joy, humor, people laughing and dancing.

No matter our particular personal motivation for coming, we always find courage, confidence and creative community from people who show up for free, offering priceless words to help us see this through.

We always find signs of holy resistance. People wrapped in flags of agency.  It keeps us human.  “Blessed Be the Resistance Bitch!”  (Must be a modern translation of The Sermon on the Mount: Perhaps a more edgy “Blessed are the peacemakers.”) We need relevant, up-to-date beatitudes of compassion. The message fits our time.  Everyone is a child of God, Bitch!!!  Not as hope or wishful thinking. Not as profanity but raw naked 2025 truth. As fact. For a fact. In fact.

And then there’s this:

When I weep, it is a good sign.  When I’m actually wholly present to joy and pain, I cry.  When there is sadness in the room, in my home, in our home on this glorious Planet and I don’t feel tears on my face, I am not fully here.  So several months ago, when I realized I was not weeping for anything or anyone in the Shit Show flooding every zone of our common life, I paid attention. I was overwhelmed.  I’m sure I wasn’t taught to cry growing up or allowed to. So there’s that.  One of my favorite protest signs is “If you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention!” So maybe I feel an obligation to rage and hold on to the anger and resentment, the “are-you-kidding-me?” moments of moral unbelievable-ness and I hold tight.  Because I want you to know I’m serious, I guess.  I want people to think I know what’s going on.  It’s a protective clothing I wear, yeah? But on the inside I’m all “WTF” at the chaos. And “Holy Shit” why should I keep trying when everything we work for seems “so out of reach.” (Mark Miller song to follow.)  I really don’t have a clue most of the time.  And I think I don’t weep sometimes because I have it so frickin easy compared to everyone (I mean EVERYONE) else!  I feel guilty for feeling any pain at all because what I and my people face seems so trivial.  So I don’t feel pain and I don’t cry.  Is something the matter with me? 

Most of the time, I take the photos. I’m rarely in them.  This time, at the Bend NO MORE KING protest, we ran into a friend, Laurie.  We were carrying our signs and she had a sign.  She wanted to get a shot of me with all our signs and slogans.  So here I am, covered head to toe in the message from my MAGA (Make America Greta Again) cap down to my “Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly” shirt.  The sign I carry at all events tells why Debbie and I show up: “I’m here for him!” We hang out with 4,000 of our best Bend friends  for all the grandchildren of Earth, yes including this 7-year-old privileged white one.  Laurie was carrying “Jesus Wept.”  She added her message to ours.  It’s  how we roll, joining our voices.  John 11:35 says “Jesus Wept” (a silent weeping) when he showed up to find his dear friend Lazarus had died and he was too late to do anything about it.  In Luke Jesus weeps over Jerusalem saying: “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace but they are hid from your eyes.”  Jesus moves from this moment of compassion directly to the temple, over-turning the tables of money changers turning profits off the misery of the disinherited.  Compassion can mingle with righteous anger.  Tears with liberating action.  When we care about stuff, we cry out somehow.  Josephus, a prime historian in Jesus’ time, reported that within a few years of Luke’s words being written, an estimated 600,000 to 1.1 million people were massacred in the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70AD.  Most were non-combatants, women and children (where have we heard this before?).  They didn’t teach this in my Sunday School.  Just like they didn’t teach about lynching in American History.  They say history never actually repeats itself but it rhymes.   No wonder Jesus wept.  And why wouldn’t we?

In 2025, our Dictator and Pedophile-in-Chief turns personal profit daily off the backs of those already beaten down, turns a daily profit from the death and suffering of our extinct, endangered and undocumented two-legged and four legged neighbors.  In 70AD, as many as 1.1 million innocents were slaughtered, and 97,000 Jewish slaves taken.  In 2025 AD, are we tempted to think we’re too late to do anything while an estimated 55-65,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza?  And 130,000 more wounded with so many more buried beneath the rubble?  Is there weeping in Gaza?  Who will raise them up?  Wildfires in Canada have now been continuously burning through their second consecutive Canadian winter and Altadena is a ghost town.  Is there weeping to the North and South? Our friends and neighbors in every place are kidnapped without due process and taken by masked moral robots to prisons in wherever, never to be seen again.  Do our neighbors cry out?   Do they sob in silence, for fear of deportation?  Millions will die without health care, reproductive care, sheltered care, climate care, any care.  There will be weeping.  

In breaking news: on his way to the country club, DJT weeps over Washington D.C. saying, “Our capital city (capitol) has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people. I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.”  Of course the fact is violent crime in DC is at a 30-year low.  If there are any tears being shed by Felonious POTUS, they are only for his own.  The city will be under federal control for 30 days and “the cops will be allowed to do whatever the hell they want,” says he. Jesus wept over his capitol city saying, “Jerusalem, O Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent you!” (Lk 13:34) DJT whines over his Capitol, while he and his minions are doing the stoning of anyone who resists.  The Orange Jesus will not be confused with the real one.  We cannot mistake faux passion for deep uncompensated empathy.  We must learn to weep again. Together. At least I must learn.  Jesus wept.  We weep.  Jesus turned the tables.  We “keep on keeping on” taking action in this time of great turning.  Not because Jesus did.  It’s just the way we roll. It’s what authentic humans do.  We weep with those who weep.  

I hope for us to have those sanctuary places where people take our I-feel-like-giving-up-faces in their hands and look into our eyes until we believe.  To find those millions of others who will grasp the arc of the moral universe with us till we start to feel it bend.  For some, those places are in a community of faith, wherever and whatever that is for us.  For some of us it’s on sacred zooms making plans for action and telling our stories.  For some it’s in the halls of power or in the streets making good trouble.  A few weeks ago we were sitting in our Bend UMC worship on a Sunday morning.  The choir was singing Mark Miller’s Love Will Rise Again.  I started listening to the words: “I won’t give up on all that seems so out of reach.”  That’s the love that lines the trenches we fight in.  “We will remember all the good we thought was gone.”  These words describe the ferocious gratitude—the light that will see us through to systemic kindness, institutional compassion and Kindom of God on earth.  I heard.  And I cried.  For the first time in many, many months, tears streamed down my cheeks and I wept. I had thought I was dead inside.  Love wins my friends. Believe it. Weep for it.  Not as hope. As fact. As now. In fact. Love wins.  I print Mark Miller’s words for us in his song Love Will Rise Again.  Go to the link and experience this song for yourselves: “As the sun rises, so will love.  Voices are rising, so will love.”  Go into the “fierce urgency of now” (MLK) and make love in fact.  In our legend of faith, after Jesus wept, he raised his friend from death to life.  If ever there was a time to rise with our human neighborhood, to rise from death to life, from hate to love, from tears to courage and with the weeping Earth, the time is now.  Love wins.

Love Will Rise Again
Words & Music by Mark Miller

I won’t give up on you. Don’t give up on me. 
I won’t give up on all that seems so out of reach.  
I believe in love.  I believe in you.  
We’ll hold each other to the light, and we will see this through.  

As the sun rises, so will love.  
Voices are rising, so will love.  

We will never give up. We will overcome.  
We will remember all the good we thought was gone. 
We believe in love. We believe in truth.  
We will hold each other to the light and we will see this through.   

Give the chance our love will rise!  Give the chance our love will rise!

I believe in forgiveness, and I won’t stop giving.  
I’ll sing of all the things that make our lives worth living.  
We’ll sing through loss.  We will sing through the pain.  
We’ll hold each other through the night, and love will rise! 

We will sing Hallelujah!  We will shout for joy!  
We will sing of all that fear and hate cannot destroy.  
We will sing through loss.  We will sing through the pain.  
We’ll hold each other through the tears and love will rise again!

Love will rise again!  Love will rise again!  Love will rise again!
LOVE WILL RISE AGAIN!