Where Do We Go from Here? (5/22/11)

Sometimes I’m a little slow to put two and two together, but once again, synchronicity stepped in to save the day. Last week Northlake turned 50 and yesterday we had rapture. How perfect can a celebration get!

Long ago I planned a sermon for today on “Where do we go from here?” never even considering the possibility that there would be no one left to listen. So it is good to see everyone here this morning – the only ones missing that I’m aware of are a few quilters off on retreat, and they’ll be back tonight. They usually have a fun time, so I guess we’ll consider their retreat, a short-term rapture experience.

Where do we go from here? The anniversary party is over, dancing feet have recovered, and now we’re left behind (and so is everyone else). We’re 50 years old plus a week. Mary Oliver, whose wisdom peers at us from volumes of poetry, demands an answer, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

This is not the first time this congregation has had to face the question. Years ago when the city of Kirkland informed Northlakers that they must abandon their church building, which was located downtown on the hemline of city hall, the congregation had to ask itself, “Where do we go from here?”

In 1994 an answer was found. This building we’re sitting in today became the new home for Northlake Unitarian Universalist Church. I’ve heard stories about how grim the sanctuary was: skinny dark stained glass windows, poor lighting, well-worn red carpet, a front wall of dark wood planking that jutted out in a point toward the pews, and of course, a leaky roof.

For the dedication of this building, Rev. Mary Scriver was invited to give the sermon. It was Mary who had the honor of being the interim minister following Rev. Patrick O’Neill. She had finished her service to Northlake, but was invited back for the dedication. For the occasion, she chose a compelling text. Mary talked about the parable where Jesus was speaking in a house where a crowd had gathered. It was so full that no one else could enter. Having heard of the miracles, four men carried their friend, who could not walk, to the house. Seeing that they could not get in, they climbed up onto the roof and lowered their friend through a hole. Jesus saw the man lying on the floor and told him, your sins are forgiven. Of course when the educated folks – the teachers – heard this, they got uneasy and started thinking Jesus was arrogant and irreverent. Jesus sensed this and was annoyed. Then he turned to the man and told him, “Get up, take your mat and walk.” The man got up and walked out in full view of everyone. (Mark 2:1-12)

In her dedication sermon, Mary Shriver says that just what this congregation did. When the City told Northlake to get out, you got up and walked – you walked right up the street to this building.

Of course the story is more complex than that. And this congregation has also been faced with other challenges as well. When someone fell through the steps at the old building, you rebuilt them stronger. A few years ago when things were looking bleak, you took a very bold step and voted to move and restore the chapel. You put in thousands of volunteer hours and a lot of money, and now the chapel is here. The chapel is beautiful and this congregation is amazing. During that time, you also recognized that you needed to grow and the best way to do that was to call a full-time minister. I am your first full-time minister since the 1990’s.

When it looked like this congregation had a choice of being pinned to the mat or doing something, you got up the courage and walked.

Last week we celebrated Northlake’s 50^th anniversary. It was a grand affair. And yesterday, we didn’t get raptured. So here we are. Where do we go from here?

A colleague of mine was at last week’s Sunday Celebration service. Afterwards, this person reminded me of an old truism. When the spotlight goes dim, there is often a crash. In the case of major celebrations, often the dip comes in a year to two after the event. I know this to be true. I also know this to be not true. And I will tell you right here and now, I am not ready for a mid-life crisis! There is too much to do!

I turned my colleague who smiled and said, “Northlake might just make it through.” Yes!

I want to do more than just make it through. When Jesus told the man to get up and walk, he did. The man walked so everyone could see.

After celebrating our 50^th so grandly, I challenge this congregation to begin thinking, what will we do in year 51? 52? 53? 54?

In this day and age when the Christian religion has been so corrupted by doomsayers, pedophiles, tea partiers, and shock jocks; Islam rocked by suicide bombers, terrorists, and militant cells; and Judaism locked in bloody battle over territory, is it any wonder a massive number of people have lost respect for religion? I believe it is religion itself that needs to meet the judgment day.

I’m tired of living in fear. I am exhausted reading headlines generated by war crimes, hate groups, and sex scandals. We live in a permanent war culture dominated by for-profit corporations where income disparity is sanctioned and the dispossessed are seen as evil.

No wonder people put all their hope and faith in a supernatural world beyond this one. Some even believe it must be so much better somewhere else that they not only refuse to work to improve things in the here and now, they actively work to destroy what is here and claim rapture is on its way. They take no responsibility or accountability because the main goal is to escape. And it is all about the individual. It’s all about me.

Where are we? Are we stuck on the mat?

It is time to get up and walk.

In a very telling story, Mary Scriver told me that when she first came to Northlake, she went into the office and sat down at what used to be Patrick O’Neill’s desk. All the drawers were empty – except for a roll of anti-acids. While ministers tend to love their congregations, and I do, we also know that the church has a responsibility to speak truth, model compassion, and seek justice in the larger world. It is easy to get comfortable and settle into a familiar routine that doesn’t challenge the status quo. It is much harder to pick up the mat and walk.

People come to church for many reasons. Young parents want their children to learn about religion and values. Seniors and people living alone often need community. Sometimes there are crisis situations. Others need a place to explore their faith. All this is good. This is what we do well. We are here for each other.

We also take care of our buildings and grounds, pay our staff fair wages, and fund programs like the choir and music as well as Religious Education for our children. All this is necessary and good.

But how do we live our faith beyond these walls?

Each Sunday we Share the Plate with a local non-profit whose mission is to help end homelessness in King County. We give $1000 to very worthwhile causes. Each dollar helps someone in need right here in our community.

In seminary I attended a lecture on church growth. A graph was shown indicating the ten fastest growing and the ten fastest declining congregations. Guess what? The bottom ten only wrote checks. The top ten wrote checks and they did hands on work in the community. Money is good, but you also have to do something. You have to get up and participate. You have to be engaged.

The good news is there is plenty to do; too much actually. It is difficult to know where to begin. But this congregation isn’t easily deterred or overwhelmed. Last fall, with the help of Sound Alliance, we undertook a listening campaign. More than half of the congregation participated in small group sessions where histories, dreams, and passions were shared. The goal was not only to listen, but also to see if there was critical mass in one or two particular areas of concern that could become the focus of our efforts.

Two areas emerged: education including public school issues, and outreach – getting our Unitarian Universalist values out there to people who need them.

Education seems like a concrete issue. But it is huge. An Education Team has met a few times trying to narrow down wide-ranging interests to a can-do project for Northlake. Next time you see an Education Team meeting in the Weekly Announcements, go! The key to ‘get up and walk’ is to take the first step. If you’ve ever been a student or care about the state of education today, go to the meeting.

The passion around outreach is intertwined with community involvement. Much of our outreach falls to the Social Justice committee. And this committee needs you. The longtime fearless chairpersons, Diane Slota and Cyndy Jones have moved on to other endeavors. Go to the committee’s next meeting – this coming Thursday night at 7:00pm – and help determine the future! The door of opportunity is wide open.

Yesterday, Susan and I attended an all-day workshop at East Shore Unitarian Church on Building Bridges. The goal was to educate and to network Unitarian Universalists and local Muslims. Nationally recognized speakers, including Captain James Yee, a former Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, addressed the audience. The last session of the workshop was to meet in small groups to find ways to work together. My friends, the three big Seattle-area UU churches sponsored the very well run event, but it is our small church that is doing an excellent job of outreaching to the Muslim community. With last year’s 9/11 service, we provided a space for the entire Kirkland /Eastside community to come together.

At this month’s Kirkland minister’s meeting, the subject of the next 9/11 service came up. One minister said, “I’d like to ignore it.” Several chimed in “yeah, but it will be the 10^th anniversary and you can’t ignore it. It will be all over the news and besides, it’s on a Sunday.” I told them about what Northlake did last year and asked if the group would like to do something together. They’re thinking about it. Stay tuned.

This is outreach. This is living our values out loud. And there are plenty more ways to do it. We need your ideas and we need you to help us walk boldly into Northlake’s next 50 years.

When I am too busy to say ‘yes’ to one more thing, I am reminded of Jewish philosopher and author Franz Kafka’s words, “The Messiah will come when we no longer need him.” Yesterday we learned the rapture won’t save you. Doing the work just might.

Be bold. Be brave. Get up. And walk.

Blessed be and amen. 

Looking for Easter (4/24/11)

Imagine you are alive in the first few hundred years after Jesus’ death on the cross. It will take almost 500 years before the church sorts out whether or not Jesus was God or a man who was God’s son. The New Testament – gospels, letters, and book of revelation – is just being written and gathered. This is no small feat in the days when writing is etched onto parchment or stones, books are almost non-existent, and almost everyone is illiterate. Jews and Gentiles – Greeks, Romans, heathens and pagans are everywhere. Your close friends are believers but there are not many of you. Your small tribe desperately wants the new religion to survive.

You begin to resent and despise the Jews. Of course, many of you come from within the Jewish faith. Jesus himself was a Jew. You are well aware that this emergent religion, Christianity, isn’t Judaism, or anything else. It is different. A clear break must be made in order to distinguish the new faith from Judaism. You need your own stories and rituals.

But every spring there is a problem. You still celebrate the ancient Jewish custom of Passover. You commemorate the children of Israel’s escape from slavery in Egypt when the ten plagues were sent upon the Egyptians. During the tenth and last plague, the Israelites sacrificed spring lambs. And as directed, they took the blood and marked a spot over the doorpost of each house so that the plague would ‘pass over’ and not kill the first-born child. The Israelite children were not killed; their homes were passed over. Pharaoh equivocated and let the people go. Hearing they were free, the Israelites left so fast, the bread dough didn’t even have time to rise. The seven days of Passover are celebrated with unleavened bread and prayers are offered in thanksgiving.

Once again it is Passover. And you have a different story to tell. Jesus died on the cross and three days later, he was resurrected. Accounts differ about the details, but this is how Christianity will be defined. Gradually you and your Christian brothers and sisters stop celebrating Passover. You borrow from the pagans and adopt Easter.

Actually, it wasn’t really borrowing. The pagans have celebrated the cycle of death and rebirth every spring for millennium. The very name Easter is derived from Eastre, the Teutonic goddess of spring. Other sources date Easter all the way back to the great flood and the Tower of Babel. Noah – who built the ark and saved the animals two by two – had a grandson, Nimrod, whom the Jewish Bible called a mighty one who made all of the people rebellious against God. His wife was Queen Semiramis who was also known as Easter.

King Nimrod became a sun god. Easter’s illegitimate son, who was ‘supernaturally conceived’, was created from the sun god’s seed and became the savior. His mother, Easter, was worshipped. In time, the son was killed and mother Easter wept so much that her tears watered the vegetation. Her tears of grief were like winter rain and in this way, her son was mystically renewed each spring.

The Hebrew Scriptures are harsh in accounting this story, calling this religion cultish, idolatrous, and false. But it is a perfect background over which to incorporate the Christian story of Jesus’ death and resurrection. The early Christians fought hard against Judaism, but found fertile ground in the pagan rituals of Easter to overlay their story.

Many adjustments had to be worked out, but by the time Christian bishops met at the Council of Nicea in 325 c.e., the major point of discussion was about the date. It was decided that Easter should always fall on a Sunday. At that point, Easter in the Roman church was separated from the Jewish calendar and became a distinct ritual. Christianity solidified as a religion.

Regardless of its origin, the day of the week it is celebrated, or by whom, Easter is true. As is often the case, the details are debatable. Even the gospel accounts vary about the form in which Jesus was resurrected. But the larger truth of death and rebirth play out every season with the turn of the earth on its axis. The story of Easter is true in Nature and it is true for each of us. Christianity gives us a wonderfully explicit story to remind us each spring of the reality of death and the hope of resurrection.

Jesus was a powerful teacher. I believe that if more people actually acted on his teachings and spent less time squabbling about them, the world would be a much better place. In so many ways, Jesus taught us how to love. Just as it takes deep sorrow to know great joy, it takes profound humility to experience unconditional love. You have to deny your own ego to love fully. It is the Easter story. You have to die to self in order to live.

Have you ever been overwhelmed by a show of love? It doesn’t always happen in big ways. Sometimes, a stranger’s kindness is a work of love. You receive a gift with no strings attached. Or you receive wise counsel that challenges you to live with integrity.

The giver wants nothing in return, but in order to receive, you must be willing to let go of control. It is risky. You cannot be a control freak and be humble. I know. I spent a lot of years thinking I was in control and only when I was powerless to do anything but accept someone’s kindness, did I realize that my delusion had prevented me from experiencing love.

It wasn’t a very big thing at all. On the surface, it was miniscule compared to the lesson I had to learn. I had just moved to Canada fresh out of seminary. I had used all my savings to go to school and arrived in my new country dependent upon the meager paycheck of an intern. I had been in Canada for about two weeks and I got pulled over by a police officer; blue lights flashing, siren blasting, the whole works. I pulled over and in a few minutes, I was signing a ticket acknowledging I had failed to use a turn signal as I navigated quiet neighborhood streets. The fine was about $200, which was my grocery allotment for the month. I cried. What else was a newbie minister in a foreign country to do?

I have no recollection how anyone found out about it. I don’t easily share my shortcomings but this one seemed so ridiculous. And the money was real. It would take until Christmas to pay the ticket if I wanted to eat.

A Sunday or two later, at the end of the service, one of the elders of the church came up to me after the last hymn. She gave me a hug and said she had heard that I had had a run-in with the law. The hat had been passed around and in the envelope she pressed into my hand, was exactly enough to pay the ticket. Again, all I could do was cry. But this time, it was in total humility. The only thing I could do was to receive love.

This might not sound like an Easter story to you, but for me, it was. I had to let go of control – to let my ego die – to accept the gift of love. This small token restored my hope in humanity and my place in it.

I invite you to think about the times when you have received gifts that were unexpected and incredibly timely. Recall those gifts whether they were a simple hug, smile, or word of encouragement, which renewed your spirit.

Think about a time when you have given a gift, helped someone, or offered kind words when nothing was expected and you had nothing to gain in return; a gift of pure love that had no strings or expectations. You might not have even seen it being received.

Jesus dying on the cross and being resurrected three days later is a story that made a religion. Whatever your personal belief about this central event of Christianity, the universal message in the Easter story is that death and rebirth. Nature itself has been modeling Easter since the beginning of time. Cycles of life beginning and ending, ending and beginning; winter rains to spring flowers, dormant seed to green shoots, even night giving way to day. Humans in our relationships with each other, act out the Easter story too. In is best displayed in expressions of love – the giving of ourselves without expecting anything in return. In this way we nurture more than our bodies; we nurture the spirit.

I am reminded of the early Christians trying to figure out how to tell their story. Until they did, they celebrated Passover, that great ritual of thanksgiving. And it is with a spirit of great thanksgiving that we can all celebrate all the stories of Easter. Spring is here and love is all around. Happy Easter.

Blessed be and amen.

Awesome Earth Day (4/17/11)

I’m in love with yet another book: Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature by Kathleen Dean Moore. On the outside cover is a photograph of two speckled blue eggs in a nest. On the pages inside, the author takes me on a “series of excursions to ancient forests, wild rivers, remote deserts, and windswept islands to learn what the natural world could teach about sorrow and gladness”. [i]

It starts with snakes. The very first page in the Gladness section begins by talking about snakes having spent the winter underground in cracks between rocks and nestled together under a glaze of ice. With springtime coming, the author is curious about what the snakes are up to.

Years before when she and her husband moved to a house that sat in the middle of a long-ago cleared land, they made room for snakes. For Father’s Day one year, the kids dragged sheets of scrap tin and placed them along the edges of the property; perfect shelter for mice and voles … and snakes.

Early each spring when the mornings are still cold, the author – who is much braver than I am – lifts the edges of the makeshift shelters and peers inside to discover what creatures have nestled beneath the scraps of tin. No one is home under the first one. Mice and voles along with a few skeletons occupy the next few. Then voila! Snakes.

The garter snakes are left alone. They are the ones that slither through your fingers and prompt you to yo-yo them between our hands to keep them in sight. The garter snakes also deposit a smelly brown snake-stain on your skin that would make a skunk proud. But then there’s the little rubber boa snakes. They’re much more lovable. When one of these is picked up, it warms itself in the palm of your hand and then slowly wraps itself around your wrist, often looping its tail around a finger.

I’m not nearly as enamored with snakes as the author – I’m usually running the other way – but she has the patience to sit for long periods and observe snake behavior. She knows that snakes can do something humans can’t. When a snake flicks its tongue out, it gathers molecules from the air and then flicks these same molecules back into pits at the top of the its mouth. The essence of the air goes straight to the snake’s brain – “not tasting, not smelling, but in another way directly knowing the acid of adult eagerness or the sweet milky warmth of the morning.”[ii]

A snake, like a mouse, has a system of glands, genes, and receptors that are almost non-existent in humans. Snakes, and some other creatures, have over five hundred genes dedicated to this “sixth sense” which feed it information on fear, lust, hunger, thirst, and satisfaction. Humans have all these genes too, but only a half dozen are functional. All the other human vomeronasal genes are broken and degenerate.[iii] Human fetuses have two vomeronasal glands, but they dry up before birth.[iv] Let’s face the facts; snakes have more sense than humans. You might say snakes are more sensitive. Or at the least, snakes react on a broader base of sensory information. To be clear, I do not include humans with snaky personalities with having more sense, or using the sense they do have. But I do wonder, what do real snakes get out of gulping air that I don’t?

Snakes often give me nightmares. But I read about this sixth sense and the idea that I’m missing something right before I went to bed one night. I didn’t exactly have a nightmare, and snakes weren’t involved – but it still started with the snakes chapter.

In my dream there were characters and a plot. At one point I found myself sitting on a concrete wall along a sidewalk across the street from a city park. I sensed something was not right and told the others sitting next to me. I was not able to explain how I knew something was going to happen, but I knew. I got up and walked further up the hill away from the street. Then my dream went blank. I kept going back to the where I was sitting on the wall, but nothing happened. The dream wouldn’t come back. My solid dream dissolved into shreds. It’s like everything fell apart. My unexplained knowing could not be processed further. Where’s the vomeronasal gland when you need it!

I wonder if this dream was an enactment of the missing sixth sense. I had breathed the air on the street near the park, taken in information that was vaguely comprehensible but not tangible or explainable. I had an awareness that there was something more, but access was denied. It’s like trying to go to the next level in a game puzzler or a math problem, but I’m not there yet. I can improve my game skills and math skills, but I can’t make hardened glands or degenerate genes work. In the case of the sixth sense, the snakes win.

What am I missing? I have a fully functioning brain, five other sense organs that work well, a healthy body, and a soul. Most of these function well beyond the snake’s ability – although I have to give it to the snakes in the slither department! But I can easily be fooled into thinking that what I’m seeing is complete. The gulps of air that I do understand, inform my senses well enough to adequately cope in this world. I know that my human lack of a working sixth sense deprives me of additional information that might be useful. My other senses work overtime to assemble meaning in conjunction with my brain (and hopefully integrate with my spirit). But this world is filled with ploys to trick us into thinking we see the whole image. All the while, we are blindly unknowing. Often our economic interests provide a storyline that make it acceptable for us to ignore even what we do know.

When I was growing up, each summer Mom and Dad would load all three kids in the back seat of our wood paneled Country Squire station wagon for our annual trek to see grandparents. They’d roll up the windows, turn on the AC against the summer heat, and chain smoke all the way from North Carolina to Indiana. We’d head north through Mt. Airy, cut through a slice of Virginia and then we’d drive through the mountains of West Virginia. I remember loving these mountains. In the early years, there was a winding two-lane highway full of hairpins and steep drop-offs. Gradually, the West Virginia Turnpike came into being, basically adding an extra lane every now and then. But some summers, the outside lane, the one closest to the edge, had actually fallen off the mountain. Traffic snarled along mountain hollows, dense forests, and tumbling creeks. It was a long haul, but the mountains drew me into their magic.

These days, the West Virginia Turnpike is a heavily traveled interstate. When you drive south from Charleston, you speed along at 70mph – a hair-raising speed around curves on steep grades. Instead of looking at the mountains in all their splendor, you hold on with white knuckles and stare wide eyed as the road races by.

As much as I love the Appalachian Mountains, it is also true that the mountains that our family used to climb up and over in our station wagon, are mostly gone. It is still picture postcard perfect along the interstate, but once you go beyond the public sight-line, more than 500 mountains have been obliterated. Giant earth moving machines have scraped them into the creeks and valleys, extracting dirty coal as they go.

My senses tell me the trip through West Virginia is still beautiful. As long as I don’t push beyond what has been carefully engineered for public relations and tourism, I can hold onto my image of pristine mountains. But just like my dream that fell apart, the truth of the mountains – the ones that used to be – is shredded into thin air.

I listened to a snippet of an interview with Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourner’s Truth yesterday afternoon. His is a leading progressive voice in today’s challenging religious world. Something he said caught my attention. We can believe everything is all right or that things just are the way they are – until we change perspective. The mountains are there until I look beyond the interstate. There are no snakes on the cleared land, until scraps of tin are put in place to provide shelter.

Jim Wallis also said something else. He believes Mother Teresa was a saint because she didn’t ask why. Oscar Romero, a priest martyr who denounced poverty and injustice in El Salvador, dared to ask why. Unlike Mother Teresa, Oscar Romero’s path to sainthood is a political nightmare.

Is asking “why” akin to lifting the scrap of tin and changing our perceptions? If we had asked why in 1970 when the first West Virginia mountaintop was removed, could we have kept asking until we got beyond economic efficiencies and profit motives and delved deep into our moral and ethical obligation to not destroy the earth? I’m sure people did ask why but encountered a political nightmare. In the meantime, we’ve lost 500 mountains in West Virginia alone. Twenty-four states still permit strip mining.

There are philosophers who say that if you can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. If we blink, the mountains are gone. Where they really there? By playing God, we are altering our perceptions. Kathleen Moore, the author of the book I love, believes it is our entire onus, our human burden, to hold the world in existence by paying attention.[v]

Sitting by the snakes as they gulp air and flick the molecules into their sense organs, we could mourn our losses. Or, we could taste the air, listen with our full bodies, see beyond the sight line, and feel our deep connection with the earth.

Carl Jung once reflected on the ladder or hierarchy of creation. He wrote, “The idea that [humans] alone possesses the primacy of reason is antiquated twaddle. I have even found that men are far more irrational than animals.” According to Jung, elephants have the most wisdom. Followed by lions. Then pythons. Pythons! Snakes again! Humans fall somewhere below.[vi]

Is there any hope? 

Once again, I look to nature – and religion. Our loss of connection with nature is not a personal or social problem: it is a religious problem.[vii] We are taught that divinity is not found in nature, but elsewhere. Our separation keeps us from listening to something ancient and deep within our selves. I wonder if lack of use of the vomeronasal sensory system caused its demise in humans. Likewise, I wonder if our lack of paying attention to nature has led to its devaluing and subsequent abuse.

I believe that as long as religions of the masses continue to shun nature and keep the body separate, the earth will continue to suffer. So will we. Last month, UU ministers and others received a request from the Unitarian Universalist Association for contributions to a new hymnal that will include Earth-centered Liturgy. How wonderful is that! Within a religious framework that honors all sorts of human and religious diversity, we hold nature as sacred. This is the type of perspective shift that we need. Not the undoing of everything we know or the undoing of belief systems, but a change that enables a re-connection with the interdependent web of ALL creation.  

Carl Jung advised that, “Enchantment is the oldest form of healing.”[viii]  What would it be like if we fell in love with nature itself, not just books about nature. We run across the earth’s back each day, paddle across earth’s waters, fly above the clouds, and get soaked by the rain. What would it be like if we could gulp the air, tap into our primordial senses, and re-enchant our love affair with nature?

I’ve seen a picture of a lone pine standing tall and alive amid the destruction on a tsunami-wrecked beach in Japan.

Birds are migrating and winter ponds are shrinking. Baby birds will hatch soon.

Daffodils are blooming. And tulips. And magnolias. Ah yes, the nature is blooming.

And we’re alive!

We can gulp the air.

Awesome.

Happy Earth Day.

Blessed be. Amen.

---

[i] Moore, Kathleen Dean. Wild comfort: The Solace of Nature. Trumpeter. Boston. 2010. Back cover.

[ii] Moore. pgs. 5-6.

[iii] Moore. pg. 7.

[iv] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomeronasal_organ

[v] Moore. pgs 91-92.

[vi] Sabini, Meredith ed. The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology and Modern Life. North Atlantic Books. Berkeley, CA. 2002, 2005. 2008. pg. 12.

[vii] Sabini. pg. 2.

[viii] Sabini. pg. 4.

Islamophobia, Racism, and the Puritan Myth (4/3/11)

If you are a Congressman and want to ignite a controversy and inflame relations, Representative Peter King is your man. He launched a grand example last month. Instead of holding yet another hearing on terrorism, Representative King stepped into religious territory and held hearings on the ‘Radicalization of Muslim-Americans’.

Known for his anti-Islamic sentiments, Representative King barreled ahead with his contentious showcasing of thinly veiled Islamophobia. King has been often quoted for statements such as “America has too many mosques.”[i] “80-85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists.” and “No Muslim leaders [are] cooperating with the war on terror.”[ii] 

These statements range from the bias of personal opinion to being provable as blatantly wrong. There are between 4 and 6 million Muslims in this country. A Homeland Security study noted that this population is so concerned about home-grown extremists in their midst that they have not only provided information to help authorities, they have been so watchful that community members have turned in people who turned out to be undercover informants.[iii]

For many people, Representative King’s hearing on Capitol Hill brings back visions of the McCarthy hearings from the 1950’s. Eventually censured for his unsubstantiated claims, Joe McCarthy used his elected position of United States Senator to strike fear in hearts of many Americans by making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence.

Representative King is not Joe McCarthy. But he waves the American flag just as high. He also uses broad rhetoric to enlarge very real but identifiable threats to cast sweeping suspicion onto entire communities. In his show of patriotism, King tapped into well-rehearsed fears in the American psyche. King, like McCarthy before him, tapped into deep-seated fears that go back to the founding of this country.

I strongly believe that to understand the persistence and viciousness of intolerance in this country, we have to go back into history to sort out its deepest roots. Sometimes we have to go way back.

Let’s do a quick re-cap of relevant religious history. Christianity is 2000 years old. Islam is 1400 years old. During the Middle Ages, Christianity expanded its territory in Europe primarily through violent inquisitions and crusades. The Protestant Reformation, started by Martin Luther in 1517, marked the end of the Middle Ages with a defiant split between the Roman Catholic Church and the new Protestant movement. Catholicism was now the archenemy of the fledging Protestant church.

In the meantime, Islam had spread throughout the Ottoman Empire. When the start-up Protestant movement needed outside help to gain momentum against the despised but well-entrenched Roman Catholic Church, the Protestants called on the Muslims. Without the backing of the Ottoman Empire – the Muslims – the Protestant movement would probably have failed.

Let me repeat that. Without the backing of the Ottoman Empire – the Muslims – the Protestant movement would probably have failed. 

Our own Unitarian church was officially founded in the midst of this triangulated struggle between the three religions. During the time following the Reformation, there was only one area of Europe that was cut off on all sides and completely surrounded by competing religions. This area stood like a Protestant island with the Catholics surrounding the western edges and the Muslims bracketing the eastern borders. It was the only Protestant territory that bordered the Ottoman Empire. It was an island where anxious Protestantism actually flourished under the protection of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. The Catholic Church would have easily conquered the area, but it did not want to risk direct confrontation with the Ottoman Empire over a small territory. It was in this isolated outpost of Protestantism, called Transylvania, that King John issued an edict of religious tolerance and formally launched the Unitarian church.

Our Unitarian Universalist Church today, owes is very existence to the establishment of religious tolerance. Carving out a peaceful existence in times of open religious warfare, King John of Transylvania refused to give in to either side. Instead, he issued an edict that declared there must be a better way. There must be a better way through religious freedom and we will openly declare it and we will live it. In our lands, let there be peace built on tolerance and non-violence. It will be against the law to attack, defame, or cause harm to a person or his family because he preaches what he believes. Everyone has the choice to listen – or not. It was a bold stand in times of aggressive religious expansion. But King John defined a better way. His official edict of religious tolerance chartered our Unitarian faith. Our religious DNA is built on tolerance and non-violence.

Besides sacred texts, what makes the competing Abrahamic religions of Catholicism, Islam, and Protestantism different from each other? It is interesting to compare. While the Bible is analyzed, formalized and distributed by the church in the Catholic tradition, Islam and Protestantism depend upon direct analysis of scripture, whether it be the Qur’an or the Bible. Neither uses a formal structure to disseminate knowledge. The Catholic Church uses its vast resources to buttress a structural religion, Islam and Protestantism each rest on a rhetorical commitment to a universal mission.[v]

It is perhaps this reliance on individual interpretation and adherence that anticipates the tension in today’s Christian-Islamic relations. Each of these traditions, Protestantism and Islam, has fostered strong religious identities and each has spawned fundamentalist factions and extremists. The tolerant and supportive relationship between Islam and Protestantism during the Reformation did not last.

About the time the Ottoman Empire began a period of decline, Europeans were discovering the New World. It was the Protestant vision of America that has most shaped our national character as well as our current struggles. As the Puritans fled religious persecution in England and embarked on the treacherous cross-Atlantic voyage, they compared themselves to the ancient Israelites fleeing bondage in Egypt and wandering for forty years in the dessert. The ancient Israelites had Moses and Joshua; the Puritans had John Winthrop.

On the ships bound for the Massachusetts Bay, Winthrop preached fiery sermons that exalted the Puritans as God’s new chosen people who were embarking on a sacred journey to the Promised Land. Before they even landed, Winthrop implanted into the Puritan mind that America had special power. As children in England, some Protestants were taught that God would work through the English faithful to bring about the ultimate redemption of mankind. America represented the great victory. God’s chosen people were called to a special destiny in the New World.[vi]

When the Puritans first reached the Massachusetts shore, the primeval forests were as great and dark a wilderness as the vast and dangerous dessert was for the Israelites. And when the chosen people met the Indians, they saw them as the Devil’s children, much like the Old Testament enemies the Philistines, Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites. For the Puritans, even though the Native Americans were here first, America was promised to God’s chosen people.[vii]

The Puritans believed they were settling the New Jerusalem, the ‘city on the hill’. This became a sacred story that gave the settlers purpose and assigned meaning to their individual and collective lives. The Puritan Myth became part of our country’s founding narrative.

Eventually, the Puritan myth began to fade. Then people became reminiscent and during the 1740’s, a Great Awakening revival rekindled the hearts and minds of Americans – the chosen people – to the idea that God’s greatest work was yet to be done. Led by Jonathan Edwards’ preaching, which was full of hellfire and brimstone, Americans were emboldened with the idea that God was breaking forth new light for the world. Indeed, in a few years, victory over the British became proof of God’s blessing on America.[viii]

By the time the founding documents of this country were written though, another thread had appeared in the American mindset. The old-fashion Puritan myth began to give way to the more rationalistic and progressive social and political doctrines of the European Enlightenment. While the founding fathers still believed in God as well as America’s destiny, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams led the way in establishing political reform and a progressive democracy.

I believe that it is these two strands of American narrative, the Puritan Myth and the European Enlightenment, which set the stage for many of this country’s ugliest and most brutal battles. When the doctrine of Americans as God’s chosen people is extended into its most fundamentalist extremes, it is easy to see how white supremacy groups are buttressed in flag-draped religious dogma. After all, the Puritans were white Anglo-Saxon and didn’t God choose them? And doesn’t God heap blessings and riches on those who are successful, even if it means massive accumulation of wealth by the very few?

But a democracy promises rights and freedoms. The high-water mark of American liberalism in the 1960’s was the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which gave African-Americans the right to vote, the Medicare and Medicaid Act, and the Immigration Act of 1965.[ix] All of these are being actively challenged, whether by the incarceration of the majority of young black men,[x] defunding healthcare programs, or attacking undocumented workers and passing draconian laws against ‘illegal aliens’.

The current spat of Islamophobia, which is premised as a response to the horrific terrorist attacks on 9/11, provides a platform for the extremist version of the Puritan myth – white supremacy – to rattle its saber. The chosen people are being attacked and challenged by terrorists, and increasingly by massive immigration of non-Anglo-Saxons into the Promised Land. I might add here that Hispanics now comprise 17% of the U.S. population. Hispanics, who are mostly Catholic, are part of a structural religion that is occupied with its own internal challenges, although their sheer numbers present a clear and present danger to the establishment. But it is the Muslim presence that most irritates the Protestant worldview. Protestants, like Muslims, have the freedom of individual interpretation of religious belief. To this end, many conservative Christians have collectively elected politicians who endorse a return to a Puritan ethos built upon a sanitized Christianity. There is no room for the other.

Representative Peter King’s hearings on Capitol Hill seem to officially sanction scrutiny of an entire population as suspect. To be sure, there are Muslim terrorists. But Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber was Christian. So are the vast majority of those who commit school shootings, church bombings, and cross-burnings, including the white supremacist suspect who planted a pipe bomb laced with rat poison along the route of this year’s MLK parade in Spokane.[xi] Home-grown radical Americans who are white and Christian. In a sad note, after the Tucson shooting rampage, I remember hearing a commentator murmur, “God, I hope the shooter is not Hispanic or Muslim.”

I wish these stories were simply reports of random acts of violence. But the roots go deeper, much deeper. These crimes are outgrowths of rampant religious idealism intent on a battle of domination. At least domination from the American viewpoint since about a decade ago the term domination appeared in our Defense Department mandate. But domination also represents the age-old Christian push to evangelize the world.

Were the attacks of 9/11 radical Muslim attempts to conquer America? Or was it seething retaliation for America’s imperialistic policies in the Arab world? That discussion was sidelined by our haste to Shock and Awe the world. We still need to have the conversation.

But America is not ready. Until we undress the Puritan Myth that blindly drives our domineering, isolationist, and racist actions, we will only be talking about symptoms. Religious freedom is constitutionally guaranteed in this country. Even so, we need to have an honest conversation about religion and values, or this country will continue to both thrive, and at the same time, be held hostage to its founding narrative – a narrative that we outgrew in the 1960’s if not before.

This week I learned that renegade pastor Terry Jones of Florida followed through on his threats and burned the Qur’an. This is the same Pastor Jones that caused an international uproar last fall when he threatened to burn copies of the Qur’an in a huge bonfire on the church lawn. In protest, we at Northlake held an Interfaith 9/11 service not only to honor the victims of the original tragedy, but also to show that religious tolerance is a much better way. This church was packed to overflowing with supporters from the entire community saying we abhor the violence and are willing to make a stand for peace.

On March 20th, two weeks ago today, Pastor Jones held a mock trial complete with attorneys and jury. The defendant, the Qur’an, lost and by a poll of the jurists, the punishment was selected. Inside the church walls, a copy of the Qur’an was burned.

With the video camera running, Pastor Jones made sure this gross act of intolerance and disrespect was available to the Muslim world. They heard it. They saw it. In response, a U.N. outpost in Afghanistan was attacked and twelve people were killed. 

Pastor Jones has no regrets.

And I have no regrets that last fall this church made a stand on 9/11 for religious tolerance and peace. Extremist on both sides, Muslim and Christian are defaming their own religions with violence, terror and murder. There must be a better way. As a Unitarian Universalist, and as a minister, I choose to stand upon my religious birthright and say there must be a better way. And I am willing to work for it. I believe you are too. And I believe we will not be alone.

Religion can be a powerful force for good in the lives of individuals and the collective. It is our way of finding meaning and purpose in life. The religious impulse is embedded deep within our very being. But there will always be a struggle between individual interpretations that go too far and oppressive structures that only a few saints can break through. There is plenty of room in the middle. There is plenty of room for good. There is plenty of room for religion. And I believe that it is through religion, not its abandonment, that healing can begin.

Before we can listen to each other however, we must lower the volume. We must make room for justice. We must make room for peace. We must make room for our neighbors.

In speaking about justice, I agree with Ebu Patel, an interfaith activist and Muslim American, when he said, “The forces of inclusion have always defeated the forces of injustice, and they always will.”[xii] Amen.

Peace. Salaam. Shalom.

Blessed be.

---

[i] Woodward, Calvin and Sullivan, Eileen. “Congressional Hearings on Radical Islam Compared to McCarthyism” Associated Press. 3/9/11. http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/congressional-hearings-radical-islam-com

[ii] Esposito, John. “Peter King’s Hearings: Islamophobia Draped in the American Flag” http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/john_esposito/2011/03/islamophobia_draped_in_the_american_flag.html

[iii] Esposito.

[iv] Protestantism and Islam. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism_and_Islam

[v] Protestantism and Islam. Wikipedia.

[vi] McAdams, Dan P. The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By. Oxford University Press: New York. 2006. pg. 101-102.

[vii] McAdams. pg. 102.

[viii] McAdams. pg. 103.

[ix] Daniels, Roger. “The Immigration Act of 1965: Intended and Unintended Consequences. Amercia.gov 4/3/08. www.america.gov/st/educ-english/2008/April/20080423214226eaifas0.9637982.html

[x] Eckholm, Erik. “Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn.” New York Times. 3/20/06. www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/national/20blackmen.html

[xi] Johnson, Gene and Geranios, Nicholas K. “Spokane MKL Bomb Suspect Tied to Hate Group, Fort Lewis” Associcated Press. The News Tribune. 4/3/11. www.thenewstribune.com/2011/03/09/1576988/federal-official-says-suspect.html

[xii] Foley, Elise. “Keith Ellison Tears Up at Hearing on Muslim-American ‘Radicalization’” Huffpost Politics. 3/31/11. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/10/keith-ellison-tears-up-muslim-hearings_n_833981.html

Kyrie, Eleison (for Japan) (3/20/11)

Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Beautiful music. Wonderful choir. Kyrie, Eléison. Words that I want to hold on to in the aftermath of massive destruction and loss from earthquakes, floods, and tsunamis, words that I want to believe in. I want to give all the sadness in Japan, New Zealand, Indonesia, New Orleans, Haiti… to something, someone beyond myself. The sorrow, grief, and pain are too much to imagine, too much to bear. Can’t I please give it away?

Lord, have mercy. Kyrie, Eléison.

But I’m a Unitarian Universalist! I can’t just use words to blindly hand-over care or responsibility. I can’t escape the travails of being human with handsome words and beautiful music. I need to understand. I need to know. I need to do something.

Lord, have mercy. Who or what is Lord? Technically, it’s just a title, not a person or a god. But often we give this title to Jesus. And for most of Christianity’s history, Kyrie, Eléison has been known as the Jesus Prayer.

Lord, have mercy.

Mercy.

I told a group of friends the other night that I was going to preach on mercy. Even though the group included a former monk, their response was silence. I waited. More silence. It almost cleared the table, until someone showed mercy and changed the subject.

I went to another group of friends, which included a couple Catholics and a nun. I figured they would know about mercy. Over lunch I told them my plan to preach on mercy. I got an immediate response, “Why would you preach on that! Mercy is pity. And we don’t need more pity.”

After more reflection, and a round of coffee, they started to take a new angle – forgiveness.  But thinking about the Japanese situation, I couldn’t figure out who needed to forgive whom for what. And pity certainly wasn’t what I was feeling. My sense of grief was much more profound.

Of course I could have joined the ranks of Rush Limbaugh fans and listened as he laughed and mocked the refugees.[i] Or, I could have said “amen” in response to a Tokyo governor who said the disaster was divine retribution.[ii] But these reactions felt utterly repulsive.

I needed to know about mercy.

At its root, the word mercy is derived from ancient Hebrew and Arabic languages. In traditional form, three consonants form the root and by adding another consonant, new words are created, expanding the core meaning. RHM are the core consonants for several words, including mercy. The root, RHM, or rehem, means “womb”.  The root for mercy is womb.[iii]

How perfect. In my shock and grief watching the devastation unfold in Japan, I wanted to be held as in a womb. My shared vulnerability as a human being had been exposed and I wanted to be held in the shelter, safety, and love. I wanted everyone to be held. Mercy, yes.

I’ll leave it to you to unscramble the gender semantics of the womb and Jesus in the Jesus Prayer, Kyrie, Eléison. But please, hold onto mercy.

In our culture, mercy is often confused with pity as uncritical, sentimental benevolence. Just as my friend had rebuked mercy as pity, we often think of showing mercy as feeling sorry for someone, or feeling sorry for ourselves. We have lost the original meaning of rehem which envelopes us with the sense of tenderness and strength found in the warmth, protection, and safety of the womb.

It might be easier to consider another word that is based on rehem – compassion. Compassion is the plural of rehem.[iv] This is fascinating to me because you can’t do plural alone. To have compassion, you must be in relationship. The archetypal image for compassion is the maternal relationship of mother and child. This isn’t a casual relationship. Its origin is deep, deep, into the womb.

The Hebrew Scriptures give us an excellent example of the depth of true compassion. Two women and a baby were brought before King Solomon. The king was asked to judge to which mother the baby belonged. The two women argued their case and King Solomon issued the verdict: the baby would be cut in half and half a baby would be given to each woman. Deeply moved for her son, the real mother told the king to save the baby and give him to the other woman. Meanwhile the other woman demanded, “Kill the baby” so neither would have a son. In his wisdom, King Solomon gave the baby to the real mother whose compassion burned deep within her. She would rather give her son away than see him killed. Great was her compassion.

In Latin and Greek, compassion takes another twist. It means to suffer, undergo, or experience. Compassion means to endure [something] with another person. I must put myself in somebody else’s shoes, to feel their pain as though it were my own – and to enter generously into their point of view.[v]

I am not in Japan. I cannot enter into the refugee’s mind or environment. But I am full of compassion, as I feel connected as a human being also living at the edge of the Ring of Fire. My heart aches with the people.

I must do something.

My Unitarian Universalist faith draws me to the practical. I could give my care and responsibility away, I could assign blame to supernatural powers, or I could hide my shared vulnerability and become cynical and laugh at other’s distress. Instead, I choose to examine my faith and reassert my commitment that we are all ultimately related. We all come from the womb. With all our frailties, how could we do anything else but have mercy and compassion.

But these words feel a little ooey-gooey. What does compassion look like in the real world? How do people connect as if they had enough mercy for the other person, like the mother of the baby in the King Solomon story? What would mercy and compassion look like?

- Albert Einstein, the great genius of science, invited the African American opera singer, Marian Anderson, to stay in his home when she came to sing in Princeton because the best hotel was segregated and wouldn’t have her.[vi]

-  Two weeks after 9/11, after having dinner at a restaurant, the chef gave Stephen Jay Gould and his wife a bag containing 12 apple brown betty desserts. The chef asked the couple to give them to the workers searching the rubble. The Goulds gave them out and the last recipient, a soot-blackened fire fighter, tasted the dessert and said, “Ah… still warm.”[vii]

-  Software engineers at Google asked to use their company allotted 20% creative time to invent a way to find people in times of disaster. After the earthquake in Haiti, it took the team 72 round-the-clock hours to create People Finder. The tool was available one-hour after the recent Japanese quake.[viii]

-  And in Japan this week, people lined up for their first hot soup since the tsunami. Each person took only one cup. No one got back in line for seconds. Food is shared. Everyone is fed, even if it means each person gets less.

It is important to share stories like this when it is so easy to become overwhelmed by the world around us. Compassion – and mercy – reminds us of our relationship to each other and to our higher calling.

All the world’s great religions have a golden rule. In 500 BCE, Confucius taught consideration and asked his disciples to practice all day and every day. In 400 BCE, the Buddha talked about nirvana, a blowing out of passions, desires, and selfishness. Buddhism’s four elements of immeasurable love are loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and even-mindedness. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam also have golden rules. Each presents compassion as natural to human beings and each calls us to set aside our own ego in empathetic consideration of others.[ix]

Kyrie, Eléison. Lord, have mercy. May we all have mercy and compassion.

At his meditation center at Plum Village in France, Thich Nhat Hanh has a random bell rung three times a day. When this mindfulness bell rings, everyone pauses what they are doing and breathes mindfully three times before returning to whatever they were doing. Three conscious breaths.[x]

I wonder if we heard a mindfulness bell everyday, if we could take three deep breaths and think about mercy and compassion. Think about it. If a mindfulness bell rang in the morning, we could set our intent. The bell in the middle of the day would remind us to act on our intention. At night, the last bell would remind us to reflect on how we exercised our intent to have compassion that day.

If we heard a bell and thought of compassion…

- Would we suddenly see the homeless person sleeping under the bridge on our way to work?

- Would we find creative ways to break the cycle of poverty?

- Would we have time to visit with the senior who is alone?

- Would we invent something truly useful like the People Finder?

- Would we give all children a quality education?

I may not be able to help the people in Japan, although my heart is filled with compassion. What I can do is act in a compassionate way right here at home. And if enough people did that, compassion and mercy would reach all around the world.

That is how I put my faith into action. Everyone is dealing with something difficult. We all need compassion. We all need mercy. Kyrie, Eléison.

(bell)

I close with words from Mary Oliver.

“When I cried for Help” (Red Bird)

Where are you, Angel of Mercy?

Outside in the dusk, among the flowers?

Leaning against the window or the door?

Or waiting, half asleep, in the spare room?

I’m here, said the Angel of Mercy.

I’m everywhere – in the garden, in the house,

and everywhere else on earth – so much

asking, so much to do. Hurry! I need you.

Kyrie, Eléison.

Blessed be and amen.

___

[1] “Rush Limbaugh Mocks Japan Quake Refugees.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/16/rush-limbaugh-mocks-japan-refugees_n_836384.html

[1] Gilgoff, Dan. “Tokyo governor apologizes for calling quake divine retribution.” http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/15/tokyo-governor-apologizes-for-calling-quake-divine-retribution/?hpt=C2

[1] Armstrong, Karen.  Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life. Alfred A. Knopf. New York. 2010. pg. 19.

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=K3jLfQP4pF0C&pg=PA140&lpg=PA140&dq=rehem+RHM&source=bl&ots=zEfiS0_JhU&sig=DC5oFjTFpW1U5Sg8OVCLpNhM5mw&hl=en&ei=L7mCTfevJpLEsAPl6NyCAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=rehem%20RHM&f=false

[1] Armstrong. pg. 9.

[1] TED Talks. Krista Tippett: Reconnecting with Compassion. http://www.ted.com/talks/krista_tippett_reconnecting_with_compassion.html

[1] Pescan, Rev. Barbara J. “Only by Your Presence” (sermon)

[1] “Google gives 20% to Japan crisis.” http://money.cnn.com/2011/03/17/technology/google_person-finder_Japan/indexhtm?hpt=T2

[1] Armstrong. pg. 11.

[1] Pescan. Rev. Barbara J. “What to Do When Nothing Can be Done?” (sermon posted on uua.org)