Making Judea Great Again

This is the text of a sermon I wrote and read this morning when I led worship for a friend who was on vacation. It is a different topic than I would normally write about, or is aimed differently, because she is minister of a Christian church and follows the lectionary. Today was Christ the King Sunday, so a reading from John 18:33-7 is my reference.

Making Judea Great Again

          A couple decades ago, when we were first married, my wife and I developed the habit of describing anything that was garishly colored—cerulean, aquamarine, taupe, copper, any neon hue—as a prom dress. As in, “That’s not a whatever, that’s a prom dress.”

          I was working at a group home for adults with emotional and developmental disabilities back then. One day, one of the residents had the day off from work and I took him shopping. When we parked in the mall parking lot, we were a couple yards from a small car that was colored a lurid lilac color. My passenger, who loved cars, pointed it out to me. “Look at that car!”

          Instinctively I said, “That’s not a car, that’s a prom dress.”

          He looked at me, he looked at the car, looked back at me, looked back at the car. Then he said, in exactly the same slow, deliberate cadence I’m sure had been used more than once on him, “That’s a car.”

          Words mean. They make solid the ephemeral world around us. They can hurt and they can heal. Before I became a full time preacher I was a full time writing teacher so you can perhaps imagine how important getting the right word or choosing the right interpretation of a word can be for me. When I taught technical writing, I had an exercise asking students to imagine I was a knight from the Middle Ages and they had to explain how a car worked to me.

          One of the most important elements of communication, whether written or oral, is to meet the audience where he or she is. To use the language that makes someone’s world real. This means using the terminology or words and phrases that the person you want to communicate with uses to make them mean roughly the same idea you want to get across. In my exercise, this meant using terms like “horse,” “spark,” and “chain,” and avoiding words like “gas”, “combustion”, “engine”, not necessarily because the words were unfamiliar but because their meanings had changed so dramatically from how someone a millennium ago would have understood them.

          The original speaker of what came to us as the Book of John may have used some word or phrase his audience had long since come to understand by virtue of its repetition. But a century later, the writer of John’s gospel, in trying to get across the newness of God’s community without bogging down his readers with questions about what exactly an unfamiliar word means, used words they had heard and understood all their lives. Hence, we get a God who is king, a Jesus who is Lord, and a place below them for the rest of us we comfortably understand.

          “Are you the king of the Jews?” “My kingdom is not from this world.” “So you are a king?” “You say that I am a king.” Why king? The John writer’s Jesus, who’s speaking Aramaic, a now nearly-extinct Semitic language related to Hebrew and Syriac, being supplanted by Arabic eventually in most places a few centuries into the Common Era, uses a word that seems, in nearly everything we understand about his theology, contrary to the freedom he otherwise espouses. If Jesus were to preach this message today, he would use a different terminology. We might get instead a God who is Chief Executive Officer, a Jesus who is our Supervisor. “Thy corporation come, thy will be done.”

To understand this, and why the John writer makes a lot about it, we need to read ahead. In seminary, I was taught two important rules in interpreting selections from the Bible: read the chapters before and after the selection and place yourself in the position of the original hearers of the selection.

          We know the books that comprise the Bible, like all ancient literature, were initially oral recitation for small audiences of believers meeting to hear the Word. These were eventually written down over the course of several hundred years. The oldest scrap of the Gospel of John has been dated to the Second Century Common Era, at least a hundred years after the death of anyone who would actually have laid eyes on the historical Jesus So to make sense of what is said, to hear it fully, we have to place ourselves in the minds of men and women who have heard scraps of the teachings of this peasant killed by an imperial force which was still very much in charge.  

It’s in chapter 19 we are given the ultimate rejection of Jesus by the people he came to Jerusalem to save. Having had Jesus whipped, Pilate presents him to the crowd gathered for Passover, saying “Here is your King!” But the crowd refuses to accept responsibility for Jesus, crying for his execution. Pilate, in John’s account, tries one last time, asking incredulously, “Shall I crucify your King?” Caiaphas and his cohorts answer him, “We have no king but Caesar.”

          The initial listeners of John’s gospel would have heard something very different. At the time of its telling, a common hymn sung during Passover contained the declaration, “We have no king but you [God].” Caiaphas and the high priests’ words make explicit their rejection not only of Jesus but of God. As followers of the Scriptures, intimately familiar with the story known to us as Exodus, the first century listeners would have heard something familiar and frightening.

Caesar is a Latin word, and in Greek is Kaiser, a word we still use. But there is no word for Caesar in Aramaic or in Hebrew, the languages the original hearers might have heard. They would have heard the word malik or king in close relation to Caesar, just as in Exodus they had heard the word Pharaoh. What they hear is a demand to return to the slavery their ancestors had escaped. 

It would be a return to, well, better the devil you know. God may have brought them out of slavery, but the people are electing to return, metaphorically, to Egypt. Knowing full well how badly most of them had it during that period, they wanted to return to that semblance of comfort. Making Judea Great Again, as it were.  

A jaded, servile Pilate famously mocks what Jesus said, that his purpose is to testify to the truth of the new community God will bring about. “What is truth?” Truth is just as malleable today as it was when Pilate said this. We live in an age of “fake news,” of “alternative facts.” We watch a video of a fight and we’re certain we understand who started it and who ended it. But then someone points out that it’s filmed from a perspective ignoring this guy over here, or that the video starts just after the first punch is thrown so we don’t hear what the other guy said. Or it’s been cropped, or speeded up or slowed down, or that the person recording is friends with one of the combatants and shows him in a better light.

Or we listen to a speech and we hear, quite clearly, the speaker make a racist comment. We are certain of what we’ve heard. But when the Pilates who work for Caesar go on TV or the Internet, saying, “That’s not what he said, or it’s not what he meant, or he was clearly joking. You are the real racist for having thought you heard him say something racist,” what are we to believe? When we’re told our eyes or our ears or our intellect is suspect, that our news sources and our schools and history books, the organizations whose intent are to collect what was said and done and tell others, are purveyors of “fake news”, then we have to admit Pilate’s mockery is justified. If Jesus’ intent is to testify to the truth, and the truth is subject to alternative facts, where does the truth lie? Does the truth lie? Scholars have discovered a Gospel of Judas. Will we someday unearth a Gospel of Pilate? 

This is a problem inherent to continuing to use, thousands of years after the event, words that were at the time an approximation of what the writer meant. Pharaohs built monuments to themselves, Caesars named conquered cities and nations after themselves, kings and princes kill people on a whim and declare themselves innocent. They aggrandize themselves, not God.

What’s needed is a different way of looking at the words we bring the world around us to life. Instead of the kingdom of God, perhaps what is to come is the community of beloveds, a phrase popularized by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. The beloved community, however, I tell you already exists. Like the John Gospel’s kingdom of god, it is not a place but an agreement between people to care for one another, to help one another, feed one another, keep one another warm and safe. The beloved community is one of radical inclusivity, where someone looks out not for himself but for everyone, knowing that in their humanity they are all him. “My kingdom is of another place,” Jesus says, locating it not in the world of then or now but to come. It requires a lot of work, and 2 millennia after Jesus, we have barely begun.

But examples of the work of the beloved community are all around us. Last month Milwaukee bus driver Natalie Barnes was on her regular route when a stranger came up to her, told her his house had been condemned, and that he was homeless and asked if he could ride the bus all night to stay warm. She did so, and when she stopped for dinner, she bought him some hot food too. When her shift was over, she bought him clothes and supplies, then dropped him off at a homeless shelter where a friend works.

Will there be a happy ending? Well, I hope so. Barnes says she speaks to him every couple days to let him know someone cares. He was a stranger in need asking for a kindness and rewarded with more than he could have hope for. As that prolific speaker, Anonymous, has it, if you have been blessed by God, build a longer table, not a taller fence.

the problem of good

A Sermon Delivered to Willmar UU Church,

September 15, 2013,

            I’d like to start this morning’s sermon by reciting the names of four young women. I’ll bring them up again later. Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Denise McNair.

I almost don’t know where to start because this involves a situation about which most of you will have thought about more than I have. As a result, I’m going to make this a shorter sermon than usual so we have more time than usual for community dialogue.

            In the event someone isn’t familiar with the facts of the situation, they are these. The body of 79 year old Lila Warwick was found the evening of Monday, July 29^th of this year, at her home on Highway 12. She had failed to pick up her daughter that morning and didn’t show up for volunteer duties at that evening’s Bible study. A Kandiyohi County deputy was asked to check on her welfare and discovered her body in her basement. She had been strangled, stabbed multiple times with a 20-inch sword-like knife, and thrown down her cellar stairs. It’s not reported that I can locate but my guess is she died from loss of blood and blunt trauma. Over the course of two days three teenagers were arrested for her murder. One of the teens is her grandson.

            The teen who is charged with the actual murder, 19 year old Brok Junkermeier, has given testimony that suggests the murder happened this way. Robbing Lila Warwick had been planned for the previous week, but been abandoned. Junkermeier entered Warwick’s home through her garage early Monday morning, about 6:45, where he apparently met up with her. The third teen arrested, 16 year old Devon Jenkins, kept watch outside the garage for witnesses or police. Warwick’s grandson, 17 year old Robbie, who stayed in the car they’d arrived in, had provided the access code or it may have been a key, stories differ, to the garage door. Junkermeier forced Warwick to show him her online bank balance and then to write a check for $1500 before killing her. Then he collected some items from the house—no one has reported what they were; given Junkermeier’s previous convictions for theft and receiving stolen property, we might presume they were easily sold things like electronics and jewelry—and as he was loading them in the back seat Junkermeier told Jenkins and Robbie he had killed Robbie’s grandmother. The three boys apparently went on with their lives as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened; Junkermeier, in fact, was arrested at his part-time job at a local printer.

Both Junkermeier, who seems to be the teen who is talking as most news stories focus on him, and Jenkins claim the idea and planning for the robbery of his grandmother was Robbie Warwick’s, although no one has explained if Lila Warwick’s murder was part of the plan. People who know the three of them say Robbie was the leader of the group. Apparently the impetus for the crime was his conviction that his grandmother had $40,000 in a safe, but that was only wishful thinking. Robbie says he was to receive $300 for having given Junkermeier access.

            While Brok Junkermeier’s and Devon Jenkins’ series of events and how we believe or disbelieve them are subject to interpretation, the facts are not. And the fact that Lila Warwick is dead and that evidence points to her grandson Robbie’s intimate involvement with it is, given what we have heard, incontrovertible we have to ask ourselves why we feel especially repulsed. I don’t think I speak only for myself when I say there is something repugnant, absent extreme circumstances, in the death of a old woman caused, at least somehow, by her grandson. Particularly when we have testimony that his grandmother allowed him to stay with her when he was at an ebb and helping him to get help for his drug issues. Interestingly, the only drug I read about Robbie being involved with was marijuana which is not typically a drug causing massively uncharacteristic behavior so we are forgiven if we assume, as I do, that he was already inclined to do the things he did. His cousin reports Robbie hated his grandmother, perhaps resenting what he saw as meddling or an attempt to control him. At this point, beyond the $300 he was supposed to receive—some news reports say it was $700 which is a good indication how little we still really know about this situation—we don’t know Robbie Warwick’s rationale for providing the victim and the means of access.

            Here’s the question that as people of faith we must ask ourselves: Leaving aside the question of whether someone is also his actions, is Robbie Warwick evil?

            I’m going to give you the answer in advance. The answer is that I don’t know the answer. I doubt anyone knows the answer, not with certainty, although given how much thought a lot of people have given the question over millennia, I’m sure someone will eventually come up with the answer. It’s probably one of those million-monkeys-on-a-million-typewriters sort of thing.

            Just because I don’t think anyone has the answer yet doesn’t mean I can’t go to someone who might have a better clue than me. In this instance it’s the author Terry Eagleton who published an essay on evil in the magazine Tikkun two years ago. You might not be familiar with Eagleton’s name unless you are up on your contemporary MarxistBritish literary critics. He’s one of the last self-identifying Marxist academics, teaching at the National University of Ireland in Galway, and publishing a book in 2010 called simply OnEvil.

            Eagleton begins with the question, Why “is evil so sexy, and so profoundly glamorous? And why does virtue seem so boring?” I might rephrase it to ask, Why is doing evil or allowing evil to happen so appealing? Well, I do have an answer for this question: Evil is appealing because to do or allow evil is easy. Doing the easy thing is not always evil but doing evil is always easy.

            Eagleton calls evil “a kind of lack or defectiveness, a sort of nothingness or negativity, an inability to be truly alive. Evil may look lively, seductive, and flamboyant, but this is just the flashy show it puts on to cover up the hollowness at its heart. It is the paper-thinness of evil, its brittle unreality” that gives it away. I’m reminded of a scene from the second Austin Powers movie when Dr. Evil is confronted by his son, Scott Evil, on the Jerry Springer Show. He’s asked by his son, “Why’d you run out on me?” To which his father replies, “Because you’re not quite evil enough. You’re quasi-evil, you’re semi-evil. You’re the margarine of evil. You’re the Diet Coke of evil.”

            Those “who are evil,” Eagleton continues, “can only manage a kind of sham, inauthentic life, a ghastly parody of genuine life; and they derive this life from their own sufferings and from the sufferings they inflict on others…Only in being in atrocious pain can the evil persuade themselves that they are still alive.” By this light, assuming Robbie Warwick wanted his grandmother to suffer and felt justified only by her suffering and not the $300 or $700 he expected to receive after his friend robbed her, then yes, his actions were evil. Does this mean Robbie Warwick is also evil? I’m not prepared to go there.

            Eagleton further explains that “virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully,” that people who do “evil…cannot bear the fact that they are incomplete—which is to say, cannot bear the fact that they are human,” that they “are pathological purists for whom [the] intolerably messy and indeterminate” aspects of life are anathema, and “are precisely those [people] who don’t enjoy an orgy.”

            We’ll let that last line stand without comment. Eagleton’s point is that “a genuine human community…can only be [constituted] on the basis of our shared failure, frailty, and mortality. This is a community of repentance and forgiveness, and it represents everything that is the opposite of the American Dream.” You may have thought I was kidding about that Marxist crack. If Eagleton is right, “that to be stripped of our culture and civilization, of all that makes for difference and specificity, is…to cease to be human altogether,” then it’s in the recognition of our own ability to be both evil and virtuous, as the Lutherans say, to be simultaneously sinner and saint, that our humanity lies. I don’t know if Robbie Warwick recognizes or regrets the evil he has done but he is profoundly human in having allowed it to bubble to the surface.

My friend RobMacDougall, a United Church of Christ minister in Menomonie, Wisconsin, was once asked how he can be certain there is a god in the face of all the evil that happens around us daily. He responded that the proof was in all the people who weren’t murdered or raped or hurt. While I’m not sure I agree with his conclusion I can’t fault his thesis. The fact remains there are a lot of people who aren’t killed or hurt. While it’s true there are many who do, there many, many more who do not wake up hungry or in pain, whose lives are essentially pleasant to them, whose grandchildren do not plan to rob them. Anglican Bishop NT Wright has written that the problem for humanity is not, Why is there evil? but, Why is there good?

            Evil, as I said, is easy. It should be our default setting. But human behavior, that massive cauldron of possibilities, does not support this. Most people do not act out of self-interest, enlightened or not. Most people act in other people’s interest even if they don’t think of it that way. Consider the simple act of flushing a public toilet that we’ve just used. We get nothing of value out of it, we’ve already used it, and there’s no reason we should feel confident leaving our mess for the next person to clean up. Similarly, yoga guru KrishnaDas has pointed out with amazement that many people show up daily at centers and churches where they try to get themselves straight with the universe. What’s amazing, he says, is that we seek anything outside ourselves. Why aren’t we all sitting at home getting drunk and eating cheeseburgers?

            Think on this. This is Sunday morning. Why aren’t we nursing hangovers and watching the game alone? Why are we in church where we gather with others to sing and talk and, we hope, learn a little more about ourselves? How can that possibly benefit us more than a Jameson single malt and a Big Mac?

            The answer may lie in this story. In yesterday’s mail I received an envelope with a thin slip of paper in it. It’s a thank-you note from a gentleman I’ve never met in Bigfork, MN, not far from Bemidji.

            I take walks during my lunch break at the bookstore where I work part time and the store is in a mall.  About a week ago I noticed a slip of paper on the floor. I picked it up and it turned out to be a check for $50.

            The check had been drawn on an account at a bank in Bigfork and when I got home that night I put it in an envelope with a note telling how I’d come to find it. I didn’t include my name since I didn’t expect to hear anything back, but I put my return address on the envelope so if the address was wrong it wouldn’t get lost. Picture this, two people communicating not by name but by addresses—to me this gentleman was 55096 Gale Lake Road and to him I am 2509 County Road N—as if we were playing a game of putting pins on a map. His note to me reads, “Thank you for finding a check I wrote to my grandson and sending it back to me. You are a very good person and they are hard to find. Thanks again, Jim Lissick.”

            He has a name for me now. We are two strangers who exist for one another only because of a good deed, and I don’t think I’m immodest making a claim to that deed. It wasn’t a heroic act. I simply bent down and picked it up and then sent it away. When I saw the envelope in my mail I had to think hard to place where I had heard of Bigfork, MN. It proves my argument, that evil is both easy and rare, that its acts stand out in our collective memory while our virtuous acts are so commonplace we forget about them.

            Picking up that check and returning it didn’t benefit me in any way, unless you count some vague warm fuzzy sensation of internal feel-good. It certainly wasn’t in my self-interest—my self-interest lay in cashing that $50 check. I think Jim Lissick and I are both aware that was a possibility and it says something about me, but about other people too, that that didn’t happen. Balladeer Bruce Springsteen sings, “You’ve got to learn to live with what you can’t riseabove.” It’s in knowing which actions we can’t live with ourselves having done that the good happens.

            Finally, is Robbie Warwick or Devon Jackson or especially Brok Junkermeier evil for what they’ve done? I don’t think so. Their actions were evil and so was their inaction—behaving as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, acting as if their lives, now that Lila Warwick’s had ended, would simply go on—but unlike Terry Eagleton I’m not ready to lump people and their acts together. Surely, if we can opt for church over cheeseburgers, then turning their lives around is possible for these boys. It’s in the nature of being human to seek something outside ourselves—god, beloved community, the universe, call it what you will—and I don’t doubt that impetus will manifest itself in these boys too. Meanwhile, paraphrasing Springsteen, we must rise to the level of actions whose doing we can live with.

            And those girls’ names I mentioned at the start. They are the 4 little girlsfamously killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church inBirmingham 50 years ago today. When we are down, when we are certain evil has won and will always win and we’re left fighting the good fight whose end is always in doubt, we need to remember that, in this country, that event is a watershed. It was an evil act whose repetition would call down such a rebuke from people we cannot even imagine it. We must remember that when it comes to evil acts there are lines beyond which no one is willing to cross.

 

unambiguous inclusion

I led one congregation that grappled with, prayed about, and tried to discern whether they should join the More Light movement of the Presbyterian Church (USA), an advocacy group striving for full inclusion of LGBT...persons in our denomination.  An elder entered my office, heartsick over the decision.  He was progressive in his views on LGBT persons, but as a part of a small church, he was afraid that a couple of members would leave, and he grieved over that loss.  He tried to work it out, saying, "But we are an open and affirming congregation--just look at our membership.  Do we have to become part of a particular organization to prove it?"

With this question in mind, I had lunch with John Gage, a young and extraordinarily gifted UCC pastor who left the Presbyterian Church (USA) because of their exclusion of LGBT persons...and now serves...as his denomination's first openly gay senior minister...I posed the question to him, "John, we're an open and affirming congregation, why do we need to become a part of a particular organization to prove it?"

"Because," he answered firmly, "gays and lesbians have been rejected by the church time and time again, and if we want to minister to our whole community, we need to confirm our stance as clearly as possible.  We have to welcome them time and time again."

--from Tribal Church: Ministering to the Missing Generation by Carol Howard Merritt (my emphasis)

This is too important a step to be allowed to be glossed over by inattention.  Insert any oppressed or ignored population into the start of that italicized pair of sentences--"Women," "Immigrants," "The disabled," "Former convicts," "The poor," "People with mental illness," "The homeless"--and the sentences retain their meaning and their strength.  Howard Merritt writes, "In this crucial point in church history, we are called to drown out the centuries of denials, dismissals, and refusals with unambiguous inclusion. The decision to include [otherwise rejected people] affects...an entire generation."  She is right.  In Unitarian Universalism we call it Radical Hospitality but I would be glad to call it what she names it:  unambiguous inclusion.  If we would practice unconditional love--and that is what every religion calls itself to do--then we must practice this too.                              

a congregation of one

"Every man will have a creed of his own," wrote [Needham, Massachusetts] pastor Stephen Palmer..."I have mine, but have no right to impose it upon others, nor have others any right to impose theirs upon me...He who thinks he has no more light to receive, has seen but little; and he who is not open to conviction is in bondage to himself."

--from Universalists and Unitarians in America:  A People's History by John Buehrens

This idea, if not this quote, opened up an intense discussion in a small group forum during our UU polity class last week.  We had assembled to discuss whether our principles and purposes are a contemporary help or a hindrance.  Early on the question "why don't we have a creed?" came up and from there the better question, "are we afraid of a creed?", was spoken.

The answer to the first question is suggested in Palmer's quote:  Unitarian Universalists as a group don't have a creed because we aren't free to impose our own convictions on others and they aren't free to impose theirs on us.  The distinction between agreeing with a conviction and insisting on it being the way people ought to behave is a fine one that seems lost on so many who would insist on the US being a Christian nation.  I agree with a number of Christian convictions--treating others as we'd like to be treated and obeying god (as I conceive god to be) are only two examples--but I don't identify as a Christian because I don't accept a supernatural force outside existence.  (Besides which, there is the issue of "which" Christianity some people are arguing for.  In terms of sheer numbers, Protestants are the predominant Christians.  But "Protestants" are a huge umbrella term, incorporating everyone from the Latter Day Saints to the United Church of Christ.  If we are talking just a single denomination, the US is far and away a Roman Catholic nation.)

The answer to the second question, according to many UUs, is "no."  But I think it's "yes," although maybe "afraid" isn't quite the right word.  We have these terrifically anodyne Principles which are and read like they are written by committee and fulfill a lot of functions.  They give us something to point to when asked "what do you believe" and something to rally around when we sense our rights as citizens of faith are threatened.  But to paraphrase Walter Royal Jones' famous question, No one asks to have the Purposes and Principles read to him on his deathbed.  They're a package of words most of us can agree to, but a Mission Statement will itself never be included as a prophetic source.

He "who is not open to conviction is in bondage to himself," Palmer writes, and insofar as his earlier point, that individuals need a personal creed, he is right.  The problem lies in that my personal creed may countermand yours and neither one of us really wants that.  None of us would, or should, want to belong to a congregation consisting of one--one person, one thought, one mission--and despite claims that are made in its favor, and the beauty sometimes of its language, that is precisely what a creed does:  Reduce a congregation to one.  Yes, we are "afraid" of a creed--if by fear we mean a wariness brought on by history and experience--but it may be good to be so afraid.

listening to sunday's sermon

I attended my wife's church this weekend, the ucc congregation in menomonie, further out on the rim to the east.  my friend rob is the minister there and we haven't taken the opportunity to visit there in nearly a year since my wife was doing her clinical practical experience at the same time I was, but while mine ended in february, hers continued until midmay. 

the church is beautiful, an old congregationalist place built sometime the early part of last century.  rob is an accomplished preacher but he wasn't doing more than opening and closing service sunday; they had a guest preacher: scott anderson, the executive director of the wisconsin council of churches.  I noted a few things about the congregation below.

my wife likes attending rob's bible studies before the service so we went early and because it had been so long since we'd attended ended up fielding questions from rob and the other students about our current doings and experiences for much of the time. the readings focused on psalm 133 and ephesians 4:1-6 and we concentrated on the message of ephesians (as rob reasoned scott would concentrate his message on that reading). it was a good conversation with older people we know and have talked with before and who are similar in thinking to us, to the point where I felt the need to speak out against diversity in order to ask questions whether we don't in fact need some form of division in order to articulate what "we" are not.

while I've been there many times, I tried to look with new eyes on the place and the people.  there were about 140-150 congregants present, most of them obviously grandparents or parents.  the average age looked about 60+.  there were many kids:  we counted 30 who scrambed up to be part of children's time.  I counted between 15 and 20 younger adults, single people or teens or early 20s.  there was 1 woman of color, a japanese woman I've seen there before, and 1 man of color, a student from nigeria who has been attending about a year and is ready to return to africa. 

rob is very connected with his community--he's been there for nearly 20 years (I'm not clear about this, it may be longer than that)--and that was born out by the reaction to a problem with the church organ.  a few weeks ago, a pipe had fallen or dropped, and a group of members had worked on it in the ensuing time.  this day was the big debut of the refinished organ.  with a big flourish, the organist hit the 1st notes of a favorite hymn--and immediately there was a resounding thump as something dropped inside the organ.  a group of 5 guys jumped to their feet and, while rob made amusing references to the organ's problems and changes, did a quick inventory outside and in the organ, and by the time mark the organist had settled at the nearby piano instead, they reported that the fix to the organ was actually easy and would be done in days.  there were lots of comments and jokes said about the situation and people laughed easily and quickly and there seemed no moments of discomfort or disease. 

the theme of the kids' time was based on the same ephesians verse--the woman working with them read a book called the crayon box that talked--and then scott's message which was strongly against what he sees as a "divided, competitive christian church."  a few quotes from his sermon:

• "we are the various parts of the body of christ as workable commodities."
• "we should recognize the unity which has been purchased and given to us by jesus."
• "we must confess our need to be with each other to be the body of christ."

it was a fine sermon, and I wish I had written down a few other quotes, particularly the quotes he used from other speakers.  one, a woman, had made a comment to a congregant complaining that most contemporary worship didn't speak to his sense of praise to the effect that, "well, it isn't really aimed at you, is it?"  this struck me as a particularly xian things to say, noting the emphasis on what rick warren referred to as "it's not about you." 

do the best things in the worst times

this morning I served pulpit supply--was the guest preacher--at 2 ucc congregations in colby and athens, wi, where I was welcomed and treated well, but I don't expect I'll be asked by either of them to return. the sermon below is what I wrote for them. I was somewhat at a disadvantage since I only had to write a 5-6 page sermon but I didn't have time to do that so I wrote an 8 page sermon that I hacked and slashed down to 6 and a half. this is the result.

Psalms 133 Sermon


“Do the Best Things in the Worst Times”
A Sermon Delivered to The 1st United Church of Christ,
Colby and Athens, Wisconsin, August 14, 2011,

I looked it up and you folks weren't part of the recall election last Tuesday. You missed a great election. I live in the 10th district where there are particularly harsh feelings about our state senator and what she has and hasn’t done for the people of her district in the last decade. We’re gearing up for yet another in other districts next week. In this last election, as elections are wont to do, some people came away happy and many came away angry. That’s as it’s always been. From the perspective of an American voter in the early 21st century, it certainly looks like the country is as divided as it’s ever been, maybe more so than at any time in American history. Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives, these positions are miles apart, aren’t they, seemingly irreconcilable. It’s never been this divisive, we’ve never been as separate before, certainly not in our lifetimes.

Only if “our lifetimes” don’t include the protests against the war in Vietnam when it seemed not a week went by without some violent demonstration, counterdemonstration, the bombings at the University in Madison or the police responses at the Chicago Democratic National Convention and Kent State. We have yet to experience many political conflagrations, certainly not like Norway, for instance, has. And for some of us, “our lifetimes” include the Great Depression, during which them what had went to whatever lengths they felt necessary—up to and including hiring private police forces who infamously used clubs and revolvers and set fires at mines like Ludlow, Lattimer and Columbine—to keep them what hadn’t who were beginning to unionize. And while none of us can count it as happening in “our lifetimes,” certainly today’s divisions are as nothing compared with the period of 1840-1865 when slavery and freedom were such contentious issues the country took up arms against itself to settle the matter.

None of us is immune to the wish-fulfillment of blame. Just the other day I told my wife I’d been thinking that afternoon about leaving her and moving out into the middle of the woods with no phone and no car and no internet and spending my days standing at the end of my driveway and shaking my fist at everyone who passes. She reminded me that if I left her I’d need to take three of our animals and their upkeep would surely cut into my fist-shaking time so I might as well stay home.

Some people blame President Obama for the country’s divisiveness and some people blame Republicans as if somehow one side or the other wants to govern a divided, off-kilter nation. Some blame public religion or the lack of public religions as if churches and synagogues and mosques don’t all have their own schisms and issues going on. Something has left us feeling like there’s something between us, as if there’s, not a wall exactly, but a sense of disconnect. We’re missing one another, walking past each other, even though we’re saying “Hi” and shaking hands, as if the other person somehow isn’t quite there.

The Psalm we read this morning seems almost to comment on this disconnect. “How pleasant it is,” the psalmist writes, “when kindred live together in unity!” Had that been written today I’d suspect the author of sarcasm at the least, dismay at the worst.

Because we don’t live in unity, do we? I mean, well, we might here in this church and even here in this town, but as a state? As a nation? No, sir, not a bit of it. We’re constantly yelling at one another over the radio and the television and the internet—you always know someone doesn’t trust his words WHEN HE TYPES OUT HIS MESSAGE IN ALL CAPS—and sometimes at the family barbecue and at work. Some of us are frustrated because we’re working two and three jobs and some of us because we aren’t even working one. Sometimes it seems the single difference between the uprisings going on this year in some Arab nations or Great Britain and the US is that no one here has thought to start heaving bricks at cops. That may change. After all, this is America, where we have more handguns available than bricks.

But the psalmist isn’t being sarcastic. He or she isn’t being ironic. He or she is quite sincere. How can that be, since the psalmist was living in a wonderful age when everyone was closer to god and thought of god all the time, paid attention to god and followed god’s laws to the best of his or her ability, or at least wasn’t actively fighting god and religion the way some people seem to do now? I'm not a believer in a golden age but think on this. A mere 2 years ago we saw an incredible outpouring of relief and hope—I felt it and I’m certain many of you did too—when Barack Obama, whose campaign slogan was the positive "yes, we can," was elected. We've lost that hope somewhere between then and now. We have moved from the radical notion that "yes, we can" to a politics of "no, you can't."

This is not entirely unexpected but what makes it particularly galling is that, amid the national and local talk of economic feasibility, of cost benefit and entitlement and loss and "what it costs the taxpayers," there is no corresponding talk about human beings. Of sharing. Of helping one another. Of community. We have entered a time and political place when a majority of citizens seem to feel the motto of the US ought to be changed from e pluribus unum, "out of many, one," to meeum habeo, "I got mine."

Has it ever been any different? Well, sure, right there, Psalm 133. That’s certainly a golden moment when everyone was looking out for one another. If only we could resurrect that time, go back to everyone looking out for his neighbor and there wasn’t all this infighting and backstabbing and calling one another names.

As Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, “It’s pretty to think so.” The truth is there’s never any golden time, never a silver or a bronze age as compared with our contemporary lead one when people had one another’s best interests at heart and truly loved their neighbors and had one another uppermost in their thoughts. Scholars don’t know when individual psalms were created or even written down but the book as it comes down to contemporary readers was probably anthologized during the 4th Century BCE, the period after the Babylonian Empire was conquered by the Persians whose king, Xerxes—you may remember him as the villain of the movie 300—allowed the Israelites to return to their homeland and helped in the restoration of the Second Temple. Some of them predate the Babylonian Exile and the destruction of the Temple. The transcriber of 133 is writing at a time when the people of Israel have come together out of a century—for the Jews of the northern kingdom, two centuries—of exile and second-class citizenship in a foreign land. To be sure, not everyone was moved out of what was once Israel and Judah, only the nobility and the most important citizens. Thousands of others were left essentially leaderless and without protection, victimized by anyone who might have happened along with a superior weapon and nothing to lose.

When we think about exile today we think of refugee camps, of malaria and stagnant water and death by diseases easily cured in less-crowded places, and it was like that in those times too. The book of Psalms is divided into several types, the most common of which, you might not be surprised to learn, is the individual lament, the crying out to god for help for oneself. There are also communal laments whose tragedies reflect contemporary experiences in the Sudan and Somalia:

"My days pass away like smoke, and my bones burn like a furnace. My heart is stricken and withered like grass; I am too wasted to eat my bread. Because of my loud groaning my bones cling to my skin…All day long my enemies taunt me; those who deride me use my name for a curse. For I eat ashes like bread, and mingle tears with my drink, because of your indignation and anger; for you have lifted me up and thrown me aside. My days are like an evening shadow; I wither away like grass."

There are also songs or psalms of trust, of individual and communal thanksgiving. “O Lord, my God, I will give thanks to you forever.” There are paeans to divinity and creation, songs of celebration and liturgies, psalms of kingship and royalty and celebrating the lineage of David (many of these were written during the times when Israel and Judah, the northern and southern kingdoms, were kingdoms ruled by David’s descendants). There are psalms celebrating Zion and pilgrimage and there are songs about wisdom. There are songs of immense beauty and trust: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.” And there are songs of great cruelty and vengeance: “Happy shall be they who pay [Babylon] back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your babies and dash their brains against the rock!” The Psalms are a repository for nearly every emotion, good and bad, a people in exile felt.

But in 133, subtitled a song of ascent, one which people sung as they made pilgrimage up the hills of Jerusalem, the people are coming together again after being apart for so long and they sing about the pleasure of being with one another as a community and as a people. You must understand, in this time and place, if you had no people and you had no land, and no way to make certain other people recognized those two things, then you were the equivalent of an unbranded steer in 1870s Abilene, Texas. Free to be owned and done with by anyone who took the trouble to acquire you and with no more access to redress than that steer had. It was a blessing to be with one another again. To be one people. To be a single, unified group.

Our Muslim friends and neighbors are currently celebrating Ramadan which takes as its initial offer that, like Gandhi said, we should be the change we want to see in the world—Surah 2: 183 and 185 of the Qur’an reads “O you who believe, fasting is decreed for you, as it was decreed for those before you, that you may attain salvation…Ramadan is the month during which the Quran was revealed, providing guidance for the people, clear teachings, and the statute book. Those of you who witness this month shall fast…GOD wishes for you convenience, not hardship, that you may fulfill your obligations, and to glorify GOD for guiding you, and to express your appreciation”—and adds to it the idea that we should all do it together. This is communal experience at its best, acknowledging the shared hunger for something outside oneself and then coming together to expunge that hunger as a community.

African culture reproaches us to remember, “I am because we are.” Annie Dillard in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek reminds us that we have an obligation “to keep the world from falling apart.” To do this we must come together to, as author Richard Gilbert puts it, “do the best things in the worst times.” We do this to bring about what my denomination, Unitarian Universalism, calls the Beloved Community and what Christians call the Kingdom of God.

What is this hard work we should do, what should this community look like? I don’t exactly know and for each of us it might be a little different. E.B. White, author of children’s classics Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, admitted he woke each morning “torn between the desire to improve the world and the desire to enjoy the world. This,” he notes, “makes it hard to plan the day.”

But this I do know. Take a moment to look to the left of you, and then to the right. Take a moment to smile at the person you see. Take his or her hand. Feel the warmth of their hands, the pulse just fluttering beneath the surface, the strong life that is there. How good it is when we are together. These are the companions you are to do this work with. You will find no better.