a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday December 14th, 2003
[Extemporaneous Introduction]
Last week I mentioned that my favorite holiday movie of all time is Frank Capra's classic Christmas film "It's a Wonderful Life." And I have to confess, I always cry during the final scene of that movie; in fact, I've done it so often now, I'm beginning to feel a little like Pavlov's Dog: Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed embrace, the bell rings, and tears begin to form in the corners of my eyes. It's not as if I don't know what's coming; I must have seen the movie dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times. But it still hasn't lost its power to effect me; I still turn on the waterworks every time.
For those of you who have been living on a desert island for the last 50 years, and are therefore not familiar with the story, in this movie Jimmy Stewart plays a character named George Bailey, the good-hearted, self-sacrificing President of the Bailey Building and Loan in the sleepy little town of Bedford Falls. The only other financial institution in town is a bank owned by a greedy, unethical man named Potter, who would like nothing more than to put the Building and Loan out of business. Then one Christmas Eve, in the excitement of season, George's absent-minded Uncle Billy misplaces an $8000 bank deposit. Potter finds it, but keeps it for himself, knowing that the Building and Loan is about to be audited. George discovers the shortfall, and, anticipating scandal and ruin, contemplates suicide in the belief that his life insurance policy makes him worth more dead than alive. So Clarence Oddbody, a rather bumbling Angel Second Class, is sent to earth to earn his wings by showing Jimmy Stewart what life would have been like in the town of "Pottersville" had George Bailey never been born. The climactic final scene, the one that always brings tears to my eyes, is when the citizens of Bedford Falls rise up in support of George, pledging their personal savings in order to make up the $8000 deficit. And maybe it is a corny story: honesty and virtue triumph over greed and opportunism, Clarence earns his wings, and everyone in Bedford Falls lives happily ever after, with the possible exception of Potter the banker (who, so far as I know, still has the eight grand). But corny or not, it still makes me cry, every time; in fact, sometimes just thinking about it is enough to start me sniffling with sentimentality.
A somewhat cynical ministerial colleague of mine once insinuated that the REAL reason I always cry at the end of "It's a Wonderful Life" is because I wish that MY Curch Fund Raising efforts would always be so serendipitously successful. And I thought that was a rather a cheap shot, actually; there I was, all choked up, daubing my red eyes with my shirt sleeve, while my colleague sat comfortably in an overstuffed chair, sipping egg nog and impugning my sincerity. And I honestly don't know why "It's a Wonderful Life" affects me the way it does. I often cry at the end of movies -- the first time I see them -- but after awhile I generally get over it. I no longer weep at the end of "Terms of Endearment," for example, and it’s all I can do now to keep from snickering out loud when Ali McGraw dies at the end of "Love Story." But for some reason, "It’s a Wonderful Life" gets me every time. And maybe it is just the corny plot. Because I WANT very much to believe that virtue always triumphs over greed, that honesty inevitably triumphs over opportunism; that the life of one truly good-hearted, self-sacrificing individual human being really does make a difference in the world, and is appreciated by those who have benefited from that difference. And maybe it’s also because I also want to become a little bit more like George Bailey myself, want to be able to look back at everything I’ve done someday and say "It truly was a Wonderful Life!"
The plain fact of the matter though, is that I'm not really feeling all that keen on Christmas this year. Oh, I'm sure the season will eventually have its moments --Christmas generally surprises me that way at some point -- but on the whole, to my way of thinking, the best thing about Christmas will be December 26th, when the hassle of the holiday will finally over, and there are 364 days before I have to go through it again. My problem is not so much with the holiday itself, as it is with the expectations we set for it. Every year I start out with such good intentions, and every year it seems as though I’m scrambling to catch up: I can’t get my Christmas letter finished on time, or I'm still shopping at the very last minute, and of course I invariably end up feeling a little awkward and embarrassed about receiving presents I don't really want or need. I generally enjoy giving gifts, but I resent trying to find something "perfect" for everyone I know; I would much rather shop thoughtfully for one or two people than worry about forgetting someone who hasn't forgotten me. I’m also not really that keen on red and green; they are OK by themselves, but together they are incredibly garish colors, particularly for socks, or a necktie. Not that my personal favorites, Purple and Crimson, would look any better. But at least no one is going to be disappointed if I decide its not the sort of thing I want to wear to church on Sunday morning.
The one thing I don't really fret that much about is the so-called "commercialization" of Christmas. I find that sort of thing fairly easy to ignore. What I can't ignore is that nagging feeling that somehow I ought to be enjoying myself more than I am, or that it's somehow all my fault if everyone around me isn't full of the holiday spirit, or that I have some sort of serious, pathological personality disorder because I'm saying "Merry Christmas" and feeling "Bah, Humbug." We do expect an awful lot out of ourselves this time of year. It's no wonder that so many of us come to feel disappointed, or even seriously depressed, in this supposed season of Peace and Good Will.
I personally find far more joy in the memories of Christmas Past than I do in the anticipation of Christmas Yet to Come. Memory is thankfully a selective thing, a fact which can in itself make memory a double edged sword. Were those old-fashioned Christmases really as good as we remember them to be? And ironically, the more fondly we recall them, the more pressure we put upon ourselves to make this year's Christmas "the best Christmas ever" -- to out-do years of accumulated recollections in one huge orgy of holiday merriment. Or in some cases, I suppose, to make up for them; for although it is in the nature of things to remember best the good times while gradually forgetting the bad, there are certain times that are just so terrible there's no forgetting them, no matter how hard one tries. Every one of us, I suspect, harbors memories of both kinds: the Christmas we endeavor to recreate, and the one we hope we'll never see again. And both influence our expectations of the current holiday season, the Spirit of Christmas Present.
And then, just beyond our personal holiday ghosts, lurk our cultural Christmas traditions: sleigh bells and mistletoe, stockings hung by the chimney with care, Jack Frost nipping at your nose -- things which make perfect sense if you lived in this part of the world a century ago, but which can be awfully confusing for a small child growing up on a ranch in West Texas, or a condominium in Southern California. Over the Freeway and to the Beach to Grandmother's house we go? Throw another Mesquite Chip on the Barbecue? The first year I lived in Texas I received a card from my brother asking me whether I was going to decorate a cactus for Christmas. But it didn’t take me too long to appreciate the advantages of being able to draw upon Mexican Christmas traditions as well as those of Northern Europe. To my way of thinking, Piñatas filled with candy and candle-lit Luminarios lining the sidewalk beat the heck out of having to shovel a foot of snow just to get to the firewood. I love looking at pictures of a one-horse open sleigh dashing through the snow dragging a freshly-cut Christmas tree back to grandmother’s house, but it’s not really something I feel compelled to do personally.
There is, of course, a symbolic quality to Tradition as well, in that Tradition often points to meanings which lie beyond itself. But traditions also tend to take on meanings all their own, through repetition if nothing else, as our personal experiences intersect with it and are shaped and influenced by it. A child who has grown up with an expectation of a "White Christmas" is going to be disappointed if it doesn't snow, just as children who have always smashed a piñata won't feel as though Christmas is really Christmas unless they go home with a pocket full of candy.
But whatever traditions we chose to observe, the one thing we must never allow ourselves to forget is that this is a religious holiday we celebrate here in the shadow of the winter solstice. And the thing we celebrate is not so much the miraculous birth of a special infant some two millennia ago, as it is the knowledge that, indeed, the life of one good-hearted, self-sacrificing, honest, virtuous, compassionate individual can make a difference, has made a difference, and still continues to make a difference, here in the here and now; and that this difference is appreciated by those of us who have benefited from it, who still believe in Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All. Call him George Bailey of Bedford Falls; call him Y'shua ben Joseph of Nazareth, the Anointed Messiah, the Christ: call it whatever you like, It's a Wonderful Life. It's the life we celebrate at Christmas, the miracle of a new light come into the world.
A living tradition can be a bridge to our appreciation of that miracle, while empty traditions are often barriers to our ever experiencing it for ourselves. And we bring our traditions to life not through the futile attempt to resurrect the Spirit of Christmas Past, but by our openness to life in the here and now, our willingness to let honesty and virtue, good-heartedness and self-sacrifice, live within us, take vitality from our laughter, and courage from our tears.
I used to feel kind of embarrassed about always crying at the end of "It's a Wonderful Life." After all, it's not a very manly thing to do -- you'd think I was still a small child or something. Lately I find that I don't worry about that kind of thing too much, at least not among my friends. Because Christmas truly is a holiday for children, mostly. For those still young enough to believe in Santa, still naive enough to believe that the world can be saved by a child, and for the child in us all who wants to believe in George Bailey, and in Clarence, an Angel Second Class, who is counting on the likes of us to help him earn his wings.
READINGS: Two Christmas poems by Ursula Askham Fanthorpe
BC : AD
This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.
This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.
This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.
And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect.
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.
What The Donkey Saw
No room in the inn, of course,
And not that much in the stable
What with the shepherds, Magi, Mary,
Joseph, the heavenly host -
Not to mention the baby
Using our manger as a cot.
You couldn’t have squeezed another cherub in
For love or money.
Still, in spite of the overcrowding,
I did my best to make them feel wanted.
I could see the baby and I
Would be going places together.
Sunday, December 14, 2003
Sunday, December 7, 2003
HOME FOR THE HOLY DAYS
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday December 7th, 2003
[extemporaneous introduction]
When I was a kid, growing up in the Bay Area, my family lived in what I suppose might be thought of as a nominally Catholic neighborhood. Most of my playmates had names like Ridley, O'Hare, Callahan; and they were never available to play on Wednesday afternoons because it conflicted with their catechism classes. The smell of fish (or, more often, macaroni and cheese) wafted through the air on Friday evenings; conversations were ripe with references to nuns, confession, and who had given whom their Saint Christopher medal; and the season of Lent was serious business -- there was no candy or ice cream to be found anywhere on our block, except perhaps at my house, making me a pretty popular kid for the six weeks prior to Easter.
Of course, these were the perceptions of a twelve year old child some thirty-five odd years ago. But to my mind then, there were a lot of advantages to being the only Unitarian-Universalist family in a neighborhood such as this. We went to the library on Wednesday afternoons, often ate steak for Friday dinner (since that was when my Dad, who traveled all week for work, was home for dinner), and no strangely-dressed little Priest in a Box was ever privy to my innermost secrets. But every year as the month of December rolled around, I began to wonder whether I might be missing out on something: the Advent wreaths, with their three purple candles and the solitary white one; and the Advent calendars, with those amazing little windows: one window for each day that remained in the countdown to Christmas. I was fascinated by those windows, with their tiny paper shutters; and behind each and every shutter, something different, something special, there in the window: and each window more amazing than the previous one; and oh! -- what a privilege to be the child selected to open the window for the day!
I recall one year, after much urging on my part, my parents finally gave in and brought home an Advent calendar for our family. I could hardly wait! In fact, I didn't wait: as soon as I was alone in the house I opened all of the little shutters on the very first day, and then had to try to close them up again so my parents wouldn't notice (which of course they did) -- but it didn't make any difference: the magic had already gone out of the thing anyway; the anticipation, the mystery, had disappeared.
I suppose, had I actually been reared a Catholic, I would have gone to confession years ago and told the priest in the box about my little indiscretion, and that would have been the end of it. Instead, I recall this memory every Advent season, with shame, and reflect upon my youthful impatience, and the priceless gift it stole from me. As Unitarian Universalists we studied ALL of the winter "Holy Days" in our Sunday School classes this time of year. We learned about Hanukkah, and various other winter "festivals of light”...it really wasn't all that different from being in the public schools, only better and more fun. And yet, there was a strangeness to it all as well: a feeling, almost, of being on the outside looking in. We might overhear adults complain about the "commercialization" of Christmas, but where was the "holiness" to replace the secular holiday? We went to elaborate parties, and were thoroughly "entertained," but would WE have actually offered hospitality to a pregnant woman far from home? Food and football and family obligations; shopping and snowmen and time off from school: the holiday season was basically defined by its possibilities for sloth, avarice and gluttony, rather than by qualities of any particular spiritual or religious significance.
In the secular world, the holiday season begins Thanksgiving Day, with its parades, its traditional football rivalries, and of course the big Department store sales which begin the countdown of "shopping days." And it ends, at last, on New Year's Day, with one final blow-out, more parades and more football games, and a plethora of unkept promises that somehow this next year will be different than the last. But within the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, the four weeks prior to Christmas are known as the season of Advent, and harbor a far different connotation. The word "Advent" comes from the Latin adventus and means "to" or "toward [the] Coming." Interestingly enough, it's the same Latin root as our English word "adventure," which my Unabridged Webster's defines as "a bold undertaking in which hazards are to be encountered and the issue staked upon unforeseen events" In the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, the four weeks of Advent are both a time of joyous anticipation for the coming birth of the child Christ, and also a time of solemn preparation for the unforeseen "Second Coming" at the end of Time, when all the world shall be judged. In the Medieval Church, Advent was observed with the same strict penitence as Lent, and even today Roman Catholicism discourages the solemnization of marriage during this period. It's this mythic tension between the physical presence of the deity here in this world, in the innocent form of an infant child; and the ultimate sovereignty of Divine Creation and Judgment, which gives this season its peculiar ethos: We look toward the Coming of we know not what, in anticipation and fear of a transformation for which we can never be fully ready or prepared.
In her poem "Feast Days," found in her collection Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, Annie Dillard writes:
Let me mention
one or two things about Christmas.
Of course you've all heard
that the animals talk
at midnight:
a particular elk, for instance,
kneeling at night to drink,
leaning tall to pull leaves
with his soft lips,
says, alleluia.
That the soil and fresh-water lakes
also rejoice,
as do products
such as sweaters
(nor are plastics excluded
from grace),
is less well known.
Further:
the reason
for some silly-looking fishes,
for the bizarre mating
of certain adult insects,
or the sprouting, say,
in a snow tire
of a Rocky Mountain grass,
is that the universal
loves the particular,
that freedom loves to live
and live flesh full,
intricate,
and in detail.
God empties himself
into the earth like a cloud.
God takes the substance, contours
of a man, and keeps them,
dying, rising, walking,
and still walking
wherever there is motion.
My very favorite holiday movie of all time is still Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," in which Jimmy Stewart plays a character by the name of George Bailey, who sacrifices his own ambitions of a college education and world travel in order to remain in the tiny town of Bedford Falls and manage the Bailey Building and Loan following the untimely death of his father. At the critical turning point of the film, as George is about to commit suicide by leaping from a bridge, he is given an opportunity, by a rather amusing Angel Second Class named Clarence, to see what this sleepy little town would have been like had George Bailey never been born. All the lives he had touched, all the people he had helped, all of the good that he had done, suddenly become conspicuous through their absence -- and George comes to see that despite the difficulties, despite the frustration, despite the disappointment and even the despair, he truly did have a Wonderful Life.
Not many of us are given this kind of opportunity: to open up a little window and see the effect of our lives upon the world, the multitude of ways in which that tiny spark of the divine within us all exerts its influence for the good on those around us. A little piece of God in human form, "dying, rising, walking, and still walking wherever there is motion." No doubt we see it first more easily in others than we do within ourselves. But this is the message of the Advent season: the coming of light into the world, the coming of goodness into the world, the opening of a shuttered window, which allows us a glimpse our own potential divinity, reflected in the face of an innocent child; yet which also calls us simultaneously to accountability for that gift in the instant that it is revealed to us. Will you chose a wonderful life? Or will you hide your lamp under a bushel, preferring to curse the darkness than to light a single candle?
Many Unitarian Universalists, I find, are uncomfortable with the mythic dimensions of religious meaning. We like the tangible, the pragmatic, the rational; all this heavy-handed symbolism leaves us feeling a little queasy in the stomach. We scoff at the notion of an infant God, a virgin birth, of angels, and astrologers who left their homes and followed a star in the sky to a distant land. We prefer to speak of the coincidence between the Christmas season and the winter solstice, trace the evolution of the holiday and identify its cross-cultural parallels; we want to throw open all the windows at once and shine the light of reason into every nook and cranny. All too often we seem to forget that much of the meaning is in the waiting, the preparing, the anticipation — that as we allow the story to unfold at its own speed, as we participate in it in "mythic time," other levels of meaning are revealed to us which are not readily comprehensible to the analytical mind.
We're always in such a hurry! We have shopping to do and packages to wrap, cards to write, meals to cook — at times it seems as though we'll never get caught up. Yet in our haste to get everything under control the real opportunities often pass us by; or rather, are quickly left behind in the whirlwind of activity to get it all done. Jesus built furniture in Nazareth for thirty years before he did anything truly worthy of remembrance! Insight particularly is not always the product of a linear process; more often our learning tends to be circular, as we return again to that which initially sparked our curiosity, and discover that we finally understand it. Time is meaningless when it comes to Truth. Let the story speak to you in its own voice, in its own language, on its own terms, and eventually the message, in its own good time, will become crystal-clear.
Christmas is an invitation to participate in a miracle: a miracle of change, of growth, of renewal and transformation... but mostly a miracle of possibility and hope, the promise of a thing rather than the thing itself. It's the drama of a child born in a stable to a very special destiny, and the anticipation of that destiny by those who may never live to see its fulfillment, but who nevertheless take the time to respond to the call for preparation. Is this the child who has been born king of the Jews, the Messiah, the Christ, sleeping in a manger -- a feed trough! -- in the midst of all these animals? And this is the mother, this naive teenaged girl, who swears she's never been with a man? From unlikely origins comes the King of Kings, the Prince of Peace, to preach the good news that we, too, are God's children, inheritors of a special destiny regardless of our birth or background.
The story of Advent is the story of the Adventure of Life: that "bold undertaking in which hazards are to be encountered, and the issue staked upon unforeseen events." It is a lesson in learning to wait upon the unknown; a lesson in the suspense of disbelief and the confidence of hope, of patient trust in the process of living between the margins of our accidental birth and our inevitable mortality. It teaches us to open the shutters one window at a time, and fully savor the vision which we find there: a promise, a potential yet to be realized, a helpless child who will someday become a most remarkable adult, and reveal to the world an authentic glimpse of the divine.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday December 7th, 2003
[extemporaneous introduction]
When I was a kid, growing up in the Bay Area, my family lived in what I suppose might be thought of as a nominally Catholic neighborhood. Most of my playmates had names like Ridley, O'Hare, Callahan; and they were never available to play on Wednesday afternoons because it conflicted with their catechism classes. The smell of fish (or, more often, macaroni and cheese) wafted through the air on Friday evenings; conversations were ripe with references to nuns, confession, and who had given whom their Saint Christopher medal; and the season of Lent was serious business -- there was no candy or ice cream to be found anywhere on our block, except perhaps at my house, making me a pretty popular kid for the six weeks prior to Easter.
Of course, these were the perceptions of a twelve year old child some thirty-five odd years ago. But to my mind then, there were a lot of advantages to being the only Unitarian-Universalist family in a neighborhood such as this. We went to the library on Wednesday afternoons, often ate steak for Friday dinner (since that was when my Dad, who traveled all week for work, was home for dinner), and no strangely-dressed little Priest in a Box was ever privy to my innermost secrets. But every year as the month of December rolled around, I began to wonder whether I might be missing out on something: the Advent wreaths, with their three purple candles and the solitary white one; and the Advent calendars, with those amazing little windows: one window for each day that remained in the countdown to Christmas. I was fascinated by those windows, with their tiny paper shutters; and behind each and every shutter, something different, something special, there in the window: and each window more amazing than the previous one; and oh! -- what a privilege to be the child selected to open the window for the day!
I recall one year, after much urging on my part, my parents finally gave in and brought home an Advent calendar for our family. I could hardly wait! In fact, I didn't wait: as soon as I was alone in the house I opened all of the little shutters on the very first day, and then had to try to close them up again so my parents wouldn't notice (which of course they did) -- but it didn't make any difference: the magic had already gone out of the thing anyway; the anticipation, the mystery, had disappeared.
I suppose, had I actually been reared a Catholic, I would have gone to confession years ago and told the priest in the box about my little indiscretion, and that would have been the end of it. Instead, I recall this memory every Advent season, with shame, and reflect upon my youthful impatience, and the priceless gift it stole from me. As Unitarian Universalists we studied ALL of the winter "Holy Days" in our Sunday School classes this time of year. We learned about Hanukkah, and various other winter "festivals of light”...it really wasn't all that different from being in the public schools, only better and more fun. And yet, there was a strangeness to it all as well: a feeling, almost, of being on the outside looking in. We might overhear adults complain about the "commercialization" of Christmas, but where was the "holiness" to replace the secular holiday? We went to elaborate parties, and were thoroughly "entertained," but would WE have actually offered hospitality to a pregnant woman far from home? Food and football and family obligations; shopping and snowmen and time off from school: the holiday season was basically defined by its possibilities for sloth, avarice and gluttony, rather than by qualities of any particular spiritual or religious significance.
In the secular world, the holiday season begins Thanksgiving Day, with its parades, its traditional football rivalries, and of course the big Department store sales which begin the countdown of "shopping days." And it ends, at last, on New Year's Day, with one final blow-out, more parades and more football games, and a plethora of unkept promises that somehow this next year will be different than the last. But within the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, the four weeks prior to Christmas are known as the season of Advent, and harbor a far different connotation. The word "Advent" comes from the Latin adventus and means "to" or "toward [the] Coming." Interestingly enough, it's the same Latin root as our English word "adventure," which my Unabridged Webster's defines as "a bold undertaking in which hazards are to be encountered and the issue staked upon unforeseen events" In the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, the four weeks of Advent are both a time of joyous anticipation for the coming birth of the child Christ, and also a time of solemn preparation for the unforeseen "Second Coming" at the end of Time, when all the world shall be judged. In the Medieval Church, Advent was observed with the same strict penitence as Lent, and even today Roman Catholicism discourages the solemnization of marriage during this period. It's this mythic tension between the physical presence of the deity here in this world, in the innocent form of an infant child; and the ultimate sovereignty of Divine Creation and Judgment, which gives this season its peculiar ethos: We look toward the Coming of we know not what, in anticipation and fear of a transformation for which we can never be fully ready or prepared.
In her poem "Feast Days," found in her collection Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, Annie Dillard writes:
Let me mention
one or two things about Christmas.
Of course you've all heard
that the animals talk
at midnight:
a particular elk, for instance,
kneeling at night to drink,
leaning tall to pull leaves
with his soft lips,
says, alleluia.
That the soil and fresh-water lakes
also rejoice,
as do products
such as sweaters
(nor are plastics excluded
from grace),
is less well known.
Further:
the reason
for some silly-looking fishes,
for the bizarre mating
of certain adult insects,
or the sprouting, say,
in a snow tire
of a Rocky Mountain grass,
is that the universal
loves the particular,
that freedom loves to live
and live flesh full,
intricate,
and in detail.
God empties himself
into the earth like a cloud.
God takes the substance, contours
of a man, and keeps them,
dying, rising, walking,
and still walking
wherever there is motion.
My very favorite holiday movie of all time is still Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," in which Jimmy Stewart plays a character by the name of George Bailey, who sacrifices his own ambitions of a college education and world travel in order to remain in the tiny town of Bedford Falls and manage the Bailey Building and Loan following the untimely death of his father. At the critical turning point of the film, as George is about to commit suicide by leaping from a bridge, he is given an opportunity, by a rather amusing Angel Second Class named Clarence, to see what this sleepy little town would have been like had George Bailey never been born. All the lives he had touched, all the people he had helped, all of the good that he had done, suddenly become conspicuous through their absence -- and George comes to see that despite the difficulties, despite the frustration, despite the disappointment and even the despair, he truly did have a Wonderful Life.
Not many of us are given this kind of opportunity: to open up a little window and see the effect of our lives upon the world, the multitude of ways in which that tiny spark of the divine within us all exerts its influence for the good on those around us. A little piece of God in human form, "dying, rising, walking, and still walking wherever there is motion." No doubt we see it first more easily in others than we do within ourselves. But this is the message of the Advent season: the coming of light into the world, the coming of goodness into the world, the opening of a shuttered window, which allows us a glimpse our own potential divinity, reflected in the face of an innocent child; yet which also calls us simultaneously to accountability for that gift in the instant that it is revealed to us. Will you chose a wonderful life? Or will you hide your lamp under a bushel, preferring to curse the darkness than to light a single candle?
Many Unitarian Universalists, I find, are uncomfortable with the mythic dimensions of religious meaning. We like the tangible, the pragmatic, the rational; all this heavy-handed symbolism leaves us feeling a little queasy in the stomach. We scoff at the notion of an infant God, a virgin birth, of angels, and astrologers who left their homes and followed a star in the sky to a distant land. We prefer to speak of the coincidence between the Christmas season and the winter solstice, trace the evolution of the holiday and identify its cross-cultural parallels; we want to throw open all the windows at once and shine the light of reason into every nook and cranny. All too often we seem to forget that much of the meaning is in the waiting, the preparing, the anticipation — that as we allow the story to unfold at its own speed, as we participate in it in "mythic time," other levels of meaning are revealed to us which are not readily comprehensible to the analytical mind.
We're always in such a hurry! We have shopping to do and packages to wrap, cards to write, meals to cook — at times it seems as though we'll never get caught up. Yet in our haste to get everything under control the real opportunities often pass us by; or rather, are quickly left behind in the whirlwind of activity to get it all done. Jesus built furniture in Nazareth for thirty years before he did anything truly worthy of remembrance! Insight particularly is not always the product of a linear process; more often our learning tends to be circular, as we return again to that which initially sparked our curiosity, and discover that we finally understand it. Time is meaningless when it comes to Truth. Let the story speak to you in its own voice, in its own language, on its own terms, and eventually the message, in its own good time, will become crystal-clear.
Christmas is an invitation to participate in a miracle: a miracle of change, of growth, of renewal and transformation... but mostly a miracle of possibility and hope, the promise of a thing rather than the thing itself. It's the drama of a child born in a stable to a very special destiny, and the anticipation of that destiny by those who may never live to see its fulfillment, but who nevertheless take the time to respond to the call for preparation. Is this the child who has been born king of the Jews, the Messiah, the Christ, sleeping in a manger -- a feed trough! -- in the midst of all these animals? And this is the mother, this naive teenaged girl, who swears she's never been with a man? From unlikely origins comes the King of Kings, the Prince of Peace, to preach the good news that we, too, are God's children, inheritors of a special destiny regardless of our birth or background.
The story of Advent is the story of the Adventure of Life: that "bold undertaking in which hazards are to be encountered, and the issue staked upon unforeseen events." It is a lesson in learning to wait upon the unknown; a lesson in the suspense of disbelief and the confidence of hope, of patient trust in the process of living between the margins of our accidental birth and our inevitable mortality. It teaches us to open the shutters one window at a time, and fully savor the vision which we find there: a promise, a potential yet to be realized, a helpless child who will someday become a most remarkable adult, and reveal to the world an authentic glimpse of the divine.
Sunday, November 23, 2003
NÅR VANDET STÅR I MUNDEN... [Lærer man vel at svømme]
(“when the water is up to the mouth....[one learns to swim well]”)
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday November 23rd, 2003
I would have to be the first to admit that I don’t really know all that much about the scientific basis of Global Warming. I believe that it’s happening because so many people who do seem to know what they’re talking about tell me that it’s happening, and I also know that there is still some dispute (although not much) about whether or not it is being caused by the emission of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gasses) by our fossil fuel-driven industrial society, or rather reflects some sort of “normal” geological climate change. I realize there are still some questions about what it really means to our society and the environment. Mostly, though, I’m just not really sure about what I ought to be doing about it. Like most members of my generation, I’m familiar with the notion of “Thinking Globally and Acting Locally.” But when confronted with a problem on the scale of Global Climactic Change, what does one do in one’s own neighborhood to make things right again? I’ve been so concerned about this I even went out and bought a book, written by two PhD’s -- Paul and Hazel Delcourt -- entitled Living Well in the Age of Global Warming: 10 Strategies for Boomers, Bobos, and Cultural Creatives. I’m a Boomer, and I share many of the qualities of a “Bourgeois Bohemian” (which is what the acronym “Bobo” stands for), and I certainly fit the demographic profile of a “Cultural Creative,” so when this title popped up on my Amazon “Recommended Picks” list I clicked with my mouse and waited for enlightenment to arrive on my doorstep.
The problem is, when the book finally did arrive it wasn’t at all what I had expected. Rather than telling me anything useful about what I might do to help stop global warming, it basically offered meaningless advice about how to end up a “Greenhouse Winner” rather than a “Greenhouse Loser,”while its “10 strategies” essentially boiled down to two. Strategy number one: move to the mountains (actually, there were several variations on this particular theme). And Strategy number two? -- buy a boat. So, needless to say, I was more than a little disappointed (even though I’ve been looking for an excuse to buy a boat for years); since when all was said and done, this book might have done a lot more good in the fight against global warming if it had remained in the form of a tree.
But the experience did get me thinking again about my feelings of helplessness in the face of the prospect of catastrophic global climate change. Growing up under the shadow of the Cold War, I’d always sorta assumed that the end of the world, when it came, would be in the form of a nuclear holocaust: one big Armageddon-like blow-out, followed by (at least for anyone who managed to survive) a long, nuclear winter -- or as Jonathan Schell once described it, a Republic of Insects and Grass. Little did I dream that our actual situation would more closely resemble that of the Frog in the Teakettle -- the temperature around us slowly increasing over time, but we never really notice because the change is so gradual...until the next thing we know the kettle is boiling and our goose is cooked. It’s difficult even to talk about it without sounding alarmist, like Chicken Little or the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But just because a problem is so big that it’s hard to conceptualize doesn’t mean that it’s a fairy tale, or that we can safely ignore it. Because if we wait until the problem is so obvious that it is undeniable (and in the opinion of many, we are there already), it may also be too late for us to do anything about it.
Some of you may remember from Neighborhood Sunday the Danish proverb I allude to in the title of my sermon: “ Når vandet står i munden, Lærer man vel at svømme” -- “When the water is up to one’s mouth, one learns to swim well.” The Danes seem to be taking global warming a lot more seriously than we do here in the United States...perhaps because despite being among the world’s leaders in per capita boat ownership, they also recognize that they live in a country surrounded by water -- 406 islands and one low, sandy peninsula, on which the highest point is less than 200 meters above sea level. And thus they are also among the world’s leaders in things like wind turbine technology (Denmark currently generates approximately 27% of its electricity this way) and other sustainable and efficient “green” technologies, and are using this technology not only to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions, but are also exporting it to Eastern Europe in order to generate even greater offsets under the terms of the Kyoto accords. 80% of the wind generation capacity in Denmark is owned either by private citizens or through small, neighborhood collectives, while government subsidies for this form of energy are scheduled for elimination in 2004, since the cost is now competitive with that of other new energy sources. Når vandet står i munden, Lærer man vel at svømme....
On a slightly different note, as most of you probably know (since the media coverage has been overwhelming, at least in the media sources I routinely view), yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the assassination, in Dallas, Texas, of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And I was a little surprised to learn that not only am I now among the minority of living Americans who can actually remember where I was and what I was doing when I learned that Kennedy had been shot, but that also (as of my last birthday), I am now myself older than JFK was at the time of his death. So the torch has indeed passed to a new generation once again. And as I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve also been reflecting upon some of the better- (and lesser-) known aspects of Kennedy’s political career: his legendary “charisma” and clever, charming wit; his reputation as a legitimate war hero, and the near-crippling physical disabilities he kept secret from the public; his now well-publicized sexual peccadilloes with women like Marilyn Monroe; the closely-contested (some might even say stolen) media-driven election which elevated him to the Oval Office, and which, in many ways, sowed the seeds of his defeated opponent Richard Nixon’s subsequent Watergate paranoia, and thus might even be said to be at the root of our nation’s present polarized political acrimony; his Keynesian-inspired tax-cuts (which many conservatives now point to as justification for their own supply-side economic theories); the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and his subsequent interest in counter-insurgency in places like Vietnam; his trip to Berlin; the Cuban Missile crisis; his mixed-record on Civil Rights; the creation of the Peace Corps, and his visionary support of the Space Program. Academic historians generally rate Kennedy as a somewhat mediocre President -- not the best or the brightest, but certainly not one of the worst either. Yet his death continues to maintain a powerful hold on the American imagination, like an icon of the end of an earlier, more optimistic era.
What I’ve found myself thinking about mostly though is what things might be like if the American people embraced the problem of Global Warming with the same spirit of optimism, and service, and idealistic self-sacrifice characteristic of the early days of the Peace Corps and the race to the Moon. We are, after all, still the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world; we represent approximately 4% of the world’s population, yet produce 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases, and given our legendary “Yankee ingenuity,” are no doubt perfectly capable of achieving an annual 5% reduction of our greenhouse gas emissions over the next ten years with little or no loss of productivity, simply through increased efficiencies, the intentional development of alternative, renewable energy sources, and the widespread adoption of a handful of lifestyle changes, many of which would actually lead to better health and an improved quality of life for the majority of American citizens.
But these things aren’t going to happen if they are simply left to “the invisible hand” of the marketplace, especially a marketplace where we continue to subsidize old, inefficient “dirty” technologies, while compelling new and innovative. sustainable “green” ones to sink or swim on their own merits, even while still in their infancy. Moreover, by producing and perfecting these sustainable technologies now, we may be able to export them to the developing world in time to head off the uncontrolled production of greenhouse gasses in those countries, while at the same time demonstrating that it is indeed possible for them to enjoy a much higher standard of living at a much more modest environmental cost.
The problem of Global Warming is a lot more complicated than merely higher mean temperatures and rising sea levels. Even the rosy scenarios anticipate significant changes in weather patterns, agricultural productivity, flooding and the like, while the worst-case scenarios predict catastrophes of near-Biblical proportions. Furthermore, even a sustained, systematic, unified global effort to ameliorate the problem may not be sufficient to reverse the trend for another 100 years or more. But rather than merely throwing our hands in the air, closing our eyes, and holding our noses, there are some practical steps we can all take in order to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
The first of these steps is self-education. There’s a lot more that we all can learn about Global Warming, both with regard to the big picture, and also in terms of the hands-on things we can do in order to avoid contributing further to the problem ourselves. Unitarians are sometimes teased about believing in “salvation by bibliography,” but in this case in particular, knowledge really is power, and is the foundation for meaningful action. Here are two book that I feel ARE worth the paper they are printed on. The first is High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them. This is a relatively new book, written by J.F. Rischard, a vice-president at the World Bank (so it’s not exactly the kind of tree-hugging liberal pabulum I ordinarily like to read). The second is Jon Naar’s Design for a Livable Planet, which is filled with all sorts of practical ideas about things you can do to reduce your environmental impact on the earth. This is a fairly old book, but the good news is that there are lots of used copies available for about a buck plus postage at Amazon. Increased awareness leads naturally to the second step, which is making as many of these lifestyle changes as we can, and then committing ourselves to making even more. I don’t want you to think that simply turning out the lights when you leave the room and driving a more fuel-efficient car is going to make all the difference in the world. But it’s a start, and it certainly doesn’t hurt.
The third step involves participating in the education of others, as well as creating networks of mutual encouragement and support...so that as communities we can begin better to understand the full dimensions of our involvement in the problem, and can help one another in our efforts to make more comprehensive changes to address it. This is one of the places where churches like ours, as learning and teaching organizations, can make an important contribution. And finally there is the step of Activism and Advocacy: working to create changes on the level of public policy, which in this particular case is going to be essential if we hope to have any kind of meaningful impact on the overall situation in the long term.
Of course, there are some who believe that because the problem of Global Warming is so complex, only a solution which relies upon “the invisible hand of the marketplace” can possibly be effective. And I agree with this view...to a point. But because the problem of Global Warming is likewise one of those instances where “Bad money drives out Good,” so long as “bad actors” are allowed to avoid paying the true environmental costs of their activities, skimming off the profits while compelling the rest of us to pay for cleaning up their mess, well-intentioned competitors are always going to be at a disadvantage. If we wish to see some sort of workable, “market-based” solution to the problem of global warming, we need to make it profitable to do the right thing, while taking the profitability out of doing wrong. And we do this through rational regulation, backed by the authority of law.
Moreover, as the World’s Leader in the production of greenhouse gasses, it only stands to reason that the United States should take the lead in working toward their reduction and eventual elimination. For America to opt-out of the Kyoto accords because we claim that compliance would put our industries at a competitive disadvantage against those of countries like Bangladesh is absurd. America ought to be showing the world a better way of doing things, rather than throwing our weight around in a vain attempt to keep things just the way they are. So long as the “invisible hand” is seen to be thumbing its nose at the rest of the world, holding down the less-fortunate while propping up the fortunes of a privileged few, it will only work to divide the world further between the “Greenhouse winners” and the “Greenhouse losers.” A rising tide may well float all boats, but that only matters if people can afford to buy a boat. The alternative of throwing the weak to the sharks is morally acceptable only in some sort of alternative universe where the fundamental laws of human decency no longer apply.
And finally, I think it is essential for us to remember that as part of that “four per cent,” ALL Americans are seen by the rest of the world as belonging to that privileged few. It may well be true that our freedom, our economic prosperity, our so-called “opportunity society” in general, are the envy of the world, so long as that prosperity is perceived as denying opportunities to others, we will be despised as selfish, short-sighted bullies rather than admired as the generous, compassionate, creative and innovative hard-working human beings we all like to imagine ourselves to be. The time has come, and indeed may be long overdue, for Americans to live up to our flattering self-image, to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival...” not only of liberty, but of the planet itself. And “the energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor...can truly light the world,” not just metaphorically, but literally as well.
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday November 23rd, 2003
I would have to be the first to admit that I don’t really know all that much about the scientific basis of Global Warming. I believe that it’s happening because so many people who do seem to know what they’re talking about tell me that it’s happening, and I also know that there is still some dispute (although not much) about whether or not it is being caused by the emission of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gasses) by our fossil fuel-driven industrial society, or rather reflects some sort of “normal” geological climate change. I realize there are still some questions about what it really means to our society and the environment. Mostly, though, I’m just not really sure about what I ought to be doing about it. Like most members of my generation, I’m familiar with the notion of “Thinking Globally and Acting Locally.” But when confronted with a problem on the scale of Global Climactic Change, what does one do in one’s own neighborhood to make things right again? I’ve been so concerned about this I even went out and bought a book, written by two PhD’s -- Paul and Hazel Delcourt -- entitled Living Well in the Age of Global Warming: 10 Strategies for Boomers, Bobos, and Cultural Creatives. I’m a Boomer, and I share many of the qualities of a “Bourgeois Bohemian” (which is what the acronym “Bobo” stands for), and I certainly fit the demographic profile of a “Cultural Creative,” so when this title popped up on my Amazon “Recommended Picks” list I clicked with my mouse and waited for enlightenment to arrive on my doorstep.
The problem is, when the book finally did arrive it wasn’t at all what I had expected. Rather than telling me anything useful about what I might do to help stop global warming, it basically offered meaningless advice about how to end up a “Greenhouse Winner” rather than a “Greenhouse Loser,”while its “10 strategies” essentially boiled down to two. Strategy number one: move to the mountains (actually, there were several variations on this particular theme). And Strategy number two? -- buy a boat. So, needless to say, I was more than a little disappointed (even though I’ve been looking for an excuse to buy a boat for years); since when all was said and done, this book might have done a lot more good in the fight against global warming if it had remained in the form of a tree.
But the experience did get me thinking again about my feelings of helplessness in the face of the prospect of catastrophic global climate change. Growing up under the shadow of the Cold War, I’d always sorta assumed that the end of the world, when it came, would be in the form of a nuclear holocaust: one big Armageddon-like blow-out, followed by (at least for anyone who managed to survive) a long, nuclear winter -- or as Jonathan Schell once described it, a Republic of Insects and Grass. Little did I dream that our actual situation would more closely resemble that of the Frog in the Teakettle -- the temperature around us slowly increasing over time, but we never really notice because the change is so gradual...until the next thing we know the kettle is boiling and our goose is cooked. It’s difficult even to talk about it without sounding alarmist, like Chicken Little or the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But just because a problem is so big that it’s hard to conceptualize doesn’t mean that it’s a fairy tale, or that we can safely ignore it. Because if we wait until the problem is so obvious that it is undeniable (and in the opinion of many, we are there already), it may also be too late for us to do anything about it.
Some of you may remember from Neighborhood Sunday the Danish proverb I allude to in the title of my sermon: “ Når vandet står i munden, Lærer man vel at svømme” -- “When the water is up to one’s mouth, one learns to swim well.” The Danes seem to be taking global warming a lot more seriously than we do here in the United States...perhaps because despite being among the world’s leaders in per capita boat ownership, they also recognize that they live in a country surrounded by water -- 406 islands and one low, sandy peninsula, on which the highest point is less than 200 meters above sea level. And thus they are also among the world’s leaders in things like wind turbine technology (Denmark currently generates approximately 27% of its electricity this way) and other sustainable and efficient “green” technologies, and are using this technology not only to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions, but are also exporting it to Eastern Europe in order to generate even greater offsets under the terms of the Kyoto accords. 80% of the wind generation capacity in Denmark is owned either by private citizens or through small, neighborhood collectives, while government subsidies for this form of energy are scheduled for elimination in 2004, since the cost is now competitive with that of other new energy sources. Når vandet står i munden, Lærer man vel at svømme....
On a slightly different note, as most of you probably know (since the media coverage has been overwhelming, at least in the media sources I routinely view), yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the assassination, in Dallas, Texas, of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And I was a little surprised to learn that not only am I now among the minority of living Americans who can actually remember where I was and what I was doing when I learned that Kennedy had been shot, but that also (as of my last birthday), I am now myself older than JFK was at the time of his death. So the torch has indeed passed to a new generation once again. And as I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve also been reflecting upon some of the better- (and lesser-) known aspects of Kennedy’s political career: his legendary “charisma” and clever, charming wit; his reputation as a legitimate war hero, and the near-crippling physical disabilities he kept secret from the public; his now well-publicized sexual peccadilloes with women like Marilyn Monroe; the closely-contested (some might even say stolen) media-driven election which elevated him to the Oval Office, and which, in many ways, sowed the seeds of his defeated opponent Richard Nixon’s subsequent Watergate paranoia, and thus might even be said to be at the root of our nation’s present polarized political acrimony; his Keynesian-inspired tax-cuts (which many conservatives now point to as justification for their own supply-side economic theories); the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and his subsequent interest in counter-insurgency in places like Vietnam; his trip to Berlin; the Cuban Missile crisis; his mixed-record on Civil Rights; the creation of the Peace Corps, and his visionary support of the Space Program. Academic historians generally rate Kennedy as a somewhat mediocre President -- not the best or the brightest, but certainly not one of the worst either. Yet his death continues to maintain a powerful hold on the American imagination, like an icon of the end of an earlier, more optimistic era.
What I’ve found myself thinking about mostly though is what things might be like if the American people embraced the problem of Global Warming with the same spirit of optimism, and service, and idealistic self-sacrifice characteristic of the early days of the Peace Corps and the race to the Moon. We are, after all, still the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world; we represent approximately 4% of the world’s population, yet produce 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases, and given our legendary “Yankee ingenuity,” are no doubt perfectly capable of achieving an annual 5% reduction of our greenhouse gas emissions over the next ten years with little or no loss of productivity, simply through increased efficiencies, the intentional development of alternative, renewable energy sources, and the widespread adoption of a handful of lifestyle changes, many of which would actually lead to better health and an improved quality of life for the majority of American citizens.
But these things aren’t going to happen if they are simply left to “the invisible hand” of the marketplace, especially a marketplace where we continue to subsidize old, inefficient “dirty” technologies, while compelling new and innovative. sustainable “green” ones to sink or swim on their own merits, even while still in their infancy. Moreover, by producing and perfecting these sustainable technologies now, we may be able to export them to the developing world in time to head off the uncontrolled production of greenhouse gasses in those countries, while at the same time demonstrating that it is indeed possible for them to enjoy a much higher standard of living at a much more modest environmental cost.
The problem of Global Warming is a lot more complicated than merely higher mean temperatures and rising sea levels. Even the rosy scenarios anticipate significant changes in weather patterns, agricultural productivity, flooding and the like, while the worst-case scenarios predict catastrophes of near-Biblical proportions. Furthermore, even a sustained, systematic, unified global effort to ameliorate the problem may not be sufficient to reverse the trend for another 100 years or more. But rather than merely throwing our hands in the air, closing our eyes, and holding our noses, there are some practical steps we can all take in order to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
The first of these steps is self-education. There’s a lot more that we all can learn about Global Warming, both with regard to the big picture, and also in terms of the hands-on things we can do in order to avoid contributing further to the problem ourselves. Unitarians are sometimes teased about believing in “salvation by bibliography,” but in this case in particular, knowledge really is power, and is the foundation for meaningful action. Here are two book that I feel ARE worth the paper they are printed on. The first is High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them. This is a relatively new book, written by J.F. Rischard, a vice-president at the World Bank (so it’s not exactly the kind of tree-hugging liberal pabulum I ordinarily like to read). The second is Jon Naar’s Design for a Livable Planet, which is filled with all sorts of practical ideas about things you can do to reduce your environmental impact on the earth. This is a fairly old book, but the good news is that there are lots of used copies available for about a buck plus postage at Amazon. Increased awareness leads naturally to the second step, which is making as many of these lifestyle changes as we can, and then committing ourselves to making even more. I don’t want you to think that simply turning out the lights when you leave the room and driving a more fuel-efficient car is going to make all the difference in the world. But it’s a start, and it certainly doesn’t hurt.
The third step involves participating in the education of others, as well as creating networks of mutual encouragement and support...so that as communities we can begin better to understand the full dimensions of our involvement in the problem, and can help one another in our efforts to make more comprehensive changes to address it. This is one of the places where churches like ours, as learning and teaching organizations, can make an important contribution. And finally there is the step of Activism and Advocacy: working to create changes on the level of public policy, which in this particular case is going to be essential if we hope to have any kind of meaningful impact on the overall situation in the long term.
Of course, there are some who believe that because the problem of Global Warming is so complex, only a solution which relies upon “the invisible hand of the marketplace” can possibly be effective. And I agree with this view...to a point. But because the problem of Global Warming is likewise one of those instances where “Bad money drives out Good,” so long as “bad actors” are allowed to avoid paying the true environmental costs of their activities, skimming off the profits while compelling the rest of us to pay for cleaning up their mess, well-intentioned competitors are always going to be at a disadvantage. If we wish to see some sort of workable, “market-based” solution to the problem of global warming, we need to make it profitable to do the right thing, while taking the profitability out of doing wrong. And we do this through rational regulation, backed by the authority of law.
Moreover, as the World’s Leader in the production of greenhouse gasses, it only stands to reason that the United States should take the lead in working toward their reduction and eventual elimination. For America to opt-out of the Kyoto accords because we claim that compliance would put our industries at a competitive disadvantage against those of countries like Bangladesh is absurd. America ought to be showing the world a better way of doing things, rather than throwing our weight around in a vain attempt to keep things just the way they are. So long as the “invisible hand” is seen to be thumbing its nose at the rest of the world, holding down the less-fortunate while propping up the fortunes of a privileged few, it will only work to divide the world further between the “Greenhouse winners” and the “Greenhouse losers.” A rising tide may well float all boats, but that only matters if people can afford to buy a boat. The alternative of throwing the weak to the sharks is morally acceptable only in some sort of alternative universe where the fundamental laws of human decency no longer apply.
And finally, I think it is essential for us to remember that as part of that “four per cent,” ALL Americans are seen by the rest of the world as belonging to that privileged few. It may well be true that our freedom, our economic prosperity, our so-called “opportunity society” in general, are the envy of the world, so long as that prosperity is perceived as denying opportunities to others, we will be despised as selfish, short-sighted bullies rather than admired as the generous, compassionate, creative and innovative hard-working human beings we all like to imagine ourselves to be. The time has come, and indeed may be long overdue, for Americans to live up to our flattering self-image, to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival...” not only of liberty, but of the planet itself. And “the energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor...can truly light the world,” not just metaphorically, but literally as well.
Sunday, November 16, 2003
ARE WE THERE YET?
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday November 16, 2003
It seems like this past week has pretty much run the “full spectrum” of ministry for me. This morning’s child dedication service has been scheduled for a month, but you can never tell when someone is going to be critically ill in the hospital, and then there was also a couple who wanted to talk with me about possibly officiating at their wedding next summer, while on Wednesday it seemed like I spent the entire day on the bus to and from New York City with Bob and Ernie and Tom and the folks from Religious Witness for the Earth, so that we could learn more about what we might do to help prevent Global Warming. But it gives me particular pleasure to share the service this morning with our Coming-of-Age candidates and their mentors.
I think I was probably about 13 or 14 myself when my family stopped attending the Unitarian Universalist Church in Palo Alto, California on a regular basis. Sometimes when I tell this story I like to make it sound a little more dramatic than it probably was, but basically my father (who first started attending University Unitarian Church in Seattle after hearing the minister there, Aaron Gilmartin, speak at an Adlai Stevenson rally in 1956) decided that he’d had enough after a handful of long-haired, bare-footed anti-war activists came down from Berkeley to conduct the service one Sunday morning because our regular minister was still in jail after being part of a group who the previous day had tried to stop a troop train bound for the Oakland Alameda naval air terminal which they thought was filled with soldiers on their way to Vietnam. And although it was never really clear to me whether it was their politics or their grooming (and hygiene!) that my father really objected to, after that Sunday he simply stopped accompanying us to church, and what at one time had been a delightful family activity (often including pancakes afterwards) became just another chore for my busy mother...so when we moved back to the Seattle area again a year or so later, we just never got back into the habit.
Which was fine with my two younger brothers, both of whom still like to sleep late on Sunday mornings. But I was just getting to the age where I was starting to become curious about spiritual matters, so I was thrown back on my own devices, which basically consisted of whatever I could find on TV (which, thankfully, in those days wasn’t much), and a Gideon Bible stolen out of a motel room during a High School debate trip, and an occasional pass past the booktable at the Eastshore Unitarian Church, which was only a few miles from our home, and just so happened to be about half-way between my house and my girlfriend’s, where I would sometimes ride my bicycle on Sundays, timing my ride so as to arrive at the church just as the services were letting out. And to make a long story short, I eventually ended up going to Divinity School and spending a total of 17 years in college and earning five liberal arts degrees, all because I missed out on going through the regular coming-of-age program in my home church when I was younger.
So parents, take note and be forewarned -- if you want your children to end up as architects or investment bankers (like my younger brothers), or perhaps in some other respectable profession, instead of becoming outspoken, overly-educated, poorly-dressed political radicals like myself, either let them sleep late, or else make certain that they get the whole course of treatment here, rather than simply letting them catch the bug and then allowing that spiritual “dis-ease” run its course. And while I could list a whole lot of other reasons why it’s best to bring them to church than to let them sleep, remember also that it doesn’t hurt to take them out to eat afterwards either. Because the really important thing is that you are doing it together, as a family.
In any event, I want to take advantage of this opportunity to speak directly to the youth of our church this morning, since you are a very important of our larger church community, yet we don’t really see you here on Sunday mornings as often as we might like to. And this is only normal: teenagers are naturally a lot more interested in one another than they are in hanging out with a lot of geezers like me, as all of us who were ever teenagers once ourselves will readily remember. In America, at least, adolescence is that period of our lives when we stand on the threshold of adulthood, exploring for the first time an identity and a relationship to the world which is NOT fundamentally defined and constructed by our parents. And in this transition from Dependence to Independence, there typically comes a phase of rebelliousness, or “Counter-dependence,” when we test for ourselves both our own limitations and those limits we sometimes believe have been arbitrarily imposed by others. And when we have finally sorted out all those issues, and feel at last like we know who we are, and what we stand for, and what we can and want to do with our lives, there’s an even bigger challenge ahead of us, which is the realization of our Interdependence -- the acknowledgment that we all rely on one another in more ways than we can possibly know, and the task of learning how best to become responsible members of a much wider community.
So if you sometimes hear your parents, or some other adult complain that “youth is wasted on the young,” I hope you will have the presence of mind to remind them that it is also “never too late to have a happy childhood.” Because remaining “Young at Heart,” even as we grow in years, is something we should all aspire to all our lives. And this is something far different from compensating for advancing age through immature behavior. Remaining perennially young at heart has to do with retaining that child-like fascination with discovering new things, and being able to delight in them. Which is, of course, profoundly different from simply acting childishly. Childish individuals never seem to learn to take responsibility for their own behavior. Nothing is ever their fault; someone else is always to blame. And yet somehow they never seem to get what they deserve either.... But people who can remember how to remain young at heart all their lives are grateful for every new day. They just seem to know, intuitively, how to take innocent pleasure in simple things, and both their innocence, and their pleasure, are contagious.
There is a second quality I would encourage you to cultivate as well, and this is the ability to be “Wise Beyond Your Years.” Someone once told me that the biggest difference between Life and School is that life gives the test first, and teaches the lesson afterwards. The older we become, the more lessons we must learn through trial and error, and failure often becomes our greatest teacher, because it FORCES us to look at ourselves in a more “critical” light. One of the key struggles of becoming an adult is determining how we will respond to failure and disappointment. Do we respond childishly: growing frustrated and throwing tantrums, blaming everyone and everything but ourselves, and then expecting sympathy? Or do we pick ourselves up, take a good long look around us and within ourselves, figure out what we did right, what we did wrong, what we might have done differently, and then try again? Talent is great (as far as it goes), but no one is ever so talented that they never come up short. Persistence and tenacity are the indispensable keys to our eventual success in almost every endeavor; simply “sticking with it” until, over time, we learn how to work both smarter AND harder, and with more efficient effort, avoiding the big mistakes and leaning from the little ones, while concentrating on doing those things most likely to give us the best results.
The trouble is that life generally doesn’t give us enough time to make all the mistakes we need to make in order to know everything need to know. And so we also need to learn how to learn from the mistakes of others, and this is what I mean by becoming “Wise Beyond Our Years.” The great blessing of youth is that it feels as though we are discovering the entire world for the first time, seeing it with fresh eyes as though it has never been seen before. And yet, we are what’s new; the world itself has been around for a long time -- long before any of us were even born -- and it will continue to be here long after all of us are long gone. A lot of folks have been here before us, and their wisdom -- the lessons learned from countless lifetimes of triumphs and failures -- is a gift to us, a legacy from our ancestors that can save us all a lot of suffering if only we can discover for ourselves how best to draw upon it.
The good news is that the same quality that allows us to remain young at heart also helps us to become wise beyond our years. And this quality is our capacity for Empathy, and Compassion...the ability to feel what another person is feeling and to sympathize with them, without losing touch with who we are and the differences or boundaries between us. It’s the most important lesson we can learn: how to live in that place where our Independence and our Interdependence come together, so that we know that we can depend on those around us, and that they can depend on us...how to love and be loved, how to be a part of the whole, and yet whole within ourselves. So practice it as much as you can. Learn to put yourself in the other guy’s shoes, try to see things from their perspective, imagine what it would be like if you were them. Or better yet, learn how to ask others what they are thinking and feeling, and learn how to listen to what they say. No matter how smart or clever you may be, everyone you meet knows something that you don’t; and if you can just learn how to listen, how to pay attention to what they are really saying, they just might teach it to you. And then you will be able to share in their success, or at least avoid making the same mistake twice. And this will make you wise beyond your years.
I know I’ve said a lot this morning, and a lot of it has probably sounded both really obvious and maybe a little cryptic too, but there’s one last thing I want to say to you this morning, something which almost goes without saying. But one of my favorite books is called “Wherever You Go, There You Are” -- which is a clever way of saying that you can travel anywhere in the world: to New York or Hollywood, Paris or Rome, even Zanzibar on the Far Side of the World...but when you get there, it’s still the same old you. So learn how to Be Here Now, and to be somewhere else later, and you’ll do fine. My old girlfriend, the one whose house was on the other side of the Unitarian Church, used to call this being “Intimate With the Moment” -- being totally alive in the here and now, without thinking so much about what happened yesterday, or what’s going to happen tomorrow. And yes, there’s a difference -- an important difference -- between living IN the moment, and living only FOR the moment...but I’m afraid you’re going to have to figure that one out for yourselves, just like all of the rest of us. But while you’re working on that, I just want you to know, on behalf of everyone in this Church, that we’re glad you’re here, and we’re on your side. We’re all very proud of who you are, and we’re all very excited to find out what kind of persons you are going to become.
PRAYER (by Bonnie Greer & Chris Eutizzi, RN)
Margie's Prayer (final version)
Divine Love. You have given the gift of Nurture to humankind. We pray now that you would help us to take the time to nurture our own bodies, and minds, and spirits. We have all lived long enough to realize that unless we pause in the busy-ness of our days, we have little left to give to others from our stretched, and stressed, and impoverished souls. We know that we are spiritual beings, and that the spirit cannot die. So help us to feed all that would make us whole. And may our time of quiet energize us to accept life as it comes to us.
Spirit of Life, we ask for Strength, for Wisdom, for Courage, for Healing that we may use our days to show our appreciation for the many gifts we receive from Your presence in our lives. We thank you for the gift of friendship, and pray that You would encourage us, and heal each one of us, wherever we most need Your healing touch. We ask especially that You would heal Margie of her discomfort and her pain. Take away her worry and her anxiousness, and help her to look to You for everything that she needs.
God our Creator, we know that this life is just a brief moment in time. Help us to live "eternally-minded," knowing that our greatest pleasure and desire in this world is to be reunited with You. We praise You for the love that binds the McCormick family together. Thank you for Bill's devotion, commitment, and abiding love for Margie. Margie's enduring love for Bill has been a constant source of comfort and joy in her life. Thank you for the dedication that Bill and Margie have for their children, Erin and Shelley, and for all the loved ones in their lives. And thank you for Margie's warmth and love. ---------Nov. 20, 2003
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday November 16, 2003
It seems like this past week has pretty much run the “full spectrum” of ministry for me. This morning’s child dedication service has been scheduled for a month, but you can never tell when someone is going to be critically ill in the hospital, and then there was also a couple who wanted to talk with me about possibly officiating at their wedding next summer, while on Wednesday it seemed like I spent the entire day on the bus to and from New York City with Bob and Ernie and Tom and the folks from Religious Witness for the Earth, so that we could learn more about what we might do to help prevent Global Warming. But it gives me particular pleasure to share the service this morning with our Coming-of-Age candidates and their mentors.
I think I was probably about 13 or 14 myself when my family stopped attending the Unitarian Universalist Church in Palo Alto, California on a regular basis. Sometimes when I tell this story I like to make it sound a little more dramatic than it probably was, but basically my father (who first started attending University Unitarian Church in Seattle after hearing the minister there, Aaron Gilmartin, speak at an Adlai Stevenson rally in 1956) decided that he’d had enough after a handful of long-haired, bare-footed anti-war activists came down from Berkeley to conduct the service one Sunday morning because our regular minister was still in jail after being part of a group who the previous day had tried to stop a troop train bound for the Oakland Alameda naval air terminal which they thought was filled with soldiers on their way to Vietnam. And although it was never really clear to me whether it was their politics or their grooming (and hygiene!) that my father really objected to, after that Sunday he simply stopped accompanying us to church, and what at one time had been a delightful family activity (often including pancakes afterwards) became just another chore for my busy mother...so when we moved back to the Seattle area again a year or so later, we just never got back into the habit.
Which was fine with my two younger brothers, both of whom still like to sleep late on Sunday mornings. But I was just getting to the age where I was starting to become curious about spiritual matters, so I was thrown back on my own devices, which basically consisted of whatever I could find on TV (which, thankfully, in those days wasn’t much), and a Gideon Bible stolen out of a motel room during a High School debate trip, and an occasional pass past the booktable at the Eastshore Unitarian Church, which was only a few miles from our home, and just so happened to be about half-way between my house and my girlfriend’s, where I would sometimes ride my bicycle on Sundays, timing my ride so as to arrive at the church just as the services were letting out. And to make a long story short, I eventually ended up going to Divinity School and spending a total of 17 years in college and earning five liberal arts degrees, all because I missed out on going through the regular coming-of-age program in my home church when I was younger.
So parents, take note and be forewarned -- if you want your children to end up as architects or investment bankers (like my younger brothers), or perhaps in some other respectable profession, instead of becoming outspoken, overly-educated, poorly-dressed political radicals like myself, either let them sleep late, or else make certain that they get the whole course of treatment here, rather than simply letting them catch the bug and then allowing that spiritual “dis-ease” run its course. And while I could list a whole lot of other reasons why it’s best to bring them to church than to let them sleep, remember also that it doesn’t hurt to take them out to eat afterwards either. Because the really important thing is that you are doing it together, as a family.
In any event, I want to take advantage of this opportunity to speak directly to the youth of our church this morning, since you are a very important of our larger church community, yet we don’t really see you here on Sunday mornings as often as we might like to. And this is only normal: teenagers are naturally a lot more interested in one another than they are in hanging out with a lot of geezers like me, as all of us who were ever teenagers once ourselves will readily remember. In America, at least, adolescence is that period of our lives when we stand on the threshold of adulthood, exploring for the first time an identity and a relationship to the world which is NOT fundamentally defined and constructed by our parents. And in this transition from Dependence to Independence, there typically comes a phase of rebelliousness, or “Counter-dependence,” when we test for ourselves both our own limitations and those limits we sometimes believe have been arbitrarily imposed by others. And when we have finally sorted out all those issues, and feel at last like we know who we are, and what we stand for, and what we can and want to do with our lives, there’s an even bigger challenge ahead of us, which is the realization of our Interdependence -- the acknowledgment that we all rely on one another in more ways than we can possibly know, and the task of learning how best to become responsible members of a much wider community.
So if you sometimes hear your parents, or some other adult complain that “youth is wasted on the young,” I hope you will have the presence of mind to remind them that it is also “never too late to have a happy childhood.” Because remaining “Young at Heart,” even as we grow in years, is something we should all aspire to all our lives. And this is something far different from compensating for advancing age through immature behavior. Remaining perennially young at heart has to do with retaining that child-like fascination with discovering new things, and being able to delight in them. Which is, of course, profoundly different from simply acting childishly. Childish individuals never seem to learn to take responsibility for their own behavior. Nothing is ever their fault; someone else is always to blame. And yet somehow they never seem to get what they deserve either.... But people who can remember how to remain young at heart all their lives are grateful for every new day. They just seem to know, intuitively, how to take innocent pleasure in simple things, and both their innocence, and their pleasure, are contagious.
There is a second quality I would encourage you to cultivate as well, and this is the ability to be “Wise Beyond Your Years.” Someone once told me that the biggest difference between Life and School is that life gives the test first, and teaches the lesson afterwards. The older we become, the more lessons we must learn through trial and error, and failure often becomes our greatest teacher, because it FORCES us to look at ourselves in a more “critical” light. One of the key struggles of becoming an adult is determining how we will respond to failure and disappointment. Do we respond childishly: growing frustrated and throwing tantrums, blaming everyone and everything but ourselves, and then expecting sympathy? Or do we pick ourselves up, take a good long look around us and within ourselves, figure out what we did right, what we did wrong, what we might have done differently, and then try again? Talent is great (as far as it goes), but no one is ever so talented that they never come up short. Persistence and tenacity are the indispensable keys to our eventual success in almost every endeavor; simply “sticking with it” until, over time, we learn how to work both smarter AND harder, and with more efficient effort, avoiding the big mistakes and leaning from the little ones, while concentrating on doing those things most likely to give us the best results.
The trouble is that life generally doesn’t give us enough time to make all the mistakes we need to make in order to know everything need to know. And so we also need to learn how to learn from the mistakes of others, and this is what I mean by becoming “Wise Beyond Our Years.” The great blessing of youth is that it feels as though we are discovering the entire world for the first time, seeing it with fresh eyes as though it has never been seen before. And yet, we are what’s new; the world itself has been around for a long time -- long before any of us were even born -- and it will continue to be here long after all of us are long gone. A lot of folks have been here before us, and their wisdom -- the lessons learned from countless lifetimes of triumphs and failures -- is a gift to us, a legacy from our ancestors that can save us all a lot of suffering if only we can discover for ourselves how best to draw upon it.
The good news is that the same quality that allows us to remain young at heart also helps us to become wise beyond our years. And this quality is our capacity for Empathy, and Compassion...the ability to feel what another person is feeling and to sympathize with them, without losing touch with who we are and the differences or boundaries between us. It’s the most important lesson we can learn: how to live in that place where our Independence and our Interdependence come together, so that we know that we can depend on those around us, and that they can depend on us...how to love and be loved, how to be a part of the whole, and yet whole within ourselves. So practice it as much as you can. Learn to put yourself in the other guy’s shoes, try to see things from their perspective, imagine what it would be like if you were them. Or better yet, learn how to ask others what they are thinking and feeling, and learn how to listen to what they say. No matter how smart or clever you may be, everyone you meet knows something that you don’t; and if you can just learn how to listen, how to pay attention to what they are really saying, they just might teach it to you. And then you will be able to share in their success, or at least avoid making the same mistake twice. And this will make you wise beyond your years.
I know I’ve said a lot this morning, and a lot of it has probably sounded both really obvious and maybe a little cryptic too, but there’s one last thing I want to say to you this morning, something which almost goes without saying. But one of my favorite books is called “Wherever You Go, There You Are” -- which is a clever way of saying that you can travel anywhere in the world: to New York or Hollywood, Paris or Rome, even Zanzibar on the Far Side of the World...but when you get there, it’s still the same old you. So learn how to Be Here Now, and to be somewhere else later, and you’ll do fine. My old girlfriend, the one whose house was on the other side of the Unitarian Church, used to call this being “Intimate With the Moment” -- being totally alive in the here and now, without thinking so much about what happened yesterday, or what’s going to happen tomorrow. And yes, there’s a difference -- an important difference -- between living IN the moment, and living only FOR the moment...but I’m afraid you’re going to have to figure that one out for yourselves, just like all of the rest of us. But while you’re working on that, I just want you to know, on behalf of everyone in this Church, that we’re glad you’re here, and we’re on your side. We’re all very proud of who you are, and we’re all very excited to find out what kind of persons you are going to become.
PRAYER (by Bonnie Greer & Chris Eutizzi, RN)
Margie's Prayer (final version)
Divine Love. You have given the gift of Nurture to humankind. We pray now that you would help us to take the time to nurture our own bodies, and minds, and spirits. We have all lived long enough to realize that unless we pause in the busy-ness of our days, we have little left to give to others from our stretched, and stressed, and impoverished souls. We know that we are spiritual beings, and that the spirit cannot die. So help us to feed all that would make us whole. And may our time of quiet energize us to accept life as it comes to us.
Spirit of Life, we ask for Strength, for Wisdom, for Courage, for Healing that we may use our days to show our appreciation for the many gifts we receive from Your presence in our lives. We thank you for the gift of friendship, and pray that You would encourage us, and heal each one of us, wherever we most need Your healing touch. We ask especially that You would heal Margie of her discomfort and her pain. Take away her worry and her anxiousness, and help her to look to You for everything that she needs.
God our Creator, we know that this life is just a brief moment in time. Help us to live "eternally-minded," knowing that our greatest pleasure and desire in this world is to be reunited with You. We praise You for the love that binds the McCormick family together. Thank you for Bill's devotion, commitment, and abiding love for Margie. Margie's enduring love for Bill has been a constant source of comfort and joy in her life. Thank you for the dedication that Bill and Margie have for their children, Erin and Shelley, and for all the loved ones in their lives. And thank you for Margie's warmth and love. ---------Nov. 20, 2003
Sunday, November 9, 2003
A DOG THAT QUACKS LIKE A DUCK?
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Veteran’s Day Sunday November 9, 2003
There’s an interesting article in this week’s Newsweek magazine on “God and Health,” which reports (among other things) that people who attend church at least once a week live, on average, eight years longer than people who don’t attend church at all. And notwithstanding the old joke that it only SEEMS longer, when you read a little more closely you discover that regular churchgoers are also 78% more likely to have quit smoking, 39% more likely to have stopped drinking, 54% more likely to exercise regularly, and 131% less likely to feel depressed. So there’s nothing particularly miraculous about these statistics: regular church attendance is simply a good habit which tends to encourage a lot of other good habits. But there are no guarantees; I can’t promise you that by choosing now to spend an hour every week here in this room with me you are assured of an extra eight years at the end of your life. You have to read the small print at the bottom of the prospectus: past performance is not predictive of future results. Still, you’ve got to like the odds...especially since it requires such a modest initial investment, and pays additional dividends almost immediately.
Of course, there are some activities in life that are inherently risky, no matter how well prepared or equipped one may be. There’s a headstone down in the cemetery at the bottom of the hill here that Parker and I often walk by as we are out getting our recommended 40 minutes of moderate cardio three times a week. It belongs to Captain John F. Kazanowski, U.S. Army Special Forces, born June 4th, 1938 (which would make him a Gemini), died October 7th, 1969. I don’t really know that much more about Captain Kazanowski, other than that his middle initial stands for “Francis” and although he was born in Carlisle, his family apparently no longer lives here. And I also know (because I can do the math) that he was 18 years old in 1956 (the year that I was born), and only 31 when he was killed in action in Kontum, South Vietnam, two weeks prior to my 13th birthday. And I was likewise able to find out (thanks to Google) that he was married, that he died as a result of small arms fire, that his body was recovered, that he apparently served in the Reserve as well as in the Special Forces, for a total of eight years, and his name is located on panel 17W, line 47 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington D.C. I have no idea what he looked like, or what his political sympathies were. I can guess about his religion (or at least the religion of his parents), but it would still be just an educated guess. I don’t know anything about his interests or hobbies, or what his friends thought of him; I don’t really even know whether or not he was a good soldier. But someone doubtlessly knows all these things, and as a historian I could potentially discover them all as well, if I were simply willing to take the time and make the effort to do the research. What I can never know, and what no one can ever know, is what kind of man John Francis Kazanowski would have become had he lived beyond the age of 31; what he would have done with his life at age 47, for example, (the age I am now), or at age 65, had he not been killed in action. I know this as well: it was in no small part because of the experiences of people like Captain Kazanowski, who fought and died serving our country in Southeast Asia when I was still a child, that I decided when I turned 18 to pursue this profession rather than his.
I also suspect it’s no big secret to any of you how I feel about the current war in Iraq. But I want you all to know that I’m not opposed to this war simply because I’m just another knee-jerk, bleeding-heart liberal peacenik. I’m also an historian, someone who has actually even taught military history at the University level, so I understand that there are times when wars are necessary, and even justified. And I also have a great deal of respect for our men and women in uniform, who are unquestionably and without a doubt the best trained, best equipped, most powerful and professional fighting force in the history of the world, and who have volunteered to risk their lives by putting themselves in harm’s way, on the orders of our Constitutionally designated Commander in Chief, in order to defend this country’s security and interests in the world. So at the end of the day, even though I AM basically just another knee-jerk, bleeding-heart liberal peacenik, when I express my doubts about the legitimacy of this war, and question the President’s motivations for starting it, I am in no way doubting or questioning the integrity of our men and women in uniform, who are simply attempting to do their duty to their country and their fellow citizens, just as I am attempting to do mine. And although there are times when I wish that some of them (General Boyken, for instance) would concentrate a little bit more attentively on the specifically military aspects of their duties, and leave the theology to people like me, this is not one of those situations where I take any sort of pleasure or satisfaction whatsoever in being able to say “I told you so.” Because these are real people’s lives that are at risk here. And when we forget that, we all fail in our duty.
I want to pause here and say just a word or two about the title of this sermon. I first heard this phrase (or something close to it) during a radio interview with reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, who are the authors of The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron. And immediately my ears perked up, since (having attended both the University of Washington and the University of Oregon), I have at various times in my life been both a “Dawg” and a “Duck” -- as well as an Oregon State University Beaver, two types of Viking, and a Crimson (whatever that is)...and thus there have been moments (generally brisk Saturday afternoons in autumn) when, not only have I been confused about which hat to wear, but I’ve also been uncertain about whether I should bark, or quack, or simply slap the surface of the pond loudly with my tail before diving to safety beneath the water. Of course, this particular interview I was listening to had nothing to do with college football. Rather, the reporters were recounting how one Enron accountant had described his job of making prepaid commodities futures contracts (which are essentially debt and therefore liabilities) appear as earnings on the company balance sheet -- “making a dog look like a duck.” Because as we all know, if it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, it’s supposed to be a duck. But they weren’t ducks. They were dogs. And as we all well know, when somebody finally got around to letting the dogs out, the whole thing came crashing down...and a lot of people got bitten. And now a lot of these same people want to know why Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling and all their crooked corporate cronies aren’t in the hoosegow (instead of merely the doghouse)...but you know, that’s not going to give people back their pensions, or their health insurance, or their homes or their livelihoods. Revenge is a very superficial form of payback. It’s much better when the people who have suffered actually get paid back what they have lost -- what in my line of work we call “Restorative Justice” (as opposed to “Retributive Justice”).
Of course, there are some folks who would still argue that a lot of the fuzzy bookkeeping done at Enron technically wasn’t illegal...it was just misleading and (perhaps) immoral. So while it’s understandable why people may wish to express their moral outrage, anything like jail time, much less actual restitution, is simply out of the question. And this isn’t the only area of public concern where we are being asked to split hairs between the “intentional cultivation of a misperception” and an outright lie. So long as our leaders, our public servants, can keep the dogs all muzzled and their ducks in a row, we have no business scrutinizing their actions or questioning their decisions...it’s just a lot of nay-saying, or fear-mongering, or partisan political “spin.” It may even be unpatriotic, and a danger to our national security.
But for my own part, I’m a lot less concerned about the possibility that the Bush Administration may have attempted to intentionally deceive the American people about their reasons for going to war with Iraq (which, by the way, I’m pretty certain that they did), than I am worried about the likelihood that they may have unintentionally deceived themselves as well. And this, to my way of thinking, is a much bigger problem...because it’s one thing to know what you are doing, and to lie about it to others, and quite another to THINK that you know what you are doing, but instead to be rushing headlong toward disaster because you’ve been lying to yourself, and living in a state of denial. And this is an insight that goes well beyond our contemporary political situation; it’s a danger that we all need to be aware of, because it happens so easily, even to the best of us. And it’s not just confined to negative things either; people also deceive themselves about the positive things in their lives, or so exaggerate their concern about what “might” happen that they never get to enjoy what IS happening. Learning to tell the difference between “what if” and “what is” is not always easy, but it’s important, not only because it allows us to distinguish between “what might have been” and “the way things really are,” but because it also allows us to consider the question of “what next” from a place of relative certainty rather than one of wishful thinking.
Personally, I’m a great believer in the power of optimism. I believe that it’s important to have faith in what you are doing, to have hope for a positive outcome, and to be confident that you can trust that you are making decisions based on the best possible information available, having carefully both calculated the potential risks and the possible returns. And of course you need to take everything you hear with a grain of salt, and double-check everything that you can; because not only are there dogs that quack like ducks, and ducks that bark like dogs...their are also wolves in sheep's clothing, and foxes hoping to guard the henhouse, and you’ve got to be on your toes to see through their disguises, to see them for what they really are, and not merely what they tell you they are, or what we wish them to be. “Trust, but Verify” I believe the old Russian proverb goes. And the higher the stakes, the more important it is to be certain of the facts before you act.
I know that there are a lot of people in this country, the families and friends of men and women in uniform in particular, who honestly feel that we somehow break faith with our troops in the field whenever we question the policies (and politics) that have put them in harm’s way. In order for our soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines to be able to do their jobs, they need to know that the nation stands solidly behind them, and that they have a clear mission, one that can effectively be achieved through the use of military force, as well as overwhelming material superiority, and a clear exit strategy when the mission is accomplished. This is the “Powell doctrine,” which was put into effect during the First Gulf War -- the 100 hours of ”Operation Desert Storm” -- and at the time was widely praised as having brought an end to the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome.”
But when there is no clear military objective, much less a well-thought-out mission and exit strategy...when we can’t even be certain that our leaders are telling us the truth, much less independently verify what they are saying; when asking questions is portrayed as unpatriotic, and ideological bravado has been substituted for the objective analysis of reliable intelligence, we are headed, as a nation, toward a world of hurt. The constant trickle of casualties which we seem powerless to prevent (an experience some might compare to being “pecked to death by ducks”) is only the thin edge of the wedge. Casualties are never good, but if it is obvious that they are contributing in a tangible way toward an eventual victory they can generally be borne. Simply SAYING this, however, does not make it so, and no one sees this sooner or more clearly than the soldiers in the field themselves. The first sign of declining morale will be a drop in the rate of re-enlistments, especially among members of the Guard and Reserves. Another place to look for signs of trouble is in the internal domestic politics of our nominal allies. And I’m not talking here so much about Great Britain, or even France or Germany or Russia. But look at countries like Turkey, and more importantly, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The President has declared that he wants to turn Iraq into a model of Islamic democracy, which can then become a template for emerging democracies throughout the region. And I hope that he is right. And I hope that he can pull it off. But what I fear is that instead we will see increased levels of authoritarian repression in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (not that it could really get much worse), as the ruling elites there attempt to control ever-growing popular resentment of the on-going American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the Turks and the Kurds (and the Syrians and the Iranians) continue to maneuver in order to take advantage of the chaos and promote their own political interests and aspirations. And should the pro-American ruling elites in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan somehow fall from power, that’s when the problems really begin. Because Pakistan truly does possess nuclear weapons. And the American economy truly does depend on the free flow of Saudi oil.
And, of course, underlying all of this is the fact that we must base our policy decisions on “what is,” and not on “what might have been.” No matter how desperately we might have wished otherwise, we no longer really have the option of simply pulling out of Iraq and leaving things to sort themselves out on their own. Our military is committed (some might even say over-extended), we are losing the initiative, and although the “exit strategy” is obvious to everyone, one honestly has to wonder whether or not the President, having thumbed his nose at the international community on numerous occasions, is actually capable of creating the kind of international coalition his father knew was indispensable in order to succeed in situations of this kind. And with the Presidential election now only a year away, you can be confident that the political discourse in this country will only grow increasingly acrimonious, as young American men and women continue to risk their lives, and shed their blood, in foreign lands.
[extemporaneous conclusion: civility, dialog, and the power of prayer]
READING: from A World Transformed by George Bush and Brent Scowcroft (1998)
Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would have instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, there was no viable “exit strategy” we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gong the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Veteran’s Day Sunday November 9, 2003
There’s an interesting article in this week’s Newsweek magazine on “God and Health,” which reports (among other things) that people who attend church at least once a week live, on average, eight years longer than people who don’t attend church at all. And notwithstanding the old joke that it only SEEMS longer, when you read a little more closely you discover that regular churchgoers are also 78% more likely to have quit smoking, 39% more likely to have stopped drinking, 54% more likely to exercise regularly, and 131% less likely to feel depressed. So there’s nothing particularly miraculous about these statistics: regular church attendance is simply a good habit which tends to encourage a lot of other good habits. But there are no guarantees; I can’t promise you that by choosing now to spend an hour every week here in this room with me you are assured of an extra eight years at the end of your life. You have to read the small print at the bottom of the prospectus: past performance is not predictive of future results. Still, you’ve got to like the odds...especially since it requires such a modest initial investment, and pays additional dividends almost immediately.
Of course, there are some activities in life that are inherently risky, no matter how well prepared or equipped one may be. There’s a headstone down in the cemetery at the bottom of the hill here that Parker and I often walk by as we are out getting our recommended 40 minutes of moderate cardio three times a week. It belongs to Captain John F. Kazanowski, U.S. Army Special Forces, born June 4th, 1938 (which would make him a Gemini), died October 7th, 1969. I don’t really know that much more about Captain Kazanowski, other than that his middle initial stands for “Francis” and although he was born in Carlisle, his family apparently no longer lives here. And I also know (because I can do the math) that he was 18 years old in 1956 (the year that I was born), and only 31 when he was killed in action in Kontum, South Vietnam, two weeks prior to my 13th birthday. And I was likewise able to find out (thanks to Google) that he was married, that he died as a result of small arms fire, that his body was recovered, that he apparently served in the Reserve as well as in the Special Forces, for a total of eight years, and his name is located on panel 17W, line 47 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington D.C. I have no idea what he looked like, or what his political sympathies were. I can guess about his religion (or at least the religion of his parents), but it would still be just an educated guess. I don’t know anything about his interests or hobbies, or what his friends thought of him; I don’t really even know whether or not he was a good soldier. But someone doubtlessly knows all these things, and as a historian I could potentially discover them all as well, if I were simply willing to take the time and make the effort to do the research. What I can never know, and what no one can ever know, is what kind of man John Francis Kazanowski would have become had he lived beyond the age of 31; what he would have done with his life at age 47, for example, (the age I am now), or at age 65, had he not been killed in action. I know this as well: it was in no small part because of the experiences of people like Captain Kazanowski, who fought and died serving our country in Southeast Asia when I was still a child, that I decided when I turned 18 to pursue this profession rather than his.
I also suspect it’s no big secret to any of you how I feel about the current war in Iraq. But I want you all to know that I’m not opposed to this war simply because I’m just another knee-jerk, bleeding-heart liberal peacenik. I’m also an historian, someone who has actually even taught military history at the University level, so I understand that there are times when wars are necessary, and even justified. And I also have a great deal of respect for our men and women in uniform, who are unquestionably and without a doubt the best trained, best equipped, most powerful and professional fighting force in the history of the world, and who have volunteered to risk their lives by putting themselves in harm’s way, on the orders of our Constitutionally designated Commander in Chief, in order to defend this country’s security and interests in the world. So at the end of the day, even though I AM basically just another knee-jerk, bleeding-heart liberal peacenik, when I express my doubts about the legitimacy of this war, and question the President’s motivations for starting it, I am in no way doubting or questioning the integrity of our men and women in uniform, who are simply attempting to do their duty to their country and their fellow citizens, just as I am attempting to do mine. And although there are times when I wish that some of them (General Boyken, for instance) would concentrate a little bit more attentively on the specifically military aspects of their duties, and leave the theology to people like me, this is not one of those situations where I take any sort of pleasure or satisfaction whatsoever in being able to say “I told you so.” Because these are real people’s lives that are at risk here. And when we forget that, we all fail in our duty.
I want to pause here and say just a word or two about the title of this sermon. I first heard this phrase (or something close to it) during a radio interview with reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, who are the authors of The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron. And immediately my ears perked up, since (having attended both the University of Washington and the University of Oregon), I have at various times in my life been both a “Dawg” and a “Duck” -- as well as an Oregon State University Beaver, two types of Viking, and a Crimson (whatever that is)...and thus there have been moments (generally brisk Saturday afternoons in autumn) when, not only have I been confused about which hat to wear, but I’ve also been uncertain about whether I should bark, or quack, or simply slap the surface of the pond loudly with my tail before diving to safety beneath the water. Of course, this particular interview I was listening to had nothing to do with college football. Rather, the reporters were recounting how one Enron accountant had described his job of making prepaid commodities futures contracts (which are essentially debt and therefore liabilities) appear as earnings on the company balance sheet -- “making a dog look like a duck.” Because as we all know, if it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, it’s supposed to be a duck. But they weren’t ducks. They were dogs. And as we all well know, when somebody finally got around to letting the dogs out, the whole thing came crashing down...and a lot of people got bitten. And now a lot of these same people want to know why Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling and all their crooked corporate cronies aren’t in the hoosegow (instead of merely the doghouse)...but you know, that’s not going to give people back their pensions, or their health insurance, or their homes or their livelihoods. Revenge is a very superficial form of payback. It’s much better when the people who have suffered actually get paid back what they have lost -- what in my line of work we call “Restorative Justice” (as opposed to “Retributive Justice”).
Of course, there are some folks who would still argue that a lot of the fuzzy bookkeeping done at Enron technically wasn’t illegal...it was just misleading and (perhaps) immoral. So while it’s understandable why people may wish to express their moral outrage, anything like jail time, much less actual restitution, is simply out of the question. And this isn’t the only area of public concern where we are being asked to split hairs between the “intentional cultivation of a misperception” and an outright lie. So long as our leaders, our public servants, can keep the dogs all muzzled and their ducks in a row, we have no business scrutinizing their actions or questioning their decisions...it’s just a lot of nay-saying, or fear-mongering, or partisan political “spin.” It may even be unpatriotic, and a danger to our national security.
But for my own part, I’m a lot less concerned about the possibility that the Bush Administration may have attempted to intentionally deceive the American people about their reasons for going to war with Iraq (which, by the way, I’m pretty certain that they did), than I am worried about the likelihood that they may have unintentionally deceived themselves as well. And this, to my way of thinking, is a much bigger problem...because it’s one thing to know what you are doing, and to lie about it to others, and quite another to THINK that you know what you are doing, but instead to be rushing headlong toward disaster because you’ve been lying to yourself, and living in a state of denial. And this is an insight that goes well beyond our contemporary political situation; it’s a danger that we all need to be aware of, because it happens so easily, even to the best of us. And it’s not just confined to negative things either; people also deceive themselves about the positive things in their lives, or so exaggerate their concern about what “might” happen that they never get to enjoy what IS happening. Learning to tell the difference between “what if” and “what is” is not always easy, but it’s important, not only because it allows us to distinguish between “what might have been” and “the way things really are,” but because it also allows us to consider the question of “what next” from a place of relative certainty rather than one of wishful thinking.
Personally, I’m a great believer in the power of optimism. I believe that it’s important to have faith in what you are doing, to have hope for a positive outcome, and to be confident that you can trust that you are making decisions based on the best possible information available, having carefully both calculated the potential risks and the possible returns. And of course you need to take everything you hear with a grain of salt, and double-check everything that you can; because not only are there dogs that quack like ducks, and ducks that bark like dogs...their are also wolves in sheep's clothing, and foxes hoping to guard the henhouse, and you’ve got to be on your toes to see through their disguises, to see them for what they really are, and not merely what they tell you they are, or what we wish them to be. “Trust, but Verify” I believe the old Russian proverb goes. And the higher the stakes, the more important it is to be certain of the facts before you act.
I know that there are a lot of people in this country, the families and friends of men and women in uniform in particular, who honestly feel that we somehow break faith with our troops in the field whenever we question the policies (and politics) that have put them in harm’s way. In order for our soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines to be able to do their jobs, they need to know that the nation stands solidly behind them, and that they have a clear mission, one that can effectively be achieved through the use of military force, as well as overwhelming material superiority, and a clear exit strategy when the mission is accomplished. This is the “Powell doctrine,” which was put into effect during the First Gulf War -- the 100 hours of ”Operation Desert Storm” -- and at the time was widely praised as having brought an end to the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome.”
But when there is no clear military objective, much less a well-thought-out mission and exit strategy...when we can’t even be certain that our leaders are telling us the truth, much less independently verify what they are saying; when asking questions is portrayed as unpatriotic, and ideological bravado has been substituted for the objective analysis of reliable intelligence, we are headed, as a nation, toward a world of hurt. The constant trickle of casualties which we seem powerless to prevent (an experience some might compare to being “pecked to death by ducks”) is only the thin edge of the wedge. Casualties are never good, but if it is obvious that they are contributing in a tangible way toward an eventual victory they can generally be borne. Simply SAYING this, however, does not make it so, and no one sees this sooner or more clearly than the soldiers in the field themselves. The first sign of declining morale will be a drop in the rate of re-enlistments, especially among members of the Guard and Reserves. Another place to look for signs of trouble is in the internal domestic politics of our nominal allies. And I’m not talking here so much about Great Britain, or even France or Germany or Russia. But look at countries like Turkey, and more importantly, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The President has declared that he wants to turn Iraq into a model of Islamic democracy, which can then become a template for emerging democracies throughout the region. And I hope that he is right. And I hope that he can pull it off. But what I fear is that instead we will see increased levels of authoritarian repression in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (not that it could really get much worse), as the ruling elites there attempt to control ever-growing popular resentment of the on-going American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the Turks and the Kurds (and the Syrians and the Iranians) continue to maneuver in order to take advantage of the chaos and promote their own political interests and aspirations. And should the pro-American ruling elites in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan somehow fall from power, that’s when the problems really begin. Because Pakistan truly does possess nuclear weapons. And the American economy truly does depend on the free flow of Saudi oil.
And, of course, underlying all of this is the fact that we must base our policy decisions on “what is,” and not on “what might have been.” No matter how desperately we might have wished otherwise, we no longer really have the option of simply pulling out of Iraq and leaving things to sort themselves out on their own. Our military is committed (some might even say over-extended), we are losing the initiative, and although the “exit strategy” is obvious to everyone, one honestly has to wonder whether or not the President, having thumbed his nose at the international community on numerous occasions, is actually capable of creating the kind of international coalition his father knew was indispensable in order to succeed in situations of this kind. And with the Presidential election now only a year away, you can be confident that the political discourse in this country will only grow increasingly acrimonious, as young American men and women continue to risk their lives, and shed their blood, in foreign lands.
[extemporaneous conclusion: civility, dialog, and the power of prayer]
READING: from A World Transformed by George Bush and Brent Scowcroft (1998)
Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would have instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, there was no viable “exit strategy” we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gong the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome.
Sunday, October 19, 2003
FIDELITY IN THE FACE OF DARKNESS
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday October 19, 2003
Like a lot of other Americans these past few days, I’ve been reflecting quite a bit about the fate and the destinies of the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs, wondering whether or not there may really be something to the “Curse of the Bambino,” or the “Curse of the Billie Goat,”and once again speculating about what might have happened, on a cosmic level, if and when these two star-crossed teams had actually met in the World Series. My father-in-law, who grew up in Chicago (and is now in his eighties), had actually flown out to Portland, Oregon so that he could watch the Series with his daughter and grand-daughter, neither of whom were even born the last time the Cubbies appeared in the Fall Classic. His disappointment, as you might imagine, is nearly inconsolable.
As for the Sox, what can I possibly say? At least they lost in a conventionally tragic fashion; having bravely rallied to force a Game Seven in Yankee Stadium, and with a comfortable three-run lead going into the eighth inning, they chose to stick with Pedro Martinez, the star pitcher who had carried them so far, rather than trusting to an at-times inconsistent and unreliable bullpen, and the Yankees...those damn Yankees... took advantage of the opportunity to tie the game, and later won it in the eleventh inning with a first pitch, lead-off home run off of Tim Wakefield, who had successfully confounded the Yankees with his knuckleball in his two previous outings as a starter.
But how can this possibly compare to the fate of the Cubs? With three chances to put away the Marlins, two of them at home in Wrigley Field, and a mere five outs away from their first pennant since 1945, one of their own fans reaches out to catch a foul ball hit into the stands, unaware of the fact that left fielder Moises Alou was about to make a spectacular, leaping over-the-wall catch for the second out of the inning; they bump hands, the ball squirts away...the Cubbies fall apart, the Marlins score eight runs, and are now they are the ones playing (and winning) in Yankee Stadium. This is well beyond conventional tragedy; clearly some sort of supernatural force is at work here. And my heart goes out to all Cubs fans, and especially to the fan who tried to catch the foul ball, 26-year-old Steve Bartman, who was pelted with beer-cups and other garbage as he was escorted from his seat for his own safety, and has now even been offered asylum at a waterfront Pompano Beach condominium by Florida Governor Jeb Bush.
I suspect that Cubs fans will eventually forgive young Mr. Bartman; he’s part of the legend now, and besides, they all know in the bottom of their hearts that any one of them would have doubtlessly done the exact same thing if they had been in the same situation, just like they all know that it takes a lot more than just one missed out and one bad inning to lose three straight games and a chance at World Series glory. But if you’re Steve Bartman, how do you forgive yourself? How do you get over that sinking, sickening feeling that your momentary, instinctive action may well have cost your beloved team their best chance of playing in a World Series in your lifetime?
Of course, my feeling is that we should just let the Cubs and the Red Sox go ahead and play anyway. I mean, who really cares about what happens in New York, much less Florida? Something far larger is clearly at stake here; it’s a matter of principle...so lets just ignore the actual scores and watch the two teams that everyone else in America really wants to see play anyway. Call it the “End-of-the-World Series;” I’m certain that we can find some TV network that would be willing to broadcast it, and I suspect that the games will all be sell-outs too. Major League baseball owes its fans an additional Fall Classic, to make up for the one that was canceled because of the strike in 1994. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no time like the present. And who knows? -- when Game Seven is still tied in the bottom of the twenty-eighth inning, and even Pete Rose is afraid to bet money on the outcome, maybe the clouds really will part, and a light shine down from heaven, and the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, and a new age of peace and harmony shall begin. Or maybe there will simply be another flood, the mother of all rainouts, and justice shall literally run down like water, and righteousness like a might stream. Or maybe Bud Selig will simply declare a tie, and send everybody home. It’s just a thought. Stranger things have happened...
***
One of the things I have always appreciated about being a Preacher, especially when I compare it to some of the other kinds of writing I have done, is that Preachers generally get to hear and know immediately what their audience thought and felt about whatever it was they had to say. We don’t have to wait around for the reviews, or even the overnight flash polls; people come right up to us on their way to the coffee pot and tell us exactly what is on their mind. Instantaneous, thoughtful, heartfelt feedback; it’s a rare gift for a writer, or for any kind of public speaker really. Last Sunday was no exception, of course. There were people who liked what I had to say, and who felt reassured by my willingness to say it; there were others who basically agreed with what I said, but questioned whether I should have said it quite so forcefully; there were people who DIDN’T agree with what I had to say, but who appreciated my boldness in speaking out; and there were people who strongly disliked what I said, and who felt very strongly that I shouldn’t have said it at all. Which is pretty much the full range of reactions I would have expected, especially when speaking out in a timely fashion about controversial issues of broad public concern. (And I suspect there are even a few people here THIS morning who WEREN’T in church last Sunday, and who are wondering now what I possibly might have said, and maybe feeling a little sorry that they missed it). And I didn’t try to count noses, because that’s really not what this is all about, but the one piece of feedback I remember most vividly came from Steve Kirk, who simply shook my hand as he came through the line and asked “When are you going to tell us what you REALLY think?”
I understand how even in a liberal denomination such as ours, which essentially idolizes the Right of Conscience and Freedom of the Pulpit, there are people who feel uncomfortable when a minister articulates strong political opinions on a Sunday morning, even if they happen to agree with those opinions. The Sabbath, after all, ought to be a day of rest, and Church a place of Sanctuary -- a place where we can come to feel sheltered and healed and inspired, rather than harangued by a ranting, outspoken radical. I understand that, and believe it or not, I even sympathize...to a point. This is, after all, a pulpit and not a soapbox. So I just want to make it perfectly clear that unlike those conservative churches in the Bible Belt I spoke of last Sunday, where the distinction between religion and politics is not nearly so clear-cut or well-defined, I don’t really expect everyone here to agree with my point of view, nor am I trying to persuade you to see things my way. I’ll even go one step further; I don’t really expect ANYONE to see things exactly the way that I do, nor to share my opinions in every detail. Because that’s not really what this is all about either. My job (or at least part of my job) is simply to sometimes challenge your complacency; to get you to look again, closely, at things that you have come to take for granted, maybe even at things that you would prefer to ignore.
And this is not only my prerogative as a minister, it is also my duty. Because I’m not a government official, or an elected politician; I’m not even a professional journalist...I don’t have to worry about setting public policy, or deciding whether or not to put soldiers in harm’s way; I don’t even have to worry about maintaining the illusion of “fair and balanced” objectivity. As a spiritual and religious leader, I am called to be a zealous and outspoken advocate of Peace and Justice, of honesty and integrity and compassion; to speak up for people who are not able to speak for themselves, to preach the truth in love, and to speak the truth to power. And I recognize that there is a difference between condemning deceit and hypocrisy and corruption and oppression in the abstract, and actually pointing fingers and citing examples and naming names. And I hope that you will learn to recognize, as we get to know one another better, that I’m only human, and that I have strong opinions about some of these issues, and from time to time I will indeed rant...ranting is, after all, a time-honored tradition in my profession, going back to before even Biblical times. But you also need to take that ranting in the spirit in which it is offered, take from it what you need, and write the rest off to “that’s just Tim, ranting again.” Because at the end of the day, my responsibility is to “call ‘em like I see ‘em,” to say my piece, and then to listen to your responses. And if I tried to do it any other way, I wouldn’t be able to do my job at all. Because not only can you not fool all of the people all of the time, you can’t please all of the people all of the time either. But TRYING to is a sure-fire formula for making yourself crazy.
***
There were quite a few other things going on in the world of a theological nature this past week, but the one thing that I really wanted to draw to your attention to is that this week marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the election of Pope John Paul II as leader of the Roman Catholic Church. And to commemorate this occasion, this morning before an audience of 300,000 in St. Peter’s Square, he formally beatified Mother Teresa of Calcutta, which is the next major step before her eventual Canonization (or the official recognition of her Sainthood). Beatification is not a process I know too terribly much about, other than that there is normally a five-year waiting period, which in Mother Teresa’s case has been partially waived. But I suppose if anyone can make an exception to their own rules, it would be the Pope.
I was still in seminary when this Pope was elected by the college of cardinals, and I still remember the process quite vividly: the first non-Italian Pope since (as I recall) from before the Reformation, from a country behind the Iron Curtain, who took the same Papal name as his immediate predecessor, who had in turn only served a mere 33 days before dying unexpectedly of a heart attack while reading in bed. And now, looking back, I find myself reflecting upon upon how much my own life has changed in the past quarter of a century, and how much has changed in the world, and in the church, and how much hasn’t changed as well. For example, there is no longer an “Iron Curtain;”Communism as we once knew (and feared) it during the so-called “Cold War” is pretty much a dead issue now. But neither do we hear much these days about “Liberation Theology,” the (some would say) Marxist-inspired Latin American theological movement which was all the rage when I was a divinity student 25 years ago, but which now (others would say) has been pretty thoroughly suppressed by the Vatican. Throughout his tenure, John Paul the Second has been an outspoken supporter and defender of human rights, and he has also been unwaveringly conservative around issues such as Abortion and Birth Control, or the ordination of women. And having now appointed the majority of the College of Cardinals, he has pretty much put his mark on the church for the next generation as well, since his hand-picked advisors will likewise hand-pick his eventual successor.
Nor does it surprise me that he would want to associate the twenty-fifth anniversary of his own election with the Beatification of Mother Teresa. Because Mother Teresa is once again a contemporary religious figure who is at once both radical and conservative in her religious views. And yes, she has her detractors (although not many: her name is already virtually synonymous with Sainthood); people who believe that she might have spent a little more time “afflicting the comfortable” by advocating for systemic reform, rather than simply comforting the sick, the poor, the dying. But what is more interesting to me, personally, is some of the information that has emerged about her interior, spiritual life now that she is no longer alive, and her private papers and correspondence have become more public as part of the Beatification process.
Like anyone else who had probably given it a moment’s thought, I’d always assumed that Mother Teresa was what the sociologist of religion Max Weber would have called a “spiritual virtuoso” -- someone who was truly “inspired,” filled with a profoundly tangible and experiential realization of God’s Presence, and who drew upon that feeling of inspiration regularly in order to sustain herself in the very difficult, even heartbreaking work of Christian Charity to which she had devoted her life. Mother Teresa was someone who spoke with God daily, who was somehow closer, more “connected,” to the Divine than you and I.
And yet now it turns out that this image is only partially true. What is true is that, as a relatively young woman in her early thirties, living as a nun in a convent in Calcutta, Teresa experienced a very profound call to work among the poorest of the poor, a call which (according to her Postulator or Advocate, Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuck), was not merely an “inner prompting,” but in which “Jesus appeared and spoke to her in a series of interior locutions and visions,” -- which is a polite way of saying that she saw things and heard voices that probably would have sent most of us, were we not nurtured and disciplined by our faith community to understand them differently, running straight for the nearest mental hospital. But with the guidance of her spiritual directors, she worked through the radical implications of this call, and eventually left her happy and relatively comfortable life in the convent in order to found the Missionaries of Charity, and begin the work for which she is so well known throughout the world.
And this is where the story becomes truly interesting. Because shortly after leaving the convent in 1947 (almost as long ago as the Cubs last appearance in a World Series), the visions ended. Teresa still talked to God every day, but God never answered. Once again, her Postulator describes it like this: “Throughout 1946 and 1947, Mother Teresa experienced a profound union with Christ. But soon after she left the convent and began her work among the destitute and dying on the street, the visions and locutions ceased, and she experienced a spiritual darkness that would remain with her until her death. It is hard to know what is more to be marveled at: that this twentieth-century commander of a worldwide apostolate and army of charity should have been a visionary contemplative at heart; or that she should have persisted in radiating invincible faith and love while suffering inwardly from the loss of spiritual consolation.” In private, to her spiritual directors, “she disclosed feelings of doubt, loneliness, and abandonment. God seemed absent, heaven empty, and bitterest of all, her own suffering seemed to count for nothing, ‘...just that terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing’....” Yet despite these dark feelings of emptiness, Mother Teresa persisted in what she sometimes called “the fidelity of small things,” and became an inspiration to millions of people around the world, even though her own inner, spiritual cupboard was bare.
“Fidelity in the face of darkness,” the ability to “keep the faith” even when things appear bleak and gloomy, and it seems like there is no tomorrow, is more than just the means by which we learn to sustain ourselves when all seems hopeless. It is also our protection against those grandiose flights of inspiration in which we feel that God has called us to subdue the world and remake it in our own image, or appointed us defenders of civilization against the intrusions of the infidel, crusaders against evil-doers who stand in our way. And it doesn’t really matter whether you live in Calcutta or Rome, or Saudi Arabia, or Washington DC (or even Florida or New York, for that matter)...because more often than not, the fruits of the spirit are not triumph, but humility; not victory, but surrender; not glorious exhalation, but faithful service. It is an insight at once both radical and conservative, which comes to us not in visions of angels, but in our own ability to endure and carry on, while we silently wait, listening, for an answer to our prayers.
READING:
Friend, in the Desolate Time
Friend, in the desolate time, when your soul
is enshrouded in darkness
When, in a deep abyss, memory and feeling
die out,
Intellect timidly gropes among shadowy forms
and illusions
Heart can no longer sigh, eye is unable
to weep;
When, from your night-clouded soul the wings
of fire have fallen
And you, to nothing, afraid, feel
yourself sinking once more,
Say, who rescues you then?—Who is the
comforting angel
Brings to your innermost soul order and
beauty again,
Building once more your fragmented world,
restoring the fallen
Altar, and when it is raised, lighting
the sacred flame?-—
None but the powerful being who first from
the limitless darkness
Kissed to life seraphs and woke
numberless suns to their dance.
None but the holy Word who called the worlds
into existence
And in whose power the worlds move on
their paths to this day.
Therefore, rejoice, oh friend, and sing in
the darkness of sorrow:
Night is the mother of day, Chaos the
neighbor of God.
Erik Johan Stagnelius
Translated from the Swedish by Bill Coyle
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday October 19, 2003
Like a lot of other Americans these past few days, I’ve been reflecting quite a bit about the fate and the destinies of the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs, wondering whether or not there may really be something to the “Curse of the Bambino,” or the “Curse of the Billie Goat,”and once again speculating about what might have happened, on a cosmic level, if and when these two star-crossed teams had actually met in the World Series. My father-in-law, who grew up in Chicago (and is now in his eighties), had actually flown out to Portland, Oregon so that he could watch the Series with his daughter and grand-daughter, neither of whom were even born the last time the Cubbies appeared in the Fall Classic. His disappointment, as you might imagine, is nearly inconsolable.
As for the Sox, what can I possibly say? At least they lost in a conventionally tragic fashion; having bravely rallied to force a Game Seven in Yankee Stadium, and with a comfortable three-run lead going into the eighth inning, they chose to stick with Pedro Martinez, the star pitcher who had carried them so far, rather than trusting to an at-times inconsistent and unreliable bullpen, and the Yankees...those damn Yankees... took advantage of the opportunity to tie the game, and later won it in the eleventh inning with a first pitch, lead-off home run off of Tim Wakefield, who had successfully confounded the Yankees with his knuckleball in his two previous outings as a starter.
But how can this possibly compare to the fate of the Cubs? With three chances to put away the Marlins, two of them at home in Wrigley Field, and a mere five outs away from their first pennant since 1945, one of their own fans reaches out to catch a foul ball hit into the stands, unaware of the fact that left fielder Moises Alou was about to make a spectacular, leaping over-the-wall catch for the second out of the inning; they bump hands, the ball squirts away...the Cubbies fall apart, the Marlins score eight runs, and are now they are the ones playing (and winning) in Yankee Stadium. This is well beyond conventional tragedy; clearly some sort of supernatural force is at work here. And my heart goes out to all Cubs fans, and especially to the fan who tried to catch the foul ball, 26-year-old Steve Bartman, who was pelted with beer-cups and other garbage as he was escorted from his seat for his own safety, and has now even been offered asylum at a waterfront Pompano Beach condominium by Florida Governor Jeb Bush.
I suspect that Cubs fans will eventually forgive young Mr. Bartman; he’s part of the legend now, and besides, they all know in the bottom of their hearts that any one of them would have doubtlessly done the exact same thing if they had been in the same situation, just like they all know that it takes a lot more than just one missed out and one bad inning to lose three straight games and a chance at World Series glory. But if you’re Steve Bartman, how do you forgive yourself? How do you get over that sinking, sickening feeling that your momentary, instinctive action may well have cost your beloved team their best chance of playing in a World Series in your lifetime?
Of course, my feeling is that we should just let the Cubs and the Red Sox go ahead and play anyway. I mean, who really cares about what happens in New York, much less Florida? Something far larger is clearly at stake here; it’s a matter of principle...so lets just ignore the actual scores and watch the two teams that everyone else in America really wants to see play anyway. Call it the “End-of-the-World Series;” I’m certain that we can find some TV network that would be willing to broadcast it, and I suspect that the games will all be sell-outs too. Major League baseball owes its fans an additional Fall Classic, to make up for the one that was canceled because of the strike in 1994. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no time like the present. And who knows? -- when Game Seven is still tied in the bottom of the twenty-eighth inning, and even Pete Rose is afraid to bet money on the outcome, maybe the clouds really will part, and a light shine down from heaven, and the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, and a new age of peace and harmony shall begin. Or maybe there will simply be another flood, the mother of all rainouts, and justice shall literally run down like water, and righteousness like a might stream. Or maybe Bud Selig will simply declare a tie, and send everybody home. It’s just a thought. Stranger things have happened...
***
One of the things I have always appreciated about being a Preacher, especially when I compare it to some of the other kinds of writing I have done, is that Preachers generally get to hear and know immediately what their audience thought and felt about whatever it was they had to say. We don’t have to wait around for the reviews, or even the overnight flash polls; people come right up to us on their way to the coffee pot and tell us exactly what is on their mind. Instantaneous, thoughtful, heartfelt feedback; it’s a rare gift for a writer, or for any kind of public speaker really. Last Sunday was no exception, of course. There were people who liked what I had to say, and who felt reassured by my willingness to say it; there were others who basically agreed with what I said, but questioned whether I should have said it quite so forcefully; there were people who DIDN’T agree with what I had to say, but who appreciated my boldness in speaking out; and there were people who strongly disliked what I said, and who felt very strongly that I shouldn’t have said it at all. Which is pretty much the full range of reactions I would have expected, especially when speaking out in a timely fashion about controversial issues of broad public concern. (And I suspect there are even a few people here THIS morning who WEREN’T in church last Sunday, and who are wondering now what I possibly might have said, and maybe feeling a little sorry that they missed it). And I didn’t try to count noses, because that’s really not what this is all about, but the one piece of feedback I remember most vividly came from Steve Kirk, who simply shook my hand as he came through the line and asked “When are you going to tell us what you REALLY think?”
I understand how even in a liberal denomination such as ours, which essentially idolizes the Right of Conscience and Freedom of the Pulpit, there are people who feel uncomfortable when a minister articulates strong political opinions on a Sunday morning, even if they happen to agree with those opinions. The Sabbath, after all, ought to be a day of rest, and Church a place of Sanctuary -- a place where we can come to feel sheltered and healed and inspired, rather than harangued by a ranting, outspoken radical. I understand that, and believe it or not, I even sympathize...to a point. This is, after all, a pulpit and not a soapbox. So I just want to make it perfectly clear that unlike those conservative churches in the Bible Belt I spoke of last Sunday, where the distinction between religion and politics is not nearly so clear-cut or well-defined, I don’t really expect everyone here to agree with my point of view, nor am I trying to persuade you to see things my way. I’ll even go one step further; I don’t really expect ANYONE to see things exactly the way that I do, nor to share my opinions in every detail. Because that’s not really what this is all about either. My job (or at least part of my job) is simply to sometimes challenge your complacency; to get you to look again, closely, at things that you have come to take for granted, maybe even at things that you would prefer to ignore.
And this is not only my prerogative as a minister, it is also my duty. Because I’m not a government official, or an elected politician; I’m not even a professional journalist...I don’t have to worry about setting public policy, or deciding whether or not to put soldiers in harm’s way; I don’t even have to worry about maintaining the illusion of “fair and balanced” objectivity. As a spiritual and religious leader, I am called to be a zealous and outspoken advocate of Peace and Justice, of honesty and integrity and compassion; to speak up for people who are not able to speak for themselves, to preach the truth in love, and to speak the truth to power. And I recognize that there is a difference between condemning deceit and hypocrisy and corruption and oppression in the abstract, and actually pointing fingers and citing examples and naming names. And I hope that you will learn to recognize, as we get to know one another better, that I’m only human, and that I have strong opinions about some of these issues, and from time to time I will indeed rant...ranting is, after all, a time-honored tradition in my profession, going back to before even Biblical times. But you also need to take that ranting in the spirit in which it is offered, take from it what you need, and write the rest off to “that’s just Tim, ranting again.” Because at the end of the day, my responsibility is to “call ‘em like I see ‘em,” to say my piece, and then to listen to your responses. And if I tried to do it any other way, I wouldn’t be able to do my job at all. Because not only can you not fool all of the people all of the time, you can’t please all of the people all of the time either. But TRYING to is a sure-fire formula for making yourself crazy.
***
There were quite a few other things going on in the world of a theological nature this past week, but the one thing that I really wanted to draw to your attention to is that this week marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the election of Pope John Paul II as leader of the Roman Catholic Church. And to commemorate this occasion, this morning before an audience of 300,000 in St. Peter’s Square, he formally beatified Mother Teresa of Calcutta, which is the next major step before her eventual Canonization (or the official recognition of her Sainthood). Beatification is not a process I know too terribly much about, other than that there is normally a five-year waiting period, which in Mother Teresa’s case has been partially waived. But I suppose if anyone can make an exception to their own rules, it would be the Pope.
I was still in seminary when this Pope was elected by the college of cardinals, and I still remember the process quite vividly: the first non-Italian Pope since (as I recall) from before the Reformation, from a country behind the Iron Curtain, who took the same Papal name as his immediate predecessor, who had in turn only served a mere 33 days before dying unexpectedly of a heart attack while reading in bed. And now, looking back, I find myself reflecting upon upon how much my own life has changed in the past quarter of a century, and how much has changed in the world, and in the church, and how much hasn’t changed as well. For example, there is no longer an “Iron Curtain;”Communism as we once knew (and feared) it during the so-called “Cold War” is pretty much a dead issue now. But neither do we hear much these days about “Liberation Theology,” the (some would say) Marxist-inspired Latin American theological movement which was all the rage when I was a divinity student 25 years ago, but which now (others would say) has been pretty thoroughly suppressed by the Vatican. Throughout his tenure, John Paul the Second has been an outspoken supporter and defender of human rights, and he has also been unwaveringly conservative around issues such as Abortion and Birth Control, or the ordination of women. And having now appointed the majority of the College of Cardinals, he has pretty much put his mark on the church for the next generation as well, since his hand-picked advisors will likewise hand-pick his eventual successor.
Nor does it surprise me that he would want to associate the twenty-fifth anniversary of his own election with the Beatification of Mother Teresa. Because Mother Teresa is once again a contemporary religious figure who is at once both radical and conservative in her religious views. And yes, she has her detractors (although not many: her name is already virtually synonymous with Sainthood); people who believe that she might have spent a little more time “afflicting the comfortable” by advocating for systemic reform, rather than simply comforting the sick, the poor, the dying. But what is more interesting to me, personally, is some of the information that has emerged about her interior, spiritual life now that she is no longer alive, and her private papers and correspondence have become more public as part of the Beatification process.
Like anyone else who had probably given it a moment’s thought, I’d always assumed that Mother Teresa was what the sociologist of religion Max Weber would have called a “spiritual virtuoso” -- someone who was truly “inspired,” filled with a profoundly tangible and experiential realization of God’s Presence, and who drew upon that feeling of inspiration regularly in order to sustain herself in the very difficult, even heartbreaking work of Christian Charity to which she had devoted her life. Mother Teresa was someone who spoke with God daily, who was somehow closer, more “connected,” to the Divine than you and I.
And yet now it turns out that this image is only partially true. What is true is that, as a relatively young woman in her early thirties, living as a nun in a convent in Calcutta, Teresa experienced a very profound call to work among the poorest of the poor, a call which (according to her Postulator or Advocate, Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuck), was not merely an “inner prompting,” but in which “Jesus appeared and spoke to her in a series of interior locutions and visions,” -- which is a polite way of saying that she saw things and heard voices that probably would have sent most of us, were we not nurtured and disciplined by our faith community to understand them differently, running straight for the nearest mental hospital. But with the guidance of her spiritual directors, she worked through the radical implications of this call, and eventually left her happy and relatively comfortable life in the convent in order to found the Missionaries of Charity, and begin the work for which she is so well known throughout the world.
And this is where the story becomes truly interesting. Because shortly after leaving the convent in 1947 (almost as long ago as the Cubs last appearance in a World Series), the visions ended. Teresa still talked to God every day, but God never answered. Once again, her Postulator describes it like this: “Throughout 1946 and 1947, Mother Teresa experienced a profound union with Christ. But soon after she left the convent and began her work among the destitute and dying on the street, the visions and locutions ceased, and she experienced a spiritual darkness that would remain with her until her death. It is hard to know what is more to be marveled at: that this twentieth-century commander of a worldwide apostolate and army of charity should have been a visionary contemplative at heart; or that she should have persisted in radiating invincible faith and love while suffering inwardly from the loss of spiritual consolation.” In private, to her spiritual directors, “she disclosed feelings of doubt, loneliness, and abandonment. God seemed absent, heaven empty, and bitterest of all, her own suffering seemed to count for nothing, ‘...just that terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing’....” Yet despite these dark feelings of emptiness, Mother Teresa persisted in what she sometimes called “the fidelity of small things,” and became an inspiration to millions of people around the world, even though her own inner, spiritual cupboard was bare.
“Fidelity in the face of darkness,” the ability to “keep the faith” even when things appear bleak and gloomy, and it seems like there is no tomorrow, is more than just the means by which we learn to sustain ourselves when all seems hopeless. It is also our protection against those grandiose flights of inspiration in which we feel that God has called us to subdue the world and remake it in our own image, or appointed us defenders of civilization against the intrusions of the infidel, crusaders against evil-doers who stand in our way. And it doesn’t really matter whether you live in Calcutta or Rome, or Saudi Arabia, or Washington DC (or even Florida or New York, for that matter)...because more often than not, the fruits of the spirit are not triumph, but humility; not victory, but surrender; not glorious exhalation, but faithful service. It is an insight at once both radical and conservative, which comes to us not in visions of angels, but in our own ability to endure and carry on, while we silently wait, listening, for an answer to our prayers.
READING:
Friend, in the Desolate Time
Friend, in the desolate time, when your soul
is enshrouded in darkness
When, in a deep abyss, memory and feeling
die out,
Intellect timidly gropes among shadowy forms
and illusions
Heart can no longer sigh, eye is unable
to weep;
When, from your night-clouded soul the wings
of fire have fallen
And you, to nothing, afraid, feel
yourself sinking once more,
Say, who rescues you then?—Who is the
comforting angel
Brings to your innermost soul order and
beauty again,
Building once more your fragmented world,
restoring the fallen
Altar, and when it is raised, lighting
the sacred flame?-—
None but the powerful being who first from
the limitless darkness
Kissed to life seraphs and woke
numberless suns to their dance.
None but the holy Word who called the worlds
into existence
And in whose power the worlds move on
their paths to this day.
Therefore, rejoice, oh friend, and sing in
the darkness of sorrow:
Night is the mother of day, Chaos the
neighbor of God.
Erik Johan Stagnelius
Translated from the Swedish by Bill Coyle
Sunday, October 12, 2003
COWBOY UP!
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday October 12, 2003
I saw a great bumper sticker the other day on the back of a pick-up truck in the parking lot at the Bedford Stop & Shop. It said, simply, "Ride 'em like you stole 'em." If I were still living in West Texas, I probably wouldn't have given this bumper sticker a second thought. But this is Massachusetts -- a Blue State -- we're generally a lot more easy-going about horse-theft in these parts. "Ride 'em like you stole 'em." It's a plain, straightforward expression of something my old High School football coach would have called "reckless abandon" -- play like there's no tomorrow, fight as though you've got nothing left to lose, take no prisoners, leave it all out on the field, don't hold anything back. Cowboy Up. It's a terrific attitude for rodeo bullriders, late-inning relief pitchers (especially those who have to pitch regularly in Fenway Park), and various other types of semi-religious fanatics whose lot in life is to be painfully bounced around by forces beyond their control, thrown to the ground, perhaps even dragged through the dirt, yet whose only option (other than simply giving up entirely) is to get right back up in the saddle and do it all over again.
This is my favorite time of year to live in New England. Autumn, and especially these pleasant few days of Indian Summer, are what living New England is really all about. The changing colors, the falling leaves, the crisp autumnal air, all leading up to that quintessential New England holiday, Thanksgiving (not to mention the Harvard/Yale game)... isn't this the real reason why people put up with the brutally cold winters, the soggy, bug-infested springs, and the hot, humid summers? And then, just when you thought it couldn't get any better, we are treated to October baseball in Fenway Park. It doesn't happen that often you know. Better enjoy it while you can.
This is not, by the way, a sermon about the Red Sox. I know there are a lot of folks here in New England, and all over the country really, who are excited about the Sox, and also the Chicago Cubs, and who are hoping to see these two star-crossed teams meet in the World Series...an event which some prognosticators have suggested may well indicate the impending end of the world. Personally I have my doubts about the eschatological implications of such an encounter, but I am finding it a congenial distraction from other things that have been weighing on my mind these past few weeks. Things like the California Recall election and the Texas gerrymander, or the arrest of the Islamic military chaplain James "Youssef" Yee and two other Arabic interpreters at Guantanamo Bay; the scandal concerning the "leak" of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA operative, and the subsequent politics surrounding calls for an independent investigation of that disclosure; and of course the on-going situation in Iraq (where almost every day, it seems, another American soldier is killed), as well as both the emerging public realization that the Bush Administration seriously and probably deliberately misrepresented its intelligence about Saddam's possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction and his alleged links to Al Queda in order to drum up popular support for the war, and the President's new request for an additional $87 billion appropriation to help rebuild that country, now that he's spent the $75 billion budget override Congress voted last spring which enabled him to attack it in the first place. In the face of all that, a little innocent speculation about "the Curse of the Bambino" is kind of a welcome relief.
Preaching, like any form of ministry, is essentially a relationship between a pastor and their people. And like any relationship, it grows and develops over time. For the past two years, as our nation has attempted to find its way in the world in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11th, I've been engaged in an on-going dialog concerning issues of peace and justice with the members of the Unitarian Church on Nantucket, just as I'm sure you were engaged in a similar dialog with your interim minister, Diane Miller, during her two year tenure here. But now Diane's in Colorado, and we're here together, and I'm feeling a little at a loss regarding how to pick up this dialog in the middle of the conversation.
At first I thought that I might just go back through some of my old sermons from the past two years and "lift out" a few choice paragraphs, both so that you could hear the tenor of my thought, and also appreciate just how prescient I've been in anticipating and articulating the issues that are now apparently on everyone's mind. And who knows, I may still do something like that at some other time or in some other forum (maybe as a BLOG); but there was just so much of it, that it was hard to distill it down into a form that I could use here this morning.
And then I thought that maybe I'd just plunge right in headfirst. That's kind of my style anyway. But you know, talking about peace in a time of war, talking about justice in the midst of a highly-charged, highly-partisan political campaign, isn't always the easiest thing to do. These are NOT simple black and white, good and evil, "us vs. them" issues, despite the constant temptation to make them appear that way. Still, one has to start somewhere. Real Cowboys never put their toe in the water first unless their foot is already in their mouth. So Cowboy Up; let me just jump in and share with you some of my thoughts about some of the things you've been reading and hearing and seeing in the news these past few weeks.
The recall election in California represents in my mind a rather intriguing case study of direct democracy gone wild. I'm kind of excited about the fact that there was such an incredible voter turnout (something in the neighborhood of 70%, I've heard); I kinda wish that there had been this kind of electoral "do over" law in Florida three years ago; and I sorta feel sorry for Arnold..."beware of what you wish for, you just may get it." I take some comfort in the fact that, despite the allegations of his occasionally groping women on the sets of his movies during the past thirty years (boorish and offensive behavior for which he has appropriately apologized), that the governor-elect of California is on the record as being both pro-choice and pro gay-rights (which is almost unheard of in the Republican party these days), and also that he has promised not to make any additional movies while in office.
The Texas gerrymander, on the other hand, represents in my mind the worst kind of cynical, opportunistic, back-room, partisan political hardball I can think of, and is a powerful argument for the elimination of Congressional districts altogether, and the adoption of a modern system of proportional representation within each state for determining the membership of the House of Representatives. Tom DeLay ought to be ashamed of himself. But if he were capable of shame, he wouldn't be Tom DeLay.
The arrest of Army Captain James "Youssef" Yee, a 1990 graduate of West Point who served with distinction in the first Gulf War, then converted to Islam and later re-enlisted in the Army as an Islamic Chaplain, is troubling for me in a different way. Yee was finally charged this past week, a month after his arrest, with "improperly handling classified information" -- although it is not exactly clear yet what this information was, or if he actually disclosed it to anyone else, or whether his motives were merely humanitarian, or somehow more sinister. And to me it doesn't really matter.
Camp X-ray, as our private and secretive little concentration camp at Gitmo is more properly known, is an outrage and an embarrassment to the ideals of justice and due process which our nation ought to stand for in the world. As a chaplain, it was Captain Yee's duty to provide "aid and comfort" to the individuals we have designated as our enemies, some of whom we have incarcerated off-shore, out of public view, without benefit of trial or even the filing of formal charges, for nearly two years. I have no way of knowing this, of course, but I doubt very seriously, judging from the public record of his exemplary military career, that Captain Yee is a traitor, at least in any conventional sense of the word. But he may well have planned to become a whistleblower, and that, in the minds of some, is tantamount to treason.
The disclosure of Valerie Plame's identity as a covert operative of the CIA was, in fact, a federal crime, although the President now tells us that we may never know who actually leaked this information to the press. But Attorney General Ashcroft will investigate, and present his findings if he finds anything. As a Senator, Ashcroft was one of the leading advocates for the appointment of a Special Prosecutor to investigate all kinds of allegations of wrong-doing in the Clinton White House (things like the firing of a few travel agents, and the status of some misplaced FBI files left lying around after the first Bush administration), but times have changed, so despite the outraged cries of the Democrats for an independent investigation, the Attorney General is going to keep this one in-house.
And who can blame him? I mean, it's not as if anyone has been accused of having sex. Things are different after 9/11. We all know, for example, that Karl Rove was behind this leak, even if we don't have any real evidence to prove it. But we don't really need evidence anymore; the CIA knows where he lives, so they ought to just take him out -- burst into his home in the middle of the night, put a bag on his head, hog-tie him in front of his wife and children, then frog-march him down to Gitmo, or some other undisclosed location, where we can hold him without benefit of trial, or an attorney, or even formal charges, until we decide we've had enough of him. Or if that proves too difficult, just order up a "bunker-buster" airstrike, or perhaps use one of those Predator drones. That's how we do things in America these days. And anyone who complains about it is unpatriotic.
America's first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, once told a visitor to the White House: "If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." I sure wish that our current President had taken those words to heart, before he started talking about yellow uranium from Niger, and the imminent threat which Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction posed to the security of the American people. But perhaps he really isn't worried about trying to fool ALL of the people. Perhaps he really only cares about those few people he CAN fool all of the time, select demographics such as evangelical, "born-again" Christians living in the South and Mountain West, who comprised approximately 21% of the electorate in the last Presidential election, and were the key constituency in providing the Republicans with their electoral majority in the so-called "Red" States.
The Republican party knows that if they can just increase their hold on this key constituency, perhaps using their $200 million campaign war chest (money contributed mostly by those who benefited most from the President's tax cuts) in order to improve the turnout of "Christian" voters while suppressing that of other constituencies living in those same states (such as African Americans, who tend to vote in the opposite direction), they don't need to worry about what we think here in Massachusetts, or in New York, or even California or Illinois. So forget all this rhetoric about freedom and democracy, and fair elections in which everyone who can vote does vote, and every vote is counted. It's all just pure power politics: "Ride 'em like you stole 'em." Play like there's no tomorrow. Fight as though you've got nothing left to lose. Take no prisoners. Leave it all out on the field. Don't hold anything back. Cowboy Up.
American electoral politics have always been kind of "rough and tumble," since back in the days when a politician's "stump" speech might literally have been delivered while standing on a tree stump in the middle of an open field, rather than loaded with carefully-scripted sound bites and performed in front of cameras. Back in those days, mud-slinging was something that politicians had to worry about physically, which was the reason most Presidential candidates never left their front porches. There is a price that we pay, as a society, when we play political hardball all the time; "Cowboy Up" is a terrific philosophy of life for a rodeo bullrider, or a relief pitcher, or even a horse thief -- it's a TERRIBLE philosophy for someone who would be a diplomat, or a statesman, a "uniter rather than a divider."
And this is why I cringe when I look at the electoral map from the last Presidential election, and recognize how closely it resembles the election of 1860....only this time, irony of ironies, it is the Republican party that controls the solid south. I cringe when I think of the price that we all pay, as a society, in order to maintain this thin Republican majority in the electoral college; nobody likes paying taxes, and I doubt whether many of us have too many objections to killing real terrorists either, but when you add those things together and present them as a solution to every single problem confronting America, the "fuzzy math" gives you a budget deficit approaching half a trillion dollars, not to mention the elimination of important government programs, or a shifting of the costs of those federal programs to state and local governments.
I cringe when I think of the loss of civility in our political discourse, and of the political payoffs to the religious right I see coming down the line on issues like abortion and gay rights, prayer in public schools, school vouchers, creation science in textbooks, and all sorts of other things that the 21% of the American electorate who believe strongly in these things would like to impose on the rest of us.
And I cringe when I hear the President, in a stump speech in New Hampshire just this past week, tell the cameras that he invaded Iraq because he "was not about to leave the security of the American People in the hands of a madman." Because, you know, I couldn't agree with him more.
And that is the most frightening feeling of all....
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday October 12, 2003
I saw a great bumper sticker the other day on the back of a pick-up truck in the parking lot at the Bedford Stop & Shop. It said, simply, "Ride 'em like you stole 'em." If I were still living in West Texas, I probably wouldn't have given this bumper sticker a second thought. But this is Massachusetts -- a Blue State -- we're generally a lot more easy-going about horse-theft in these parts. "Ride 'em like you stole 'em." It's a plain, straightforward expression of something my old High School football coach would have called "reckless abandon" -- play like there's no tomorrow, fight as though you've got nothing left to lose, take no prisoners, leave it all out on the field, don't hold anything back. Cowboy Up. It's a terrific attitude for rodeo bullriders, late-inning relief pitchers (especially those who have to pitch regularly in Fenway Park), and various other types of semi-religious fanatics whose lot in life is to be painfully bounced around by forces beyond their control, thrown to the ground, perhaps even dragged through the dirt, yet whose only option (other than simply giving up entirely) is to get right back up in the saddle and do it all over again.
This is my favorite time of year to live in New England. Autumn, and especially these pleasant few days of Indian Summer, are what living New England is really all about. The changing colors, the falling leaves, the crisp autumnal air, all leading up to that quintessential New England holiday, Thanksgiving (not to mention the Harvard/Yale game)... isn't this the real reason why people put up with the brutally cold winters, the soggy, bug-infested springs, and the hot, humid summers? And then, just when you thought it couldn't get any better, we are treated to October baseball in Fenway Park. It doesn't happen that often you know. Better enjoy it while you can.
This is not, by the way, a sermon about the Red Sox. I know there are a lot of folks here in New England, and all over the country really, who are excited about the Sox, and also the Chicago Cubs, and who are hoping to see these two star-crossed teams meet in the World Series...an event which some prognosticators have suggested may well indicate the impending end of the world. Personally I have my doubts about the eschatological implications of such an encounter, but I am finding it a congenial distraction from other things that have been weighing on my mind these past few weeks. Things like the California Recall election and the Texas gerrymander, or the arrest of the Islamic military chaplain James "Youssef" Yee and two other Arabic interpreters at Guantanamo Bay; the scandal concerning the "leak" of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA operative, and the subsequent politics surrounding calls for an independent investigation of that disclosure; and of course the on-going situation in Iraq (where almost every day, it seems, another American soldier is killed), as well as both the emerging public realization that the Bush Administration seriously and probably deliberately misrepresented its intelligence about Saddam's possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction and his alleged links to Al Queda in order to drum up popular support for the war, and the President's new request for an additional $87 billion appropriation to help rebuild that country, now that he's spent the $75 billion budget override Congress voted last spring which enabled him to attack it in the first place. In the face of all that, a little innocent speculation about "the Curse of the Bambino" is kind of a welcome relief.
Preaching, like any form of ministry, is essentially a relationship between a pastor and their people. And like any relationship, it grows and develops over time. For the past two years, as our nation has attempted to find its way in the world in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11th, I've been engaged in an on-going dialog concerning issues of peace and justice with the members of the Unitarian Church on Nantucket, just as I'm sure you were engaged in a similar dialog with your interim minister, Diane Miller, during her two year tenure here. But now Diane's in Colorado, and we're here together, and I'm feeling a little at a loss regarding how to pick up this dialog in the middle of the conversation.
At first I thought that I might just go back through some of my old sermons from the past two years and "lift out" a few choice paragraphs, both so that you could hear the tenor of my thought, and also appreciate just how prescient I've been in anticipating and articulating the issues that are now apparently on everyone's mind. And who knows, I may still do something like that at some other time or in some other forum (maybe as a BLOG); but there was just so much of it, that it was hard to distill it down into a form that I could use here this morning.
And then I thought that maybe I'd just plunge right in headfirst. That's kind of my style anyway. But you know, talking about peace in a time of war, talking about justice in the midst of a highly-charged, highly-partisan political campaign, isn't always the easiest thing to do. These are NOT simple black and white, good and evil, "us vs. them" issues, despite the constant temptation to make them appear that way. Still, one has to start somewhere. Real Cowboys never put their toe in the water first unless their foot is already in their mouth. So Cowboy Up; let me just jump in and share with you some of my thoughts about some of the things you've been reading and hearing and seeing in the news these past few weeks.
The recall election in California represents in my mind a rather intriguing case study of direct democracy gone wild. I'm kind of excited about the fact that there was such an incredible voter turnout (something in the neighborhood of 70%, I've heard); I kinda wish that there had been this kind of electoral "do over" law in Florida three years ago; and I sorta feel sorry for Arnold..."beware of what you wish for, you just may get it." I take some comfort in the fact that, despite the allegations of his occasionally groping women on the sets of his movies during the past thirty years (boorish and offensive behavior for which he has appropriately apologized), that the governor-elect of California is on the record as being both pro-choice and pro gay-rights (which is almost unheard of in the Republican party these days), and also that he has promised not to make any additional movies while in office.
The Texas gerrymander, on the other hand, represents in my mind the worst kind of cynical, opportunistic, back-room, partisan political hardball I can think of, and is a powerful argument for the elimination of Congressional districts altogether, and the adoption of a modern system of proportional representation within each state for determining the membership of the House of Representatives. Tom DeLay ought to be ashamed of himself. But if he were capable of shame, he wouldn't be Tom DeLay.
The arrest of Army Captain James "Youssef" Yee, a 1990 graduate of West Point who served with distinction in the first Gulf War, then converted to Islam and later re-enlisted in the Army as an Islamic Chaplain, is troubling for me in a different way. Yee was finally charged this past week, a month after his arrest, with "improperly handling classified information" -- although it is not exactly clear yet what this information was, or if he actually disclosed it to anyone else, or whether his motives were merely humanitarian, or somehow more sinister. And to me it doesn't really matter.
Camp X-ray, as our private and secretive little concentration camp at Gitmo is more properly known, is an outrage and an embarrassment to the ideals of justice and due process which our nation ought to stand for in the world. As a chaplain, it was Captain Yee's duty to provide "aid and comfort" to the individuals we have designated as our enemies, some of whom we have incarcerated off-shore, out of public view, without benefit of trial or even the filing of formal charges, for nearly two years. I have no way of knowing this, of course, but I doubt very seriously, judging from the public record of his exemplary military career, that Captain Yee is a traitor, at least in any conventional sense of the word. But he may well have planned to become a whistleblower, and that, in the minds of some, is tantamount to treason.
The disclosure of Valerie Plame's identity as a covert operative of the CIA was, in fact, a federal crime, although the President now tells us that we may never know who actually leaked this information to the press. But Attorney General Ashcroft will investigate, and present his findings if he finds anything. As a Senator, Ashcroft was one of the leading advocates for the appointment of a Special Prosecutor to investigate all kinds of allegations of wrong-doing in the Clinton White House (things like the firing of a few travel agents, and the status of some misplaced FBI files left lying around after the first Bush administration), but times have changed, so despite the outraged cries of the Democrats for an independent investigation, the Attorney General is going to keep this one in-house.
And who can blame him? I mean, it's not as if anyone has been accused of having sex. Things are different after 9/11. We all know, for example, that Karl Rove was behind this leak, even if we don't have any real evidence to prove it. But we don't really need evidence anymore; the CIA knows where he lives, so they ought to just take him out -- burst into his home in the middle of the night, put a bag on his head, hog-tie him in front of his wife and children, then frog-march him down to Gitmo, or some other undisclosed location, where we can hold him without benefit of trial, or an attorney, or even formal charges, until we decide we've had enough of him. Or if that proves too difficult, just order up a "bunker-buster" airstrike, or perhaps use one of those Predator drones. That's how we do things in America these days. And anyone who complains about it is unpatriotic.
America's first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, once told a visitor to the White House: "If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." I sure wish that our current President had taken those words to heart, before he started talking about yellow uranium from Niger, and the imminent threat which Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction posed to the security of the American people. But perhaps he really isn't worried about trying to fool ALL of the people. Perhaps he really only cares about those few people he CAN fool all of the time, select demographics such as evangelical, "born-again" Christians living in the South and Mountain West, who comprised approximately 21% of the electorate in the last Presidential election, and were the key constituency in providing the Republicans with their electoral majority in the so-called "Red" States.
The Republican party knows that if they can just increase their hold on this key constituency, perhaps using their $200 million campaign war chest (money contributed mostly by those who benefited most from the President's tax cuts) in order to improve the turnout of "Christian" voters while suppressing that of other constituencies living in those same states (such as African Americans, who tend to vote in the opposite direction), they don't need to worry about what we think here in Massachusetts, or in New York, or even California or Illinois. So forget all this rhetoric about freedom and democracy, and fair elections in which everyone who can vote does vote, and every vote is counted. It's all just pure power politics: "Ride 'em like you stole 'em." Play like there's no tomorrow. Fight as though you've got nothing left to lose. Take no prisoners. Leave it all out on the field. Don't hold anything back. Cowboy Up.
American electoral politics have always been kind of "rough and tumble," since back in the days when a politician's "stump" speech might literally have been delivered while standing on a tree stump in the middle of an open field, rather than loaded with carefully-scripted sound bites and performed in front of cameras. Back in those days, mud-slinging was something that politicians had to worry about physically, which was the reason most Presidential candidates never left their front porches. There is a price that we pay, as a society, when we play political hardball all the time; "Cowboy Up" is a terrific philosophy of life for a rodeo bullrider, or a relief pitcher, or even a horse thief -- it's a TERRIBLE philosophy for someone who would be a diplomat, or a statesman, a "uniter rather than a divider."
And this is why I cringe when I look at the electoral map from the last Presidential election, and recognize how closely it resembles the election of 1860....only this time, irony of ironies, it is the Republican party that controls the solid south. I cringe when I think of the price that we all pay, as a society, in order to maintain this thin Republican majority in the electoral college; nobody likes paying taxes, and I doubt whether many of us have too many objections to killing real terrorists either, but when you add those things together and present them as a solution to every single problem confronting America, the "fuzzy math" gives you a budget deficit approaching half a trillion dollars, not to mention the elimination of important government programs, or a shifting of the costs of those federal programs to state and local governments.
I cringe when I think of the loss of civility in our political discourse, and of the political payoffs to the religious right I see coming down the line on issues like abortion and gay rights, prayer in public schools, school vouchers, creation science in textbooks, and all sorts of other things that the 21% of the American electorate who believe strongly in these things would like to impose on the rest of us.
And I cringe when I hear the President, in a stump speech in New Hampshire just this past week, tell the cameras that he invaded Iraq because he "was not about to leave the security of the American People in the hands of a madman." Because, you know, I couldn't agree with him more.
And that is the most frightening feeling of all....
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