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
Sunday, October 19, 2003
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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