a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle MA
Neighborhood Sunday September 26, 2004
[extemperaneous introduction: in a year we’ve gone from strangers to familiar friends; when the honeymoon is finally over, the real work of living together in community begins]
Last weekend I was out in Seattle attending my 30th High School reunion. I had really mixed feelings about attending this event. On the one hand it really couldn’t have come at a much more inconvenient time of year -- which was reflected in the absence of a lot of my former classmates who, like me, also live at a distance, and whose lives basically follow an academic calendar. Plus, between the airfare, the rental car, the hotel room, the dogsitter, and all of the other incidental expenses, it turned out to be a pretty expensive trip -- (I’m a little embarrassed to say just how much). On the other hand, it is only once every decade, and I felt kinda obligated to go, since I was after all a student body officer, and had also served on the committee that initially organized our 10th. And then at the 20th I had the dubious distinction of being honored as one of the twenty most Distinguished Alumni of my graduating class of 540 (96% of whom are apparently even bigger slackers than I am) but which also happens to include the graphic artist who designed Microsoft’s “Clippy the Paper-Clip.” (He sometimes calls himself “the most annoying man in America). But the real reason I felt like I had to go is that I have a friend from High School whom none of us had seen or heard from in 28 years, despite having searched high and low for him prior to both of our previous two reunions. But last spring he Googled me, and got a hit on our FRS website; so to make a long story short I got him to agree that he would go if I would go, and so...I was going, whether it was convenient or not. And when I got back to Carlisle Tuesday morning (having flown overnight on the red-eye), there was an e-mail from Tom waiting for me, which I’d like to share with you now. It goes:
Tim: It was great to see you last night. It's really nice to be connecting with you again. It feels completely natural; it isn't like we're trying to escape into the past. The reunion in general felt like that to me, like I was reconnecting with people in the present, talking to them in terms of who they are now. It wasn't a nostalgia fest, which was nice. You mentioned that you had a nice talk with Dwight and Mary [I’ll say a little bit more about them in a minute}. I talked with them too, and had the same sense of being able to connect with them in a meaningful way. Mainly, I just want to thank you for helping me feel at ease. To me it felt like you were the host of the party, doing your best to make sure that I had a good time. Anyway, thanks,and stay in touch. And I don't believe a word of what you were saying about the presidential campaign, so there.
Dwight and Mary, by the way, were my High School’s poster-perfect Born-Again Christian couple. They’ve been together for as long as I’ve known them -- since before we were Freshmen, over 35 years now. And when we were in school together it was basically their mission in life to try to “save” me (and everyone else they met), while mine in turn (in my role as my High School’s chief gadfly, infidel and heretic) was to resist salvation at any cost, while at the same time challenging everything they believed. After graduation Dwight went to work as a contractor (a job he still does today), while Mary became a housewife and a stay-at-home mom...until the last of their children had at last fled the nest, at which point she decided that it was her turn to attend the University of Washington. She now works as an administrator for Habitat for Humanity, doing church relations, and in that capacity she and Dwight have traveled all over the world, doing their small part to help put an end to poverty housing. (And yes, they’ve both actually met Jimmy and Roslyn Carter).
Of course, the most interesting thing about our respective lives now is how closely our faith journeys have converged over the past three decades. I no longer feel so obsessed about always having to be right, or even trying to be the smartest guy in the room. I have a lot more respect and appreciation now for the “softer” side of spirituality -- I can sometimes actually even sing “Kum Ba Yah” without feeling ridiculously self-conscious. Mary, on the other hand, still feels nostalgic for the “feel-good” Christianity of her youth, but she’s also developed the capacity to look critically at her church, and to be displeased about some of the things she sees going on there. And she’s developed a lot more respect for Unitarian-Universalists too, now that she’s discovered that we’re not just all talk and hot air, but that some of us at least can also actually swing a hammer and use a saw.
My topic for today, if you haven’t figured out already, is Community -- what does it really mean to “dwell together in peace.” It’s the first of a series of four sermons I have planned for this Fall about the language of our covenant. And the reason I have gone on here at such great length about my High School reunion is that, for a lot of us I suspect, High School was the first truly complex community that we participated in. Prior to High School most people tend to live their lives on a lot smaller scale. Our world consists of our family and our immediate neighborhood, plus a teacher and maybe a couple of dozen kids we share a classroom with each day...perhaps only a few hundred souls at most, including our cousins and grandparents and the kids we met at summer camp.
But when we arrive at High School, at the age of thirteen or so, our whole world suddenly becomes a whole lot larger in a big hurry. There were over two thousand students, for example, at my High School, plus several hundred more teachers and administrators (and in my case every one of them was a stranger to me, since my family had just moved during the summer back to Seattle from California). But even for kids who have lived in the same neighborhood their entire lives, the first big challenge that confronts us all in High School -- bigger even than finding our way to our classes, or remembering our locker combinations, or determining whether it’s really safe to go into that particular restroom -- is figuring out where we fit in. Am I smart enough to be one of the Honor Society kids? Am I a good enough athlete to hang out with the Jocks? Am I going to try to be popular, and wear all the right clothes and go to the parties and make lots of friends; or am I going to pretty much try to keep to myself, maybe just hanging out with the handful of friends I’ve known since kindergarten? And what will I do if they decide to do something different than I do?
Discovering our affinities -- where we fit in -- is a key element in the process of exploring and discovering who we are as individuals. And yet there’s a second, even bigger challenge that confronts us for the first time in High School, and that’s figuring out how we’re going to get along with the folks with whom we DON’T fit in. How are we going to relate to people (and more pointedly, to groups of people) who are different from us, who are not part of our group, our “in” crowd, our little clique? Are we going to focus on the differences, the things that keep us separate? Or are we going to look for things that we have in common, that potentially bring us together? And let’s be honest -- there’s a power dynamic at work here also. Because if you are part of that supposedly “popular” group, it can sometimes seem to your advantage to keep others out, or to put them down in order to bolster your own status and sense of superiority; while if you’re NOT a member of that group, you have to decide at some point whether you are even going to play that game, or instead going to make up new and different rules of your own. But either way, it still comes down to a question of Empathy or Antipathy. Do we concentrate on our commonalities, the qualities we share? Or do we emphasize the distinctions, real or imagined, which we hope will distinguish us one from the other?
And then we all graduated (or at least most of us did) and went our separate ways. Some of us went to college, some of us went to work, or into the military, some of us even went to prison (at least in my graduating class they did). And at some subsequent point in time (probably a lot sooner than most of us realized) all of the little distinctions that meant so much in High School gradually became meaningless, because the subsequent distinctions had become so much greater. And yet no matter how great those differences may become, you will always have two things in common with the people you went to High School with. First, no matter how old you get, you will always be the same age. Your age. And the second, of course, is the accident of shared history -- that because you all happened to be the same age, and your parents all happened to live in the same community, you spent four critically formative years of your life (more or less) with this basically random group of people. And there’s nothing you can do to change that, no matter how hard you try. The best you can do is to choose to ignore it, to try to put it all behind you.
But if you have properly learned your lessons of empathy and affinity, you can also choose to embrace that community in a new way. And you can likewise use those same lessons to embrace new communities -- to discover new affinities that you might not have otherwise explored, and to grow as an individual in the process. I don’t remember anything about High School Algebra (in fact, I sometimes have trouble doing simple elementary school fractions)...but I do remember this: if you listen carefully enough, you can eventually find something you have in common with just about everyone you may happen to meet. It may be something so simple as neither one of you has ever met anyone else so different from yourself in your life, but it’s a start. That common denominator is enough to begin a dialog, a relationship, and from that interaction other commonalities (and differences) will begin to emerge. But so long as neither party desires to harm or exploit or dominate the other, the differences don’t really matter. While the commonalities potentially form the basis of a larger and more inclusive community.
I’m pretty sure that everyone here has heard of the Golden Rule: “do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” And there’s also a more apologetic variation of this rule, which basically says “do NOT do unto others that which you find hateful to yourself.” And then there’s the so-called “strong” version of the rule, which says “do unto others as THEY would have you do unto them” -- in other words, empathetically substituting the other person’s personal or cultural sensibilities for one’s own. But the point is, we don’t necessarily have to have a LOT in common with another human being in order to empathize with them, or to treat them fairly. We can learn how to “dwell together in peace,” without having to see eye to eye on every little thing.
Of course, there is also a cynical version of the rule, which goes something like: “Do unto others BEFORE they get a chance to do it unto you, because at the end of the day, it’s a dog eat dog world out there, and whoever has the most Gold makes the rules....” It’s clever, and maybe even a little funny (and to my mind disgustingly “American”); but it’s also dead wrong, even though at times it may not always seem like it. At the end of the day, there’s not enough gold in all the world to keep in place rules that are fundamentally mean or unfair; every dog has its day, truth is stronger than falsehood, and our common humanity is far more powerful than the differences and disagreements that divide us.
It’s true that often times we end up defining who we are by differenciating ourselves from who and what we are not. All Communities have boundaries of some sort. But healthy, loving, dymanic communities define themselves positively rather than negatively -- by lifting up who they are and what they stand for, in both words and deeds. And they are not so much things that we discover and join as they are entities that we help to create through our presence and participation in them. And likewise, “dwelling together in peace” is not generally something that we can do through domination: by imposing our will on others. Rather, lasting peace comes from learning to listen to one another, and then building on our commonalities in order to create a larger and more inclusive community.
Communities built on love -- or at the very least mutual respect and tolerance and perhaps even some grudging admiration -- are communities that endure. Communities built on hate are eventually consumed by their own hatred, no matter how righteous or justified it may seem. “To Dwell Together in Peace” is not just goal, it is also a discipline, a process which creates its own success. And it begins with a decision to listen, and to discover some common ground on which to build a home that we can share.
Reading: Martin Luther King Jr., “Loving Your Enemies.” A Sermon preached at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomary, Alabama on November 17, 1957.
There’s another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate. You can’t walk straight when you hate. You can’t stand upright. Your vision is distorted. There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate. He comes to the point that he becomes a pathological case. For the person who hates, you can stand up and see a person and that person can be beautiful, and you will call them ugly. For the person who hates, the beautiful becomes ugly and the ugly becomes beautiful. For the person who hates, the good becomes bad and the bad becomes good. For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That’s what hate does. You can’t see right. The symbol of objectivity is lost. Hate destroys the very structure of the personality of the hater.
Sunday, September 26, 2004
Sunday, September 12, 2004
IF THE WORLD WERE PERFECT, IT WOULDN’T BE
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle MA
Sunday September 12th, 2004
READING: Matthew 5: 43-48
I thought I’d start out this morning by telling you all about the one time in my life I actually met Yogi Berra. I remember it almost perfectly. It was the summer of 1980, and I was taking a break from my job at the Massachusetts Historical Society, sitting out on the front steps drinking a cup of coffee and eating a Bavarian Creme doughnut, when who should come strolling along up Boylston Street toward Fenway Park but the manager of the hated New York Yankees. I recognized him right away, and instantly became star-struck, until finally he was right in front of me, at which point I blurted out “So, are you gonna beat us tonight?” to which he replied, without skipping a beat or breaking his step, “Gonna try,” and continued on his way to the ballpark.
OK, so maybe it’s not that great of a story. There I was, face to face with the legendary, undisputed champion of the unforgettable malaprop, my one big chance to say and perhaps even elicit something immortally clever, and Yogi Berra turns out to be more articulate than I am. Way more articulate. And I suppose the point of this story (if indeed it has one) is that if anyone ever tells you that there’s no such thing as a stupid question, tell them that they’re wrong. Stupid questions are abundant in this world. But it’s the stupid answers we remember, and sometimes have to live with a lot longer than we’d like to.
Just so you all know, today’s sermon topic was purchased by Margaret Darling at last Spring’s service auction. Auctioning off the topic of a sermon is an almost perfect fundraising gimmick. It works like this: the high bidder gets to select an issue or theme of their own choice, maybe even suggest a title, or some readings...we have a little conversation so that I can learn more about their ideas, and then I go right ahead and preach about whatever I want to anyway, just like I do every Sunday.... OK, maybe I feel just a LITTLE more conscientious than I normally do anyway about trying to give those of you who generously support this church (and who show up here faithfully Sunday after Sunday, I hope at least in part, to hear what I have to say) your money’s worth. But the bottom line is that I’m always interested in hearing your ideas about possible sermons, whether you pay extra or not; yet the “Free Pulpit” itslef is never REALLY for sale. Preaching is a sacred duty, which you have generously entrusted to me, and which I humbly attempt to fulfill, to the best of my ability every time I climb these stairs. Am I perfect? No. But I’m gonna try....
In any event, this particular topic is an especially good one (almost perfect, really) for a sermon like this, since it can be taken so effortlessly in so many different directions. What does it mean to be “perfect” anyway, and how do we know it when we see it? What is the relationship between perfection and change -- is perfection something that, by definition, never changes; and can anything incapable of changing ever really be considered “perfect?” And finally, how does our desire for perfection effect the quality of our lives in other ways? Are our lives truly made better by the attempt to do everything “perfectly,” or is perfectionism in fact something that undermines the quality of our lives, making life less satisfactory than is was to begin with?
If we were to start out simply by looking in the dictionary, we would discover that to be Perfect is to be “complete in all respects; without defect or omission; sound; flawless.” And if that were the end of it, we would likewise recognize immediately that the world isn’t perfect, and that it never has been perfect, and that it’s never going to be perfect either. Life is nothing if not dynamic, and the world right along with it, with all its flaws and defects and imperfections. The only thing we can ever really count on is change, and we can’t always even count on that. And yet, if we’re lucky, there are moments in our lives when the world FEELS perfect; when we obtain a fleeting glimpse of that elusive quality we call “perfection,” only to see it slip away again. Perfection’s very elusiveness is what makes it appear so desirable. And so we imagine that at some mythical time in the distant past, some Golden Age, the “good old days,” the world was always that way, always perfect, and perhaps that it will be that way again if only we work hard enough to make it so. Our vision of perfection (imperfect as it may be) thus helps to shape our understanding of the meaning of change; every change, either great or small, becomes either an act of progress or an act of declension, depending upon whether it seems to move us closer to, or further away from, what we imagine to be “perfect.”
This insight is especially important, because yesterday was the third anniversary of “the day the World changed.” And this past week as I’ve been listening to and reading the public reflections on the significance of that day, I’ve found myself wondering “what really changed on September 11th, 2001?” Was it actually the world itself that changed, or was it just our understanding of the world that we imagined ourselves to be living in -- our “normal” world which seemed so comfortable, so “perfect.” And if in fact it was princpally the latter, did our perspective change for the better, or for the worse?
Three years ago on the Sunday immediately following the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, I asked the congregation I was serving on Nantucket to reflect upon “the difference between a catastrophe and a tragedy.”
...A catastrophe is a calamity, a disaster, an event which inflicts widespread destruction and suffering. But tragedy contains an additional element: the fact that the cause of that calamity originates in the arrogant pride or hubris of an otherwise heroic figure, which blinds him or her to a fatal flaw within their character, which in turn becomes the source of their undoing. The same quality which makes the hero great also makes them vulnerable, and their destruction becomes tragic because it might have so easily been avoided, had the hero simply exercised a little more humility.
Think for a moment about the tragedies of Oedipus, or Othello. A calamity becomes tragic because a hero’s greatness, their capacity for bold, courageous, decisive action, unleashes a chain of events beyond their control, which eventually overtakes them and robs them of their own freedom to decide their destiny. Their fate becomes sealed, because their pride has in some way outraged and offended the Gods, who are ultimately responsible for preserving justice, and order, and equity in the Universe.
The events of [September 11th] were without question calamitous. But they will become tragic only if we allow ourselves, in our arrogant pride, to set out blindly upon a course of action that will eventually transform us into something we can not abide. Don’t misunderstand me on this point. It is essential that we commit the resources of this nation to bringing the perpetrators of this crime to justice. But, in doing so, it is equally essential that we do not allow ourselves to become criminals in our own right. I really can’t say it any more plainly than that. There is too much blood on our hands already; we are not always the heroic defenders of freedom and justice that we like to see ourselves as being. So long as we persist in remaining blind to our own faults, we risk unleashing a tragic calamity of truly catastrophic proportion.
Simply because we have been wronged does not make us right. Simply because we are powerful enough to hurt those whom we perceive to be our enemies does not in any sense justify our doing so. If our actions are to be regarded as just and proper, we must seek out the cooperation of the international community, behave consistently with standards of due process, and truly become the champions of freedom, justice, and human rights that we so often claim to be.
And above all...we must [continue to] believe and trust the words of America’s first (and in my mind still the best) Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, and remember that we most truly succeed in destroying our enemies when we are able to make them our friends.
If anything these insights are even more poignent today than they were three years ago. And at the heart of our nation’s tragic inability to see and recognize that we just might possibly be less than perfect is a second erroneous belief: the mistaken assumption that if we could just somehow succeed in exterminating all of the terrorists, and all the potential terrorists, and all their supporters and sympathizers, life would go back to being “normal,” and the world would be perfect again. But a world that is driven by violence and ideological zealotry and the passion for revenge will never be perfect, and should never be considered “normal.” Perfection lies in an altogether different direction.
It’s natural, I think, for people to assume that what seems “normal” to them should be normal for everyone else, and that if everyone would just act “normally” the world would be, if not perfect, at least a better place for everyone to live in. But this “tyranny of the normal” has an ugly side as well, which we often just choose to ignore. “Normal” and “Perfect” are not exactly synonymns. Normal refers to a statistical mean: an average, a “norm.” Perfection on the other hand represents an ideal, which is essentially unattainable for most of us, except perhaps in brief glimpses. And yet so often it seems as if the goal of life is to be “normal” instead of “exceptional,” to be “ordinary” rather than “extraordinary.” And so we struggle to be perfect because we fear that maybe there is something abnormal about us if we are less than perfect, while the reality is that none of us is perfect, and our efforts to become so often times are simply making us (and everyone around us) miserable. And maybe even a little crazy too. We look around, we compare ourselves to others, and even if we do eventually get to the point where we are aware of our own limitations and shortcomings and are able to accept them, God help the person who offers to help point them out for us.
But when Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount “Therefore be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect” he’s not saying “be normal, so that none might find fault with you.” The actual word in Greek is teleios, and what it means is “complete” or “fulfilled” -- to be “fully realized.” It’s a Commandment to go beyond the ordinary, or what is generally considered normal -- and instead to love our enemies, and to return good for evil....because this is what God would do. And this is what we should be trying to do as well, if we wish to be part of God’s family. It’s not a demand that we become “perfectly” Perfect -- dictionary perfect -- or that we try to impose that vision of perfection on the rest of the world. That would be hypocrisy -- the sin of judging others by a higher standard than we are capable of meeting ourselves. Rather, it asks us to realize who we really are, and then to attempt to make THAT reality “real.” Is this going to be easy? No. Are we ever going to do it “perfectly?” Probably not. But we’re gonna try. Because that’s really the only answer that works “perfectly,” every time, to life’s most challenging questions...
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle MA
Sunday September 12th, 2004
READING: Matthew 5: 43-48
I thought I’d start out this morning by telling you all about the one time in my life I actually met Yogi Berra. I remember it almost perfectly. It was the summer of 1980, and I was taking a break from my job at the Massachusetts Historical Society, sitting out on the front steps drinking a cup of coffee and eating a Bavarian Creme doughnut, when who should come strolling along up Boylston Street toward Fenway Park but the manager of the hated New York Yankees. I recognized him right away, and instantly became star-struck, until finally he was right in front of me, at which point I blurted out “So, are you gonna beat us tonight?” to which he replied, without skipping a beat or breaking his step, “Gonna try,” and continued on his way to the ballpark.
OK, so maybe it’s not that great of a story. There I was, face to face with the legendary, undisputed champion of the unforgettable malaprop, my one big chance to say and perhaps even elicit something immortally clever, and Yogi Berra turns out to be more articulate than I am. Way more articulate. And I suppose the point of this story (if indeed it has one) is that if anyone ever tells you that there’s no such thing as a stupid question, tell them that they’re wrong. Stupid questions are abundant in this world. But it’s the stupid answers we remember, and sometimes have to live with a lot longer than we’d like to.
Just so you all know, today’s sermon topic was purchased by Margaret Darling at last Spring’s service auction. Auctioning off the topic of a sermon is an almost perfect fundraising gimmick. It works like this: the high bidder gets to select an issue or theme of their own choice, maybe even suggest a title, or some readings...we have a little conversation so that I can learn more about their ideas, and then I go right ahead and preach about whatever I want to anyway, just like I do every Sunday.... OK, maybe I feel just a LITTLE more conscientious than I normally do anyway about trying to give those of you who generously support this church (and who show up here faithfully Sunday after Sunday, I hope at least in part, to hear what I have to say) your money’s worth. But the bottom line is that I’m always interested in hearing your ideas about possible sermons, whether you pay extra or not; yet the “Free Pulpit” itslef is never REALLY for sale. Preaching is a sacred duty, which you have generously entrusted to me, and which I humbly attempt to fulfill, to the best of my ability every time I climb these stairs. Am I perfect? No. But I’m gonna try....
In any event, this particular topic is an especially good one (almost perfect, really) for a sermon like this, since it can be taken so effortlessly in so many different directions. What does it mean to be “perfect” anyway, and how do we know it when we see it? What is the relationship between perfection and change -- is perfection something that, by definition, never changes; and can anything incapable of changing ever really be considered “perfect?” And finally, how does our desire for perfection effect the quality of our lives in other ways? Are our lives truly made better by the attempt to do everything “perfectly,” or is perfectionism in fact something that undermines the quality of our lives, making life less satisfactory than is was to begin with?
If we were to start out simply by looking in the dictionary, we would discover that to be Perfect is to be “complete in all respects; without defect or omission; sound; flawless.” And if that were the end of it, we would likewise recognize immediately that the world isn’t perfect, and that it never has been perfect, and that it’s never going to be perfect either. Life is nothing if not dynamic, and the world right along with it, with all its flaws and defects and imperfections. The only thing we can ever really count on is change, and we can’t always even count on that. And yet, if we’re lucky, there are moments in our lives when the world FEELS perfect; when we obtain a fleeting glimpse of that elusive quality we call “perfection,” only to see it slip away again. Perfection’s very elusiveness is what makes it appear so desirable. And so we imagine that at some mythical time in the distant past, some Golden Age, the “good old days,” the world was always that way, always perfect, and perhaps that it will be that way again if only we work hard enough to make it so. Our vision of perfection (imperfect as it may be) thus helps to shape our understanding of the meaning of change; every change, either great or small, becomes either an act of progress or an act of declension, depending upon whether it seems to move us closer to, or further away from, what we imagine to be “perfect.”
This insight is especially important, because yesterday was the third anniversary of “the day the World changed.” And this past week as I’ve been listening to and reading the public reflections on the significance of that day, I’ve found myself wondering “what really changed on September 11th, 2001?” Was it actually the world itself that changed, or was it just our understanding of the world that we imagined ourselves to be living in -- our “normal” world which seemed so comfortable, so “perfect.” And if in fact it was princpally the latter, did our perspective change for the better, or for the worse?
Three years ago on the Sunday immediately following the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, I asked the congregation I was serving on Nantucket to reflect upon “the difference between a catastrophe and a tragedy.”
...A catastrophe is a calamity, a disaster, an event which inflicts widespread destruction and suffering. But tragedy contains an additional element: the fact that the cause of that calamity originates in the arrogant pride or hubris of an otherwise heroic figure, which blinds him or her to a fatal flaw within their character, which in turn becomes the source of their undoing. The same quality which makes the hero great also makes them vulnerable, and their destruction becomes tragic because it might have so easily been avoided, had the hero simply exercised a little more humility.
Think for a moment about the tragedies of Oedipus, or Othello. A calamity becomes tragic because a hero’s greatness, their capacity for bold, courageous, decisive action, unleashes a chain of events beyond their control, which eventually overtakes them and robs them of their own freedom to decide their destiny. Their fate becomes sealed, because their pride has in some way outraged and offended the Gods, who are ultimately responsible for preserving justice, and order, and equity in the Universe.
The events of [September 11th] were without question calamitous. But they will become tragic only if we allow ourselves, in our arrogant pride, to set out blindly upon a course of action that will eventually transform us into something we can not abide. Don’t misunderstand me on this point. It is essential that we commit the resources of this nation to bringing the perpetrators of this crime to justice. But, in doing so, it is equally essential that we do not allow ourselves to become criminals in our own right. I really can’t say it any more plainly than that. There is too much blood on our hands already; we are not always the heroic defenders of freedom and justice that we like to see ourselves as being. So long as we persist in remaining blind to our own faults, we risk unleashing a tragic calamity of truly catastrophic proportion.
Simply because we have been wronged does not make us right. Simply because we are powerful enough to hurt those whom we perceive to be our enemies does not in any sense justify our doing so. If our actions are to be regarded as just and proper, we must seek out the cooperation of the international community, behave consistently with standards of due process, and truly become the champions of freedom, justice, and human rights that we so often claim to be.
And above all...we must [continue to] believe and trust the words of America’s first (and in my mind still the best) Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, and remember that we most truly succeed in destroying our enemies when we are able to make them our friends.
If anything these insights are even more poignent today than they were three years ago. And at the heart of our nation’s tragic inability to see and recognize that we just might possibly be less than perfect is a second erroneous belief: the mistaken assumption that if we could just somehow succeed in exterminating all of the terrorists, and all the potential terrorists, and all their supporters and sympathizers, life would go back to being “normal,” and the world would be perfect again. But a world that is driven by violence and ideological zealotry and the passion for revenge will never be perfect, and should never be considered “normal.” Perfection lies in an altogether different direction.
It’s natural, I think, for people to assume that what seems “normal” to them should be normal for everyone else, and that if everyone would just act “normally” the world would be, if not perfect, at least a better place for everyone to live in. But this “tyranny of the normal” has an ugly side as well, which we often just choose to ignore. “Normal” and “Perfect” are not exactly synonymns. Normal refers to a statistical mean: an average, a “norm.” Perfection on the other hand represents an ideal, which is essentially unattainable for most of us, except perhaps in brief glimpses. And yet so often it seems as if the goal of life is to be “normal” instead of “exceptional,” to be “ordinary” rather than “extraordinary.” And so we struggle to be perfect because we fear that maybe there is something abnormal about us if we are less than perfect, while the reality is that none of us is perfect, and our efforts to become so often times are simply making us (and everyone around us) miserable. And maybe even a little crazy too. We look around, we compare ourselves to others, and even if we do eventually get to the point where we are aware of our own limitations and shortcomings and are able to accept them, God help the person who offers to help point them out for us.
But when Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount “Therefore be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect” he’s not saying “be normal, so that none might find fault with you.” The actual word in Greek is teleios, and what it means is “complete” or “fulfilled” -- to be “fully realized.” It’s a Commandment to go beyond the ordinary, or what is generally considered normal -- and instead to love our enemies, and to return good for evil....because this is what God would do. And this is what we should be trying to do as well, if we wish to be part of God’s family. It’s not a demand that we become “perfectly” Perfect -- dictionary perfect -- or that we try to impose that vision of perfection on the rest of the world. That would be hypocrisy -- the sin of judging others by a higher standard than we are capable of meeting ourselves. Rather, it asks us to realize who we really are, and then to attempt to make THAT reality “real.” Is this going to be easy? No. Are we ever going to do it “perfectly?” Probably not. But we’re gonna try. Because that’s really the only answer that works “perfectly,” every time, to life’s most challenging questions...
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