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...
Sunday, May 16, 2004
THE STATE OF THE CHURCH (2004)
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle MA
Sunday May 16, 2004
Early in my career as a Parish Minister, I got into the habit of preaching once a year, on the date of the Annual Meeting, on the subject of “The State of the Church.” The logic of this seemed obvious at the time, and hasn’t really changed that much. To my mind the only thing more tedious and deadly dull than listening to a traditional annual report is writing and presenting one. But making this subject the topic of a sermon, moving the issue of “the state of the church” from the nuts and bolts context of a business meeting to the inspirational forum of public worship, effectively shifts the focus from one of dry reporting to a dynamic exploration of questions of meaning and value. Rather than looking backwards, it becomes an invitation to look to the future, to examine the purpose and effectiveness of our religious society in the light of a shared and articulate vision of our mission and future goals. Or at least that’s the theory. It could also turn out to be just another one of those tedious and deadly dull sermons that every preacher seems to preach once in awhile, no matter how hard they try to avoid it....
But having said all that, let me just begin by saying that from where I stand, the state of the church looks good. It could be better, of course -- it can always be better -- but it could certainly be a lot worse as well. It seems to me that there’s been a lot of positive energy in the congregation this year, lots of optimism and enthusiasm, lots of good feelings. And of course, for all I know, it’s always like this around here; because, after all , I am still a relative newcomer to Carlisle and the First Religious Society, so there is certainly plenty left for me to learn about this place, and all of you. I was talking with a colleague about this the other day, and she told me that it really wasn’t until after the start of her third year, when she knew that she was really a “settled” minister, and not just serving as another interim. And the literature suggests that it’s typically not until the sixth or seventh year of a ministry that clergy truly “come into their own” as the “leader” of a congregation -- a phenomenon which seems to coincide with the moment that the number of people who have joined the church since the minister’s arrival begins to approach the number of people who have been there all along.
For my own part, I already feel very much at home here. But I’m also kind of hoping that the novelty NEVER really wears off -- that amidst our growing sense of comfort and mutual familiarity there will always be something new to learn, something different to try, some undiscovered territory to explore. And the thing that makes this possible is often simply the recognition that nothing in life is ever truly “settled” once and for all, and while at times this can feel unsettling, it’s also what makes life interesting, what keeps us lively and on our toes. Of course, this insight can sometimes be taken to the opposite extreme as well. There also always seem to be some people who like to shake things up simply for the thrill of the adrenaline rush, because they crave excitement of change for its own sake. But between these two extremes there’s a pretty broad path that we can follow, which allows us to be both creative and innovative while still enjoying the things we have always enjoyed, without getting stuck in a rut.
There’s one other thing I’ve noticed about my experience settling in here, which is that in ever other congregation I’ve served, without exception, I’ve been brought in to serve as a troubleshooter -- there was some specific problem or set of problems that needed to be fixed (or at least addressed), and it was my job to see to it that it happened. This wasn’t really the career I’d planned for myself; things just sort of worked out that way. But one of the big attractions of this congregation was that I liked the things that you were doing here, and simply wanted to be a part of it all -- maybe help you learn to do things a little better, or even just bring my own talents to the party, in the expectation that my contributions would add to the overall quality of the experience. So I’ve been trying to break my old habit of always looking around for problems to be fixed, and to learn instead how to look for new opportunities to be embraced, along with ways that I might best fit in and contribute to what you are already doing well together.
At our leadership retreat last fall, facilitated by our District Executive Lynn Thomas, we tried as a group to identify priorities for my first year of ministry here in Carlisle. And obviously, near the very top of the list was what we are doing right now: our Sunday morning worship service. Any time you add a new member to a team, any kind of team, regardless of how skilled or talented they may be, it takes a little time for the team to really “gel” again-- for the various teammates to get to know one another’s skills and abilities and how they all fit together in a supportive, synerystic and harmonious way. Preaching is obviously a very important part of what I do as a minister: it is certainly the most visible part of my job, and also probably the most time consuming...and although a lot of this work, the writing and the reading, I have to do alone that still doesn’t mean that I can do it all myself or that it happens in a vacuum.
A sermon is just one part of a larger experience of public worship which has a structure and a dynamic all its own. My job as a preacher is “to instruct, to delight, and to inspire” -- to take what I have learned through my education and experience, about our shared Unitarian Universalist faith, and to examine what is happening in the world in the light of what I know, in such a way that others might find it enlightening as well, not just spiritually or intellectually or in the abstract, but in the place where people actually live their lives. And the context of this activity is a time that we set aside each week to gather together apart from the distractions of the rest of the world, and to reconnect to one another as a religious community, to center ourselves and explore our lives more deeply, share our joys and our sorrows, sing out loudly in celebration of the things that we hold sacred, and then to return to the world inspired and encouraged to put our values and our principles into practice in our daily lives.
This worship, this “liturgy,” literally is “the work of the people” -- something that we do together. And all my ideas -- every one -- ultimately originate from listening carefully to you. If it’s on your mind, eventually I want to get around to talking about it from the pulpit -- not because I want to tell you what to believe, but because “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and our tradition of the Free Pulpit is grounded in presenting to thinking people thoughtful opinions slightly different from their own.
This brings me to what has been a second priority for this first year, which is simply trying to get to know all of you as well as I can. Obviously, this remains an on-going process, complicated by the fact that I don’t always see all of you as often as I would like. My head-counters tell me that the average attendance has been good this past year, although it has dropped off a little here in the spring; I fully expect that next September it will be a little lighter than it was last September (now that the novelty of seeing the new minister has worn off), and that basically by a year from now we will have a pretty good idea of what the new baseline is. And then we will begin to grow the church from there.
Growth in average attendance is the product of two things: an increase in the absolute number of people who attend church, and an increase in the number (or frequency) of times that each individual attends. Population times Frequency: how many, how often. And it is the single most important statistical indicator of the health and vitality of a congregation: more important than formal membership, more important even than the budget. All good things in church begin by people showing up, not just on Sunday morning, but at the various other activities of the church as well. And churches grow when people invite their friends. It’s really just that simple. One of the unanticipated benefits of the activities we have organized this past year to help me meet people is that they seem to have helped many of you to get to know one another a little better as well. I fully expect that we will try to continue to organize these kinds of events far into the foreseeable future.
There are a lot of other things I would like to talk about here this morning, such as our recent pledge campaign, and the efforts we have made together to build upon the work this congregation did with Michael Durrell during Diane’s interim ministry, as well as some of the plans to begin to create a more systematic program of Adult Religious Education here at FRS, together with the development of what are sometimes called “Chalice Circles” -- small, lay-led “covenant group” ministries of six to ten souls who meet together on a regular basis simply to share with one another, in an open yet structured way, their insights and experiences as spiritual seekers. But time is short, and I don’t want to leave here this morning without saying a few words, at least, about the Welcoming Congregation Program.
I have to admit that becoming a Welcoming Congregation wasn’t really something that was very high on my priority list when I was called here. It was (if I can borrow some language from Richard Clarke) something I thought was important, but not very urgent...and I knew that it had been somewhat controversial here, and thus needlessly divisive, and so I was perfectly willing to let it simmer on the back burner for awhile until there was some compelling reason to bring it up again. But we don’t always get to decide the timing of these things for ourselves; sometimes someone else decides to turn up the heat, so that things start to boil over and demand our attention.
Tonight at midnight same-sex couples will at long last have the right to become legally married here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and while many (though not all) religious conservatives tend to view this development as either the work of the devil or the product of a sinister conspiracy of activist judges and secular humanists, I suspect that the response of most religious liberals (including Unitarian Universalists) ranges somewhere between benign ambivalence and outright joy. But regardless of how people may feel personally, the principle of “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” is now once more, for better or worse, front and center on the battlefield of the Culture Wars, in the midst of what is perhaps the most acrimonious and polarized political campaign of our generation.
There are a lot of misconceptions, right here in this church, about what it means to become a Welcoming Congregation, and while it would obviously be impossible to clear them all up right this second, the most egregious goes something like this: becoming a Welcoming Congregation means taking a vote to change the by-laws to declare that you are a “Gay Church” -- then you fly a Rainbow Flag above the front door, and suddenly anyone who ISN’T Gay is no longer welcome here. I know it sounds silly, but don’t laugh...because I’ve heard it described in almost just so many words on more than one occasion right here in this building, sometimes even by people who were basically in favor of the program.
What the Welcoming Congregation is REALLY all about, is essentiallly a systematic and on-going comprehensive process of Adult Religious Education designed to help churches learn how better to create the kind of safe space where ANYONE can come, along with their families and their loved ones, and talk openly about mundane things like where they went on their summer vacation, and NOT have to worry about about being shunned or ridiculed, or beaten up, or fired from their jobs, or thrown out of their homes, simply because God made them a certain way, and they are tired of always trying to hide who they are from their neighbors and fellow creatures.
The Welcoming Congregation Program is about building mutual respect and trust, along with a tolerance for diversity which is grounded in a better understanding of the value of pluralism, and of the wide range of human experiences that make up the human race. And the reason that it focuses so specifically on the LBGT community is that so much of the so-called “traditional religious values” crowd is so overtly hostile toward them. Thus we are called by our faith tradition to answer that hostility with hospitality, just like it says in the Bible....just like Lot took the two strangers into his home, in order to prevent the male citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah from abusing them, and thereby entertained angels unawares.
I think that it is only natural for human beings, or any kind of animal really, to be suspicious (and maybe even a little fearful) of the unfamiliar. This cautiousness concerning things that we don’t really understand is probably hard-wired into our brains -- a kind of “safety mechanism” which typically errs on the side of caution by keeping us out of harm’s way even when we’re not really sure what the harm might potentially be, or even whether there is any real danger at all. Homophobia is basically just another form of Xenophobia: a fear of the foreign, a fear of strangers. Like all prejudices, it is generally rooted in ignorance and misunderstanding, and tends to disappear rapidly in the presence of improved knowledge and increased familiarity. But we all come to this issue at different places on the learning curve, each of us with our own backgrounds and experiences. And as we learn together about one another from one another, our shared experiences eventually drive out the stereotypes and the misconceptions, and replace them with healthy relationships that affirm our similarities as well as our differences, always within a larger context of mutual respect and understanding.
And this is why I’m so confident that once we begin this process in earnest, it’s all going to go a lot more smoothly than you might suspect. Because after a year here, I feel like I am starting to get to know you -- and I know that you are all basically good, decent people: intelligent, curious, open-minded...who care about one another and the world around you, and who want nothing more than to do the right thing. You’re Unitarian Universalists, for crissakes! -- you really do possess the one true faith, but you don’t want to say anything about it because you don’t want those other folks to feel badly about theirs. But let’s not let that keep us from practicing what we preach. Because practice is what keeps a faith like ours alive. And it is through our good example that we begin to change the world, one good deed at at time.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle MA
Sunday May 16, 2004
Early in my career as a Parish Minister, I got into the habit of preaching once a year, on the date of the Annual Meeting, on the subject of “The State of the Church.” The logic of this seemed obvious at the time, and hasn’t really changed that much. To my mind the only thing more tedious and deadly dull than listening to a traditional annual report is writing and presenting one. But making this subject the topic of a sermon, moving the issue of “the state of the church” from the nuts and bolts context of a business meeting to the inspirational forum of public worship, effectively shifts the focus from one of dry reporting to a dynamic exploration of questions of meaning and value. Rather than looking backwards, it becomes an invitation to look to the future, to examine the purpose and effectiveness of our religious society in the light of a shared and articulate vision of our mission and future goals. Or at least that’s the theory. It could also turn out to be just another one of those tedious and deadly dull sermons that every preacher seems to preach once in awhile, no matter how hard they try to avoid it....
But having said all that, let me just begin by saying that from where I stand, the state of the church looks good. It could be better, of course -- it can always be better -- but it could certainly be a lot worse as well. It seems to me that there’s been a lot of positive energy in the congregation this year, lots of optimism and enthusiasm, lots of good feelings. And of course, for all I know, it’s always like this around here; because, after all , I am still a relative newcomer to Carlisle and the First Religious Society, so there is certainly plenty left for me to learn about this place, and all of you. I was talking with a colleague about this the other day, and she told me that it really wasn’t until after the start of her third year, when she knew that she was really a “settled” minister, and not just serving as another interim. And the literature suggests that it’s typically not until the sixth or seventh year of a ministry that clergy truly “come into their own” as the “leader” of a congregation -- a phenomenon which seems to coincide with the moment that the number of people who have joined the church since the minister’s arrival begins to approach the number of people who have been there all along.
For my own part, I already feel very much at home here. But I’m also kind of hoping that the novelty NEVER really wears off -- that amidst our growing sense of comfort and mutual familiarity there will always be something new to learn, something different to try, some undiscovered territory to explore. And the thing that makes this possible is often simply the recognition that nothing in life is ever truly “settled” once and for all, and while at times this can feel unsettling, it’s also what makes life interesting, what keeps us lively and on our toes. Of course, this insight can sometimes be taken to the opposite extreme as well. There also always seem to be some people who like to shake things up simply for the thrill of the adrenaline rush, because they crave excitement of change for its own sake. But between these two extremes there’s a pretty broad path that we can follow, which allows us to be both creative and innovative while still enjoying the things we have always enjoyed, without getting stuck in a rut.
There’s one other thing I’ve noticed about my experience settling in here, which is that in ever other congregation I’ve served, without exception, I’ve been brought in to serve as a troubleshooter -- there was some specific problem or set of problems that needed to be fixed (or at least addressed), and it was my job to see to it that it happened. This wasn’t really the career I’d planned for myself; things just sort of worked out that way. But one of the big attractions of this congregation was that I liked the things that you were doing here, and simply wanted to be a part of it all -- maybe help you learn to do things a little better, or even just bring my own talents to the party, in the expectation that my contributions would add to the overall quality of the experience. So I’ve been trying to break my old habit of always looking around for problems to be fixed, and to learn instead how to look for new opportunities to be embraced, along with ways that I might best fit in and contribute to what you are already doing well together.
At our leadership retreat last fall, facilitated by our District Executive Lynn Thomas, we tried as a group to identify priorities for my first year of ministry here in Carlisle. And obviously, near the very top of the list was what we are doing right now: our Sunday morning worship service. Any time you add a new member to a team, any kind of team, regardless of how skilled or talented they may be, it takes a little time for the team to really “gel” again-- for the various teammates to get to know one another’s skills and abilities and how they all fit together in a supportive, synerystic and harmonious way. Preaching is obviously a very important part of what I do as a minister: it is certainly the most visible part of my job, and also probably the most time consuming...and although a lot of this work, the writing and the reading, I have to do alone that still doesn’t mean that I can do it all myself or that it happens in a vacuum.
A sermon is just one part of a larger experience of public worship which has a structure and a dynamic all its own. My job as a preacher is “to instruct, to delight, and to inspire” -- to take what I have learned through my education and experience, about our shared Unitarian Universalist faith, and to examine what is happening in the world in the light of what I know, in such a way that others might find it enlightening as well, not just spiritually or intellectually or in the abstract, but in the place where people actually live their lives. And the context of this activity is a time that we set aside each week to gather together apart from the distractions of the rest of the world, and to reconnect to one another as a religious community, to center ourselves and explore our lives more deeply, share our joys and our sorrows, sing out loudly in celebration of the things that we hold sacred, and then to return to the world inspired and encouraged to put our values and our principles into practice in our daily lives.
This worship, this “liturgy,” literally is “the work of the people” -- something that we do together. And all my ideas -- every one -- ultimately originate from listening carefully to you. If it’s on your mind, eventually I want to get around to talking about it from the pulpit -- not because I want to tell you what to believe, but because “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and our tradition of the Free Pulpit is grounded in presenting to thinking people thoughtful opinions slightly different from their own.
This brings me to what has been a second priority for this first year, which is simply trying to get to know all of you as well as I can. Obviously, this remains an on-going process, complicated by the fact that I don’t always see all of you as often as I would like. My head-counters tell me that the average attendance has been good this past year, although it has dropped off a little here in the spring; I fully expect that next September it will be a little lighter than it was last September (now that the novelty of seeing the new minister has worn off), and that basically by a year from now we will have a pretty good idea of what the new baseline is. And then we will begin to grow the church from there.
Growth in average attendance is the product of two things: an increase in the absolute number of people who attend church, and an increase in the number (or frequency) of times that each individual attends. Population times Frequency: how many, how often. And it is the single most important statistical indicator of the health and vitality of a congregation: more important than formal membership, more important even than the budget. All good things in church begin by people showing up, not just on Sunday morning, but at the various other activities of the church as well. And churches grow when people invite their friends. It’s really just that simple. One of the unanticipated benefits of the activities we have organized this past year to help me meet people is that they seem to have helped many of you to get to know one another a little better as well. I fully expect that we will try to continue to organize these kinds of events far into the foreseeable future.
There are a lot of other things I would like to talk about here this morning, such as our recent pledge campaign, and the efforts we have made together to build upon the work this congregation did with Michael Durrell during Diane’s interim ministry, as well as some of the plans to begin to create a more systematic program of Adult Religious Education here at FRS, together with the development of what are sometimes called “Chalice Circles” -- small, lay-led “covenant group” ministries of six to ten souls who meet together on a regular basis simply to share with one another, in an open yet structured way, their insights and experiences as spiritual seekers. But time is short, and I don’t want to leave here this morning without saying a few words, at least, about the Welcoming Congregation Program.
I have to admit that becoming a Welcoming Congregation wasn’t really something that was very high on my priority list when I was called here. It was (if I can borrow some language from Richard Clarke) something I thought was important, but not very urgent...and I knew that it had been somewhat controversial here, and thus needlessly divisive, and so I was perfectly willing to let it simmer on the back burner for awhile until there was some compelling reason to bring it up again. But we don’t always get to decide the timing of these things for ourselves; sometimes someone else decides to turn up the heat, so that things start to boil over and demand our attention.
Tonight at midnight same-sex couples will at long last have the right to become legally married here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and while many (though not all) religious conservatives tend to view this development as either the work of the devil or the product of a sinister conspiracy of activist judges and secular humanists, I suspect that the response of most religious liberals (including Unitarian Universalists) ranges somewhere between benign ambivalence and outright joy. But regardless of how people may feel personally, the principle of “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” is now once more, for better or worse, front and center on the battlefield of the Culture Wars, in the midst of what is perhaps the most acrimonious and polarized political campaign of our generation.
There are a lot of misconceptions, right here in this church, about what it means to become a Welcoming Congregation, and while it would obviously be impossible to clear them all up right this second, the most egregious goes something like this: becoming a Welcoming Congregation means taking a vote to change the by-laws to declare that you are a “Gay Church” -- then you fly a Rainbow Flag above the front door, and suddenly anyone who ISN’T Gay is no longer welcome here. I know it sounds silly, but don’t laugh...because I’ve heard it described in almost just so many words on more than one occasion right here in this building, sometimes even by people who were basically in favor of the program.
What the Welcoming Congregation is REALLY all about, is essentiallly a systematic and on-going comprehensive process of Adult Religious Education designed to help churches learn how better to create the kind of safe space where ANYONE can come, along with their families and their loved ones, and talk openly about mundane things like where they went on their summer vacation, and NOT have to worry about about being shunned or ridiculed, or beaten up, or fired from their jobs, or thrown out of their homes, simply because God made them a certain way, and they are tired of always trying to hide who they are from their neighbors and fellow creatures.
The Welcoming Congregation Program is about building mutual respect and trust, along with a tolerance for diversity which is grounded in a better understanding of the value of pluralism, and of the wide range of human experiences that make up the human race. And the reason that it focuses so specifically on the LBGT community is that so much of the so-called “traditional religious values” crowd is so overtly hostile toward them. Thus we are called by our faith tradition to answer that hostility with hospitality, just like it says in the Bible....just like Lot took the two strangers into his home, in order to prevent the male citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah from abusing them, and thereby entertained angels unawares.
I think that it is only natural for human beings, or any kind of animal really, to be suspicious (and maybe even a little fearful) of the unfamiliar. This cautiousness concerning things that we don’t really understand is probably hard-wired into our brains -- a kind of “safety mechanism” which typically errs on the side of caution by keeping us out of harm’s way even when we’re not really sure what the harm might potentially be, or even whether there is any real danger at all. Homophobia is basically just another form of Xenophobia: a fear of the foreign, a fear of strangers. Like all prejudices, it is generally rooted in ignorance and misunderstanding, and tends to disappear rapidly in the presence of improved knowledge and increased familiarity. But we all come to this issue at different places on the learning curve, each of us with our own backgrounds and experiences. And as we learn together about one another from one another, our shared experiences eventually drive out the stereotypes and the misconceptions, and replace them with healthy relationships that affirm our similarities as well as our differences, always within a larger context of mutual respect and understanding.
And this is why I’m so confident that once we begin this process in earnest, it’s all going to go a lot more smoothly than you might suspect. Because after a year here, I feel like I am starting to get to know you -- and I know that you are all basically good, decent people: intelligent, curious, open-minded...who care about one another and the world around you, and who want nothing more than to do the right thing. You’re Unitarian Universalists, for crissakes! -- you really do possess the one true faith, but you don’t want to say anything about it because you don’t want those other folks to feel badly about theirs. But let’s not let that keep us from practicing what we preach. Because practice is what keeps a faith like ours alive. And it is through our good example that we begin to change the world, one good deed at at time.
Sunday, May 2, 2004
PASTOR AND COMMANDER: ANOTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday May 2rd, 2004
I thought I’d start out this morning simply by taking a couple of minutes (more or less) to say a few nice things about President Bush. I know this may seem a little out of character for me, and that therefore some of what I have to say may sound like damning faint praise, or insincere, or even ironic, but I can’t really help that. This seemingly interminable electoral contest is steadily emerging as the most acrimonious in MY memory; and even though I know as an historian that elections often resemble open warfare (which is why they call them “campaigns”), and democracy itself many times seems like not much more than a rough and tumble, bare knuckled brawl, I still believe that at the end of the day a functional civilized society requires civil behavior, and that as a spiritual leader I ought to somehow try to model that. Not only is the ability to recognize (and even admire) the positive qualities of those with whom one disagrees an important step toward dialog, compromise, and eventual reconciliation, I also know that whenever people succumb to the temptation of “demonizing” their opposition, they run the serious risk of “misunderestimating” them as well. Even the most evil and odious political figure of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler, was a decorated war veteran wounded on the battlefield, as well as a committed and disciplined vegetarian who loathed both smoking and drinking, and loved both dogs and small children. Not much of a writer (although apparently he’s better in English than in his native German, because his translators have tended to clean up his grammar), but certainly a dynamic and inspiring public speaker, whose rabid patriotism was unquestionable. Simply to dismiss him as a madman -- a monster and an abomination -- actually minimizes the true magnitude of his evil-doing, because it ignores both its banality and its mass appeal.
But I digress. What I meant to say is that if I can find something complimentary to say about Adolf Hitler, even if it is essentially irrelevant in the greater scheme of things, I can certainly find something nice to say about George W. Bush. In fact, I can think of three things, right off the top of my head. And the first is that I know for a fact that the President is neither as dumb as he sounds, nor is he as sanctimonious and insincere as he sometimes seems to those of us who do not share his views. Let me take these one at a time. I first realized that the President is a lot smarter than he looks when I saw his SAT scores published in one of the national news magazines, and realized that they were virtually identical to mine. Not that the results of some stupid standardized test probably mean that much anyway. But personally, I’m not too sure that I’m really smart enough to be the President (and I can’t imagine any possible circumstance where I might actually have an chance to find out either -- thank God!), but I’m certainly no dummy; and I suppose that if I had the opportunity to watch my father do it first, I might feel a lot more confident that I was capable of doing the job myself as well. But my main point is that just because the President isn’t in the top one or two percent of the population intellectually doesn’t mean that he isn’t plenty smart enough to lead. If anything, the fact that he’s NOT a “wonk” is what makes him seem so personable and approachable. And if there are times when he appears a little smug and self-righteous, or even vindictive and mean spirited toward his antagonists...who isn’t? Those of us on the other side certainly haven’t been too kind to him either.
The second nice thing I wanted to say about the President is that he knows who he is and he knows his limits without surrendering to his limitations; he isn’t ashamed of being himself, and he isn’t afraid of surrounding himself with strong, smart, and outspokenly opinionated people. And this is actually relatively rare in a leader. Many leaders, I think, tend to assume that because they are in charge, their followers are all looking to THEM for direction and guidance, and sometimes they get a little swept away by this, and start to believe that they always have to be “the smartest guy in the room” -- that their leadership depends on providing the right answer in every situation every time, and that they can therefore never afford to be wrong or to appear foolish. And there are certainly times when the President appears to have fallen into this trap as well: when his need to present a strong, principled, and decisive image in public really just make him seem (at least to those of us who disagree with him) stubborn and ideologically obsessed (not to mention a little out of touch with reality). But it also seems to me that (in private at least) the President is quite adept at listening to the opinions of his advisors and other experts, as well as gauging the mood of the public (and especially his core constituencies), and then modifying his own views based on what he has learned. And this too is a positive quality in a leader: the ability to listen, to learn, and to lead your followers in the direction they want to go.
Finally, the one quality I truly admire in the President above all others is his singular ability to earn and inspire the loyalty of those who support him. On one level, there is nothing particularly mysterious about this quality: people are loyal to the President because they know he is loyal to them -- it is a reciprocal relationship of mutual obligation and responsibility. One hand washes the other. But there’s actually a lot more to it than that. I think the President inspires such strong feelings of loyalty among his core supporters because he articulates and defends a view of the world that is strongly held by people who feel that their opinions and beliefs have been profoundly marginalized in contemporary American society, and who see in him a leader who will restore that worldview and its moral values to the heart of our government’s foreign and domestic policy. They believe in him because he believes what they believe, and they all believe it with all their hearts.
I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership lately, and not just because there will be an election in six months which will once again determine the leadership of our nation for the next four years. This first Sunday in May is also the first anniversary of my election as the minister of this congregation, so I’ve also been thinking quite a bit about the differences between political and religious leadership, and likewise where they overlap, and where they ought to leave one another alone. Political leadership, at least in a democracy, is an expression of the will of the people through the principle of majority rule. Thus politics is all about the art of the possible: not merely an unvarnished manifestation of what is sometimes called “the tyranny of the majority,” but more typically a subtle combination of compromise and coalition building, together at times with a little judicious arm twisting, the ubiquitous quid pro quo, and no small amount of inflammatory pandering to the fears and prejudices of the electorate.
But religious leadership ought to be about helping people to discern the Will of God, together with a humble submission to divine authority (however you may choose to understand that concept of a “higher power”) -- not my will, but thine Oh Lord be done. Keeping these things clearly distinguished in one’s mind is not always the easiest thing to do. What’s wrong with twisting a few arms, or even knocking a few heads and kicking a few butts, when you know that God is on your side? The answer, of course, is this notion of humility -- the realization that no matter how powerful our convictions may be, we will never FULLY know and understand the mind of our Creator, and that to believe otherwise is arrogant idolatry. Faith is less about certainty of belief than it is the trusting confidence that we must act in good faith even in the midst of our uncertainty, not knowing for sure whether God is on our side, but hoping that we are on the side of God, a God who is both Just AND Merciful, Righteous AND Compassionate, and who loves All Souls with the same unconditional affection that a perfect mother might feel for her children. The experience of faith is something which should be freely shared, but never forcibly imposed; there is no place for coercion in the Kingdom of God. Or at least this is what Unitarians, Universalists, and other religious liberals have traditionally believed. Faith is a Gift of God. And we best discern God’s will for us when we are free to share our faith openly with one another, without duress or fear of reprisal.
Of course, religion and politics are not the only fields where quality of leadership significantly determines both the quality of the experience and the quality of the results. I strongly suspect, for example, if we were to do a quick survey of the number of books on the subject, most of them would deal with issues of Leadership in Business, where it is sometimes said that “managers do things right, but leaders do the right things.” And yet I wonder whether this dichotomy is really fair. Which is preferable: to do the wrong things well, or to do the right things poorly? (Actually, that statement pretty much describes the differences between our two political parties, doesn’t it?) Clearly, the best alternative is to do the right things well: in other words, to be attentive to both the process and the vision -- the quality of the relationship between the leader, the followers, and their task -- as well as the ultimate worthiness of the goal itself, and how that worthiness is best determined and communicated.
Business leaders often look to sports for metaphors that can help them understand and explain what it is they are trying to do when leading a “team” toward a “goal.” Sports are a lot simpler than life: the rules are reasonably clear and fixed, the goals are pre-determined by the rules, and both the size of the field and the duration of the game are relatively limited in scope when compared to “real life.” The job of a coach basically has three parts. The first part is to come up with a “game plan” -- a strategy that will allow the team to achieve a victory. The second part is to teach their players all the skills they will need to have in order to successfully carry out the plan. And the third part is to motivate the players to make their best possible effort, to play up to the level of their ability and maybe even a little beyond it -- to inspire and encourage, threaten and cajole, reward, punish, praise, prod, criticize, challenge, support...and so on and so on. No two coaches are exactly alike, and no two players respond to exactly the same set of motivators -- yet often a feeling of pride in the quality of one’s effort and achievements, together with fear of the shame of letting one’s teammates down, are at the heart of all these other motivations; and good coaches, good leaders in general, seem to know instinctively the exact combination of each that will work best for every player on the team. Or perhaps they know because they listen, and because they know their players as well as their players know themselves, and therefore know also what makes them tick, and how to communicate with them in a manner that that the players can easily understand.
Of course no discussion of leadership can really be complete without some exploration of the role of leadership in the military. Warfare is the attempt to impose one’s will on another through force; and the mission of the military is the management and effective application of lethal violence. Over the centuries, military organizations have turned the process of leadership development into a science, because professional soldiers know from experience that no matter how carefully you plan, no matter how rigorously you train, no matter how good your equipment is, there inevitably comes a time in combat when someone has to stand up in the face of danger and say to his comrades “follow me.” Planning, training, good equipment, unit discipline and morale, camaraderie and trust, obviously all play an important role in what happens next. But without leadership, nothing happens at all. The common assumption about moments like this is that these leaders must somehow be more courageous than the soldiers they lead, that they are so naturally brave that they simply aren’t afraid to risk their lives in the face of the enemy. But according to those who have had the experience, this isn’t the case at all. Courage under fire has nothing to do with not being afraid. True courage is about being afraid, and doing your duty anyway, because you know that the others are depending on you, and the example of your leadership, for their survival.
Here’s another interesting thing to ponder. A standard light infantry platoon in the US Army is comprised of 35 soldiers (or, as the Army would put it, “34 men and one officer” -- typically, a 2nd Lieutenant, who is probably still in his early twenties). Yet this young Lieutenant doesn’t lead this entire platoon all by himself: he is assisted by a Platoon Sergeant, three Squad Leaders, six Fire Team Leaders, and two Weapons Team Leaders...35 soldiers, and a full third of them are designated as “leaders” -- each of whom is prepared to assume the responsibilities of their superior should the latter be killed in battle. And, of course, the platoon is also supported by an entire “chain of command” which coordinates their movement with the movement of other units, resupplies them with food and ammunition, evacuates casualties and provides reinforcements, along with all of the countless other things (including chaplains) that are necessary in order for this particular platoon to be able to accomplish its assigned operational mission. It’s a pretty elaborate organization, all of which can be sent into action at the word of a single individual, the Commander in Chief, whose leadership “by precept and example” trickles down through the ranks. Yet ultimately the success or failure of our military in actual combat (and its aftermath) relies far less on the leadership of the individual at the top of the chain of command than it does on the morale, the training, and the leadership of the soldiers whose boots actually ARE on the ground, and who rely on one another in order to survive, safely, to the end of another day.
We’ve seen two vivid examples representing both the best and the worst of American soldiery just within these past few weeks. The positive example, of course, was Ranger Specialist Pat Tillman, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, who was killed in action in Afghanistan during an ambush on April 22nd. Tillman, as you probably already know, had been the starting strong safety of the Arizona Cardinals, who left his lucrative professional football career to enlist, along with his brother Kevin, in the Rangers following September 11th. My big concern, both when I first heard about Tillman’s enlistment two years ago, and when I learned of his death last week, was that people would get the wrong message -- that they would look at his example and somehow equate being a soldier with being a professional athlete, and assume that combat was just another game. I don’t think Tillman ever felt that way, and I’m pretty sure he never intended to send that message...although you never know. Yet there aren’t that many people on this planet who are willing to walk away from a seven-figure income, and all that goes with it, in order to put themselves in harm’s way fighting for what they believe in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan. Pat Tillman was one. Osama bin Laden, interestingly enough, is another. I’m not really sure what to make of that, but there it is.
The shameful example involves the report, with explicit photographs, of the systematic abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by US Army Reserve military police at the Abu Ghraib prison. This is a complicated situation, and details are still emerging from the on-going investigation, so doubtlessly there will be much more to be learned in the weeks and months ahead. The President has said that he feels a “deep disgust” at the way these prisoners were treated (as he should), and that the behavior of these few guards does not represent the values of most American soldiers or the American people...which is certainly true. But I also believe that the President is wrong if he thinks that this is just an isolated anomaly that can be blamed on a handful of inadequately-trained and poorly-led reserve soldiers. The tone for this treatment was set much higher up the chain of command, and by decisions we have made as a nation about how we will treat the “enemy combatants” who come into our custody.
I’m not certain which profession is older -- that of the warrior, or that of the shaman -- and I’m not really sure that it matters that much either. I do know that in many ancient societies they were one and the same: the warrior king was also the chief priest, to whom the people looked for leadership at times of both military and spiritual crisis. Nowadays the two vocations don’t really appear to have much in common, although they intersect in intriguing ways. The trained, professional killer is also a dedicated professional peacemaker, whose strength deters conflict, and whose judicious use of force or the threat of force can sometimes prevent more widespread violence. Professional religious leaders, in every major religious tradition (including Islam), are typically taught that all men and women are brothers and sisters to one another in the eyes of their Creator, and that we should do unto others as we would have others do unto us; that the redeeming power of God’s love is more powerful than our own human desire for revenge, and that we most completely destroy our enemies when we make them our friends. But when righteous anger becomes wedded to religious zeal, bad things happen. Call it Jihad or call it a Crusade, when we dehumanize our enemies we dehumanize ourselves, rationalizing and justifying our evil behavior with the lame excuse that we are only doing God’s will.
Here “in the trenches” of religious life in America, in the day to day activities of local congregations like our’s, we don’t often talk about these “big issues” of leadership. Here the talk is all about “shared ministry” and the role of the “equipping pastor” -- a leader who gives to the people the tools, and training, and guidance they need to pursue effectively their own “call” to serve. A “coach.” Yet what we do here is not unconnected to what is happening in the wider world. Our faithful attempts to do the right things well, to inspire and encourage one another to excellence, and to lead by example as well as by precept, are not confined just to this building, or even to our little town. In some abstract, spiritual way, the light we bring to our endevours truly does shine beyond ourselves. So carry this flame of peace and love in your hearts, in everything you undertake. And may the light you bring to all you do become a shining example to all the world.
READING
[Ft Lewis] Installation Chaplain's Office
Unit Ministry Teams Mission
• Operate a state-of-the-art spiritual power projection platform for the warfighter by providing them a superior religious support program and infrastructure that ensures the well being of our soldiers, civilians, retirees and their families through free exercise of their beliefs and gives them the opportunities for the positive life changing lessons, power and stability that transform people of faith.
I Corps Unit Ministry Teams Mission
• To provide or perform religious support for all authorized personnel of I Corps and Fort Lewis during peacetime and across the full spectrum of war in order to support the command in the facilitation of the free exercise of religion.
• To advise the command in matters of religion, morals, morale, and ethical issues in order to support the unit mission.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday May 2rd, 2004
I thought I’d start out this morning simply by taking a couple of minutes (more or less) to say a few nice things about President Bush. I know this may seem a little out of character for me, and that therefore some of what I have to say may sound like damning faint praise, or insincere, or even ironic, but I can’t really help that. This seemingly interminable electoral contest is steadily emerging as the most acrimonious in MY memory; and even though I know as an historian that elections often resemble open warfare (which is why they call them “campaigns”), and democracy itself many times seems like not much more than a rough and tumble, bare knuckled brawl, I still believe that at the end of the day a functional civilized society requires civil behavior, and that as a spiritual leader I ought to somehow try to model that. Not only is the ability to recognize (and even admire) the positive qualities of those with whom one disagrees an important step toward dialog, compromise, and eventual reconciliation, I also know that whenever people succumb to the temptation of “demonizing” their opposition, they run the serious risk of “misunderestimating” them as well. Even the most evil and odious political figure of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler, was a decorated war veteran wounded on the battlefield, as well as a committed and disciplined vegetarian who loathed both smoking and drinking, and loved both dogs and small children. Not much of a writer (although apparently he’s better in English than in his native German, because his translators have tended to clean up his grammar), but certainly a dynamic and inspiring public speaker, whose rabid patriotism was unquestionable. Simply to dismiss him as a madman -- a monster and an abomination -- actually minimizes the true magnitude of his evil-doing, because it ignores both its banality and its mass appeal.
But I digress. What I meant to say is that if I can find something complimentary to say about Adolf Hitler, even if it is essentially irrelevant in the greater scheme of things, I can certainly find something nice to say about George W. Bush. In fact, I can think of three things, right off the top of my head. And the first is that I know for a fact that the President is neither as dumb as he sounds, nor is he as sanctimonious and insincere as he sometimes seems to those of us who do not share his views. Let me take these one at a time. I first realized that the President is a lot smarter than he looks when I saw his SAT scores published in one of the national news magazines, and realized that they were virtually identical to mine. Not that the results of some stupid standardized test probably mean that much anyway. But personally, I’m not too sure that I’m really smart enough to be the President (and I can’t imagine any possible circumstance where I might actually have an chance to find out either -- thank God!), but I’m certainly no dummy; and I suppose that if I had the opportunity to watch my father do it first, I might feel a lot more confident that I was capable of doing the job myself as well. But my main point is that just because the President isn’t in the top one or two percent of the population intellectually doesn’t mean that he isn’t plenty smart enough to lead. If anything, the fact that he’s NOT a “wonk” is what makes him seem so personable and approachable. And if there are times when he appears a little smug and self-righteous, or even vindictive and mean spirited toward his antagonists...who isn’t? Those of us on the other side certainly haven’t been too kind to him either.
The second nice thing I wanted to say about the President is that he knows who he is and he knows his limits without surrendering to his limitations; he isn’t ashamed of being himself, and he isn’t afraid of surrounding himself with strong, smart, and outspokenly opinionated people. And this is actually relatively rare in a leader. Many leaders, I think, tend to assume that because they are in charge, their followers are all looking to THEM for direction and guidance, and sometimes they get a little swept away by this, and start to believe that they always have to be “the smartest guy in the room” -- that their leadership depends on providing the right answer in every situation every time, and that they can therefore never afford to be wrong or to appear foolish. And there are certainly times when the President appears to have fallen into this trap as well: when his need to present a strong, principled, and decisive image in public really just make him seem (at least to those of us who disagree with him) stubborn and ideologically obsessed (not to mention a little out of touch with reality). But it also seems to me that (in private at least) the President is quite adept at listening to the opinions of his advisors and other experts, as well as gauging the mood of the public (and especially his core constituencies), and then modifying his own views based on what he has learned. And this too is a positive quality in a leader: the ability to listen, to learn, and to lead your followers in the direction they want to go.
Finally, the one quality I truly admire in the President above all others is his singular ability to earn and inspire the loyalty of those who support him. On one level, there is nothing particularly mysterious about this quality: people are loyal to the President because they know he is loyal to them -- it is a reciprocal relationship of mutual obligation and responsibility. One hand washes the other. But there’s actually a lot more to it than that. I think the President inspires such strong feelings of loyalty among his core supporters because he articulates and defends a view of the world that is strongly held by people who feel that their opinions and beliefs have been profoundly marginalized in contemporary American society, and who see in him a leader who will restore that worldview and its moral values to the heart of our government’s foreign and domestic policy. They believe in him because he believes what they believe, and they all believe it with all their hearts.
I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership lately, and not just because there will be an election in six months which will once again determine the leadership of our nation for the next four years. This first Sunday in May is also the first anniversary of my election as the minister of this congregation, so I’ve also been thinking quite a bit about the differences between political and religious leadership, and likewise where they overlap, and where they ought to leave one another alone. Political leadership, at least in a democracy, is an expression of the will of the people through the principle of majority rule. Thus politics is all about the art of the possible: not merely an unvarnished manifestation of what is sometimes called “the tyranny of the majority,” but more typically a subtle combination of compromise and coalition building, together at times with a little judicious arm twisting, the ubiquitous quid pro quo, and no small amount of inflammatory pandering to the fears and prejudices of the electorate.
But religious leadership ought to be about helping people to discern the Will of God, together with a humble submission to divine authority (however you may choose to understand that concept of a “higher power”) -- not my will, but thine Oh Lord be done. Keeping these things clearly distinguished in one’s mind is not always the easiest thing to do. What’s wrong with twisting a few arms, or even knocking a few heads and kicking a few butts, when you know that God is on your side? The answer, of course, is this notion of humility -- the realization that no matter how powerful our convictions may be, we will never FULLY know and understand the mind of our Creator, and that to believe otherwise is arrogant idolatry. Faith is less about certainty of belief than it is the trusting confidence that we must act in good faith even in the midst of our uncertainty, not knowing for sure whether God is on our side, but hoping that we are on the side of God, a God who is both Just AND Merciful, Righteous AND Compassionate, and who loves All Souls with the same unconditional affection that a perfect mother might feel for her children. The experience of faith is something which should be freely shared, but never forcibly imposed; there is no place for coercion in the Kingdom of God. Or at least this is what Unitarians, Universalists, and other religious liberals have traditionally believed. Faith is a Gift of God. And we best discern God’s will for us when we are free to share our faith openly with one another, without duress or fear of reprisal.
Of course, religion and politics are not the only fields where quality of leadership significantly determines both the quality of the experience and the quality of the results. I strongly suspect, for example, if we were to do a quick survey of the number of books on the subject, most of them would deal with issues of Leadership in Business, where it is sometimes said that “managers do things right, but leaders do the right things.” And yet I wonder whether this dichotomy is really fair. Which is preferable: to do the wrong things well, or to do the right things poorly? (Actually, that statement pretty much describes the differences between our two political parties, doesn’t it?) Clearly, the best alternative is to do the right things well: in other words, to be attentive to both the process and the vision -- the quality of the relationship between the leader, the followers, and their task -- as well as the ultimate worthiness of the goal itself, and how that worthiness is best determined and communicated.
Business leaders often look to sports for metaphors that can help them understand and explain what it is they are trying to do when leading a “team” toward a “goal.” Sports are a lot simpler than life: the rules are reasonably clear and fixed, the goals are pre-determined by the rules, and both the size of the field and the duration of the game are relatively limited in scope when compared to “real life.” The job of a coach basically has three parts. The first part is to come up with a “game plan” -- a strategy that will allow the team to achieve a victory. The second part is to teach their players all the skills they will need to have in order to successfully carry out the plan. And the third part is to motivate the players to make their best possible effort, to play up to the level of their ability and maybe even a little beyond it -- to inspire and encourage, threaten and cajole, reward, punish, praise, prod, criticize, challenge, support...and so on and so on. No two coaches are exactly alike, and no two players respond to exactly the same set of motivators -- yet often a feeling of pride in the quality of one’s effort and achievements, together with fear of the shame of letting one’s teammates down, are at the heart of all these other motivations; and good coaches, good leaders in general, seem to know instinctively the exact combination of each that will work best for every player on the team. Or perhaps they know because they listen, and because they know their players as well as their players know themselves, and therefore know also what makes them tick, and how to communicate with them in a manner that that the players can easily understand.
Of course no discussion of leadership can really be complete without some exploration of the role of leadership in the military. Warfare is the attempt to impose one’s will on another through force; and the mission of the military is the management and effective application of lethal violence. Over the centuries, military organizations have turned the process of leadership development into a science, because professional soldiers know from experience that no matter how carefully you plan, no matter how rigorously you train, no matter how good your equipment is, there inevitably comes a time in combat when someone has to stand up in the face of danger and say to his comrades “follow me.” Planning, training, good equipment, unit discipline and morale, camaraderie and trust, obviously all play an important role in what happens next. But without leadership, nothing happens at all. The common assumption about moments like this is that these leaders must somehow be more courageous than the soldiers they lead, that they are so naturally brave that they simply aren’t afraid to risk their lives in the face of the enemy. But according to those who have had the experience, this isn’t the case at all. Courage under fire has nothing to do with not being afraid. True courage is about being afraid, and doing your duty anyway, because you know that the others are depending on you, and the example of your leadership, for their survival.
Here’s another interesting thing to ponder. A standard light infantry platoon in the US Army is comprised of 35 soldiers (or, as the Army would put it, “34 men and one officer” -- typically, a 2nd Lieutenant, who is probably still in his early twenties). Yet this young Lieutenant doesn’t lead this entire platoon all by himself: he is assisted by a Platoon Sergeant, three Squad Leaders, six Fire Team Leaders, and two Weapons Team Leaders...35 soldiers, and a full third of them are designated as “leaders” -- each of whom is prepared to assume the responsibilities of their superior should the latter be killed in battle. And, of course, the platoon is also supported by an entire “chain of command” which coordinates their movement with the movement of other units, resupplies them with food and ammunition, evacuates casualties and provides reinforcements, along with all of the countless other things (including chaplains) that are necessary in order for this particular platoon to be able to accomplish its assigned operational mission. It’s a pretty elaborate organization, all of which can be sent into action at the word of a single individual, the Commander in Chief, whose leadership “by precept and example” trickles down through the ranks. Yet ultimately the success or failure of our military in actual combat (and its aftermath) relies far less on the leadership of the individual at the top of the chain of command than it does on the morale, the training, and the leadership of the soldiers whose boots actually ARE on the ground, and who rely on one another in order to survive, safely, to the end of another day.
We’ve seen two vivid examples representing both the best and the worst of American soldiery just within these past few weeks. The positive example, of course, was Ranger Specialist Pat Tillman, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, who was killed in action in Afghanistan during an ambush on April 22nd. Tillman, as you probably already know, had been the starting strong safety of the Arizona Cardinals, who left his lucrative professional football career to enlist, along with his brother Kevin, in the Rangers following September 11th. My big concern, both when I first heard about Tillman’s enlistment two years ago, and when I learned of his death last week, was that people would get the wrong message -- that they would look at his example and somehow equate being a soldier with being a professional athlete, and assume that combat was just another game. I don’t think Tillman ever felt that way, and I’m pretty sure he never intended to send that message...although you never know. Yet there aren’t that many people on this planet who are willing to walk away from a seven-figure income, and all that goes with it, in order to put themselves in harm’s way fighting for what they believe in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan. Pat Tillman was one. Osama bin Laden, interestingly enough, is another. I’m not really sure what to make of that, but there it is.
The shameful example involves the report, with explicit photographs, of the systematic abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by US Army Reserve military police at the Abu Ghraib prison. This is a complicated situation, and details are still emerging from the on-going investigation, so doubtlessly there will be much more to be learned in the weeks and months ahead. The President has said that he feels a “deep disgust” at the way these prisoners were treated (as he should), and that the behavior of these few guards does not represent the values of most American soldiers or the American people...which is certainly true. But I also believe that the President is wrong if he thinks that this is just an isolated anomaly that can be blamed on a handful of inadequately-trained and poorly-led reserve soldiers. The tone for this treatment was set much higher up the chain of command, and by decisions we have made as a nation about how we will treat the “enemy combatants” who come into our custody.
I’m not certain which profession is older -- that of the warrior, or that of the shaman -- and I’m not really sure that it matters that much either. I do know that in many ancient societies they were one and the same: the warrior king was also the chief priest, to whom the people looked for leadership at times of both military and spiritual crisis. Nowadays the two vocations don’t really appear to have much in common, although they intersect in intriguing ways. The trained, professional killer is also a dedicated professional peacemaker, whose strength deters conflict, and whose judicious use of force or the threat of force can sometimes prevent more widespread violence. Professional religious leaders, in every major religious tradition (including Islam), are typically taught that all men and women are brothers and sisters to one another in the eyes of their Creator, and that we should do unto others as we would have others do unto us; that the redeeming power of God’s love is more powerful than our own human desire for revenge, and that we most completely destroy our enemies when we make them our friends. But when righteous anger becomes wedded to religious zeal, bad things happen. Call it Jihad or call it a Crusade, when we dehumanize our enemies we dehumanize ourselves, rationalizing and justifying our evil behavior with the lame excuse that we are only doing God’s will.
Here “in the trenches” of religious life in America, in the day to day activities of local congregations like our’s, we don’t often talk about these “big issues” of leadership. Here the talk is all about “shared ministry” and the role of the “equipping pastor” -- a leader who gives to the people the tools, and training, and guidance they need to pursue effectively their own “call” to serve. A “coach.” Yet what we do here is not unconnected to what is happening in the wider world. Our faithful attempts to do the right things well, to inspire and encourage one another to excellence, and to lead by example as well as by precept, are not confined just to this building, or even to our little town. In some abstract, spiritual way, the light we bring to our endevours truly does shine beyond ourselves. So carry this flame of peace and love in your hearts, in everything you undertake. And may the light you bring to all you do become a shining example to all the world.
READING
[Ft Lewis] Installation Chaplain's Office
Unit Ministry Teams Mission
• Operate a state-of-the-art spiritual power projection platform for the warfighter by providing them a superior religious support program and infrastructure that ensures the well being of our soldiers, civilians, retirees and their families through free exercise of their beliefs and gives them the opportunities for the positive life changing lessons, power and stability that transform people of faith.
I Corps Unit Ministry Teams Mission
• To provide or perform religious support for all authorized personnel of I Corps and Fort Lewis during peacetime and across the full spectrum of war in order to support the command in the facilitation of the free exercise of religion.
• To advise the command in matters of religion, morals, morale, and ethical issues in order to support the unit mission.
Sunday, April 25, 2004
PATRIOTS & SCOUNDRELS
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, MA
Sunday April 25, 2004
I woke up last Monday morning with a mean-spirited thought in my head. It was a thought so maliciously mean-spirited that I hated to write it down, but so deliciously mean-spirited that I could hardly wait to share it....
But suppose, just suppose, that when June 30th finally rolls around, and the deadline for the formal transition of sovereignty has come and gone, we get the Supreme Court to appoint George W. Bush as the next President of Iraq? He could simply drag that snappy little flight suit of his back out of the closet and jump on the next plane to Baghdad, along with Rummy and Wolfie and Condi and Ashcroft and Ridge (we’ll leave Colin Powell out of this, since apparently he was already out of the loop anyway); Dick Cheney can go back to openly being the CEO of Halliburton, and our guardsmen and reservists could all come back home to their regular jobs and their families as well.
It wouldn’t really be considered “cutting and running,” since the very same people who wanted so badly to start this war will be right there on the spot cutting taxes and relying upon the “entrepreneurial spirit” to revitalize the Iraqi economy and create a free and democratic society out of the ashes of tyranny. Any remaining members of coalition who are still willing to stay will naturally be welcome to do so, and of course the new government would likewise remain free to hire as many “independent contractors” as they like...provided they are willing to pay them out of their own pockets.
It’s a win/win scenario; the only catch is that for everything to be considered legitimate and above-board, the Bushies will all have to quit their current jobs and formally renounce their United States citizenship, in order to officially become citizens of Iraq. But personally, I don’t have any problem with that. No problem at all....
Of course, there are some people who are of the opinion that the goal of creating a viable democratic government in Iraq is little more than a naive pipe dream. But I disagree. Even the most traditional and oppressive societies tend to endure “by the consent of the governed.” Not only do people everywhere like to have a say in how they live their lives, it is also very difficult to maintain control of a population whose basic desires are in serious conflict with those who would seek to rule them.
So as a result, even the most repressive and authoritarian regimes generally become quite adept at “manufacturing consent.” Sometimes this is merely the reluctant consent imposed by fear, and enforced by threat of violence; but more often than not far more subtle powers are at work as well. Authoritarian regimes are experts at saying one thing and doing another -- lying about their true intentions, while concealing their actions from public scrutiny.
They pacify the population with “bread and circuses,” while silencing their critics--not merely through violence or the threat of violence, nor even arrest and incarceration -- but by ridicule, or the emotional appeal to prejudice (and patriotism); through character assassination, propaganda, rigged elections, and effective control over the means of mass communication.
We’ve seen this pattern at work in Iraq...and in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, even as far back as Ancient Rome....and you can see it other places as well, once you know what it is you’re looking for. But the “will of the people,” and the basic desire for lives which can be lived in relative safety and security, the desire to raise children with a reasonable expectation of a better future, and to enjoy the benefits of peace and prosperity, is both universal, and indomitable. And it doesn’t really matter where you were born, or what religion you practice, or even whether you’ve had a lot of experience with democratic self-government in the past.
People tolerate authoritarian regimes for as long as they believe that they are better off simply “going along to get along” than they are standing up and resisting. A fear of violent reprisal is obviously part of that calculation, as is the natural human tendency to turn a blind eye to things we would rather not see in order to avoid rocking the boat. But when people realize that the time has come for them to stand up and be counted, and to take control of their own destiny, there is no power in the world that can keep them down.
Of course, free and enlightened liberal democracies also “manufacture consent,” but they go about it in a somewhat different manner. Authoritarian regimes attempt to suppress dissent, through a variety of coercive or misleading techniques. But the goal of liberal democracy is to elicit consensus, through the free and open exchange of information and ideas -- a dialog (or, if you prefer, a debate) which not only highlights dissent and various areas of disagreement, but also identifies and builds upon shared goals, values and interests, and is open to the possibility of collaboration around a common purpose, or compromise on points of difference.
The one essential quality that makes liberal democracy work is the ability to disagree without becoming disagreeable, and to recognize that your opponent is also your partner...the “loyal opposition.” Which is why, in a democracy, the rule of law is used to protect the voice and rights of unpopular minorities, while in authoritarian societies, the courts and the police inevitably serve to reinforce the power and privileges of the rulers, and to make those dissident voices “disappear.”
Which is also why you generally don’t see a lot of clever political bumper stickers publicly displayed in authoritarian regimes. My new personal favorite goes like this: “If you aren’t completely appalled, then you haven’t been paying attention.” Of course, as someone who has been paying attention -- close, focused attention, for quite some time now -- it’s all felt very vindicating to have the things that I’ve been thinking and feeling and saying and writing for two and a half years publicly confirmed both in print and under oath on nationally-broadcast TV by people who were there and who know, first hand, what really went on.
Depressing, but vindicating.
The appalling part is that there are apparently still a lot of folks who either simply don’t care, or who would just as soon dismiss it all as vindictive, politically-motivated “spin.” And this is the real challenge which confronts us all: how does one vindicate the truth, without seeming vindictive toward those who have been shamelessly lied to, yet who hesitate to confront the ramifications of that deception because the consequences are simply just too appalling to contemplate?
The date August 6th, for example, will probably never have the same immediate public recognition as September 11th, but maybe it ought to, since that was the day (as we all now know, or ought to know) that the President was told, to his face, in his Daily Intelligence Briefing, that Osama Bin Ladin was “determined to strike” in the United States, that al-Qa’ida was actively attempting to recruit within the Muslem-American community here, and that there were (and this is a direct quote) “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”
The President’s response to the insinuation that had he paid a little more attention to these warnings at the time he first received them, September 11th might have been avoided, was to say that if he had known that terrorists were going to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings he would have “moved heaven and earth” to prevent that from happening. But that’s the whole problem, isn’t it? Terrorists don’t generally send engraved invitations to their deplorable acts of violence. You have to be intelligent enough to read the signs of the times, to understand the significance of the handwriting on the wall.
Even so, I’m inclined to feel fairly forgiving toward the President on this account. We were all taken by surprise on September 11th; and it could have happened on anyone’s watch, no matter how vigilant they were. I feel much less forgiving regarding what happened afterwards -- of how the President and his close advisors intentionally exploited public sentiment about the September 11th attacks, and used misleading “methods of mass deception” against his own people in order to “bait and switch” Americans into a war against Iraq, a war which had apparently been on his White House “To Do” list long before he had even assumed the Presidency.
Some of the allegations that have surfaced in this connection truly do defy credibility. For example, Bob Woodward’s report that Saudi Arabian Ambassador Prince Bandar Bin Sultan was privy to the plan to invade Iraq even before Secretary of State Colin Powell had been made aware of it, and that there was an Enronesque secret deal between Bandar and the Bushies to manipulate oil prices this summer in an attempt to influence the outcome of the fall election. Incredible, if indeed it’s true....
I could go on and on and on about these issues, but there’s really no need -- you are all perfectly capable of picking up a newspaper or opening a book, turning on the television, or listening to Public Radio for yourselves. What I would just like to say though is that I rarely feel more connected to my illustrious Revolutionary-era predecessors like William Emerson of Concord or Jonas Clarke of Lexington than when I take advantage of the opportunity my vocation affords me to speak out from this free pulpit publicly about issues of “public concern.” “Sedition flows copiously from the pulpits” in Massachusetts, General Gage wrote to his superiors in London, in both the spring and the fall of 1774. Back in those days New England Clergy were known as “the Black Regiment” because of the color of their distinctive clothing, and their outspoken advocacy of the Patriot cause.
As an historian, my first official “Patriot’s Day” here in Carlisle was a real treat; Parker and I came out to watch the Minute Men muster on the Carlisle town green, and next time we will undoubtedly make the walk as well -- this year I had a very generous invitation to watch the Red Sox play the Yankees in Fenway Park, which naturally took precedence as a matter of religious observance. But this past week I’ve been able to take advantage of some of these sunny afternoons to explore the Minute Man National Historical park, and to read up a little about “the shot heard ‘round the world,” which initiated the American Revolution.
It all happened right here in our own back yard; a part of our national heritage that we should all be more aware of. Sometimes though it seems a little TOO close to home: an occupying military force plans a raid to seize a cache of illegal weapons. At first everything appears to be going smoothly, then suddenly it seems as though the entire countryside has risen up against the Expeditionary Force like a swarm of angry bees (inspired to a frenzied pitch by the exhortations of their radical religious leaders). Shots are fired by snipers all along the line of march, the casualties mount as the Regulars counterattack and retreat...where have I heard THIS story recently?
Obviously, there are huge differences between 1775 and 2004, but the irony of the similarities is too great to be ignored. The same National Guard and Reserve units whose predecessors fought at Lexington Green and the Concord Bridge, and all along the Battle Road back to Boston, now find themselves deployed half-way around the world for an indeterminate time in a hostile foreign land.
No doubt these citizen-soldiers are still overwhelmingly just like the patriotic young American men and women who fought at Lexington and Concord, who enlisted to serve their country for a variety of good reasons, and who now suffer tremendous hardships on our behalf -- not just the danger of being killed or wounded, but also separation from their families and the interruption of their careers...not to mention the indignity of knowing that our government has hired countless thousands of so-called military “contractors” who earn as much in a single day as a typical soldier is paid each month, and who are basically free to quit their jobs and go home whenever they like.
And what is the mission of this military adventure? The liberation of a peaceful and freedom-loving people from the oppressive rule of a cruel tyrant? The protection of our homeland from the threat of further terrorist attack? Effective control over some of the world’s most significant oil reserves? A personal vendetta on the part of a handful of our political leaders, based on their desire not to appear weak in the eyes of the world, or to lose the battle of wills with their sworn enemies? A religious crusade against Evil-Doers, driven by one man’s sense of moral certainty, a man who frequently declares that “there’s not a doubt in [his] mind” that he’s doing the right thing, and sincerely believes that he is accountable only to a “Higher Authority?”
Maybe it’s a little of all these things, and some others we don’t know about...but it’s costing us four and a half billion dollars a month, people are dying, and there’s no end in sight. We deserve some honest answers. And our patriotic men and women in uniform deserve them most of all.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, MA
Sunday April 25, 2004
I woke up last Monday morning with a mean-spirited thought in my head. It was a thought so maliciously mean-spirited that I hated to write it down, but so deliciously mean-spirited that I could hardly wait to share it....
But suppose, just suppose, that when June 30th finally rolls around, and the deadline for the formal transition of sovereignty has come and gone, we get the Supreme Court to appoint George W. Bush as the next President of Iraq? He could simply drag that snappy little flight suit of his back out of the closet and jump on the next plane to Baghdad, along with Rummy and Wolfie and Condi and Ashcroft and Ridge (we’ll leave Colin Powell out of this, since apparently he was already out of the loop anyway); Dick Cheney can go back to openly being the CEO of Halliburton, and our guardsmen and reservists could all come back home to their regular jobs and their families as well.
It wouldn’t really be considered “cutting and running,” since the very same people who wanted so badly to start this war will be right there on the spot cutting taxes and relying upon the “entrepreneurial spirit” to revitalize the Iraqi economy and create a free and democratic society out of the ashes of tyranny. Any remaining members of coalition who are still willing to stay will naturally be welcome to do so, and of course the new government would likewise remain free to hire as many “independent contractors” as they like...provided they are willing to pay them out of their own pockets.
It’s a win/win scenario; the only catch is that for everything to be considered legitimate and above-board, the Bushies will all have to quit their current jobs and formally renounce their United States citizenship, in order to officially become citizens of Iraq. But personally, I don’t have any problem with that. No problem at all....
Of course, there are some people who are of the opinion that the goal of creating a viable democratic government in Iraq is little more than a naive pipe dream. But I disagree. Even the most traditional and oppressive societies tend to endure “by the consent of the governed.” Not only do people everywhere like to have a say in how they live their lives, it is also very difficult to maintain control of a population whose basic desires are in serious conflict with those who would seek to rule them.
So as a result, even the most repressive and authoritarian regimes generally become quite adept at “manufacturing consent.” Sometimes this is merely the reluctant consent imposed by fear, and enforced by threat of violence; but more often than not far more subtle powers are at work as well. Authoritarian regimes are experts at saying one thing and doing another -- lying about their true intentions, while concealing their actions from public scrutiny.
They pacify the population with “bread and circuses,” while silencing their critics--not merely through violence or the threat of violence, nor even arrest and incarceration -- but by ridicule, or the emotional appeal to prejudice (and patriotism); through character assassination, propaganda, rigged elections, and effective control over the means of mass communication.
We’ve seen this pattern at work in Iraq...and in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, even as far back as Ancient Rome....and you can see it other places as well, once you know what it is you’re looking for. But the “will of the people,” and the basic desire for lives which can be lived in relative safety and security, the desire to raise children with a reasonable expectation of a better future, and to enjoy the benefits of peace and prosperity, is both universal, and indomitable. And it doesn’t really matter where you were born, or what religion you practice, or even whether you’ve had a lot of experience with democratic self-government in the past.
People tolerate authoritarian regimes for as long as they believe that they are better off simply “going along to get along” than they are standing up and resisting. A fear of violent reprisal is obviously part of that calculation, as is the natural human tendency to turn a blind eye to things we would rather not see in order to avoid rocking the boat. But when people realize that the time has come for them to stand up and be counted, and to take control of their own destiny, there is no power in the world that can keep them down.
Of course, free and enlightened liberal democracies also “manufacture consent,” but they go about it in a somewhat different manner. Authoritarian regimes attempt to suppress dissent, through a variety of coercive or misleading techniques. But the goal of liberal democracy is to elicit consensus, through the free and open exchange of information and ideas -- a dialog (or, if you prefer, a debate) which not only highlights dissent and various areas of disagreement, but also identifies and builds upon shared goals, values and interests, and is open to the possibility of collaboration around a common purpose, or compromise on points of difference.
The one essential quality that makes liberal democracy work is the ability to disagree without becoming disagreeable, and to recognize that your opponent is also your partner...the “loyal opposition.” Which is why, in a democracy, the rule of law is used to protect the voice and rights of unpopular minorities, while in authoritarian societies, the courts and the police inevitably serve to reinforce the power and privileges of the rulers, and to make those dissident voices “disappear.”
Which is also why you generally don’t see a lot of clever political bumper stickers publicly displayed in authoritarian regimes. My new personal favorite goes like this: “If you aren’t completely appalled, then you haven’t been paying attention.” Of course, as someone who has been paying attention -- close, focused attention, for quite some time now -- it’s all felt very vindicating to have the things that I’ve been thinking and feeling and saying and writing for two and a half years publicly confirmed both in print and under oath on nationally-broadcast TV by people who were there and who know, first hand, what really went on.
Depressing, but vindicating.
The appalling part is that there are apparently still a lot of folks who either simply don’t care, or who would just as soon dismiss it all as vindictive, politically-motivated “spin.” And this is the real challenge which confronts us all: how does one vindicate the truth, without seeming vindictive toward those who have been shamelessly lied to, yet who hesitate to confront the ramifications of that deception because the consequences are simply just too appalling to contemplate?
The date August 6th, for example, will probably never have the same immediate public recognition as September 11th, but maybe it ought to, since that was the day (as we all now know, or ought to know) that the President was told, to his face, in his Daily Intelligence Briefing, that Osama Bin Ladin was “determined to strike” in the United States, that al-Qa’ida was actively attempting to recruit within the Muslem-American community here, and that there were (and this is a direct quote) “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”
The President’s response to the insinuation that had he paid a little more attention to these warnings at the time he first received them, September 11th might have been avoided, was to say that if he had known that terrorists were going to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings he would have “moved heaven and earth” to prevent that from happening. But that’s the whole problem, isn’t it? Terrorists don’t generally send engraved invitations to their deplorable acts of violence. You have to be intelligent enough to read the signs of the times, to understand the significance of the handwriting on the wall.
Even so, I’m inclined to feel fairly forgiving toward the President on this account. We were all taken by surprise on September 11th; and it could have happened on anyone’s watch, no matter how vigilant they were. I feel much less forgiving regarding what happened afterwards -- of how the President and his close advisors intentionally exploited public sentiment about the September 11th attacks, and used misleading “methods of mass deception” against his own people in order to “bait and switch” Americans into a war against Iraq, a war which had apparently been on his White House “To Do” list long before he had even assumed the Presidency.
Some of the allegations that have surfaced in this connection truly do defy credibility. For example, Bob Woodward’s report that Saudi Arabian Ambassador Prince Bandar Bin Sultan was privy to the plan to invade Iraq even before Secretary of State Colin Powell had been made aware of it, and that there was an Enronesque secret deal between Bandar and the Bushies to manipulate oil prices this summer in an attempt to influence the outcome of the fall election. Incredible, if indeed it’s true....
I could go on and on and on about these issues, but there’s really no need -- you are all perfectly capable of picking up a newspaper or opening a book, turning on the television, or listening to Public Radio for yourselves. What I would just like to say though is that I rarely feel more connected to my illustrious Revolutionary-era predecessors like William Emerson of Concord or Jonas Clarke of Lexington than when I take advantage of the opportunity my vocation affords me to speak out from this free pulpit publicly about issues of “public concern.” “Sedition flows copiously from the pulpits” in Massachusetts, General Gage wrote to his superiors in London, in both the spring and the fall of 1774. Back in those days New England Clergy were known as “the Black Regiment” because of the color of their distinctive clothing, and their outspoken advocacy of the Patriot cause.
As an historian, my first official “Patriot’s Day” here in Carlisle was a real treat; Parker and I came out to watch the Minute Men muster on the Carlisle town green, and next time we will undoubtedly make the walk as well -- this year I had a very generous invitation to watch the Red Sox play the Yankees in Fenway Park, which naturally took precedence as a matter of religious observance. But this past week I’ve been able to take advantage of some of these sunny afternoons to explore the Minute Man National Historical park, and to read up a little about “the shot heard ‘round the world,” which initiated the American Revolution.
It all happened right here in our own back yard; a part of our national heritage that we should all be more aware of. Sometimes though it seems a little TOO close to home: an occupying military force plans a raid to seize a cache of illegal weapons. At first everything appears to be going smoothly, then suddenly it seems as though the entire countryside has risen up against the Expeditionary Force like a swarm of angry bees (inspired to a frenzied pitch by the exhortations of their radical religious leaders). Shots are fired by snipers all along the line of march, the casualties mount as the Regulars counterattack and retreat...where have I heard THIS story recently?
Obviously, there are huge differences between 1775 and 2004, but the irony of the similarities is too great to be ignored. The same National Guard and Reserve units whose predecessors fought at Lexington Green and the Concord Bridge, and all along the Battle Road back to Boston, now find themselves deployed half-way around the world for an indeterminate time in a hostile foreign land.
No doubt these citizen-soldiers are still overwhelmingly just like the patriotic young American men and women who fought at Lexington and Concord, who enlisted to serve their country for a variety of good reasons, and who now suffer tremendous hardships on our behalf -- not just the danger of being killed or wounded, but also separation from their families and the interruption of their careers...not to mention the indignity of knowing that our government has hired countless thousands of so-called military “contractors” who earn as much in a single day as a typical soldier is paid each month, and who are basically free to quit their jobs and go home whenever they like.
And what is the mission of this military adventure? The liberation of a peaceful and freedom-loving people from the oppressive rule of a cruel tyrant? The protection of our homeland from the threat of further terrorist attack? Effective control over some of the world’s most significant oil reserves? A personal vendetta on the part of a handful of our political leaders, based on their desire not to appear weak in the eyes of the world, or to lose the battle of wills with their sworn enemies? A religious crusade against Evil-Doers, driven by one man’s sense of moral certainty, a man who frequently declares that “there’s not a doubt in [his] mind” that he’s doing the right thing, and sincerely believes that he is accountable only to a “Higher Authority?”
Maybe it’s a little of all these things, and some others we don’t know about...but it’s costing us four and a half billion dollars a month, people are dying, and there’s no end in sight. We deserve some honest answers. And our patriotic men and women in uniform deserve them most of all.
Sunday, April 18, 2004
THE HOUSE IN WHICH WE DWELL
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, MA
Sunday April 18th, 2004
READING: Genesis 1:26-31a
I want to let you in on a little secret, just in case you weren't aware of it, but most of the sermon I am going to preach today is basically the same as the very first sermon I ever preached to a Unitarian Universalist congregation. It was Sunday April 29th, 1979, I was 22 years old at the time, a first-year student at the Harvard Divinity School, and my field-education supervisor, the Rev. Dr. Rhys Williams, had arranged for me to speak to the 1st Congregational Society, Unitarian Universalist, of Jamaica Plain, MA. I had six weeks to prepare that sermon, for which I was to be paid $50; and I got to practice it twice — once in front of my homiletics class at Harvard, and once for the entire staff of the First and Second Church in Boston. When the fateful day at last arrived, I woke up early, dressed in my best clothes, bought myself a big breakfast at the Mug & Muffin restaurant in Harvard Square (don’t bother looking for it; it isn’t there any more), rode the Red Line in to the Park Street station where I transferred to the Green Line out to Jamaica Plain, found the church, and was ushered into a huge Sanctuary which seated probably a minimum of three hundred people — twenty-two of whom happened to be in attendance there that Sunday morning, including myself, the organist, the soloist, and the sexton.
Coming up with a topic for that sermon was not so easy as you might imagine. As I’ve mentioned here before, Rhys had given me some very excellent advice: "Don't try to tell them everything you know the first Sunday," he had said to me (something that would have been a lot easier to attempt back then than it would be now), but even so, it still seemed at the time as though I had an overwhelming amount of spiritual wisdom and insight to communicate to those eighteen parishioners in a mere twenty minutes. I had taken my inspiration from an article I had read in the Boston Globe about some trouble the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority was having in their efforts to extend the Red Line north to Porter Square. MBTA engineers boring core samples along the planned route of the extension had discovered directly in the proposed path of the tunnel 40 thousand cubic yards of chemical sludge, which at one time had been dumped into a cesspool by a chemical manufacturing firm, and over a period of several decades had seeped out into the surrounding soil. Because the chemicals had continued to react long after their former owners had considered them garbage, no one could be certain of the exact properties of this sludge: how toxic or corrosive it might of been, whether it was going to present a significant problem in the construction of the subway, how much it would cost to clean it up, whether it could be burned or rendered chemically inert, or if they were simply going to have to dig it all up and transport it to another location. But the most outrageous part of the article was a comment by the president of the chemical company, who denied any responsibility whatsoever, asking instead "How were we supposed to know they were going to build a subway through there?"
Things really haven’t changed all that much in the last twenty-five years, have they? Well, maybe a little. There are now 129 certified members at the First Parish in Jamaica Plain, and when I go out on the road as a guest preacher these days I earn a little bit more than $50. But there is still a widespread belief in our society that those who want a strong economy, and those who want a sound ecology, are somehow working at cross-purposes. We can have forests or we can have houses; clean air and water, or automobiles and electric power — but to think that we might possibly have both somehow violates a fundamental law of the cosmos. Yet in the case of the Boston Subway we are confronted with the exact opposite of this belief: a situation in which a little ecological foresight might have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars of needless capital expenditure. And I'm sure that many of us can think of other, similar examples over the last quarter of a century — situations in which the ecologists and the economists have, in fact, had a mutual interest, and shared a common purpose. But this should really come as no surprise. Because, linguistically at least, the etymologies of the word "ecology" and the word "economy" are identical. Both stem from the Greek noun oikos, or "house," and its related verb form which means "to live in a house." Economics describes the rules or "laws" for running a house; Ecology refers to the "logic" or principles by which a house is run. In both disciplines, the object of study is the same. O Oikos en Oikoumena — "The House in Which We Dwell."
Why then is the belief I mentioned earlier so widespread? One would think that living under the same roof as we do, we would have been able to reach some sort of consensus about how best to put our house in order, and that we would have done so long ago. Are the conflicts between environmentalists and industrialists merely differences of opinion? And, if so, where does the truth really lie?
The etymologies offer us a clue to the origins and history of this conflict. As the translation suggests, in its earliest form the science of economics was roughly equivalent to what we today would call "home economics," or, more accurately, the rules for the management of a farm or "homestead." And the first significant economist of whom we have record was none other than Socrates, whose thoughts on this subject can be found in a dialog by Xenophon known as The Oeconomicus. After extolling the virtues of a pastoral lifestyle — that sublime symbiosis between a farmer and the earth which allows one to pass the winter with an abundance of fire and warm baths, and spend summers amidst cool water and breezes and shade, Socrates remarks:
It would seem wonderful to me if any free human being possessed anything more pleasant than this, or found a concern at once more pleasant and of greater benefit in life. Furthermore, [and here Socrates uses the Greek word Gaia] ...the Earth, being a goddess, teaches justice to those who are able to learn, for she gives the most goods to those who serve her best.
Had the science of economics remained at this level — The Earth helps those who help the Earth — today's disagreements between conservationists and developers would have a far different tenor. But although Socrates may be remembered today as the founder of humanism, he is not considered the founder of modern economics — that honor falls instead upon Adam Smith, whose 18th century book The Wealth of Nations is now recognized as the cornerstone of Western Economic theory. Smith was a proponent of what is known as laissez faire or "free market" economics: the cost of goods is based upon the relationship between the desire for those goods and the amount of goods available, and governed by the "invisible hand" of a market economy. The goal of economically sophisticated individuals is to buy low and sell high — to acquire the things they desire at the lowest possible price while maximizing the value of their own labor and resources. In an unregulated marketplace, an equilibrium of costs and prices will be reached through the competition between various suppliers of the same goods and services, thus establishing a "fair market value" — the price the market will bear. I've simplified Smith's position considerably here, but the important thing for us to remember is that Smith and those who follow him think of the economic system primarily in terms of the metaphor of the marketplace: an arena in which commodities are exchanged.
A contemporary of Adam Smith was the Reverend Thomas Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of Population was one of the major inspirations of Charles Darwin's theory of Natural Selection. If Smith can be thought of as the founder of modern economics, then Malthus might be thought of as the founder of modern ecology, at least to the extent that he was among the first to address many of the same issues which confront environmentalists today. Malthus noted that because the supplies of all commodities, and especially the supply of food, increase at a rate far slower than that of the population, there inevitably will come a time when the demand for essential commodities simply cannot be met by the available supply at any price. The competition of the marketplace, which Smith believed would insure the lowest possible price for all, instead becomes a struggle based on "the survival of the fittest," in which some individuals live and thrive while others are left to starve and perish. In the absence of an ecologically sustainable, "steady-state" economy, the invisible hand of the Goddess, Gaia, reaches out to strike us down, lashing back in self-defense at the fools who refuse to learn.
It was a Unitarian Universalist, Buckminster Fuller, who first coined the term "Spaceship Earth" back in 1964, in an effort to describe, metaphorically, the synergistic nature of that "interdependent web of all existence" in which economics and ecology find their synthesis as a single science of global survival. Since that time concepts like Acid Rain, the Ozone hole, Greenhouse gasses and Global Warming, have become parts of our everyday vocabulary; and many of us have also come to see the one fallacy contained in Fuller's excellent metaphor. The Earth is not a machine, a product of technology: it was not launched with "all systems go," it has no control panel by which we can easily manipulate its course, it has no ultimate destination, whereupon our arrival we will all disembark and make speeches to the media. If anything, the Earth resembles, not a spaceship, but a single living organism. The Biosphere has all of the characteristics of a living creature save one, that of consciousness; and even this criterion can be fulfilled if we are willing to recognize that our own species, homo sapiens, is itself a part of the biosphere — a part which can think. Just as within our own bodies exist organisms such as the mitochondria, which have an independent DNA structure yet play an essential role in the functioning of a cell, so too do we exist within the context of a larger, living being — the being Socrates called Gaia, or Earth.
When the economic laws of supply and demand fail to accurately reflect the ecological expense of producing certain products, we fool ourselves into thinking that we're getting a bargain. But instead we end up on the short end of the deal: we pay the bill for our technology in the price of our health care, the cost of our carelessness is subtracted from the quality of our future. When we think only of ourselves and our own profits, and fail to think and act prophetically for the Earth, we shortsightedly cut ourselves off from the true and ultimate source of value in our lives: we become, not the Mind of Gaia, but rather dangerous parasites which threaten the survival of the entire biosphere.
In the book of Genesis we read that on the Sixth Day of Creation, the creatures, male and female, who had been created in the image of God, were given dominion over the earth by the One who had created them. But this was a gift shared with others: with every beast upon the earth, every bird of the air, everything that creeps upon the ground, everything that has the breath of life...these too were given every green plant for food. And when the Creator saw everything that had been made, "Behold, it was very good."
And it still is good. But we have been poor stewards of our inheritance. In our post-Enlightenment attempts to make humanity the measure of all things, we have forgotten that more fundamental maxim of humanism taught by Socrates: to know ourselves. Our ignorance and our arrogance have combined to turn a garden into a desert, our house into a cesspool. Through our thoughtlessness we have abandoned our responsibilities to our Creator, and are discovering that we must indeed pay the price for this original sin. For we live here not as owners, but merely tenants in this garden. It is time for us to begin to put our house in better order. It is time to make our house into our home.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, MA
Sunday April 18th, 2004
READING: Genesis 1:26-31a
I want to let you in on a little secret, just in case you weren't aware of it, but most of the sermon I am going to preach today is basically the same as the very first sermon I ever preached to a Unitarian Universalist congregation. It was Sunday April 29th, 1979, I was 22 years old at the time, a first-year student at the Harvard Divinity School, and my field-education supervisor, the Rev. Dr. Rhys Williams, had arranged for me to speak to the 1st Congregational Society, Unitarian Universalist, of Jamaica Plain, MA. I had six weeks to prepare that sermon, for which I was to be paid $50; and I got to practice it twice — once in front of my homiletics class at Harvard, and once for the entire staff of the First and Second Church in Boston. When the fateful day at last arrived, I woke up early, dressed in my best clothes, bought myself a big breakfast at the Mug & Muffin restaurant in Harvard Square (don’t bother looking for it; it isn’t there any more), rode the Red Line in to the Park Street station where I transferred to the Green Line out to Jamaica Plain, found the church, and was ushered into a huge Sanctuary which seated probably a minimum of three hundred people — twenty-two of whom happened to be in attendance there that Sunday morning, including myself, the organist, the soloist, and the sexton.
Coming up with a topic for that sermon was not so easy as you might imagine. As I’ve mentioned here before, Rhys had given me some very excellent advice: "Don't try to tell them everything you know the first Sunday," he had said to me (something that would have been a lot easier to attempt back then than it would be now), but even so, it still seemed at the time as though I had an overwhelming amount of spiritual wisdom and insight to communicate to those eighteen parishioners in a mere twenty minutes. I had taken my inspiration from an article I had read in the Boston Globe about some trouble the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority was having in their efforts to extend the Red Line north to Porter Square. MBTA engineers boring core samples along the planned route of the extension had discovered directly in the proposed path of the tunnel 40 thousand cubic yards of chemical sludge, which at one time had been dumped into a cesspool by a chemical manufacturing firm, and over a period of several decades had seeped out into the surrounding soil. Because the chemicals had continued to react long after their former owners had considered them garbage, no one could be certain of the exact properties of this sludge: how toxic or corrosive it might of been, whether it was going to present a significant problem in the construction of the subway, how much it would cost to clean it up, whether it could be burned or rendered chemically inert, or if they were simply going to have to dig it all up and transport it to another location. But the most outrageous part of the article was a comment by the president of the chemical company, who denied any responsibility whatsoever, asking instead "How were we supposed to know they were going to build a subway through there?"
Things really haven’t changed all that much in the last twenty-five years, have they? Well, maybe a little. There are now 129 certified members at the First Parish in Jamaica Plain, and when I go out on the road as a guest preacher these days I earn a little bit more than $50. But there is still a widespread belief in our society that those who want a strong economy, and those who want a sound ecology, are somehow working at cross-purposes. We can have forests or we can have houses; clean air and water, or automobiles and electric power — but to think that we might possibly have both somehow violates a fundamental law of the cosmos. Yet in the case of the Boston Subway we are confronted with the exact opposite of this belief: a situation in which a little ecological foresight might have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars of needless capital expenditure. And I'm sure that many of us can think of other, similar examples over the last quarter of a century — situations in which the ecologists and the economists have, in fact, had a mutual interest, and shared a common purpose. But this should really come as no surprise. Because, linguistically at least, the etymologies of the word "ecology" and the word "economy" are identical. Both stem from the Greek noun oikos, or "house," and its related verb form which means "to live in a house." Economics describes the rules or "laws" for running a house; Ecology refers to the "logic" or principles by which a house is run. In both disciplines, the object of study is the same. O Oikos en Oikoumena — "The House in Which We Dwell."
Why then is the belief I mentioned earlier so widespread? One would think that living under the same roof as we do, we would have been able to reach some sort of consensus about how best to put our house in order, and that we would have done so long ago. Are the conflicts between environmentalists and industrialists merely differences of opinion? And, if so, where does the truth really lie?
The etymologies offer us a clue to the origins and history of this conflict. As the translation suggests, in its earliest form the science of economics was roughly equivalent to what we today would call "home economics," or, more accurately, the rules for the management of a farm or "homestead." And the first significant economist of whom we have record was none other than Socrates, whose thoughts on this subject can be found in a dialog by Xenophon known as The Oeconomicus. After extolling the virtues of a pastoral lifestyle — that sublime symbiosis between a farmer and the earth which allows one to pass the winter with an abundance of fire and warm baths, and spend summers amidst cool water and breezes and shade, Socrates remarks:
It would seem wonderful to me if any free human being possessed anything more pleasant than this, or found a concern at once more pleasant and of greater benefit in life. Furthermore, [and here Socrates uses the Greek word Gaia] ...the Earth, being a goddess, teaches justice to those who are able to learn, for she gives the most goods to those who serve her best.
Had the science of economics remained at this level — The Earth helps those who help the Earth — today's disagreements between conservationists and developers would have a far different tenor. But although Socrates may be remembered today as the founder of humanism, he is not considered the founder of modern economics — that honor falls instead upon Adam Smith, whose 18th century book The Wealth of Nations is now recognized as the cornerstone of Western Economic theory. Smith was a proponent of what is known as laissez faire or "free market" economics: the cost of goods is based upon the relationship between the desire for those goods and the amount of goods available, and governed by the "invisible hand" of a market economy. The goal of economically sophisticated individuals is to buy low and sell high — to acquire the things they desire at the lowest possible price while maximizing the value of their own labor and resources. In an unregulated marketplace, an equilibrium of costs and prices will be reached through the competition between various suppliers of the same goods and services, thus establishing a "fair market value" — the price the market will bear. I've simplified Smith's position considerably here, but the important thing for us to remember is that Smith and those who follow him think of the economic system primarily in terms of the metaphor of the marketplace: an arena in which commodities are exchanged.
A contemporary of Adam Smith was the Reverend Thomas Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of Population was one of the major inspirations of Charles Darwin's theory of Natural Selection. If Smith can be thought of as the founder of modern economics, then Malthus might be thought of as the founder of modern ecology, at least to the extent that he was among the first to address many of the same issues which confront environmentalists today. Malthus noted that because the supplies of all commodities, and especially the supply of food, increase at a rate far slower than that of the population, there inevitably will come a time when the demand for essential commodities simply cannot be met by the available supply at any price. The competition of the marketplace, which Smith believed would insure the lowest possible price for all, instead becomes a struggle based on "the survival of the fittest," in which some individuals live and thrive while others are left to starve and perish. In the absence of an ecologically sustainable, "steady-state" economy, the invisible hand of the Goddess, Gaia, reaches out to strike us down, lashing back in self-defense at the fools who refuse to learn.
It was a Unitarian Universalist, Buckminster Fuller, who first coined the term "Spaceship Earth" back in 1964, in an effort to describe, metaphorically, the synergistic nature of that "interdependent web of all existence" in which economics and ecology find their synthesis as a single science of global survival. Since that time concepts like Acid Rain, the Ozone hole, Greenhouse gasses and Global Warming, have become parts of our everyday vocabulary; and many of us have also come to see the one fallacy contained in Fuller's excellent metaphor. The Earth is not a machine, a product of technology: it was not launched with "all systems go," it has no control panel by which we can easily manipulate its course, it has no ultimate destination, whereupon our arrival we will all disembark and make speeches to the media. If anything, the Earth resembles, not a spaceship, but a single living organism. The Biosphere has all of the characteristics of a living creature save one, that of consciousness; and even this criterion can be fulfilled if we are willing to recognize that our own species, homo sapiens, is itself a part of the biosphere — a part which can think. Just as within our own bodies exist organisms such as the mitochondria, which have an independent DNA structure yet play an essential role in the functioning of a cell, so too do we exist within the context of a larger, living being — the being Socrates called Gaia, or Earth.
When the economic laws of supply and demand fail to accurately reflect the ecological expense of producing certain products, we fool ourselves into thinking that we're getting a bargain. But instead we end up on the short end of the deal: we pay the bill for our technology in the price of our health care, the cost of our carelessness is subtracted from the quality of our future. When we think only of ourselves and our own profits, and fail to think and act prophetically for the Earth, we shortsightedly cut ourselves off from the true and ultimate source of value in our lives: we become, not the Mind of Gaia, but rather dangerous parasites which threaten the survival of the entire biosphere.
In the book of Genesis we read that on the Sixth Day of Creation, the creatures, male and female, who had been created in the image of God, were given dominion over the earth by the One who had created them. But this was a gift shared with others: with every beast upon the earth, every bird of the air, everything that creeps upon the ground, everything that has the breath of life...these too were given every green plant for food. And when the Creator saw everything that had been made, "Behold, it was very good."
And it still is good. But we have been poor stewards of our inheritance. In our post-Enlightenment attempts to make humanity the measure of all things, we have forgotten that more fundamental maxim of humanism taught by Socrates: to know ourselves. Our ignorance and our arrogance have combined to turn a garden into a desert, our house into a cesspool. Through our thoughtlessness we have abandoned our responsibilities to our Creator, and are discovering that we must indeed pay the price for this original sin. For we live here not as owners, but merely tenants in this garden. It is time for us to begin to put our house in better order. It is time to make our house into our home.
Sunday, April 11, 2004
EASTER, AGAIN?
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, MA
Easter Sunday, April 11th, 2004
READING: Luke 24: 13-35
[Extemporaneous Welcome to Children]
Some years ago now, when I was still relatively new to the ministry, and serving the Unitarian Universalist Church in Midland, Texas, there was a child in our Sunday School whose parents were divorced, so every other Sunday she attended our church with her father, and then on the alternating Sundays she went to the Baptist church with her mother and grandparents. And naturally (as you might imagine) this was a little confusing for her. One Sunday she’d go to the Baptist Church and hear about how God created the world in seven days. The next week she’d come to our church and learn about the dinosaurs. The next week she’d be back over at the Baptist church hearing about Adam and Eve and Original Sin. And then the following week she’d be back with us, and the teacher would have brought an actual snake into the classroom, as part of a lesson about “The Interdependent Web of All Existence, of Which We are a Part.”
Now as it so happened, the Sunday School teacher at the Baptist Church was actually kind of curious about Unitarianism, so she decided to try to find out more by asking Sherry about something that a young child was likely to know, such as the holidays.
“What do the Unitarians believe about Thanksgiving?” the Sunday School teacher asked.
“Thanksgiving is when remember the Pilgrims, who came to America in search of religious freedom, and survived the first winter with the help of their friends, the Indians.”
“And what do the Unitarians believe about Christmas?”
“Christmas is when we celebrate the birth of the Baby Jesus, and the coming of light into the world at the darkest time of the year.”
“And what do the Unitarians believe about Easter?”
No response. So the teacher began to give some hints.
“You know, Jesus dies on the cross, and is buried in the tomb....”
Still no response.
“And he’s buried in the Tomb for three days.... And at the end of three days, he rolls away the rock, and comes out of the tomb....”
Suddenly Sherry’s eyes lit up. “And if he sees his shadow he goes back in and there’s six more weeks of winter!”
Now let me tell you a true story. A generation ago, when I was a child growing up in the Unitarian Church, it was still quite common in many of our Unitarian and Universalist churches for the Sunday School students to perform a full-scale Easter pageant at this time of year. And when my mentor, Peter Raible, who is now the minister emeritus at University Unitarian Church in Seattle (where I attended Sunday School as a child), was himself new to our ministry, he was in charge of organizing the Easter Pageant at our church in Providence, Rhode Island, which the children were to perform before the entire congregation as part of the Sunday service. Everything went smoothly until the dramatic climax, when the child who was playing the part of Saint Peter rushed onstage to announce the Good News. At the top of his lungs, he shouted his discovery to the congregation: "The Rock has risen, Christ has rolled away!" There was silence, followed by a nervous titter which soon gave way to uproarious laughter, bringing the pageant to an abrupt and early close. For from the innocent mouth of a child, a profound commentary on our faith had sprung forth. What is the meaning of Easter here in the Unitarian church? Perhaps it is nothing more than this: the Rock has risen, Christ has rolled away.
This is not an easy time of year to be a Unitarian Minister. It's not like Christmas; we call all pretty much get into the Spirit of Christmas without worrying too much about whether or not it truly was a Virgin Birth, or if the angels really did speak to the shepherds. Thanksgiving is essentially OUR holiday: a tiny group of pilgrims who come to a new world in search of religious freedom, and who survive against all odds and in the face of terrible hardship; and if you ever happen to find yourself in Plymouth some Sunday morning, and decide to worship in the church that the Pilgrims started, you will find other Unitarians there to greet you.
But Easter is different. No matter how eloquently we may speak of the rebirth of new life in Spring, or of other Ancient Near Eastern traditions of dying and rising gods, Easter remains the story of an empty tomb, the Resurrection of the Christ, a corpse that got up and "stood again." It's a story, quite frankly, which I don't believe; which is why it's so tough to be a Unitarian minister on Easter Sunday. What do you say after you've said "Sorry, I don't buy it. Not a word of it. It's nothing but fiction, a metaphor, a lot of make believe...."? That's not exactly the sort of message designed to inspire a great outpouring of renewed commitment and religious faith. And yet this is precisely what Easter is all about: the renewal of trust, the renewal of hope: the rebirth of a commitment rooted in faith, even in the face of death and disappointment.
As I said last week, our Unitarian Universalist religious heritage is based on a very simple premise: the premise that Truth, vigorously sought and plainly spoken, will win out over falsehood every time. The free and responsible search for truth and meaning is the cornerstone of our religious practice -- it's the reason a church like ours endures. But curiosity alone, even a "responsible" curiosity, is not enough. There also needs to be, somewhere, an understanding that Truth really matters: that this is not just some abstract, intellectual exercise we are engaged in, but rather potentially an activity of life-transforming significance. The life of faith is not just a commitment to know the truth, but also a willingness to be "set free" by the truth: a willingness to live, truly, by what one has learned, to come into the light rather than skulking in the darkness. It is only through our commitment to something which is larger than our self, larger than our personal preferences and desires -- a commitment which is open to the possibility of surrender, of losing one's self in order to find it -- that we grow beyond our present limitations as religious beings, whatever they may be, and bring our potential to fruition. Knowledge becomes transformative only when one is willing to be changed by what one has learned, willing to grow beyond what we already are to what we potentially might become. And I called this commitment the Challenge of Discipleship: the challenge of becoming a disciplined religious learner, enjoying Fellowship with other learners, sharing the Stewardship of a religious heritage and institution, providing Leadership for others who would join us on our way, and who likewise seek to grow beyond themselves.
You see, Easter is the story of an Empty Tomb. But it is also many other stories as well. It is a story of martyrdom: of one individual's faithful witness to the integrity of his beliefs, and of the price which he paid for maintaining that integrity. It is a story of failure, and temptation, and betrayal; and of the opportunity for a different kind of relationship with the divine, a "New Covenant" which is open to us even in midst of our human weaknesses and shortcomings, and still inspires us to become more than we now are. And above all, I think, it is a story of survival in the aftermath of tragedy, and of that hidden strength which exists within each of us, and which rises to the surface when we need it most.
Consider if you will the story of Simon Peter, or "Rocky" as one of the more contemporary translations of the New Testament calls him, in an attempt to render the effect of the Greek pun on his nickname Petros or "rock." He was the first of the disciples to answer the call of Jesus, a simple working man who caught fish for a living on the Sea of Galilee, and lived at home with his wife and his mother and his brother -- always the most faithful and loyal of the disciples, and yet also (it's always seemed to me) a little thick-headed, as though he really didn't grasp or understand the full significance of everything that was going on around him at the time. Yet it was upon this "rock" that Jesus chose to build his church, his community of people who had been "called out" to learn the Good News of the New Covenant. And the Story of Easter is as much the story of disciple Peter as it is of Rabbi Jesus: what does the "learner" do when the "teacher" is suddenly taken from him, and the full significance of it all finally begins to grow clear?
This, in a nutshell, is what it means to become a disciple: it means the recognition that when you answer the call to become a religious learner, and commit yourself to the discipline which that entails, you are also accepting the responsibility of becoming a religious teacher: of communicating by example what you have learned through imitation. You become an "apostle" -- one who is "sent out" -- one whose faith has not only taken root in the discipline of religious life, but which has also taken wing so that it can be spread to others. This is the quality that separates the Disciple from the dilettante, from someone who merely dabbles in spriritual learning for their own amusement, pretending to a wisdom greater than they possess. The disciple may recognize that his or her knowledge is incomplete, may even shy away from the challenge of sharing it with others. But ultimately the true disciple will rise to the challenge; and it is through this process: learners teaching learners teaching learners teaching learners, that the community endures, surviving even the execution of the teacher who first gathered it.
Jesus himself was a disciple once. In the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel we read of an episode in his life, when he was the age of twelve, in which he remained behind in the city of Jerusalem following the Feast of Passover, and was missing from his family for three days. They eventually found him sitting in the temple, listening to the rabbis and asking them questions, and surprised that his parents should have been so worried about his whereabouts. And eighteen years later, following his baptism by John in the river Jordan, it was only after forty days of fasting in the wilderness that Jesus came to the decision to answer the call to ministry, to gather disciples to him, and to preach good news to the poor. The challenge of an authentic religious faith entails making that step from study to service, to move forward from learning to actively doing the Good and the True.
In the case of Simon Peter, the challenge came upon him suddenly. At the moment Jesus was arrested Peter's first impulse was to resist, to fight back; and afterwards, in those dark hours before dawn, as he followed the members of this paramilitary "Death Squad" who had kidnapped his teacher back to the house of the High Priest himself, and then sat in the courtyard -- frightened, helpless, and confused -- three times he denied that he even knew Jesus, no doubt hoping to avoid a similar fate himself. And when he realized what he had done, he wept for the shame of it.
And then a very strange thing happened. For in the ensuing hours and days that immediately followed the crucifixion, it was the Apostle Peter -- the Rock -- who "stood again" in the place of the departed Jesus, who gathered the disciples together in the Upper Room to observe the Sabbath while they waited for the opportunity to anoint the body of their executed teacher. There was as yet no talk of any "resurrection," no one had been to visit the tomb, no one had claimed to have seen the Risen Lord. But the miracle of Easter had already begun; the teacher was dead, but the teaching lived on: the disciples, the learners, were becoming teachers in their own right, and the community which they formed would survive.
Recall for a moment the passage I read this morning from the Gospel According to Luke, the story of the resurrection appearance on the road to Emmaus. I read that passage not because I think that it's an accurate account of something that actually happened, but because it is a story that is personally meaningful to me. Imagine this, if you will. Two disciples, two "learners," are returning home after having witnessed the crucifixion of their teacher and master. They meet a stranger on the road, invite him to share their company and hospitality; and in the familiar action of the breaking of the bread, they see again the face of their rabbi, Jesus. And the message of this story, for me, is not so much that Christ still lives, but that Christ Lives On: that everything that Jesus had come to stand for in the lives of these two students was just as valid after the crucifixion as it had been before.
It has always struck me as ironic, with all the heated arguments I've heard about the nature of the resurrection: whether or not it occurred at all; whether the tomb was empty or Christ simply "appeared;" what, if anything, it should mean to us today anyway, that more often than not, whenever the Apostle Paul (whose epistles represent the earliest documents of what we now call the "New Testament") speaks of the "risen body of Christ," he is speaking metaphorically of the early Christian church, with its "body" of believers, its "many members." For Paul, the empty tomb was never an issue; he saw the Risen Christ every time he saw another Christian, every time they broke bread together. Paul himself never met the living Jesus -- of this even the most conservative Biblical scholars agree. And yet tradition records that he was struck blind on the road to Damascus, and emerged from that experience a different human being: not just a disciple, but an apostle of Christ, with a new vision of his role as a religious learner, and a teacher. The Greek word anastasis, which we translate as Resurrection, literally means "to rise" or "to stand again." And it happens not once in history for all time, but continually for each of us who encounters the Rabbi on the road to Emmaus, or Damascus, and who "rises up" to "take a stand" for a higher principle, for a different way.
Once Jesus had died upon the cross, it was the Apostles who held the church together during its early years: Peter who provided the leadership, the continuity, the solid root from which the community of faith would take wing; Paul who carried the good news to the Gentiles, who spent a good portion of his ministry in prison, and whose letters are now regarded by the church to have the authority of Scripture. Peter went on to become the Bishop of Rome, the first Pope; and was likewise crucified for his beliefs there in that city during the reign of the emperor Nero. Tradition says that Peter asked to be crucified up-side-down, with his head toward the ground and his feet in the air, because he did not feel himself worthy to be executed in the same manner as Jesus. He had answered the call, and then risen to the challenge; he had truly become a "fisher of men," just as the Rabbi had promised when he had said to him "follow me."
The challenges we face in finding our own wings may not be so dramatic as those faced by Peter and Paul. But the thrust of it all is still very much the same: to grow beyond our fears, to rise to the challenge, to use the things which we have learned in the service of others, to become the solid rocks upon which a community can be built. When we rise to this challenge, it is the miracle of Easter all over again: the renewal of faith, the renewal of hope, the resurrection of the spirit of truth and love and fellowship. Through the willingness to serve, to become teachers as well as learners, to act as witnesses to the truth of our beliefs and our ideals, we become active participants in the process of “saving” the world: a world in which evil and falsehood retreat before the power of the Truth plainly spoken, and no challenge is too great for the community of those who faithfully seek it.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, MA
Easter Sunday, April 11th, 2004
READING: Luke 24: 13-35
[Extemporaneous Welcome to Children]
Some years ago now, when I was still relatively new to the ministry, and serving the Unitarian Universalist Church in Midland, Texas, there was a child in our Sunday School whose parents were divorced, so every other Sunday she attended our church with her father, and then on the alternating Sundays she went to the Baptist church with her mother and grandparents. And naturally (as you might imagine) this was a little confusing for her. One Sunday she’d go to the Baptist Church and hear about how God created the world in seven days. The next week she’d come to our church and learn about the dinosaurs. The next week she’d be back over at the Baptist church hearing about Adam and Eve and Original Sin. And then the following week she’d be back with us, and the teacher would have brought an actual snake into the classroom, as part of a lesson about “The Interdependent Web of All Existence, of Which We are a Part.”
Now as it so happened, the Sunday School teacher at the Baptist Church was actually kind of curious about Unitarianism, so she decided to try to find out more by asking Sherry about something that a young child was likely to know, such as the holidays.
“What do the Unitarians believe about Thanksgiving?” the Sunday School teacher asked.
“Thanksgiving is when remember the Pilgrims, who came to America in search of religious freedom, and survived the first winter with the help of their friends, the Indians.”
“And what do the Unitarians believe about Christmas?”
“Christmas is when we celebrate the birth of the Baby Jesus, and the coming of light into the world at the darkest time of the year.”
“And what do the Unitarians believe about Easter?”
No response. So the teacher began to give some hints.
“You know, Jesus dies on the cross, and is buried in the tomb....”
Still no response.
“And he’s buried in the Tomb for three days.... And at the end of three days, he rolls away the rock, and comes out of the tomb....”
Suddenly Sherry’s eyes lit up. “And if he sees his shadow he goes back in and there’s six more weeks of winter!”
Now let me tell you a true story. A generation ago, when I was a child growing up in the Unitarian Church, it was still quite common in many of our Unitarian and Universalist churches for the Sunday School students to perform a full-scale Easter pageant at this time of year. And when my mentor, Peter Raible, who is now the minister emeritus at University Unitarian Church in Seattle (where I attended Sunday School as a child), was himself new to our ministry, he was in charge of organizing the Easter Pageant at our church in Providence, Rhode Island, which the children were to perform before the entire congregation as part of the Sunday service. Everything went smoothly until the dramatic climax, when the child who was playing the part of Saint Peter rushed onstage to announce the Good News. At the top of his lungs, he shouted his discovery to the congregation: "The Rock has risen, Christ has rolled away!" There was silence, followed by a nervous titter which soon gave way to uproarious laughter, bringing the pageant to an abrupt and early close. For from the innocent mouth of a child, a profound commentary on our faith had sprung forth. What is the meaning of Easter here in the Unitarian church? Perhaps it is nothing more than this: the Rock has risen, Christ has rolled away.
This is not an easy time of year to be a Unitarian Minister. It's not like Christmas; we call all pretty much get into the Spirit of Christmas without worrying too much about whether or not it truly was a Virgin Birth, or if the angels really did speak to the shepherds. Thanksgiving is essentially OUR holiday: a tiny group of pilgrims who come to a new world in search of religious freedom, and who survive against all odds and in the face of terrible hardship; and if you ever happen to find yourself in Plymouth some Sunday morning, and decide to worship in the church that the Pilgrims started, you will find other Unitarians there to greet you.
But Easter is different. No matter how eloquently we may speak of the rebirth of new life in Spring, or of other Ancient Near Eastern traditions of dying and rising gods, Easter remains the story of an empty tomb, the Resurrection of the Christ, a corpse that got up and "stood again." It's a story, quite frankly, which I don't believe; which is why it's so tough to be a Unitarian minister on Easter Sunday. What do you say after you've said "Sorry, I don't buy it. Not a word of it. It's nothing but fiction, a metaphor, a lot of make believe...."? That's not exactly the sort of message designed to inspire a great outpouring of renewed commitment and religious faith. And yet this is precisely what Easter is all about: the renewal of trust, the renewal of hope: the rebirth of a commitment rooted in faith, even in the face of death and disappointment.
As I said last week, our Unitarian Universalist religious heritage is based on a very simple premise: the premise that Truth, vigorously sought and plainly spoken, will win out over falsehood every time. The free and responsible search for truth and meaning is the cornerstone of our religious practice -- it's the reason a church like ours endures. But curiosity alone, even a "responsible" curiosity, is not enough. There also needs to be, somewhere, an understanding that Truth really matters: that this is not just some abstract, intellectual exercise we are engaged in, but rather potentially an activity of life-transforming significance. The life of faith is not just a commitment to know the truth, but also a willingness to be "set free" by the truth: a willingness to live, truly, by what one has learned, to come into the light rather than skulking in the darkness. It is only through our commitment to something which is larger than our self, larger than our personal preferences and desires -- a commitment which is open to the possibility of surrender, of losing one's self in order to find it -- that we grow beyond our present limitations as religious beings, whatever they may be, and bring our potential to fruition. Knowledge becomes transformative only when one is willing to be changed by what one has learned, willing to grow beyond what we already are to what we potentially might become. And I called this commitment the Challenge of Discipleship: the challenge of becoming a disciplined religious learner, enjoying Fellowship with other learners, sharing the Stewardship of a religious heritage and institution, providing Leadership for others who would join us on our way, and who likewise seek to grow beyond themselves.
You see, Easter is the story of an Empty Tomb. But it is also many other stories as well. It is a story of martyrdom: of one individual's faithful witness to the integrity of his beliefs, and of the price which he paid for maintaining that integrity. It is a story of failure, and temptation, and betrayal; and of the opportunity for a different kind of relationship with the divine, a "New Covenant" which is open to us even in midst of our human weaknesses and shortcomings, and still inspires us to become more than we now are. And above all, I think, it is a story of survival in the aftermath of tragedy, and of that hidden strength which exists within each of us, and which rises to the surface when we need it most.
Consider if you will the story of Simon Peter, or "Rocky" as one of the more contemporary translations of the New Testament calls him, in an attempt to render the effect of the Greek pun on his nickname Petros or "rock." He was the first of the disciples to answer the call of Jesus, a simple working man who caught fish for a living on the Sea of Galilee, and lived at home with his wife and his mother and his brother -- always the most faithful and loyal of the disciples, and yet also (it's always seemed to me) a little thick-headed, as though he really didn't grasp or understand the full significance of everything that was going on around him at the time. Yet it was upon this "rock" that Jesus chose to build his church, his community of people who had been "called out" to learn the Good News of the New Covenant. And the Story of Easter is as much the story of disciple Peter as it is of Rabbi Jesus: what does the "learner" do when the "teacher" is suddenly taken from him, and the full significance of it all finally begins to grow clear?
This, in a nutshell, is what it means to become a disciple: it means the recognition that when you answer the call to become a religious learner, and commit yourself to the discipline which that entails, you are also accepting the responsibility of becoming a religious teacher: of communicating by example what you have learned through imitation. You become an "apostle" -- one who is "sent out" -- one whose faith has not only taken root in the discipline of religious life, but which has also taken wing so that it can be spread to others. This is the quality that separates the Disciple from the dilettante, from someone who merely dabbles in spriritual learning for their own amusement, pretending to a wisdom greater than they possess. The disciple may recognize that his or her knowledge is incomplete, may even shy away from the challenge of sharing it with others. But ultimately the true disciple will rise to the challenge; and it is through this process: learners teaching learners teaching learners teaching learners, that the community endures, surviving even the execution of the teacher who first gathered it.
Jesus himself was a disciple once. In the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel we read of an episode in his life, when he was the age of twelve, in which he remained behind in the city of Jerusalem following the Feast of Passover, and was missing from his family for three days. They eventually found him sitting in the temple, listening to the rabbis and asking them questions, and surprised that his parents should have been so worried about his whereabouts. And eighteen years later, following his baptism by John in the river Jordan, it was only after forty days of fasting in the wilderness that Jesus came to the decision to answer the call to ministry, to gather disciples to him, and to preach good news to the poor. The challenge of an authentic religious faith entails making that step from study to service, to move forward from learning to actively doing the Good and the True.
In the case of Simon Peter, the challenge came upon him suddenly. At the moment Jesus was arrested Peter's first impulse was to resist, to fight back; and afterwards, in those dark hours before dawn, as he followed the members of this paramilitary "Death Squad" who had kidnapped his teacher back to the house of the High Priest himself, and then sat in the courtyard -- frightened, helpless, and confused -- three times he denied that he even knew Jesus, no doubt hoping to avoid a similar fate himself. And when he realized what he had done, he wept for the shame of it.
And then a very strange thing happened. For in the ensuing hours and days that immediately followed the crucifixion, it was the Apostle Peter -- the Rock -- who "stood again" in the place of the departed Jesus, who gathered the disciples together in the Upper Room to observe the Sabbath while they waited for the opportunity to anoint the body of their executed teacher. There was as yet no talk of any "resurrection," no one had been to visit the tomb, no one had claimed to have seen the Risen Lord. But the miracle of Easter had already begun; the teacher was dead, but the teaching lived on: the disciples, the learners, were becoming teachers in their own right, and the community which they formed would survive.
Recall for a moment the passage I read this morning from the Gospel According to Luke, the story of the resurrection appearance on the road to Emmaus. I read that passage not because I think that it's an accurate account of something that actually happened, but because it is a story that is personally meaningful to me. Imagine this, if you will. Two disciples, two "learners," are returning home after having witnessed the crucifixion of their teacher and master. They meet a stranger on the road, invite him to share their company and hospitality; and in the familiar action of the breaking of the bread, they see again the face of their rabbi, Jesus. And the message of this story, for me, is not so much that Christ still lives, but that Christ Lives On: that everything that Jesus had come to stand for in the lives of these two students was just as valid after the crucifixion as it had been before.
It has always struck me as ironic, with all the heated arguments I've heard about the nature of the resurrection: whether or not it occurred at all; whether the tomb was empty or Christ simply "appeared;" what, if anything, it should mean to us today anyway, that more often than not, whenever the Apostle Paul (whose epistles represent the earliest documents of what we now call the "New Testament") speaks of the "risen body of Christ," he is speaking metaphorically of the early Christian church, with its "body" of believers, its "many members." For Paul, the empty tomb was never an issue; he saw the Risen Christ every time he saw another Christian, every time they broke bread together. Paul himself never met the living Jesus -- of this even the most conservative Biblical scholars agree. And yet tradition records that he was struck blind on the road to Damascus, and emerged from that experience a different human being: not just a disciple, but an apostle of Christ, with a new vision of his role as a religious learner, and a teacher. The Greek word anastasis, which we translate as Resurrection, literally means "to rise" or "to stand again." And it happens not once in history for all time, but continually for each of us who encounters the Rabbi on the road to Emmaus, or Damascus, and who "rises up" to "take a stand" for a higher principle, for a different way.
Once Jesus had died upon the cross, it was the Apostles who held the church together during its early years: Peter who provided the leadership, the continuity, the solid root from which the community of faith would take wing; Paul who carried the good news to the Gentiles, who spent a good portion of his ministry in prison, and whose letters are now regarded by the church to have the authority of Scripture. Peter went on to become the Bishop of Rome, the first Pope; and was likewise crucified for his beliefs there in that city during the reign of the emperor Nero. Tradition says that Peter asked to be crucified up-side-down, with his head toward the ground and his feet in the air, because he did not feel himself worthy to be executed in the same manner as Jesus. He had answered the call, and then risen to the challenge; he had truly become a "fisher of men," just as the Rabbi had promised when he had said to him "follow me."
The challenges we face in finding our own wings may not be so dramatic as those faced by Peter and Paul. But the thrust of it all is still very much the same: to grow beyond our fears, to rise to the challenge, to use the things which we have learned in the service of others, to become the solid rocks upon which a community can be built. When we rise to this challenge, it is the miracle of Easter all over again: the renewal of faith, the renewal of hope, the resurrection of the spirit of truth and love and fellowship. Through the willingness to serve, to become teachers as well as learners, to act as witnesses to the truth of our beliefs and our ideals, we become active participants in the process of “saving” the world: a world in which evil and falsehood retreat before the power of the Truth plainly spoken, and no challenge is too great for the community of those who faithfully seek it.
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