Sermons 2012-13

Wake Up in a Multi-Religious America
Rev. Douglas Taylor
October 14, 2012

Four and a half years ago I got a call from a private investigator who was worried for me.  It was a courtesy call, ostensibly.  Considered beyond the polite and calm words that were exchanged, it bordered on fear-mongering.  The crux of it was that this private investigator had come across my name during his investigation of a Muslim community from Deposit NY.  The Muslim community in Deposit had in the spring of 2008 invited me to attend and speak at their first annual parade and rally in downtown Binghamton.  I had of course agreed and I was looking forward to the march.  And then I got this call. 

The PI was worried for me, for my reputation.  Did I know these are not the Muslims who meet in town; they are a second group out in Deposit?  Yes, I knew that.  I also knew that they are Shi’a while the Islamic Center in Johnson City is Sunni.  I also knew then that the in-town group was comprised mostly of Arab Americans who were first or second generation immigrants while the Deposit group was predominantly African American.  The Private Investigator told me he was investigating the rural, African American, Shi’a group for suspicion of links to domestic terrorism.  He had called to give me the heads up before I associated myself too closely. 

I thanked the investigator for his call and told him I would consider what he had said.  The next call I made for to Dick Antoun, professor emeritus of Anthropology at Binghamton University, author of Understanding Fundamentalism, and member of the congregation.  Dick’s focus had been the Middle East and Islam.  When I described the call from the investigator and the preceding invitation from the Muslims, Dick was very excited for me.  First off, he agreed with my suspicion about the private investigator.  Dick wondered who he was investigating for, and suggested the fellow might be self-appointed and thus not a reliable source.  Nonetheless, Dick said I should certainly go in with my eyes open.

Dick couldn’t tell me much about the Muslim community in Deposit.  They were reclusive back then in 2008.  I said they were aware of that and were now trying to step out into the community, to build up some connections and goodwill.  Dick was excited about the movement and direction of this Muslim group, and made me promise to tell him about the experience afterward.

I really miss having conversations like that with Dick.  For those who may not know, Dick Antoun was murdered in December of 2009, stabbed by a Saudi graduate student.  Dick’s focus on Middle East culture and religion was combined with his heart for teaching; the result was his regular presentations here in this congregation any out in the community of interfaith panel discussions that he moderated as well as educational forums on Islam and the Middle East that he offered.  People in the local Muslim community appreciated his work and his presence.  At his memorial service his wife Roz appointed that a portion of the donations made in his honor be set aside in interfaith fund for the future, to create a program to honor Dick’s legacy.  I sat on the Richard Antoun Memorial fund, helped shape the grant we offered.  I remained fairly quiet during it except to voice Roz’s original intentions.  I remained silent because I knew that another group I was with would be submitting a proposal for the funds. 

The Children of Abraham is an interfaith group comprised of the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  I participate in that group and remained encouraging though quiet as they created the proposal that eventually won the grant money from the Antoun Fund.  The result is the wonderful program that will be taking place this afternoon (Sunday, October 14, 2012) at Temple Concord.  The event begins at 2pm, doors open at 1:30 pm.  All are welcome.  Donations toward future events are being accepted but there is no cost to attending this event.  The speaker, Zainab Al Suwaij, is cofounder of the American Islamic Congress and a dedicated promoter of interfaith tolerance and the bridging of cultures.  Her talk is titled “Multi-religious America: Challenges and Hopes.”

Let me say, in telling you this I am not just advertising the latest project I am involved in.  This afternoon’s program is in line with the book we read last year as our congregation’s Common Read: Eboo Patel’s Acts of Faith.  This afternoon’s program is in line with the work of Religion scholar Karen Armstrong and her Charter of Compassion.  This afternoon’s program at Temple Concord goes right to the heart of the desire on the part of the Muslims from Deposit to march back in 2008 and the concerns of the self-appointed private investigator who wanted to stop them. 

America is becoming more diverse, ethnically and racially as well as religiously.  Census data reveals this to us and much is made about the findings.  But we are also becoming more fearful of each other, as witnessed by the Private Investigator’s courtesy warning to me.  For some time scholars have recognized that a fearful fundamentalism is both a natural sociological response to the growing diversity as well as a poison to our liberty and freedom as a pluralistic nation.  

Do you remember a book from the 90’s titled Bowling Alone?  It was by sociologies Robert Putnam (1995) in which he talked about the need for ‘third places’ in our lives.  We have home and work and we need a Third Place in our lives where the home and work concerns are not at the top.  Third places allow us to broaden our civic concern and social network.  Putnam went on to claim that churches and other places of worship were critical for the strengthening of civil society and the creation of what he called “Social Capital.” 

Where levels of social capital are higher, children grow up healthier, safer, and better educated, people live longer, happier lives, and democracy and the economy work better. (Putnam, E Pluribus Unum)

But here is the kick.  While liberal thinkers like me got a boost from this study, his second study, published in 2007 entitled E Pluribus Unum, Putnam looked more closely at diversity and discovered that the effects he discovered earlier work best among homogenous groups.  He discovered that diversity actually reduced social capital.  “In more diverse communities, people trust their neighbors less … [and] appear to ‘hunker down’ (ibid)

I admit I have had this very relaxed posture at times when considering diversity and our nation.  I figured, diversity is coming, all we have to do is wait a generation or so and the tide will have turned and the Beloved Community will practically slip up on us unbidden!  What I missed in that thought is the power of fear in the face of difference.

Harvard University scholar Diana Eck wrote about American’s religious diversity in her 2001 book New Religious America.  In her book, Eck made a crucial distinction between diversity and pluralism.  Diversity is simply the fact of people of different backgrounds living in close proximity.  Pluralism is when people have done this on purpose.  Her book came out the summer before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  The paperback version released in 2002 included a post 9/11 preface to point out the obvious: diversity is not enough.  Diversity is not enough because a fearful fundamentalism is a natural sociological response to diversity.  People insulate themselves, and they turn toward those that look like themselves. 

And we see stories of violence and attempts to escalate violence.  The most recent headline of this sort is the attack on the American embassy in Libya on September 11, initially considered to be the result of spontaneous protests around the Muslim world against the amateurish American film about Muhammad, recent evidence shows it was a planned attack that took the life of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. 

Alongside the increase of our religious and ethnic diversity as a nation is the parallel increase of violence and debasement against those who are different.  Diversity is not enough.  Pluralism is needed, pluralism is diversity on purpose.  It is the building of bridges and the cross-group networking that people can choose to do to build community in response to diversity.  There was a broad study done of villages in India where a significant amount of religious diversity can be found.  (This study was done by Brown University professor Ashutosh Varshney, as reported in Eboo Patel’s Sacred Ground, p 76)  Some villages exploded with inter-religious violence while others remained peaceful.  What was the difference?  The answer is the obvious one.  The villages that had inter-religious organizations and networks that bring people from different religious backgrounds together regularly to do good works are the villages that do not succumb to interreligious violence.

Eboo Patel writes about this sort of thing in his latest book Sacred Ground.  His earlier book Acts of Faith, which we used as our Common Read last year, is largely autobiographical.  While Patel still uses an abundance of personal story in this new book, it is more of an exploration of Pluralism and American identity.  He makes the case that the two things most influential to a person’s attitude about people from different religions are knowledge and relationships.  The more accurate knowledge and close relationships a person has with a person from a different faith, the more positive that person’s attitude will be toward all people from different faiths.  This works in reverse as well as witnessed by the protest sign that claimed “All I ever needed to know about Islam I learned on 9/11.”

Patel shares a 9/11 story near the beginning of his new book.  He begins the story with a reminder of Walt Whitman’s quote “Whoever degrades another degrades me.”  Patel goes on to say, “That is the heart of the American Spirit.”

It is a lesson I learned from John Tateishi, executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League.  One of John’s earliest memories was being released from an internment camp.  His father held him by the shoulders and said, “Son, do not forget this moment, and do not let America forget it.  This country is too good for what it did to us.”

On the morning of 9/11, John was heading south on I-5 out of Seattle, driving to an early meeting.  He was casually turning the radio dial when he caught the news of the first plane hitting the tower.  He turned the volume up and listened as the second plane hit, the towers collapsed, and threats directed at Muslims started pouring in.  He turned his car around and called his assistant.  “Cancel my meetings for the rest of the week,” he said.  “And start calling our regional directors.  Tell them to cancel their meetings.  The focus of our organization has just become about the protection of American Muslims.”  When I asked him why he did that, he told me how grateful he was for the people who stood up for Japanese Americans during World War II.  Had there been more, he believed, the internment camps would not have happened.  When it was his turn to protect another community, it was his responsibility to take it.  The most American thing you can do is stand up for someone else.

            (Eboo Patel, Sacred Ground, p 18)

Patel also shared the story of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.  During the summer of 2010, many people whipped into a frenzy around what was called the “Ground Zero Mosque” which is actually the ‘Islamic community center a few blocks away from ground zero.’  Perhaps you remember this, it was originally called the Cordoba House and it is now known as 51 Park Place.  The folks against it said it was a travesty; they said it was a ‘victory mosque’ to honor the Muslim perpetrators of the terrorist attack.  But Mayor Bloomberg remained a supporter through the firestorm of lies and fear.  And for what it’s worth, the center opened its doors without much fanfare or grief on September 21, 2011 – International Peace Day.  Partly Bloomberg supported the Cordoba House because that was the right thing to do, because America has insisted on Religious Freedom as a founding principle.  It turns out Bloomberg has a personal reason for supporting it as well; a memory of childhood prejudice that prompted him to act on his conscience. 

He remembered a time when his family, because they were Jewish, could not purchase a home outright in the Boston suburb of Medford.  They had to ask their lawyer – a Christian – to buy it and sell it back to them.  It was a personal thread in the fabric of religious prejudice in America.  Some people experience bigotry and respond, “I’m going to help build a world where that never happens to my people again.”  Michael Bloomberg experienced it and decided, “I’m going to help build a world where that never happens to anyone again.” (Eboo Patel, Sacred Ground, p21-22)

So what is our role in all this?  Unitarian Universalism is practically a Multi-religious group unto itself.  This means we know something of pluralism and religious diversity.  But our role is the same as that of any religious person – to show up and share our perspective in the mix. When the Muslim community from Deposit asked me to speak at the rally following their march in 2008, they asked specifically if I would talk on the theme of unity.  I spoke a little about unity there on the courthouse steps that chilly spring afternoon.  I spoke more, however, about diversity – about the intentional diversity that we call pluralism.  I mentioned Martin Luther King Jr. and asked them to put their trust in the American dream of unity that says we are one not because we are all the same, but because we are all together in the effort to build a more perfect union.  Our different faiths are part of the beautiful mosaic of our country.  E Pluribus Unum.  Out of many, we are one.

In a world without end, may it be so.  Shalom, Salaam, Om, and Amen.

Disarming the Clobber Passages
Rev. Douglas Taylor
October 7, 2012

Do you know what the ‘clobber passages’ are?  Did you know of the phrase before you read about my title and the accompanying sentence description in the newsletter?  The phrase ‘clobber passages’ refers to a set of specific biblical verses that are used by conservative Christians to condemn homosexuality. 

Let me start with a brief explanation of why this matters to me.  I am not gay but I am an ally and an advocate for broad civil rights.  I do not buy into the misunderstanding that says I am not personally affected by the oppression felt by other people.  I do not buy into the idea that as a straight white man the concerns of people who are not straight or not white or not male are some how not my concerns.  No.  I am an ally and an advocate for broad civil rights.  For when the rights and liberties of oppressed minorities and otherwise disenfranchised people are protected and upheld, then the rights and liberties of the whole are protected and upheld; and that is good for all people.  So when religion is used as a weapon against gay and lesbian people it matters to me and I will not stand by doing nothing.  It matters not just to me personally because I know and care about people who are gay – it matters to us all on the big scale of the common good.

Far too often religion is used as a weapon to exclude and injure and condemn.  That is not what religion is for.  This also matters to me as a person of faith.  I am not a Christian and the bible is not my sacred book, but the bible and Christianity are too important to me to stand by watching them be corrupted thus.  Unitarian Universalism grew up out of liberal Protestant Christianity, we are not longer, strictly speak, a Christian community.  Yet we remain in deep relationship with Christianity.  As a Unitarian Universalist I am free to simply ignore the parts of the Bible I don’t like.  That was part of our heresy, part of how we moved beyond the Christianity of our time.  Theologically I am free to challenge or even dismiss any aspect of the Bible that my conscience leads me to find wanting.  The easiest way for me to disarm the clobber passages is to simply say they are wrong, I don’t believe them, to declare that they are not the divinely inspired ‘word of God’ but rather the flawed words of specific human beings from a specific time in history and that they have no relevance to our life and culture today.  The end. 

Except, it is not so simple.  I may deem these passages to have no relevance to my life, to our life; but there are countless other people of faith who find these passages to be significant and very relevant.  These Bible verses affect me whether I want them to or not.  They are part of the cultural conversation and the political discourse.  Laws are passed based on these passages.  So it matters not just because I am a person of faith who cares about how others use religion, it matters because I am part of this culture that is so heavily influenced by the Bible and its interpretations. 

Let me clarify for you just what the Clobber Passages are and then show you how you might disarm them.  There are seven passages to consider.  I can’t sustain a full and careful sermon walking through all seven, but I’ll go far enough to make it clear how this works.   One of the seven is a story in Genesis, two are verses in Leviticus, two more are verses from Paul’s letters and the last two are verses from other later letters.

Let us begin with the story.  It is perhaps the most familiar of the Clobber Passages.  It is also the longest, taking up the entirety of Chapter 19 in Genesis – where the other six Clobber Passages are each only one or two verses long.  Chapter 19 is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.  There are several elements to the story, but the heart of what is pertinent this morning is recounted in verse 5.  In the story, two angels have come to Sodom to see if they might find ten righteous men on behalf of Abraham who does not wish God to destroy the city – and God agreed to not destroy it if ten righteous men could be found.  These angels did not find ten righteous men.  They found a man named Lot.  Lot jumped up when he saw two travelers, he did not recognize them as angels, he jumped up and offered them the hospitality of his house.  He brought them to his house, fed them and prepared beds for them.  However, (and here is the troubling part) that evening …

all the men from every part of the city of Sodom – both young and old – surrounded the house.  They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.” (vs 4-5)

Lot then goes out and tries to calm the crowd but he refuses to turn over the strangers.   This paragon of hospitality and righteousness offers them a deal if they’ll leave the strangers unmolested.  He says

Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.” (vs 8)

But they don’t take Lot up on his offer.  They would rather gang rape the two male strangers than Lot’s two virgin daughters.  The angels intercede on Lot’s behalf and they get Lot, his wife and their two daughters out of Sodom before God destroys the place that night.  There is more to the story but the crux of it is the behavior of the men of Sodom. 

It is from this story that the term ‘sodomy’ arises.  Every state in the union had Sodomy laws on the books at one time.  Thomas Jefferson put forth a Virginia State law in 1778 proscribing castration as the maximum punishment for sodomy.  The Virginia State legislature did not accept Jefferson’s attempt at leniency, instead choosing to keep the maximum punishment of death that they already had on the books.  Illinois was the first state to repeal the laws in 1962.  By 2002, 36 states had repealed the law, courts were largely ignoring the law anyway.  In 2003 the Supreme Court invalidated all of the state laws across the board.  Many countries around the world have similar histories with such laws.  

As you can see, there is a long standing interpretation that this story is all about how anal sex is immoral and even criminal.  When I was in seminary, a liberal Methodist seminary I attended for two years before transferring to the UU seminary in Chicago where I graduated, the Bible courses I took offered a different interpretation, a liberal interpretation.  I was taught that the sin of Sodom was not homosexuality or anal sex.  It was inhospitality.  What Lot offered the two strangers, the two disguised angels, was hospitality.  There are other places in scripture where the value of hospitality is lifted up and lauded as a good and great virtue.  The story is about hospitality, I was taught; that is what we can learn from this text. 

I have to tell you, I see a lot of space between Lot’s behavior in the story and the behavior of the rest of the men in Sodom, and while ‘inhospitality’ doesn’t quite cover it – I also don’t think we are talking about homosexuality in the least.  I find both interpretations to miss the point.  I think this story shows us violence and sexual brutality.  If nations the world over had looked at the story of Sodom and made laws against gang rape and non-consensual sex, I’d be right there supporting them.  I think to claim the moral of the story is a warning against the sin of inhospitality is rather weak.  But the claim that it is an indictment of homosexuality takes it too far into absurdity.  It would be like hearing a story about someone being killed by a drunk driving and concluding that driving a car is immoral, disgusting, and evil.

This first of the seven Clobber Passages is the most disturbing because it is in the form of a story.  It also happens to be the easiest to refute.  If you fall into conversation with someone about this story, don’t let them claim it to be about homosexuality.  It is not.  It is about sexual violence. 

The next two Clobber Passages are in Leviticus and are the most commonly used by conservatives to make their point because they are written as laws.  Leviticus 18:22 says, “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.” And a few chapters further on, the law is repeated with a slight nuance in Leviticus 20:13 which says, “If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”  The conservative interpretation of this is that God’s law says men can not have sex with men; therefore homosexuality is immoral and wrong.

Liberal interpretations point out that Leviticus is also where we find laws against wearing mixed fabrics, eating shellfish, gathering sticks on the Sabbath, and instructions on how to sell your daughter into slavery.  Liberal interpretations point out that the Leviticus laws are in the context of a particular time and culture that is largely irrelevant today.  By this reasoning we can and should ignore the laws that do not fit our contemporary time and culture.  A deeper contextual interpretation says that the restrictions in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 refer specifically to ritual sex between two men in a pagan temple, not all forms of sex between two men.  The first dozen and a half verses of Chapter 18 line out various incestuous relationships that are against God’s law.  Then there is a shift away from defining incest to laws against behaviors that make you ritually unclean – don’t sleep with a woman when she is menstruating and do not sacrificing your children to the pagan god Molech.  It is in this second set that we find the verse that says “do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman.”  In the context of the surrounding verses, according to a liberal interpretation, this verse refers to ritual sex between two men, not all sex between two men.  While I personally lean toward the simpler interpretation that says this verse, and its echo in chapter 20 are irrelevant to modern life, if you want to go for the deeper interpretation, there it is. 

Consider all the verses that support slavery, in Exodus and Deuteronomy, in Ephesians and Colossians; verses that describe how one can be justly made into a slave or how a slave ought to obey his earthly master.  We have been able to see our way to ignoring these passages as irrelevant.  Consider all the verses that support a subservient role for women in society, family and church life, in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, in Timothy and Corinthians; verses that tell women to obey their husbands and to not speak in church.  We have been able to see our way to ignoring these passages as irrelevant.  And consider all the scripture passages about mass murder, the murder of children, the murder of innocent people … all offered as the work of God or the good work of God’s righteous people.  We can see past such horrible and – by today’s standards – immoral verses to the gems of spiritual truth still found in scripture.  Let us do the same with these Clobber Passages, I say.

There are four more passages to consider, and frankly I am not going to go into them in detail because I’ll just be saying more of the same and I think you get the point.  For the sake of thoroughness I will tell you the remaining four are:  Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, 1 Timothy 1:9-10, and Jude 1:7.  The Corinthians and Timothy passages make a list of people who are going to hell, homosexuals are on the list.  Romans equates godlessness with sexual amorality.  And Jude is a repeat of these three with the twist of bringing up the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as proof that such immoral people shall end up in hell.  You can look them up if you wish.  I can even offer a balanced website to peruse: www.religioustolerance.org.  In fairness I will say the author of most of the essays on this website is a Unitarian from Canada.

Stepping back from the specifics about the Clobber Passages themselves and ways to disarm them let me wrap up with a broader perspective on both the Bible and Sexual orientation.  For I find something lacking in the details of these passages.   Both liberal and conservative interpretations focus exclusively on sexual behavior and not at all on loving relationships.  And of course, that is only fair for the interpretations to be thus focused because the details of the passages have that focus.  Yet my own beliefs and understanding of homosexuality comes mostly from my personal experiences with people I know now and knew when I was growing up.  As a child I saw same-sex couples in loving committed relationship.  One of my best friends has two moms.  I took piano lessons from the music director at church, I remember sitting at the piano bench with him while my mom sat in the kitchen with his partner.  These same-sex relationships were – to my young eyes – in a word: normal.  The Clobber Passages show me nothing resembling these relationships.  Perhaps I could look elsewhere in the bible, for example to the Biblical stories of Ruth and Naomi or of Jonathan and David.

The big message in the Bible, to the best of my understanding, is the message of God’s love.  Everything we read in Christian scripture ought to be filtered through that lens.  The Bible is not my only scripture.  It is one source among several sources I turn to for wisdom.  On an interesting note I am reminded of a pamphlet I once saw entitled “What Jesus Said about Homosexuality.”  The inside of the pamphlet is blank.  On the back in small letters it says, “That’s right; Jesus did not say anything about homosexuality.”  Really, if sexual orientation were a big deal for God, Jesus would have talk about it.  Instead Jesus talked about forgiveness, he talked about helping the poor, he talked about not judging others, and he talked about love.  Would that we all could learn to do the same.

Each of us reads our scriptures selectively.  All of us lean toward certain interpretations over other interpretations.  Let us ever remember to read through the lens of love and grace rather than the lens of judgment and hate.  The Bible should not be a weapon to wound or exclude others.  The Bible is at best a tool.  It is a book written by people seeking to understand God and faith and how to live well in this life.  A higher authority and arbiter of truth and faith is found in the depths of every human heart.  Use the Bible as a guide, but trust the spark of God within you over all other authority. 

In a world without end,

May it be so.

Angry Birds
Rev. Douglas Taylor
September 23, 2012

Angry Birds is a delightful brain-numbing, time-wasting, award-winning, highly-popular and addicting computer game created a mere three years ago (December 2009).  In the game, you put different birds into a slingshot and then you launch the birds at pigs that are hiding in, on, or under different structures.  The point is to destroy the pigs.  Out of curiosity, how many people here have ever played the game and know what I’m talking about?  (raise hands) If you play it at work, you may not know that there is theme music for this game.  Vicky Gordon made me promise to tell you all that the postlude (Angry Birds Theme Music) was my idea.  I asked her to do it.

The story that is told in a little 10 or 15 second opening to explain the game is that the pigs have stolen the birds’ eggs, and the birds are trying to get the eggs back.  They are angry at the pigs.  So they fling themselves across the field and though they injure themselves they hope to also take a pig or two with them.  I’m not sure if the makers of the game intended this to be such a fine metaphor of what our anger can do to us, but there it is. 

An ancient Chinese saying puts it, “the one who would pursue vengeance must start by digging two graves.”  Or as the second reading this morning (from Maj-Britt Johnson) reminds us, the Buddha said, “Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with this intent of throwing it at someone else.”  Your anger is in you, unless you move it along it will burn inside you and consume you.  Ann Landers often said, “hate is like an acid. It destroys the vessel in which it is stored.”  The same could easily be said of anger. You will fling yourself across the field, causing certain injury to yourself while hoping and intending to cause injury unto others.

Anger is a natural human response to situations in life.  We don’t choose to be angry at something.  Our emotions are part of us, they happen.  We don’t plan them or choose them, they simply are.  Deciding to be angry or to not be angry is like choosing to be happy or to fall in love.  It’s ridiculous.  We can of course choose to live in ways that promote happiness and discourages anger, but the emotions will always be with us.  So my sermon is not a rant against anger.  Instead, I want to talk about what we can do about our anger. 

But here is a trick: anger is encouraged in our society.  Case in point: there isn’t a computer game called ‘peaceful birds’ or ‘forgiving birds.’  That would be boring.  No one would play that game.  Vengeance is an exciting plot device.  It is a compelling and believable motivation for a game or a story.  It is a terrible way to live a life, however.  But our society does not feed us on stories of peace and forgiveness.  We are fed stories of aggression and anger.  Our political campaigns have bought into that as well.  But what good is it? 

Margaret Wheatley, in her wonderful little book Perseverance, asks this question:

But how far can anger carry us?  And where do we end up?  Anger is a primary cause of burn-out and depression.  It doesn’t give us energy it eats at us and makes us sick – there is no nourishment coming into our bodies, such as is so readily available when we feel peaceful, centered, generous.  (p 35) 

Do you know what that is like?  Have you ever let anger circle around inside you and feel it consuming you?  I have felt it.  It’s funny; I’ve gotten to the point where I can sometimes catch myself cycling around a little nub of anger, working myself up.  I am not the ‘explode and say something foolish’ type of person when I’m angry.  That still happens, I still do that, but it is not my usual method of being angry.  I’m more naturally a stew-er, I stew in my anger.

I’ll be washing dishes, and I will be replaying in my mind some slight or irritant. “Don’t tell me what to think,” Mutter, mutter, mutter. “Oh, you really think you can say that?”  Or I’ll be lying awake at midnight trying to relax and trying to count sheep and really all I’m doing is counting my grievances.  And I’ll feel the emotions as strongly as if I am in the moment that made me upset.  And I can almost feel my spirit contracting and growing bitter.

And I’ll catch myself!  Wow, I’m really working myself up.  I’m like those stupid birds in that game, sling-shooting my emotional self across the field to batter against the walls of my enemy. To counter the embittering spiral I exercise generosity of spirit. Maybe that person didn’t mean it like that (I think to myself, considering their side of it) or maybe they didn’t know I had this button they would be pushing.  Or, maybe they really were trying to offend me and look at how easily I am walking into their script.  I don’t need to play along with my anger, I can set it aside.  If we can catch ourselves in the spiral, we can set it aside.  Forgiveness is in some ways a setting aside of the ‘right and wrong’ of a situation so as to not let it consume us.

Anne Lamott writes about her experience with anger and forgiveness.

I went around saying for a long time that I am not one of those… who is heavily into forgiveness.  But, they say we are not punished for the sin, but by the sin, and I began to feel punished by my unwillingness to forgive.  By the time I decided to become one of those who is heavily into forgiveness, it was like trying to become a marathon runner in middle age; everything inside me either recoiled, as from a hot flame, or laughed a little too hysterically. I tried to will myself into forgiving people who had harmed me directly or indirectly over the years—four former Presidents, three relatives, two old boyfriends, and one teacher in a pear tree—it was ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas” meets Taxi Driver.  But in the end I could only pretend I had.  I decided I was starting off with my sights aimed too high.  As C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity, “If we really want to learn forgiveness, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo.”

Forgiveness is not easy because it is a choice we can consciously step into, but it is fraught with emotion so it is not entirely in our control.  We can say “I forgive you” or “I forgive that person;” and yet still be angry, still have that anger pop up. 

Have you ever tried to pray when you’re angry? It’s not easy.  According to the desert monks of the early Christian Church, “The remedy for all anger is prayer.”

But prayer was, according to [one] monk, “warfare to the last breath,” because it was when the monk sat down to pray that he was most likely to be distracted by unresolved anger – old grudges against those who had wronged him, schemes of retaliation and revenge.                     

                        (Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace p 126)

I do a centering prayer that is like a Buddhist medication of breathing; that is one of my regular practices.  Similar to the chant in our teal hymnal: breathing in I think “peace” and when I breathe out I think “love.”

But sometimes I start doing this and I breathe in the irritating memory at the edge of my consciousness and I breathe out a picture of a person’s words that so bother me and soon I have forgotten to say the words “peace” and “love” and instead I am saying “they were wrong” and “I should have replied thus. That would have shown them.”

But that, right there, is the crux of why I cannot simply condemn anger and be done with it.  Anger, as well as being one the basic human emotional responses to life, is also a true response to life.  My anger, your anger, anyone’s anger, is first and foremost a response to injury or injustice.  Our anger is true.  Christine Robinson wrote about this in our first reading this morning; “When someone has hurt me I have a right to be angry.” 

Our anger is borne of our love; it arises because we care about something.  Rev. Edward Frost has a meditation that begins, “I love those who are angry with me because they care deeply about something they feel I may have hurt.”  Reading this line in that meditation is a reminder to me to consider the other person’s perspective.  “I love those who are angry with me because they care deeply about something they feel I may have hurt.”  And conversely, when I am angry at someone, I can consider my own part in the event or incident that led to my being hurt.  My initial anger is a true response to the injury or injustice. I am hurt because of something I care deeply about.  My anger is a response to my love.  As Robinson said, “I have a right to my anger.”  Yet, I must beware: my anger can also consume me, drawing away all capacity I might otherwise have to respond with love. There is no nourishment in my anger, as Margaret Wheatley said.

So, one healthy response is forgiveness. The Aramaic word for ‘forgive’ is literally: to untie, disentangle, to let loose.  Forgiveness is a way of getting unstuck, of loosening the knot that holds us to the person or event. It is not about forgetting or excusing or any of those other stand-ins that don’t really cover it.  Forgiveness is about moving forward in the face of it all.

Christine Robinson continues from the reading we offered this morning, saying,

Forgiveness does not require forgetting.  Indeed, our memory of past hurts is one of the things that helps us stay safe in the future.  We just need to find a way to give up our anger so that when we remember the incident, the sting is gone, and all that is left is what we have learned.  Than we can continue the relationship. (p28)

A key first step in forgiving someone is in acknowledging your real true hurt and injury.  And an equally necessary step is to consider the situation from the perspective of the one who caused the injury.  If you focus exclusively on the injury, how can you ever see your way through it to the other side of forgiveness?  The abusive parent, the disloyal spouse, the spiteful ex-friend, manipulative neighbor, all have full lives beyond the offenses they have committed.  All of them have an inherent worth that can be uncovered if you are willing to see it. 

The goal is not to lose your anger, but to temper it.  That is how we work through all our powerful and painful emotions such as grief and guilt, resentment and anger: temper them in the context of your whole life.  Don’t partition these difficult emotions into a small compartment.  Let them leak all over your life.  When you forgive, your anger does not automatically disappear any more than accepting the death of a loved one causes the grief and loss to go away. 

Your anger will continue to pop up from time to time.  And you may need to forgive over and over again.  And you will know that it has finally taken root when you remember the offense yet feel not the sting.

Anger is often a roadblock to forgiveness.  How can we forgive if we are still angry? “My anger is proof that I have not forgiven and cannot forgive.” But I say this is not necessarily true.  Your anger is a natural emotional response.  Your forgiveness is a choice.  And if it seems hard to hold onto both, it may be that what you are longing to forgive is too big – the hurt too significant, the injury ongoing.  If that is the case, let me remind you of three things I’ve already said this morning.

First, as Christine Robinson said, “Our memory of past hurts is one of the things that helps us stay safe in the future.”  You don’t need to forget, indeed remembering may be key to moving forward without being re-injured.  Perhaps give attention to amends at this time and work toward forgiveness in the near future.

Second, as Anne Lamott said, “I decided I was starting off with my sights aimed too high.  As C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity, “If we really want to learn forgiveness, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo.””  Perhaps you can set aside the really big injury and practice forgiveness in smaller ways, build up the muscles by forgiving the cashier or those noisy kids down the street or that dog.  Practice on small things, work your way up to forgiving the big injury in time.

Third, as Margaret Wheatley said, our anger “doesn’t give us energy it eats at us and makes us sick.”  Our anger offers no nourishment to our spirit.  The cost to holding my anger is a cost I bear – it eats away at my soul.  Forgiveness is a salve to the injury, a way to ease out of the anger and into grace and love. 

Forgiveness is the ultimate religious activity.  It is tucked up between love and justice, calling us to move forward with our imperfect lives and our imperfect relationships.  Forgiveness is for the easing of the strains all relationships undergo.  It is a salve to the injury, a way to ease out of the anger.  Forgiveness steps past the argument of ‘right and wrong’ so that we can move forward, untangled, to continue our relationships and to let our spirits grow.

In a world with out end,

may it be so

In the Beginning Was a Really Good Story
Rev. Douglas Taylor
9-16-12

By the time I was twelve I had shifted into that phase of being a literalist on purpose, to annoy people – my mother and other authority figures mostly.  “Douglas,” she would say, “do you want to take out the garbage?”  (pause) “No,” I would reply, thoughtfully.  She turned to me, exasperated, “Will you take it out anyway”  “Yes, of course,” I smiled, jumping from my seat to do the chore.  She learned to phrase her statements and expectations without niceties and polite colloquialisms when addressing me that year.  I thankfully grew out of that phase but it took a while.  I found myself still slipping into it from time to time even while entering seminary.  It was discouraging to discover that some people see such literalism as the best they can come up with to demonstrate a commitment to their faith and beliefs.  It was in seminary that I began to grasp how I had been using my 12-year-old literalism as a weapon of cleverness.  Let us linger today in literalism and its implications.

In the beginning, it was not a problem to have two versions of creation written into the sacred text, two version of Noah and the flood, or four versions of Jesus’ life and teachings.  People understood these were stories not about historic facts of how is all really happened.  They knew them to be stories revealing information about who they were as a people.

Tonight at sunset begins the High Holy Days which begin with Rosh Hashanah.  Our Jewish brothers and sisters in faith will be blowing the Shofar and eating apples and honey tonight to commemorate the beginning of the New Year, year 5773.  It is the birthday of the world, according to some interpretations.  Others see it as symbolic.  To take it literally is to say that God created the universe and everything in it including Adam and Eve on October 7, 3761 B.C.  Or maybe September 25, 3760 BC … calendars are a little tricky over time.  There seems to be more support for the earlier October 7 date.

I find within myself absolutely no capacity to accept this date in a literal sense.  The literal interpretation of religious a truth is limiting and flat and not the least bit inspiring – indeed it is deadening.  However, as a story, chapter one of Genesis is beautiful and moving: look at where we came from!  Everything sufficient for life arose at a word from God.  All that is good is spread out and look, we are there in that story as kin to all the world.  But then there is a second version of events that puts it a little differently.  In the second tale we are not created ex nihilo, we arise from clay and the breath of God.

The biggest stories, what Loy called meta-stories in the reading this morning (from The World is Made of Stories), are stories of Cosmos, the Tao, God, Brahman.  The trouble with them is that they don’t like to admit to being stories – the meta-stories each want to be known as The True Story.  Once upon a time a fish swam through the water in search of the ocean.  “Can you tell me where to find the ocean,” it would ask anyone it could.  “Silly fish,” many replied, “This is the ocean – you are swimming in it.”  Discouraged the fish would mutter, “I am swimming in water, what I am looking for is the ocean.”  Perhaps the concept of “the ocean” is another story about the water.

Not all the biggest stories come from religion; science has them too, only they are usually called theories rather than stories.  Yet they serve the same purpose.  A scientific theory is not a statement of fact, it is the framework and narrative that strings the facts together into a meaningful message. The story that evolution offers leads me to wonder and awe in nearly the same way as the first chapter of Genesis: look, we arise from earth and stardust!

The second account of creation in Genesis is also compelling.  It is the story of the expulsion from Eden and reveals a dramatic cosmic version of growing up.  It is about the anxiety of adulthood and the burden of facing the world’s challenges on my own.  Or at least that is one non-literalist interpretation that can serve to lead me to a deeper and richer life.

Or, consider this other version of creation.  Once upon a time when the earth was new …

The Creator’s angels were afraid that people might try to kidnap or monopolize God, and so they decided that she had to be hidden in a safe place, a place where all people would be able to find her if they searched, but where none could own her exclusively.  So they sent out angel scouts to find the perfect place … Meanwhile the Creator had already found her hiding place, the safest, fairest, and warmest place to hide, and yet the most difficult to find: inside each and every human heart.  (from Elisa Davey Pearman’s book Doorway to the Soul)

A literalist must answer the question, ‘which one actually happened?’  Which account of creation is the true account?  They’re all true to the extent that they are meaningful.  A literalist must fit the stories together and make them say the same thing – or throw some of them away as untrue.  Have you ever heard the argument that all four gospels tell the same account of Jesus’ life and death – and that there is no contradiction between them, it is merely our misunderstanding of how the events flow together?  That is the argument of a literalist trying to make the complexity of life and faith fit neatly into an eye-witness account.  Our problem today is not one religion’s story vs. another.  Our problem is the literalist interpretation of any story. 

Consider the current violence and protest over blasphemy we see happening among Muslims globally over a video denigrating and insulting the Prophet Muhammad.  Not all Muslims interpret the story of their doctrine as stories leading them to violence.  Oh, the violence is there in the stories, just as it is in the Jewish and Christian stories as well as the stories of many other faiths.  And perhaps a literalist interpretation would lead a believer to think that violence is the only faithful response.  I am not so strong a scholar of the Monotheistic religions to know that this is in fact true, but it certainly seems to be the case.  It is the extreme and literalist interpretations that lead people to behave with violence.  But the literalist way is not the only way to understand a story.

Or consider the political end of the same recent series of events.  As a liberal who champions values such as the freedom of speech as well as respect and tolerance among different religions, I feel like I am being asked to either condemn the ‘free speech’ of the video or condemn the different religion and its response.  I am asked to side with the literalist extremists who promote lies and intolerance under the guise of ‘free speech’ or to side with the literalist extremists who demand that violence is a reasonable, even doctrinally correct, response to blasphemy.  Which value of liberalism will I admit has fail?  Which literalist will I support?  I refuse to participate. 

I will not live by a literalist interpretation of the bill of rights that says all speech is just fine and dandy.  Nor will I live by a literalist interpretation of religious toleration that says all religious actions and statements should be equally respected and valued.  Instead I live in a nuanced world where our higher values of love and justice are given greater authority to test and discern a way through complicated situations.  Of course Islam should be respected.  But violence and murder are in no way a faithful response to disrespect.

My point in bring this up is to show that your stories matter and how you interpret your stories matters, and it matters not just when you are in prayer or worship – it matters on the global stage in contemporary affairs.  The world is made of stories and events unfold along the lines of these stories.  It is true for religious beliefs, it is true for political and social affairs, and it is true for our personal lives as well.  Myths and stories hint not only at insights to daily political motifs.  They are also the original self-help manuals.  Consider the truths they reveal for your personal and spiritual life.

The limits of our personal stories are the limits of our living.  Our reading (from David Loy’s The World Is Made of Stories,) mentions an example of an anorexic girl who looks in the mirror and sees herself as overweight.  Body image is a question of your story.  There are countless similar examples: do you cast yourself as a helper, as a victim, as a person of power or one without power?  Is yours a story of success or failure one in which those terms don’t apply?  Meaning is made through story.

Here is an example of one of my personal stories.  I have several.  One is about growing up the youngest, another focuses on divorce and alcoholism, a third story of me is one of music and theater, and still another is the story of being a young father and husband.  Each one contains truth about me, each is mostly factual and partly fabricated, and all of them tell me who I am.  “All my stories are true, and most of them actually happened.” (from Letters to a Buddhist Jew) The one I will tell you now has been an important one for me.

We have, within each of us, echoes of memories beyond us.  There are traces of lives and loves which are not ours, and yet belong to us and shape who we are and how we see the world.  I am a fourth generation Unitarian Universalist. 

My mother’s mother’s mother, Cora Arvilla Beadle Miller, was one of the founding members of the Old Stone Universalist Church of Schuylur Lake, NY.  That is the same church where my mother’s mother, Marie Elizabeth Miller Strong, played the organ and was Superintendent of the Church School, and where my mother’s father, Ashley Walter Strong, was Moderator and then President of the New York Convention of Universalists in the mid 1950’s.  It is the same church, The Old Stone Universalist Church, where my mother, Elizabeth May Strong, now a retired Minister of Religious Education, grew up and began teaching when she was in eighth grade.

We have, within each of us, echoes of memories beyond us; traces of lives and loves which are not ours, and yet belong to us.  My mother’s mother’s mother was a church builder.  May I be so blessed as to be the same.    

Anais Nin said “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”  David Loy writes “A story is a point of view.  There is no perspectiveless perspective.”  So prod your stories, learn their messages and their perspectives.  Every story is a message aimed.  There are no random stories of worth.  You are a storied soul.  The whole question of meaning is tangled up in the stories.  Stories such as religious creation stories are not meant to be heard as historic fact.  They are intended as statements of identity.  We each live by personal stories that shape us and define us.  We can choose our stories and our roles in those stories.  None of us can change events and situations, but with effort we can control our responses, our interpretations, our definitions of ourselves in the face of it all. 

So, “Shanah Tovah!”  May you be inscribed in the book of life for a good year.  May your story unfold with blessings and meaning and joy.

In a world without end,

may it be so