Better To Light One Candle

Sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
December 12, 2004

She wasn’t the best mother, but she was voted the most admired woman in America. She lacked self confidence and was painfully shy much of her life, yet she became known as "the First Lady of the Western World." Admonished for interfering in affairs of state, she was the eyes and ears of the longest-serving U.S. president. Raised in a wealthy, cloistered society that knew only its own, she spent her life as a champion of the underdog. Eleanor Roosevelt was no saint, but she was a woman ahead of her time, who employed her talents and position in the service of social change.

As a widow, she was asked by Harry Truman to be on the first American delegation to the United Nations. She chaired the commission that created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She called it a Magna Carta for all humankind and believed it was the greatest accomplishment of her life. The Magna Carta, as you may know, established the rights of English citizens vis-a-vis their king. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted among representatives of the people of the world to provide a universal standard to which all humanity could aspire and against which all governments could be measured.

Adlai Stevenson, a dear friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s, wrote a tribute of her the day she died. It was printed in The New York Times the following day, November 8, 1962. He said of her, “What other single human being has touched and transformed the existence of so many? She walked in the slums and ghettos of the world, not on a tour of inspection, but as one who could not feel contentment when others were hungry …  I have lost more than a beloved friend. I have lost an inspiration. She would rather light a candle than curse the darkness, and her glow has warmed the world.”

Now, Adlai Stevenson is popular in these parts, not only because he was a Democratic presidential candidate from Illinois, but because he was an active Unitarian, (that’s for another sermon). His theology is summed up by the pithy statement he made famous: It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

You have likely come across these good words. For me, they are on a pin for Amnesty International on my altar at home. I’m curious of its derivation. Some people say an ancient Chinese proverb. Likely, however, I can’t find the source. Several internet sites attribute it to Eleanor Roosevelt. Again, I can’t find any record of her ever saying it, but she certainly lived its wisdom. Several sources attribute it to the motto of the Christopher Society. What is the Christopher Society? There are different ones, none of which provided me confirmation. All sources agree, Adlai Stevenson popularized the phrase in his eulogy for Eleanor Roosevelt.

It makes it all that more fitting that Amnesty International now uses the phrase. Amnesty International was formed the year Eleanor died. The human rights organization seeks to uphold what Eleanor Roosevelt felt was her greatest achievement. This week marks the 56th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948. Many pooh-poohed the document then in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, as do many today as our nation carries out a war on terror. It is a dark time when considering what’s going on in Iraq, in Israel and Palestine, in Sudan, in several Latin American countries, in American military prisons. There is plenty of reason to despair. It may seem a lost cause in many places, but thousands upon thousands of people continue to believe it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness, even if it means, as it does in too many places on our planet, to risk imprisonment, torture, or death.

This week is also the celebration of Hanukkah, a Jewish holiday that calls for the lighting of candles when darkness descends. And so I want to share with you the original Hanukkah story.

Nearly two centuries before Jesus’ birth, Jerusalem was ruled by a harsh Syrian King, Antiochus Epiphanes. The Jewish homeland of Judea had been conquered just decades before by Alexander the Great. Hellenistic rule and culture sought to compromise Jewish identity. Then, under Antiochus, Jewish religion was banned--circumcision, kosher food, and Jewish Sabbath observance all became crimes punishable by death. It was a cruel, bitter time for Jews. Worse, some Jews cooperated with their oppressors. The enticements of cosmopolitan culture of Hellenistic Syrians coupled with their overwhelming military power compelled many Jerusalem Jews to submit willingly to Antiochus’ demands.

Mattathius wasn’t among them. Fleeing the Holy City with his five sons, they became known as the Maccabees, who organized a seemingly futile revolt against Antiochus's army and its Jewish collaborators. The Greeks had far superior armor and weaponry and numbers. After three years of bloody struggle, the Maccabees amazingly bested their foes and recaptured Jerusalem.

When the Maccabees reached the Holy Temple, they found it utterly desecrated. In the Holy of Holies, which Jews regarded as the dwelling place of God, lay the severed head of a pig. The altar was profaned, the gates burnt down, the courtyards overgrown with weeds. Instead of throwing up their hands in despair, they went right to work, restored their temple and when they rededicated it, the ceremonies lasted for eight days. Every year since, those eight days have been celebrated as Hanukkah, which means dedication.

According to tradition, the ruined temple, only one bottle of oil remained, enough to last but a single day. Yet that oil miraculously burned eight days. For many, Hanukkah celebrates that miracle. I am coming to believe that this perspective undermines the deeper meanings of Hanukkah.  Besides, the story of the oil isn’t mentioned in early Jewish texts, for hundreds of years following the supposed incident. So what is the meaning of Hanukkah beyond the miracle of the oil? For me, Hanukkah is a story of conquest, a story of dedication, and fundamentally, a story of hope.

As a story of conquest, Hanukkah tells the story of religious oppression. As my colleague John Millspaugh writes, “Hanukkah is a story of the physical conquest of the Jewish people, yes, but perhaps even more sinister, it is the story of the seduction of their minds and hearts. Through their public institutions and events, the ancient Greeks systematically promoted their own ends in Judea. Their methods were quite successful—they hooked many Jews, like fish on a line. So the holiday of Hanukkah in our modern age becomes a time to consider—“How have I been hooked?” It’s a time to become reflective, to ask, “Who or what has gotten hooks into me, and is cheerfully stringing me along? Who has taken over some part of my mind and heart for their own purposes, and done me harm in the process?”  Maybe it is an industry that has convinced you that you can find happiness through its products or services, or that it really is okay to overlook its cruel methods for the sake of its bottom line. Maybe it’s a politician who has persuaded you that thinking for yourself is unpatriotic. Maybe it is someone in your personal life who has convinced you that your behavior determines their happiness or fulfillment. Hanukkah is a time to consider how our minds and hearts and spirits have been the object of another’s conquest; it’s a time to recognize subtle invasions and full-scale occupations. Time to begin noticing if our most holy temple has been ransacked and waters poured on our holy fires, and time to begin doing something about it.”

Hanukkah is also a story of dedication. The word Hanukkah literally means dedication, both in terms to dedicate oneself to what one is committed as well as to re-consecrate. So Hanukkah is a time to reflect on to what we dedicate ourselves as well as what we need to re-consecrate in our own lives.

Hanukkah is also a story about hope, radical hope. It is a story of carrying forth in the face of overwhelming odds. There was little expectation the Maccabees would prevail, yet they held out. They had only their own indomitable spirit to rely on. Any neutral observer would have said that their struggle was useless and defeating. Yet the sons of Mattathias held to their convictions, refusing to capitulate to the demands of a tyrannical king, refusing to depart from their religion in the slightest degree.

Their story speaks to the modern condition. From a, quote, “objective” observer, hope often appears irrational. All over the world, prisoners of conscience are tortured, detained for simply disagreeing with the state or resisting tyrannical authority. Their plight appears to many as futile and self-destructive. Yet they do what I believe all authentically religious people are called to do—to hold on to hope, radical hope.

All around the globe, people are giving of their lives for the sake of this hope, even if it means imprisonment, torture, or death. Sometimes that hope is born out in history, such as in the lives of Nelson Mandela and Gandhi. Much more often, the devoted have lives cut short, but without whom the likes of Mandela and Gandhi could never have succeeded.

What I am calling hope isn’t the same as the kind of hope that many religions promote through a messiah. That kind of hope is simply the mixture of expectation and desire. A number of modern thinkers appropriately call this form of hope into question. But if one limits hope to this conception, then there is no truly sustaining hope. Rami Shapiro defines hope in this manner. In his words, “Hope is focusing on what you wish to happen rather than accepting and dealing with what is actually happening. Hope is living one step ahead of reality; but as Rabbi Hillel taught, now is all there is.”

Religion in our world too often has a messiah complex. Every major religion has created messiahs. Messiah based religion puts its hope in an idealized future, with the accompanying belief that there will be a perfect world someday and the believers will be rescued from this imperfect present. This is what I call utopian hope.

Our faith tradition has no messiah figure that will make everything right. Instead we put our hope in the human capacity to be touched and transformed, because those of us who have been touched and transformed through genuine human interaction know this is ground enough on which to stand and carry forth into the night. We are called to a sustaining form of hope.

The kind of hope I am talking about is not utopian hope. It isn’t the kind of hope that many religions evoke when faith is grounded in the belief of a future messiah. The kind of hope I’m talking about is radical hope. When embracing the courage to think critically about one’s situation, it is difficult to avoid falling into despair. This is the existential condition. We human beings are trapped in the mess of the world with no way to ever fully escape it. But that isn’t the end of the story as it is for the likes of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, and many secular philosophers. There is another kind of hope found, as Cornel West notes, in the blues developed by African Americans, in Lucian of the Roman Empire, in Cervantes of the Spanish empire, in Chekhov of the Russian empire, in Eleanor Roosevelt’s quest for universal human rights. In this season of gathering darkness, we too are called to light unlikely lamps of courage and hope.

Cornel West points out that radical hope is grounded in what “the Enlightenment did not adequately articulate: the courage to care, to feel deep agony and anguish, to deal with the tears generated by the suffering that people experience—…[radical hope] is also rooted in the blood-drenched tear-soaked traditions of resistance and critique—and in the agency of the wretched of the earth. The courage to hope, like laughter and dance, is an attempt to endure, to persevere, to fight, and to struggle come what may. Nothing can extinguish or crush radical hope—no matter what we continue to think critically about, care deeply for, or hope substantively to achieve.”

Eleanor Roosevelt discovered this within her own privileged life. Mattathias and his sons embodied it as do prisoners of conscience all over our world and those who work tirelessly for their release. This wisdom awaits all who give of themselves for the sake of cultivating a better present rather than relinquish it in favor of materialism or a messiah. It is what sustains all who cast their lot with those who are marginalized and insist on holding onto hope.

As Rabbi Arthur Waskow reminds us, commenting on the Hanukkah story, "There is no use pretending that the sun is always bright; there is no use pretending that the moon is always full. It is only by recognizing the season of darkness that we know it is time to light the candles."

What forms of conquest do you need to resist in your life? To what do you need to re-dedicate yourself? What in your life needs to be re-consecrated? Answer genuinely these questions and the sustenance of radical hope will be yours. May we light candles when darkness descends.

Blessed be. Amen.

 

© Copyright 2004 Alan C. Taylor, All Rights Reserved.