Sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
March 27, 2005
First Reading:
from Jesus and the
Disinherited by Howard Thurman
Howard
Thurman was a professor at Morehouse and Howard Universities and then Dean of the Chapel at Morehouse and then
Boston
University. He
then moved to San Francisco
to pastor the first interracial congregation in the
United States.
There
is one overmastering problem that the socially and politically disinherited
always face: Under what terms is survival possible? The crucial problem of
Judaism was to exist as an isolated, autonomous, cultural, religious, and
political unit in the midst of the hostile Hellenic world. In the midst of this
psychological climate Jesus began his teaching and ministry. His words were
directed to the House of Israel, a minority within the Greco-Roman world,
smarting under the loss of status, freedom, and autonomy, haunted by the dream
of the restoration of a lost glory and a former greatness. [Jesus’] message
focused on the urgency of a radical change in the inner attitude of the people.
He recognized fully that out of the heart are the issues of life and that no
external force, however great and overwhelming, can at long last destroy a
people if it doesn’t win the victory of the spirit against them. “To revile
because one has been reviled—this is the real evil because it is the evil of the
soul itself.” Jesus saw this with almighty clarity. Again and again he came back
to the inner life of the individual. With increasing insight and startling
accuracy he placed his finger on the “inward center” as the crucial arena where
the issues would determine the destiny of his people. …
He
recognized with authentic realism that anyone who permits another to determine
the quality of his inner life gives into the hands of the other the keys to his
destiny. …
The basic
fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and
thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed. That it became,
through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used
sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that
it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. “In him was life; and the life was
the light of men.” Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh
courage; for he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the
three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no
dominion over them.
Second Reading:
from
Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Bonhoeffer was an evangelical minister who
resisted the German Nazis and was arrested in April of 1993. In June of 1994, a
year before he was executed, he wrote the following:
Who
am I? They often tell me I would step from my prison cell poised,
cheerful and sturdy, like a nobleman from his country estate.
Who am I? They often tell me I would speak with my guards freely,
pleasantly, and firmly, as if I had it to command.
Who am I? I have also been told that I suffer the days of misfortune with
serenity,
smiles and pride, as someone accustomed to victory.
Am I really what others say about me?
Or am I only what I know of myself?
Restless, yearning and sick, like a bird in its cage,
struggling for the breath of life,
as though someone where choking my throat;
hungering for colors, flowers, for the songs of birds,
thirsting for kind words and human closeness,
shaking with anger at capricious tyranny and the pettiest slurs,
bedeviled by anxiety, awaiting great events that might never occur,
fearfully powerless and worried for friends far away,
weary and empty in prayer, in thinking and doing,
weak, and ready to take leave of it all.
Who am I? This man or that other?
Am I then this man today and tomorrow another?
Am I both all at once? An imposter to others,
but to me little more than a whining, despicable weakling?
Does what is in me compare to a vanquished army,
that flees in disorder before a battle already won?
Who am I? They mock me these lonely questions of mine.Whoever I am, you know, O
God. You know I am yours.
Sermon:
Easter
poses a difficulty for many Unitarian Universalists for whom Jesus’ life was
more important than his death. We’re uncertain about how to treat Easter Sunday.
I’ve heard sermon titles of colleagues that reflect this discomfort, such as
“You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down”, or “Disappointed Tomb Raiders”. My colleague
Daniel Budd says that a congregant charged with placing an ad in the local
newspaper, suggested as the headline for their Easter ad: “Join us. We’re not
sure what happened.”
There are a
few things that scholars agree on. Jesus was a spiritual teacher who sought to
reform the Jewish tradition and was killed, likely crucified. He had a religious
vision that spoke to people but he wasn’t well known during his lifetime.
Somehow, over the centuries, his memory and teachings spread throughout the
world.
I grew up
Unitarian Universalist in a small fellowship and was taught by omission that
there really wasn’t much in the figure of Jesus relevant to my life and to what
is important. It wasn’t until I went to seminary that I learned what Jesus’
teachings and the story of his resurrection have to teach religious liberals.
Although we don’t affirm a literal reading of the story, it is possible to get
inside the story and discover wisdom to carry us forth.
Howard
Thurman, arguably the most influential African-American theologian in the
twentieth century, is responsible for getting me passionate about Jesus. I
hadn’t realized that Jesus was a Jew, a poor Jew, among an oppressed people,
second class citizens with little influence in worldly affairs, that often
suffered persecution. His religious vision spoke to people who had their backs
up against the wall, people for whom nothing was certain in life, except that
someday they would die. Any person, he taught, no matter their social standing,
no matter their riches, no matter their health, any person can walk in the paths
of love and fairness and forgiveness, and thus each and every person has the
capacity to bring light to the world. And more than that, each person cultivates
a personal integrity when walking these paths, an integrity, a dignity, that
cannot be taken away, even in death. Jesus called upon people to secure the keys
to their own dignity and to come into community with others who committed to
walk their shared path together.
For the
first time in my life, I realized that I could value the teachings of Jesus
without affirming the teachings about Jesus. In other words, I found deep
meaning with the pre-Easter Jesus rather than the post-Easter Jesus. But still I
saw Jesus as a tragic figure. One who defied worldly authority and whose life
was cut short because of that defiance.
It was the
life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer that inspired within me a deeper
appreciation of the post-Easter Jesus. Bonhoeffer came from a completely
different background than Thurman. Bonhoeffer was an upper class Lutheran
Evangelical minister from Germany. When he studied theology at Union in New York
City, he disdained the sloppiness of American theology. A friend took him to
Ebeneezer Baptist Church. Bonhoeffer was riveted by the African-American
congregation in which he taught Bible study. There he encountered a faith
community completely different from the one in which he was born. He witnessed a
deep spirituality forged in the fires of pain and struggle and loss. He learned
a different language of compassionate witness, a language that served him as he
returned to Germany just as Adolph Hitler came to power, a language that would
inspire him to lead the resistance movement. When it became dangerous for
outspoken critics of fascism, Bonhoeffer’s friends at Union secured a fellowship
for him in the United States,
and Bonhoeffer returned to New York City. After a few long days of
soul-searching, he decided to return to his homeland against the advice of his
friends and colleagues. Bonhoeffer couldn’t abandon his countrymen who were
resisting Hitler, and further he would have no claim in the reconstruction of
the Christian community if he stayed away. Bonhoeffer actively helped Jews to
flee, and he took part in a plot to assassinate Hitler. When he was imprisoned
for his assistance to Jews, he began writing. His letters from prison reveal a
transformational shift in his theology. He no longer could believe that God was
fully in control.
Bonhoeffer
believed most churches had lost the essence of Jesus’ teachings. He tried to
understand why the vast majority of decent German Christians supported Hitler or
at least refused to join the resistance. Why did they watch silently as Jewish
families were forced from their homes and rounded up never to be seen again. Why
did they do nothing when they knew it was wrong? For Bonhoeffer, the answer was
simple: human folly and moral ambiguity. For Bonhoeffer, folly is capitulation
in the face of overweening power. Most German citizens were unable to imagine
and carry out forms of resistance. Any possible resistance appeared paltry
compared with the outrages of genocide. And then there was the uncertainty of
the consequences for oneself and one’s family. As for moral ambiguity, most
people simply rationalized their passivity because resisting fascism required a
degree of immorality: lying, deception, and breaking the law.
Bonhoeffer
lived from a foundation of compassionate witness. And that clarity of vision
gave him the sense of self that prompted his resistance and later commanded the
respect of others, even his prison guards. It also cost him his life. Yet he
willingly submitted, for he knew there is far more to life than avoiding death.
His memory has inspired countless others, including myself, who humbly reflect
on the nature of compassion in the face of worldly power. And therein lies, for
me, the post-Easter Jesus. The story of the resurrection.
Rob
Eller-Isaacs sums it up, “Jesus did not live and die that we might all bow down
and worship him. He lived and died so that, by his example, we might learn to
live and die for love. The story begins when God puts on flesh and comes to walk
among us. It ends, or perhaps it just begins again, when God's spirit is uncaged
by death, when the one who walked among us dies an individual and is born again
as a community. It's not so hard to understand. Easter happens every day. Easter
happens each time those who mourn rise up again to honor those they've lost by
loving life more dearly. Easter happens every time we stand in solidarity with
those who've lost all hope and say, "hold on, we're at your side." And Easter
happens every time, in spite of woe and death, in spite of the multitude of ways
we've turned away, in spite of our failures and denials, we say yes to life.
On this
Easter Sunday as everyday, I wrestle with how to be an embodiment of compassion
in our world, how to resist the temptations of complacency. The questions
Dietrich Bonhoeffer expressed in his poignant poem also plague me. Who am I? Am
I what others say about me? Or am I what I know myself to be, little more than a
fearful weakling that struggles to be faithful to my convictions?
And in my
darkest moments, I ask the question raised by this morning’s hymn, “Mother
Spirit, Father Spirit”, penned by Norbert Capek, a Unitarian minister who served
a flourishing congregation in Prague, and who, like Bonhoeffer, actively
resisted the Nazis, was imprisoned and executed at a concentration camp. The
hymn that survives him asks the most important theological question of his time
and ours: Where is God? Or to put it differently, how can we have faith in our
broken world?
Bonhoeffer
answers this question in a letter in prison shortly after the plot on Hitler’s
life failed. "I discovered later, and I'm still discovering right up to this
moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to
have faith. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties,
problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we
throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own
sufferings, but those of God in the world. That, I think, is faith."
What
sufferings of God are begging for our attention?
Our lives
are filled with potential distractions and siren songs. Our world is filled with
fear, deception, and hatred. Is not our job as people of liberal faith to
transcend these hounds of hell and to find ways to assist others to do likewise?
To engage in community of like-spirited individuals, to honor the memory of
those who have gone before us, with the likes of Sandy Loevy, Matilda Cobb,
Barbara Heine, Ruth Schutt? The list goes on and on.
The aspect
of the resurrection story most difficult and yet the most real, at least for me,
is the awful abyss that occurs following the brutal death of Jesus, or the
untimely or horrific death of those, well-known or little-known, for whom their
death is a shattering of innocence. It’s when we have been left shattered,
sobered with reflection, and we know we can never be the same. It is only in
this abyss where new life comes—when we go through it, when our lives are
stripped to the bone. In that place, we can learn that it is each and every one
of us who ultimately do resurrection—and that we do it in community. In so
doing, we are the ones who lift up, protect the good, and make a dwelling place
for the holy.
This past
week, I saw the first spikes of green jutting out of the earth. My heart leapt
and was joyous all day. Nothing could foil my gladness. That too is a part of
the resurrection story. For every Jesus, for every Gandhi, for every Thurman,
for every Bonhoeffer, they were at one time only a small shoot, that through the
practice of compassionate witness, their influence grew into mighty trees and
underground their compassion took root and spread into the lives of others. Just
like a lone weedy flower emerging from the crack of a concrete sidewalk, so does
compassion burst forth with new life providing hope, voicing dissent, resisting
evil, and rejoicing in the miracle of life that inevitably finds a way.
The word
compassion comes from the Latin cum patior, which means “to suffer with”.
Many words in the English language convey the depth of human connection such as
empathy, altruism, sympathy, and love, but “compassion” is the only term that
implies kindness without condition. The Hebrew word for compassion, rachamim,
is the plural of the word for womb. Could compassion be tantamount to living
from the womb of God? Within the resurrection story, compassion is what is left.
Marcus
Borg, a nationally recognized Jesus scholar, writes, “[I]t is only when we
appreciate … Jesus’ emphasis on compassion that we realize how radical his
message and vision were. For Jesus, compassion was more than a quality of God
and an individual virtue: it was a social paradigm, the core value for life in
community. To put it boldly: compassion for Jesus was political. He directly and
repeatedly challenged the dominant sociopolitical paradigm of his social world
and advocated instead what might be called a politics of compassion. This
conflict and this social vision continue to have striking implications for the
life of the church today.”
Forty
years ago, many mainline churches seemed to understand this. They led the charge
for the civil rights movement and provided the backbone for the anti-war
movement. Howard Thurman never was outspoken about politics in his sermons.
Thurman did not attend political rallies, engage in civil disobedience, or take
part in marches; however, he was a chief mentor to many of the civil rights
movement’s organizers and planners. A considerable amount of their theological
reflection and dreaming took place in Thurman’s office and home.
Compassionate witness takes different forms from political activism to public
service to heeding the inward call to act on the behalf of others. However,
compassionate witness cannot be done in a vacuum. It takes a community.
For Jesus,
compassion was breaking the purity codes of his time, inviting people to claim
an inner authority that no one could take away, not even in the face of death.
For Bonhoeffer, compassion called for breaking the law to help save lives and
called for the shedding of blood to prevent an evil man from murdering millions
of people. Compassion called for him to willingly sacrifice his own life. For
Thurman, compassion is the cornerstone of human dignity and the inspiration to
overcome fear, deception, and hatred, so as to be fully free as a human being to
have a creative response to life. For each of them, compassion is a form of
power, relational power.
And what is
it for us, in our individual lives and within our community?
It isn’t
the kind of power that one can lord over others. It isn’t worldly power or
hierarchical power. It is the power available to bring compassion into the
world. It very well may appear as a remote spark, a dim star, and may take
considerable effort to discern clearly, but it always calls us to affirm the
humanity of our neighbor and to shatter the hard reality constructed by evil. It
is the power of the soul, the power that ignites the flame of conscience, the
power of integrity, that power that no one can take away. For love is stronger
than death, and the gifts of the spirit are forever. That is what the
resurrection story teaches us. Resurrection occurs every day, each time the
compassion of another lives on in the hearts and actions of those of us alive
today.
Happy
Easter. Blessed be. Amen.
© Copyright 2005 Rev.
Alan Taylor, All Rights Reserved.
