Of the 1%, By the 1%, For the 1%: Economic Justice in America

Reading before the sermon is available here.

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“What can we say,” asks economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, “about the [Occupy Wall Street] protests? First things first: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right. A weary cynicism, a belief that justice will never get served, has taken over much of our political debate…. In the process, it has been easy to forget just how outrageous the story of our economic woes really is. So, in case you’ve forgotten, it was a play in three acts. In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins. And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis. Given this history, how can you not applaud the protesters for finally taking a stand?”

That’s Paul Krugman, and he paints a picture of an economic world that is not so much trickle-down as trickle-up.

We’ve already heard the statistics. In the past 30 years, the top 1% have gotten richer and richer—massive economic expansion at the top—while the middle class and the working class are just treading water, or worse. One of the examples of “worse” being: absorbing the costs of all the financial recklessness at the top. “Suffering for the consequences of the bankers’ sins.”

Just sit with this for a moment. Just absorb this big picture. Paul Krugman calls it “outrageous.” What do you think? What do you call it?

America is supposed to be something so very different than this. A land of opportunity. “Of the people, by the people, for the people.” Not just some people, but all…. That’s what it’s supposed to be….

But, as economist and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, it’s more like Russia with its oligarchs. It’s more like Iran. In an article from last May, entitled “Of the 1%, By the 1%, and For the 1%,” he reminds us of how, recently, governments around the world have been toppled by people taking the streets in millions to protest political, economic, and social conditions. Egypt, Tunisia, Libya. “The ruling families elsewhere in the region,” he says, “look on nervously from their air-conditioned penthouses—will they be next? They are right to worry,” says Stiglitz. “These are societies where a minuscule fraction of the population—less than 1 percent—controls the lion’s share of the wealth; where wealth is a main determinant of power; where entrenched corruption of one sort or another is a way of life; and where the wealthiest often stand actively in the way of policies that would improve life for people in general.” And then Joseph Stiglitz says, “As we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question to ask ourselves is this: When will it come to America? In important ways, our own country has become like one of these distant, troubled places.”

It’s outrageous. A sorry, sad state of affairs…. No wonder we have the Occupy Movement, which Al Gore described as “a primal scream of democracy”…

So it’s a time for honesty. A time for speaking up. Dr. King once said that “our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” “Every man,” he said, “must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”

That’s what he did. Dr. King. He broke the silence. He walked in the light of creative altruism. Listen to his words from a speech delivered the year of my birth, in 1967: “I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the oil?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the iron ore?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that’s two-thirds water?’ These are words that must be said.”

Dr. King was passionate about economic justice in his day, and his words are still powerful for us in our day of continuing economic outrageousness. We’ve got to break the silence. Spirituality that’s real and authentic calls us to this. The Spirit of Life calls us to this. The God of the Hebrew prophets calls us to this. We’ve got to find a way to walk in the light of creative altruism. We’ve just got to.

“There are words that must be said.”

So today, let’s say some of them. Speak of our system of trickle-up economics. Speak of what this is doing to our nation. Speak of why it’s like this. Speak of how to, as Dr. King put it, “restructure the edifice which produces beggars.” Speak of where to go from here…

Starting with this historical observation, coming from Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their excellent book entitled Winner-Take-All-Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Hacker and Pierson remind us that the period existing from the end of World War II until the early 1970s was a high-growth period, economically speaking. America busting out at the seams… And during this period, incomes grew at a slightly faster rate at the bottom and middle of the economic distribution than at top. If ever there was a time we could call the American economy “trickle down,” this is it. But starting in the 1970s, everything got flipped upside-down. Things started to stall, or go worse, for middle and working class folks, and the money started to flow with increasing speed straight to the top, to the upper class—the top 1 percent. Included in this 1 percent as a substantial majority are company executives and managers—the “working rich” of the executive world. Their share of income, says Hacker and Pierson, “has increased from around 8 percent in 1974 to more than 18 percent in 2007—a more than twofold increase. If you include capital gains like investments and dividend income, the share of the top 1 percent has gone from just over 9 percent to 23.5 percent.” It’s trickle-up economics. Has been since the 1970s. No more booming (and more egalitarian) economy of post World War II America. That’s long gone….

Now perhaps the situation wouldn’t be so dire if we could point to mitigating factors: say ease of social mobility, or abundance of workplace benefits, or availability of money to buy things. But we can’t. What we have is vanishing benefits instead, and regular people like you and me drowning in debt. As for the question of social mobility (want to spend just a little more time covering this one): Hacker and Pierson say that “American mobility may well have declined over the last generation, even as inequality has risen. This is true of both individual mobility (‘Am I richer than I was a decade ago?’) and of intergenerational mobility (‘Am I richer than my parents were?’). […] The American dream,” says Hacker and Pierson, “portrays the United States as a classless society where anyone can rise to the top, regardless of family background. Yet there is more intergenerational mobility in Australia, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Spain, France, and Canada. In fact, of affluent countries studied, only Britain and Italy have lower intergenerational mobility than the United States does (and they are basically even with the United States).”

(Our closest neighbor Canada is just sounding better and better, isn’t it?)

It’s a trickle-up economic system we live in. Hacker and Pierson call it “Richistan”—as opposed to “Broadland,” where incomes are growing at the same rate for everyone, and you’ve got social mobility, you’ve got solid workplace benefits, you’ve got free-and-clear money to buy stuff. That’s Broadland. But Richistan is a different place entirely. And Richistan is hurting America.

Now you know, some people just don’t believe it. The insight that a hyperconcentration of wealth in just 1 percent of a country like America is a bad thing is NOT necessarily obvious. New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof reminds us that “Economists used to believe that we had to hold our noses and put up with high inequality as the price of robust growth. But,” he goes on to say, “more recent research suggests the opposite: inequality not only stinks, but also damages economies. In his important new book, ‘The Darwin Economy,’ Robert H. Frank of Cornell University cites a study showing that among 65 industrial nations, the more unequal ones experience slower growth on average. Likewise, individual countries grow more rapidly in periods when incomes are more equal, and slow down when incomes are skewed.”

In other words: more equality, more growth. We saw this in post-World War II America, and we could see it again. But, you know, just because economists might be seeing the light doesn’t mean that the rest of America is. Ideas that the experts used to believe but which they now know as false still have staying power. They stick around. In public discourse, they continue to sound soo believable. So full of “truthiness.” Here’s an example of one: “If taxes are raised on the rich, job creation is going to stop.” I’m guessing you’ve heard this one before… This is just another way of saying something that economists used to believe, but no longer… We know Republicans believe it. Democrats, if they don’t also believe it, just don’t say anything… (By now you can see that neither Republicans nor Democrats are gonna come out of this sermon unscathed.) Both of them, saying: Don’t raise taxes on the rich, now. Don’t touch them. Do it, and the economy is going to crash….

But I like what business entrepreneur Nick Hanauer has to say about all this. First he introduces himself: “I’m a very rich person. As an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I’ve started or helped get off the ground dozens of companies in industries including manufacturing, retail, medical services, the Internet and software. I founded the Internet media company aQuantive Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) in 2007 for $6.4 billion. I was also the first non-family investor in Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)” That’s Nick Hanauer. Not too shabby, right? (He could take all of us out for lunch everyday for the rest of our lives….) But now listen to what he says next: “Even so,” he says, “I’ve never been a ‘job creator.’ I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.
That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be. […] Middle-class consumers [are the ones who create jobs], and when they thrive, U.S. businesses grow and profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.”

That’s Nick Hanauer. Besides injecting some needed wisdom into the conversation, he also reminds us that we can’t stereotype members of the 1 percent, we can’t automatically assume anything about them. Being wealthy is just not an intrinsically evil thing. So … if you are a member of the 1 percent and you’re here today, I want to ease your mind … you don’t have to be worried about being tarred and feathered… I say this because some of the Occupy Wall Street “primal scream” rhetoric can get pretty hot and heavy… And also because it’s just human nature to want to scapegoat.

OK, let’s press pause for a moment. Take stock. Whoo! How many books and scholars and authors do you think I’ve quoted from in this sermon so far? Twenty bucks to the person who gets the right answer…. Just kidding! But there’s so much to say, so many voices wanting to be heard. And I’m only just scratching the surface! It’s not a simple issue, this issue of economic justice. Requires the kind of spiritual practice that involves a lot of reading and a lot of research and a lot of underlining…

And now, in our remaining time together, just two more things: what explains this outrageous economic inequality, and where to go from here… (Small issues, I know… saving the best for last!)

Hacker and Pierson, in their book Winner-Take-All-Politics, speak powerfully to the question of why. Why the trickle-up system, why Richistan? What causes it all? The orthodox answer is to point to abstract economic forces that are beyond anyone’s control. Laborsaving technologies, which have reduced the demand for many “good” middle-class, blue-collar jobs. Globalization, which has created a worldwide marketplace, pitting expensive unskilled workers in America against cheap unskilled workers overseas. Abstract economic forces like this, beyond anyone’s control. This is the orthodox view, the standard view.

And Hacker and Pierson reject it, see it as nothing less than propaganda that both disempowers and empowers: disempowers the many who want to create a more just and fair economy, and empowers the few who love Richistan and want more of it—enables them to get off scott free…

Hacker and Pierson’s argument is fundamentally a historical one. A shift towards Richistan occurred in the 1970s—during the Carter administration—because business and the super-rich began a process of political organization, enabling them to pool their wealth and contacts to achieve dominant political influence. One statistic Hacker and Pierson cite refers to the number of companies with registered lobbyists in Washington. That number grew from 175 in 1971 to nearly 2,500 in 1982. Money poured into lobbying firms, political campaigns, and ideological think tanks, and this is what powered the Republicans throughout the 1980s, gave them a clear advantage over the Democrats. As for the Democrats: they’ve been able to reduce that advantage only by becoming more like Republicans: more business-friendly, more anti-tax, and more dependent on money from the super-rich. That dependency has severely limited both their ability and their desire to fight back on behalf of the middle class (let alone the poor).

I love me my Obama, but can we honestly say that his administration is fighting the trickle-up, Richistan reality of our economy the way it needs to be fought? Can we?

The root cause is the money game in politics. The evolution in the nature of the vote in our democracy. “From one propertied man, one vote; to one man, one vote; to one person, one vote; trending to one dollar, one vote.” The language here comes from Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence. His colleague Joseph Stiglitz agrees: “Wealth,” he says, “begets power, which begets more wealth. During the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s—a scandal whose dimensions, by today’s standards, seem almost quaint—the banker Charles Keating was asked by a congressional committee whether the $1.5 million he had spread among a few key elected officials could actually buy influence. “I certainly hope so,” he replied. The Supreme Court, in its recent Citizens United case, has enshrined the right of corporations to buy government, by removing limitations on campaign spending. The personal and the political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.” That’s Joseph Stiglitz.

And this takes us to where to go from here. The reason for where we are now is not outside of our control. We can take control. We can turn this thing around before it is too late. Absolutely, we can talk about specific policy goals—and when the Occupy Wall Street movement starts doing this, it’ll be more powerful. Creating a truly effective wall of separation between our elected representatives and business lobbyists. Debt relief for working Americans. Investments in infrastructure to help create jobs. No more tax cuts for the wealthy. Specific goals like this. Call on our elected politicians to champion them, or throw the bums out of office. Call on the Obama administration to do more.

But even more important than all this is the central moral decision each of us must make in our hearts, to help create a more just society. “Every man,” says Dr. King, “must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.” It is about light. Got to keep shining a light on what’s happening. Got to enlighten people. Nick Hanauer, one of the exalted 1 percent, gets it, and that gives me hope. He knows that his fate is bound up with the fate of the 99 percent. “We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” Listen to Dr. King! The greater the inequality, the worse off we all are. It slows down economic growth. It prevents job creation. Trickle-up and Richistan are bad for the 99 percent and ultimately bad for the 1 percent—and you better believe, the people who used to be the 1 percent in Egypt know this all too well. They know. We need to know it too. Greed is not good.

Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: The Prophets

The voice of Isaiah, one of the classic Hebrew prophets:

In the year that King Uzziah died [probably 738 BCE.], I beheld my Lord seated on a high and mighty throne; and the skirts of His robe filled the Temple. Seraphs stood in attendance on Him. Each of them had six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his legs, and with two he would fly. And one would call to the other, “Holy, holy, holy! The Lord of Hosts! His presence fills all the earth!” […] And I cried out, “Woe is me; I am lost! For I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips; Yet my own eyes have beheld the King Lord of Hosts.” Then one of the seraphs flew over to me with a live coal, which he had taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. He touched it to my lips and declared, “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt shall depart and your sin shall be purged away.” Then I heard the voice of my Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” And I said, “Here I am, send me.”

That’s Isaiah speaking—six hundred years after Moses had his own burning bush experience with God, six hundred years after Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and helped establish them as a new people in covenant with God not to become another Egypt, not to re-establish the oppressive social and political dynamics of that nation, but to become “a priestly kingdom and a holy nation,” a people committed to a social justice vision of “shalom” which means “well-being, peace, and wholeness.”

But it’s a vision in trouble, six hundred years after Moses. The people entered the promised land, under the leadership of Joshua, but there was to be no centralized organization. For three hundred years, Israel was a confederacy of various tribes, each led by a military ruler. Did it work? The Bible suggests no, for in it we find this continuing refrain: “In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” So, around 1000 BCE, a king was established: first Saul, then David, then Solomon. These are names many of us already know. But the tensions and complexities would ultimately prove too great for the kingdom to stay single. After Solomon’s death in 922 BCE, the kingdom split into northern and southern halves; and it is out of these kingdoms that we hear voices like that of Isaiah, voices which spare no feelings in their protest against what’s happening. Absence of shalom. People who were once slaves in Egypt, recreating Egypt among themselves! “I live among a people of unclean lips,” says Isaiah. So: “Here I am, send me.”

Biblical scholar Gerhard von Rad defines a Biblical prophet as “one who participates in the emotions of God.” Something happens to the soul of one who becomes a prophet; the guilt that prevents them from being fully present to life is burned away—a glowing coal is touched to their lips—and that’s when their sense of participating in a life larger than their own really and truly begins. The guilt is burned away; self-centeredness burned away; and from that point on, they live for the message, which is: We can be so much better than we are right now. Things are not good right now, but we can change before it is too late and all the negative karma we’re generating right now catches up with us. So wake up! Get shaken up, and then shake up the status quo! Make the vision of shalom real! (Side note: I know that the Biblical prophets never spoke of karma—I’m just throwing that word in to keep things “diverse.” Keep you on your toes…)

Just listen to what another prophet says, Amos (contemporary with Isaiah, although they would not have known each other, since Isaiah was in the southern kingdom and Amos was in the north).

The words of Amos:

Thus says the Lord:

You oppress the poor and crush the needy. You trample on the poor and take from them taxes of grain. You trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land.

Thus says the Lord:

Woe to you who lie on beds of ivory and lounge on your couches, eating lambs from the flock and calves from the stall; who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp, and like David improvise on instruments of music, who drink wines from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of [the poor]. Therefore you shall now be the first to go into exile.

Thus says the Lord:

I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies…. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

Thus says the Lord:

But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

That’s Amos. And if he was a prophet in the sense that Gerhard von Rad defines prophets, then what we are hearing are the emotions of God conveyed through human language. Could you worship a God who feels like this? Who stands for the poor and the needy and is outraged by their unjust treatment? Who is angry at the complacency and utter neglect of the self-indulgent wealthy? Who prefers justice and righteousness over anything else and will never be fooled (as many of us are) by shows of religious piety? Could you love and serve a God like this? (Of course, you don’t HAVE to: we are Unitarian Universalists after all! But … COULD you?)

And already we are deep into our topic for today. “Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: the Prophets.” These remarkable, unforgettable voices of conscience to their own day and to ours. People whose lips have been touched by a live coal; people who feel a Larger Life surging through their own and sending them into the world to help people wake up and remember the vision of shalom, remember what life is really all about. There are silences in this world that are so hard to break … silence of groupthink, silence of complacency, silence of unexamined assumptions, silence of sheer habit … and the job of the Biblical prophet is to break that silence, speak truth against the power of all that oppressive silence.

Now a moment ago, after quoting the prophet Amos, I asked if you could love and serve the God that Amos serves, the God whose feelings Amos feels. But don’t answer yet, because the picture is incomplete. For there’s another side to the prophetic message. It’s not always and exclusively along the lines of outrage and anger and “get your act together or else.” It’s not just a broken record… We also find, among the prophets, feelings and words that are breathtakingly energizing and positive and encouraging…. We’d have to, if they’re truly feeling the feelings of God, because the God that they served is the God of “Let there be light!,” the God who delights in creativity and in renewal.

A classic example of this is the writer called “Second Isaiah.” One thing you have to know about the Bible is that one book does not necessarily mean one author. Appearance is not reality. Chapters 1 through 39 of the book of Isaiah are about the prophet whose lips were touched by a live coal, the Isaiah who said, “Here I am, send me,” the Isaiah who spoke to the northern kingdom in the 700s BCE. But then we have chapters 40 through 55, and these chapters—just tacked on to the earlier ones—refer to events hundreds of years later, after all the destruction that the First Isaiah predicted would happen really came to pass. Jerusalem destroyed by the Babylonian empire in 586 BCE and the Israelites kicked out of their homeland, exiled, orphaned, lost, bereft…. This was their 9/11 … worse than 9/11. The writer of chapters 40 through 55 speaks to these broken people, conveys God’s emotions to them where they are. This is Second Isaiah, and here is a sampling of what he says:

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid.

In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places plain.

Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you.

God gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not be faint.

Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. For behold, I am about to do a new thing; even now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.

This is the Second Isaiah. This is what shalom looks like. God’s feelings conveyed here are the feelings of an encouraging coach, a faithful mother, an irrepressible visionary, a passionate poet, an unfailing lover. So the question again: could you love and serve a God like this? The God who says, “For behold, I am about to do a new thing; even now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” These are the among the most beautiful words ever written, words which are themselves like a burning coal, and when they touch our lips, they burn away guilt, they burn away fear, they burn away despair, and we are liberated into a larger hope. Despair is perhaps the hardest silence of all to break, but the Biblical prophet breaks it. “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” 2500 years ago, the Israelite exiles had to believe, in order to come back to their homeland, once they were allowed to do so, and rebuild their nation; and we today, in a world that seems in so many ways on a path of soul destruction and ecological disaster, have to believe, too….

“Behold, I am about to do a new thing…” Just let the burning coal of that touch our lips…

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It’s soo good. The prophets are soo good….

But there’s bad and ugly too. Gotta take a look at this before we’re done today. (You knew the other shoe had to drop at some point, right?)

One thing I can only mention in passing, and then encourage you to read about in our study text ( Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, by Marcus Borg) is this: dueling prophets. People with opposite messages, all claiming to feel the feelings of God, all claiming to speak for God (which is unheard of today, right?). For example, in 1 Samuel 9: 11-22, the prophet Samuel basically says, “Thus says the Lord, if you go ahead and establish a monarchy, you are going to regret it. Bad news.” But then, in 2 Samuel 7:1-17, the prophet Nathan basically says, “Thus says the Lord, I love the fact that you are going to establish a monarchy. Nothing but good times ahead.” Whaaaat?

Clearly the question of distinguishing between true and false prophets was (and is) a burning issue, a complex one. Often the yardstick becomes a matter of consequences: does what the prophet say come to pass? Are the results of putting a prophet’s ideas into motion constructive or destructive? A reasonable yardstick: but not so helpful in the moment when you have multiple strident voices up in your face and you have to make a decision now….

Last thing I’ll say about this is an observation about the Bible. I love the Bible exactly because it is unafraid of featuring multiple voices. Lots of people are anxious to dress the Bible up in its Sunday best … but the Bible is more like the kid who, just five minutes after the mom or the dad has combed its hair and smoothed its dress, is already a mess, hair askew, grass stains on its pants, scuffed up shoes, juice stains and cookie crumbs everywhere. The Bible is messy, and that’s why I love it. It’s a book for human beings, by human beings. That’s what it is.

Bad and ugly in it, to complement the good. And now, more bad and ugly: Jonah. Let’s finish up with Jonah.

What do you think about that story? Here’s a hint: the essential message has pretty much nothing to do with the whale… (Some people in fact speculate that the whole episode with the whale is in there in the same way that a dramatic car chase might be smack dab in the middle of a chick flick—as a way to throw a bone to someone who might otherwise die of boredom…) God sends Jonah to Ninevah to convey a message: clean up your act, or else. But Jonah doesn’t want to go. He hates the Ninevites. Haaaates them. So God bless stubborn Jonah, he tries resisting his calling, gets on a ship going the opposite direction, to Tarshish. But what happens when you resist and deny your call in life? God doesn’t let you off the hook; and you become a danger to other people too. Horrible weather threatens to sink the ship; Jonah owns up to being the cause of it all; he says to them, “Throw me overboard;” but they have more love in their hearts for him than Jonah has for the Ninevites and they try everything they can to avoid having to throw him overboard, but it’s no use, in the end they have to. Which leads to the episode with the whale, which God calls to save Jonah, and good thing that the whale, unlike Jonah, doesn’t resist its call—it goes where it is sent, swallows Jonah up, and there Jonah stays until he’s spat out, all slimy and smelly. That’s when he reconsiders his stubbornness and makes his way to Ninevah, conveys God’s feelings of outrage at their cruelty and wickedness, and guess what? The Ninevites hear it, they see the error of their ways, they repent. Pisses Jonah right off! So he goes and sulks. Leaves the city, finds a hill to sit on. “Oh Lord,” he actually says, “please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die rather than to live.” But God does something very different, very … crafty. He calls to a seed to grow into a bush, to give Jonah shade (and once again, happily, the seed responds to God’s call in a way that puts Jonah to shame). Overnight, the seeds grows into a bush, the bush gives delightful shade to Jonah, and it makes Jonah feel a lot better. Doesn’t want to die so much anymore. But then God calls a worm to come and attack the bush, the worm responds to the call (again, putting Jonah to shame), the bush withers overnight, and next day, Jonah is back to “just kill me now.” This is when God appears. God says, basically, You are all upset about a bush that I made grow up overnight. Do you know how much goes into growing up a people, like the Ninevites? And what a tragedy it would be to have to destroy an entire city? And in the end, the entire story hangs on that line of questioning. We don’t know whether Jonah ever lets go of his hatred for the Ninevites. We just don’t know.

I mean, what kind of prophet is this Jonah anyway? It’s as if only a part of his lips got touched by God’s burning coal. The bullet just winged him. He’s just half-baked. Everything in the story God calls to responds immediately—except for Jonah. It’s as if Jonah is the kind of prophet who’s addicted to feeling God’s feelings of outrage and wrath but can’t feel God’s feelings of compassion and love too. That’s a dangerous kind of prophet. We have prophets just like this today….

But now, at this point, we need to know some history. Ninevah was the capital city of Assyria, and guess what the Assyrians did to the Israelites back in the eight century BCE? Tortured them. Crushed them. Exiled them. Violated their nation to the core. Jonah hates them because of this. Hates them with a pure hate. Vengeance.

Knowing this, does this make Jonah’s behavior in the story more understandable?

It also ought to make the Bible even more precious to us. For the Book of Jonah, if it is anything, is a satire on a certain trend within Israelite religion, which saw the Hebrews as loved and cared for by God exclusively. The book of Jonah is itself a work of prophetic criticism towards this “some are saved, others are damned” mentality which the Jonah character so stubbornly held on to, despite all—and which too many people today hold on to for dear life as well.

But the God of this prophetic story says no to all of that. God’s feelings of love and compassion extend to all, from Ninevite to Israelite, from liberal Unitarian Universalist to fundamentalist Church of Christ, from President Barack Obama to President George W. Bush. No favorites for God….

Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you.

Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. For behold, I am about to do a new thing; even now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.

Could you love and serve a Universalist God like this, who feels this way about everybody, no exceptions? Could you?

Holiday Letter to You

The holidays: a season of Christmas cards, Hanukkah cards, snail mail cards and internet cards, cards of all sorts through which we reach out to family and friends near and far away, to let them know that we’re thinking about them and that we love them.

And sometimes, in the cards, we include letters. Updates on main events of the past year.

Humorist Bob Schwartz puts his finger on one kind of thing we might see in these holiday letters:

Dear Friends, Family and those others who are somehow lucky enough to receive this Holiday Greeting letter,

This year was a fantastic, spectacular, phenomenal and incredible year for the Schwartz family. Life is so wonderful, so prosperous, so stupendous and astounding that everything is coming up roses and what good would it all be if we didn’t have the opportunity to brag about it with you?

Sometimes, in other words, the holiday letters are all about bragging rights, whose kids are best, whose family and life is shiniest. I’ve read a few real letters like this, and maybe you have too.

On the other hand, there’s the kind of letters which don’t so much brag as stay on the surface of things. After all, how much can you say in a holiday letter? And, really, how much do you want to say? What if tis year you lost your job? What if someone you love got cancer, or you are desperately lonely, or your child has been having a hard time at school? What if?

But this is life. This is our humanity. Shiny and dull. Stuff to brag about, and stuff to grieve. It’s just as William Blake once wrote:

Joy and woe are woven fine,
Clothing for the soul divine:
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

Words that have been in the back of my mind as I’ve been thinking about my holiday letter this year, to you. Here it is:

Dear Friends:

As I reflect on this past year, what comes up for me most forcefully is what’s on the inside, what’s been moving in my spirit and soul. Chalk that up, I guess, to being a natural introvert.

To say what I need to say, I’m going to draw on a memory of something that happened several years ago, when my family and I were still living in Chicago. It’s about the time Laura, Sophia, and I went downtown to the Kristkindle Mart to do some Christmas shopping.

The Kristkindle Mart features the wares of craftspeople and merchants from Germany and Russia and all sorts of other far flung places. Foods and sweets are also sold, as well as beer and a holiday drink they call glug. A few words about this glug. It’s red wine heated and mixed with spices, goes down like fire, and it feels GOOD. The secret ingredient has got to be brandy or something equally potent. It’s powerful stuff.

So anyhow–I’m wandering around this outdoor faire and the light is starting to fade. I’ve got my hot cup of glug in hand and, despite the Chicago cold, I’m feeling pretty toasty. Laura and Sophia are off looking at a booth somewhere. I hear Christmas music nearby, and eventually I find three men playing “Silent Night” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and other favorites. I stand there and, in the fading light, enjoy the smiles of the people surrounding the musicians, their red cheeks, the rising cheer.

It’s then that I notice, nearby, the almost life-size manger scene. I wander over to it, not really expecting that it will be any different from any other manger scene I’ve ever run across before. I stand there, looking, and the critical voice in my head starts up. It didn’t really happen like that, it says. It says, By the looks of the statues, you’d think that everyone involved in the gospel story was a blond-haired and blue-eyed WASP.

And so on. I almost turn away, but my eyes fall on the tight circle of Mary holding the baby Jesus, and all of a sudden a realization comes to me, like a bolt out of the blue, and it zaps the cynical voice in my head, replaces it with a floating feeling of utter awe. What had always been before my eyes, I now suddenly see: that the birth of this great liberating prophet and spiritual teacher—this Bearer of the Light—happens in a time and place that goes contrary to all expectation. Greatness, goes the expectation, ought to be received by greatness. The Buddha was born in a palace. But it is all so different for the Christ. The birth of this Son of God happened in a cold and smelly manger, in an obscure backwater town of Judea, in the time of Imperial Rome with all its crushing greed and brutality. In circumstances even this unpleasant, even this obscure, even this unjust and hopeless, God can be born.

All this is what I realized, standing there in the Chicago cold, looking upon the manger scene. Didn’t matter anymore, all the ways it might have neglected the historical facts. Like a classic work of fiction—which tells moral and spiritual truths better than any work of fact—it was conveying one of the deepest promises of the human spirit: that Bearers of the Light like Jesus can be born anywhere. Justice, compassion, hope: born here and now. Born to you and born to me.

And that’s the story. It happened a while ago, but it says it all for me this year. My continuing sense that something is trying to be born in and through the imperfect circumstances of our lives—something truly wonderful, a creative courage and love that can save the world. I’ll admit—some days I wake up and in no way can I feel the miracle that is trying to be born. I witness the suffering around me—people struggling with illness, or unhealthy relationships, or resentments. I read the headlines, and every day brings evidence of crushing brutality and injustice. I see the brokenness—the lack of compassion and lack of hope. Those are bad days. I know you know what I mean.

But the mystery is real, nonetheless. The miracle is real. With or without the glug, Christmas reminds us about one of the deepest truths of the human spirit.

For you, as for myself, I wish for eyes of faith to see this unfolding miracle. In the manger of our world which can be so often unpleasant, so often obscure, so often hopeless: the miracle is nothing less than the birth of God.

Life is so short. Let’s live it to the full, and let’s never stop expecting miracles to happen, here and now.

Happy holidays, and much love.

Anthony

The Truth Smirks

Video clip before the sermon

jesus-is-a-liberal-democrat

Sermon

Writer Mary Hirsch has this to say about humor: it’s like a “rubber sword—it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.”

Go back in time with me to 2006, to a special event of that year called the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. Washington DC. Media movers and shakers in the house, political movers and shakers in the house. Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report is the main speaker for the evening. He’s looking President George W. Bush right in the eye when he says:

“We’re not so different, he and I. We get it. We’re not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We’re not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say ‘I did look it up, and that’s not true.’ That’s ’cause you looked it up in a book.

“Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works. Every night on my show, The Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, OK? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. I call it the “No Fact Zone.” Fox News, I hold a copyright on that term.

“I’m sorry, but this reading initiative. I’m sorry, I’ve never been a fan of books. I don’t trust them. They’re all fact, no heart. I mean, they’re elitist, telling us what is or isn’t true, or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was built in 1914? If I want to say it was built in 1941, that’s my right as an American! I’m with the president, let history decide what did or did not happen.”

That’s Stephen Colbert. Pulled out his rubber sword and made his point. A former aide of the President said that “[Bush] had that look that he’s ready to blow.” As for the rest of us—at least for many of the rest of us—we were cheering, and still are. Feeling relieved. The reality before our eyes—denied or obscured in so many ways—finally being affirmed.

Bring out the rubber sword! The point needed to be made. Colbert was speaking to something that is one of the most troubling features of our social and political landscape today: people voting against their own interests because they equate smart with tricky and dumb with honest. Factinistas and brainiacs: bad. Looking it up in your gut: good.

As the saying goes, in politics, when you are explaining, you are losing. So don’t explain, don’t look it up in books. Go, not for truth, but truthiness. The no-fact zone. Thomas Frank, author of the best-selling book What’s the Matter With Kansas, speaks to this as he acknowledges voters’ preference for emotional engagement over reasonable argument. People who are hurting in this nation, in love with politicians whose policies only serve the interests of the very few who are very well off. Thomas Frank says, “You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining. It’s like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy.”

In a time like this, we need the Stephen Colberts and Jon Stewarts of the world. One of the things we affirm as Unitarian Universalists is “the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.” We’re going to see it in action later today, during our congregational meeting. And we want to see it in America at large. We want to see it healthy and vibrant. That’s what my sermon today is all about. The points that Colbert and Stewart are making about this with their rubber swords.

One of them has to do with the media’s role in creating an American citizenry addicted to the high fructose corn syrup of truthiness.

This is real. Just listen to these results from Farleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind poll. Came out just last month. “The real finding,” says the report, “is that the results depend on what media sources people turn to for their news. People who report reading a national newspaper like The New York Times or USA Today are 12-points more likely to know that Egyptians have overthrown their government than those who have not looked at any news source. [On the other hand,] people who watch Fox News, the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18-points less likely to know [this] than those who watch no news at all.” Commenting on this, Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson and an analyst for the PublicMind Poll, says, “Because of the controls for partisanship, we know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being more likely to watch Fox News. Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all.”

In other words, better to watch no news at all than Fox News, with its Bill O’Reillys and Sean Hannitys and all the shouting… How many of you are positively shocked by this revelation? Your world has just been rocked?

But it’s just not Fox News. It doesn’t have proprietary rights to all the shouting, not by a long shot. Take CNN—one of its current events debate programs that aired from 1982 to 2005, designed to allow the exchange of opinions between liberal and conservative pundits. Know which one I’m talking about? Crossfire.

Right before Crossfore was cancelled, guess who came on the show? Hint: it’s a guy with a rubber sword. Jon Stewart. This is a little of what it sounded like…

“So I wanted to come here today and say… Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America. 
See, the thing is, we need your help. Right now, you’re helping the politicians and the corporations. And we’re left out there to mow our lawns.”

This is Stewart chatting with hosts Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, and slowly, they’re realizing that Stewart is bringing something very different from what they THOUGHT he’d be bringing….

Back to Stewart: “But the thing is … you’re doing theater, when you should be doing debate, which would be great. […] It’s not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery.”

Now things are heating up.

STEWART: You know, the interesting thing I have is, you have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably. 



CARLSON: You need to get a job at a journalism school, I think. 



STEWART: You need to go to one. 



CARLSON: Wait. I thought you were going to be funny. Come on. Be funny. 



STEWART: No. No. I’m not going to be your monkey.

CARLSON: Is this really Jon Stewart? What is this, anyway?



STEWART: It’s someone who watches your show and cannot take it anymore.

**

I think a strong argument can be made for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as a new breed of public intellectual. Legal scholar Richard Posner defines a public intellectual as “a person who, drawing on his or her intellectual resources, addresses a broad though educated public on issued with political or ideological dimensions.” Now it used to be that public intellectuals were like Ralph Waldo Emerson or William James or John Dewey: serious but accessible, profound but practical. Nobody’s monkey. Today, however, with the ascendency of truthiness, and schlocky punditry everywhere, what we need is the rubber sword. People who are willing to be monkeys for the greater good. Funny—with a point.

Absolutely, Jon Stewart wasn’t going to be Tucker Carlson’s or Paul Begala’s monkey during that particular episode of Crossfire—but it’s a different story on The Daily Show. Speaking truth to power, through hilarious irony. The gap between what’s said and what’s meant. Here’s an example, from one episode:

STEWART: Obviously what’s going on in the Middle East is awfully complicated. The fuel that fans the flames: The rival factions within Islam, both of them seem to have antipathy towards the US, Israel. It seems like there are some authoritarian regimes that are using proxy countries to fight their wars. It’s a very difficult situation to grasp. Luckily, news organizations are on hand to give us context and ask the important questions.

cut to PAULA ZAHN, on CNN: (The graphic up on the screen says “Armageddon?”) Are we really at the end of the world? We asked Faith and Values Correspondent Delia Gallagher to do some checking.

Here’s another example. The context is former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, taking a question during one of his speeches. Camera is on the questioner:

QUESTIONER: I’m Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency. Why did you lie to get us into a war that was not necessary, that has caused these kind of casualties?

RUMSFELD: First of all, I haven’t lied.

cut to STEWART: Oh, he didn’t lie. Well, that settles it. There’s pound cake in the back, we can have a good time, and uh—

back to RUMSFELD: It appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction.

MCGOVERN: You said you knew where they were.

RUMSFELD: I did not.

STEWART: See? He never said he knew where they were.

RUMSFELD: (from a video three years earlier) We know where they are. They’re in the area around Baghdad.

STEWART: Well to be fair, Rumsfeld probably never saw that episode of Meet the Press.

Yet another example: this one took place shortly after the Washington DC-area sniper shootings of 2002. Stewart is speaking: “By watching the 24-hour news networks, I learned that the sniper was an olive-skinned, white-black male—men—with ties to Son of Sam, Al Qaeda, and was a military kid, playing video games, white, 17, maybe 40.”

And on and on. Add to this the over-the-top graphics and music, a Senior Correspondent for everything, segments like “Great Moments in Punditry as Read by Children,” and Lewis Black, and it’s monkey time, but with a point. Makes you laugh for five seconds and think for ten minutes. Cuts through all the addictive high fructose corn syrup truthiness and all the No Fact Zones and gets to something real.

It’s the Colbert Report too. Listen to Colbert commenting on Governor of Texas Rick Perry’s “pro-Christmas” ad, from just a couple of days ago. Rick Perry saying, “I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in a pew every Sunday to know that there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas. “Yes,” agrees Colbert, “Governor Perry is right. Thanks to the gays, our children can’t openly celebrate the birth of our savior in school, and yet, these gays in the military can openly celebrate their favorite holiday: being away from their families, risking their lives in Afghanistan.”

It’s the rubber sword. And that’s the second point that Stewart and Colbert have to make. The power of humor. As Chinese proverb says, “one never needs their humor as much as when thy argue with a fool.” “If you can find humor in anything, even poverty,” says Bill Cosby, “you can survive it.”

It even makes you smarter. That Farlieigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind Poll? It found that when Jon Stewart (ands no doubt Stephen Colbert) talk about something, viewers pick up a lot more information than they would from all other news sources. Study after study repeatedly shows this, across the years. Contrary to Bill O’ Reilly’s famous comment that Daily Show viewers are all “stoned slackers,” they’re in fact the best-informed of all. All the wit keeps them on their toes, makes them sharp. Thus this observation from philosopher Terence MacMullan: “The greatest irony of the show is that even though Stewart isn’t a news anchor and his writers couldn’t get jobs on Family Guy, they’re still able to exceed, in many respects and for a fraction of the cost, the quality of news shows produced by real journalists.” Stewart and Colbert are the new breed of public intellectual: liberating the popular mind from the fog of truthiness—and doing it through a lot of monkeying around…

Liberating that popular mind for a purpose—that’s the third and last point I want to explore. The purpose being reintroducing democracy as a viable way of political life. Reminding us that we are better than we think, we are up to the challenge of American politics.

It’s what 2010’s Rally to Restore Sanity was all about. More than 200,000 people in attendance. Stewart and Colbert in top form. Colbert doing his trademark shtick as a right-wing blowhard fearmongerer, playing against Stewart’s motto, which is, “I may disagree with you, but I’m pretty sure you’re not Hitler.” Sanity vs. Fear, Peace Train vs. Crazy Train. In the Rally’s finale, a giant paper-mache puppet of Colbert (“Fearzilla”) was brought on stage to symbolize his superiority. Peter Pan—played by John Oliver—then appeared and led the crowd in a chant that caused Colbert and his puppet to melt into the stage, thereby handing final victory to Stewart’s message: “Take it down a notch for America.”

We can do this. We are better, said Stewart in his closing remarks, than the political process suggests or how our media portrays us. The image of Americans reflected back to us from all that, he says, “is false. It is us through a fun house mirror, and not the good kind that makes you look slim in the waist and maybe taller, but the kind where you have a giant forehead and a butt shaped like a month-old-pumpkin and one eye.” “We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is—on the brink of catastrophe—torn by polarizing hate and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done, but the truth is we do. We work together to get things done every damn day!” “Most Americans,” he says, “don’t live their lives solely as Democrats, Republicans, liberals or conservatives. Americans live their lives more as people that are just a little bit late for something they have to do—often something that they do not want to do—but they do it–impossible things every day that are only made possible by the little reasonable compromises that we all make.”

We love John Stewart and Stephen Colbert because their rubber swords make the ultimate point that we don’t have to live our lives stuck in tiny dogmatic boxes separate from each other, and the best we can ever do is just shout at each other. We love them because they are stealing our reality from truthiness in politics and truthiness in the media, stealing reality from this and handing it right back to us; helping us step back from voting against our best interests; strengthening us with the power of humor, amidst all the shouting and all the spin; reminding us and encouraging us, we can do this, we can make America work, I Am America and So Can You. It comes as a huge relief.

Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: The Books of Moses

“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor,” writes the author of the Biblical book of Deuteronomy. “He went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us by imposing hard labor upon us we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors. The LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and the LORD brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”

This is one of the greatest stories every told.

Now, I didn’t grow up in church, so the first time this story dawned on my consciousness was not in a pew and not in a Sunday school class. It was in the basement of my Baba’s house, close to Christmastime, back when I was something like eight years old. I was in my jammies, and Baba had put on her pink polyester nightgown, and I sat down in her lap, and her face was shiny with Oil of Olay, and I could smell that sweet smell as I nestled into her softness. Lawrence Welk was just finishing up in an explosion of tiny bubbles, and at that point Dido got up to go to bed—he was an early to sleep, early to rise kind of guy—but we stayed put in the TV room because Baba wanted to watch something called The Ten Commandments. Something about Charlton Heston (and whenever she talked about Charlton Heston there was a strange sound in her voice my eight year old mind could never decode, but I got it now, she loooved Charlton Heston…) OK, so The Ten Commandments is on, it’s unfolding before me scene by scene—the baby Moses found in a basket on the Nile river by Pharoah’s daughter; the adult Moses as a Prince of Egypt; the time he kills a guard abusing one of the Israelite slaves; when he discovers who he really is; when he’s brought before his Pharoah father in chains; when he’s banished to the wilderness by Rameses (played by the awesome Yul Brynner); when he encounters God in the burning bush and is called to liberate his people … on and on and on … all these scenes unfolding before the eyes of this eight year old … and let’s not forget the soundtrack: duh duh duh duh, duh DAH DAH DAH DAH!! Heady stuff! And then that scene, after the ten plagues, after the flight from Egypt, when the Israelites find themselves at the shore of the Red Sea, jammed right up against the edge, and the Egyptian army is hot on their heels, and they are between a rock and a hard place, but Moses holds out his arms and lifts up his staff (duh duh duh duh, duh DAH DAH DAH DAH!!) and the waters part and the Hebrews surge forward and the day is saved and I thought to myself O MY GOD what IS this? This is COOL! THIS is a story.

One of the greatest stories ever told.

And not just in my eight-year-old self’s opinion, or that of Judaism and Jews worldwide. It’s religion writer Bruce Feiler’s argument too in his book America’s Prophet: How the Story of Moses Shaped America. A fascinating read, tracing the history of the impact of the biblical narrative of the Israelites on twenty generations of Americans and their leaders. The Pilgrims who left England in 1620 bound for the freedom of America, describing themselves as the chosen people fleeing their pharaoh, King James. “On the Atlantic, they proclaimed their journey to be as vital as ‘Moses and the Israelites when they went out of Egypt.’ And when they got to Cape Cod, they thanked God for letting them pass through their fiery Red Sea” (Bruce Feiler). The Biblical narrative gave the Pilgrims not only language for what they were doing, but logic, justification. “The only reason they could have done that,” says historian Tim Safford—one of many of Bruce Feiler’s interviewees—“The only reason they could have done that is because they had a narrative larger than their own lives. A narrative of God delivers me through the Red Sea. A narrative that if you’re lost in exile, you can still remain holy. A narrative of life is stronger than death, love is more powerful than hate. If you do not have a narrative larger than the world gives you, you’re just going to get sucked up by the world.” That’s Tim Safford. The Pilgrims were just not going to allow themselves to get sucked up by the world. The Founding Fathers of this nation weren’t going to allow that either. Or Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Or leaders of the civil rights movement like Martin Luther King Jr. They had a narrative larger than their own lives, given to them by the Bible, and though the story was thousands of years old, about people long dead and gone, it was nevertheless absolutely new, exactly what they were going through in their own day, it spoke straight to their lives. Oppression in Egypt; liberation from all that through Exodus; the newly freed slaves, despite all the murmuring and complaining, becoming a united people and a new nation at the foot of Mt. Sinai; the new nation entering into the Promised Land. All of it—America’s story too.

“The universe,” says poet Murial Rukeyser, “is made of stories, not atoms.” The universe, nations, and people like you and me. Made of stories.

In our remaining time together, I want to go deeper into this greatest story ever told. Apply the three Bible reading principles that scholar Marcus Borg talks about in his Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, the companion book to this year-long sermon series.

Principle #1: It’s never “God says”; it’s always “humans say.” You just can’t open your Bible and go, “Let’s see what God says about that.” No. The Bible is a record of humans in quest for meaning and truth in life, humans striving for love and justice yet always creatures of their day, always limited by this. We take what the Bible says very seriously but not slavishly—don’t want to make it yet another Pharaoh in our lives!

Second principle: Look to the past. As Bible readers we will miss so much of the meaning if we are not aware of historical context. As Marcus Borg likes to say: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” Gotta know the history to truly understand.

Finally the third principle: Don’t allow the Bible to stay stuck in the past. And don’t dismiss a passage if scholarship or science tells you that it can’t be literally true. Don’t cut it out. Instead, go deeper. Read it as poetry, read it as metaphor, read it as myth that conveys psychological and spiritual truth. The voice of the Bible can comfort you, can challenge you, can speak to your spirit right here and right now. It will read you more than you read it, if you let it.

These are the principles: and now let’s get to work.

We begin with what history and scholarship and science have to say. Frankly it’s not pretty.

Something happened in the thirteenth century BCE. The book of Exodus tells us that six hundred thousand Israelite men plus women and children left Egypt—presumably a total of two to three million people. That’s not a small thing. Leaves a HUGE footprint. Yet to this date, no archaeological evidence has ever been found. No contemporaneous writings from the ancient Near East—nothing outside the Bible—makes even a passing mention of it. Definitely nothing from Egypt, which is really strange. As Jonathan Kirsch in his book Moses: A Life puts it, quite ironically, “The ancient Egyptians, who were compulsive chroniclers of their own rich history, somehow failed to notice the presence or the absence of a couple of million Israelite slaves, the afflictions of the Ten Plagues, the plague that took the life of every firstborn child on a single night, of the miraculous events of the Red Sea.” That is just strange. It is no wonder that even the most pious scholar who chooses to honestly grapple with this fact can come away with a most unpleasant feeling of uncertainty. What really happened three thousand plus years ago?

And then there are the miracles. Did those really happen? Just think of the list of plagues Moses unleashed upon Egypt: the Nile water turns to blood, frogs fill the land, gnat attack, fly attack, all Egyptian livestock die, everyone gets boils, the mother of all hail storms wreaks havoc, locust attack, thick darkness covers the land for three days, and then all the firstborn die. Now I know and we know that there are earnest people who have a scientific explanation for every one of these things. The Nile water, for example, did not really turn to blood; it was just a profusion of some microorganism that made the water intensely red. But this misses the point. So much of the Israelite story is premised on God acting in a way that upsets the natural order of things. God’s mighty hand acting supernaturally. And here is where the problem lies. Not just in terms of science, but also in terms of theology. The problem is one of consistency. Lack of consistency says something bad about God and bad about the Exodus story as a whole. Take God first. If God used to act in the world like the Bible tells us, but no longer, despite situations of intense suffering in the centuries ever since (including the Holocaust), then God clearly plays favorites, God is abusive in God’s absence, God is a jerk. As for the story itself: if the liberation of the Israelites was possible only because of genuine bend-the-laws-of-nature miracles, then how can this possibly speak to us today, when we don’t have the luxury of some Moses wielding God-power as he strides through the halls of Congress and demands that the nonsense end, that our rich-getting-richer and poor-getting-poorer system cease. Back then, it was all duh duh duh duh, duh DAH DAH DAH DAH!! But it’s not like that anymore. All of this is good reason for doubting that the miracles ever happened. Again, not just because science doesn’t like supernatural stuff. But also because the theological conclusions about God we end up with are truly ugly. And this greatest story ever told—Egypt, Exodus, Sinai, Promised Land—falls flat.

So we’re not dealing with a story that is to be taken as literally true. Two to three million Israelites were not a part of the picture; Egypt was not devastated as part of the Israelite withdrawal; there were no miracles. This is the judgment of history and science and scholarship. It’s just not “God says,” it’s “people say.”

So why did the people say it? Why did the ancient Israelites tell the story as they did?

Maybe we can’t take the story literally in all its details, but you know, something must really have happened three thousand plus years ago to those Israelites. “Why,” asks religion writer Jonathan Kirsch, “would the chroniclers of ancient Israel make up something as ignoble as four hundred years of servitude in a foreign land unless it was a fact of their history?” And not just the fact of four hundred years of servitude. Also all the murmuring of the Israelites, there in the desert. Time and again, they are saved from death, and still they complain. They KVETCH. Or they create a Golden Calf that spits in the eye of the one saving them. These are not moments to be proud of. Yet they make their way into the narrative, and that says something. A classic rule of Biblical interpretation puts it this way: where there’s honest disclosure of something embarrassing, you’re probably in touch with the truth.

Something must have happened. Surely, when you consider the spiritual and political vision of the ancient Israelites. The moment God hears his people moaning under slavery, the entire moral focus of the story becomes protesting exploitation of any and all kinds and building a society that nurtures everyone. Thirty-six times, in the Exodus narrative, the Israelites are urged to befriend the stranger, for they were themselves strangers in Egypt. The vision of social justice is paramount. The laws that Moses is purported to hand down from on high: some of them represent the most radical socioeconomic legislation of all time. For example: every forty-nine years, during what is called the Jubilee year, “all debts are to be forgiven, all debtors freed, all workers are to return to their ancestral lands, and all families split by economic hardship reunited. The messages is that the land belongs to God, not humans, and nobody should benefit too greatly or suffer too greatly for their work with God’s bounty.” (Bruce Feiler) Can you imagine a law like that here in America? What would happen if we observed it here and now? No need for the Occupy movement for sure….

Something must have happened—something transformative—to those ancient Israelites. If not duh duh duh duh, duh DAH DAH DAH DAH!! of the supernatural kind, then of a kind more natural but still amazing. Still life-changing.

And that’s what we’re looking for—the potentials for life-change—as we practice the Bible-reading principle that says, Don’t allow the Bible to stay stuck in the past. And don’t dismiss a passage if scholarship or science tells you that it can’t be literally true. Don’t cut it out. Go deeper instead. Read it as poetry, read it as metaphor, read it as myth that conveys psychological and spiritual truth. Let the Bible speak straight to your heart. like it did to that eight-year-old boy curled up in his Baba’s lap, smelling her smell of Oil of Olay, watching the scenes of The Ten Commandments unfold and getting it, getting the amazing message that belongs to no one time in history and to no one nation—the message that whatever form of slavery we are oppressed by, it can still be otherwise, there can still be change, there can still be a Promised Land.

Let the Bible speak. There will always be times we find ourselves at the shore of some Red Sea in life. Know what I mean? You were a slave, and somehow you fought your way out. You got away. But the Egyptian army is hot on your heels—your escape is not gonna be automatic or easy. So you are standing at the shoreline, and you are in a desperate, impossible place, and it’s just like poet Audre Lorde says: you are

seeking a now that can breed
futures

like bread in our children’s mouths…


That’s what you are seeking in the face of fear and pain and chaos

a now that can breed
futures

like bread in our children’s mouths.


So what are you going to do NOW?

Maybe there is no Charlton Heston Moses spreading his handsome arms out wide….
No supernatural guarantees to what you are doing
You don’t know what the end of this story is gonna look like

You know how the story of the Pilgrims ended,
or that of our Founding Fathers
or of the Civil War
or of the Civil Rights movement

You know those stories
all those desperate impossible times
when there were people who, against all odds,
stepped right into the Red Sea,
went right in up to their chests
up to their noses
up to their eyeballs
and THAT’S when the waters parted…

You know how their stories ended
just not your own…

What you DO know is you have to do this
you have to find a new life
you have to find your Promised Land

So step in
live a story in your life
larger than the one the world gives you.
Don’t allow yourself to be sucked up by the world….

Step in

The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice

Story before the sermon

Our reading this morning comes from authors Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham. Their book is entitled The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning.

Once upon a time, but not very long ago, in a kingdom both near and far away, there lived a canny scientist who longed for the love of a beautiful woman. Because his first love was not even science but his own knowledge, wise women were wary of the man, and so he lived a very lonely life.

One day, the man decided to use his science to win love, and he set about to concoct a chemical that would cause the object of his affection to fall madly in love with him. Soon his research succeeded, he produced the chemical, and as luck would have it, at just that time he met a beautiful, talented and good woman—the ultimate woman of his dreams.

The scientist arranged for friends to introduce them, and at their first meeting, he poured his potion into her beverage. Lo and behold, his fantasy came true! The exquisite creature fell instantly and completely in love with him, and they soon married.

But was our hero happy? Alas, no. In a short time, he became gaunt from not eating, his work fell by the wayside, and eventually he could not even bring himself to touch his beloved, as he spent every waking moment torturing himself, trying to devise some kind of test to answer his agonized question: “Would she love me if it were not for the chemical?”

For our scientist did crave love, but love cannot be commanded.

Sermon

In their book The Spirituality of Imperfection, Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham share a story about a time when a group of addiction experts from Russia visited the United States and attended several Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, “hoping to find in those smoky rooms something that could be used to fight the serious alcohol problem in their homeland”:

They listened to the stories, they talked to the A.A. members, and they decided that, yes, there was something here that could help. But what was it, exactly? They couldn’t quite figure it out.

At the end of one meeting they approached their hosts, several of whom were recovering alcoholics. “We want to make alcoholics like that,” they said. “Teach us how.”

The hosts smiled in gentle understanding. “Well, that’s what we’ve been doing this evening,” came the answer. “You see, you learn how to be like THAT only by BEING like that.”

“But,” the Russians sputtered, “surely there must be something you could share with us, a technique, a certain kind of approach, some kind of trick that would make this all a little easier?”

“No,” came the reply. “What you see in this smoky room, what you want to take home with you, is spirituality; and if there is one thing that all alcoholics discover, it is that there are no shortcuts to spirituality, no techniques that can command it, and especially no ‘tricks.’ That’s what we tried to find in the bottle, in booze, in alcohol. It didn’t work. What we have learned is that the only ‘technique’ is what we call ‘a four-letter word’: it is spelled ‘T-I-M-E.’”

**

This morning, I want you to imagine that this space has become one of those smoky A.A. meeting rooms—although in all fairness, there’s lots of meetings these days which are non-smoking… But THIS room is smoky. And you’ve got a Styrofoam coffee cup in your hand. You’re sitting in a fold-up chair. Here we are. Now, you might be wondering why you are here, since you might not have an addiction to alcohol—or to another way of self-medicating like overeating, or gambling, or sex, or enabling someone who HAS an addiction—but maybe by the T-I-M-E our meeting is done you’ll see that there’s wisdom here for you too, whoever you are, in this room where people are working the Twelve Steps in their lives and sharing that with each other.

How many of you are familiar with the Twelve Steps? It’s a set of guiding principles first published in 1939, in the Big Book, more formally known as Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism.

Since then, the guiding principles have been adapted to become the foundation for all sorts of recovery programs: Adult Children of Alcoholics, Codependents Anonymous, Crystal Meth Anonymous, Workaholics Anonymous, Online Gamers Anonymous, and on and on. The American Medical Association summarizes the Twelve Steps as follows: admitting that one cannot control one’s addiction or compulsion; recognizing a higher power that can give strength; examining past errors with the help of a sponsor (experienced member); making amends for these errors; learning to live a new life with a new code of behavior; helping others who suffer from the same addictions or compulsions.

There is a powerful form of spirituality here—that’s what gathers us together in this smoky room, in the T-I-M-E of this morning. That and lots of humor, lots of sayings and slogans. As in:

“How come if alcohol kills millions of brain cells, it never killed the ones that made me want to drink?”

“I’m an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.”

“The good news is you get your emotions back. The bad news is you get your emotions back”

“I would rather go through life sober, believing I am an alcoholic, than go through life drunk, trying to convince myself that I am not”

“Alcohol gave me wings and then slowly took away my sky”

“Resentments are like stray cats: if you don’t feed them, they’ll go away”

“I can’t do God’s will my way”

“The power behind me is greater than the problem in front of me.”

“I used to be a hopeless dope fiend, now I’m a dopeless hope fiend.”

“The shortest sentence in the Big Book is, “It works.”

**

One of the main things that happens in the smoky room of a Twelve Step meeting is storytelling. Rabbi Rami Shapiro speaks to this in his book, Recovery, where he says, “I am not drawn to Twelve Step meetings to listen to people who are perfect; I am drawn to listen to people who are broken and who have found the wisdom in that brokenness that allows them to live in a place of love. […] We don’t ignore the trauma of the past, and our story is still rooted in it, but it is no longer controlled by it. We don’t end up where we began. […] By learning to tell our story over and over, we learn to free ourselves from the emotions attached to it. We begin to tell the story in a detached manner. We own the story; the story no longer owns us.”

Here we are, in this smoky room, Styrofoam coffee cup in hand. And I’m gonna tell my story now, at least a part of it. TRUE story.

Hi, my name is Anthony. [Hi, Anthony]

I remember my Mom drugging as I was growing up—Dad ended up drugging too, but only after I left home for college, as far as I know. Before that, Dad was just Mom’s supplier—and since he was a medical doctor, the supply was endless.

I remember my Mom as either crazy high and rushing around the house, obsessively vacuuming the rugs, compulsively polishing windows and dusting and straightening; either this, or she’d be crashed on the couch, catatonic, dead to everything.

Either way, she was not available to me, and I felt the lack of connection in my body as an insecurity that ate into my child’s heart and made it hard to look into the eyes of my teachers; I felt it as an irritability that would not go away, a restlessness that made it hard to receive things like friendship and fun and peace and just spoiled everything and could only be soothed by busy-ness, activity, movement.

Also by snooping. I was an incurable snoop. What’s in this drawer? What’s in that desk? I marveled at how perfectly everything would be stacked and sorted. It got to be a game, although I learned, only too late, and much to my surprise, that Mom was playing the game too. One afternoon I snuck into the piano room. The rug had been carefully vacuumed in such a way that the tracings of the vacuum left cross-hatching marks. Didn’t pay much attention to that. Passed by the piano (yet another thing I was not allowed to touch) and longingly caressed the polished keys with a finger. Went straight to the cabinet and opened it, looked inside at my Dad’s classical LPs. One at a time, slipped out Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, the Red Army Choir. Looked at the albums, wondered about the music… Knew it was my heritage, since my family had come from that part of the world…. Didn’t linger too long, because my Spidey sense started to tingle… Mom was busy downstairs, but not for long… I slipped the LPs back, slunk out of the room, smiled to myself at my cleverness.

Until later, when Dad came home from work. “Bob, would you PLEASE tell your son not to go into the piano room? I work like a slave all day and I don’t need him going in there messing things up!” Mom found out because my small footprints had ruined the perfect symmetry of the rug’s crosshatching. I hadn’t thought of that.

Mom couldn’t bear my energy. I needed to sit down and shut up. I needed to be still. Being active in the house meant making a mess, and Mom hated messes. She was at war with messes. Mom couldn’t stand a house that wasn’t as sorted and clean as a museum. If I didn’t calm down, she’d put me outside and lock the door, that’s what she’d do. I’d be out there for hours. If I had to pee, it would be in a beer bottle.

One day, I tried a different strategy. Mom was drugging, so why not me? From previous times when I’d been sick with a cold, I’d noticed that the cough medicine Dad gave me made me feel REALLY good. Took me to a place where my body didn’t need to soothe itself through restlessness or snooping. Body felt groovy. Had no problem sitting down and shutting up then. In fact, all felt perfectly right with my world. This stuff was a straight shot to sweetness. I’d think of Mom, I’d think of Dad, and I’d tear up with the gooey feelings of love that I felt. Shortcut to love. The anger—the rage—was pushed aside, and it was a relief. Raging against the people who were your sole source of protection did not feel safe.

So my strategy was sneaking into the laundry room (where the medicines were stored) and stealing a few nips of that cough medicine. Did this early in the afternoon, so I’d have a couple hours to enjoy the kaleidoscope of the day.

Made me into a different kid. One way is this. I used to have this coin bank that looked like a barrel with a bunch of monkeys coming out of it. Smiling monkeys—and on the barrel, these words: “Quit monkeyin’ around and save money.” And I did. Ruthlessly. I was a greedy kid with my money. Didn’t like to spend it; wanted to keep it all because the fuller the bank was, the more I liked the sound when I shook it. Especially in my brother Rob’s presence, making him green with envy. Yeah! Rob was always wanting to borrow money, and I was always pitiless. Never gonna go there.

Until I started drugging. That’s what turned this 1% into a 99%er. Rob, you want some money? Sure! Want some more? Charge you interest? Are you kidding? What’s the matter with me? Nothing! I feel fiiiiine.

Dad eventually found out. Maybe Rob got seriously weirded out at my about-face generosity and complained to Dad. I don’t know. All I know is that when Dad found out, he bent me over his knee, spanked me good. Ordered me never to drink the stuff again. I limped away from the scene wondering why he never drew the line with Mom….

And I never did drink the stuff again. Ironically, I would end up developing a deadly allergy to the codeine that was the active substance in that cough syrup. And while my path since the days of my childhood has not led me into a problem with alcohol, it has taken me into being a super high-achiever, a workaholic, a caretaker … Not that wanting to excel is intrinsically bad, or working hard, or wanting to be a caring person. But since drugs as a way of playing God in my life were out of the question, I took to codependency instead. That’s what worked in my family; that’s what worked to ease the restlessness and irritability and lack of peace that I never stopped feeling. My way of playing God, my way of lying to myself that through carefully honed technique I can command the love that I so craved and still crave. My technique. My insanity.

And that’s my story.

**

If this were a real a real Twelve Step meeting, this would be the time for me to sit down. As another Twelve Step slogan says, to people who are sharing their story, “Be interesting, be brief, be seated.” But seeing that I’m the preacher today, let me tell you another story:

Comes from the tradition of Buddhism. One day, a woman approached the Buddha in tears. She presented him with her dead child and said, “Lord Buddha, I have heard that you can bring the dead back to life. This is my beloved son who died only this morning. I beg you, Lord Buddha, restore him to me.”

The Buddha agreed, provided that the woman bring him a single mustard seed from a home in the village that had not experienced death. The woman ran to the village and went door to door to find even one household that had not been touched by death. But every single one had been touched by death. There would be no mustard seed to bring back to the Buddha. Finally, when she returned to him, her grief was no less but her attitude towards it had changed. She knew the inevitability of suffering and the futility of seeking to make things other than they are. She could now mourn her child and move on.

I share this story because it gets to the heart of the matter. Everybody hurts. Life can hurt us terribly, if not disappoint us deeply. If it’s not a dysfunctional family with a drugging Mom and dealing Dad, it’s something else. Your child dies. Or a shy brown puppy comes into your life (that’s for those of you who were here last Sunday). Whatever it is—it’s always something.

And this so very easily takes us to the reflex response that is at the bottom of every kind of addiction: to refuse to move on, to refuse accepting reality—and this refusal energy morphs into paranoia that reality is out to get you! The essence of every kind of addiction is making war on reality, so that one can live in a world that is perfectly ordered to one’s design, as my Mom wanted to order her house. Seeking out the Buddha so he can bring your child back to life. Trying to be the Buddha yourself, to work a miracle. Playing God. God miracle of codeine-laced cough syrup—shortcut to love. God miracle of perfectionism and workaholism and every other kind of –ism you can think of, in order to force into being states of heart and mind like self-confidence, contentment, peace. “We sought,” says Rabbi Rami Shapiro, “to create for ourselves a world of light alone, and when that failed, we sought to shield ourselves from the dark through acts of self-medication.”

But Twelve Step spirituality says that there’s hope. There’s T-I-M-E. “I used to be a hopeless dope fiend, now I’m a dopeless hope fiend.” “The power behind me is greater than the problem in front of me.”

One of the ways I practice Twelve Step spirituality is through a prayer of my own. I created it in the context of yet another circumstance in which I felt the itch to play God in my life. Being judge, jury, and executioner all rolled up into one. It was years ago. I was sitting on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, watching the fascinating world go by with all its exotic and exciting sights and scenes, but feeling like I was on the outside, looking in. Not able to take it all in, not able to be in the moment and feel joy. Feeling wretched and alone, “other,” left out, ill-prepared for life because I’d grown up in a screwed up family….

Out of this turmoil came the words of a prayer that I continue to pray to this very day, some days more than others…. Something like this:

I forgive all the ways in which my life appears to fall short.
I trust that whatever I truly need will find its way into my life.
I am grateful for what I have.

My holy trinity: forgiveness, trust, gratitude.

My way of doing what the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous says: “ceasing from fighting anything and everyone.” Stopping the war and letting go, letting go of all my pride that says I am entitled to whatever I want. Letting go of pride, letting go of greed for MORE, letting go of the itch to order my world as my Mom tried to order her house … and relaxing. Relaxing into the sea of my life. THIS is the only power I really do have … not hard power to command the world to be as I want it to be, not hard power to command love, but soft power to let go and relax, soft power to let the sea hold and carry me along its currents. Let go and let God.

Forgiveness, trust, gratitude. Trusting that if I take one step at a time, with every step life is going to meet me with what I need. The daily bread will come. “Alcoholism is a disease of faith,” says the writers of The Spirituality of Imperfection. “Alcoholics often develop a cynical attitude toward life, not seeing anything to believe in. When you persistently feel the need to change your consciousness through drugs or booze, you are expressing a lack of trust in yourself, in your ability to tolerate life undiluted, to find value in your own, unadulterated experience.” That’s what I saw Mom and Dad doing all the time. I did it too. I knew and know this kind of self-mistrust intimately. But there is another way. It’s like my man Emerson says, in one of my all-time favorite quotes: “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”

Forgiveness, trust, gratitude. The power behind me which is greater than the problem in front of me. The Higher Power I have to turn my will and life over to again and again, lest resentment be the poison I keep on drinking in the insane hope that it’s gonna kill anything and everyone that’s hurt me. Praying that prayer again and again, to open up my heart. It’s just like washing the dishes. Never happens just once. It’s just part of the human condition to slip into the mania of wanting to play God. But as Bill Wilson, creator of the Twelve Step program, says, “First of all, we had to quit playing God.” “I can’t do God’s will my way” “Let go and let God.”

The shortest sentence in the Big Book is, “It works.”

Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: The Creation Stories

In his recent article in the New Yorker, writer Paul Simms invites us to reimagine the Hebrew Bible story of God’s creation of the universe as taking the form of a blog: “God’s Blog.” Here it is, together with a couple user “comments”:

UPDATE: Pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off. Feel free to check out what I’ve done so far. Suggestions and criticism (constructive, please!) more than welcome. God out.

COMMENTS:

Not sure who this is for. Seems like a fix for a problem that didn’t exist. Liked it better when the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep.

Going carbon-based for the life-forms seems a tad obvious, no?

The creeping things that creepeth over the earth are gross.

Why do they have to poop? Seems like there could have been a more elegant/family-friendly solution to the food-waste-disposal problem.

Unfocussed. Seems like a mishmash at best. You’ve got creatures that can speak but aren’t smart (parrots). Then, You’ve got creatures that are smart but can’t speak (dolphins, dogs, houseflies). Then, You’ve got man, who is smart and can speak but who can’t fly, breathe underwater, or unhinge his jaws to swallow large prey in one gulp. If it’s supposed to be chaos, then mission accomplished. But it seems more like laziness and bad planning.

There’s imitation, and then there’s homage, and then there’s straight-up idea theft, which is what Your thing appears to be. Anyone who wants to check out the original should go to www.VishnuAndBrahma.com. (And check it out soon, because I think they’re about to go behind a paywall.)

Epic fail.

And that’s “God’s Blog” for you—from writer Paul Simms. Hilarious. And, in its own way, very instructive. A reminder, once again—even in joking form—of the very real temptation to make the stories of the Bible God’s stories and not the stories of the people of ancient Israel from three thousand years ago. Bible stories are not God’s stories but people’s stories—people gathering around the fire, the hearth, the altar; people gathering as they have always done in all times everywhere, speaking from the heart about deepest concerns; people giving voice to their best sense of the cruelty and beauty of life; people seeking out truth and meaning.

Today I want to talk about how the ancient Israelites did this through the stories told in the first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis. The Creation. Adam and Eve. The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Cain and Abel. The Flood, Noah’s Ark, and God’s vow never to destroy life again. The Tower of Babel. Some of the best-known parts of the Bible, which all together make up ancient Israel’s “primeval history” focusing on all of humankind, asking universal questions like

Where does it all come from?
What is the nature of reality?
What about human nature?
Why is being human so hard?

and

Is it all an “epic fail” (just like one of the blog comments said)?

Is it?

Big questions we’re dealing with today—

And to understand how the ancient Bible writers approached them, let’s start with a bit of history. As scholar Marcus Borg reminds us, in his book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, we want to know our Bible history because it adds dimensions of crucial meaning that we just can’t get to from a surface reading of the text. We also want to know our Bible history, says Borg, because people naturally tend to project all sorts of meanings on scripture—read all sorts of stuff between the lines—but knowing the history helps to limit this tendency and keep it healthy. Gotta know the history!

So: one part of history we need to know is this: how the ancient Israelite culture wasn’t operating in a vacuum. The ancient Near East (roughly corresponding to today’s Middle East) saw the rise of empire after empire: the Egyptian, the Sumerian, the Akkadian, the Hittite, the Assyrian, the Babylonian—and every one had stories, and such stories couldn’t help but influence how Israel told its own. One theme common in a lot of these cultures is that of a great flood destroying the world, and so we see the Bible telling a version of it which has striking parallels with the others. The story of Noah and the flood is just not unique with the Bible.

On the other hand, there are times when ancient Israel chose to tell its stories in ways very different from the cultures surrounding it. Take this creation story from the Akkadian empire, written hundreds of years before the ancient Israelites wrote theirs:

“When the god Enlil was the boss, the gods were burdened with toil, they lugged the work basket. The god’s work basket . . . was big, so that the toil was heavy, the straits were great. Enlil, having charge of the earth, put the other gods to work digging the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. One night, tired of their condition and at the instigation of one of the gods, they burned their tools and surrounded Enlil’s house. (A little like today’s Occupy movement—there is indeed nothing new under the sun.) The striking gods complained that the work was killing them and that they would not continue. Hearing this, Enlil burst into tears and offered his resignation. At this point Enki (another god) proposed a compromise. The gods would create man to bear the burden of work so that the gods would be free. So with the birth goddess, Nintur, Enki used the flesh and blood of the strike’s ringleader (killed by the other gods [doesn’t pay to be the ringleader, right?]) to fashion clay into seven male and seven female embryos in the “house of destiny.” After nine months, humanity was born, and immediately, they were put to work” (adapted from Thorkild Jacobsen, “The Treasures of Darkness,” Yale University Press, 1967).

Now this is a completely different kind of creation story! Yes, the ancient Israelites often did what one of the blog comments from earlier suggested (imitate other sources, even steal them outright), but then there are times when the Bible vision stands out as utterly unique. According to the Bible, God created humanity not out of a sense of weariness, for the purpose of enslavement, but out of a sense of the goodness of life, and a desire for humanity to have a share in it. “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it…. [And] God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. […] And on the seventh day God finished the work he had done, and he rested….” It’s this last part that absolutely proves my point on how radically different the vision of the ancient Israelites was from its neighbors. The point of creation—where it’s all going—is not a relentless grind but a graceful rhythm of work and rest, a graceful dance of body and spirit, an invitation for every one of us to receive this gracefulness into our lives.

Just a remarkable vision, once you know a little history and context.

But now, by this time, if you’ve been following really closely, you might be wondering about something. We just heard the ancient Israelite creation story saying that God created humankind male and female—he created them simultaneously. But but but … doesn’t the Bible ALSO say that God created Adam first? Doesn’t the Bible portray God as saying, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner”? At which point God created the animals—thinking that one of them (bat, butterfly, dolphin, tiger, falcon, snake, wolf, or something else) might become his ideal partner. Which of course turned out to be a bust. So God made Adam sleep, and he took one of Adam’s ribs, and from that rib, God made Eve. Doesn’t the Bible also say this? So which is it: man and woman created simultaneously, or man created first, and woman later?

Have you been wondering about this?

We also just heard that the endpoint of creation was rest: God resting, humankind resting, God seeing that everything he had made was very good, and wanting us to join in. But but but … doesn’t the Bible ALSO tell a story that’s the opposite of rest? As when God commanded Adam and Eve not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and thus set into motion a momentum that continues to this very day: momentum of moral ambivalence and complexity which the serpent represents; momentum of freedom and desire and choice; momentum of our expulsion from the garden, with all its shame and guilt and suffering; momentum of Cain and Abel, of the Flood, of The Tower of Babel, extending all the way to this very day, with its own stories of violence and greed and misery; momentum of perpetual lessons and perpetual learning, growth of wisdom, growth of insight. Where is our Sabbath from all of this? How does this fit in with “And God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good”?

Well, I don’t know about you, but speaking for myself, I was very slow to ask these kinds of questions. Didn’t matter that, as a high schooler, I’d carry a Bible with me everywhere, read it all the time, underline, make notes, memorize, recite—all with the understanding that what I was doing was studying words straight from the mouth of God, to be taken literally. Didn’t matter. I thought I knew the Bible, until I went to seminary. University of Chicago, 1999. First day of class, professor points out that there are, in fact, TWO creation stories in the book of Genesis—Genesis 1 through 2:4 and Genesis 2:4 through 3:24—one editorially glued on to the other so as to give an appearance of seamlessness UNLESS you look closer. The first envisioning the absolute beginning as a scene of endless, depthless waters; the second envisioning the absolute beginning as a rainless, sterile desert. In the first, God creates cleanly through the spoken word, through a sheer act of poetry; in the second, God creates by getting his hands dirty; he grabs a piece of earth, he breathes into it the breathe of his very life. In the first, humans are created last; in the second, Adam is created first before all other life forms. In the first, male and female created at the same time; in the second, man first, then woman. My University of Chicago professor, pointing it all out clearly, clinically, dispassionately, while I’m sitting there in my chair in a state of heavy ragged breathing, eyes bugging out, trying to comprehend how in the world I ever could have missed it.

And now, it makes me laugh. It makes me think that whoever wove together the various story traditions of the book of Genesis must have had some Unitarian Universalist DNA in him. Some editor who placed two fundamentally incompatible stories right at the start of the Bible—right at the start of the whole thing—as if to say, “All ye who enter these pages, abandon all hope! That is, abandon all hope of absoluteness and literality! Go deeper! Wake up! Be more profound in your thinking! This is myth, folks, in the sense of ‘it never was but always is,’ not science but simply telling the truth about what it means to be human.” Some editor we will never know, suggesting all of this, winking at us down through the ages….

But why the stories are so very different? Scholar Marcus Borg helps us begin to understand. Drawing on contemporary Biblical scholarship, he points out that the two stories were composed at very different times in ancient Israel’s history, for different purposes. The first story—the “Let there be Light!” story—was written during or shortly after the Babylonian Exile, from 587 to 538 BCE. During this period, ancient Israel was under the thumb of the Babylonian Empire, had lost its independence, its pride. But with the Exile coming to an end, it was time for Israel to tell a new story, one that would strengthen its weakened sense of identity and inspire it to greater things. And so: since the Sabbath was a characteristic practice of ancient Israel, to have God practice it in the story was and is a powerful way of reinforcing its value. Furthermore, it was a truism in the ancient Near East that if your nation had been conquered, as Israel’s had, then your god was conquered too. Your god was weak. So when ancient Israel composed a new creation story, it was its way of reaffirming God’s power, a way of saying, Our God is not weak but strong. Our God is truly Lord of all Gods.

As for the second creation story—the “Adam and Eve and Garden of Eden” story—it was actually written three hundred years before the first. It’s much older. It comes from the time of the monarchy in ancient Israel—rulers like David and Solomon. A time when ancient Israel was trying to remember its origins: a people born in a dry land, given a different land of milk and honey, invited into a relationship with God governed by rules to follow, tempted all the time by the competing religious visions and traditions of its Caananite neighbors, and subject to dire consequences should Israel break the rules. Do you see how this parallels what’s happening in the second creation story? The image of the serpent is particularly fascinating: the serpent was a Caananite fertility symbol, representing sexuality, wisdom, also immortality. The ancient Israelites knew exactly what the serpent in the story represented. Stay away. Don’t break the rules, or bad things are gonna happen!

The two stories are different, written at different times and for different purposes. But (and this is my final observation for today) there is nevertheless great wisdom in them that speaks to all times and purposes. Beyond their historical significance, beyond the absolutely incompatible details, there is a metaphorical richness to the stories that can speak to us all. Especially in how the two stories are told together. Following the Bible’s lead, what if, in trying to explain the meaning of our lives or of a part of our lives, we always sought to tell the two different kinds of stories, and tell them simultaneously?

One would always be like the second creation story: the one that speaks to the human inevitability to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; the one that puts its finger on the unquenchable yearning at the core of our human freedom; the one that portrays the deep, soulful desire in all of us to jump right into messes of one kind or another; the one that predicts how a serpent will always pop up when it feels like you’ve got your life together, your relationship is steady, your work is steady, you got a good rhythm going, but then BAM! the serpent—and it takes you into yet another place of passion and craziness and confusion and it feels like once again you’ve been exiled from the Garden and you feel like you are dying and you hope—you hope—that somehow you will be born anew.

That’s when it’s time to tell the first creation story. The one that affirms the sheer sacred mystery at the core of our lives, the inherent worth and dignity and goodness that is fundamentally there even when we don’t see it and we don’t feel it. When we just feel like it’s all an epic fail. But we nevertheless breathe, and keep breathing. When all else fails, that’s what we do. Perhaps the true sin of Adam and Eve was in having but a shallow understanding of the meaning of good and evil but thinking it deep enough to justify action; taking but a small bite of the Apple but thinking themselves as wise as God in judging the true worth of things. Tell the second creation story, but never fail to tell the first, because then we remember that we are not God, that we are not vast enough to contain and reconcile all that we experience, that we have no right to condemn. Tell the first story, because then we remember that there is a point of view that CAN see everything: everything we think pathetic, everything we think unworthy, everything we think shameful and unspeakable—and in the context of all that is, this is what God will say. God will say, “This is my creation, all things have their proper place in the economy of life, and indeed, it is very good.”

Don’t Hold Back

There once lived a rich man who had no greater desire than to do good to those around him, and especially those who worked for him.

He noticed that one of his workers, a carpenter, was very poor, and was struggling to feed his family. He could see for himself that the hovel in which the man lived with his wife and children was falling into disrepair, and was no longer a match for the cold and rain that beat down upon it. He felt great compassion for the carpenter and his family, and he had an idea.

He called the carpenter to him one morning and gave him these instructions:

“I want you to build me a beautiful house,” he said. “I want you to spare no expense, and employ only the finest craftsmen for every job that’s needed. I have to make a journey, and I will be away for a while, but when I come back, I want you to have the house ready for me.”

The carpenter was delighted to be given this task, and immediately, he set out to work. But knowing that the master would be away, he decided to make a good profit on the enterprise. Instead of hiring the best craftsmen, and using the finest materials, he cut corners wherever he possibly could. The master would never know, and he could keep the difference, and make a lot of money for himself.

And so the house was built. From the outside, it looked beautiful, but as the carpenter well knew, it was not at all sound. The timbers in the roof were weak and badly fitted. The bricks were seconds, and would soon begin to crumble. The roof tiles were rejects from the quarry. The building had been carried out by inexperienced workers for low pay.

When the master returned, he came to inspect the house. “I have done as you instructed,” the carpenter told him. “I have used the best materials and the finest craftsmen.”

“I’m delighted to hear it,” said the master. “Here are the keys. The house is yours. It is my gift to you and your family. May it be a fine home for you for the rest of your life.”

In the years that followed, the carpenter could often be heard to mutter under his breath, “If only I had known that the house was meant for me…” (From One Hundred Wisdom Stories from Around the World, edited by Margaret Silf)

Fact is, life (which the story symbolizes as the rich man) is abundant and means great things for us—so it puts us to work, gives us gifts of time and talent and energy and money and says, “Spare no expense.” “Build me a beautiful house.” The instructions seem clear enough. The challenge may even delight us, as it did the carpenter. But the central issue–the central ambiguity–is “what’s in it for me.” WHOSE house is being built? If it’s someone or something else’s, then what’s in it for me?

Now by “houses” here we’re talking about anything in which we can dwell—a literal building, for sure, but also such things as key friendships, a marriage, a career, an artistic or athletic passion, and (most importantly for us today) a congregation. It’s the responsive reading from earlier:

This house is for the ingathering of nature and human nature.
This house is a cradle for our dreams,
the workshop of our common endeavor. (Kenneth Patton)

But, again, how we imagine ourselves in relation to this house and all the houses we build determines everything.

If we imagine ourselves as somehow separate, then we’ll cut corners, hold back, withhold, pocket the extra cash, see the result as gain for us. Us against them. Someone else is gonna have to deal with the weak and badly fitted timbers in the roof; someone else is gonna have to contend with the crumbling bricks; someone else is gonna have to deal with the defective roof tiles. Someone else, but not me, because I’ll have gotten mine, I’ll be long gone…

That’s what the carpenter thinks. And who here has never thought like that before? Cause I want to meet you—you are a living saint!

For the rest of us—we have to learn the hard way, and muttering under the breath just like the carpenter is part of the deal. We have to learn the instant karma way. There is just no separation between ourselves and the work of our hands and hearts. An ancient Buddhist saying puts it like this: “the hand of the dyer is subdued by the dye in which he works.” In some form or fashion, through life’s abundance and generosity, we are handed the keys to each house we’ve ever had a part in building. Life says, “The house is yours. May it be a fine home for you for the rest of your life.” Life intends good things for us, but a big factor is how we respond….

Now when I say “instant karma,” I mean it ultimately doesn’t matter that no one might see how we hold back. Doesn’t matter that the master won’t know. WE will know. WE will know. Every choice we make, every action we take, has an inevitable impact on our hearts and minds and character. Every hurtful action rebounds upon the actor; and so does every neglectful inaction. Sins of commission, sins of omission. Weak and badly-fitted timbers, crumbling bricks, defective roof tiles: WE’LL have to deal with them, eventually. Every one will rebound upon us, instant-karma style.

My message today is about cutting through the ambiguity and getting to clarity. Work as if whatever house you are building you’re gonna live in for the rest of your life, cause believe it, the keys are coming to you. So spare no expense. Don’t hold back. Don’t hold back from your friendships, don’t hold back from your marriage, don’t hold back from your career or your passions. And don’t hold back from this congregation. If the thought of not holding back pains you, because what you are building you don’t really believe in, make a change. But if you DO really believe, put the pedal to the metal. Gun it. Give and don’t stop until it feels GOOD.

Be like Walter Overby, our stewardship campaign chair. Back on October 2 he said this: “I celebrate the fact that I’ve integrated support for UUCA into my life all year round. This is the sixth year I will pledge 5% of my income. I’ve learned that it works for me financially and it makes me feel invested. When I come here and see a coffee cup, it isn’t just A coffee cup, it’s MY coffee cup. When I see that piano, it isn’t just A piano, it’s MY piano. And when I see my minister, he’s not just THE minister, he’s MY minister. It feels good.”

Yes it does! It DOES feel good! This is OUR house. Life has given us gifts of time and talent and energy and money, Life has been generous with us, so let’s be generous right back, let’s take care of our house,

our house

(whose house is it?)

OURS!

(can’t hear you)

OURS!

Our house.
Gotta take care of it.
Amen.

Sticky, Tricky, Tangled: The Immigration Issue

Reading
Today’s reading comes from the Rev. Daniel Groody, Roman Catholic priest and scholar:

A few years ago I was working in Mexico at a border outreach center that offered material and pastoral support to those on the move. Some were traveling northwards in search of better lives, and others had tried to enter the U.S. but failed and were deported back to Mexico. One day a group of forty immigrants arrived in the center, sojourners who had hoped to reach the U.S. It had been a long night for them – and an even longer week. For three days they had crossed through the Arizona desert in temperatures that reach 120 degrees in the shade. Amid the challenges of the desert terrain – their personal vulnerability to every- thing from heat stroke to poisonous snakes – they had braved a perilous journey and tried to make their way to the U.S., often under the cover of darkness. They walked remote and diffuse trails that have taken the lives of thousands of immigrants – an estimated 300-500 annually since 1994.

Why were they willing to take such risks and leave their home country? When I asked them, some said they had relatives back home who needed medication they could not afford. Others said the $3-$5 a day they earned for a twelve-hour work day in Mexico was not enough to put much more than beans and tortillas on the table. Still others said potato chips had become a luxury they could no longer afford, and they could not stand to look their children in the eyes when they complained of hunger.

“We are migrating not because we want to but because we have to,” said Mario. “My family at home depends on me. I’m already dead in Mexico, and getting to the U.S. gives us the hope of living, even though I may die.”

But now they were back on the border after a week-long ordeal. While walking through the Arizona desert, they had suddenly heard a rumbling sound on the horizon. Then a white laser-like light cut their world in two. Within moments a border patrol helicopter surrounded them and threw the group into chaos.

“So they circled around us and then rounded us up like we were cattle,” said Maria. “I said, no, dear God … I’ve gone through so much sacrifice to come this far … please don’t let them send us back where we came from.”

“It was an awful night,” added Gustavo. “But the worst part was when they started playing the song, ‘La Cucaracha’ over the helicopter intercom. I never felt so humiliated in my life, like I was the lowest form of life of earth, like I wasn’t even a human being.”

The story of Mario, Maria and Gustavo gives witness to their particular journey across the U.S.- Mexico border, but its dynamics are universal in scope. Today there are more than 200 million people migrating around the world, or one out of every thirty-five people on the planet, which is equivalent to the population of Brazil. Some 30-40 million of these are undocumented, 24 million are internally displaced and about 10 million are refugees. For many reasons some scholars refer to these days as the “age of migration,” touching every area of human life.

Sermon

Our reading for today tells us that we are in an “age of migration.” More than 200 million people migrating around the world, or one out of every thirty-five people on the planet…. Some 30-40 million of these undocumented, 24 million internally displaced, 10 million refugees.

Listen to Adam Zagajewski’s poem, entitled “Refugees”:

Bent under burdens which sometimes
can be seen and sometimes can’t,
they trudge through mud or desert sands,
hunched, hungry,

silent men in heavy jackets,
dressed for all four seasons,
old women with crumpled faces,
clutching something—a child, the family
lamp, the last loaf of bread?

[…]

There’s always a wagon or at least a wheelbarrow
full of treasures (a quilt, a silver cup,
the fading scent of home),
a car out of gas marooned in a ditch,
a horse (soon left behind), snow, a lot of snow,
too much snow, too much sun, too much rain,

and always that special slouch
as if leaning toward another, better planet,
with less ambitious generals,
less snow, less wind, fewer cannons,
less History (alas, there’s no
such planet, just that slouch).

Shuffling their feet,
they move slowly, very slowly
toward the country of nowhere,
and the city of no one
on the river of never.

That’s the poem. We are in an age of migration, an age of humanitarian disasters, more than 200 million people leaning towards another, better planet, shuffling their feet, moving slowly, hunched, hungry, bent under burdens which sometimes can be seen and sometimes can’t.

Meanwhile anti-immigrant furor is on the rise, also around the world. Journalist Jeffrey Kaye writes, “Just as in the United States, [we hear calls for] border restrictions as well as budgets for higher fences, more border guards, and migrant prisons. The recent British election was marked by debates over how to restrict migrants, and by criticism from the right that the government had embraced a too-lenient immigration policy. In the U.K., France, Italy, Spain, Denmark and elsewhere, fear, xenophobia and anxiety over the immigration issue have spurred the rise of nationalist groups, just as in the United States. And, as the U.S. is trying to deter illegal immigration, mostly from Latin America, Europe is attempting to keep out non-Europeans.”

Today we’re exploring this sticky, tricky, tangled issue of immigration—what our values as a people of faith call us to. We’ll be looking at primarily the American situation—we’ll be hearing primarily American voices—but we can’t forget that the immigration issue is global in nature, and what we learn here is to some extent applicable elsewhere.

So: the American situation. The Rev. John Fife, human rights advocate and founder of the Sanctuary Movement, compares our time to when the Reagan Administration declared amnesty in 1986. “Compared to now,” he says, “the climate has shifted 180 degrees. I haven’t seen anything like this before,” he says: “political leaders who talk about immigration, using bigotry and fear and hate speech in ways we haven’t seen since the 1950s in the segregated South. Back then, politicians had to “out-seg” (as in, segregation) their opponents in order to get elected. It’s that kind of thing now—a race to the bottom.”

Arizona got there first, in its attempt to enforce its own punitive anti-immigration laws, then Utah, then Indiana, then our state of Georgia, and now Alabama. Alabama’s law (HB 56) is regarded as the most restrictive of the whole lot: makes it a crime for anyone not to have papers showing that they are in the state legally. Makes it a crime to knowingly rent to, transport, or hire someone who is in the country without documentation. Public schools are required to determine the legal residency of students upon enrollment. Police are required to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect of being in the state illegally. This is the race to the bottom. And while federal judges blocked Arizona, Utah, Indiana, and Georgia from enforcing their own anti-immigrant laws, Alabama got through in a way that no other state had: Judge Blackburn let stand the provision giving police officers unprecedented power to act as immigration agents. A power the police themselves say they don’t want. Racial profiling made legal.

Race to the bottom.

When Georgia passed its anti-immigration law, HB 87, I wrote a letter to the AJC, cosigned by all the Unitarian Universalist ministers here in Georgia I could get ahold of, and in part, here’s what I said: “There are a tremendous number of problems with House Bill 87. It is racist. It is neither workable nor fair. It is bad for business. It reflects Georgia politicians acting far beyond the bounds of their proper jurisdiction. Its twin bill in Arizona has cost that state millions of dollars in litigation, and its unconstitutionality has recently been upheld. But even more problematic than all these is the fundamental spiritual blight that House Bill 87 reflects. It is hate-filled and fear-filled. I urge Governor Deal not to sign this bill into law. We need to make room at the table. There’s always enough of what’s truly important to go around if we’re resolved to make it so. What would Jesus do?”

Well, lemme tell you, my “What would Jesus do?” letter did not go down well with lots of people. One person objected by saying, “What is it about illegal aliens [the ministers who signed the letter] don’t understand? Those people are here in violation of federal immigration laws…. Shame on these ministers for their support and encouragement of lawlessness.”

[Yeah—look at me right here: lawlessness. Woo hoo!]

NOT lawlessness, but justice, informed by a sense of history. Our Unitarian Universalist Association President, the Rev. Peter Morales, makes this point brilliantly. He says, “As a religious people who affirm human compassion, advocate for human rights, and seek justice, we must never make the mistake of confusing a legal right with a moral right. The forced removal of Native Americans from their land and onto reservations was legal. The importation and sale of African slaves was legal. South African apartheid was legal. The confiscation of the property of Jews at the beginning of the Nazi regime was legal. The Spanish Inquisition was legal. Crucifying Jesus was legal. Burning Michael Servetus at the stake for his unitarian theology was legal. The fact that something is legal does not cut much ethical ice. The powerful have always used the legal system to oppress the powerless. It is true,” the Rev. Morales says, “that as citizens we should respect the rule of law. More importantly, though, our duty is to create laws founded on our highest sense of justice, equity, and compassion. Loud voices urge us to choose fear, denial, reactionary nationalism, and racism. We must resist and choose the better way urged by every major religious tradition. We must choose the path of compassion and hope. We must choose a path that is founded on the recognition that we are connected, that we are all in this together.” That’s our Association President, who spent time in jail for his activism in Arizona. Justice is why General Assembly in June of 2012 is in Arizona—Unitarian Universalists from all over the land, getting clear about what law looks like when it is founded on our highest sense of justice, equity, and compassion; Unitarian Universalists from all over the land, standing together, standing together, discerning what Love is calling us to.

You know, what’s so ironic about the appeal to law—the idea that the law is sacrosanct, and once its speaks, there’s nothing more to say—is that the lawmakers themselves admit over and over again that if they found themselves in the shoes of Mexican immigrants, they would find a way across the border in a heartbeat, no hesitations. This is the finding of journalist Jeffrey Kaye. “I have asked countless conservatives and Republicans the same question: ‘If you had to support your family on $3-a-day or less, but you had the opportunity to cross a border illegally to raise your living standard, would you migrate?’ The answer from even the most diehard anti-immigrant advocate is consistent: ‘Yes.’”

This is the American situation: bigotry and fear and hate speech; race-to-the-bottom initiatives in now five states; blindness to the all-important distinction between what is legal and what is just. Also this: in the minds of millions of Americans, myths about immigration that take the form of slogans and soundbites, falsehoods that cover up the reality of what’s truly happening with darkness. Myths like:

The United States has a generous refugee policy. MYTH!
Since we are all the descendents of immigrants here, we all start on equal footing. MYTH!
Today’s immigrants threaten the national culture because they are not assimilating. MYTH!
Immigrants are a major source of crime in America. MYTH!
Immigrants compete with low-skilled workers and drive down wages. MYTH!
Immigrants don’t pay taxes. MYTH!
Immigrants take jobs and opportunity away from Americans. MYTH!

Myth after myth after myth—all easily dispelled. Check out Aviva Chomsky’s book, “They Take Our Jobs” and 20 Other Myths About Immigration, published by Beacon Press. Here, I want to address just one of them—the last: “Immigrants take jobs and opportunity away from Americans.” Quite to the contrary, from the Brookings Institute we learn that the largest wave of immigration to the U.S. since the early 1900s coincided with our lowest national unemployment rate and fastest economic growth. Immigrant entrepreneurs create jobs for U.S. and foreign workers, and foreign-born students allow many U.S. graduate programs to keep their doors open. While there has been no comprehensive study done of immigrant-owned businesses, we have countless examples: in Silicon Valley, companies begun by Chinese and Indian immigrants generated more than $19.5 billion in sales and nearly 73,000 jobs in 2000.

The myth is easily dispelled—but what’s not so easily dispelled (what no doubt keeps the myths entrenched) is a deep sense of anger and resentment in the hearts of millions about what’s happening to the American economy. You have the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has spread to other cities across the country including Atlanta, protesting an unjust economic system that benefits the 1% of people at the expense of all the rest.

Then you have the so-called “53%ers” who oppose the Occupy Wall Street movement, who say our economic system as is is just fine. People who see themselves as the only ones standing up for hard work and personal responsibility. One of these 53%ers says this:

I am a former Marine. I work two jobs. I don’t have health insurance. I worked 60-70 hours a week for 8 years to pay my way through college. I haven’t had 4 consecutive days off in over 4 years. But I don’t blame Wall Street. Suck it up you whiners. I am the 53%. God bless the USA!

I don’t know about you, but I’m having a really hard time understanding why this man, this 53%er, working two jobs, without health insurance, hasn’t had four consecutive days off in four years, isn’t himself whining—why he isn’t plain OUTRAGED. I can see a man like this drinking in myths about immigrants, imagining that the little he has is being threatened—this man, believing he’s got to do anything he can to preserve his slight advantage in the shaky American economy. So this man can’t help but support the bigoted politician who stands for punitive anti-immigration legislation. This is what’s happening, for millions of Americans, even as the real problem is and has always been the unholy accord between business and government that benefits the few at the expense of the many. The unholy accord that we find in America and we find around the world. The unholy accord that throughout history has sent refugees on their way,

Bent under burdens which sometimes
can be seen and sometimes can’t,
they trudge through mud or desert sands,
hunched, hungry…

…always that special slouch
as if leaning toward another, better planet,
with less ambitious generals,
less snow, less wind, fewer cannons,
less History…

“When I give food to the poor,” says the Roman Catholic Archbishop, Brazilian Dom Hélder Camara, “they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.” My message today is that we need to be asking the right questions about immigration if things are gonna get better. Questions about racism. Questions about what is legal vs. what is truly just. Questions about how it is that people with so little can feel so threatened by people who have even less. Questions about how our national and global economic system continues to fly under the radar, get off scot free. All of us, asking questions like this. All of us, migrants with that special slouch. All of us, leaning towards another, better planet. All of us.

Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Getting Started

Reading the Bible again for the first time. Isn’t that an interesting idea? Suggests some kind of initial acquaintance, and then a return, a seeing-again with new eyes.

It’s certainly my story. I grew up singing songs like this

The B-I-B-L-E
Yes, that’s the book for me
I stand alone on the Word of God
The B-I-B-L-E

You all know that song?

But then I got a little older, and I started to struggle with how my teachers were interpreting the B-I-B-L-E, as well as with the kinds of hurtful things people were doing in the Bible’s name. I had to let the B-I-B-L-E go for a long time actually, until Unitarian Universalism helped me read it again for the first time.

Another story of this comes from writer A. J. Jacobs in his both hilarious and insightful book, The Year of Living Biblically:

“I grew up in an extremely secular home in New York City. I am officially Jewish, but I’m Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant. Which is to say: Not very. […] It’s not that my parents badmouthed religion. It’s just that religion wasn’t for us. We lived in the 20th century, for crying out loud. In our house, spirituality was almost a taboo subject, much like my father’s salary or my sister’s clove cigarette habit.

“My only brushes with the Bible were brief and superficial. […] I attended a handful of bar mitzvahs where I zoned out during services and spent the time trying to guess who had bald spots under their yarmulkes. […] And as far as childhood religion, that was about it.

“College didn’t help my spiritual development. I went to a secular university where you were more likely to study the semiotics of Wicca rituals than the Judeo-Christian tradition. And when we did read the Bible, it was as literature, as a fusty ancient book with the same truth quotient as The Faerie Queene.

“For a long time, I thought that religion, for all the good it does, seemed too risky for our modern world. The potential for abuse too high. I figured it would slowly fade away like other archaic things.” But then A. J. Jacobs goes on to say, “I was spectacularly mistaken. The influence of the Bible — and religion as a whole – remains a mighty force, perhaps even stronger than it was when I was a kid. So in the last few years, religion has become my fixation. Is half of the world suffering from a massive delusion? Or is my blindness to spirituality a huge defect in my personality? What if I’m missing out on part of being human, like a guy who goes through life without ever hearing Beethoven or falling in love? And most important, I now have a young son – if my lack of religion is a flaw, I don’t want to pass it onto him. So I knew I wanted to explore religion. I just needed to figure out how.” Thus began A. J. Jacobs’ year-long adventure in trying to live the Bible in complete literal fashion. The book is a scream. Gotta read it!

Point is, people are reading the Bible again for the first time, and there’s lots of reasons why. I did it simply because I’m a Unitarian Universalist, and Judaism and Christianity are one of our six main sources of truth and wisdom; but I also did it because the Bible reflects a significant part of my history, struggles and all, and I don’t want to have to shut that out of my life, I don’t want to let unresolved issues about the Bible limit my spiritual growth or my relationships.

As for A. J. Jacobs, he might have grown up with only fragmentary impressions of the Bible; he might have read it in college and been bored to tears; but now that he’s older, and sees the permanent and all-pervasive nature of its influence, he wants to go deeper. It’s about being fully alive. “What if I’m missing out on part of being human,” he asks, “like a guy who goes through life without ever hearing Beethoven or falling in love?” He doesn’t want to miss out on being fully alive—and doesn’t want his son to miss out on that, either.

Reading the Bible again for the first time. So many reasons for why we might do this. Yet another is to improve our cultural intelligence. From classics like Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci and Bach, all the way to contemporary movies like Dead Man Walking, Pulp Fiction, the Matrix, and Hannibal: Bible themes are everywhere. Know your Bible, you can grasp better what’s going on. Don’t know your Bible, you’re missing out, you’re in the dark.

There’s one more reason to consider, before we move on. The political reason. I’m talking culture wars over homosexuality and same-sex marriage, culture wars over the teaching of evolution in public schools, culture wars over women’s reproductive rights. The Bible is at the heart of things here too. Specifically: the issue of how to see it and read it—this issue that our wisdom story today addressed so well. Interpretation. The fundamentalist-conservative side sees the Bible as a flawless transcription of words coming straight from God’s mouth, to be applied literally everywhere and at all times. But strongly opposed to this is the other side: people convinced that this approach is wrong, that the Bible is not to be taken literally. But then how is it to be taken? People on the other side (and I’m talking about US) often do not offer a compelling vision for how to read the Bible in a better way. So ultimately, in the end, what happens is that the Religious Right steals the Bible and transforms it into a set of conservative talking points. Because we no longer read the thing ourselves with any degree of sophistication, we take their interpretations to represent what the Bible actually says, and we miss out on all the ways the Bible stands for something better. As religion writer Bruce Feiler points out, “on a wide range of topics, including respecting the value of other faiths, shielding religion from politics, serving the poor and protecting the environment, the Bible offers powerful arguments in support of moderate and liberal causes.” This is a wonderful thing, and it’s time that this best kept secret about the Bible be spread far and wide. People need to know. Just can’t let the Religious Right steal the power of the Bible to be used for ends that are unloving and unjust!

So here we are: reading the Bible again for the first time. This is actually the title of a book written by religion scholar Marcus Borg, and we’re going to be using it as our primary source text for our year-long sermon series. Today, we’re looking at ideas covered in the first three chapters; next month, it’s chapter 4: “Reading the Creation Stories Again.” Very very cool stuff.

You’ll also need a Bible. Perhaps that goes without saying—or does it go without saying? Gotta have a Bible—read it side by side with Borg—and my recommendation is that you use the New Revised Standard Version, because it has one of the best reputations for the use of correct original texts and accuracy of translation. Other good possibilities include the Revised Standard Version, The Revised English Bible, and the New International Version. I do suggest that you look away from that old warhorse, the King James Version, despite the archaic beauty of its language—because the language IS archaic and hard to relate to, and also because it incorporates lots of errors and mistranslations. I’d also avoid Bible paraphrases like The Living Bible and The Good News Bible, because they gloss over difficulties, they leave things out, and they do all this in order to convey a decidedly conservative religious viewpoint.

OK, so by now we know why we’re reading the Bible again for the first time, and we’ve got some of the housekeeping, some of the logistics taken care of. Now—it’s time to jump in. And let’s do this by looking at three basic principles for reading the Bible in a way that enables us to take it, not literally, but seriously and profoundly. Not slavish adherence to the surface, but faithfulness to the deeper spirit.

Here’s the first principle: to very carefully distinguish mystical experiences of the Sacred from interpretations of the experiences. On the one hand you have true Wonder and Mystery, and on the other you have people trying to make sense of what they felt and saw and heard. The two—God and humanity—simply cannot be confused, because when that happens, you have people opening up their Bibles saying, “Let’s see what God says about that.” You have people taking absolutist moral positions on the basis of 3000 year-old laws which they see as God’s laws. You have people saying all that, totally ignoring how the Bible writers said what they said in great part on the basis of the culture they lived in, the specific concerns of their communities, their personal hopes and fears.

Which means we CAN talk about the sins of scripture without dismissing the Bible altogether. The Bible writers produced so much that is usable and inspiring, but they, like all humans, bear the scars and the biases of their time. The Bible writers were not immune to the injustices of their world, and we see this in atrocious passages—toxic passages—that literalists invoke to harm women, homosexuals, children, Jews, and all of us.

But if we no longer see scripture as “God says” but “people say,” then we are free to use our ethical and spiritual judgment to separate the good from the bad, the noble from the base. “The Bible says so” must never be used to silence doubts, to put a stop to honest conversation, or to justify hurtful actions. Ultimately nothing and no one can take away the personal responsibility each of us has to do the right thing in life. People try to hand it off to one kind of religious authority or another all the time; they just want to be given orders to carry out with a clean conscience. Bob Jones, of Bob Jones University, likes to say, “The Bible itself is intolerant, and true followers of God should be as well.” THAT IS NOT GOING TO CUT IT. TAKE RESPONSIBILITY. It’s NEVER “God says.” ALWAYS, it’s “people say.” We always have a choice.

This first principle—distinguishing the Sacred from interpretations of the Sacred—also helps us to understand something else: the clear fact that different books of the Bible talk about different kinds of God, so in the beginning you face a bloodthirsty Yahweh who creates the world but ends up destroying it through a flood, and then later on He urges the Israelites to slaughter their enemies; but in other places you have the God of the prophets who longs for a time when there shall be no more war, and the lion shall lie down with the lamb; and then you have the God of Jesus, whom he called Abba, which means “daddy,”—Jesus, who at times even characterized God in feminine terms as an all-embracing womb. To all this we can say: Of course. It’s because Bible stories convey the voices and visions of people changing over time, moving from perspectives that are firmly tribal to those that are more open and universal. The Bible writers are people grappling in the deepest ways with the challenges and possibilities of life. I pray to God that we might be people like this too. This is what it means to be fully, humanly alive. This is what we’re missing out on, as A. J. Jacobs suggested earlier, if we don’t read the Bible.

The first principle of Bible reading: It’s never “God says”; it’s always “humans say” –humans in quest for meaning and truth in life, humans striving for love and justice yet always creatures of their day, always limited by this. That’s the first principle of Bible reading.

Which leads immediately to the second: to stress a historical, contextual understanding of the Scriptures. Marcus Borg likes to say that “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” And this cannot ever be underestimated. It is undeniable that the Bible stories continue to inspire and inform people because they are just fine literature, powerful narratives. But as readers we will miss so much of the meaning if we are not aware of the ancient world from which these stories came.

For example, consider a parable that appears in Matthew, Mark, and Luke in the Christian scriptures. Jesus is comparing what he calls the Kingdom of Heaven to a mustard seed. From small beginnings, it grows into something big: that’s pretty much what we get from the parable—kind of ho-hum, honestly, and you can get far richer wisdom from the self-help section of your local bookstore—unless we go deeper, unless we understand more of Jesus’ historical context. Fact is, in Jesus’ day, his parable would have made the jaws of his hearers drop. His hearers, first of all, were oppressed peasants, and they wanted Jesus to compare the kingdom to something more bold, something more triumphant, something that would represent the destruction of the Romans and the advent of their long-awaited social and political freedom. But Jesus doesn’t give them that. He gives them a mustard plant, low-lying, scrubby, weedy. Jaws dropped when he said it, also because Jewish religious law dictated that the mustard plant was unclean. Jewish gardens of the time followed the religious injunction that different kinds of plants should never mix and needed to stay separate from each other. But you know what would happen if a mustard plant got in there? It would grow and spread like a wild weed, mixing things up like crazy, uniting things that were supposed to stay separate and apart. But this is how the Kingdom of Heaven works, said Jesus. It’s a love which overcomes all differences, a love which reconciles all who are separated, a love which is always already here and now among us, a power just waiting to be recognized in this very moment! If that’s what unclean looks like, then the Kingdom of Heaven is unclean.

Know your Bible history—know the context out of which the speakers speak—and what emerges is a book that is radical and profound and utterly unique among all the world’s religious literature.

And now the third and last Bible-reading principle. It says, don’t allow the Bible to stay stuck in the past. And don’t dismiss a passage if science tells you that it can’t be literally true. Don’t cut it out. Instead, go deeper. Read it as poetry, read it as metaphor, read it as myth that conveys psychological and spiritual truth. The voice of the Bible can comfort you, can challenge you, can speak to your spirit right here and right now. It will read you more than you read it, if you let it.

Just allow that Bible parable from a moment ago sink in. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed. It starts out small, grows and spreads like a wild weed, and mixes things up, connects things are separate and apart. To allow the Bible to read you in this instance is to ask, What are the rigid polarities or dichotomies of my life? Woman vs. man? Gay vs. straight? Rich vs. poor? Head vs. heart? Work vs. play? Safe and bored vs. risky and energized? Think about it. Are there places where you WANT things to remain all polarized like this? All ordered like this?

But then comes a tiny seed, from somewhere… It comes, and what does it look like? Is it an idea? A person? Something that, in its apparent smallness, seems insignificant, but you let it go, and BAM, it grows like crazy, it mixes things up like crazy. What does this look like, for you? Is it happening in your life right now? Does it scare you, make you anxious?

Does it even make sense to think that the Kingdom of Heaven might be a place or a state that creates fear and anxiety? Isn’t heaven supposed to be angels sitting on downy clouds strumming lutes? What is Heaven, truly? What does it mean to be abundantly alive?

And THAT’S reading the Bible! That’s the Bible reading you! That’s how the Bible truly becomes sacred scripture, when it opens your heart up, gets the deepest possible questions and conversations going, puts you in a place where you can feel the Spirit of Life speaking, you can hear it speaking, and guess what? It’s speaking right to you.