The Signals We Send

Readings

Campaigns by Mark Danner, New Yorker
"A Ritual to Read to Each Other" by William Stafford

Sermon

Once upon a time there was a church looking for a new minister. They were delighted to find in the first candidate they spoke to an excellent preacher. They were totally wowed.

The committee decided to jump over the denominational search procedures and called him his sermon was quite so excellent.

Needless to say the first Sunday the committee was a little nervous about how he would perform. Again, they were blown away: a tremendous sermon, reflective, deep spiritual, touching them in their daily lives with the great forces of human destiny.

Eagerly they went to church the following Sunday to be fed again. And surely they were, it was still a great sermon, but it was the same one. Well... it was good enough so nobody said anything. The third Sunday he gave the same sermon. It was good, but maybe not that good. People began to mutter, a great sin according to the Apostle Paul.

The next Sunday after he preached the same sermon, the committee met in the parking lot. What were they to do? The next step was to speak with the new minister. The eldest of the elders was volunteered and off he went.

“Preacher,” he said to him, “that was a mighty fine sermon the first time you preached it, and it was still pretty good the second time. But we can all practically recite it from memory and we were wondering when you were going to move on to something else.”

“When you all start doing what I’m telling you to do,” the young preacher responded, “I’ll move on to the next topic.”

I imagine that most ministers spend some time wondering how to get parishioners to do what our high ideals, our Principles and Purposes call for us to do. This morning, I want you to understand that I think it is important for St. John’s to act together, would it be too much for me to say, “let’s get our act together.”

This morning we used for our Affirmation the draft of our Proposed Mission Statement developed by the Strategic Planning Committee. It is also part of the opening remarks in Announcements. It reads, “St. John's is committed to creating a safe and caring community, working for social justice, and celebrating beliefs that respect freedom of thought." As I read it, this draft is not so much a new statement as a refinement of what has long been the sense of this community.

This morning I want to focus on just the middle part, which I read as “St. John’s is committed to ... working for social justice.” What is that all about?

From conversation with a number of you along with Chris Reed and the Social Action Coordinating Committee, a good number of members and friends of St. John’s are involved in justice concerns and share them in various contexts, as individuals, here at St. John. Another conversation I have picked up on is at the Strategic Planning Committee, when they have been asking what St. John’s commitment to social Justice might mean, for example, a congregational wide project for the year. This might mean, for example, adults, youth, and children becoming invoked in the Partnering Center that seeks to address police-community issues, which have arisen out of racial violence.

It is important that we each are involved is some form of social justice. For myself I have solicited signatures for the petition to Repeal Article Twelve. I attend the monthly meetings of the Metropolitan Area Religious Coalition of Cincinnati. So what? Am I just an individual? Or do I represent St. John’s?

The by-laws say I cannot represent St. John’s unless you have voted on the issue. So I am very pleased that the Board has recently approved the Congregational Initiatives Policy that gives us a process for speaking as a congregation, not just individuals. In our second reading, the poem by William Stafford, he wrote, “the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--should be clear:” I’m calling for more light, more clarity.

At a significant level, these, however, are just mechanics and avoid the really great issue, getting people moving. How do you motivate people, how does a minister mobilize her parishioners? In some churches, the minister might suggest that Jesus calls them to follow him, to uproot discrimination and prejudice. That might be enough for some, but you would be wondering what I have to say next.

So, let’s talk about Chicken Little. This is a classic story about how to get people moving: the sky is falling. There is nothing better to get folks up and anxious than to tell them that the end is nigh. Create a sense of urgency that their children are in imminent danger and people will, as the story illustrates, allow a fictional danger to lead them into real danger.

This is a serious problem faced by a leader who wants to mobilize people around an issue. Recall our fist reading, from the New Yorker: ‘Last May, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz explained in an interview with a reporter from Vanity Fair that, in deciding how to persuade Americans to go to war, “we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.’”

Notice that the concern was not to tell us what was going on in Iraq, nor was there any interest in clarity, the issue poets such as Stafford and Wendell Berry thrust upon us. The issue being discussed was none these. The issue was, “How can we persuade Americans to do what we want?”

This is a lack of clarity! And as Stafford says in his poem, this lack of clarity misleads us, “following the wrong god home we may miss our star.” And now we fear we have missed our star.

Other reasons for going to war in Iraq have been presented. At his Press conference this past Wednesday, President Bush said "I also have this belief, strong belief that freedom is not this country's gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the earth we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom." Bush’s God may be demanding the blood sacrifice of America’s youth, but we have freedom of religion and there is no way that my God demands the spilling of my children’s blood. At least the waters have been muddied about why we have gone to war. How clear are our nation’s signals?

One more muddying the water, lack of clarity as to why we have gone to war, another argument to persuade. Donald Rumsfeld has called the youthful Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his band ‘terrorists.’ Is the war against Iraq part of the war on terror? The recent visit of Ariel Sharon with George Bush has promoted speculation as to who is leading who. Rabbi Michael Lerner writes in THE NATION,

Sharon will give Bush's declining popularity a boost when he helps the US President reframe our current war against the people of Iraq as a struggle against terrorism. For thirty-seven years Israeli governments have used that approach to justify their own occupation of the West Bank and Gaza--and it has worked politically to convince many Israelis to ignore the evidence that it is the occupation that causes the terror and not vice versa.

Last Sunday I watched a dialogue between Cornel West and Toni Morrison on C-Span. West began with one of his grand questions for Morrison, “How are you feeling about the current historical moment?” Ever thoughtful, meditative, Morrison offered “Terrified, ... melancholic.”

Morrison speaks truth, speaks clearly to us: fearful, sad.

Should we at St. John vote on the war in Iraq? I don’t think we are ready to.

Underlying the lack of clarity of the current administration is not merely an effort to persuade Americans about the war, nor for the President to get reelected. There is a deeper lack of clarity about our lives, not only in terms of foreign relations, but also domestic relations and economics.

One of the commentators on our current situation, Tom Engelhardt, has made a significant observation about the lack of clarity of our time. Writing about the attempt to understand the disintegration of the war in Iraq, he remarks in Mother Jones, “Under the pressure of recent events, as has been true over and over since 9/11, journalists, analysts and pundits are reaching for historical analogies that might help us grasp or even domesticate the rush of events.”

We think the world changed as of Sept 11, 2001. We seek clarity since 9/11, to domesticate what James Joyce called, “the nightmare of history.” A far better date, I think, is the fall of the Berlin Wall. With the end of the evil empire, we no longer knew who to blame our problems on, whom to beat up on when we are angry. Many have been seeking a new enemy, a new evil empire ever since. One of the most profound thinkers about our world, anthropologist Clifford Geertz at Princeton, has written a thoughtful article on this. The title says it all “The World in Pieces.” What little clarity we can find since the fall of the Berlin Wall, since the end of a bi-polar world, reveals that we are not really so sure about what a nation is, a country. Not a culture, not a consensus.

So, if you go home and someone asks what the preacher said today, do not say I said the sky was falling. Say I said – as the poet Archibald MacLeish said in our responsive reading -- No, the sky is not falling. The sky has already fallen.

Where do we go from here? I think it is the church’s role to bring some clarity to things, to send clear signals about the search for meaning in our lives.

Following Geertz as he describes “The World In Pieces,” let us ask if we know what a church is. We are St. John’s UU church. What is a church? The first definition often found in a dictionary is, the church is a place, a building: an address: 320 Resor Ave. Is that what we mean?

The next definition is usually something like some universal body, the body of Christ, the Roman Catholic Church. Catholics have used the term “Mother Church”, as Dorothy Day, who said, “The church may be a harlot, but she is my Mother.” We’re not likely to speak of our association of churches, as a church itself, or denominational headquarters as the “Mother Church”.

A definition that comes closest to the traditions of our origins, reads, “A congregation of Christians locally organized into a society for religious worship and spiritual purpose”

Geertz’s point in “the World In Pieces,” remains valid for us as an organization. We are not clear when we use the word church: are we a building? a congregation of people who met and know each other, or an overarching organization? When someone says, “the church is against birth control,” we know what it means, but we know it is not talking about us.

I am not being pedantic. This is a practical question, what is a church? Are we an assemblage of individuals, or are we a unity? If we are an assemblage of individuals, does that mean, referring to our mission statement, that only some of us are committed to St. John’s being a “safe and caring community?” Can St. John’s be a safe and caring community if some of us could care less about it?

Can we be committed to social justice without acting in unity some of the time? But if we act in unity, what about the next part of the mission statement, respecting freedom of thought?”

Am I asking for greater logical consistency in our mission statement? No, I am not. Am I saying we need more coherence in its formulation? No I am not. Following Geertz, we need to think of a community, not as some sort of solid bar of iron, the same all the way through, whose main function is to allow us to figure out who our enemies are. Rather, think of a church as, say, yarn.

Most Sundays, I stand here and watch several people knitting. Okay, time to be a sermon illustration. If you have ever spun yarn, you know it is a process of twisting different pieces of wool into thread. No one piece of wool goes the entire length of the yarn. But twisted together, they make a length of material that can once again be woven into something else. A church then is like some yarn, or a ball of yarn, or maybe a sweater knitted out of yarn. If we follow Geertz, we will see that a church is much like a nation, not simply defined, even if it may exist.

The mistake comes when we start to take one definition as absolute. We want to be a safe and caring congregation. As we turn to be committed to social justice, we may risk some of that safety, and challenge our freedom of speech. As long was we do not take any of them as absolute, twining them together as we need, we can be a light unto the world.

Humanity today is searching for clarity. We seek to domesticate the reality we find ourselves absorbed in, to get handles on parts of our lives. We here at this church can be a light unto the world, if we are clear about the signals we send.

I am glad that a number of people involved with our Social Action Coordinating Committee are circulating a petition that is the first step in a process of dialogue and voting about whether St. John’s supports the Repeal of Article XII. At the moment, you personally may support repeal. But a strict reading of our By-Laws makes it clear that just because there is a consensus on an issue here at St. John’s does not mean that St. John’s is committed to that issue. If St. John’s is for repeal of Article XII, you will have to vote on it. Wanda and Daisy have a petition, see them during the coffee hour and sign up to bring this before a congregational meeting.

Let us send a clear signal on gay rights. When the time comes, if we need to send a clear signal on terrorism or ecology, we’ll be able to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

The sky has fallen. What then does it mean when we say, “St. John's is committed to creating a safe and caring community, working for social justice, and celebrating beliefs that respect freedom of thought?”