Proof November 6, 2005 Mark Belletini The First Reading is the poem “Inventing Sin” by the God signs to us; we cannot read She shouts - we take cover She shrugs and trains leave the tracks Our schedules! we moan Our loved ones God is fed up All the oceans she gave us All the fields All the acres of steep seedful forests And we did what? Invented the Great Chain of Being and the chain saw Invented sin God sees us now gorging ourselves & starving our neighbors starving ourselves & storing our grain & She says I’ve had it you cast your trash upon the waters— it’s rolling in You stuck your fine fine finger into the mystery of life to find death & you did. You learned how to end the world in nothing flat Now you come crying to your mommy Send us a miracle Prove that you exist Look at your hand, I say Listen to your sacred heart Do you have to haul the tide in, sweeten the berries on the vine? I set you down a miracle among miracles. You want more. It’s your turn You show me. The Second Reading comes from Paul’s First Letter to the Gathered Community at Thessalonike. It is in all likelihood the earliest bit of writing from the collection of writings now called the New Testament, and it dates, we think, from the spring of the year 50, a mere 20 years after Jesus died. Belletini’s translation of the First Letter of Paul to the Community gathered at Thessolonike 5:13b-18a/19-20 Be at peace among yourselves. For that to happen, we are asking you, who are so like family to us, to confront those who disrupt everything, as at the same time you comfort the cautious, give care to the ailing, and be patient with everyone. Never react to hurt by hurting back, both when dealing with each other, and with everyone outside your community. Live a life that is lively, turn your whole life into a prayer, and find the thanks hidden in everything. Do not stifle the spirit, or ridicule those who warn of injustice at every turn; Examine everything carefully, clinging to what you can honestly prove, and turning from what harms the community. Sermon: Proof Gimme proof. I want proof. Prove to me that you love me. Prove to me that I am not just wasting my time. Prove to me that god exists. Prove to me that god doesn’t exist. Prove to me that you shouldn’t be ignored. Prove to me that I’m wrong. When I hear statements like that… (and I assure you, I have heard them all…) I feel as if a gauntlet has been thrown down in front of me. I feel as if a challenge has been issued. I feel like I want to respond right away with my whole being “Oh Yeah? Well hold on, ‘cause I AM gonna show you.” Of course, once I get past my competitiveness, and think about it for a bit, I slowly recognize that when people utter such a challenge, “prove it,” it always feels to me like they have an unspoken list of things which would prove the issue to their satisfaction, but which I cannot possibly provide. In other words, trying to “prove things” to others often strikes me as a futile exercise, except for a few high school geometry classes. For example, I just talked with a man recently who tried to convince me, (since I think he regarded a minister like me as a potential big catch,) that the ancient Galilean peasant Jesus never existed. He assured me that the son of Mary was really no different than the tooth fairy. He offered me scads of evidence too. There were all those contradictions in the gospels. There were clear influences from pagan sources, especially in all those miracle stories. The stories of Jesus’ death and resurrection are told differently in every single gospel. Paul, who wrote only 20 years after Jesus died, doesn’t ever talk about the historical Jesus, and only speaks of the overarching Christ Jesus, or Anointed One, clearly a supernatural figure. All of these issues “proved” to him that the historical Jesus was entirely made up out of whole cloth. Now, you need to know that everything he said to me is well known to anyone who ever went to a major seminary or, like oddball me, enjoyed going to the library as a teenager so I could read books by Goguel, Klausner and Bultmann, critical New Testament scholars all. Everything this man said is hardly news to the scholarly community for the last hundred years. But the main difference between this man and the scholars I mentioned is that he was raised in a profoundly fundamentalist household, whereas none of the scholars I mentioned were. Nor was I. So I came to feel that his desperate need to prove that Jesus of Galilee was a fairy tale must have another origin. You see, I had asked this man a few questions about his own life. About his own history with Jesus. And as his story unfolded, I came to realize that what he was trying to “prove” by massing his evidence was this: that his life did not have to be defined anymore by the absolute boogieman God of his childhood church, the terrifying Christ of his harsh upbringing. What he was trying to prove, desperately, was that his heart was good, not hopelessly depraved, as he had been tragically taught. What he was trying to prove was something I already knew… that he was inherently worthy, and that there was no Jesus anywhere who could take that precious dignity from him. Thus, you can see perhaps, that over the years, I’ve come to think a lot of things that people try to “prove” are rooted in autobiography, often life stories filled with conflicts about self-worth, self-affirmation, and self-identity. I’ve come to think over the years that what I call the religious life, or what some call the spiritual life, is tied far more to feelings and the heart than it is to cool-headed reasoning, and that even when cool headed reasoning comes into the picture, its often a deep feeling in disguise. Now both of our readings this afternoon have a few things to say about this notion of proving things. The first, our poet George Ella Lyon, suggests that its rather futile to ask God to prove her existence when humanity’s behavior…and thus existence… is far more questionable. The poem lists the way we human beings have polluted the earth, cooked up doomsday bombs, and neatly divided our whole social world into a few million haves and billions of have nots. And the motherly voice of God says “What, you want me to prove myself to you? How about you proving yourself to me instead? ” And then the poet twists the screws even tighter by daring to name her poem “Inventing Sin.” I always remark to folks that it’s easier to say a few choice inappropriate words in the pulpit than it ever is the word “sin.” Its one of those words that has been dragged through such moralistic mud, and for such a long time, that its barely recognizable anymore. I certainly understand why any religious liberal could recoil in good conscience from the petty venal word it has become under the spell of the television tent preachers. But I want you to hear again how our two writers are seeing the human condition. Not as existential and individual, but as shared and communal. It’s hard to be a have and have not all by yourself… you need a whole community to have that sad split. And the ocean coughs up its trash on everyone’s shore, not just on one or two beaches. Paul makes it pretty clear: “Do not stifle the spirit, or ridicule those who warn of injustice at every turn; examine everything carefully, clinging to what you can honestly prove, and turning from what harms the community.” Paul agrees that there is injustice at every turn…but makes sure that you understand that injustice…sin… is what harms the whole community. Furthermore, for Paul, “proof” is not about theological speculation. You hold fast to what you can honestly prove, which means turning from what harms the whole community. Sin, according to both our poet and Paul, is not brief spasm of private guilt for some sexual feeling, but the breaking of our common world…by us, humanity as a whole. Nevertheless, this communal breaking of the world is not just systemic…it also involves personal feeling. Indeed, I believe that feeling always comes first…and reason comes second. Reason gives structure to our feelings like bones give structure to our hands. But it also helps keep the feelings from swamping us, or exhausting us, too. Nevertheless, for any religion that wants to engage the fractured world, feeling comes first. I’ll go further. I maintain ours is a religion of reason because we can deeply feel so much first. Feel the reality of injustices… the woman begging on the corner, the young black man pulled over for DWB driving while black. Those images sear my soul. They call to my heart, which breaks, as if it was emblematic of the world. I can feel the tears of polluted air in my eyes, feel the resentment growing in me as young men and women, who are scarcely teenagers die daily in war, or from bad water, or because of buried landmines. I can feel the power of televised religious bigotry trying to seep into my bones, trying to distort my soul. I can feel the ache of my neighbors who have had too little access to health care or too much access to homophobic climates in schools and work and at church. You see, you feel first, and then you find ways to respond. One piece at a time. Organized. Patient. Steady. Together. And without resorting to magical thinking, like when we believed the Taliban was going to give up their cruel ways just because we sent them an email with ten thousand typed names on it. But, “Our schedules, we moan, our loved ones!” The poet puts it well, doesn’t she, in that precise line? Oh, I understand. There is much to do, and even more to feel. It’s rough. We have other demands, other desires. But the poet continues Look at your hand. Listen to your own sacred heart. No one but us, she is saying, is going to face all of these problems. They don’t go away by magic. No one comes down and turns off the landmines before children step on them. No lighting comes down to sizzle the homophobia out of a cleric’s head, or to distribute access to power more equitably by a miracle. Our own human sacred heart has to feel the anguish, and then our hand has to be set to the plow and to reasonably guide it forward, so that there can one day be a great harvest, if not in our own lifetime, than in the lifetimes of our children’s children. So, I say it again, convincing proof begins not with evidence, but by naming the feelings in the heart. And those feelings, shaped by our liberal religious tradition of social justice accountability, leads to the kind of reason which helps us begin the process of repairing the broken world and healing ourselves. So now let me offer you some proof that what I am saying is moving toward truth. Back in 1987, there was an IARF conference in At that particular IARF congress, they came up with the bold idea of Circle Groups. These were to be mixtures of people from all over the world, about ten to a group. Translators were to be supplied for the Japanese speakers, the Hungarian speakers, and some of the Indians. Most everyone else spoke a little English, although often highly accented. Well, it turned out that this grand scheme worked. Except in our group. They ran out of translators, and we were the one group without them. We thought we would just give up when one woman communicated with us that instead of relying on translators, we should just make up our own language, and use that. It seemed pretty over the top until she explained what she meant. She suggested that we come up with 80 or so words and symbols that indicated central sorts of words in any language. And then, she suggested, we would each get a half hour to tell the story of our life in our own language, but using a timeline on the chalkboard on which we would draw the symbols from our made up common language. After we communicated this idea by hand gestures and signals of various kinds. we all agreed, and got immediately to work. So using simple geometric designs or stylized drawings, we came up with symbols suggesting the following ideas (and this is only a partial list) Life, death, birth, family, spouse, lover, friend, wedding, divorce, mother, father, sister, brother, child, teen, adult, elder, grandparents, funeral, city, countryside, morning, evening, night, travel, vacation, war, peace, sickness, health, grief, joy, catastrophe, anger, depression, love, justice, conflict, reconciliation, school, university, work, retirement, spiritual center, (ie. temple or church,) devotional life, and The Holy, (however people defined it for their own lives.) It was a giddy exercise just to come up with our vocabulary, since we had to speak sign language to each other to get our point across. But we loved doing this difficult work, and we were proud of what we did during that long first day. The next day, one at a time, we started telling each other our life stories, drawing a horizontal line on the board, and then, beginning with the sign for birth, we spoke of our joys and sorrows, our trials and tribulations, our discoveries and adventures. It was moving to a fault. Every story was both hilarious and heartbreaking, sad and profound. On the last day, a Canadian woman spoke, in English. She told about being raised in the States, but moving up north with her second husband who was a Canadian. She spoke of her upbringing, and of the visible signs of the coming war in the late 1930’s. She spoke of her first husband, and how once they were married they moved to After she was finished, and we had asked her questions, a woman from She then looked over to the Canadian woman, whose eyes were, understandably by then, spilling with tears of recognition. And the Canadian woman got up off her chair, and walked over and put her arms around the Japanese woman, and they held each other good and long. And in a little, we all reached out to each other, and held each other good and long. Because, you see, we understood that everything good and holy was flowing in those tears…, compassion, sympathy, and even the beginnings of forgiveness. And, as I promised you, all the proof we ever needed about anything. Everything was proved that day, and to this day my heart has never lost the beauty of that proof. And using the poet’s words, if my “sacred heart” and my miraculous hands don’t know that, what do they know? Today, you are installing your minister, my dear friend and heart/brother David. And you are doing this for many reasons, to be sure, but among those reasons are so that he might, as your minister, walk with you as you feel what you feel, and then, joining his hand to yours, work together with you to face the hard realities of the spirit, examining your own part in those realities as you go. And then he will support you all as you move forward to slowly dismantle systems of injustice inside and outside your own heart. And he will support you while you weave strong new strands of fairness to supplant the tatter of an unfair world. In the ancient words of Paul, David is here to remind you of what you already know: Live a life that is lively, turn your whole life into a prayer, and find the thanks hidden in everything. Do not stifle the spirit, or ridicule those who warn of injustice at every turn; Examine everything carefully, clinging to what you can honestly prove, and turning from what harms the community. And be at peace among yourselves. Installation Prayer Love, in your presence we lay these our hands on this man to confirm his ordination with our own sacred hearts, to press into him our supportive presence in his life, to anoint him with the open palm of our peace. Now installed to serve this congregation, and to help them serve their neighborhood, city, nation and world, we pray, O Love, that he might find some quiet under the clamor, and strength to learn from both wonder and weariness. May he never abandon the struggles of service while welcoming it joys, nor allow his frailties and frustrations to define him. Ease this man into the kind of courage that is more being than achievement, and let the abrasive grace of your vision of justice for all who live upon the earth polish him so as to better reflect your consistent illumination. Darken his bright mind with fresh questions, and bid him ever to take tenderly the hand of the one he especially loves. Let the stars of night sparkle in the pools of his eyes so that he might respond in health to those daily summons to saving priorities. O Love, for your presence and for this man we are grateful. And now, move in each of us as we, day by day, year by year, fulfill the promise of this action by ourselves serving with gladness and gratitude. Amen. |