THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
WITH NO FIG LEAF FOR MY SHAME
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached October 7, 2001, at The First Unitarian Church of HonoluluLast night was the launching event of our annual Church canvass drive. The folk who will be hosting the pledge dinners next weekend were having their "practice" dinner. I was supposed to have had a wedding ceremony that day at three o'clock in the afternoon out at the Turtle Bay Hilton. The couple and I had worked on it since the beginning of August. We'd had some difficulty being able to get together because the groom is a military officer stationed here in Honolulu. We could only get together when he was in port. When September 11th happened, he immediately realized that the first 20 minutes that he could steal from the U.S. government was going to be spent getting the paperwork done for that marriage and he did. On the 14th they dashed down town and managed to get it done and get married. They weren't at all sure whether the guests that they had invited for yesterday at three o'clock were going to be able to make it. You'll recall the airlines were somewhat unpredictable then. As it turned out, some of the flights remained unpredictable and on Friday the wedding ceremony was moved from three o'clock until five-thirty. Even so, we didn't get the wedding ceremony started until six o'clock.
Well, as I was getting ready to do this wedding ceremony I was bemoaning the fact that I was going to have to do it fast. I actually got back in town just about the time everybody left the party. I was filled with indignation and resentment at the way the world had intervened on my life.
Shortly after I woke up this morning Mary MacKay called and said, "If you haven't, then you best turn on the radio or the TV." The bombs had started falling. Suddenly my righteous indignation seemed awfully trivial.
Yes, the events of the last almost month, now, probably will interfere with our canvass drive. This community is no less worthy of your generous support and we are confident that our congregation remembers that we need your pledges. We need to know what you'll be giving next year so we can plan responsibly.
But you also need us.
I used to be president of the Florida Consumers Action Network, one of the largest consumer action organizations in the state and one of the more effective ones in the country. We had folk that went out canvassing for money and lobbying people to get them to call legislators about the various issues that the organization was working on. And I used to tell the canvassers, "When you present our story to somebody at their front door and you persuade them to part with a check, you have not taken something from them -- you have given something to them. They will experience the issues on their TV and radio and in their newspapers with a different awareness than they did before you parted them from that check. You have prodded them to pay attention to their community, their world, their environment, in a way that they probably weren't before. And that's a gift."
When we get you to write your name on the bottom of a pledge card we appreciate the fact that it is a promise of a gift to us. But please be clear: getting you to do that is our gift to you. With a name on a pledge card, you will experience this community differently.
Members, friends and visitors are always welcome at our activities and services; but there is a secret that is not often spoken aloud. That which we have in a Unitarian Universalist congregation that is of most value is not the opportunity to hear the brilliance of the Rev. Mike Young. That which we have that is of the most value occurs in the process of being a part of the community that makes this community happen. The most profound pieces of theology occur doing dishes together. The most profound encourgement to stay alive and growing happens in the process of planning an event or activity, or being a part of the brainstorming that comes up with ideas. These are the places where we, in fact, do our growing. So please accept our gift and sign a pledge card.
END OF COMMERCIAL
The sermon that I had intended for this morning began six months ago, long before the events of September 11. However, those events have given the topic, at least, if not the sermon a poignancy that I had no way of anticipating. For, in the face of what has and what will be continuing to happen in this world, to talk about forgiveness is awkward, at best. Partly, this is because we have so trivialized the notion of forgiveness.
It has come to have to do with whether or not you met all of my expectations. If you didn't meet all of my expectations, I expect you to say you're sorry and maybe I'll forgive you.
How many times have we expected someone to say they're sorry so that we can very gratuitously forgive them for having hurt our feelings? "You hurt my feelings" is a fascinating theological statement. "You didn't behave the way I wanted you to and expected you to and never mind the fact I didn't tell you ahead of time what was expected of you, you were supposed to know that. Everybody knows that and you did it, anyway! Now, if you say you're sorry, I'll forgive you."
Forgiveness has become so trivialized that when we are confronted with true evil that really does need transforming, somehow forgiveness just won't bear the weight.
I'm a listener to Dr. Laura. This shocks a few people and has offended a few others. I find Dr. Laura quite fascinating. I disagree with her about a great many things but she has one of the best "crap" detectors I have ever come across. She often engages in the kind of interviewing skill that everybody in the people-helping biz needs to learn. She can hear right where the B.S. and evasion is and call it dead center. I've learned a great deal from her.
One of the things that she has occasionally gotten exorcised about is people who are feeling guilty that they can't forgive somebody for having done something truly vicious, mean, evil and horrible. We have told ourselves that "you are supposed to forgive people." Dr. Laura insists that you must not forgive until there is true repentance and restitution and demonstrated changed behavior; that, in fact, to forgive until those things have happened is to become a co-conspirator with evil.
What did Jesus say? You're supposed to forgive seventy times seven times. I think almost nobody hearing that very Zen-like teaching of Jesus catches what I believe was the point of his statement. I think the point of that interesting hyperbole of Jesus' is that if you're worried about this trivial thing we are used to calling "forgiveness" you have missed it entirely. For the point of forgiving seventy times seven is not counting how many times you are expected or required to forgive somebody. The point is that we do not give up on people, not that we endlessly indulge them. Foriveness is ultimately not an individual-to-individual act. It is something that happens in community and is about community.
Those who breach the bounds and engage in some behavior worthy of forgiveness are responding to stuff on their own insides. Whatever else it may be, it has to do with already feeling excluded from community, with behaving in ways that drive community away, that disrupt their own communities and, in the process, the larger community as well.
It is not the case that you can do anything you want, and that is strictly and only your own business. Robinson Crusoe might have needed no morals on his island but the moment Friday showed up, he did. We individualists would like to think of ourselves as so self-contained and separate that our behavior is "none of your business." But we are relatively sloppy about, in fact, keeping our behavior none of your business. Almost all of the things that we do that are of significant importance in our lives connect us or disconnect us. That is what forgiveness has to do with !
My father told me you should always trust people, but you should never trust them to be something you know perfectly well they are not.
Related to that is a quote from Anne Lammott: "Forgiveness is to give up hope of ever having had a better past."
Think about that. Forgiveness is to give up hope of ever having had a better past. Is there not something basically ludicrous, on a cosmic scale, to the expectation that the past can somehow be annulled ? And yet, is this not at the heart of "I'm sorry." "You are forgiven." With the expectation we will forgive and forget.
Thomas Szasz says, "The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but they do not forget." They choose love but they choose to love in the real world, as it is.
Individually, at least, the issue finally is: Who do you want to be ? Do you want to be the person who hangs on to slights and hurts, whether trivial or profound, demanding that they somehow be undone? This is to choose to live in the past, surrounded by the open sores of every bruise and injury. From the side of the offender, do you wish to be the person who trods through people's lives completely self-indulgent and self-involved, expecting every "I'm sorry" to result in reprieve no matter how often repeated, until one is indeed self-indulgent and self-involved because no one else will indulge or be involved?
I may forgive the fox for being a fox but I will not put him in charge of the henhouse. I may even give the hungry chicken thief a second chicken, but not a third.
Unconditional love, as we have come to romantically misconstrue it, is an oxymoron. Agape Love, that love that Jesus and the theologians and the great poets of our Western tradition have spoken of, seeks the wholeness, health and joy of the beloved, not their indulgence. That love indeed has conditions. That love indeed seeks to build toward the redemption and joy of the other, not their self-indulgence. Too often, alleged conditional love, however, is mere cowardice. The unconditional love is, in fact, merely the fear of conflict and unpleasantness, or sometimes, so sadly, the fear of being alone. If we were to put conditions upon our love, really work to move our relationships in healthy directions, we fear we would simply be abandoned.
In the present, post-September 11th circumstance we've heard a good deal of anger and the desire for retribution. I hear in it largely the demand that someone make me stop feeling this way, a demand which, even if granted, isn't effective.
Much as we individualists hate to admit it, forgiveness is indeed, ultimately, a communal act, not an individual one. Oh, an individual may indeed grant or refuse forgiveness. But in refusing to give forgiveness the individual as much as the offender is isolating himself or herself from the community. Any offense worthy of forgiveness was an offense against the whole community, not merely an offense against an individual. Any individual who takes offense as an individual has mistaken themselves in their isolating self-importance as the community. And any individual who grants forgiveness as an individual is seeking to bolster and reinforce that isolating self-importance. For the other's behavior is not about me. Even Osama bin Laden's behavior is not about me. It's about them; it is their mistaken perception, their self-defeating and self-isolating habits, their acting out of their inclusion-exclusion experience of community or lack of it. And that is a much larger event than a mere "I'm sorry," or even restitution for that particular offense and reformation concerning that particular behavior.
The world that we live in is larger than that and forgiveness, even person-to-person, is larger than that. In the present situation that forgiveness includes finding the ways to make the odds as good as possible that September 11ths will not happen again and that is no simple matter of merely throwing bombs.
I have to admit that I have been impressed. The easiest thing that could have happened on September 12th was for Mr. Bush to have attempted to out-Clinton Clinton and thrown twice as many cruise missiles indiscriminately around the Islamic world. I'm not converted yet to being a "compassionate conservative," but I am impressed with the restraint and the care and systematic nature of the response so far. There will be continuing great tragedy. This will not go away soon. And a part of forgiveness requires that we, in fact, be a part of dealing with the real world that confronts us--as individuals, as a nation, as a family of nations--so that the realities that produce and produced September 11ths get dealt with. Any forgiveness that does not fully engage that task is not forgiveness and is not building peace. To simply indulge the allegedly evil "other" is not forgiveness, does not build community. As the quote from Lao Tzu that Mary shared so powerfully this morning suggests, peace comes as all of the parts of the relationship of us as individuals to the people we live with, the communities we are a part of, and in our modern world, the whole world that we share. It will task and test our wisdom. I am not short-term optimistic that we will be wise enough. I am long-term optimistic enough to believe we will find the way as a world community to get through it.
There is another aspect of this that is a challenge, I think, to all of our self-righteousness: Unitarians, Christians, Jews, Moslems. A part of what confronts us is that a major segment of Islam is not able to conceive of itself as being the community that they wish to be in a secular pluralistic culture. At first, the temptation is to look at that and to be quite self-righteous until we look at our own culture. In how many places have we been hearing the call for returning to our "Christian roots," and the insistence that we are a "Christian nation." The implication is that the West can only be moral and god-fearing in a Christian culture, as well. It is a lesson the whole world is agonizing over. How do we learn to live together in what inevitably must be a pluralistic world?
Forgive one another, not seven times but seventy times seven, and remember, every time that you do we are in the process of connecting and reconnecting ourselves to one another, and that may be the largest, most important task any of us will ever do.
Mary MacKay's Canvass TestimonialIf there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,There must be peace between neighbors.
If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.
-- Lao-TseThis is where I have come to in the last month. That what we do here matters. That whatever I carry into the world can be no better than I am. No wiser or more loving than I am with my family and friends. No stronger or more generous than I am in this beloved community. It is here that I create the person I want to be. Here that my vision of a better world is formed.
Last night, in this sanctuary, we began our pledge drive with a dinner for those who will be hosting pledge dinners in their homes next weekend. It was a lovely evening, but not the carefree, joyous, occasion we would like. We chose this year's theme before September 11. Now I can't imagine what else it could be but "Building Community". Out of all the confusion, anger and grief of the past month, it is the one thing that has emerged clearly for me. The one place I can act. Community matters. This community matters. And who I am -- loving, generous, just, at best. Terrified and vengeful at worst. Who I am matters.
I don't have any illusions that violence and oppression will vanish from the face of the earth if only I am good enough, if only we are good enough. I do believe that we each have enormous power and responsibility to find and act in our best selves. To reject vengeance and embrace justice. To reject hatred and bigotry and act in love. To reject the voice that calls me to draw in, break away, cast out. To build community.
In this time, in any time, a few will be called to great things. Some will be called to acts of great courage and sacrifice. Most of us, as Mother Theresa said, will be called to do small things with great love. -- Mary MacKay (Oct 7,2001)