"A God for All Seasons"
A sermon for Jewish High Holy Days by Rev. Charles Blustein
Ortman
September 20, 2009
ANCIENT READINGS:
The first reading is from The Book of Job, Chapter 7:
"Will you never turn your gaze away from me, nor let me alone
until I swallow my spittle? Have I sinned? What have I done to You,
O watcher of humankind? Why have you set me as your target, so that
I am a burden [even] to myself?
"Why then do you not pardon my transgression and take away
my iniquity? For now I will lie down in the dust; And You will seek
me, but I will not be."
The second reading is from the Mishna Yoma 8:9, a well-known
text, often reprinted in Jewish prayer books for meditation on Yom
Kippur:
One who says, "I will sin and repent, and sin and repent again,"
will be given no opportunity to repent. For one who says, "I
will sin and Yom Kippur will effect atonement," Yom Kippur
effects no atonement. Yom Kippur atones for sins against God, not
for those against people, unless the injured party has been appeased.
SERMON:
"Le shana tovah tikatevu." "May you be inscribed
for a good year in the Book of Life." This is the traditional
Jewish greeting from Rosh Ha-Shona, the New Year, which began this
past Friday evening, and runs through Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement,
which starts at sunset, a week from tonight. During this time, Jewish
people around the world observe and celebrate the season of fasting,
penitence and atonement at this, the beginning of the Jewish New
Year, 5770. These are the High Holy Days.
Many of us in this congregation come directly out of the Jewish
tradition; some are related by blood, or by marriage, some of us
even by a gastronomic affinity. And some of us are not quite so
directly related to Judaism at all.
In our Principles and Purposes of Unitarian Universalism, we especially
claim our heritage from Jewish, Christian, Humanist and Earth-Centered
sources. It's our practice in the liberal religious tradition to
celebrate these foundations that have fed our own tradition, and
to recognize the universal values and truths inherent in them. And
so today, as we do each year, we turn to the message of the High
Holy Days to find there the value of its theme, and the lessons
that relate to us in our time and place.
A danger in drawing from other traditions, which we would do well
to note, is the risk of misappropriating elements of those traditions.
It's not our attempt here to pretend that we're all Jews for a day,
or for the week. Instead, we recognize that these High Holy Days
are of major significance in the Jewish year, that they carry valuable
lessons for us all about atonement, right-relationship, and about
renewal and integrity for the long haul.
In a fairly untraditional approach to this season (and if you can't
get an untraditional approach here, I don't know where else you
might!), I want to invoke the Book of Job for this High Holy Day
message. I think that Job is an often underestimated story in the
Jewish scriptures. It's often thought that Job loses everything
- his land, his cattle and crops, his children, his wife, his wealth,
his equanimity, even his faith and his desire to live. It's thought
that, in his mercy, God forgives Job and restores him to his humanity
and to his life.
The truth of it is though, Job never loses his faith. He loses
his cool, but he doesn't lose his faith. For the most part, I think
that is the point often missed in the story: Job loses his cool
and keeps his faith.
Job goes through loss after loss, unending. He is beside himself
in grief and agony. Clearly, it is God who has caused him all this
suffering. Not a very kind or loving God, mind you. This god is
more of an ass than an asset. He's not what I would call a god for
all seasons. Remember, he does all of these horrendous things to
Job, pretty much as the result of a bet with the Devil over whether
or not there is one good person walking the Earth. He's not particularly
my idea of an ideal god, but he's the one put forward in this Old
Testament story.
So, this is the god that Job has to deal with. How does Job do
that? In all his grief and agony, he recognizes that God is the
culprit who has done all of this stuff to him. He doesn't forsake
God though. He gets angry with him, really angry, and he lets him
have it. Job lets loose with a litany of anger. That's what saves
him. That's what saves his faith and his life. It's his expression,
his heartfelt, earnest and healthy expression of his anger.
The point of the story is that we do get hurt, sometimes incredibly
hurt, by life. We lose a job; we lose security; we lose our health;
we lose a loved one; we lose our sanity. There are so many losses
that are a part of life that we have to endure. We just have to
bear all these losses. We know them; we've lived them.
How can we do that? And what can help us? If there's any truth
and value to the story of Job, and I think there's a lot of both,
then one way we can bear our many burdens is by acknowledging the
pain that we are in. And part of that is by expressing the anger
that those burdens stir in us. A key element in the story is not
that Job gets angry, but that he expresses his anger to God.
It would be a lot easier for us to address our anger at some idiot
idol that plays with our fate for sport. But for most of us, that
god is no more than a figure from literary fiction. For many, if
not most of us here, there is little belief in any god who causes
things to happen, to, or for, or against us. If god is love, or
mystery or nature, that can make it challenging to come up with
a divine target for our anger. It doesn't have to make it impossible
though.
The thing is, we do need a God for all Seasons. We need a raison
d'etre, a cause for being, a sense of goodness that we are a part
of, a sense of the mystery in which we have our being. Call it what
you want. We need it. I need it, and today I'm calling it a God
for all Seasons. Whatever we call it though, it needs to be big
enough, grand enough, to be the cause of all our beings, not just
a chosen few. And whatever we call it, it needs to provide a big
enough target for our anger. And it needs to be great enough to
absorb that anger.
I'll tell you why I need a God for all Seasons, just now. I'm having
a real hard time getting a hold of this season we are in. I think
I do understand one thing about it though - we are living in an
era of incredible anger. Everyday it seems there are fresh examples
in the news of individuals, often public persons, who, unlike Job,
express their anger in incredibly vitriolic and destructive ways.
These exhibitions are often professed as the manifestations of faith.
They are anything but faithful, though, except perhaps as a display
of faith in some very minor deity, who does indeed favor a chosen
few, who is vindictive, and arbitrary, and mean spirited. Gods are
diminished when they're used to inflict injury on others. Gods shrink
to piteous when they are used to express anger that people don't
want to own for themselves.
There's a lot of anger being mongered out there. It's often hard
in the public square to tell the difference between anger and hatred.
I suspect that they're two are parts of the same thing…with
a measure of fear thrown into the mix.
I'm not talking about Serena Williams' or Roger Federer's outbursts
at the US Open. Although I might be talking about some of the response
to Serena's expression of anger.
I am talking about the feeling, so often expressed of late that
anyone can spew venom whenever they want or wherever they happen
to be. I'm talking about the Rush Limbaughs and the Glenn Becks
out there, who are so filled with unresolved anger that the annihilation
of any sense of civility in our country is of little consequence
in their faithless efforts to unseat our democratically elected
government.
I'm talking about a host of ministers from the Religious Right
who pray from their pulpits for the death of President Obama. I'm
not kidding. Just this past week the Washington Post reported that
among such pastors is Steven L. Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist
Church in Tempe, Arizona, who,
"…on August 16th… told his congregation that he prays
for the death of President Obama. In a sermon titled "Why I
Hate Barack Obama," Anderson preached: "I'm not going
to pray for his good I'm going to pray he dies and goes to hell."
Anderson is not the only man of the cloth to wish widowhood upon
Michelle Obama. In June, the Rev. Wiley Drake of First Southern
Baptist Church in Buena Park, California, said he was praying for
the President's death. Anderson, however, was explicit in his wish.
"I'd like him to die of natural causes. I don't want him to
be a martyr; we don't need another holiday. I'd like to see him
die, like Ted Kennedy, of brain cancer."
I hear fear, hatred and anger in those voices. Job was a man who,
even through his incredible losses and grief and anger, remained
faithful to his god. Who is the god to whom Revs. Anderson, Drake
and others like them direct their prayers? What god could hear such
prayers?!
Le shana tovah tikatevu. May you be inscribed for a good year in
the Book of Life. The High Holy Days represent the season of change,
the season of turning, the season of atonement. Atonement means
the righting of wrongs, the correction of sin. The story of Job
suggests that the sin of anger is not about being angry, but about
failing to air our anger in heartfelt, earnest, healthy expressions
of it.
When we fail to be responsible for our anger, when we refuse to
acknowledge it, when we keep a lid on it, it festers and sickens
until we are infected and sickened by it. Much of the reason for
the outlandish and destructive displays of anger we've been witnessing
so much of late, I have to believe, have to do with a cultural inability
to own the pain that is at its source. I'm not suggesting this is
the only dynamic at play, but that it is a major dynamic.
There is indeed incredible hurt that has been experienced by those
public figures - politicians, pundits and preachers - who shriek
with malice, and by those average Joes and average Janes who pick
up and reverberate their voices. We hear the sickness spoken and
echoed in the Chambers of Congress, in houses of worship, in town
hall meetings, in print, over the airwaves and out in the streets.
There is indeed incredible hurt that has been experienced by so
many, hurt that has yet has gone unclaimed and unowned, and so it
goes exorcised.
What is this hurt all about? What is this loss, filled with fear,
and fear of further loss all about? I suspect that is has a great
deal to do with privilege. Again, I'm not suggesting this is the
only dynamic at play, but that it is a major dynamic in the mix.
This loss is about the privilege once experienced by segments of
our population that has eroded over the years. "We hold these
truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal..."
"All men," at the time those words were written, meant
all white men who owned property. And then the slaves were freed.
And then women got the vote. And then Blacks got the vote; at least
as 3/5 of a human being they got the vote. And eventually they got
it all the way. And then the migrant laborers from Mexico and other
Latin countries started to stay here after the picking seasons were
over. And they started to speak for their rights. And then African,
Middle Eastern and other immigrants said, "Hey, we're in it,
too!"
And with each wave of expansion in the definition of what it means
to be an American, there has been hurt that comes from the loss
of privilege. We don't have a great track record, as a nation, in
owning that hurt. We do have a litany of practices and philosophies
though that have been put into place in order to help us deny the
hurt. They are racism, sexism, classism and, one most recently in
play, heterosexism.
Why do you suppose all that hurt goes unexpressed in ways that
might be constructive? It would mean that the institutional, national
theft that has denied the marginalized their due in this melting
pot nation, would have to be owned, would have to be atoned for,
by those who have constructed the structures of privilege and even
by those of us who have benefited from the protection provided within
its walls.
So the pain of loss goes unexpressed and the flames of anger are
fanned into raging fires. Maybe what we need is some kind of National
Day of Atonement. Or maybe more of what we need are efforts to engage
in processes that extend the blessings of America to those who have
had diminished access to them. Wait a minute, such efforts already
do exist and they exist right here in our own congregation!
There is a group planning to go to Washington, DC with me on October
11th to march on behalf of the rights of our gay and lesbian brothers
and sisters. There are more who are organizing to promote Marriage
Equality in New Jersey by supporting legislation that will come
before our State Assembly in November. There are groups working
to sustain our environment and to promote ethical eating - and these
issues are most assuredly closely related to the isms listed above.
There are those who work relentlessly on behalf of underprivileged
children and their plight for what is right. There are those who
have joined together to feed the hungry through their work and support
of the Human Needs Food Pantry, the Salvation Army and Toni's Kitchen.
There are so many here who labor together for the rights of others
- for those who are penalized because of race or ethnicity, those
who are imprisoned, those documented and undocumented immigrants
who do not receive fair or civil treatment. There are those who
strive, amid the incredible anger of this era, to secure health
care for those who go in want of it.
The call to atonement does not allow us to hide behind the mask
of not knowing. We can see to easily that oppression exists. And
with little effort we can see myriad opportunities for our participation
in the creation of a more just and loving world.
The High Holy Days provide us a season for atonement. We needn't
fool ourselves into thinking that this is something that can be
accomplished in a day, or a week, or even in a couple of weeks.
It's really about a lifetime of effort. This season can remind us
of that. And it can remind out us that saying we're sorry to God,
whatever god we might imagine, or even just saying we're sorry at
all, is never enough. "The injured party must be appeased,"
the scripture reads. Ongoing atonement for those with privilege
is the relentless task of securing for others the blessings that
they, that we, enjoy.
We cannot force those on the radical right or any others to deal
with their pain or their loss or their anger in any particular ways.
But we can be responsible for our own hurt and fear and anger. In
this way, we can own the pain of what has been lost. We can find
earnest, heartfelt and healthy ways to express our anger. We can
honor the great mystery that holds us in being. In this way we can
open ourselves to awe, bathe ourselves in gratitude and commit ourselves
to be born again and again in the possibilities of service.
How goes it with you this holiday season? Are you willing and able
to own the hurts that are a part of your life? Are you ready to
go out on a limb, to be vulnerable, to express your anger in earnest,
heartfelt and healthful ways? Are you ready to turn, to change,
and to be renewed?
So much has already been lost. But there are ways that can show
us a way. There are ways that can invite our participation. There
are ways that can remind us that we are not in this alone, but are
on a part of something much larger than ourselves, something quite
grand, something very holy, that is waiting for us to atone, to
be at one, in our lives and in our world.
"Le shana tovah." "May you be inscribed for a good
year."
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