"God's Chosen People…
It's All of Us!"
A sermon by Rev. Charles Blustein Ortman
For the Jewish High Holy Days
October 5, 2008
ANCIENT READINGS:
Our first reading this morning is from the Hebrew Book of Isaiah:
I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.
The wild animals will honour me,
the jackals and the ostriches;
for I give water in the wilderness,
rivers in the desert,
to give drink to my chosen people,
the people whom I formed for myself
so that they might declare my praise.
Our second reading is also from the Hebrew scripture this morning,
from the Book of Psalms, Number 36:
Your steadfast love, O LORD, extends to the heavens,
your faithfulness to the clouds.
Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains,
your judgments are like the great deep;
you save humans and animals alike...
How precious is your steadfast love, O God!
All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
They feast on the abundance of your house,
and you give them drink from the river of your delights.
For with you is the fountain of life;
in your light we see light.
SERMON:
"Le shana tovah tikatevu." "May you all 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 Monday evening and runs through Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement,
which starts at sunset this coming Wednesday evening. During this
time, Jewish people from around the world observe and celebrate
the season of fasting, penitence and atonement at this, the beginning
of the Jewish New Year, 5769. 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
by a gastronomic affinity. 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 we turn to the message of the High Holy Days to find the
value of its theme as it relates to us in our time and place.
A danger in drawing from other traditions is the risk of misappropriating
elements of those traditions. It's not our attempt here to pretend
that we're all Jewish for the 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, renewal and integrity for the long-haul.
When I chose the theme for this year's High Holy Day sermon, "God's
Chosen People…" I couldn't help but to remember a piece
I came across a couple of years ago on The Onion website. I couldn't
locate it there this week, but did find it on the website, SatireWire.com.
GOD NAMES NEXT "CHOSEN PEOPLE"; IT'S JEWS AGAIN.
"Oy Vey," Say Jews
Jerusalem (SatireWire.com) Update - Jews, whose troubled, 10,000-year
term as God's "chosen people" finally expired last night,
woke up this morning to find that they had once again been hand-picked
by the Almighty. Synagogues across the globe declared a day of mourning.
Asked if the descendants of Abraham shouldn't be pleased about
being tapped for an unprecedented second term, Jerusalem Rabbi Ben
Meyerson shrugged. "Of course, you are right, we should be
thrilled," he said. "We should also enjoy a good swift
kick in the head, but for some reason, we don't.
Much of the world's re-blessed Jewish community shared that feeling.
"It's always been considered a joke with us. You know, 'Please
G-d (Hashem), next time choose someone else,' ha ha," said
a New York City resident.
The High Holy Days are a time for making confession and so I'll
make a confession here. I'm a Unitarian Universalist because, first
- I need to be in a religious community; second - because I could
never survive in the world of orthodoxy. I'm not very good at taking
anything literally. That's because I truly believe that anything
expressed by humans (and I do count sacred scriptures among human
expressions) anything uttered comes out of a particular perspective.
So, at best and at worst, our expressions relate the truth of our
authentic experience from a perspective of the experience. Our expression
is always a metaphor for the experience, but not the experience
itself. Our expression is a metaphor for truth, it is not THE truth;
the better the metaphor, the more aptly truth has been illustrated.
Metaphor is our vehicle for approaching truth, and the metaphoric
stories we tell ourselves and our children are the mythologies we
live by.
When I think of God, I don't think of a super person or any kind
of being. I think, instead, of questions that seem to have no answers.
I think of the balance between harmony and discord, between light
and dark. I think about the unknowable cause of being. I think of
life and love, of birth and death, of what comes before birth and
after death. Other words might work quite as well, but God is as
good of a metaphor for whatever those universal truths are as I
can imagine.
So when I think of the ancient Hebrews thrown into slavery by the
Egyptians, their escape from slavery and wandering in the desert
and then finally arriving in the Promised Land, I think about some
people who had a pretty tough go of it. They were, and to a significant
extent still are, at odds with the people in the world around them.
They needed a God who was tough as nails because they needed to
be as tough as nails. They chose their God within the context of
an experience of being chosen by that God. The stories, the mythologies
around the metaphor of that patriarchal desert deity, reflect the
spiritual response of a people in place and time.
However we might experience or address the unfathomable mysteries
of this universe and this life, whatever metaphors we might use,
we, too, need to find in them a place for ourselves, a feeling that
we are here because, through fate or by calling, this is where we
are meant to be. We are here because we are chosen, by fate or by
chance or by design, to be here. This is a basic spiritual need
all people have in response to being human, no need to be a part
of, to belong.
The problem begins, as it too often does within a wide variety
of orthodoxies, when a group or a tradition recognizes itself as
being chosen over and above others of other groups and traditions.
The problem begins, when a group or a tradition believes that its
idea of God, which is a metaphor, is the one true explanation for
that question which cannot be answered. And people get very defensive
about protecting their metaphors; throughout history most wars have
been fought in such defense.
The Jewish idea of being God's chosen people was very attractive
to the Calvinists, who were the majority of the European settlers
who came to take over this "new world we live in." Next
week we commemorate Columbus Day, which is really a celebration
of the American branch of God's chosen people laying claim to land
that really had already been settled for millennia, but by "savages."
These heathens had never even heard of the God who'd really been
in charge of the choosing!
The Calvinists believed that there were very few, among the multitudes
of the Earth, who were indeed chosen, saved for salvation from before
the beginnings of time. How would one know if they were among the
saved? Through faith. And how would the rest of the world know that
someone was saved? God would favor them, make them prosperous, make
them pleasing to look at and bless them with all sorts of bounty.
And they would deserve it, of course, because they were hard workers
and because these would be God's blessing on HIS chosen ones. And
others would not be so blessed, not because they hadn't toiled just
as hard, not because they… were any less deserving, but because
they had simply not been chosen by God.
We can look at the ancient children of Israel and perhaps think
that maybe their cir-cumstances encouraged them to take their metaphor
literally. We can look at the early colonists of America and perhaps
think that they took themselves and their ideas of God a bit too
literally. But if we fail to recognize the continuation, in our
society and in our lives, of theological models that encourage us
to see ourselves as more deserving than others, we fail to see how
we are also participants in promoting as real, the metaphors that
assure us that we are special, that we are chosen.
The idea of being God's chosen people is woven deeply into the
fabric of our culture. Racism is one of the strands woven in to
it. So are homophobia and sexism, ablism and ethnocentrism, classism
and ageism. They are all subdivisions that can but don't necessarily
exclude us from being in the most chosen group. But that's why so
many of us have to work so hard, right? Or at least we get caught
up in being wildly busy so that we can wear the appearance of success,
the appearance of being among the saved, the chosen.
It's quite amazing that our current administration in Washington
has been so success-ful in revitalizing the full scale of the myth
of that patriarchal god whose business it's been to choose the saved
and to damn the rest. It seemed that we'd made such great strides
in reweaving the fabric of our society, but it's as though the newer
fibers have been stripped out. And one of the most amazing parts
of it is that many of those who have the least in our society have
been sold a bill of goods, a bill of goods that's wrapped in the
cloth of that old-time religion. They've been sold the promise that
devotion to that God, who has chosen America as his own, will keep
our country strong and safe and will keep all of them at least on
track to be in the winner's circle, if they aren't already in it.
It's not enough though to merely recognize our own flaws in others.
That's too easy.
This is not just about the downtrodden who've been sold a bill
of goods. To a very large extent, it's really about all of us. What
else might explain that we live here in this affluent community
just a couple of miles from some of the most imprisoning intercity
ghettos in the state of New Jersey. What else might explain why
children in our community enjoy enriched and enriching school programs,
and as a matter of course go on to college, while just a few miles
away, children dodge bullets and are shot and killed within walking
distance of their schools, and so many, many fewer children ever
make it out of the system at the graduation end of the process.
What else might explain why life expectancy figures nationally for
whites are consistently 10% longer than life expectancy figures
for African-Americans. (www.webmd.com). What else could explain
why nearly five percent of all black men, compared to 0.6 percent
of white men, are incarcerated in our nation's prisons. (www.hrw.org).
This list could go on for a very long time, including iniquities
in potential income, health care availability and so many others
based on race, gender and other marginalizing constructs determining
who is really saved. (Research on the African-American Family: A
Holistic Perspective; By Robert Bernard Hill). What this all indicates
is that we live in a culture that is intentionally divided between
the haves and have-nots. Our culture is based and supported, theologically
and religiously, by a shared belief system, conscious or unconscious,
that there are those who are saved and there are those who are not.
If we are somewhere in the winner's circle and we have not exhausted
ourselves in the effort to widen the circle to include all of humanity,
then to some extent we have accepted things as they are and we have
accepted that we are the rightful recipients of our many blessings
by the grace of God, or fate, or chance. The truth of it is that
the privileges we have been born into have been carefully crafted
for us, structured and secured through history by those who reap
the greatest benefits at the top of the heap.
It is not too great a stretch in this belief system to imagine
that there are no limits to what those on top actually deserve.
The harvest is theirs to reap. And so, because the system fails
to embrace the larger religious truth and ethical injunction that
we are all children of God, all children of the universe, all among
the chosen, the system loses its way. We lose our way.
Financial structures topple under the strain and weight of a top-heavy
greed that is unquenchable, as much as it is unsustainable. In the
toppling, we all lose. Turning from economy to military, we see
our system fails to embrace the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity;
we engage in wars that have no real enemies, only far too many victims.
Turning from military to ecology, we witness the ongoing destruction
of our planet and wonder, how did I, how did we ever get to this
place?
These days are the High Holy Days on the Jewish calendar. They
are not now, if they ever were, a time to relish in an imagined
mythology of special relationships with a father God who holds us
as a favorite child. This is a time for fasting - and the markets
will have us fast. This is a time for penitence. It is as good a
time as any to search our own behaviors and consciences for our
compliance in mythologies and theologies which promote separation
within the human family.
These are the days of atonement. If we truly want to cast off the
shackles of the pa-triarchal God of old; if we want to embrace the
Universalist notion that we are indeed all saved (which, I think,
implies in a worldly sense that none of us is saved unless we are
all saved); if we want to employ myths and metaphors of our own
choosing, that do our bidding in the creation of a world of our
aspiring, then we will need, individually and collectively, to find
and create ways of true atonement. We will need to find ways of
making amends for the iniquities we have participated in and benefited
from. We will need to see the promise of every child, as we might
see it in our own, so that the future is secured for all children.
Atonement requires action. It requires turning.
"Now is the time for turning. It takes an act of will to turn.
It means breaking with old habits. It means admitting that we have
been wrong, and this is never easy… But unless we turn we will
be trapped in yesterday's ways… (Jack Reimer)
Let our High Holy Day prayer be this - that we might recognize
that we are a part of a great multitude of humanity, each of us
with the need to find our way back into the oneness, into the mystery
that holds us all in shared existence. Each of us has need to feel
held and loved, to be fed and clothed, educated and employed, housed
and protected. Each of us has need to express our most intimate
thoughts in relation to the most ultimate realities that we can
imagine. Each of us needs the other to find our way. For only as
one humanity, do we secure our lives on this planet. Only as one
humanity do we secure our progeny.
"… turn us toward each other God, for in isolation there
is no life."
God's chosen people? It's all of us!
"Le shana tovah tikatevu."
|
