From the Pulpit:

The Rev. Margaret Waters

I want to begin by sharing with you a quotation that I stumbled upon earlier this week. It struck me as so meaty and engaging that it has been haunting me, and it has given deeper meaning to the events of the week It is from the very quotable Polish-American rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. He said, “A religious person is one who holds God and humanity in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.” (1) (Repeat) You hear lots of talk about the United States being a very religious nation. I confess to having spent quite a bit of time on the web page of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life looking at the maps and pie charts generated by a number of surveys about how religious Americans are and how Americans are religious. That led me to the Harris Poll that told me that 92% of Americans believe in God, but only 68% of us believe in the devil. 84% of us believe that the soul lives after death and the same number believe in miracles, but there is no way to know if it is the same 84%. 70% of Christians today accept that many religions lead to eternal life, and that included a surprising 57% of Evangelical Christians, who, by the way, are the largest denominational group in our nation, followed by Roman Catholics, and then mainline Protestants, which is the category we fit into. In the United States there is a great deal of interest in religion as opposed to in Europe, where the great cathedrals are regarded as museums. I’ll digress just a little to tell you the story of one of the most wonderful blessings I ever received. It happened in September of 2001 shortly after the tragedy of 9/11. If you remember there was a surge of church attendance for a few weeks. I was serving at St. David’s downtown and I don’t remember which service it was that I preached, but afterwards a nice looking middle aged man with an accent I couldn’t identify came up to me and wanted to talk. Basically, if I remember correctly, he more or less asked if it was OK for him to come to church as he was not a Christian. I said, “Of course it is.” His parents were Dutch, and they were so repulsed by how the church capitulated to the Nazis during the Second World War that they had never had Andy baptized or even taken him to church. He had arrived in Austin to be the guest scholar at the LBJ School of Pubic Affairs, his wife and son had not yet arrived, and he had walked across the street from the Omni, where he was staying. The long and the short of it is that he kept coming back, and when his wife and son arrived he essentially told them, You’re not going to believe what I’ve found.” Actually it was who, and it was Jesus. Nicholas was seven and went to Sunday School  not speaking English and barely having heard Jesus’ name. Andy and Saskia asked the most basic questions but asked them with a hunger and delight that was a joy for all of us, and there are simply no words for how wonderful the day was when we baptized all three of them into the family of Christ before they left for their new assignment in Wales, where they now are the backbone of their church. Coming from a totally secular background in Europe, the Klom family found that they were deeply religious people indeed.

So as I pondered the week’s lessons, that was what kept coming back to me, what does it mean to be religious? Our reading from the Epistle of Peter addresses that question clearly, and it tells us that it is all about where the rubber meets the road, not what we think in our heads. It is about integrity and authenticity, about knowing who we are and taking action in the world because we know who we are.

In the world of academic biblical scholarship, in which much of what tradition holds is unraveled, there is still credibility given that the author of this letter could well be James the brother of Jesus. I love it when we get to keep those traditions and to believe that there is at least a good chance that we are reading the actual words of our lord’s brother, who is preaching out of very intimate personal knowledge of Jesus. Since we know that James was martyred by Rome in the year 62, this advice was given to a very embryonic church, actually a group of Christ-loving Jews who had not yet separated from the synagogue. In fact, Jesus is not mentioned much in the letter; it is rather faithfulness to the creator God as known in the person of Jesus that the letter holds up. There are three things I’d like to highlight about today’s reading. The first is that it begins in gratitude. If I could get this idea sewn tightly into our consciousness I’d never have to preach another stewardship sermon. Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above. When we know in our bones that everything we have, absolutely everything, is radical gift, that God gives with outrageous abundance, then we have no choice but to respond with generosity. When we look in the mirror and see not our flaws and imperfections but our essential selves created in the perfect image of God, that image does not disappear when we turn away, but we turn to the world with God’s own love. Peter is saying, “Live up to who you are!” Second, he gives good, common sense advice. Don’t let anger get the best of you. Christians were being persecuted. They had reason to get angry. They were misunderstood and feared both by the Jewish authorities and the Romans, whose Pax Romana was a tenuous thing, maintained by violence. The Romans knew Jesus was a real threat, and so they killed him. His followers were a threat as well. Be quick to listen, James tells them. I don’t know any better advice for all of us. This world could use a lot more listening. More often than not enmity dissipates when we listen. Let’s do an experiment this week, and if you’d like to report to me how it works, I’d love to hear about it. Just one time this week, when you are about to jump in and tell somebody what they ought to be doing, or how what they are saying reminds you of something your Aunt Josephine once did, take a deep breath and bite your tongue and listen deeper and longer to them. Let them reveal their vulnerable selves. Invite them to keep going and see if it doesn’t bring you closer to them. And third, James says, be doers of the word. Yes, do hear the word, but let its power flow from your ears to your hands and your feet and your lips. Be overpowered by it and empowered by it.

I imagine that yesterday many of you all watched with me the funeral and burial of  Senator Ted Kennedy. We are Republicans and Democrats in this congregation. Some of us admire him and some don’t. Some of us agree with his politics and others are appalled by them. That’s not the point. The point is that an icon has died. The era of the Kennedys is finished. Teddy was called the lion of the Senate. He was eulogized by his two sons and the President of the United States. This summer we spent a lot of time in church hearing stories about King David, and I thought how like King David Ted Kennedy had been. He was the baby of the family who became its patriarch. He lived through unimaginable personal tragedy, but his faith sustained him and he transformed his pain into conviction and his conviction into action. He was far from a perfect man. Both David and Ted did some horrible things, they hurt innocent people badly. But, as Kennedy’s sons said, he believed in the power of repentance, and he dedicated his life to giving voice to those who were not heard. We watched as 150,000 people filed past his flag-draped casket, some until 2:00 in the morning,  and we heard some of their stories, how he had gotten them jobs, education, medical care, citizenship. President Obama told how he had personally phoned every Massachusetts family who had lost someone in the 9/11 tragedy, how he had gone to most of their funerals, and that was not all, he kept up with the survivors and saw to it that their needs were not falling through the cracks. He suffered harm done to others.

We know he was a devout Roman Catholic, though Rome and the Pope do not appreciate his outspokenness about what he considers social justice issues – abortion, stem cell research, and gay marriage. We don’t all agree about those issues either, but we can admire a person of conviction. I think back to James’ definition of a religious person, and he says it boils down to caring for widows and orphans. Teddy raised four families in the end – his own three children, his brother John’s two, his brother Robert’s eleven, and his second wife, Vicky’s son and daughter. But there were all the other widows and orphans, those who benefited from the 300 Senate bills he authored, the 150,000 who waited hours in line to pay respect as he lay in repose.

So, the question our scripture poses for us today is not what does it look like to be perfect. Even Jesus denied that he was perfect, only God is, but the question is what it means to be religious, and what it does not mean is to be holier than thou. It is not to consider ourselves to be purer or more rigorous than others. More entitled or more privileged. No, quite the opposite. It is to recognize that as we have our human failings, so do others, but they are as beloved of their creator God as we are. They are as capable of being religious as we are. Capable of holding God and humanity in one thought at one time, at all times, of suffering harm done to others, of embracing passion as compassion, and holding strength as love and defiance of despair. I like to imagine that Senator Kennedy had the larger kingdom in mind when he said, the work begins anew, the hope rises again, and the dream lives on. It is God’s work, it is God’s hope, and it is God’s dream. And it is ours to take on.

Amen.

(1) New York Journal-American, April 5, 1963, edited for political correctness.

02/13/2010