The video for my sermon “Encountering the Kingdom” is now available. You can view it here. 

On Friday Peter Morales, the President on my religious association, the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, issued a statement on possible strikes on Syria by the United States military. This Sunday, in my home congregation, excerpts of that statement were read during the worship service. It was heartbreaking. Morales’ words echoed the Obama Administration’s line on Syria. Morales wrote, “And we assert that the U.S. government needs to exhaust all non-violent methods to bring about an end to this conflict before resorting to military intervention.” One of the chief arguments for why the U.S. military should bomb Syrian is that all non-violent options have been exhausted. U.N. Ambassador Samatha Powers made precisely this point on Friday when she said in a speech, “Some have asked, given our collective war-weariness, why we cannot use non-military tools to achieve the same end. My answer to this question is: we have exhausted the alternatives.”

Morales’s statement does nothing to counter this assertion. Nor does it challenge any of the Obama Administration’s reasons for wanting to bomb Syria. It does not question the assumption that bombing Syria will lessen the use of chemical weapons or that it will prevent chemical weapons from falling into the hands of “terrorists.” It does not dispute the legality or morality of the U.S. government’s long standing tradition of unilateral military action. Nor does it offer any possible non-violent or legal solutions to the crisis such as, going after the arms dealers who facilitated the manufacture of Syrian chemical weapons or pursuing the Assad regime in the International Criminal Court. Instead, Morales appears to assume that there are times when such military action can be justified. In truth, it is the weakest amongst us who suffer most when war is waged.

I can’t help but contrast Morales’s statement with Pope Francis. The Pope led a prayer vigil in Rome on Saturday, which was attended by tens of thousands of people, and has fasted for peace. He said, “violence and war are never the way to peace!” and called for “Forgiveness, dialogue, reconciliation.”

I am saddened that Pope Francis offers more moral clarity on the Syrian situation than the President of my own religious association, especially because some of the finest religious voices for nonviolence come from within it. Adin Ballou, a 19th century abolitionist, peace advocate and both Unitarian and Universalist minister offered words more than a 150 years ago that are worth hearing again today. He preached, “The end sanctifies the means, does it? It is right to do evil that good may come, is it?… Alas, for such short sighted wisdom—such self-thwarting expediency… With armies and navies, police guards and prisons at his command, he would be weak, after once allowing himself to be shorn of his moral strength. Because he would then be but an armed hypocrite, forcing others by brute power to abstain from crimes far less dangerous to human welfare than those which he was obliged to commit…”

I pray that Unitarian Universalists will listen to voices like Ballou’s, and his liberal religious contemporaries such as Henry David Thoreau and Julia Ward Howe, rather than the President of our religious association. They, and not he, offer us a moral compass in the current crisis.

A video version of my sermon “Present to Each Other” is now available on-line. You can view it here. 

President Obama’s August 31, 2013 speech suggests that his administration wants to attack the Assad regime for two reasons: to protect national security and to deter the future use of chemical weapons, both by the Assad regime and in future conflicts. Is United States military action an effective way to achieve the second of the Obama’s administration’s two stated goals? No, stopping the proliferation of chemical weapons requires a focus on the arms dealers who enable their use.

To prevent the use of chemical weapons, we must know who is responsible for their use. Inspired by the Nuremberg Principles, I suggest that there are three responsible groups: the people who deployed the chemical weapons (the soldiers who pulled the trigger, so to speak); the people who ordered the use of the chemical weapons (rarely members of the first party, in the Syrian case this most likely includes Assad and/or high level members of his loyal military); and the people who manufactured the chemical weapons and/or facilitated their manufacture and deployment. Without any of these groups, the use of chemical weapons is impossible.

The debate will almost certainly focus on the second group, Assad and his military commanders. There will be discussion, and eventually targeting, of the third group, but only in a limited sense. And that limit is a problem. President Obama, his political allies, war hawks and United States military commanders will focus great attention on the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons facilities but they will ignore the arms dealers and Syrian allies who made the construction of these facilities possible. It will only become possible to stop the use of chemical weapons when it becomes impossible for such people to do business.

If the goal is to deter the future use of chemical weapons it is necessary to ask questions like: Where did the Assad regime get the equipment required to manufacture and deploy its chemical weapons? Who trained the technicians who manufactured the weapons? Who profited from the creation and, ultimately, use of the weapons? It is unlikely that the Syrian regime developed its chemical weapons on its own or deployed them unassisted. Russia has been a major supplier of the regime’s weapons since the Cold War and probably supplied the regime the equipment its soliders needed to use chemical weapons. During the 1980s and 1990s German companies, along with Russia, sold Syria the equipment necessary to manufacture chemical weapons. Uncomfortably, after the start of the Syrian Civil War British firms sold the Assad regime the chemical components it needed to build chemical weapons.

The United States government is not in a position, by itself, to stop further arms sales. As a recent article in Foreign Policy magazine suggests, it is likely that elements of the United States government have, at times, encouraged such sales. During the Iran-Iraq War the CIA supported the Hussein regime’s use of chemical weapons, which required the purchase of equipment from Italy.

A military attack by the United States is unlikely to discourage the future sales of the equipment necessary to manufacture or deploy chemical weapons. What a military attack might do is temporarily halt the Syrian regime’s ability to manufacture chemical weapons or disrupt the chain of command necessary for their use. Even that is unlikely. Sarin gas is relatively easy to make and was made, and used, by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo in Japan in the 1990s.

What airstrikes will accomplish is the further deaths of civilians. Airstrikes could be the prelude to further involvement by the United States military in Syria. They will emphasize the United States government’s willingness to use unilateral force in pursuit of its policy ends and, in turn, underscore the belief, held by the Assad regime and so many others, that violence is an appropriate way to solve political conflicts.

I do not, however, believe that the United States should do nothing. If President Obama is interested in preventing the future use of chemical weapons his administration, the United States Congress and/or the United Nations could create severe penalties for the companies that provide the materials to manufacture or deploy chemical weapons. Congress could pass a law making it impossible for such companies to do business in the United States. As a first step, President Obama could support the British Parliament’s inquiry into the licensing of firms to sell the Assad regime. Would any of these actions prevent the Assad regime from using chemical weapons again? Nothing, including airstrikes, can prevent that. However, such actions might make it difficult, if not impossible, for any regime, including Assad’s, to manufacture chemical weapons in the future.

I will be preaching at the Unitarian Church of Marlborough and Hudson on September 29th. If you’re in the area I hope you can join me.

Tomorrow morning at 10:00 a.m. I am preaching at The First Church in Salem, Unitarian. My sermon will be a variation on one I gave a few weeks back in Milton, MA entitled “Over My Head.” The congregation in Salem is quite lovely and I am looking forward to being with them again. 

I went to my first techno party, or rave, back in the spring of 1993. I consider that event the start of my serious engagement with electronic dance music. I was 16 and before that the only electronic music I listened to was that of industrial bands like Ministry and Skinny Puppy. Since then I have something of aficionado and have been to literally thousands of dance parties in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. At the twentieth anniversary event for ele_mental in New York Charles Noel suggested that I share some of my reflections and poetry from the early days. Over the next several months I plan to do that. Here’s poem I wrote when I first heard Robert Hood’s “Minimal Nation” in 1996. It is called “Metamorphism.” Perhaps it captures something of the time.

Metamorphism

Steel gray light pours into my head,
a word whispered in imagined silences.

A sudden image
white, black, urban desolate, crimson

thought: I don’t know me, anymore
as if… I ever… did

what was lost?
Sleep sound
the connection point
the textual, the real

Am I (we all, perhaps, in this case) just a piled jumble of words
detroit, fission, spaghetti, printer, moog…
spun together in some seemingly coherent pattern

wanting, needing, finding? more I watch something else occur…
a new sort of synthesis
non-organic
anti-photographic
startling

still it (I?) strives to be concrete
wet, moist, firm, tender, rough, gray
burning

whatever it is
it takes me and shoves

It has been a little bit less than a year since I left my pulpit in Cleveland. My main focus since then has been, rather obviously, school. However, I have also done some pulpit supply and officiated a few rites of passage. I recently put together a ledger to keep track of it all and in the process started to wonder about the hourly rate that I am making as an itinerant minister. My conclusion? About $26.50 an hour. I got this number by adding up all of the fees I have received for sermons, weddings and funerals and divided by the total number of hours I have spent doing them. If I were to break the things I do as an itinerant clergy down by kind funerals would be the most lucrative and sermons would be the least. The hourly rate for funerals would be $58.33, the rate for weddings $35.00 and the rate for preaching a lowly $18.50. Admittedly, the rate for sermons is skewed by the fact that I preached a sermon series of all new sermons while I was serving in Milton this month. When I am not preaching a new sermon the hourly rate for pulpit supply is more like $55.50. Still, it does give me pause.

I wonder if other clergy have made similar calculations. If so, what do you think of mine?

I particularly like my prayer from yesterday’s service so I thought I would share it. 

God,
the holy,
the divine,
the spirit of life,
whirling, changing, transmuting dance
of energy and matter,
all that is,
eternal illusion,
whatever it is,
however we name it,
be it the atheist’s balancing equations
or the mystics interrupting visions,
let us be present to it,
let us feel its presence,
now,
this morning,
through our lives
and in our final breaths.

preached at the First Parish in Milton, Unitarian Universalist, July 28, 2013

It has been a pleasure worshiping with you this month. Since I left my parish in Ohio at the end of last summer I have been doing pulpit supply. There is a real difference between preaching somewhere once and regularly. Worshiping with the same congregation week after week allows for a dialogue between pulpit and pew to emerge. Last week someone came up to me after the service and let me know they disagreed with a portion of what I had to say. The knowledge that I would be coming back here this week made me think about that person’s critique differently than I would have if I had preached here once.

The opportunity to preach here four times has let me offer you a sermon series on Unitarian Universalist as religion of presence. Each week have we have asked a different question. We began three Sunday’s ago by asking: What does it mean to be present? Then we asked: What does it mean to be present to each other? Last week: What does it mean to be present to justice? This week we conclude by asking: What does it mean to be present to the holy?

This question could be recast: where do we find God? God is, of course, one of the most difficult words to define. I was reminded this difficultly the other day while talking with friends. They have a four year old who is just at the point of asking big questions. Recently, she was asking about God. My friends do not believe in a God that sits outside of the universe and human history judging us. They believe in what a theologian might call an immanent God, a God who is part of, who makes up, the universe itself. So when their daughter asked about God they told her that God lived inside of her. A horrified look came over her face. “No,” she replied. “There’s nothing inside of me. It’s just me.”

This story suggests the challenge we face when communicating about the holy. Language frequently fails us. The critique one of you had of last week’s sermon revolved around a single word choice. This is similar to the problem of talking about the holy, it is difficult because often people cannot even agree on what they are talking about. Words are gestures towards a larger reality. They frame how we understand the world but they are not the world.

A few years ago the physicist Stephen Hawking generated significant interest by claiming that the findings of modern science demonstrated that God was no longer necessary. Since we now have a fairly complete picture of how the universe came into being, how life evolves and how the physical laws of nature work, he reasoned there is no longer room for God in the rational mind.

Liberal theologians have long argued the opposite. God, they claim, is not a rational construct. God is a feeling. Friedrich Schleiermacher, described as the father of liberal theology, believed that “the feeling of absolute dependence” is the experience of “consciousness of God.” It is the moments that I am most aware of my dependence that I feel the presence of the holy.

I close my eyes and it fills my senses. The room dark, pitch even, illuminated only by the hazy light of medical machines and a blue string of Christmas lights. Hysteria, desperation, the sounds of panic and despair contrast the dimness of the room. On the bed, the thin, wan, retreating figure of a sixteen year old girl. Her Haitian mother wails, alternating between Creole and accented English, over her fading body. The words come back, a terrible litany of loss, “There will be no graduation for you. There will be no wedding for you. There will be no babies for you. There will be nothing for you, nothing.”

For the last five months the daughter has struggled with cancer. Tonight she has lost that struggle. The doctors and the nurses have told her parents it is over. Everything but the morphine drip and the monitors have been disconnected. This is it. The daughter is about to die, is dying, is dead.

Over the decade I have spent as a member of the clergy, I have witnessed many deaths and conducted many funerals. This one, the death of a young immigrant to cancer, remains one of the most memorable. Perhaps, because the mother’s wails echoed the famous line from the 22nd Psalm, words repeated by Jesus as he died on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” Or maybe it because at that moment I felt an intense connection to life itself. The waning breaths of the young woman, the mother’s love, the prayers we said together combined and I knew that I was in the presence of something greater than myself. To be witness to death is to be witness to our absolute dependence.

Despite this it is at death, and in moments of pain, that the absence of the holy can be felt most profoundly. William Schulz, past President of the Unitarian Universalist Association and former Executive Director of Amnesty International, once gave a lecture entitled “What Torture Has Taught Me.” In it he challenged the concept of an immanent God, a God that is present in all things, by claiming “that no God worthy of the name is present in a torture chamber.”

Rabbi Irving Greenberg offered a counter perspective when trying to make theological sense of the Holocaust: “To the question, ‘Where was God at Auschwitz?’ the answer is: God was there — starving, broken, humiliated, gassed and burned alive, sharing the infinite pain as only an infinite capacity for pain can share it.”

African American liberation theologians like Kelly Brown Douglas make a similar point when they argue for the necessity of a Black Christ. In this view, Christ needs to be black so that he can accompany, in Brown’s words, “the Black struggle to ‘make do and do better’ in face of racist, sexist, classist, and heterosexist oppression.” As Brown puts it, “Christ is inside of my grandmother and other Black women and men as they fight for life and wholeness.”

I do not pretend to know whether Schulz or Greenberg and Douglas is right. What I do know is that one of the most political decisions that each of us makes, that each culture makes, is in how we define the holy. Rebecca Parker makes precisely this point when talking about the crucifixion of Jesus. She writes, “To say that Jesus’ executioners did what was historically necessary for salvation is to say that state terrorism is a good thing, that torture and murder are the will of God.” To choose between locating the holy in Jesus’ life or in his death is to choose between two radically different theologies. The option of finding it in both, or in all things, is yet another.

When we start to think about the holy we are confronted with questions beyond just the choice to find it in life or death. We also must ask: Does the holy only belong to some people? Is it only found in some places? Is it everywhere and everything? Is it a metaphor? Is it separate from the visible world? Does it act upon us? Do we act upon it? How do we know when we experience its presence?

These are not questions with rational answers. They are tied to feelings. I do not know how I know. I only know when I feel. I was fourteen. It was my first time away from my parents for an extended period. I was at a week long Unitarian Universalist youth camp in the Pacific Northwest. The grounds, abutting the ocean, were rich with immense trees. The camp was isolated and powered by its own generators. Each night after dinner and evening worship there was a hymn sing around a camp fire.

The last night of the camp we had a dance. It was a wonderfully goofy affair. People dressed in ridiculous costumes, painted their faces and flailed around to punk rock anthems by the Clash and disco jams like the Village People’s “YMCA.” After an hour, maybe two, the power suddenly went out.

The dance’s abrupt end found a number of us back at the fire pit, singing. It was the only place on the campground with any light and, besides, we enjoyed making music together. I don’t know how long we sang, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, an hour… It was a consuming experience. Eventually we reached the hymn, “Over My Head.” Maybe you remember the words. We sang them a couple of weeks ago. The first verse runs, “Over my head I hear music in the air. / Over my head I hear music in the air. / Over my head I hear music in the air. / There must be a God somewhere.” We sang that song for awhile, substituting new phrases for what was over our heads as we went. Laughter, joy, singing… Someone, a little snidely, finally suggested light. And when we reached the end of the, “There must be a God someone,” the power at the camp went back on.

It seemed like a minor miracle. It might have been someone from the camp’s idea of a prank. Whatever the explanation, the experience left an impression. Up until that moment I described myself as an atheist. Now I am not so sure. I am more open to the mystery of our lives and cognizant of the limitations of language. I understand that words like holy, divine and God are metaphors for the experience of connection to something greater than ourselves. The human mind, marvelous as it is, is quite small and in the end each of us can grasp but an infinitesimal fraction of the universe’s complexity. To speak of the holy is, I believe, to acknowledge this.

There is a certain timelessness to my memories of the holy. They fade far less than others. They come forward in vivid color rather than tattered grey, occasionally so strong that they blot out the present. There is a difference between ordinary time and holy time. The experience of the holy is more defined, placed in sharper relief. It marks me, changes me, even if the change is ever so slight.

James Wright’s poem “A Blessing” speaks to this. In his poem, Wright finds himself in a perfectly ordinary place “Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota” observing the ordinary. For what is more ordinary in rural Minnesota than two ponies “munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness”? And yet, it is here that Wright finds a blessing. Simply observing these ordinary ponies, the affection they have for each other and the peace they seem to feel while grazing alone, together, makes him realize that “if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.”

Wright’s poem suggests that the transformative experience, being in the presence of the holy, can be found in even the most unremarkable of activities. It is not what surrounds us that matters. We do not need to seek out the extraordinary to find the holy.

There are many stories from the Bible that are instructive on this dynamic. One found in Genesis is the story of Jacob wrestling what the text refers to as “a divine being.” In the story Jacob, the patriarch whose children eventually founded the tribes of Israel, stops, alone, by the side of a river to spend the night. There he finds a man. They wrestle all night, the man trying to escape Jacob, Jacob refusing to let him go. Finally, the dawn comes. The man wrenches Jacob’s hip from his socket and says to him, “Let me go, for dawn is breaking.” Jacob replies, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” And so, the divine being blesses Jacob. In doing so, he changes Jacob’s name to Israel.

The story instructively suggests several things. The holy can be found anywhere. Jacob encountered it on the river bank. James Wright discovered it in two ponies. I have felt its presence in the room of dying child and at a youth camp. When we find it we must somehow engage it. It must be wrestled with. Wright looked at the ponies. Jacob struggled against the divine being. I heard music, saw light, and rethought the way I see the world. To be in the presence of the holy is to be open to change. Jacob received a blessing and a new name. Wright wanted to burst from his body. This change can come at a cost–a limp, pain, the presence of death–but it does not have to. One suspects that the only thing Wright’s experience of the ponies like “wet swans” cost him was reflection.

The story of Jacob and the feeling of being present to the holy is helpful on another level, a moral level. It reminds us that the experience of the holy frequently requires an other. Each of the experiences that I have described is an experience of connection, not the experience of an autonomous and isolated individual. At the start of this sermon series I suggested that we each construct our theologies out of our personal experiences. Since each of our experiences are different our theologies are be different as well. This might lead to moral relativism but it does not have to. If being present to the holy means being present to our feelings of dependence and connection then we know we have strayed when disavow those feelings.

Moral clarity comes from understanding our dependence on the universe not on claiming a sense of independence from it. For me there is only one heresy worth interrogating, the myth of the autonomous individual. None of the experiences of the holy that I have described have taken placed in a vacuum. All of them are interactions between people or between people and the larger world. We need each other, or at least an other, to experience the holy.

It is like the hymn we sang that night at youth camp, “Over my head there is singing in the air.” Over our heads there is something in the air. It is through that something, because of that something, with that something that we know that we are present to the holy. And so, in that spirit, I invite you now to sing with me hymn #30 “Over My Head.”

Blessed Be and Amen.