I’m not ashamed ( OK maybe just a little) that what we chose for marathon viewing was Breaking Bad, the critically acclaimed show about a high school chemistry teacher with lung cancer who becomes a big time methamphetamine cook in order to leave behind some money for his wife and children—just about as uncompassionate a show as I have ever watched, and enjoyed every minute of it. What I was ashamed of, however, was that I was lying there at all, instead of bundling up, like I had for at least a decade, or probably closer to the last 15 years, and going downtown to the Martin Luther King Jr. annual parade.

After all, Dr. King had preached that true compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. So, in his memory, the King Holiday was not to be seen or used as just a three day weekend, an extra day off, but a day to do service and call for action. To be systemically compassionate.

A day to hurry up and wait for what has always seemed like hours in some office tower wind tunnel for the marching to begin, down Peachtree and around to Auburn Avenue, chanting and singing. Different issues, different places in the country, in the world, but always asking for, demanding more justice, more equality, more peace. We shall overcome.

But this year on MLK Day I was fighting a stubborn infection with the locus of pain in a throbbing molar. I was heavily medicated with antibiotics, drowsy from many doses of extra strength Motrin, just a day away from my first root canal. In no shape to be anywhere other than exactly where I was, couch and housebound, yet overcome with a sense of guilt and shame and a lack of true compassion.

Guilt that I wasn’t where I should have been. Ashamed that I had waited so long to deal with a tooth issue, and that I had most likely brought the suffering upon myself through bad self care and neglect. ( none of you have ever felt this way I am sure). Awash with a sense of seeming indifferent to what is happening outside my own body, my own home: the disparities, the human rights violations, the oppressions.

Some of what I felt I shared, and in 2012 that means ( at least for me and many millions of others) posting on Facebook about my dilemma—wanting to be doing the work of justice and equity in the wider community, but not feeling up to it, trying to feel compassion for myself in the meantime. And seeing the “likes” from friends across the country, one in particular reminding me that taking care of ourselves is the first way to contribute to our world.

So in the discussion today about compassion: what it is, how we have come to understand it and manifest it, how it fits with the history of religion and philosophy, including our own faith tradition, I started where some end—instead of moving away from self occupation, moving toward self-compassion as a way of understanding how it works for each one of us and in the larger society. How we can judge and shame, or how we help alleviate pain and suffering , even heal ourselves and each other.

Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun and writer of numerous books about religious affairs, tells us that the principle of compassion, which lies at the heart, she believes, of all ethical and spiritual traditions, calls us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Her work in comparative religious history over the years has continued to draw her attention and ours to parallel Golden Rules:

Treat others as you would yourself be treated.” — Hinduism

“What you yourself hate do to no man.” — Judaism

“Hurt not others with that which pains you.” — Buddhism

“Do unto all men as you would wish to have done.” — Islam

Live in harmony, for we are all related.” — Native American

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” — Christianity

Armstrong tells us that the Golden Rule in any of its manifestations requires self-knowledge; It asks us to use our own feelings as a guide to our behavior with others. If we treat ourselves harshly, this is likely to be the way we treat other people. So this is the first in a series of 12 steps toward the more compassionate life she would want for all of us, this and learning all we need to know about empathy, mindfulness, right speech, right dialogue, right action, and how to really see one another.

When she was awarded a TED prize in 2007 from this non- profit organization that holds conferences about and supports individuals for ideas worth spreading, she decided to use the money she was given to help create, launch and propagate a Charter for Compassion written by leaders from a variety of major faiths that would, if successful, counter the voices of extremism, intolerance and hatred. Elements of this charter call upon all of us to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity and cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings, even those regarded as enemies. As Karen Armstrong describes: to make compassion a clear, luminous, and dynamic force in a polarized world.

The work she has done around affirming and promoting this principle is far reaching, aimed at global change, as it should be, preventing religious warfare and ethnic genocide for example.

But for me, this past week, the powerful workings of compassion began with that toothache. A persistent and worsening toothache that forced me to make a long avoided appointment with a new dentist—a stranger to me– to sit in the unfamiliar chair in her office and be x-rayed, to have a painful place in my mouth poked with various steel instruments, to be told I indeed had a problem that needed immediate fixing, and some longer term “issues”, like gum disease that needed tending to.

All of which I had heard before, me and 80 percent of the adults in this country, more than half of whom never go to the dentist, some–many of whom because they do not have insurance or the money to pay for their care–but others, as many as 75% of them, experiencing some degree of dental fear, women more than men, younger people more than older people. In some cases, they have become afraid because of a past traumatic, difficult or even painful dental experience, and others, including sexual abuse. However these experiences do not explain, we are told, why other people develop so called dental phobia. The perceived manner of the dentist, it has been found, is an important variable. Dentists who were considered impersonal, uncaring, uninterested, even judgmental can cause high dental fear, while patients who have had painful procedures have failed to develop this fear and phobia if they perceived their dentist as caring and warm.

There are of course ever improving methods available for pain management that can help make the actual physical treatment work better— and anti-anxiety medications as well. Besides these medical solutions, there are simply ways that a dentist can be with a patient — just that, which can profoundly transform the experience as well.

The dentist I saw last week chose to do just that—to be with me. When I apologized for my lack of consistency in seeking preventive care, to put it mildly, she could have fussed and scolded, judged and shamed, pulling out pictures of advanced gum conditions and the consequences thereof. But she didn’t. She volunteered that she struggles with weight issues, choosing to self-medicate with food and ignoring the need to exercise or consult a doctor. We all have something she said.

She had me at that.

We all have something. The heart of compassion.

We all have something, and for Paula Deen, television’s self crowned queen of Southern Cooking, as one reporter has called her, this past week she finally disclosed what she has known for the past three years that she has type 2 diabetes, being managed with a medication she has become a paid spokesperson for. She announced that her response had been not abstinence from her favorite meals, but more moderation in a diet heavy with fat and salt, which she has endorsed and modeled on cooking shows where she wields slabs of cream cheese and mounds of mayonnaise, and concocts recipes such as one for “nutter bacon cheese balls”—otherwise called a widow maker-—pork slaw, and deep fried cheesecake. She has eliminated sweet tea altogether she says, the tablespoons of sugar she consumed that way every day of her life.

Some of the news coverage has focused on what can be seen as a self-serving exploitation of her serious medical condition—avoiding disclosure and continuing dietary business as usual until there was a lucrative contract associated with it –while continuing to peddle grossly unhealthy foods and as one person put it egregious indulgence.

Most vocal of all of her critics perhaps has been chef Anthony Bordain, a fellow food celebrity, who said in one interview that Deen’s advocacy of fatty food made her the worst, most dangerous person to America, pushing recipes filled with sugar and grease in the midst of a diabetes and obesity epidemic in this country.

Thousands of her loyal fans have posted messages of sympathy and tweeted their support, protesting that she is being singled out and thrashed in the media, and that criticisms of her reflect a level of classism and sexism and stereotyping about the South. One food writer has pointed out that no one vilifies Michelin chefs for putting sticks of butter in their food, but when a Southern woman does it, it’s tacky.

One defender has observed that as a diabetic, she is enduring a severe public scolding because of her cooking and eating habits, even while her illness was probably caused by any number of forces, including heredity.

And even if and while her diet has a lot to do with her condition, is this very viral shaming and rush to judgment helpful to her and to the more than 25 million Americans believed to have diabetes–the something they have?

Another story that was making the media rounds just a few months back was about a non-celebrity, Mary Hyde, a 64 year old woman who recalls her mother’s response after hearing her daughter had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes when she was in her mid-forties.

“I told you not to eat all those sweet rolls when you were a teenager.”

For years after her mother’s reproach, Hyde admits that she kept her condition and treatment pretty much to herself. She didn’t speak about it or test her blood sugar in public. Her efforts to hide her diabetic condition aren’t usual, wrote reporter Rita Rubin. Few chronic diseases carry more stigma than type 2 or so called adult onset diabetes. While patients with heart disease or cancer are often showered with sympathy, she noted, people with Hyde’s type of diabetes are criticized for being fat, lazy or junk food junkies. None of which was particularly true for her.

What we eat does contribute, of course, and excess weight. But not everyone who is overweight is diabetic and there are genetic triggers in some ethnic groups such as African-Americans and Hispanics, who are more likely to develop it.

The problem is that shame plus denial, especially with loved ones or medical professionals, can be a risky combo, experts warn, leading to poor management of the condition, which then leads to the complications associated with it, including blindness and amputations. And the economic toll for all of us, including health care costs, absenteeism, and lost productivity.

One diabetic has shared that her disease has caused her to feel woefully inadequate, failing to maintain perfect blood sugars and a perfectly “normal life”, leading to spiraling negativity , self-blame , isolation, as well as a life-endangering lack of self-care and self-compassion.

Instead of a deep knowing that we all have something, we are all connected and have a common ground we share.

Not all obese people are diabetic, but obesity is being seen in what has been called epidemic proportions in this country and over much of the developed world. And those who are overweight and especially obese the object of both empathetic concern and derision.

A report released last week issued by the Centers for Disease Control ( a federal institution well known to many of you) indicated that alarmingly high obesity rates have remained steady over the last 12 years. While the good news is that the rate is not increasing, there will still be ongoing consequences for society- with children entering adulthood heavier than they have ever been in human history.

This piece of data is reflected in efforts by First Lady Michele Obama and others to highlight and fight childhood obesity in particular, overall obesity in general, citing the costs to society of failing to do so, with direct and indirect financial costs of around $147 billion.

The intractability of childhood obesity, sincere concern and frustration on behalf of medical professionals and policy makers, have led to the unveiling of a public awareness media campaign by a group called the Georgia Children’s Health Alliance, with billboards now appearing around the state with pictures of heavier children with hard hitting messages: Chubby Kids May Not Out Live Their Parents, Fat Kids Become Fat Adults, Big Bones Didn’t Make Me This Way-Big Meals Did.

Another group, The Obesity Action Coalition, is pushing back on this billboard crusade, conducting their own poll of Georgians, 82 percent of whom agreed that the campaign hurts, not helps children affected by obesity, agreeing that it is offensive. Certainly not compassionate.

Those professionals who are opposing the billboards, both the visuals and the language, are citing scholarly articles like one in the American Journal of Public Health that say that negative attitudes toward obese persons are pervasive in North American society, with numerous studies documenting weight based stereotypes that overweight people are lazy, weak-willed, unsuccessful, unintelligent, lack self-discipline, have poor willpower, and are non-compliant with weight reduction treatment. Recent estimates are that the prevalence of weight discrimination has increased more than 60 percent over the past decade.

The point of this particular article was that this kind of judgment and stigma is not a beneficial tool for improving health. The authors call it a social justice issue, which of course it is, but it can also be called a compassion issue as well, or lack thereof.

Disease stigma has been with us throughout history they tell us, imposing suffering on those seen as pariahs– vulnerable individuals and groups–and preventing efforts to heal or treat them. In Jesus’ time, the list of “sinners” – the ones he hung out with– included some vocational and behavioral outcasts- prostitutes and tax collectors—and some who had diseases that carried stigma- people with leprosy and epilepsy.

Over time, other conditions and sufferers have been judged and ostracized, seen as Other, In 19th century America, Irish immigrants were believed to be responsible for epidemic diseases because they were “filthy and unmindful of public hygiene,” and their deaths from cholera retribution for their being sinful and spiritually unworthy.

When African Americans were dying from tuberculosis in the early 20th century. Instead of providing treatment for them, Whites were warned not to co-mingle with them. Add to the list of stigma: people with sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV-AIDS; women, especially young unmarried women facing unintended pregnancy and having later term abortions, and those with mental illnesses. We all have a list of our own, if we are honest with ourselves and each other, whether meth addicts or bulimics or smokers. Or people who don’t go to the dentist .

We wonder about them. We fuss about them. We can’t understand why they do what they do– knowing full well what the consequences may surely be. But, however sincere and well-meaning, in no instances has shame and blame or what some call inculcating a sense of spoiled identity worked to help or cure, to get people to adopt healthier behaviors or make a significant change.

What has helped as an antidote to shame is self-compassion and the compassion of others, because it resists judgment and seeks understanding. As one researcher discovered, compassion allows for imperfection and mistakes and sees life as a journey of experimentation, discovery and learning.

Rev. Richard Gilbert, retired UU minister and social justice activist, believes that compassion is the spiritual value that undergirds Unitarian Universalist ethics. He says that living compassionately is an act of thanksgiving, flowing from the blessings of life that we wish to share. In our imperative for social reform, he believes that we may overlook or move too quickly past the pastoral impulse– the feeling with others– that can move us to and sustain us in humane action on their behalf. That sense that we all have something to overcome, something we suffer, and empathy to give and receive- to be moved by another’s pain and suffering as if it were our own.

Yet the word compassion was not originally included in the original language of our second principle- justice, equity and compassion in human relations, nor is it in our own UUCA mission statement today.

It was not Martin Luther King Jr. who wrote that the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice, Gilbert reminds us, but our own 19th century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. The bending, he says, is not automatic. It depends on people who feel equity, justice and compassion, all in good measure, as imperatives of their faith.

May it be so.

Reading: 5 Facts You Should Know About the Wealthiest One Percent of Americans

http://www.alternet.org/economy/152601/5_facts_you_should_know_about_the_wealthiest_one_percent_of_americans/

Sermon:

“What can we say,” asks economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, “about the [Occupy Wall Street] protests? First things first: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right. A weary cynicism, a belief that justice will never get served, has taken over much of our political debate…. In the process, it has been easy to forget just how outrageous the story of our economic woes really is. So, in case you’ve forgotten, it was a play in three acts.

In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins. And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis. Given this history, how can you not applaud the protesters for finally taking a stand?”

That’s Paul Krugman, and he paints a picture of an economic world that is not so much trickle-down as trickle-up. We’ve already heard the statistics. In the past 30 years, the top 1% have gotten richer and richer—massive economic expansion at the top—while the middle class and the working class are just treading water, or worse. One of the examples of “worse” being: absorbing the costs of all the financial recklessness at the top. “Suffering for the consequences of the bankers’ sins.”

Just sit with this for a moment. Just absorb this big picture. Paul Krugman calls it “outrageous.” What do you think? What do you call it?

America is supposed to be something so very different than this. A land of opportunity. “Of the people, by the people, for the people.” Not just some people, but all…. That’s what it’s supposed to be….

But, as economist and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, it’s more like Russia with its oligarchs. It’s more like Iran. In an article from last May, entitled “Of the 1%, By the 1%, and For the 1%,” he reminds us of how, recently, governments around the world have been toppled by people taking the streets in millions to protest political, economic, and social conditions. Egypt, Tunisia, Libya. “The ruling families elsewhere in the region,” he says, “look on nervously from their air-conditioned penthouses—will they be next? They are right to worry,” says Stiglitz. “These are societies where a minuscule fraction of the population—less than 1 percent—controls the lion’s share of the wealth; where wealth is a main determinant of power; where entrenched corruption of one sort or another is a way of life; and where the wealthiest often stand actively in the way of policies that would improve life for people in general.” And then Joseph Stiglitz says, “As we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question to ask ourselves is this: When will it come to America? In important ways, our own country has become like one of these distant, troubled places.”

It’s outrageous. A sorry, sad state of affairs…. No wonder we have the Occupy Movement, which Al Gore described as “a primal scream of democracy”…

So it’s a time for honesty. A time for speaking up. Dr. King once said that “our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” “Every man,” he said, “must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”

That’s what he did. Dr. King. He broke the silence. He walked in the light of creative altruism. Listen to his words from a speech delivered the year of my birth, in 1967: “I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the oil?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the iron ore?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that’s two-thirds water?’ These are words that must be said.”

Dr. King was passionate about economic justice in his day, and his words are still powerful for us in our day of continuing economic outrageousness. We’ve got to break the silence. Spirituality that’s real and authentic calls us to this. The Spirit of Life calls us to this. The God of the Hebrew prophets calls us to this. We’ve got to find a way to walk in the light of creative altruism. We’ve just got to.

“There are words that must be said.”

So today, let’s say some of them. Speak of our system of trickle-up economics. Speak of what this is doing to our nation. Speak of why it’s like this. Speak of how to, as Dr. King put it, “restructure the edifice which produces beggars.” Speak of where to go from here…

Starting with this historical observation, coming from Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their excellent book entitled Winner-Take-All-Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Hacker and Pierson remind us that the period existing from the end of World War II until the early 1970s was a high-growth period, economically speaking. America busting out at the seams… And during this period, incomes grew at a slightly faster rate at the bottom and middle of the economic distribution than at top. If ever there was a time we could call the American economy “trickle down,” this is it. But starting in the 1970s, everything got flipped upside-down. Things started to stall, or go worse, for middle and working class folks, and the money started to flow with increasing speed straight to the top, to the upper class—the top 1 percent. Included in this 1 percent as a substantial majority are company executives and managers—the “working rich” of the executive world. Their share of income, says Hacker and Pierson, “has increased from around 8 percent in 1974 to more than 18 percent in 2007—a more than twofold increase. If you include capital gains like investments and dividend income, the share of the top 1 percent has gone from just over 9 percent to 23.5 percent.” It’s trickle-up economics. Has been since the 1970s. No more booming (and more egalitarian) economy of post World War II America. That’s long gone….

Now perhaps the situation wouldn’t be so dire if we could point to mitigating factors: say ease of social mobility, or abundance of workplace benefits, or availability of money to buy things. But we can’t. What we have is vanishing benefits instead, and regular people like you and me drowning in debt. As for the question of social mobility (want to spend just a little more time covering this one): Hacker and Pierson say that “American mobility may well have declined over the last generation, even as inequality has risen. This is true of both individual mobility (‘Am I richer than I was a decade ago?’) and of intergenerational mobility (‘Am I richer than my parents were?’). […] The American dream,” says Hacker and Pierson, “portrays the United States as a classless society where anyone can rise to the top, regardless of family background. Yet there is more intergenerational mobility in Australia, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Spain, France, and Canada. In fact, of affluent countries studied, only Britain and Italy have lower intergenerational mobility than the United States does (and they are basically even with the United States).”

(Our closest neighbor Canada is just sounding better and better, isn’t it?)

It’s a trickle-up economic system we live in. Hacker and Pierson call it “Richistan”—as opposed to “Broadland,” where incomes are growing at the same rate for everyone, and you’ve got social mobility, you’ve got solid workplace benefits, you’ve got free-and-clear money to buy stuff. That’s Broadland. But Richistan is a different place entirely. And Richistan is hurting America.

Now you know, some people just don’t believe it. The insight that a hyperconcentration of wealth in just 1 percent of a country like America is a bad thing is NOT necessarily obvious. New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof reminds us that “Economists used to believe that we had to hold our noses and put up with high inequality as the price of robust growth. But,” he goes on to say, “more recent research suggests the opposite: inequality not only stinks, but also damages economies. In his important new book, ‘The Darwin Economy,’ Robert H. Frank of Cornell University cites a study showing that among 65 industrial nations, the more unequal ones experience slower growth on average. Likewise, individual countries grow more rapidly in periods when incomes are more equal, and slow down when incomes are skewed.”

In other words: more equality, more growth. We saw this in post-World War II America, and we could see it again. But, you know, just because economists might be seeing the light doesn’t mean that the rest of America is. Ideas that the experts used to believe but which they now know as false still have staying power. They stick around. In public discourse, they continue to sound soo believable. So full of “truthiness.” Here’s an example of one: “If taxes are raised on the rich, job creation is going to stop.” I’m guessing you’ve heard this one before… This is just another way of saying something that economists used to believe, but no longer… We know Republicans believe it. Democrats, if they don’t also believe it, just don’t say anything… (By now you can see that neither Republicans nor Democrats are gonna come out of this sermon unscathed.) Both of them, saying: Don’t raise taxes on the rich, now. Don’t touch them. Do it, and the economy is going to crash….

But I like what business entrepreneur Nick Hanauer has to say about all this. First he introduces himself: “I’m a very rich person. As an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I’ve started or helped get off the ground dozens of companies in industries including manufacturing, retail, medical services, the Internet and software. I founded the Internet media company aQuantive Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) in 2007 for $6.4 billion. I was also the first non-family investor in Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)” That’s Nick Hanauer. Not too shabby, right? (He could take all of us out for lunch everyday for the rest of our lives….) But now listen to what he says next: “Even so,” he says, “I’ve never been a ‘job creator.’ I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be. […] Middle-class consumers [are the ones who create jobs], and when they thrive, U.S. businesses grow and profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.”

That’s Nick Hanauer. Besides injecting some needed wisdom into the conversation, he also reminds us that we can’t stereotype members of the 1 percent, we can’t automatically assume anything about them. Being wealthy is just not an intrinsically evil thing. So … if you are a member of the 1 percent and you’re here today, I want to ease your mind … you don’t have to be worried about being tarred and feathered… I say this because some of the Occupy Wall Street “primal scream” rhetoric can get pretty hot and heavy… And also because it’s just human nature to want to scapegoat.

OK, let’s press pause for a moment. Take stock. Whoo! How many books and scholars and authors do you think I’ve quoted from in this sermon so far? Twenty bucks to the person who gets the right answer…. Just kidding! But there’s so much to say, so many voices wanting to be heard. And I’m only just scratching the surface! It’s not a simple issue, this issue of economic justice. Requires the kind of spiritual practice that involves a lot of reading and a lot of research and a lot of underlining…

And now, in our remaining time together, just two more things: what explains this outrageous economic inequality, and where to go from here… (Small issues, I know… saving the best for last!)

Hacker and Pierson, in their book Winner-Take-All-Politics, speak powerfully to the question of why. Why the trickle-up system, why Richistan? What causes it all? The orthodox answer is to point to abstract economic forces that are beyond anyone’s control. Laborsaving technologies, which have reduced the demand for many “good” middle-class, blue-collar jobs. Globalization, which has created a worldwide marketplace, pitting expensive unskilled workers in America against cheap unskilled workers overseas. Abstract economic forces like this, beyond anyone’s control. This is the orthodox view, the standard view.

And Hacker and Pierson reject it, see it as nothing less than propaganda that both disempowers and empowers: disempowers the many who want to create a more just and fair economy, and empowers the few who love Richistan and want more of it—enables them to get off scott free…

Hacker and Pierson’s argument is fundamentally a historical one. A shift towards Richistan occurred in the 1970s—during the Carter administration—because business and the super-rich began a process of political organization, enabling them to pool their wealth and contacts to achieve dominant political influence. One statistic Hacker and Pierson cite refers to the number of companies with registered lobbyists in Washington. That number grew from 175 in 1971 to nearly 2,500 in 1982. Money poured into lobbying firms, political campaigns, and ideological think tanks, and this is what powered the Republicans throughout the 1980s, gave them a clear advantage over the Democrats. As for the Democrats: they’ve been able to reduce that advantage only by becoming more like Republicans: more business-friendly, more anti-tax, and more dependent on money from the super-rich. That dependency has severely limited both their ability and their desire to fight back on behalf of the middle class (let alone the poor).

I love me my Obama, but can we honestly say that his administration is fighting the trickle-up, Richistan reality of our economy the way it needs to be fought? Can we?

The root cause is the money game in politics. The evolution in the nature of the vote in our democracy. “From one propertied man, one vote; to one man, one vote; to one person, one vote; trending to one dollar, one vote.” The language here comes from Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence. His colleague Joseph Stiglitz agrees: “Wealth,” he says, “begets power, which begets more wealth. During the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s—a scandal whose dimensions, by today’s standards, seem almost quaint—the banker Charles Keating was asked by a congressional committee whether the $1.5 million he had spread among a few key elected officials could actually buy influence. “I certainly hope so,” he replied. The Supreme Court, in its recent Citizens United case, has enshrined the right of corporations to buy government, by removing limitations on campaign spending. The personal and the political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.” That’s Joseph Stiglitz.

And this takes us to where to go from here. The reason for where we are now is not outside of our control. We can take control. We can turn this thing around before it is too late. Absolutely, we can talk about specific policy goals—and when the Occupy Wall Street movement starts doing this, it’ll be more powerful. Creating a truly effective wall of separation between our elected representatives and business lobbyists. Debt relief for working Americans. Investments in infrastructure to help create jobs. No more tax cuts for the wealthy. Specific goals like this. Call on our elected politicians to champion them, or throw the bums out of office. Call on the Obama administration to do more.

But even more important than all this is the central moral decision each of us must make in our hearts, to help create a more just society. “Every man,” says Dr. King, “must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.” It is about light. Got to keep shining a light on what’s happening. Got to enlighten people. Nick Hanauer, one of the exalted 1 percent, gets it, and that gives me hope. He knows that his fate is bound up with the fate of the 99 percent. “We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” Listen to Dr. King! The greater the inequality, the worse off we all are. It slows down economic growth. It prevents job creation. Trickle-up and Richistan are bad for the 99 percent and ultimately bad for the 1 percent—and you better believe, the people who used to be the 1 percent in Egypt know this all too well. They know. We need to know it too. Greed is not good.

The voice of Isaiah, one of the classic Hebrew prophets:

In the year that King Uzziah died [probably 738 BCE.], I beheld my Lord seated on a high and mighty throne; and the skirts of His robe filled the Temple. Seraphs stood in attendance on Him. Each of them had six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his legs, and with two he would fly. And one would call to the other, “Holy, holy, holy! The Lord of Hosts! His presence fills all the earth!” […] And I cried out, “Woe is me; I am lost! For I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips; Yet my own eyes have beheld the King Lord of Hosts.” Then one of the seraphs flew over to me with a live coal, which he had taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. He touched it to my lips and declared, “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt shall depart and your sin shall be purged away.” Then I heard the voice of my Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” And I said, “Here I am, send me.”

That’s Isaiah speaking—six hundred years after Moses had his own burning bush experience with God, six hundred years after Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and helped establish them as a new people in covenant with God not to become another Egypt, not to re-establish the oppressive social and political dynamics of that nation, but to become “a priestly kingdom and a holy nation,” a people committed to a social justice vision of “shalom” which means “well-being, peace, and wholeness.”

But it’s a vision in trouble, six hundred years after Moses. The people entered the promised land, under the leadership of Joshua, but there was to be no centralized organization. For three hundred years, Israel was a confederacy of various tribes, each led by a military ruler. Did it work? The Bible suggests no, for in it we find this continuing refrain: “In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” So, around 1000 BCE, a king was established: first Saul, then David, then Solomon. These are names many of us already know. But the tensions and complexities would ultimately prove too great for the kingdom to stay single. After Solomon’s death in 922 BCE, the kingdom split into northern and southern halves; and it is out of these kingdoms that we hear voices like that of Isaiah, voices which spare no feelings in their protest against what’s happening. Absence of shalom. People who were once slaves in Egypt, recreating Egypt among themselves! “I live among a people of unclean lips,” says Isaiah. So: “Here I am, send me.”

Biblical scholar Gerhard von Rad defines a Biblical prophet as “one who participates in the emotions of God.” Something happens to the soul of one who becomes a prophet; the guilt that prevents them from being fully present to life is burned away—a glowing coal is touched to their lips—and that’s when their sense of participating in a life larger than their own really and truly begins. The guilt is burned away; self-centeredness burned away; and from that point on, they live for the message, which is: We can be so much better than we are right now. Things are not good right now, but we can change before it is too late and all the negative karma we’re generating right now catches up with us. So wake up! Get shaken up, and then shake up the status quo! Make the vision of shalom real! (Side note: I know that the Biblical prophets never spoke of karma—I’m just throwing that word in to keep things “diverse.” Keep you on your toes…)

Just listen to what another prophet says, Amos (contemporary with Isaiah, although they would not have known each other, since Isaiah was in the southern kingdom and Amos was in the north). The words of Amos:

Thus says the Lord:

You oppress the poor and crush the needy. You trample on the poor and take from them taxes of grain. You trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land.

Thus says the Lord:

Woe to you who lie on beds of ivory and lounge on your couches, eating lambs from the flock and calves from the stall; who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp, and like David improvise on instruments of music, who drink wines from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of [the poor]. Therefore you shall now be the first to go into exile.

Thus says the Lord:

I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies…. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

Thus says the Lord:

But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

That’s Amos. And if he was a prophet in the sense that Gerhard von Rad defines prophets, then what we are hearing are the emotions of God conveyed through human language. Could you worship a God who feels like this? Who stands for the poor and the needy and is outraged by their unjust treatment? Who is angry at the complacency and utter neglect of the self-indulgent wealthy? Who prefers justice and righteousness over anything else and will never be fooled (as many of us are) by shows of religious piety? Could you love and serve a God like this? (Of course, you don’t HAVE to: we are Unitarian Universalists after all! But … COULD you?)

And already we are deep into our topic for today. “Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: the Prophets.” These remarkable, unforgettable voices of conscience to their own day and to ours. People whose lips have been touched by a live coal; people who feel a Larger Life surging through their own and sending them into the world to help people wake up and remember the vision of shalom, remember what life is really all about. There are silences in this world that are so hard to break … silence of groupthink, silence of complacency, silence of unexamined assumptions, silence of sheer habit … and the job of the Biblical prophet is to break that silence, speak truth against the power of all that oppressive silence.

Now a moment ago, after quoting the prophet Amos, I asked if you could love and serve the God that Amos serves, the God whose feelings Amos feels. But don’t answer yet, because the picture is incomplete. For there’s another side to the prophetic message. It’s not always and exclusively along the lines of outrage and anger and “get your act together or else.” It’s not just a broken record… We also find, among the prophets, feelings and words that are breathtakingly energizing and positive and encouraging…. We’d have to, if they’re truly feeling the feelings of God, because the God that they served is the God of “Let there be light!,” the God who delights in creativity and in renewal.

A classic example of this is the writer called “Second Isaiah.” One thing you have to know about the Bible is that one book does not necessarily mean one author. Appearance is not reality. Chapters 1 through 39 of the book of Isaiah are about the prophet whose lips were touched by a live coal, the Isaiah who said, “Here I am, send me,” the Isaiah who spoke to the northern kingdom in the 700s BCE. But then we have chapters 40 through 55, and these chapters—just tacked on to the earlier ones—refer to events hundreds of years later, after all the destruction that the First Isaiah predicted would happen really came to pass. Jerusalem destroyed by the Babylonian empire in 586 BCE and the Israelites kicked out of their homeland, exiled, orphaned, lost, bereft…. This was their 9/11 … worse than 9/11. The writer of chapters 40 through 55 speaks to these broken people, conveys God’s emotions to them where they are. This is Second Isaiah, and here is a sampling of what he says:

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid.

In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places plain.

Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you.

God gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not be faint.

Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. For behold, I am about to do a new thing; even now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.

This is the Second Isaiah. This is what shalom looks like. God’s feelings conveyed here are the feelings of an encouraging coach, a faithful mother, an irrepressible visionary, a passionate poet, an unfailing lover. So the question again: could you love and serve a God like this? The God who says, “For behold, I am about to do a new thing; even now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” These are the among the most beautiful words ever written, words which are themselves like a burning coal, and when they touch our lips, they burn away guilt, they burn away fear, they burn away despair, and we are liberated into a larger hope. Despair is perhaps the hardest silence of all to break, but the Biblical prophet breaks it. “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” 2500 years ago, the Israelite exiles had to believe, in order to come back to their homeland, once they were allowed to do so, and rebuild their nation; and we today, in a world that seems in so many ways on a path of soul destruction and ecological disaster, have to believe, too….

“Behold, I am about to do a new thing…” Just let the burning coal of that touch our lips…

**

It’s soo good. The prophets are soo good….

But there’s bad and ugly too. Gotta take a look at this before we’re done today.

One thing I can only mention in passing, and then encourage you to read about in our study text, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, by Marcus Borg, is this: dueling prophets. People with opposite messages, all claiming to feel the feelings of God, all claiming to speak for God (which is unheard of today, right?). For example, in 1 Samuel 9: 11-22, the prophet Samuel basically says, “Thus says the Lord, if you go ahead and establish a monarchy, you are going to regret it. Bad news.” But then, in 2 Samuel 7:1-17, the prophet Nathan basically says, “Thus says the Lord, I love the fact that you are going to establish a monarchy. Nothing but good times ahead.” Whaaaat?

Clearly the question of distinguishing between true and false prophets was (and is) a burning issue, a complex one. Often the yardstick becomes a matter of consequences: does what the prophet say come to pass? Are the results of putting a prophet’s ideas into motion constructive or destructive? A reasonable yardstick: but not so helpful in the moment when you have multiple strident voices up in your face and you have to make a decision now….

Last thing I’ll say about this is an observation about the Bible. I love the Bible exactly because it is unafraid of featuring multiple voices. Lots of people are anxious to dress the Bible up in its Sunday best … but the Bible is more like the kid who, just five minutes after the mom or the dad has combed its hair and smoothed its dress, is already a mess, hair askew, grass stains on its pants, scuffed up shoes, juice stains and cookie crumbs everywhere. The Bible is messy, and that’s why I love it. It’s a book for human beings, by human beings. That’s what it is.

Bad and ugly in it, to complement the good. And now, more bad and ugly: Jonah. Let’s finish up with Jonah.

What do you think about that story? Here’s a hint: the essential message has pretty much nothing to do with the whale… (Some people in fact speculate that the whole episode with the whale is in there in the same way that a dramatic car chase might be smack dab in the middle of a chick flick—as a way to throw a bone to someone who might otherwise die of boredom…) God sends Jonah to Ninevah to convey a message: clean up your act, or else. But Jonah doesn’t want to go. He hates the Ninevites. Haaaates them. So God bless stubborn Jonah, he tries resisting his calling, gets on a ship going the opposite direction, to Tarshish. But what happens when you resist and deny your call in life? God doesn’t let you off the hook; and you become a danger to other people too. Horrible weather threatens to sink the ship; Jonah owns up to being the cause of it all; he says to them, “Throw me overboard;” but they have more love in their hearts for him than Jonah has for the Ninevites and they try everything they can to avoid having to throw him overboard, but it’s no use, in the end they have to. Which leads to the episode with the whale, which God calls to save Jonah, and good thing that the whale, unlike Jonah, doesn’t resist its call—it goes where it is sent, swallows Jonah up, and there Jonah stays until he’s spat out, all slimy and smelly. That’s when he reconsiders his stubbornness and makes his way to Ninevah, conveys God’s feelings of outrage at their cruelty and wickedness, and guess what? The Ninevites hear it, they see the error of their ways, they repent. Pisses Jonah right off! So he goes and sulks. Leaves the city, finds a hill to sit on. “Oh Lord,” he actually says, “please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die rather than to live.” But God does something very different, very … crafty. He calls to a seed to grow into a bush, to give Jonah shade (and once again, happily, the seed responds to God’s call in a way that puts Jonah to shame). Overnight, the seeds grows into a bush, the bush gives delightful shade to Jonah, and it makes Jonah feel a lot better. Doesn’t want to die so much anymore. But then God calls a worm to come and attack the bush, the worm responds to the call (again, putting Jonah to shame), the bush withers overnight, and next day, Jonah is back to “just kill me now.” This is when God appears. God says, basically, You are all upset about a bush that I made grow up overnight. Do you know how much goes into growing up a people, like the Ninevites? And what a tragedy it would be to have to destroy an entire city? And in the end, the entire story hangs on that line of questioning. We don’t know whether Jonah ever lets go of his hatred for the Ninevites. We just don’t know.

I mean, what kind of prophet is this Jonah anyway? It’s as if only a part of his lips got touched by God’s burning coal. The bullet just winged him. He’s just half-baked. Everything in the story God calls to responds immediately—except for Jonah. It’s as if Jonah is the kind of prophet who’s addicted to feeling God’s feelings of outrage and wrath but can’t feel God’s feelings of compassion and love too. That’s a dangerous kind of prophet. We have prophets just like this today….

But now, at this point, we need to know some history. Ninevah was the capital city of Assyria, and guess what the Assyrians did to the Israelites back in the eight century BCE? Tortured them. Crushed them. Exiled them. Violated their nation to the core. Jonah hates them because of this. Hates them with a pure hate. Vengeance.

Knowing this, does this make Jonah’s behavior in the story more understandable?

It also ought to make the Bible even more precious to us. For the Book of Jonah, if it is anything, is a satire on a certain trend within Israelite religion, which saw the Hebrews as loved and cared for by God exclusively. The book of Jonah is itself a work of prophetic criticism towards this “some are saved, others are damned” mentality which the Jonah character so stubbornly held on to, despite all—and which too many people today hold on to for dear life as well.

But the God of this prophetic story says no to all of that. God’s feelings of love and compassion extend to all, from Ninevite to Israelite, from liberal Unitarian Universalist to fundamentalist Church of Christ, from President Barack Obama to President George W. Bush. No favorites for God….

Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you.

Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. For behold, I am about to do a new thing; even now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.

Could you love and serve a Universalist God like this, who feels this way about everybody, no exceptions? Could you?

Hand and Glove

Reflection by Kelly Schwartz

Mine is a story of double blessings. I feel this way because I’m part of an interfaith family – me, a little girl who spent her formative years at Northwest Christian Academy, in the suburbs of Miami. My husband, Alan, raised in East Cobb, attending Hebrew School at Etz Chaim, prepping for the biggest day of his life, his bar mitzvah and BECOMING A MAN! While I was learning about how to get to heaven and avoid hell, Alan was perfecting his Hebrew and pouring over the Torah. While some of our learnings intersected, the bigger things that we were being taught to us as spiritually true and correct, were different in so many ways.

But I say that I am doubly blessed because where our two faiths could have divided us, they did not. Instead, I stand before you as part of an interfaith family that has two spiritual wells to draw wisdom from, two cultures to celebrate, two long, rich histories that are our own stories.

–

What our parents wanted for Alan and I as children was not really different at all – just different ways and beliefs that went into getting us there. They wanted us to be in touch with a power bigger than ourselves. A foundation of faith we could lean on in times when we needed it. They wanted us to be educated in the stories of our past, and appreciative for those who came before us. They wanted us to live and learn how to “do unto others as you would have done unto you.” And when all the schooling was said and done, both sets of parents really just wanted each of us to be happy – no matter kind of wrapper that happiness came in.

And now, it’s the same thing we want for our own daughter, Ella Rose, just 20 months old. In a cruel twist of fate, we HAVE become our parents! On this one issue though, I’m OK with it. Alan and I are lucky to have been raised by two sets of open-minded, forward-in-their-thinking parents, married for over 40 years…and not just married, but *having fun*. Two sets of parents that are crazy and supportive and loving. Both sets, for whom, at the end of the day, “interfaith marriage” is really a non-issue. And I know this is not the story for everyone, it’s just not this easy for so many families trying to merge two faiths, so for that I again feel doubly blessed.

—

At my house, we light the menorah and the Christmas tree.  We spin the dreidle and build gingerbread houses.  I have a stocking decked in red and green glitter and gaud. Alan has a custom-made blue and white stocking, with Shalom embroidered at the top.

Santa is the one who really lucks out because he gets cookies AND rugelach with his milk. The ever cheery “non-denominational snowman” is a popular guest at our home during the holidays, making an appearance on wrapping paper, cards, and dishes – he works for both of us.

There is never the age-old argument “whose parents are we spending the holidays with?” because we do both – latke party at the Schwartzes for Hanukkah and lasagna dinner at the Mitchells on Christmas Eve. The entire family – his parents, my parents, my brother-in-law, three grandkids – all of us – come together for BOTH events because, well, that’s what it’s all about in our families. We love each other, we support each other, we know how important family is, and we all know how doubly blessed we are to have these two families, from two very different backgrounds and faiths, come together in such a wonderful way. Wonderful family gatherings filled with people who THINK they’re funny.

When asked their take on me standing up here talking to you all about being part of an interfaith family:

My mother: “Oh wow. Are you really going to be able to stand up there and do that? Remember the third grade spelling bee when you misspelled “biscuit” and all those kids laughed?” Yeah, thanks mom. Not really answering the question.

My father: “I just want to celebrate festivus. Who’s ready for feats of strength?”

His Father: “Everyone should be so lucky – you’re married to a guy who won’t be disappointed if he finds socks and underwear under the tree.”

His Mother: “Stop me if I’ve told you this before, but when the boys were growing up, we *had* to have a tree in the house at the holidays. We needed *somewhere* to hang all the Christmas crap they were making at school.” If you knew her, and had the privilege of hearing that for the last nine Hanukkahs, you’d appreciate it even more.

—

What I love about what I’ve found here at UUCA for my interfaith family is that our daughter will have a place to learn about BOTH of her traditions – BOTH of her stories. She will see how BOTH faiths come together in a beautiful way and used as teachings to unite us in this world instead of divide us. To come together on the side of love, not on the side of whose religion is “right” or “wrong.” I know our daughter will grow up richer for the experience of being born into an interfaith family, and richer for being a part of our UU congregation.

—

As worked to finish this piece, I tested my material on my ever-patient husband. “Is it too serious?” I asked him. “Tell me something funny about Hebrew School.” He rolled his eyes and told me that a. there is nothing funny about Hebrew School and b. I just needed to speak from the heart.

In that spirit, I will leave you something that is straight from the heart. Words from our ketubah – the traditional Jewish marriage contract that Alan and I signed on our wedding day and now hangs in our home. It’s the spirit in which both sets of our parents raised us, Jewish and Christian. It’s the spirit in which we vow to live out our days and raise our child. And it’s exactly the spirit of what I believe other interfaith families like us find right here at UUCA.

“We promise to be ever accepting of one another while treasuring each other’s individuality; to comfort and support each other through life’s disappointments and sorrows; to revel and share in each other’s joys and accomplishments. We vow to establish a home open to all of life’s potential; a home filled with respect for all people; a home based on love and understanding. May we live each day as the first, the last, and the only day we will have with each other.”

—-

From my family to yours, we wish you a Merry Christmukkah!

* * *

Blintzes for Blitzen by Rev. Marti Keller

A week after Thanksgiving, USA Today reported that the Christmas Season had finally arrived—at least in Washington—when President Obama continued a White House tradition that dates back to Calvin Coolidge, with the lighting of the National Christmas tree.

This was a replacement tree for the majestic Colorado blue spruce that had to be removed following a fierce windstorm last winter. A little smaller than the last one, the President noted, but it was still a pretty good looking tree, which he said would be filled with spirit and , not incidentally, strung with energy efficient lights.

This federal ritual went off without a hitch and with no negative publicity in an election year when already the slightest misspeak or misstep triggers a righteous (and frequently self-righteous)  howl in cyberspace.

Not so a few days later, December 9th to be exact, when another article, this time in a New York City tabloid with the dateline- Washington Oy vey! , with its usual not so objective approach to news coverage, noted that just days after rival candidate Rick Perry had accused him of fighting a war on  religion, President Obama had looked more like a schlemiel, fighting a war on decorum when the White House lit all the candles on the  menorah at its official Hanukkah party.

One rabbi, when asked, weighed in by affirming that you’re not supposed to—the first night of Hanukkah you ( only) light one.

Even worse though, this ritual candle lighting occurred almost two weeks too early. This year, Hanukkah begins at sundown Tuesday, only a few days before Christmas when, as the reporter snarked, Obama will be in Hawaii on a scheduled family vacation.  And then the Fox circuits lit up like a  neon Menorah in Las Vegas.

This relatively unimportant but well known eight day Jewish festival can begin as early as late November , but ordinarily sometime in December, from earlier in the month, to other years  when it smacks right up again the major Christian holy day and secular holiday period of Christmas, thus causing what has come to be called the December challenge for Jews and Christians alike, especially those who are part of an interfaith relationship, either by birth or partnership, or extended family. Let alone merchandisers, advertisers, and elected officials.

How do we  appropriately acknowledge these two holidays? Publicly and privately honor and/or observe them? How can they co-exist without being homogenized into a marketing melting pot?  Or can they?  Can we really all be doubly blessed? Or, as one writer noted, must there be a line drawn, so to speak, in the spiritual snow?

I will speak initially this morning from the perspective of  a minority religion and culture, that of the Jewish people, but not exclusively. And in describing their beliefs and experiences, I would ask you to remember that there are holidays and holy days celebrated and revered by other religions and  cultures this month, with some of the same challenges and opportunities: Ashura  for Muslims, Bodhi Day or Buddha’s birthday, the Winter Solstice for pagans, and Kwanza in the African American community. What might this say to us about their status aswell?

One rabbi tells us that for the vast majority of Americans, Dec. 25 is a time to celebrate the birth of Jesus, but for Jews, he says, it is a time to consider ones relationship to the wider society. Some Jews have chosen to adopt the Yuletide festivities, some have emphatically rejected the rituals and symbols of Christmas. Still others have sought ways to meld Christmas and Hanukkah.

Christmas  has in effect become a prism through which Jews can view how living in this land of freedom has shaped their religion, culture and identity says Rabbi Joshua Plaut in a piece from My Jewish Learning, a great online resource. He shares with us a little history: before coming to this country, for centuries the Jewish people living in Eastern Europe, places like Poland and Hungary, feared Christmas-time.

At any other time, pious Jews would be in studying in schul,  but not on Christmas. Wary of being attacked in the street on their way to and from their synagogues, they took refuge in their homes, playing cards or chess with their families.

We are told that the story was different in Western Europe, where or the Jewish elite, holiday symbols, such as the Christmas tree, signified secular inclusion in society. So we have photos of affluent German Jewish people posing for portraits with their extended families in front of elaborately decorated firs. Others celebrated Christmas with a roast goose or hare, and a big distribution of presents for servants, relatives and friends, and played carols on the piano, including “Silent Night, Holy Night.” These celebrations, one Jewish historian says, reflected the view that Christmas was a German National Festival that Jews joined in, not as Jews but as Germans, and co-celebrated with other exclusively Jewish holiday events, including the annual Hanukkah Maccabee  ball for singles in Berlin, with its modern counterpart, the Matzo Ball, in North America.

Jews coming to America anytime after the 1870’s would have found a Christmas that had changed from a private religious observance, as was the want of the Puritans who first arrived here, to a secular national holiday—thanks in no small part to the role of our 19th century Unitarian forebears in introducing the decorated tree and gift-giving as enlightened European imports.

In response, Jewish families in some communities from Boston to New Orleans staged their own celebrations on Christmas Eve, as they hung wreaths on their doors and stockings on the fireplace. Even Hanukkah began to be dressed in Christmas garb, with garlands and evergreen boughs, and Hanukkah trees ( not bushes) brilliantly illuminated with wax candles, and the singing of Hanukkah hymns by Sabbath-school children.

Perhaps the most widely appropriate Christmas custom among Jews in America was gift giving, as the 1931 how to classic What Every Jewish Woman Should Know, advised:

It is a time hallowed Jewish custom to distribute gifts in honor of the Hanukkah festival. If ever lavishness in gifts is appropriate, it is on Hanukkah. Jewish children should be showered with gifts, Hanukkah gifts, as perhaps a primitive but most effective means of making them immune against the envy of Christian children and their Christmas.

What were the consequences for Jews who embraced Christmas traditions, the rabbi asks? Starting in the 1950’s, American Jewish sociologists conducted  a number of studies which revealed fairly consistently that in the second generation of  Jewish immigrants, parents often agreed that a Jewish child might need a Christmas tree to “ hyphenate the contradiction between his or her Americanism and his or her  ethnicity.”

Which is where my childhood comes in, with parents who had essentially rejected religious Judaism and joined a Humanist Unitarian fellowship, who saw themselves exclusively as secular Americans, who chose to live in majority Christian neighborhoods, who put up a tree, invited Santa down the chimney with piles of gifts, and loved to drive us around town enjoying the outdoor Christmas lights. Where there was never a Menorah, or a driedal or chocolate gelt ( or coins) to be found. Where my father lustily sang Good King Wensleslus, the only song he seemed to know, and not satisfied with sticking with the secular, acceptable commercial Christmas songs penned by Jews- White Christmas, Silver Bells, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Winter Wonderland, and many many more, I tried out for the alto part in a O Holy Night duet in my school chorus.

Then there was the third generation of Jewish transplants, who decided that they did not need to and would not adopt the religious symbols of another group in order to acculturate, giving up the tree to such an extent that it was found that 82 percent of these families had never displayed a tree , instead choosing to elevate Hanukkah, inventing their own holiday tradition, as one commentator said, through a Christmas mirror.

Large reinvented and greatly elevated, picked up and sometimes exploited by the American culture at large, which despite some grumblings about stealing Christmas, even here in the deeply Christian South  came to acknowledge this other holiday was happening, with full page supermarket ads for kosher wine and egg noodles, oil to make potato latkes, Menorah candles, and traditional jelly ring,

And now the fourth and fifth generations of Jews in this country, and the reality of Jewish-Christian intermarriage, exponentially increasing in the 1970’s, until now almost 50 percent choosing non-Jewish partners.

Bringing some angst ( a lot of angst actually) and the need to figure out how to live together in this new reality, a new reality that with  its large numbers, an estimated 2.5 million families  has attracted both  marketing attention and faith community response, sometimes of rejection, at others serious intention in embracing.

Interfaith life partners and families like some among us here. People who come from different religious and cultural traditions, facing the joys—the blessings—and the challenges of creating intimacy across these potential boundaries, with differences in belief and practice that may not be a big issue at the beginning of the relationship, but at some point most interfaith couples, we have learned, must wrestle with the issue of family religious identity, especially as the family expands to include children.

This month of December, as Mary Rosenbaum has written in Dovetail, a newsletter by and for Jewish/Christian families, is particularly ripe for conversation and sometimes fraught with pain, past and present.

The perennial December dilemma, “ to tree or not to tree”, is only the tip of the iceberg, she notes. It’s the part underwater, the unshapen fears, and assumptions that can sink the family ship. For interfaith families, the holidays can be a particularly divisive time.

Listen to some of the stories and some of the wrestling:

One longtime  member tells us that to begin with she has always loved Christmas, one of her favorite holidays, starting with the four Advent Sundays, the Christmas Eve dinner, lighting the tree for the first time with candles, singing and the gift exchange. The first time she and her son and her Jewish husband celebrated together it was, she admits, with a lot of fights. Her new husband resisted the heck, she recalls, out of anything Christmassy. Since she had celebrated his Jewish holidays, she expected him to do the same.

No so, she found, and as she came to understand later, he thought on some level God was punishing him for  not living up to the Jewish traditions.

After some years passed, she found he had relented , coming to peace and being comfortable together.

Her husband says he has realized that he does not have to believe in other people’s holy days in order for him to enjoy the festivities, the food, the joy, most of the music, the decorations and lights, even while he assures us he’ll still take a potato latke, matzo ball soup, a kosher corned beef/pastrami sandwich, or a Dr. Brown’s cream soda over any ham any day!

Another UUCA interfaith family story:

Another member said that when she married her  culturally Christian husband, she let him know that Hanukah was not a big deal really, and while the holiday menorah was enchanting to her as a child, it really paled in comparison with the colored bulbs and tinsel, with gobs of brightly wrapped and big bowed presents under the tree .Her childhood experience of Christmas had certainly been mixed, with all those days and days of singing Christmas carols in school, only mouthing  the word Jesus, and not singing it, because she had heard some folks believed that the Jews had killed Jesus, followed by cookies in the shape of angels and candy canes.

As non-theistic adults, celebrating either holiday become a matter of relative indifference for them, it seems, or too much work, until their daughter Cyndee came into their lives at age five, when they  were 50 and 55, and since their child  had celebrated Christmas as far back as she could remember, that tradition would continue for her— with twinkling lights  and popcorn strands–and Hanukkah as well—with a series of cat menorahs that they light and recite the Hebrew prayers, so as atheists they don’t have to say “ Oh Lord our God”, in English anyway.

And some thoughts from a Christian congregant in her first year here, whose Jewish husband does not come with her and their two daughters to services.  At home, they celebrate Hanukkah and Christmas, and she says while her husband is not the biggest fan of Christmas and he still does not participate in the tree decorating, he will grudgingly say that the tree smells nice ( after 13 years), loves seeing their girls on Christmas morning, and how they are filled with joy and wonder after Santa’s arrival.

Inside the walls of our UU congregations, and others, both Christian and Jewish, who welcome and  even expansively outreach to interfaith families, we can find these stories of struggle, accommodation and the  intertwining of holiday traditions. And outside our walls, there are a number of resources on how to navigate these words more smoothly. It can be found  in the upswing of interfaith holiday greeting cards, produced by companies like Mixed Blessings, some sentimental, some humorous, non explicitly religious.

No baby in the manger scenes or action figures of the Macabees, rather the two holidays’ more secular qualities: Santa Claus and dreidels, cookies and latkes. Cards with text like “ Whether it’s one merry day or  candle- lit-eight, it’s  holiday time we celebrate.”

It can also be seen in books for children and their parents in interfaith families- straightforward books like My Daddy is Jewish and My Mommy is Christian, written by a Christian woman with a husband raised in the Jewish faith, focused on parallel holiday food and fun and gifts. And Blintzes for Blitzen, wherein one of Santa’s reindeer veers off track and ends up visiting a Jewish family Christmas Eve.

There’s the newest, My Two Holidays, that is more nuanced in its  characterization of a child who is embarrassed by the fact that in his school all the other children observe either Christmas or Hanukkah, not both. I wish, he tells his mother, we just celebrated one- it’s weird to have two.

Not weird at all, says Ron Gompertz, author of Chrismukkah, a book that proposes that the next step in the evolution of Christmas and Hanukkah for what he calls mishmash interfaith families like his own, in this increasingly mishmash interfaith country is what he terms a hybrid celebration that merges the two.

He admits that Chrismukkah is pretend, that it doesn’t exist, it’s made up, wishful thinking He notes it won’t earn extra days off from school or work, won’t bring you spiritual enlightenment, or get you right with God, or win the approval of many priests or rabbis, or many parents or grandparents.

He explains that Chrismukkah, which begins on the first night of Hanukkah and continues through Christmas Day or the last night of Hanukkah, whichever comes first, is a first rate celebration of diversity, a global gumbo of cherished secular traditions. It’s the good stuff  we all enjoy no matter what our religion: sleigh bells, eggnog, snowmen, twinkling lights, flickering candles, exchanging  gifts with friends and families. It’s decorating the tree, he imagines, with bagels and candy canes.

Like many if not most interfaith couples, he maintains, neither he or his wife have any interest in converting to each other’s faith, in fact they are not religious, rather both proud of their cultural heritage. At the same time, he says, they are curious to learn about and happy to help each other celebrate their respective traditions and customs and raise children who grow up informed, tolerant and balanced.

Which would be a good thing, but is a secular mishmash holiday really going to help us with the  more complex and  thornier holy day aspects as well?

Our congregant whose husband chooses not to come here and who is reluctant even to help with the Christmas decorations had the opportunity this year, after putting on a recording of religious Christmas music sung by Joan Baez, to explain to her girls that Christmas for traditional Christians is the celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus or Christ, and that Christians believe that Christ is God. Then she explained that Jews, like their Daddy, do not believe in Christ and usually don’t celebrate Christmas, but that their father does because she does. She said that when they grow up they could explore Christianity or Judaism and choose for themselves, or they could remain UU. They both said they wanted to stay UU- which pleased her very much.

Our  December Dilemma, I would say, is that while we do the holiday piece well in a respectful Christian and Jewish or even Chrismukkah kind of way, we need to be more intentional, more thoughtful about the holy day part,  not just for our explicitly interfaith families, but for all  of us. If these are indeed source traditions—and not an exercise in comparative religion–what exactly does it mean to be observing these holidays as UUs, when it comes to sorting out the religious assumptions behind Hanukkah and Christmas—the first, some say, is actually a celebration of a Jewish civil war during the Hellenistic period,  the victory of forces of Orthodoxy against those who would be more culturally open. What can we take away and what do we need to reject ?

And  the second, a celebration of the birth of God in the form of a  Savior and Messiah, when our faith movement stems directly from a radically liberal Christian tradition that  two centuries or more ago rejected the  core notions of Jesus as divine, original sin, and salvation through him.  What fits and what doesn’t?

For some of us, the December Jewish and Christian holidays, and the way we approach them, has actually become a point of frustration and contention for our children who were raised UU. The daughter of one of our members, now married into a Christian family, has told her parents she would rather spend Thanksgiving with her UU parents, and Christmas with her husband’s, with the implicit message that it is clearer what is being celebrated.

My own adult children, raised UU but tilting Jewish, while having finally sorted out what kinds of food we will eat as a family together– a Christian Christmas Eve dinner and  then Chinese on Christmas Day, Jewish-style– have been dismayed at times at what happens within UU congregations during these holidays, when we indeed have  on occasion insisted on lighting the Menorah early, or the candles all at once, for the convenience of our worship schedule.

And confused by if not uncomfortable with the words of traditional Christian carols and Christmas gospel readings that don’t fit with our basic, bottom line theology. Not just that there’s God language, but what and who is being worshipped?

Where are we in all of this? They want to know.

As one of our British Unitarians admits, Christmas may be the one time that our Unitarian theology is frankly compromised, taking second place to convention, and for once we can be found singing “ Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Glory to the Newborn King” or” O Come Let us Adore Him, Christ the Lord.”We find ourselves in this season choosing the familiar, harking back to a sense of holiday and holy day that is, for some of us, immensely comforting, and filled with joy.

I am not expecting a full throttle conversation about how what it means to be interfaith in a faithful and authentic way between now and New Years. We’ve too much preparation and celebrating to do.

But how about meeting back here for Christmas and Hanukkah, say sometime in July?

The Truth Smirks

Rev. Anthony David

Dec. 11, 2011

Writer Mary Hirsch has this to say about humor: it’s like a “rubber sword—it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.”

Go back in time with me to 2006, to a special event of that year called the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. Washington DC. Media movers and shakers in the house, political movers and shakers in the house. Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report is the main speaker for the evening. He’s looking President George W. Bush right in the eye when he says:

“We’re not so different, he and I. We get it. We’re not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We’re not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say ‘I did look it up, and that’s not true.’ That’s ’cause you looked it up in a book.

“Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works. Every night on my show, The Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, OK? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. I call it the “No Fact Zone.” Fox News, I hold a copyright on that term.

“I’m sorry, but this reading initiative. I’m sorry, I’ve never been a fan of books. I don’t trust them. They’re all fact, no heart. I mean, they’re elitist, telling us what is or isn’t true, or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was built in 1914? If I want to say it was built in 1941, that’s my right as an American! I’m with the president, let history decide what did or did not happen.”

That’s Stephen Colbert. Pulled out his rubber sword and made his point. A former aide of the President said that “[Bush] had that look that he’s ready to blow.” As for the rest of us—at least for many of the rest of us—we were cheering, and still are. Feeling relieved. The reality before our eyes—denied or obscured in so many ways—finally being affirmed.

Bring out the rubber sword! The point needed to be made. Colbert was speaking to something that is one of the most troubling features of our social and political landscape today: people voting against their own interests because they equate smart with tricky and dumb with honest. Factinistas and brainiacs: bad. Looking it up in your gut: good.

As the saying goes, in politics, when you are explaining, you are losing. So don’t explain, don’t look it up in books. Go, not for truth, but truthiness. The no-fact zone. Thomas Frank, author of the best-selling book What’s the Matter With Kansas, speaks to this as he acknowledges voters’ preference for emotional engagement over reasonable argument. People who are hurting in this nation, in love with politicians whose policies only serve the interests of the very few who are very well off. Thomas Frank says, “You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining. It’s like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy.”

In a time like this, we need the Stephen Colberts and Jon Stewarts of the world. One of the things we affirm as Unitarian Universalists is “the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.” We’re going to see it in action later today, during our congregational meeting. And we want to see it in America at large. We want to see it healthy and vibrant. That’s what my sermon today is all about. The points that Colbert and Stewart are making about this with their rubber swords.

One of them has to do with the media’s role in creating an American citizenry addicted to the high fructose corn syrup of truthiness.

This is real. Just listen to these results from Farleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind poll. Came out just last month. “The real finding,” says the report, “is that the results depend on what media sources people turn to for their news. People who report reading a national newspaper like The New York Times or USA Today are 12-points more likely to know that Egyptians have overthrown their government than those who have not looked at any news source. [On the other hand,] people who watch Fox News, the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18-points less likely to know [this] than those who watch no news at all.” Commenting on this, Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson and an analyst for the PublicMind Poll, says, “Because of the controls for partisanship, we know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being more likely to watch Fox News. Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all.”

In other words, better to watch no news at all than Fox News, with its Bill O’Reillys and Sean Hannitys and all the shouting… How many of you are positively shocked by this revelation? Your world has just been rocked?

But it’s just not Fox News. It doesn’t have proprietary rights to all the shouting, not by a long shot. Take CNN—one of its current events debate programs that aired from 1982 to 2005, designed to allow the exchange of opinions between liberal and conservative pundits. Know which one I’m talking about? Crossfire.

Right before Crossfore was cancelled, guess who came on the show? Hint: it’s a guy with a rubber sword. Jon Stewart. This is a little of what it sounded like…

“So I wanted to come here today and say… Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America. ?See, the thing is, we need your help. Right now, you’re helping the politicians and the corporations. And we’re left out there to mow our lawns.”

This is Stewart chatting with hosts Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, and slowly, they’re realizing that Stewart is bringing something very different from what they THOUGHT he’d be bringing….

Back to Stewart: “But the thing is … you’re doing theater, when you should be doing debate, which would be great. […] It’s not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery.”

Now things are heating up.

STEWART: You know, the interesting thing I have is, you have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably.

CARLSON: You need to get a job at a journalism school, I think.

STEWART: You need to go to one.

CARLSON: Wait. I thought you were going to be funny. Come on. Be funny.

STEWART: No. No. I’m not going to be your monkey.

CARLSON: Is this really Jon Stewart? What is this, anyway?

STEWART: It’s someone who watches your show and cannot take it anymore.

**

I think a strong argument can be made for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as a new breed of public intellectual. Legal scholar Richard Posner defines a public intellectual as “a person who, drawing on his or her intellectual resources, addresses a broad though educated public on issued with political or ideological dimensions.” Now it used to be that public intellectuals were like Ralph Waldo Emerson or William James or John Dewey: serious but accessible, profound but practical. Nobody’s monkey. Today, however, with the ascendency of truthiness, and schlocky punditry everywhere, what we need is the rubber sword. People who are willing to be monkeys for the greater good. Funny—with a point.

Absolutely, Jon Stewart wasn’t going to be Tucker Carlson’s or Paul Begala’s monkey during that particular episode of Crossfire—but it’s a different story on The Daily Show. Speaking truth to power, through hilarious irony. The gap between what’s said and what’s meant. Here’s an example, from one episode:

STEWART: Obviously what’s going on in the Middle East is awfully complicated. The fuel that fans the flames: The rival factions within Islam, both of them seem to have antipathy towards the US, Israel. It seems like there are some authoritarian regimes that are using proxy countries to fight their wars. It’s a very difficult situation to grasp. Luckily, news organizations are on hand to give us context and ask the important questions.

cut to PAULA ZAHN, on CNN: (The graphic up on the screen says “Armageddon?”) Are we really at the end of the world? We asked Faith and Values Correspondent Delia Gallagher to do some checking.

Here’s another example. The context is former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, taking a question during one of his speeches. Camera is on the questioner:

QUESTIONER: I’m Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency. Why did you lie to get us into a war that was not necessary, that has caused these kind of casualties?

RUMSFELD: First of all, I haven’t lied.

cut to STEWART: Oh, he didn’t lie. Well, that settles it. There’s pound cake in the back, we can have a good time, and uh—

back to RUMSFELD: It appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction.

MCGOVERN: You said you knew where they were.

RUMSFELD: I did not.

STEWART: See? He never said he knew where they were.

RUMSFELD: (from a video three years earlier) We know where they are. They’re in the area around Baghdad.

STEWART: Well to be fair, Rumsfeld probably never saw that episode of Meet the Press.

Yet another example: this one took place shortly after the Washington DC-area sniper shootings of 2002. Stewart is speaking: “By watching the 24-hour news networks, I learned that the sniper was an olive-skinned, white-black male—men—with ties to Son of Sam, Al Qaeda, and was a military kid, playing video games, white, 17, maybe 40.”

And on and on. Add to this the over-the-top graphics and music, a Senior Correspondent for everything, segments like “Great Moments in Punditry as Read by Children,” and Lewis Black, and it’s monkey time, but with a point. Makes you laugh for five seconds and think for ten minutes. Cuts through all the addictive high fructose corn syrup truthiness and all the No Fact Zones and gets to something real.

It’s the Colbert Report too. Listen to Colbert commenting on Governor of Texas Rick Perry’s “pro-Christmas” ad, from just a couple of days ago. Rick Perry saying, “I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in a pew every Sunday to know that there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas. “Yes,” agrees Colbert, “Governor Perry is right. Thanks to the gays, our children can’t openly celebrate the birth of our savior in school, and yet, these gays in the military can openly celebrate their favorite holiday: being away from their families, risking their lives in Afghanistan.”

It’s the rubber sword. And that’s the second point that Stewart and Colbert have to make. The power of humor. As Chinese proverb says, “one never needs their humor as much as when thy argue with a fool.” “If you can find humor in anything, even poverty,” says Bill Cosby, “you can survive it.”

It even makes you smarter. That Farlieigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind Poll? It found that when Jon Stewart (ands no doubt Stephen Colbert) talk about something, viewers pick up a lot more information than they would from all other news sources. Study after study repeatedly shows this, across the years. Contrary to Bill O’ Reilly’s famous comment that Daily Show viewers are all “stoned slackers,” they’re in fact the best-informed of all. All the wit keeps them on their toes, makes them sharp. Thus this observation from philosopher Terence MacMullan: “The greatest irony of the show is that even though Stewart isn’t a news anchor and his writers couldn’t get jobs on Family Guy, they’re still able to exceed, in many respects and for a fraction of the cost, the quality of news shows produced by real journalists.” Stewart and Colbert are the new breed of public intellectual: liberating the popular mind from the fog of truthiness—and doing it through a lot of monkeying around…

Liberating that popular mind for a purpose—that’s the third and last point I want to explore. The purpose being reintroducing democracy as a viable way of political life. Reminding us that we are better than we think, we are up to the challenge of American politics.

It’s what 2010’s Rally to Restore Sanity was all about. More than 200,000 people in attendance. Stewart and Colbert in top form. Colbert doing his trademark shtick as a right-wing blowhard fearmongerer, playing against Stewart’s motto, which is, “I may disagree with you, but I’m pretty sure you’re not Hitler.” Sanity vs. Fear , Peace Train vs. Crazy Train. In the Rally’s finale, a giant paper-mache puppet of Colbert (“Fearzilla”) was brought on stage to symbolize his superiority. Peter Pan—played by John Oliver—then appeared and led the crowd in a chant that caused Colbert and his puppet to melt into the stage, thereby handing final victory to Stewart’s message: “Take it down a notch for America.”

We can do this. We are better, said Stewart in his closing remarks, than the political process suggests or how our media portrays us. The image of Americans reflected back to us from all that, he says, “is false. It is us through a fun house mirror, and not the good kind that makes you look slim in the waist and maybe taller, but the kind where you have a giant forehead and a butt shaped like a month-old-pumpkin and one eye.” “We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is—on the brink of catastrophe—torn by polarizing hate and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done, but the truth is we do.  We work together to get things done every damn day!” “Most Americans,” he says, “don’t live their lives solely as Democrats, Republicans, liberals or conservatives.  Americans live their lives more as people that are just a little bit late for something they have to do—often something that they do not want to do—but they do it–impossible things every day that are only made possible by the little reasonable compromises that we all make.”

We love John Stewart and Stephen Colbert because their rubber swords make the ultimate point that we don’t have to live our lives stuck in tiny dogmatic boxes separate from each other, and the best we can ever do is just shout at each other. We love them because they are stealing our reality from truthiness in politics and truthiness in the media, stealing reality from this and handing it right back to us; helping us step back from voting against our best interests; strengthening us with the power of humor, amidst all the shouting and all the spin; reminding us and encouraging us, we can do this, we can make America work, I Am America and So Can You. It comes as a huge relief.

Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: The Books of Moses

Rev. Anthony David

Dec. 4, 2011

“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor,” writes the author of the Biblical book of Deuteronomy. “He went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us by imposing hard labor upon us we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors. The LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and the LORD brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”

This is one of the greatest stories every told.

Now, I didn’t grow up in church, so the first time this story dawned on my consciousness was not in a pew and not in a Sunday school class. It was in the basement of my Baba’s house, close to Christmastime, back when I was something like eight years old. I was in my jammies, and Baba had put on her pink polyester nightgown, and I sat down in her lap, and her face was shiny with Oil of Olay, and I could smell that sweet smell as I nestled into her softness. Lawrence Welk was just finishing up in an explosion of tiny bubbles, and at that point Dido got up to go to bed—he was an early to sleep, early to rise kind of guy—but we stayed put in the TV room because Baba wanted to watch something called The Ten Commandments. Something about Charlton Heston (and whenever she talked about Charlton Heston there was a strange sound in her voice my eight year old mind could never decode, but I got it now, she loooved Charlton Heston…) OK, so The Ten Commandments is on, it’s unfolding before me scene by scene—the baby Moses found in a basket on the Nile river by Pharoah’s daughter; the adult Moses as a Prince of Egypt; the time he kills a guard abusing one of the Israelite slaves; when he discovers who he really is; when he’s brought before his Pharoah father in chains; when he’s banished to the wilderness by Rameses (played by the awesome Yul Brynner); when he encounters God in the burning bush and is called to liberate his people … on and on and on … all these scenes unfolding before the eyes of this eight year old … and let’s not forget the soundtrack:  duh duh duh duh, duh DAH DAH DAH DAH!! Heady stuff! And then that scene, after the ten plagues, after the flight from Egypt, when the Israelites find themselves at the shore of the Red Sea, jammed right up against the edge, and the Egyptian army is hot on their heels, and they are between a rock and a hard place, but Moses holds out his arms and lifts up his staff (duh duh duh duh, duh DAH DAH DAH DAH!!) and the waters part and the Hebrews surge forward and the day is saved and I thought to myself O MY GOD what IS this? This is COOL! THIS is a story.

One of the greatest stories ever told.

And not just in my eight-year-old self’s opinion, or that of Judaism and Jews worldwide. It’s religion writer Bruce Feiler’s argument too in his book America’s Prophet: How the Story of Moses Shaped America. A fascinating read, tracing the history of the impact of the biblical narrative of the Israelites on twenty generations of Americans and their leaders. The Pilgrims who left England in 1620 bound for the freedom of America, describing themselves as the chosen people fleeing their pharaoh, King James. “On the Atlantic, they proclaimed their journey to be as vital as ‘Moses and the Israelites when they went out of Egypt.’ And when they got to Cape Cod, they thanked God for letting them pass through their fiery Red Sea” (Bruce Feiler). The Biblical narrative gave the Pilgrims not only language for what they were doing, but logic, justification. “The only reason they could have done that,” says historian Tim Safford—one of many of Bruce Feiler’s interviewees—“The only reason they could have done that is because they had a narrative larger than their own lives. A narrative of God delivers me through the Red Sea. A narrative that if you’re lost in exile, you can still remain holy. A narrative of life is stronger than death, love is more powerful than hate. If you do not have a narrative larger than the world gives you, you’re just going to get sucked up by the world.” That’s Tim Safford. The Pilgrims were just not going to allow themselves to get sucked up by the world. The Founding Fathers of this nation weren’t going to allow that either. Or Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Or leaders of the civil rights movement like Martin Luther King Jr. They had a narrative larger than their own lives, given to them by the Bible, and though the story was thousands of years old, about people long dead and gone, it was nevertheless absolutely new, exactly what they were going through in their own day, it spoke straight to their lives. Oppression in Egypt; liberation from all that through Exodus; the newly freed slaves, despite all the murmuring and complaining, becoming a united people and a new nation at the foot of Mt. Sinai; the new nation entering into the Promised Land. All of it—America’s story too.

“The universe,” says poet Murial Rukeyser, “is made of stories, not atoms.” The universe, nations, and people like you and me. Made of stories.

In our remaining time together, I want to go deeper into this greatest story ever told. Apply the three Bible reading principles that scholar Marcus Borg talks about in his Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, the companion book to this year-long sermon series.

Principle #1: It’s never “God says”; it’s always “humans say.” You just can’t open your Bible and go, “Let’s see what God says about that.” No. The Bible is a record of humans in quest for meaning and truth in life, humans striving for love and justice yet always creatures of their day, always limited by this. We take what the Bible says very seriously but not slavishly—don’t want to make it yet another Pharaoh in our lives!

Second principle: Look to the past. As Bible readers we will miss so much of the meaning if we are not aware of historical context. As Marcus Borg likes to say: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” Gotta know the history to truly understand.

Finally the third principle: Don’t allow the Bible to stay stuck in the past. And don’t dismiss a passage if scholarship or science tells you that it can’t be literally true. Don’t cut it out. Instead, go deeper. Read it as poetry, read it as metaphor, read it as myth that conveys psychological and spiritual truth. The voice of the Bible can comfort you, can challenge you, can speak to your spirit right here and right now. It will read you more than you read it, if you let it.

These are the principles: and now let’s get to work.

We begin with what history and scholarship and science have to say. Frankly it’s not pretty.

Something happened in the thirteenth century BCE. The book of Exodus tells us that six hundred thousand Israelite men plus women and children left Egypt—presumably a total of two to three million people. That’s not a small thing. Leaves a HUGE footprint. Yet to this date, no archaeological evidence has ever been found. No contemporaneous writings from the ancient Near East—nothing outside the Bible—makes even a passing mention of it. Definitely nothing from Egypt, which is really strange. As Jonathan Kirsch in his book Moses: A Life puts it, quite ironically, “The ancient Egyptians, who were compulsive chroniclers of their own rich history, somehow failed to notice the presence or the absence of a couple of million Israelite slaves, the afflictions of the Ten Plagues, the plague that took the life of every firstborn child on a single night, of the miraculous events of the Red Sea.” That is just strange. It is no wonder that even the most pious scholar who chooses to honestly grapple with this fact can come away with a most unpleasant feeling of uncertainty. What really happened three thousand plus years ago?

And then there are the miracles. Did those really happen? Just think of the list of plagues Moses unleashed upon Egypt: the Nile water turns to blood, frogs fill the land, gnat attack, fly attack, all Egyptian livestock die, everyone gets boils, the mother of all hail storms wreaks havoc, locust attack, thick darkness covers the land for three days, and then all the firstborn die. Now I know and we know that there are earnest people who have a scientific explanation for every one of these things. The Nile water, for example, did not really turn to blood; it was just a profusion of some microorganism that made the water intensely red. But this misses the point. So much of the Israelite story is premised on God acting in a way that upsets the natural order of things. God’s mighty hand acting supernaturally. And here is where the problem lies. Not just in terms of science, but also in terms of theology. The problem is one of consistency. Lack of consistency says something bad about God and bad about the Exodus story as a whole. Take God first. If God used to act in the world like the Bible tells us, but no longer, despite situations of intense suffering in the centuries ever since (including the Holocaust), then God clearly plays favorites, God is abusive in God’s absence, God is a jerk. As for the story itself: if the liberation of the Israelites was possible only because of genuine bend-the-laws-of-nature miracles, then how can this possibly speak to us today, when we don’t have the luxury of some Moses wielding God-power as he strides through the halls of Congress and demands that the nonsense end, that our rich-getting-richer and poor-getting-poorer system cease. Back then, it was all duh duh duh duh, duh DAH DAH DAH DAH!! But it’s not like that anymore. All of this is good reason for doubting that the miracles ever happened. Again, not just because science doesn’t like supernatural stuff. But also because the theological conclusions about God we end up with are truly ugly. And this greatest story ever told—Egypt, Exodus, Sinai, Promised Land—falls flat.

So we’re not dealing with a story that is to be taken as literally true. Two to three million Israelites were not a part of the picture; Egypt was not devastated as part of the Israelite withdrawal; there were no miracles. This is the judgment of history and science and scholarship. It’s just not “God says,” it’s “people say.”

So why did the people say it? Why did the ancient Israelites tell the story as they did?

Maybe we can’t take the story literally in all its details, but you know, something must really have happened three thousand plus years ago to those Israelites. “Why,” asks religion writer Jonathan Kirsch, “would the chroniclers of ancient Israel make up something as ignoble as four hundred years of servitude in a foreign land unless it was a fact of their history?” And not just the fact of four hundred years of servitude. Also all the murmuring of the Israelites, there in the desert. Time and again, they are saved from death, and still they complain. They KVETCH. Or they create a Golden Calf that spits in the eye of the one saving them. These are not moments to be proud of. Yet they make their way into the narrative, and that says something. A classic rule of Biblical interpretation puts it this way: where there’s honest disclosure of something embarrassing, you’re probably in touch with the truth.

Something must have happened. Surely, when you consider the spiritual and political vision of the ancient Israelites. The moment God hears his people moaning under slavery, the entire moral focus of the story becomes protesting exploitation of any and all kinds and building a society that nurtures everyone. Thirty-six times, in the Exodus narrative, the Israelites are urged to befriend the stranger, for they were themselves strangers in Egypt. The vision of social justice is paramount. The laws that Moses is purported to hand down from on high: some of them represent the most radical socioeconomic legislation of all time. For example: every forty-nine years, during what is called the Jubilee year, “all debts are to be forgiven, all debtors freed, all workers are to return to their ancestral lands, and all families split by economic hardship reunited. The messages is that the land belongs to God, not humans, and nobody should benefit too greatly or suffer too greatly for their work with God’s bounty.” (Bruce Feiler) Can you imagine a law like that here in America? What would happen if we observed it here and now? No need for the Occupy movement for sure….

Something must have happened—something transformative—to those ancient Israelites. If not duh duh duh duh, duh DAH DAH DAH DAH!! of the supernatural kind, then of a kind more natural but still amazing. Still life-changing.

And that’s what we’re looking for—the potentials for life-change—as we practice the Bible-reading principle that says, Don’t allow the Bible to stay stuck in the past. And don’t dismiss a passage if scholarship or science tells you that it can’t be literally true. Don’t cut it out. Go deeper instead. Read it as poetry, read it as metaphor, read it as myth that conveys psychological and spiritual truth. Let the Bible speak straight to your heart. like it did to that eight-year-old boy curled up in his Baba’s lap, smelling her smell of Oil of Olay, watching the scenes of The Ten Commandments unfold and getting it, getting the amazing message that belongs to no one time in history and to no one nation—the message that whatever form of slavery we are oppressed by, it can still be otherwise, there can still be change, there can still be a Promised Land.

Let the Bible speak. There will always be times we find ourselves at the shore of some Red Sea in life. Know what I mean? You were a slave, and somehow you fought your way out. You got away. But the Egyptian army is hot on your heels—your escape is not gonna be automatic or easy. So you are standing at the shoreline, and you are in a desperate, impossible place, and it’s just like poet Audre Lorde says: you are

seeking a now that can breed?futures

like bread in our children’s mouths…

That’s what you are seeking in the face of fear and pain and chaos

a now that can breed?futures

like bread in our children’s mouths.

So what are you going to do NOW?

Maybe there is no Charlton Heston Moses spreading his handsome arms out wide….

No supernatural guarantees to what you are doing

You don’t know what the end of this story is gonna look like

You know how the story of the Pilgrims ended,

or that of our Founding Fathers

or of the Civil War

or of the Civil Rights movement

You know those stories

all those desperate impossible times

when there were people who, against all odds,

stepped right into the Red Sea,

went right in up to their chests

up to their noses

up to their eyeballs

and THAT’S when the waters parted…

You know how their stories ended

just not your own…

What you DO know is you have to do this

you have to find a new life

you have to find your Promised Land

So step in

live a story in your life

larger than the one the world gives you.

Don’t allow yourself to be sucked up by the world….

Step in

Story before the sermon

Our reading this morning comes from authors Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham. Their book is entitled “The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning.”

Once upon a time, but not very long ago, in a kingdom both near and far away, there lived a canny scientist who longed for the love of a beautiful woman. Because his first love was not even science but his own knowledge, wise women were wary of the man, and so he lived a very lonely life.

One day, the man decided to use his science to win love, and he set about to concoct a chemical that would cause the object of his affection to fall madly in love with him. Soon his research succeeded, he produced the chemical, and as luck would have it, at just that time he met a beautiful, talented and good woman—the ultimate woman of his dreams.

The scientist arranged for friends to introduce them, and at their first meeting, he poured his potion into her beverage. Lo and behold, his fantasy came true! The exquisite creature fell instantly and completely in love with him, and they soon married.

But was our hero happy? Alas, no. In a short time, he became gaunt from not eating, his work fell by the wayside, and eventually he could not even bring himself to touch his beloved, as he spent every waking moment torturing himself, trying to devise some kind of test to answer his agonized question: “Would she love me if it were not for the chemical?”

For our scientist did crave love, but love cannot be commanded.

Sermon

In their book The Spirituality of Imperfection, Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham share a story about a time when a group of addiction experts from Russia visited the United States and attended several Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, “hoping to find in those smoky rooms something that could be used to fight the serious alcohol problem in their homeland”:

They listened to the stories, they talked to the A.A. members, and they decided that, yes, there was something here that could help. But what was it, exactly? They couldn’t quite figure it out.

At the end of one meeting they approached their hosts, several of whom were recovering alcoholics. “We want to make alcoholics like that,” they said. “Teach us how.”

The hosts smiled in gentle understanding. “Well, that’s what we’ve been doing this evening,” came the answer. “You see, you learn how to be like THAT only by BEING like that.”

“But,” the Russians sputtered, “surely there must be something you could share with us, a technique, a certain kind of approach, some kind of trick that would make this all a little easier?”

“No,” came the reply. “What you see in this smoky room, what you want to take home with you, is spirituality; and if there is one thing that all alcoholics discover, it is that there are no shortcuts to spirituality, no techniques that can command it, and especially no ‘tricks.’ That’s what we tried to find in the bottle, in booze, in alcohol. It didn’t work. What we have learned is that the only ‘technique’ is what we call ‘a four-letter word’: it is spelled ‘T-I-M-E.’”

**

This morning, I want you to imagine that this space has become one of those smoky A.A. meeting rooms—although in all fairness, there’s lots of meetings these days which are non-smoking… But THIS room is smoky. And you’ve got a Styrofoam coffee cup in your hand. You’re sitting in a fold-up chair. Here we are. Now, you might be wondering why you are here, since you might not have an addiction to alcohol—or to another way of self-medicating like overeating, or gambling, or sex, or enabling someone who HAS an addiction—but maybe by the T-I-M-E our meeting is done you’ll see that there’s wisdom here for you too, whoever you are, in this room where people are working the Twelve Steps in their lives and sharing that with each other.

How many of you are familiar with the Twelve Steps? It’s a set of guiding principles first published in 1939, in the Big Book, more formally known as Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism. Since then, the guiding principles have been adapted to become the foundation for all sorts of recovery programs: Adult Children of Alcoholics, Codependents Anonymous, Crystal Meth Anonymous, Workaholics Anonymous, Online Gamers Anonymous, and on and on. The American Medical Association summarizes the Twelve Steps as follows: admitting that one cannot control one’s addiction or compulsion; recognizing a higher power that can give strength; examining past errors with the help of a sponsor (experienced member); making amends for these errors; learning to live a new life with a new code of behavior; helping others who suffer from the same addictions or compulsions.

There is a powerful form of spirituality here—that’s what gathers us together in this smoky room, in the T-I-M-E of this morning. That and lots of humor, lots of sayings and slogans. As in:

“How come if alcohol kills millions of brain cells, it never killed the ones that made me want to drink?”

“I’m an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.”

“The good news is you get your emotions back. The bad news is you get your emotions back”

“I would rather go through life sober, believing I am an alcoholic, than go through life drunk, trying to convince myself that I am not”

“Alcohol gave me wings and then slowly took away my sky”

“Resentments are like stray cats: if you don’t feed them, they’ll go away”

“I can’t do God’s will my way”

“The power behind me is greater than the problem in front of me.”

“I used to be a hopeless dope fiend, now I’m a dopeless hope fiend.”

“The shortest sentence in the Big Book is, “It works.”

**

One of the main things that happens in the smoky room of a Twelve Step meeting is storytelling. Rabbi Rami Shapiro speaks to this in his book, Recovery, where he says, “I am not drawn to Twelve Step meetings to listen to people who are perfect; I am drawn to listen to people who are broken and who have found the wisdom in that brokenness that allows them to live in a place of love. […] We don’t ignore the trauma of the past, and our story is still rooted in it, but it is no longer controlled by it. We don’t end up where we began. […] By learning to tell our story over and over, we learn to free ourselves from the emotions attached to it. We begin to tell the story in a detached manner. We own the story; the story no longer owns us.”

Here we are, in this smoky room, Styrofoam coffee cup in hand. And I’m gonna tell my story now, at least a part of it. TRUE story.

Hi, my name is Anthony. [Hi, Anthony]

I remember my Mom drugging as I was growing up—Dad ended up drugging too, but only after I left home for college, as far as I know. Before that, Dad was just Mom’s supplier—and since he was a medical doctor, the supply was endless.

I remember my Mom as either crazy high and rushing around the house, obsessively vacuuming the rugs, compulsively polishing windows and dusting and straightening; either this, or she’d be crashed on the couch, catatonic, dead to everything.

Either way, she was not available to me, and I felt the lack of connection in my body as an insecurity that ate into my child’s heart and made it hard to look into the eyes of my teachers; I felt it as an irritability that would not go away, a restlessness that made it hard to receive things like friendship and fun and peace and just spoiled everything and could only be soothed by busy-ness, activity, movement.

Also by snooping. I was an incurable snoop. What’s in this drawer? What’s in that desk? I marveled at how perfectly everything would be stacked and sorted. It got to be a game, although I learned, only too late, and much to my surprise, that Mom was playing the game too. One afternoon I snuck into the piano room. The rug had been carefully vacuumed in such a way that the tracings of the vacuum left cross-hatching marks. Didn’t pay much attention to that. Passed by the piano (yet another thing I was not allowed to touch) and longingly caressed the polished keys with a finger. Went straight to the cabinet and opened it, looked inside at my Dad’s classical LPs. One at a time, slipped out Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, the Red Army Choir. Looked at the albums, wondered about the music… Knew it was my heritage, since my family had come from that part of the world…. Didn’t linger too long, because my Spidey sense started to tingle… Mom was busy downstairs, but not for long… I slipped the LPs back, slunk out of the room, smiled to myself at my cleverness.

Until later, when Dad came home from work. “Bob, would you PLEASE tell your son not to go into the piano room? I work like a slave all day and I don’t need him going in there messing things up!” Mom found out because my small footprints had ruined the perfect symmetry of the rug’s crosshatching. I hadn’t thought of that.

Mom couldn’t bear my energy. I needed to sit down and shut up. I needed to be still. Being active in the house meant making a mess, and Mom hated messes. She was at war with messes. Mom couldn’t stand a house that wasn’t as sorted and clean as a museum. If I didn’t calm down, she’d put me outside and lock the door, that’s what she’d do. I’d be out there for hours. If I had to pee, it would be in a beer bottle.

One day, I tried a different strategy. Mom was drugging, so why not me? From previous times when I’d been sick with a cold, I’d noticed that the cough medicine Dad gave me made me feel REALLY good. Took me to a place where my body didn’t need to soothe itself through restlessness or snooping. Body felt groovy. Had no problem sitting down and shutting up then. In fact, all felt perfectly right with my world. This stuff was a straight shot to sweetness. I’d think of Mom, I’d think of Dad, and I’d tear up with the gooey feelings of love that I felt. Shortcut to love. The anger—the rage—was pushed aside, and it was a relief. Raging against the people who were your sole source of protection did not feel safe.

So my strategy was sneaking into the laundry room (where the medicines were stored) and stealing a few nips of that cough medicine. Did this early in the afternoon, so I’d have a couple hours to enjoy the kaleidoscope of the day.

Made me into a different kid. One way is this. I used to have this coin bank that looked like a barrel with a bunch of monkeys coming out of it. Smiling monkeys—and on the barrel, these words: “Quit monkeyin’ around and save money.” And I did. Ruthlessly. I was greedy kid with my money. Didn’t like to spend it; wanted to keep it all because the fuller the bank was, the more I liked the sound when I shook it. Especially in my brother Rob’s presence, making him green with envy. Yeah! Rob was always wanting to borrow money, and I was always pitiless. Never gonna go there.

Until I started drugging. That’s what turned this 1% into a 99%er. Rob, you want some money? Sure! Want some more? Charge you interest? Are you kidding? What’s the matter with me? Nothing! I feel fiiiiine.

Dad eventually found out. Maybe Rob got seriously weirded out at my about-face generosity and complained to Dad. I don’t know. All I know is that when Dad found out, he bent me over his knee, spanked me good. Ordered me never to drink the stuff again. I limped away from the scene wondering why he never drew the line with Mom….

And I never did drink the stuff again. Ironically, I would end up developing a deadly allergy to the codeine that was the active substance in that cough syrup. And while my path since the days of my childhood has not led me into a problem with alcohol, it has taken me into being a super high-achiever, a workaholic, a caretaker … Not that wanting to excel is intrinsically bad, or working hard, or wanting to be a caring person. But since drugs as a way of playing God in my life were out of the question, I took to codependency instead. That’s what worked in my family; that’s what worked to ease the restlessness and irritability and lack of peace that I never stopped feeling. My way of playing God, my way of lying to myself that through carefully honed technique I can command the love that I so craved and still crave. My technique. My insanity.

And that’s my story.

**

If this were a real a real Twelve Step meeting, this would be the time for me to sit down. As another Twelve Step slogan says, to people who are sharing their story, “Be interesting, be brief, be seated.” But seeing that I’m the preacher today, let me tell you another story:

Comes from the tradition of Buddhism. One day, a woman approached the Buddha in tears. She presented him with her dead child and said, “Lord Buddha, I have heard that you can bring the dead back to life. This is my beloved son who died only this morning. I beg you, Lord Buddha, restore him to me.”

The Buddha agreed, provided that the woman bring him a single mustard seed from a home in the village that had not experienced death. The woman ran to the village and went door to door to find even one household that had not been touched by death. But every single one had been touched by death. There would be no mustard seed to bring back to the Buddha. Finally, when she returned to him, her grief was no less but her attitude towards it had changed. She knew the inevitability of suffering and the futility of seeking to make things other than they are. She could now mourn her child and move on.

I share this story because it gets to the heart of the matter. Everybody hurts. Life can hurt us terribly, if not disappoint us deeply. If it’s not a dysfunctional family with a drugging Mom and dealing Dad, it’s something else. Your child dies. Or a shy brown puppy comes into your life (that’s for those of you who were here last Sunday). Whatever it is—it’s always something.

And this so very easily takes us to the reflex response that is at the bottom of every kind of addiction: to refuse to move on, to refuse accepting reality—and this refusal energy morphs into paranoia that reality is out to get you! The essence of every kind of addiction is making war on reality, so that one can live in a world that is perfectly ordered to one’s design, as my Mom wanted to order her house. Seeking out the Buddha so he can bring your child back to life. Trying to be the Buddha yourself, to work a miracle. Playing God. God miracle of codeine-laced cough syrup—shortcut to love. God miracle of perfectionism and workaholism and every other kind of –ism you can think of, in order to force into being states of heart and mind like self-confidence, contentment, peace. “We sought,” says Rabbi Rami Shapiro, “to create for ourselves a world of light alone, and when that failed, we sought to shield ourselves from the dark through acts of self-medication.”

But Twelve Step spirituality says that there’s hope. There’s T-I-M-E. “I used to be a hopeless dope fiend, now I’m a dopeless hope fiend.” “The power behind me is greater than the problem in front of me.”

One of the ways I practice Twelve Step spirituality is through a prayer of my own. I created it in the context of yet another circumstance in which I felt the itch to play God in my life. Being judge, jury, and executioner all rolled up into one. It was years ago. I was sitting on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, watching the fascinating world go by with all its exotic and exciting sights and scenes, but feeling like I was on the outside, looking in. Not able to take it all in, not able to be in the moment and feel joy. Feeling wretched and alone, “other,” left out, ill-prepared for life because I’d grown up in a screwed up family….

Out of this turmoil came the words of a prayer that I continue to pray to this very day, some days more than others…. Something like this:

I forgive all the ways in which my life appears to fall short.

I trust that whatever I truly need will find its way into my life.

I am grateful for what I have.

My holy trinity: forgiveness, trust, gratitude.

My way of doing what the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous says: “ceasing from fighting anything and everyone.” Stopping the war and letting go, letting go of all my pride that says I am entitled to whatever I want. Letting go of pride, letting go of greed for MORE, letting go of the itch to order my world as my Mom tried to order her house … and relaxing. Relaxing into the sea of my life. THIS is the only power I really do have … not hard power to command the world to be as I want it to be, not hard power to command love, but soft power to let go and relax, soft power to let the sea hold and carry me along its currents. Let go and let God.

Forgiveness, trust, gratitude. Trusting that if I take one step at a time, with every step life is going to meet me with what I need. The daily bread will come. “Alcoholism is a disease of faith,” says the writers of The Spirituality of Imperfection. “Alcoholics often develop a cynical attitude toward life, not seeing anything to believe in. When you persistently feel the need to change your consciousness through drugs or booze, you are expressing a lack of trust in yourself, in your ability to tolerate life undiluted, to find value in your own, unadulterated experience.” That’s what I saw Mom and Dad doing all the time. I did it too. I knew and know this kind of self-mistrust intimately. But there is another way. It’s like my man Emerson says, in one of my all-time favorite quotes: “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”

Forgiveness, trust, gratitude. The power behind me which is greater than the problem in front of me. The Higher Power I have to turn my will and life over to again and again, lest resentment be the poison I keep on drinking in the insane hope that it’s gonna kill anything and everyone that’s hurt me. Praying that prayer again and again, to open up my heart. It’s just like washing the dishes. Never happens just once. It’s just part of the human condition to slip into the mania of wanting to play God. But as Bill Wilson, creator of the Twelve Step program, says, “First of all, we had to quit playing God.” “I can’t do God’s will my way” “Let go and let God.”

The shortest sentence in the Big Book is, “It works.”

Early this past week, a third year student at a rural state college wrote an editorial for the newspaper there, noting that “in a country that prides itself on being the land of equality, we are not all equal, not even close.”

She said that while she supported the proactive role that Occupy Wall Street has taken throughout the past few months, that it is about time someone started to express the distaste Corporate America has left in the mouths of many, at the end of the day, from her perspective, Occupy Wall Street is not where she wants us to put our time and energy.

Occupy Wall Street, she declared, is misguided in their efforts for reforming the system. Instead we need to Occupy the Classroom. The root of America’s problem, she said, is that we are not giving education the time and money it deserves.  Too many children and youth are being denied access to quality teachers, equipped classrooms, and the chance to succeed.  To live out their dreams.

Education, as high as an individual has the will and skills to go, is a far better return, she reminded us, than many stock investments.

This is an American, we-the-people problem that needs to be remedied immediately, she urged. It’s time to Occupy, she demanded, in the name of our future.

A couple of days later in that same college town, there was what has been described as a  raucous downtown protest with thousands of students pouring into the streets, clashing with the police and damaging property.  Expressing their anger, making their demands.

Not for reform of Wall Street or our education system. No, they were drawn out of their dorm rooms and their lecture halls in what has been reported as a massive display of anger at the Board of Trustees’ decision to fire Joe Paterno, the 84 year old head football coach of Pennsylvania State College since 1966 (as well as ousting  the college president). Fired in the wake of charges against a former top assistant coach of the sexual abuse of young boys, who knows how many of them, over a period of years.

Incensed, not at the abuse, but at the loss of their beloved athletic leader, head of a winning team at a college where football rules.  But where also the same coach devised a concept known as the Great Experiment there—finding a way to balance big time athletics and academics—promoting a culture of excellence in both. And yet and still somehow getting it so terribly wrong.

It is sad and I believe disgraceful that these students took to the streets, not to express their indignity at what had been done to these numbers of young boys in the men’s locker room of their own school, but out of fevered loyalty to this larger than life figure, and blinding attachment to a winning team.

This story will rise and fall on the media radar, as all stories do, and some will say that this is what college students are all about these days: tailgate parties, and keggers, and sports mania, to the point of overlooking abuse and cover-ups.

That they seem detached from the large issues of the day, even the ones that would seem to most immediately and directly impact them. That they dream of the next touchdown, the next big win, the next division or national title, and little else.

Which is not true if we follow stories of other on campus outbursts and outside the campus outbursts— twittered stirrings  and even some throw- back sit- ins–protesting  the ever escalating costs of college and the diminishing quality of what they are getting in return, as faculty cuts increase class size and reduce the number of courses offered. And the American Dream further and further out of reach.

The American Dream, our national ethos, in which freedom includes a promise of the possibility of prosperity and success. In the words of James Truslow Adams in 1931, “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.

And there has been little change in definition over all these years.

There is actually a Center for the Study of the American Dream at Xavier University, which released the results of a second annual American Dream Survey earlier this year. What they learned is that on a scale of one to 10, most people gave the Dream’s condition a mediocre score of from 3 to 6, only 23 percent convinced  that the country is going in the right direction, a 15 percent net drop from a year ago.

Between the first and the second survey there had not been much of a change, with two exceptions. Confidence in the economy has lessened. Last year the majority ( 51 percent) still felt the U.S. economy would improve over the next year or so. Now only 41 percent expect it to get better.

The second change is what might be called a generational fissure. Last year 60% of Americans surveyed felt it was harder to reach the Dream today than it was for their parents’ generation. Today the number has surged to 69%.

Nowhere is the decline in optimism more dramatic than among African Americans, a sense of despair, of dreams almost permanently deferred. Nowhere is optimism higher than among recent immigrants, who continue to hold markedly more positive views about their country and the Dream than other Americans.

Who does the American Dream look like? For some, Steve Jobs, who shortly up until his tragically untimely death from pancreatic cancer just a few weeks ago, was CEO of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios, would have fit the bill. Brilliant, ingenious, entrepreneurial, in many ways self-made. Wildly successful.

And while he was invited to deliver the commencement address at Stanford University in 2005, for Jobs, a university degree was not part of his resume, or essential to his dream-making.

As he admitted that year in a speech that has gone viral several times over, this was the closest he had ever gotten to a college graduation.

He told them that he dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months before he finally quit.

So why did he drop out?

His biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student and she decided to put him up for adoption. She felt very strongly, he said, that he should be adopted by college graduates so everything was set for him to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except it turned out the couple really wanted a girl, so his parents, who had been on the waiting list, were called in the middle of the night and were asked if they wanted this newborn baby boy. And they said yes, of course.

When his biological mother found out that the adoptive parents were not college graduates, in fact his father had never even graduated from high school, she refused at first to sign the paperwork, but relinquished when they promised that he would someday go to college. But 17 years later when he landed in a high price private school and all of his working class parents’ savings were being spent on college tuition and he saw no value in it, he eventually left. And trusted that all would, in his words, work out OK.

The rest is history, and for Jobs the lack of an advanced degree did not disadvantage him.You.ve got to find what you love, he told those Stanford graduates, and so he did.

It may seem like he was on to something, dodging those tuition bills and for him a wasted four years, though not helpful to hear by those many students who have gone the distance, especially in the past few years.  When the studying was over for 2010, college graduates in Georgia owed an average of $19,000 in student loan debt.

Nationwide, graduates carry an average debt of $25,000, the highest debt on record. Struggling to begin to repaying their debt, they have entered a job market that is among the most depressed ever for their age group. They have moved out of  their campuses, degrees in hand, if they are lucky hired to drive catering trucks or put up dry wall,  work as line cooks or receptionists in spas. I know, because this is the story of my own young adult son and his friends.

Among men 20-25, the unemployment rate is 15.8 percent, with many more uncounted, never having had the chance to enter the fulltime workforce at all. On an unpainted wooden fence in the Woodruff Park Occupy Atlanta encampment, one 24 year old wrote that he goes to school fulltime and gets an average of four hours sleep a night. I am hoping the degree I earn will help me pay off my $80,000 student loan… the outlook of this is dim.

Another wrote that all of his life he has seen immigrants being denied the right to receive scholarships to go to school and citizens being drowned in debt, due to going to school, and once they finish NO JOBS. So what’s the point anymore?

Yet in the long run, or even the shorter run, the American Dream is inescapably linked with education, as columnist David Brooks has pointed out.  While he may not be as concerned as some of us might want him to be about the economic and status gap caused by corporate practices in this country, he does argue convincingly that ultimately the achievement or lack of a college degree plays a crucial role in so many disparities: income differences, health status, marital status, community involvement and others.  In the chance for a good life for ourselves and our families.

The American Dream Survey, while pessimistic in part, is hopeful and compassionate in its view of who can and cannot be included.  As we note and celebrate the 125^th anniversary of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants, a majority of us believe that we still are a “beacon of opportunity” to immigrants who want to live out their dreams, rather than viewing immigrants as coming to America mainly to seize jobs or accept handouts. Immigration, most (more than 60%) agree, is important to keeping the American Dream alive.

Alive for young immigrants who have been raised in the U.S. and who have managed to succeed despite the challenges of being brought here without proper documentation. The approximately 65,000 undocumented students graduating from high school, many at the top of their classes, who cannot go to college, join the military, work or otherwise pursue their dreams.

They are called the 1.5 generation, immigrants largely raised in this country, and therefore sharing much in common with second generation Americans. These students are culturally American, growing up here, and often having little attachment to their country of birth.

Young people like David Cho, whose parents came from South Korea when he was 9 and wants to serve in the air force.

Young people like Mayra Garcia, who came to the U.S. from Mexico when she was two. Now 18, she is a member of the National Honor Society, graduating from high school with a 3.9 GPA.

Young people like Juan Gomez who also arrived here when he was two, finishing in the top 20 of his class in his high school in Miami.

Young people like Barbara, who does not want to share her last name, who, as much as she would like to attend a state university, is working at a local restaurant, afraid of being discovered, of being deported if she should apply for student aid.

What do we do with these children, these children who live in the shadows of fear of deportation and separation from family? What do we do with what one Lutheran minister has named the children of captivity, who excel in school, against all odds and sensibilities, knock on the door of higher education and find admittance only to find that they do not possess the proper documents to utilize their education, intelligence and skill?

Our immigration law currently has no mechanism to consider their special circumstances, and the attempt to reform this, the federal DREAM ACT, (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) which would offer a potential path to citizenship, once with bipartisan support, is now languishing in congress.

This legislation would allow upstanding high school students without documents to obtain a temporary visa so they can attend school, travel and work legally, and after ten years apply for a green card and lawful permanent residency.

DREAMers – our young people seeking a route to citizenship—-are not asking for special access or treatment. They seek to sing their songs of Zion, pursue their dreams of hope and justice freely, in a land they have come to know as home. To contribute to our country, to serve the United States, to be part of our collective American Dream. How long shall we — can we– defer their dreams?

In the words of African American poet Langston Hughes- what happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore? And then run?… Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?