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PITCHING AGAIN THE TENT OF
ABRAHAM
a sermon by Preston
Moore
Williamsburg Unitarian Universalists
Williamsburg, VA
September 24, 2006 |
In a desert town in sixth
century Arabia, a young boy, orphaned at the age of six, is sent
to live with relatives among the Hashimite tribe, where he
learns to tend sheep. Eventually, he learns the skills of
hauling and trading goods. Although illiterate, he attracts the
attention, and then the attentions, of a wealthy widow twenty
years his senior. She proposes to him. They start
a family and settle into a happy and secure life.
But the shepherd turned entrepreneur is
disturbed by the widespread practices of idolatry among his
neighbors. Leaving his family in town, he heads off into the
desert to meditate on what to do with his life. After nearly a
month of solitude, he is visited by an angel who utters a
one-word command: “read!” He responds, “but I can’t read!”
After three such commands and helpless responses, the angel
grasps him with overwhelming force. When released, he begins to
recite beautiful, complex textual passages of which he had no
prior knowledge.
Returning to his family in an inspired
state, he plunges himself into religious leadership. The
revelations and recitations continue. They are transcribed by
a growing band of literate followers who find the recitations,
now book length, to be tremendously inspiring. An extraordinary
religion is born.
The shepherd turned entrepreneur turned religious leader
is, of course, Mohammed. The book of extraordinary recitation
in this story is the Koran. And the calendar month during which
his transformation began is the ninth one, called Ramadan.
Today, another Ramadan begins. Over a billion Muslims around
the world are beginning a month-long religious observance of
fasting, prayer, and communion.
Ramadan is a season of intensified, collective effort to
achieve closeness with God. Muslims spend this entire month in
sober reflection on how well or poorly their religious values
are reflected in their lives. Much time is spent in houses of
worship and in communal prayer. Fasting is required between
sunrise and sundown. This intensified embrace of piety reaches
a climax on a specified date known as the night of
predestination – or perhaps night of fate would render the
meaning better. Muslims hold this night as the time when God
determines the course of the world for the coming year.
Mohammed’s ancestors were the family of Abraham, of
Genesis fame. We can dispense with the Biblical begats here and
just focus on Abraham’s two sons. One, named Ishmael, started a
family from which the Muslim tribes of the Arabian Peninsula are
descended. His younger half-brother Isaac started a family from
which the twelve tribes of Israel are descended.
The Jewish side of the family of Abraham has long
observed a yearly period of intensified piety similar to that of
their Muslim kin. It occurs during first ten days of the Jewish
new year, referred to as the High Holy Days. Fasting, prayer,
and spiritual reflection are the focus of this time. As in
Islam, in Judaism these are community practices.
The High Holy Days also include a mythic
story similar to the night of fate in Islam. Each new year’s
day, God writes in books containing the names of all humanity,
recording who will live, who will die, who will have a good
year, who will have a bad one. For ten days, however, humans
have a fleeting opportunity to affect their fates by acts of
atonement.
Before addressing any unresolved issues
with god, they are enjoined to make amends for wounds they have
caused other people and grant forgiveness to those who have
wounded them. On the tenth day of the new year, called Yom
Kippur, the divine books are sealed again until the passing of
another year.
Today the Jewish High Holy Days begin
again. The ten-day clock is ticking, counting down toward the
Day of Atonement. Yom Kippur. Jews are striving to move closer
to God, closer to what is holy.
Other than historical curiosity, what cause
do we have to look over our shoulder at these strange-sounding
ancestral stories? My reason for doing so is that I expect to
be changed by any story good enough to survive so long.
Something powerful must be waiting there.
The spirit of Mohammed’s story is so much more
interesting than the letter. I don’t read his story as an
empirical description of an angel miraculously appearing out of
the sky to begin downloading massive volumes of highly poetic
text into the brain of an illiterate man. I read it as a tale
of an ordinary man having a extraordinary, transformative
experience -- one that taught him not to read books, but rather,
to read the WORLD, and himself in it, in an utterly new way.
Whatever happened out there in the desert, I believe it brought
him very close to something so new . . . that it had to be
beyond the realm of experience available in the finite world: a
brush with the infinite, or to use Mohammed’s language, Allah.
God.
The name I would give to that new experience is
awe – a sense of speechless amazement, appreciation, and
respect. I believe Mohammed suddenly saw human life as it
really is – a state of being that can be grasped not only
through our physical senses but also through our spiritual ones,
enabling an experience of the connectedness of the finite and
the infinite – in other words, an experience of wholeness. Of
the holy. Mohammed’s experience moved his feet onto a path of
legendary religious leadership. On that path he not only
read but also wrote, in his actions, with a spiritual
literacy that dwarfed what is known as literacy in the everyday
world.
Ramadan is a celebration of the awe and joy
and power of closeness to the infinite, experienced by
Mohammed. We UUs aren’t sure what to make of this. We are a
skeptical bunch, rarely awe-struck; a language-loving people
rarely visited by speechlessness. And when I say “we,’ I do
mean “we.” But as a religious people, we can’t escape the fact
that like our Abrahamic relatives, we are in the awe business.
Today Jews and Muslims throughout the world
are focusing their attention not only on awe itself but also on
the spiritual practices that bring people to awe. They
believe that through highly intentional spiritual practice,
humans can evoke an experience of closeness to the holy, rather
than having it be something that strikes them only rarely, and
unbeckoned. As a religious people, we UUs are in the spiritual
practice business too.
Signaling the importance of one such
spiritual practice, the holiest of the Jewish High Holy Days is
Yom Kippur, the Day Of Atonement. Once again I find myself more
interested in the spirit than the letter of the sacred texts. I
don’t read this Jewish story as an empirical description of a
God who enters judgments about each human in eternal journals,
and then sets up a legalistic process by which humans have ten
days to appeal these judgments by generating fresh evidence of
good conduct. I read it as a tale of fate and freedom.
Fate is that which we cannot change. God
gives us the world, or, if you don’t find favor with the word
God, we at least can say that the world is given to us. As
given, it is an accomplished fact, a fait accompli. Our fate.
It is where we must start, but it need not be where we
end up. Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, represents two
bold religious claims: first, that humans can chart a path in
life toward a destination of their own choosing; and second,
that the wish lying at the bottom of every human heart is to
choose a destination of healing, wholeness, connection with the
holy. These are the conditions that bring us to awe and make
life joyful.
Atonement is about changing ones path by
making amends. Judaism teaches that making amends for wounds
inflicted on other humans must precede any plea for
reconciliation with God. This is for the benefit of the injured
party, to be sure, but also for the sake of the atoner, who has
wounded himself by dishonoring his own heart’s connection with
others. There can be no ultimate healing, no all-encompassing
wholeness and connection with God, if healing with oneself and
ones neighbors is left out.
To many UUs, atonement is a heavy-sounding
word, resonant of judgment and reproach. When we hear it, we
picture ministers moralizing about sinners in the hands of an
angry god. One cannot have atonement, of course, without having
something to atone for; and the traditional word for that
something is sin -- a word conveying such repellant associations
with christian fundamentalism that it has become taboo in
unitarian universalism.
This allergic reaction is an overreaction.
We can embrace atonement without dishonoring our values. The
word atonement entered our language on account of the struggle
of a man named William Tyndale to translate the Bible into early
modern English in the sixteenth century. Not finding just the
right word among the existing choices, he put “at” together with
a now-archaic English word: “onement” –meaning a state of being
one. At-onement. Atonement. So, to atone is to move into a
state of being at one with others, with the universe, with God
if that usage serves you. It is a “Journey Toward Wholeness” –
an idea with impeccable UU credentials.
As you can see, I read the story of the
High Holy Days with admiring eyes. My reading isn’t complete,
though, unless it comes to terms with that peculiar clock that
sets a deadline for atonement, starting to count down on New
Year’s Day and hitting zero on Atonement Day ten days later. It
won’t surprise you that I don’t feel particularly bound to take
that part of the story literally either.
I don’t read the High Holy Days as a story of using
acts of atonement to fend off divine imposition of capital
punishment. I read it as a cautionary tale about yet another
critical word in religion: mortality. What would life mean to
you if you only had ten days to live? Unless we have had a
near-death experience, we can scarcely imagine mortality being
so real and immediate. Without an experience of mortality, of
finiteness, it is impossible to have an experience -- or even a
glimpse -- of the infinite. Without that glimpse, we cannot
even imagine life as a connection of the finite and the
infinite, as an experience of wholeness. An experience that
brings us to awe.
And I wonder if atonement would look
different too, from that ten-days-to-live perspective.
We all know many stories of regret, told by people who did not
clean up old hurts and estrangements; people who only
appreciated the value of atonement after important people in
their lives were dead and gone. If you only had ten days to
live, wouldn’t completing things with the important people in
your life move to the top of your list?
In opening the gates between the finite and
the infinite, this ten-day clock, this annual Jewish ritual of
mortality, invites us to live every day as if there were only
ten days to live -- to be in awe of the extraordinary confluence
of a finite human life and an infinite god. The mythic rituals
of mortality re-enacted every year on these High Holy Days
represent the essential truth about life – that it is fleeting,
precious, hanging by a slender thread, and undervalued by most
of us until we are in jeopardy of losing it. We all may
have only ten days to live. The High Holy Days ask us to
consider whether living life as if that were so might be
transformative, awe-inspiring.
On the eve of last year’s Ramadan and High Holy Days
[CHECK], The President of our religious movement, Bill Sinkford,
wrote a pastoral letter in which he suggested that as a faith
community, UUs should celebrate an annual day of atonement.
Bill likes to make provocative suggestions, and this certainly
was one of those. All of this praying and emoting and
soul-baring in unison by Muslims and Jews is pretty much against
our UU grain. We pride ourselves on our individualism.
I wonder, though, whether our Abrahamic
siblings are onto something with their communal rituals.
Reaching “at-onement,” coming to awe, looks to me like something
we need to do in the company of fellow seekers. And I wonder if
even praying and atoning in unison might look different, from
that ten-days-to-live perspective. Rugged individualism sound
romantic, but I don’t know anyone who can face death alone.
There is consolation in being closely connected to a loving
community at such a difficult time. There is consolation in
knowing that what one is facing has been faced by humans for
thousands of years. Communal ritual, with its quality of
constancy over time, gives us this.
And I don’t know anyone who can face
life alone either. In particular, to confess to having
injured someone might call for some support – perhaps in the
form of a holiday in which all are atoning at the same time.
With our human frailty that makes us tremble at being the one to
go first, to risk looking foolish or weak, mightn’t we be in
need of that kind of support?
The celebration of holy days is a way to
make sacred whatever brings us closer to the holy. We mark
something as sacred by setting it aside. For over a millennium
now, billions of our Muslim brothers and sisters have set aside
an entire month for practices and rituals of awe and atonement.
By making declarations of what is sacred, Muslims and Jews have
affected the way their lives are lived in the expanses of time
between these annual observances. The annual cycles of
Ramadan and the High Holy Days are emblematic of the cycles of a
single day and an entire life. Their message is a wonderfully
mixed one -- that in matters of awe and atonement, it is always
nearly too late and, at the same time, never quite yet too
late. Not in a single day, not in an entire lifetime, not even
after thousands of years of toxic accumulation of unatoned
wounds.
These rituals, these communal practices,
are worthy of a place of honor in our own tradition. A place
established by the telling of stories and fashioning of rituals
of our own unique making. Reading and writing the world as
we see it. We should do what Bill Sinkford suggests, not
only for our own sake but also for the sake of a world bereft of
atonement, a world in which awe and joy have been overwhelmed by
grim pessimism. A world in which, ironically, Jewish Isaacs and
Muslim Ishmaels continue to slaughter each other by the
thousands.
Shortly after the attack on the World Trade
Center, the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley established
an Islamic Studies task force. This happened only because of
the prophetic leadership of the smallest of the Union’s member
seminaries – the Unitarian Universalist one, Starr King. The
only member seminary that had already been offering courses in
Islamic religion.
There is an old Jewish saying – that a
prophet is someone who knows what time it is. Indeed, and who
also knows that, no matter what time it is, it is usually later
than we think. Prophetic leadership comes from unlikely
sources. For recovery of an ethic of atonement, that leadership
might have to come from a source as unlikely as a small
religious movement like ours – skeptical by temperament, leery
of tradition, and yet committed enough to spiritual wholeness to
find its way back to awe and atonement.
Awe and atonement. mortality and community.
ritual and story. We look over our shoulders to give thanks to
our Abrahamic heritage. And we ask, how can we bring awe and
atonement into our own religious tradition? Given what is at
stake, how can we afford not to? Is there anyone here today who
is not carrying the weight of unatoned injuries, old wounds
suffered or inflicted? Who does not also carry unspoken hopes
for reconciliation with someone, maybe even someone
sitting right here in this sanctuary? For the sake of such
hopes, may we take our own small steps, right here in this
church, to begin again in love.
Amen.
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