Joy has reminded of the crucial scope of the United Nations work. As I pored over the UN’s enormous website, I was overwhelmed by the size and range of the organization’s outlook and action.
While most of us can only relate to the whole planet as an abstraction, the UN’s work is to take, as its concrete responsibility, the health and stability of the entire, interconnected human community—and by necessity, the community of all life, as we wake up to the reality that human beings cannot be healthy or secure when the eco-systems we depend on are not.
So it holds in its range of concern the global picture concretized right down to the most specific, nitty-gritty services. It delivers not only in conference rooms with the leaders or nations, but in dusty villages and refugee camps, in backwater medical clinics and one-room school houses made out of mud brick and corrugated tin.
However one may criticize the UN for its inadequacies and failures or its ponderous bureaucracy, it manifests, in the most extensive possible way, the philosophy of “Think globally, act locally.”
On this UN Sunday, we remember the necessity for all of us to work for peace, human dignity, and environmental health. And yet, for most of us, “the whole world” is so hard to comprehend, much less respond to. And so the adage, “Think globally, act locally,” becomes all the more relevant for us.
If we love the world, if we love human beings and believe humanity worthy of dignity and peace, if we love the web of life, the trees, the icecaps, the rivers, the jungles, the spotted trout, if we feel it as our sacred responsibility to uphold these things, how will we concretize our love?
Psychologist Scott Peck wisely wrote in his book, The Road Less Traveled,
Love is an action, an activity. . . Genuine love implies commitment and the exercise of wisdom. . . . Love is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... True love is an act of will that often transcends ephemeral feelings of love…It is correct to say, 'Love is as love does.'
I recently watched the 2004 documentary, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train,” about historian and peace activist Howard Zinn. Zinn is perhaps best known for his book, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to the Present. In A People’s History, he approaches every major chapter in our country’s story—from Columbus to the “war on terror”—from the standpoint of the underdog, the marginalized or the dissident, lifting up those voices generally lost or ignored in mainstream accounts.
As a historian, he has always brought to light those “hidden episodes…when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally, to win.” He believes that our future is to be found in what he calls “the past’s fugitive moments of compassion” rather than in its centuries of warfare.
This film about Zinn was, for me powerfully moving and inspiring, a portrait of someone who has been moved by love to continuously placed his voice, his reputation, his body on the front lines of people’s movements—for civil rights, for labor, for peace. When Marion Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, was interviewed about Zinn, she said that, in spite of his low-keyed approachability, Zinn has always embodied a kind of moral outrage that she finds sadly lacking today.
I was struck by the truth of this comment. I had to admit, as I sat there like a potato watching this documentary in comfort and safety, how low the embers of moral outrage seem to simmer in me and those around me—although in our world there is enough cause for outrage to fuel bonfires. And when it does flare up, where are we to go with it? How and where are we to direct it?
The capacity to feel intensely about social justice and peace, and the capacity to live powerfully for them, are intertwined. Finding a constructive vehicle for the expression of powerful concerns allows those feelings to breathe into fullness, like giving oxygen to a fire. Action fuels hope, and hope fuels action.
When no outlet is found or created, when no action is taken, when we find no way to experience ourselves as effective, intense feelings become too painful to carry, and they implode, suffocate, turn bitter, or simply go to sleep.
In the last moments of the film, a voiceover of Zinn’s voice says:
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now, as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
I know we each already search ourselves and our lives for how we will make real our love for the world. We each ponder that and are already finding ways to do that. Even so, I do want to lift up a few things happening through the organization of this congregation, any or all of which make excellent venues for that expression. In particular, this congregation voted during it’s annual meeting last spring to affirm and support the work of four social action task forces.
The Green Sanctuary Task Force is engaged in helping the congregation make very concrete changes in behavior with the end purpose of reducing our energy and environmental footprint, both in this facility of our church buildings and activities, and in our individual homes and lives.
If you are involved with the Green Sanctuary Task Force, would you please stand up so that people can see who you are and approach you with questions?
The Boston Peace and Safety Initiative Task Force is focused on peace and safety in the schools, on the streets, and in the homes of Boston and local neighborhoods. This group will help us get active by recommending measures that we can take, at church, at home and in the community to reduce violence in our local area. This will likely include collaboration with the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, Renewal House—a domestic abuse shelter—and Healthy Roslindale. We may be invited to raise money, volunteer at events, and participate in rallies and marches.
If you are involved with the Boston Peace and Safety Task Force, would you be willing to stand so folks can see who you are?
The Hands Across the Water Task Force is working in partnership with our neighbors up the hill at Temple Hillel B’Nai Torah. The intention with this effort is to help address literacy needs in developing countries by collecting quality used books and delivering them to libraries & schools in those countries. We have the potential to raise local awareness about both literacy and recycling, while building a relationship with the Temple that may have many wonderful future expressions for friendship, learning, and peace and justice work.
So, if you don’t mind, if you are involved with Hands Across the Water, would you be willing to stand so folks can see who you are?
And last but far from least, the Community Supported Agriculture Task Force was created to help rebuild connections between growers and food consumers right here at the community level. If you were able to be in worship on Oct. 7, you had the privilege of hearing farmer and theologian Greg Maslowe talk so movingly about all the reasons why this connection needs to be nurtured—from reducing the environmental degradation caused by industrial farming and shipping food long distances, to the peace and justice aspect of providing food to the poor and improving wages and conditions for farm laborers.
Would the folks connected with the Community Supported Agriculture Task Force please stand and be seen?
Now these are not the only venues for peace and justice action that members of this community are involved in, but I wanted to emphasize the wonderful bridge between idealism and pragmatic action that each of these initiatives offers us. By giving ourselves to these endeavors, sincerely and energetically, as individuals and as a congregation, we will be truly loving the world through acts of will.
As I anticipated this Sunday, and as I reflected on the sometimes anemic state of my own moral outrage, I found myself remembering a dream that I had, many years ago. I don’t always know why my imagination makes these connections, but I thought I would share it with you, because this dream has been an important source of spiritual guidance for me in understanding why I am called to love the world, and humanity, with my might as well as with my feelings.
In the dream, I am making my way quickly through the narrow, cobbled streets of a third-world slum—could be a city in India or Pakistan or Afghanistan. The narrow alleys zigzag through the maze of multistoried adobe walls; clotheslines hang across the streets about me. Dogs bark. People go about their business.
I’m looking for my friend, who in my mind's eye is a thin, dark-skinned, dark-eyed boy of about 11 years. I race through winding alleys, checking all our familiar spots. Finally I make my way to his home, and knock on a weathered screen door that seems to be barely hanging on to its hinges.
After a moment, someone shuffles toward me from the other side. It is my friend’s father, a bitter, ill-tempered, sometimes violent man. With barely a grunt of acknowledgement, he opens the door for me to step into the apartment’s dingy kitchen.
And yet, through the eyes of dreaming I see something amazing.
The man’s potbellied body is like a paper lantern, a translucent husk barely containing the unmistakable radiance of the divine mind, the divine presence, like a honey-colored internal sun. So bright is this light that it extends out beyond its container. He glows like a beacon.
Here, in this worn and embittered man, with his bad back and aching joints, with his bad attitude and a heart wounded and crusted over, glows the full luminosity of the divine. Entirely ignorant of the power that he has, and is, he is unaware that the mind of god lives and shines as brightly, as unmistakably, as joyfully within him as it would in an enlightened holy man. He shines not because he is a special person but simply because he is a human being.
Everything goes silent as we stand facing each other in the doorway. With wonderment, then awe, I can do nothing but wordlessly put my hands together in the prayerful salutation of Namaste, and bow to him in reverence.
The dream ends there, but I carried into my waking the message that if I had such vision as I went about my daily life, every person I encountered would be god walking around in a pair of worn shoes. Six billion illuminated beings, six billion Buddhas, walking around, struggling, weeping, warring, starving, praying to some god “out there” to rescue us from ourselves.
As I look out at you now, if I could see with the same eyes I saw through when I was dreaming—and I almost can if I try—I would see a room full of torches, full of suns, full of angels, a room full of Buddhas. I would see each of you as a manifestation of the divine presence, anchoring that presence right here in your bodies, anchoring that light to the earth through your beings.
If we could see ourselves and each other as such vessels of power, we would lose our timidity and nonchalance. We would be inflamed with love, with reverence, and with moral outrage. For we would feel what a blasphemy against the indwelling holy is perpetrated by humankind in our ignorance, cruelty, callousness, and war. We would see what blasphemy against the indwelling divine occurs in the degradation of nature, which groans under the strain of our abuses.
And we would recognize our own unfathomable capacity to be (in the words of our chalice lighting this morning, from Diane Ackerman)
…guardians of nature,
healers of misery,
messengers of wonder,
And architects of peace.
May it be so.
Before saying our closing words together, let’s remember Howard Zinn’s words:
If we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future, for the future is an infinite succession of presents.
Our closing words, by Judy Chicago, express both the grand utopian future and also the very means, through the creation of right relationship, that can guide each successive present moment toward eventual wholeness:
And then all that has divided us will merge
And then compassion will be wedded to power
And then softness will come to a world that is harsh and unkind
And then both men and women will be gentle
And then both women and men will be strong
And then no person will be subject to another's will
And then all will be rich and free and varied
And then the greed of some will give way to the needs of many
And then all will share equally in the Earth's abundance
And then all will care for the sick and the weak and the old
And then all will nourish the young
And then will cherish life's creatures
And then all will live in harmony with one another and the Earth
And then everywhere will be called Eden once again.
As we extinguish the chalice
flame, let us carry its light with us into the world:
the holy fire of love made real through our living.
Amen and blessed be.