9-11

I marked the anniversary of 9-11 last week by making a contribution to the Cordoba Initiative. In case you don’t know what that is because of the very sloppy media coverage of the last month, the Cordoba Initiative is what has been called the “Mosque at ground zero.” Of course it is not really a mosque (it is a community center with a planned prayer room for Muslims as well as ones for Christians and Jews) and it isn’t at ground zero (it is in a very mixed neighborhood a couple of blocks from the edges of the World Trade Center site), but I won’t get into that here.

I wanted to express my support for the project because I strongly believe in what Imam Feisal Rauf is trying to do. He wants to create a center that can promote a vision of Islam as a faith tradition that works for peace, love and understanding. And he wants this center to be a place where Jews, Christians, and Muslims can come together to learn from each other, support one another and celebrate their common ground and common heritage. The Cordoba project has at its heart the commandment common to all of our scriptures to “love God with all your heart, soul, and mind and love your neighbor as yourself.”

This kind of leadership in the Muslim community in the area of interfaith understanding and cooperation is just what all Christians and Jews should be hoping for and praying for. Here are Muslims extending their hands to us and I, for one, will eagerly and thankfully grasp those hands.

In each of our separate faith traditions, we are trying, with God’s help, to find truth and wisdom and a meaning for our lives that embodies God’s love and grace. Each of our traditions are limited and flawed. Each of us have histories with ugly chapters that should rightfully embarrass us. Each of our faiths have some radical and fundamentalist followers that espouse our faith in ways that cause division and violence and promote hatred. Each of our precious scriptures have stories or ideas that run counter to the whole and strain our abilities to interpret them in ways that honor the beauty of the central ideas of our traditions. Each of our faiths are incredibly diverse and no one can take any responsibility for their thousands of parts. All three are considered “revealed” religions depending upon the ways in which we have experienced God’s reaching out to us and our forbearers. But all three faiths have grown a myriad of different ways in which we interpret and reinterpret those revelations in our limited, self-centered, and flawed human ways.

Because none of us can claim that our limited minds and hearts can comprehend the whole of the mystery that we call God; because none of our interpretations of our faith traditions are without error and prejudice; we need each other. We need the wisdom, beauty and truth embodied in the other great religions to help us to better understand our own. We need the breadth of God’s grace breaking forth in other cultures, in other languages, in other times, in other lives and minds, to even begin to give us a sense of the wholeness and grandeur that is the God we worship. We each have a central revelation of God that informs and shapes the way we understand the world, but the universal spirit that we worship has been revealed in other ways, in other places, in other lives. Shouldn’t we want to hear those stories? Shouldn’t we want to learn from those other moments of God’s grace? Shouldn’t we celebrate the way in which God has spoken among us even when God wasn’t just speaking to our culture?

Our religions all have God’s love and grace at their hearts. Nothing based on that love and grace should ever become a divider between peoples. It should never create hatred or misunderstanding. It should never spawn violence. We should be able to celebrate each other’s ways. Our faiths are not in competition with each other, they are part of one another. They compliment each other. They complete each other.

What happened on 9-11 was a tragedy that grew out of the hatred that sprouted in the cracks of misunderstanding and distrust in one tiny segment of one of our faiths. That kind of violence has, at times, also found expression among followers of each of our traditions. To allow distrust of Muslims among us, to foster more misunderstanding, to sow more seeds of chauvinistic hatred between us, is simply to promote more 9-11's. If we want to honor those who died, if we want to fight the enemy that created that tragedy, then let us take up the weapons of the heart against hatred. Let us wield the power of love that God has taught us. Let us banish the sources of misunderstanding and ignorance that separate us from brothers and sisters who worship the same God of love. That is what, I believe, the Cordoba initiative is all about. I will join hands with them because there is no better monument that can spring up near ground zero or anywhere than this.

Hard Times

“To preach the good news when times are not good at all.” That is the way my old friend, now deceased, William Sloan Coffin, once described the church’s vocation. And this fall, as we begin to start up a new church year, as we go back to the committee work and the stewardship drive and the Sunday school and the choir and the fundraisers and the mission work, we have to start by recognizing that these times “are not good at all.”

I won’t go into all of the things that make for our “hard times,” but just on the economic side of our lives, things have certainly gotten more difficult. Here in Maine one in every twelve people is unemployed (that’s just the official statistic that doesn’t count those who have stopped actively looking for work). Estimates are that one in four of the people who have jobs are underemployed (meaning all those people who are working part-time that need to be working full-time as well as those people with masters degrees who are employed pouring lattes in coffee shops). Housing foreclosures are the highest that they’ve been since the 1930’s. Small businesses are closing in record numbers. Our state is forced to make budget cuts that leave some of the people hardest hit by these problems more vulnerable. And things don’t appear to be getting much better. Those of us that have not been personally affected by the hard times are still feeling insecure and we all share great anxieties about the future.

I know this is a depressing way to begin a letter about a new church year. But it is in times like these that a church like ours really matters. The difficulties in our economy, the growing polarization of our public lives, the stress and anxiety that is now a part of the national fabric; all these things make what we can do here and offer here more crucial and more urgent than ever. These are times when the message of hope and faith needs to be shouted from the rooftops. These are times when people need a community that makes them feel embraced and cared for. These are times when our children need the support of people beyond just our immediate families and when they need a safe and secure place to be and belong. These are times for us to preach the good news—that no matter how difficult things are on the outside, it is the inside that matters; that no matter what our material circumstances may be, it is the spiritual heart of life that is the meaning and the center of who we are; that even when things are going badly, the gifts of God abound and can still be savored and celebrated.

In short, hard times are what we are here for. Our church community may have more money or more members or be more fun when times are good and safe and secure, but it is in the hard times that we need to be reminded that this church has, down through dozens of generations, helped to give people the strength, the courage, the support, the faith and the hope that has gotten them through. It is in hard times that we can rediscover the urgency and the importance of what we are here for. There is no more vital role to be played by any community or institution or group of people than the mission to which we are together called—to speak a word of love when hatred holds sway; to speak a word of comfort when lives are dislocated; to speak a word of hope when people are cast down; and to speak a word faith when lives feel empty. And then to find the ways to live out that love and comfort and hope and grace in who we are to each other and our neighbors.

It is time to get back to the work of being the church together, with a renewed sense of urgency and purpose. It is also time to discover again the joy, fellowship, fun and grace that we find together in that task. You are part of a great and important enterprise here at First Parish and we need all of you to gather round now and be the church when it is urgently needed. Welcome back if you’ve been away, and welcome home to all of you.