Now Is Not The Time For Hope
Sermon given at
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
January 17, 2021
The Reverend Craig M. Nowak
“I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say I would go to church no more.” So wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in his famous “Divinity School Address”, which he delivered to the graduates of Harvard Divinity School on July 15, 1838.
He continued, “Men go, thought I, where they are wont to go, else had no soul entered the temple in the afternoon. A snow-storm was falling around us. The snow-storm was real, the preacher merely spectral, and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had not one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not learned. Not one fact in all his experience had he yet imported into his doctrine. This man had ploughed and planted and talked and bought and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head aches, his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all.”
Hearing Emerson’s words we might at first conclude that he found the minister of whom he speaks boring. And that may be so, but that’s not all, for if a boring sermon here and there is enough to make one, “attend church no more” then every church in America would be empty.
Indeed, being boring is not the main charge Emerson is leveling against the preacher he heard, but being unreal… detached from the world in which he and his congregation lived. Which is to say, disconnected from life and thus unable to fulfill the most vital purpose of his profession as Emerson understood it, “to convert life into truth.”
Emerson’s words came to mind as I watched in partial disbelief the events of January 6th unfold at the US Capitol from the safe distance of my television. I knew I would have to set aside the sermon I had planned and by then had already started for today and find something to say about what I was seeing instead. That was not the problem. The problem was, what exactly was I seeing?
As I often do when I’m “stuck” or at a loss for words, I walked down to the water and alternated sitting in silence while staring forward over the water with pacing back and forth along the shore with my eyes fixed on the ground. As I did this on that day thoughts slowly surfaced, transitioning into an internal dialogue after a while. Soon a question formed, “Who are we?”
During and in the aftermath of the siege at the Capitol many people, especially political leaders of both major parties, practically tripped over one another to remind the American people who we’re not. Whatever that mob who attacked the capitol is or represents, they told us, that IS NOT who WE are.
Well, such words may provide solace to the mind, but they betray the heart.
I mean, we live on land forcibly taken from others. We abuse people whose ancestors were brought here as slaves. We break up brown families. 40% of our LGBTQ youth seriously considered suicide…in 2020! In schools across the country children learn reading, writing, arithmetic... and active shooter protocols. Our mothers, daughters, and sisters are routinely blamed for violence against them. Need I go on?
So, who are we?
While politicians and pundits scramble to assure us who we’re not, journalist Sam Sanders reminds us, “We are a country built on fabrication, nostalgia and euphemism. And every time America shows the worst of itself, all the contradictions collapse into… “This isn't who we are.”
As images of the attack continue to be released and published, one in particular has remained with me consistently over the last week and a half. Amid the sea of blue Trump flags, American flags, Confederate flags and those yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, was another. White with an ichthus (ΙΧΘΥΣ), popularly known as a “Jesus fish”, colored in with red, white and blue stars and stripes, bearing the words, “Proud American Christian.”
There is, of course, no such thing as an “American” Christian. The idea is itself, anti-Christian. As Paul wrote in his Epistle to the Galatians (3:28), “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
The longer I think about that flag and the contradiction it represents, the longer I realize the question isn’t, Who are we? but, What are we?
After last week, it is clearer than ever to me that what we are is lost. Not a lost cause, but lost as in far from home…living in exile, if you will, as the poet Dunya Mikhail writes,
“Yesterday I lost a country.
I was in a hurry,
and didn't notice when it fell from me
like a broken branch from a forgetful tree.”
“Poetry”, says Dunya Mikhail, “is not medicine — it's an X-ray. It helps you see the wound and understand it.” Another means of converting life into truth. And while Mikhail’s poem is in response to her own experience fleeing her native Iraq a few years into the first Gulf War, the pain, disorientation, profound sense of sadness and loss conveyed by her words speaks to what many of us and our neighbors across this country feel at this time.
“Please, if anyone passes by and stumbles across it…
perhaps in a suitcase open to the sky,
or engraved on a rock like a gaping wound,
…or helplessly forgotten
in Purgatory,
or rushing forward without a goal
like the questions of children,
or rising with the smoke of war,
…return it to me, please.
Please return it, sir.
Please return it, madam.
It is my country. . .
I was in a hurry
when I lost it yesterday.”
That so many insist, “This is not who we are.” in the aftermath of events like the capitol siege reveals how painfully lost we really are, for those words are themselves a symptom of what the late psychologist and writer, James Hillman called, America’s “addiction to innocence, to not knowing life’s darkness and not wanting to know, either.” A collective effort to repress what we find difficult or unpleasant about our past and present in order to protect our minds and remain “innocent”, weaving lanyards, we might say.
Indeed, innocence is a form of escape, from responsibility, from confrontation, from truth. And while it can be endearing in a child, it is unbecoming in an adult, let alone a centuries old nation.
Coming across the word “lanyard” in a dictionary, the boy in Billy Collins’ poem “The Lanyard” is moved to reflection. He recalls,
“I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me…and taught me to walk and swim, and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.”
Continuing to contrast the innumerable gifts he’s received from his mother with the plastic lanyard he gave her, he eventually comes to acknowledge, “The worn truth- that you can never repay your mother.”
But then he says this,
“When she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.”
And this, his “rueful admission”, as he describes it, is a turning point. For it reveals innocence lost, bittersweet and beautiful. An innocence lost at the gentle invitation of a word in the dictionary.
Yet when we ignore or resist the gentler invitations out of innocence, they arrive in far less welcome forms.
What happened at the capitol on January 6th may be described as many things, a wake-up call, a warning, but it was also an invitation. An invitation out of innocence. Indeed, it is time to admit, hard as it may be, that the nation we’ve woven out of boredom, out of our self-imposed, self-assured naivete is not worthy of the lives that have been given, taken, or have suffered for us. My friends, to echo the words of the poet, we are far from “even.”
Which is why, to me, now is not the time for hope, which prematurely propels us into the future. It is our hour of initiation, our rite of passage, in which our nation is called to grow up. To move from innocence to adulthood. And like some of the rites of passage found throughout the world’s cultures and religions, it won’t be easy. For it will require, in part, facing, owning up to, and meaningfully addressing our oppressive past and present. And it won’t happen without pain, for it will demand of us minds open to the facts of history AND hearts open to the truth of our interconnectedness. And one cannot open one’s heart without making it vulnerable to pain.
As a nation, we are indeed lost, but all is not lost. For who we like to say we are has not disappeared, but lies on the other side of where we find ourselves today. To get there we cannot continue to refuse or resist, but instead we must accept, endure, and take seriously the initiation rite to which our nation has again been called: To leave behind what keeps us “innocent” and exiled from our nobler vision, e pluribus unum (out of many, one). May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
Sermon given at
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
January 17, 2021
The Reverend Craig M. Nowak
“I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say I would go to church no more.” So wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in his famous “Divinity School Address”, which he delivered to the graduates of Harvard Divinity School on July 15, 1838.
He continued, “Men go, thought I, where they are wont to go, else had no soul entered the temple in the afternoon. A snow-storm was falling around us. The snow-storm was real, the preacher merely spectral, and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had not one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not learned. Not one fact in all his experience had he yet imported into his doctrine. This man had ploughed and planted and talked and bought and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head aches, his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all.”
Hearing Emerson’s words we might at first conclude that he found the minister of whom he speaks boring. And that may be so, but that’s not all, for if a boring sermon here and there is enough to make one, “attend church no more” then every church in America would be empty.
Indeed, being boring is not the main charge Emerson is leveling against the preacher he heard, but being unreal… detached from the world in which he and his congregation lived. Which is to say, disconnected from life and thus unable to fulfill the most vital purpose of his profession as Emerson understood it, “to convert life into truth.”
Emerson’s words came to mind as I watched in partial disbelief the events of January 6th unfold at the US Capitol from the safe distance of my television. I knew I would have to set aside the sermon I had planned and by then had already started for today and find something to say about what I was seeing instead. That was not the problem. The problem was, what exactly was I seeing?
As I often do when I’m “stuck” or at a loss for words, I walked down to the water and alternated sitting in silence while staring forward over the water with pacing back and forth along the shore with my eyes fixed on the ground. As I did this on that day thoughts slowly surfaced, transitioning into an internal dialogue after a while. Soon a question formed, “Who are we?”
During and in the aftermath of the siege at the Capitol many people, especially political leaders of both major parties, practically tripped over one another to remind the American people who we’re not. Whatever that mob who attacked the capitol is or represents, they told us, that IS NOT who WE are.
Well, such words may provide solace to the mind, but they betray the heart.
I mean, we live on land forcibly taken from others. We abuse people whose ancestors were brought here as slaves. We break up brown families. 40% of our LGBTQ youth seriously considered suicide…in 2020! In schools across the country children learn reading, writing, arithmetic... and active shooter protocols. Our mothers, daughters, and sisters are routinely blamed for violence against them. Need I go on?
So, who are we?
While politicians and pundits scramble to assure us who we’re not, journalist Sam Sanders reminds us, “We are a country built on fabrication, nostalgia and euphemism. And every time America shows the worst of itself, all the contradictions collapse into… “This isn't who we are.”
As images of the attack continue to be released and published, one in particular has remained with me consistently over the last week and a half. Amid the sea of blue Trump flags, American flags, Confederate flags and those yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, was another. White with an ichthus (ΙΧΘΥΣ), popularly known as a “Jesus fish”, colored in with red, white and blue stars and stripes, bearing the words, “Proud American Christian.”
There is, of course, no such thing as an “American” Christian. The idea is itself, anti-Christian. As Paul wrote in his Epistle to the Galatians (3:28), “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
The longer I think about that flag and the contradiction it represents, the longer I realize the question isn’t, Who are we? but, What are we?
After last week, it is clearer than ever to me that what we are is lost. Not a lost cause, but lost as in far from home…living in exile, if you will, as the poet Dunya Mikhail writes,
“Yesterday I lost a country.
I was in a hurry,
and didn't notice when it fell from me
like a broken branch from a forgetful tree.”
“Poetry”, says Dunya Mikhail, “is not medicine — it's an X-ray. It helps you see the wound and understand it.” Another means of converting life into truth. And while Mikhail’s poem is in response to her own experience fleeing her native Iraq a few years into the first Gulf War, the pain, disorientation, profound sense of sadness and loss conveyed by her words speaks to what many of us and our neighbors across this country feel at this time.
“Please, if anyone passes by and stumbles across it…
perhaps in a suitcase open to the sky,
or engraved on a rock like a gaping wound,
…or helplessly forgotten
in Purgatory,
or rushing forward without a goal
like the questions of children,
or rising with the smoke of war,
…return it to me, please.
Please return it, sir.
Please return it, madam.
It is my country. . .
I was in a hurry
when I lost it yesterday.”
That so many insist, “This is not who we are.” in the aftermath of events like the capitol siege reveals how painfully lost we really are, for those words are themselves a symptom of what the late psychologist and writer, James Hillman called, America’s “addiction to innocence, to not knowing life’s darkness and not wanting to know, either.” A collective effort to repress what we find difficult or unpleasant about our past and present in order to protect our minds and remain “innocent”, weaving lanyards, we might say.
Indeed, innocence is a form of escape, from responsibility, from confrontation, from truth. And while it can be endearing in a child, it is unbecoming in an adult, let alone a centuries old nation.
Coming across the word “lanyard” in a dictionary, the boy in Billy Collins’ poem “The Lanyard” is moved to reflection. He recalls,
“I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me…and taught me to walk and swim, and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.”
Continuing to contrast the innumerable gifts he’s received from his mother with the plastic lanyard he gave her, he eventually comes to acknowledge, “The worn truth- that you can never repay your mother.”
But then he says this,
“When she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.”
And this, his “rueful admission”, as he describes it, is a turning point. For it reveals innocence lost, bittersweet and beautiful. An innocence lost at the gentle invitation of a word in the dictionary.
Yet when we ignore or resist the gentler invitations out of innocence, they arrive in far less welcome forms.
What happened at the capitol on January 6th may be described as many things, a wake-up call, a warning, but it was also an invitation. An invitation out of innocence. Indeed, it is time to admit, hard as it may be, that the nation we’ve woven out of boredom, out of our self-imposed, self-assured naivete is not worthy of the lives that have been given, taken, or have suffered for us. My friends, to echo the words of the poet, we are far from “even.”
Which is why, to me, now is not the time for hope, which prematurely propels us into the future. It is our hour of initiation, our rite of passage, in which our nation is called to grow up. To move from innocence to adulthood. And like some of the rites of passage found throughout the world’s cultures and religions, it won’t be easy. For it will require, in part, facing, owning up to, and meaningfully addressing our oppressive past and present. And it won’t happen without pain, for it will demand of us minds open to the facts of history AND hearts open to the truth of our interconnectedness. And one cannot open one’s heart without making it vulnerable to pain.
As a nation, we are indeed lost, but all is not lost. For who we like to say we are has not disappeared, but lies on the other side of where we find ourselves today. To get there we cannot continue to refuse or resist, but instead we must accept, endure, and take seriously the initiation rite to which our nation has again been called: To leave behind what keeps us “innocent” and exiled from our nobler vision, e pluribus unum (out of many, one). May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
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