“Love is a place,” e.e. cummings tells us, “and through this place of love move (with brightness of peace) all places.” It is the first Sunday of our new church year. September eleven, two-thousand-eleven. We are ten years into the post-9/11 world.
A decade ago in the wake of 9/11, right up to last fall when plans were announced for Park 51, an Islamic Community Center to be developed about a third of a mile from Ground Zero, many Americans voiced anger and fear about a growing Jihadist movement. Ordinary Arab Americans and Muslims of any heritage grew suspect. Understandably, people directly affected by the horrific events of 9/11 were fearful, angry, distraught, but it was from the collective American throat, that the shrill sound of fury overpowered the quieter tones of reason and conscience.
We gather this year as members of a religious community founded in 1768, a congregation assembled in this building since 1837. Our lives would likely be unrecognizable to our forebears who first filed into this grand building at the top of the common—who had no knowledge of internet connection, jumbo jet liners, skyscrapers or even the Pentagon. What our forebears in 1768 and 1837 did know firsthand were the realities of religious intolerance and misunderstanding.
Our Unitarian and Universalist predecessors gathered not in spite of religious intolerance but as a result, Had Unitarians and Universalists not been branded heretics—our theologies of the oneness of God and universal salvation scorned by Calvinists certain of their doctrine of the Trinity and pre-destination—we would likely not be sitting here. Unitarian Universalism emerged from critical thinking in response to deep faith, and flourished in inhospitable soil. If the denomination and this congregation are to thrive we must root ourselves in the place of love.
It is September 11, 2011. Osama Bin Laden is dead. The Arab Spring now dons the autumnal color of crimson as blood runs across the Middle East and drought parches the earth in Somalia
The largest population of Arab-Americans in the U.S. lives in and around Dearborn , Michigan , not far from Detroit
Had I not heard Terri Gross’s interview on Fresh Air (NPR) on Aug. 24 with Rachel Tabachnick who studies this new apocalyptic movement, I would not have known two of its founders, Mike Bickle and Lou Engle, organized Rick Perry’s recent day of prayer. While any of us might be concerned about a new American religious movement calling for martyrs and spiritual warfare, the fact that two of its founders just organized a rally for the leading presidential contender in the Republican party casts an ominous shadow on the separation of church and state and religious freedom.
Rachel Tabachnick explains the tenets of the movement:
This group believes … they must re-organize Protestant Christianity …[and] unify the Protestant Church
Herein lies the challenge on this auspicious day: in our midst, on our soil, embedded in our political process and public discourse, is a religious movement that espouses love while calling for martyrs and claiming all who fall outside their proscribed belief system are possessed by Satan and must be stopped in order for the second coming of Christ to occur.
As we have seen recently in the horrific massacre in Norway
Violence as response to theological challenge or threat isn’t new; beheadings and burning at the stake and other grisly methods of execution punctuated the Reformation era. What has changed with the invention of automatic weapons and improvised explosive devices is the speed and magnitude with which death comes. Instead of burning one heretic at a time in the public square, a lone gunman or suicide bomber can kill scores of people. The flying projectiles of 9/11 claimed three thousand lives within hours.
That increased capacity for long-range, virtually instantaneous damage is what also makes drones and airstrikes possible. The remoteness of our violence intensifies it. Just as it’s easier to verbally accost someone through the relative anonymity of the internet, it’s far easier to depersonalize the ones we don’t actually see half a world away—or down the street.
At the new Martin Luther King memorial in Washington
“Love is a place and through this place of love move (with brightness of peace) all places.” I find it hard to imagine love is a place that summons us to cast out the demon of Islam. I find it impossible to reconcile the love Dr. King extolled as a love predicated on religious intolerance. The catch-22 of course is that we are faced with the conundrum: are we to tolerate intolerance? Do we accept an apocalyptic movement that requires the demons of every other form of Christianity and all other religions to be destroyed so that the one true Messiah will return? Do we love the intolerant among us but loathe their intolerance as they purport to love the sinner and abhor the sin? And in so doing are we one and the same?
The nineteen men who boarded four planes ten years ago hijacked Islam the way Joseph Kony transmogrified Christianity with his Lord’s Resistance Army, that terrorized and brutalized an entire generation of Ugandans while purporting to follow the Ten Commandments. It is excruciatingly difficult to meet the extremes of religious extremism with a critical mind and compassionate heart, to enlist reason and conscience in an attempt to understand how and why people come to believe their fellow citizens are possessed by Satan—and remain standing like the stone of hope erected in our nation’s capitol to remind us, “Yes is a world and in this world of yes live (skillfully curled) all worlds.”
Yes is not the only world; but all worlds nest within it and they are ours to inhabit and transform. Our ingathering today is no insignificant matter. We are not just forty people ringing in the new church year. We are far greater than that—for this day occasions a hewing of our own stone of hope within this granite foundation and structure of brick. We are the incarnation of Unitarians and Universalists who have gathered in this parish for two-hundred-and forty-three years, and in this edifice for one-hundred-seventy-five, to create and sustain a place of love. Our inheritance is a religious foundation built on reason and conscience, carved by commitment and faith. We cultivate that world of yes by affirming the inherent worth and dignity of all, insisting that no one is possessed by demons, that no one among us is unsalvageable even if we cannot conceive of their salvation any more than they can imagine ours. We inhabit the world of yes when we acknowledge that those who seek to transform us, or even destroy us, are not some distant unrelated species, some wretched mutation that must be eliminated if we are to survive. That is the trope of no.
In his later writings, Martin Luther King identified the connections among militarism, racism and capitalism. He was not naïve nor was his analysis simple. He understood and articulated what few in his day would acknowledge: being a drum major for peace meant dismantling systems of economy and hegemony far great than the Jim Crow south. He knew of his detractors, he felt the target tacked on his back and yet he persisted. He died in service to a conviction of conscience because to die without would have been a fate worse than death.
If we choose to live with conviction informed by conscience, and reason rooted in faith not devoid of it, we can build that place of love, that world of yes—and in so doing determine whether Unitarian Universalism will thrive or perish. “Yes is a world” wherein all worlds curl: the yes of martyrs who hijack planes and rise from stone. The yes of child soldiers conscripted into horror and the yes of those who would welcome them back, the yes of apocalyptic believers exorcising demons and the yes of iron workers erecting beams from the ashes of Ground Zero. Yes is a world that includes both and no.
Martin Luther King wrote: “The chain reaction of evil, hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.” More than twice as many service members have died in Iraq and Afghanistan
With our bodies may we break the chain and be the link of what binds us together. May nothing evil cross this door coming in or going out. Amen.
[1] Rachel Tabachnick, quoted in an interview on “Fresh Air,” NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=139781021,
[2] [2] Rachel Tabachnick, quoted in an interview on “Fresh Air,” NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=139781021
