Healing the World-Part 1 8-4-13

Healing the World-Part 1  8-4-13

God, Creator of the world, Sustainer of all that it in it, and Lover of all that find their breath of life through you, gather us together this day.  Encourage us to listen with soft and open hearts.  May all that we say, and all that we ponder together, contribute to healing energy for the sake of the world.  Amen.

                If I began to sing, “we are the world; we are the children”, most of you would start swaying with the music and singing along.  It was 1985 and Harry Belfonte had an idea.  Following the release of “Do They Know It’s Christmas” by a UK supergroup of singers, Belefonte tasked Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie to write a song for a US-based supergroup.  If you haven’t looked at the video lately, look it up, it’s amazing how many of the singers I could not identify.  Let me remind you of the rest of the words to the chorus:  We are the world, we are the children; we are the ones who make a brighter day
so lets start giving.  There's a choice we're making; we're saving our own lives.  It’s true we'll make a better day—just you and me.”  If you were like me, you listened to that song A LOT!  For a while there, it played at least once an hour on virtually every radio station in the country.  The song went to Quadruple Platinum and sales from the song itself and marketed “We Are the World” merchandise raised over $63 million dollars for humanitarian aid to Africa and the US.  Now this song was not without its critics—primarily around the notion that the song did not raise questions about the nature and cause of poverty and that the lyrics sounded strangely familiar to language that we had used for decades—language  which had never resulted in any fundamental change.  And, this is where we pick up today.   By the way, I loved the song then and love it now; sometimes the very thought that people cared enough to come together is enough for a start.   As we grow spiritually, we also grow morally and ethically; and, we ask incrementally harder questions.

                Marshall Ganz, a Harvard professor and community organizer, gives our thoughts structure by way of describing our stories that we bring to the energy, the diversynergy, if you will, of our common ground of faithfulness.  First, according to Ganz, “We all have a story of self…What’s utterly unique to us is our own journey of learning to be a full human being, a faithful person.  And those journeys are never easy.  They have their challenges, their obstacles,  their crises.  We learn to overcome them, and because of that we have lessons to teach.  In a sense, all of us walk around with a text from which to teach, the text of our own lives.”  So far, in our communal walk through the nature and process of healing we have mostly talked about the “text of our own lives.”  And only when this text includes our own experiences  of healing are we able to actively invite others into the same spiritual place that we are.  Perhaps, even more important—we have concluded that one must have experienced this healing before one is ready to stand against injustice, bigotry, and evil.  And, we have told that story many times in the power of the diversity and exchange of energy that we experience as a community of faith.  So, this is our story.

                Ganz writes, “The second story is the story of us.  That’s an answer to the question, Why are we called?  What experiences and values do we share as a community that call us to what we are called to? What is it about our experience of faith, public life, the pain of the world, and the hopefulness of the world?  It’s putting what we share into words. ..Faith traditions are grand stories of us.  They teach how to be an us.”  We, here at Open Circle, have talked often about where we have been and where we believe we are headed.  Your presence and enthusiasm in last week’s Holy Conversation were proof of your commitment to this community.  You, each one of you, from those who have attended for years to those of you who are here today for the first time are part of this great “US”.  But, as you would suppose, there is more.  There is, according to Ganz, the story of now.

                Ganz strikes a common chord for us when he says:  “Finally, there’s the story of now—the fierce urgency of now.  The story of now is realizing, after the sharing of values and aspirations, that the world out there is not as it ought to be.  Instead, it is as it is.  And that is a challenge to us.  We need to appreciate the challenge and the conflict between the values by which we wish the world lived and the values by which it actually does.  The difference between those two creates tension.  It forces upon us consideration of a choice.  What do we do about that? We are called to answer that question in a spirit of hope.”  Ganz says “we”—and we must resist the temptation to say “we who?”  Nevertheless, moving into this spirit of hope, facing this challenge is sometimes quite difficult.  We can begin to understand why it is difficult when we remember our passage from the New Testament this morning:   Jesus had been up on a mountain, a place he often went to re-power or revive his own connection to the sacred.  Having spent time in meditation or prayer, Jesus comes down and sees a large (the scripture says “huge”) crowd.  These were his disciples, followers, and other people who wanted to see and hear him.  The New Testament says:  “They came to hear him and to be healed from their diseases—even those suffering from what we today would call mental illness came and were healed.  And listen carefully to this:  "The whole crowd wanted to touch him, because power was going out from him and he was healing everyone.”  Notice that our scripture says “Power was going out from him”.  For Jesus, and, subsequently for us, this healing ministry required work—it required power—power that was restored in his own spiritual practices and meditation so that he could continue in the world.  Not content to only touch them physically, Jesus also wanted to touch or teach them spiritually.  Hear again the words of comfort from Jesus.  “Jesus raised his eyes to his disciples and said:  “Happy are you who are poor, because God’s kingdom is yours.  Happy are you who hunger now, because you will be satisfied.  Happy are you who weep now, because you will laugh”.  For Jesus, words and actions were tied very closely together.  Notice that he healed them of their physical and mental illnesses before he tried to teach them about the nature of the world, or suggest that a new order was on the horizon for those who now are poor, hungry, weeping.  This then is true for us as well.  First, we show the world our love and then we talk.  It is almost as if our actions, just like the actions of Jesus, earn us the right to tell others what propels us to care for them.  Without those actions of love, our words of love and comfort ring hollow. 

                Philosopher and theologian Teilhard de Chardin speaks of a “day when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of Love.  And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, human beings will have discovered fire.”   Stop for a moment, and let that thought sink in.  When fire, the fire that captured heat and the ability to cook and stay warm revolutionized the way people lived.  Nothing was the same after fire was discovered and shared with the world.  You have to assume that word about the wonderful thing called fire spread far and wide, quick and fast.  Everyone wanted to know about this fire—this fire that would change their very lives every single day, for the rest of their lives. 

                I believe the same is true of the fire of which Teilhard de Chardin speaks. On that day when we harness the energies of Love in the name of God, news of this new “fire” will spread as fast as the first fire.  Diairmuid O Murchό, captures the significance of this new fire.  He says, “The time is right for a type of religious quantum leap—not into some vast unknown, but into the deep story, the well-spring of spiritual awakening which existed before, and will continue to flourish long after, every religion know to humankind will have faded into history.”  Are you ready to stretch who this community is, indeed, who you are in order to experience this quantum leap into the deep story?  Are you ready to feel your heart warm with the new fire—and to take the news of the new fire to others?  Are you ready to say “this is the day I will put aside all negative and unhealthy thoughts” and devote yourself to learning and loving your way through this quantum leap—a leap not unlike the leap that Jesus made when he turned the laws upside down and challenged the bedrock of society when he said we are all the same—all the children of God.  God calls us to leap; and, so we will, and, so, we do. In this community—this community of quantum leapers—we find discernment—in this community we find challenge—and in this community we find love.  Amen and amen.