Spirit of Hope, lead us to question deeply and often
if we are all you lead us to be. Use us
to welcome the most un-welcome and teach us to open our hearts and arms to save
the world. Amen
For
those of us who live and have always lived in privilege, choosing to understand
what it is to be the outsider can be difficult indeed. Every once in a while the Universe, with her
unending sense of humor, teaches me in ways I didn’t expect. On Friday, I went to Mt. Dora to a Native
American Pow-Wow. I used to travel to
the top of Hunter Mountain in the Catskills of New York every couple of years
to attend huge pow-wows and spend a full day shopping for sterling silver
jewelry. I was interested to see how
this pow-wow differed from the ones I was used to in New York. I went on Friday afternoon to hear a specific
musician and was surprised to see it very sparsely attended. What that meant is that most of the folks who
were there were Native American and I was very, very, well, not. I felt particularly out of place--different. Now it helped that many, though not all, of
the Native Americans were in some form of native dress or at least aspects of
native dress. I was impressed by the
sense of welcome I felt. Every performer
made certain to translate their chants and to explain to those of us who did
not share their traditions exactly what they were doing and to explain the
beliefs behind the various chants and dances.
I wandered through the vendors (and, yes, some
habits die hard and I allowed myself to purchase a memento of the afternoon). As the show kicked into gear, I sat on a
bleacher in the beautiful Florida sun under a cloudless sky and began to
meditate to the sounds of a wonderful Cherokee flute player. But, God wouldn’t let me rest on the issue of
welcoming and hospitality and so I reflected about what it meant to feel so
“different” from the majority of those walking around; yet, so welcome. And, not surprisingly, I got to thinking about
today’s sermon and what I really wanted to say.
I found myself asking if there was really anything new to say. Though I didn’t count them, I figure this is
at least the sixth sermon on hospitality that I have preached in the 4 years
since Open Circle first became this circle.
And, yet, I continue to be asked about hospitality and inclusivity and
what it means to us as a church.
Just
recently, during the Capital Campaign, I learned that there seems to be a
measure of misunderstanding and concern about what is meant when we call
ourselves a “radically inclusive faith community”. What are we missing as a congregation? What am I missing as your pastor? And, I realize that, for the most part, those
of you who are hearing this sermon are not the folks who seem to be
concerned. But, nevertheless, I think we
need to take a second or third or tenth look at this thing called
hospitality. And, perhaps, these
thoughts can be shared with those who are missing today. Briefly, back to my meditative thoughts at the
pow-wow—after a while, the singer I most wanted to hear, Joanne Shenandoah,
took the stage. She began talking about
Mother Earth and the spirituality that we all share and that we all must share
if we are going to save our Mother (Earth, that is). She sang in words of the Iroquois Nation that
I could not understand, but it did not matter.
The feelings of both despair and hope were captured in her voice. Suddenly, I did not feel different at
all. She had helped me to remember that
we all share the same mother. Funny,
she, a member of one of the many oppressed peoples, sought to help me remember
our sameness. With a radical inclusivity
born of her understanding that we are all the same, she called me into her
sacred circle of hope and passion.
What
is it, then, that keeps us from focusing in on the feeling of being human when
we think about welcome, hospitality and inclusivity? At its truest sense, being radically
inclusive means nothing more than being truly human together as we are all
human. At one point, on Friday, when I
was listening to one of the many Native American or First Nation musical groups
sing, drum and chant, they announced that the next song was a “Trail of Tears”
song. The announcer asked us all to
stand in memory of those people who were forced by the US Government to walk
from the East Coast, including Florida, Georgia, and North and South Carolina
to Oklahoma. The announcer brought
forward two facts that I must have forgotten along the way: one—the reason why the Native Americans left
their lands. From our place of privilege
we might ask, “Why didn’t they just refuse to move? Or just give up and die?” Native
Americans think in terms of seven generations from themselves. They knew and understood well that, if they
did not take the long walk to Oklahoma, that the US Government would wipe out
their nations completely. They did it
for the seventh generation—so that, seven generations from then, there would be
at least a small contingent of people to pass on the traditions and cultures of
those Tribes. We stood in honor of those
brave souls; and, while I did not understand the words of the chant, I could
not have missed the feelings if I had tried.
The pain, suffering, and loss came through without mistake. It was not possible to stand in that hot,
Florida sun, and not see, at least for a few seconds, the long winding trail of
a people displaced from their land. Secondly,
I must have forgotten that history records that those who led the Native
Americans did not follow a Western path to Oklahoma even though Oklahoma is
clearly west of the East Coast. They
twisted and turned mostly so that many more of the people would die but also
because the White Americans believed that it would be harder for the Native
Americans to stay connected to their cultures if they took a circuitous
route.
I do not, nor do they, remind you of
these stories to inflict guilt. I remind
you of them so that you might remember.
For it is in the remembering that we become human. Jesus cared about very few specific beliefs. He cared most of all about love and justice
and knowing who we are. He cared about
the pain of the Native Americans and he cared about the White European Americans
of privilege because he knew that they were alienated from their true nature as
children of God. This is some of what
makes Jesus a true “radical” in every sense of the word. He taught us to care about oppressed and
oppressor, healed and healer, listener and speaker. In our scripture today, John the Baptizer is
curious about Jesus. He sends his
disciples to find out if Jesus is “the one”, the messiah, the one they had been
waiting for. Jesus is cryptic in his
answer. He says, “This is what I am
doing. The blind see,
the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the displaced
of the earth have God’s salvation hospitality extended to them”. And then he says, “If this is what you are
waiting for, then you are in luck.” Now,
with the benefit of history, we know that this is not what the Jewish people
were waiting for. They were waiting for
a king; they got a man who knew that the true nature of love and justice is as
radical as it gets. They were waiting
for a military conqueror; they got someone who did not call us to “Charge!”; he
called us to “Remember!”—to remember that we are children of all there is—of
the one God.
This is how we
remember our humanity. This is how we
remember what we share, not what sets us apart.
And, once we remember, we cannot help but embrace this radical
inclusivity. To be radically inclusive
is merely, and I mean merely, to remember that we are all the same—that any
barriers we set up come from us and not from the unity of love we call “God”. To be
radical is to remember. It is, oh, so
easy to forget. We are schooled in
forgetting; we practice it diligently anytime we see the differences of class,
race, and culture as more important than the similarities of humanity. I
think back on the words of Joanne Shenandoah on Friday afternoon. She said something like this, “If we are to
survive”—and she meant all of us, not just Native Americans—“we must act and
think and be as one people committed to saving our planet, to loving justice,
and to acting for peace”. May we, in this circle, remember. And in remembering, may we act; and in our
acting, may we remember again. Amen and
amen.
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