Our Brother’s Keeper – Yet Again

 

(Apologies.  Verizon “upgraded” on Friday and has been down ever since.  Thus the site wasn’t accessible to me.  Here is Friday’s blog … on LATE Monday)

 

No one who even glances at the news, whether on the radio, television or in newspapers can be unaware that we in the United States have passed through a tumultuous debate over health care.  And the passage of the health care bill seems to have done nothing do dampen the flames of passion and, on no few occasions, vitriol. 

 

It is not my purpose to discuss the politics of it.  But I would like to examine a spiritual aspect, an aspect that seems much too often overwhelmed by the shouting.  It was brought home dramatically to me as I was reading some citizen responses to the bill’s passage.  To paraphrase several, the clearly angry statement was to the effect: “I worked hard for my health coverage.  And I have good health coverage.  Why should I help pay for yours?”

 

It’s not my place to delve into the accuracy or inaccuracy of the statement’s belief about the nature of the health care bill.  I’d rather spend a little time with it’s spiritual component.  “I’m fine.  Why should I worry about you?”  Good question.  Let’s examine it.

 

In Luke, Jesus tells us the parable of the good Samaritan.  A man is beaten and lays on the road.  Two ostensibly pious men walk right by.  It’s the “outcast,” the Samaritan, who stops and gives aid.  And Jesus makes it crystal clear who the hero of the story is.

 

The 39^th Sura of the Qur’an tells us simply “Those who act kindly to others in this world will have kindness.” 

 

Buddhism instructs us, “As a mother guards the life of her child with her own life, let all-embracing thoughts for all that lives be thine.”

 

Poet John Milton writes that we are each a part of the whole and therefore, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls.  It tolls for thee.”

 

Winston Churchill, a man not known for particularly radical thoughts, put it simply: “There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.”

 

And from my own tradition, in Genesis, Cain asks the question “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  The answer is clear.  Yes!

 

There are arguments to be made for and against regarding the size and scope of government.  I fully respect and realize that.  I don’t seek to enter into that discussion here.

 

In all honesty, I would have much preferred a recognition by both Republicans and Democrats that we cannot possess our inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” without universal health care.  Every industrial country in the world has it, except for the United States.

 

What would have been wonderful would have been a spirited debate as to how BEST to attain universal health care.  I am certain there are a multiplicity of ways to accomplish it that would be different from the health care bill that was passed. 

 

So I am not here to proclaim one political party’s solutions right and the other’s wrong.  Surely there are a host of solutions to any problem.  Indeed, the great joy of a democracy is that it provides a marketplace for competing ideas.  But I am here to state that decent health care ought to be a right, and to reiterate what our spiritual guides have told us over and over again.

 

We are our brother’s keeper. 

 

The conviction that “I’ve got mine, so I don’t need to worry about you” is foreign to Christianity.  Is foreign to Islam.  It is foreign to Judaism, to Humanism and Buddhism.  It is foreign to our First Peoples (Native Americans if you prefer) who tried to teach us to always think of how our actions would affect not only ourselves but those living seven generations from now.

 

We are our brother’s keeper.  We say it often enough.  It is among my deepest prayers that we learn to live it.

Beginnings

 

Our first service.  In a sense our first service, which began last Sunday, wasn’t really finished until today.  More about that shortly.

 

What a wonderful group.  What a warm, caring group of people.  Some I’d met.  Indeed two of the people there had been working with me since October to make the service possible.  Without them, it would not have been possible.  Some of the people there I knew, but not well.  And some I was meeting for the very first time.  And they were meeting me.

 

Who is this guy?  I could see that question in some eyes.  Not so much in a challenging sense, but more curious, and perhaps a little cautious.

 

It helps me a lot to know full well that people weren’t there for me.  They were there for Interfaith.  They had come because they could feel a need for Interfaith: for Muslims, Jews, Humanists, Buddhists, Baha’i, Christians and others to come together – without fear, without conflict.  And we did.  What an incredible joy it is to truly begin to get to know one another. 

 

We talk about our common humanity.  Here was a chance to experience it. 

Three of us spoke briefly about our spiritual journeys.  We’ll continue that with three more people (all volunteers, no one will be called on) at our service next month.  That, for me, was part of the magic of the service.  Part of our getting to know each other to be sure, but also part of experiencing the real and profound paths that we have walked.  Diverse paths.  Sometimes fairly similar, sometimes hugely diverse, but all paths that have brought us together.  That is something.

 

I think the potluck after the service was every bit as spiritual as the service itself.  Indeed, one flowed into the other.  I couldn’t have asked for more.

 

So why did our first service only finish up today?  Asked to bring a non-perishable food item to the service, folks had stepped up.  I had a box of food to take to the Lynnwood Food Bank.  Tuesday is their day for contributions.  So today I transported our small but important offering.

 

Living Interfaith is something that involves more than a Sunday service.  To live Interfaith is to integrate the path of respecting our brother and sisterhood with all humanity into our daily lives.  We wanted to do that from the beginning, from our very first service.  And we did.  At the food bank I met Judy, who was so gracious, and made me feel like I’d brought a carload of food instead of a box.  The need.  The need is so great.  The recession is real and it is deep.  People are in need.  Judy talked to me of the lines that form every week.  Week after week.  I’d just brought a box.  But I was glad I had.  And my heart warmed as Judy wrote down “Living Interfaith Church” as the donor.

 

Everything about our first service warms my heart.  The openness with which we shared peace with each other.  The gusto with which some folks sang hymns they had never seen before.  The depth of commitment that people brought with them, including the willingness of a member of our new congregation to challenge me on an overgeneralization I should not have made during the service, and will not make again.  And the eagerness with which people engaged each other after the service.

 

One service does not make a successful church.  But we are started.  And we are well started. 

 

My heart is full.  April 11^th can’t come soon enough!  I want to meet with these people again.  I so look forward to getting to know them better.

 

I can remember the days of doubt.  I can remember days when there were setbacks.  And I know full well that life has its twists and turns.  But Interfaith is worth it.  The people I have met and will meet are worth it.

 

And what a wonderful start we have made!

Our First Service

 

In two days, the Living Interfaith Church will have its first service.  Fourteen people have said they are coming, which is already at the high end of what I had hoped.  Nearly half of those who are coming, I do not know.  I so look forward to meeting them.  The other half I’ve at least met.  A few I know pretty well.  Others I look forward to getting to know better.

 

So far as I’m aware, we have at least one Jew, one Muslim, one Baha’i, and two Humanists in the fourteen.  I’m hoping, just for some balance, there will be at least one or two Christians and perhaps a Buddhist.  But everyone can’t be represented at the very first service.  I know that.

 

My job, as minister, is to create the space: a space where everyone not only feels welcome but feels safe to be themselves … as long as they respect the selves of others.

 

This is the essence of Interfaith, as a faith.  No one is asked to leave who they are at the door.  But we are asked to remember that the person seated next to us has also not left who he or she is as the door.  We come not to convert or to convince.  We come to share.  We come to create a loving community where it is safe to share, and therefore safe to listen and to grow.  We come as well to help heal a world that all of our traditions, all of them, call upon us to heal.

 

I’m struggling with a metaphor or parable for Sunday, to demonstrate that Interfaith is about sharing, not about converting or convincing.  Which means Interfaith is not only about talking – Interfaith is about listening. 

 

I’ve read recently about “listening” as a tool.  When I hear that, my stomach churns.  A minister I know makes no secret of suggesting listening and what’s called “mirroring” to win people, and as a way to diffuse anger.  But “listening” as a tool is better called “manipulating.”  No wonder so many are so turned off by what they perceive as “religion.”

 

Listening is NOT a tool for getting you to come around to my point of view.  Listening, really listening, truly listening, means caring enough to actually hear what is being said.  More to the point, listening requires feeling safe enough to let down those “me against the world” walls and actually pay attention to what people who may not see the world the same way we do are saying.

 

That is real respect.  And that is what I mean when I say Interfaith is about both sharing and listening.  And that’s why a creating a safe space is so important.

 

I’ve spent the past two weeks baring my soul as I have never before, in sermons first at my Ballard Interfaith Church and then at my Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.  The subject was the same, though framed a bit differently for the individual congregation. 

 

The essence of the message was and is simple.  We endlessly divide ourselves into camps of “us” and “them”.  We do it with our religions, our politics, our “races”, our genders, our ages.  You name it: we find a way to divide it.  But what I tried to get across is a  belief that lies at the very core of my being.  There is no “them.”  There is no them.  There is only us. 

 

Interfaith is about us.  All of us. 

 

We reach out to the stranger because, in point of fact, he or she is one of us. 

 

We seek to end poverty because people who have little or nothing to eat, or no roof for shelter, are emphatically not a “them” that needs help; but a part of us who need help.

 

We seek to end racism, not because we feel sorry for “them,” but because the only race that matters is the human race.  And that’s all of us.

 

Yes we are different.  We are all different.  Each of us comes from our own world and our own experiences, our own special and important and unique lives.  But we are all, all a part of us.

 

There is no them.  There is only us.  Anyone who truly understands that, understands Interfaith.

Starting a Church 101: Part 3

 

Last October, I met for the first time with a small group of people.  Our intent was to start a church.  A new church.  A church based on a faith that confirms that we all deserve respect.  A faith concerned not with the one “right” belief or the one “right” way to pray, but concerned rather with the oneness in our diversity.  It is a faith that teaches us that we each encounter the sacred in our own way, and it is what we do about it after we encounter the sacred that truly matters.  Does our encounter with the sacred help us to be more compassionate, more involved with the “other”?  If so, it is a righteous path, whether that path be Christianity, Humanism, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, I’m Still a Seekerism, or any of a multitude of other paths.

 

We set out to start a church, undeterred by the fact that none of us had ever started a church before. 

 

That was last October.  And now, now it’s just nine days until we come together for our first service.  March 14^th.  The service will be at a home in Lynnwood.  Come September, we will be meeting weekly, and renting, somewhere in south Snohomish County.  For those who may not know, that’s about twenty-five minutes north of Seattle in Washington State.  I need to say that because last week I found out just how wide the “worldwide” web is.  A seeker from the state of Connecticut asked about where our first service would be. 

 

It’s an exciting time.  And not as scary as it used to be.  I’m guessing there will be between ten and fifteen people at our first “home service.”  This with no publicity save the web.  Ten to fifteen people, who sought out the Living Interfaith Church and want to see what Interfaith can mean.  In the process, they will help define what Interfaith can mean.

 

This much I know already.  Now is the moment.  This is the time.  We’ve been practicing our spiritual paths in isolation for thousands of years.  It hasn’t worked.  Four thousand years after the beginnings of the Hindu faith, three thousand years after Moses, twenty-five hundred years after Confucius and the Buddha, two thousand years after Jesus, and fifteen hundred years after Muhammad, to name but a few of our traditions, we still haven’t learned something so simple as how to love our neighbor as ourselves. 

 

The “Golden Rule” is something taught by every spiritual path.  We think it.  Intellectually we may “believe” it.  But we haven’t taken it to heart.  The time has come. 

 

By not so odd coincidence, that’s in large part what I’ll be speaking to this Sunday, when I lead the service at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship that I’ll be leaving this June in order to devote full time to the Living Interfaith Church.  So many things we espouse: as beliefs, as principles.  But do we take these beliefs and these principles into our hearts?  Do they cease to be “what we believe” and truly become “who we are”? 

 

The call of Interfaith is to take the Golden Rule out of the realm of belief, and into the realm of daily practice.  Moving it, if you will, from mind to heart.

 

More on the Golden Rule next week – how completely it pervades our spiritual paths, cultural paths, philosophical paths. 

 

Right now we return to the question I get so very frequently.  “Why Interfaith?”  The answer is because we need to learn to respect each other if we are ever going to learn to actually practice the Golden Rule that at the heart of all of our paths.  Part of respecting each other is talking to each other (what a concept!).  And listening, truly listening to each other!  Part of respecting and listening to each other is taking to heart that there are many profound paths to the sacred, and no one “right” path for everyone.

 

And for me, beyond that is the joy of celebrating differing spiritual paths.  I say celebrating, not “tolerating.”  This past December, when I had the joy of celebrating Christmas in a service with my Christian as well as Muslim, and Jewish, and First Peoples and Humanist friends, the was no jockeying for position, there was no attempt to convert or convince.  It was an honor as well as a pleasure for me to honor, respect and learn from my Christian friends by celebrating Christmas with them, just as it was a pleasure to honor, respect and learn from my Muslim friends when we celebrated Ramadan together. 

 

Interfaith is about love, about practicing love, about taking love as well as compassion to heart. 

 

The Living Interfaith Church will begin small.  We will not stay small.  Interfaith, as a faith, begins small.  It will not stay small either.  It has been said before but bears repeating.  Interfaith is not THE answer.  But it is an answer.  And it can help to heal a very broken world.