Sermons

If we are to give rise to a new civilization worthy of our highest ideals and deepest values, it will be the cultivating spirit of the river of human freedom rather than the reactive position of the resistance that will carry us there. The goal, after all, is not a more ferocious revolution. It is a more beautiful social order.

Eboo Patel.  We Need To Build (p. xv). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.

 

TALKING ABOUT INTERFAITH COOPERATION

The United States of America is the most religiously devout nation in the industrialized world.

The United States of America is the most religiously diverse nation in human history.

Two truths.  So what?

Well, there are two ways – at least two ways – that we the people might respond to these two truths.

We can travel the way of division and mutual destruction

or

We can travel the way of coexistence and cooperation.

Of course, nothing is ever this simple or so dramatically one or the other.

I offer the two ends of the spectrum of what it means to live in this nation of diverse and devout religious people.

Eboo Patel is in the very center of those working for the second approach.  For him, our future freedom and well-being really do depend on religious coexistence and cooperation.

I first encountered Eboo Patel at the 2013 Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly meeting in Louisville, Kentucky when he delivered the Ware Lecture.  The, he was talking about the organization he founded - the interfaith youth corps - and the need for people of faith to be leaders in moving toward more and deeper cooperation.  Here is part of what he said back then in 2013 …

I believe the central problem interfaith work seeks to solve is this. How are all of us, with our beautiful resonances and our deep disagreements, to share a nation and a world together? An important task of an interfaith leader in my view is to help build relationships between people with profoundly different views on fundamental theological and political matters. How else do you have a diverse democracy, unless people who have deep disagreements on some issues are able to work together on other issues?

He went on to explain that interfaith work is not easy and that leaders often take a punch on the chin before finding that beautiful resonance with people of different faiths.

An interfaith leader works to understand the other's theology while gently articulating her own. An interfaith leader recognizes that the definition of interfaith cooperation is working with people who are religiously different than you. An interfaith leader above all builds the relationship.

We need exceptional people who are able to hold the tensions here in a way that binds together rather than breaks apart. People who are willing to lead with their chin and take a punch. That's you.

He looked at the assembly of a few thousand Unitarian Universalists and said – “That’s you.”    We are interfaith leaders of our time.

Why us?  Does he say that to all his audiences?   I don’t know, maybe he does, but I doubt it.

We are as well situated to be helpful in establishing and maintaining interfaith cooperation as any religion.  Why?  Well, we are already theologically, spiritually, philosophically, and behaviorally diverse.  We have learned to be one community with many beliefs and practices. We already understand the need to discover common values rather than getting stuck on doctrinal differences. We already understand that, for us, being in relationship with people of diverse beliefs and appreciating those differences while holding firmly to our own beliefs and practices is where we want to be.  The rich diversity of Unitarian Universalism is our strength – sure, it is also our greatest challenge, but that’s ok because we’ve learned that the resulting shared commitment to each other and the world is worth the effort.  For us, Beloved Community is all about inviting people in and widening the circle.  We are not concerned with keeping out unbelievers, sinners, and people from away.

But why does this matter?

Simple answer.  The Faith Factor in public life.

Just this year, on May 10^th, Eboo Patel invited the world to celebrate the official transition of Interfaith Youth Core to Interfaith America.

Opening and closing remarks of that event were delivered by Jim Wallis. His name may be familiar to you as the founder of Sojourners, a progressive Christian grassroots movement that advocates spirituality and social change in America. He is also a bestselling author, public theologian, and commentator on religion and public life, faith, and politics who serves as the first Chair in Faith and Justice and leader of the Center on Faith and Justice in the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy.

Jim Wallis has been a mentor and friend to Eboo Patel for over twenty years.

What I heard Jim Wallis say is that we are facing right now the greatest threat to our democracy.  Without democracy, religious and civic life will not continue, the needs of people will not be met, and very few of us will retain the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Whether we preserve and strengthen our democracy or watch it crumble heavily depends on the Faith Factor.

We are heading in one of the two directions I mentioned at the beginning of this talk.  Division and destruction or coexistence and cooperation.

What can halt the destructive energy of division, discrimination, intolerance, hatred, and the truly evil mentality of a holy war that operates in a winner takes all mentality?

Interfaith cooperation.

Religion can divide more deeply and violently than just about anything.  When people rely on the conviction that God hates the same people they hate and for the same reasons, then people act in murderous and destructive ways.

Alternatively, religion can hold people together in a common cause for mutual well-being despite our religious differences – deep though they may be.

How do we follow that direction?

Interfaith cooperation.

We will absolutely need to understand each other better and find ways of working together across our various faith traditions wherever and whenever we can if we are to bless and save our lives.

And here comes Interfaith America.

Eboo Patel has been moving in this direction toward Interfaith America and deep interfaith cooperation for many years.  He is inspiring.  He is determined.  He is working for justice and wholeness.

What inspires me about this work is that it is honest about where we can and where we cannot find sufficient ground to work together.  There is some ground that can never be crossed safely and happily.  There is, however, enough common ground to build really strong and effective partnerships that move our nation toward greater justice for all.

Interfaith America is an organization.

Interfaith America is also a description of our country.

We are not and never have been a Christian Nation, though there are those who are now actively seeking to make this a Christian nation by law and by force.

Interfaith Cooperation will resist and ultimately end that threat – but it will take focused effort and strength of purpose.  We need to be engaged in Interfaith Cooperation if we hope to repel the forces of Christian Nationalism.

In our UU sources, one of them is the strength we draw from our Judeo-Christian roots.  I’ve never liked Judeo-Christian as a description of anything.  There is no such thing as Judeo-Christian.  So where does that come from and why in world did UUs ever think that is a great source of faith and meaning?

Eboo Patel talks about how that phrase came into being.  Apparently, it was a deliberate attempt to reframe the religious landscape of America during a time of extreme religious discrimination, persecution and violence.

Do you know this story?   I did not.

The term “Judeo-Christian” did not fall from the sky or rise from the ground. It was not written on Plymouth Rock when the Pilgrims arrived on the Eastern Seaboard or discovered in the soil during the California gold rush. The term is not especially historically accurate or particularly theologically precise. Instead, “Judeo-Christian” was a concrete social response to the anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism of the early twentieth century. It was a civic invention of one of the most impressive American civic institutions of the last one hundred years: the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ). … The NCCJ emerged in the 1920s specifically to combat the anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic propaganda of the Ku Klux Klan. Over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, it set itself a much more ambitious mission: the creation of Judeo-Christian America, both in the public imagination and in the social infrastructure of the nation.

Patel, Eboo. We Need To Build (pp. 145-147). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.

So, Judeo – Christian was invented to stop religious hatred and violence toward Catholics and Jews.  By combining the broad heritage of the Jews with the whole range of Christians, people began to actually see America as this nation of religious pluralism.  But, we are not a Judeo – Christian nation. 

There are now almost as many Muslims in America as there are Jews, and more Muslims than there are Episcopalians. It is time for a new chapter in the story of American religious diversity, a chapter titled “Interfaith America.”

Patel, Eboo. We Need To Build (p. 147). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.

In a world where the diversity of faith is growing rapidly, we need Interfaith America to be our reality.  We need to build the interfaith world that supports all of us.

VIDEO:   Interfaith America - We Need to Build

 

TALKING ABOUT INTERFAITH BUILDING – Rev. Margaret Beckman

At Interfaith America, cooperation and building for better lives is not only religious work, it is civic work and it is sacred work.

Interfaith Building is the work of Eboo Patel and Interfaith America.

Like so many leaders, his path toward maturity was complicated and full of the mistakes or missteps of youth.  His story is familiar to me in many ways, though it is uniquely his.

I will make this short, though I think you’d appreciate his longer version of “there and back again.”

Eboo Patel is a Muslim born to a family from India and his skin is brown.

Layers of minority status.

As a kid, he endured religious and racial prejudice.

As a young man, he railed against oppression, colonialism, racism, and other isms whenever he sniffed it in the air.

He was angry.

He was brutal in criticisms and critiques.

He was, and is, wicked smart …. He elevated righteous indignation to high brow art – but at a deep cost to those around him and ultimately, to himself.

Negativity does not build; it destroys.

Someone, an Indigenous woman, who was just as keenly aware of all that is wrong in this world but also kind suggested to Eboo that he was right about all the injustice he saw, AND that while resistance has its place and purpose, it alone is not sufficient to move anything toward justice.  To move toward justice, we must build the world we want to inhabit.

Eboo saw the wisdom.  Thus began his career to be a builder; moving from resisting to rebuilding.  Not to say that he has given up on resistance, he has not. Both are necessarily and neither is sufficient.

He says this:

The first seeks primarily to expose structures of injustice, the second to construct a more just society. These two dimensions of social change work can certainly go hand in hand. People are generally wary of turning away from a system that they know, bad as it might be, if they do not believe that something better can be built. And in order to trust that something better can be built, people need to have faith in the leaders doing the building.

Patel, Eboo. We Need To Build (p. x). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.

Our religious diversity combined with our deep devotion makes religion a very powerful force in American life.

All of our forms of diversity make America what it is and all of our various identities can come together when working for a just and sustainable world.

We talk about race, gender, national origin, language, age, class, ability and disability – all these identities and diversities make us a strong and vibrant nation.

We hardly ever talk about religion.  And religious diversity can be our greatest strength or it can tear us apart in ways that other things cannot – because we enlist the specter and support of the divine in our efforts to promote our vision of the world.

That vision might be to keep others out  OR  it might be to bring people in.

Eboo Patel thinks that Interfaith Cooperation is absolutely key to bringing people together.  Together, we build and rebuild and build some more.

His kind advisor, who he met at an interfaith gathering– the one who cautioned him about always being the resister and the critic – said one more thing that launched him into his life’s work.

Sounds like you have a vision for something different—an interfaith movement full of young people and focused on social action. That’s powerful. You should build that.

Patel, Eboo. We Need To Build (p. 16). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.

Sounds like you have a vision for something different.

Our UUCC mission is to support and sustain the spiritual, ethical, intellectual and overall well-being of our members while serving our broader communities.

Sounds like something different.  Sounds like we too have a vision for what is possible.  Part of our support for our community is doing the work of moving injustice anywhere toward justice everywhere.

We cannot turn away from this call to action. It is part of who we are as people of faith, specifically as Unitarian Universalists.  We also cannot accomplish this work on our own – even with a thousand UU congregations.

I am heartened and inspired by the very notion that we are right now Interfaith America, we are an interfaith nation.

The day will come when Christianity represents fewer than 50% of Americans… perhaps in the next two decades. Who knows?  What we DO know is that our religious diversity, including atheists, agnostics and humanists, grows with each generation.

Interfaith Cooperation is hard work.  We need to be prepared to get a knock on the nose every now and then.  We need to be prepared to be ridiculed by some, misunderstood by many, and encouraged by the rest.  Our work is sacred.  It is worth doing.  We hold in our vision our children to the 7^th generation who need us to act for them NOW.

We bless the world – together.

May you be inspired by your faith and the faith of others.

May we all remember that we need not think alike or worship alike to love alike and then go, hand in hand & heart in heart to build the world we want to leave to our children’s children.

I want to end with words of wisdom from Rev. Dr. Rebecca Ann Parker.

Choose to Bless the World  By Rebecca Parker  (adapted)

You must answer this question:
What will you do with your gifts?

Choose to bless the world.

The choice to bless the world is more than an act of will,
a moving forward into the world
with the intention to do good.

It is an act of recognition,
a confession of surprise,
a grateful acknowledgment
that in the midst of a broken world
unspeakable beauty, grace and mystery abide.

There is an embrace of kindness
that encompasses all life, even yours.

And while there is injustice, anesthetization, or evil
there moves a holy disturbance,
a benevolent rage,
a revolutionary love,
protesting, urging, insisting
that which is sacred will not be defiled.

Those who bless the world live their life
as a gesture of thanks
for this beauty
and this rage.

None of us alone can save the world.
Together—that is another possibility, waiting.

Source: "Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now"

Blessed Be.   I Love You.   Amen.