I am now known on the staff as a liturgical pyromaniac.
I like to light candles… In my first year here I thought, okay, let’s heavily invest in candles and candelabras, and it was only through a kindly but firm intervention by Rosemary, that I avoided becoming the Liberace of liberalism. I am a totally “light candles” kind of guy. When the ministerial search packet describing the church came to me in Connecticut, there was this lovely depiction of 7 Chestnut Street as being the place where, in 1828, after recovering from a severe illness, the owner began the tradition of putting candles in the windows. And of course, every house on Beacon Hill has the same story, but I believe it. It is Christmastime – I believe everything.
I also feel close to Rhys, because on Christmas Eve I always read his words from “The Imperishable Flame,” and there is no more moment of intimacy than that.
We light candles this time of year. They are emotionally and symbolically important. Edward Searl, who worked for Beacon Press for many years, wrote,
“The candle, the child, these are the symbols of the season. For we affirm that a flame banishes the dreariest darkness. For we affirm the spirit of love is renewed in the birth of every child. So it is light and life and love we see in the Christmas fire, and in the Christmas child.”
And of course in its deep roots we will celebrate this week the Solstice, a primal thing in the human heart and spirit-- to light a fire to invoke and even magically to invite the return of light when light grows so short. And so our forebears, in times of increasing darkness, lit their torches and their bonfires and their worshipful candles for the purpose of holding off the darkness. And if you walk through this city at night, there is something more at play, and that is the effect upon our eyes. A flame on a winter’s night is just so beautiful; it may the most beautiful thing I know. But these are not really ultimately the candles I am going to be talking about in this sermon. They are symbolic, to be sure, in a time of increasing darkness, but to go where I want to go, I first need to go back into our past.
It is the nineteenth of May, 1780, in Hartford, Connecticut. The day has gone down in history New England history in what our forebears called a terrible foretaste of Judgment day, for at noon the skies turned from blue to grey and by mid-afternoon had blackened over so densely that in that superstitious age men fell on their knees and begged a final blessing before the end would come. The Connecticut House of Representatives was in session and as some fell down and others clamored for an immediate adjournment, the speaker of the House, one Colonel Davenport, came to his feet and he silenced them and said these words: “The Day of Judgment is either approaching or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for adjournment, and if it is, then I would choose to be found doing my duty and I wish that candles be brought. Ladies and gentlemen, let candles be brought.”
In this holiday season, it may seem rather Grinch-like to do what I am about to do, to intrude in some sense upon your celebration, but I’ve thought about this a lot, and I feel that sometimes the shadowed sides of our hearts need to be expressed, that there is something in our national purpose and will that knows all too well that this is a dark time. A knowledge of this increasing darkness is inescapable and it must be dealt with and it is good and liberating to give it expression. Because while the truth may set you free, it sometimes hurts to hear before it does.
We have to begin bringing more candles into our lives, to know the situation that we are in. Emerson said, “We can no more escape politics than we can evade the frost.” He is right. As we enter into the fourth year of a war, one freely chosen and embarked upon, a war longer now than World War II and approaching the Civil War, as we approach by New Year’s Day some 3000 American dead and over 25,000 casualties, and an untold and uncounted tidal wave of Iraqi lives in the chaos.
The darkness includes (and I need to say right now, that these are only my opinions, and they are no more wise, no more prescient, than yours), in this deepening crisis, the fear that we stand at a particularly crucial turning in world history. The stories we will read in the Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols service depict a world of Roman occupiers and a mad King Herod. Believe me, Herod still walks the earth. Trust me on this.
This is where we are heading in Iraq…We live in a time we must consider Iran’s increasing power and instinct to back the majority Shi’ites, and as well, Saudi Arabia’s announcement transmitted through the Vice-President that their inclination was, if there is an increasing civil war in Iraq, one that that our troops are in the middle of, to back the minority Sunni population. Not only is Iraq mired in a messy and bloody civil war, we are poised upon a much greater conflagration. It is unavoidable to look at the dangers we face.
Now, our troops did not ask to spend their fourth Christmas there. They didn’t ask to be sent in. And whenever I read the story of the Slaughter of the Innocents in the Christmas story, I cannot help now but think of the next American GI man or woman who may die in the next week and months as we proceed to lay out “a new way forward,” a new plan in a new year-- I can’t help but wonder (and fear) that such plans and such delays are really about national pride, about the now sadly disabused vision of four years ago of Empire. Remember people talking about the new emerging American Empire? Do you remember the sign emblazoned upon the battleship, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?
Well, we are in a new place now. We need a new way forward, but in the end, a vision is growing among our leaders that perhaps just one more new invasion might solve the puzzle; that if we could, in the term being bruited about in Washington D. C., “double down the bet,” just strike Iran and nullify its increasing power and nuclear ambitions, that maybe that would unlock the puzzle of the Middle East. These are serious discussions now going on, and do not fool yourselves that policy-makers are not actively discussing this option. It is happening. And so we propose to sink deeper and deeper into the morass – into a world, frankly, we don’t understand very well. And never did. This week, the new head of the House Intelligence panel, Silvestre Reyes, was being interviewed by the Congressional Quarterly (and this is why this is not a partisan sermon, because he’s a Democrat) and he didn’t know the difference between the Sunni’s and the Shi’ites. Nor did the President of the United States before the Iraq invasion, according to Bob Woodward’s State of Denial.
So, this is a war in a world we don’t understand very well, as we move into perhaps more Middle Eastern adventures. It is reported that, even this far into the war, that there are fewer than ten Arabic translators in the American Embassy in Iraq. We are not prepared to do this war and we do not know how to do the next.
Sometimes I think about what we have done as an expression of a profound innocence, and sometimes as a great hubris that takes my breath away.
And I think that we Americans are confusing to people around the world because the innocence and the hubris are true at the same time. It is way too simple to say that what we were engaged in was about oil. I think there is some truth to this, and I will get to that in a moment, but I believe, and the reason I am talking about this from this pulpit and the reason I have in the past, is that there are profound religious fundamentalist impulses and urges underlying the structures of this conflict-- and that these fundamentalist impulses are driving the decisions in ways that are very frightening. Fundamentalism to be found on the banks of the Potomac as well as on the Tigris and the Euphrates.
It wasn’t just oil that drove us into this darkness, but I believe it is true, and I am amazed that I don’t hear this from more pulpits and from both sides of the political aisle, that if we had ever, ever, been truly serious about the so-called war on terror, that we would have, the week after 9/11, embarked on a national comprehensive and massively funded Marshall-like plan of high desperation to end, forever, our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. The end of the oil age is fast approaching, and frankly, we cannot afford to antagonize and alienate the entire Arab Muslim world as the oil age enters it’s death throes. We have spent, it is estimated, 2 trillion dollars upon our Iraq adventure. If that 2 trillion dollars had gone into energy independence, think of how many American men and women would not have to be sacrificed. Two trillion dollars.
Now I am going to shift the tone of this sermon, because you didn’t come here for
an harangue. I want to talk about the candles we need to bring, remembering Colonel Davenport. Bring more candles. If the Day of Judgment is approaching, let us at least do our duty. Let us do our duty as spiritual people. And the first candle is humility. We Americans have been humbled, and we have to stay awake to that fact. We have to face it, and we have to be frank and upfront about it. Our words and actions need to come from this humbled place, and not thrash about in wounded pride.
And another candle is information. We simply need to learn more. How can you and I learn more about this world we have so casually entered, throwing our children’s lives into the balance? Because I think, as people of faith, as Unitarian-Universalists, we have this deep and abiding responsibility to learn more and to sense more and to be a bridge, if you will, across fundamental issues. We can be, if we accept this role, exactly the people who can help reach across dangerous religious divisions. Interfaith used to be seen, if it was ever talked about at all, as a ‘good thing’. I believe, and I don’t think I am being rhetorical here, I believe it is quite literally the salvation of the future.
And I think we need to bring a candle of understanding, that this darkness has always been deeply imbued in our human heart and spirit. It is a part of the Christmas story. Robinson Jeffers wrote,
Caesar and Herod shared the world,
Sorrow over Bethlehem lay,
Iron the Empire, Brutal the time,
Dark was that day.
All of us have probably grown up with poems, amusing, light, frivolous poems by Ogden Nash. I daresay you haven’t encountered a poem he wrote during World War II, entitled,
The Innocents.
The ancient altars smoke afresh,
The ancient idols stir:
Faint in the reek of burning flesh
Sink frankincense and myrhh. Gaspar, Balthazar, Melchior!
Where are your offerings now?
Two ultimate laws alone we know, What greetings to the Prince of War,
The ledger and the sword – His darkly branded brow?
So far away, so long ago,
We lost the infant Lord. Only the children clasp His hand:
His voice speaks low to them,
God rest you, merry Innocents And still for them the shining band
While innocence endures Wings over Bethlehem.
A sweeter Christmas than we to ours,
May you bequeath to yours.
We need to bring candles of realization. What is this story we tell every year about anyway? What is this Lessons and Carols service really about? Why do we tell this story anyway? There is one an inner essence about it that we miss-- because we see the Christmas cards, and we sing the carols, and we have heard the tale all of our lives, so we just don’t see it, but it is there staring at us in the face. Mary and Joseph are political exiles. There is a reason that the innocent children of Bethlehem are killed – because Herod wants them dead because this child is a threat to power.
And the people who receive the message of the angels? The angels apparently don’t give the message in the middle of Jerusalem to the Pharisees or the Sadducees, no; they don’t give the highly educated or the elites in the Temple the message. Where does the message go to? It goes to the illiterate shepherds!
This whole story, its framework, is a radical recasting of what it means to have the divine speak to us and through us. It comes from poor people. It doesn’t come from the people who hold the power; those who control the purse strings and who define what ‘goodness’ is. This story is dynamite, more than we can sometimes handle, and so we turn around and make it sentimental. But there is nothing particularly sentimental about the radical message of “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to all”. This is a message so stunning that if we could but hear it, this world would never be the same.
Herod is hard to evade, try as we might, in Christmas 2006, but I think we need to find the spiritual resources within us to deal with him. The last candle we bring is one of hope. And I do hope. I would not take the risk of this sermon unless I had a profound hope that we will turn, that we will redeem the time, that the ancient story is in fact offering us the way out. You talk about “a new way forward” – it is the old way forward, and it has always been our possession, in our hands and in our hearts. I do hope. Christmas rolls around again precisely at the moment I most need it. Howard Thurman, the great Boston University theologian said, “I will light a candle of hope this Christmas,” and in strange irony he added, “there seems to exist a more secure basis for hope in a world during the grimmest days of war, than in the vast uncertainties of peace. The miracle of fulfillment dreamed of by the uprooted and persecuted masses of men, women and children takes now the form of a nightmare, as peace is so long deferred. Hope is the mood of Christmas, “ Howard Thurman wrote, and “the raw materials are new-born babes, of families and their work. Life keeps coming on, keeps seeking to fulfill itself, keeps affirming the possibility of hope.” I believe this good message, this powerful message, offers us renewal, good will. Good will on this earth is, in fact, an infinitely renewable resource.
This is the last of the sermons that began with “The New Transcendentalists.” One of the successors of Emerson, Wendell Berry, is an essayist as well as a wonderful poet, and I read some words from him about a month ago that I resolved I would share with you the week before Christmas. He says,
Islam, Judaism, Christianity, all have been warlike religions. All have tried to make peace and to rid the world of evil by fighting wars. This has not worked. It is never going to work. The failure belongs inescapably to all of these religions insofar as they have been warlike and to acknowledge this failure is the duty of all of them. It is the duty of all of them to see that it is wrong to destroy the world or to risk destroying it to get rid of its evil… We can no longer afford to confuse peaceability with passivity. Authentic peace is not more passive than war. Like war, it calls for discipline and intelligence and strength of character, though it calls also for higher principles and aims. If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.”
That is the candle that I think we need to bring, to bring more candles this Christmas-- to make myself and this church I love, and this faith and this nation and the groaning, burdened world itself, so seriously that we at last hear what the. The angels have spoken. It is only time that we listen. Amen.
