This morning I don't have to change my sermon title in response to events over the past week. I only have to change my sermon. With seventeen Americans dead in a brutal and evil terrorist bombing and some ninety Israelis and Palestinians the victims of a new wave of violence in Israel and the West Bank, God Why? is as good a title as any other.
Last week, in a very thoughtful sermon, Galen explored some of the political ramifications of the latest crisis in the Middle East. This morning I want to place the same subject in a theological context. The history of wars fought in God's name or over sacred territory is enough to turn almost any thinking person against religion. To hear it from the legion of terrorists for Truth and God, you would think that the scriptures were nothing more than a cookbook for war and violence. Yet, if anything, the opposite is the case. The Koran prescribes peace over violence time and again. The Hebrew Prophets call on us to turn our swords into plowshares. Jesus is the prince of peace.
I shall begin this morning with a text that is included in all three canons of the great Western religions. And then, drawing from its spirit of Universalism, I shall explore the difference between the Universalist and Fundamentalist views of God. What we believe does make a difference, not only in our own lives but for the lives of our neighbors. My text for the morning is the Book of Jonah from the Hebrew Scriptures, a book that is also held by Christians and Muslims as a Holy text.
Jonah didn't want to be a prophet. As is so often the case, where there are many openings few apply. It's hard to blame him. A true prophet must suffer. So when God called Jonah and said to him, "Arise and go to the great city of Nineveh, go now and denounce it, for its wickedness stares me in the face," Jonah booked passage on the next ship out, not Nineveth but in precisely the opposite direction.
Ironically, it is during his flight from God, not his later service, that Jonah displays his regard for humanity. His ship runs into high seas and then a mighty storm. White capped waves crash over the bow. Should the storm continue, the ship will surely go down. Clearly God is angry, and all eyes turn to Jonah. "Who are you?" the Phoenician sailors cry. "Where you come from? What have you done wrong?."
"I am a Hebrew," Jonah replies. "And I worship the God of heaven, who made both sea and land. It is my fault that the sea has risen against you. God called upon me and I tried to flee from God." Here Jonah demonstrates true virtue. "You must throw me overboard," he tells them "and the sea will go down." Over Jonah goes, and at once the sea grows calm. The Ship is saved, and Jonah is swallowed by a great .fish. For three days, deep within the belly of the fish Jonah prays to God, offering up his thanks and promising to pay his vows should God give him a second chance. His prayers are answered. The fish vomits Jonah up on the beach. Jonah travels straight to Nineveh and denounces its crimes, proclaiming that in forty days Nineveh will be destroyed. But then something wonderful happens. The people listen; their king decrees a period of penitence; and God spares Nineveh
Jonah, of course, is furious. He had done his duty, proclaiming the righteous word of God's vengeful justice, and nothing happened. He felt a fool, his honor tarnished. Jonah placed his reputation on the line, but God didn't deliver. Not to mention the fact that justice was not done. So what does Jonah do? He goes out and sits down on the east of the city and sulks.
Displaying a divine sense of humor, God ordains that a climbing gourd should grow up over Jonah's head to shade him from the sun. Jonah is grateful for the gourd, but at dawn the next day a worm attacks the gourd and it withers. As if designed to burn away his self deceit, the sun beats down on Jonah's head. But Jonah will not abandon his newfound virtue. Growing faint, he offers up a final desperate prayer to God, this time for death. They say that virtue has few martyrs, but Jonah almost makes it. He is prepared to die for justice, not the justice God dispenses, but the tooth-for-a tooth variety that he, a prophet, so passionately proclaimed in Nineveth.
In the course of this brief story, Jonah falls twice-first on account of selfishness, and then self-righteousness. The first time, a sinner, Jonah acts valiantly, offering his life to.save others; later a messenger of God, he plays cad, whining that he wants to die because others had been spared. "The wise turns vices into virtues; the fool, virtues into vices," as the old adage goes. Thinking little of himself, Jonah proves his wisdom; when puffed up with virtue, he demonstrates his folly.
But having saved the people of Nineveh despite their sins, God will not permit Jonah to destroy himself for virtue. Instead God asks his leading question: "Are you so angry over the gourd?"
"Yes" Jonah answers, "mortally angry."
"Think about it, Jonah. You are sorry to lose the gourd, though you did not have the trouble of growing it, a plant which came up in a night and withered in a night. How is it then that I should not be sorry for the great city of Nineveth, with its hundred and twenty thousand who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and cattle without number?" (Jonah 1-4).
So ends the Book of Jonah. You will notice that everyone is saved: The sailors from Jonah; Jonah from the sea; and the people of Nineveth, themselves not Jews, by the God of Jews.
No wonder Jonah is so perplexed, for this mark a profound the nature of the divine dispensation. God's mercy extends not only to a chosen righteous few, but to all the earth's creatures, Gentile and Jew alike and cattle without number.
If the fall was an individual act, redemption turns out to be a corporate enterprise.
George Huntston Williams, a Unitarian minister and Church Historian who led me through my doctorate at Harvard, summed up his study of history in these words: "Choose your enemies carefully for you will become like them." When we become like our own worst enemies, we become our own worst enemy.
Watching this latest tragic chapter of destructive and self-destructive passion, both nationalistic and religious passion, unfold in the Middle East, I am also reminded of Umberto Eco's novel, The Name of the Rose. In it, the greatest library in Christendom burns to the ground, torched by a monk. The holy man's zeal for Christ leads him to hide and finally to destroy any evidences that might inspire sophisticated Christians to water down the theology of revelation with their own experience. As Eco's protagonist, William of Baskerville, explains to his young disciple, Adso:
"The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. Jorge did a diabolical thing because he loved his truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood.
As Ecco himself puts it, "Because of excess virtue the forces of hell prevail.
I think of Arafat. I think of Sharon. I think of the suicide bombers who took seventeen innocent people with them in hope of meeting God. "Because of excess virtue the forces of hell prevail."
By the way, the theological counterpart to the adage, "Choose your enemies carefully because you will become like them," is "Love your enemies. As Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse writes," From the religious point of view, we have not understood that every member of the entire human family is out neighbor; much less have we approached them primarily on the basis of real care for their welfare, and respect for their chosen ways. From the psychiatric point of view, it is possible to unleash selectively the primitive aggression necessary to acquire and maintain power over others, even in a "good cause." The ends not only do not justify the means, but aggressive means can subvert even the best of ends."
If the only pain in the life that has meaning is shared pain, the one true joy is shared joy. Whether material or spiritual, exclusively held properties posses only illusionary value, whereas mutual goods credit everyone by enhancing the commonweal The former are illusionary, for we are inextricably linked to one another in an interdependent web of being, our 7th Unitarian principle In the commonwealth of Gods, goods are held in the common, because there is no other way in which goods can be held
This is the new truth, though many old prophets have spoken it. All of us are part of one body, even those who never awaken to the nature of our interdependencies. We may spend our lives as antibodies within the body of Christ-or Atman or Allah or God or the universe---but still, whatever sustenance we may garner springs from this common source. When squander our lives life itself: when we give our lives away to others we enhance all life, including our own.
Yet our confidence in the old values, based upon virtues promoting self-enhancement and tribal security, subverts recognition of our interdependencies. A larger faith, multiform yet multilateral, based upon yet transcending a host of particular expressions, is undercut daily by a powerful cadre of competitive faiths, each in its own way deadly. Entering their champions into the lists (zealots inspired by scripture and prepared to kill and die for truth), competing faiths crucify God greater than all and yet present in each-in God's name.
Religious or otherwise, every war between peoples, parties, and faiths is a civil war brothers and sisters killing one another with words or weapons, renting the one fabric, riving the body of God.
"Coins tossing becomes our primary metaphor for resolution," as last year's Lifelines speaker Stephen Jay Gould writes." "We are left with a win/lose rather than a win/win approach to conflict resolution. The truly great intellectual dichotomies are not battles to the death, but struggles to find the partial truths of each vision," he concludes. "If we tried a large set of twofold divisions, placing the wall of separation at different angles and in different places each time, we might finally occupy enough perspectives to appreciate the true complexity of most issues."
Defining virtue in a cooperative rather than competitive fashion, the good we seek is the common good, moving wherever possible from "either/or" confrontation to "both/and" reconciliation. This is Paul's model in Romans. It can be practiced within our homes and our churches, between nations and among the world's religions.
I admit that though the foundations for cooperative virtue, and a relational approach to conflict resolution, are established in scripture and demonstrated by science, as of today little building has taken place upon them. As Gould writes, "I despair of persuading people to stop playing dichotomy; the need seems to lie too deep in the human soul."
This morning, yet again, there is a glimmer of hope from the Middle East. As I hope against hope that the region, destructively and self-destructively will not ignite like a tinder box, I think of Ireland and its year of impossible peace.
I also think about how important our faith is here in this church. A faith grounded in the book of Jonah, in Jesus' love, in Paul's one body with many members, in our commitment to win/win solutions, and yes, in our Universalism. If ever you are tempted to think that your faith and beliefs don't matter, both to you and to your neighbor, just open the morning paper. And then do whatever little you can to make your faith and beliefs matter. At home. In your work place. In your neighborhood. In this city and this country. To follow God as a Universalist is to love our neighbor as ourselves. Copyright AllSouls 2000.