Today's sermon is the first of a series of close readings of sacred texts. Today was the launch of our children's and youth programming for the year, and it seemed appropriate to take "teaching our children" as the sermonic focus too. Enjoy.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
Living with the Texts: Hear, O Israel!
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
September 19, 2010
So what’s this about “Living with the Texts,”
the first half of my sermon title today?
The texts I’m talking about
are the great scriptures of world religions—
like the Bible, the Qur’an, the ancient Hindu texts,
the Buddhist sutras, the Tao Te Ching.
For the next nine months, I’m going to be preaching
on a different one of these texts each month,
because I think they have a lot to teach us.
Let me be clear right up front:
I’m not trying to say the Bible or any other scripture
should be the boss of our spiritual lives.
Ever since Emerson and Thoreau back in the 19th century,
we Unitarians have been saying, we get our religious authority—
we figure out what we believe and how we think we should live—
based on our own personal experience and our own inner wisdom.
Over the years, we freed ourselves from the idea
that we had to accept whatever the Bible said.
We learned to trust ourselves.
Just a couple of weeks ago I preached to you
about using our inner wisdom as a guide,
and I stand by everything I said then.
Yet I am also 100% convinced
that every one of us has a tremendous amount to learn
from the great religious books of the world—
not only the Bible but definitely including the Bible.
I’ve often talked about my personal spiritual practice
of reading sacred texts. Almost every morning, I start the day
by reading a few lines from world scriptures,
or sometimes contemporary spiritual writers,
and I go slow, but I’ve made my way
through lots of the books of Bible this way,
and some of the Asian scriptures too.
I’ve stuck with this practice for years
not because I believe every word in every scripture is true,
but because I do have faith that when something lasts that long,
if something has been meaningful to so many people for so long,
there’s something there that is worthy of our attention.
Maybe something we can learn from.
There’s a Christian practice called lectio divina—
that’s Latin for “holy reading.”
This is a way of reading scripture, or poetry,
or really any text that has some oomph and depth to it,
where you go slow, you read a few lines,
take your time, pause,
think about what the words mean to you.
What do they spark for you?
You ask questions, think some more, play with it—
basically you hang out with the text
and let it speak to your imagination.
This is the kind of reading I try to do in my morning practice,
and this the kind of reading I want to share with you today.
The first thing is, we have to find a text.
For today, I wanted to bring you a text
that could speak to the kickoff of our children’s and youth programming for the year.
Immediately I thought of the reading from Deuteronomy
that we heard as our first reading
(Deuteronomy 6:4–12).
For thousands of years, this text has been part
of the most important prayer in all of Judaism: the Shema.
Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.
Sh’ma Yis’ra’eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad.
These are the first Hebrew words that Jewish children learn
and perhaps the last words on the lips of Jewish people
as they lie dying.
No other text from the Bible is so important for Jews.
So, for that reason alone,
I think it’s worthy of our respectful attention.
And when I realized Yom Kippur,
the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, fell on this very weekend,
the message was even clearer: this was our text.
Let me tell you first what I love about this text,
what I think we can learn from it.
I love the challenge I hear in the Shema:
teach your children about your faith.
This is so important,
but it’s easy to forget, especially in a church like this.
This congregation has been around for nearly 100 years.
We built this building back in 1930, 80 years ago this year.
Our sheer physical presence is so solid,
it’s easy to think it’ll always be here no matter what we do.
But in fact, that’s not the case.
We have to pass on our faith, our values, our beliefs to our children,
because they’re the ones who are going to carry this thing forward.
This congregation and the faith that gives it a reason for being,
everything we love about this church,
all that has to be passed down to each new generation.
Someone did it for us.
Someone planted trees of faith that today are bearing fruit for us.
As the text reminds us, we all drink from wells we did not dig.
And all of us who are blessed to make it to adulthood,
we have a collective responsibility to do some spiritual planting
and digging for the generations still to come.
Every one of us, whether or not we have children of our own,
has a vested interest in nurturing our children,
helping them grow in their own spiritual lives,
encouraging them to be Unitarian Universalists
in this moment and their whole life long.
And of course it’s not just for our church;
first and foremost it is for our children themselves.
If we are here for any length of time, I’m assuming that means
we have found something here that is important and precious to us.
I know that’s true for me.
Our message of love and respect for differences,
the way we encourage people to use their brains
and think for themselves,
the inspiration we find to open our hearts and practice justice—
our religion has given me so much hope and challenge
and inspiration and grounding—
and I want that not just for myself
but for you and for all of us
and for our children
and all the children still to come.
I think our kids need to hear from us what we find meaningful,
what we think is important,
that which touches us and opens us to the sacred in our lives.
And maybe some of this happens naturally,
in the sweet little moments that we get to share with our kids,
and in the big and scary moments all families go through.
Some of this happens naturally,
we pass on our faith in those little moments and big ones,
but I don’t want to leave it all to chance.
And I don’t think we get to take a pass
and leave it all to our religious education teachers, either,
wonderful and gifted and skilled as they are.
Let me draw us back to the text of the Shema,
because it gives us some brilliant advice
about what it takes to pass on our faith to our kids.
And in a nutshell, the advice is live your faith 24/7.
Talk about it. Make it really clear what you believe.
The text says:
Recite [these teachings] when you stay at home
and when you are away,
when you lie down and when you get up.
The Jewish tradition interprets this text
as a mandate to say the Shema twice a day,
in the morning and at night.
For us, to play with the interpretation a little—
what I hear the text telling us is, talk about your faith.
Think about what it means to you.
Tell your children what it means to you.
The text goes on:
Bind them as a sign on your hand
and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead;
inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
By the way, this is why some Jewish people wear tefillin
on their arms and their foreheads,
little pouches with passages from the Torah inside.
“A sign on your hand,” “a symbol on your forehead.”
This is why they put a mezuzah on the doorframe of their home,
a case with a scroll inside with the Shema written on it.
For us, what I hear is an invitation
to wear our faith literally on our sleeve.
Bring signs and symbols of our faith into our homes,
as reminders of what we care about,
for ourselves and also for our children.
That’s why I wear a chalice necklace every Sunday,
because I want to have some physical embodiment of my faith
that people can see, to show how important it is to me.
Maybe you have a flaming chalice in your home.
Maybe another symbol that’s meaningful to you.
Something physical, that you can see and touch,
to keep your faith and your values in front of you.
Signs and symbols to keep our faith in our minds and our hearts,
to teach our children.
But now you may be starting to wonder,
why should I do something just because the text says so?
And that’s a really good question,
especially when we’re talking about teaching our kids.
Our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition has always said
religious education shouldn’t be about telling children what to think,
what to believe.
We teach our children what we believe to be true,
what we have found through our own search for truth,
yes, absolutely—we tell them why our faith matters to us
and we hope it will become a living spring for them too—
and we encourage them to think and feel for themselves,
to wake up to the mystery all around us,
to trust their own minds and hearts.
I hope our children will grow up Unitarian Universalist
and choose to embrace this faith as adults.
But even more than that, I hope they will grow up
to be people who love truth and justice,
who practice compassion,
people with a clear head and an open heart.
And obviously this doesn’t mean blindly accepting
whatever the Bible has to say, or any other text.
In fact, moving back to our text of the day,
there is an aspect of this text which we absolutely cannot ignore
and we absolutely do not want to follow.
To explain what I mean,
I need to tell you something about the story behind the text.
Because the Shema text is part of a story.
Moses and the Israelites have been wandering in the desert
for 40 years.
Now, at last, God has told Moses
it’s time for the people to enter the Promised Land of Canaan.
Before they cross over into Canaan,
Moses calls a time-out.
He gets all the people to gather round,
and he tells everyone they all have to be really careful
to obey God’s commands, because if they don’t,
things are going to go very badly for them.
This is the context for the Shema text.
And, OK, I know we Unitarian Universalists
aren’t that big on obedience,
but we can work with that idea theologically—
we can maybe talk about how it’s important
to keep focused on what’s really important,
to honor the commitments we’ve made, that kind of thing,
and as far as it goes that’s not wrong.
But here’s the thing.
You have to know what the God of the Israelites is commanding.
And among other things, God is commanding the Israelites
to get rid of the people in the country they are about to move into.
God very explicitly orders them to dispossess the people
of their land, their homes, everything they have,
and take it all for themselves.
(Numbers 33:50–56)
This is a God who has already ordered them
to exterminate whole tribes of peoples
they’ve encountered in the desert.
Now God is ordering them
to take over the homes and the cities and the entire civilization
of a people who has never done anything to hurt them.
These are the wells they did not dig.
These are the vineyards they did not plant.
Ouch.
And so we see the story of this text,
this story which we want to read
as a beautiful story of freedom and liberation and enduring faith
for the Israelites, and thus for ourselves—
the literal meaning of this story and this text is that the Israelites are becoming
a people that brutally conquers other peoples,
dispossesses them from all they have built,
exiles them from the country they had called their own.
And I so don’t want to have to tell you this is our story too.
But of course it is.
For how is it that we came to be here,
all of us on this bit of earth we call Stockton, California?
We weren’t the first people to live on this land.
We are here at the corner of Bristol and Pacific today
not only because of the legacy of religious freedom
passed on to us by our ancestors, which we celebrate and rightly so,
but also because other ancestors, or maybe even the same ones,
forcibly removed the native peoples of this place
and destroyed their culture, their traditions, their faith.
This is a hard truth,
but I know our minds and hearts are big enough to hold it.
I’m not trying to blame us or anybody else.
I just want to name it
and hold it in this space.
The story of the Israelites is our story too,
and the story of every American
whose ancestors came to this land from across the waters.
But I find I don’t want to just throw the text away, reject it entirely.
As I hold this text of the Shema in my mind and heart,
this most holy scripture for an entire people,
it echoes in my ears as a challenge, a prayer, a whispered hope:
May we teach our children the faith that we have found
through our living and our striving and our dreaming.
And let us keep our minds and our hearts as open as we can,
deeply aware of our capacity for error and cruelty and harm,
and pass this knowledge on to our children too.
May our faith be strong enough to critique itself
in the light of evolving wisdom.
May ours be a faith not fixed like letters on a page,
but one that challenges every generation
to understand more and love more,
to create justice and peace and hope
out of our most tragic failures and devastations.
The text commands us:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart
and with all your soul
and with all your might.
I know I cannot love the God fixed on that printed page,
a God who calls on one people to destroy another.
But I can love that which gives life.
I can love goodness. I can love justice.
I can love peace and compassion and wisdom.
This I can do, as best I can,
with all my heart and all my soul and all my might.
What more could I wish for us all
and for all the generations to come?
Amen.
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