All Saint's Day sermon (late)

 

Celebration of the Saints

1 Kings 5:1-5; 8:1-13

John 2:19-21

10/31/21

               In the passage that we read today from 1 Kings, we hear of the amazing plans of Solomon for the building of the temple.  We also hear in that last line the intent of the temple.  “Then Solomon said, ‘The Lord said that he would live in a dark cloud, but I have indeed built you a lofty temple as a place where you can live forever.’”   We don’t tend to think of God as living in a temple, as living in a building, as residing in a specific place at all.  If we do, I think we envision heaven as the place where God lives.  But this is not really a biblical understanding.  And it is certainly not an Old Testament understanding.  The Israelites truly and deeply believed that God resided in the temple, in the Holy of Holies: the innermost part of the temple: in the Ark of the Covenant.  This was where God LIVED and could be found. 

               I invite you to think about that for a moment.  How would our faith, our practice of faith change if we believed God actually lived in the church, for example?  What would you do differently if we believed that this building was God’s HOUSE? 

               And then the next question is, if we believed that God lived here in this building and then the building was destroyed, especially by people we believed to be enemies, how would that impact you?  What would you do?  What would WE do? 

               That is in fact what happened to the Israelites.  For them the temple was sacred, absolutely holy in the highest sense of that word.  It was perfect, it was God’s home.  And then it was destroyed.  Twice it was destroyed.  And both times that destruction was beyond devastating.  It challenged everything they believed, everything they understood.  Did this mean that God was destroyed too?  Did it mean that God had left the “home” they had made for God?  And if so had God left them, too?

               They had come to a very unhealthy place in their understanding.  God had wanted a relationship with the Israelites.  But instead, they had made it into a set of rites, rituals and regulations.  But that became their core value, their core understanding.  And when that was destroyed?

               We all have beliefs, we all have “sacred cows” in our understandings and in our theology, but also in our mind sets.  Things that we cling to absolutely.  Those beliefs that we cling to become our grounding, our base.  They become foundational for us; core beliefs that effect everything else about the way we view the world.  They affect what information we can take in, what information we reject.  They also blind us to other pieces of information.  They blind us, many times to inconsistencies and to flaws in the arguments that support those beliefs.  They blind us to obvious truths that would challenge our way of thinking. 

But the thing is, sacred cows cannot survive in this world.  Anything other than God that we make into an idol is bound to fall, that we declare absolute, that we decide is “truth” cannot survive, ultimately.  Maybe not in our lifetimes, but everything that we make into an idol, or that we decide is unshakeable, or absolute will be challenged.  And when the beliefs or the idols or the sacred cows become challenged, as all sacred cows will, we will have a choice we must make. 

There are four ways people usually respond when their core beliefs are challenged. 

               The first is to continue to deny what has challenged our understanding.  This can only be done up to a certain point, but people do this.  Even when it is obvious to everyone around them that they are doing that, people still do this.  For example, if you were raised to believe that people who are rich have it because they deserve it, and people who are poor don’t have things because they don’t deserve to have good things, then these beliefs might be challenged the first time that you actually get to know a poor person, or someone who grew up in abject poverty.  Even so, I hear people find ways to cling to their old belief systems: “Well, this person is the exception”.  “Well, but MOST people who are poor are different.”  Or they discover how much harm someone who is rich has really done to those under them in order to climb that particular ladder.  Same deal: “Well, that action was the exception.  They don’t normally act that way.” 

               When I was in Ohio there was another clergy couple in our Presbytery who also went through a terrible scandal.  The male pastor was brought up on ecclesiastical charges for sexually abusing a bunch of different boys from three different Presbyteries around the country.  These boys were now all men, the pastor was past the statute of limitations so could not be brought up on criminal charges, but these boys were pressing ecclesiastical charges.  The pastor renounced jurisdiction, which means he gave up his ordination, in order to shut down the process so that no one would hear the charges or be able to confront him.  But the three Presbyteries involved decided this was unfair to the victims.  They hosted “listening” sessions that would simply allow the victims to share their experiences with this pastor.  When the charges were first brought, most people supported the pastor.  They denied the possibility that their beloved, charming, charismatic pastor could ever be found guilty of something like this.  But with the listening sessions man after man came forward to share their story.  And those these men had not previously known each other (some from California, some from Florida and now some in Ohio), their stories all had strong similarities and were all intensely painful.  Once those stories were out, it became much, much harder to deny the charges.  But his wife continued to hold on to her belief in his innocence.  She could not allow her core faith in her husband’s innocence to be shaken, despite the evidence. 

The second response that a person may have in the face of the face of a core belief being challenged is that a person may change lesser beliefs around the core belief in order to hold up their core belief.  I saw this with Martha Stewart.  People believed in her. Many idolized her. So when she was found guilty of insider trading, people changed other ideas they had in order to keep Martha Stewart as the idol she had been for so many.  “Oh, that’s not such a bad thing,” they decided.  Or “Well, she wasn’t really guilty.”  Or, “well, people make mistakes”.  And they forget that if it had been a poor, unknown person making that same “mistake”, they would have wanted them put away for life.

               However, if the situation is too big, too overwhelming, neither of these responses can be upheld.  Such was the case with the destruction of the temple.  It was far too clear and obvious that the temple had been destroyed for any denial to be long lasting.  So then again, they had a bigger choice to make about the cognitive dissonance they were experiencing.  One possible response is to throw out the whole belief system.  Some people decide that because a core understanding has been found to be flawed, the whole thing has to go.  We see this response in many situations.  When I was doing my dissertation on fundamentalism, as you know from a few weeks ago, I interviewed some people who had left fundamentalism to become atheists.  For these folk, they would find something in scripture that contradicted something else in scripture (like, for example, the order of creation in Genesis 1 versus the order of creation in Genesis 2, or Jesus’ constant confrontation and overturning of some of the old biblical laws: like the law of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” which he completely threw out saying “But I say to you, do not return evil for evil. But if someone slaps one cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.”, etc.) then their core belief in a literal and inerrant scripture becomes challenged.  The reaction of some, then, is to throw out the entire faith.  “If this is wrong, the whole thing must be wrong.”

Another example I’ve often encountered is with the core belief that God is in charge of everything, and that everything happens for a reason.  If God is all-powerful and then something too terrible to be dealt with happens, what is a core belief for many is shaken.  If I believe that God can take control or is in control of everything, then I may have been able to say, “everything happens for a reason” when my brother died or when I lost my job.  But when an event such as the Holocaust happens?  Or when I know a child who is raped or tortured?  When I encounter first hand the thousands of people who die from starvation or dehydration?  Then the ability to say “well, God was in charge” and “everything happens for a reason” can be challenged.  The result for many who go through this experience is also one of choosing to reject faith completely.  There can’t be a God at all, certainly not a loving God, if these kinds of terrible things happen and God does not prevent them.

In the secular world, we see this happen when an idol is found to be human. When a politician or movie star or pastor is caught in a scandal that is so horrific that it cannot be denied, people may throw out the person all together.  They will flip from seeing the person as all good to seeing the person as all evil.  There is no in-between.  There is no humanity to be accounted for.  They were perfect.  And now they are the devil. 

Finally, the last, and obviously the most healthy response to that cognitive dissonance, to an irrefutable challenge to our core beliefs is to go through the grief and pain of adjusting them.  Can we make that choice to change how we think, to readjust our beliefs to include the new information?  This is the hardest self-reflective work that we will ever have to do in our lifetimes: to actually be willing to look at foundational beliefs, to accommodate information we did not have before, to change.  I cannot overstate how hard this is for people.  The grief involved in a complete mind-set change is so large that most people simply cannot do it.  It takes amazing strength, courage and wisdom to be able to look at new information and consider that we may have been wrong.

I think about the people who believed with absolute conviction that Hitler was doing a good thing for his people, and what they must have felt after WWII.  Were they able to see that they had in fact been wrong?  Were they able to change?  Where they able to see the evil in their own understandings?  Or did they die declaring he was right, or misunderstood, or that we just were focusing on the wrong thing?   Did they deny the evil he did?  Say it hadn’t really happened at all?  Did they deny the inhumanity of the concentration camps?  Or continue in prejudice, blind thinking?  Were they able to change?

We know that some were.  I think about Corrie Ten Boom’s writing about some of the guards she met when the Holocaust had ended.  I think about their confessions to her with sorrow and deep regret about the parts they played.  But how hard that must have been for them!  How hard for any of us to realize we have participated in something harmful, or destructive.  I’m reminded once again of Professor Dumbledore’s commentary at the end of the Harry Potter series about the evil Voldemort.   He said that even this evil man could heal, he could heal all the horrible, awful things he had done.  He could find “salvation” but only if he were willing to face what he had done and to feel remorse for it.  He also admitted that the pain of that remorse would be worse than he could imagine.  But it would save him.  Being willing to see and understand would save him.  But it would not come without a pain he was unwilling to experience. 

               Today we celebrate the saints.  And we tend to mean two things by this in the Presbyterian Church.  The first is those people who have gone ahead of us whom we honor.  When I think of the saints in my life, the people in my life whom I deeply respect, admire, look up to; they are, consistently, people who are willing to do the hard internal work of really looking at themselves, their core beliefs, and all of their actions throughout their lives that have come out of those core beliefs.  They are willing to turn, or go a different direction, when they have found that their most sacredly held beliefs have led them astray.  They are people, like Jack, who are willing to adjust, change, and go a different way.

               The other thing we in the church mean by “the saints” is all those whom we have cared about and valued who have passed before us.  Because we believe and understand that they are all children of God, all loved by God, all valued by God.  They have added to our lives, not always in a good way, but always they have added something, something we could learn from if not rest in.  They have made us who we are, they have made the church what it is.  They have struggled and suffered as we now struggle at times and suffer at times.  And their legacy informs ours and who we are and who we are becoming.  We remember them in all their humanity, in all their ideas that we now know to have been false, all their core beliefs that we have now come to see were flawed and limited.  Our remembering them can help us to be gentle with our own flawed beliefs.  Our remembering the building of the temple and the hope they placed in this building that was destroyed can help us to have compassion for those who remain stuck in their ideas, but also for ourselves when we are struggling to change.  It can also give us the courage to change: Remembering can give us the courage and strength to be willing to change our ideas when they are challenged. 

               So, on this All Saints Day, I call you to remember.  Remember a temple people thought housed God.  Remember that it fell.  Remember that the people had to choose how to respond when their core beliefs, their sacred cows, were destroyed.  Remember the saints we have known and their core beliefs that were challenged or shattered during their life times or afterwards.  And then remember to be gentle with yourself when you are faced with new information.  You have choices about how to respond.  Will we grow?  Will we learn?  Growing and learning will make our lives easier.  But know this good news: that even when we don’t, when we cannot stretch or cannot grow, God will still love us, hold us, and carry us into tomorrow.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

"Interesting" Attitudes from Volunteer Coordinators...

     As I've done my usual volunteer activities at various places over the last month, I was struck with a weird sense that at several of these places, I was meeting the same person with different faces, and it was a person I thought very ill-fitted for the job of managing volunteers.  To be more specific, these are people who seem extremely controlling of the people they are in the position to oversee.  Keeping in mind that the people who are coming to work for them are volunteers donating their time for something they believe in, the managers overbearing, unkind, and extremely picky behavior could potentially chase off the people they need in order to provide the service.  So I've found myself thinking and reflecting a great deal this last month on what is really going on with these volunteer managers.

       To give specifics: I was helping prepare food at a place that serves the poorer community out here with daily meals (not going to name te place... not fair since they really do a wonderful service in the community).  One other woman and I were cutting vegetables for a salad, when the person who was in charge that day came over and was very, well, clear about the fact that she wanted the vegetables cut all uniform (whether they were carrots, tomatoes, cucumber, lettuce, radishes, bell peppers, onions, etc.) in these extremely precisely sized cubes.  Not only was this impossible for me, but I could not figure out why this was necessary.

         Finally, I just asked, "Why do all of these vegetables need to be exactly the same shape and size?"

        "Well, some of the guests don't have teeth."  I stared down at the vegetables.  That didn't actually answer the question for me.  There was no way that someone without teeth was going to be able to handle a carrot of any shape or size, and I thought that if all the vegetables were exactly this same cubed size and shape, it actually might be harder on the guest to pick the carrots out.  I did not voice this.  I was just baffled.  Well, I tried to do my best to produce the cuts she wanted, but again, I was just simply not gifted in this cubed cutting thing and eventually she came over and recut everything that both I and the other woman who was also trying her best but not meeting the manager's standards, had done.

         Okay.  That's fine.  Except I probably will not volunteer to cut vegetables again when she is in charge.  I don't need to waste my time if it's going to be redone anyway.  And I continue to think her extremism around this was actually not helping in the way she believed it would.

        Second scenario: also a place our church volunteers each month.  This time it was a ministry in which guests are offered multiple services.  They come to wash their clothes (which the serving churches pay for), they are served a hot meal, sometimes someone comes to offer hair cuts, and the guests can pick up all kinds of clothing and packaged foods to take home with them, whatever and wherever home may be.  My encounter here was with a different woman, but I've run into her each time we've gone to this location.  The first time I met her, we had a huge bin full of socks.  I know that socks are often one of the clothing items most needed by our homeless population, so I was happily putting the socks out on the table with the other clothing items for folk to pick up.  This woman came over to me, "Oh no!  We don't put the socks out.  We don't give them socks unless they ask for them.  And if they ask, give them only one pair each!"

         Again, ever inquisitive me, "Why?"

         "Well, because if we put out more, they would take them."

          Well, yes, isn't that the point?  I'm confused.  I thought we were trying to get rid of the donated items.  They aren't for us, we don't need them.  The point of this is to give away the things that are needed, isn't it?

          Then the last time I went, I was standing at the packaged foods table, putting out cans and pastas and other foods.  One man came over and asked if I had any Vienna Sausages.  As it turned out, there were a couple cans, so I found them and gave them to him.  At that point the same woman bustled over, "Don't give a person more than one can!"

          Undoubtedly, she has gotten used to my responses every time she gives me an order, but none the less, I persist, "Why?"

         "Well, it's greedy on their part!"  Again, I just found myself confused.  We hand out the food to folk over the course of a few hours.  But the number of people who approach the table asking for canned foods is not huge.  Probably one person every 5-10 minutes.  There were piles and piles of canned foods behind me waiting to be put out.  So why are we not willing to give a person two cans of something he specifically requested?  There obviously was more than enough, not a high demand.  And equally obviously, the food has been donated for the purpose of being given away.  I have no doubt the man who asked for the sausages will not waste them.  So why be stingy in this way?

           I know that I am part of the issue here.  First of all, I don't like being bossed around, micromanaged, snipped at, yelled at, when I am trying to do my best.  Secondly, I have my own opinions about how people should be served, and I believe we should work from a place of abundance rather than scarcity. That naturally will mean that I will lean towards giving more when others might be working from a more fearful, "we might not have enough" thinking.  Third, while hearing and acknowledging the woman at the second place, I also choose to ignore her mandates and continue to give from that place of abundance, so in this way, I cause her to "keep a wary eye on me."

          But I also see that this personality, the one who micromanages the volunteers, keeps showing up at so many of these places.  I've given you two examples.  But I have seen this same personality type at many of the places I've volunteered, often controlling, and even bullying, the volunteers. I've also heard my parishioners and friends talking about this personality at other volunteer places they have served, not just here but in every state where I've lived. So it also causes me to think.  Why does this personality keep showing up in these volunteer locations?  Why does the volunteer manager behave in this controlling, stingy, rigid, legalistic and overbearing way with consistency?  Why does she insist on asserting her authority in this bossy and unkind way?

          I think there are several things going on. One is a simple need for these people to claim power somewhere in their lives.  Perhaps these service locations are the only place where they have authority and so they take it, assert it, insist on making it known.  Maybe they are worried they will lose their position of power and authority if they don't assert it in an aggressive way.  Perhaps they went into the position for the very reason that they needed a place where they had some power or control.  Perhaps they are used to being shut down in other places and they are simply reflecting how other people have managed them in other situations.  

         Second, I think many people do work from a more legalistic and structured world view than I am used to, and they need those rules and that structure to be in place where they lead. There may not even be real reasons anymore for the rules that are in place, but maybe at one time there were.  And those rules have remained even when the reasons behind them no longer exist.  They give the person a sense of comfort, knowing the structure, knowing the boundaries.  This may especially be important when there are people who are not always behaving in socially acceptable ways.  Sometimes those we serve act unpredictably and so having rules may offer order in the midst of a bit of chaos.

        I'm sure there are other reasons as well.  

        I am grateful to the many people who continue to serve even when pushed around, because they believe deeply in the work they are doing.  I know my own parishioners, while they find the behavior of these managers irritating and occasionally annoying, will not be put off by it.  They believe in what they are doing, they have a strong sense of their own self-worth and will treat any belittling or controlling behavior as an issue of the person acting this way, rather than a slight to them.  I am grateful for that response.  I wish everyone had it.  

          I continue to worry that this managerial stance will turn some folk away from service who would otherwise have an opportunity to learn, to grow, to serve, and to be part of something bigger than themselves.  But I realize I don't have control over that.  So I will do my part to challenge rules that I feel are unjust, to offer a different perspective when I think the rule being enforced is failing to take into account the real situation.  I will also try to support those I see being bullied.  But mostly, I am using the experiences I've had volunteering to look at my own behavior when I am leading volunteers, and to strive to offer a different model for how to lead: not one of micromanaging and mistrusting my volunteers, but one of trust, openness, flexibility and giving a lot of latitude.  I believe in the gifts of my folk, their discernment and their ability to see and do ministry with grace and love.  I believe the Holy Spirit works through them, their vision, and their efforts even when they have a different world view and different way of doing things than my own.  Being the volunteer (rather than the manger) is a good reminder to me of what I choose not to present, not to model, not to be in my leadership positions. And for that I am deeply grateful.