“Kangaroo Theology”

A Sermon by Rev. John Gibbons

delivered on Sunday, September 16, 2001

at The First Parish in Bedford

 Opening Words:

 “…friends, I come to you starved for all you have to give…

We talk of first things and last things…

No one comes to this house who is not changed.

I meet no one here who does not change me.” 

                                                            May Sarton

 Readings:

The people will live on.

They will be tricked and sold and again sold

And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,

The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,

You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.

The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas….

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.

There are women and men who cannot be bought.

The fireborn are at home in fire.

The stars make no noise.

You can't hinder the wind from blowing.

Time is a great teacher.

Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief

The people march.

In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march:

"Where to?  What next?"

                                                             from "The People, Yes," by Carl Sandburg, adapted

The quality of these trees, green height; of the sky, shining, of water, a clear flow; of the rock, hardness

And reticence: each is noble in its quality.  The love of freedom has been the quality of Western man

There is a stubborn torch that flames from Marathon to Concord, its dangerous beauty binding three ages

Into one time; the waves of barbarism and civilization have eclipsed but have never quenched it.

For the Greeks the love of beauty, for Rome of ruling; for the present age the passionate love of discovery;

But in one noble passion we are one; and Washington, Luther, Tacitus, Aeschylus, one kind man.

And you, America, that passion made you.  You were not born to prosperity, you were born to love freedom.

You did not say "en masse," you said "independence."

But we cannot have all the luxuries and freedom also.

Freedom is poor and laborious; that torch is not safe but hungry, and often requires blood for its fuel.

You will tame it against it burn too clearly, you will hood it like a kept hawk, you will perch it on the wrist of Caesar.

But keep the tradition, conserve the forms, the observances, keep the spot sore.  Be great, carve deep your heel-marks.

The states of the next age will no doubt remember you, and edge their love of freedom with contempt of luxury.

                                                                                  "Shine, Republic," by Robinson Jeffers

Never does hatred cease by hating in return;

Only through love can hatred come to an end.

Victory breeds hatred;

The conquered dwell in sorrow and resentment.

They who give up all thought of victory and defeat,

May be calm and live happily at peace.

Let us overcome violence by gentleness;

Let us overcome evil by good;

Let us overcome the miserly by liberality;

Let us overcome the liar by truth.

                                                                                                       -- from the Dhammapada

Save us from weak resignation to violence, teach us that restraint is the highest expression of power, that thoughtfulness and tenderness are the mark of the strong;

Help us to love our enemies, not by countenancing their sins, but remembering our own.

                                                                                                                 -- Christian Prayer

Save us, compassionate Lord, from our folly, by your wisdom, from our arrogance, by your forgiving love, and from our greed by your infinite bounty, and from our insecurity by your healing power.

                                                                                                                     -- Muslim Prayer

The young dead soldiers do not speak.

Nevertheless they are heard in the still houses: who has not heard them?

They have a silence that speaks for them at night and when the clock counts.

They say: We were young.  We have died.  Remember us.

They say: We have done what we could but until it is finished it is not done.

They say: We have given our lives but until it is finished no one can know what our lives gave.

They say: Our deaths are not ours; they are yours; they will mean what you make them.

They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say; it is you who must say this.

They say: We leave you our deaths.  Give them their meaning.

We were young, they say.  We have died.  Remember us.

                                                           -- "The Young Dead Soldiers," by Archibald MacLeish

Don't go to the anger forest where everyone howls, screams, shouts, and

throws things and makes a mess.

Don't cross the bridge of fears unless you have no choice.

Do not go to the worry roads unless they are surrounding you.

For now is a laughter day filled with joy and glee.

So don't waste the happy days on those bad roads, for now is a sunny day.

                                                     -- Pamela Weidman, Age 7

Reading from Betty Kornitzer (Student Minister)

 The heavy shadow of the threat of war is upon us, and as we search our hearts, we find we are at war within ourselves.  We recognize the failure of the things upon which we have pinned our hopes.  We recognize the hopes that have not deserted us, even in these strange times loaded with stranger events, and we long for some authentic word that will speak peace to our hearts and peace to the nations of the earth. 

 Oh, God, we do not know how to pray to Thee.  We do not know what we have the right to say to Thee. We do not even know how we feel. All we know is that our peace is choked by the threat that lingers menacingly over all our waking hours, making our sleep fretful and unrewarding.  Give unto us guidance.  Give unto those in whose hands rests the immediate decision guidance. Tame the stupidity and the greed and the avarice and the fear out of the souls of the peoples of the earth, that Thy purposes may not be thwarted and frustrated because of the blindness in our thoughts and the fear in our hearts.

 Creator of life, Sustainer of the generations of (humanity), leave us not alone, leave us not alone.

                                                                               From Centering Moment by Howard Thurman

Sermon:

 "Kangaroo Theology"

 Sometime before September 11, I announced in our newsletter that my topic today would be "Kangaroo Theology;" and if you think I have been tempted to change that topic you would be correct.  But on the other hand it had also been my intent to say something about the fundamentals of our faith for too often, I fear, we are all a little tongue-tied when it comes to saying who we are and what we stand for as a community of faith. If, however, the fundamentals of our faith are of genuine worth in the living of our daily lives -- as we do claim and as I truly believe -- then I think Kangaroo Theology may have merit even and perhaps especially in the horrific circumstances we are in today.

I am told that kangaroo is an aboriginal name for "I don't know."  When someone asked, "What are those things hopping around the countryside?" Australian aborigines would shrug and say "Kangaroo."  Hence the name.

If ever there was a week for experts, pundits, know-it-alls and chattering classes, this has been it.  So much commentary, so many opinions, so much however-heartfelt…noise.  Too much information and too little wisdom.  We can't get away from it -- in the newspaper, on the TV, in the grocery store, flags flying from car antennas, hearts worn on sleeves, preachers talking about it in church.  We can't get away from it and yet we are not ready to move on. 

I've been reading a fascinating collection of true stories, part of the National Story Project, including one by a woman who happened upon a gruesome car wreck.  She tells her story but then laments, "There is no lesson, no moral, barely even an ending.  You want to tell it, hear it told, but you don't know why." (I Thought My Father Was God, edited by Paul Auster)

A colleague from New York tells me she's just not ready for lessons, morals or pontification about last Tuesday's events -- she can't yet hear herself think, she says. We still don't know how many are missing or dead -- let alone their names.  We are still deep in shock and grief.  We don't know what this will mean to us this week or next or for the rest of our lives or our children's lives.  At this stage of the nightmare, we hardly know anything.  At this stage, I think, there is no lesson no moral, barely even an ending.  We want to tell it; we want to hear it told; but we don't know why. 

"I don't know" is good theology.  Pascal said that true eloquence is the abstention from all eloquence.  In the 27^th chapter of Matthew, verses 12-14, Jesus once responded not a word.

Our culture and Unitarian Universalism, our talkative opinionated faith tradition in particular, are not known for humility; and yet if we are truthful, our certain knowledge is quite limited.  When the Delphic oracle named Socrates the wisest man in all Greece, Socrates said, "…it must be because I alone of all the Greeks know that I know nothing."  Socrates remains an ideal and insufficiently-imitated role model for religious liberals.

In our present circumstance, some have already concluded who is responsible for the terror of last Tuesday.  Some wish for America to now be an avenging angel.  Ninety-four percent of Americans, according to one poll, wish quick, massive and decisive military retaliation.  Seventy-one percent, according to a Newsweek poll, favor such retaliation even if it means massive civilian casualties.  I say no more innocent victims.

Some -- like those who attacked a Sikh businessman on the streets of Boston last week -- know (or think they know) that the perpetrators are, of course, people who wear turbans.  Some -- like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson -- choose to point their fingers at "pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians…the ACLU, People for the American Way, and all who have tried to secularize America" as the ones who are responsible for terrorism -- a stance so preposterous that President Bush, who seems remarkably confident of his abilities to wage war, has called inappropriate.

Some others -- like every member of Congress save one -- feel sufficiently confident as to authorize the expenditure of 40 billion dollars to seek and destroy an as-yet unknown enemy.  They feel such confidence despite our track record of, in the immediate aftermath of terrorism, misidentifying the perpetrators of the Atlanta Olympic bombing of 1986, the World Trade Center Bombing of 1993, and the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. The truth is that we as a culture know very little about anyone other than ourselves (and that we know ourselves is itself in some doubt).  Our knowledge of Arab culture or Islam -- or of the anti-American motivations of people and groups such as Usama Bin Laden's Qa'ida -- is partial, distorted, or nonexistent.

I didn't see it but I'm told that on Friday Peter Jennings hosted a remarkable meeting with children, young people and some of the so-called experts.  At the end of the program, a very small child, perhaps seven years old, said she had a question and no one anticipated how profound her question would be.  Quietly, she asked, "Why do these people hate us?"  And that is a question that has, like most questions, an answer; but it is not a simple or an easy answer nor one which most of us yet know as well as we must -- if we are to be truthful.  It was a question which gave the experts pause, as should these events give us pause. 

Karl Weintraub of the University of Chicago has suggested that humans possess an as-yet-undiscovered organ he calls "the conclusion glands."  He says they secrete a powerful hormone that makes us jump to conclusions that fly in the face of reality just because we're afraid to pass through the phase of "not knowing."

I suggest that we would benefit from staying a while longer in this phase of not knowing.  Perhaps indeed it would be most respectful to all who have died and suffered for us to stay a while longer in this odd eerie reflective annoying painful agonizing overwhelming and honest phase of not knowing. 

What horror it takes for American culture to shut up for a while: to silence our obsessions with ball games, scandals, crime, fashion, entertainment, infotainment, "reality programming," stock markets, and "Is that your final answer?"  We do not yet know the final answer to the million dollar question and we would be fools to guess. 

It is a remarkable thing for (at least some elements of) American culture to be as quiet, as reflective, as caringly attentive to one another, and as humbly un-cocky as we have been for the last five days, and -- I hope this is not misinterpreted as disrespectful to the dead -- I am not anxious to return to what we once called "normalcy."

Wislawa Szymborska devoted her 1996 Nobel Prize acceptance address to the meaning of these three words, "I don't know."

Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know.  That little phrase "I don't know" is small, but it flies on mighty wings.  It expands our lives to include spaces within us as well as the outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended.  If Isaac Newton had never said to himself, "I don't know," the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones, and at best he would have stopped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto.  Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself, "I don't know," she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families and ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job.  But she kept on saying, "I don't know," and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

As I said at the outset, I am concerned about our ability to articulate our faith, to "say what we mean and mean what we say."  By the way, I've been trying to simplify my convoluted verbosity and create a rhebus of our approach to religion…Do you remember what a rhebus is?  A rhebus is composed of pictures that substitute for words.  In rhebus form, therefore, I suggest that our approach to religion is to nurture in each of us a heart of compassion.  We also aspire to be an oasis from stress and overwork -- a place where we have opportunity to think, reflect and consider the deeper issues of our lives.  We are as well a bridge from that which is private to that which is public.  And finally, shining out from this cherished Common, we are a beacon of religiously liberal values.  The rhebus, therefore, is one of a heart, an oasis, a bridge, and a beacon.  Perhaps that rhebus will be of some use the next time you are asked what it is that First Parish stands for.

To focus upon but two of those pictures, in the aftermath of Tuesday we are called -- like all people of all faiths and people of no faith whatsoever - to have a heart of compassion.  As I watched on live television the tower of the second World Trade Center collapse, all I thought were the words said by the radio announcer when the Hindenburg exploded, "Oh, the humanity."  Even if all we can do is to cry with one another, we must do all we can do for all who are suffering.  We must put some money in the firefighters' boots or find other ways of helping those whose suffering is unimaginable.  Oh, the humanity.

Quite soon, however, sooner perhaps than we may wish, we must also cross the bridge from our private lives to our public life.  And here, as well, I believe that we must resist our "conclusion gland."  How often we have heard the comparison of last Tuesday's events to those of Pearl Harbor, the precursor to the Second World War. 

Truthfully, I do believe that last Tuesday's events will be a defining moment in our history.  We shall live in its aftermath all our lives, and its after-shocks and effects will be incalculable.  Nonetheless, Whether the lives and the deaths of all who died last Tuesday "were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say; it is you who must say this." (from Archibald MacLeish's poem "The Young Dead Soldiers") 

Many now say that war is inevitable or that we are already at war.  To that simple word "inevitable," I must say "I don't know."  War -- with whom? Toward what end? At what price?  I, truthfully, don’t yet know.

I recall some motivational speaker who once spoke to a student assembly at Bedford High School.  Some famous jock, probably, though I can't recall his name.  He said that, when assaulted or insulted, he used to have but two responses: he'd either submit and take it, or he'd use his fists.  Slowly, from painful experience, he learned to develop other responses:  avoidance sometimes, compromise at other times, and the kind of street-smart cleverness that sometimes saves face, gets you out of trouble, and accomplishes your objectives at the same time.  He told his student audience that if you have two responses to attack, you need three.  If you have three, you need four.  You must ever expand your repertoire of response. 

America must do this also.  There has always been a tension between a jingoistic my-country-right-or-wrong, reward-my-friends-and-punish-my enemies, the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend type of response and a response which may lack the simplistic beauty of unquestioned patriotism but which is more nuanced, conditional, problematic and ultimately more true to the American dream. 

I urge us to ponder the meaning of American democracy.  In this struggle, nothing less is at stake.  While we shall never condone unspeakable deeds and we shall bring perpetrators to severe justice, we must nonetheless -- at our peril -- attempt to understand the larger meaning of what's going on.

"You were not born to prosperity, you were born to love freedom," wrote Robinson Jeffers in his poem "Shine, Republic."  "You did not say 'en masse,' you said 'independence.'  But we cannot have all the luxuries and freedom also." 

The other day I saw a print ad for a Jeep Hummer.  It read:

You are Invincible.

You are All-Powerful.

You are Un-stoppable.

You Are on Your Way to the Grocery Store.

Can this arrogance, this unspeakable hubris stand?  Can a nation of only a few percent of the world's people persist in using the vast bulk of our planet's natural resources?  It was a good deal while it lasted, but I'm not sure -- in our own self interest -- if it remains a good deal at all.

Jeffers again said, "The states of the next age will no doubt remember you, and edge their love of freedom with contempt of luxury."

I do not believe that war is inevitable.  Neither do I believe that the American Way of Life as we now know it is either immortal or even altogether desirable.  I don't know.

Our theological forbears were frequently confronted by those who declared the inevitability of human damnation.  When a hurricane destroyed all the forests in this vicinity in the year 1815, the religious conservatives declared that it was God's judgment on the liberals who had ascended to pulpits such as this one in Bedford.  The religious liberals, however, weren't so sure: they said that with all the dead wood lying around, perhaps it meant that it was time to build a new meetinghouse and that they did in 1816.

If ever there was a time to question, to doubt, to be skeptical and to scrupulously think through the competing claims of

the fundamentalists, Islamic and Christian;

the governments, our own and every other;

the media manipulators;

the oil and banking interests;

the financial speculators;

the militant avengers and the peaceable appeasers;

the hesitant and the decisive;

that time is now!

Ours is not a deterministic faith but one which is pragmatic, resilient, skeptical, unconvinced, and nonetheless hopeful of human potential and agency to choose creative actions that promote our common good.  I need not lecture you that, in the present circumstance, our common good is not that of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts nor even of the United States of America but we are, indeed, part of a global interconnected and interdependent web of inevitable mutuality.  Beneficial outcomes are those and those only that benefit all.

I believe that, given a view longer than any of which we are inclined or perhaps even presently capable, the events of last Tuesday were inevitable in the maturing of America.  Not that we were pristine, untouched and unbloodied: that we have perpetuated centuries of terrorism remains an apt description of America's treatment of Native Americans, people of color, and in our great Civil War, of one another.  And yet, for the majority population, Tuesday's events were something altogether new.  I expect that, with me, you grew up with a mythology that our American shores were largely and forever unbloodied by foreign assaults.  Never again.

This week, I received an email from one of my Transylvanian Unitarian colleagues and friends, Kinga-Reka Székely who indeed preached one Christmas Eve from this pulpit. This week, Kinga said, "The whole world is stunned, we are stunned here too.  A dream crashed, broke.  We were happy to have brothers and sisters in a strong, free, happy country, which had no Mohac-es" (citing the Battle of Mohacs which the Hungarians unforgettably lost to the Turks in the year 1526).  America was a strong, free, happy country which had no Mohac-es, which was the ideal for every other country.  No more.

I believe, with Kinga, that a dream crashed and broke last week.  We as individuals and we, as a people, shall never be the same.  I further believe that we, the people, can choose our future.

And with Carl Sandburg, I repeat:

The people will live on.

The learning and blundering people will live on….

They will be tricked and sold and again sold

And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,

The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,

You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.

The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.

There are (women and) men who can't be bought.

The fireborn are at home in fire.

The stars make no noise.

You can't hinder the wind from blowing.

Time is a great teacher.

Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief

The people march.

In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps,

The people march:

"Where to?  What next?"

Kangaroo. 

Sermon preached by the Rev. John Gibbons at the First Parish in Bedford

Bedford, Massachusetts

16 September 2001