HAVE FAITH IN THE  SEED

A Sermon by Rev. Robert M. Eddy, M.Div.

Delivered at

The First Unitarian Church

Denver, Colorado

23 March 1995

 

On Friday morning, Virginia Culver, religion editor at the Denver Post called to ask if I was going to change my topic in response to the bombing in Oklahoma City.   I said, “No, the message I planned to give is needed more than ever but I certainly will relate it to what we’ve been experiencing since Wednesday.”  What is that message?  You heard it in the reading that preceeded our silent meditation.   “Have faith in the seed.”       

 

Like you, I’m still reeling from images  of the slaughter in Oklahoma. When the bombing was first reported we were assaulted once more with the realization that in this global village, there is no longer any place to hide.  Truly we live in an interdependent web and it seems there’s a bloody great spider stalking us.  The great oceans that once made “isolationism”  a feasible if not a moral policy now count for little or nothing.  All the walls are down.  John Donne  was prophetic, “No Man is an Island.”  We are all linked in this global villiage.  

It’s not yet possible to send bombs by fax, but it is possible to disrupt the normal flow of civilized life by launching viruses on the internet.  Hundreds were killed Wednesday by a car bomb in Oklahoma City. Thousands could be killed by Nerve Gas in Tokyo tomorrow;  perhaps  millions could  be  killed by a suitcase sized atomic  bomb in New York.  That is what I hope Americans realized when they thought the perpetrators were Fundamentalist Muslims or some other foreign villans.   “It’s them, again.”  I heard myself saying.  How can we protect ourselves against terrorists?   Though it now appears it was Americans who did the bombing,  and not to terrorize but for revenge, we would be wise to remember the disturbing insight we had the first day. There’s is no place to hide.            

I’ve been praying – as much as a Secular Humanist can pray – for decades,  that “globalism” would prevail over “nationalism” – but the globalization of  terrorism is not what I had in mind.   Still, though my  “anxiety quotient” is elevated this week,  and  though I  long for the parochial illusions of my  grandparents, still, I  was able to  “sing the joy of living” earlier this morning.  I hope you could sing it   too.  And I hope you can believe with Malvina Reynolds that the grass and the truth will prevail over the concrete and the lies.  I hope you rejoice that today, twenty five years and one day after the first earth day,  more and more people are coming to see humanity as “one people living on one planet with one destiny.”          

 

That’s reason to have hope on this national day of mourning.  The fecund earth, which the Greeks called Gaea,  seen  in traditional Christianity as the source and theater of sin, has been elevated in the last twenty five years -by some consciously and others unconsciously – to the status of Divinity. For many religious persons, including many who call themselves Christians,  “The Goddess” now stands beside or in the place of  the stern patriarchal god of  the ancient Hebrews.  The religion of Wicca, from which the English word Witchcraft is derived, is enjoying a revival – both as a separate movement and as a powerful influence within the dominant religions of the world.    In the reading I originally scheduled this morning , Timothy Weiskel pointed out that

  “a theology is, after all, a particular theory of human limits in creation.  Each epoch and culture has had its own functional theology appropriate to its own experience of human limitation.”          I was this morning going to talk about the transformation,  of traditional Patri-archal, life rejecting Christianity into Matri-filial, life affirming Christianity.   I was going to introduce you to the most perceptive and creative of those Theologians, Matthew Fox.   But that must wait for another time. Those of you who are free during the day might want to sign up for the “Sprituality 101” class I’ll be leading Thursday mornings at 10:30 beginning Aplril 27th.  Or you can examine the books “Origional Blessing” and “Coming of the Cosmic Christ”  and magazine which I’ll leave on the platform after the service ends.     

       For today, we must deal with the rage and grief and terror we have all experienced as we identified with the victims, survivors, relatives and friends of the dead and wounded in Oklahoma City.

I think the experience we’ve shared via the media has done four things. 

First it has overloaded our capacity for denial.   The very media that led us to the realization that we are “one planet, one people, one destiny” had contributed to the illusion that we could somehow wall off ourselves in privileged enclaves: like the Borgias of Midieval Italy.   The notion that we can sit in our suburban, American homes and not be effected by the events in the middle east was  shattered  once more as it was briefly when a bomb exploded in the basement of the World trade center.  Men who believe the means justifies the end will resort to terror when that seems an effective weapon.  And they will inflict that terror on those they perceive to be their enemies.  I hope that the realization that this world is real – not just “virtual reality” but bloody, anguished-mother-screaming reality.  It is bodies shredded and decapatitated and crushed into unrecognizable remains – no longer even corpses.   I know this shocks you, brings back images that some readers of the Denver Post object to being printed.  But we need to escape the pathology of thinking the pictures we see are somehow mere images. They are the visual cries of the dead and dying, demanding that we wake up and face reality.  The almost lascivious attention the t.v.cameras pay to the gory facts may be essential to wake up.  Those people in are just like us with children, parents, friends ; with dreams, fears, virtues and vices : just like us.  Just like the   Japanese the Koreans, the Vietnamese  we gleefully watched being blown to bits not so many years ago. When we did it in Iraq we “sanitized” the media coverge so we could imagine that only buildings and vehicle were destroyed.   Let us hope that is one thing we’ve learned from this experience. 

A second thing we’ve  learned, I hope, what Pogo pointed out so long ago: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” 

 One of the N.B.C. reporters in Oklahoman reported his own and fellow Okies dismay when they discovered that “the bomber was one of us.”   I sensed a wave of disappointment, when it was discovered that the Jordanian-American  detained by the British was not involved.  We wanted the enemy to be “them”.  Those others.  Those not quite as human as us.  “Them”

The enemy is never “them”.  The enemy is us, and the more we deny the evil in ourselves and project it onto  the stranger, the more that evil will express itself in our own actions.  We must acknowledge that we too, as a Nation and as individuals are capable of great evil.  That is the second lesson.         

We’ve also learned, I think, the power of the “rage to punish.”  It seems to be a human reflex to want to inflict pain on those we think have harmed us or someone we love.  It is understandable.  But if what we now suspect is true, Timothy McVeigh, the man now accused of the bombing,  saw himself as a divine avenger.  He was not bombing children, and women and men.  He was  punishing “the government” for taking away the liberty of those he considered “his countrymen.”   We can say that’s insane.  Perhaps it is, but if so it is  not  alien to any one of us.           The rage to punish is all too prevalent in America today.  Just listen to the   mean spiritedness of the “ditto heads” who cheer on Rush Limbaugh.  Listen to his only slightly less deplorable look alike, Newt Gingrich.   Even President Clinton, whose behavior has mostly been exemplary, pandered to this rage by reassuring the nation Friday, and the  nation’s children yesterday, that the perpetrators will be caught and punished, severely.  That may comfort  children. It does not comfort me, though I sincerely applaud everything else Mr. and Mrs. Clilnton said to children and parents yesterday.           

Nearly two thousand years ago Jesus taught his desiples “love your enemies; do good to those who spitefully use you.”   Yet most of those who claim to follow Jesus are crying  “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life.”   That is not the way to go.   What is the way to go?  One of the children at the White House    Saturday, when asked what children could do to help, reported that her pre-school group had planted trees in memory of the children who had been murdered.  That is the way we must go .   Where there is hatred we must plant love.  Where there is death, we must nourish life.            When I came to Denver twenty-two years ago, I called myself a Vitalist:  A believer in the ultimate victory of the forces of growth over the forces of decay; life over death. I still am.   I suspect I was predisposed  to Vitalism by reading Emerson and Thoreau in my teens.  then, in 1951, the Methodist Chaplain at Syracuse University gave me a book of poems by a  young Quaker economist, Kenneth Boulding that put that faith it in a nutshell.     I think the poem has a message for us this morning.  It was written during the darkest days of World War II.  

 “How to Endure, when all around us die  Nations and gracious cities, homes and men,   And the sweet earth is made a filthy den   Beneath whose roof black, belching vultures fly. 

How to endure the darkness, when the sky  Is totally eclipsed by evil;

 when  Foul grinning Chaos spreads its reign again  And all good things in senseless ruin lie. 

Must we be hard as stone? 

It wears to dust. 

As stiff as oaks? 

But they untimely break. 

As pitiless as steel? 

It turns to rust, 

And Time from Pyramids will ruins make. 

In violence, decay, starvation, need, 

What can endure ?                

Only the living Seed.    

Kenneth Boulding, The Nailer Sonnets, Pendel Hill .  ~1944 

That’s my answer to the bombing.

In violence, decay, starvation, need,

what can endure ?      

Only the living Seed.   

Nurture that living seed !

Please  join me in some moments of silent meditation:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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