Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
September 16, 2018
Unitarian Society of New Haven
Reading: The Ways I Kept Myself Alive Today by Hanif Abdurraquib
Sermon:
My daughter, Arden, got her first bee stings this week. Yes, stings, plural. She has given me permission to share this story with you. We got a note from Arden’s school on Thursday that during a walk in the park, someone stepped on a yellow jacket nest and, in a split second, twelve kindergarteners were screaming and crying and running away from a swarm of bees. The bees followed them back to school and into the classroom. They were in their hair and in their clothes.
Some kids were stung up to five times.
When I arrived to pick her up, I was greeted by Arden and her friends, all showing me their beestings. And their drawings of the attack of the bees. And the “act of kindness” award they had all received for being so careful and gentle with each other during the attack and in its aftermath.
When life stung, these kids found the honey.
Each day we make choices that allow us to find the honey in spite of the stings.
Each day we make choices that keep us alive, keep us engaged.
Each day we make choices that provide us a vision
for the future despite the present, despite the past.
“The ways I kept myself alive today,” the poet begins his list. No casual statement from a black man with a Muslim name who, despite his complex relationship with the faith in which he was raised, still fasts each year on Ramadan.[i][ii]
No casual statement for this man in a society bent on his destruction and the destruction of people like him for generations. In so many ways, America, herself, was built upon the fear, control, and destruction of people who look and pray and live like Abdurriquib.
It is in part true that there is no comparison of this poet’s life – his staying alive in this society –
to the lives of those of us who live in white skin, those of us whom the social structure does not conspire to kill. And so we listen with humility. We listen with respect and solidarity. We understand the profundity of his words, the powerful defiance inherent in them, the careful attention to caring for one’s self required for this man – and so many like him – to literally stay alive each day.
And, as we listen, we hear also what we share in common. We consider the ways we are all working to survive. This poem invites us to think about the choices we make every day. The food we choose to consume, the ways we choose to move our body – or not – depending on what hurts. We think about what we send into the “digital wind.” “Is it ‘I love you’? Perhaps, if we are honest, not always.
We think about the times we have closed our eyes, or not watched all-together the video of the murder, not listened to the cries of children at the border ripped from their parents’ arms, the times we have turned off the news to keep ourselves from despair. We think about the choices we make to keep ourselves – our souls and our hearts and sometimes our bodies – intact each day.
And the question is: how do we close our eyes without closing our hearts? How do we not absorb the pain of the world while staying engaged, resisting where we can, working in solidarity with others, maintaining our commitment to care?
How do we take a lesson from the poet and turn birds, startled at the crack of a gunshot,
into bearers of loved ones to a “new and cleaner place”?
It’s a powerful image. A vision, I think, for how we might, each of us, might head into this new year.
~
I love marking the new year in this season. The leaves are just beginning to turn. If not the days, the nights, at least, have become somewhat cooler. Folks are back to school and back to the weekly routine. There is a chance we will slip back into our regular ways of doing things, and then, just in-time, the Jewish High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur invite us to take stock, to look at the year that has just past, to think of the year ahead, to wish each other a sweet new year, to atone for the ways we have not lived according to our values, to forgive ourselves and each other, to begin again.
Today, we find ourselves in the middle of these two holidays, a time known as the Days of Awe.
It is a time set aside in the year for repentance. Jewish tradition tells us that the Book of Life is opened on Rosh Hashanah and the names of the righteous are inscribed in it. The book is sealed on Yom Kippur but the prayers, the good deeds, and the repentance that one does during the time in-between the holidays can alter one’s fate for the year ahead.[iii]
Many of us balk at the idea of a God who divides people into the righteous and the damned. And still, we want to live lives that are considered righteous. Still, we hope that we have done right by those we love and those who love us. Still, we try to live in this broken world according to our values. Still, we work to be in right relationship with members of our family, our colleagues, our fellow congregants, even strangers we might meet on the street. And so this occasion of repentance and atonement may feel foreign to some of us, and we may not like the idea of God determining our fate annually (or at all), and still, I believe that when we take the opportunity to engage a practice of review and repentance, we free ourselves to cast a vision of the year ahead:
what do we wish for ourselves and others? How we imagine we might engage the world differently than we have in the year just past?
~
A vision of the year ahead. Can you picture it? What do you see?
The Bible is full of visions. The ancient Hebrew prophets have visions left and right: visions of God’s vengeance, visions of a people’s redemption, visions – positive and negative – of the end of times.
This year, as I was meditating on our theme of vision and the High Holy Days, the vision that kept emerging for me is that of the prophet Ezekiel’s and the Valley of the Dry Bones. Do you know this story?
Ezekiel is shown by God a valley filled with the decimated skeletons of his people. It is literally a massive pile of dry bones. These bones, God says, “are the whole house of Israel.” And God asks Ezekiel, “Mortal, can these bones live?” The 6th century prophet Ezekiel wrote to hold his people together. Israel had been decimated by the conquering army of the Babylonians and carted off to a foreign land.
Captives in Babylon, the people were cut off from their homeland for generations; they were as disconnected as a valley filled with bones. And they were terrified that they would never leave that valley. Ezekiel does not seem to see much hope either. Can these bones live? Ezekiel seems to want to say, “probably not.”
And then the character of God surprises Ezekiel. The prophet is told that he, the human, is to revive the bones. He is commanded to speak, and as he does, bodies begin to take shape. The bones rattle against each other, sinew appears and then flesh and then skin, but there is no breath.
A little Hebrew word study makes this even more interesting. You’ve heard me say before that the word for breath in Hebrew, ruach, is the same as the word for spirit, and for wind. So to give these bodies breath, to fill the people with spirit, Ezekiel must speak again. He calls to the Four Winds, and the breath of life comes from all the reaches of the world to restore a people in despair. They rise as a great multitude, transformed. “The breath came into them,” Ezekiel writes, “and they lived and stood on their feet.”
Can these bones live? Yes, they can.
A valley of bones transformed into living, breathing people, people filled again with hope.
Birds flying from treetops, carrying loved ones to a new and cleaner place.
I ask you again, what is your vision for the new year?
What choices will you make to keep you and those you love alive and open to life’s gifts?
What words will you speak to offer hope to a despairing people?
What do you wish for yourselves, for us, for our nation?
~
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “visionary” as one who looks to the future with imagination or wisdom. I believe we can all be visionaries.
What does it take to be a visionary? It takes freeing ourselves from the confines of the past, freeing ourselves from regrets and should haves, freeing ourselves from the “this-is-the-way-we’ve-always-done-its.”
I love the story of a family that always cut both ends off the Christmas ham. A lot went to waste, but folks insisted that this was the way they had always done it. Finally, someone asked grandma why the tradition was to cut so much off the ham. “Well,” she said, “when we first came to this country, we lived in a tiny apartment in New York. The stove was so small and our pan was so small, the full ham didn’t fit. I had to cut both ends off. I guess we never stopped.”
This is nothing against tradition. Tradition and traditions are important, vital in so many ways, but when we become beholden to traditions that have lost their usefulness or to ways of doing things that are less than effective or even counterproductive, we lose our ability to envision something new.
This is true for us as individuals. It is true for us as a gathered community, a congregation.
It is true for us as a nation.
~
In the year that lies ahead, I wish for us the boldness to claim and proclaim a radical vision that counteracts the narrative so pervasive in our national discourse – that there is not enough –
not enough jobs, not enough safety, not enough good will, not enough room.
Might it be our vision to make choices each day that enable our own survival and the survival and flourishing of others?
Might it be our vision to leave our corner of the world a little better than we found it?
Might it be our vision to fill up our lungs with the breath of spirit and revive our people – all our people – with a lasting hope?
Might it be our vision to create with our partners a world in which black and brown lives matter, a world in which our children understand themselves as no better or no less than their playmates of a different color, a world in which all people are celebrated and honored for the fullness of their identities and the richness of their humanity.
This year at USNH, we have myriad opportunities to explore and engage these visions.
From worship services to small group ministries, book discussions, to a new anti-racism curriculum called Beloved Conversations[iv] coming this spring, consciousness-raising films and opportunities to serve others through our food ministries and turning USNH into an emergency shelter for a week this winter. Opportunities to work with children and youth, opportunities to help refugees and immigrants, to work for safer communities and be good stewards of our planet.[v]
And while we do all these things and more, while we hone our individual visions and think about how and why we engage together, I encourage us to continue to practice being visionary together. Your Board of Trustees and Management Team are thinking seriously about this;
we spent all day yesterday in retreat thinking and talking about our shared vision.
Your staff is thinking about this: about ways we can continue to live our values and widen our welcome, from reviewing our curricula and practices for places where white supremacy rears its head, to making resources and pronoun labels available in an effort to be more welcoming
to those who identify as transgender or gender non-conforming.
A guiding question as we think together about our shared vision is this: what difference do we want to make and for whom? What are we doing here? Why does it matter? And For whom does it matter?
This new year, let us look to the future with imagination and our collective wisdom.
Let us take with us traditions and rituals that feed us and help us to stay alive each day.
Let us leave behind guilt and regrets and old patterns that no longer serve us.
Let us look toward the new year; may it be sweet.
[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanif_Abdurraqib
[ii] https://www.colorlines.com/articles/read-writer-hanif-abdurraqib-on-his-enduring-connection-ramadan
[iii] https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/book-of-life/
[iv] http://www.meadville.edu/fahs-collaborative/fahs-curriculum-catalogue/beloved-conversations/
[v] To get involved in any of these projects at USNH, email office@usnh.org for information and contacts. Learn more at www.usnh.org.