In the midst of a world marked by tragedy and beauty there must be those who bear witness against unnecessary destruction and who, with faith, stand and lead in freedom, with grace and power.

There must be those who speak honestly and do not avoid seeing what must be seen of sorrow and outrage, or tenderness, and wonder.

There must be those whose grief troubles the water while their voices sing and speak refreshed worlds.

There must be those whose exuberance rises with lovely energy that articulates earth's joys.

There must be those who are restless for respectful and loving companionship among human beings, whose presence invites people to be themselves without fear.

There must be those who gather with the congregation of remembrance and compassion, draw water from old wells, and walk the simple path of love for neighbor.

And, there must be communities of people who seek to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly God, who call on the strength of soul-force to heal, transform, and bless life.

There must be religious witness. ___________________________________________________________________________________

Prophetic Voices
Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, May 12, 2002

I want to begin this morning by offering again the words I shared with you in April's newsletter, from the prophetic voice of the great Jewish teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel. He wrote, "Others have considered history from the point of view of power, judging its course in terms of victory and defeat, of wealth and success. But the prophets look at history from the point of view of justice, judging its course in terms of righteousness and corruption, of compassion and violence…They proclaimed that might is not supreme, that the sword is an abomination, that violence is obscene."

The prophets of the Hebrew tradition were not soothsayers or predictors of the future, though they often warned about dangers they saw looming ahead. They were individuals who felt compelled to challenge the prevailing powers of their nation and turn their people toward a higher vision, a better way of living together. That kind of prophesy is not something that lived and died with the people of the Hebrew scriptures. The same passion for justice that impelled the ancient prophets is surely alive and well, and can speak out from any one of us.

We are living in troubled times, and it isn't easy to discern the way forward. There are wars raging away out there that we know implicate us -- wars in the name of our safety, or wars born of deep historical troubles to which we're bound, one way or another. They are far away from our beautiful springtime right now, but now far away from our minds or hearts. And as the impulse to war steadily moves forward, and as the rumblings move us ever closer to a new attack, especially against Iraq, it's hard to know how to think about what's happening.

There isn't much room anywhere around us for public debate, no chance for us to scratch our heads together, to think about other choices, to ponder the consequences. Many of our government representatives seem to feel the chill of a new sort of McCarthyism. If they raise a dissenting voice someone labels them 'unpatriotic' or 'soft on terrorism' -- the new version of the old accusation that one is 'soft on communism'.

There is also a strange sort of detachment afoot. Two weeks ago the Sunday New York Times reported in a matter-of-fact way on the plans being laid by our government for a massive new war against Iraq. It was almost chatty in tone, raising up the diplomatic and strategic constraints, but without any sense that there were profound human consequences at stake. There was no mention of the lives to be lost, the anguish to be endured -- or even a rationale for why. It is all very far away, and it takes an effort of will to bring it close, to look at it intently, to raise the questions that must be raised.

In times such as these, what does our faith require of us? I don't have the answer, at least not in the form of a neat prescription for logical next steps. Unitarian Universalists rarely speak with one voice, even on easy issues like how many windows in the new sanctuary. How much less can we expect consensus on issues of literally global impact?

But amid all our differences, I do believe our faith calls each one of us toward some common ground. Common ground does not imply identical answers to our questions, or shared conclusions that will lead us all to the same action. Common ground means only that we have a place to stand together. It means that we remain committed to the difficult and necessary task of discernment, together, and that across our differences in choice and action we will recognize one another still as community. And it does mean we ask the hard questions: What does our faith require of us?

I want to use the occasion of Mothers' Day think out loud a little, and invite more thinking from you, on what it means to search for the prophetic voice in our times. I choose Mothers' Day very deliberately because of its roots in a much earlier prophetic call for peace. It is sobering, even disheartening, to recall that Julia Ward Howe's ringing call for an end to war came before all the wars, all the suffering, of the twentieth century. Far from an end to war, there has been massive escalation, with not even the glimmer of an end in sight. But that fact doesn't exempt us. Maybe it's best to think of ourselves as a work in progress, as long as the human race endures. For that long, it will be the task of those who are alive and awake to move us forward, despite our confusions and doubts and failure of nerve. That's what the best among us have always done.

In thinking about how we search for the power of our own prophetic voices in these times of worry and struggle, I decided to borrow a rhetorical tool from my old mentor, Richard Gilbert, with whom I served my ministerial internship fifteen years ago. He borrowed it also: he borrowed it from Moses, and maybe Moses borrowed it too. Dick Gilbert was fond of preaching the 'Ten Commandments' for this or that issue, always with the tongue-in-cheek caveat that since he was preaching to Unitarian Universalists, they were of course the Ten Suggestions rather than commandments. I think of mine, at least today, more as the Ten Reminders, because they are the things I find most useful to remember myself, as I struggle to find my voice and raise it in a way that might make a difference in our troubled world.

The first reminder is drawn from the Buddha: Remember that there is no end to suffering on this small and fragile planet. That might seem a stark and hopeless thing to hold as a reminder, but there is no place to begin except at the beginning. The beginning point is allowing ourselves to feel, to recognize and to acknowledge the deep sorrows of our world, the endless ways we visit cruelties on one another. We are surely called to respond to that suffering in many different ways. But we will only cause more suffering for ourselves, and for our children and others who depend on us, if we let ourselves believe that we can solve the whole thing.

It's easy to fall unconsciously into a sort of Messiah complex: if we could only work a little harder, stretch a little further, take on one more thing, somehow all would be well. To ask: 'How shall we end suffering?' is to be defeated before we begin. Suffering will always be with us. So we ask instead: How shall I keep my heart open to the suffering? How shall I keep my heart open so that I will see, when the time comes, the place where my voice can be heard, my hands engage, so that the suffering of the world might be lessened a little?

Reminder number two is particularly important for extremists like me: there is no hierarchy to suffering. Some weeks ago when I first learned that there were international volunteers seeking to literally place themselves between the warring sides in Palestine, I felt a twinge of something between envy and guilt. Eighteen years ago when I went to Nicaragua with Witness for Peace, this was exactly what I and the other volunteers were trying to do. What am I doing now, in my safe home, my safe ministry, while so much death and destruction is falling on others? What are you doing? The answer may not seem very brave or radical. But for many of us the answer is: I'm doing what I can.

There is no hierarchy in suffering. To sit and listen to the friend with terminal cancer is not less worthy than the brave healing work of the international doctor in Afghanistan. To bathe the aging mother who can no longer lift her arms is a work as important as that of the volunteer carrying food into Bosnia. To sit with the child who is yours to raise, yours to keep safe, is not a lesser calling than that of the nuns sheltering orphans in Rwanda. To respond to need in one place is simply to respond to need: it is not less because it is here rather than there. It is not less because it is quiet and every day, instead dramatic and newsworthy. We are called to respond on this day, in this place -- not to berate ourselves because we have not landed in some other corner of our hurting world.

The third reminder may sound like a challenge in light of this emphasis on hard edges and hard times, but it is the imperative to hold hope at the center of our days. Erich Fromm wrote, "Hope is paradoxical. It is neither passive waiting nor is it unrealistic forcing of circumstances that cannot occur….To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime…Those whose hope is strong see and cherish all signs of new life and are ready every moment to help the birth of that which is ready to be born." There is always some small tendril of life that is ready to be born. It seems to me that the heart of religious faith is this recognition. We don't get to choose where or how those signs of life emerge; but we can choose to believe in them, and turn our hands and hearts to their nurture.

The fourth reminder is the central proclamation of the prophetic voice: All are called. All are called. Not to the same task, not to the same perspective, but to the imperative to use our gifts, our will and our powers on the side of justice and mercy and peace-making. In his story, Simple Speaks His Mind, written in 1950, Langston Hughes writes this dialogue between Simple and the narrator:

"What kind of prayer would you pray, friend?

"I would pray a don't-want-to-have-no-more-wars prayer, and it would go like this: 'Lord,' I would say, I would ask [God], 'Lord, kindly please, take the blood off of my hands and off of my brothers' hands and make us shake hands clean and not be afraid. Neither let me nor them have no knives behind our backs, Lord, nor up our sleeves, nor no bombs piled up yonder in a desert. Let's forget about bygones. Too many mens and womens are dead. The fault is mine and theirs too. So teach us all to do right, Lord, please, and to get along together with that atom bomb on this earth - because I do not want it to fall on me - nor Thee - nor anybody living. Amen!"

"I didn't know you could pray like that", I said.

"It ain't much . . . I figure God will listen to me as well as the next one." " . . . But now it's up to you to help God bring it into being, since God is created in your image," [I said].

"I thought it was the other way around," said Simple.

"However that may be," I said, "according to the Bible, God can bring things about on this earth only through [people]. You are a [person], so you must help God make a good world."

In the simplest possible way, those words sum up the mandate of the prophetic voice. "You are a person, so you must help God make a good world". All are called.

The fifth reminder is that we are called to take one step at a time. Step by step is not the way I really want to move forward in my life, and I know I'm not alone in that. We want the great leaps. We are always impatient for the quick fix, some form of instant gratification. We want to see sweeping changes come into view as soon as we start to push. Or if not quite so easily, then at least some sort of visible change, something altered for the good after we turn our effort toward it.

The truth is that we might never see the results toward which we turn our efforts. In a work as large as the movement toward peace, toward justice, toward a world that treasures and respects life, we have to assume that we till and plant and mulch for a harvest we will never see, or at best will see only in small fragments. As the wisdom of the Talmud puts it, "You are not required to complete your work, but neither are you permitted to lay it down."

My sixth and seventh reminders are linked to one another: remember what you know, and lean toward new understanding. Very few of us are experts, or have the time to become experts, on the issues that command our attention. The temptation is to throw up our hands and say we can never know enough to take a stand. But we're not required to be experts -- only responsible and informed citizens. Sometimes, even when we are not experts, we are called to take stands based on the "courage of our confusions."

Remember what you know. As we are asked to throw our support behind a renewed war against Iraq, there are some important things we know without being experts on the Middle East. We know there is an oil agenda behind the choice for war, while conservation is being utterly ignored. We know that hundreds of thousand of Iraqi civilians have already suffered grievously from sanctions and war in the past ten years, many of them small children. We know that nearly all of our staunchest allies are urging us not to pursue this war. We know that it carries almost unthinkable risks because of the anger and pain already roiling all of the surrounding countries. We must remember what we know.

And we must be willing to learn more and understand more deeply. We must be people with the maturity to see that our world has never been made up of black and white but of infinite shades of gray. There will be times when new information, new understanding, turns us to another opinion or wakes us up to a different course of action. How extraordinary it would be if the leaders of countries could admit to this process! How amazing it would be to hear a President or Prime Minister say, "We realize now that we were wrong to pursue that policy, and we'll do all that we can to make things right". This is the way of our limited minds: Stay open to new learning, and lean toward it.

My eighth reminder is one of the wisest things I've gleaned from the great teacher of nonviolence, Mahatma Gandhi: Do not make your adversary into your enemy. When we distance ourselves from a person, violence in our own hearts or through our own actions becomes more possible. The more solidly we see someone as 'the bad guy', the enemy, the less compelled we are to see him or her as a human being, a member of this strange tribe of ours. Radical nonviolence refuses to create this distance. It insists that we see every person as someone linked to us, every person as someone infinitely capable of transformation. This is a difficult mandate, especially when our passions are high and our righteousness strong. But it is essential.

It leads to the ninth reminder: Never try to transform the world without the willingness to also be transformed. I said at the beginning that it was probably safest to consider ourselves always a work in progress. This is true whether we're thinking of the whole messy human race or only our own little puddle of longings and contradictions. Many years ago, when I was in my early twenties and full of the power of my convictions, I scoffed openly at the idea that making peace within ourselves had anything at all to do with making peace in the world. Who has time to meditate or pray, when the world is going to hell in a hand-basket?

I don't scoff any longer. I don't think the two things can be teased apart at all. I don't think we can advocate for peace by screaming at those who disagree with us, or insulting our political leaders, or hurling rocks through windows to make a point. The violence within is not a separate thing from the violence without. Peace without is linked to our ability to make peace within.

And my tenth reminder is: stay grounded in a community of faith. Author Gary Gunderson writes, "A congregation is not only a physical point of connection, but a field of coherence in which…we might amplify our …efforts to shape the world for ourselves and those we love. People are in congregations on purpose and that purpose makes all the difference."

Our faith communities are amplifiers of our purpose. They enlarge our understanding. They keep us alive to the joy and synergy that feed our efforts toward justice. They help us to sing. They encourage us to hold hands. They remind us why our faces should be turned toward the pain of the world. They balance us with laughter. They help us keep our eyes on a distant prize, and on the immediate prize right here at hand, a face we can touch, a voice we can hear.

And communities of faith bring us back to the ten reminders -- or eight of them, or twelve -- back to the ways we listen outside of our small selves for how we are called, every blessed and struggling one of us, back into the work of the world. AMEN.