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Talking
It Out Rev.
Mark Stringer
Call
to Gather We
gather this morning, We
gather this morning in the safety of our church Indeed,
we bring to this space differing opinions, varied
perspectives, and diverse understandings of this
time in our shared history. Comfort, challenge, companionship, reprieve, forgiveness… May we rejoice in our diversity, And may there be space here for us all.
Introducing the ThemeWeeks ago, I designated this morning’s service as Small Group Ministry Sunday, a time to celebrate the one-year anniversary of a successful church program in which more than 120 of our members and friends have participated. I will not devote as much time to this celebration this morning as I had intended. But I have chosen not to completely abandon my plans because I believe in a world where bombs are falling and war has become an armchair spectator’s sport, we might need to be reminded more than ever of the good that can come when we choose to gather together, sharing our stories, bearing witness to each other’s humanity in all our imperfection, building our own perceptions and perspectives through interactions with people who may see the world differently than we do, and finding ourselves connected in new ways to each other and to this world that we share.
Reading“Connections Are Made Slowly” by Marge Piercy
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground. You cannot tell always by looking what is happening. More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet. Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet. Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree. Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden. Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar. Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses. Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving. Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in, a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs. Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen: Reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in. This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always, For every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
Reflection “Talking it out” part 1
Small Group Ministry was introduced to this church one year ago this month, after several months of intentional exploration and planning. An implementation team of nine church members met with me over many weeks to put together the program. Some of these people stayed on to be facilitators, and some stepped aside for a while and then returned this past fall. But all have played an important role in the success of SGM because their involvement insured that this would be an ongoing all-church program…not the minister’s project or a one-time shot in the dark affair. SGM features small relational groups made up of five to ten members and friends of our church who meet twice a month for six months to establish and nurture themselves in this community. All groups follow the same basic structure of sharing and reflection at each two-hour meeting.
Each group is led by a trained facilitator who, in addition to the two monthly sessions with their group, meets with me and the other facilitators once a month for our own small group. This monthly meeting enables us to share feedback and new ideas, troubleshoot problems, and celebrate successes and gives each group a tie-in back to the church.
I’d like to acknowledge the women and men who have served as facilitators over the past six months: Sally Boeckholt, Roger Evans, Xenda Lindel, Cathy Musset, Joel Severinghaus, Mike Smith, and John Sonnenburg. Thank you for your commitment to this program and to our church community. It has been a privilege for me to work with you and to get to know you better.
During
their six months together, each group also
covenants to carry out at least one service
project for the church or greater community.
The service projects planned over the past six
months have included: --cleaning
and reorganizing rooms in the basement of the
church
We are grateful to these groups for their service.
Today is the final Sunday for enrollment in the next round, which begins April 1st. I encourage you to visit the Small Group Ministry table in Channing Hall after the service to sign up. Even if you have only been visiting this church for a short time, you should consider joining the program. It’s a great way to enter this community…to get to know more people so that you can feel at home here. Even if you have been around this church for a while, chances are good that participating in SGM will enable you to know more people.
From the feedback we have received, we know that this program has not met everyone’s needs (as if any single program could) but it has been an important means by which many of us have gotten more connected, and have grown our understanding of what it means to be in community with others we otherwise might not have known.
We also have learned that this program is most successful when individuals take responsibility for the functioning of their group, when the members make a commitment to attend regularly, to follow the group covenant and to speak up when their needs aren’t being met. Groups that have had the most regular attendance and the most positive interactions are those who have taken the program seriously enough to contact members when they have been absent, and those that have not been afraid to talk out their differences, to reflect together on how they wish to be in community.
Each group then becomes its own temporary village within the greater body that is this church. This has been exciting for me to watch. On Sundays and at other church events, I see people connected and interacting in ways that might not have been possible had it not been for SGM. I hear with great pride and satisfaction the stories of people who say that SGM enabled them to make this church their home. And I look forward to the day when everyone in the church will have participated in the Small Group Ministry program. Won’t you come join us?
Reflection “Talking it out” part 2 In my sermon last week, I raised some questions about what our president and his administration seemed prepared to do…and what they have now begun. I spoke of my concern for the much-advertised “Shock and awe” campaign that would rain 3000 missiles and bombs on Iraq in hopes of removing a dictator who has already shown he doesn’t care about his people or their suffering. And I encouraged all of us to not stay silent, regardless of our position on the possible war, because I believed that when people are intentional and respectful about sharing their thoughts with one another, when people take the risk to talk out their differences, we all come out ahead in the end…even if we must agree to disagree.
What I didn’t tell you is that for a long time I had been on the fence with this build-up to war. I had been on the fence in part because I was greatly influenced by a class I took in theological school called “Politics, Ethics, and Terror” in which we studied the writing of Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer: people who had lived during the Holocaust and who knew a great deal about totalitarian regimes and the difficult but necessary choices that these regimes sometimes force civilized people to make. I remained on the fence because I wanted to believe President Bush and his administration when they spoke of the dangers of allowing Saddam Hussein to go unchecked. I remained on the fence because I wanted to give Colin Powell the benefit of the doubt. He’s always struck me as a man of his word and if he says he believes the threat warrants an invasion, well, then maybe it does. And as I watched Tony Blair tie himself to a cause that almost ensured his own political suicide, I figured that maybe these guys have good reason to be so worried. After all, I am certain that I don’t have access to the information that they do. So who am I to judge? Who am I to question?
However over the past few months, as I watched the goals for this war shift every couple of weeks…from disarming Saddam, to removing him from power, and then from bringing democracy to Iraq, to bringing Democracy to the entire Middle East…I have become more and more suspicious of our President’s intentions. Each time I have heard or seen our government’s arrogant posturing in the face of our allies’ questions and concerns, I have lost a little faith in the men I have wanted so much to trust. Why does it seem so difficult for these guys to muster even just a smidgen of humility? Is it really too much to ask to want to see our country at least throw a bone to world opinion…to acknowledge that others may have different but valid viewpoints with which we simply disagree? I’m not saying we can’t be firm in our position. I just wonder why we have to be so haughty.
And each time I have heard the protests of the millions of people around the world referred to as nothing more than the easily disregarded opinions of a focus group, I have become more and more convinced that I need to keep from buying into the “Go USA” hype that we now see proudly trumpeted by the news channels, by the Pentagon, by the White House. As if the crushing bombardment of a country that never stood a chance against our power and resources is some cause for gloating. What is there to gloat about anyway? The destruction of buildings and a few random civilians with millions of dollars worth of bombs?
And each day I have become more convinced that all of us need to keep questioning the actions of this country’s government…especially the hawkish focus group that has led us into war.
Now I know that there are some in this church…and if polls are accurate, a majority in this country…who still want to believe in this war…who believe it is a tough but necessary step that Saddam Hussein has forced us to take. You may be right. I hope you are right. Certainly we all agree that it would be good if you are. Then the enormous destruction now being rained on Iraq and its people and wildlife might somehow be worth it. Then the father of an American soldier who was killed yesterday might feel less certain about his tearful declaration to the President: “Take a good look at this picture. You killed my only son.”
Thursday, after I had offered a prayer at a city-wide Ecumenical service, I came home to get caught up on all the glorious destruction of Baghdad that had taken place while I was gone. Just as I was beginning to wind-down from a busy day, I got a call from my father. He told me that he wanted to talk about the sermon I gave last week (I had e-mailed him a copy.) He sounded kind of hyped up, so I just let him talk. He told me that he didn’t know he had raised a “bleeding heart liberal” and that I didn’t know enough about history to say some of the things I said. He figured I should at least study the build-up to World War II. He drew a parallel between Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler and implied that I was misguided to so quickly assume that the President isn’t driven by purely noble intentions. I told him that I appreciated hearing his opinion but that I wasn’t sure I felt up to having this conversation that night. Then he said something that made me know I had to stay on the phone. He said, “You wrote in your sermon we should talk about how we feel.”
Now I expect this congregation to use my sermons against me…to call me on the carpet for my opinions…but my Dad?
So we did talk. I felt like he was coming at me rather strongly and I told him so. I admitted that I really had no more answers than he had but that I was concerned over how badly the administration had bungled its attempts at diplomacy…how tired I was of its arrogant posturing…and how suspicious I had become at the ever-changing outcomes the U.S. claims to be seeking. I admitted to him that I am not a pacifist, carefully dropped in a reference to the class on totalitarianism I had taken, and wondered aloud why Iraq, a nation who has yet to be directly connected with September 11, a nation that was already being contained by a diplomatic process that we might have seen to a productive conclusion was such a threat to us that we needed to brazenly disregard international opinion, alienate people around the world and pulverize Baghdad with shock and awe. “Besides,” I said, “I left room in the sermon for people who disagree with me.”
“Not really,” he said. “Your bias was clearly showing.”
“I’m not a reporter,” I answered. “I’m a minister. I have a responsibility to the people of the church I serve to try to view things as holistically as possible. I just don’t see a rush to war as a very holistic activity.”
As we talked out our different opinions it was clear that we weren’t all that far apart. We are both afraid for the fall-out from this war. We both support our troops and want to see them come home safely. And we both want to see justice. Essentially it comes down to the fact that my Dad trusts the administration, and I want to, but can’t. At least not yet. It’s hard for me to trust hubris.
Before we got off the phone, he asked me whether or not people in the church had challenged my positions. “Well,” I said. “Not directly, but I know there are some who don’t agree with me. They are just more subtle about it than you were.”
In the end, I was thankful to have that conversation with my father. Hearing his thoughts helped me better understand my own…and reminded me to keep suggesting that all of us talk to each other during this war…especially to those who may disagree with us. Who knows…the conversations we have might actually grow our perspectives…or at least remind us why we should do everything we can to find peaceful solutions to our problems.
In the meantime, when I see the pictures of bombs falling and troops advancing and reporters salivating, I will feel sick at heart. Not sick enough, however, to give up hope. After all, never before have people all over the world taken action for peace like they have in recent weeks. Maybe this war will teach us something about violence that we may have forgotten. And maybe this dark cloud that has positioned itself over our nation does indeed have a silver lining. Time will tell. Time will tell. And so will the choices we make in response to what we see.
I invite you to pause with me in a spirit of prayer as I share with you the prayer I delivered at the service Thursday night.
We’ve left behind the light of our singular rooms To be together… To
acknowledge that despite our differences A desire for peace.
Many of us are feeling sorrow this day: Sorrow
for the men and women of our military, Sorrow for the rifts that have now formed between Americans and people around the globe we once counted as friends. And sorrow for the unintended consequences and pain that always accompany intentional violence.
Indeed, there is much to mourn this day. But there is something more in this room than sorrow. There is the hopeful glow of our shared presence, And the recognition that we are not alone in our sorrow, We are not alone in our fear or our concern.
And may this fact empower us to be the change we want to see. If we desire peace, we must be peaceful. If we desire justice, we must be just. If
we desire love, we must be loving. Therefore,
may we carry this gathering in our hearts
Amen.
Closing Words (Anwar Fazal) We all drink from one water We all breathe from one air We rise from one ocean And we live under one sky
Remember We are one
The newborn baby cries the same The laughter of children is universal Everyone’s blood is red And our hearts beat the same song
Remember We are one
We are all brothers and sisters Only one family, only one earth Together we live And together we die
Remember We are one
Peace be on you Brothers and sisters Peace be on you.
©Copyright Rev.
Mark Stringer |