The call to neighborliness is the promise we have made to mystery.
I am not entirely clear on what that means – even though it’s my own sentence. Still I felt when I first wrote it and feel still that it is somehow pointing to something that matters. And it gets clearer as I hold that sentence before me and lean into it, and live into it.
The call to neighborliness is the promise we have made to mystery.
I think that is the call that we – we who constitute Community Unitarian Universalist – answer and aspire to answer. It’s what we do in our being here, in our participation in congregational life: we answer the call to neighborliness and live into the promise we have made to mystery.
Today’s topic, “Hope Amid Despair” – is the culmination of a scattered three-part series that began last December with “Reality Amid Ideology.” I started that sermon with this sentence to which I now return:
the call to neighborliness is the promise we have made to mystery. We Unitarians Universalists are a part of a covenantal tradition – a tradition of covenant with something that is more powerful than you or I, something mysterious that calls us to our better selves, something that we all sometimes stray from, but that ever-beckons us back to a truer path -- something that defines us as a people.
We covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person – every being, I’d say. We covenant to respect the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part. The interdependence of existence, and inherent worth and dignity, are powerful. There is a quality of mystery and awe there. How could this be, this total interdependence, this inalienability from concern and respect? That’s why I say we’ve made a promise to mystery: because our covenant commits us to principles ultimately inexplicable.
We sometimes fall away from our covenantal promise – and we do so in the same way the Ancient Israelites did. We fail to care for the vulnerable.
Love of God and love of neighbor are the same thing. Jesus was explicit on that point, and before him, Jeremiah said it. They are the same thing. Love of God and care for the vulnerable are synonyms. Care, kindness, and compassion are, for us, rooted, after all, in a promise to uphold everyone’s worth and dignity because, mysteriously, it’s inherent – and a promise to respect the web of existence because, mysteriously, we’re an interdependent part of it.
This promise we made to mystery calls us to neighborliness. The call to neighborliness prompts us to make a promise to mystery. I don’t know which came first because it seems to me they emerge together, or, rather, they are the same thing.
A month ago, in part 2, “Grief Amid Denial,” I mentioned four things that we are losing that are good to be losing. US military hegemony is waning – which is a good thing because military dominance inevitably turns the possessor into the global bully.
Second, US economic dominance is waning – which is a good thing because economic dominance was never sustainable, or fair to the rest of the world.
Third, the ethnically northern-European have lost the capacity to maintain “our kind of America” – which is a good thing because that kind of America depended on subjugation, exclusion, and exploitation of other ethnicities.
Fourth, the old-line Protestant churches are waning – which is a good thing because religious institutions that saw no need to distinguish between Bible-thumping and flag-waving were never conducive to real spiritual flourishing.
These four, in various ways, constituted the support structure for the American way of life. Without them, the fabric of American life is coming unraveled – which it needed to do, but that doesn’t make it easy.
We’re in a tough spot. We don’t know how to weave a new fabric. We are, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.”
Those most benefited by the old order are most likely to be in denial about these changes, most likely to believe that there’s not really any problem that can’t be straightforwardly corrected. There’s clinging to the notion that these things that are waning can be shored up and America can be made
"great again."
Change is always going to be spelled L-O-S-S for some, and to get past being in denial requires the practices and rituals of grieving – preparing us to move on. So as reality is antidote for ideology, grief is the antidote for denial. Yet grief can slide into despair, so today, part 3, we look at hope amid despair. Our reliance, abroad, on military and economic might and, at home, on privileging persons of northern-European descent and faith institutions of old-line Protestantism in turn rested on fossil fuels and Enlightenment rationality.
Fossil fuels are not sustainable – both because they will run out eventually and because burning them overheats the planet. Enlightenment rationality gives us the wonders of science, but emphasizes control and “a vigorous individualism that has trivialized the common good.” Sensing that these have about reached their limit stirs up anxiety, and the anxiety manifests in exacerbation of what was worst. Greed has been a problematic current of America from its beginning. Anxiety heightens it.
We commit ourselves ever more ruthlessly to self-serving wealth, and those who have it are most able to amass more, so “wealth and control flows upward to the few on the basis of the cheap labor of the many.” Spiraling income inequality results.
Privatism is a related problematic current in American history. Anxiety exacerbates it. The notion that there are common goods that we can collectively realize, and that the form of our collective action is called government grows increasingly quaint. When we privatize everything from schools to prisons to health care should be privatized then the wealthy get health care and education but no one gets the benefits we would all receive when more of our neighbors are educated and healthy.
Which means that prisons are run for profit rather than based on a serious attempt to balance the needs of public safety and the public good of rehabilitating convicts into productive workers, and are thus subject to reform as we learn more about how to effect the optimal balance.
Privatism renders neighborhood “an unfortunate inconvenience rather than an indispensable arrangement for viable human life” (Brueggemann 116). The proliferation of “survival shows” on television and film reflects and dramatically performs this “privatism in which everything is raw competition.” The fantasies that become popular at any given time are metaphors for how reality feels, and the US today has come to feel, to many of us, like “The Hunger Games.”
Violence has long been problem in American culture. Anxiety prompts more of it. The dominance of the gun lobby has represented our readiness for violence in protection of privatized greed. Privatism leads finally to “every one for their self” in a competition in which it behooves us to be armed. In our anxiety about loss of the old way of life, we react in ways that make us less connected, more isolated, less secure, and thus more anxious.
How do we break out of this vicious circle? We are not ready yet for a blueprint, a program, an agenda. We cannot properly assess proposals until we have done the work of imagination.
We suffer, as I mentioned in the first installment, from a failure of imagination, and exercising and strengthening our imaginations is the first task. Before we turn to the policy-makers we need first to turn to the poets and prophets – or else the policies will have no coherence.
We must “dream of possibilities for peace and justice with lesser measures of U.S. hegemony” – in place of the military force of empire.
We must “dream of a lowered standard of living among us, but with a genuine neighborliness in which all share” – in place of the economy of empire.
We must “dream of a new cultural pluralism in which the marker is not nation, race, ethnic origin, but the capacity for neighborliness” – in place of privileging European descent.
We must “dream of a religious [pluralism] in which particular faith is deeply held in the presence of other deeply held faiths” – in place of our historic centering of old-line Protestantism.
We are not ready for details, for we have not yet coalesced around a dream. Recall that Martin Luther King’s dream was articulated in several of his addresses leading up its most famous expression in Washington DC in August 1963. Only after that dream exercised the imaginations of a significant number of people could we then follow with policy: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the fair housing act of 1968.
Hope amid despair was exemplified by Alaxchiia Ahu – also known as Plenty Coups – who lived from 1848 to 1932 in the Montana area. He was the principal chief of the Mountain Crows of the Crow nation. He saw that his people could not win against white encroachment and settlement.
Under his leadership the Crow acquiesced. Unlike the neighboring Cheyenne and Sioux, they did not opt for the noble destruction of going down fighting.
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| Alaxchiaa Ahu (Plenty Coups), 1908 |
It was a time of despair. The buffalo went away – slaughtered by whites intent on undermining the livelihood of the indigenous people. “The hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. There was little singing anywhere,” he reported.
“The Crow experienced this as death of established social roles, of standards of excellence, and of personal identities. It is for good reason that the nation lost its sense of life, meaning, and energy….The Crow entered a time when everything familiar and reliable ceased and they were required [as Plenty Coups said,] ‘to live a life that I do not understand.’”
Plenty Coups had experienced a vision when he was young, and this vision – received, processed, and interpreted by the tribal elders – was the cornerstone of his leadership of his people. Under that vision and leadership, the Crow people came to understand:
“All our traditional way of life is coming to an end. We must do what we can to open our imaginations up to a radically different set of future possibilities. In the face of the discontinuity that is upon us, we must preserve some integrity across that discontinuity."
There is reason to hope for a dignified passage across this abyss because there is still, even in the midst of all loss and grief, a basic goodness to the universe.
And: we shall get the good back, though at the moment we have no more than a glimmer of what that might mean.
Plenty Coups was “committed to the bare idea that something good will emerge.” The old way of life was passing and would pass away entirely, yet somehow “traditional tribal values, customs, and memories” would find a future flourishing in the new context, whatever it would turn out to be.
There are possibilities of hope that transcends our limited capacity to understand them.
Thus the Crow resigned themselves neither to despair nor to the suicide of resistance, but embraced, instead, the only hope available. It was a hope that required adapting – learning what could be learned of the new reality in preparation for an unforeseeable future.
Plenty Coups famously urged his people:
"Education is your greatest weapon. With education you are the white man's equal, without education you are his victim and so shall remain all of your lives."
Through many trips to Washington DC to represent his people, Plenty Coups kept the Crow on their original land while many other tribes were relocated to reservations distant from their homeland.
For us today, says theologian Walter Brueggemann,
“the prophetic task is not blueprint or program or even advocacy. It is the elusiveness of possibility out beyond evidence, an act of imagination that authorizes the listening assembly to imagine even out beyond the ken of the speaker.” (127)
The name for imagining beyond evidence is: faith.
“Walking by sight is likely a return to the old ways that have failed. Walking by faith is to seek a world other than the one from we are being swiftly ejected.” (128)
The crucial step in this walk is turning from the narrative of empire to the narrative of neighborhood. From the standpoint of empire, with its market economy, neighborliness appears as miraculous.
What, people caring about each other when they aren’t paid too? That’s spooky supernatural stuff!
The Bible offers us some stories dealing with empire, for its texts were largely composed under imperial oppression: the Babylonian Empire, the Roman Empire. And so the subversive stories of neighborliness in the Bible do appear as miracles. For instance, the story of the loaves and fishes. As I read that story, there was a miracle there. Nothing supernatural about it, though. It was the miracle of neighborliness.
“Jesus talks a great deal about the kingdom of God -- and what he means by that is a public life reorganized toward neighborliness.” (Brueggemann)
Neighbors gather, community and abundance happen.
That’s the kingdom – the kin-dom -- of god Jesus was talking about: public life reorganized toward neighborliness. A crowd of people in the grip of scarcity thinking had gathered to hear Jesus teach. They had secreted away for their own use food for themselves. Under the influence of this remarkable teacher, they began to open up, began to sense the intrinsic abundance of the life they breathed, and the universe in which they swam.
From that sense of boundless provision welled up a gladness to share of this plenty of which they were suddenly so acutely aware. From the bottoms of bags and folds of clothes came forth food to share.
What happened in the loaves and fishes story? Neighborliness happened. Just as neighborliness happened in the story of Elisha and the widow’s oil. She has one jar of oil, from which she is able to fill many vessels with oil – enough so that the sale of that oil will pay her debts and provide enough for her and her children to live on. Where did all that oil come from?
I imagine it came from Elisha himself organizing the neighbors to help out a widow in need.
“Unlike the economy of empire where all flows to the top, the economy of this narrative features miracles of abundance that are unexpectedly and inscrutably given among the lowly.”
Thus neighbors come forth with life-sustaining gifts for a resourceless widow who was about to be devoured by predatory economic arrangement.
Of course, we need the market economy, but we need that sphere to be
A sphere of human interaction, not
THE sole or dominant sphere.
Of course, we need Enlightenment rationality and the scientific method. But science is about control: prediction and thereby control. The kind of explanations that are scientific are explanations we can use to predict – and hence to control. And that’s been very helpful for developing ways to care for each other – medicine, food production and distribution. But again, that needs to be
A sphere, and not so dominant a one.
Our spirits yearn to not merely control our world, but to befriend it. A world that we control – or that we are trying to, or imagining we could, control – is a world in which we ourselves never quite belong – never love or are loved, but can only covet.
The call to neighborliness – the promise we have made to mystery – that is our hope. Your presence here to be with each other, to make the unmarketable abundance of community, is the embodiment of that hope. With the wider culture around us sliding toward despair and desperation, all we need to see hope right now is to look our congregation's building on a Sunday morning.
