March 25, 2007

I want to begin with a heartfelt expression of gratitude to the PJA community for your solidarity with All Saints Church, Pasadena in the last two years during the ongoing investigation of our tax exempt status by the IRS.  When I received the initial letter from the Internal Revenue Service in July of 2005, one of the first calls I made was to my dear friend and colleague in justice work, Daniel Sokatch.  Daniel immediately gave me Doug Mirrell’s cell phone number whom I reached on vacation.  Doug asked that I fax to him the pertinent documents and while on his vacation took time to study the documents and suggest a menu of options All Saints could take.  We followed Doug’s advice, hired an attorney, began fighting the intrusion into the freedom of the pulpit and freedom of religion and have felt the strong support of many of you in the PJA community throughout our ordeal. 

 Many of you, notably Rabbis Neil Comes-Daniels and Leonard Beerman, were instrumental in imagining a new category of membership at All Saints Church for those who wanted to institutionalize their sense of standing with us.  As a result many members of PJA are now official members of All Saints in that new category of membership called “Solidarity Members”.   Finally, many of you were present with All Saints’ governing board and me at a press conference when we announced our decision not to comply with the summonses issued against the church and me, a strategy designed to involve the Department of Justice in our investigation.

 The IRS investigation of our church, which still is in the hands of the Department of Justice, has had a chilling effect on many progressive religious organizations throughout our country.  Leaders of many of those organizations have told us that either they are afraid to speak out critically of our current government or that members of their governing boards have pressured them to silence their critiques of the Bush administration. We at All Saints have continued to express our foundational values of justice and peace without feeling intimidated because we believe that our very soul is at stake.

 Dr. Martin Luther King spoke of how important it is for churches (and I believe he meant all religious organizations) to do what we are doing. Dr. King said, “The church [read religious institution] must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority. If the church does not participate actively in the struggle for peace and for economic and racial justice, it will forfeit the loyalty of millions … But if the church will free itself from the shackles of a deadening status quo, and, recovering its great historic mission, will speak and act fearlessly and insistently in terms of justice and peace, it will enkindle the imagination of [hu]mankind and fire the souls of [people], imbuing them with a glowing and ardent love for truth, justice, and peace….” (King, Jr., Martin Luther, “A Knock at Midnight”, A Knock at Midnight; Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson and Peter Halloran, p. 73)

It is no easy task for synagogues, mosques, and churches to recapture their prophetic zeal, particularly in the fear-based political climate in which we have been living since 9-11.  Nevertheless it can be done, as we are experiencing at All Saints.

You at PJA know what is at stake when an arm of the government investigates a non-profit organization for proclaiming its foundational values.   What I want you to sense from me tonight is how much we at All Saints have depended on your solidarity with us in the journey and how grateful we are to you for helping to make our ordeal one that is so much easier and so full of friendship and joy.  I thank you.

Five years ago during a sermon on Pentecost Sunday, I asked those in church to raise their hands if they either had a close friend, or colleague or were either married to or partnered with someone who was of another faith.  A full 90% of those gathered raised their hands.  It illustrated for me the truth of the statement that to be religious in the 21st century is to be interreligious.  If you and I are going to be practitioners of one of the worlds’ religions in our time, particularly here in Southern California, it behooves each of us, I believe, to find ways so to plumb the depths of our own religious practices and values or to sink our religious roots so deep that we touch the common stream that nourishes all world religions.

In many ways I think that is a description of my own personal religious journey.  And I rush to say that I am not one of those interfaith advocates who desires to smooth away all the distinctions of our differing religions.  Rather while practicing our unique religious paths I think we must do so in ways that open us to what unifies as well as what distinguishes us.

Soon after arriving in Los Angeles to become rector of All Saints Church, Pasadena, I was sitting with a small group of Jews, Muslims, and Christians talking about the nuclear threat to the survival of the human race.  A new Jewish friend spoke candidly about the fact that he felt much safer and more in concert with the people of other religions in the room than he did with many of his own co-religionists.  All of us agreed.  We all were experiencing the threat in our own religious groups of the rise of conservatism which seemed to be taking our religions away from their core values of inclusion, healing, universal acceptance of others, justice and peace.

After 9-11 I was in Syria at a mosque in Damascus while on an inter-faith peace mission. The 80 year old founder of that teaching mosque was giving his Friday morning instruction to hundreds of imams and 4,000 other students prior to those imams fanning out all over Damascus to lead the Friday prayers in their own mosques. All of us non-Arabic speakers were outfitted with translation devices. I was amazed at his message of universal inclusion delivered with joy and a sense of buoyant hope.  At that point in my life I had already spent a significant amount of time with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, experiencing his irrepressible joy while declaring his message of hope. 

While listening to the Sheik in Damascus I found myself thinking, “This man has the same spirit as that of Desmond Tutu.  What gives?”  I later had the opportunity to meet the Dalai Lama.  Here again was the same buoyancy, hopefulness, and universal acceptance of all people.  

Then I made a journey to Gaza where I interviewed a physician at the Red Crescent Center in Gaza City.  He had the same spirit. My curiosity became quite intense.  What was I picking up in my Jewish friend, the Sheik in Syria, Archbishop Tutu, the Dalai Lama, and the Muslim physician in Gaza?

The answer came to me via a question I posed to this Muslim doctor.  “What do you think, sir, is the one message of Islam?  What is the fundamental message of Islam?”  Without blinking an eye this physician said, “Justice.  Justice for all.”

What I have discovered, my friends, is that when you and I work for justice for all when we work for justice for all then we are participating in the most profoundly divine and mystical activity.  Works of justice are the deepest form of worship.  No wonder we read in Deuteronomy, “Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue. (Deut 16: 20).  That is the secret to buoyant, hopeful, courageous, inspired living.

I want to emphasize the universal nature of justice work – as opposed to working for justice for only our kind. Martin Luther King, Jr. was often criticized for being an outside agitator.  The Episcopal bishop of Alabama along with other white religious leaders in Birmingham ciriticzed Dr. King for not staying in Atlanta and tending to his own knitting there.  Why drive the two ½ hours to Birmingham to stir things up in that city?

Dr. King responded in his letter from a Birmingham Jail,  “I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds. (Martin Luther King, jr. "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," A Testament of Hope, p. 290)

The truth of human interrelatedness and interdependence which Dr. King so prosaically described must now be applied to any divisions, particularly, religious divisions that now plague the human race. The smallest survival unit in our time is no longer an individual nation, an individual religion, or an individual anything.  The smallest survival unit in our time and henceforth is the whole human race and its environment. (Coffin, William Sloane, Credo, p. 84)

I made that 2 ½ hour drive from Atlanta to Birmingham and back just this past week to visit my grandson, who was born last Sunday to my daughter who lives in Birmingham.  I have been giving a great deal of thought to what I must do in my remaining years before handing the stewardship of this world over to my grandchildren. 

In addition to doing everything I can to bring an end to this immoral and unjust war we are fighting in Iraq and doing everything I can to prevent this administration from going to war against Iran.  In addition to doing everything I can to bring some institutional transformation to what Dr. King called the giant triplets of racism, economic injustice, and militarism, I have concluded that as a Christian clergyman I must do everything I can to reform Christianity itself. 

I must find ways to reinterpret my own religion devoid of the anti-Semitism and Crusader mentality that has caused so much injustice, violence, and human pain for the past 2,000 years. We must find new expressions of theology which do not claim in word or deed that certain practitioners are advantaged before God over adherents of any other religion or even of non-believers – that all of these beliefs are nothing but religious bigotry and are thus found to be unworthy of any practice of any religion in the 21st century.  This will be an act of working for universal justice itself.

I take great inspiration from Bobby Kennedy’s vision of the ripples of hope. “It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped.  Each time a man/woman stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he/she sends forth a tiny ripple of hope; and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance…. I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the moral conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the world.” (Kennedy, Robert F., quoted in Make Gentle the Life of this World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy, ed by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, p. 133)

My friends of PJA, thank you for your friendship and collegiality.  I pledge to you continued support of your brilliant and fruitful work. And I believe that in Los Angeles our work together in which we are entering the moral conflicts of our day, we are sending out ripples of hope that can indeed sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

 Thank you.