ONE YEAR LATER

FROM A SERMON ON ISAIAH, MARTIN, AND AMERICA

 

For Zion's sake I will not keep silent and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest…

Isaiah 62:1

 A year and more has passed, yet we have not been delivered.  Some believed that Barack Obama had come to restore the Republic, to return our nation to the righteous path.  A new, glorious era in American politics was at hand….If only that were true.  We all can taste the bitterness now.

Roger D. Hodge, "The  Mendacity of Hope" Harper's, February 2010          

 

The preacher bears a great responsibility.  In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., the preacher must "articulate the longings and aspirations of the people."  "Somehow," he added in Memphis in that last sermon of his life, "the preacher must be an Amos, and say, 'Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.'  Somehow, the preacher must say with Jesus, 'The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to deal with the problems of the poor.'"       

Like Martin, a good preacher must be a prophet and a witness.  But I'm no Martin.  And, facing the obligation he places on anyone who would stand before a congregation, I'm inclined to sit down and shut up for fear of embarrassment.  But knowing how great are the problems of the poor and how deep are our shared longings and aspirations in this time of war and economic decline, I feel I have no choice.  And I haven't been afraid for a long time.   As Martin said in another sermon – on Vietnam – "A time comes when silence is betrayal."  By my lights that time has come in America.

It does no good – not even for Jesus – to say, when that time comes, when the "fierce urgency of now" is upon us, "My hour has not yet come."  We do not choose the time.  The time chooses us.  Such a time had come for the Jewish people in Isaiah's time.  The Jews had just been liberated from their exile in Babylon and were about the business of restoring their kingdom in Jerusalem.  It was a time of opportunity, but the dangers of backsliding into old ways of doing things – old ways that had brought them down before – were great.  It was a critical hour in the life of Judah.  It was time for Isaiah to speak his message of encouraging hope: "For Zion's sake I will not keep silent and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest, until her vindication goes forth as brightness, and her salvation as a burning torch." 

That message – be true to your aspirations and you will be a great people – was one Martin preached in his time and one that we would do well to heed in our time.  For we too have been in exile this past decade …and, I would argue, since Martin was taken from us.  We are emerging from forty years of endless war – overlapping, futile, and, for the most part, unworthy wars…wars that have left us mired in Afghanistan and facing enemies on every continent.  We are emerging also from decades of rampant greed and reckless risk-taking that have produced a Great Recession in an America we hardly recognize any more.

Over the past decade alone, there has been NO net gain in job growth – Nada! - and every tenth American seeking a job can't find one.  Middle class Americans are making less than we did a decade ago and one in every eight of us is on food stamps.  One in every four homeowners is "under water" and home foreclosures have reached crisis proportions.  What kind of crisis?  What does a crisis looks like?  In my community, Vallejo, it looks like this – four pages of foreclosure notices on one day last week…and every day since.  No wonder we've rediscovered layaways, clipping coupons, and doing without so many things we once deemed necessary.  And our newspapers – when they're not running foreclosure notices – have become outlets for national fencing operations eager to take our "unwanted" things right here in Concord or Emeryville.  We've all seen the ads – "Bring us your gold, your family jewels.  We pay top dollar!"

No wonder, at this moment of crisis, that the national mood is one of fear, the worst fear being that we might not be up to the task – an "uneasy feeling," a "sinking feeling," as the New York Time's Bob Herbert put it two weeks ago, "that important opportunities are slipping from the nation's grasp."  We are, he said, "escalating in Afghanistan, falling back into a panic mode over an attempted act of terror and squandering a golden opportunity to build a better society."  And, he added, "If America can't change, then the current state of decline is bound to continue."

Indeed it will…if we don't change.  But you and I – we – know better.  We have had our cold shower.  Our eyes are wide open.  We are poised to act.  Our hour has come.  We dare not squander this opportunity to build a better society.  As Christians and as Americans we must give voice to our longings and aspirations.  We are at another moment when silence is betrayal.  Our old ways of doing things no longer work.  We must find new ways…new ways that reflect those longings and aspirations.

What sorts of new ways?  Jim Wallis of Sojourners warns us against just seeking to get back to "normal."  Noting that "normal" is what got us into this situation, Wallis urges us to craft a "new normal" – one consistent with our Christian and national values of justice, equality, charity, and solidarity with our fellow human beings.  Rugged individualism never really worked – except in B movies – and it won't work now. 

In his latest book - Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street – Wallis says we must rediscover our sense of community, our spirit of cooperation. We must remind Washington, Sacramento, and each other that "car[ing] for the poor is not just a moral duty but is critical for the common good."   It's time, he adds to "stop keeping up with the Joneses and start making sure the Joneses are okay."  We have, he concludes, arrived "at a transformational moment, one of those times that comes around only very occasionally.  We don't want to miss this opportunity."

Just down the road in Berkeley, Rabbi Michael Lerner has been preaching the same message on the pages of Tikkun and in his Network of Spiritual Progressives.  He calls for a "New Bottom Line" in our economic life – one that measures success by how we live and care for each other rather than by what we accumulate for ourselves.  Advocating a new Global Marshall Plan, he urges us to scrap the current security paradigm – the one we've operated on throughout my lifetime – security through domination – in favor of a new paradigm of security through generosity, respect and caring.

Once before – before this current crisis became so apparent – I preached this message in a church in San Francisco.  At the door, after the service, an angry young man in a blue suit and power tie – a millionaire I later learned – stuck his finger in my face and growled "That was naïve, incredibly naïve!"

I have to ask, however, is it being naïve or is it being faithful to preach a Gospel that asks "Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink?  And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee?"  Is it being naïve or is it being faithful to hope that we as a people might be numbered among those who did just that for the least of our brothers and sisters and that we as a nation might be "a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord."    

This week we have seen Jesus hungry and thirsty and naked and, yes, dying on the streets of Port au Prince and our response thus far suggests that we may be capable of a new paradigm, a new normal, a new bottom line.  And we have reacted in ways that give one hope.  As the soldiers of the 82^nd Airborne they fanned out about Port au Prince to restore calm and distribute food and drink, their commander, a Col. Anderson, said: "We're here to do as much good and as little evil as possible."  Talk about the paradigm of domination crumbling before one of generosity, respect and caring!          

And talk about "making sure the Joneses are okay!"  Witness all the doctors, nurses, and civilian aid workers who are now deployed, all bringing a measure of generosity, respect and caring.  Then there are all of us – here in this sanctuary of peace and solidarity – opening our checkbooks to unseen brothers and sisters and our hearts to those among us who grieve for family in Haiti.

Our hearts are broken…broken open…open to Martin's plea that April night in Memphis: "Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness…. Let us rise up…with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation."

May we not be found wanting in the face of that challenge. 

 

                                                                     

                                                                       

 

 

TIME FOR PLAIN TALK ABOUT ISRAEL

In light of a January 10 attack on Representative George Miller (D-CA) in the Vallejo Times-Herald by Larry Grossman (http://www.timesheraldonline.com/guestopinions/ci_14160252), an attack that echoes the strident propaganda of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), it's time for some plain talk about Israel, Palestine…and America.

 

Let me preface my remarks by saying something about myself, for I know what will come my way in the wake of what I have to say.

 

Sunday night, after reading Mr. Grossman's un-nuanced, one-sided diatribe, I happened to watch again Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."  It's a movie I can't watch without a shiver up my spine, for I know its cobble-stoned streets and bloody fields like the back of my hand.  I was the American Consul in Krakow, the first American Consul there.  I walked those streets and the fields of Plaszow.  I walked that railroad track in Birkenau with William Styron and represented America at memorial ceremonies in Auschwitz.  I also walked the Jewish cemetery in Krakow, alone with the community leader of the then-dying Jewish remnant of a thousand…a thousand from a pre-war community of 100,000.  I protested to the Polish authorities about the condition of that and other graveyards throughout Galicia.  And I prayed at services in the Rehmuh Synagogue, cantor-led services, because, in 1973, there wasn't a single rabbi in all of Poland.

 

And I can sleep better at night knowing that, thanks to such efforts begun forty years ago, there is, once again, a thriving Jewish community in Poland.  No, I don't need any lessons about the Holocaust.

 

Nor do I need any lessons about Israel, "the quintessential post-Holocaust response to centuries of powerlessness and discrimination."  For I have visited Israel twice, staying at kibbutzim on the Lebanese border and in the Huleh Valley and, standing on the Golan Heights, looking across that valley to Lebanon.  I understand the average Israeli's fear – a fear generated by geography and history.

 

But I have also visited Palestine – from Nablus in the north to Bedouin villages south of Hebron - and just a year ago experienced first-hand the powerlessness and discrimination visited upon Palestinians in a thousand daily humiliations.  And I recall with pain standing at the thirty-foot high wall surrounding Gaza, as a convoy of NGO vehicles tried to make its way through the Eretz Crossing to break the now two-year-long blockade that has penned 1.5 million people into an outdoor prison 20 miles long by 6 miles wide.

 

I recall also that cynical and callous onslaught against Gaza – "Cast Lead" - that began under cover of Christmas a year ago and continued until the last breath of the Bush Administration, killing over 1,300 men, women, and children.  No amount of vitriolic rhetoric from "Israel's traditional supporters" (read AIPAC) can erase the images of the dead and maimed children or the truth contained the Goldstone Report to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

 

To call the Goldstone Report a "kangaroo court" and to accuse the UNHRC of anti-Semitism is a calumny of the worst sort.  Richard Goldstone, a Zionist Jew whose daughter lives in Israel, is a distinguished South African jurist, whose uncovering of the crimes of the apartheid regime formed the basis for that country's Truth and Reconciliation Commissions.  Subsequently, he served as chief prosecutor of the war criminals of Yugoslavia and Rwanda.  His report on war crimes in Gaza was thorough, balanced, and well-documented.  For the sake, not only of its standing in the world, but of its national soul, Israel would be well advised to address the issues raised by the report and stop throwing stones at its author.    

 

Unfortunately, the United States voted against the adoption of the Goldstone report and pressured the Palestinian Authority to do so also – a move that led to an uproar among ordinary Palestinians and subsequently to the resignation of their moderate Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas.

 

Indeed, we have stood virtually alone with Israel in vote after vote in the United Nations, the last such vote being against a December 18, 2009 UN General Assembly resolution "reaffirm[ing] the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, including the right to their independent State of Palestine"…even though that reaffirmation reflects the two-state policy of the United States government.  That vote was 171-6.  With us – the six in Israel's corner – were the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, and Palau.  Palau?  Nauru?  Really?!  Increasingly, we – Israel and the United States – are standing out in our singularity and isolation vis-a-vis our allies and the settled body of international law. 

 

Israel, however, has been isolated not by Representative Miller, J Street, or the Obama Administration, all of whom wish Israel well, but by the Likud government of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his racist Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman who have time and again undermined the two-state solution by the continued construction of illegal and provocative settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.  In doing so they have, time and again, undercut moderate Palestinian leaders like Abbas and may soon find out that there are Palestinians even more extreme than Hamas.

 

Unlike Representative Steny Hoyer, who has made annual trips to Israel paid for by AIPAC's American Israel Education Foundation, George Miller has indeed demonstrated his independence, intelligence, and integrity by visiting Israel – and Palestine – with his eyes wide open and beholden to no one save the American people, especially the people of the 7^th District.  He and J Street have stood with President Obama in seeking a two-state solution based on justice and mutual security and dignity for two long-suffering peoples.  They recognize that support for Israel is not synonymous with AIPAC's knee-jerk, "unequivocal" support for Likud's extremist and self-defeating policies.

 

Those policies can only lead to a one-state solution that would lead, in turn, to the demise of Israel as a Jewish democratic state.  Demography would force Israel to choose between its Jewishness and its democracy.  With a majority Palestinian population, an Israel that extended from the Mediterranean to the Jordan could only survive as an apartheid police state.  That is not, I think, the sort of state that the United States could support.  It certainly is not the sort of Israel I could support.

 

I urge all your readers to support Representative Miller, President Obama, and reasonable Israelis and Palestinians as they seek to head off such a disaster.  The time is short and, for Israelis and Palestinians, the success or failure of this effort will be existential.