The Zen of Lifeboat Maintenance

an Earth Day sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V

at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, April 18, 2010;

after a reading from Barbara Kingsolver in the April 2010 National Geographic, and

this passage about the woman caught in adultery sometimes found at John 8:2-11 -

Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?’ They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’ And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ She said, ‘No one, sir.’ And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.’

 

 

The Zen of Lifeboat Maintenance

Happy Earth Day!  Outdoors, it’s a gorgeous spring day.  Indoors, here we are all together, ready to talk about what we can do for the earth, how we can quit having quite the negative impact on our environment that we’ve had these past few decades.  Last week, Wayne Politsch talked about how we can decide to eat differently and feel better and make more moral choices when it comes to what we put in our mouths and how we provide food for each other, so our Earth Day celebration in this church may technically have begun way back last week. 

This Sunday, I’ve made plans to talk about this ‘Blue Boat Home’ of ours and how we are afloat in a veritable ocean of miracles with wonders all around us, and how it may feel some days - especially with all the earthquakes and volcanoes in the news - as though we are at the mercy of the elements but how the elements are also at our mercy way too often.  In my preparations for today, I found some poetically lovely but challenging words from Barbara Kingsolver saying that, when it comes to how we treat our once-seemingly-endless supply of water, we have now overdrawn our accounts.  Too many on earth now have not enough fresh water - the lakes and aquifers many people once depended on have dried up from either overuse or climate change.  Too many, conversely, have too much water - with the complicated effects of global warming melting the icecaps and changing weather patterns, sea levels are rising and threatening to inundate a huge proportion of the human population who live close to shorelines.

I made plans for today to describe our need to perform some maintenance, if you will, on this lovely blue lifeboat we call home.  I wanted to say that it’s imperative we find some balance between abundance and scarcity, between living as though we have no effect on this lifeboat of ours, and living as though there is nothing out there larger than us that will show us a way out.

It was going to be a great sermon today, mixing the science of environmentalism and the religious notions of grace and mercy and you were going to be the beneficiaries of it all. 

But then I saw the Alton Telegraph on Monday morning.  And I realized I would have to change my plans because we would have different issues to discuss this morning.

 

As congregational President Jennifer Herndon mentioned a few minutes ago during announcements, a former member of this church who resigned formally last December and who once acted as both Finance Committee chairperson and financial secretary of Endowment landed in jail late last week accused of defrauding a very-long-time member of this congregation of some $137,000.  What is there to say?  How do we even talk about it without falling prey to pettiness or rumor-mongering?  How shall we ever understand such a bizarre and horrible thing?

It made for a sensational story:  a mug shot on the front page;  an attorney, one of the people society charges with upholding the highest of legal standards, arrested after meeting with the poor widow woman he’d bilked out of a sizable inheritance four years ago, telling her that he couldn’t pay her back because he’d spent all the money, not knowing she was wearing a wire so that authorities could record the encounter for use as further evidence of his wrongdoing, as if they needed it. 

Yes, it’s criminal.  The details are sordid and sad.  But sadness is not the first emotion most of us felt, I bet, when we first heard.  I talked to more than a few who felt angry, who wanted to get back at the man who’d done wrong.  Surely that would be true of most of us;  we know the lady who lost a fortune because of one man’s greed and deceit.  Even those who don’t know her are outraged:  many of the comments in the paper were directed at doing violence to the man, and said he deserved to suffer greatly for his crimes.

And it’s not only that we’re angry at one man.  The whole situation is just another brick out of the foundational wall that in more naïve times we used to take for granted:  we used to think we could trust that those in responsible positions would act responsibly.  As it is, this story plays to our lowest estimation of those who were once supposed to be responsible - especially lawyers;  predictably, the majority of the newspaper comments seemed to be lawyer jokes.  Those charged by society with keeping higher standards become the objects of ridicule pretty quickly and fall very hard when standards aren’t met - witness the numerous and ongoing scandals in politics and the church.

But concerning this scandal, I’ve received many, many e-mails since the news broke. Some of you have written worrying about whether our finances are safe.  The Board was assured Wednesday night that all was well, and our president’s report this morning should allay your fears in that regard. 

Some of you have written wondering about your personal part in this drama - what you may have said or done that contributed to the climate that allowed this to happen, or what you have not said or not done that, had you acted, might have made a difference.  I myself feel intimately involved;  I’d like to hide from the media and the spotlight and the world until I can get clear about what I should have known and about which clues I should have noticed that might have kept us from getting to such a dark place.  But I can’t hide in the dark and, I think, neither can you.  I think you and I are called to different standards than those who sit alone at home writing horrible comments to the newspaper.

Some of you have suggested to me that we should keep quiet about this, that we treat it as a private transgression:  no need to drag the family or the victim or us through any more of the mire than we’ve already been through or that we’re already going to face.  I certainly understand the impulse.  I, too, feel for the man’s family and I don’t believe they deserve this shame and anguish.  I, too, feel for the victim as well;  she’s suffered enough already.  I wish we could keep quiet, look the other way.  But I don’t believe we can;  I believe we’re better served by having this conversation in the open rather than gossiping by e-mail or phone or whispering about it in the corner.  

I have heard a couple of responses that I find to be at either end of a spectrum.  On end of that spectrum I’ve heard it said that, “Because of this incident, I no longer trust…” - pick your group - lawyers, men, people who go to church.  “I don’t trust anyone” is different from “I don’t trust male lawyers who go to church” is different from “I don’t trust the person who did this.”  What the person in question may have done has nothing to do with what other attorneys or men or church people do.

But the other end of the spectrum is equally disturbing, which has been the tendency to say, “Oh, none of us would ever do anything like that.”  Well, I hope not.  But none of us is perfect:  we have done things, we have stepped off the path, we have treated each other in less than charitable ways, and to pronounce judgment on another so easily without remembering that we ourselves are broken doesn’t serve us well.

But after all that, I guess for me the most disturbing emotion I’ve had to deal with personally is my own deep anger.  How could one person do this to another?  Of course, we see news stories all the time about the awful things people do to each other out there.  There’s no shortage of bad behavior - dare I say, evil? - out in the world these days.  It’s there in all its glory on the front page of our newspapers every morning.  But the people who show up on the front page (in a bad way) are not the people I come to church with, are they?  Those people are others, those people are strangers, those people are broken in ways we can’t even imagine. 

You and I are not those people, are we?  You and I have covenanted together, haven’t we?, to behave with each other in certain ways, we have covenanted together to follow the 1^st Principle and affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person, we have covenanted together to say ‘no’ to the things that threaten our neighbors.  Haven’t we?  Haven’t we?

Though I am not yet absolutely sure, all the indications are that the covenant we have together has apparently been broken egregiously in this case:  thou shall not threaten one of our neighbors or one of us; or, thou shall not steal.  But even allowing for the fact that our judicial system is such that one must be considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law rather than a court of public opinion, I am still angry, I am still livid that one of our own might possibly stoop so low and fall so far.

‘Accountability’ is a word I have heard used badly around here before, too often as a bludgeon simply to get one’s way.  But accountability is indeed critical in the application and administration of true justice.  If our former member has done the things he’s been accused of doing, then he must be held accountable.  Justice demands that he be held accountable to right the things he did wrong, and to never do them again.  Justice demands that he pay his debt to society.  Justice demands that he return every cent he acquired wrongfully. 

It is my anger that brings me to demand justice.  In other moments, however,  - and I know it’s true for some of you, too, because you have told me about it - in other moments, my anger morphs into other emotions:  sadness, for example.  Sadness for the victim - no one should have to experience such a violation.  Sadness for the family - how will they show their faces and hold their heads high as they go about their lives?  Sadness for our broken covenants - those promises were put in place to keep such things from happening.  Sadness for us - that evil has come so close and taken whatever of our innocence remained.  Sadness, even, for the alleged perpetrator - how could you do this, to our friend, to your friend, to your family, to us?  How could you do this to yourself? 

 

This anger-become-sadness may have been something Jesus felt when the crowd of scribes and Pharisees brought the woman caught in adultery to stand before him.  As the crowd angrily challenged him on the specifics of the law, curiously he knelt down and began to draw in the dust with one finger, maybe feeling sad that things were such a mess, maybe trying to figure out how justice might properly be applied in this case, maybe letting the crowd’s anger move ever-so-imperceptibly toward sadness.

But when he straightened himself back up, as the story goes, he didn’t tell them not to be angry, he didn’t try to reason with them or talk them out of their demand for vengeance.  The woman had been caught breaking the law, after all.  But in that moment, he didn’t attempt to address questions of guilt or innocence at all.  He merely invited the ones among them who had never sinned, who had never broken any law, who had always lived strictly within the covenants, to step forward and cast the first stone.

From our vantage point today, we may want to imagine that this has something to do with letting the punishment fit the crime.  Some acts our society deems so heinous that we still put people to death when they behave thus.  Other acts are adjudged to cost a person some other price than their entire life.  Such an interpretation of this story would speak both to those who would let our own perpetrator-in-question off scot-free and to those whose anger drives them to demand a public horsewhipping or worse.  Let the punishment fit the crime, we like to say. 

But Jesus didn’t choose at that moment to address questions of justice - unless that’s what he was doing scribbling in the dust with his finger, which is not reported and has been lost to us anyway.  No, I think he was at that moment kneeling before the intersection between justice and mercy. 

 

That’s not an easy place to be, that intersection of justice and mercy.  Even someone with the wisdom of Jesus must kneel before it.  But that’s where we are in this congregation right now and we dare not turn away before we’ve wrestled with the questions posed by our predicament:

On the one hand, how do we enact justice in the world?  When one of us goes astray, how much punishment does justice demand?  When one of us has hurt another, how shall we be held accountable?  How much force shall we use to stop those who would threaten our neighbors?

On the other hand, how do we show mercy?  How do we practice compassion for the broken ones, the ones who break the covenant, even as we ourselves are broken?  Are any of us free enough from sin to line up and cast the first stone?

Ultimately, we cannot act on emotion alone.  We are called to go beyond emotion to live and act in that intersection of justice and mercy, where we hold others accountable but with compassion for them and with trembling and trepidation for our own sin and brokenness.

 

I fear that we often overdraw our accounts in this regard, either over-reacting in vengeance or under-reacting in timidity.  I’m familiar with both in myself;  perhaps you see it in yourself, too.

In the end, here we are, living together in this lifeboat we call our ‘Blue Boat Home,’ afloat on a veritable ocean of miracles with wonders all around.  We have to pay attention to our relationship with the environment:  we are at the mercy of the elements, it’s true, but more than ever, the elements are at our mercy as well. 

But we have to pay attention to our relationships with each other, too.  Getting our relationships right is a critical piece of the maintenance of this fine lifeboat of ours.

So may it be.

Happy Earth Day!