The Sound of Not Quite Speaking, by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz Oct. 25, 2009

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Be ours a religion which, like sunshine, goes everywhere – its temple, all space; its shrine, the good heart; its creed, all truth; its ritual, works of love. –Theodore Parker

The Sound of Not Quite Speaking,

        The words to the hymn we just sang were written by Theodore Parker, the great Unitarian minister who counseled his congregation to hang onto the permanent truths of their religion, and to let go of beliefs that were transient. Parker died in 1860, so we can be pretty confident that he never imagined anything like the Internet. And yet he wrote, “Be ours a religion which, like sunshine, goes everywhere,” and if that isn’t a call in 2009 to be in cyberspace, I don’t know what is.

         Our religious movement wants to leave our mark on the future, a legacy for those who come after. We are the faith that has believed for nearly five centuries that “revelation is not sealed,” and so we keep our hearts and minds open to new truths, and new ways of speaking truth. We have a living tradition – six sources, at latest count, from which we derive meaning.

         According to the Creation myth of one of those six – the Jewish tradition – God spoke the world into being. “Let there be light,” God said, and there was light where before there had been – not darkness, but a unity of dark and light. God spoke the word, and the word separated light from darkness, land from ocean, day from night. It wasn’t created out of nothing. Words separated creation out of, we might say, God’s body – all that was – Unity.

         Naturally, this makes words pretty important to our Jewish brothers and sisters, and the centrality of words has been heartily embraced by the rest of the western world. Words, words, words! Ministers love them. Bloggers too, and now, everybody’s a blogger, or can be.

         Jewish religious leaders have made a fine art of adding words, elaborating on the words of the Torah, the holy book which was said to have been delivered to Moses at Sinai. The tradition of midrash is a wonder of the human religious imagination, and starting from about the 13th century, Jewish mystics, called Kabbalists, began to work not only on the words of the Torah but on the letters of the words.

         According to the Kabbalists, when God created the world God started with a bet, the second letter of the alphabet, which is, appropriately, the letter that begins the word baruch, or blessing. But if you ar a Jew, according to Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, my teacher at the Graduate Theological Union, you believe that it was when God spoke at Sinai, that God revealed more of Godself than had been revealed before or since. And at Sinai, the first word God spoke was “anochi,” I am – beginning with the first letter of the alphabet, “aleph.” “I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

        “Aleph” is the letter that begins God’s not-to-be-spoken mystical name, which God reveals to Moses at the Burning Bush, and which can be translated, “I am becoming what I am becoming.”

         We are tempted to think of “aleph” as analogous to the “letter a” in our Roman alphabet, and in a way it is, but the sound is not the same. The sound of the Hebrew letter “aleph” is ( ). It’s a glottal stop. Rabbi Kushner says this is the sound you make before you make a sound. The sound of not quite speaking.

        If you are a Jew, Rabbi Kushner would say, you believe that when God spoke at Sinai, God revealed more about Godself than ever has been revealed at any other time in history.

         According to one thread in the midrash – that endless elaboration of the words of the holy books – when God made that terribly important appearance at Sinai, God didn’t really say all those commandments that came down on the stone tablets, or the book of Deuteronomy, or the rules of sacrifice listed in Leviticus. According to midrash, all God actually said, was ( ). The one letter that doesn’t really make any sound at all. Included in that one sound, or no-sound spoken by God at Sinai was everything the Hebrew people needed to know to find their way out of slavery, out of Egypt, out of the wilderness, and to the promised land. ( )

        In searching for meaning behind the words, and meaning behind the letters, the Kabbalists began to plumb the shape of the letters themselves. Take a look at the letter aleph, on the cover of your Order of Service. If you hold it off and squint a little bit, and turn it a quarter turn, does it remind you of anything? Can you see that it is a human face?

         Look at the faces of the people sitting next to you. Go on, look around. Can you see the aleph on their faces?

         Can it be that what God revealed at Sinai was that on every human face is stamped the holy, unsayable Name? Can it be that this is the great secret God was letting the Hebrews in on? -- That this is what we need to find our way to freedom: That we set before us the human face, in all its singularity and plurality. The unity of everything, everyone -- AND the blessing of multiplicity – all revealed in one another’s faces.

         “As we let our own light shine,” wrote Marianne Williamson, “we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

         OK, I don’t think that’s what they had in mind when they called it, “Facebook.” But it can work that way. Any human community has the potential. Facebook, and especially our own social platform website, which we enter in covenantal community, can work for liberation, for justice, for compassion, if we choose to see it -- the blessing stamped on every one of us. The divine spark within. Inherent worth and dignity.

Benediction

Let us reveal ourselves to one another by making time to have the face-to-face, relational conversations that feed our souls. Let our faces shine for one another in this sanctuary, in our homes, on the streets, in our workplaces. Let us shine for the new members that joined us today, and into the future as our legacy. And in blogs! We can shine in cyberspace too. Let ours be a religion that goes everywhere. Like sunshine.

Enter, Rejoice, Sign In and Commune, by June Herold