Chalice Lighting Words
The thought manifests as the word;
The word manifests as the deed;
The deed develops into habit;
And habit hardens into character.So watch the thought and its ways with care,
And let it spring from love
Born out of concern for all beings.--The Buddha
Call to Worship
We gather together at this time and place to affirm our liberal religious values. Here we believe that it is possible to have joy without hysteria. We believe it is possible to have morality without inquisitions. We believe it is possible to have community without conformity. We believe it is possible to have authority without slavery. We believe it is possible to have religion without madness. We believe it is possible to have worship without idolatry. And here we believe it is possible to have love without perfection. We welcome all who wish to join us in this celebration of life.
--Rev. Roger Fritts
Reading
From A New Religious America by Diana L. Eck
The huge white dome of a mosque with its minarets rises from the cornfields just outside Toledo, Ohio. You can see it as you drive by on the interstate highway. A great Hindu temple with elephants carved in relief at the doorway stands on a hillside in the western suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee. A Cambodian Buddhist temple and monastery with a hint of a Southeast Asian roofline is set in the farmlands south of Minneapolis, Minnesota. In suburban Fremont, California, flags fly from the golden domes of a new Sikh gurdwara on Hillside Terrace, now renamed Gurdwara Road. The religious landscape of America has changed radically in the past thirty years, but most of us have not yet begun to see the dimensions and scope of that change, so gradual has it been and so colossal. …
Our first challenge in America today is simply to open our eyes to these changes, to discover America anew, and to explore the many ways in which the new immigration has changed the religious landscape of our cities and towns, our neighborhoods and schools. For many of us, this is real news. …
In the past thirty years massive movements of people, both as migrants and refugees, have reshaped the demography of our world. Immigrants around the world number over 130 million, with about 30 million in the United States, a million arriving each year. … This is an astonishing new reality. We have never been here before. …
“We the people of the United States” now form the most profusely religious nation on earth. But many, if not most, Christian, Jewish, or secular Americans have never visited a mosque or a Hindu or Buddhist temple. Many Americans are not so sure so sure what Sikhs and Muslims believe, let alone Jains or Zoroastrians. Similarly, Muslim or Hindu Americans may have sketchy and stereotypical views of Christians and Jews. … So where do we go from here? …
As the new century dawns, we Americans are challenged to make good on the promise of religious freedom so basic to the very idea and image of America. Religious freedom has always given rise to religious diversity, and never has our diversity been more dramatic than it is today. This will require us to reclaim the deepest meaning of the very principles we cherish and to create a truly pluralistic American society in which this great diversity is not simply tolerated but becomes the very source of our strength. But to do this, we will all need to know more than we do about one another and to listen for the new ways in which new Americans articulate the “we” and contribute to the sound and spirit of America. …
Today, right here in the U.S., we have an opportunity to create a vibrant and hopeful pluralism, in a world of increasing fragmentation where there are few models for truly pluralistic, multireligious society.
Sermon: “A Newer America; A Newer Pluralism”
Multiculturalism has been on my mind for a long time – back in the “Observer’s Perch” area of the brain.
Harvey Cox wrote a book about it, called “Many Mansions,” I think, back in the early 90’s, and I remember responding to it with – “yes, that’s what’s happening; America is really changing.”
I grew up in New York City, so it’s not that I was ignorant of diversity. There was Williamsburg in Brooklyn, populated by Orthodox Jews called Hasidim; downtown NY – Orchard Street, an immigrant Jewish enclave; Black Harlem in uptown NYC; Chinatown, Little Italy, and so many more ethnic neighborhoods of all varieties. Diversity was just part of the NYC experience. A city of immigrants. The Lady of the Harbor – the gateway of Ellis Island --
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to be free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
In looking back, and having traveled a bit, and lived in different places, I also realized that, as diverse as the population was in the metropolitan New York area, there was something that united all of us; we were all “New Yorkers.” It took leaving the New York area, in the 1980’s, and living in Wichita, Kansas for a couple of years, to realize how much all of us in that Big Apple, had in common. This is hard to articulate, but we had our own culture, our own pace, our own ways of talking to each other, arguing with each other, riding in the subway together, complaining about the Mayor; a certain “law of the jungle” when it came to shopping. We knew each other very well on one level; we spoke each other’s language, so to speak! We were New Yorkers and we were Americans and one, or all of our family immigrated to these shores. There were Chinese Americans, yes, but there were also Chinese American New Yorkers! Believe me! A Noo Yawkah is a Noo Yawkah!!! So what can I tell you…!?
After the terrorist attack of September 11, as I watched the story unfold and read about it, through these last 3 months, I have been continuously aware of what I just told you about – the enormous diversity, and yet, commonality of being a New Yorker; Guiliani personifying it. But, I can also imagine former Mayor Ed Koch making a similar impression. On that last point, you may argue, but you’re entitled to your opinion!
I moved to this area, from Wichita, to begin my ministry here in 1989. Ahhh! Back to the East Coast and a big city! I sighed with relief! Back to what I know and love.
But, I found out how different the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area is from New York. Here is a different kind of diversity. I can still see no connecting principle here – no sense of being “Washingtonians” as there was of being “New Yorkers.” No real sense of being Virginians, here, either; – everyone says that Northern Virginia is not Virginia! So, what is it?
We certainly identify ourselves as Americans, yes; this is the seat of national government after all, but I haven’t picked up a cohesive feeling of being an American as I did in New York. We have all around us a very rich and fascinating diversity, yes, but not pluralism; not a strong sense of E Pluribus Unum – From Many, One.
Here, there are enclaves of Asians, Hispanics, Middle Easterners, Africans, but, in general, my sense of it is they retain their connection with their home countries, to a great extent, and depend on each other for community. And the rest of us “Americans,” with English as our first language, citizens for a long time, and for several generations perhaps, kind-of remain in our own communities as well. We are not living in friction together, just separate; we don’t know each other. I see no larger identity and connection.
I don’t think many of us living here are attached to our geography, and, “America,” in many ways, is an abstract idea that has had different realities through these 226 years since its birth.
Diana Eck, in her book, “A New Religious America,” writes:
Just as our religious traditions are dynamic, so is the very idea of America. The motto of the republic, E Pluribus Unum, “From Many, One,” is not an accomplished fact but an ideal that Americans must continue to claim. The story of America’s many peoples and the creation of one nation is an unfinished story in which the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are continually brought into being. …
As we enter a new millennium, Americans are in the process of discovering who ‘we’ are anew. Each part of the composite picture of a new religious America may seem small, but each contributes to a new self-portrait of America.
From 1880 to 1924, there were millions of immigrants from all of Europe, and hundreds of thousands from Asia and Mexico.
Opposition to immigration arose in many places, by many voices. The Ku Klux Clan was one such voice. On the Fourth of July, 1924, they marched through the streets of Long Branch, New Jersey, protesting the immigration of Catholics and Jews to the U.S. What they had to say was, “The vast alien immigration is, at the root, an attack upon Protestant religion … A few more years of our present sentimental, irrational hospitality will reduce the American people to a hopeless minority.” The collective voices of opposition were enough to lead to legal restriction of immigration with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. Strict quotas were applied by nation, and were particularly restrictive of immigration from what was then called the Asian-Pacific Triangle.
Finally, the Immigration Act of 1965 eliminated the quotas linking immigration to national origins. It was signed into law on the Fourth of July, 1965, by then-President Lyndon Johnson, as he stood at the base of the Statue of Liberty.
The Civil Rights Act had been passed the previous year, reflecting Americans’ growing awareness of our nation’s deep structures of racism. Robert Kennedy, who was Attorney General then, said, “As we are working to remove the vestiges of racism from our public life, we cannot maintain racism as the cornerstone of our immigration laws.” And so began a new era of immigration, and a new complex and vivid chapter in America’s religious life.
Since then, of the more than 15 million new immigrants who came to American between 1965 and the 1990’s, more than a third were Asian. People came from New Delhi, Taiwan, Tamil, Banaras, Lahore; from many countries including Kenya, Lebanon, and Indonesia. Today, our cultural differences are magnified with the new immigration. It’s not just Swedes and Italians, Lutherans and Catholics, but Russian and Iranian Jews, Pakistani and Bengali Muslims, Trinidadi and Gujarati Hindus, Punjabi Sikhs and Sindhi Jains.
So we have before us a Newer America; a Newer Pluralism. A newer challenge!
Our country began with the establishment of religious freedom, and that principle is enshrined in the Bill of Rights. The framers of the Constitution could not imagine the religious diversity of America today, but the principles of religious freedom have stood the test of time.
E Pluribus Unum doesn’t mean is “From many religions, one religion.” There will never be unanimity on matters of religious truth. Instead, the oneness we hope for will be civic—a oneness of commitment to the common covenants of our citizenship out of the manyness of religious ways and worlds. We also know that a multireligious society is not easily maintained.
Simply to know one another is the first step.
Real religious pluralism poses challenges to America’s Christian churches. As the population of Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, and Buddhist neighbors grows, it throws out the gauntlet to the commonly held idea of a “Christian Nation.” There is now no more normative Protestant culture in America. It is gone. There’s no going back. The horses are already out of the barn. Religious pluralism is squarely and forever on the American agenda.
I remember, when living in Wichita in the mid-80’s, I heard Rush Limbaugh for the first time and found out that that my beloved liberal values were not the norm. I realized there were probably more people out there than I cared to think of who might refer to me as, in Limbaugh’s words, a “FemiNazi!” He also talked in terms of this nation being a “Christian Nation” – a nation of Christian values and beliefs. Practically everything he said bothered me.
It wasn’t until I read a letter to the Editor, one day, in the Wichita Eagle Beacon, that I decided to act! America was referred to, again, casually, as if common knowledge, as a Christian Nation. I wrote a Letter to the Editor about that Letter to the Editor, and sounded off about my concern – “This is no Christian Nation. Didn’t you folks ever hear of Religious Freedom and the Bill of Rights and pluralism – as BASIC to this beloved democracy…?” Or something like that. My letter was printed in the paper.
A few days later, I received an envelope stuffed with printed material about apocalyptic prophecies, and a note from someone who read Rev. Gelbein’s letter to the editor in the newspaper and thought she might be interested in reading the enclosed tracts. Well, she WASN’T!
Couple a deep negativity toward religious difference with a deep ignorance of other religious traditions, and we have a recipe for prejudice.
Outside of Oklahoma City, in Edmonton, where the University of Oklahoma is located, there was a big to-do over granting a permit to the town’s Muslims to build a mosque. This was in 1992. It seems the wife of one of the ministers who attended the first public hearing, and vehemently opposed granting the permit, stood up and unashamedly stated: “The Constitution says One Nation Under God, and that’s a Christian God. These people have absolutely no right to be here.” Those words express a view of a normative Christian America that many Americans still hold, despite our constitutional commitment to religious freedom and despite the facts of our multireligious society.
On the other hand, there have been random acts of kindness.
In August of 2000, the Boston Globe printed a story under the headline, “A Not-So-Random Act of Kindness: Vietnamese in Roslindale Invite Vandals to a Picnic.”
It was about the response of a Buddhist congregation to a growing number of vandalism attacks. The Vietnamese Temple is located in a mixed African-American, Carribean, and Latino area, at the end of a tree-lined, dead-end residential street, in a building that was formerly a mechanic’s garage, then a day care center. It is the oldest of Boston’s three Vietnamese Buddhist temples, and its leader is Dr. Chi Nguyen. In the yard of the temple, there were flowers planted, and, near the temple door, a graceful seven-foot tall statue of Kuan Yin, the female boddhisattva of compassion, stood in welcome.
Some kids started throwing rocks at the statue of Kuan Yin, and damaged it. A few weeks later, vandals broke into a tool shed on the property, took an ax, and smashed the image of the boddhissatva to bits. They also broke a skylight and attempted to enter the sanctuary.
Police investigators found those responsible—a fifteen-year-old trouble-maker and some other boys from the neighborhood. The temple members didn’t want to press charges. In a spirit of compassion, they wanted to reach out to the surrounding community and bring people together. They scheduled a clean-up and cookout for September and invited neighbors and the offending boys. Dr. Chi said, “We believe that small acts of kindness can have a big impact. You sow a small seed and maybe it will grow into beautiful flowers.”
Here’s what they did—Dr. Chi wrote to Boston’s Mayor for his support; a planning committee was put together including people from the Mayor’s office, the Boston Police, the Healthy Roslindale Coalition, the Sacred Heart Parish a few blocks away, and the neighboring Roslindale housing project.
They distributed flyers that invited neighbors to come for coffee and donuts at the temple, then a 3-hour clean-up, ending with a cook-out and tour of the temple. The flyer included the message in English, Vietnamese, Spanish, and Haitian Creole.
People came from all over the community. A group of four nuns spent the morning filling trash bags in a vacant lot, side by side with the kids from the housing project, citizens from the Coalition group, members of the Temple Vietnam congregation – all wearing the Southeast Asian palm-leaf pointed hats in the midday sun.
The real work was the connection people were making to one another.
Angelo, the 15-year-old trouble-maker wore a palm leaf hat and worked on the clean-up. After the two were introduced by the Police, Dr. Chi embraced him, and said, “You are welcome here.” He told him that since his name was Angelo, he would be the temple’s guardian angel, and watch out for them. As the day concluded, Angelo said, “If I had known what they were like, what I know now, I would never have done it.”
Dr. Chi and members of the temple are followers of the Vietnamese Monk, Thich Nhat Hanh who teaches that violence is rooted in suffering, and only kindness can begin to touch the suffering in another.’’
Their new statue of Kuan Yin is now on order from Vietnam, and the sisters from the Catholic parish are taking a special offering to help with the costs!
New alliances may be made across the religious spectrum. These stories of encounter also remind us that our religious traditions are constantly influencing one another. Christians encounter the faith of new Sikh or Hindu neighbors and rethink what it means to speak of God’s universal providence. A Lutheran undersecretary of defense finds himself addressing Muslims at the Pentagon on the holiest night of the Muslim year. Jews in Sacramento find new allies in Christian and Muslim neighbors in the wake of synagogue burnings. Christians in Roslindale find themselves moved by the spirit of forgiveness they find in their Vietnamese Buddhist neighbors.
Our church’s swift response to our Muslim neighbors after the events of September 11th was very meaningful for us and for them. During the September 16th services, two Imams from the Mosque in Falls Church who had been invited, came to talk to us. We welcomed them in friendship. Later, we visited their mosque when they held an Open House to support their presence in our community. Our “Many Paths” Covenant Group sponsored a series of meetings in church so that we could get to know more about Islam, again inviting Muslim neighbors to engage in conversation with us and answer our questions.
What we can do, first, is to get to learn about the many different religions right here, in our multicultural and multireligious Northern Virginia home. This year, we picked a theme of “The Big Questions” for a series of sermons and activities from September through May. Perhaps next year, the theme could be Comparative Religions, and see where and into what projects our learning leads us.
I agree with Diana Eck and others who say that for a nation like the United States to imagine itself anew as a multireligious nation is our deepest challenge.
It means being able to imagine, as instrinsically American, the mosques in many of our cities, like the one here on Rt. 7, and Hindu temples in places like Nashville. When we think of “we the people,” we will have to include the Muslim members of the armed forces, the Hindus of Atlanta, Memphis, Pittsburgh, and Fairfax County, the Sikhs of Cleveland, the Buddhists of Portland, Phoenix, and Roslindale.
And for our newer immigrants, it means including themselves in their own mental image of America.
The story of the new religious America is unfinished. Diana Eck tells us that whether the vibrant new religious diversity that is now part and parcel of the United States will, in the years ahead, bring us together “… depends on whether we are able to imagine our national community in a new way. … And the fate of a vibrant pluralism in the U.S. will have an important impact on the fate of religious pluralism worldwide. The ongoing argument over who ‘we’ are—as religious people, as a nation, and as a global community—is one in which all of us, ready or not, will participate.”
May “we,” as individuals, and “we,” as this church, become ready. May our acts of kindness light the way.
Benediction
The threat to our salvation is the clash of peoples:
Jews and Arabs,
offspring of a single father,
separated in youth by jealousy,
in adolescence by fear,
in adulthood by power,
in old age by habit.
It is time to break these habits of hater
and create new habits:
habits of the heart
that will awake within us
the causeless love of redemption and peace.--Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro
Go now in peace and understanding.
Amen, shalom, and Blessed Be.
Suggested Reading—
“A new Religious America; How a Christian Country has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation,” by Diana L. Eck. 2001. HarperCollins Publishers, New York.
