Yom Kippur 5782 (2021): Reflections.....

 9/20

with Rabbi Steve at the Bitter End

The Jewish High Holy Days are coming to an end. After a totally "virtual" celebration last year, this year congregations struggled to figure out exactly what they could do. All kinds of creative  hybrid concoctions emerged. My friend Rabbi Steve and his Sim Shalom congregation (a pioneer in online worship) held a pre-fast dinner then Kol Nidre service at  one of our favorite local clubs, Silvana. (Owned by an Israeli and African couple.)

Kol Nidre at Silvana

On Yom Kippur, we returned again to the Bitter End, the iconic venue that has somehow survived the pandemic. Both services were live on ZOOM.  In person  attendance was significantly down.  A lot of anxiety remains in the city. Here's what I had to say in Yom Kippur morning:

It’s good to be with you here today. I realize that it’s been two years since I set foot in the Bitter End.  At a Yom Kippur service. It’s always an honor and privilege to get to share in this service  with you and to get to share some of my  thoughts. 

I was thinking that I have been participating in Jewish High Holy Day services for 44 years now. First with colleagues, then friends, ultimately family and now here with you my Sim Shalom chaverim.

I’ve really come to appreciate the arc of these days. Celebrating a new year at just the right time. I mean this is when  school starts again. The time when vacation is over and when people come back to work. New season for TV and Broadway and football. And given how we do with New Year’s resolutions, it’s always good to have a chance not go back and start again. Most especially in a year like this one. 

And then the days of awe. A chance to review your life and make corrections. The spiritual liturgical narrative is even more serious than that….it’s when names are being written into the Book of Life. I love the drama of the repetitive warnings that the doors are inexorably swinging shut …. Here on Yom Kippur morning, the morning after Kol Nidre, midway through the fast, this service is kind of like the two minute warning. And as far as getting yourself into the Book of Life, if you’re not there yet, you’ve just got about enough  time for a spiritual Hail Mary…well, maybe I could use a better metaphor.

The real content of that spiritual work has to do with repentance and forgiveness. I’ve appreciated learning that in Judaism, you can’t ask God  to forgive you for something you did to someone who is still around. You have to go to them. It’s almost like if you really want to make Yom Kippur meaningful, you need to try to take a first step towards healing at least one relationship before you come here. And if you haven’t done that  yet, well the fast isn’t over yet.

In Christianity, our defining ritual, perhaps our most important sacrament, is Holy Communion.  I’m not about to try and explain that now. The point is, we used to have a part of our liturgy that told everyone that anyone who had anything against a brother or sister  should  leave the table and go take care of it before communing. (Not that anyone ever really left..) But it’s the idea….

What’s at stake here is repentance, t’shuvah, turning around, going a new way.  In my tradition, we use a Greek word, metanoia, changing your heart, your spiritual being. If you think about it, metanoia is like the opposite of paranoia. Because the greatest impediments to changing, to repenting, taking that  first step towards reconciliation, is fear.

In Christian scriptures, we have a saying, Perfect love casts out fear. (I John 4:18) But I’ve learned that the opposite his equally true, fear can cast out even perfect love. You got to get rid of paranoia to get to metanoia,. 

I taught my boys that when you go somewhere and see someone you don’t want to see, it’s like they have an evil spell over you. The only way to break that spell is to walk across the room and offer your hand.  Whether they accept it or not doesn’t matter…once you take the first step, the spell is broken. 

In this divided country, now more than ever, we have to find the courage to take the first step, to simply learn to talk to one another again.

What I’ve learned from participating in the annual High Holy Day cycle has made me a better person, made me a better Christian.

Okay.  Book of Life. What a time to be alive…we’re still in the midst of a killer pandemic…and yes, vaccines help big time…but we still die…there are wild fires, firenados on the west coast, hurricane after hurricane on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts…we just finished our endless war in Afghanistan right before the 20th anniversary of  9/11…I watched the Spike Lee film last night on HBO and relived that time when we had no idea what would happen next.....and how many mass shootings this year? More than one  a day…so common they’ve practically stopped reporting them.

It’s like we’re living the unetenahtokef…..,  who by fire, who by water who by virus and who by a crazy man with an ak47….and as Leonard rewrote it,  

Who in mortal chains, who in power

And who shall I say is calling? 

We have more than enough to remind us of our mortality…..

I want to leave you with this….the one thing Covid…and losing friends… did was make me think of my mortality .

You never know, you know? So I decided to not leave anything unsaid. I made a list of everyone I felt I had hurt or wronged and not acknowledged it. And when we could  see each other again, I started making  appointments.  I discovered something amazing…in most cases things hung more heavily on me than the the other person.  The usual response was you’re still worried about that? I learned that there is a deeper well of grace and forgiveness in the world than we realize, and the most difficult person to forgive ourselves…

Maybe that’s the deepest mending of Yom Kippur…you can forgive yourself and live on…that’s what it means to be written into the Book of Life…

May your fast go swift. Leave nothing unsaid. Take the first step.And may this year be filled with sweetness and light….

 9/13

angel of 9/11

West Park and 9/11

For those who have followed the West Park story, this is synopsis of how the small upper West Side Manhattan church responded. (To read more stories, simply enter “9/11” in the search portal..)

That afternoon, the elders gather at the church and call every church member to make sure they’re safe and okay

That night, we open our doors to the community for prayers and reflection. The sanctuary is full. A reporter visiting from France publishes an article about what she experienced at West Park.

The first Sunday after, our intern Chris Shelton creates a giant banner with the words of the original West Park motto from Zechariah 4:6 :

Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts and hangs it from the balcony.  

The service begins  with these words in a musical piece created by Bob Brashear with William Schimmel and the singers.  Each musician has been asked to share what is most important and special to them. Andre Solomon-Glover has brought a Muslim friend to accompany him and demonstrate our solidarity.

After church, we make some 1500 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the first responders with Andre showing us how to make the perfect pbj.

About two weeks later, a work group from West Park goes to Ground Zero to work the night shift feeding workers on the steps of St.Paul Chapel. Among our group is a volunteer from Tennesee who had been with a church work group at West Park during the summer. A visiting college woman from Oberlin writes a reflection, “I was there.”  The national magazine Presbyterians Today published a center spread story on West Park. 

A West Park group spends the night at Boule slicing onions for a gourmet meal to be delivered to workers,

In the following weeks, Associate Pastor Reginaldo Braga served as a volunteer chaplain at the armory where people came to seek word of their loved ones. Pastor Brashear served at Union Square and led return groups to Ground Zero.

A  large banner signed by church members arrived from Oklahoma and was hung in our 86th street entrance hall.

Our sanctuary hosted a concert  organized by Dana Hanchard to raise relief money and also declare “Not in our name,” part of a rising concern that our grief would serve a grounds for warfare.

West Park also hosted a performance as part of the International Lysistrata Project seeking to prevent the coming war in Iraq.  Our production was performed by formerly homeless and incarcerated persons organized by Marc Greenberg and the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing as a way of showing who the domestic victims of the war would be. 

When war is declared, Pastor  Brashear is arrested as part of an interfaith protest against the war.  

At our annual Benefit concert for people who are homeless, Comfort Ye, organized by Metropolitan and City Opera soprano and West Park elder Lauren Flanigan, Met bass Le Roy Lehr closed the concert with a poignant Try to remember a time in September leading into a whole cast “O Holy Night.” 

For the next year, every sermon continued the exegesis of the people who made up the living body of the Risen Christ as we experienced living in 9/11 world.

New York City Presbytery selected West Park to be one of its five “hub churches” to meet the needs of this who “fell between the cracks.” This program directed by Angela Willey with the assistance of social workers would operate for the next 18 months.,

New York City Presbytery would recognize the work of West Park in our response by naming us an angel of 9/11. 

In the 18 months following 9-11, West Park added 35 new members and enrolled 25 new Sunday school members….

It's been twenty years...

9/13

Heroes

 It’s been twenty years. We  have found our ways in public and private to commemorate what is important to us. I appreciated, for example, the Yankees and Mets wearing first responder hats like they did in 2001 and the Mets wearing “New York” on their chest instead of “Mets.” 

(Can you  remember when the NYPD were only heroes and Rudy Giuliani seems like the right guy at the right time?) 

How do we reflect on this anniversary? Everyone remembers  a time of great unity. All of us in the same boat. But I remember the passionate nightly Hyde Park debates in Union Square. The Square an interactive public art project with every inch of fence covered with missing persons posters, the equestrian statue of George Washington painted and graffitied, the votive candles, shrines.  It went on until the rains came and finally broke through the frozen in time sun shine. 

The debate raged between those who argued to make someone pay for this and those who adamantly declared Don’t use our grief as an excuse for your war.

For one brief moment, we had the opportunity to understand what it is to live in the world. In our woundedness we could be Baghdad, Beirut, Berlin. We could have found a connection with what the rest of the world experiences. But we chose to go another way.

For all the  recent rehabilitation of the public image of George Bush (thank you Donald Trump), we cannot forget that he led us into two unending wars. The war in Iraq especially  heinous as it was for no other reason than Oedipal hubris. (And maybe some  oil.) 

The end of the Afghan War came right on the cusp of the anniversary. And despite the declaration of Secretary of State Anthony Blinken  that “This is manifestly not Saigon,”  the optics were pretty much as Yogi said, deja vu all over again.  

I recall sitting in a dorm lounge at Yale Divinity School, the students cheering as the Viet Cong entered Saigon. There are no cheers for the Taliban. Though in reflection, if they took over that easily, they must have had some popular support. That’s worth reflection.

A friend of mine who is a Muslim peace activist asks us to look at our reactions to the Afghan resolution and see how much Islamophobia enters in. And she says that the situation, in the end, must be and will be resolved by Afghan Muslims.  

One of the lessons of 9/11 should  be that we cannot rebuild the world as we want it to be. Starting with Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve taken countless lives and accomplished …. ?

And despite warm memories of unity, 9/11 opened the doors to Islamophobia, xenophobia, Christian nationalism and the cartoon though deadly dangerous protofascist populism of Trump. 

When you look at the way our responses to 9/11 have affected how the world sees us, how divided we have become, well, maybe terrorism works better than we like to admit. 

We very much hang in the balance now.  The questions opened by 9/11 still waiting resolution. How we respond will define who we are and determine what future we have.

The most important lesson  of 9/11 for me is not about  the US but about New York City. I say often that our city hangs together by an everyday collective act of will. We choose to make it work. No army could force us, we do it on our own. This includes the 1000 or more graces we extend  to each other every  day just to keep it all going for one more day. The day of 9/11 saw us at our best because we do it every day. We chose to make it through without direction by politicians, army or police. And we did. That’s one reason I love living here. That I hold onto. That gives me hope.

Be Opened: Labor Day weekend reflections

 9/5

flowers along the way...

The  Beverley Church gathered again...virtually...still dealing with the fact that their basement is under five feet of water. Faithful Evgeny has been tireless in trying to deal with the water. Here are my Labor Day reflections...

So here we are.  Labor Day weekend. Even though there are 16 days left of “official summer,” this is it, the traditional end of summer. Vacations come to an end. The time for back to school. (Though the charter school across the street from me has been back for several weeks now, the kids in their uniforms, shirts and ties and all…) We’re heading back to actual children in actual class rooms while churches like ours continue to meet virtually…..signs that like it or not, we are still living in coronavirusworld.

This new Delta variant has us all kinds of anxious as we try and figure out what is going on. Even vaccinated people falling victim to what we call breakthrough covid. Some even dying.  It’s all so confusing.  The one thing we do know is that the more of us who are vaccinated, the better off we are. And somehow still some of our fellow citizens adamantly refuse to get vaccinated. I just don’t get it.

Many of us are old enough to remember mandated vaccines at school…the polio sugar cubes, the scratched patches on our arms as we conquered polio and smallpox.  I just don’t get it…how did common sense and public health become controversial? Enough already.

And on Tuesday, our longest war came to an end with 13 more casualties and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Afghani friends vulnerable and at risk. Twenty years…or forty if you go back to Carter and the Mujahideen. To what end?

And last Wednesday, another hurricane, Ida, ravaged the East Coast and the Gulf Coast. New Orleans under water again. Over 100,000 without electricity or water. New York City hjghways and subway systems down.  My apartment basement flooded. My former West Park Church flooded. Porters working all night to limit the damage. Back in Pittsburgh, the old downtown of my last parish flooded. Friends in Brooklyn with water filling their first floor. (Is everyone here alright?) Along with raging wildfires out of control in California and the Northwest. Do we need any more evidence of the damage we have done to our environment, our God-given home before we take action? 

And so here we are…

Jesus has left the Galilee. Crossed the border into what we no we call Lebanon. The region of Tyre and Sidon.  He wants to lay low. To bide his time, to chill for awhile. This place of tension between exposure, revelation and seclusion. But as always, they find him.  And this time, since  he is in a mainly Gentile region, a place despised by the Jewish community, it's not surprising that the person who seeks him out is a gentile woman, a Syro-Phoenician ethnically speaking. She wants him to cast out a demon from her daughter. (This, by the way is the third of four exorcisms Jesus will perform in Mark.)

Jesus response is shocking to us. He says, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.” And that is every bit as bad as it sounds. That word  dogs, in Greek kynarion, is actually for the Jews of that day an ethnic slur, kind of like the n word in its impact. He is literally saying I am only here for my own  people. 

Her response to him is very clever: "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.” ( She also might well have asked him if so, what was he doing in her part of the world?)  And he immediately gets it. And tells her that even as she spoke those words, her daughter was already  healed. 

So what’s going on here? For centuries, scholars embarrassed by Jesus’ words, have tried to find a way out for him., Finesse this in one way or another. But it is what it is. He said it. And in today’s culture, that's enough to cost him a job as a newscaster, professor, politician or preacher. I believe it’s best to take the Bible as it is. 

If we do, we see Jesus gain a new insight …and grow. Look, if Jesus is in our tradition, fully human as well as fully divine, then as fully human, he can’t be perfect. As fully human, he can’t know everything in advance. As fully human, he can be filled with prejudice and un- reflected upon attitudes. And he shows us that we can grow and change in how we understand our world.

Think about this …in the immediately  preceding chapters, Jesus has been engaged in intellectual repartee, debate with high level scholars and religious leaders. And he always wins, he’s always got the right  word.

This time, a simple woman, from the “outside,” bests him and leads Jesus to a new understanding of how he is and  what his mission is. She helps Jesus understand that there is room in his community for people like you, people  like you and me.

What happens next is a more typical healing story. Jesus heals a man who is hearing and speech impaired. What’s significant is what he says to him…be opened. The man’s physical impairments are a metaphor for Jesus…and our…emotional impairments.  In his experience with the woman, It is Jesus who is every bit as much in need of healing as the woman’s daughter, And I might add, us.

Jesus says to us, be opened..to reexamining our own preconceptions, prejudices and attitudes and be open to seeing the world in a new way. 

Jesus wants the people to be quiet about this healing, Why? Wouldn’t it help spread his fame, grow his following? It’s the same reason Jesus turned down everything Satan offered in the wilderness. Everything he was offered was good…food for people, convincing miracles, political power…but none of that is at the center of  what Jesus wants. 

We spent weeks studying and reflecting on Jesus as the bread of life. He didn’t want people following him because he could provide food. He didn’t want people following him because he was a magic man who performed miracles. He performs miracles, he heals, out of compassion for the human need he sees in front of him…And that is the heart of the matter.

What he wants from us is to follow him…follow him in a life that recognizes the need in front of us regardless of who it is that is presenting it and to respond with compassion and  a commitment to doing whatever is in our power to bring about healing….

Jesus says Be opened…let those with ears to hear, hear…

Amen

Mark 7: 24-37

24From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, 25but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. 26Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 27He said to her, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." 28But she answered him, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." 29Then he said to her, "For saying that, you may go — the demon has left your daughter." 30So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

31Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. 32They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. 33He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. 34Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, "Ephphatha," that is, "Be opened." 35And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. 36Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. 37They were astounded beyond measure, saying, "He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak."

 8/25

In October in Barcelona, there will be a major international conference on working for world peace. As part of that conference, there will be a panel on peace and religion. Last Wednesday, as a lead up to that conference, there was an. international webinar on peace and religion as it relates to the (new) sanctuary movement. What follows was my contribution to that webinar. 

My work in international just migration comes as part of my commitment as a person of faith to building  a more just, humane, inclusive and sustainable world. 

Shortly after dawn, in October 1992, in San Salvador, my friend John Fife and I went out to meet the student volunteers who would go out every morning to photograph that day’s harvest of mutilated bodies dumped after another night of terror  in the ongoing massacre, genocide of the poor carried out by the death squads of the US supported Salvadoran regime.  The photos had to be taken before sanitation crews removed the bodies for disposal. The photos would be kept at the diocese office and were the only way families could find out what had happened to disappeared loved ones. 

We were there on behalf of the Presbyterian Church seeking to understand what was causing so many Salvadorans to risk their lives crossing the deadly Sonoran desert to come to the US. John was involved because one  morning there was a knock on  his door and someone was there seeking shelter. When he heard the story, John opened the doors of the church. And inspired by an ancient tradition whereby fugitives fleeing for their lives could claim respite and protection within the doors of the church, the Sanctuary Movement was born.

In the next year, I would go to Arizona and travel with John across the border to visit refugee detainees in a Nogales, Mexico jail, once even encountering  someone I had  met in a Salvadoran prison,  and then facilitate and accompany one of these “pilgrims” across the border to a safe haven on the other side. 

In 2007, I was visiting Berlin with a group of clergy from New York City.  We were meeting with Pastor Juergen Quandt at the Heilege Kruz church to learn of their work with asylum seekers. Pastor Juergen described how their work had begun by responding to Palestinian refugees from the Lebanese Civil War in the 80’s. I told him that it reminded me of the work that we had done with Central Americans during those years and he responded, “that’s where we got the idea.” 

I knew that it was important for those involved in this work on both sides  of the ocean to meet one another. 

One year later, with the help of the Halbreich Foundation and the 

Fellowship of Reconciliation, and Stony Point Center, church asylum workers from Germany traveled to Arizona to meet with their colleagues from No Mas Muertos  and other groups involved in Sanctuary work. A year later a return visit to Germany would take place. We began to understand the parallels between the life threatening realities of the Sonoran desert and the Mediterranean Sea for those risking their lives seeking asylum.

After a few years’ hiatus, the resurgent world migration crisis led us to come together again, made easier by the emergent global communications technologies.  

In 2016, our work group produced the International Sanctuary Declaration.  It had two main purposes:  the first was to arrive at a common set of principles for those engaged in this work. The other was to begin a process of advocacy that could result in internationally recognized protocols for just migration,. 

Later that year the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church would endorse the statement as well as many other faith based organizations. Today we have an ever expanding work group with participants from the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe and Africa who are involved in the front line of  just migration work. 

Another round of visits would begin in 2018 with representatives from our  expanding circle of colleagues.  Our last pre-covid visit taking place in November 2019 to Tucson/Nogales, El Paso/Juarez and Stony Point, New York.

I come to this work as one who seeks to follow Jesus. My tradition finds inspiration in our commonly held Hebrew Scriptures…or Old Testament…and the Christian New Testament. Throughout the Five Books of the Torah, (Law, or better teaching) there is a constant call to care for the widow, the orphan and the stranger at your gate. (E.g.  Deut.10:18). At the very center of the Torah with as many verses before as after is this verse, Leviticus 19:18

¹⁸You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.

This is the verse that Jesus in Mark 12:31, (and Matthew 22:39)  would quote as the most important commandment, the essence of loving God is loving neighbor. 

…The most important commandment is to

30Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your 

soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’

 31The second is this ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ No other commandment is greater than these.”

There are at least 18 variations of this quote in the Bible.

In my reformed tradition, we understand ourselves to have a responsibility for the stewardship of creation. That work is guided by a vision of shalom, a peace that is not simply the absence of violence but is a wholeness, including justice….

But for me, faith is not proof texting or assent to theological proposition but is a way of being, a life lived. 

So then, this struggle for just immigration is a basic expression of faith. 

However….it is more than an expression of faith, it is an expression of being human. The story of humanity is the story of people on the move. Everything from the texture of our hair to the color of our skin to the words we speak the food we eat and the religions we practice are the result of people in motion encountering one another. And coming together. There is no language, culture or religion that is pure;. The stream is everflowing and unique particularities come together only for their own season ready to make their own contribution to the stream. Which then flows on. We are all part of what AI Wei Wei has called the “human flow.”As part of humanity, we have a responsibility to see that the flow continues with as much compassion, humaneness and justice as possible. That is our calling, that is our work.