July 17, 2016 – “Freedom and Obligation” – Eileen Wiviott

“Reaching Through Walls” Eileen Wiviott speaking.

August 12, 2012

SERMON – “Reaching Through Walls” – Eileen Wiviott 8-12-12

We love to sort things, don’t we? We love to define things, categorize, put things into neat little boxes, including other people and ourselves. It’s our way of trying to make order out of chaos, to try to understand the world and our place in it. We look to define things, to put walls around our selves and each other, as a way of making sense and finding meaning.

The illusion of separateness and the creation of false differences go back to the earliest civilizations. Divide and conquer is the oldest trick in the book if you want to oppress others and accumulate power. Think of the Roman Empire, slavery, Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration, the border between the United States and Mexico, the Berlin Wall, the wall between Israel and Palestine.

We human beings are binary thinkers. We have evolved from animals who utilized a very concrete, either/or, yes or no, way of thinking, which has allowed us to survive and evolve. If a cheetah is chasing you, you don’t want to carefully weigh multiple options, you want to make a split second, either/or decision – either run or fight. However, even though we’ve evolved higher and more complex ways of thinking, we fall back on that binary thinking far too easily. We are still wired to look for definite answers, clear categories, to put sturdy boundaries around our ideas and beliefs. We are good at building walls. We build them to keep some people out and to keep some people in. We build them to protect ourselves from the elements – wind, rain, and snow. We build them to protect ourselves from each other, to feel safe, secure, and comfortable. We build them to support, to provide structure and order. We build walls out of concrete and steel, out of ideas, out of relationships, out of beliefs. Putting up walls can be a pejorative term but walls aren’t all bad. They are useful and important, but without windows or doors in those walls, to allow the air, the light, and the ideas to move in and out, walls can stifle and imprison us.

We sit inside these walls right now. The walls of our church, a place where relationships are nurtured, where we practice living out a covenant of love and service to the world, which we carry outside of these walls. We seek continually to make these walls feel open and embracing to all who might find shelter and comfort within them. These walls keep us warm in the winter, cool in the summer. They provide a place of beauty, of respite, of comfort. However, were we to close these walls off from light, to refuse to let newcomers in or keep people out based on different views, different lifestyles, or expressions, we would surely die as a community.

The walls of a cell provide the necessary support and protection for the functioning organelles within the cell to get what they need, to let go of what they must in order to multiply and grow, to thrive. All of life depends on the thriving of cells, and thus the permeability of their walls. How do we make our walls more permeable – the walls we build in our minds to define, categorize and shut out others? We can’t tear every wall down, but there are several things that make the walls that separate us more permeable so that they are like the walls of plant and animal cells rather than the walls of a prison cell.

Music, drama, art, books can breath life into rigid barriers. The arts build a common ground, allow us to reach across divisions and feel a sense of connection. Service is another way of putting windows in our walls. When we serve together toward a common cause, we reach across barriers to remind each other of our common humanity, the goodness that we share.

Authentic conversation across differences can be one of the most powerful ways of permeating the walls that we build to separate and divide, walls across race, gender, sexual orientation, class, education and experience. We need to talk to each other. We need to learn from each other. We need to be open to each other. Not just people we find interesting and who we agree with. We need to talk to people who are markedly different from us. Not to change their minds, as much as we’d like to, but to be willing to have our own mind changed. It’s not always a matter of tearing down walls, of letting go of what we feel is right, of diminishing our commitment to our values. It is a matter of seeing that there is a human being on the other side of the conversation. That another person with different values does not threaten ours. Maybe that conversation makes us even more committed to our own values while at the same time holding that person with respect and love. If one of our values is the inherent worth and dignity of every person, here’s a great time to practice it, with those who would most challenge that value for our binary thinking brains.

I have four brothers. All of them are older than me. Two of my brothers are on my side of the political wall and two are on the other side of the wall.  I love all of my brothers but one of my brothers, Matt, is special to me. He was always nicest to me. He was the only brother to pay attention to me, to protect me from my brother Brian who was mercilessly cruel to me (I’m exaggerating but it felt merciless in the dramatic throws of childhood). Matt is one of the most generous and kind people I know. He is loving, affectionate, smart and very competent. I love him very much and I know that he loves me and I know he is a good person.  Guess what side of the wall he’s on? He’s on the other side of the wall and he loves to give me a hard time about my side of the wall. I usually don’t engage, laugh it off, rather than try to argue my position. Mostly because I don’t feel I’m very good at it and partly because I don’t want to lose my cool and damage my relationship with him. But I carry him with me. When I am hearing about economic injustice, about strident and ineffectual politics, about the impasses we continually come to as we see each other as opposition rather than human beings. I can very easily put people that share my brother’s political views in a box and make generalizations like, “None of them care about anything but themselves.” But I know that’s not true because I know that’s not true about Matt. I am trying to think of ways I can communicate my point of view while holding onto the love I have for him. Loving Matt makes me want to learn how to maintain the integrity of my values while trusting that I can explore my views, even poke holes in the certainties, so that I can see another view without losing the strength I feel in my convictions. Love can be a window maker. Love can permeate walls. My brother made a window in a wall that might have stood between us. He put that window in by loving me, reaching out continually, and listening. I chose to look through the window and see his face, hear his voice.

The walls of religion can be impenetrable, made of fixed and solid belief mortared by intolerance to questions. We can see those walls and choose to turn away from them or we can try to put some windows in those walls. Rather than tearing down the entire structure of religion, Christianity or any other specific religion, it is our responsibility as religious people to build windows and doors in our understanding of religion so that we can better see those who live within, and maybe ourselves a bit better too.

My religious and spiritual journey is like any other in that I have been searching for understanding and meaning, to give order and direction to my life. When I was a child, sitting in the pews of my Catholic church, I wanted very much to feel at home in that place, within those boundaries and walls of that religious house. I said the words of the creed we all spoke, glancing from side to side, wondering if anyone could see that my doubt was showing. I longed to experience faith and feel the comfort of its walls.

I wasn’t sure how I missed the line where God was handing out belief and I really didn’t know how I was supposed to get that belief. I thought that belief meant you knew for sure, with absolute certainty that something was true and that you felt it in your heart. It didn’t occur to me that belief had any room for doubt, questioning, and discovering meaning.  For many years, I felt there was no place in my life for a religious community, because I could not imagine one where the walls could be flexible and permeable. In my mind the only kind of religious community was one with fixed and solid brick walls. Like my rigid concept of belief, religion itself was something I chose to be shut out of rather than locked into. I climbed over the wall of faith and walked away from it, only to find that my journey put it right in front of me again. Now, facing faith and whatever draws me back to this concept, I want to make a window and let some light pour in.

When I found this religious community and saw that there could be a different way of being religious, which included questioning, and valuing of openness rather than certainty, I felt at home. Within the safety of the walls of this community, I have found the courage to examine my religious and theological boundaries and try to open up some windows and doors.  Being a part of this religious community has led me to seminary, where I am constantly challenged to examine the walls around my beliefs and to make them more porous.

This spring I took a Christian Scriptures course, for which I read the New Testament (for the first time in my life) along with six other books on HOW to read the New Testament. There were some basic questions that I wrestled with throughout my study, “What is it about this book? What is it that has everyone so excited and drives many to so fiercely defend it? And because it is so vehemently defended as the only truth, does that mean that those of us open to uncertainty should disregard it entirely? What, if any, is it’s meaning and purpose in my life?” Finally, it was time for me to explore these questions, chipping through my own thick walls about belief, faith, and doubt, and to confront the message that I was going to hell for not believing. And even though I had long ago dismissed that idea, I very much came face to face with those specters of my religious past as I read passages like John 3:18 – “Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” I find that kind of certainty intimidating, like facing a solid brick wall. My binary thinking reactions are to feel first afraid – to hear it as truth and therefore question my own belief and resulting condemnation or salvation and then, secondly rebel against it and dismiss it entirely. Neither option allows me to examine the passage in its context, to find possible alternate meanings or uses.

Reading the bible was painful but it was like taking out a splinter. I have had these theological questions all my life and they’ve never gone away even though I’ve tried to ignore them. They were just buried in my heel, making it uncomfortable to walk my path. So to take it out and really examine the belief system I was raised in, to recognize that I wasn’t making up the message that I was going to hell if I didn’t believe, was in some ways a relief.

As I began to understand the historical context of the bible, that these were people, just like us, trying to make sense and find order in a very uncertain world, I began to understand the desire for absolute certainty, then and now. I started to hear, as I read through the stories and letters of the Christian bible, that belief is not absolute certainty, and faith is not exactly the same as belief. Belief can exist with doubt and questions or it can be more immovable.  But faith, to me, is a way of being in the world. It is a trusting without any tangible proof that something is real. I was struck by one passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans, Chapter 8, verses 18-27.

Paul was a Pharisee, which was a Jewish holy man charged with interpreting and upholding the Jewish laws. These were laws about what it meant to be Jewish – laws about what to eat, where to pray, what to wear, laws about marriage and circumcision.  Paul was very strict in his interpretation of the laws and very good and persecuting those who did not follow them. The story of Paul, as described by Luke, is that he met the resurrected Jesus on the road to Damascus, and was converted instantly. He gave up his life as a Pharisee and wrote a bunch of letters to churches explaining why and how they should follow Jesus. These letters became the foundational beliefs and teachings of Christianity. In his letter to the Romans, he talks about hope and faith, which are words I can embrace more easily than belief. Paul says, “For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” I was moved by this passage. I found light in there, a window I could open up to allow my ideas of faith and belief to breath and expand.  I like the idea that maybe it is enough to hope, even if I don’t know for sure. By reading, thinking and talking about the bible in a way that tries to understand why it was written, by whom, and what story it is telling, I was able to get beyond some of the barriers I put up about faith and to find some valuable meaning.

While I was reading the New Testament for my class, I sat down with Bill Fisher to flush out some of my questions and thoughts. He said something very helpful to me. To paraphrase, he said that his faith was in the beauty and magnificence of life.  This simple and profound statement gave me permission to throw open the window in my understanding of my own faith, in fact, to see that word in a whole new way.  I can now see faith as more than a rigid belief system, a blind trust in each unverifiable but steadfast claim propping up an intricate system of false hope.

My faith is not about what God is or isn’t, or what happens when we die, although I have my ideas about those things. My faith, what I must have faith in, in order to arise every morning and face the day, is simply that this life matters. That life is not only senseless, purposeless chaos. I have faith that life has meaning, that love is powerful, the most powerful force there is, that there is a unity, a oneness, an interconnection of all beings and things. These are the things that I have faith in, that I realize I must have always had faith in because I have gotten up in the morning and faced each day, sometimes with courage and grace, more often with uncertainty, doubt and confusion, but face it I have and will continue to do, asking how I can be of use. I can search the world over for proof that life matters but the only place I’ll find that faith is in my own soul. Self-discovery, prayer, conversations with others on the journey of the spirit have helped me make a window in the wall of faith, where I had previously felt shut out.     Some walls must be torn down – walls of bigotry, hatred and oppression. But walls that provide support, protection and order to our lives will remain. Examine your walls. Tap them. Look for where the support beams are. Find a place where you can open up the wall with a window. You might be amazed at how your perspective and your life can change.