I have a confession to make. I hesitate to say this out loud because I don't want you to get the wrong idea, but I do want you to get to know me and I want to get to know you, and every week Scott and Kaaren get up and talk about the importance of being bold in our living and in our loving, so here goes.
I am an optimist. I am not just your garden variety glass half full kind of optimist, I am a dyed in the wool, my cup floweth over in the middle of a desert, silver lining seeking kind of optimist. I hesitate to tell you this because I hate to be perceived as naive. But the truth is that I can't seem to shake it. I believe that everyone and everything possesses the capacity to change and grow. I believe that literally anything is possible, and I expect to walk through life being greeted by surprise and wonder in almost every moment. I am always looking for the lesson, looking for the learning in my painful experiences, and I am confident each time that something important will come out of my suffering.
I know this about myself because I, like so many of you, have had my heart broken, my trust betrayed, my safety threatened. I know this about myself because I, like so many of you, have at times found myself up against impossible odds, facing situations and people that seemed impenetrable and unjust. I know this about myself because even when I have slid into the depths of depression, I catch myself searching for moments in the day when I am laughing despite my pain, when a smile breaks across my face like the sun rising and before I know it, sometimes even just for a moment, I am able to forget myself and reach out to someone else.
My optimism often peeks through in what I read. Whenever I've got a bit of free time on my hands I reach for a book, and my choice is fairly predictable. I like non-fiction, true stories of the underdog, the person or town or group who choose hope against all odds and dedicate themselves and their community to change. I reach for stories of healing and transformation, for stories that defy the odds, stories that place a higher value on discovery, on pushing, on growth and healing than on traditional models of success.
Over the last couple of years, for some unexplainable reason I've found myself reaching for book after book about young, white, female inner-city pastors who help to transform churches and communities. I've read stories about kids with no money and no support winning scholarships to Ivy League Universities and graduating with honors, and I'll even admit that I've watched that terrible TV show, The Apprentice, and enjoyed seeing the younger entrepreneurs beat out their older more educated competitors. I reach for these stories not out of some voyeuristic tendency or the desire to eavesdrop on someone else's success, but because these stories fuel my imagination. They offer a metaphor, a path of meaning and possibility that makes sense to me.
So when I realized that I would get the opportunity to preach about the insights we draw from the Jewish tradition during this season of holidays, naturally, I got excited. The story of Hanukkah - a true to life - or at least as true to life as we ever get several centuries removed - story of a small band of underdogs defying the odds, lighting the oil of hope in the midst of the greatest darkness of the year - what could be better!
As I read and read, I found that there are at least two Hanukkah stories. One focuses on an historical, military victory and the other focuses on light and endurance. In both cases, the seemingly miraculous occurs.
The first Hanukkah story - the one found in the Christian version of the Hebrew Scriptures - tells the tale of the Maccabees, a small band of devout Jews who resisted the rule of Antiochus, and his decree outlawing all local religions, including Judaism. The Maccabees refused to surrender their freedom or their faith, and in their resistance they took to the hills and the mountains and fought the regular armies with guerilla tactics. After several years of fighting, the Maccabees won the war and took back the city of Jerusalem.
When they arrived in the city they found their Holy Temple in ruins. They mourned and raged and together they rebuilt the Temple. They pulled down the altar and built it anew. They cleaned the interior, consecrated the temple courts, burnt incense, and brought bread. When all of their work was completed, early on the twenty-fifth day of the ninth month of the lunar calendar in the year 164 B.C.E. - on one of the darkest days of the year, the Maccabees rededicated their temple amidst hymns of thanksgiving. They decorated the front of the building with wreaths and they played harps and cymbals and lutes. Great joy filled the air, and the old feelings of shame disappeared. Everyone worshipped and praised Heaven in gratitude and the celebration lasted for eight days.[1]
This story of the Maccabees' perseverance and ultimate recovery of religious freedom led the way as the dominant story of Hanukkah for hundreds of years. The military victory of a small group of devout Jews against an enormous, seemingly unbeatable empire inspired many.
Later, however, the focus of the holiday shifted to a wrinkle found deep within the outer layer of the Talmud. The account of this second story reads that "when the Greeks entered the Temple, they defiled all the oils in it, and when the Hasmonean dynasty prevailed over them and defeated them, they searched and found only one bottle of oil sealed by the High Priest. It contained only enough for one day's lighting. Yet a miracle was brought about with it, and they lit with that oil for eight days."[2] Many of the broad strokes of this second story are the same as the first: the Greeks defiled the Temple, they were defeated by the Jewish underdogs, and a festival lasting eight days ensued. The major difference in this second story comes with a single bottle of sacred oil that burned far beyond its capacity to last for eight long days. In this story, the miracle of light takes center stage.
A light shone in the darkness, light that should have gone out days before. As one commentator suggests, "the single bottle of oil symbolized the last irreducible minimum of spiritual light and creativity within the Jewish people - still there even in its worst moments of apathy and idolatry. The ability of that single jar of oil to stay lit for eight days symbolized how...that tiny amount could unfold into an infinite supply of spiritual riches."[3] This interpretation of the Hanukkah story brought the focus away from war and violence to the magnification of a miracle, to the importance of hope and of light.
Now I am not a big fan of war, so I, like many others I'm sure, find it much easier to take inspiration from the wrinkle in the Hanukkah story that has drawn so much attention in the last several hundred years. Most of the time, I prefer to look to the single day's supply of oil that lasted for eight long days, to the tiny spark of spiritual light that expanded into infinite riches, offering a symbol of hope, a symbol of freedom and faith that could not be extinguished by the surrounding darkness.
But still I hesitate to leave the first story behind entirely. When we leave the first story behind, we ignore the passion and the risk taking of the Maccabee warriors. When we leave behind the story of a small band of insurgents winning out against a seemingly unbeatable empire, in some ways we are saying that we have outgrown the story of resistance, the story of risk and struggle against seemingly unbeatable odds.
Up against an enormously powerful empire, resisting even many of their fellow Jews, the Maccabees began and continued their fight for religious freedom faced with the prospect of almost certain failure. They, with their small numbers and limited resources, could not possibly have expected to win, but they fought anyway.
The Maccabee's sense of hope and optimism, their commitment to freedom and to their faith inspires me. I draw inspiration from people who see beyond themselves and their own conditions, who see even beyond their own lifetimes - offering up their gifts of struggle and resistance to the shared altar of humanity in hopes that someday things will change. All of the great resistance movements - the civil rights movement here in the United States and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa just to name two - these movements were made up of people who took the long view, who saw themselves as part of an arc rather than as a discreet end point on a line, people who knew it was more important to do something than to let their spirit die.
These people who led the way knew what the writer Katha Pollitt knows, that even though in the end she sometimes might as well "be mailing herself to the moon or marrying a palm tree...what can we do but offer what we have?" What can we do but offer what we have, even if we cannot know if it will help. This kind of resistance, this kind of outlook, requires a different set of assumptions than we are used to. It requires an ethic of risk, rather than an ethic of control.
In our society, an ethic of control predominates. Heroes take center stage. Individuals who take decisive, unilateral action are lifted up. We claim responsibility and rationality by putting our support behind causes and actions that we know can succeed. And then, when we are faced with complex problems, problems that are too big to be solved alone or within the foreseeable future, often times we as a society do nothing, dismissing even partial solutions as naive or useless.[4] When we live this way, we sink into a kind of paralysis.
While our culture as a whole clings to this model of living, it is a far from inspiring way of life. Think about it with me for a moment, Would the story of Hanukkah be a story of inspiration for generations if the Maccabees had simply waited, if they had refused to light the single bottle of oil that they found and instead postponed the celebration until they could press and consecrate more oil?
Of course not, the story of the Maccabean victory is strengthened by the fact that again, in the face of almost certain failure, the Maccabees did just the opposite of what so many people would do, they stepped forward and lit the lamp. The Macabees, shored up by their experience of abundance in the past, placed their faith in the abundance of the future as well. The Maccabees lived by an ethic of risk. This ethic of risk, this way of looking at and participating in the world, allows people to resist even when success is unimaginable.
Unitarian Universalist theologian and ethicist Sharon Welch describes an ethic of risk as a worldview "that begins with the recognition that we cannot guarantee decisive changes in the near future or even in our lifetime." If we cease resisting, she says, "we lose the ability to imagine a world that is any different than that of the present; we lose the ability to imagine strategies of resistance and ways of sustaining each other in the long struggle for justice. We lose the ability to care, to love life in all its forms. We cannot numb our pain at the degradation of life," she cautions, "without numbing our joy at its abundance."[5]
The poet Mary Oliver embodies this ethic of risk in her writing. If we look away from the woman scrubbing ashtrays in the toilet of the airport in Singapore, we miss the beauty as well. Oliver tells us that a darkness was ripped from her eyes. As she describes in her back and forth way the reality of the woman kneeling in front of her, the surprising beauty of the scene peeks through - not beauty in the traditional sense with birds and trees and fountains, and not beauty in the miraculous, supernatural sense - but beauty in the way that light can shine out of a life. In the way that the woman smiled only for her sake, neatly folding and refolding her blue cloth. In all of this Oliver never lets go of the possibility, unlikely as it is, that this woman will "rise up from the crust and the slop and fly down to the river. This probably won't happen," she acknowledges, "But maybe it will."
Before I went to seminary, I worked for a number of years as a counselor for children and adolescents living with serious mental illnesses and behavior problems. During my last year on the job, when I felt particularly burnt out and I knew that it was just a matter of months until I would leave to start a new career in a new city, our agency received a number of referrals for young boys who had sexually abused other children and somehow their cases all landed on my desk. Honestly, it felt like some kind of final test.
As one of the supervisors in the program, I reviewed the histories, the offenses and the patterns of victimization. I looked at the statistics, the likelihood of recidivism, and the treatment methods that had been attempted so far. Sitting alone in my windowless office, I longed to push these cases away, to refuse them entry into our program or into my life.
But one afternoon a few days later I found myself walking up the steps to one of these family's homes. To my surprise, I found an eleven-year old boy inside - a boy who loved basketball and fishing, video games and Frisbee, pizza and fresh mangoes. I found a boy with light in his eyes. I left his house that day full of both confusion and clarity. I knew his history. I had no idea if we could help or not, but I knew that we would work with him. I knew that in offering him another chance we would plant a seed of possibility - a tiny seed in a predominantly barren land.
Now, I am the first to admit that the next months were difficult, and I will never know if we made a difference in this child's life. I will never know if he changed his ways or if he returned to hurting others. I do know that in opening my heart to him, in choosing to believe in his capacity for healing, I retained the ability to care, to imagine things differently, and the possibility of change stayed alive within me. In the rare and beautiful days and weeks that followed, this boy had the chance to feel like a regular, valued kid and I, in those beautiful and rare moments received the gift of knowing him that way too.
What more could I ask for? And what more could I offer than what I had?
This kind of hope, this kind of resistance that Mary Oliver and the Maccabees call us to, this ethic of risk requires a certain amount of faith. It does not necessarily require belief in the supernatural or even in the miraculous, but it does require faith. As our previous minister and social justice activist Dick Gilbert says in his book, The Prophetic Imperative, "the deeper we probe spiritually, the more we identify with others and cast our lot with them in battling all that keeps us from celebrating our mystic bonds."[6] This center of faith and passion can sustain a person in social and political justice efforts for years. It reminds us that the work of our spirit, the work of our lives is ultimately about connection with others, not about winning or achieving
So, what do you need to keep your candle burning? What do you need to nurture imagination, resistance, and care? What do you need to fuel and refuel yourself on this journey of love and justice?
In this season of holidays, may we each find inspiration in the stories we share. May we look closely to our own lives and souls, to the faith which nurtures and sustains us, seeking the source of love and of life, of hope and connection that restores us and helps us to keep our balance in a world of joy and despair, apathy and excitement. May the naive, the young, the optimistic, all find their way into our hearts, and may we each keep the candle burning.
May it be so, and amen.
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