It's Not My Water
The purpose of our water is to put it to use. This too we gather together to remember.
A few weeks ago, I listened to a radio interview that remains under my skin. The interviewee was a doctor named David Hilfiker, who, when his children 12, 9 and 4, gave up his comfortable medical practice and moved with his family-along with the families of other doctors-into Christ House, a medical shelter for homeless men struggling with cancer and aids. Christ House is located in one of the poorest and crime-ridden parts of Washington DC. And so, one of the first questions the interviewer asked Dr Hilfiker was about his children. What about their safety? The interviewer referred to an occasion when his older daughter on her way to school discovered someone who had just been shot and killed. Wasn't he worried, the interviewer asked, about the danger to which he had exposed his children?
Dr. Hilfiker responded by saying a remarkable thing. He admitted that the inner city was dangerous, but he said so was the affluent segregated neighborhood which they left. He then quoted what FEMA director Michael Brown said right after Katrina, "We're seeing people we didn't know existed." Think about that said Dr. Hilfiker. It's an amazing admission. It's a truth that Michael Brown would surely take back if he could, yet a truth nonetheless: There is something deeply embedded in the comfortable parts of our culture that leads us to living lives in which we have no idea that the impoverished and desperate among us exist.
It's hard to explain, said Hilfiker, but his family just slowly came to the realization that such blindness scared them more than living in the neighborhood of Christ House. Living along side and in relationship with the poor and vulnerable, he said, in some way healed them by keeping them in touch with Martin Luther King's idea that "None of us is well until all of us are well."
I believe we come together today as brothers and sisters of Dr. Hilfiker. His particular path and calling may not be ours, but I think his fear and his hunger certainly is. We may have a hard time articulating it, but we sense it: this hovering, nagging feeling that something is wrong, that we are being misled, or that our priorities are somehow just a bit askew. Again, it's faint, but it doesn't go away: this hunger to be, and feel, and care about more.
As Kaaren said, we each come with our own pain and needs, our own emptiness and brokenness. Each of us wants to be held, healed and refilled. And yet none of us want it to end there. None of us want that to be the story of our lives. We don't want to simply have our emptiness filled; we want to be the kind of people who want their emptiness filled in order that we can then go out and use what we've been given to fill the emptiness of others.
Howard Thurman, spiritual advisor to Martin Luther King, and considered by some to be one of the great preachers of the 20th century, once asked, "Are you a reservoir or a swamp?" Both, he reminds us, have inlets; but only reservoirs have outlets as well. Reservoirs take in and hold water in order that it may be available when needed. A swamp in contrast develops no provision for water to flow out. It simply reaches for and takes more and more of whatever comes its way. The water in a swamp is surely alive, says Thurman, but apt to be rotten. And, says Thurman, it's hard, very hard, to live in our culture and not become a swamp.
Which speaks to why we bring our water here today, and why we bring our spiritual, emotional and physical waters here every week: we want to be reminded that our water is not ours alone. We want, and need, to hear a different message than the one we hear out there.
It's not, as President Bush says referring to social security, "our money."
Buying a Hummer is not, as the automakers say, "solely a matter of personal choice."
Welfare is not, as President Clinton recently said again, mainly "about personal responsibility."
The Rochester City Schools are not, as suburban politicians say, "the city's problem."
We don't, as the commercials tell us, "deserve" bigger homes, faster computers, more dinners out and more extravagant vacations.
We are not independent, self-sufficient or ultimately responsible just for looking out for "our own."
Rather we are, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, "never rich as long as there is poverty in the world; never totally healthy, as long as diseases are rampant; never fully what we ought to be, until others are what they ought to be."
This is what we don't want to forget or ever stop feeling. To use Howard Thurman's metaphor, we don't want to be swamp people. We don't want to have swamp kids. We don't want to live in a swamp culture. And we don't want to inflict a swamp country on the rest of the world.
Which is why the water in your hands this morning means so very much. It's why it matters so much how we think about the water in our hands this morning. This is not a cutesy, feel-good ritual of return; it is instead an act of great commitment. Make no mistake. When you bring your water forward in a moment and pour it into one of the common bowls, we invite you to treat it as a symbol of your loyalty to needs greater than your own, a symbol of your belief that we fill our own cups so that we may better fill the cups of others, a symbol of your desire to be part of a church community committed not just to personal growth, but also to the common good.
As Unitarian Universalists, what binds us as a religious community is not that we are a special or different kind of people, but that we want to become a different kind of people.
As we come forward, may it be to this end.
Let us begin...
September 10, 2006