Yearning

Psalm 42, Romans 12:9-21, Matthew 9:9-13

June 8, 2008

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

In March, this congregation held an auction whose proceeds have helped start a new Habitat for Humanity chapter in New Haven and Hamden, as well as helping to fund the trip of seven Redeemer women to Camp Coast Care, helping to rebuild Katrina-ravaged Mississippi. As part of that Auction, Greta Seashore won the right to choose the topic for a sermon I would preach, and today is that sermon! A few weeks ago we sat down over at Yale/New Haven hospital where Greta works, and I hoped she would come up with something easy yet challenging for me to address. One out of two isn’t bad, and I got the challenging piece. We had a wonderful discussion that day about the medical team with which Greta works, a team which reflects some pieces of the amazing ethnic, racial and religious diversity of this nation. Greta has invited me to reflect in this sermon on how we can get beyond all that divides us from one another in different religious traditions in order to work together in healing this planet, as her team works very hard to heal tiny, sick babies of every race, ethnic and religious background every day here in New Haven.

When I first thought about what she was saying, I went to the simple answer: what do we all have in common? It is a great temptation when discussing our relationships with those of other faiths to move into mathematics and seek out the lowest common denominator. And that is a fascinating exercise. It was great fun a few weeks ago to hear Cheryl Doss’ colleague Fatima tell us about how Islam’s holy book, the Qu’ran, tells many of the same stories that Jews and Christians read in our Bibles, although some of those stories are slightly different. When I taught last year’s Confirmation Class about Christians relating to those of other faiths, I posted around our room the signs you see posted up here today, and I could have added about a dozen more of these from even less well-known religions. Most religions in the world have some sort of rule or proverb or advice that is similar to what we know of as the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” So, the moral of the story is, if we all have so much in common, why can’t we just get along?

But to leave it at that would be simplistic and unrealistic. Even though many of us are remarkably ignorant about other religious traditions, people have known for generations about many of the commonalities between us, and that hasn’t stopped us from hating, judging and even killing each other in the name of religious tradition.

So as I thought further about this, I went back to the question of where religious traditions came from in the first place. One might ask why we have religion in the first place if it seems to cause so much trouble and division between people? Why not just, as John Lennon suggested in his song, “Imagine no religion”?

At the risk of continuing to be simplistic, I don’t think we can, and I think the reason is that it boils down to one word, one universal human characteristic: yearning. Our yearning for God, God’s yearning for us, our yearning to connect with one another. Yearning.

The Psalmist sings, “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for the living God.” There is something within each of us that has a yearning to connect with our Creator, with whatever we call the one who calls us out of ourselves and into something greater, a yearning which I believe was implanted in us at the beginning of human life. That yearning brings people into churches, synagogues, temples and mosques and even, I would suggest, into civil religious rituals like Memorial Day exercises in cemeteries around the nation. It’s what drove people into religious settings of all kinds after 9/11. It is expressed in creeds old and new, like the basic creed of Reformed Protestants, the Westminster Confession, which begins with the question, “What is the chief end of humanity?” (What’s the point of people?), which is answered by “To glorify God and to serve God forever.” Yearning to connect with God is often why people bring their children for baptism, that desire to make sure the child is united with God all their lives.

The great English author E.M. Forster began his novel Howard’s End with the words “only connect;” that yearning for connection drives human life. We yearn for oneness with God, and we also yearn for healthy, creative, productive and loving ways to connect with one another. What is the chief end of religions then? At their best, our religious traditions help those connections happen. At their worst, religious traditions connect only a small group of people and divide them from others outside that tradition.

This sort of practice is what Jesus chided the Pharisees about in our gospel reading for today. Jesus spent his life trying to bring people together with God and with one another across all the barriers his religious tradition had put up to divide people. One of the greatest sins of the Christian church, I believe, is that we have bought into the same kind of divisiveness within our own tradition. The author Sara Miles reflects on this in her book, Take This Bread as she looks at how Christians have been divided for millennia around who can receive Holy Communion in any given church and who cannot. She ponders how this meal evoking the presence of Jesus who ate “barrier-breaking meals with sinners of all descriptions” has so contradicted that reality. “A sign of unconditional acceptance and forgiveness, it was doled out and rationed to insiders; a sign of unity, it divided people” Her hope, though, about the table of Christ is that it might “show us how to re-member what had been dis-membered by human attempts to separate and divide, judge and cast out, select or punish.” (p. 76) Religion is about re-membering that which has been dis-membered.

In Matthew’s gospel text for today, Jesus tells the Pharisees to go back and study the text from the Prophet Hosea where the people are told that God desires not sacrifice, but mercy. The whole system of sacrificial rituals was designed to help people re-connect with God and one another following any kind of sin which might sever that connection. Animals were killed as an offering to make things right with God, which would free one also to make things right with people. Hosea, and Jesus, reminded the people that their impulse to want to restore connection was right, but the method was not what would really work. Mercy, Hosea said; the Hebrew word is hesed, a word often translated as “steadfast love,” the same word used to describe the love a mother has for a child in her womb. “Connect with God and one another by reaching inside your heart, soul and mind to remember that kind of primal love and then live it every day,” is what Hosea was trying to get across. “Go and study what Hosea said,” Jesus told the Pharisees, “and maybe then you’ll stop harping on who’s at table with me and come and join us.”

Paul and Talia have brought Isabella to us this day to be baptized. When we baptize a person here we do not put a tattoo like a gang tag on their heads; we do not proclaim that they are now different and so better than everyone else. We do not proclaim that now she can only associate with people who have been similarly marked. We don’t brand her as anything other than what she already is: a child created in the image of God like every other child in this world. What we do today is acknowledge a set of relationships that already exist: her connection with God and God’s connection with her, implanted in her at her creation, and her need to be connected with other human beings who feel hesed, steadfast love, toward her and who can teach her how to remember that love within herself and share it with others. What we do today is call on the presence of the Holy Spirit in her life to help her stay connected to God and all God’s children. We yearn with hope that as she grows up she will remind those of us who find it too easy to forget that the deepest heart of our faith, as embodied by Jesus, is to cut gates in fences, to add chairs to banquet tables, to come out of our cocoons and risk flying to connect with this amazing world and the even more amazing people in it. Amen.