Sermon

INTRODUCTION: I watched with special interest last week the speech by our president in Oslo, as he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. For certain, he was conflicted receiving a prestigious peace award while serving as commander-in-chief of two costly and destructive wars.

But before I say anything about that, let’s agree on one thing: If America’s history reveals anything, it is that we as a nation are not about peace. We are about war. Our military industrial complex thrives on war. Just try to close an outdated, irrelevant military base. Or merely attempt to slow down the production of a multi-billion dollar unneeded fighter plane.

War feeds our economy. This is a nation whose economic well-being depends upon war. We export war, not peace, no matter the president nor the party in power.

We are not only a nation whose foreign policy is dictated in part by the military industrial complex, but our American way of life depends on selling our instruments of war and being at war somewhere. Presently, and for the last almost seven years, we are an invading and occupying foreign force in Iraq, attempting with force, to force peace on a nation at war within itself.

That means we are an occupying army and nation. Lest we forget, as the Israeli-Palestinian occupation has shown, occupation is itself a form of violence. When we’re told we have 140,000 soldiers with rifles and helmets and scary looking uniforms controlling where you can go, what you can say, who you can have at your house, and where you can travel, we should also remember that we have contracted for another 190,000 who do of the same work of war.

The story is even more complex with our invasion and occupation of Afghanistan for the past eight years. Our occupation is an exercise in violence, doomed to fail because it hinges on the premise that we can bring peace through the use of violence!

In his speech, President Obama appropriately paid tribute to other great Nobel winners, specifically, the great revolutionary Indian leader, Mahatma Gandhi; and the equally great African American civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. However, he paid them only lip service, because if he had said more, he would have had to confess that as a pacifist, Gandhi was totally opposed to war. And Dr. King suffered greatly because he opposed the Vietnam War. King charged that America was the most violent nation in the world. Further, President Obama’s notion of a “just war” was discredited long ago. We didn’t do all we could before invading. We have used excessive force against civilian populations.

I remember when traveling in Israel and the Occupied Territories working on my doctoral project. Time after time, Palestinians and Arabs told me, “You Americans think in terms of 18 months, or three and five year plans. We Arabs think in terms of hundreds of years. We don’t want American democracy, we don’t want American values, and for sure we don’t want America’s religions.” And if they were Palestinian Arabs, they said, mainly, “We just want our county back. Period.”

Ditto for the Iraqis. We should give it back to them. That means saying publicly, “Help us Yankees to go home.”

In the book of the Maccabees: It was just like yesteryear…2,200 years ago…when a foreign power invaded the tiny nation of Israel. The king of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes IV, one of the successor families to Alexander the Great, thought that Israel needed a thorough housecleaning. They were worshipping the wrong god, reading the wrong books, and believing the wrong ideas. He would have been right at home in the Pentagon. Get on your white horse and ride; save the world, Western style!

So in they marched and occupied the nation of Israel – shock and awe. Big bully. Little nation. They began to check it out and asked all these intrusive kinds of questions: What’s all this stuff about killing animals and offering their blood on the big altar of your temple in Jerusalem. Stop it now. That is so primitive. And this notion of not eating pork: What’s the matter with you? Here, we’ll spill some pork blood on your altar.

And oh yes! the limitations of your language. We will teach Greek in your schools – actually we will set up gymnasiums for the whole person – body, mind and soul – and then your sons and daughters will be able to read Socrates and Plato, and the wonderful plays of Homer. No more of this Torah stuff with all of its commands to do this and not to do that. Ridiculous. And get rid of this stupid Sabbath observance. Your children will go to school on the seventh day of the week.

We Greeks know best. Really, you are so primitive. Just wait until you have become Greek-like in your walking, talking and thinking.

And what did a part of the Jews of Judea say? Was it, “Oh this is so wonderful that you have invaded us, conscripted our young men to the army, done away with our schools, and committed sacrilege in our temple?” Of course, not. They fought back. They fought dirty. They conducted guerilla warfare. And Antiochus Epiphanes IV hadn’t planned on this. It was very disconcerting. After three years he did something we should admire. He declared victory and got the heck out of Dodgistan as fast as he could.

And when the historians of Judaism, mainly rabbis, retold the story of what had actually happened. They included the story of how the people of Judea went about refurbishing the temple to clean it up, to dedicate it, and return it to its sacred purpose. In the process, the rabbis remembered that it was dark, and some had found left over oil to burn as candles and it burned and lasted days upon end…in fact, for eight whole days. In remembrance and celebration, they said, let’s focus on the burning candle oil that kept on burning and burning…for eight days. And back in Judea and its capitol city of Jerusalem, they were so happy. It became an annual celebration.

But what they didn’t know is that Antiochus Epiphanes IV had really won. He left behind Jews who thought like Greeks, who theologized like Greeks, and who were thoroughly Hellenized as it’s called since, “Greekicized” just doesn’t work well.

The change was pervasive. For example, Yahweh, the god of the Jews converted to Greek ways of being god. Before the Greeks came, Yahweh was this really, quite terrible God: C- at best, and more likely, D+. Check out his story with Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, or the invasion of what we now know as Palestine. It was standard operating procedure for Yahweh God to say to Israel’s army, don’t take any prisoners. Kill the women and children. Even in one place, he instructs them to “bash the heads of the babies against the wall.” What a god, you might say.

How did what happened to him happen? How was the God of the Israelites transformed into a Judaeo-Greek God of love, who cared for the oppressed, the alien, the imprisoned, the sick and the suffering? Too many Christians think Jesus did it. But it wasn’t Jesus, it was the Greeks and the successors to Alexander the Great.

It was a miracle…the miracle which we now remember as Hanukkah. Don’t look too close…don’t get too literal. Just like Christmas and Easter…it’s the story that gives the heft and the lift to life, namely, when ancient women and men of faith marched into the arena of darkness and lighted the way to freedom for their peoples. It was a miracle. And miracles are when the unexpected simply happens.

In the almost nine years we’ve been in existence, we’ve worked to have our own home…

n Back in 2003, we worked at buying 18 acres downtown and turning it into a community village, but because of the raging construction market, it didn’t fly…

n We proposed renovating the Foulds Theater at the Alliance for the Arts in exchange for a greatly extended lease in 2005, but it didn’t happen…

n The Episcopal Church in South Ft. Myers invited us to join them and to use their facilities on Sunday mornings starting this Fall of 2009, but it didn’t occur.

And then, a miracle happened: Three weeks ago, you voted to buy the Trinity Community Church at 2756 McGregor Boulevard which had an asking price of $385,000. In just three weeks you’ve given more than $81,100 in cash and pledged a total of $175,000, which includes the cash, by January 15. On that date, the total amount given could well approach $200,000! This week, we go back to our bank to see the bank president who has committed to financing the balance.

Again, it’s a miracle: We didn’t have a penny when we started, and in just three weeks, pledge commitments of $175,000…and cash of more than $81,000 is already in the bank and more coming in daily. <Give ourselves a hand!> For a congregation like ours, that was beginning to wonder about its future and purpose, that is a miracle.

So when I Hanukkah means, “Believing in miracles,” I mean real miracles conceived in faith, created in love, and constructed out of hope. But don’t just believe in miracles.

b. Hanukkah says, Expect a miracle. It’s time to be bold in belief and confidence. Our slogan should be, “Yes we can.” Say it with me, “Yes we can.” We can grow as we’ve never grown. We can give financially as we’ve never given before. That means that it’s now time to start putting All Faiths in your will. Leave a legacy. As far as attendance, we can have one full service and spill over into the overflow room. We can have two services, fill up the sanctuary and spill over again into the over flow room. At 8 a.m. we can have an interfaith communion service for those who wish to use the language of the ancients and the poetry of faith to confess their mistakes as a community of human beings and find forgiveness in living and loving, and dreaming and hoping. We can have Jewish services on Friday nights, Muslim prayers on Friday afternoons, Buddhist ritual before or after meditations on Wednesday. We can have yoga classes for those going home from a hard day’s work. We can have book club meetings, mother’s support group meetings, recently bereaved group meetings, Alcoholics Anonymous, community forums, and even more, in that one graciously small building.

We can flow out of the fellowship hall onto a significant wooden deck for Unitarian Communion. We can address the need for religious education. We can deepen and enrich our music program; we can develop a more exciting adult education program; we can have community programming. And all of this we can do every week of the year because of what you have done. We no longer are hemmed in, tied up, boxed out, nor even close to giving up. We expect a miracle. And it is happening before our very eyes. This says nothing about our community outreach which can be even more significant.

And when the time comes for you and to conclude this journey we call life, our friends and family will take a new brick, and have our name inscribed on it. We will place the brick in that precious little memorial garden, on which someone will spread some of our ashes.

We will be, and we will continue to be. Why because we expect. And what do we expect? A miracle…at this time of celebrating the miracle of Hanukkah.

Five-year-old Jewish, Isaac Schnitzer, a Jewish boy who lived in Billings, Montana. When Hanukkah arrived, he was proud of the menorah in his bedroom window. But as he and Rachel, his sister, prepared for bed, a brick hurled from the street sending shards of glass flying through the room.

The day, police advised the family to get bullet-proof glass in their windows and to take down the menorahs. Instead, Mrs. Snitcher decided to put the menorah back in the window and to call the local newspaper.

The next morning, a member of the local Congregational church read the story and phoned her pastor. A plan was hatched echoing the World War II legend from Denmark where the Nazi’s ordered all Jews to wear a yellow Star of David. But the King and thousands of other non-Jews donned the same stars in solidarity with their Jewish neighbors, frustrating the very intent of the Nazis to isolate the Jews.

And in Billings, within days, the word was out and paper menorahs were distributed for display in windows throughout town. The Target store had some plastic menorahs, but soon sold out. An antique store in Billings reported a Christian woman buying a very expensive, antique menorah to place in her window.

The marquee at the Catholic High School read, “Happy Hanukkah to our Jewish friends.” Soon, hundreds of homes in Billings had menorahs in their windows. Some were shot out by bullets, some shattered by bricks, and hate calls were made to Christian families.

Margaret MacDonald, whose idea it was initially to put up the paper menorahs, said she thought it would be a simple thing for people to do. But when she went to put the menorah in her own window, she hesitated: "With two young children, I had to think hard about it myself. We put our menorah in a living room window, and made sure nobody sat in front of it."

However, the community would not be intimidated. Each night of Hanukkah, more and more menorahs were placed in windows. The local paper printed a brightly colored full-page picture of a menorah, urging its 56,000 subscribers to cut them out and place them in their windows.

On the last night of Hanukkah, thousands of homes had menorahs in them. As the Schnitzers drove around town that night, Isaac saw all of the houses with menorahs in their windows and exclaimed, “I didn’t know so many people were Jews!” The miracle of the light of Hanukkah was shining.

[1] A sermon presented Dec. 13, 2009 at All Faiths Unitarian Congregation of Ft. Myers, FL, meeting temporarily at the Crestwell School, 1901 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, Minister.