Roll Like Waters
We can find inspiration, encouragement, and resources for resilience in stories from the past, including ancient texts such as the Hebrew Prophets. This sermon was written during the Jewish High Holidays and was presented to the UUs of Fallston on October 9, 2011. (Apologies for the late post.)
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Introduction: Taschlich
The High Holidays ended yesterday with Yom Kippur. As many of you know, my interfaith family celebrates the Jewish holidays. Part of our Rosh Hashanah observance is the practice of Tashlich, symbolically “casting off” the transgressions of the previous year into a natural body of flowing water. The sins of the previous year are represented by bread. Taschlich alone isn’t enough for closing out the year; ideally we’ve already made amends and reconciled directly with anyone we’ve wronged or been in conflict with. Even so, I find it meaningful to have a tactile experience of letting go and to watch the water below me flow into the future.
So it was that we put the babies in their wagon and headed down the hill. There’s a place where the road into our neighborhood goes over a bridge spanning the creek. We lifted the children up to see the water below, and we read a passage from the Book of Micah:
“God will take us back in love;
God will cover up out iniquities,
God will hurl all our sins
Into the depths of the sea”
—Micah 7:19
I felt like I most needed to let of things left undone and unsaid. There were affirmations I hadn’t spoken, cards I hadn’t written, plans that I had let fall through. It’s hard to deal with an absence, so I was all the more glad for a ritual.
I took a hunk of stale bread and, with as much strength as I could muster, pitched the bread over the side of the bridge. The bread, not being a baseball, did not sail through the air, but bounced down the embankment and disappeared from view. Ackb let her hunk of bread go like a bird in flight. It landed on the water like a graceful heron and became one with the stream. I learned that it was more satisfying to release the bread from underneath, not trying to create distance by sheer individual effort. Moving forward, it seemed, involved cooperation with forces like gravity, resistance, and time.
Resilience—the ability to spring back and to move on or through—can be supported from many directions. For me, there was promise from up ahead, a new year, and encouragement from behind in the form of ancient poetry. There was comfort from within—my sense that we will eventually be received by the universe in love—and acceptance from the family around me.
Everyone needs a little help with resilience. We need comfort and encouragement. We need something to look forward to, a calling, a reason to bounce back. In today’s service, let’s look into the past to find resources for resilience. I’m going to draw from the Hebrew prophets, and also from some 20th century leaders who were inspired by those same prophets. Finally, we’ll come back to the present, and the resources we have right now.
My intention in referring to the Bible is to see how those who have come before us have found strength. In this congregation, our beliefs about the Divine vary widely, and many of us have experienced painful mis-use of Biblical texts. At the same time, I find treasures there that I am not willing to give up, passages that bring comfort and challenge, voices that call me out of despair.
Resilience: Returning to home base
Some passages are like home base, markers to which we can return for reminders of hope. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., often quoted the Hebrew prophets. In his speeches and sermons and in the passages that inspired him, perhaps we can find something that endures and that helps us to endure. One of the verses he called upon throughout his career is from the Book of Amos:
“Let justice roll down like waters,
And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”
—Amos 5:24
I probably heard that verse for the first time, not in a church Bible study, but in a recording of the “I Have a Dream” speech from the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Dr. King’s study of that passage had begun long before. (I am indebted to Arthur Howe for calling attention to Amos as a common thread in Dr. King’s writings)
He quoted Amos in his first sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in 1954. He quoted Amos at the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955.
After the March on Washington, Amos continued to be a touchstone for Dr. King. In his essay for The Nation in 1965, he critiqued President Johnson’s “consensus” approach with the urgency of rolling water. Dr. King wrote that “[Amos] was seeking not consensus but the cleansing action of revolutionary change.”
The night before he was assassinated, Dr. King commented on how important it was to have faith leaders involved in organizing for justice. He said, “Somehow the preacher must have a kind of fire shut up in his bones. And whenever injustice is around he tell it. Somehow the preacher must be an Amos, and saith, ‘When God speaks who can but prophesy?’ Again with Amos, ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’”
I can understand why this passage was so important in a movement for equality. As a whole, Amos calls attention to the gap between the rich and the poor. No ceremony, no declaration of piety, no donation, no form of worship will substitute for justice. Even so, I wonder what else there is about this verse that is so powerful that it became a home base. What else might we find if we return there?
Verse 5:24 is short, yet it contains a complete thought. Doubling the image—rolling waters and an ever-flowing stream—is a poetic device often used in the Hebrew Bible. Repetition lets us know that this is an important thought, a place where we pause and let the words sink in. The image itself invokes the roaring voice of waterfalls and raging storms. An ever-flowing stream is fed by sources beyond ourselves, fresh with reserves of strength.
For me, the image of rolling waters offers another angle on hope. Water flows over, under, and around obstacles in its path. Rolling waters are alive and adaptable. Neither justice nor resilience can be fixed points. I find it helpful to imagine myself becoming part of a flow, joining in the same direction with the forces that uphold life. While I don’t want to lose sight of goals, I can draw hope from energy in motion long before goals are reached.
When I told Ondiru what I was preaching about, he said finding resilience is like finding keys. We never find it once and for all, and the search is most difficult when the item to be found is most needed. “Have you seen my resilience? I know I must have set it down around here somewhere.” “Did you check the bookshelf by the front door?”
In other words, because resilience is not the sort of thing we can have permanently implanted, we need places to look for it. It seems to me that memorable poetry and powerful images give us places to which we can return when we’re looking for some keys to hope. Maybe for you that’s Mary Oliver’s poetry or music from Jimi Hendrix. Maybe you keep your keys in the folk tales that your ancestors told, or in the Star Wars movies as we talked about two weeks ago.
I think there’s something to be said for having multiple home bases, several places to keep reserves of resilience. Images of comfort, strength, and positive movement abound in sacred text. These sanctuaries of word and story are all the more powerful in cases when their ethical core still resonates with us today.
Resilience: Hope believed
Once we’ve established some places to look when we need to be reminded of our capacity for resilience, we might notice companions in recent generations, people whose perseverance make hope look like something worth having.
Jim Wallis of Sojourners Magazine describes communities of such people. He says:
“I was a seminary student in Chicago many years ago. We decided to try an experiment. We made a study of every single reference in the whole Bible to the poor, to God’s love for the poor, to God being the deliverer of the oppressed… “One member of our group … took an old Bible and a pair of scissors. He cut every single reference to the poor out of the Bible. It took him a very long time.
“When he was through, the Bible was very different, because when he came to Amos and read the words, ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,’ he just cut it out. When he got to Isaiah and heard the prophet say, ‘Is not this the fast that I choose: to bring the homeless poor into your home, to break the yoke and let the oppressed go free?’ he just cut it right out…
“So much of the Bible was cut out; so much so that when he was through, that old Bible literally was in shreds. It wouldn’t hold together. I held it in my hand and it was falling apart. It was a Bible full of holes….
“We should know by now that our fidelity to faith is not determined by adherence to sound dogma and doctrine, but how we live our lives, whether they are the test of what we believe. Well, the Good News is that it is already happening. It is already going on. Our Bibles are being put back together again.”
Wallis goes on to describe some of the work his community in DC was involved with in the 1980s relieving poverty. He continues to network with all kinds of communities of faith around economic justice issues.
The good news for me in reading about Wallis’ putting-back-together story is knowing that the waters continue to roll. There is a lot to learn and to be inspired by from half a century ago and more. Let’s continue to re-tell those stories. Let’s also pass along the stories from within our lifetimes. Let’s remember the people who have worked for justice and sustained hope in the last decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. Victory is not the only thing that gives me hope. Hearing about people who dedicated their lives to compassion, whether they accomplished their goals within their lifetimes or not, helps me to believe that the earth’s supply of kindness is not yet exhausted.
One of the gifts of adulthood has been making friends with people from a broad age range. When I was younger, it seemed to me that history was at least 25 years in the past, current events were no older than last week, and nothing in between was relevant. Yet hearing from people who are just a little bit older than I am has helped me understand that encouragement is an unbroken chain.
I realized what a gift this was when I did an interview project during seminary. My project had to do with people of different generations who were raised Unitarian Universalist and how music was part of their spirituality. As I listened to their stories about music, I found out a lot about my friends’ lives that I hadn’t known before. I heard stories about feminist communities in the 70s, providing health care to people with AIDS in the early days of the epidemic, and songs of peace during the last days of the Cold War.
There have been people who comforted and challenged one another, from friend to friend and from mentor to mentee, continuously through time. Remarkable people did not stop existing at the last chapter of the history textbook and suddenly reappear in the current times. Compassion is an ever-flowing stream. Knowing that is a source of resilience. It may be that the goals of compassion will not be met all over the world in my lifetime, but I want to be part of that stream.
Resilience: A system of starting over
We find resilience through the distant and recent generations of those who have gone before us. We also find hope in the present moment, and in the people around us right now. Having a “reset” button like the High Holidays can be helpful. As I mentioned,
part of the idea is to make amends for our mistakes over the past year, and to start the new year with as much healing as possible.
This system of starting over is built into the Hebrew Bible. Practices such as the Sabbath, clearing out time once a week, and the jubilee year (Leviticus 25:10), canceling debts and restoring property once a generation, suggest that rest and renewal for even the least powerful people in the land is a concern that affects everyone.
Part of the point of the “reset” cycle is to remind people of gratitude. Reflecting on the year highlights our blessings. Letting go of the past gives us energy for the present. I am sometimes surprised by what happens when I act as if renewal is possible.
My Dad was visiting the other day, which he does about once a week. Dad isn’t Jewish, but every year around Rosh Hashanah, he asks us to let him know if there’s anything he’s done, and he pre-emptively offers an apology. It’s very sweet. There’s never anything that comes to mind, and usually I laugh it off. This time, I answered seriously, and I told him that he’s been a great Dad and Grandpa over the past year. Even I didn’t expect the seriousness of my response until it was said. I realized that it was rare for me to tell him that, much more rare than I would like. A conversation about reconciliation can heal what is unsaid as well as what is mistakenly said. Sharing gratitude is another source of resilience.
So let me keep going on that theme. I was asked to do an opening prayer in class the other day. To make it more collaborative, I asked my classmates what was giving them hope. After they had all spoken, it got back around to me, and I realized that I hadn’t prepared my own answer. It only took a moment before I knew that what gave me hope in that moment was you, the people of this congregation.
Young people who exhibit sportsmanship as a way of living their UU values give me hope. People who pay attention to joys and sorrows give me hope. Families and partners who support each other through illness and struggle give me hope. Nurses, doctors, physician assistants, health aids, pharmacists, psychologists, social workers, addiction counselors, healers of all kinds give me hope. Teachers, education administrators, scientists, researchers, people who want to increase truth and understanding in this world give me hope. Lawyers, activists, advocates, letter-writers, voters, people on the side of justice give me hope. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, children, teens, people who love each other no matter what give me hope. Hospitality volunteers, worship associates, greeters, building and grounds volunteers, anyone who makes this house of worship into a welcoming spiritual home gives me hope. It is a deep source of resilience for me to know you.
Our system of starting fresh, of meeting together each week to begin again in love, rebuilds confidence in that which is good. My friends, we have been called to bind up the brokenhearted, to comfort, to plant, to praise. That is what you are doing. May we find in each other the encouragement to move forward.
Conclusion
Sources of resilience stretch back into history. The poetry and ethical clarity of the Hebrew prophets can become touchstones, home bases to which we return for renewal. The civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s reminds us of what can be accomplished, and of what is yet before us to accomplish. We follow recent generations in a stream of compassion, finding strength in its continuous flow.
History brings us to the present moment, and in the present moment there are people who form their lives into gateways of kindness. Through them, justice and mercy flow into the universe. Where charity and love abide, that which I might call God is there. May we find that which gives us hope. May we share that hope and let it fuel our care for one another, for our neighbors, for this world.
