Aug. 29, 2021, Zwingli UCC, Mt. Vernon
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us. Amen.
“My beloved, let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.”
It seems to me those must have been important words for the people James was writing to in the late First Century. There must have been some issues around how people spoke and how angry they were getting. It seems to me they also are important words for us living in the first quarter of the 21st Century.
Let me tell you a story.
One of the things I do on occasion is help lead groups for an organization called the Local Voices Network. We bring together about a half dozen people to talk about what they like and what concerns them in our communities. Along the way, we try to bring in voices that might differ from the group seated around the table.
In May of 2019, I gathered a group of Madison-area Muslim residents for one of these conversations. I thought I could predict what they would be saying. And yes, I was right about some of those expectations. But because I listened – that was my job after all – I also learned some new things.
As we approach the 20th anniversary of the horrible events of Sept. 11, I think one piece of that conversation is worth recalling. In fact, as we witness what is happening right now in Afghanistan, it makes this even more timely. I am worried about the experiences our Muslim neighbors might be facing in our country in the weeks ahead.
Surely, on Sept. 11, Muslims in this country became an immediate target. Too many people were unwilling to be quick to listen, to be slow to speak or to think before they acted.
In my group, one of the participants – his name is Awais (Avais)– talked about being a junior in high school in Kenosha on that Sept. 11. He was one of just a handful of Muslims at Bradford High. Word spread quickly that day about the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City, on the Pentagon, about the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.
Awais said, “I remember being a scared teenager who was sincerely frightened…I remember walking through the halls just really scared. I mean, it was a moment where I wasn’t sure how people were looking at me, what people would say to me.”
His fear made a lot of sense to me. Many Muslims were verbally and even physically assaulted that day and in the days afterwards, even though they had nothing to do with the attacks, even though they did not share the distorted views of Islam held by al-Qaeda and other terrorists.
I kept listening.
Awais talked about how surprised he was that people would come up to him to tell him that they supported him, even that they loved him. Some were friends, so that was not so surprising, but others he barely knew.
And some, as he put it, “were people who, if we're being completely honest here, the way they looked, they fit that stereotype of who you would expect react the opposite way.”
He talked about one student in particular, someone he did not know really well. The way Awais described him, this young white man “drove an old ratty pickup truck, almost always wore cutoff sleeveless t-shirts, even in the winter, played football, was a little country.” And then this guy walks up to the frightened Awais and says, "Awais, if anyone messes with you, I got you."
Two stereotypes went right out the window. Listening has a way of doing that.
One other quick story from that conversation. At the end, I asked the group if they had any particular message they would like public officials to hear from them. I figured they would say something about acting against hate crimes, tackling religious discrimination.
Do you know what the first issue they raised was?
“Fix the roads.”
Ah, something we all share in common.
Let me go back to that letter from James.
Be quick to listen, slow to speak.
Got it. We could all practice that idea of taking a breath before we blurt out whatever wise words we think we have to offer.
But then there is being slow to anger.
Yes, patience is a virtue. Letting your anger rip against those you love, those you work with is a recipe for trouble. But there are some things that should make us angry. Setting off a suicide bomb in the middle of a desperate crowd at the Kabul airport is one of those things that should make us angry, even if there is nothing we can immediately do about it.
But James pairs that advice about being slow to anger with another piece of advice – be doers of the word, not just hearers of the word.
One of my favorite authors is someone who lives in Madison. His name is Parker Palmer and he is a wise voice about many things. About a decade ago, he wrote a book called Healing the Heart of Democracy. In it, he described two virtues we need in our era. One is chutzpah, the other is humility.
Chutzpah is a Yiddish word for nonconformist but gutsy advocacy. Parker uses it in the sense of “having a voice that needs to be heard and the right to speak it.”
But it shares top billing with humility, which Parker says means “accepting the fact that my truth is always partial and may not be true at all.”
It’s that combination of being able to listen – that’s the humility – and then being able to act on what we learn – that’s the chutzpah.
A few years ago, I was at a conference of journalists who cover religion. One of the panels was called “Atheism Revisited” and on the panel was Wendy Kaminer, a significant atheist voice in our nation. I wound up waiting at the airport with her and her husband, making an interesting trio – a Christian minister and two advocates from a group that defends the interests of atheists, agnostics, humanists and others who do not embrace religion as I know it.
As I chatted with Wendy, I told her I appreciated her presentation and her perspective on the panel. I quoted one of my mentors whose words had become a sort of mantra for me: “Here’s what I believe – but I could be wrong.”
Wendy smiled and said, “That’s what I think, too.” Then there was a pause. “You could be wrong.”
She was teasing, of course. But it was a vivid reminder that as we engage in conversations about politics or religion or any other hot-button topic, we would do well to embrace a spirit of humility – a willingness to listen and learn.
Let me ask you take a few moments right now to think about the places where listening might be useful in your life.
What are the issues you care deeply about but find yourself in conflict with a family member, a neighbor, a friend, a co-worker? Are there ways you could be a better listener? I don’t mean agreeing with them. I simply mean learning a bit more about why they have the views they have.
I’m not asking you to say them out loud. I’m simply asking you in a moment of quiet to think of where these hot buttons are in your life.
Pause
I know, it’s hard to come up with the right way to approach this. Some wise people I know say one of the best things is to ask questions – honest questions, not “I’m-going-to-trip-you-up” questions. You could ask, “Could you tell me why you think that?” Or you could ask, “There must be something in what you believe that leads you to that. Could you explain that to me?”
It turns out that Jesus faced a fair number of people who disagreed with him and with his message. We met a few of them in our Gospel reading today.
The scribes and the Pharisees get into this whole thing about washing hands. Yes – I know this has an odd resonance in our pandemic era. But this was not really a discussion about public health. It’s not a good idea to say “I don’t need to wash my hands…or wear a mask…because Jesus said it does not matter.” That’s not what this was about.
Listen again to their question:
“Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?”
Here’s the thing. There was nothing in the Hebrew scriptures, with all their many rules, that required people to wash their hands before they ate. There was, however, a law that priests had to wash their hands before eating holy meat from the sacrifices in the temple. And the Pharisees argued that all Jews should be as holy as the priests and therefore should wash their hands before they ate.
Good public health practice? Sure. But what Jesus was objecting to was making following the rituals the test of one’s faithfulness to God rather than the way one lives their lives, the way Isaiah said that people honor God with their lips while their hearts are far from God.
If the people in Jesus’ time - if we in our time - truly listened, we would hear that the measure of our faithfulness to God has to do with loving justice, doing mercy, walking humbly with our God. We would hear that the measure of our faithfulness to God is doing what James wrote about “caring for the orphans and widows” – in other words, looking out for those in need, perhaps for the refugees coming to our nation right now.
There’s a lot in all this that seem like a swirl of contractions – be slow to listen but get out there and act. Be slow to anger but act against the injustices in our world.
Part of our task, I’d suggest, is to be attentive to each part of that. Take time to listen, seek to understand but don’t let that paralyze from acting on the messages of Jesus. Don’t let the anger of the moment lead you to do something destructive to relationships but don’t retreat into a passivity that means the cause of the anger goes unaddressed.
In a few minutes, we are going to have a chance to share bread and cup in communion. This is a wonderfully tangible symbol of the life we share.
It is a reminder that for us, being in community has dimensions beyond the fractures of everyday life.
It is a reminder that within our Christian tradition, among the ways that we can sort out the tensions between listening and acting, between anger and response, is in prayer and in community with one another.
We, after all, cannot do this on our own. We need God’s grace.
And here’s the good news – God’s grace abounds for each and every one of us.
Amen.
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