Feb 5 – Football & Food . . . and Madonna!

HELP TACKLE HUNGER

Join us on Sun, Feb. 5, after our weekly Taizé Service (~6PM), for the heavenliest Super Bowl party around.

Of course there’s football on the big screen in the Guild Room. Also, in coordination with Souper Bowl of Caring, we are asking people to bring money and/or canned goods/non-perishable food items which will then be donated to Martha’s Table. Bring food and drinks to share. Bring money or food to donate.

And most importantly bring yourself + partner or spouse or friend/other to enjoy the game and help fight hunger. (Btw, Madonna’s doing the halftime show.)

I live a fortunate,  indeed by most of the world’s standards a privileged, life.  Yet few days are just “eazy peazy” – many are a challenge for me like lots of people, even if for different reasons.  Today has been on of my most challenging in a while; don’t ask me why … I told you, I’d have to ….. (as the saying goes).  Let’s just say that sometimes Christians can seem far more part of the problem than the solution.

Yet all day, I’ve had going through my head the old traditional Shaker hymn, a powerful eschatological invocation of hope breaking in out of the future in places where it cannot yet be seen,  only sung.  It’s entitled “How can I keep from singing?”  Any time I find myself answering by saying, “How long have you got …,” I know it’s time for this song again.

What my mind hears is the Folk Legacy recording of Gordon Bok, Ann Mayo Muir & Ed Trickett from the 1970s or earlier (yes, I owned it only in vinyl); but this YouTube recording by the Celtic singer Enya will have to do! Listen and pray along and tell me it doesn’t soften your sharp edges just a bit; or if it doesn’t, play it again … now again … now … [If it starts in fullscreen mode, click the bottom right corner of your screen to reduce the image so you can read along with the lyrics below.]

  My life goes on in endless song
  Above earth’s lamentations,
I hear the real though far off hymn
That hails a new creation.

Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear its music ringing,
It sounds an echo in my soul.
How can I keep from singing?

While though the tempest loudly roars,
I hear the truth it liveth.
And though the darkness round me close,
Songs in the night it giveth.

No storm can shake my inmost calm,
While to that rock I’m clinging.
Since love is lord of heaven and earth
How can I keep from singing?

When tyrants tremble in their fear
And hear their death knell ringing,
When friends rejoice both far and near
How can I keep from singing?

In prison cell and dungeon vile
Our thoughts to them are winging,
When friends by shame are undefiled
How can I keep from singing?

Violence comes in many forms. Bombs. Guns. Fists.

As well as words, gestures, posturing.

Bullying-behavior rarely resorts to the former; but bullies are masters-of-manipulation with the latter.

We live in the middle of what Ryan Halligan, a staff writer for the Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation, has described as “An Epidemic of Bullying,” verging on a societal pandemic.  At least, in the case of the bullying of children and young adults, light is finally beginning to be shed on this dark behavior, and responses are being formulated.  For example, St. Thomas’ Parish participated in the It Gets Better project, a national response to the suicides of teenagers who were bullied because of their sexual orientation and identity:

Bullying in the workplace, however, has been described as “The Silent Epidemic” — it happens regularly, but it isn’t being discussed very openly yet.  Writing for Psychology Today, Ray Williams defines such bullying as “the conscious repeated effort to wound and seriously harm another person not with [physical] violence, but with words and actions. Bullying damages the physical, emotional and mental healthy of the person who is targeted.”  And we have gotten so accustomed to such behavior in our entertainment, our politics, and our work-environments that we are numb to the effects of psychological violence, much less to potential remedies for it.

That’s one of the reasons that St. Thomas’ Parish is in conversation with Bishop V. Gene Robinson about the formation of a Center for Nonviolent Communication in our new building when he retires as Bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire in 2013. Meanwhile, we are already beginning to work on our own nonviolent communication skills, as well as the community dynamics that can encourage and discourage them, in our upcoming parish retreat with Canon Charles LaFond, who oversees congregational development in the Diocese of New Hampshire.

This is important work for us to do, because besides being potential agents of change in a culture of violence-filled rhetoric and behavior, churches also can themselves be hotbeds for bullying.  In an organization that is built on a metaphor of sheep being cared for and protected from harm by a shepherd, churchgoers get caught off-guard when the sheep attack one another .. or sometimes, even more viciously, the shepherd.  Episcopal priest Dennis Maynard has chronicled the latter behavior in his book, When Sheep Attack, which provides chilling examples of how a lone-wolf bully, or a small pack of parishioners bent on destruction, can threaten to bring a parish to its knees through their bullying behavior.

One of the worst characteristics of church communities, however, is not just that such behavior exists — undercutting even the best efforts of a community to foster an environment of hospitality, welcome, and inclusion — but that often virtually the entire congregation is  aware of what is going on and chooses to stand by and do nothing.

Rabbi Edwin Friedman, one of the most respected voices in describing the systemic dysfunctions of families and communities like the church, challenges this bystander-behavior in the face of bullying in his little book, Friedman’s Fables, in the story he entitled “The Friendly Forest.”   There he describes the efforts of the inhabitants of a forest to encourage a lamb to disregard the continually threatening and aggressive behaviors of a tiger who has taken up residence in the same forest where the lamb lives. Some want to brush off the behavior as “just the way tigers are,”  while others even go to far as to suggest that the lamb is bringing in on herself by being so unnaturally peaceful. Then the conciliators of the forest suggest that all that is needed is “better communication” between the lion and the lamb; they should should just talk through their differences.

The fable ends rather abruptly when, following the continuing advice to the harried lamb, “Don’t be so sheepish. … Speak up strongly when it does these things,” finally “one of the less subtle animals in the forest, more uncouth in expression and unconcerned about just who remained, was overheard to remark, ‘I never heard of anything so ridiculous. If you want a lamb and a tiger to live in the same forest, you don’t try to make them communicate. You cage the bloody tiger.’”

Bullying continues until it stops.  And it seldom stops of its own accord.  It stops when it no longer is deemed acceptable to blame the victim of bullying and instead the bystanders step up — which often begins when they speak out — and state the obvious: We’ve got to cage the tiger.  Authentic nonviolent communication leads to justice in the way we behave — not by talking while the bullying continues, but by finding ways to “cage the tiger” … in ourselves and in our communities. This is the way that Christians envision the Reign of God when the “lion lies down with the lamb” … and the lamb sleeps well through the whole night.

Sermon preached at St. Thomas’ Parish
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Dr. Wayne Whitson Floyd
Audio Podcast Available

Choosing Nonviolence Download

“You yourself created my inmost parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I will thank you because I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and I know it well.” (Psalm 139)

Of all the ways in which human beings are indeed so marvelously made, one of the most wonderful is our capacity for memory. It is in the process of remembrance that we assemble the pattern of the formative moments of our personal identity. Anamnesis Plato called it – reminiscence, remembrance. Anamnesis is at the core of our Eucharistic theology; Holy Communion isn’t considered valid without invoking the Holy Spirit (epiklesis) to transform the bread and wine to bear the presence of Christ, first comes anamnesis, remembrance, of the deeds that give significance to the communion elements. “On the night before he died,” the Celebrant reminds us. So “Do this in remembrance.”

Our own memories, likewise, and those of the communities to which we belong, that give significance to all that we have become over a lifetime. In my own memory, the spring and summer of 1968 left an indelible mark. I graduated from high school that spring and left home for the first time to begin college late that summer. All of my classmates who shared those experiences would forever remember the first half of 1968, but unfortunately not for any of the reasons we might have imagined when the year began.

Through our parents and grandparents, our lives already had been shaped by the turmoil and terror of World War II, and then Korea, and now Viet Nam. Closer to home, violence had slashed through our junior high years, when just before Thanksgiving of 1963, President Kennedy had been cut down by gunfire in Dallas. Now just five years later, our high school graduation was bracketed in time by two other assassinations by gunfire, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis on April 4th and JFK’s brother Robert Kennedy on June 5th.

Barely a year later other dramatic events for a while overcame the notoriety of these deaths with equally graphic and iconic cultural images: the first manned moon landing on July 20th, 1969; Woodstock that August; and between them the Stonewall Riots in New York on June 28th that began the modern gay rights movement. And then just a year after that, arson struck St. Thomas’ Parish church in the summer of 1970. There was only one Woodstock; and decades have passed since the last person walked the face of the moon, leaving us with but fading memories of those glory days. But we are still playing out the consequences of the violence of the 1960s and the ways we have learned, or refused to learn, how to deal with it.

The commemoration tomorrow of the birthday of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is an act of remembrance celebrating a remarkable life and recalling a painful and transformative period of our national history, a time when the effectiveness of his strategy of resistance through non-violence could seem like a pipe-dream when surrounded by the smoke of arson and the brutality of war and racial and social upheaval. Who could have imagined Barak Obama in the White House less than fifty years later, or that incessant war would still consume so much of our country’s resources across so much of the globe.

With Dr. King and the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, however, world history took a turn towards the possibility of a more redemptive future. The pains of social dislocation were the birth pangs of the culture of radical hospitality and inclusion that have now a half-century later come to define St. Thomas’ Parish. We in this very room are heirs to the legacy of the riots at Stonewall, NY, as well as those on 14th Street just blocks from here, and those that left Columbia Heights and the U Street Corridor that lay in ruins. And Dr. King’s commitment to non-violence needs to be remembered as the essential backdrop for the dream we currently explore with Bishop Gene Robinson to establish a Center for Non-Violent Communication in the new church we are building. In looking back, we frame our future, with gratitude to those who have shown us the way, however painful those memories often are. Read more