A MESSAGE IN FOUR PARTS

PART I  -  A Story 

It was the Schnitzers’ second Hanukkah in Billings, Montana and five-year-old Isaac

wanted the menorah to be in his bedroom window. But as Isaac and his sister, Rachel, prepared for bed, a brick hurled from the street

sent shards of glass flying through the room.

The day after the incident, the police advised the family to get bullet-proof glass in their windows and to take down the menorahs. Relatives advised them to buy a gun. Instead, they decided to put the menorah back in the window and call the local newspaper. The next morning, a member of the local Congregational church

read the story and phoned her pastor. Within days, the word was out and paper menorahs were distributed for display in windows throughout town. 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. Hate calls were made to Christian families. Margaret MacDonald, whose idea it was 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: She said, "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."

The local paper printed a brightly colored full-page menorah, urging its 56,000 subscribers to place them in their windows. Each night of Hanukkah, more and more menorahs were placed in windows.

On the last night of Hanukkah, many hundreds of homes in Billings had menorahs in them.

As the Schnitzers drove around town that night,

they were awed by the sympathy and compassion

of so many strangers who chose to overcome evil and injustice, one menorah at a time.

The people of Billings Montana won their war against hatred, not with arms, but with compassion.

PART II  - A Statement

Maybe every generation believes that it is at a turning point of history, but our 21^st century problems seem particularly intractable.

The 20^th century saw the eruption of violence

on an unprecedented scale. The atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed the self-destructive potential at the heart of the brilliant achievements of our modern culture. 

We risk environmental catastrophe

because we regard the earth simply as a “resource.” Unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution, it is unlikely that we will save our planet for human beings.

A purely rational education will not suffice.

We have found that a great university can exist in the same vicinity as a concentration camp.

Auschwitz, Rwanda, Bosnia, Oklahoma City

and the destruction of the World Trade Center

were all dark epiphanies that revealed what can happen when simple compassion for human life is lost.

Religion, which is supposed to help us to cultivate this compassion, too often seems to initiate violence. Increasing numbers of people find traditional religious doctrines irrelevant.

Where can we look for inspiration? In this current predicament, I believe, along with Karen Armstrong on whose book this message is based,

….I believe that we can find inspiration in an earlier time, in an ancient time, in the millennium before the coming of Christ.

PART III –  Some History

I am inspired by a great and pivotal era where,

in all the great cultures of the world,  --simultaneously, an intellectual and spiritual flourishing occurred.

It began in 900 BC.  (B.C.!) It lasted 700 years. 

It has been named The Axial Age. So-called, because it was an age when human consciousness turned on its axis.

In China, the Axial Age saw the burgeoning

of the reasonableness and moderation taught by Confucius, as well as the mystical reality

described by Lao Tzu in the Tao te Ching.

In India, the great age produced the Upanishads,

the magnificent Hindu scriptures and the incomparable man Buddha, together, revealing the path to personal peace. 

In the Middle East, Zarathustra spoke to the Persians, teaching a challenging view of the world as a cosmic battle between good and evil.

And in the tiny, unstable kingdoms of Israel,

the Hebrew prophets appeared, from Micah and Elijah to Amos and Isaiah giving the Jewish people a profound ethical foundation for their religion. 

And in these same few centuries, in the islands of Greece, the Axial Age saw the flowering of what would come to be called “philosophy” –love of wisdom for its own sake ---and a noble form of government called “democracy.” 

It was in this Axial Age, an era from roughly 900 B.C. to 200 B.C., that the foundations of all the world's great religions were laid. This was a great transformation.

The age was itself the fruition of thousands of years of economic, social and cultural evolution.

People, at that time, instead of simply growing enough crops to satisfy their immediate needs,

became capable of producing an agricultural surplus with which they could trade and thereby acquire additional income. This enabled them to build the first civilizations, develop the arts,

and create increasingly powerful cities,  and, eventually, empires.

The Axial Age was not a peaceful age.

On the contrary, violence, political disruption, injustice cruelty, personal vendetta and vengeance dominated these societies.

Life was short, brutal and corrupt.

In these new agrarian societies, power no longer resided exclusively with the local king or priest;

its locus shifted, at least partly, to the marketplace, the source of each culture's wealth.

In these new circumstances, people began to find that the old religions, which had served their ancestors well, no longer spoke to their new condition.

At the time ---in the centuries before our common era---throughout  the ancient world,

religious practices were oriented around sacrifices ---usually blood sacrifices---

and elaborate rituals that were meant to placate a panoply of gods. Strange as it sounds to our moderns ears, ethical behavior was not part of religion.

But in India, China, Greece and Israel the Axial sages created something new by declaring love and justice and compassion as the will of God. FOR THE FIRST TIME, ethical behavior became a part of religious teaching.

During the Axial Age, in the cities and empires

of China, India, Western Europe and the Middle East, citizens had more leisure and so had time to develop a richer interior life.  The most sensitive people were troubled by the social injustice that seemed built into these agrarian societies, depending as it did on the labor of peasants.

Consequently, prophets and reformers arose

who insisted that it was not rules or rituals that pleased God but that the very essence of the divine life lay in the practice of compassion.

By compassion they meant an ability to see sacredness in every human being, and a willingness to take practical care of the more vulnerable members of society. This became the new proof of religious piety.

It was at this time, during the Axial Age,

that the great religions that have continued to guide human beings sprang up in the civilized world:  Hinduism and Buddhism in India,

Confucianism and Taoism in the Far East;

Judaism, and subsequently Christianity and Islam

(which followed Judaism) in the Middle East.

Despite their major cultural differences, these Axial Age religions had much in common:

They all stressed the necessity of practical compassion. They initiated a new, and ethical precept into the concept of religion. It was tolerance, love, and humane treatment of others. Each tradition formulated its own version of the Golden Rule because, they said,  what mattered was how one acts toward others---that ethical behavior was the essence of spiritual life.

Thus, the central Buddhist practice of ahimsa,

doing no harm, developed in India.

I have made our First Reading a traditional Buddhist prayer that shows this practice of compassion for all.

A Traditional Buddhist Prayer

May I be well. May I be happy and peaceful. May no harm come to me. May I be free from greed, selfishness, and jealousy. May I be able to face life’s problems with patience, courage and understanding.

May my family, friends and all the people in this city be well. May they be happy and peaceful. May no harm come to them. May they be free from greed, selfishness, and jealousy. May they be able to face life’s problems with patience, courage and understanding.

May those who wish me harm be well. May they be happy and peaceful. May no harm come to them. May they be free from greed, selfishness, and jealousy. May they be able to face life’s problems with patience, courage and understanding.

May all beings be well.

The Hebrew prophets ---and we have their writings in our Old Testament-insisted FOR THE FIRST TIME --that animal sacrifice and noisy rituals were not what God required, and proclaimed that justice and mercy toward everyone, especially the most vulnerable, offered the only correct way of walking with God.

A little of this is evident in our second reading,

which is God speaking through the prophet Amos.

God’s voice in Amos Chapter 5

Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings,  I will not accept them and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Seek good and not evil, that you may live and the Lord will be with you. Hate evil and love good and establish justice in the land.

Breaking sharply from the Greek tradition of vengeance, Socrates argued that retaliation was always unjust and that the key to enlightenment and social virtue was acting with forbearance toward everyone, friend or enemy.

Listen carefully to this short reading from Socrates.

Do not do to others what angers you if done to you by others.   

The original sages-Zarathustra (also called Zoroaster,) Confucius, the Greek idealists and the Hebrew prophets - never relied on dogma. Their emphasis was consistently on attitude,

on compassion. They realized that if you wanted to outlaw brutal, tyrannical behavior, it was no good simply issuing a set of rules.

Buddha, Muhammad and Jesus were all reformers in later centuries who tried to renew the wisdom of their traditions by living it. They didn’t just talk the talk; they walked the walk.

They, like the Axial sages who preceded them,

advocated taming the ego that is largely responsible for human violence and promoted the compassion of the Golden Rule. 

They said it was not a necessary to define your belief in “God” first and then living a compassionate life to please or placate that God.

No. They said the practice of  compassion

-----disciplined sympathy and care for all ----

would itself yield a divine experience.  If we methodically cultivate sympathy and care

(the sages discovered,)we experience an alternate and improved state of consciousness.

When we heard the word “compassion” we think it automatically refers to care and sympathy for the needy. It does, of course. But it also means care and sympathy for the wrong. That is to say, someone we think is wrong.

If, for example, every time we are tempted to say something hostile about a colleague, a sibling, or an enemy country, we consider how we would feel if such a remark were made about us ---and refrain---we will, in that moment, go beyond ourselves. 

The Axial programs all promoted this behavior. 

It was the essence of their religious teaching.

For them, the Golden Rule WAS religion.

“Do to others as you would have them to do you. ”From there, it is only a short step to the rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and then of course to “Love your enemies.”

That love doesn’t mean feeling soft and mushy about them. It means active sympathy for their position and genuine care for them as a person.

In every single religion people have failed to measure up to this high ideal.

In every faith, people have fallen prey to

exclusivity, cruelty, superstition and even atrocity. Hence, some people have concluded either that religion itself is inescapably violent

or that violence is endemic to a particular culture or tradition, But the sages who lived and wrote 500 years before Jesus show that in fact the opposite is true. Every single one of these great and enduring faiths began in visceral recoil  from the pervasive injustice and violence of their time.

PART IV – A PRESCRIPTION

Though I speak today about ancient history, I have a present-day agenda. We also live in a time of great social transformation and unrest and, learning from the Axial sages, I believe our best hope lies in fostering justice and compassion.

We are undergoing a great period of transition.

The technological and economic changes over the last few hundred years have been accompanied by immense social, political, and intellectual revolutions.

The result is that our concept of truth is different from the people in the first century---or tenth, or fifteenth century. And, once again, a radical religious adjustment has become necessary.

All over the world, people are finding that the old forms of faith no longer work for them.

The old dogmas cannot provide the enlighten-ment and consolation that human beings seem to need. As a result, people are trying to find new ways of being religious.

Like the reformers and prophets of the Axial Age, they are attempting to build upon the insights of the past in a way that will take human beings forward into this new world they have created for themselves.

How is this done? The Axial sages gave us two important pieces of advice.

First, there must be self criticism. Instead of encouraging a dangerous self righteousness,

they wanted to puncture the personal and  national ego. To imagine that God is reflexively on your side and opposed to your enemies is not a mature religious attitude. 

Jesus told his followers not to condemn the splinter in their neighbor’s eye while ignoring the log in their own. The Indian doctrine of karma insisted that all our deeds have long-lasting consequences.

The Axial sages would probably tell us, reformation starts at home. We cannot hope to reform others until we have reformed ourselves. 

Second, we should take practical, effective action. When the Axial sages confronted error in their own traditions, they did not pretend it was not there but worked vigorously to change their religion, rewriting and reorganizing their rituals and scriptures.

Jesus was a reformer who tried to revive and renew the wisdom of his own tradition which had become too legalistic. He was not  timid about questioning the fundamental religious assumptions of his time. As we face the problems of our time, we need to have a mind that is open to new ideas.

We have reason to be proud of the questioning, searching attitude we foster here at Hope.

We are part of a large and growing group of Progressive Christians around the world, in every denomination.

The great teachers did not jettison the insights of the old religions, but deepened and extended them. In the same way, we need to reclaim the insights of our Judeo-Christian foundations

striving to renew a compassionate vision and finding a way of expressing our faith in innovative, inspiriting ways. G.K. Chesterton was never more correct than when he said,

“Christianity has not failed; it has never been tried.”

I suggest we have an open-eyed criticism of our own religious tradition but I believe our best hope lies in the goodness within us and in the compassion taught by Jesus and the sages who preceded him. 

In a highly technological world we easily forget the importance of community and place value on our technology and our possessions. I know it is easy for me to do this, but as I was standing in my garden the other day, looking up at the single wire that brings power into my house I began to think:

One malicious cut, one big storm, one natural or manmade catastrophe and I have no lights, no heat, no phone, no computer and no water pressure. I am, in an instant, completely dependent on my neighbors. And so are you.

No, it’s not our technology and our possessions that will keep us going in this world. Locally and globally we depend, as people always have, on the compassion of others. We must have that care for others ourselves.

Where does compassion begin? Right here. Make it a point ---today---to smile and say hello to someone you don’t like, or more importantly, someone you think doesn’t like you.

Let go of your ego. Stand with and show care for that other person, here at Hope, and everywhere.

The people of Billings, Montana made a difference one menorah at a time. We can make a difference, one loving act at a time

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Be good to one another.