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Rev. Nell Newton
June 26, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
So much around us seems fragmented and unsustainable, like the world around us seems broken. But is it? We will look at theology and possible responses to the idea that our world is a broken mess.
Reading:
The Truth About Stories; A Native Narrative pages 21-22
by Thomas King
Reading:
Adrienne Rich
My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
So much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
Who, age after age,
Perversely, with no extraordinary
Power, reconstitute the world.
Sermon
One of my favorite bumper stickers asks “Where are we going? And why are we in this hand basket?!” To some it would seem like everything is falling apart and changing for the worse at every turn. The alarmists in our midst assure us that we are facing End Times.
The revolution will NOT be televised, but Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo.
Even for us Universalists, this hand basket seems to be heading someplace hot. But what everything is not falling apart? What if this is just business as usual and it’s up to us to reframe our response?
In some religious circles, people have expressed a desire to “heal our broken world”. This sentiment is usually couched as part of a mission statement – along the lines of what the Salvation Army has as its mission: “The Salvation Army – a growing, loving community of people dynamically living God’s mission in a broken world.”
This language is pretty popular among justice-seeking Christians. You can find it in colleges, mission trip groups, and from folks who are working to improve the lives of the poor. It generally can be summed up as “Together we share a quest for justice, peace, reconciliation and healing in a broken world.”
(Honestly, they lifted the term from the Judaic concept of “tikkun olam” which translates as “world repair” but they took some liberties in the translation and theology.)
So there are people who see our world as broken. These are good and loving people, and they want to make things better. But something about it just sticks in my craw…
What is it? Why does that language make me itchy? That’s what’s happening… I’m getting itchy.
I really don’t have a problem with people who are motivated by their understanding of the holy to go out and do some good work. I deeply respect people of any faith tradition who are called to address injustice.
So why the itch over this language? Our Broken World…
What’s wrong with recognizing that things are messed up and we can become a blessing to our world by walking humbly and doing justice?
It’s the “broken” that sets me on edge. Casting our world as “broken” irks me.
I find myself growling – that’s how I know something is serious – growling: “It ain’t broke! It was built this way!”
Built this way – in our natural world and our human society.
Rockslides and typhoons are part of the entire system of Nature. They cause disruption of human activities – even death and illness – but they are how this whole system works. It’s not broken. It’s complex but not broken.
But scientists are pretty much in agreement that global climate change is directly caused by human activity. Wouldn’t that show that we’ve broken our world? Yes and no. Yes, our activities have changed the system. But it’s not broken, just different. Not very comfortable for us and many other species, but still a full system. No missing pieces, nothing removed, just all of the interlinked parts responding to the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. The natural world is not broken… it’s working quite well. And with or without us it will continue following its deep, old laws.
So, if anything, it’s not that we need to fix anything but we do need to get things back into balance if we, and all of the bears and bees and beavers are going to survive.
So what about our human society? What do I mean by “It’s not broken – it’s built that way?”
Well, our brains are hardwired for xenophobia. As a species we are inherently mistrustful of people outside of our immediate clan. We’re built that way.
But when it becomes institutionalized and rationalized, it moves from being a residual part of our lizard brain, to becoming racism that prevents us all from accessing the richness of life. Both the oppressor and the oppressed are limited by institutionalized racism. And our laws and financial practices have been built to hold groups of othered people away from resources like education, work, or medical care.
Why did so many people of color wind up in foreclosure during the Great Recession? Because of a complex system of practices, all legal, that kept them hemmed into certain neighborhoods and then made a lot of money off of them through predatory lending. It wasn’t that anyone said “How can we engineer a system to perfectly oppress people we are uncomfortable with?” But that’s pretty much what happened.
It’s what happens when we don’t examine prejudice or the way our brains work. Nothing was broken. The system worked quite well. In fact some systems work better when they are unexamined.
And that’s how evil moves about in this world, buried so deep into our normal that we don’t notice it until a person close to us cries out.
Many of the worst parts of our human society are not really broken, just unexamined prejudice. Any fixing to be done is the hard work of unpacking and naming and trying to do it better it over and over until there’s less unexamined stuff around to trip us up.
Okay… deep breath…
So that’s what I mean when I say “It ain’t broken.”
Now, here’s another reason why the phrase “broken world” just irks me: It implies that there is a more perfect, more preferred state that has been broken. It presumes that there is a norm that is better than a variation. Which is okay as long as you fit the norm….
And, here’s the real reason I get itchy: it is based upon an underlying theology that is problematic.
That theology – the one where our world is “broken”. It comes from an interpretation of the Judeo-Christian creation story. You know this one:
In the beginning there was perfection…
(Except that actually, if you read Genesis you find two beginnings…)
In The Beginning There Was Perfection in a Garden.
And eventually two humans, who were somehow too human, not perfect, despite having been made in God’s image…
(Do you sense a set up here?)
The two humans transgressed a rule…
(Really, this was a set up – eat anything and everything except THAT.)
And perfection was broken.
Because humans were not perfectly obedient.
Because they were too human.
Despite having made their god in their own image…
This break, this rupture, this banishment and punishment… this is the underpinning of what many Christians interpret as Our Broken World. Inherent human sinfulness broke God’s perfect world. And it continues to break this world.
This suggests that they have some assumptions about what Perfection would look like. They are trying to fix something they perceive is broken, and restore it to what they would consider whole or mended.
So, the problem with presuming that our world is broken is that it is based upon a theology that casts us as inherently bad children who broke something, and now we’re trying to fix it, but, of course, we can’t because there is an omnipotent god who is really in charge but seems to be waiting for us to live up or down to his expectations.
Can you see why I get itchy here?
So… here’s where a different kind of theology might change our response.
What if, instead of a single omnipotent, omniscient, judging sky god, what if there was a theology that accepted that perfection includes things that are outside the norms, things that appear imperfect? We’ve all seen leaves that simply grew asymmetrically or trees that have been misshapen by terrain or weather and yet they still grow and photosynthesize and bring beauty.
We’ve all seen imperfection and loved it more dearly because of its uniqueness. Think of a beloved – is it their perfection, their adherence to a norm that you love? Or is it their crooked smile – the way the left eye crinkles more than the right eye when they grin and laugh?
So, what if our understanding of perfection included some things that appear broken, or imperfect? And what if our understanding of the divine included our having to help create and recreate this perfect imperfection? Rather than always failing at restoring Eden, what if we are actually tasked with joining in as a part of Nature to create with wild diversity? Our job becomes less about fixing and more about participating!
Whew!
Okay, now I’m going to recognize that brokenness is real. There really is brokenness in our world. More specifically, covenants can be broken, and people can be broken.
You’ve known people who were broken. Most families have someone who isn’t quite okay. Maybe it was trauma or odd neurological wiring, or both, but there’s someone in the family who wound up broken. And that old judging sky god doesn’t seem interested in helping.
How we respond to broken people is how I’ll measure our gods.
Here’s an example – Cousin Guido. In one branch of my extended family one of our broken ones was Cousin Guido. He wasn’t really my cousin. He was my step grandfather’s second cousin but in an Italian American family, for better or worse, everyone is family.
When I was a little kid I really couldn’t tell how old Guido was. He seemed like a young man right up until the moment he became an old man. That was because when he was a young man, he was sent over to fight in World War II. He was a poor Italian American kid who was probably a little neurologically vulnerable but had no one to speak up for him or assign him to non-combat work. So, like too many poor young men, he was issued a pair of boots and a gun and sent to fight. And, when the bombs started exploding and guns firing all around him, his mind snapped. It was all over. It was what used to be called “shell shocked.” He got stuck in the middle of that terror and stayed there for the rest of his life.
Guido’s father finally found him in a hospital. Back then there was no real treatment for that kind of trauma, so his father simply brought him home and resigned to care for his son. In fact, Guido’s father married a young woman with the understanding that she would care for his son after he died. And she did. And the rest of the family cared for him too. My step grandparents always included Guido in the big family dinners and took him places. They’d include him exactly as he was – not leaving him in a back room, not waiting for him to get better, not expecting him to change – just including him and loving him as the rocking, moaning, terrified person that he was.
Have you ever seen that kind of love? The love that keeps loving someone even in their brokenness?
What makes it astonishing is because it means finding the holy in the spaces God seems to have deserted.
If we’re going to live and love brokenness, it’s going to take a different kind of theology that asks us to just live into what is, not in guilt or as punishment, but in a steady renewal, over and over again of what family and love and connection can look like.
It took the rest of Guido’s life, and he did have tranquility and kindness in his later years. He knew he belonged. It became the work of a family to hold his brokenness, his fragility. It showed us, the younger members of the family, that we didn’t have to be perfect to be loved; we simply had to be present.
This is the work of creative people who take what is imperfect and add to it with their love. Not to fix it, but to simply keep creating alongside their god.
And such is a god that I will measure us by.
Rev. Nell Newton was ordained by the San Marcos Unitarian Universalist Fellowship this past June. A lifelong Unitarian Universalist, she lives in Central Austin with her husband, assorted teenagers, too many cats, a mess of chickens, and one sweet dog.
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