21st Century Atonement

Rev. Marisol Caballero
September 20, 2015

This week marks Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement of sins in the past year. It calls to take an inventory of our “sins;” not for the sake of returning to that familiar place of liberal guilt, but for finding collective, relational means of moving past it.

Call to Worship
by Chaim Stern

Once more, Atonement Day has come.
All pretense gone, naked heart revealed to the hiding self,
We stand on holy ground, between the day that was and the one that must be.
We tremble. At what did we aim?
How did we stumble? What did we take?
What did we give? To what were we blind?
Last year’s confession came easily to the lips.
Will this year’s come from deeper than the skin?
Say then: Why are our paths strewn with promises like fallen leaves?
Say then: What shall our lust be for wisdom?
Say now: love and truth shall meet; Justice and peace shall embrace.

Reading:
“Coming Clean,” by Rev. Marta Valentin

Coming clean
Is another way of finding peace in one’s heart.
It is looking up at the clear crisp lavender sky
To find a reflection of my soul spelling out God’s
Prayer among the wisps of clouds-
“Love thyself and then you will truly love me… ”
Coming clean does not wipe out imagined slates of guilt and suffering,
Does not imply travelling a continuum from evil
Toward what is good, blessed, pure, untarnished…

To come clean
Is what pounds in my heart,
Inviting me into its rhythms,
Inviting me to create music out of cacophonous
Sounds and dance from beats richly textured
And interwoven by
Faith,
Hope,
Love…

Sermon:
“21st Century Atonement”

My wife has a wonderfully wicked sense of humor. When we were still just dating, I told her how I chuckled when I read online that one of my liberal Baptist colleagues posted that she was, “about to go preach a word to the people.” I commented that I wish UUs could get away with a just one word sermon! I laughed as I told Erin this story and wondered aloud what the one word might be. Without missing a beat, she smiled and triumphantly shouted, “REPENT”

This Tuesday, at sundown, people of Jewish descent around the world will celebrate Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and closing observation to the annual High Holy Days that began with Rosh Hashannah. Though of all days, this is the one that will bring mostly secular Jews into synagogue, the more observant will spend the day in prayer, fasting from food and drink and abstain from all physical pleasures, including bathing.

On this day, the sins of the past year are reflected upon with regret. There is a new resolve not to commit those sins again in this new year, and they are confessed before God in prayer. Jewish people are also encouraged to make things right with anyone they have harmed or who has harmed them and to start anew; to “come clean.” In this way, each person has the opportunity to practice forgiveness and be forgiven.

Of course, none of us can make it through twelve months without hurting someone we care about or being hurt by someone we care about. That is human. But there are transgressions that we commit in our hearts, in our actions, and in our inactions that warrant a careful consideration of this aspect of Judaism. Last Sunday, Meg somewhat jokingly referred to what UUs might consider “sins,” such as throwing something away that could be recycled or appearing unintelligent or gullible. But, in all seriousness, there does exist the possibility of community atonement from a liberal religious community such as ours. As a community, we have perhaps fallen short when we could have done more to interrupt systems of oppression, or maybe we have made wrong assumptions on the ways we can be helpful, even still, there were probably times when our action or inaction worked to perpetuate such systems.

Just as racism doesn’t require racist intent, sexism doesn’t require sexist intent, xenophobia doesn’t require xenophobic intent, etc, we know that we don’t have to mean it to mess up. By now, many of us are beginning to get the message that the slogan “All Lives Matter” was created to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement and the fact that right now, we need to strongly affirm the worth of people of color who are the disproportionate victims of excessive police brutality. For the majority of us, we have come to understand that the slogan “All Lives Matter” is a reactionary function of white supremacy feeling threatened, whether or not racism was the intent of the one insisting on erasing the current attention on black lives. We are coming to understand that “white supremacy” does not simply refer to the Klu Klux Klan, but to a system that we did not build but that we all participate in and are subject to, whether wittingly or unwittingly. We are on the verge of understanding that if we are not feeling each loss of an unarmed black or Latino life, if we are deciding to look away, that we are part of the problem. Silence equals violence.

The same can be said for all systems of oppression – the misogyny at play in the assault on available women’s health care options, the xenophobia and islamophobia present in a teen arrested for being a proud electronic tinkerer in a magnet school devoted to science and technology and in the violent and inhumane responses to the current refugee crisis in Europe. But, before we get out the hair shirt and cozy up to that familiar, self-centered place of liberal guilt, let’s remember that Yom Kippur is not simply about wallowing in guilt, as no growth happens there. We’ve all experienced such apologies and have probably delivered them, ourselves. When the one apologizing goes on and on about how terrible they feel, the focus moves far away from the feelings of the other; far away from empathy and true reconciliation; far away from mutual understanding, and the one being apologized to often feels the need to then take care of the feelings of the other.

The advent of the internet and social media has made the high-horse riding finger wagging and postponement of personal introspection so easy and convenient, feeding our notions that the ills of the world are the fault of everyone else but us.

Yesterday, I learned about Jon Ronson’s Ted Talk, “When online shaming spirals out of control,” on NPR’s “Ted Radio Hour.” He spoke about the woman with the minimally-followed twitter account who unskillfully attempted sarcastic, thought-provoking humor when she tweeted, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” Before she even landed, the tweet had been picked up by Buzzfeed and shared millions of times. The hatred and suggested violence spewed her way by strangers around the world was staggering. A shocking statement like this could have been uttered on stage by a satirical comedian like Sara Silverman and the world would have understood that she is mocking an attitude of white privilege and invincibility that the developed world often carries while traveling. The woman was fired from her job and has suffered trauma associated with the vitriolic response of the internet. Of course, her suffering is nothing compared to the actual suffering of people living with and dying of AIDS on the continent of Africa, but in her confusion around the massive blow up, she told Ronson that she had only hoped to make a sarcastic joke about western hypocrisy.

But, Twitter has no “Covenant of Healthy Relations.” No one is asked to assume good intentions, check assumptions, or engage in direct communication. In fact, social media is structured to encourage the exact opposite of ethical human interactions. For many of us who try not to engage in “trolling” or online bullying, we are guilty of haughty notions of superiority while posting clever social-justicey memes and endless links to think pieces on important issues, online petitions, and crowd-funding causes while hesitating to speak out or for such issues in person and unshielded by our computer screens. I will admit that I can be pretty bad about this as well. And, I believe that there is a merit to armchair activism, or slacktivism, as it is now being termed. There is merit to sharing these messages when they are shared in tandem with real organizing work and when that organizing does not simply reach for the low-hanging fruit of like-minded thinkers, but also appeals the hearts of those with opposing viewpoints who hold positions of power and influence.

The tendency to point fingers and deflect blame from ourselves and our communities was not invented in this century. It is as old as time. The difference now is that our actions and inactions, no matter how small, can have global implications- take the role of social media during the Arab Spring, for example. It is this awareness that can bring the gift of atonement into our lives. The notion of doing better once we know better is as practical as it is powerful. This is the great gift of Yom Kippur’s wisdom to us today.

I will leave you with the words of Stephen Shick, “The events of a single day strike a full balance. At any moment, enough evidence might be presented to convince us that evil will soon rule the world. In the next moment, we may see people breaking free from their fears, confessing the hurt they have caused others, and asking for forgiveness. In such a moment, we might think love will win. Life offers both the sweet blueberry and the poisonous nightshade. Both are real, both grow when given the right conditions. Our moment-to-moment task is not to deny the nature of growing things, but to choose what we will grow in our garden.”

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