Finding Peace in Troubled Times 2

Here’s a story from Simran’s book.  Simran is a follower of Sikhism, or Sikhi as they call it; He was born and raised in Texas, and he’s a brown guy who wears a turban.  He’s a few years younger than me, so he lived through September 11 as a teenager and he can tell countless stories about racial profiling by people who assume he is a terrorist, about being told he could not wear his turban on the soccer field, and being told to “go back where he came from…”  This is what his life has been like.

Air travel is a particular challenge for folks who look like Simran.  One day his seatmate, an older white man, boarded the plane, took one look at him, harrumphed loudly and sat down.  After ignoring Simran’s hello, he began to watch what Simran noticed was a right wing news channel on his phone; “[he sat there shaking] his head furiously every time [the program] showed images of refugees in camps and detention centers” as Simran wondered “What might he think of me?  Was he going to confront me during the flight?  Would I be safe?”

Facing up to his discomfort and resisting his own urge to make assumptions, Simran leaned in.  He asked the man “Where are you headed…?”  and after a couple more open-ended, friendly questions, the man opened up that he was headed back to Detroit following a chemo treatment, one he was convinced was not going to work.  “We began to talk about family and friends who had deal with cancer,” he writes, “and then we began a deeper conversation that reflected on life and death:  what we believed and how we wanted to live…”  On that plane, two different people, who were probably both afraid of the other, made a connection.

Simran goes on to write:  Perhaps our connection really changed something inside him.  But then he wisely corrects himself:  “It takes a lot more than a single conversation to move people, and changing people’s views isn’t my goal in moments like these.  …tying our happiness to other people’s behaviors and outlooks will only leave us disappointed and dissastisfied.  Instead, we must search for the common ground between us, the space where we are both one.”  (129)

Simran is a wise teacher and practitioner when it comes to finding peace in troubled times.  I find in his work aspects of Sikh tradition that are also common to our Christian tradition.  There’s a thing Sikhism calls ik oankar—recognizing the divine light within one’s own life, and giving that same light to others; seeing the sacredness in others and in ourselves.  Christians have a name for this too:  we call it loving God and loving neighbor, or being created in the image of God.  In both cases the lesson is the same.  Peace does not come from changing someone else, or winning; but neither does peace come from ignoring the problems of the world as if they do not exist.  Instead, we must live in ways that lead to peace in our own lives, while also remembering the needs of others and seeking what is best for the whole community.  Peace is only found in a life of integrity that honors both our own spirituality and also the love of our neighbors.

Last week I preached a sermon that left me with no peace.  I mean this in a good way, because I knew I would need to return to it this week.  I wonder if any of you noticed it in the way I did.  Last week we told the story of Joshua and the conquest of the Promised Land.  We told Joshua’s story of gathering the elders of the 12 tribes at Shechem to renew their covenant with God.  We talked about idolatry, the many ways in which wealth, power, or comfort pull us away from God.  It was a good enough sermon, I hope God spoke through it, I stand by it as a solid interpretation.  But there is only so much a sermon can accomplish in 15 minutes, and there was an aspect of last week’s message that haunted me, even as I was preaching it.  Our tradition often selects readings that omit verses that might make us uncomfortable.  As often as I can, I draw these verses back in and talk about them; not because I think I need to fix the Bible, but because I believe when there are parts of our history and tradition we are not proud of, we need to deal with them.

Last week what was skipped was the listing of peoples who were casualties of the conquest of the Promised Land.  The story reads like this, God says:  “I brought you to the land of the Amorites, who lived on the other side of the Jordan; they fought with you and I handed them over to you and you took possession of their land, and I destroyed them before you.”  And it goes on to say the same about “…the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites…” and the obvious question seems to be, why?  Why do these people have to suffer in order for God’s “chosen” people to thrive?  Why must their land be taken and the people destroyed?  Is that really what God wants?  We cannot leave these questions unexplored.  There is no peace in that.

There are explanations for these violent texts in the Bible.  One is that these texts arise out of an ancient culture—tribal, violent, and full of daily threats to survival you and I can hardly imagine.  So ancient literature is full of references that show how communities defended themselves by establishing unity in the face of outside threats.  Building on that argument, the historical record outside of the Bible suggest that this whole “conquest” of Canaan by the Hebrews may never have happened—it was a mythology created to strengthen the bonds of the community that were necessary for survival.  And finally, one might argue that these others groups were criticized not for their existence, but for their love of other gods, and that it is the extermination of those false gods and not the people, that is really the point of the story.

Even if all of that is true, I cannot just make peace with it.  How can I worship a God, calling that God the God of love, the God of grace, the God of all creation, without wondering why that God choose to preference one dominant group of people and subject others to expulsion and extermination?  I just can’t stand the thought of it.

Scriptures like this one have been a source of irreparable harm throughout history toward people who have lost their homelands and lives.  They’ve lost their homes and lives to people who have felt “called by God” to colonize them.  This is the thinking that convinced white settlers to expel Native Americans from their homes, and Europeans to force Jews out of their communities a century ago; it happened again when the State of Israel was established and Palestinians were expelled from their homes, and continues today in Gaza and the West Bank.  And I could site countless other examples.  These atrocities are often the result of government or military policies decided upon by the few while the many look on in horror; but in every one of these circumstances it is wrong, and yet it is a sin humanity seems to commit over and over again; and as long as we live in a world where we allow these tragedies to continue, there is no peace.  There is no peace for a preacher who would prefer to talk about something else, or for regular people like all of us who do not wish to turn a blind eye while others suffer; and there is certainly no peace for people in so many conflict zones, all over the world, who keep losing their homes and lives.

And the great biblical tragedy is that this is all a corruption of God’s Word. This message of conquest is inconsistent with the teaching of the Bible.  Thankfully, there are other Bible stories—ones that I believe take precedence over this story of conquest and tribalism in Joshua.  I believe we honor God by telling Joshua’s story honestly, without taking any verses out; and we do better by remembering God’s more foundational stories, and telling them as often as we can.

One is the story in Genesis 12, familiar to many:  God calls Abraham, saying, “Go to the land I will show you, and I will make of you a great nation…”  You’ve probably heard that before.   What often gets too little attention is the verse that follows that says “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”  All the families of the earth shall be blessed.  This is what God has in mind.  Not a conquest of other peoples but an honoring of them all.

Christians may be more familiar with Jesus’ Parable of the Good Samaritan.  In this story, a man is brutally beaten and left by the roadside to die, a priest and Levite pass by the man out of fear, but the Samaritan helps.  I imagine many of you have heard good sermons about this story, and know:  the priest and the Levite–these are a couple of examples of people we know, trust, and consider to be good.  They leave the man to die.  The Samaritan is the enemy—someone perceived as we might perceive the drug dealer, the person from the other political party, the one who gets on your nerves at work…  The person we perceive to be the enemy, this is the person who helps.

The important part of this story isn’t the story itself, it’s the question that prompts Jesus to tell it, he is asked by a man in the crowd, “Jesus, who is my neighbor?”  And the answer is obvious:  your neighbor is not just the person who lives closest to you; it is the one who may be different.  The neighbor, according to this story, is not the person you grill with at the block party or chat with on the sideline of the soccer game; the neighbor in this story is the person you fear and perceive to be a threat.  The parable of the Good Samaritan isn’t told to get you to be nicer to the person who is part of your tribe, but to get us to behave humanely toward the person who is not.  This is our tradition.

So much of this may seem at first to be tangential—how did I get down this road in a sermon that is supposed to be about finding peace in troubled times?  Well, again, the starting point for me is that as I preached last week’s sermon, I had no peace.  I was preaching a message of finding inner peace by placing our trust in God—and that’s a good message.  But I could not stop wondering:  what would be the reaction to such a sermon if it were listened to by a Palestinian from Gaza, or a Native American whose expansive native home was reduced to a reservation, or Simran Jeet Singh, our guest preacher for next week.  He spent his childhood being barred from soccer games and skating rinks because he wears a turban, who is yelled at by strangers to go back to where he came from even though he was born and raised in Texas.  What would any of them think to hear me preach Joshua 24 and conveniently skip over the verses that we don’t like.  There is no peace in that.

Each Sunday when I walk up to the pulpit, I repeat to myself a simple mantra I was once taught by a mentor:  he said, when you walk in the pulpit always remind yourself, “I have good news for these people…”  The good news is that there are things we can do that encourage peace—peace for people who are suffering and also peace within our own souls.  And thinking about both, peace within and peace without, love of God and love of neighbor, thinking about both kinds of peace is the only way you get either one.