Sermons

Reflections on Social Action

Rabbi Kotok:  Our challenge today relates to the question, the broader question, of why we as religious communities engage in social action, or for some, the word that’s used is social justice. And among many texts that we could turn to in the Jewish community, I turn to two of frame this conversation. The first comes to us from the book of Deuteronomy 16 [verse 20]. It says, “Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that Adonai your god is giving you.”A second text from the prophet Micah 6 [verse 8], “It has been told you what is good and what God requires of you to do justice, love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” Each of these texts, among many others, presents the pattern of responsibility and human empowerment within Jewish life definitions that our works are directly bound up with our beliefs. We use the terminology "omer v'oseh," that we are to say and to do, and there is to be a consistent and continuous link between our belief action and our behavior in the world. They cannot be separated.

Rev. Wilkinson:  The text that I would offer up for us today (and you can read it in all of the gospel accounts) is that most familiar story of the Good Samaritan. And simply remember (and I won’t read all of it this morning; I’m looking at Luke’s version of it at the moment [10:25-37]), that the answer to the question that Jesus was asked from the young lawyer, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” came not on belief but on action, and that Jesus told a story that had to do with neighbors and strangers and love. And so, again, the notion that action flows from belief and action puts us in places that our comfort level might not normally suggest. Why do we get involved? Why do we care about this world? Why do we engage socially in acts of justice or mercy or compassion? Why? I think for our two traditions we are commanded by the texts we share, by the God who has called those texts into being. And for us in the Christian tradition, we are compelled by the ministry of Jesus. It is at its fundamental sense an identity issue. We can’t separate how we live in the world with who we are as people of God, as people of faith, and for us as followers of Jesus. And our call is to respond to God’s love now, in this world, not in some other world in the yet-to-be. Because God loved us, we love others. Because God so loved the world, we love the world. Not to get into heaven, not to earn salvation --- we know we can’t do that. But as a grateful response to God’s gift of grace.

Rabbi Kotok:  What does God really want of us? And how each of us takes that and moves that into our faith commitments and our lives seems to be simple. If it were only based on the way that we interpret the texts that are sacred and central to each of our traditions, it would seem there would be no question to be asked. But I believe that the question needs to be asked. And that is, “Why do we do this?” And that question resounds because of a phenomenon in the culture which we refer to as “liberalism.” And it’s not to in any way denigrate or to reject a concept of liberalism. But liberalism has in some ways come to be the motivation for behavior, even for people of faith. They’ve become synonymous. In some cases, people who generated out of a faith community only to find their faith behavior by their acts of social justice, which are no longer connected to their faith commitments.  They are self-perpetuating.  And part of what challenged John and me was to attempt to see if we could define and identify ways for people who care about the world around them to do it out of the primary resource of their life, and that is their relationship to God and their connection to a faith community.

Rev. Wilkinson:  We have worried over these past months, as we’ve been talking about these things, about the world around us, and whether or not our commitments flow from our faith and not the other way around. It seems providential that we meet here the Sunday after we have remembered Martin Luther King, Jr., as a witness among us, and that reminder last week that for him everything he did in the public world, in the public realm for the common good, flowed from this deep, fundamental theological affirmation, coming as it did from his own experiences. If you were to do a word search of King’s sermons, texts like the prophet Micah and the prophet Amos, as well as texts from the Christian scriptures, would present themselves repeatedly. And so it is from that affirmation, that core faith affirmation, that anything we do in the world should flow, and not simply be a reflection of our political ideologies. The other interesting thing we’ve been talking about over the last little while is the changing face of things. Last week we sang the hymn that Martin Luther King quoted many times, “Once To Every Man and Nation,” which includes this extraordinary phrase, “New occasions teach new duties.” And certainly at the beginning of this new century, this millennium, it looks differently than it did in the 1920s or the 1960s or the 1970s. And each of our traditions is facing changes, evolutions, both in the way that we engage in our own religious practices, but also the world around us and how we respond to that world.So how we live in this culture is very much an important question facing each one of us, and really forces us to look back at the reasons why we engage the world as people of faith.

Rabbi Kotok:  It appears for many that it used to be simpler. It used to be clearer, the connection between faith and behavior. Within the Reform Jewish community, there was a point in time where it seemed that the mandate was the doing of social action. That in fact the way one lived as a Jew within the Reform movement was to do acts of social justice. And again, that’s wonderful. The problem was --- or the potential problem is --- that it became a substitution for the totality of other efforts: prayer, learning, and practice. That the social justice piece became all of it. And I think what we have been trying to do is to create a new synthesis which includes all of the definition markers of identity for the Jewish community. I think also we are struck by a new challenge. And that is, we seem to used to know what justice was. We used to know what the right act was. I think we’re struggling with that today. And when John and I spoke just last week about this, I had a thought that I want to share with you. Religious traditions are a wealth of guidance, a wealth of history, and a wealth of faith. And during the course of time, people have turned to their religious faiths for answers to the mysteries of life, and to the dilemmas of life. And it was not uncommon that religious communities have taken powerfully black-and-white stances on issues of war and peace. It is an amazing phenomenon to think that sixty years ago, religious communities in the United States were presenting justice positions concerning World War II. And that in other communities of the world, who were on the other side of that issue, there were religious communities that were presenting justice issues based upon their own perspectives. The same is true today. It’s true today in terms of the way that we are perceiving the evolving events in Iraq, and in the way the community of Iraq is perceiving us. The thought that came to me was, as information has increased, the access to information and the analysis of information, we have lost our ability to be so black and white about our decisions. And that troubles us, because I know there are people in our community, and people in your community, who are looking to us to make a statement concerning the justice or the lack thereof of what’s happening in the movement towards war in Iraq. It’s not so easy.

Rev. Wilkinson: Many of us in mainline Protestantism have spent much of the past few decades thinking about why this feels different. And I think it’s many of the issues that Rabbi Kotok suggests for us. It’s most certainly the rise of evangelicalism, the rise of secularism, the rise of individualism, and the decline of denominationalism. It used to be quite simple to know what the Presbyterians or the Methodists or the Lutherans thought about any one thing. Those days are far over. But all of those evolutionary realities don’t mean that we abandon the primary conversation, commitments either to activity or to living our faith out in the world. It does mean that our responses have evolved as well as the culture in the world around us. But still, we need to respond, perhaps in greater way than we ever have before. Those of us who think about such things for some moment think that wouldn’t it be great if it used to be the way it used to be. But we know that’s not the new thing to which God is calling us. It’s not about nostalgia. It’s also not about a privatistic faith, kind of hunkering down and just thinking about things of a spiritual nature. It does mean that we are called to engage the world as complex. As difficult and as different as that might be, that’s the world to which we are called to respond. I think it’s important. And we’ve talked about how we might continue this conversation, and we don’t offer now a strategy session, but the continuing collaboration between our two congregations, maybe even on the question of war, might not be such a bad idea. But I think it reminds us that we are called to engage these issues, and not push them away, and not pretend they’re not out there, but to remind ourselves that the deep resources of our faith call us ever more deeply and ever more strongly into this conversation.

Rabbi Kotok:  I’m reminded of the words of William Sloane Coffin during the Vietnam War, when he made the following statement: “Would that people would struggle to love the good as much as they are able to hate the evil.” That struggle among each of us is still apparent. But let me close with the words of Micah once again: “It has been told you what is good and what God requires of you, to do justice, love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

Rev. Wilkinson:  You can’t beat William Sloane Coffin, and you most certainly can’t beat the prophet Micah.  So with that in mind, might we pause for a moment of prayer. 

Eternal and gracious God, whose will for us is known through acts of loving kindness and justice and mercy, we would pray for the world in which we live.  We would pray for our faith traditions and for this relationship between these two congregations, that we might by our resources, by our energy, by our creativity, by our commitments seek, who you would have us be in the world and seek the things that make for peace.  We ask you to be with us this day, and for every day to come.  AMEN.