Ingathering Sermon

Rev. Barbara H. Gadon

First Unitarian Church of Chicago

September 11, 2011

Ten years ago today at approximately 8:45 a.m., first one, then 15 minutes later, another plane flew into the Twin Towers in Manhattan.  Less than two hours later, we heard news that a third plane had crashed – this time, into the Pentagon in Washington, DC.  A fourth plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania, not hitting any populated target, but those on board were lost.  There were reports of other planes whose attempts were foiled.  I remember that I needed to hear it several times, for it to sink in.  For those of us with loved ones living in New York and DC, the news was an especially brutal punch.  We immediately started making phone calls.  I have friends who are like an extra set of parents, people with whom my husband and I usually spend Christmas, who live three miles from the Pentagon.  In that moment, I needed to hear their voices.  I also needed to call the man I was just beginning to date at the time, Robert Gadon.  Robert worked a good 30 miles from the Pentagon, but this was a moment of wild imagining.  It was a time when we needed reassurance; not everyone got it.  

For those living in or near the two cities, of course, it was worse.  People in our congregation in Paramus, NJ, were just across the river from the city, the Manhattan skyline in full view of the church.  They lost members who worked in the Towers, or whose relatives did.  The most haunting thing, they told me, was to drive by the park and ride, the commuter lot, as it became gradually and awfully clear that certain cars had been there for days.  No one was going to claim them.  

Churches were called upon to help, and I remember being grateful that there was something we could do.  I was grateful that President Bush… You know, those are words that I have not put together very often, “grateful” and “President Bush”, but I was grateful that President Bush called upon churches across the country to have services on Friday at noon.  This week, I was looking through a file that Rev. Nina left me from 9/11, and there were her notes for the service you held here.  She roughed out an order of service:  “Silence, Chalice, Opening Words, Song, Candles, Prayer, Song…”  I remember making a list like that.  I remember feeling what a sacred trust that was.

At the time, I was living in little town called Easton, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, serving my first parish assignment, a small fellowship of about 80 people.  They had converted a veteranarian’s office into a church building.  It was small.  I went in to set up the chairs in our all-purpose room:  two concentric circles with our chalice in the middle.  I can still remember how it felt to place each chair, with a dull, satisfying thump on the carpet.  In seminary, we sometimes compared creating and leading worship to building a box, or making a container to hold people’s intense and difficult emotions.  In that one moment, I knew what to do, I needed to make a box.  We seldom have such clarity.
Also in Rev. Nina’s notes from 9/11 were instructions for people to synchronize their watches with WBBM, in order to ring the church bell precisely when churches all over the city were also ringing their bells.  

When I read this, I remembered something I had been told when I was a student at Meadville/Lombard, many years ago.  Ron Engels, one of our professors, told it to us.  It was the day that Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated.  He said that when he heard the news of Dr. King’s death, he was so distraught, so outraged, so bewildered and bereft, he knew he had to do something.  He was, himself, a student at Meadville at the time, and a member of this church.  The only thing he could think to do, he told us, was to come to the church and ring the bell.  He rang and he rang and he rang the bell, pulling and pulling and pulling until his arms, his whole body ached.  And he lay for a moment on the floor, exhausted.  When he got up, and walked into the sanctuary, to his surprise, the room – this room - was crammed with people.  They had heard the bell.  It had summoned dozens of people in the neighborhood, and they all came in.  And they clearly expected him to say something.  He said a few words, he said, but he had no grand speech.  He had only known to ring the bell. Coming together was the only speech necessary.  

What we do in the midst of fear and grief, how do we find hope?  These are some of the most important spiritual questions we can ask.   

“The Conference of the Birds” asks these questions. At that time, in the kingdom of the birds, there were widespread feelings of fear and grief.  The poet does not tell us what brought this about, only that it was so.  The birds in this kingdom were lost and afraid, longing for a god or a king - the text isn’t clear which.  The line between a divine and a mortal leader may have been blurred in their minds.  (As it frequently is in ours.)  They desperately needed someone to lead them.  Along comes a hoopoe bird.  If you have seen a male hoopoe bird, you know he is both beautiful and ridiculous, with his bright orange body, and black and white checkered wings and tail.  He has a thicket of black and white feathers sticking straight up from his head.  It looks like he’s wearing a loud sports coat and a bad rug.  He has a long, awkward-looking beak, good for poking into other people’s business.  Which is what he does in this story.  But he also sees the birds’ great confusion, grief and fear, and feels compassion for them.  And he tells them that he can take them to the Simurgh, the great god of the birds, at the mountain of Qaf.  He also tells them it will be a long and dangerous journey.  “The Conference of the Birds” is actually a poem, hundreds of verses long, many of which involve the various birds giving the hoopoe their excuses for why they cannot go.  “I’m too attached to my rose,” one says.  Or, “My children need me.”  Or, “I’m too old…”  All quite reasonable.  All but thirty of the birds find reasons not to go.  You may think that these were the bravest of the lot, but they may also have been the most desperate.

After 9/11, after we had seen some of the best the American people had to offer by way of kindness and love, we began to see the worst.  People were longing to feel safe and whole, to feel like the strong, invincible America we were – or thought we were – before this whole mess began. We needed a message, we needed something that would help pull us together.  Our president urged us to travel, to spend money on consumer goods and stay in nice hotels.  Bill Maher put it well.  “At that moment, my president could have called on me to do anything for my country, to make any number of sacrifices for the common good - I was primed, I was ready.  What did he do?  He asked me to go shopping.”  

The president who had first called us to understand and respect Islam, proceeded to turn a blind eye to atrocious acts of profiling.  He led us down one wrong-headed rabbit hole after another.  Congress went with him.  We got the Patriot Act, offering us surveillance as a form of security.  We invaded Iraq, our leaders taking raw data, unsubstantiated reports of weapon of mass destruction and throwing Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden together in one neat bombable target.  They used our fears to increase the president’s decision-making powers, and they lied, in order to get popular support for the war. We also started targeting Muslims, imprisoning them without trial.  We felt the shame of Abu Ghraib.  Most of us did not know what “water-boarding” meant before 9/11.  We do now.  

And still, it took much courage to oppose the war.  We were told it was unpatriotic.  People who spoke out, if they had a sizeable audience, had to fear for their lives.  The filmmaker, Michael Moore, who made the film “Fahrenheit 911”, began to travel with Navy Seals when he ventured out of his house.  He was called unpatriotic, and he was assaulted for it.  

Growing up in the 60s and 70s, I developed a sharp resistance to talk about patriotism, and what it meant I should or should not do to prove mine.  The church was and is a place where I have learned a new meaning for this word:  that is, to insist on the best from the country I love.  To insist on the best from the country I love.  

Sometimes the work of the church is to insist on the best from our country.  To insist that our government live up to its own ideals.  This church, I am told, stood with a Chicago Muslim woman, Anna Mustafa, when she was arrested at the airport.  It was early on – October of 2001 – and public fear was running high. She was on her way to her father’s funeral in Palestine, and was searched and searched and searched, and searched again, and she was worried she would miss her plane, and miss services back home.  Having just recently experienced the heavy heart one feels when going to a parent’s memorial, I know something about this.  You are certainly not at your best.  In her exasperation, she said, “What are you looking for, a bomb?”  Have you ever said the wrong thing at the worst possible time? Usually we just feel a little embarrassed, and move on.  Anna was arrested and put in jail.  She was also fired from her job at the County Clerk’s office.  

In answer to the question, “What do we do with our fear and our grief?” all too often, the answer was to find someone to blame.  Back then, the world seemed to be governed by this impulse.  
Members of our Social Justice Council, the 9/11 2001 Social Action committee voted to get involved.  Ms. Mustafa and her lawyer appeared at a First Forum, and told her story to this congregation.  The church helped raise money for her attorney’s fees, and supported her during her trial.  She was acquitted with a warning, and eventually she got her job back.  I tell you this story, not to make us out to be heroes.  We had only a tiny part in this happy outcome.  Anna is the heroine; it was her persistence and her courage that were important here, make no mistake about it.  But I say it to remind us how much community can sustain us, when we need to have courage.  When we need to step up and do what’s right.  We cannot make the journey all by ourselves, it’s just too dangerous. We seldom think we’re up to it.  

Let me take a moment now, to say a word about the title of this sermon.  Have you been wondering about the “dirty” birds?  I shared this story a few weeks ago with some minister friends, and they stared at me for a moment, and one of them politely changed the subject.  Finally, I brought it up again, and someone said, “30 birds?  As in 3-0?  I thought you said, ‘dirty birds’”.  It turns out all of them had thought that.  “Why?” we wondered.  (Ministers love to talk about these things.)  Well, there’s the obvious answer, that it’s a common figure of speech.  We teach parrots to say, “Dirty bird!  Dirty bird!”  But we wondered if it doesn’t also have to do with the way we think about ourselves.  Maybe it’s easier for us to feel more shame about ourselves than goodness.  Dirty.  Maybe it’s easier for us to feel cynical about the human race, than it is to feel hope and courage.  The Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed once said that our trouble as Unitarian Universalists is that we don’t really BELIEVE our first principle, affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person.  It’s harder than it sounds.  Maybe it’s just easier to feel discouraged sometimes.

Once upon a time, there were some birds who were lost and afraid.  They didn’t think much of their own abilities, their own courage.  Thirty of them set out - because they had to.  And in facing all kinds of trials together – horrible storms, mountains much too big to climb, ogres and monsters they knew they couldn’t defeat – all of this made them strong.  

At last, when they got to the Circle Mountain, they had finally made it to the home of the gods, they found out they had been tricked.  There was no one there but themselves.  Boy, were they mad.  “Oh,” said the hoopoe bird, “that’s right.  I forgot to tell you.  ‘Simurgh’ is really a pun.  It’s made up of two words: ‘si’, meaning 30, and ‘murgh’ meaning birds.  You have been looking for 30 birds.  You are it.”  

You have to wonder why they didn’t see this sooner.  Why they kept looking outside themselves for the hope they sought.  Kind of like Dorothy, who was told that she could have gone home any time she wanted, just by clicking her heels together three times.  After all she had been through with her friends, all the dangers they faced, and that huge disappointment they called a “wizard”...  “You never would have believed me,” said the good witch.  “You had to find out for yourself.”

We so seldom believe in our own, natural goodness, the god within us, the power among us.  It is the job of the faith community to show us.  It is the job of the church – and the mosque and the temple and the community – to help us find our best selves.  It is here where we learn how to stay human in a world that feels broken.

Ten years ago, we who love and serve the church, we were given a powerful opportunity to BE the church.  Ten years ago, we were shown, unequivocally, that people really needed us. They poured into our doors. The church was given their sacred trust.  People always need the church.  I wouldn’t be a minister if I didn’t believe that.  But on September 11, 2001, we were given the gift of people knowing they needed us.  

And today?  We are still needed.  Our country is still suffering from rising unemployment, and little understanding of how to come together across differences.  As Hendrick Hertzberg put it in the New Yorker,  (8-9-11) “[We] have allowed deficits and debt to supersede mass unemployment as the emergency of the moment.”  We have allowed our modest social infrastructure to be called “entitlements”, cutting into Medicare for our elderly, which will take effect this fall.  We have allowed tax cuts for millionaires to seem, somehow, inevitable. That it’s all right for 1% of our nation to own 40% of the wealth.  Our president, for whom I voted with more joy in my heart than I can ever recall, cannot seem to cross the divide, hard though he tries.  We are more steeply polarized than ever politically, and it is robbing us of our dreams, our health, our very lives.  I don’t know how we are going to overcome this.  And we cannot give up hope.  

We must be the church.  The Church of Consumer Bliss and The Church of I Don’t Need Anyone is failing us.  We forget that our fates are tied together, and we need to be reminded.  It’s time again to ring the bell.  It’s time again to put out the chairs and build the box.  It’s time for the church to gather for a new church year, with a message of hope for the world.  

In our time together, over the course of a year or two, you and I will go on a journey together.  We will be looking for Circle Mountain, for the Simurgh.  It will require some courage – change is never easy.  There will be delights and lovely views.  There MAY even be some monsters you will need to face, and there will certainly be some hard questions you will need answer.  But somewhere on our journey, we must find it in ourselves to be the church the world needs.  

And at the end of our journey, when we find Circle Mountain, I predict, you will be amazed.  There is no great Simurgh waiting for you there.  I am not it, and the minister you call will not be it.  I’ll tell you that right now.  You’re it.  You may not believe it yet.  You may have to go on the journey to find out.  I hope you do.  And I’m so excited to be starting the journey with you.  Amen.