HomeREADING #629
SERMON
Hanukkah is the story of the survival of the Jewish religion and the reestablishment of the state of Israel against impossible odds. Antiochus IV Epiphanies was thinking less of Judaism than of keeping his empire together, but he saw religion as the means to do so and attempted to impose his religion on everyone else. The choice was to worship Zeus or to die.
The Maccabees led a resistance movement that defeated this effort.
The writings of the Jews claim that Antiochus decided at some point to eliminate the Jews, which is probably false propaganda; nevertheless, the story of the Maccabees is another example of Jewish survival in the face of oppression.
The historic attempts to destroy Jews, whether that was the case in 164 BC or not, reminds me of the events taking place in Darfur today.
The players are different, but the story of ethnic bigotry and hatred is the same. Little has changed in the nearly 2200 years since the Maccabees. People still kill people for being different than they. In just the past few decades we have seen genocide in Bosnia, Kosovo, Burundi, and Rwanda and ethnic fighting in too many places to list.
Human beings are just too prone to the tendency to choose up sides and fail to respect the humanity of others.
What can change is that in the extreme cases the world can say no, not this time. Darfur is one of those cases. I would again urge everyone to contact their legislators—your United States senators and members of congress--with that message.
I also must make some mention this morning of the conference in Iran about the holocaust.
It is an historic irony that the Seleucid Empire of Antiochus IV Epiphanies was, in essence, the ancient empire of Persia to which Iran is the successor state. The fact that this conference has taken place in the heart of the Seleucid Empire at about the time of Hanukkah is somehow appropriate.
This conference is an example of astonishing political grandstanding. It is an assemblage of anti-Jewish bigots called together by an anti-Jewish politician who has already stated his belief that the holocaust did not occur. The sad thing is that they can use the misguided actions of Europeans to justify this meeting in the eyes of too many around the world.
As a believer in freedom of speech I do not approve of laws that make it illegal to deny the holocaust.
And, I believe that to have such laws serves on to drive the deniers underground and to make undeserved martyrs of them.
They can also then point to the laws and say that the powers that be do not want the truth to come out and that will give them unwarranted legitimacy in the minds of some. The proper way to deal with false claims is to allow them to be aired and to prove them wrong.
But on to today’s sermon.
In the First Book of Maccabees, after the Temple is cleansed, the Maccabees must decide what to do with the old altar.
The altar was defiled by sacrifices to Greek gods and possibly by the sacrifice of pigs on it, so they felt they could not continue to use it. Yet it was the altar that had served ever since the Temple was rebuilt following the Babylonian exile. So it had presumably been the sacred altar, dedicated to Yahweh, for hundreds of years. They felt they could not, then, just throw away the stones. So, says the text, they “tore down the altar and stored the stones in a convenient place on the temple hill until a prophet should come to tell them what to do with them”.
One aspect of this part of the Maccabee story that is quite out of keeping with the rest is that here the Maccabees chose to be patient. If you read the story, the Maccabees had no patience with anyone, not the Greeks, not the Idumeans, not the Jews who were willing to Hellenize. But on this issue, they were willing to wait as long as it took. A cynic might say they just decided not to decide, but I think they decided to wait, and that is different. It is a subtle difference, but I think it is a genuine difference.
I have read that story many times, but it was only this year that I began to wonder what happened to those stones. I began to wonder where they are today.
They could, I suppose, be anywhere. There might still be a pile of stones somewhere on the hill. They might have been used later to build a Roman bath or to build a Christian Church. They might have been used to build the Mosque that now sits on top of Temple Mount, or a farmer’s house or a merchant’s store. That happens sometimes with things set aside. They get used later by someone else for some purpose we could never have imagined.
The reference to the stones in the story started me thinking about things set aside in our lives.
I am not talking about clutter, though I have plenty of that in my house. I have boxes and piles of things that I do not wish to throw away as they might be useful some day. They clog up what once was a studio for clay and painting, they fill shelves in my office, and they spill onto tables in the kitchen and the den.
I know there is a psychiatric term for people who hoard so many things that one cannot walk through their home. My daughter used to baby sit for the children of a couple like that. To get from the front door to the couch in the living room one had to negotiate one’s way through piles of boxes. The piles were only stacked about two high, but these people were still young.
I don’t believe I qualify as that kind of hoarder, but I do see the tendency within myself.
But as I say, I am not thinking about these things. My mind turns more to the things with deeper meaning, and things that might be called sacred.
I have a watch that belonged to my father. It doesn’t work anymore, but I cannot toss it away. It has too much meaning. Oddly enough, it did work for a while. After years of not keeping time accurately, it suddenly began to run well. It worked for a year or so, only in the last few months returning to its errant ways. So now I really cannot toss it out: It might work again someday.
And there are things that are not things. People often have dreams that get set aside or put on hold until some later time.
At the age of 17 I decided to become a minister, and when I began college in 1968, that was my goal. But I was sidetracked for a while and it was not until 1987 that I graduated from college and 1991 that I graduated from Divinity School. During that entire time, had you asked me my goals I would have answered as I so often did, that I was going to be a minister one day. But somehow, that kept being put off, somehow the time never was right, somehow I just did not quite know how to achieve that goal. It was set aside on the mountain until a later time. It was set aside until the prophetic voice within would tell me it was time. Fortunately for me, that time did come, but it took a while.
How many other things in my life have been like that?
The problem the Maccabees faced was, for them, even more intense. Here was the sacred altar, but it had been profaned and made unclean. The Sacred and the Unclean mixed together.
One of the things that brought to mind for me was the difficulty the people of this congregation faced back in 1965 when the issue of selling the old building and moving out of Yonkers was first raised up. That building had been the meeting home of the congregation for over one hundred years. I was not present at the time the decision was made, of course, but I project onto it a certain trauma, a certain deep sense of the possibility of loss. I was in the building some ten years ago or so, and there are memorial stained glass windows—they have people’s names on them, people dating back to the founding of the congregation, but some were a bit more recent. And important things had happened for people within those walls. I am sure that for some the possibility of leaving was profoundly disturbing. But it was also difficult, maybe impossible, to stay.
I mentioned that the problem for the Maccabees was the issue of the Sacred and the Unclean mixed together. That strikes me as an apt description of most people.
I feel that way often, that is, both sacred and unclean. I have done things in life I am not proud of. Truth be told I still do. I have found myself needing to apologize to people on occasion. And if I look at my past honestly, there are things there that are unworthy of a good person. There are things I either do not speak about or refer to only rarely because they are sad or bring a sense of failure or even shame.
And yet, there is within me something sacred, something pure and unsullied by whatever I have done in my past. There is within me a person who has passion for truth, for being good and for doing good.
I believe that is true for each and every one of us.
And that is why I believe we should never give up on our self—or on anyone else.
Each of us, you see, is a miracle and has miracles within.
Hanukkah is the story of our human ability to do that which is impossible.
If we allow the pure part of ourselves to catch flame, then even though it is small and seemingly insignificant, like the sacred flame of the Hanukkah menorah it will burn so bright and so long that we and everyone else will be stunned by its beauty and its glory.
May I strive always to see that flame within myself, and within every other person.
May I strive to let my flame shine through always.
So let it be.
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