Don’t Stand So Close To Me: September 23, 2018

On Wednesday night, in our Theology on Tap gathering, we wrestled with the Book of Joshua, with its story of divinely-sanctioned genocide. Many of us are unwilling to worship a god that would order the slaughter of innocent civilians, infants, even livestock. We struggle with both the historicity and the theology of this story, wondering how we can claim the Hebrew heritage without this notion that Yahweh is a violent and exclusive deity. The violence in the Hebrew Scriptures even led to an early Christian heresy, Marcionism, which claimed that the God of the Hebrew scriptures must be a lower deity than the loving God of Jesus.

The truth is, humankind has always had to wrestle with the past, past events, old beliefs, with interpretations of history, though it seems to be almost all we do these days. We pull down statues, change the names of buildings and streets, sometimes rushing to judgment. We want figures of the past to cohere with modern standards of equality and right conduct. For the most part, I get it. Naming the oppressor is necessary in combating oppression and taking the oppressor’s name off a building and the oppressor’s flag off the flagpole sends a powerful signal to those groups that have been oppressed. But like most everyone else, I’m not always certain exactly where to draw those lines. I wish right and wrong were always clear to me, but they aren’t.

Among the re-evaluations of past conduct that have been taking place are the scandals in the Roman church and the #MeToo movement. These have touched every aspect of modern life, from Hollywood and Congress to famous megachurches. Male power can victimize, and speaking truthfully about the ways men have used their power, their economic power, their religious power, has taken down one executive, director, bishop, and actor after another, as well as quite a few of those who enabled their misconduct.

It is hard, in the current context, to imagine that The Police won a Grammy Award in 1982 for the smash hit “Don’t Stand So Close To Me,” the story of inappropriate longing between a teacher and a high school girl. It is one step short of Nabakov’s “Lolita,” a literary classic based on an actual kidnapping, a novel and a song we might now see through a very different lens.

One of the foremost historians of the mid-20th century had his own Lolita story, and like “Don’t Stand So Close To Me,” it started in a classroom. It was before the Great War, and he was the principal of the Ferrer Modern School in Manhattan. The school was named after an executed Catalan anarchist, supported by Emma Goldman, and educated, among others, the children of striking members of the labor movement. It was there that the young principal met 15 year-old Chaya Kaufman, though he nicknamed her Ariel. They would soon wed.

Later, she would become not just his wife, but also his co-author. Will and Ariel Durant were noted historians, producing the twelve-volume Story of Civilization and winning the Pulitzer Prize for the eleventh volume, Rousseau and Revolution. In 1977, they were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Gerald Ford, not bad for an old anarchist philosopher, anarchy having fallen out of favor bu the late ’70’s. I still remember that single volume, Rousseau and Revolution, on the bookshelf in my childhood home, burgundy, hardback, demanding respect.

Even if the Durant’s “Lolita” love affair and their conclusions about history are all subject to re-evaluation as we, the human species, learns and evolves, there are still treasures to be found in their body of work. Will Durant’s 1945 Declaration of INTERdependence remains as true today as it did then, even if the language could be gender-inclusive. There is a copy in today’s Order of Service insert. But what I love the best out of all of the hundreds of thousands of words Will and Ariel Durant produced is a quote from the slim volume “The Lessons of History,” in which he states that “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.”

I’d just add that most history is the guessing and prejudice of a particular time and place, for history lives not only in the context of the actual past events, but also in the context of current understanding and interpretation. In fact, the history of interpretation is one way modern pastor’s deal with scripture, what it meant then, what it means now, but also what it meant to Origen, to Augustine, to Luther. When we are learning the lessons of history, we must ask many questions: How did the people that experienced these events understand them? How have those events effected later generations? How are we to understand those events today?

You might ask, rightly, what this has to do with spirituality, with personal practice. The answer, I believe, is that wisdom is nothing more than sharing and learning from the lessons of history, short-term and long-term, last week and last millennia, personal history and community history, national and religious history, the history of ideas and of science, indeed the deep history of humankind. Wisdom is learning from the past without becoming enslaved by the past.

Wisdom is not only understanding ancient stories like the Exodus and the horrendous evil in the Book of Joshua, but it is also learning from the lessons of 1938, of 1953, and even from a first marriage. Wisdom is an active practice of continually checking to see if a particular tool still works for the job at hand, for the business of getting on with life in ways that are fulfilling and just.

We established last week that we are engulfed in a tsunami of information and noise, that we have monkey mind on a good day, distracted and driven to desire and despair by Madison Avenue and Russian hackers. It has become a bit hard to learn, to share wisdom, to pass it to future generations with the ticker flashing breaking news in bright red at the bottom of the television screen, text messages and non-stop social media.

The thing is, if you want to take responsibility for your government, and that is what democracy is, then you must learn the lessons of history, must stand on the wisdom of the past. If you want to take responsibility for your life together in religious covenant, and that is all Congregationalism is, then you must learn the lessons of history, the lessons of scripture, must stand on the wisdom of the past. In both cases, you must understand the abuses that drove people to fight for freedom, in the trenches and in the pews, which were often the same thing.

So how do we do that? How do we learn the wisdom of the past, which is to say, how do we learn, for we humans are learning machines. Just look at any toddler.

Just as we need more silence in our lives, so too do we need more learning. I am a longtime believer that you can, in fact, teach an old dog new tricks. I am surrounded by inspiring old dogs that are still learning, still growing in knowledge and love, still contributing to the world, well into old age.

De-cluttering has been all the rage in the last few years, websites and magazine articles, television programs and professional services. De-cluttering is a mash-up of a Japanese sensibility and a Western minimalism, embraced, in part, by a generation that can no longer afford McMansions full of stuff. I love the comic line about holding objects in your hands and throwing away those things that don’t bring you joy, starting with the bathroom scale and the electric bill… though I don’t advise throwing out either. But maybe there are things we can and should throw out, objects, habits, ideas.

We could do with decluttering our schedules, making room for silence, for prayer, but also for learning, even if we still must do some things that don’t bring us joy. I’m just never going to get the zen enlightenment of cleaning the toilet, but I can get that job done and sit down with a good book or an online course or a friend who will teach me how to cook a new dish.

We might even need to throw out some things that aren’t on our schedules but that are nonetheless blackholes that suck in time and energy. Maybe the necessary spiritual discipline behind both last week’s theme, silence, and this week’s theme, wisdom, is really just making better decisions. Maybe I didn’t need to binge-watch that last series on Netflix, which was a little dumb, if I’m being honest with myself.

Fun is okay, and sometimes we could all use some time to turn the brain off. I love me a beer and a board game with friends on a Friday night. That New York anarchist Emma Goldman expressed an idea that was shortened, finding its way onto t-shirts and posters and buttons: If I can’t dance, its not my revolution!

Don’t throw away fun.

But I need time for learning as well as fun, for our world is desperately crying out for wisdom. Sometimes we do need totally new ideas, new solutions, but often there is already a solution, if we will just listen and learn. Someone may have figured it out in another town, in another age, maybe even some wandering rabbi two thousand years ago in Galilee. We do not need to continually re-invent the wheel. Just because it isn’t our idea doesn’t mean it isn’t a good idea.

So pick something and learn. Learn what works for you, for Paul reminds us that we are not all called to the same task.

I find it odd that you might not be interested in the role Erasmus played in the Enlightenment and the Protestant Reformation, that you are not necessarily concerned with how the passive participle changes the meaning of “The Lord is risen indeed,” but you might find it odd that I don’t want to learn how to fly fish or how to bake ciabatta. But somebody translated that participle in scripture and someone spent years writing a dissertation about Erasmus, and I can learn from them. Someone else tied a hundred flies before finding the right one and baked dozens of loaves that were impossible to chew, scorched and inedible, before getting the ingredients, temperature and time just right, and you can learn from them.

There is something holy in a good loaf, a spirituality at the trout stream, just as there is when we tell these ancient stories, sing these old songs, perform these ancient rites that we have performed for two thousands years.

We learn, for as we read in the Wisdom of Jesus Bin Sirach, “without knowledge, there is no wisdom.”

And we need wisdom. And silence. And healing. We need space. And love. And God… a God that Jesus told us is good, a loving parent, that forgives us if we forgive others. Let us learn, from an ancient book, from one another, from the Spirit of the Living God. Amen.