The Rev. Dr. Richard L.
Tolliver Rick2251@aol.com preached the following sermon at St. Edmund’s Episcopal Church,
Chicago, Illinois on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, April 21, 2002.
Are
you aware that since 1965, the United States has become the most religiously
diverse country in the world? Yes, the religious landscape of America has
changed radically in the past thirty years, but most of us have not yet begun
to see the dimensions and scope of that change, so gradual has it been and yet
so colossal. It began with the “new immigration,” spurred by the 1965
Immigration and Naturalization Act, as people from all over the world came to
America and have become citizens. With them have come the religious traditions
of the world----Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Zoroastrian, African, and
Afro-Caribbean. The people of these living traditions of faith have moved into
American neighborhoods, tentatively at first, their altars and prayer rooms in
storefronts and office buildings, basements and garages, recreation rooms and
coat closets, nearly invisible to the rest of us. But in the past decade, we
have begun to see their visible presence.
President
Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the new immigration act into law on July 4, 1965,
at the base of the Statue of Liberty, America’s doors were opened once again to
immigrants from all over the world. Since 1924 an extremely restrictive quota
system had virtually cut off all immigration. Entry from Asia had always been
extremely limited, beginning with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The scope of
Asian exclusion expanded decade after decade to exclude Japanese, Koreans, and
other “Asiatics” as well. Asian-born immigrants could not become citizens,
argued the Supreme Court in the case of Bhgat Singh Thind. Thind was a Sikh, a
naturalized citizen, who had served in World War I. Drawing on a 1790 statute,
the court declared Asians to be outside the range of “free white men” who could
become citizens. In 1923 he was stripped of his citizenship. The 1924
immigration law then barred from immigration anyone ineligible for citizenship,
and that meant all Asians.
The
1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act was linked in spirit to the Civil
Rights Act passed just a year earlier. As Americans became critically aware of
our nation’s deep structures of racism, we also saw that race discrimination
continued to shape immigration law, excluding people from what was then called
the Asia-Pacific triangle. Robert Kennedy in supporting the act before the U.S.
Congress, said, “Everywhere else in our national life, we have eliminated
discrimination based on national origins. Yet, this system is still the
foundation of our immigration law.”
The arrival of this new religious diversity has not escaped
Chicago. It’s reality is well documented in a book titled, Public Religion:
Faith in the City and Urban Transformation, published in 2000 by The
Religion in Urban America Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
There
is no sector of American society that hasn’t been touched by this new
phenomenon. For example, the front page of the Metro Section of Monday, April
15, 2002’s edition of The Washington Post features an article titled,
“Chaplain Stretched Beyond Sermons: Prison’s Diversity of Faiths Also Requires
Coordinating Ministries, Weighing Inmate Requests.” The article describes some
of the challenges of Baptist Chaplain, Rev. Elwood Gray. The article states
that Chaplain Gray and other prison chaplains often find themselves mired in
research on the Internet, studying the tenets of unfamiliar faiths so they can
rule on an ever-wider range of prisoners’ requests.
The
issues vary among prisons. At the Lino Lakes Correctional Facility outside
Minneapolis, where many of the 1,000 inmates are Native American, Chaplain
Steve Hokonson has allowed animal claws, herbs and smoking pipes to be taken in
as religious artifacts. But Hokonson turned down a Sikh inmate’s request to
carry a sword after determining that under their own religious laws, Sikhs
forfeit the right to a sword if they commit a crime.
We
read the newspaper daily and are reminded of controversies in other parts of
the world that are raging between people who embrace different religious. Dr.
Diana Eck says that some of the tension existing in the United States today
among groups, is due to the presence of the new religious diversity. She
chronicles many instances of vandalism in this country perpetrated against
religious houses of worship of people embracing non-Christian religions in her
recently published book, A New Religious America. For example, in May
1999 huge chunks of concrete were used to shatter windows of the newly
constructed $3.6 million dollar Mosque in the Chicago suburb, Villa Park. The
largest, a concrete block weighing some fifty pounds, was found in the foyer
amid shards of glass.
The most highly publicized
case in recent memory in the metropolitan Chicago area occurred in the summer
of 2000 when the city council of Palo Heights offered to pay a Muslim group $200,000
to walk away from the offer they had made on a Reformed Church building. The
prospective buyers had planned to convert the space into an Islamic Center.
Writing
in a chapter titled, “Building Bridges,” Dr. Eck challenges spiritual leaders
to become involved in providing solutions to settle these controversies being
generated because of animosity being expressed toward people who embrace other
religions. What can we do as spiritual people? We can take the lead by the
example of how we live our own lives.
One
of the main reasons I chose the topic, “Understanding Diverse Religions” as the
theme for our five week Lenten series this year, was to help us learn more
about people who embrace religious traditions other than our own. Although the
attendance at the forms was respectable, it wasn’t as high as in past years
when we have discussed other topics. Several parishioners who faithfully
attended, made note of that fact to me. One of the least attended forms was the
night the speaker spoke on the topic, “Understanding Islam.” One of our
parishioner’s said to me following the presentation, “Father, I’m surprised
that given all the controversy in the world today involving people of the
Muslim faith, you would have thought that more of our parishioners would have
wanted to better understand that religious tradition.” I concurred. After all,
of the six million members of the Orthodox Muslim faith in the United States
today, it’s a documented fact that between 25% and 40% are African Americans.
Allan D. Austin, writing in a book he titles, African Muslims in Antebellum
America, documents that the first members of the Islamic faith to arrive in
America were African slaves. The book includes several personal narratives of
some of those slaves.
Let
us not pretend that some tension doesn’t exist between black Americans who are
Christian and Muslim. In the summer of 1998, I attended a two-week seminar at
the Harvard Divinity School at which some other Chicago African-American clergy
were in attendance. One of the attendees from another state was a Muslim
cleric. He subsequently visited our city and spent some time with me and
another local clergyman who had participated in the seminar. I later chatted
with that local clergyman. He acknowledged that the Muslim cleric had visited
his church. He said to me, “I even let
him speak from my pulpit and you know how I feel about Muslims.” I inferred
that he doesn’t fell very positive about them.
I
agree with Dr. Eck, we as spiritual leaders must lead by the example of our own
lives, and venture into these controversies and begin to break down the walls
that divide us because of religious diversity. I am very much involved in
activities intended to break down these barriers and I challenge you to do the
same.
Indeed,
I am increasingly haunted and inspired by a statement a former seminary
professor made one day to our social ethics class at the Episcopal Divinity
School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Joseph Fletcher was Professor of Social
Ethics. One day he said to the class, “You know, I have decided at my age, I no
longer have time to be involved in non-controversial activities. We sit here
and bemoan a fallen world and when we leave here, nothing better seems to
happen in the world as a result of anything we do. With what days I have left
on this earth, I no longer have time to be involved in non-controversial
activities.” My brothers and sisters in Christ, I have appropriated Dr.
Fletcher’s statement of commitment as my own.
One
of the actions I have recently personally taken is accepted membership on the
Steering Committee of the Progressive Religious Partnership. We have
established a network around the country of significant clergy, both Jewish and
Christian, and a few Muslims and now one Zen Buddhist. After 25 years of the
Religious Right being the sole definition of religion in the public arena,
there is an urgent need for a strong progressive religious voice that is
organized to speak to both economic and racial justice as well as dealing with
gender equality, gay justice and reproductive choice. We are also discerning
ways to speak prophetically and effectively on peacemaking around the theme
“Faith, Patriotism and the Next America: Religious Terror and War.” This past
Monday we held a town hall meeting in Washington, D.C. The topic was,
“Spiritual Crisis in America: Seeking a Prophetic Response to 9/11 and its
Aftermath.” On Tuesday we held a press conference in the nation’s capital to
speak out against the violence in the Middle East and call for a solution that
will be just to both Palestinians and Jews, recognizing that any resolution of
the crisis will be less than perfect.
Are there others present this morning
who are prepared to make that same commitment to become spiritual leaders
during times of controversy? President
Clinton said on the occasion of his 50th birthday, “I have seen more
yesterdays than tomorrows.” Most of us sitting here today have seen more
yesterday’s than tomorrows. Will the world be any less tense when we leave
here, because of some controversy we have tried to alleviate while we were
alive? That’s the question I ask you to ponder.
Where
do those of us who have decided to no longer involve ourselves in
non-controversial activities get our marching orders from? The Chinese probably invented the compass at
least 150 years before it began to be used in Europe around A.D. 1200. Before
the compass, sailors relied on the skies for information about their location;
in cloudy and stormy weather they were clueless. The compass changed all that
and made shipping faster and safer, allowing for busy trading routes to
develop, linking the world together in the first phase of what we now call the
“death of distance.”
About
a thousand years before the compass was invented, however, the appearance of
Christ, the True Compass, introduced a new way to navigate spiritual waters and
the treacherous shoals of life. In Acts 6-7 we see how influential the Christ
as Compass was in the life of the early church. These chapters do not contain
the stories of Jesus, of course, but they illustrate just how transformative
his example and guidance proved to be in the lives of the first Christians.
What we see in Acts is a picture of a completely new way of life, one based
entirely on the direction provided by Jesus Christ.
The
changes begin in chapter 6, with the selection of seven souls to serve as
deacons to ensure that the needy in their communities are properly served. So
the 12 apostles call a meeting, and ask the group to select “seven men of good
standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom” (v.3). The community chooses
Stephen and six others, and the apostles ordain them to the ministry of serving
the needs of the fellowship. Stephen becomes a world-changer, the first martyr
of the Christian Church because he set his sail according to the Christ
Compass. And, as such, he is a prototype, a model, a compass, for each of us.
Stephen shows us how to navigate by the compass of Christ and to see Jesus as
the directional signal that we follow in life and in death. That’s what it
means to follow the Christ-compass. That’s what it means to be a spiritual
leader during times of controversy.
Martin
Luther King, Jr. was a spiritual leader during times of controversy. On one
occasion he preached a sermon against the United States’ involvement in the
Vietnam War. He titled that sermon, “A Time to Break Silence.” In its final
paragraph he states, “Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the
long and bitter, but beautiful struggle for a new world. This is the calling of
the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say
the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our
message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as
full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of
longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their
cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it
otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human
history.”
My
brothers and sisters in Christ, as that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell
Lowell, eloquently stated:
Once
to every man and nation
Comes
the moment to decide
In
the strife of truth and falsehood
For
the good or evil side;
Some
great cause God’s new Messiah
Offering
each the gloom or blight
And
the choice goes by forever
Twixt
that darkness and that light.
Though
the cause of evil prosper
Yet
‘tis truth along is strong
Though
her portion be the scaffold
And
upon the throne be wrong
Yet
that scaffold sways the future
And
behind the dim unknown
Standeth
God within the shadow
Keeping
watch above his own.
Who
will join me this morning in becoming spiritual leaders during times of
controversy?
Please sign my guestbook and
view it.
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