“A Growing, Lasting Light”
Rev. Robert M. Hardies
Sunday, 10 December 2006
Our reading this morning is from the poet, Lynn Unger. The poem is called “Hanukkah,” and it’s addressed to the Maccabees, the freedom fighters who are the stars of the Hanukkah story.
“Hanukkah.”
Come down from the hills; declare the fighting done.
Be bold; declare victory even when the temple is wrecked,
and the tyrants have not retreated, only coiled back like a snake,
prepared to strike again.
Come down.
Try to remember a life gentled by daily acts of domestic faith:
the pot set to boil, the bed made up, the table set in calm expectation
that when the sun sets, we will still be here.
Come down and settle.
Unlearn the years of hiding; light fires that can be seen for miles,
that dance and spark and warm your frozen marrow.
Declare your presence, your loyalties, the truths for which
you do not expect to have to die.
It would take a miracle, you say, to carve such a solid life
out of this shell of fear.
I say, “You are the stuff of which such miracles are made.”
On the first night of Hanukkah, in 1938, in a small apartment in Brooklyn, a stooped, aging father donned his yarmulke and did what his father had taught him. As his wife and son looked on, he lit the first candle of the menorah. “We kindle these lights,” he intoned in Hebrew, “on account of the miracles, the deliverances and the wonders which you did for our ancestors.” With candle lit and prayer spoken, father, mother and child gazed at the lone candle. Looking back on that moment from years later, the boy recalls, “That flame seemed almost pitiful against the malignant darkness outside our window.”
It being1938, there hadn’t been many miracles, deliverances or wonders of late to celebrate. The lingering Depression left the streets of New York littered with the poor and just weeks before Jews across the world received news of Cristalnacht, the night the Nazis tore apart the ghettos, burned synagogues and began shipping Jews to the camps. The boy, Chaim Potok, who would grow up to become a famous author, remembers, “The days of that November and December began to go dark until it seemed the whole world would soon be shades of darkness, dark sun and dark moon, dark sky and dark earth, dark night and dark day.” Yet on each successive evening, his father lit the candles, one after another. When, one last time, on the eighth night, he repeated the incantation, “We kindle these lights on account of the miracles, the deliverances and the wonders which you did for our ancestors.” Now, with all eight candles burning bright, still, says Potok, “The darkness mocked the light.” From the look in his eye, Potok’s parents could see that he just wasn’t buying Hanukkah that year. The candles weren’t working their usual magic. His mother sighed. His father asked wearily, “You want another miracle?” The boy didn’t respond. “Yes,” said the father, “you want another miracle. I also want a miracle. But if it does not come, we will make a human miracle. We won’t let the world extinguish our souls,” he said.
The father continued as all three stared into the glowing menorah. “Sometimes,” he said, “I think man is a greater miracle worker than God anyway. God doesn’t have to live, day after day, on this broken planet. Perhaps, son, you will learn to make your own miracles. I will try to teach you how to make human miracles.”
This is my favorite Hanukkah story, one that I tell year after year, for it always seems to contain a different message. Today, as we welcome a child into our midst, the father’s words to his son suggest to me our own responsibility to the young among us. “I will teach you,” he says, “how to make human miracles.” That sounds to me as good a charge as any, to help our children make miracles, or at the very least, to notice them.
But what is a human miracle, anyway? And does the need for human miracles suggest that the age of God’s miracles is over, that God has, somehow, abandoned us, leaving us here to fend for ourselves? When you get down to it, really, that is the question that lies at the heart of all of our winter holidays – Hanukkah, Christmas, the Solstice. At the center of them all is this question, this problem, of our radical vulnerability and dependency as human beings. Winter, after all, was a time when our ancestors found themselves increasingly enveloped in darkness. As night swallowed more and more of the light they asked themselves, “Has God abandoned us? Has our creator and sustainer left us alone to be consumed by the cold and darkness?” No. Have faith, resounds the chorus of all our winter celebrations. Have hope; we are not alone. Precisely at our most vulnerable moment we will be delivered. Precisely at our darkest hour, the light comes again. A growing, lasting light.
But in what manner will we be delivered from our vulnerability? That’s what I want to explore this morning and the Hanukkah story gives us one such answer to this question. Hanukkah, of course, is the story of a Jewish minority living under the thumb of a capricious imperial rule. When the Greek emperor of Judea decided to crack down on Jewish worship some Jews went along, but others fought back. The Maccabees led a tiny armed insurgency that, with the help of God’s mighty hand, achieved an improbable victory over the empire. Then they marched into Jerusalem and rededicated the destroyed temple and, though the temple’s lamps contained only one night’s worth of oil, the story goes, they lasted for eight nights. Hanukkah is, in part, a story of deliverance from our vulnerability, through the deadly intervention of God’s righteous justice.
It’s easy to see how a Jewish family, huddled around their menorah at the beginning of the Holocaust might light their candles and wonder what ever happened to the age of miracles. But rather than despair, Chaim Potok suggests that perhaps another kind of miracle is possible. Listen again to what his father says to him. “I also want a miracle,” he says, “but if it does not come, we will make a human miracle. We won’t let the world extinguish our souls.” Rather than deliverance from God’s mighty hand, this story suggests that a certain kind of inner strength, inner power, is necessary for us to cope with our vulnerability and our frailty in the world. “We won’t let the world extinguish our souls.” Perhaps the miracle is not that the temple lamps remain lit, but that our own light – the spark of divinity that dwells within us – that that remains kindled, the light that gives us hope and courage and faith in our darkest times. These, Potok suggests, are the miracles we must rely on now, now that the age of former miracles is over.
Now I’m going somewhere with this sermon that I didn’t expect to go when I started it this morning. This poem, the reading that I shared with you this morning, is going to begin to take us in that direction. Bear with me while we move from Hanukkahs past to our contemporary situation.
Lynn Unger offers another retelling of the Hanukkah story in her poem this morning and, in doing so, she helps us paint a picture of what a different kind of miracle might look like, a human miracle. Addressing the Maccabees, she writes “come down from the hills; declare the fighting done. Be bold. Declare victory, even when the temple is wrecked and the tyrants have not retreated, only coiled back like a snake prepared to strike again. Come down. Try to remember a life gentled by daily acts of domestic faith – the pot set to boil, the bed made up, the table set in calm expectation that when the sun sets we will still be here. Come down and settle. Unlearn the years of hiding and warring. Light fires that can be seen for miles, that dance and spark and warm the frozen marrow. Declare your presence, your loyalties, the truths for which you do not expect to have to die. “It would take a miracle,” you say, “ to carve such a solid life out of the shell of fear.” I say, “You are the stuff of which such miracles are made.”
What if these were the kinds of miracles that we began to count on? Having the courage to come down from our mountain fortresses, to declare peace, to set our tables fully expecting that there will be others to gather around and join us for dinner, to light our fires to the values that we hold dear. There is a leap of courage that this takes. What the poet’s words are suggesting is that we must develop a certain tolerance for our vulnerability, develop a spiritual fortitude that allows us to face down the fear and the anxiety of our vulnerability rather than to lash out in violence.
As I said before, I wasn’t sure where I was going when I began my Hanukkah preparation this morning, but the story has led me to some reflections on our contemporary world and our nation’s role in that world. I want to suggest that the age-old question of our vulnerability as human beings and the various ways that our faith teaches us to respond to that vulnerability – that these questions have become one of the most important spiritual questions of our age. And it’s not just a private question; it’s a public question.
On September 11, 2001, the American people were reacquainted with their fundamental vulnerability as human beings. Until then, I think, many of us had forgotten that, certainly many in the middle and ruling classes had forgotten that. Fresh off a Cold War victory and a dot-com boom, we could almost believe we were invincible. Then on one September day five years ago our illusions collapsed and we rejoined the human family, united in our essential vulnerability.
At that moment we were faced with a choice. We were faced with a choice of how we would respond to that vulnerability. Would we rely on the old saving stories of trusting God to lead us into battle and come out victorious, or would we rely on new stories, new interpretations of old stories, stories of courage and hope in spite of vulnerability. Stories that tell of a faith that through our common vulnerability, we might discover a solidarity that might lead us to peace through justice.
Well, we all know the choice that we made. We chose the old stories, and we went to war with all the trappings of a crusade, certain that God was on our side, our Commander in Chief, certain that God had ordained him to lead us at precisely this moment. The funny thing about God, though, is that in the Bible (and Michael Lerner reminded us of this in the Spring), in the Bible, whenever God does bring down his mighty hand in the midst of a war to smite an opponent, it’s always on behalf of the poor and the oppressed and the downtrodden. It’s for people like the Maccabees, the underdogs.
We are not the Maccabees. We are the empire. And as the empire we were in the strongest position to have made a different choice back then, to have risked what Lynn Unger suggests. We could have come down from the hills, come out of our militarized fortresses, come out of our splendid isolation and, in new-found solidarity with the world, we could have tried to forge a new peace through justice, not through force. We could have declared a truce and lit a fire on the plain and set a feast and invited others to join us there. But we made a different choice, and today we are living with the deathly consequences of that choice.
Our nation is currently engaged in a re-evaluation of the war in Iraq, how we got there and how we will go forward. But I believe that the re-evaluation that must take place right now must go much deeper than simply a re-evaluation of policy. I don’t believe we will find peace and security in this age of fear and terror unless we as a nation and as a world grapple with this fundamental spiritual question of our human vulnerability. We must acknowledge that vulnerability is an inescapable part of what it means to be human. And we must discover the spiritual courage to face the fear and anxiety that vulnerability causes so that we don’t try to legislate or battle our vulnerability away. Because we can never do that.
Only when we’ve faced these religious questions, only when we’ve come to terms with our own vulnerability as a people and this hold true for us as a nation, it holds true for the people of Israel and Palestine, it really holds true for all of us in this age of terror, only when we face down these existential and spiritual questions of our vulnerability can we really move on to asking the essential political question of our time, which is how much vulnerability are we willing to live with and how much are we willing to risk for peace.
I believe that if we can use our vulnerability as a people and as a nation to draw us into solidarity with the people of the world, rather than causing us to step away in fear from the world, that we can indeed build a world of peace.
It would take a miracle, you say, to carve such a solid life
out of the shell of our fear.
I say “We are the stuff from which such miracles are made.”
One age of miracles may indeed be over. Let us pray fervently that a new better age is about to begin. Amen. [Applause]