Broken Land Parkway

Sermon

I am driving past the Broken Land Parkway
Near our nation's capital, thinking
'Man, ain't that the truth.'

How did such an ordinary stretch of road come by such a biblical designation?
Was it some prophet-highway planner
With a name we ought to have paid more attention to?
Isaiah Lopez or Jeremiah Jones.

I am afraid to ever set my wheels upon it,
Afraid of what I will find using that road.
It seems a path through a cursed place.
It must be lined with pillars of salt.
I imagine it is long and straight and flat,
Bordered by wasteland on either side,
Long stretches of arid plain,
With occasional brittle scrub rooted in cracked ground
And a rare, small rodent scuttling.

This is the image that comes every time, the post-apocalyptic visual that floods my mind despite the actual visual all around me. The Broken Land Parkway lies in Columbia, Maryland, and is merely a highway, with verdant tree-lined embankments. The sign that displays its dread name has no gothic lettering, no ragged, burned edges, just mundane bright, fairly new, highway green background with white printing. It is the strangest juxtaposition. Unitarian Universalists don't believe in hell as a theological reality, but just imagine – this is just how the devil would make those signs to clue us in to our destination: a sign just like all those we're entirely used to except this one says Road To Hell as we walk along our good intentions.

I think of the Broken Land Parkway and my mind turns to what would be its opposite. Perhaps in Greece – the Ieros Odos or 'Sacred Way.' This road of 30 km or so was taken by devotees of the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone. In the annual September celebration, initiates cleansed themselves in the sparkling Aegean and made sacrifice, then processed the 30 km from the Acropolis in Athens to the city of Eleusis, swinging branches and uttering ritual exclamations and phrases at certain points along their journey. Imagine the roadway, in the dry warmth of early autumn, filled with the figures, garbed in their colorful, draped garments, walking together in the inevitably sunny day of that time of year, swinging their branches and talking, and uttering invocations as they made their way down towards the divine mysteries that waited at the other end. The whole ritual took a few days to experience – and was so profound that we know almost nothing of its sacred details, so respectfully did ancient Greek writers honor the secret nature of the mysteries.

The same road still exists, but now it is a strikingly bleak motorway, literally filthy with trash and the soot of the industrial companies which mark its entire length together with small storefronts. And do you know its modern name, printed in bright blue and white highway signs in English and Greek along the road: Ieros Odos, Sacred Way. Maybe it's actually too naïve to expect the devil to label the road to hell for what it is.

The Broken Land Parkway's location is ironic considering that 'Columbia' is also the name we have given the supercontinent which existed approximately 1.8 - 1.5 billion years ago in the Paleoproterozoic Era. It comprised what we call Laurentia, Baltica, Ukraine, Amazonia, Australia, and possibly Siberia, North China and Kalahari as well. Now that's a really broken land, which of course points out that our land is not broken at all, not the way that supercontinent was broken, not the way an archipelago is broken, not the way a drought-ridden land is broken. According to a website giving some brief history of the Columbia area, the part called 'Broken Land' was apparently a land grant patented to Thomas Worthington and Henry Ridgely in 1722. It's unclear how and why the term 'broken land' was used – perhaps because it was broken up between the two owners. Somehow the land seems to have retained this sad identity (never becoming, say, 'Ridgely,' for example), all the way up until it was designated for the construction of a parkway. And not only is the land there not broken, it is thriving. The parkway is lined not with pillars of salt but with a mall and many companies and leads not to hell but to the Merriweather Post Pavilion, among other destinations.

It is the people who are broken, it is us, it is our land in terms of our humanity, and our sense of ourselves as a nation that is broken. In some ways, no doubt this is good for us. We have historically been a prideful nation, all too often unconcerned about the numberless times and ways our choices have broken others within our shores and beyond. It is no doubt good for us to get even a taste of what it is to suffer as a people from estrangement and distrust among us. In fact, this is not the first time it has happened to us. It has happened many times, over colonization and annexation of Indian lands, over industrialization, over slavery, over wars, over the Red scares, the terrible one-two punch of the Great Depression and dustbowl, McCarthyism, Vietnam, and more that I've missed, I know, including, over and over again, immigration.

But we always bounce back, don't we, and then we're riding high again, lifted on the wings of our own plenty and that boundless optimism and looking to the future that are the shame and blessing of America and Americans. We don't look back as a nation, we leave that to Europe and others with more to look back on, us we look forward, upward not downward, outward not inward. It's not a very spiritual perspective we take, but by gum it gets things done.

I often look admiringly at the Europeans and their universal health care and education and strong sense of identity together – but of course they've got it easy. You can drive across some European countries in one long day. They have one, maybe two internal languages tops; one ethnic cuisine; one, maybe two climates; a few religions; a few major industries – and this leaves them with all kinds of homogeneity to bind them. We have probably the most heterogenous nation on the planet and the volume and diversity of headaches that attend are commensurate.

In two days we go to vote. In this broken land, this red or blue land, this NRA or gun control land, this pro-life or pro-choice land, this unilateral or United Nations land, this fearful, awesome, magnificent, riven land with a wound right down the middle of us that gapes larger than the Grand Canyon and deeper than the Colorado River that courses along its very bottom. How did we get here? I see it, though I know it's not true, as the difference between the Ieros Odos then and now. Once we were all united, sharing in purpose, walking together, shining down a shining way. It was never true – from the Whigs and the Tories, and even earlier: the Puritans and the Indians, the Puritans and the Quakers – even during WWII, lauded for its unifying power, were dissention and division – nothing has ever been clear and shining and shared by all in this nation.

But no question, things have been clearer, more shared, at some times, than they are now. And in recent years, as those who have disagreed with positions taken by the White House have been vilified and mocked, even as the nation has sunk deeper into almost every conceivable mire from financial disaster of generational proportions to potentially irreversible climate change and at least tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis dead on our watch, I've become a VAL, a new category, not yet known yet certainly apparent to me: Very Angry Liberal. I don't know how many of us there are. For me, it stays mysteriously limited to the political realm: though spiritually and religiously I have wished to communicate with and understand my conservative brethren, politically I have wished to punch them in their collective solar plexus. Their actions against our environment, our poor, our Muslims, our lesbians and gays who wish to marry and honor their love for a lifetime, against prisoners who have no right but to be tortured, against our non-English speaking laborers, against our international friends and enemies, against the Palestinians whose suffering worsens daily, against the people of Darfur whose deaths are occasionally condemned and then ignored again, their abuse of our armed services in underequipping them for impossible missions and then calling occupation, liberation and war, peace, have made me crazy.

And now, ha ha, now it's election time, the time to turn the tables, time to reap what they sowed, time for shoe's on the other foot, time for … for ... for what? Ecclesiastes tells us that to everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up; a time to keep silence and a time to speak; a time to love and a time to hate; a time of war and a time of peace. (Ecclesiastes, 3:2-1, excerpted)

And things are never as simple as they seem. In this congregation we have in recent years and have now, members who serve in the White House. We have people who every day, live their UU values by finding a middle ground wherein good work can be sown.

I hold them in mind as I think "Now it's time to vote. In two days there's a chance that some of the ride we have been on will change for the better." What does that make this time about? Perhaps it is the chance for change that enables me to say it, but though I have been angry a long time, though I will no doubt be angry again, I don't want to cast my vote in anger. If my candidates win, I don't want them to rule unjustly or vengefully. I want them to do what's right for the right reasons. I want to be magnanimous in victory. I want us all to exercise discernment and wisdom and find a way to heal the wrong that’s been done, including the wrong that’s been done between us in this broken land. I want to take the next exit off the Broken Land Parkway and drive far away from there.

And in searching my mind for a way to do this, my thoughts turn to the Turkish graduate students who graced this church in the wake of 9/11. Within a very few weeks of that dark day Fehmi, Salih, Murat and others came to visit us on a Sunday to learn more about what Christians and church were about. They had, obviously, no idea what to expect. For one thing they thought we were Christians, in the usual sense of the term. But the difference in our faith was in some ways the least of it. They might have met here with condemnation, with hostility, even with violence, because that was a risk and reality anywhere for observant Muslims in America.

They came here on a great bridge across difference and ignorance. The bridge has no name, but it might be another path called the Sacred Way. Their act was full of curiosity but more so, of courage. They were visitors in this country as well as to this church, of a ethnic minority that is misunderstood as Arab in this country, and of a religion that had just been featured in the most negative way possible, and anti-Muslim and anti-Arab prejudice were particularly high just then. Their courage and action were therefore especially important and powerful, even transformative, for us and them both. It was the beginning of a relationship that prospered for the years they were here finishing their studies. They came to church services some Sundays, they stayed for conversation in coffee hour, from those conversations they offered a session on their take on living Islam, from that grew a series of classes on important aspects of Islam and two shared dinners between a large group of their Muslim friends and relatives and members and friends of UUCSS, cooked by them, hosted by us. From that grew the opportunity for them to teach their classes at other area UU churches, endorsed and aided by UUCSS, and the opportunity to build their "Rumi Club" that developed programs to bring Muslim artists here to show their work and Sufi dancers to perform the observance of their transfixing whirling meditation.

That is the spirit we need in this country, that is the kind of activity we need to engage in and when I say 'we' I don’t just mean we in this country, I mean we in this church. I want to follow in the footsteps of Fehmi and his friends, I want to go to unknown territory, conservative churches that do not share our public values. I want to experience who they are and introduce myself and hope that somewhere I find not hostility and condemnation but warmth and gratitude for reaching out. I believe some of my Sundays off this year are going to be spent doing this. And doing this will not only be part of my liberal religious living, it is also going to be part of my political living. The two areas of life are united in this enterprise in a way that feels risky and surprisingly coherent and good. And because political living is part of it, this has become another element in my voting this year – it is another part of what I am committing to when I pull the lever or touch the screen or whatever form my voting will take (pulling a lever certainly feels, and sounds, more decisive doesn't it?). It will be part of living my faith, the Unitarian Universalist quest to examine and re-examine our lives for the lessons and wisdom that may illuminate any day. And this is a lesson that came from serving this church, and from maintaining this community so that people and wisdom can come here and share themselves with us. Came right to us, right through our doors. I love it when that happens – it is so rare, such a blessing, such a confirmation of our existence and our principles.

I invite you to join me. If you’re interested, send me an email or give me a call and I’ll keep a list and when I schedule a Sunday off to visit another church I'll let you know and we can go together. We can't know what will come of it, perhaps nothing, perhaps much – but we'll do it in hope, and in faith. What gives it meaning is not certainty of a warm welcome, it is the hope of a new link, of being part of a solution and not merely the bemoaner of a problem. This will be, for me, another way to vote, another way to effect the change I seek. And what if we lose – in either way of voting, what if we lose? Then we go on – though I confess that I find it a lot harder to be magnanimous in defeat! – we go on, we take another exit off the Broken Land Parkway, we keep getting off and seeking that other way, the Sacred Way, until we find it.

From the Ojibway Indians of North America:
Sacred One,
Look at our brokenness
We know that in all creation
only the human family
has strayed from the Sacred Way.
We know that we are the ones
Who are divided.
And we are the ones
Who must come back together
To walk in the Sacred Way.
Sacred One,
Teach us love, compassion and honor
That we may heal the earth
And heal each other.
Amen.