Turning the Tables

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 13^th of April, 2003

Mark Belletini, Minister, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
as the days grow warmer
and the trees glow with tender new green,
to worship, to find the Alleluia
dancing inside every child of blessing,
every searching human being,
every heart that dares to reach out
past the No! which only desires control.

And at the end of our time together (together)

May we remain true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become….

{9 AM Invocation)

Everywhere there are children.

In Columbus, newly born,
in Baghdad, carried down alleys by their mothers,
in Calcutta, near the river where people pray,
in Johannesburg, at a Sunday School picnic,
in Columbo, by a temple ruin, playing
in Sinkiang, at a family gathering for a birthday,
in Kosovo, on a bicycle,
in Zimbabwe at an AIDS hospital,
in Paris, at a museum,
in Moscow, at a gymnasium,
in Manila at a merry-go-round,
in Hobart, walking through a zoo,
in Fiji, landing in a plane flown by their father..

All children, those whose names we know,
and those we shall never know.

May their parents and family members love them.
May their societies love them. May they know peace, O Love. May they know peace.

(11 AM)

Naming Ceremony for Jesse Emmanuel Eible
Welcoming of New Members

Sequence [Next] [back to top]

Not the silence of a child finally asleep in a crib;
not the silence of pear blossoms falling
not the silence of singers after the song
not the silence of embarrassed strangers
not the silence of streets when gunshot stops
not the silence of rage
not the red-faced silence of frustration,
not the silence of the exhausted,
not the silence of the gardener gardening alone,
but this
the silence of those who have been together
enough that they need not always hide their
aloneness with words,
the silence of lovers who have come to a place
of quiet comfort,
the silence of a newborn at breast,
the silence of an overflowing human heart
under the stars at night,the silence of friends holding still in a long and tender embrace.

(silence)

In this silence, a presence, not an absence.
In this silence, the reality of our lives as
community, not solitude.

This silence is a tower
of strength that shelters us,
a rock foundation that holds us secure
in relationships that stretch round the world.

As we remember those who are a presence to us,
no matter where they may be,
let us give thanks for them by naming them in
silence, or in whispers of love.

(naming)

This silence is a tower of strength.
As is the music which holds us close to the harmonies that sign the world of which we so often dream.

First Reading [Next] [back to top] is from the Gospel of Mark, written by an anonymous author we only call Mark, sometime around 71 years after the beginning of our era.

And so he enters Jerusalem, and takes stock of everything, but since it was already late, he returned to Bethany with his twelve students.

The next day, they come again to Jerusalem. And he went into the temple precincts and began to chase out the vendors there, and the shoppers, and he turned the tables (Gk katastrepho-to turn down) of the money-changers upside-down. He even refused to let anyone carry a container of any kind through the court. And then he began to teach this way: "Don't the scriptures say, 'My house shall be a house of prayer for everyone?' But look! Now you've let it become a hideout for assassins" (Gk. lestai, lit. thieves, but in the year 71 used primarily to refer to violent revolutionaries, who by that time had fought against Rome and lost their lives and their temple." Finally, once it was growing dark, they made their way out of the city.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] is an excerpt of a longer poem by Marge Piercy, dating back to 1980.

Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they will roll over you.

But two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.

Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge.

With four you can play bridge and start an organization.

With six you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fund raising party.

A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said "no,"
it starts when you say "We"
and know who you mean,
and each day you mean one more.

Sermon: Turning the Tables [Next][back to top]

Whenever I talk with my colleagues, I always tell them that the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus Ohio worships on Sundays in an absolutely gorgeous building. One of the most gorgeous centers for worship which I have ever personally visited, and I have visited more than my share. I love the surprisingly varied colors of the wood in the ceiling and the rich multi-colored gray of the carpet along with the vivid red spot and teal directional stripes. I thrill to the soft green leaves of spring trees glowing through the clerestory windows and the festive colors of the altar boxes that the late and beloved Lillian Frank designed. I love the rich parament hanging in front of me, parament, the fancy word for this stunning quilted pulpit art by Gwen Surratt and Kate Gorman. And I love the huge ceramic chalice made by Jack Kelley, and the curve of our magnificent piano. I love this building, its shape, its colors, its warmth.

Now, like most speakers of English, I sometimes slip and call this building "the church." You know, I'll routinely say things like "I'm going to the church now to look at the art show Myra just put up." But, as most of you know, the colloquial use of the word "church" for this stunning building is just that, merely colloquial. "Church" is now, and always has been a word about people, not wood and glass. It's a really a word that translates an old Greek word…ekklesia… a word that means "a called-out gathering."

Ekklesia originally had something of a political meaning. When there was some sort of civic emergency, a town crier would go out and literally call the most significant folks in the city out of their houses so that they could gather at a central site to figure out, together, how to confront the problem. This gathering was the basis of what we might now call a congress or a city council.

Some early Greek Christians borrowed the word for their gatherings. They felt they were always meeting to confront a problem. They called the leader of their "called-out" gathering "the president" or sometimes "presbyter," which means "the person with the most experience." It's sometimes translated as "elder" but understand this doesn't refer to age so much as to wisdom based on experience. Considering the average age in Roman times was about 32, an "elder" could well have been what we now call a young adult.

But there was another leader in the "called out community." That person was called "the table person" or diakonos/a in Greek, deacon in English, literally, the table-waiter. The deacon was the person who took care of the practical stuff communities require in order to be good communities. Food, Fun. Outreach to others. Gifts. Service. Help. Organization. Stewardship. Economic accountability.

I like to remind people that people in ancient times were pretty smart, even though we moderns too often flatter ourselves by thinking we're smarter, we with our notions of great "progress." I know very well that the ancients couldn't send people to the moon, drive cars, or run computers. And their dentistry was pretty painful compared to ours. But they were not the fools we moderns sometimes make them out to be. Without having read a trendy book about organization and development from some think tank down in Washington D.C., they figured out things like community pretty well.

As Marge Piercy's poem puts it…they simply knew that two is better than one, and three is better than two, and "a dozen make a demonstration.

A hundred fill a hall." They knew that cooperation was better than competition, and that working together to make the common good was notably better than working against each other. They were no dummies.

Marge Piercy concludes her poem about the wisdom of community with these fine lines:

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said "no,"
it starts when you say "We"
and know who you mean,
and each day you mean one more.

This is a great definition of what I understand by the word church….a group of people, growing one by one, member by member, who care to act for the positive good even when people around them say NO, don't act, leave things as they are so that everything stays the same. Don't grow, don't question, don't move, don't wonder, don't give, don't resist, don't be generous, don't be merciful. Be practical. Church starts when "we," knowing what that great word "we" means, dare to act, and when we do it again after hearing that terrified NO a hundred times.

I support such a church. I pledge my time and 5% of my income to such a church. I offer a portion of my livelihood so that I, with others, might dare and care to act against "the principalities and powers" that would insist we keep our place and shut our mouth and go along for the ride without kicking or even frowning.

What kind of act are we "called-out" to do? What is a church supposed to do to face the emergencies of the world. I sum it up by the phrase, "To turn the tables."

Which of course brings me to the story from the gospel of Mark usually associated with this day, called Palm Sunday, in many Christian churches.

Now the author Kurt Vonnegut, who apparently claims to be a Unitarian Universalist when pressed for his religious affiliation, once gave a sermon on Palm Sunday at an Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. In that sermon he offered the following observation, "Being merciful is the only good idea we have received so far."

I tend to agree. Being merciful is the only good idea we have received so far. Merciful, you know, full of mercy. Synonyms: compassionate and forbearing, and lovingly kind…from the French and ultimately the Latin, misericordia,…meaning the payment, or salary, or thanksgiving if you will (merci as the French say), offered by the heart, cor. (Cor gives us all those hospital words, like coronary.) To be merciful is to pay out the thanksgiving of the heart. To be merciful is to be grateful for others, even people we may have a hard time liking. To be merciful is to show compassion for others. (Compassion: Cum-passio in Latin, to suffer along side of) To be merciful is to recognize that everyone outside our circle is not really outside anything…for all of the social, racial, ethnic, religious, ideological circles we draw to keep others away, to keep others in some other place, are false, arbitrary, hurtful, cruel, hard-hearted, self-serving, and foolish. Mercy declares this:

Every human being is just that, a human being. Everyone.

No exceptions.

Ever.

Some are broken, sure, some are distorted by their conditions, their births, their suffering, their brain chemistry. But they are all human. Like us.

Like us. Different in culture maybe, but what is that? Different in form, different in beauty…but that beauty…it's the beauty of the world! And as Shakespeare continues in Hamlet in his moving commentary describing human beings: "How noble in reason, in form and moving; how like an angel in apprehension, express and admirable, the paragon of animals, yes, the beauty of this world."

And if these beautiful creatures are broken…ah then, mercy, mercy! And more mercy. After all, they did not ask to be broken. They did not awake one morning and say, "Ah, now I shall break my mind, bedevil my heart, be evil, and hurt the world and all in it, because I am the very devil." No one does this. You know it and I underscore it. Yes, indeed, I agree with Vonnegut wholeheartedly: "Being merciful is the only good idea we have received so far."

And so what does the story of turning tables have to do with mercy, and the act of the church as a called-out community of mercy in a broken, nay-saying world?

Here's the tale. Jesus, a human being, you see, a human being like every other human being, a being exactly like you, a being exactly like me, comes down from the Galilee where he grew up, to the Big City.

And there in the Big City is the temple, the center of everything, the power and the might, the authority and the gravity, the internal revenue service and the economic center of things all rolled up into one. It was not a community, however, not a congregation or some large synagogue. It was a primarily a building, a building for pilgrims. A beautiful one at that, white and gold in the sun, columns and stones of many colors, the largest building in the whole world of that day and era. Nothing bigger even in Rome.

It was divided into courts, this great building, this temple. Courts within courts. God, they said, was at the center in the Holy Place, in an empty room. That very idea scared the Roman conquerors in their boots. "What kind of a God," they asked, would have no image, no picture, no body, no nothin'? These people, these Jews, are atheists at best," they used to constantly complain. "How strange. How different they are from us."

And outside the place where the Empty God lived? The court of the priests. Outside that, the court of the men. Outside that, the court of the women. Outside that a big fence, made of very pretty stone. On the fence, many placards, carved in stone, with red letters five inches high.

If you are not one of us, the sign said, and you are found on the other side of this placard, then you alone are responsible for your execution, which will happen at once.

Clear words. But not terribly merciful. Anyone who was not "one of us" could go where they wanted in the outermost courtyard. But if they went into the inner courtyard, they were dead meat. After all, they were strange, these Romans. They were different from us, these foreigners.

Archeologists have found two of these signs, the only thing left of that ancient temple which the Romans angrily tore down in the year 70, just before the Gospel of Mark was written as a meditation on that Big Event.

The fence surrounded the courts of the temple on three sides and part of the fourth. But where the fence parted, tables were set up. Tables for the money changers. Their job was simple. Exchange coins that had pictures of that false god Caesar, for coins that had an inoffensive picture of a palm tree on it. The exchange rate was fixed. The money changers were famed for their honesty. To say, as so many modern people do, that Jesus got angry at them because they were cheating people is just the usual anti-Jewish nonsense that has made a shambles out of Western So-Called Civilization for 1800 years…you know, all that business about Jews and money. Sometimes I despair when I think of it. There is so much baloney people are willing to believe about others based on nothing more than sly innuendo and raised eyebrows.

So according to the story, Jesus turns over the tables of the money changers. Then he teaches for a while. Then when it gets dark, he leaves and goes back to his guest house outside the walls.

I want you to note, the police do not come to arrest him. No sirens. No handcuffs. And at the end of the day, he goes home. Think about this please. If someone came in this place on Sunday and started having a temper tantrum and turning over Lillian's boxes and Jack's chalice and ripping up the gorgeous parament made by Gwen and Kate, I would hope that at least one of you would haul out your cell phone and call 911 pronto. Call the police. Such behavior would be violent, scary and frightening, and not to be trifled with.

But in the story, Jesus just continues to teach. Whatever he did may have been based on anger, sure, for a lot of social justice work is based on anger. But not a self-righteous and violent tantrum. Anger can take the form of deliberate social witness…it does not have to always take the form of violence and losing one's cool. So this story is obviously not a report of wild rage, of Jesus losing his cool because of all that "nasty ol' money" in the sacred spaces, or worse, as I heard one preacher explain it, because of all those souvenir vendors in the vestibule. He simply and quite non-violently chases away the folks doing the ordinary business for the ordinary rites of the temple, the selling of animals and the changing of coins. But, isn't it clear now? What he is doing by breaking up the vendors and turning over the tables is to tear down the temple fence. He is symbolically breaking open the stone fence which separates people, the "us" from the "them." He's calling into question the whole temple idea as it was commonly practiced. He was asking, using the pantomime style of many of the prophets before him, "Should a holy place, a beautiful building like this, be for keeping people apart, or for getting people together? Why," he was asking by his act, "do we divide everyone up into little itsy bitsy categories and then tell them we are going to kill them if they cross the line we have set up for them?"

The Galilean was not saying anything Jeremiah the prophet hadn't said hundreds of years earlier, which is why the gospel writer put Jeremiah's words on Jesus lips. Jesus' was giving a Jewish prophetic response to the difficult cultural symbol of the temple . He was asking people to refrain from hating and judging and corralling each other. He was asking them, instead, to feel compassion for each other, to show mercy to each other, to welcome each other, to try and understand what it might be like to be another person, be it another gender, another nationality, another ability, another sadness, another way. He was doing nothing different than any of the teachers before him, who cried out over and over, "Mercy and compassion, not sacrifices!" (Hosea 6:6, for example)

He was saying that the practice of justice cannot begin without mercy in the human heart, mercy, which is the payment given by the heart toward "the other," the payment of kindness, love, consideration, sympathy, hope and thanksgiving. The gift of reaching out past barriers of culture and actually meeting the reality. Mercy is the gift of reaching across the aisle, the wall, the no, to touch hands as a prelude to real meeting, which always takes time and commitment.

Mercy is what the old diakonoi used to offer. The table waiters. The deacons. Not all tables need to be turned, after all. Some need to be set, to invite guests, including those who are usually excluded. Potlucks, like the Interweave potluck on Friday, festive dinners, like last night's French supper from the auction, this week's ritual meals, like the Passover seder and Socinian communion, all those tables need to be set, not turned. Some tables are prepared to collect gifts, like at a wedding or union. Some tables serve as desks, for organizing, for getting things sorted and mailed. And some are benches with tools of the trade spread across them for building something that improves lives.

At other times, it's political tables that need to be turned, as in the English phrase "to turn the tables on someone." This means to reverse the direction of power. It means to stop running. It means to stop being run over. It means to turn and face the bullies overpowering you. It means to look them in the eye, to call them to account, to say you really do indeed see what they are doing. It means to tell them they are not pulling the wool over your eyes. It means to stop playing possum in fear. It means to stand up and be counted.

Let me give you a very concrete example of what I mean. The BREAD assemblies are very often table-turning events, especially the large ones, like the one at the end of the month down at Veterans Memorial. We are working to get literally hundreds of us there that night, along with thousands from other congregations, both Jewish and Christian. BREAD, as most of you know, is the interfaith social justice organization our church is part of. It, too, is about enacting mercy in the world. And tables are turned at BREAD assemblies, not literally, but metaphorically. Folks in power are often confronted publicly and asked to change their votes about things which block either access to healthcare or access to low cost housing or access to a fair education. It makes many people who attend these sessions very uncomfortable. I understand that. I was raised to feel shame about asking for what I want, too. But please, if you think that it is uncomfortable and unfair to see someone confronted publicly, please, please, try to imagine how much more uncomfortable and unfair it is to be homeless, or to have no access to low-cost housing or education. Imagine how much more unfair and uncomfortable it would be to have no access to health care. Imagine how uncomfortable it is when laws, red-tape, and policies isolate and separate and leave you apart from any support, or solace, or a good education. To turn the tables at a BREAD assembly is to face the discomfort it takes to confront the powers that can make or break housing and healthcare and education. But please know this. BREAD is fair about things. The people we confront always know in advance what will be said to them. They always know the time limits, the scripts and the realities that will be presented. If they choose to push against the things that they agreed to, BREAD only pushes back as far as our own agreements go. No further. We don't allow ourselves to be bullied by a pretense of politeness or sudden self-righteous shock on the part of those we confront. BREAD does things exactly like the ancient prophets, including Jesus, did things…fairly. There is nothing rude in holding people to their promises any more than there was anything violent when Jesus overturned the tables in the temple.

So, in sum, "church" is not a building, even one as beautiful as this particular one is. Church is a congregation of human beings, two or three at first, then forty, then two hundred, then six hundred, always open to one more. It's a community focused on mercy, on compassion, the best idea as Vonnegut reminded us, that we human beings have ever had.

Mercy is what it is all about. Reaching across the arbitrary barriers to make community that dares and cares to turn tables in the world, and to nurture each other at tables of food and shared responsibility within this beautiful building. Please join us all in celebrating all that we do in the social hall after the service. Even, I hasten to add, if this is your first day here.

Table Prayer [back to top]

May there be tables of shared feasting,
not strained boards of suspicion.

May there be tables of yes, not
the folded arms of no.

May there be tables of joyous welcome,
not the closed doors of cultivated fear.

And, o Love, may we not credit ourselves
as the ones who need to do all the welcoming,
but know in our hearts that we ourselves are
welcomed….

[back to top]
 

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Last update: 04/28/2003