What I Said to the Jehovah's Witness

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 24^th of August, 2004

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

Opening words

The Sequence Before the Silence

First Reading: Scroll of Yisayahu (Second Isaiah)

Second Reading: Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Sermon: What I Said to the Jehovah's Witness

Prayer

Opening words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
in witness of the wonder of it all,
the morning sun, the sweetness of a peach,
red Mars in the sky, the songs of birds,
and the tears and laughter of the people.
And so we begin our worship time
with these words of promise and prayer:
May we live fully, love deeply, learn daily,
and speak truly, that we might together leave the sacred
legacy of a better world.

The Sequence Before the Silence [Next] [back to top]

Usual week, I guess. Typical.
Near Chendu in China, blue summer lupine continue to blossom in high meadows.
In Yozgat, Turkey, women put mint into their eggplant as their husbands play backgammon down at the café.
In Chamayo, New Mexico, Diné fathers teach their sons their Navajo heritage and language under blue skies.
In Baghdad and Jerusalem and Gaza, eyes stream with tears,
as the prayers for the dead are chanted.
In India, on the streets of Mumbai,
beggars lift their hands in the shadow of taxi cabs whisking visitors from Germany and Holland on past.
In the forests of Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, people, who have never heard of Columbus, sing a new moon song.
And in Punt Arenas, Chile, the camera flashes of the tourists once again scare the shy penguins right off the beach.
A typical week. Flowers bloom as the sky spreads itself over all of us. Sorrow and joy, eating and mourning, welcoming and learning, foolishness and isolation. A typical week, that comes to an end right now in the period of this brief silence. (chime sounded)
(silence)
Amazed to have come through such a week with each other,
amazed to be alive, we remember our loved ones near and far as a mark of our communion with the many.
We call out their names into the air, or breathe them silently in our heart's own peace.
(naming)
Amazed that our tiny planet exists at all, amazed to be graced by life, we are not surprised that songs rise and soar…

First Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from the Tanak, the Hebrew Bible, specifically, the Scroll of Yisayahu. This is known to most English speakers as "The Book of Isaiah," but to scholars as Second Isaiah. It was written in 586 BCE.

Let the nations come together as if they were one! Let all peoples gather!
"And who among them,"
some will ask,
"who among them declared
this new world?
And who foretold its dawning?
Let them come with witnesses
who can verify, testify,
and offer such convincing evidence
that everyone round them will cry
'Oh, it's true!'"
"The witnesses I send are you."
So says the Eternal.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from a memoir by the late, great journalist Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, Visions of Glory, 1978. She had been raised Jehovah's Witness and left the fold when she got older.

On Christmas Day, 1968, a member of the Watchtower headquarters staff rang my doorbell and asked, "Are you Connie Grizzuti's daughter who used to be associated with the Lord's sheep?" I leaped at once to the conclusion that something had happened to my mother. I had thought that I was "killing" my mother by leaving her religion; the appearance of that man one Christmas - the holiday we had regarded as devilish and abominable - triggered guilt. My mother is dead, I thought; I really have killed her.
The reality, less awful, was quite odd enough: "It has come to our attention," the man said, "that in 1963 you were observed bowing from the waist in the Shiva temple in Warangal, India. You are also known to have made the sign of the cross while passing a Roman Catholic Church in Guatemala City. These are grounds for dis-fellowshipping. If you can prove, before a group of elders, that you are innocent of the charges, dis-fellowshipping charges will be halted. If we remain convinced of your guilt, you may be reinstated in the Lord's organization if you beg forgiveness. If we judge you guilty, and you do not confess, you will be dis-fellowshipped. If you refuse to appear before the elders, you will be automatically dis-fellowshipped."
I said, "Wouldn't it be redundant to dis-fellowship me? After all, I left ten years ago of my own accord." He said, "But you can't leave. You can never leave us. We can expel you. But you, having been baptized into The Truth, are one of us until we say you're not."

Sermon: What I Said to the Jehovah's Witness [Next][back to top]

I assure you, talking about religion is no easier for me, as a man who has spent his life studying it, than it is for anyone else. In fact, I would say that my life experiences routinely shatter all the neat little categories into which I can place people so easily with all of my studies.
Take this taxi-cab driver in Mexico City, a guy with whom my friend Farley and I talked last month. He had pictures and a little statue of a saint mounted there on his dashboard. Farley asked him, "Who is that saint?"
The driver grinned: "Yudatadayo."
Farley looked at him, then at me. He said, in Spanish, "Yudatadayo? Never heard of him."
"I never heard of him either," I said, baffled that, with my parochial school background, I had somehow missed this particular saint.
The taxi-driver was miffed that we didn't instantly know who it was, and kept saying the saint's name insistently, jabbing his hands to make the point. "Yudatadayo! Yudatadayo!"
All of a sudden it occurred to me that the y sound in Spanish would likely be a "j" sound in English and so I substituted the sounds.
It all came together in that moment. "Oh, I get it," I said to Farley in English. "Yuda-tadeo is Jude Thaddéus, one of the 12 apostles. You know, St. Jude. The famous patron of lost causes. The one they named the great St. Jude Clinic after, that hospital for children."
"Oh, yes," agreed Farley. "Yes, that's it, St. Jude." He turned to the driver in Spanish, "So you are a practicing Catholic then?"
"Oh, no, no, no!" the driver said, quite horrified. " I am not a Catholic. I don't go to mass. I do not worship God. I don't light candles to La Virgen de Guadelupe. I just pray to Yudatadayo. That's all. The rest of it is nonsense."
Well, that left both me and Farley floored.
And so who was this man? An odd Catholic? A strange atheist? Or is he rather someone who defies any of those constraining categories, a unique human being who happens to drive a taxi in Mexico City?
I say that each of us is a unique person. And not one of us is a representative member of any category we happen to belong to. This is clearly my main point this morning.
My second point, my corollary, if you will, is that we are not alone. We are unique individuals together, in community, always in relationship.
Now I know many of you have heard the following joke. At the very least, I know I have been told it a hundred times. "What do you get when you cross a Unitarian Universalist with a Jehovah's Witness?" Answer "Someone who knocks at your door for no particular reason."
I don't like the joke, actually. It's an insult to us because it does not tell the truth about our great tradition. It makes us sound like wishy-washy flakes, and I for one wish people would grow up and stop telling it.
Our ancestors, after all, didn't rot in prison, and go to the stake, or suffer endless ridicule "for no particular reason."
The joke is also a bit dated on the Jehovah's Witnesses. They certainly used to go door to door, quite frequently. In pairs, usually. But these days, as often as not, they apparently will call you up on the phone.
Like at my loft a month ago. A woman called and asked me if I wouldn't mind talking with her about my hopes for the future of the world. "Are you optimistic?" she asked, "or would you describe yourself as pessimistic, or somewhere in-between?"
I had a lot to do that day and almost said that I didn't have any time, but I thought, "Interesting question, actually. Might be fun to think about it." So I told her "Well, I think the human race certainly doesn't have a very good track record, especially in the last century, ranging from all those 'wars and rumors of wars' to the various 'holocausts' in Europe, Armenia and South-East Asia. But the resilience of the human spirit, the individual stories of people who met the horrors of the age, and did not lose their humanity because of it, do give me some hope. I tend, I think, to fall more in the optimist category, with a kind of realist eye that never shuts, always watching, watching, watching, however."
"Me too," she said. "Your description fits my inner life very well. Of course, my own religious organization tends to lift up the possibility of a sublime new world pretty strongly."
"Oh, what religious organization is that?"
"Jehovah's Witnesses," she replied.
"Ah," I said. "Yes, your publications often do strike a hopeful note about the future. I often remark to people that the pictures, those line-drawings, in many Watchtower magazines you often leave on bus seats and the like are really quite remarkable for their vision of a multi-racial future embracing all the world's cultures. They take the famous passage in Isaiah 43 very clearly…'Let all the nations gather.' Not too many other religious organizations are so clear about that. These drawings aren't very good art, mind you, but they strike me as very deliberate and, actually, quite radical in this white-biased culture of ours."
She audibly smiled at my art-critique, then said, "You are saying something nice about my religion. I don't often hear that when I talk with folks."
"No, I suppose you don't. I heard all the jokes about you, too. As well as jokes about my own religion."
"What's that, if I may be so bold as to ask?"
"I'm a Unitarian Universalist."
"Oh, I have heard of you. Certainly. You are not Unity Church, are you, or Unification Church? You are the church of Emerson. And, like us, you don't believe in the Trinity, or that there is eternal hellfire."
"Correct. And like our great minister, Norbert Capek, many of your people were put to death during the Nazi holocaust. I have great respect for such courage in the face of unspeakable human malice, no matter what religion a person professes.
And, I added, your folks and my own have the dubious distinction of being listed, along with the Mormons and the Seventh Day Adventists, as a terrible cult, in that book by Martin that serves as a handbook for many conservative Evangelical Christians.
"You sound as if you are one of us."
"Oh, no, not at all. I disagree with the stated teachings of the Witnesses about many things, especially the End of the World business, and all the dire predictions. I know quite a number of folks who were raised Witnesses too, and their departures turned out to be very painful and even destructive because of the strict institutional controls in place among the Witnesses. You probably have heard of Barbara Grizzuti Harrison?"
"Oh, her," she said, sounding disappointed I had brought her up.
I said,"I don't know her personally, of course, but my friends raised Jehovah's Witnesses sometimes tell me that her book echoes their own painful experiences."
"Ah," she said, "unfortunately, what you say is true. I have been a Witness for over 60 years, and I've learned that there are some folks among us who have been very clumsy and even cruel. I know some have turned from The Truth by sinning against others. But doesn't Isaiah 43 also say, 'You are my witnesses?' God wants us to serve him in the way He has determined, and to live out his statutes on earth until it becomes the promised paradise. And doesn't it say in the Book of …."
"Look," I interrupted, "I'm sorry if I misled you by showing you that I can quote the scriptures, but I want to be clear with you that quoting Bible verses at me won't help me agree with you. If you are a believing Jehovah's Witness, you believe the Bible is the word of God. But for me, God did not dictate the Scriptures, nor is it the source of my authority or understanding. I think it's a varied collection of ancient literature that tells us a lot about the thoughts and concerns current three thousand years ago, but I certainly don't think the Bible has anything final to say about astronomy, evolution, gender, psychology, sexuality, sociology, or, for that matter, good critical theology."
"You don't? Well, what, if you don't mind me asking, do you consider your source of authority and understanding?"
"Well," I said, "let me quote someone I don't know. These words are attributed to the Buddha, but they're not found anyplace in the authentic Buddhist scriptures that I have been able to find. So I have to be honest and say they are simply anonymous…but nevertheless, they say a lot to me:
'Believe nothing, o monks, merely because you have been told it, or because it is traditional. Do not believe what your teacher tells you out of respect for your teacher. But whatsoever you find, after due examination, which leads to the good, and the welfare of all beings…cling to that and take it as your guide.' **

In other words, I have to be my own authority, deciding today and tomorrow how I shall live my life to better the world, to hasten the day you and I both long for, a day of peace for 'all the nations.' And frankly, I want to witness for my faith too, like you do…by living my life in such a way from day to day as makes for a better, more honest world. Sometimes I do well, sometimes I fail miserably, but always, I try to maintain my vision, my hope; always I try to worship daily…not text, a verse or metaphor, or an organization, but the spirit behind them." I paused briefly, suddenly recognizing that I was 'going on.' "Look," I said, calling her by name, "I have to go now. It was nice talking with you."
"And it was nice talking with you. Thanks for making it a conversation about understanding, and not a shouting match."
"Well," I concluded, "I can say the same to you. Thanks for an enjoyable conversation. May we both one day find the peace we each desire so much."
I tell this story to try and be clear about what I think the Unitarian Universalist path looks like. We may personally draw nourishment from the prophet Isaiah, or Jesus the Teacher, or legends of the great Mother Goddess. We may read authentic Buddhist texts, or even texts from Ms. Anonymous merely attributed to Buddha. We may even find strength to live the good life in the mythic stories about Yudatadayo, like that taxi driver. We may read secular novels, study math, dip into astronomy, or debate sociology. But ultimately, our faith is not so much in great teachers or scriptures or books or theological assertions about Yahweh (or if you insist, Jehovah), or nature of the world, but in the possibility that, together, we might bring some good to this hurting earth. And promote, with our own lives, the "welfare of all beings" and some mutual understanding between people. To live our lives in witness of this hope is our central religious calling. Now, I'm not saying we have to knock on doors or ring people up, like the Jehovah's Witnesses, but even if we did, I assure you, it wouldn't be because we have no reason.
How do you imagine "Unitarian Universalist witnesses" would live their lives? How would they speak? Act? How clear would the message be?
I wonder…..
** Turns out these words are not quite as anonymous as I thought. Tom Tucker (thank you!) was able to thread through the nonsense on the internet for me, claiming that these words were simply "from the Buddha" (very suspicious) or "from the Dhammapada," and help me to find their origin. They do come out of a Buddhist source, the 65th sutta (something like a cross between a gospel and a chapter) of a scriptural anthology of the Pali Canon called Anguttara Nikaya, Tika Nipata which dates to around the first century CE, making this text very old. It was originally written down in Pali, a language related to Sanskrit. The later Chinese version of this particular sutta does not contain these words on skepticism. The Theravada Buddhists think of these as the authentic words of Siddattha, but modern Buddhist scholars can only assert that these words reflect the sophisticated state of a certain kind of Buddhism in the first century following an oral tradition over two hundred years earlier. The words are certainly unique in the history of religions.

Prayer [back to top]

May the vision of nation holding hands
with nation never abandon us.
May the dream of a world at peace never
seem unrealistic to us, or futile.
May the idea that all people have inherent
dignity never depart from our lips.
May all the cities that have been ravished
be built up, that despair might cease to be our portion.
O Spirit of Hope, may the portrait of the peaceful commonwealth of all humankind, foreseen by the ancient prophets in the beating of their humane hearts, be our own portrait. Amen.

[back to top]

Last update: 9/1/2003