“Rarer Than a Two Dollar Bill?
Traditional Shabbat Sermons and The Future
Of The Reform Rabbinate”
Presented by
J. Alfred Smith, Sr.
121st Annual Convention of the
Central Conference of American Rabbis,
Rabbi Ellen Weinberg Dreyfus, President
Presented March 10, 2010
Fairmont Hotel
San Francisco, CA
1:30 p.m. – 3:15 p.m.
The Pope and the Rabbi told in tongue and cheek, and never to be pejoratively expressed helps us to never take ourselves too seriously. Several centuries ago the Pope decreed that all the Jews had to convert to Catholicism or leave Italy. There was a huge outcry from the Jewish community, so the Pope offered a deal he’d have a religious debate with the leader of the Jewish community. If the Jews won, they could stay in Italy, if the Pope won, they’d have to convert or leave. The Jewish people met and picked an aged and wise rabbi to represent them in the debate. However, as the rabbi spoke no Italian, and the Pope spoke no Yiddish, they agreed that it would a “silent” debate. On the chosen day the Pope and rabbi sat opposite each other. The Pope raised his hand and showed three fingers. The rabbi looked back and raised one finger. Next, the Pope waved his finger around his head. The rabbi pointed to the ground where he sat. The Pope brought out a communion wafer and a chalice of wine. The rabbi pulled out an apple. With that, the Pope stood up and declared himself beaten and said that the rabbi was too clever. The Jews could stay in Italy.
Later the Cardinals met with the Pope and asked him what had happened. The Pope said, “First I held up three fingers to represent the Trinity. He responded by holding up a single finger to remind me there is still only one God common to both our faiths. Then I waved my finger around my head to show him that God was all around us. The rabbi responded by pointing to the ground to show that God was also right here with us. I pulled out the wine and host to show that through the perfect sacrifice Jesus has atoned for our sins, but the rabbi pulled out an apple to remind me of the original sin. He bested me at every move and I could not continue.”
Meanwhile, the Jewish community gathered to ask the rabbi how he’d won. “I haven’t a clue.” Said the rabbi. “First, he told me that we had three days to get out of Italy, so I gave him the finger. Then he tells me that the whole country would be cleared of Jews but I told him emphatically that we were staying right here.” “And then what?” asked a woman. “Who knows?” said the rabbi. “He took out his lunch, so I took out mine.”
Or to poke fun at the Black Baptist Pastor who came to heaven in his Cadillac Deville
but was made to wait at the gate while a Rabbi in a Ford Mustang that was bringing up the rear, was allowed to enter heaven first. When the Anglicans and Lutherans asked the Black Baptist Preacher how this could happen, the Black Preacher simply said: “He is kin to the boss.”
Seriously speaking I am grateful to be on program with Rabbi Stephen Chester and Dr. James Hopkins, highly respected clergy leaders in Oakland and very able representative of our ecumenical witness in Northern California. Nonetheless, I am humbled by my appearance here this afternoon because who am I to address members of a tradition that is older than my own, a tradition that has given and a tradition that continues to enrich, empower, and inspire me to work tirelessly at becoming more than what I am as a preacher.
I agree with Thomas Cahill who wrote The Gifts of the Jews. I might add that in addition to the gifts of the Jews, the promise given to Abraham that the seed of Abraham has and continues to be a gift to humanity. Said Cahill:
If we had lived in the second millennium B.C., the millennium of Abraham, and could have canvassed all the nations of the earth, what would they have said of Abraham’s journey? In most of Africa and Europe, they would have laughed at Abraham’s madness and pointed to the heavens, where the life of earth had been plotted from eternity a man (a person) cannot escape his/her fate. The Egyptians would have shaken their heads in disbelief. The early Greeks might have told Abraham the story of Prometheus … Do not over reach they would advise; come to resignation. In India he (Abraham) would be told that time is black, irrational and merciless. Do not set yourself the task of accomplishing something in time; which is only the dominion of suffering. On every continent in society, Abraham would have been given the same advice that wise men as diverse as Heraclitus, Lao-Tsu and Siddhartha would one day give their followers: Do not journey, but sit compose yourself by the river of life, meditate on its ceaseless and meaningless flow.”
Thomas Cahill reminds us that many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make us Jew and Gentile, believer and atheist are rooted in the rich traditions of Jewish literature and lore. Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Boaz and Ruth, Jeremiah and the Ethiopian Eunuch and many other narratives in the Hebrew Bible continue to shape the way we see, hear, and feel, and draw conclusions which ultimately shape our lives.
The Black religious experience in America is a beautiful experience of power, love, and sanity. As a sane way of surviving in an insane environment my ancestors took the Bible their slave masters allowed their discerning ears to hear to reinterpret the message as life affirming in the midst of their experiences of exclusion and suffering. The message of the first Black preachers identified the plight of Black people with the plight of the oppressed Israelites who believed that the God of Israel is a God of freedom and liberation. These children of Ebony have fashioned from Hebrew Bible America’s original Negro spirituals that birthed new hope when hope unburned had died. These sorrow songs and songs of ecstasy enabled them to pray, preach, and praise in their hopes and despairs, and in their defeats and victories.
The founding Black preachers of the Black American religious experience like Ezekiel in Babylon who sat where the exiles sat was a part of the travails of the people,. It is true that whatever happened to them also happened to the preacher. Kneeling on the cold dirt floor of a slave cabin, working in the hot dusty fields, walking the lonely wilderness paths to arrive at secret places of unsupervised worship, this preacher was a person of God by calling, but often teacher, healer, carpenter, and under taker by necessity; it was this preacher who took down the mutilated bodies of Black men after the mobs had done their worst. It was this black preacher who represented Black people to a hostile white community in times of deep troubles. It was this black preacher who sang “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See.” This preacher did it not for pay or glory, but only to serve when a child was born. The preacher was there to bless and cheer. When death came in the cabins, it was this preacher who borrowed from the Hebrew Bible the imagery of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, and “There Is a Balm in Gilead to Heal the Wounded Soul.” The literature abounds with sermonic narratives that used Hebrew Bible narratives such as “Can These Bones Live? Didn’t The Lord Deliver Daniel? “Mounting Up With Wings like an Eagle?” Black Womanist Theologians are resurrecting preaching themes on women like Hagar who was liberated from oppression and the manifestation of power from the periphery in Ruth, The Moabite beauty. The midwives, Shiprah and Puah, who showed no fear or respect towards the most powerful man in the Egyptian hierarchy of power. Early Black women preachers like Jarena Lee, Zilaphaw Elaw, and Julia Foote joined the female preaching tradition of Black religion in the early 19th century after reading being inspired by the Prophetess Huldah, whose speaking sparked reforms during the reign of King Josiah. The Black preacher used imagination, creativity, elegant prose, and ecstatic poetry to help save a race and this nation. Although unheralded in the annals of history, the black preacher was often without honor, but never without integrity.
Thanks be to the God of our weary years and our silent tears that this tradition so richly endowed by the Hebrew Bible and a robust faith is still alive. Our not too distant past has had our faith fueled with the writings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rabbi Stephen Reid, Rabbi Lerner, Rabbi Robert Gordis, the scholar on Job, and Rabbi Harold Schulweiss, a powerful exponent on social justice. The issues of theodicy have been addressed for me by Rabbi Harold Kushner.
In preparing for this assignment I have read the sermons of Rabbi Don Goor, Rabbi Karen Bender, and Rabbi Dan Moskovitz. All of their sermons could have been preached in my social location because of their simple use of plain language. They reasoned like Greek philosophers but they spoke using the visual language of the Hebrew language. They were brief in presenting messages of social relevancy. Considering where the Allen Temple Baptist Church is as it relates to the worship of God in Sunday worship, the issue is not so much the form of the preaching or the use of innovative worship styles as much as is the sermon addressing their anger, their unbelief, their skepticism, their doubt, their fears, their thirst for justice, their quest for meaning, their finding a reason to continue in well doing in a society where senseless violence curses a sense of the sacred, the discovery to live meaningfully with unanswered questions, and to walk in the dark with God rather than to walk alone in the light.
The African American unemployment rate is 30%. But the government reports 16%. Predatory loans have raped African Americans and Latinos. Home ownership rates for Blacks are at the Great Depression rates for Blacks. The front page of the Oakland Tribune for Tuesday, March 2, 2010, has pictures of Black students at U.C. Berkeley participating in a silent protest in solidarity with U.C. San Diego Black students who were confronted with a klansman’s noose as a direct rejection of Black’s observing Black History Month. Health disparities, dysfunctional public schools, inequities in sentencing on part of the criminal justice system, an exploding geometrical growth of young black males in the prison industrial complex, a failure of the Wall Street stimulus package to even provide crumbs at the level of the poor on Main Street. The issues of ageism, classism, sexism, homophobia, and militarism, and the urban environmental pollution brought to us by elevated freeways that divide communities and bring suburbanites from work to homes and back to work again. These and many other unstated issues of social injustice burden our people who come not on Sundays believing that the sermon is a burden to be endured. No, no, the people, young and old return to ask Hezekiah’s questions: “Is there a Word from the Lord? Even if they do not believe in the God of tradition they want to know if we can give them a reason to live.”
I respond to your concern about whether there is a place for the traditional sermon by quoting Dr. Carlyle Fielding Stewart, III. Dr. Stewart therefore suggests that post-modern preaching should consist of poetic recitation because our cognitive-spiritual orientation is poetic. Post-modern preaching should consist of imaginative insight because the imaginative gives birth to actualizing the possible. Post-modern preaching should consist of spiritual pharmacology which provides regular doses of prescriptive cure for the ailments of the congregation. Lastly, Stewart suggests that the post-modern sermon should consist of spiritual and social transformation to help people stretch beyond the comfort zones of their circumstances with the creative catalyst of the Spirit of God for the effecting of positive change in their lives.
Rarer than a two dollar bill and the future of the reformed Rabbinate is preaching for the facing of this hour and the living of these days.