Is Multiculturalism a Failure? Should it be?

    

When I was a child, my parents took me to the New York World Fair, way back in ’64, where there was an enchanting exhibit called “It’s a Small World”, a celebration of the variety of peoples and cultures of the world. But multiculturalism was more of a theory that a reality way back then, with the United States largely separated from the rest of the world, and primarily white and mainline Christian, albeit with a small but significant African-American population, much of which was segregated from the white majority.

     The United States, and the world for that matter, are far different today. The States have become far more diverse in every sense: ethnically, racially, religiously, culturally, and so on. Where once the United States was often thought of as a “melting pot”, we now more and more resemble a “salad bowl”. And no longer are the religious options here limited to Christian, Jewish, and none-of-the-above; now in addition to those we also have vibrant and visible Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, Muslim, and Mormon communities of faith, plus a variety of others as well.

            A rise in multiculturalism has been happening in Europe as well, with large flows of immigrants, including Muslim immigrants, coming in from eastern Europe and Africa.

            While there are many who celebrate the rise of multiculturalism, there has been, particularly recently, vocal and even violent opposition. A week ago a Norwegian citizen, identified by police as a right-wing fundamentalist Christian obsessed with what he saw as the threat of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration, exploded a bomb in central Oslo, then went on a killing rampage at a youth camp on a nearby island. He simultaneously released on the internet at 1500-page “manifesto” detailing what he saw as the dangers of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration and the need to abandon dialogue and take up armed resistance.

            It would be dangerous to believe that this man’s horrific deeds are simply the work of a mad man, divorced from a wider cultural and religious context. In recent years leaders from across Europe have trumpeted the alleged failure of multiculturalism, particularly with respect to Islam and Muslim immigrants. Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, said in October 2010 that attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany had "utterly failed", stating: "The concept that we are now living side by side and are happy about it does not work”, and that "we feel attached to the Christian concept of mankind, that is what defines us. Anyone who doesn't accept that is in the wrong place here."  The United Kingdom’s Prime Minister David Cameron has echoed her remarks, as has Australia’s ex-Prime Minister John Howard.

            And we in this country are no strangers to anti-multiculturalism sentiment, particularly with respect to religious bigotry. Herman Cain, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, told a reporter a few months ago that he would not be comfortable with a Muslim in his cabinet; he expanded upon that thought in a subsequent television interview saying that his discomfort was due to the intention of some Muslims, and I quote here, “to kill us.” Moving from this absurd generalization to advocating a blatant violation of the Constitution of the United States, he supported opposition to the construction of a mosque in Tennessee on the grounds that “Islam is both a religion and a set of laws, Shariah laws”, which he claims is different from “traditional religions where it’s just about religious purposes.”  Never mind that Judaism and Christianity, to name just two other world religions, are also structured around religious laws, beginning with those same 10 Commandments that conservative Christians keep wanting to have posted in classrooms and court houses.

            The Chancellor of Germany claims that the Christian concept of mankind, as she puts it, requires that those who don’t share the same heritage, culture, and religion of traditional Germans don’t belong in their country. A self-proclaimed Christian in Norway believes that multiculturalism and immigration by Muslims are such dangers to Norway and such abominations that they justify mass murder. An American presidential candidate, an associate minister in his Baptist church in Atlanta, openly advocates bigotry against Muslims. So well might the world ask, so might we ask, what does our Christian faith have to say about the challenge of multiculturalism?  What does Christianity have to say to us about how we ought to approach the religiously other?

            We could, of course, start with Scripture, which brings us back to Paul in Athens. For Paul, there is no note of religious superiority, no claim that God has favored any one set of the world’s peoples, privileged them or set them above all others. Listen again to what he says:

“The God who made the world and everything in it . . . made all the nations to inhabit the whole earth; and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him – though indeed he is not far from each of us.” (Acts 17:24-28).

The effect, theologian and preacher Brian McLaren says, is to shatter the traditional us-them mind-set:

“People of every language, culture, and religion are given a place in God’s world, and no nation is given permission to crush, annihilate, dominate or assimilate others. In so doing, Paul unifies everyone in a singular “us” – people created by God, people who have a God-given right to life and land, people who are being invited to seek God right where they are, people to whom God is already near, people who are already living and moving and having their being in God, people who are already God’s children.” (A New Kind of Christianity, p.211)

            Paul is not saying anything new here, nothing that does not follow the trajectory of Scripture beginning with Abraham and running through the prophets and right through to Jesus.  Abraham was called by God to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth.  The prophets spoke of how while God loved the Hebrews, God’s love extended to the other nations as well – I think here of Amos, through whom God said, “Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel? Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Captor and the Arameans from Kir?” (Amos 9:7). Jesus made explicit that his message was not just for the house of Israel, but for the world, reaching out to a Samaritan woman, a Roman centurion, the Greek friends of Andrew and Philip. The early church, beginning with Peter and his message that God shows no partiality, continued that trajectory affirming that we all have a place in God’s world.

            The backlash against multiculturalism is driven, of course, by fear. By anxiety that immigrants will take our jobs, by worries that the increased presence of those unlike us will threaten the ways we have always done things, by concerns that “they” might lay claim to that larger portion of the pie which we by historic accident and luck of place of birth have enjoyed.

But it should not, and must not, be fueled or justified by claims that the Christian faith supports such bigotry. Angela Merkel has it completely wrong – the “Christian concept of mankind”, as she puts it, speaks of love of neighbor, not his exclusion and eviction. Herman Cain has it completely wrong – Jesus has no room for discrimination against those whose groping for God, as Paul put it, is done in the name of Islam. And the Norwegian domestic terrorist has it completely wrong – nothing in Christianity endorses the cold-blooded mass murder of innocent men, women and children, and certainly not in pursuit of keeping a country pure from immigration by those of another faith.

            This, instead, is what our Christian faith calls us to do:

To love, not hate, our neighbor – to feed, tend, and care for God’s children, recalling the risen Christ’s command to Peter: “feed my sheep.”

To repent of our tendency to divide the world into us versus them, to think of insider versus outsider, but instead to see that we are all our God’s children, and all have a place not in our world, but in God’s world.

And finally,  to trust so securely in our faith and in Jesus’ abiding love for us that we can both humbly offer that faith to the world as a gift, and at the same time receive as a gift from others their experiences of the one God who holds us all in the palms of his hands.

Nothing but a Daylily

“A daylily,” he said. “I am nothing but a daylily.”

Daylilies (Hemerocallis) are in bloom here on the Cape, blooming in glorious, profuse mounds along Old Kings Highway, in perennial gardens overlooking the bays and beaches, in borders fronting white picket fences. The name Hemerocallis comes from the Greek words ἡμέρα (hēmera) "day" and καλός (kalos) "beautiful". The blooms generally last but 24 hours, opening with the morning sun, closing as evening fades into night, and then are gone forever.

 A man of a certain age, his observation would have been unlikely for a younger man, for those who believe they are immortal and have yet to realize that this shall not last forever. He was in good health, he said, but the fact of his approaching annual physical, at which he would be told the results of what he hoped was just routine blood work, gave him great pause.

“You see,” he said, “I have plans, things to do. Important stuff at work that simply has to get done. Children at home who will need me for years, a spouse who would have such a hard time of it were I not around. And yet – if I get bad news today, it could just all crumble away overnight.”

I waited, resisting the temptation to rush in with baseless assurances and what he would know were simply platitudes.

“But you know,” he continued, “I’m okay with that, I think. With being a daylily. Because they are so beautiful, and their time, although limited, is such a gift. And I know my worrying about that check-up is not going to change whatever the news is, and I know as well that when all is said and done, that I, and my family, and all the rest of it, are in good hands. Come what may.”

Beautiful!

Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you…. Luke 12

Paddling with Divine Abandon

Even as I knew with a big part of my mind that there really was no going back, that getting out and off was not really an option, and that it was probably going to be fun, a part of me still played with the fantasy that there might be a way to set the clock back an hour and so magically get off this seemingly rather flimsy rubber raft, a raft which was rapidly propelling me and seven others towards a large bend in the Snake River Canyon. The Rafting Company’s brochure had touted their extensive safety record, and had promised that “rafting adventurers,” as we were called, would get a thorough safety orientation. My confidence in the truth of the first claim was somewhat shaken by patent falsity of the second  --  the “thorough safety orientation” turned out to be only a thirty second river-side explanation of how to put on the faded life-jackets they had handed out, together with some brief remarks that if we fell out we were to point our legs downstream so that they would crash into the boulders before our skulls. I immediately resolved to stay in the raft at all costs.

            The river bend was drawing nearer, but it was not the bend itself that concerned me – indeed, for the past 30 minutes we had been drifting lazily down the Snake, admiring the gently rising canyon walls along both banks, getting glimpses of the Grand Tetons now and again off to the west, even spotting an occasional bald eagle. Our guide had insisted that we, novice “rafting adventurers” all, practice paddling, which mostly consisted of her yelling, Captain Bligh-like, a stream of orders: “paddle left”, “paddle right”, “full power, five strokes”, “reverse all”, and so on. We were not very good at this. We improved remarkably when she told us that our ability to paddle was going to get us through the rapids – or not.

            Which was my concern. As the bend got nearer and nearer, the canyon walls drew closer and closer together, a sound, a roaring, was getting louder and louder, and the raft steadily picked up speed. A quick look at the waterproof map they had handed out showed that just around that rapidly approaching bend was something called a “Category 3” rapid – how bad could that be, I thought? Looking over my shoulder, a fellow rafter said “Oh, look, they even name the rapids – I wonder why this one was named “the Widowmaker”?”

By now the river had got my attention. As had our guide, who ordered the right side to paddle to avoid a bolder, which flashed by to starboard, then called for three strokes from the left to line us up for the approach to what looked to be something you might see on the “Discovery Channel”, or in one of those big-screen Omni-Max theaters about kayaking the Himalayans, a steep stretch of river that boiled and churned over boulders the size of cars and towards which we were headed like a runaway freight train.

At it was at that point when I seriously wondered why I hadn’t had the presence of mind to object way back at the boarding area when the guide had placed me not on the left side of the raft, not on the right side of the raft, not way back on the stern, where she was safely ensconced – but on the blunt front of the raft!

“Full power, everyone!,” yelled our guide, and the sensible, logical part of me, that wisdom and intelligence that had seen me safely through some 43 years,  said to me, “Are you nuts?! Let’s hit the reverse thrusters and get out of Dodge!” But then, as our paddles furiously dug into the tossing waves, it became clear that the way out was the way forward, that it was only by aggressively working to move the raft forward through the water that we could have steerageway, and so avoid that bus-size boulder on the left, and that back eddy on the right, but what about – oh my God, that huge hole right in front of us?!  Down, down, down  we slammed into the hole, a sucking vortex in the rapids created in the lee of a submerged ledge, the raft buckling underneath my crouched legs. The front of the raft slammed into the wall of water at the bottom of the hole, a wave poured over my head, screaming with terror and joy I furiously dug my paddle into the water and pulled for life and then – and then we were up and out and spinning in lazy circles in the calm waters beneath the rapids.

            And so maybe you can see why Mary Oliver’s little prose poem speaks to me – it resonates with my experience on the Snake River – and it calls to mind Jesus’ conversation with those recalcitrant experts of religion close to the end of his ministry.

            First, the poet calls us to stop, to listen, to pay attention. Put aside those distractions; put aside that single-minded focus you have on rowing so diligently on a course that was set for you long ago, a course you might not even know why you are on right now. “Listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and listen to me.” Mary Oliver, West Wind, Poems and Prose Poems (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1997), p. 46.

            She goes on, here is the lesson you need to learn. This is what is ultimately important in life. Not success, not money, not the adulation of others, not some secret horde of brownie points you accumulate for pleasing others. This is what is important: love. For there is life without love, but “It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied.”

            This is, of course, Jesus’ message.  What is the greatest commandment, what is the Divinely-given rule which, if followed, will be both pleasing to God as well as life-promoting for the individual and the community? “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind’ . . . [and} ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”  Love. Its that easy. Its what I have been teaching you about all these past three years, it is what I have been modeling for you as we have healed the sick, restored to the community those who were marginalized and scorned, welcomed all to our table fellowship, urged justice for the oppressed, sharing by all. Simply this: love God, love yourself, and love one another.

But Jesus’ message, and that echoed by the poet, is not as easy at it first might sound. Love, the poet reminds us, is not simply warm and fuzzy and a feel-good emotion. Love is risky, love is dangerous, love can be costly. There really is nothing safe and secure about loving. Love, Mary Oliver tells us, is not a leisurely row on a placid lily-pad-strewn pond. Love is a heart-pounding, adrenaline-inducing roller-coaster ride where there are no visible safety rails, an accelerating journey of increasing speed as a river is narrowed by steeply rising canyon walls into a foaming, churning rapids, a boulder-littered watery obstacle course where standing waves conspire to overturn your raft, where Charbydis-like whirlpools threaten to pull you under. This is what love sounds like, this is how love tastes and feels in the pit of your stomach: “When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, -- when you hear that unmistakable pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming….”

Like Jesus speaking to the lawyers long ago, Mary Oliver tells you again what you already know. You know the risk and cost of loving. Why else did your stomach get all tied up in knots when she first agreed to go out with you on that date? Why did you hope and fear and hope some more that he would pop the question, would ask you if you would commit yourself to him for the rest of your life? Why else is it so hard to send your child away to school the first time, and the second time, and you wonder if it ever gets easier? Why else does it pain you so when a loved one suffers, or dies? Loving comes with risk and with costs. You know that when you volunteer at a the hospital and come face to face with pain and suffering; you know that when you commit your time and energy to the young of this church, through teaching in the church school or helping as a youth leader; you know that when you put yourself on the line for the homeless or struggling parents or people of different sexual orientation or our environment. Love is more than chocolates and flowers and mutual self-absorption – love, in all its wonder and life-affirmingness, can be risky and costly. See where love took Jesus.

The Good News, of course, is that we can risk love because God loves us first, because God loves us so fiercely that no matter the category of rapids we might face in our lives of loving each other and God, we have Jesus for our guide, we have the Holy Spirit to give us strength for the task at hand, and we have a God who is both in the raft with us and who promises us that at the last we shall be together, at peace besides the still waters.

So what to do? What difference does this make in your life? Shall you, when love comes knocking on your heart, do the sensible and safe and sane thing, and turn and run for your life? Or will you, learning the lesson we on that raft on the Snake River learned, for love and for life paddle with divine abandon?

Listen to me.

“When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, -- when you hear that unmistakable pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life toward it.”

Transitions -- Where LIFE is!

     The intertidal zone is the area where land and sea meetThis habitat is covered with water at high tide, and exposed to air at low tide. The land in this zone can be rocky, sandy or covered in mudflats. It is a perilous place for organisms to make a go of it – at times underwater, and times drying out, continually buffeted by wave and wind, ever-changing salinity, exposed to predators from above and below. And yet it is a place of amazing biological diversity and adaptation, where life if abundant and varied.

     Transitional zones are where life happens. The continental shelf has far more species, a much more vibrant habitat, than the deep ocean. The boundaries where different types of habitat meet are the places where life abounds, and where change happens.

     In the same way, it is in life’s transitional times that, for all the pain and struggle, life, real life, abounds. What we all want, we say, is life to just settle down, to be stable, predictable, routine. But then something happens, and everything changes --- the job is lost, the cancer diagnosis arrives, the relationship falls through.  And there is struggle, there is pain, at times it even seems like life itself is at stake.  And who would ever want to be in those shoes? And yet…

     And yet, the one facing cancer can actually say – yes, it does happen! – that they are thankful for what they are facing, because it is woken them up to appreciate the gift and joy of this day, this one special day, this gorgeous hydrangea which they really appreciated before, this sunrise that they actually stopped to watch, this love which they never fully appreciated before. That they have never felt so alive.

     And yet, the one grieving over the lost job at times wakes up and sees the blessing in it, the opportunity to start over and do what they had always wanted to do, or the chance to re-evaluate their priorities and what all that “stuff” really means to them.

     Fully one-half of the Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Mark is concerned with only one week – the last week -- of the life of a man who we suspect lived maybe some thirty years.  It is a week of suffering, trial, and death – but it is also a week of life lived to the hilt, and beyond.

      Transitional times are hard. But they can also be times of life, and life abundant.

Slavery, Its Not Just History

            This weekend we celebrate the gift of human freedom as we have known it here in this country.  The Biblical account (Gen. 24) of how Abraham arranged for Rebekah, his kinsman Laban’s sister, to marry Isaac reminds us that many people, women especially, have not always enjoyed the freedoms we cherish.

            Theft of the gift of human freedom takes many forms, and human trafficking, slavery, is perhaps the most pernicious. Human trafficking is alive and thriving, and yet only recently has garnered even a modicum of publicity. It has been identified as the fastest growing criminal industry in the world. It takes the form of bonded labor, otherwise known as debt labor, where victims are required to labor to repay amounts owed, but find that the interest on the loan rises faster than they can ever hope to pay it off. It takes the form of  forced labor, where workers are imprisoned and forced to work under threat of physical coercion. And it takes the form of sexual exploitation.

This year, UNICEF estimates that 1.8 million children will be sold into the commercial sex trade. India is perhaps the world’s sex slave capital, and we know of Thailand’s and Cambodia’s reputations as havens for the commercial sex slave trade. But human trafficking thrives here in our own country as well, at times taking the forms of imported Russian and Mexican girls that are kept locked up in brothels, but more often in the form of the mini-skirted runaway on the streets of our cities.

Nicholas Kristoff writes, “Typically, she’s a 13-year-old girl of color from a troubled home who is on bad terms with her mother. Then her mom’s boyfriend hits on her, and she runs away to the bus station, where the only person on the lookout for girls like her is a pimp. He buys her dinner, gives her a place to stay and next thing she knows she’s earning him $1,500 a day.” (NY Times, 4/24/11).  And we respond by treating her as a criminal, not a victim, prosecuting her while the pimp goes free, the customers go unnamed.

So what to do, here in the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave? Here today, some 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and 235 years after the Declaration of Independence, we could do worse than listen, really listen, to the voice of Rebekah, calling to us, asking only for freedom for those deprived of this basic human right.

            Friends, here in our time, and at our doorstep, Rebekah calls. Will we listen?