Sermon - Repairing the World Together 

Brothers and Sisters,

Assalamu Alaikum and Peace be with you.

May God protect you and protect this beautiful house of God.

There is a lot which is broken in this world. We cannot begin to count that all here. But one of the things we need to fix is our knowledge of the world. In this world of war and suffering, knowing and understanding others is the first step in repairing the world. For how can we do what is right and what is required for us as moral people otherwise?

We dominate the world. Yet we know very little about the world. A National Geographic Society survey recently found that 60% of our students cannot find Iraq on a map, although we hear about Iraq everyday.

While China is among our top trade partners and we owe billions of dollars to them in debt, nearly 75% of our students think English is the most widely spoken native tongue, rather than Chinese.

Young Americans stood next to last in a nine country survey of knowledge of current events. Compare this to the fact that China teaches English beginning in the third grade and 25% of Australian students learn an Asian language.

However, the good news is that students are interested in the world. Ninety percent believe it is important to know more about other world languages, peoples, and cultures.

The whole world watches Hollywood, and their perceptions of Americans are shaped by movies and TV shows.  But they don’t truly know America—as we don’t know them.

Knowing and absorbing the extent of poverty in our world is the first step in our paths towards living justly and healing our world.

Just days before Hurricane Katrina showed us the human face of poverty in New Orleans, the U.S. Census Bureau issued the latest poverty statistics. Another million Americans were added last year to the 36 million who already live under poverty in our neighborhoods. Two million of those who are incarcerated today are mostly the poor and the weak of our society.

And yet our poverty is not the absolute poverty found in other parts of the world.

According to the UNICEF, 210,000 children die each week due to poverty. That is 11 million children a year. And they “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on Earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.”

That is just under 11 million children under five years of age, each year.

The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, reminds us that we cannot be good people of faith if our neighbor goes hungry while we eat our fill. In today’s global village, the neighborhood has expanded, as the late Pope John Paul II pointed out.

We have the duty to do more to alleviate poverty worldwide.

While slavery is over, we have made countries our slaves through the world lending system. Smaller governments in the world are crumbling under debt. How many of our congregants know about it?

Poverty is the moral issue of our times.

Faith groups can emerge as voices of conscience. We must insist that hunger and poverty CAN be eliminated. Poverty, occupation, and violence are as connected as mercy, love, and selfless service.

We have a responsibility as a leading country of the human civilization today.

Teachers and preachers need to work on increasing our knowledge of the world.

Living in America, we don’t have to go very far to find experts of the other cultures. We have masters of those cultures right here. We can learn from them.

Twenty million Americans, according to the last Census, were born in some other country. We have people from all over the world. If we consider these immigrants as our strength, experts not suspects, they could guide us to the allies of the world where we are scared to walk today.

It is unfortunate that while businessmen from China walk freely in the world, growing ten times the U.S. growth rate, the European public opinion considers America a greater danger to world peace, and we don’t feel safe even in Berlin.

Learning about the other and talking with the other has a transforming effect on human beings.

Knowing the other has transformed me. I am a convert to interfaith work. I started out a skeptical participant. I used to think interfaith participants are people who are trying to be nice without handling difficult issues.

To my surprise, as I grew in my own faith, I became more convinced of the beauty of interfaith work. I started paying attention to Islamic texts I had not noticed in the past. The choice that one remain an island of isolation or build bridges of understanding by serving humanity together became more and more clear to me as a Muslim.

Twenty-five years ago, I probably would not have noted that the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, pitched a tent in his own mosque for the visiting Christian bishop of Yemen and his delegation to celebrate Christmas.  Nor would I have realized that the city of the Prophet, called Medina, became a state with a constitution that declared Muslims, polytheists, Jews, and Christians one community (ummatum ma ‘al mumineen).

This written constitution guaranteed not only full freedom of religion to others, but also secured their right to be judged by their own laws and books. This document, which Muslims proudly refer to as the first written constitution in the world, is called Saheefa and Waseeqa in Arabic.

That city state was called the peace sanctuary (Madinatul Haram). Within its boundaries, no tree could be cut and no animal hurt. The Prophet insisted that even the idols worshiped by others cannot be ridiculed and no one can force a religion on anyone.

He was first to jump on any offer of peace, but he had to defend the sanctuary. The total time spent in the armed defense of the peace sanctuary was seven days out of his 23 years of prophetic life.

In the current context, however, all of this sounds remote.

With the extremists on both sides feeding off each other, dehumanization of the perceived enemy is at its height sacrificing truth and respect at the altar of hate.

Years ago, I experienced another moment of connection. It surprised me because buried in it was a story of understanding, tolerance, and the sharing of our precious humanity across supposedly clashing cultural divides.

 When my youngest daughter was in third grade, she was consumed by the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  During those same days I came across a book entitled The Disovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority, by Rose Ingalls Wilder, Laura’s daughter. In this book, she considers three major sources of freedom in the world, and one of the three main sources is the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.

On Amazon.com, the vast majority of writers about Islam are Islamophobic, so the discovery of this book was a very pleasant surprise. It turned out that she wrote this 60 years ago, when she was a reporter in the Muslim world.

But I think what might have also influenced her was an act of kindness among strangers several centuries ago. Among her forefathers was a Crusader. And in this conflict, his life was saved by a Muslim named Almansoor. Moved and grateful, the Crusader asked that one male in his progeny should always have Almanzo as a middle name. Therefore, her father was given a Muslim middle name.

Rumi would consider this to be a token of love between these two noble persons of the past. They became a mirror of each other’s goodness, which continues to blossom centuries after the Crusades were over.

In popular culture today, it is a generally accepted belief that religion is a major cause of violence in the world. That may be true of the years of the Crusades; but I beg to differ about the recent past. Most of the wars in the last 100 years were not religious wars. They were wars of nationalism. The two World Wars, which inflicted horrible suffering and pain on humanity, had nothing to do with religion.

However, religion has been, and will continue to be, unfortunately, one of the contributing factors in violent conflict. It is, therefore, essential to include religion and religious actors in the peace struggle, not just as chaplains in the armed forces but as planners and commanders in the struggle for peace and justice.

We have an obligation to make the world a better place.

We cannot do it alone. In a world of fear and warfare, people of faith must continue to work together for a just and peaceful world for our children and ourselves.

This cannot be done without influencing public policy.

Ladies and gentleman, standing in this house of God, I say with full responsibility, that the single most important thing we can do together to repair the world is to make our government more humane domestically and globally. 

The dilemma of moderates like us is that we are less vocal and too moderate. We are a majority, but a silent one. Moderates like us take separation of church and state more seriously than the extremists of both sides. The result is that the people of faith and interfaith have less power than the extremists.

Another dilemma we have is that we exchange unity of vagueness for the clarity of truth. The result is that interfaith energy fails to focus.

Dr. King was not known for his silence. He would not have achieved what he achieved if he had preferred the unity brought by vagueness over clarity of truth. When he stood, he took churches and worshipers with him.

Our government has become a monster, more reflective of our vice than of our goodness.

Just this Friday our Congress passed another draconian law which takes away more of our freedoms. It allows a citizen to be detained indefinitely without a judicial process.

Now one man, our president, can interpret what the Geneva Conventions are, and the courts will have no say in this.

How does this happen in a country where more than 45% of the people go to worship in their churches, mosques, and temples almost every week? Most people I know are caring, intelligent, and well-intentioned people. But it does not get reflected in our policies—and  that disconnect worries me. They take our money and we get to vote; but we still feel helpless and voiceless.

Government is the most important product of our civilization. Why does this most powerful of human institutions regularly fail in the test of humanity? Why is it more prone to war than conversation? How and when did it become so inhumane? How can we make our governments become more sensitive?

I think we need more churches, mosques, and temples that work independent of the IRS 501 C 3 tax deduction system, so we are free to rally moderates for the sake of humanity. We must think of some creative way to liberate the religious institutions from this willing slavery of IRS rules.

I know I am almost committing a heresy here. (But I know that I can get away with this in Lake Street Church).

As citizens of the leading country of the current civilization, it is our religious duty to develop consciousness about this, which can render us better citizens in the global village we live in today.

Without the churches, there would not have been an underground railroad. The Civil Rights Movement would have been declared dead upon arrival if it were to follow IRS limitations.

Churches must stand up for America. Early this year, some churches did stand up, resulting in the massive immigration-rights marches when a House bill asked for the deportation of 12 million undocumented workers. But a sustained movement is needed if America will have to be honest in its promise of the American Dream for all people.

The treatment which we have been giving to Muslims since 9/11 is now being extended to Latinos. Hate and racism does not limit itself to one target. In January this year, the Dept. of Homeland Security signed a $385 million dollar contract with Halliburton to build new detention centers. Interestingly, Muslims are thinking it is for them while Latinos are thinking it is for them.

In this world of fear and warfare, we must stand bold and tall with truth for justice. Only that will liberate us from fear and warfare.

As a Muslim, let me declare that there is no war which is holy. Not only is holy war an absolutely wrong translation of Jihad, but it hides the fact that war can never be holy. It might be at best justifiable, but never holy.

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

The poet Rumi said, "Take on a big project, like Noah." Let the learning about the other and making our governments humane become a first step toward repairing the world together.

I believe we can change the world if we start listening to one another.

We should commit to simple living and sharing the resources of this planet with the rest of the six billion other human beings as equally as possible.

This struggle to change ourselves and our world will make us better human beings, more deserving of God’s Mercy, helping us become His true servants.

Thank you and God bless you.