TO LIGHT ONE CANDLE A Unitarian Universalist Reflection on Hanukkah
Preached at the combined New Year’s service at the First Parish in Needham
James Ishmael Ford
1 January 2006

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
Emily Dickinson

I vividly recall the first time I became aware of John Buehrens. It was in 1989 while I was still at seminary in Berkeley, California. That’s when his collaboration with Forrest Church, Our Chosen Faith was released. As for so many of us UUs at the time, I was hungry for a decent introduction to our shared, and as the title said, “chosen” faith. At no extra cost I found myself encountering and quite taken with the personalities of the two writers as they shone out from the pages. I was particularly taken with Church’s recounting in the Preface about when his wife heard he and John Beuhrens would be doing a book together. She declared “You and John complement each other perfectly. You write. He reads.” As those who know me know, this distinction makes some sense.

Over the years, what are now the many years, I’ve gotten to know John, first as our denominational president, then so important to me, as he demonstrated what a parish minister can actually be, and finally over these more recent years, just as a person. Out of all this I can freely say how much I admire him. He is genuinely an expression of a UU minister as “rabbi,” a teacher. And as such he’s a model upon which I’ve attempted to frame much of my own ministry. It was such a treat, when my own first book came out that he was willing to write its Forward. And now it’s a pure delight we’ve been able to join together with the congregations we serve, or at least the faithful remnant of our Needham and Newton parishes, to observe first Christmas Sunday and now today New Years Sunday as combined communities of faith and hope.

Without a doubt this is the season of the triumph of hope over despair, of light over the dark. It’s in the very air we breathe; in the coldest and darkest moment of our shared lives, we feel somewhere deep in our bodies a seed of hope. To shift that metaphor, we discover in this dark season a small flickering flame. And its so important. This hint of hope within what could be despair appears to be a pretty universal experience in the Northern hemisphere. In addition to Christmas and Hanukkah, this is the season of the Yule, in ancient times of bonfires burning on hilltops across Europe. This season is also the marking of the great awakening of Gautama Siddhartha beneath that tree in ancient India some twenty-five hundred years ago. In our European calendar we even dedicate this remarkable time as the turning of the year itself.

All those things should be recalled in this season; each story informing the other, and all of them a pointing to something lovely, frankly, frightening; and somehow deeply compelling to our human imagination. Today is New Year’s day, 2006. And today it’s my particular obligation to recall aspects of the Hanukkah story, the celebration of which will continue through Sundown tomorrow. It is my task here today to reflect on how it all comes together, all these various stories, but particularly the Hanukkah story. If we do this, within the universal human pageant, the glorious tapestry of human culture and faith we can find out much about who we are. There are lessons here for us as contemporary religious liberals, some very important. So, let’s explore.

John Shelby Spong, most Unitarian Universalists favorite Episcopal bishop provides a succinct summary of the Hanukkah event. “Hanukkah,” the bishop writes, “was a late-developing festival, which came into the cycle of Jewish liturgical observances in the second century before the Common Era. It was designed to mark the time when a military leader named Judas, (and) nicknamed ‘The Hammer’ (or Maccabeas in Hebrew) routed the (Greek) Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes and his army.

“The Temple in Jerusalem was (with this) restored to the worship of Yahweh.” The liberating army found, according to at least one tradition, the temple desecrated with pagan images including the head of a pig sitting on the high altar. As Bishop Spong relates, “The victorious Judas stripped away these offending images and restored the sanctity of the Temple. Then, the tradition states, he lit the eight-branched candelabra called the Menorah to initiate (rites of purification as well as) a time of great celebration.”

Despite the lack of sufficient oil to fulfill ritual needs, “These candles burned miraculously to extend the celebration for (the necessary) eight days. In the minds of the Jewish faithful this act not only restored light to darkness, but it also replaced idolatry with the true faith.” John Beuhrens in his important study of our western scriptural inheritance, Understanding the Bible: An Introduction for Skeptics, Seekers, and Religious Liberals, that is you and me; points out “You will not (in fact) find this legend in First Maccabees (the primary source for these times)… or even” he goes on to note, “in the more miracle-friendly addition and retelling of this story that is Second Maccabees.”

This is very important, I think. And there’s a question here. What’s going on? If not particularly historical, why is this story of candles the theme of the event’s ritual observance today? Some scholars suggest the shift from a story of military success found in the bare texts which we must rely on for any threads of historical accuracy to that wondrous miracle of the candles celebrated in liturgical Judaism, was likely a way the rabbis, never particularly close to the Maccabees themselves, and in fact uncomfortable with much of what they were about; dealt with this thorny story in a creative and ultimately compelling way.

Just to underscore the difficulties; as I surveyed various sermons and essays on the web with particular interest in what UUs had to say about Hanukkah and the Maccabees, I was disconcertingly aware how many noticed within the scriptural accounts similarities between the Maccabees and modern day fundamentalist religious groups. A particularly disconcerting comparison was observed by several writers between the Maccabees and Afghanistan’s recent Taliban theocracy. However much a stretch that might or might not be, in the more or less historical telling of the story behind the Hanukkah story, we see an undisputedly rigid particularlism triumphing over a more eclectic if not actually universalist vision of the world.

What can this say to us, other than be careful, there are people who aren’t going to like us and our pluralistic vision? That might not be a bad message. But there’s more, there’s something deeper for us. To my mind, this question of particularism, of focus on one specific tradition, and the how it relates or doesn’t relate to universalism, our shared focus on the connections between all faiths and peoples; is one of the most important things we religious liberals need to attend to.

This is the conundrum of our necessary commitment to how we in fact arise in the world. Just look at us, we certainly have our own particularisms. We UUs are nearly all Westerners, overwhelmingly (and for me, disconcertingly) of European descent, largely rationalists, mostly very liberal, generally possessing a pressing sense of connection to the rest of the world, to peoples in New Orleans, Darfur, Afghanistan and Iraq to simply start the list and going on to possessing a generally acknowledged sense of connection to the world itself. What, one can legitimately ask, can we that peculiar subset of North Americans have to do with the world as a whole? This is a deeply important question.

To set the frame of this particular reflection on unique identity and its relationship to larger visions, I’d like to cite two things. First a traditional North American Hanukkah joke. And second something I heard on NPR the other day. First the joke: On the first day of Hanukkah a man was given two sweaters by his mother. On the second day when he went over to his parent’s house for dinner he wore one of the sweaters. As she opened the door and looked at him, his mother said “What? You didn’t like the other sweater?” And second from an NPR interview with the novelist Philip Roth. It appears that shortly after the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint, a reporter from the New York Times managed to interview Roth’s mother. When asked about the mother portrayed in her son’s novel, and whether she feared it conveyed a negative image if not of her specifically, of Jewish mothers in general; she replied “all mothers are Jewish mothers.”

Within this I think we might discern the problems we deal with. Against the background of our lives, is our commonality. All mothers are Jewish mothers. All of us come from some same basic place. Our inheritance ultimately is the same earth. And, at the very same time we’re each of us different; our lives are all about picking and choosing, about choices and particularities and further distinctions; the least of which are why this sweater and not that?

I believe Hanukkah, with all its layers and nuances points to some deep truths for us. From the time of the Babylonian captivity, at least, Judaism became a world religion, a religion that spoke to some universal insights we share as human beings. And yet, from that time, at least, it was a faith that guarded its own particular expression of universal truths. Now, of course, it owes much to others, as a human activity, it is dynamic and has changed more over the millennia than its most conservative advocates might want to admit. For instance, because the books of the Maccabees have no Hebrew originals, they were excluded from the Jewish canon. It appears they may have survived because they were adopted as scripture by Christians. The threads of interconnection are endless.

The larger truth we need to deal with is that universal truths are ever only known in particular ways. So, for instance, there is no abstract love, no Platonic ideal floating out there in the cosmos somewhere. Love is something that happens between John and Gwen, between Jan and James, between Arlene and Sue. Love is found when we clothe the naked, house the homeless, feed the hungry. Our saving faith is found only in concrete expressions. The catch, the catch we contemporary rationalist religious liberals know is that the particular is itself fluid and dynamic and over time subject to change. Nothing is fixed. We can change. And will. So, we need to hold these traditions, but we need to hold them with open hands. So, for one example, while I’m grateful for what we are; I also look forward to the day Unitarian Universalism is the common inheritance of people of European descent, African descent and Asian descent. How rich that will make us!

But, now, back to starting with where we are, with celebrating the particulars. Here’s the lesson I glean from this reflection on Hanukkah as a Unitarian Universalist holy day. We, you and I, are about something profound and true. We are about the connections. We find that succinctly expressed in that image of the interdependent web which so enthralls so many of us. But we really can only know this through particular things; for us as UUs through our traditions and unique religious style. This means cherishing our Jewish and Christian inheritance, our commitment to reason as a spiritual practice, our humanist and this-worldly bias, and a guarded openness to wisdom where ever we find it. These days that includes being open to earth-centered traditions, various Buddhisms as well as psychology, sociology and comparative mythology.

Here’s the joyful thing. And, perhaps, the Hanukkah lesson for us. If we are faithful to the wisdom this tradition and style we’ve inherited, we don’t just love in general, the people or the world, some grand abstraction. Rather we will go into the real and lived world with healing hands, speaking truths to powers, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, visiting the prisoner, working for our mother the earth in actual and real ways; casting a vital vision of love and hope across the globe in the many actual ways we can. We do this then we will respect that Maccabean candle. In fact we’ll light our own candle, and it will shine a light that can light the world. Of this possibility, which rests in our hands, yours and mine, I have no doubt.

Amen.