Stop
This is not a sermon about Bill Cosby.
I have to start with that caveat because Cosby’s alleged crimes against women are reprehensible and inexcusable. But as a child of the 80’s, I took many life lessons from his long running sitcom, “The Cosby Show.” A year ago I discussed my struggle to rectify my admiration of the fictional Heathcliff Huxtable with my sheer disgust towards these alleged actions. And I’ll say again my love for his body of work does not transcend the power of his crimes.
But I have to take you back to my living room—and likely many of yours. It is 1988—Thursday night at 8pm and a rather strange episode of the Cosby Show is on television. In it, eight year old Rudy is reading a story she wrote to her parents, and, through the magic of television, that story comes alive and is presented by the cast.
There are two groups of people—the happy people and the mean people. The audience watches as the mean people invade the land of the happy people and subject them to cruel rules—including that there can be no singing and they can only eat broccoli. As the story climaxes, the happy people are losing faith. They miss singing and parties. Their previously colorful world is literally changed to black and white. Seeing all of this, the young flower girl, played by Rudy herself, decides to do something about the situation. She goes over to the mean people and says “stop.”
And that is the end of the story.
The scene returns to the Huxtable living room, where the parents have questions. What happened next, they wondered. And Rudy tells them that the mean people stopped being mean and stopped making rules. And why did they stop? Because the flower girl told them to.
In fact, Rudy explains, she is going to use the same tactic when she is President of the World. She says, “I am going to get on the bull horn and I am going to tell all the bad people to stop it. And then I’m going to tell them to throw all their bombs in the ocean, so there’ll be no more fighting.” And with that, she walks away, clearly unaware of the naivete expressed through her remarks.
If only it was that easy.
We live in a world where the line between “good guys” and “bad guys” is not always clear. Our struggles are complex and nuanced. We could yell stop at the top of our lungs and not be heard.
But what if you thought you could be heard? What would happen if you walked up to an oppressive ruler or a “mean guy” and told him to stop? Imagine the situation in Syria—believing that your simple intervention would end civil war, and bring the mass casualties and utter destruction to a rapid and complete halt—who among us would not act? Closer to home, imagine if we could tell white supremacist organizations to stop. Stop teaching hate. Stop encouraging violence. Stop. Or imagine if we could walk into the headquarters of the NRA and tell them to stop. Stop enabling people to resort to the basest, most savage of behaviors through engaging in gun violence. Stop using your enormous power to sway industries and legislators to upend any attempt to curb the deplorable, unparalleled epidemic of gun violence in our nation.
It seems to me that what emboldened the flower girl to confront her oppressive enemies was the fact that she believed that her words would work. The reality of her fantasy was that her simple command could change her world. And it did.
We, of course, do not live in a fantasy world. And we know all too well that simply saying “stop,” simply praying for hatred to stop, for violence to stop does not make it so.
But I want to invite you to imagine what you would do—what you could do—if you were the flower girl in our world today. Who would you tell to stop? How would you get him/her/them to hear you?
I ask this question inspired by two critical events that we will encounter during the course of the upcoming week. Tomorrow night we begin Hanukkah, the festival of Lights. There are many themes, values and ideals embedded in the Hanukkah story, both from an historical perspective and through a religious one.
I’d like to look at the most well-known, and perhaps the simplest of elements of our Hanukkah tradition. We are taught that Hanukkah is the time of miracles—our dreidl reads nes gadol haya sham, a great miracle happened there. Legend teaches us that a crude of oil meant to last for just one day managed to last for eight days, allowing the Temple to remain lit while new oil was prepared. We do not rely on miracles, we do not expect them to occur. But maybe, if we believe in the unbelievable, we could feel emboldened, brave, and we could act to create the miracle we want to ignite.
This year, Hanukkah coincides with Human Rights Day. Each year on December 10 we celebrate the anniversary of the ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which occurred this day in 1948. The Declaration’s preamble concludes:
“The General Assembly, Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance…”
It is a statement so obvious that it needn’t be said, yet one so groundbreaking and powerful that it must be celebrated and reaffirmed each year. As we watch human rights violated throughout our world on a daily basis, we must say stop. We must pray stop. And then we must act in order to make it stop.
When I took a homiletics course at seminary we were taught to end a sermon with “marching orders.” What instructions do you want your sermon to present for the congregation? In this instance, I am woefully without answers. I cannot tell you how to solve the multi-faceted ills that plague our world, both at home and abroad.
But I can encourage you to galvanize your inner flower girl. Utilize her courage and conviction. Say “stop” and demand to be heard.
We do not expect prayer to solve our problems but we do rely on it to encourage and inspire us. And so I’ve done a creative translation of the well known “oseh shalom:”
May we emulate God who ordains harmony in the heavens in order to find the means to create understanding, comradery and peace on earth, for our sake and the sake of all who dwell upon it. And let us say, Amen.