Pilgrimage to Wholeness: Remembering our Destiny: The Common Good
August 22, 2010
“How lovely to think that no one need wait a moment, we can start now, start slowly
changing the world!”
This is one of many quotes from the daily journals that Anne Frank kept, written
when she and her family was forced into hiding in an attic in Amsterdam, Holland
after the Nazi takeover of Germany. For two years, Anne and her family hid in this
“Secret Annex,” where she began to keep a journal, documenting her life in hiding
and opening up to the world about her desire for respect for human dignity. On an
early August morning in 1944, the secret annex was discovered and Anne and her
family were taken to various concentration camps around Europe. At the age of
fifteen, she died of typhus in 1945.
In July, Kathy and I were grateful to take a brief vacation, a road trip to the Sawtooth
Mountains in Idaho, which we now consider one of the most breathtaking places
we’ve ever been. Enroute to the mountains, we spent some time in Boise, Idaho,
where we discovered a most magnificent tribute, the Anne Frank Human Rights
Memorial.
This is a world-class educational park inspired by Anne Frank’s faith in humanity.
Built to promote respect for human dignity and diversity it was designed to not only
engage our highest ethical and spiritual values, but also to remind us of the terrible
costs of failing to act when action is required. You might be asking the same
question we did: how did this end up in Boise, Idaho? Its beginnings are traced to
1995, when concerned citizens brought the internationally recognized “Anne Frank
and the World Exhibit” to Idaho for a one month stay. Attracting more than 46,000
visitors, it was an enormous success, and became the impetus for citizens and
community leaders throughout Idaho and the U.S. to contribute nearly 2 million
dollars to build the Human Rights Memorial. It was completed and opened to the
public in 2002.
The Rev. Joanne Sanders
Stanford Memorial Church
Pilgrimage to Wholeness: Remembering our Destiny: The Common Good
August 22, 2010
On a very warm afternoon in Boise we slowly walked through this memorial,
surrounded by rocks, trees and waterfalls reading most of the 60 quotes inscribed
there, drawn from leaders and human rights figures throughout history,
representing nearly every region of the world. It was so moving, very powerful in
its own right, that both of us seemed to forget it was 95+ degrees outside. We knew
we had found something truly inspiring.
One of the most striking quotes I read that afternoon was one from Anne Frank,
written in July of 1944, one month before she and her family would be found and
taken to a concentration camp:
It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only
to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals; they
seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of
everything, that people are truly good at heart. It’s utterly impossible for me to build a
life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly
transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will
destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I
somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end,
that peace and tranquility will return once more. In the meantime, I must hold on to
my ideals. Perhaps the day will come when I’ll be able to realize them.
This morning is the second sermon in a Pilgrimage To Wholeness series of three,
which will conclude next week. Last Sunday’s theme of a Call to Goodness invited us
to consider some of Anne Frank’s convictions – that people are truly good at heart;
that we are made for goodness as Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Archbishop Desmond
Tutu reminded us; and finally, that Jesus harsh indictments in the gospel of Luke
were meant to challenge us to broaden our understanding of what the human
family, our commonwealth, really means and not to forget who we are and are
The Rev. Joanne Sanders
Stanford Memorial Church
Pilgrimage to Wholeness: Remembering our Destiny: The Common Good
August 22, 2010
meant to be. Our call to goodness yet remains – despite the catalogue of cruelties
and injuries we have and still do inflict on one another. Our challenge is yet present,
as I ended last week’s sermon by asking us to listen meditatively and prayerfully to
the words of poet John van de Laar that the voice of our fear will not be easily
dismissed – and that in the small silent places within us is another voice, one that
beckons us into the foolishness of faith – faith in humanity, in God’s goodness, in our
goodness.
In the gospel of Luke we heard moments ago, Jesus is under close surveillance by
the powerful people of his day, those known as Pharisees, to see if he will conform
to their regime. He uses a common social occasion – a dinner – to show that what
the world honors is not what is valued in the new order of God. An order that is
engaged on behalf of the poor, crippled, lame and blind, those whom the world in
essence devalues.
This same reordering is evident in the Letter to the Hebrews from which Doug read.
If I may, I want to offer a contemporary translation of verse 16 from this letter:
Make sure you don’t take things for granted and go slack in working for the common
good; share what you have with others. God takes particular pleasure in acts of
worship – a different kind of sacrifice – that take place in kitchen and workplace and
on the streets.
A most respected scholar and favorite theologian of mine, Walter Brueggemann,
writes in his work Journey to the Common Good: “The great crisis among us is the
crisis of “the common good,” the sense of community solidarity that binds all in a
common destiny – haves and have-nots, the rich and the poor. We face a crisis
about the common good because there are powerful forces at work among us to
resist the common good, to violate community solidarity, and to deny a common
The Rev. Joanne Sanders
Stanford Memorial Church
Pilgrimage to Wholeness: Remembering our Destiny: The Common Good
August 22, 2010
destiny. Mature people, at their best, are people who are committed to the common
good that reaches beyond private interest, transcends sectarian commitments, and
offers human solidarity. It is a trek that all serious human beings must make.”
My question, as may be yours, is whether we indeed do have the maturity and
seriousness to make such a trek, or pilgrimage? I have hope that we do, and Walter
Brueggemann and others have helped me understood why more deeply.
Brueggemann, for example, is a brilliant Hebrew Scripture scholar, and understands
the Hebrew narratives as a journey to the common good that is always reperformed
in communities of faith. It occurs to him that the script for these kinds of journeys is
immediately pertinent as well in the broader public community that something
definitive is happening among us right now. If we read through the narrative texts
of the Hebrew Scriptures for example, Brueggemann contends that as a society we
have dwelt for a very long time in the realm of Pharaoh, where everything and
everyone is reduced to a commodity and all human worth is measured by
productivity. Our current economic crisis is a serious departure from the economy
and assumptions of pharanonic production. The loss of jobs, the failure of pension
plans, the evaporation of health care, and the general feeling of vulnerability are
pervasive. Outrageous bonuses for the financial elite can be interpreted as a last
gasp of this Pharaoh like injustice that our society may no longer be willing to
tolerate. Yes, there is a shameless aggressive acquisitiveness that has marked the
U.S. economy (and thus has created a global impact) with a shameless embrace of
greed at the expense of neighbor. According to Brueggemann, the great triad of
wealth, wisdom and might has been the compelling agenda of those persons who
believed and the institutions that practiced the false wisdom that enough wealth
and power bring both security and happiness. I couldn’t agree with him more.
While the prophets of our Hebrew and Christian narratives saw all of this a very
long time ago, it is now very clear that our society, perhaps until now, has learned
The Rev. Joanne Sanders
Stanford Memorial Church
Pilgrimage to Wholeness: Remembering our Destiny: The Common Good
August 22, 2010
very little even though the covenantal, prophetic alternative of steadfast love, justice
and righteousness remains an offer. Those are the timeless offers in our texts today
too.
The hopefulness for me and for us is that the elemental passions of our prophetic
and gospel traditions assume that faith has little to do with private piety and
everything to do with the systemic maintenance of a humane infrastructure. To be
sure, some of those conversations have come into more plain and urgent view –
health care, job security, immigration reform, civil rights and educational access can
all be considered manifestations of justice and righteousness that are grounded in
our prophetic and gospel narratives, and in our communal solidarity with those who
have been before us and have called it “the common good.” That is, on the side of
our neighbor and neighborliness, local, global and otherwise. These teachings as
they were long ago and still are today, are compellingly urgent and call for our
attention. Remembering our Destiny to the Common Good means that we cannot
and must not hunker down in refusal of the new social reality where God has placed
us. It is indeed part of our wholeness. As we were reminded last Sunday, goodness
is not realized alone. It is always manifested with, through and for others.
To be sure, none of us need to be a Jesus or Jeremiah to see that the God of the Book
of All Religions (as Brueggeman calls it) is on the side of neighborliness, on the side
of the common good. It has been said that yes, God delights in it in fact. The
seriousness of the decision to be made is a pragmatic one.
Our prophetic
traditions have known for a very long time, and until now, wistfully sang in
bewilderment, when will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?
Have we learned? How do we embrace such realities today with maturity and
seriousness? We are so human after all. We are prone to forget as Anne Frank
The Rev. Joanne Sanders
Stanford Memorial Church
Pilgrimage to Wholeness: Remembering our Destiny: The Common Good
August 22, 2010
reminded us that no one need wait a moment, we can start now, start changing the
world in small or large ways.
I have in my hand two bookmarks from the Idaho Human Rights Memorial. They
will be available to you after the service today.
One says: never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can
change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. (Margaret Mead,
anthropologist)
I commend to you the example of Jacqueline Novogratz, who received her MBA
from Stanford. A counsel she internalized from the late public policy guru John
Gardner, one of her teachers and mentors here at the Stanford Graduate School of
Business is instructive: “ It is far more important to be interested in the world than
to be an interesting person.” Jacqueline left a career in international banking to
found and serve as the CEO of The Acumen Fund, a nonprofit venture capital firm
that is building a new paradigm – philanthropic venture capital.
Working with entrepreneurs on the ground in places like Kenya, Tanzania, Pakistan,
and India, the Fund invests in for-profit projects that bring basic services such as
clean water, maternal health care, and ambulance services to people who make less
than four dollars a day. Her book, The Blue Sweater, Bridging the Gap between Rich
and Poor in an interconnected world is an introduction to global poverty and a
spectrum of approaches to that. It is also a story of the evolution not merely of aid
but of idealism in our time. It is a story about the common good and building a
better world.
The other bookmark says this: The rights of all are diminished when the rights of
one are threatened. (Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights leader.)
The Rev. Joanne Sanders
Stanford Memorial Church
Pilgrimage to Wholeness: Remembering our Destiny: The Common Good
August 22, 2010
This is a poignant quote particularly for us in California considering the recent
landmark ruling on Proposition 8 by Judge Vaughn Walker overturning the ban on
same gender marriage in California. He ruled that the plaintiffs – the two couples
who sued the State of California -- were correct in their contention that Proposition
8 was unconstitutional and violated basic civil rights. From the decision:
Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians
for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing
more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples
are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating
against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from
fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court
concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.
Plaintiffs do not seek recognition of a new right. To characterize plaintiffs' objective as
'the right to same-sex marriage' would suggest that plaintiffs seek something different
from what opposite-sex couples across the state enjoy -- namely, marriage. Rather,
plaintiffs ask California to recognize their relationships for what they are: marriages.
The issue on the table is not who’s right about questions of faith or religion. It’s who
is entitled to equal protection by the Constitution when it comes to civil marriage.
The rights of all are diminished when the rights of one are threatened.
I want to end with a story that I shared earlier in the year. It also came up last week
in our talk back following the service. It seems appropriate to tell it again, as we
wrestle with the imperatives of our religious narratives and the social, global
The Rev. Joanne Sanders
Stanford Memorial Church
Pilgrimage to Wholeness: Remembering our Destiny: The Common Good
August 22, 2010
realities before us. Indeed, how we choose to lean in to our call to goodness and
contribute to the common good:
It is a Native American wisdom story that goes like this: One evening a grandfather
was teaching his young grandson about the internal battle that each person faces.
“There are two wolves struggling inside each of us, “ the old man said. “One wolf is
vengefulness, anger, resentment, self-pity and fear. The other wolf is compassion,
faithfulness, hope, truth, and love.” The grandson sat thinking for a moment and
then asked: “Which wolf wins grandfather?” His grandfather replied: “The one you
feed.”
The Rev. Joanne Sanders
Stanford Memorial Church