Welcome, friends. It is, as always, a delight to be with you in this pleasant place. It was Winston Churchill who famously said, “We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.” I was having lunch with a friend this past week who asked me what I would have done if I hadn’t been a pastor and writer, and I said I would have wanted to create beautiful and useful places for people to enjoy. In his book Walden, Henry David Thoreau said, “I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house.” At the end of his home-building at Walden Pond, Thoreau wrote what might be the loveliest sentence in the English language when one considers the wind and rain of this past week, “I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long…”
Alas, Thoreau’s cabin was sold to a local farmer by the name of Brooks Clark, who moved it to his own property and disassembled it, using parts of it to build a pig sty and other pieces of it to mend a barn. The only surviving fragment is a single timber on display at the Concord Museum in Massachusetts. I’ve been reading about Thoreau’s cabin because I want to build a replica of it at our farm, in the upper meadow, next to the woods, a quiet place where I can write. It turns out if you don’t have to install plumbing or electricity, building a 10×15 structure is surprisingly affordable. So I’m wanting to shape a building, that will in turn shape me.
I want that for our nation, too. Along with others, I want to shape a nation that will in turn shape us. Perhaps this is why so many of us feel the weight of history press upon us so acutely these days, to a degree we have never felt before. We realize a nation is being built, and we want to make sure that nation is built in such a way that others are blessed, not cursed, by its building. Others want to build a nation in which only they will prosper, a nation in which only they will have a say, a nation in which only they are free, a nation of limited democracy, limited opportunity, limited prosperity, and limited freedom.
I wrote a rather spirited letter to the editor which appeared in our local newspaper this past week, and a man took offense to it and told me that for someone who claimed to value tolerance I was most intolerant of the current administration. Fortuitously, I had just read an article about a philosopher named Karl Popper, who in 1945 coined the phrase “the paradox of tolerance.” The paradox of tolerance is this–if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. Boiled down, it means that the only thing a tolerant society should not tolerate is intolerance, since unlimited tolerance leads to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we do not defend a tolerant society against the tyranny of the intolerant, then those who are tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. This is the paradox of tolerance.
So when I was approached by this man who accused me of being intolerant, I was able to explain to him why we could not tolerate intolerance, and he listened, then said, “I understand what you’re saying, and I’ve changed my mind. Thank you for helping me grow.” No, I’m just kidding, he didn’t say that. He just told me I was un-American and that I better watch my step, that I was making people mad.
Just to be clear, and not that I’m Jesus, but if Jesus’s passion for justice infuriated the powerful and unprincipled, shouldn’t our passion for justice do the same. Remember that he was killed by a government, not a religion. Let’s dispense once and for all with the terrible lie that he was murdered by Jews. His was a political assassination, nothing more, nothing less. He was murdered for his intolerance of intolerance, for his refusal to stand quietly by while others suffered harm. He was killed for naming names, for pointing his finger directly at Herod and condemning his cruelty. If your passion for justice infuriates the powerful and unprincipled, then I say good for you, you are in excellent company.
Now understand this–every culture is given its character by the events that keep on happening in it. Think about that. The things that keep happening over and over again in a culture are the things that shape that culture. What was happening in first century Palestine was a pattern of tyranny forming a culture of tyranny.
Today in our nation there are patterns of tyranny misshaping the character of America. Commodities are being prized above community. Our nation is being shaped in directions we do not want, shaped in ways inconsistent with the values and Constitution we cherish. This angers us, so we respond accordingly, not with hatred, not with violence, but with determination to set matters right. There are those who awaken each morning determined to do harm and not good, to make room for a privileged few and not the struggling many. They make room for the oligarch, for the corporate insider, for the managers of hedge funds, for the politically entrenched and powerful, for the Christian Nationalists, for evangelical hucksters, but leave no room for the common people, for the children, for the needy or infirm, or anyone else they can not tolerate. We must not, we cannot, tolerate their intolerance.
What we seek for our nation is a culture of hospitality, what Henri Nouwen defined as the “creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy.” This is the Christian calling–not to rule, but to love. Not to control others, but to encourage them; never to crucify, but to resurrect; to shape a society of dignity and compassion that will in turn shape us.