No man is an island.
No man is an island entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were,
As well as if a man of thy friends or thine own were.
Any man’s death diminishes me.
For I am part of mankind, and therefore
Never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
In this writing, John Donne gets at what may be the most important spiritual teaching. We are all connected. The death of any one person diminishes us all. It is a teaching that has been echoed again and again and again by spiritual leaders. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the last Sunday sermon that he preached at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., spoke about how our scientific advances had made the world one neighborhood. But, our spirituality and our ethics have not caught up, and we are not yet one brotherhood. We must become a brotherhood, he said. We must; we will live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools. We are knit together in this inescapable network of mutuality, he said. I will never be what I ought to be unless you are what you ought to be.
That was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s teaching. It has been echoed by other spiritual teachers, not just Christian leaders. Geshe Michael Roach, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, likes to say this: As long as you think you are separate, you will suffer. As long as we think we are separate, we will suffer. I believe this is a central teaching in Christian spirituality as well as in other spiritual traditions. We are so interconnected that it matters; it matters that thirty-three people were killed at Virginia Tech. It matters to us here.
It matters that parents lost children; children lost parents; siblings lost siblings. It matters that Cho Seung-Hui was so disturbed that he did this; it matters to us. The grief of Cho’s family matters. It matters that people are starving around the world; it matters that there are refugees in Darfur. Even though I want to ignore it, I am connected to all of those people.
We are connected to soldiers who are wounded, who lose limbs. We are connected to families of soldiers; we are connected to Iraqis. We are connected to the Iraqi mother who not only loses a daughter when she is killed, but also loses a son who is so angry at his sister’s death that he learns how to make a bomb.
I’m even connected to the guy that stands on the corner at the stoplight with the cardboard sign, begging for food, the guy I pretend I don’t see even when I’m stopped right in front of him. I’m connected to all of these people, and my welfare is dependent on their welfare.
We are woven together in this fabric, and that connection matters. Death “there” hurts us here. It’s not just a woven fabric of humanity, but we are beginning to become acutely aware that we are woven together with the earth, and that the earth’s destiny is our destiny. Degradation to our environment matters.
This truth of our connectedness was really brought home to me in a sermon I listened to on the Internet. It was preached this past Sunday by Alan Jones, the Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. In that sermon, he said that hell is disconnection. Hell is disconnection. Heaven is unity. The way he worded it was, Heaven is unity amidst unimaginable diversity. It is not uniformity, but it is realizing that even in our spectacular diversity we are one, and we are bound together. We are one not only with other people; we are one with God, one with creation, one with our selves.
Sin, according to Dean Jones, is the perverse denial of these connections. Sin is denying that we are connected to all those around us. Sin is denying that we are connected to those who are hungry. Sin is thinking that, as long as I’m fed, I’m OK.
I’m not OK. I am connected. What struck me about Dean Jones’ sermon was its simplicity. Hell is disconnection; Heaven is connection. I began to realize that we have a choice. Throughout our lives, we have a choice to be either more in Heaven, or more in hell. These choices come into play in every decision we make, but particularly after times of violence or tragedy.
After times of violence or tragedy, we can choose to put up walls of isolation and safety and security, and become more isolated and more in hell; or we can choose to enter more deeply into the lives and the suffering of others, and become stronger and more alive. One of my icons for this choice is what happened after the Oklahoma City bombing. The Oklahoma City bombing took place twelve years to the day before the massacre at Virginia Tech. Timothy McVeigh took a Ryder rental truck to the Murrah Federal Building, jam-packed with homemade explosives. The truck blew off one-third of this very large building. A hundred and sixty-eight people died. I remember that the moment that news spread, there was all of this speculation about the foreign terrorists who must have done this, and there was an immediate cry to strengthen our borders, to prevent others from coming in and threatening us. Then it was discovered that it was Timothy McVeigh, a white American from the heartland, who did it. This took the wind out of the sails of that isolationist urge.
But what interests me more was the other reaction. The other reaction was, the moment the news spread, people got in their cars. They left work, they left their families, they left their homes. They drove for hours, for hundreds of miles, to get to the site of the explosion. As soon as people arrived they would go to ground zero and they lined up, all of these people, with hand-made signs around their necks with their profession written on the signs. Relief workers could grab whomever they needed from certain professions and put them to work.
The whole community got so wrapped up in the relief effort that restaurants stopped charging for food. Volunteers were fed for free. Markets stopped charging for food. Hardware stores stopped charging for their supplies. Bus stations, train stations, airline terminals stopped charging for transportation. The whole community was rallied around. There were so many people lined up a blood banks that the blood banks had to turn donors away. More people were realizing their connections, leaving their own little bubbles of security to join this effort.
One thing that will always remain in my mind from this tragedy, was an African-American women’s Gospel choir that came to the site of the explosion. They positioned themselves right on the edge of the carnage, and they sang: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. As that music flowed through the carnage, everyone stopped, and everyone listened. In the midst of that moment of unity, white Oklahoma National Guard soldiers went up to the black Gospel singers and, with tears in their eyes, they embraced each other. The Kingdom of Heaven happened. Resurrection happened. Because people at that moment got it; people understood how connected they were. At that moment, they were impervious. In their unity was their strength.
Do you remember what happened after 9/11? How people all over the world were reaching out to us? Not only our allies, but also people who didn’t like us very much. Even people who considered us enemies were reaching out. There was this moment of world-wide strength; this unity amidst the diversity. This Kingdom of Heaven breaking in.
We have that choice. With every tragedy, whenever anyone is vulnerable, whenever anyone is broken, it is an opportunity for us to become stronger, at that place of brokenness. By realizing our connection; by reaching out to one another in compassion; that is how we become stronger.
We have two opportunities today to practice that here at Trinity. One is that our young adults group is participating in an initiative that is happening across the nation, begun at college campuses. Our young adults group has made prayer flags, maroon and white squares, that we are invited to write prayers upon. They will be strung together, and sent to Virginia Tech and prayer flags will come from all over the nation, showing prayers of support from across the country. We get to participate in that symbol of unity. These flags are available after the service today for you to write prayers upon.
Another way that we get to practice our connection with one another is in the healing prayers that are about to be offered. It is a remarkable thing—we get to come forward with whatever our brokenness is, and kneel, and be physically touched by other people. We get to express and experience the unity we have, not only with one another, but with God. We can let that love and that unity heal us. You can come forward not only with your own brokenness, but you can carry, you can bear, the brokenness of the world. You can bear the grief of those in Virginia. You can bear the grief of those in Iraq, and the grief of those all around the world who are struggling with death and pain and violence. You can bear that for them up to the altar rail, and kneel, and be connected with them and with God.
It is one more chance to make the choice to live into Heaven. The more we do that, the more we act toward realizing our union and our connection, the more we will experience the strength of the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen.