Here is the text from my opening remarks at the Hennepin County forum for Affordable Housing, Immigrant rights, and Restorative Justice:
"Thank you so much for coming out this evening and for your participation. Again thank you to Commissioner Callison for your service in our county. We are grateful and honored by your presence here tonight.
I want to welcome you here and welcome you to this place. I was asked to spiritually ground our evening together and so to do that I will start with the important work of first pointing out the bathrooms. There is an accessible and all gender restroom in the corner of this room. There are additional restrooms downstairs to your left. If you need a ramped exit, it is in the back of this room, then turn right and there is a ramp taking you out to the south side of our parking lot.
The Mills Church is in district 6 of Hennepin County. This church began 121 years ago and rented the original Minnetonka Town Hall for $1 a Sunday. Village Hall is the building on the west side of this parking and hosts our youth ministries.
It is pretty normal to begin a story of where here is with the particular dates and boundaries of our group. However, most stories have a beginning before you or I entered the narrative. This church, this city, this district, this county, this state exists on Dakota land. Lake Minnetonka and Minnehaha creek are and will always be sacred sites. What we call Baker road has long before been a migratory trail that went from Shakopee up to lake Mille lacs for both the Dakato and the Ojibwe nations.
Behind my own history is a very old mythic story that primed me to believe that my prosperity depended on, accepts, and tolerates the dispossession of someone else. Whether conscious or unconscious my gain comes at someone else’s loss. For me this myth also came with a kind of religious justification. Our god wanted us to have, therefore it is understandable that they do not. Maybe because we are chosen, or exceptional, superior or better than in some way: This is often the hidden and explicit Why behind a reality where I have and some do not. And though painful to confront, avoidance does not promise a better future for anyone.
2700 years ago one in a very great history of Hebrew Prophets challenged this story…the myth that prosperity must tolerate dispossession. Instead this poet declared that prosperity depended on seeing and bringing justice for the dispossessed. In this story, to be chosen or exceptional means to be a people that treat the foreigner as native born, and provides shelter and protection to single mothers, to the orphan, refugee, and to fatherless children. This prophet named Micah expands our imagination by exhorting us to work toward a world where nation no longer fights against nation. We no longer expend energy training for war, rather our resources are directed toward peace with God, others, and creation. Make justice, love mercy, walk humbly. Beat swords and weapons into shovels. And then this other famous line…Then, “Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid.” Micah 4:4
Everyone, not some at the expense of others, but everyone has meaningful work tending their own grape vines and is able to provide a safe haven for their family flourishing and at peace under their own fig tree.
Now just one more date in history...
It was August 1790…Jewish congregations in NewPort Rhode Island wrote a letter to the newly elected first president of the United States, George Washington.
In their congratulations was a profound question. Will we as Jews be welcome? Will we have a home and a place in this new nation?
Washington gave a 340 word response that included these words…
“For happily the Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance…The children from the stock of Abraham” are welcome and then he quotes Micah 4:4
“Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid.“
This wonderful history would have remained unknown to me if it wasn’t for our good neighbors and friends at Bet Shalom congregation around the corner on Orchard Road. I am indebted to them and grateful for our kinship.
And these beautiful words and history would have remained without a tune for me if it wasn’t for a talented young man from Puerto Rico name Lin-Manuel Miranda
In writing the award winning musical about Alexander Hamilton.
He had the vision to have these words sung by an African American George Washington. Building on the vision that Washington saw and now including those for whom most of this nations founding Fathers did not see.
[sing]
“Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid. They’ll be safe in the nation we’ve made / I want to sit under my own vine and fig tree a moment alone in the shade, at home in this nation we’ve made.”
These lyrics capture the spiritual foundation of all of our major religions. The ability to identify my own desires and be able to extend them to the other. To love the other as you love yourself.
"I want to sit under my own vine" is simply extended to Everyone. Everyone will sit. It is a story and a vision that dispossesses no one.
My hope tonight is that our time this evening be guided and blessed by the same prayer that George Washington extended to the New Port Jewish community…
"May the God of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in God’s own due time and way, everlastingly happy."
Amen"
