Sermon

Hotel Rwanda

The Rev. Jack D. Bryant

Hope Unitarian Church

February 13, 2005

Reading: Genesis 19:1-14

The two angels came to Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gateway of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them, and bowed down with his face to the ground. He said, ‘Please, my lords, turn aside to your servant’s house and spend the night, and wash your feet; then you can rise early and go on your way.’ They said, ‘No; we will spend the night in the square.’ But he urged them strongly; so they turned aside to him and entered his house; and he made them a feast, and baked unleavened bread, and they ate.

But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house; and they called to Lot, ‘Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may know them.’ Lot went out of the door to the men, shut the door after him, and said, ‘I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.’ But they replied, ‘Stand back!’ And they said, ‘This fellow came here as an alien, and he would play the judge! Now we will deal worse with you than with them.’ Then they pressed hard against the man Lot, and came near the door to break it down. But the men inside reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them, and shut the door. And they struck with blindness the men who were at the door of the house, both small and great, so that they were unable to find the door.

Then the men said to Lot, ‘Have you anyone else here? Sons-in-law, sons, daughters, or anyone you have in the city—bring them out of the place. For we are about to destroy this place, because the outcry against its people has become great before the LORD, and the LORD has sent us to destroy it.’ So Lot went out and said to his sons-in-law, who were to marry his daughters, ‘Up, get out of this place; for the LORD is about to destroy the city.’ But he seemed to his sons-in-law to be jesting. When morning dawned, the angels urged Lot, saying, ‘Get up, take your wife and your two daughters who are here, or else you will be consumed in the punishment of the city.’ But he lingered; so the men seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand, the LORD being merciful to him, and they brought him out and left him outside the city.

Sermon

Four years ago Alan Dershowitz, the well known and sometimes controversial professor of law at Harvard University, wrote a book entitled The Genesis of Justice. His book was an examination of ten biblical stories of injustice. In the introduction he explained his belief that the reason the bible is full of stories of injustice is because such stories are the best way to teach the concept of justice. This morning I would use a similar approach to understanding love.

I’m wondering - how many of you have seen the movie, Hotel Rwanda? If you haven’t I highly recommend it. It tells the story of Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager in Rwanda during the genocide that swept that country in 1994. The genocide was the result of a long standing conflict between two ethnic groups in Rwanda - the Hutus and the Tutsis. When open warfare broke out in that country 800,000 people were killed in a matter of weeks when Hutu militias went on a rampage against Tutsis. Only a handful were killed in what we would think of as warfare. Almost all of the victims - men, women and children - were hacked to death with machetes.

Paul Rusesabagina is a Hutu married to a Tutsi. When the fighting broke out he bribed members of the militia to save his family and his Tutsi neighbors. He gave them refuge in the Hotel Mille Collines where he was a manager. Before long just over a thousand Tutsi refuges crowded into the Hotel. Using every trick in the book - and some that weren’t - Mr. Rusesabagina kept the militias out for eleven weeks until he and those he had sheltered were evacuated to safety.

The movie is not a documentary. In an interview I heard Mr. Rusesabagina said it is about ninety percent fact and ten percent fiction. There were practical reasons for adding a bit of fiction - if, for example, they had shown the true brutality of the killing they would not have been able to release the picture. They showed only limited and representative scenes of violence. One scene in particular demonstrates the scope of the horror. It is early in the morning when Mr. Rusesabagina has left the hotel to buy food and other supplies. On the way back he and his drive take a different road. Driving with their lights out for safety they suddenly begin bouncing wildly making him think they have run off the road. He stops to investigate and discovers they are still on the road - a road covered with hundreds of bodies that they are driving over. Such scenes were the norm in Rwanda in 1994.

Why did this happen? What was the root cause of the conflict between the Hutus and the Tutsis? That question is asked in the movie. The answer given has to do with colonial history. Rwanda was once part of Belgium’s African colonies. The Belgians are alleged in the movie to have arbitrarily divided the citizens of Rwanda into two groups. If you were taller or slightly fairer in complexion you were classified as a Tutsi and given certain types of jobs - especially administrative and government jobs. Those who were shorter and darker were called Hutus and given more menial jobs. Some accounts say this arbitrary system of classification actually began under the Germans who controlled Rwanda for several years before turning it over to the Belgians. Stop and think about it: Approximately eight hundred thousand people murdered because of a feud based on a colonial bureaucrat arbitrarily dividing people into two groups. It reminds me of the stories I’ve heard about teachers who arbitrarily divide their classes into two groups with different sets of privileges as a means of teaching about discrimination.

There is some doubt about the truth of the story as told in the movie. It may be that the division did not begin with either the Belgians or the Germans, but began because of long standing tribal differences. But the story - in the most important sense - is true. It doesn’t matter exactly how the differences were originally established. What matters is that the differences between Hutus and Tutsis are - for all practical purposes - as meaningless and insignificant as if someone had arbitrarily divided them - a difference that led to hundreds of thousands dying in Rwanda.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the killing. It continued in places like Sudan, Burundi and Somalia. It continues today. And you may ask why isn’t it stopped. In Rwanda there were United Nations troops on the ground - some of them at the Hotel Mille Collines. Unfortunately, they were under orders not to shoot - allowing the Hutu militias to murder at will. The movie provides a graphic - and I believe factual explanation. That explanation is contained in a scene where a Canadian Army colonel serving with the UN peace keeping troops angrily tells Mr. Rusesabagina that no help is coming because they are black. I would add that they also don’t have any oil.

When I watched the movie - and afterwards while reading about the actual events - I repeatedly thought of the story I read this morning from Genesis. It’s not an easy story. I’m not sure what to make of parts of it. What immediately drew me to it is that in the story Lot - like Paul Rusesabagina - provides food and shelter for strangers; and when people come to do violence to those strangers he protects them. It’s also a story which in its modern interpretation is frequently used to make the argument that homosexual behavior is demonic. But that is to misunderstand the story. Biblical scholars - equipped with a knowledge of cultural practices from the time of the story - will tell you that the problem with the behavior by Lot’s neighbors in Genesis was not its sexual content, but that it involved violence. It was not the sex - it was the violence that was the problem. But the modern misinterpretation of the story as a justification for homophobia reinforces what I think is the common thread that runs from Sodom and Gomorrah all the way to Rwanda - the ideas, beliefs and actions throughout human history - and here today among us as a nation, as a church and in our own families - the ideas, beliefs and actions that separate us from one another.

I don’t know if it was the Belgians or the Germans who invented the distinction between the Hutus and the Tutsis or whether they did it to themselves. I don’t think it matters. The difference - regardless of who invented it - was one without genuine meaning, a difference without meaning except as the justification for mass murder. In the story of Sodom and Gomorrah the fact that the two men - or angels, if you will - were strangers was again a difference without real meaning except as the justification for violence. And today the rest of the world stands by and does nothing, except an occasional verbal remonstrance, as mass murder between ethnic groups continue because of differences that don’t really matter. The western world intervened in Bosnia to stop the ethnic violence and genocide, but we won’t do it in Africa - because they are black and don’t have oil. But what does that have to do with being human and suffering? And what does one’s sexual orientation have to do with the legal ability to marry the human being you love and want to spend the rest of your life with? These kinds of differences are mindful of the racial theories of the Nazis - racial theories that were absolute nonsense - except as the justification for mass murder.

But what does this have to tell us about love? I began by saying I thought there was a lesson here about love, a lesson about the nature of love rooted in a story about the opposite of love. I think the story of Hotel Rwanda is one of the latest chapter in the ancient human story of the multitude of ways in which we find justification for dividing ourselves from one another. And I think it is this practice of division that is the opposite of love. Love - looking beyond notions of romantic love that usually come to mind - love is that which brings people together. The opposite of love is that which separates us from one another.

Paul Rusesabagina could have just saved his own family and turned his neighbors away. He could have turned away the next thousand people who came to the Hotel Mille Collines. He could have found a way to divide the Tutsis from the Hutus, black from white, straight from gay, liberal from conservative, or the sheep from the goats. But he didn’t. He rejected all the reasons for dividing himself from others. A lot of people have said what he did was an act of courage. I think it obviously is. Paul Rusesabagina, however, laughs at the idea. He says he just did what he was supposed to do. If we take him at his word - that what he did wasn’t courageous - we are left with actions that united people - we are left with nothing more nor less than an act of love. I think whenever we take in the stranger, whenever we reject the idea that another person is a stranger - we are rejecting the opposite of love and - instead - embracing love. Most of the time it doesn’t look much like our traditional understanding of love - something that has to do with flowers and cute cards and boxes of candy, and so on and so forth. It’s just saying yes to the idea that what we have in common outweighs our differences. But all too often that’s not what we do. All too often we seem obsessed with finding or focusing on our differences.

I met a woman about three weeks ago who told me a story about this. She’s not a Unitarian. She’s never attended a Unitarian church. She told me all this. She also told me that she had been curious about Unitarians and several months ago - to satisfy that curiosity - accepted an invitation to attend a lunch group made up of Unitarians from a church in the city where she lives. She attended several weeks and enjoyed it. The next week, however, she attended and found herself listening to a bitter political diatribe. It so upset her that she never went back - and, she said, she never will.

Evil takes many different forms. One of those forms is the opposite of love, the words and actions that divide us. That’s not to say that people don’t have real differences - social, political, ethnic. Some such differences are real. They are not to be denied and not to be avoided. But the transformation of legitimate differences into something that splits people apart is evil. In the story from Genesis the two men - or angels - announce that God is going to destroy the city because of the wickedness of its inhabitants. This got me to thinking about angel stories. I don’t believe in angels in the conventional sense. I never have. But I realized that I like - really like - almost all the stories of angels I’ve ever heard. I wondered why. It occurs to me that one way of understanding angels is as a metaphor for our better selves. The angel in a story isn’t someone else, it’s part of me - and part of you. One way of understanding the story about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, then, isn’t to think of it as the act of the angels or God, it is to see it as a story of the people who destroy themselves and their own city - a city that was not an actual city, a city that was itself a metaphor for every city, every community, every nation. And the seed of that destruction was the rejection of love and the adoption of a divisiveness of spirit that justified violence against the stranger - violence against the person they could label as other.

Across our country today we have become embroiled in political and religious divides. Pro-lifers stand divided against the evil of those who favor choice. Those for choice see those who oppose them as evil. Neo-Cons write books about how to talk to liberals - if you must - making it clear that liberals are the other - and you know what to do with those who are others. And there are political liberals who use such angry rhetoric against conservatives that people walk away from them, never to return. The rhetoric on both sides sounds remarkably like the justification for genocide used by the Hutus in Rwanda. Too many churches have become places where such behavior is commonplace. It may be the conservatives in Evangelical Christian Churches and the liberals in churches such as ours, but in truth they are - by tolerating such speech and behavior - both espousing the same doctrine - a doctrine of division and separation - a doctrine that is the opposite of love, a doctrine that is evil. It is long overdue for people of goodwill in all churches to speak the truth about this and to no longer tolerate it.

And it is a truth that needs to be said in our nation and in our families. We spend so much time and so much money talking about love. Tomorrow, on Valentine’s Day, I’m sure hundreds of millions of dollars - if not billions - will be spent on cards with hearts and flowers and presents. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve given and received flowers already this year. It’s a wonderful thing to do. But how much more wonderful would it be if we decided to cultivate a culture of inclusion, a culture of looking for ways to build bridges between one another, a culture of love?

Such a culture - a culture based on love - would never deny our differences, but instead of focusing on them, it would focus on what connects us to one another. It would be the culture that lies at the heart of what Martin Luther King, Jr. called the Beloved Community. But that idea was not original to Dr. King. The idea of the Beloved Community was originally espoused by the philosopher Josiah Royce. And Royce himself was just paraphrasing what Jesus said when he spoke of the Kingdom of God. And if we look at what Jesus said we discover that the root idea of his Kingdom of God lies in what he called the most important of the commandments - a commandment rooted in Judaism - the need to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul - and another that is like it - to love your neighbor as yourself. Paul Rusesabagina - when he took in not only his family but his neighbors - and when he gave shelter to a thousand strangers - said no to division and yes to loving his neighbors as himself. I wonder what I would do in those circumstances? What would you have done? I wonder what would we do as a church - not just in the face of genocide, but in the face of the next stranger who walks through our doors.

Amen.