First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

PRAYER

          Mystery of many names and mystery beyond all naming, we sit here today at the very beginning of a new year. Whether you believe in cyclical time or the linear version today is a new beginning for all of us. Perhaps it’s time to set down our burdens and examine them. With the weight off our shoulders let’s take a good look at those indispensables that we’ve carted with us for the past umpteen years. George Carlen says that wherever we go we need to take a little of our stuff with us. Are the burdens you’re been carrying around just too large to be considered a little of your stuff? That argument you had last year - you know the one I mean - the one that was never resolved - the one that still gets replayed in your head first thing every morning. Perhaps it’s time to bury the hatchet and call that person up and tell them you don’t care who’s right, you just want your friendship restored to its former luster. I’m thinking now of those rooms at the various concentration camps during the Holocaust - those rooms filled with the detritus of a hurried exit - those rooms filled with things that had no life in and of themselves. Holocaust means a whole burning. Maybe it’s time to burn all the burdens we’ve been carrying all these years. Ask yourself this question, Who am I without these burdens? You might be surprised to find yourself facing a new you. It’s a new year and a new time to rub the slate of resentments clean. In a hundred years who will know the score you’re keeping? Better to wipe off that slate and use it for a grocery list - at least that would feed you. And now let us all promise to honor our feelings this coming year - to honor our pain, our anger, our love, our joy, to honor all the feelings that come our way and to stop imagining that we can control any of this thing we call life. Make us all non-anxious presences in life - create in us the loving space to simply watch and not judge - prepare us to meet life on its own terms, remembering that how we think things should be and how things are rarely line up together. In the name of everything that is holy and that is, precisely, everything. Amen

SERMON

Introduction:

“Frankie and Johnny were lovers. O my Gawd how they did love! They swore to be true to each other, As true as the stars above. He was her man but he done her wrong.”

          When I was a bad boy - that is - when I was a practicing alcoholic I did a whole bunch of folks wrong! As a consequence I bathed in a font of forgiveness day and night. When you’re a blackout drinker and your nightly activities are related to you by those that you insulted, harassed, and otherwise abused you get used to saying things like, “I’m sorry, I really don’t remember that.” Or “I can’t believe I said, did, or acted in that manner and I sincerely hope you know that it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with my drinking.” Whatever! You get to say, “I’m sorry” a lot, and you know what, people are generally willing to say they forgive you.

          The forgiveness factor is directly related to how long people have known you. If it’s an old friend, a close relative, a spouse, brother or sister, then the forgiveness font is fairly plentiful. You can bathe there night and day if you wish - if you can stand the looks of disgust as they say they forgive you, if you can bring yourself to face them one more time, or if simply you can take any more forgiveness. This a point that a lot of people don’t get, understand, sabe - there comes a point at which you are so full of forgiveness that you can’t take anymore. How many times can you go back to a spouse and hear her say, I forgive you, but I’ll never forget until you’re dreaming of the day when she’ll have Alzheimer’s? And by saying that you’re full of forgiveness doesn’t in this case mean that you’ve been forgiving a lot of folks it means that you have been forgiven umpteen times and the forgiveness of others is beginning to look bad on you - like a cheap suit.

          And speaking of cheap suits I can’t help but free associate to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called cheap grace. And in the end that’s what forgiveness of those multiple transgressions begins to feel like - cheap grace. You’ve gotten away with murder - once again.

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:24 KJV).

          Jesus supposedly said this from the cross while he was hanging there, nailed up so that the weight of his body would slowly suffocate him. His feet nailed to a support with his knees bent so all the weight would be on his arms. In all that pain Jesus said, Forgive them, they know not what they do? Luke’s one of the later Gospels. Lots of additions and traditions got blended into the good doctor’s book.

          The earliest gospel, Mark, was written before Luke. And on the cross Jesus is reported to have said only one thing, Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani! Aramaic for “My god, my god, why has thou forsaken me?”

So … Which story do you buy?

          In Luke Jesus forgives his murderers as he is being murdered. In Mark Jesus’ only voice on the cross is a voice of anger, rage, resentment and hurt!

          My thesis for today is simple: If you think forgiveness is a difficult problem - you’re right, but probably not for the right reasons! Forgiveness is a symptom - the real problem is anger! Because we can’t forgive someone without first being angry with them. And not many people want to own their anger!

          Traditionally anger is considered to be one of the seven deadly sins - remembering that sin is simply separation from God or from the source of our being.  Do you remember your seven deadlies - let me refresh your memory; Pride, Envy, Anger, Avarice, Sadness, Gluttony & Lust.

          The American Buddhist Monk, Phillip Kapleau, said “Anger is the means of staving off the fear of the isolation of dying.” The solitariness of death scares the Be-Jesus out of us and that fear inspires anger.

          In psychological circles it is believed that anger, pure anger, never happens and that anger is a cluster emotion - secondary to and combined with fear and threat.

          The reason we have trouble forgiving is that we have not allowed ourselves the luxury of our anger. Acting out our anger can kill others, stuffing our anger can kill us. We seem to be caught between a rock and a hard place.

          If the source of anger is threat or fear, then we must understand what threatens us, what we are truly afraid of. It is rather human-like to defend ourselves when we are being threatened.

          Recently a president of a prominent Democratic nation has built his entire regime around being threatened.      

          My friend the Buddhist monk, Claude AnShin Thomas, who is also a Vietnam Veteran, said that after 9/11 we had an enormous opportunity to turn the dharma wheel. Turning the dharma wheel is a good thing for Buddhist - it’s sort of like teaching peace. The world post 9/11 was on our side … the world was reaching out to us. What would have happened if when we flew over Afghanistan we had dropped, instead of bombs, food, medicine and supplies? What if the better angles of our natures had responded?

          In her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gilead, Marilynne Robinson, has the old, dying preacher writing a letter to his seven-year-old son. In part of the letter he says, “I would advise you against defensiveness on principle. It precludes the best eventualities along with the worst. At the most basic level it expresses a lack of faith. As I have said, the worst eventualities can have great value as experience. And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.” Another problem - how do we see Osama bin Laden as a rescuer?

            Perhaps the heart of this problem surfaces best when we get away from the world of morality and enter the world of aesthetics. John Calvin, pre-eminent among the 16^th Century Reformed theologians, says that each of us is an actor on God’s stage and that God is our audience. This gets at the point in a more convenient and expedient manner. For if our actions are not to be judged morally by those who surround us and go to make up our lives, but rather they are to be judged as a performance - then we get closer to the problem. Is an actor forgiven a bad performance? Do we feel a need to forgive a painter for a bad painting? When we hear someone play the violin like it’s a cat being tortured, do we even begin to think that we need to forgive that person their bad playing?

          When an actor has a bad performance they are encouraged not to dwell on it. The best way to do this is to be in the moment and the next time the curtain comes up to begin again, to start over as if it were the first time the actor had ever performed that play.

          Joel Gregory who used to be the preacher at First Baptist in Dallas calls this beginning again the final stage of forgiveness. Imagine you’ve got a daughter that you’ve disowned and simply telling her one day, “I’d like to be your dad again, and I’d like you to be my daughter again.” Or say you’ve got an old friend that you’ve fallen out with - you’d say to that friend, “Hey, let’s start over, let’s be friends again.” Sure you run the risk of being rebuffed, but is that any worse than waking up every morning with those same tapes of resentment and bitterness running through your heart and mind? Starting over again would be akin to beginning a new chapter in the story of your friendship, a new chapter in the narrative of what it means to be a father who has a daughter.

          We all tell ourselves stories - that’s how we make our lives meaningful - everyone does it from childhood to old age. These stories are sometimes known as core narratives. They are no more or less true than the narrative of Jesus itself. The stories we tell ourselves are there to keep us in a comfort zone - whatever makes us happy or strokes us is in. Whatever we don’t like we either keep it out or expand the story to contain the discomfort.

          To forgive one must first realize what has scared us into being angry - what has pushed us out of our comfort zone.

          Reality has a way of not cooperating with our comfort zones. If you’re angry a lot or feel powerless to forgive those that have dumped upon your dreams then the stories you are telling yourself might sound like this, “This isn’t fair, I’m a good person. Things like this don’t happen to good people. Where is the justice in what has happened to me?” You see the problem doesn’t lie in the events themselves - in reality. The problem lies in your interpretation of the events - how well you have or have not included these threatening events in your core narratives. For in the end the only thing that actually counts is your interpretation of reality.

          Feeling anxious, angry, unforgiving - it’s probably time to rewrite your core narrative.

          Do you remember the way you felt when the Beatles went from the loving mop heads of The Rubber Soul Album to the freaks of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?

          The Beatles had met the Maha-Rishi, they’d gone to India, George had taken sitar lessons, and oh yeah, they’d dropped Acid.

          Their psychological experiences caused them to rewrite, refigure, reformat, reinvent who the Beatles were and if you loved them because, as John said, they were more popular than Jesus Christ, himself, or if you loved them in spite of this statement, then you - who could have been threatened by their change - you changed, too. You and I helped rewrite the core narrative of who the Beatles were. And, of course, it didn’t hurt if you had also dropped acid.

          Can’t forgive someone for what they’ve done to you, how they abused you, discarded you, betrayed you. Rewrite your story. Put their actions in perspective, deal with them, their actions, your reactions, detriangulate yourself, redefine yourself so that your understanding of grace and justice is not so narrowly construed.

          Try to remember if you’ve allowed someone to stomp on your dream there was a time when you thought that person worthy of your dream. It helps to again give that person as much credit as you can for being a good and worthy human being. Don’t forget the minute community is posited - the second you have an alliance, a love, a relationship you have automatically given the other person the trump card of betrayal. People act out from their fears/threats/hurts. Can we even know why someone chooses to play the trump card of betrayal? Perhaps it would help to remember when we have in times past played such a card?

          So … let go of the story that hurts you. Write a story that heals and blesses you.

          Frederick Nietzsche once said, “That which does not kill me … makes me stronger.” We must, if we are to survive, optimize the possibilities for survival.

          And it’s not as simple as either you see the glass half empty or half full - no!

          You’ve told yourself the same stories for so many years - are you happy yet? Do you still have fear? Do you still feel threatened?

          You’ve got to expand your repertoire. Write some new material for God’s sake. If you were a comedian you’d be booed off the stage!

          Again, Marilynne Robinson in her Pulitzer Prize winning book, Gilead, suggests that looking at our relationship with God in this actor/performer mode, a la John Calvin, is one way to see how God might enjoy us. In other words, God isn’t passing morality judgments on us. The book of life isn’t full of black marks; it’s full of bad reviews.

          And what is the difference you might ask? Glad you ask that! We can’t learn anything from a moral judgment - other than the fact that we are in fact wrong! But from a bad review - my god the possibilities are endless.

          In the first play I ever wrote, entitled, “The Valley of the Shadow” the reviewer from the Tallahassee Democrat, John Habich, raked me across the coals. At one point in the review he said that my play had more tragic flaws in it than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. Did I cry over this review? No, I contacted the paper, had a meeting with John and began to learn more about playwriting as a product of that review.

          What if we had been taught that God was really a life-coach, that God was on our side and somewhere along the way she had suggested ways in which we could, you know, enhance our performance? 

          But what if you feel that you are literally caught in a hellish situation - caught in a performance not of your own design? What do you do then?

          Concentration camp survival literature consistently shows that even in that environment the way the people in the camps reacted, responded to that horrific environment made all the difference in the world. You’ve got to look for the cracks in the door of fate. You’re the salesperson for your life - you see the door of fate crack open - stick your foot in there. Impose yourself - sing, dance, whatever the situation calls for.

          In conclusion I’d like to offer you an easy formula for forgiveness - a way for you to know how to deal with your anger, whom to forgive and how to forgive them … unfortunately no such formula exists. Like much of life, the manner in which we deal with our anger at people, situations and even our anger with inanimate objects brings a great deal to bear on the people that could benefit from our forgiveness, never forgetting that we are one of those people.

          I want to reiterate the fact that you are the dealer in your life. I want to remind you as the dealer of your life you can reshuffle the deck any time you like and start a new deal. But you need to keep in mind that no matter how many times you shuffle your deck, once you enter relationship, community or any sort of intimacy the card at the top of the deck, the one you’re about to deal out is always the trump card of betrayal. It looks like a card trick, but it turns out the trick may be on you.

          If you simply don’t want to deal with others, then you can play solitaire. Lots of people have done it, some have actually won at that game - Zen Masters and some religious mystics of every order come to mind. But I must warn you there is a danger in playing solitaire. You just might deal the trump card of betrayal to yourself. State institutions are full of people who have dealt themselves this card and I can only conjecture that suicides are holding this card in their hand for years before they actually play it.

          Forty-five years ago Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen had a patient who had been lost in a snowstorm during a skiing trip. When they found him he was badly frost bit. It looked like he was going to lose both of his feet. He waited for a world-class vascular surgeon and with this doctor’s help his left foot became better while his right foot took a turn for the worse. This surgeon and a team of other surgeons all recommended the amputation of the right foot. He refused.

          Finally when the toxins from that gangrenous foot were surging through his body and he was on the edge of death, the doctors and his finance made one last effort to get his permission to amputate. Again he refused. At which point his finance pulled the brilliant diamond ring from her finger and thrust it upon the black little toe of his right foot. “I hate this damned foot,” she sobbed, “if you want this foot so damned much, why don’t you marry it!” He had the amputation. They are still married.

          There’s a parallel between our resentments, our betrayals, our inability to forgive and get on with life and this man’s gangrenous foot. I guess the question boils down to; what are you married to - the baggage of your life, or life itself.