Choosing the Feathered Things

Davidson Loehr

February 11, 2001

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PUPPET SHOW:

INTRO. (Lisa): Now is the time for children to come down for the Story for All Ages. Children please come sit in front of the curtain and bring your gifts for Caritas so you can put them in the wagon after the puppet show. And now The First UU No Strings Attached Puppet Players present”The Lesson”.

GRUMP: I am so bored, nothing ever happens at this church.

BIG RACCOON: We’re looking for sticks!

LITTLE RACCOON: Sticks! Sticks!

BIG RACCOON: You can do lots of tricks with sticks. Can you help us?

LITTLE RACCOON: Were in a fix. We need some sticks!

GRUMP: Uh, no. (sarcastically)

WOLF: I need some bricks to go with their sticks ’cause we’ve got a lot of fun things to fix. Would you like to join us and show off your tricks?

GRUMP: You people. I mean puppets, are nuts!

CATERPILLAR: I was wondering whether, you might have a feather? If you join me, we could make things together.

GRUMP: What do I look like, Big Bird?

CATERPILLAR: Could I assume, you don’t have a plume?

GRUMP: No, but you need a padded room.

BIG RACCOON: (appears with sticks) Would you help us with our sticks?

LITTLE RACCOON: Sticks! Sticks!

WOLF: (with brick) Would you help me lay some bricks?

CATERPILLAR: (appears with feathers) Would you help me glue some feathers?

ALL PUPPETS: We can all have fun together!

GRUMP: No, I will not help you with your sticks! I will not help you lay some bricks! I will not help you glue your feathers! Why don’t you all get lost together!

BIG RACCOON: Okay.

LITTLE RACCOON: Have it your way.

WOLF: You don’t have to huff and puff about it.

CATEPILLAR: What a bird brain!

(Puppets disappear and make all kinds of construction noises.)

(Raccoons and Wolf appear with house)

WOLF: All you do is gripe and grouse.

BIG RACCOON: But look at us.

LITTLE RACCOON: We made a house!

GRUMP: That’s not fair! I don’t have a house!

WOLF: Stop your complaining.

BIG RACCOON: Stop your grousing! You had your chance.

(Turn house to logo)

LITTLE RACCOON: at Paws-on-Housing!

GRUMP: DOH! (Buries head in hands)

BIRD: Look at me up in the sky. With these wings, I can fly!

GRUMP: I want to fly. I want a house. I wish I hadn’t been such a louse. You’re right, you’re right. I’ve learned, I’ve learned. I have no right to what I’ve spurned. I’ve learned my lesson. Okay. Okay. Now what can I help you make today? (Walks over to side of puppets.)

BIG RACCOON: I ‘ve got some string.

LITTLE RACCOON: String!

WOLF: I’ve got some glue!

BIRD: Let’s go figure out what to do!

ALL: Yea!

END

SERMON: Choosing the Feathered Things

As many of you have read in the latest church newsletter, your governing board and I have been busy during the last month, on two very exciting projects. The first was the remarkable offer of 142 acres of land in the Hill Country, complete with four buildings, a new barn and an outdoor pool. Some of you have visited the land; I hope others will make the trip to see it before you vote on whether to recommend that your board accept this gift in the congregational meeting two weeks from today. There are some legal and financial details we are still investigating, and some good sober questions we need to resolve, but it’s an amazing gift, filled with exciting possibilities.

For me, though, the other project was even more exciting. Your board and I developed an ambitious model for serving the church that we have modestly called The Austin Model. While it will evolve and change over time, as a living thing would do, its essence is really very simple. We know that organizations, including churches, exist to make a difference in the world, that they are supposed to be doing something. It is like sailing a boat rather than minding the store, and like standing on the bridge to see where we’re actually going rather than being in the engine room check oil levels. We’re not just trying to stay afloat, we need to ask where are we going, and are we making any progress?

Here’s another way of understanding it. We are taking nearly a half million dollars a year from this community, and the time and talents of over five hundred adults. What are we doing that’s worth that amount of time, energy and money? The money could be used instead to open a bookstore, a little coffee house, maybe a donut shop. In what ways is what we are doing more worthwhile than that? I think we need to be able to answer, both to ourselves and to the community, just what differences we are making that are worth that kind of time and money. And I think you need to be able to give a satisfactory answer to your Baptist or Catholic friends who wonder what in hell (or at least the preparation for hell) you are doing here.

We want to begin consciously planning the actions of myself and the other staff to make a positive difference in the lives of our members, our children, and the community. And as far as possible, we want to take a rough measurement of the differences we are making, and keep you informed of them so that you will feel some of the excitement as we move in this new style.

This may all sound very obvious, you might expect that of course all churches and all organizations would think this way. But they don’t. And to be honest, it is an intimidating prospect, this business of actually taking who we are and what we’re doing with your money and your trust seriously enough to measure our actions by the differences they are making.

It is exciting and frankly, a little scary. It changes, or at least sharpens, my focus in planning sermons.

I wonder what I should do to be more intentional and effective in addressing issues that might make a positive difference in your life, the lives of your children and the community? How do we choose the things in life that might make a positive difference? Or in terms of this morning’s puppet show, how do we choose those things we need to make a home, or those feathered things that can help our spirit take flight? It was Emily Dickinson who said that hope is the thing with feathers, and I’ve always liked her definition. Hope is the thing with feathers, the thing that lifts us up. How do we choose that thing?

There is plenty to gripe about if we’d rather do that, you know. Our lives aren’t as perfect as we fantasize they should be. Not everybody loves us, or even understands us. Our jobs are like most jobs, filled with ups and downs, but not ideal. And as of this week with Motorola’s layoffs, there are over 4,000 fewer jobs in Austin, a number that may soon increase. Besides our jobs, our relationships are seldom perfect. And our kids will almost all grow up to be just regular old adults, not the envy of the civilized world. They’ll probably make about as many dumb mistakes as we did, as will their kids and their kids’ kids. It’s easy to just sit it out, gripe that Nuts, I don’t like this place, or this place, or this place. And we do it too often and too easily, don’t we?

It’s as though we come to believe that the world owes us something. As though we were born with this long list of entitlements. I don’t think we are. I think there is only one gift offered to us, and that is the gift of life itself. I think we’re paid in full the day we’re born. After that, it’s up to us to learn how to negotiate for the other things we wish we had. I don’t think the world owes us love. It doesn’t even owe us fairness or justice. Those are conditions we have to create if we really want them. We were given life, and the chance to make something of it, or just sit and be disappointed. It matters what we believe. It also matters what we choose.

And given the choice, we have to work to discover who we are and make a home for ourselves in life. We need to choose the things with feathers. And I think we must wish the same for others, and try to make our interactions with them positive rather than negative, creative rather than destructive. If our beliefs can’t help us do that, we probably have the wrong beliefs. If they can help us do that, they’re probably working fairly well for us and those in our greater community. That’s a pretty pragmatic approach to religion, but I think it’s the right one.

But the only real miracle is the gift of life. It wasn’t supposed to be perfect, it was only supposed to present itself to us, to let us see what we would and could do with it. If we sit back like couch potatoes waiting for life to please us, it will probably be a very long wait. This is true in churches, too, including this one.

Several years ago I was talking about things like this with two colleagues, and we discovered that the same visitor had been to each of our churches a few times, and then went away. So she had visited a Unitarian church, an American Baptist church, and a liberal Disciples of Christ church.

They were all good churches with good people. In each one, the visitor could have found ways to ask her questions, to meet wonderful friends, to struggle with personal and spiritual issues on several levels. None of the churches was any more perfect than the visitor, but they were all good enough. Maybe she finally found a church where she decided to take root, make friends and become a participant rather than an onlooker. If so, she was the exception.

It’s easy to read this as a failure of the church to integrate visitors, and it’s fair. We could do more to integrate visitors into the body of the church, and we should. But it isn’t only a failure of the churches. It’s also the habit of people to see themselves only as shoppers who keep moving on until something finds a way of keeping them there.

If you are a visitor here, or have just been coming for a few months, here’s something to think about: less than half of you will still be here a year from now. In this or any other church, most who come never join, never make a commitment, and never become a part of the church. Liberal churches, conservative churches, big churches, little churches, it’s the same: most visitors don’t last a year.

I think people visit churches sort of thinking, “Well, I’ll just sit here quietly and see if they swarm around me to make me feel welcome.’ The truth is, it isn’t likely to happen very often. So while I want to welcome all visitors, I want to challenge you. Don’t be passive here. Don’t expect these people to try harder to keep you than you try to stay. We’re not any better at it than you are, and creating a meaningful relationship is a two-way street.

And the way you stay ‘ here or anywhere ‘ is to seek for and choose those things, those relationships, that you can build on and grow from. Seek the things you need to make a home for yourself here, and seek the hopeful things, the bits that nourish you.

This isn’t something I have always known. It is something I learned in a memorable moment. And while I can’t give you the experience I had, I can tell you the story.

It was about twenty years ago, in a preaching class in graduate school. David, our professor was a very gifted preacher who was deeply serious about the ministry, and equally serious about professionalism. In those minutes before class begins, several of the students were whining about the church they all attended, complaining that the preacher was horrible, the service was amateurish, and they didn’t get a single thing out of it. David glared at these future ministers and said ‘How hard did you try?’

That was the first time I really understood that attending a worship service, like attending to living, is meant to be an activity, not a passivity. It changed a lot for me. The church I attended during graduate school also had a very poor preacher, and I could fall into whining about not getting anything out of the worship service as quickly as the next person.

But after that day in class, the question ‘How hard did you try?’ stayed with me. And, while I seldom heard a sermon worth remembering in the next five years, I was always glad I had attended church, but each week I saw it as a personal challenge to find something moving, something memorable in the service. Sometimes, it was the organist, sometimes the sound or feel of a hymn. Sometimes, it was just sitting there as the candles were extinguished, watching the wispy smoke rise up into the dark at the top of the big old church, thinking of the smoke as a spirit set free. But every Sunday, I went to church to try and find something, and it made all the difference.

So if you are a visitor, or have been coming here less than a year, I want to offer you a challenge. Don’t sit passively with us. Come try with us. Or if this church doesn’t suit you and you need to find another, try hard there.

Most churches are pretty good, and this one is pretty good too. We can raise spiritual questions here without any regard for whether they cross over the boundaries of an orthodoxy. You can find some interesting and engaging people here whose spiritual searches are similar to your own, once you get to know one another. We have a strong and active social conscience, we are important parts of our community, and during the coming years we will learn to make even bigger positive differences in the community.

So I challenge you to try hard here, and to come up to me next February and tell me you are still here. We’re not unfriendly. In fact I think many of us are quite friendly. But acceptance and community here require some effort on your part. If you want meaningful relationships and associations here, you have to try. If you want to feel chosen, you have to choose. If you want to live in a friendly community, you need to make friends. I challenge you to come see me and tell me you have done it.

Now some of you are sitting there thinking “Yeah, right!” It’s a lot easier said than done. We sit passively; we hesitate to reach out, to meet new people, partly because most of us just aren’t very good at it, but also because it is very risky. You could fail, feel rebuffed, and be embarrassed. It is so easy to stand back, mind the shop, wait cautiously to see if maybe the world will take the first step, come to you, and make it easy.

It’s like sailing a boat again. Much of life is kind of like sailing a boat. On shore, the boat looks good, and you can have all these great fantasies about how cool it would be to be sailing. But once you actually put the boat in the water, it’s bound to get messier. The wind comes up, the balance shifts, you have to learn what you’re doing, and not all lessons keep you dry.

I like this sailing metaphor even though my experience with sailboats has not been impressive. I was about sixteen the first time I went sailing. My friend Tom took me out in his family’s small sailboat. He steered, I sat on one side feeling the breeze and thinking how cool this was, this sailing business. Within a few minutes, he uttered the strangest sentence I had ever heard in my life. “Prepare to come about,” he said. “Prepare to come about,” I thought: hey, that must be sailing talk. Now I really know I’m a sailor, because we’re talking sailing talk. This is so cool!

Then, with absolutely no warning, I learned what that four-word bit of sailing talk meant. For the land-lubbers here, those words are a kind of shorthand that mean “In about three seconds, the sail is going to swing across the boat, hit you in the chest, knock you overboard, and tip the whole boat over!” Tom explained that to me while we were swimming around in the middle of the lake. And I decided, right there bobbing up and down like fish bait, that I didn’t much like sailing. I still liked the idea of sailing, and the fantasies about it, as long as no boat containing me ever touched the water.

So I understand the fear of failure, and the fact that wishing something were so doesn’t accomplish a single thing, though it’s not as intimidating as putting the boat into the water. I suspect that’s why, in so many areas of life, we are controlled by our fears rather than our hopes, and keep our boats on the shore. We don’t want to fail, we don’t want to be embarrassed, and we don’t want to feel like an idiot.

Sometimes, it helps to hear stories about others who have failed, so we don’t feel so alone when it happens to us. So I have another story for you about someone who was so good at failure he made a career out of it. If you’ve ever felt foolish or inadequate because you made a fool of yourself, this might make you feel better.

It was a while ago; he was a man without any apparent gifts or any apparent luck. I have never personally known such a failure, and I doubt that you have either.

First, he failed as a businessman. Maybe he thought politics would be easier, so the next year he ran for the state legislature, and lost. He went back into business and two years later, he failed in business again.

Besides his habit of failure, life wasn’t very kind to him and he wasn’t very lucky, because the following year his sweetheart died and the next year, not surprisingly, he had a nervous breakdown. Two years later, incredibly, he tried politics for a third time, and for a third time he lost. Then perhaps thinking that his problem was that he had set his sights too low, he ran for Congress. He lost.

About this time in reading his story, I thought this is a guy who just didn’t get it. There are people like that, and he was one of them. Life was giving him all the clues he needed, and he wasn’t listening. If he had any gifts, it seemed pretty clear they didn’t lie in running a business or in winning elections. How many times do you tip the boat over before you decide you weren’t meant to be a sailor?

Still, three years later he ran for Congress again, and was defeated again, and two years later he tried again and again he lost. This man had never won an election. He had run five times and lost five times. When do you get tired of bobbing up and down in the middle of the lake like fish bait? But he wasn’t through. He decided to aim still higher.

So his sixth defeat was for the Senate, his seventh defeat was for the Vice Presidency, and his eighth consecutive defeat, with no victories, was for the Senate again.

Finally, finally! Two years later, he was elected President. Then he won the second and last election of his life when he was re-elected as President in 1864. If you look on your calendars or your daily planners, they’ll tell you that tomorrow is his birthday. We Americans tell a lot of stories about Abraham Lincoln. But we almost never remember that in his whole life, he won only two elections and one war and his victory in that war is still not universally acclaimed in some parts of the South.

But how, after so many successive defeats, was he able to keep choosing the feathered thing? How did he keep putting the boat in the water, when it had turned over on him eight times in a row? I honestly don’t know. I wouldn’t have done it. I would have given up, or found another career, some time before the eighth consecutive failure. I suspect most of you would have, too. That’s just one of the reasons that we won’t have our birthdays written into the next century’s calendars. He doesn’t seem to have spent much time looking for sticks and bricks, looking to stop and make a home. But Abraham Lincoln had an amazing ability to keep looking for and finding hope over, and over, and over again.

If this were a competition, we could feel pretty inadequate next to Lincoln. But this is church. This is the time and the place when we gather together to seek inspiration from higher visions and strivings of more nobility and character. Sometimes we do it by looking to the lives of great religious figures. Today, I used the life of a great American for whom official religion was not a very important category. It is remarkable, I think, how many similarities we find in the lives of great religious figures and great civic figures.

They all show the powerful presence of an invisible kind of force, a kind of dynamism that helped them steer the course of their lives. It isn’t a “force” in the sense of some scientifically demonstrable energy field; it is the force of a powerful and life-affirming kind of attitude. The power of that hopeful, trusting attitude beckons to me through these stories, and I hope it beckons to you as well.

Because life wants to be an active word, not a passive one. And there is a source for that activity that seems to dwell within and around us. Call it the will of God, the inner and outer moving of the Holy Spirit, the Tao, the dynamic presence of the Life Force, or call it something else. As long as you can call it forth, it doesn’t much matter what you

call it. But it has feathers, this indescribable thing. And if we can keep seeking and choosing that feathered thing, it will absolutely make all the difference: all the difference in the world.

Endnotes

The puppet show script was a collaborative effort. I gave the puppeteers a script that gave the general direction and made the points I had incorporated into the sermon. They modified and adapted it, adding their own creative twists. They also turned it into Dr. Seuss-like rhyming. The puppeteers were Lisa Sutton, Eric Kay, David Smith and Melissa Smith.

The Story of a Life

Failed in business – 1831

Lost election for legislature – 1832

Failed again in business – 1834

Sweetheart died – 1835

Nervous breakdown – 1836

Lost second political race – 1838

Defeated for Congress – 1843

Defeated for Congress – 1846

Defeated for Congress – 1848

Defeated for US Senate – 1855

Defeated for Vice President – 1856

Defeated for US Senate – 1858

Elected President – 1860

(Abraham Lincoln)