Funny Church Store

May 13, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 7875

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Mystery of many names, mystery beyond all naming, today we wish to speak of misunderstandings. Today we bring before the congregation here gathered the idea that listening may be more of a passive activity than we imagined. When we’re listening there are times in which what we wish to hear stands in the way of what is being said. Empty us, Great Spirit, leech from us the agendas, hidden and open, as we gather here this morning. Make of each of us a receptacle of peace. If we try to put iced tea in our favorite pitcher, it will not fit if the pitcher is already filled with beer. The use of the receptacle is in the vacuity of its space. Make us empty Great Spirit as we gather here this morning. Our monkey minds keep chattering in the background, but we will in this worship space pull away from the distracting voices in our heads, we will gather our minds in the intervals between the noises, between the conflicting voices that call for us to react in a world that’s already rife with reactions. Also in this hour help us examine our intentions on which our road to hell is paved. Help us be aware enough to see that holding out for what seemingly benefits us, excludes us from participating in a salvation that may be disguised as something that we secretly despise, secretly wish would simply go away.

Mothers and fathers gather with their children this day. May they realize that who they are has nothing to do with where they came from or what has come from them. Mothers and fathers, your children are not you, and their actions are their actions. Having a child who is a brain surgeon doesn’t make you a brain surgeon, nor does it reflect well on you. Their glory and honor is theirs not yours. Likewise having a jailbird as a son throws no aspersions in your direction. Their crimes are not your crimes. Yes, we are all connected, but the fruits of one’s actions are one’s own even when pride and shame declare otherwise.

Bring us now to a point of stillness in which we can feel our hearts beating within us, feel our breath as it revolves in and out of us. In the space between the breaths let us pause and ask ourselves who is it that is breathing, since in fact, this breath started without our conscious intervention and continues when we slip into sleep and unconsciousness. As we rely on that hidden source to keep us alive, let us lean back on that hidden source and relax into the hereness of our existence. We are not in control. Hallelujah and Amen. We pray this in the name of everything that is holy and that is exactly everything.

Amen

SERMON-Funny Church Store

Introduction:

When I moved to New Haven to attend the Yale School of Drama in 1989, I rented a truck and car dolly and moved myself. I saved a bundle. Viv followed me in her 2002 BMW when we went to return the truck. We couldn’t find the place. We kept driving up and down this same stretch of New England back road, but the rental place was nowhere in sight. I stopped at a minit mart and went in to ask directions. The man behind the counter was from somewhere in Asia. I explained my predicament and his eyes lit up. “Yes, Yes, I know where that is. You go this way down the road, and turn right at the Funny Church Store.” He smiled glad that he’d been able to help. “The Funny Church Store?” I asked with a puzzled look on my face. “Yes, the Funny Church Store, you’ll see it on your right, it’s right behind there.” “Behind the Funny Church Store?” “That’s right!” I walked back to the truck and Viv yelled at me from her car window, “Do you know where it is?”

I walked over to her car smiling. “I know exactly, where it is.”

Driving toward the funny church store I was imagining a church whose Pastor would look and sound something like this – Jesus and Moses were playing golf. Moses approached the ball, and Jesus said, “What iron are you using on this shot?” “The four iron,” said Moses. “Well,” said Jesus, “Tiger Woods would use the five iron.” Moses stepped up to the ball and gave it a whack. The ball went pretty far, but then dropped into the lake. Jesus took his five iron and approached his ball. “I told you, Tiger Woods would use the five iron!” Jesus hit the ball well, it went further than Moses’ ball, but also dropped into the lake. Jesus went over and was walking on the water looking for both balls when a group of golfers played through. One of the golfers turned to Moses and asked, “Say, who does that guy think he is, Jesus Christ?” “Well,” said Moses, “he is Jesus Christ, but he thinks he’s Tiger Woods.”

After driving up and down the same stretch of highway I finally saw the Budget Rent a Car Sign. The rental place was directly behind a furniture store. A Funny Church Store.

Every time I retell this story about the funny church store I am reminded of my mother. You’ll get the connection later.

When my mother graduated from teacher’s college in Bluefield West Virginia, she thought her father might help her get a job – he was President of the local School Board. Daddy Jack was, if anything, a fair man who practiced his business like it was his church. He didn’t even want a hint of scandal around his family and to prove that he hadn’t influenced my mother’s position he appointed her to one of the schools in the middle of a coal-mining town. It was literally a one-room schoolhouse with one of the fifth graders that was 15 years old and out weighed my mother by a hundred pounds. My mother was terrified, but since she was her father’s favorite, he called her Queenie; she was determined not to leave this job until it was well done.

By recess, she felt she just about got a hold of the group, but was afraid of the energy that would be infused in the malicious assembly once they went outside to play. She gave them a stern warning before they recessed, “If I see you misbehaving on the playground, I’m gonna tap on the window, and when I do that you’d better get in here immediately or you’ll be late for your whipping.”

It was winter and the janitor of the school had built a fire in an old trash-burning barrel on the playground. The kids who got cold could go over there and stand by the fire. My mother looked up just in time to see the 15 year old 5th grader holding a cat’s face to the fire. She jumped up and tapped angrily on the glass. Retrieving the paddle she walked out into the front of the classroom to await the culprit’s arrival. She waited, but then realized the door to cloakroom was closed and he was probably waiting outside the closed door. When she opened the door, much to her dismay, there was a line of some 16 students, nearly half the class, that was lined up and ready to be paddled. They had all heard the angry tapping, and all were guilty of something. My mother took them on one by one, paddling each until her arm ached and she was nearly laughing. You’d have to know mother to understand that, when she fell and hurt herself, she always laughed. It was her way of dealing with the pain.

Today, my mother’s actions would raise more than eyebrows, she would lose her job, and probably be banded from teaching forever. But then again those that would condemn her today were not back in the coal fields teaching fifth graders who outweighed and towered over them. Mother went on to teach for nearly thirty years, winning award after award. She was tough, she demanded authority and attention and she got it, or else.

Mother’s background and upbringing stayed with her, along with her West Virginia twang, throughout a lifetime of travel when my father who was in the Air Force.

There’s a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals named Mrs. Malaprop. Mrs. Malaprop is known for saying the wrong thing at the funniest times. The word malapropos entered English usage around 1660, derived from the French phrase mal a propos (literally “ill suited to the purpose”).

Here are two examples of malaprops the first from Mrs. Malaprop, “She’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile” and the second from Curly of Three Stooges fame after he’s been insulted by Mo, “Hey, I resemble that remark!”

There is a sense in which my mother was the West Virginia version of Mrs. Malaprop.

One summer evening after my freshman year at the University of Florida I’d brought some friends home. Late one night these about to be college sophomores, were drinking beer and eagerly talking about the Vietnam War, black power, the hippies, marijuana, free love, we were getting loaded and feeling the power of youth; always young, always strong and with our entire lives before us.

My mother had stayed up after dad had gone to bed, and she was sitting in the dining room with us, listening, and laughing at our jokes. My friends always loved my mother. Finally, she’d had enough white wine that she decided she would chime in when the black power issue came up.

“I read his autobiography, you know. It was fascinating.”

“Whose biography?” one of my friends wanted to know.

Mother was proud, this was her moment. She wasn’t in Bluefield any more, and her hillbilly friends were all forgotten as she smiled and said, “Why, the Autobiography of Moslem X!”

Everyone laughed.

My girlfriend at the time saw my mother leave hurriedly, her head down and embarrassed.

“Is she all right?” she asked concerned.

“She’s fine,” I said knowing I would hear about this later.

It’s weird. You see, the moment my mother had become the bell of the ball, Cinderella with the shoe that fits, the minute she had finally graduated from Hicksville, she took it personally, and declined the honor.

Had she thrown back her head and laughed with the rest of us, she would have risen in our eyes to the heights of Maureen O’Sullivan or Katherine Hepburn.

But she misunderstood; she thought her moment of triumph was her moment of defeat. She thought our laughter was a club to which she could not belong, when in reality she had built that club and christen it with mirth.

Speaking of mothers?

People in different parts of the world celebrate Mother’s Day on different days of the year because that day has different meanings. The ancient Greeks had a festival to Cybele, a great mother of gods, and it was celebrated around the Vernal Equinox. In Rome another holiday, Matronalia, that was dedicated to Juno, a male god, though mothers were usually given gifts on his day.

After the Civil War social activist Julia Ward Howe borrowed Mother’s Day from the English. Julia Ward Howe is best known for her “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which was set to already-existing music, and first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862 and quickly became one of the most popular songs of the Union during the Civil War.

Originally Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day was a call to unite women against war. For that first Mother’s Day in 1870 she wrote this Mother’s Day Proclamation.

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have breasts,

Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,

Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn

All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.

We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country

To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.

It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”

Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,

Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means

Whereby the great human family can live in peace,

Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,

But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask

That a general congress of women without limit of nationality

May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient

And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,

To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,

The amicable settlement of international questions,

The great and general interests of peace.

So how was that message turned/deflected from mother’s concerns about their children’s deaths and mutilations – to concern for the mothers themselves? Can you see a parallel between what Jesus came to proclaim – the kingdom, right here, right now – and how they (the church) have taken his message away and made the church about the messenger. As Rudolf Bultmann asked, “How did the Proclaimer become the Proclaimed?”

The Greeks used to have a saying, don’t kill the messenger – well, the church went one step further, not only did they kill the messenger, but they perverted the message. The kingdom is someplace else; the reward is later – this is invaluable propaganda for fat cat churches, and fat cat ministers and priests.

You came here with an anticipation of what you want. Some want serenity, some advice, some spirituality, some the celebration of the human, some reassurance that things will be okay. But when will you understand that these expectations are born from the same desire that changed the original care of mothers for their children into what the National Restaurant Association calls the biggest sales day of the year? And when will you understand that these expectations are born from the same desire that changed the Jesus of Love One Another into the Inquisition?

You come to the funny church store looking for that painting to go with that sofa. You decide in advance exactly what you need, but hey, you’re keeping that a secret – you imagine in your heart of hearts that the funny church store can guess, that I can guess, that a person of the cloth can guess what you refuse to admit even to yourselves.

There is a line in the play, Medicine Men toward the end of the play the black servant of Albert Schweitzer, Paul Subira says, “We can’t pick out those we love “quite unexpectedly they are presented to us.”

It’s time you stepped aside and let your life live itself. It’s time you stop interfering, it’s time to look and see exactly what’s being offered you. This is your life.

My job, Dr. Loehr’s job, it’s not to lead you anywhere – into what – spirituality – a sabe world view – the one-upmanship of liberalism? God? We’re here for one reason and one reason only to define ourselves in public – to articulate existentially what we feel about our lives, our spiritual journeys – why?

It’s an old maxim of good writing. The more specific you get the more general it becomes. The hope is that if you witness this individuation, then you will accept the challenge and articulate who you are. And here’s the “Funny” as in odd/paradoxical part of the funny church store. The more we settle into the real life we are leading, the life we are being offered, the more we speak from within – the more we resonate with one another and the cosmos.

Recently, physicists have become aware of what are called fractals.

The basic concept of fractals is that they contain a large degree of self-similarity. This means that they usually contain little copies of themselves buried deep within the original. (Online source:

http://www.jracademy.com/~jtucek/math/fractals.html)

This notion has often been alluded to in poetry and fiction. But now it seems, it is physically demonstrable.

And that is why somas are, fundamentally, recreations of the organic model of the cosmos itself. (Hanna, 7)

If, we are models of the cosmos itself, according to the recent discoveries of fractals, then it follows that to be created in the image of God is to be created in the image of the cosmos. What exactly is the cosmos?

The cosmos is a continuous explosion of joy. It is sheer release and letting-go of an immense compression and, in a sense, depression. It is a 20 billion-year orgasm. (Hanna, 9)

Awareness is what allowed us to differentiate in the first place. We were a part of a family, but we moved away from home. Then we were part of a college, but we graduated. Then, we were part of a country, but our awareness took us beyond that to the point where we could and can identify with the pain that is suffered by other countries, other peoples.

We need to forget about trying to fix ourselves. There’s nothing to fix. Our lives … the ones we so desperately want to change can only be lived from the inside. First we’ve got to live the life we’re offered, then, and only then, can we possibly think of navigating elsewhere.