Happy New Year!

28 September 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

It is time to take stock of who we are, what we serve, and whether what we serve is adequate to who we are meant to be.

Let us choose our beliefs and our religion as we choose our companions and mates. Let us not go where we are not honored and cherished.

Let us seek spiritual paths that take us more seriously than we take ourselves, that lift us up rather than bringing us down.

Let us remember that all great religious prophets have said that the way that leads toward life is narrow, and few take it. We would aspire to be among those few.

May we seek not an easy religion, but a hard one, not a partial challenge but a complete one.

Let us, in this time of taking stock, treat ourselves and others as though we were all, equally, children of God, sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself, made of stardust enfolded in dreams and nearly unlimited possibilities. For we are, we are, we are.

Amen.

SERMON: Happy New Year!

When I began planning this sermon, I didn’t think it would have anything to do with last week’s sermon on the book The DaVinci Code, but it does. One theme in that book, and in the huge interest it has stirred up, is the message that some religions lie, mislead people, or are simply inadequate vehicles for providing enough help with our life questions.

At first, I didn’t think about, or even want to think about, the Jewish festival of Rosh Hashanah in that way. I’ve always liked it, and found it to be very moving, whether you’re Jewish or not.

But then, when I realized that there was another religious festival that also began yesterday, one that is both very similar to and very different from Rosh Hashanah, it reframed the subject.

So now I think what we are doing this morning is taking a trip. It’s a trip through time, around the world, within and without us, a trip to God and a trip beyond God.

That’s one of the things I love most about liberal religion; we don’t need to stop asking questions at conventional borders of religious thought. The only religious “convention” we need to take seriously is the convention of taking ourselves, our lives, and our relationships seriously. And in this quest, we can and do travel beyond the boundaries of any and every more particular religious orthodoxy. It’s comparative religion in the same way we do comparative politics, comparative ideologies, even comparative diets.

Let’s begin with Rosh Hashanah. It is one of the holiest days in the Jewish year, and marks the beginning of their new year. This is now the year 5764 in Jewish tradition, though the Hebrew traditions go back only about 3500 to 3800 years.

Rosh Hashanah is not like our January 1st New Year celebration, except in one important way. It is a time for repentance and serious introspection, for looking back at the mistakes we made during the past year, and correcting them. If you take the tradition seriously, this is important because God keeps books in which he writes who has been good and bad, and who will have a good and bad year next year. The “Book of Life” on last year will be sealed on Yom Kippur in a week, so it’s important to repent, pray, and do charitable deeds this week to impress God with your good intentions, so he might give you a better “report.” Not all Jews care about this part, like not all Christians care about Communion; but it is an ancient part of the tradition.

Saying it this way makes God sound like a Boy Scout troop leader, but that is one of the things about the God of the Bible. Scholars have shown that when he was created, he was created in the image of a Hebrew tribal chief who set the laws, prescribed the behavioral boundaries, and rewarded or punished the people of his tribe. Even the covenant between God and His people was modeled on Hittite suzerainty treaties that predated them.

And Rosh Hashanah shows much of this history, for Jews are supposed to make amends to people in their community they have wronged, before they can “get right with God.” The focus is on us, our tribe, and our tribe’s God. This isn’t news; anyone raised in a Western religion is familiar with those traits of this God. But they’re worth remembering.

Now I want to leave the “Jewishness” of this festival to focus on its insights into the human condition: our human condition. Because it is really quite profound, and there is something for all of us here, whether we are Jewish or not. Many parts of religions are particular, meant to give members, insiders, an identity as parts of that religion. And those outside the religion can ignore those parts, as members of the other religion would ignore our own odd rituals — like lighting a chalice to begin each service, or having 150 votive candles to light in the side windows.

But in most religions, there are “universal” elements with insights into the human condition, and those are often precious fruits, even for outsiders. There is something important, for example, about not just tumbling from one year to the next without stopping to take stock, and that’s what Rosh Hashanah is about. The ancient Hebrews are given credit for inventing the idea of a rhythm to the week, where six regular days are followed by a holy day when we are to stop working and focus on our gratitude for the gifts of life. All of Western civilization owes the Jews a huge debt of gratitude for this notion that time has a rhythm, that we must stop from time to time and take stock.

And Rosh Hashanah continues this sense of rhythm in a bigger way, by saying we should take ten days at the end of every year to look at ourselves and how we are living with real honesty, and make changes rather than just running blindly on from one year to the next.

And we owe Jews another debt of gratitude for insisting that before we can make our peace with God, we must make our peace with each other, with those in our community, our tribe, from whom we have grown estranged. Don’t pray to God for forgiveness until you have done all you can to earn it from those you have harmed, whether intentionally or not.

Think of how much better off we would all be if we did that every year, if we took ten whole days for the task of taking ourselves seriously, our relationships and our relation to all we hold most sacred seriously, and changed our behavior accordingly.

We can go astray for only a year before we need to seek reconciliation with those we may have wronged. Is that worth ten days? Is there anyone here who wouldn’t benefit from this kind of discipline? I know we can all think of ten friends who would be a lot better off if they did this. But the odds are, they’re thinking it might help us, too.

We’re not told how to do this, just that it’s up to us, and God is watching and judging and will write the results down in that Book he’s keeping on us. Frankly, I don’t like that part much. I keep thinking of Santa Claus keeping a list of who is naughty and nice, or of Big Brother watching me. But that has a lot to do with the fact that I don’t think religion is about God, and that the concept of God is often more misleading than helpful.

The Hebrew religion began, in the opinion of some biblical scholars and archaeologists, as a departure from the Canaanite religion, which was a powerful nature religion with a goddess, a Divine Mother, a Mother Nature, as the focus. In their early years, up until about 2600 years ago, the Hebrews were not monotheists, but polytheists, worshiping the gods and goddesses of their surrounding cultures, as well as Jahweh. King Solomon, regarded as the wisest of the wise Hebrew rulers, worshiped both Jahweh and the goddess Asherah, and had a statue of this great goddess in his temple. And even the Ten Commandments endorse polytheism, saying only that “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

But around 2600 years ago a very conservative and exclusive change came, and the goddesses were banished from a central place in the religion. The creation story of a nature goddess who created everything out of herself was turned into the highly illogical creation story of a male deity who created everything by himself. It became a religion in which both feminine power and women were second-rate citizens, as hundreds of millions of women in all three Western religions have known for many centuries.

Does it necessarily seem that way to the women in those religions? Not all of them. Even Muslim or Christian fundamentalist women will say they choose and cherish their subordinate roles. But to most of us, it looks very unbalanced. I think it would look equally unbalanced to the men in those religions, if their central deity were a Goddess, most ecclesiastical leaders were women, and men didn’t count toward a minyan, had to veil their faces, or were told it was shameful for them to speak in church, as St. Paul said.

Jahweh remains a kind of tribal chief who wants his people to get along and to worship him, but who has no room for people finding alternate religious paths, or alternate gods. And this notion of a “jealous God” is central to all three Western religions (four, counting Mormons).

In fact, we know it so well you may wonder why I’m bothering to bring it up. I bring it up as a segue to the other religious festival that started yesterday, from an even older religion. Yesterday was the Hindu festival of Navaratri, also known as the Durga festival. I’m betting that almost nobody here has ever heard of it.

Like Rosh Hashanah, this is a time for Hindus to take stock, though the scope is much broader. Hinduism has the broadest horizons and most nuanced depth of any religion I know, and all that shows up here.

The most abiding human failing in Hinduism isn’t sin or estrangement from God, but ignorance. We do not realize our real identity, and live our lives in the service of lesser identities that are not worthy of us. Our real identity is infinite and eternal, not just limited to this life here and now.

Our modern physicists tell us that the universe began with a Big Bang, and that everything in the universe, including us, is made up entirely of stardust. A Hindu teacher could have written this story, perhaps forty centuries ago.

But Hindu understandings of God and gods is very different from Western understandings. The overall reality is called Brahman, the sum of all creative, sustaining and destructive forces in the universe. But Brahman is not a god. Brahman is an abstract concept, which can’t be reduced to a human-like god.

Still, Hindus know that people can’t relate well to abstract concepts, and so they have created many gods and goddesses to give more useful images for people to focus on. But all these gods: Krishna, Shiva, Vishnu, and all the goddesses, aren’t beings, don’t exist in any except a highly imaginative sense.

And both male and female powers are recognized as essential. In fact, as in all ancient nature religions, the power belongs to the goddesses, not the gods. As one Hindu teacher explains it, the Divine Mother is the cosmic energy, the omnipotent power, of God. She is called by many names, one of which is Durga.

The supreme power of God, they say, is manifested as knowledge, activity, and strength. And each of these is represented by a goddess, on whom we can focus to draw ourselves closer to that kind of energy.

It surprised me to realize how much this is like the teachings of the Gnostics in the first century of the Christian era. They also taught that the highest god was impersonal, a concept much like Brahman, and that Jahweh was just a second-order deity, made to create things. So they said the Jews and early Christians had completely misunderstood the nature of God by worshiping Jahweh, much as the Hindus teach that all the gods and goddesses are imaginative creations to represent some of the attributes of Brahman, the impersonal and ineffable reality behind all reality.

Like all religions, Hinduism grew out of the kinds of human questions and yearnings that have always been with us. So even though it may sound odd and foreign, it really isn’t. All religions grow from the hopes, fears and yearnings of the human heart, given form by the human imaginations of different times and places.

What we’re talking about is that same condition of being disconnected and out of sync that the Jews are focusing on in Rosh Hashanah. But here, our identity is not as members of a tribe or worshipers of a tribal god. In Hinduism, our identity is as parts of all the infinite and eternal elements of the universe; we are made of stardust, and our true home cannot be contained by anything less than infinity and eternity.

What keeps us blinded to our real nature? It is at least three things that we are to try and combat during this time of year, aided by the Divine Mother Durga in several of her forms.

First, we are blinded by ignorance and the unhappiness that goes with it. The goddess Saraswati, one of Mother Durga’s manifestations, aids by drawing us toward knowledge and happiness. We must seek paths that lead toward knowledge and happiness rather than their opposites, and the infinite and eternal energy of the universe is our friend and ally here as the goddess Saraswati, rather than a judge that keeps score in a Book.

Second, we are misled by pursuing the wrong kind of wealth. We are easily misled to put ourselves in pursuit of material wealth. Almost all religions have realized this. Ancient Hebrews wrote about the people fashioning a calf-god out of their gold as soon as Moses was out of sight, which sounds surprisingly modern. In the Christian scriptures, Jesus asks, “What does it profit a person if they gain the whole world and lose their soul?” and the ancient Hindus ask the same question. Here, the powerful and sexy goddess Lakshmi is the part that wants to help awaken us to and excite us by the spiritual and physical pleasures of life that are free for the taking. She wants to make us fall in love and in lust with life. Sex, for Hindus, is a good and natural thing, rather than a sin as so many Western religions often regard it. Again, Lakshmi is not our judge; she is the part of us that is there to help if only we will awaken to her.

And third, we are held captive by inertia, indolence, sleep, and laziness. We may be in a rut, but it’s our rut, and we prefer it to the more unfamiliar life that could be happier. This inertia is very strong, and requires a very strong force to break it apart, to shatter it.

And that’s a job for the goddess Kali, the terrifying aspect of Mother Durga. Kali has the power to break us free, to shatter our denial, to shatter the pretense that we are being true to our highest calling while living according to our lowest callings.

Kali is a terrifying goddess, often pictured with blood dripping from her teeth. But her enemies are spiritual, not mortal. She seeks to destroy the demons of our lower nature, and is there to help us shatter their hold on us.

So we may appeal to Kali to combine with the other aspects of Mother Durga, the Divine Mother, Mother Nature, that great source of feminine powers of creation and nurture who has gone by so many names. She has been excluded in Western religions, but is prominent and powerful in most others. And again, even Kali is not here to frighten or judge us or write our names in a Book. She is the fierce and powerful part of the universe and of us that is always here to help.

And the Durga Festival, or Navaratri, is a reminder, just as Rosh Hashanah is, that we need to stop, take stock, look inside ourselves and at our lives, and retune them. Just as an orchestra gets in tune by listening to the “A” pitch before a concert, so we need to get in tune by listening to those still, small, and powerful voices within us.

In some ways, these two festivals are what religion is about. They are the voices saying “Wake up!” Don’t be less than you are called to be! Don’t spend life living out low values when your deepest nature yearns only for high values. Don’t get walled up in pettiness or hatred when you can become animated by knowledge, life-pursuing passion and a strength of spirit, a strength of character, that will amaze you if only you will take this time to attend to it. Wake up! Life is too important to sleep through, and you are too important to be sleeping when so much knowledge, passion, excitement and happiness are all around you for the taking!

But look at the difference in how these two great religions of Judaism and Hinduism go about calling us to our higher calling. Judaism, Christianity and Islam have all struggled throughout their histories to outgrow the shadow of the old tribal deity who lays down commandments, rewards and punishes, and seems unable to offer us the other half, the feminine half, of the holy forces that create and sustain life — except in the mystical forms which make up relatively small parts of these religions. And there is always the theological limit, the hidden message that whatever we do must be in the worship of that one male deity.

How different is the prescription of Hinduism! You can appeal to these powers through either the three-part Divine Mother, or the three-part male deities of Krishna, Vishnu and Shiva. If you protest that you don’t think any of these really exist as beings, Hindu teachers will remind you that of course they don’t, they exist as imaginative vehicles to help carry these important reminders of our highest and deepest nature.

Now you see why I said this was like a trip through time, around the world, within and without us, a trip to God and a trip beyond God. The great German poet Goethe once said that the person who doesn’t know two languages doesn’t even know one language, because they’ll mistake their way of talking for the Truth. The same is true in religion. For centuries, people in Western civilization have been taught there is only one basic religion. They have killed hundreds of thousands of others who didn’t see it that way. That couldn’t possibly be in the service of a true, or even an adequate, concept of God.

We are left with the same kind of insight suggested by that book The DaVinci Code: the suspicion that major religions have misled us in major ways, that they have often failed to give us adequate help, and that they are making us more out of balance, rather than more whole. Examining our religions and beliefs is an essential part of the self-inventory that are at the center of both religions.

And so it is the season of Rosh Hashanah, the season of the Mother Durga festival, when we are asked to take stock, to repent of ways of living that do not honor us or our highest calling. If I were a Jew, I might tell you to think of this in terms of Jahweh or that Book of Life. If I were a Hindu, I might suggest that you honor the divine energies you seek through the imaginative goddesses Saraswati, Lakshmi and Kali.

But I’m a 21st century religious liberal. So instead, I’ll remind you that this is indeed the beginning of a new year, and it is time to take stock. It is the beginning of a new school year, a new church year, a year with a new ministerial intern, a new pledge drive for the money needed to make this church vibrant and aggressive in pursuing its many duties.

It is time to take stock. All around us are materials, people, stories and myths with clues about how we might do it. Some of you will call this power God; some may call it the Divine Mother. Both personally and professionally, I don’t care what you call it, as long as you can call it forth. Call it forth. For that power, if you will seek it, can help you focus on your most holy calling. It’s always here, always available, just waiting to be called forth.

Now it’s our move.