In the Beginning

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© Davidson Loehr

February 2, 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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Four Part Series

In the Beginning

Original Sins and Blessings

Reconsidering the Concept of God

The Legitimate Heir to Salvation

PRAYER:

Once in awhile – not often, but once in awhile – a very painful moment gets our attention. It breaks through all the mind-numbing manipulations of our best advertising and political geniuses, and wakes us up, often rudely. It hurts. And, if we will let it, it may bring us some wisdom.

I love that paradox of wisdom coming through unwanted pain. The best statement of it I’ve ever read was written by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, some 2500 years ago:

Pain that cannot forget

falls drop by drop

upon the heart

until in our despair

there comes wisdom

through the awful

grace of God.

Yesterday another of those awful moments got to us. Our space shuttle Columbia exploded and disintegrated over Texas around 8:00 yesterday morning, less than 15 minutes before it was to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Here was a crew of seven people, an international crew: a black man, an Israeli, two women – one from India – a couple American Top Gun Air Force pilots, some doctors and scientists. Different sexes, races, nationalities, and religions.

Yet we all knew immediately that all these lives were equal, not ranked according to their ethnicity or ideology. If we hadn’t realized it, there would have been something dangerously missing from us, I think. Perhaps that realization is some of the wisdom that comes through what Aeschylus called “the awful grace of God.”

Yet the timing of this tragedy will bring a revelation, if we will let it. For our elected leaders are preparing to invade a sovereign nation and slaughter an estimated tens of thousands of innocent civilians. They and we try to ignore this human sacrifice by calling it “collateral damage.”

But no one yesterday dismissed those seven deaths as collateral damage from our space program. It would have been vulgar to do so. We showed each of their faces. We told their stories. We cried for the families they left behind.

Yesterday we remembered that all the lives lost were equally precious, regardless of sex, race, religion or nationality. Can we really now forget it again so quickly, and resume our talk of unprovoked war, of using our weapons of mass destruction to destroy huge masses of our brothers and sisters in Iraq?

If we are to squeeze a lesson from yesterday’s tragedy, let it be to remember that all lives are equally sacred, and that war – even if it were an honest war – is the ultimate failure of our imagination, our leadership, and our humanity.

Let us pray that those seven deaths do not go by without letting them remind us that no other people are enough different from us that we have license to kill them in an unprovoked war.

SERMON: In the Beginning…

Those of you who heard the Rev. Donald Wheat preach here on December 29th will remember he said one reason liberal religion loses out to the many more literalistic varieties is because we don’t have a good story. He meant a story of creation, of human nature, of the human condition, and of prescriptions for the yearnings and fears that always seem to arise for those of us in the human condition.

Last summer, my 16-year-old niece had an even more pointed accusation. She’s a Christian fundamentalist, and she and my brother visited me in Quebec while thousands of UUs were mobbing the city for their General Assembly. She studied this odd tribe as though she were doing fieldwork in a foreign, and weird, island. She engaged some of them in conversation – just gathering data, I suspect.

On about the third day, she announced “Uncle Davidson, I know why your religion is such a miserable failure.” “Well,” I said, “that would be interesting to know.” “It’s simple,” she said: “You don’t have a Book.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. I said, lamely, that we had lots of books, but that wouldn’t wash: “Nope, you can’t just tell people to go browse around the library and see if they find any wisdom. You’ve got to have a Book so you can say “Hey: go read the Book.” But you can’t say that ’cause you don’t have a Book. That’s why your religion is so miserable.” I think (or at least hope) I thanked her for her insights, but didn’t have an answer for them.

I suppose my answer to the “Book” issue would be that one book isn’t enough, that the range of life’s questions surpasses the scope of any one book or any one religion. No, I don’t think she would have bought it.

So I’ll return to the easier challenge of Rev. Don Wheat. This month I want to offer four sermons to address his critiques. I think we do have a coherent story, and a true one; but I don’t know that it has ever been put into the form of a good myth. And when it comes to showdowns between facts and stories, good stories will win almost every time. Even the sciences rely on stories to make their points: like the story of the Big Bang and the story of evolution.

The kind of stories people really seem to yearn for have to help us find answers to a lot of very basic questions: like who we are, where we came from, how we should live, how we should live together, and what, if anything, will remain after we are gone, to testify to the fact that once, we lived, loved, and gave our lives to things we thought enduringly important?

These are the questions we have been asking for, probably, hundreds of thousands of years. Only a fool would try to address them in four sermons. Let’s begin.

Most religions start with a creation story: “In the beginning….” Non-theistic religions like Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism don’t use creation stories. But all our Western religions begin with essentially the same creation story.

Creation stories are very powerful. They tell us where we come from, what we’re made of, where the real power in life lies, and how to get it. If you know someone’s creation story, you can understand their salvation story, for the two are almost always linked, the one being a mirror image of the other.

That point alone is worth a half dozen sermons. You might think of asking about your own story: what you think you’re made of, what gives you your worth, what you need to do to become more whole.

But for now, let’s think about our creation story, about how everything came to be: us, life, the universe, everything. Forget about religious myths for now. Just think about how we really believe it all began. The myths will come in later.

Most of us answer these questions with our sciences. That’s where we go for our most convincing stories. About fifteen billion years ago, we’re told by our scientific storytellers, it began with a Bang. It all exploded and expanded faster than we can imagine, but everything in the universe was once all together in a little sort of ball.

This means that everything in the universe, including us, is made of stardust. Our birthplace was literally in the stars. And it means that everything everywhere, the whole shebang, is made of the same stuff.

This seems to be true. We have discovered 109 different elements so far, and all the information we’ve gathered through our space probes and spectrographic analysis of images from the Hubbell Space Telescope hasn’t found any others. We’re made of the same stuff that everything else is.

Here on earth, life evolved in ways we’re still just beginning to understand. But again, it’s the case that a very few materials make up the warp and the weft of all life on earth. All DNA, from ours down to the DNA of bacteria, is made from just four different building blocks:

A = Adenine

G = Guanine

C = Cytosine

T = Thymine

When you consider RNA as well, you add one more chemical: Uracil replaces Thymine.

And when they combine, each one is always and only attracted to just one other: the adenine always links with the thymine (or uracil), the guanine always connects to the cytosine. Very simple building blocks, simple rules. They have formed millions of shapes, millions of kinds of living things, but once again, the whole shebang is made up of the same stuff. Animals, plants, all intimately related, made of combinations of the same five building blocks. All life on earth is part of the same family.

And it’s a cycle. We live by killing and eating other plant and animal life. Then when we die, our bodies are broken down and become the bodies of plants, then the plants become the bodies of other animals, from the beginning of time till the end of time. It’s nature’s great plan, reducing life to its basics, then recycling it over and over again.

I’m not trying to sell you on reincarnation. But I am trying to sell you our most honest story of creation, which is that we are deeply linked with all life on earth, all the way down. That is our deepest identity, and carries powerful suggestions for how we should think about each other and treat one another.

The great poets and sages of the world’s religions seemed to intuit this thousands of years ago. And they built it into their myths, myths that survive today. Native Americans had rituals like the Buffalo Dance, done to repay the buffaloes they ate by helping them regenerate. I’ve read other Indian rituals of talking to trees before cutting them down for a canoe or for tipi poles, treating the tree as a brother and explaining why it was necessary to cut it down. They felt, and expressed, a familiar connection that sciences show us is really, deeply, there.

Even the most ancient Neanderthal burial sites discovered in China, dating to more than 100,000 years ago, show a sense of our being a part of the whole world. Those Neanderthals buried their dead in womb-shaped graves, curled into a fetal position, facing east, the direction of the rising sun. While they didn’t explain it in words, it looks like they are entrusting their beloved dead to mother earth, returning them to her womb curled up like babies, ready to be reborn as the rising sun is reborn. And similar burial practices have been found among the ancient Peruvian people, and the Dogon people on Mali.

The true creation story tells us that we’re not strangers here. This is our home. We are one with everything here, intimately connected with all life and all matter.

The ancient Greek myth of creation expresses this by saying that in the beginning Father Heaven mated with Mother Earth, and everything here was born from that mating. We’re the children of heaven and earth, the children of the gods. Every particle of us is sacred, just as every atom is stardust.

It’s poetry, but it’s good poetry, poetry that tells the truth. Remember, one of the most famous of all religious prayers is that it become “on earth, as it is in heaven.” We may be made of earth, but the earth is made of stardust, and we want to regain a sense of our regal beginnings and our true home.

This is the real story of creation, and of the creation of life on earth. It’s all made of stardust, and is all intimately interconnected. Here is the plea for universal peace and brotherhood that sings like a leitmotif through every great religion in the world. The power that created the universe is within us; it is our own power. If we would remember our real creation story, if we would claim that power and if we would act in ways that are consistent with our interrelation with everyone and everything else, how different our local, national and international worlds would look!

That’s the good news: there really is a true creation story, which can be verified not only by our most advanced sciences but also by some of the greatest myths in the world’s most ancient religions.

But there’s a problem, and it is an absolutely gigantic problem. It’s one of the most important things to learn about religion, politics, psychology, sociology, anthropology and how they become demonic. And that’s that the true story has usually been changed by priests (or politicians) into a story that takes the power and the dignity away from people and transfers it to priests, tribal leaders, religions and rulers.

Archaeologists and biblical scholars are now fairly sure that the ancient Hebrews developed from the more ancient tribe of Canaanites. Modern scholars are beginning to say with some force that there was never an Egyptian chapter in ancient Jewish history, and that Moses was not a historical character in their actual history. They came from the Canaanites, and developed their religion in large part to contradict the older Canaanite religion.

We know the Canaanite religion was a powerful nature religion, with an Earth Mother who gave birth to all. This is the same basic story the Chinese Neanderthals acted out 100,000 years earlier: the earth is our mother and our natural home. It was a religion that might have empowered its people through rituals to put them in touch with the power of the earth and their own power, though we don’t know that.

But the Hebrews created a new religion, in direct opposition to the Canaanite religion. You can see it in their creation story, which was obviously adapted from the creation story of a Mother Earth. Why? Because when you read a story about a deity creating everything by itself, you know it is a woman’s story, not a man’s. Mother earth can do it, but not Father Sky.

Scholars have argued that the god invented by the ancient Hebrews was a simple projection of their tribal chiefs, with the same powers and duties as their tribal chiefs. The chiefs set the rules, laid out rewards and punishments, and defined the way of life for the tribe, just as old Jahweh did.

And other scholars have shown that the covenant made between God and humans in the bible was modeled after ancient Hittite treaties between tribal rulers and their people. The people were expected to have no other ruler above the tribal chief. They were punished if they disobeyed, but were rewarded and protected as long as they were obedient. This is the basic structure of the covenant between the ancient Hebrews and the God they created.

And so their male god, they wrote, created the whole world and all the life on it, all by himself. In their new creation story, we were made out of dirt, and were nothing but dirt until this male tribal-chief-god breathed his breath of life into us. By ourselves, we were nothing. We had nothing sacred in or about us. It was all loaned to us by this new God. In return, we had to obey him. Or, more accurately, we had to obey those who claimed to speak for him: the priests and rulers.

Even if you were never Muslim, Christian or Jewish, you were soaked in this creation story just because you grew up in this society. And we’ve not been trained to back off from the story, look at it critically, and ask bold questions like whether or not it is a true account of creation, or even if it is a good myth. But that’s what I’m asking you to do: to back off far enough to see that the dominant creation story, and the dominant style of religion in Western civilization, may in fact be bad religion based on a false creation story.

And this is important because creation stories are so closely related to salvation stories. They can either empower or enslave us, and it’s our job to try and find out which kind we’ve given our hearts and minds to. The true creation story empowers us. It says we are carriers of the dynamic power of the universe, related to all of creation, and the power is ours to claim and act on, to make it “on earth as it is in heaven” by acting like all other life forms are related to us, in our family. The power and the responsibility are ours. What would such a world look like? Jesus called it the Kingdom of God: the world in which we simply treat all others as our sisters and brothers. Buddhists could call it living in Nirvana, connected with true life by being freed from our misleading illusions about it. Honest religion needs an honest creation story, or it isn’t likely to have a healthy salvation story.

But in the ancient Hebrew revision of that story, everything is different. Now there is nothing sacred about us at all. We are dirt, God is God, and the most we can hope for is to establish an obedient relationship with this God – through the priests and the rulers who claim to represent him.

The first creation story says our salvation comes through realizing our identity with the sacred forces of the universe. The second says all we can hope for is a relationship with those forces – now identified not with the universe, but with this God – a relationship defined by our being obedient to the priests and rulers who speak for this God created so long ago.

The first salvation story is found in advanced Hinduism, when the teacher points the student outward toward the whole world, the whole universe, and says “That art thou!” That is a religion of empowerment, grounded in the true story of our creation and birth. It is found in all mysticisms, which also teach our fundamental and unmediated identity with all that is sacred.

The second is taught by religions that teach obedience rather than empowerment, and threaten all who disobey their church’s rules with damnation. It’s a dishonest religion, founded in a dishonest creation story, and we need to say it loud and clear.

Religious liberals and millions of secular people who reject the biblical creation story and its authoritarian God are routinely attacked as heretics, as though they weren’t really seeking the truth. But the facts show otherwise. It was the ancient Hebrews who falsified the real creation story. It seems to have arisen from their boundary disputes with their closest religious kin, the Canaanites. But they created a creation story that was untrue, and a God who disempowered people and transferred both their dignity and their power to the priests who claimed to speak for that God. And that habit has continued all the way down to the present, as we know.

Power belongs to those who control the story. If we don’t know the true story, we’re not likely to have much power or dignity at all. And the churches aren’t likely to have any honest authority, either, no matter how many costumes they wear.

This last point was made clear to me in an unexpected way last week. While I was in Berkeley, I spent a little time with John Dominic Crossan, an acquaintance of mine who was the cofounder of the Jesus Seminar. Dominic spent nineteen years as a Catholic priest, then left the priesthood, married, and raised a family. But he is still a Catholic who fights much of what his church is doing, and fights it on the basis of his forty years of work as a biblical scholar. Dominic spoke of the arrogance of the bishops, cardinals, and the pope today on the terrible cases of sexual abuse – where they want to be regarded as authoritative even though they are wrong. He said “We Catholics are yearning for the days when the worst thing the Church did was sell indulgences.” (The sale of indulgences was the church practice that led to the Protestant Reformation five hundred years ago.)

What Catholics and non-Catholics alike have come to see is that religions that aren’t grounded in the real truth have no necessary moral or ethical authority. The good news in religion is that you really can’t fake it.

The other good news is that if you know the truth, the truth can set you free. It may not make you popular with members of your tribe, but it can set you free. It may be the only thing that can set you free.

This morning, I began our four-part sermon series by telling you the true story of creation. There’s much more to consider in the coming weeks: the nature of human nature, good and evil, and the prescription for what ails the human condition. But this was a beginning. Think about the story this week, and about the difference between religious stories that empower you and stories that enslave you. If you find yourself feeling a little more free, it’s a good sign that you may be a religious liberal. And that, for the record, is also good news!