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© Davidson Loehr
8 September 2002
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
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INVOCATION
(from the Sanskrit salutation to the Dawn)
Look to this day for it is life, the very life of life,
in its brief course lie all the verities and realities of our existence.
the bliss of growth, the splendor of beauty,
for yesterday is but a dream and tomorrow is only a vision.
but today well spent makes every yesterday a dream of happiness
and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day.
It is good to be together again.
It is a sacred time, this
And a sacred place, this:
a place for questions more profound than answers,
vulnerability more powerful than strength,
and a peace that can pass all understanding.
It is a sacred time, this:
Let us begin it together in song.
STORYTIME: The Wolves Within
(This story comes to us from the Native American traditions, but it comes more primally from within the human condition.)
A young boy was wronged terribly by his friend, and embarrassed in front of his peers. Hurt and angry, he plotted in secret for days to devise a plan to get even. But once he had perfected the truly nasty plan, he had the gnawing feeling that maybe, just maybe, he should get another opinion before proceeding.
So he went to his grandfather. His grandfather must be wise, because he was older than dirt. And he was kind, and a good listener. So even if he wasn’t wise, it was going to be a safe visit.
The boy told his grandfather the whole sordid story, from the awful thing his friend did to the even more awful thing he had devised to do in return.
“And,” asked the grandfather after he had finished, “is your heart set on doing this terrible thing?”
The boy paused at the word “heart.” “Well, grandfather, my head is set on it, but I’m not so sure about my heart. I am torn, I want to do it and yet I don’t want to do it. That’s why I came to ask your advice. I hoped you might understand.”
“Yes,” said the old man, “I think I do understand, for I have had these feelings all of my life. For as long as I can remember, it is as though there were two wolves living inside of me, fighting for control of my soul. One wolf is very kind and loving, and wants me always to do the kind and loving thing. The other wolf is angry and mean, and urges me to be clever and vicious, as you are thinking of being. All my life those wolves have been there, fighting for control of me.”
The old man stopped, just as the boy was wanting him to finish.
“I don’t understand, grandfather. Which wolf wins?”
“Ah,” said the old man, “that’s up to me. The one that wins is the one that I feed.”
PRAYER
Let us confess that we are capable of the most horrible crimes against each other.
We are capable of slaughtering our brothers and sisters with great self-righteousness, as though they were not humans but merely things.
Let us confess that the ability to hate comes from as ancient a place as the ability to love, and the ability to destroy is as deeply human as the ability to create.
Who are we, when we cheer the destruction of innocent people?
What drives us so often to seek revenge as a first response, rather than more reasoned and less bloody tactics?
We can be so tender toward our own children, our own mates, our own parents; how can we be so easily callous toward the children, mates and parents of others?
We come fully equipped to do both good and evil, to love and to hate, to be blessings or curses to the world.
How can we engender our tender mercies, and protect them against our furies?
Oh, let us give power and courage to those tender mercies, that we may help turn the tide of our world. As St. Francis of Assisi prayed:
Where there is hatred, let us sow love,
where there is doubt, faith,
where there is error, truth,
where there is despair, hope,
where there is sadness, joy,
where there is darkness, light.
Let us not so much seek to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
in forgiving that we are forgiven,
and in dying to hate that we are born into love.
Let us become the noble people we are meant to be,
for the world needs us at our very best.
Let it be so. Here, now, let it be so.
Amen.
(Partially adapted from the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi)
SERMON
There is an old story, told in many traditions, about a man who dreamed of a treasure map hidden in a faraway city. The dream was very clear about the location of the map, and promised the map would be an equally clear guide to the hidden treasure.
It was a three-day journey, but the treasure was worth the trip, so he set out. When he found the house he had dreamed of, he knocked on the door and told the woman of the house of his odd dream. “Why,” she exclaimed, “my husband had just such a dream himself three days ago, and set out to find his treasure map in a house in the village of – and here she mentioned the name of the old man’s town! How odd!
The woman let the old man in, he went straight to the loose rock in the fireplace chimney he had seen in his dream, removed it, and sure enough, there was the treasure map! He thanked the woman and left. Outside, he studied the map. It said the treasure was buried in a house in his home town: his house! He returned home and sure enough, discovered the treasure which had been hidden there all the time.
This is a story telling a lesson many have learned, that we expect treasures hidden in faraway places, but seldom suspect they’re also buried at home. It’s like the plot of “The Wizard of Oz,” where the goal was really to return to Kansas, which the girl didn’t learn until she had traveled to the land of Oz.
This is a common story in religion, especially now. We are bored with the religious traditions around us, and read books on all sorts of exotic religious paths from other places and times. It is true they have much to teach us. But sometimes what they teach us is that we could have found what we were seeking at home, if only we had looked.
So I decided to roam closer to home for some sermons this year, and take some stories from the Bible as seriously as I take stories borrowed from other traditions. I decided to start at the beginning, in the book of Genesis. The stories in that book have launched hundreds of thousands of sermons. Even the simplest story can be turned around in different ways offering a whole kaleidoscope of insights that are still relevant to our lives today.
And it gets even more interesting when you mingle a story from the Bible with a story from another tradition, which is what I want to do today.
The Bible story is the tale of Adam and Eve being thrown out of the Garden of Eden for eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. There are a few things to realize about this old story:
— It was not written as an eye-witness account. It’s a myth, written long ago to give an imaginative twist to the human condition.
— It’s saying that one difference between us and the other animals is that we know the difference between good and evil, and that makes a huge difference.
— The story is also saying that the price of growing up and learning there’s a difference between right and wrong is that it expels us from a fool’s paradise.
— On a more sobering level, isn’t it also admitting that we know both of them, that we can do both good and evil?
So we live, the old storyteller says, east of Eden. A few chapters later, Cain is also sent to live east of Eden in what they call the land of Nod: the word means wandering, restlessness. We live in a world of restless wandering, armed with our prize – or is it our burden? – of the knowledge of, and capacity for, good and evil.
Now let’s make it more complex, by mixing it with another story.
This one comes from a collection of Turkish folk tales about one of the great figures of religious fiction, a holy man known as Nasreddin Hodja. Four boys were very close friends. They did everything together, and always strove to be completely fair in their dealings with one another.
When walnut season came, they went to the lone walnut tree in their village and spent the afternoon hunting among the grass for the freshly-fallen walnuts, for they all loved walnuts. They put them all in a basket, to divide them later.
But later, when the counted their walnuts, they discovered that they had found exactly eighty-three walnuts. Eighty-three? That number doesn’t divide by four. They would have to give twenty-one walnuts to three boys, and the fourth would get only twenty – and this wasn’t fair!
They returned to the tree, hoping for an eighty-fourth walnut. But of course if there had been another walnut, there wouldn’t be a story! They racked their brains, but no one could figure out how to divide them equally.
Finally, they decided to find the Hodja, their local holy man, to seek his wisdom on this difficult subject.
“What do you want?” asked the Hodja, after hearing their story.
“Justice,” they replied. “We want justice. But we don’t know how to divide eighty-three walnuts amongst the four of us.”
“Justice!” he intoned, shaking his head. “A very difficult thing! Well, you haven’t told me enough yet. I must know what kind of justice you want. Do you want God’s justice, or human justice?”
This was a distinction the boys had never before thought of, so they retired to talk it over.
In truth, they weren’t sure what either kind of justice would be. But the more they talked, the more stories they could remember of human justice going horribly wrong. One told the story of a judge who had been bribed to make an unjust ruling. Another knew of people who could not get a fair trial because they were poor, or outcasts. Finally their decision was clear.
“We have decided unanimously that it is God’s justice we want,” they told the Hodja.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “this can’t be undone, you know. Are you sure?”
Well, they were a little less sure than they had been a minute before, but yes, they were sure: they wanted God’s justice, nothing less.
“Very well,” said the Hodja, it is God’s justice you shall have. Then he took the basket from them and divided the walnuts. To the first boy he gave seventy walnuts, to the second ten, to the third three, and to the fourth none at all.
When I first read the story over a decade ago, I was sure I knew how it would end, but I was wrong, as you probably were too. It sounds rude, maybe even blasphemous, to suggest that God’s justice is the problem, and human justice might be the solution.
Then I thought back to the Bible, and remembered how many stories it tells about God telling the Hebrew armies to slaughter every man, woman and child in a neighboring village, to leave no thing alive. It’s the rule of might makes right, and it seems to have a lot in common with God’s justice.
And in history, it’s the same as it is in the scriptures. You think of the attacks of 9-11, of course, of those Muslim extremists who were sure God wanted them to kill 3,000 innocent people working in the office buildings that were symbols of America’s economic power. Their God even told them they would be rewarded in heaven with a prize of seventy virgins (without ever mentioning just why these virgins would want to be around murderers). Or you could think of our country’s retaliation, bombing the desperately poor country of Afghanistan, killing perhaps as many as 5,000 innocent people who had nothing to do with the attacks of 9-11.
But you also have to think of the Crusades of seven centuries ago, when Christians were told to slaughter thousands of Muslims, and were promised a place in heaven if they were killed in battle. God’s justice. The rewards go to the powerful, at the expense of the weak.
In every war, people call upon their gods, and in every war they are certain that their gods want them to kill thousands, perhaps millions, of other people. The ones who kill the most usually win. And they thank their god for their victory. God’s justice.
And the numbers are staggering. Here in this basket we have about 8,000 stones as a guess at the number of innocents killed here on 9-11 and in Afghanistan through our retaliations. To have a stone for every American killed in the Vietnam war, we would need 7-1/2 baskets full of stones. For the million Vietnamese who were killed, we would need 125 of these baskets full of stones.
I don’t know what god the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot cared for, but it would take 500 of these stone-filled baskets to count the four million of his own people he murdered.
So if God is the pre-eminent force in the world, than these things seem to be God’s justice. They certainly seem to be the law of the world, the kind of justice dispensed by nature. It is a kind of justice that lets the powerful few do whatever they like to the powerless many, even to the point of endangering or taking their lives.
Meanwhile, the voices of millions upon millions of people are crying out for a different kind of justice, and who will listen to them?
If we are really hard-wired to respect this kind of justice, this slaughter of the innocent many at the whims of the powerful few, then we need to take the notion of “original sin” more seriously, don’t we? For in all these cases, this justice of God is done by humans.
And we do seem to be hard-wired for this way of looking at life. Here, we can think of a hundred examples from our own lives. Everything seems to be stacked in favor of the powerful or gifted few, and against the many:
— The most attractive men and women have far more potential mates to choose from than most of the rest of us do.
— In all of our sports, all of our athletic contests, only the one winner is recognized and remembered. Football teams and their fans only want to be Number One. You never see fans chanting “we’re number three!”
— On television, you watch some of these “survivor” shows, and again everyone takes it for granted that only one person should win. 83 walnuts to the winner, nuts to the losers, and something in us seems to nod and say Yes, that’s how it should be.
I remember a few years ago when it was disclosed that Michael Jordan was paid a promotional fee of $25 million for endorsing Nike tennis shoes. If you added together all of the workers in all the Asian countries who were making all of our tennis shoes, Michael got more than twice as much as all of the more than 20,000 workers combined made in an entire year. But I don’t remember much outrage over this. 83 walnuts to Michael, and 20,000 invisible Asians can scramble for their $500/year.
We know this kind of justice. We know it well. Something inside of us resonates with it, in hundreds of ways. It’s what makes Americans shrug off the fact that Bill Gates has more money than the bottom 100 million Americans combined. If you translate this to stones, it means we would need 12,500 baskets like this one, all filled with stones. And if you put them all on one end of a scale of important and put Bill Gates on the other end, they would be equal. And no one is rioting in the streets over this, we just accept it. It is God’s justice, and we accept it without even blinking.
It is a kind of justice defined as the rule of the powerful few over the powerless many.
It is a justice that favors combat over compassion, and competition over cooperation. It is a justice that only remembers the winners, the few, while the many, nearly all of us, are forgotten as unimportant, almost invisible. God’s justice.
Yes, there are the cries of the poor, the starving, the powerless, cries for food, for mercy, for life, but they seem mostly to go unheeded, don’t they? People don’t listen to them, do we? Or do much about them? It seems that could only happen if something in us felt that this is indeed a form of justice that’s part of the way the world works. If it’s God’s world, it’s God’s justice.
This is the lens through which I’ve been looking at our country and our world this week, and it reveals some interesting patterns, some striking examples of God’s justice, dividing the walnuts with most to a few, and a few or none to the rest.
I’ve spoken before here, and will undoubtedly speak again, of the economic picture in our country, and how it has been dramatically changed over the past twenty years or so, to favor the very wealthy at the expense of nearly everyone else. Now I want to look at it as another example of God’s justice, an example of the way the world really seems to work, the way life runs here where we live, east of Eden in the land of restlessness.
The restructuring of our economy to transfer trillions of dollars from the lower and middle sections of our country to the very top few percent has not been subtle, but it has been rapid.
— between 1981-1986, the income tax on America’s wealthiest people was reduced from 70% to 28%. Twenty years earlier, it had been 91%. Taxes on corporations have fallen as dramatically, some large corporations now pay almost nothing in taxes. All this money has been taken instead from other parts of our society, which is why income tax rates on workers increased five-fold, from about 5% to about 25% since 1950.
During the decade of the 1980s, the portion of our nation’s wealth held by the top 1% nearly doubled, from 22% to 39%, probably the most rapid excalation in U.S. history (Phillips, p. 92)
For the past twenty years, the American economy has been identified primarily with the activity of the stock market. But of the stock market gains of the 1990s, 86% went to the top 10% of households, and 42% went to the top 1%.
This is the same kind of justice that the Turkish folk tale identified as God’s justice. It’s the same kind of justice that we accept without blinking when Michael Jordan makes twice as much as an entire workforce of 20,000 Asians combined, or when Bill Gates is worth more than 100 million of us.
In a way, this gives a kind of dignity to this sort of justice, doesn’t it? It’s everywhere, it seems to be the way the world works, and we seem to accept it almost without a whimper.
Not everyone was pursuing God’s justice to the extent that we were.
The author of the main book I read on this is a man named Kevin Phillips, who has been writing on “Wealth and Democracy” – which is the name of his newest book – for several decades. He’s a Republican, and he won’t consider it partisan politics. He reminds us that in 1972 the Republican platform actually criticized multinational corporations for building plants overseas to take advantage of cheap labor. But since 1980, all four presidents have helped restructure our economy to transfer huge amounts of money and power from the bottom three-fifths to the top, mostly to the very top.
He reminds us that NAFTA was enacted by Bill Clinton, with the provision in its Chapter Eleven that lets investors bring claims against the governments of the U.S., Canada and Mexico to demand compensation if national laws cost them profits – for example, by forbidding them to import unsafe products or services. One ruling against the U.S. required amendment of our Clean Air Act to permit the entry of Venezuelan gasoline that did not meet federal standards, for example. (Phillips, 231)
And the World Trade Organization, whose headquarters used to be in the World Trade Center, brings similar suits against governments that impede profits. Thailand, for example, was told to give up manufacturing a cheap AIDS drug after the US threatened a WTO suit on behalf of an American pharmaceitucal firm. These actions are decided by a three-person panel from the WTO, and are not subject to rulings by any of our courts.
Critics of these new laws have pointed out the potential dangers of a worldwide policy of formally putting profits ahead of people’s safety and people’s lives. Each year, Japan, the European Union, and Canada publish lists of American laws that they consider harmful to their profits, and therefore illegal. In 1999, ninety-five such laws were tentatively identified in California alone. (231)
This is God’s justice, just as surely as the bombing of innocent countries and the subjugation of powerless people all over the world is God’s just. If one is just, the other must also be. All this “God’s justice” business doesn’t seem to be helping very many of us.
Are these new laws merely changes we need to remain number one? No, they don’t seem to be working that way. In fact, they seem to go with rising indications that we are falling dramatically in comparison even to other industrialized nations.
During the 1980s and 1990s, for example, wages in our country lost ground while working hours increased, as many of you know quite personally. But during the same time in Britain, France, Germany and Japan, wages rose while working hours decreased. (Phillips, 163)
By 2000, the U.S. had the highest levels of economic inequality of all major Western industrial nations. (111)
“Today, a CEO would be embarrassed to admit he sacrificed profits to protect employees or a community.” (148)
We have the highest percentage of poverty in people over the age of 65 among the industrialized nations.We have the highest percentage of child poverty among the industrialized nations. We have the lowest percentage of students finishing high school. (345-6)
And we have the highest rates of youth homicides. (346)
While some of these figures may be news to you, the overall picture can’t be. We’ve been living in this brave new world for a couple decades already. The part that has interested me comes through thinking of all these conditions I don’t like as examples of God’s justice, not particularly worse than similar examples throughout all of human history.
Yet it is terribly ironic. We were driven from paradise, according to the old story, because we learned the difference between good and evil. The God who expelled us in that old story is on record in the Bible as sanctioning the slaughter of thousands upon thousands of innocent people, including his own, when he destroyed nearly the whole world.
And so the Turkish folk tale seems to be right. All of this is an example of God’s justice, the rule of the world out here to the east of Eden.
What of the other kind, what of human justice?
In the bible, the voices pleading for human justice come not from God but from the human prophets. Amos sees the ancient equivalent of our Asian tennis-shoe sweat shops, and he has a fit. He says God is angry because the people of his time ‘s ell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes,” that ‘they trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth.” But it wasn’t God saying that. It was Amos.
The same was true of Jesus. He saw the way the world has always worked, what the Turkish story calls God’s justice. And Jesus calls for new rules, new ways of living. He says whatever we do to the least of these, we do also to God. He thinks so little of money that he wonders of rich people can even get into heaven. He attributes these sentiments to God, but history shows otherwise. They were Jesus’s sentiments, not God’s .
(One of the most important pair of essays in the history of Christianity was written by Clement of Alexandria in the late 2nd century. One essay, “stromateis,” wrote that Christians can use all Greek, Roman and other philosophers and writers, that all wisdom is welcome, to be used by intelligent and informed Christians. The other essay, “On that rich man getting into heaven,” said it is not money that is bad, but the uses to which it can be put. It advised wealthy people to use some of their money to benefit others, and implied that these are actions that can let the rich enter into heaven.)
The closest those four boys were ever going to come to justice was if they divided the walnuts themselves, gave three boys 21 and one 20, promising to make it up to him the next time. And the reason they could do that was because they liked and respected each other as people, and believed that all of them deserved justice equally. Their justice, human justice, was not based on power, but on compassion.
That’s human justice. It isn’t based on market value or on military might or concerned with which handful of people can survive in a dog-eat-dog world.
Isn’t it ironic to think of human justice as based on love, and as the only hope we have to escape God’s justice, which seems always to be based on the law of might makes right?
Throughout human history, in the midst of this world east of Eden in which the strong have always taken what the can and the weak have suffered what they must, the only chance we have ever had to create a just world has been through the application not of God’s rules, but of the rules of human justice, based on compassion not combat, cooperation not competition, and not power but love.
Only humans can do that, and only if they will, only if they will remember the difference between these two kinds of justice, and remember to fight for the more compassionate kind.
You may wonder why I chose to preach this sermon now, this sermon about the two kinds of justice.
One reason was because the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks is upon us, and most of the voices we’re hearing from our media and our leaders are demanding God’s justice from the angry God they have ordered to bless America. We can’t let that be the only voice we hear. We must be reminded that there is a higher calling, a calling higher than the trumpet calls of the flag-waving God who wants to declare unending war on anyone in the world who might not like us. I thought we learned in Vietnam that when you bomb and kill thousands of innocent people, you don’t win their hearts and minds, you simple create more people who hate you.
Another reason for this sermon was because we’ve been talking about our pledge drive for a few weeks, about wanting you to want to support this church generously with your time, your energy, and your money.
This may not seem related, but it is. It’s related to that story of the two wolves within us, fighting to control us, and how the one that wins is the one we feed. I’m not completely comfortable, though, thinking of the church as a “wolf.” Maybe it’s kinder and more civil to think of it instead as a fight within us between the angels of our better nature and the angels of our lower urgings. That’s a fight with which we can all identify, just as we all know that it is indeed the angels we feed, the voices we listen to, that determine our character and our destiny, as individuals and as a society.
This church is committed, and will remain committed, to being a place where those ancient and necessary cries for human justice are honored.
I will promise to help the leaders of this church make this place a haven for the very human spirits of compassion, understanding, justice and love. I will promise to keep it a place where we can find and nurture our human cries for a more humane world. The staff and the volunteer leaders of this church are one of those voices of the angels of our better nature, fighting for your support and commitment.
It’s a good bet that the voices we feed will win. Now it’s your move.
