© Davidson Loehr
30 September 2001
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
This morning will be the first of a series of five sermons that will end with the Thanksgiving service. These are taken from a model of dealing with change and grief developed about 32 years ago by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross whose book on death and dying came out in 1969. She was dealing with terminal patients and what they were trying to come to terms with was the fact of their own death.
But many people have seen that this is a model with many applications outside of chaplaincy where I used it when I worked with terminal patients for a year. It’s a model that deals with the death of any belief system or any worldview. It deals with the death of our comfortable way of seeing things and the stages we tend to go through when trying to find a new way to do it. After September 11th, models like this seem to have an immediate and obvious application as we’re all going to be dealing, individually and as a society, with some stages in trying to come to terms with having to look at life and safety very differently than we did two weeks ago.
What I want to focus on in this sermon series, though, is much much narrower. I want to focus on the death of beliefs, of faiths, of religions that many people have experienced sometimes many years ago and the stages they go through or the troubles they have going through stages to get past it and to find a new kind of faith and trust. It’s surprising to me how many people still talk about faith experiences they had 25 years ago as though they had happened yesterday. They’re still so vivid and the people still feel so angry and so burned about it.
I remember a discussion I had with a fundamentalist friend, probably 15 years ago, a man who had grown up until he was 25 or 26 as a fundamentalist. And then the world cracked and it fell apart for him and this was now 20 years later and he was still furious. I said what are you angry at? You are out of it now. He said “I’m angry because I was betrayed.” He said, “I’m angry because people I trusted lied to me.” He said, “I’m angry because I once had a picture of life that was so whole and so complete, that I had no worries and no questions. And I’ll never have a picture that simple again.” Powerful stuff.
What happens to many people – and it happened to this man too even though he was a professor of religion – is that when they have a bad experience with religion they decide the whole field of religion is no damn good. I tried it once, it stunk, I’m never trying it again.
I can understand the pain but I cannot understand the plan. The plan sounds to me like someone who went to a restaurant and once got a bad case of food poisoning so swore off eating. What they needed was healthy food, not no food. And the same is true with religion.
But this distrust and distaste for religion is part of the reason that the word “religion” is a bad word now in popular speech, and “spirituality” is a good word. Somehow that’s lighter and a little easier and it’s sort of about feeling good, whereas religion is something deep and dark and evil and awful with which we want to have nothing to do. Now if we stay there, if we follow that, we can easily become the character of the eagle from the story of the eagle and the chickens. The eagle didn’t belong there. It wasn’t a chicken and the things the eagle needed to learn the chicken couldn’t teach it, because it needed to learn how to fly and chickens can’t fly.
There are a lot of stories like this and if we pervert them, they give us the same picture. That story I told the kids this morning is a perversion of another version of the story where the eagle does finally realize it’s an eagle and it flies and joins the eagles and protects that little hen house forever and everyone lives happily ever after. That movie’s probably done by Disney. But you can take popular fairy tales and change one item in them and come up with the same perverse plot. This is the story of Cinderella who never went to the ball, who never escaped from the house where she was hated and the kitchen where she was misused and abused. It’s the story of Rapunzel, who never let her hair down and never escaped from the tower that she’d been put into because of her mother’s fears. It’s the story of denial and I think denial is a bad thing, after the first few minutes or days.
Now I’m taking this a little differently than Elizabeth Kubler-Ross did. There are two sides to denial. One is the fact that we are denying that we are carrying with us something that isn’t serving us and doesn’t work anymore. And if you’re stuck in an old religion that has you under its control- whether you love it or whether you hate it, it doesn’t matter, you have to get past it.
It reminds me, since my mind works this way; of a standup comic I saw 10 or 15 years ago, a Canadian comic. He never made it very big but he had one joke I’ve always loved. He’s a master at playing the audience and he played the audience with 3 or 4 very funny jokes in a row. Very quick punch lines, and had the whole audience rolling and then he set them up by telling a joke so bad, so stupid, that they booed. And he’d been waiting for it. He said, “That’s all right, whether you clap or whether you boo, you are under my control!”
That’s true with a religious past too, you know. Whether we love it or whether we hate it, we’re in orbit around it. And denial is a form of faithlessness. It’s just about as faithless as it gets. Because the other half of denial is the fact that we are not seeing that after every significant loss we have to learn how to choose life again, and that it is always worth finding a way to do that. Furthermore, we’re playing the game of denial against a background of life and of the world that, if only we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, is overwhelmingly positive, life- affirming, and trustworthy.
For instance, 2 weeks ago here in addition to the regular offering that we took, we took, as we are today, a special collection for disaster relief. From our 3 Sunday services we collected over $9,400 to send to New York and Washington for disaster relief. From the 270 people in the 1st service we collected about $3,000. From the 480 people at the 2nd service, we collected just under $6,000, and from the 135 people who were at the evening service we collected $480. $9,400 collected to be sent to people we didn’t know, for uses we’ll never see, simply because they are humans and we are too, and we knew we owed it and we wanted to do it.
You could look on television 2 weeks ago and I don’t know why no one remarked on this. You see all these New Yorkers. Now these are the New Yorkers who have been made the butt of jokes in many churches for decades because they are so secular, so completely secular that the only thing sacred to New Yorkers are work, bagels, coffee and New York City. Here were these secular New Yorkers–firemen and policemen– sacrificing their lives for strangers. Walking up 60 flights of stairs in a burning building and sacrificing their lives for people they didn’t know. If you want to go to another extreme, for an example, I read this week about a prison in Louisiana, called Angola, a horrible prison for serious criminals that deserves a sermon of its own. The lifers in Angola have virtually no benefits. Any money, anything they want for television, for books, for any kind of benefits, they have to earn the money for themselves. And they do it in the Angola prison through only one fund-raiser; they have an annual rodeo that’s become fairly well known.
This year that rodeo raised $30,000. And these lifers, many in there for violent crimes and murder, donated all $30,000 to disaster relief. Now that’s the background against which we are playing games of denial and it should make us feel silly. The message of it is that goodness does not come from religion, goodness comes from our humanity. It’s inside of us. And what we need from religion isn’t an infusion of goodness into people who are originally sinful. That just isn’t true. We need help from religions in recognizing and nourishing the goodness that’s already in us. There’s a creation story from the Kabala, the medieval, mystical Judaism, that talked about how in the beginning there was the great light Ein Sof, and that at the beginning the great light was broken into millions and millions of little sparks of God, and inside of every living thing was a spark of God. And the job of every living thing was to recognize that spark of God and to nourish it, so that it too may burst into a flame to illuminate a dark world.
It’s a wonderful story. It is true; there are religions that don’t do that. We’ve seen a couple of varieties of them, right now, the last few weeks on both sides of the Atlantic. There are religions of narrowness of exclusion and of hate. There are bad religions. The Taliban was one. The Taliban has a list of people it hates and whom it assumes Allah hates. They speak for Allah and say that Allah hates liberated women–women outside of the veil. There are women who have had acid thrown in their face for being unveiled over there. It is a religion of hatred that preaches that. It’s not true to anything about Muslim religion. Not true to anything in it. It’s a perversion of it. They hate homosexuals and hate anyone whose sexual orientation and lifestyle isn’t like they think theirs is. Not counting all of the things they are repressing to say that. They hate foreigners, they hate non-believers, they hate anyone whose truth is bigger or much different from theirs.
That’s a religion of exclusion and narrowness and hate, and that’s a bad religion. It can’t nourish life. And we’ve seen exactly the same religions spring up in this country through that amazingly unguarded interview between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson when they created exactly the same hateful list of people they thought responsible for the slaughter of over 6000 innocents. There are religions that are hateful and narrow and cannot feed life and should not be supported. It is simply not the case that whatever anyone believes is fine. We believe all kinds of things that are hurtful and hateful. But that isn’t all. We don’t need no religion, like we don’t need no food after we get food poisoning. We need healthy religion and we need honest religion for head and heart that can recognize the Godspark inside of us and help us. Nourish it, so that it too grows into a flame. God knows the world needs more light. And that positive and hopeful religion is all around us too. It is in the poem we used for Centering this morning. I want to read you that poem again:
“The man whispered, God, speak to me, and a meadowlark sang. But the man did not hear. So the man yelled, God, speak to me, and the thunder and lightening rolled across the sky but the man didn’t listen. The man looked around and said, God, let me see you, and the stars shined brightly but he wasn’t watching. Then the man shouted, God, show me a miracle and a life was born, but he was looking elsewhere. So the man cried out in despair, touch me God and let me know you are here, whereupon God reached down and touched the man but he brushed the butterfly away and walked on. He cried God, I need your help, and an e-mail arrived reaching out with good news and encouragement from someone who loved him. But he deleted it and continued crying. He’s crying still.”
Jesus used to talk about people needing the eyes to see and the ears to hear the simple truths in his stories. We need the eyes to see and the ears to hear that we live in a world of blessedness. We have a Godspark inside of us that is the most important thing about us that we need to find and nourish and help burst into flame. And that plot seems to be the most popular plot we have in all of our stories. Religious stories, fairy tales. You can talk about the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel by the river Jabbok. Jacob, this scummy, scurrilous little man who, for the first time in his life, did something that showed some character and courage. He wrestled with this demon angel messenger of god at the river, and he wrestled all night and would not let go until it blessed him. And it blessed him with a new name and this Jacob; this horrible scurrilous little man then became Israel, the father of the twelve tribes of Judaism. This is a wonderful story. All the heroes we need are made out of very common stock. Just like us. We just need to take a moment to recognize a spark inside of us and wrestle with it and hold on until we are blessed by our struggle.
You find this plot in fairy tales. It is the story of Cinderella without the perversion. There is something holy in Cinderella that she believed in and held onto until birth was given to it. It’s the story of Rapunzel who does let down her hair. It’s the story of sleeping beauty. It’s the story of beauty and the beast. It’s the story of so many. And if we stay in denial about this we’re going to miss one of the most important simple truths there is. That’s the realization that “human being” is a verb, not a noun. “Human being” is a verb. It takes a healthy religion to become really human religiously. It isn’t for lazy people. It isn’t just a feeling of feeling good and groovy about yourself. It takes work and it takes focus to become human.
And now I wonder on all these stories, if we’ve read them right yet. Can it really be that in the stories of Cinderella, Rapunzel and all the rest of them, only the main character is meant to become human? I don’t think so. All the other characters – the stepsisters, the stepmother, all the wicked people in the stories – are in denial. They are in denial of the fact that they too have a Godspark that’s so covered over with neglect and dirt and dust that its little flame is on the verge of going out.
What about the story of the eagle and the chickens? What if the chickens are also really supposed to be eagles and what if the story of the eagle and the chickens and all of the rest of these stories aren’t really about eagles and chickens and Cinderella and Rapunzel at all. What if they’re really stories about us? They are, you know. Now what?
