Missing Stories

1 February 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

This was the first service constructed under the new “Worship Associates” (WA) program we are trying. Church members may apply to be considered for this program. They are chosen by the ministers, who will have to work with them (in our case, by the minister and the ministerial intern). They are chosen by several criteria, including whether they “play well with others,” whether they might make for good chemistry, with preference given if they are new voices for this aspect of the church’s mission. The UU church in Oakland, CA, which developed the model and wrote the book, now has about thirty applicants a year for thirteen positions. We are hoping for a similar ratio. We began with eleven Worship Associates, who nominated and voted on general themes for the worship services for that quarter. The minister and intern have veto power over themes on which neither of them have strong interest for preaching (only one theme was vetoed this time). The WA who proposed the theme is asked to write a 3-4 minute Affirmation of Faith, about their personal interest in and passion for this topic, as the minister who will be preaching on it decides how to narrow it down to a preachable topic. It’s a new experiment, so we will learn by trying it, just what changes need to be made as we go. As you can read here, this first attempt to blend the passions of a Worship Associate with the prayer and sermon by a minister found a good match and created a good service. The theme chosen was “Women’s Spirituality,” which was narrowed down to the topic of some of the women’s stories that were omitted from the Western religious traditions.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Sally Dennis

Every summer between third and ninth grades, I went to a Girl Scout camp in far southwestern Oklahoma for one to two weeks. The summer after my sophomore year in high school, I began a five-summer-long career as a camp counselor. Between singing songs, building campfires, teaching archery, leading hikes, and pulling cactus spines out of socks and ankles, I also taught many cooperative games. One of these games required the players to stand in a circle shoulder-to-shoulder, then turn so everyone was front-to-back and pretty close together. Please bear in mind that July in southern Oklahoma is just as sticky as July in Austin, and we don’t have air conditioning. Now everybody is in place, and everybody is wondering when we’re going to get to go swimming, and the leader (me) asks the group to sit down. Each player is now wondering two things: Am I strong enough to hold up the girl who’s about to sit on my knees? And: Is the girl behind me going to let me fall? But, the leaders says, “Trust me. It’s going to be okay.” So everybody sits, and everybody learns a vital lesson: The group, working together, can support the weight of everyone in the circle. Ah, the team-building moment we have! The game can be finished at this point, but the lesson is driven home even better if the leader takes a few players out of the circle. Even the removal of just one player works wonders. Without tightening ranks, the group is asked to sit again. Just the space left by one player is enough to make everyone fall over. We’re playing on grass, so nobody’s hurt, and everybody learns an even more important lesson—everybody has to be involved and working together, or else we all fall down.

When Dr. Loehr and I were first discussing women’s spirituality, we were talking about the Greeks, and their goddesses. Dr. Loehr asked what I like about ancient Greek polytheism, what exists there that’s not available in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and I kept talking about the accessibility of the gods, how human they are, and how much they’re something that everyone has to contend with. The Greeks didn’t like women any more than the Hebrews did, but somehow they managed to produce plays such as The Trojan Women or Lysistrata, illustrating women’s reactions to events over which they had no control. Eventually, I started telling Dr. Loehr about my days as a camp counselor, and about how this game could perfectly sum up my thoughts on the need for women’s involvement in spiritual matters. If everybody in the circle doesn’t get to participate, doesn’t get to make his or her own impact, share his or her voice and spirit, then the group will fall down. If our culture were a cooperative game, our team would not be doing well at all. Our history is full of places where many of the people in the game haven’t been allowed to play. Sometimes they’re women, sometimes they’re from a race or ethnic group; sometimes they’re men. For me, a great part of the reason why I’m a UU is the fact that here we know we’ve lost some of the participants in our religious game. We’re trying to get them back now. That’s why we have women in the ministry, gays, minorities. That’s why this is a Welcoming Congregation. I’m here because I want everybody to sit in my religious circle, and I think the rest of the people in this room want that as well.

(By Sally Dennis, member of First UU Church of Austin.)

PRAYER

One of Jesus’ most interesting statements was “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do also to me.” He was pointing to a group of children, so perhaps it was only a one-time local saying without any broader meaning.

But he also said that the kingdom of God was spread out across the earth and people wouldn’t see it. What if “the least of these” is part of the kingdom of God, and how we treat them shows us the size of our God, the size of our concept of the sacred?

Then “the least of these” is a changing group, different for each of us. It’s what we hate, what we can’t incorporate or love, and it shows us the limits of our love for the world, society, even our own psyches.

Let us examine who, for us, are “the least of these.” Are they an economic class, a race, a people whose beliefs we hate?

For better and worse, they mark the edges of our world, the limits of creation that we can allow. When we have identified “the least of these,” we have drawn the limits of our compassion.

And inside. What about those parts of ourselves we cannot love, cannot convert to our higher purposes, and so we reject or deny? Our shadows, our smallnesses, those places where fear keeps us too small.

From our souls to our world, the size of all we hold sacred is abridged by what we can not let into our circles of compassion.

Who, for us, are the least of these? What would it take to bring them into our hearts and into our world? Even those weak parts become stronger when they are made parts of a connected circle. Even the least of these.

What would it take and what would it cost to bring safety and strength to all the parts of our lives? All parts of our society or our world?

Let our hearts be tugged by the cries of the least within us, and the least among us.

Amen.

SERMON: Missing Stories

One of the most important and most neglected facts of life are the stories we live in, the stories that assign us our roles and identities, our social and economic status, our worth. And if there’s a single sin we fall into more than any other, it may be the failure to claim a role in writing the stories of our lives, our relationships, our country, and our world. It’s my candidate for our real original sin.

When I first began baking bread years ago, a friend gave me a recipe for a bread she loved. She knew it so well, she just wrote it out on some notepaper for me. The bread was so bad you couldn’t eat it. I invited her over, gave her a piece of it and the recipe she had written out. She took one bite, made an awful face, looked at the recipe, and said “Oh, I left out the salt!” I knew what the recipe said, and I followed it, but I forgot that someone first wrote it down, and may have left something out, without which the whole recipe was ruined.

All our stories have those same three steps. The first step, which we usually forget like I did, is that in the beginning, somebody wrote the recipe, the story. The second step is that we read or hear the story, and think we have learned how things are, what’s true, what’s important, and who we are and what we are to do. The third step is doing it, playing our role, acting out our assigned part in this story that reflects the way things are, the way God or the State or someone else wants them.

Real-life stories are more important than a bread recipe; and whoever writes the stories is sure to give themselves and their kind a better role than they’ll give others. If stories are written by the rich, the poor will fare poorly. If Hispanics write them, they’ll probably have the best parts, just as whites, blacks, yellows, men or women would if they wrote the stories.

We aren’t taught to think of our identities and roles in life as playing parts in stories. We’re taught that it’s who we are and how we are to live. But that’s not quite true, you know? First, somebody wrote a story.

Attending to our stories is a big thing in this church. That’s why we try to open doors for as many people as possible to add their gifts to the mix. We have two people helping with the service this morning rather than the usual one. And you heard each of their voices, and parts of each of their stories. It’s a new experiment we’re trying with worship services, to bring more voices and passions to the pulpit.

And we’re using a new approach to finding people who would like to serve on the church’s governing board. It’s a process open to all members who think they have the skills, experience and passion that can help move this church ahead. We recently learned that we are the fourth fastest-growing church in the UUA, and that’s partly because we are trying very hard to help you find a beloved home here. If you have leadership skills and think you might have something to offer to the church board of governors, you are invited to apply: to send a letter with your experience, your skills, and some words about your passions and your hopes for this church. The Nominating Committee will be publishing the skills and styles they’re looking for, so you can watch for them. It may seem like a little thing, but it is so important to get a lot of voices involved in creating our story, because stories with missing parts misshape us and our world.

And we are surrounded, defined, by stories with missing voices. In politics, we know that elections now are largely bought and paid for by wealthy corporations and individuals. That’s been true for over twenty years; it’s what’s behind all the clamor for campaign finance reform. We know that President Bush has brought more former high executives of large corporations into his cabinet than any president in history.

We know that taxes on corporations and the very wealthy have been cut by over a trillion dollars since 2001. We know that over 40% of Americans have no health insurance: the worst record in the developed world. We know that we have the highest poverty rate among people over 65 in the developed world, and that while the pay of CEOs and the top 1% rises, the pay, benefits, job security and future of the vast majority of America’s workers has fallen steadily and dramatically, as indicated by the fact that in 2003 we had more than 1,660,000 bankruptcies filed, the highest number in our nation’s history.

And we know that all these facts are related. A different set of people gained the power to write America’s story, and they did just what we would have done: they wrote starring roles for themselves, and supporting roles for everyone else.

We are told, again and again in the media, that a healthy economy is to be defined by how well the stock market does, rather than by how well the vast majority of our citizens do. You don’t have to ask who wrote that story, or who it benefits.

If we ask whose job it is to write the stories, it’s easy to see that it is all of our jobs to write them. Anybody who doesn’t help write the story will probably not do very well in it. As citizens, we must all help write the stories that define our nation’s priorities. As world citizens, we have a sacred responsibility to write a script that takes better care of the world.

It is so important that stories have all the voices represented! If you ride in a car with the wheels out of balance, the car will veer off course. The same is true of riding in a society living out a story that’s out of balance: it veers off course, in the direction dictated by those who got to write the script.

Sally Dennis painted a powerful and wonderful picture of this in her story of the cooperative camp game where everyone stood in that circle, front to back, close together. As long as they were all there, they could all sit down and be supported by the person behind them. But remove just a few people from the circle, and everybody falls down. Take half the people out, and it’s a farce. Most of our scripts have voices left out.

But of all the stories leaving people out, the biggest, oldest, most persistent are the religious stories that have left out 50% of the human race for almost all of recorded history in almost all times and places. These are the stories of women and women’s perspectives, omitted from the sacred scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Some of this is due to the men who wrote the Bible, most is due to those who have interpreted it. But some is due to the fact that so few people have read the book that we don’t even know there are some better stories there.

For instance, most people don’t know there are two very different creation stories in Genesis. Here’s the one you may not know, though it’s the first one in the Bible:

Gen. 1:26-28: Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them.”

This is the first creation story to appear in the bible. No mention of Eve created out of Adam’s rib, no mention of her as a helpmate for him, but equal creation, and “the image of God” is defined as “both male and female.” What a different religious tradition it might have been if that had been the creation story we had used!

But the only creation story most people have ever heard of is the second one:

Gen. 2: 18, 20-23: Then God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” So God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.

You might wonder, especially if you’re a man, what the big deal is with some old stories. But we and our worlds are shaped by the stories we tell. And leaving out half the stories, all the women’s voices, has been more destructive to both women and men than we can begin to measure.

You could point to the fact that in the book of Leviticus the worth of women was 3/5 that of a man (Lv 27:2-4). Which creation story did this have to follow? Two hundred years ago in the Constitution of our own country, slaves were also valued at 3/5 of a free man. Where do you think they got that particular fraction for something that is less than a man, if not from these old stories from the Bible? It matters, what we omit from our stories.

Let me share just three more passages from the Bible that rely on this second creation story, and the story of Eve eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. These all come from the Christian scriptures, or the New Testament:

A man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man was not born of the woman; but the woman born of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man. This is why it is right for a woman to wear on her head a sign of the authority over her. (I Corinthians 11:3-9)

As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. (I Corinthians 14:34-36)

“I do not permit a woman to be a teacher, nor must she domineer over man; she should be quiet. For Adam was created first, and Eve afterwards; and it was not Adam who was deceived; it was the woman who fell into sin.” (I Timothy 2:14, NEB) p. 109

The price women have paid for living within these stories has been horrific, in almost every religion. In the West, it has had dramatic effects. The link between the bible and witchcraft, for example, is a very strong one. And it didn’t come from the lunatic fringe, but from some of the most famous thinkers in Christianity. Martin Luther said that witches were the devil’s whores, and he would burn them all. John Calvin also insisted, on the basis of Exodus 22:18 that all witches must be killed.

In 1768 John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, said that “Giving up belief in witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible.” William Blackstone, the famed English jurist, wrote that “To deny the . . . existence of witchcraft and sorcery is at once flatly to contradict the revealed word of God.” And we should remember that eight of the original 13 US colonies recognized witchcraft as a capital crime.

Women have been called the lustful, seductive sex for centuries, even though virtually all rapes and sex crimes are committed by men. Why do we listen to such stories without protesting their nonsense?

Eve’s desire for knowledge of good and evil, in any sober discussion, would be regarded as profoundly good, a great gift to the species. How on earth did we ever buy the notion that it was bad? If Adam and Eve were our children, we would compliment and reward Eve for wanting the knowledge of good and evil, and might well tell Adam that he could learn a few things from her. Why did we ever buy such a silly story? I think it’s because we forgot that it began when somebody wrote it to benefit his kind at the expense of her kind, and that no one has the authority to do that without our say-so.

And think of some of the voices that are missing from the Bible:

Eve’s story. Sometime this week, rehearse in your mind what she might have had to say about that business of seeking the knowledge of good and evil, and what she might have to say to both Adam and God, and see how much the story changes.

Abraham’s wife, Sarah. One of the most psychologically and theologically horrid stories in the whole Bible is the story of Abraham hearing voices telling him to murder his son Isaac, and being willing to do it! Where was his wife Sarah’s voice? Where is she in her incredulous fury, asking him what in hell he thinks he is doing to her son? Where is the humanity, the compassion, even the common sense in this story? It belonged to Sarah, and she was omitted.

Miriam, the sister of Moses. We learn that she was also a prophet in her own right, and a woman of considerable power and influence. That’s all we’re told. How would it have changed religious history if we had been given powerful models of women prophets and priests?

Mary Magdalen. Since the book The DaVince Code came out, it has become clear to millions of readers, as it has been clear to biblical scholars for a long time, that Mary Magdalen had one of the most powerful roles and interesting stories in the whole story of Jesus. The Dead Sea Scrolls brought us gospels that show us that she was called The Apostle of the Apostles, and was Jesus’ favorite, whom he was often seen kissing on the mouth. If that story, if her voice, had not been left out of the story, how might it have changed Christianity and Western history? Perhaps, since she was Jesus’ favorite, and he ranked her above all the other apostles, only women would be able to become Pope!

“In the bible, as in soap operas, woman’s concerns center almost exclusively on childbearing and on her relationships with men.” (Roslyn Lacks, Women and Judaism, Doubleday & Co., 1980, p. 88)

“The first step in the elevation of women under all systems of religion is to convince them that the great Spirit of the Universe is in no way responsible for any of these absurdities.” (Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 13)

What can we do?

We can speak up and act up to challenge and change stories with missing voices, circles with missing people. Let me share one more quotation with you. It comes from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who lived from 1815 to 1902. In 1892, in a long series of studied commentaries on the Bible, she wrote this:

“Take the snake, the fruit-tree and the woman from the tableau, and we have no fall, nor frowning Judge, no inferno, no everlasting punishment—hence no need of a Savior. Thus the bottom falls out of the whole Christian theology. Here is the reason why in all the biblical researches and higher criticisms, the scholars never touch the position of women.” This was written 112 years ago, and its theological implications are still right on.

So what can we do? We can speak up, and demand a voice in writing the stories of our lives, so that we are not assigned roles that demean and endanger us. Don’t let people tell these stories without wondering aloud to them whether such a story could possibly be worthy of God. Sometimes it’s just worth saying something as short as “Boy, you know a man wrote that story, don’t you!”

What can we do? We can act up and claim a better role. Last year, my 19-year-old niece, who was in ROTC as a junior at Boston University, heard her sergeant tell them that BU had four slots to send ROTC students to the tough three-week Army Airborne training, and suggested that some of the really macho guys might want to apply. It made her so mad that she applied, and last June I flew to Ft. Benning, GA for a week, to photograph her jumping out of airplanes, and to pin her Airborne wings on her at graduation. In my office, I have a whole wall of photos from that trip, of this small and fierce little warrior, which you can see by looking in the door. They inspire me; maybe they will do the same for you.

The whole human sound goes up only from the full choir. We’re all in the choir: even the least among us. Let us sing songs, tell stories, and act in ways that are worthy of us, worthy of God, worthy of all that is holy, all that is necessary to make our circle complete. Let’s end with an old story:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them” Both of them. Equally.

Amen.