Original Sins and Blessings

Home / Sermons / Audio available / Original Sins and Blessings

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

February 9, 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Four Part Series

In the Beginning

Original Sins and Blessings

Reconsidering the Concept of God

The Legitimate Heir to Salvation

PRAYER

In some ways, the answer to all prayers is about the same. You are a child of the earth, a child of God, a child of the universe. You are precious and the world needs your blessing. Be still, be still and know that you are loved.

If you come here feeling alone, know that you are not alone. You are among friends, even if you have not yet met them.

If you came with guilt over your sins of commission or sins of omission, know that you are the healthy company of others with the same guilt over the same kind of sins of commission and omission.

If you come wishing your life were more whole, more satisfying, perhaps even more perfect, know that the honesty of those wishes marks you as someone who belongs here, where we come to face the truth unafraid, even when we are afraid. Because we know, even when we do not want to know, that the truth can set us free. Perhaps not painlessly, but the truth can set us free.

And so: Know that you are a child of the earth, a child of God, a child of the universe. Know that you are precious and the world needs your blessing. Be still, be still and know that you are loved.

Amen.

SERMON: Original Sins and Blessings

The theme of this series of four sermons is “What’s the true story of our origins, our human nature, the human condition and what we need?” Never mind what different religions may say, what do we really believe to be true? The sub theme is “How and why have the religious teachings of our society strayed so far from the truth?” The truth is empowering, it can set us free. Bad creation stories, false pictures of human nature and unhealthy concepts of God diminish and demean us. Part of the road to salvation is learning to tell the difference between religious stories that empower us, and those that enslave us; between healthy and unhealthy myths.

Last week I began by talking about the true story of creation: how the universe got here, what it’s made of, what life on earth is made of, and how deeply it’s all related. We’re made of stardust, the stuff of the universe. And here on earth, life is made from just five chemical building-blocks that make up DNA and RNA. We are more deeply related to one another, more deeply a part of one another, that we can begin to imagine. The dynamic powers of the universe are within us, if we will see them and free them. We are part of a linked continuum of life; we should expect similarities with all other life on earth.

And yet the creation story in the Bible distorts this, takes the power and dignity away from us and gives it to the Hebrew God who was created as a projection of an ancient tribal chief. For historical reasons we can understand, the ancient writers turned it from a true story of empowerment to a false story of enslavement and obedience to the priests who spoke for the God they had constructed.

Religious myths are to be judged by whether they serve the truth or not. Some do, some do not. In Western religions, the myths as interpreted by the dominant orthodoxies do not serve the truth well. I want us to look at that, no matter how rude it may seem to do so.

Today, I want to look at human nature. What kind of creatures are we? How is this odd species we call homo sapiens put together? What are our original blessings and sins?

I want to do this as I did last week, by beginning with the true story, then bringing in biblical myths to compare with it. By the true story, I mean one we can verify through sciences, but also from common observations and experience, as you’ll see. It’s what we can demonstrate to be the case about humans, regardless of our beliefs. In computer language, human nature includes both hardware and software. Most of the hardwiring is obvious and easy to find examples of, though we don’t think about it much:

1. We are a social species. There is an old German saying “Ein Mensch ist kein Mensch.” It means “one person is no person,” and it echoes an ancient Greek proverb that said the same thing. We are, as Aristotle noted 2400 years ago, a profoundly social species. Alone, we’re not complete. We need a connection to others, which we have to learn how to make wisely and well.

2. We are hardwired to be in “families” of about four to twelve. When we think of intimate groups, groups small enough for us to feel known in, that’s the size we seek. Most of our small social and professional groups are in this size range: bridge groups, church committees, covenant groups, Evensong. Our sports teams also fit this: basketball, baseball, football, soccer. Almost all are in that range of four or five to a dozen. Juries are a dozen; church boards are usually a dozen or fewer. If you ask Why, the answer is that this is the kind of species we are. It isn’t about free will, it’s about predestination here. Each species has its characteristic family or brood size, and that’s ours. It helps shape most of the small groups we create, in most areas of our lives.

3. Each species also has a characteristic troop size, and ethologists say the characteristic troop size of our species is about 150 to 200. That’s about the most people each of us is likely to be able to know, to keep in mind as our real “community.” It’s almost amazing, the number of times and places this size comes up.

A. Back in graduate school, I read a book by the German scholar Hannah Arendt on the 1917 Russian revolution, which she witnessed firsthand. She was interested to see that the chaos didn’t last long. Some charismatic leaders seemed to emerge from nowhere, and people gathered around them in groups. However, when the groups got to about 200, they always divided. That was the biggest group that seemed stable.

B. When I spoke at the LAMP group at the University of Texas last year, I mentioned some of these facts. Later, one of their leaders said they had tried for years to increase the number of people who were active, but had never been able to get it above 150: the number present on that day. This is predestination, not free will: it’s who we are and how we are made.

C. Church consultants use these numbers, too. The hardest and most unlikely growth is for a church to grow from an average attendance of 150 to one of 250 or more. Most don’t make it over that hump, because that’s as big as our biologically-wired troop size has prepared us for. You have to learn how to grow larger. You have to learn how to grow beyond our biology, which has not prepared us for the modern world. Ironically, when a church does figure it out, it can do a much better job of providing structures of intimacy than a smaller church. Because in a small church, you have a troop, with a few de facto alpha males and females who control its power. If you don’t like their style, you don’t have a home there.

But in a larger church, there are many sub-communities, and you can move more freely between them, finding places that feel more homey to you. When they are well-done, large churches have much better structures of intimacy than small ones. Because in small ones, there’s one de facto troop leader or small group that defines the group. If you don’t fit with their politics, you won’t fit with the group. In larger churches, there are subgroups, and you have choices.

Still, it takes intelligent work to create structures of intimacy that can let a church grow, because our biology hasn’t prepared us for the modern world, and we have to work to grow into it.

We can say a lot more about our species, about the kind of creatures we are. Here are some other traits. A century ago, none of this was controversial. A generation ago, some of this was controversial; now it’s not very controversial again:

We are a profoundly territorial species. We build fences around our yards, for goodness’ sake! We identify with our ‘turf,’ our nation, our state, our neighborhood. The next time you’re walking down the street and a dog barks at you from behind his master’s fence, remember that the dog is barking for the same reason the master built the fence: it’s their turf, and you’re a potential intruder.

All territory is really conceptual, not drawn on the ground in yellow lines. We think of this with humans, but territory is conceptual for all animals. I used to raise a breed of French shepherd called Briards: extremely territorial animals. They still use them in France to herd sheep. We saw movies of ranchers waking the dog around the boundaries of their territory – no fences. Then the dog learned that territory, internalized it, and kept sheep inside of it. The tendency is hard-wired, but the content is learned. We learn what counts as “our territory”: UT? Austin? Houston? Ann Arbor? America? The world?

We are a profoundly hierarchical species. We think in terms of categories like top dogs, “The Man,” kings, presidents. We seek to identify the “top” one: Miss America. I’ve never heard of a beauty contest to find “the seventh most attractive woman in Travis County.” We only care about #1. We award gold medals to the winners, and put some of them on cereal boxes. Nobody even remembers the names of the athletes who won silver medals: they were the losers. Grocery story magazines inform us who “the sexiest man alive is” – this week, I think it’s still Ben Affleck, in case you had forgotten. We don’t think to ask how, in a world of six billion people, anyone could ever think of narrowing that category down to below about a million people. We’re not built that way. We want to know who’s on top. We only reward the winners. I’ve seen some of the football fever here in the fall. I did my undergraduate work at the University of Michigan, another football superpower. And never in either city, and never on any televised game, have I seen players and fans excitedly screaming “We’re Number Two!” Something inside of us thinks that number two doesn’t really count. We’re wrong, but it’s how we’re made.

There are good things about us, too. We are naturally altruistic. Cats and dogs will risk themselves for their young, monkeys do, so do horses, cows, and humans. And sometimes altruism extends beyond species lines. We stop to save an endangered dog we don’t know. Why do we do that? Maybe we just feel related to them. You’ve read the stories of dolphins saving humans from drowning. They swim under the person, lift them to the surface and take them into shallow water. Why? It’s how they’re made. We are caring, altruistic animals. Our behaviors show we are linked very deeply, and recognize the connections. Our altruism doesn’t come from religion, it wasn’t a gift from the gods, it comes from nature.

This next one will sound kind of mushy, like I’m moving from science into mystical gobbledygook, but it isn’t. There just isn’t a clear word for this next trait. But every animal has a soul, a self, a style, a character, that distinguishes it from others. You can sense this being around them. If you’ve watched a litter of puppies or kittens for long, you see that each one has its own “personality,” its own style. Some are trusting, some more afraid. Some are adventurous, some are shy. And if you’ve raised those kittens or puppies, you know they keep those styles all their lives, just as we do. Human babies have different characters from the start. But so do other species.

A member of this church, Clare Tilson, has her Ph.D. in entomology, and once spent several minutes explaining to me about the individuality she found in, of all things, moths. For a graduate school project, she had to feed a few dozen very large moths each day, and found great individual differences between them. She had to grab them, turn them on their backs, and put some sugar water into their mouths. She could identify the individual moths based on their different styles. Some fought her every day. Others quickly learned the procedure, and flopped onto their backs as soon as she picked them up. Some even stuck their tongues out for her. And one moth, she said, was just so sweet that she kept feeding it even after the experiment ended because she had grown to like it.

Each creature seems to need and want to live in a way that is consistent with its unique style. This is something everyone here has struggled with. We know that we must be true to ourselves, to our styles, to our “souls” if you like, and that if we don’t do it, we are not living integrated or authentic or very satisfying lives. One of Jesus’ famous rhetorical questions was “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?” That’s what this is about. A “soul” isn’t some little metaphysical gas bag, it’s that inner integrity of remaining true to our own soul, our own style.

In a social species like ours, there is a necessary conflict between each individual’s unique style, and the style of its troop and world. The effort is to find an integrated way of living that honors all levels of our identity, all our territories and individualities, has marked humans from the beginning of recorded history. When we talk of getting our lives together, we mean something like this: living in a way that is true to ourselves while also fitting into “the world” in a harmonious way. It isn’t easy to do, you know?

Our original blessings are considerable. We’re curious. We want to learn about ourselves, our environment, about the difference between life-empowering and life-enslaving values – what some have called the difference between good and evil. We feel connections to others and to much of life, and we’re a caring species that wants to act on these deeply-felt connections. All these are blessings, gifts to us from life.

Our original sins are also considerable. And our biggest and most dangerous original sin is that we can’t tell the difference between good leaders and bad leaders, good stories and bad stories, good groups and bad groups. We follow leaders, especially charismatic ones, and follow them into untrue stories that enslave, into wars that slaughter, into stories of such nonsense they should but don’t boggle even our minds.

I was just remembering the Heaven’s Gate cult of about five years ago. You recall that Matthew Applewhite led a group of people to believe that they needed to commit mass suicide – all dressed alike and wearing Nike tennis shoes – so they would be transported up to the Mother Ship, which was hidden behind the Hale Bopp comet.

The media, thankfully, identified Applewhite as an Episcopalian, for which we can be grateful. But last week I learned that he had also been the music director of the First Unitarian Church in Houston. As a Unitarian who used to be a musician, I’m not sure which eccentricity finally drove him over the edge. But I watched several of the videotaped interviews of his people before their suicides. And they looked absolutely at peace, completely sure of what they were doing. They were wrong, but they were certain. They followed a man they saw as a spiritual leader and it cost them their lives. Others have strapped bombs to themselves and walked into crowded buildings to kill themselves, or flown planes into buildings, because some nut has told them seventy virgins will await them in heaven for dying like this. I can’t imagine that anyone thought to ask the virgins what they thought of this. Our worst original sin is that we often can’t tell the difference between good stories and bad ones, and often serve gods that aren’t worth serving at all. We’re easily distracted and misled. Advertising, politics and bad preachers count on it.

The only hope we have is good education, to teach us the difference between good and evil, health and unhealth, sanity and insanity. But in doing that, we’re growing beyond the limits of our biology, which has not prepared us for the kind of world we’re living in.

These are a few of the things we know to be true about human nature, a few of the things we know about how we are put together and who we are.

Now let’s look at the story in the Bible to see what it says about who we are and who we are supposed to be. Listen to the story against this background, and see if it strikes you as an empowering or an enslaving story:

Genesis 2:15-17: The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

Genesis 3: 1ff – Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, “You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened ….

Afterwards, God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” – therefore God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. (RSV, emphasis added)

And so: education, learning to make distinctions between good and evil, gaining wisdom, takes you out of a fool’s paradise. But look at this story. Here it takes humans, born curious, whose great hope and strength is our ability to learn, to grow bigger, to learn the difference between good and evil, and to become more godlike by doing so. These are among our original blessings. But this story condemns humans for their very strengths. This was the god shaped in the image of a tribal chief, who wants people to be obedient rather than empowered. Do you see how clearly this shows up when you begin to look for it? It isn’t hidden, we have just not been taught to look for it.

This is an untrue story and a bad myth that does not offer empowerment. Christianity made this concept of God central for many centuries. For most of its history, the Roman Catholic Church taught that its people were not to read the bible for themselves, but were to be taught its meaning by the priests. Some in this room grew up in that kind of a church: I’ve talked with members here in their 30s who went through 12 years of Catholic schools, and said they were still being told not to read the bible, just fed the relevant passages with their interpretations. That isn’t an empowering or ennobling style of taking life seriously. The churches should be ashamed.

The message of Jesus reverted to a loving rather than an authoritative God, and for the first four centuries of Christianity, it was often a religion that empowered women, poor people, and social outcasts. You hardly ever hear about those first four centuries of Christianity, when there was very widespread theological diversity, including some very non-supernatural varieties with which most of us would be comfortable.

But in the early 5th century, when the Roman Empire was crumbling, St. Augustine believed the church needed to take some of the authority the Roman Empire had had, to structure and stabilize society. The story of Eve eating the apple had been celebrated for the first four century of Christianity, as a story about our free will.

But Augustine changed the story. He made it part of his new notion of original sin. This original sin meant that people couldn’t be trusted, and couldn’t be trusted even with their own lives. They needed to be kept in line through the Authority of the Church, like sheep kept in line by shepherds.

It’s impossible to measure the harm that story of original sin has done. It’s important to say, as clearly as possible, that the story was a lie. It was not true to human nature. It became a story of enslavement rather than empowerment.

Even worse, it hid the real answer from us. The real answer to the human condition was provided by the serpent, and acted on by Eve. We must eat the apple. We must learn the difference between good and evil, and begin to reclaim some of the power transferred to this God so long ago. We must transform stories that enslave into more honest stories that empower. That’s how we grow up, that’s how we leave the fool’s paradise of childhood and grow into powerful, confident adults.

The snake was right. Eve was right. That concept of God was wrong, untrue, and disempowering. Next week I’ll wrestle with the concept of God. But look back on your own religious stories this week, and ask what parts of them were empowering and life-giving, and what parts were enslaving or demeaning, taking power and dignity away from you. I think you’ll find that the places you felt empowered were places where the true story broke through. Maybe through a preacher, a Sunday school teacher, a parent or mentor. Or maybe you just found the hidden truths for yourselves.

As you look back through these stories – and this can be a painful process – remember those things that are the answer to almost every prayer:

Know that you are a child of the earth, a child of God, a child of the universe. Know that you are precious and the world needs your blessing. Be still, be still and know that you are loved.

Amen.